The Cloning of Joanna May: Reproductive Technologies, Motherhood, Identity

What is an appropriate feminist response to reproductive technologies? Many feminists condemn such technologies as extensions of patriarchal control over women's bodies. They describe current practices, like paid surrogacy, as constituting near-total exploitation of the female body. From this point of view, the potential for the exploitation of women's bodies through human cloning, an increasingly viable technology, appears even greater. Cloning would turn the supposedly "natural" functions of conceiving and bearing a child into a commodity, something that can be controlled, bought and sold.

Yet other, more tenable feminist responses to reproductive technologies exist. Fay Weldon's novel, The Cloning of Joanna May (1989), imaginatively explores one such possibility. It is not an easy task to imagine how the exploitation of women's bodies can be resisted without resorting to an acceptance of the feminine as simply "the inverse, indeed the underside, of the masculine" (Irigaray 1985, 159). In other words, how does one deal with reproductive technologies without invoking and reinforcing ideologies such as the "naturalness" of the mother-child bond, ideologies that bolster patriarchal control of women and their bodies?

A major strand of Irigaray's work in the 1980s and 1990s consists of her philosophical and practical interest in the ways in which women might move beyond the category of commodity—an object or thing that certainly has value, but that is always a possession and as such cannot have a will or voice of its/ her own—and begin symbolically representing themselves as women. Works such as An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1993 [1984]), Sexes and Genealogies (1993 [1987]) and je, tu, nous: Toward a Culture of Difference (1993 [1990]) outline a variety of ideas in this regard, including a central insistence on the notion that women need to create their own genealogy via the figure of the mother in order to create their own symbolic world. Irigaray's concern is that women not sever themselves completely from the figure of difference that has been represented by the mother since Greek mythology. In this paper I argue that this concern need not necessitate the rejection of reproductive technologies, some of which do seem to "kill the mother" by controlling and commodifying her function and activities.

In The Cloning of Joanna May (1989), Fay Weldon moves beyond blanket acceptance or rejection of reproductive technologies by exploring the consequences of a particular kind of reproductive technology—cloning—for her characters, Joanna May and her four clones. Weldon links the characters' understanding of the stakes involved in using reproductive technologies to their ability to decide for and amongst themselves what it means to be a woman, a daughter, a mother and a sister. To return to Irigaray's terminology, then, Weldon does not "[reverse] the economy of sameness, by turning the feminine into the standard for 'sexual difference'" and by asserting a monolithic vision of feminine values and ethics that appears, but may not be, natural. Rather, with interesting results, Weldon enables her characters "to practice that difference" (Irigaray 1985, 159).

Although the term "reproductive technologies" encompasses both conceptive and contraceptive technologies, the events of The Cloning of Joanna May are primarily concerned with conceptive technologies. Such technologies include artificial or donor insemination, sex preselection, in-vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood, artificial parthenogenesis, and egg fusion and cloning (The New Our Bodies, Ourselves 1984, 317-324). Not all of these technologies change the terms of fertility and motherhood. Artificial or donor insemination, the simplest and oldest of these techniques (and the only one recommended by the feminist health handbook Our Bodies, Ourselves) was first performed in 1776 (Wacjman 1991, 80). It requires little technical know-how, much less the presence of a doctor, since it entails merely the practice of inserting a few syringefuls of semen into the uterus at the time ovulation is due. But other conceptive technologies require professional knowledge and sophisticated instrumentation. They are most often used as solutions to infertility itself. It is these technologies that confer infertility with the status of a disease. As Judy Wajcman argues in the book Feminism Confronts Technology, the fact that infertility is now considered a medically treatable condition means that a woman is placed in the position of refusing to be treated for her supposed illness if she decides not to make use of conceptive reproductive technologies. Technologies currently in use are sex preselection, in-vitro fertilization and surrogate motherhood, all of which are both scientifically possible and, in privileged Western terms, fairly commonplace.

