Embryology and the Rise of the Gothic Novel 3030736474, 9783030736477

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LITERATURE, SCIENCE AND MEDICINE

Embryology and the Rise of the Gothic Novel Diana Pérez Edelman

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine Series Editors Sharon Ruston Department of English and Creative Writing Lancaster University Lancaster, UK Alice Jenkins School of Critical Studies University of Glasgow Glasgow, UK Jessica Howell Department of English Texas A&M University College Station, TX, USA

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine is an exciting new series that focuses on one of the most vibrant and interdisciplinary areas in literary studies: the intersection of literature, science and medicine. Comprised of academic monographs, essay collections, and Palgrave Pivot books, the series will emphasize a historical approach to its subjects, in conjunction with a range of other theoretical approaches. The series will cover all aspects of this rich and varied field and is open to new and emerging topics as well as established ones. Editorial board Andrew M. Beresford, Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Durham University, UK Steven Connor, Professor of English, University of Cambridge, UK Lisa Diedrich, Associate Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies, Stony Brook University, USA Kate Hayles, Professor of English, Duke University, USA Jessica Howell, Associate Professor of English, Texas A&M University, USA Peter Middleton, Professor of English, University of Southampton, UK Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, Professor of English and Theatre Studies, University of Oxford, UK Sally Shuttleworth, Professorial Fellow in English, St Anne’s College, University of Oxford, UK Susan Squier, Professor of Women’s Studies and English, Pennsylvania State University, USA Martin Willis, Professor of English, University of Westminster, UK Karen A. Winstead, Professor of English, The Ohio State University, USA More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14613

Diana Pérez Edelman

Embryology and the Rise of the Gothic Novel

Diana Pérez Edelman University of North Georgia Oakwood, GA, USA

ISSN 2634-6435     ISSN 2634-6443 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine ISBN 978-3-030-73647-7    ISBN 978-3-030-73648-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73648-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Historical Images Archive / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To James and Robert Young, my little monsters

Acknowledgments

This book project has been developing since I was in the PhD program at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill while pregnant, ironically, with my first child, who is now nineteen years old. I have stepped away from the project for years at a time—rearing human children while putting the intellectual ones on hold. The project narrowed from one about Romanticism and its connections to embryology and obstetrics more broadly to its current focus on embryology and the Gothic. I have many, many friends, colleagues, and institutions to thank for helping me bring it to its current form. I am so grateful to Professor Jeanne Moskal at UNC-Chapel Hill for her guidance and direction when this project was initially conceived; she challenged me and made me a better thinker and writer. Thanks, also, to Elizabeth Stockton, a colleague at UNC, who recommended that I free write about my ideas, which signaled a turning point in my thinking. To this day, I tell that story to my students to convince them that free writing works. My dissertation writing group was instrumental in encouraging me to make “big” claims about the relevance of obstetrics to the period—Amy Weldon, Kathryn Wymer, Tom Horan, and Gena Chandler (now ChandlerSmith). I am also grateful to Professor Robert Mitchell at Duke University, who generously read the manuscript and suggested narrowing to the Gothic; perhaps more importantly, he helped me shift the focus of the work by recommending Helmut Müller-Sievers’ book, Self-Generation. After a long hiatus, I returned to academia and participated in an NEH Summer Seminar with Professor Stephen Behrendt in Lincoln, Nebraska, vii

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in 2013. This six-week seminar reignited the project, moving it to the next stage. The encouragement of Professor Behrendt, who generously commented on the manuscript, and the support of the life-long friends I made that summer enabled me to return to the project with new direction. I would like to thank Yohei Igarashi for recommending Stephen Gould’s work and Brian Rejack for recommending Denise Gigante’s Life: Romanticism and Organic Form. Kellie Donovan-Condron has been instrumental in supporting the project from afar as we have been accountability partners since our time at NEH. Thank you, Chris Washington, for reading several versions of the final proposal and helping me get it to its final state. James Rovira has always been a cheerleader and supporter in many ways (too many to count), and for that I am thankful. I am grateful to my home institution, the University of North Georgia (UGA), for offering financial support for parts of this project. In 2015, I won two internal awards: the Presidential Semester Scholar Award and the Presidential Summer Scholar Award. My gratitude also goes to Mary Carney and my WriteIN faculty writing group, including Steve Pearson, Michael Rifenburg, and Leigh Dillard, for reading and commenting on drafts of the proposal for this award. During those months of research leave, I was able to conduct research at the Wellcome Library, Archives & Special Collections at the University of Glasgow, and the Royal College of Surgeons of England. A special thanks to Kelly Ball at Emory University, who provided me with archival research training before my trips. A significant portion of my gratitude for bringing the project to its final state goes to the anonymous readers of the first two proposals that I sent to Palgrave and to Professor Anne Williams at the University of Georgia. The first two rounds of the reader’s comments were most generous and encouraging and significantly helped me reframe the project. And thank you to Professor Williams, my former MA thesis advisor at UGA, for encouraging me to write a chapter on Walpole and to rethink and reframe the introductory material. She has read the manuscript twice in the last two years. Furthermore, well before this project was even on my radar, she ignited my love for the Gothic in the mid-1990s, and her book Art of Darkness has been enormously influential. And, thank you, dear Friends and Family, for listening to me talk about this book for years and years and years, always believing in me, and encouraging me even when I wanted to give up. You know who you are.

Praise for Embryology and the Rise of the Gothic Novel “Foregrounding some of the most canonical and widely studied Gothic and Romantic texts, offering readings that are at once vibrant and new while still somehow familiar in the best possible way, Edelman makes it clear just how fundamental a concern with generation is to any understanding of the period. This work is deeply learned and wonderfully accessible—and profoundly urgent.” —James Robert Allard, Brock University, Canada, and author of Romanticism, Medicine, and the Poet’s Body (2007) “Edelman argues that contemporary theories of embryology (not yet an empirical science) debate often contradictory concerns about origins, identity, hybridity, and the potential for an infinite number of forms. Gothic narratives express similar anxieties, adapting to popular and high art, changing historical circumstances, and media unimaginable at their birth. Reading the evolution of Gothic in the context of inherently contradictory theories of embryology illuminates the literature’s own contradictions. (Is it conservative or revolutionary? Feminist or misogynist?) Edelman’s learned and cogent exposition of this unexpected biological context will engage not only students of the Gothic tradition, but also the growing audience discovering the material and scientific roots of Romanticism.” —Anne Williams, Professor of English Emeritus, University of Georgia, USA, and author of Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (1995)

Contents

1 Conceiving the Gothic; or, “A New Species of Romance”  1 “Seeds of Poetry and Rhyme”   7 “Modes of Perception”; Or, Eighteenth-Century Embryology  20 The Gothic: Preformationist or Epigenetic?  32 Internal Sources of Identity  33 Monstrosity, Hybridity, Endless Narration  36 References  40 2 “A Very Natural Dream”; or, The Castle of Otranto 45 Origin Stories: The Dream and the Prefaces  47 The Houses of Manfred and Alfonso  52 The Statue as Symbol of Epigenesis  59 References  63 3 “The Liberty of Choice”; or, the Novels of Ann Radcliffe 65 Radcliffe and Science  67 Individual Passion versus Parental Control  71 Family Resemblance  76 The “Explained Supernatural”  79 The Miniature  82 Endless Narration  84 References  85

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4 “Dark, Shapeless Substances”; or, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein 87 M. W. Shelley & Embryology  92 Interrogating Embryology  94 Agrippa and Paracelsus  94 Epigenesis & Preformation 100 Egalitarian Embryology: The Female Creature 109 References 114 5 “Nature Preached a Milder Theology”; Or, Melmoth the Wanderer119 Biddy Brannigan: Birthing the Story 121 Alonzo: From Preformation to Epigenesis 128 Adonijah: Symbol of Epigenetic Power 137 Immalee/Isidora: From Epigenesis to Preformation 143 The Novel’s Monstrous Form 149 References 153 6 “Something Scarcely Tangible”; Or, James Hogg’s Confessions155 “Stern Doctrines” Versus “Free Principles” 157 The Editor’s Scientific Narrative 159 Robert Colwan’s Preformationist Nightmare 161 The Monstrous Form of Confessions 164 References 167 7 Conclusion: Gothic Offspring; or, “The Qualitas Occulta”169 Diversity of Identities: The Fiction of Reproductive Technologies 170 Hauntings in the Body: Supernatural Fiction 171 References 174 Index175

CHAPTER 1

Conceiving the Gothic; or, “A New Species of Romance”

Mathematic Form is Eternal in the Reasoning Memory. Living Form is Eternal Existence. Grecian is Mathematic Form Gothic is Living Form —William Blake, On Virgil (Blake 1822, 270)

In 1764, Horace Walpole defined the Gothic as a “new species” (Otranto 14) designed to unleash the “great resources of fancy [that] have been dammed up” through the redeployment of medieval “miracles, visions, necromancy, dreams, and other preternatural events” (Otranto 6).1 This blending of ancient and modern romances, conceived as a new life, is made possible only through the fantastic and terrific. Walpole’s very pointed species metaphor suggests that the Gothic can be read through the lens of those branches of science most concerned with the origins and continuation of the human species: the sciences of generation.2 Indeed, 1  All references to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and the two prefaces will be referred to in the text as Otranto. All references to Walpole’s letters are to the Yale Correspondence available online and will be referred to as Yale Correspondence and by volume and page number. 2  Throughout this work, I use the term “reproductive sciences” and “generation” interchangeably. Although the term “reproductive sciences” is applied anachronistically, it offers

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. P. Edelman, Embryology and the Rise of the Gothic Novel, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73648-4_1

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Walpole turned to the reproductive sciences, embryology in particular, well before The Castle of Otranto. In a 1737 letter to Richard West, when Walpole still had poetic aspirations, he equates imaginative processes with embryological ones, indicating that the embryological foundations of Walpole’s new genre emerged much earlier than his most famous publication. The poem attached to the letter describes, using the discourse of contemporary embryological debates, his imaginative process in which the pretty phrases of well-formed poetry turn toward the macabre, the seeds of the Gothic. Embryology and the Rise of the Gothic Novel explores the relevance of the sciences of generation to the Gothic novel, which will not only broaden our understanding of the historical and cultural contexts of Romanticism and the Gothic, but also suggests additional source material that illuminates the original forms that the Gothic novel generated during this time. Reading the Gothic alongside the sciences of generation helps readers understand the questions (and answers) that these writers asked about the nature of aesthetic creation as well as destabilizes some of the dichotomies traditionally associated with the Gothic, dichotomies that are reinforced over and over again in its critical history—male versus female, natural versus supernatural, horror versus terror, conservative versus progressive. As Maggie Kilgour asked over twenty years ago, is the Gothic “Revolutionary or reactionary? An incoherent mess or a self-conscious critique of repressive concepts of coherence and order?…Transgressive and lawless or conformist and meekly law-abiding?” (Kilgour, 1995 10). Is the Gothic merely a reaction to Enlightenment reason? Is it an aesthetic failure? Is it really a return to a barbaric past because it fears the technological future promised by modernity? I would suggest that tracing the relationship more precision than “natural philosophy,” the contemporary term that encompasses many branches of sciences that we now treat as distinct. Our modern definition of “science” refers primarily to areas such as chemistry, physics, biology, and geology. In the Romantic period, “science” was generally used to denote any branch of knowledge, even those that we would now categorize as part of the humanities such as linguistics and literature. Further, from ancient times to the nineteenth century, the term “generation” was used more often than “reproduction” for the discussion of sexual reproduction in humans and animals. The term “scientist” in the modern sense was not coined until 1834. In the period covered in this book, the broadest and most common term was “natural philosopher.” In the medical field, depending on discipline, one could be called “medical man,” “man-midwife,” “surgeon,” “anatomist,” and the like. The first known use of the term “embryologist” in English was 1795 (OED), but I use the term to refer to those in the period working specifically on explanations of conception and fetal development.

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between the first Gothic works and their embryological contexts reveals that the Gothic, even the Radcliffean kind, is transgressive in its embrace of scientific discoveries that articulate and accept the “incoherent mess” of organic life. Diane Hoeveler has argued that the Gothic is one of the cultural productions that ushered in modern, secular ideals; the “triumph of the ideology of individualism, interiority, and modern subjectivity as we know it today…were initially honed in the flood of gothic works that permeated European culture during this period” (Hoeveler 2010, 12). Thus, instead of the Gothic being primarily nostalgia for a sacred and superstitious past, it was a way of mediating the shift to a secular and progressive modernity, albeit an “ambivalent” one as Hoeveler terms it (Hoeveler 2010, 6). When read through the sciences of generation, the Gothic emerges, ironically, as scientifically progressive and an aesthetic success in its proliferation of genres. The embryological contexts of the Gothic also offer a response to William Patrick Day’s assertion that “we must also attempt to explain why [the Gothic] has endured when other popular forms, such as the Newgate novel or the silver-fork novel or cousins like the sensation and the ‘blood’ novel, had their brief lives and disappeared” (Day 1985, 5). This study provides the beginnings of an answer to the question that Steven Bruhm asked in 2002: why do we still need the Gothic? (Bruhm 2002). He writes that “We search for a genesis but find only ghostly manifestations” (Bruhm 2002, 259). It is these “ghostly manifestations” that I trace to the mysteries of generation. The Gothic, concerned with origins, follows a trajectory parallel to changes in ideas about the process of conception and continues to be one of the key methods by which advances in the sciences of reproduction are predicted, explored, and challenged. Further, the Gothic, both then and now, has produced a number of subgenres, which is no accident given that the Gothic is concerned simultaneously with biological and aesthetic creation. Although the “narrative incoherence” of the Gothic has “[lead] to the denigration of the form for its lack of aesthetic unity” (Kilgour 1995, 5), these features are not failures, but rather signs of its success, for it has created perhaps more aesthetic life than Romanticism itself. David Punter argued almost forty years ago that the “narrative complexity” of Gothic and “its tendency to raise technical problems which it often fails to resolve” comes from the “difficulty” of dealing with the “taboo quality of many of the themes to which Gothic addresses itself— incest, rape, various kinds of transgressions of the boundaries between the natural and the human, the human and the divine” (Punter 1980, 19). In

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addition to the socio-cultural and psychological difficulties that Punter enumerates, the Gothic addresses the question of biological and aesthetic origins, questions that have been somewhat obscured in the scholarship by more seductive questions about the ghosts of sexual repression, the nightmare of history, and the drama of gender dynamics. As scholars continue to reassess and redefine Romanticism, particularly in its scientific contexts, embryology and the reproductive sciences offer insights into not only how and why the Gothic came to be, but also why it continues so spectacularly in many media other than prose fiction. Drawing on the history of medicine, this study contributes to feminist studies of the body in literary and scientific scholarship by focusing on the relationship between embryology and genre formation, a connection that has remained relatively unexplored. While scholarship in the history of medicine has long acknowledged the imbalance of power between men and women, particularly in the field of obstetrics and midwifery, it has not discussed as frequently the science of embryology.3 Similarly, feminist studies of the female body in literature tend to replicate this focus on pregnancy and obstetrics as well as on cultural constructs of the maternal, not on embryological sciences specifically. In 1977, Ellen Moers famously equated the female Gothic with her reading of Frankenstein as a “birth myth” and as an exploration of the “motif of revulsion against newborn life, and the drama of guilt, dread, and flight surrounding birth and its consequences” (Moers 1977, 92–93). Juliann Fleenor added to Moers’ argument stating that the female Gothic is “self-fear and self-disgust directed toward the female role, female sexuality, female physiology, and procreation” (Fleenor 1983, 15). In both of these cases, as in many of the studies that have followed suit, the focus is on the maternal body and birth itself, not on what happens at the moment of creation/conception (or even before), which is the central concern of embryology.4 The sciences of generation in this period will take us in a different direction in interpreting the Gothic. In recent decades, Romantic-period scholarship has attempted to articulate the ways in which the sciences are central to our ideas of what constitutes Romanticism; however, very few, if any, mention embryology. 3  Studies in the history of medicine have acknowledged the relevance of the female body in numerous ways. See Eccles (1982), Arney (1982), Shorter (1982, 1991), McLaren (1978, 1984, 1992), Jordanova (1989, 1999), Hanson (2004) and Wilson (1995, 2014). 4  I realize that it is impossible physiologically to divorce the moment of conception from the female body itself, but I am here trying to make a distinction between attempts to articulate the how of creation/conception with the horrors of its aftermath.

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Embryology and the Rise of the Gothic Novel introduces embryology into these discussions and synthesizes feminist and medical perspectives to articulate the role that embryology played in the formation and development of the Gothic mode. This approach reveals the extent to which the Gothic embraces and challenges scientific, technological, and social progress and explains why the Gothic continues to be the mode most suited to explore these questions. Studies that paved the way for a focus on the medical and bodily in the Romantic period, as opposed to the sciences in general, include Hermione de Almeida’s Romantic Medicine and John Keats (1990), Steven Bruhm’s Gothic Bodies (1994), Alan Bewell’s Romanticism and Colonial Disease, and Alan Richardson’s British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (2001). Richardson’s work grounds Romantic theories of psychology in brain-based models of mind arguing, ultimately, that “although literary Romanticism has most often been associated with idealistic and transcendental conceptions of mind, the many points of contact between scientific and literary representations of the embodied psyche helps [sic] remind us of an antidualistic, materialist register within Romantic writing that has, until recently, been badly ignored” (Richardson 2001, 36). Embryology and the Rise of the Gothic Novel adds to the scholarship of the “materialist register” of the period identifying the nexus between “scientific and literary representations” of conception, a connection that provides a more thorough understanding of why and how the genre developed as it did and, perhaps more importantly, why it continues to be associated with “alternative” ways of being. Scholarship since Richardson has continued to search out and explain this “materialist register,” but they almost always overlook reproductive bodies and women writers. James Robert Allard’s Romanticism, Medicine, and the Poet’s Body argues that both poets and medical practitioners sought to establish authority in the marketplace of the material and did so through the body, thus he “theorize[s] an interrelation between poetry and medicine that constitutes and is constituted by contemporary notions—and the concomitant representations—of the body” (Allard 2007, 5). Gavin Budge’s Romanticism, Medicine and the Natural Supernatural, similar to Richardson’s work, “stress[es] the somatic dimension of nineteenth-­ century accounts of hallucination in a way that framing the subject in terms of psychology would not really allow” (Budge 2012, 3). According to Budge, an “ambiguous relationship between bodily materiality and the immateriality of mind” is “representative” of the writing of the period

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(Budge 2012, 5). All of these studies instantiate a shift from the immaterial to the material in Romantic-period scholarship, focusing on male authors and on scientific concepts like nerve theory, sensibility, and irritability. My project joins this discussion of the “materialist register” in the Romantic period, but extends it to the reproductive sciences offering a new way of seeing the period as one that is defined, at least in part, by a focus on aesthetic and biological origins. There are, notably, two important studies that directly address the medical dimensions of the maternal. In Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism, Paul Youngquist argues that “medicine, at the historical moment of its emergence as a distinct institutional and professional practice, produces and enforces a cultural norm of human embodiment. Monstrosities offer medicine a material occasion for such operations” (Youngquist 2003, xi). Youngquist’s thesis—that medicine itself generated the idea of a “proper body” (Youngquist 2003, xiv), which then fostered a fascination with “improper” or “monstrous” bodies—underscores my claim that it is no accident that the Gothic developed alongside changes in the reproductive landscape, in particular embryology. The British fascination with monstrous bodies in museums and circuses is not unlike the reading public’s fascination with the Gothic, the monstrous narrative that replicates, as I will argue, the processes of generation. A significant portion of Youngquist’s work focuses on male bodies, male writers, and male medical professionals; however, his chapter, “Mother Flesh,” addresses the material reality of the female body and the ways in which obstetrical medicine serves to regulate that body in the “private and public spheres,” creating and sustaining it as abject property (Youngquist 2003, 130). Monstrosities outlines the relevance of the work of John and William Hunter to the creation of that abject body, which, he argues, Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley challenge. In Romanticism, Maternity, and the Body Politic, Julie Kipp (2003) also raises the question of the significance of the maternal body in the public sphere. Kipp brings together several cultural strands surrounding the maternal body—medical, legal, educational—and argues that the treatment of mothers and mother-child bonds in literature reflects the reality that the maternal body was a site on which political, economic, and social issues were worked out. Treatments of motherhood in these fields, Kipp argues, are not idiosyncratic, but “rendered the physical processes associated with mothering matters of national importance” (Kipp 2003, 1). Embryology and the Rise of the Gothic Novel recognizes Kipp’s astute

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conclusions regarding the maternal body as cultural symbol, but narrows the focus to embryology in order to identify and describe the frame of mind that contributed to changes in the embryological and aesthetic discourses of the period and their implications. This study treats male and female authors as engaging equally, if differently, in these matters and in ways that transcend the dichotomies with which we generally treat them: male/female, horror/terror, conservative/progressive.

“Seeds of Poetry and Rhyme” In order to introduce the parallels between the Gothic and embryology, we must return to a moment of imaginative conception—Walpole’s 1737 poem, which I will call by its provocative first line, “Seeds of poetry and rhyme.” This poem and its accompanying letter provide a useful illustration of the embryological subtexts of the Gothic mode. Walpole’s early, unpublished poem adumbrates techniques, themes, and plot devices of the Gothic mode and underscores the relationship between embryological and aesthetic concerns about origins. The letter introduces the poem with a metaphor that evokes two competing theories of generation of the period, preformation and epigenesis: In short as naturalists account for insects in places, where they can’t tell how they got there, but cry the wind wafts their eggs about into all parts, and some perish, and some, meeting with proper juices, thrive; so Nature, I believe, wafts about poetical eggs or seeds, and thence come poets, when the grain don’t light upon a barren surface. But I’ll give you some account of it, as far as my own experience goes, in verse; as the best way to describe a circle, is to draw it: You will perceive that my knowledge extends no farther than the miscarrying embryos. (Yale Correspondence 13:121)5

When Walpole writes that the naturalists “can’t tell how they [insects] got there,” he indicates the central problem in eighteenth-century embryology: the inability to identify biological origins empirically. This passage reveals not only Walpole’s knowledge of the various theories of embryology in his day, but also the link, in his imagination, however unconscious, between aesthetic and biological origins. While we cannot say for certain 5  This letter is to Mr. Richard West and dated Monday, 3 January 1737. All letters are hereafter referred to in the text as Yale Correspondence by volume and page number. All Walpole letters can be found at http://images.library.yale.edu/hwcorrespondence/.

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that Walpole read embryological treatises, particularly not this early, Walpole knew several “naturalists” over the course of his life. Walpole had a friendship with the famous William Hunter, anatomist, man-midwife, and brother of the Father of Modern Surgery, John Hunter. Lisa Forman Cody notes that Walpole “frequently mentioned [William] Hunter, both as a friend and confidant and as go-between and carrier of political pamphlets, rare books, exotic tea-trees, and even wallpaper samples between various clients and friends” (Cody 2005, 190).6 In addition, Walpole knew the famous natural historian Sir Hans Sloane who entrusted part of his collection to him in 1753; of the collection, Walpole wrote, “It is a rent charge to keep the foetuses in spirits!” (Yale Correspondence, 20:359).7 Walpole was even an admirer of the epigenesist Count de Buffon visiting him in Paris in 1766. In a letter to Sir Horace Mann in 1779, Walpole writes, “The philosophes, except Buffon, are solemn, arrogant, dictatorial coxcombs—I need not say superlatively disagreeable: the rest are amazingly ignorant in general, and void of all conversation but the routine with women—my dear and very old friend is a relic of a better age—and at near eighty-four has all the impetuosity that was the character of the French” (Yale Correspondence, 24:498). While these specific references are clearly after the period of the writing of the 1737 poem, Walpole, as a high-­ ranking British intellectual, was very likely aware of the scientific contexts of his early years, which are embedded in his early poem. Walpole’s letter and poem deploy metaphors and images that evoke the two competing theories of generation of the period—preformation and epigenesis—and their opposing worldviews, which center on the relative importance of each component in a series of fundamental dichotomies: male/female, internal/external, natural/supernatural, conservative/progressive, mechanical/organic. In embryology, the contest addressed the origins of human life; in aesthetics, the battle was the need to understand and explain how the imagination creates, a central concern of the Romantic period more generally, but also of the Gothic. Walpole’s poem describes how he is haunted by external forms of origination as he struggles, but fails, to achieve poetic autonomy. I will transcribe the poem in its entirety.

6  In another interesting connection, the surgeon John Douglas dedicated his 1736 A Short Account of the State of Midwifery in London, Westminster, &c. to Lady Walpole, Horace Walpole’s mother. See Douglas (1736). 7  This letter is to Sir Horace Mann, dated 14 February 1753.

1  CONCEIVING THE GOTHIC; OR, “A NEW SPECIES OF ROMANCE” 

           1.   Seeds of poetry and rhyme    Nature in my soul implanted;   But the genial hand of Time,    Still to ripen ‘em is wanted:  Or soon as they begin to blow,          5   My cold soil nips the buds with snow.            2.   If a plenteous crop arise,    Copious numbers, swelling grain,   Judgment from the harvest flies,   And careless spares to weed the plain:      10   Tares of similes choke the roots,    Or poppy-thoughts blast all the shoots.            3.   Youth, his torrid beams who plays,    Bids the poetic spirit flourish;  But though flowers his ardour raise,       15    Maggots too ‘twill form and nourish;   And variegated Fancy’s seen   Vainly enamelling the green.            4.   First when pastorals I read;   Purling streams and cooling breezes    20   I only wrote of; and my head    Rhymed on, reclined beneath the treezes:   In pretty dialogue I told   Of Phoebus’ heat, and Daphne’s cold.            5.  Battles, sieges, men and arms,          25    If heroic verse I’m reading,   I burn to write, with Myra’s charms    In episodes, to show my breeding:   But if my Myra cruel be,  I tell her so in elegy.              30            6.   Tragic numbers, buskined strains,    If Melpomene inspire,

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  I sing; but fickle throw my trains    And half an act into the fire:  Perhaps Thalia prompts a sonnet       35   On Chloe’s fan or Cælia’s bonnet.            7.   For one silk-worm thought that thrives,    Twenty more in embryo die;   Some spin away their little lives,   In ductile lines of foolery:         40   Then for one moiety of the year,   Pent in a chrysalis appear.            8.   Till again the rolling sun    Bursts th’ inactive shell, and thoughts  Like butterflies their prison shun,       45    Buzzing with all their parent faults;   And springing from the sluggish mould    Expand their wings of flimsy gold.            9.   But, my dear, these flies, they say,   Can boast of one good quality,       50   To Phoebus gratefully they pay    Their little songs and melody:   So I to you this trifle give,    Whose influence first bid it live. (Yale Correspondence, 13:121–123)8

The poem, although juvenile, illustrates a pattern of degeneration from the light and beautiful parts of nature to the darker and more grotesque. The poem is fundamentally concerned with origins—that of the poet and, by implication, the poetry. Walpole seeks “to show [my] breeding” (ln. 28), his aesthetic heritage, which necessarily derives from previous generations. At the same time, the poem also questions his ability to do that because of this burning spirit of originality that is part of his poetic identity. This conflict between light and dark, mechanical and organic narrates the poet’s struggle to master external forms of origination, or 8  Line numbers have been added and will be referenced parenthetically in the text. Stanza numbers are in the original.

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predetermined forms, which he contrasts with the internal fire of his poetic spirit, hinting at the two major theories of the period that attempted to explain the beginnings of life. Preformation, one attempt to explain origins, posited that all beings were fully formed by God prior to conception and that the process of gestation in the womb was merely a growing larger over time of an infinitesimally small human being. Preformationist theories bifurcated along male and female lines: ovist preformation suggested that the fully formed being resided in the egg whereas spermist (or animalculist) preformation posited that it resided in the male sperm. Epigenesis, by contrast, asserted that human beings developed organ by organ over time in a complex process of matter and motion, a process driven by vital “juices” and variously explained “powers.” In short, preformation relied on supernatural explanations of origins external to the being itself, for God predetermines being and identity. Epigenesis, by contrast, located origins within the material itself and attempted, as we shall see in more detail below, to reject supernatural explanations in favor of scientific ones, but as with the genre itself, the supernatural was a lingering, constitutive presence.9 A pivotal argument in these debates was the existence of monsters—defined as anything from a minor birth defect to the spawn of inter-­ species copulation.10 While epigenesists could easily explain birth defects, monstrosity, hybrids, and polyps as the result of the anomalies of matter and motion, preformationists had to contend with the notion that God pre-ordained them, an idea that disrupted their concept of a harmonious universe. The poem and letter evoke traits of the various theories of generation of the time—panspermism (an early version of preformation), preformation, and epigenesis. The poetical eggs of the letter and the chrysalis in the 9  Scholars of Romanticism will note that this distinction is notably similar to Coleridge’s famous distinction between mechanic and organic form, suggesting the wider applicability of embryological sciences to aesthetic concerns. 10  Earlier in the century, prior to the height of the conflict between preformationists and epigenesists, monstrous births were explained as effects of the maternal imagination on the fetus. As Dennis Todd (1995) explains, belief in the power of the maternal imagination partially explains why so many people, including eminent natural philosophers, were able to believe the infamous 1726 hoax of Mary Toft, who claimed to give birth to 17 rabbits. At that point in history, the “attribution of monstrosities to God or the devil had become less convincing as European thought had grown more secularized,” so the “power of the imagination had become the explanation of first resort within the last century and a half” (Todd 1995, 48). For a detailed discussion of the discourse on the maternal imagination and its effects on the literature of the period, see Buckley (2017).

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poem represent preformation whereas the “proper juices” of the letter and the “torrid beams,” “poetic spirit,” and “ardour” of stanza three are suggestive of various epigenetic explanations for what starts this process. The image of the wind carrying eggs mentioned in the body of the letter is a direct reference to an early version of preformation, panspermism, which suggested that the preformed germs created by God were actually floating through the air and ingested by their hosts. In 1651, William Harvey describes panspermism: “many animals, especially insects, arise and are propagated from elements and seeds so small as to be invisible, (like atoms flying in the air,) scattered and dispersed here and there by the winds” (Harvey 1847, 321). The eggs, germs, or seeds of preformation are ingested by the host who then nourishes them, but they are externally sourced. As the first two lines of the poem indicate, personified Nature implants these preformed seeds into the poet; creation occurs prior and outside. Throughout the poem, though, the poet’s own spirit changes the nature of these preformed seeds, which, according to preformation theory, should have been perfectly formed to begin with. Like epigenetic processes, though, the vagaries of matter and motion, in this case the poet himself, changes the very nature of the seeds, turning them into something darker than intended. The poet’s “cold soil nips the buds” (ln. 6). His “torrid beams” and “ardour” create not only flowers, but also “maggots” (ll. 13, 15, 16), small creatures that eat dead flesh. The poet’s very nature resists the preformed. The image of the chrysalis in stanzas seven and eight also evokes preformation, but just as Walpole’s poetic self destroys the eggs of panspermism, so too his internal heat, his “ardour,” creates monstrosities—flesh-eating maggots and “miscarrying embryos.” While maggots and miscarriages are certainly part of the natural world, they signify the dark undercurrents of that world, the undercurrents that the Gothic explores more directly than any other genre. The chrysalis as scientific proof of preformation was made famous by Jan Swammerdam, seventeenth-century Dutch entomologist. Swammerdam argued for preformation based on insect observations, particularly the butterfly. Joseph Needham, British biochemist and historian of science, summarizes Swammerdam’s work: “having hardened the chrysalis with alcohol, [he] had seen the butterfly folded up and perfectly formed within the cocoon. He concluded that the butterfly had been hidden or masked….in the caterpillar, and thence it was no great step to regard the egg in a similar light…Before long, Swammerdam extended this theory to man” (Needham 1959, 170). Walpole’s poems are “pent in

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a chrysalis” (ln. 42) until the warmth of the sun “Bursts the inactive shell, and thoughts / Like butterflies their prison shun” (ll. 44–45). The “inactive shell” alludes to the cocoon, which is just a casing for what is already formed, according to preformation theory. Read alongside Swammerdam’s argument, the shell signifies the body of the parent, the host who incubates and nourishes, but does not generate. Like butterflies in a chrysalis, the poems are already fully formed as indicated by Walpole’s repeated references to well-established genres and other literary influences. The image of the beautiful butterflies is, however, undercut by negative descriptions of the newly emerged butterflies: “parent faults,” “sluggish,” and “flimsy” (ll. 46–48). In the next stanza, he calls them “flies” (ln. 49), and readers cannot help but return to the earlier image of the maggots in line sixteen and the twenty dead silkworm embryos of line thirty-eight. Although these features are part of the natural world, their irregularity can be associated with monstrosity as it was perceived at the time. Monstrosity was anything that deviated from a harmonious norm—birth defects, hybrids, and other malformations. Further, given that this poem describes the nature of Walpole’s imagination, these images should be read in the context of contemporary beliefs that the imagination is the “agent of teratogenesis” (Todd 1995, 52). As Todd explains, it was the imagination that had the “capacity to misshape the fetus” because it was considered, at the time, the intermediary between mind and body (Todd 1995, 52). Walpole, perhaps, draws on this belief when he describes the monstrous capacities of his own imagination, but in doing so, he also points to the emerging embryological debate in which epigenesists could explain monstrosities more satisfactorily. The “ardour” of his poetic spirit, which is internal to the poet and necessary for the organic creation of poetry, parallels the various elements of epigenetic processes that embryologists used to explain conception and development. As with epigenetic processes, though, this ardor creates flowers, but “maggots too ‘twill form and nourish” (ln. 16). The maggots, a kind of monstrous offspring in this context, represent death and the darker sides of nature. In this way, stanza three suggests epigenetic processes, which can as easily give birth to monsters as to healthy, well-shaped human beings. In Walpole’s metaphor, his poetic thoughts sometimes grow into something beautiful, but oftentimes, malnourished and distorted, they turn into something else. Unlike preformation wherein God created each perfect being ahead of time, epigenesis was subject to the anomalies of matter, motion, and environment and could, thus, explain

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more easily the existence of monsters. In fact, this question of monstrous births was a defining feature of the debate between the two theories (see Park and Daston 1981). The pattern of preformed perfection morphing into malformed monstrosity is characteristic of the poem. The imagery shifts from life to death—from ripening seeds to frozen buds, from plenteous crops to blasted shoots, from flowers to maggots, from butterflies to flies. Walpole cannot quite submit to the mechanical rules of poetry, predetermined forms, because the organic products of his own imagination, like epigenesis, are subject to malformation and monstrosity. Although the poem expresses an anxiety about being able to live up to the models of the past, the most interesting parts of the poem are the images of deformity, the ones that emerge organically from Walpole’s imagination, suggesting his preference, despite what he says on the literal level, for originality. While alluding to the various theories of embryology in the pattern of imagery that hints at the monstrous, the poem also evokes the conflict between the mechanical and the organic as well as the male and the female; both dichotomies are important components of all theories of generation. Walpole associates the darker side of the natural world with the organic, with internal forms of origination and generation. By contrast, the “lighter” side is much more mechanical; his references to earlier forms read like a shopping list of conventions to deploy—“purling streams” and “curling breezes” of line 20 and “Battles, sieges, men and arms” in line twenty five. It is merely “Fancy” at work here, not unlike what Samuel Taylor Coleridge would later describe as a “mode of memory” that plays with “fixities and definites” (Coleridge 1985, 313). Although dark, the images that emerge from Walpole’s mind are organic because they come naturally from within; they are not forced from the outside. Although he refers to his “cold soil” in the first stanza, most of the terms associated with his imagination are warm—the “torrid beams” and “ardour” of stanza three. The poem also embeds the underlying conflict between male and female that is explicitly stated in most embryological theories. Although he references some female figures in Greek mythology—Melpomene, Thalia, Myra—Walpole dedicates the poem to Phoebus (Apollo), God of the Sun. The female element of generation is notably absent or repressed, which offers an additional parallel with the various embryological theories of the day, each of which struggled to articulate satisfactorily the role of male and female, and more often than not, downplayed the female role. Although the allusion to Melpomene, a tragic muse, may indicate the

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participation of the feminine in creation, the imagery of the poem as a whole replicates the problem of theories of generation of the time—the female provides the material but the male the creative spirit. References to “Chloe’s fan or Cælia’s bonnet” (ln. 36), mere trifles, place the feminine in the lesser role of providing material, but not creative energy or life, which is reserved for the male poet. This hierarchy is explicit in Aristotelian biology, which asserted that the female provides only the material whereas the male provides the spirit of life. Later theories deployed a similar hierarchy, but in varying ways. This brief analysis of Walpole’s juvenile poem demonstrates the interpretive potential offered by an embryological reading, in particular a new understanding of how and why the genre developed as it did in some of its most representative examples.11 Perhaps more importantly, embryological discourse helps answer the lingering questions surrounding the implicit dichotomies central to both embryology and the Gothic: mechanical versus organic, supernatural versus natural, healthy versus “monstrous,” male versus female. To what extent does the Gothic (and its later permutations such as science fiction) support/reject scientific and technological advances? Who or what is the monster/the monstrous? Is the genre regressive or progressive politically, socially, culturally? Does it reinforce or challenge social norms? Each novel raises these and similar questions; embryological discourse will bring some answers into relief. While the history of criticism clearly addresses science and medicine as important themes in Gothic fiction, the scholarship in this area can be enhanced by attending to a significant omission: the reproductive sciences, specifically embryology. In a 2015 issue of Gothic Studies, Sara Wasson asserts that “Medicine itself can be seen as an incorrigibly Gothic project,” but Wasson’s account addresses neither obstetrics nor embryology (Wasson 2015, 1). In the last 20–30 years, scholars have explored electricity, galvanism, Newtonian physics, botany, chemistry, and psychology.12 While there is a strand of scholarship that attends to the body and the medical sciences more specifically, embryology has received relatively little attention in this context. 11  Much has been written on the history of the Gothic and its varieties of source material, from the medieval romance to Shakespearean tragedy, from French adventure stories to German horror stories. For a brief overview, see Clery (2002) and Hale (2002). 12  A notable exception to this lack is Alan Bewell (1988). See the following: Cunningham and Jardine (1990), Fulford et al. (2004), Holmes (2008), Jackson (2008) and Ruston (2013).

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As Sharon Ruston contends in Creating Romanticism, “science and medicine should be recognized as playing a part in the creation of what we now, anachronistically, call ‘Romanticism’. It recognizes, as do the writers themselves, that scientific and medical writing as much as any other kind of writing is a product of its historical moment and shows that this writing is employed knowingly for political purposes” (Ruston 2013, 2).13 The reproductive sciences are, I contend, “product[s] of [their] historical moment” and play a part in what we call “Gothic.” The reproductive sciences, both popular and professional, provided some of the key images, motifs, and themes that came to be associated with the Gothic novel. The Gothic novel, in turn, became a place wherein both superstitions and scientific advances could be challenged and explored, for as Ruston argues, the “political purposes” of any kind of writing are ever-present. As Ruston does for Romanticism and the sciences, I want to argue that the Gothic novel is the aesthetic manifestation of the social and political concerns implicit in the embryological sciences of the time. The importance of the sciences in genre formation is acknowledged in several important studies: Katherine Kickel’s Novel Notions: Medical Discourse and the Mapping of the Imagination in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (2007); Helmut Müller-Sievers’ Self-Generation: Biology, Philosophy, and Literature around 1800 (1997); Denise Gigante’s Life: Organic Form and Romanticism (2009); and Tilottama Rajan’s article “The Epigenesis of Genre: New Forms from Old” (2009).14 In Kickel’s work, she successfully demonstrates that the development of the English novel is “indebted to earlier conversations about the imagination in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century medicine” (Kickel 2007, 4). Kickel shows, through Defoe, Fielding, Sterne, and Radcliffe, that “the English novel was shaped by the contemporaneous medical and philosophical investigations of the imagination to produce an increasingly self-promoting 13  Similar to Ruston’s argument in Creating Romanticism, this study suggests that medical documents, as much as literary ones, are formative. While Ruston discusses Romanticism more broadly and a variety of scientific discourses (e.g., animal magnetism and botany), I narrow my focus to the Gothic and the reproductive sciences. 14  I am indebted to Brian Rejack, NEH Summer Scholar (Lincoln, NE 2013), for recommending Gigante’s book and to Robert Mitchell of Duke University for recommending Müller-Sievers’ book. Another important work in this context, which shares with Müller-­ Sievers a focus on German philosophy and biological theories, is Richards (2002). In this study Richards argues that “the central currents of nineteenth-century biology had their origins in the Romantic movement” (Richards 2002, xix).

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aesthetic object” (Kickel 2007, 7). Similarly, I argue that the Gothic novel was shaped by conceptions of conception, by medical arguments about the formation of the self in the womb. The genre developed, in part, as a reflection of and response to embryological discourse. The novels I treat in this book are touchstones, key moments in the development of the various forms of the Gothic novel. While Kickel addresses medical discourse on the imagination, Müller-­ Sievers discusses embryological discourse, specifically epigenesis, and its effect on German literature and philosophy. He argues that The romantic insistence on the autogony of the self in poetry and in the novel of development [Bildungsroman] also relies on the acceptance of epigenetic forms of origination. The genealogy and function of epigenesis— this is the thesis of the following study—provides an altogether unique means by which to understand the momentous and irrevocable changes in philosophy, language philosophy, and literature at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. (Müller-Sievers 1997, 4)

Müller-Sievers is here arguing that a specific embryological theory—epigenesis—had a radical influence on German aesthetics, specifically the notion that life is internally sourced, the “autogony of the self.” He argues for the existence of “epigenetic literature,” the most prominent example being the Bildungsroman (Müller-Sievers 1997, 20). The influence of a particular version of embryology is not, however, limited to a thematic component of literature. There are, as Müller-Sievers argues, consequences for form: “epigenesis and preformation cannot be contained in the position of theme or content but always have formative consequences for their Darstellung” (Müller-Sievers 1997, 18). One such consequence is what he calls “endless narration,” the tendency of the narrative to never truly end because origins cannot be known (Müller-Sievers 1997, 20). Thus, the embryological point of view of any given text affects its form. Although Müller-Sievers discusses German literature and philosophy around 1800, his argument about the “genealogy and function of epigenesis” applies equally well to British Romanticism, which was, of course, highly influenced by German philosophy, literature, and natural philosophy. Like Müller-Sievers, Gigante takes up the field of embryology and applies it to British poetry, specifically John Keats, Percy Shelley, and Christopher Smart. Her analysis turns to discussions of vitality and power in embryological medicine. Beginning with the premise that Romantic

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scientists and poets were both confronted with the same question, “what is life?” Gigante claims that “science and aesthetics confronted the same formal problems” and that Romantic life science “made possible the analogy between aesthetic and biological form upon which we still rely” (Gigante 2009, 3). Through this analogy, Gigante argues for the existence of an “epigenesist poetics,” which she applies primarily to Romantic poetry (Gigante 2009, 46). Her “epigenesist poetics” is much like Müller-­ Sievers’ argument for an epigenetic literature in German aesthetics. The poems she chooses as examples of this poetics are those that demonstrate, through their form, the unpredictability of vitality and power, both key elements of her definition of “life.” If life is power, then the poet “risk[s] the object’s slipping out of representation, and hence out of imaginative control. As the Romanticists recognized, power, even when in balance, is still power, and the slightest alteration in circumstance or environment could set that power in unpredictable motion” (Gigante 2009, 2–3). This unpredictability turns to “monstrosity,” which, she argues, “came to represent life’s relentless fecundity” (Gigante 2009, 6). Gigante’s definition of “epigenesist poetics” applies even more directly, I would suggest, to the Gothic, which embodies this monstrosity and “relentless fecundity” not only in its individual artifacts, but also of the genre as a whole. Just as Walpole articulated in his early poem, the Gothic imagination will assert itself, turning butterflies into maggots, and the genre itself has spawned innumerable other genres and subgenres that, unlike other genres that have “had their brief lives and disappeared” as Day reminds us, continues in full force (Day 1985, 5). Just as Kickel, Müller-Sievers, and Gigante argue that developments in the sciences had material effects on the aesthetic products of the period, so too Rajan claims that biological developments led to a proliferation of Romantic genres. The central purpose of Rajan’s article is to challenge the critical history of Romanticism that suggests that the Romantics codified the concept of “Literature” around which our current idea of disciplines and aesthetic education revolve. Instead, she asserts that “in the Romantic period Literature had yet to emerge as a discipline with a defined curricular core,” a fact that changes our understanding of what constitutes the art object. She begins, though, with the premise that the Romantic “aesthetics for individual genius” led to a deformalization of genres and “a more contingent and hybrid notion of genre as historically produced and still in process” (Rajan 2009, 508). Rajan’s “aesthetics for individual genius,” Kickel’s “self-promoting aesthetic object,” and Müller-Sievers’ “autogony

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of the self” foreground the Romantic privileging of internal sources of origination, identity, art. The Romantic desire to create an aesthetic identity in defiance of external sources of origination, not unlike what was exemplified in Walpole’s poem (and, indeed, much of Romantic poetry from Wordsworth to Keats), led to a variety of genres, including ones that are monstrous, hybrid, unfinished. Rajan argues that the diversity of genres in the Romantic period is directly linked to developments in biology, specifically embryology (Rajan 2009, 511–513). For my purposes, the most significant aspect of Rajan’s argument is the link between the biological sciences and “genres-in-progress” of which the Gothic is the most notable example (Rajan 2009, 525). Rajan argues that “developments in biology make it possible at an archeological level not only to rethink the system of genre epigenetically (as adding new forms where needed), but even to rethink what constitutes the aesthetic organism” (Rajan 2009, 516–517). In this way, Rajan makes a parallel between epigenetic formation and genre formation; for both biological species and literary species, new forms can be either regressive or progressive. Notably, epigenesis accounts for “the incomplete, for failed or botched forms” (Rajan 2009, 517), the monstrous. As the history of Gothic studies shows, which I alluded to at the beginning of this chapter, the Gothic itself challenges what we consider the art object. Just as epigenesis accounts for biological monstrosity so too Romantic aesthetics, according to Rajan, accounts for genres in process, genres like the Gothic that are bound up in monstrosity: the Gothic is the presently deformed possibility of future transformations— a genre, like so many others, that invites embryological reading as conflictedly progressive and regressive. As the case of the Gothic suggests, an embryology rather than a formalism or thematics of genre may in the end be the most significant contribution of Romantic genre viewed as a practical poetics. (Rajan 2009, 526)

The “deformed” nature of the Gothic “invites embryological reading,” partly because, as I am arguing, embryology, specifically epigenesis, is the science that explains monstrosity, hybridity, species formation. “Formalism,” which indicates a predetermined form coming from outside the thing itself, contrasts with an epigenetic approach to genre, which allows the “future transformations.” Rajan’s argument ends with a reference to the Gothic as the epitome of those genres in process. I wish to pick up where she left off and explore in more depth the epigenetic nature of

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the genre and the ways in which it not only mirrors the epistemological and ontological concerns of embryology, but also how it answers some of the questions it raises. The Gothic as a genre can be explained, in part, by its embryological contexts not merely as a metaphor but, as I hope to show, a practical reality, for as I have suggested and will demonstrate more thoroughly in the chapters that follow, the Gothic reflects an epigenetic aesthetics, which explains, in part, the unique forms its most famous novels have taken and its continuation, to this day, into its deformed “future transformations”—science fiction, horror, psychological thriller, slasher films, dark metal and Goth rock, eco-Gothic, Southern Gothic, ad infinitum.

