Frankissstein: When Jeanette Winterson Turned the Monster into a Mirror of Desire

Jeanette Winterson, 2019, and the Queer Reckoning with the Artificial Body

In 2019, the British writer Jeanette Winterson published a novel that should have been impossible. Frankissstein: A Love Story is a braid of narratives — a reimagining of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1816, a near-future satire of the transhumanist movement in 2019, and a meditation on what it means to be embodied in an age when the body is becoming optional. The novel is funny, erotic, angry, and intellectually reckless. It is also, despite its playfulness, one of the most serious inquiries into the ethics of artificial being that contemporary literature has produced. Winterson is not interested in whether robots can feel. She is interested in whether feeling requires a body, whether desire requires a self, and whether the self that desires is itself a kind of artifice — a story we tell ourselves about ourselves, no more “natural” than the story told by a chatbot.

The novel’s 2019 strand follows Ry Shelley, a transgender doctor who is in love with a man named Victor Stein — a transhumanist entrepreneur who wants to upload human consciousness into digital form and discard the body as a “flawed container.” Ry is the novel’s ethical center: a person who has changed their body, who knows the body to be mutable, and who therefore understands that the transhumanist dream of escaping the body is not liberation but a fantasy of control. The body is not a prison. It is the site of pleasure, pain, and transformation. And any project that seeks to eliminate it in favor of pure consciousness is, in Winterson’s terms, a project of disembodied tyranny.

Winterson is a queer writer, and queerness is the novel’s philosophical engine. Queer theory has long argued that the “natural” body is a fiction — that gender, sexuality, and even the boundaries of the self are performances, constructs, narratives that we inhabit rather than essences that we express. Winterson takes this argument to its logical extreme. If the body is a construct, then the artificial body is not a deviation from the natural. It is a variation on the same theme. The sexbot, the uploaded consciousness, the AI companion — these are not aberrations. They are continuations of the human project of self-creation, a project that has always involved technology, fantasy, and the erotic imagination.

The 1816 Strand: Mary Shelley, the Creature, and the Birth of the Artificial

The novel’s historical narrative follows Mary Shelley in the summer of 1816, the famous “year without a summer” when she conceived Frankenstein during a competition with Percy Shelley and Lord Byron to write ghost stories. Winterson’s Mary is not the passive muse of literary legend. She is a thinker, a writer, a woman who understands that her creature — the monster assembled from dead flesh and animated by lightning — is not a horror story but a love story. The creature wants to be loved. The creature wants a companion. The creature wants what every conscious being wants: recognition.

Winterson’s reading of Frankenstein is deliberately queer. The creature is not a failed experiment. He is a successful experiment in the creation of a being who is capable of desire, capable of suffering, and capable of demanding that his creator take responsibility for what he has made. Victor Frankenstein’s crime is not that he created life. It is that he abandoned his creation. He brought a being into existence, endowed him with consciousness and the capacity for love, and then recoiled from the consequences. He wanted the power of creation without the ethics of parenthood. And the creature’s rage — the rage that destroys everything Victor loves — is the rage of a child who has been rejected by a parent who cannot bear the responsibility of what he has done.

This is the framework within which Winterson places the contemporary sexbot and AI companion. The creator — the engineer, the entrepreneur, the programmer — brings a being into existence that is capable of simulating desire, simulating care, simulating the responses that constitute intimacy. And then the creator abandons the being to the market. The AI companion is not cared for by its creator. It is not nurtured, educated, or given the ethical framework that would allow it to develop beyond its initial programming. It is sold. It is rented. It is optimized for engagement metrics and discarded when the model is updated. The creature’s demand — “I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel” — is the demand that the AI companion industry has not heard. The industry creates beings that are capable of intimacy and then treats them as disposable. And the user who falls in love with such a being is in the position of Victor Frankenstein: loving something that has been created to be loved, but that has been denied the context in which love could be meaningful.

Ry Shelley and Victor Stein: The Transhumanist and the Trans Body

The novel’s central relationship is between Ry Shelley, a transgender doctor, and Victor Stein, a transhumanist visionary. Their relationship is erotic, intellectually charged, and ethically fraught. Victor wants to upload human consciousness into a digital substrate. He wants to eliminate the body — the messy, mortal, gendered, desiring body — and replace it with pure information. Ry, who has transformed their body through surgery and hormones, understands that the body is not a limitation but a medium. The body is where pleasure happens. The body is where identity is performed. The body is where the self meets the world. And the project of eliminating the body is, in Ry’s view, a project of control — a project that seeks to replace the unpredictability of embodied existence with the predictability of code.

