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NINETEENTH-CENTURY CYBORGS: VITALISM AND MATERIALISM IN
FRANKENSTEIN, THE COMING RACE, AND THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU
By Miranda Joelle Butler
ABSTRACT:
Cyborg creatures are often associated with the technological advancements of the 1980s
and 1990s. However, Donna J. Haraway argues that cyborg imagery exists as a way to blur the
lines between traditional dualisms, which suggests that cyborg hybridity could be present in
literature long before the twentieth century. For example, in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the
complex identity of Victor’s cyborg creature demonstrates that “life” cannot be explained in
purely vitalist or purely materialist terms. In what follows, I will explore the way that, sparked
by the vitality debate, several Victorian novels after Frankenstein argue through their
representations of cyborg entities that a purely dualistic model is insufficient to explain “life.”
Edward Bulwer-Lytton presents hybridity and the complexities of vitality in his novel The
Coming Race, when he describes the utopian society of the Vril-ya. In The Island of Doctor
Moreau, H.G. Wells introduces another image of cyborgs: the hybrid creatures called the Beast
People. Lastly, although modern science and technology has developed far beyond the nineteenth
century, the questions of “life” raised by nineteenth-century science, and the cyborg images
which allowed authors to complicate these questions, continue to inspire modern literature such
as Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age.
CONTENTS
Introduction
Cyborg Hybrids, Frankenstein, and the Vitality Debate
1
Part I
Bulwer-Lytton’s Vril-ya: The Cyborgs of The Coming Race
10
Part II
Vivisection and Human/Animal Boundaries in
The Island of Doctor Moreau
18
Part III
Nineteenth-Century Cyborgs in Contemporary Literature:
Nanotechnological Hybridity in The Diamond Age
25
Conclusion
Cyborg Identities in a Posthuman World
33
Works Cited
37
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Introduction:
Cyborg Hybrids, Frankenstein, and the Vitality Debate
One of the most memorable images of Frankenstein comes from James Whale’s 1931
film, when in the midst of a loud storm of thunder and lightning, the crazed doctor sparks life
into his creation and declares, “It’s alive! It’s alive! It’s alive!” (Whale). However, in Mary
Shelley’s 1818 novel, Victor does not react so triumphantly to the reanimation of his creature—
and the meaning of the word “alive,” as associated with his experiment, becomes much more
complicated than this classic moment in film history suggests.
Despite the fact that Victor constructed his creature to be a “man” with a “human frame”
(Shelley 81-82), and even goes so far as to call his handiwork “beautiful” (85), in the instant that
he brings his creature to life, Victor’s perception completely changes. “These luxuriances,”
Victor explains of his creature’s beautiful limbs, “only formed a more horrid contrast with his
watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were
set, his shriveled complexion, and straight black lips” (85). Since the appearance of the creature
has not changed between his compilation and his reanimation, Victor is not reacting to a material
transformation. Instead, because the creature is built out of a collection of dead human body
parts and reanimated with electricity, Victor finds his work terrifying because it breaches the
scientific and philosophical boundaries between human and nonhuman, and life and death. As
Teresa Heffernan writes, “Both ‘humanity’ and ‘monstrosity’ are not, as [Victor] assumes,
miraculously brought to life in the vacuum of his laboratory, but constructed in and through a
complex world of conflicting narratives, where self and other, nonhuman and human, monster
and doctor are open to constant renegotiation and interpenetration” (124). In Frankenstein, the
definition of life itself is subject to several categorical distinctions that often contradict each
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other. In her essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna J. Haraway explains that this act of blurring
the lines between dualisms and boundaries can be described as cyborg hybridity.
According to Haraway, the concept of a cyborg—that is, a “cybernetic organism, a hybrid
of machine and organism”—is commonly associated with breakthrough technological
developments of the late twentieth century. However, the concept of cyborg imagery “can
suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools
to ourselves” (Haraway). Therefore, as Frankenstein illustrates, scientists, philosophers, and
writers asked questions that broke down strict dualisms long before the pop-culture cyborgs of
the 1980s and 1990s emerged. For example, in addition to existing in an undefined space
between human and nonhuman, and life and death, Victor’s creature also transgresses the
boundary between nature and artifice. In true cyborg fashion, Victor’s creature “was not born”
and “has no origin story in the Western sense” (Haraway). Victor describes this realization: “No
father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve their’s” (82). In
this way, these dualisms that Shelley subverts through cyborg imagery are inspired by an
overarching uncertainty about the nature of life. Is Victor’s creature “alive” because Victor
assembled all the necessary parts, or was he simply revivified through a physical “principle of
life” like electric shock? During the nineteenth century, in the wake of the age of enlightenment,
these were complicated questions, which required much more complicated answers than a binary
or dualism could provide.
Although Shelley’s novel is fantastical, the debate that motivated her protagonist’s
experiment is far from fictitious. Its basis in scientific questions of life and death stem from the
debate over the “life principle,” or the vitality debate, of the early 1800s. During this vitality
debate, many radical members of the scientific community chose to embrace an empirical
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perspective called materialism, a “biology which conceived of life (as it still does) simply as the
totality of an organism’s functions” (Macdonald and Scherf 18). One of the most prominent
supporters of materialism was William Lawrence, President of the Royal College of Surgeons of
London, who was also Percy Shelley’s personal physician (Butler, Introduction xvii). However,
this new materialist biology clashed with older theories of vitalism, a different view of human
life. One of the vitalists’ leading advocates was surgeon John Abernethy, one of Lawrence’s
former professors. Scholar Marilyn Butler writes that “As a moderate willing to conform to
religious scruples, [Abernethy] conceded that the modern catchwords ‘organization,’ ‘function,’
and ‘matter,’ could not explain what was distinctively life-giving. Life, that which vitalized, had
to be thought of as something independent” (Introduction xviii). Throughout their various
publications and lectures, Lawrence and Abernethy, alongside other scientists and philosophers,
brought the debate of vitalism versus materialism to the forefront of intellectual discussion.
Consequently, as Butler argues, “…almost all Lawrence’s own publications in the vitalist and
evolutionary field fall into the years of the conceiving and writing of Frankenstein. The dialogue
continues, embraces the novel, becomes its essential context and at times its text” (Introduction
xviii).
In the novel, when Victor first arrives at the University of Ingolstadt, he meets two
professors, M. Krempe and M. Waldman, whose conversations explore the way that the
philosophical beliefs of prior scientists and vitalists contradicted the more practical approach of
modern experimentalists, like the materialists. Victor first meets M. Krempe, a professor of
natural philosophy whose model of science adheres to the materialist perspective. Krempe is
shocked to learn that Victor became interested in science after reading outdated works by
Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, and Paracelsus: “Every instant that you have wasted on
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those books is utterly and entirely lost. You have burdened your memory with exploded systems,
and useless names. Good God! … I little expected in this enlightened and scientific age to find a
disciple of Albertus Magnus and Paracelsus” (74-75). Here, Krempe’s discussion of the
“enlightened age,” as well as his disapproval of earlier scientists, mirrors the argument that
Lawrence makes in the preface to his Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History
of Man. Lawrence writes, “Follow the dictates of reason and you must be led to just and rational
conclusions; follow those of the passions—quit once the paths of observation, and you may be
lured unconsciously into the regions of imagination” (iii). Here, Lawrence uses the term
“imagination” in the Romantic sense, dismissing the imaginative and ambitious pursuits of
earlier scientists as dangerous and unpredictable. Instead, Lawrence and the materialists
represented by M. Krempe favor a more practical, responsible approach to science, and choose to
pursue theories based solely on empirical observations.