They are also subject to resistance from radical feminists. Since its inception in 1984, FINRRAGE (the Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering) has castigated reproductive technologies as "designed less to help the infertile woman than to appease men's envy of women's reproductive power" (Baruch 1988, 138). Even more angrily, Gena Corea states: "Surrogacy is not liberty. It is crime" (1989, 183). This view of reproductive technologies rejects them as inimical to the interests of women since they increase the control of technicians and bureaucrats over the process of conception. In response to these critical assertions, Michelle Stanworth argues that feminists need to recognize and be sensitive to the needs of women who are infertile, especially given the fact that women's view of themselves is so often bound up with their ability to bear and raise children. Thus, Stanworth suggests that feminists should not simply reject conceptive technologies. She argues that radical feminists' rejection of conceptive technologies is based on an essentially anti-feminist distinction between good, or natural, motherhood and bad, or technologically assisted, motherhood. At the same time, most feminist critiques of conceptive technologies acknowledge that current uses of them have predominantly conservative effects. As Judy Wacjman explains, "the emphasis placed on women's right to use these technologies to their own ends tends to obscure the way in which historical and social relations are built into the technologies themselves" (Wacjman 1991, 62).

Currently, only technologies that reinforce the value of having one's "own" child, or in other words, a child that is related to oneself genetically, are being developed. This fact is worth examining, because other uses of reproductive technologies have the potential to radically disrupt conventional ideas about parenthood and family relationships. Techniques such as artificial parthenogenesis, egg fusion and cloning are not currently in use at least partly because they pose a fundamental threat to accepted notions of what it means to be a parent, a child, or a sibling. Even in the existing case of in-vitro fertilization combined with surrogacy, reproductively assisted conception creates enormous anxiety. A child can now have three mothers: a genetic mother who supplies the ovum, a gestational mother who supplies the uterine environment, and a nurturing mother who provides the postnatal care. With which mother, the question springs to mind, does the resulting child have the closest natural bond, and why? Difficult questions are raised about the apparent naturalness of any mother-child bond. Thus the project of reclaiming motherhood as a female accomplishment (a project undertaken by both feminists and conservative anti-feminists alike) is clearly threatened.

Do feminist projects to reclaim motherhood necessarily mean giving the natural priority over the technological? The Cloning of Joanna May suggests that the answer to this question may be no. While Weldon herself has written that "[i]n The Cloning of Joanna May I take birth away from women, and hand it over to men: as they are of course busy doing for themselves in the real world," (1994b, 206) such a description of the impact of reproductive technology reflects only part of the manner in which reproductive technology is brought into play in the novel. The Cloning of Joanna May thoroughly interrogates the ideology of the so-called natural bond between mother and child.

The novel plays fast and loose with the expectations of what constitutes natural family relations in a world of benign technology, as this overview of its wacky plot will demonstrate. In the novel, Joanna May is the sixty-year-old childless ex-wife of Carl May, a powerful British businessman who has risen from extremely inauspicious beginnings (he was kept in a kennel as a child until rescued by social workers) to become head of Britnuc, a fictional company that owns, among other things, the various nuclear power stations in England. The novel's action begins at about the time the nuclear power station at Chernobyl breaks down and begins pouring radioactivity into the air of Europe, an event that metaphorically signals a (temporary) breakdown of patriarchal science's control over the natural world. Joanna May discovers that Carl, with the aid of a Dr Holly, created four clones of her when she was in Dr Holly's clinic thirty years before. She also discovers that the abortion she had obtained at the time (Carl did not, he said, wish to have children) was in fact merely an excuse to obtain her ovum, since Carl was aware, although she herself was not, that her pregnancy was an hysterical one. In the interim, the reader meets the four clones, Jane, Julie, Gina and Alice, as Weldon introduces their stories in several third person-narrated sections. Other sections are also told in the third person, excepting the pieces of Joanna May's first-person "year of strange events: some wonderful, some terrible" (The Cloning of Joanna May, hereafter C, 7) in which she attempts to make sense of her experiences and identity by writing her own story. Eventually, Joanna May finds the clones, and Carl May dies after taking a public-relations swim in a nuclear cooling tank. He has, during the course of the narrative, had both his ex-wife's adulterous lover, Isaac, and her current lover and gardener, Oliver, murdered. Finally, he has plotted to kill Jane and Gina, and keep as his "new wives" Julie and Alice, since the two latter clones are more glamorous and successful than the former due to the influence of the more privileged environments in which they grew up and still live.

