"But where were my friends and relations? No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses. . . . I had never yet seen a being resembling me, or who claimed any intercourse with me. What was I?" (Shelley 121)
Interesting essay by Norma Rowen about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as one in a whole series of embodiments of one of man's oldest dreams -- that of making a creature of his own, referring to the Golem story as one of the most ancient ones.
Another 'making a creature story', interesting from a gender perspective, is the medieval, alchemist recipe of Paracelsus in the Philosophia Sagax (1536).
"If the sperm, enclosed in a hermetically-sealed glass, is buried in horse manure for about forty days and properly "magnetized," it begins to live and to move. After such a time it bears the form and resemblance of a human being, but it will be transparent and without a corpus. If it is now artificially fed with the arcanum sanguinis hominis until it is about forty weeks old, and if allowed to remain during that time in the horse manure, in a continually even temperature, it will grow into a human child, with all its members developed like any other child, such as may have been born of a woman, only it will be much smaller. We call such a being a homunculus, and he may be raised and educated like any other child, until he grows older and obtains reason and intellect, and is able to take care of himself. (Pachter 278)"
Imagine that - making a baby out of a sperm without using a woman.
Read the full essay here.
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