Victor, however, is not as interested in these practical endeavors as he is in the grand
ambitions of his idols. Instead of adhering to Lawrence’s advice, Victor follows the scientific
practices of the early nineteenth-century vitalist Humphry Davy, who was a poet as well as a
scientist. Unlike Lawrence, Davy “dared to call science almost ‘creative,’ a word which still had
powerful religious connotations in the Romantic period,” and even once spoke of the
“conversion of dead matter into living matter” (Macdonald and Scherf 23). As a result, Victor’s
disappointment with Krempe’s strictly materialist view of science causes him to feel “a contempt
for the uses of modern natural philosophy. It was very different, when the masters of the science
sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand: but now the scene was
changed … I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little
worth” (75). By including this reflection, Shelley introduces the idea that even though Victor is
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an enlightened intellectual who recognizes the success of modern science, he seeks to use his
knowledge in an ambitious way rather than a simply practical one.
Thus, Victor is pleased when he meets Krempe’s opponent, the chemistry instructor M.
Waldman. Instead of dismissing the ambitions of the ancient teachers, Waldman says that,
“These were men to whose indefatigable zeal modern philosophers were indebted for most of the
foundations of their knowledge. They had left to us an easier task, to give new names, and
arrange in connected classifications, the facts which they in a great degree had been the
instruments of bringing to light” (76-77). Waldman respects the ancient theorists just as
Abernethy supported the theories of his predecessor John Hunter, a renowned eighteenth-century
comparative anatomist who “drew an inference which has not, [Abernethy] believes, been
disputed … that the principle of life may in some instances be suddenly removed, or have its
power abolished, whilst in general it is lost by degrees” (Abernethy 31-32). Abernethy upholds
Hunter’s theory not only because “it seems highly probable” (13), but also because he believes
that, “The greatest philosophers were through the whole course of their enquiries and
demonstrations, theorists … It is scarcely necessary for me to assert that this kind of thinking is
useful, and promotive to Science” (10). When Waldman reinforces vitalism in a similar way,
Victor realizes that if he remains open-minded in his scientific endeavors, he can “become really
a man of science, and not merely a petty experimentalist” (77). This realization ultimately
prompts Victor to use the powerful tools of modern science to investigate vitality and
philosophical questions concerning life.
Therefore, while he is studying the practical applications of medicine, Victor does not
lose interest in the questions that first drew him to science. In fact, his curiosity and his vitalist
tendencies increase as he explains that:
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One phaenomena which had peculiarly attracted my attention was the structure of the
human frame, and indeed, any animal endued with life. Whence, I often asked myself,
did the principle of life proceed? It was a bold question, and one which has ever been
considered a mystery; yet with how many things are we upon the brink of becoming
acquainted, if cowardice or carelessness did not restrain our inquiries (79).
In this reflection, Shelley further reinforces the idea that Victor’s motivations are fueled by the
vitality debate. When Victor refers to the “principle of life,” he references the exact words of
Abernethy’s essays and Hunter’s earlier theories. As D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf note,
Shelley confirms this inspiration in a journal entry, when she “attributes the nightmare that
inspired her novel to a conversation between her lover and Byron about ‘the nature of the
principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and
communicated’” (19). Victor initiates his experiment as an exploration into vitality.
When Victor finally succeeds in discovering this life principle, Shelley’s novel makes
another clear reference to Abernethy’s works. Victor states, “After days and nights of incredible
labour and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I
became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter … I collected the
instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay
at my feet” (80, 84). When Shelley compares the principle of life to a “spark,” she recalls
Abernethy’s explanation that life is caused by “the effect of some subtile, mobile, invisible
substance, superadded to the evident structure of muscles … as magnetism is to iron, and as
electricity is to various substances with which it may be corrected” (Abernethy 39). Similarly,
because Victor is able to physically bestow this life into a dead vessel, he confirms Abernethy’s
hypothesis that, “The phaenomena of electricity and of life correspond. The electricity may be
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attached to or inhere in a wire; it may be suddenly dissipated or have its powers annulled or it
may be removed by degrees or in portions, and the wire may remain less and less strongly
electrified in proportion as it is abstracted” (42). In this way, Victor’s experiment reinforces the
two key points of vitalism: that life has a singular, physical cause, and that there is a clearly
defined difference between animation and dead matter.
Ultimately, Victor not only intellectually identifies himself as a vitalist, but also
successfully applies vitalist theories to his groundbreaking experiment. When he brings his
creature to life, Victor’s narrative fictitiously answers Shelley’s question of whether a physical
“principle of life” might exist, and what could happen if it was to be discovered. Therefore, since
Victor’s experiment successfully discovers the “life principle,” it is easy to conclude that
Shelley’s novel supports the vitalist side of the vitality debate. It is equally easy to conclude,
however, that Shelley depicts Victor as a “blundering experimenter, still working with
superseded notions,” and that because this “portrayal of her hero is harsh [and] contemptuous,” it
demonstrates a disapproval of his Romantic vitalist beliefs, and instead favors the rational
approach of materialism (Butler, “Frankenstein and Radical Science” 409). But just as Victor’s
creature lies somewhere between life/death, human/nonhuman, and natural/artificial, Shelley’s
novel is neither purely vitalist nor purely materialist. In the same way that Victor’s experiment
requires both the modern methods of materialism and the ambitions of vitalism, the complex
identity of his cyborg creature demonstrates that “life” cannot simply be explained in dualistic
terms. In what follows, I will explore the way that, following Frankenstein, several creatures in
later Victorian novels break down traditional binaries in order to allow for a more complex
analysis of human life and identity. Sparked by nineteenth-century scientific theories that were
influenced by the vitality debate, these works argue, through their representations of entities that
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display the fundamental qualities of Haraway’s cyborgs, that a purely dualistic model is
insufficient to explain “life.”
Although Frankenstein was published in the heyday of the vitality debate, many later
authors continued to use their fictional works, as Shelley did, to explore how science contributes
to and complicates our understanding of life. Like Shelley, Edward Bulwer-Lytton applies
theories of vitalism to his novel The Coming Race, when he describes the utopian race of the
Vril-ya. Like Victor, the Vril-ya have discovered the essence of life: an all-prevailing substance
called vril, which has omnipotent power over humans and animals, as well as organic and
inorganic matter, and can be used for both healing and destruction. The Vril-ya also share a close
relationship with their machines. By providing the Vril-ya with mechanical prostheses, and
situating them in a society which has evolved beyond human technologies, Bulwer-Lytton’s
cyborg creatures enable him to illustrate the fears incited by new evolutionary theories of life.
