University of Iowa
Iowa Research Online
Theses and Dissertations
Fall 2015
Automata, artificial bodies, and reproductive
futurisms in nineteenth-century French literature
Elizabeth Anne Carroll
University of Iowa
Copyright 2015 Elizabeth Carroll
This dissertation is available at Iowa Research Online: http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/1956
Recommended Citation
Carroll, Elizabeth Anne. "Automata, artificial bodies, and reproductive futurisms in nineteenth-century French literature." PhD
(Doctor of Philosophy) thesis, University of Iowa, 2015.
http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/1956.
Follow this and additional works at: http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd
Part of the French and Francophone Language and Literature Commons
AUTOMATA, ARTIFICIAL BODIES, AND REPRODUCTIVE FUTURISMS IN
LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH LITERATURE
by
Elizabeth Anne Carroll
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy
degree in French and Francophone World Studies in the
Graduate College of
The University of Iowa
December 2015
Thesis Supervisor: Assistant Professor Roxanna Curto
Copyright by
ELIZABETH ANNE CARROLL
2015
All Rights Reserved
Graduate College
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa
CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL
____________________________
PH.D. THESIS
_________________
This is to certify that the Ph.D. thesis of
Elizabeth Anne Carroll
has been approved by the Examining Committee for
the thesis requirement for the Doctor of Philosophy degree
in French and Francophone World Studies at the December 2015 graduation.
Thesis Committee:
____________________________________________
Roxanna Curto, Thesis Supervisor
____________________________________________
Florence Boos
____________________________________________
Russell Ganim
____________________________________________
Roland Racevskis
____________________________________________
Rosemarie Scullion
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank the following people. First, to my fellow graduate students
and professors in the Department of French and Italian. I have enjoyed learning alongside
you and from you these past few years. All of the members of my dissertation committee
for their guidance in this scholarly endeavor. Especially Professor Rosemarie Scullion
whose courses on twentieth century French literature and culture, and women’s studies
provided a discursive framework for my anyalysis. Foremost to Assistant Professor
Roxanna Curto for being my advisor and chair of my dissertation committee. Your
assistance and feedback has been invaluable. I have also looked up to her as a young
female professional in academia. Attending graduate school would not have been possible
without the Presidential Fellowship awarded to me by the University of Iowa Graduate
College.
To my family, my parents Susan and Michael for their unflagging love and
support over the years. Maman, I thank you as well for the proofreading and copyediting
assistance. Thank you also for babysitting so I could finish the final chapters. To my
husband Ryan, thank you for your encouragement and listening to me. To my daughter
Evelyn, thank you for understanding that I was busy sometimes and couldn’t play with
you every moment. I hope someday you follow in my footsteps.
Finally, to Cleo and Maggie for their feline “assistance.” You knew just when a
soft paw, a gentle meow, or a friendly nuzzle were needed.
ii
ABSTRACT
This dissertation is an analysis of the role of the automaton in late-nineteenth
century French novels by Émile Zola, Jules Verne, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and Rachilde.
Designed to resemble naturally produced people and animals, these living machines were
animated by steam or electricity and used to explore the changing relationships between
humans, animals, and machines.
My analysis focuses on a specific type of automaton, the bachelor machine—
feminized and sexualized machines that often resemble women and replace them in
romantic and sexual relationships. My research is informed by the nineteenth century
clinical approach to medicine that assumed that the body, particularly the female body,
was a penetrable space to be dissected and diagnosed. By focusing on female sexuality
and reproduction, women in the nineteenth century were considered biological machines,
valued only for their reproductive capabilities. Under the male scientific gaze, the
hysterical female body was a site of diseased sexuality that was replaced by bachelor
machines and other mechanized women. I label these fictional bachelor machines
“reproductive futurisms” and consider their role in evolutionary debates which
increasingly link anthrogenesis and technogenesis.
The female automata presented in these novels are examples of a new type of
representational text in which artificial femininity is a hybrid of technical mastery and
artistry. Female automata are fabricated using technologies of re-production including:
sculpture, wax casts, photography, the hologram, the phonograph, and early films. These
technologies of re-production change the ways in which the human body and voice are
captured and reproduced. Furthermore, many of these technologies of re-production
iii
mimic dissection techniques and result in the fragmentation of the female form. This
study makes a contribution to the fields of nineteenth century French studies and gender
and sexuality studies.
iv
PUBLIC ABSTRACT
This dissertation analyzes the role of automata and other mechanical bodies in
nineteenth century French novels authored by Émile Zola, Jules Verne, Villiers de L’IsleAdam, and Rachilde. “Automaton” refers to a self-moving object that often resembles a
human being and is a precursor to today’s robots. Specifically, the automata discussed are
examples of bachelor machines: machines created by men to resemble women. Written
during the Industrial Age, these novels present automata in two ways. First, by comparing
man and machines, these authors consider the positive and negative effects of
industrialization on the human body and on modern man’s identity. Secondly, as hybrids
of technology and artistry, the automata featured in these narratives contribute to ongoing debates about the place of science in art and fiction, leading to the creation of the
genre we now refer to as “science-fiction.”
v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction ...................................................................................................................................... 1
Chapter 1: Reproduction Derailed: Zola’s La Bête humaine ......................................................... 22
Derailing Desire ......................................................................................................................... 28
Le train: scène du crime ............................................................................................................. 44
Chapter 2: The Natural, the Supernatural, and the Mechanical in Jules Verne’s Novels .............. 73
La maison à vapeur: The Train as Colonial Machine ................................................................ 76
Le Château des Carpathes .......................................................................................................... 98
Mechanical Illusions ............................................................................................................ 110
Chapter 3: Technologies of Sexual Re-production in L’Eve future ............................................ 127
Female Pathology and Technologies of Re-Production ........................................................... 130
The Eve of Reproductive Futurisms ........................................................................................ 157
Chapter 4: Textual Anatomies in Monsieur Vénus and La Jongleuse ......................................... 174
Re-writing the Dis-Ease of Women’s Authorship ................................................................... 178
Narrating Hysteria ................................................................................................................ 191
Alternative Models of Procreation ........................................................................................... 206
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 218
Epilogue: Artificial Bodies from the Gothic to the Cyborgothic ................................................. 222
Works Cited ................................................................................................................................. 232
vi
INTRODUCTION
Nineteenth century French literature is often classified according to aesthetic and
artistic movements, notably romanticism, realism, naturalism, and decadence. Texts
about technology, machines, and artificial bodies tend to be relegated to the genres of the
fantastic, marvelous, or science-fiction. The literary roles that science, technology, and
machines play are often subsumed by the literary movement to which a particular author
belongs. Although science, technology, medicine, and the literary and visual arts all
overlapped in nineteenth-century France, these are typically viewed as separate domains.
Two classic studies on the role of technology in nineteenth century France are Jacques
Noiray’s Le romancier et la machine, (1981),1 and Michel Carrouges’ Machines
célibataires (1954).2 Two more recent studies are Kai Mikkonen’s The Plot Machine
(2001),3 and Minsoo Kang’s Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the
European Imagination (2011).4 Existing scholarship about technology in nineteenth-
1
Jacques Noiray’s two-volume work Le romancier et la machine (1981) is an in-depth study of
machines in the works of Emile Zola, Jules Verne, and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. The first volume provides a
general overview of the machine during France’s Industrial Age. This text focuses on types of machines
and technological innovation. This classic text is reference by other authors in this study including Kai
Mikkonen. Noiray does mention women in the mechanical novels he discusses, but gender remains an
underdeveloped category of analysis in his critique.
2
Michel Carrouges’Les Machines célibataires (1954) focuses on a particular type of machine in
literature: the bachelor machine. Bachelor machines are operated by men who fall in love with the female
machine they have created. Carrgoues outlines modern man’s relationship to myths and machines before
turning his attention to specific authors including: Raymond Roussel, Alfred Jarry, and Guillaume
Apollinaire. Also included in his analysis are non-French authors such as Edgar Allen Poe and Franz
Kafka. The artificial bodies I discuss are bachelor machines, but I have tried to develop the bachelor
machine into something more, the reproductive futurism.
3
Kai Mikkonen’s The Plot Machine is an updated version of Carrouges’ work. Like, Carrouges,
Mikkonen studies the bachelor machine in the later part of the nineteenth century. However, Mikkonenn
also explores the narrative functions of plot machines and mechanical novels. In Mikkonen’s analysis, the
mechanical novel emerges as a new genre of narrative in which the structure and function of the machine
determines the narrative structure, narrative consciousness, and our approach to reading. As before, the
name “bachelor machine” implies a focus on gender and Mikkonen begins to explore machines and their
relationship to the sexes, in particular how machines produce narrative lines of desire. I build upon
Mikkonen’s analysis by looking at bachelor machines from the female character’s point of view.
4
Kang’s work traces the cultural significance of the automaton in Europe from the Middle Ages to
post-World War I.
1
century French literature tends to divide innovations into two categories which are
addressed in different ways: machines such as the steam engine, bicycle, and
phonograph; and artificial bodies or devices designed to influence love.
My dissertation focuses on the evolution of anthropomorphized machines and
artificial bodies in nineteenth-century France. Specifically, I analyze artificial bodies in
nineteenth-century French literature and culture that are examples of reproductive
futurisms.5 First, reproductive futurisms encompass machines designed to produce,
manufacture, or transport goods. The steam engine, which I discuss in chapters one and
two, is an example of this. Additionally, nineteenth-century technologies such as the
photograph, telegraph, and phonograph allowed sound and images to be captured,
retransmitted, and reproduced. The second type of reproductive futurism refers to
machines that resemble human bodies and replace either the man or woman in the normal
procreative or sexual act. Critics often refer to these statues, wax mannequins, and
mechanized figures as bachelor machines because more often than not, they resemble
women. I intend to expand the definition of machine in order to study a broad range of
artificial bodies and challenge the traditional machine/body relationship. Finally, for my
analytic purposes, “futurism” is used to indicate that although artificial bodies, automata,
and bachelor machines existed on the page in the nineteenth-century, such reproductive
technologies were not advanced enough to produce a living, functioning human being.
“Futurism” refers to the potential for these reproductive technologies to be perfected at a
later date.
5
Although the terminology is similar, I am not referring to the futurist movement started by F. T.
Marinetti in Italy in the twentieth century. As an aesthetic doctrine, the futurist movement did emphasize
technology and machines as hallmarks of modernism, and all of these are elements found in discussions of
artificial bodies and bachelor machines in the nineteenth century.
2
Following the French Revolution, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries saw two movements, the rise of modern medicine and the Industrial Revolution,
converge to produce new understandings of the nature of man in France as well as the
rest of Europe.6 As Foucault argues in The Birth of the Clinic, modern medicine and the
clinical approach to treatment differed from that before. For example, doctors treated
patients in hospitals rather than at home; dissection and autopsy produced new spatial and
verbal explanations of pathology. One of the goals of the clinical experience was to
understand why men died in order to help cure and prevent illnesses in the living.
Anatomy and dissection allowed doctors to see the body in new ways. Until the
relaxation of moral strictures in the 1800s, medical students learned anatomy by watching
doctors perform surgery. However, anatomists soon realized they needed a more handson method. Corpses were used instead of surgery patients. “This hands-on practice, called
the Parisian method, gave them a chance to study how each organ, muscle, nerve, and
bone operated. It was called the Parisian method because the law in France allowed
surgeons to use the unclaimed bodies left in hospitals and death houses” (Montillo 69). In
England corpses used for dissections could only be procured from the gallows.
Restrictions on where suitable bodies were available led to widespread grave-robbing and
body snatching.
Dissection of the dead was carried out to aid the living. But if the dead could be
brought back to life, what scientific knowledge would be gained from reanimation? The
topic of reanimation was popular in Europe in the late eighteenth century. Scientists such
as the Italian Giovanni Aldini attempted to bring dead frogs, dogs, and pigs back to life
6
The Industrial Revolution occurred much earlier in England. Unless otherwise noted, I refer
specifically to the Industrial Revolution in France.
3
using metal wires and lightning. It was only a matter of time before scientists and doctors
tried to reanimate or resuscitate a dead human. Scientists and doctors weren’t the only
ones interested in such topics. Reanimation “became a go-to subject not only in the
scientific community, but also among artists and writers and at crowd-pleasing soirées
and salons all over England, France, and Germany” (9). The anatomy theatre, and indeed
dissection was akin to a theatrical performance, attracted authors, artists, and the general
public.7 The line between doctor, scientist and author was often blurred since many
doctors wrote poems and novels incorporating their latest findings and many poets and
authors did medical and scientific experiments. “But one particular author, Mary Godwin
Shelley, truly combined the urgency of scientific endeavors in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries, the lure of forbidden knowledge, and the power of literary
interpretation in her masterpiece Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818)”
(Montillo 9). Victor Frankenstein became the archetype of the mad scientist, since he
succeeded where Aldini and others had failed; he brought his automaton to life using a
bolt of lightning.
The second movement that revolutionized our understanding of man was the
Industrial Revolution and the consequent rise of machines. Although the automata that I
discuss are products of the Industrial Age, their fabrication is nevertheless influenced by
earlier versions of the automaton. During what Minsoo Kang calls the “Golden Age of
the Automaton,” from 1637 to 1748, the automaton was part of intellectual and
philosophical debates about the man-machine. For example, in Discours de la méthode
(1637), “Descartes sees that only the human soul (including the faculties of reasoning and
7
See William Brockbank’s “Old Anatomical Theatres and What Took Place Therein.” Medical
History 12 (1968): 374-81.
4
language) is wholly separate from the sphere of the body and its clockwork operation”
(Mikkonen 18). In the eighteenth century Julien de la Mettrie took the comparison further
and argued that the soul is mechanical as well. During the “automaton craze” of the
eighteenth century, Vaucanson produced his mechanical duck, flute player, and fife-anddrum player, and Pierre and Henri-Louis Jacquet-Droz and Jean Leschot collaborated to
produce clockwork automata including a writer, a draughtsman, and a female harpsicord
player (Kang 106). These performing automata were prized for their entertainment value
and are the inspiration for the “living dolls” in Verne’s, Villiers’, and Rachilde’s novels.
In the late eighteenth century, the automaton regained its magical qualities. In
Romantic and fantastic narratives, the “self-moving machine no longer represented
rational or mechanistic ideas but appeared as an uncanny entity of mysterious nature that
frightened people” (187). Though written in the late nineteenth-century, Verne’s Le
Château des Carpathes features an example of the uncanny automaton.8 The most
important iteration of the automaton’s cultural status for this study occurred during the
Industrial Age, from 1838 to 1914. During this time, living machines were animated by
steam and electricity. Narratives like Zola’s La Bête humaine and Verne’s La Maison à
vapeur feature living machines in industrial settings and explore the effects of industry
and urbanization on man’s identity. In other narratives of this time period, the automaton
is removed from industrial settings and is presented as a work of art.
Nineteenth-century literature echoes the aforementioned representational trends.
The industrial revolution was slower to take hold in France than it was in England;
8
For more information on the uncanniness of the automaton and its relationship to Romanticism
and the notion of the romantic sublime, see Kang “Chapter 5: The Uncanny Automaton” pages 185-222.
5
therefore, machines and the literary construct we call the mechanical novel9 are slower to
appear in French literature. “In early nineteenth-century British and French romantic
literature, machines, technology or natural science were not considered appropriate
subjects of description except as symbols of utility and the ‘inhumanity’ of
industrialization. The machine was to be condemned aesthetically and morally” (14).
Prior to 1850, machines were a marginal part of existing literature, limited to fictions
focused on space travel and littérature futuriste. The push to industrialize, as well as
wealth from the growing colonial empire during the Third Republic, greatly expanded the
impact of technological innovations in the lives of everyday French citizens and its role
in French literature and the arts. Although science and medicine were present in French
fiction prior to the nineteenth-century, the two fields remained largely separate. In each
of the chapters in my dissertation I consider how the particular narrative or narratives in
question contribute to the creation of the genre we now know as science fiction.10
The artificial bodies I analyze span the spectrum of nineteenth-century
technologies and include: the steam engine, phonograph, hologram, and the automaton.
Lewis Mumford’s classification of the paleotechnic and the neotechnic are useful
categories of analysis. Paleotechnic is a term used to describe the machines developed in
the first two-thirds of the nineteenth-century which are galvanized by steam and are
anthropomorphized. Neotechnic bodies emerge in the later third of the nineteenth-century
and are more advanced, precise machines; they are often composed of metal plates, wire,
9
There are two types of mechanical novels, those that feature machines as part of the plot, and
those that are written according to a pre-determined formula (Mikkonen 32). My research focuses on the
former type of mechanical novel.
10
“Science fiction” has existed for centuries, but the genre we now recognize as “science fiction”
emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Demerliac writes, “En 1857, le journal La Science
proclame l’existence d’une ‘branche spéciale et nouvelle de la littérature mondiale,’ servant d’intermédiare
entre le public d’un côté, les savants, les inventeurs, et les intellectuels de l’autre” (Demerliac 62).
6
and cylinders and are animated by electricity. Other artificial bodies are composed of
organs, limbs, and tissues harvested from corpses, reassembled, and jolted back to life
with electricity.11 Paleotechnic and neotechnic bodies are inorganic, organic, or a mixture
of both.
A third type of technical body is also present in nineteenth-century machine
novels. This type of body is best labelled a representational body and includes depictions
of the human body in paintings, sculptures, statues, or relics. In the quest to create
artificial bodies, two creation myths, that of Pygmalion, an ancient myth not modernized
until George Bernard Shaw’s version in the twentieth century and that of Frankenstein,
stand out in nineteenth-century machine novels. In the decades following the French
Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and burgeoning scientific and medical revolutions,
French men and women questioned the nature of being a man or human. “Was man a
creature created by a God who dished out values and properties according to his fancies?
Or was man a machine powered by an internal galvanic fluid, which in turn could be
sparked alive by a rush of electricity? Did man possess a soul endowed by God? Or was
he merely a soulless automaton?” (Montillo 93). Marie Lathers calls works featuring
Pygmalionesque or Frankensteinian myths of creation “representational texts” because
they present the creation or representation of woman. In Shelley’s novel, Dr.
Frankenstein considers, but ultimately refuses, making a female companion for his male
monster. Despite the absence of an artificial female creature, Frankenstein presents many
of the same thematic elements as the story of Pygmalion and Galatea.
Traditionally, representational bodies such as these appeared in many narratives
belonging to the genres of the fantastic or marvelous, in which the art work, often a
11
See Kristine Butler page 68.
7
painting, sculpture, statue, or relic, is brought to life through supernatural or mysterious
means, usually magic, a curse or a legend. Pygmalion stories are an important
predecessor to machine novels and have a substantial tradition in French literature, for
example, Gautier’s Pied de momie or Mérimée’s Vénus d’Ille. However, I intend to focus
on Frankenstein-type stories which emphasize the role of science and technology rather
than that of the supernatural. This is not to say that the supernatural plays no role in
machine novels; indeed, early machines were seen as magical and wondrous. For
example, in chapter two, I discuss Jules Verne’s Le château des Carpathes, which
illustrates the tensions between occultism and technology, and the corresponding literary
transition from the genres of gothic and fantastic to science fiction.
Later examples of representational texts adopt the Frankensteinian model of
creation and feature technology as the animating force. Nevertheless, they still draw
inspiration from art. Nineteenth-century representational texts “address the fabrication of
the feminine in its two major nineteenth-century models: woman as technological
innovation and woman as aesthetic masterpiece” (Lathers 27). The artistic representations
of the female (sexual) body are examples of what Lathers has termed “technologies of
reproduction.” Lathers’ critic is based on Foucault’s Histoire de la sexualité. Lathers
explains, “Technology in the Foucauldian sense refers to the effects or products of the
bourgeois machine à fabriquer la sexualité …the institutions, strategies, and modles of
behavior” that comprise the Scientia sexualis (112). Lathers suggests a literal use of the
word technology as well and argues that the rise of technology in the form of applied
sciences and industry contributed to the birth of the body as a sexual representation.
Technologies of reproduction include: sculpture, painting, wax engravings or carvings,
8
the phonograph, and the cinema. In nineteenth-century representational texts, art is never
far removed from science, and the technical and aesthetic combine to create the artificial.
“The artificial in the nineteenth-century was indeed an ambivalent notion, combining as it
did the age-old ability of art to imitate nature and the newly discovered, or at least newly
imagined, ability of industry and technology to replace nature” (27-28). Chapters Three
and Four attempt to answer one of the main questions in my dissertation: how the fields
of science and medicine were defined in nineteenth-century France relative to the literary
and visual arts. The final type of artificial body I wish to consider is the socio-cultural
body. The socio-cultural body is not a physical body per se, but rather, it is the outward
projection of the self. The signs of the socio-cultural body may manifest themselves on a
person externally through speech, gestures, and clothing, but the socio-cultural body is
the sum of a character’s race, time, milieu, religion, politics, sex and gender.
Literary representations of technology in nineteenth-century France have been
produced by a pantheon of male writers, particularly Émile Zola, Jules Verne, and
Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. One of the most difficult scholarly gaps to fill is that of femaleauthored works on technology and artificial bodies from this region and time period. In
Chapter Four, I attempt to fill this scholarly lacuna and to shed light on contemporary
debates about science, technology, and the feminine in nineteenth-century French
literature and culture by analyzing female characters and their interactions with
technology in two novels written by a female author, Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus and La
Jongleuse.
In most, though not all of these narratives, the scientist, inventor or doctor
responsible for creating and running the machine or artificial body is a man, and the
9
machine or artificial body is characterized as a woman. Verne’s steam elephant and
Rachilde’s wax automaton are two exceptions. Female infirmities were used to justify the
need for alternative modes of reproduction. Medical texts and fictional doctors and
scientists reduced a woman’s life to a series of illnesses (birth, menstruation, pregnancy
and childbirth, menopause) needing treatment. Once again, the theories of Foucault,
particularly those outlined in Histoire de la sexualité, provide an analytic framework for
my dissertation. Foucault argues that certain institutions and fields of study including
medicine, criminology, psychology, and demography prescribed the parameters for
normative bourgeois sexual and gendered behavior. Zola applies Krafft-Ebing’s theories
of criminology to his character development in La Bête humaine. Twentieth-century
scholars Lisa Downing and Ruth Harris also interpret Zola’s novel using discourses of
psychiatry and criminology, and Michelle Bloom’s and Dorothy Kelly’s analyses are
based on nineteenth-century medicine. Several scholars, in particular Asti Hustvedt,
Michael Finn, and Rachel Mesch, examine the influence of hysteria on L’Eve future,
Monsieur Vénus, and La Jongleuse. Medical, particularly psychological, explanations of
hysteria are prevalent in my analyses of these four novels as well.
Although the mechanical woman is not perceived as “ill” per se, she is often
reduced to a series of parts that can be disassembled and reassembled at whim. Narratives
that explore the creation and destruction of woman abound with themes of disarticulation,
dismemberment and fetishizing of the female body, a trend that reaches new heights in
Villiers' L’Eve future, in which the android Hadaly’s body parts, eyes, skin, and organs,
are used as chapter titles. In this novel the female body is used to construct the narrative
and give order to the novel itself. The female body remains a troubled, imperfect
10
organism. In Chapter Four, I consider how automata and other manufactured bodies call
into question the naturalness of sex, gender, and the relationships between the sexes.
Producing new, artificial human life by means of reproductive futurisms raises questions
about reproduction and reproductive rights. In many of these textual and visual
representations, the traditional female role of giving birth is usurped by the male scientist.
A traditionally gynocentric topic is thus redefined and hidden behind phallic language.
In most machine novels or mechanical texts, the machine created is described as
woman and endowed with feminine characteristics. The machine’s creator, scientist,
artist, doctor, inventor, or author, is usually a man. In my analysis I will use the term
“creator” since this term encompasses the other roles of scientist and others except when
a different specific term is more appropriate. Rather than an object, created and
manipulated by a male scientist or inventor, my dissertation focuses on female characters
as subjects and their role as creators in mechanical texts. Three main narratives studied
here, La bête humaine, L’Eve future, and Monsieur Vénus, feature a female protagonist
who either assists the male creator or assumes the role of creator herself. Studying the
roles that Flore, Séverine, Sowana, Hadaly, Raoule and Eliante play reveals the extent to
which women were involved in the creation of the artificial feminine. Rachilde’s
Monsieur Vénus (1884) which features, a female author, a female protagonist, and a male
artificial body, is a further exception to the typical narrative structure of the machine
novel.
In Chapters Three and Four, novels by Villiers and Rachilde explore the limits of
both male, but especially female, technological and scientific prowess. Often cast as
Muse, female characters do in fact assume the role of creator in mechanical novels and in
11
doing so challenge the sexual and gender discourses present in the novels and in French
culture at the end of the nineteenth-century? Each of these novels presents the issue of
desire between a man and his female machine. Although male desire is often privileged
in these narratives, Mikkonen points out that, bachelor machines explore the “narrow
prison of human (not just) male desire” (30). Desire between man and machine is
considered acceptable because it replicates the heterosexual desire normally found
between a man and a woman. However, desire between a female creator and a female
machine is problematic because such desire is implicitly homosexual. Automatons and
other artificial bodies also call into question the naturalness of sex and gender. Can desire
be manufactured, and if so, does artificial desire fatally disrupt patterns of heteronormative desire and reproduction? Reproductive futurisms combine the goals of the
Industrial Revolution to streamline the production of goods and products, as well as the
tenets of human procreation. Desire, love, and even people, became products that could
be manufactured or reproduced. Mechanical texts challenge standard methods of human
reproduction either by stopping reproduction all together or severely limiting
(re)productive output.
The dissertation will be divided into four chapters and concludes with an
epilogue. Each chapter will be devoted to the analysis of one or two novels written by
Verne, Zola, Villiers, and Rachilde. I analyze these texts in order of increasing technical
and scientific complexity. This organizational schema suggests that scientists and
inventors moved inexorably forward, seeking to perfect the automaton. However, this
push for mechanical perfectio is temprered in narratives by fear of mechanization. My
organizational structure reflects changes in means of mechanization in the nineteenth-
12
century. I begin by discussing machines powered by steam, and conclude with those
animated by electricity.
In the first chapter, I examine Émile Zola’s novel La Bête humaine, published in
1890. Zola is best known for his Rougon-Macquart series which traces the rise and fall
of one family during the Second Empire. I begin with a discussion of the scientific and
mechanical theories that inform Zola’s literary aesthetic. His naturalist philosophy and
aesthetic approach were influenced by Claude Bernard’s La Médicine expérimentale
(1865). Indeed, in Le Roman expérimental, Zola states that authors should approach the
task of writing as observers and participants or experimenters. Thus, each of the novels in
the Rougon-Macquart series can be read as a scientific experiment and observation on the
laws of heredity. In addition to this scientific framework, many of Zola’s novels feature
machines or mechanical settings: the mine in Germinal, the distillery in L’Assommoir,
and the steam engine in La Bête humaine. Some critics consider the department store in
Au Bonheur des dames, and the theater in Nana to be machines as well. Each of these
machines provides structure that moves the plot forward, and one could characterize
Zola’s novels as mechanical or formulaic in this respect.
Chapter One is organized around the definition of La Bête humaine as a
quintessential “railway novel.” Originally intended as a background figure, the railway
tracks, schedules, and trains themselves were developed into principal characters that
again provide an underlying structure that drives the plot forward. Nineteenth-century
passengers were impressed by the speed of trains, but train-vision, the telescopic and
ever-changing vision from a moving train, created cognitive distances and dissonances
between people and places. Passengers were unable to create coherent images of the land
13
surrounding the railroad tracks. Blurry, incomplete images underlie unstable identities
and a resulting fragmentation of the self. In addition to being a sign of urbanization,
modernity, and the fragmented self, the steam engine is also a metaphor for protagonist
Jacques Lantier’s psychological and hereditary problems.
Les Rougon-Macquart traces the rise and fall of one family in the Second Empire
in France. Many of the “falls” are attributed to a genetic stain or defect inherited from the
family matriarch Adelaide Fouque. Preliminary notes for La Bête humaine focused on the
abnormal sexual desires Jacques inherited from his family. To satisfy his sexual urges
without resorting to the murder of women, he establishes a romantic relationship with his
steam engine, La Lison. La Lison is a vehicle of desire and can be considered an early
example of a bachelor machine. Unlike the other bachelor machines I discuss, La Lison is
described in human terms although she doesn’t resemble a woman. As a desiring
machine, La Lison, is described on more than one occasion as Jacques’ mistress. She also
derails the hetero-normative sexual relationships of several couples: Roubaud and
Séverine, Jacques and Séverine, Jacques and Philomène, and Philomène and Pecqueux
for example. The tracks, schedules, and routine of railway life keep Jacques’ desires in
check until they are derailed by Séverine and Flore. The train became a symbol of
masculine identity and accidents such as those featured in La Bête humaine were
metaphors for untamed male sexual desire. In this and many of Zola’s novels, deviant
sexuality is explained through the discourses of medicine, psychology, and criminology. I
suggest that murder is a creative act and comparisons are made to Zola’s Thérèse Raquin
and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.
14
Chapter Two is divided into a discussion of two of Jules Verne’s novels, La
Maison à vapeur (1880) and Le Château des Carpathes (1892). Although the primary
focus of Les voyages extraordinaires is geography, roughly seventeen novels and two of
the short stories in the series feature machines. “De plus, la machine occupe, dans Les
voyages extraordinaires une position centrale: fille de la science et née pour le voyage,
elle unit les deux grands thèmes fondamentaux de l’œuvre de Verne; la fiction
scientifique et le voyage géographique (Noiray 37). The two novels I discuss here are no
exception to Verne’s broad œuvre.
First, my discussion of the steam engine in the nineteenth-century continues with
Verne’s La Maison à vapeur. A group of British colonists travel across the Indian
countryside in a steam engine designed to resemble an Indian elephant. The steam house
or steam elephant is a tool of British colonialism and part of my analysis considers the
steam engine as a colonialist machine designed to control the indigenous population. As
evidenced in La Bête humaine, the steam engine is once again a symbol of modernity and
urbanization. However, in Verne’s novel, the effects of urbanization and train vision are
compounded with colonialization resulting in a reshaping of the Indian landscape to
reflect British ideals.
The second part of my analysis of La Maison à vapeur is a close reading of
several scenes from the novel that pit the steam elephant against animals, birds, and other
natural features of the Indian environment. Analysis of these scenes allows readers to
better understand the evolving man-animal-machine hierarchy, as well as the changing
relationships between science and nature. This is the only novel I analyze that features a
mechanical animal instead of a mechanical human. Verne introduces discourses about the
15
man-animal-machine relationship; in this work, the British travelers believe that their
steam elephant is superior to the natural elephants found in India. However, Verne ends
this tale on a cautionary note. In order for man, nature, and machines to exist in harmony,
man must understand the limits of machines and the limits of nature.
Le Château des Carpathes is the second novel by Verne that I discuss and this
novel indicates a shift in attitudes towards machines and technology in everyday life in
the nineteenth-century. Jules Verne is affectionately referred to as “The Father of Science
Fiction” and in my analyses of Verne’s works, I consider how Verne contributed to the
emerging genre of science fiction by breaking down perceived barriers between art,
literature, and science. This first person to call Verne “the Father of Science Fiction” was
critic Jean-Jacques Bridenne in 1954. Slusser explains that the term “science fiction” was
first popularized in France in the 1950s and during this time Verne was “repatriated” in
the context of an influx of American Science Fiction. In order to establish a native,
French Science Fiction tradtion, critics sought an ancestral figure and settled on Jules
Verne (Slusser 62). Costello explains as well that during Verne’s lifetime, the adjective
“Vernian” had come to stand for the romantic possibilities of the future. Predictive in
nature, Verne’s novels created the twentieth-century. Le Château des Carpathes is an
interesting text because despite its late publication date and the increasing presence of
machines and technology in everyday life, the magical and the supernatural are featured
prominently.
Villagers in the Transylvanian town of Werst attribute mysterious events that
occur in their village to supernatural forces. However, they begin to question the
supernatural as cause of these events when technology provides an alternate explanation.
16
Faced with two systems of knowledge, the supernatural and the technical, the villagers
must ask themselves how do I see and hear, and how do I know that what I see and hear
is true or real? Once introduced, technology becomes a crutch for the villagers who
cannot live without it. The tension-filled relationship between the supernatural and
science presented in this novel allows readers and scholars to consider the emerging
genre of science fiction and its antecedents, the genres of the fantastic and the marvelous.
Le Château des Carpathes also marks the beginning of my analysis of bachelor
machines and automata in nineteenth-century French novels. The Baron de Gortz and
Orfanik use technologies of reproduction, a phonograph and a magic lantern, to bring the
Italian opera singer La Stilla back to life—or at least to make her sing again. Verne was
inspired by Villiers’ L’Eve future, although his automaton is less technologically
advanced than Villiers’. When read together, Le Château des Carpathes and L’Eve future
raise interesting questions about the public and private functions of technologies, and
about their utility and aesthetics. In both novels, the artificial woman is created for
private use. La Stilla is a somewhat ironic automaton or self-mover given her name’s
connotations of immobility. In Chapters Two and Three, I discuss the extent to which any
of these artificial bodies are autonomous automatons since they are controlled by an
inventor.
The third chapter is an analysis of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s 1886 novel L’Eve
future.Villiers’ L’Eve future is one of the most widely discussed nineteenth-century
French novels featuring artificial bodies and could be considered the French version of
Frankenstein. Dr. Frankenstein created his monster to see if it was possible to do so;
Villiers’ fictional Thomas Edison creates the future Eve to solve his friend Lord Ewald’s
17
amorous problems. Villiers’ Edison pays great attention to detail and tries to make the
future Eve perfect. In contrast, Victor Frankenstein creates a hodgepodge of body parts so
freakish as to be repellent to human company and his monster ultimately begs for a
female companion. Each of these representational texts explores the question of
reproductive rights, specifically, who has the right to reproduce and under what
circumstances? Although women were the primary targets, Frankenstein and L’Eve
future hint at theories of eugenics and attempts to control or eliminate the less- or
undesirable parts of the French population. To answer such questions, I will consider
Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859). Darwin’s theories explain how nature allows for
natural mutations and progressions in species, as well as how nature eliminates
undesirable or no-longer needed features in animals and plants. Edison believes his
automaton is superior to any woman produced by nature because he has figured out how
to remove female imperfections.
In the novel, the temperaments of the female characters are explained using the
discourses of nineteenth-century medicine. Additionally, the android Hadaly, the future
Eve, is dissected by Edison in order to explain how her body works. The female body is
fragmented and reduced to a series of parts. The female body is disassembled by means
of sculpture, photography, the phonograph, and an early movie camera as well. Although
outside the primary scope of this dissertation, I briefly discuss the early films of Georges
Méliès and Thomas Edison. As the technology of reproduction par excellence of the
twentieth century, their early magic and trick films reproduced many of the attitudes
towards female sexuality and the female body found in nineteenth-century
representational texts.
18
The final chapter provides a close reading and analysis of female author
Marguerite Eymery (Rachilde). She wrote “decadent” novels, plays, and short stories
including Monsieur Vénus (1884) and La Jongleuse (1900). Rachilde’s writings grapple
with many of the same questions and issues as works written by her male contemporaries.
Rachilde calls into question the construct of the artificial body of gender. In Zola, Verne,
and Villiers’ novels, the categories of male and masculine are not questioned and are
presented as stable, complete identities. Rachilde asks how we create men and women in
French society; that is, which behavioral and physical signs are used to delineate the
sexes and can these signs be reinterpreted and assigned new meaning? Monsieur Vénus
and La Jongleuse suggest that the answer is yes and provide the reader with alternative
models for creating men and women.
In Monsieur Vénus, the anatomically female Raoule de Vénérande wishes to be a
male. With the help of her lover, the anatomically male Jacques Silvert, she contrives to
become a man. Raoule and Jacques alter their clothes, behavior, and mannerisms. While
they largely succeed in switching genders, changing their physical, biological sex proves
more difficult. Furthermore, the female protagonist Raoule de Vénérande occupies the
roles of scientist, author, artist and creator. At the end of the novel, Raoule makes a wax
automaton out of her dead lover’s body. La Jongleuse tells the story of Eliante Donalger,
an aristocratic woman who juggles. Juggling refers to her juggling or managing of men,
but also to the literal juggling she includes as part of her dance routines. One of the
critiques Rachilde levels against her contemporaries is that male doctors, scientists, and
authors often don’t understand women and that the language they use to write about
19
women is inaccurate. As a result, Raoule and Eliante’s behavior and manner of dress is
an alternative bodily discourse, often unintelligible to their male counterparts.
Rachilde, the only female author of this study, was well-known at the time of the
novel’s publication and an active figure in literary and artistic circles of her day, but it is
only in the past two to three decades that scholars have renewed interest in her work.
At first glance, Rachilde’s works seem autobiographical, and they are based on
her life. However, Rachilde herself warns readers of her unreliability as a narrator.
Instead, as Melanie Hawthorne recommends, readers should pay attention to patterns and
recurring images in Rachilde’s works in order to ascertain the meaning they held for
Rachilde (Hawthorne 15). I have chosen to discuss certain events from Rachilde’s life,
chiefly her decision to become an author and her experiences with hysteria, because
doing so allows me to underscore how the gendered body was manufactured and
maintained by nineteenth-century French institutions such as marriage and the emerging
field of psychology.
In their critical works, scholars such as Melanie Hawthorne, Diana Holmes,
Renée Kingcaid, and Rachel Mesch, often emphasize questions of gender and sexuality in
Rachilde’s works, and interpret her works using the twentieth century discourses of
feminism, women’s and gender studies, and queer studies. Such interpretations of her
novels and short stories are not entirely wrong; however, there is a tendency to lock
Rachilde into these interpretations and her alternative models of procreation and
reproductive futurisms make her a strong candidate for inclusion in queer studies. The
field of queer studies is a history of imagined futures, a time and place where nonheterosexual relationships are possible. Indeed, Katherine Gantz states, “The notion of
20
‘queer’, then, shouldn’t be understood as the binary opposite of ‘heterosexual’ (in fact
queerness works against binarism), but is best illuminated in juxtaposition to the term
‘straight,’ suggesting a similarly inclusive category of that which is prohibitive,
oppressive, and static about culturally-dictated definitions of ‘normative’ sexuality”
(Gantz 115). Rachilde is a difficult author to classify by genre, and queer and anti-queer
interpretations of her novels are possible. However, the idea that nothing is natural or
unnatural about human desire is the most salient evidence of Rachilde’s inclusion in a
Queer canon. By identifying a space outside of or next to the binary of male-female
desire, Rachilde and others who think like she did, are able to make reproductive
futurisms actual possibilities.
A brief epilogue will explore the ramifications of my research on the twentiethcentury. My research thus far has revealed that the nineteenth-century French public was
fascinated with the questions and problems of artificial life. If at first such questions only
interested the doctors, scientists, and inventors who created new machines, interest
quickly spread to the general public as well as to artists and writers as technology and
machines became more ubiquitous. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, robots and
cybernetic organisms or cyborgs are the most popular technologies of reproduction.
Increasingly concerned with replicating human emotions, thoughts, and memories,
contemporary cybernetics work is inching closer and closer to fusing humans and
machines. Tracing a narrative trajectory from Gothic romances of the late eighteenth
century and early science fiction from the nineteenth-century suggests that yesterday’s
reproductive futurisms are in fact today’s reproductive reality.
21
CHAPTER 1: REPRODUCTION DERAILED: ZOLA’S LA BÊTE HUMAINE
The definition of “automaton” has evolved throughout the centuries to reflect
changes in socio-cultural, political, historical, and psychological thought. The most basic
definition of “automaton” is a self-moving object. The Émile Littré Dictionnaire de la
langue française (1872-77) defines automate as, “Machine et, en particulier, machine
imitant les êtres animés, qui se meut par resorts. Les automates de Vaucanson” (ARTFL).
Ironically, another definition of the word is someone who blindly obeys the orders of
another, one without original thoughts or motivations. For example, the 6th Edition of the
Dictionnaire de l’Académie française includes the figurative and familiar definition of
automate “C’est un automate, se dit d’une personne stupide.” (ARTFL). This chapter
examines the question of self control in Émile Zola’s La Bête humaine. La Lison, the
feminized steam engine, is controlled or driven by Jacques. In turn, Jacques follows the
path of the tracks on the Paris-Le Havre line. Both, it would seem, are not self-moving or
self-motivated beings. Zola’s novel also depicts the “beast” in man. The sexual and
murderous beast is controlled by primal urges and is the opposite of well-regulated
machines.
La Bête humaine, published in 1890, was one of the first French “railway novels.”
Inspired by the expansion of the national railway and actual murders committed on
French trains, this novel tells the story of several murders and other crimes committed by
railway employees on or near the trains of the Paris-Le Havre line.12 In a fit of violent
rage, Roubaud the stationmaster decides to murder Grandmorin aboard the train bound
12
The character Grandmorin had once been director of the railway company and then occupied a
high position in social and political circles. His murder was based on the Poinsat affair which took place in
December 1860. Poinsat, a senior judge, was found murdered in a first-class compartment on the train from
Troyes to Paris. In 1886, Barrême, the Prefect of the Département de l’Eure was also found murdered in a
train (Zola XV).
22
for Le Havre for molesting his wife Séverine. Unbeknownst to them, Jacques witnesses
their crime, only later realizing what he has glimpsed through the window of the passing
train. Séverine begins a romantic relationship with Jacques and the two plan to murder
Roubaud. However, Jacques’ hereditary lust for murder results in her death. At the end of
the novel, Jacques loses control of his steam engine which careens out of control down
the tracks.
Many of Zola’s novels explore man’s relationship with machines. La Bête
humaine explores man’s relationship with one of the most ubiquitous nineteenth-century
machines, the steam engine. In this “railway novel” the train takes on the status of a
character and drives the plot forward. Though the French government intended the
railroad to be a civilizing tool, Zola viewed it as a symbol of society’s decline and the
degeneracy of modern man. My research focuses on reproductive futurisms and the
bachelor machine as a new model of procreation in the nineteenth-century. Jacques’
steam engine La Lison is the first of several bachelor machines I discuss. In Les RougonMacquart, Zola creates a gynamythology, a set of myths or beliefs about women, female
sexuality, and reproduction. As part of this gynamythology, La Lison is one of many
mechanical or natural wombs in Zola’s novels that reflect the notion that woman was a
biological machine. In her functions as a bachelor machine, La Lison takes the place of a
woman in Jacques’ sexual relationship and tempers his desires to commit lust murder.
Over the course of the narrative, the man-machine relationship evolves from conjugal
neutrality to an eroticism that careens out of control. The train’s regularity belies the
primitive, out-of-control sexual beast in men and women.
23
The second half of this chapter explores the other meaning of “railway novel.” As
Geoff Woolen explains, “à l’époque, le terme ‘railway novel’ pouvait designer le roman
conçu pour être lu en chemin de fer, à ce titre souvent policier ou judiciaire, et par
conséquent marqué par les ‘empreintes digitales’ du roman populaire et du feuilleton”
(Woolen 2). The train and railroad function as both the scene of the crime and as a
weapon in the series of lust murders and crimes passionnels committed in the novel. Zola
refers to the fictional murderers and murderesses as beasts; a term which is once again
the opposite of machine. The murderous beast loses himself or herself in a moment of
primal rage. Zola challenges the male/female aggressor/victim paradigm in his portrayal
of Roubaud, Jacques, Séverine and Flore as murderers. Secondly, trials of female
criminals often resembled melodramas in which the female defendants acted out the part
of criminelle passionnelle written by criminologists and sexologists. These performed
case studies reduced the murderess to an object of study and denied her any ontology
other than criminal. The careful staging of the scène du crime and the development of a
visual aesthetics of guilt in La Bête humaine and Thérèse Raquin suggest that rather than
acting out a prescribed role, Zola’s murderers script their own parts and in so doing
become artists and subjects of murder.
Emile Zola’s novel La Bête humaine, or indeed any of the novels in the RougonMacquart series, may seem like an odd place to begin a study of reproductive futurisms
and the creation of artificial bodies in nineteenth-century French literature. However,
Zola’s gynamythology in Les Rougon-Macquart combines scientific and medical
theories, Claude Bernard’s experimental method, and the principles of Naturalism, all of
which claimed the female body in particular as a penetrable source of knowledge. As
24
Foucault explains in La Naissance de la clinique, advances in nineteenth-century medical
practices, in particular autopsy, dissection, and anatomy, led to changes in the concept of
visibility of the body and diseases. By exposing the human body in new ways, the
“scientific gaze seemed to have the power to look into the body, to read it, to discover its
hidden truth,” and medicine lost its association with speculation (Kelly 16). Zola’s
Roman experimental was inspired by physiologist Claude Bernard’s Introduction à
l’étude de la médecine expérimentale (1865). Bernard believed that experiments and
observations were the means by which scientific authority was established.
Certain bodies were more easily penetrated by the clinical gaze. The medical and
scientific gazes were coded as male while females were the objects of this gaze. “By the
late nineteenth-century, medicine as science was not simply claiming the human body,
especially that of women, as the main object of its medical look or gaze, but also
asserting that the defining and understanding of womanhood should lie within its
domain” (Bland 53). The medical field of gynecology that emerged during the fin de
siècle as the study and treatment of women’s reproductive physiology reflected the
beliefs that the female body must be penetrated in order to be understood. “La femme est
d’abord soumise à un déterminisme biologique: elle est machine pour ainsi dire, de
l’intérieur, dans sa nature même, dans ses nerfs, et plus précisément encore dans son
sexe” (Noiray 397). Woman is a natural, biological machine and her mechanical nature
extends to every fiber of her being.
This gendered outlook is reflected in Zola’s interpretation of Claude Bernard’s La
Méthode expérimentale that he described as “virile.” “Bernard’s, and thus Zola’s,
scientific method is virile, masculine, strong, as opposed to the weak, soppy, effeminate,
25
‘art’ of medicine and the novels of romanticism” (Kelly 231). Masculinity is equated with
objectivity while sentimentality and subjectivity are associated with femininity in the
increasingly popular scientific outlook. The “art of medicine” refers to the fact that
medicine and science were originally separate domains but throughout the nineteenthcentury the two fields became more closely aligned. The subjective and artistic practice
of medicine has a different meaning in my analysis of bachelor machines. In the novels I
discuss, the female body is dissected—literally or figuratively—only to be reassembled
according to aesthetic ideals, usually those of painting and sculpture.
Machines and the literary genres of realism and naturalism are intimately linked.
As scholar Jacques Noiray explains, the Exposition Universelle or World’s Exposition of
1855 marked a turning point in the machine-novel relationship. The 1855 Exposition
Universelle indicated “la fin d’une période qu’on pourrait qualifier de romantisme
industriel et littéraire” characterized by a reticence to include technical and scientific
objects or any form of progress (Noiray 35). This change in attitude was wrought by the
expansion of the French railway system in the 1850s; by the end of the decade trains and
the railway were common sites in everyday life. The machine became both object and
subject of realist and naturalist novels. The locomotive, railway, and train stations of the
Paris-Havre line take on the role of characters and move the plot of La Bête humaine
forward. Indeed, Zola himself explained, “Je voudrais que mon œuvre elle-même fût
comme le parcours d’un train considérable, partant d’une tête de ligne pour arriver à un
débarcadère final, avec des ralentissements et des arrêts à chaque station, c’est-à-dire, à
chaque chapitre” (Mikkonen 109). The chapters of La Bête humaine often begin and end
with the arrival or departure of a train. Realist and naturalist authors adopted components
26
of the scientific method, namely the importance of observation as methodological
approach. The result of this scientific approach was that machines were featured objects
of novels and the novel became a machine itself. “Issue de la science comme la machine,
et comme elle destiné à produire un effet déterminé, le roman réaliste et naturaliste
apparaît donc, dans sa forme et dans son fonctionnement, comme un véritable objet
technique, une machine à reproduire et à exprimer le réel” (Noiray 40). The mechanical
aesthetics of Zola’s novel are indicative of the increasingly significant role industry
played in daily life.
