ABSTRACT
In 1818, Mary Shelley first published her celebrated novel, Franken-
stein, a cautionary tale of scientist Victor Frankenstein’s “fervent
longing to penetrate the secrets of nature.” Her language highlights
the sexual politics that equated science with masculine power and
“nature” with victimized femininity. Significantly, just one year
before this enduring fiction debuted on the cultural scene, George
Cuvier-himself a celebrated scientist, baron, and Napoleon’s sur-
geon general-published his own influential work on the developing
science of anatomy. Whereas Shelley only hints in her novel at the
ghoulish horror enacted by a scientist who experiments on the dead
in his quest for supreme knowledge, Cuvier actualized such a feat, lit-
erally “penetrating the secrets of nature” with his tools of science as
he acquired in 1816 the cadaver of the once-living and -famous Sara
Baartman-performing as the “Hottentot Venus”—who died of an
unknown illness by early January of that year. Placing her corpse on his
table, Cuvier proceeded to dissect her, unveiling the great mysteries of
her genital organs, which he had “the honor of presenting to the
Académie, prepared in a manner so as not to leave any doubt about
the nature of her apron.”1