In The Island of Doctor Moreau, H.G. Wells introduces another image of cyborgs: the
hybrid creatures called the Beast People, who appear “where the boundary between humans and
animals is transgressed” (Haraway). These creatures were once animals, but after many
experiments, graftings, and vivisections, Dr. Moreau transforms them into human-like creatures
that still retain traces of their animal identities. Since Wells himself supported animal
vivisection, his novel blurs the boundaries between humans and animals in order to embrace the
similarities between them. Wells’s depiction of human/animal hybrids identifies many of the
arguing points in the nineteenth-century animal vivisection debate, which revolved around
anxieties concerning the deterioration of vitalist feeling and sentiment in favor of the seemingly
cold, scientific methodology of the materialists. While Moreau is experimenting with the
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physical makeup of life, Wells complicates this issue by portraying his antagonist as an
ambitious vitalist.
Ultimately, although modern science and technology have developed far beyond the
nineteenth century, the questions of “life” raised by nineteenth-century science, and the cyborg
images which allowed authors to complicate these questions, are still present in more recent
literature. For example, Neal Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age presents a world that is
completely dominated by futuristic nanotechnology. However, despite its futuristic science
fiction qualities, the novel also contains a group of people who call themselves the NeoVictorians, since they look to the past to emulate more refined and learned lifestyles. Just as was
common in nineteenth-century fiction, the characters in Stephenson’s novel have become
cyborgs because humankind has merged its identity with nanotechnological machines. Since any
form of matter can be instantly created because it can be constructed invisibly at a molecular
level, Stephenson’s contemporary novel continues to challenge the vitalist/materialist division by
demonstrating how modern scientific developments such as nanotechnology break down
humanity’s perceptions of both “life” and materiality itself.
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Part I
Bulwer-Lytton’s Vril-ya: The Cyborgs of The Coming Race
Early on in her work, Haraway clarifies that her essay is “an argument for pleasure in the
confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction” (Haraway). Thus, cyborg
imagery challenges the differences between vitalist notions of creativity and the imagination, and
the materialist emphasis on practicality and morals. Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel The Coming
Race demonstrates both the pleasurable yet dangerous power of vitalism, and the responsibilities
that accompany science and discovery, through its portrayal of the utopian race of the Vril-ya:
cyborg creatures who subvert dualisms of human/animal, human/machine, and nature/artifice.
These hybrids are able to control the essence of life, which is a tangible substance, but since they
are also a highly practical race that has evolved far beyond humanity, they do not adhere solely
to either the vitalist or materialist perspective.
Even before the dualism of human and machine starts to dissolve, Haraway proposes that
the idea of the cyborg developed as soon as humanity began to question the differences between
humans and animals. She explains, “The cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary
between human and animal is transgressed. Far from signaling a walling off of people from other
living beings, cyborgs signal disturbingly and pleasurably tight coupling” (72). Bulwer-Lytton
demonstrates this unity of humans, animals, and inorganic matter alike when he introduces the
all-powerful substance of vril, a physical embodiment of the “subtile, movable substance” that
Abernethy describes earlier in the nineteenth century (39)—and because vril is the essence of life
in general, it affects all sorts of entities in addition to humans. The narrator of The Coming Race
explains that, “This fluid is capable of being raised and disciplined into the mightiest agency
over all forms of matter, animate or inanimate” (59). As Haraway anticipates, the ability to
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control humans and animals is both disturbing and pleasurable. Since vril “can destroy like the
flash of lightening; yet differently applied, it can replenish or invigorate life, heal, and
preserve…” (Bulwer-Lytton 59), the control of vril draws indisputable similarities, for better and
for worse, between Vril-ya the rest of their fellow creatures.
Through vril, the Vril-ya can destroy or heal any sort of life-form, whether it is human or
animal. This ability ultimately enables the Vril-ya to control inanimate objects, such as natural
phenomena, as well. Using vril, “They rend their way through the most solid substances, and
open valleys for culture through the rocks of their subterranean wilderness…” (Bulwer-Lytton
59). Furthermore, since vril controls humans, animals, and inanimate objects, it also has power
over the Vril-ya’s automata and machines. The narrator’s host, Zee, explains this concept:
If a heap of metal be not capable of originating a thought of its own, yet, through its
internal susceptibility to movement, it obtains the power to receive the thought of the
intellectual agent at work on it; and which, when conveyed with a sufficient force of vril
power, it is as much compelled to obey as if it were displaced by a visible bodily force. It
is animated for the time being by the soul thus infused into it… (94)
By demonstrating such an omnipotent system of control, the society of the Vril-ya not only
challenges the boundaries between human and animal, but takes this one step further in order to
blur the boundaries between any life forms, whether they appear to be literally “living” or not.
Like Victor’s creation, the “life principle” of vril deconstructs the boundary of living/nonliving
by applying the essence of life to an inanimate object.
As a result, Haraway describes the cyborg as an indistinguishable combination of human
and machine identities. She writes that, “Modern medicine is full of cyborgs, of couplings
between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices…” (70). The Vril-ya further
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exemplify this unity of organism and mechanism when the narrator encounters their artificial
wings. These apparatuses are man-made, as they “are composed from the feathers of a gigantic
bird that abounds in the rocky heights of the country” (120). However, in order for the Vril-ya to
utilize their wings, they must use their power of vril to unite their human limbs with the artificial
extensions of their bodies. Although these wings are not a natural part of the body, the Vril-ya
have an innate ability which allows even an infant to “ply his invented or artificial wings with as
much safety as a bird plies those with which it is born” (121). This artificial skill is also
biological, because when the narrator is unable to master his wings, Zee explains that this is
because he, unlike their race, has not been born with the evolved ability which allows the Vril-ya
to fly effortlessly: “…The connection between the will and the agencies of vril … [was] never
achieved by a single generation; it has gone on increasing, like other properties of race, in
proportion as it has been uniformly transmitted from parent to child…” (121). Essentially, the
Vril-ya have evolved this ability, just as Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection proposes
that “…variations in any way useful to beings, under the excessively complex relationships of
life, [are] preserved, accumulated, and inherited” (210). In this way, the Vril-ya, as cyborgs, call
into question the boundary between human life and the machine, and also serve as an
embodiment of an emerging evolutionary theory of life.
Because of the existence of vril, the Vril-ya also defy the boundary between mind and
body. Haraway argues that this is characteristic of the cyborg, because although the boundary
between humans and machines was once clear, “Now we are not so sure. Late twentieth-century
machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind
and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to
apply to organisms and machines” (72). The way the Vril-ya control their wings connects the
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human mind to the mechanical body just as Haraway describes, which ultimately frustrates the
human/machine distinction. When Zee analyzes the narrator’s inability to master his wings, she
not only identifies that he was not physically born with the necessary genetic traits, but also
explains that the ability he lacks is not solely a physical “malformation of [the narrator’s] own
corpuscular system,” but rather, a “defect in [his] power of volition” (121). Therefore, when the
non-physical elements of the Vril-ya’s minds and consciousnesses exert control of their physical
bodies (as well as their mechanical extensions), Bulwer-Lytton blurs the boundaries between
mind and body, and portrays both the physical and mental aspects of life.
However, although the wings of the Vril-ya are an extension of the self, they are not a
necessary one. For this reason, they support Haraway’s argument that cyborgs subvert the myth
of the biological organism as an organic whole (72). When the narrator describes the wings, he
says that, “They are fastened round the shoulders with light but strong springs of steel; and, when
expanded, the arms slide through loops for that purpose, forming, as it were, a stout central
membrane” (120). Such a description entails that the wings can, and sometimes will, be
removed. In fact, the female Vril-ya willingly choose to only wear their wings when they are
unmarried: “From the day of marriage, she (a Gy) wears her wings no more, she suspends them
with her own willing hand over the nuptial couch, never to be resumed unless the marriage tie be
severed by divorce or death” (121). The mechanical aspect of a cyborg’s biological organism is
simultaneously part of that organism, but nonetheless, not necessary to the creature’s overall
being.
