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Article Excerpt
The story has been told in so many versions in the modern age that most readers will recognize the essential narrative. It involves a man who finds women unsatisfactory as companions, whether in their capacity as sexual partner or wife. The solution he comes across is a technological one--the building of a female robot designed to fulfill all of his desires. Certain elements of this story have pre-modern origins, most notably in the ancient myth of Pygmalion, the king of Cyprus who loved a statue of his making, turned into a real woman by Aphrodite, the goddess of love. (1) This paper deals with the specifically modern narratives in which the creation and the animation of the artificial woman are realized through the male manipulation of machines, rather than through magic or divine intervention. The technological aspect of the story is what constitutes its modernity, placing it in the historical and cultural context of the industrialization of the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The central purpose of my analysis is to highlight the subversive potential of the narrative, especially in relation to notions of woman's nature. The most important text for this discussion is Villiers de l'Isle Adam's 1886 novel L'Eve future [Future Eve], which involves a fictional version of the American inventor Thomas Edison who builds a female android for a friend. Much of the scholarship on this work has concentrated on the overtly misogynistic ideas in the narrative. Asti Hustvedt, for instance, analyzes the story in connection with research being conducted at the time by Jean-Martin Charcot on female hysteria and concludes that Edison's android "is the ideal hysteric, a woman-machine stripped of any threatening pathology or degeneracy, reinscribed with male language: an Eve for the future to absolve the sins of the Eve of the past" (Anzalone 46). (2) Julie Wosk also sees the construct as a "man's slave," a product of the traditional dual view of woman as a saintly angel and a destructive whore, which is also behind the image of the false Maria robot in Fritz Lang's 1926 film Metropolis (68-88). There is no doubt that the stories center around the male desire to construct a woman ideal in body and personality, and to maintain total control over her.
What is often ignored in such analyses is that in virtually every story of its kind, the experiment goes awry in unexpected and often catastrophic ways. In the most radical cases, the female robot malfunctions and runs amok or becomes so humanlike that it frees itself of its original programming to achieve independence of consciousness and will. The situation necessitates that it be destroyed. This does not mean that the narratives are actually antimisogynistic in that they present the male fantasy only to subvert it in the end by thwarting its fulfillment. One could argue, on the contrary, that presenting the figure of a powerful woman (even an artificial one) who acts upon her own desires, beyond the dictates of man, but then destroying her and morally justifying the destruction by vilifying her as a whore or a monster, is a well-established narrative strategy of reaffirming the political, cultural, and sexual status quo in the face of a phenomenon that threatens it. A close reading of the stories, however, reveals serious questions about the whole enterprise on several issues, which constitutes their subversive potential. On a literal level, the failure of the man to recreate woman puts into doubt not only his technological mastery but also his ideas on the nature of woman. In other words, his inability to fulfill the male fantasy exposes it as a problematic dream at best, whether because a satisfactory simulacrum of a woman can never be created through purely technological means or because once you animate something with humanity it inevitably seeks to be free. On a symbolic level, these stories of living machines blur the boundary between the natural and the artificial, with serious consequences to the very identity of humanity itself. In terms of contemporary gender theory, what is ultimately put into doubt is the "essentialist" attitude toward both women and human beings in general that endows them with characteristics of an inborn and immutable nature, rather than seeing them as "performances," political, social, and cultural constructs (J. Butler).
Rosemary Jackson, in her analysis of the fantastic, argues that the genre is inherently subversive, in that the evocation of extreme emotions such as terror and the appearances of ghosts, monsters, and lunatics gives expression to the loss of faith in the classic rationalist worldview of the Enlightenment as well as the established socio-political order (1-10, 171-80). Jose B. Monleon places fantastic works in the context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political revolutions that shook the complacency of reason, but he is skeptical about their subversive nature, since they end with the defeat of the irrational element and the reaffirmation of rationality (3-20). The differing views of Jackson and Monleon also suggest a more nuanced approach to the issue of literary subversion. For instance, Judith Butler has pointed out that judgments on whether a certain act or work is subversive or unsubversive
cannot be made out of context ... [nor] made in ways that endure through time ("contexts" are themselves posited unities that undergo temporal change and expose their essential disunity). Just as metaphors lose their metaphoricity as they congeal through time into concepts, so subversive performances always run the risk of becoming deadening cliches through repetition within commodity culture where "subversion" carries market value. (xxi)
The story of the revolt of robots against their creators has been told so many times that it has become a well-established myth of the modern era. The gendered version of the story, involving a specifically female robot built to be a man's companion, is more unusual, but it has been repeated enough to be well on the way to becoming a cliche. Given this context, I speak only of the "subversive potential" of the stories, in reference to certain themes and ideas recurring in the narratives that make simplistic interpretations of them as purely misogynistic texts problematic. Angela Carter, in her analysis of the works of Marquis de Sade in political and cultural contexts, argues that while there is no doubt that the libertine writer was a monstrous misanthrope, the extremity of his sexual visions exposed the cruelty and the exploitive nature of the society in which he lived (3-37). That aspect of his works makes it possible for his pornography to be appropriated by feminist readers for critical purposes. The same case can be made for the female robot stories: unexpected turns in the technological project result in a crisis of traditional male ideas on the nature of woman and humanity. Whether the writer's intention or the product of fantastic literature's inherently disruptive attitude toward established notions of reality, that element of the narratives can be read as the exposure of the culturally constructed nature of gender and the boundaries of the human.
In the seventeenth century, major rationalist thinkers of the period, including Rene Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz, and Robert Boyle, considered the body as a kind of automaton built by God, with the immortal and immaterial soul imposed on the machine to provide reason. Descartes, in his 1637 work Discours de la Methode, argued that this notion
will not seem at all strange to those who know how many kinds of automatons, or moving machines, the skill of man can construct with the use of very few parts, in veins and all the other parts that are in the body of any animal. For they will regard this body as a machine which, having been made by the hands of God, is incomparably better ordered than any machine that can be devised by man, and contains in itself movements more wonderful than those in any such machine. (139) (3)
Such ideas gave rise to mechanistic physiology (sometimes called iatromechanism), a method of studying and understanding the functions of the natural body as a type of machinery, as the dominant medical movement in Western Europe well into the eighteenth century. (4) One of the most striking expressions of the prevalence of mechanistic ideas in the larger culture of the period is the automaton craze of the eighteenth century, which began with the French inventor Jacques de Vaucanson's mechanical duck and music players, displayed in Paris in the 1730s to great...
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