{"id":1595,"date":"2023-08-19T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-12-31T20:37:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/?p=1595"},"modified":"2025-01-01T09:37:53","modified_gmt":"2024-12-31T20:37:53","slug":"our-hideous-progeny","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/2023\/08\/19\/our-hideous-progeny\/","title":{"rendered":"Our Hideous Progeny"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

C.E. McGill<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Penguin Random House<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Otago Daily Times, August 19th 2023<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Recent years have seen a flourishing of books retelling classic tales from the point of view of minor \u2013 often female \u2013 characters. Now, it seems, with the arrival of novels such as last year\u2019s highly regarded The Daughter of Doctor Moreau,<\/em> this re-visioning has extended to future generations. In Our Hideous Progeny<\/em>, C.E. McGill introduces us to Mary Sutherland, the great-niece of Victor Frankenstein, an able scientist in her own right whose talent and ambition are stifled by the same misogynistic 19th<\/sup>-century attitudes that refused to acknowledge such brilliant women as Ada Lovelace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is the 1850s, and Mary and her husband, palaeologist Henry Sutherland have been blackballed from the scientific establishment after Henry\u2019s public criticism of Professor Richard Owen\u2019s claims about Dinosauria, accusing him of \u201ccreating entire orders out of mere handfuls of bone\u201d<\/em>.  He is especially critical of the depictions of the iguanodon as crawling like a lizard and the plesiosaurus with its neck \u201ccurving like a snake or the neck of a swan\u201d<\/em> (Owen\u2019s original publication included a drawing where he indeed juxtaposed the tail and the neck). Financially straitened and with a marriage that has been faltering since the stillbirth of their daughter a year earlier, they are close to breaking point when Mary discovers partially burned notes detailing her great-uncle\u2019s work.  She and her husband immediately set out to recreate Frankenstein\u2019s experiments. But rather than animate a human form, they decide to prove Owen wrong by recreating a miniature plesiosaurus and unveiling it at the Great Exhibition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story is told from Mary\u2019s perspective and highlights the hardships and frustrations of being forced to occupy a role in which she must continually subsume herself. Her marriage to Henry is not without affection but has more to do with his acknowledgment of her abilities than any strong attraction, and she is still relegated to illustrating her husband\u2019s manuscripts rather than writing papers in her own right. Her grief at her daughter\u2019s loss is complicated by the ambivalence she felt about her impending motherhood right up until the birth, and her sense that, by being unable to bear a live child, she has failed some essential test of womanhood. Her growing attraction to Henry\u2019s sister Maisie, which parallels her disillusionment with her husband, only adds to her distress.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the creation of her plesiosaur \u2013 for it is<\/em> hers, despite her husband and their male colleague\u2019s attempts to minimise her contribution \u2013 she finally finds the intersection between \u2018masculine\u2019 science and \u2018feminine\u2019 generativity. But she is also able to see what the others do not: that the creature is in pain and deserves to be free from both confinement and suffering. And if she is brave enough to save the creature, perhaps she can save herself too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our Hideous Progeny<\/em> is both a commentary on the historical (and not so historical) discrimination against women in science and a tribute to the English-speaking world\u2019s science-fiction novel, itself the work of an extraordinary woman. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

C.E. McGill Penguin Random House Otago Daily Times, August 19th 2023 Recent years have seen a flourishing of books retelling classic tales from the point of view of minor \u2013 often female \u2013 characters. Now, it seems, with the arrival of novels such as last year\u2019s highly regarded The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, this re-visioning […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[428,442,370,421,18],"class_list":["post-1595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-428","tag-c-e-mcgill","tag-fiction","tag-historical","tag-odt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1595"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1595\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1596,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1595\/revisions\/1596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}