As human-like creatures that are so closely tied to machines, the Vril-ya at first appear to
be a simply practical species. The Vril-ya are “…wholly without a contemporaneous literature,
despite the excellence to which culture had brought a language at once rich, simple, vigorous,
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and musical” (Bulwer-Lytton 104). Bulwer-Lytton explains that literature, especially of fictitious
or poetic nature, has become completely incompatible with the Vril-ya’s social and political
system because in order to create poetry, a person must experience intense emotions and
feelings. To the Vril-ya, these are “…passions which we no longer experience—ambition,
vengeance, unhallowed love, the thirst for warlike renown, and such like” (105). For this reason,
the Vril-ya, despite their clear mastery of the “life principle,” take a materialist approach to
science by rejecting passion, imagination and ambition. At the same time, however, it is not
necessarily true that everything they do is practical, because all members of the society can
choose their own pursuits.
Bulwer-Lytton’s cyborgs both reinforce and challenge the idea that members of society
are all interrelated pieces of an organic whole. As Haraway states, “The cyborg is a kind of
disassembled and reassembled, post-modern collective and personal self” (79). Bulwer-Lytton’s
novel portrays this complexity because on the surface level, each member of the Vril-ya
civilization is part of the communal society. It is the children’s place to protect the society from
dangerous animals: “These, together with lesser wild animals, corresponding to our tigers or
venomous serpents, it is left to the younger children to hunt and destroy; because, according to
the Ana, here ruthlessness is wanted, and the younger the child the more ruthlessly he will
destroy” (64). The women, too, have a specific role, especially if they are widowed or unmarried.
These Gy-ei find their place in the College of Sages, where “It is by the female Professors of this
College that those studies which are deemed of least use in practical life … are more diligently
cultivated” (63). Despite their intense focus on practical and scientific priorities, the Vril-ya sill
pursue more creative and imaginative tasks, and the culture still retains some traces of
individuality. The narrator clearly states that the Vril-ya are not a completely uniform and
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communal society: “Not that property is held in common, or that all are equals in the extent of
their possessions or the size and luxury of their habitations” (62). Instead, he clarifies that even
though there is “no difference of rank or position between the grades of wealth or the choice of
occupations, each pursues his own inclinations without creating envy or vying; some like a
modest, some a more splendid kind of life; each makes himself happy in his own way” (62). As a
result, the Vril-ya exemplify the true complexity of a cyborg identity that contains both the
collective and personal self.
The Vril-ya cyborgs also inhabit a hybrid world. According to Haraway, “contemporary
science fiction is full of cyborgs … who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted”
(Haraway). One of the narrator’s first observations speaks to this point, when he notices that the
Vril-ya have built an artificial world, which includes “lakes and rivulets which seemed to have
been curved into artificial banks” (37). He also describes the Vril-ya’s choice in unnatural
lighting: “The whole scene behind, before, and beside me far as the eye could reach, was brilliant
with innumerable lamps. The world without a sun was bright and warm as an Italian landscape at
noon, but the air less oppressive, the heat softer” (38). These lamps are beautiful and comparable
to the sun, but the narrator nonetheless rejects this artificial lighting in favor of the celestial lights
of the natural world. He says, “I could not conceive how any who had once beheld the orbs of
heaven could compare to their lustre the artificial lights invented by the necessities of man” (51).
The landmarks and lighting systems of the Vril-ya world are recognizable and similar to natural
occurrences, but are not necessarily natural. Bulwer-Lytton further complicates the lamps’
identities as both natural and crafted, when the narrator adds that the Vril-ya use vril to control
the lighting. Through their biological ability to control vril, the Vril-ya “extract the light which
supplies their lamps, finding it steadier, softer, and healthier than the other inflammable materials
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they had formerly used” (59). Of course, it is clearly stated that these lamps are man-made.
However, because the Vril-ya use their innate vril-control powers to fuel them, this begs the
question: is vril natural, artificial, or both? Although it is biologically inherited, the narrator of
the novel struggles with this question throughout his adventure, as he slowly begins to realize
that this utopian society cannot be explained by the binary terms within his understanding of life.
Bulwer-Lytton’s cyborg creatures allow him to effectively fictionalize the fears incited
by nineteenth-century evolutionary theories. In his essay “Zoological Philosophy,” Darwin’s
predecessor Jean Baptiste Lamarck writes that although many people believe that “the
individuals composing a species never vary in their specific characters, and consequently that
species have an absolute constancy in nature” (45), he plans to prove that species are not
constant, and that animals change over time when “the organs that are less used die away little by
little” (45). According to this theory, the distinctions between species are purely arbitrary.
Likewise, Charles Lyell offers a similar proposal regarding the history of the earth, when he
asserts, “It is not only the present condition of the globe which has been suited to the
accommodation of many living creatures … Many former states have also been adapted to the
organisation and habits of prior races of beings” (52). Thus, since the Vril-ya evolved from the
human race, but have long since surpassed humanity’s achievements, Bulwer-Lytton writes that
the Vril-ya “had yet now developed into a distinct species with which it was impossible that any
community in the upper world could amalgamate … If they ever emerged from the nether
recesses into the light of day, they would, according to their own traditional persuasions of their
ultimate destiny, destroy and replace our existent varieties of man” (159). Bulwer-Lytton’s novel
uses cyborg creatures to express the fear that, although evolution once helped humanity attain the
status of superior and powerful creatures, if new species continue to evolve, humans will not be
Butler 17
the highest creatures forever. By challenging human/machine, human/animal, and
natural/artificial boundaries, Bulwer-Lytton’s Vril-ya demonstrate that evolutionary theory itself
provides a new explanation for human life that subverts traditional dualisms.
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Part II
Vivisection and Human/Animal Boundaries in The Island of Doctor Moreau
The unique blurring of human/machine boundaries plays an important role in BulwerLytton’s The Coming Race, but as placing his novel in conversation with Haraway suggests,
human/machine cyborgs developed from an earlier urge to subvert the human/animal boundary.
This fusion of human and animal identities is prevalent in both nineteenth-century fiction and
scientific discourse, because the Victorian era debate over vivisection raised many of the same
questions as the vitality debate, and led to similar anxieties about losing human emotions and
feelings in favor of pure science. H.G. Wells’s novel The Island of Doctor Moreau, as well as
pro-vivisectionist essays by Wells and Claude Bernard, also use cyborg entities to express these
anxieties about humanity and life.