“Modes of Perception”; Or, Eighteenth-Century Embryology Fully grasping the implications of applying embryology to the Gothic novel begins with understanding that the sciences of generation in this period were, to a great extent, fictions devised to support a particular worldview. Epigenesist, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, writes: But are we certain these qualities [impenetrability, divisibility, elasticity, etc.] are the only ones which matter possesses, or rather, must we not think these qualities, which we take for principles, are only modes of perception; and that if our senses were differently formed, we should discover in matter, qualities different from those which we have enumerated? (Buffon 1792, 2:308; emphasis added)15

In this passage Buffon, attempting to explain his theory fetal formation and development, asserts that some scientific principles are not a matter of material proof, but of perception. We cannot see gravity or elasticity, but 15  See Buffon (1792, 2:308). Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle was published in thirty one volumes between 1749 and 1789. Abridged English translations began appearing around 1780, the most famous being Barr’s Buffon. There was a 9-volume version in 1780 published in Edinburgh and a second edition published in London with notes by Scottish publisher William Smellie (not the obstetrician) in 1785. Another printing occurred in 1790 for C. and G. Kearsley, and it is this edition that Mary Wollstonecraft reviewed for Joseph Johnson at the Analytical Review. J. S. Barr published abridged versions in 1792 (10 volumes) and 1797 (2 volumes). Unless otherwise noted, the quotations from Buffon come from the 1792 Barr’s Buffon version and will be cited by volume and page number in the text.

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we perceive them. In other words, the imagination must fill the gaps created by the limitations of our senses. Not unlike the Gothic novel, embryological discourse itself was shaped by the imaginations of its writers, writers who were struggling, like Walpole, to strike a balance between the rational and the supernatural. The major embryological theories of the day, the key terms of the debates, and the philosophical differences that led to the gradual preference, in scientific circles, for epigenetic explanations of life over preformationist ones play an important role in the development of the Gothic novel. The philosophical differences among the key players in embryology hinged on the conflict between the mechanic and the organic, science and the supernatural, female and male, and internal and external sources of human generation, as did Walpole’s early poem in which he provided a cursory explanation of his aesthetic. Within this context, “monsters” played a crucial role in the evidence in favor of epigenesis. These same conflicts are constitutive of the Gothic, which shares with embryology a focus on origins and a development around the clash between the scientific and supernatural. The following section provides a broad overview of the history of embryology and a more detailed explanation of the two competing worldviews that marked the eighteenth-century debates. The history of embryology underscores the struggle between imagination and scientific evidence, with scientific evidence, as we currently understand it, emerging relatively late in the story. More often than not, imagination and perception, buttressed by political and cultural ideologies, filled the gaps that scientific evidence left. Jane Maienschein explains that “epistemological issues of rightness, and the coexistence of competing sets of epistemological values, often strongly direct the scientific discussions and underlie the controversies involved in particular cases,” sometimes even more so than empirical evidence itself (Maienschein 2000, 123). Maienschein’s claim is evident in the history of embryology from Aristotle onward, for preconceived notions about the world and humans’ place within it often drove the interpretation of evidence, if there even was evidence at all. The debates were complex and rarely were there clear dividing lines among the theories available, but three sets of binaries generally appeared, in various forms, in all discussions, from Aristotle in the fourth century B.C.E. to the preformationists and epigenesists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: mechanicism versus organicism, materialism versus vitalism, external versus internal sources of identity. Implicit within these

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binaries is the conflict between the scientific and supernatural, which is, not surprisingly, a key component of the Gothic genre as originally conceived and as it continues to play out. Walpole attempted to marry the fantastic with the realistic in terms of how human beings would organically and “naturally” respond to fantastic or supernatural situations, and discussions of the genre from its earliest times until now invoke a need for balance between the two. Further, Walpole wanted to combine the supernatural and the rational in order to create a new genre, but he did so with some clear ambivalence about the supernatural. Similarly, embryologists struggled to articulate a balance between the scientific and supernatural, and many embryologists wanted/needed to keep the supernatural in play while others rejected it. As Shirley Roe (1981) points out, the embryological debates pivoted on the conflict between mechanical and organic explanations of life, which in turn had serious implications for one’s understanding of God’s role in the universe. Mechanicism, the notion that life can be explained as merely a combination of matter and motion, conflicted with organicism, which suggested that life is explained as a whole system wherein the individual parts cannot be separated from the whole and wherein the properties of life are inherent to the material. Related to this mechanical/organic binary is materialism and vitalism. Materialism, the philosophical perspective that explains life in terms of the material and its internal properties, contrasts with vitalism, which explains life in terms of supernatural, external forces. Materialism and vitalism had clear ideological implications as evidenced by the Lawrence-Abernethy debates. John Abernethy argued for the existence of a soul as the necessary prerequisite of life whereas Lawrence argued that organization and the material were the only necessary elements of life. In other words, there is no soul; life is material. Referring to the more conservative, reactionary fears expressed by The Radical Triumvirate, Sharon Ruston sums up the implications of the debates for contemporaries of Abernethy and Lawrence: Abernethy’s response to contemporary calls for law and order in a time when reform was being demanded was to portray the principle of life as a sovereign substance, controlling the gross and inert matter of the body. By making virtue something that was imposed and regulated from outside the self, he gave a physiological support for a system of society that operated using legal organisations to enforce good behaviour…In contrast…Lawrence’s theory is a republican one, levelling all matter and denying that a ‘monarch’ was needed as the head of the state. (Ruston 2005, 75)

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The political and theological implications of the materialist-vitalist debate of course infiltrated the various theories of embryology, which rested on similar assumptions about the sources of life. Generally speaking, preformation came to be associated with mechanism and a religious point of view that insisted that God, an external source, was the origin of life.16 Epigenesis, on the other hand, sought to identify, from scientifically observable phenomena, organic, material causes internal to the being itself instead of supernatural, external explanations of life. Epigenesists were not always successful in finding purely internal sources, often lapsing into vitalism, which was essentially a supernatural concept despite the specific labels they applied to it. These binaries—vitalism/materialism, mechanicism/ organicism, external/internal—were the major threads running through each theory, each of which had its own epistemological and ontological implications. Embryological history in the West generally begins with the Aristotelian fantasy of gender and species hierarchy, for within his system women are inferior to men, animals inferior to humans, and plants inferior to animals.17 Significantly, Aristotle’s theory was committed to explaining life as something that occurs within the creature itself; there are no external forces, but the being, of whatever variety (plant, animal, human), holds the potential within the material. Thus, life is “self-sourced,” to coin a term. Aristotle’s system was, of course, pre-Christian and committed to the notion of female inferiority, for in Aristotle’s program the male provides the essence of life, the creative force, whereas the female provides only the material.18 His system also supports species hierarchy wherein the vegetable is the lowest form of identity and the male human the highest. Aristotle’s theory articulated a relationship between the form and the material, a relationship that later theorists continued to discuss and revise 16  Because of vitalism’s supernatural element, it might seem that preformationists would lean in that direction; however, according to preformation theory, God had already done the act of creating, so any suggestion that creation occurred in the present flew in the face of the preformationist emphasis on God as First Cause. Further, vitalism did not necessarily imply God, but something extra-natural and outside the material, which is the reason that the scientifically minded rejected it or attempted to steer around it. 17  This explanation of Aristotelian theory relies heavily on Maienschein (2017). 18  There were some earlier theories that suggested that both male and female contributed seed to conception. According to Needham, Hippocrates articulated the doctrine of the two seeds in which both male and female contribute semen to the process. The female seed is “identified with the vaginal secretion.” This theory competed with Aristotelian theory for centuries. See Needham (1959, 35).

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based on their own ideologies. In Aristotle’s scheme, form emerges from the unformed in a gradual process that is teleologically driven (final causes) and guided by the internal and the material (formal cause) and begun externally with the mixing of the male seed and female blood (efficient cause). In short, the rational soul (which is not a theological concept in this case) “resides in the combination of male and female semen. The living differs from the dead because of the action of the soul. Therefore, it is the teleological drive of the potential that actualizes the individual and its form and function, epigenetically, gradually, and internally” (Maienschein 2017). In this articulation, Aristotle explains that the soul is that which distinguishes the living from the dead, an idea that will be significant for later Christians who will turn Aristotle’s “soul” into a supernatural, God-­ created element of the self. For Aristotle, though, the souls enter the body at various stages in the gestation process, but they are material and do not come from the outside. In considering the agent that causes form and material to create an embryo, Aristotle writes, “Either it is something external which makes them or else it is something existing in the seminal fluid and the semen; and this must either be soul or a part of a soul, or something containing soul” (qtd. in Needham 1959, 46). Here Aristotle posits that the soul must be either external or internal, but he decides that the soul is internally created in the moment. Later, he writes that “all three kinds of soul, not only the nutritive, must be possessed potentially before they are possessed actually” (qtd. in Needham 1959, 49), indicating that these souls were not “in-breathed from any source external to the embryo, but rather they were internally generated each in due time” (qtd. in Needham 1959, 50). The “soul” is “internally generated.” Thus, Aristotelian theory was entirely organic, material, and epigenetic. The preformationist fantasy emerged in roughly the middle of the seventeenth century and came to be associated with a more conservative, Christian stance and a desire to eradicate chance and the monstrous.19 Preformationists began with two premises: (1) God plays an active role in 19  The explanation that follows is necessarily simplified as there were varieties of preformationist theories, even beyond the distinction between ovism and spermism. There were those, for example, who believed the being was fully formed before conception, but also those who believed that the being was fully formed shortly after conception. See the following for overviews of the embryology of the period: Needham (1959), Gasking (1967), Roe (1981), Farley (1982), Pinto-Correia (1997). Spontaneous generation—the theory that life could emerge from both organic and inorganic matter arbitrarily—was also a part of reproductive discourse in this period. Iris Fry (2000) demonstrates that the second half of the

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the universe and (2) the natural world is harmonious and economical in the sense that there is a divine plan wherein everyone has a role and nothing goes to waste. There were various versions of preformation, but generally speaking, preformation asserted that human form was predetermined by God before birth. Although the Catholic Church’s official stance (and the popular one in circulation among Anglicans) was a version of Aristotelian epigenesis, preformationists, by and large, were adamant about God’s role often accusing their opponents of being overly reliant on material explanations, which, for them, implied atheism (Fry 2000, 18–19, 26). The problem with preformation, though, was that it could not explain the existence of deformities and monstrous births without also saying that God pre-ordained them, a problem that continually threatened the preformationist stance. Specific articulations of preformation in the eighteenth century demonstrate its implications and guide my analysis of the primary Gothic texts in the rest of this study. Preformation, supported by Charles Bonnet (1720–1793), Albrecht von Haller (1708–1777), and Lazzaro Spallanzani (1729–1799) and which was called evolution in its early stages, argues that complete, microscopic human beings reside in either the female egg or the male sperm prior to conception.20 The being (also known as a “miniature” or “germ”) is not, as with Aristotle’s theory, only potential, but actual; form is complete ahead of time. Moreover, unlike Aristotle who argued that all processes are teleologically driven by a potential form, preformationists attributed first causes to God, an external, supernatural, intelligent being. For many preformationists, both form and material are predetermined. Conception ferments the being and begins the process of slow growth, which is really just the being growing larger over time. Advocated by Hartsoeker, Boerhaave, and Liebniz, animalculist (also called spermist) preformation places the miniature being in the male sperm whereas ovist preformation places the tiny being in the female egg. Another distinction within preformation is the concept of preexistence, which posits that God created all human beings at Creation and that each life is encased within eighteenth century saw a resurgence of belief in this concept, which was only finally exploded by Louis Pasteur in the 1850s. 20  The application of the term “evolution” to preformation is not related to our current understanding of the term. Preformation was evolution in the sense of its literal translation of “to unfold.” A preformed body was unfolded over time, not created or changed except in size and proportion of parts. See Gould (1977, 18). I am indebted to Yohei Igarashi, fellow NEH Summer Scholar (Lincoln, NE 2013), for recommending Gould’s work to me.

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another life all the way back to Eve (also called encapsulation or emboîtement). Like a Russian doll, each being resided, fully formed, within the previous generation ad infinitum.21 By and large, by the middle of the eighteenth century, the predominant view among preformationists was ovism, partly because ovism solved the problem of the apparent waste of the unused spermatozoa.22 Preformation was especially palatable for Christians because it supported the most fundamental stories of the faith: two original parents, original sin, and the gender and species hierarchies expressed in Genesis. Clara Pinto-Correia writes: Preformation “scientifically” established that all men were in fact brothers, since they all came from the same gonad. Thus it confirmed the teachings of Jesus with a new discourse in natural philosophy, and in this the theory became even more effective since it could finally explain the irrevocability of original sin—we had all been soiled by it, since we had all been encased within the first sinner. Moreover, it could now be seen as inevitable that servants would always originate from servants, just as kings would always originate from kings. By putting lineages inside each other, preformation could function as a “politically correct” antidemocratic doctrine, implicitly legitimizing the dynastic system. (Pinto-Correia 1997, 4)

Preformation, then, implicitly supported traditional hierarchies, both religious and political. Original sin now had scientific “proof,” and monarchs, aristocrats, and tyrannical fathers had biologically based support for their dominant position. In short, “One cannot understand the preformation theory unless one realizes that, from Swammerdam on, its inspiration and appeal were partly theological, and that it was meant to subordinate biology to the Christian doctrine of Creation by denying that the origin of life 21  It is important to note here a distinction between preformation and preexistence. As Peter Bowler (1971) explains, preformation is simply the idea that a complete form exists simultaneously with the material, which can happen either before or after conception. Preexistence, on the other hand, is the idea that this preformed being existed from the beginning of time. In this article, Bowler traces how preformation and preexistence became conflated over the course of time. 22  According to Roe, the central problem “lay in the tremendous waste that male emboîtement would imply. Why would God have created so many creatures in spermatozoa destined never to develop?” At the time, it was believed that female mammals developed from “a female egg” (emphasis added); thus, there was no idea in play that thousands and millions of eggs were being wasted (Roe 1981, 9).

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might be a purely biochemical process” (Vartanian 1953, 88). The ideology of preformation, then, rests on conservative, religious principles, ones that support the political and cultural status quo. Preformationists Charles Bonnet and Albrecht von Haller both express religious zeal in their beliefs about preformation; furthermore, each suggests that the theory appeals to their imaginations, their sense of the aesthetic, underscoring the link between scientific stories and aesthetic stories that this study attempts to trace. In 1762, Bonnet wrote of the beauty of preformationist explanations with a tone approaching religious ecstasy: “The different orders of infinitely small [beings] nested [abîmés] with one another that this hypothesis allows, overwhelms the imagination without alarming reason….I could not bring myself to abandon a theory so beautiful as that of the preexisting germs just to embrace purely mechanical explanations” (qtd. in Müller-Sievers 1997, 27–28). The theory of encapsulation, which he describes as “beautiful,” excites Bonnet’s imagination; as Müller-Sievers points out, the nested beings in their infinite smallness borders on the sublime (Müller-Sievers 1997, 27). Haller too highlights the aesthetic and religious value of preformation. Over the years, Haller went back and forth between preformation and epigenesis, but it was his religious beliefs, more than scientific evidence, that caused him to embrace preformation. In 1766, Haller explains preformation in more precise religious terms than his mentor does: If the first rudiment of the fetus is in the mother, if it has been built in the egg, and has been completed to such a point that it needs only to receive nourishment to grow from this, the greatest difficulty in building this most artistic structure from brute matter is solved. In this hypothesis, the Creator himself, for whom nothing is difficult, has built this structure: He has arranged at one time, or at least before the male force [of fecundation] approaches, the brute matter according to foreseen ends and according to a model preformed by his Wisdom. (qtd. in Roe 1981, 43–44; emphasis mine)

The appeal to God, a supernatural force, as the cause of this “artistic structure” underscores again the truth that the scientific imagination and religious fervor, more than actual evidence, are at play. The theory of ovism brings both Haller and Bonnet to the point of religious transport; both are enchanted by what the material evidence allows them to believe about the ultimate harmony of the universe and the wisdom of God as Creator.

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Haller’s and Bonnet’s attitudes illustrate the religious foundations of their reproductive biology. While preformationists embraced and welcomed the supernatural, epigenesists tried to dispel it; they wanted to ground their work in scientific and material realities that could be observed. However, they too had to weave stories to explain the evidence in ways that would align with their preconceived ideas about the universe—the fantasy of internal sources of life, of self-generation. As Müller-Sievers argues, the superiority of epigenesis in scientific circles was a “purely textual event” because “there is no discovery, no experiment, no microscopic evidence that would demonstrate” its scientific superiority (Müller-Sievers 1997, 5). They were reacting, in part, to the non-scientific assumptions of preformationists and were generally committed to organic, material explanations; as a result, they eventually became more aligned with progressive science rather than conservative Christian worldviews, even though most of them identified, at least nominally, as Christians. Significantly, epigenetic theories, despite their basis in objective “facts,” often slipped into the supernatural or, in contemporary scientific terms, vitalism. The theories of the most influential epigenesists of the period attempted to explain the source of life without resorting to vitalism; like their preformationist counterparts, their imaginations supplied the gaps in the physical evidence. Supported by natural philosophers such as Count de Buffon (1707–1788), C.  F. Wolff (1735–1794), and J.  F. Blumenbach (1752–1840), epigenesis posits that at conception (a part of the process that is never quite fully explained) the fetus begins as a small bit of material, which gradually develops organ by organ in a particular order until a perfect being is formed.23 Who or what drives this process was up for debate, and the proposed answers were often responses to objections from either (a) preformationists who felt that epigenetic explanations left God out of the process, or (b) scientists who rejected vitalism, supernatural explanations of life. Epigenesists competed on two fronts. Organic epigenesists rejected the mechanistic philosophies of the eighteenth century, but then their colleagues often charged them with vitalism. Mechanical epigenesists were trying to avoid vitalism, but in doing so were then accused of materialism and atheism by preformationists. More often than not, 23  Although the cell was discovered in 1665 by Robert Hooke, cell theory, as the foundation for modern biology, was not articulated fully until the late 1830s in the work of Theodor Schwann and Matthias Schleiden.

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though, “those who accepted epigenesis also accepted a form of vitalism” (Maienschein 2017). Because it rejects preformation and vitalism, ­epigenesis, generally speaking, was associated with the more progressive, scientifically based camp. Again, though, both preformationists and epigenesists relied on narratives spun from the imagination to explain their theories. While preformation embraced the supernatural as a given, epigenesis eschewed it while embracing instead, as I discuss below, both uncertainty and the monstrous. French naturalist Buffon, whom Walpole knew and admired, buttressed the fantasy of purely material self-generation through his theory of the internal mold and his assertions that “experience, [is] the sole source of all real science” (Buffon 1792, 2:334). Rejecting the idea that the creation of life is “an immediate effect of the Almighty’s will” (Buffon 1792, 2:289), Buffon posited, instead, the idea of the internal mold, which he likened to mechanical forces of nature similar to gravity. He reasoned that organic matter contains an “internal mould, in which the nutritive matter assimilates itself with the whole in such a manner that, without changing the order and proportion of the parts, each receives an augmentation” (Buffon 1792, 2:298). The embryo forms when the male and female seminal fluids mix. The seminal fluids of each contain “living organic particles,” which are representatives of each organ (Buffon 1792, 2:279). The heart has heart particles, the lungs have lung particles, and so on. This kind of matter is different from brute or animal matter, which merely provides for nourishment, not generation. The organism’s internal mold accepts these particles under the guidance of the “penetrating powers” (Buffon 1792, 2:302). He compares the internal mold to forces like gravity whose effects are known without any physical evidence. After articulating his own theory, Buffon challenges preformationist theories by asserting that they are founded on “moral affinities which far from producing any physical or real existence only alter the reality and confound the objects of our sensations, perceptions and knowledge, with those of our sentiments, our passions and our wills” (Buffon 1792, 2:336; emphasis added). Preformationists allow their passions to “confound” what they observe with their senses. Their passions have obscured their reason. There were other epigenetic explanations on the scene, each offering different terms for the powers that guide conception and development, different “modes of perception,” as Buffon called them. These various explanations attempted to navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of mechanism and vitalism, highlighting the way in which the specter of vitalism/

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the supernatural troubled the epigenetic program. In his dissertation Theory of Generation (1759), Wolff tried to rescue epigenesis from charges of mechanism by positing an “essential force” (essentliche Kraft or vis essentialis) that guided organic matter, or “nutritive juices” (Müller-Sievers 1997, 38). Wolff’s “essential force” was, unfortunately, associated with vitalism because it was external to the nutritive juices; while not “God” per se, these powers were supernatural, in the literal sense of being above or beyond what is clearly defined by natural laws. J.  F. Blumenbach attempted to escape this problem of vitalism by positing that a “formative drive” was the guiding force that caused the material to form into particular organs. He equated the “formative drive” with life forces such as irritability and sensibility, an argument not unlike Buffon’s “penetrating powers,” which he compared to mechanical laws and the properties of matter. What is unique about Blumenbach’s claim is that he dispensed with the need to push origins back to a source. Blumenbach wrote that it is “a power, the constant agency of which we ascertain by experience, whilst its cause, like that of all other generally recognized natural powers, still remains, in the strictest sense of the word—‘qualitas occulta’” (qtd. in Müller-Sievers 1997, 43). Whether called “penetrating powers,” the power of attraction, an “essential force,” or a “formative drive,” each of these theories can be subject either to charges of materialism or vitalism, depending on who’s issuing the objection. Buffon, Wolff, and Blumenbach all demonstrate the need to identify the unique properties of organic matter while at the same time avoiding supernatural explanations. Blumenbach’s seems to be the most successful partly because he forsakes the need to identify precisely the qualitas occulta. Although they attempted to account for life with purely material explanations, epigenesists could never quite eliminate the ghost of the supernatural. The worldview each camp is trying to maintain is underscored most clearly in their responses to natural anomalies—birth defects, hybrids, and monsters. Preformationists embraced the supernatural in the form of God as the First Cause in their efforts to support a worldview in which the universe is a harmonious, fixed whole with no waste, but they struggled to address the riddle posed by monsters, birth defects, hybrids, and other species that did not fit into this system. Epigenesists, by contrast, could embrace monsters and hybrids, but were always haunted by the supernatural. Although they rejected vitalism (or attempted to), epigenesists could, at least, acknowledge the ultimate unknowability of biological origins and

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embrace monstrosity and hybridity. The existence of monsters and hybrids thus played a pivotal role in the debates. In defining monstrosity, preformationist Bonnet writes, “EVERY organical production, which has more or less parts than the species requires, or that has constructed them otherwise, is a monster” (Bonnet 1766, 1:150). In attempting to explain it, Bonnet suggests, not unlike epigenesists, that it is the environment that might cause problems after evolution begins, but he and Haller both express lingering uncertainty. He goes on to list types of monsters using parallels with vegetation such as grafting. While some monsters are created by accidental grafts and unequal growth, another type proliferates through propagation, what we would now call genetic inheritance. Here he turns to humans as an example: “A family is born with six fingers and six toes. Such monstrous parts as are propagated, bear an affinity with the organs of generation. Those by excess, and which are propagated, suppose a relative excess in the fecundative organ” (Bonnet 1766, 1:152). He starts to explain this phenomenon in more detail, but stops short: “…they—but if I undertake to dive still deeper into this obscure question, I shall forget that I am not therein performing the office of a contemplator of nature, which indeed I seem already to have too little attended to” (Bonnet 1766, 1:153). At this moment in the text, Bonnet’s pause and redirect, signaled by the very pregnant dash, suggests that he knows he cannot fully explore the question without getting into logical and theological trouble. Haller, too, struggles for an answer. In 1786, he lists the objections to preformation, which include monstrosity, to which he responds, “in so great an infancy of human knowledge, we cannot yet give a full answer” (Haller 1966, 209). Both Bonnet and Haller stop short of fully answering the question of monstrosity because of its theological implications. Bonnet’s explanations do not convince epigenesists like Blumenbach who refutes the idea that the premise of preordination and preformation can sustain the idea of accidental causes (epigenesis can, but preformation cannot). He asserts, “Nor, is it at all easy to comprehend how the advocates for that theory make the phenomena of the accidental origin and growth of certain preternatural parts agree with their doctrine of pre-­ existing organic germs” (Blumenbach 1792, 51). He goes on to discuss polyps, methods by which the body repairs itself when injured, and hybrid species. Using these examples to demonstrate that nature creates anew in the moment, Blumenbach writes, “it would be rather a bold conjecture to suppose that nature had foreseen such accidents” (Blumenbach 1792,

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73). If the body can repair itself and grow new tissue to connect broken parts, then one would have to suppose that God had anticipated all of these accidents and pre-ordained those parts in the body. The same is true of polyps. When polyps are cut, they regenerate limbs, and the excised limbs become new, whole organisms. If that is the case, then God would have to have created innumerable predetermined germs within each germ of each polyp and would have had to know ahead of time how many times the polyps would experience this cutting. Blumenbach’s final claim is a refutation of Haller’s explanation of two-­ headed “animal monsters” and an assertion of his own theory, which can account for monstrosity and its many forms. According to Blumenbach, Haller claims that the two original germs of such a creation were originally deformed. Blumenbach observes that these monsters never occur in the wild, only in domestication. He argues this point via a rhetorical question: “Can the Author of nature have ordained it, that from amongst the involved germs of any one species of animals, for instance, swine, the monsters should arrive at evolution, just when taken under the care of men, and that the monsters should be produced only by the tame, and not by the wild also?” (Blumenbach 1792, 83). It makes little sense for monsters to occur by God’s design only under particular environmental circumstances. Instead, Blumenbach offers his theory of the “Formative Nisus,” which does not require the logical leaps that preformationist theory does. If the “Formative Nisus” deviates from its goal, then the animals they are a part of can “degenerate into endless varieties” and are “also more subjected to monstrosity” (Blumenbach 1792, 84). While preformation could not adequately explain monstrosity and hybridity, epigenesis could embrace it and the “endless varieties” it offers. These two points of contention—the supernatural and the monstrous—are, quite obviously, central to the Gothic and its development, which is also characterized by “endless varieties.”

The Gothic: Preformationist or Epigenetic? This brief history of embryology demonstrates that “modes of perception,” the imagination, shaped the varying embryological theories of the period. The imaginative constructs of natural historians created an excess of scientific treatises attempting to solve these questions. The Gothic novel also emerged from attempts to solve questions related to origins, the origins of aesthetic creations, using the supernatural and monstrous as a

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means of answering those questions. How does life begin, whether aesthetic or biological? What force or forces drive this process? Where and how do “monstrosities” develop? Because they share an insistence on internal sources of life and the ability to explain monstrosity and hybridity and because both are predicated on an uncomfortable, inexplicable relationship to the supernatural, epigenesis and the Gothic have the most philosophical overlap. The parallels between the two help readers see that the Gothic, like epigenesis, is actually scientifically, politically, and theologically progressive, not reactionary. The Gothic, as a genre, favors the epigenetic worldview and can be read as epigenetic literature in its ambivalent relationship to the supernatural, its development of the trope of monstrosity, its narrative excess, and its insistence on internal sources of origination. The remainder of this chapter discusses the features of epigenetic literature as applied to the Gothic more broadly, features that I will trace in the novels that are the subjects of the chapters that follow. The insistence on an internal, organic source of life, whether biological or aesthetic, makes possible monstrosity, hybridity, and a seemingly endless variety of species. Internal sources of the self/life appear in Gothic novels primarily at the level of content—in characterization, the theme of companionate marriage, and the plot device of the conflict between individuals and authority. Monstrosity and hybridity appear not only in the content of Gothic novels (e.g., a demon masquerading as a monk, a vampire, a zombie), but also in the narrative form of individual novels and in the proliferation of the genre itself and is, as in biology, an inevitable result of organic, internally sourced generation. Internal Sources of Identity In 1737, Walpole’s “poetic spirit,” like Blumenbach’s “Formative Nisus,” led to the nipped buds, maggots, and dead embryos of Walpole’s juvenile poem; eventually, this poetic fire led to the creation of a new species, the Gothic. The products of the Gothic imagination, like the powers of the epigenetic process as described by Blumenbach, are “also more subjected to monstrosity” and can “degenerate into endless varieties” (Blumenbach 1792, 84). Both epigenesis and the Gothic seek origins through the drama of imaginative narrative and do so in similar ways with similar results: a privileging of internal sources of origination results in unending,

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“monstrous” discursive structures, both buttressed by a democratic political ideology and always haunted by the supernatural. Müller-Sievers and Rajan both identify the self as a key feature of epigenetic literature. Müller-Sievers writes that “the romantic insistence on the autogony of the self in poetry and in the novel of development [Bildungsroman]…relies on the acceptance of epigenetic forms of origination” (Müller-Sievers 1997, 4). Müller-Sievers argues that genre—the bildungsroman in his example—is a direct reflection of new biologies of the self. Rajan makes a similar argument about the “de-formalization” of genres in British Romanticism. This “de-formalization” is intimately “connected to the space made in aesthetics for individual genius or, less romantically, new technologies of the self facilitated by the proliferation of print culture” (Rajan 2009, 508). Rajan’s “new technologies of the self” include epigenesis, which allows for life created organically from within. Like Müller-Sievers, Rajan links this biological reality to aesthetic products: epigenetic biology has direct, material effects on aesthetic form. The “autogony of the self” appears in the literature of the period through characters who insist on autonomy, particularly in choosing a marriage partner, a choice that must always be based on internal passion. This shift in power, from external sources like parents to that of the individual, mirrors the shift from the preformationist, external God to the epigenetic, internal “power.” This shift plays itself out in fiction in what Müller-Sievers describes as the political subtext surrounding marriage. Arguing that the embryological point of view has consequences for marriage laws and traditions, Müller-Sievers asserts that biological epigenesis provides a scientific foundation for the authority of the individual will in the choice of marriage partner. If preformation is true, the preformed being remains the same regardless of who one’s marriage partner is; thus, “the ultimate biological insignificance of the generative partner—the woman in the case of animalculism or, usually, the man in ovism calls for practical and external considerations to motivate the choice, whereas the epigenetic framework, in which there is always an ‘alternative,’ opens up the possibility of free choice of the partner” (Müller-Sievers 1997, 30). Because the child of preformation is already formed by God, parents could choose their child’s partner for external reasons, money or status, without being accused of going against nature; however, in epigenesis, choice matters. Passion or desire became important factors in choosing a partner because they are, it could be argued, “natural,” internal impulses guiding the choice of partner organically. Thus, the shift from preformation to

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epigenesis in the sciences, and their practical implications, parallels that which was occurring in the political world—from aristocratic, monarchical divine right to democratic choice. The “autogony of the self” also plays out in characterization more generally, for the characters of Gothic novels insist on a “free cause and formation of the self” (Müller-Sievers 1997, 20). Characters in Gothic novels often do not know who their parents are and are portrayed as self-formed, self-made. Sentimental novels and domestic fiction also generally emphasize the importance of individual choice in love over the prescription of traditionalist parents, but the Gothic novel makes it a centerpiece on multiple levels and it is only one part of the epigenesist equation.24 The epigenesis of the novel extends beyond the theme of marriage, for it has broader philosophical implications. Müller–Sievers writes that “scientific arguments and treatises against preformation [that is, epigenesis] contain a clearly legible political subtext: anti-aristocratic sentiments against the high-handedness of parental choice extol the democratic staunchness of the heart” (Müller-Sievers 1997, 12; emphasis mine). The “political subtext” favoring democracy necessarily repudiates hierarchies of any kind, particularly those in which the self’s identity is dependent on external will. Epigenesis then provides the biological foundation for the self, the internal will, as the primary source of identity formation. By contrast, preformation, as the opposite of epigenesis, supports established hierarchies, familial and national. As I noted earlier, Pinto-­ Correia argues that “putting lineages inside each other, preformation could function as a ‘politically correct’ antidemocratic doctrine, implicitly legitimizing the dynastic system” (Pinto-Correia 1997, 4). Given the period’s increased attention to individual rights and the problems created by class hierarchies, preformation can be associated with conservative principles and “backwards” science, for without any physical evidence, preformation posits that God the father is the source of life and that one owes one’s being to the previous generation. Certainly, in an age that is known 24  Clearly, this argument applies to any novel that favors companionate over endogamic marriage, from the domestic novels of Jane Austen to the Jacobin novels of Mary Hays and Elizabeth Inchbald. In this case, however, I am suggesting that the Gothic novel is a prime candidate for this genre of literature because it does so, more than the others, at the level of content and form. Whereas marriage based on love is a theme of the domestic novel, the epigenetic point of view does not drive the form. Most domestic novels do not exhibit what Müller-Sievers calls “endless narration” as they usually have conclusive endings wherein all problems are solved either comedically or tragically.

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for valorizing the individual, social mobility, democracy, aesthetic freedom, and the rights of mankind, it is no coincidence that there should be a scientific basis, or counterpoint, to the various contexts through which we define and read the Gothic. Monstrosity, Hybridity, Endless Narration In Walpole’s Gothic imagination, for every one silkworm created, “twenty more in embryo die,” an apt metaphor for another central component of the genre: prolific monstrosity (Yale Correspondence, 13:121–123). The development of the self from internal passions and forces leads to monstrosity, hybridity, endless variety, which are perhaps more beautiful than the mechanical productions of preformationist harmony. Monstrosity appears clearly in actual monsters such as Frankenstein’s creature, but it also emerges in narrative form and generic proliferation. For Blumenbach, the processes of epigenesis can “degenerate into endless varieties” (Blumenbach 1792, 84). Similarly, Müller-Sievers argues that The epitome of epigenetic literature, the Bildungsroman, rests on quite different presuppositions. It opts for the antithesis in Kant’s scenario by claiming a free cause and formation of the self; for the protagonist of the novel of development his conception is not merely inexplicable (and therefore a hidden source of endless narration), but properly unknowable by the linear processes of the understanding… The search for the self is thus oriented toward a future in which… it will have formed itself. (Müller-Sievers 1997, 20)

In Müller-Sievers’ explanation this “free cause and formation of the self” leads to “endless narration” because it is impossible to truly discover origins. Gigante makes a similar claim about epigenesist poetics, which, she argues, is characterized by “relentless fecundity” (Gigante 2009, 6).25 Just as the search for origins in embryology led to a number of imaginative 25  Both Gigante and Müller-Sievers argue the existence of a poetics/aesthetics that is epigenetic in nature and politically driven, but they disagree on its aesthetic success. Müller-­ Sievers believes that this epigenetic poetics masks ideology, for “epigenesis generates ideologies by suggesting that their origin be natural” (Müller-Sievers 1997, 6) and that the epigenetic novel is a failure precisely because of “endless narration” (Müller-Sievers 1997, 20). By contrast, Gigante argues that epigenesis is politically liberating and, indeed, necessary to a truly free society. Further, epigenetic poetics, because of its potential to get create new forms, is an aesthetic and political success.

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treatises, some of which I outlined above, so too the Gothic attempt to explain the deeper mysteries of the self has created an endless variety of texts. The Gothic instantiates this “relentless fecundity” in some of its central tropes and in the varieties of Gothic spawned not only at the time of its classic phase, but in the decades (and now centuries) after. The genre is infamous for the trope of found manuscripts, the mixing of literary genres within the text, and endless searches in the subterraneous vaults of unknown castles. Characters in Gothic novels are often searching for their biological origins, a process that creates the text itself and its endless varieties. Just as Müller-Sievers argues, the search for origins leads to a proliferation of texts: found manuscripts, stories within stories, poetry interspersed with narratives, letters. The subterraneous passages and mazes that are standard fare in the Gothic novel facilitate the search for origins and literalize this endless search for identity. For example, in Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance, the subterraneous passages eventually lead Julia, Emilia, and Ferdinand to their mother, their point of biological origin. Biological origins are not the only relevant components here, though, for the Gothic novel also stages a drama in which the individual seeks to define himself or herself from within, from internal impulses more generally (not just sexual passion). Individuals in these novels attempt to identify a “free cause and formation of the self” characteristic of epigenetic literature and often wind up creating “endless narration” (Müller-Sievers 1997, 20). The pastiche of literary genres that is also characteristic of the Gothic reflects its democratic nature in culling material from both high and low, mirroring the marriage of passion founded upon epigenetically supported choice. The Gothic is the quintessentially epigenetic genre, for it foregrounds biological and aesthetic origins and privileges internal passion, as opposed to parental control, as the source of identity, both for its characters and the genre itself. Most Gothic plots valorize the individual will over hierarchical control, and this epigenetic subtext leads to the Gothic’s characteristic form. Not following a prescribed plan from the outside, the Gothic novel reads as if it is creating itself part by part over time, from within, that is, epigenetically. Jerrold Hogle recognizes the self-sourced element of the Gothic when he writes that early Gothic dramatizes the conflict between the “enticing call of aristocratic wealth and sensuous Catholic splendor” and the “desire to overthrow these past orders of authority in favor of a quasi-equality associated with the rising middle-class ideology of the self as

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self-made” (Hogle 2002, 4; emphasis mine). Though he is reading the Gothic in terms of class conflict, Hogle’s point applies equally well to the biological underpinnings of the Gothic, which re-enacts the epigenetic drama of the “self as self-made,” which is congruent to Müller-Sievers’ “autogony of the self” (Müller-Sievers  1997, 4) and Rajan’s “aesthetics for individual genius” (Rajan 2009, 508). The risk in epigenetic literature, as with epigenetic biology, is that the process itself is subject to anomalies, creating both new forms and deviations from existing forms. Epigenesis, dependent primarily on blind matter and motion, could create monsters and other malformed beings. The same can happen with art, writes Gigante, for the artist following an epigenetic aesthetics “risk[s] the object’s slipping out of representation, and hence out of imaginative control” (Gigante 2009, 2–3). This epigenetic “slipping” is characteristic of the Gothic, both when it first formed in Walpole’s mind and in its most representative manifestations of the period. The chapters that follow will trace the embryological subtexts of classic Gothic texts, demonstrating the role of the reproductive sciences in the conception and development of the most popular genre of the period and, arguably, today. Each work treated here offers a unique manifestation of its embryological contexts, which, in turn, offer new interpretations of some of the most important questions that these novels raise. Chapter 2, focused on Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, demonstrates the ways in which Walpole develops the embryological metaphors of his early poetry into his most famous work of fiction, which not only created a new genre, but also laid the foundation for its most famous immediate successors, the subjects of the remaining chapters. Walpole’s work establishes the philosophical foundations of the Gothic and its focus on the search for origins, a search mediated by the struggle between internal and external sources of identity, the organic and the mechanical, and the natural and supernatural. The prefaces set up the conflict between preformation and epigenesis, which is manifested in the novel in the plot’s focus on family fertility, the biological foundations of the love stories, and in the statue of Alfonso, which becomes a metaphor for epigenetic formation. Chapter 3 turns to Ann Radcliffe’s work focusing on The Italian, A Sicilian Romance, and The Mysteries of Udolpho. Radcliffe’s novels demonstrate their epigenetic subtexts primarily through the privileging of individual passion over parental control and through family resemblance. Her work also, while giving lip service to an almighty God, reinforces the epigenetic point of view through the scientific world she creates, a world that

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values scientific evidence over supernatural explanations. Radcliffe’s “explained supernatural” coupled with the favoring of organic love and identity created from within place her clearly in the epigenetic camp. While her novels are centered on a search for biological origins through various encounters with the “supernatural,” her fiction always has a clear conclusion and does not threaten “endless narration,” making her work an early example of the Gothic manifestation of epigenetic literature. It is, thus, less epigenetic than the novels I treat in the next three chapters, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, and James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Chapter 4 argues that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is an even clearer example of how the epigenetic point of view affects genre because Shelley’s own aesthetic theory, like Walpole’s, conceives of the art object in epigenetic terms. The novel itself, like its most famous creature, comes into being around a theory of aesthetic origins that favors organic development from internal powers. At the same time, Shelley interrogates contemporary theories of embryology through the various scenes of creation in the novel— from the creature’s initial stitching together to the creation of the female creature. Tracing the details of these scenes, this chapter shows the ways in which Shelley evokes and critiques elements of spermist preformation, vitalist epigenesis, and epigenesis. Victor’s education also includes some of the earliest, female-centered theories of embryology of Agrippa and Paracelsus, suggesting Shelley’s preference for more egalitarian models. These direct engagements with theories of fetal formation and development also address the processes of the creative imagination, making the novel illustrative of the ways in which science affects genre. Charles Robert Maturin’s most famous novel, Melmoth the Wanderer, the subject of Chap. 5, is one of the most epigenetic of all of these texts in that it foregrounds the intimate connection between conception and writing and weaves a tale that displays Gigante’s “relentless fecundity” and Müller-Sievers’ “endless narration.” The novel begins with Biddy Brannigan, a witchy midwife figure, giving birth to this story in which several identities—Alonzo, Adonijah, Immalee/Isidora—powerfully illustrate the conflict between internal passions and external controls that is a hallmark of epigenetic literature. Also, the novel is significantly more engaged with the supernatural than either Radcliffe’s or Shelley’s, which parallels the struggle that epigenesists had with vitalism, the temptation to offer supernatural explanations for how life begins. Finally, the novel’s monstrous form and its inconclusive conclusion suggest that origins will

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never be found and the story will continue ad nauseum, paralleling the epigenetic search for origins in the field of embryology. The final chapter, Chap. 6, reads James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner as an epigenetic text quite different from its predecessors in that its epigenetic stance is portrayed through a vehement anti-preformationism. The anti-preformationism of Confessions manifests itself in the novel’s critique of Calvinism’s doctrine of double-predestination, which almost completely eradicates the identity of its protagonist. The novel’s obsession with the protagonist’s identity, foregrounded as it is in the confused and confusing relationship between Robert Colwan and Gil-Martin, creates the narrative’s complexity, a complexity of form that leads to, as I shall show, a text that circles back onto itself eternally, demonstrating the unending search for origins that creates endless narration characteristic of epigenetic literature.

