Abstract
Frankenstein seems to exert a strong fascination on young adult fiction writers. Mary Shelley’s novel is built around a number of deep-seated fears which often surface in adolescence: the search for biological origins, the fear of abandonment, anxieties about corporeal image and worries about not fitting in. These issues are powerfully articulated in a number of recent young adult novels that engage with these Frankensteinian tropes: Sangu Mandanna’s The Lost Girl (2012), Neal Shusterman’s Unwind (2012) and Sarah Maria Griffin’s Spare and found parts (2016). In a world where organ transplants and prosthetic body parts will become an increasingly common feature, enabling longer, healthier lives, Frankenstein’s creature can be seen as the original transplant organ receiver, paving the way for a posthuman future. Taking this figure to a radical extreme, he also represents the possible dangers and stigma of being made from a patchwork of organs stitched together, potentially becoming an outsider unable to be fully accepted. Frankenstein’s creature emblematizes the problematics of a body with transplanted organs, a hybrid body that is physically strong but also grotesque. These apprehensions are addressed and given expression in these texts, which revise Shelley’s narrative of bodily technogenesis and recreation.
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Notes
- 1.
As Jeffrey S. Kaplan remarks, the “trope that all young adult literature has in common is the search for identity” (2005, p. 12).
- 2.
Elaine Ostry points out that “there is a significant, popular, and current body of work with common themes that mediates the posthuman future for young adults” (2004, p. 224).
- 3.
Death is a prominent topic in young adult fiction, as Karen Coats and Farran Norris Sands note (2016, p. 242), while for Roberta Selinger Trites, death is the “sine qua non of adolescent literature, the defining factor that distinguishes it both from children’s and adult literature” (in Coats & Sands, 2016, p. 242).
- 4.
Everet Hamner notes the preponderance of Biblical names in clone narratives (2017, p. 59).
- 5.
This scenario is also dramatized in Jessica Chiarella’s And again: A novel (2016), where the brain matter and consciousness of very sick people is transferred into their new, cloned bodies, free of disease, so that they can start their life anew.
- 6.
According to Melissa Ames, YA dystopian narratives “present fictional fear-based scenarios that align with contemporary cultural concerns” (2013, p. 4).
- 7.
The name Io may be an intertextual echo of another android also built by two women and a man, Yod, in Marge Piercy’s He, she, it.
- 8.
Mackenzi Lee’s This monstrous thing (2015), another retelling of Frankenstein, can be read as a companion piece to Sarah Maria Griffin’s Spare and found parts (2016). In Lee’s Gothic novel, the protagonist, a young mechanic, manages to resurrect his brother with recourse to clockwork pieces.
- 9.
This term may reference a dystopian tetralogy, and it seems to be uniquely applied to Shusterman’s Unwind series.
- 10.
For a discussion of the medicalized context of these organ donations see Sara Wasson (2015).
- 11.
On this topic see Susan Louise Stewart (2004).
- 12.
After the publication of the article, and given the controversial nature of their arguments, the authors received death threats while the journal and its Editor, Julian Savulescu, also received an avalanche of abuse and criticism. In “‘Liberals are disgusting’: In defence of the publication of ‘After-Birth abortion,’” Savulescu retorted: “[w]hat is disturbing is not the arguments in this paper nor its publication in an ethics journal. It is the hostile, abusive, threatening responses that it has elicited. More than ever, proper academic discussion and freedom are under threat from fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society” (2012).
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Ferreira, A. (2019). Stitching, Weaving, Recreating: Frankenstein and Young Adult Fiction. In: Callahan, D., Barker, A. (eds) Body and Text: Cultural Transformations in New Media Environments. Second Language Learning and Teaching(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25189-5_9
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