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The exquisite corpse: disarticulations of the artificial female

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The exquisite corpse: disarticulations of the artificial female

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Content THE EXQUISITE CORPSE:
DISARTICULATIONS OF THE ARTIFICIAL FEMALE

by

Allison de Fren

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CRITICAL STUDIES)

December 2008

Copyright 2008 Allison de Fren

ii
Acknowledgements

I am one of those people who tend to do things the hard way, but even I
outdid myself by attempting to complete my doctorate while working on a
feature-length documentary. My exercise in masochism would not have
been possible without the encouragement, support, and ongoing patience
of more individuals than I am able to acknowledge here.
I would, however, like to offer my deepest appreciation and thanks
to my advisor, Michael Renov, for persevering with me and for inspiring
me with his brilliant documentary scholarship.
The members of my dissertation committee, Tara McPherson, Akira
Mizuta Lippit, and Steve Anderson, offered invaluable advice and
encouragement throughout this long journey, and I thank them for all
that they have generously given over the years. Other USC faculty (and
former faculty) who were instrumental in my research and to whom I
offer my heartfelt thanks are: Marsha Kinder, Lynn Spigel, David James,
Marita Sturken, Dana Polan, and Holly Willis.
For their generous support, which provided the time I needed to
write, I would like to thank the Annenberg Foundation and the American
Association of University Women.
My soul brother James Tobias was not only responsible for
convincing me to pursue my doctorate, but has been an indefatigable

iii
guide and cheerleader every step of the way. I owe him more than I can
possibly express.
My dearest friend Ilana Boss Markowitz and her husband Neil had
an open-heart, open-door policy in which I repeatedly sought refuge, and
for which I will feel forever blessed. I also owe them endless thanks for
hatching the plan that provided me with a month-long dissertation
“writing retreat,” as well as the Sonora Co-Housing Community in
Tucson, Arizona, for their hospitality.
There are many friends and colleagues who were a source of
companionship and laughter over the years, helping to balance out the
long hours that I spent alone in front of a computer. I would like to
acknowledge, in particular: Elizabeth Segal, Chaia Heller, Nithila Peter,
Holly Myers, Elizabeth Hamilton, Natalie Loveless, Sha LaBare, Elena
Dorfman, Anita Hecht, Kim Morgan, Belinda Baldwin, Scott Polisky,
Karen Voss, Sean Uyehara, Andrew Syder, and Laurie O’Brien.
None of this would have been possible without my immediate
family—my mother Marcia, my father Burt, my sister Sharon and her
husband Andy—who encouraged and supported me through the many
years that I spent as a poor student/filmmaker.
And finally, to my partner Francis, who coached and cajoled me,
who sang my praises to all who would listen, and who loved me through
it all: words cannot express what I hold for you in my heart.

iv
Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ii

List of Figures v

Abstract vii

Introduction 1
The Aesthetic and Scientific 17
Motion and Stasis 18
Interiority and Exteriority 18

Chapter One: The Anatomy of a Living Doll 23

Chapter Two: The Artificial Woman as Exquisite Corpse 119
But Who Is She Really? 130
The Napoleon of Neurosis 142
Mad Love 169
I Robot 192
On a Personal Note 197

Chapter Three: The Subtle Apparatus 200
Pneumatica 209
The Wizard of Vienna 236
La Loie 263

Conclusion 272

Bibliography 282

v
List of Figures

Figure 1: The Uncanny Valley 6

Figure 2: Honda's ASIMO (humanoid robot) 7

Figure 3: Karakuri 9

Figure 4: Head Surgery 24

Figure 5: Anatomical Demonstration 36

Figure 6: Waxen Venus 40

Figure 7: Perseus decapitates Medusa as 48
Athena looks on

Figure 8: Sketch of the face at the center of the 48
Aztec Calendar Stone

Figure 9: Photograph of a corpse after more than 48 hours 50

Figure 10: Anatomia 52

Figure 11: The frontispiece from the 1555 edition of 53
Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica

Figure 12: Ouroboros 65

Figure 13: Living Anatomy 71

Figure 14: The Ambassadors (1533) by Hans Holbein 76
the Younger

Figure 15: Memento Mori 84

Figure 16: All is Vanity 85

Figure 17: Kishin Image 128

Figure 18: Rasturbation 129

vi
Figure 19: Richer Synoptic Table 145

Figure 20: Augustine 147

Figure 21: Charcot’s Tuesday Lesson 151

Figure 22: Duchenne de Boulogne, imitation of 154
“Lady Macbeth” induced with electricity

Figure 23: Casanova: The Lover and the Doll 159

Figure 24: Exquisite Corpse 175

Figure 25: Bellmer’s work in Minotaure 178

Figure 26: Peep-show diagram for the first doll 180

Figure 27: Ball-jointed doll 182

Figure 28: The Mirror Stage 185

Figure 29: The Lonely 194

Figure 30: The Turk 218

Figure 31: Jaquet Droz Automata 220

Figure 32: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis 230

Figure 33: Burning the witch at the stake 231

Figure 34: Montage of Eyes 257

Figure 35: Comparison: Paths to Strength and Olympia 261

Figure 36: Loie Fuller 265

Figure 37: Sorayama Gynoid 278

Figure 38: AIBO 280

vii
Abstract

This dissertation examines artificial women in literature, art, and cinema
from the myth of Pygmalion to the present, as well as the dialogue
between such fictional beings and their real-life counterparts, from
historical automata to the current development of life-sized silicone
lovedolls and gendered robots. Whether real or imaginary, the artificial
female tends to get theorized in relation to the Pygmalionesque desire for
either perfection or perfect versimilitude; in contrast, this dissertation
focuses on artificial female bodies that resist both realism and humanity
and whose “mechanicity” is foregrounded. It argues that the “failed
Galatea” expresses a different set of desires than the successful one, for
she remains a borderline site suspended between contradictory states—
the human and technological, aesthetic and scientific, animate and
inanimate, perfection and imperfection, exteriority and interiority,
fantasy and reality—and it interrogates the ambivalences engendered by
such vacillation, as well as the particular meanings that accumulate
around artificiality in relation to gender. For example, the “artificial”
artificial female body is often pitted against classical and normative
conventions around love and beauty; it is used as a cipher for that which
cannot be seen or represented, but only intuited; and it opens a space for
the imagination and play, both in the sense of what children do with

viii
dolls and in the sense of linguistics or semiotics as that which decenters
structure. Such roles are explored within a range of core texts—
including Villiers d’Isle-Adam’s novel L’Eve Future (Future Eve, 1886),
E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short stories “Automata” (1814) and “Der Sandmann”
(The Sandman 1816), and Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis—and
parallels are drawn to contemporary works from The Stepford Wives
(1975) and Lars and the Real Girl (2007) to the Realdoll (a life-sized
silicone lovedoll currently available for purchase on the internet) and
ASFR (alt.sex.fetish.robots), an internet fetish community devoted to
fantasies around robotic women.

1

Introduction

The fantasy of bringing to life the perfect artificially constructed female
dates back to the myth of Pygmalion, most familiar in the work of Ovid.
Part of his Metamorphoses—a collection of classic myths, all with the
common theme of transformation—the Roman poet describes a protean
world in which all things are rendered digital in the hands of the gods.
Pygmalion prays to the goddess Venus to bring to life Galatea, the
woman that he has carved from ivory who is so perfect that he has fallen
in love with her. Venus grants his wish and Galatea becomes flesh; she
and Pygmalion are married and the two live happily ever after.
Pygmalion’s desire to animate his beautiful statue, as well as his
underlying motivations (the hardened sexuality of the Propoetides),
strikes a familiar chord in a city like Los Angeles, where living women are
pumped full of silicone and silicone lovedolls are strikingly realistic.
Indeed, the legacy of Pygmalion survives on the outskirts of the city in
the factory of the company Abyss Creations, the maker of a silicone
lovedoll called Realdoll, where life-sized artificial female bodies dangle

2
from what look like meat hooks, waiting to be made up, clothed, and sent
to their expectant partners. It seems only a matter of time before a
Realdoll walks out of the factory on her own two legs, and that is
precisely what David Levy predicts in his book, Love + Sex with Robots
(2007). According to Levy, we are within only a half-century of a science
fiction future in which sexual intimacy between humans and their robot
companions is so commonplace that society will need to address the
issues around robot prostitution and human/robot marriage. An
outgrowth of his doctoral research in artificial intelligence at the
University of Maastricht in the Netherlands and his dissertation, Intimate
Relationships with Artificial Partners, Levy broaches a topic that has
lurked beneath the rapid advances in robotics technology and artificial
intelligence at research institutions and corporations around the world,
but that is rarely discussed in such settings.
1
His predictions are
unapologetically utopian, and while he draws from research in a wide
range of fields including sociology, psychology, and sexology, much of his
argument is predicated on studies in attachment theory: in essence, that
we have intimate relationships with our pets, our cars, our computers,

1
Perhaps in response to such evasion, in 2001, former students at the MIT media lab
launched a parody site for the Erotic Computation Group, which mimicked the design
of a standard MIT web page (to such an extent that a great deal of commentary
appeared on the web, taking the group seriously). The group’s directive was, so the site
clamed, to study “the implications of modern technology on human eroticism in its
myriad forms,” as well as how to “broaden the range of human amative expression.”
(I believe that the site no longer exists.)

3
and so on, all of which become personally meaningful and unique
extensions of ourselves (whether or not they were bought on sale or look
like a thousand others), and if such nonhuman objects can inspire deep
feelings of attachment, then it is far from unreasonable to imagine sexual
intimacy with and love for a machine that looks and responds like a
human.
Indeed, whether or not human behavior can be extrapolated from
animal studies, there have been noteworthy experiments that use robotic
surrogates to study the mating habits of various animal species. For
example, Gail Patricelli, an ecologist at the University of California at
Davis, has studied the unique courting ritual of the male sage grouse
using a grouse fembot with a hidden camera.
2
Patricelli’s current
research expands on her doctoral work in biology on the Australian
bowerbird, in which she and colleagues in the engineering department at
The University of Maryland built a female bowerbird-bot, whose signals
of consent, such as beak tilting and wing fluffing, were realistic enough
to prompt more than one male to attempt to mate with her, and in the
trials for the experiment, a fight between two males for her attention
became so violent that her head was accidentally knocked off. Such an
image brings to mind the explosive fembot decoys in a range of media,

2
She has posted a good deal of her footage on youtube; see, for example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eY25pisBDmg

4
from Dr. Goldfoot and Austin Powers to Bugs Bunny. However, it also
invokes what many find most disturbing about human/robot sexuality,
which is not the idea of an android so human that we can’t tell the
difference (an idea that brings to mind yet another series of media
images), but that human sexuality is so programmatic, indeed so robotic,
that it can be reduced to a series of triggers whose artificiality is
inconsequential (think silicone breasts with artificial everything else
attached). This, in fact, seems to be what David Levy is driving at via a
series of studies, anecdotes, and hard data on human relational attitudes
toward a range of technologies from vibrators and tamagotchis
3
to
artificial intelligence applications, all of which he suggests will add up to
Love + Sex with Robots when organized into a totality that looks and acts
like we do.
However, if Levy’s exhaustive research indicates anything, it is the
human capacity for investing emotionally in inanimate objects
irrespective of the teleology of human-looking and acting robots. And if
the humanoid robotics industry in Japan (currently the only corporate-
backed effort to create robotic companions) is any indication, then
verisimilitude is not only unnecessary, but may actually interfere with
our ability to love robots. Levy (perhaps purposefully) overlooks the

3
A virtual pet created by the Japanese toy company Bandai, which sold in the millions
in the mid-1990s.

5
“theory of the uncanny valley,” which has not only served as a central
tenet of Japanese humanoid robotics, but also recently become a popular
topic in relation to computer animation, gaming, and, in particular, CGI
effects within cinema. Originally espoused in 1970 by the man
considered the father of industrial robots in Japan, Masahiro Mori, the
theory of bukimi no tani or the “uncanny valley” borrows from the essay
“The Psychology of the Uncanny” by Ernst Jentsch, which theorizes the
Uncanny as based in the confusion between the human and artificial
(later critiqued by Freud in his more famous essay, “The Uncanny”).
Mori’s theory suggests that when anthropomorphic creations are realistic
enough to instill expectations of human movement, behavior, and
appearance, but still fall short in some significant way, they evoke a
creepy or uncanny feeling, an idea illustrated in a graph, which charts
the degree of realism or humanness achieved (both in terms of motion
and appearance) and the resultant sensation evoked (see figure 1).
4

At one end of the graph are toys and puppets, while at the other
end is perfect verisimilitude, both ends of which, according to Mori,
inspire various degrees of pleasure. However, the graph dips dramatically
into the unpleasurable uncanny valley between these two points, where
one finds prosthetics and, at the lowest point on the graph, the moving

4
Masahiro Mori, “Bukimi no tani” (The uncanny valley), translated by K. F. MacDorman
& T. Minato in Energy, 7(4) (1970), 33-35.

6

Figure 1. The Uncanny Valley

corpse or zombie. In no small part, due to the theory of the “uncanny
valley,” the majority of humanoid robots in Japan have a distinctly anti-
realistic, toy-like appearance (see figure 2). The theory, however, is also
grounded in traditional Japanese aesthetics as influenced by Buddhism,
which tend to emphasize evocation over description, achieved via the
interplay of opposite states—such as light and shadow or sound and

7

Figure 2. Honda's ASIMO (humanoid robot)

8
silence.
5
Such aesthetics are evident in a variety of cultural forms, from
bunraku puppet theater to anime and, perhaps most significantly, an
early form of mechanical human that dates back to the Edo period called
karakuri ningyo, which many consider a precursor to present-day
humanoid robots
6
. A small puppet-like figure, the karakuri would travel
across the room with a teacup on a small serving tray and, after the cup
was taken, it would wait for its return to the tray, after which it would
turn and travel in the opposite direction (see figure 3). Its subtle and
abstract motion influenced bunraku and noh drama, each of which uses
an economy of expression to achieve a maximum emotional impact,
reinforcing the idea, expressed by Mori’s theory, that the deepest chords
of humanity are better struck through a dedicated artificiality than a
simulation of humanness.
7

The “theory of the uncanny valley” not only points to cultural
differences in ideas about artificial humanity and its representations, but
it throws into relief an assumption about realism that has gone largely

5
Jun’ichiro Tanizaki explains traditional Japanese aesthetics of beauty in the following
way: “There is an old song that says ‘the brushwood we gather—stack it together, it
makes a hut, pull it apart, a field once more.’ Such is our way of thinking—we find
beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness,
that one thing against another creates.” Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows (New Haven:
Leete’s Island Books, 1977), 29-30.
6
When I attended Robodex in Yokohama, at the time (2003), the world’s only humanoid
robot exposition, there was an exhibit devoted to karakuri.
7
Such minimalist aesthetics are evident not only in the robotics industry in Japan, but
also the lovedoll industry (the oldest and largest sexdoll industry in the world,
purportedly controlled by the yakuza, the Japanese mafia) in which the dolls are
distinctly doll-like (as opposed to Realdolls, which are hyper-realistic) and anime dolls
are not uncommon.

9

Figure 3. Karakuri

10
unquestioned. The artificial female, in particular, is read in relation to
the myth of Pygmalion as an inanimate object magically transformed into
a perfect human subject, a trajectory whose arc shoots straight from
representation to realism with little contemplation of the zone in
between. For example, in her essay “Pygmalionesque Delusions and
Illusions of Movement,” Michelle E. Bloom traces “pygmalionesque
desire” from the “‘happily-ever-after’ formula of Ovid’s version” of the
myth through its failure within the literature of the nineteenth century
(in which female androids are common, but happy endings are rare) to
its metamorphosis “at the end of the century into ‘illusions of movement’
made possible by the advent of cinema.”
8
As she notes, her primary
interest is in the “longstanding human desire for the animation of the
inanimate” for which cinema is a privileged site: “even when the
Pygmalion paradigm fails in film, the medium itself succeeds in creating
the illusion of movement.”
9
Bloom’s thoughtful essay, however, glosses
the “failed Galateas” of the nineteenth century, exemplified by Olimpia,
the female automaton in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s story “Der Sandmann” (The
Sandman, 1816), discussed by both Freud and Jentsch in relation to the
Uncanny. Although she suggests that Hoffman’s automaton was

8
Michelle E. Bloom, “Pygmalionesque Delusions and Illusions of Movement: Animation
from Hoffmann to Truffaut” in Comparative Literature, Vol. 52, No. 4 (Autumn, 2000),
291.
9
Bloom, 292.

11
intended as a parody of Pygmalionesque desire, her inquiry ends there
without further elaboration.
It is my contention that the “failed Galatea” expresses a different
desire than the successful one, but a desire worth interrogating
nonetheless, and she is the subject of my dissertation. The following
chapters are a historical, cultural, and critical exploration of the terrain
around the “uncanny valley” populated by artificial women who eschew
realism and whose artificiality is foregrounded. I choose to focus on
female automatons (robots, androids, and mechanical dolls) because I
am interested in underscoring the particular meanings that accumulate
around artificiality in relation to gender, which are, as noted above, often
in dialogue with the Pygmalionesque desire for either perfection or a
perfect union (and as will become apparent, the latter is rarely dependent
on the former). Indeed, the artificial female body that resists both
perfection and realism is often pitted against classical and normative
conventions around love and beauty; it is used as a cipher for that which
cannot be seen or represented, but only intuited; and it opens a space for
the imagination and play, both in the sense of what children do with
dolls and in the sense of linguistics or semiotics as that which decenters
structure. Such are the roles of many of the Galateas—more properly
understood as “resistant” rather than “failed”— within the literature of

12
the nineteenth century. Thus, the following pages focus a great deal on
the century leading up to the invention of cinema, in which many of the
tropes and themes around artificiality that appear in film are first
articulated.
In addition to tracing a line from literary representations of
artificial women who resist humanity to both their artistic and cinematic
counterparts, I examine the intersection between representational and
material practices both past and present. For example, as I will discuss
at greater length in Chapter Three, the proliferation of androids gendered
female in the fiction of the nineteenth century was not only a response to
the mimetic automata popularized in the century prior as a form of
public entertainment, but also to the understanding and theorization of
the human mind and body to which such mechanical humans
contributed. Moreover, as will become apparent in Chapter One, current
manifestations and uses of artificial women such as Realdolls, are often
in dialogue with earlier representations and experiences of artificial
bodies. For example, the two films recently released that feature a
Realdoll, Love Object (2003) and Lars and the Real Girl (2007), each recall
a famous encounter between a modern-day Pygmalion and his artificial
love. Love Object, a horror film, in which the central protagonist has a
Realdoll made in the image of a woman on whom he has a crush (only to

13
realize that he would rather turn the real woman into a doll through
plastination, than invest life in an artificial body) echoes the relationship
between the artist Oskar Kokoschka and his “doll-fetish.” Kokoschka had
a tempestuous three-year love affair with Alma Mahler, a Viennese
socialite and former wife of composer Gustav Mahler. Unable to let go of
Alma even after the affair ended, he hired the Munich doll-maker
Hermine Moos to make a life-sized replica of her in 1918. As he wrote to
Moos:
If you are able to carry out this task as I would wish, to
deceive me with such magic that when I see it and touch it
imagine that I have the woman of my dreams in front of me,
then dear Fräulein Moos, I will be eternally indebted to your
skills of invention and womanly sensitivity.
10

The doll, however, was horribly disappointing. Kokoschka used it instead
as an artist’s model and, after he grew tired of it, he threw a “going away”
party for it, after which he broke a bottle of red wine over its head and
decapitated it in the garden.
11
In contrast, Lars and the Realgirl is a
saccharine sweet, Capra-esque tale in which a small town comes
together around the central protagonist and treats his silicone lovedoll,
Bianca, as if she were part of the community. Bianca’s active social life is
reminiscent of Cynthia, one of the “Gaba girls”—realistic mannequins
created in the 1930s by former soap sculptor Lester Gaba—to whom

10
Alfred Weidinger, Kokoschka and Alma Mahler (Munich: Prestel, 1996), 89-90.
11
Police who were patrolling in the area the next day burst into the house when they
saw what they thought was a gruesome murder scene outside.

14
Lester took a particular shine and who was his constant companion.
Gaba took Cynthia to social clubs, to the opera, and on carriage rides;
designers sent her dresses, Cartier and Tiffany lent her jewels, and she
was featured in an article in Life Magazine in 1937. (Unfortunately, she
too met with an early demise after slipping from a chair in a beauty salon
and breaking into pieces.) Perhaps as a way of commenting on the
relationship between Realdolls and historical representations of artificial
female love interests, media artist Lynn Hershman features a Realdoll in
her latest installation, which recreates three-dimensionally Edouard
Manet's 1865 painting, Olympia.
12
.
My approach to the topic of artificial women has, to a large extent,
been shaped by my own experiences with practices in material culture
around artificial bodies in the process of producing two films: a
documentary short on a community of robot fetishists and a feature-
length documentary that examines science fiction fantasies about
artificial women in relation to the present-day technological reality of
artificial companions, particularly within the “real-to-life” love doll
industry. Before writing a single word, I spent a good three years
conducting interviews with companies that manufactured lovedolls (in
the US, Europe, and Japan) and their customers, as well as those whose

12
See Hershman, Olympia: Fictive Projections and the Myth of the Real Doll:
http://www.bitforms.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=32&Itemid=9
1#id=28&num=1

15
work is affiliated with the lovedoll industry (such as Slade, who repairs
broken dolls, whom I discuss in the first chapter); those who attempt to
enhance the dolls through robotic animation, motion sensing, and
artificial intelligence; and those who either fantasize about or build
female robots.
The interdisciplinarity of my research is an outgrowth of the
difficulties that I encountered, when I returned to the project of writing,
of finding scholarly material, particularly within cinema and media
studies, that corroborated or clarified the experiences I had “out in the
field.” Within these disciplines, as well as cultural studies, artificial
female bodies (to the extent that they are discussed at all) tend to get
theorized in one of two ways: either within a psychoanalytic framework—
in particular, as the object of a fetishistic gaze that is both restaging and
attempting to circumvent the oedipal drama, castration, and those
traumas associated with the maternal body in all its excesses as well as
its fundamental lack—or within a Foucauldian paradigm of corporeal
discipline and surveillance—as an ideological production of imaging
technologies, from the scientific and medical to the popular. While I
found both approaches helpful in thinking about the female body in
relation to science and technology, in general, their lack of cultural and
historical specificity ultimately proved them to be too myopic a lens

16
through which to make sense of the particular instantiations of the
artificial female that I encountered in the course of working on the two
documentaries.
Furthermore, much of the work that I encountered conformed to
the “Pygmalionesque paradigm” within which robotic or artificial women
fall into one of two camps—“failed” and “successful” or utopic and
dystopic—understood in relation to a binary attitude not only towards
women as either virgins or whores, but towards technology as either a
symbol of human progress or destruction. Robotic women are seen as
either walking Venuses, the ultimate example of the extraordinary power
of technology to satisfy our desires or they represent the destructive
potential of technology, and lurking within their alluring exterior are
machine gun breasts or a nuclear warhead or a faulty program that goes
haywire. In contrast to such readings, my own experience is that rather
than conforming to these either/or categories, the artificial woman is
compelling because of her inbetween or borderline status and the
ambivalence and tension engendered by the vacillation between opposite
states: the human and technological, animate and inanimate, perfection
and imperfection, speculative fantasy and material reality. I have,
therefore, attempted to situate her within a nexus of relations—social,
cultural, scientific, literary-cinematic—and, in particular, to seek out

17
texts that provide a historical and critical context within which to
understand a series of oppositional relationships that she embodies:
The Aesthetic and Scientific

One of the hallmarks of the artificial woman, in most every form in which
she appears, is her marriage of the aesthetic and the scientific: when
presented as an object of science or medicine, such as an anatomical
model, she is often marked by aesthetic or erotic details unnecessary to
the kind of objective knowledge she is intended to supply; as an erotic
object, say, a sexy female robot in any number of science fiction books or
films, her technological components are often unveiled in striptease
fashion, as though they were the locus of erotic contemplation. The
imbrication of the two is especially meaningful when one considers that
fictional androids became increasingly gendered female during the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a time during which science was
disentangled from aesthetics, matter emptied of spirit, mind detached
from the body, and the body reformulated as a machine. Thus, the
machine-woman was simultaneously a culmination of the Enlightenment
project and a site of resistance to scientific materialism and positivism, a
role that I explore in great depth in the pages that follow.
13

13
A parody of Cartesianism, in particular, took shape in an apocryphal story circulated
during the eighteenth century about a female automaton built by René Descartes. The
automaton, so it was told, was in the image of his daughter. Descartes did, in fact, have
a daughter named Francine who died at the age of five of scarlet fever. Although she
was born to a servant to whom Descartes never married, her death was, so he told a

18
Motion and Stasis.

The artificial female that “fails” to realize the Pygmalionesque fantasy of
“coming to life” remains suspended between object and subject-hood, a
space with a rich history in both literary theory and art history (and, in
particular, work that straddles both disciplines, for example, the “picture
theory” of W.J.T. Mitchell, which explores the tension between the figural
and textural). And while the halted subject or the animated object is both
a trickier undertaking and more difficult to nail down within the moving
arts, such as cinema, the artificial female serves as a privileged site of
the tension between motion and stasis and its attendant meanings (an
example of which is the film The Stepford Wives, in which the mechanical
breakdown of the perfect domestic female robot becomes a form of
cultural critique, a strategy on which I comment at greater length in
Chapter Two).
Interiority and Exteriority

The female image, particularly within cinema studies, has often been
theorized in relation to “fetishistic scopophilia” as a visual exterior or

friend, the greatest sorrow of his life. The automaton Francine was supposedly built out
of metal and clockwork, and she was stored in a trunk that he had taken aboard the
ship on which he traveled to Sweden at the request of Queen Christina (a trip that, in
actuality, he loathed to take and from which he never returned home). While he told
those aboard that he was traveling with his daughter, no one ever saw her. Overcome
with curiosity, some of the sailors snuck into his room one night, and while no one was
there, they came upon the trunk, which they opened, whereupon they found the
automaton. They showed the “moving marvel” to the ship’s captain, who thought that it
was an instrument of dark magic that had somehow been responsible for the bad
weather they were encountering, and he ordered it to be thrown overboard. See Gaby
Wood, 3-6.

19
screen that masks a symbolic absence, protecting the male Gaze from
the castration anxiety that it embodies; it is, as Laura Mulvey states in
Fetishism and Curiosity, a “surface that conceals” born of the refusal to
acknowledge sexual difference.
14
However, the artificial female, seemingly
the culmination of such fetishism and visual obfuscation, is, as I will
argue, often a site of unmasking, particularly of the male subject’s self-
amputation (and thus castration). As opposed to the “surface that
conceals” in the form of the visual fetish, she represents a crisis of vision
whereby male interiority is exteriorized. Like the hysteric (whom she both
anticipates and supplants), she is a cipher of unseen forces through
which her male spectators encounter (and indeed pursue) decentering
and desublimation. And while such instrumental use of the female body
is problematic in the case of hysteria, in which a female subject is
manipulated, it is potentially instructive when enacted via an artificial
female object whose “artificiality” is underscored, and it complicates, in
productive ways, theorizations of the male Gaze in relation to specular
wholeness and cohesion.

* * * *

Each of the following chapters, thus, examines strategies by which the
“artificiality” or “mechanicity” of an artificial female is emphasized,

14
See Laura Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1996).

20
enacting a crisis of representation that becomes a metaphor for, and a
way of apprehending, that which defies normal vision. In each case, the
artificial female is offered as a counter to classical ideals of beauty,
rather than their culmination, in an attempt to question the symbolic
economy within which such ideals operate. In each chapter, I begin with
a contemporary subject or object (taken from my documentary) and trace
a line between it and female androids from core historical texts in order
to find the overarching patterns that shed light on each:
Chapter One examines the work of Slade, the “Realdoll Doctor,”
who enacts a form of “anatomy theater” on the internet using silicone
lovedolls. Slade’s performances are reminiscent of the dissection of a
female android by a fictional Thomas Edison in Villiers d’Isle-Adam’s
L’Eve Future (Future Eve, 1886), which has been discussed by a number
of theorists in relation to the invention of cinema, but whose “crisis of
vision” in the form of dissection hearkens back to the emblematic
tradition of the Renaissance, which I argue is reinvented within early
cinema (particularly within the work of filmmaker Georges Méliès).
Chapter Two explores representations of the Uncanny body, using
as a starting point the sexual proclivities of A.S.F.R.
(alt.sex.fetish.robots), an internet fetish community whose collective
fantasies tend to revolve around robotic breakdown and malfunction. The

21
“come shot” for A.S.F.R.ians is remarkably similar to the climactic scene
of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s story “Der Sandmann” (The Sandman, 1816) in
which the love interest of the central male protagonist is revealed as an
android through her disassembly. While Hoffmann’s story provides an
example par excellence of the Uncanny, according to Sigmund Freud
(who describes the term as the “shadow side of the beautiful and
attractive”), the disassembled body of the automaton is largely occluded
in his discussion, an oversight that serves as impetus for examining
closer the visual effects of the Uncanny object in literature, art
(particularly that of Surrealism), and the cinematic and televisual
interests of A.S.F.R.
Chapter Three examines the artificial female as conduit of natural
and “subtle” forces, whose “instrumentality” is emphasized over her
realism, giving rise to what I will call kaleido-scopophilia (a mesmerizing
visuality representing an interiority). I trace this leitmotif within the
German imaginary, from the construction of early automata and
pneumatica through fictional representations of female androids in
German Romanticism and Expressionism (in particular, Fritz Lang’s
1927 film Metropolis) to present-day Nuremberg, in which the town’s
historical legacy of both mechanical toy-making and fascism are invoked

22
by a latter day “mad scientist” building the most advanced sexual
android in the world.
Taken together, these chapters present a cultural history of the
(largely) pre-cinematic artificial female that prefigures the female
androids and cyborgs within cinema, as well as the simulated women
(and cyborgian constructions) within the digital. While the digital, in
particular, offers unprecedented opportunities for both perfection and
verisimilitude, my goal, in elaborating on the desires that have favored
non-realism and “artificiality” in the artificial women of the past, is to lay
the groundwork for further research into those present and future
Galateas whose resistance is inevitable.

23

Chapter One
The Anatomy of a Living Doll

In Northern California resides Slade Fiero, a man who has made a name
for himself as “The Realdoll Doctor.” Realdolls, which are produced in
Southern California, are life-sized silicone sex dolls that achieve a
remarkable degree of verisimilitude and that, for many, offer a glimpse
into a future where one might be able to go out and buy the perfect
female companion. Slade has become a cult figure in the Realdoll
community not only because he restores broken dolls to their former
condition, but because of the performative aspects of his repairs. Each
doll “surgery” is conducted with an air of the theatrical; medical
instruments procured from a coroner’s lab are positioned in and around
the injured doll and the various stages of her reconstruction are
photographically documented and posted to his website (see figure 4).
15

A onetime tattoo artist, Slade embarked on this unusual “hobby”
after a close brush with death, which occurred fatefully enough on his

15
http://realdolldoctor.com

24

Figure 4. Head Surgery

25
birthday. As a present to himself, he went skydiving and, on his final
jump, his parachute malfunctioned, resulting in a tumultuous landing
that broke his back. He was rushed into surgery and emerged, in his own
words, “a new man.” He has since walked with a limp and requires a
colostomy bag and a daily dose of painkillers, which have made it
difficult for him to hold down a full-time job. As he tells it, he was so
depressed after his back surgery that he kept a Colt ‘45 close at hand for
almost a year, working up the courage to put himself out of his own
misery. However, on a particularly difficult day, as he sat with the gun to
his head, he had a brainstorm: why not attempt something beautiful
before he died? After all, there was no damage to his hands and arms.
Why not create something unearthly, like a sculpture? He proceeded to
set to work on a series of small sculptures that occupied him, revivified
him, and of which he felt so proud, that he eventually sent them to the
creator of Realdoll, Matt McMullen. Matt was duly impressed and the two
became friends. Slade began repairing dolls for Matt and Matt began
directing customers with injured dolls to Slade.
However culturally marginal Slade’s pursuits might appear at first
glance, there is something almost mythic about his story and strangely
familiar about his photographs. He strikes the imagination as any one of
a long line of physically compromised artists/scientists dabbling at the

26
crossroads between life and death. It is a lineage that reaches as far back
as Hephaestus, Homer’s “god of the dragging footsteps,” the lame artisan
who, despite his stunted legs, was able to use his strong arms to build
golden androids that gave the appearance of living women. And it
perhaps finds its prototype in Rotwang, the mad scientist in the film
Metropolis, whose creation set the bar for female robots, and whose
prosthetic hand became such a common trope among his cinematic
descendents that it was spoofed to hilarious effect in Stanley Kubrick’s
film Dr. Strangelove (1964).
Like Hephaestus who, most famously, forged a shield for the hero
Achilles upon which such a dazzling spectacle of life and death unfolded
that none were brave enough to look at it, or Rotwang, whose robotic
Maria performed a dance of such hypno-erotic potency that it led to the
destruction of an entire city, such men are instigators who assault the
Gaze as much as they appeal to it with visual displays that render that
which is intended as beautiful—whether the ornamentation on a shield
or the artificial female body—horrifying. Slade’s work simultaneously
recalls the wonders of surgery (plastic and otherwise) and the horrors of
autopsy, consciously playing to a medico-erotic Gaze that has centered
on the female body since the Renaissance and that is sustained by both
reality television and a parade of horror films (many of them b-grade) in

27
which beautiful women are made monstrous by their dissection. Such
work peddles in a scopic ambivalence that has historical analogues in
various media throughout history, but that many have argued
culminates in the cinema.
Why create a spectacle that calls to the gaze only to avert it? Why
dissect an artificial body when there is nothing to reveal? And what do
such equivocal gestures mean in relation to the female body? These are
some of the fundamental questions that this chapter will address, as it
circles around the idea of the shield, in particular, that of Hephaestus,
whose moving display within a still frame is a literary precursor to
cinema, and whose very impossibility still haunts the cinematic image
(and those like myself who attempt to understand it). In so doing, it will,
like the visual construction of the shield within Homer’s epic, vacillate
between the figural and the textual, while making liberal use of the
theoretical frameworks within a range of disciplines in order to interpret
the interplay between the figural and the textual. The thread that will
serve as a throughline is L’Eve Future (Tomorrow’s Eve), a novel written
at the end of the nineteenth century featuring a fictionalized Thomas
Edison whose goal is to create a factory for the production of ideal
artificial women much like McMullen’s Realdoll factory. Written just over
one hundred years before the Realdoll was invented by Villiers d’Isle-

28
Adam, the novel appeared in installments in La Vie Moderne between
1885 - 1886 and was published as a volume in 1886, only three years
before the author’s death in 1889, coincidentally the same year that the
real Edison gave W.K.L. Dickson the task of developing the kinetoscope.
A further coincidence was the pet project on which Edison was working
at the time: the creation of what could be considered a female android, a
small doll into whose chest was placed a miniature phonograph so that
she could speak.
16

The novel follows the creation of the fictional Edison’s first robotic
prototype, which he brings to fruition for a friend and patron named Lord
Celian Ewald, a poetic type who is on the verge of suicide due to a failed
love. In a turn reminiscent of Slade’s encounter with artificial women,
Edison’s android, which is in the image of Ewald’s beloved, restores to
him the will to live. The real woman who necessitates such drastic
measures is a young singer named Alicia Clary of unearthly beauty, but
whose personality Ewald cannot stand. Shortly after the novel opens,
Lord Ewald pays the great inventor a visit and explains the desperation
to which he has been reduced by his mistress, whose body has the
perfection of a statue that has come to life...
Miss Alicia is about twenty years old, and slim as a silver
aspen. Her gestures are gently and deliciously harmonious,

16
Discussed at length by Gaby Wood in Edison’s Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for
Mechanical Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002).