The novel begins interrogating accepted ideas of the mother-child bond with Carl May's relationship to his mother. This relationship is a highly negative one. Dr Holly, creator of the clones, wonders about Carl May's motives for refusing to allow his wife to become a mother while simultaneously using her body to produce offspring himself: "[C]ould a man brought up in a kennel, barking in his heart, baying at the moon, really ever know himself?" (C 123). It is Carl May's mother who kept him in the kennel. The narrator emphasizes the perceived power of the natural feminine as a force with which Carl has to reckon, since it is the traditionally female moon at which he "bays" in anger and frustration. The suggestion that Carl might be insane, "barking in his heart," is also hinted at here. Angela, Joanna May's friend and the intelligent wife of one of Carl's employees, is quite convinced that Carl May is mad, telling both her husband and Joanna May of her opinion on several occasions (C 167, 173, 267). However, Joanna May dismisses this view of Carl, insisting that "he just likes to get his own way, and get his own back. He's childish" (C 167). In her reading of him, in other words, Carl is trying to revenge himself upon his mother, trying to "get his own way" rather than fall under the sway of her frightening authority. The exaggerated power of Carl May's mother (who is never given a name in the novel, which adds to the reader's sense of her as a symbolic figure) renders her the model of the castrating feminine that patriarchy so fears and reviles. At the same time, it remains unclear whether Weldon wishes the reader to seriously believe that Carl May's mother should be held responsible for his adult actions. The language used when Carl May's sanity is discussed, including such stock phrases as "could... a man... ever really know himself?" suggests that Weldon may well be emphasizing the inadequacy of such explanations. The manner in which the language of psychological explanation rooted in childhood is used here points to the glib, clichéd status that such explanations have acquired. The figure of Carl's young mistress Bethany, brought up in a brothel and yet apparently largely unaffected by her own traumatic childhood, raises some further doubts about simplistically drawing conclusions about adult behavior in terms of childhood experiences.

What is very clear is the fact that both Carl May and Dr Holly symbolize patriarchal conquest over nature. They view the natural world as so chaotic and directionless that it needs them to play God. They feel

Carl May and Dr Holly's view of the woman whom they have cloned, and the reason they did not bother to inform her of the cloning process, is as follows:

In this passage, Weldon ironically reproduces the phallogocentric language that carefully conceals its fear of the feminine by pretending only to revere and respect it. Science and technology are the powers to which Carl May and Dr Holly turn in order to attempt to improve upon the chaos of the world as they see it. This vision of the world, in which everything inhabits either the dimension of the rational, scientific and masculine, or the chaotic world of the natural and feminine, is one that always remains with Carl May. He does not restrict the feminine category to subjects who are gendered female. Confronted by the Barbers of the Bath, the "rock band" he has hired as his private squad of bully-boys and clone-trailers, he despairingly decides that all his "efforts on behalf of the human race" have been futile, for

Carl May primarily fears and detests the natural world—the world of irrationality, chance and excess—and his attempts to reckon with this world do seem partly rooted in his childhood, and partly in his view of the feminine body as the site or root cause of the disorder of the natural. These attempts include, centrally, his cloning of Joanna May, but the impulse to control and exert order on the natural via scientific method can also be seen in his links with nuclear power and detected in his careful watching of the forces of nature and chance via his Divination Department. The Divination Department is his final attempt to use scientific principles in order to understand and control the (super)natural, and his failure to take seriously its conclusions destroys him.