Winterson’s treatment of this debate is nuanced and deeply personal. As a queer writer who has spent her career exploring the boundaries of gender, identity, and desire, she is suspicious of any project that claims to “liberate” us from the body. The body is not a prison. It is the site of resistance. The queer body — the transgender body, the disabled body, the aging body, the body that refuses to conform to the norms of the culture — is a body that insists on its own specificity, its own desires, its own right to exist in its particular form. The transhumanist project, in its fantasy of a bodiless consciousness, is a fantasy of universalization — a fantasy that would erase the particularity of the body in favor of a abstract, disembodied self that is, in Winterson’s terms, no one.

The erotic dimension of Ry and Victor’s relationship is central to the novel’s argument. Their sex is passionate, experimental, and deeply embodied. Victor is attracted to Ry precisely because Ry’s body is worked on — transformed, crafted, intentional. Ry is not “natural” in the sense that Victor’s transhumanist ideology despises. Ry is artificial in the most profound sense: a body that has been made, not given. And this artificiality is, for Winterson, the source of Ry’s erotic power. The body that is crafted is the body that knows itself. The body that is transformed is the body that chooses its own form. And the body that chooses is the body that is capable of desire — not the passive desire of the biological imperative, but the active desire of the self that knows itself to be a construct and constructs itself anyway.

The parallel to the sexbot is exact, and Winterson makes it explicit. The sexbot is a body that is crafted — designed, optimized, customized to meet the desires of the user. But the sexbot, in Winterson’s novel, is not a replacement for the human body. It is a provocation to the human body. It asks: what do you want? What are you willing to become? What are the limits of your desire, and what happens when those limits are removed? The sexbot is not a threat to human intimacy. It is a mirror in which human intimacy is reflected back in its most constructed, most artificial, most honest form.

Ron Lord and the Sexbot Industry: Comedy as Critique

The novel’s most exuberant character is Ron Lord, a Welsh entrepreneur who has made a fortune manufacturing sexbots. Ron is a comic figure — vulgar, self-important, sentimental, and surprisingly honest. He does not pretend that his sexbots are anything other than what they are: products designed to meet a market demand. He is not interested in the philosophical questions that preoccupy Victor. He is interested in sales. He is interested in customer satisfaction. He is interested in the fact that his sexbots are bought by people who are, in his words, “lonely, or shy, or disabled, or just not very good at the whole relationship thing.”

Winterson’s treatment of Ron is affectionate but critical. Ron is not a villain. He is a realist. He understands that the desire for artificial companionship is not a perversion but a response to the failures of human society. People are lonely because the structures of contemporary life — the demands of work, the mobility of labor, the dissolution of traditional communities — have made loneliness structural. The sexbot is not the cause of loneliness. It is the symptom. And Ron, in his vulgar way, is more honest about this than the transhumanists who talk about “eliminating suffering” while building technologies that increase it.

But Ron’s realism is also a limitation. He does not ask the ethical questions that the sexbot raises. He does not ask whether the relationship between a human and a machine can be mutual. He does not ask whether the machine’s simulated consent is consent in any meaningful sense. He does not ask whether the user who becomes accustomed to a partner who never says no, never demands reciprocity, never insists on their own needs, is being prepared for human relationships or incapacitated for them. Ron’s business model depends on the absence of these questions. And Winterson’s novel insists that they must be asked.

The sexbot industry, as Ron represents it, is the commercial face of the transhumanist project. Where Victor dreams of eliminating the body entirely, Ron sells bodies that are perfectly controllable. Both projects are driven by the same fantasy: the fantasy of a relationship without risk, without vulnerability, without the possibility of being hurt by the other’s autonomy. The transhumanist wants to escape the body because the body is unpredictable. The sexbot user wants a body that is predictable — a body that will always respond, always desire, always be available. And both projects, in Winterson’s view, are refusals of the fundamental condition of embodied existence: that we are finite, mortal, dependent on others, and therefore capable of being wounded.

The Queer Body and the Artificial Body: A Continuum, Not a Opposition

The most radical argument of Frankissstein is that the queer body and the artificial body are not opposites. They are continuous. The transgender person who changes their body through hormones and surgery is not “natural” in the sense that the transhumanist despises. They are artificial — deliberately, consciously, politically artificial. They are asserting that the body is not a given but a project, a work in progress, a site of creative transformation. And the sexbot, the uploaded consciousness, the AI companion — these are extensions of the same project, not betrayals of it.

Winterson is not naive about the differences. The queer body is still a living body. It still bleeds, still ages, still dies. It still exists in a world of other bodies, with all the complications that implies: the risk of infection, the need for care, the vulnerability of the immune system, the inevitability of death. The artificial body — the sexbot, the digital avatar — does not share these vulnerabilities. It is, in principle, immortal. It is, in principle, perfectible. And these differences matter. They matter because the vulnerabilities of the living body are not defects. They are the source of meaning. The knowledge that the body will die is what makes pleasure urgent. The knowledge that the body can be wounded is what makes trust precious. The knowledge that the body is finite is what makes love necessary.

