Tradition and the Test-Tube Baby

Type:

Book Chapter

Author:

Rachel Bowlby

Published:

2020

Publisher:

Liverpool University Press

This chapter considers a modernist juxtaposition of scientific creativity and creative science, the focal point of which is the persistence of the hybrid expression “test-tube baby” to designate possible or actual results of new reproductive technologies. This phrase encapsulates the jarring and juxtaposition of different descriptive and performative levels, as twentieth-century technologies imagined and sometimes achieved the mutation of human reproduction into a matter of careful chemistry. The new art-science of psychoanalysis conceptualized human mentalities in the language and the transformational logic of chemistry. Writers often likened their own effects or modes of production to quasi-scientific procedures for making the new, whether flamboyantly “experimental” or studiedly lab-based. The chapter concentrates in particular on passages from the work of T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, and Virginia Woolf.

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