In The Island of Doctor Moreau, subtitled “A Possibility,” the eponymous antagonist
uses controversial grafting and vivisection processes to literally build creatures that are both
animal and human. Moreau explains to the narrator, Prendick, “These creatures you have seen
are animals carven and wrought into new shapes. To that, to the study of the plasticity of living
forms, my life has been devoted” (124). In this way, Moreau’s fictitious experiments testing the
ability to surgically hybridize live creatures is, on one hand, a terrifying “possibility” only made
possible by fiction. Yet, theorists studying the plasticity of life continued to ask serious vitalist
questions during later nineteenth-century scientific debates. Prompted by Darwin’s evolutionary
theories, and alongside similar studies such as Galton’s research into heredity and eugenics,
some Victorian scientists sought to discover the essence of life through vivisection, just as
Moreau does. For example, in An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, provivisectionist Claude Bernard writes that, “…to learn how man and animals live, we cannot
Butler 19
avoid seeing great numbers of them die, because the mechanisms of life can be unveiled and
proved only by knowledge of the mechanisms of death” (254). Here, Bernard suggests a close
relationship between humans and animals, as well as comparable similarities between life and
death. Wells himself, in the pursuit of uncovering the mechanisms and limitations of life,
supports vivisection in his essay “The Limits of Individual Plasticity.” He writes that innate
tendencies are only one aspect of life, and posits, “We overlook only too often the fact that a
living being may also be regarded as raw material, as something plastic, something that may be
shaped and altered, that this, possibly, may be added and that eliminated, and the organism as a
whole developed far beyond its apparent possibilities” (275). Consequently, the creatures in The
Island of Doctor Moreau may not have seemed so improbable to Wells and his readers. Wells’s
depiction of these hybrids is both an embodiment of scientific discourse, and a representation of
Victorian scientists’ controversial drive to discover the material qualities of life and its systems.
As Haraway anticipates, this hybridization of human and animal once again yields both
“pleasurable” and “disturbing” results in The Island of Doctor Moreau. When Prendick first
encounters Moreau’s Beast People, he describes them as simultaneously unfamiliar (or
disturbing), and familiar (or pleasurable):
Suddenly, as I watched the grotesque and unaccountable gestures, I perceived clearly for
the first time what it was that had offended me, what had given me the two inconsistent
and conflicting impressions of utter strangeness and yet of the strangest familiarity. The
three creatures … were human in shape, and yet human beings with the strangest air
about them of some familiar animal (100).
Moreau’s human/animal hybrids are both terrifying and delightful because they evoke
conflicting emotions. Prendick further explains his response to this uncanny blend of human and
Butler 20
animal characteristics when he witnesses the Beast People recite The Law: “Superficially the
contagion of these brute men was upon me, but deep down within me laughter and disgust
struggled together” (114). This uncertain mixture of both disturbing and pleasurable qualities is
the result of transgressing the boundaries that Haraway describes—and these transgressions were
prevalent in Victorian fiction and science alike. In his essays, Wells agrees that vivisection can
yield both beautiful and grotesque results: “This artistic treatment of living things, this moulding
of the commonplace individual into the beautiful or the grotesque, certainly seems so far credible
as to merit a place in our minds among the things that may someday be” (Wells, “Plasticity”
276). Even though Wells is describing the material alteration of life, he still considers this an
artistic and ambitious act. Furthermore, the uncanny nature of human/animal hybrids both in
science fiction and scientific debate illustrates the exciting and terrifying repercussions that
Victorians anticipated when they realized that science may someday uncover the principle of life.
Because hybrids are such an indecipherable blend of familiar and unfamiliar, they blur
the line between human and animal so effectively that it is not always possible to distinguish
their “true” identities. This complete dissolving of boundaries is necessary to Haraway’s theory
of how and why cyborg identities developed. For instance, when Prendick first arrives on
Moreau’s island, he believes that the Beast People are humans who have been turned into
animals, rather than vice versa. When Moreau informs him that “Hi non sunt homnes; sunt
animalia qui nos habemus—vivisected,” Prendick laughs doubtfully and responds, “a pretty story
… They talk, build houses” (120). Prendick’s inability to identify the hybrids exemplifies the
cultural environment that Haraway argues was necessary to create cyborg creatures in the
modern day: “By the late twentieth century in United States scientific culture, the boundary
between human and animal is thoroughly breached. The last beachheads of uniqueness have been
Butler 21
polluted if not turned into amusement parks—language, tool use, social behavior, mental events,
nothing really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal” (Haraway). Prendick
exemplifies this overcoming of boundaries when he attempts to use a seemingly sound judgment
to distinguish human from animal: the ability to use language. But even this once effective
criterion fails him. Prendick contemplates that one of the Beast People “…was a man, then—at
least as much of a man as Montgomery’s attendant—for he could talk” (110). Yet, Prendick
cannot dismiss the possibility that the Beast People are somehow still animals as well, which
causes Moreau’s creatures to breach the human/animal boundary beyond repair.
Likewise, Moreau tells Prendick that he is not afraid of accepting that there are very few
differences between humans and animals, which further emphasizes the irreversible hybridity of
his creatures. Moreau asserts that “the great difference between man and monkey is in the
larynx” and that his grafting techniques have eliminated this defining difference (125). As such,
Moreau embraces, rather than fears, his familial relationship with animals, and thus makes
possible the cyborg-yielding culture that Haraway describes: “…a cyborg world might be about
lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals
and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints”
(Haraway). This incapacity to identify whether the Beast People are either human or animal
fulfills Haraway’s expectations, and also demonstrates a Darwinian judgment popularized both
in nineteenth-century fiction and science. Prendick’s and Moreau’s descriptions reflect the
controversial Victorian perspective that, as Lewis Carroll explains in an argument against
vivisection, because the essence of life is universal in all living creatures, animals do not differ in
kind from humans; certain animal qualities differ only in degree (Carroll 343).
Butler 22
Both The Island of Doctor Moreau and nineteenth-century pro-vivisection arguments
identify that building hybrid creatures which are both human and animal is a way to construct
physical improvements without dabbling in eugenics. As a result, even though The Island of
Doctor Moreau has its frightening and violent moments, both Moreau and Wells describe the
human/animal hybrid as a means to better science and humankind. Moreau tells Prendick that, “It
is a possible thing to transplant tissue from one part of an animal to another, or from one animal
to another; to alter its chemical reactions and methods of growth; to modify the articulations of
its limbs; and, indeed, to change it in its most intimate structure” (124). Moreau explains this
concept as a way to physically alter, and thus, to learn to understand life, which is a positive
accomplishment. It is not only fictional characters who agree; Bernard also writes favorably
about the possibilities of vivisection, asserting that “…we shall succeed in learning the laws and
properties of living matter only by displacing living organs in order to get into their inner
environment” (254). Wells takes this positive argument a step further when he adds that
manufacturing hybrids is, in fact, beneficial to the creatures and humankind. He writes that, “If
we concede the justifications of vivisection, we may imagine as possible in the future, operators,
armed with antiseptic surgery and a growing perfection in the knowledge of the laws of growth,
taking living creatures and moulding them into the most amazing forms…” (Wells, “Plasticity”
276). Likewise, he concludes that when scientists change or hybridize physical characteristics,
they can overcome “mere subservience to natural selection” (Wells, “Plasticity” 275). Thus,
positive receptions of human/animal hybrids play a role in both Victorian fiction and nonfiction,
in order to serve as complicated vessels through which to explore questions of humanity and
materiality.
