"Little C" in Clones and Clones (1998)
By Martha C Nussbaum
Cloning; Nature/nurture; Short story
This elegant story assesses the complex emotional ramifications that result from cloning a child to replace a deceased spouse.
The story parallels two nineteenth-century works—George Sand’s François de Champi and the opera Don Carlo--with the story of a cloned child named Little C and the woman who raises him. In the Romantic works from the nineteenth century, a young woman finds and raises an abandoned boy, only to become his lover when he grows into an adult. The boy in “Little C” is not the narrator’s adopted son, but a clone of the narrator’s deceased husband, who the woman is raising from infancy. The widow/mother creates Little C in hopes that he will grow up to replace the husband she has lost, but she gradually discovers that while Little C has the same genetic makeup as her husband, the cloned child was raised in a different environment and is unable to substitute for his predecessor. Little C hauntingly resembles his “original,” but he also has tastes and proclivities of his own. The uneasy sexual tension that attends his growing up with a mother who might become his lover, as well as the differences that ultimately separate them, give the ending of this story a provocative and melancholy tone.
Evaluation: The story addresses the ethical problem of expecting someone to “stand in” for someone else. Written by a noted philosopher, this piece is a moving (if somewhat kinky) evocation of a potential set of emotional consequences that might beset human reproductive cloning.
– Anonymous