The Science of Herself (4 page)

In 1833, an entry in Anna Maria Pinney's diary alludes to a deep sorrow, given in strictest confidence and too delicate to set down in its details. Whatever it was, Pinney kept the secret, noting only that eight years earlier Mary had hoped to see herself raised from her low situation and had seen those hopes cruelly dashed.

The world dislikes a story in which a woman is merely accomplished, brave, and consequential. Eight years before, Letitia De la Beche had sought a legal separation from Henry alleging ill treatment, which may have simply been his long years without her in Jamaica. A year later, she'd taken up residence with her lover, Major General Wyndham. We've no reason beyond the faint hint of Pinney's diary to believe that Mary wanted Henry. If she did, like Anne Elliot, she'd had this second chance. But Henry took off for the continent to escape the scandal and Mary found a pterosaur, the first in England, instead.

In 1830, Henry came to Mary with an offering. He had painted a watercolor for her entitled “Duria Antiquior, A More Ancient Dorset.” This crowded Jurassic landscape,
largely underwater, included every creature Mary had found, and most of them trying to eat each other. It was an astonishing act of imagination, beautifully rendered.

But it was not the painting that was Henry's chief gift. Mary had lost her money in a bad investment; the market for fossils had slowed, and once again her finances were precarious. Lithographic prints had been made from Henry's painting and were being briskly sold. All the proceeds were to be Mary's. Henry hoped her fossil sales would be boosted as well by the advertising.

Meanwhile her old friend William Buckland persuaded the British Association for the Advancement of Science to grant her an annuity of £25 a year. No other woman had ever been half so acknowledged. When secured, it was enough to keep her and her mother, too, even if she never made another great find.

A decade passed and a few years more. Mary Anning continued to uncover fossils—ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and pterosaurs, but also the
Squaloraja polyspondyla
, the fish
Dapedius,
the shark
Hybodus
. In 1839, she wrote a letter to the
Magazine of Natural History
, part of which was published. She was correcting a claim made in one of their articles, that a recent
Hybodus
fossil was the first of its kind, a new genus, since she had already discovered several others. She was among the earliest to recognize coprolites for what they were—petrified feces—and sold
sketches made from the ink she discovered still in the ink sacs of belemnite fossils.

She narrowly escaped a drowning. She was nearly crushed by a runaway carriage. She was only a few feet away from the cliff collapse that killed her Tray, her constant companion.

Prominent scientists such as Louis Agassiz and Richard Owen continued to seek her out, to, in Owen's words, “take a run down to make love to Mary Anning at Lyme.” Owen routinely omitted her role when discussing her finds, but in the early 1840s, Agassiz named two fish fossils for her—
Acrodus anningiae
and
Belenostomus anningiae
. He was the only person to so acknowledge her while she was still alive to enjoy it. He even threw in
Eugnathus philpotae
, for her good friend, the collector, Elizabeth Philpot. Both women had impressed him enormously.

Mary was part now of the great debates, even if only from the counter of her fossil shop. The theory of catastrophism waned in favor of uniformitarianism, geological change coming slowly and uniformly rather than in a series of catastrophes. Biblical stories fell beneath Agassiz's glaciers and Lyell's recurring cycles of climate change. Darwin was about to speak.

Henry De la Beche was named director of the British Geological Survey. As such he was more interested in finding the materials to fuel the British Empire— tin, iron, and coal—than in fossils. William Buckland was named dean of Westminster, and occupied with
problems of cholera and sewage. Lyme was hit, first with disastrous landslips that caused whole houses to fall from the cliffs, and then with fire. Mary lost her dog and then her mother. She found a lump in one of her breasts.

These things Mary Anning and Jane Austen shared: that they made their own way in the world, and that they are remembered. Tourists come to Lyme to see the inn where Austen stayed or the place where Mary Anning's shop once stood, and some, like Lord Tennyson, come to see the exact spot where Louisa Musgrove fell. They shared this, too, that they both died young: Austen at forty-one and Mary at forty-seven.