References Allard, James Robert. 2007. Romanticism, Medicine, and the Poet’s Body. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Arney, William Ray. 1982. Power and the Profession of Obstetrics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bewell, Alan. 1988. An Issue of Monstrous Desire: Frankenstein and Obstetrics. The Yale Journal of Criticism: Interpretation in the Humanities 2 (1): 105–128. ———. 1999. Romanticism and Colonial Disease. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Blake, William. 1988. On Virgil. In The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman. Blumenbach, J.F. 1792. An Essay on Generation. Translated by A.  Crichton. London: T. Cadell. Bonnet, Charles. 1766. The Contemplation of Nature. London: T. Longman. Bowler, Peter. 1971. Preformation and Pre-existence in the Seventeenth Century: A Brief Analysis. JHB 4 (2): 221–244. Bruhm, Steven. 1994. Gothic Bodies: The Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 2002. The Contemporary Gothic: Why We Need It. In The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E.  Hogle, 259–276. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Buckley, Jenifer. 2017. Gender, Pregnancy and Power in Eighteenth-Century Literature: The Maternal Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan. Budge, Gavin. 2012. Romanticism, Medicine and the Natural Supernatural: Transcendent Vision and Bodily Spectres, 1789–1852. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de. 1792. Barr’s Buffon: Buffon’s Natural History. London: J. S. Barr. Clery, E.J. 2002. The Genesis of ‘Gothic’ Fiction. In The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle, 21–39. Cambridge University Press. Cody, Lisa Forman. 2005. Birthing the Nation: Sex, Science, and the Conception of Eighteenth-Century Britons. Oxford University Press. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1985. Biographia Literaria. In Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. H.J. Jackson, 307–313. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Cunningham, Andrew, and Nicholas Jardine. 1990. Romanticism and the Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Day, William Patrick. 1985. In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study of Gothic Fantasy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. De Almeida, Hermione. 1990. Romantic Medicine and John Keats. New  York: Oxford University Press. Eccles, Audrey. 1982. Obstetrics and Gynaecology in Tudor and Stuart England. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Farley, John. 1982. Gametes & Spores: Ideas about Sexual Reproduction, 1750–1914. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Fleenor, Juliann E. 1983. The Female Gothic. Montreal: Eden. Fry, Iris. 2000. The Emergence of Life on Earth. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Fulford, Tim, Debbie Lee, and Peter J.  Kitson. 2004. Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gasking, Elizabeth B. 1967. Investigations into Generation, 1651–1828. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Gigante, Denise. 2009. Life: Organic Form and Romanticism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gould, Stephen Jay. 1977. Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hale, Terry. 2002. French and German Gothic: The Beginnings. In The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E.  Hogle, 63–84. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haller, Albrecht von. 1966. First Lines of Physiology. In The Sources of Science. New York and London: Johnson Reprint Corporation. Hanson, Clare. 2004. A Cultural History of Pregnancy: Pregnancy, Medicine, and Culture, 1750–2000. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Harvey, William. 1847. Anatomical Exercises on the Generation of Animals. In The Works of William Harvey. London: Printed for the Sydenham Society. Hoeveler, Diane Long. 2010. Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, 1780–1820. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

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Hogle, Jerrold E. 2002. Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture. In The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E.  Hogle, 1–20. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holmes, Richard. 2008. The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. New York: Pantheon Books. Jackson, Noel. 2008. Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jordanova, L.J. 1989. Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. ———. 1999. Nature Displayed: Gender, Science and Medicine 1760–1820. London: Routledge. Kickel, Katherine E. 2007. Novel Notions: Medical Discourse and the Mapping of the Imagination in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. New York and London: Routledge. Kilgour, Maggie. 1995. The Rise of the Gothic Novel. London and New  York: Routledge. Kipp, Julie. 2003. Romanticism, Maternity, and the Body Politic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maienschein, Jane. 2000. Competing Epistemologies and Developmental Biology. In Biology and Epistemology, ed. Richard Creath and Jane Maienschein, 122–137. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2017. Epigenesis and Preformationism. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N.  Zalta. Accessed January 13, 2021. http://plato. stanford.edu/entries/epigenesis/. McLaren, Angus. 1978. Birth Control in Nineteenth-Century England. New York: Holmes & Meier. ———. 1984. Reproductive Rituals: The Perception of Fertility in England from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century. London: Routledge. ———. 1992. A History of Contraception. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Moers, Ellen. 1977. Literary Women. New York: Oxford University Press. Müller-Sievers, Helmut. 1997. Self-Generation: Biology, Philosophy, and Literature around 1800. Stanford University Press. Needham, Joseph. 1959. A History of Embryology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Park, Katharine, and Lorraine J.  Daston. 1981. Unnatural Conceptions: The Study of Monsters in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France and Scotland. Past and Present 92 (1): 20–54. Pinto-Correia, Clara. 1997. The Ovary of Eve: Egg and Sperm and Preformation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Punter, David. 1980. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. London and New York: Longman.

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Rajan, Tilottama. 2009. The Epigenesis of Genre: New Forms from Old. In The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature, ed. James Chandler, 507–526. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Richards, Robert J. 2002. The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Richardson, Alan. 2001. British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roe, Shirley A. 1981. Matter, Life, and Generation: Eighteenth-Century Embryology and the Haller-Wolff Debate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ruston, Sharon. 2005. ‘Natural Enemies in Science, as Well as in Politics’: Romanticism and Scientific Conflict. Romanticism: The Journal of Romantic Culture and Criticism 11 (1): 70–83. ———. 2013. Creating Romanticism: Case Studies in the Literature, Science and Medicine of the 1790s. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Shorter, Edward. 1982. A History of Women’s Bodies. New York: Basic Books. ———. 1991. Women’s Bodies: A Social History of Women’s Encounter with Health, Ill-Health, and Medicine. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Todd, Dennis. 1995. Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-­ Century England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Vartanian, Aram. 1953. John R.  Baker’s Abraham Trembley of Geneva [book review]. Isis 44 (4): 387–389. Walpole, Horace. 1996. The Castle of Otranto. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2010. The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence (1937–1983). New Haven: Yale University Press. Wasson, Sara. 2015. Useful Darkness: Intersections between Medical Humanities and Gothic Studies. Gothic Studies 17 (1): 1–12. Wilson, Adrian. 1995. The Making of Man-Midwifery: Childbirth in England, 1660–1770. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2014. Ritual and Conflict: The Social Relations of Childbirth in Early Modern England. Farnham: Ashgate. Youngquist, Paul. 2003. Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

CHAPTER 2

“A Very Natural Dream”; or, The Castle of Otranto

I waked one morning in the beginning of last June from a dream, of which all I could recover was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head filled like mine with Gothic story) and that on the uppermost bannister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour. —Walpole (2010, 1:88)1

While Walpole’s 1737 “Seeds of poetry and rhyme” lamented his inability to create beautiful poetry in the tradition of his literary ancestors, his most famous work, The Castle of Otranto, embraces the macabre originality that crept into that early poem. This first Gothic story, as the second edition is subtitled, explores more fully the metaphors of generation evoked in the poem and lays the groundwork for the Gothic struggle: organic, internally sourced originality versus mechanical, externally sourced forms. The clash of epigenetic and preformationist forces in the novel creates its Gothic power, and tracing them reveals that the genre—despite being frequently associated with a nostalgia for the past, an anti-Enlightenment point of view, and a set of mechanical, derivative literary conventions—is actually aesthetically and scientifically progressive. As Crystal B.  Lake astutely 1

 This letter is addressed to Rev. William Cole and dated 9 March 1765.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. P. Edelman, Embryology and the Rise of the Gothic Novel, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73648-4_2

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observes about critical treatments of The Castle of Otranto, many scholars read the medieval setting as an attempt to “remove characters and readers alike from the empiricist ideologies of the Enlightenment and the demands of realist fiction,” which is further suggestive of Walpole’s supposed “superficial antiquarian idealization of the Gothic past” (Lake 2013, 489–490).2 Just as Lake attempts to argue that Walpole’s work actually demonstrates a serious engagement with the political present, so too, I am here arguing that Walpole engages with eighteenth-century scientific contexts in ways that destabilize the idea that the Gothic is hostile to scientific progress and modernity, that the Gothic merely idealizes the past. The manifestation of Walpole’s early embryological metaphors in novel form establishes the role of the scientific in the development of the Gothic, suggesting that we reread and revise interpretations of the Gothic’s relationship to past and present. The Gothic engagement with the supernatural is neither to nostalgize faith and imagination nor to conquer superstition, but rather to get at the very real truth about origins, a search that necessarily embraces scientific progress. This unending search for origins explains the initial development and persistence of the Gothic. As Steven Bruhm asks about contemporary Gothic, “why are we driven to consume these fictions?” (Bruhm 2002, 259–260). In demonstrating the parallels between embryology and the development of the Gothic in its beginning phase, I hope to show that its central concern is biological origins, perhaps even more so than the ghosts of the past or the dark corners of the human psyche. The first edition preface and the second edition preface to The Castle of Otranto garner as much, if not more, critical attention than the novel itself, which is frequently treated as more of a clumsy forerunner of the genre than a work of art in itself. As E. J. Clery writes in her introduction to the novel, “the story has been regularly censured for wooden characterization, and the amateurish self-indulgence of its supernatural effects” and probably survives not “on its own merits, but rather as the founding text of a genre that has flourished, through various permutations, up to the present” (“Introduction,” Clery 1996b, ix). While it is not my purpose to argue for the aesthetic qualities of the work, I hope to show here that the 2  More recently, Stephen Yeager has argued, via manuscript paleography and book history, that Walpole’s prefatory remarks contain an “implicit parody of the rationalist ideology underlying the discourse for analyzing and critiquing historical artifacts,” a parody of antiquarianism itself, which, of course, challenges notions of Walpole’s antiquarianism as summarized by Lake (Yeager 2019, 147).

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novel carries out important aesthetic and cultural work that began much earlier when Walpole conceived of himself as an author, borrowing terms and concepts from embryological discourse. Walpole’s introductory remarks attempt to explain the nature of the genre, a conversation that continues to this day. In these two prefaces, Walpole sets up the central conflict between mechanical, external origins and organic, internal ones, each mediated by an ambiguous relationship with the supernatural. As in the 1737 poem, the fundamental question in the prefatory remarks revolves around origins. How is art created? This is a question that Walpole and many of his descendants try to solve through recourse to embryological models. The prefaces set up a battle between two opposing answers to this question: preformation and epigenesis. The battle is played out in the novel in the conflict between Manfred and Alfonso, the various love relationships in the story, and the symbolic nature of the statue of Alfonso, which represents the epigenetic process.

Origin Stories: The Dream and the Prefaces The preface to the first edition suggests that art is externally sourced through its evocation of a preformationist point of view. In the first line of the first preface, Walpole announces, “The following work was found in the library of an ancient catholic family in the north of England” (Walpole  1996, 5; emphasis mine). The two prefaces, particularly the translation from medieval Italian in the first and Walpole’s remarks on Shakespeare in the second, are most often interpreted through Walpole’s complicated political existence, his attempt to identify and validate a national literary tradition, and his engagement with the past.3 I would like, instead, to interpret this material in its scientific contexts suggesting that the work is very much engaged with the biological present. The found manuscript, which becomes a staple of Gothic fiction, is an objective correlative to the preformed being in preformationist embryology. Like the fully formed life provided by God, the “found” manuscript is gifted from the outside, externally sourced. The work is not his own as he is 3  See, for example, Angela Wright’s study in which she contextualizes Walpole’s work within a growing climate of Francophobia despite Walpole’s own personal Francophilia (Wright 2013). See Mowl (1996) and Ketton-Cremer (1966) for political contexts. For a recent discussion of Walpole’s (and the Gothic’s) engagement with history, see Dent (2016) and Price (2016).

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merely a translator. Walpole, after some brief remarks on the beauty of the style, situates the work in the context of a conflict between reason and superstition. Praising the fact that letters were “flourishing” at this time and helping to “dispel the empire of superstition,” Walpole speculates that the manuscript was written by an “artful priest” who wanted to “confirm the populace in their ancient errors and superstitions” (Walpole 1996, 5). Although he admits that his comments are “mere conjecture,” he establishes one of the key elements of Gothic fiction: the interplay between the natural and the supernatural, between reason and superstition (Walpole 1996, 6). If this imagined priest has his way, the people will return to a belief in an almighty, all-knowing God who determines each of their fates, a God with a plan that must be followed, a preformationist point of view. Walpole’s attitude toward this priest is clearly dismissive, and as the second preface bears out when he reveals the fraud, such externally sourced origins are clearly inferior. By contrast, the preface to the second edition answers the question about aesthetic origins from an epigenetic point of view, exposing the original frame of the “found” manuscript as a fraud and setting the stage for the implicit battle between internal and external sources of creation that underlie the Gothic mode. It is in this edition that Walpole adds the subtitle, “A Gothic Story,” includes a Latin epigraph about form and content, and deploys his by-now-famous species metaphor, all of which work together to establish a link between genre and embryology. Once Walpole throws off the “borrowed personage of a translator,” he labels his work a “Gothic Story,” creating a completely new genre, which he goes on to call a “new species” (Walpole 1996, 9, 14). Maggie Kilgour reads this effort to create something new as a “reactionary nostalgia” rather than anything truly original: “like his museum of curiosities [Strawberry Hill], his fiction is an attempt to create something new from the past; to return to older models for relations as a means of creating a new and truly original narrative form” (Kilgour 1995, 17). She argues that Walpole presents himself as “part of a tradition rather than an originator” (Kilgour 1995, 22). On the one hand, Kilgour is right that Walpole appeals to an existing tradition and situates his work within that; on the other hand, Walpole’s work is clearly more than a mere “revival of the past.” While he might hint at an “anxiety of influence,” as he did with his 1737 poem, Walpole’s deployment of embryological metaphors is indicative of an engagement with the scientific present with an eye to the future, not the past. The Latin epigraph that he adds contributes to this metaphor by introducing the

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interplay between form and content as mediated by the imagination. The original from Horace’s Ars Poetica translates to “idle fancies shall be shaped [like a sick man’s dream] so that neither foot nor head can be assigned to a single shape” (“Explanatory Notes,” Clery 1996a, 116). The mind or imagination effects the form (“single shape”) that the content takes (“foot” and “head”). In the original, there is no single shape, no predetermined form for the material. E. J. Clery paraphrases W. S. Lewis to explain that Walpole’s adaptation reads, in English, “nevertheless head and foot are assigned to a single shape” (“Explanatory Notes,” Clery 1996a, 116). Clery argues that this change signals not only the plot of the novel, but also Walpole’s belief that even though he is violating the rules of probability, the novel “nevertheless form[s] an imaginative unity” (“Explanatory Notes,” Clery 1996a, 116). In this sense, the art object, the novel, is created from disparate parts in an organic process guided by forces internal to the poet. On one hand, this process is epigenetic in that it brings together a chaos of material organically; on the other hand, one can read the role of the imagination as external to the material itself, a supernatural force affecting the final product. In this way, it could be considered preformationist except that the aesthetic life created is not fully formed; it’s a process of generation. The complexity of this metaphor mirrors the complexities of embryological theories particularly in relation to the role of the supernatural. Walpole’s aesthetic process is epigenetic in that a power, an inexplicable “something,” internal to the author guides the existing materials into a unique shape. It is neither given fully formed from without nor is it spontaneously generated in the moment. This complicated relationship to the supernatural runs through each preface, for Walpole both evokes and ridicules it. In the first, he speaks with disdain of the time when the “empire of superstition” reigned and offers “some apology” for all of the miracles and preternatural events in the work (Walpole 1996,  5–6). His disdain for the supernatural is less pronounced in the second preface, but he does say that in earlier times “all was imagination and improbability” that created characters who were as “unnatural as the machines employed to put them in motion” (Walpole 1996, 9). The machine metaphor is telling given that the preformationist process was described as being purely mechanical; if the being is fully formed by God, then the process of development is machine-like in its dependence on only matter and motion. Walpole’s association between the machine and a world where the supernatural controlled all from the outside implies the preformationist worldview, which he clearly contrasts

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with the natural and organic. Kilgour writes that “Like Romanticism, the gothic is especially a revolt against a mechanistic or atomistic view of the world and relations, in favour of recovering an earlier organic model” (Kilgour 1995, 11). Walpole’s machine metaphor suggests this revolt against the “mechanistic,” and while he does appeal to older models, what he actually creates is undeniably new. Although Walpole has some disdain for superstition, he embraces the supernatural of the self, a kind of power that comes from the inside, leading Fred Botting to characterize the second preface as one that “appeals to new ideas about writing. Inspiration, individual artistic genius and imaginative freedom overstep the boundaries of neoclassical taste” (Botting 1996, 48). “Individual artistic genius” is consistent with an epigenetic point of view, for the powers of the imagination are individual and come from within the artist himself. While the critical history is clear about the numerous literary influences on Walpole, from Shakespeare to the Graveyard School, scholars often can neither deny nor fully explain Walpole’s genius. Carol Davison writes (after a description of literary influences) that his “monstrous blending of aesthetic and generic styles was unique for an age that increasingly valorized originality” and that his deployment of the term Gothic was nothing short of an “inspired act of genius” (Davison 2009, 63). Walpole asserts, in opposition to the idea of the external supernatural, that “My rule was nature” (Walpole 1996,  10). Although he is talking specifically about characterization in this passage, his appeal to nature indicates a privileging of internal powers, ones that are individualized and come naturally (i.e., organically) to the individual, not imposed from the outside. The dichotomy between the mechanical and the organic, implicit throughout the second preface, relates ultimately to the life of the genre as a “new species.” The Gothic, to be truly new, has to be epigenetic, not preformed. The origin story Walpole tells William Cole in a letter dated 9 March 1765 further supports the epigenetic foundations of Otranto and the Gothic. Clery explains that the dream-origin of the story “has been mentioned more often as an explanation for its short-comings, than as a cause for enthusiasm” (“Introduction,” Clery 1996b, ix). While the dream-­ origin does, in a way, get Walpole “off the hook” for lapses in aesthetic quality, I am treating the origin story with enthusiasm because it means something very important for how we understand the development of the Gothic and the cultural work that the Gothic was (and is) doing. The origin story begins with a rhetorical question, “Shall I even confess to you what was the origin of this romance?” (Walpole  2010, 1:88). He

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then describes the dream, quoted in the epigraph to this chapter, in which he sees himself in a gothic castle looking at a staircase at the peak of which rests a gigantic hand in armor. What follows is a description that can be explained only by the drive of internal passions and forces. He admits that he had no preconceived ideas. He wrote “without knowing in the least what [he] intended to say or relate” (Walpole 2010, 1:88). He is driven by his imagination, a power unique to himself. He writes further that the “work grew on my hands,” suggesting that, not unlike Buffon’s interior mold, his imagination guides the pieces to their proper places. He even asserts that it is a “very natural dream” because it comes from his unique imagination, a “head filled…with Gothic story”  (Walpole  2010, 1:88). The story comes from within and defies external forces: “I gave rein to my imagination; visions and passions heated me. I did it in spite of rules, critics, and philosophers” (qtd. in “Introduction,” Clery 1996b, xiii). R.W. Ketton-Cremer, one of Walpole’s biographers, writes that despite the novel’s flaws the “Gothic parts of the book—the horror, the gloom, the unearthly portents—are infinitely more effective” and that these emerge from “the fantasy of an exhausted brain” (Ketton-Cremer 1966, 175). Timothy Mowl, another biographer, writes that “Otranto is easily ridiculed but dangerous to ignore. Written quickly in a state of high excitement by a man too disturbed to notice its incongruities, Otranto appears to reflect Horace Walpole’s state of mind” (Mowl 1996, 185). Walpole and his biographers explain the origins and the Gothic power of the story epigenetically; it is a power from within that guides the process. Since the 1737 poem “Seeds of poetry and rhyme,” Walpole has embraced the epigenetic nature of the imagination, which he continues to explore in the novel, but not without the troubling preformationist worldview that challenges it, recapitulating the struggle he expressed poetically 27 years earlier. The embryological subtexts of The Castle of Otranto appear in three ways: (1) the conflict between the house of Manfred and that of Alfonso; (2) the relationships between Manfred and Hippolita, Manfred and Isabella, Frederick and Mathilda, and Matilda and Theodore; and (3) in the physical monstrosities of the gigantic hand and foot and the moral monstrosity of Manfred himself. The preformationist and

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epigenetic narratives provide important interpretive contexts for each of these features of the novel.4

The Houses of Manfred and Alfonso Starting on the fifteenth birthday of his only son, Conrad, the novel opens with a description of the reproductive failures of Manfred’s family. His first-born is a daughter, which is problematic in light of the patriarchal laws of primogeniture, but even more problematic is Conrad, “a homely youth, sickly, and of no promising disposition” who suffers from great “infirmities” (Walpole 1996, 17). The young man, it seems, is of so weak a disposition that his mother Hippolita fears that the marriage will be too much for his young body, and Manfred rushes his marriage as if Conrad is at death’s door. The reader also learns in the first page of the novel that Hippolita’s “sterility” is a source of frustration and anger for Manfred (Walpole 1996, 17). Although she birthed two children already, her inability to have more enrages Manfred, leading to the scheme of Conrad’s early marriage, which he hopes will secure his control of Otranto presumably before Conrad succumbs to these infirmities. The reproductive failures of Manfred’s house, along with metaphors of aesthetic generation established in the prefaces, set the stage for reading the rest of the novel in embryological terms. Manfred’s generative failures are pitted against the generative success of his competition as evidenced in the prophecy: “That the castle and lordship of Otranto should pass from the present family, whenever the real owner should be grown too large to inhabit it” (Walpole 1996, 17). Manfred’s inability to reproduce is in stark contrast to Alfonso’s reproductive abundance. The conflict between the two, which drives the novel’s plot, is organized around the same dichotomies implicit in the embryological debates: internal/organic origins versus external/mechanical ones. Manfred has acquired Otranto by unfair means, a fraud not unlike that described in the first preface, whereas Alfonso’s claim is legitimate legally 4  The focus of this study is embryology, but the work of anatomists and obstetricians such as William and John Hunter are also important for establishing the medical contexts of Walpole’s work. As I noted in the introduction, Walpole had a relationship with William Hunter. Although Hunter’s Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus was not published until 1774, the fear of the male obstetrician chasing female bodies was certainly in the cultural imagination and, as I have argued elsewhere, contributes to the Gothic trope of the male patriarch pursuing reproductive female bodies. See Edelman (2018).

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and organically, for the throne is his biologically and legally. His claim, however, is, to some degree, mechanical in that it relies on pre-established hierarchies, external rules that allow him to make the claims in the first place. In this way, the preformationist claims of Manfred and the epigenetic claims of Alfonso are not uncomplicated. Manfred’s family line betrays a preformationist foundation in that his motivations are purely external, providing a contrast to the line of Alfonso, which is generated and sustained by internal, organic passions. As we learn at the end of the novel, Manfred’s grandfather, Ricardo, murdered Alfonso and created a fraudulent will to claim the principality, certainly an unnatural avenue to the throne. From that point on, the heirs were solely motivated by the need to keep the estate by continuing to have male children with women of the aristocracy. In a preformationist world, the unspoken hope is that God’s favoring of the aristocratic class extends beyond wealth and status to fertility. To keep the kingdom, wealth and status must be maintained along with the bloodline itself; thus, “the ultimate biological insignificance of the generative partner…calls for practical and external considerations to motivate the choice, whereas the epigenetic framework, in which there is always an ‘alternative,’ opens up the possibility of free choice of the partner” (Müller-Sievers 1997, 30). Manfred’s family history is justified only in a preformationist world. Manfred’s attitude toward his wife and children reflect this preformationist attitude toward family in that he has almost no natural feelings for them at all, indicating that, perhaps, Matilda and Conrad are more Hippolita’s than his. If they are the preformed beings of ovism, then his response to them makes perfect sense; they are his only in name. Conrad is the “darling of his father” but only as long as he has the potential to carry on the throne (Walpole 1996, 17). As soon as he is dashed to pieces by a giant helmet, Manfred ceases to show any feeling toward him at all; within hours, he is chasing after Isabella and saying his love was “foolish fondness” and that he hopes soon to “rejoice at the death of Conrad” who is a weak foundation upon which to build a kingdom (Walpole 1996, 24). And, of course, it is no secret that he has no paternal love for Matilda. Within the first few sentences of the novel, we learn that he “never showed any symptoms of affection to Matilda” (Walpole 1996,  17). While this may be a symptom of the patriarchy, it is also evidence, particularly taken alongside his change in feelings toward Conrad, that he has no natural affections at all, which may provide further support for preformationist ideology. His disdain for Hippolita, his wife, is clear as well. He married

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her in order to have a male heir, not for love, so when she ceases to produce, he abandons her emotionally and attempts to legally and physically. He reminds her often of her “sterility,” and the moment he has a chance, he tries to divorce her so that he can marry Isabella and produce more children. His motives are external; demanding that Jerome give him a divorce, he claims that it is urgent, that “Reasons of state….my own and the safety of my people” require it (Walpole 1996, 49). While Hippolita is a much more admirable character than Manfred, she does not appear to love Manfred any more than he does her. Most of what she does for him is out of duty. She asserts, “it is not ours to make election for ourselves; heaven, our fathers, and our husbands, must decide for us” (Walpole 1996, 91). Although she knows the way Manfred treats her is wrong, she submits. At first, she is opposed to the divorce, but at some point, she is almost eager to make it happen, particularly when she asks Jerome “whether in conscience she might not consent to the divorce” (Walpole 1996,  93). Hippolita never expresses any love for Manfred, only duty, which is appropriate in a preformationist world where marriage is for convenience. Even though they remain technically married at the end of the novel, they each go their separate ways into a convent with no expressions of passionate love for one another. Manfred’s family line rests primarily on preformationist foundations, the only biological way to explain his behavior and his relationship to his wife and children. The line of Alfonso rests on quite other foundations—internal, organic passion. As Müller-Sievers writes, epigenesis “opens up the possibility of free choice of the partner,” and it is this “alternative” to preformation that provides biological support for the way he and his family treat marriage (Müller-Sievers 1997, 30). At the end of the novel, the reader learns that the kingdom belongs to Alfonso not only legally because of the legitimate will, but also biologically because of the epigenetic foundations of the Alfonso line. Alfonso, on his way to the Holy Land, winds up in Sicily where he falls in love with a “fair virgin named Victoria” whom he marries (Walpole 1996, 114). Unfortunately, he dies before he can acknowledge their union leaving her with no way to claim the principality of Otranto. She gives birth to a daughter who marries the Count Falconara, who, we have already learned, is none other than Father Jerome. Theodore is the issue of Jerome and the unnamed daughter of Alfonso and Victoria. The text does not say whether or not Victoria is of high birth, but the foundation of their union is clearly internally sourced, based on love and passion, not status or wealth. Similarly, Father Jerome had been in love with Theodore’s mother whom he calls “dear woman” as he desperately

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inquires of his son whether she is still alive (Walpole 1996, 58). It is the epigenetic foundations of their love that legitimize their claim to the throne, which is signaled more by their fertility than by legal documentation. The prophecy highlights their biological claim, not their legal one, although, of course, the documentation supports it. The contrast between Manfred’s line and Alfonso’s underscores the embryological subtexts of the novel, and it is clear that the author supports the latter. Underscoring these more organic unions—Alfonso/Victoria and Jerome/Theodore’s mother—is Theodore’s resemblance to Alfonso. Family resemblance was an important component of arguments against preformation. If one were an ovist preformationist (as most were), one would have to explain why children ever look like their fathers; similarly, spermist preformationists could not adequately explain why children look like their mothers without resorting to very non-scientific concepts like the effect of the maternal imagination on the fetus. One of the most uncanny parts of the text is Theodore’s resemblance to Alfonso, his maternal grandfather. We first learn of his resemblance to Alfonso through Matilda who says to Bianca, as she is watching her father threaten to dismember Theodore, “is not that youth the exact resemblance of Alfonso’s picture in the gallery?” (Walpole 1996, 54). He looks so much like Alfonso that Manfred later mistakes him for a ghost. Seeing him at the beside of Frederic, Isabella’s father whom Theodore accidentally wounded, Manfred exclaims, “what art thou, thou dreadful spectre! Is my hour come?” (Walpole 1996, 83). Hippolita tries to calm him down, and Manfred asks, “Is this ghastly phantom sent to me alone….Is not that Alfonso?” (Walpole 1996, 83). Hippolita informs him that it is only Theodore, but Manfred is so shocked at the uncanny resemblance that he fears his “brain’s delirium” (Walpole 1996, 83). Manfred even exclaims, “Theodore, or a phantom, he has unhinged the soul of Manfred” (Walpole 1996, 83). Shortly after, we learn more of Theodore’s history and how he came to the castle in search of his father. Though his right to the throne comes through a maternal line, he resembles his grandfather, not his mother as would be expected in an ovist world. Although one could argue that Theodore’s resemblance to his grandfather could be explained by spermist preformation, the organic passion of the union between his mother and father and that between his grandfather and grandmother support the epigenetic foundations of the Alfonso line. The next generation also promises to be epigenetic, but not before that foundation is briefly threatened by a possible return to a preformationist

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nightmare. When Frederic, Isabella’s father, comes to the castle to claim both his daughter and the throne, Manfred devises a plan to marry his daughter Matilda to Frederic and thus unite the two houses. Frederic had “assumed the style of princes of Otranto” as the nearest blood relation when Alfonso the Good died, but they were not strong enough to oust Manfred’s ancestors (Walpole 1996, 62). Frederic’s claim is based on the bloodline and supported by the organic nature of his love for his late wife. Frederic had “married a beautiful young lady, of whom he was enamoured, and who had died in childbed of Isabella” (Walpole 1996, 62). His love was so great for her that when she died he escaped to the Holy Land, losing himself in the Crusades. The epigenetic foundation of their love and its fruitful abundance support Frederic’s claim to the throne even more so than the documents themselves. This foundation is briefly threatened when Frederic contemplates marrying Matilda against her will. Feeling desperate, Manfred plans to offer Matilda to Frederic, but if that happens, it would be a completely preformationist move because there is no natural passion between Matilda and Frederic. Frederic is motivated in part by lust and in part by greed, and Manfred is, of course, totally motivated by greed and ambition. Initially, the union is suggested by Hippolita in an attempt to save her daughter from the consequences of the family’s downfall. Manfred tells Frederic of his plan to marry Isabella and to allow Frederic to marry his daughter, Matilda. Frederic “that weak prince, who had been struck with the charms of Matilda, listened but too eagerly to the offer. He forgot his enmity to Manfred” (Walpole 1996, 96). Frederic’s feelings for Matilda are purely sensual; her “charms” inspire his lust, which causes him to deny the organic, natural passions upon which his house is founded. The narrator’s description of Frederic as “weak” underscores the novel’s judgment of preformationist motives, which Father Jerome also articulates earlier in the novel. When Manfred and Father Jerome first discuss Manfred’s plan to divorce Hippolita, Jerome vehemently rejects the idea, asserting that Manfred’s tears will “weigh more with heaven towards the welfare of [his] subjects, than a marriage, which, founded on lust or policy, could never prosper”  (Walpole 1996,  51). Marital unions based on preformationist ideals—wealth, status, lust—can never be sanctioned in the eyes of God; they can never be deemed natural. Only in a preformationist world is it possible to suggest that “practical and external considerations [should] motivate the choice” of marriage partner (Müller-Sievers 1997, 30).

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Jerome’s assertion supports an epigenetic worldview, which is aligned with the sympathetic characters in the novel. The epigenetic line of Alfonso is only briefly interrupted by the preformationist monstrosity of the potential union of Manfred/Isabella and Frederic/Matilda. The epigenetic foundations of Alfonso’s lineage promises to continue in the union of Theodore and Matilda whose love is based on internal passions. When Matilda first sees Theodore, she is immediately struck by him in the same way that she is fascinated by the ancient portrait of Alfonso. While Manfred questions Theodore, Matilda and Bianca pass through a nearby gallery. Suddenly, the “prisoner soon drew her attention: the steady and composed manner in which he answered, and the gallantry of his last reply…interested her in his favour. His person was noble, handsome and commanding, even in that situation: but his countenance soon engrossed her whole care” (Walpole 1996, 54). She is drawn to him by something within herself, a passion that existed before she even met him, indicating that it is a part of her identity as Matilda, not enforced from without. At that moment, Bianca notes the “exact resemblance” between Theodore and the picture of Alfonso in the gallery. Earlier in the novel, Bianca teases Matilda for her seeming obsession with this image. Lamenting Matilda’s apparent preference for the veil, Bianca speculates what would happen if her father finally brought her a handsome, wealthy suitor with “large black eyes, a smooth white forehead, and manly curling locks like jet; in short, madam, a young hero resembling the picture of the good Alfonso in the gallery, which you sit and gaze at for hours together” (Walpole 1996, 40). Bianca equates Matilda’s admiration for the portrait with feelings of love, which Matilda unconvincingly denies. She does, however, express the feeling that her “destiny is linked with something relating to him” (Walpole 1996, 41). Although the term “destiny” might suggest a predetermination associated with preformationism, Matilda expresses these feelings as if they are a part of her identity. Hippolita, she says, taught her to admire the prince, but these endeavors would have only intellectual influence if mechanically forced. Matilda feels the connection deeply; otherwise, she would not gaze for hours on the image on her own. The naturalness of this passion is supported by the way she connects with Theodore emotionally. Unlike Matilda’s, Theodore’s passion has no external influence at all underscoring the epigenetic nature of their love. Before he meets Matilda, Theodore encounters Isabella in the passageways beneath the castle as she is escaping from Manfred. Theodore helps her escape through a trap door.

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He later encounters Matilda, via a conversation only, when she hears him below her window. They have a conversation in which he expresses melancholy for another, which Bianca, the servant, interprets as him being in love. Matilda argues with Bianca’s interpretation, but it turns out that he is in love, but not with Isabella. Later, when Matilda helps Theodore escape, we learn that he believes she is the one he had assisted in the subterraneous vaults. Matilda opens his prison door and tells him to escape, wishing the angels’ protection on him. Theodore replies, “Thou art surely one of those angels!…none but a blessed saint could speak, could act, could look like thee!” (Walpole 1996, 72). When he sees her, he is immediately “enraptured” and will not leave her to be punished by her father Manfred. She commands him to flee, but he asks, “How?…thinkest thou, charming maid, that I will accept of life at the hazard of aught so calamitous to thee? Better I endured a thousand deaths” (Walpole 1996, 72). Although he thinks she is the one he rescued and does not recognize her voice from the window conversation, he immediately falls in love with her. In fact, one could argue that he fell in love with her before first sight because, when he was helping Isabella, he was falling in love with the person he thought was Manfred’s daughter whom he had not encountered yet. Either way, the love that grows between them is of the epigenetic variety, based solely on passions that develop from within. It is neither duty nor parental authority nor personal ambition that motivates Theodore. He cries, “’tis my soul would print its effusions on thy hand” (Walpole 1996, 73). His soul, his identity, draws him to her, and by the end of the interview, they are both in love: “He sighed, and retired, but with eyes fixed on the gate, until Matilda closing it put an end to an interview, in which the hearts of both had drunk so deeply of a passion which both now tasted for the first time” (Walpole 1996, 74). Their hearts and souls guide their passion, which comes naturally. The love between Theodore and Matilda is short-lived, though, because her father Manfred accidentally stabs her to death mistaking her for Isabella. Theodore tries to marry her before she passes away, but Matilda spends her last breaths sanctioning his union with Isabella. Even while bleeding to death, Matilda “acknowledged with looks of grateful love the zeal of Theodore” (Walpole 1996, 109). Trying to convince her she has hope to recover, Theodore supports her head and “hang[s] over her in an agony of despairing love” (Walpole 1996, 110). The surgeons pronounce that she cannot be saved; in passionate agony, Theodore demands that they marry: “Since she cannot live mine…at least she shall be mine in death!—Father! Jerome! will you not join our hands?” (Walpole 1996,

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111). Before they can be united, she sanctions a marriage between Isabella and Theodore when she cries, “I would say something more…but it wonnot be—Isabella—Theodore—for my sake—oh!” (Walpole 1996, 112). Although not stated explicitly, in this moment, Matilda is sanctioning the future union of her lover and her almost-sister-in-law. The epigenetic union of Matilda and Theodore is interrupted by the violence of Manfred, but a quasi-epigenetic union eventually takes place between Theodore and Isabella. Frederic, Isabella’s father, offers her in marriage to Theodore, but his “grief was too fresh to admit the thought of another love” (Walpole 1996, 115). Eventually, though, he is able to marry Isabella but mostly as a surrogate for Matilda. Because of her closeness to Matilda, Isabella becomes the “one with whom he could forever indulge the melancholy that had taken possession of his soul” (Walpole 1996, 115). With Matilda’s dying approval, Theodore is able to marry Isabella but only as a way of psychically being with the one approved by his internal passions. In this way, the novel ends with a quasi-epigenetic marriage. It is not a full triumph over preformation, but it is at least a nod in its favor as the healthiest kind of union.

The Statue as Symbol of Epigenesis The conflict between the preformationist and epigenetic relationships of the novel exposes the novel’s real monsters. Ostensibly, the supernatural parts—gigantic helmets crushing people to death, swaying black feathers, and ghosts stepping down out of pictures—are the elements of Gothic monstrosity, the ones meant to frighten and terrify the reader just as Manfred is frightened. In the course of the novel, though, the reader sees that these symbols are most closely associated with goodness, with the true line of Otranto, which is epigenetically based. The fusion of the parts of the statue of Alfonso the Good, as they move and connect part-by-part over time, represents epigenesis wherein a mysterious, inexplicable power guides the formation of a whole from disparate parts. The power is never fully defined nor identified with the divine. The power seems to come from within the materials themselves. Although Father Jerome and others attribute some of these occurrences to God’s judgment, the prophecy of Otranto and the supernatural events of the plot are curiously devoid of any connection to a supernatural being, good or evil. The “ancient prophecy” with which the novel begins does not speak of God’s judgment or even of good and evil, but merely references the fertility of the “real owner” (Walpole 1996, 17). It is the “translator” who claims the moral of the

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story to be Biblical in nature: “the sins of fathers are visited on their children to the third and fourth generation,” an allusion to Deuteronomy 5:9–10. The translator even suggests that a “more useful moral” could have driven the plot, suggesting the weakness of the connection, which is really only his interpretation (Walpole 1996, 7). In short, there is no external God or supernatural power driving the plot of this novel; if there are references to God, it is in name only, just as it was with the epigenesists who acknowledged God, but left him out of the process of biological creation. The formation and development of the “body” of Alfonso over the course of the narrative mirrors the epigenetic process and underscores the novel’s underlying themes of biological and aesthetic origins. As the statue comes together, the reader learns of Theodore’s identity, witnessing him being conceived and “born” so to speak. Simultaneously, the statue and the novel, both aesthetic products, take shape, suggesting the metaphorical link between life and art with which Walpole began the epigraph to the second edition. The story, of course, begins with Conrad being crushed to death by “an enormous helmet, an hundred times more large than any casque ever made for human being” and which is covered by a “mountain of sable plumes” (Walpole 1996, 19, 18). This helmet is immediately associated with a young peasant of unknown identity who explains that the helmet is “exactly like that on the figure in black marble of Alfonso the Good…in the church of St. Nicholas” (Walpole 1996, 20). In this moment, the question of the peasant’s identity and the origins (as well as driving power) of the helmet come into play. As the story unfolds, the statue comes together and origins are revealed, but the source of the power that brings these parts together is never identified. The “idle fancies” of the “sick man’s dream” have been “assigned to a single shape” (“Explanatory Notes,” Clery 1996a, 116). It seems to come from within the identity of the line of the Alfonso, that is, epigenetically. As the story progresses and identities are revealed, the monstrosity of the novel becomes less and less about the gigantic statue and the supernatural and more and more about Manfred’s moral monstrosity, suggesting the undercurrent of all Gothic—that monstrosity is located in conformity. As Manfred pursues his nefarious designs on Isabella, the statue registers its dissatisfaction, seemingly animated from an internal spirit. The moment Manfred rises to pursue Isabella, “the plumes of the fatal helmet, which rose to the height of the windows, [waved] backwards and forwards in a tempestuous manner” and was “accompanied with a hollow and rustling sound” (Walpole 1996, 25). Even Manfred’s guilty ancestors do not

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approve. After the waving of the black plumes, the portrait of Manfred’s grandfather, Ricardo, “uttered a deep sigh” and “began to move,” eventually stepping down out of the picture and leading Manfred to a chamber whose door is slammed in Manfred’s face by an “invisible hand” (Walpole 1996, 26). Isabella attributes the waving of the helmet feathers as a sign from heaven, but the helmet appears to move on its on without an external source. It is driven by its own internal power to give life to, to bring into existence, the true heir. The next time the reader encounters the parts of the statue is via the narrative of the servants Diego and Jaquez who investigated the chamber to which Manfred’s grandfather’s portrait had led him earlier. Diego and Jaquez claim to have seen a giant in the great chamber. Diego, with his hair standing on end, explains, “it is a giant, I believe; he is all clad in armour, for I saw his foot and part of his leg, and they are as large as the helmet below in the court” (Walpole 1996, 35). The parts of the statue— head, leg, foot—are slowly coming together, and while they seem monstrous due to their size and strange ability to move on their own, they only serve to highlight the true monster: Manfred. The whole scene creates a panic in Manfred who worries the women with his “frantic deportment” (Walpole 1996, 37). Later Hippolita assures him that the servants’ minds were playing tricks on them, but he recovers only a “a little from the tempest of mind into which so many strange events had thrown him” (Walpole 1996, 38). Shortly thereafter, the reader learns that “the next transition of his soul was to exquisite villainy” (Walpole 1996, 38). Although it is the “ghost” and giant statue that are purportedly the monstrous features of the novel, the real monster is, of course, Manfred, representative of a preformationist nightmare. As Jerome, formerly the Duke of Falconara, is pleading for the life of his son, Theodore, someone arrives at the castle, and “at the same instant the sable plumes on the enchanted helmet…were tempestuously agitated, and nodded thrice, as if bowed by some invisible wearer” (Walpole 1996, 59). The helmet, moved by an internal spirit, both condemns Manfred’s actions and approves the arrival of the real prince of Otranto, continuing the novel’s implicit reinforcement of epigenetic origins. The group that arrives comes to claim the throne and includes a group of one hundred men “bearing an enormous sword” (Walpole 1996, 65), which is clearly part of the dismembered statue whose parts are slowly coming together. As Manfred leads the visitors through the castle, “the gigantic sword burst from the supporters, and, falling to the ground opposite to the helmet,

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remained immoveable” (Walpole 1996, 66). And, in the moments after Frederic agrees to Manfred’s plan to offer him Matilda in marriage, Bianca comes running in to announce (after a long-winded prelude that tries Manfred’s patience) that she has seen “upon the uppermost banister of the great stairs a hand in armour as big, as big,” as big presumably as the leg, foot, and helmet previously seen (Walpole 1996, 104). Shortly after, Frederic changes his mind. The parts of the statue, moved by an internal spirit, are coming together to create a complete body, in a process that simultaneously mirrors epigenesis, condemns Manfred, and reveals the origins of numerous other characters in the novel. The body finally comes together, completing the epigenetic process, at the moment that Manfred’s monstrosity is complete. Manfred accidentally murders his own daughter, thinking she is Isabella running away to a lover. Manfred pronounces it when he says, of himself, “Murderous monster!” (Walpole 1996, 109). Matilda is carried to the castle and treated, but she dies. Shortly after, the complete body of Alfonso appears—all the parts have come together: A clap of thunder at that instant shook the castle to its foundations; the earth rocked, and the clank of more than mortal armour was heard behind. Frederic and Jerome thought the last day was at hand. The latter, forcing Theodore along with them, rushed into the court. The moment Theodore appeared, the walls of the castle behind Manfred were thrown down with a mighty force, and the form of Alfonso, dilated to an immense magnitude, appeared in the centre of the ruins. Behold in Theodore, the true heir of Alfonso! said the vision: and having pronounced those words, accompanied by a clap of thunder, it ascended solemnly towards heaven. (Walpole 1996, 112–113)

In this moment, all of the floating body parts have come together to create a whole, a whole that announces the final condemnation of Manfred’s line and its preformationist undercurrents. The line of Alfonso, with its epigenetic foundations, has gained a victory that will continue as long as the individuals involved follow the internal powers/passions that lie within. The true monster in The Castle of Otranto is Manfred and what he represents, a preformationist nightmare in which individuality is lost.

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References Botting, Fred. 1996. Gothic. London: Routledge. Bruhm, Steven. 2002. The Contemporary Gothic: Why We Need It. In The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E.  Hogle, 259–276. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clery, E.J. 1996a. Explanatory Notes. In The Castle of Otranto, ed. W.S. Lewis, 116–125. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1996b. Introduction. In The Castle of Otranto, ed. W.S. Lewis, vii–xxxiii. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davison, Carol Margaret. 2009. Gothic Literature, 1764–1824, Gothic Literary Studies. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Dent, Jonathan. 2016. Sinister Histories: Gothic Novels and Representations of the Past, from Horace Walpole to Mary Wollstonecraft. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Edelman, Diana. 2018. Gothic Medicine: Murderous Midwives and Homicidal Obstetricians. Gothic Studies 20 (1–2): 227–243. Ketton-Cremer, R.W. 1966. Horace Walpole: A Biography. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kilgour, Maggie. 1995. The Rise of the Gothic Novel. London and New  York: Routledge. Lake, Crystal B. 2013. Bloody Records: Manuscripts and Politics in The Castle of Otranto. Modern Philology: Critical and Historical Studies in Literature, Medieval Through Contemporary 110 (4): 489–512. https://doi. org/10.1086/670066. Mowl, Timothy. 1996. Horace Walpole: The Great Outsider. London: John Murray, Ltd. Müller-Sievers, Helmut. 1997. Self-Generation: Biology, Philosophy, and Literature around 1800. Stanford University Press. Price, Fiona. 2016. Reinventing Liberty: Nation, Commerce and the Historical Novel from Walpole to Scott. Edinburgh University Press. Walpole, Horace. 1996. The Castle of Otranto. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2010. The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence (1937–1983). New Haven: Yale University Press. Wright, Angela. 2013. Britain, France and the Gothic, 1764–1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yeager, Stephen. 2019. Gothic Paleography and the Preface to the First Edition of The Castle of Otranto. Gothic Studies 21 (2): 145–158.

