“My Monstrous Progeny”: Reproducing the Other of Reproduction in <em>Frankenstein</em> and <em>The Island of Doctor Moreau</em>

Abstract

This article provides an interpretation, influenced by Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, for two seminal works of British horror fiction from the nineteenth century: Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley and The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) by H. G. Wells. In the first part of the article, I discuss the importance of Frankenstein destroying the unfinished female companion of his monster. In the second part, I analyze how the proto-genetic insights that Moreau gained in his quest for the successful reproduction of uplifted beasts are used to inscribe his symbolic father function. In the conclusion, I analyze Frankenstein’s and Moreau’s own respective ways of reinscribing their experiments into the natural order of things and how they eventually displace the male creator into the symbolic position of the mother and thus overwrite the trope of mother nature as well. This is why Frankenstein’s and Moreau’s creations simultaneously transgress all limits and demonstrate (monstrare) the very limits that the binary logic of presence and absence inevitably enact.