Book Review: Suparna Banerjee,Science,Gender and History: The Fantastic in Mary Shelley and Margaret Atwood

Suparna Banerjee’s Science, Gender and History: The Fantastic in Mary Shelley and Margaret Atwood accomplishes more than what is usually expected from a comparative analysis. The author has made a valuable contribution to the discourse around the ‘science question in feminism’. Her study reflects a more complex polyphony than mere ‘dia’-logic exchanges between temporalities depicted in the chosen novels. It is not a simplistic diachronic juxtaposition of texts and contexts of two writers exploring overlapping themes or mapping the interfaces of science and gender. The author’s analytic strategy is similar to a collage where disjointed segments are held together. Such a method permits more analytical freedom than would a method of contrast and comparison. Banerjee uses a vast canvas of history and gender to juxtapose the fragments of the socio-political life-worlds that Mary Shelley and Margaret Atwood narrate. The study deftly captures—against the backdrop of science, equations of state power, ‘defining’ macrotraits of various milieus—several motifs and scenarios that undergird patriarchy and its effect on gendered existence; the economy of biopower in the light of changing ‘technologies’ of production and distribution (read ‘industrialisation’, liberal global ‘capitalism’ and trade) and re-production (of lives, selves, identities), as well as constructed, yet constantly shifting, gender roles regulated by ideals and ideologies.

Banerjee is aware of the separate space–times of Shelley and Atwood. The narrative realms of fantasy (or fantasy realms of narratives) constructed by them are read as sites of marked and marking differences. She is also aware of the modes of social critique and subversion of stereotypes that these writers effect through fantasy. The author draws attention to overlapping yet dichotomous distinctions embedded in epistemes of post-Enlightenment culture, such as human–animal, human–monster, nature–nurture (or broadly culture), masculine–feminine, poetic–scientific, reality–fantasy and reason–sentiment, in order to problematise the ‘given’ categories and polarities of perception and evaluation. Her study indirectly proposes several alterative analytical tropes and sites of inquiry that make the scope quite ambitious: it is simultaneously a non-dichotomous epistemological inquiry through feminist, post-colonial and science studies and an ontological exploration into the construction of the self in terms of gender, sexuality, species (human, animal, live or lifeless machine, post-human?) and nationality, with its implications in the scheme of global dominations (colonialism and imperialism). She studies aspects of fantasy that accommodate the paradox of diverging confluence.

Using the traces of ‘cultural’ history that she gathers from select novels and with her intuitive reading around their contexts, Suparna Banerjee re-views the different worlds far removed from one another and sees through their ominous similitude. The domains of fantasy constructed by Shelley and Atwood allude to the recognisable, ‘actually existing’ scenarios of their own times; the dystopias in their fiction parody the horrors of the lived experience through a defamiliarised symbolic or allegoric signification. Banerjee suggests another possibility of comparison that, in my opinion, makes her study quite unique: she suggests that the distant and distinct spatio-temporalities in the works of these two women writers hint at life-worlds ‘experientially’ familiar to us. In other words, the ‘fictional–fictive’ ‘then’ and ‘there’ reeks of ‘here’ and ‘now’ and of an ambient ‘reality’ painfully familiar to us. The enchantment of gothic or apocalyptic fantasy partly owes to one’s intimate yet aloof acquaintance with the horror it captures: the uncanny familiarity that one confronts in the worlds of the texts. It is not a gaze directed from the present to the past that erroneously sees today in yesterday or looks at yesterday through the eyes of today. The gaze is not even reversed to suggest the cliché of the past casting a derisive glance on the future through the present. The gaze wanders on the liminal zone where temporal distinctions are blurred. Banerjee’s reading explores this zone taking cues from the texts she examines and presents a nuanced view on the aesthetics and politics of science and gender as they meet at the crossroads of history.

Science, Gender and History takes the reader through several such crossroads as the study leads through not too obvious ‘indirections’ as approaches to ‘directions’. Other pathways of analyses criss-cross between such interrelated concerns as scientific discoveries and construction of gendered selves; ethics of science and the mythopoesis of religion as a decisive ‘moral’ authority; politics and poetics of ‘production’ and reproduction; scientific advancements operative in modes of conquests and gender roles fleshed out through colonialism and imperialism; and (pseudo)scientific stereotyping of identities and resulting cultural normativity. That is to say that Banerjee’s reading of the four novels—Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and The Last Man; and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake—does justice to the varied and meandering narratives of these novels by not reducing them to a rather facile monochromatic and unidirectional continuum of dystopic fantasy. The socio-political critique Banerjee reads in the works of Shelley and Atwood extends to our times through a strange teleopoetic ethical logic.

