Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birth-Mark” (1843) generally isn’t taught as science fiction, though it has all the core elements of many configurations of the genre. In it, a scientist named Aylmer becomes obsessed with removing the one perceived imperfection on his wife, a red birthmark on her cheek. Georgiana submits to his experiments because risking her life is preferable to enduring her husband’s ongoing distress at the sight of her physical variation, but the potion that eliminates the blemish also takes her life, because the two are inextricably linked.
The “long nineteenth century” (c. 1750-1914) was a time of significant preoccupation with what constituted aberrancy in nature: what was and was not in the grand “plan” for humanity, and what human responsibility entailed, in terms of fixing what was found to be deviant around and within us. But to access the era’s rich discourse on these themes, both in fiction and nonfiction prose, we also have the mediating challenge of twentieth- and twenty-first-century reinterpretations. A common challenge in historiography is “getting out of our own way,” because it’s easy for today’s views of monstrosity, and simplistic notions of our ancestors’ knowledge and capacity for nuance, to impose on conversations of old.
Two centuries ago, our understanding of human biology was still gradually rounding a monumental discursive corner, which would compel a major reframing of Christian ideas around pathology, embryology, teleology, and ancient lineage. The fact that we were born well after the worst of this great transformation can often make us smug witnesses to the past. However, people in the late eighteenth through early twentieth century also weren’t as removed as many in the global north today are from the everyday muck and misery of death and deterioration. Large families more often lived in close, multigenerational quarters, where births, deaths, diseases, deformities, and kinship variations existed in much more common view. Our ancestors were no more naïve than we are; they simply had at their disposal different facts and exposures to variation with which to ascertain its nature and purpose.
Andrew Mangham’s We Are All Monsters: How Deviant Organisms Came to Define Us (2024) comes to us as an excellent mediator of many of these historiographical challenges. This work is remarkably lively for its form, and should prove a stimulating read for many writers and readers of speculative fiction, along with its primary academic audience. Whereas many such volumes dwell on the horror that certainly existed as part of the era’s understanding of aberration, they often do so in a way that neglects the quotidian nature of “monstrosity” in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century records. That’s the error Mangham looks to correct when he writes, “We lost sight of how, at one rich and vital point in our history, we were capable of seeing monstrosity as part of nature and the ordinary life course, as a vital part of each and every one of us.”
To reclaim these lost cultural norms around the abnormal, Mangham’s text covers extensive interdisciplinary ground, while drawing centrally from naturalist debates in the mid-1700s through to the early 1900s. He also deftly crafts journeys between scientific discourse and literary response (including Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, and Lucas Malet) that show how one generation’s science can inform another’s scientists through the medium of art.
The benefit of reading a volume such as this—for scholars and SFF writers or readers alike—lies in its thought-provoking presentation of humanity’s quest for self-understanding, and in its dispelling of simplistic binaries in favour of more engaging ideological debates.
In one early nineteenth-century debate, for example, Mangham describes Albrecht von Haller and Caspar Friedrich Wolff as at odds about which came first, the chicken or the egg—but in the debate’s more coherent form as a philosophical question, not the variation of the problem colloquially known today. At the time, Von Haller felt that the chicken had to be “preformed” in the egg before fertilization; the alternative, presented by Wolff, was that the act of gestation created the chicken’s essence, which seemed to von Haller deeply irreligious because it placed creation in the realm of the mechanical, not the divine.
This wasn’t idle banter, either. The argument had deep implications for parental culpability in the form and attitudes of any resulting offspring. There was a time when it was believed that mothers were mere vessels in the procreative act, and that the creative force lay solely with the father, and whatever mental impressions he might be making at the time of insemination. But if the mother was suddenly empowered as a creative force unto herself, actively impressing a specific form on the new life growing within her, then the blame for any malformation in her progeny could be set upon her instead.
Mangham’s nuanced approach to arguments like this dispels a simplistic religious/secular debate around classifications of human life, and leaves room for a more dynamic push-pull between different biological conjectures and their social and moral implications.
It is, of course, a shame that this work of reclamation needed to be done at all. After all, long before the theory of natural selection became a heated point of scientific and spiritual debate in the mid-nineteenth century, the very notion of a species was already posing serious cultural challenges, with many religious and scientific sources taking issue (for different reasons!) with the use of rigid biological categories, and fiercely dissenting amongst themselves as to whether monstrosity was a sign of failure or transformation.
Writers like the Comte de Buffon (Histoire Naturelle, 1749-1804), for instance, championed the fundamental mutability of all life on Earth—in Buffon’s case, to such a degree that he considered highly suspect the human impulse to impose grander technical systems on the natural world. He was more interested in educating people on material presence than abstract theory, and this divisive approach to taxonomy, joined with the fact that some specimens were more overtly atypical than others, yielded a lively range of spiritual and scientific questions about biological variation over the following century.
