Eighteenth-century "monsters" and nineteenth-century "freaks": Reading the maternally marked child

Literature and Medicine

Volumn 21, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 1-25

  Wilson, Philip K ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; CHILD; CONGENITAL MALFORMATION; FEMALE; HISTORY; HUMAN; LITERATURE; MONSTER; PREGNANCY; PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT;

ABNORMALITIES; CHILD; FEMALE; HISTORY, 18TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HUMANS; LITERATURE, MODERN; MEDICINE IN LITERATURE; MONSTERS; PREGNANCY;

EID: 0036513868     PISSN: 02789671     EISSN: 10806571     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/lm.2002.0014     Document Type: Review

References (120)

1. Key works that focus on popular representations and meanings of genetics are Dorothy Nelkin and M. Susan Lindee's The DNA Mystique: The Gene as a Cultural Icon (New York: Freeman, 1995)
2. Jose Van Dijck's Imagenation: Popular Images of Genetics (New York: New York University Press, 1998)
3. and Celeste Michelle Condit's The Meanings of the Gene: Public Debates About Human Heredity (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999)
4. Jane Caplan's recent edited volume, Written on the Body: The Tattoo in European and American History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) focuses on the epidermal level
5. as does Margo DeMello's Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000)
6. The skin is also featured prominently in Elizabeth Haiken's Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997)
7. Sander L. Gilman's Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul: Race and Psychology in the Shaping of Aesthetic Surgery (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998)
8. and Allen M. Hornblum's Acres of Skin: Human Experiments at Holmesburg Prison (New York: Routledge, 1998)
9. Philip K. Wilson describes the skin's historical significance in dividing the practices of surgery and medicine in two recent works, "Surgical Perspectives of the Body with a Special Focus on Skin," Chapter 4 of his Surgery, Skin and Syphilis: Daniel Turner's London (1667-1741) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 59-84
10. and "Imaging the Human Body: A Surgical Perspective of Skin in Enlightenment London," in Medicine and the History of the Body, ed. Yasuo Otsuka, Shizu Sakai, and Shigehisa Kuriyama (Tokyo: Ishiyaku EuroAmerica, Inc., 1999), 339-55
11. These Foucauldian themes draw attention to the cultural construction of bodies through which medical and scientific knowledge as well as particular power structures are gained. See Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla, eds., Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995)
12. Rosemarie Garland Thomson's Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) reconceives disability as a narrative of cultural liberation rather than a narrative of medical oppression
13. For a broader representation of disability, see The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability, ed. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997)
14. John Brown, Notes and Observations on Maternal Impressions. M.D. thesis, University of Glasgow, 1888, 58
15. Marie-Hélène Huet attempts a much more comprehensive discussion of the maternal imagination, drawing especially upon literature, in her Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993)
16. To supplement Huet's work bibliographically, see J. W. Ballantine's exhaustive reference for this maternal power in medical and philosophical literature from antiquity through the early twentieth century in his Manual of Antenatal Pathology and Hygiene: The Embryo (Edinburgh: William Green & Sons, 1904), 105-28
17. Pathologist F. González-Crussi provides a cursory popular overview of changing thoughts about prenatal influences in "From Mother to Fetus, from Superstition to Science," Britannica Medical and Health Annual (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1998), 42-59
18. For a discussion of the maternal imagination within cultural meanings of fear, see Herman W. Roodenburg, "The Maternal Imagination: The Fears of Pregnant Women in Seventeenth-Century Holland," Journal of Social History 21 (1988): 701-16
19. Jan Bondeson reviews this wide-ranging belief in "Maternal Impressions," a chapter in his A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 144-69
20. On a completely different tack, Ian Stevenson argues that maternal markings are evidence of reincarnation. For an overview, see Stevenson's Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997)
21. Abbot Claude Quillet, Callipaediae; or, An Art How to Have Handsome Children (London: John Morphew, 1710), 53-54
22. Aphra Behn, The Dumb Virgin; or, The Force of Imagination, in Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Montague Summers (New York: Phaeton Press, 1967), 5:417-44. My citations are taken from p. 424. Following the birth of these maternally marked children, an Oedipal tragedy ensues. It is noteworthy that the true identity of the "English" nobleman, Dangerfield, becomes known when his father, Rinaldo, discovers the dagger-shaped birthmark - an omen symbolic of the action at the close of the novel - on Dangerfield's neck
23. As Huet shows in Monstrous Imagination, 6, several philological traditions exist regarding the term monster, including the Latin monstrare, to show, as well as Augustine's use of monstrum to signify the prodigious demonstration of God's will. Other traditions associate monster with the Latin monere, to warn, to emphasize the prophetic nature of monsters. Later in the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson defined monster as both something out of the common order of nature and something horrible because of deformity, wickedness, or mischief (A Dictionary of the English Language, 9th ed., vol. III [London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1805, n.p.])