The expansion of industry meant that certain types of people, the lower classes,
factory workers, engineers, became acceptable literary subjects. An earlier example of
this trend is the Goncourt brothers’ call to arms in their preface of Germinie Lacerteux
published in 1864, that the novel should become a social inquiry (39). Scholar Susan
Harrow finds that Zola’s oeuvre as a whole emphasizes the body in various forms. She
explains, “The body—in the generational and generative senses—is the raw material and
the motor of Zola’s fiction; it is the dynamo powering the Rougon-Macquart series,
sending its reverberations down each of the family line and across the networks that link
individuals, social classes, professions, generations and geographies” (Harrow 14). The
body is dissected, historicized, visualized, modified, sexualized, and dehumanized in the
Zolian oeuvre. Zola explains, “Je veux animer toute la population spéciale des chemins
de fer: employés, chefs de gare, chauffeurs, mécaniciens, gardes de la voie, employés du
wagon des postes et télégraphes…On fera tout dans mes trains: on y manger, on y
dormira, on y aimera, il y aura même une naissance en wagon; enfin l’on y mourra”
27
(Mikkonen 109). In this synopsis, Zola hints at the network of geographies (mail and
telegraph), generations (birth and death), and professions that Harrow alludes to.
Derailing Desire
Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series is in fact one large social experiment carried out
on the page. Zola’s experiment tests the social milieu’s effects on heredity. In Zola’s
series, the successes of the Rougon-Macquart clan are attributed to luck at one’s genetic
lot, while failures are attributed to the genetic taint inherited from the family matriarch
Tante Adelaide. Closely linked to Zola’s study of heredity is an interest in fertility,
reproduction, and birth. “It is in particular in this fascination with procreation that Zola’s
scientific naturalism reveals the way in which it is driven by gendered concerns. The
fascination with procreation is a fascination with the woman’s body and the way in which
she produces her offspring” (Kelly 241). Through his focus on heredity, birth, and
reproduction, Zola created what might be called a gynamythology.
Existing scholarship about the artificial and mechanical wombs in Zola’s novels is
plentiful. Jurate Kamiskas discusses the realist and symbolic functions of birth scenes in
Pot-Bouille, La Joie de vivre, and La Terre and concludes that these birth scenes are
unhappy events. It is only with the birth of Clotilde’s child in Le Docteur Pascal that the
cycle of hereditary misfortunes is broken. Susan Hennessy analyzes sterile and spiritual
mothers, women who become mothers through means other than natural childbirth, in Au
Bonheur des dames, La Joie de vivre, Le Rêve, and L’Argent. Hennessy has found that,
“By placing these characters in a realm of expanding technology and mechanical
production, Zola implies that the spiritual mothers, through their lack of biological
children, forego human reproduction in favor of mechanical reproduction” (Hennessy 85-
28
86). A second article by Hennessy considers male mediation in metaphoric/mechanical
birth, and male management of natural childbirth in Germinal and La Terre respectively.
These novels are examples of gynacolonization, the process through which males take
over the act of procreation. Both Hennessy and Dorothy Kelly have identified the
difficulties and problems associated with scenes of childbirth in Zola’s novels as
manifestations of man’s fears about woman’s excessive sexuality and fertility. Kelly
aptly sums up the role of mechanical reproduction in the Rougon-Macquart series stating,
“One must conclude that this association of giant women and artificial wombs does not
present some kind of sunny utopian future for mankind, but rather a nightmarish vision of
both heredity and the effects of industrialization on the human race, of the driving force
of industrial and urban development that warps bodies and continues its runaway forward
advance like the conductor-less train at the end of La Bête humaine” (Kelly 106). In
Zola’s novels, women are either larger-than-life biological machines or the female
procreative function is usurped by machines or male protagonists.
My analysis of the locomotive in La Bête humaine develops the ideas raised by
Hennessy and Kelly. In Zola’s novel, the crippled though not aphasic Tante Phasie serves
as Zola’s mouthpiece and critiques the train as civilizing tool and symbol of modern
man’s identity. The unified social body organized around the French railway system is
revealed to be degenerate and diseased, prone to outbursts of the “beast in man.”
Secondly, in her role as a bachelor machine, Jacques’ steam engine La Lison is an
example of gynacolonization. She replaces an actual woman in Jacques’ life and affords
him a sense of control over his sexual desires. Finally, although trains resemble the male
sexual organ, in Zola’s train novel and Huysmans Les Sœurs Vatard, the proximity of the
29
domestic space to the rail yard and the synching of female biorhythms with the trains’
schedules is an example of the equivalency established by the medical community
between woman and (biological) machine. The relationship between the train, the
individual, and the private sphere was replicated on a much larger scale. The national
railway became a symbol of modern man’s negotiation of his identity as an individual
and as a part of a group.
The railway was an uncontested symbol of modernism in nineteenth-century
France. During the Second Empire, Napoleon III invested heavily in the expansion of the
French railway in order to legitimize his ascension to power and propagate the empire’s
values.
The rituals of inaugurating new railway lines and stations provided a rich
opportunity for the emperor to present himself as the patron of French
cities and the benefactor of the French nation. The glorification of the
railways in fact became the project for aggrandizing the emperor and for
compromising the republicans, who dared to doubt the civilizing impact of
the Empire on France. (Starostina 144)
In addition to being a symbol of economic prowess and modernity, the railway became a
symbol of the Empire.
The railway system in metropolitan France and in her overseas Empire was
designed to civilize provincials and the colonized by making them more urbane, polished,
and sophisticated through more frequent contact with major cities. The fact that the
railway was a public machine exponentially increased its civilizing potential. Noiray
explains, “Tout d’abord, l’extension du réseau ferroviaire français, régulière à partir du
1840, a fait entrer progressivement le train dans le décor de la vie quotidienne. Alors que
les autres machines restent enfermées derrière les hauts murs des usines, invisibles et par
conséquent peu connues du grand public, la locomotive s’impose jusque dans les
30
campagnes les plus reculées” (Noiray 69). La Croix-de-Maufras where Tante Phasie and
Flore live is one such remote area now accessed by the train. La Lison and the Paris-Le
Havre railway line are the only public machines I discuss. Each of the other bachelor
machines is built for private use. The national railroad was a means of achieving and
maintaining a corps social organized around imperial values.
Articulated explicitly in La Fortune des Rougon, La Bête humaine,
La Terre, and Le Docteur Pascal, le corps social connotes an
organism crisscrossed by competing desires, antagonisms,
reciprocities, and empathies. The relatively rare lexical incidence
of the term corps social across the cycle as a whole is in inverse
correlation to its thematic significance—the crowd, the group,
social classes, social mobility, collective organization,
neighborhood, family, work, and politics are all deeply imbricated
in notions of the social body. (Harrow 148)
The railway’s physical resemblance to a body underscores the idea of the social body.
“The railway is a giant system or body, connecting all peoples and places. “It was like
some huge body, a giant creature laid out on the ground with its head in Paris, its
vertebrae the length of the track, its limbs stretching out with every branch line, and its
hands and feet in Le Havre and other destinations” (Zola 44). Additionally, Phasie
remarks, “the whole world passed by here, and not only French people, foreigners too,
people from the farthest lands…and soon anyway, so they said, all peoples would be one”
(41). The observations emphasize the unifying and objective goals of technology and
machines, the belief that technology is an equalizer among men.
Zola, Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, and Edmond de Goncourt were the
most prominent members of the Médan group of writers in the nineteenth-century who
took the French government to task for its claims that the railway was a civilizing tool.
Zola and his contemporaries argued that the railway, by bringing peasants and
31
immigrants into close contact with urban centers did little to civilize France. “In their
writings, a railway trip was nothing more than wasting time in the company of annoying
passengers, a boring and painful experience of observing dull landscapes and coping with
unavoidable headache after a sleepless night on the road” (Starostina 145).
Tante Phasie spends hours watching the passing trains from her house at La
Croix-de-Maufras and she serves as Zola’s mouthpiece in his critique and hesitant
embrace of modernity and technology. “Zola’s narrative is experiential and performative:
it does not simply recount Phasie’s struggle to see and to stabilize a view, rather it
(re)creates the method, the repeated effort, the speculation and the exasperating
negotiation of uncertain images” (Harrow 53). The railway is intended to be a unified
economic and political space, but the railways in La Bête humaine belie this uniformity.
Mikkonen echoes Harrow’s findings and suggests, “In the passing trains, the flux of
travelers and the violence associated with them, the novel portrays the numbness, closure,
and ‘auto-amputation’ of the human body caused by the extension and stimulation of our
senses through new forms of technology” (Mikkonen 142). Auto-amputation refers to the
splitting of one’s identity that comes to define the modern subject, and is an example of
the dehumanizing effects of technology. Other technologies such as electricity, air waves,
or radio waves are less uniform. In chapters Two and Three, I discuss the potential for
communicative interference in Verne’s Le Château des Carpathes and Villiers’ L’Eve
future.
Susan Blood finds that Zola’s “moving pictures” are the result of the affinities
between the blending of art and science in naturalism and technology’s gradual shift from
32
scientific to aesthetic.13 “The image that is transported by Zola’s train is deeply traumatic,
both for the character who views it and for the narrative organization of the novel. The
image disturbs straightforward narrative causality, generating a multiplicity of
interconnected stories and undermining narratorial omniscience” (Blood 51).14 Jacques is
haunted by the fleeting image of Grandmorin’s murder. Like his aunt, he spends weeks
trying to make sense of the image he saw. These moving images produced a new way of
seeing, “train vision.” As opposed to travel on horseback or in a coach, passengers on a
train were separated from the surrounding elements by glass windows. High speeds
reduced countryside, village, and town to blurs and flashes of color and light.15 From the
window of the crossing-guard’s house, Tante Phasie can barely recognize the people who
pass her house each week on the train. The blurry images produce an incomplete portrait
and suggest that modern identity is unstable and fragmented. 16 Even when the passengers
enter her home after the train stalls in the snow, Phasie is incapable of reconciling the
people in front of her with the fleeting images of them from the train.
Out of all the passengers she recognized only two, she examined
them as one might inspect a buzzing insect which has finally
settled after an invisible flight. They seemed singular to her, she
had not pictured them quite like this…As for the others, they
struck her as belonging to a different race, inhabitants of an
unknown planet who had dropped from the sky and brought with
13
In her article, “The Precinematic Novel: Zola’s La Bête humaine, Susan Blood cites evidence
that Zola’s novel anticipates the aesthetic qualities of the cinema. Zola prefigures cinema’s moving pictures
by using passing trains to make images move.
14
Mikkonen highlights the novel’s theme of triads and suggests that the triangle formed by the
train’s three red taillights signifies changes in narrative time. The plot of La Bête humaine is on the one
hand teleological, moving straight forward as though on a train track. This regimented modern time is
interrupted by the cyclical primitive time scheme that introduced elements from the characters’ pasts. See
Mikkonen page 111.
15
See Christophe Studény, L’invention de la vitesse.
16
A later example of blurred identities in a novel featuring a train is Michel Butor’s La
Modification published in 1957. In Butor’s novel, the protagonist’s identity as Léon Delmont is revealed
gradually as he travels back and forth on the train from Paris to Rome.
33
them, here into her very own kitchen, clothes, customs, ideas, that
she would never have dreamed of encountering there. (Zola 200)
Phasie’s reflections belie the government’s civilizing mission via the railway; these
passengers are so foreign as to be from another world. “Phasie’s fascination with the
railway…turns her into an improbably perceptive cultural commentator on speed,
mobility, multiculturalism and alienation: on velocity and vacancy” (Harrow 51). The
railway created a new way for the modern subject to define his/her identity, amidst a
crowd and in motion. Additionally, the modern subject was both an individual and part of
a collective. The railway’s high speeds and ubiquitous presence across French territories
may have reduced physical distances between people, but ironically it did little to reduce
interpersonal space. Indeed, Phasie’s consternation and inability to identify passengers is
indicative of another modern phobia. Mikkonen explains, “The moving faceless mass of
people on the trains represents another possible loss of identity related to the unsuccessful
effort to control a gigantic female engine and violent sexuality (or the possible
ramifications of the plot for that matter)” (Mikkonen 140).17 The fear of crowds is often
associated with a fear of women.18 In the following pages, I discuss the fear of women
and violent sexuality as they are manifested in depictions of the “beast” in man and in the
anthropomorphized steam engine. Zola’s portrayals of the railway in La Bête humaine
suggest that the social body, instead of being healthy, robust, modern, and unified is
instead degenerate, ill, and hurtling out of control.
17
See Andreas Huyssen’s, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and
Postermodernism (1986), Gustave Le Bon’s La Psychologie des foules (1895), and Karl Abraham’s “A
Constitutional Basis of Locomotor Anxiety” (1927) for analyses of the various metaphors associated with
crowds in the late nineteenth century.
18
An example of this is Zola’s Au Bonheur des dames (1883). The female shoppers are seduced
by the goods in the department store and abandon themselves to the machine of the store.
34
While Flaubert decried the discomforts and boredom associated with rail travel,
the Goncourt brothers and Théophile Gautier lambasted development of the railway as a
governmental thirst for money, and Maupassant highlighted the anti-civilizing elements,
foreigners, savages, and other primitives, flooding the rails, Zola uses the railway to show
the degeneracy of modern man that lurks below the surface. If the railway was intended
to be a symbol of the Empire, Zola transforms the railroad into a symbol of the crimes of
the Empire. La Bête humaine was one of the last novels in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart
series, and it was “designed as the revelation of utter degradation of human nature during
the less than two decades of the rule of Napoleon III…no other novel of the series has so
much violence and expresses so little faith in the ability of man to overcome his heredity
and the degrading influence of his surroundings” (Starostina 146). The five murders, two
suicides, and one train derailment are all signs of man’s degeneracy and the failures of
Napoleon III. Before discussing the five murders that take place in the novel, I consider
the idea of the “beast in man” in nineteenth-century literature and culture.
Tante Phasie alludes to the novel’s title when she tells Jacques, “But wild beasts
are still wild beasts, and they can go on inventing bigger and better machines for as long
as they like, there’ll still be wild beasts underneath there somewhere” (Zola 41). The
“beast in man” refers to the unstable, out of control desires of men and women. Kai
Mikkonen identifies a relationship between beasts, technology, and time in the novel.
“One conventional way of reading the novel is to suggest that it is about the convergence
and collision of two different time structures and societal orders represented by the
different kinds of ‘beasts’ in the novel. On the one hand, there is the chronological
modern time of trains and their schedules…and groups of ‘modern’ people who are
35
trying to live accordingly” (Mikkonen 120). In contrast to this standardized time is a
competing time structure that is cyclical and primitive; “the time of the forgotten
ancestors, the savageness of the past” that intrudes on the modern order in violent ways”
(120). Mikkonen suggests, but does not fully articulate that the modern order of
machines, schedules, and standardization dehumanizes man, causing violent outbursts.
Although this may be true, it fails to explain why certain characters are prone to
violent outbursts and others are not. In Zola’s novel, “cracked” individuals such as
Jacques, Flore, and Séverine are liable to commit crimes. The “beast” in man seems to be
a hereditary disposition not simply an effect of living in a modern society. Another
limitation of Mikkonen’s framework is that the steam engine La Lison both represents
and suffers the effects of Jacques’ primitive sexual urges. “At one level, identity in La
Bête humaine depends on the prevention of suppressed, uncontrollable desire. The trains
and people that never cease passing contribute to a kind of locomotor anxiety…that is
rooted in a fear of one’s own sexuality being ‘unstoppable’” (141). This mechanical yet
sexualized beast is at odds with the concept of a well-regulated modern self.
As Lisa Downing explains, the “beast” in the nineteenth-century French cultural
imaginary is “gendered masculine—but ambiguously so—and constructed along strict
ideological lines as the underside of progressive modernity and the product of sexual
excess” (Downing 28). In La Bête humaine, however, sexual beasts are female and
murderous beasts are male. Nevertheless, one could argue that Jacques’ desire to commit
lust murder makes him a sexual beast as well. The female beast is characterized by a
heightened sex drive. When Séverine tells Roubaud that Grandmorin molested her,
Roubaud responds by beating her and saying that Grandmorin “found a willing beast” in
36
her (Zola 240). Roubaud is disturbed by Séverine’s animalistic, inappropriate and
excessive (she was willing) sexuality. It is ironic that Séverine refuses to have intercourse
with her husband, but as a “willing beast,” readily gave herself up to Grandmorin.
Jacques’ steam engine La Lison is also an insatiable female. Her one defect is that she
uses too much oil, a metaphor for the female sexual appetite. Though insatiable, the
female beast is not prone to aggression and is able to be controlled by men.
In nineteenth-century literature, “railway locomotives are imagined as creatures
with female souls who are submissive to the will of their masculine master. While the
corruption of the female soul and body, in the portrayal of misogynistic writers, doomed
love for women to disastrous consequences, love for machines gave men the illusion of
happiness” (Starostina 149). Until he loses himself in a conjugal relationship with
Séverine, Jacques exercises complete control over La Lison. Jacques’ relationship with
La Lison is unique precisely because she had a soul. “The mystery of manufacture has
given her [La Lison] a soul, that something that the chance blows of a hammer can bring
to metal, that an assembly worker’s hand can lend to the individual parts: the engine’s
personality, its life” (Zola 147). La Lison’s unique personality is underscored by the
meaning of the name Jacques chooses for her. Jacques created the name La Lison by
adding the feminine article “la” to the station name “Lison” engraved on the engine’s
front. This act of naming personalizes the engine and makes her his engine. Naming the
engine is also a procreative or generative act and Jacques fulfills the role of male creator.
Kai Mikkonen mentions several meanings for the name La Lison, among them lionne a
female lioness or beast, lis for both lily and readability (lisible). The lily’s pureness
contrasts with the sordid females of the novel and as a type of flower helps link the
37
engine to Flore. Finally Mikkonen suggests that the name is not too far from licit or illicit
(Mikkonen 142). The various connotations of the engine’s name sum up common beliefs
about women: women should be pure (lily), women are sexual animals (lioness), women
are objects of study (readable), and certain women are forbidden (illicit).
The symbolism of La Lison’s name, particularly lis, the pure lily, and illicit are
indicative of the evolving relationship between driver and engine. Jacques and La Lison’s
relationship becomes increasingly erotic as the novel progresses. A possible reason for
this lies in the French word for train engine: “la locomotive,” a noun with a female
gender. Similar feminization and eroticization of the train can be found in J.K.Huysmans’
novel A Rebours. Des Esseintes describes two engines, “L’une, la Crampton, une
adorable blond, à la voix aigüe, à la grande taille frêle…L’autre l’Engerth, une
monumentale et sombre brune aux ris sourds et raques” (Noiray 75). However, a platonic
relationship exists between Céline and Désirée Vatard and La Mioche (Kid) in
Huysmans’ 1879 novel Les Sœurs Vatard. “They would feel a childish joy whenever they
noticed one, a very small one, reserved for moving merchandise in the station yard and
working on the track, a dinky locomotive, smart and elegant” (Huysmans 192). An
equivalency is established between the sisters and the locomotive with the words
“childlike” and the engine’s name La Mioche (Kid). Jacques Noiray presents a similar
conclusion stating, “Celle-ci, dans les sœurs Vatard, est individualisée sans être
sexualisée: sans doute parce que l’érotisation de l’objet technique, qui ne peut se traduire,
selon les phantasmes du romancier masculine, que par une féminisation du corps
mécanique, ne semble pas ici nécessaire, puisque nous avons affaire qu’à des
personnages féminins” (Noiray 75). Desire between the Vatard sisters and a female
38
locomotive would suggest a taboo homosexual desire. Jacques’ desire for La Lison is
heterosexual and therefore considered acceptable.19 However, Noiray also notes, “Il n’est
pas difficile de reconnaître dans les trains de La Bête humaine, si souvent représentés
jaillissant du tunnel de la Croix-de-Maufras ou s’y engouffrant, un équivalent symbolique
du sexe masculine” (406). The train serves as a symbol of modern male and female
sexual identities and this fact is reflected in the French words “le train” and “la
locomotive.”
Neutral conjugal desires exist in an inverse relationship to sexual and erotic
desires. This inverse relationship plays itself out between man-machine (Jacques-La
Lison) and man-woman (Jacques-Séverine). Early in the novel, La Lison is described as a
good woman and is compared to a resourceful housewife. Prior to driving La Lison, “he
had had others, the docile and awkward, the courageous and the lazy; he knew that each
one had its own character and that many of them were not up to much, rather like those of
the flesh-and-blood variety; with the result that if he loved this one, it was because she
really did have the rare qualities of a good woman” (147). La Lison uses fuel judiciously
and her punctuality and reliability result in a larger paycheck for Jacques.
Their profound though platonic relationship becomes erotically charged. Noiray
maintains that the erotic relationship is at first beneficial because it quells Jacques’
desires to murder women. Other women place certain demands on Jacques. “That was
why he loved his engine so much: it was like a soothing mistress from whom he expected
nothing but happiness” (54). La Lison’s physical features contribute to Jacques’ sense of
control and solitude. Jacques “was only ever at peace, happy and cut off from the world,
when he was on his engine. When it was carrying him along, amidst the clatter of its
39
wheels, at top speed, when he had his hand on the regulator, completely absorbed in his
attention to the track” (Zola 54). In the steam engine’s cab, Jacques cannot see or hear the
passengers. Zola uses ambiguous vocabulary to at once humanize and eroticize the train.
Jacques frequently shines (astiquer), rubs (frotter), caresses (caresser), and polishes
(faire reluire) his locomotive.
However, the erotic relationship between man and machine diminishes just as the
romantic and sexual relationship between Jacques and Séverine picks up speed. La Lison
“no longer had sole possession of his heart” and “it troubled him, it really did, this
wanton appetite for grease; and there was something else too…that he had never felt
before, an uneasiness, a mistrust of her, as if he doubted her” (Zola 149). The idealized
relationship between man and machine fails when the feminized machine is placed next
to a real woman. “La mort de l’objet technique, conséquence à la fois d’une lente
dégradation physique et de la sauvagerie des hommes, vient sceller définitivement
l’échec, et prouver que l’amour que Jacques ressent pour elle et par elle, s’il peut
apparaitre parfait, demeure cependant provisoire et d’autant plus fragile qu’il est toujours
vécu sur un plan imaginaire” (Noiray 411). Jacques’ love for La Lison is idealized and
without a real-world counterpart, cannot be maintained.
The man-machine relationship deteriorates until the machine dies. Flore places a
horse cart across the tracks and Jacques doesn’t see it in time to stop. La Lison hits the
cart and topples over on her side. “Upside down, her belly gaping, La Lison was losing
steam through burst tubes and wrenched-off taps, her thunderous puffing like the
desperate dying gasps of some female giant,” white steam mixed with the red coals
40
looking like breath and entrails (290). Without La Lison, Jacques’ sexual desires hurtle
out of control and he gives in to his psychopathic desires and murders Séverine.
For women, their conjugal relationships were also regulated by trains. Zola and
Huysmans use trains as a metaphor for the control and regulation of female sexuality and
identity as evidenced by the close proximity of the domestic space, living room and
bedroom, to the railroad yard. Clarity of thought and regularity of female sexual behavior
in La Bête humaine and Les Sœurs Vatard is mirrored by the precise timing of the rail
schedules. Séverine “was happy to rise quite late, happy to remain alone in bed listening
to the comforting sound of the trains, their arrivals and departures marking the advance of
the hours with the precision of a clock” (156). Early in her marriage Séverine was
bothered by the clamor but now she derives pleasure from the noise. In J. K. Huysmans’
novel Les Sœurs Vatard, Céline and Désirée Vatard’s bedroom also faces the rail yard
and they too are accustomed to the noise. Huysmans writes, “When they were younger,
the two girls had found all this movement, this teaming life of machines, very
entertaining. Now that they were accustomed to the noise, they were aware of only one
unbearable inconvenience, that of having copious amounts of coal dust and black smoke
in their rooms” (Huysmans 111-112). For these women, the trains are part of their
everyday routine, as noticeable or unnoticeable as breathing. Mechanical rhythms and
bio-rhythms become one, lending support to Noiray’s argument that women were
considered biological machines in the nineteenth-century.
Trains also gave women more freedom in their sexual desires and relationships.
Monsieur Vatard refuses to allow Désirée to marry her sweetheart August. Desirée locks
herself in her bedroom in protest, but also because unbeknownst to her father, she is able
41
to see August from her bedroom. Her bedroom overlooked the suspension bridge “and
there, too far apart to speak, they would make signs at each other, exchanging kisses,
winks, and smiles. That would last until night fell and sometimes their signals were
interrupted by a passing train” (166). Periodically Auguste would disappear behind a
cloud of smoke or steam released by a train. Séverine’s relations, sexual and otherwise,
with Jacques are determined by Jacques’ and Roubaud’s work schedule. Until she is
murdered, Séverine is not punished for stepping out alone on a train. Proximity between
domestic spaces and the public spaces of the railway stations and train yards controls
female sexual desires but also grants women freedom from parental and conjugal
boundaries.
Traditionally, the couple is the desired social unit to carry out the propagation of
the species. By removing woman from the act of procreation, a bachelor machine
reconfigures the couple, essentially removing one person from it. Trains generally travel
along a particular track in order to complete a given route; at times however, they shift
tracks and head in new directions. Furthermore, train cars can be easily hitched or
coupled together and later just as easily be uncoupled and joined to different train cars.
The ease with which train cars can be attached or detached is mirrored by the characters’
frequent coupling and uncoupling. “The dynamic but destructive system of the triangle is
pinned against the socially constructive but potentially automatizing and jealousyinducing structure of the couple” (Mikkonen 113). Jacques’ relationship with La Lison is
stable compared to the disharmonious couples in the novel, but even this relationship is
fraught with tension and derails.
42
La Bête humaine is rife with trios and ménages à trois that replace the couple as
the primary unit of social organization. Numerous trios include: Roubaud-SéverineJacques, Jacques-Séverine-Flore, Jacques-La Lison-Séverine, Flore-Jacques-Cabuche,
Grandmorin-Séverine-Roubaud to name just a few. Looking at the list of trios, two names
stand out: Jacques and Séverine. In the shifting relationship dynamics, these two are
particularly contagious or active vehicles of desire. The only relationship actually labeled
a ménage à trois is that of Jacques-La Lison-Pecqueux. The fireman’s love for La Lison
helps maintain a harmonious relationship, “together, the pair of them and the engine
constituted a regular ménage à trois, and never so much as an argument” (148). This trio
is only stable because of the machine and once Jacques begins to mistrust La Lison, the
triangle collapses. Shortly thereafter, Jacques pushes his engine too hard and she stalls in
a snowbank. At the end of the novel, Nº 608, full of soldiers headed to Germany, speeds
down the tracks while Jacques and Pecqueux fight over Pecqueux’s wife. Here again, the
triangle between Nº 608, Jacques, and Pecqueux is unstable because it relies on a
machine. The runaway train carrying soldiers to fight in the Franco-Prussian war is also a
final social commentary on the ill effects of the Second Empire.
In nineteenth-century novels such as La Bête humaine, the pathological love for
the train acts as a substitute for absent or threatening human connections, an attempt to
control man’s primitive urges. In her function as bachelor machine, La Lison is designed
to control Jacques’ sexual urges. However, given its ubiquitous presence in French
culture, the train was in fact a symbol of both male and female sexual identity. To the
extent that women, and less so men, were considered biological machines, the railway
mimicked the clinical gaze and scope in its attempts to penetrate into the smallest
43
recesses of the corps social. As Zola demonstrates, the social body is diseased and
decayed, suspect to the beast in man.
Le train: scène du crime
The previous section was devoted to one meaning of the genre “railway novel”,
that is, novels that feature locomotives and whose plots unfold along the tracks. This
section explores a second meaning of the genre, novels meant to be read by passengers on
trains. Such novels were often popular serialized novels of a mysterious, criminal, or
judicial nature. In the earliest outlines of La Bête humaine, crime, punishment, and justice
were the main themes and only later did the railway emerge from the background and
assume its full structural and narrative roles. The series of crimes passionnels and
murders committed by Jacques, Roubaud, Séverine, and Flore were inspired by actual
criminal cases such as those documented by criminologists Cesare Lombroso and
Richard von Krafft-Ebing. In The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault documents a shift in the
nineteenth-century disciplines of medicine and human sciences. At this historical
juncture, human beings became both the object and subject of these disciplines. Both the
crime and the criminal were components of the subject of murder.20
In their case studies of nineteenth-century criminals Lombroso and Krafft-Ebing
developed a series of “portraits” of what different types of criminals looked like and how
they behaved. These categorized appearances and modus operandi suggest that murderers
are akin to automata in that they behave in predictable ways. However, Zolian criminals
do not follow such patterns. Descriptions of murderers in La Bête humaine and Thérèse
Raquin emphasize the criminal’s brutish, beastly, and unpredictable behaviors. In
20
See Downing The Subject of Murder, pages 6-9.
44
particular, Zola’s murderesses challenge nineteenth-century beliefs about female
criminals by suggesting that aggression is a masculine though not necessarily male trait.
The depictions of murderers developed by criminologists were replicated in the
judicial system as well. Testimonies were intended to show that the criminal’s behavior
prior to committing a crime was already indicative of his/her deviant nature. “No longer
simply neutral pieces of behavior, all the characteristics of the individual about to be
written into discourse as a criminal subject are read as symptoms of an abnormal—or an
exceptional—individual” (Downing 8). However, criminals also draw on common
cultural depictions of the act of murder in order to understand the ontology of murderer.
In cases were murderers have written autobiographies, poetry, or produced other artistic
pieces, these creative works are a means of establishing their identity as murderers. My
analysis highlights the dramatic and artistic elements present in the staging of each crime
and the aesthetics of guilt created by Zola in La Bête humaine and Thérèse Raquin in
order to explain how these murderers and murderesses constitute themselves as criminals.
Visual aesthetics of guilt are established in Zola’s series of railway sketches and the
“Camille Series” in Thérèse Raquin. These “works of art” illustrate how murder can be a
creative act. Aesthetics of guilt are also established through performative or theatrical
means. Ruth Harris has found that the trials of nineteenth-century criminelles
passionnelles were judged according to righteous self-presentation and retrospective
rationalization such as one would find in melodramas. For all trials, but especially those
of female criminals, the court resembled the theater; the defendant was akin to an actor
playing a role. As the murderers stage the scène du crime, they improvise and create a
45
new role for themselves. In so doing, they establish themselves as subjects, not merely
objects, in the study of murder.
Zola blamed the Second Empire for the decline of French society, particularly in
the working classes and the crimes committed by Jacques, Roubaud, and Séverine are
attributed to the government’s abuses of power. For instance, Grandmorin abused
Séverine that led to his murder. Zola was particularly inspired by newspaper coverage of
several murders committed on trains.21 Above all, he was influenced by the nineteenthcentury lust murderer par excellence, Jack the Ripper or Jacques l’Éventreur. “Sketches
for a novel about a man with an overwhelming desire to kill women—‘un homme qui a
besoin de tuer’—first occur in Zola’s notebooks as early as 1874” although Jack the
Ripper didn’t make headlines until 1888 (82). “The Ripper case also served as a hook on
which to hang a story central to nineteenth-century criminological and sexological
thinking: the narrative of civilization’s decline as dramatized by degeneration theory”
(Downing 73). Various theories emerged about the identity of Jack the Ripper. Some
believed he was a member of the proletarian masses, others speculated that he was an
American, still others that he was a man of “foreign appearance.” This led to the targeting
of immigrants in London’s East End, which was home to the Ripper’s preferred victims:
prostitutes. The prostitute was the female equivalent of the lust murderer. Both were
diseased and had the power to further contribute to the decline of society by infecting
others. Descriptions of lust murderers emphasize the penetration of the victim’s body,
either through sexual intercourse or by stabbing. By defining sex as penetration, the lust
46
murderer was destined to be a male figure (75). However, Zola’s lust murderers do not
adhere to this model of natural male aggression.
Lust murder is the most extreme form of excessive sexual aggression and sadism.
Krafft-Ebing states that generally psychopathic states, such as a proclivity for sadism,
exist since birth, although in some cases it is acquired. “Many individuals, tainted from
birth, for a long time do everything to conquer the perverse instinct. If they are potent,
they are able for some time to lead a normal sex life” (Krafft-Ebing 57). Roughly half of
Zola’s characters are tainted, having received a genetic stain from the family matriarch
Tante Adelaide. Jacques is keenly aware of this defect and it is for this reason that he
seeks sexually fulfillment with La Lison. Another nineteenth-century criminologist,
Cesare Lombroso, critiqued Zola’s portrayal of Jacques for precisely this reason.
According to Lombroso, a “real” murder with such a hereditary predisposition would
never be able to enjoy sexual intercourse with a woman without wanting to kill her.
Jacques and Séverine have normal sexual relations for several months. In the early stages
of their relationship, they were both submissive, sacrificing the self for the other’s
pleasure. “Jacques, for his part, no longer had any doubt; he had found a cure to his awful
hereditary disorder; for since he had first made love to her, the thought of murder had
never once troubled him. Was it that physical possession satisfied this thirst for death?
Did possessing and killing amount to the same thing deep within the dark recesses of the
human beast?” (Zola 175-176). Possessing a woman is akin to killing, but for the lust
murderer it is not enough and s/he gives into his/her murderous desires.
Krafft-Ebing explains, “Later, when the opposing motives of an ethical and
aesthetic kind have been gradually overcome, and when oft-repeated experience has
47
proved the natural act to give but incomplete satisfaction, the abnormal instinct suddenly
bursts forth” (Krafft-Ebing 57). Jacques and Laurent the protagonist in Thérèse Raquin
both reason with themselves as to why they should or should not kill Roubaud and
Camille respectively. Jacques believes he has a right to eliminate Roubaud due to his
weakness. Jacques says to himself, “Kill this man, my God, had he any right to? When a
fly bothered him, he crushed it with a tap of his hand. One day a cat had got entangled in
his legs and he had broken its back with a kick, unintentionally, it was true” (Zola 263).
However, he had to reason with himself to prove “that he had the right to murder, the
right of the strong who find the weak in their way, and who devour them” (263). Laurent
arrives at much the same conclusion. Killing Camille present no risks, “il poussait
seulement un homme pour se mettre à sa place. Dans sa logique brutale de paysan, il
trouvait ce moyen excellent et naturel” (Zola 70). Laurent’s comment hints at natural
selection, in which nature kills off the weaker species. Jacques then reasons that killing
Roubaud is a way to maintain the right to life—Jacques’ life and happiness with
Séverine. Laurent also make this argument; Camille prevents Laurent from marrying
Thérèse and inheriting Madame Raquin’s fortune, allowing him to live a life of ease.
Criminologists believed that ethical defects, hereditary degeneracy and moral
insanity weakened one’s resolve against the desire to kill. By writing Thérèse Raquin,
Zola set out to study temperaments and he explains in the preface, “J’ai choisi des
personnages souverainement dominés par leurs nerfs et leur sang, dépourvus de libre
arbitre, entraînés à chaque acte de leur vie par les fatalités de leur chair. Thérèse et
Laurent sont des brutes humaines, rien de plus” (Zola 8). Ethical defects or hereditary
degeneracy are implied by the words “sang” (blood) and “nerfs” (nerves). Jacques’
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hereditary defect is underscored throughout the novel. Jacques asks himself, “Why
indeed should he not kill Roubaud? Perhaps, upon this chosen victim, he would be able to
assuage forever his need to murder…he would be cured…Never again to feel himself
shaking with that thirst for blood, to possess Séverine without that wild awakening of the
primordial male, wanting to slit women’s bellies open and carry them away on his
shoulders” (Zola 262-263). Jacques traces his hereditary weakness not only to his family,
but suggests that such a condition is innate to all of mankind. Downing has found two
tendencies in Zola’s portrayal of the lust murderer. She argues that at times, Jacques is
merely a case study of lust murder. At others, and the above quote is indicative of this,
Zola suggests that these types of violent tendencies are signs of normal masculinity, not
excessive or aberrant behavior (Downing 70). The killing of Séverine illustrates these
competing images of the lust murderer.
As is often the case with narratives of lust murders, readers are presented with the
criminal’s viewpoint. While waiting for Roubaud to come to La Croix-de-Maufras so
Jacques can kill him, Séverine begs Jacques to kiss her and he feels the murderous thirst
return. Readers are aware of Jacques’ desires and anticipate how this scene will end. Her
face upturned and her neck exposed, she waits for the kiss only to be stabbed in the neck.
“In doing so he twisted the weapon, as though his hand were satisfying some gruesome
need of its own… At that very moment the Paris express was passing, so violently and so
rapidly that the floor shook, and she died as though struck by lightning during the storm”
(Zola 330). Because the scene is not read from Séverine’s viewpoint, her desires are cast
from the masculine viewpoint. Alternating between a particular case study and an
example of universal masculinity, in this moment, “when he should so clearly be the
49
former, distanced from the reader as horrifically ‘other,’ the narrative point of view,
which suggests irresistible collusion with him, forces the reader to relate to him as the
latter” (Downing 86). In the popular press and in court, murderers were presented as
“Other”: beastly, monstrous, abnormal, or inhuman. However, Jacques’ reaction to what
he has done, underscores Downing’s premise that violent tendencies are part of a
continuum of normative masculinity.
As Jacques looks down upon Séverine’s body and the blood spilling from her he
thinks he hears an animal snorting or grunting, but it was only his own breathing. The
beast within has emerged. Jacques is overcome with joy since he has finally dared to kill.
“He felt a sudden surge of pride as though his supremacy as a male had somehow been
enhanced. He had killed womankind, and he possessed her now as he had for so long
desired to possess her, completely, even to destruction” (331). Possessing a woman
makes Jacques more masculine. Laurent and Thérèse experience a similar emotional high
after murdering Camille. “Le meurtre avait comme apaisé pour un moment les lèvres
voluptueuses de leur chair, ils avaient parvenus à contenter, en tuant Camille, les désirs
fougueux et insatiables qu’ils n’avaient pu assouvir en se brisant dans les bras l’un de
l’autre” (Zola 108). Laurent and Thérèse associate carnal pleasure with an animalistic
drive to kill. Similar emotions are described in the novel’s first chapter when Roubaud
beats Séverine.
When he learned that Grandmorin molested Séverine, Roubaud lashed out,
verbally and physically abusing his wife. Over the course of an hour as his anger ebbs
and flows, Roubaud is transformed into a beast, blinded by fury. “He was no longer in
control of himself, flailing into the void, tossed hither and tither by every shift in the wind
50
of violence that lashed him, sinking back into the one, single need to appease the beast
that howled within him” (25). Roubaud is animalistic, more akin to Thérèse and Laurent
who are controlled by their blood and nerves. Another reference to the beast occurs
several pages later, “What terrified her was to sense the animal in him, the animal which
she had half been conscious of these past three years form his dark growls, and which
today was unleashed, frothing at the mouth, ready to bite” (27). Roubaud, like most lust
murderers, has always had these urges but had thus far been able to control them.
Roubaud’s initial plan was to kill Séverine by “slitting her” using the new knife
she had bought him that very afternoon. Eviscerating, cutting and slicing appear
throughout the novel. In “Ripper cases” the knife is an extension of the penis—plunging
into a female victim, penetrating her and thus controlling or silencing her sexually. In an
attempt to appease him, Séverine tries to make love to Roubaud who refuses saying he
would be burned or killed by the memory of her sexual betrayal with Grandmorin. “And
in the turbid darkness of his flesh, from the depths of his sullied, wounded desire,
abruptly there rose a need for death. ‘If it’s not going to kill me going with you again,
you see, I’ll have to kill him first…kill him, kill him’” (27). Once again lust and death
exist alongside one another. Although unique case studies for criminologists, the
portrayals of Jacques, Roubaud, and Laurent shows that sadistic tendencies are part of a
continuum of normal masculinity in nineteenth-century culture. In a challenge to
common beliefs about gender, these masculine traits are also found in female murderers.
Despite the fact that female criminals were less common than males, nineteenthcentury criminologist Cesare Lombroso believed that women were predestined to be
delinquent because of their inherently weak natures. Lombroso defines a normal woman
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as physically feminine, maternal, passive, and whose sexual desire is limited to
procreation. Normal women were also believed to be morally weaker and intellectually
inferior to men. Lombroso concludes, “She therefore has in embryonic form the
characteristics of the delinquent woman: a tendency to calculate and manipulate, a
limited intelligence, a similarity to children and animals in her simplicity and
capriciousness” (Downing 64). Flore and Thérèse display very few, if any of these
“normal” feminine traits. Indeed, Flore and Thérèse are portrayed as more masculine than
feminine. In his research, Lombroso found that female delinquents and criminals were
more similar to men, criminal or normal, than to other women.
Excessive emotions, explained by psychologists as symptoms of hysteria, were
used to account for female criminal behavior. In her analysis of nineteenth-century
crimes of passion, Ruth Harris has found that female criminals were judged according to
two standards. First they were tried “according to the official masculine world of
psychiatric assessment and judicial analysis” and the feminine discourses of melodrama
(Harris 208). Even in healthy or normal women, excessive female emotions were
explained by and attributed to hysteria. Although diagnoses of hysteria did not render
female criminals innocent, they did mitigate their degree of responsibility. In the clinical
setting, “hysteria represented a very specific conception of bodily illness linked to a wide
array of psychological behavioural abnormalities. In lay parlance, however, it was used to
denote any common form of excess emotion” (Harris 228). Hysteria was a kind of
blanket term for any deviant behavior in women. In their evaluations of criminals of both
sexes, physicians, and to a lesser extent judges and juries, drew boundaries between
passion and illness. At the fin de siècle, most female defendants were not found to suffer
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from grande hystérie, but they were also not in fully health and signs of petite hysteria
were readily ascribed to them. As femmes passionnées or passionate women they were
still found guilty although less responsible than a “normal” woman would have been.
Zola’s protagonist Thérèse Raquin suffers from a classic case of hysteria.
Descriptions of Thérèse Raquin are full of images of illness and excessive
emotions. Thérèse was raised alongside her cousin Camille and adopted many of his
sickroom behaviors: “Elle était d’une santé de fer, et elle fut soignée comme une enfant
chétive, partageant les medicaments que prenait son cousin” (Zola 23). She becomes
withdrawn, pensive, and lethargic. However, her passionate and tempestuous nature lies
dormant under her placid exterior. After they murder Camille, Thérèse and Laurent are
haunted by what they have done. Thérèse attempts to atone for her actions in a series of
histrionics before Madame Raquin. Several times a day, she kneels before Madame
Raquin, and “criait, étouffait, jouait à elle seule une scène de remords qui la soulageait”
(214). These scenes also take on the aspect of the melodramatic self-representations of
female criminals in court. “Elle parlait de la sorte pendant des heures entières, passant du
désespoir à l’espérance, se condamnât, puis se pardonnant…obéissant à toutes les idées
d’humilité et de fierté, de repentir et de révolte qui lui passait par la tête” (214). This
histrionic scene performed in front of Madame Raquin is akin to the melodramatic trials
of female criminals.
In La Bête humaine, hysteria becomes synonymous with mental degeneracy and is
no longer only a woman’s disease. Hysteria was originally believed to be a sexual malady
originating in the uterus. Later however, the famed French neurologist Charcot argued
that hysteria was not housed in the genitals, but was instead a neurologic disorder. In fact,
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Zola elides hysteria and mental degeneracy. L’Inconscient was a potential title for the
novel. The unconscious was the third “institution”, besides the railway and court of law,
which split the modern subject. The unconscious hints at the hereditary split or crack in
Jacques’ mind. “The ‘cracked’ individual’s dilemma in Zola anticipates the
psychoanalytical self, which is characterized by the interaction and switching between
various mental currents” (Mikkonen 143). For example, Freud used the terms “tracks”
and “switches”, borrowed from railway terminology, to describe his patient Dora’s
mental state. Jacques’ “hysteria” is reiterated throughout the novel as a desire to murder
women. On the other hand, Zola makes a single reference to hysteria when describing
Flore. “Flore was a virgin and a warrior, disdainful of the male, which was what
convinced people that she really must be off her head” (48). Zola challenges the gendered
descriptions of hysteria by downplaying Flore’s mental instabilities while emphasizing
Jacques’.
The female criminal’s appearance, intelligence and temperament are also
decidedly masculine. Such is the case for Flore. Readers are first introduced to Flore
when Jacques comes to visit Tante Phasie. Flore, “raised her powerful head, with its thick
mass of blonde hair that came down low over her eyes; and with every firm and supple
fiber of her being she displayed the savage energy of her will” (Zola 48). Three words
stand out in this description: powerful, firm, and savage. Her strength is decidedly
unfeminine and she is repeatedly described as a warrior-virgin akin to the Amazons and
Athena. This description is reiterated when Flore catches Jacques and Séverine kissing
and “remained standing there, like the tall figure of a warrior virgin, beneath her heavy
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helmet of blond hair” (207). Hair is a symbol of femininity and beauty; here though,
Flore’s hair is a protective shield and a weapon of defense.
Unrequited love and jealousy drive Flore to murder Jacques and Séverine: “Just
seeing them, seeing them every week going off to their love together like that, was
simply more than she could bear. Now that she was certain she would never have Jacques
for her own, she preferred that he should cease to exist” (181). In crimes of passion,
unrequited love and jealousy are common motives for killing one’s romantic interest.
Flore has taken over her mother’s job as crossing guard at the signal and this firsthand
knowledge of the train schedules, as well as with the mechanics of the tracks, inspires her
to remove a section of the track and cause Jacques’ train to derail thus killing him and
Séverine; “Here was the irrevocable moment; the cuff of the she-wolf’s paw as it breaks
the back of a passing prey. In the egotism of her vengeance she still saw only the two
mutilated bodies, and gave no thought to the crowd” (284). Flore, like Jacques, is
compared to an animal or beast stalking its prey. Cabuche arrives on the scene with his
cart and horses and asks to cross the tracks. Flore decides instead to use his cart to block
the tracks.
Jacques doesn’t see the cart until it is too late. La Lison hits the cart and derails.
Flore realizes the horror of her crime and finally sees the crowd of people she has killed
or injured. She also realizes that Jacques saw her stall the cart on the tracks and that he
understands why she did it. “And she had just realized from the way he had recoiled that
he now felt for he that terrified repulsion one feels for monsters. …anyway when you fail
with other people, you mustn’t fail with yourself: she would kill herself by and by” (301).
Lombroso felt that female murderers were monsters because they were exceptions both as
55
women and criminals. “What horrifies about the female murderer is not her excess, for
excess is always-already constructed as on the side of the feminine, but her paradoxical
cerebrality, her agency, her creativity. For these are the attributes of the Romantic hero in
the nineteenth-century, the ideal man” (Downing 70). Murderesses are aberrant because
they resist categorization based on gender.
Flore commits suicide by walking into an approaching train. Flore’s bodice is
unbuttoned and she looks into the light of the approaching train.