The details of Joanna May's childhood extend the novel's interrogation of the effect of childhood trauma on adult life. Joanna May explains her adult choice of marriage to Carl by referring to her own childhood, and in the process, she expresses her view of herself as damaged by her accession to a feminine identity, much as Carl is damaged by the savagery of his early childhood. Although "Carl had suffered cruelty and hardship, and I had not," Joanna May says that she "knew a different kind of cruelty, but the same kind of terror—the inevitability of illness, age, death: the impotence of love" (C 261). This parallel makes what is typically considered normal feminine subjectivity look like child abuse. Shoshana Felman comes to a similar conclusion whilst examining women's autobiography in terms of the concept of psychic trauma: she says "[i]ndeed, I will suggest—in line with what has recently been claimed by feminist psychiatrists and psychotherapists—that every woman's life contains, explicitly or in implicit ways, the story of a trauma" (1993, 16). And Irigaray says that the trauma of women's lives appears related to "one thing which has been singularly neglected, barely touched on, in the theory of the unconscious: the relation of woman to the mother and the relation of women among themselves" (1985, 124).

Exploring these relationships—the relation of woman to the mother and the relation of women among themselves—helps Joanna May make some sense of her own identity. She realizes that being Carl's wife, far from being "an opportunity for being healed, for becoming real," (C 261) as she initially hopes, merely makes her "Carl May's wife" (C 132). Her relationship with mothers and motherhood is irrevocably affected by Carl May's attempts to separate children from mothers. Not only does he (initially) prevent Joanna May from herself becoming a mother, he also separates her from her own mother. Joanna May says,

The link between mother and daughter is thus severed by the daughter's becoming someone's wife. Irigaray notes how Freud, in his analysis of the young girl's negotiation of the Oedipus complex, states that the daughter has to begin to hate her mother in order to accede to her identity as feminine, and asks, "[d]oesn't that mean that it is impossible—within our current value system—for a girl to achieve a satisfactory relation to the woman who has given her birth?" (1985, 143). In other words, a woman must turn away from her mother before she meets her husband, who merely finalizes the separation of daughter from mother, a separation that results in the isolation that Joanna May feels. The sense of isolation emerges, paradoxically, from the fact that the two women involved (mother and daughter) are not adequately differentiated or separated from each other: "strictly speaking, they make neither one nor two, neither has a name, meaning, sex of her own, neither can be 'identified' with respect to the other" (Irigaray 1985, 143). What might be a solution to this isolation? Jane Gallop suggests that

In other words, women need both equality and difference. Such a combination of equality and difference is forged in The Cloning of Joanna May: Joanna May finds a way to name herself, to say "I, Joanna May. Or perhaps now, just Joanna" (C 326). Her identity as both and simultaneously daughter and mother is absolutely central to her new self-made identity. In the formation of her new identity, meeting the clones, whom she eventually names via the multiple description "my sisters, my twins, my clones, my children," (C 324) is crucial.

Through Joanna May's response to her own cloning, Weldon creates an emblematic trajectory of feminist reaction to reproductive technologies. This reaction begins with horror and fear, especially with regard to the implied loss of an already ill-defined sense of self. Fear is followed by outrage, then courageous confrontation. In Joanna May's case, confrontation is followed by a negotiated acceptance and redefinition of self. When first told about the clones, Joanna May is "shocked into calmness, [then]... consider[ing] herself split into five... her gorge rose in her throat" (C 141). Shortly afterwards, she says that she is "horrified,... terrified, I don't know what to do with myself at all, whatever myself means now" (C 157). She immediately grasps the fact that the cloning will affect her sense of herself but is unable to assess how it will do so or what the end result will be. When Joanna May returns to her home after being told of the clones' existence, she discovers her young lover, Oliver, murdered by Carl May, together with a Tarot card message, which she interprets as notification of Carl's intention to "kill the clones" (C 204) as punishment for her repeated unfaithfulness (although they are divorced, he still regards her as his wife). At this low point, Joanna May is uncertain whether she ever wants to meet the clones, saying "I'm not at all sure that I recognize their right to life, these thefts from me, these depletings of my 'I', these early symptoms of the way the world is going. I might myself be rather in favor of termination" (C 204). This passage uses the language of abortion ("right to life," "termination") and disease ("depletings," "symptoms") to suggest Joanna May's distaste, and it demonstrates that there exists as yet no clearly defined discourse within which conceptive technologies can be discussed. She decides to fight for her clones when she discovers that her apparently terminated pregnancy, during which her ovary was removed by Dr Holly for the cloning process, was in fact a hysterical one. The fact that Carl never told her about the hysterical nature of the pregnancy leads Joanna May to insist that "he shan't have the clones. I want them. I need them. They're mine" (C 246). She hires a detective agency to trace the process of the clones' creation.

