Title: Riveter

Author: Sean Eads

Date of First Publication: 2015

Place of Publication: Daughters of Frankenstein: Lesbian Mad Scientists

Type: Short Story

Characters: No Character

Themes: MAD SCIENTIST/MONSTER; BYRONIC HERO; QUEER FRANKENSTEIN

Critical Summary: The story begins with a meeting involving Hitler, a few top party members, Hitler’s mistress, and Dr. Goebble discussing the superior propaganda of the United States. As they are discussing the propaganda, Goebble shows a poster of Rosie the Riveter and Hitler’s Mistress just becomes enamored with her face and beauty. Then it cuts back to the mistress’s youth and an event when she was kidnapped by another scientist. However, she was agreeable in the situation as she was intrigued to learn more about science from the man who studied under the great minds of Tesla and Einstein. As time passes and she gets older, the advances from the scientist stop as he no longer sees the child he loved. She is not bothered by this however as she feels she has learned all she needs to know from this scientist. Her goal is to create a living thing from photographs. She wants to create a woman who she can love. She realizes that she needs money and space to conduct her experiments. By fortunate happen stance, she is invited to a party where she meets Hitler and he takes a liking to her and she becomes his mistress. Now she has the means to create her female companion. One she creates her first creature she realizes she was not able to create a soulful creature and decides to kill her creation. She swears off any attempts to create another mosnster. Soon she isn’t able to resisi the urges of creating a companion. She tries again and the first re-attempt is a failure and for a second she uses a picture of a little girl and also requests the body of a child to create the new child. She realizes that they killed a little girl specifically for her and she was disturbed by such actions. Again, she stops creating the creatures as she feels terrible that she killed a living person. Later on, she has an idea, she uses herself to create another person, only this time she is able to procure the Rosie the Riveter poster to use. When she does the experiment, she is successful but isn’t sure how it worked and she soon realizes that she is now Rosie and herself in one mind. Now with the mind of Rosie within her, she starts to use her experiments for good. She does so by taking all the bodies of the Jews murdered in camps and revives them from pictures she has gotten from family in order to bring them back to life.

The mad scientist theme is prevalent as we see her go through the madness of wanting to create the perfect companion and even killing to create one. Her first subject even tries to kill her but like with most of her experiments, she kills it. The queer aspect of this story is prevalent in the main character as her main reason in creating the creatures is to find a lover and companion. We also see her desires push though and her disgust of men as she only sleeps with men to get things from then like status or knowledge.

Administrative Notes: Pedro Ruiz, CSUF; Dr. David Sandner, CSUF (Editing)