The origin of science fiction in the monsters of botany: Carolus Linnaeus, Erasmus Darwin, Mary Shelley

Now that in vitro fertilization and embryo transfer can divide a gestational from a genetic mother, natural maternity has been rendered ambiguous. Because this poses a problem of judgement courts have begun to judge by the purposes expressed by the parties to the surrogacy contract instead of the rule of natural purpose, and this dissertation examines the early history of this development. In 1758 Carl Linnaeus confronted a similar problem when he fertilized the first artificial hybrid, because this reproductive technology seemed to defy divine purpose. Tragopogon hybridum challenged the doctrine of the fixity of species, and he had to rewrite Genesis as a proto-evolutionary narrative in which hybridity was the mechanism of Divine Creation. In his poetry Erasmus Darwin expanded the implications of Linnaean botany in his own theory of evolution. Male desire was to guarantee progress in both nature and the Industrial Revolution, and only after he reproduced hybrid fruit did he admit that both sexes might be necessary. Because neither alone were a sufficient condition for progress, male desire might even reproduce a monster and Mary Shelley extrapolated this possibility in Frankenstein. Freudian critics have read Frankenstein's technical reproduction as a symptom of sexual repression or womb-envy, but I argue that it is an expression of an asexual desire to reproduce we share with him. Whether this desire is a vestigial trait of our asexual evolutionary ancestors or a construct of the history of reproductive technologies since the 18th century, is not the important question. We have tried to judge by natural and human purpose, ever since Kant made purposiveness the rule in the Critique of Judgement, but this is the very rule Shelley problematized in her science fiction. The problem is how to judge without purposiveness, and I propose that we can only do so with the method of extrapolation she invented with this new genre.