In this section of the novel, Joanna May is able to consciously claim self-acceptance by wresting away from Carl the power of motherhood and self-definition. Because Carl does not want any children and has secretly ensured that he physically cannot have any, Joanna is prevented from bearing children during her marriage. As a result she is unable to forge a conventional female identity as a natural mother. Her hysterical pregnancy is not an unexpected result of her marital frustration and despair. Hysterical pregnancy, or pseudocyesis, is a condition in which many of the symptoms of pregnancy are present without conception having occurred (Joanna May remembers "her breasts heavy and sore ..., and feeling sick, ... and all her being focused in on this one wonderful fact: a baby, a baby!" [C 243]). By taking control even over a pregnancy that he himself did not physically produce, Carl attempts to quell the power of conception expressed through Joanna May's body in the pregnancy and to manipulate this power to his own ends. He attempts to eliminate the mother-child relationship and to destroy the state of motherhood with its creative and mystical potential. Ironically, however, the pregnancy's products—the clones—become the catalyst of Joanna May's attempt to create and express her own sense of self. Thus, Joanna May's hysterical pregnancy works to empower her through indirect means. Like hysteria, the hysterical pregnancy turns

The hysterical pregnancy makes a mother of Joanna May, first of the clones and then of "little Carl" (C 347). But it is a highly unusual kind of motherhood, claimed in a conscious, unusual, and creative way, which thus disrupts the system of patrilineal authority.

Joanna May's motherhood is unusual not only at the stage of conception, but also at the stage of parenting. At the point at which Joanna May decides to search for the clones, they have already begun to find each other. Julie Rainer and Gina Herriot are the first to meet, in a McDonalds in which they have both, uncharacteristically, taken refuge after particularly unpleasant experiences. Gina, who does not want to return home to her abusive husband, accepts Julie's offer of her own empty, lonely and childless house as a refuge. Jane Jarvis and Alice Morthampton meet when journalist Jane goes to model/actress Alice's house to interview her for a magazine article. These meetings in turn lead to Gina and Jane confronting their (birth)mothers about their origins, and the four clones eventually all meet at Dr Holly's Bulstrode Clinic. When angrily allied with each other against what they perceive to be a common enemy, the clones are a model of powerful solidarity. Dealing with Dr Holly, for example, they are seen to have "rapidly acquired the habit... of dividing up a sentence amongst them and handing it out, with fourfold emphasis" (C 302). Dr Holly decides that they produce "a kind of wave motion of feeling and thought" (C 302) and feels that "their energy bisected him" (C 304). He is also disappointed, although not surprised, by their lack of gratitude towards him. When confronted, finally, by "the detail of their birth," or as Alice says, "[n]ot birth... genesis" (C 306), they are all shaken and upset, but are still basically united:

After this incident, the clones and Joanna May meet. Initially, the clones greet Joanna May as "Mother!" and ask her for "a proper mother's report" (C 328) on them. She agrees to give them her "maternal view" (C 328) and proceeds to say that

After trying to justify such criticisms, Joanna May stops speaking, and the narrator says "[s]he had shocked herself as well as them" (C 329). She apologizes and explains that she has been trying to act like an ordinary mother, attempting to

In other words, the mother tries to make the daughter in her own image, since she (in Weldon's view) is engaged in an active struggle against the father, which she exerts through and "takes out on" the daughter. This struggle has detrimental effects for both mother and daughter, since it changes the mother-daughter relationship very quickly into a relationship of conflict and competition. Here, Weldon adds her own slant to the theoretical ideas of Irigaray: while Irigaray does not explicitly view conflict between mother and daughter as arising directly from the conflict sometimes coyly referred to as the "battle of the sexes," Weldon does. Thus, for Joanna May, there is a way to resolve the problem of mother-daughter conflict: renounce the title of mother—but not the mother's actual experience or creative potential.

