SOURCE: Diamond, Marie Josephine. “Flaubert's ‘Quidquid Volueris’: The Colonial Father and the Poetics of Hysteria.” SubStance 85, no. 1 (1998): 71-88.

In the following essay, Diamond finds parallels between Flaubert's “Quidquid volueris” and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

It is generally admitted that with woman the powers of intuition, of rapid perception, and perhaps of imitation, are more strongly marked than in man; but some, at least of these faculties are characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilization.

—Charles Darwin

We have trained and bred one kind of qualities into one half of the species, and another kind into the other half. And then we wonder at the contradictions of human nature! … We have bred a race of psychic hybrids, and the moral quality of hybrids is well known.

—Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The mechanism of poetry is the same as that of hysterical fantasies.

—Sigmund...