As Diderot asked in Eléments de Physiologie (1768– 1780), “Why cannot man and all animals be considered species of monsters that are a little more enduring? ... What is a monster?” A century later, naturalists would still be hashing out whether the fetus had to recapitulate stages of lesser lifeforms on its way to birth as a human—and thus, was simply “stuck” at an earlier stage if it came out with limb differences or congenital defects—or if some variations at birth (like the growth of extra digits) were actually signs of a leap forward in human design. Charles Darwin was emphatically against viewing drastic transformations in a single generation as evolutionary advancements; they could only be aberrations that the gradual sweep of natural selection would correct for, given time. But Lamarckian thought and similar would take the opposite approach: arguing that the existence of extreme variations indicated the possibility for accelerated evolutionary processes, which simply needed to be harnessed by humans through eugenics.
In Mangham’s account of some 150 years of heated discourse around the nature, cause, and purpose of aberrant life, we’re treated to far more than religious fears and discourse on sin. Although the ability to trace “monstrous” deviation to a series of biochemical interactions did perturb some, because it would remove divine force from the human equation, there is also a much more optimistic view of natural chaos in the work of, say, John Hunter: a man who did not recoil from the possibility that all of natural creation was one big “trial and error” effort by design. In his writings, the ordinariness of monstrosity—that is, of nature “trying things out”—made the study of abnormality a highly enlightening path to self-knowledge. Hunter would be praised by nineteenth-century writers for this view, but not without some pushback on how much he focused on variation as an internally driven process. Others would come to wish that he had taken into deeper account the role of environmental interaction in the creation of natural variation.
For all their diversity, the arguments depicted by Mangham here share a core concern: uncovering the purpose of variation. Is difference “defect,” or merely the expression of other intrinsic possibilities in the germ of life, which might come to yield more resilient specimens over time? And if mere “defect,” was such aberrancy something that humans could expect nature to correct on its own, or did it exist precisely so that we would be called upon to interfere? Were defects something we were supposed to remove—or, like Hawthorne’s Aylmer, something we were meant to accept and surmount in other ways?
Mangham’s exploration of eighteenth-century discourse includes Erasmus Darwin’s celebratory approach to the transmutative powers of life, and Robert Chambers’ write-up of a body of scientific literature that includes parallelist ideas: essentially, that human imperfections reveal examples of what would be “perfect” in other animals. In this text, we also spend significant time with Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, who experimented with the creation of abnormalities through field studies in chicken embryology, and William Lawrence, a medical specialist seeking a greater design behind monstrosity’s appearance.
But the real skill of this volume—and the crux of its utility for readers and writers of science fiction—lies in how Mangham transitions from such scientific backdrops to literary depictions of attendant cultural discourse, and back again. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), for instance, we find a powerful template for science-fictional tensions between the monstrosity of what we create and the monstrosity of creation. Yet Mangham does not indulge in historical erasure of Shelley’s flaws to elevate her contributions: While situating her within a powerful scientific moment, he also notes that her diary includes many “monstrous” desires to cull fellow humans in her vicinity, known as “cretins” for their different physiology. That Shelley was able to write a work that highlighted the monstrosity of those who would terrorize Frankenstein’s monster, while personally abhorring human difference, requires no great leap of the imagination. We are often capable of depicting the world with more insight and compassion in prose than we achieve in personal praxis.
This book’s interweaving of personal and scientific backdrops with fictional narratives of monstrosity continues into the mid-century, where Mangham pays considerable attention to the presentation of natural sciences in Charles Dickens’s books, book reviews, and articles in Household Words—all of which were in turn read by people engaged in biological research. Here, the Dickensian term “curiosity,” as a different way of depicting natural variation, reinforces Mangham’s larger thesis about the quotidian nature of aberration in the era. But Mangham doesn’t let Dickens off the hook, either, for his often grotesquely twinned spectacles of physical and moral deviation; and when Mangham later addresses Lucas Malet (born Mary St. Leger Kingsley), in his exploration of her The History of Sir Richard Calmady (1901), the story of a man born with limb difference (based on an Irish politician born without full limbs), he similarly avoids hagiographic treatment of someone writing imperfectly on important themes.
Not all academic writing offers so many well-integrated explorations of surrounding natural philosophy and cultural anxiety when delving into the core work of literary analysis. As an interdisciplinary specialist, Andrew Mangham has crafted something quite useful for scholars and writers alike. For the scholar, Mangham stands on giants in the field of literary histories of science to argue effectively for the abiding complexity of cultural discourse around natural variation over two centuries particularly concerned with the “monstrous” in nature. For the writer (of SFF especially, but not exclusively), that same deft interweaving of philosophical and literary debate offers a wealth of thematic tensions and gripping narrative examples to build upon in the course of all our own endlessly transmutative works to come.