Jeanette Winterson burst onto the British literary scene at the young age of twenty-five, when her innovative semi-autobiographical postmodern novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) won the prestigious Whitbread Prize for the year’s best first novel. A complex meditation on the clash between the lesbianism of the protagonist (named “Jeanette”) and the Pentecostal religious inclinations of her family and community, this novel appeared at a time when a frank exploration of such issues was still relatively unusual. Winterson has continued to pursue controversial topics (especially related to gender) throughout her much-awarded career, leading to the production of Frankissstein, a highly literary interweaving of two different narratives, one of which is a sort of historical narrative based on the experience of Mary Shelley in writing and promoting her novel Frankenstein (1818) and the other of which is a science fictional account of the emerging possibilities of artificial intelligence (AI) as a road to human immortality. Among other things, the postmodern combination of these two very different narratives provides a reminder that Frankenstein was itself an artificial intelligence narrative of sorts, suggesting an important continuity in literary history. At the same time, Frankissstein pursues the implications of artificial intelligence in terms of gender in ways that had not been widely emphasized before its publication. The novel thus combines a sophisticated, self-consciously literary form that clearly makes it postmodern with highly charged content that clearly makes it political.
Frankissstein and Postmodernism
Winterson’s credentials as a postmodern novelist are well established, and critics seem to grant without question that her novels, including Frankissstein, should be considered postmodern. The most obvious postmodern characteristic of Frankissstein is its combination of two different main narratives from two different centuries and two different genres, deftly placing these two narratives in dialogue with one another. The basic structure of Frankissstein, which interweaves an essentially contemporary narrative with a historical narrative from the nineteenth century, has certainly been seen before. John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) was perhaps the first such narrative, though A. S. Byatt’s much-admired, Booker Prize–winning Possession: A Love Story (1990) involves a similar combination of narratives. Indeed, Winterson, by giving Frankissstein the same subtitle as Byatt’s novel, perhaps points to it as the most direct predecessor. In any case, both Possession and The French Lieutenant’s Woman have both long been widely regarded as postmodern novels. Frankissstein, though, goes beyond either of these in the extent to which it mixes widely differing genres while also engaging in a very specific dialogue with a specific predecessor text. Fausto Ciompi notes that “parallel narratives” such as those in Frankissstein are “not infrequent in postmodern novels—mentioning Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor (1985) and English Music (1992), in addition to Possession (171). However, in the case of Frankissstein, “parallel” is not quite the right word, given that the Winterson’s two narratives intersect so extensively.
Frankissstein begins in a very postmodern mode with an epigraph from the song “Take It Easy” (1972) by the Eagles: “We May Lose and We May Win But We Will Never Be Here Again.” It then immediately shifts to Shelley’s narrative (narrated by Shelley herself), opening in 1816 on the shores of Lake Geneva, where she and poets Percy Shelley and Lord Byron have famously gathered, along with Byron’s friend and physician John William Polidori and Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont. We all know that Frankenstein would have its genesis in this gathering, though Mary’s narrative provides fictionalized first-hand details that extend what we actually know about this story. Many of these details are personal, and Mary’s narrative makes her a vivid, living presence. At the same time, Frankissstein is a novel of ideas, more than events, and much of this narrative is designed to highlight ways in which the intellectual framework within which Frankenstein was created provides a crucial prehistory to today’s concerns over artificial intelligence.
Indeed, very near the beginning of her narrative, Mary muses on the fact that, as a human, she has physical capabilities that are far inferior to those of any number of animals. “I am a poor specimen of a creature,” she declares, “except that I can think” (3). This early declaration, of course, does not suggest that the human body is unimportant; in keeping with the Romantic worldview in which Mary is very much immersed, it is simply a declaration of the importance of human interiority. Much of the rest of Mary’s narrative, meanwhile, supplements this particular statement to add the importance of emotion, and her love for Percy Shelley is presented to us as absolutely sincere and authentic. Still, her declaration that the mind is what makes humans special does set up the later AI narrative, in which the research of Victor Stein points toward a time when humans might be freed of the limitations of their physical bodies altogether. Indeed, in 12 Bytes, her nonfiction meditation on the possibilities of artificial intelligence that serves as a sort of companion to Frankissstein, Winterson makes clear her view that Mary Shelley, in writing Frankenstein, sent a “message in a bottle” that presaged the development of artificial intelligence (9)[1].