The eye was turning into a brazier, into the mouth of a furnace
spewing fire, and the panting breath of the monster was coming
closer…And on she strode, straight towards this furnace, so that
engine should not miss her, like a bewitched moth drawn to a
flame. And in the horrendous impact of collision, at the moment of
embrace, she drew herself up once more as though the fighter in
her had wanted, in one last effort of resistance, to seize the
colossus in her arms and hurl it to the ground. (Zola 304)
Flore is depicted once again as a larger-than-life warrior. Machines, death, and
destruction are closely linked in many of Zola’s works. Noiray explains, “La machine,
tout à la fois, provoque, contient, et désigne la mort. L’étrangeté ici se mue en hostilité et
l’inhumanité radicale de cette créature mécanique, insensible, indifférente, est
immédiatement interprétée comme le signe le plus évident de sa méchanceté” (Noiray
131). Trains in La Bête humaine function as both crime scenes and weapons. In his
novels, Zola uses familiar vocabulary to compare machines to animals, people, and
nature. This narrative technique renders machines more familiar and emphasizes the
machines’ presence in everyday life. Although the steam engine “breathes” like a human
would, the machine’s inhumanity is emphasized.
Criminologists and sexologists used case studies to define the parameters of
normal male and female moral and sexual behavior. In general, males are rational and
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some sexual aggression is normal. Females are less intelligent and rational than males,
and they are expected to be passive in sexual matters. However, Lisa Downing suggests
that in Zola’s novels, the desire to murder is linked to a longing for destruction. “In La
Bête humaine, however, the binary difference in question is no longer simply the division
and assumed complementarity between (aggressive) male and (passive) female, but that
between destructive agency and passive victimhood” (Downing 87). Sexologists and
criminologists put forth the belief that male aggression and female passivity are naturally
occurring traits. In reality, these traits are culturally produced and projected onto the
sexes. In La Bête humaine, desire operates along the axis of lust and death/destruction. In
Zola’s novels, murderers do not desire a particular sex or gender but a “doer” or “doneto.” For instance, “Flore’s desire for Jacques, who like herself is an agent of death,
suggests a model of desire analogous to homosexuality, but—crucially, one from which
the privileged term sex/gender is removed” (88). Flore desires another murderer. Jacques
adheres to a hetero-destructive desire. He attempts to kill Roubaud in an alleyway, but
cannot. A potential reason for this is because Roubaud is another destroyer. Jacques
desires a passive victim, whom he finds in Séverine.
Romantics, and later Decadents, admired the murder’s nobility, audacity, and
exceptionality, at the same time that criminologists and sexologists categorized them as
abnormal. Foucault describes this literary mode in Discipline and Punish, “crime is
glorified, because it is one of the fine arts, because it can be the work only of exceptional
natures, because it reveals the monstrousness of the strong and powerful, because villainy
is yet another mode of privilege” (9). Destructive acts were proximal to creative acts and
the murderer-artist was born. The nineteenth-century murderess was not granted the
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status of artist, but depictions of the male and female murderer as artist emerge in the
following discussion of aesthetics of guilt in Zola’s novels. Furthermore, the murdererartist, and creativity through destruction are themes in several of the novels I discuss. For
instance, the Baron de Gortz creates a hologram of La Stilla after she dies on stage in
Verne’s Le Château des Carpathes and Rachilde’s protagonist Raoule uses her dead
lover’s body to make an automaton. Beautiful destructive acts in nature are akin to
mechanically destructive acts in Verne’s La Maison à vapeur and Villiers’ L’Eve future.
In the popular press and in courtrooms, murderers are vilified and treated with
disdain and disgust. In testimonies murderers, defendants and prosecutors rely on
common cultural knowledge about the act of murder and murderers themselves to
construct the murderer’s identity. Two recent studies by Anna Norris and Lisa Downing
ask, “How do murderers decipher themselves, how do murderers become subjects or
agents instead of merely objects of study?”22 To answer this, we can turn to the art and
writings produced by murderers. “Discourse can bring the acts it describes into being; it
can be productive of them. And by extension, the act of writing as a murderer contributes
to bringing the subject of murder constitutively into being” (Downing 9). Art and writing
produced by murderers often contains a priori confessions or otherwise hints at the
crime-to-be-committed.
La Bête humaine and Thérèse Raquin do not contain written confessions or other
narratives written by the murderers, these novels nevertheless allow readers to see how
Downing’s and Norris’ theses apply in a fictional setting. The visual and performative
aesthetics of guilt, Zola’s “use of aesthetics as a vehicle for representing crime and
22
Anna Norris, L’écriture du défi: Textes carcéraux féminins du XIXe et du XXe siècles. Entre
l’aiguille et la plume. Lisa Downing, The Subject of Murder: Gender, Exceptionality and the Modern
Killer.
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punishment” are the means through which Roubaud Jacques, Séverine, Laurent, and
Thérèse establish themselves as subjects and create their identities as murderers (Bloom
26). On the visual register, autobiographical references, i.e. the crimes and sins
committed, appear in art as if by chance and suggest a link between art and the both the
conscious and sub-conscious mind. Zola’s impressionist railway sketches punctuate
Roubaud and Séverine’s argument that leads to Grandmorin’s murder. Fantastic portraits
in Thérèse Raquin and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray depict the murderer’s
obsession with his crimes. Ruth Harris has found that the trials of criminelles
passionnelles borrowed the language of nineteenth-century melodramas and the
courtroom resembled the theater. This theatrical expression of guilt is replicated in the
novel by the elaborate staging of the scène de crime. Ultimately, Zola’s aesthetics of guilt
illustrates the Romantic and later Decadent notion of the murderer as artist and creator.
Visual aesthetics of guilt are first presented in La Bête humaine in a series of
railway “sketches” inspired by Monet’s Gare St. Lazare series. These narrative
“sketches” as well as Monet’s Gare St. Lazare series present the machine or technical
object as a worthy artistic subject. Zola’s interest in Impressionism and Claude Monet in
particular accounts for the poetic and personal qualities of his railway. Monet’s series of
Gare Saint Lazare painted in the 1870s and Zola’s great train novel offer evidence of the
railway’s popularity in everyday life as well as the railway’s becoming an artistic subject.
The presence of trains in the novel and in painting reflects the profound social
transformations that took place in France in the decades following the Exposition
Universelle in 1855.23 Marion S. Robinson maintains that La Bête humaine features the
23
In her article, “The Démon de la vitesse: Technology, Subjectivity, and the Sketch”, Wendelin
Guetner explains that nineteenth century travelogue descriptions of rail travel found their counterpart in
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most impressionist elements of any of Zola’s novels and comparisons between the novel
and Monet’s series are worth noting.
The first impressionist technique Zola uses is the place or space accorded to the
train and railway system. In Monet’s Gare Saint Lazare series the train occupies the
foreground and most of the remaining space on the canvas. Similarly, as La Bête humaine
evolved, the steam engine and the railway took on greater structural roles and thus
dominate the page. “Zola moves the rain from the sphere of the familiar and mundane to
something very close to that of the supernatural and heroic. He does this partly through
the use of a technique borrowed from the Impressionists and specifically from Monet: a
series of sketches of the railway” (Robinson 62). The Gare Saint Lazare series features
twelve paintings which reflect the experiments Monet carried out with light, time of day,
and season. Each painting is different and captures an isolated moment in time as well as
the particular mood evoked by the combination of these elements. Zola “worked like a
plein air painter, wandering around the Halles, the quays, the gares with pencil and
notebook in hand” (63). The result is a series of lengthy descriptions or sketches of trains
and the railway yard. Moreover, each “sketch” in Zola’s series illustrates the attitudes and
emotions of a particular character at a given moment in the narrative.
The novel’s first chapter contains Zola’s railway “sketches” and these sketches
frame Roubaud’s and Séverine’s fight and plot to murder Grandmorin.
This opening chapter of La Bête humaine mobilizes the themes of
modernity (speed, progress, technology, commodity, fetishism) in the
riveting portrait of Roubaud’s alienation and nervous exasperation. It is as
if the pressures of modernity invading the consciousness of the characters,
of disrupting narrative continuity via a series of shifts between outward,
definitions of preliminary sketches, “esquisses” or “ébauches.” Impressionist works such as those by Monet
are not sketches per se, but they do present rather spontaneous and blurry images. The changes in narrative
and aesthetic approach indicate the profound effect trains had on the modern identity.
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collectives purportedly ‘objective’ themes of travel and technology and
troubled intimate narratives of anxiety, jealousy incest, and homicidal
desire. (Harrow 105)
The saccadic, elliptic narrative splicing evident in the fight scene between
Roubaud and Séverine disrupts readers’ expectations and removes narrative
transparency.24 The railway sketches ground the characters; in the tumult they
return to the window to gaze at the trains and the trains provide a center and sense
of equilibrium for the characters. Nevertheless, the trains’ stillness and routine
belies the inner mental turmoil of Roubaud in particular.
The third railway sketch precedes the fight between Roubaud and Séverine.
“Beneath them, still the little shunting-engines moved ceaselessly back and forth; and the
muffled sound of their wheels and the occasional, discreet whistle-blast were scarcely
audible as they went about their business like tidy housekeepers” (Zola 17). The noises of
the train station are barely heard by Roubaud and Séverine; there is near silence and
order. Like the drivers and engineers, Roubaud and Séverine engage in their own
housekeeping although far less quietly. Passengers for the 4:25 to Dieppe were hurrying
along and the “sky had grown dark over the Batignolles district: an ashen twilight
engulfed the house-fronts” (17). Opacity and energy replace clarity and tranquility. The
menacing sky foreshadows the brewing fight.
In Thérèse Raquin, Laurent’s portrait of Camille foreshadows his murder in much
the same way that Zola’s railway sketches presage Grandmorin’s murder. Afterwards,
Laurent’s “Camille series” forces Thérèse and Laurent to face the incarnations of sin and
guilt. These works of art produced before and after the crime establish Laurent’s guilt is
24
Susan Harrow finds evidence of narrative nesting and Zola’s use of plot-within-plot in Le Ventre
de Paris, La Bête humaine, and Le Docteur Pascal, see page 133. Kai Mikkonen also discusses Zola’s
double temporal structure in La Bête humaine, see The Plot Machine page 111.
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both poietic and mimetic. Discourse or painting describes acts into being (poietic) and
later functions as a confession by depicting what has already occurred (mimesis)
(Downing 9). Laurent’s portrait of Camille will inspire his crime. “Le portrait était
ignoble, d’un gris sale, avec de larges plaques violacées. Laurent ne pouvait employer les
couleurs les plus éclatantes sans les rendre ternes et boueuse; il avait, malgré lui, exagéré
les teintes blafards de son modèle et le visage de Camille ressemblait à la face verdâtre
d’un noyé” (Zola 48). Laurent has unwittingly painted his crime—the muddy colors
evoke the Seine’s muddy waters where Camille will be drowned (noyé).
After the murder, Thérèse and Laurent are haunted by the drowned-man’s portrait
hanging in their bedroom. “L’effroi lui faisait voir le tableau tel qu’il était ignoble, mal
bâti, boueux, montant sur un fond noir une face grimaçante de cadavre…il y avait surtout
les deux yeux blancs flottant dans les orbites molles et jaunâtres, qui lui rappelaient
exactement les yeux pourris du noyés de la Morgue” (Zola 154). The portrait is described
in almost identical terms as when it was first painted. Emphasis is placed on the shades of
gray, yellow, and green used in the painting as well as on the drowned-man’s eyes.
Camille’s painted eyes seem to signal or point out Laurent and Thérèse as the guilty ones.
Comparisons have been made between the Camille portrait and the titular portrait
in Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray. Michelle Bloom explains, “The titular
portrait of Wilde’s novel represents Dorian’s guilt even more explicitly than the Camille
portrait and series reflect Laurent’s because Dorian Gray is the person represented in the
portrait, not its artist” (Bloom 30). The Camille portrait explicitly depicts the victim and
implicitly the murderer/artist. Nevertheless, Dorian is the artist because each time he
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commits a crime, the portrait ages, as though it had been retouched.25 After killing Sybil
Vane, Dorian observes his portrait and notices a subtle difference in the expression on his
face. “He rubbed his eyes, and came close to the picture, and examined it again. There
were no signs of any change when he looking into the actual painting, and yet there was
no doubt that the whole expression had altered” (102). The expression on the painted
Dorian’s face becomes more cruel, haggard, and old with each sin Dorian commits.
Eventually, Dorian shows the much-changed portrait to Basil.26 Horrified by what
he sees, Basil begs Dorian to repent and reform himself. Listening to Basil’s entreaties,
Dorian, as though spurred on by the canvas, begins to hate him. “The mad passions of a
hunted animal stirred within him and he loathed the man who was seated at the table”
(179). Dorian stabs Basil in the back of the head with a knife. Basil’s death signals a
change in Dorian’s status as an artist and he begins to sketch a “Basil series” not unlike
Laurent’s “Camille series.”
The “Basil series” and “Camille series” are haunted paintings. These paintings
serve as visual reminders of the crimes committed and weigh on the artists’ conscience.
After murdering Basil, Dorian, “began sketching upon a piece of paper, drawing first
flowers, and bits of architecture, and then human faces. Suddenly, he remarked that every
face he drew seemed to have a fantastic likeness to Basil Hallward” (185). Dorian now
becomes an artist and he draws his guilt into being. In Thérèse Raquin a similar
phenomenon occurs after Camille’s murder. Laurent quits his job and finds a studio
where he begins to paint a series of figures. A friend comes to see the paintings and
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Dorian’s major crimes are a series of murders: Sybil Vane, Basil Hallward, and indirectly Alan
Campbell and James Vane. Dorian fell in love with the actress Sybil Vane, proposed to her, and then called
off the engagement following a bad theatrical performance. Heartbroken, Sybil committed suicide.
Although he didn’t actually kill her, Dorian knows that he is responsible for Sybil’s death.
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remarks that they all look alike, “tes études ont un air de famille” (Zola 184). Each of the
paintings resembles Camille. “La première était une face de vieillard, avec une longue
barbe blanche; sous cette barbe blanche, l’artiste devinait le menton maigre de Camille.
La seconde représentait une jeune fille blonde, et cette jeune fille le regardait avec les
yeux bleus de sa victime” (185). Laurent believes he has spent too much time looking at
cadavers, particularly Camille’s, at the morgue and that the image of Camille’s dead body
is now engrained in his mind. Laurent decides to give up painting for fear that each time
he picks up the brush he will paint Camille. The male murderer as artist is developed in
Zola’s articulation of visual aesthetics of guilt. Theatrical and performative aesthetics of
guilt suggest that murderesses are artists as well.
Performative aesthetics of guilt are developed alongside visual aesthetics as
Zola’s murderers and murderesses engage in elaborate stagings of the scène du crime. As
discussed before, trails often resembled the theater, and criminals were akin to actors
playing a prescribed part. In my analysis of Zola’s performative aesthetics of guilt, I
create a rapprochement between an actor and an automaton. Minsoo Kang explains that
in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, an automaton denoted an object that
was self-moving, but less than a century later, an automaton referred to someone who
blindly followed orders and was incapable of independent thought (Kang 148). In the
multiple stagings of the crimes in Zola’s novels, the characters oscillate between
independence, indicated by improvising, and puppetry, blindly repeating lines fed to them
by other characters.
Dramatic elements in Thérèse Raquin are not limited to the actual scene of the
crime. Thérèse had been acting for years, hiding her true thoughts and feelings from
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Madame Raquin and Camille. She continues to play this part when she and Laurent
become lovers in order to hide the truth from Madame Raquin and Camille. “Thérèse,
plus nerveuse, plus frémissante que lui, était obligée de jouer un role. Elle le jouait à
perfection, grâce à l’hypocrisie savante que lui avait donnée son éducation. Pendant près
de quinze ans, elle avait menti, étouffant ses fièvres, mettant une volonté implacable à
paraitre morne et endormie” (Zola 60). Thérèse is a consummate actress, playing the role
of devoted wife to perfection.
When Camille’s murder is performed, Laurent improvises his role, but Thérèse
functions as a puppet. Laurent seizes the opportunity to drown Camille during an
afternoon of boating. Thérèse “ignorait les projets de Laurent” (81) only becoming aware
of his plans when he whispers in her ear as she climbs into the canoe, “Prends garde…je
vais le jeter à l’eau…Obéis moi…Je réponds de tout” (83). Although she participates in
the murder, Thérèse’s role during the crime is more akin to spectator than to actor. As she
listens to Camille’s cries, “Elle ne pouvait fermer les yeux; une effrayante contraction les
tenait grands ouverts, fixés sur le spectacle horrible de la lutte” (85). She remains frozen
in place, looking on at the struggle until she faints. By staring at rather than participating
directly in the drowning, Thérèse herself becomes a spectator and reinforces the theatrical
nature of the crime. In his role as director, Laurent rows the canoe up the Seine towards a
couple of islands. Aside from another group of rowers, they are alone on the river, far
enough from the shore to be seen or heard by anyone else. As Camille leans over the edge
of the canoe gazing into the water, Laurent grabs him and shoves him over the side.
In the midst of their struggle, Camille bites Laurent’s neck wounding him, but
Laurent succeeds in throwing him in the water and drowning him. “Puis, il saisit entre ses
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bras Thérèse évanouie, fit chavirer le canot d’un coup de pied, et se laissa tomber dans la
Seine avec sa maitresse. Il la soutint sur l’eau, appelant au secours d’une voix
lamentable” (86). His cries attract the attention of the other canoers who Michelle Bloom
said function as both spectators and eye witnesses. To complete his performance, Laurent
“se jeta à l’eau, il chercha Camille dans les endroits où il ne pouvait être, il revint en
pleurant, en se tordant les bras, en s’arrachant les cheveux” (86). Laurent’s performance
is enough to convince the canoers that Camille’s drowning really was an accident. After
Camille is murdered, Laurent returns to Paris alone to break the news to Madame Raquin
leaving Thérèse with the Michauds to recover from her nervous breakdown. “Elle eut une
crise de nerfs, elle éclate en sanglots déchirants, il fallut la mettre au lit. La nature aidant
à la sinistre comédie qui venait de se jouer…Il préférait lui laisser le temps de réfléchir et
d’apprendre son rôle” (87). The drowning is compared to a performance, sinistre
comédie.
Similar vocabulary and images are used to stage Grandmorin’s murder and the
attempted murder of Roubaud, ultimately Séverine’s murder. Grandmorin’s murder is
staged twice; the first performance is his actual murder. Later, Séverine performs the
crime again when she confesses to Jacques that she and Roubaud killed Grandmorin.
Additionally, these two murders are in fact literary retellings of actual murders. The idea
to murder someone on a train was not unique or even original to Zola. By the 1860s in
both France and England trains and crime were readily associated with one another. Rail
passengers were warned about the dangers of rail travel. An 1863 issue of The Globe
warned readers, “‘The loudest screams are swallowed up by the roar of the rapidly
revolving wheels, and murder, or violence worse than murder, may go on to the
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accompaniment of the train flying along at sixty miles an hour…we are not romancing’”
(Shivelbusch 79). The Globe warns readers and riders that such crimes are not fictional or
taken from les romans. Indeed, Roubaud has Séverine write Grandmorin a letter “telling
him to leave on the express…and not to show himself until we got to Rouen” (Zola 221).
According to plan, Grandmorin rides alone in his private railcar until Roubaud and
Séverine join him.
As they ride along together, Séverine wonders when Roubaud will stab
Grandmorin and realizes he is waiting until they enter the tunnel near La Croix-deMaufras. Séverine anticipates the crime, but like Thérèse she does not know exactly
when it will occur. As she relives the scene, she says, “I had stayed in my corner,
completely rigid, and pressing myself against the back of the seat to get as far away as
possible.” (226). Initially, Séverine fulfills the role of spectator and watches Roubaud
struggle with Grandmorin. In contrast to Thérèse, she then participates in the drama by
flinging herself across the President’s legs so Roubaud can stab him. Jacques who
happened to be standing by the tracks, saw, “in the flaming light of a coupé window, a
man pinning another man down on the seat and planting a knife in his throat, while a dark
shape, perhaps a third person, perhaps some tumbling luggage, was bearing down with all
its weight on the flailing legs of the victim” (Zola 57). Jacques, like the oarsmen in
Thérèse Raquin fulfills a double role as eyewitness and audience member. The train’s
speed prevents him from observing any details and he questions what he saw. “Not one
single feature of the two actors in the drama remained clear in his memory” (57). Jacques
believes he was hallucinating and is only later convinced that he witnessed a murder
when Misard tells him he saw a body lying across the tracks. Jacques’ fleeting,
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hallucinatory vision is only clarified when Séverine confesses to the murder at the end of
the novel and “relives the scene”.
The morning after the crime Séverine performs her new role. She is summoned to
the train station and she “came up, walking with short even strides. There was a whole
lone stretch of platform to cover, beneath the gaze of the onlookers observing her arrival;
and she did not falter, simply pressing a handkerchief to her eyes from the enormous
grief” (82). The platform becomes a stage and the onlookers an audience. Her “costume”
of black wool in mourning for her benefactor, heightens the theatrical nature of this
scene. Afraid his wife’s emotions will betray them, Roubaud speaks for both of them.
Roubaud says, “‘I was here, my wife sat over there…Didn’t he dear, he told us he’d be
leaving the next day.’” To which Séverine replies, “‘Yes, the next day.’” (83). Or,
“Didn’t you dear, you said no?’ ‘Yes, I said no’” (83). In her dramatic performance,
Séverine’s “lines” are supplied by Roubaud. When she confesses the crime to Jacques,
Séverine has full control of the narrative. For example, she says she felt the knife go in,
“‘with a sort of thud.’ Jacques remarks, ‘Ah, a thud. Not a kind of tearing? Are you
sure?’ ‘No, no, just a sudden jolt.’ ‘And then he gave a shudder. Is that right?’ ‘Yes, three
shudders, oh! From one end of his body to the other’” (229). Séverine’s answers are more
developed, and although she confirms Jacques’ impressions, she also clarifies and
corrects them.
The attempt to murder Roubaud is different from the murders of Camille and
Grandmorin because the female accomplice, Séverine, stages the crime. The “scene was
the main bedroom at La Croix-de-Maufras” where Jacques is convalescing after the
derailment. One night Séverine slowly begins to outline her plan to murder Roubaud. She
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says, “‘He’d need to come out here on some pretext or other. I don’t know what. We can
think of that later…And you could be waiting for him, couldn’t you, hiding somewhere,
and everything would take care of itself” (320). Séverine will ultimately send Roubaud a
letter, similar to the letter she wrote to Grandmorin, in order to lure him to the scene. She
continues to script the scene, drawing ideas from literature. “Look, I’ve read
somewhere…it must have been in a novel, that the best thing would be to make it look
like a suicide” (321). Roubaud has been depressed lately and no one would think it
strange if he killed himself. An alibi is furnished when Jacques tells Misard and Cabuche
that he is leaving for Paris. Jacques takes the train back and sneaks into the house. They
decide that Séverine will wait in the darkened bedroom and Jacques will stab Roubaud in
the neck. They’ll lay the body across the tracks, so a passing train would sever the head
erasing any trace of foul play. The knife, the stab to the neck, and laying the body across
the tracks, are a re-staging of Grandmorin’s murder. All goes according to script until
Jacques kills Séverine instead. The dramatic scenes in Thérèse Raquin and La Bête
humaine are staged in similar ways. The scène du crime is an isolated location and one or
two witnesses serve as audience members. The crimes in La Bête humaine are new
performances of previously committed crimes, either actual crimes or previous crimes
committed in the novel.
La bête humaine is part of a dense canon of railroad novels, a key component of
which is a murder on or near a train. Zola’s “Rippers” and criminelles passionnelles were
inspired by actual criminals such as those studied by Cesare Lombroso and Richard von
Krafft-Ebing as part of the nineteenth-century discipline of criminology. The murderer’s
behavior and physical traits were believed to indicate his/her ontology as a murderer.
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However, Zolian criminals deviate from these anticipated patterns; Jacques, Roubaud,
Séverine, Flore, Thérèse, and Laurent behave in brutish, animalistic ways. As exceptional
individuals, Zola’s murderers illustrate the nineteenth-century idea that murder was a
creative act.
Zola uses the railway to develop visual and performative aesthetics of guilt. The
machine or technical object is elevated to the status of artistic subject in both Monet’s
railway series and Zola’s railway “sketches.” Visual aesthetics of guilt are also
established through Laurent’s portrait of Camille and “Camille series” which both
anticipate and replicate his guilt. Finally, an aesthetic of guilt is also established through
theater. As they stage their crimes, the murderer-actors either improvise their roles or
behave like puppets, following the directives of others. The motivations, psychic drives,
locations, and language used to describe these crimes of passion combine to produce a
Zolian aesthetic of murder. In such a context, the murder is no longer a taker-of-life or
destroyer, but an artist and a creator.
Zola considered La Bête humaine to be a technical masterpiece. In a letter to
Dutch critic Jacques Van Santen Kolff, he wrote,
I cannot tell you the whole subject, which is quite complicated
with many gear-wheels biting deeply into one another. It is in sum
the story of several crimes, one of which is central. I am very
pleased with the construction of the plot, which is perhaps the best
I have very worked out, that is to say the one whose various parts
engage each other with the most complexity and logical necessity.
(Blood 51)
As a technical masterpiece, La Bête humaine illustrates perfectly the influence of
machines in the late nineteenth-century and the corresponding narrative plot machine.
Zola’s railway is not a background figure; instead, the train, tracks, arrivals and
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departures push the plot in new directions. The railway is also a metaphor for modern
identity. The national railroad was purported to be a unifying and civilizing machine,
creating a geographic and ideological rapprochement between French citizens throughout
France and her colonies. I discuss this idea as well in the next chapter with regard to
British colonialism in Jules Verne’s La Maison à vapeur. The train in La Bête humaine is
revealed to be fragmented, diseased, and out of control. The speeding trains present
disparate images of the fleeting modern subject, who is defined as both an individual and
part of a group. The various crimes committed in the novel are evidence of societal decay
and the sexual and murderous beasts that reside in man.
Zola’s novel also mobilizes several nineteenth-century beliefs about women,
sexuality, reproduction, and machines. Woman was believed to be a biological machine,
albeit a diseased one. Artificial women like Lison, were designed to be counterparts to
natural woman. La Lison is the first example of a reproductive futurism I discuss. As a
bachelor machine, she replaces a wife or mistress in Jacques’ life and gives him a sense
of control over his sexual urges. La Lison’s death is indicative of a larger theme present
in each of the novels I discuss. The bachelor machine is marked by the competing desires
of Eros and Thanatos. Jacques dispels his murderous urges by displacing his sexual
desires onto La Lison. Later, Flore’s unrequited love compels her to destroy La Lison in
an attempt to kills Jacques and Séverine. Similar destructive desires are found in Verne’s
Le Château des Carpathes, Villiers’ L’Eve future, and Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus. In
each of these novels, the object of affection is killed and then transformed into an
automaton.
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In this chapter, two main ideas about the relationship between Man and machines
are evident. First, Man’s identity is increasingly linked to machines, in this case, the
steam engine. I consider the association between Man and the train in my discussion of
Verne’s La Maison à vapeur in Chapter two. In both urban France and British-colonial
India, the train is intended to be an equalizer and civilizer of man. However, Man’s
identity is disjointed, and like the train, careens out of control. Furthermore, in his
personification of the steam engine, Zola develops the idea of the man-machine, an
idealogical construct that both Verne and Villiers expand upon. In the following chapters,
Verne’s and Villiers’ narratives suggest that technology is essential for the continuity of
the human race. Secondly, Verne’s La Maison à vapeur modifies Zola’s idea of the
“beast” in man and its relationship to technology. The train was often called the “iron
horse” and Verne’s novel presents an iron elephant instead. “Behemoth” as this iron beast
is called, illustrates the changing dynamic between technology and Nature.
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CHAPTER 2: THE NATURAL, THE SUPERNATURAL, AND THE
MECHANICAL IN JULES VERNE’S NOVELS
Each of the narratives discussed in this study is an example of mechanical novels
or mechanical texts. The plot is organized around, and driven by, machines or other
technological elements present. In Chapter One, Zola’s railway narrative is punctuated by
the arrivals and departures of the trains on the Paris-Le Havre line; in Chapter Three, the
chapters of L’Eve future are presented in such a way that they are read as a dissection of
Edison’s automaton; and, Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus, discussed in Chapter Four,
culminates with the creation of an automaton. Jules Verne’s novels, La Maison à vapeur
and Le Château des Carpathes are also mechanical novels. La Maison, like La Bête
humaine, is organized around train travel, and Le Château details the inner-workings of
mechanical opera singer. Although each of the novels I analyze can be considered a
mélange of science and fiction, Verne’s works are the most readily identifiable as
science-fiction. Chapter Two outlines some of the features of the genre of science-fiction
and Verne’s enduring contribution to this genre.
Nineteenth-century French author Jules Verne’s series Les Voyages
extraordinaires, comprised of sixty-five novels and seventeen short stories published
between 1863 and 1910, bears witness to his tremendous fascination with discovery,
science, technology, and machines. Verne’s publisher Hetzel wrote, “Son but est en effet,
de résumer, toutes les connaissances géographiques, géologiques, astronomiques,
physiques amassées par la science moderne, et de refaire, sous la forme attrayante and
pittoresque qui lui est propre, l’histoire de l’univers” (Noiray 12). At times fanciful and
fantastic, giving glimpses of the way the world could be, Verne’s works are nevertheless
grounded in the scientific and technical theories of his day and as a result, present a
portrait of man’s actual interactions with science and machines. In contrast to his
contemporaries Edgar Allen Poe or Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Verne’s science is concrete,
not theoretical. “Le roman, pour obtenir le vraisemblance souhaitée, doit être garanti par
le fonctionnement réel et concret d’une science appliquée, d’une technologie” (28). Les
Voyages extraordinaires focuses on practical and actual applications of technological
developments in everyday life.
This chapter on Verne signals a profound change in the functions of technology
and the nature of the automaton between Zola’s naturalist novels and the decadent novels
written by Villiers de l’Isle-Adam and Rachilde. Minsoo Kang divides the modern
history of the automaton as a cultural object into the following periods: the years 16371748 mark the automaton’s intellectual primacy. During this time, Descartes, La Mettrie,
and others compared man to a machine. From 1748-1789, the automaton captured the
public’s interest and a series of automata that resembled man were created, included
those by Vaucanson. The end of the Enlightenment, 1789-1833, is the period of the
uncanny automaton which came alive through supernatural means. Finally, during the
Industrial Age of 1833-1914, “there was an outpouring of steam- or electricity-driven
machines taking on characteristics of living creatures” (Kang 225). These living
machines were animated according theories of thermodynamics and Darwinian evolution.
The latter two periods spanning 1789-1914 are of interest here.
Although not chronological according to Kang’s schema, I discuss Verne’s La
Maison à Vapeur, which features a living machine of the Industrial Age first. The steam
elephant featured in the novel is compared to La Lison in Zola’s La Bête humaine. These
living machines that careen out of control mobilize nineteenth-century concerns
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regarding the utility and civilizing aspects of technology. In the second half of this
chapter, I analyze Verne’s 1892 novel Le Château des Carpathes (The Castle in
Transylvania), which combines the scientific and aesthetic principles of both the uncanny
automaton and the living machines of the Industrial Age. La Stilla, the automaton, is a
living machine created using electricity. However, La Stilla is simultaneously presented
as an uncanny automaton since supernatural means are used to explain events throughout
the novel. La Stilla, like the automata created by Villiers and Rachilde, is removed from
the industrial setting and is conceived of as an artistic object.
In my analysis of these novels I consider the following questions: How does
Verne structure his mechanical novels? In these two novels, what narrative techniques
does he use to introduce science and technology and which scientific developments of his
day does he choose to include? Which figures are associated with technology in these
novels and how do they establish their authority as men of science? How do these novels
tackle the issues of the production and reproduction of reality on a small-scale, individual
level? Finally, in Le Château des Carpathes, how does the vacillation between fear and
acceptance of the automata illustrate changing cultural attitudes towards technology and
art? These two novels are examples of science fiction but are also realist novels, by which
I mean they represent reality. Each novel relies on a particular way of knowing or
understanding the surrounding world. In La Maison, the natural world and the Indian
lifestyle are confronted by the mechanical and the British colonial outlook. In Le
Château, a belief in the supernatural determines how a particular group of Transylvanians
interprets the world until they are confronted by events that only science can explain.
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La maison à vapeur: The Train as Colonial Machine
Les Voyages extraordinaires expanded the literary horizons of French readers as
they travelled with Verne’s protagonists to far off lands. This fictionalized geography
changed French readers’ knowledge of the world. Verne’s novel La Maison à vapeur or
The Steam House was published in 1880, but the plot takes place in colonial British India
in 1867. Only one event during the British colonization of India, the Indian rebellion of
1857, bears directly on the events in La Maison à vapeur. Verne provides an explanation
of this rebellion stating that by 1857 tensions between the British and the Indians
nationals had reached a critical point. In May of that year Nana Sahib launched a
rebellion against British soldiers during which Hindu soldiers mutinied and killed their
commanding officers. In July of 1857 another massacre occurred and it was at this time
that Nana Sahib killed Verne’s protagonist Colonel Munro’s wife and Munro killed Nana
Sahib’s love interest. Once order is restored a bounty is placed on Nana Sahib’s head and
our story begins ten years later. Interspersed with this revenge narrative is the story of the
steam house and the British travelers’ journey across India. The main characters, in
addition to Nana Sahib and Munro, are Maucler the narrator, Banks the engineer, Captain
Hood a former member of the British army and a big-game hunter, Sergeant McNeil who
acts as Munro’s personal attendant, and Kaligani, the Indian traitor. Although based on
actual historical events, Verne nevertheless fictionalizes the historical and physical
landscape.
The fields of colonial and post-colonial studies, as well as scientific theories
provide the basis for my critique and understanding of the novel. France and Great
Britain began colonizing Africa and Asia in earnest in the first third of the nineteenth-
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century. For the purposes of my analysis, what is most significant aspect of colonization
is the cultural mindset that developed in Europe regarding the colonies. Demerliac
explains, “Relancé en France dans les années 1880, le mouvement d’expansion colonial
marque un changement d’esprit dans la géographie qui voit le formidable essor de
l’ethnologie, laquelle relance avec vigueur les questions sur l’homme posées par la
paléontologie” (36). Verne, like many other authors, was also interested in colonization.
European authors combined scientific theories such as ethnology and paleontology with
fictional narratives to explain the relationships between the colonizers and the colonized.
The novel’s exotic setting, colonial British India, lends itself readily to colonialist
interpretation and critiques. Indeed, in the first part of my analysis I consider the novel in
light of nineteenth-century British colonialism. Since Verne himself never travelled to
India, how does he establish his authority on this part of British history? What are the
results of his fictionalized geographies? Machines, especially the railroad, were used at
this time by colonial powers to establish and maintain control in the colonies as well as to
transport and export goods to strengthen the economy. In La Maison à vapeur, the
railroad is the featured machine, but the steam elephant is not a traditional colonial and
capitalist machine. Instead, the steam elephant is designed for pleasure and isolation, not
exploration. What does the steam elephant tell us about the relationship between
machines and the colonial other?
In the second part of my analysis, I consider the juxtaposition between the natural
world and the mechanical. The nineteenth-century was witness to many changes in
scientific thought and understanding. Some of the scientific theories that influenced
Verne were Comte’s positivism, which emphasized observation and experience as the
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basis for scientific law, Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species. In Verne’s novels
one sees, “l’opposition entre théorie et pratique, une réflexion sur l’origine et l’évolution
des espèces (donc l’origine de l’homme) ou encore les relations entre les hommes et leur
habitat (qu’il faut respecter et protéger)” (Dupuy 118). In The Steam House, glimpses of
Darwin’s theories on natural selection can be seen in racial descriptions of the native
Indian population and in descriptions of the animals in the jungle. Secondly, I consider
Verne’s ecological message. In many of his works, Verne adopted an intellectual stance,
écologie humaine, that is necessary and even commonplace today, but largely unheard of
in his own time, “respecter l’environnement et procéder à un usage raisonné des
ressources naturelles afin de protéger l’homme et ses dernières” (102).27 In order to
provide a clear understanding of the tensions that exist between the natural and the
technical, I provide a close reading of six key episodes in the novel. These episodes
illustrate the transition from a harmonic state between the natural and the technical, to a
state of unrest and disequilibrium between the two.
Because Verne’s colonial novel takes place in British-controlled India in 1867,
readers might ask themselves why Verne chose a British colony rather than a French one
as the setting for this story. An explanation is provided by the fact that Nana Sahib
appears in two previously published novels by Verne: Nana Sahib is Captain Nemo in
Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1870) and he is Prince Dakkar in The
Mysterious Island (1874-75). Swati Dasgupta explains that Verne’s original story idea for
Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea involved a Polish Prince (Captain Nemo) whose
family had been brutally killed by the Russian Tsar. “But in the 1860s, France had to treat
27
Dupuy discusses Verne’s ecological message in Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, but his
interpretation can be applied to La Maison à vapeur.
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the Tsar as an ally, Verne’s publisher Hetzel pronounced the book unprintable”
(Dasgupta 93). In order to sell more books Verne was forced to change the character of
Captain Nemo. By changing Nemo’s ethnicity to Indian, and situating the novel during
the 1857 rebellion and skirmish between native Indians and the British, Verne was able to
vent his outrage and that of other Europeans regarding the Russian massacre of Poles in
1863. Verne also used historical facts surrounding the rebellion to his narrative
advantage. The ultimate fate of the real-life Nana Sahib was unknown and Verne uses
this historical fact in his novel. At the end of the novel Maucler explains, “The result of
this was, that there was no certain proof of the death of Nana Sahib, a legend sprang up
among the population of Central India. To them their unseen nabob was still living; they
regarded him as an immortal being” (Verne 396). The narrative of La Maison à vapeur
serves as a prequel and provides the backstory for Nana Sahib’s reincarnations as Nemo
and Prince Dakkar.
Although the novel is based on events in British colonial history, parallels can be
made to French colonial history. H.L. Malchow provides a racialized and colonial
interpretation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Malchow suggests that Frankenstein’s
monster mobilized early-nineteenth-century British fears about colonial uprisings and the
Negro male. For instance, for the British, “the Indian Mutiny, the Jamaican rebellions of
1831 and 1865, the countless wars fought by Victoria’s armies against Maori, Ashanti,
Zulus, or Canadian métis, all contributed to the emotional appeal of a text ‘portraying the
Other as a rebellious child’” (Malchow 127). It is uncertain whether or not Verne himself
read Shelley’s novel, but Malchow’s colonialist reading of Frankenstein is applicable to
La Maison. The Indian Mutiny had grave consequences for both the Indian rebels and the
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British colonists. However, despite a relatively nuanced version of events, the British
outlook dominates La Maison and the rebellious nature of Nana Sahib is given undue
attention.
Frankenstein is a gothic novel and Kang and other scholars, in particular Chris
Baldick whom I quote here, have highlighted the gothic fascination with ghosts,
monsters, and other fantastic beings. Baldick refers to the late eighteen and early
nineteenth centuries as a time when humanity seized responsibility “ʻfor recreating the
world, for violently reshaping the natural environment and its inherited social and
political forms’” (90). In Verne’s novel, the British travelers recreate the natural world by
producing a mechanical elephant that tears across the Indian landscape. A final point of
comparison between Shelley and Verne’s novels is the creation of a “monster”. Malchow
writes, “In some sense the story of Frankenstein itself, the construction of the monster, is
the fictional equivalent of the simultaneous ‘construction’ of both race and racial
prejudice” (127). Frankenstein’s monster and Behemoth, the mechanical elephant, were
symbols and products of colonial power.
Technology and empire often went hand in hand. France, England, and other
European powers exported manufactured goods overseas to colonies in Asia and Africa.
These manufactured goods were used as either actual or symbolic weapons to control and
conquer foreign peoples.
When combined with military forces which, well before the Industrial
Revolution, had achieved clear superiority in discipline and organization,
mass-produced weapons, railway and telegraph lines, and iron-clad
steamships made it possible for the Europeans to conquer and rule
directly—or defeat and control through indigenous surrogates—virtually
all African and Asian peoples. (Adas 143)
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Colonial expositions throughout the continent allowed Europeans to show off their
cultural and technical advances while simultaneously displaying peoples and artifacts
from the colonies as exotic objects. Exploration, colonization, and technology all
combined to produce new ways of understanding the nineteenth-century world and its
peoples. Increasingly, science and technology became hallmarks of civilization and signs
of superiority. Generally speaking, in this view, Europeans were superior to Africans and
Asians, but not all colonized peoples were alike. “By the middle of the century most
writers were lumping Africans and Melanesians together indiscriminately as savages or
primitives. The term ‘barbarian’ was reserved for peoples who, like the Chinese and
Indians, had advanced somewhat and then stagnated and declined” (Adas 195). India in
the 1850s and 1860s was believed to be in a declining state. The civilizing mission of the
British would educate and elevate the Indian population to a higher level of humankind.
Jacques Noiray argues that the Exposition of 1855 was particularly significant in
France because after 1850, the railroad became fully entrenched in French society. “Mais
ce que l’Exposition de 1855 annonce surtout, c’est l’avènement d’une période nouvelle
de l’histoire économique et technique, marquée par le triomphe définitive de la grande
industrie moderne et du machinisme” (Noiray 37). Noiray adds that it was after the 1855
Exposition that trains and other machines became common fixtures in novels, poetry, and
other art forms. In The Steam House, colonial power is symbolized explicitly by the
British army and implicitly by the railroad.
The railroad became a prominent civilizing tool in both Europe and in European
colonies, where it penetrated remote areas and brought the colonized into more frequent
contact with the colonizers. Similarly, in Europe, railroads brought peasants and
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villagers, normally far-removed from major cities such as Paris or London, into contact
with city-dwellers who were believed to be the true bearers of culture. In the colonies the
railway also provided subtle signs of difference between colonized and colonizers.
“Powered by steam engines that were the core invention of the industrial transformation,
locomotives boldly exhibited the latest advances in metallurgy and machine tooling”
(221). Running on metal tracks, locomotives reshaped the landscape, bridges highlighted
feats of engineering, and railway stations and yards were new urban features. Europeans
had mastered time and space as exhibited by the trains’ speed and regularity. Indians
were believed to be slow, lazy and late. Instead of adapting to the precision of railway
time, Adas explains that many Indians simply arrived hours before the train’s scheduled
arrival. They still weren’t punctual, just early.
La Maison à vapeur features two railway systems, the nationalized rail network
implemented by the British and the steam house. The former is a clear symbol of
colonialism and the Indians react negatively to its presence. During his escape near
Nagore, Nana Sahib comes across the tracks for the Calcutta Express, the railway running
from Bombay to Allahabad. “On a sudden, the Calcutta Express dashed into sight,
flinging masses of white vapor among the stately banyans, and startling with its shrieking
whistle the wild inhabitants of the jungle” (Verne 152). The railway disturbs the people,
animals, and flora around it. Nana Sahib addresses the train saying, “ʻSpeed on thy way
and tell the viceroy of India that Nana Sahib lives! Tell him that this railroad, the
accursed work of the invader’s hands, shall ere long be drenched in blood’” (152). The
train is unwelcome and unwanted.
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Because the steam house is a private enterprise, the Indians react differently
towards it than they do towards the national rail network. In general the Indians are
amazed and gawk at the steam house. Unlike traditional locomotives the steam house
doesn’t run on tracks; it travels on grass, dirt, and through water. The steam house thus
affords the British travelers freedom and control over their movements across India. They
are not bound to a fixed schedule. On the one hand, this freedom of movement could
signal a pervasive and pernicious side to the steam house. No regulatory body exists to
keep the steam house or its passengers in check. However, this independence is tempered
by the isolation and personal aspects of their journey. In my analysis I refer to the British
as travelers, not colonists, since that is their primary function. Their goal is to explore the
countryside and show off the steam house. Although they bring prejudices and attitudes
of superiority with them, they are not on a colonial mission. The steam house exists
alongside the colonial system and is an oblique sign of colonial oppression.
Trains generally serve one of two purposes: to transport people (travel) or to
transport goods. Transport implies efficiency and directness. In contrast, the idea of travel
or of a journey implies a particular destination but also suggests detours, stops, and
deviations. At the beginning of the novel the characters debate the merits of train travel.
Maucler asks, “ʻlet me ask whether you call it travelling to be jammed up in the
compartment of a carriage, see no farther than the glass of the windows on each side of
you, tear along day and night…stopping only at stations one exactly like another’”
(Verne 124). What Maucler describes is more akin to transport than to travel. On such a
journey, passengers are separated from the world outside the train and beyond the tracks.
Glass windows and iron tracks serve as barriers. Travel as envisaged by Maucler, Hood,
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and Banks necessitates more intimate encounters with the land and its populations.
Eventually, Maucler remarks, “ʻA snail who could leave its shell and return to it at
pleasure would not be badly off. To travel in one’s house, a rolling house, will probably
be the climax of inventions in the manner of journeying” (130). Jacques Noiray argues
that the “extraordinary” aspect of Vernian voyages is the ability to stop where one likes.
In order to fully enjoy the picturesque sites when travelling, one has to have mastery and
control over the machine in which one travels. “Ce que Verne reproche aux chemins de
fer, leur monotonie, leur régularité, est justement la conséquence de leur caractère
mécanique, tandis que les grandes machines verniennes ont su dépasser les inconvénients
d’une technique encore maladroite pour atteindre à la perfection” (Noiray 137). The
steam house or mobile home that Banks constructs is a technical and mechanic marvel
that allows the travelers to journey in comfort and privacy similar to their own home.
Banks designs a steam engine disguised as an elephant that is capable of
traversing roads, grass, and water. Behind the elephant are two bungalows replete with
every comfort imaginable—bedrooms, a living room, a dining room, a kitchen with a
private chef. Demerliac writes, “Pas de locomotion ou de voyage sans son home ou son
habitacle protecteur. Le véhicule postule immédiatement sa condition opposée, le
fauteuil, le rêve de confort et de sédentarisation bourgeois” (Dermerliac 79). Activity and
exploration are juxtaposed with passivity and enclosure. Several scholars have
emphasized the novelty of the steam house as a machine. For Noiray, it is unique because
it defies all mechanical categories since the steam house is a train that travels on roads
and through water not on iron tracks. In this respect, the steam house is a machine of the
future. According to Michel Serres, the steam house is not necessarily a machine of the
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future, but it is certainly not a nineteenth-century machine. Nineteenth-century machines
tended to be made for production. The comforts of the steam house allow the travelers to
remain inside and occasionally venture into the outside world. The machine has no
tangible output and produces nothing.
Similarly, in Le Château des Carpathes, I emphasize the communicative
functions of the phonograph and the telegraph which allow the Baron de Gortz to isolate
himself within the castle walls. Machines in these two novels are not productive in the
Marxist or capitalist sense since they produce no goods. Indeed, the steam house does not
even reproduce the domestic economy (children or farm products). For Michel Serres,
Vernian machines are unique because they break with the Marxist ideology that
dominated much of the nineteenth-century economy and mechanical development. By
labelling the steam house as a non-productive machine, I return to one of my initial
questions: Is the steam house a colonial machine? Examination of the novel leads me to
conclude that although the steam house is part of the colonial system, it is a rather
ineffective colonial machine. The steam house is a private enterprise and is not part of the
British railway in India. Consequently, the only colonial mentalities represented by the
steam house are those of the British travelers. These travelers share the colonial mindset
of their compatriots, but the manner in which they express their beliefs is not uniform or
codified. Because the steam house exists at best alongside and not within the British
colonial system, attitudes towards the steam house vary and are open to much wider
interpretations.
