Our Hideous Progeny

by C.E. McGill

‘British science, indeed!’ Mr Jamsetjee had muttered to me as the pair of us had toured the first exhibition three years prior. ‘West Indian cotton in the looms, Amazonian rubber in the hydraulics . . . and all bought with sapphires from Ceylon and diamonds from Kollur. My, what wonders the British have made, with their own wit and gumption.’

The truth was unappealing, after all; ugly and complex and inconvenient. Truth had never opened anyone’s heart – or purse strings – to a cause. It was no wonder that most preferred a spectacle.

Far better to make something that does not know enough of the world to resent its place in it.’ I chuckled, bleakly. ‘Something that cannot hold a knife.’

‘Because it means that we are justified in exacting our revenge.’ It was a foolish, grandiose thing to say – but it was a foolish, grandiose thing we were doing, and I could not help but love the look on Henry’s face when I said it. ‘We shall steal fire from the heavens, and I shall not repent, even for one minute – for what sort of god would condemn us to such a cold world without it? We’re merely taking what should have been ours from the beginning.’

I could not imagine the same generosity being extended to me, if things were reversed. (Perhaps, I thought later, this was why he felt so drawn to games of chance. They must seem a wonderful pastime, if all the world had conspired to convince you that there was no loss from which you could not recover.)

It had made me sour and hateful, a bone that had not healed right. One has a choice in such circumstances, I have found: one can hate oneself – believe that the pain is weakness, punishment for Eve’s sin – or one can hate God.

From the beginning I had noted how strange it was, that surgery and sewing should be so similar, yet the former should be restricted to those who had never held a needle in their lives before their first days at university.

‘One cannot afford principles, if one is trying not to drown.’

‘Oh, no need. I already know exactly what he’d say.’ Henry forced his face into an awful, pouting approximation of the portrait that hung above the parlour fireplace. ‘You’ve conquered death, have you? Why, so you can have all the time in the world to lie about?’

Whenever a woman without children loved an animal or a cause or anything else – anything else besides that which she ought to love most in the world, that which she ought to spend all her days trying and longing for – it was thought to be a substitute for what she did not have. No matter that all three of us had looked upon the Creature with pride and joy; I alone was not its creator, or its artist, or its inventor, but merely a mother, most qualified to care for it not due to any intelligence or observation on my part, but due to the perversion of some natural urge.

I remembered, vividly, that in the first awful month of my lying-in – though I had nothing but grief to lie in for – Mrs Jamsetjee had come to see me. In her quiet way, she had laid a box of pastels upon the foot of the bed and said: ‘Trust me, it will be better if you have something to fill your time.’ I’d waited until she left before tossing them to the floor. She meant well, I knew; but somehow that had only made it worse, for how could she not see? It had been she who had given me my very first drawing set, a narrow wooden box I still kept in my bedside drawer, though I’d worn the pencils down to nothing long ago. It was she who had taken me to the banks of the Thames and taught me how to measure the rocks with my thumb at arm’s length, how to catch their shadows and pin them to the page. Had all my work since then merely been ‘filling time’? Was every idea that sprang from my mind, every thing that I had ever fashioned with my own two hands, simply a means of filling the void of my barren, childless life?

The notion of a thing that was not one’s child, and not a replacement, but something else entirely. Something chosen.

‘What is the natural order, anyway? The tendency of things to rot and die and . . . and hurt? Is medicine unnatural, then? Is this not just the natural progression of medical science, one thing to another?’

I have no friend, Margaret: when I am glowing with the enthusiasm of success, there will be none to participate my joy; if I am assailed by disappointment, no one will endeavour to sustain me in dejection.

I should not have to wait and grovel and plead and crush and cut away at myself until I’m small enough to fit at the margins, in the footnotes!

Growth/self-reparation. It had been one of the items on our list, tacked up on the wall of the nursery in London – one of the fundamental qualities of life. I cast my mind back, frantically, to the trials we had performed the previous year. Those creatures had healed, hadn’t they? But I did not recall ever seeing their stitches absorbed, now that I thought of it; our neat seams had remained. Could it be that, all along, none of our subjects’ parts had actually fused? That the catgut – which would last longer above water, but still not for ever – was all that had been keeping them from falling apart?