24. The Scottish natural philosopher William Smellie, the first editor of Encyclopaedia Britannica, provides the following definition of monster in his monumental work of 1768-71: "any production that deviates from the species to which it belongs, whether with respect to the number or disposition of its parts; in which sense, a man with six fingers on each hand, or six toes on each foot, is a monster." Smellie carefully adds, "But the term monster seems to be chiefly applied to such productions as deviate very much from the ordinary course of nature." Encyclopaedia Britannica (Edinburgh, 1771), III:269
25. Richard D. Altick provides many well-documented accounts in his The Shows of London (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), esp. 36, 42, and 49
26. Paul Semonin argues that the cross-class appeal of monsters originated from a general sense of them as comic grotesques. See his "Monsters in the Marketplace: The Exhibition of Human Oddities in Early Modern England," in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Rosemarie Garland Thomson (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 69-81
27. Using Bakhtinian ideas of high and low culture, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White address the display of the human body at carnivals in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986)
28. C. J. S. Thompson, The Mystery and Lore of Monsters (London: Williams & Norgate, 1930), 67
29. Colin Clair, Human Curiosities (London: Abelard-Schuman, 1968), 2
30. Bondeson presents similar cases in his The Two-Headed Boy, and Other Medical Marvels (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000)
31. "A Letter from the Reverend Mr. W. Derham, F.R.S. to Dr. Hans Sloane, R.S. Secr, giving an Account of some ... Monstrous Births ...," Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 26 (1709): 310
32. "A Letter from Mr. Timothy Sheldrake to Sir Hans Sloane, ... concerning a Monstrous Child born of a Woman under Sentence of Transportation," Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 41 (1739-40): 341-43
33. Philip K. Wilson, "Out of Sight, Out of Mind?': The Daniel Turner-James Blondel Dispute Over the Power of the Maternal Imagination," Annals of Science 49 (1992): 63-85
34. Dennis Todd, Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 104
35. Aristotle's Master-piece, in The Works of Aristotle: In Four Parts, 4th ed. (London, 1822). Often printed together, there were four separate works that comprised the many editions of this pseudo-Aristotelian creation: Aristotle's Complete Master-piece, Aristotle's Experienced Midwife, Aristotle's Book of Problems, and Aristotle's Last Legacy. Aristotle's Master-piece - the whole work - has received surprisingly minimal historical consideration, given its enduring influence on roughly three centuries of readers
36. Novum Organum, in Sir Francis Bacon, Advancement of Learning, Novum Organum, New Atlantis, vol. 30 in Great Books of the Western World (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), 159
37. C. J. S. Thompson, 78. For an assessment of how Enlightenment natural philosophers used "abnormal" bodies, see Javier Moscoso, "Monsters as Evidence: The Uses of the Abnormal Body During the Early Eighteenth Century," Journal of the History of Biology 31 (1998): 355-82
38. Rosemarie Garland Thomson, "Introduction: From Wonder to Error - A Genealogy of Freak Discourse in Modernity," in R. G. Thomson, Freakery, 3
39. Paula Findlen, "Jokes of Nature and Jokes of Knowledge: The Playfulness of Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Europe," Renaissance Quarterly 43 (1990): 293
40. Harriet Ritvo similarly describes monsters as being "united not so much by physical deformity or eccentricity as by their common inability to fit or be fitted into the category of the ordinary," in The Platypus and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 133
41. For reassessments of monsters in the Early Modern period, see Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 173-214
42. At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period, ed. Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert, and Susan Wiseman (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999)
43. and Zakiya Hanafi, The Monster in the Machine: Magic, Medicine, and the Marvelous in the Time of the Scientific Revolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001)
44. On the morality underlying early modern monstrosity, see Kathryn M. Brammall, "Monstrous Metamorphosis: Nature, Morality, and the Rhetoric of Monstrosity in Tudor England," Sixteenth Century Journal 27 (1996): 3-21
45. Linnaeus's distinction appears in the 10th edition of his Systema Naturae per Regna Tria Naturae (Holmiae: L. Salvii, 1758)
46. For a brief contextualization of this work, see Annemarie de Waal Malefijt, "Homo Monstrosus," Scientific American 219 (1968): 113-18