Five of Verne’s novels are set in India even though Verne never travelled there.
Readers may wonder how an author whose works are devoted to the exploration and
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understanding of distant lands had never visited some of the areas he described.
Furthermore, how are readers to believe or accept the narrator’s descriptions as fact? It is
neither surprising nor detrimental to readers’ understanding of La Maison à vapeur that
Verne never visited India. Many nineteenth-century colonial writers, or to borrow
Edward Said’s term, Orientalist writers, had not been to the particular colony in question.
“The main thing for the European visitor was a European representation of the Orient and
its contemporary fate” (Said 1). Images of the colonized and of the colonies were written
in such a way as to reflect the culture and viewpoint of the colonizers. The problem was
that these fictional portrayals of colonized lands failed to correspond to reality. Although
Verne created a fictionalized geography of India, he nevertheless attempted to present a
nuanced account of the Sepoy rebellion. In the original version of La Maison, Verne
included a chapter explaining both sides of the rebellion, atrocities committed by the
British and Indians, and the aftermath. Dasgupta also explains that many English
translations of The Steam House, especially those published after the Fitzroy edition in
1959, leave out the entire chapter that explains both sides of the rebellion and its
aftermath. The edition consulted for this study includes this often-missing chapter.
To fill in gaps in their personal knowledge, Verne and other authors relied on the
writings of scholars who had visited India. For example Verne references Valbazen’s Les
Anglais de l’Inde for information about colonial British India. By relying on the writings,
findings, and maps of others, Verne practiced what Michel Serres has labelled the
“secondary voyage.” “C’est un ‘géographe de cabinet’ toujours prodigieusement informé
et documenté sur les lieux de ses romans et sur l’état des découverts. Système de fiches
(plusieurs milliers), lecture quotidienne des journaux et des revues comme Le Tour du
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monde, et fréquentation assidue des bibliothèques” (Demerliac 21). As a “géographe de
cabinet” or a cabinet geographer, one might even say an armchair geographer, Verne is
one step removed from the act of exploration and discovery. Indeed, Verne practices the
type of home or armchair travel which Maucler, Hood, and Banks advocate.
Additionally, although Verne’s maps are accurate and one could trace the
travelers’ route across India, accuracy was not the point of his work. Verne often
modified existing maps or created his own maps. “À l’origine des romans, on trouve
toujours la carte sure laquelle Jules Verne trace les parcours de ses héros. Jules Verne en
manipulait de nombreuses et en inventait même au besoin quelques-unes…Ces cartes de
lieux fermés, analogues aux machines hermétiques qui jalonnent les romans, sont
révélatrices d’un désir de ʻclôture spatiale’ selon Barthes” (18). The maps and machines
in Verne’s novels are finite and closed-in upon themselves. Ironically, exploration leads
to closure, again placing emphasis on the home and one’s native environment. Finally,
Verne’s fictional geography serves another purpose. How one travels, the type of
machine one uses, is as important as is how the machine interacts with the particular
environment in which it is found. The steam house’s destination isn’t important; what is
important is its ability to traverse dirt, grass, and water, affording the travelers an easy
journey. The interactions and relationship between the steam house and the environment
will be discussed in more detail in the next section.
The steam engine serves three purposes in La Maison à vapeur. First, it is a
colonial tool and symbol of the British presence in India. Secondly, the steam engine or
steam house allows the British to travel in the comfort similar to that of their own home.
Finally, the machine puts nature on display. As the travelers sojourn across India, they
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employ the rhetoric of ecology and consider what the limits of man’s exploration of
nature should be, and how man and animals interact with a given environment. Darwin’s
theory of evolution is also cited. Banks believes his mechanical elephant is a perfected
specimen compared to the animals found in nature. Ultimately, by creating a mechanical
animal, Banks takes on the role of God and removes procreative functions from Nature.
Verne’s novels all involve geographic, spatial, or temporal exploration. Rather
late in the novel Maucler and Banks debate the necessities and limits of human
exploration. Unlike Captain Hood, Maucler is against spatial exploration. He believes
man is limited to explore the earth, but “though he is confined to its crust, he may
penetrate into all its secrets” (Verne 260). Maucler suggests that the earth is inert, passive
and therefore capable of being possessed and understood. Because man can possess
nature, he is superior to it. Banks agrees with him but advances the argument a step
further saying, “All that is within the limits of possibility may and shall be accomplished.
Then when man has nothing more to discover in the globe which he inhabits…he will
enjoy it as a master, and will derive far greater advantages from it” (260). According to
Banks, controlling nature and profiting from it are goals of exploration. Ironically,
however, the steam engine’s design prevents the travelers from mastering the Indian
landscape and gaining advantages from it.
Vernian machines are designed to put nature or the surrounding landscape on
display. Michel Serres writes, “Il y a toujours un hublot, ou un trou, à travers lequel le
spectacle a lieu et la nature devient spectacle, mais ce n’est pas seulement le spectacle au
sens du théâtre ou le spectacle au sens original du terme, c’est la ʻmise en spectacle’ de la
nature” (Demerliac 48). Nature is dramatized and put on display for man’s benefit. The
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engine driver’s howdah on top of Behemoth as well as the numerous windows in the
bungalows are the vantage points from which, and through which, the travelers observe
and put nature on display. In Le Château, Frik’s telescope is the portal that puts the
Carpathian mountains on display as never before. A key difference between the telescope
and steam house is the different role the glass lens or windows play in one’s observation
of nature. The telescope allows Frik to see the countryside as if he is nearby and
diminishes the distance between the observer and the observed. The windows of the
steam house create a barrier between the travelers and the Indian countryside. Although
Behemoth does not travel at the high speeds as La Lison does in Zola’s La Bête humaine,
both trains create a unique train vision so that passengers view a world in which outside
sounds are muted and landscapes blurred. The steam house was built to replicate the
British home, consequently providing a sense of enclosure and distance from the outside
and foreign world.
Vernian machines are adapted to the environment in which they are found and to
the type of exploration the protagonists carry out (land, sea, or air). The steam house is
able to traverse water, roads, and mountains, all features of India. Some machines, like
the steam house, even mimic nature. “Certaines machines comme le Nautilus ou
L’Albatros, apparaissent vouées à réaliser une symbiose écologique et ‘absolue’ entre
leur passagers et telle ou telle portion du cosmos, bien à se fondre aisément dans la
nature, ainsi le Géant d’Acier” (89). The steam house is in fact a steam elephant. Banks is
a skilled engineer and to a large extent he succeeds in recreating the Indian elephants
found in nature. Serres explains, “Les Européens ont mis la main sur le secret de la terre,
découvert par Fourrier, ils savent construire un animal et lui donner une source de vie: le
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monde inerte et l’animalité sont à eux sans partage” (Serres 276). Reproducing an animal
endows Banks with certain God-like qualities and suggests his mastery over the natural
world.
Verne was part of a long tradition of authors who participated in the debates
surrounding the hierarchy of man, animals, and machines. Aristotle’s Movement of
Animals compares animals to automatic puppets. Descartes for example, believed that
animals were pure mechanical constructs, and unlike man, had no soul. Because they
lacked a soul, animals and automata were inferior to man. “One could conceivably
construct an automaton that could utter words, just as one can train magpies and parrots
to do the same, but none could be taught to converse with a person in an intelligent
manner” (Kang 117). La Fontaine defends the intelligence of animals in his Fables.
Descartes also believed that animals and automata could not learn skills that were not part
of their organic makeup. Descartes’ argument is complicated by the fact that Behemoth is
presented as an animal and a machine. As the British travel across India, they compare
Behemoth to the animals found in nature and suggest that their machine is superior to
animals. He is also presented as better than a regular steam engine since he is not limited
to moving on tracks. Analysis of six key scenes from the novel illustrates the tensions
between animal and machine.
When the travelers depart they are joined by a crowd of onlookers who stare at
the elephant. “First, and apparently drawing the caravan, came a gigantic elephant. The
monstrous animal, twenty feet in height, and thirty in length, advanced deliberately,
steadily, and with a certain mystery of movement…his trunk, curved like a cornucopia,
was uplifted high in the air. His gilded tusks, projecting from behind the massive jaws,
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resembled a pair of huge scythes” (Verne 152). The British travelers name the steam
elephant Behemoth in recognition of his physical size and strength. Naming the machine
also indicates the domesticated status of the animal/machine; other animals in the novel
are not named nor do they follow the orders of men. Banks had even succeeded in
reproducing the trumpeting and roaring sounds made by real elephants and Behemoth’s
green-black skin looked lifelike as well. Sight and sound produce a realistic elephant but
touch belies this illusion. Touching this “King of Pachyderms” reveals that the elephant’s
“skin” simply covers a steam engine attached to two bungalows.
At the outset of their journey, Banks seems to have succeeded in reproducing life
and an important symbol of Indian culture. The onlookers’ awe reflects Bank’s skill as an
engineer. “On the morning of the 5th of May, the passengers along the high road from
Calcutta to Chandernagore, whether men, women, or children, English or native, were
completely astounded by a sight which met their eyes” (152). In this scene, the characters
are confronted with the machine for the first time and they cannot believe their eyes.
Their mixture of amazement and wonder parallels Frik’s astonishment the first time he
peered through the telescope in Le Château. By grouping the onlookers together
regardless of age, sex, or nationality, Verne suggests that everyone shares the same
viewpoint—namely that Behemoth is impressive and that the machine is a good thing.
Since they know nothing about Behemoth, the natives accept him as a positive
accomplishment.
Two other scenes illustrate the harmony that can exist between nature and
machines. In these two scenes Behemoth is approached by other animals in the Indian
jungle who don’t hesitate to incorporate Behemoth into their ordinary lives. Near the
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territory of Behar, Maucler describes the travelers’ progress through the jungle, “The
snorting and trumpeting of our elephant mingled with the deafening screams of the
winged tribes and the discordant chatterings and scoldings of apes and monkeys, and the
golden fruit of the bananas shone like stars though light clouds, as smoke and steam
rolled in volumes among the trees” (168). In this pastoral scene, nature and machine are
one—steam from the humid jungle is indistinguishable from the train’s smoke.
Behemoth’s bellows are part of the jungle cacophony.
Much later in the novel a large group of monkeys climbs on Behemoth’s back in
order to cross a river. Like the elephant, these particular monkeys were sacred animals.
“These were not insolent gibbons, with long hairy arms and importunate manners…but
black monkeys, the largest in India, and with white whiskers around their smooth faces,
which made them look like old lawyers” (335). Verne anthropomorphizes these monkeys
and the reference to lawyers gives them a particularly human, even British touch. This
anthropomorphizing and classification of monkeys can be interpreted in two ways. First,
Verne reproduces racial and ethnic theories by organizing the monkeys according to color
and, one might argue, by class. Some monkeys, like the British and some native Indians,
are superior to others. The monkeys are not hostile and “the whole party, males, females,
old, and young, began to gambol and spring toward us, and finally seizing each other by
the hand, they fairly bounded up on our train” (336). This particular description of the
monkeys parallels the description of the crowd of onlookers who watched Behemoth
leave Calcutta. In these two descriptions of monkeys, Verne also puts forth evolutionist
theories suggesting that man is descended from apes. Man is not so far removed from his
simian cousins. The similarities between man and ape are underscored by the
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“conversations” Hood has with the monkeys. Hood “soon made friends with the free and
easy creatures…He talked to them, shook hands, made his best bows, offered them lumps
of sugar” (336). Hood’s servant Fox laments that the monkeys never thanked them. By
the time the party crosses the river, the monkeys are no longer considered animals but
passengers, albeit somewhat rude ones.
From these scenes of harmony we turn to two scenes of unease between animals
and Behemoth. This time, the animals in question are Indian elephants. Along the route
the travelers meet Prince Gourou Singh and assert that not one of his royal elephants
could make Behemoth move. The prince is struck by their arrogance and believes his
elephants are superior. They wager 4,000 rupees, but pride and bragging rights are also at
stake. Three of the prince’s elephants are attached to Behemoth’s underbelly with chains.
Once the brake is applied, these three elephants are incapable of moving the steam house.
When the brake is released and Behemoth moves forward he drags the prince’s elephants
behind him. “As Behemoth still moved forward, the enormous animals fell over on their
sides, and were thus dragged some twenty feet” (237-238). As the prince’s elephants are
led away one of them bows before Behemoth in seeming recognition of his superiority.
The prince and his elephants are ashamed and readers are led to believe that machines are
superior to the natural world.
Later in their journey the tables are turned and Behemoth faces 100 elephants and
his victory comes at a higher cost. One night a troop of 100 elephants surrounds the
caravan trumpeting and roaring. The travelers turn on the lights in Behemoths eyes in
order to observe the sleeping elephants, “the brilliant light turned upon their dark bodies
seemed to animate them with supernatural life. By a natural optical illusion the monsters
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assumed gigantic proportions, rivaling our Behemoth” (347). Clear differences exist
between the troop of real elephants and Behemoth, and the real elephants seem to sense
that Behemoth is not like them. They respect him because he his larger, but they are ill at
ease. The next day the troop of elephants follows Behemoth towards the lake. As the road
on which they are travelling narrows, the caravan is forced to stop or risk being crushed
by the other elephants. As a last resort, Hood and the others resort to shooting at the
elephants to make them leave. These scenes of unease illustrate the tensions that exist
between the natural and mechanical world. In the nineteenth-century hierarchy of man,
animals, and machines, man is superior to animals and machines. Machines can be
fashioned in the image of man or animal but, however, lifelike, machines fail to capture
the essence of the animal.
As the episodes with the prince’s elephants and the troop of elephants show, the
natural and mechanical worlds exist in an uncomfortable balance. Tensions between them
suggest that Banks’ invention is not as lifelike as readers were initially led to believe. As
an engineer, Banks’ machine is perfect; as a representation of Indian culture, Behemoth is
missing something, perhaps something akin to the aura that Walter Benjamin argues is
diminished when works of art, or in this case an animal, are mechanically reproduced.28
Behemoth isn’t a work of art, but in his mechanical reproduction of a natural object,
Banks subsumes the history and tradition associated with the Indian elephant and replaces
it with a British historical viewpoint. This lack of understanding and respect for the
Indian elephant leads to Behemoth’s destruction. “Dès qu’explose le Géant d’Acier, il
semble ignorer que c’est l’Inde qui gagne, savoir le vieux système indo-européen du feu.
28
See Benjamin’s 1936 article, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”
Benjamin argues that when works of art are mechanically reproduced, their presence in time and space,
their history and authenticity are compromised. These elements form the object’s aura.
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La science anglaise a l’Inde dans le dos, la science en général, a sous les pieds, une
culture” (Serres 276). Banks ignores the milieu in which his machine is produced.
As Verne’s heros explore and travel the world, the author reflects on man’s place
in the world, and his relationship to the places in which he lives. These relationships are
the basis of Haeckel’s écologie humaine, founded in 1866. However, as Dupuy notes,
Verne had begun to apply these same principles before Haeckel outlined his theory. The
British travelers’ place in India is questionable, and one could argue that they do not
belong there at all, a fact illustrated by the caravan’s encounter with the Belgian naturalist
Mathias Van Guitt.
Like Captain Hood, Van Guitt stalks big-game. However, Van Guitt merely wants
to capture leopards, panthers, and the like to take them back to European zoos and similar
such exhibits. Captain Hood wants to add to his tiger trophy count and insists on killing
any big cat that crosses his path. During his temporary stay in India Van Guitt is more or
less respectful of Indian customs and culture. Although the animals he captures will be
put on display, his underlying goal seems to be to educate Europeans about Indian
wildlife. Van Guitt lives in a hut in a kraal with natives who help him capture animals.
The contrast between Van Guitt’s lodgings and the steam house couldn’t be greater.
Maucler says, “Our dwellings drew forth many compliments from him, but I must
confess that Behemoth did not excite his admiration in the least. A naturalist, such as he
was, could not but be indifferent to this masterpiece of mechanics” (Verne 295). In
Maucler’s eyes, the mechanical world is superior to the natural world. Van Guitt isn’t
impressed with Behemoth and prefers to have Indian buffalo pull the cages filled with
animals. Van Guitt prefers natural (animal) energy to the steam produced by a machine
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disguised as an animal. Furthermore, he scoffs at the idea that Behemoth protects the
travelers because animals don’t have a taste for iron flesh and wouldn’t attack them
anyway.
However, the travelers are attacked in the kraal one night when Kaligani, the
traitor, doesn’t lock the gates and wild leopards and tigers enter the kraal in order to
attack the buffalo. The men try to save the buffalo and are in turn attacked by the wild
animals. In the fracas, Maucler and Hood must seek refuge inside one of the empty cages.
“The world is turned upside down’ cried Hood, who was almost mad with vexation.
‘Those brutes to be out and we shut up’” (312). This episode recalls Cyrano de
Bergerac’s 1657 novel Voyage dans la lune. The Lunarians assume Dyrcona is an exotic
animal and capture him in a cage. Dyrcona learns their language to prove that he is an
intelligent, sentient creature, but the Lunarians think of him only as an ostrich. Cyrano’s
novel is a critique of Descartes’ argument that animals lack souls and cannot learn new
skills. Likewise, Verne questions man’s civilized nature. Maucler and Hood are reduced
to the status of animals and Verne suggests that man needs to be tamed.
Finally, I wish to briefly discuss the end of the novel and the destruction of
Behemoth. At the end of the novel, the travelers capture Nana Sahib and tie him to
Behemoth’s trunk. The caravan is then attacked by a group of rebels who are intent on
freeing their hero (Nana Sahib). Banks increases the pressure in the boilers and steers
Behemoth towards a cliff face which forces the travelers to dismount and flee on foot.
The pressure is so great that when Behemoth hits the cliff face he explodes. He was
destroyed, “one of his huge feet was found at a great distance. A part of his trunk blown
against the cliff, stuck fast, and now projected like a gigantic arm. To a great distance the
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ground was strewn with fragments of iron, screws, bolts, pins” and other remains (395).
Behemoth’s carcass is described in both human and mechanical terms, which suggests
that humans, not animals, are machine-like. Banks says he could build another steam
house, bigger, more powerful, and more perfect than Behemoth. But Hood laments “‘No
doubt, but it won’t be him’” (395). Throughout the novel the travelers have considered
Behemoth to be more of a pet than a machine. Behemoth was unique among
animals/machines and, as a result, a replacement isn’t possible. Although Behemoth was
destroyed in the novel, Verne’s mechanical elephant exists today. At the Machines de
l’Île theme park in Nantes, France, visitors can ride a four-story mechanical elephant.
This steam-house or steam elephant is based on descriptions and drawings of Behemoth
and features balconies, a restaurant, and squirts water from its trunk (Thomas 22).
La Maison à vapeur illustrates the limits of the steam engine as a colonial and
mechanical enterprise. The steam engine in La Maison à vapeur serves three purposes:
first, it is an oblique symbol of colonization, bringing Indians into more immediate
contact with the British colonizers. Second, although the steam house is designed for
travel and exploration, the steam engine’s architecture and resemblance to a British home
maintains a distance between the British and the surrounding countryside. The British are
able to engage in the practice of armchair travelling. Finally, the steam engine, like many
Vernian machines, is designed to display nature. However, the steam house’s windows
serve as a barrier between the mechanical and natural worlds. Verne makes a case for the
co-existence of the mechanical and natural worlds, but in order for both to survive and
flourish, a deeper understanding of their relationship is needed.
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Le Château des Carpathes
Le Château des Carpathes marks a transition in my discussion of the artificial
woman and the bachelor machine. Zola’s steam engine La Lison is technically a bachelor
machine, but the steam engine is merely anthropomorphized and remains by and large an
inanimate object. Beginning with Verne’s Le Château and continuing with Villiers’
L’Eve future and Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus, the female automata I discuss increasingly
resemble the human form. La Stilla, the automaton in Le Château, is a mélange of the
uncanny automaton animated by supernatural forces at the beginning of the nineteenthcentury and the living machines animated by steam or electricity of the latter half of the
nineteenth-century. Verne’s Le Château is a late example of fantastic novels of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth-century which teemed with ghosts, vampires, reanimated
corpses, monsters, and automata. These figures blurred the boundaries between the
animate and inanimate, the artificial and the natural, and the living and the dead.
Furthermore, such novels demonstrate the relationship between the supernatural and the
scientific, two seemingly opposed fields. In Le Château des Carpathes, Transylvanian
villagers from the town of Werst are frightened when they hear noises and see lights
emerging from an abandoned castle. Their fear increases when a presumed dead opera
singer is discovered alive in the castle. The villagers attribute these events to the
supernatural, but scientific discoveries in late-eighteenth and early nineteenth-century
France suggested to many that raising the dead was actually possible.
My discussion of Le Château begins with a brief discussion of the genre of
science fiction as it was understood when Verne published his novels. Narrative tensions
between outsiders, Dr. Patak, Baron de Gortz, and Orfanik, as harbingers of science, and
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Frik, Nic Deck, and Franz de Telek who believe in natural and supernatural phenomenon,
illustrate the aesthetic tensions between the genres of realism, the fantastic or marvelous,
and science fiction. Secondly, I discuss the machines themselves and how they relate to
the novel’s debate about the supernatural and the rational. Verne introduces four
machines in this novel: the telescope, the telegraph, the phonograph, and the hologram.
These machines force the protagonists and readers to question the world around them,
asking “What do I see? What do I hear? How can I know that what I see and hear are
real?” The final part of my analysis is a discussion of the automaton La Stilla. La Stilla’s
name implies stillness, a contradiction to her designation as an automaton or self-mover.
This contradiction raises questions about how life-like artificial bodies were expected to
be.
Verne’s novels were by no means the earliest examples of the genre of science
fiction, but Verne’s role in the genre’s development cannot be ignored. Timothy Unwin,
George Slusser, and Roger Bozzetto provide key insights into Verne’s role in the history
of science fiction as a genre and as a form of literary expression. As a separate literary
genre, science fiction is relatively new, dating to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
However, some elements of science fiction existed before this in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. “Between the end of the 17th and 19th centuries, what would later be
called SF [science fiction] begins to take shape as an autonomous fictional domain as
concerns its materials, themes, and narrative formats derived from varying sorts of
merveilleux, utopias, imaginary voyages, and texts of scientific popularization” (Bozzetto
3). The ideal of “progress” sparked much of these early science fiction developments. At
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this historical juncture, science existed in fiction; it was only later in the nineteenthcentury that science assumed its full narrative function.
Debates about the place of science in literature became increasingly frequent in
the nineteenth-century although many literary critics believed that science did not belong
in literature. Slusser writes, “Science in nineteenth-century France, increasingly appears
to be ʻkilling’ literature. This killing, moreover, is associated with a developmental, even
ʻparental’ model of thinking in Auguste Comte” who identifies science as the age of
mature human thought (Slusser 65). Literature was viewed by many as narratives about
individuals or types of people set in everyday France—the novels of Balzac, Flaubert,
and Zola. Zola himself dismissed Verne as irrelevant to mainstream literature (Unwin
13). Verne’s goal was not to kill existing forms of literature but to change them. In 1902
Verne lamented in the Gazette, that novels were no longer necessary and that journalists
did a better more accurate job of capturing the events of everyday life. For Verne the
future, or lack thereof, for the novel as literary form, “rests on the unquestioning belief
that the novelist’s primary role is to instruct and to provide knowledge, rather than, say,
to offer a dramatic story or insights into the behavior of characters” (12). Verne’s novels
were written for an adolescent audience and the parental model of thinking borrowed
from Comte is applicable to teaching young French citizens about France and the world
beyond. It is with Verne that science ceases to simply be in fiction and becomes fiction.
My analysis of Le Château des Carpathes is centered on the role of science in a
system of beliefs often dominated by the supernatural. Le Château begins with
commentary from the narrator about the historical setting of the novel and the role of the
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supernatural in Transylvanian culture and lore. In the novel’s first lines the narrator
admonishes the reader,
If our tale is not very likely today, it can be so tomorrow, thanks to the
scientific resources that are the lot of the future, so no one should take it
into his head to rank it among legends. Moreover, legends have stopped
being created in the decline of this practical and positive nineteenthcentury…even in Transylvania where the setting lends itself so readily to
all psychagogic evocations. (Verne 5)
Verne’s narrator explicitly grounds the story in the nineteenth-century and his readers
would have easily understood references to the “practical and positive.” The “positive”
nineteenth-century refers to the then-emerging theory of positivism. Auguste Comte
published his Discours sur l’esprit positif in 1842. In his treatise, Comte traces the
evolution of thought and thought processes. Over the centuries, imagination and
speculation were replaced by observation29. Comte’s positivism is summed up by his
adage, “Voir pour prévoir” or “see in order to predict” (Comte 13). Seemingly random
phenomena are, and will be, explained by rational laws and principles. These laws and
principles are relative to a given time and situation. Thus, our understanding of human
nature and the world around us will continue to evolve beyond the nineteenth-century.
Readers are also supposed to identify with the novel’s protagonists as they pass from a
state of incomprehension to one of greater understanding; as a result, the narrator’s
comments anticipate and offset the reader’s skepticism. Although difficult to believe or
accept as truth, the events in the story are posited by the narrator as possible because they
reflect actual scientific advances of the day. Timothy Unwin cautions against labeling
Verne’s works “futuristic” even though they depict an evolving world. “Most of Verne’s
29
According to Comte, human thought has passed through three theoretical stages: the theological,
the metaphysical, and the positivist. The first is a provisional and preparatory stage; the metaphysical is a
slight variation on the theological but remains transitional in nature. Positivism defines human reason
(Comte 6).
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novels move from events in a recent past to a narrative present that coincides with the
actual moment of the book’s writing. Where there is speculation about the future
possibilities of technology…it almost always takes the form of an implicitly ironic
commentary on the author’s own century” (Unwin 6). The narrator’s gentle warning
reminds the reader that Verne was interested in the practical applications or uses of
science and technology. Finally, Verne reminds his readers that the supernatural,
superstitions, legends, and the fear associated with these, are not wholly absent from
science.
The characters in the novel must constantly navigate tensions between science
and the supernatural. These thematic tensions mirror debates about form in scientific
writing and in the genres of fiction and science fiction. Didier Coste writes, “L’auteur
doit déléguer la plupart de ses pouvoirs—et de ceux du lecteur—aux personnages; c’està-dire que le roman est domaine de la voix et du regard pluriels, tandis que le discours de
la science est monolithique—du moins sous Jules Verne” (Coste 166). Characters in the
novel see and interpret events in their own ways, but at the end, there is one logical,
rational, objective explanation for events.
To help readers navigate the paired genres of science and fiction writing as well
as tensions between science and the supernatural, Verne created pairs of characters. Male
characters are coupled or doubled in this novel. The three pairings are: Nic Deck and
Doctor Patak, Franz de Telek and Rotzko, and the Baron de Gortz and Orfanik. If we
create a schema that divides these characters, Nic Dec, Franz de Telek, and Gortz
represent fiction, romance, and the supernatural. Dr. Patak, Rotzko and Orfanik represent
the scientific, the rational, and the material. These characters are paired, but they are also
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doubles of each other. At times, characters in each pair switch sides and, in the pas-dedeux between science and fiction, often adopt the opposite mindset. For example, Dr
Patak is the rational part of Nic Deck; but, Dr. Patak, like Nic also comes to believe in the
supernatural. “Le jeu de la fiction et de la science conditionne profondément la lecture
même si de grands panneaux de signalisation sont plantés dans le texte nous invite à
renier le hasard de l’une pour l’amour de l’autre” (Coste 167). The reader’s loyalties to
science or fiction vacillate as s/he identifies with different characters in the novel.
The pas-de-deux between science and fiction is reflected by particular narrative
forms in the novel. Scholar Philippe Hamon’s schema for identifying descriptive
paragraphs in nineteenth-century novels provides a useful framework for understanding
the relationships between paired characters as well as the relationship between science
and fiction. Hamon presents the following schema: “personnage non/sous-informé + un
personnage informé/bavard + verbe de parole + objet à décrire” (Hamon 470).30 In our
story, Frik the shepherd’s encounter with the peddler is a good illustration of this schema.
During their encounter, the peddler is the first character, less-informed, and as Hamon
says, “intrus nouveau, étranger, curieux” (470). The object described in this scene is the
village of Werst about which Frik is extremely knowledgeable. However, in the course of
their encounter, the two switch roles and the peddler is the more informed character when
it comes to matters of technology. This flip-flopping of roles underscores Didier Coste’s
above remark that Verne’s narrative technique forces readers to engage in a pas-de-deux
between science and fiction.
30
Non/under-informed character+informed and chatty character+speaking verb+described object
(Hamon 470).
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These pairs of characters and their interactions with technology function as a
metaphor for how to read Verne’s mechanical novel. “In terms of the narrative and its
reading, these machines hint at two types of readings: on the one hand at the danger of
being a ‘mechanical’ reader, i.e., tied to the conventions of the form and on the other
hand, at the promise of being an ‘initiated’ reader, i.e., able to seek new meanings and to
explain the unknown elements of the tale and its world” (Mikkonen 80). Technology is
introduced by the marginal characters: the Peddler, Dr. Patak, Baron de Gortz, and
Orfanik. Fear is replaced with acceptance once it is understood how these technical
objects function. However, unlike Zola and Villiers, Verne doesn’t encourage mechanical
reading. In Zola’s railway novel, the train’s arrivals and departures punctuate and
organize the novel, directing the reader. Similarly, Villiers’ L’Eve future is organized
around the parts and functions of Thomas Edison’s automaton.
Through my analysis of the marginal characters, the peddler, Dr. Patak, Baron de
Gortz, and Orfanik, I explore the relationship between the Other and technology.
Paradoxically, the Other is not to be trusted, and yet, his authority in regards to
technology remains largely unquestioned. In this novel, technology only comes from
outside the village. According to the narrator, “For Frik never to have looked through a
spyglass before, the village of Werst had to have been ranked among the most backward
in the district of Klausenburg. And it was, as we shall soon see” (Verne 17). The village
of Werst is isolated, ignored by both travelers and the government. The narrator explains,
“Civilization is like air or water. Wherever a passage—even if it is just a fissure—is
opened to it, it penetrates and modifies the conditions of a country. However, it should be
acknowledged that no fissure had yet been produced throughout this southern portion of
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the Carpathians” (36). The Jewish peddler is that fissure; he is a herald of civilization.
Following in his footsteps, other characters will enlarge the fissure and exploit the naiveté
of the villagers.
The peddler is first and foremost an outsider, and his otherness is compounded by
the fact that he is Jewish.31 Despite some anti-Semitic attitudes projected onto the
peddler, he is quickly trusted by Frik. Peddlers we are told, speak all languages, “was this
one Italian, Saxon, or Wallachian? No one could have said; but he was Jewish, a Polish
Jew, tall thin, with a hooked nose, a pointy beard, domed forehead, eyes very lively”
(12). The peddler is racialized and this racial portrait immediately arouses anti-Semitic
theories and attitudes of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.32
At the heart of these theories was the idea that the blond, pure Aryan race was
threatened by Jews and various other social vampires. In our cultural imagination, the
novel’s setting in Transylvania immediately calls to mind the legend of Dracula. The
peddler and Jonas, the Jewish inn-keeper and money lender are not presented as social
vampires. But, the narrator cautions that other Jewish proprietors are. “His fellow
worshippers in this faith, his colleagues in the profession—for they are all innkeepers,
selling drinks and foodstuffs—practice the profession of lender with a fierceness that is
worrisome for the future of the Romanian peasant. Little by little the land will pass from
31
Some of the anti-Semitism in Verne’s novels may have arisen from a family scandal. Verne
received a letter from a Polish Jew named Olscievitz in 1873 claiming to be his long-lost brother.
Eventually a Polish journalist appeared and revealed information about an affair Verne had apparently had
with a Jewish lady. Verne went along with the journalist’s story as a joke, but a story was published touting
his Polish Jewish origins. It wasn’t until 1928 that the rumor was finally sorted out and laid to rest (Costello
130-131). Anti-Semitic elements appeared in Verne’s novels well before the scandal about the Verne
family’s origins. Martin Paz (1852) and the unflattering portrait of the Jewish peddler in Hector Servadac
(1877) are two examples. The Rabbi of Paris Ladoc Kahn was upset with the portrait of the peddler in
Hector Servadac and even met with Hetzel and Verne to discuss making changes, but French editions of
the novel remained as Verne had originally written them.
32
See Dikstra’s Evil Sisters and Idols of Perversity for more about the Anti-Semitism and eugenics
in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe.
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the native race to the foreign one” (47). The narrator goes so far as to suggest that one
day the Jewish Promised Land will be in Transylvania as the result of Jewish greed. Here,
Verne suggests that one day outsiders will control or dominate the natives. This is an
example of the racially and ethnically motivated fears about social vampires threatening
the Aryan race in Europe. A related fear is generated by the machines in this novel. If
outsiders possess and understand machines, they may be capable of using machines to
control others. The British used the railway to shape and control the native Indians in La
Maison à vapeur. Although they believed they had a right to rule India, as colonizers the
British were outsiders.
Once the peddler leaves Werst, readers are introduced to Dr. Patak. Before
describing the Doctor, the narrator asks, “What’s that, there was a doctor in Werst, and
the villages still believed in the supernatural?” (41). Dr. Patak is about 45 years old and
sold drugs and gave consultations to the villagers. However, his title is merely a formality
since he had no formal training to speak of. “He was simply a former quarantine
attendant, whose role consisted of watching over the travelers held back at the border for
various reasons” (42). Dr. Patak’s work at the borders of the village would have put him
in contact with a variety of people, much like the Jewish peddler. Although Dr. Patak is a
villager his former job gives him a marginal status; he thus stands out from the rest of the
villagers. Finally, “Dr. Patak was a free thinker, as is only right for whoever takes care of
looking after his fellows. Further, he didn’t acknowledge any of the superstitions that
were rampant in the region” (42). Men of science or medicine, even those without formal
training, were expected to be open-minded, to think for themselves, and to explore the
unknown. In contrast to Nic who attributes the mysterious smoke rising from the castle to
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the devil, Dr. Patak firmly believes that there is a rational explanation for the
“supernatural” events that occurred.
The doctor’s rationality doesn’t prevent him from being afraid; many times on
their journey he begs Nic to turn back. Once outside the castle the two stop to rest for the
night. At midnight, Dr. Patak saw spectral forms, a strange light, and he heard moaning
and the tolling of the castle bell. Added to these strange events is the fact that Nic and the
doctor begin to resemble corpses. “In fact, the forest and he had both taken on a
cadaverous look, with pale faces, dead eyes, empty sockets, graying green cheeks and
their hair looked like the moss” that apparently grows on hanged man’s faces (83). Dr.
Patak is paralyzed with fear and is reduced to an autonomic state. He was an “inert
machine” (85). Dr. Patak is temporarily immobilized by his fear, but his friend’s urgings
as well as an inner desire to understand the noises drive him forward. Their fear is almost
enough to keep them out of the castle. However, Verne’s lesson, that we must understand
the world around us, prevails and they soldier on. The following day Nic scales the castle
wall and reaches the top of the drawbridge. Once there, he cries out in pain as though
struck by lightning. Since Nic is injured the two return to Werst and tell their tale to the
villagers.
The final two outsiders are the Baron de Gortz and Orfanik. Interestingly, these
two characters are two halves of a whole rather than exact opposites. The Baron de Gortz
is the sole survivor of the de Gortz family. Living alone in the Carpathian Castle,
“without parents, one can even say without friends, what would Baron Rudolf do to pass
the time in this monotonous solitude that death had created around him?” (25). His only
passion was for music and he eventually left the region to spend his fortune on the great
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opera houses of Europe. It was during his travels that he met Orfanik, “the eccentric that
the Baron made his only companion…the peculiar character…that misunderstood
scholar, the inventor always in the pursuit of some chimera” (191). Like the peddler and
Dr. Patak, Orfanik is identified by his profession, that of scholar and inventor. The
peddler’s status evokes marginality and outsiderness, Dr. Patak’s the rationality of
medicine, and Orfanik’s the new possibilities presented by science. Orfanik is a disciple
of Thomas Edison, although his scientific endeavors were unappreciated by all except de
Gortz. During their time in Italy, de Gortz and Orfanik had become inseparable, “but
while the music-lover was becoming intoxicated by the incomparable artist’s singing,
Orfanik was busy only with perfecting the discoveries in electricity that had been made
by scientists during these last few years, perfecting their applications” (196).
The relationship between these two characters shows the artistic side of science
and suggests in many ways that technology is a new artistic form of expression. Indeed,
literature was no longer solely an artistic and aesthetically pleasing domain. In his preface
to The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hateras, Verne wrote, “ʻArt for art’s sake is
no longer sufficient for our era…the time has come for Science to take its place in the
realm of Literature’” (Unwin 18). Technology was an appropriate literary subject. By
fusing science and art, Verne underscores scientific beauty, artistry and technique.
Furthermore, science is no longer only associated with utility and production, but also
with enjoyment. Orfanik uses a hologram to reproduce La Stilla’s operatic performances.
His technique is a distant cousin of the wax Venuses and automata modelled on statues
that are featured in the novels of Villiers and Rachilde.
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Finally, these character pairings are underscored by the various sounds used to
mimic new technologies in the novel. Kai Mikkonen and Michel Serres highlight the
phonetic nature of these pairings. Certain sounds, particularly “or” are repeated
throughout the novel. For example, Orfanik and the opera Orlanda that La Stilla sings;
Baron and the French word “borgne” or one-eyed; and the Hungarian word “Chort” or
devil. The telegraph, telephone and telepathy are hinted at by the repetition of the name
“Telek”. This name emphasizes the means of communication used to traverse great
distances. Finally, the sound “tz” is repeated in the names Gortz, Rotzko. Werst, Fritz,
and Koltz. “To start, continuing the world of play and imaginary sounds suggested by
Serres, one could evoke a meaning for the sound ‘tz’ as in imitation of the sound of a
spark of electricity or electric shock” (Mikkonen 95). The “tz” sound is a visual and
auditory rapprochement of people, electricity, and electric machines. These common
sounds are suggestive of a nascent shared language between people and machines. These
male pairs are mediated by the female pair of Miriota and La Stilla, which is itself a
double-pair since Miriota is coupled with both the real La Stilla and the mechanical one.
The male pairings are active; these characters constantly bounce off one another and
create energy and sparks. “The phonetic ‘noise’ of, or the electrostatic charging between,
the male characters’ names creates a contrast with the singing, albeit paradoxically
tranquil (‘still’) center of Le Château, la Stilla” (95). These phonetic pairings are
reminiscent of the couplings and triangles of desire in La Bête humaine. In both novels,
pairings mimic the featured machine or machines and suggest that man is becoming
increasingly mechanical in nature.
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Mechanical Illusions
The protagonists’ attitudes towards science, technology, and the supernatural are
best illustrated by their reactions to the machines featured in the novel. Verne introduces
four machines in this novel: the telescope, the telegraph, the phonograph, and the
hologram or proto-film. These four machines are paired: telescope and telegraph,
hologram and phonograph. The telescope and hologram call into question the process of
sight. With the aid of the telescope, people are able to see minute details, or see things
beyond the normal range of human vision. How do machines reproduce visual reality?
Similarly, the telegraph and phonograph concern sound and verbal communication,
particularly the relationship between sound, image, and distance. As sounds are
transmitted mechanically across distances, the characters work to identify the referents
for these sounds. These machines alter typical patterns of informational exchange.
I will first analyze the role of the telescope in the novel. Briefly, the telescope is
the simplest of the four machines, it is the only one that doesn’t use electricity, and it
provides the impetus for the novel’s action. The telescope is closely associated with Frik
and the peddler. In their brief encounter, these two characters ask the essential questions
what do I see and how can I believe what I see? Frik is accosted by a peddler, “He was
one of those merchants that travel from market to market in the region. They can be
found in towns, in hamlets, even in the most humble of villages” (Verne 12). This peddler
sold thermometers, barometers, small clocks, and eyeglasses. As Schuerewegen points
out, Verne’s peddler recalls the tales of E.T.A. Hoffman, particularly the character
Copelius in The Sandman who also sells barometers. The peddler unsuccessfully tries to
sell his man-made instruments to Frik. Frik says he has no use for a clock because the sun
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indicates the time of day. Thermometers are of little use since sweat or chills allow Frik
to determine how warm or cold it is. Finally, Frik predicts the approaching weather by
observing the clouds, thus a barometer is of no use to him. Since he works as a shepherd,
Frik has developed a profound understanding of and connection with the natural world;
scientific or technical principles have no place in his world-view.
However, there is one instrument that Frik cannot resist. In order to successfully
tend his flock, Frik needs good eyesight and a strong voice. In order to observe the castle
from afar, he “turned around; then with his curled fingers, he fashioned a telescope for
himself—just as he would have shaped it into a megaphone to be heard from afar—and
he looked very attentively” (8). Frik’s eyesight is good, good enough for him to count the
remaining branches on the beech tree in the castle’s courtyard.
Nevertheless, Frik gives in and tries the peddler’s telescope. Before, he had been
able to see the castle of Werst that sits outside the village. But unbeknownst to him,
Frik’s vision and understanding of the village were about to be dramatically altered. Frik
asks, “What is that, that mist escaping form the castle keeps? It is a mist? No! It looks
like smoke…it’s not possible! (19). The Gortz family castle is believed to be abandoned.
According to legend, when the remaining three branches fall from the beech tree in the
castle’s courtyard, the castle itself will collapse. It is for this reason that smoke coming
from the castle is so alarming. Frik cannot believe his eyes or rather the eye of the
telescope and suggests that the telescope lens is foggy. After wiping the lens Frik looks
again and is convinced that he sees smoke. The peddlers’ claims are substantiated; Frik’s
vision is enhanced and he is able to see further with greater clarity. Telescopic vision
profoundly changes Frik’s ways of knowing his village. “Frik begins to actively survey
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the countryside that he knows so well, or thought he knew, but which is suddenly not the
same. Everything is more precise and present. But everything has become different as
well—unusual, unheimlich” (Schuerewegen 26).
Émile Zola and Jules Verne comment on how machines change our perception of
the world and interactions with others. Zola’s train novel La Bête humaine develops the
theory of train vision. Train or tunnel vision is the result of travelling on a train and
observing the outside world through the train window or conversely, by watching a
passing train. In either case, train vision results in blurry, disjointed images. Railroad
passengers or observers were lost in the anonymity of railway travel; people and
landscapes were reduced to blurry patches of light and color. Telescopic vision
emphasizes the proximity and relationships between people and objects. Looking through
a telescope affords observation of minute, intimate details. Characters in Zola’s and
Verne’s novels must negotiate the disparate images generated by mechanical vision and
natural sight.
Nineteenth-century users of technology had to determine which images best
captured reality. For example, Frik could only see the smoke with the aid of the telescope
and was no longer certain that what he sees and knows is real or correct. “But the precise
problem of the text we are reading is that the shepherd turns to an artificial instrument in
order to perceive a natural sign and that we thus have a conflict between two visual
registers that are not readily compatible” (27). The telescope is an object not normally
found in the natural world and Frik questions the utility and accuracy of the device to
reproduce the natural world. The visual prosthesis or telescope creates a moment of
disequilibrium. This disequilibrium quickly becomes equilibrium as more and more
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villagers peer through the telescope and confirm Frik’s vision. As the story unfolds,
readers learn that Frik and his fellow villagers cannot live without the telescope. The
once foreign object is assimilated into daily life. Indeed, Frik’s master, Master Koltz,
always has the telescope in his pocket—“he was never without it now” (Verne 63). That
Master Koltz, an inhabitant of a town so backwards that until the peddler’s arrival no one
had seen a telescope, is now reliant on technology shouldn’t surprise readers then or now.
One of the lessons and critiques Verne presents in this novel is that
anthropogenesis and technogenesis go hand in hand; our humanness is defined by our
reliance on technology. “Without technological assistance, man would die; with it, with
prosthetic devices, he can survive, but he is also condemned to live the life of a
handicapped person” (Schuerewegen 31). The arrival of technology in the village of
Werst is much like the passing of the trains at Le Croix de Maufras in La bête humaine.
Unlike Tante Phasie, Frik is eager to use technology and make it part of his daily life.
Although an active observer of the train, Phasie is never able to appropriate technology
for her own uses and thus remains largely immune to its effects, either positive or
negative. Frik, on the other hand, is eager to incorporate technology in his and the other
villagers’ daily lives. The extent to which Frik, Master Koltz and other character
understand how the telescope works is debatable. The villagers quickly come to
appreciate the value and purpose of the telescope, but they remain in a state of wonder;
they don’t seek to understand how the telescope works. If we do not understand how
machines work, we risk being slaves of the machine, relying only on the machine to
inform us about the world around us. Machines should not be used only as a crutch.
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Verne asks his readers what good, if any, comes from our reliance on and manipulation
of technological objects.
The three other machines, the telegraph, the phonograph, and the hologram, are
typical examples of Vernian inventions and they show Verne’s fascination with
electricity. “Everything by electricity” could have been Verne’s motto according to
Jacques Noiray. Electricity was a symbol of modernity for Verne and each of the three
machines, telegraph, phonograph, and hologram make use of this modern element.
Electricity was not entirely new during Verne’s lifetime. Towards the end of the novel
the narrator explains, “At that time—we will emphasize the fact that this story occurred
in one of the last years of the nineteenth-century—the use of electricity, which is rightly
considered ‘the soul of the universe’, has just been finally perfected. The illustrious
Edison and his disciples had just completed their work” (Verne 195). Orfanik uses
advances in electricity to make the versions of the telegraph, phonograph, and hologram
featured in the novel.
The telegraph is first introduced in the novel at Jonas’ inn. The villagers met in
Jonas’s inn and decide to send Nic Deck and Dr. Patak to investigate the castle. To
celebrate their journey and to bolster the duo’s spirits, the villagers stay at the inn to drink
and converse. Their conviviality is quickly destroyed when, “Suddenly, a voice made
itself heard…and these are the words that were slowly uttered: ‘Nicolas Deck, do not go
to the castle tomorrow! Do not go there…or misfortune will be befall you!’” (Verne 59).
The villagers are immediately filled with terror and try to locate the source of the voice to
no avail. “Whence came this voice that no one recognized and that seemed to come from
an invisible mouth? It could only be the voice of a ghost, a supernatural voice, a voice
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from the other world” (59). At this point in the narrative, the villagers have yet to pass
from disbelief to comprehension. A final comment on the scene at the inn is that both the
Jewish peddler and Jewish innkeeper introduce foreign elements to the villagers. “Le Juif
errant fournit la lunette qui pose la question; le Juif sédentaire fournit le lieu de la
divagation spéculative” (Coste 169). The peddler provides the telescope through which
Frik sees smoke. Didier Coste suggests that Jonas, as proprietor of the inn and provider of
alcohol, is responsible for the villagers’ “immobile” travels. These two characters allow
the villagers and readers to ask the questions, “Qui parle? Ou qui fume? Qui sonne la
cloche? Qui fait de la lumière? Etc., en bref, la question qui émet des signes?” (169).
During their investigation of the castle Nic is shocked by something as he climbs
the castle wall and as he falls to the ground he recalls the voice’s ominous warning. The
villagers become more frightened when Nic and the Doctor return to tell their tale. They
believe Nic was punished for his disobedience, but their fear spreads and villagers talk of
leaving Werst. “Now that it served as a refuge to supernatural, harmful, being, it was
beyond what the public temperament could bear. There was nothing left but to go away to
some other region of the land, unless the Hungarian government decided to destroy that
unapproachable lair” (Verne 108). Why the government would be spared supernatural
attacks is unclear.