The AI narrative of Frankissstein makes some similar points, as when one character tells another, “Artificial Intelligence. Frankenstein was a vision of how life might be created—the first non-human intelligence” (27). This narrative is overtly linked to the Frankenstein narrative in a number of ways, perhaps the most postmodern of which is the way each of the major characters in the AI narrative is the direct counterpart to one of the major figures in the Frankenstein narrative, emphasizing the game-like nature of the construction of the novel and collapsing different ontological levels by mapping the fictional characters of the AI narrative directly onto the real-world figures who populate the Frankenstein narrative. The AI narrative, for example, is also narrated by a character named “Mary Shelley,” though this character was given that name (and assigned a female gender) at birth. Never comfortable with this gender identity, this character has, by the time of the events of the AI narrative, adopted the name “Ry Shelley” and has also modified their body to match their sense of their own gender as a nonbinary individual who is sexually attracted to males. This orientation leads Ry, who works as an emergency room doctor in Manchester (among other things), into a relationship with the enigmatic scientist Victor Stein (the counterpart to Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein), who is engaged in high-level research in both cryogenics and artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, the Lord Byron counterpart is one Ron Lord, who is engaged in what one might call low-level artificial intelligence research—he is an entrepreneur whose company develops and markets advanced sexbots (mostly female). Polidoris has a counterpart, as well, in the person of the journalist Polly D, while Claire Clairmont gets a counterpart in the form of an African American evangelical Christian (also named “Claire”). Among the major figures in the Frankenstein narrative, only Percy Shelley has no counterpart in the AI narrative, the role of Ry’s lover having been taken by Victor Stein. Meanwhile, making Victor Stein the counterpart to Percy Shelley links the poet to Victor Frankenstein as well, suggesting that the original Victor Frankenstein might have been at least partly inspired by Shelley.
Frankissstein’s postmodern epigraph will later make an appearance within the narrative itself, when Ry and Victor stop at a diner in which their waitress is wearing an Eagles T-shirt bearing the novel’s epigraph. Indeed, the entire text of the AI narrative is sprinkled with allusions to popular culture of a kind that are frequently found in postmodern fiction. Movies are referred to particularly frequently, which seems appropriate given the historical prominence of films based on the Frankenstein story, though (oddly) Frankenstein films themselves are not directly referenced in a prominent way. We are told, though, when Victor, Ron, and Ry enter Victor’s underground laboratory (with Polly secretly following), Victor lights the place by flipping “a bank of Bakelite switches like the electricity stack in a Frankenstein movie” (274). In a slightly more indirect reference, Victor responds to Ry’s description of his research as an attempt to bring back the dead by noting that “you make it sound like a Hammer Horror movie,” of which Frankenstein films formed a prominent subgroup (186).
Meanwhile, this reference to Hammer Horror films also points to the fact that Frankissstein, in addition to its obvious participation in the genres of historical fiction and science fiction,makes liberal use of ideas and images that would normally be associated with the genre of horror (though Frankissstein generally partakes of horror comedy). Indeed, Victor’s research is multi-faceted and essentially multigeneric in its own right. His vision of uploading the contents of human brains into computers sounds like pure science fiction, though Winterson is not really interested in providing hard scientific details of Victor’s work[2]. This motif is especially prominent in cyberpunk science fiction, though versions of it appear even earlier, as in Robert Silverberg’s To Live Again (1969). In the “Culture” series of novels by Iain M. Banks (1987–2012) and the “Takeshi Kovacs” novels of Richard K. Morgan (2002–2005), human minds can be backed up in digital form, then reloaded into new bodies in the event the mind’s original body dies, effectively bestowing immortality. The mind-upload motif has also been featured in a number of films. In the 2014 film Transcendence, a dying scientist’s mind is uploaded into a computer so that he can live on, while other films have featured uploads into artificial bodies (sometimes biological, sometimes robotic), as in James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) and its sequels. Finally, mind-uploading is also central to the 2020 videogame Cyberpunk 2077, indicating the extent to which the motif has permeated contemporary popular culture.
Victor’s research also veers into territory normally occupied by the horror genre. He is also interested (like his predecessor Victor Frankenstein and like many horror film mad scientists) in learning to replicate human body parts, toward which he acquires and studies actual human body parts (which Ry, as an emergency room physician, is in a good position to help supply to him).
Victor is especially interested in hands, whose mechanisms are so intricate that they are particularly hard to reproduce. Fiddling with an actual dead hand as he talks, he notes at one point that “hands are a huge challenge. It’s the test of a good artist—can she draw hands? Human hands are incredibly dextrous. So far even Hanson Robotics haven’t got it perfect for their bots. Sophia’s hands are good—but you know she’s a robot”[3] (149). In this case, Victor’s research into the replication of physical body parts interestingly anticipates trends in artificial intelligence research; much has been made of the fact that the recently developed AI art programs are particularly bad at drawing human hands[4].
