Of Sexbots, Cyborgs and Artificial Intelligence: Articulations of the Posthuman Subject in Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein: A Love Story

Jeanette Winterson’s latest novel, Frankissstein: A Love Story (2019), was written as a contribution to the world-wide celebrations of the second centenary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Evincing the characteristic excessiveness and parodic stance of the postmodern romance, it alternates two interlocked story lines. The first, narrated by Mary Shelley, is situated during her own life span and populated by Mary herself, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, John William Polidori and Claire Clairmont. The second, situated in 2018, is narrated by Dr Ry Shelley, a transgender medical doctor who sells body parts to Prof. Victor Stein, a cutting-edge researcher in Artificial Intelligence. The essay argues that for all its parodic doubleness, temporal circularity, thematic enmeshment and palimpsestic structure, the novel draws a clear-cut distinction between the Idealist conception of subjectivity endorsed by the male Romantic poets that leads to Prof. Stein’s transmodern conception of a future universe colonised by bodiless enhanced humans, and Mary Shelley’s affectively charged conception of embodied subjectivity that foreruns Ry Shelley’s posthuman conception of fluid subjectivity.