Obstetric Violence vs. The Insubordination of Eve’s Daughters: Embers of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in Elizabeth Baines’s The Birth Machine

Abstract

Frankenstein can be understood as Mary Shelley’s accusation of the usurpation of women’s reproductive capacity by a scientific father and has become a myth nurturing a ‘hideous progeny’ of multifarious literary expressions. Through the lens of Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, this essay explores Frankenstein’s inspiration for Elizabeth Baines’s The Birth Machine to unravel the intergenerational rage of Eve’s daughters against patriarchal science, and the timelessness of Shelley’s rewriting of the Bible and Milton’s Paradise Lost, transfused from the nineteenth century to contemporary times of obstetric technology and violence against women. In sisterly  unison, Shelley and Baines reveal how, yesterday and today, overreachers ravage pregnant/birthing patients and a Gothic son not ‘of woman born’, all of them converted into malleable matter in male hands. However, this essay examines how women reach power to avenge the law of the Mother, violated by unethical scientists.

Keywords: Childbirth, Cyborg, Obstetric Technology, Violence.

Highlights:

1- The paper sees Frankenstein as Mary Shelley’s feminist attack on men’s seizure of women’s reproductive power.

2- The paper shows how Elizabeth Baines’s The Birth Machine updates Mary Shelley's critique through modern obstetric violence and medical control.

3- The paper links biblical and Miltonic myths to the long history of patriarchy reducing women’s creativity to men’s intellect.

4- Using Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, the paper reads Baine's character Zelda as a cyborg who resists male domination through her hybrid body.

5- The paper concludes that Mary Shelley and Elizabeth Baines rewrite patriarchal myths to reclaim female power and voice in childbirth.