Butler 23
Nineteenth-century vivisectionists embraced hybridity not only to discover the physical
properties of living matter, but also as a means to discover, or even modify, the fundamental
essence of life. In Wells’s novel, Moreau tells Prendick that, “It is not simply the outward form
of an animal which I can change. The physiology, the chemical rhythm of the creature, may also
be made to undergo an enduring modification” (124). Wells proves that Moreau has succeeded in
this task when Prendick describes the way the Beast People have been psychologically changed
in order to restrain their animal desires. Their Law includes complete prohibition of any animallike behavior, despite their obviously animal physical characteristics. For example, the Beast
People have been re-programmed to follow rules of human-like behavior, such as, “not to go on
all fours,” and “not to suck up Drink” (114). Moreau successfully tests the plasticity of life all
the way to its mental processes; yet, this possibility is also inspired by scientific developments in
the nineteenth century. Wells argues, in a similar fashion as his character, that the possibilities of
altering the plasticity of life do “not stop at a mere physical metamorphosis. In our growing
science of hypnotism we find the promise of a possibility of replacing old inherent instincts by
new suggestions, grafting upon or replacing the inherited fixed ideas” (Wells, “Plasticity” 276).
The ability for vivisectionists to not only create human/animal hybrids physically, but to change
their innermost instincts and desires, exemplifies the full extent of cyborg hybridity and reveals
what Wells considered to be the true controversy of the vivisection debate. In his essay “Popular
Feeling and the Advancement of Science,” Wells writes that “…anti-vivisection is not really a
campaign against pain at all. The real campaign is against the thrusting of a scientific probe into
the mysteries and hidden things which it is felt should either be approached in a state of awe,
tenderness, excitement, or passion, or else avoided” (268). In this way, hybrid identities reflect
the Victorian concern regarding what would happen if humans discovered the life principle.
Butler 24
Problematically, the urge to revere the natural order of things, and reflect upon the secrets
of life with a sense of awe and passion, is a vitalist one. However, Wells suggests that the
morally questionable antagonist, Moreau, is a vitalist as well. After having a long discussion
with Moreau about his experiments, Prendick states, “I still do not understand. Where is your
justification for all this pain? The only thing that could excuse vivisection to me would be some
application” (126). Moreau agrees with Prendick, but has an explanation: “But, you see, I am
differently constituted. We are on different platforms. You are a materialist” (126). To this,
Prendick angrily responds, “I am not a materialist” (126). Although materialists were sometimes
regarded as cold or unfeeling because of the way they prioritized practicality and application, the
vitalist Moreau complicates the seemingly strict boundary between the two “platforms” of
science when he becomes so consumed by his ambitious pursuits as to cause injury and harm to
nature, and, like Victor, violate the natural order of life.
In conclusion, human/machine cyborgs emerged from Victorian fiction alongside many
other boundary-blurring creatures—such as the human/animal hybrids in The Island of Doctor
Moreau—and both of these types of hybrids work together to provide more complex answers to
the scientific questions of the world they inhabited. As Bernard writes, “We have succeeded in
discovering the laws of inorganic matter only by penetrating into inanimate bodies and
machines; similarly, we shall succeed in learning the laws and properties of living matter only by
displacing living organs in order to get into their inner environment” (254). In this way, both
fictitious and factual portrayals of human/animal hybrids reinforce the idea that cyborg imagery
is a more effective way to ask, and answer, questions of life inspired by the vitality debate and
similar scientific theories.
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Part III
Nineteenth-Century Cyborgs in Contemporary Literature:
Nanotechnological Hybridity in The Diamond Age
One of the many other dichotomies that cyborgs supersede is the boundary between
physical and non-physical identities, which Haraway argues have “become very imprecise for
us,” because of the pervasiveness of microelectronics in our culture (Haraway). She writes,
“Modern machines are quintessentially microelectronic devices: they are everywhere and they
are invisible. Modern machinery is an irreverent upstart god, mocking the Father’s ubiquity and
spirituality” (Haraway). Although several technologies demonstrate this ubiquity and invisibility,
the controversial science of nanotechnology, as described in Neal Stephenson’s novel The
Diamond Age, encompasses the endless possibilities that Haraway evokes. Nanotechnology
refers to the science of shaping and molding matter at a molecular level through the practical
manipulation of atoms, which can theoretically be accomplished by microscopic machines
(Milburn 261). In his essay “Nanotechnology in the Age of Posthuman Engineering: Science
Fiction as Science,” Colin Milburn explains that these nanotechnological machines could
possibly be “modeled largely after biological ‘machines,’ like enzymes, ribosomes, and
mitochondria—even the cell … These nanomachines will have specific purposes such as binding
two chemical elements together or taking certain compounds apart, and will also be designed to
replicate themselves so that the speed and scale of molecular manufacturing may be increased”
(261). Nanotechnology invariably blurs the boundary between visible and invisible, but by
analyzing machines to understand nature (and vice versa), and also assigning the organic ability
of reproduction to inorganic entities, nanotechnology causes many additional kinds of boundary
blurring. As a result, Stephenson’s novel employs cyborg hybridity in order to challenge
Butler 26
traditional boundaries of the visible/invisible and natural/artificial, and ask whether or not life,
and materiality itself, can be artificially created.
Nanotechnology, in its simplest sense, threatens established dualisms because it creates
electronic devices that are so small, they break down the boundary between visible and invisible
machines. Haraway suggests that this hybridity of seen and unseen is particularly thoughtprovoking because of its frightening nature: “…miniaturization has changed our experience of
mechanism. Miniaturization has turned out to be about power; small is not so much beautiful as
pre-eminently dangerous...” (Haraway). This is certainly the case in The Diamond Age. Because
of the virtually undetectable but omnipresent “mites” in the air, Stephenson writes that, “A welldefended clave was surrounded by an aerial buffer zone infested with immunocules—
microscopic aerostats designed to seek and destroy invaders … It was always foggy in the
Leased Territories, because of all the immunocules in the air” (59). Thus, the characters in
Stephenson’s novel are constantly guarding their territories from these powerful and dangerous
machines. They are even compelled to take extra precautions when inviting visitors into their
homes: “…all tribes with sophistication in nanotech understood that visitors had to be carefully
examined before they could be admitted into one’s inner sanctum, and that such examination,
carried out by thousands of assiduous reconnaissance mites, took time” (172). Nanotechnology is
a constant threat to anyone and everyone, and even despite such safety measures, characters in
Stephenson’s novel can still be instantly killed by certain nanotechnological devices. Stephenson
explains that, “Microscopic invaders were more of a threat nowadays. Just to name one example,
there was Red Death, a.k.a. the Seven Minute Special, a tiny aerodynamic capsule that burst
open after impact and released a thousand or so corpuscule-size bodies, known colloquially as
cookie-cutters, into the victim’s bloodstream …” (58). In fact, one of the first demonstrations of
Butler 27
nanotechnology in the novel is the way Bud, a common criminal, is sentenced to death, and
explodes from the inside out when a cookie-cutter inside of his bloodstream detonates (43). The
invisible and omnipresent nanotechnology in his body illustrates the power and danger of fusing
microscopic machines with the human body.