There were too many unanswered questions. Could such created beings grow and age? Did they have souls? And if so, was it the same soul that had inhabited the body before? Or a patchwork combination, like the body itself? If such beings – as seemed to be the case with Victor’s creature – entered the world without memories, then did it even matter? Would memory be preserved in whole bodies, if not patchwork ones?

It will not have been for nothing, I wanted to cry, no matter what happens – don’t you see? Don’t you see? Because it is already worth something. It is worth something, even in the dark. Even if no one else ever loves it but me.

‘Do you not remember the state it was in the last time we saw it? And that list we made at the very beginning? Growth, self-reparation – the defining qualities of life. Our Creature cannot heal, Henry.’

Here it was again, the notion I loathed with an intensity even I could not fully comprehend. What I understood was this: I cared for the Creature, yes. I loved it, as one might very well love a child – or a symphony, or a masterpiece, or a beloved pet raised from infancy, or anything else perfect and beautiful that one has helped shepherd into the world. What I despised was the notion that it was a replacement – some inferior substitute to that which I ought to have brought forth by natural means, through agony and blood. The hollow that our poor daughter had left inside my heart was one that might never be filled. But – and here was a thought I had kept buried for a very long time, too afraid even to think it – I was still not sure how much of that grief belonged to her, and how much belonged to the version of myself I had hoped to find alongside her. The bliss of motherhood. The completeness I would finally feel, holding her in my arms. The knowledge that I had at last completed the task for which God, or Nature, had made me.

‘It loved you very much, I think. Loves you, that is,’ Maisie carried on. ‘And if it is miserable on occasion, or if it is in pain – well, so am I. And yet, I don’t believe my making was a mistake. You couldn’t have known that life would be so unkind to it. You care for it, and that is what matters most.’

‘For everything. For what I said about your Creature that first night, and for not talking to you for so very long. All I could think of was the cruelty of it, all those lizards or what-have-you sliced into bits, playing with living things as if they were just toys to be put together in different forms, but then—’

Part of me wishes I regretted it. It says something about me, I think, that I do not. Perhaps it says that I am a monster. Or perhaps it says that I am simply committed to a sense of justice in the world – the sort of justice which I knew would never be served in a court, or in the public eye, or upon a Society stage.

Pride – what a tricky word that was. It was pride that had turned the angels into demons, pride that had doomed Babel, pride that had tempted Eve; it was the sin of believing oneself capable of great things, worthy of better. It was the worst sin a woman could commit. Had I pride? Of course; for what else was I to have, when hard work and humility and civility yielded naught? I had resigned myself, now, to the fact that I would never have money – never enough of it, at least, to change the workings of the world. I had longed for so many years to be recognized, remembered; surely, this quiet and self-sufficient dignity, the knowledge that I could and I had, no matter what anyone else believed, was less prideful than standing behind a lectern awaiting applause?

‘Does it matter? The Creature was a monster, and yet you loved it just the same. A monster is simply something . . . irregular, isn’t it? Something strange?’ I could hear the smile in her voice, even though I couldn’t see it. ‘And I’ve always thought you a little strange.’

But did I wish to find the answer? Was it worth it? Even if I happened to find the Creature again one day – as unlikely as that seemed – could it ever be repaired, or would it have to be entirely remade? And even supposing there was a way to make resurrected flesh heal and grow, to ensure that whatever beings I conjured forth would be free from rot and pain – what would such a science do, when unleashed upon the world? Would it bring forth a utopia free from suffering and sickness, as my great-uncle had hoped? Or a living nightmare of patchwork flesh, wherein a body is merely a means of conveying oneself from one place to another, replaced with a fresh vessel every time it grows too old?

So if you like her, if she strikes a chord, this one goes out to you: the angry women, the threatening women, the solitary and the abhorred; women with cold hearts and sharp tongues, who play with fire and fall in love with monsters; women who love women, women who didn’t know they were women at first but know better now, those who thought they were women at first but know better now. We shall be monsters, you and I.