Reproduction Without Women: Demothering the Biological in Nineteenth-Century Speculative Fiction

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) famously condemns scientists’ hubris for assuming biologically creative powers. Where Shelley, rebutting Thomas Malthus’s warning of un-checked population growth, suggested that men-only reproductive experiments would result in technological and moral failure, prominent late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century speculative works returned Shelley’s plot into cultural circulation, among them Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), and Filippo-Tommaso Marinetti’s Mafarka the Futurist (1909). Adding misogyny to Shelley’s anti-creation myth, these texts responded to the increased visibility of women’s political agitation, finding their apotheosis in Marinetti’s proto-fascism. But he was so irresponsible, so utterly careless. His curiosity, his mad, aimless investigations, drove him on, and the things were thrown out to live a year or so, to struggle, and blunder, and suffer; at last to die painfully.