29
her body is molded in lines to delight and surprise the
greatest sculptors. Her figure is full, but with the pale glow of
lilies; she has indeed the splendor of a Venus Victorious, but
humanized. Her masses of brown hair have the brilliance of
a summer night ... Her face forms the most seductive oval,
within which her mouth flowers like a deep-dyed rosebud ...
Her lashes are alive with shadows, the lobes of her charming
ears are fresh as April roses. Her nose exquisitely straight,
with translucent wings, continues perfectly the line of her
forehead. Her hands are more pagan than aristocratic; her
feet have the same elegance as those of Greek statues...
17

This brief encomium to Alicia’s beauty is of note not only for the way in
which it offers a piecemeal appraisal of the living woman, but also for the
way in which it vacillates between the natural and the sculptural—the
hand of the artist seemingly an extension of the hand of the divine
creator—as well as between the woman who is being dissected and the
statue that she resembles. Is Ewald describing a woman who is
statuesque or a Venus that has stepped down from its pedestal to enter
the human realm? The confusion between the two launches the primary
tension around which the narrative unfolds, leading to a series of
dissections, the end result of which will be the creation of the female
robot.
The conflation between the human and the inanimate in the novel
is rooted in the ekphrastic project, in which the representation of the
female body, whether real or artificial, is invariably engaged. Ekphrasis,

17
Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, Tomorrow’s Eve (L’Eve Future), (Champaign: University of
Illinois Press, 2001), 29.

30
broadly defined, is a poetic description of something visual, the attempt
to conjure through words a picture within the mind’s eye.
18
The genre
dates back as far as the classical period, often appearing as an
ornamental section within epic poetry wherein a figural account was
rendered of an object often of utilitarian value, such as a goblet, urn or
vase; weaponry or armor; embroidery or sculpture. Whatever the object
or subject, its ekphrasis tends to serve as a moment of visual repose
within the narrative, wherein the poet attempts “iconicity, or a ‘still
moment’ of plastic presence through language.”
The canonical and most celebrated instance of ekphrasis is
Homer’s description of the legendary shield forged by Hephaestus for
Achilles in the 18th book of the Iliad. In response to an entreaty by Thetis
on behalf of her son, the lame god forges first, the shield from bronze,
gold, and silver, and then upon it scenes of elaborate complexity,
including those of war and peace, within cities and on farms and
vineyards, amidst festivals and trials, all unfolding as if in real time.
Homer’s shield as exemplary instance of ekphrasis, thus, reveals a
paradox at the core of the genre that complicates our preliminary
understanding of it, for what one finds on the face of Achilles’s shield is

18
While more narrow interpretations of the genre confine the objects of ekphrasis to
works in the plastic arts, “The early meaning given ‘ekphrasis’ in Hellenistic rhetoric
(mainly in the “second sophistic’ of the third and fourth centuries A.D.) was totally
unrestricted: it referred, most broadly, to a verbal description of something, almost
anything in life or art.” See Krieger.

31
neither static nor plastic but a moving history of Greek culture. The
shield, in effect, partakes of both the figural presence or state of being of
the sculptural object and the state of becoming that only a temporal
medium such as language can achieve, a duplicity that Murray Krieger
has dubbed the “metonymic metaphor,” and which arises, he suggests,
from two opposed aesthetic impulses: “the first which craves the spatial
fix, while the second yearns for the freedom of the temporal flow.”
19

W.J.T. Mitchell elaborates on the tension between “fixity and flow,”
suggesting that it is a reflection of the tension between object and
subject. If the “dead, passive image” seems to come to life in the
ekphrastic poem, it is not without a certain ambivalence, which is
ultimately “grounded in our ambivalence about other people, regarded as
subjects and objects in the field of verbal and visual representation.”
20

Such ambivalence accumulates, in particular, around the female body,
which is often either the object of ekphrasis or the subject that the
ekphrastic object emulates. As Mitchell states:
... female otherness is an overdetermined feature in a genre
that tends to describe an object of visual pleasure and
fascination from a masculine perspective, often to an
audience understood to be masculine as well. Ekphrastic
poetry as a verbal conjuring up of the female image has

19
Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign., (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1992), 10.
20
W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995), 163.

32
overtones, then, of pornographic writing and masturbatory
fantasy...
21

However, while the ekphrasis of the female body operates within a similar
symbolic economy as that of the “shield” or the “urn,” there is a reversal
in effect. For that which is descriptive when applied to the inanimate
object and which seems to bring the object to life, becomes dissective—as
hands, body, face, mouth are isolated from the whole—transforming the
living woman into a “still life” of disassembled parts which resemble a
statue or corpse.
Such an effect is rendered particularly vivid in a subgenre of
ekphrastic poetry, popular during the Renaissance, known as the blason
du corps or blazons anatomique, in which discrete fragments or features
of a beautiful woman are dissected from the whole and described in
intimate detail. This form, which was prefigured by the head-to-toe
effictio to which Ewald’s description of Alicia hearkens and which will
echo throughout Villiers’s novel, is attributed, in particular, to Clément
Marot and is considered a banalization of the psalms, which he
translated during his exile from Fontainebleau. In place of the body of
Christ or the holy relic, Marot substituted parts of the female body, the
first being “Le Blason du Tetin” (The Blazon of the Breast) in 1535, which
he presented to an esteemed group of court poets as a form of literary

21
Mitchell, 168.

33
challenge. Their responses, each dedicated to a separate part of the
female body, were organized and eventually published as a single
volume, Blasons Anatomiques, which experienced wide appeal in the
French and English courts of the mid-sixteenth century.
The success of the anatomical blazon was likely due to its potent
combination, in textual form, of two popular visual spectacles of the
time. The first was the entertaining display of the “’colorful paraphernalia
of heraldry,’ which fed into a nostalgic fascination in the waning chivalric
tradition of knights and armor that ‘tended to proliferate as the practical
function of knighthood disappeared.’”
22
As Nancy J. Vickers points out,
blazon is a word that combines the French blason or shield and, in
particular, the heraldic or ornamental display on a shield with the older
English verb, “to blaze,” that is, “to proclaim as with a trumpet, to
divulge, to make known.” The two meanings are combined in the poetic
blazon, in which parts of women’s bodies are displayed by men in a
gesture of rhetorical challenge to other men:
Combatants offer up blazons—poems or/as shields—for
aesthetic judgments…the heraldic metaphor “woman’s face
is a shield” emblematizes the conflict that motivates it. Here
celebratory conceit inscribes woman’s body between rivals:
she deflects blows, prevents direct hits, and constitutes the
field upon which the battle may be fought.
23

22
Quoted in Nancy J. Vickers, “This Heraldry in Lucrece’s Face,” in The Female Body in
Western Literature, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1986), 210.
23
Vickers, 219.

34

The rhetorical displays of the blassoneur, although criticized by some as
being either idolatrous or scandalous,
24
fed into the Renaissance tradition
of ut pictura poesis in which the poet, who was able to construct verbal
monuments of greater duration than the bronze from which many a
shield was cast, was considered the equivalent if not the superior of the
warrior, and equally deserving of glory. And if the female body inspired
distaste in some, Love in the abstract was considered the highest object
of both the courtier and the poet and a reflection of the Love of God.
A second contributing factor to the popularity of the blazon was
the fascination with dissection, encouraged by the medical performances
within the anatomy theatre (indeed, “the authors of the blazon poems
were called by themselves and by their contemporaries ‘anatomistes.’”).
25

The practice of anatomy underwent a transformation in the Renaissance,
which had far-reaching cultural effects that permeated art, literature,
and philosophy. For over a century, anatomical practice had been
influenced by the work of Galen of Pergamum (ca. A.D. 129-200), who
produced over two hundred medical volumes, which extrapolated on

24
Parisian poet-bookseller Gilles Corrozet published in 1539 Les Blasons Domestiques,
which praised the “parts of a respectable house as correctives to the ‘anatomical
blazons’” which he considered offensive. See Nancy J. Vickers, “Members Only” in The
Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed., David Hillman and
Carla Mazzio (London: Routledge Press, 1997), 2-5.
25
Nancy J. Vickers, “Members Only,” 7.

35
studies of dissected animals to describe human anatomy.
26
From the time
of Galen, if and on the rare occasion that a body was dissected, it was
conducted by barber-surgeons while an anatomy professor stood at a
distance from the proceedings reading from Galen's works (see figure 5).
Indeed, the physical findings were of less significance than the
transmission of ancient knowledge, much of it incorrect since it was
based on animal physiology. Within the anatomy theatre of the
Renaissance, however, the visual began to vie with the textual for
authority, eventually giving rise to the concept of autopsy or auto-opsis—
“seeing for oneself”—as the basis of anatomical truth.
One of the first anatomists to perform dissections with his own
hand, rather than to relegate them to assistants, was Andreas Vesalius,
who published an exhaustive anatomical treatise that replaced Galen as
authoritative reference. Vesalius’s masterpiece, De Humani Corporis
Fabrica, was published in 1543, the same year that the ‘definitive’ edition
of the Blasons Anatomiques appeared, and both, according to Jonathan
Sawday, operated within a similar erotic economy:
Both sought to gaze upon the body which they dismantled,
piece by piece. Both too progressively constructed a new
body made of the parts which they had examined. Just as
Vesalius was to dismiss his scientific rivals in anatomical

26
Of interest to our discussion here, perhaps, is the fact that Galen traced his manual
skills to a childhood of playing with wooden toys, as well as to his first employment as a
surgeon for injured gladiators. (from the Introduction to the Fabrica by Vivian Nutton in
an online version of De Humani Corporis Fabrica made available by Northwestern
University: http://vesalius.northwestern.edu/).

36

Figure 5. Anatomical Demonstration, from FASICULO DE MEDICINA by Johannes
de Ketham (1494)

37

demonstrations, so the poetic texts struggled in
competition with one another, brandishing the dissected
female form as a token of mastery.
27

The association between the poetic mastery of the blassonneur and the
intellectual rigor and manual dexterity of the anatomist is made explicit
in Villiers’s novel in the narrative progression from Ewald’s anatomical
presentation of Alicia, the woman who resembles a statue, to the
mechanical statue that Edison will create in her image, named Hadaly.
As Edison tells Lord Ewald, Hadaly is a word that means Ideal in
Persian, and which will be etched and mounted on a plaque in the coffin
in which the android, upon her completion, will be presented to Lord
Ewald. Below this plaque will be placed the Ewald family’s ancient coat of
arms (that is, his blazon), a symbol that will, according to Edison,
sanctify Ewald’s captivity of her. Furthermore, as a kind of riposte to
Ewald’s aesthetic dissection of Alicia, Edison conducts what can only be
described as an anatomy lesson or demonstration on Hadaly. As he
unveils her for his patron, he provides not only a thorough inventory of
her various systems, parts, and functions, but an examination of her

27
Sawday, 197. Unlike Sawday, who is interested in drawing correspondences between
the blazon and anatomical dissection, Nancy Vickers suggests that while the practice of
anatomy situated the fragmented body “in relation to an image of a vital whole,” few
attempts were made to recover bodily integrity in the presentation of the blasons
anatomiques. See Nancy J. Vickers, “Members Only,” 9.

38
innards, in a scene that Villiers compares to a corpse on the dissecting
table in an amphitheater presided over by Andreas Vesalius.
28

It is on this scene, which simultaneously hearkens back to
Vesalius standing above a female corpse and anticipates Slade’s
anatomization of silicone lovedolls, that we will focus. For within the
mise-en-abîme
29
of the opened female body, we find a privileged instance
not only of beauty rendered monstrous through dissection, but it has
been argued of the dynamics of representation within cinema. A number
of feminist film theorists have drawn persuasive analogies between the
dissection of the female body and film form and content, suggesting that
a form of fetishistic anatomy is not only enacted by the “cutting up“ of
the female through close-ups, medium and long-shots, but is formative
in cinema and evident in even the earliest cinematic experiments.
Annette Michelson has drawn an explicit correspondence between
the dissection of Hadaly in Villiers’s novel and the “mutilations,
reconstitutions, levitations, and transformations” to which the female
body is subjected within the early “cinema of attractions,” both of which
she suggests can trace their rhetorical genealogy not only to the
anatomical blazon, but also to the medical drawings and anatomical

28
This initial dissection is repeated in textual form later in the novel, in which the
functionality of each part of Hadaly’s body is explained at length and given its own
chapter: Flesh; Rosy Mouth, Pearly Teeth; Physical Eyes; Hair; Epidermis. See also,
Michelle Bloom, 302.
29
Originally understood as the placement of a smaller version of a heraldic escutcheon
within the same escutcheon.

39
models of the Enlightenment, in particular, the Waxen Venus, a figure
that simultaneously invoked the objectivity of scientific inquiry and the
subjectivity of erotic contemplation (see figure 6):
Here is the fastidiously and voluptuously modeled woman in
the flush of youth, nude, recumbent, suave and tender of
aspect, her digestive, pulmonary, circulatory, and genital
systems revealed and resolved into detachable elements. Her
balance, her posture, her ever-so-slightly parted lips, her
long, gleaming tresses, her pearl necklace, the tasseled
silken coverlet upon which she lies—these and the presence
of public hair (none of these indispensable for the purpose of
anatomical demonstration)—fashion an object of fascinated
desire in which the anatomist’s analytic is modulated by the
lambent sensuality of Bernini.
30

Giuliana Bruno offers further corroborative evidence for the connections
that Michelson draws between the Waxen Venus, the dissection of
Alicia/Hadaly, and the invention of cinema, by recounting the anatomical
attractions of the first movie theatre to open in Naples, Italy. The
proprietor, Menotti Cattaneo, began his film exhibitions with a spectacle
called “the anatomy lesson,” which he had developed in his career as a
showman. Dressed as a surgeon, Cattaneo would “dissect” a human
body that he had constructed out of wax, removing various organs to the
wonder and horror of his audience. He would follow this spectacle with a
film exhibition, the latter seamlessly following the former since:

30
Annette Michelson, “On the Eve of the Future: The Reasonable Facsimile and the
Philosophical Toy” in October, No. 29 (Summer 1984), 11. For a further discussion of
the aesthetic component in medical writing and images of women in the Enlightenment,
see Ludmilla Jordanova.

40

Figure 6. Waxen Venus from Semmelweis Medical Historical Museum in Budapest,
Hungary

41

Their common terrain is a discourse of investigation and the
fragmentation of the body. The spectacle of the anatomy
lesson exhibits an analytic drive, an obsession with the body,
upon which acts of dismemberment are performed. Such
“analytic” desire is present in the very language of film. It is
inscribed in the semiotic construction of film, its découpage
(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.
31

In discussions of the fetishism inherent in the cinematic image, attention
has been drawn, in particular, to the early films of the real Edison and
especially to the film trickery of Georges Méliès, wherein women
repetitively and, it seems, obsessively, vanish, reappear, are
dismembered and then reassembled. The film Extraordinary Illusions
(1903), in which Méliès produces a living woman from mannequin parts,
is prototypical in this regard. As in most of his films, Méliès plays a
magician and appears as if on a theater stage, addressing the camera
directly. Surrounded by statues on pedestals (a foreshadowing of the
Pygmalionesque fantasy that will follow), he places a “Magic Box” upon a
table, from which he pulls a mannequin’s legs, torso, and head and then
proceeds to assemble it into a make-believe girlfriend. After kissing and
briefly conversing with her, he throws the mannequin into the air and
she is instantly transformed into a living woman, a dancer who flits

31
Giuliana Bruno, “Spectatorial Embodiments: Anatomies of the Visible and the Female
Bodyscape” in Camera Obscura: A Journal of Feminism and Film Theory/28
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 241.

42
around the stage. Her dancing costume is changed to pedestrian clothes
by the magician, and the two promenade together around the stage in a
kind of happily-ever-after jig. However, their happiness is short-lived, for
not long after she has been brought to life, the woman unexpectedly
transforms into a male cook with a grotesque, clownish mask, stirring a
spoon in a pot. The magician attempts to turn him back into a she,
however, each time he does so, she is transformed back into the cook, a
cycle that continues until the magician, in frustration, grabs the cook
and disassembles him into separate dummy parts.
Méliès enacted similar Pygmalionesque fantasies in many other
films, most significantly, Pygmalion et Galathée (1898), which featured
his wife, Jehanne d’Alcy, as a statue who comes to life and then literally
falls to pieces as her sculptor attempts to embrace her.
32
Lucy Fischer has
described these films, in which the female body is the object of
manipulation and disassembly, as engaging in a form of “magical
misogyny” and Linda Williams traces such “perverse” proclivities not only
to Méliès's pre-filmic work as a magician but also to his fascination and
experimentation with the automata that he inherited when he purchased
Robert Houdin’s theater in Paris. Williams suggests that there is a
parallel between Méliès’s attempt to control the appearance and

32
From the Lubin catalog plot synopsis.

43
movement of the mechanical humans in the basement of his theater and
his later manipulation and control of the female body in his films:
From the first trick of assembling a simulation of the whole
body out of mechanical parts to the further trick of making
the imaginary bodies projected on a screen appear and
disappear, Méliès perfects his mastery over the threatening
presence of the actual body, investing his pleasure in an
infinitely repeatable trucage.
33

The anatomy lesson, particularly when performed on the female body is,
then, presented as the primal scene of cinema, inaugurating a medico-
erotic gaze that will be repetitively staged and re-enacted and that will
serve not only as a form of cinematic pleasure but as the fantasmatic
ground of cinema itself. “Primal scene” is the operative phrase here for,
in their interpretations of the dismemberment of the female body in early
cinema, Williams and Bruno in particular invoke psychoanalytical
theory, taking many of their theoretical cues from Laura Mulvey’s
seminal essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” For Mulvey, the
role of the female body in cinema is to remain passive, static, and
emanating a “to-be-looked-at-ness” quality so that she is readily
available for the visual delectation of the active male gaze. As in the
ekphrastic moment within literature, wherein the visual study of the objet
d’art seemingly halts the narrative flow, the appearance of the female
body results in a moment of erotic contemplation that “takes the film into
a no man’s land outside of time and space.” Mulvey explains the
insistent, interrogative male gaze of the passive female body as rooted in

33
Linda Williams, “Film Body: An Implantation of Perversions” in Narrative, Apparatus,
Ideology: A Film Reader, ed. Philip Rosen. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986),
525.

44
early sexuality, in particular, the fear of castration launched by the
realization of female lack:

Ultimately the meaning of woman is sexual difference, the
absence of the penis as visually ascertainable, the material
evidence of which is based the castration complex essential
for the organization of entrance to the symbolic order and
the law of the father. Thus the woman as icon, displayed for
the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active controllers of the
look, always threatens to evoke the anxiety it originally
signified.
34

In Mulvey’s terms, the assembly and disassembly, appearance and
disappearance of the female body functions in cinema—as in the child’s
symbolic restaging of his mother’s absence in the game fort!/da!—as a
contradictory gesture, an attempt at revealing the “truth” of the woman’s
body at the same time that it is an attempt at hiding that very same
truth. The “truth” in this case, is that which Freud, in collaboration with
his close friend and associate Sandor Ferenczi, dubbed the “Medusa’s
Head,” a figure that emblematizes the female’s lack of a phallus:
The terror of Medusa is a terror of castration that is linked to
the sight of something ... it occurs when a boy, who has
hitherto been unwilling to believe the threat of castration,
catches sight of the female genitals, probably those of an
adult, surrounded by hair, and essentially those of his
mother.
35

34
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in Narrative, Apparatus,
Ideology: A Film Reader, ed. Philip Rosen. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986),
208.
35
Sigmund Freud, “Medusa’s Head” in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1963), 202.

45
Medusa, we will recall, was the Gorgon in classical mythology with
serpents for hair who turned to stone any who gazed upon her. In some
interpretations of the myth, Medusa is the representation of the beautiful
turned monstrous, for she was once a ravishing beauty over whose
attention men competed. She was turned into a horrifying vision by
Athena as punishment for lying in the goddess’s temple with (or, in some
versions, having the ill fortune to get raped by) Poseidon. Athena and
Hermes would later help Perseus slay the Gorgon as she slept by
providing him with, among other aids, a mirrored shield and harpe. By
glancing at Medusa’s reflection in the shield, Perseus was able to
decapitate her with the harpe (the same instrument used by Zeus to
castrate his father Kronos, helping Freud with the formulation:
decapitation = castration).
However, once slain, Medusa became a source of both creative and
protective power. At the instant that she was decapitated, the two
children from her union with Poseidon sprang to life: Chrysaor, the hero
with the golden sword, and Pegasus, the winged horse of the Muses
(contributing to the link between Medusa and the arts). Ovid in his
Metamorphoses tells of how the drops of blood that fell from the Gorgon’s
detached head as Perseus carried it across the Libyan desert were
instantly turned into snakes. The head itself was used by Perseus to

46
petrify and vanquish his enemies, and he eventually offered it as a votive
gift to Athena, who wore the head on her aegis or shield as a means of
terrifying her foes.
Once decapitated and mounted on the shield, the Medusa head
becomes the prototype for the apotropaic image, that which becomes a
means of protection from the terror that it once embodied. For Freud, the
invocation of the Medusa’s head within literature and art is understood
as a way of raising the specter of castration while simultaneously
refusing, as well as defusing its threat, an interpretation that he suggests
is supported by the site of its mythological display: the shield of the
virgin goddess, Athena. Freud suggests that the snakes writhing around
the face of the Gorgon, while terrifying, are a substitute for the missing
phallus, multiplied as a form of compensation, and the stiffness that the
spectator feels in their presence serves as a reassuring reminder of his
own virile status. It is, then, via mediation, the filling in of an absence
with a symbolic presence displayed on a shield, a protective barrier
between the conscious mind and the suppressed truth, that the site of
terror is transformed. It is within the apotropaic matrix as theorized by
Freud that the display of the female body in pieces is generally
understood—whether as heraldic display of parts in the form of the
blazon or the female body partitioned and projected onto the cinema

47
screen—a double gesture, whereby the site/sight of sexual difference is
submitted to that which Bruno calls the “anatomical-analytic Gaze” in
order to mitigate its threat. And while it is perhaps less veiled in the
primitive “tricks of anatomical dismemberment” within the early cinema
about which Bruno and Williams write, it is no less present in
contemporary narrative cinema, according to Mulvey.
Freud ends his short essay on the Medusa Head with a reminder of
its interpretive status and an admission that “in order seriously to
substantiate this interpretation it would be necessary to investigate the
origin of this isolated symbol of horror in Greek mythology as well as
parallels to it in other mythologies.”
36
This invitation was, in fact, taken
up by Stephen Wilk in a book-length study of the Medusa figure, who
found parallels to the visual depiction of the Gorgon Head within a wide
variety of cultural settings at varying historical moments and on a
diverse array of objects, from Mayan shields and Maori carvings to
Peruvian metalworks and Indian temples (see figures 7 and 8). Indeed, as
Marina Warner points out, there were numerous Medusa heads in the
architecture of Freud’s Vienna, including the one mounted to the aegis of
a statue of Athena on the fountain outside the parliament building.
37

36
Freud, “Medusa’s Head,” 203.
37
Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form, (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 1985), 111.

48

Figure 7. Perseus decapitates Medusa as Athena looks on. A limestone metope
(decorative panel) from Temple C at Silenus, near Palermo in modern-day Sicily.
From Stephen R. Wilk. MEDUSA: SOLVING THE MYSTERY OF THE GORGON.

Figure 8. Sketch of the face at the center of the Aztec Calendar Stone. From
Cecelia F. Klein, THE FACE OF THE EARTH, reprinted in Stephen R. Wilk,
MEDUSA: SOLVING THE MYSTERY OF THE GORGON.

49
Wilk suggests that in order to solve the mystery of this pan-cultural
symbol, one needs to pose a question with a surprisingly simple answer:
What item, common to the experience of a broad range of
humankind, could produce a humanlike face with huge,
staring eyes, broad nose, wide, gritted-toothed grin,
protruding tongue, facial lines, and stylized hair? We are not
familiar with the answer because it is kept from us,
deliberately. At one time in our history it was a much more
common sight, just as deliberately placed in view. Much of
the time, it was simply considered inevitable. But it was
distasteful at best, horrifying at worst, and so over time it
has been carefully removed from immediate view, a process
that has now gone on for so long that the object is no longer
familiar.
38

According to Wilk, the Gorgon is not, as Freud suggests, a symbol of the
opening from which we all enter the world, but the abyss to which we are
all heading: Death. Specifically, the Medusa Head is an aestheticized
portrayal of the human face one to two weeks after death when gases
from putrefaction cause the body to bloat, pushing out the eyes and
tongue (see figure 9). “The Gorgoneion is terrible because it shows us the
transformation of a human being into Death, and does so by a process
that destroys all dignity.”
39
It is in death and decay that the subject
becomes an object and, in particular, one of horror. While it is a sight
that is rarely encountered today due to embalming and the
medicalization of death and dying, the horrifying specificities of

38
Stephen R. Wilk. Medusa: Solving the Mystery of the Gorgon (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000), 186.
39
Wilk, 190

50

Figure 9. Photograph of a corpse after more than 48 hours, face forward (left) and
in profile (right). From Keith Simpson’s FORENSIC MEDICINE, Fifth Edition,
reprinted in Stephen R. Wilk, MEDUSA: SOLVING THE MYSTERY OF THE
GORGON.

putrefaction were once all too familiar, particularly in instances in which
the burial of the body was delayed, such as war, as well as public
execution and decapitation.
When we consider the fact that the body within the anatomy
theatre of the Renaissance was, in most cases, the criminal body recently
removed from the gallows and saved from the ignoble fate of public
decomposition in order to serve the greater good through its participation
in the acquisition of anatomical knowledge, then a reconsideration of the
symbolism of dissection in general and, in particular, its relation to the
image of the Medusa Head seems warranted. Indeed, it is within the
mise-en-scene of the anatomical demonstration that the reflective
glances of the shield and the Medusa figure are transformed into those of

51
the goddess Anatomia, who holds a mirror in one hand and a skull in the
other, a personification of the moral imperatives inscribed within the
theatre’s ritualized atmosphere: “’Nosce te ipsum’ (know thyself) and
‘Pulvis et umbra sum[u]s’ (we are dust and shadows)”(see figure 10).
Therefore, if we want to accept the argument that the anatomy theatre
serves as the fantasmatic ground of cinema, we may find it productive to
see how and to what extent our understanding of the
anatomical/cinematic Gaze is elaborated by reading its visual coding
through the lens of history. And to do that, we will return to the primal
scene, epitomized by the title page of Vesalius’s anatomical masterpiece,
De Humani Corporis Fabrica (see figure 11), where Vesalius himself
stands above a dissected female corpse revealing her innards, a scene
that would, over 300 years later, inspire the scene in Villiers’s novel in
which Edison stands above the robot Hadaly revealing her mechanical
parts and over 100 years after that, Slade photographing dissected love
dolls.
On the title page of the Fabrica, Vesalius appears front and center
(a novelty at the time; Vesalius was the first anatomist to show himself at
work within a printed book), and it is as though he is personally
welcoming us at the gates of the anatomical wonders to which we are
about to receive admittance. To his left is the female cadaver, surrounded

52

Figure 10. Anatomia

53

Figure 11. The frontispiece from the 1555 edition of Vesalius’s DE HUMANI
CORPORIS FABRICA

54
by circular benches populated by a seemingly unruly crowd of humans
and animals, the living and the dead, some of whom watch Vesalius
while others are clearly distracted. Only Vesalius meets our gaze (with a
significant look not all that dissimilar from that of Méliès before
performing a magic trick), while he pulls open the abdomen of the dead
woman as if gesturing us inside both the female womb and the mysteries
of the anatomical body to which it gives birth and that the Fabrica will
help to disclose. While Vesalius opens the womb with his right hand,
with his left he points up to a skeletal figure directly above, a gesture
that bifurcates both our focus and the page:
... if the womb marks our point of entrance into the world,
then Vesalius's own left hand, with its finger raised in a
gesture of signification, as well as rhetoric, guides our
attention back to the skeleton, our point of departure:
‘Nascentes Morimur’ — we are born to die. A drama of life
and death is, then, being played out within the circular
confines of the temple of anatomy.
40

The symbolic circuit created between womb and skeleton is not just that
between life and death, according to Sawday, but between death as
representative of the Fall and eternal life as represented by the body of
Christ. Indeed, the sacrificial pose of the body at the center of the title
page of the Fabrica, as well as that within other anatomical treatises of
the time (which were as often male as female) is a clear evocation of the

40
Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in
Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), 71.

55
body of Christ after crucifixion. Such allegorical richness offers, perhaps,
our first clue to the texture of the performance within the anatomy
theatre and the argument, made convincingly by Sawday, that anatomy
was not its sole aim, but one aspect incorporated into a larger sphere of
multivalent significance:
The anatomical Renaissance, the reordering of our
knowledge of the human body which took place in Europe in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was not merely a
moment of high intellectual excitement. Instead, the
discovery of the body was grounded in older, traditional,
patterns of symbol and ritual ... The confrontation which had
taken place outside the anatomy theatre, on the gallows, was
transformed once the body had been taken inside the
theatre. Instead of being a mere object of investigation, the
criminal corpse was invested with a transcendent
significance.
41

To help us understand the constellation of signification circulating
around the dissected corpse within the anatomical imaginary of the
Renaissance, Sawday brings our attention to the arrangement of the
scene on the title page of the Fabrica. Here, the womb forms the mid-
point, and it and the skeleton above it form the central vertical axis
around which all other elements in the picture rotate, including the
semi-circular columns of the theatre dome. The heliocentric construction
of the scene conforms to the architectural principles of Vitruvius, whose
belief that the human body should form the foundation of proportional
design served as the basis of many of the basilica churches built during

41
Sawday, 75.

56
the Renaissance. According to Sawday, such symbolism suggests that
there is an overarching universal harmony, where the human body
represents not itself but a greater organizing principle in which its
dissection is “no less than a demonstration of the structural coherence of
the universe itself, whose central component—the principle of life
concealed within the womb—Vesalius is about to open up to our gaze.”
42

The dissection within the anatomy theatre is, then, not just a way
of gaining knowledge of the body in an analytical or empirical sense, but
a way of enacting a transfiguration of its base nature into a realm of
divine abstraction of both spiritual and ontological significance. It
represents a moment that helps set the stage for, but that must be
differentiated from the Cartesian break in the seventeenth century and
the eventual triumph of “science” in the modern sense, during which the
body would be reformulated as a machine. As Sawday explains:
The development of the machine image dramatically
transformed the attitude of investigators towards the body’s
interior, and towards their own tasks of investigation. They
no longer stood before the body as though it was a
mysterious continent. It had become, instead, a system, a
design, a mechanically organized structure, whose rules of
operation, though still complex, could with the aid of reason,
be comprehended in the most minute detail.
43

If the body had at one time served as a microcosm of the universe, it
would become objectified within this new discursive regime, a body of

42
Sawday, 76.
43
Sawday, 31.

57
physiological facts permanently separated from the Cartesian cogito. The
body would henceforth be that against which “I” must be distinguished,
the rational pitted against the somatic, and the anatomist, now
representative of the scientific method, in direct contestation with that
which he investigated:
...the connotation of a searching operation performed on a
recalcitrant substance. One involved manual probing, the
other cerebral grasping. Each suggested the stripping away
of excess by decomposition and fragmentation for the
purpose of control. The messiness of the body, as well as the
unruliness of everyday life, were thus managed by the use of
either a reducing tool or analytical system. The immobilized
specimen under scrutiny could neither hide nor escape.
44

It is in response to the Enlightenment project in which the male Gaze
subjects the body, often figured as female, to analytic scrutiny—in order
to gain control as well as to reveal its insubstantiality—that the
representation of the dissected female body, both figural and textual, has
generally been read. However, Sawday complicates this reading by
tracing historically many of the anatomical metaphors that continue to
circulate in popular and visual culture. What his findings suggest is that
within the ritualized atmosphere in which these tropes originally
appeared, “an aesthetic investment in the liminal moment where an
active masculine science defines itself in relation to the passive female
form—would have been inconceivable” since both “the woman, just as

44
Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and
Medicine (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 47.

58
much as the man, had to be shown to be aiding and abetting the process
of her own deconstruction.”
45
Moreover, the purpose of this
deconstruction was not an “analysis” in the service of medical science in
any sense that we would understand it today. “Public dissection ... was
not primarily designed to demonstrate the facts of physiology to a
professional gathering ... Instead it illustrated the rich complexity of the
universe and its central physical component: the human body.”
46

In short, it was in the name of a higher order or gestalt that
anatomization was conducted. “Fragmentation provided the means of
discovering a unified truth,” according to Francette Pacteau, a truth that
invoked a classical sense of organic coherence and harmony. One can
see this kind of dual gesture in the work of Leonardo da Vinci, whereby
“the human body was subject, by the same hand, both to the aggressive
act of sectioning and dissecting, and to the totalizing act or
representation.”
47
This transfiguration via dissection permeated
Renaissance culture not only in medicine, but in art and literature. As
Pacteau notes, sectioning and dissection were performed not only on the
human body, both in the anatomy theatre and in the form of the blazon
anatomique, but on a favored metaphor and any other topic worthy of

45
Sawday, 217.
46
Sawday, 63.
47
Francette Pacteau, The Symptom of Beauty (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University
Press, 1994), 61.

59
consideration. Such works as The Anatomy of Wyt, The Anatomie of
Absurditie, and The Anatomy of Melancholy were published within a fifty
year span, and there was a wide circulation of spiritual anatomies,
“moral works whose aim was to purify by cutting away the sins which
conceal the truth.”
48

It is, indeed, this sort of Anatomy that Lord Ewald conducts on
Alicia in L’Eve Future, to which her poetic blazoning is a mere prologue.
Shortly after the brief paragraph in which Ewald extols Alicia’s beauty
are three chapters entitled, “Analysis.” “Hypothesis,” and significantly,
“Dissection,” in which Ewald conducts a moral appraisal of his mistress,
ultimately suggesting that there is a lack of proportionality between her
celestial body and her earthbound “soul”...
... between the body and the soul of Miss Alicia, it wasn’t
just a disproportion which distressed and upset my
understanding; it was an absolute disparity ... The traits of
her divine beauty seemed to be foreign to her self; her words
seemed constrained and out of place in her mouth. Her
intimate being was in flat contradiction with the form it
inhabited.
49

Alicia’s soul is alienated from its body, a distinctly post-Cartesian
affliction; however, it is not, as we might expect, her soul that is
imprisoned by the shackles of her body, but her soul that, in Lord
Ewald’s judgment, defiles the sacred temple that is her body. And that

48
Pacteau, 61.
49
Villiers, 31.

60
which weighs down her soul is, according to Ewald, a bourgeois concern
for the rational, the literal, the commonsensical. Alicia is, we might say, a
material girl. Even her surname, “Clary,” likely inspired by “Clara” the
practical woman in E.T.A. Hoffman’s story “The Sandman” whom the
protagonist compares to an automaton and whom he rejects for the
mechanical doll Olympia (read: she of Olympus), etymologically points to
a consciousness within which all is submitted to the light of reason. As
Ewald complains to Edison, although Alicia’s body recalls the Venus
Victorius, a statue of classical and transcendent proportions, “in everyday
life, Miss Alicia is the Goddess Reason ... she believes in heaven, but a
heaven of rational dimensions.”
50

The set of contradictory distinctions that Ewald draws between
Alicia’s “sacred body” and her “profane soul,” as well as between the
Venus Victorius and the Goddess of Reason (whom, we are reminded,
was Athena) provides a clue to the agenda of Villiers (for whom Ewald is
a stand-in).
51
As translator Robert Martin Adams suggests, Villiers was,
like his contemporaries Baudelaire and Mallarmé, a man very much at

50
Villiers, 40.
51
Translator Robert Martin Adams draws parallels, in particular, between Miss Alicia in
the novel and Miss Anny Eyre Powell, a wealthy London woman whom Villiers
attempted to court with disastrous results: “... Villiers escorted his young lady to Covent
Garden, and in the privacy of a box declared his passion. But he recited so much
poetry, gave such a long reading from his next novel, and grew so frantically agitated
that the young lady was frightened, thought him a lunatic, and made her escape from
his society as abruptly as she could ... of the whole episode what remained most
strongly in Villiers’ mind was the spiritless, blockish female who had been utterly
incapable of responding to his romantic declarations, had not even glimpsed the world
of his ideal values.” See Villiers, xii.