CHAPTER 3

“The Liberty of Choice”; or, the Novels of Ann Radcliffe

Fly … from the authority of a father who abuses his power, and assert the liberty of choice, which nature assigned you. —Ferdinand, A Sicilian Romance (61)

In his biography, Ann Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress, Robert Miles asserts that Radcliffe “helped create a new ‘topography of the self’” (Miles 1995, 11). Distinguishing between pre-Romantic and Romantic notions of the self and nature, Miles asserts that the Romantic self is not distinct from nature but “constituted in and through nature” (Miles 1995, 12). For Romantic writers, “the self is now no longer defined by a priori notions of identity, but enters a free-floating, conditional realm of signification” (Miles 1995, 12). While Miles is here making an argument about language and rhetoric, his conceptualization of the self/nature connection supports what was emerging in embryological studies—the notion of a self constituted not from the outside but from the inside, organically. Miles’ early explanation of Radcliffe’s work dovetails with what Rajan has said about the proliferation of Romantic genres, which emerge, as I noted in the introduction, from an “aesthetics for individual genius” rooted in epigenetic biology (Rajan 2009, 508). Perhaps it might be more accurate to

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. P. Edelman, Embryology and the Rise of the Gothic Novel, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73648-4_3

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say that the Gothic novel itself provides an objective correlative to the shift from the pre-Romantic to the Romantic notion of self as Miles constructs it and of the shift from preformation to epigenesis. This notion of the self is precisely what we see reflected in the Gothic novel, including Radcliffe’s, whose works embed key signifiers of this shift. While Radcliffean Gothic is synonymous with the conservative Gothic, reading her work in relation to its embryological contexts reveals the progressive undercurrents of her novels, which are founded, I shall argue, on the least religious brand of the embryological sciences, i.e., epigenesis without recourse to the supernatural. The critical history of Radcliffe insists on her conservatism, a point of view that largely influences the way we discuss Radcliffe today. James Watt, for example, disagrees with feminist critics that try to find the subversive potential in Radcliffe focusing instead on “the congeniality of Radcliffean romance for conservative critics in the 1790s and early 1800s” (Watt 2006, 103). Mary Poovey asserts that “rather than proposing an alternative to paternalistic society and its values, [Radcliffe] merely reasserts an idealized—and insulated—paternalism and relegates the issues she cannot solve to the background of her narrative” (qtd. in Watt 2006, 107). Maggie Kilgour writes that “It is sadly appropriate, however, considering Radcliffe’s view of human nature, that the revolutionary form she perfected became a new type of generic tyranny, which hasn’t changed much in the last two hundred years” (Kilgour 1995, 141). Robert Miles, on the other hand, agrees with feminist critics who attempt to rescue Radcliffe from charges of passivity. In relation to his idea of the hygienic self, Miles argues that “In Radcliffe one encounters subjectivity, the discovery of the self as subject, of being ‘subject to’, but in addition one encounters the creation of inner space” (Miles 1993, 124). This “creation of inner space” is suggestive of a more progressive point of view in regards to the subject in history. Although there are critics, like Miles, who see a strand of the radical in Radcliffe, it is still very much standard to interpret Radcliffean Gothic as ultimately conservative. I hope to reveal here that the progressive nature of her work lies in its embryological point of view, in the very foundations of the self from the moment of conception. Ann Radcliffe’s novels wrestle with the same epistemological and ontological concerns as the field of eighteenth-century embryology. Radcliffe often structures her plots around a return to biological origins, whether a

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return to the literal mother or an unveiling of secret identities (or both). The plot of return/unfolding is mediated by an uneasy conflict between internal and external sources of identity and between the scientific and the supernatural, the same dichotomies that inform the conflict between preformation and epigenesis, the two competing embryological theories of the period. Radcliffe’s works exemplify an early point in what Müller-­ Sievers named the “epigenetic turn,”1 for while her novels are clearly in the Gothic tradition, they maintain, at least narratively speaking, a more straightforward structure with clear beginnings and endings, secrets and  identities revealed, and what readers would call “closure.” Later Gothic, like Shelley’s, Maturin’s, and Hogg’s, offers the reader more structural and thematic “play,” leading to less certainty about the identities of its characters and the answers to the ethical questions raised. Of equal importance are these works’ tendency, narratively speaking, to never end, Gigante’s “relentless fecundity” (Gigante 2009, 6) and Müller-­Sievers’ “endless narration” (Müller-Sievers 1997, 20). These are key features of epigenetic literature, and as I have been arguing, the Gothic, as a genre, has that more than any other genre. Radcliffe’s works do not exhibit this tendency as many later works do, but what I am tracing here is a trajectory from less to more epigenetic both in form and in structure. Radcliffe’s works operate epigenetically more in terms of content and theme: the privileging of natural romantic passion, the search for biological origins, the emphasis on family resemblance, and the power of physical evidence (and its potential to be misinterpreted). Underscoring all of these features of Radcliffe’s epigenetic novels is the threat of the supernatural, which, although explained, both haunts and drives each novel’s internal logic.

Radcliffe and Science At the end of the nineteenth century, Christina Rossetti famously gave up writing a biography of Ann Radcliffe due to lack of source material. Rictor Norton (1999), however, offers some interesting insights into Radcliffe’s family and its political and religious foundations, including Rational Dissent and revolutionary politics. He asserts that Radcliffe’s beliefs were Unitarian in nature despite her regular attendance at Anglican services. The list of eminent Unitarians in Radcliffe’s circle partially explains her vigorously rational frame of mind, which supports her obvious preference 1

 “The Epigenetic Turn” is the title of Müller-Sievers’ introduction (1997).

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for science over superstition. For example, her cousin, Dr. John Jebb, a Unitarian Rector who later studied medicine at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, was denied medical appointments due to his political activism, which earlier in his life included seeking relief from subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles (Norton 1999, 14–15). He was also a friend of Dr. Joseph Priestley, author of Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity (1777), which he dedicated to Jebb. Dr. Jebb was probably one of the many relatives whom Radcliffe resided with in her youth, and Norton speculates, “his belief in egalitarian principles and political freedom would have rubbed off upon his niece” (Norton 1999, 16). He further argues that the debate between rationalism and enthusiasm that occurs in her major novels should be understood within the context of the Dissenting debate between the Rational Dissenters (that is Unitarians) and the Evangelical Dissenters, and, more complexly, in the context of the internal debate within Rational Dissent itself, notably the tension between faith and the inevitable trends of Unitarianism towards materialism, determinism and agnosticism. (Norton 1999, 69)

Given her childhood experiences with various dissenting relatives and friends as well as her novels’ presentation of the relationship between faith and reason, I agree with Norton that her work should be read in this context, for it helps establish the scientific worldview evident in her fiction. Adam Miller argues for a specific link between Radcliffe’s aesthetic and her responses to scientific developments of her time. Specifically, Radcliffe’s naturalism rejects the “relationship between scientific discovery and industrial application,” or science as a supporter of capitalism (Miller 2016, 530). Although Miller here focuses on Radcliffe’s critique of utilitarianism, his argument that Radcliffe creates a “scientific romance” in which her explained supernatural allows an “empirical and aesthetic contemplation of the presencing of things” suggests that the development of her narratives can be explained, in part, by a particular scientific worldview (Miller 2016, 531). In this chapter, I am focusing on the ways in which Radcliffe demonstrates an implicit stance on reproductive biology, which, as I have been arguing, informs the development of the genre. This Unitarian influence emerges in her novels’ rationality as well as the scientific “bent” of her work, which embraces the language of botany and natural history. Her knowledge of broad concepts in science is obvious, but what she knew about reproductive theories, specifically embryology, is

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not as clear. Aristotle’s Masterpiece was, of course, in circulation and espoused the Aristotelian theory of embryology, which was an early form of epigenesis. Interestingly, she was related on her father’s side to William Cheselden, author of The Anatomy of the Human Body (1712) and surgeon to King George II. Cheselden espoused, though not dogmatically, the theory of preformation. If Radcliffe read his 1712 text, she would have encountered a brief overview of preformation and epigenesis and her great uncle’s retorts to the epigenetic reasons against preformation. In the introduction, Cheselden writes that “the ancients supposed, that the heart and brain were first formed, and that the other parts proceeded from them” (Cheselden 1712, 1). This view is essentially epigenetic in that it assumes that the fetus developed part-by-part over time with one organ following another. Cheselden contrasts this with the current view: “But the moderns, by the assistance of glasses having made more accurate observations, conclude, that all the parts exist in miniature, from the first formation of the foetus; and that their increase is only the extension and thickening of their vessels, and that no part owes its existence to another” (Cheselden 1712, 1–2). This view is clearly that of preformation; at this point, Cheselden does not further discuss his preference, but later in the manuscript, he reveals his preference for preformation. In the section on male and female genitalia, he references Leeuwenhoek’s observation of small animals, animalcules, under the microscope, which Leeuwenhoek believed to be “men in miniature” (Cheselden 1712, 269). Cheselden says that, even though many reject this theory, “I am inclined to think it true” (Cheselden 1712, 270). He goes on to address the common objections: family resemblance and mixed species (e.g., mules); the problem of overabundance of miniature beings that do not make it to fruition; and the difference in shape from the earlier to the later stages. He argues that the maternal imagination accounts for much of the effect on the fetus and even says that the perfection of the fetus depends more on the female than the male; otherwise, men would stop being able to reproduce as they age, just as women do (Cheselden 1712, 277). As for surplus of creatures, he says the process is similar to seeds in plants. Some become fully formed plants, but others are just food for other animals and have thus lived out their purpose. Human beings, while not necessarily nourishment for others, live out their existence, however brief, just like any other lower order animal (Cheselden 1712, 271). Despite his preference for preformation, he does not appear to be dogmatic about it and does acknowledge that there is a serious difficulty in determining how these

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miniatures got there in the first place other than by “equivocal generation,” a term for spontaneous generation (Cheselden 1712, 271). Although her great uncle took a more conservative view on this issue, Radcliffe seems to have adopted a more scientifically progressive one, which would align with her more democratic political principles. Norton asserts that “those few specifically political views that she expressed are invariably in favour of liberty, democracy and reform” (Norton 1999, 9). Furthermore, she “clearly subscribed to the Romantic notion that feeling and integrity were more important than birth” (Norton 1999, 11). Her novels also clearly favor companionate marriage over both endogamic marriage and celibacy. This more democratic view of love, marriage, and the self are supported by epigenetic biology as Müller-Sievers has shown. He writes that “the ultimate biological insignificance of the generative partner—the woman in the case of animalculism or, usually, the man in ovism—calls for practical and external considerations to motivate the choice, whereas the epigenetic framework, in which there is always an ‘alternative,’ opens up the possibility of free choice of the partner” (Müller-­ Sievers 1997, 30). Furthermore, resisting one’s passion “might dam the flux of molecules and, by so doing, act against oneself and against nature” (Müller-Sievers 1997, 33). In this way, parental control is a crime against nature. While these ideas in her work clearly have a source in rational dissent and the revolutionary milieu of the 1790s, I would suggest that epigenetic biology, at least in part, made this point of view possible. While individual choice and passion are key features of epigenetic literature, so too are monstrosity and hybridity and, ultimately, the tendency of biological and aesthetic species to generate (or degenerate into) endless varieties. Radcliffe’s work, given that it represents an early moment in the trajectory of the Gothic, registers the epigenetic point of view more in terms of individual passion and choice and less in terms of monstrosity and hybridity. This chapter discusses A Sicilian Romance, The Italian, and The Mysteries of Udolpho as early examples of epigenetic literature in that Radcliffe presents external controls, whether parents or the Church, as crimes against nature.2 Furthermore, as I hope to show, her plots develop along similar lines of argument as the embryological debates, from family resemblance to monstrosity. While her form is more contained than later versions of the Gothic, her work demonstrates the hybridity that is essential to the Gothic, or at least the beginning stages of it. 2  References to the three major Radcliffe novels that I will discuss—The Italian, A Sicilian Romance, and The Mysteries of Udolpho—will appear parenthetically in the text and will be abbreviated as follows: Italian, Sicilian Romance, Udolpho.

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Individual Passion versus Parental Control The conflict between individual passion and parental control in choice of marriage partner and, more importantly, the privileging of identity created from within, are, perhaps, the most obvious ways in which Radcliffe’s novels reveal their embryological underpinnings. Müller-Sievers writes that polemic against arranged marriages is therefore sustained by a discourse on love not as passion, but as a legitimate, interior force of self-foundation. Invariably, it espouses the cause of woman’s liberation from the unnatural obligation to the previous generation in favor of her dedication to her new family, from her preformed past as a daughter, that is, to her epigenetic future as a mother. (Müller-Sievers 1997, 12)

Individual passion, though, is an external sign of the self and allows the woman to identify the proper partner for the love that allows a “self-­ foundation” and “epigenetic future.” Radcliffe presents love in just this way—throwing off the shackles of the past and embracing a future in which the self is self-formed. Although Miles argues that Radcliffe’s “interiority” is “rooted in history,” he does argue that the hygienic self can, at times, lead to the “the disappearance of an ‘outside’” altogether (Miles 1993, 125). In A Sicilian Romance, the conflict between individual passion and parental control emerges in the relationship between Julia and Hippolitus, the Count de Vereza. When Julia encounters Hippolitus at the ball, her feelings for him are expressed physiologically—“her heart dilated with pleasure, and diffused over her features an expression of pure and complacent delight. A generous, frank, and exalted sentiment sparkled in her eyes, and animated her manner” (Sicilian Romance, 18–19). Her body’s reaction, not merely erotic, suggests the naturalness of this connection. She becomes “animated” as if she is finally awakened to new life, which is exactly how the narrator describes the revolution. Radcliffe writes, “she seemed to have entered upon a new state of existence … it was now only that she appeared to live” (Sicilian Romance, 23). After her encounter with Hippolitus, she does not merely feel joy and excitement; she enters a “new state of existence,” a new identity, a new version of herself that she had not known before. In this way, her natural passions become the source of her identity and her “epigenetic future as a mother” (Müller-­ Sievers 1997, 12). This relationship demonstrates precisely what Müller-­ Sievers argues: the “polemic against arranged marriages is therefore sustained by a discourse on love not as passion, but as a legitimate, interior

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force of self-foundation” (Müller-Sievers 1997, 12). Julia’s love is a source of “self-foundation.” These natural passions quickly come into conflict with parental choice, the voice of preformationist identity. The Marquis wants Julia to marry the Duke De Luovo primarily for reasons of status and wealth, which Radcliffe depicts as unnatural, but which, according to preformationist ideology, are perfectly legitimate reasons. The narrator calls it an “act of cruel authority” by one who had no “gentle or generous sentiment [to ameliorate] the harshness of authority”; the Marquis “delighted in simple undisguised tyranny” (Sicilian Romance, 57). This tyranny competes directly with individual passion as the basis of choice. Radcliffe’s representation of the Marquis as a tyrant exemplifies the epigenetic belief that preformation can be read as unnatural. Müller-Sievers writes that resisting one’s passion “might dam the flux of molecules and, by so doing, act against oneself and against nature” (Müller-Sievers 1997, 33). Because the Marquis exerts resistance to his daughter’s natural passions, he is guilty of a crime “against nature.” Ferdinand, her brother, cries to Julia, “Fly … from the authority of a father who abuses his power, and assert the liberty of choice, which nature assigned you” (Sicilian Romance, 61; emphasis added). In these lines, Ferdinand indicates that desire and passion must emerge from within the individual self in order to be aligned with a healthy biology consecrated by nature. He asserts again, “Believe me, that a choice which involves the happiness or misery of your whole life, ought to be decided only by yourself” (Sicilian Romance, 62–63). Because it is only the self that determines its own happiness or despair, these choices are linked directly to identity, to internal passions, particularly for Julia, for as described earlier, it is this passion that gives her a life, an identity. This new identity is fulfilled later in the novel when she encounters her mother, Louisa, trapped in the subterraneous vaults of the castle; she returns to her biological origins. Alison Milbank reads this scene in terms of conscious choice and biological reproduction. Julia chooses to “share her mother’s imprisonment in an act of deliberate—if desperate—choice,” a choice between being married to someone she does not love and imprisonment (Milbank 1993, xxv). Her conscious choice is a fulfillment of her natural biological inclinations. Milbank goes on to connect this choice to biological origins: Julia’s identification with her mother’s situation is no infantile regression to the womb: instead it precipitates her maturation and sexual union …. And

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the opening of what had hitherto been a hermetically closed womblike space and symbolically an occluded and forbidden origin will allow change in terms of both individual sexual fulfilment and social mobility, as the absolutist power of the male aristocrat is cancelled. (Milbank 1993, xxv–xxvi)

As Julia follows her natural, organic passions, she returns to a point of biological origins—her mother; in doing so, her true identity unfolds. She rejects the shackles of external power—the “absolutist power of the male aristocrat”—and creates her identity from within. When this integrity of the self is violated, there are clear physical, emotional, and psychological consequences. For example, Cornelia, Hippolitus’ sister whom Julia meets coincidentally in a convent, suffers physically when she is kept from her lover Angelo. Her family circumstances had required her to “assume the veil” despite her assertion that her “heart was unfit” for the task because she was in love with Angelo. Of course, there is some kind of “insuperable barrier” to the union (Sicilian Romance, 119). Eventually her father consents to the union, but as soon as he does that, they learn that Angelo has died. Cornelia takes the veil only to discover that Angelo is not dead, but has also taken vows as a monk. The inability to follow her natural desires leads Cornelia to illness and death. The whole situation was “equally fatal to [her] peace and to [her] health” (Sicilian Romance, 123). When Julia sees her in the convent, she nurses her and gives her some comfort, but the damage has been done to her body. In Cornelia’s story, we see the physiological effects of unnatural sexuality whether through monastic vows or a prevention of a passionate union. The physically debilitating effects of extreme emotional distress are typical of Gothic novels, and though they are typically read as a commentary on the relationship between mind and body, I would suggest that it demonstrates, additionally, an alignment with epigenetic biology due to its focus on sexual love (and the underlying implications for reproduction). In The Italian, the story begins with a physical and emotional attraction between Ellena di Rosalba and Vincentio di Vivaldi, and it is their love, her mysteries origins, and her reproductive potential that drive the plot of the entire novel. The desire within individuals is the beginning of the epigenetic process, and mutual sexual attraction and gratification are necessary for reproduction. We see these desires playing out in the relationship between Ellena and Vivaldi whose mutual attraction opens the story inside the frame narrative. Their mutual desire is represented favorably by Radcliffe who, throughout the novel, contrasts this epigenetic

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attraction with the unnatural sexuality of Catholic celibacy and endogamic marriage. Mesmerized by her sweet voice and fine figure at the church of San Lorenzo in Naples, Vincentio di Vivaldi follows Ellena and her aunt Bianchi home. We learn later that Ellena too was attracted to Vivaldi, for he was “not of a figure to pass unobserved when seen, and Ellena had been struck by the spirit and dignity of his air, and by his countenance” (Italian, 14). This epigenetic attraction, however, is thwarted by the problem of Ellena’s biological origins. Vivaldi defies his father’s wishes, demands his “sacred right,” and determines to pursue the “freedom of his nature” (Italian, 50). The appeal to both “nature” and a “right” indicates, just as Müller-Sievers suggests, the link between reproductive biology and religio-cultural norms. The Marchesa’s desires represent the ultimate in preformationist duty and hierarchy because she speaks for the family, the Church, and the State. The Marchesa’s wishes are presented as a despotic crime against nature and motivated by external forces. The Marchesa exclaims, “The woman who obtrudes herself upon a family, to dishonour it … deserves a punishment nearly equal to that of a state criminal, since she injures those who best support the state. She ought to suffer” (Italian, 196). In this statement, there is no concern for natural, organic passion, only for duty to external forces—the family, the State, and, by implication, the Church. Vivaldi’s mother, the Marchesa, plots with Schedoni, her confessor, to thwart the match. Ellena is abducted and taken to live in a convent where she is given the choice of marrying a man of the Marchesa’s choice or taking the veil, an arranged marriage or celibacy, both equally untenable in an epigenetic world. Ellena is certain of her rights, as are the readers, for she boldly tells the Abbess, “be assured, that my own voice never shall sanction the evils to which I may be subjected, and that the immortal love of justice, which fills all my heart, will sustain my courage no less powerfully than the sense of what is due to my own character” (Italian, 99). As her lover Vivaldi did with his father, Ellena asserts that her wishes supersede those of external voices. It is not merely a political or cultural right, but a fundamental part of her identity—her heart, her voice, her nature. Love is one of the few, if not only, reasons that women in these novels can assert themselves against authority without risking censure from the audience. The epigenetic assumptions of author and audience make this kind of rebellion possible, even necessary and heroic. The sanctity of organic love is reinforced in The Mysteries of Udolpho as well, and any rejection of that passion is presented as unnatural and

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tyrannical. The growing love between Emily and Valancourt is depicted as completely organic, reinforced not only by their sublime surroundings, but also by her father’s validation. St. Aubert, an amateur botanist who marries for love, detects Valancourt’s worth and the connection between him and his daughter perhaps before even they do. When Valancourt must part ways with them for the first time, St. Aubert “observed him look with an earnest and pensive eye at Emily, who bowed to him with a countenance full of timid sweetness” (Udolpho, 36). St. Aubert, the opposite of the patriarchal tyrant, clearly approves of this match, although Valancourt’s background at this point is unknown. The good patriarch’s approval supports the naturalness of this union as do the circumstances in which their love grows. When the three are later reunited, they travel through the woods. While St. Aubert studies the flora and fauna, Valancourt and Emily stroll through the woods while Valancourt points out various plants and quotes poetry. In these moments, Valancourt speaks with “peculiar tenderness” as he observes her face, “which expressed with so much animation the taste and energy of her mind” (Udolpho, 42). Not unlike Julia’s in A Sicilian Romance, Emily’s love gives her life—animation and energy. The validation from a good patriarch, one who (perhaps not coincidentally) is an amateur natural historian, and the environment in which it is conceived and nourished supports the organic nature of their love, a process indicative of epigenetic biology. Any thwarting of their union is depicted as a crime against nature, a violation of the natural order, and always leads to distress. The St. Auberts are a perfect example of natural, organic love, which leads to healthy reproduction in the figure of Emily, who is not only biologically but also morally strong. By contrast, Montoni’s marriage to St. Aubert’s sister, the widow Madame Cheron, is, of course, disastrous due to the pecuniary motives of both parties, motives sanctioned by a preformationist outlook. Although Radcliffe clearly warns her readers about the dangers of overdeveloped passions, it is equally clear that the tyrants of the novel are wrong and the individuals who follow their natural, moderate desires are right. The conflict between internally and externally sourced identity, particularly in relation to love and reproduction, drives the plots of Radcliffe’s works and, indeed, most Gothic novels. Certainly, many of the novels of the period, including domestic novels such as Austen’s, could make the same claim; however, the Gothic is unique in the way that its epigenetic underpinnings affect the content and form of both the individual works themselves and the genre as a whole. While one could argue that

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Müller-Sievers’ argument about the democratic nature of love in epigenetic literature applies to Austen, that is not the only feature of epigenetic literature. In addition to its flirtation with the supernatural that is not a feature of domestic novels, epigenetic literature has an obsessive need to find origins so much so that it can never really satisfactorily conclude, leading to “endless narration.” This narration is not unlike epigenesists themselves who spilled a lot of ink trying to explain conception scientifically, but never could do so satisfactorily. Radcliffe, I would suggest, falls early on this continuum, for her works have neat and tidy endings more in line with domestic fiction; however, her engagement with other elements essential to the embryological debates—resemblance, the conflict between science and the supernatural, monstrosity—indicate that her novels embed embryological discourse that explains, in part, the development of the genre. The moral and ethical questions Radcliffe treats in her novel are easily answered unlike later Gothic novels, the more epigenetically based ones, that often raise questions that cannot be answered, leading to that “relentless fecundity” and “endless narration.”

Family Resemblance Each of Radcliffe’s novels also relies on the importance of family resemblance, a key argument against preformation. The epigenesist Count de Buffon writes that “what more strongly proves the truth of our explanation, is the resemblance of children to their parents … children sometimes resemble the father, sometimes the mother, and sometimes both” (Buffon 1792, 2:323–324). Preformationists could not explain family resemblance. If the being is fully formed in the mother’s egg (ovism) before conception, then there is no physical explanation why children sometimes look like their father’s or members of their father’s family. The reverse is true, of course, with spermism (animalculism). If the fully formed being is in the male sperm, the question becomes why do children sometimes look like their mothers? Family resemblance, a significant element in all of Radcliffe’s novels, implicitly evokes the embryological contexts of the period. An embryological reading of her novels uncovers the aesthetic manifestations of reproductive biology, not only in the plot of Radcliffe’s novels, but also in the development of the genre itself. The differences in character and appearance between Julia and Emilia in A Sicilian Romance are expressed early in the novel; Julia’s character appears to resemble both parents, supporting epigenetic biology.

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Typical of Gothic novels (and novels of this period in general), Radcliffe sets up a contrast in appearance and personality between the two sisters. Emilia, the elder sister, “inherited much of her mother’s disposition. She had a mild and sweet temper, united with a clear and comprehensive mind” (Sicilian Romance, 4). Later in the novel, we learn that she looks strikingly like her mother in terms of physical appearance, for toward the end of the novel when Julia is trapped in the winding passages of the castle, she comes upon a woman in whom she thought she found the “resemblance of Emilia” (Sicilian Romance, 174). Although not expressly stated, Julia, it seems, is more like her father both in temperament and physical features, for she “was of a more lively cast. An extreme sensibility subjected her to frequent uneasiness; her temper was warm, but generous; she was quickly irritated, and quickly appeased” (Sicilian Romance, 4). Her father is described as a “voluptuous and imperious character” who is both “arrogant and impetuous” (Sicilian Romance, 3). Although Julia is not arrogant, she does appear to have inherited the passionate nature of her father; the difference here is that she has inherited elements of her mother’s disposition as well, for like her gentle mother she is generous and easy to appease. She is also opposite of her sister in terms of physical appearance. Whereas Emilia is fair with blue eyes, Julia’s features are dark—her eyes are dark and her hair auburn (Sicilian Romance, 6). In taking traits from both mother and father, Julia becomes a supporting example for epigenesis. In The Italian, resemblance to both parents is asserted explicitly in Vivaldi. Vivaldi is stamped with character traits from both of his parents, making his conception and development epigenetic. Radcliffe’s positive portrayal of Vivaldi’s physical features and moral character suggests a favoring of epigenetic biology. A “marking feature” of his family is pride of birth (Italian, 31). He is the “only son of the Marchese di Vivaldi, a nobleman of one of the most ancient families of the kingdom of Naples” (Italian, 11). His “pride of birth” is balanced with his principle of mind, which is more like that of his father. Vivaldi’s mother, the Marchesa, descends from a “family as ancient as that of his father,” but she is haughty and deceitful (Italian, 11, 12). Vivaldi’s history is known and further reinforced by his physical and moral resemblance to his parents. He “inherited much of the character of his father, and very little of that of his mother” (Italian, 12). He is like her in passion but not duplicity. Vivaldi inherits, through the blood, both character and social status, a little from his mother and a little from his father.

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Ellena too becomes an example of epigenetic biology. She favors her mother in terms of voice and temperament. When Ellena first sees her mother, she is struck by her countenance, which exposes a “similarity of feeling” (Italian, 102). Their voices are also similar. Ellena’s first appearance in the novel is through Vivaldi’s enchantment with the “sweetness and fine expression of her voice” (Italian, 9). Ellena has a similar attraction to her mother’s voice whose “expression immediately fixed her attention; it seemed to speak a loftier sentiment of devotion than the others … Ellena felt that she understood all the feelings of the breast from which it flowed” (Italian, 101). Ellena also resembles her father. When Olivia first sees Ellena, she “was struck with a slight resemblance she bore to the late Count di Bruno, and had frequently afterwards examined her features with a most painful curiosity” (Italian, 443). Ellena’s resemblance to both father and mother, then, further reinforces the novel’s epigenetic foundation. In The Mysteries of Udolpho, the miniature portrait provides even stronger support for an epigenetic reading, for Emily St. Aubert resembles both her mother and her father’s sister. Ironically, the evidence against preformation in this novel comes in the form of the miniature, the term typically used for the microscopic beings of preformationist theory. Though the nomenclature is coincidental, the resemblance among characters from both sides of the family is essential not only for the plot, but also for the epigenetic biology upon which the key relationships are based. Early in the novel, the narrator reveals, “In person, Emily resembled her mother” (Udolpho, 5). Later in the novel, we learn that she also bears a striking resemblance to her father’s late sister, whom we learn is the Marchioness de Villeroi. A servant of Chateau Le Blanc says to Emily, “My lady Marchioness was then about your age, and, as I have often thought, very like you” (Udolpho, 523–524). Sister Agnes, the mistress of the Marquis de Villeroi who was formerly known as the Signora Laurentini, is struck by the resemblance between Emily and her lover’s wife (St. Aubert’s sister and, therefore, Emily’s aunt). Agnes produces a miniature much like the one that Emily saw her father weeping over at the beginning of the novel. It is the Marchioness de Villeroi. Agnes gives it to Emily and exclaims, “I have frequently observed the resemblance between you; but never, till this day, did it strike upon my conscience so powerfully!” (Udolpho, 645). The persistence of both maternal and paternal resemblance in characters across Radcliffe’s novels evokes this component of the embryological debates

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and is suggestive, along with her support for individual passion in love, of an epigenetic point of view.

The “Explained Supernatural” In addition to family resemblance, the role of the supernatural was one of the key points of contention between preformationists and epigenesists; it comes into play in the world Radcliffe creates through the “explained supernatural,” which  intellectually  acknowledges God and the spiritual world but that, ultimately, privileges material causes. Preformationists insisted on God’s role in the process of generation, which allowed them to explain fetal formation primarily in terms of God as creator. Essentially, preformationists did not have to explain the actual creation of life, only the movement of matter and motion after God began the process, which was just a matter of nutrition and development. Epigenesists, on the other hand, attempted to provide concrete, physical evidence not only for fetal development, but also for its initial formation. They were not quite successful with this as there were no actual observations under the microscope, only theories with varying degrees of reliance on the supernatural (despite their attempts to avoid it). Preformationists were willing to accept an element of the supernatural without question that epigenesists were not. Read in this context, Radcliffe’s “explained supernatural” places her within the epigenetic camp, for there are no effects without concrete, physical, observable causes.3 At the same time, Radcliffe’s comments on God and faith in her works at times sound like the more conservative, faith-based preformationist stance wherein God is the First Cause; however, as I noted at the beginning of this chapter, Norton’s biography of Radcliffe indicates that her Unitarian background helped establish a faith unrestricted by conservative doctrines and rules. In addition, as Terry Castle has argued, Radcliffe, despite her dismissal of “the age-old vagaries of Western superstition” continued to be haunted by the supernatural, which she merely displaced (Castle 1995, 139). Not unlike epigenesists who tried to “domesticate” the supernatural into material “forces” and “vital juices,” Radcliffe may have explained the supernatural, but she still “saw ghosts” (Castle 1995, 139). A closer look at the internal logic of her 3  As I noted earlier in this chapter, Miller (2016) argues that Radcliffe’s explained supernatural is the space in which she is able to rescue science from utilitarianism and marry it to her aesthetics.

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novels reveals a stricter alignment with an epigenetic stance than with a preformationist one. One of the most revealing passages in A Sicilian Romance occurs early in the novel just after Madame de Menon narrates her own history and that of Julia and Emilia’s mother. Right after this brief history, Julia and Emilia hear a “low hollow sound, which arose from beneath the apartment,” a sound that “chilled [them] into a silence” (Sicilian Romance, 35). These noises, which came from the uninhabited southern portion of the castle in which a mysterious figure and a lamp had been seen at night, cause them to run to Madame de Menon because they fear the presence of spirits or ghosts. The sisters ask Menon if she believes in “disembodied spirits,” and it is in her answer that the novel articulates what can be read as an ambivalent embryological stance. Menon responds, “I will not attempt to persuade you that the existence of such spirits is impossible. Who shall say that any thing is impossible with God? We know that he has made us, who are embodied spirits; he, therefore, can make unembodied spirits” (Sicilian Romance, 36). Menon’s appeal to a supernatural, all-­ powerful, all-knowing God aligns her with preformationists who often made a similar claim, a kind of logical deus ex machina. In attempting to answer the essential embryological question of origins, Haller concludes, “the Creator himself, for whom nothing is difficult, has built this structure: He has arranged at one time … the brute matter according to foreseen ends and according to a model preformed by his Wisdom” (qtd. in Roe 1981, 43–44; emphasis mine). Menon asserts that “If we cannot understand how such spirits exist, we should consider the limited powers of our minds, and that we cannot understand many things which are indisputably true” (Sicilian Romance, 36). Likewise, preformationists argued that we cannot understand preformation because of our limited human perception. Madame de Menon’s next example, however, is also reminiscent of one of Buffon’s arguments in favor of epigenesis. She argues from effects to causes: No one yet knows why the magnetic needle points to the north; yet you, who have never seen a magnet, do not hesitate to believe that it has this tendency, because you have been well assured of it, both from books and in conversation. Since, therefore, we are sure that nothing is impossible to God, and that such beings may exist, though we cannot tell how, we ought to consider by what evidence their existence is supported. (Sicilian Romance, 36)

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Despite her appeal to God here, Menon’s argument suggests that we can know causes primarily because of the experience we have of their effects and by making a parallel with known mechanical laws. Similarly, Buffon argued for the existence of an internal mold guided by “penetrating powers” by making a parallel with gravity and other known principles of matter. He writes: “These internal moulds, although we cannot acquire, Nature may be possessed of as she is of the qualities of gravity, which penetrates to the internal particles of matter” (Buffon 1792, 2:291–292). Furthermore, he asks, “are we certain these qualities [impenetrability, divisibility, elasticity, etc.] are the only ones which matter possesses”? (Buffon 1792, 2:308). Though we cannot see gravity or elasticity, we accept their existence based on their observed effects; in the same way, the epigenetic process may be guided by principles such as penetrating powers. Although Madame de Menon is commenting on the existence of supernatural beings, her logic is grounded in material realities: the comparison to magnetism, her appeal to “consider by what evidence their existence is supported” (emphasis added), and her assertion that Julia and Emilia must “exercise [their] reason” (Sicilian Romance, 36; emphasis added). A speech similar to Madame de Menon’s occurs in The Mysteries of Udolpho. St. Aubert, whose narrative tone in this passage seems aligned with the author’s, argues that faith is essentially a fiction. Early in the novel, a local peasant asks St. Aubert if he believes that the dead can revisit the earth. St. Aubert’s response signifies that it is unlikely, but a very important belief for those who wish to comfort themselves upon the death of a loved one: “Futurity is much veiled from our eyes, and faith and hope are our only guides concerning it. We are not enjoined to believe, that disembodied spirits watch over the friends they have loved, but we may innocently hope it. It is a hope which I will never resign” (Udolpho, 67–68). The rational mind does not believe it, but human nature hopes for it. St. Aubert’s wisdom suggests that faith is merely psychological and emotional and thus distinct from material, scientific realities, which was essentially the operating logic of most epigenesists of the time. Menon’s speech and St. Aubert’s words contain a logic more aligned with the epigenesists than with the preformationists. Almost all scientists of the time gave at least nominal agreement to the idea of a divine being; it was more the implications of epigenetic theory, than stated personal beliefs, that led to charges of atheism against them. Menon appears to be speaking for Radcliffe herself here in that the internal logic of the speech

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is a microcosm of that of the novel. Radcliffe clearly does not deny a spiritual world, but she favors the “sun of science” over the darkness of superstition (Sicilian Romance, 116). Her characteristic “explained supernatural” bears this out; at the same time, as with epigenesis itself, the novels are always haunted by the supernatural. That supernatural may not be the demons of The Monk and Zofloya, but it is a nagging potential that prevents both Menon and Radcliffe from being “proud or bold enough to reply—‘it is impossible’” (Sicilian Romance, 36).

The Miniature In Menon’s speech and St. Aubert’s statement, the focus is on whether there is evidence to prove the existence of disembodied spirits. In The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian, the importance of scientific evidence is explicitly related to biological origins, linking the work more clearly with epigenesis. The belief that biological identity can be verified only through physical evidence corroborated by a medical expert is implicit in both The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian. In both novels, the miniature portrait, which is simultaneously a critique of preformation and supporting evidence for epigenesis, comes to symbolize this scientific evidence, which is, as it was for embryologists, subject to interpretation. Despite its nominal connection to preformation, the miniature in Radcliffe’s works underscores the epigenetic biology of the world Radcliffe creates not only through its support for family resemblance, discussed earlier, but also as a key element of physical evidence for biological origins. Though subtle, this feature of the novel’s plot is suggestive of an epigenetic stance, which insisted on physical evidence rather than superstitious theories about God. They were not always successful in finding evidence themselves, but epigenesists were committed to explanations of life grounded in verifiable evidence. The miniature in these novels supports the epigenetic frame of mind in its role as biological evidence, but not before the preformationist stance is called into question by the portrait’s susceptibility to misreading. In The Italian, the miniature is frequently misidentified until the end of the novel, suggesting that what we see is often a matter of personal bias, even for the scientist looking under the microscope; scientific arguments are, as Buffon wrote, “modes of perception.” In the case of the miniature, what is under the microscope is identity, which evokes, as I am arguing, the novel’s embryological subtexts. Joe Bray argues in “Ann Radcliffe,

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precursors and portraits” that Radcliffe’s portraits (including the miniatures) frequently “appear to question, even at times to transcend, the boundary between representation and reality, and to challenge the notion of identity” (Bray 2014, 41). The portrait in Radcliffe, he suggests, is less about the connection between the image and the person than about “the emotional force of the portrait on its viewer,” which indicates interpretive bias (Bray 2014, 41). Indeed, we see this time and time again when portraits are misidentified by biased viewers. I would suggest that these misidentifications are Radcliffe’s critique of preformation.4 In The Italian the miniature, the portrait that Ellena incorrectly identifies as her father, significantly shifts the story’s trajectory, for it is upon seeing the portrait that Schedoni stops himself from murdering Ellena and, instead, seeks to plead her case with the Marchesa because he mistakenly thinks Ellena is his daughter. The “emotional force” of the portrait, as Bray would term it, causes Schedoni to completely change course because he does not attempt to get any supporting evidence for his interpretation. The miniature is the one bit of physical evidence that can verify Ellena’s parentage. Initially, she too misreads this evidence because she sees what she wants to see without any other corroboration. By the end of the novel, the reader learns that Schedoni is not Ellena’s father but her uncle, who killed Ellena’s father and forced his brother’s widow to marry him after raping her. Olivia, Ellena’s mother, reveals this information to Ellena after she returns safely from the seaside house where Schedoni had originally planned to kill her. The misidentification of the portrait by both Ellena and Schedoni indicates that the power of the emotions and imagination can cause the misinterpretation of physical signs. Even though Olivia corroborates this story with Vivaldi’s father, it is not until the Marchese contacts the physician who helped Olivia fake her own death that he believes the evidence that reveals Ellena’s noble parentage. The physical evidence corroborated by the unbiased eye of a man of science is suggestive of Radcliffe’s scientific point of view, and given the miniature’s association with biological identity and family resemblance, the point of view appears to be an epigenetic one. 4  Kickel argues that Emily’s misperceptions are a reflection of “eighteenth-century anxieties about the imagination’s continued ill-effects on the senses,” a theory she links to Bishop Berkeley’s 1709 Theory of Vision (Kickel 2007, 115). Although I am asserting that Radcliffe is here engaging with embryological discourse, Kickel’s argument is plausible and reinforces the overall argument here (and recent studies in Romanticism and the Gothic) that medical discourse was central to the development of literature in the period.

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The miniature plays an important role in The Mysteries of Udolpho as well; it is the figure of the miniature that establishes family resemblance, a key element of epigenetic arguments against preformation. The miniature also serves, as it does for The Italian, to establish the importance of physical evidence against superstition and the supernatural. After her mother’s death, Emily sees her father weeping over the miniature of a woman who is not her mother. The identity of this person remains a mystery until the very end of the novel when we discover that it is St. Aubert’s late sister who was poisoned by her husband, the Marquis de Villeroi, and his lover the Signora di Laurentini (later Sister Agnes). There are, of course, other mysterious identities in the novel—who or what is the source of the music that is often heard in the woods around La Vallée and Le Chateau le Blanc? This identity is also revealed through a miniature. Although she is not the one in the miniature, her possession of an image of her lover’s wife (St. Aubert’s sister) reinforces her identity, which is further confirmed by the portrait of her that Emily had seen when trapped in Montoni’s castle. At the end of the novel, all of the mysteries are solved by concrete, physical evidence underscoring Radcliffe’s alignment with the epigenetic frame of mind. She, like many of the epigenesists of the time, has an uncomfortable relationship with the supernatural, which she acknowledges in word, but never in action or evidence. They too were working on an “explained supernatural” that involved them in endless narration, for there is no way to know origins absolutely.

Endless Narration In the worlds that Radcliffe creates, the epigenetic point of view prevails, particularly through the privileging of the individual’s internal guides or passions, the invoking of family resemblance, and in her rejection of supernatural explanations. These features, centered as they are on plots that pivot on biological identity, make Radcliffe’s work exemplary of epigenetic literature. One of the most important features, though, of epigenetic literature, as defined by Müller-Sievers and Gigante, is the tendency toward the proliferation of narrative. Radcliffe’s novels do not appear to have this tendency as they are straightforward linear narratives that are easy to follow and that always tie up loose ends. I would suggest, though, that Radcliffe’s work appears early in the period wherein, as Rajan argues, the deformalization of genres led to “a more contingent and hybrid notion of genre as historically produced and still in process” (Rajan 2009, 508).

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The hybridity of Radcliffe’s work appears not only in its very “Gothicness” as a marrying, per Walpole, of ancient and modern romances, but also in the interspersed poetry and her scene descriptions, which can easily be described as landscape paintings. Her novels themselves, while not embodying “relentless fecundity” (Gigante 2009, 6) within their own narrative walls as later, more epigenetic texts do, contributed to the proliferation of Gothic romances during the period and to the development of the genre itself. In the next three chapters, I turn to texts that are more epigenetic, which were published in the mid-to-late Gothic period and which demonstrate more of this feature of epigenetic literature.