Because Joanna is formulating the bond between her and her clones without any long-standing traditions, she has the opportunity to avoid the damaging aspects of apparently natural family relations as Freud, Irigaray, and other theorists have described them. Joanna is scathing: "[i]f this is motherhood," she says, "save me from it. I always wanted it, but this is all it is! Nag, nag, nag!" (C 329-330). The clones' reaction is immediate:

Without the authority of motherhood, therefore, the older woman has no authority at all. The daughters—or younger generation—examine her and find her lacking. She has contributed nothing and deserves no recognition, either for her status as apparent originator or for her own sufferings. Here, the problems created by the lack of models other than that of the mother-daughter relationship for interaction, cooperation and learning between and from women are made glaringly obvious. However, the "sisterhood" of the clones and Joanna does survive, after Joanna attempts to leave, once she consents to be their chairperson, "someone who controlled an agenda but couldn't vote" (C 331). When they discuss anything, therefore, Joanna leads and advises, but does not make final decisions, which are jointly decided upon by the clones. Joanna and the clones thus find a regulated, just way of working together for their mutual benefit, and it is Joanna's discovery and acknowledgement of them that enables her finally to name herself as "perhaps now, just Joanna" (C 326). She is finally no longer encompassed by her identity as Carl's wife, but discovers in the "fear... shame... rage... desire, and a great swelling energy" (C 324) of meeting the clones that she

In my opinion, Joanna's declaration is one of the only positive and triumphant statements of female certainty via a new—but still specifically feminine—identity to be found in all of Weldon's work. Weldon is generally pessimistic about such utopian ideals and possibilities in her fiction: examples of her rather skeptical outlook are found in some of her best-known novels, such as Praxis (1978) and The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983). Perhaps The Cloning of Joanna May manages to envision a model of a mother-daughter bond that works and is mutually useful precisely because it cannot be perceived as natural and thus has to be consciously and contingently developed.

The revision of not just past and present, but also future identity, is gestured toward at the end of The Cloning of Joanna May. With the help of the other clones, Joanna May creates a "little Carl," (C 347) using Dr Holly's assistance with his "tried and tested techniques of nuclei transfer" (C 348). Now that Joanna May has learned much about the meanings of motherhood, she becomes nurturing mother. This plot twist has proven difficult for readers to swallow. It is an indication of the common distrust of such gratuitous overstepping of the mark of the natural that one early reviewer called the child Carl's "ex-wife's quasi-grandchild" (Craig 1989, 518). Joanna says that she cannot allow the little Carl to be held responsible for Carl May's deeds, because

She also places her faith in the future, which she says "shouldn't alarm us: how could it be worse than what's gone before...? It is the past that is so terrifying, with its capacity to spoil and destroy the present" (C 347). With little Carl, Weldon takes the destabilization of natural motherhood and parenting to an extreme.

Joanna's remark is an almost exact replica of Weldon's own philosophy: Weldon refuses to adhere to condemnatory feminist judgements of reproductive technologies, which she sees as attempts to validate only apparently natural pregnancy and birth processes. Recently Weldon said, "[w]e can't be frightened of the future, I say: it's the past that destroys us" (1994a, 197). Weldon has always been deeply suspicious of simplistic recourse to the natural, saying, "I have always seen 'nature' as inimical to women; nature kills you" (1994a, 196).