61
odds with the positivist values of the time into which he was born. He
loathed materialism and the very idea of progress, scientific or otherwise.
However, he peddled in a form of romantic irony, and there is, indeed, an
irony in the scientist Edison’s proposed solution to the woman who is so
afflicted by positivist rationalism that she acts, according to Lord Ewald,
like a mechanical doll or puppet, and that solution is to create a
mechanical doll in her image. Thus Hadaly, to whatever extent she is a
fulfillment of a Cartesian worldview in which the body is rendered as a
machine, is also in a dialectical sense (and Villiers loved Hegel), an
antidote to it, for she restores to Alicia’s body its metaphysicality. And
she does so through an act of transfiguration, wrought by Edison, of
macrocosmic proportions similar to that depicted on the title page of
Vesalius’s Fabrica. As Edison proclaims to Lord Ewald and, it seems, to
the heavens:
In place of this soul which repels you in the living woman, I
shall infuse another sort of soul ... capable of impressions a
thousand times more lovely, more lofty, more noble—that is,
they will be robed in that character of eternity without which
our mortal life can be no more than a shabby comedy ... I
will compel the Ideal itself to become apparent, for the first
time, to your senses, PALPABLE, AUDIBLE, AND FULLY
MATERIAL...
52

Within Edison’s promise to lift the veil of appearances in order to compel
the Ideal to reveal itself, we can detect the Platonic urge for the

52
Villiers, 64.

62
Intelligible beyond the rational or the sensible. That the immaterial realm
will be revealed through Hadaly, a goddess forged from the latest
technologies, may appear contradictory, but conforms to the aesthetic
ideals of both Vesalius, whose work Villiers evokes in Hadaly’s
construction and Baudelaire, his mentor, and it underscores the semiotic
relationship between the emblematists of the Renaissance and the
symbolists of the nineteenth century.
Vesalius’s work, as Sawday suggests, was conducted in the service
of a Christian neo-platonic conception of the universe, in which the
material or aesthetic realm could lead, via a hierarchy of
correspondences, to the invisible realm of Ideas. Within such a
conception, there are two roads by which the sensible or material can
lead to the Intelligible or Divine, kataphasis (affirmation) and apophasis
(denial), Greek terms that were reworked by Dionysius the Areopagite in
his exegesis on the Celestian Hierarchies, discussed at length by E.H.
Gombrich in his seminal essay on symbolic imagery, Icones Symbolicae.
It is worth examining each in succession since Hadaly, in the terms that
Villiers imagines her, represents both.
Kataphasis, the affirmation of “like through like,” attempts to
emulate the Divine through images of beauty. It is born of the analogical
method introduced by Plato in which the love of earthly beauty is but the

63
first step on the journey to the apprehension of Beauty as such.
However, unlike classical Platonism, which spurned Art, the neo-Platonic
tradition as influenced by Christianity held a special place for the artist
who, it was believed, had visionary powers that enabled him to see and
potentially lead the faithful beyond the dross of matter to the
supercelestial realm. In particular, symbolic imagery was held in great
esteem, a common form of which was Personification, inherited from the
Greeks, in which anthropomorphic figures were used to convey abstract
ideas. Such imagery, it was thought, could awaken within the imperfect
senses the memory of perfection. As Christoforo Giarda suggests in the
introduction to his Icones Symbolicae (1628):
... it is impossible to love what cannot be apprehended either
by reason or by the senses. As nothing can be apprehended
by the senses that is not somewhat corporeal, nothing can
be understood by our mind in its depressed condition that
has not the appearance of a body. Who, then, can
sufficiently estimate the magnitude of the debt we owe to
those who expressed the Arts and Sciences themselves in
images and thus achieved it that we can not only know them
but look at them, as it were, with our eyes, that we can meet
them and almost converse with them about a variety of
matters?
53

It is precisely this sort of earthly analogue of the divine to which Edison
aspires when he tells Lord Ewald that he will combine art and science to
incarnate the “Ideal itself” in the form of Hadaly, an android who will

53
Giarda in E.H. Gombrich, Gombrich on the Renaissance, Volume 2: Symbolic Images
(London: Phaidon Press, 1972), 154.

64
make manifest in a conversant being all that Alicia inspires in Ewald but
does not fulfill. Hadaly is the Personification of Beauty or, as Edison puts
it, “... the first hours of love, immobilized, the hour of the Ideal made
eternal prisoner.”
54

The apophatic, on the other hand, which was the favored mode
within the period to which we are referring, is the “enigmatic image”
which attempts “like through unlike.” Such an approach shuns mimesis,
which might encourage confusion between a representation and the Ideal
that it is attempting to emulate, ultimately leading down the false path of
idolatry or the worship of graven images. Instead, it sidesteps the
problematics of representation, while using its toolbox to construct that
which would be impossible or monstrous in nature as a way of engaging
the mind in a hermeneutic paradox that urges it beyond the sensible to
the Intelligible. This is the realm of the chimaera, the hybrid, the
hieroglyph, images that obscure as much as they reveal.
Such an approach was common in the emblem books of the
Renaissance, in which abstract ideas or topoi were represented through
the conjunction of words and symbolic drawings. Within these books, the
idea of the emblem, at one time associated with the heraldic escutcheon,
was invested with the mystical import of Egyptian hieroglyphics, an
interest in which was kindled after the discovery in 1419 of Horapollo’s

54
Villiers, 135.

65
Hieroglyphica, a Greek guide to Egyptian hieroglyphics and their
meanings.
55
Marsilio Ficino drew heavily from the Hieroglyphica in his
theologically-grounded guide to emblematics, from which Gombrich
culls, as an example of the apophatic image, the ouroboros (see figure
12), or winged serpent biting its own tail. Such images are codes that

Figure 12. Ouroboros

require deciphering, and to this one, Ficino ascribes the significance of
eternity and the paradoxes of Time:
... the mysterious hieroglyph of the monster devouring itself
sets the mind a puzzle which forces it to rise above the
image. Not only can we not think of the sign as representing
a real creature, even the event it represents transcends the
possibility of our experience—what will happen when the

55
Liselotte Dieckmann, “The Metaphor of Hieroglyphics in German Romanticism” in
Comparative Literature, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Autumn, 1955), 307.

66
devouring jaws reach the neck and the jaws themselves. It is
this paradoxical nature of the image that has made it the
archetypal symbol of mystery. We are certainly not tempted
to confuse the painted enigma with its manifold meanings ...
Unlike the image of beauty, then, the image of mystery will
not arrest the mind in its ascent to the intelligible world. The
serpent biting its own tail is not a ‘representation’ of time, for
time is not part of the sensible world and so it cannot appear
to our bodily senses. The essence of time is accessible only to
intuition, and it is this intuition which is symbolized in our
response to the image which both demands contemplation
and spurs us on to transcend it.
56

Critical to Ficino’s understanding of this figure was the way in which it
embodied “in one firm image” the multiple, shifting, and conflicted
thoughts that may be conjured in reference to the abstract notion of
time. This singular view encapsulating multiple meanings, which serves
as an adumbration of an abstraction or higher reality, brings to mind the
paradox of Achilles’ shield, which contains within its circular confines an
eternal unfolding. Both the hieroglyph and the shield present a
contradiction in the form of an invocation to an aesthetic Other—the
hieroglyph or pictorial enigma attempts the kind of abstraction that is
normally conferred to the verbal arts, while the shield feigns the iconicity
of the plastic arts—in order to achieve their divinizing effect.
While Achilles’ shield is presented to the reader of Homer in a
before-and-after series of events that corresponds to the order in which
Hephaestus creates them, when taken as a totality, the shield renders

56
Gombrich, 160.

67
linear time circular by encapsulating all that has led up to the moment
of its creation and all that will follow. Indeed, the shield represents more
of Homer’s world than does the Iliad itself, presented in a kind of
cosmogony, from Hephaestus’s creation of the earth, sky, sun, moon,
and stars down to the pettiest human dealings, all unfolding
simultaneously and concentrically, in a spiraling display of life and death
so awe-inspiring that “none had the courage to look at it.”
57
Thus, the
creation of the shield, whose ekphrasis appears at first to be a visual or
ornamental side note to the narrative, is in fact its macrocosm, a
totalizing vision of frightening subliminity, narrativized as the paralyzing
effect that the shield has on the Myrmidons. Like the apophatic image,
the ekphrastic image is an “illusionary representation of the
unrepresentable,” that which is “allowed to masquerade as a natural
sign” but which is born of a paradoxical vacillation that renders it
impossible, and this very impossibility enables it to conjure what Krieger
calls a “magic semiotic”:
This hermeneutic system has its alchemical home in the
transmutation of base elements into gold and its ontological
home in a pool of being in which separate entities, from the
monstrous to the sublime, are dissolved into identity. The
signs that such a hermeneutic is prepared to read evade the
“natural equivalence” that would arise from their being
matched, through perceptible similarity, to their referents

57
Richmond Lattimore, translator, The Iliad of Homer (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1951), 392.

68
and instead attain a meta-physically sanctioned identity with
them, thereby achieving a meta-natural, intelligible status.
58

While the shield has a material presence (even if fictional) that affords
physical protection, its ekphrasis leads us away from (even as it points
us towards) its iconic properties and alerts us to its symbolic protection,
which is, as Krieger suggests, of the order of the Palladium, “an
empowered surrogate of divine presence.”
59
It is the shield’s “divine
synoptic perspective” of the vast panoply of human enterprise both life-
affirming and death-dealing that, as Stephen Scully suggests, terrifies its
mortal viewers with “a sense of godhead made present. In their
collectivity the scenes on the shield offer a ‘literary’ version of this
presence, Gorgon-like in its effect upon humankind.”
60

It is, as well, a “divine synoptic perspective” born of a paradoxical
vacillation to which the title page of Vesalius’s Fabrica aspires in the dual
gesture between the womb and the skeleton, the instructional equivalent
of which is the snake biting its own tail. And like the Myrmidons in the
face of Achilles’ shield, the figures surrounding Vesalius are portrayed, in
a kind of morality play, as hindered by the limitations of human
perception from grasping its full revelatory potential:

58
Krieger, 137.
59
Krieger, xvi.
60
Scully, Stephen. “Reading The Shield of Achilles: Terror, Anger, Delight” in Harvard
Studies in Classical Philology, Vol. 101, 2003 (2003), 45.

69
Each of these: the naked figure, the spectral figure, the
young man reading, the figure with the slashed arm, the
monkey, the squabbling assistants, the figure with the dog,
can be envisaged as contributing to the rich allusive web of
meaning enfolded within the title-page. The spectral figure
gazing down on the scene, for example, though it may
remind us of Dante who imaginatively passed from life into
the circles of the dead in the Divina Commedia, is also
reminiscent of the iconic image of Death or Time, who stands
in the world’s anatomy theatre, quietly surveying the human
attempt to unravel his mystery. The young man reading is
suggestive of youth endeavoring to understand the world
according to formulaic precepts contained in written texts,
unable to realize that the most significant feature of the
world is contained within the conjunction of womb and
skeleton. The older man, who has closed his book (as though
realizing the futility of written observation), answers the
figure of youth by gesturing towards the dissective arm
beside him. Again, the figures in the foreground,
undoubtedly offering a commentary on older anatomical
practices, also echo the central message of the image. Thus,
the ape who distracts two of the spectators on the left of the
image symbolizes the distracting power of human ingenuity,
deflecting the understanding from contemplation of the
central truth now understood by Vesalius and those who
follow his left hand.
61

The vacillation between life and death, space (womb) and time (skeleton),
as well as the didacticism of the title page, holds sway throughout the
folio pages that follow in the form of “living anatomy,” a convention that
was common until well into the eighteenth century, in which the corpse
was figured as alive and often engaged in a scene of allegorical
significance. Throughout the Fabrica, dissected bodies re-enact familiar
Christian narratives—the Creation story, the crucifixion, the martyrdom

61
Sawday, 71-72.

70
of various saints; they appear against scenic backdrops—strolling
through pastoral landscapes, near tombs or crumbling ruins, imagery
that itself vacillates between the monumental and the transient; or they
assist in their own dissection, in some cases with knife in hand (see
figure 13). Such imagery is both descriptive (of the bodily interior) and
narrative, thus rendering the dissected body both dead and alive, both
object and subject. This vacillation produces, as Janis McLaren Caldwell
suggests, a self-reflexivity that not only collapses the distinction between
viewer and viewed—encouraging the recognition of ourselves in a body
that, while dead and dissected, still roams the countryside—but between
cadaver and anatomist.
62
It is, indeed, the self-reflexive circuit that the
figure of Anatomia personifies, as mediating agent between the skull and
the mirror, for within the anatomical demonstration we are all, the
anatomist included, the future dead examining ourselves in a spectacle
that both reveals and hides the truth from us. The animated corpse is,
then, like the Medusa head, both a shield and a mirror. It is, as Kenneth
Gross says of the statue that steps down from its pedestal to enter the

62
Caldwell, a medical doctor turned literary scholar, is unique in her reading of the
animated corpse of the high Renaissance. Whereas most find themes of sadism,
masochism, and misogyny in anatomical imagery that combines the aesthetic and
scientific contemplation of dissected bodies in situ, Caldwell suggests that there is a
self-referentiality implied that contributes to an ethics of medicine, which she finds
lacking in the age of clinical detachment. See Caldwell.

71

Figure 13. Living Anatomy

72
human realm, “... a wedge between myself and my death, as well as a
reflection of my astonishment at death.”
63

The iconography of the anatomical scene would persist, albeit in a
more private and secularized fashion, in the “stasis-motion paradox” of
the “still life” painting, an art form popular in post-Reformation Northern
Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is the “still
life,” particularly in the form of the vanitas that, I would argue, is a
touchstone for understanding the paradoxes inherent in the living statue
Hadaly within Villiers’s novel. Within the vanitas, objects such as a
human skull or an hourglass, serve as a memento mori, “a reminder of
the illusory, flimsy, and ultimately unreal character of the things of this
fading world in the face of death’s eternity.”
64
By introducing time into the
spatial array depicted in the painting, the descriptive image is rendered
allegorical, underscoring the illusionism inherent not only in the material
objects being displayed, but as Rosalie Colie suggests, of the painting
itself. Such self-consciousness, the image’s full disclosure of its own
illusionary qualities, becomes a testament to and a justification for the
work of art:
It suggests that all worldly existence is to be seen as
delusion, leading us astray, except for the conscious self-
referentiality of the work of art: the work’s confession that its

63
Kenneth Gross, T. The Dream of the Moving Statue (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1992), 19.
64
Krieger, 210.

73
illusion reveals itself to us as a self-conscious version of
delusion that can serve as our metaphysical beacon through
these shadows and snares. In reminding us of its own status
as illusion, as soothsayer of our universe, the work of art
may be the only thing we can trust, even as it self-
consciously retreats before itself.
65

The artistic work as allegorical beacon of the Real was a view that was
both espoused and practiced by Baudelaire, to whom Villiers's œuvre
owes its greatest debt. For Baudelaire, the Poet is he who is able to distill
the eternal and universal from the dross of materiality. As many have
pointed out, there is a neo-Platonic conception of hierarchical analogy
running throughout Baudelaire’s work, perhaps most apparent in the
poem Correspondences, inspired, in part, by the 18th century mystic
Emanuel Swedenborg, who wrote of the correspondences between the
material and spiritual realms. The poem begins:
Nature is a temple where living pillars
Let escape sometimes confused words;
Man traverses it through forests of symbols
That observe him with familiar glances.

To whatever extent Nature or the objects of the world are hieroglyphs
from which greater truths may be decoded, they are meaningless until
submitted to the interpretative faculties of human consciousness, in
particular, that of the Poet, who is most equipped to serve as ‘un
traducteur, un déchiffreur’ (a translator, a decipherer) of the symbols

65
Murray Krieger discussing Rosalie Colie’s “Paradoxia Epidemica” in Ekphrasis, 212.

74
and metaphors concealed in the outside world.”
66
Thus, it is the Poet’s
own creative intuition and originality that serves as the philosopher’s
stone in this sacred alchemy. As Baudelaire states in his essay on
Philosophic Art, “pure art” in the modern vernacular is “the creation of
an evocative magic containing at once the object and the subject, the
world external to the artist and the artist himself.”
67

The ideal within art is, for Baudelaire, marked by a duality, which
“is a fatal consequence of the duality of man,” and that encompasses
both the immutable/eternal and the ephemeral/transient: “Consider, if
you will, the eternally subsisting portion as the soul of art, and the
variable element as its body.”
68
Such an approach leads to what, at times,
seems like duplicity or contradiction, but that, as Maria Scott suggests,
is grounded in an allegorical self-reflexivity. In an attempt to shed light
on the obliquities within Baudelaire’s work, Scott draws a helpful
analogy to the technique of visual anamorphosis. Anamorphic images are
distorted or monstrous-looking images that, when viewed from a certain
vantage point (often from an angle or through a curved mirror) appear in
regular proportion:
At the moment that this angled image is perceived, the initial
(frontal) image or impression fades in clarity, such that a

66
Scott, Maria C. Baudelaire’s Le Spleen De Paris: Shifting Persepctives (Studies in
European Cultural Transition), (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2005).
67
Charles Baudelaire, “Philosophic Art” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays
(London: Phaidon Press, 1964), 205
68
Baudelaire, 3.

75
simultaneous and clear perception of both images is
impossible. The preservation of a tension between two
viewpoints is essential to an anamorphic work; neither
perspective ever entirely does away with the other.
69

By creating a tension between two perspectives, the anamorphic work
underscores the illusionary qualities of all works of art, achieving the
sort of allegorical self-referentiality to which Colie refers in her
description of the “still life.” Indeed, one of the most famous anamorphic
works, The Ambassadors (1533) by Hans Holbein the Younger draws on
the iconology of the Northern European vanitas (see figure 14). In the
painting, two well-dressed men, an ambassador and a bishop, lean
against two shelves, the upper shelf containing objects seemingly related
to the heavens, while the lower shelf has objects of earthly interest.
Between them, at the bottom center of the painting, is an anamorphic
image that is difficult to see unless one stands to the far right of the
painting, at which point it reveals itself as a human skull.
As Scott points out, Baudelaire attempted a similar kind of double-
edged text, “hovering between what is said and what is left blank,
between the visible and the spectral.”
70
Although writing about the prose
poems in Le Spleen de Paris, whose hieroglyphic ambiguities are left up
to the reader to decipher, Scott attempts to highlight the kind of duplicity
to which Baudelaire aspired by directing us to the poem “Le Masque (The

69
Scott, 10.
70
Scott, 67.

76

Figure 14. The Ambassadors (1533) by Hans Holbein the Younger

77

Mask)” in Fleur du Mal, which was inspired by an anamorphic statuette
by Ernest Christophe (referred to by Baudelaire as “an Allegorical Statue
in Renaissance Style.”) From the front, the statuette appeared to
represent a grinning woman, but when viewed from the side, the
woman’s smiling face is revealed as a mask, which hides her true
countenance, distorted from pain and agony. The poem begins with a
description of the statue from the front that recalls, in its evocation of
classical beauty, Ewald’s description of Alicia as the Venus de Milo:
Behold this prize of beauties wholly Florentine,
See in this muscled body, lithe and sinuous,
Divine concinnity married to strength divine.
This woman sculpted by hands that wrought, miraculous.
So strangely strong, and strangely slim in scope,
She was born to throne on beds made rich and sumptuous
To charm the happy leisure of a Prince or Pope.

Baudelaire then replicates the experience of surprise that one would
have if moving around the statue ...
On this proud creature vested with such stateliness
See what exciting charms her daintiness has shed.
Let us draw close and walk around her. O excess,
O Blasphemy of Art! O treachery unique!
That body filled with promise, rapturous and rare,
Turns at the top into a double-headed freak!
71

In so doing, the poem describes “the movement from comfortable
delusion to confusion to recognition of the artist’s ruse,” effecting a self-
reflexivity that, as Scott suggests of the prose poems, lends it “un

71
Jacques LeClercq, Flowers of Evil (Mt Vernon, NY: Peter Pauper Press, 1958).

78
élément mysterérieux, durable, éternal (a mysterious, durable, eternal
element).”
72

It is to anamorphosis, a double gesture in which the artwork lays
bare its illusionism in the process of its reception, to which Villiers points
in his novel and to which the fictional Edison seems to aspire in his
dissection and construction of the robot, Hadaly. Hadaly is artifice as
revelation as opposed to art(ifice) for its own sake, a condition with which
real women are, according to Edison, afflicted. Her allure will reside in
the truth of her deception as opposed to the lie of the deception that real
women perpetrate on men. The deception of the latter is emphasized
throughout the novel, but is made explicit in two parallel instances, in
which Ewald and Edison each conjure the equivalent of the anamorphic
statue in Baudelaire’s poem. The first occurs during Ewald’s moral
dissection of Alicia, in which he explains how the beautiful image of
Venus that Alicia’s body projects is rendered horrifying every time she
opens her mouth and reveals the utter banality of her thoughts:
The marble Venus, in fact, has nothing to do with thinking.
The goddess is veiled in stone and silence. From her
appearance comes this word: "I am Beauty, complete and
alone. I speak only through the spirit of him who looks at me
… This meaning of the statue, which Venus Victorious
expresses with her contours, Miss Alicia Clary, standing on
the sand beside the ocean, might inspire as her model—if
she kept her mouth shut and closed her eyes. But how to
understand a Venus Victorious who has found her arms

72
Scott, 102.

79
again in the dark night of time, and reappears in the middle
of the human race …
73

The living statue was a common theme in the fantastic literature of the
nineteenth century, particularly within the French tradition, in which
“one can really speak of a ‘Pygmalion complex.’
74
In many of these tales,
the animation of the statue is a horrifying event that results in the death
of its beholder. By invoking such tales in its description of a living
woman’s body, this paragraph closes the ekphrastic circuit initiated in
Ewald’s original description of Alicia, in which she appears as a
humanized Venus. It is in the indeterminacy between her animacy and
inanimacy that Alicia rouses passion in Ewald, inspiring the kind of
“ekphrastic hope” inscribed by the poet when he attempts to bring an
aesthetic object to life through language. However, subtending such
desire is, as Mitchell suggests, “ekphrastic fear,” “the moment of
resistance or counterdesire that occurs when we sense that the
difference between the verbal and visual representation might collapse
and the figurative, imaginary desire of ekphrasis might be realized
literally and actually.”
75
Although “ekphrastic hope” bespeaks the utopian
desire to collapse the distinction between binaries—temporal and spatial,
animate and inanimate, subject and object—it is sustained by the very

73
Villiers, 41.
74
“Pygmalion complex” is a phrase used by Chambers in his essay on Gautier,
elaborated on by both Rigolet and Lathers.
75
Mitchell, 154.

80
impossibility of the desire’s realization. If, as Jean Hagstrum states,
ekphrasis attempts “to give voice to the mute art object,” it fails in the
presence of an object that, like Alicia, is a subject who actually starts
speaking.
In her refusal to remain silent, Alicia appears to Ewald as “the
most hideous of the Eumenides,” a comparison that raises the specter of
Medusa and the return of the repressed from behind the mask of Alicia’s
beauty. The Gorgon is being invoked here neither in relation to Alicia’s
body, which for Ewald is heavenly, nor the lack implicit in her sexuality,
but in her very subjectivity and refusal to be a symbol (whether of
transcendental plenitude or phallic absence), which shatters the illusion
of Ewald’s solipsistic reverie. “Medusa is the image that turns the tables
on the spectator,” according to Mitchell, “She exerts and reverses the
power of the ekphrastic gaze, portrayed as herself gazing, her look raking
over the world, perhaps even capable of looking back at the poet.”
76
Ewald
is dumbstruck in the face of Alicia’s literal and rational presence, in
which all the subtle shades of his perception are rendered unambiguous.
Edison’s proposal to recreate Alicia in the form of an android sans her
intrusive personality is the equivalent of the decapitation and mounting
of the Medusa Head onto the Athenian shield, a reinscription within the
symbolic order of that which signifies its disruption.

76
Mitchell, 172.

81
The second instance in which the “beautiful mask” is uncovered to
reveal a horrifying vision occurs when Edison recounts for Ewald a tale
about his friend, Edward Anderson, who was ensnared, bankrupted
morally and financially, and brought to his eventual suicide by the
“seductive arts” of a dancer named Evelyn Habal. Edison states that after
his friend’s demise, he made it a point to investigate in scientific fashion
the dancer to determine the exact nature of that which seduced and
demoralized his friend. What he discovers is that the dancer was
rendered all the more intoxicating by the fact that her charms were spun
around a complete absence of charm, a kind of abyss to which his friend
was both repelled and drawn.
In order to demonstrate for Ewald the great disparity between the
illusion cast by the woman who destroyed his friend and her reality,
Edison both resurrects and deconstructs her aura by displaying a
moving image of Evelyn Habal dancing. It is a scene that is prophetic in
its anticipation not only of cinematic projection, which would not premier
in reality for another ten years, but of cinematic content, in particular,
the controversial Serpentine Dance, which the real Edison “borrowed”
from the French performer Loie Fuller (the dancing muse of the
Symbolists) and shot in the Black Maria:
A long strip of transparent plastic encrusted with bits of
tinted glass moved laterally along two steel tracks before the
luminous cone of the astral lamp. Drawn by a clockwork

82
mechanism at one of its ends, this strip began to glide swiftly
between the lens and the disk of a powerful reflector.
Suddenly on the wide white screen within its fame of ebony
flashed the life-size figure of a very pretty and quite youthful
blonde girl.
77

Shortly thereafter, in a move that collapses the functionality of the magic
lantern and film projector, evoking a cinematic Phantasmagoria, Edison
adjusts his device so that “a second heliochromic band replaced the first
and began running as quick as light before the reflector,” on which
appears “a little bloodless creature, vaguely female of gender, with
dwarfish limbs, hollow cheeks, toothless jaws with practically no lips,
and almost bald skull, with dim and squinting eyes, flabby lids, and
wrinkled features, all dark and skinny.”
78
Edison informs Ewald that this
is the same Evelyn Habal as in the first image, magically stripped of her
make-up and accoutrements.
This doubled vision of beauty and decrepitude not only recalls the
anamorphic statue in Baudelaire’s poem “The Mask,” but it references
directly “Danse Macabre,” the second poem in Fleur du Mal inspired by a
Christophe statuette, this one depicting a female skeleton dressed up as
if for a ball. Indeed, the chapter shares the same name as the poem and
begins with a quote by Baudelaire: “And it’s hard work being a beautiful
woman!” The poem describes a female skeleton who dances in a ballroom

77
Villiers, 117.
78
Villiers, 118

83
encircled by couples perfumed with musk, but who smell of death and
who, like those circling the skeleton on the title page of the Fabrica,
remain oblivious to the truth in their midst. The Danse Macabre, a
common allegorical trope in the late Medieval period often depicted as a
death figure leading a group of dancing skeletons to the grave (see figure
15), was both admired and emulated by Baudelaire. In an essay on the
1859 Salon, in which he discusses the Christophe statuette on which his
poem is based, Baudelaire expresses “a nostalgia for ‘those magnificent
allegories of the Middle Ages, in which the immortal grotesque
intertwined itself playfully, as it still does, with the mortal horrible.”
79
As
Marie Lathers points out, Baudelaire’s “syntagmatic association between
sculpture, death, and the feminine” runs throughout L’Eve Future.
80
While
both the poem and Villiers’s chapter play on the theme of the dancing
skeleton, they also hearken back to a particular elaboration of the
vanitas image in which a beautiful woman sits at a looking glass, her
mirrored reflection appearing as a skull or skeleton (see figure 16). Such
images lend themselves to a dual interpretation: one, a critique of female
vanity, the other a memento mori in which the female figure represents

79
Scott, 149. Baudelaire had intended to have a frontispiece with an allegorical skeleton
in the tradition of the Danse Macabre for the second edition of Les Fleurs du Mal,
published in 1861 (his vision for the piece was not realized until 1866 by Félicien Rops
and was featured in Les épaves, published the same year). See Holtzman, “Felicien Rops
and Baudelaire: Evolution of a Frontispiece.”
80
Marie Lathers, The Aesthetics of Artifice: Villiers's ‘L’Eve Future.’ (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 63.

84

Figure 15. Memento Mori

85

Figure 16. All is Vanity

86
the personification of Beauty as that to which the world of appearances
aspires, made poignant by the face of death smiling back, which reminds
the viewer of the transience and ephemeral nature not just of beauty, but
of the entire world of things.
In Villiers’s novel both readings are brought into play; if Evelyn
Habal (who manifests a potentiality in all living women, according to
Edison) represents the woman/death dyad as vanity, then Hadaly will
serve as her antidote, the vanitas or that which Baudelaire describes
admiringly as a “spell of nothingness, madly bedecked.” The comparison
between the two is underscored in the next chapter in which Edison
leads Ewald to a drawer in which he has kept Evelyn Habal’s things
since her death. He is accompanied by Hadaly, who illuminates the
collection with a torch, “like a statue at the side of a tomb,” bringing to
mind a statue of liberty whose call to freedom is in the form of a memento
mori. Edison’s presentation of the dancer’s beautifying accoutrements is
the contreblazon to Ewald’s initial blazoning of the singer, Alicia, a
parodic echoing of those same attributes upon which praise was
bestowed, now rendered horrifying through their deconstruction:
Here we have ... the tresses of Salome, the glittering fluid of
the stars, the brilliance of sunlight on autumn foliage, the
magic of forest noontides, a vision of Eve the blond, our
youthful ancestry, forever radiant! Ah! To revel in these
tresses! What a delight, eh?
And he shook in the air a horrible mare’s nest of
matted hair and faded ribbons, streaked here and there where

87
the coloring had worn away, mottled and tangled, a dirty
rainbow of wig work, corroded and yellowed by the action of
various acids.
—Here now is the lily complexion, the rosy modesty of
the virgin, here is the seductive power of passionate lips,
moist and warm with desire, all eager with love!
And he set forth a make-up box filled with half-empty
jars of rouge, pots of greasepaint, creams and pastes of every
sort, patches, mascara, and so forth...
—Here now are the lovely breasts of our siren, from
the salt sea waves of morning! From the foam of ocean and
the rays of the sun, here are the ethereal contours of the
heavenly court of Venus!
And he waved aloft some scraps of gray wadding,
bulging, grubby, and giving off a particularly rancid odor.
—Here are the thighs of the wood nymph, the delirious
bacchante, the modern girl of perfect beauty, more lovely
than the statues of Athens, and who dances with such divine
madness!
And he brandished aloft various old girdles, falsies,
and apparatus of steel and whalebone, busks of orthopedic
function, and the remains of two or three ancient corsets so
complicated, what with their laces and buttons, that they
looked like old dismantled mandolins, with their strings
whipping at random about them.
81

However frightening these objects are in isolation, they were able in their
totality to cast a spell of seduction that, like a siren’s call, lured Edward
Anderson to his eventual doom. Echoing Baudelaire’s views on the tricks
of artifice with which modern women conjure an image that verges on the
supernatural, Edison assures Ewald that even if Anderson had been
aware of the dancer’s trickery, his fate was sealed. “What is this craft
called “make-up”? Women have fairy fingers, it’s clear! And once the
original impression is produced, I tell you the illusion clings forever ...

81
Villiers, 120.

88
even on the most hideous of all women.”
82
Indeed, Edison conjectures
that such “modern Furies” as Evelyn Habal benefit from an unfortunate
equation in which “their morbid and fatal influence on their victim is in
direct ratio to the quantity of moral and physical artifice with which they
reinforce—or, rather, overwhelm—the very few natural seductive powers
they seem to possess.”
83
Thus, the dancer’s deleterious effect on Edison’s
friend, which was complete and all-consuming, must have been the
function of a total negativity: “Only the absolute void could have imposed
on him this particular manner of vertigo.”
The thematic of a spiraling nullity around which desire is
constructed was, of course, explored to great effect by Hitchcock in his
film, Vertigo in which a simple and ordinary woman, Judy Barton, is able
to trick the main protagonist, Scottie, into believing that she is the wife of
an old friend of his, named Madeleine, whom his friend has hired him to
follow. As Madeleine, she will appear to be possessed by the spirit of a
dead woman, in front of whose portrait in a museum she sits in a trance
for hours at a time, and Scottie will find her so beautiful and mysterious
that he will become obsessed with her. After “Madeleine’s” death, Scottie
accidentally runs into Judy Barton with whom he becomes acquainted
and, although he is initially put off by her banality, he is so taken by her

82
Villiers, 118.
83
Villiers, 115.

89
visual similarity to “Madeleine” that he attempts to recreate the aura of
the dead woman by asking Judy to wear her hair and clothes in a similar
style. The conception of desire expressed in the film—that it can be
catalyzed by an assemblage of technologies of artifice producing the effect
of a woman and that it is all the more piqued the greater the absence for
which such artifice compensates—is articulated explicitly in Villiers's
novel by Edison. After discovering the secret of Evelyn Habal’s allure,
Edison concludes that if the vertiginous effect that the dancer had on his
friend Edward Anderson can be reduced to the contents of a drawer, why
not mobilize the same production to a more positive end?
In a word, I have come, I, the ‘Sorcerer of Menlo Park,” as
they call me here, to offer the human beings of these new
and up-to-date times, to my scientific contemporaries as a
matter of fact, something better than a false, mediocre, and
ever-changing Reality; what I bring is a positive, enchanting,
ever-faithful Illusion. If it’s just one chimera for another, one
sin against another sin, one phantasm against all the rest,
why not, then?
84

Edison then sets to work on Hadaly, in which he will recreate the
formula of artificially-induced desire that he has distilled from his
studies of Evelyn Habal, but which he will amplify by “saturating it with a
profound awe hitherto unknown.” The mechanics of this awe is similar to
that produced by the false Madeleine in Hitchcock’s film, but with a
difference. Hadaly not only benefits from a full arsenal of beautifying

84
Villiers, 164.

90
effects, but some of them serve as the interface by which she can be
controlled. On each finger she wears a ring, each with a different stone,
which allows Ewald to influence her movements. Around her neck she
wears a string of pearls, “every pearl of which has a specific
correspondence” (italics mine. A direct reference to Baudelaire). Via two
golden phonographs that serve as her lungs, she will speak words,
captured in advance in Alicia’s voice, from “the greatest poets, the most
subtle metaphysicians, the most profound novelists.”
85
Moreover, Hadaly
is actually invested with the soul of a dead woman. As we will later learn,
Anny Anderson, the noble wife of Edward Anderson for whom Edison had
the greatest respect, was reduced to a cataleptic state after her
husband’s demise. She was thereafter cared for by Edison, who learned
to communicate with her through a form of mesmerism. The
disembodied soul of Mrs. Anderson, who conversed telepathically with
the inventor, began to take on a life of its own, as well as a new name,
Sowana. Towards the end of the novel, as Ewald prepares to depart with
Hadaly, Sowana will shed finally the mortal coil of Anny Anderson and
incorporate fully within the android.
Sowana is the ghost in the machine, Hadaly’s x factor; she invests
the android’s programming with an enigmatic and fuzzy logic that makes
her not only clairvoyant, able to telegraph events from over large

85
Villiers, 131.

91
distances, but unfathomable even to her creator. Edison insists, “though
I know Mrs. Anderson, I swear to you on my soul THAT I DO NOT KNOW
SOWANA!” Sowana serves as an organizational agent for the mechanical
workings of Hadaly, while also investing her with an infinite mystery that
is irreducible to the sum of its parts. This dual function enables Hadaly
to embody in “one firm image” an awe-inspiring metaphysicality that is
wrought in a similar manner to the ekphrastic shield. As Marina Warner
tells us at the start of her essay on the “Aegis of Athena”—”The
transfiguration of a Homeric hero is achieved through armour.”
86
—and,
indeed, our first glimpse of the android Hadaly in the novel is ”a coat of
armor, shaped as for a woman out of silver plates” upon which the divine
agent Sowana, like Hephaestus, will sculpt the image of Alicia. The
process by which Hadaly is created will be replicated in 1915 in the film
Metropolis in which Rotwang, the mad scientist, builds an android whose
initial appearance resembles a coat of armor (this one with a distinctly
art deco flair), into which he invests the life force of the virginal woman
Maria, an act that also magically transposes her image onto the android’s
outer shell.
87
The technique by which Edison, with the help of Sowana,
transforms Hadaly into the image of Alicia is, as Marie Lathers points
out, reminiscent of the (then) new art of photosculpture, “a process that

86
Warner, 104.
87
I will discuss this film and, in particular, the process by which the android is
ensouled, at greater length in Chapter Three.

