ABSTRACT
This chapter locates rationales for eighteenth-century fantasies about men producing life ex-utero in embryological debates about who contributes more to reproduction, the mother or the father. Maternal imagination—the notion that whatever the mother sees imprints on the unborn child—made wombs appear like tombs that potentially jeopardized the perfect specimens encapsulated in the father’s seed. A motherless creation, the homunculus, illustrated the perfection contained in man’s seed. Pseudo-scientific literature by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek and pseudepigraphic literature by Albrecht Haller cast mothers in the role of antagonists who damage the fetus by failing to control their imagination. For example, Claude Quillet’s poem “Callipaedia, Or, The Art of Getting Beautiful Children” is a medical-advice text that warns readers about the effect of mothers’ imaginations on the aesthetics of unborn children. The scandal of Mary Toft, the woman who claimed to have given birth to rabbits, illustrates the atmosphere of skepticism and distrust around the subject of maternal imagination. While medical narratives purport to report fact, before 1800, they often rely on second- and third-hand sources from Classical authors. These fables sustain the idea that men seem better suited to creating beautiful children, either as male midwives, automaton manufacturers, or artisans. The chapter considers paratextual evidence such as William Hogarth’s etching of Mary Toft giving birth to rabbits (Cunicularii or the Wise Men of Godliman in Consultation), an etching of the uterus after Swammerdam, images of fetuses, and Nicholas Hartsoeker’s drawing from Dioptric Essay that resembles a homunculus.