At the end of The Cloning of Joanna May, the clones divide and exchange their responsibilities regarding children as they judge best: Alice gives birth to "little Carl," (C 347) then happily gives the baby to Joanna when he is six weeks old; Julie adopts Gina's two sons, and Jane and her erstwhile "live-out" (C 10) but now live-in lover, Tom, look after Sue, Gina's daughter. These complicated parenting arrangements are made to look not like immorality in an age of family crisis and technological excess, but like a new version of mothering that removes restrictive and potentially damaging social conventions. Joanna says that "[w]e've had so many oughts and shoulds, all of us, we've all but given up being critical of one another" (C 350), and the clones are given the advantage, says the narrator elsewhere, of feeling "the inherent guilt of the female, but not powerfully; being four that guilt was quartered. The soul was multiplied, the guilt divided. That was a great advance" (C 310-11). This "division of guilt" is thus explicitly linked with Joanna and the clones' discovery of one another, with their sisterhood. They are able to make the considered connections of female "sameness" referred to above, which in turn enables them to develop meanings of motherhood and sisterhood that are different, useful to them. There is no reason, the novel argues, to be guilty anymore.

Finally, it is useful to note that The Cloning of Joanna May deploys both a realist mode and an allegorical one: the narrative has both a political and a mythical dimension. The mythical dimension is suggested by Weldon's use of the Tarot pack, which adds a symbolic aspect to the novel's workings, but it also exists, I would argue, in the story's exploration of one woman's identity. In this reading, the clones each function as one aspect of Joanna's personality: Jane as intellect (Queen of Wands), Julie as strength derived from the material world (Queen of Pentacles), Gina as endurance (Queen of Swords) and Alice as aesthetic and moral perception (Queen of Cups). According to the Tarot reading given of Joanna by Isaac, then, the novel contains the story of her journey from the simply intellectual to a more advanced state of aesthetic and moral perception, via her endurance and understanding of the material world. "Little Carl" is thus, in this reading, the end product of Joanna's developed identity. The story functions as a kind of female creation myth or fairytale, in which a female protagonist experiences trials and hardship in order to produce a new order of life, of which she is the author.

However, notions of singular and all-powerful authorship (so often, in literary history, metaphorically represented by the role or actions of parenting) are rendered highly problematic by the novel. The fantasy of the single and all-knowing creator / parent is upheld by Carl May, and is clearly (self-)destructive. In the place of this fantasy of omnipotence, the acknowledged imperfections and multiplicity of the clones, together with the fact that they neither purposefully destroy Carl May, nor try in their re-production of him to genetically perfect him, constitutes their creative project as very different from current uses of reproductive technologies. Crucially, their use of such technologies is forgiving of faults or even potential faults, abandoning "oughts and shoulds" (C 350). This acceptance of difference and imperfection in turn means that The Cloning of Joanna May cannot be read as simply recommending the takeover by women of the means of reproduction. After all, Joanna and the clones do not produce more female clones; instead they choose to symbolically allow Carl a second chance in the world. This gesture of forgiveness fits in well with the pragmatic feminist critique outlined in my introduction, which refuses to seize and use medical and scientific power in a destructive way, or in order that one sex can once more gain complete ascendancy over the other. Rather than simplistically advocating that women are and should remain the producers of children, that mothers (and women in general) are naturally better, or that mothering is necessarily the exclusive domain of women, the novel shifts the process of reproduction itself away from both such notions of naturalness and the scientific notion of perfect children.

To return to the concerns raised in the epigraphs to this paper, then, The Cloning of Joanna May explores and alters accepted notions of motherhood (as well as daughterhood and sisterhood). However, it does so without either "kill[ing] the mother" (Irigaray 1991, 43) or reinstating either the patriarchal or the feminist fantasy of the perfect, supposedly natural mother. Weldon enables Joanna and the clones to make sense of their origin and status, (re)productively resist their position as "'products' used and exchanged by men," (Irigaray 1985, 84) and thus "quarter their guilt" and participate in processes of exchange on their own terms and to their own advantage. Crucial to Weldon's feminist critique through fiction is the recognition and acceptance of the clones' "sameness," that which they have in common, and their simultaneous multiplicity, their difference.

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