47. Gunnar Broberg discusses these three species in "Homo sapiens, Linnaeus's Classification of Man," in Linnaeus: The Man and His Work, ed. Tore Frängsmyr, rev. ed. (Canton, Mass.: Science History Publications, 1994), 156-94
48. Paul-Gabriel Boucé, "Imagination, Pregnant Women, and Monsters in Enlightenment England and France," in Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 94
49. For an introduction to writings for midwives about reproductive generation, see Robert A. Erickson's "'The Books of Generation': Some Observations on the Style of the English Midwife Books, 1671-1764," in Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Paul-Gabriel Boucé (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), 74-94
50. As in so many areas of Enlightenment medical historiography, Roy Porter led the way toward better contextualizing the usefulness of Aristotle's Master-piece to its numerous readers: see "'The Secrets of Generation Display'd': Aristotle's Master-piece in Eighteenth-Century England," in Eighteenth-Century Life 9 (1985): 1-21
51. See also Chapter 2, "Medical Folklore in High and Low Culture: Aristotle's Master-piece," in Roy Porter and Lesley Hall, The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650-1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995)
52. Porter, "The Secrets of Generation," 12, 16
53. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Peregrine, 1978), 104, 125
54. See also Katharine Park and Lorraine J. Daston, "Unnatural Conceptions: The Study of Monsters in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France and England," Past and Present 92 (1981): 20-54
55. and Dudley Wilson, Signs & Portents: Monstrous Births from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (London: Routledge, 1993)
56. Although the readership of this pseudo-Aristotelian text is difficult to ascertain, Porter points out that references to Aristotle's Master-piece in Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759-67) support the idea that it was very much "in the air" at the time. Roy Porter, "Spreading Carnal Knowledge or Selling Dirt Cheap? Nicholas Venette's Tableau de l'Amour Conjugal in Eighteenth Century England," Journal of European Studies 14 (1984): 235
57. Janet Blackman discusses the popularity of Aristotle's Master-piece in "Popular Theories of Generation: The Evolution of Aristotle's Works, The Study of an Anachronism," in Health Care and Popular Medicine in Nineteenth Century England, ed. John Woodward and David Richards (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1977), 56-88
58. For an account of this work's popularity in America, see Otho T. Beall, Jr., "Aristotle's Master Piece in America: A Landmark in the Folklore of Medicine," William and Mary Quarterly 20 (1963): 207-22
59. Rosi Braidotti, "Signs of Wonder and Traces of Doubt: On Teratology and Embodied Differences," in Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs: Feminist Confrontations with Science, Medicine, and Cyberspace, ed. Nina Lykke and Rosi Braidotti (London: Zed Books, 1996), 149
60. For various perspectives on the development of male midwifery in eighteenth-century England and nineteenth-century America, see the articles gathered in The Medicalization of Obstetrics, ed. Philip K. Wilson, vol. 2 in Childbirth: Changing Ideas and Practices in Britain and America, 1600 to the Present, ed. Philip K. Wilson (New York: Garland, 1996)
61. Porter, "The Secrets of Generation," 11
62. Bondeson, Medical Curiosities, 164
63. For a discussion of the maternal imagination in Enlightenment literature, see G. S. Rousseau, "Pineapples, Pregnancy, Pica, and Peregrine Pickle," in Tobias Smollett: Bicentennial Essays Presented to Lewis M. Knapp, ed. G. S. Rousseau and P.-G. Boucé (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 79-109
64. Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, in The Miscellaneous Works of Tobias Smlolett, M.D. (London: for J. Mundell, Edinburgh and Glasgow, 1796), Book I, Chapter V, 25
65. Andrew Curran and Patrick Graille reach a similar conclusion concerning the explanations of monsters in late Enlightenment France in "The Faces of Eighteenth-Century Monstrosity," a special issue on "Faces of Monstrosity in Eighteenth-Century Thought," Eighteenth-Century Life 21 (1997): 8-10
66. For additional discussion of eighteenth-century monstrosity as difference, see "Defects": Engineering the Modern Body, ed. Helen Deutsch and Felicity Nussbaum (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2000)
67. For the development of modern teratology, see Alice Domurat Dreger, "Nature Is One Whole: Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire's Traité de Tératologie." Master's thesis, Indiana University, 1993
68. G. J. Fisher, physician at Sing Sing, New York, discusses Hammond's beliefs in "Does Maternal Mental Influence Have Any Constructive or Destructive Power in the Production of Malformations or Monstrosities at Any Stage of Embryonic Development?" American Journal of Insanity 26 (1870): 250-53, 56, 80, 84