The author reads these texts against what, in recent theory, has been identified as ‘the fantastic’, which is a broader and more inclusive concept than the restrictive categories generated by critical discourses on the genre of fantasy. Banerjee does NOT read Frankenstein as a condemnation of the male ‘urge’ to appropriate female power. She questions the very notion that such a ‘power’ exists, and argues with an acute sense of history that in praxis, female ‘power’ is an absence unaccounted for. Curiously, she presents a view that Mary Shelly presages the ontological concerns of Bruno Latour built around the socio-economy of gendered political being. Banerjee’s comparison of Shelley’s Frankenstein and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and the study of Frankenstein and Oryx and Crake using perspectives from theories on ‘embodiment and identity’ goes beyond a mere fleshing out of the self. She reflects on a novel conception that includes socio-political mechanisms of subject formation. Her views on the self usher the contemporary anxieties surrounding the anthropocene: human in and as environment(s).

In her study of The Last Man, Banerjee ventures beyond a reading of this novel as a roman-à-clef and argues that Mary Shelley is explicitly derisive about women being absorbed into and overwhelmed by familial–relational domain that privileges the ‘private’ over the ‘public’. Women, in many instances, are reduced to co-creators and co-conspirators of patriarchy. The ‘public–private’ divide is sustained by patriarchy, suggesting a hierarchy and an absolute and non-converging schism. Shelley critiques smug glorification of ‘love’ and the institution of ‘motherhood’. Atwood’s Oryx and Crake offers a powerful critique of contemporary technoscience that works at the behest of big capital.

Banerjee examines the reaffirmation of the institution of motherhood and its romanticisation as dominant traits of neo-right American (patriarchal) culture. Suggesting that the question of women’s corporeal agency is entangled with the processes of mothering, Banerjee thinks through a model that disrupts the unrelenting patriarchal institution of motherhood and proposes an alternative model of gynocentric mothering that ensures dignity, agency and affirmation of selfhood for the woman.

Banerjee’s study concentrates on the contexts of the works of Shelley and Atwood, keeping in mind the lives and afterlives of these authors and their texts. They are not merely ‘writing’ individuals—but also those who respond to their milieus and re-present their times. Shelley and Atwood give alternative narrative versions of these, which question and contradict the official historical constructs about their respective milieus. Banerjee looks at the author function indirectly, through the lens of authorial subjectivities and agency. She highlights how the modalities of social critique in the novels of Shelley and Atwood challenge and destabilise several stereotypes of gender and selfhood constructed in their times. In the writings of Shelley and Atwood that critique the general inclinations and dominations of their milieus, agency as an authorial prerogative deploys an ambivalent strategy of simultaneous situatedness and distancing, and involvement and disinterestedness. Very superficially, one may connect this ambivalence to the presumed polarity in methods of art as subjective and be drawn into the life around science as objective and aloof. Banerjee dismisses such binaries of art and science and one-dimensional attribution of values to them.

Apparently, this ambivalence suggested in the context of art–science is more nuanced. By re-presenting the rigidities of science that has taken different guises since the ‘age of Enlightenment’ and shedding light on the alliances that masculinist scientific positivism establishes with patriarchy, technocracy and consumerist–capitalist economy, Shelley and Atwood map out the formation of gender as a closed, dominated territory. Authorial agency opens out gender as a radical category by showing the transformative potential and fluidity of gender. Narrative transformation and re-formation of socio-cultural stereotypes and roles suggest a possibility of revolution and realignment in aesthetic sensibilities. That is how, perhaps, social critique in literary texts translates into social change. Shelley and Atwood, and Banerjee in her analysis of their texts, affirm this reassuring potential of literature to present a radical alternative view to ‘conventional’ history.

Banerjee illustrates various aspects of Mary Shelley and Margaret Atwood’s works that target the precarious proclivities of their times. However, so as to enhance her analysis, the author could have incorporated other novels of Atwood that have used aspects of ‘the fantastic’, especially The Year of the Flood. While the author has discussed Atwood’s own views on fantasy as a radical mode of representation and critique, a more elaborate analysis could have been perhaps possible through a study of Atwood’s interviews. These are a competent reflection of Atwood’s views concerning politics and aesthetics where the author is quite articulate about her ‘personal’ poetics and philosophy of writing. I feel a brief analysis of other writers who have used fantasy as a mode of social critique, and the ways in which they validate or challenge existing prejudices and proclivities, would have made Banerjee’s otherwise excellent entry point into a comparatively less explored research domain richer in scope. For instance, fantasy may not be such a radical narrative strategy. I am curious to know if any ‘conformist’ writer has ever represented her milieu through fantasy: a fantasy in which the narrative plays along the stereotypes and reinforces social biases?