92
combines the reproductive potentials of the ancient art of sculpture and
the novel technique of photography,”
88
invented in 1861, and of which
Villiers was clearly aware since Edison mentions it in the novel. But
however modern the technique, the metal body onto which the female
image is cast is figured as the base element in an occult process whose
result is an alchemical transubstantiation (made explicit in Metropolis by
a pentagram that hangs behind the android as she is being transformed),
which will result not in a copy, but in a radically altered being. Hadaly is
described by Villiers not as an android but as an “Androsphinx,” an
apophatic enigma in the form of a living woman. Although a
technological marvel, she will, from the moment that Ewald first
encounters her, continually direct him beyond her own material presence
to the metaphysical realm as the source from which she has incarnated.
When Ewald first meets the metallic being that will become Hadaly,
her face is covered by a veil, an evocation of mystery reminiscent of the
famous parable by Pliny the Elder on the nature of illusionism. There
was, so the story goes, a competition between two painters, Zeuxis and
Parrhasios, over who could paint the most authentic illusion. While
Zeuxis was able to paint grapes that were so lifelike that birds attempted
to peck at them, Parrahasios painted a curtain that fooled Zeuxis, who

88
Lathers, 48.

93
attempted to look behind it. Enigmatic icon thus trumps faithful illusion
in its ability to capture the imagination. As Marie Lathers aptly puts it:
Zeuxis’s fruit is “for the birds,” it is a lure, a mere illusion, or
that which deceives in nature. Parrhasios’s veil, on the other
hand, is a trompe-l’oeil that, one may infer, aims beyond the
satisfaction of need and demand to operate in the register of
desire.
89

Hadaly continues to pose a riddle whose answer remains “beyond the
veil” even after she has been transformed into the image of Alicia. In one
of the later scenes in the novel, the newly transfigured Hadaly is
reintroduced to Ewald, who mistakes her for his mistress. Confused in
part by the fact that “the false Alicia ... seemed far more natural than the
true one,” he asks “Who are you?” In her explanation, Hadaly recreates
the parable of Plato’s cave, suggesting that she is an emissary from a
more real, infinite reality, for which our own is “merely the metaphor.”
This supernal realm can be glimpsed in flights of the imagination, such
as in the forms and figures that take shape in the shadows of night,
when we are between sleep and waking. “And the first natural instinct of
the Soul is to recognize them, in and through that same holy terror
which bears witness to them.” However, they are often quickly
extinguished when, in the morning light, our sense of reason dismisses
them as mere illusions cast by “clothes tossed hastily over the back of a

89
Lathers discusses the veil in Pliny’s parable in relation to Lacan’s object petit ‘a’ “the
Freudian fetish or that which substitutes for the allure of the mother’s phallus,” see p.
37.

94
chair.” It is the reasonable mind that deadens the world by turning those
objects, shapes, and colors that vibrate with metaphysical possibility into
a world of dead things:
I am an envoy to you from those limitless regions whose pale
frontiers man can contemplate only in certain reveries and
dreams. There all periods of time flow together, there space
is no more; there the last illusions of instinct disappear...
Who am I? A creature of dream, who lives half-awake in your
thoughts, and whose shadow you may dissipate any time
with one of those fine reasonable arguments which will leave
you, in my place, nothing but vacancy, sorrow, heartache—
the fruits of that truth to which they pretend.
90

Like the ekphrastic shield, Hadaly/Sowana is a portal to an infinite
realm beyond time and space, but which the rational mind, if it so
chooses, can reduce to an aesthetic object, a piece of metal inscribed
with a programmatic series of interactions. She implores Ewald to defend
her against his reason for, she suggests, it is only in his imagination that
the spark of her existence is ignited: “Attribute a being to me, affirm that
I am! Reinforce me with your self. And then suddenly I will come to life
under your eyes, to precisely the extent that your creative Good Will has
penetrated me.”
91
Hadaly is the Baudelairean work of art personified, for
she represents (and speaks as) a modern monstrosity whose
metaphysical and eternal qualities are catalyzed, in a kind of sacred
alchemy, by the Artist’s imagination.

90
Villiers, 198.
91
Villiers, 199.

95
Hadaly’s relationship to the living woman Alicia is, in this sense, a
microcosm of that between the fictionalized Edison in Villiers's novel and
the real one. In his “Advice to the Reader” which precedes the novel,
Villiers suggests that there are two Edisons: the first an inventor living
and working in New Jersey and the second the wizard, magician, or
sorcerer of Menlo Park. It is the second, the embodiment of the mystique,
speculation, and enthusiasm that has circulated around the first, who
belongs, according to Villiers, more properly to the realm of art:
For example, if Doctor Johann Faust had been living in the
age of Goethe and had given rise to his symbolic legend at
that time, wouldn’t the writing of Faust, even then, have
been a perfectly legitimate undertaking? Thus, the EDISON
of the present work, his character, his dwelling, his
language, and his theories, are and ought to be at least
somewhat distinct from anything existing in reality. Let it be
understood, then, that I interpret a modern legend to the
best advantage of the work of Art-metaphysics that I have
conceived; and that, in a word, the hero of this book is above
all “The Sorcerer of Menlo Park,” and so forth—and not the
engineer, Mr. Edison, our contemporary. (italics mine)
92

Villiers has, in other words, reified the legend that surrounds the real
Edison in the same way that the fictional Edison has “made captive the
ideal” aura that surrounds the body of Alicia. In neither case is the
double a copy or an imitation, but rather a transmutation achieved via
the imaginative gifts of the Artist. Villiers thus suggests that it is in the
creative work that not only the object, but the subject, achieves its

92
Villiers, 3.

96
highest manifestation; and it is in self-reflective illusionism that the
creative work offers a glimpse of the divine. Thus, Hadaly’s confession to
Ewald of her own contingency is not just an entreaty, but a justification
of her artificiality; it is what makes her the phantom that edifies, as
opposed to the degrading phantoms that Villiers suggests “real” women
may become.
It is as self-conscious illusion or apophatic enigma that the
creation and dissection of Hadaly achieves its status as heir to the
anatomical imaginary of the Renaissance and precursor to the cinematic
image. As in the anatomical scene in which Vesalius points both to the
dissected female body and away from it, the dissections performed in
Villiers’s novel are conducted in an ongoing attempt to inspire that which
transcends reduction or quantification. Although Edison is all too happy
to reveal the masterpiece of Hadaly’s inner workings to Ewald, he warns
him:
... knowing the mechanism of the puppet will never explain
to you how it becomes the phantom—any more than the
skeleton which lies beneath the surface of Miss Alicia Clary
can possibly explain to you how her mechanism, integrated
with the beauty of her flesh, idealizes itself to the point of
developing those contours on which your entire love is
founded.
93

And yet, even in the case of Evelyn Habal, who engages in the kind of
feminizing tricks of artifice that, as Baudelaire once claimed about make-

93
Villiers, 78.

97
up and fashion, are spellbinding even though they “are known to all,”
there is, Villiers seems to suggest (in the manner of Baudelaire), a
revelatory quality to the vacillating gesture between the beautiful woman
and the horrible truth beneath her appearance, whether it is the skeleton
beneath the semblance of glamour or the mechanism within the android.
And it is this gesture of simulation and dissimulation that anticipates the
cinema and is perhaps most evident in the films of Georges Méliès to
whom many have drawn comparisons with Villiers. Indeed, the kind of
vacillation that Hadaly/Sowana represents is writ large in the first trick
film that Georges Méliès ever shot, entitled The Vanishing Lady (1896), a
cinematic interpretation of the vanitas. In the film, a seated woman is
covered with fabric by a magician (Méliès) and, when the fabric is
removed, the woman has been replaced by a skeleton.
Lucy Fischer in her essay, “The Lady Vanishes” has written at
length about early trick films, both those of Méliès and other filmmakers
including Edison, as well as the rhetoric of stage magic. As she points
out, there are many examples in which the female body is juxtaposed
with or transformed into symbols of death, including Edison’s The Mystic
Swing. She considers such films, along with the magical tradition that
they emulate, as a site at which complex and contradictory attitudes

98
towards women, and in many cases a distinct fear of the Other, are
enacted by the male magician:
Perhaps this fear of women explains why so many magic
films involve tricks in which women are turned into men,
thereby annihilating their disturbing sexual status. In A
Delusion (Biograph/1902) a female model turns into a man
each time the photographer looks into the camera lens. In
The Artist’s Dilemma (Edison/1901) a woman turns into a
clown.
94

While Fischer’s discussion is both broad and nuanced, drawing on
insights from both anthropology and psychoanalysis, it overlooks the
history of allegorical representation in which the female body represents
not just itself (and thus attitudes towards women) but larger principles
beyond itself. It is only by taking into account this historical tradition
that we can more fully engage with those contemporary works in which
we find the vestiges of its iconographical legacy. Indeed, we would do well
to follow the lead of Gombrich who, in his study of symbolic iconology,
encourages us to “abandon the assumptions about the functions of the
image we usually take for granted” and, in particular, the distinctions
that we tend to draw between representation (in which an image
represents an object in the real world) and symbolization (in which an
image may serve as a symbol of either an abstract idea or an

94
Fischer, Lucy, “The Lady Vanishes: Women, Magic, and the Movies” in Film Quarterly,
Vol. 33, No. 1 (Autumn, 1979), 34.

99
unconscious desire or fear). As he tells us, these different registers may
be, and often are, present in one image...
... a motif in a painting by Hieronymus Bosch may represent
a broken vessel, symbolize the sin of gluttony and express an
unconscious sexual fantasy on the part of the artist, but to
us the three levels of meaning remain quite distinct. As soon,
however, as we leave the ground of rational analysis we find
that these neat distinctions no longer hold.
95

A particularly telling example of the extent to which such distinctions are
collapsed is in Renaissance iconographer Cesare Ripa’s introduction to
his Iconologia (1593), the most famous of all the emblem books of the
Renaissance, in which he explains why the virtue of Strength, which is
so often associated with men, is personified as female:
She should be a Lady, not to declare thereby that a strong
man should come close to feminine ways, but to make the
figure suit the way we speak; or, on the other hand, as every
virtue is an appearance of the true, the beautiful and the
desirable, in which the intellect takes its delight, as we
commonly attribute beauty to the ladies, we can
conveniently represent one by the other; or, rather because,
just as those women who deprive themselves of the
pleasures to which nature has made them incline acquire
and preserve the glory of an exceptional honour, so the
strong man, risking his body, putting his life in danger, his
soul aflame with virtue, gives birth to reputation and fame of
the highest esteem.

As Marina Warner points out, such an explanation—”an intriguing
cocktail, and a fair résumé of some of the thinking behind the Statue of

95
Gombrich, 124.

100
Liberty, for example”
96
— conflates Platonic ideas of beauty (as being a
reflection of the divine) with cultural attitudes towards women (as being
morally weaker and thus an appropriate symbol of strength if they
manage to be virtuous). Moreover, it collapses epistemology and trope,
the abstract and the particular, suggesting, in sum, that truth is beauty
and beauty should be represented by women because they are more
beautiful. Within such an equation, the female body, however particular,
may become the site at which Beauty, in the abstract, is mined for Truth.
And while such an interpretation doesn’t occlude those which are
sensitive to the treatment of the female body as a threat, it is one to
which we should be particularly attuned in works that peddle in the
tropes of allegorical representation, such as the films of Méliès, many of
which deal with hieratic themes—from Satan to Faust—and occult
imagery.
As many have pointed out, Méliès revives in his films the
mythological and ritual roots of modern magic, while borrowing
techniques and themes from the stagecraft of his day, including
theatrical repertory, opera, the circus, and, in particular, the féerie, a
theatrical spectacle of acrobatics, music, and mime, which appealed to
the newly liberated masses following the French Revolution and in which
decapitations, dismembered bodies, and other magical transformations

96
Warner, 65.

101
were often the highlight.
97
However, despite the proscenium arch beneath
which many of these scenes unfold, Méliès’s work is, above all, a
celebration of the new technology of cinema to produce, in
unprecedented fashion, an allegorical spectacle that, like the anatomical
scene or the ekphrastic shield, points simultaneously at and beyond its
own outrageous visuality. In attempting to understand Méliè’s œuvre, it
is helpful to consider the distinction that Walter Benjamin draws
between the magician and the surgeon, as well as the homologies that he
then makes between the magician and painter and the surgeon and
cameraman. Although Benjamin is referring to the magician who heals
through a laying on of hands, his insights still hold for the prestidigitator
or the stage magician who is able to conjure magical illusions with the
wave of a hand or a wand. According to Benjamin, unlike the magician,
who faces his patient (or audience) directly, and whose art requires a
certain distance, the cameraman, like the surgeon is invisible yet directly
penetrates his patient’s (spectator’s) body:
Magician and surgeon compare to painter and cameraman.
The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from
reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web. There
is a tremendous difference between the pictures they obtain.
That of the painter is a total one, that of the cameraman

97
See Katherine Singer Kovács, “Georges Méliès and the ‘Féerie” in Cinema Journal, vol.
16, No. 1 (Autumn, 1976), 1 -13.

102
consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under a
new law.
98

While the films of Méliès recreate the environment of the theatrical stage,
with the magician performing at a substantial remove from his audience
whom he faces directly, the magic of a Méliès film lies not only in what is
conjured before our eyes by the magician played by Méliès, but also by
the stop-motion substitutions and editorial splicing of the filmmaker,
who is also Méliès. And there is enacted within many of his films a
sustained tension between the two. While the magician attempts to
conjure for our visual delectation (and his own) an image of monumental
beauty (whether in the form of a beautiful woman or statue), the
cameraman keeps replacing the image with its opposite: a man, a cook,
or that ultimate reminder of the transience of all worldly things, a
skeleton. The result is an ongoing vacillation whose equivalent is the
anamorphic statue or the memento mori, and which achieves a self-
referentiality that destabilizes the illusionism inherent not only in the
magic act, but the act of representation itself. Indeed, as the examples
given by Fisher make clear, it is not just the magician who is being
undermined in such films, but the painter, the photographer, and the
sculptor. Even Pygmalion, that rare soul whose encounter with a living
statue ends happily, is in Méliès's reinterpretation, confronted with a

98
Benjamin, Walter, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in
Illuminations, (NY: Schocken, 1969).

103
Galatea who refuses to be contained. Méliès is, like the fictional Edison
who resurrects the illusion of Evelyn Habal in order to denature it,
conjuring for us an image whose illusionary status he himself will
repetitively emphasize by its transience. More particularly, however, he
is (like Edison) showcasing for us the powers of cinema to explode the
visual world with what Walter Benjamin hailed as “the dynamite of the
tenth of a second.” While Méliès’s camerawork is virtually non-existent
and his editing primitive
99
, his films display an early romance with the
eruptive possibilities of montage that will, in their later evolution, achieve
the kind of unconscious optics to which Benjamin referred. The
transience of the visual object, its repetitive substitution with people and
things from an unseen field of action, and the parodic manner in which it
is dissimulated, effect not only a destabilization of beauty (which proves
to be two- and even three-faced), but the entire world of appearances in
what often amounts to social satire, and which can be read as a revival of
the carnivalesque-grotesque of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
100

Indeed, the blazon anatomique, to which Méliès’s and Villiers’s work

99
This is a point of contention. Tom Gunning, for example, has argued that while many
believed that most of the tricks in Méliès’s films were produced by stop-motion
substitutions performed in camera, closer examination of the actual prints have
revealed that, in most cases, such substitutions were perfected by splicing the film. See
Gunning, “‘Primitive’ Cinema—A Frame-up? or The Trick’s on Us” in Cinema Journal,
Vol. 28, No. 2 (Winter 1989), 3-12.
100
Darragh O’Donoghue suggests that the films of Méliès’ not only parody bourgeois
values, but display a distinct anti-authoritarianism in evidence since his work as a
caricaturist for his cousin’s journal La Griffe. See O’Donoghue “Georges Méliès” in
Senses of Cinema, http://www.sensesof cinema.com (May 2004).

104
hearken, grew out of “the popular dual-faced praise of the marketplace”
of the Renaissance, according to Mikhail Bakhtin, who reminds us that
even Clément Marot’s ode to “The Beautiful Breast” was to be read in
conjunction with its contreblazon “The Ugly Breast,” a combination
intended to produce ambivalent laughter over a female body part that
was never meant to be isolated from the whole, let alone addressed as if
it were a person.
According to Bakhtin the imagery of the carnivalesque-grotesque—
which often combined the ritualistic enactment of torture, abuse and
anatomic enumeration with bawdy allusions to both sex and food—was
based in the very ambivalence of being and, despite its excessive and
oxymoronic visuality, it reflected a “deep realism” and recognition of the
life-death cycle, through which the entire world is leveled and reborn and
“the hero and author is Time itself.” In its suspension of real time and
evocation of universal time, the carnivalesque enabled its participants “to
see with new eyes” the ephemeral nature of reality and its universal
destiny. For even the greatest individual dies and every epoch fades, but
the life of the collective is continually renewed: “in the world of carnival
the awareness of the people’s immortality is combined with the
realization that established authority and truth are relative.”
101
This

101
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
1984), 256.

105
evocation of “mass consciousness” is, perhaps, not all that different from
that of Benjamin who, in hailing the revolutionary possibilities of cinema,
compares the contemplative beauty of painting, which is experienced
singularly and at a distance, with the “shock effect” of cinema, which
assails its spectators, acquiring a tactile and participatory quality that
has the potential for collective mobilization.
According to Bakhtin, although the carnivalesque-grotesque
experienced a revival in the romantic literature of the nineteenth century,
to which Villiers’s novel is heir, it was radically changed. Some of its
more potent symbols, in particular the mask and the puppet, which were
intended to be humorous in their original forms and connected to the
“the joy of change and reincarnation,” become reflective of a somber
disenchantment with and alienation from the world. Furthermore, the
grotesque became nocturnal, chthonic, marked by darkness and
subterranean dealings—and Bakhtin mentions Hoffman specifically in
this regard, although Villiers equally fits the bill—whereas the folk
version of the genre was light, fanciful, celebratory. Most significantly,
that which was once representative of the people became individualized:
Unlike the medieval and Renaissance grotesque, which was
directly related to folk culture and thus belonged to all the
people, the Romantic genre acquired a private “chamber”
character. It became, as it were, an individual carnival,
marked by a vivid sense of isolation. The carnival spirit was
transposed into a subjective, idealistic philosophy ...
However, the most important transformation of Romantic

106
grotesque was that of the principle of laughter ... laughter
was cut down to cold humor, irony, sarcasm.
102

It is in its interiorized pathos and alienating idealism that the Romantic
grotesque is understood within the register of the Imaginary, as a
nostalgic dream of a wholeness that is forever elusive. And to the extent
that such desire is projected onto a female Other, whether woman or
female robot, and whether or not she is anatomically interrogated in the
process, it reeks of fetishism or, in its most exaggerated form, a sexless
sublimation, of which Villiers has been accused repeatedly.
Hadaly, a spiritual being incarnate, is incapable of having sex, a
fact that has been read in terms of machines célibataires or the “bachelor
machine,” best known by Duchamp’s work The Bride Stripped Bare by
her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), and which Michel Carrouges called
“a fantastic image that transforms love into a mechanics of death.”
103
The
bachelor machine represents a narcissistic and totalizing autoeroticism
experienced as epiphanic paroxysm, which marks, according to Allen S.
Weiss, early modernism’s “transformation of the theological notion of
demonic possession into scientific concepts of hysteria and psychosis” of
which both “romantic morbidity” in general, and Hadaly in particular, is
emblematic:

102
Bakhtin, 38.
103
Allen S. Weiss, “Narcissistic Machines and Erotic Prostheses” in Camera Obscura,
Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson, ed. Allen and Turvey (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2003), 58.

107
Such transformations describe the solipsistic circuit of an
onanistic sexuality (incorporating all possible dualisms and
perversions); a delirious metaphysics (conflating all possible
ontological contradictions); a useless simulation (where every
machine is essentially infernal); and a morbid functionalism
(where time, solitude, and death are synonymous).
104

Drawing on Freud’s essay in which he describes the sublimation of
sexual impulses in the form of a non-sexual, “spiritual” love as a form of
hypnosis, Raymond Bellour (whose essay Weiss acknowledges as
formative to his own) suggests that it is in the service of ideal love as “a
desire which oscillates between the satisfaction of a drive and its
opposite” that the dissections in Villiers novel, particularly that of
Hadaly, are performed:
Freed from all sexuality, fixing love in the heat of its first
moment, the Android induces a transcendental form of
“erotic subjection.” In a state of self-purified feeling, the love
object comes to occupy, once and for all, the place of the ego-
ideal. This is why Edison says that in Persian (a way of
shrouding the evidence with mystery), the name Hadaly
“means the ‘IDEAL.’”
105

It is in the tension between the collective and the individual expression of
the anatomical grotesque that we will return, finally, to the place where
we started: the work of the Realdoll doctor, Slade. The Realdoll is, like
Hadaly, feminine artifice raised to its logical conclusion by the latest
technologies. And although the Realdoll is mass manufactured, she is
also individually conceived. The founder of Realdoll, Matt McMullen is,

104
Weiss, 58. See also R.L. Rutsky.
105
Raymond Bellour, “Ideal Hadaly” in in Camera Obscura, No. 15 (Fall 1986), 123.

108
he would claim, first and foremost an artist and his foray into the
lovedoll business was both serendipitous and Pygmalionesque. McMullen
created a series of large sculptures of beautiful women, which he posted
onto a website. They inspired a surprising flurry of emails from men
expressing a willingness to pay top dollar for one of his sculptures if it
were “outfitted” in such a way that they could have sexual relations with
it. Matt obliged and Realdoll was born. Although now a multi-million
dollar business, each doll still begins as a sculpture, which is
handcrafted (and only later cast as a mold) by Matt, who claims that his
inspiration comes from the women he encounters in his daily life, both
friends and strangers, whose best qualities he combines and enhances
with his own creative imagination. The technologies used to create the
dolls, fittingly, are taken from the film industry, in particular special
effects model making, a profession to which McMullen once aspired. In
fact, Realdolls are made with the exact same effects technology (molded
silicone over an articulated skeleton) as corpses in horror films, and
thus, in more than one sense, McMullen is transforming the morbid into
the erotic.

109
The difference between the Realdoll and the robot Hadaly, aside
from the obvious inanimation of the former,
106
is homologous to the
difference between the anamorphic statue and the Venus. Although
molded from silicone, the Realdoll aspires to an ideal beauty that, if not
entirely classic (Realdolls resemble silicone-enhanced pinups more than
they do classical sculpture) is photographic. Indeed the appeal of the
Realdoll is the ability for mere mortals to physically possess a beauty
that normally exists only in a virtual, digitally-altered or airbrushed
realm. Such beauty was never meant to step down from its pedestal and
enter the human world and, when it does, even with the benefit of a
malleable exterior of silicone, its takes little time for time to take its toll.
And so there is Slade, a Baudelairean character for the virtual age,
whose own vertiginous drop into the abyss provided the marginal
vantage point from which he sees these ruined creatures as both a
reflection and redemption. They are, in a sense, the heir to the prostitute,
in whom Baudelaire found an endlessly generative symbol of modernity,
the apotheosis of woman as commodity.
107
Slade’s photographs, in which
the sexual is eclipsed by the anatomical, and which reveal the

106
Although McMullen has created a prototype for a doll who can swivel her hips, and
he is already selling dolls that, like large interactive versions of Edison’s doll, speak
when fondled.
107
The Realdoll is emblematic not only of a virtual culture, but of the age of AIDS; the
primary justification that doll owners cite for buying a Realdoll over the services of a
prostitute (whose association with syphillis, from which Baudelaire eventually died,
echoes throughout his poetry in the conflation between women and death) is the
avoidance of STDs.

110
nothingness at the doll’s core, is in the manner of Villiers, a form of
recuperation in which the commodity becomes art and the material is
rendered metaphysical via an ambivalent vacillation between the
beautiful and the horrible, the living and the dead. Moreover, by posting
the photographs to his website, he renders that which is private and
shameful, the physical degradation of a sexual surrogate, both public
and parodic.
In attempting to explain to me why he does what he does, Slade led
me to his version of Edison’s drawer of death, a kind of cabinet of
curiosities, which was located in his living room next to his theatre-sized
television, in what was clearly a place of prominence. In the cabinet was
a collection of fragments of the once living: skulls of different sizes—both
animal and human—a porcupine quill, an ostrich egg. His prized
possession, however, was not on display, but preserved in a red brocade
box and wrapped in silk, which Slade carefully opened for me. It was an
amputated finger. Slade told me that it was a yubizume, a ritual
amputation (usually of the pinky finger below the first joint) performed
on oneself by a member of the yakuza, the Japanese mafia, and
presented to the yakuza boss as an act of contrition for doing something
wrong. The act supposedly dates back to the time of the samurai; the
littlest finger was considered the most important for wielding a sword,

111
and severing it made the person less effective as a warrior and more
reliant on his yakuza brethren.
The phallic significance of the object was difficult to ignore, but it
seemed to have the shimmer of something more. Indeed, it is strangely
reminiscent of the amputated arm that appears, in bookend fashion, at
the beginning and end of Villiers's novel. It is the first object to which we
are introduced in Edison’s laboratory, where he sits alone at the start of
the novel, in a kind of idle reverie. Edison is lamenting his late arrival in
history and all the moments that have been lost to time because he was
not there to record them on phonographic cylinders for perpetuity:
Even among the noises of the past, how many mysterious
sounds were known to our predecessors, which for lack of a
convenient machine to record them have now fallen forever
into the abyss? ... Who nowadays could form, for example, a
proper notion of the sound of the trumpets of Jericho? Of the
bellow of Pharlaris’ bull? Of the laughter of the augurs? Or of
the morning melody of Memnon? And all the rest? Dead
voices, lost sounds, forgotten noises, vibrations lockstepping
into the abyss, and now too distant ever to be recaptured!
108

Edison then tempers his own remorse by suggesting that even if he had
been able to capture these sounds, their original significance might not
be heard or understood by the rational sensibilities of the modern ear:
If I could record them and transmit them to the present age,
they would constitute nothing more, nowadays, than dead
sounds. They would be, in a word, sounds completely
different from what they actually were, and from what their

108
Villiers, 10.

112
phonographic labels pretended they were—since it’s in
ourselves that the killing silence exists.
109

Edison’s reverie is then interrupted by a dispatch from Lord Ewald, to
whom we are for the first time introduced, announcing that he will arrive
the next evening. He absentmindedly drops the piece of paper onto a
table, where it auspiciously falls between two fingers of the hand on the
amputated arm. Lying on a cushion of silk, the arm, we learn, is that of a
young woman who was one of many people killed and dismembered in a
head-on collision between two trains, the accidental result of an
experiment in which the inventor played a primary role. “The delicate
wrist was encircled by a viper of enameled gold; on the ring finger of the
pale hand flittered a circlet of sapphires.” It is a frightening object that
we are told would freeze the mind of any who accidentally encountered it
with “an icy thought.” However, for Edison, a modern-day magus
dabbling in the space between life and death, it is a source of wonder,
and the coincidental conjunction of the hand and the dispatch is a
moment of curious inspiration, in which he wonders whether Ewald is
the man who will bring Hadaly to life. As if in confirmation:
Suddenly, outside across the valleys, the moon passing a
gap in the clouds shot a ray through the curtains and
directed it, as if with malign intent, onto the table. The pale
light caressed that inanimate hand, wandered across the

109
Villier, 14.

113
arm, lit up the eyes of the golden viper, and caused the blue
ring to sparkle.
110

We will eventually come to understand that this moment is, in fact, not a
coincidence, but one of divine intervention, in which the shade
Hadaly/Sowana was whispering her intentions to incarnate. It is, as she
later tells Ewald, through seemingly random objects and events that the
visitations of the spirit world may, to the sensitive soul, be detected:
“through the stone of a ring, the decoration of a lamp, a gleam of
starlight in the mirror.” And while it was Edison who created her body
and Ewald’s imagination that will provide the catalytic spark that will
bring her to life, it is she who is ultimately the puppet master, calling
herself into existence through each man:
...while he 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 in this world of sense, I made use of
every last object that seemed to me capable in any way of
drawing you out of it.
111

The amputated arm, then, like the dissected arm on the cover of
Vesalius's Fabrica, is a dead and empty object only to those who fail to
see and hear that which is attempting to speak through it. We will be
reminded of its symbolism at the very end of the novel. Three weeks
earlier, Ewald and Hadaly boarded a transatlantic liner called Wonderful
and headed back to Ewald’s castle. Edison is alone, once again, in his

110
Villiers, 19.
111
Villiers, 198.

114
laboratory reading a newspaper, in which he finds an article about an
accident involving the ship that his friends are on. A fire broke out
mysteriously in the cargo compartment in the rear hold; the article
makes it clear that while Ewald survived, Hadaly was consumed by the
flames. Shortly after this disturbing revelation he receives a telegram
from the bereft Ewald, which suggests that without Hadaly, he has no
reason to live and wishes to bid the inventor farewell before killing
himself. In a moment of déjà vu, which marks the last paragraph of the
novel, Edison throws down the piece of paper, catching sight of the still
appendage:
... a beam of moonlight fell whitely on that charming arm, on
the pale hand with its enchanted rings. And the melancholy
dreamer, losing himself in unknown thoughts, lifted his eyes
to look through the open window, out into the night. There
for some time he listened to the indifferent winds of winter,
whistling and howling through the bare branches—then,
raising his eyes even higher toward the ancient luminous
spheres which still shone, unmoved, through the gaps in the
heavy clouds, and sent their glints forever through the
infinite, inconceivable mystery of the heavens, he shivered—
no doubt, from the cold—in utter silence.
112

How are we to read this final scene? Is Hadaly still whispering to the
“melancholy dreamer” through the rustling of the branches and the
illuminated rings on the once living hand or has she abandoned his
surrounds and his thoughts, leaving them empty, dead, and silent? And
who started the mysterious fire? Is Villiers suggesting that the voyage on

112
Villiers 219.

115
which Ewald and his android were heading is itself, metaphorical, a
voyage of the imagination or “Une Voyage,” in the sense of Baudelaire,
realized most completely and exquisitely as death?
How we interpret the amputated arm, hand, finger, has everything
to do with our final impression. Freud, in his essay on the uncanny,
identifies the disembodied hand as a persistent motif in fantastic
literature, a potent symbol of disrupted identity. And it is a motif that
has carried over into film. As David Skal in his book Screams of Reason
reminds us, Metropolis was the first in a long line of horror films in which
a mad scientist, his assistant, or his creation possessed a withered,
deformed, or transplanted hand. And like Metropolis, many of these films
also feature an artificial or animated woman, from Mad Love (1935) to
The Brain that Wouldn’t Die (1962). Is the latter a compensation for the
former? Or is the compromised physical status of the mad scientist an
allegorical symbol, like Hephaestus’s dragging legs, of his liminality and
existence between this and another world?
Marie Lathers describes the amputated arm as “the floating
signifier” of Villiers's novel, in which the narrative is propelled by “the
restitution of the Venus de Milo’s lost arms. Since Alicia is a
disappointing copy of the Venus, Edison’s goal becomes the completion
and perfection of the ancient statue through the addition of artificial

116
arms, those of the android.”
113
She points out that this signifier is
invoked, through its absence, in Ewald’s recounting of a visit to the
Louvre, where he took Alicia so that she could see for the first time the
Venus de Milo, hoping that it would inspire in her even a fraction of what
her resemblance to the statue inspires in him. Instead, she evinces a
distinct fascination with the obvious. “Look, it’s me!” she exclaims, and
then adds, “Yes, but I have arms, and besides I’m more distinguished
looking.”
Lather draws correspondences between Edison’s restitution of
Ewald’s disappointing Venus and the hypnotic suggestion that formed
the basis of the psychoanalytic practice of Charcot, who was able to
produce in his subjects a form of artificial paralysis of the hand, “a
phenomenon that constitutes ‘the sublime in this matter and the ideal as
regards pathological physiology.’” In so doing, she reminds us that
hypnosis plays a major role in the novel: Anny Anderson is mesmerized
by Edison, Alicia is hypnotized by Sowana in order to copy her figure,
and Hadaly’s allure is, in part, due to the impression that she gives of a
sleepwalker. For Lathers, the Venus de Milo is, as is made clear by the
novel as well as many other nineteenth century tales of animated
statues, an aesthetic representation of the hysterical paralysis being

113
Lathers, 76.

117
dramatized in the same time period within the theatre of the Salpêtrière,
the arm a “grisly reminder” of that which the female body lacks:
Nineteenth-century patriarchy is, these texts suggest,
paralyzed or hypnotized before the threat of the female body.
Villiers’s response to this threat, his mode of disarmament,
is typical of a literature obsessed with stone images of
women: the male protagonist would appropriate Medusa’s
power to petrify, that is to fragment sculpturally and
hypnotically and thus neutralize the (female) corpus. Typical,
but with a (technical) difference, for the story of Hadaly
foreshadows twentieth-century literary and cinematic
representations of the post-Freudian female monstrosities
imagined by science.
114

Perhaps. And yet … around the same time that Freud was writing his
essay “The Medusa’s Head,” Walter Benjamin was translating into
German the poetry of Baudelaire, for whom the female body and, in
particular the body of the prostitute, was a symbol of the fragmentation
of city life and a hallmark of modernity. It is the shock to the sensorium
of modern life, which results in a crisis of the image, to which
Baudelaire’s work is responding, Benjamin would later argue about the
poet’s work. Baudelaire’s response, like that of the Surrealists after him,
was profane illumination, “a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday
as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday,” in which the enigmatic
is wrought from the detritus of the city, as Hephaestus once managed
upon a sheet of metal. “It takes a heroic constitution” Benjamin says of
Baudelaire “to live modernism,” and, as Ackbar Abbas points out:

114
Lathers, 83.

118
It is not the heroism of ancient times, as in the figure of the
gladiator, but rather a heroism of little deeds, whose figures
include the traveling salesman, the ragpicker, the collector,
as well as the writer, the purveyor of images.
115

Abbas, further, makes a connection between the dialectical and
paradoxical practice of profane illumination and the glance of the Medusa,
the latter of which Adorno once compared to the philosophy of Benjamin.
It is what Benjamin himself would call an allegorical reading of history,
that which opens up a fissure by which the appearance of historical
continuity or of organic wholeness starts to crack:
Benjamin, we recall, speaks of modern experience as one of
shock. And like Medusa, history in the sense of ‘things as
they are” remains invisible and can only be represented by
something other than itself. In Freud, such a ratio gives rise
to the theory of the sexual fetish, a surrogate or substitute
for that forever missing object, the female phallus. In
Benjamin, this is the moment when images—monadic,
apotropaic, destructive of appearances—come into their
own.
116

Fetish object or modern fragment, the amputated appendage, so lovingly
ragpicked and preserved by Slade and the fictional Edison, represents a
loss and a redemption that might be personal or universal, compensatory
or revolutionary. But no matter how we interpret it, that which stays
invisible and missing, to be recuperated by other means, is the living
Woman.