References Bray, Joe. 2014. Ann Radcliffe, Precursors and Portraits. In Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic, ed. Dale Townshend and Angela Wright, 33–48. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de. 1792. Barr’s Buffon: Buffon’s Natural History. London: J. S. Barr. Castle, Terry. 1995. The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cheselden, William. 1712. The Anatomy of the Human Body. 6th ed. London: William Bowyer. Gigante, Denise. 2009. Life: Organic Form and Romanticism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kickel, Katherine E. 2007. Novel Notions: Medical Discourse and the Mapping of the Imagination in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. New York & London: Routledge. Kilgour, Maggie. 1995. The Rise of the Gothic Novel. London and New  York: Routledge. Milbank, Alison. 1993. Introduction. In Ann Radcliffe: A Sicilian Romance, ed. Alison Milbank, ix–xxix. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miles, Robert. 1993. Gothic Writing 1750-1820: A Genealogy. Routledge. ———. 1995. Ann Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress. Manchester University Press. Miller, Adam. Spring 2016. Ann Radcliffe’s Scientific Romance. Eighteenth-­ Century Fiction. 28 (3): 527–545. https://doi.org/10.3138/ecf.28.3.527. Müller-Sievers, Helmut. 1997. Self-Generation: Biology, Philosophy, and Literature Around 1800. Stanford University Press. Norton, Rictor. 1999. Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe. London and New York: Leicester University Press. Radcliffe, Ann. 1998a. A Sicilian Romance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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———. 1998b. The Mysteries of Udolpho. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2000. The Italian. London: Penguin Books. Rajan, Tilottama. 2009. The Epigenesis of Genre: New Forms From Old. In The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature, ed. James Chandler, 507–526. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roe, Shirley A. 1981. Matter, Life, and Generation: Eighteenth-Century Embryology and the Haller-Wolff Debate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Watt, James. 2006. Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764–1832. Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 4

“Dark, Shapeless Substances”; or, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Invention … does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos. —Frankenstein, 356. (See Shelley 2001)

Not unlike her Gothic forbear, Horace Walpole, Shelley turns to embryological metaphors to explain the workings of her imagination. In the 1831 Introduction to Frankenstein, Shelley writes, Every thing must have a beginning, to speak in Sanchean phrase; and that beginning must be linked to something that went before. The Hindoos give the world an elephant to support it, but they make the elephant stand upon a tortoise. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself. In all matters of discovery and invention, even of those that appertain to the imagination, we are continually reminded of the story of Columbus and his egg. Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject, and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to it. (Frankenstein, 356)

Unless otherwise noted, all references to the novel and the 1831 introduction are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text as Frankenstein. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. P. Edelman, Embryology and the Rise of the Gothic Novel, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73648-4_4

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This passage immediately follows Shelley’s narration of the infamous ghost story contest in which her imagination is being challenged to conceive and give birth. She struggles to come up with an idea, and in doing so, she makes a connection between aesthetic invention and creation/life. In this passage, Shelley demonstrates Gigante’s claim that “science and aesthetics confronted the same formal problems” (Gigante 2009, 3). While Shelley here refers to the creation of the world as a whole, her metaphors can be read as grounded in embryology. When she writes that we cannot create out of “void” and that we must “give form to dark, shapeless substances,” she makes an epigenetic argument. The epigenetic process takes the “materials” and the “substance” and gives them form; this process directly contrasts with preformation, which implies that God created out of a void, which Shelley rejects. In this passage, she even references the vague kind of “power” that must mold and shape the materials; this power is not unlike Buffon’s “penetrating powers,” Blumenbach’s “Formative Nisus,” or Wolff’s “vis essentialis.” Her imagination, like these powers, must mold and shape existing materials, part by part over time, an epigenetic process. Also similar to the epigenesists of her time, Shelley’s aesthetic theory faces the problem of an unending search for origins. The metaphor of the world standing on an elephant standing on a tortoise implies that the search for origins will go on infinitely, for the question is, of course, what is the tortoise standing on? The import of this metaphor is why epigenetic literature leads to what Müller-Sievers calls “endless narration” (Müller-­ Sievers 1997, 20). One can never go back all the way to the point of origin. Each attempt to do so spins more and more narrative. The Gothic, I have been arguing, is the most epigenetic of all genres because it engages with more of the features of embryological discourse—specifically the supernatural and the monstrous—and demonstrates more than any other genre the effects of that search: endless narration. Arguably, Frankenstein has witnessed more permutations since its inception than any other Gothic tale because it engages directly with the various theories of embryology by asking quite directly “what is life?” and by explicitly linking that question to the aesthetic process. Uncovering the embryological foundations of Shelley’s first novel helps answer the central questions that have plagued Gothic scholarship since 1764. Is the Gothic an aesthetic success? Is it merely reactionary? Is it a rejection of reason and scientific inquiry? Despite the fact that Frankenstein is most often read as a warning against scientific and technological progress and is considered the harbinger of science fiction, the novel, when read in its embryological contexts, supports

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scientific progress and demonstrates the aesthetic success of the genre itself (despite individual instances wherein “copycats” merely treated it as formulaic). In addition, the embryological contexts of the work explain why the Gothic continues to this present day. Frankenstein addresses the question of biological origins at the level of plot, which leads, inevitably, to the novel’s unique form: the creature’s story is buried within Victor’s story, which is buried within Walton’s story, which is likely, though not discussed, buried within his sister’s story. While Victor’s creation is directly about conception and gestation, it is also about, as others have argued, the origins and development of the aesthetic product.1 This intimate connection between life and art is why people almost inevitably bring up the infamous “ghost story contest” when talking about this novel, whether they have read it or not, and is partly why contemporary critics focused so much on how a writer could conceive of such a story: Shelley highlighted the ineluctable connection between aesthetic life and biological life, which explains in part why feminist critics claim that the novel is “the story of the experience of writing Frankenstein” (Johnson 1996, 248) and an “assertion of her own imaginative authority” (Bewell 1988, 124). In attempting to answer the central question of life, the unique form of her novel developed: a series of nested stories digging deeper and deeper to the point of origin, but like all epigenetic literature, they are never quite able to get there. Hence, at the end of the novel, the creature’s story continues as does the genre itself as it makes and remakes itself to the present day. Given Shelley’s explanation of the imagination and its products, it is no surprise that Victor Frankenstein’s journey begins with the same question asked by embryologists—“how and when does life begin?” Even though “the theme of generation was at the core of the life sciences during the eighteenth century” (Jordanova 1999, 175), much of Frankenstein scholarship that traces its scientific contexts is devoted to Dr. Erasmus Darwin, Humphry Davy, galvanism, electricity, technology, and the vitalist-­ materialist debate between John Abernethy and William Lawrence.2  See the following: Kiely (1972); Sherwin (1981); Wohlpart (1998).  The vitalist-materialist debate is obviously relevant to embryological studies, but embryology per se is not often invoked directly in these studies. See Mellor (1988). For a discussion of Mary Shelley as the progenitor of science fiction, see Stableford (1995). For a detailed discussion of the vitalist debate and Frankenstein, see Butler (1996). For a quick (and more recent) overview of Aristotelian theories of life and the materialist-vitalist debate as it relates to Frankenstein, see Maienschein and MacCord (2017). Zak Sitter (2016) argues, using the 1 2

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At least since Ellen Moers’ reading of the novel as a “birth myth,” feminist criticism has recognized the novel’s critique of masculine structures of power whether sociological, psychological, legal, aesthetic, or scientific (Moers 1977; Johnson 1996; Gilbert and Gubar 1979; Poovey 1984; Kipp 2003). The feminist criticism that tackles the sciences addresses the same sciences of the scholarship more broadly with some additional focus on reproduction and obstetrics. For example, Anne Mellor (1988) argues that Frankenstein critiques patriarchal science, which attempts to penetrate, control, and manipulate a feminized Nature, rather than respecting its autonomy. Arguing that M.  W. Shelley draws on the influences of Humphry Davy, Erasmus Darwin, and Luigi Galvani, Mellor describes Victor’s science as, in part, an inversion of the reproductive hierarchy described by Darwin. In this groundbreaking work, Mellor established a direct link between reproductive sciences and the novel, demonstrating that Shelley was interrogating the ideological underpinnings of natural philosophy. In the same year that Mellor published her literary biography, Alan Bewell (1988) linked Victor Frankenstein with the rise of the obstetrician, specifically William Smellie who used a doll-machine to teach midwifery students about the science of birth (see also Edelman 2018). Much more recently, Mary Fairclough, Martin Priestman, and Jerrold Hogle have shifted the discussion of the electricity in the novel to connect it more directly to contemporary theories of life. According to Fairclough, studies that concentrate on electricity and galvanism fail to recognize that Shelley’s presentation is much messier than infusing life from an outside, mechanical force. Fairclough argues that the “spark of being” in the novel should be read as organic and chemical: “He [Victor] could have discovered the secret of harnessing the generative power of the electrical force inherent in the nerves and cells of all living matter” (Fairclough 2018, 405). Priestman makes a similar claim when he argues that reviewing the classical sources of the novel allows us to see that the Creature is more a “fully functioning biochemical organism” than a machine infused with electricity (Priestman 2018, 49). Hogle argues that the creature embodies unresolved conflicts in the sciences, specifically theories of life. Using context of the Abernethy-Lawrence debate, that Shelley’s novel demonstrates that the human tendency towards advanced organization leads to its tendency to become inorganic and mechanical. Interestingly, Sitter relates this to Paul de Man’s aesthetic theory. Sitter’s analysis underscores the relationship between life science and aesthetic theory, which is central to the claims I am making here.

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Gigante’s Life, Hogle argues that the creature embodies the conflict between preformation and epigenesis (Hogle 2018). Though Fairclough and Priestman are not discussing embryology per se, their focus on the two theories of life implied by the novel’s use of electrical metaphors are indicative of Hogle’s argument that the novel stages the conflict between preformation and epigenesis. Although highlighting mostly obstetrics and obstetricians, Youngquist’s argument about Frankenstein actually rests on embryological foundations and subtly foregrounds one of the key differences between preformation and epigenesis: fixed versus unlimited identities. He argues that medical science, specifically obstetrical medicine, creates the abject female body that it seeks to control through the concept of the liberal subject. He reads Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a continuation of her mother’s challenge to one of the key concepts of the “proper body” as Youngquist calls it—the generative debt to the father (Youngquist 2003, 151). The passage from Vindication that is the springboard to his argument is embryological in nature. He quotes the moment in the text when Wollstonecraft discusses how gender is determined in the womb, an embryological argument that I discuss elsewhere (Edelman-Young 2014). Youngquist suggests that Wollstonecraft’s challenge to patriarchy rests on, at least in part, an argument about fetal formation in the womb; this challenge continues in Frankenstein, which “registers an appeal for a fully corporeal feminism, a politics that multiplies the possibilities of embodiment instead of assimilating them to a proper, and properly human, norm” (Youngquist 2003, 160). Similarly, Richard Sha has argued that “obstetrics and embryology shaped the discourse of imagination in ways that Shelley challenges,” arguing that she wrestles with the ways in which culture “tries to map gender onto creation.” In response, Shelley “tries to figure out how science can reliably turn to imagination to do its exploratory work, and how the imagination’s creations can move beyond the mere reproduction of ideas” (Sha 2018, 186). Not unlike Youngquist, Sha suggests that obstetricians and embryologists attempted to differentiate between the rational “male” work of science and the irrational “female” work of imagination and embodiment in an attempt to control the female subject. Quite accurately, Sha indicates that the creation of the creature is an allegory not only of the process of the imagination, but also the “problem of how some matter becomes organic,” in other words, how/when life begins (Sha 2018, 187).

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Both Youngquist’s and Sha’s work underscore the conflict between fixed, predetermined identities and self-formed, self-driven ones, which have the potential for monstrosity. While Sha argues that Shelley is concerned that “obstetrics and embryology frame creation in such a way that self-replication or narcissism is the only version of autonomy possible” (Sha 2018, 186), I believe her deployment of epigenesis indicates otherwise. Preformation produces only machines, not autonomous subjects. Certainly, preformation presents the problem of replication, but it is not self-replication. Identity is determined by an external force. Epigenesis solves this problem by allowing the self to reproduce organically, a process she clearly prefers both scientifically and aesthetically. Significantly, Youngquist’s argument suggests that bodies are legion, not one, which underscores this key distinction between preformation and epigenesis. Whereas preformation is prescriptive, epigenesis offers endless “possibilities of embodiment,” both physiologically and narratively as I am arguing. In this chapter, I would like to explore more fully the embryological foundations of Shelley’s novel addressing the ways in which Shelley engages specifically with existing theories of fetal formation and development, but also how the novel demonstrates one manifestation of epigenetic literature, ultimately serving as proof of the success of the genre as a whole and the reason why the Gothic remains a powerful force in fiction.

M. W. Shelley & Embryology Shelley may have gained knowledge of embryological theories through various means—her parents, Dr. Polidori, her reading of Davy and Erasmus Darwin, and her familiarity with the Abernethy-Lawrence debate over vitalism and materialism. In P. B. Shelley’s preface to the 1818 edition of the novel, he asserts that the “event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr. Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence” (Frankenstein, 47). These other “physiological writers” may be noted embryologists Albrecht von Haller, J. F. Blumenbach, and C. F. Wolff. Although he is Dutch, Hermann Boerhaave was also a considerable influence on physiological studies of the period and was a mentor to Haller. Mellor discusses Mary Shelley’s debt to Davy’s skepticism toward chemical physiology, but it is possible Mary Shelley knew the other half of the conversation, namely Boerhaave’s Elementa Chemiae, which was the “standard chemical book of the whole

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period” (Needham 1959, 186). Edinburgh, home of a famous medical school, “had close links with Leyden where, under Boerhaave, the medical school had become the most famous and influential in Europe” (Stansfield 1984, 22). Boerhaave’s work was well known. It was available in the Physical Society Library for Guy’s Hospital, where Keats studied medicine (De Almeida 1990, 30). Edinburgh Medical School, whose medical philosophy “was virtually a copy of that expounded by Hermann Boerhaave at Leiden” (Bynum and Porter 1985, 154), certainly influences Victor who spends one week in Edinburgh on his way to the Orkney Islands. In addition, Dr. Polidori, who was there for the infamous ghost story contest of 1816, studied at the University of Edinburgh. Mary Shelley’s extensive readings in scientific materials and the influence of Davy, critic of chemical physiology, indicate that she may have been familiar with Boerhaave, whose works became available in England, as plagiarized copies, as early as 1714. The influence of Boerhaave’s medicine is evident in the circulation of Haller’s edition of Institutes of Medicine, which went through nine reprintings in English and “became extensively available in Britain for all those who were interested in a systematic exposition of the theory and practice of medicine” (Lindeboom 1974, 15). If Shelley knew Boerhaave, she would probably have been familiar with Haller too. Even if she were not familiar with Boerhaave, she would have encountered competing theories of embryology through Buffon. We know from the 1818 version of Frankenstein that Shelley was familiar with Buffon, and she may have been, through Buffon, also familiar with Haller, Blumenbach, and Wolff. The 1818 version of the novel indicates that Victor “read Pliny and Buffon with delight” (Frankenstein, 70). P. B. Shelley wrote about Buffon in a letter to Thomas Peacock in 1816, and Mary Shelley’s journal notes that he read Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle in June 1817 (Feldman and Scott-Kilvert 1995, 117n2). And, of course, Mary Wollstonecraft reviewed Barr’s Buffon in 1792 (Todd and Butler 1989). Wollstonecraft herself indicates knowledge of fetal formation and development in Vindication of the Rights of Woman as I discuss elsewhere (Edelman-Young 2014). Anyone who read Buffon would have been familiar with the competing theories of generation, if not the names of specific people such as Haller, Bonnet, and Blumenbach. Shelley would possibly also have been familiar with Aristotle’s Masterpiece , the most popular sex manual of the period, through Tristram Shandy, which relies heavily on

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it.3 Given Mary Shelley’s familiarity with Davy’s work, her knowledge of science in general, and her reading of Buffon and her parents’ work, it is not a stretch to suggest that she was familiar with the important theories of embryology of her day.

Interrogating Embryology Reading the novel through the existing theories of embryology enables us to see Victor’s work, and therefore M. W. Shelley’s commentary on science, in a different light. The trajectory of Victor’s education and experimentation, as Mary Shelley constructs it, begins with the female-centered theories of sixteenth-century scientists Agrippa and Paracelsus, continues through an experiment with both male-centered versions of preformation and epigenesis, and finally ends with a more egalitarian model in the creation of the female creature. These scenes of conception and development in the novel register Shelley’s exploration and critique of the various theories while at the same time articulating the imaginative process, solidifying the connection between science and art so central to epigenetic literature. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, reading these scenes embryologically helps the reader to see that the epigenetic and egalitarian elements of Victor’s process are, in fact, a success. The critical history of the novel follows Victor’s interpretation of the creature—a failure and a monster. But the embryological subtexts suggest that the creature’s difference and even his monstrosity are signs of his success as a model for both life and art. Agrippa and Paracelsus Victor’s education begins with Agrippa and Paracelsus, both of whom were in conflict with the medical establishments of their time. While they are most known for their alchemical theories, which is how they are most often discussed in relation to Frankenstein, they also wrote about conception and generation, and it is those theories that I find most relevant for unpacking the embryological contexts of Frankenstein. Their theories valorize the female body in ways that Aristotelian medicine, preformation, and epigenesis did not, but as Shelley presents it, these theories are 3  See William St. Clair’s discussion of Godwin and Wollstonecraft’s sex life in Chapter 13 of his biography of the family (St. Clair 1989). See also Emily Sunstein’s discussion of Mary Shelley’s familiarity with Sterne (Sunstein 1989).

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insufficient because of their embedded gender inequality even if they offer some positives. Victor’s initial fascination with them as “lords of [his] imagination” (Frankenstein, 70) indicates the potentially liberating science he might be capable of, but he regresses to a type of science that rejects both these early visions and the medical establishment of his time. They stimulate his imagination, not his intellect, underscoring the intertwining of science and art with which Shelley introduces her novel and its development. Victor’s direct engagement with embryology leads to the creation of art, the creature, which, in turn, brings us the novel, another product of the Gothic imagination. Mary Shelley knew about the work of Agrippa and Paracelsus through her father’s novel St. Leon, set during the lifetime of both philosophers and in which the title character encounters an alchemist who gives him the secret of the philosopher’s stone, clearly an allusion to Agrippa. In the context of Victor’s medical education, Agrippa and Paracelsus represent a less patriarchal, and even matriarchal, version of the sciences of generation, but one that is perhaps too riddled with the supernatural and lack of gender equality. Shelley’s inclusion of these thinkers provides a broad historical context for the embryological theories that Victor actually acts upon and demonstrates the political and cultural implications of the sciences. Agrippa, who was awarded a medical degree from Pavia University in 1512 and appointed as court physician to the Queen Mother of Frances I in Lyons in 1524, was later persecuted by the Dominicans for his occult beliefs (Nauert 1965). Agrippa, famous for his works on alchemy, also wrote in support of woman’s superior role in the procreative process. Victor’s other teacher, Paracelsus, born the son of a physician in Switzerland in 1493 and advocate of female equality and agency, eventually became city physician and professor of medicine in Basel (one of the places St. Leon visits in Godwin’s novel). Known as the “Luther of Medicine,” Paracelsus, like Agrippa, was at odds with the medical community because of his radical belief in biological equality and his support of popular, rather than university, medicine (Debus 1977).4 Agrippa’s persecution by the Dominicans and Paracelus’ association with reform (as the “Luther of Medicine”) links Victor, initially, to a non-institutional, proto-feminist vision of medicine; however, he eventually regresses to a more patriarchal hierarchical medicine. As Anne Mellor argues, by creating a child without 4  For a more recent discussion of the novel and Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Albertus Magnus, see Sage (2018).

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a woman, Victor subverts Darwin’s reproductive hierarchy, making his science anti-evolutionary and anti-progressive. Mellor writes that Frankenstein “portrays the consequences of the failure of the family, the damage wrought when the mother … is absent” (Mellor 1988, 39). When Victor is learning on his own, surrounded by the women in his family, he discovers Agrippa and Paracelsus, whose more female-centered theories of generation Victor could have deployed to end disease and create life, but we know also that, while there are great possibilities with these thinkers, there are also limitations. Having discovered the works of Agrippa at age 13, Victor sees a “new light” inspiring him to acquire the work of Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus whose “wild fancies” were “treasures known to few beside myself” (Frankenstein, 68). Two years later, the wonders of electricity and galvanism “threw greatly into the shade Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, and Paracelsus, the lords of my imagination” leading to Victor’s abandonment of natural history “and all its progeny as a deformed and abortive creation.”5 Victor’s interpretation of Agrippa’s and Paracelsus’ work in obstetrical terms—“progeny” and “abortive”— implicitly challenges their generational theories, a challenge that encourages Mary Shelley’s audience to map out the rest of the novel as an exploration of reproductive science; further, her association of their theories with “wild fancies” encourages the reader to link physiological creation with aesthetic ones. Unlike Darwin’s reproductive hierarchy, which places male/female sexual propagation at the top of the list (see Mellor 1988), Agrippa’s work raises solitary female reproduction to the highest place, which, one could argue, that Shelley might have found to be an attractive theory given its feminist potential, but the rest of the novel demonstrates their limitations. Agrippa and Paracelsus “provided a counterthrust to the misogynist theories and practises of the sixteenth century” (Guinsburg 1981, 4). In the 1670 English translation of Female Pre-eminence: Or The Dignity and Excellency of that Sex, above the Male, Agrippa, purposely rejecting the Aristotelian doctrine of male dynamism and female plasticity (an early, biological version of the “separate spheres”), writes, “Nature hath given Women the greatest share in the procreation of Mankind; for according to the opinion of those great pillars of the Art of Healing, Galen and 5  Quotations from the 1831 edition and can be found at Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (2008), https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/84 and will be referred to parenthetically as Frankenstein 1831 in the text.

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Avicenna, she contributes most to the matter and nutriment of the Birth” (Agrippa 1980, 23).6 Agrippa believed that the woman’s body was the site of creation and incubation whereas the man’s was merely incidental. The culmination of Agrippa’s demonstration of female superiority is the claim that women can conceive without men: “But that which transcends all wonder, is, that Woman alone without Man, should be able to produce humane [sic] Nature, which Man alone never could pretend to” (Agrippa 1980, 26), a biological phenomenon Mary Shelley experiments with more directly in the figure of Wilhelmina in Valperga. In the ultimate reversal of Aristotelian science, to which some nineteenth-century scientists were returning, Agrippa rejects the notion of woman as incubator and confers that role on man. Agrippa further valorized woman because of her ability to breastfeed: And this leads us to make some reflection on that which is our first Commons in this World, our Mothers Milk, a thing of that Catholick virtue, that it not only nourishes Infants, cherishes the sick, and restores consumptive and languishing Nature, but may in case of necessity suffice for the preservation of life to persons of any age. (Agrippa 1980, 23)

Referencing Agrippa, Mary Shelley subtly evokes the political significance of the breast, an important image in this revolutionary period due to the promotion of maternal breast feeding as a means of strengthening the French Republic, but it also serves to foreground the proto-feminist science that first engaged Victor’s imagination.7 His imagination, though, turns from these ideas of female power, reflecting what Aristotle’s Masterpiece says about solitary female propagation: “For though some will have a woman to be an animal that can engender of herself, it is a great mistake; there can be no conception without a man to discharge his seed into her womb” (Salmon 1792, 160). Victor’s initial fascination with Agrippa turns into a professional rivalry in which Victor determines to “pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation” (Frankenstein 1831). Victor eliminates the female at all stages—creation, incubation, nourishment—and thus creates, not a human being, but an “abortion” alienated further by his  Page numbers refer to the original text.  For more information on breast feeding in this period, see the following: Bowers (1996), Fildes (1986), Perry (1991), Yalom (1997), Muers (2010), Greenfield and Barash (1999). 6 7

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i­nability to participate in what Agrippa calls the “Catholick virtue” of imbibing “Mothers Milk.” Victor’s rejection of the female role at all stages and his inability to nurse his child lead to the annihilation of his family, indicating Shelley’s critique of biological sciences that downplay and dismiss the roles of women, but it is not entirely a rejection of science, but perhaps, as I hope to show, an embracing of true science. Victor’s early education also included Paracelsus, who, like Agrippa, advocated for a more democratic approach to medicine and whose female-­ centered theories of generation offered a more egalitarian approach to life.8 His theories of procreation “gave rise to specialized gynecological literature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (Guinsburg 1981, 25). For Paracelsus, the woman’s body is “similar to the male body, for woman too is formed as a human being, and like man she carries God’s image in her. But in everything else, in its essence, properties, nature, and peculiarities, it is completely different from the male body” (Guinsburg 1981, 24–25). The Paracelsian notion of complete anatomical difference conflicts with standard medical texts of Shelley’s time that almost always describe female anatomy as internalized versions of male body parts (the ovaries, for example, are often described as internal testicles) (Laqueur 1992). Paracelsian medicine generated professional “battles between the male medical community and midwives in the seventeenth century” (Guinsburg 1981, 25), partly because Paracelsus embraced alternatives to the university doctor: The physician does not learn everything he must know and master at high colleges alone; from time to time he must consult old women, gypsies, magicians, wayfarers, and all manner of peasant folk and random people, and learn from them; for these have more knowledge about such things than all the high colleges. (Paracelsus 1995, 57)

Paracelsus’ subordination of the university-trained physician to the “inner physician” of the self (Paracelsus 1995, 76) and the biological authority of the female body contributed to the early tension between physicians and midwives, a tension that was reaching its height in Mary Shelley’s lifetime,

8  For a detailed discussion of Paracelsus in Frankenstein, particularly related to the psychological development (or lack thereof) of Victor and the creature as well its relationship to the novel’s narrative structure, see Peterfreund (2004).

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as her mother’s consciously political choice of a midwife at her bedside suggests (Arney 1982; Porter 1987; Wilson 1995). Initially, Victor’s studies embraced the Paracelsian vision of the woman’s womb as a metaphor for God’s creation, which offers the potential for a focus on universal good that includes female power: There are three different kinds of matrix: the first is the water on which the spirit of God was borne, and this was the maternal womb in which heaven and earth were created. Then heaven and earth each in turn became a matrix, in which Adam, the first man, was formed by the hand of God. Then woman was created out of man; she became the maternal womb of all men. (Paracelsus 1995, 23–24)

The woman, the matrix out of which all life is created and born, constitutes a “Little World” that contains “all the kinds of heaven and earth” (Paracelsus 1995, 25). The “maternal womb”—the first matrix—predates man and gave birth to the “spirit of God,” making woman and her ability to procreate “superior to man” who is the pear to the woman’s tree: “The pear falls, but the tree remains standing” (Paracelsus 1995, 26). Though he recognized woman’s procreative power, Paracelsus adopted the two-­ seed theory in which “nature combines the seed of the man and the seed of the woman” from which the “better and stronger will form the other according to its nature” (Paracelsus 1995, 27).9 In this egalitarian model, both contribute “seed” and each potentially has the same power. This equality of power is in direct contrast to Aristotle’s Masterpiece, which argued, like Aristotle, that the female is the passive principle and the male the active principle: “Now in conception, that which is first to be regarded, and without which it cannot be, is the seed of the man, that being the active principle, or efficient cause of the foetus” (Salmon 1792, 34). The writer goes on to assert that “the woman has no active principle to impregnate” (Salmon 1792, 35). In Paracelsus’ view, the stronger one determines the sex of the child, but in eighteenth-century lore, the female happens only as a mistake, not as a matter of greater power. 9  This argument is not unlike what Wollstonecraft says in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in regard to how males and females are created in the womb: “With respect to the formation of the foetus in the womb, we are very ignorant; but it appears to me probable, that an accidental physical cause may account for this phenomenon, and prove it not to be a law of nature” (Wollstonecraft 1992, 166). She goes on to quote explorer John Reinhold Forster who argues that the baby’s sex is determined by which “seed” is stronger.

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Victor’s initial education, then, has great potential to create a more egalitarian science, but of course, he rejects these theories. Readers are encouraged to both admire and question Agrippa and Paracelsus. M.  Krempe calls them “exploded systems” that are “musty” with age (Frankenstein, 74, 75). Although Victor dislikes Krempe, the reader sides with Krempe’s assessment of these thinkers who are clearly not of the modern school of natural philosophers. At the same time, readers cannot help but share Victor’s feeling of admiration for Agrippa and Paracelsus who “sought immortality and power” and who clearly had vivid imaginations (Frankenstein, 75). In this way, Shelley subtly explores the assets and liabilities of these systems. Ultimately, a female-centered theory is no better than a male-centered one though. Shelley also rejects these authors for their deployment of the supernatural, which has no place in science. Victor reflects that the “raising of ghosts or devils was a promise liberally accorded by my favourite authors” (Frankenstein, 69). Of course, he follows their incantations and is never successful. He attributes his failures to his own ignorance, but readers know that such dreams are ridiculous. This passage shuts down any temptation to interpret Shelley’s work as advocating for older, less scientific systems that are reliant on the supernatural. In rejecting the supernatural and focusing on the progressive, Shelley prepares the reader to encounter more modern theories of embryology, which she turns to in the creation of the male creature. Epigenesis & Preformation Once Victor throws off Agrippa and Paracelsus, his work follows the theories of contemporary embryology. In the creation of the male creature, Mary Shelley presents mechanical epigenesis, vitalist epigenesis, and spermist (animalculist) preformation, demonstrating the possibilities and failures of each. As Hogle argues, Victor “makes his creature a fearsome site for embodying and abjecting that very irresolution in much of Mary Shelley’s audience between life conceived of as a divinely-based ‘preformation’ and life understood as a self-shaping ‘epigenesis’” (Hogle 2018, 26). In rejecting Agrippa’s and Paracelsus’ proto-feminist vision, Victor turns to the contemporary sciences. The description of Victor’s first creation aligns him with mechanical epigenesists whose search for the “principle of life” includes a rationalist study of natural philosophy, chemistry, and anatomy and that has no patience for vitalism, or supernatural (non-material)

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explanations of life (Frankenstein, 79). Victor’s education, carefully constructed so that his mind “should be impressed with no supernatural horrors,” enables Victor to torture callously “the living animal to animate the lifeless clay” (Frankenstein, 79, 82). Victor rejects the supernatural just as mechanical epigenesists did. Victor’s active repudiation of God’s role in creation and his refusal to acknowledge the supernatural equates him with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century epigenesists who were often accused of atheism because their theory was dangerously material and mechanical, leaving no room for God and the supernatural. Victor admits, “I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation” (Frankenstein, 82). In Barr’s Buffon, the translator acknowledges that Buffon’s work is “subject to some objections for prefering [sic] physical reasonings on general causes rather than allowing ought to have arisen from supernatural agency, or the will of the Almighty” (Buffon 1792, 1.vi–vii). Like Buffon whom he read “with delight” (Frankenstein, 70), Victor favors physical and material explanations, allowing him to treat dead bodies and pained animals as mere instruments for his work. In a further resemblance to epigenesists like Buffon, Victor follows the epigenetic theory of fetal development when he creates a human being from a mass of parts dug up from the churchyard and stolen from charnel houses. Victor conceives of himself as a potter bringing animation to “lifeless clay” (Frankenstein, 82), alluding to not only Milton’s Paradise Lost and the Promethean myth but also to William Harvey’s metaphor for epigenesis: Just then as the works of art are accomplished in two manners, one, in which the workman cuts the material already prepared, divides it, and rejects what is superfluous, till he leaves it in the desired shape (as is the custom of the statuary); the other, as when the potter educes a form out of clay by the addition of parts, or increasing its mass, and giving it a figure, at the same time that he provides the material, which he prepares, adapts, and applies to his work … so exactly is it with regard to the generation of animals. (Harvey 1952, 412)

Harvey contrasts epigenesis with its rival theory, preformation, through the images of the sculptor and the potter. Preformationist development brings out the fully formed being just as the sculptor creates his work from an image already residing in the marble, whereas with epigenesis, like the

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potter and the clay, the being grows by the gradual addition of material. Victor’s “lifeless clay” duplicates Harvey’s metaphor for epigenesis allowing Mary Shelley to not only critique but also, to some extent, embrace epigenetic embryology as an apt metaphor for the creation of aesthetic life because, even though Victor deems his work monstrous, it is, in fact, a success. The creature lives. Victor’s method emphasizes, as does epigenesis, the organization or form of the parts that are created over time. Having prepared “a frame for the reception of it [life], with all its intricacies of fibres, muscles, and veins” (Frankenstein, 81), Victor augments the body to make the materials easier to work with and forms the creature by “addition of parts,” as Harvey describes it (Harvey 1952, 412). Buffon describes it as a creation and expansion based on an internal form (what he calls an “internal mould”) that guides the development of the parts: “It therefore appears certain that the body of an animal or vegetable is an internal mould of a constant form, but where their masses may augment proportionably, by the extension of this mould in all its external and internal dimensions” (Buffon 1792, 2:300). The materials develop part by part over time according to their form. Significantly, form is the key for Buffon and is, much to the chagrin of his more traditionally Christian opponents, the source of life: “it is, therefore, the organization, the soul, and the life, which constitute our existence” (Buffon 1792, 2:258). He writes further that death is “nothing more than a separation of the same particles” (Buffon 1792, 2:280). The “soul” is the form or organization, and death is not a spiritual event but a material one. Before he asks himself, “whence … did the principle of life proceed?” Victor reveals that he is “peculiarly attracted” to the “structure of the human frame” (Frankenstein, 79). Fascination with the structure or organization precedes his question about life. Victor follows this process in his procedure. He first prepares a “frame,” which signifies an internal mold or, at the very least, the importance of the form or organization to what life is. He never says what this “frame” is made of. Perhaps it is the skeleton, perhaps it is not. Either way, it is that which makes the development of life possible through augmentation and expansion. Rather than using a completely formed body from the graves, Victor spends “some months in successfully collecting and arranging [his] materials”—bones, eyeballs, and other parts from graves, slaughterhouses, and dissecting rooms (Frankenstein, 81). Like the potter in Harvey’s metaphor and Buffon’s theory of the “internal mould,” he collects, adds, and fashions his material according to a process of slow growth.

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Another element of his process that signifies epigenesis is Victor’s equation between life and death. He tells Walton, “I became acquainted with the science of anatomy: but this was not sufficient; I must also observe the natural decay and corruption of the human body …. I was led to examine the cause and progress of this decay” (Frankenstein, 79). Buffon makes a similar claim about life and death when he writes, “the cause of reproduction is infinitely more powerful and active; she seems to borrow, even from destruction itself, means to multiply, since assimilation, which is one cause of death, is, at the same time, a necessary means of producing life” (Buffon 1792, 2:297). Destruction, through assimilation, is a means of multiplication or reproduction. When Nature takes material and changes its form, it causes death to one being while creating life in another. This intimate connection between death and life is precisely what leads to Victor’s discovery: “I paused, examining and analysing all the minutiae of causation, as exemplified in the change from life to death, and death to life, until from the midst of this darkness a sudden light broke in upon me” (Frankenstein, 79–80). In these moments of observing the connection between life and death, Victor discovers the secret of life signifying the epigenetic process that both he and Shelley are exploring. While this scene, particularly Victor’s rejection of the supernatural, indicates mechanical epigenesis, his process can also be read as vitalist epigenesis and spermist preformation, particularly in light of the metanarrative of Shelley’s introduction. Just like Buffon, Blumenbach, and Wolff, Victor cannot quite escape the supernatural. As Maienschein tells us, “those who accepted epigenesis also accepted a form of vitalism” (Maienschein 2017). Victor prepares the frame, collects, and arranges the body parts, but the “life” is infused from the outside, at least that is the implication. Shelley’s discussion of galvanism and the description of her dream in the introduction to the 1831 edition support this reading. In the dream, “on the working of some powerful engine” the creature comes alive in a “half vital motion,” but the “slight spark of life” would “subside into dead matter” (Frankenstein, 357). The terms “half vital” and “spark” are, of course, suggestive of Buffon’s “active power” (Buffon 1792, 2:297), Blumenbach’s “Bildungstrieb” (Blumenbach 1792, ix), or Wolff’s “essential force” (essentliche Kraft or vis essentialis) (qtd. in Müller-Sievers 1997, 38). The film versions of the novel use electricity directly, from James Whale’s (1931) bolt of lightning to Kenneth Branagh’s (1994) use of electric eels in a tub of amniotic fluid. In these versions, life and vitality

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come from outside. Victor, despite his rejection of the supernatural, becomes the supernatural itself (something outside the creature’s material body) when he “collect[s] the instruments of life” and infuses the creature with a “spark of being” (Frankenstein, 84). In this scene, Shelley presents the reader with an aesthetic version of epigenetic theory: a focus on mechanical and material explanations that lapse into vitalism. This scene can also be read as spermist preformation, for Victor, a God-­ like figure, creates a fully formed being and infuses it with life externally, from his own supernatural powers. Because there are no women involved, the scene is suggestive of spermist or animalculist preformation in which the fully formed being resides in the male sperm. Preformationists Andry, Dalenpatius, and Gautier all claimed that they “had seen exceedingly minute forms of men, with arms, heads and legs complete, inside the spermatozoa under the microscope” (Needham 1959, 205). As these scientists make clear, within the preformationist camp there emerged a division between ovists, who argued that the preformed being resided in the maternal egg, and the animalculists, who argued that it resided in the male spermatozoa. Animalculists “either denied the existence of the egg or argued that it only existed to provide nourishment for the tiny beings within the drop of semen,” a return to the Aristotelian notion that the woman was merely a nest or incubator for the unborn child (McLaren 1984, 23). The creation of the male creature can be read as an investigation of a variety of embryological theories. Famously, of course, these methods—whether read as mechanical epigenesis, vitalist epigenesis, or spermist preformation—fail, but only in Victor’s eyes. Victor does what he sets out to do—creates a new species that is larger and stronger than human beings are. In that way, the experiment is a success. The question becomes which of these theories is Shelley most likely to advocate? Which is the most scientific, the most egalitarian, and the most organic? The answer lies in the creature’s monstrosity. Ironically, the creature’s monstrosity (because of its difference) indicates that it is a scientific and aesthetic success. Because epigenesis could more easily explain the existence of monstrous and unusual births as well as polyps, hybrids, and new species, it is the very monstrosity of the creature that signifies Victor’s method of generation and announces its success: His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!—Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of mus-

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cles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips. (Frankenstein, 85)

The cadaverous features of the creature—yellow skin, shriveled black lips, taut skin, bulging eyes—turn the creature into a signifier for epigenesis, a science whose reliance on dead matter for its conclusions about the “truths” of life make it suspect, at least to preformationists. At the same time, the existence of abnormalities and monstrosities, as well as new species like the creature, is proof of its viability as an explanation for life and a metaphor for art as Shelley sets it up in the 1831 introduction. Although Victor says that he “began the creation of a human being,” he winds up with, as he hoped, “a new species” (Frankenstein, 81–82). New species and hybrids were more easily explained by epigenesis than by preformation. When interpreted without bias, difference can be healthy and beautiful, particularly in relation to art where monotony and conformity are, generally speaking, rarely praised. Monstrosity was  an important  signifier in the embryological debates and a clear supporting example for epigenesis: “for British as well as French physicians, monsters became clarifying counter-examples to normal embryological development, and as such played an important role in the eighteenth-century debates between advocates of preformationism and epigenesis” (Park and Daston 1981, 53). J. T. Needham, in his 1776 Idée sommaire, rejected preformation on the basis of its inability to explain the birth of monsters: “the numerous absurdities which exist in the opinion of pre-existent germs, together with the impossibility of explaining on that ground the birth of monsters and hybrids, made me embrace the ancient system of epigenesis” (qtd. in Needham 1959, 218).10 Preformation raises the question of how a complete human being could develop into a monster over the course of gestation. If God created each being as a perfect whole, how does one explain deformity? Preformationists countered with the argument that the randomness of the epigenetic process would make normal growth almost impossible. Charles Bonnet, an eighteenth-century ovist preformationist born in Geneva, argued that “all the parts of an 10  To avoid confusion, please note that J. T. Needham is an eighteenth-century epigenesist while Joseph Needham is the twentieth-century author of A History of Embryology (1959).

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animal have such direct, varied, and multiplied relations, such strict and indissoluble connexions [sic] between them, that they must necessarily have always co-existed together. The arteries imply veins; both of these imply nerves; the latter, the brain; this, the heart; and all of them suppose a multitude of other organs” (Bonnet 1766, 1:129). Bonnet then goes on to compare epigenesis to crystal growth, which proceeds so randomly that it is impossible to conceive of normal growth. Victor’s birth in Geneva links him to Bonnet, also a Genovese, but as he does with his professors at Ingolstadt, Victor rejects his theories. The development of Victor’s creature, following the slow and random process Bonnet rejects, becomes simultaneously a rejection of preformationist theory, which cannot explain the birth of monsters, and only a partial rejection of epigenetic theory, which may have some patriarchal and supernatural elements, but which offers potentially the beauty of difference. The beauty of monstrosity is a key component of Shelley’s aesthetic; her novel is, after all, her “hideous progeny.” While it may seem at this point that epigenetic creation is the favored model, readers cannot fully know this until the rest of the story plays out. The creation scene is only the beginning. A second “conception” scene occurs after Victor’s initial experiment allowing Shelley to demonstrate a more complete rejection of preformationism: the creature’s experience in the De Lacey hovel, a womb-like space in which a fully formed body grows into a feeling and reasoning being. With all his body parts extant, the creature lives with a jumble of indistinguishable senses: “a strange multiplicity of sensations seized me, and I saw, felt, heard, and smelt, at the same time; and it was, indeed, a long time before I learned to distinguish between the operations of my various senses” (Frankenstein, 128). Like a newborn baby’s, the creature’s eyes are sensitive to light, and he instinctively seeks food and warmth: No distinct ideas occupied my mind; all was confused. I felt light, and hunger, and thirst, and darkness; innumerable sounds rung in my ears, and on all sides various scents saluted me: the only object that I could distinguish was the bright moon, and I fixed my eyes on that with pleasure. (Frankenstein, 129)

He looks to the moon, a symbol of fertility and the mother. Like the round, bright abdomen of a pregnant woman, the moon represents the womb where the creature experiences the confusion of new life. Having all

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his basic body parts in place and functioning, the creature feels, sees, hears, and smells, but it is only with the subsequent growth and development of his existing heart, brain, and body that he becomes a more perfectly formed being. The creature’s experience of gradually becoming aware of his body and its various functions recalls Albrecht von Haller’s description of preformationist theory: Again, the more frequently, or the more minutely, we observe the long series of increase through which the shapeless embryo is brought to the perfection necessary for animal life, so much the more certainly does it appear, that those things which are observed in the more perfect foetus have been present in the tender embryo, although the situation, figure and composition seem at first to have been exceedingly different from what they show themselves to be at last; for an unwearied and laborious patience has discovered the intermediate degrees by which the situation, figure, and symmetry, are … reformed … And it sufficiently appears that those parts which eminent anatomists have supposed in aftertimes to be generated, and to be added to the primeval ones, have been all cotemporary [sic] with the primeval parts, only small, soft, and colourless. (Haller 1966, 207–208)

Haller believed that Harvey and other epigenesists were mistaken in their notion of fetal formation because human vision was limited to seeing all the parts gradually, but, he argues, the parts were “all cotemporary [sic].” The creature discovers his body parts and sensations by “intermediate degrees.” His body displays the “indissoluable connexions [sic] between them” (Bonnet 1766, 1:129) but discovers them and his senses by “intermediate degrees,” as Haller says above, signifying that this scene can be read as a preformationist conception. Although preformationist theory lacks gender balance, Shelley offers some potentially positive elements of the theory by reintroducing the female and writing this scene within a more egalitarian domestic space. The creature incubates in the womb of the De Lacey hovel where he must maintain a fetal position because it was “so low, that [he] could with difficulty sit upright in it” (Frankenstein, 132).11 The hovel, “surrounded on the sides which were exposed by a pig-stye and a clear pool of water,” duplicates the biological positioning of the womb between the bowels and the bladder of the mother (Frankenstein, 133). Often falsely attributed to  The original reading of the hovel as a womb is from Mellor (1988).

11

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St. Augustine, the following phrase applies here: inter faeces et urinam nascimur, which translates to we are born between feces and urine.12 The cramped space of the hovel mirrors contemporary medical illustrations of mother and fetus, particularly William Hunter’s The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus (1774), in which the child is shown so ensconced in the mother’s womb that it is difficult to tell where baby ends and mother begins. The creature’s positioning in the hovel, as a fully formed being, evokes both preformation and the burgeoning belief in intimate maternal-infant bonds supported by contemporary medical illustrations like Hunter’s, suggesting that Shelley may here be looking at the potentially positive elements of preformation (or at least the ways in which the maternal home of the uterus can offset the imbalanced theory of conception). As Ludmilla Jordanova points out, Hunter’s images, markedly different “from the tiny adult body floating in an enormous cavity in a variety of postures, found in early illustrations, and persisting in some popular eighteenth-century prints” (Jordanova 1999, 196) signifies a different relationship to mother, family, and society, one that requires more from the father, certainly a point of view that Mary Shelley would have supported: Hunter’s foetuses possessed and confidently inhabited their mothers’ bodies. In contrast, earlier, proto-adult “preformationist” foetuses lived in a different world, where they seemed lost in the waters of the womb. They appeared as temporary tenants, with no “natural” rights of possession. From the point of view of imagery, they were born into a looser family structure, one that easily permitted children to leave home for work or training without shattering a sacred bond with the mother, which, by the end of the century, was construed as at once natural, legal and social … The medical literature of the second half of the eighteenth century … emphasised that maternal and child welfare were necessarily connected, and the need to protect and carefully nurture infants as natural resources; furthermore, it sought to woo fathers into greater responsibility for the upbringing of children. (Jordanova 1999, 200)

Mary Shelley’s presentation of the creature parallels the ideology of contemporary medical illustration that emphasized a “sacred bond with the mother” and that tried to “woo fathers into greater responsibility” in 12  I credit Professor Jeanne Moskal with alerting me to the relevance of this Latin phrase for this passage in the novel.

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childcare. Although the imagery of the cramped hovel does not match Jordanova’s description of preformationist illustrations of the free-floating tiny adult, the method of his development in this scene is preformationist and invites the reader to interrogate, along with Shelley, the consequences of biological theories and their illustrations on human behavior. While the spermist preformation of Victor’s laboratory reveals the limitations of patriarchal theories of embryology, the preformation of the De Lacey hovel may indicate the potential for an egalitarian model because it introduces the female and the role of the mother, which were essentially made useless by both Aristotle and Victor. The domestic tranquility of the De Lacey cottage highlights the sacred bond between mother and child as illustrated by Hunter. The first thing the creature sees when looking through the wall is a young woman “bearing [a] pail, which was now partly filled with milk,” most certainly an image of the lactating mother (Frankenstein, 133). When Shelley introduces the feminine in this preformationist scene, she challenges preformationist theory by balancing out its aristocratic, patriarchal tendencies. The role of the female, the mother, becomes so important here because it is the creature’s only hope. The creature witnesses the value of the maternal, but also the democratic, which is a key component of epigenetic theory, according to Müller-­ Sievers. Unfortunately, because his father Victor rejects the maternal and fails in his “greater responsibility for the upbringing of children” (Jordanova 1999, 200), the creature misses his second chance at mother’s milk when the De Laceys ultimately reject him.