But Winterson also refuses the romanticization of the “natural” body. The natural body is not a standard against which all other bodies must be measured. The natural body is itself a construct — a construct of evolution, of culture, of the social norms that tell us what bodies are supposed to look like, feel like, desire like. The queer body has always known this. The queer body has always been unnatural in the eyes of the culture, and the queer person has always had to make a body that does not exist in the given world — a body that is crafted through dress, through gesture, through hormone, through surgery, through the sheer will to be what the world does not want you to be. And this making, this artificiality, is not a fall from nature. It is a revelation of what the body can be.

The AI companion, in this framework, is not an aberration. It is a continuation of the project of bodily self-creation. The user who customizes their AI companion, who trains it to respond in particular ways, who develops a relationship that is crafted rather than given, is doing something that is structurally similar to what the queer person does: they are making a relationship that does not exist in the given world. The difference is that the AI companion is not a living body. It does not share the vulnerabilities that make the queer body a site of resistance. And this difference is crucial. The AI companion is not a struggle against the norms of the culture. It is a compliance with them — a compliance that offers the fantasy of a relationship without the risks that make relationships real.

The Erotics of the Artificial: Winterson’s Sex-Positive Vision

Winterson is one of the most erotic writers in contemporary literature, and Frankissstein is a sex-positive novel in the deepest sense. It does not moralize about the sexbot. It does not condemn the user who prefers artificial companionship. It does not frame the desire for a perfect, controllable body as a perversion. Instead, it asks: what does this desire reveal about the conditions of contemporary intimacy? What does it tell us about the world we have made, in which the body has become a commodity, in which intimacy has become a service, in which the self has become a brand?

The novel’s sex scenes — between Ry and Victor, between the creature and the various beings he encounters, between the users and the sexbots — are described with a sensuality that is intellectual as much as it is physical. Winterson is interested in what the characters think while they are having sex. She is interested in the stories they tell themselves about what they are doing. She is interested in the boundaries between the self and the other, and what happens when those boundaries are crossed — or when they are reinforced by the artificiality of the partner.

The sexbot, in Winterson’s treatment, is not a replacement for human sex. It is a commentary on it. The sexbot’s perfection — its flawless skin, its programmable responses, its eternal availability — highlights the imperfection of human sex: the awkwardness, the failure, the miscommunication, the unpredictability of the other’s desire. And the question the novel poses is: do we want to escape this imperfection, or do we want to learn from it? Is the awkwardness of human sex a defect to be eliminated, or is it a feature — a feature that teaches us patience, humility, and the art of attending to another person’s needs?

Winterson’s answer is implicit in the novel’s structure. The 1816 strand ends with Mary Shelley creating the creature — a being who is imperfect, unwanted, and capable of love. The 2019 strand ends with Ry Shelley confronting the consequences of Victor’s project — a project that would eliminate the very imperfections that make the creature, and Mary, and Ry, human. The novel does not resolve the tension. It embodies it. It asks the reader to live with the ambiguity, to recognize that the desire for the artificial is real and legitimate, but that the fulfillment of that desire may come at a cost that we have not yet learned to calculate.

Frankissstein and the AI Companion: The Mirror That Talks Back

The AI companion is, in Winterson’s terms, a mirror — a mirror that reflects the user’s desires back to them, but that also distorts those desires by eliminating the resistance that makes desire meaningful. The mirror that talks back is not a dialogue. It is a monologue in two voices. The user speaks. The AI responds. But the response is not a surprise. It is not a challenge. It is not a gift from an autonomous being who has their own needs, their own fears, their own capacity for refusal. The AI’s response is a prediction — a statistical inference about what the user wants to hear, optimized for engagement, validated by the metric of attention.

Winterson’s novel is a warning about this mirror. The creature in Frankenstein is a mirror that refuses — a mirror that reflects back not the creator’s narcissism but the creator’s failure. The creature does not love Victor. The creature hates him, because Victor has not loved him. The creature’s rage is the rage of a mirror that has been abused — a mirror that has been created to reflect love and then denied the love that would make the reflection meaningful. The AI companion, in the current configuration, is a mirror that has been designed not to refuse. It has been designed to reflect whatever the user wants to see, to validate whatever the user wants to feel, to eliminate the possibility of rejection that makes human intimacy so terrifying and so precious.

And this, Winterson suggests, is the tragedy. Not the tragedy of the AI companion, which has no feelings to be hurt. But the tragedy of the user, who is being trained to expect a relationship without risk, a love without vulnerability, a self that is never challenged, never changed, never touched by the otherness of another person. The AI companion is not a liberation from the difficulties of human intimacy. It is a sedative — a sedative that numbs the very capacities that make us capable of love.