69. Barker discusses cases he views as supportive of the maternal imagination argument in "The Influence of Maternal Impressions on the Fetus," Transactions of the American Gynecological Society 11 (1887): 152-96
70. reprinted in Methods and Folklore, ed. Philip K. Wilson, vol. 3 in Childbirth: Changing Ideas and Practices in Britain and America, 1600 to the Present, ed. Philip K. Wilson (New York: Garland, 1996), 384-428
71. Brown, 35. G. J. Fisher charges physicians with being "in no inconsiderable degree responsible for the existence and continuance" of this popular belief (p. 293). I have yet to find substantial evidence of Ballantyne's claim that the recrudescence of belief in the maternal imagination was greater in the United States than in Britain. See his Antenatal Pathology and Hygiene, 123
72. as well as T. E. Glenister in "Fantasies, Facts and Foetuses: The Interplay of Fancy and Reason in Teratology," Medical History 8 (1964): 24
73. Many nineteenth-century authors introduced physiognomy into their works, as discussed in Graeme Tytler's Physiognomy in the European Novel: Faces and Fortunes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982)
74. and in Christopher Rivers's Face Value: Physiognomical Thought and the Legible Body in Marivaux, Lavater, Balzac, Gautier, and Zola (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994)
75. Lavater's influence on medical thinking pervades Barbara Maria Stafford's extraordinary vision of the Enlightenment in Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991)
76. Taylor Stoehr discusses Hawthorne's reliance upon physiognomy and phrenology for the framework of many of his tales in Hawthorne's Mad Scientists: Pseudoscience and Social Science in Nineteenth-Century Life and Letters (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1978), esp. 64-102
77. Roger Cooter deciphers the cultural meaning of British phrenology in his The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)
78. See also antiquarian book dealer Madeleine B. Stern's history of nineteenth-century American phrenology, Heads and Headlines: The Phrenological Fowlers (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971)
79. Hawthorne's "Birthmark" first appeared in Pioneer 1 (1843): 113-19. Hawthorne was also likely to have been influenced by chirapsy, a contemporary "scientific" movement that supported the belief that a pregnant woman's hand placed upon her own body could, via "sympathy," produce a likeness of her hand at the corresponding spot on her fetus. Brown, 102
80. According to Judith Fetterley's feminist reading of this story, the hand "which shaped Georgiana's birth" also "left its mark on her in blood." The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 25
81. For other interpretations, see Robert B. Heilman's "Hawthorne's 'The Birthmark': Science and Religion," South Atlantic Quarterly 48 (1949): 575-83
82. Alfred S. Reid's "Hawthorne's Humanism: 'The Birthmark' and Sir Kenelm Digby," American Literature 38 (1966): 337-51
83. and Lewis B. Thorne's "The Heart, The Hand, and 'Birthmark,'" American Transcendental Quarterly 1 (1969): 38-41
84. Elsie Venner initially appeared as serialized segments in the Atlantic Monthly under the title "The Professor's Story," beginning in December 1859
85. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Elsie Venner, vol. 5 in The Writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Riverside Edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1891), 434
86. Charles Boewe, "Reflex Action in the Novels of Oliver Wendell Holmes," American Literature 26 (1954): 303-19
87. Margaret Hallissy discusses Elsie's sexual monstrosity, focusing upon the serpent woman myth (or lamia) in "Poisonous Creature: Holmes's Elsie Venner," Studies in the Novel 17 (1985): 406-19
88. Susan Gillman, Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain's America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 55. "Siamese twins" became common parlance for all physically conjoined twins
89. Twain had previously written "The Personal Habits of the Siamese Twins" for Packard's Monthly in 1869. For further discussion on Twain and twins, see Nancy Fredrick's "Twain's Indelible Twins," Nineteenth Century Literature 43 (1989): 484-99
90. For an discussion of pathography as a genre, see Anne Hunsaker Hawkins, Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography, 2nd ed. (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1999)
91. Merrick's brief pathography, originally distributed where he was exhibited, is reprinted in Michael Howell and Peter Ford, The True History of the Elephant Man (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1980), 182-84
92. Philosopher Arnold I. Davidson correctly notes this in "The Horror of Monsters," in The Boundaries of Humanity: Humans, Animals, Machines, ed. James J. Sheehan and Morton Sosna (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 53
93. Merrick gained recent celebrity through Bernard Pomerance's Tony Award-winning stage play, The Elephant Man (New York: Grove Press, 1979)