Egalitarian Embryology: The Female Creature Having demonstrated the assets and liabilities of both epigenetic and spermist preformationist theories through the “births” of the male creature (to both Victor Frankenstein and the De Laceys), Mary Shelley then turns to the conception and gestation of a female creature, which is epigenetic, but egalitarian in that it accounts for the female equally. Furthermore, embedded in the story of the female creature, despite her destruction, is the epigenetically supported “democratic staunchness of the heart” (Müller-Sievers 1997, 12), suggesting the favoring of epigenesis scientifically and aesthetically. Mary Shelley emphasizes Victor’s lack of knowledge of the female reproductive system, and his desire to know more, through his own words to Walton: “I found that I could not

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compose a female without again devoting several months to profound study and laborious disquisition. I had heard of some discoveries having been made by an English philosopher, the knowledge of which was material to my success” (Frankenstein, 175). Victor’s travels to the British Isles are motivated, he claims, by a need for a certain type of knowledge: “I remembered also the necessity imposed upon me of either journeying to England, or entering into a long correspondence with those philosophers of that country, whose knowledge and discoveries were of indispensable use to me in my present undertaking” (Frankenstein, 177). He acquires letters of introduction “addressed to the most distinguished natural philosophers” of that time and place (Frankenstein, 183). Victor’s research leads him to England to learn about a new theory of natural philosophy that will enable him to construct a female creature; the most obvious reason for this further research is the difference between the male and female reproductive organs. It would be difficult to determine with any accuracy the name of the “English philosopher” or the “most distinguished natural philosophers” he mentions; however, it is important to note that there was much going on in England in the field of obstetrical medicine at this time. William Hunter, who once worked with Smellie (inventor of the infamous “doll-­ machine”) and who served as accoucheur to Queen Charlotte, published work on the pregnant uterus in 1774 and started a school of anatomy at Great Windmill Street in 1770. His brother, John Hunter, started an anatomy school in London in 1764, and in the 1780s, his home became a museum of preserved specimen, including exotic animals and abnormal fetuses (such as conjoined twins).13 Youngquist suggests that these philosophers could be the Hunter brothers: “Could it be that Frankenstein wanted to study the generative mysteries of the placenta in the tradition of the British masters, the brothers Hunter, credited with its discovery? Perhaps the glorious plates of the Gravid Uterus were not available in Geneva” (Youngquist 2003, 159). Another possibility is Thomas Beddoes, a significant influence on Coleridge and Davy, who was in London when Hunter was giving public lectures. Also, in 1784 Beddoes translated and published the writings of Lazzaro Spallanzani whose work was important for ovist preformation. Hunter’s work on the pregnant uterus and Beddoes’ translations of Spallanzani’s work would have been of interest to Victor. The work of William Lawrence, the Shelleys’ physician and liberal  For a popular but well-researched biography of John Hunter, see Moore (2005).

13

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empiricist famed for his debate with John Abernethy, conservative vitalist, would certainly have been significant to Victor as well (Luke 1965). Regardless of where Victor gets his information, the fact remains that his original research falls short because it does not contain the necessary female element. Mary Shelley uses the shortcomings of Victor’s research to reintroduce the importance of the female body in reproductive science. Another potential influence on Victor’s medical knowledge is the University of Edinburgh, which had a significant impact on studies in obstetrics and midwifery at this time. Although midwifery courses were the only ones not required for graduation at the University of Edinburgh, which started its program in midwifery in 1739, they were fairly well attended (twenty seven percent of the total student body between 1763 and 1826 attended midwifery courses), indicating the rising importance of this medical specialty (Rosner 1991). Dr. Polidori graduated from the University of Edinburgh. Even though Victor says he did not plan to go to Edinburgh, he and Clerval spend a week there before heading to Perth. After that, Victor tours Scotland alone (Frankenstein, 187). Victor’s extensive studies, whether they included the Hunters, Beddoes, or someone else, reintroduce the female body into the reproductive equation, a move that Shelley clearly supports. In the creation of the male creature, the female is obviously absent at every stage. Victor does not return to the proto-feminist theories of Agrippa and Paracelsus, but he does recognize the need for specialized knowledge. In this way, Shelley returns to (or perhaps creates) a more egalitarian model in which male and female are equally necessary. As with the first conception of the male creature, the process is likely epigenetic, and is a piecing together of body parts. The reader gets even fewer details in these scenes. Does he rob the graves and charnel houses? Does he make her larger? Victor describes only the difference in his state of mind. The “enthusiastic frenzy” that drove him as he created the male creature is replaced by “cold blood” (Frankenstein, 189). If he studied with someone like William Hunter, he would have gained more information about the female reproductive system, which, it seems, he intended to keep intact. I speculate that the nature of his inquiries had more to do with how to prevent reproduction while still keeping the body female. In this way, he could keep his promise to the creature, but not fear that the creatures would reproduce.  Of course, he could never be entirely sure as the creature himself turned out stronger, faster, and hardier than he expected, which suggests a final answer to the question students always ask, “why didn't he just create her without a uterus?”

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Clearly, his inquiries failed because the precise source of life is, as Blumenbach said, the “qualitas occulta” (qtd. in Müller-Sievers 1997, 43). He cannot rule out the idea that this woman, as he studied in Agrippa and Paracelsus, could reproduce without a man. Even if he could, he is uncertain of the precise source of life, so he cannot eliminate the possibility that these two will reproduce, particularly since the creature seems to be superhuman in his strength and physical endurance. The two could have extraordinary reproductive potential regardless of whatever measures he might take to prevent it. Victor is infamously frightened by the realization that she is free to propagate: “one of the first results of those sympathies for which the daemon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth” (Frankenstein, 190). His assertion that they might mate and have children is an admission of his failure in understanding not only the female reproductive system, but life itself. This acknowledgment that he does not actually know the source of life aligns him with the epigenesists who could, like Blumenbach, acknowledge that ultimately this is unknowable. Additionally, Victor emphasizes the importance of choice when he speculates that “she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate … she, who in all probability was to become a thinking and reasoning animal, might refuse to comply” (Frankenstein, 190). As Müller-Sievers has argued, a clear sign of the epigenetic frame of mind and epigenetic literature itself is that marriage must be a choice based on passion and love, not parental demand. We see this valuing of love and passion over parental control much more clearly in Radcliffe and Maturin as love relationships are foregrounded more so than in Shelley’s novel, but the destruction of the female creature is the climax of Frankenstein. Victor has been willing to reject his former masters, Agrippa and Paracelsus; the natural historians and scientists of his own time; and the superstitions of the grave, but he succumbs to the higher power of love and passion as necessary groundwork for marriage. While we can debate his motives, certainly partially selfish, his decision to destroy the female creature is based, at least in part, on an emphatic belief in the “democratic staunchness of the heart,” which is supported by epigenesis (Müller-Sievers 1997, 12). Thus, ironically, his decision to destroy her is an acknowledgment that an egalitarian epigenetic model is the most favorable, if imperfect, for both biology and aesthetics. Shelley’s description of the imaginative process with which I began this chapter is suggestive of the intimate connection between eighteenth-­ century descriptions of embryological processes and aesthetics. Embryologists of the time were spinning tales to explain biological creation, and many of their metaphors became the same ones for imaginative

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creation. It is perhaps no accident that scientific rivals often accused each other of having overactive imaginations. Blumenbach calls panspermism a “romance of Hippocrates” and the conclusions of people like Haller and Bonnet “extravagant and romantic” (Blumenbach 1792, 6, 15). Bonnet refers to these types of accusations against himself when he says that if he is wrong about preexistence, then it can be looked upon as “mere romance” (Bonnet 1766, 1:xix). He counters that epigenesists also have a “great share of imagination” and “often substitute images for notions” (Bonnet 1766, 1:lvi). He goes on to argue that they have a greater share of imagination subtly comparing them to authors of fiction who keep the public’s attention through images rather than ideas, essentially arguing that a passive audience is wooed by their words, which are merely fiction. Writers, whether of fiction or natural history, continually return to this parallel between aesthetic processes and embryological ones as did Mary Shelley when she conceived her story, a story that unified the scientific and aesthetic parallels in its plot and key scenes. The scenes of conception in Frankenstein explore the same uncertainties about origins that were part of the embryological debates, and they highlight, not surprisingly for Shelley, the problem of leaving the female out of the equation. These problems have direct parallels with the way Shelley describes her imagination. While she may not offer an answer to the ultimate question about biological or aesthetic origins, Shelley favors the egalitarian potential of epigenesis, for she describes the working of her imagination as internally sourced, a process that leads to the monstrous—a signifier for epigenesis. She explains in 1831, “When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie” (Frankenstein, 357). It is her own imagination, internal to herself, that guides the process like Buffon’s internal mold. In this same passage, she contrasts Victor’s “spark of life” with the “stupendous mechanism of the Creator,” perhaps an allusion to preformation, which explains only the forces of matter and motion, not life itself (Frankenstein, 357). There is a seamless movement in this passage from her description of the creative forces of her imagination to Victor’s creation of the creature to the development of the novel itself, which she asserts is her own. Just as she subtly defends the necessity of the female in her explorations of embryology within the novel, she asserts her creative power here. She writes, “I

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certainly did not owe the suggestion of one incident, nor scarcely of one train of feeling, to my husband, and yet but for his incitement, it would never have taken the form in which it was presented to the world” (Frankenstein, 358). One could argue that this passage is suggestive of the old model: she provides the material and he provides the power (the “incitement”).14 However, when paired with the description of the dream, it is clear that the driving force is her own imagination, which provides not only the crux of the story, but also its power. The internally sourced power of her imagination creates a “hideous progeny,” a creature whose very monstrosity is not a rejection of science, but a support of the sciences and arts that, like the Gothic, embrace difference.

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14  Marc Rubenstein reads Mary Shelley’s obstetrical language as an attempt “to draw for us a picture of her imagination as a passive womb” (Rubenstein 1976, 181). Bewell asserts that Mary Shelley ultimately rejects the Darwinian theory of generation in “an assertion of her own imaginative authority” (Bewell 1988, 124).

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Priestman, Martin. 2018. Prometheus and Dr. Darwin’s Vermicelli: Another Stir to the Frankenstein Broth. In Frankenstein and Its Classics: The Modern Prometheus from Antiquity to Science Fiction, ed. Jesse Weiner, Benjamin Eldon Stevens, and Brett M. Rogers, 42–58. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Rosner, Lisa. 1991. Medical Education in the Age of Improvement: Edinburgh Students and Apprentices 1760–1826. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rubenstein, Marc. 1976. ‘My Accursed Origin’: The Search for the Mother in Frankenstein. Studies in Romanticism 15: 165–194. Sage, Victor. 2018. Paracelsus and ‘P[r]etty Experimentalism’: The Glass Prison of Science and Secrecy in Frankenstein. In Global Frankenstein, ed. Carol Margaret Davison and Marie Mulvey Roberts, 37–52. Palgrave Macmillan. Salmon, William. 1792. The Works of Aristotle, in Four Parts. Containing I. His Complete Master-Piece; Displaying the Secrets of Nature in the Generation of Man. To Which Is Added, the Family Physician, Being Approved Remedies for the Several Distemper Incident to the Human Body. II.  His Experienced Midwife; Absolutely Necessary for Surgeons, Midwives, Nurses, and Child Bearing Women. III. His Book of Problems; Containing Various Questions and Answers Relative to the State Man’s Body. IV.  His Last Legacy; Unfolding the Secrets of Nature Respecting the Generation of Man. London. Sha, Richard C. 2018. Imagination and Science in Romanticism. Johns Hopkins University Press. Shelley, Mary. 1831. Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. Project Gutenberg. ———. 2001. Frankenstein. Eds. D.L. Scherf and Kathleen MacDonald. Ontario: Broadview. Sherwin, Paul. 1981. Frankenstein: Creation as Catastrophe. PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 96 (5): 883–903. Sitter, Zak. 2016. Inorganic Intentions: Organizing Form from Frankenstein to de Man. Literature Compass 13 (10): 655–662. St. Clair, William. 1989. The Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family. New York: Norton. Stableford, Brian. 1995. Frankenstein and the Origins of Science Fiction. In Anticipations: Essays on Early Science Fiction and Its Precursors, ed. David Seed, 58–74. Syracuse: New York. Stansfield, Dorothy A. 1984. Thomas Beddoes M. D. 1760–1808: Chemist, Physician, Democrat. Dordrecht, Boston, and Lancaster: D. Reidel Publishing Company. Sunstein, Emily. 1989. Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Todd, Janet M., and Marilyn Butler. 1989. The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. Washington Square, NY: New York University Press. Whale, James. 1931. Frankenstein. Universal Pictures. Wilson, Adrian. 1995. The Making of Man-Midwifery: Childbirth in England, 1660–1770. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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Wohlpart, A. James. 1998. A Tradition of Male Poetics: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as an Allegory of Art. Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought 39 (3): 265–279. Wollstonecraft, Mary. 1992. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Penguin Classics Series. Penguin. Yalom, Marilyn. 1997. A History of the Breast. New York: Alfred A Knopf. Youngquist, Paul. 2003. Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

CHAPTER 5

“Nature Preached a Milder Theology”; Or, Melmoth the Wanderer

The moment life is put beyond the reach of your will, and placed under the influence of mechanical operations, it becomes, to thinking beings, a torment insupportable. —Melmoth the Wanderer (123)

Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer,1 published just two years after the first edition of Frankenstein, epitomizes the conflict between preformation and epigenesis, between superstition and science, and between the mechanic and organic. The frame narrative, the visit to the dying Melmoth, establishes an association between reproduction and writing, between life and story with which Walpole began the genre decades earlier. This connection invites an embryological reading. Whereas Shelley’s novel keeps this connection mostly implicit and supported by elements outside the main narrative (Shelley’s 1831 introduction), Maturin makes the connection between life and art an explicit and central part of the tale. The frame in Melmoth, as I shall show, establishes the link between human generation and aesthetic generation, which is 1  All references to the novel are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text as Melmoth. References to the 1994 Dover edition of Maturin’s Fatal Revenge will be cited parenthetically in the text as Fatal Revenge.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. P. Edelman, Embryology and the Rise of the Gothic Novel, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73648-4_5

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underscored throughout by the novel’s self-conscious references to its own writing and structure, which is, in turn, aligned with the body. Clayton Koelb has recently argued that reading is a “process of reconstructing and construing human discourse that has been embodied as a material artifact” and the interaction between the living producers and receivers of such discourse, mediated as it is by lifeless objects, necessarily involves readers in an activity that must, at times, seem like a rite of revivification. It surely seemed so to the writers discussed in this book [including Maturin], who in effect founded their conception of art on the mysterious possibility that potential life inheres in apparently dead matter. (Koelb 2008, x)

The dead matter of the word, Koelb argues, is revitalized through reading. If reading is a process of reanimation of dead objects, the book/novel/ artifact is congruent to a human body. While Koelb argues that reading revives dead objects, I am arguing that writing creates the life itself in a process that mirrors contemporary theories of fetal formation and development. Reading the novel embryologically allows us to see that Maturin’s work comments not only on national and religious identities, but also on physiological formation and human identity.2 Further, this reading helps us understand the novel’s unique structure. The epigenetic frame of mind, as I have been arguing, affects narrative shape and nowhere more so at this

2  Scholarship on Maturin tends to focus, for obvious reasons, on Irish identity and/or the religious commentary/critique that are foregrounded in his works, especially Melmoth. Maturin’s work is reflective of the struggles associated with Irish history and identity. Joseph W. Lew argues that the novel “explores problems of cultural and personal identity and assimilation—a problem particularly acute for the English in Ireland during Maturin’s lifetime, but also becoming increasingly important in Great Britain’s colonial holdings” (Lew 1994, 174). It is, Lew argues, a “political allegory” (Lew 1994, 175). Christina Morin asserts that the novel is “spectrally possessed” by the history of Ireland (Morin 2011, 133). Nathaniel Leach claims that the novel is about subjectivity and the “disorienting influence of the Other on the experience of the self” (Leach 2011, 28). Ashley Marshall challenges the typical reading of Melmoth’s ironic indictment of religion as dehumanizing in order to suggest, instead, that the novel “ultimately confirm[s] the strength of genuine spiritual conviction” (Marshall 2008, 121). National and religious identities are clearly at play here, but they are also reflective of underlying beliefs about physiological and characterological identity. The ambivalence and struggle that so many recognize at the biographical, national, and historical level can also be traced to the underlying scientific subtexts of Romantic-period Britain. In this way, the novel is an embryological “allegory,” to borrow Lew’s phrasing.

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time than in Melmoth the Wanderer, recognized as the apogee of the classic Gothic phase. Its embryological and obstetrical contexts reveal that Maturin’s novel, like Radcliffe’s and Shelley’s, stages a battle between science and superstition, between self-formation and external control, which demonstrates that the Gothic novel owes its unique formation, at least in part, to an epigenetic frame of mind. Further, the embryological approach destabilizes the long-received notion that the Gothic is reactionary and regressive scientifically; as with Radcliffe’s and Shelley’s novels, Melmoth, despite its deployment of the supernatural and its clearly religious framework, does not reject progress, but rather embraces it. While Shelley’s novel makes the creation of life central to the plot and more literal than her Gothic contemporaries, Maturin replicates the central embryological question through both form and content and is much more self-conscious about the formation of the genre than Shelley’s. In this way, Melmoth is the most epigenetic of all, for it demonstrates (and clearly values) identity formation that is primarily driven from internal, organic factors as in the characters of Alonzo, Immalee/Isidora, and Adonijah, and it is in the development of these identities that the novel unfolds organically from within creating Maturin’s infamously confusing, unending narrative of stories within stories. This unique play between form and content parallels the epigenetic process itself—an organic relationship between the material and the shape it takes driven by principles inherent to the material itself. As with epigenesis, though, this process of formation can quickly spiral out of control and lead to monstrosity, which is precisely what happens not only in Melmoth but also in all Gothic, which has an uncanny and characteristic ability to reproduce, revive, and return.

Biddy Brannigan: Birthing the Story The outer frame of the story establishes a direct link between writing/the novel and reproduction and one of the central elements of the novel’s embryological subtexts, the conflict between science and the supernatural. This conflict underscores the theme of internal versus external forms of origination and identity, which is where the embryological subtexts come into play. The opening scene is a deathbed turned birthing chamber, for it is here that a birth service is conducted and a midwife, who facilitates the presentation of the main story, is introduced. As Uncle Melmoth is dying, a nearly illiterate servant reads a passage from the Anglican Book of Prayer

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on the “churching of women,” a service of thanksgiving for women who have given birth (Melmoth, 18). Because it follows the service for the burial of the dead in the text, the servant mistakes it for a prayer for the dead man’s rebirth in the afterlife. Though subtle, this feature of the outer frame suggests a connection between the birth/rebirth of Melmoth and the birth of the novel itself; this birth is facilitated by a midwife, Biddy Brannigan, whose appearance establishes the novel’s underlying embryological themes. Biddy Brannigan, a haggard, witch-like midwife, births this story and establishes the embryological threads that this chapter will trace through its central characters. Upon entering the house to visit his dying uncle, John Melmoth sees several people around the fire including an “old woman, whom John immediately recognized as the doctress of the neighborhood,—a withered Sybil” (Melmoth, 12). Identified clearly as a “doctress,” a practitioner of the medical arts, Biddy Brannigan is the midwife of Western history and legend whose wisdom blends science and superstition to heal the sick, cure sterility, identify the sex of unborn babies, procure abortions, and assist in delivery (Erickson 1986). Setting up the complicated relationship between science and superstition and between birth and storytelling, Biddy Brannigan is the withered, wise, and witch-like midwife: [She] prolonged her squalid existence by practising on the fears, the ignorance, and the sufferings of beings as miserable as herself. Among the better sort, to whom she sometimes had access by the influence of servants, she tried the effects of some simples, her skill in which was sometimes productive of success. Among the lower orders she talked much of the effects of the “evil eye”, against which she boasted a counter-spell of unfailing efficacy; and while she spoke, she shook her grizzled locks with such witch-like eagerness, that she never failed to communicate to her half-terrified, half-­ believing audience, some portion of that enthusiasm which, amid all her consciousness of imposture, she herself probably felt a larger share of. (Melmoth, 12)

Sporting “grizzled locks” and a “witch-like” intensity, Biddy Brannigan takes advantage of the credulous commoners who, like her, are ignorant and poor. She has some skill, for her “simples,” or medicinal herbs and remedies often do cure ailments, but she also dabbles in magic. When her diagnostic powers fail her, she resorts to blaming the spirits claiming that

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she had “difficulties to contend with which were invincible by human power” (Melmoth, 13). Her medical practice relies on a mixture of science, superstition, and storytelling. Biddy’s mixture of science and superstition invites the reader to trace these themes in the novel specifically as they relate to the creation of life, which is bound up with the creation of the story. The storytelling aspect of her practice emerges in the form of fortune telling, for if she could not gain money through her skills as a healer, she would tell fortunes, a practice linking her to witches and the Fates, but more importantly, establishing the link between storytelling/writing/aesthetic creation and birth. Of Brannigan, the narrator states: “No one twined so well as she the mystic yarn to be dropt into the lime-kiln pit, on the edge of which stood the shivering inquirer into futurity, doubtful whether the answer to her question of ‘who holds?’ was to be uttered by the voice of demon or lover” (Melmoth, 13). The terms “twined” and “mystic yarn” here tap into the stories of the Fates weaving man’s destiny: “The association of the old midwife with scissors, string, and sewing allies her, from the beginning, with the goddesses of fate who were all spinstresses…But beyond the midwife’s link with sewing and her supposed control of sexual and verbal destiny is a deeper connection between spinning and man’s fate” (Erickson 1986, 13). She, like the Fates, participates in human destiny through prophecy and prediction, but she also participates in the weaving of the womb. The process of generation within the womb was often described in terms of spinning and weaving; in this way, the midwife becomes a tailor by helping complete that process when the child emerges from the womb (Erickson 1986, 13). The link between narrative and birth is made clear here and reinforced throughout the narrative leading to the novel’s unique narrative structure. Biddy is the source of the tale of Melmoth, for it is she to whom John Melmoth turns as a “last resource” to discover the family’s secret history (Melmoth, 27). Biddy’s presence gives birth to the story and John Melmoth’s curiosity; once he hears her story, he resolves to find the manuscript in his uncle’s closet and read it. Brannigan is described almost as if she is giving birth. Once John asks her about the family’s history, her “figure seemed frightfully dilated,” as if her cervix is preparing for birth (Melmoth, 28). She walks across the room toward the fire and “seated, or rather squatted herself on the hearth-stone like a hare in her form, spread her bony and withered hands towards the blaze, and rocked for a considerable time in silence before she commenced her tale” (Melmoth, 28). The

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midwife, whom the narrator compares to that most fertile of symbols, the rabbit, prepares herself for delivery by taking a squatting position. She even rocks back and forth silently as if struggling with labor pains before beginning her tale. She then gives birth to the story and to John’s curiosity, setting the narrative in motion and grounding it in its reproductive and obstetrical foundations inviting us to read the story as an engagement with the reproductive sciences that support Maturin’s metaphor for artistic creation. Brannigan births the novel, which is structured roughly around three main characters—Alonzo, Adonijah, and Immalee—whose stories hinge on a conflict between internal desire and external control and whose lives are haunted by the supernatural, Melmoth. The plot device of forbidden love and the resulting development of characters like Alonzo and Immalee/ Isidora are suggestive of the novel’s embryological subtexts. Parental authority rests on preformationist biology, which allows parents to choose for their children based on external considerations. The love plots of Melmoth and other Gothic novels extol the “democratic staunchness of the heart. Polemic against arranged marriages is therefore sustained by a discourse on love not as passion, but as a legitimate, interior force of self-­ foundation” (Müller-Sievers 1997, 12). In his overview of Scottish and Irish Gothic, David Punter argues that the Gothic (and Alonzo’s story in particular) is about individual identity “‘subjected’ to domination by an external force” (Punter 2002, 122). Koelb, too, writes that “the distinction between the internal and the external is unquestionably one of the chief intellectual foundation stones of Maturin’s novel” (Koelb 2008, 156). While Punter is referring to politics and Koelb to narrative form, the conflict itself is at the root of the matter, and I assert that this struggle between internal and external emerges from the culture’s embryological landscape. The characters Alonzo, Immalee, and Adonijah each represent varying strengths of this “interior force of self-foundation,” for they each exist (or try to exist) outside a system that compels them to do, be, and love according to external rules. Alonzo’s story showcases a move from outside to inside to back outside the system—from epigenetic to preformationist and back to epigenetic. Immalee’s history is epigenetic, but eventually degenerates to a monstrosity of preformationist determinacy when she becomes Isidora, underscoring the truth suggested by Shelley that conformity and lack of difference are the true sources of monstrosity. Adonijah is the most epigenetic existence of all, for he operates completely outside the system and represents most fully the “interior force of

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self-foundation.” Melmoth—a supernatural figure who is “married” to an external force—represents the contrasting point of view—the preformationist stance wherein identity is determined from without. The story that unfolds from this frame is ostensibly about finding Melmoth, a supernatural figure; along the way, John and the reader encounter several characters whose stories instantiate the conflict between preformationist and epigenetic biology, between the mechanical and the organic leading to the novel’s unique form. As these conflicts play out in the lives of Alonzo and Immalee/Isidora, the reader witnesses the repercussions of mechanism and external forces of control and the benefits of organic self-formation implied by epigenesis. At the same time, as with epigenesis, their stories are haunted by the supernatural, Melmoth. Alonzo’s story traces what happens when preformation comes in conflict with epigenetic processes, for he degenerates into an automaton. Eventually, though, he is freed from this nightmare of predetermined identity. Immalee, on the other hand, represents a uniquely epigenetic existence in that she is self-formed alone on an island and only degenerates after she returns to a system of ideologies that favor preformation. She is forced to exchange identities leading to a complete degeneration that ends with her as a shadow of her former self, desperately grasping her dead baby, the spawn of the devilish Melmoth. In the center of this narrative, we are led to the most epigenetic character of all, Adonijah. Not coincidentally, this character is the one most closely and consistently associated with self-formation, the scientific, and the word. Adonijah comes to symbolize the best of epigenetic processes, the exact opposite of Melmoth whose very existence replicates preformationist process. Ironically, then, even though epigenesists were better able to explain monstrosity and malformation than preformationists, Maturin’s novel indicates that preformation creates nothing but monsters, not physically but emotionally and psychologically because preformed beings exist without an internally sourced, authentic identity. As we trace the contours of the conflict between the mechanic and organic in the central figures of this novel— Alonzo, Immalee/Isidora, and Adonijah—it becomes clear that the novel replicates, in narrative form, the central problem of epigenesis—the inability to return to a definitive point of origin without recourse to the supernatural. While Maturin clearly favors epigenetic biology, the novel’s processes themselves demonstrate, as epigenetic scientists found, that the search for origins is unending.

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The embryological debates of the period hinged, in part, on a conflict between internal and external sources of origination, between the role of the spiritual (God) and the material in the formation of life (and, therefore, identity). Buffon, French epigenesist, argues that preformationists essentially do not answer the question of how life is reproduced because “these hypotheses, instead of explaining the effects by physical causes, are founded only on arbitrary connections and moral agreements” (Buffon 1792, 2:289). Preformationists allow their own beliefs and biases to replace reason. Experience is the “sole source of all real science” and anything else is “abuse”; preformation is a “temple founded on error” (Buffon 1792, 2:334–335). Rejecting theories that resort to God’s will, Buffon reasons that he cannot accept a theory of fetal formation that “supposes the thing already done” and that is an “immediate effect of the Almighty’s will” (Buffon 1792, 2:288–289). Buffon posits, instead, that all life is composed of “living organic particles, which are common to animals and vegetables” and that the “assemblage of these particles form an animal or plant, and consequently that reproduction, or generation, is only a change of form made by the addition of these resembling parts alone, and that death or dissolution is nothing more than a separation of the same particles” (Buffon 1792, 2:279–280). In Buffon’s view, these particles are a part of the being itself, and reproduction, the creation of new identities, occurs from principles inherent to the material, including organization (or form). Buffon is famous for positing an “internal mould” to which these living particles are attracted (Buffon 1792, 2:292). Mechanical principles are not enough to explain life; there is “some active power” which moves these particles to the mold, but “these powers…will never come under our cognizance, because their action is made on the internal part of the body” (Buffon 1792, 2:302). Thus, both the mold and the power are inherent to the being itself, which is defined not only by the material, but also the organization or form. Similarly, Blumenbach argued that theories of preexisting germs advocated by the likes of Haller and Bonnet are “deceptions of prejudice and error” (Blumenbach 1792, ix). Blumenbach posits that the “unorganized matter of generation” arrives at its final place and there takes on a “nisus,” which is the “chief principle of generation, growth, nutrition, and reproduction” (Blumenbach 1792, 20). He names this the Nisus formativus or Bildungstrieb in order to distinguish it from dead matter (Blumenbach 1792, 20). It is, like other qualities of matter (such as irritability or attraction), inherent to the material itself. The prefix “Bildung” suggests this idea as it refers to the German concept of

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self-formation as in a Bildungsroman, the genre of self-discovery and development. For both Buffon and Blumenbach, physiological life and identity are a matter of “bildung”: self-formation. Bonnet and Haller, on the other hand, were preformationists who turned to Almighty God as the source of all life. Life is external to the material and predetermined by the supernatural. Although they appealed to God as the First Cause, they were reputable scientists whose experiments enabled them to describe natural phenomena in extensive and accurate detail, but when it came to the question of how generation started, they not only reasoned from the physical facts, but also from a place of faith. In his 1766 The Contemplation of Nature, Bonnet reviews the available theories of generation, but ultimately concludes that preformation and preexistence are the only logical explanations. Though he reasons with logic and analogy to other living beings, Bonnet’s final word is rooted in the supernatural: We can then form no idea of the primitive state of organized beings; I mean that state which I conceive to be given them by the hand of HIM who has ordained all things from the beginning. Facts lead us to admit of such a pre-­ ordination; but they do not discover to us the manner of it. The insufficiency of all solutions that are purely mechanical, is a new motive for recurring to a pre-established arrangement. Wherefore should we make vain and ridiculous efforts to forbear allowing of an ORDAINED BEING? Must not second causes always in the aggregate resolve themselves ultimately into the FIRST CAUSE, the sublime and consolatory idea of which is so capable of satisfying and perfecting the heart and spirit?” (Bonnet 1766, 1:135)

Though Bonnet rejects the “purely mechanical,” one of the primary objections against preformation was that the process of growth was, in fact, only a result of matter and motion, which epigenesists said was not life, but mechanism. Gould argues that “preformationists were the mechanists of their time” (Gould 1977, 21). For Bonnet, God “ordained all things from the beginning” and each individual is an “ORDAINED BEING” (Bonnet 1766, 1:135). God is the source of all life and has determined our identity not only before we were born, but since the beginning of time. For Bonnet, this “sublime” idea is a comfort (“consolatory”), for life is external to the self, determined by a supernatural being. Haller changed his position on embryology several times over the course of his career, but he finally determined that preformation is the

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only theory that makes sense partly due to a belief in God’s role. In a passage with similar religious overtones as Bonnet’s, Haller writes, this most beautiful frame of animals is so various, and so exquisitely fitted for its proper and distinct functions of every kind, and the offices and manner and of life for which the animal is designed; that it is calculated according to laws more perfect than any human geometry; that the ends of have been foreseen in the eye, in the ear, and the hand, so that to these ends every thing is most evidently accommodated: it appears, therefore, certain to me, that no cause can be assigned for it below the infinite wisdom of the Creator himself. (Haller 1966, 207)

Haller’s endless experiments caused changes of mind over the years (and a fruitful debate with Caspar Friedrich Wolff, an epigenesist), but his faith in the supernatural, the role of the divine, turned him into a preformationist. Like Bonnet, Haller also uses reason and analogy, based on scientific experiments, to come to this conclusion, but appeals to the “Creator himself” led epigenesists like Buffon to argue that their conclusions were based on “arbitrary connections and moral agreements” (Buffon 1792, 2:289). The conflict exemplified by Buffon and Blumenbach on the one hand and Bonnet and Haller on the other is that between theories of identity in which life is internal and organic and theories of identity in which life is external and growth mechanical. This conflict—internal/external, mechanical/organic—is central to Maturin’s most significant characters, the identities he creates through the life of the narrative. In this way, Maturin’s novel replicates the embryological debates in both content and form.

Alonzo: From Preformation to Epigenesis As Radcliffe does in her novels, Maturin describes the Catholic Church and parental control in terms of mechanism and sterility, concepts rooted in part in embryological and obstetrical discourse. Parental and ecclesiastical authority is buttressed by superstitions surrounding conception and birth, enabling an external locus of control over the individual who is, as Bonnet says, an “ORDAINED BEING” (Bonnet 1766, 1:135). In this novel, as in many others, the strongest and most sympathetically portrayed characters are those who find and create their identity from within, that is, epigenetically; they possess what Buffon called a “living animated nature”

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that is not a “metaphysical degree of beings” but rather a “physical property, common to all matter” (Buffon 1792, 2:272). Blumenbach would call it the Bildungstrieb—the source of self-formation (Blumenbach 1792, 20). Alonzo’s and Immalee/Isidora’s stories highlight these dichotomies, for in each case, the creation of individual identity competes with parental control, which is always mechanical and sterile. Buffon writes, “But I am quite of a different opinion from those philosophers; for it appears to me that, by admitting only a certain number of mechanical principles, they do not see how greatly they contract the bounds of philosophy” (Buffon 1792, 2:307). Such a philosophy is “confined” and restrictive (Buffon 1792, 2:307). Alonzo’s story, typical of many characters in Gothic novels, begins with the mystery surrounding his birth, a birth whose details are later revealed to be steeped in the superstitious and preformationist reproductive traditions. Through his struggle, Alonzo tries to fashion himself from his own passion, an internal force that vies with a compact made before his birth, dramatizing the preformationist/epigenesist controversy of the Romantic period. Alonzo recalls living with an old woman, probably a midwife or cunning woman, whose “affection for me appeared prompted as much by interest as inclination” (Melmoth, 82). He was visited regularly by a man and woman, apparently his parents, but as he states, “a shadow of mystery enveloped my infant days, and perhaps gave its lasting and ineffaceable tinge to the pursuits, the character, and the feelings of my present existence” (Melmoth, 83). Separated from his parents like Immalee, Alonzo’s character grows from this shadow of mystery, and he must rely on himself to create an identity. His character, feelings, and desires must all come from within because the woman he lives with is merely working from financial interest and his parents are essentially uninvolved until he reaches the age of twelve when the battle between a preformed existence and an epigenetic one begins. Alonzo’s parents, the Duke and Duchess of Monçada, take him from the old woman and place him in a convent where they determine that he should renounce the world and take vows, which sets up the story’s conflict between internal and external sources of identity. Alonzo resists external control in terms that privilege his internal voice, which can be read as Blumenbach’s bildungstrieb or Buffon’s internal mold, the force or feature of the organism that defines it from within. When his father hints that he wishes him to embrace a religious vocation, to be married to the Church as it were, Alonzo replies, “I dare to speak of myself,-I can never be a

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monk” (Melmoth, 88–89). In this moment, Alonzo asserts his authority as the creator of himself, as the one to choose how he will live his life and whom he will marry. Although he has no specific love interest as Gothic heroes and heroines often do, taking vows essentially commits him to the Church and keeps him from forming any attachment to a woman based on passion, a component necessary for healthy, epigenetic fertility. Alonzo perceives an attachment to the Church as a kind of forced marriage when he tells the Director that “the voice of God, echoed from my own heart, bids me not to obey you, by adulterating his service with prostituted vows” (Melmoth, 94). His “own” heart, an internal voice, tells him whom and what to commit to; anything else is adultery, an unnatural union. Though he calls it the “voice of God,” it is Alonzo’s heart that determines the outcome. His parents also claim God as a guide, but they are misguided because they decide for him before he is even born, like a preformationist God. Like Buffon’s penetrating powers, this “voice of God” creates Alonzo’s identity from within. Alonzo’s internal voice competes with the compact made before his creation (one is reminded here of the female creature in Frankenstein), a kind of preformed existence based on external authority. Soon after this conversation with the Director, he discovers that his parents, steeped in the superstition and fear cultivated by the Church, promised that he would become a monk in order to absolve them from the sin of fornication and the taint of his illegitimate birth. When he remains steadfast against taking vows, his mother reveals the truth: “you are illegitimate,—your brother is not: and your intrusion into your father’s house is not only its disgrace, but a perpetual monitor of that crime which it aggravates without absolving” (Melmoth, 100). Even though she and the Duke married, the grandfather refused to accept him; in order to pay for their sins, she explains, “Before you were born, I devoted you to him, as the only expiation of my crime. While I yet bore you in my bosom without life, I dared to implore his forgiveness only on the condition of your future intercession for me as a minister of religion. I relied on your prayers before you could speak” (Melmoth, 101). The Duchess then paints a picture of him, one that she formed in her imagination, as an adult monk interceding for her. In this way, the Duchess creates him, fully formed, in her own heart and mind before he is even born. As Bonnet argued in 1766, organized bodies are “designed in miniature” and are “pre-formed” (Bonnet 1766, 1:xx). He argues that there are “so many abundantly decisive facts, which seem to lead us as it were by the hand to the pre-existence of germs” (Bonnet

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1766, 1:xxii). Bonnet even labels this principle the “pre-ordination of beings” (Bonnet 1766, 1:xxii). In Melmoth, the Duchess, an external authority, has pre-ordained Alonzo to be a certain type of person; in this way, she becomes like the God of preformation who determines identity prior to birth. Because of her extreme religious devotion, Alonzo’s mother would likely subscribe to the more reverent tradition of preformation, which aims to keep God central to all processes. In addition to that, her belief in the supernatural and in the battle between good and evil indicates that she would also subscribe to popular superstitions such as the role of the maternal imagination on the unborn fetus, which was one way that preformationists could explain monsters. Alonzo, however, comes to signify the victory of epigenesis over preformation on this point, for monstrosity signals epigenetic processes. Blumenbach, epigenesist, asks, “Can the Author of nature have ordained it, that from amongst the involved germs of any one species of animals, for instance, swine, the monsters should arrive at evolution, just when taken under the care of men, and that the monsters should be produced only by the tame, and not by the wild also?” (Blumenbach 1792 83). In other words, much of this deformation is a matter of environment, not pre-ordination. Although preformationists like Bonnet attempted to explain monstrosity via physical causes, epigenesists like Blumenbach exposed the limitations of their logic. Popular (and even some professional) obstetrical literature often asserted that the maternal imagination could affect her offspring, a belief that comes into play in the way that the Duchess and the Church respond to Alonzo. According to Aristotle’s Masterpiece, “outward deformity of body is often a sign of the pollution of the heart, as a curse laid upon the child for the incontinency of the parents” (Salmon 1792, 91)3 While Alonzo has no outward deformity, his parents’ sin corrupted his mother’s mind at the time of conception. She likely felt guilt and fear of the terrors wielded by the Church. The maternal imagination “is of such force that it stamps a character of the thing imagined upon the child” (Salmon 1792, 92). Other, more credible writers also argued that the maternal imagination was an important factor in a child’s development. In 1726, the ­physician Daniel Turner argues that the link between mind and body is 3  Although Aristotle’s Masterpiece does not advocate preformation, it does provide one of the most popular and widely accessible explanations of the effect of the maternal imagination on the unborn fetus. This popular text espoused the Aristotelian two-seed theory, an early form of epigenesis without all of the theological implications.

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strong; he then lists a series of examples of babies deformed by “the strong Imagination or disappointed Longings of the Mother” (Turner 1730, 167). Although many denounced this belief, including members of the Royal College of Physicians, the power of the maternal imagination was still an important part of reproductive discourse even into the twentieth century when Aristotle’s Masterpiece was still being printed. Attempting to move beyond the maternal imagination as an explanation,  Bonnet provides several scientific reasons for the existence of monsters and monstrous births, but his final explanation is of key interest here. He writes, “But the soil, culture, and other particular circumstances, may influence the proportions and certain qualities so as to render the species liable to be mistaken” (Bonnet 1766, 1:155). Although he is discussing plants here, the entire section is dedicated, in part, to an analogy between generation in plants and animals. If “culture” and “other particular circumstances” apply to animals, including humans, one suspects that monstrosity can be created by the circumstances of one’s conception and birth. In Alonzo’s case, his mother’s “particular circumstances” affect him physically and morally, suggesting the many ways in which Maturin engages with contemporary reproductive discourse. The physical manifestations of the Duchess’ imagination are present on Alonzo’s body, at least according to the Superior of the convent in which Alonzo is trapped, indicating the Church’s belief in the power of the maternal imagination or at least the effects of external forces on unborn children. The Superior explains how maternal sin stamps Alonzo’s character and body: You were abominable from your very birth,—you were the offspring of sin—you are conscious of it. Amid the livid paleness, that horrible unnatural white that discolours your very lips, I see a tingle like crimson burning on your cheek at the mention of it. The demon who was presiding at your natal hour—the demon of impurity and antimonasticism—pursues you in the very walls of a convent. (Melmoth, 179).

The Superior reads the taint of his birth on his body, for he sees a “tinge” of red in the midst of an “unnatural white.” If a demon was “presiding” at the moment of his conception, then Alonzo is a monstrous birth in his “antimonasticism,” his refusal to comply with the Church. While not a preformationist stance per se, the belief that supernatural powers affect an individual’s moral and physical identity relies on external powers, whether good or evil. Maturin clearly critiques the Superior whose seething anger

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is, to put it lightly, unbecoming. Maturin’s characterization of the Superior and the Church in general indicates a rejection of external, supernatural forces as causes of identity and offers a contrast to characters whose identities develop organically from within. While it is the Church’s position that Alonzo is unnatural and monstrous, the narrative makes clear that the Church represents the mechanical sterility of outdated, unscientific and superstitious biology; and it is conformity, underwritten by preformationist biology, that is the real monster. The Church attempts to reinforce external control by trapping Alonzo in a convent and forcing him to take vows. The further Alonzo descends into the womb of the Church, the more robotic he becomes, indicating that external controls destroy, not create, identity. The language of mechanism pervades the novel, particularly in regard to the Catholic Church. Given that “preformationists were the mechanists of their time” (Gould 1977, 21), Maturin’s frequent recourse to these kinds of images is suggestive of  his critique of both the Catholic Church and preformation. Though Bonnet, a preformationist, rejects the “purely mechanical” (Bonnet 1766, 1:135), natural philosophers like Buffon and Blumenbach argued that, if the being is fully formed, everything that happens after that is, in fact, purely mechanical—a process merely of matter of motion. Buffon writes, “to explain the animal economy, and the different movements of the human body, solely by mechanical principles, is the same as if a man would give an account of a picture by shutting his eyes and feeling on it” (Buffon 1792, 2:316–317). These are, he writes, merely “modes of perception” that do not adequately explain the powers of life (Buffon 1792, 2:308). Mechanical principles are not enough, for life is beyond material parts. Buffon says the main distinction to make is between living and dead matter. Living matter is organic and life is inherent to the being itself; all other matter is dead (Buffon 1792, 2:296). When Alonzo descends into the belly of the convent and comes more and more under the control of an external force, the narrator describes him in terms that are increasingly mechanical and indicative of dead matter, signifying the novel’s underlying critique of preformationist biology and all its implications. Imagery and language conveying the “frozen and hopeless monotony of a cloister” are ubiquitous in this novel and demonstrate that preformationist biology, which buttresses the power of the hierarchy against the individual, creates monsters (Melmoth, 89). As I noted in the introduction, preformationists believed that the seemingly random process of epigenetic formation, subject to the chances of matter and motion, was more

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likely to create monsters. Maturin demonstrates the opposite. After Alonzo submits to his mother’s wishes, he becomes robotic in his obedience: My life was a sea without a tide. The bell did not toll for service with more mechanical punctuality than I obeyed the summons. No automaton, constructed on the most exquisite principles of mechanism, and obeying those principles with a punctuality almost miraculous, could leave the artist less room for complaint or disappointment, than I did the Superior and community. (Melmoth, 111)

Referring to the passage cited above, Punter argues that it represents the conflict between the human “considered as founded upon a notion of self-­ motivation and free will” and the “dehumanizing forces of history, religion, and ideology” (Punter 2002, 121). Punter concludes that this is a commentary on a national history from which we learn that “the national ‘subject’ is in practice still ‘subjected’ to domination by an external force” (Punter 2002, 122).4 Though Punter locates this force in political culture, the core of his argument demonstrates one of the key elements of embryological discourse: the conflict between internal and external loci of control and identity. At the literal level in this passage, Alonzo is being subjected to the “dehumanizing force” of religion. While Punter is no doubt correct that Maturin is commenting on Irish identity, I would argue that he is also addressing one’s physiological and moral identity (in the broadest sense of individual value and character). Obeying the strict rules and schedule of the convent, Alonzo becomes an “automaton” guided by mechanism, devoid of an organic life force; he has lost his bildungstrieb. External control is untenable to those most suspicious of the Church, signifying Maturin’s alignment with a more progressive, scientifically-­ based biology. On his deathbed, one of the old monks laments, “The moment life is put beyond the reach of your will, and placed under the influence of mechanical operations, it becomes, to thinking beings, a torment insupportable” (Melmoth, 123; emphasis added). The individual will, which is something internal and organic, must participate in the creation of identity. The mere “mechanism” (Melmoth, 123) of the monastic 4  Morin makes a similar claim when she writes that the works of Maturin, Edgeworth, and Owenson are “inheritors of the violence, disruption, and bloodshed of Irish history…. Highlighting the destructively repetitive cycle in which Irish society is trapped, these texts instead suggest that spectral possession is the condition of modern Ireland” (Morin 2011, 13).