The characters in this novel have deeply engrained beliefs in the supernatural.
They first attribute the mysterious happenings to the supernatural, but Verne provides
another explanation for these events that is grounded in the ever-expanding and pervasive
world of science. In this case, the voices were caused by the telegraph. “PostRevolutionary France had been the first nation state that was relayed through the
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telegraph. All across French-occupied Europe, Napoleon installed networks of optical
Chappe telegraphs that transported visual signals through their big levers over great
distances” (Niebisch 94). French engineer Claude Chappe’s telegraph system was
basically an enlarged semaphore system on land. That the telegraph was first used by
Napoleon’s army is not surprising. “‘Empire’ as derived from Latin, ‘imperare, to give an
order’, signifies as Bernard Siegert points out, nothing other than a communicative
framework in which orders can effectively reach their receivers” (95). Furthermore, “the
nineteenth-century sped up communication even more due to the translation of messages
into transmittable codes and their transmission through telegraphic networks. Out of these
technological developments arose a modern concept of information that conceived of a
message not as a hermeneutical item, but as a mere signal” (Niebisch 93). The manner in
which telegraphic messages are relayed and understood leads to questions about the
nature of the information. Is the message received from the telegraph the same as the
original message?
Orfanik’s telegraph is different from Chappe’s or even from Edison’s. Orfanik’s
telegraph only allows for messages to be sent; communication goes one way. The
primary purpose of the telegraph is communication and this is important because most
Vernian machines are not designed for communication. Orfanik’s telegraphic messages
keep all but the most intrepid villagers away from the castle allowing the Baron to enjoy
the other two machines, the phonograph and the hologram, in solitude.
The hologram and phonograph are used to create an automaton and bring the
opera singer La Stilla back to life. As he creates La Stilla, Verne mobilizes the rhetoric
and narrative techniques of late eighteenth century and early nineteenth-century fantastic
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literature with an emphasis on the supernatural, and that of the mid- to late nineteenthcentury which emphasized electricity as an animating force.33 Automata featured in
fantastic narratives were considered uncanny, “that is a thing that causes psychological
insecurity through its transcategorical nature”, by blurring the boundaries of animate and
inanimate (196).34 Le Château des Carpathes has much in common with the stories of
German romantic writer E.T.A. Hoffman who was also a master of the fantastic. In
particular, Verne’s narrative recalls Hoffmann’s tale The Sandman. 35 Although
anomalous events in the novel are first attributed to the supernatural, La Stilla is in fact a
living machine of the Industrial Age. At the end of the novel, the narrator explains how
the artificial La Stilla was created using electricity, mirrors, and the phonograph. As a
living machine, La Stilla is removed from the realm of industry and utility and functions
as an artistic object.
Franz de Telek first met La Stilla when she sang on stage at the Italian Opera. “La
Stilla, who was then twenty-five, was a woman of incomparable beauty, with her long
gold-tinged hair, her deep black eyes where flames sparkled, the purity of her features,
her warm complexion, her waist that the chisel of a Praxiteles could not have made more
perfect” (Verne 129). The mention of gold, flame, and warmth all hint at the energy or
33
Kang explains that automata were either objects of satire or uncanny objects in late eighteenth
and early nineteenth century narratives. Critics often mistakenly attribute fears of industrialization onto
portrayals of automata from this time period. Industrialization didn’t occur until much later on the
continent. Instead, Kang argues, these automata stories arose in response to political upheavals in Europe
and the development of Romantic natural philosophy. Le Château des Carpathes borrows the belief that
matter is animated by supernatural spirits from German Romantic philosophy. See Kang “The Uncanny
Automaton, 1789-1833, pages 185-222.
34
Todorov identifies three types of non-realist literature: fantastic, marvelous, and strange. In
“marvelous” narratives, it is clear from the outset that supernatural forces such as ghosts or vampires are
responsible for unusual occurrences. Horror stories are an example. In the category of the strange, however,
an ordinary solution is provided for anomalous occurrences. Kang cites The Hound of the Baskervilles as an
example. Fantastic narratives maintain the uncertainty between natural and supernatural for as long as
possible (Kang 195).
35
See Kang pages 206-217.
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electricity that animates the singer. This liveliness is countered by the reference to
sculpture and the rigidity implied therein. Franz watches her sing for six years, but the
Baron de Gortz also attends her performances and is equally enthralled by her. Over the
years, the Baron’s inexplicable hold on La Stilla takes its toll and she decides to retire
and marry Franz. Jealousies, from the Baron and from other audience members and art
lovers arise. La Stilla is meant to be shared and enjoyed by all.
The love triangle is a common element in Verne’s novels and this thematic
element was likely inspired by Verne’s own experiences with unrequited love.36 “La
figure féminine se constituait en somme d’un triangle plus ou moins obsessionnel, dont
les deux autres sommets étaient l'un celui de l’amoureux dépossédé, l’autre de celui du
rival triomphant” (Picot 75). La Stilla becomes an object possessed and owned by others.
Franz’s desire for her will be tempered and contained by the socially acceptable bounds
of marriage. This love triangle recalls the triangles of desire and the various ménages à
trois in La Bête humaine. Largely relegated to the background is the marriage of Miriota
and Nic which serves as a narrative bookend. Frik first spies the lovers through the
telescope and they marry at the end of the novel. La Stilla dies before she can marry
Franz. Death is the other means of controlling women’s sexuality in many novels, plays,
and poems of the era.
During her final performance, La Stilla looks at the Baron in his loge, “the face of
the Baron of Gortz terrified her…An inexplicable terror paralyzed her…she brought her
hand quickly to her mouth, which was red with blood…she tottered…she fell” and was
dead (Verne 137). The last words she sang were, “Innamorata, mio cuore tremante,
36
Verne wanted to marry Herminie Arnault-Grossetière but she married another man while Verne
was away at school (Picot 75).
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voglio morire” (137).37 La Stilla dies and Franz and the Baron blame each other and seek
revenge. Mikkonen argues that La Stilla achieves mimetic desire when she dies onstage
immediately after singing her aria. This mimetic desire blurs the boundaries between the
real and the literal, and the imaginary and the metaphoric.
Orfanik uses the phonograph and hologram to reanimate La Stilla and make her
sing once again in the castle. Franz enters the castle and in one of the chambers he sees
the Baron of Gortz sitting in an armchair facing a platform. Suddenly, La Stilla appears:
“La Stilla was standing on the platform, bathed in light, her hair flowing, her arms
stretched out, wonderfully beautiful in her white costume of Angelica in Orlando”
(Verne 209). Any doubts that Franz has that this woman is in fact La Stilla are dispelled
when she begins to sing. “Yes! La Stilla was singing! She was singing for him…only for
him. It was like a breath exhaling from her lips, which seemed motionless” (209). Here
again, motion or energy are juxtaposed with stillness and inactivity. This is an example of
the autonomic nature of the operatic voice; only a machine could sing without breathing.
What Franz saw in the castle was an illusion. At the end of her song, La Stilla
doesn’t fall as she did onstage but she does stop singing. “She let out a cry…and it was
the same cry that Franz had heard that night…And yet La Stilla was still there, standing,
motionless” (Verne 210-211). Once again, the visual and auditory produce differing
effects. Her voice is the same, but her actions are not. Franz believes that La Stilla is still
alive and his remark causes the Baron to challenge him to take her away. In the ensuing
struggle Franz’s knife, intended for the Baron, stabs La Stilla’s heart. “It was too
late…Suddenly, the noise of a mirror breaking was heard, and, with the thousand shards
of glass scattered throughout the room, La Stilla disappeared” (211). At this point in time,
37
“Enamored, my heart trembling, I wish to die” (Mikkonen 97).
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La Stilla had already been dead five years. What Franz saw was a carefully crafted
reproduction.
The Baron used a life-size portrait of La Stilla in her costume and Orfanik’s
genius to produce the illusion. “Now by means of mirrors curved according to a certain
angle calculated by Orfanik, when a powerful light illumined this portrait placed before a
mirror, La Stilla appeared, in reflection, as ‘real’ as when she was full of life” (221).
Additionally, years before, Orfanik collected sound recordings of her singing. Using the
latest phonographic technology he was able to reproduce her vocal performances without
sacrificing the quality or tone. The machine’s quality ensured that Franz couldn’t detect
the difference. Using the mirror and phonograph, Orfanik managed to produce a protofilm. La Stilla’s body was captured in the mirror’s frame just as films stars are confined
to the film itself and the screen. La Stilla is an interesting example of an automaton. Her
name, La Stilla, suggests immobility, an ironic name for an object that is meant to be
self-moving. La Stilla the automaton illustrates how electricity can be used to control
bodies, particularly female bodies. Previously, I discussed the paired and oppositely
charged male characters of the novel, who buzz with energy. The two female characters,
La Stilla and Miriota, are largely motionless.
The flesh and blood La Stilla and the mechanical La Stilla are an interesting
example of Walter Benjamin’s argument about reproducing art in the mechanical age.
Benjamin discusses reproduction of art such as paintings through the means of
photography and then discusses film. Le Château is different because a person, La Stilla,
is the work of art that is replicated. Humans have always been able to reproduce works of
art manually but mechanical reproduction is different. “Even the most perfect work of art
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is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place
where it happens to be” (Benjamin 667). The work of art’s presence determines how
people interpret the object throughout history. The mechanical La Stilla is removed from
the original site of her art, the Italian opera house. Furthermore, Benjamin explains that
an original work of art maintained its authority vis-à-vis a manual reproduction since the
manual reproduction was often labelled a forgery.
Mechanical reproductions are different though since they tend to create greater
distances between the original and reproduction. For example, photography, like the
telescope, can reveal details invisible to the naked eye through enlargement and the
photographer can manipulate angles to control what the viewer sees. Orfanik arranged the
mirrors and the La Stilla’s portrait in such a way that the composite image was life-like.
Franz believed the copy was the actual La Stilla until she failed to die again. By placing
La Stilla in a new environment Orfanik compromised her aura. “The authenticity of a
thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its
substantive duration to its testimony to the history which is has experienced” (668). La
Stilla’s aura is destroyed mainly because she herself was destroyed and died. Intended as
a copy of the singer, the mechanical La Stilla is in fact an original creation. As an original
creation, the mechanical object is imbued with its own aura and history that are distinct
from those of the flesh-and-blood La Stilla.
Several scholars, notably Jean-Pierre Picot, Cormac Newark, and Michel Poizat,
have studied the role of music, particularly opera, in Verne’s novels. Here I consider De
Gortz’s and Orfanik’s successful reproduction of La Stilla’s voice in terms of its musical
quality, in terms of loss and necrophilic desire, but most importantly how does the
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mechanical La Stilla answer Frik and Jonas’ questions “what do I see? and What do I
hear?”
In many of these studies the voice, especially the female voice, is fetishized.
Poizat discussed the blue note in music by which he means “instants when singing,
particularly the singing of a woman, deliberately presents itself as singing, as pure music
free of all ties to speech; singing which literally destroys speech” (Poizat 199). He argues
that although producers invest a great deal of money into designing elaborate sets and
light displays, at certain moments, when the blue note is struck, the only element operagoers are aware of is the diva’s voice.
The collapse of the visual order in these instants, or its transfiguration
under the alluring influence of voice and music, is not a secondary or
accessory phenomenon of the genre. Quite the contrary…the radical
autonomisation of the voice, the transformation into a detached object that
lays claim to the listener’s entire receptivity, has made possible the very
establishment of the apparatus that is opera. (197)
How does Poizat’s argument relate to our main question of establishing theories of
knowledge? First, visual and auditory stimuli generally combine to produce a cohesive
perceptual picture. However, as already illustrated by the scene in Jonas’ inn, auditory
and visual stimuli do not always produce a uniform picture. In the case of opera, Poizat’s
remarks suggest that voice, rather than physical presence or visual stimuli, has a greater
role or influence in narration, evocation of mood, and finally in establishing a character’s
identity. The dénouement of Le Château bears witness to these claims. La Stilla is
presented in fragments; her body and her voice are parts of a whole and at times
constitute whole subjects in and of themselves. When he sees the mechanical singer,
Franz identifies her as La Stilla by her voice alone, by her appearance alone, or both
together.
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By reducing La Stilla to fragmented body parts, the voice becomes an object. As
Poizat explains, the operatic voice was described as autonomic and disconnected from the
surrounding visual schema. In such a state, the operatic voice is devoid of attachment and
therefore anyone can lay claim to it. This is precisely what the Baron, and to a lesser
extent Franz, does. In legal terms, one possesses, claims, and enjoys an object or piece of
property. The Baron possesses and enjoys La Stilla’s voice and Franz would have
controlled her body and her voice had he married her. The other important element of La
Stilla’s voice is its ability to establish emotional connections with her listeners. Franz is
“intoxicated” by her voice; the Baron listened attentively, in a “paroxysm of ecstasy”
(209). Ecstasy is related to Franz and the Baron’s desires to possess La Stilla.
Poizat and critic Alain Didier-Weill discuss the jouissance or enjoyment produced
by the blue note. “To speak of jouissance is to speak of the enjoyment of property, of an
object (the legal usage of the term should be kept in mind), and when one speaks of a
quest, the idea of a search for a lost object is understood” (Poizat 201). Recording La
Stilla’s voice allowed Orfanik and the Baron to possess La Stilla. “Many expressions in
everyday language, many literary, mythical or artistic examples, refer directly to this
object-like consistency that the voice can assume, particularly in its singular propensity to
be lost, stolen or broken” (Poizat 201). Interwoven in the search for the lost voice are
themes of: nostalgia, necrophilia, and identity. A classic example of the search for a lost
voice is Gaston Leroux’s Le Phantom de l’Opéra published in 1907. “The combination of
Hoffman’s tales of the musically bizarre, English gothic novels, and the revelations of the
seamier side of Parisian life contained in Eugene Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris, had given
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rise to the opera-house mystery as early as the 1840s” (Newark 66). Le Château is a late
nineteenth-century example of the genre.
Thus far, the voice as an object has been confined to literary and musical
expressions. However, the field of psychoanalysis offers another interpretation of the
vocal object. Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis have been decried by many critics as
outmoded and are arguably limited, especially Freud, in their treatment of female sex and
gender issues. Nevertheless, the Freudian psychoanalytic frameworks is useful to the
present study because Freud developed his theories around the same time at Verne
published his novels and therefore, Freudian psychoanalysis is a potential source of
inspiration to Verne. In psychoanalysis the voice as object is “a process within each
individual, a process by which the voice is constituted as an object, an object of a drive,
and thereby is lost form the very outset, independent of any reification into a tangible
object of ‘reality’ in the way that term is usually understood” (Poizat 205). The voice is
once again detached from the speaker. Furthermore, the voice and speech act imply a
relationship with the Other, “with the desire of the Other; in this respect, the vocal object
occupied a fundamental place in the structuration of any subject” (205-206). For
example, the first cry an infant makes is pure, much the same way the blue note is pure.
Subsequent cries made by the infant are imbued with meaning, meaning derived in part
from the response of the mother or another person to the infant’s first cry. The cry is now
for someone. “It is no longer simple vocal expression but demand, a demand for the
return of the object linked to initial jouissance; the cry has once and for all attained the
status of ‘speech’ and ‘meaning’” (207). The same can be said of La Stilla’s song: she
doesn’t sing for herself and the words of her aria mean nothing without someone to
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interpret them. La Stilla interprets the aria and uses emotion to convey meaning; the
audience in turn interprets her song and responds. Subsequent performances are imbued
with additional meaning. For example, La Stilla’s later performances were influenced by
the Baron’s presence. His presence filled her with terror and her voice froze.
But La Stilla’s vocal object is different from what Poizat describes and reflects
her autonomic nature. Poizat and the psychoanalytic tradition suggest that the vocal
object is mutable. La Stilla sings the same words over and over. Furthermore, her
mimetic desire, or literalyzing of the words, limits the strength of the vocal object. “I
wish to die” is a limiting speech act. If we consider Frik and Jonas’s questions one last
time, we conclude that their vocal objects take on the status of speech and meaning. Frik
and Jonas ask open-ended questions and the answers to their initial questions as well as
subsequent reiterations are mediated by another’s input. Bachelor machines and automata
developed later in the nineteenth and into the twentieth century were not only able to
move, but were also able to generate speech in response to another person’s input.
Jules Verne traced an indelible path through French literature with his series of
novels Les Voyages extraordinaires. His novels changed the shape and scope of French
literature. As the so-called “Father of Science Fiction,” Verne ensured that science and
technology were literary subjects, on par with tales of personal triumphs and character
studies. In these two novels, scientific tenets compete with natural law and a belief in the
supernatural and Vernian machines help readers bridge the gap between science in fiction
and science fiction. The automata in these two novels are examples of living machines
developed in the Industrial Age. Behemoth and La Stilla are animated by steam or
electricity. Questions of identity are discussed in Le Château especially in regards to the
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mechanical reproduction of the voice. Although written late in the nineteenth-century, La
Stilla is also representative of the uncanny automata that were popular in fantastic
literature of the early nineteenth-century. The larger-than-life automata produced in the
latter half of the nineteenth-century often reflected fears about the unstoppable process of
technology. Behemoth, the steam engine that does not run on tracks, is an example of
this. These two novels demonstrate that anthropogenesis and technogenesis increasingly
go hand-in-hand. However, Verne injects a note of caution: although science and
machines are increasingly part of everyday life and seem to be a hallmark of the future,
man should not become machine-like or mechanical in nature. Man must understand how
machines work in order to derive the greatest benefit from them. One can easily identify
an ecological message in Verne’s works, namely that man has to understand his
relationship to his environment, and from there, determine his relationship to machines.
The novels discussed in this chapter represent a shift in the relationship between
Man and machines. In La Maison à vapeur, as in Zola’s La Bête humaine discussed in
Chapter One, Man, or animal, is compared to machines with a focus on the mechanical,
non-human, aspects of man. However, the personification of the machine is indicative of
the inverse relationship as well. In Le Château des Carpathes, and as will be
demonstrated in Chapters Three and Four, the works of Verne, Villiers, and Rachilde
present living machines that emphasize the machine’s humanity. The statues, wax
figures, and automata that constitute living machines in Verne’s, Villiers’, and Rachilde’s
novels are presented as art objects; artificial beauty is attained only through technical
mastery.
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CHAPTER 3: TECHNOLOGIES OF SEXUAL RE-PRODUCTION IN L’EVE
FUTURE
In the previous chapter, Verne’s Le Château des Carpathes was used to illustrate
the association between artificial beauty and technology. The “mad” scientist Orfanik and
Baron de Gortz used primitive versions of the telegraph, phonograph, and hologram in
order to resurrect La Stilla and have her perform once more. Verne’s plot and choice of
machines in this novel were inspired by Villiers’ novel L’Eve future. Villiers’ novel is
technologically and mechanically more complex than Verne’s, despite being published
earlier.
At the 1878 Paris Exposition, Thomas Edison became famous for his phonograph
or “talking machine.” He also presented designs for a doll that would be equipped with a
miniature “talking machine” (Kang 243). French Symbolist writer Villiers de l’Isle-Adam
was inspired by Edison’s plans for a talking doll and began work on the novel that would
be published in 1886 as L’Eve future. L’Eve future tells the story of Thomas Edison’s
attempt to fabricate the ideal woman in the form of an android.38 Lord Celian Ewald tells
his friend Thomas Edison that he is going to commit suicide because he is despondent
about the actress Alicia Clary. To save his friend, Edison uses advances in sound
production and electricity, as well as the artistic media of sculpture and photography to
recreate Alicia in the form of an android. Hadaly, which means “ideal” in Persian, is
meant to replace the fallen Eves of the world, actresses like Alicia and dancers like
Evelyn Habal, who sexually corrupt men.
38
In a note to readers, Villiers makes clear that the Thomas Edison in L’Eve future is based on the
legends of the real inventor that sprang up in the nineteenth century. His fictional Edison is “the sorcerer of
Menlo Park” or “the father of the phonograph.” In this chapter all references to Thomas Edison are to the
fictional character and not to the real life inventor.
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Villiers’ android is an example of what Kang refers to as the living machines of
the Industrial Age. Narratives written between 1886 and 1914 that feature automatons
generally do not take place in industrial settings. “Their main interest lies rather in
explaining the fantastic natures of the new beings, including biological-mechanical
hybrids that represent the next step in evolution and autonomous objects of pure artistic
value beyond a utilitarian function” (243). Marie Lathers states as well that in nineteenthcentury representational texts, woman and the feminine are fabricated as either
technological invention or as aesthetic masterpiece in retellings of the myth of Pygmalion
and Galatea. The android Hadaly is both technical and aesthetic masterpiece and signals a
new type of artificial femininity.
Sculpture, photography, sound production and electricity are all technologies of
re-production and constitute une machine à fabriquer la sexualité.39 In Foucault’s work,
“technologies of sex” refer to the institutions, behaviors, and strategies used in the
nineteenth-century to control and regulate bourgeois sexual behavior. Technology of sex
also refers to the scientific and medical methods as well as machines used to regulate sex
and sexual representations (Lathers 112). Hadaly, who lacks reproductive organs, is
meant to be a replacement for pathologically ill and sexually deviant women of the fin de
siècle. The technologies of re-production that Edison uses to fabricate his android all
function based on a relationship between absence and presence, void and meaning.
39
Foucault identifies four institutions that determined relationships between knowledge, power,
and the body in nineteenth century France: pedagogy, medicine, psychiatry, and demography. Four
technologies of applied sexuality, medicine, psychiatry, economics, and criminology, exist alongside the
aforementioned institutions. Combined, this scientia sexualis regulated and controlled the bourgeois body.
Forms of technology, such as photography and electricity, are themselves technologies of sex (Lathers
112).
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The first part of my analysis discusses woman as machine and the pathology of
the nineteenth-century woman. Edison uses art, specifically sculpture and photography,
to diagnose and “dissect” the female body and make it intelligible to man. My analysis
then turns to the ways in which the voice and the image were reproduced in the novel. I
consider how the phonograph and the moving picture were used on a small scale to
illustrate female artificiality in the chapter “Danse Macabre.” Finally, I consider the roles
that the female spirit Sowana and Hadaly herself play in the fabrication of the android. As
a new type of creation story, L’Eve future is more femino-centric than other
representational texts. A feminine milieu based upon odors and shadows suggests that the
female characters are not meaningless voids. Rather, they use odors and shadows to
diffuse their meaning and keep it separate from Edison’s patriarchal reasoning.
Throughout the novel the thematic relationship between void and meaning makes use of
two competing definitions of automaton. The automaton is a self-mover, and one could
add self-thinker who generates her own meaning. At the same time, the automaton is also
an object that is incapable of independent thought; meaning is only ascribed to the object
when it is gazed upon by a man.
In the second half of the chapter I discuss Hadaly as a reproductive futurism and
the ways in which her creation challenges the notions of gender authority that dominate
the debate about science versus Nature, and creation narratives. The creation of a female
android, specifically a new Eve, is a clear example of the relationship between
anthrogenesis and technogenesis. Much like Banks, the engineer in Verne’s La Maison à
vapeur, Edison explains the ways in which his android is superior to works produced by
Nature. Secondly, I analyze Villiers’ narrative as a nineteenth-century creation story in
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which Edison tests the limits of his godhood by fabricating a new Eve. Although Eve is
traditionally considered to be a fallen woman, Villiers suggests that the new Eve, the Eve
of the future, may in fact be the source of man’s salvation. However, in his zeal to best
Nature, Edison removes too many of woman’s flaws and creates a machine à fabriquer
l’idéal that is incapable of sustaining itself.
Female Pathology and Technologies of Re-Production
Villiers uses nineteenth-century medical and psychological theories to define the
relationship between knowledge, the female body, and female sexuality. Perhaps the most
important tenet taken from these fields was the belief that feminine instinct was often
attributed to mechanical and automatic behaviors. Edison’s definition of female
automatism mirrors neurologist Charcot’s definition of “automatisme ambulatoire.”
Charcot used the term automatisme ambulatoire in 1888 to refer to mechanical regression
or renunciation of one’s will that is often found in patients afflicted with neurasthenia,
epilepsy, hysteria, degeneration, bad heredity, and primitive savagery (Forrest 23). The
female protagonists in L’Eve future suffer from various manifestations of automatisme
ambulatoire. Alicia Clary’s “difformité pathologique” is a type of degeneration or bad
heredity. Evelyn Habal suffers from degeneration as well, while Any Anderson is
afflicted with hysteria.
Although these afflictions were believed to be incurable, the hospital and the
factory were considered ideal environments to counter congenital automatic behavior
with routine discipline. Automatisme ambulatoire is a medical term with origins in
science and engineering. “Like many other mechanical models of the Industrial
Revolution, medicine adopted it, not only in the interest of accounting for human
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biological functions, but equally to create regulated, factory-like environments (public
hospitals, later public schools) where a new, socially sanctioned, official, automatic
behavior could be imposed toward the production of ‘le nouvel homme’” (Forrest 24).
Jennifer Forrest argues that it is therefore not surprising that Villiers chose an engineer,
Thomas Edison, as the protagonist of his novel. Edison adopts the role of medical expert
on the female condition, but uses his skills as an engineer to fabricate an android that will
save the human race.
Edison also adopts the role of medical expert on female illnesses. “Not only a
great inventor, his is also a specialist of medicine, a doctor who diagnoses, treats, and
attempts to cure an ailing friend—and indeed an ailing world—of a disease called
woman” (Hustvedt 25). This novel, like others of its kind, replicates nineteenth-century
cultural norms that pathologized the state of being a woman. “In late-nineteenth-century
France, the deranged body—a pathological, degenerate, and hysterical physiology—
becomes the dominant cognitive frame for the idea of femininity” (Hustvedt 26).
Edison’s diagnoses of the female protagonists are mediated by the practices and
principles of art. Specifically, Edison uses sculpture and photography to lay bare the
diseased female form and render it intelligible to others. Woman, whether natural,
sculpted or photographed, is devoid of meaning until she is dissected, probed, formed, or
gazed upon by a man.
Alicia Clary the actress “suffers” according to Ewald from a “difformité
pathologique” or a pathological deformity. Specifically, Alicia’s bourgeois and pragmatic
mind does not fit with her physical beauty. According to Lord Ewald Alicia’s anomaly is
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an endemic and incurable disease. Given the advanced stage of Alicia’s degeneracy, she
is described as monstrous.
Under the sway of applied Darwinism, late nineteenth-century doctors
were fascinated by evolutionary failures, with those who never quite made
it to complete human perfection or with those who, having made it had
regressed. The fin de siècle’s deep concern with the abnormal and its
scientific study of monsters quickly led to the elaboration of a teratology,
massing a fabulous array of monster, freaks, and degenerates. (Hustvedt
29)
Edison’s final diagnosis of Alicia reflects this fascination with monsters. Despite his best
attempts, Alicia remains immune to Ewald’s efforts to reform her spirit. “Alicia’s
autonomy and isolation from the will of her male admirer makes her monstrous, albeit a
sublime monster” (Hustvedt 30). Edison and Ewald believe that Alicia’s ideal form
should be accompanied by an ideal psychology, and her disease lies within the
differences between her appearance and reality. Alicia’s career as an actress illustrates
her condition, since on stage her true nature is masked by the role she plays. Throughout
their dissection and diagnoses of Alicia, Lord Ewald and Edison compare Alicia to
statues of Venus, which like the figure of the actress, are devoid of meaning until touched
by the male gaze.
Ewald describes Alicia to Edison saying, “Miss Alicia n’a que vingt ans à peu
près. Elle est svelte comme le tremble argenté. Ses mouvements sont d’une lente et
délicieuse harmonie; —son corps offre un ensemble de lignes à surprendre les plus
grandes statuaires” (Villiers 75). Alicia is presented to readers as an objet d’art. More
specifically, she is the Venus Victrix or the Venus de Milo. As they visit museums and
galleries across Europe the relationship between Alicia’s body and aesthetic beauty is
strengthened. According to Ewald, Alicia is the original “statue”; the works of art in the
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museums are copies fashioned after her. “Elle regardait, jalouse, les chefs-d’œuvre, qui
pensait-elle la privaient, pour un instant, d’une attention totale, sans comprendre qu’elle
faisait partie de la beauté des chefs-d’œuvre et que c’était des miroirs que je lui montrais”
(Villiers 99). However, the statues are not a perfect mirror and Alicia doesn’t readily
identify with her “reflection.” In the Louvre she looks at the Venus de Milo and says,
“‘Tiens, MOI!’…‘Oui, mais moi, j’ai mes bras, et j’ai l’air plus distinguée’” (100).
Although she detects a strong resemblance between herself and the Venus de Milo, Alicia
is quick to point out that she is physically complete and the statue is not. The Venus de
Milo’s physical incompleteness is indicative of the statue’s role as a muse.
Throughout Villiers’ works, the heroine has very little to do with real nineteenthcentury women and is instead an idealized projection of man’s desires. Consequently,
heroines in Villiers’ novels often function either as fixed signifiers, projecting one image
or desire, or as deceptive signs, suggesting one ideal but projecting another. Villiers’
short story Isis (1862) serves as a counterargument to the theories regarding the statue as
void that is given meaning only when someone gazes upon her. Isis is the story of an
Italian noblewoman Tulia Fabriana who is inspired by a statue of Isis and lives a
hermetic, private, and veiled life. Even in her most personal interactions, part of Tulia’s
identity escapes the comprehension of others and for this reason, she is a flexible signifier
because, “On essaie de la circonvenir, mais elle cache son âme et sa pensée avec un
inviolable talent” (Villiers 108). Tulia controls the multiple images she projects. She uses
a veiled statue of Isis as her inspiration. “La statue voilée d’Isis, la figure de la création;
sur le socle ils avaient inscrit ces paroles: ‘Je suis ce qui est, ce qui fut, ce qui sera:
personne n’a soulevé le voile qui me couvre’” (149). Isis is the goddess of creation and
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the statue of her embodies the past, the present, and the future. One could argue that the
statue’s meaning slides along a temporal and historical continuum.
Tulia begins to resemble the statue of Isis; she has a constitution of marble and
her skin is very pale. Furthermore, “Les formes de la femme se sculptaient d’elles-mêmes
sur le marbre de ce corps de vierge: la grâce ondoyait dans ses mouvements, la force
courait dans ses membres…mais nulle port ouvert sur la pensée” (127). References to
sculpture and to marble emphasize Tulia’s statue-like qualities. In contrast to the static,
fixed statues Lord Ewald and Alicia saw in museums, Tulia’s statue-like body is
animated by movement and force. Finally, Tulia is a flexible signifier because she
generates and controls outer projections of herself and her thoughts. Although she
responds to Le Comte de Strally-d’Anthas’ desires, she determines the manner in which
she responds. Tulia explains that what Strally-d’Anthas sees is not necessarily reality.
Je ne serai en réalité que l’occasion du déploiement de sa pensée. …Ce
qu’il aimera, ce ne sera point moi, telle que je suis, mais cette personne de
sa pensée que je lui paraîtrai. Sans doute, il m’accordera mille qualités et
mille charmes étrangers, dont je serais peu satisfaite si je les avais; de
sorte que, en croyant me posséder, il ne me touchera même pas réellement.
(191)
For all appearances Tulia conforms to the count’s vision of her, but she has found a way
to escape being possessed by him. In contrast, Alicia functions as a deceptive sign; her
outward physical beauty promises an ideal that her simple mind and vulgar speech cannot
produce. To solve this problem, Edison uses Alicia’s physical beauty as inspiration for
his android’s outer shell. By artificially recreating Alicia’s beauty, Edison reduced her to
a mere or fixed signifier who is programmed to say a few things. Lord Ewald falls in love
with Alicia in her role as an actress and conjures an ideal aesthetic image of her that is
maintained only when Alicia is performing. In her capacity as an actress, Alicia suggests
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that she can be a flexible signifier, that is, someone able to interpret and project a range
of desires and emotions. Onstage, Alicia’s personal identity is subsumed and erased by
that of the character she plays; all that remains of Alicia is her physical body.
Ross Chambers has identified similarities between the treatment of statues and
actresses in nineteenth and early twentieth century literature. What he calls the myth of
the actress is based on emptiness and distance, two terms that Edison and Ewald use to
describe Alicia. Chambers explains, “Ils [les poètes] ne voient en elle…qu’apparence et
artifice; elle est ‘fantôme’ ou ‘mannequin’, une apparence de femme, vidée en quelque
sorte de la substance du réel, et éloignée du domaine de la vie par toute la distance que
mesure leur regard éperdu” (Chambers 7). As a phantom or mannequin, the actress is
hollow and contains no traces of any personal substance; she is reduced to the status of
sign: “L’actrice apparait comme un signe de la femme, au sens ou le masque est un signe
de visage; et alors, comme tous les visages peuvent se rêver derrière un masque, l’actrice
semble contenir en elle, virtuellement, toutes les femmes” (10). An actress adopts the
identity of multiple women on stage, and Ewald is enamored with Alicia when she
performs, not when she speaks in real life. The android is fabricated in such a way that
she, too, contains traces of multiple women. Hadaly tells Ewald, “J’ai tant de femmes en
moi qu’aucun harem ne pourrait les contenir. Veuille, elles seront! Il dépend de toi de les
découvrir en ma vision” (Villiers 317). Ewald simply has to tell Hadaly which woman he
desires and she will become her.
In his analysis of the actress, Chambers states that in her various incarnations, she
slides along the continuum of angel and automaton (l’ange et l’automate). The myths of
Orpheus and Eurydice, and Pygmalion and Galatea, illustrate the two ends of the
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spectrum. “Lorsque l’actrice-Muse est un ange et que c’est une transcendance qui vient
combler le vide des signes, faisant du poète un instrument au moyen duquel le monde des
esprits se manifeste au nôtre, nous dirons qu’il s’agit d’une conception et d’une vision de
l’actrice de type orphique” (Chambers 19). Sowana, the spirit medium who
communicates with Edison and controls Hadaly is the clearest example of an angel in
Villiers’ novel, although the android herself is another. Representations of artificial
femininity that mobilize images of the actress-angel are also examples of what Minsoo
Kang has labelled the uncanny automaton that was popular in gothic narratives of the
early nineteenth-century. On the contrary, “Elle sera Galatée lorsque…les signes seront
ressentis comme étant d’invention humaine et l’univers de l’art comme un monde
autonome créé par le travail actif du poète, l’actrice-automate étant cette poupée à
laquelle il s’agit d’‘insuffler la vie’” (19). Villiers was inspired by Edison’s prototype for
a talking doll as well as artistic renderings of the female form. Edison breathes life into
Hadaly by means of electricity. As they slide along the axis of angel and automaton, the
four female characters occupy various positions of emptiness. Men like Edison and
Ewald believe that the female mind and body operate in unison and are equally devoid of
meaning. Throughout the narrative, a second view of woman emerges, which argues that
the female mind and body do not—and need not—reflect one another. Evelyn, Sowana,
and Hadaly capitalize on the split existing between the female mind and body to make
their meanings known.
The second diagnosis and dissection in the novel also revolves around the
inconsistencies between perceived appearances and reality. Whereas Alicia was naturally
beautiful, Edison contends that Evelyn Habal used artificial beauty enhancements to
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disguise her naturally diseased body. Edison diagnoses Evelyn Habal as a degenerate and
descriptions of her employ nineteenth-century discourses on hygiene, the dangers of the
female sexual body, and prostitutes. Like the statue and actress, the prostitute’s body is
meant to be a blank canvas onto which male sexual fantasies are projected. However, the
prostitute’s body is not devoid of meaning; instead the semiotics of dress and makeup
obscure meaning and render the female body illegible to men. Edison uses a lamposcope
to project moving pictures akin to x-rays that show Evelyn’s disease hidden under her
clothes and make-up. These moving images are included in discussions of early cinema
and this section concludes with an analysis of the cinema as a technology of
(re)production by means of which the female body passes through the lens (male) of the
camera, is captured on film, cut, and reassembled.
Numerous novels, plays, poems, and works of art in nineteenth-century France
feature prostitutes or courtesans.40 French administrators and morality police created
numerous categories to describe venal women, but the labels themselves actually had
very little meaning. Categories include: prostitute, courtesan, pierreuse, femme de
maison, insoumise, femme à parties, femme galante, femme entretenue, and most
importantly for my discussion of Evelyn Habal, femme fatale and femme de spectacles et
de théâtre. Etymologically, “to prostitute” means to set or place in public. Baudelaire
quipped that art is prostitution, by which he meant that art is a means of making public
the artist’s hidden fantasies and desires. “As an emblem for their own artistic practice, it
represented creative artifice, surface, illusion, seductive falsity, even a kind of inspiring
void” (Bernheimer 1). Artifice, illusion, falsity, and void are all words Edison uses to
describe Alicia, Evelyn, and the different statues in L’Eve future. The prostitute as
40
See Bernheimer pages 6-7.
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inspiring void is integral to discussions of statues and actresses, who, Edison argues, are
devoid of meaning until gazed upon by a male spectator. Bernheimer continues, “The
complex fascination of the idea is posited on the denial of what is beneath, the female
sexual body” (1). Male artists project their fantasies and desires onto the sexless female
body.
By telling Evelyn’s story, Villiers outlines the history of the femme fatale and
suggests that the femme de spectacle et de théâtre is the latest manifestation of female
cunning and artifice, which in fact have their origins in nature. The femme fatale uses
artifice to transform herself and the milieu around her thereby influencing the
surrounding environment. In the chapter “L’ombre de l’upa” Edison develops an analogy
between the femme fatale, Evelyn Habal, and the toxic environment produced by the upas
tree’s leaves and the shadow surrounding the tree. This analogy gives proof to the
association of Woman and Nature that evolved during the nineteenth-century. According
to Edison, the Circe’s of the modern world find their natural equivalent in the upas tree.
The upas tree “apparaît très doré par le soleil. Son ombre, vous le savez, engourdit, enivré
d’hallucinations fiévreuses et, si l’on s’attarde sous son influence, elle devient mortelle”
(Villiers 159). Standing in the shadow of the tree will bring about serious harm. Women
like Evelyn Habal also produce a toxic shadow or atmosphere that is deadly to men in
their lives. In this chapter, the femme fatale refers to Evelyn Habal specifically, but
similar conjectures could be made about Alicia Clary as well. In the following chapter
Edison explains how Evelyn Habal created the toxic environment that ruined Mr. Edward
Anderson. The femme fatale, “telles ces ‘femmes’, sorte de Stymphalides modernes pour
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qui celui qu’elles passionnent est simplement une proie vouée à tous les asservissement”
(190). Man is seemingly powerless in the face of the femme fatale.
The upas tree is not toxic, but derives its toxic effects from the environment.
Removing the caterpillars from its leaves, all that remains is a dead tree with dirty pink
flowers. “Sa vertu meurtrière, même, disparaît, si on le transplante hors du terrain propice
à son action, et il ne tarde pas à dépérir, dédaigné de toute attention humaine” (197). As
applied to the femme fatale, the caterpillars are make-up, clothes, and perfume. By
pointing out that the tree and women don’t possess their toxic powers innately, Edison
tries to detract from female authority or power. However, Bordeau argues that Edison
actually confirms the model of authority associated with women and Nature.
Evolutionary theories transfer power from an individual (God, for example) to a model in
which power is derived from a set of conditions (Nature). “To this extent, Edison’s
debunking of the femme fatale’s power does not allow for a simple assertion of man’s
godlike rule, but reinscribes the influence of the milieu as the dominant model of
authority” (194). Uprooting the upas tree or the femme fatale and transplanting her in a
new environment wouldn’t necessarily kill it or her; according to evolutionary theory the
tree or woman would adapt to a new environment and new conditions. The noxious odors
produced by the feminized upas tree are part of a larger nineteenth-century debate about
odors and hygiene.
Evelyn’s identification as a prostitute develops the themes of l’être et le paraître,
or of the inside and outside that are present throughout L’Eve future. My interpretation of
her is informed by nineteenth-century rhetoric and practices about hygiene, disease,
decay, and odors, which had as their purpose keeping unsavory aspects that threatened
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the civilized way of life invisible. Alain Corbin and Norbert Elias suggest that between
1750 and 1880, Europeans underwent a sensory revolution, pleasant scents and offensive
odors became markers of one’s identity and controlling them was a central issue (Barnes
26 and 40).41 In her capacity as a femme fatale, Evelyn is dangerous precisely because she
used bodily semiotics to hide her disease and mislead Anderson. One of the major studies
of prostitution in nineteenth-century France was Parent-Duchâtelet’s De la prostitution de
la ville de Paris published in 1836. Parent was a member of the government’s public
health council and his study on prostitutes was part of his efforts to regulate, sanitize, and
improve the physical and social hygiene of Paris. His study on prostitution was conducted
simultaneously with his investigation into the sewers of Paris and it is not surprising that
he considered prostitution to be a type of sewer, a site of biological decomposition and
decay (15). In response to the Great Stink of 1880, Barnes explains that Parisian’s
responses to the odors are indicative of changing attitudes towards bodily deportment and
collective sensibility. “In a time of political and social change, as urbanization drastically
altered the rhythms of everyday life and as government increasingly looked to science for
the expert knowledge that would help regulate society, perceptions of the human body’s
proper place in society were changing as well” (Barnes 23).42 Similar ideas were applied
to prostitutes as well. When well-regulated, Parent found that prostitutes enjoyed better
health than other members of the population—except for the transmission of syphilis,
which made prostitution a public health concern.
41
See Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (1986)
and Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (1939).
42
David Barnes discussed the Great Stink of Paris in 1880 and a second Great Stink in 1895
during which Paris was inundated with noxious odors from the sewers. The Great Stink inspired an
unpublished novel by Zola entitled Le Grand collecteur (The Great Sewer Main).
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According to Parent, the most dangerous women were those who hid prostitution
behind perfectly legal fronts, the femmes galantes, femmes à parties, and femmes de
spectacle et de théâtre. Evelyn is an example of this most dangerous type of prostitute.
Well-regulated houses of prostitution allowed the police and other administrators to
survey, regulate, and read the prostitute’s physical and sexual body. However, in the case
of actresses or music-hall performers, the police were powerless to intervene. “The
women themselves have become semiotic experts, using their mastery to make their
availability readable only to clients of their choice, turning their bodies into refined
instruments to attract capital” (Bernheimer 27).43 Prostitutes use clothing and make-up to
create an alternative body language which erodes and undermines the bourgeois sexual
code. Edison’s friend Anderson misread Evelyn’s bodily signs. Edison rightly suspects
that his friend Anderson contracted syphilis from Evelyn Habal. After this friend dies,
Edison pays a visit to the ailing actress finding, “elle était bien souffrante. ….Une
affection la minait; --au physique, bien entendu. De sorte qu’elle ne survécut, même, que
peu de temps à son cher Edward” (Villiers 198). Edison’s suspicions about Evelyn’s
disease were confirmed upon her death.
The theories used to describe Evelyn’s degeneracy are borrowed from
psychologist and criminologist Césare Lombroso. Lombroso believed that prostitutes and
female delinquents were “born criminals.” The signs of their deviance are biologically
determined and written into their anatomy (Hustvedt 32). He says to Ewald, “S’il s’en
trouve qui semblent belles, au premier regard, j’affirme que leur visage ou leur corps doit,
immanquablement, offrir quelques traits infâmes, abjects, qui démentent le reste et où se
43
Balzac’s La Fille aux yeux d’or and Splendeurs et misères des courtisans detail the relationship
between prostitution, capital, and degeneracy.
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traduit leur être” (Villiers 195). Edison uses photography and state-of-the-art film
technology to show Lord Ewald how Evelyn tricked Anderson and that her disease was
there all along. “Edison photographically—one would say almost radiographically—
penetrates the artificial trappings of Miss Evelyn Habal in order to reveal the beast
lurking underneath” (Forrest 25). Evelyn is a sexual beast, like Séverine and La Lison in
Zola’s La Bête humaine.
The photographs of Evelyn are displayed in the chapter, “Danse macabre”. Both
the chapter title and its epigraph, “Et c’est un dur métier que d’être belle femme,” are
taken from Baudelaire. It is not surprising then that Villiers reproduces Baudelaire’s
viewpoints on women, namely that woman is contemptible, abhorrent even because she is
more natural than man; only by employing artifice is she beautiful (Hustvedt 34). The
pictures of Evelyn are “before” and “after” photos, depicting the dancer in her “natural”
and “artificial” states. The first picture shows a radiant Evelyn performing: “La vision,
chair transparent, miraculeusement photochromée, dansait, en costume pailleté, une sorte
de danse mexicaine populaire” (Villiers 199). Evelyn’s health and livelihood are
underscored by the fact that these pictures move as Edison projects them on a screen.
Edison describes Evelyn’s body, saying, “Et ces longs yeux si singuliers? Ces petites
griffes en pétales de roses où l’aurore semble avoir pleuré, tant elles brillent? Et ces jolies
veines, qui s’accusent sous l’excitation de la danse? …Ce sourire emperlé où se jouent de
leur mouillées sur ces jolies dents!” (200). Here Edison adopts the role of art critic,
detailing and explaining the muse’s body.
His role changes to that of anatomist when he shows the next set of pictures.
“L’image vivante disparut…le réflecteur envoya dans le cadre l’apparition d’un petit être
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exsangue, vaguement féminin, aux membres rabougris, aux joues creuses, à la bouche
édentée” (201). This second photograph is an example of the autopsy Edison conducts on
Evelyn’s body and continues in the chapter entitled “Exhumation,” in which he dissects
her personal effects. The attention paid to Evelyn’s body after death is evidence that the
degenerative effects caused by prostitutes lingered. Zola’s Nana provides a similar
commentary about the danger of female degeneracy. The final scene of this novel
describes Nana’s decomposing body: “C’était un charnier, un tas d’humeur et de sang,
une pelletée de chair corrompue, jetée là, sur un cousin. Les pustules avaient envahi la
figure entière” (Zola 467). Nana’s eyes are absorbed by the purulent mud of putrid flesh
and her mouth is transformed into a horrible laugh. Though similar, Villiers’ and Zola’s
descriptions of the decaying female body differ in one respect: Zola’s descriptions remain
in the literary register; by introducing moving pictures, Villiers’ description combines the
literary and cinematic.
Film scholars include “Danse macabre” in discussions of early cinema. The
anatomy theater and the spectacle of dissection are key to understanding the ways in
which Villiers’ novel anticipates the cinematic gaze. Dissection, like cinema, presents a
visual image while hinting at that which we cannot see.44 Although Edison synchronized
the moving pictures of Evelyn and the accompanying soundtrack, a disconnect remains
between sound and image, between the voice and the body. This section concludes with a
discussion of early trick films produced by Thomas Edison and Georges Méliès, which
employ many of the same themes as representational texts. Women are reproduced on
screen by male magicians. Film aesthetics and editing techniques often reflect dissection
44
Walter Benjamin compares the cameraman to a surgeon in his essay, “The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”
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techniques found in the hospital. The film itself and the images contained on it, are
spliced, cut, and rearranged to create new composite images. The artificial or mechanical
nature of the female body is reinforced by the fact that her image is contained in the film,
and woman is equated with a mechanical object (the strip of film), which is made
meaningful as it is processed by the male gaze behind the camera. Laura Mulvey’s
“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) is perhaps the most well-known critique
of the fetishizing of the female form in early cinema. Mulvey’s argument is constructed
around psychoanalysis and the ideas of female lack and castration. On screen, woman is
the bearer of meaning while man is the maker of meaning, a dynamic that echoes the
arguments discussed earlier about female statues and actresses being devoid of meaning
until gazed upon by man.
