Today’s story was published in Fantasy Magazine in 2022 and you can read it online here. The story opens with the revelation that you can now grow your own girlfriend. Just add water (and some liquid nutrients to enhance your desired characteristics). Our protagonist isn’t interested in a girlfriend though, she’s interested in transformation.
As I was reading this story, I kept coming back to parallels with Frankenstein, another tale of human creation. ‘Girlfriend Material’ can be usefully placed into conversation with Mary Shelley’s novel, I think, a modern, sapphic variant of the tale which takes its underlying themes and reapplies them to contemporary issues. The heart of ‘Girlfriend Material’ is a girl who wants to change herself. It speaks to the pressure, particularly on adolescent girls, to conform to a prescribed way to look and be in order to be considered pretty, attractive and therefore of value. Underneath this primary layer of meaning, there’s another (fantastic) exploration of Frankensteinian themes of creation, coercion, indifference, commodification and humanity’s antagonistic relationship to much of the rest of the natural world.
Like Frankenstein, Sam, the protagonist of ‘Girlfriend Material’ wants to create life, but not ‘real life’ (with all the complexities that entails), she wants to create artificial life. Frankenstein has grand speeches about wishing to defeat death but he doesn’t attempt to return life to an autonomous being, he sews together body parts to create his own definition of a beautiful body (‘I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God!’) and foreground his own mastery over the processes of death. He famously has no care for the life he created, rushing out of the room after exclaiming in horror at the sight of the creature. However, although it’s easy to focus on that moment of rejection, it is worth noting that he never had any care for the life he was creating. It was a means to an end. The end of his own victory over the natural world, which he has vowed to ‘penetrate’, finding all her ‘secret hiding places’. At first glance, Sam’s story might seem entirely dissimilar. She is delighted with the beauty of the ‘girlfriend’. Moreover, the girlfriend was not created from harvested body parts but grown in the soil – an organic whole that does not seem to represent the same ‘fight against nature’ which Frankenstein so often talks about. However, the roots of both stories (apologies) are the same. The very idea of ‘grow your own girlfriend’ is a commodification of creation, a denial of autonomy and agency, and subordinates one creation’s life (the grown girlfriend) to the desires and agenda of another (the grower). Like Frankenstein, Sam creates a ‘creature’ to her own specifications, although she’s slightly better at it than Frankenstein because what was the wild experiment of a lone wolf has gone mass-market. It’s been refined and perfected so that Sam and those other girlfriend growers can ‘grow’ a real/unreal girlfriend from the soil – a far more subversive and insidious rebellion against ‘nature’ than Frankenstein’s more brutal hack, slash and electrify technique.
In Ayinde’s story, it’s easy to get sucked into locating the story’s horror the visual grotesque of cutting the tubers from the ‘girlfriend’s’ feet, eating a ‘girlfriend stew’ and Sam vomiting up blood and body parts. The horrifying grotesquery certainly underlines the nature of the expectations Sam is trying to conform herself to. However, the real horror for me is the ‘quiet’ horror of the ‘girlfriend’ business itself – both Sam’s engagement with it and the business as a whole. Like Frankenstein, Sam ignores her creation as much as possible. She’s kinder but she’s uninterested. Like Frankenstein, she never imagined or wanted an autonomous creation, an individual that she had to engage with as an equal or as a human being. The way in which she coolly ignores the girlfriend is a melancholy reflection of this disinterest. The girlfriend’s whole existence is bound up in Sam’s life, she was literally created for her, and Sam has no time for her. And there’s something terrible about that disinterest, just as there is in Frankenstein’s rejection of his creature. However, the real horror is also highlighted by what doesn’t happen to the girlfriend. It’s the absence that sits starkly on the page and gestures towards other horrors off-screen. Because all these grown girlfriends, sentient living creatures, have been created as accoutrements, to fulfil the desires of their creators, to act whatever part they’re asked or forced to act. They are not simply Frankensteinian creatures but brides of Frankenstein. In this Frankensteinian tale, though, (and I hate to give any credit to Frankenstein here but it is what it is!) no-one even thinks to ask whether these girlfriends ‘might refuse to comply with a compact made before [their] creation'(Frankenstein). No-one is interested in these real/unreal girlfriends and whether they want to be in a relationships, whether they might object to being enslaved objects. Sam indifferently creates, uses and barely tolerates the presence of her girlfriend but she is not an outlier in doing so. Her use and purpose may be unique (or copied by hundreds of other girls – we can’t know) but the way in which she sees or does not see the ‘girlfriend’ as human, autonomous or as ‘real’ is the basis for the whole system of ‘grow your own girlfriends’. Others ‘girlfriends’ are used as well. In different ways. For their created purpose. And there’s something far far more horrifying about that than in the details of blood and gore the story offers. This is a world where you can buy and sell people and design them to your exact specifications. The two themes dovetail here – the pressures faced by Sam and the girlfriend business’ marketing of growable women. It’s misogyny and capitalism run wild, internalised and reproduced on a mass scale creating an endless carnival hall of mirrors reflecting back the monstrous faces behind which beat their cold cold hearts.
Romancing the Gothic 