However, nanotechnology also contributes to a cyborg identity because it allows
manmade inventions to look and act like natural organisms, which challenges the difference
between “natural” and “artificial” matter. As Haraway asserts, “It is certainly true that
postmodernist strategies, like the cyborg myth, subvert myriad organic wholes. In short, the
certainty of what counts as nature … is undermined, probably fatally” (Haraway). For example,
another early instance of nanotechnology in Stephenson’s novel occurs during the celebration of
Princess Charlotte’s birthday, when nano-engineers develop a way to spontaneously create an
island and a coral reef, which constructs itself at the blow of the princess’s whistle: “The smart
coral burst out of the depths with violence that shocked Hackworth, even though he’d been in on
the design” (14). Although this is outwardly an artificial project built by engineers like
Hackworth, the smart coral also has a life of its own: “…each lithocule knew exactly where it
was supposed to go and what it was supposed to do. They were tetrahedral building blocks of
calcium and carbon, the size of poppyseeds, each equipped with a power source, a brain, and a
navigational system” (14-15). Together, these tiny lithocules effortlessly build a new island,
using artificial constructs which are strikingly human, such as a “brain,” to do so. Stephenson
furthers this theme of imbuing manmade machines with lifelike qualities when he explains the
way that the microscopic, mechanical immunocules have evolved as if they are living creatures:
“The Victorian [immunocule] system used Darwinian techniques to create killers adapted to their
prey, which was elegant and effective but led to the creation of killers that were simply too
Butler 28
bizarre to have been thought up by humans, just as humans designing a world never would have
thought up the naked mole rat” (75). By arguing that the immunocules are too bizarre to have
been originally invented by humans, Stephenson suggests that these artificial machines are
actually evolving naturally, and crossing the line between “natural” and “artificial” life.
Similarly, nanotechnology breaks down the distinction between humans and machines
because it enables mechanical devices to communicate with biological systems. Haraway argues
that, “Information is just that kind of quantifiable element which allows universal translation,
and so unhindered instrumental power” (Haraway). For this reason, she explains that “Biological
organisms have become biotic systems, communications devices like others. There is no
fundamental, ontological separation in our formal knowledge of machine and organism, of
technical and organic” (Haraway). Because of the universality of informatics in The Diamond
Age, nanotechnological devices are able to unite with biological systems within the human body:
“Nearly all of the mites were connected in some way to the Victorian immune system, and of
these, most were immunocules whose job was to drift around the dirty littoral of New Chusan
using lidar to home in on any other mites that might disobey Protocol. Finding one, they killed
the invader by grabbing onto it and not letting go” (75). Nanotechnology connects biological and
mechanical systems through the common language of information, and ultimately, as Milburn
suggests, “causes ‘the distinction between hardware and life … to blur’—and human bodies
become posthuman cyborgs, inextricably entwined, interpenetrant, and merged with the
mechanical nanodevices already inside them” (288). Here, Milburn’s language, and the issues he
raises about nanotechnology, are reminiscent of the vitality debate even two hundred years later.
Modern nanotechnology effectively blurs the distinction between simple material matter, and the
Butler 29
more abstract concept of life. As a result of nanotechnology, the human and the machine are
fused into one as each transmits information to the other.
Because of the way that natural and artificial life forms become almost interchangeable,
nanotechnology also allows humans to constantly change their identities, which are no longer
tied to their physical bodies. In The Diamond Age, when the aspiring ractor Miranda decides to
modify her body, she asks to have a “Jodie” dermal grid installed. This nanotechnological
apparatus has “a hundred times as many ‘sites as the lo-res grid sported by many a porn starlet,
something like ten thousand of them in the face alone. The grossest part was when the machine
reached down her throat to plant a trail of nanophones from her vocal cords all the way up to her
gums” (87). Once Miranda has fused this mechanical body with her own, she is able to “ract” on
a screen, which transforms her body and voice into someone else’s (89). Although Miranda does
not literally become those other images or people, to the customers who interact with her, she
could look like anyone physically, or act like anyone mentally. This frustrates the differences
between the physical body and a cyborg’s non-physical identity.
Likewise, when exploring the mindset of a society that can build almost any piece of
matter in an instant, Stephenson’s fictitious “matter compilers” demonstrate another transgressed
boundary: the difference between creator and creation. Haraway explains that in cyborg cultures,
it is difficult to distinguish between the tool and the mind that built it: “Communications sciences
and biology are constructions of natural-technical objects of knowledge in which the difference
between machine and organism is thoroughly blurred; mind, body, and tool are on very intimate
terms.” In a high-tech culture, she writes, “it is not clear who makes and who is made in the
relation between human and machine” (Haraway). In The Diamond Age, Stephenson’s matter
compilers are manmade machines; however, they are able to produce nearly anything without
Butler 30
human guidance. Stephenson describes the programming behind matter compilers: “Hackworth
was the programmer. Runcible was the program. It was made up of a number of subprograms,
each of which had resided on a separate piece of paper until a few minutes ago, when the
immensely powerful computer in Hackworth’s office had compiled them into a single finished
program written in a language that the matter compiler could understand” (65). As a result, even
though programs are engineered by experts like Hackworth, the matter compiler itself translates
those blueprints into physical objects, and consequently becomes their creator. Humanity has
created a tool, but this tool can create infinitely more objects, and humans and machines
mutually create each other.
Thus, nanotechnological devices such as the matter compiler and the things it builds do
more than just mimic human abilities. By reproducing copies without originals, the matter
compiler crosses the line between a real object and its simulation. Haraway describes that before
cybernetic machinery, “machines were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous. They could
not achieve man’s dream, only mock it. They were not man, an author to himself, but only a
caricature … To think otherwise was paranoid. Now we are not so sure” (Haraway). According
to Haraway, microelectronics now allow humans to produce copies that are indistinguishable
from, and not dependent upon, their originals, which further troubles the distinction between
humans and machines. In Stephenson’s novel, Nell is unable to differentiate between material
copied by the M.C., and material that was actually made by hand, until an incident occurs with
her four favorite stuffed animals:
These four creatures were the only animals that had survived a great massacre
perpetuated during the previous year by Mac, one of mom’s boyfriends, who in a fit of
Butler 31
rage had gathered up all of the dolls and stuffed animals in Nell’s room and stuffed them
into the knocking hatch. When Harv had opened it up a few hours later, he had found all
the toys vanished except for these four … anything that had been made “by hand” (a
troublesome concept to explain) was rejected (68-69).
This encounter with the deconstructive option of the matter compiler is one of the only
experiences that enable Stephenson’s characters to identify the difference between “real” and
artificial materials. As a result, nanotechnology allows for the merging of the real and its
simulation into one indistinguishable entity.
Nanotechnological machines also imitate human consciousness, which blurs the
distinction between humanity and machinery in another dangerous way. Haraway adds that, “The
ubiquity and invisibility of cyborgs is precisely why these … machines are so deadly. They are
as hard to see politically as materially. They are about consciousness—or its simulation”
(Haraway). As Stephenson’s novel reaches its climax, Hackworth realizes that the most
dangerous nanotechnological machine yet—the Seed—is being built through the human
consciousness of the bizarre group called the Drummers. Stephenson explains, “All
communication between the Drummers and normal human society took place unconsciously,
through their influence upon the Net …” (434). Through all their lecherous encounters, the
Drummer’s collective mind has equipped Hackworth with a set of numerical keys that will
unlock the code that creates the Seed. However, because this consciousness is a fabricated and
collective one, Carl Hollywood is able to enter the circle and take the set of numerical codes
from Hackworth. Once Carl attains this keys, he, “for the purposes of the Net, was
indistinguishable from Miranda or Nell or Dr. X or even Hackworth himself” (435). For this
reason, Milburn cites the “eroticized collective consciousness of the Drummers in Stephenson’s
Butler 32
The Diamond Age” as evidence that “nanonarratives resist traditional humanist interpretations by
repeatedly depicting the future in terms that disequilibrate the human body” (287). The way that
the mechanized Seed becomes a part of human consciousness, and the way that this
consciousness is not a tangible part of one person’s mind, but rather a malleable construction
unconsciously built made by numerous contributors, completely fuses human and machine, as
well as material and immaterial.
