Frankenstein Unbuttoned

The erotics of time-travel

Recently I re-read Brian Aldiss’s Frankenstein Bound (1973), a novel I last read as a teenager. War in the 21^st-century (how futuristic!) has broken time, such that portions of the world undergo ‘time slips’ that are also spatial relocations. The globe becomes a crazy tesselation of different time periods, from the past and also the future. Joe Bodenland’s American country estate is, randomly, relocated to early 19^th-century Europe: Bodenland drives off his property in a futuristic car to explore Switzerland, during which time his house slips in time again, leaving him stranded. He goes on to meet Byron, Percy Shelley and Mary Wollstonecroft (dating but not yet married to Percy), as well as Frankenstein’s monster, which in this slippery-temporal reality is an actual being, roaming the world. There are various adventures, but the main point of the story is that Bodenland has sex with Mary. It starts with her flashing her boob at him: ‘when she saw me, she smiled and put a finger to her lips, motioning silence. She made no attempt to conceal her appealing expanse of breast. Uncertain about Regency conventions, I was both embarrassed and charmed … Mary's eyes were grey, her whole expression animated and a little skittish from the moment she observed me admiring her breast’ [71]. Later the two go skinny-dipping together in a Swiss lake, afterwards having sex: ‘we lay on the bed together, embracing, mouth to mouth. Time and the great day fluttered round our bodies.’ ‘There was a moment later,’ Bodenland wincingly adds, ‘when I found a willow leaf stuck to her still-moist haunches. “I shall keep it, since it comes from enchanted ground” I told her.’ This is not well-judged writing. Still-moist haunches indeed.

Since Aldiss is a writer of science fiction, and has argued (in his history of the genre, Billion Year Spree) that Frankenstein is the first science fiction novel, and Mary Shelley herself the mother of SF, having his stand-in character boink her involves an awkward Oedipal vibe. But perhaps this is to overread it. We could say that for a certain randy male-brain view of the world, what else is there to do with the opportunity time-travel gives you to meet a famous woman from the past? Obviously this is the point of travelling through time: to have sex with a famous woman.

Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer (1979), the first of Roth’s Zuckerman novels, Roth’s fictional alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman stays with an older writer called E.I. Lonoff. Here he meets a woman introduced to him as ‘Amy Bellette’, actually Anne Frank, who it seems like Tiny Tim did NOT die, who has survived the Holocaust and has moved to the United States under a pseudonym. What does Zuckerman do? Well, of course he has sex with her. What else?

The Ghost Writer is not a time-travel story. But I’ve been thinking about the erotics of temporal translation. In the sub-genre’s originary tale, The Time Machine (1895), Wells’s time traveller propels his machine into the far future, the year 802,701, to discover human has evolved into two species, the monstrous subterranean Morlocks and the beautiful, carefree, childlike Eloi who live a pseudo-Hellenic lifestyle: throwbacks to the dawn of history (watched over by a classical sphinx), the childhood of mankind, something literalised in their childlike stature and limited mental capacity. Wells takes their name from the Greek ἤλòς (ēlos; the plural form is ēloi), a word which originally (in Homer) meant ‘deranged’ or ‘insane’, but which came in later usage to mean: ‘vain, useless, worthless’. A very appropriate title for this decorative but useless people. What does Wells, another randy heterosexual male author, have his protagonist do? Have sex with an Eloi girl, of course: Weena.

She was exactly like a child. She wanted to be with me always. She tried to follow me everywhere, and on my next journey out and about it went to my heart to tire her down, and leave her at last, exhausted and calling after me rather plaintively. ... I had not, I said to myself, come into the future to carry on a miniature flirtation. Yet her distress when I left her was very great, her expostulations at the parting were sometimes frantic, and I think, altogether, I had as much trouble as comfort from her devotion. Nevertheless she was, somehow, a very great comfort … her odd affection for me triumphed, and for five of the nights of our acquaintance, including the last night of all, she slept with her head pillowed on my arm. But my story slips away from me as I speak of her.