Victor himself calls attention to the intersection of his research with horror when he notes, “There’s a horror story about a hand that becomes detached from its owner and lives its own, rather sordid, existence. Strangles people, frightens children, forges cheques, that sort of thing. These days I suppose it would troll people on Twitter” (152). There are, in fact, any number of horror stories about disembodied hands, especially in film, where the visual possibilities of crawling severed hands are particularly rich. One thinks here of such films as Robert Florey’s The Beast with Five Fingers (1946) and Oliver Stone’s The Hand (1981), though this motif is clearly always on the verge of self-parody, and it has been used with good comic effect in the figure of the Thing in The Addams Family television series (1964–1966), as well as Barry Sonnenfeld’s 1991 film adaptation and other offshoots. And, of course, there is the possessed hand to which Bruce Campbell’s Ash says farewell in Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead 2 (1987), which is both horrifying and hilarious.
Frankissstein, in fact, invests the motif with considerable humor as well. Meanwhile, its more important focus is not on hands but on heads. A more crucial part of Victor’s research involves the cryonic preservation of disembodied heads (and brains), including that of his mentor, real-world British mathematician I. J. “Jack” Good (1916–2009), a former associate of Alan Turing. The goal of this project is to thaw and reactivate Good’s brain at a time when computer technology has advanced to the point where the contents of Good’s brain can be digitized and uploaded into a computer, giving Good a new lease on life (and potentially making him immortal). Such immortality projects have long been the stuff of science fiction (and have typically taken on a sinister air—as in Norman Spinrad’s 1969 novel Bug Jack Barron). In Frankissstein, many of the problems associated with this project are acknowledged, but Winterson stops short of dismissing the idea out of hand. Indeed, the enigmatic ending of the novel leaves open the possibility that Victor’s dream of resuscitating Good has been achieved.
There is also a rich tradition of (sometimes campy) horror stories (again, especially in film) involving disembodied heads or brains, though these films also often tilt into the realm of science fiction, and Frankissstein clearly taps into a tradition of viewing brains as loci of horror. For example, there are a number of films featuring attacks on earth by disembodied alien brains, including such examples as The Brain from Planet Arous (1957), in which a sex-crazed criminal alien brain occupies the body of a nuclear scientist and attempts to take over the world. Meanwhile, the British film Fiend Without a Face (1958) is a sort of vampire film, in that its invisible monsters feed on their victims, sucking out their brains and spinal cords. When they eventually take visible form, they themselves look exactly like brains with spinal cords attached. Indeed, those images of the brain creatures flying about and attacking their victims (but relatively easily killed by gunshots, after which they noisily deflate while gurgling out blood) are among the indelible images of 1950s science fiction film.
More directly relevant to Frankissstein is Curt Siodmak’s 1942 novel Donovan’s Brain, which was adapted to film as The Lady and the Monster (1944) and then again under its original title in 1953. Other films somewhat in the same mode include the intentionally campy The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (1962) and a broad spoof of such films in Carl Reiner’s The Man With Two Brains (1983). Edward Dmytryk’s The Devil Commands (1941) is perhaps the most relevant of all. It even features Boris Karloff (the actor who played the most iconic film version of Frankenstein’s monster) as a brilliant, respected, and kindly scientist who is driven to mad extremes by a combination of his own broken heart and sheer bad luck. A pioneer in the study of brain waves, Karloff’s Dr. Julian Blair is overwhelmed by grief when his beloved wife Helen (Shirley Warde) is killed in an auto accident. He then focuses his brain-wave research on trying to replicate Helen’s brain functions electronically and thus allow him to recover her companionship. Not surprisingly, it all goes badly wrong. In a film that echoes Frankenstein in many ways, the house where Blair does his research is even eventually stormed by a mob of angry villagers. However, the film does end with a note of future hope that points toward the kind of research done by Victor Stein in Frankissstein, closing with on-screen text that reads, “And yet, perhaps the time will come when the door to infinity will open. Perhaps. Perhaps.”
It might be noted that, at one point in Frankissstein, Ron Lord points out that surely some particularly villainous individuals should be excluded from having their brains preserved for all time in a computer: “Murdering bastards, child molesters, thugs, nutters, that bloke in Brazil—Bolsonaro. What if you had Hitler’s head in a bag in there? Would you defrost it?” (227). Hitler might seem an extreme case, but that very possibility has been explored in film. The ultra-low-budget film They Saved Hitler’s Brain (1968) is based on the premise that Nazi doctors somehow managed to saw off Hitler’s head during the war so that it could be preserved (alive and conscious) in a jar to be shipped off to a South American island nation to await the day when der Führer could re-launch his plan for world conquest.
