Research Information System
16th International IDEA Conference: Studies in English, Nevşehir, Turkey, 24 - 26 April 2024, pp.28
Jeannette Winterson meditates on the implications of creation and artificial intelligence in
Frankissstein (2019), which is a beguiling reanimation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
(1818). She is deeply engaged with the issues of hybridity, fluidity and their trans-human
implications. Winterson takes us to Lake Geneva in 1816. Mary Sheller is the first narrator
who is keenly observant and utterly unashamed of her own sexuality. The second narrator is
Ry Shelley who identifies as a transgender man who works for a company devoted to
restoring the dead to life. He meets Victor Stein, a famous expert in artificial intelligence,
who becomes his lover. Winterson is concerned with a wide range of issues varying from the
fear of death, the doubleness of childbirth to the collapse of binary oppositions. She is also
preoccupied with the liminality of transgender subjectivity, non-biological life forms,
embodied human beings and disembodied future. This paper aims to explore the desire to be
disembodied post-human through the male characters, Percy Shelley and Victor Stein, and to
gain insights into the urge to be embodied trans-human through the female characters Mary
Shelley and Ry Shelley. This study argues that the novel’s main question is not what will
happen to humans when they are superseded by more sophisticated non-human entities or
more complex conscious but disembodied beings. On the contrary, the primary question that
lies at the heart of this novel is, this paper asserts, pertaining to the core issues of the
hybridity, fluidity, liminality of already complex, sophisticated, transitional embodied human
beings furnished with consciousness.