Reconstructed bodies: a fictocritical consideration of the personal experience of organ transplantation and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Claire Stubber

Research output: ThesisDoctoral Thesis

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Abstract

This dissertation provides an account of my experience of organ transplantation and its aftermath. It includes a discussion of the history of transplantation as a medical procedure, as well as my personal history. Issues such as public attitudes to organ donation and public responses to illness and to perceived bodily differences are considered, as is public and medical anxiety about death and composite bodies. The primary component of the dissertation is an inclusion, within the autobiographical narrative, of a discussion of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: a seminal literary text in terms of concerns about scientific responsibility, the status of the dead and the projection of monstrosity. Three distinct discourses are under consideration in this dissertation: the autobiographical, which is recognised as inevitably incomplete; the discourse of the scientific paper, which is a limited discourse from the point of view of the medical subject; and the literary discourse of Mary Shelley’s imaginative work which has an obvious relationship to my narrative and the medical history and sanctioned narrative which I discuss. Situating the text of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as an anticipatory and prescient representation of aspects of organ transplantation, the dissertation considers the correspondence between cultural attitudes to organ transplantation and the creation of Mary Shelley’s Creature. It also considers mythologies that relate to both Frankenstein and organ transplantation and the cultural anxieties that both precipitated the writing of Frankenstein and, amplified by the text and its on-going popular quotation in film and elsewhere, inform the medical practice of organ transplantation. The thesis, then, engages with multiple genres: my own autobiography, the novel Frankenstein, critics of Gothic fiction as well as scientific and medical papers. It finds unexpected relationships between these modes of discourse.

Fictocriticism functions as the methodological framework which allows for the explication of the analogous nature of aspects of organ transplantation and the ways in which it appears to have been anticipated in Frankenstein. It is a hybrid genre, involving essay, exegesis and autobiography and exemplifying the capacity for the interdependence of these forms. The plurality of narrators in Frankenstein accentuates the discrepancy that exists between the viewpoint of Frankenstein and that of his Creature, between the experimenter and his experiment. The two main narratives in the novel are vastly different. In my fictocritical work a multiple text is also evident: autobiographical vignettes serve to contrast critical, literary and medical writing and the actual experience of organ transplantation. All of these aspects are informed by a reading of Frankenstein.

Original languageEnglish
QualificationDoctor of Philosophy
Publication statusUnpublished - 2013

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