115
Ackbar Abbas, “On Fascination: Walter Benjamin’s Images” in New German Critique,
No. 48 (Autumn, 1989), 46.
116
Abbas, 57.

119

Chapter Two
The Artificial Woman as Exquisite Corpse

If the anatomico-medical gaze explored in the last chapter is
emblematized by the figure of Medusa, then the figure most
representative of the gaze on which the present chapter focuses is
Pandora. Hesiod describes Pandora as the first woman, an artificial being
molded from clay by Hephaestus (the lame artisan who forged Achilles’
shield) at the behest of Zeus, who wished to punish men for the gift of
fire that Prometheus had given to them, after stealing its secret from the
gods. The stolen fire has inspired various interpretations, many of which
suggest a form of human knowledge or technics, such as the mechanical
arts, science, or language. The artificial woman was, thus, meant to void
whatever enlightening benefits were gained or progress made from
Prometheus’s gift. Endowed with desirable attributes by all the gods, she
was a “wonder” to behold, but “sheer guile” (described with the
oxymoronic kalòn kakòn or “beautiful evil”), an irresistible and deceptive
exterior masking a secret horror in the form of a box (or jar), containing

120
sickness, toil, sorrow, and “a myriad other pains.” On the orders of Zeus,
Hermes offered Pandora as a gift to Prometheus’s more gullible brother
Epimetheus, who was so entranced by her beauty, that he forgot to heed
Prometheus’s warning to beware all gifts from the king of the gods. And
so Pandora entered the human realm and soon thereafter, incited by
curiosity, she opened the box, releasing pain and suffering into the world
of men.
In “Pandora’s Box: Topographies of Curiosity,” Laura Mulvey
attempts to recuperate the iconography of Pandora and her box from the
decidedly misogynist reading of Hesiod, employing her instead as an
empowering figure of psychoanalytic feminist theory. In particular, she is
interested in the possibilities opened up by Pandora’s curious gaze as an
intervening agent in the closed circuit that she describes in her seminal
essay, “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema,” between the gaze of the
spectator, understood as both active and masculine, and the passive
female image that serves as its object. There is, Mulvey suggests, a self-
reflexivity at work in the curious gaze (a gaze often coded as female), a
desire to know that is “associated with enclosed, secret, and forbidden
spaces” representative of female interiority. So when Pandora looks
inside the box, a hidden space that many have read as a synecdoche for
female sexuality, she is interrogating the site/sight of sexual difference

121
that she herself represents. Thus, the curious gaze as epistomephilia (the
desire to know), by which the female image becomes a site or cipher to be
decoded, serves as a challenge to fetishistic scopophilia (the desire to see,
but not to know) through which the female image is constituted as a
sight or “surface that conceals”:
While curiosity is a compulsive desire to see and to know, to
investigate something secret, fetishism is born out of a
refusal to see, a refusal to accept the difference the female
body represents for the male. These complex series of turns
away, of covering over, not of the eyes but of understanding,
of fixating on a substitute object to hold the gaze, leave the
female body as an enigma and threat, condemned to return
as a symbol of anxiety while simultaneously being
transformed into its own screen in representation.
117

According to Mulvey, the inner/outer, surface/secret topography that the
automaton Pandora emblematizes is elaborated through a long history of
femme-fatales that includes the fictional female androids in Villiers de
l’Isle-Adam’s The Eve of the Future (1886), E.T.A. Hoffmann’s story “The
Sandman” (1816-17), and Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1927), all of which
“connote uncertainty, mystery, and are only readable in death.” Having
spent a good deal of the last chapter on Eve of the Future, I am going to
examine at various points in this chapter Hoffmann’s “Sandman” in
relation to the fetishistic “desire to see but not to know” described by
Mulvey as integral to the male spectator’s visual pleasure. (I will cover

117
Laura Mulvey, “Pandora’s Box: Topographies of Curiosity” in Fetishism and Curiosity
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 64.

122
Metropolis in some depth in the next chapter.) The prompt for doing so is
my experience interviewing subjects for a documentary short that I made
in 2001 from a community of robot fetishists that, I believe, complicates
in productive ways the psychoanalytic reading of fetishism employed by
Mulvey, while shedding light on both the topography and iconography of
the female android.
It was an act of Pandora-like curiosity that first led me to the
community and that has kept me engaged in trying to understand their
erotic peculiarities, which many find strange or disturbing. Spurred by
the saying that “if you enter any object in a search engine followed by the
word “sex,” you will find people who fetishize that object,” I decided early
in the course of my research on artificial women to type into Google
“robot” and “sex” and, indeed, found websites created by groups of people
who collectively fantasize about, among other things, robots. While some
refer to themselves as “technosexuals,” most call the fetish itself A.S.F.R.,
an acronym for alt.sex.fetish.robots, the name of the now-defunct
Internet newsgroup where members originally congregated on-line.
The originary myth of A.S.F.R. is that it was started as a joke.
However, the site began to attract a loyal following of participants,
primarily men, who had a secret attraction to the mechanical and the
robotic. Many of these men had believed that they were alone in their

123
sexual preferences, and the site provided a sense of relief and
community, a place to share their interests and compare notes with
others, and a definitive name for the ill-defined feelings that they had
been harboring in isolation. Although today A.S.F.R. tends to be
associated most strongly with men who fantasize about robots, it is, in
fact, a blanket designation for a range of different fetishes, which
includes sexual attraction to mannequins, dolls, and sculpture, and
more specifically, real people acting like mannequins, puppets, dolls, or
robots, or being hypnotized or frozen like statues.
118
While all of these

118
Variations of ASFR were commented on in the early twentieth century by Iwan Bloch,
a German doctor whose encyclopedic treatise on modern sexuality, The Sexual Life of
Our Time In Its Relation to Modern Civilization, helped establish sexology
(“Sexualwissenschaft”) as a science. In a chapter dedicated to sexual perversity, Bloch
mentions two sexual deviations that are, he suggests, related to necrophilia. The first,
“Venus Statuaria” is a desire to have sexual intercourse with statues or other
representations of human beings, a passion that can seize some merely by walking
through a museum. The second, “Pygmalionism” is based in the desire to enact the
animation of an inanimate statue, usually by having real women stand atop pedestals,
pretending to be statues and then gradually come to life. Such a request was, Bloch
suggests, common in Parisian brothels at the turn of the century. Connected to the
desire for statues is, according to Bloch, the use of new technologies to construct
anatomically-correct human models for explicitly sexual ends: “There exist true
Vaucansons in this province of pornographic technology, clever mechanics who, from
rubber and other plastic materials, prepare entire male or female bodies, which, as
hommes or dames de voyage, subserve fornicatory purposes. More especially are the
genital organs represented in a manner true to nature. Even the secretion of Bartholin’s
glands is imitated, by means of a ‘pneumatic tube’ filled with oil. Similarly, by means of
fluid and suitable apparatus, the ejaculation of the semen is imitated. Such artificial
human beings are actually offered for sale in the catalogue of certain manufacturers of
‘Parisian rubber articles.’” While in the case of “Venus Statuaria” Bloch makes a
distinction between those who become sexually aroused by statues because they are
artificial and those merely responding to a naked human body despite its artificiality
(the latter of whom he suggests comprise the bulk of the documented cases), in general,
he tends to collapse distinctions between the various desires that circulate around the
inanimate and to suggest that they are equally perverse. Moreover, he treats such
tendencies as a separate topic from fetishism, a category that he reserves for those who
invest sexual energy in a part of the human body at the expense of the whole. See Iwan

124
fetishes were explored on the original newsgroup, many of their fans later
splintered off and founded websites geared to their specific interests.
They do, however, still consider themselves “ASFRians” and acknowledge
their relation to one another and their point of common interest: the
thematic of programmatic control—whether imagined as hypnotism,
magic, a puppet master or artificial intelligence—of a human object. If
taken in this sense alone, A.S.F.R. strikes the imagination as a
technological elaboration of standard BDSM (bondage-domination-sado-
masochism) fantasies, in which one person dominates another for sexual
pleasure. Indeed, when I first discovered the fetish, I assumed that it was
the ultimate expression of the domination, objectification and
containment of women, and that the kind of robot about which ASFRians
fantasized was a technologically souped-up gender ideal, without a will of
her own, a vacant Stepford Wife (or Husband), mindlessly fulfilling the
orders of its master, both sexual and domestic. And while my
understanding evolved over time, it is this common assumption about
their fetish that, according to ASFRians, necessitates its obscurity and
keeps its members highly closeted, while fetishes like the Furries and
Plushies (those who eroticize anthropomorphic and stuffed animals and
animal costumes) have garnered enough acceptance to hold conventions

Bloch, MD, The Sexual Life of Our Time In Its Relation to Modern Civilization (New York:
Allied Book Coompany, 1928), 648. See also Gaby Wood, 138-39.

125
in Las Vegas. ASFRians are so concerned about the accusation of
misogyny that they have a mantra or tagline, oft repeated on their
websites and by members in interviews: “ASFR is not about the
objectification of women, it’s about the feminization of objects.”
119

The mantra, unfortunately, seems to reflect even more negatively
on the fetish than positively. Aside from raising obvious questions about
the extent to which the feminization of objects can be extricated from the
objectification of women, it is also somewhat misleading, encouraging the
mistaken idea that ASFRians are more interested in artificial women that
they can control than real ones, whom they can’t. In fact, while one
might imagine that ASFRians, as lovers of feminized objects, are also
Realdoll lovers and collectors, this was, in my experience, not the case.
Moreover, and this is more surprising, few expressed interest in actually
obtaining a female robot (if one, in fact, existed). ASFRians seem to prefer
the fantasy of an artificial woman to the potential reality, and the fantasy
tends to revolve less around the robot as indistinguishable from and an
ideal version of a real person than as a site of tension and rupture
between the human and the robotic. For example, while ASFRians are
fascinated by the movie The Stepford Wives, their interest lies not in the

119

Despite the mantra, a notable portion of the community is homosexual. However, all
the members with whom I communicated were heterosexual and because of that, as
well as the focus of my research topic, my descriptions should be considered more
representative of their proclivities.

126
idea of replacing women with robots or in creating the perfect female
companion, but specifically in those scenes in the film in which the
Wives break down or become caught in a repeat loop, scenes beneath
which foreboding music plays and that are intended to evoke horror.
Moreover, the sight of a real person acting like a robot (as in the film) is
as, if not more, exciting to ASFRians than the actuality of a robot.
Indeed, many ASFRians describe their earliest fetishistic experiences as
occurring while watching actors and actresses playing robots on such
television shows as The Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, and Star Trek, in
which silver and gold costuming and behavioral mannerisms, such as
robotic speech, stilted movement, and repetitive motion, were the
primary indicators of mechanicity. ASFRians often attempt to recreate in
private both the costuming and performances of these robots, giving the
fetish a kind of do-it-yourself quality, on which Katherine Gates
comments in her book Deviant Desires. Gates places ASFR alongside
slash fandom as a group that appropriates science fiction effects in
homemade productions to their own erotic ends; ASFRians often write
their own stories, create their own pictures, and construct their own
robot costumes using shiny materials like latex, PVC, and Lycra to which
they attach toys that blink, bobble, and glow, in order to create the
illusion of circuitry. As Gates notes, unmasking is a key aspect of such

127
performances, an act that emphasizes the tension between not only the
human and technological, but surface and interior, outside and inside.
One of the ASFRians with whom I spoke described his primary
fascination as that of transformation and the main triggers of his fetish
as involving “the outward appearance of something going on inside that
is different, that is mechanical, that is robotic.” While ASFRians tend to
focus on moments of transition, such as those in which a human is
being turned into a robot or in which a robot is being booted up, shut
down, or programmed, many consider the most exciting fantasies to
involve the sudden revelation of artificiality through either robotic
malfunction—in which a human/robot gets caught in a repeat loop—or
disassembly—in which a panel opens or a part is removed to reveal the
circuitry beneath the semblance of humanity. The latter is, of course,
harder to perform, but ASFRians either search television and film for
such moments (which they then list obsessively on their websites) or they
produce disassembly images themselves in the manner of ASFRian artist
“Kishin,” who either renders them from scratch in a 3D program or
creates them by adding exposed circuitry to figures from such magazines
as Playboy using Photoshop (a practice that some call “rasturbation”)
(see figures 17 and 18). When I asked Kishin what it was about
disassembly that he most enjoyed, he replied, “It’s something about the

128

Figure 17. Kishin Image

129

Figure 18. Rasturbation

130

contrast between the cold hard steel and the circuits and the wiring and
the smooth skin and the soft flesh.” The “come shot” or climax scene for
Kishin occurs when a female robot reaches up “to remove the mask that
is her face” because “it’s like a revelation of who she really is.”
But Who is She Really?

In his essay “Fetishism” (1927), Sigmund Freud tells us that in all cases,
a fetish is “a substitute for the woman’s (mother’s) phallus which the
little boy once believed in and does not wish to forego.”
120
It embodies an
ambivalence, a double attitude towards female castration for which a
compromise is struck by which the absent phallus is conjured elsewhere,
a new point of erotic interest that serves as both an acknowledgement
and denial, “a sort of permanent memorial” that may manifest itself in a
single part, like a foot, which the fetishist then worships, or a set of
opposing attitudes that involve both hostility and reverence, such as “the
Chinese custom of first mutilating a woman’s foot and then revering it.”
121

The ASFRian fetish object is, however, less a monument than a ruin. It
is, to use Freud’s examples, like mutilating one foot while keeping the
other whole, an ongoing reminder that a deformation has occurred. To
the extent that it attempts to assuage the ambivalence around an

120
Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism” in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love (New York:
Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1963), 205-206.
121
Freud, 209

131
absence via a displaced presence, it also repetitively restages the
vacillation between absence and presence at this alternate location.
ASFR is, thus, less a fetishistic fixation on a “surface that conceals,”
than a re-enactment of the original trauma by which it was constituted.
In this sense, it smacks of the compulsion to repeat that Freud links to
the “death instinct”; indeed, there is a distinct similarity between the
hiding and revealing of the mechanical interior of the robot female in
ASFRian fantasy and the throwing away and retrieving of the wooden reel
by the child in the game fort/da described by Freud in Beyond the
Pleasure Principle.
122
However, there is also something more. For critical to
the game of ASFR is not just a hiding and revealing, but the import of
what is being revealed, which is, I would argue, not technology so much
as mechanicity or automatism, a force (imagined as programming by
ASFRians) beyond the rational mind or will that controls behavior
(brought to the fore in moments of robotic unveiling or breakdown).
Gates argues that the automatism at the heart of the fetish is a metaphor
for sexuality itself: “the sense that we have no control over it; that we
respond mechanically to stimuli; and that our sexual programming
makes us helpless. Fetishes, especially, are a kind of hard-wired sexual

122
See Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, translated by James Strachey
(New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1961), 13-14.

132
subroutine.”
123
Indeed ASFR, as an erotics of automatism (which Freud
associates with the “death drive”), is a fetish whose object is, in part, a
revelation of the psychic mechanism of fetishism itself.
In this sense, the ASFRian fetishistic gaze is less aligned to
fetishistic scopophilia, the desire to see but not to know, which is
generally read in relation to the cohesive male subject, than the self-
reflexive curiosity of Pandora, the desire to see beneath the seen. Indeed,
it embodies the etymological essence of curiosity as cura, the Latin word
for care, which vacillates between its usage as a noun, meaning anxiety
or sorrow, and a verb, meaning to provide relief or ministration. Curiosity
often involves looking at that which causes anxiety rather than pleasure,
and thus it stems from a different impulse than the visual delectation of
the beautiful image. St. Augustine pejoratively referred to it as ‘the eyes’
urges” in his Confessions, explaining that while the beautiful inspires the
body to delight in sensual pleasures, curiositas “experiments with their
opposites, not submitting to the gross for its own sake, but from the
drive to experience and know.”
124
It is curiositas that compels men to look
at those things that make them shudder, the ultimate example of which
is, according to Augustine, the mutilated corpse:

123
Katherine Gates, Deviant Desires (New York: Juno Books, 2000), 228.
124
Saint Augustine, Confessions, translated by Garry Wills (New York: Penguin Books,
2006), 240.

133
This is something they do not want to see [in terms of
sensual pleasure] even in dreams, or if forced to look at it
while awake, or if lured to the sight expecting something
pretty … It is for this perverse craving that unnatural things
are put on in the theater. This also leads men to pry into the
arcane elements of nature, which are beyond our scope—
knowing them would serve no purpose, yet men make of that
knowing its own purpose.
125

Any act of looking that involves prying into things that are “beyond our
scope” or “ken” raises the specter of the Uncanny, a word that, according
to Victoria Nelson, is etymologically rooted in “that which cannot be
‘kenned’ or known by the five senses”
126
and that, by Webster’s definition,
has “a supernatural character or origin” or is “beyond what is normal or
expected.” Although an aesthetic concept, the experience of the Uncanny
is worth investigating psychoanalytically, according to Freud, who
describes it in a manner similar to Augustine as the “shadow side of the
beautiful and attractive,” and who provides as an example par excellence
of the uncanny the story “The Sandman” by E.T.A Hoffman, in which the
central protagonist Nathanael mistakenly falls in love with an artificial
woman named Olimpia. Indeed, the scene in the story in which Olimpia’s
eyes are removed and she is revealed as an automaton, a revelation that
drives Nathanael insane and leads to his suicide, is what ASFRians
would call “the come shot.” The Uncanny is, therefore, a term (and an

125
Saint Augustine, 245
126
Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life Of Puppets (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2001), 17.

134
experience) that helps to shed light on that about which ASFRians are
fantasizing.
Freud uses as a starting point for his psychoanalytical inquiry into
the uncanny a study entitled “The Psychology of the Uncanny” by
physician Ernst Anton Jentsch, published in 1906. For Jentsch, the
uncanny is a function of misoneism (the fear of the new), in which the
mind becomes disoriented in relation to a phenomenon that does not
conform to one’s established conceptual framework or “ideational
sphere.”
127
It is Jentsch, who initially links the uncanny to the German
word unheimlich, the opposite of that with which one is familiar, the
“heimlich” (homely) or heimisch (native) in German and who uses
Hoffman’s story as a significant example of the uncanny since:
Among all the psychical uncertainties that can become an
original cause of the uncanny feeling, there is one in
particular that is able to develop a fairly regular, powerful
and very general effect: namely, doubt as to whether an
apparently living being is animate and, conversely, doubt as
to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate.
128

In Hoffmann’s story, the psychical uncertainty around the automaton
Olimpia is sustained by her mechanical behavior, the kind of behavior
that is erotically-charged for ASFRians—stilted movement and limited
and repetitive speech—which the reader is left guessing about until the
climactic scene when she is revealed as a mechanical doll.

127
Ernst Jentsch, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny” (1906) in Angelaki, 2:1 (1996), 8.
128
Jentsch, 11.

135
Freud picks up where Jentsch leaves off but differs from Jentsch
in his interpretation of the source of the uncanny. While for Jentsch the
uncanny is rooted in uncertainty about something unknown, Freud
insists that what makes this unknown thing frightening is the fact that it
was once known, but has returned in an alienated form. As a kind of
etymological proof, Freud returns to the German word “heimlich” whose
multiple definitions include not only that which is familiar and homely,
but also what is secret and hidden from view, suggestive of the magic
arts. Within this definition are shades of the uncanny or Unheimlich as
the supernatural or frightening and the preconditions for the experience
of the Unheimlich as, in German philosopher Friedrich von Schelling’s
words (quoted by Freud), “everything that ought to have remained … secret
and hidden but has come to light.”
129
Thus, as Freud concludes, “heimlich
is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence,
until it finally coincides with its opposite, Unheimlich.”
130
Uncanniness is
rooted [“the prefix ‘un’ is the token of repression”] in the return of the
repressed, that which was once familiar but hidden from view. There is,
according to Freud, no more Unheimlich place than the female genitals—
that “entrance to the former Heim of all human beings, to the place,

129
Quoted in Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII, translated by James Strachey
(London: The Hogarth Press), 224.
130
Freud, 226.

136
where everyone dwelt once upon a time in the beginning”—the home
turned horror show following the Oedipal crisis.
131
Interestingly, however,
this interpretation leads Freud away from the figure of the female
automaton in Hoffman’s story and the emphasis placed on her by
Jentsch’s interpretation.
According to Freud, the mystery surrounding Olimpia is of less
significance to the story’s ability to elicit an uncanny sensation than the
theme of the “Sandman,” a mythological figure who steals the eyes of bad
children while they’re sleeping, and whose image haunts Nathanael
throughout the story. Uncanniness is based in the anxiety of losing one’s
sight, which is a substitute for the fear of castration and steeped in
Oedipal drama. As Freud points out, Nathanael’s anxiety about the
Sandman (and losing his eyes) is intimately connected in the story with
his father’s death (his father dies mysteriously in the company of the
frightening lawyer Coppelius, whom Nathanael associates with the
Sandman). Moreover, the reoccurrence and doubling of characters
(Nathanael’s father is replaced by Spalanzani, the “father” of Olimpia; the
Sandman is Coppelius who is also Coppola, the peddler who sells
Nathanael the spyglass or “pocket perspective” through which he first
sees Olimpia) tied together by the theme of eyes (Coppola, whose name
translates to coppo or “eye socket” in Italian, also made the eyes of

131
Freud, “The Uncanny,” 245.

137
Olimpia, which he later steals back) all connect, in a logically circular
way, to Freud’s overall premise that the uncanny effects of similar
occurrences is related to repressed infantile sexuality.
Freud’s marginalization of Olimpia has been a point of great
contestation, and many have argued that Olimpia is the repressed within
Freud’s theory of the uncanny. As Nicholas Royle puts it:
Freud’s reading of ‘The Sandman’ is a violent attempt to
reduce or eliminate the significance of Jentsch’s work on the
Uncanny, and in particular the importance of the figures of
the doll and automaton for an understanding of the
uncanny. It is also a violent attempt to reduce or eliminate
the place and importance of women … ‘Freud failed to see
that the question of woman is inextricably connected to
Nathaniel’s fear of castration.’
132

Particularly within the context of a fetish like ASFR, Freud’s exclusion of
the automaton from the locus of castration anxiety is unusual. However,
when we consider the fact that he is drawing our attention away from the
visual ambiguity of Olimpia’s physicality towards the psychic register of
the story, as represented by the imaginary Sandman, an intentionality
begins to take shape. In particular, I would draw attention to the
relevance of Freud’s argument within the history and etiology of hysteria,
an illness that serves as the backdrop of both Olimpia and Nathanael’s
mechanical behavior in the story, as well as Freud’s development of

132
Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny: An Introduction (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2003), 41. See also: Helene Cixous, “Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of
Freud’s Das Unhemliche (the Uncanny) and Sarah Kofman, “The Double is/and the
Devil: The Uncanniness of The Sandman (Der Sandmann).

138
psychoanalysis. Our first clue to a connection between the automatic
body of the mechanical woman in Hoffmann’s story and the hysterical
body is Freud’s rationale for dismissing Olimpia as a symbol of infantile
sexuality. While Freud acknowledges that Olimpia does invoke a sense of
the uncanny, he suggests that it arises not from the return of the
repressed, but from the return of the surmounted. The return of the
repressed involves the revival of infantile complexes, or amputated
aspects of oneself, which had been buried in the unconscious. The
return of the surmounted involves discarded beliefs that are “primitive”
or “animistic” in nature. While we have surmounted the animistic
conception of the universe, wherein the gods are capable of—”the
omnipotence of thoughts, the prompt fulfillment of wishes, secret
injurious powers and the return of the dead”—vestiges of it remain.
So that when something happens that we cannot explain—for example, a
coincidence of events, the manifestation of secret desires or thoughts, the
animation of an inanimate body—they revive and bring into expression
these old beliefs, raising doubts about our current material reality and
invoking the uncanny. Accordingly, the return of the surmounted, tends
to operate in the realm of reality more than fiction (where supernatural
events are less unusual).

139
Olimpia is, of course, fictional, but to the extent that her
mechanical behavior strikes a supernatural chord, it evokes the real
uncanniness of the hysterical body, whose paroxysmal and repetitive
gestures make it seem as if it’s animated by unseen forces. Jentsch in
his essay on the uncanny draws an explicit association between the two,
suggesting that while the automaton strikes some people more than
others as uncanny, the uncanniness of a mental and nervous illness,
such as epilepsy or hysteria, is nearly universal, since it renders the
autonomous human subject mechanical or puppet-like:
It is not unjustly that epilepsy is therefore spoken of as the
morbus sacer, as an illness deriving not from the human
world but from foreign and enigmatic spheres, for the
epileptic attack of spasms reveals the human body to the
viewer—the body under normal conditions is so meaningful,
expedient, and unitary, functioning according to the
direction of his consciousness—as an immensely
complicated and delicate mechanism. This is an important
cause of the epileptic fit’s ability to produce such a demonic
effect on those who see it.
133

Indeed, it is because of its mechanical seizures, paradigmatically
associated with grotesque body movements—such as spasms,
convulsions, catalepsy, and fainting—that hysteria inspired varying
interpretations about its animating force over the course of its history,
invariably inflected by the ideational context and culture in which they
appeared. The illness appeared in medical writing as early as 2000 B.C.

133
Jentsch, 14.

140
in Egypt and was given a clinical definition by Hippocrates in the fifth
century B.C. The word “hysteria” derives from the Greek word hystera,
meaning “of the uterus.” While its symptoms have often been observed in
both men and women, the hysteric has always been implicated in what is
understood, both etymologically and culturally, as a feminine pathology.
For Hippocrates, the illness was confined to women and based in
physiology. In his treatise On the Diseases of Women, he links it to a
dissatisfied and autonomous womb that wanders through the body
causing disturbances in the various organs that it encounters. (The
proposed cure was to lure the womb back to its proper place through
marriage.) In Timaeus, Plato describes the womb as an animal (“within
an animal”) with a voracious appetite for procreation that, when
frustrated by lack of activity, starts moving about the body, defying both
reason and will. Galen also believed that it was an illness of a sexually-
starved uterus, to which licentious women were particularly prone, and
he prescribed a technique of genital massage that, as Rachel P. Maines
points out, “was to be repeated almost verbatim in later texts and to be
regarded as therapeutic gospel in some medical circles until the end of
the nineteenth century.”
134

134
Rachel P. Maines, The Technology of Orgasm: “Hysteria,” the Vibrator, and Women’s
Sexual Satisfaction (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 24.

141
With the rise of Christianity, the illness took on a moral tenor, and
its locus shifted from physiology to the influence of external demonic
forces on a female body compromised by both original sin and bestial
instincts:
In the course of the Middle Ages, mental illness became
coterminous with spirit possession—the devil tricking
humans by taking over the imagination rather than the
body—and hysteria came to be understood as the illness par
excellence of the soul. Now the hysteric was no longer the
sexually dissatisfied woman but rather a figure that
appeared different than she really was, in the guise of a
normal person when in fact she was the dangerous host of
evil spirits.
135

The treatment of the hysteric reached a low point following the
publication of the handbook for witch hunters and Inquisitors, Malleus
Maleficarum (1494), in which the ailment was recast as a form of satanic
possession, the proposed cure for which was physical and emotional
interrogation and the extraction of a confession.
Although the etiology of hysteria began to shift with the birth of
modern medicine, the man who freed it, once and for all, from its
association with animist superstition was the famous neurologist Jean-
Martin Charcot, whose displays of hysterical symptoms in his Tuesday
lessons at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris in the late nineteenth century
became legendary. It is worth examining the work of Charcot in some
detail since, as I will argue, there is a significant parallel between Freud’s

135
Elisabeth Bronfen, The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and its Discontents (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1998), 106.

142
redirection of our attention from the mechanical body of the female
automaton in ‘The Sandman,’ and his shift in emphasis from the external
symptoms of hysteria charted by Charcot to an exploration of internal
psychic processes, a shift that directly paved the way for his development
of psychoanalysis.
The Napoleon of Neurosis

Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) arrived at the Salpêtrière
136
in the early
1850s as a medical intern. By 1870, having helped to establish neurology
as a science and himself as its foremost practitioner, he became the head
of a newly formed ward at the hospital in which both epileptics and
hysterics were housed. Until his death in 1893, he dedicated himself to
studying the specificities of hystero-epilepsy
137
, and to differentiating
between the seizures of the two illnesses. His approach was, above all,
visual, influenced by the clinico-anatomic method developed in France in
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in which pathological
phenomena were observed through the cases of numerous individuals

136

Derived from the word “saltpeter,” Hospice de la Salpêtrière was established by Louis
XIV on the site of what had been a gunpowder factory. Less a hospital than a holding
pen, it originally housed mostly indigent and insane women, whom the Sun King
wanted cleaned off the streets of Paris; it incorporated a women’s prison for prostitutes
at the end of the seventeenth century; and it became the largest asylum in Europe
between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The humanitarian and medical
reform of the hospital is associated with Philippe Pinel (1745-1826), who became its
chief physician in 1795; a statue in honor of him still stands outside the hospital today.
137
Hystero-Epilepsy was, according to Veith, a misnomer by Charcot who, at first, failed
to realize that the symptoms of epilepsy witnessed in his hysterical patients were, in
large part, a result of their tendency to mimic the epileptics with whom they had
contact in the new ward. See Ilza Veith, Hysteria: The History of a Disease (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1965), 230-231.

143
and categorized into “archetypes” against which future “variants” were
measured. Charcot, who expressed disdain for theory outside of patient
populations, found the Salpêtrière an ideal environment; with some 5000
residents, it was a “living museum of pathology” that provided an endless
supply of specimens that he could submit to clinical scrutiny, as well as
visual documentation and cataloguing.
Although Charcot deployed a variety of techniques, central to his
system of visual documentation was photography, through which he
captured the various phases of the hysterico-epileptic seizure in different
patients and made comparisons, organizing the broad range of tics,
grimaces, contractures, and spasms into categorical types or facies. As
Georges Didi-Huberman puts it in his book on the use of photography at
the Salpêtrière: “Photography had to crystallize the case into a Tableau;
not an extensive tableau, but a tableau in which the Type was condensed
in a unique image, or in a univocal series of images— the facies.”
138
In
support of this practice, a veritable production facility was added onto
the ward, with a glass-walled studio, dark and light labs, screens and
backdrops, and special cameras and lenses. Through the ongoing
photographic documentation of his patients, Charcot produced a system
of classification for the “complete and regular form of the great hysterical

138
George Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic
Iconography of the Salpêtrière (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003), 48.

144
attack” comprised of eighty-six body postures, each of which was
associated with one of five progressive phases: the prodomes phase which
preceded the onset of the attack, often called the “aura,” included
palpitations, nervous cough, yawning, and the feeling of obstructions in
the throat; the attack itself began with an epileptoid phase, marked by
convulsions similar to those within a standard epileptic fit; in the
clownism phase, the body underwent strange contortions and illogical
movements that often took the form of the arc-de-cercle, a spastic
inversion in which the back arched in a manner similar to tetanus, and
rhythmic chorea, named for its dance like movements; the next stage
involved plastic poses or attitudes passionnelles that included expressive
mimicry that ranged from the ecstatic to the cataleptic and in which the
patient might begin conversing with hallucinated interlocutors; and in
some cases, the attitude passionelles would culminate in a fourth phase
of extended delirium, which might last hours or even days.
139
The full set
of poses and phases were sketched and schematized within a “single
synoptic chart” by Paul Richer, professor of artistic anatomy at École
National Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. (see figure 19). And both
the photographs and charts, along with transcriptions from the case
histories that they documented, were published in a series of medical
volumes entitled Inconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière (1876-77,

139
See Didi-Huberman, 115-116. See also de Marneffe, 75.

145

Figure 19. Richer Synoptic Table

146
1878, 1879-80), the most extensive clinical record of hysteria that had
ever been produced.
What I hope to make apparent in this detailed explanation is the
regimented systemization through which Charcot utilized the new visual
technology of photography in documenting and classifying the poorly
understood symptoms of hysteria. Photography was for Charcot and his
staff a scientific instrument; Albert Londe, who was placed in charge of
the Photographic Service of the Salpêtrière in 1884, hailed the
photographic plate as "the true retina of the scientist," which made
possible an unprecedented objectivity. There is, however, particularly in
retrospect, an obvious disconnect between the scientific methodology of
the Iconographie and the photographs themselves, in which something
more than clinical observation seems to be at play. Indeed, there is a
staged quality that is difficult to overlook, particularly in the photographs
of the Salpêtrière’s most famous inhabitant, Augustine (see figure 20).
140

In a series of images ordered in such a way to conform to the various
stages of the complete hysterical attack, in particular the “Attitudes
Passionnelles” phase—whose gestural markers are given such suggestive
names as “Threat”, “Call”, “Ecstasy”, and “Eroticism”—Augustine,
enshrouded in white linen, raises her head skywards as if supplicating

140

Augustine, who became famous for the photographs of her in the Iconographie,
arrived at the Salpêtrière in October 1875 at the age of fifteen. She escaped five years
later dressed as a man, and no record exists of her thereafter.

147

Figure 20. Augustine

148
the heavens. The similarity to, among other things, spiritual iconography
seems more than coincidental and, in all likelihood, it wasn’t. As Sigrid
Schade points out, the demystification of hysteria at the Salpêtrière was
conducted in ongoing dialogue with the ailment’s ignoble history of
possession, against which Charcot positioned himself as a liberator. On
the walls of the ward were hung his collection of paintings and graphic
images of exorcisms, witch inquisitions, and martyr executions. And
while the intention of such images was a retrospective nod to the
beneficence of science, which brought an objective eye to a condition that
had historically been met with punitive cruelty, they could not help but
serve as a visual reminder to the women who passed them on a daily
basis of the gestural vocabulary that they were to submit to memory and
perform on command.
141
The similarity between the poses within the
Iconographie and the fine art on the walls of the Salpêtrière was for
Charcot, however, merely confirmation of his revisionist history of
possession. As he famously stated in response to the charge that he was
influencing hysterical phenomena in the course of documenting it, “but
in truth I am nothing but a photographer; I register what I see,”
142
And
yet, even if one discounts the various tortures to which the patients at

141
Sigrid Schade. “Charcot and the Spectacle of the Hysterical Body” in Art History, vol.
18, No. 4 (December 1995), 508-510.
142
Quoted in Daphne de Mernaffe, “Looking and Listening: The Construction of Clinical
Knowledge in Charcot and Freud” in Signs, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Autumn, 1991), 79.