Frankissstein overtly riffs on Mary Shelley’s original Frankenstein, but it is clear that Winterson has also drawn material, pastiche-like, from a wide variety of predecessor texts in science fiction and horror, even as the form of the novel also recalls that of postmodern predecessors such as The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Possession. This broad intertextual dialogue, entered into in a playfully gamelike fashion, clearly marks Frankissstein as a postmodern text. At the same time, the dialogue with Frankenstein is extensive enough that it potentially changes the way we see Shelley’s novel, which might not otherwise be an obvious forerunner of today’s artificial intelligence research. The pastiche of Frankenstein in Frankissstein, then, is not mere “blank parody” but something more dynamic and productive. This active dialogue, meanwhile, points to the fact that Winterson’s novel engages with a number of key political issues in a way that clearly moves it beyond a simple restatement of the cultural logic of late capitalism.
The Politics of Frankissstein
Frankissstein is an intensely political novel that addresses a number of issues. For example, while climate change itself is not a major preoccupation of the novel, Victor Stein does at one point argue that one reason to look forward to a posthuman reality is that humans have been such poor stewards of the natural world that a turn to an AI-dominated world might be a clear improvement: “Climate change, mass extinction of fauna and flora, destruction of habitat and wilderness, atmospheric pollution, failure to control population, extraordinary brutality, the daily stupidity of our childish feelings …” (78). Then again, with humans still in charge of the initiation of the posthuman era, there is every reason to wonder whether that might be bungled as well. Victor, though, assures us that this problem can be easily overcome. He thus declares that “even if the first superintelligence is the worst possible iteration of what you might call the white male autistic default programme, the first upgrade by the intelligence itself will begin to correct such errors. And why? Because we humans will only programme the future once. After that, the intelligence we create will manage itself” (80).
Frankissstein could be viewed as an intervention that asks humans to start thinking seriously about the coming AI revolution, thus making a contribution to the preparation of humans for this looming change. After all, the closest thing we have seen to the AI revolution was the sweeping update to human societies that constituted the bourgeois cultural revolution, and the novel was central to the development of a new way of thinking that helped to support the rise of capitalism, so perhaps it could contribute once again to our ability to change our thinking along with fundamental changes in the mode of production. As Sam Byers noted in an early review of the novel, “We now have the technology to redesign ourselves, but to manage it, we still need a technology to understand ourselves—one fluid enough to incorporate the past and the future, the real and the imagined; one expansive enough to offer a life beyond our bodies. Winterson is reminding us that, in the form of the novel, that technology is already here.”
This point about the power of the novel is a subtle one, but Frankissstein makes more obvious political points as well, especially through its sympathetic presentation of Ry’s nonbinary gender, which also aligns itself with the suggestion that humans need to learn to think in fundamentally different ways, given that technology is on the verge of introducing radical changes in the very nature of what it means to be a human being. In particular, Ry’s fluid gender is part of as a broader critique of binary thinking in general. As Ry summarizes Victor Stein’s attitude early on, “binaries belong to our carbon-based past. The future is not biology—it’s AI” (72). The radical technological changes associated with AI, of course, mean the end of capitalism as we know it, but they are ultimately the result of capitalist modernization, reminding us of the declaration by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto that capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction (even if the agents of that destruction might be AIs, rather than proletarians). Of course, the beginnings of capitalist modernization were a major inspiration for the original Frankenstein, so that the dual structure of Frankissstein makes perfect historical sense. The dramatic changes foreseen in the AI narrative of the novel are the ultimate consequences of the initial changes to which Frankenstein was already responding two hundred years earlier. In short, Frankissstein is centrally informed by a strong historical vision, clearly breaking free of the blindness to history that Jameson found in the postmodernism of the 1980s.
In addition to this broad historical vision, Frankissstein addresses capitalism directly, especially via the figure of Ron Lord, a rather crude and vulgar figure who is nevertheless a shrewd businessman. Lord understands the capabilities of existing robotic technologies quite well, though he does nothing to push the envelope of existing technology; instead, he uses existing technologies to supply products that meet what he rightly perceives to be a real demand. His sexbots, though, are far more than glorified masturbation devices. Lord rather cynically understands that, in the era of neoliberal capitalism, human relationships have been so thoroughly reduced to the status of economic transactions that they can be replaced by relationships between humans and machines.
Lord also understands that the overt status of his sexbots as commodities offers multiple marketing opportunities. He seems particularly excited, for example, about the possibility of renting out the sexbots, rather than selling them outright. As he tells Ry (whom he insists on calling “Ryan” because he parses them as a “bloke”), “Renting gives you all the pleasure and none of the problems. Breakages, storage, updating—the technology is changing all the time” (38). Meanwhile, the very fact that Lord so clearly considers these sexbots as replacements (either temporary or permanent) suggests the way in which capitalism has reduced human beings to the status of commodities as well, interchangeable not only with each other but, ultimately, with machines.