Austen's death came in 1817, the same year Mary's first ichthyosaurus was named, the same year
Persuasion
was published. Austen had worked on Anne's story until illness prevented her and would have worked on it more had she been able. Its publication was posthumous.

Mary Anning made it into Jules Verne's books in the guise of her monsters, but never into Austen's. She wouldn't have made sense there with her bits of gothic history, her lightning, her science, her creatures. She wouldn't make sense in any story until the story changed.

Austen's story does not.

Anne Elliot is standing in the shelter of the Cobb, her cloak pulled tightly around her. The seagulls float above on currents, glide with their wings outstretched through the air. The day is cloudless, but the sun is thin. Anne is certain that Captain Wentworth no longer loves her and yet, Austen tells us, she is coming into a second bloom. She has recently been admired by a young man in passing who will propose to her before the story's end. All Anne has to do to see young Mary approaching in her curious clothes with her curious rocks is turn.

But the moment is already past. Austen is tired; she is dying. Her pen moves and Anne's mouth opens in fear and horror. Into the charming setting of Lyme Regis, just as Austen remembers it from her visits long ago, Louisa Musgrove falls.

T
HE
“T
URKEY
C
ITY
L
EXICON
,” a primer for science fiction workshops, currently contains the following:

The Motherhood Statement

SF story which posits some profoundly unsettling threat to the human condition, explores the implications briefly, then hastily retreats to affirm the conventional social and humanistic pieties, e.g. apple pie and motherhood. Greg Egan once stated that the secret of truly effective SF was to deliberately “burn the motherhood statement.”

As general advice, I have no problem with this. Easy assumptions should always be examined and examined again. The coinage is catchy and rolls off the tongue. Something important is being said.

It's the specifics that give me pause. Apple pie, okay, fine, whatever. But motherhood? Nothing, absolutely nothing, appears to me more contested in our political and social and private lives than motherhood. Any woman who has ever had children can tell you it is no picnic of affirmation. Any woman who has not had children can tell you that that, too, is a controversial place to be. Neither is much admired.

Motherhood is a concept that changes from culture to culture and over time. Sometimes, it's set in opposition to mothering—motherhood, in this schematic, is the sacred duty of women, an artificial construct which underlies the whole system of patriarchy. In this system, a woman with no children is a shirker. Mothering, on the other hand, is simply the work of first bearing and then raising a child. The biological mother need not be the same person who raises the child. The person (or people) who raises the child need not be female. The extent to which this second formulation, mothering, can be untangled from any imposed societal values is unclear. (At the very least, the untangling would be the work of generations.)

Childcare has too often been, as Adrienne Rich once noted, a form of enforced servitude or a duty performed out of guilt with its own unhappy consequences.
Equally problematic is the argument that mothers, or women in general, have a particular gift for nurturance and that by putting our politics into the hands of women this gift will transform the world.

Not that the world doesn't desperately need transforming.

While doing primate research for my most recent novel, I read many pages about Harry Harlow's infamous studies of rhesus monkey infants raised with replacement mothers, inanimate mothers made of cloth or wire. It's important to remember that these experiments took place against a backdrop of considerable scientific hostility toward mothers. “Mother love is a dangerous instrument,” John B. Watson, president of the American Psychological Association had said with considerable impact. The influence of the mother should be limited as much as possible and eventually, in some utopian future, eliminated altogether. The “overkissed child” was debilitated for life by such unnecessary affections.

But here is what we think we now know: love (often, but not always mother love) changes the young brain and those changes have permanent consequences. Neuroplasticity is the necessary ability of the brain to rearrange itself, and love is neuroplasticity's primary source.

A subsequent movement, often exemplified by Dr. Benjamin Spock, assured mothers that they knew more than they thought they knew and encouraged them to trust themselves above all. Affection was okay again; in
fact it was essential. World War II had shown us infants who died without it.