149
the Salpêtrière were subjected to bring on their symptoms (including
electric shocks, ether, magnesium flashes, loud noises, and ovarian
pressure)
143
, the objectivity, or “facticity” as Didi-Huberman puts it, of
these images remains questionable. As Daphne de Mernaffe rightly
observes:
The very naming of the attitudes passionnelles (“passional
attitudes” or “poses”) renders primarily visual a subjectively
meaningful state. The meaning of these variable states was
further fixed through the use of captions, which ostensibly
identified, but in fact constructed, the specific meaning of
each gesture. Finally, the poses present as stereotyped
depictions of emotion what were probably witnessed as
chaotic gestures. In fact, the style of the photographs has
much less in common with other early photographs of
mental patients than with the theatrical portraiture of the
day.
144

There was, then, a system of choreography and notation at work that
transformed a cacophony of symptomatic gestures into a symphonic
ballet whose movements could be anticipated. Charcot not only
organized the symptoms and signs of hysteria, he aestheticized them.
Indeed, by all accounts, he was less a photographer,
145
than an artist,

143
As James Hillman notes, some of these tortures marked a vestigial link between
hysteria and witchcraft, for example the practice of sticking patients with pins and
needles, which was an old test for witchery, was used to bring on hysterical symptoms
in demonstrations at the Salpêtrière. See James Hillman, The Myth of Analysis: Three
Essays in Archetypal Psychology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 255.
144
de Marneffe, 81.
145
According to Tom Gunning, recent biographers “have questioned Charcot's personal
devotion to photography as a method of medical investigation. They point out that the
Iconographie was instigated by Desiré Bourneville [an intern under Charcot from 1870-
1879] and that its hiatus coincided with Bourneville's departure from Salpêtrière for
Bicetre in 1879. They also claim Bourneville rather than Charcot was the driving force

150
whose work was conducted not only in dialogue with historical painting,
but contemporary artistic practice. Charcot had shown artistic talent at
an early age; as a youth, he helped out the family business by decorating
the carriages that his father built, and he continued to draw and paint
over the course of his life. At the age of eighteen, his father offered to
sponsor his education as either a painter or a doctor and, although he
chose the latter, he was an active participant in the artistic circles of
Paris. As Schade suggests, Charcot:
… was obviously determined to make a name for himself not
only in the world of medicine, but in the world of art as well.
Marriage with a wealthy widow enabled him to become active
as an art collector, to become a patron for various artists,
such as Gallé and Rodin, to participate in the initiation of
exhibition projects, and to conduct a weekly salon in his
house in boulevard St. Germain, to which he invited the
literary men, artists, art critics, actors and politicians of
Paris.
146

His salon extended into the halls of the Salpêtrière, where he opened up
his Tuesday lessons to an audience comprised not only of doctors, but
also of artists writers, and performers, for whom he paraded in and
hypnotized a series of hysterical patients in order to display their
symptoms (see figure 21). In combining art and science, visual spectacle

behind photography at Salpêtrière, and that the photographic service as well as the
Iconographie fell into stagnation until Londe took charge in 1884. From this perspective,
Charcot's self-identification with the photographer may indicate he felt his own gaze
was sufficient as the major device of visual investigation, rather than the photograph.”
See Gunning, “In Your Face” in The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology, and the
Culltural Arts in Europe and America, 1880-1940, edited by Mark S. Micale (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2004), 159.
146
Schade, 505.

151

Figure 21. Charcot's Tuesday Lesson

and medical demonstration, however, the Tuesday lessons solicited a
different gaze than that of the salon. The hysteric as “medical marvel”
available for public viewing within Charcot’s “museum of living
pathology” shared a kinship with the living human spectacles that had
recently populated P.T. Barnum’s American museum.
147
As Tom Gunning

147
The American Museum was owned and run by Barnum between 1841 and 1865 on
Manhattan’s lower west side, until it was destroyed in a fire. Part museum, lecture hall,
zoo, aquarium, waxworks, theater, and freak show, it combined “sensational
entertainment and gaudy display with instruction and moral uplift.” See The Lost
Museum, an American Social History Project: http://www.lostmuseum.cuny.edu/

152
points out, both employed an “operational aesthetic” that drew viewers
who wanted:
… not only to see a marvel, but to understand and speculate
on how it works. An impresario technique tailored to an age
of technology and its fascinations, this aesthetic both excites
and satisfies curiosity and supplies a very different aesthetic
experience from that of the traditional art forms.
148

It was, according to Gunning, curiosity, the perverse desire to feed “the
eyes’ urges” maligned by St. Augustine that served as the motivating
impulse of visual spectacles like those of Charcot and Barnum, which
combined scientific knowledge and popular entertainment, a desire
encouraged by the indexicality of the photographic image and, he
suggests, that brought the first spectators to the earliest motion pictures:
The gradual perfection of still photography stimulated the
pursuit of visual phenomena that might otherwise slip below
the threshold of conscious observation and opened up new
possibilities of visual knowledge. A continual attempt to
make photography ever more sensitive to the ephemeral and
instantaneous events of physical nature was a major
motivation for cinema's invention and perfection.
149

Gunning traces what he calls the “gnostic” impulse to know through
seeing through various photographic and cinematic experiments that
interrogated the human face, that “most polysemous of human objects.”
His insights, however, easily apply to the hysterical body, whose physical

148
Tom Gunning, “In Your Face: Physiognomy, Photography, and the Gnostic Mission of
Early Film” in Modernism/Modernity 4.1 (1997), 1-29.
149
Gunning, “In Your Face: Physiognomy, Photography, and the Gnostic Mission of
Early Film” in Modernism/Modernity 4.1 (1997), 1-29.

153
expressivity conveys similar tensions between outer and inner, the visible
and unseen, and which experienced a similar exchange between occult
and physiological explanations as the practice of physiognomy. Indeed, a
seminal figure within both spheres was G.B. Duchenne de Boulogne, the
founder of neurology in France and mentor to Charcot, who in 1862
published Mécanismes de la Physionomie Humaine, a photographic
investigation of human facial expressiveness in which the facial muscles
of different subjects were sent into involuntary contraction through the
application of electrodes. As in the documentation of the various phases
of the hysterical attack, the combination of electrode and photography
allowed the isolation and fixing of that which was normally too transitory
to study. As in the photographs of the Iconographie, Duchenne’s studies,
to the extent that they were oriented towards objective visual analysis,
were also gendered, aestheticized, and even narrativized in ways that
defied scientific objectivity. Duchenne divided the photographic plates in
his study into “scientific” and “aesthetic” sections, the former using
predominantly male subjects and the latter female, posed in costumes
and with props. Within these artificial tableaux, subjects were sometimes
used like puppets in reenacting emotional gestures from spiritual
imagery, as well as Shakespearean dramas (see figure 22), a histrionic

154

Figure 22. Duchenne de Boulogne, imitation of “Lady Macbeth” induced with
electricity

practice that, as Didi-Huberman points out, was passed on to the theatre
of Charcot.
150

Such tendencies were, however, far from unusual in nineteenth
century studies of the body. The combination of the aesthetic and the
empirical is also evident, for example, in Edweard Muybridge’s
protocinematic studies of human motion, about which Linda Williams
has written. Like Duchenne’s studies of facial expression, Muybridge’s
motion studies were intended to be relatively objective, and yet, as

150
See Didi-Huberman, 226-227.

155
Williams notes, there was “gratuitous fantasization and iconization of the
bodies of women that have no parallel in the representation of the
male.”
151
While the men in Muybridge’s studies are engaged in physical
activities: running, jumping, kicking, boxing, wrestling, etc., the females
are engaged in far more passive activities, such as standing, sitting, and
kneeling, in which there is always some extra detail, as in one series
where a female covers her mouth and another, where the female holds
her breast. Furthermore, unlike the male series, the female series also
include props unnecessary to the activity being displayed, such as a
basket or jug of water. Perhaps most questionable are the series in which
women use various materials, whether sheets in a bed, a dress, a scarf,
or a veil to cover and uncover their bodies as if engaged in a kind of
striptease. Such activities and objects, which invest the woman’s body
with a diegetic and even erotic surplus of meaning, also overdetermine
her difference from the male, according to Williams.
In making sense of these embellishments, Williams follows Laura
Mulvey’s lead and reads them through Freudian ideas about fetishism,
as a contradictory gesture, which is ultimately a disavowal of female
castration. Gunning, on the other hand, seems to suggest that it is the
grotesquerie of the human body interrogated in the most unnatural of

151
Linda Williams, “Film Body: An Implantation of Perversions” in Narrative, Apparatus,
Ideology: A Film Reader, ed. Philip Rosen. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986),
511.

156
ways that requires disavowal. In the case of Duchenne, narrative and
aesthetic framing helped to offset the monstrosity being displayed:
… as if familiar situations and cultural clichés of feminine
roles provided a context of ideologically reassuring
recognizability necessary to allow the viewer to see these
shocking demonstrations of the human face as the play of
muscles as part of a visible “natural language.”
152

In either case, the aestheticization or narrativization of physiological or
pathological phenomena produces within a visual field that would
otherwise encourage clinical and objective observation a vacillation
between the diegetic framing and the dissimulating gesture that incites
the “looking beneath the seen” of the curious gaze. While both staged
and provoked (in the above cases), this sort of looking brings to mind the
dialectical relationship between the studium and the punctum of the
photograph as described by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida. While the
studium is the ostensible subject of the photograph, which bears the
imprint of the photographer’s intentions, the punctum is an unintentional
detail or accident within the image that “pricks” or “bruises” the viewer,
that evokes a poignancy somewhere between love and pity, whose field of
action extends beyond the visible toward the personal and subjective.
Elaborating on this idea, Barthes draws a connection between the
punctum and the noeme, the “that-has-been” of the photograph, by which
the subject pictured, particularly within historical photographs, is

152
See Gunning.

157
irreconcilably suspended between the reality of his present death (“he is
dead”) and his photographic presence, which posits his death as an
inevitability forever postponed (“he is going to die”). “Whether or not the
subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.”
153
It is the
noeme, the living death of the subject, that for Barthes imbues the
photograph with a pathos that is closer to the experience of theatre than
painting, and in particular those theatrical forms in which an intentional
artificiality conjures a realm both connected to and separate from that of
the living: “the whitened bust of the totemic theater … the Japanese No
mask … a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which
we see the dead.”
154
Within the theatrical production whose verisimilitude
is made partial by the presence of the mask, or the photograph whose
unintentional detail snags the psyche of its viewer is, I want to suggest, a
similar tension to that conjured within the photograph that theatrically
or narratively frames a pathological disruption; each enacts a
dissimulation in the process of construction that Barthes compares to
madness (but that, in fact, involves a madness that is constrained to a
“prick” or “bruise,” as we shall see). In an anecdote of particular
significance to our discussion, he describes how the connection between
photography and madness was made manifest to him while watching the

153
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Farrar,
Straus, and Giroux, Inc. 1981), 96.
154
Barthes, 31-32.

158
dance between a female automaton, seemingly fashioned after Olimpia in
Hoffmann’s story, and the infamous seducer of women in Frederico
Fellini’s film Casanova (1976):
… when Casanova began dancing with the young
automaton, my eyes were touched with a kind of painful and
delicious intensity, as if I were suddenly experiencing the
effects of a strange drug; each detail, which I was seeing so
exactly, savoring it, so to speak, down to its last evidence,
overwhelmed me … something desperately inert and yet
available, offered, affectionate, according to an angelic
impulse of “good will” … At which moment I could not help
thinking about Photography: for I could say all this about
the photographs which touched me.
155
(See figure 23)

The dance between the lover and the automaton (as well as the studium
and the punctum) invokes, like the danse macabre
156
once did, an
acknowledgement of death in life, a “wakening of intractable reality” that
bestows on its subject an exquisite poignancy that implicates its
spectator. In the tension or vacillation between the simulation of a
familiar scene and the unassimilable conjured in its midsts arises a
spasm of recognition that “I too will die” or “I too am a puppet subject to
forces beyond my control.” The madness of this doubled vision, which
Barthes suggests is inherent in the photograph, is tamed by society in
one of two ways: first, by turning photography into an art “for no art is
mad” and second, by universalizing or banalizing the image, so that all

155
Barthes, 116.
156
A common allegorical image in the late Medieval period depicting a death figure
leading a group of dancing skeletons to the grave (see Chapter One).

159

Figure 23. Casanova: The Lover and the Doll

160
that is unique or scandalous becomes subsumed within a generalizable
stereotype.
These are, of course, the two strategies by which Charcot
attempted to tame hysteria. Indeed, both the Tuesday lessons and the
Iconographie were geared towards the twin projects of aestheticizing and
generalizing (that is, subjecting to the codes of both art and science) that
which was otherwise indecipherable and which inspired horror in those
who witnessed it. Even Charcot’s predecessor Paul Briquet, the first to
systematically examine the ailment, and whose Traite clinique et
Therapeutique de l’hysterie (1859) provided an unprecedented empirical
study (based on clinical observation of 430 patients over a ten-year
period at the Pitié Hospital), remained ill-disposed to its visual
symptoms, which he readily admitted inspired revulsion in him:
I was obliged to bestow all my attention on this sort of
patient, although my taste for positive science did not in the
least draw me to them. Treating illnesses that all authors see
as the classic example of the unstable, irregular, fantastic,
unforeseeable, ungoverned by any law or rule, not linked
together by any serious theory: the task disgusted me more
than any other.
157

As if in answer to this sentiment, Charcot, in his inaugural lecture, as
the new university chair of diseases of the nervous system at the
University of Paris, in 1882, acknowledged the mysterious nature of
hysteria (along with epilepsy and chorea), which were presented to the

157
Quoted in Didi-Huberman, 68.

161
medical establishment “as so many Sphinxes” for which many saw “only
an assemblage of odd incoherent phenomena inaccessible to analysis,
and which had better, perhaps, be banished to the category of the
unknown.”
158
However, by training his clinically grounded, artistically
gifted eye on this odd assemblage, he believed that he could decipher its
hidden patterns, of whose existence he had no doubt. As Freud would
later state in his obituary for Charcot:
He was not a reflective man, not a thinker: he had the nature
of an artist—he was, as he himself said, a visuel, a man who
sees. Here is what he himself told us about his method for
working. He used to look again and again at the things he
did not understand, to deepen his impression of them day by
day, till suddenly an understanding of them dawned on him.
In his mind’s eye the apparent chaos presented by the
continual repetition of the same symptoms then gave way to
order … He called this kind of intellectual work, in which he
had no equal, ‘practicing nosography’, and he took pride in
it. He might be heard to say that the greatest satisfaction a
man could have was to see something new. (emphasis
added)
159

Charcot’s nosography, dedicated as it was to an unflinching vision that
saw “something new,” an intelligible order, within the unknown and
visually chaotic, poses an answer not only to the indecipherability of
hysterical symptoms, but to the uncanny as misoneism (the fear of the
new) through which they are rendered demonic. The effect, however, was
not as simple as a taming of madness, as Barthes is suggesting about

158
Quoted in de Mernaffe, 75.
159
Quoted in deMernaffe, 92. See also Didi-Huberman, 26-27.

162
the banalizing of photography. Indeed, it seems impossible, in looking
over the photographs of the Iconographie, not to experience a pathos or
poignancy in the gestures of the women pictured, at once theatrical and
unmotivated, a vertiginous disruption within a narrativized frame, which
is evocative of the pas de deux between the lover and the automaton. In
domesticating and aestheticizing the unassimilable and frightening,
Charcot produced the kind of theatre through which the uncanny is
rendered both pleasurable and cathartic; and this is precisely the role of
the fictional uncanny, according to Ernst Jentsch, of which Hoffmann
was a master:
In life we do not like to expose ourselves to severe emotional
blows, but in the theatre or while reading we gladly let
ourselves be influenced in this way: we hereby experience
certain powerful excitements which awake in us a strong
feeling for life, without having to accept the consequences of
the causes of the unpleasant moods if they were to have the
opportunity to appear in corresponding form on their own
account, so to speak. In physiological terms, the sensation of
such excitements seems frequently to be bound up with
artistic pleasure in a direct way.
160

The theatrical framing of the uncanny, through which the spectator
experiences dissimulation as pleasure is, to a certain extent, related to
that which Nathanael experiences in his encounter with the female
automaton, whose embodiment of both the human and artificial, the
living and dead, strikes profound chords within him. Indeed, in the scene

160
Jentsch, “The Psychology of the Uncanny,” 12.

163
in “The Sandman” in which Nathanael and Olimpia dance, there are
echoes of Barthes’s experience of the dancing automaton in Fellini’s
Casanova. The stiff and measured gait and mechanical movements of
Olimpia appear to Nathanael (as does the “desperately inert and yet
available” figure of the automaton to Barthes) a cipher of hidden
meaning; “As he [Nathanael] touched her cold hand, he felt his heart
thrill with awe; the legend of ‘The Dead Bride’ shot suddenly through his
mind.”
161
Her repetitive and vacuous utterances strike him as “genuine
hieroglyphs of the inner world of Love and of the higher cognition of the
intellectual life revealed in the intuition of the Eternal beyond the
grave.”
162
However, whereas the viewer (or spectator) of the dance between
the lover and the automaton is subject to the “emotional blow” of the
uncanny at an aesthetic remove, Nathanael is undone by the madness of
his love for this figure of death in life when he is awakened, at the end of
the story, to the subjectivity that he has invested in the object of his love.
While Barthes suggests that the punctum of the photograph is also
invested with a subjective unraveling akin to madness, it “bruises” rather
than destroys for it is mediated by the studium, a diegetic frame that
both contains and distances the viewer from the madness while (as

161

The “dead bride” is a reference to Goethe’s poem “Bride of Corinth (Die Braut von
Korinth)” first published in 1797, in which the corpse of an unwed bride comes back
from the dead to consort with her betrothed.
162
E.T.A. Hoffmann, “The Sandman” in Best Tales of Hoffmann (New York: Dover
Publications, 1967), 207-208.

164
Charcot’s photographs make clear) also creating the conditions by which
it can be experienced, and even enjoyed, in the first place.
It is this madness, which Barthes finds compelling in photography
and Jentsch celebrates in Hoffmann’s work, that Freud is interested in
extracting from the visual and the aesthetic in his theorization of the
uncanny. Freud is, in a sense, attempting to hone in on that which leads
to Nathanael’s death rather than the mediated experience of death in life
enjoyed by the viewer (or reader) of the dance (narrative and otherwise)
between Nathanael and the automaton. Moreover, his insistence that we
ignore the automaton in our attempt to understand the causes of the
uncanny is, I would suggest, related to the extent to which the
aestheticization of the visually uncanny in Charcot’s treatment of
hysteria occluded the real causes of the ailment. As Freud’s studies with
Breuer made manifest, it was Charcot’s gift for seeing what others could
not that constituted his primary blind spot in assessing and treating
hysteria, for the more he looked and documented what he saw, the more
his etiology was bound to the ailment’s physicality. While he entertained
the idea of external influences or psychic trauma, he remained
committed to a physiological explanation, in particular, that the illness
was the result of brain lesions that were likely hereditary in nature and
that traumatic events served merely as agent provocateurs for an

165
inherent neurological “degeneracy.” To the extent that Charcot was able
to find meaning in visual disorder, he discounted that which was most
meaningful—what his patients were saying—as delirious banter. However
Freud, who studied with Charcot for seventeen weeks between 1885 and
1886, in his subsequent private practice began listening for the
psychological content of what his patients where saying, ultimately
concluding that their hysterical symptoms were the result of sexually-
based trauma that was repressed, displaced from the lower body regions,
and somatically converted into motor activity.
163
And in lieu of hypnosis,
which Charcot had so theatrically induced in his patients before a crowd
of onlookers, he prescribed “the talking cure” through which access was
gained to the analysand’s “private theatre”
164
only within the context of
the psychoanalytic relationship.
It is this core insight about the etiology of hysteria that, aside from
its larger implications in the development of the field of psychoanalysis,
serves as the backdrop of Freud’s interpretation of the uncanny as the
return of repressed infantile sexuality and his insistence that we turn
our attention away from the visual signs of Olympia’s ambiguous nature,
suggestive of supernatural influences, towards the symbolic register of

163
Freud would later revise his “seduction theory’ concluding that hysterical symptoms
were less dependent on a reality-based sexual trauma than projected fantasies and
repressed desire.
164
This was a term used by Anna O. for describing her “daydreams,” which she explored
with Breuer.

166
Nathanael’s castration anxiety, enacted through a narrative doubling in
the form of the Sandman. Unlike Jentsch, who is interested in the
aesthetics of the uncanny and how something frightening in real life can
be rendered pleasurable within art and literature, Freud is interested in
linking the uncanny to a psychological drive that overrides the pursuit of
pleasure, which he will call the “death instinct” in Beyond the Pleasure
Principle (1920) a book that served as the impetus for his essay “On the
Uncanny” (1919) (the latter was written between drafts of the former and
published the year before), as well as a reworking of his theory of the
drives. In the book, he states early on that while the enjoyment derived
from “painful experiences” in the theater or art hints at that which he is
addressing:
They are of no use for our purposes, since they presuppose
the existence and dominance of the pleasure principle; they
give no evidence of the operation of tendencies beyond the
pleasure principle, that is, of tendencies more primitive than
it and independent of it.
165

These tendencies are the function of instincts “inherent in organic life to
restore an earlier state of things,”(43) and since “inanimate things existed
before living ones,” this urge drives the organism towards inanimacy or
quiescence. Thus, as Freud will famously put it, “the aim of all life is
death.”(46). In explaining the persistence of life despite the primacy of the
“death instinct,” Freud describes the way in which the “life instincts,”

165
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 17.

167
under which he groups both the sexual and self-preservative drives,
interact with and delay the organism’s primary imperative (death), in
order to ensure that it dies “only in its own fashion” (47). Although
seemingly at cross purposes, the two instincts—life and death, Eros and
Thannatos—work not in opposition to one another, but dynamically, the
individual life arising in the “field of force” created between them:
It is as though the life of the organism moved with a
vacillating rhythm. One group of instincts rushes forward so
as to reach the final aim of life as swiftly as possible; but
when a particular stage in the advance has been reached,
the other group jerks back to a certain point to make a fresh
start and so prolong the journey.
166

Within the retrogressive logic of the organism’s “vacillating rhythm” are
echoes of the dynamic relationship between studium and punctum or
between narrative or aesthetic framing or construction and the
vertiginous gesture of deconstruction or dissimulation. Freud is, in a
sense, offering his own oblique theory of art or poetry, describing in
psycho-physiological terms that which Aristotle once called catharsis
(katharsis) in relation to the tragedic form.
167
Like the “fatal flaw” by which
the narrative unravels in dramatic tragedy, the “death instinct” subtends
the erotic drive, the latter of which is merely a preparatory act or

166
Freud, 49.
167
Indeed, one of many examples of the way in which the dynamic principles in Beyond
the Pleasure Principle are invoked in aesthetic or narrative analysis is Peter Brooks in
Reading for the Plot, who uses it to describe the driving force of a narrative plot, which
he suggests, like the living organism, must also “tend toward its end, seek illumination
in its own death. Yet this must be the right death, the correct end.” See Peter Brooks,
Reading for the Plot, 103.

168
“preliminary function” for “binding” freely mobile energy “designed to
prepare the excitation for its final elimination in the pleasure of
discharge,” returning the organism to a “quiescent cathexis” through
cathartic expulsion. In contrast to the vacillating rhythm of catharsis
(which, as Freud notes, is most intense in relation to a cultural
production experienced for the first time: “If a joke is heard for a second
time it produces almost no effect; a theatrical production never creates
so great an impression the second time as the first”
168
) is the
mechanically-driven ceaseless rhythm of the “death drive” enacted in the
compulsion to repeat, a psychic phenomenon that, according to Freud,
lays at the heart of the uncanny.
Although Freud might have elaborated on repetition compulsion
using hysteria as an example, once again, he steers our attention away
from the mechanical body towards psychic automatism, using as an
example the traumatic dreams of soldiers returned from battle (with
whom Freud had direct experience following WWI). Like hysteria, the
neurotic symptoms of war veterans had been linked to a predisposition
in the form of organic/hereditary lesions of the brain and nervous
system, which were, it was argued, activated by trauma. However, the
repetition of traumatic experiences in the dreams of the soldiers
suggested a psychic component to their symptoms, while challenging the

168
Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 42.

169
idea of dreams as primarily a form of “wish fulfillment.” Freud concludes
that the repetitive war dreams of the soldiers were attempts at preparing
for and mastering retrospectively traumas that, at the time they were
experienced, had caught them by surprise, or of developing after the fact
the shielding “anxiety whose omission was the cause of the traumatic
neurosis”:
They thus afford us a view of a function of the mental
apparatus which, though it does not contradict the pleasure
principle, is nevertheless independent of it and seems to be
more primitive than the purpose of gaining pleasure and
avoiding unpleasure.
169

To extrapolate from this to Freud’s interpretation of Hoffmann’s story,
the uncanny as a repetition compulsion that overrides the pleasure
principle is better represented by the Sandman, who inspires repulsion
and fear in Nathanael in every form in which he is recreated, than in
Olimpia whose mechanical movements, however much they hint at the
“death instinct” lurking beneath Eros, are marked by a vacillation
between life and death, beauty and its shadow, that is experienced by
Nathanael (and the reader) as compelling.
Mad Love

In his essay “On the Uncanny,” Freud introduces the “compulsion to
repeat” in a strange anecdote about an experience that he had of
unintentionally and repeatedly returning to the red light district of a

169
Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 37.

170
small Italian town that he was visiting, whose streets were unknown to
him:
I found myself in a quarter of whose character I could not
long remain in doubt. Nothing but painted women were to be
seen at the windows of the small houses, and I hastened to
leave the narrow street at the next turning. But after having
wandered about for a time without enquiring my way, I
suddenly found myself back in the same street, where my
presence was now beginning to excite attention. I hurried
away once more, only to arrive by another détour at the same
place yet a third time. Now, however, a feeling overcame me
which I can only describe as uncanny, and I was glad
enough to find myself back at the piazza I had left a short
while before …
170

While Freud hints at the psychic origin of this “unintended reoccurrence
of the same situation,” he quickly moves on, referring the reader in a
footnote to Beyond the Pleasure Principle and ignoring the erotic
significance of the “painted women” in the compulsion that repeatedly
brought him back into their company. However, to the extent that the
“painted lady” is repressed (both in this anecdote and in Freud’s
theorization of the uncanny) in order to stress the “death instinct” over
the sexual drives, she will return with a vengeance in the works of
Surrealism, an anti-aesthetic art movement that came of age with
psychoanalysis and that compulsively explored the link between Eros
and Thannatos, often in the form of artificial women and imagery that
invoked the disarticulation of hysteria. Indeed, Freud’s experience in the

170
Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” 237.

171
Italian town was virtually recreated in 1938 at the height of the
movement at the International Exposition of Surrealism held in Paris,
which featured a network of dimly-lit streets populated by mannequins,
each outfitted by a different artist (with objects ranging from a bird cage
to a fisherman’s net) and standing near a street sign (all of which had
provocative names like “Lips Street” and “Blood Transfusions Street”), an
uncanny red-light district through which visitors were initially asked to
find their way in the dark with a flash light.
171

Although Freud attempted to close a Pandora’s Box by diverting
attention from the mechanical body, whether automaton or hysteric, he
opened another in his “discovery” of the automatic psychic processes
behind the compulsion to repeat. Just as the body of the
automaton/hysteric was losing her meaning—for she had been emptied
of demonic intrigue by Charcot and visual intrigue by the practice of
psychoanalysis—she was once again invested with an invisible force (the
repressed unconscious, whether her own or the projection of another)
inspiring a generation of artists and writers to make her a site/sight of
psychic exploration. André Breton, the founder of the Surrealist
movement, famously called hysteria “the greatest poetic discovery of the
nineteenth century,” for in its manifestations of psychic automatism he

171
Robert Belton, The Beribboned Bomb: The Image of Woman in Male Surrealist Art
(Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1995), 111.

172
saw not symptoms of pathology, but liberation, a means of expressing an
inner psychic reality that was superior to external reality. Thus, the
definition of surrealism offered by Breton in 1924, in the movement’s
first manifesto, was as follows:
SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by
which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the
written word, or in any other manner—the actual
functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence
of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any
aesthetic or moral concern.
172

The human mind has, according to Breton, been kept hostage by
rationality, logic, and commonsense, its imaginative capabilities
withering beneath the weight of convention and utility. However, within
Freudian psychoanalytic methods (especially his work on dreams) are the
seeds of a liberatory praxis.
Breton had first gained exposure to hysteria, as well as the
techniques of dream interpretation and free association, during World
War I, as a medical student interning in a series of neuropsychiatric
clinics under two former assistants of Charcot (Raoul Leroy and Joseph
Babinski) in the treatment of soldiers who had returned from battle. In
the same symptoms of “post-traumatic stress” that had inspired Freud’s
theory of the “death drive,” Breton detected a psychic (sur)reality, and in
those same techniques used to address the shock of war on the psyche

172
André Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism” in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard
Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1971).

173
and shepherd it back to normalcy, he intuited a system for shocking the
mind out of its normative conditioning and tapping into its imaginative
potential.
173
While Breton’s poetic interpretation and creative use of
psychoanalytic theory put surrealism at odds with Freud, as well as the
French School of Psychiatry as represented by Pierre Janet
174
, Breton gave
credit to Freud for bringing back to light “the most important aspect of
intellectual life” and grounded surrealist practice in the “psychic
automatism” of Janet.
175

The surrealists experimented with psychic automatism through a
variety of collaborative writing and drawing games, whose goal was to
bypass the mind and tap into the inner psyche, the results of which were
often nonsensical phrases or imagistic disarticulations that reproduced
the illogic of dreams and the physical disjuncture of hysteria (viewed as
analogues by the Surrealists). A favorite was called The Exquisite Corpse
and it was played by a group of people on a piece of paper. The first
person would compose part of a sentence or drawing, fold over the paper

173
Moreover, as Hal Foster notes, “whereas surrealism began with hypnotic sessions,
psychoanalysis commenced with the abandonment of hypnosis.” See Hal Foster,
Compulsive Beauty, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1997), 2.
174
Following a paper published in the Annales Medico-Psychologiques in which
psychiatrist Paul Abély condemned the attack on psychiatry (and the call for the
murder of psychiatrists) in Breton’s Nadja, Janet took part in a discussion at the
Société Médico-Psychologique, in which he decried the work of Surrealists as “above all
confessions of men obsessed, and men who doubt.” Both the paper and discussion are
reprinted at the beginning of the Second Manifesto of Surrealism as a kind of initiatory
prompt for the declarations that follow. See Breton, Second Manifesto of Surrealism
(1930) in Manifestoes of Surrealism, 119-123.
175
Janet’s L’Automatisme Psychologique was published in 1893. See Foster, 3, 1-5,
footnote 8, 221.

174
so that his contribution would be concealed from the next person, who
would add onto it, until all were finished and the paper was unfolded (see
figure 24). The collaborative and free-associative nature of the game held
great appeal for “holding the critical intellect in abeyance, and of fully
liberating the mind’s metaphorical activity.”
176
And the resulting figures—
disjointed hybrids that merged inanimate objects with parts of animals,
as well as female and male body parts, conjoined or mutated beyond
recognition—were extolled by Breton for their “total negation of the
ridiculous activity of imitation of physical characteristics,” as well as for
carrying “anthropomorphism to its climax.”
Reminiscent of the ASFRian “feminization of objects,” the
anthropomorphism enacted by the Exquisite Corpse was one of a series of
Surrealist interests—including dolls, mannequins, and the conjunction
of the human and the mechanical—that dovetail with ASFRian
proclivities, to which Breton gave the name convulsive beauty. At the end
of Nadja (the last line of which is: “beauty will be convulsive or it will not
be at all”), Breton links convulsive beauty to the trauma of a railway
accident, which (like war trauma) Freud discusses in relation to the
compulsion to repeat in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which results in a
jolt, shock, or “short circuit” that derails the rational mind. In L’Amour

176
Andre Breton, “Exquisite Corpse,” in Surrealism by Patrick Waldberg (New York:
McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1971), 95.

175

Figure 24. Exquisite Corpse

176
Fou (Mad Love), he elaborates on the concept (and the train analogy),
suggesting that the perfect illustration would be “a photograph of a very
handsome locomotive after it had been abandoned for many years to the
delirium of a virgin forest,” for “there can be beauty—convulsive beauty—
only at the price of the affirmation of the reciprocal relationship that
joins an object in movement to the same object in repose.”
177
At the heart
of convulsive beauty is a contradiction between animacy and inanimacy,
life and death, motion and stasis, which Hal Foster calls “the punctum of
the uncanny,” for its resemblance to the doubled and irreconcilable
aspect of photography described by Barthes.
The artist who took the disarticulated figure of convulsive beauty
even further than the Surrealists,
178
who was perhaps most responsible
for the surrealist fascination with mannequins, and whose work
intersects most blatantly with ASFRian proclivities is the German
surrealist associate Hans Bellmer (1902-1975), best known for his
photographed poupees or dolls. Bellmer drew an explicit connection
between his dolls and the uncanny, stating that a large part of their
inspiration was his attendance at Max Reinhardt’s 1932 production of
the Offenbach opera “Tales of Hoffmann,” in which the story of

177
Andre Breton, “Mad Love” (L’Amour Fou) in What is Surrealism? Selected Writings,
edited by Franklin Rosemont (New York: Monad Press, 1978), 162.
178
Bellmer is, in fact, generally discussed more in relation to the Sadeian materialism of
Georges Bataille, who invited him to illustrate his Story of the Eye (Histoire de l'oeil) in
1945.

177
Coppelia/Olympia from the “The Sandman” is recreated in the first act.
He began work on his first doll shortly thereafter, building its frame from
wood brooms and metal rods jointed with nuts and bolts and filled out
with flax fiber covered with plaster of paris. Throughout the doll’s
construction he took photographs, ten of which were included in a small
book that he published with his own money called Die Puppe, preceded
by a short introductory text entitled “Memories of a Doll Theme.” In the
winter of 1934-35, eighteen photographs appeared in a two-page spread
in the Surrealist journal Minotaure (see figure 25), launching his career
as an artist and his relationship with the surrealist movement. In these
images, the doll appears like a mannequin hopeful caught in an ongoing
state of arrested development between wholeness and dissolution,
adulthood and adolescence, her sad, partial figure splayed on a bed or
leaning against a wall and often posed against a backdrop of chiffon or
delicate lace. Bellmer told his biographer Peter Webb that his work on
the doll was not only a desire to return to the wonder of childhood, but
also a reflection of the pain and anxiety of adulthood, articulated through
a figure of erotic liberation. The resulting form of these psychic
crosscurrents was, as Webb stated:
… pregnant with riddles—not only riddles posed by
Hoffmann about the natural and artificial or the living and
the dead, but fresh, Bellmerian riddles about the states of
childhood and womanhood between which the doll is
indeterminately suspended. Bellmer conveyed both the

178

Figure 25. Bellmer's work in MINOTAURE

179
precocious sexuality of the child, already amply documented
by Freud, and the residue of childhood imagination and
longings in the adult. The effect is insidious and cruel, but …
the doll is simplicity itself.
179

Bellmer had wanted to allude to the internal or psychic nature of the
doll’s form through a kind of peep show embedded in her stomach.
Activated by a button on the left nipple, it was to display in succession
six miniature panoramas attached to a wooden disc (see figure 26), each
of which made visible “suppressed girlish thoughts.”
180
Although the peep
show was never implemented, Bellmer’s desire to produce a figure
capable of articulating the gravity-defying permutations of the
unconscious was more fully realized through a second doll, completed in
1935. Inspiration came in the form of a pair of 16
th
century wooden
figures, each about eight-inches tall, that he and Lotte Pritzel
181
discovered in the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin.

