Abstract
For creating his creature out of dead bodies, Victor Frankenstein makes use of dissection, described by William Lawrence as a ‘dirty source of knowledge’. Victor’s historical antecedents will be related to Mary Shelley’s circle and look ahead to Gunther von Hagens, known as Dr Death and a modern-day Frankenstein. Female dissection, such as that of nineteenth-century prophetess Joanna Southcott and Sarah Baartman, ‘the Hottentot Venus’, was regarded as particularly distasteful and this is mirrored in Victor’s tearing apart of the female monster. This dismemberment and fragmentation is re-membered and reconstituted in the work of French performance artist, ORLAN, who identifies herself as the Bride of Frankenstein. She uses surgery as a means of challenging inequalities of gender and race in a celebration of racial and sexual hybridity.
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Notes
- 1.
This was not true of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Calvinist theology in England where dissectors and theologians were not in conflict. See Sawday (1995: 106).
- 2.
One edition was bound in golden brown human skin and presented to Brown University in the USA by an alumnus. This practice is known as anthropodermic bibliopegy and though a rarity is applied more commonly to medical books.
- 3.
I am indebted to Anthony Mandal for drawing my attention to this connection.
- 4.
The London ‘Burkers’ John Bishop, Thomas Williams, Michael Shields and James May provided even more with 500–1000 corpses.
- 5.
Orlan, FAQ, on her official website http://www.orlan.eu/f-a-q/.
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Mulvey-Roberts, M. (2018). Monstrous Dissections and Surgery as Performance: Gender, Race and the Bride of Frankenstein. In: Davison, C., Mulvey-Roberts, M. (eds) Global Frankenstein. Studies in Global Science Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78142-6_4
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