Much of the historicism of Frankissstein focuses on the city of Manchester, which seems highly appropriate given the place of Manchester in the history of capitalism. In his magisterial history of the historical roots of working-class consciousness in England, E. P. Thompson puts a great deal of emphasis on Manchester as a key site for the growth of both capitalism and resistance to capitalist exploitation. He notes, for example, that “Manchester in 1819 exemplifies the emergence of the self-disciplined patterns of the new working-class movement” (93). This observation, meanwhile, is very much in accord with Winterson’s observation, in 12 Bytes, that the difficult living and working conditions for workers in Manchester led to the organization of “the world’s first trades union, as workers realised that their power could be stronger in negotiation than in outright revolution” (42). Manchester is, in a very real sense, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. It also just happens to be the birthplace of Ry Shelley and of Winterson herself.
Manchester’s role as a locus of working-class organizing and resistance in 1819 also played a special role in the lives of Percy and Mary Shelley as the location of the so-called Peterloo Massacre when cavalry attacked a crowd demonstrating for reforms in parliamentary representation, killing eighteen demonstrators and injuring hundreds on 16 August 1819. The Shelleys were in Italy at the time, and Percy responded by writing a long poem entitled The Masque of Anarchy: Written on the Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester, which would become one of his strongest political statements—so much so that it was not published until 1832 (ten years after its death) because it was considered too radical. This poem features directly in Frankissstein, as Shelley composes it, then reads it to Mary, whose response clearly links the moment to the AI narrative. She wonders “what will become of the human dream? Will we see it end in pain and despair? Will we be free from the brutality of this life? By some artful intelligence find a better way?” (258).
In both Frankissstein and 12 Bytes, Winterson emphasizes that the grim conditions faced by Manchester’s early-nineteenth-century factory workers were a major inspiration for the development of the thought of Marx and Engels and the writing of The Communist Manifesto (1848). “I am not a communist,” says Victor at one point, “and science is immensely—depressingly—competitive, but I am sympathetic to the human spirit. It interests me that it was Marx’s time in Manchester, and his friendship with Engels, who owned a factory here, that gave Marx the material he needed for the Communist Manifesto” (Frankissstein 165). Victor here is correct. In his classic text The Condition of the Working Class in England (published in German in 1845), Friedrich Engels not only elaborates some of the grim conditions of life among the workers of early industrial England, but also makes clear that these workers were themselves a new historical phenomenon. The poor had long been a social “problem” in England, but now the rise of capitalism had transformed at least a portion of the poor into an emerging proletariat. They were thus not simply victims of capitalist oppression and exploitation, but also the potential gravediggers of the capitalist system itself, an idea that Engels and his new partner Karl Marx would elaborate much further a few years later in The Communist Manifesto (1848). Indeed, Engels seeks in his 1845 text not merely to describe the harsh conditions under which Britain’s new proletariat lived and worked, but to announce the virtual inevitability of a proletarian revolution drive by the pressure of these conditions. Further, Engels celebrates the inevitability of this revolution, which might explain why his book did not appear in English until 1887 (in America)—and not until 1892 in Britain.
Manchester is crucial to the historical narrative that Winterson constructs in the novel. For example, Victor points out to Ry that there are now 36 Manchesters in the world, 31 of which are in America—suggesting the emergence of America as the epicenter of capitalist modernization, something that Victor envisions as a literal migration. Pointing out that, at one point in the nineteenth century, 98% of the world’s cotton was processed in the mills of Manchester, he proceeds to note that “many cotton workers, pressed by hardship, booked passage from Liverpool to the brave new world of America and took their Manchester with them,” beginning the shift to the U.S. as the capital of capitalism (108).
By looping back to Manchester at the end of Frankissstein, Winterson brings her narrative full circle, placing the city both at the beginning of industrial capitalism and at its end, when AI research potentially brings about a whole new era in history. Granted, Victor points out to the journalist Polly D in the novel (possibly as a strategy of misdirection to keep her from prying into his research) that she should not look to Manchester to find evidence of breakthroughs in AI technology, noting that the real resources for advanced AI research are in the U.S. and China (274). However, he also provides reminders that the Information Revolution, like the Industrial Revolution, arguably began in Manchester (274). Indeed, he points out that, thanks to the work of men such as Turing and Good, followed by the impetus of the Cold War, “Manchester was the computing hub of the world after the Second World War, and every possible effort was made to develop computer technology fast enough to eavesdrop on, and outwit, the Soviets” (167). And the plot of Frankissstein, including Victor’s disappearance, certainly leaves open the possibility that Victor, working beneath Manchester, has somehow made a breakthrough that will lead to an era of true artificial intelligence.