In the BBC sitcom Goodnight Sweetheart (1993-99), created by Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, Gary Sparrow (Nicholas Lyndhurst), a 1993 TV repairman, discovers a time-portal that takes him to-and-fro WW2 London. In the present day he is married to Yvonne; in the 1940s he starts a relationship with Phoebe Bamford, a barmaid at the Royal Oak. Time-travel here is a means to, or we could say is a straightforward representational conceit for, adultery. Robert Silverberg’s Hugo and Nebula shortlisted novel Up The Line (1969) combines temporal paradoxes with a great deal of sexually explicit stuff: protagonist Jud Elliott II ends up having great quantities of rumpy-pumpy with the toothsome Pulcheria, herself styled a ‘marvelous transtemporal paradox’ since she is his own great-great-great-xgreats-grandmother. Going back in time and having sex with your own actual mother—the scenario played, rather nervously, for laughs in the first Back to the Future film—is here innoculated against ickiness by the very many generations that intervene betwixt then and now.

Why should it be that time-travel be tangled up with sex in this way? Such a story, taking a protagonist into the past, will tend to gravitate towards famous people: a male time traveller going back to Cleopatra’s Egypt or Catherine the Great’s Russia is liable to do more than simply have a quick look around and then come back. A striking precusor to the time-travel mode is Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1594), where Faustus uses his diabolic pact to, as he believes, draw the most beautiful woman the world has ever seen, Helen of Troy, out of her time and into his (in fact, we the audience know that this isn’t actually Helen: it’s a devil in disguise). Faustus doesn’t engage in this proto-time-travel simply in order to say hello: he wants to have sex with Helen, and does.

FAUSTUS. One thing, good servant, let me crave of thee,
To glut the longing of my heart’s desire, —
That I may have unto my paramour
That heavenly Helen which I saw of late,
Whose sweet embraces may extinguish clean
Those thoughts that do dissuade me from my vow,
And keep my oath I made to Lucifer.

MEPHIST. This, or what else my Faustus shall desire,
Shall be perform’d in twinkling of an eye.

Re-enter HELEN, passing over the stage between two CUPIDS.

FAUSTUS. Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? —
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss. —
[Kisses her.]
Her lips suck forth my soul: see, where it flies! —
Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.
Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena.

We could take this as a commentary upon the one-dimensional shallowness of men: invent a marvellous new technology, and men will use it to have sex: invent the car, and men will have sex in them; invent the internet and men will use it to seek out sexual stimulation; invent the time machine and men will use it to go back in time and shag Anne Boyleyn, or Mary Shelley, or Helen of Troy. There’s some satirical point in this, although Aldiss attempts to drape the encounter in his novel on the lineaments of great romance, ‘enchanted ground’, ‘time and the great day fluttered round our bodies.’

The emphasis is different in time-travel stories written by women, although the substance is similar. In Kathleen A Flynn’s The Jane Austen Project (2018) two researchers in a near-future temporal institute, Rachel Katzman and Liam Finucane, are sent back to the Regency, and Rachel, a Janeite, meets and falls for Jane’s brother, Henry Austen. Diana Gabaldon’s immensely popular ‘Outlander’ books (starting with Outlander in 1980, and so far nine large volumes long, with a successful TV adaptation to boot) is about twentieth-century nurse Claire Beauchamp travelling back to 18th-century Scotland, where she finds romance and exciting nookie with the dashing Jacobite Jamie Fraser. When Clemmie Bennett’s The Apple and the Tree (2023) sends its heroine Ella back to Henry VIII times, via a magic time-travelling ring, it is to the court of a young Henry VIII, when he was still handsome and lithe, so that romantic sparks can fly. Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife (2009) was a huge success, as was Ruchard Curtis’s time-travel romcom movie About Time (2013), even though both are stories of sexually-predatory men using time-travel to groom and gaslight the objects of their erotic fixation.

There is sex in these stories, since romance as a genre is no longer merely coyly suggestive about such matters, although it doesn’t feel as instrumentalised, as nakedly the get-your-rocks-off ‘point’ of the storytelling, as with the male stories. But the connection between time-travel as such, and sex, is there.

A Freudian would say that these fantasies are about our oedpial and electral complexes. Or that Mary Shelley or Cleopatra or Helen of Troy are objets petites a, that what they stand-in for is the object grand a, the Big Other, and that’s what we want to engage erotically. That these are stories about us having sex not with specific individuals from the past so much as with the past itself, which is to say, with our past. Or perhaps it is simply a testament to the opportunism of the male libido: always looking to insert itself, always making excuses: ‘ah, in this timeline my wife hasn’t been born yet, so this doesn’t count as cheating on her …’