Used by artists as
aids to study human proportions and movement (similar to the wooden
figures that artists still use today), they could be manipulated to a high
degree since every body part, from limbs to neck and torso, were
assembled around carefully crafted ball joints. Using them as a guide,
Bellmer produced wooden ball joints around which he arranged a new

179
Peter Webb, Death, Desire & The Doll: The Life and Art of Hans Bellmer (Washington,
DC: Solar Books, 2004), 35.
180
From “Memories of the Doll Theme” (1934) reprinted in Therese Lichtenstein, Behind
Closed Doors, 174.
181
Lotte Pritzel (1887-1952) was a German artist best known for her wax dolls, which
served as inspiration for Rainer Maria Rilke’s essay, Puppen.

180

Figure 26. Peep-show diagram for the first doll

181
set of interchangeable and multiplied limbs and breasts. Unlike the first
doll, the second was less a construction than what Rosalind Krauss has
called “construction as dismemberment,” an endlessly transformable
configuration of discombobulated body parts, which Bellmer
photographed in more naturalistic settings, both domestic and outdoors.
Some of the more provocative images involve two sets of thighs and legs
attached to the same torso, from which the upper body and head is
missing (see figure 27). The uncanny doubling of limbs that are often
contorted or flailing convey both the disarticulation and convulsive
visuality of hysteria, in which Bellmer like many Surrealists was
fascinated.
Bellmer elaborates on the connection between the dolls and
hysteria in his Little Anatomy of the Physical Unconscious or The Anatomy
of the Image, a book of essays that serves as a theoretical and poetic
counterpart to his work. The book translates the Freudian interpretation
of hysteria as the physical migration of displaced psychic trauma into a
theory of desire, particularly as expressed and transformed through the
kinds of physical disarticulations made possible by the image, which he
compares to such word games as anagrams and palindromes (in an oft-
quoted comment about the analogy between what he calls the “doll
games” and word games, he states: “the body is comparable to a

182

Figure 27. Ball-jointed Doll

183
sentence that invites you to disarticulate it.”
182
) In a lengthy passage
worth quoting for the way in which it eroticizes the shock associated with
the uncanny, as well as the psychic bruising of Barthes’s photographic
punctum, Bellmer suggests that:
… desire takes its point of departure, when concerning the
intensity of its images, not from a perceptive whole but from
details. If a naked hand unexpectedly emerges from a pair of
pants in place of a foot, it is provocative of quite another
degree of reality and—like an embarrassing stain on the edge
of one’s underwear—infinitely more powerful than an entirely
visible woman, it hardly matters, for the moment, whether
this efficacy can be attributed to the surprise of discovering a
deceptive aspect of desire, anticipated souvenirs, or even
some reference to dark knowledge. The main thing is to
retain from the monstrous dictionary of analogies/
antagonisms, which constitute the dictionary of the image, is
that any given detail, such as a leg, is perceptible, accessible
to memory, and available, (in short is REAL), only if desire
does not fatally take it for a leg. The object identical to itself
remains devoid of reality.
183

In locating the REAL within visual deformation and substitution, Bellmer
is asserting the Reality of what Lacan calls the “fragmented body” over
the Ideal-I of the subject constituted through the “mirror stage.” The
mirror stage is, according to Lacan, precipitated when the infant, who
has yet to gain full mastery of its body, identifies its “self” within a mirror
image through which it appears whole, integrated, and individual. The
exteriorized double represented in the mirror becomes the misplaced site

182
Hans Bellmer, Little Anatomy of the Physical Unconscious or The Anatomy of the Image,
translated by Jon Graham (Waterbury Center: Dominion Press, 2004), 37-38.
183
Bellmer, 31

184
of “self” identification, whose Gestalt opposes the heterogeneous flux of
the body, launching:
… the mental permanence of the I, at the same time as it
prefigures its alienating destination; it is still pregnant with
the correspondences that unite the I with the statue in which
man projects himself, with the phantoms that dominate him,
or with the automaton in which, in an ambiguous relation
the world of his own making tends to find completion
(emphasis added).
184

Bellmer’s dolls both reflect and reverse the process by which the
“automaton” of the “mirror stage” is constructed through an uncanny
doubling that invokes the “fragmented body,” retained, according to
Lacan, in dreams, as well as “the lines of ‘fragilization’ that define the
anatomy of phantasy, as exhibited in the schizoid and spasmodic
symptoms of hysteria.”
185
This gesture of derealization is made manifest
in one of Bellmer’s photographs (see figure 28) in which the doll,
appearing as two sets of legs inversed and attached to the same torso,
each outfitted like a young girl in mary janes and bobby socks, lies
sprawled in front of a mirror, one set of legs braced against the wall and
mirror, the other seemingly in the midst of kicking as if in a temper
tantrum or epileptic fit. Visible in the mirror against which the doll is
leaning is an amorphous jumble of parts that has no correspondence to
the body it is reflecting. Played out within the conflicted doubling of the

184
Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage” in Écrits: A Selection (New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 1977), 2-3.
185
Lacan, 5.

185

Figure 28. The Mirror Stage

186
doll and its disjointed reflection is an attempt at acknowledging and
reincorporating what Julia Kristeva has called the “abject,” that which
opposes the I, whose amputation results simultaneously in the subject’s
constitution and expulsion. If the self is launched through the process of
a projection that serves as a unified, if alienated, front for a lost somatic
experience, Bellmer attempts to recuperate that which has been lost
through the visceral assault of the fractured image, an act of effacement
whose aim is recognition.
Bellmer’s relentless mapping of his own “physical unconscious,”
enacted in defiance of a symbolic order that draws distinctions between
self and other, as well as inside and outside, complicates any
understanding of the dolls as autonomous objects. Nevertheless, there
remains the nagging question of how to read the (often sadistic)
manipulation of the female figure, a question that has garnered intense
psychological scrutiny.
186
For example, Andrew Brink, who reads
Bellmer’s work through the lens of attachment theory, concludes that “it
represents a “false solution to his troubles, arising from gynocentric
combined with gynophobic fantasies generated unawares in childhood
and made manifest with acquired artistic skills”
187
and that its

186
See in particular Sue Taylor, Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Desire (Cambridge: The
MIT Press, 2000).
187
Andrew Brink, “Hans Bellmer’s Sacrificial Dolls” in Desire and Avoidance in Art (New
York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2007), 78.

187
unmitigated display of pathology overwhelms whatever artistic value it
might otherwise have. Although others echo Brink’s views, it is difficult
to trace a definitive line from Bellmer’s imagery to his views of women.
While he had a series of ill-fated marriages (his first wife died young of
tuberculosis, his marriage to his second wife ended in a bitter divorce,
and his third wife, the artist and writer Unica Zurn, committed suicide),
there is, in fact, little circumstantial evidence of gynophobia or misogyny
outside of his artwork (Bellmer was a devoted partner to his first and
third wives and a loving son to his mother). On the other hand, Bellmer
had ongoing difficulties throughout his life with partriarchal authority,
starting with his abusive engineer father who was a Nazi sympathizer
and whose tyrannical authority Bellmer would associate with the Third
Reich. Bellmer himself suggests that there is a connection between his
early hatred of the patriarchal order and his assault on the symbolic via
the dolls.
Both Therese Lichtenstein and Hal Foster insist that the cultural
and historical context of fascism is necessary to any reading of Bellmer’s
work. Bellmer’s first doll was constructed in 1933, the year that the
Nazis came to power in Germany. At the time, Bellmer owned an
advertising and design agency. However, he closed down shop, in the fear
of inadvertently creating work that would in some way benefit the

188
government and devoted himself entirely to artwork that, according to
Lichtenstein, was produced, in large part, as a protest against the cult of
the perfect body within fascism, as well as the more general appearance
of a mechanized, spectacularized, and “feminized” mass culture.”
188

Indeed, the endless recombinatory partiality of a doll that is a stand-in
for a mass-produced mannequin becomes a transgressive act towards a
cultural imaginary that, at the time, gravitated not only towards the
classical nude, but also the kind of choreographed displays of live bodies
dubbed by Siegfried Kracauer as “the mass ornament,” typified by the
regimented parades of S.S. guards at Nazi Party rallies. Against the
idealized and stereotyped body, Bellmer pits a convulsively mutating
figure that breaches the boundaries between internal and external
policed by the Nazis. Like the Exquisite Corpse, Bellmer’s dolls defied the
rational and social order with an anatomical projection of internal
processes, a physical map of the convolutions of the psyche and the
rhizomatic workings of desire, free from outside control. However, they
also embodied the psychological tensions and displacements experienced
under the social constraints of the Nazi party. Indeed, Bellmer suggests
in his Little Anatomy that, as in hysteria, the greater the repression, the
more convoluted the expression, and thus the dolls not only represent
the promiscuity or “flow” of desire, but also the psychic distortions of a

188
Lichtenstein, 13.

189
desire caught between inner longing and external forces. As Bellmer
would state, “The origin of that part of my work that scandalizes is the
fact that for me the world is a scandal.”
189
There is, then, both a self-
reflexivity and social critique at work in Bellmer’s poupees; indeed, he
seems to pose an unflinching self-reflexivity as a form of social critique.
Thus, as Rosalind Krauss suggests, to the extent that the dolls are
fetishistic, an artificial monument erected in place of an absence, they
are also a reflection (and shattering) of the “automaton” in the mirror, the
monument that we erect in place of the amputated self, through which
the world is constructed:
Surrealist photography does not admit of the natural, as
opposed to the cultural or made. And so all of what it looks
at is seen as if already, and always, constructed, through a
strange transposition of this thing into a different register.
We see the object by means of an act of displacement,
defined through a gesture of substitution. The object,
“straight” or manipulated, is always manipulated, and thus
always appears as a fetish.
190

Foster, on the other hand, suggests that something more than fetishism
is at work in the poupees. As he notes, unlike the fetish object (or at least
the way in which it has been interpreted), they don’t disguise sexual
difference, but explore it obsessively, and they don’t hide the effects of
their own production, as in the Marxist account of fetishism, but flaunt it

189
Quoted in Constantin Jelenski, “Introduction” to Hans Bellmer, edited by Alex Grall
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1966).
190
Rosalind Krauss, “Corpus Delicti” in October, Vol. 33, (Summer, 1985), 69.

190
repetitively. “Moreover, the notion of a ‘dictionary of analogues-
antagonisms’ does not imply a fixing of desire (as in the Freudian
account of fetishism); rather its shifting drives the many recombinations
of the dolls.”
191
To put it another way, while the fetishistic relationship
requires a subject and an object of visual fascination, the dolls
undermine the stability of the object and attempt to expose the
mechanisms by which it is constituted as separate from the subject.
For those who cannot help but see the dolls as sadistic, Hal Foster
suggests that a distinction should be made between sadism and the
representation of sadism. In similar fashion, I would suggest that the
dolls not be viewed as the amputation of the female body so much as the
recognition of amputation. Such a distinction is, hopefully, clarified by
drawing a comparison between the work of Bellmer (or the fantasies of
ASFR) and the classical nude in western art and, in particular, to the
presentation of the Venus de Milo, a statue discussed by prominent
disability studies scholar Lennerd J. Davis in relation to physical
difference. Davis comments on the way in which the amputated and
disfigured state of the Venus is ignored or repressed by art historians in
order to maintain its status as an object of desire. Moreover, Davis
suggests that the contingency of desire on the object’s wholeness is
based on the way in which the subject is constituted in relation to the

191
Foster, 103.

191
fragmentary nature of his own body. Davis reads the subject’s encounter
with the mutilated statue through Lacan’s “mirror stage.” As Davis puts
it:
… the specular moment between the armored, unified self
and its repressed double—the fragmented body—is
characterized by a kind of death work, a repetition
compulsion in which the unified self continuously sees itself
undone—castrated, mutilated, perforated, made partial.
192

It is, indeed, this sort of death work in which Bellmer peddles, according
to Hal Foster. His dolls “go beyond (or is it inside?) sadistic mastery to
the point where the masculine subject confronts his greatest fear: his
own fragmentation, disintegration, and dissolution. And yet this is also
his greatest wish.”
193
As Bellmer stated, “all dreams return again to the
only remaining instinct, to escape from the outline of the self.”
194
This is
neither the wish nor the traditional function of classical aesthetics, in
which the sexual drives are sublimated and pleasure is courted through
“the reconciliation of contrary modes of experience.” Bellmer’s dolls are a
desublimatory assault on the normative, stable and cohesive subject,
and in particular the psychic armoring of the fascist body by which the
fragmentary, fluid, and chaotic drives are repressed, abjected, and
mapped onto the OTHER, represented in the case of the Nazis by women,

192
Lennerd J. Davis, “Nude Venuses, Medusa’s Body and Phantom Limbs” in The
Disability Studies Reader, 2
nd
Edition (New York: Routledge, 2006) 61.
193
Foster, 109.
194
Quoted in Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty, 109.

192
Jews, homosexuals, and Communists. In other words, this is not the
curious gaze of the spectator, who aestheticizes the abject in order to
keep it at a distance, a gaze courted by both Charcot and Barnum. It is
the curious gaze of Pandora who opens the box and experiences the
vertigo or her own true nature (as does Nathanael when the automaton is
revealed as not just a mechanical object, but an extension of the
mechanical compulsions of his own psyche).
I Robot

When I asked the ASFRians that I interviewed which movies or television
shows spoke most directly to their fetish, many mentioned an episode
from the first season of the Twilight Zone called “The Lonely” (1959). The
story takes place in the year 2046 on a barren and desolate asteroid nine
million miles from earth, which serves as solitary confinement for a
convicted criminal named James A. Corry. When the episode opens, a
supply ship, which makes occasional visits to the planet, is arriving and
the captain, who has taken pity on the isolated prisoner, has left behind
a box that he instructs Corry not to open until after the ship has
departed. When Corry does open it, he finds a lifelike female android
named Alicia, programmed to keep him company. He is at first appalled
and wants nothing to do with her, but (in similar fashion to Tom Hanks’s
character in the film Castaway, who becomes intimately involved with a

193
volleyball), his need for companionship prevails and he starts to forget
her mechanical nature and eventually to fall in love with her. The next
time the supply ship arrives, the captain informs Corry that he has been
pardoned and can return home immediately. But as the prisoner rushes
excitedly towards the ship with his companion, the captain informs him
that there is not enough room for the robot. Corry argues with him,
insisting that Alicia is not a robot but a woman, HIS woman, and in
order to wake him up to reality, the captain pulls out his gun and shoots
her in the face. In the final scene, Alicia breaks down; her calls for Corry
get slower and s-l-o-w-e-r, like a record on the wrong speed, as broken
circuitry and loose wiring shoot off a few last sparks of life through the
hole where her face once was (see figure 29).
“The Lonely” is one of the few media examples with which I’m
familiar that appeals to ASFRians not just visually, but narratively. As in
“The Sandman,” the revelation of the female robot’s mechanical nature is
simultaneously a revelation of the central protagonist’s psychological
programming, i.e., the need for love and companionship that made him
forget that his lover was not human. It is, in fact, the reminder or
awakening to the programmatic nature of human need and sociality that
lays at the core of ASFRian fantasy, which is ultimately, I would argue,
less grounded in female objectification and the hypostasis of normative

194

Figure 29. "The Lonely"

195
gender ideals, than the subversion of normative desire. After all, if
normative gender roles are typified by women acting like Stepford Wives
who cheerfully and mindlessly engage in sexual and domestic servitude
towards men, then the ultimate rebellion would be to short-circuit one of
them so that she malfunctions. Indeed, in the film Stepford Wives, such
moments are offered as a feminist commentary on the extent to which
real women (and men) have been socially programmed, and a connection
is made in particular, between the domestic scripting of women and
television advertising (many of the Stepford Wives speak as though
they’re actresses in commercials for household products). Similarly, the
robot female is, I believe, for ASFRians, a metaphor for social
programming and her breakdown a symbol of resistance, as hysteria
once was for the surrealists.
Most of the ASFRians that I interviewed came of age in the 1960s,
70s, and 80s, and while their fetish is a product of television shows like
Star Trek, Outer Limits, and the Twilight Zone, it is also a reaction to a
historical and cultural moment in which mass consciousness was
shaped by the centralizing force of television programming and
advertising. Indeed, if the medium of television tends to codify normative
social rules and behaviors, then science fiction stands out as a site at
which the normal rules are suspended and other worlds are imagined

196
that, in many cases, serve as a critique of and an alternative to the
conventions of our own world.
That which seems to unite many of the men I met is a highly
developed internalized gaze and therefore an unusual degree of self-
reflexivity combined with social awkwardness and difficulty reading
social cues.
195
For these men, puberty was an unusually fraught time
during which they felt both confused by and compelled to conform to the
rules of social engagement. The female robot represents for ASFRians the
promise of a simplified playing field in which the rules of the game are
programmed in advance, thus sidestepping social politics and
eliminating the anxiety of making social mistakes. However, within that
simplified playing field, ASFRians imagine endless concatenations of
possible moves, the erotic locus of which are moments of tension and
rupture between opposite states—the human and the artificial, control
and loss of control. And such rupture is, I would argue, a metaphor for
and a condensation of the eruptive effects of adolescent desire on the
socially regulated body. It is a kind of re-enactment of the tension

195
It occurred to me more than once that ASFR might be related to a mild form of
Asperger Syndrome. I was, therefore, not surprised when I read a passage in Katherine
Gates’s book in which she explains the appeal of the android Data on Star Trek: The
Next Generation (whom she claims has gotten more erotic mail than any other Star Trek
character; Spock comes in second) for a female ASFRian that she interviewed (one of the
few I’ve ever heard about) by referencing the autistic slaughterhouse designer and
author of Thinking in Pictures, Temple Grandin, who also: “feels close to him [Data] in
his clumsy efforts to perform like a human, and in his urge to sort out the mystifyingly
inconsistent rules of human social behavior.” See Gates, 228.

197
between biological and social programming, the chaotic flux of inner
experience and the unified, controlled (and, for adolescents, “cool”) self as
mandated by the social order, and it is ultimately an attempt at their
reconciliation. Like Hans Bellmer, who described his continual
rearranging of body parts as the “doll games,” ASFRians engage in robot
play as a way of addressing an internal anxiety in relation to external
dictates, as well as giving free reign to erotic impulses that threaten
hierarchical and socially enforced boundaries between such categories as
self and other, nature and culture, and even male and female. As
Katherine Gates point out, ASFRians tend to be more interested in “robot
play” in general than in “who gets to be the robot”; most are as interested
in acting like robots themselves as in the idea of a robotic companion.
196

On a personal note

Coincidentally, while I was in the middle of writing this chapter, one of
the ASFRians that I interviewed for my documentary, with whom I’ve
remained close, asked if I would do him a large favor. He was living with
a woman to whom he had recently gotten engaged, and from whom he
had been hiding his fetish, insisting that he would eventually tell her
“when the time was right.” However, she had found some of his ASFR
paraphernalia in a closet and waved it in front of him yelling, “I don’t

196
One might make a similar point about Bellmer, who was a cross dresser. See, in
particular, Lichtenstein, “The Hermaphrodite in Me” in Behind Closed Doors, 47-104.

198
know what this is and I don’t want to know!” He was scared for their
relationship and deeply embarrassed, however he realized that he could
no longer hide from her such a large part of himself. But before he
attempted to tell her, he wondered if I would be willing to sit in private
with him and have a conversation about his fetish — while we were both
wearing silver PVC.
197
Although the idea made me uncomfortable, I
decided that it was an opportunity to get off the armchair in which I had
been thinking about ASFR and get a different perspective. So I agreed
and we did; we sat in chairs facing one other, each in the gleaming silver
outfits that he had bought for the occasion. The first thing he said to me,
almost apologetically was, “this is me” and then “how does that make you
feel?” I tried to be as honest as I could (for what were likely gendered
reasons, I felt stranger about his silver outfit than my own). We talked
about his fetish for over an hour, and I ran by him some of the “theories”
I had about it. And, as I began to feel more comfortable about having a
largely therapeutic conversation in “costume” I began to see that the
silver that we were each wearing was a reminder for him, as he listened
to me describe what his fetish made me think and feel, that there was
still something essential, beyond gender or any other outward markers,
that made us the same (in the same way that pointy ears signify a

197
Polyvinyl chloride, which has, of late, been used in a great deal of costuming and
erotic wear.

199
distinct species on Star Trek) and that knowing this helped him face the
fear of confronting his own difference (on many levels, but in particular,
the extent to which his fetish marks him as Other). And while, even as I
write this, I cannot help but imagine the many ways in which one might
pathologize his need for non-differentiation and the behavior that it
engenders, I came to the realization that, like Pandora, I was attempting
to understand the uncanniness of ASFR because in its desire for
uncovering what is essentially human beneath the mask of appearances,
I see aspects of myself.

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Chapter Three
The Subtle Apparatus

The most advanced “sexual android” in the world, the Andybot, is
currently in development in Nuremberg, Germany by a man who refers to
himself as, simply, The Creator, a moniker that gestures ironically
towards Germany’s legacy of “mad scientists” while also ensuring his
anonymity. What makes the Andybot unique, indeed astounding, is the
way that she moves. Before visiting the Creator, I had already seen
prototypes of silicone lovedolls capable of “pelvic motion” at two other
doll companies in the United States; one was even hooked up to a
controller box with five pre-sets for changing its speed, not unlike those
found on a Stairmaster. However, in each case, the movement was a
strictly forward and backward affair that was mechanical and
unwavering (and in the case of the Stairmaster doll, frighteningly violent),
accompanied by the distracting sound of the powering motor. Each was a
long way from being ready for market. The Creator, however, was (even at
the time I met him, which is now years ago) already selling dolls capable

201
of movement. When I visited his lab, although there was no fully
assembled motion-enabled doll available, he demonstrated for me a
series of motorized doll parts: a foot that moved up and down as if
keeping time, a head that craned forwards and backwards (which he
proudly called das blowjob modell), and a gyrating torso that he
compared to a bellydancer. Although the net effect of these separate
moving parts was both creepy and campy, less Frankenstein than
Frankenhooker, it was the torso that got to me. Missing a head and limbs
(but equipped with everything essential to a sex doll) it moved in silent,
fluid, circular waves. It was simultaneously captivating and disturbing,
for although it embodied a living impossibility, it was the most erotic
humanoid object I’d ever seen. The Creator had managed, through
motion, to imbue an amputated figure with a lifelike quality, the essence
of something organic, that eluded the other dollmakers and this, in itself,
made him deserving of his self-assigned title.
Part of the mystique of the Creator’s work, to which he contributes
by wearing dark sunglasses and speaking about his dolls in quasi-
mystical terms, is the cultural history of Nuremberg. Two important
landmarks of this quaint Bavarian town, both of which I visited while
there, are the Toy Museum at its center and The Documentation Centre

202
Party Rally Grounds
198
on its outskirts. Their connection was made
apparent to me in one of the displays at the toy museum, which (as I
recall) was room-sized and recreated the scene of a town that included a
military center with soldiers, trains, automobiles, armaments, etc., all
constructed to realistic perfection. I remember thinking, “My god, it’s a
miniaturized version of the Third Reich!” I would later learn that the “tin
soldier” was invented in Nuremberg, a fact that conjures a range of
questions about the relationship between mechanical movement and
militarism, made even more pointed by the fate of many Nuremberg
toymakers (particularly metal toymakers) during World War II, who were
forced to shut down production in order to serve the Nazi war effort, so
that (I imagine) some were helping to create life-sized versions of what
they had previously produced in miniature.
Up until World War II, Germany had dominated the toy market
(after which, they were supplanted by the U.S. and Japan), and
Nuremberg, in particular, was the center of toymaking in Europe for
hundreds of years (today, it still hosts the world’s largest international
toy fair). Although it is still known for its wooden toys, a tradition that
dates back to the fifteenth century, part of its reputation has always

198
Opened in 2001 on the site of the unfinished remains of the Congress Hall of the
former Nazi party rallies, the Documentation Center, aside from offering a chronological
history of Nuremberg’s role in German National Socialism, including the post-war
Nuremberg trials, includes a permanent exhibit, “Fascination and Terror,” which
examines “the causes, context, and consequences” of the Nazi Party.

203
been its unparalleled genius for producing toys that move. Early
“dockenmacher” (doll makers) fashioned figures from wood with moving
parts and later incorporated clockwork mechanisms.
199
The first
automata in human form is believed to have been built in Nuremberg in
the mid-sixteenth century. The country’s proliferation of mechanical
objects, as well as the more complex automata that they prefigured,
served as inspiration for a generation of romantic writers, including
Hoffmann, Poe, Balzac, Mérimée, and Shelley, who concocted tales
around the creation of artificial life (most of it gendered female). Many of
these mechanical objects are on display at the museum along with an
extraordinary range of moving metal toys: carriages, animals and circus
performers, as well as larger assemblages, like merry-go-rounds and
ferris wheels, and proto-cinematic optical toys like the zoetrope and
praxinoscope. Such a display supports the argument, made by Michelle
Bloom, that the “Pygmalionesque desire” for the animation of the
inanimate may be traced through the literature of the nineteenth century
to its culmination in the “illusion of movement” within cinema.
200

199
The articulated doll that inspired Hans Bellmer’s ball jointed doll, mentioned in the
previous chapter, has been described as a Dürer-era wooden artist's mannequin;
Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) was a Nuremberg artist, printmaker, and theorist who,
among other things, produced extraordinarily complex woodcuts that helped
revolutionize the medium.
200
See Michelle Bloom, “Pygmalionesque Delusions and Illusions of Movement:
Animation from Hoffmann to Truffaut” in Comparative Literature, Vol. 52, No. 4
(Autumn, 2000), 291-320.

204
In this chapter, I follow this trajectory, albeit with an eye towards
movement and the force that animates it. In particular, I attempt to trace
a line from early automata to the cinematic that accounts for both the
organic movement of Andybot’s gyrating hips and the mechanical
parades of Nazi soldiers, mapping out their point of intersection. There
has, of course, long been a sexual undercurrent to Nazism, linked to its
association with both slavery and mind control, as well as a series of
(likely apocryphal) stories of their attempts to produce sex dolls.
According to one story, Hitler ordered the production of what would have
been the world’s first blow-up sex doll in 1941. The plan, which was to
be carried out by S.S. commander Heinrich Himmler (whom we do know
organized brothels in concentration camps as incentive for camp
laborers), was to create an Aryan surrogate that would help relieve
soldiers on the front lines who might otherwise cave in to temptation by
prostitutes or, worse, “foreign women.” However, the plan was never
realized because the Dresden production factory was bombed by the
Allies.
201
It is, however, not the verity or falsehood of these salacious tales
that interests me, but the way in which the artificial female body (real or
imaginary) becomes a conduit for what Klaus Theweleit in his book Male

201
A related story claims that, under Nazi orders, a team of craftsmen from Germany's
Hygiene Museum in Dresden worked on the “Borghild Project” to produce a realistic
Aryan “galvanoplastical” sex doll. While the story has largely been dismissed as a hoax,
the Creator claims that the bronze molds have been found and that he will use them to
create another model of the Andybot.

205
Fantasies calls (in the manner of Deleuze and Guattari) “flows” of desire.
Theweleit argues that the body of the male fascist (particularly within the
Freikorps, the proto-fascist paramilitary group that helped shape, and in
many instances run, the Nazi war effort) was constituted in relation to
the fear of the boundary-dissolving flows, “oceans” and “floods”
associated (in particular) with female sexuality, which it resisted through
both psychic and physical hardening (what Wilhelm Reich, from whose
work he also draws, calls “character armor”). Within such an imaginary,
a female sex doll would seem to be the perfect vessel for both release and
protection against the threat of contamination. However, and this is the
thrust of my argument, the female android, particularly within German
romantic literature and expressionist cinema leading up to the Third
Reich, served as an instrument for the psychic and physical dissolution
of the male ego (as well as for exploring themes that, in many ways,
anticipate Hitler’s rise to power). And to help begin exploring this
somewhat contradictory idea, I’m going to turn to a short, but influential,
essay of which I was reminded while looking at the Creator’s swiveling
torso.
Published in 1810 in the Berliner Abendblatter (for which its author
was an editor), “On the Marionette Theater” (Über das Marionettentheater)
by German dramatist, Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811), was written at

206
the height of the human automaton’s popularity, and it argues the case
for the anti-realistic puppet over the mechanical human that attempts
mimesis. The essay is comprised entirely of a conversation between a
first-person narrator and Herr C _____, a one-time principal dancer in the
local opera company. Herr C______ explains to the narrator the unique
pleasure of the puppets in the puppet theater at the local market, which
he believes have something to teach a dancer like himself. Since puppets
at that time were considered a “low” form of entertainment, geared at
children and the unsophisticated populace, the narrator expresses
surprise that his friend would find redeeming qualities in them. Herr
C_____ explains their appeal by suggesting that the movements of the
puppet each have a center of gravity that, when moved in a straight line,
cause the puppet’s limbs to describe curves:
In fact, the movements of [the mechanic’s] fingers are
related to the movements of the puppets attached to them
somewhat like numbers to their logarithms or the
asymptote to the hyperbola.
202

Ultimately, what Herr C______ will suggest with his mathematical
analogies is that puppets achieve a kind of divine geometry—for the lines
of their center of gravity are “something very mysterious ... nothing other

202
Heinrich von Kleist, “On the Marionette Theater” in ZONE: Fragments for a History of
the Human Body, Part One, ed. Michel Feher, (New York: Urzone, 1989), 416

207
than the path of the dancer’s soul”—as well as a “grace” of which human
dancers are incapable “since we have eaten of the tree of knowledge.”
203

He goes on to explain that not only are puppets antigravitational,
for they rarely touch the ground, but that they are unafflicted by the self-
consciousness or affectation that weighs down or unbalances the
movements of the human body. He ends his argument (and Kleist’s
essay) with a story about how once, after winning a fencing match with a
skilled, if affected, fencer, he was then outmaneuvered by a bear that the
fencer had trained. This leads to his and the essay’s final conclusion:
We see that in the organic world, to the extent that
reflection grows dimmer and weaker, the grace therein
becomes more brilliant and powerful. Yet, just as the
intersection of two lines on one side of a point suddenly
appears again on the other side after passing through the
infinite; or the image in a concave mirror, after receding
into the infinite, suddenly resurfaces close before us—
grace likewise reappears when knowledge has passed
through the infinite, so that it appears purest
simultaneously in the human body that has either none
at all or else infinite consciousness—that is, in the puppet
or in the god.
204

The comparison between the puppet and the god in Kleist’s essay is, as
Harold Segel puts it, “a product of a cohering Romantic
Weltanshauung,”
205
which posits both the creative and spiritual
superiority of unconscious, intuitive, and internally-motivated

203
Kleist, 416.
204
Kleist, 420
205
Harold Segel, Pinocchio’s Progeny: Puppets, Marionettes, Automatons, and Robots in
Modernist and Avant-Garde Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995),
14

208
spontaneity over the conscious and rational mind and its attendant
movements. The essay inspired many Romantic writers (including E.T.A.
Hoffman, whose story involving a female automaton, “The Sandman,”
was published only six years later) to draw an association between the
mechanical body and a spontaneity (that drew simultaneously from the
unconscious and divine inspiration) that was pitted against both the
rational and social order. However, Kleist’s valorization (in this and other
stories) of nature (as well as folk traditions) over culture, coupled with
his nationalism, would later earn him a reputation, among some, as a
proto-fascist writer, and one can detect a similarity between the
geometrical sweep of Kleist’s unconscious puppet and the parades of
Nazi bodies that were choreographed like toy soldiers in the formations
that graced the fields of the Nazi Party Rallies.
How does the puppet or automaton—and, in particular, the
mechanical female descendents of Kleist’s puppet within the German
romantic imaginary—simultaneously embody the organic and
mechanical, nature and culture, psychic dissolution and psychic/
physical armoring, spontaneity and regimentation, freedom and control?
These are some of the contradictions that I hope to address in this
chapter (in which I am, admittedly, biting off more than I can chew) by

209
tracing historically the “flows” for which its body would serve as a
conduit. And I will begin at the beginning …
Pneumatica

The earliest humanoids were spiritual objects. In his “impressionistic
survey” of the history of the automaton, Jean-Claude Beaune dubs them
mythical automata, whose relationship “with the cosmos, with the totality
of things” is the basis of a “primordial ambiguity” that serves as an
undercurrent to “the whole realm of technology.” The mythical
automaton is superceded, according to Beaune, by the “mechanistic
automaton (from the Renaissance to the first machine-tools), an attempt
to dissect and copy the human body and the body of other living
creatures.” With the industrial revolution came the mechanical
automaton, which “groups together concentrations of machines,
workshops, and factories, in accordance with very inflexible rules.”
206

For Beaune, the mechanistic automaton is an intersecting point
between the speaking statues of the Egyptian temples, invested with ka,
and the machines of the industrial revolution, emptied of humanity,
which either replace human beings or force them to conform to the
mechanical rhythms of industry. However Daniel Tiffany in the book Toy
Medium complicates this basic chronology by breaking down the moment

206
Jean-Claude Beaune, “The Classical Age of Automata: An Impressionistic Survey
from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century” in ZONE: Fragments for a History of the
Human Body, Part One, ed. Michel Feher, (New York: Urzone, 1989), 433-434.

210
of intersection into pre- and post-mechanistic eras, or what we might call
more broadly the philosophical toys of the Renaissance and the
mechanistic humans of the Enlightenment. According to Tiffany, the
automata of the Renaissance must be understood within a poetic setting,
in particular, that of philosophical (as opposed to scientific) materialism.
They are, in fact, the primary example that he offers of the subject of his
book, “materia poetica” or “lyric substance,” phenomena that exist
somewhere between the material and immaterial, reality and the
imagination.
According to Tiffany, early automata were the equivalent of the
poetic trope or a visual model within physics (both of which he is,
ultimately, interested in comparing to one another), a means of making
the intangible tangible. Their popularity during the Renaissance was, in
large part, inspired by a revival of Greek culture and philosophy,
particularly the writings of Ctesibios, Philon, Epicurus and Hero (or
Heron), which had been preserved in the works of the Arabs and
Byzantines and translated first into Latin and then Italian and German
by Renaissance humanists.
207
These men were the builders of the first
automata, a word derived from the Greek automatos, meaning “to act of

207
Silvio Bedini, “The Role of Automata in the History of Technology” in Technology and
Culture 5, no. 1 (Winter 1964), 25.