In the nineteenth-century, Thomas Edison, Nadar, and P.T. Barnum tried
individually to preserve the human voice and image from the effects of space and time by
creating a “real copy” in the form of talking dummies, photographs with music, or sound
recordings accompanied by images. Part of the difficulty they faced was synchronizing
sound and image. Early forms of popular entertainment—such as the diorama, panorama,
living pictures and statues, and melodrama—focused on visual accuracy and details.
Later in vaudeville productions dialogue was minimized and physical comedy,
pantomime, and parody were developed. Finally, there is a thirty-year gap between the
Lumière brothers’ first silent film produced in 1895 and the first sound film, The Jazz
Singer produced in 1927 (Forrest 72-73). Limited sound technology made sound
accessory in these early attempts, and until image and sound were synchronized in the
1920s, the illusion of presence was incomplete. Villiers’ protagonist constructed a
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lamposcope, which consisted of a strip of material with pieces of tinted glass stuck to it
suspended in front of an astral lamp between to steel rods.
Cette lame d’étoffe, tirée à l’un des bouts par un mouvement d’horloge,
commença de glisser, très vivement, entre la lentille et le timbre d’un
puissant réflecteur. Celui-ci, tout à coup, sur la grande toile blanche,
tendue en face de lui, dans le cadre d’ébène surmonté de la rose d’or, -réfracta l’apparition en sa taille humaine d’une très jolie et assez jeune
femme rousse. (Villiers 199)
The first projected image shows Evelyn dancing in her make-up and costume while the
second one shows her in her natural state. The images are accompanied by sound,
“Soudain, une voix plate et comme empesée, une voix sotte et dure se fit entendre; la
danseuse chantait l’alza et le holè de son fandango. Le tambour de basque se mis à
ronfler sous son coude et les castagnettes à cliqueter” (200). By synchronizing sound and
image, Edison has produced one of the earliest “courts-métrages” or short films.
Dissection exposes spectators to the inner workings of the human body,
removing some of the mystery. However, dissection couldn’t explain everything, such
that anatomists and spectators were often left in awe of phenomena that continued to defy
explanation. Metaphysical awe “was cultivated via an anamorphic or doubled vision,
which encouraged a sublime reading of grotesque phenomena—that is, a reading in
which dissection is simultaneously a revelation of the interior wonders and horrors of the
body, and larger universal truths that defy both vision and intelligibility” (240). As he
describes his android, Edison maintains dissection’s spectacular nature through metaphor:
“this is the place in the spinal column from which springs the marvelous tree of the
nervous system,” the mythical, “This particular electric spark—it’s on loan from
Prometheus,” and the hyperbolic, the words produced by the android’s lungs are “those
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invented by the greatest poets” (240). The android is a combination of science and art, of
the explainable and the unexplainable.
Secondly, dissection provides a framework for cinematic editing techniques such
as framing, cutting, and splicing which in early and classical cinema result in the
fetishizing and fragmentation of the female form. Walter Benjamin likens the painter to a
magician and the cameraman to a surgeon. The magician, he says, “heals a sick person by
the laying on of hands; the surgeon cuts into the patients’ body” (Benjamin 678). The
magician and painter maintain the natural distance between the body or subject. In
contrast, the surgeon and cameraman penetrate deeply into their subjects. In the case of
the cameraman, original images are cut and rearranged to produce an entirely new
version of reality. Benjamin’s metaphor is evident in early films by Georges Méliès and
Thomas Alva Edison that were part of the trick or magic film genre. However, in these
films the magician functions as a surgeon who alters the female body.
Lucy Fischer states that Méliès is considered the “father of film fantasy,” but that
he should also be considered the father of a certain cinematic vision of woman. “By 1896
the trick film paradigm has been established: such works would involve a male magician
performing acts of wonder upon a female subject” (Fischer 339). Examples of Méliès’
trick films include Extraordinary Illusions (1903), L’Enchanteur Alcofribas (1903). In
these films, on a narrative level, acts of conjuring and vanishing ladies demonstrates the
male magician’s power over the female sex as well as dematerializing and
decorporealizing the female sex. The Red Spectre (Pathé 1907) and A Pipe Dream
(Edison 1905) are two counter examples featuring female magicians. However, as with
female vampires of literature, female magicians are presented as figures of horror and are
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feared because they control the male mind and body. “This makes clear the fact that
woman is not always perceived as powerless—a passive prop. Rather woman’s power is
often acknowledged, but it is viewed as perilous and perverse” (344). The perversity of
woman’s power is evident in Edison’s “Danse Macabre” when he projects film of Evelyn
Habal.
The female form is further fragmented and dematerialized through technical
means. Giuliana Bruno posits that the analytic nature of dissection is translated directly
into film language. “It is inscribed in the semiotic construction of film, its decoupage (as
the very word connotes, a ‘dissection’ of narration in shots and sequences), its techniques
of framing, and its process of editing, literally called ‘cutting’ a process of
(de)construction of bodies in space” (De Fren 238). A particularly apt example of the
melding of dissection, theater, and cinema is found at the first cinema to open in Naples,
Italy. Prior to projecting the film, the owner Menotti Catteneo conducted an “anatomy
lesson” on a “human body,” really a wax figure. The medico-erotic gaze of an anatomy
lesson or dissection conducted on the female body forms the basis of cinematic pleasure.
By combining narrative and pre-cinematic elements, Edison’s short film of
Evelyn is an early example of the gendering of the voice and body in the mechanical age.
Forrest explains, “From the late eighteenth century, Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s female
harpsichordist and male writing automata separate their activities along gender-based
lines; the image of the woman is deemed more appropriate to performance, while that of
man connotes the large sense of the use of the voice, written or spoken” and the
accompanying authority to express himself (Forrest 72). These patterns continue in early
cinema in which woman often, though not exclusively, the bearer of meaning while man
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is the maker of meaning. “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking
has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze
projects its phantasy onto the female figure which is styled accordingly” (Mulvey 715).
The female body is styled to maximize visual and erotic impact and close-ups of
(eroticized) female body parts such as the face and legs are all evidence of her status as
object.
The diagnoses of Alicia and Evelyn are articulated using sculpture and
photography that reinforce the “to-be-looked-at nature” of their professions of actress and
dancer respectively. Meaning is generated by “he-who-gazes,” not by “she-who-is-gazedupon.” Both sculpture and photography capture the disparities between the subject’s mind
or spirit and body. This split between the mind and body is also part of Mistress
Anderson’s and Hadaly’s pathologies. Mistress Anderson is diagnosed with hysteria and
Edison controls her physical body with the aid of the spirit Sowana. Hadaly’s physical
body is veiled and housed in shadows. As will be demonstrated, spirits and shadows
allow Mistress Anderson and Hadaly to control their own behavior and thoughts.
The third pathology and diagnosis in L’Eve future occurs at the end of the novel
when Edison explains that Mistress Anderson/Sowana suffers from hysteria. In my
chapters on the works of Zola and Rachilde, I discuss hysteria as a determinant of normal
behavior in legal, social, and literary situations. In my reading of Villiers’ novel, I focus
on the use of the reproductive technologies of sculpture and photography for depicting
hysteria. At the Salpêtrière, French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot transformed the
hysterics he treated into living statues and actresses. The clinic was designed to treat the
automatic and erratic behaviors associated with automatisme ambulatoire and the
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renunciation of one’s will. However, the iatrogenic nature of hysteria suggests that
patients and doctors were equally responsible the cultivation of the disease. The
seemingly mechanical behaviors of the hysteric are to some extent learned. Secondly, I
discuss hypnosis as a treatment for hysteria at both the Salpêtrière and in L’Eve future.
Hypnosis allowed clinicians to transform the unpredictable female body into a
predictable machine. Edison’s hysteric is not so susceptible and maintains control of her
own mind.
Trauma, puberty, sexual intercourse and motherhood were all considered potential
origins of hysteria, but being female was the most common cause of all.45 Hysteria in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a “trash can” disease—any symptom or
illness that couldn’t be identified or explained was lumped under the category of hysteria.
“Located on the problematic border between psychosomatic and somatic disorders,
hysteria was a confusion of real and imagined illness. In an era without demons and
before Freud’s unconscious, hysteria fell into a theoretical vacuum. The female body was
viewed as the site of a disturbing and incomprehensible split between its inside and
outside” (Hustvedt 5-6). The incongruities between Alicia and Evelyn’s appearance and
personality are considered symptoms of hysteria. It is worth noting that all of the female
protagonists in L’Eve future exhibit symptoms of hysteria, but it is Mistress Anderson
who presents the most symptoms of a classic hysteric and is easily read as such. Annie
45
Charcot believed hysteria was a neurologic disorder and worked hard to debunk previous
theories that hysteria was a disease of the female reproductive system. Nevertheless, despite his claims that
hysteria knows no gender, he continued to consider it a woman’s condition (Hustvedt 26).
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Anderson began to exhibit signs of hysteria following her husband’s affair with Evelyn
Habal and his suicide.46
My reading of Villiers is grounded in the domains of art and medicine. As artists
and clinicians, neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and Edison use aesthetics and technology
to create new visualizations and fictions of the female body. Freud described Charcot as a
visuel and the emphasis on the visual in Charcot’s work is evident. Charcot drew stilllifes and painted throughout his life and many of his colleagues were artists as and it is
therefore not surprising that drawing, sculpture, and photography became popular
methods for documenting hysterical symptoms at the Salpêtrière. “Charcot described the
physical characteristic of hysteria in great detail, and repeatedly produced visual
representations of its various poses in photographs, drawings, wax casts, as well as staged
reenactments” (Hustvedt 49).47 Edison is also described as a visuel and he is compared to
French artist Gustave Doré. Edison’s physiognomy “rappelait, il y a quelques années,
d’une manière frappante, celle d’un illustre Français, Gustave Doré. C’était presque le
visage de l’artiste traduit en un visage de savant. Aptitudes congénères, applications
différentes” (Villiers 39). Like Charcot, Edison’s artistic skills are applied to medicine
and medicine was a practice consisting of equal parts art and science.
Charcot believed that photography and the camera were the most objective means
of documenting hysteria. Perhaps the most famous photographic depiction of hysteric
contortions and convulsive attacks is Charcot’s Iconographie photographique de la
Salpêtrière. Scholar Didi Huberman suggests that, “Charcot sought to intensify the
46
Mistress Anderson is also called Annie or Any Anderson. These names are similar
phonologically and “Any” in particular suggests that any woman could suffer the same fate as Mistress
Anderson.
47
I discuss the use of wax statues in the study and treatment of hysteria in my chapter on Rachilde.
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objectivity and heighten the vivisectional quality of his research by using photography, a
seeming mirror-image of nature. Neither a painting nor a drawing, the photograph was
more like a microscope, emphasizing and capturing the pathological reality, ostensibly
without the prejudice of artistic license” (Hustvedt 162-163). Despite Charcot’s claims to
objectivity, many of the photographs, particularly Augustine’s attitudes passionnelles, are
romantic in nature. Although the women at the Salpêtrière did suffer from hysteria or
other neurologic ailments, critics have long suggested that hysteria was an iatrogenic
disease, one cultivated in the clinic. For instance, Blanche Whitmann became Charcot’s
start patient, a model hysteric. “Her symptoms, which had at first been unpredictable,
became prototypical, medically perfect” (48). Blanche arrived with pre-existing
symptoms that she modified over time to meet evolving medical standards. Diagnosis and
interpretation of the body came from a male clinician, but through participation in
medical demonstrations, female patients like Blanche retained a modicum of control over
their body.
Hypnosis was a method of controlling female behavior used at the Salpêtrière and
in L’Eve future.48 Hypnosis was first popularized by Franz Anton Mesmer who claimed
man could be controlled by a universal fluid exerting cosmic influences. In the medical
and legal fields, the use of hypnosis raised questions about unconscious mental activity,
memory, suggestibility, and manipulation. Edison believes whole-heartedly in the
practice of hypnotism saying, “Elles ont démontré, vous le savez, que la Science, à la fois
ancienne et récente, du Magnétisme humain est une science positive, indiscutable”
(Villiers 332). By describing magnetism as a positivist science, Edison places it among
48
As Asti Hustvedt explains, two competing schools of thought regarding hypnosis in the clinical
setting existed. In the Nancy School, hypnotic suggestion was used as a treatment. Charcot and others at the
Salpêtrière used hypnosis to control, not treat, the hysteric’s body.
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modern scientific and medical techniques. Charcot worked to legitimize the practice of
hypnotism and believed it was a neurosis only found in hysterics. Charcot identified three
types of hypnotic states as well as their hysterical counterparts. Hysterical lethargy,
catalepsy, and somnambulism occur naturally during a hysterical attack; hypnotic
lethargy, catalepsy, and somnambulism are induced artificially through hypnosis
(Hustvedt 59). The goal of hypnotism was not to cure hysteria, but to transform an
unpredictable, undisciplined natural woman into a disciplined and predictable artificial
woman.
Alicia and Evelyn are imperfect hysterics because they can only become healthy
when artificially reproduced. “On the other hand, Mistress Any Anderson, or Sowana, is
a model patient, a perfect example of the amazing transfiguring possibilities of hysteria,
once it has been mastered” (Hustvedt 38). Any Anderson is able to be controlled by
Edison’s hypnotic powers. Edison explains that Any Anderson began to suffer “d’un mal
qui la réduisit à l’inaction complète—d’une de ces grandes névroses reconnues incurables
celle du Sommeil” (331). Edison nevertheless decides to cure his friend and began to use
his hypnotic skills on her. “Grâce à l’état de torpeur vibrante, suraiguë, où se trouvait
notre malade…se développa, vite, jusqu’au degré le plus intense peut-être…j’en vins
donc à établir un courant si subtil entre cette dormeuse rare et moi” (333). Once
hypnotized or induced into a cataleptic or somnambulist state, Any Anderson will do
whatever Edison tells her to do.
At the Salpêtrière, lights, gongs, whistles or tuning forks were used to induce a
cataleptic state in patients. Once in this seemingly anesthetized state, electricity was used
to animate her body. “An electric probe was applied to her [Blanche] face that would set
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in motion an entire repertoire of facial expressions. By the stopping the current once the
desired look appeared, the expression would remain indefinitely imprinted, and the
appropriate gesture would follow mechanically” (Hustvedt 69). Once hypnotized,
Blanche and other hysterics were turned into machines. Dr. Foveau de Courmelles, a
pioneer of electrotherapy, says, “Although at first an inert, plastic mass of flesh and
bones…the cataleptic subject allows herself to be molded at the will of the operator. She
becomes a soft wax figure on which the most fantastic emotions can be imprinted, she is
an automaton capable of being animated” (70). Explicit comparisons were made between
hypnotized patients and wax figures, statues, and automata. Charcot compared his
artificial hysteric to La Mettrie’s man-machine and his fellow clinicians Tourette and
Richer considered her a sophisticated version of Vaucanson’s animated doll.
Edison employs similar techniques to control Any Anderson and animate his
android. The connection between hypnotist and patient is maintained by two rings filled
with electromagnetic fluid, one worn by Edison, the other by Any Anderson. Hadaly also
wears rings on her fingers and beads around her neck. In this way, Hadaly is likened to
Charcot’s artificial hysterics. Ewald’s relationship to her “will function like that of a
hypnotist to her subject since she has been programmed by Edison to respond to Ewald’s
suggestions, just as the hysteric responds to those of her doctor” (Hustvedt 42). The
jewels around Hadaly’s fingers and neck act like a remote control, guaranteeing the
android’s submission and responses. Charcot and his colleagues used ether, chloroform,
electric shock therapy and magnets to control their patients’ behavior and elicit certain
responses. “Edison’s solution—the rings functioning like electric shock therapy and
adornment—incorporates both therapeutic and aesthetic ambitions (the cataleptic as
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statue), assuring the docility of the android while at the same time transforming her into a
work of art” (Forrest 34). Hadaly’s rings and necklaces make her seem even more like a
real woman.
Although Charcot and Edison placed great faith in their practices, in reality,
hypnotic suggestion rarely worked outside the clinical setting. Sowana, the identity Any
Anderson assumes when hypnotized, is able to circumvent Edison’s control and in this
way she represents the limits of male aurality and authority. Edison explains, “J’ai dit
Sowana tout à l’heure. Vous n’oubliez pas, sans doute, que la plupart des grandes
magnétisées finissent par se designer à la troisième personne, comme les petits enfants.
Elles se voient distantes de leur organisme, de tout leur système sensorial enfin” (Villiers
333). Referring to herself in the third person further separates Sowana from Annie
Anderson’s physical body. Indeed, Sowana only exists as sound. “Sans corps, sans
‘ombre’, cet ‘être invisible’ offre peu de prise au regard et à l’intelligence masculins et
échappe évidemment à la règle qui impose l’immobilité à la femme” (Rollet 97). Edison
admits to Ewald, “Si je connais Mistress Anderson, je vous atteste QUE JE NE
CONNAIS PAS SOWANA” (335). Edison is able to control the female body, but not the
female mind and voice.
Scholars are divided about the extent to which Sowana and Hadaly are able to
establish a feminine milieu that exists beyond Edison’s control. Pascal Rollet suggests
that the feminine milieu and female voice are created within the bounds of male control.
He states, “En somme, si nous devons retenir l’alliance spécifiquement féminine qui
s’oppose au projet phallocrate d’Edison, il faut préciser que ce n’est pas une valorisation
de la femme en soi qui a lieu dans L’Eve future, mais la valorisation d’une voix
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intellectuelle et féminine qui accède à une suprématie dans un ordre et selon des
paramètres masculins” (Rollet 98). According to Rollet, Hadaly and Sowana are
programmed to meet Edison’s desires and project his philosophies. If the voice,
particularly the female voice, is detached from the body and considered an object, it is
possible for a feminine philosophical milieu to exist outside the parameters established by
Edison. “Hadaly’s voice is the perfect echo of male desire, yet within it resides Sowana’s
re-incarnated voice, which becomes a dis-incarnated voice once the android is gone. The
female voice is now absolutely free, no longer the result of technology but of her absolute
non-relation to Ewald” (Butler 74). Sowana maintains an electro-magnetic connection
with Hadaly, but any tangible connection between Sowana’s voice and Hadaly’s body is
destroyed when Hadaly and Ewald travel to Europe. Furthermore, Ewald is attracted to
the android’s physical body which reminds him of Alicia, but he has no connection to the
android’s voice that replaced Alicia’s coarse speech.
Marilyn Gaddis Rose provides a third scenario for the establishment of a feminine
milieu. Gaddis Rose suggests that Sowana, not Edison, creates Hadaly and that Edison is
in fact the target of female revenge. Sowana uses the same type of artifice as Evelyn did
to program herself to be a “man’s woman.” “Sowana creates Hadaly/Alicia to destroy
another exemplar of virility, another man who wants a woman programmed to his
desires,” and that man is Edison (Gaddis Rose 120). By sacrificing herself, Hadaly, and
Alicia, Sowana does not allow woman to be a male creation. When Edison explained his
plans for the android, Sowana asked him to explain how the android would work. “Afin,
l’ayant étudiée en totalité, de pouvoir à l’occasion S’Y INCORPORER ELLE-MÊME ET
L’ANIMER DE SON ÉTAT ‘SURNATUREL’” (335). Sowana is sometimes able to
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enter the android’s body and control it. Hadaly explains to Ewald that she is an
otherworldly spirit who was born by occupying Edison’s machine. She says, “Je
m’appelais en la pensée de qui me créait, de sorte qu’en croyant seulement agir de luimême, il m’obéissait aussi obscurément. Ainsi, me suggérant, par son entremise, dans le
monde sensible, je me suis saisie de tous les objets qui m’ont semblé le mieux appropriés
au dessein de te ravir” (315).49 The android uses Sowana’s spiritual ability to occupy the
material world. Hadaly’s role in her self-creation is evidenced by the use of the word “I”.
Though Hadaly played a role in her own creation, her life is controlled by Sowana.
Sowana commits suicide and definitively severs any connections established between her
mind and Edison. Her death also triggers Hadaly’s demise.
According to nineteenth-century medical thought, woman is naturally
pathologically ill or deformed. The broad term automatisme ambulatoire was used to
account for many seemingly erratic behaviors that were in fact innate and signaled a lack
of control over one’s mind and body. Alicia’s pathological deformity and Evelyn’s
physical degeneracy are examples of this. Edison uses sculpture, photography, the
phonograph, and moving pictures to dissect and diagnose women. These technologies of
re-production operate on the basis of presence and absence and generate a split between
the female body and mind. As a result, the female body is considered devoid of meaning
until gazed upon or penetrated by a male mind. However, each of the female protagonists
is able to maintain a certain degree of independent movement and thought. In the
49
“I called myself into existence in the thought of him who created me, so that while [Edison]
thought he was acting of his own accord, he was also deeply, darkly obedient to me. Thus, making use of
his craft to introduce myself into this world of sense, I made every last object that seemed to be capable in
any way of drawing you out of it” (Kang 243) .
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following section, I discuss how Edison takes technologies of re-production one step
further by producing an artificial woman.
The Eve of Reproductive Futurisms
In this section I analyze the android Hadaly as an example of a reproductive
futurism; her creation signals the eve or dawn of reproductive possibilities. I interpret
Edison’s android using the language of evolutionary theories, creation stories, and the
figure of the dandy, and conclude that Hadaly challenges Edison’s godhood and gender
authority rather than confirming it. As he explains the origins and inner workings of his
android, Edison identifies the limitations of evolutionary theories which favor feminized
Nature, and argues instead that anthrogenesis is not possible without technogenesis.
Edison’s android is presented both as a triumph over Nature, and as the perfection of
earlier attempts to fabricate a human simulacrum. Secondly, I discuss Hadaly’s identity
as a dandy and the implications that this categorization has on the creation and locus of
identity. As a cultural figure, the dandy’s principal occupation was the fabrication and
commodification of the self. By externalizing the creation of the self and projecting their
desires onto the android, Edison and Ewald cease to be performers of their identity and
instead are reduced to mere spectators.
Finally, I consider L’Eve future as a creation story of the Industrial Age. Like
many such narratives, the novel features a male scientist or engineer who fabricates a
female or feminized machine. In the first half of this chapter, I identified ways in which
Sowana and Hadaly contribute to the creative process. Here I consider how the novel
challenges the creation story in Genesis in which a divine being creates the original man
and woman. In the quest to fabricate an ideal woman, Hadaly not only contributes to her
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own creation but as the new Eve she is no longer simply man’s downfall but his salvation
as well. My analysis of L’Eve future aligns itself along a femino-centric spectrum and
demonstrates how this new type of representational narrative challenges classic notions
of creation, godhood, and science versus Nature that orient themselves around a gendered
dichotomy of man/woman, male/female, and good/evil.
In typical representational narratives, male characters create female or feminized
objects using techniques developed in the laboratory or factory. Edison and Banks, the
engineer in Verne’s La Maison à vapeur, use science to improve upon, or even
circumvent, the laws of nature. These engineers believe that their machines are superior
to animals or humans produced naturally. Villiers’ novel, and less so Verne’s,
emphasizes the gendered aspects of the science versus nature debate. Edison believes that
the masculine domain of science will allow him to triumph over (female) Nature.50 In
contrast, in her interpretation of L’Eve future, Catherine Bordeau examines the issues of
creation, godhood, and gender authority by finding room for female maneuvering in
evolutionary theories. She posits that naturalist theories such as evolution put forth by
Lamarck and Darwin challenge and threaten male mastery in two ways: first, in
evolutionary theories, God is replaced by Nature who is personified as female. The
publication of Darwin’s The Origin of the Species in 1859, “a provoqué bien des
émotions sur le plan social et a pu ainsi constituer un socle poétique pour l’imaginaire
littéraire” (Clermont 348). Science-fiction writers were drawn to Darwin’s theories not
50
In La Maison à vapeur, the gendered dynamic of science is revealed when Banks argues that
exploring and penetrating the earth will lead to mastery over it. There is an oblique comparison between the
earth and the female body which were both sites of the speculative and penetrative scope of nineteenth
century scientific practices.
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only because of the ideas and emotions at stake but also because the nature of the theory
itself.
Le darwinisme n’a pas seulement un caractère explicatif (tel le point
essential du mécanisme de la sélection naturelle). Cette théorie de
l’évolution possède également une dimension historique (la question de
l’origine des espèces, la lenteur du processor évolutif) et surtout prédictive
(la possibilité pour une espèce de varier sur le plan physiologique, ou bien
la possibilité de la fin d’une espèce). (348)
This three-pronged approach, explanatory, historical, and predictive, lends itself easily to
the speculative genre of science fiction which asks “what if X happened to man?” For
Villiers’ Edison, the historical and predictive aspects of evolution are more important
than the explanatory. Edison tries to outdo Nature by creating an android and in so doing,
he explores the limits of nature (historical) and suggests how his android is better
(predictive), but spends little time explaining how the Alicias of the modern world came
to dominate and be such a problem.
In particular, Edison adopts an historical approach which outlines the limits of
Nature, her slowness to reproduce and her finite resources. Edison describes Nature to
Lord Ewald saying, “‘Et entre nous, la Nature est une grande dame à laquelle je voudrais
bien être présenté, car tout le monde en parle et personne ne l’a jamais vue” (Villiers
119). Edison identifies several ways that his android is superior to people produced by
Nature. First, despite an abundance of resources, Nature is slow to produce, but Edison’s
android takes a matter of weeks, not years to complete. Edison says to Lord Ewald,
“Songez que la puissante Nature, avec toutes ses ressources, met encore aujourd’hui seize
ans et neuf mois à confectionner une jolie femme! Et aux prix de quelles ébauches! Sans
cesse modifiées, jour à jour, pour durer si peu! Et qu’une maladie peut effacer de son
coup de vent” (Villiers 248). Secondly, Nature’s products are not finished or correct the
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first time: a woman produced naturally is continually modified as she ages, while the
android is a finished product whose character remains constant.
Lastly, Edison laments that Nature’s works are finite and fragile and he attempts
to diminish Nature’s prestige by reproducing her works (Bordeau 193). As impressed as
he is with Hadaly, Lord Ewald is even more impressed with the artificial hand Edison has
created and believes it is real flesh. However, Edison explains that the arm is merely
artificial skin. “La chair se fane et vieillit: ceci est un composé de substances exquises,
élaborées par la chimie, de manière à confondre la suffisance de la ‘Nature’” (119).
Edison’s critique of Nature’s works is that they fade and age. The things he creates in his
laboratory are timeless and presumably do not die. “La suffisance” can be translated as
either “smugness” or “plenty.” Edison clearly considers his works superior to those of
Nature and unhampered by supply issues, could produce countless new Eves. In contrast,
according to evolutionary theorists, Nature does not have unlimited resources and
instead, she strategically uses existing conditions and modifies them to create diversity
(Bordeau 193). However, Nature has the last word in the novel since Hadaly dies in a
shipwreck. Nature’s triumph calls Edison’s technical mastery into question. In his
presentation of nineteenth-century debates about the future relationship between science
and man, Villiers suggests, like Verne, that anthrogenesis and technogenesis go hand-inhand. Edison believes that because women are mechanical, replacing natural women with
machines is possible.
Edison created his android with the intent to fabricate a new race of women.
Hadaly is meant to replace the diseased women of the nineteenth-century. Edison
believes his choice to replace natural woman with an artificial woman is logical because
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women are inherently mechanical and artificial as evidenced by Alicia’s, Evelyn’s and
Mistress Anderson’s behaviors.51
Si l’Artificiel assimilé, amalgame plutôt, à l’être humain, peut produire de
telles catastrophes, et puisque, par suite, à tel ou tel degré physique ou
moral, toute femme qui les cause tient plus ou moins d’un andréïde, --eh
bien! Chimère pour chimère, pourquoi pas l’Andréïde elle-même?
Puisqu’il est impossible, en ces sortes de passions, de sortir de l’illusion,
strictement personnelle, et qu’elles tiennent, toutes, de l’artificiel,
puisqu’en un mot la Femme elle-même nous donne l’exemple de se
remplacer par de l’Artificiel, épargnons-lui, s’il se peut, cette besogne.
(Forrest 23)
When comparing Hadaly to these other women, Edison sees Hadaly as the more perfect
and real machine, la réelle et non pas la vivante (Forrest 23). Although he explains how
his android is superior to natural women, Edison also situates his android along the
historical and cultural continuum of automata. Earlier attempts to create an imitation-man
produced monstrous results. “Albert le Grand, Vaucanson, Maelzel, Horner, etc….furent,
à peine, des fabricants d’épouvantails pour les oiseaux. Leurs automates sont dignes de
figurer dans les plus hideux salons de cire, à titre d’objets de dégout d’où ne sort qu’une
forte odeur de bois, d’huile rance, et de gutta-percha” (Villiers 120). These “scarecrows”
were rudimentary in their execution, wax, wigs, and the wind-up key used to animate
them were all evident and did little Edison, argues, to give man a sense of power.
Edison’s biggest criticism is that earlier automata had a sense of emptiness about them;
Hadaly is endowed with an identity, a presence.
Hadaly’s body is dissected and put on display in much the same way as the other
female bodies in L’Eve future, but with one key difference: Villiers uses medieval and
early Renaissance dissection techniques in order to capture the speculative and wondrous
51
Evelyn Habal is categorized as l’artificiel illusoirement vivant and her clothes and make-up are
purported to be her real bones. At one point Alicia’s dress gives off sparks which suggests she and Hadaly
are both animated by electricity (Forrest 23).
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nature of dissection. Prior to the Renaissance it was believed that four humors controlled
the human body. Later, anatomists such as the Italian Andreas Vesalius (1514-64) used
dissection to disprove this theory. The anatomy theater, public demonstrations of
dissections, which became popular during the Renaissance combined art and science and
the public nature of the event served to dispel some of the secrecy, magic and mystery
that once surrounded dissection.52 Villiers draws upon this tradition when Edison
compares himself to Vesalius. Lord Ewald watches as Edison selects a crystal scalpel
from among his tools and lays Hadaly on the table, her head resting on a cushion.
“L’Andréïde à présent couchée sur elle comme une trépassée sur une dalle
d’amphithéâtre. ‘Rappelez-vous le tableau d’André Vésale! Dit en souriant Edison; bien
que nous soyons seuls, nous en exécutons un peu l’idée en ce moment’” (Villiers 211212). This is a semi-public demonstration of dissection techniques. Theatrical and
spectacular elements of the anatomy theater are maintained through references to the
visual, particularly the painting (tableau) of Vesalius. “Under the influence of Vesalian
anatomy, the visual began to vie with the textual for authority, eventually giving rise to
the concept of autopsy, or autopsis—“‘seeing for oneself’” (De Fern 240). Edison’s
dissection of Hadaly is an example of the clinical method outlined by Foucault.
Visualization and spatial mapping of diseases in the human body are two important
developments in nineteenth-century medicine that Foucault discusses in La Naissance de
la clinique. The dissection of Hadaly is different because mapping the effects of a disease
on the body is not the concern, but visually mapping and charting the body are. Entire
52
See Roseanne Montillo’s The Lady and Her Monsters, specifically chapter two “Waking the
Dead.”
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chapters discuss the android’s features including: “la bouche de rose,” “les dents de
perle,” “les yeux physiques,” “la chevelure,” and “l’épiderme.”
Although Edison provides detailed explanations of how his android functions,
Hadaly’s body is presented in shadows and remains veiled or sealed in her coffin most of
the time. Hadaly is first presented to Lord Ewald draped in a shroud and surrounded by
shadows. “La vision semblait avoir un visage de ténèbres: un lacis de perles serrait, à la
hauteur de son front, les enroulent d’un tissue de deuil dont l’obscurité lui cachait toute la
tête” (Villiers 114). The words ténèbres (shadows), l’obscurité (obscurity), and cachait
(was hiding or covering) underscore Hadaly’s hidden identity. It is impossible for Lord
Ewald to see her clearly. References to shadows and veils continue throughout Edison’s
descriptions of Hadaly. Catherine Bordeau argues that shadows are part of a feminized
and transforming milieu in L’Eve future. Associated either with the femme fatale or with
Hadaly and Sowana, “the diffusion of the ‘shadow’ and of other atmospheric images
provides the basis for a gendered model of women’s influence. To the extent that L’Eve
future produced its own disruptive ‘atmosphere’, its own unexpected ‘play of shadows’,
the novel itself engages in a ‘feminine’ seduction through which the reader is invited to
diverge from patriarchal reason” (Bordeau 203). Evelyn’s clothes and make-up are
“veils” that keep her true nature hidden and allow her to literally seduce Anderson.
Sowana and Hadaly use similar means to divert Edison’s plans and seduce Ewald.
Shadows are also an identifying element in the novel’s development of the dandy.
As part of the Decadent tradition of novels and stories featuring dandies and dance hall
girls, L’Eve future explores changes in class consciousness brought about by the
mechanization of industry and entertainment. One notable fin-de-siècle figure, the dandy,
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was particularly attuned to these class changes because his subjectivity was closely linked
to his evolving social status. These aristocrats and artists saw their beliefs compromised
as societal values shifted increasingly towards bourgeois capitalism. Rather than invest in
the creation of wealth, the dandy invested in creating the self (Houk 60). As dandies,
Edison and Ewald set out to establish their identity by creating an android. However, by
projecting their desires and identities onto Hadaly, they no longer perform their identity
and are reduced to spectators. As a female dandy, Hadaly complicates issues of the threat
of the female sexual Other in traditional portrayals of the male dandy.
Like many dandies, Ewald projects his self-image and soul onto an art object, in
this case the actress Alicia. He fears that Hadaly won’t resemble Alicia. Edison explains
that although the android’s physical appearance is important, her soul is more important.
“C’est cette ombre que vous aimez…c’est elle votre esprit que vous appelez, que vous
voyez, que vous créez en votre vivante et qui n’est que votre âme, dédoublé en elle”
(Garelick 464). Lord Ewald loves the image of himself that he sees reflected in Alicia and
in this way he is a precursor to Dorian Gray.53 Both Lord Ewald and Dorian engage in
specular, auto-erotic relationships. Dorian only loves the actress Sybil Vane when she is
performing; and he develops a relationship with his never-aging portrait. Lord Ewald is
similar to the Huysmans hero Des Esseintes who falls in love with a ventriloquist.
Edison’s use of the words soul (esprit) and shadow (ombre) to describe what Ewald
admires in Alicia recall the novel’s play of shadows and the creation of a feminized
milieu. In the context of the dandy, the presence of shadows is indicative of Hadaly’s
existence apart and the process of self-creation. Hadaly exists in the shadows is because
53
I discuss The Picture of Dorian Gray in Chapter One as part of a discussion about murder as an
artistic act in Zola’s novels.
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she is not yet a complete person. Her metal frame or skeleton houses the possibility of a
person. “Ce n’est encore que du diamant brut, je vous assure. C’est la squelette d’une
ombre attendant que l’OMBRE soit” (121). Lord Ewald is skeptical that Edison’s plan is
possible and he asks if Hadaly will know who she is or have a sense of self. Edison
replies, “‘Je dis: sans doute! Puisque cela dépend de vous’” (130). As readers come to
realize, Hadaly’s identity depends on Sowana and her, not on Ewald.
Though part of the classic Decadent tradition, Garelick maintains that Villiers
departs from this literary model as well. “While Ewald prefigures both Des Esseintes and
Dorian Gray, there is another point of ostensible resemblance among the novels that
actually distances L’Eve future from the other two. This is the resemblance between the
classical dandy and Hadaly” (Garelick 464). Dorian Gray and Des Esseintes resemble the
android Hadaly since they all attempt to live as art objects. Comparing Hadaly to a dandy
and even going so far as to suggest that she is one, complicates our understanding of how
a dandy creates his identity, particularly the role of spectator/performer. The dandy’s role
as spectator and performer of identity is compromised by the technologies of
reproduction that Edison uses to create his android. These technologies include:
sculpture, photography, the phonograph, electricity, and the mimeograph. “As critics
have noted, Edison’s inventions all have a structure of presence/absence that informs
Villiers’s treatment of the infusion of consciousness into an inanimate machine. Their
preoccupation with transporting the trace of the other is also relevant in this context” (De
Dobay Rifelj 130). Although the android contains traces of Alicia and Sowana, she is
meant to be the projection of Lord Ewald’s self-image, her various movements and
utterances perfect performances of Lord Ewald’s identity. The performative nature of the
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android results in a splitting of the roles of audience and performer instead of Edison’s
proposed auto-performance. “However much Hadaly will function as Ewald’s reflection,
she is nonetheless apart from him; the creation of Hadaly externalizes the dandy’s
process of self-reification” (Garelick 465). By introducing traces of the Other,
technologies of reproduction break the unified image presented resulting in absences,
lacuna, and fragmented identities.
The threat of the Other, especially the female Other, is a pressing concern for the
dandy. The dandy is generally a man; however, female dandies do exist.54 As Deborah
Houk explains, “Issues of gender and its potential for uncertainty come to the forefront in
any discussion of the dandy, largely because this figure so skillfully combines
characteristics that are traditionally separated as masculine or feminine” (Houk 59). For
example, the dandy often pays extra attention to clothing, primping, and masquerading in
front of others, behaviors which are traditionally associated with women. The threat of
the female Other is particularly pronounced in matters of sexual relationships, since the
dandy remains sexually apart and never loses himself in sexual encounters in order to
avoid this threat.55 The dandy may desire a woman, but obtaining that desire isn’t his
objective. Achieving his desire has the potential to take control away from the dandy and
transfer some of it to the Other. “Because the subject is constituted in language, all
signification must necessarily pass through the place of the Other…Moreover, defined as
a gap opened up between need and demand, desire entertains a particular relationship to
54
Deborah Houk’s article “Sexual Construction and Sexual Identity in Nineteenth Century French
Dandyism” discusses dandies in the works of Huysmans, Baudelaire, Balzac and Rachilde. I discuss two of
Rachilde’s female dandies, Raoule de Vénérande and Eliante Donalger, in chapter four.
55
For instance, the narrator explains that Samuel Cramer, the dandy in Baudelaire’s La Fanfarlo,
considers love “moins une affaire des sens que du raisonnement” (Houk 67).
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the Other” (68). The Other can potentially withhold satisfaction leaving the desire
unfulfilled.56
Villiers solves the problem of potentially unfulfilled desire by making Hadaly
incapable of reproduction. The author’s choice to leave out Hadaly’s reproductive system
is noteworthy given that Naturalist and Decadent literature teemed with the spectacle of
the uterus, scenes depicting prolonged and difficult births, abortions, miscarriages, and
cases of syphilis and hysteria (Forrest 26). In the late nineteenth-century, some
gynecological discussions and practices focused on isolating disease itself in the ovaries
or uterus and led to the belief that the female reproductive system was the site of almost
all dysfunction and illness in women. Such notions gave rise to the increased practice of
hysterectomies and overectomies in order to eradicate dysfunction.57 However, “The
uterus as the site of contagion, of lust, and of animality is a projection by men of
medicine, art, and philosophy of their perceptions of their own desire. Surgery’s
ovariotomoies and hysterectomies and engineering’s inorganic mechanical women take
the transference one step further by physically acting upon that desire by excising it along
with the uterus and the ovaries” ( 27).58 Such surgeries were believed to “unsex” women.
As a reproductive futurism, Hadaly is ironically sterile.
Finally, sexual distance is maintained by associating the female dandy with stock
female figures of horror, namely non-reproducing vampiric women. Garelick maintains
that “Women give the lie to the dandy’s androgynous and autochthonous pose, and tend,
56
See also Kai Mikkonen “Narrative Lines of Desire in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Future Eve, pp
161-170.
57
See Michael Finn’s article, “Female Sterilization and Artificial Insemination at the French Fin
de Siècle: Facts and Fictions.”
58
Bram Djikstra has found evidence of clitorectomies in novels and films featuring female
vampires. The stake driven through the vampire’s heart is often seen as a metaphor for removing the
vampire’s sexual organs. See Evil Sisters pp. 119-120.
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therefore, to appear as inhuman or unnatural monsters: sphinxes, vampires, or femmes
fatales. By transforming them into figures of horror, the decadent novel suppresses the
reproductivity of women” (465).59 I find Garelick’s premise that vampiric women do not
reproduce specious, since traditionally, the vampire needs the blood of another in order to
survive and often the victim turns into a vampire. In L’Eve future, it is true that female
characters do not reproduce; in fact, each of them dies. Nevertheless, Evelyn Habal is
able to pass on her illness to Mr. Anderson, weakening and ultimately killing him.60 In
fact, Evelyn is also identified as a female dandy: she is completely self-created and
artificial. In her mastery of être and paraître, “she represents a threatening usurpation of
self-control and self-awareness. Like Alicia, Evelyn displays a division of form and
content, interior and exterior. And yet, she is quite conscious of this distinction—she is
her own Edison in a sense” (467). Ewald establishes the similarities between the two
when he sees Evelyn’s photographs and asks, “Qui est cette sorcière?” which recalls
Edison’s sobriquet as the “Sorcerer of Menlo Park.” Sorceresses, female vampires and
dandies are all manifestations of Eve and are the source of man’s downfall.
59
The trend of labelling women “vampires” began earlier in the nineteenth century. Darwin’s
discoveries were used to categorize female sexuality and identify it as a source of social disruption. By the
twentieth century, Djikstra explains, all women were viewed as vampires, predators, and harbingers of
death to men (Djikstra 3). Images of male and female vampires were compounded with nineteenth century
imperialist politics and the Other was portrayed as evil and inferior. Racial discourses such as these evolved
into the eugenics theories of the twentieth century when the vampire was associated with Jews, Orientals,
and those of non-Aryan stock.
60
An example of the relationship between female vampire and artist is Philip Burne Jones’ 1897
painting The Vampire. “The painting showed a young man prone and lifeless upon his bed, his pale features
bloodless, his body drained of all its energy and manhood. ….A dark spot, almost like a bullet wound, was
visible on his half-bare chest. Hovering above him, leaning on bare arms in a cat-like half-crouched
position, sharp teeth flashing with a steely glint between thin lips, the woman” (Djikstra 83). It was
rumored that Burne Jones painted this following an infatuation with a popular London actress. The
painting’s stage-like setting and bohemian décor suggest a theatrical element and that the lifeless man
depicted was an artist. Comparisons can readily be made between The Vampire and the relationship
between Evelyn Habal and Edward Anderson.
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Finally, as a representational text and creation story, Villiers’ narrative challenges
man’s godhood. As Marie Lathers explains, representational texts involve the fabrication
of a female or feminized object and are often retellings of the stories of Pygmalion and
Galatea or Frankenstein. As the nineteenth-century progressed, technology, not
supernatural forces, was used to fabricate the artificial feminine as demonstrated in
Villiers’ novel by Edison’s recourse to technology. In her study of L’Eve future, BlainPinel asks if Edison is a profane creator or a redeemer; is he an equal of God or is he a
rival like Satan or Faust?61 “Comme bien des romantiques avant lui, Villiers achoppe sur
la conscience d’un monde si peu acceptable qu’il justifierait une nouvelle rédemption.
Quelle serait alors la figure capable d’assumer un rôle Christique?” (Blain-Pinel 599).
Villiers’ idea is to have recourse to the artificial in order to fight modern depravity. “Si en
effet, la création d’un Eve artificielle se justifie par l’artificialité de la femme moderne, la
révolte ne se positionne plus alors contre la création originelle mais contre la perversion
que l’homme a imposée à cette création, dans une dérive que Dieu entérine par son
silence” (610). God’s silence causes Edison to despair and he turns to science to solve the
problem. Late nineteenth-century representational texts such as L’Eve future or Charles
Cros’ La Machine à changer la caractère des femmes reinforce the belief that Woman,
not man, is flawed and can and should be changed.
In the creative role assigned to man, representational texts underscore man’s
godhood. This is especially evident in L’Eve future with its references to the story of
Genesis and the fall of Man. However, Blain-Pinel and Linn Konrad suggest that
although many of Villiers’ female characters are vilified, he also suggests that Woman is
61
Marie Blain-Pinel. “Edison créateur, profanateur ou rédempteur? À propos de l’Eve
future de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam.”
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the source of mankind’s salvation. The Judeo-Christian creation story in Genesis is
indeed problematic; we are taught and conditioned to blame Eve, rather than Eve and
Adam, for the Fall of man. In the Christian Bible the possibility for mankind’s salvation
occurs in the New Testament when God appears on Earth in the form of Jesus. Villiers
writes his own New Testament so to speak and even goes so far as to create a new
Trinity: Edison is God the father, Hadaly the sinless, pure savior on Earth, and Sowana is
the Holy Spirit. Sowana remains an enigma to readers and spends most of her time in
shadows. For Blain-Pinel, she remains largely in the shadows to lend credence to the idea
of God’s intervention on Earth via the Holy Spirit, and to mitigate the truly profane idea
that the Holy Spirit would be reincarnated in the form of a robot or medium (617).
Furthermore, because Hadaly is actually sterile, her role in saving mankind is perhaps
less literal than one might think. As an ideal, she is meant to give hope, but we are left
waiting for a savior, or Messiah. If Hadaly was intended to be a savior for mankind, why
then, does Villiers destroy her in the end? Perhaps the answer lies in what Hadaly was
meant to be: an ideal, not a reality. Linn Konrad argues that women in Villiers’ oeuvres
are often presented as ideals and this is precisely why they fail.
Tulia, Hadaly, Elën, Sara, and Morgane, all have famous models that
seemingly support the new ideal. But these figurative referents are only
mythological images which function according to the meaning granted
them by men. Because of her beauty and her difference, admired and
feared by man—the male artist—the woman suggests an ideal reality, but
because it is exclusively in her capacity of being a pure image, a signifier,
that she can maintain that power, she must fail.62 (Konrad 124)
Hadaly is a shell onto which Ewald projects his desires. To further clarify, Hadaly is a
machine à fabriquer l’idéal, not the ideal itself.
62
Konrad discusses Isis (1862), L’Eve future (1886), Elën, a play about Helen of Troy, Sara who
is based on Abraham’s wife in the play Axël, and Morgane (1866) which was inspired by Arthurian
legends.
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Villiers’ fictional account of Edison’s attempt to fabricate a female android is
part of a tradition of creation stories and representational texts that assert man’s authority
over woman and the female body. Although it is a modern version of the fall of man,
Villiers rewrites Judeo-Christian tradition and suggests that a woman, the new Eve, is the
source of man’s salvation. Secondly, the role technology plays in the fabrication of
Edison’s android is indicative of the novel’s status as a representational text. As he
outlines the origins and inner workings of his android, Edison explains how his machine
is superior to the works produced by Nature. Anthrogenesis is literally equated with
technogenesis as he uses electricity to create a spark of life in Hadaly. Edison’s godhood
is undermined by the counter-narrative of Hadaly’s self-creation and her identification as
a female dandy. By remaining in the shadows and with the aid of Sowana, Hadaly is able
to create her own identity instead of merely reflecting Ewald’s.