Whether or not Victor is simply trying to direct Polly’s attention away from his research when he claims that any true breakthrough in AI technology would have to happen in the U.S. or China is just one of many questions left unanswered at the end of Frankissstein. Indeed, there is room to complain that Frankissstein does not provide any details to flesh out its suggestion of the fundamental changes to come, leaving the exact nature of those changes open for speculation. Winterson goes out of her way to leave her narrative open-ended, Victor Stein having inexplicably disappeared from his underground laboratory in the midst of a massive power outage, accompanied by a massive “meltdown” in the city’s computer systems, including the wiping of vast amounts of data (especially Victor’s) (338). Afterward, Ry and Polly pay a visit to the lab, finding it carefully cleaned, with all evidence of the nature of Victor’s research removed. There is no explanation for what has happened, but it is tempting to speculate that something in Victor’s research might have triggered the Singularity that has been so-much discussed in relation to AI research. After all, Winterson, in 12 Bytes reports that she first became interested in the topics that led to the novel after reading, in 2009, futurist Ray Kurzweil’s influential 2005 book The Singularity Is Near, which picks up on the predictions of science fiction novelist Vernor Vinge (in his 1993 essay “The Coming Technological Singularity”) that legitimate artificial intelligence, once achieved, would proceed to become progressively more intelligent at an explosive, exponential rate.
Kurzweil’s view of the Singularity (which he envisions as occurring by the year 2045) is especially optimistic, seeing the new artificial intelligence as being capable of solving problems that humans alone could never solve, leading humans, among other things, to transcend the limitations of the flesh. This view is very much the view of Frankissstein’s Victor Stein, whose work involves not just the development of machine intelligence but a sort of merger between human beings and that intelligence. Indeed, his central project involves the cryogenic preservation of human brains toward a time when the technology will be available so that the brains can be thawed and their contents uploaded into digital form. As Victor’s story in Frankissstein reaches its enigmatic conclusion, and he seems about to attempt to thaw Good’s preserved brain, we should perhaps recall that Good was the originator (in 1965) of the notion of an “intelligence explosion,” the forerunner of the idea of the Singularity. We are thus left to wonder whether the massive power and “IT” outage near the end of the novel should be taken as a signal that Victor has indeed resurrected Good’s brain, uploaded it into a computer, and thereby triggered the Singularity.
Given the potential world-changing power of this Singularity (for good or ill), it is clear that Frankissstein’s most important political mission is to call attention to this all-but-inevitable event. Moreover, the fact that Winterson leaves the ending so open, without giving us any details about the nature of the changed world after the Singularity does not detract from this mission. Indeed, the very fact that the nature of human reality would be so fundamentally changed changed by this event implies that, by definition, we cannot possibly imagine what the post-Singularity world might be like. Indeed, science fiction as a whole is not principally concerned with predicting the future. One might compare here the insistence of most Marxist thinkers (including Jameson) that we cannot envision what life would be like in a truly socialist world (or a truly utopian world) because it would be so different that our imaginations (bound by the limitations of our own world) are simply unable to comprehend a fundamentally different future. Jameson, in fact, has expressed this idea numerous times in numerous ways, perhaps the most relevant of which in this particular situation is his declaration, all the way back in 1982, in his now-classic “Progress Versus Utopia” essay (reprinted in Archaeologies of the Future), that science fiction is not meant to predict the future so much as to remind us that there will be a future and that it might be very different from the present: “the most characteristic SF does not seriously attempt to imagine the ‘real’ future of our social system. Rather, its multiple mock futures serve the quite different function of transforming our own present into the determinate past of something yet to come” (Archaeologies 288).
The fundamental historical point made by Frankissstein is very much along these lines. In addition, Winterson reinforces this point by linking these two narratives in a number of specific ways. One of the most important of these linkages has to do with the novel’s treatment of the city of Manchester and its central role in the Industrial Revolution that helped propel capitalism into its current state of global dominance[5]. Frankenstein, of course, has often been described as a response to the IndustrialRevolution—or at least to the new, rational-scientific worldview that ultimately drove that revolution. In her narrative within Frankissstein, Mary relates having visited, with her illustrious father William Godwin, a Manchester factory and having been shocked by the conditions she observed there: “I saw that the wretched creatures enslaved to the machines were as repetitive in their movements as machines. They were distinguished only by their unhappiness.” She then extends that observation to note that these workers are being sacrificed to the machines in the interest of greater profits for their capitalist bosses: “The great wealth of the manufactories is not for the workers but for the owners. Humans must live in misery to be the mind of the machines” (59).