Nanotechnology blends the distinction between visible and invisible, natural and
artificial, creator and creation, and more, in order to address both old questions of vitality,
humanity, and nature, as well as new questions of how modern technologies once again
complicate humanity’s perception of life. For this reason, Stephenson’s science fiction novel
references real pioneers of nanotechnology, such as Feynman, Merkle, and Drexler (Milburn
282), whose theories have contributed to the possibility that nanotechnology could someday
cause distinctions of both materiality and life to collapse. After all, the type of nanotechnology
proposed in The Diamond Age has the power to build physical objects, including all their
necessary pieces, in a materialist fashion. However, nanotechnology also confuses the boundary
between human and machine, as well as human and mechanical life. This is a vitalist question;
when nanotechnology compares microscopic computers to biological organisms, could these
nanosites actually be alive? Similarly, since the nanotechnological collective can bring the
consciousnesses and bodies of otherwise disconnected people together, does this change
humanity’s definition of itself? The Diamond Age, like Frankenstein, The Coming Race, and The
Island of Doctor Moreau, harnesses the complexity of a cyborg identity in order to demonstrate
how life is not simple enough to be explained in dualistic terms.
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“I am pieced together from man and machine, which tells me what I am, but not who I am.”
—Adam, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Conclusion:
Cyborg Identities in a Posthuman World
The way that Victorian authors harnessed cyborg hybridity to provide more complicated
explorations of the scientific, moral, and philosophical debates of their times reinforces one of
Haraway’s fundamental arguments: that the cyborg is a creature of social reality as well as a
creature of fiction (Haraway). Many of the nineteenth-century scientific ideas that stemmed from
the vitality debate, such as theories of electricity, anxieties about evolution, and arguments of
vivisection, became even more complicated as humanity began to realize that “life” was not
simply “alive!” as Victor declares in the classic Frankenstein film. Instead, many combinations
of life/death, human/nonhuman, and human/machine exist. In fact, sometimes the principle of
life, as seen in Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race, can even be applied to inanimate objects,
causing cyborg identities to defy nearly any boundary imaginable; cyborgs are not limited to
exist within a creature, but can also blur the distinctions between human/object and
nature/artifice. For this reason, cyborg hybrids flourish in modern fiction just as they did in the
nineteenth century, because they offer a necessary escape from traditional dualisms.
As cyborgs continue to thrive in literature and culture, they allow humanity to break free
from the idea that things are simply alive/dead, or human/inhuman. Cyborg identities serve as a
reminder that such binaries are not created in a laboratory, like Victor once assumed, but are
instead simply perpetuated by society. Haraway explains, “The machine is us, our processes, an
aspect of our embodiment … We are responsible for boundaries; we are they” (Haraway). Since
this is the case, humanity can also become responsible for the deconstruction of these
Butler 34
boundaries, and take pleasure in acknowledging that viewing life in binary terms is not an
adequate way to understand its complexities.
Heffernan explains this realization by writing that cyborg identities do more than allow
humanity to seek more complicated answers—this hybridity allows humankind to escape from
asking dualistic questions in the first place. According to Heffernan, cyborg theories allow
humanity to ask: “not ‘is “it” human,’ but what does it mean to be human?” (117). Like Victor,
who is horrified by the “monstrous” elements of his “human” creation, cyborg identities lead
humanity to this more open-ended inquiry. The narrator of The Coming Race constantly
struggles with the meaning of his humanity, as he marvels at the utopian society of the Vril-ya,
and “[recognizes] much more affinity with ‘the savages,’ than I did with the Vril-ya, and
remembering all I had said in praise of the glorious American institutions, which Aph-Lin had
stigmatised as Koom-Posh” (109). Prendick in The Island of Doctor Moreau also finds himself
perplexed by the same puzzling predicament as he speculates about the somewhat-human Beast
People, and the nanotechnology of The Diamond Age provides a similar reevaluation of human
identity, as it becomes increasingly merged with new technologies.
Consequently, as Heffernan writes, “In the wake of the ‘death of man’ (or of the liberal
humanist subject), the fields of genetic engineering and biotechnology are comprising another
creation story, yet another virgin birth, for the second millennium, with their focus on DNA and
the Human Genome Project as the source/secret of life” (125). Novels like Stephenson’s The
Diamond Age serve as a reminder that even if some of the scientific beliefs of the nineteenth
century are outdated or have since been disproved, the questions asked in the vitality debate are
still relevant. Just as Victor complicates the definition of humanity by applying the “life
principle” to his dead creation, modern works of fiction present similar problems, anxieties, and
Butler 35
theories. DNA could easily become humanity’s next “life principle,” and as nanotechnology
begins to call materiality itself into question, humanity may once again need to ask whether
“life” or existence is purely defined by the physical compilation of a creature or object. These
modern questions of vitality relate to one final cyborg theory: posthumanism. Like cyborgs, the
posthuman is often associated with the union of the human with the intelligent machine (Hayles
2); however, also like cyborgs, the concept of the posthuman is much more complicated than it
may seem.
In her book How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles describes the posthuman
subject as “an amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-informational
entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction” (3). Like
Haraway’s “pleasurable” and “disturbing” description of cyborg hybrids, Hayles writes that this
shift from the human to posthuman, “both evokes terror and excites pleasure” (4). As
fictionalized in The Diamond Age, one of posthumanism’s most powerful cyborg functions is the
ability to break down the boundary between material objects and the immaterial flow of
information (Hayles 12). Yet, as extremely modern as posthumanism may seem, it also has many
similarities to the cyborg identities present in Victorian fiction, which emerged from nineteenthcentury scientific discourse and the inadequacy of the vitalist/materialist dualism. In the same
way that the Human Genome Project could replace Victor’s electric shock as a possible
“principle of life,” the posthumanist model suggests a new life principle—that the essence of life
may exist in the form of informational code (Hayles 11).
Perhaps, then, as Hayles writes, “we have always been posthuman” (291) and in a similar
sense, perhaps we have always been cyborgs—we just required some time to make this
discovery. In the same way that cyborg hybrids emerged not from a fear of machines, but rather,
Butler 36
from a necessity to analyze the meaning of life from multiple disciplinary perspectives, the
posthuman “does not really mean the end of humanity” (Hayles 286). Instead, like the cyborg,
posthuman theories of hybridity allow humanity to free itself from the limitations of a binary
perspective. Just as Haraway argues in favor of the cyborg imagery because it suggests a way out
of the maze of dualisms, and creates a “not a common language, but a powerful infidel
heteroglossia” (Haraway), Hayles explains that the posthuman is not antihuman. Instead, “it
signals the end of a certain conception of the human, a conception that may have been applied, at
best, to … a fraction of humanity” (286). This model of hybridity, rather than strict binaries and
boundaries, allows humanity to understand science, life, and its own identity, not in terms of
what we are, but who we are.
Butler 37
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