Villiers’ novel L’Eve future features an example of artificial femininity that for
the first time combined technical skill with artistic masterpiece. A fictionalized Thomas
Edison creates his android in order to save the world from dangerous women like Alicia
Clary and Evelyn Habal. Edison’s rationalizations are framed within the discourses of
medicine and psychiatry, one of four institutions that Foucault argued regulated and
articulated relationships between power and the body in nineteenth-century France. In
L’Eve future these institutions or technologies of sex combine with other technologies of
re-production chiefly sculpture, photography, sound production, and electricity, to
produce a new model of woman and femininity. Although grounded in the nineteenthcentury, Villiers’ novel hints at two future technologies of reproduction: the cinema and
cyborgs. Early cinema reproduces the male creator/female object dynamic by privileging
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the male gaze and maintaining the separation between the female body and voice.63 L’Eve
future has inspired at least one feature film Oshii Mamoru’s Ghost in the Shell 2:
Innocence (2004). Mamoru’s film depicts subjectivity and affect in a cyborg.64
Edison’s inventions and the technologies of re-production he employs are based
on the relationship of presence/absence and meaning/void. The empty actress-statues and
angelic mechanical women embody one meaning of automaton, that is, a person who is
incapable of independent thought or movement. However, as I have demonstrated,
Villiers’ female protagonists are able to create a feminine milieu via odors and shadows
that disrupts Edison’s patriarchal reasoning. In her role as a female dandy, Hadaly
assumes the role of performer and Edison and Ewald are mere spectators of the play of
identity.
Finally, I discussed the ways in which Edison’s android challenges gender
authority in traditional narratives of creation, and in debates about science versus Nature.
In L’Eve future, the works of Nature are considered inferior to those of man and
anthrogenesis hinges on progress made in the scientific and industrial fields. However,
natural law prevails and Edison’s project fails. As a creation story for the Industrial Age,
Villiers suggests that Woman has the potential to save man. The active role Villiers gives
to his female characters in L’Eve future reaches a new level in Rachilde’s novel Monsieur
Vénus, which I discuss in the following chapter. In Monsieur Vénus, a woman creates an
artificial man.
63
See Mary Ann Doane’s “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space” (1980)
for discussions of early cinema, sound, and the body.
64
See Sharalyn Orbaugh’s “Emotional Infectivity: Cyborg Affect and the Limits of the Human”
(2008) for analysis of Mamoru’s film and Villiers’ novel.
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The following chapter examines Rachilde’s narratives and the over-arching theme
of diseased female sexuality presented earlier in Zola’s La Bête humaine and Villiers’
L’Eve future. Whereas Villiers uses the clinical approach to diagnose and control (cure)
deviant female sexual and social behavior, Rachilde has no recourse to a cure. Instead,
hysteria is used to explain erratic female behaviors and Rachilde explores the sexual and
social liberties associated with such a diagnosis.
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CHAPTER 4: TEXTUAL ANATOMIES IN MONSIEUR VÉNUS AND LA
JONGLEUSE
Each of the preceeding chapters has presented an example of a re-productive
futurism, specifically the bachelor machine. La Lison, La Stilla, and Hadaly were made
in the likeness of Woman. Rachilde’s narratives, Monsieur Vénus and La Jongleuse are
no different in that respect. However, Rachilde’s writing adds questions related to the
ideological construct of “Woman,” that is, the socio-cultural, political, and historical
concepts of Woman. In her own life and in her literary œuvre, Rachilde draws our
attention not only to what Woman looks like (physical representations), but also to the
ways in which the idea of Woman is constructed through medical, political, and social
discourses.
Nineteenth-century French author Marguerite Eymery (1860-1953), better known
by her penname Rachilde, was a decadent author well-known and read by her
contemporaries, but an author not well-studied by late-twentieth and early-twenty-first
century scholars. In recent decades, however, Rachilde has enjoyed a comeback and her
literary corpus is the focus of scholarly critique in the fields of French literary and
cultural studies, women’s studies, and gender studies. Rachilde is one of the four most
popular nineteenth-century female authors written about today. Scholarly publications
and presentations about her works have held steady at 2% to 3% of all presentations at
the Nineteenth-century French Studies Colloquium between 1980 and 2013 (Corry
Cropper). In this chapter I consider reproductive futurisms in two of Rachilde’s novels:
Monsieur Vénus, published in 1884, and La Jongleuse (The Juggler), published in 1900.
Monsieur Vénus recounts the developing romantic and sexual relationship between
Raoule de Vénérande, a young aristocrat and Jacques Silvert an artist. In their
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relationship, Raoule increasingly adopts the male role and emasculates Jacques, forcing
him to play the part of the woman. At the end of the novel, Raoule fabricates an
automaton from Jacques’ dead body. The narrative of La Jongleuse is primarily a series
of letters exchanged between Eliante Donalger and her latest admirer, medical student
Leon Reille. The theatricalized novel features several dramatic scenes between the two as
Eliante tries to explain her point of view on love, relationships, and sex to Leon. In her
capacity as a jongleuse or juggler, Eliante juggles knives, men, and social conventions.
At the end of the novel she commits suicide in the midst of one of her performances.
My primary analysis of these two novels considers the construction and
deconstruction of the artificial gendered body in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Twenty and twenty-first century scholars and sociologists define sex and
gender as separate categories, but this distinction was not common in the nineteenthcentury. Sex refers to the anatomical organs (penis or vagina and breasts) that make one
male or female. Gender is determined socially, culturally, and temporally. When I refer to
the gendered body as artificial, I do not mean that it doesn’t exist. I use the term artificial
to indicate that although the gendered body can be informed by the sexual body, the
gendered body is not biologically determined and is instead made, remade, and
performed throughout one’s life. Performance and performativity of gender are used
throughout this chapter according to the definition coined by Judith Butler. According to
the tenets of performativity, identity is a fantasy; an idealized identity is the result of
corporeal significations. “In other words, acts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of
an internal core or substance, but produce this effect on the surface of the body, through
the play of signifying absences that suggest, but never reveal, the organizing principle of
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identity as a cause” (Butler 185). Bodily signs and language produce and maintain the
fabricated identity. The gendered body is performative in that it has no ontological status
except for that which it derives from the gestures and acts that make up its reality.
In what ways does Rachilde construct and deconstruct the gendered body of
nineteenth-century women, and to a lesser extent, men? Nineteenth-century discourses
and beliefs regarding the dis-ease of female authorship and women’s illnesses, hysteria in
particular, produce images of weak, fragile women who need to be saved by marriage and
maternity. However, Raoule de Vénérande and Eliante Donalger, the female protagonists
of Monsieur Vénus and La Jongleuse respectively, resist such diagnoses, rescripting and
performing gender anew by means of language, dress, and behavior. Finally,
consideration of Raoule’s male automaton and Eliante’s sexually ambiguous amphora
and wax figurines serve as counterexamples to my previous analyses of the feminized
machines and female automata in the novels of Zola, Verne, and Villiers. The male
automaton, amphora, and wax figurines push the envelope of reproductive futurisms. By
removing the social obligation to marry and produce children, Raoule and Eliante are
able to redo love.
This chapter focuses on the artificiality of gender, an idea popular in women’s
studies, gender and sexuality studies, and queer theory. Rachilde is often read by
twentieth and twenty-first century scholars as a participant in early feminist movements
and causes because of her writings on gender. However, as Jennifer Burkett notes, such
interpretations need to be made cautiously because, “A preoccupation with the
conventional signs of gender and with their attribution to the ‘wrong’ sex does not in
itself produce a feminist meaning. It does, however, signify a questioning of the dominant
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ideology of late-nineteenth-century France which took gender to be a stable category
linked inextricably to sex” (80). Rachilde’s unhappiness with being a woman and her
gender play stemmed largely from her father’s dissatisfaction with having a daughter
instead of a son. She wished to be a man primarily for personal, not political, reasons. As
far as a feminist interpretation is concerned, Rachilde categorically denied being a
feminist.
In 1928 Rachilde published a short piece entitled, Pourquoi je ne suis pas
féministe in which she explains to herself but also to her readers why she does not
identify with feminists of her era.
I never had confidence in women, the eternal feminine having
tricked me first of all under the maternal mask, no more than I
have confidence in myself. I always regretted not being a man, not
so much because I considered the other half of humanity better, but
because obliged by duty or taste to live like a man, to alone carry
the heaviest burden of life during my childhood, it would have
been preferable to have had at least the privileges if not the
appearance. (6)65
Well-educated herself, Rachilde also ironically deplored female intellectual studies and
found feminist projects too time-consuming saying, “No, I’m not a feminist. I don’t want
to vote because it would bore me to occupy myself with politics. I hate speeches….but I
don’t see any inconvenience if women vote. Women are and can do a lot.” (83).66
Elsewhere she suggests that feminists seek equal opportunities simply to stir up trouble or
because they are bored. She concludes her piece by stating that she begrudgingly accepts
65
« Je n’ai jamais eu confiance dans les femmes, l’éternel féminin m’ayant trompé d’abord sous le
masqu3e maternel et je n’ai pas plus confiance en moi. J’ai toujours regretté de ne pas être un homme, non
point que je prise davantage l’autre moitié de l’humanité mais parce qu’obligée, par devoir ou par goût de
vivre comme un homme, de porter seule tout le plus lourd du fardeau de la vie pendant ma jeunesse, il eût
été préférable d’en avoir au moins les privilèges sinon les apparences » (6).
66
« Non, je ne suis pas féministe. Je ne veux pas voter parce que cela m’ennuierait de m’occuper
de politique. J’ai horreur des discours….mais je ne vois aucun inconvénient à ce que les femmes votent.
Elles sont et peuvent beaucoup. » (83).
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the label of feminist not according to personal merit, but according to the spirit of the
times.67 Feminist, queer, and gender-theory based readings of Rachilde’s novels are not
wrong, indeed I myself make use of these interpretations. Nonetheless, I don’t want to
overemphasize the twentieth and twenty-first century discourses on feminisms, queer,
and gender theory that are often applied to Rachilde’s novels and short stories.
Overemphasis on a feminist, queer, or gender theory discourse limits the contemporary
reader’s understanding of Rachilde. The following section presents two models of
nineteenth-century women’s authorship, that of a patriarchal literary tradition and the
monstrosity of female writing. Instead of focusing on how limited Rachilde was by such
parameters, I turn attention to how she used these parameters to her advantage.
Re-writing the Dis-Ease of Women’s Authorship
Women authors have always existed, but social and cultural beliefs about
authorship and male and female roles in society often resulted in a dearth of women
writers. A common metaphor for authorship is that of a parent; by taking up the pen,
authors give birth so to speak to characters in plays, novels, short stories, and other texts.
However, this parental metaphor largely favors male authors rather than authors of both
sexes equally. According to Edward Said, an author is “a person who originates or gives
existence to something, a begetter, beginner, father, or ancestor, a person who also sets
forth written statements” (Gilbert and Gubar 4). Author encompasses the ideas of writer,
67
« Je le ferai avec connaissance de cause et en prenant cette liberté comme représentant, malgré
moi, une des premières féministes de l’époque, sinon par le mérite, au moins par l’esprit révolutionnaire
d’alors » (Rachilde 8).
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deity and pater familias. It is only by including the word “father” that Said excludes
women from the category of author.68
This patrilineal model of authorship manifested itself in Rachilde’s personal life
as she tried to trace various literary persons from her family tree.69 Both sides of her
family provided connections to writing, but these connections were established through
male rather than female members. For example, her maternal grandfather Urbain Feytaud
was a typesetter in Paris and later established a print shop and published a newspaper in
Nonton. Her mother’s side of the family had legitimate connections to literary fields.
However, her father’s side of the family provided illegitimate, though more exciting,
connections to writing and publishing. Born and raised a bastard for eighteen years,
Joseph Eymery’s illegitimate past allowed Rachilde to rewrite this side of her family
history. By weeding through her family’s history and French cultural history, Rachilde
established links to the aristocracy and to medieval knights and thus conferred a sense of
legitimacy. Given her penchant for breaking with tradition, it is not surprising that
Rachilde chose to focus on the fabricated genealogy of her father’s family in order to
establish her literary career.
68
Further excluding women from authorship was the belief that textual authority was derived not
only from male sexuality but from the male sexual organ itself. The Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins
wrote, “the artist’s most essential quality…is masterly execution which is a kind of male gift, and
especially marks off men from women” in writing or other matters (Gilbert and Gubar 3). Hopkins doesn’t
say that women aren’t talented, but he does suggest that women are less talented than men and lack mastery
of their craft.
69
Mary Shelley’s experiences as a female writer make an interesting comparison to Rachilde’s.
Raised in a household with two literary parents, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and William Godwin, critics
Gilbert and Gubar state that Mary Shelley came to know herself and her parents (her genealogy) by reading
the works of her parents. “Mary Shelley may be said to have ‘read’ her family and to have related to her
reading, for books appear to have functioned as her surrogate parents, pages and words standing in for flesh
and blood” (Gilbert and Gubar 223). From 1815-1817 while she was writing Frankenstein, studying her
parents’ works, and the works of Milton, she was almost continually pregnant, confined or nursing. “For
her developing sense of herself as a literary creature and/or creator seems to have been inseparable from her
emerging self-definition as daughter, mistress, wife, and mother” (224).
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In addition to contending with patriarchal literary models and a male-centered
world view, women authors had to confront and, in many cases, rewrite the aforementioned male-centered world view as well as the pre-existing male writing of her and
the female sex. An example of this is Mary Elizabeth Coleridge’s poem “The Other Side
of the Mirror.”
I sat before my glass one day,
And conjured up a vision bare,
Unlike the aspects glad and gay,
That erst were found reflected there—
The vision of a woman, wild
With more than womanly despair…
Her lips were open—not a sound
Came through the parted lines of red.
Whate’er it was, the hideous wound
In silence and in secret bled (Gilbert and Gubar 15)
The woman who gazes into the looking glass is confronted with a specter who suffers in
silence. She has been silenced by the male voices surrounding her. “The hideous wound”
recalls the categorization of women as sick, injured, and weak, a label I discuss in detail
later. However, the end of the poem suggests that the gazer, though silent, is extremely
self-aware and is seemingly determined to break free from this frozen image.
Shade of a shadow in the glass,
O set the crystal surface free!
Pass—as the fairer visions pass-Nor ever more return to be
The ghost of a distracted hour,
Then heard me whisper, “I am she!” (16)
Before women can gain literary autonomy, they must first break the looking glass,
freeing themselves from the “mythic masks male artists have fastened over her human
face” (17). The two images that women authors most often confronted were that of angel
and whore/monster. The angel, embodied by mothers, dutiful daughters, nuns and the like
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were images designed to imprison women behind the walls of convents and within the
home. These images also limited appropriate expressions of female sexuality and
behavior. The angel’s opposite, the monster or whore, was an image generated to
underscore woman’s inconsistency and irrationality. To paraphrase Virginia Woolf, both
the angel and the monster in the house must be killed before women can write. Women
have to kill the aesthetic images that have “killed” them into art.
The idea that women must confront the image in the mirror assumes that how a
woman perceives herself and what she sees in the mirror are different than what men see
when they look at women. Furthermore, one cannot assume that one’s internalized
perception of the self is the same as the external reflection seen in the mirror. Self-image
is not uniform. Rachilde’s literary œuvre illustrates this mirror theory, but as Christine
Kiebuzinska argues, by writing against female nature, Rachilde reveals multiple mirrors
and multiple selves behind the original mirror. This refracted representation of the self is
best demonstrated in her symbolist play L’Araignée de cristal (The Crystal Spider) first
published in 1892 and first performed in 1894. Rachilde was a leader of the symbolist
movement in France working and writing alongside other avant-garde symbolists
including André Antoine, Paul Fort, and Lugné-Poe. Symbolist aesthetics, in particular
how the audience watches a symbolist drama, are critical for understanding how Rachilde
mobilizes the mirror as an image of the self. “The twin changes of dimming the house
lights and changing the design of the stage brought theater closer to the twentieth-century
experience of viewing films. Symbolist plays were among the first mass art forms where
the audience sat in the dark and all directed their attention to something resembling a
screen” (Hawthorne 165). These aesthetic changes coupled with symbolist philosophical
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idealism promoted introspection among audience members. In Rachilde’s works,
introspection is used to explore psychic issues.
The Crystal Spider features a lunar landscape typical of symbolist plays. The two
characters, The Mother, and her son, Terror-Stricken or Sylvius, sit before an open door
through which moonlight beams. Also onstage is a large mirror or psyche from which
most of the onstage light comes. “The play on the word ‘pysche’ as both the soul of the
self, the nymph loved by Cupid, or ultimately the psyche as a whimsical reference to the
popularization of mirrors set in low dressing tables…suggests a theme of reflections at
several levels and of a psyche obsessed with its own image” (Kiebuzinska 33). In
addition to themes of narcissism and introspection, the mirror also allows one to see
one’s double, the dark, irrational side of the self which Freud was beginning to expose
and explore.70 Symbolism uses the power of suggestion to convey that which language
cannot express.
As the play begins The Mother asks Sylvius, “Voyons petit fils, à quoi pensestu?” (Hawthorne 166). Though couched as maternal concern, The Mother’s question is an
attempt to penetrate her son’s psyche. Sylvius confesses that he is afraid of mirrors
because of a childhood trauma. At the age of ten he was locked in a summer house
studying and gazing into a large mirror. The mirror’s watery surface resembled a lake and
Sylvius began to feel that he was trapped and drowning. At the height of his terror, the
mirror was smashed. Following this incident, Sylvius is afraid of mirrors and other
reflective surfaces he sees around him, convinced that his mother puts them there on
purpose to torment him. During the play, he smashes the large mirror hanging on stage.
70
Freud came to Paris to work with Charcot in 1885. Given her personal experiences with hysteria
and her familiarity with Charcot’s theories, it is highly probable that Rachilde was familiar with Freud’s
theories as well.
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Sylvius’ fear of the mirror is that the mirror doesn’t show one, unified image.
Instead, the mirror, especially when broken resembles a spider, an octopus or crab,
projecting multiple, complex images of the self. “If the vision of the coherent self as
glimpsed in a mirror is what gives the subject an image—albeit illusory—of an identity,
as Lacan has suggested, then the sudden, unexpected fragmentation of that image such as
Sylvius experiences could destabilized that image just as easily” (168). If Freud and
others had begun to suggest that the self wasn’t unified, Rachilde compounds this idea by
adding gender to the equation. Further complicating his fear, is the fact that mirrors show
Sylvius that parts of him are not male. Sylvius often sees the reflection of his cousin
Sylvia when he gazes in the mirror. Also, he believes his mother puts reflective surfaces
everywhere, thus, the maternal threatens the unified vision of the self. Inversion, a
common element in Rachilde’s work, is at play here as well since Sylvius’ masculinity is
feminized. “The representational mirror of identity and gender stabilization is shattered
into fragments as Rachilde explodes the ‘myth of women’s solipsistic introversion when
they are imaged in a glass.’ She does so by using the yet unformed male character as her
mirror double to illustrate the painful process that the character must work through before
an autonomous identity can be achieved” (Kiebuzinska 33). Coleridge’s poem “The
Other Side of the Mirror” and Rachilde’s writings challenge the notion that women were
expected to see an unified image of the self in the mirror, and that the mirror image
women see was expected to match the image of them put forth by men. Rachilde pushes
the idea of the fragmented self further by arguing as well that the male mirror image is
not unified either. The fragmentation of the self and the multiplicity of identity are
themes that came to dominate twentieth century modernism.
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One theory or model of feminine or female writing that can be applied to
Rachilde’s narratives is Hélène Cixous’ The Laugh of the Medusa. The Medusa’s
multiple snake heads all laugh in the face of the patriarchal model of writing. Here I
briefly consider what Cixous’ call to arms asks of women writers as well as how
Rachilde’s novels exemplify Cixous’ ideas before the fact. To begin, Cixous states that
there is marked writing explaining, “I mean it when I speak of male writing. I maintain
unequivocally that there is such a thing as marked writing; that until now…writing has
been run by a libidinal and cultural—hence political, typically masculine—economy”
(Cixous 418). This phallocentric tradition excludes and represses women writers. By
deciding to write, Cixous argues that women write themselves. By this she means that
women write about themselves or other women rather than being written about by men
and secondly, that women write their selves and their stories into history.
Though her essay is devoted to women and she exhorts women to take up the pen,
at the end Cixous clarifies that she is speaking about feminine writing practices. Unlike
men’s and women’s writing which are categories determined by one’s sex, masculine and
feminine writing practices are not necessarily determined by the author’s sex.71Just as
men’s writing is a vague category, women’s writing and feminine writing practices are
equally hard to define. Cixous states, “It is impossible to define a feminine practice of
writing…for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded—which doesn’t mean
it doesn’t exist. But it will always surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocentric
system; it does take place in areas other than those subordinated to philosophico-
71
For example, Cixous considers Colette, Marguerite Duras, and Jean Genet to be practicers of
feminine writing practices.
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theoretical discussions” (422). Meaning is generated in the spaces between and alongside
the dominant discourse.
Michael Finn finds evidence that Rachilde succeeded in removing outside control
and gaining autonomy in her personal life and that this autonomy is echoed in her fiction
where “hesitatingly, but unmistakably, she attempts to claim for her creative character
cerebral powers of aesthetic achievement that are directly connected to their ability to
obtain sexual completion cerebrally” (Finn 130). Rachilde’s 1900 novel La Jongleuse
(The Juggler) illustrates several of Cixous’ main arguments especially the emphasis
placed on the body in feminine practices of writing and that feminine practices of writing
exist outside of the dominant phallocentric system of signification. The novel’s
protagonist Eliante Donalger72 creates a new way of communicating that remains
undecipherable to those who cannot read the body. Hawthorne explains, “Although
Eliante does not know how to write, she knows how to sign…and thus she is a juggler not
only in the literal sense, but also in the older and more general sense of jongleur, ‘a
troubadour,’ not just one who entertains with dancing and acrobatics, but one who tells
stories, who ‘finds’—and signs—them” (Hawthorne xxiv-xxv). Much of La Jongleuse is
a series of letters exchanged between Eliante and Leon. Eliante writes to Leon, “The love
letter…it is one of my manias, you see, and I’m writing to you because women write at
certain turning points in their existence like they cry, without knowing why. Besides, I
never cry in front of someone, and when I write…it is in order to be alone” (Rachilde
167). Writing letters allows Eliante to retreat into a private space where she is alone with
72
Eliante’s first name is a reference to a character in Molière’s Le Misantrope. La Jongleuse is a
highly theatrical novel: almost all of the action takes place in Eliante’s house which is divided into two
wings or spheres: the courtyard and the garden, evoking the nineteenth century terminology for the two
sides of the theater côté cour and côté jardin. Theatricality allows Eliante to rescript, restage, and reperform
her identity.
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her thoughts. Letter writing is for her a cerebral and physical activity as it combines
thoughts as well as tears. Eliante’s letters to Leon are not straightforward and he doesn’t
always understand them. Her letters are examples of a feminine practice of writing in
which meaning is found beyond the typical limits of the phallocentric order.
Cixous also argues that women pour themselves into speech and that their bodies
reveal more meaning than their words. Woman “doesn’t ‘speak,’ she throws her
trembling body forward; she lets go of herself, she flies; all of her passes into her voice,
and it’s with her body that vitally supports the ‘logic’ of her speech. Her flesh speaks
true” (Cixous 420). Eliante at times lets her body do all of the talking, her other way of
communicating is through juggling and dance, either the tarantella or the fandango. In her
juggler’s costume she resembles a statue. “Eliante Donalger wore the tight-fitting leotard
of the acrobat, a very high necked leotard of black silk, ending at the neck in the corolla
of a dark flower” (Rachilde 106). Behind her mask only her red mouth remained visible.
As she juggles knives to entertain her niece and her friends, Leon watches her, becoming
more and more entranced as her performance continues. “Having taken refuge in the last
row of guests, he [Leon] kept for himself the pain of seeing her there, standing and
juggling, separated from her family, from society, from the whole world, from all of
human society by the enigma of her perpetual comedy. And he guessed that she was
juggling not only in his honor or in their honor, she juggled to please herself” (107-108).
Eliante writes, signs, and juggles her self and for herself. Discrepancies exist between
what the audience sees and understands and what Eliante means to convey through her
juggling. “Her perpetual comedy” is for most of the guests an impressive parlor trick.
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Leon is astute enough to figure out that there is more to her act than simple
entertainment, but he remains in the dark as to what the deeper meaning may be.
Cerebral autonomy goes hand in hand with sexual autonomy for Rachildean
heroines. Both Eliante and Raoule achieve orgasm without help from another person.
Eliante stands before her amphora, which functions as a non-sentient person, and Leon.
She gives herself to the vase, not to him, “without a single indecent gesture, arms
chastely crossed on this slender from, neither girl nor boy, she clenched her fingers a
little…her lips half open…she gave a small groan of imperceptible pleasure” (23). Leon
is revolted that she would do such a thing in front of him, but more importantly that she
would do it without him. Eliante’s focus on how to love, rather than on physical pleasure,
transforms her orgasms into cerebral acts. Furthermore, she believes the presence of
another person would weaken her. She says, “I’m disgusted by union, which destroys my
strength, I find no delightful plenitude in it” (Rachilde 22). For Eliante, sexual
satisfaction is an intellectual pursuit best conducted alone. Raoule experiences something
similar to Eliante when she leaves the flower shop for the first time. Leaving Jacques and
Marie’s garret, she experiences a cerebral shock. Once alone in her carriage, she thinks
about Jacques. “The envelope, the epidermis, the palpable being, the male sufficed for
her dream…The woman who vibrated within her saw nothing in Silvert but a beautiful
instrument of pleasure that she coveted…with half-closed eyes and a half-open mouth,
her head falling on a shoulder raised intermittently by a long calming sigh, she resembled
a creature deliciously fatigued by ardent caresses” (Rachilde 19). Some critics have
suggested that this scene in the carriage is evidence of Raoule’s hysterical nature which
will be discussed in detail later. Her posture while thinking of Jacques and achieving
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orgasm resembles the poses assumed by hysterics in the midst of a seizure at the
Salpêtrière. Raoule focuses on Jacques’ exterior or shell and he is for her as devoid of
meaning as Eliante’s vase. Raoule and Eliante are able to fashion Jacques and the vase
respectively into whatever they desire.
Scenes such as these were shocking to Rachilde’s readers in part because they are
scenes of female masturbation. Female masturbation was believed to damage a woman’s
health and was a sign of abnormal sexual behavior. However scandalous such behavior
was, Eliante and Raoule push the envelope even further. The frisson of sexual satisfaction
felt by these two protagonists sent shockwaves through readers because Rachilde showed
that men were not essential players in sexual interactions. Simone De Beauvoir, although
not her original idea, discusses the socio-cultural belief that women are lacking and men
complete them, filling any void. Eliante avoids union. Laughing at the monster in the
mirror was only one of the ways that Rachilde embraced the monstrosity of female
authorship.
Monsters and the occult were often featured in literature of the time and served as
metaphors for the anxieties people felt in the face of uncertain political and social times.
Instead of simply creating monstrous characters, Rachilde used a werewolf legend and a
medium to establish her legitimacy as an author. According to family legend, Rachilde’s
great-grandfather was an honorary Canon who had turned his back on the church. “Like
all such priests, he and his descendants for five generations would be werewolves”
(Hawthorne 21). Rachilde is the fourth generation and if one believes this superstition,
she turned into a werewolf each Candlemas. For her, the (were)wolf became a totem with
which she readily identified. Melanie Hawthorne explains, “Regardless of the curse, the
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wolf came to represent the persecuted outsider for Rachilde. To the extent that she also
felt like an outsider, the werewolf was her alter ego, the wild, untamed, and even
sometimes frightening side of herself that rebelled” (21). Images of wolves or wolf traps
appear throughout her writings, notably in: Minette (1889), “La fille du louvetier” in
L’imitation de la mort (1903), Le meneur de louves (1905), Le Parc du mystère (1923),
L’Amazone rouge 1932), and finally in Quand j’étais jeune (1947). Rachilde’s embrace
of the monster reflects her awareness of the “unnaturalness” of her wish to be an author.
Rachilde uses her status as monster/werewolf to legitimize her writing. Because she is
cursed, read not normal, one shouldn’t expect normal behavior from her. As I discuss
later, Rachilde employs a similar strategy when she embraces the label hysteric.
Rachilde also established her authority as an author by assuming a pen name and
engaging in the practice of dédoublement or the doubling of one’s identity. Such practices
were common for authors of both sexes, but pen names and dédoublement afforded
certain protections and luxuries for the woman writer. Melanie Hawthorne proposes that
for the novice or doubtful woman writer, “the (woman) writer creates an alter ego (male),
the alter ego becomes a writer, and the ‘self’ is the reader for whom the author writes”
(Hawthorne 65). Such a premise supports the patriarchal model of authorship which
grants legitimacy to male authors at the expense of female authors. Hawthorne’s idea also
highlights the often private nature of women’s writing and suggests that male authors
wrote for publicity but female authors wrote more often for their own eyes and
satisfaction.
Biographical and autobiographical information about Rachilde all suggest that she
wanted a public literary career. Rachilde received special permission from the police so
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she could cross-dress and more easily carry out her duties as a reporter in Paris. She also
led a literary salon. Before publishing novels Rachilde published short stories in the
newspaper using the initials M.E. (Marguerite Eymery) in order to avoid her father’s
interdiction to write. However, her father unwittingly read M.E.’s short stories aloud to
his daughter. Not only did he read the short stories to his daughter, Joseph also censored
the content, further complicating his daughter’s role as writer and audience. “Rachilde
was placed in the interesting position of being both sender and receiver of her work, but
with the realization that the text returned to her was slightly different than that which she
had originally placed in circulation” (66). Her father’s rewriting of M.E.’s stories is
another example of the discrepancies between male and female images of the female self.
The choice of “Rachilde” as her pen name was inspired at least in part by her
mother’s and other family members’ interest in spiritualism. “Her family resembled many
others in Second Empire France that were in the grip of this craze. Spiritualism was taken
up with particular enthusiasm by her grandparents, who indulged in table turning and
murmured invitations to speak to the spirits who responded to their invocations” (67).
According to Marguerite, “Rachilde” was a Swiss nobleman whose sprit possessed her.
Given her family’s belief in spiritualism, they would have supported her claims and
listened to what she had to say. Furthermore, since she was apparently possessed, she
couldn’t refuse the spirit’s invitation to speak on his behalf. Because she made no claim
to speak in her own right, this spiritual ventriloquism did allow her to pass off her words
as those of a man. Overtime, Marguerite Eymery was replaced in public and private life
by Rachilde.
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Narrating Hysteria
In the preceding pages I discussed the monstrosity of women’s writing and the
idea that women writers had to confront the images of angel and monster created by
phallocentric and patriarchal social and literary cultures. In this section I turn my
attention to the dis-ease of women’s authorship. The patriarchal literary tradition handed
down by literary forefathers to “inferior” female descendants “is in many ways the germ
of a dis-ease or, at any rate, a disaffection, a disturbance, a distrust, that spreads like a
stain…throughout the style and structure of much literature by women before the
twentieth century” (Gilbert and Gubar 51). “Dis-ease” refers first and foremost to the
discomfort women writers felt, but Gilbert and Gubar’s remarks hint at a second
systematic means of simultaneously preventing women from writing and in instances
when they did write, of characterizing their writing. Women’s writing was marked by the
germ of disease, an infection in the sentence.73 Being ill was sign of womanliness and
femininity. As discussed in previous chapters, hysteria was the go-to illness most
frequently ascribed to women and even “healthy” women had mild symptoms of hysteria.
Emily Apter coined the term pathography to describe the disease of women’s
authorship which is also characterized by an “infection in the sentence.” Pathography is
the narrative style resulting from the symbiotic relationship between medicine and
fiction. “As the broad parameters of what constituted medical discourse in the nineteenthcentury gave way to the more specialized disciplines of psychiatry and psychoanalysis by
the century’s end, nosological realism was joined with case-history narrative
conventions” (Apter 34). The blurred boundaries between medical and fictional narrative
73
This phrase is a reference to Emily Dickinson who wrote, “Infection in the sentence breeds/ We
may inhale Despair/ At distances of Centuries/ From the Malaria” (Gilbert and Gubar 45).
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conventions combined with a particular emphasis on female sexual pathology produced
pathography. Nineteenth-century authors were akin to anatomists who diagnosed,
dissected and cured societal ills by rewriting concepts of women. Many of Rachilde’s
novels, in particular Monsieur Vénus and La Jongleuse (The Juggler), contain examples
of pathography. In Rachilde’s novels, how is the hysterical body written, prescribed, and
performed? The novels themselves become hysterical bodies in their own right through
literary critiques and diagnoses of Rachilde as hysteric. This cycle is continued in the
narrative when Raoule and Eliante are diagnosed as hysteric by other characters. In her
own life and in her novels, Rachilde embraced the label hysteric and used the looseness
of medical definitions in order to subvert traditional pathography. For example, in
Monsieur Vénus, Raoule challenges the classic diagnosis of hysteria by projecting the
signs and symptoms of disease onto Jacques.
Rachilde was always considered the family invalid; weakness, deficiency, and
illness were all used to describe her temperament. Rachilde’s father wanted a boy and
this gender deficiency was accompanied by physical deformity since one of her legs was
shorter than the other. However, exposure to societal discourses on female hysteria,
pathological sexuality, and mental imbalance had a far greater impact on Rachilde.
“Between the ages of about 15 and 30 in particular, she lived in close contact with two
debilitating discourses that were factors in her emotional and psychological development
and in the grounding of her sense of creativity and a personal writing stance” (Finn 121).
Rachilde had early exposure to hysteria and psychiatric treatments since her mother was
an inpatient at a psychiatric hospital. A turbulent adolescence marked by visions and
thoughts of suicide lend credence to Rachilde herself suffering from hysteria. In Dans les
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puits Rachilde wrote, “je n’ai jamais rien trouvé à louer dans cette fonction d’un cerveau
sans cesse obsédé d’images, et j’en fus fatiguée, malade, jusqu’à en vouloir mourir”
(122). Rachilde also experienced temporary paralysis of her legs after falling under the
seductive spell of Catulle Mendès. Paralysis was yet another symptom of hysteria.
When Rachilde was treated for her temporary paralysis, she was seen by Charles
Lasègue, a famous hysteria specialist. Studies and articles written by Freud and JeanMartin Charcot suggest that hysteria is easy to define and recognize. Reading the works
of Freud and Charcot, one is led to believe that almost any atypical reaction or behavior
is a sign of hysteria. Lasègue had a different opinion and remarked, “La définition de
l’hystérie n’a jamais était donnée et ne le sera jamais” (Finn 122). Lasègue doesn’t deny
hysteria’s prevalence, rather he emphasizes the variations in the disease’s pathology,
symptoms, and prognosis. Lasègue’s open-ended definition of hysteria is key to
understanding Rachilde’s (un)willing embrace of hysteria. By accepting the label of
female hysteric, Rachilde ipso facto accounted for any deviant behavior on her part. As a
hysteric, Rachilde was expected to behave differently or abnormally from “regular”
women. Both the act of writing and the content of her novels became understandable as
symptoms of Rachilde’s illness.
When Monsieur Vénus was first published in Belgium, the novel was quickly
banned and Rachilde charged with pornography and assaulting good morals. The novel
was republished in France in 1889 with a preface by Maurice Barrès. Barrès’ preface and
other reviews of the novel serve as a legal response to the novel much like the censorship
trials faced by Flaubert regarding Madame Bovary. These reviews vary in tone but all
attempt to account for the pornographic nature of the novel and explain what motivated
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Rachilde to write what she did. Barbey d’Aurevilly remarked, “Pornographe soit! Mais
tellement distinguée!”; Barrès called Rachilde “Mademoiselle Baudelaire” and praised
her as a true curiosity in Paris; her friend Jean Lorrain wrote, “chaste, mais elle a dans le
cerveau une alcôve, où elle fait forniquer Mlle Sapho et M. Ganymède” from which the
novel Monsieur Vénus was produced (Bolhalder Mayer 12). According to d’Aurevilly,
Barrès, and Lorrain, Rachilde was a literary genius and innovator. The source of her
creative genius was always attributed to her névrose or hysteria. Medical and literary
discourses were divided in their consideration of hysteric writers. The Goncourt brothers
viewed hysteria as a sign of creative genius and superior artistry. For Emile Zola, mental
taints were a sign of the decline of the modern race.
Again, by arguing that Monsieur Vénus was the product of a hysterical
disposition, Rachilde’s literary compatriots removed the taint of scandal from the novel
by telling readers that Rachilde’s creativity and literary skill were symptoms of her
illness. “The weepy fantasy of an isolated girl, a cerebral eccentricity, but of interest of
the psychologist, the moralist and the artist, Monsieur Vénus is a very significant
symptom” (Mesch 139). Read in this way, the novel becomes a case study of hysteria and
readers become experts who diagnose Rachilde and Raoule. The socially threatening and
perverse nature of the novel are diffused by the label hysteric.
During the nineteenth-century reading novels was considered dangerous or
harmful for women since doing so was believed to turn them away from their “natural”
roles as wives and mothers and would awaken in them an unhealthy sexual passion. A
classic example of this phenomenon is Emma Bovary’s disappointment with her married
life after reading novels filled with fairy-tale type romances. Raoule’s first exposure to
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passion came from reading the works of Sade and Boccaccio. Nathalie Buchet Rogers
argues that since Raoule’s desire was first ignited by a text, it can only subsequently
manifest itself in textual forms. Raoule says to the Baron de Raittolbe, “It’s true
Monsieur…that I’ve had lovers. Lovers in my life, like books in my library, to learn, to
study…But I’ve never known passion. I haven’t written my book yet” (Rachilde 69-70).
Raoule’s relationship with Jacques finally affords her the opportunity to write her book.
In Raoule’s book, her narrative perspective dominates and Jacques once again largely
occupies the role of literary subject and muse.
Barrès and others understood Monsieur Vénus only has a confirmation of their
own or others diagnoses that Rachilde was a hysteric. Although such an interpretation
helped diffuse the novel’s scandalous nature, it also served to limit the ways in which the
novel’s content was understood. However, some medical professionals were hesitant to
dismiss the writings of women authors such as Rachilde as the “ravings of hysterics”.
These doctors, and in some cases writers and artists, began to question the relationship
between hysteria, the mind, and artistic creativity. The medical and scientific community
may have increasingly acknowledged the existence of the unconscious, but opinion
remained divided as to whether a split personality was a positive or a negative. Dr.
Lasègue wrote, “toute hystérique présente une sorte de délire à deux: d’une part l’être
raisonnable, de l’autre l’être délirant” (Finn 128). Although the reasonable self may
dominate, often times the delirious self does. As a possible consequence, “le romancier
qui, partant d’une donnée qui le lui fournit l’imagination, se laisse entraîner par celle-ci
au point d’arriver à croire que tout ce qu’il crée est arrivé” (128). Hysterics were also said
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to experience similar nerve crises and crises of the self, but their crises were not
interpreted as signs of creative genius but rather as a disintegration of one’s personality.
Rachilde herself was nervous and had experiences with dream states, hysteria, and
her mother’s mental illness. Although she claims full responsibility for her pseudonym,
her mother Gabriel may have played a significant role in its creation. In Le Parc du
mystère (1923) Rachilde transcribes a manuscript written by her mother about Rachilde’s
(the spirit’s ) first manifestations. “It would seem, then, that it was Gabriel who started
out writing down what the voices told her and that her daughter merely copied her, thus
transforming madness into literature” (Hawthorne 69). Transcribing Gabriel’s manuscript
wouldn’t automatically remove the stigma of madness from Rachilde’s literature. Indeed,
Monsieur Vénus was attributed to the writings of a depraved and hysterical young
woman. Although Rachilde’s family and other believers in the spiritual world would have
believed that she was possessed by a spirit, not everyone considered communication with
the spirits to be a positive thing. In the late nineteenth-century some doctors,
psychiatrists, and aliénistes had a renewed interest in visions, hallucinations, voices, and
the idea that the self wasn’t unified. For example, discussions about the unconscious
appeared in medical literature on hysteria and hypnotism and in scientific discussions of
spiritualism.
Interestingly enough, it was another doctor, Dr. Paul Chabaneix, who provided a
positive environment for, and response to, Rachilde’s otherworldly source of inspiration.
Rachilde, along with writers Paul Adam, Vincent d’Indy, Jean Richepin, Sully
Prudhomme, and Dr. Charles Richet, participated in a survey entitled Le Subconscient
chez les artistes, les savants, et les écrivains published by Chabaneix in 1897. In this
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study, dreams, visions, and hallucinatory states were considered aesthetically productive.
Rachilde readily admitted to having a split personality, “Étant jeune fille, [mes rêves]
avaient une telle intensité que je me demandais souvent si je n’existais pas sous deux
formes: ma personnalité vivante et ma personnalité rêvante. […S]ouvent le rêve
inachevé, je le terminais moi-même tout éveillée, ce qui m’a donné ainsi l’habitude de me
raconter des histoires, de composer des romans” (Finn 130). Her comments make explicit
connections between her dreams and the origins of her writings. Rachilde’s dream state
and writing style are similar to the practice of écriture automatique developed in the early
twentieth century by the Surrealists.74 Rachilde was familiar with the Surrealist
movement and with André Breton in particular. Certain comparisons can be made
between Rachilde, Raoule, and Nadja, the protagonist of Breton’s 1928 novel Nadja.
Nadja, like Rachilde, seems to live suspended between dreams and reality. Nadja admits
to Breton, “C’est ainsi que je me parle quand je suis seule, que je me raconte toutes sortes
d’histoires. Et pas seulement de vaines histoires: c’est même entièrement de cette façon
que je vis” (Breton 60). Comparisons between Rachilde and André Breton’s works
indicate just how pervasive the connections between hysteria and artistic creativity were
believed to be.
Doctors like Dr. Chabaneix, Charcot, Lassègue and Freud understood that there
was not always a one-to-one correspondence between the mind, the body, the self, and
the outward projection of the self.75 However, their opinions on the split between the
conscious, the unconscious, and the body as well as how to cope with, treat, or react to
74
Rachilde had a complex and fractuous relationship with the Surrealists. She initially supported
André Breton but later had a falling out with the Surrealists. See Hawthorne’s chapter, “Women and
Surrealism: In Which Rachilde gets into a Bun Fight” in Rachilde and French Women’s Authorship for
more details about Rachilde and Surrealism.
75
See Breuer and Freud, page 45-47.
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this split were far from unanimous. For her part, Rachilde chose to embrace the label
hysteric while simultaneously capitalizing on the literary, artistic, and personal freedoms
the label afforded her. The content of Rachilde’s novels and the manner in which she
presents hysteria in her novels are indicative of her personal understanding of the disease.
A number of women writers mocked the pervasiveness of hysteria in both medical fields
and in novels by creating fictional doctors who quickly diagnose any female illness as
hysteria. Rachilde’s satire of hysteria is more subtle and trenchant. “She exploits
hysteria’s lack of determinacy to reinvent the disease as an illness so subversive that it
challenges the very patriarchal system in place to diagnose and contain such deviance. At
the same time, the text camouflages this subversiveness in familiar decadent vocabulary”
(Mesch 128). According to nineteenth-century medical discourse that labels all deviant
female behavior as symptomatic of hysteria, Raoule and Eliante are read as hysteric.
However, by the end of the novel it is clear that nineteenth-century medical discourse
cannot account for and categorize their sexual behavior. Rachilde reveals the emptiness
of the label hysteric and the simultaneous looseness and limited definition of the disease
give Raoule and Eliante the freedom to behave as they wish.
In previous chapters mechanical women and statues have been analyzed and
understood primarily as representative objects combining esthetic ideals and
technological skills. The wax and mechanical figures in Rachilde’s novels are part of this
tradition, but the statues in her novels are also signs of hysteria. Temporary or even
permanent paralysis were often part of diagnoses of hysteria. Rachilde includes images of
paralysis and women as marble statues in her novels and short stories partly because she
herself suffered from similar physical ailments. As mentioned before, one of her legs was
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shorter than the other and she was briefly paralyzed for two months. As is the case with
many other elements in Rachilde’s works, paralysis isn’t included simply because the
author herself was paralyzed.
Paralysis of the legs is an example of how Rachilde writes and rewrites the
hysterical body. A psychiatrist explains, “[Les] paralysies[…] constituent, comment tout
symptôme hystérique, une représentation, la représentation d’un corps imaginaire auquel
manquerait peut-être une fonction par rapport au corps réel, mais on pourra demander
aussi s’il ne s’agit pas d’un corps débarrassé de certains fonctions ou activités imposes au
corps réel” (Finn 122). This psychiatrist’s comments suggest that hysterics experience a
split in their physical bodies that parallels the psychic split that often manifests itself in
their minds and thoughts. The imaginary body differs from the person’s real body in one
or more functions often specific to the patient.
Cases of paralysis such as Rachilde’s can be understood as well as a means to free
oneself from certain social and natural bodily functions. In Rachilde’s case, the
temporary paralysis she experienced after Catulle Mendes proposed freed her from the
social obligation of marriage and the concomitant physical demands of sexual
intercourse. However, cases of paralysis were also viewed by medical professionals such
as Lasègue and Charcot as “performing” hysteria. Finn remarks that “Rachilde here acts
out the female role in the hegemonic, male, theory of hysterical possession with its
concomitant sexual complications and in so doing, she becomes the gestural medium of
the canonical medical discourse of the day” (123). Charcot’s Iconographie of the
Salpêtrière is another example of the performance of hysteria.
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Within her novels, Rachildean heroines resist and challenge the dominant medical
discourse and perform hysteria in their own ways. Leon Reille a young medical student
wants to sleep with Eliante in La Jongleuse but his desire to do so is driven more by his
insistence that he teach her “normal” sexual behavior that it is driven by passion. He
warns her that, “Medically persons of your sex who allow themselves the luxury of a
supernatural physicality—and it is clear that you live as you come—end up with
illnesses of which the least horrible is St. Vitus’ dance” if not complete paralysis
(Rachilde 95). Saint Vitus’ Dance is a type of ambulatory disease in which the limbs
move in uncoordinated ways. Leon obliquely references Eliante’s masturbatory practices,
“the luxury of a supernatural physicality”, which was believed to cause diseases such as
St. Vitus’ Dance. His proposed cure is for Eliante to “sin” like everybody else, in a
heteronormative relationship.
As discussed earlier, Eliante doesn’t rely on others to attain sexual satisfaction.
Her response to Leon’s diagnosis is to dance with her amphora to the point of orgasm.
Sometimes, while turning, she would stamps her little right heel
and at the same time her elbow on her left knee, dislocating in a
strange revolution of lines all the harmony of her person…she
would stand up, completely pulled upward by a force, a string
which seemed to hold her suspended, her little feet prancing on the
spot, trampling mad and frail the St. John’s herb, which one sensed
burned her soles. (197)
Eliante’s Fandango is a re-choreographed version of Leon’s diagnosis. Eliante moves
disjointedly, her physical features out of sync with her inner persona. At the end of her
dance, Eliante smears her breast with red makeup, a foreshadowing of her last dance at
the end of the novel when she stabs herself in the throat and dies. Leon doesn’t
understand how Eliante can dance the way she does, but what he really misunderstands
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his what Eliante is trying to tell him through her body language. Leon’s misdiagnosis is
an example of the lack of a one-to-one correspondence between language, especially
medical discourse, and the body.
In Monsieur Vénus hysteria as female resistance hinges on the dialogue, or lack
thereof, between the mind and the body. Diagnoses and descriptions of hysteria assume
there is a relationship between the psyche and the body—mental problems or trauma
have corresponding physical symptoms or ailments. This semiotics of the body is
presumed translatable into regular speech. Freud’s talking cure is a perfect example of the
presumed relationship between body language, mental problems, and speech. However,
others have suggested that bodily discourse is different from and even opposed to
linguistic discourse or writing. “Why this sense of a word that would make all the
difference? Why this feeling that words are incapable of expressing the emotions of the
body? Why this desire to write and the simultaneous sense that the desire has only to
surface to be frustrated?” (Josipovici 65). Writing or speaking the body using the
conventional linguistics is often futile. Freud championed the talking cure as a means for
understanding the causes of female hysteria. The talking cure is predicated on the belief
that all bodily symptoms can be explained with words. However, careful reading of
Freud’s case study of Dora suggests that there isn’t a direct correspondence between
language and the body.