Mary’s horror at the way machines were coming to dominate the humans who work in factories is very much in keeping with the sense, in the original Frankenstein, that advances in technology might become a threat to humanity. The early sense that factory machinery posed a threat to workers has come to be crystallized in our historical memory in the case of the “Luddites,” English textile workers who opposed the mechanization of their factories between 1811 and 1816 by smashing the machines. The Luddites were eventually overwhelmed by the forces of capitalist modernity, both in a material sense and in a public relations sense—so that the very term “Luddite” came to symbolize a fanatical, wrong-headed, and hidebound opposition to technological progress in general. Winterson, though, has disputed this legacy, arguing that “the Luddites of the early 19th century were not against progress; they were against exploitation” (39).
The Luddites also played a role in the history of English Romanticism, as Lord Byron famously became one of their few defenders, decrying the suppression of the Luddite movement (which included such baroque measures as making the sabotage of a power loom a capital offense via the 1812 Frame Breaking Act) as an example of extreme despotism. Winterson calls attention to Byron’s stance in Frankissstein by having Mary Shelley suggest that it was the machines, not the Luddites, that were a disruptive force. “Are not these new inventions the disrupting force? … Is there not violence in forcing men to work for lower wages in order to compete with a machine?” (134). Mary here is joining a conversation in which Percy Shelley and Byron were discussing the Luddites in opposition to the loutish Polidori, who declares himself an unequivocal supporter of progress and thus an enemy of the Luddites. Byron responds to Polidori by declaring his agreement with Mary: “I understand those men—and, yes, those women. Their work is their livelihood and their life. They are skilled. The machines are senseless. What man would stand by and see his life destroyed?” (134–35).
In addition to her engagement with such class-related elements of capitalism, Winterson also acknowledges other issues, such as the conflict between science and religion in Frankissstein, though she treats it with a rather light touch. The evangelical Christian Claire is the primary bearer of religion in the text, and the novel undermines her position in a number of ways. Her very name automatically makes her a bit suspect, as the other Claires introduced in the text before her are Mary Shelley’s stepsister and Lord Byron’s lover, clearly presented as the least intellectually interesting of the characters in the Frankenstein story. Then, when we shift to the AI narrative, we first meet what seems to be her modern counterpart, in the form of Ron Lord’s malfunctioning sexbot, also named “Claire.” When the Christian Claire is finally introduced to us, she seems quite confused by Ry’s gender and definitely put off by Lord’s sexbots (and his attitudes toward women in general). Claire thus begins with some predictable religious declarations. By the end of the text, though, she has entered into a partnership with Lord to produce a new model of sexbot known as the “Christian Companion.” She’s also all-in on Victor’s posthumanist life-extension program, declaring that “the evangelical church of Christ will embrace long life” (310). Victor responds with a somewhat comic concern at the idea of all those long-lived Christians running around, and the overall depiction of Claire is clear: whatever her declared beliefs, she is willing to make exceptions if she has something to gain. She shows herself to be a hypocrite via her own actions, no commentary on the part of the narrator needed.
Of course, Winterson is probably best known for her focus on gender throughout her career, and gender issues are front and center in Frankissstein as well. Her frank and open treatment of the non-binary sexuality of Ry Shelley—and of the sexual relationship between Ry and Victor Stein as part of a loving relationship that is a perfectly healthy part of human experience—is in itself an important statement. It is also a very political one, given recent attempts in the U.S. and elsewhere to legislate against the very existence of individuals who display anything but conventional heteronormal sexual identities. Again, though, Winterson treats this issue with a rather light (and even comic) touch, focusing largely on the rather prurient curiosity of Ron Lord (himself a provider of somewhat unconventional sexual experiences) about the status of Ry’s genitals and exactly what sort of sexual activities Ry might be able to participate in.
Lord’s sexbots, meanwhile, point toward what is perhaps an even more radical stance in Frankissstein that goes beyond a simple challenge to conventional conservative arguments that gender is entirely determined by the biological condition of one’s genitals at birth. These sexbots offer new, technological modes of sexual experience that go beyond mere biology, providing a bridge to the project of Victor Stein, which raises the question of whether we might be on the verge of a fundamental movement beyond biological determinism by making the body itself irrelevant, and perhaps even nonexistent. After all, it makes no sense to appeal to “the way god made us” if we have actually been manufactured in high-tech computer facilities.