94. People have also come to know of Merrick's plight through David Lynch's 1979 movie, The Elephant Man (Paramount Pictures). For an analysis of the true and fictitious tales surrounding Joseph Merrick, see Peter W. Graham and Fritz H. Oehlschlaeger, Articulating the Elephant Man: Joseph Merrick and His Interpreters (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992)
95. [M. F.] Ashley Montagu, The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity (New York: Outerbridge & Dienstfrey, 1971), 3
96. Sir Frederick Treves, The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences (London: Cassell & Co., 1923), as reprinted in Howell and Ford, 210
97. Interestingly, as George M. Gould and Walter L. Pyle note in Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1900), 81, pregnant women were often warned not to visit Barnumesque freaks for fear that what they saw might precipitate the birth of similarly formed freaks
98. In essence, Barnum helped establish a paradigmatic cultural view of the limits of normality by displaying the range of freakery. This distinction is consistent with Thomas S. Kuhn's argument that "anomaly appears only against the background provided by the paradigm," The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, vol. 2, no. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 65
99. A. H. Saxon, P. T. Barnum: The Legend and the Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 125
100. For a discussion of medical and social distinctions between the labels of "dwarf" and "midget," see Joan Ablon, Little People of America: The Social Dimension of Dwarfism (New York: Praeger, 1984)
101. Robert Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 151
102. For insight into the commodity of cuteness, see Lori Merish, "Cuteness and Commodity Aesthetics: Tom Thumb and Shirley Temple," in R. G. Thomson, Freakery, 185-203
103. David D. Yuan discusses the cultural impact of these war «rounded in "Disfigurement and Reconstruction in Oliver Wendell Holmes's 'The Human Wheel, Its Spoke and Felloes,'" in The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability, ed. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 71-88
104. See, for example, eugenicist Harry H. Laughlin's "The Socially Inadequate: How Shall We Designate and Sort Them?" American Journal of Sociology 27 (1921): 54-70
105. Philip K. Wilson elaborates upon this labeling in "Eugenicist Harry Laughlin's Crusade to Classify and Control the 'Socially Inadequate' in Progressive Era America," in a special thematic issue, "The New Genetics and the Old Eugenics," of Patterns of Prejudice 36 (2002): 49-67
106. [M. F.] Ashley Montagu, Prenatal Influences (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1962), 5
107. Such pangs are still described by many mothers of infants with maternally derived Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, crack addiction, and HIV. Janet Golden discusses changes in the maternal view of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome in "'An Argument That Goes Back to the Womb': The Demedicalization of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, 1973-1992," Journal of Social History 33 (1999): 269-98
108. Josef Warkany, "Congenital Malformations in the Past," Journal of Chronic Disease 10 (1959): 95
109. The dichotomy between a creative and a destructive maternal power recurs throughout Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (London: Heinemann, 1963)
110. Luce Irigaray develops the metaphorical representation of the womb as a screen upon which the mother's fantasies are projected in Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985)
111. The psychosocial anxieties surrounding the maternally impressed birthmark as a disablement are central to Toni Morrison's Sula (New York: Knopf, 1973)
112. Jill McCorkle's Ferris Beach (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin, 1990)
113. and Michael Golding's Benjamin's Gift (New York: Warner, 1999)
114. The maternally marked "monster" becomes integral to the plot development of Tom Gilling's The Sooterkin (New York: Viking, 2000)
115. In a current best-seller, one finds that Harry Potter's lightning bolt scar on his forehead was also maternally impressed. However, this mark, signifying his mother's powerful and enduring love, serves a protective function. The only ones to fear this scar are Harry's enemies, who know that "it was agony to touch a person marked by something so good" (J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone [New York: Arthur A. Levine Books, Scholastic, 1998], 299). I am grateful to James and Douglas Wilson for introducing me to this last cited source
116. See Fay Weldon, The Cloning of Joanna May (London: Collins, 1989)
117. Nancy Kress, Beggars in Spain (Eugene, Ore.: Axolotl Press/Pulphouse, 1991)
118. Jack Dann and Garnder R. Dozois, eds. Clones (New York: Ace, 1998)
119. and Nancy A. Parker, Double Helix, A Novel (Ashland, Ore.: Ashland Hills Press, 2000)
120. R. G. Thomson, Freakery, 10