The Dora case illustrates the divide between the irrational discourse of the body
and rational discourse of the everyday. Freud continually changed the “plot” of the Dora
case study. “First Dora is adjudged to be in love with Herr K., then with her father, then
with Frau K., then with her childhood self, and finally…with Freud himself” (Kingkaid
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115). Freud changes the origins of Dora’s trauma in order to conform to his ideas. Renée
Kingkaid argues that Dora’s body chooses to be hysteric and in so doing, Dora remains
incomprehensible to Freud. Dora, like Raoule and Eliante, understands that she can
control her own diagnosis.
In Le deuxième sexe Simone De Beauvoir critiques Freud’s definition of female
sexuality as a deviation of male sexuality. Nevertheless, De Beauvoir, like Freud, is
interested in dysfunction, not function. “While The Second Sex treats the hysterical body
as an explainable, changeable, product of culture, the body within the work still resists
language in the way that Dora resisted Freud” (117). Like Freud, De Beauvoir cites
numerous case studies and anecdotes she has collected about women’s bodily and sexual
experiences. De Beauvoir never includes her own experiences in The Second Sex, instead
asserting “I have read/known/seen” thereby acting as a witness not a participant in the
generation of bodily discourse. By considering Freud and De Beauvoir, we gain
retrospective insight into how Rachilde understood hysteria, the body, and language.
“Where De Beauvoir would repress hysteria (like Freud) by describing it, Rachilde
understands (like Dora) that hysteria is a discourse that must be allowed its say. As the
(primary process) incoherence that challenges (secondary process) logic, hysteria is
resolutely the domain of the feminine” (121). In Monsieur Vénus direct references to
hysteria using medical terminology and images familiar to readers are rare; instead,
Rachilde allows the hysteric body to speak for itself.
Monsieur Vénus is an example of epithalamic horror. There is a certain shock,
disgust, or horror for the body that results in bodily displacement. In the novel, rational
discourse, “yes” or “no” are useless as Raoule goes back and forth in her sexual desires.
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Instead of frustrations like Freud’s case study of Dora, this uncertainty and
unspeakability of the hysterical body become salient plot points. “Rachilde is free, as it
were, to keep tossing the coin between the competing couples of desire and disgust, male
and female. Each successive chapter of Monsieur Vénus is based on whichever side of the
coin turns up” (123).
The most striking and literal example of Raoule’s written text occurs when she
beats Jacques. Jacques had attempted to seduce the Baron de Raittolbe, friend and former
suitor of Raoule. De Raittolbe beat Jacques in order to dispel any latent homosexual
desires he might have felt for Jacques. Initially, Raoule is saddened and attempts to erase
the wounds left on Jacques’ body by kissing and caressing him. Then, fueled by passion
and jealousy, Raoule rewrites Jacques’ body by beating anew. “Violently she tore off the
linen bandages…she bit his marbled flesh, squeezed it tightly in her hands, scratched
with her pointed nails” (Rachilde 131). Jacques is reduced to bleeding wounds and scars.
Although both De Raittolbe and Raoule beat Jacques and “wrote” on him, Raoule has
final textual authority since she beat Jacques after the Baron and erased his words with
her marks.
When she beats Jacques Raoule adopts the role of medical expert who diagnoses
the hysteric patient Jacques. In his writings Charcot popularized the phenomenon of
dermographism which “consists of imprinting graffiti-like markings on the anesthetic but
otherwise impressionable skin of the hysteric, following the vagaries of the doctor’s will:
doctor’s signature, patient’s name, diagnosis, invocation of devil, ornamental design” etc.
(Beizer 20). The welts on Jacques’ body are caused by Raoule’s biting, scratching, and
beating more so than by any somatic manifestation of hysterical symptoms. However,
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because Jacques increasingly takes on the woman’s role, he is a hysteric. Janet Beizer
explains, “Jacques’ share is less notably hysteria (in the clinical sense) than hysterization,
or the aura created by hysteria’s discourse; the reduction of the person to the body and of
the body to its sexuality, the pathologizing of this sexuality, and its conversion into a
semiotic force” (250). As the title of Beizer’s work Ventriloquized Bodies suggests,
Jacques’ words are filtered and only given meaning through Raoule. Jacques
ventriloquized body is a perfect example of the limits of Freud’s talking cure. The doctor
or medical expert is not always able to understand his patient and instead of letting the
hysteric body speak for itself, projects his thoughts and words onto the patient.
A final aspect of the beating to consider is the relationship between the body,
violence against women and women’s writing. Women writers in the nineteenth-century
feared writing and even viewed the task as monstrous and against nature. Consequently,
“many women experience their own bodies as the only available medium for their art,
with the result that he distance between the woman artist and her art is often radically
diminished” (Gubar 248). Susan Gubar discussed Isak Dinesen’s short story “The Blank
Page” which recounts the story of nuns who weave linen sheets that are then used by
princesses on their wedding nights. After consummating their marriages, a square of the
blood-stained linen is given back to the convent and hung on the wall, creating a portrait
gallery of sorts. These blood-stained sheets become a visual and tactile library of the
women’s work and the princesses’ virginal blood is an artistic tool. In Monsieur Vénus
although Raoule changes her appearance, Jacques’ body suffers beatings and after his
death is corpse is violated to create the automaton. It is often difficult to completely
separate Raoule and Jacques. If one understands their identity as she-he and not she and
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he, violence is committed against Raoule’s body to the same extent as Jacques’.
Alternatively, if readers grant separate ontological existence to Raoule and Jacques, more
distance is created between artist and art.
Finally, blood plays an important role in Raoule’s textual inscription on Jacques’
body. Gubar posits that “one of the primary and most resonant metaphors provided by the
female body is blood, and cultural forms of creativity are often experienced as a painful
wounding” (Gubar 248). In “The Blank Page” the princesses’ blood was a sign of their
virginity and also a marker of their coming into full womanhood through marriage.
Raoule had previous lovers and was not a virgin when she met Jacques. Therefore, I
consider the bloodied page as related to menstrual blood not hymeneal blood. As part of
effeminizing or symbolically castrating Jacques, Raoule sends him flowers, just as lovers
traditionally send to their mistresses. “Jacques turned very red when the flowers arrived,
then he solemnly placed the flowers in pots around the studio, playing out the game with
himself, catching himself being a woman for the pleasure of art” (Rachilde 94). This
scene recalls the novel’s opening paragraph when Jacques took on the role of flowermaker; in both instances he plays the role of a woman. Raoule always sends white
flowers and this is most likely a reference to Alexandre Dumas’ novel and play La Dame
aux camellias. The courtesan Marguerite Gautier wears white camellias except when she
is menstruating to signal her sexual availability to her suitors. Since Raoule always sends
Jacques white flowers this implies that both of them are always sexually available and not
menstruating. It is suggested that Raoule never menstruates thus calling into question her
extent of her womanhood. Logically, Jacques as a biological male fulfilling the social
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role of female courtesan will never menstruate. The lack of menstrual blood is a
biological stumbling block in their reversal of sex and gender roles.
Alternative Models of Procreation
In this last section I return to the central question of this study, that of
reproductive futurisms as demonstrated by the creation of artificial and mechanical
bodies. As demonstrated in previous chapters, male doctors, scientists, and inventors
created mechanical bodies for a variety reasons: to overcome personal loss, to control
one’s own insatiable sexual and homicidal urges, and to create the perfect woman for a
heartbroken friend. These sexualized and feminized machines are all bachelor machines;
the role of the woman in procreation and reproduction is denied. Monsieur Vénus and La
Jongleuse present different models for creating mechanical beings. First, artificial and
mechanical bodies are used in Rachilde’s narratives for pleasure, not for reproduction. I
briefly consider Rachilde’s attitudes towards motherhood and the absence of natural or
artificial birth as viable options in Monsieur Vénus and La Jongleuse. Second, as opposed
to the traditional male scientist creator and female mechanical body paradigm,
Rachildean creators and their mechanical bodies are ambiguously sexed. The constant vaet-vient between male and female roles allows Raoule, Eliante, Jacques and to a lesser
extent Leon, to be either sex depending on their given predilection.
Despite her fractious relationship to the organized causes of feminism, her
personal choices, career choices, and the content of her novels are all informed by
women’s issues of the Third Republic and the Belle Époque, in particular questions
regarding the control of fertility and motherhood. The creation of artificial and
mechanical bodies is at heart an endeavor to expand the boundaries of fertility and
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procreation. Melanie Hawthorne explains that the idea that fertility could be controlled
was viewed as something out of science fiction. Michel Corday wrote a novel in 1903
called Sésame, ou la Maternité consentie: roman contemporain (Voluntary Maternity),
which features an elixir that temporarily suppresses a woman’s fertility, much like
modern oral contraceptives today. “Corday appears to be a sort of Jules Verne of
feminism, in that he merely anticipates—rather than invents—what science can bring
about once it catches up with imagination” (Hawthorne 178). Rachilde’s literary oeuvre
is less science-fiction than Corday’s novel, but she also imagines alternatives to the
heterosocial and heterosexual norms. In her novels, “it is clear that in the fictional realm
Rachilde took the lead enthusiastically in exploring ways that women could find sexual
satisfaction while avoiding the risk of pregnancy” (180). In “Refaire l’amour” a title
derived from Rachilde’s novel of the same name published in 1928, Linda Klieger
Stillman echoes Hawthorne’s claims and argues that Rachilde’s novels explore new ways
to love (aimer) and be loved (être aimée); Rachilde “redoes love”. “Le moteur de sa
fiction, c’est-à-dire la négation du retour du féminin refoulé—avant tout sous la forme du
maternel—opère selon la formation d’un « masque » : bestial et effrayant” (Klieger
Stillman 209).
Rachilde eventually became a mother herself, but she was disappointed in her
own mother and grandmother as models of femininity and womanhood. Her grandmother
and mother were described respectively as “deux oppositions très classiques du type de la
femme; la 1830, la romantique, et la 1870, l’excentrique, celle qui devait précéder la
révoltée moderne” (Hawthorne 31). Throughout her childhood Rachilde was faced with
the capricious frivolity and sentimentality, and unstable neuroses. Her disappointment in
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the maternal model is illustrated in her novels by a lack of strong maternal figures. When
maternal figures are present they are often highly dysfunctional. For example, Mary
Barbe in La Marquise de Sade is raised by a cousin, Raoule de Vénérande is raised by an
aunt, and Eliante Donalger by a creole nurse. La Marquise de Sade (1887), is perhaps the
most striking example of Rachilde’s views on maternity. In this novel, Rachilde,
“explores the fate of the child who is unmothered, who, like Victor Frankenstein’s
monster, turns to antisocial behavior out of rage and frustration at not being provided for”
(189).76 In Monsieur Vénus any reproductive potential is denied to Raoule and Jacques.
Although she is able to pass for a man by cross-dressing, Jacques points out that Raoule
will never be a man because she lacks a penis. Compounding the lack of penis is the fact
that Raoule doesn’t menstruate and thus is viewed as an incomplete woman. Despite
their best efforts to reassign their gender, Raoule and Jacques are trumped by biology. At
the end of La Jongleuse, Eliante agrees to sleep with Leon but at the last minute
substitutes her niece Missy instead and commits suicide while juggling. One of the ways
in which Rachilde a refait l’amour or redid love was to deny the maternal as an option
for women. Instead, her female protagonists pursue love for pleasure. As will be
discussed in the next section, sexual pleasure is often found not in the arms of another
person, but reflected in art or experienced in the embrace of an inanimate object or
mechanical body.
In Verne’s novel Le Château des Carpathes, La Stilla’s body as an opera singer,
her costumes, and her operatic performances are the inspiration for Baron de Gortz’s
76
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) once again provides a point of comparison to Rachilde’s
work. When Frankenstein was published no one considered that a woman might have written the novel. In
A Lady and Her Monsters Montillo outlines the signs of female authorship that critics ignored, including
the narrative timeline that covers nine months, the typical duration of a preganancy, and that Victor
Frankenstein’s disgust with his monster is an example of the “horror story of maternity”.
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holographic and phonographic renderings of her. Similarly, Alicia Clary the actress is the
physical inspiration for the android created by Villiers’ fictional Thomas Edison in L’Eve
future. In both cases, scientific and technological bodies are derived from art. This
phenomenon is present in Monsieur Vénus as well, but with one major difference. The
gendered roles of artist and artistic subject are reversed; Raoule is artist and creator
whereas Jacques is muse and artistic subject. Artistic representations of Jacques include
flower making, painting, and sculpture.
Raoule and Jacques first meet in Jacques’ sister Marie’s flower shop and because
Marie is ill, Jacques has taken over her role as flower-maker. “Around his body, over his
loose smock ran a spiraling garland of roses, very big roses of fleshy satin with velvety
grenadine tracings. They slipped between his legs, threaded their ways up to his
shoulders, and came curling around his neck” (Rachilde 8). Jacques is presented as a
flower in mid-metamorphosis, consistent with his overall gender transition from
masculine to feminine. In French Jacques’ last name “Silvert”, the color green (vert)
indicating newness and the name as a whole evokes the English word “sylvan.” The
fluidity of Jacques’ identity is further emphasized by the fact that he readily assumes his
sister’s identity saying, “For the time being I’m Marie Silvert” (9). Jacques’ remark is
explained logically by his sister’s illness, but it also suggests that he has adopted certain
feminine behaviors. “Mechanically, Silvert picked up a daisy stem, rolling it between his
fingers, and without paying attention used the skilled touch of a trained woman to make
the piece of material look just like a blade of grass (15). The word “mechanical” suggests
to readers that Jacques has performed this task so many times as to render it a natural
movement or task, even though men would not normally engage in such an activity.
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Jacques tells Raoule that he is a landscape painter but she is unimpressed with his
paintings. “‘A strange profession,’ Mlle de Vénérande went on, paying no more attention
to the canvas, ‘because you really ought to be a stone breaker’” (16). Raoule’s comment
is a reference to Gustave Courbet’s painting The Stone Breakers (1849). As the editors of
Monsieur Vénus note, Courbet was known for landscapes and for elevating the status of
the working classes to high art. “Raoule’s comment turn Jacques, as a workman, into
subject matter for an artist and displaces him from the status of being an artist himself”
(16). Raoule sees Jacques as an artist’s nude model and this verbal exchange signals the
beginning of Jacques’ transformation from artist (flower-maker) to work of art.
Elsewhere Raoule compares Jacques to the statue of Venus Callygraphe. Jacques’
transformation into a work of art is completed at the end of the novel when Raoule
creates a wax automaton out of his dead body.
The automaton Raoule commissions is an example of the anatomical Venuses
popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which fused relationships between art,
science, and the medical and sexual gazes. According to Ludmilla Jordanova, these wax
anatomical models demonstrated “how the medical sciences in this period were bound up
with a particular aspect of bodily image, namely the differences between men and
women” in addition to bringing together “the imaginative realm, especially the visual
language of the body, naturalist accounts of anatomical and physiological and
pathological characteristics, and beliefs about how men and women inhabit a world
deeply marked by gender” (Jordanova 44). The primary purpose of the wax models was
to show the pathology of diseases on the human body. However, the techniques used to
make these modes, dissections, vivisections, and plaster and wax casts, reflect
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assumptions about masculinity and femininity. The position of female wax figures, prone
not upright, and the organs shown, usually breasts and uterus with or without a fetus,
emphasize at once the threat of female sexuality and eroticism and woman’s primary role
as mother.
Eliante has a collection of ivory and wax figurines, some of which resemble her.
As she explains to Leon, “They resemble me because it’s me they represent. The double
is copied from my own body” (Rachilde 86). Her husband Henri Donalger saw a Chinese
statue and had copy made since it resembled his wife. Later he had other figurines
fashioned in her likeness. “He modeled the wax himself like a real artist, and, during my
absence, his fingers kneaded all these little women in my image” (86). Henri Donalger’s
figurines form an erotic cabinet de curiosité, not far removed from the rather erotic wax
Venuses created by medical professionals. Indeed, Leon is repulsed by the figurines
calling them the work of a sex-obsessed monomaniacal madman.
Wax, like photography, was an apt medium to achieve scientific realism.77 “Wax
was associated with reality and rationality through its connections with the scientific
world, but it was also linked to spectacle and fantasy as is apparent by the emergence and
popularity of wax museums” (Hunter 43).78 As artistic media, wax and photography
allowed doctors to see into or penetrate the most intimate orifices of the human body and
to “freeze” or render their findings immobile, preserving them forever. Additionally, wax
was associated with femininity, malleability, fragility, and death.
77
Perhaps the most well-known example of medical photography is neurologist Charcot’s
collection of prints of hysterical woman as the Salpêtrière.
78
See Jennifer Forrest, “The Banquet imperial: History in Wax in the Second Empire” for a
detailed account of wax figures featured in museums and fairgrounds in nineteenth century France.
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One such collection of wax Venuses belonged to Dr. Jules Émile Péan of the
Hôpital Saint-Louis in Paris who commissioned roughly 70 moulages of diseased body
parts. The fabrication process combined artistic techniques and anatomical studies. A
plaster cast was made around the body part in question or even the whole body of a living
subject and later wax was poured into the cat. “Following the molding process, the
mouleur and doctor would work together to create an object that was understood as an
exact replica of the human body. The application of colored pigments and the manual
shaping of rough and smooth surfaces produced signs and symptoms of illness that were
medically legible” (45). The mouleur’s signature on the wax augmented sculptural
connotations; the wax models were signed just as a sculpture would be. Although meant
to be scientifically objective, these anatomical models belie intimacy between subject and
medical professional. In some cases, the mouleur’s or his assistants hands would be
included in the wax model as they held bodily tissues apart. Hunter and Jordanova
discuss paintings depicting the wax casting process and dissection. In Edouard Dantan’s
1887 painting Une moulage sur nature, assistants remove the plaster cast from a naked
woman’s leg. In Félicien Rops 1878 painting La naissance de Vénus, a woman’s stomach
and genitals are covered with liquid plaster (46). Hasselhorst’s Professor Lucae and his
Assistants Dissecting a Female Cadaver, Gabriel Max’s The Anatomist and Brodnax’s
Only a Dream show female cadavers partially veiled or covered and male anatomists
gazing at the female figures in dream-like ways. In these three paintings subjectivity and
reverence replace the objective scientific gaze which again emphasizes the intimate
nature of these wax models. An undercurrent of violence against the female body,
penetrated in life and in death, is evident in these paintings as well.
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Associations between the female body and nature suggest that both could and
should be penetrated and explored in the name of revealing truth. “The representation of
a woman’s body in the process of being dissected appears to be a historically specific
theme. It bears directly on the idea of unveiling, which has, at any one time, both a
mythical dimension and a rooted socio-cultural one” (Jordanova 98). The female body
was probed or cut into and made to reveal her secrets and produce scientific knowledge.
A clear example of the association between nature, art, and science is Luis Ernest
Barrias’ 1899 sculpture Nature Unveiling Herself Before Science which shows,
unusually, a standing woman, with a cloth wrapped around her torso under her breasts
that trails to her feet, and a second cloth covering her head, but parted at the torso
revealing her breasts (88). Woman is personified as Nature and reveals herself to Man,
incarnated by Science. It is rare to find examples of men being unveiled. An example of
this in Monsieur Vénus occurs when Jacques admonishes Raoule for looking at him in the
bath. In this scene Jacques occupies the role of woman and thus is modesty is fitting.
However, his reasoning is that men don’t look at each naked because it’s rude and he also
implies that there is nothing to see or be revealed.
The unveiling of women is also evident in dissection techniques in which layers
of skin and tissues are peeled back and cut away. Many wax models show these layers of
tissues as well. In Monsieur Vénus the roles are reversed and Raoule dissects Jacques
after he died in a duel. In their bed in the Temple of love, Raoule uses silver pincers, a
velvet covered hammer, and a silver scalpel to remove parts of Jacques’ body. A German
wax sculptor then turns the body parts into a wax model. “On the bed shaped like a
seashell, guarded by an Eros of marble, rests a wax figure covered with transparent
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rubber skin. The red hair, the blond eyelashes, the gold hair of the chest are natural; the
teeth that ornament the mouth, the nails on the hands and feet were torn from a corpse.
The enameled eyes have an adorable look” (Rachilde 208). The reference to the marble
Eros is key because Raoule has created a waxen Venus and by casting Jacques in wax has
rendered him pliable and soft thus removing the active, aggressive, and domineering
traits associated with men. These masculine traits are presumably maintained in the
marble statue.
Finally, Raoule’s wax Venus is unusual because it was made of a man, by a
woman, for female scopophilia. Most anatomical waxes were of women and emphasized
the erotic and the sexual. Charcot had a full-body wax figure cast of a hysteric patient.
“Although the Salpêtrière wax-woman’s nakedness, uncovered hair, and deformed body
intimates that this model is as true-to-life as possible, the woman’s wax hand is placed
near her genitals, as if to suggest that is inanimate body also retains the modesty of a
young Venus” whose hand hides and draws attention to her sex (Hunter 54). Sometimes
the wax Venuses included hair and jewelry. Female passivity was evoked by the prone,
sleep-like poses in which they were placed. In contrast, male wax models were cast
standing up and showed exterior muscles and bones thus suggesting activity and strength.
Jordanova explains that such poses underscored assumptions about masculine and
feminine behavior: males were believed to be active, public, subjects and reasonable;
females were passive, private, domestic, objects, and seen by others (59). Finally, some
wax models were electrified or otherwise animated and in such cases the threat of female
sexuality, although heightened, remains safely encases in the waxy exterior. Raoule’s
automaton is animated and becomes a source of sexual pleasure. Raoule dressed either as
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a man or as a woman contemplates the wax figure before embracing it and kissing it. “A
spring hidden inside the flanks connects with the mouth and animates it at the same time
that it spreads apart the thighs” (Rachilde 210). Raoule’s necrophillic advances
underscore the associations between femininity, wax, and death.
Although the wax figure is meant to be Jacques, the figure’s sex is ambiguous. Its
legs part the way a woman’s would during sexual intercourse, but the French text refers
to the wax model as both la statue, a feminine noun, and ce mannequin, a masculine
noun. Raoule dresses as a man or a woman which further complicates sexual
differentiation. Throughout Monsieur Vénus, comparisons between art and gendered
behavior and traits are made. Fetishizing and sexualizing an objet d’art is found in La
Jongleuse as well. There is an alabaster amphora in Eliante’s boudoir that is as tall as a
man. The vase is endowed with human shaped, “the foot, very narrow, like a spear of
hyacinth, surged up from a flat and oval base, narrowed as it rose, swelled, at mid-height,
to the size of two beautiful young thighs hermetically joined” (Rachilde 18). The top of
the amphora is a corolla resembling shoulder and giving one the impression that the
figure is headless. The lack of a head or top means that when Eliante dances and makes
love to the vase, her partner so to speak remains faceless and without a complete identity.
Eliante first refers to the objet d’art as a he but later explains that the amphora occupies a
sexless position. She tells Leon, “My Tunisian urn is by turns a ‘he’ or a ‘she,’ for that’s
the way it likes it” (52). In the original French text, the object’s indistinct gender is
maintained by the use of une urne, un vase, similar to Raoule’s use of un mannequin and
une statue to describe her automaton. There is a subtle difference in the pairing of sexes
and these two objects. Eliante always identifies as a woman; her vase decides if it is a he
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or a she. In Monsieur Vénus, Raoule self-identifies as a male or female as indicated by
her style of dress when she makes love to the automaton. In either case, an environment
open to heterosexual and homosexual relations is maintained by the fluidity of sexual
identity.
Through references to flower-making, painting, sculpture, and finally wax
anatomical models, Raoule transforms Jacques into a subject worthy of artistic
representation and an object of art. Although specific to dissection, Raoule unveils the
fe/male body in three ways. “First, the body itself can be unveiled by removing its
enveloping tissues. Second, a particular person, procedure or piece of information can be
revealed in the process, and identity made manifest. Third, at an abstract level, nature can
be unveiled by science” (Jordanova 106). Raoule “unveils” Jacques in the bath and later
chisels and cuts away at his dead body.
Nineteenth and twentieth century French author Marguerite Eymery, better known
as Rachilde, was an avant garde writer whose novels, short stories, plays and essays have
received renewed interest from twentieth and twenty-first century scholars and critics in
the fields of French studies, women’s studies, gender, sexuality and queer studies.
Classifying Rachilde in these ways has tended to overemphasize the obstacles she faced
as a woman writer in fin de siècle France as well as typecasting her as a feminist.
Nevertheless, her personal struggles with sexuality, gender, and unhappiness with being a
woman are how she came to be included in the present study.
In previous chapters the artificial and mechanical human bodies were exclusively
feminized and sexualized. These artificial bodies were constructed in response to a crisis
of femininity and asking what is wrong with the female sex and how can we fix it?
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Rachilde realized in the declining nineteenth-century that both femininity and masculinity
were in changing. Rachilde asks the equally important questions, what does it mean to be
a man and what does it mean to be a woman? Consequently, Rachildean protagonists
operate under the assumption that gender is not fixed or predetermined. Characters in
Monsieur Vénus and La Jongleuse manipulate their behavior, dress, and speech
reproducing and rewriting their gender on a sliding continuum that is neither male nor
female but bi-gendered.
The ambivalence of the gendered bodies creates new types of relationships,
moving beyond the heterosexual and homosexual binary. Sex and gender ambivalence is
further maintained by the new ways of interacting with wax figures and automata. In
contrast to La Stilla and La Lison who were both trained and programmed to sing the
same song or run along the same route over and over again, the amphora in La Jongleuse
and the automaton in Monsieur Vénus are not preprogrammed and the body is allowed to
speak for itself. In La Jongleuse, Eliante responds to the sexless state of her amphora
according to its wishes. Raoule dresses either as a man or as a woman to make love to her
automaton. Hadaly occupies a middle ground since she is preprogrammed to respond to
Lord Ewald’s changing desires. Finally, artificial and mechanical bodies in Rachilde’s
works are designed for sexual and intellectual autonomy. Eliante avoids union and her
amphora only loosely resembles a person. In this respect, mechanical and artificial bodies
in Rachilde’s novels move one step closer to couplings without humans.
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CONCLUSION
This dissertation analyzes the roles ascribed to the automaton in late nineteenthcentury French literature. Specifically, I consider the automaton as a living machine of
the Industrial Age in novels by Émile Zola, Jules Verne, Villiers de l’Ilse-Adam, and
Rachilde. Zola’s railway novel La Bête humaine details a series of crimes and romances
on the Paris-La Havre line and is part of his narrative tableau of the Third Republic. The
second chapter examined two novels in Verne’s Les Voyages extraordinaires: La Maison
à vapeur, a railroad adventure set in British-colonized India, and Le Château des
Carpathes, a mysterious Transylvanian love story. My analysis then turned to Villiers’
novel L’Eve future, in which Thomas Edison creates an android in his Menlo Park
laboratory. Finally, two novels by Rachilde Monsieur Vénus and La Jongleuse explore
the artificial body of gender. The various settings of these novels suggest the European,
and even American, cultural imagination was gripped by industrialization and its effects
on man, particularly the idea that man was a machine.
The definition of automaton has changed during the past few centuries, but the
most basic definition is a self-moving object that often resembles a living being.
Comparisons have long been made between man and machines in French literature. The
most famous example is perhaps Descartes’ seventeenth century Traité du monde which
included a mechanistic description of the human body. Over the course of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, Descartes’ metaphor was refined to reflect changes in
technology and in the nineteenth-century, Man was animated by steam and electricity, not
the gears of a clock. By anthropomorphizing and animating the steam engine, Zola and
Verne explore the ramifications of increased industrialization and urbanization on
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modern man. In Zola’s La Bête humaine the railway serves as a metaphor for the physical
and sexual body as well as the corps social. The railway was intended to regulate
biorhythms and control sexual behavior. Verne’s mechanized steam elephant illustrates
the limits of the railroad as a civilizing tool in the colonies. Instead, the modern body is
diseased and derails itself by careening out of control.
Other automata of the late nineteenth-century were examples of art objects,
divorced from utilitarian and industrial concerns. The mechanical women and in Verne’s,
Villiers’, and Rachilde’s novels are representations of a new type of artificial femininity
or, in the case of Monsieur Vénus, masculinity. In their novels, technologies of sexual reproduction including painting, sculpture, photography, and phonography, were used to
replicate the human form and reinforce models of normal sexuality as outlined in
medical, psychological, and criminological texts. Paintings and statues that were
animated by curses and spells in fantastic tales serve as inspiration for the automated
Galateas of the late-nineteenth-century. Alicia Clary is compared to statues of Venus in
the Louvre. In La Jongleuse, Eliante’s wax figures and large amphora reinforce the links
between statuary and mechanical man. The wax automaton in Monsieur Vénus was
inspired by the wax “Venuses” increasingly used in dissections carried out in hospitals
and medical schools. Verne’s mad scientist Orfanik and Villiers’ Edison, the “Sorcerer of
Menlo Park,” use holograms, telescopes, and phonographs to alter the ways in which the
human voice and image are captured and replayed. These authors produce images of the
artificial woman as both technical achievement and artistic object.
My readings of these novels are informed by the nineteenth-century clinical
practices of dissection and anatomy which revealed the human body in new ways. The
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recesses of the female body were targets of the masculine medical and scientific gazes.
L’Eve future most clearly illustrates the dissection and probing of the female body in
order to assign pathology. Hysteria was the most prevalent female malady of the late
nineteenth-century and is discussed in the works of Zola, Villiers, and Rachilde. The
elision of hysteria and mental degeneracy in La Bête humaine, however, suggests that a
divided psyche is part of modern male and female identity. Rachilde used the label
hysteric to justify her unconventional behavior and her status as a female author. In so
doing, she simultaneously confirmed the patriarchal view of women as diseased, and
revealed the constructed-ness and hollowness of the definition of hysteria. The natural
association between the female body and disease provided the justification for replacing
Woman with an artificial body. Indeed, female contagion is the justification for creating a
new breed of women in L’Eve Future.
The artificial women produced in these novels are examples of bachelor
machines. As a technology of reproduction, bachelor machines resemble women and are
designed to replace woman in romantic and sexual relationships and are predicated on the
notion that woman is a biological machine and thus more easily mechanized than man.
La Lison, the feminized and anthropomorphized steam engine, stands in for human
women in Jacques’ life. La Stilla and Hadaly are the most readily identifiable bachelor
machines I have discussed. Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus is the only novel discussed that
features a male automaton. Rachilde believed that masculinity was constructed in the
same way as femininity.
These narratives of constructing artificial and mechanized human life are creation
stories that challenge the relationships between Man, Nature, and God. In subtle ways,
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Verne’s Le Château des Carpathes hints at the changing relationship between man and
Nature. By aid of the telescope, the villagers of Werst see their land up close, as never
before. Technology’s more sinister effects on Nature are presented in La Maison à
vapeur, in which the steam elephant, not bound by metal tracks, tears across the Indian
countryside. Edison’s philosophical musings in L’Eve future suggest that man-made
bodies are superior to those produced naturally. In these creation stories, anthrogenesis is
linked to technogenesis. Man’s future is intrinsically bound to the mechanized bodies
produced in the laboratory or clinic. However, the success of these re-productive
futurisms is called into question by the machine’s destruction. La Lison and Behemoth
crash, La Stilla is shattered, and Hadaly drowns in a shipwreck.
Finally, these novels are indicative of the relationship between science and
fiction. As science and technology became a part of everyday life, so too did they become
appropriate subjects for fiction. Zola used the tenets of the scientific method to carry out
his social experiment about the triumphs and failures of the fictional Rougon-Macquart
clan. Furthermore, he compared the novel to a train; the chapters are equivalent to the
train’s arrivals and departures. Villiers, like Zola, organizes his novel around the
machine. The android Hadaly is dissected and her mechanics explained in the chapters
devoted to her hair, voice, skin, etc. In Verne’s Le Château des Carpathes, events are
explained as new technological devices are introduced. Technology becomes a tool for
organizing the narrative and of everyday life as characters rely more and more upon it.
Zola, Verne, Villiers, and Rachilde wrote with the conviction that science belonged in
fiction and thus contributed to the then-emerging genre of science fiction.
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EPILOGUE: ARTIFICIAL BODIES FROM THE GOTHIC TO THE
CYBORGOTHIC
In 1980 Patrick Brantlinger posited that science fiction’s status as “mainstream”
fiction depended on it becoming a “realism of the future” (Brantlinger 30). He believed
that the conventions of science fiction are derived from those of fantasy, romance, and
Gothic romance in particular, all of which are at odds with the conventions of realism. In
my analysis of artificial bodies in nineteenth-century French literature and culture, I have
in large part avoided categorizing the narratives according to genre. Using Marie Lathers’
terminology, the five novels under consideration here can all be labelled representational
texts. These novels discuss the representation of woman, man, and sometimes animals
primarily in literature but at times in other art forms as well. Although classifying these
narratives according to genre is not my ultimate goal, I do wish to consider how the
narratives in question are part of the genre of science fiction, and in particular, to
consider how the representation of artificial bodies has evolved from the early nineteenthcentury Gothic romance to the twentieth and twenty-first century cyborgothic narrative.
Pinpointing an exact date to mark the definitive emergence of science fiction as a
genre is problematic. Part of the difficulty lies in the basic definition of the genre of
science fiction. “Between the end of the 17th and the 19th centuries, what would later be
called SF [science fiction] begins to take shape as an autonomous fictional domain as
concerns its materials, themes, and narrative formats derived from varying sorts of
merveilleux, utopias, imaginary voyages, and texts of scientific popularization” (Bozzetto
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3).79 Technology and scientific inquiry were combined in these texts with
philosophically-based utopian speculation and geographic exploration to produce
alternate futures. However, texts written in France and England during the Enlightenment
failed to provide links between philosophical “voyages” and developing technology. It
wasn’t until Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, Or the Modern Prometheus (1818) that
the first modern science fiction novel was created. Although not the earliest example,
Brantlinger, Minsoo Kang, and Marie-Hélène Huet, among other scholars, have all
identified Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a clear example of the cross-fertilization of the
genres of science fiction and Gothic romance.
Definitions of realism and Gothic romance, and subsequent identification of
narrative and aesthetic trends in Gothic romances present in the five novels I discussed
are important because they underpin much of the discussion. In this dissertation, realism
is most readily associated with the works of Emile Zola and refers to nineteenth-century
narratives that imitate Nature as she is, or copy a reality that exists outside of the text.
Authors and artists represent what they see, not what they feel and therefore do not rely
on poetry, embellishments, or idyllic and dream-like states in their works which are
common features of Gothic romances.
The Gothic romance is characterized by a set of literary conventions that
internalize or subjectify events, thus emphasizing the break from reality.
These internalizing conventions include frame-tale narration; the use of
unreliable narrators; the patter of the double or of the ghostly, demonic
alter ego; claustrophobic motifs of imprisonment, secret passages, coffins
and catacombs; and metaphors that liken events to demonic possession
or…lunacy. (Brantlinger 35)
79
See Roger Bozzetto’s “Intercultural Interplay: Science Fiction in France and the United States”
for an analysis of how the genre of science fiction evolved from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth
centuries in France and the United States.
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Narrative features of Frankenstein that combine Gothic romance and science fiction
include: anti-utopias and scenes of destruction, the incarnation of reason, the mad
scientist, and the monster.
If a Gothic romance is anti-modern and anti-rational, Frankenstein, like much of
modern science fiction, is anti-Promethean, anti-utopian, and anti-scientific pessimism
(32). I labelled the artificial bodies I discussed as reproductive futurisms. Each of these
artificial bodies employs contemporary technical, scientific, and mechanical methods.
Technologies of reproduction such as the phonograph, hologram, wax sculpture,
photography, and early movie camera were used to create the artificial bodies. However,
as reproductive futurisms, I suggest that these artificial bodies are also products of the
future. For instance, Verne and Villiers hint at cinema, a twentieth century technology.
As products of the future, these artificial bodies can suggest progress and development, a
bettering of society.
However, a salient feature of many science fiction narratives is an anti-utopian
and destructive drive. In “The Imagination of Disaster,” Susan Sontag suggests that
science fiction films are concerned with the aesthetics of destruction, “the beauty of
wreaking havoc,” rather than with science itself (Sontag 213). By qualifying this claim,
and instead stating that science fiction narratives are concerned with the failures of
science, one can begin to see the origins of science fiction in Gothic romances. For
example, Dr. Frankenstein’s monster kills his family and friends. The mechanical bodies
analyzed in this study, La Lison, La Stilla, Behemoth, Hadaly, and Jacques are all killed
or otherwise destroyed at the end of the novel. In Verne’s La Maison à vapeur, the
mechanical elephant is destroyed when it crashes into a cliff; Banks, the engineer, failed
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to account for nature in his plans to build a steam house. Similarly, Edison’s android
Hadaly is destroyed by a fire and a shipwreck, events that depend on nature or natural
elements. Differences between destruction in Gothic romances and science fiction
narratives relate to the destructive scale and scope. Destruction in Gothic romances is
often internalized or limited to one person. For example, Frankenstein’s monster attacks
the doctor’s friends and family. Science fiction narratives tend to globalize destruction. In
La Bête humaine, Flore’s attempt to kill Jacques and Séverine resulted in a massive train
derailment.
A second feature of science fiction narratives is the incarnation of reason. Kang
traces the origins of fantastic literature to the mid- to late-eighteenth century, a time of
social and political upheaval in Europe. When the political situation in Europe
destabilized, literary devices returned to previously repressed figures, ghosts, sorcerers,
lunatics, and monsters. Fantastic literature is a type of nonrealist literature whose purpose
“is to deliberately make it unclear whether an anomalous occurrence or entity is indeed
supernatural or natural, delaying the revelation as long as possible, sometimes
indefinitely. Much of the fantastic literature of the early nineteenth-century employs this
narrative strategy” (Kang 195). In early fantastic tales such as works by Hoffmann or
Shelley, uncertainty in narratives reflected individuals’ anxiety about the unstable
political situation rather than anxiety about the Industrial Revolution. Over time, anxiety
surrounding the Industrial Revolution on the Continent (post 1830) increasingly became a
key issue in representations of automata. Verne’s Le Château des Carpathes is a good
example of the evolving role of reason in fantastic literature and science fiction. Frik and
the other villagers begin to question the accuracy of their visual and auditory faculties
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when technology is introduced in the village of Werst. Initially, they attribute the strange
smoke and sounds coming from the castle to a curse. Eventually, they come to realize
that there is a logical explanation for these events.
Additionally, reason in science fiction is often incarnated by a mad-scientist.
Villiers’ Thomas Edison is a dandified wizard, and Orfanik, the Baron de Gortz’
assistant, is described as a misunderstood genius; his glasses, eye-patch, and crooked
nose signified his difference from others, lending credence to the belief that he was crazy
or strange. In Gothic romances, the break with reality occurs in an individual with
Promethean-like qualities. In science fiction, though, industrial technology and machines
threaten individualism. “The pattern in science fiction is to present people as
dehumanized, having little or no power, sub-natural rather than super-natural, turned into
machines or machine-tenders, while machines acquire power, take on personalities, and
behave demonically” (Brantlinger 41). Both self-destructive reason in Gothic romances
and destruction of man by machines in science fiction are examples of necrophilic
desires, including the passion to destroy life, and a fascination with the dead and
mechanical. Necrophilia is particularly evident in Zola’s La Bête humaine. Lisa Downing
posits that murder is a creative act. Zolian protagonists such as Jacques Lantier in La Bête
and Laurence in Thérèse Raquin are fascinated with death and killing the objects of their
desire creates art. In a similar way, Raoule de Vénérande, the heroine of Monsieur Vénus
transforms her dead lover’s body into a wax automaton.
Finally, the creation of a monster is a link between the Gothic and science fiction.
Marie-Hélène Huet explains that often times deformities or abnormalities in children
were attributed to unspoken desires or unchecked passion on the mother’s part. However,
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in Frankenstein and the novels I analyzed, the maternal figure is absent and the monster
is created by something other than misplaced female passion or desire. In representational
texts such as these, the father’s procreative role is primary and replaces the mother’s
traditional role. La Stilla and Hadaly are bachelor machines; a feminized and sexualized
machine that often replaces a real woman in romantic and sexual relationships. The
artificial bodies or “monsters” in these narratives are examples of the nineteenth-century
science of teratogeny or the fabrication of monsters. Monstrous qualities were no longer
considered random, but were now explained by evolution. Teratogeny systematizes the
presence of monstrous qualities or aberrations. According to Darwin, “‘We also have
what are called monstrosities, but they graduate into varieties. By a monstrosity I
presume is meant some considerable deviation of structure, generally injurious, or not
useful to the species’” (Huet 75). Monstrosity became a biological concept and is
explained as a variant in norms. Such an understanding of the monstrous and monstrosity
begins to limit the distance or demarcation between that which is recognizably human
and that which is labelled Other. As we trace the evolution of science fiction as genre
from the late-eighteenth century gothic romance to the end of the nineteenth-century,
three narrative features stand out: destruction on a mass scale, the incarnation of reason,
and the presence of a monster. In the twentieth century, particularly during the interwar
years and during the Cold War, the genre of science fiction changes dramatically. 80 In
general, science fiction output shifts from Europe to the United States, and the automaton
is replaced by robots and the cyborg.
It is at this juncture that cyborgs, the posthuman, and the genre of cyborgothic
come into play. In each of the nineteenth-century representational texts analyzed in this
80
See Bozzetto pages 6-9 and Kang “The Revolt of the Robots” pages 264-296.
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dissertation, humans, particularly man, are used as the basis for defining the Other or the
machine, which is only understood in terms of its relationship to man or the artist/creator.
Such an anthropocentric focus limits the potential for non-human development. One of
the effects of anthropocentrism is an “uncanniness” associated with robots or other
machines. As robots and machines become increasingly human, eventually they may
reach a point where their familiarity levels off or drops. The uncanniness of robots is the
result of only thinking about them in human terms and refusing to change ourselves.
Instead, Yi argues that we should create a two-way relationship with technology instead
of only considering how a robot responds to us. Additionally, “by drawing up
specifications for a robot that responds to human emotions, roboticists could either
recklessly universalize human or mistakenly undermine human adaptabilities” (12).
Conceived in this way, human emotions run the risk of becoming inflexible, predictable
and mechanical.
Emotions, moods, and thoughts are some of the most fundamental characteristics
of humanness. In the nineteenth-century novels I discuss, the artificial body is designed
to physically resemble and move the way a human would (the steam engine is an
exception). In certain cases, La Stilla and Hadaly, recreating the human voice is also
added to the design. In the mid-twentieth century, the trend shifts and artificial bodies in
the form of robots or cyborgs are designed to not only resemble humans and mimic their
behavior, but also to think like humans. Minsoo Kang explains that the physiological
debate between the vitalist or mechanist nature of man became moot given advances in
biology and medicine. “The central focus of the machine-human comparison shifted to
the nature of the mind. Some of the most interesting intellectual debates on the subject
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are on the questions whether the human brain works in some sense like a digital
computer and whether a computer of sufficient complexity and power could achieve
consciousness” (Kang 198). An early example of this phenomenon is Villiers’ android
Hadaly who is programmed to respond to Lord Ewald’s thoughts.81
A successful posthuman aesthetical ethos must redefine “cyborg” and reconfigure
our relationship with machines. In the 1950s, the emerging field of cybernetics coined the
term “cybernetic organism” or “cyborg.” In the 1980s, Donna Haraway defined a cyborg
as “a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of
fiction” (6). Defined in this way, the cyborg has no clear genealogy and furthermore is
able to be too easily appropriated by most representational systems. “This practice of
(mis)representing the cyborg, particularly in literary studies and social sciences, is most
evident in the discussion of teratology, where the cyborg is associated with traditional
monsters” (12). As discussed earlier, teratogeny or teratology uses monsters to establish
boundaries between the normal and abnormal. Unlike other monsters, we are able to
choose how to fabricate the cyborg. Although Haraway claims that cyborgs have no clear
genealogy, cyberneticits suggest that cyborgs do in fact have a genealogy.
Cyberneticists regard “both the body and the mind as essentially data carriers
(genes in the body and cultural and intellectual information or ‘memes’ in the mind)
[and] raised the implication that they and the digital computer operated under analogous
principles” which could be merged in a cyborg (Kang 199). Dongshin Yi adapts a
genealogical approach and looks for “genes” in the genres of gothic literature and science
81
Sharalyn Orbaugh discusses Oshii Mamoru’s 2004 film Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence.
Mamoru’s film is loosely based on L’Eve future and explores the limits of human affect. Mamoru argues
that the human body has become meaningless since the advent of language, and because memory can be
programmed and transferred, memory is no longer the basis for selfhood. Affect is all that remains of the
human.
229
fiction that would produce a posthuman aesthetical discourse. In order to encompass a
variety of texts, science fiction refers to the genre of science fiction itself, but also to
science in fiction or fiction that concerns itself with questions of science in society. In his
articulation of a posthuman aesthetics, Yi explains that cyborgothic “is thus a literary
genre that emphasizes the necessity of an imaginary/imaginative approach to
posthumanism, the current discourses of which are limited by practicalities of
technoscience and dictates of anthropocentrism and, therefore, incapable of envisioning
an aesthetical ethics for non-humans” (Yi 3).82 A successful posthuman aesthetics would
consider the relationship between man and machine from the machine’s perspective as
well.
What does a posthuman or cyborgothic genealogy look like? In the age of digital
technology and a potentially posthuman era, Kang argues that robots and cyborgs can
confront humans in three theoretical ways. First, by inevitable confrontation. This theory
posits that humans dominate earth because of superior intelligence; eventually machines
will become more intelligent than humans and will then become the dominant life form
on Earth. Second, using the theory of equivalence through sentience, “once machines do
reach the human level of consciousness, they should indeed be treated as living, thinking
beings and that granting them status as such, including even political and legal rights,
might be the best way to prevent a catastrophic confrontation with them” (301-302).
Humans and robots are different, but equal according to this theory. Finally, the theory of
cybernetic mergence proposes that in the future humans and robots will fuse together.
The fusion of human and robot would be so complete as to remove the distinctions
82
Cyborgothic is derived from “cybergothic”, itself a hybrid of Gothicism, science fiction, and
cyberpunk. Yi has chosen to use cyborgothic in his book in order to emphasize the potential that cyborgs
have in the posthuman.
230
between natural and artificial, organic and mechanical, and biological and digital. Yi
confirms Kang’s ideas and argues that only when cyborgs are made in a reciprocal and
responsive relationship between humans and non-humans will the posthuman be
achieved.
Brantlinger posited that science fiction would become mainstream only if the
genre evolved into a realism of the future. Advances in biology, science, and technology
suggest that we are moving inexorably towards the moment of singularity, the time in
which man is completely fused with machines and according to Ray Kurzweil, the
moment in the near future “when we will be able to leave behind the biological prison of
our bodies and transcend to the infinite and infinitely malleable world of virtuality”
(303). One narrative feature of modern science fiction is that science is presented as a
mediator in man’s relationship to the world (Bozzetto 4). The aesthetics of cyborgothic
imply that science fiction is no longer a realism of the future or even fiction, but simply
realism, a genre of the now.
231
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