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routine creates physical and mental disease. The old man describes the fate of all monks who, because of their monotonous routine, begin to get nervous, morbid, restless. If they have interest, they are indulged with remission from their duties, and they remain in their cells, relaxed,—torpid,—idiotical; if they have not interest, they are forced to the punctual performance of their duties, and then idiotism comes on much sooner, as diseased horses, employed in a mill, become blind sooner than those who are suffered to wear out existence in ordinary labour. (Melmoth, 129)

Having been a monk for sixty years, this man reveals the whole process as a debilitating fraud. The bodies and minds of the men are like “diseased horses.” They are “nervous” and “idiotical.” External control wears them down, and they lose their sense of self as they are reduced to “idiotism.” The old monk articulates a critique of ideological structures that suppress natural, organic identity; read embryologically, his opinion favors an epigenetic frame of mind that one could align with the author. The man himself, though, symbolizes bad science, that which is based on sentiment and belief rather than reason. Buffon and Blumenbach both accused preformationists of emotional and religious bias. Blumenbach writes that preformationist beliefs are “extravagant and romantic” (Blumenbach 1792, 15). Preformation and preexistence, like that advocated by Bonnet and Haller, are “deceptions of prejudice and error” (Blumenbach 1792, ix). Buffon is more kind when he says that preformation is argued through “arbitrary connections and moral agreements” (Buffon 1792, 2:289). Interestingly, this old monk uses science to create deceptions that are designed to elicit faith, aligning him with bad science. The monk reveals that he has scientific knowledge, for it was he, not God, who performed the “miracle” of the dried up fountain and withered trees. Alonzo interpreted this event as a sign from God that he must commit to the Church. This monk is a much tamer version of Schemoli from Maturin’s earlier novel Fatal Revenge. Schemoli spends the entire novel haunting the two brothers, Ippolito and Annibal, using techniques that are eventually “found to be attainable by means merely physical” (Fatal Revenge, 417). Father Schemoli reveals that he spent years training in the medical arts, which he used to deceive the brothers. The monk in Melmoth does the same. He explains, “I was in possession of some chemical secrets” that could make the poplars appear to be dead (Melmoth, 125). The “miracle”

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was nothing but a fraud, but he clearly has valuable scientific knowledge. One of his metaphors for religious ecstasy suggests that he could be a physician; religious passion, he says, is “mere inebriation that the most ignorant physician could produce in his patients by certain medicines” (Melmoth, 127). In some ways, the monk’s chemical and medical knowledge positions him against the Church and its superstitions because he can expose the fraud like any good scientist; however, because he submits his will to theirs, he becomes a diseased, mechanical monster and an advocate and representative of bad, backward science that is just what Buffon describes: a “temple founded on error” (Buffon 1792, 2:335). Maturin’s rejection of biased science based on external control is further reinforced by the monk’s willingness to support physical torture, which turns him into a moral monster. Convents and the Inquisition often used physicians to assist in the practice of torture. Medical professionals, usually monks within the order, were employed to keep the tortured party alive and to revive them for further torture. The dying monk seems to have had this role in the torture and murder of the young favorite of Fra Paolo, for he exults in the boy’s whipping: “I was the secret, unsuspected adviser of the whole proceeding” (Melmoth, 128). As physician-adviser, this monk participated in the torture and murder of an innocent man leading Alonzo to cry out, “Monster!” (Melmoth, 128). Although the old man could have represented scientific truth in the face of religious fear as other medical figures in the novel do, he becomes just as monstrous as the other brothers are, signifying it is unnatural mechanism, not organic epigenesis, that breeds monsters. Alonzo is almost swallowed up by this mechanism of control, this sterile womb. When he is deepest in the bowels or womb of the convent, he becomes more of an automaton than at any other time and, simultaneously, must fight off the monsters that reside in its unnatural womb. When Alonzo refuses to stop the annulment process for his vows, the Superior employs four other monks to drag him into the conventual dungeon where he is placed in darkness and almost starved. The “sterility of humanity in a convent” makes the other monks deaf to his cries for help (Melmoth, 156). This sterility leads to a kind of anti-birth, a retreat into the womb that is slithering with monsters. At this point, Alonzo metaphorically becomes a clock, symbolic of mechanist theories of life: I wished to be the clock, that I might have no feeling, no motive for hurrying on the approach of time…I tried to eke it out by my incessant repetition of

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minutes and seconds, and I succeeded; for I always consoled myself, that whatever hour it was, sixty minutes must go to an hour. Had I led this life much longer, I might have been converted into the idiot, who as I have read, from the habit of watching a clock, imitated its mechanism so well, that when it was down, he sounded the hour as faithfully as ear could desire. (Melmoth, 162)

In an attempt to survive, Alonzo focuses on the clock suppressing the part of himself that would make him think and feel, that would make him aware of the sacrifice of his will in the face of the Church’s control. As he states, Alonzo becomes, like the madman, a clock, able to mark time with his mind and body as faithfully as the cogs in a clock. The parricide who later assists Alonzo in an attempt to escape calls him “an insect perched on a wheel of this vast machine,” the Church “whose roots are in the bowels of the earth” (Melmoth, 244). The Church is a sterile machine, and when it gets Alonzo in its clutches, he degenerates into an insect. While Alonzo is in the dungeon, he is plagued by death and monstrosity. He begs for a light to in order to “gaze on that skull,” so he must be surrounded by bones (Melmoth, 159). Worse, he sees reptiles of “extraordinary size…crawling down the walls” (Melmoth, 159). He is merely marking time and fighting off “the cold crawling of their bloated limbs” (Melmoth, 161). They eat his bread, plunge into his pitcher of water, and very likely leave feces all over the cell. Representing the monstrosity that strict religious control breeds, the reptiles plague him both externally and internally. The metaphorical reptiles “which his own heart hourly engenders in a cell” are far worse (Melmoth, 161). As he loses his sense of self, his internal spirit of self-creation, he turns monstrous, a product of lifeless mechanism, conformity, preformation.

Adonijah: Symbol of Epigenetic Power Alonzo is delivered safely and regains life when he joins Adonijah, who is the novel’s most positive scientific figure and, not coincidentally, the most prolific of writers. The link between physiological and aesthetic generation is an important component of epigenetic literature. Whereas Shelley indicates this concept more subtly through the parallels between Victor and the artist, Maturin makes it explicit in the figure of Adonijah who is both scientist and writer. Significantly, Adonijah’s part of the story occurs dead center in the novel and introduces Immalee whose initial life is organic and

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epigenetic, which Maturin clearly contrasts with the mechanism and death of superstition and ecclesiastical control. Adonijah represents the three most significant elements of epigenesis—organic self-formation, the scientific, and the power of the word. The power of the word is the power to generate aesthetic life, to create life as epigenesists did in their construction of various theories of conception from Buffon’s “internal mould” to C. F. Wolff’s vis essentialis. As with epigenesis, though, the novel incessantly seeks concrete evidence of origins and is always haunted by the role of the supernatural. The search for Melmoth, who represents the supernatural, leads to narrative eternity, a key feature of epigenetic literature.  Although the novel betrays some clear anti-Semitism, Adonijah is, for the most part, favorably portrayed, which signifies Maturin’s favoring of the epigenetic, the scientific. Like the Scottish male midwives and obstetricians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Adonijah stands outside traditional English Protestant culture while simultaneously representing scientific progress and life. He lives in a room reminiscent of John Hunter’s museum and spends his days resurrecting dead identities through narrative. Victor Sage explains that the “link between the embedded narrative and frame tale is portrayed as a kind of resurrection” (Melmoth, 302, 636n8). Koelb argues that the Adonijah section of the novel is a powerful revivification through reading/writing that emphasizes the unnatural relationship between life and death: “The manuscript’s physical character, its location, and the circumstances in which Alonzo reads it all contribute to an atmosphere of death so powerful that the narrative it contains cannot help but seem a corpse come back to life” (Koelb 2008, 153). Both Sage and Koelb link the structure of the narrative to life and vitality and questions of identity, which are, as I have been arguing, essential to the novel’s embryological contexts. “Resurrectionist” and anatomist Adonijah stands for the progressive, life-giving science of people like John and William Hunter and William Smellie, each of whom performed or relied on the controversial science of anatomy to do their work as medical professionals. Like them, Adonijah works with facts dissecting the stories of the individuals he writes about in order to come to truth. He too must contend with the superstitions and fears of the people and the Church. Adonijah weaves the tales that make it spin into an epigenetic, unending narrative that can never really identify origins, but that creates life, authentic self-­ formed identities, in the process. Adonijah’s association with science and life is made clear by the contents of his chamber. After the fire allows him to escape the Inquisition,

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Alonzo arrives at the home of a converso. The inquisitors arrive, but Alonzo hides in a small recess and then descends the stairs into a subterraneous passage while the converso and his family are arrested. He finds a door to an apartment that is described as follows: In the centre of the room stood a table covered with black cloth; it supported an iron lamp of an antique and singular form…There were, amid maps and globes, several instruments, of which my ignorance did not permit me then to know the use,—some, I have since learned, were anatomical; there was an electrifying machine…around the room were placed four skeletons, not in cases, but in a kind of upright coffin, that gave their bony emptiness a kind of ghastly and imperative prominence, as if they were the real and rightful tenants of that singular apartment. (Melmoth, 291–292)

The anatomical instruments, the electrifying machine, and the skeletons are all suggestive of a scientific laboratory. Lew argues that Adonijah “is a philosopher in the older sense of the word, which still included the sciences…and medicine. In this womb lie images of life and death: medical implements such as the forceps” (Lew 1994, 177). The forceps are not actually mentioned in this passage, but the narrator calls them “anatomical” instruments, clearly indicating Adonijah’s medical knowledge. The table covered with a black cloth and surrounded by human and animal remains is very likely a dissection table. Along with the human skeletons are “the stuffed figures of animals…an alligator,—some gigantic bones, which I took for those of Samson, but which turned out to be the fragments of those of the Mammoth…Then I saw figures smaller, but not less horrible,—human and brute abortions” (Melmoth, 292). Although they turn out to be part of a mammoth, the gigantic bones are reminiscent of the Irish Giant, Charles Byrne, whose skeleton was famously on display in John Hunter’s museum (and, in fact, still is). Also similar to Hunter’s museum, which was the only one of its kind at the time, are the aborted human and animal fetuses that Alonzo sees. Hunter was well-known for his motley collection, which at the time of Maturin’s novel, was housed in a small space at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Some of Hunter’s most famous specimens include the aforementioned giant, the tusks of a mammoth, various parts of an alligator, monkey brains, and the bodies of conjoined twins at six-months gestation. Koelb writes that the features of Adonijah’s chamber contribute to an “atmosphere of death” (Koelb 2008, 153). Certainly,

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the coffin, skeletons, and other features are indicative of death, but they are also part of the life-giving field of science.5 Although Alonzo fears the unknown Jew and at first paints him in demonic terms, he comes to reverence him for his knowledge, which provides a striking contrast to the superstitious ignorance of the Church and those in its power. Alonzo fears the man will poison him and refuses to eat or drink what he offers. Laughing, Adonijah mocks his lack of medical knowledge: “I pity thee…Were not thy masters, the Jesuits, masters also of the healing art, and art thou not acquainted with the sight of its ordinary implements?” (Melmoth, 294). As a monk in the Jesuit order, Alonzo should be familiar with all of the medical equipment and instruments in Adonjiah’s chamber. Alonzo’s fear betrays his ignorance, which is an indictment not only of Alonzo, but also of ecclesiastical power that keeps its people in the dark. His fear that Adonijah is facilitating an “infernal orgie” represents the superstitious fears of people against medical progress, the kind of fear that leads to mob attacks at the doors of anatomists (Melmoth, 292). Adonijah is no demon, but a “secluded leach [sic]” (Melmoth, 295). Leeches were, of course, men who practiced the art of healing. Adonjiah’s apartment offers a strict contrast to the horrors and monstrosities of the convent and the Inquisition from which Alonzo has recently escaped, underscoring Maturin’s alignment with this good, progressive science. The belly of the convent spawns monsters—bloated reptiles, parricides, and apostates. Whereas Adonijah’s apartment holds the specimen and instruments that lead to prolonged life and health, the Church leaves “the proofs of its power in abortive intellects, crippled frames, distorted creeds, and ossified hearts” (Melmoth, 295). The medical language here—abortive, crippled, ossified—is indicative of the novel’s medical subtexts. The monstrosities of the Church contrast directly with the leech’s chamber, which gives life and health. While Koelb argues that Adonijah’s chamber is full of death and represents “that death and life may coexist in a single entity” and that the chamber offers “no sign of Christian hope,” I would suggest otherwise (Koelb 2008, 155, 154). Although the chamber does include skeletons and other symbols of the dead, it also 5  Life and vitality are also key elements of Koelb’s argument as the title of his book suggests; his discussion of this particular passage leans toward an emphasis on the horrors of death in life or the living dead whereas I lean toward an emphasis on conception, creation, vitality.

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contains symbols of life and health, such as the anatomy table, whose discovery was essential to medical progress; further, just as Buffon (and Victor Frankenstein) indicates, to understand life you have to understand death. Adonijah restores Alonzo physically with healthy, medicinal nourishment and psychologically with active use of his natural skills as a writer, signifying the intimate connection between physiological and aesthetic life upon which epigenetic literature is grounded. Instead of using his external power to force Alonzo into a profession that he has no spirit for, Adonijah harnesses Alonzo’s gift of writing, an internal power, his bildungstrieb. Adonijah employs him in the art of narrative resurrection, the writing of stories to revive the identities of the dead. Because of its explicit connection between writing and life, this section of the novel suggests that the Gothic novel itself, and Maturin in particular, should be read in terms of physiological life. As Alonzo writes these stories, he himself regenerates, for writing is one of his internal powers, not something forced on him from without as in the case of the monastic vows. Although his anti-­ Semitism gives him some reservations about following Adonijah’s request, writing is a skill he already has, something that comes from within. Alonzo has the “pen of a ready writer” and immediately recognizes the language of Adonijah’s manuscripts (Melmoth, 294). Briefly looking toward the manuscript, Alonzo states, “I saw they contained only the Spanish language written in the Greek characters—a mode of writing that, I easily conceived, must have been as unintelligible to the officers of the Inquisition, as the Hieroglyphics of the Egyptian priests” (Melmoth, 301). The briefest of glances is enough to decipher the old man’s code. Alonzo’s skill in the art of writing comes from within, an internal mode of self-­ creation, which allows him to revive himself from the near-death he experienced in the convent. Like the mutilated polyp, he regenerates himself from internal principles. Reinforcing Alonzo’s affinity for narrative and the novel’s implicit link between resurrection and narrative is the obvious admiration he feels for Adonijah precisely because of his role as resurrectionist/writer. Despite cultural prejudices, Alonzo cannot help but reverence the leech: “As he spoke, my eyes hung in reverence on the hoary majesty of his patriarchal figure, and I felt as if I beheld an embodied representation of the old law in all its stern simplicity—the unbending grandeur, and primeval antiquity” (Melmoth, 297). The leech, metaphorically transformed into an ancient scroll, symbolizes the body/narrative fusion. The healthy,

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life-­giving associations of narrative are underscored by the leech’s role as healer. As a scientist and anatomist, steeped in anatomical study and divorced from the superstitions of the Catholic Church, he is raised up to “majesty” and “grandeur” in the reader’s imagination. In this way, he is the most completely self-formed character in the entire novel, for the reader has no sense of what or who came before him. The parallel between narrative practice and scientific healing is made even more explicit at the moment when he finally convinces Alonzo to write the remaining stories. In this passage, the bodies of the dead, the writer, and the scrolls become one: “Behold, there are those around thee, whose mute and motionless arms of bone plead to thee as no arms of flesh ever pleaded. Behold, there are those who, being speechless, yet speak—who, being dead, are yet alive—who, though in the abyss of eternity, are yet around thee, and call on thee, as with a mortal voice. Hear them!—take the pen in thine hand, and write”… in a transport of ecstasy, snatching a skeleton from its receptacle, [he] placed it before me. “Tell him thy story thyself, peradventure he will believe thee, and record it.” And supporting the skeleton with one hand, he pointed with the other, as bleached and bony as that of the dead, to the manuscript that lay before me. (Melmoth, 302)

In this passage, the bodies call to Alonzo to record their histories, for they are “yet alive” in their stories. Like the eighteenth-century anatomist who must dissect the dead to understand life, Alonzo must resurrect the stories and lives of the bodies that surround him. The final image in this passage—the diagonal line from the white skull in Adonijah’s hand, through his white and bony body, to the white sheets of the manuscript—joins all of these bodies visually and thematically. The dead body is resurrected in the manuscript, so those “being dead, are yet alive” (Melmoth, 302). The novel opened with Biddy Brannigan giving birth. The story then attempts to return to the point of conception—aesthetically and biologically. Adonijah is the point where the stories converge, but also a being whose origins are unknowable. He, like Melmoth, appears to have no beginning or end.

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Immalee/Isidora: From Epigenesis to Preformation At the moment when the resurrected bodies, the writer, and the manuscript become one, the reader is taken to the story of Immalee whose initial formation is epigenetic and organic. Not coincidentally, she is also, not including Adonijah, the least superstitious character in the novel, the furthest removed from ecclesiastical control, and, though naïve, the most humanitarian. Unfortunately, Immalee’s story becomes a narrative of degeneration, of preformation. Like Alonzo, the more she lives within the control of the Church and her parents and the more she denies her own will, the more she becomes a victim of ignorance and superstition. Immalee transforms from a noble savage to a monstrous mother, for in the end, she copulates with a demonic spirit and gives birth to a stillborn son carrying the mark of the devil. Her story, thus,  allegorizes a regression to non-­ scientific medical beliefs, signifying an underlying indictment of preformationist embryology similar to that articulated in Alonzo’s story. Maturin frames Immalee’s story within the articulation of a belief that theology infects our perceptions of the natural world. Science can, of course, be wielded in support of specific ideologies, and theology can misguide the observer’s interpretation of the evidence. When the narrator asserts, “nature preached a milder theology” (Melmoth, 308), he suggests the direct link between biology and belief, not unlike Buffon’s assertion, negatively stated, that “moral affinity can never become a physical reason” (Buffon 1792, 2:287). Just as Buffon privileges physical reasons over moral ones, so Maturin, despite his religious vocation, privileges nature over theology. The effect of theology on scientific interpretation is made more explicit in the following passage: He [Melmoth] returned to the shore of the haunted isle, the name by which it was distinguished by those who knew not how to classify the new goddess who was supposed to inhabit it, and who were as much puzzled by this new specimen in their theology, as Linnaeus himself could have been by a non-­ descript in botany. Alas! the varieties in moral botany far exceed the wildest anomalies of those in the natural. (Melmoth, 346)

Immalee is a “non-descript,” a being on the border between species at least according to the superimposed system of classification; however, there is nothing wrong with her physically or morally. Maturin implies that the problem is perception and theology. Instead of allowing the

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observable evidence to guide interpretation, the viewers, whether island worshippers or scientists like Linnaeus, attempt to make the evidence fit into “their theology.” Science then becomes a “moral botany,” not an accurate depiction of the natural world. Immalee’s story, then, should be read in the context of Maturin’s rejection of “moral botany,” which I am arguing includes the political subtexts of the reproductive sciences. Immalee herself, as a being that cannot fit neatly into preconceived categories of species, is evidence of epigenesis, which was able to embrace the formation of new species, hybrids, polyps, and other anomalies. The destruction of the temple on Immalee’s island prior to her arrival signifies a break from systems based on biologies of external control, which lead to, in the scientific world of Maturin and epigenesis, the real monstrosities. While Immalee might be monstrous from the perspective of the Church and her religious parents, in Maturin’s system, as in Radcliffe’s, it is conformity/the Church/rigid religious systems that create monsters. Prior to Immalee’s arrival, the island housed a temple to the black goddess whose worshippers, terrorized by superstition, practiced child sacrifice. The idol sits on a bed of snakes, wears human skulls around her neck, and accepts the “mutilated limbs and immolated infants of her worshippers” (Melmoth, 303). This image parallels the monstrosities produced by the superstitions of the Church, whose belly is crawling with bloated reptiles. Amidst the ruins, though, grows a rose “as if nature preached a milder theology” (Melmoth, 308). Here the narrator indicates that systems, like preformation, that support destructive theologies are less natural  and divorced from scientific fact. Symbolically, this system is destroyed by an earthquake, allowing Immalee to grow there epigenetically, from her own powers interacting with nature. It is destroyed because it is, as Buffon says of preformation, “a temple founded on error” (Buffon 1792, 2:335). In this case, the temple is both literal and figurative. Immalee’s organic and epigenetic growth leads to an ideology of equality and compassion and provides further indictment of religious systems, and their underlying reproductive foundations, that pollute the world outside the island. Her bildunstrieb is allowed to flourish without restraint in the first few years of her life. Immalee tells Melmoth the circumstances of her development: “she was the daughter of a palm-tree, under whose shade she had been first conscious of existence, but that her poor father had been long withered and dead” (Melmoth, 315). Without parents to guide and control her, Immalee grows in a symbiotic relationship with the nature immediately surrounding her, signifying the epigenetic process in

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which the fetus grows incrementally from Buffon’s “living organic particles” (Buffon 1792, 2:279) or Blumenbach’s “Formative Nisus” (or bildundstrieb), which is unique to living matter (Blumenbach 1792, 61). The narrator contrasts the “artificial life” of Melmoth’s world with “the unadulterated existence of Immalee, into whose pure elements nothing but flowers and fragrance, the sparkling of the heavens, and the odours of earth, had transfused their essence” (Melmoth, 346). The “essence” of nature is “transfused” into her. She becomes who she is by her immediate surroundings; it was not a preformed figure, but one that developed progressively, guided by an inexplicable, unlocatable internal power. Far removed from the grasp of the Church, Immalee grows organically and outside time. Measuring herself in terms of natural cycles, Immalee has no concept of the clock, which symbolizes the mechanical control of the Church and its underlying biology as we saw in the passages focused on Alonzo. She measures her life by the cycles of the moon and the life of the flowers. She explains to Melmoth that “she [is] very old, having seen many roses decay on their stalks” and many moons “waste away” (Melmoth, 315). Developing from nature and living outside time, Immalee is a direct contrast to the mechanical systems in Melmoth’s world. Immalee’s growth, representing a better kind of science, generates in her mind a belief in compassion and equality that stands in stark contrast to the outside world. She recognizes no gender distinctions, for example. When she tells Melmoth of her friend (which is her reflection in the stream), he asks if the friend is male or female. She replies, “What is that?” (Melmoth, 316). She has no concept of male or female, nor can she envision poverty and inequality. Melmoth “had incredible difficulty to make Immalee comprehend how there could be an unequal division of the means of existence” (Melmoth, 336). In response to his explanations, she asks innocently, “Why should some have more than they can eat, and others nothing to eat?” (Melmoth, 336). Compassionate to the core, Immalee cannot fathom poverty, inequality, injustice, or cruelty, underscoring Maturin’s indictment of religious systems and their underlying biologies. Unfortunately, once Immalee returns to the moral and biological confines of the Church and her parents, she degenerates, like Alonzo, into a kind of automaton and becomes engulfed by superstition. On the island, she lived organically and outside time, but at her parents’ home, the mechanical rituals of the Church reign and she loses her identity like the preformed germ. As in Alonzo’s story, the clock becomes an important symbol of this mechanism in this section of the novel. Donna Clara,

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Immalee’s mother, would often “fret about the family clock not chiming synchronically with the bells of the neighbouring [sic] church” (Melmoth, 409). Her home and family must be subject to the laws and rituals of the Church, including its biology. The incessant references to clocks throughout (and their association with cruelty, Catholicism, and hierarchy) suggest the mechanical undertones of the family’s biology. Clara exclaims proudly, “I never loved in my life, thank the saints!—and as to marriage, that is according to the will of God and of our parents” (Melmoth, 411). As Müller-Sievers asserts, “the ultimate biological insignificance of the generative partner—the woman in the case of animalculism or, usually, the man in ovism—calls for practical and external considerations to motivate the choice, whereas the epigenetic framework, in which there is always an ‘alternative,’ opens up the possibility of free choice of the partner” (Müller-­ Sievers 1997, 30). In Donna Clara’s case, there is no need for love or passion, for God and parents will decide. Her biology, then, is founded on preformationist or mechanical principles. The more Immalee lives in this mechanical world, the more subject she is to superstition, the influence of supernatural forces. Not insignificantly, she is rechristened Isidora at this point in the novel, indicating a change in identity, one predetermined from the outside. She loses her bildungstrieb, the internal power, and becomes swayed by other, external powers. Despite what she knows about herself and the world from her more organic development on the island, she resists this knowledge and bends to the “artificial objects and manners” of her mother and Fra Jose (Melmoth, 413). Her “conscious vitality” contrasts with the “organized uniformity” that “crippled” the other young women in Madrid society. She is “bound by no laws, or by laws that she alone understood and obeyed” (Melmoth, 365). As with Alonzo, Immalee forms her identity from within, from internal laws, a bildungstrieb or internal mold unique to her. Unfortunately, the more time she spends as a proper Christian in a rigid society, the more she degenerates and loses identity, becoming the conforming monster only preformation can create. Despite the “heterodoxy of [her] heart” and that “she had not found Christianity what she had at first believed it” (Melmoth, 378, 383), she continues to participate in their religious rituals, insists on her parents’ and the Church’s official blessing before she weds Melmoth, and learns to dissimulate in order to please her mother. She demands that Melmoth “invoke the sanction of the church” before they can be united (Melmoth, 386). Kowtowing to the strict rules of female propriety, she feels shame in talking to Melmoth privately, a shame she did not feel on

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the island: “I feel I am transgressing the decorums of a Spanish female and a Christian, in holding this conference with you any longer” (Melmoth, 387). She is not transgressing her own “conscious vitality” but their rules of decorum (Melmoth, 365). Artificial systems corrupt Immalee making her vulnerable to Melmoth’s machinations, suggesting Maturin’s privileging of epigenetically formed identity. Despite his rebellion against God, Melmoth is a figure who exists primarily because of the system that he rejects. He is a feature of the Church’s belief in hell, Satan, and demonic spirits. In Immalee’s world on the island, there were no such systems, making her less vulnerable to his temptations. Although she is clearly enamored of him when he visits her on the island, her love at that point is innocent; she expresses a wish to return to the world with him, but she never actually goes with him. Her parents find her and “rescue” her from the island. In her words, they “seized” her and “made” her a Christian (Melmoth, 381). For Melmoth’s purposes, he cannot offer sufficient temptation until the individual he targets is at his or her most miserable state. For Stanton, that moment was in the insane asylum; for Immalee, that moment is when she is subject to ecclesiastical and parental authority, not to her own will. Immalee’s innocent love on the island turns into a wretched obsession dependent on self-­ denial. Only then, when she is in the clutches of a preformationist system, can Melmoth swoop in and complete his mission. Her vulnerability to evil and the supernatural is part of Maturin’s critique of the Church and its regressive science. Similar to Alonzo’s story, the result of this “moral botany” of artificial habits and the denial of internal will is a monstrous birth. In this way, Maturin turns the story around on preformation by implying that it is preformationist ideology that leads to monstrosity, not epigenetic formation. Immalee copulates with a demonic spirit giving birth to a child marked by the devil who dies after just a few weeks. Popular superstitions of the time identified bestiality and sex with the devil as two causes of monstrous births. The author of Aristotle’s Masterpiece, though he denies it himself, writes: “There are some of opinion that monsters may be engendered by infernal spirits” (Salmon 1792, 93). Maternal imagination is another cause of the monstrous and clearly plays a role in the fate of Melmoth and Immalee’s offspring. In 1726, Daniel Turner writes, “‘Tis on this Account the Poet Hesiod exhorts his Friends, that they by no means set about this Work [conception] after their Return from Funerals, or thinking of any Calamity befallen them, lest the sorrowful Idea they

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have just thought on, be transmitted to the Conception, and the tender Foetus mark’d with some frightful Character” (Turner 1730, 1:246). Pregnant women should avoid death or any other shocks to the system because they will hurt the fetus, which is precisely what happens to Isidora. Melmoth and Immalee’s wedding night is fraught with fear, guilt, and images of death and is the culmination of Immalee’s preformationist nightmare; the shocks she encounters that evening leave their mark on the child. On the way to the ruined church to be married by a hermit, Immalee feels “doubt and terror” and faints after Melmoth tells her wild stories of the murders that occurred there (Melmoth, 429, 431). According to reproductive superstitions of the time, a woman should avoid monstrous images, frights, and corpses. An image of a dead body, for example, could cause a stillbirth. Though Immalee is not aware of it at the time, the corpse of a hermit unites her and Melmoth in holy matrimony. She senses disaster when she feels the hand that joins hers to Melmoth’s, for it is as “cold as that of death” (Melmoth, 438). Just before she gives birth, she sees the bloody corpse of the only witness to her wedding. All of these frights— at the wedding, at conception, and at birth—cause the “weak cry and wasted frame” of the baby (Melmoth, 590). When the Inquisitors come to take the baby, they find a marked corpse: “around the throat of the miserable infant, born amid agony, and nursed in a dungeon, there was a black mark, which the officials made their use of in representing this extraordinary circumstance to the holy office. By some it was deemed as the sign impressed by the evil one at its birth—by others as the fearful effect of maternal despair” (Melmoth, 593). The officials, aware of reproductive superstitions, exploit them. The black marks are explained as the trace of the devil or the effects of a diseased maternal imagination.6 Illustrating the consequences of a “moral botany” (Melmoth, 346), Alonzo’s and Immalee’s stories constitute Maturin’s indictment of the Church and the populace for their pseudo-scientific beliefs and reproductive superstitions. Alonzo’s journey takes him into the monstrous womb of the Church where he becomes almost completely mechanized and sterile; fortunately, he escapes. Adonijah, a Hunterian-like scientist, 6  The second explanation that the officials give could be interpreted as infanticide. Maternal despair may have caused her to murder her own child; however, the context also suggests that Maturin is playing on the widespread belief in the strength of the maternal imagination. Maturin treats the “maternal despair” explanation as equally superstitious as a belief in the devil’s mark. Infanticide, while certainly useful to officials who wished to condemn her, is much less fantastic than the force of the mother’s mind.

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resurrects Alonzo through physical and psychological medicine; the act of storytelling saves Alonzo from winding up like Immalee. Immalee’s story follows the opposite trajectory, for she begins in an organic system of nature that supports her bildungstrieb. Growing up without parents, her generation is epigenetic, natural, and morally superior to the rest of the characters. Unfortunately, she is forced away from the island outside of time and is engulfed by the superstitions and mechanical routines of the Church, leading to a monstrous birth and her death. The development of each of these characters—Alonzo, Immalee/Isidora, Adonijah—dramatizes the conflict between external and internal sources of identity formation, exposing the embryological subtexts of the novel. They become emblems of epigenetic and preformationist accounts of human conception and development. Maturin’s favoring of organic, internally sourced formation is implicit in each of their stories, for it is internal vitality that leads to wholeness and life whereas external controls lead to mechanism and death.

The Novel’s Monstrous Form Of course, Maturin’s stance is not definitive. As many critics have noted, the novel betrays a deep ambivalence on many levels.7 The embryological subtexts are no different, for just as epigenesists attempted to eschew the supernatural, but ultimately could not, Maturin’s text is structured around the avoidance of the supernatural—Melmoth himself. Melmoth haunts the novel and its characters, which leads not only to the development (or de-volution) of each person’s identity, but also the novel’s unique form. The novel’s form, like the individual characters themselves as I have interpreted them, embodies the conflict between preformation and ­ 7  Leach argues that the novel’s “incessantly shifting perspective” resists any “totalizing moral viewpoint” (Leach 2011, 22). Keith M.  C. O’Sullivan (2016) argues that Melmoth betrays Maturin’s own internal struggles, an inner divide. Jim Kelly reads the novel as an “ambivalent critique of the post-Revolutionary moment that runs through all of his work” (Kelly 2011, 14). In “Scottish and Irish Gothic,” Punter asserts that the novel “exposes a terrifying abyss” in which history is incoherent and “undermines the entire sense of memory and interpretation on which history is based” (Punter 2002, 120). Although an older and quite a different type of reading, Mark M. Hennelly’s article “Melmoth the Wanderer and Gothic Existentialism” reads the novel as deeply ambivalent and uncommitted to anything, but existential despair. In fact, it is a “kind of nightmare trauma in which the reader discovers several conflicting sides of himself” (Hennelly 1981, 666). Whether located in Maturin the author, Irish nationalism, history itself, or the reader, the novel’s ambivalence is a consistent thread in the scholarship.

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epigenesis, and while Maturin clearly leans toward an epigenetic frame of mind, the preformationist subtext  and the supernatural  are never quite eradicated. The novel’s concentric stories, each revealing more and more hidden identities, narratively and structurally represent the preformationist theory of encapsulation, a corollary to ovist preformation, but there are cracks in this system suggestive of epigenetic formation. Melmoth is frequently described as formed like Chinese boxes or Russian nesting dolls (Lew 1994, 176), an apt metaphor for encapsulation (also called encasement). Ovist preformationists argued that each egg harbors a fully formed being within, a germ that was housed within the egg of the previous generation, which was housed in the egg of the previous, and so on all the way back to Eve. The concentric stories of Melmoth re-create the encapsulated germs of preformation, a narrative Russian doll. The protagonist, the Wanderer, represents the hidden germ whose existence goes further back in history than any living being; his mission to get someone to change places with him can be read as a metaphor for preformation where one being replaces another from a previous generation; unfortunately for Melmoth, his purpose is consistently thwarted throughout the novel, suggesting a narrative rejection of the limits of preformation. But the challenge to preformation is not just in Melmoth’s failure to trade places with the next generation; the encasement hypothesis suggests a clear distinction between the various generations. Like the nesting dolls, even though they are all inside one another, each doll remains separate and whole. The same cannot be said for the structure of the novel, which is messy to say the least. As the critical history of the novel makes clear, the stories are not discrete. Melmoth bleeds through all of them; furthermore, it is not always clear which narrative we are inhabiting at any given time, not to mention the physical stability (or lack thereof) of the manuscripts themselves. Lew notes, “point of view changes oddly and inexplicably in the ‘Indians’ section. So far, the novel has fluctuated at least explicably, if not logically, between limited third person and first person points of view” (Lew 1994, 178). Lew goes on to explain the logical problems with the characters’ narrations as well as the “fuzzy” timeline of events, so I will not repeat those here. Others have clearly described the state of the manuscripts themselves—the asterisks, deletions, illegibility, and even physical decay.8 The narrative confusion that Lew describes delivered via a series of illegible, incomplete, and  See Koelb (2008), Lew (1994), Leach (2011).

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sometimes decaying manuscripts is suggestive of a challenge to the preformationist structure of the embedded narratives. The state of the manuscripts as well as how they are pieced together to form another whole identity—the novel—is indicative of epigenetic theories of fetal formation and the problem that epigenesists faced in explaining their theories. Like the epigenetic fetus, the novel develops organically from within—each part leads to another part, which leads to another part in ways that really cannot be separated from one another. In this way, the novel replicates the epigenetic process. Koelb, too, reads the manuscripts as bodies, arguing that the novel questions the strict line between the living and the dead: “The process of reading performs a miraculous raising of the dead as it reassembles and revivifies the dismembered body of the text” (Koelb 2008, 147). Koelb’s reading of the texts themselves as bodies (as identities) supports my reading of the novel’s structure as representative of physiological processes, specifically embryological ones. If we can read the novel as a created body, we can see the many ways in which embryology is implicated, particularly for a novel that is so self-conscious about the interrelationship between narrative and identity. The novel is also epigenetic in that it replicates the central problem of its proponents—origins are unknowable, so the search for them leads to unending narration, the definition of epigenetic literature as Müller-­ Sievers and Gigante have termed it and as I explained in the introduction. In addition, epigenesists were plagued by the problem of the supernatural, for while they attempted to explain all phenomena through physical, material causes or properties, they never were able to locate those under the microscope and were always in danger of having recourse to the supernatural. The “penetrating powers” of Buffon and the Nisus formativus (formative powers) of Blumenbach were really concepts in the imagination, not unlike God himself. Epigenesis, like the characters in Melmoth, was haunted by the supernatural. As in the history of embryology, epigenesis triumphs in Melmoth, even at the structural level, for “conception is not merely inexplicable (and therefore a hidden source of endless narration), but properly unknowable” (Müller-Sievers 1997, 20). Melmoth is, indeed, a story of conception whose inexplicability is a source of “endless narration.” The novel is “the wild and awful pursuit of an indefinite object”; that object is Melmoth who can be “known to none” (Melmoth, 25, 441). Of Melmoth, Kelly explains that “The prospect of closure, of a definitive ending of the tale, remains distant, if attainable at all” (Kelly 2011, 174). Although Kelly is arguing that the novel is a “cipher for

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unresolved historical conflict,” his interpretation of the novel remains accurate when read from a purely biological standpoint (Kelly 2011, 150). The unresolved conflict that defies closure is that which might explain the nature of physical existence itself. The nature of Melmoth’s conception, in the sense of how he came to be in the first place, is the unutterable secret that is never revealed. Although Maturin implies in the preface that it was a Faustian pact, the novel itself makes no such claim, and as Koelb reveals, we are not always certain about Melmoth’s “ontological status” (Koelb 2008, 149). The question for all of us (and the other characters) is “Who is he? Where did he come from?” (Koelb 2008, 149). The endless search for an answer to this question is what creates the “endless narration” that is characteristic of this novel and all epigenetic texts (Müller-Sievers 1997, 20). Nobody is ever sure who he is or how he came to be; his identity is only partially seen in the stories told about him, stories that are fragmented, misremembered, and incomplete. Even the ending suggests that the story can and will continue ad nauseam, for Melmoth escapes the grasp of the outer frame and will continue to create more stories. The narrative is epigenetic, creating itself from itself and subject to chaos and monstrosity. Melmoth the Wanderer instantiates the epigenetic frame of mind in its most advanced state, for the reproductive subtexts of the novel emerge at the level of form and content. While the concentric stories may dramatize the encapsulation implied by preformationist biology, the novel transforms instead into the fragmented, unending narrative characteristic epigenetic literature. As the novel traces the stories of Alonzo, Adonijah, and Immalee/Isidora, its unique structure unfolds—the stories within stories and the endless narration caused by the haunting of the supernatural— Melmoth and his nature. The novel can never explicitly identify the wanderer’s origins—his conception, his development, and his final cause or purpose. Melmoth’s nature always remains unuttered and unutterable. At the end of the novel, he tells Alonzo and John, “The secret of my destiny rests with myself” (Melmoth, 601). Nobody can know his origins or his purpose. The traditional reading is that Melmoth exchanged his soul for power on earth and for eternal life on earth; furthermore, the only way to break the curse is to change places with someone. Melmoth himself suggests as much when he is talking to Alonzo and John, but the entire discussion is framed in terms of popular reports and speculation. Phrases such as “it has been reported of me” and “it has been said” and “if this be true” cast doubt on this reading, for the masses cannot be trusted (Melmoth,

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601). The missing parts of manuscripts and illegible texts scattered throughout the stories further corroborate the uncertainty of this or any definitive reading of Melmoth’s origins, which is precisely the point. Origins can never be known, and evidence is often unreliable. Alonzo and John may see Melmoth age before their very eyes, but that “death” is merely a ruse. He has faked his death before. After a night listening to Melmoth’s diabolical shrieks, John and Alonzo enter his room, but “it was empty—not a vestige of its last inhabitant was to be traced within” (Melmoth, 606). They trace footsteps out a small door, down a staircase, and finally to a precipice over the sea. The Wanderer has escaped leaving only the fluttering of a handkerchief on a rock, a non-definitive sign of his existence. The stories will continue—a fragmented, unreliable narrative that incessantly searches for origins.

References Blumenbach, J.F. 1792. An Essay on Generation. Translated by A.  Crichton. London: T. Cadell. Bonnet, Charles. 1766. The Contemplation of Nature. London: T. Longman. Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de. 1792. Barr’s Buffon: Buffon’s Natural History. London: J. S. Barr. Erickson, Robert A. 1986. Mother Midnight: Birth, Sex, and Fate in Eighteenth-­ Century Fiction. AMS Press. Gould, Stephen Jay. 1977. Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Haller, Albrecht von. 1966. First Lines of Physiology. The Sources of Science. New York and London: Johnson Reprint Corporation. Hennelly, Mark M., Jr. 1981. Melmoth the Wanderer and Gothic Existentialism. SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 21 (4): 665–679. Kelly, Jim. 2011. Charles Maturin: Authorship, Authenticity, and the Nation. Dublin: Four Courts Press. Koelb, Clayton. 2008. The Revivifying Word: Literature, Philosophy, and the Theory of Life in Europe’s Romantic Age. Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture: Camden House. Leach, Nathaniel. 2011. The Ethics of Excess in Melmoth the Wanderer. Gothic Studies 13 (1): 21–37. Lew, Joseph W. 1994. ‘Unprepared for Sudden Transformations’: Identity and Politics in Melmoth the Wanderer. Studies in the Novel 26 (2): 173–195. Marshall, Ashley. Summer 2008. Melmoth Affirmed: Maturin’s Defense of Sacred History. Studies in Romanticism 47 (2): 121–145. Maturin, Charles. 1994. Fatal Revenge. Dover, NH: Alan Sutton Publishing, Ltd.

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———. 2000. Melmoth the Wanderer. London: Penguin Books. Morin, Christina. 2011. Charles Robert Maturin and the Haunting of Irish Romantic Fiction. Manchester University Press. Müller-Sievers, Helmut. 1997. Self-Generation: Biology, Philosophy, and Literature around 1800. Stanford University Press. O’Sullivan, Keith M.C. 2016. His Dark Ingredients: The Viscous Palimpsest of Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer. Gothic Studies 18 (2): 74–85. Punter, David. 2002. Scottish and Irish Gothic. In The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle, 105–123. Cambridge University Press. Salmon, William. 1792. The works of Aristotle, in four parts. Containing I.  His complete master-piece; displaying the Secrets of Nature in the Generation of Man. To which is added, the family physician, being approved Remedies for the several Distemper incident to the Human Body. II. His experienced midwife; absolutely necessary for Surgeons, Midwives, Nurses, and Child bearing Women. III.  His book of problems; containing various Questions and Answers relative to the State Man’s Body. IV.  His last legacy; unfolding the Secrets of Nature respecting the Generation of Man. London. Turner, Daniel. 1730. The force of the mother’s imagination upon her foetus in utero, Still further considered. London: J.  Walthoe, R.  Wilkin, J. and J.  Bonwicke, S. Birt, J. Clarke, T. Ward and E. Wicksteed.

CHAPTER 6

“Something Scarcely Tangible”; Or, James Hogg’s Confessions

I account all the rest either dreaming or madness; or…a religious parable, on purpose to illustrate something scarcely tangible, but to which he seems to have attached great weight. —The Editor, Confessions of a Justified Sinner (236)

Published in 1824, just four years after Melmoth the Wanderer and toward the end of the popularity of the initial phase of British Gothic, James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is another representative Gothic novel of the period that offers an important example of epigenetic literature. Hogg’s Gothic is undoubtedly distinct from Radcliffe’s, Shelley’s, and Maturin’s, and yet it shares with each of them an obsession with identity and the supernatural that marks it clearly as Gothic and, in the context of this argument, as epigenetic. Not unlike the works of Radcliffe, Shelley, and Maturin, Hogg’s novel narrates a conflict between reason and superstition, between science and religion, between the natural and the supernatural. This conflict centers, not surprisingly, on the identity and origins of the “justified sinner.” As with Maturin’s work, the role of the supernatural in Hogg remains a constant, uncomfortable

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. P. Edelman, Embryology and the Rise of the Gothic Novel, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73648-4_6

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presence that is never fully solved and that leads to a confusing narrative in which the story never really ends. Unlike the previous three works I have treated, however, the epigenetic foundations of Hogg’s narrative emerge primarily as an anti-preformationist narrative articulated through the Calvinist backdrop of the plot.1 The purported Editor of this strange manuscript announces that this story is perhaps, in the words of the confessor himself, “a religious parable” designed “on purpose to illustrate something scarcely tangible” (Confessions, 236).2 This “scarcely tangible” idea is, I would like to argue, a parable of preformation, for it is, like the Gothic novels I have been discussing, a narrative centered on a mysterious identity that is never revealed but one in which identity is formed almost completely from an external, supernatural force. Ismael Velasco argues that the novel demonstrates a conflict between two modes of historical discourse: history and tradition (Velasco 2006, 38). Velasco links this conflict to an issue of identity, both Scotland’s and Hogg’s: “the unresolved and final impasse is intentional, aimed, not at furnishing answers, but at exposing tensions inevitably present in an ambivalent Scotland, unsure of her own identity…much like Hogg himself” (Velasco 2006, 38). Interestingly, Velasco argues that this conflict registers itself quite clearly in the novel’s structure: “the conflict between differing forms of historical consciousness is experienced as conflict in the very structure of the story” (Velasco 2006, 40). Velasco’s reading, although dealing with a different set of binaries, supports what I have been arguing about biological identity and its manifestation in the Gothic mode: the attempt to identify origins affects the structure of the text. The heart of the novel rests on biological origins beginning with the questionable paternity of the “justified sinner” and traces his demise caused by the influence of an external force or power that is presumed to be supernatural. The Calvinist backdrop of the novel, with its emphasis on double-­ predestination, leads to the novel’s horrific events, most notably the complete loss of identity of Robert Colwan, the sinner of the novel’s title. The novel tells the story of a battle between internal and external controls, between Robert Colwan and Gil-Martin. In this way, the novel can be read as an allegory of preformationist biology and its effects on individual identity—madness and suicide in this case. Not unlike Alonzo who loses his identity within the machine of the church in Maturin’s novel, Robert 1  Karen M. McConnell (2011) discusses Hogg’s work in the context of Antinomianism and Arminianism. 2  See Hogg (2002, 236). All references to The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner will be cited parenthetically in the text as Confessions.