In 12 Bytes, Winterson concludes that improvements in technology will surely lead to more and more advanced sexbots, but then worries whether these advances will simply become extensions of conventional patriarchal fantasies. She thus asks, “Will we have created a Stepford Wives-style sub-class of femalettes who exist in a 1950s domestic time warp—fixing cocktails and baking cookies, plus plenty of sex on the side?” (159)[6]. At the same time, she also imagines that these changes might be fundamental enough to change humans themselves and to help break human societies free of patriarchal ideas once and for all, something that she obviously welcomes: “I love the idea of non-biological life-forms with whom we will form relationships that challenge our assumptions about both gender and sexuality” (159).
Conclusion
Given its progressive foregrounding of transgender issues and the critical stance it takes toward capitalism, Frankissstein is already a political novel via its content. However, the real political power of this novel inheres in its strongly historicist vision, one that clearly depicts the past as the prehistory of the present and the present as the prehistory of the future. Winterson cleverly employs Mary Shelley’s original Frankenstein as a marker of the beginnings of modern industrial capitalism and then draws a direct line from this story to her modern story of AI research that could bring about the end of the capitalist era. Further, the historical model put forth in this novel insists that the historical process that might be described as capitalist modernization or as the bourgeois cultural revolution has led to a world and to human beings that are fundamentally different than they were in precapitalist times. Perhaps more importantly, Frankissstein posits artificial intelligence as a potential driving force for a future radical fundamental change that would lead not to the end of the world but to the end of the capitalist world, with all its ingrained prejudices and systemic injustices.
Works Cited
Booker, M. Keith, and Isra Daraiseh. “Don’t Worry Darling: Critiquing the Nostalgic Cultural Logic of Late Patriarchy. European Journal of American Culture, forthcoming.
Byers, Sam. “Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson Review—A Dazzling Reanimation of Shelley’s Novel.” The Guardian, 24 May 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/24/frankissstein-jeanette-winterson-review. Accessed 31 January 2024.
Chayka, Kyle. “The Uncanny Failures of A.I.-Generated Hands.” The New Yorker, 10 March 2023, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/rabbit-holes/the-uncanny-failures-of-ai-generated-hands. Accessed 8 February 2024.
Ciompi, Fausto. “The Future of Humans in a Post-Human World: Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson.” Between, vol. 12, no. 24, November 2022, pp. 165–82.
Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844: With Appendix Written 1886, and Preface 1887. Translated by Florence Kelley, William Reeves, 1888.
Jameson, Fredric. “Progress Versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?” Science Fiction Studies,vol. 9, no. 2, July 1982
Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity Is Near. 2005. Penguin, 2006.
Quill, Lawrence. “Post-Humanism and the Road to Castle Frankissstein.” Love and the Politics of Intimacy: Bodies, Boundaries, Liberation. Edited by Stanislava Dikova, Wendy McMahon, and Jordan Savage, Bloomsbury Academic, 2023, pp. 217–32.
Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. 1963. Vintage, 1965.
Winterson, Jeanette. How Artificial Intelligence Will Change the Way We Live and Love. Grove Press, 2021.
Winterson, Jeanette. Frankissstein: A Love Story. Grove Atlantic, 2019.
Wrobel, Claire. “Underground Manchester as Urban Palimpsest in Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein: A Love Story (2019).” Angles, vol. 15, 2022, pp. 178–97.
Notes
[1] Winterson also suggests in 12 Bytes that Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron and a woman who is often described as the world’s first computer programmer, joined Mary Shelley as women who were “flares flung across time, throwing light on the world of the future” (9).
[2] It is clear, though, that Winterson has done a lot of reading and thinking about the real-world scientific advances that provide the context for the AI narrative in Frankissstein, which sometimes makes reference to the work of real-world AI scientists, such as Oxford’s Nick Bostrom (274). See Quill for a discussion that touches on much of the real science that intersects with the novel.
[3] “Sophia” is a real-world robot, developed by the Texas-founded and now Hong Kong–based Hanson Robotics. Sophia is mentioned to Victor earlier in the novel as having been granted citizenship (and legal personhood) in Saudi Arabia in 2017. The Muslim woman who brings up this fact, meanwhile, complains that Sophia “has more rights than any Saudi woman” (74).
[4] See, for example, Chayka, who notes that AI art generators have a tendency to produce “nightmarish appendages.”
[5] For a more detailed discussion of the role of Manchester in Frankissstein, see Wrobel.
[6] In Ira Levin’s satirical 1972 novel Stepford Wives, as in its 1975 film adaptation, suburban husbands conspireto replace their wives with docile and obedient robot duplicates. However, in the 2004 adaptation, which Victor Stein mentions favorably in Frankissstein,the wives turn the tables and replace their husbands (159). Actually, though, the possibility decried by Winterson in 12 Bytes is even closer to the central premise of Olivia Wilde’s 2022 film Don’t Worry Darling, which we discuss in detail in our essay on the film.