Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-Century England

by Dennis Todd

In 1726, an illiterate woman from Surrey named Mary Toft announced that she had given birth to seventeen rabbits. Deceiving respected physicians and citizens alike, she created a hoax that held England spellbound for months. In Imagining Monsters , Dennis Todd tells the story of this bizarre incident and shows how it illuminates eighteenth-century beliefs about the power of imagination and the problems of personal identity.

Mary Toft's outrageous claim was accepted because of a common belief that the imagination of a pregnant woman could deform her fetus, creating a monster within her. Drawing on largely unexamined material from medicine, embryology, philosophy, and popular "monster" exhibitions, Todd shows that such ideas about monstrous births expressed a fear central to scientific, literary, and philosophical that the imagination could transgress the barrier between mind and body.

In his analysis of the Toft case, Todd exposes deep anxieties about the threat this transgressive imagination posed to the idea of the self as stable, coherent, and autonomous. Major works of Pope and Swift reveal that they, too, were concerned with these issues, and Imagining Monsters provides detailed discussions of Gulliver's Travels and The Dunciad illustrating how these writers used images of monstrosity to explore the problematic nature of human identity. It also includes a provocative analysis of Pope's later work that takes into account his physical deformity and his need to defend himself in a society that linked a deformed body with a deformed character.

357 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1995

Reviews

[Oscar]

A bizarre yet informational analysis of the creation of monsters. Why do people create monsters and why do people so readily accept the idea of an inhuman explanation for their problems? To deliver its point, Todd describes the story of Mary Toft, a woman who conned England into believing she could give birth to rabbits. The entire story goes to so many ridiculous levels, its hard to believe more historians haven't kept track of the events. Todd's telling of the Toft story makes use of immaculate research and easily summarizes the more difficult passages and journals he uses for his evidence. Highly recommend giving a look if you enjoy strange, interesting tales that help explain a part of human nature.

[Jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

nothing like a book about a woman who faked giving birth to rabbits