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Colwan loses his identity in the face of a supernatural force greater than he. In Maturin’s work, though, identity remains intact because the individual will and its epigenetic biology persist, whereas in Hogg’s novel preformation wins the day and identity is completely lost even to the man himself. The novel as a whole, though, supports—through the negative example of Colwan and through the Editor’s scientific worldview—the more democratic, scientific point of view of epigenesis.3 Karen M. McConnell argues that Hogg’s work is a battle between Antinomianism and Enlightenment thought and “offers for critique not only the Antinomian fanaticism espoused by Gil-Martin, but also the questionable enlightened objectivity of the Editor” (McConnell 2011, 22). Nicholas Williams argues similarly in that he suggests that Wringham’s radical beliefs and the modern, scientific point of view are actually two sides of the same coin. Both rely on Enlightenment logic and have a “dialectical interdependency” in which both are found wanting (Williams 2014, 32). Williams argues that the conflict between religion and reason in the novel “fails to resolve into a progressive narrative in which modernity gradually overcomes belief” (Williams 2014, 33). Velasco agrees: Hogg “casts doubt” on both history and tradition and does not resolve the question regarding which is superior; both are problematic (Velasco 2006, 39). While there may be some critique of Enlightenment rationality, the novel overwhelmingly rejects systems in which control is external and equates that control with a complete loss of identity, siding a bit more with the Editor’s scientific worldview than with the sinner’s.

“Stern Doctrines” Versus “Free Principles” The questionable paternity of Hogg’s famous memoir writer lays the foundation for the rivalry that leads to Robert Colwan’s ultimate demise by an external, supernatural force. The novel begins with the Editor’s Narrative, wherein we learn that George Dalcastle has married Rabina Orde, daughter of Baillie Orde of Glasgow, a pious woman who subscribes to the “stern doctrines of the reformers” as opposed to the “free principles 3  Kelly E.  Battles (2012) has written an intriguing analysis of Hogg’s treatment of the Editor as a critique of the literary cultural elite, particularly John Wilson and John Gibson Lockhart of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, arguing that their use of food metaphors in their vicious reviews was designed to maintain their higher status through controlling the definition of “good taste.”

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cherished by the court party” (Confessions, 6). The religious conflict between the Lord and Lady Dalcastle causes Lady Dalcastle to spurn marital relations with her husband. Although she does have one son by him, George Colwan, her second son, Robert Colwan, is purportedly the result of an affair with Rev. Robert Wringhim, her advisor and constant companion who  stokes  her hatred of Dalcastle for his lack of religious gravitas. The Laird of Dalcastle rejects the second son, Robert, who then goes to live with Rev. Wringhim, who treats him like a son. Early in the memoir, the logic of preformationist biology asserts itself in a brief conversation between Rev. Wringhim and a servant, John Barnet. On a previous occasion, John had implied to Robert that he very much resembled Rev. Wringhim, who later confronts John and asks, “But did you ever say to any one, that he resembled me, and fathered himself well enough?” (Confessions, 101). When John confesses that he said that several times, Rev. Wringhim provides a preformationist answer: “But, John, there are many natural reasons for such likenesses, besides that of consanguinity. They depend much on the thoughts and affections of the mother; and, it is probably, that the mother of this boy, being deserted by her worthless husband, having turned her thoughts on me, as likely to be her protector, may have caused this striking resemblance” (Confessions, 101). McConnell argues that Wringham’s response is evidence of a “rationale that looks suspiciously like Hume’s moral philosophy,” arguing that this man of faith is, hypocritically, turning to enlightened thinking as an explanation (McConnell 2011, 25). This turn to Hume is, McConnell suggests, evidence of Hogg’s critique of religious fanaticism. While that argument is plausible, it seems just as likely, if not more so, that Wringham was evoking the popular belief in the powers of the maternal imagination. Family resemblance was one of the key points of contention between epigenesists and preformationists. Epigenesists asserted that preformationists could not satisfactorily explain why a child looked like the other parent, the one who did not contain the preformed germ. To rebut, preformationists could argue that the maternal imagination affected the fetus. In this passage, Wringhim asserts just that: Lady Dalcastle had her mind on him when she conceived the child, thus Robert looks like Rev. Wringhim and not Laird Dalcastle. Wringhim goes on to provide “evidence,” which is very much similar to a passage in Aristotle’s Masterpiece (and many other obstetrical texts): “I have known a lady, John, who was delivered of a black-amoor child, merely from the circumstance of having got a start by

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the sudden entrance of her negro servant, and not being able to forget him for several hours” (Confessions, 101). While certainly not all preformationists made this claim (neither Bonnet nor Haller did), it was an idea in wide circulation that would have helped a preformationist address the problem of family resemblance. Regardless of which specific scientists did or did not make this claim, Hogg’s deployment of this argument in association with Calvinist theology evokes the absolute control of a higher power implicit in preformationist biology, which contrasts directly with the Editor’s more scientific approach, an approach not unlike Radcliffe’s more rational point of view in her novels.

The Editor’s Scientific Narrative The Editor’s Narrative, both at the beginning and at the end of the memoirs, frames the work within a scientific mindset that is more in line with epigenetic biology with its focus on physical evidence and the senses rather than supernatural explanations.4 The descriptive title of the work states that the Editor includes a “detail of curious traditionary facts, and other evidence” suggesting the attempt to ground the story in unbiased facts. This more scientific point of view is underscored by some comments made both by the narrator and by two characters in the first part of the novel. When describing the moment that George Colwan sees a halo of light in the mountains, the narrator explains, “That was a scene that would have entranced the man of science with delight, but which the uninitiated and sordid man would have regarded less than the mole rearing up his hill in silence and in darkness” (Confessions, 40–41). At this moment, the narrator draws a distinction between how the man of science would interpret this phenomenon and how someone ignorant and superstitious might. The scientist or natural philosopher would appreciate this phenomenon as an explainable part of nature, whereas the ignorant and uninitiated, such as Wringhim and Robert Colwan, would turn blindly to supernatural explanations. The entire narrative is set up as a balance between the “traditionary facts” presented in the Editor’s Narrative and the repetition of those facts in the memoir from the sinner’s point of view. The importance 4  The Editor’s Narrative is not without complication as it has been clearly linked to Hogg’s fraught relationship with Blackwood’s Magazine. My focus is the novel’s scientific contexts, which  offer a more positive, though not uncomplicated, reading of the Editor’s point of view. See Battles (2012) and George (2012).

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of scientific facts is reinforced again in a comment from Mrs. Logan to Mrs. Calvert, an eyewitness to the murder of George Dalcastle. Logan says to Mrs. Calvert, “Whose word, or whose reasoning can convince us against our own senses?” (Confessions, 81). At the end of the novel, the Editor takes pieces of evidence from the excavated grave of the dead body upon which he found the memoirs. He says, like a good scientist, “I brought samples of all along with me,” as if he were going to test them in order to legitimize them (Confessions, 233). The Editor’s scientific frame of mind, which is also underscored by the exacting details he gives about the corpse (including noting the existence of fresh mud on the soles of the shoes), is in stark contrast to the ignorance and superstition exhibited by Rev. Wringhim, particularly regarding Robert’s resemblance to him. The Editor’s focus on physical evidence and proof highlights, by contrast, the darkness and superstition that underlie the Calvinist theology of the main characters in the memoir, thus serving to challenge the preformationist biology upon which it relies. At the same time, like all Gothic novels and like epigenetic biology itself, the supernatural is always uncomfortably present. McConnell argues that Hogg offers a critique of the Editor’s scientific point of view by pointing out two instances where he seems to rely on the supernatural: when he calls the halo at Arthur’s Seat the “little wee ghost of the rainbow” and at the end when he succumbs to superstition saying that he will not change the manuscript due to a “curse pronounced by the writer” on anyone who does (Confessions, 41, 235).5 Although the Editor does contradict himself in these superstitious moments, the Editor’s struggle with the supernatural can be read as mirroring the epigenetic struggle with vitalism wherein its proponents usually ended up resorting to non-scientific concepts like “powers” and “forces.” The moments of doubt in the novel only underscore the very tension that is characteristic of an epigenetic point of view. For Williams, Hogg’s novel exposes the fantasy of liberal individualism, an identity created from internal forces, as an “unsustainable ideological myth” (Williams 2014, 36). Although Williams is arguing that the source of religious belief cannot definitively be identified as coming from within the self, his argument applies equally well to biology. Epigenesists could only speculate about, but never discover, the source of the biological self. Despite this uncertain ground, Hogg’s work favors the epigenetic in its absolute rejection of preformationist ideology. The memoir’s references to predestination 5

 See McConnell (2011).

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evoke the preformationist biology, and more specifically the theory of encapsulation, upon which it relies. Robert says to his brother, George, in the Editor’s Narrative, “It was foreordained that you should cherish them [abandoned notions and principles], and that they should be the ruin of your soul and body, before the world was framed” (Confessions, 45). Although Robert is here attempting to “save” his brother, he assures him that he is eternally damned and has been since before creation. Robert reinforces this point again to Wringhim when he says that his brother’s “body and soul have been, from all eternity, consigned over to everlasting destruction” (Confessions, 98). According to Robert Colwan’s Calvinist theology, his brother has been damned for eternity, even before he existed physically.

Robert Colwan’s Preformationist Nightmare The references to God’s will and predestination increase significantly as the memoirs progress, and it is within this context that Robert Colwan loses his own identity in the face of a supernatural, external power. The more preformationist his stance, the more he loses himself as an individual. Although this power is purportedly the opposite of a good God, the novel, read as an allegory of embryology, becomes an argument in favor of the epigenetic frame of mind, for the speaker of the memoir is wholly given over to preformationist ideology, which leads to his physical, emotional, and psychological demise. When first getting to know Gil-Martin (who is nameless through most of the story), Robert wants to know if the stranger has the same faith. The speaker reports, “I asked if he believed in the eternal and irrevocable decrees of God, regarding the salvation and condemnation of all mankind?” (Confessions, 112). Robert and the stranger believe wholeheartedly in double-predestination, which becomes the main reason that the stranger is able to convince Robert to commit murder, for if he is one of the elect, God cannot withdraw his favor. Robert asserts that it is ridiculous to try to save the damned, for “God had from all eternity decided the fate of every individual that was to be born of woman” (Confessions, 116). God’s “act of absolute predestination” makes it quite unnecessary for Robert to follow moral laws or to attempt the salvation of others (Confessions, 116). Robert’s assertion that God knows what will happen to every person “from all eternity” is suggestive of preformation. “Every individual” (and his or her complete identity) was

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already in existence at the beginning of time; they thus cannot create their own identity after being born of woman. The more that Robert comes under the influence of Gil-Martin, the more he loses his sense of self, his autonomy. Their relationship is depicted as a conflict between external and internal controls, not unlike that between preformation and epigenesis. Robert describes his first acquaintance with Gil-Martin, after he learns he is one of the Elect, as “the most important period of my existence,—the period that has modelled my character, and influenced every action of my life” (Confessions, 108). Upon first seeing the stranger, he explains, “I felt a sort of invisible power that drew me towards him” and later, when he sees him reading, he feels a “sensation resembling a stroke of electricity” (Confessions, 110, 117). This “invisible power,” while nominally similar to the epigenetic appeal to undefined powers and forces, is much more like the preformationist spark of life or being imposed by an external, intelligent power. God-like, Gil-­ Martin has an “energy” impossible to resist (Confessions, 122). Robert writes, “my powers were inadequate to the task” (Confessions, 121). Any references to his own reason or his own soul throughout the narrative indicate his inability to resist this outside influence, this powerful personality that eventually takes complete control. At first, the control is a physical presence, a god-like omnipresence that Gil-Martin uses to convince Robert to harass and murder his brother, but eventually this presence leads to both psychological and physical control. At first, Robert writes, “he was constant to me as my shadow” (Confessions, 125). He is always there, often at the exact moment when Robert is about to make a choice different from what Gil-Martin wants. He gets inside Robert’s mind, and “he [Gil-Martin] soon perceived a leaning to his will on my part” (Confessions, 139). Although Robert often resists, the urges that agree with the stranger’s ideas start to come from inside himself. For example, in reference to interrupting George’s tennis match, Robert writes, “I found myself moved by the spirit within me so to do” (Confessions, 140). The “spirit” within him is no longer his own. An external force takes over, and Robert relinquishes his identity. By the end of the confessions, we learn that Gil-Martin has been assuming Robert’s identity and committing all kinds of crimes without Robert’s knowledge. Robert has no memory of these events, but multiple witnesses assert that they saw him perform these acts. Robert writes, “I generally conceived myself to be two people” and refers to Gil-Martin as “my second self” (Confessions, 145). He has completely lost his own identity, for as Gil-Martin says, “Our

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essences are one, our bodies and spirits being united, so, that I am drawn towards you as by magnetism, and wherever you are, there must my presence be with you” (Confessions, 213). They are no longer separate beings. By the end of the confessions, Robert has completely lost his own identity and no longer recognizes himself: “I was a being incomprehensible to myself. Either I had a second self, who transacted business in my likeness, or else my body was at times possessed by a spirit over which it had no controul” (Confessions, 170). He is no longer master of himself. Having succumbed completely to an external source of power, Robert’s loss of self illustrates the logical outcome of a preformationist biology. Robert’s complete loss of identity is the manifestation of preformationist biology, which creates the monstrosity and horror of no identity at all. The narrative proper tells a preformationist story that, due to the evil that ensues, offers an argument against preformation. Both Robert and Gil-­ Martin are described as demons or monsters. When George sits at the top of Arthur’s Seat, in an effort to escape his brother’s constant presence, he sees a strange vision that the Editor describes as follows: George conceived it to be a spirit. He could conceive it to be nothing else; and he took it for some horrid demon by which he was haunted, that had assumed the features of his brother in every lineament, but in taking on itself the human form, had miscalculated dreadfully on the size, and presented itself thus to him in a blown-up, dilated frame of embodied air, exhaled from the caverns of death or the regions of devouring fire. (Confessions, 42)

His brother does appear as George runs away, and they fight. Based on the rest of the narrative, this presence is Gil-Martin who has taken the form of Robert, which he does more and more toward the end of the confessions. Gil-Martin is a “horrid demon” in his shapeshifting abilities, but Robert is also described as fiend-like and in very similar terms. Mrs. Calvert says of the young Wringhim: “I never in my life saw any human being…whom I thought so like a fiend. If a demon could inherit flesh and blood, that youth is precisely such a being as I could conceive that demon to be. The depth and the malignity of his eye is [sic] hideous. His breath is like the airs from a charnel house, and his flesh seems fading from his bones, as if the worm that never dies were gnawing it away already” (Confessions, 86). This passage is remarkably similar to the one describing Gil-Martin. They are both fiends in human form and smell of the grave. Throughout the confessions, the reader learns that Gil-Martin is able to take on the

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appearance of anyone he likes. The individual who becomes possessed is the one whose nature completely changes and commits acts he would never think of doing on his own. In this way, Hogg suggests that external powers create monstrous identities because those identities go against their own nature; they, like Robert, can no longer listen to their internal voice.

The Monstrous Form of Confessions The horrors created by external control support, by contrast, an epigenetic stance, which is underscored in this novel by the narrative structure. As I have been arguing, unknowable identities coupled with narratives that threaten to continue forever are key features of epigenetic texts. Robert’s identity, as the son of Rev. Wringhim, is never fully clarified; however, there is much evidence to support it. Even more importantly, the identity of Gil-Martin is never clarified. Is he the devil? Is he just another part of Robert himself? Is he a figment of Robert’s crazed imagination? None of these questions are ever answered, nor can ever be answered, for origins, without recourse to supernatural explanations, are never fully knowable. Thus, any narrative centered on them is subject to “endless narration” (Müller-Sievers 1997, 20). In terms of narrative structure, Hogg’s novel is both a repetition and an endless circle because the reader comes to the beginning of the story, the moment of the found manuscript, at the end of the novel. This part of the story is presented as a “sequel,” when in reality it is the mode by which the Editor becomes interested in the story to begin with. If we follow the narrative logic of the story, the ending returns us to the beginning of the confessions in a kind of narrative ouroboros. Elements of the Editor’s Narrative at the beginning, particularly with regard to the tennis match, are repeated in the confessions with more detail. Mrs. Calvert’s tale of seeing the fight and the murder from her window is later repeated and confirmed in the confessions with the mysterious identities somewhat explained. These details lend themselves to a confirmation of the narrative’s truth, supporting the more scientifically minded framework provided by the Editor. The Editor introduces this “original document of a most singular nature” at the end of his brief history of the Colwans, but does not explain how he found it until the very end of the novel (Confessions, 89). He found the manuscript on the dead body of, presumably, Robert Colwan, who had committed suicide. The Editor exhumed the body after reading the story of a “suicide” written by

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James Hogg and printed in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1823, 150 years after the beginning of Robert’s memoirs. The novel ends at the beginning, not only of the Editor’s story, but also of Robert’s, creating a never-ending loop, the “endless narration” of epigenetic literature. The never-ending loop of the storyline is underscored by the increasing confusion surrounding Robert’s identity, which is, not surprisingly, caught up in association with the written word. Just as Walpole, Shelley, and Maturin did, Hogg develops a metaphor for life/origins/identity in which ontological origins are equated with aesthetic ones. Walpole equated the creation of the Gothic with the creation of a new species. Shelley, too, used biological metaphors for her novel about biological origins. Similarly, Adonijah, in Maturin’s novel, comes to represent the relationship between an ultimately unknowable identity and the text. In Hogg’s novel, Robert and the novel itself become inextricably intertwined. The nature of our anti-hero and his stranger companion Gil-Martin is not revealed at the end; in fact, the question of identity becomes even more complicated. Interestingly, as Robert’s identity becomes more and more wrapped up in Gil-Martin’s, he ends up in a printing house where he determines to tell his story. In an effort to escape Gil-Martin’s oppressive presence, he attempts to regain his identity through the writing of the narrative, but typical of texts that seek origins, the narrative quickly spins out of control. Enamored of the idea of printing his ideas, he works tirelessly: “I put my work to the press, and wrote early and late” (Confessions, 207). After he prints the first copy, he recalls, “The first sheet was wrought off; and I never shall forget how my heart exulted when at the printing house this day, I saw what numbers of my works were to go abroad among mankind” (Confessions, 207). He even indicates that he would not put his “assumed” name of Elliot on the work, presumably wanting to put his real name to it, solidifying it as an extension of his identity. Mr. Watson hears about the work and burns it all except one copy. Although Mr. Watson destroys the capacity for the work to be mechanically reproduced in multiple copies, Robert retains the first print copy and continually adds to it by hand. The multiple date entries at the end of the manuscript suggest that his story will continue despite his attempts to end it. On 3 August 1712, he wishes farewell to the reader, but the story continues again on August 24. The end of the August 30 entry says, “My last hour is arrived,” and yet we have another entry on September 7 (Confessions, 221). Throughout these final entries, through September 18, he implies that death is imminent, but it never comes. The September 8 entry says he was “hung by the locks over

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a yawning chasm,” and after praying “the tremendous prayer” he was “instantly at liberty” (Confessions, 223). These final moments suggest that he has sold his soul to the devil (or, rather, to Gil-Martin whose nature is really never confirmed, but only presumed by the reader). The next day, he says again, “Still am I living” (Confessions, 223). Despite the speaker’s curse on those who “alter or amend” the manuscript, the story will continue ad nauseam (Confessions, 223). The narrative evidence of eternal stories is supported by the body that the Editor finds in the grave, the body on which he finds the original manuscript. Although the body in the grave suggests a clear ending in death, it is, despite the smashed in head, oddly fresh, suggesting that this life continues somewhere. When the Editor exhumes the body, it betrays signs of being completely fresh and even having recently walked the earth, despite having been buried for over a century. The clothes on the body, although of a style 200 years out of fashion, were “all as fresh as any those we wore” (Confessions, 233). Even more significantly, on the sole of the shoe is fresh cow dung: “it was firm, green, and fresh; and proved that he had been working in a byre” (Confessions, 233). The fresh mud on the soles suggests, perhaps, that the body gets up and walks around. The bonnet he is wearing is not of the old style and is the type that is “still seen in the west of Scotland” (Confessions, 233). These details indicate the continuation of Robert’s story, his immortality in some kind of vampire-like state. The continuation of the narrative in the body and the body in the narrative foregrounds the nature of this text as epigenetic. As I hope to have shown in this analysis, Robert’s struggle to maintain his own identity in the face of the external, god-like power of Gil-Martin allegorizes preformationist biology. Implicitly supported by the theology of double-predestination, preformationist biology creates the self completely from the outside, which, as we see through Robert’s story, means there is no identity at all. Robert does not know himself, nor does anyone else. The memoirs trace his complete loss of self as Robert eventually commits crimes of which he has no recollection and then must take on a different identity in an attempt to escape his tormentor. Although Robert clearly fears Gil-Martin, the “argument” of the entire narrative essentially supports his theology; it is, after all, a “justification.” Despite his suffering, Robert continually throughout the narrative claims sound reasoning for his behavior, signaling Gil-Martin’s complete takeover of Robert’s identity. The novel as a whole, though, with the scientifically minded Editor’s Narrative as a frame and the confusing conclusion about the nature of

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Gil-Martin/Robert as well as the circular, unending qualities of the narrative make it yet another example of epigenetic literature, albeit one that allegorizes the monstrosities of preformation.

References Battles, Kelly E. 2012. Bad Taste, Gothic Bodies, and Subversive Aesthetics in Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Essays in Romanticism 19: 49–64. https://doi.org/10.3828/eir.2012.19.5. George, Jacqueline. 2012. Avatars in Edinburgh: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and the Second Life of Hogg’s Ettrick Shepherd. Romanticism on the Net 62: 1–29. Hogg, James. 2002. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. New York: New York Review of Books. McConnell, Karen M. 2011. Rationally Murderous: Antinomianism, Arminianism, and Enlightenment Thought in James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Studies in Hogg and His World 21: 22–33. Müller-Sievers, Helmut. 1997. Self-Generation: Biology, Philosophy, and Literature around 1800. Stanford University Press. Velasco, Ismael. 2006. Paradoxical Readings: Reason, Religion and Tradition in James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Scottish Studies Review 7 (1): 38–52. Williams, Nicholas. 2014. ‘The Liberty Wherewith We Are Made Free’: Belief and Liberal Individualism in James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Studies in Hogg and His World 24: 32–41.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion: Gothic Offspring; or, “The Qualitas Occulta”

In the previous chapters, I have attempted to show the ways in which touchstones of early Gothic fiction reflect their embryological contexts, arguing that epigenesis is both biological and aesthetic. The “epigenetic turn,” as Müller-Sievers (1997) calls it, accounts for the proliferation of the genre itself, particularly since it has demonstrated in the last couple of hundred years that it is, in the words of Catherine Spooner, “relentlessly adaptive and will continue to find new outlets and hybrid forms” (Spooner 2017, 10). The Gothic, like no other genre, has taken on multiple forms whose direct lineage is easily traceable partly because of its emphasis on biological origins, creation, and reproduction. Whereas domestic and other types of novels have also evolved over the decades and centuries, they are not concerned with essential questions about life and origins, which seem to repeat from generation to generation and to morph alongside developments in the reproductive sciences. This centralization of origins and identity is what makes Gothic, horror, science fiction, and other descendants of the genre simultaneously hard to define and immediately recognizable. Their fundamental biological and aesthetic concerns are the same. As I stated in the introduction, this book attempts “to explain why [the Gothic] has endured when other popular forms, such as the Newgate novel or the silver-fork novel or cousins like the sensation and the ‘blood’ novel, had their brief lives and disappeared” (Day 1985, 5). To that end, I would like to offer some brief reflections on the most popular genres that © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. P. Edelman, Embryology and the Rise of the Gothic Novel, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73648-4_7

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are descendants of the Gothic in order to suggest potential areas where this conversation about the connections between the Gothic and reproductive discourse can continue.

Diversity of Identities: The Fiction of Reproductive Technologies Although science fiction is certainly as diverse as “classic” Gothic, it does seem that some of its most compelling narratives are those that focus on reproductive technologies. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) is, of course, one of the first to explore the implications of intervening in the “natural” process of conception and development. More recent works like Dutch author Stefan Brijs’ The Angel Maker (2005; translated into English in 2008) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) address the issue of human cloning. Brijs’ novel is most akin to early Gothic in that its main character, Dr. Victor Hoppe, is an updated version of Victor Frankenstein as Jerrold Hogle has pointed out (Hogle 2011). Hoppe, an embryologist who spent the first few years of his life in a group home run by abusive nuns, creates clones of himself, a set of triplets whom he treats as mere experiments. Even Victor Frankenstein has more compassion for the creature than Dr. Hoppe does for his own children. The novel, not unlike early Gothic, critiques both science and superstition. The ultimate message seems to be, as it was for writers from Walpole to Hogg, that conformity and uniformity are the real monsters, which is an extension of the implications of preformation. In a preformationist world, biological identity is predetermined in a harmonious, closed system; any change, from a birth defect to a new species, was deemed monstrous because it did not conform. Epigenesis allowed for diversity, for individuals to develop their own identities, for new species to emerge and be embraced. Novels like Brijs’ continue the engagement with reproductive discourse, particularly the kind that values difference and the acknowledgment of new identities. The novel presents scientific controversies such as the first “test-tube baby,” Louise Joy Brown, in the late 1970s; stem-cell research; and animal testing. In addition to exploring the assets and liabilities of the reproductive sciences, Brijs’ novel comments on important social issues surrounding reproduction, including  ones that embrace diversity. The Angel Maker features a lesbian couple who wants to have children so badly that they allow Dr. Hoppe to experiment on them, convinced by promises that he can make a child from their DNA. Although

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that goes horribly wrong, the value of what reproductive science offers them pushes back against any warnings that science is “bad.” Gothic novels like Brijs’ offer scholars evidence of the ongoing connection between the Gothic aesthetic and reproductive discourse. Like the fiction of the early Gothic, most obviously Frankenstein, contemporary Gothic, in the form of science fiction, addresses the social, moral, and cultural implications of reproductive technologies. While these fictions have come to be synonymous with warnings against the potential harm of scientific advances, as I hoped to show with Gothic novels of the eighteenth- and nineteenth- centuries, these fictions are more supportive of progressive science than otherwise. The epigenetic subtexts of the major novels of Walpole, Radcliffe, Shelley, Maturin, and Hogg attest to a preference for the more scientifically advanced theories of the day and their implications for identity. Brijs’ novel does the same. Although the vast majority of the narrative provides a bleak picture of scientific breakthroughs, the real problems are the Catholic Church, the institution of academia, and Dr. Hoppe himself. The moment of hope offered by the text is directly related to our expanding understanding of varieties of identity. Hoppe’s science offers the lesbian couple hope that they can conceive. Whereas gender identities beyond the male/female binary would have been considered “monstrous” in a preformationist world (and remains so in some circles today, unfortunately), contemporary Gothic reflects the advancements in science that valorize, as epigenesis did in its day, the varieties of forms offered by the natural world, including not only hybrids, but also totally new species.

Hauntings in the Body: Supernatural Fiction Just as early Gothic wrestled with the supernatural, so too do contemporary versions of Gothic. Two of the most common subgenres of Gothic are science fiction and the fiction of the supernatural (oftentimes, but not always, synonymous with horror). The fiction of the supernatural often deals with non-human identities, bringing us to the era of the post-human. One has only to think about classics like Rosemary’s Baby (1967 novel by Ira Levin; 1968 film by Roman Polanski), Stephen King’s Carrie (1974), the Alien franchise (1979–2017), the 1976 Richard Donner film The Omen, and more recently Hereditary (2018). A key feature of early Gothic is, of course, the supernatural. While there were few stories of interspecies coupling (e.g., Isidora in Melmoth procreates with a supernatural being

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who was once human), the stories obviously engage with the effect of the supernatural on human identity and development. In the eighteenth century, the role of the supernatural in reproduction was hotly under debate; this debate manifested itself in Gothic fiction, whose stories develop around the conflict between the natural and the supernatural, between reason and superstition. Though the Gothic “classics” presented the effect of the supernatural primarily on existing bodies, the supernatural played a key role in the development of identity. Twentieth- and twenty-first-­ century descendants of Gothic fiction often feature alien and supernatural conceptions, revealing continued anxieties not only about the role of the supernatural in conception, but also about the very real haunting of one’s ancestors in the form of genetic inheritance. These types of fictions are asking similar questions as classic Gothic stories like Maturin’s Melmoth and Hogg’s Confessions. What is the supernatural, and does it exist? What role does the supernatural play in our conception? Although science appears to have “figured it out,” conception and birth remain the ultimate uncanny—the most everyday thing in the world is enveloped in mystery. While science has certainly gotten more accurate, has it really identified the “force” that starts this process? Science has broken down the process into finer and finer detail (cells, cell parts, DNA, etc.) and can accurately describe what happens on the cellular level in ways that eighteenth-century embryologists could not, but there remains the question of exactly what starts the process. Why does a fat cell behave the way it does? Why does a blood cell behave differently? One can point to enzymes and proteins and whatever else, but there really is no identifiable First Cause. In addition to this ultimately unanswerable question, we also understand DNA, which makes it painfully clear that we do, in fact, harbor parts of our ancestors in our bodies, and sometimes those parts can wreak havoc whether it’s a genetic predisposition to cancer, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, or something else altogether. In works like Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen, the children are offspring of the devil and purported to be the Antichrist; these characters implicitly evoke the question of what monstrosities are harbored in our DNA. In The Omen, Damien looks human, but has evil powers; through the course of the film, his father, Robert Thorn (played by Gregory Peck) learns that Damien is the Antichrist and has an inhuman mother who appears to him as a jackal when he and Keith Jennings, the photographer who helps reveal the mystery to Thorn, dig up the grave of Thorn’s biological son. In Rosemary’s Baby, Rosemary is raped by Satan in a ritual facilitated by her

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husband, Guy Woodhouse, who befriends a coven of witches who live in their building. The question of genetics is more explicit in this work. Toward the end of the novel, she enters the room where her baby is lying in a black bassinet, complete with an upside-down crucifix hanging over him. She looks in and sees his “golden-[yellow]” eyes and screams, “What have you done to his eyes?” (Levin 1967, 258). At this moment, she learns he is not a human baby meant for sacrifice in the coven, but the son of the devil himself. Roman says to her, “Satan is His Father, not Guy” (Levin 1967, 258). Shortly after, she contemplates killing him, but changes her mind because she convinces herself that she can be a positive influence: “He couldn’t be all bad, he just couldn’t. Even if he was half Satan, wasn’t he half her as well, half decent, ordinary, sensible, human being? If she worked against them, exerted a good influence to counteract their bad one,” then he might not be completely evil (Levin 1967, 267). Her argument of course evokes the nature/nurture debate implicit in Frankenstein, but it is also suggestive, on the flip side, of the “evils” that might be haunting our DNA. Although Carrie is not literal demon spawn like Damien and Rosemary’s baby (though her mother certainly believes she’s the offspring of sin), King’s novel  (1964) evokes similar controversies about what’s lurking in our DNA. The entire novel is pieced together in a series of newspaper articles, interviews, and government reports about what happened on prom night, each with a distinctly scientific point of view. This scientific point of view conflicts with Carrie’s mother’s excessively religious point of view, one that evokes the classic Gothic religious oppression in works by Maturin and Hogg (King 1964). Not surprisingly, it was in this same decade, the 1960s, that scientists “Robert W.  Holley, Har Gobind Khorana, Heinrich Matthaei, Marshall W.  Nirenberg, and colleagues crack[ed] the genetic code,” a discovery that led to not only the development of molecular genetics, but also the popular conception of how DNA works (Dahm 2005). In addition to evoking the problem of “monstrous” genes in the body, these stories also point to the controversy of abortion (Valerius 2005). One of the fundamental questions in this debate is, of course, “when does life begin?” but perhaps even more fundamental to that is, “what is life?”—the same question at stake in eighteenth-­century embryology. Both science fiction and supernatural fiction dramatize anxieties associated with our current knowledge about human reproduction, knowledge that is always veiled partly in mystery. The Gothic as a genre can be read epigenetically in its curious ability to shape and reshape itself into multiple forms. The clear recognizability of

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the Gothic, despite its many faces, is due, in part, to its intimate connection with reproductive questions, which have been implicit in Gothic aesthetics from Walpole’s dead embryos of thought to M.  W. Shelley’s hideous progeny. This study has not fully traced the implications of this argument for the Gothic and its spinoffs—science fiction, horror, thriller— but I hope that the final thoughts offered in these concluding remarks will inspire additional scholarship that addresses how the newest species of Gothic have been shaped by modern embryology. Gothic fiction continues with such power and force because the cause of our origins will forever remain, in the words of J. F. Blumenbach (1792), the qualitas occulta.

References Aster, Ari. 2018. Hereditary: A24. Blumenbach, J.F. 1792. An Essay on Generation. Trans. A.  Crichton. London: T. Cadell. Brijs, Stephen. 2008. The Angel Maker. Trans. Hester Velmans. New  York: Penguin Books. Dahm, Ralf. 2005. Friedrich Miescher and the Discovery of DNA. Developmental Biology. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ydbio.2004.11.028. Day, William Patrick. 1985. In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study of Gothic Fantasy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Donner, Richard, Mike Hodges, Don Taylor, Graham Baker, and Dominique Othenin-Girard. 1976. The Omen: 20th Century Studios. Hogle, Jerrold E. 2011. From Asperger’s Syndrome to Monosexual Reproduction: Stefan Brijs’ The Angel Maker and Its Transformations of Frankenstein. In 21st Century Gothic: Great Gothic Novels Since 2000, ed. Danel Olsen, 1–13. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, Inc. Huxley, Aldous. 1932. Brave New World. Chatto & Windus. Ishiguro, Kazuo. 2005. Never Let Me Go. New York: Vintage Books. King, Stephen. 1964. Carrie. Reprint, New York: Anchor Books, 2011. Levin, Ira. l967. Rosemary’s Baby. New York: Pegasus Books. Müller-Sievers, Helmut. 1997. Self-Generation: Biology, Philosophy, and Literature Around 1800. Stanford University Press. Spooner, Catherine. 2017. Post-Millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic. London: Bloomsbury. Valerius, Karyn. 2005. Rosemary’s Baby, Gothic Pregnancy, and Fetal Subjects. College Literature 32 (3): 116–135.

Index1

A Abernethy, John, 22, 89, 111 Agrippa, 39, 94–100 Albertus Magnus, 96 Alien (film franchise, 1979-2017), 171 Allard, James Robert, 5 Aristotle embryological theories of, 15, 23–25, 131n3 Aristotle’s Masterpiece [Salmon, William], 69, 93, 97, 99, 131, 131n3, 132, 147, 158 Arney, William Ray, 4n3, 99 B Barash, Carol, 97n7 Battles, Kelly E., 157n3, 159n4 Beddoes, Thomas, 110

Bewell, Alan, 5, 15n12, 89, 90, 114n14 Blumenbach, J. F., 28–33, 36, 88, 92, 103, 112, 113, 126, 129, 131, 133, 135, 145, 174 Boerhaave, Hermann, 92–93 Bonnet, Charles, 25, 27–28, 31, 105, 107, 113, 127–128, 130, 132, 133, 159 Botting, Fred, 50 Bowers, Toni, 97n7 Bowler, Peter, 26n21 Branagh, Kenneth Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994), 103 Bray, Joe, 82 Brijs, Stefan The Angel Maker, 170–171 Bruhm, Steven, 3, 5, 46 Budge, Gavin, 5

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. P. Edelman, Embryology and the Rise of the Gothic Novel, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73648-4

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INDEX

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, 8, 20, 20n15, 28, 29, 76, 81, 88, 93, 101–103, 126–129, 133, 135, 136, 138, 143–145 Butler, Marilyn, 89n2, 93 Bynum, W. F., 93 C Castle, Terry, 79–80 Cheselden, William The Anatomy of the Human Body (1712), 68–70 Clery, E. J., 15n11, 46, 50, 60 Cody, Lisa Forman, 8 Cole, William, 45n1 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 11n9, 14, 110 Cunningham, Andrew, 15n12 D Dacre, Charlotte Zofloya, 82 Dahm, Ralf, 173 Darwin, Erasmus, 89, 90, 92, 96 Daston, Lorraine J., 14, 105 Davison, Carol, 50 Davy, Humphry, 89, 90, 92–94, 110 Day, William Patrick, 3, 18, 169 De Almeida, Hermione, 5, 93 Debus, Allen G., 95 Dent, Jonathan, 47n3 Douglas, John A Short Account of the State of Midwifery (1736), 8n6 E Eccles, Audrey, 4n3 Edelman, Diana, 52n4, 90 Edelman-Young, Diana, 91, 93

Emboîtement, see Preexistence Embryology, history of, 20–32 Erickson, Robert A., 122, 123 F Fairclough, Mary, 90 Farley, John, 24n19 Fildes, Valerie, 97n7 Fleenor, Juliann, 4 Fry, Iris, 24n19, 25 Fulford, Tim, 15n12 G Galvani, Luigi, 90 Gasking, Elizabeth, 24n19 George, Jaqueline, 159n4 Gigante, Denise, 16–20, 36, 38, 39, 67, 85, 88 Gilbert, Sandra, 90 Gould, Stephen Jay, 25n20, 127, 133 Greenfield, Susan C., 97n7 Gubar, Susan, 90 Guinsburg, Arlene Miller, 96, 98 H Hale, Terry, 15n11 Haller, Albrecht von, 25, 27–28, 92, 107, 127–128, 159 Hanson, Clare, 4n3 Harvey, William, 12, 101–102 Hays, Mary, 35n24 Hennelly, Mark M., 149n7 Hereditary (2018 film), 171 Hippocrates, 23n18 Hoeveler, Diane, 3 Hogg, James, 171, 173 Confessions of a Justified Sinner, 40, 172 Hogle, Jerrold E., 37, 90, 100, 170

 INDEX 

Holmes, Richard, 15n12 Hunter, John, 6, 8, 52n4, 110, 138, 139 Hunter, William, 6, 8, 52n4, 108–111, 138 Huxley, Aldous, 170 I Inchbald, Elizabeth, 35n24 Ishiguro, Kazuo Never Let Me Go, 170 J Jackson, Noel, 15n12 Jardine, Nicholas, 15n12 Jebb, John, 68 Johnson, Barbara, 89, 90 Jordanova, L. J., 4n3, 89, 108, 109 K Keats, John, 17, 19, 93 Kelly, Jim, 149n7, 151 Ketton-Cremer, R. W., 47n3, 51 Kickel, Katherine, 16–17, 83n4 Kiely, Robert, 89n1 Kilgour, Maggie, 2, 3, 48, 50, 66 King, Stephen, 173 Carrie, 171, 173 Kipp, Julie, 6–7, 90 Kitson, Peter J., 15n12 Koelb, Clayton, 120, 124, 138–140, 140n5, 150n8, 151, 152 L Lake, Crystal B., 45 Laqueur, Thomas, 98 Lawrence, William, 89, 110

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Leach, Nathaniel, 120n2, 149n7, 150n8 Lew, Joseph W., 120n2, 139, 150, 150n8 Lewis, Matthew Gregory The Monk, 82 Lindeboom, G. A., 93 Luke, Hugh J., Jr., 111 M MacCord, Kate, 89n2 Maienschein, Jane, 21, 23n17, 24, 29, 89n2, 103 Marshall, Ashley, 120n2 Maternal imagination, 11n10, 55, 69, 131, 131n3, 132, 148, 148n6, 158 Maturin, Charles Robert, 112, 155, 165, 171, 173 Fatal Revenge, 135 Melmoth the Wanderer, 39, 172 McConnell, Karen M., 156n1, 157, 158, 160, 160n5 McLaren, Angus, 4n3, 104 Mellor, Anne, 89n2, 90, 92, 95, 96, 107n11 Milbank, Alison, 72–73 Miles, Robert, 65–66, 71 Miller, Adam, 67–68, 79n3 Moers, Ellen, 4, 90 Moore, Wendy, 110n13 Morin, Christina, 120n2, 134n4 Moskal, Jeanne, 108n12 Mowl, Timothy, 47n3, 51 Muers, Rachel, 97n7 Müller-Sievers, Helmut, 16–18, 28, 34–37, 39, 53, 54, 56, 67, 70–72, 88, 109, 112, 124, 146, 151, 152, 164, 169

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INDEX

N Nauert, Charles G., Jr., 95 Needham, Joseph, 12, 23n18, 24, 24n19, 93, 104 Idée sommaire (1776), 105 Norton, Rictor, 67, 68, 70

Rosemary’s Baby, 171–173 Rosner, Lisa, 111 Rossetti, Christina, 67 Rubenstein, Marc, 114n14 Ruston, Sharon, 15n12, 16–17, 16n13, 22

O O’Sullivan, Keith M. C., 149n7 The Omen, 172

S Sage, Victor, 95n4, 138 St. Clair, William, 94n3 Salmon, William, see Aristotle’s Masterpiece [Salmon, William] Sha, Richard, 91, 92 Shelley, Mary, 119, 121, 137, 155, 165, 171 Frankenstein, 39, 141, 170, 171 Valperga, 97 Shelley, P. B., 17, 92, 93 Sherwin, Paul, 89n1 Shorter, Edward, 4n3 Sitter, Zak, 90n2 Sloane, Sir Hans, 8 Smart, Christopher, 17 Smellie, William, 90, 110, 138 Spallanzani, Lazzaro, 25, 110 Spooner, Catherine, 169 Stableford, Brian, 89n2 Stansfield, Dorothy A., 93 Sublime, 27, 127 Sunstein, Emily, 94n3 Swammerdam, Jan, 12, 13, 26

P Panspermism, 11–12 Paracelsus, 39, 94–100 Park, Katharine, 14, 105 Peacock, Thomas, 93 Perry, Ruth, 97n7 Peterfreund, Stuart, 98n8 Pinto-Correia, Clara, 24n19, 26, 35 Polidori, John, 92, 93, 111 Poovey, Mary, 66, 90 Porter, Roy, 93, 99 Preexistence, 25, 127 Price, Fiona, 47n3 Priestley, Joseph, 68 Priestman, Martin, 90 Punter, David, 3, 124, 134, 149n7 R Radcliffe, Ann, 112, 121, 128, 144, 155, 159, 171 The Italian, 38, 73–75, 77–79, 82–84 The Mysteries of Udolpho, 38, 74–75, 78–79, 81, 82, 84 A Sicilian Romance, 37, 38, 71–74, 76–77, 80–82 Rajan, Tilottama, 16, 18–20, 34, 65, 84 Richardson, Alan, 5 Roe, Shirley, 22, 24n19, 26n22, 80

T Todd, Dennis, 11n10, 13 Todd, Janet, 93 Toft, Mary, 11n10 Tristram Shandy, 93 Turner, Daniel The force of the mother’s imagination upon her foetus in utero, 131, 147

 INDEX 

V Valerius, Karyn, 173 Vartanian, Aram, 27 Velasco, Ismael, 156–157 W Walpole, Horace, 1–2, 18, 21, 22, 29, 165, 171 1737 Poem, 7–15, 33, 36 The Castle of Otranto, 38 Letter to Horace Mann, 14 February 1753, 8n7 Letter to Horace Mann, 7 July 1779, 8 Letter to Richard West, 3 January 1737, 2, 7 Letter to William Cole, 9 March 1765, 50–51 Wasson, Sara, 15

Watt, James, 66 Whale, James Frankenstein (1931), 103 Williams, Nicholas, 156–157, 160 Wilson, Adrian, 4n3, 99 Wohlpart, A. James, 89n1 Wolff, C. F., 28, 30, 88, 92, 103, 128, 138 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 93, 99n9 Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 93 Wordsworth, William, 19 Wright, Angela, 47n3 Y Yalom, Marilyn, 97n7 Yeager, Stephen, 46n2 Youngquist, Paul, 6–7, 91, 110

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