Abstract
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein gives vivid expression to what many regard as the evils of modern science—dehumanizing, destructive, mechanistic, malevolent—a monstrous, masculine birth of the male mind. This dystopian image of science struck a chord with her contemporaries and has dominated the scientific imaginary ever since. So powerfully has the image of Frankenstein captured the modern imagination that it is easy to overlook the fact that part of the impact of the story is derived from its novelty—certainly as far as literary writing on science is concerned. Mary Shelly was not the first woman to write science fiction, or to deal with scientific themes in her writings. But she is probably the first to create such a negative image. For when we look across women’s writing on science during the early modern period and across the eighteenth century, a very different picture emerges.
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Notes
See, for example, Londa Schiebinger, The Mind has no Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature. Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco, Harper Row, 1980). On Merchant, see the articles in “Focus: Getting Back to The Death of Nature: Rereading Carolyn Merchant,” Isis 97.3 (September 2006), especially Katharine Park, “Women, Gender, and Utopia: The Death of Nature and the Historiography of Early Modern Science,” 48–95.
Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).
Lisa T. Sarasohn, “Science Turned Upside-Down: Feminism and the Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish,” Huntington Library Quarterly 47.4 (Autumn 1984): 289–307;
Eve Keller, “Producing Petty Gods: Margaret Cavendish’s Critique of Experimental Science,” English Literary History 64.2 (Summer 1997): 447–71.
Francis Bacon, The Masculine Birth of Time or Great Instauration of the Dominion of Man over the Universe, ed. and trans, Benjamin Farrington, in The Philosophy of Francis Bacon…. with New Translations of Fundamental Texts (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1964), 62.
Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason. “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1984; London: Routledge, 1992), viii. In her preface to the second edition Genevieve Lloyd states that were she to rewrite the book, she would put more emphasis on metaphor.
Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science, 52. Cf. also Helen Longino, “Subjects, Power and Knowledge: Description and Prescription in Feminist Philosophies of Science,” in Feminist Epistemologies, ed. and intro. Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter (London: Routlege, 1993), 101.
Susan Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity. Essays on Cartesianism and Culture (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1987), 105 and 127n.;
Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991), 300–1;
Susan Hekman, Gender and Knowledge. Elements of a Postmodern Feminism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 115 and 120.
“The Publisher to the Reader,” in Robert Boyle, Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours… Experimental History of Colours (London: H. Herringman, 1664).
Boyle, Some Considerations Touching the Usefulnesse of Experimental Naturall Philosophy… by Way of Invitation to the Study of It (Oxford: Printed by H. Hall for R. Davis, 1663), 19.
Cf. Boyle, Certain Physiological Essays and Other Tracts… on several Occasions, 2nd ed. (1661. London: H. Herringman, 1669), “For some Men care only to Know Nature, others desire to Command Her,” 42.
See Men, Women, and the Birthing of Modern Science, ed. Judith Zinsser (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005), especially Margaret Osler, “The Gender of Nature and the Nature of Gender in Early Modern Natural Philosophy,” 71–85. See also my “Riddle of the Sphinx. Francis Bacon and the Emblems of Science,” in Women, Science and Medicine, 1500–1700, ed. Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1997), 7–28.
Londa Schiebinger, The Mind has no Sex? 39; Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs and Margaret C. Jacob, Newton and the Culture of Newtonianism (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995).
Leonhard Euler, Letters of Euler to a German Princess, on Different Subjects in Physic and Philosophy. Translated from the French by Henry Hunter D.D., 2 vols. (London: Printed for the translator & for H. Murray, 1795).
Damaris Masham to John Locke, November 14 [1685], The Correspondence of John Locke, 8 vols., ed. E. S. de Beer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976–89), vol. 2, 757.
Rob Iliffe and Frances Willmoth, “Astronomy and the Domestic Sphere,” in Women, Science and Medicine, 1500–1700, ed. Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1997), 248.
Dorothée Sturkenboom and Margaret C. Jacob, “A Women’s Scientific Society in the West: The Late Eighteenth-Century Assimilation of Science,” Isis 94.2 (June 2003): 217–52.
On Bassi, see P. Findlen, “Science as a Career in Enlightenment Italy. The Strategies of Laura Bassi,” Isis 84.3 (September 1993): 441–69.
G. Berti Logan, “The Desire to Contribute: An Eighteenth-Century Italian Woman of Science,” American Historical Review 99.3 (June 1994): 785–812.
Maria Laura Soppelsa and Eva Viani, “Dal Newtonianismo per le dame al Neutonianismo delle dame. Cristina Roccati una savante del settecento Veneto,” in Pina Tortaro (ed.), Donne filosofia e cultura nel seicento (Rome: CNR, 1999), 211–40.
Lynette Hunter, “Women and Domestic Medicine: Lady Experimenters, 1570–1620,” in Women, Science and Medicine, 1500–1700, ed. Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1997), 89–107.
Monika Mommertz, “The Invisible Economy of Science. A New Approach to the History of Gender and Astronomy at the Eighteenth-Century Berlin Academy of Sciences,” in Men, Women, and the Birthing of Modern Science, ed. Judith Zinsser (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005), 159–78.
Newton, Opticks, or, A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections & Colours of Light (New York: Dover, 1952), 25.
Quoted in Isobel Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Comet of the Enlightenment (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 524.
Newton’s Principia’s reputation “was based on the authority of a few competent readers” and was difficult even for people like Locke and Halley; see Paolo Cassini, “Newton’s Principia and the Philosophies of the Enlightenment,” in Newton’s Principia and Its Legacy, ed. D. G. King-Hele and A. R. Hall (London: Royal Society; Port Washington, NY: Distributed by Scholium International, 1988), 35–52; see particularly 42. See also in this same volume E. A. Fellman, “The Principia and Continental Mathematicians,” 13–34.
Mary Somerville, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (London: J. Murray, 1834), 4–5.
Galileo Galilei, Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo [Dialogue Concerning the Two Great World Systems] (Fiorenza: Per Gio: Batista Landini, 1632).
John Wilkins, A Discovery of a New World, or A Discourse Tending to prove, that’tis possible there may be another Habitable World in the Moone. In 2 Bookes (London: Printed for John Maynard, 1640), 16–18.
Aphra Behn, “Preface,” in A Discovery of New Worlds, vol. 4, Seneca Unmasqued and Other Prose Translations, in The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993), 72.
Cavendish, The Description of a New World Called a Blazing World (1666), in Margaret Cavendish: Political Writing, ed. Susan James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 6.
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© 2011 Judy A. Hayden
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Hutton, S. (2011). Before Frankenstein. In: Hayden, J.A. (eds) The New Science and Women’s Literary Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118430_2
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