211
one’s own will.”
208
Their writings inspired a renewed interest in
mechanical objects, as well as the Greek and Roman myths (Pygmalion,
in particular, was quite popular during the Renaissance). A work that
was particularly influential was Hero’s Pneumatica, a guide to the
philosophy behind and schematics of numerous machines powered by
air, water, and steam, which inspired a great proliferation of mechanical
objects and pleasure gardens that made use of the principles of
hydraulics and pneumatics.
209

Along with this wealth of new cultural knowledge came the
philosophy of atomism—founded on the idea that all of material
existence and corporeality is composed of infinitesimal and irreducible
particles. It was philosophical atomism in particular—which combined a
physical doctrine of invisible matter with a practice of mechanical
“proofs”—for which the automaton would become the corporeal
manifestation. A key element of Heronic atomism, and Hellenized Egypt
in general was, according to Victoria Nelson, a micro/macrocosmic view
of the world in which there was no division between organic and
inorganic, or between sensible and invisible. Humans resided in the

208
The first recorded automaton in history was a singing blackbird built by Ctesibios of
Alexandria in the third century B.C.
209
According to Victoria Nelson, “One Heidelberg grotto of the early seventeenth century
featured an elaborate mechanism—an automated Galatea moving back and forth on the
waves before the giant Polyphemus—that its creator, Salomon de Caus, had modeled
after instructions provided in Hero’s Pneumatica.” See Victoria Nelson, 50.

212
microcosm, the physical world that reflected the divine macrocosm, as
did human-like objects:
If all things in the material world are simulacra of the true
World of Forms, then statues and people alike (and
especially statues if they took the shape of humans) acted
not just as passive vessels but as magnets to the energies of
the higher world, drawing down the gods’ powers and
materially embodying them.
210

These ideas would inflect those of mechanical philosophy, albeit in more
mechanistic terms, giving rise to the belief that everything, from the
microcosm to the macrocosm, was composed of subtle physical matter
(what Newton would call “aether” and link to such forces as gravity,
magnetism, and electricity). Early automata or pneumatica must be
understood, according to Tiffany, within this context, as visual indicators
of the imponderable processes of subtle matter, whose intention was less
a mimetic representation of the body than an evocation of invisible
forces:
…the automaton, as an emblem of mechanical philosophy,
stands for a conception of matter (atomism) that is
irremediably hypothetical in its dependence on
unsubstantiated pictures. In the hands of science, the
automaton—little more than an ingenious toy—symbolizes a
conception of materiality founded on immateriality, a
discourse of bodies whose sole reality is the invisible
corpuscles of which they are composed.
211

210
Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2001), 32-33.
211
Daniel Tiffany, Toy Medium: Materialism and the Modern Lyric (Berkeley: The
University of California Press, 2000), 49.

213
The doctrine of atomism or what Tiffany calls “the mechanization of
nothing,” as well as its relation to early automata, was a key aspect of
Cartesian mechanical philosophy as extended to the human and animal
body. Indeed, it was in contemplating the pneumatic and hydraulic
figures in the grottoes and fountains of Saint-Germain-en-Laye
212
that
Descartes began to compare the body to a clock, machine or, as he would
later put it, an “automaton (that is, a self-moving machine) when it is
wound up and contains in itself the corporeal principle of the movements
for which it is designed.”
213
Descartes’s description of the mechanical
processes of the body translate atomistic philosophy into a doctrine of
bodies composed of “animal spirits,” which serve as a motivating force
comparable to the flow of water or steam that drive the motion of
automata. While the belief in “animal spirits” dates back to Galen’s
theory of the four humours,
214
Descartes’s understanding of their impact

212
“The automata and waterworks of the Renaissance undoubtedly reached the highest
peak of development in the gardens of the royal chateau of Saint-Germain-en-Laye,
which had often served as the residence of the kings of France … The main feature was
a great fountain, from the basin of which water descended by means of intricate
channels and accumulated in the reservoirs placed within the vaults of the galleries
beneath. By means of a multitude of secondary tubes, these reservoirs supplied the
grottoes and fountains of the galleries and provided the force to motivate the various
mechanisms … Dictated by the popular style of the period, mythological subjects were
featured. The first three grottoes opened from the third landing, or Doric Gallery, and
featured a Dragon, an Organ Player, and Neptune. On the fourth landing the grotto of
Hercules was flanked on either side by the grottoes of Perseus and Andromeda and of
Orpheus.” Bedini, 27-28,
213
Quoted in Tiffany, 329-30.
214
Galen of Pergamum (ca. A.D. 129-200) stated that there were four humouric
temperaments—sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, and melancholic—each of which is
connected to the predominance in an individual of one of the following; blood, yellow
bile, black bile, and phlegm. The doctrine was disproved largely through the work of

214
on the body was shaped by new discoveries in the fields of anatomy and
medicine, the most significant of which was English physician William
Harvey’s Anatomical Essay on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in
Animals (1628), a groundbreaking explanation of the circulatory system
and the role of the heart in pumping blood through the body. Descartes
extrapolates from Harvey’s empirical research by not only extending his
findings on circulation to the nervous system, but also imbuing the
physical mechanism of circulation with the intangible effects of “animal
spirits.” Descartes believed that “animal spirits” had a direct influence on
the “passions” through their movement between the mind and body via
tubular nerves that he compares to the pipes in the figures populating
the royal gardens:
The spirits have the power to change the shape of the
muscles in which the nerves are embedded, and by this
means to move all limbs. Similarly, you may have observed
in the grottos and fountains in the royal gardens that the
mere force with which the water is driven as it emerges from
its source is sufficient to move various machines. One may
compare the nerves of the machine I am describing [the
human body] with the pipes in the works of these fountains,
its muscles and tendons with the various devices and
springs which serve to set them in motion, its animal spirits
with the water which drives them.
215

Hermann Boerhaave, a famous physician and professor at the University of Leiden, the
preeminent medical center of Europe. La Mettrie studied at the University under
Boerhaave and spent six years translating his work into French.
215
Quoted in Tiffany, 137.

215
The discourse around and reception of automata changed over the
course of the eighteenth century, during which the human body was
increasingly thought of as a machine while human automata became
more life-like, as their builders moved from hydraulics and pneumatics
to mechanization. While Descartes made a critical distinction between
animals, which he considered entirely mechanical, and humans, who
possess a “rational soul” that interfaces with the body via the pineal
gland and the flow of “animal spirits,” the equivalence between humans
and machines (and thus animals and humans) was declared most
forcefully (if anonymously) by physician/philosopher Julien Offray de La
Mettrie (1709 - 1751) in his 1748 essay L’Homme machine (Man a
Machine).
216
La Mettrie ascribes to the entirety of man a mechanical
functionality; the human body is, he declares, “a self-winding machine, a
living representation of perpetual motion,” like an “immense clock,” and
the soul is “only a principle of movement or sensible, material part of the
brain, which one can regard as the machine’s principal spring.”
217
La
Mettrie grounded his theory in two recent scientific discoveries, the first

216
La Mettrie was one of a number of atheist philosophers who argued that if Descartes
had been born a century later, he too would have concluded that the entirety of man is
comparable to a machine, but that his fear of theological retribution forced him to
distinguish between animals and humans, and to compare humans and machines only
in analogical terms. Still, however emboldened La Mettrie felt in taking Cartesian
mechanical philosophy to its logical conclusion, he too experienced the wrath of the
church, which seized and burned all copies of Man A Machine, and whose suspicion
that he was its author forced him to flee to Prussia.
217
Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Man A Machine (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett
Publishing Company, Inc., 1994), 32 and 65.

216
made by Abraham Trembley about the freshwater polyp. While the polyp
was originally classified as a plant, Trembley was able to prove that it
was an animal, but that, like a plant, it could be split into pieces, each of
which would, in a sense, sprout into a separate organism akin to the
original. This discovery became the foundation of La Mettrie’s claims that
life was a property of matter, rather than of a soul or an imponderable
force. Second, were the experiments on muscular irritability of Albrecht
von Haller (1708-1777), to whom La Mettrie dedicates his book. Von
Haller showed that muscles could be stimulated directly and that, rather
than relying on the impetus of “animal spirits” as Descartes believed,
they had within themselves the properties of their own animation. La
Mettrie concludes in light of this discovery that thought too is a “property
of matter,” much like electricity. He also begins to investigate the way in
which different parts of the brain control different perceptual, cognitive,
and behavioral functions, as well as how they are differentially affected
by localized brain damage or hereditary abnormality.
218
Such
investigations would help to give birth to the field of neurology, as well as
to the view, held by the famous neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, that a
behavioral disorder such as hysteria was based in physiology.
Like Descartes, La Mettrie was fascinated by automata, and he
also turned to contemporary examples of mechanical animation to

218
Justin Leiber, “Introduction” to La Mettrie, Man a Machine, 8

217
illustrate his ideas. He mentions, in particular, an automaton flute player
built by doctor and engineer Jacques de Vaucanson, presented to the
French Academy in 1738, which had a repertoire of twelve songs and
astounded spectators not only with its mastery of a wind instrument, but
one considered particularly difficult to play in tune. La Mettrie reasons
that if Vaucanson, whom he calls “a new Prometheus,” can create a
figure like the flute player, then it should also be possible to make a
mechanical human that can talk and eventually, one infers, artificial
intelligence. Indeed, the call to prove the correspondence between
humans and machines through mechanical simulation would get
answered over the course of the next century by a series of master
craftsmen.
Mechanician Wolfgang von Kempelen constructed an automaton
chess player in 1769, dubbed “The Turk” because of his sultan’s attire
(see figure 30). Foreshadowing Deep Blue’s battle with Gary Kasparov,
The Turk won against even the most formidable human opponents, and
its touring life spanned over a hundred years (although it was eventually
proven as a fake). A father and son team of Swiss clockmakers, Pierre
and Henry-Louis Jaquet-Droz, produced in 1774 two male children, one
a draughtsman that could draw both animals and people, the other a
writer that could put pen to paper and compose a number of different

218

Figure 30. The Turk

messages.
219
In 1776, they premiered a female Harpsichord Player with a
repertoire of five songs, whose breast heaved as she played, and who was
advertised as “a vestal virgin with a heart of steel” (see figure 31). Near
the end of the eighteenth century, Henri Maillardet produced a
writer/draughtsman with an unusually large memory—it could draw six

219
One of these messages, a humorous jab at Descartes, is “Je ne pense pas...ne serais-
je donc point?” (I do not think...do I therefore not exist?)

219
different images and write three poems, two in French and one in
English—as well as a magician, which answered questions printed on
oval cards that were inserted into the drawer of the small stage on which
it sat. And in 1823, less than a century after La Mettrie’s hypothetical
talking android, Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, a musician and court
mechanician credited as the inventor of the metronome, patented a doll
that could say “Mama” and “Papa.” By then Maelzel was already famous,
for he had purchased and reassembled The Turk after the death of von
Kempelen and embarked on a tour that took him through Europe and
the United States.
220
By virtue of Maelzel’s mechanical genius, The Turk
was also given the gift of speech—it could previously only nod its head,
but it was now able to say “échec” (check)—and it was accompanied by a
mechanical entourage, including “rope dancers, an automaton
trumpeter, a mechanical instrument called the Orchestrion, which

220
Maelzel would, in fact, have a large impact on P.T. Barnum who met him while
displaying his first “human curiosity,” a blind and crippled black woman, whom he was
passing off as George Washington’s 161-year old nursemaid in an adjoining room to the
Turk at Concert Hall, an exhibition space in Boston. Maelzel was a mentor to Barnum
and impressed on him the importance of the press and advertising in capitalizing on his
attractions, which Barnum took to heart. When, after a number of weeks, interest in
and attendance at the exhibition of Heth began to die down, Barnum sent anonymous
letters to local newspapers claiming that Heth was not a human being but an
automaton, “made up of whalebone, india-rubber, and numberless springs ingeniously
put together, and made to move at the slightest touch, according to the will of the
operator.” The result, according to Barnum was renewed interest: those who hadn’t yet
seen her were drawn by the controversy and those who had seen her now wanted
another look in order to determine whether or not they had been duped during their
initial visit. See The Life of P.T. Barnum, Written by Himself (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2000). 155-159.

220

Figure 31. Jaquet-Droz Automata

221
imitated a full military band, and a moving panorama called the
Conflagration of Moscow.”
221

Such figures gave rise to a new term, androïde, first defined in
Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond D'Alembert’s Encyclopédie
222
as “an
automaton in human form, which, by means of certain well-positioned
springs, etc. performs certain functions which externally resemble those
of man,” for which Vaucanson’s flute player was offered as an example.
The separate definition for automaton was “an instrument which moves
by itself, or machine which contains within itself the source of its own
motion,” and the example offered was a mechanical duck, also built by
Vaucanson in 1739, which ate food from its exhibitor’s hand and then,
through an intricate system of tubes and articulated parts, appeared to
swallow, digest and excrete what it had eaten.
223

While the taxonomic separation between human and non-human
mechanical objects seemingly reinscribes the ontological separation
made by Descartes between humans and animals, Diderot and
D’Alembert make it clear that the distinction is based primarily on
external appearances, and they argue explicitly against Descartes under

221
See Gaby Wood, Edison’s Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 73-75.
222
Considered the major achievement of the French Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie
was an exhaustive scientific reference written by over 140 “men of letters” and
published between 1751 and 1777.
223
See the Encyclopédie Translation Project, now available on the web for students and
other scholars: http://www.hti.umich.edu/d/did/

222
the definition for “animal soul,” where they insist that “beasts or animals,
have an intellectual principle united to their machines, made purposely
for them, as ours is made for us.”
224
The distinction between the android
and automaton, however, became particularly potent within the realm of
popular discourse and literature, to which mechanical humans would
become increasingly confined over the course of the nineteenth century,
as mechanicians began to turn away from constructing curiosity pieces
in order to design machines that would replace human labor.
225

The “android”—an automaton that looks and acts like a human—
has, since the time of the Encyclopédie, been a signifier of verisimilitude
and used to raise philosophical questions about what it means to be
human, what separates humans from machines, and what it means to
make machines in the image of a human, questions that have informed
literary and cinematic narratives from Frankenstein to Bladerunner. The
word “automaton,” however, underwent a transformation over the course
of the nineteenth century, through which two terms emerged in
dialectical relation to one another. On the one hand, as humans became
increasingly subject to the repetitive rhythms of an industrialized

224
Diderot and D’Alembert, Select Essays from the Encyclopédie, quoted by J.C. Beaune,
453. See also “Animal Soul” in the Encyclopédie Translation Project.
225
A notable example is Vaucanson who eventually stopped building automata and was
made Inspector of Silk Manufacture in France by Louis XV. In the process of
streamlining the industry with, among other things, new automated looms that became
the inspiration for the better-known Jacquard loom, Vaucanson incurred the wrath of
workers, many of whom were replaced by his industrial improvements. See Gaby Wood,
40-41.

223
workplace and public sphere, as well as mass transit and standardized
time, the “automaton” came to represent a human who acts like a
machine (as opposed to the machine either in the image of a human or
animal). On the other hand, as Tiffany points out, as mechanical
humans became more lifelike due to their mechanization, the discourse
of pneuma shifted from automata to “automatism,” that is to “mechanical
bodies animated—and indeed constituted—by a ‘climate’ of incorporeal
substances and forces,”
226
of which the hysterical female body became
emblematic. The latter was, in large part the result of the Cartesian
discourse around pneuma as “animal spirits” flowing through a
mechanical body, through which hysteria, once attributed to either
demonic possession or wandering organs, became linked to the nervous
system.
The reinterpretation of hysteria according to Cartesian mechanical
philosophy was argued in the Epistolary Dissertation of Thomas
Sydenham (1624-89), a physician known as “the Hippocrates of the
Enlightenment.” Sydenham considered hysteria, next to fever, the most
common illness of his time (responsible for “one-sixth of all human
maladies”), and he reframed the relationship between its internal and
external influences by attributing its variable symptoms to nervous fluids
weakened by a “disorder of animal spirits,” by which the individual was

226
Tiffany, 139.

224
more likely to experience the adverse affects of external stimuli. Indeed,
as John P. Wright points out, he considered “emotional upsets to
constitute the chief ‘remote or external causes’ of hysteria.”
227

A contemporary of Sydenham who elaborated not only on the way
in which external stimuli produced hysterical symptoms, but the
mechanical philosophy through which the workings of the body were
understood, was Robert Boyle (1627-1691). Boyle had a particular
interest in the properties of “effluvia” and engaged in both chemical and
alchemical experimentation. He had direct experience with the principles
of pneumatica through his efforts in improving the Toricellian air-pump
or vacuum, which produced his most famous invention, the
“Pneumatical Engine.” Boyle’s interest in and experimentation in the
properties of air and other gases helped give rise to his “corpuscularian
hypothesis,” which served as a challenge to the atomist faction of
mechanical philosophy. In place of atoms (from the Greek for
‘indivisible’), through which matter was understood as continuous, Boyle
theorized matter as comprised of corpuscles, invisible particles of
individual shapes and motions, which brought about changes in visible
phenomena by interacting with one another in particular ways. Boyle’s
corpuscularian theory, aside from being a precursor to modern physics,

227
John P. Wright, “Hysteria and Mechanical Man” in Journal of the History of Ideas,
Vol. 41, No. 2 (April-June 1980), 242.

225
helped to reify the Cartesian understanding of the body as a kind of clock
or machine, by imagining its inner workings as composed of and made
functional by the interaction of discrete “cogs.” Indeed, this view inflected
his writings on hysteria, in which he described the human body as “an
engine, the parts of which are so connected together, that great changes
can be wrought by a ‘very weak and inconsiderable impression of
adventitious matter.’”
228
Thus in the hysteric, whose nervous system is
the equivalent of a faulty engine, small disturbances which would have
little impact on more resilient apparatuses, lead to large aberrations in
the overall functioning of the machine. It is for this reason that, as many
observed about the ailment, its symptoms appear contagious; if one
hysterical woman witnesses another in the midst of a fit, she too will be
“infected with the like strange composure.” Boyle further notes that the
catalyst may be external or internal, and he comments on the cases of
women who were sent into hysterical paroxysms by particular odors or
sounds, as well as women who were affected by figments of their own
imaginations.
While the interpretation of hysteria as the function of, in effect,
faulty machinery expanded the field of inquiry, which had focused on
women, to include both sexes, it did little to change the gendered nature
of the illness, since women were thought not only to possess a weaker

228
Wright, 243.

226
and more sensitive nervous system than men, but to have less recourse
to the rational soul or mind though which it might be conditioned.
Moreover, it encouraged an association between women and
imponderable forces since they too were considered more detectable by
the delicate female sensory apparatus. The sensitive female machine
even found her way into the “new science” of La Mettrie, via an
exaggeratedly materialist interpretation of the connection between
thought and matter that led him to conclude that physicality determined
character, giving rise not only to the dubious practice of phrenology, but
to the attribution of heightened impressionability to the delicacy of the
female physique:
In the fair sex, the soul also follows refinements of
temperament, hence that tenderness, that affection, those
keen sentiments, founded more on passion than on reason,
those prejudices, those superstitions whose strong imprint
can hardly be erased, etc. Man, on the other hand, whose
brain and nerves share the firmness of all solids, has a more
sinewy mind, just like his face.
229

The idea of the female as subtle apparatus lent itself to a metaphorical
instrumentality that found its way into popular discourse, a telling
example of which is offered by Terry Castle in the title essay of her book,
The Female Thermometer. According to Castle, as the thermometer and
barometer were developed into separate instruments and became more

229
La Mettrie, Man a Machine, 34.

227
finely calibrated through the work of Toricelli, Boyle, and others, as well
as portable and therefore available for domestic use, they:
… exerted a powerful imaginative appeal. This charisma
derived in part from the seemingly magical nature of
mercury, that strange semiliquid medium that in the
eighteenth century still preserved the evocative name of
quicksilver, or “living silver.” Mercury, the celebrated volatile
principle of the alchemists, lent the weatherglass some of its
own elemental physical mystery, as well as ancient symbolic
associations with magic, change, and metamorphosis.
Mercury also established a connection with the theme of
human temperament … Women were usually considered the
primary embodiments of mercuriality—witnessed by their
purported fickleness, emotional variability, and susceptibility
to hysteria.
230

As Descartes extrapolated on Harvey’s discovery of blood circulation in
describing the nervous system, so too was there an associative link
created between the rising and falling liquid silver in the weatherglass
and the movement of blood through the blood vessels, concretized by the
addition of red tint. It was not long after that the “mercurial climate” of
the female nature was underscored via a satirical and imaginary
instrument that could measure female desire. This instrument made
numerous appearances throughout the eighteenth century, a notable
example of which was a device described in a 1712 Spectator essay by
Joseph Addison “in which liquid from a dissected ‘coquette’s

230
Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: 18
th
Century Culture and the Invention of the
Uncanny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 25.

228
Pericardium’ is used to make a thermometer measuring feminine
lasciviousness.”
231

The idea behind the “female thermometer,” as well as her
relationship to the automaton as the human cog (usually figured as
male), is writ large in the 1927 film Metropolis by Fritz Lang, in which
men who appear as mindless worker drones and perform in repetitive
sync with the machines of industry are incited to rebellion by a female
android that has been animated with the electro-magnetic energy (the
nineteenth and early twentieth-century equivalent of “animal spirits”) of
a living woman, Maria.
232
In the transformation scene (a cinematic tour-
de-force that set the bar for every technological creation film to follow),
Maria, who has been captured by the mad scientist Rotwang, is encased
within a life-sized test tube hooked up to electrical wires that connect to
the metallic android via orbs of fluid that look like cloud chambers.
233

When Rotwang hits the main switch, vital current flows from Maria
through these atmospheric conductors, which start bubbling and
producing steam, which is then funneled into a vortex of spiraling energy
around the body of the android. The pericardium of the android lights
up, as if suddenly jolted into life, and starts pulsing through an arterial

231
Castle, 16.
232
All commentary on the film is based on the 2001 restored version.
233
Indeed, they may be inspired by the cloud chamber, which was invented fifteen years
prior by Scottish physicist, Charles Thomson Rees Wilson.

229
network that transforms its outer metallic shell into the living image of
Maria (see figure 32).
This new “false” Maria, however, is not the same as the old Maria.
Whatever it was that was siphoned off has been distilled into a force that
is both destructive and hypnotically irresistible. The visual cues that we
are given to the nature of this force are first, the overt sexual behavior of
the “false” Maria and second, her symptoms of hysteria. The first is most
explicitly demonstrated in the erotic dance sequence at Yoshiwara’s, in
which the “false” Maria dressed as “the Whore of Babylon,” whips the
“Club of the Sons” into a violent frenzy with her mechanical gyrations.
The second is expressed through jerky body movements and facial tics, a
textbook display of hysterical symptoms, in evidence throughout her
encounters with the workers, but particularly exaggerated in the final
scene, during which she is burned at the stake like a witch, as she
laughs hysterically (see figure 33). The film thus collapses the historical
association between hysteria, demon possession, and sexual promiscuity
with automatism, as a mechanical body constituted by a vital force
figured as both pneumatic and electrical. As the paroxysmal, laughing
image of the “false” Maria is reduced to ashes at the stake, the metallic
body of the android is revealed, a visual reminder of the automatic
mechanism, at once technological and occult, that had controlled her all

230

Figure 32. Fritz Lang's METROPOLIS

231

Figure 33. Burning the witch at the stake

along. This mechanism, is, however, powered with that which was
extracted from the real Maria, suggesting, as Andreas Huyssen points
out, a “threatening and explosive female sexuality which is inherently
there in any woman, even the virgin.”
234

In his essay, “The Vamp and the Machine,” Huyssen uses the
female android in Metropolis to ask larger questions about the interfusion
of gender and technology over the course of the nineteenth century. Why,
for example, does a literary trend emerge that favors the machine-woman

234
Andreas Huyssen, “The Vamp and the Machine” in After the Great Divide: Modernism,
Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 80

232
to the machine-man, when “the android builders of the 18
th
century did
not seem to have an overriding preference for either sex?” Moreover, why
are “male fantasies about women and sexuality … interlaced with visions
of technology in the film,” particularly when women are generally
associated with nature?
235
His answer, delivered in a brief “historical
digression,” is that as technology shifted from a symbol of human
innovation and progress to one of dehumanization and man-made forces
run amok, it was figured as female:
Historically, then, we can conclude that as soon as the
machine came to be perceived as a demonic, inexplicable
threat and as a harbinger of chaos and destruction—a view
which typically characterizes many 19
th
-century reactions to
the railroad to give but one major example—writers began to
imagine the Maschinenmensch as woman. There are grounds
to suspect that we are facing here a complex process of
projection and displacement. The fears and perceptual
anxieties emanating from ever more powerful machines are
recast and reconstructed in terms of the male fear of female
sexuality, reflecting, in the Freudian account, the male’s
castration anxiety.
236

In answer to the question why female sexuality, often depicted as a beast
of nature, becomes homologous with technology, Huyssen reminds us
that since La Mettrie’s L’Homme machine, not only the human body, but
all of nature has been viewed in mechanistic terms, laying the
groundwork for the imbrication of woman, nature, and machine in “a
mesh of significations which all had one thing in common: otherness; by

235
Huyssen, 70.
236
Huyssen, 70.

233
their very existence they raised fears and threatened male authority and
control.”
237

One of the visual themes of the film through which Huyssen
elaborates on his argument is water and steam, with which Maria, as
both virginal woman and machine-vamp, is visually associated. As the
film opens, the central protagonist Freder, the son of the city’s
mastermind, Joh Fredersen, is engaged in a playful chasing game with a
group of young women in and around the Eternal Gardens. He catches
up with one of the women in front of a large and beautiful fountain and,
as he is about to kiss her, doors open and Maria appears, attempting to
lead a group of the workers’ children into the gardens. Freder is instantly
struck by the aura (derived from aria or air; an “invisible breath,
emanation, or radiation”) surrounding Maria, and he becomes distracted
from the woman he was about to kiss. Maria and the children are quickly
escorted out of the gardens by the overseers, after which Freder attempts
to find her. In his pursuit, he descends into the subterranean world
below, where he discovers the machines whose steam power keeps the
city running and the human labor that serves as their living pistons. His
revelation of the inner workings of the city, and the sweat that feeds the
waterworks above, is accompanied by the horror of its precarious
balance, as he watches the temperature rise to dangerous levels and a

237
Huyssen, 70.

234
great release of steam throw several workers to their deaths. It is the
electric and hydraulic power produced by the workers that Rotwang will
harness to extract the vital force of Maria to animate his android. Water
imagery will continue to render metaphorical the actions of the robotic
evil Maria; her erotic dance is accompanied by what looks like a cauldron
of steam, and her manipulation of the workers results in the destruction
of the city from a flood of water exploding through the “heart machine” at
its core.
Huyssen draws our attention to the sexual connotations of the
film’s water imagery, suggesting that the fountains represent a
“controlled, channeled and non-threatening sexuality” in contrast to the
steam and floods in later sequences, which “allegorize female frenzy (the
proletarian women) and threatening female sexuality (the vamp).”
238

According to this reading, sexual steam is vented, literally and
figuratively, as a form of catharsis, culminating in the final scene in
which the machine-woman is burnt at the stake as a witch: “It is as if the
destructive potential of modern technology, which the expressionists
rightfully feared, had to be displaced and projected onto the machine-
woman so that it could be metaphorically purged.”
239

238
Huyssen, 78
239
Huyssen, 81

235
While Huyssen’s essay goes a long way in explaining the homology
between women and technology in Lang’s film, the relationship between
the automaton and automatism can be further elaborated. This
relationship is represented in the film not only in the pneumatic flow
between the Cartesian Pleasure Gardens above, associated with the
electric brainpower of the city, and the working cogs below (which are
analogized: the machine is a body and the bodies of the men who run it
are machines), but between the various nervous disorders that mark the
imbalance between the two, in particular that of Freder, who is rendered
neurasthenic once he descends beneath the surface of Metropolis.
To help clarify this relationship, we will take a detour through the
history of automatism (examining its influence on German Romanticism,
to which an expressionist film like Metropolis is heir), in particular, the
work of Austrian physician Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815), the man
considered the father of automatism, whose demonstrations, in which he
put young female patients (fittingly, suffering from “vapors”) into
“magnetic trances,” became legendary. Although the mad scientist
Rotwang in Metropolis is often compared to Frankenstein—especially in
regard to the transformation sequence—it is Mesmer to whom his
characterization owes its greatest debt. Indeed, we might say that any
time a fictional scientist or doctor (including Frankenstein) blurs the line

236
between science and the supernatural, reality and madness, the legacy of
Mesmer is invoked.
The Wizard of Vienna

Despite his compromised legacy, Mesmer’s work both mirrored and was
an extension of the philosophical environment in which it was
conducted, and he struggled over the course of his life for both scientific
and medical legitimacy. Well educated and versed in the latest theories
and treatments of his day, Mesmer was awarded an MD in 1766 at the
Vienna School of Medicine (later called the New Vienna School, which
Freud famously attended). His dissertation, Dissertatio Physico-medica de
Plantarum Influxu, which he would later give the more concise title, The
Influence of the Planets on the Human Body, was heavily indebted to the
writings of Descartes and Newton on subtle matter and, in particular, the
isotropic connection made between both cosmological and meteorological
forces and the nervous system. In it, he argues the case for a “universal
fluid” coursing through the earth, atmosphere, and cosmos, which gives
rise to gravitation, magnetism, electricity, light, and heat; which joins
and permeates all physical bodies; which ebbs and flows like the ocean;
and, as the moon controls the tides and waves, which produces tidal
effects in the “animal spirits” flowing through the human circulatory and
nervous system.

237
Mesmer initially named the property of the “animal body” (those
mechanical processes that Descartes distinguishes from the “rational
soul”) that makes it susceptible to the cyclical changes of the universal
fluid animal gravitation, but he later changed the name to animal
magnetism following a groundbreaking case involving his wife’s twenty-
nine year old female cousin, Francisca “Franzl” Oesterline who, as
biographer Vincent Buranelli puts it, was Mesmer’s Anna O. Franzl had
suffered for many years from a debilitating psychosomatic illness that
included such hysterical symptoms as convulsions, spasms of vomiting,
cataleptic trance, fainting, temporary blindness, and feelings of
suffocation. In the course of her treatment, Mesmer noticed that Franzl’s
symptoms ebbed and flowed in ways that corroborated his theory of
animal gravitation, and, following his own line of reasoning, he attempted
to direct the “volatile currents” affecting her nerves using magnets, which
he placed on various parts of her body (a treatment made popular by
fifteenth century alchemist and physician Paracelsus). He noticed
immediate results and, over the course of a year-long treatment, was
able to alleviate many of her symptoms. While he would shortly
thereafter dispense with the magnets, believing that he could direct
magnetic fluid equally effectively through his hands and eyes, his
treatment remained grounded in the theory of “animal magnetism” and

238
the practice of “conducting” universal fluid through the body. Mesmerism
was born.
In 1778, Mesmer left Vienna for Paris, where he established a
clinic that drew the majority of its clientele from the aristocracy and the
most fashionable of Parisian society, which thrived until the French
Revolution. In its heyday, the Mesmerist cure was administered to a
group of individuals in a form of ritualized theater choreographed down
to the subtlest details. The group (comprised predominantly of women)
would enter an opulent room, which was dim and quiet except for the
sound of a pianoforte or “glass harmonica” (Mesmer believed in the
healing properties of music and that animal magnetism could be
“communicated, propagated, and intensified by sound”
240
). Patients were
examined, given preliminary treatments, and then escorted to a baquet, a
large basin or tub filled with water and magnetized iron fillings from
which iron rods protruded, around which they would stand, touching
both the metal rods and one another to set up a “current” of animal
magnetism. Donning a powered wig and a robe and breeches of purple
silk, Mesmer acted as the master of ceremonies conducting the whole
affair with an iron wand that he used to point at or touch his patients as
he moved from baquet to baquet.

240
Franz Anton Mesmer, “The Philosophical Assertions of Franz Anton Mesmer” (no. 16)
in Mesmerism: The Discovery of Animal Magnetism (1779) translated by Joseph Bouleur
(Sequim, WA: Holmes Publishing Group, 2006), 27.

239
Although Mesmer had earlier considered and rejected electricity as
the “universal fluid” that flowed through all matter, Maria Tatar points
out the extent to which his techniques were in dialogue with
electrotherapeutic cures, in which patients were administered shocks
using electric torpedoes and even electric eels, and his baquet
reminiscent of the recently invented Leyden jar, a device that stored and
discharged static electricity. Indeed, the chain of individuals holding
hands around Mesmer’s baquet recalled earlier entertainments in which
Leyden jars were discharged through human circuits created by either
joining hands or grasping iron rods or wires:
A Polish scientist, the first to perform such experiments,
delivered shocks to twenty people simultaneously. In France,
Abbé Jean-Antoine Nollet administered shocks to 180
soldiers in a single instant. For the amusement of Louis XV,
the inhabitants of a Carthusian monastery were convulsed;
the conducting chain formed by the monks was reported to
have stretched for more than a mile.
241

The similarities not only illustrate the extent to which Mesmer’s “animal
magnetism” was but one of an array of subtle fluids being proposed and
harnessed by natural philosophers over the course of the eighteenth
century, but the spectacularization of science to which such propositions
contributed. Akin to the highly visual somatic effects of electroshock
treatment was the Mesmerian “crisis,” the culmination of the magnetic

241
Maria Tatar, Spellbound: Studies on Mesmerism and Literature (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1978), 51-52.

240
séance, in which the patient’s body was overcome by a series of
uncontrollable symptoms including physical convulsions, paralysis, and
wild gesticulations and verbalizations. The crisis was, Mesmer insisted,
an integral part of the cure. As Buranelli states, he believed that
“magnetism is to the bodily organs as the wind is to the windmill” and
that a raised level of force was needed to get the apparatus back in
working order:
If the universal fluid flowed from the magnetizer into the
subject in doses powerful enough to start defective
physiological machinery working again, then the subject had
to be severely affected. The action had to be followed by a
reaction just as Newton said of all mutually interacting
objects. An electrical machine shakes when you start it and
then settles down to its proper uniform movement. The body
does the same thing when triggered into action by animal
magnetism.
242

The most enduring legacy of Mesmerism was not the crisis, however, but
an unexpected discovery made in the course of treatment: “magnetic
sleep” or trance. In his initial treatment of Franzl Oesterlin, Mesmer
found his patient slipping into a state between sleep and wakefulness in
which something more than ordinary consciousness seemed to be at
play; her thoughts and actions were uncensored and she was highly
suggestible. Having discovered this phenomenon early on, Mesmer
became a master at inducing paralysis, drowsiness, sleep, and a variety

242
Vincent Buranelli, The Wizard From Vienna: Franz Anton Mesmer (New York, Coward,
McCann & Geoghegan, Inc., 1975), 113.

241
of mental and physical states within his patients. While “mesmerism”
was to become synonymous with mind control and the ability to throw
others into a somnambulistic state, Mesmer used it primarily to bring on
the “salutary crisis.”
The trance was, however, exploited to great effect by others, most
notably a student of Mesmer, the Marquis de Puységur, an aristocrat
who practiced mesmerism at his family estate on anyone from the local
area who asked for help. Following a remarkable experience with a
simple and taciturn peasant who, in a state of trance, turned suddenly
intelligent, eloquent, and even showed signs of clairvoyance, Puységur
began focusing his research and practice increasingly on “magnetic
sleep”—or what he called “lucid somnambulism”—to the exclusion of the
crisis. The rift that subsequently developed between Puységur and
Mesmer over the use of trance in treatment foreshadowed the rift that
would later occur between Charcot and Bernheim over the use of
hypnosis (a word coined by surgeon James Braid in 1843, after his own
experiences with an itinerant mesmerist, in an attempt to rid sleep-wake
phenomena once and for all of the taint of “animal magnetism”).
Puységur’s further exploration of “mesmerist sleep” and of states of
awareness that were hidden from, and at times superior to, the
conscious mind, not only set the stage for later medical investigations of

242
the unconscious mind by Breuer and Freud, but contributed to a
developing “self” consciousness and interiority that became integral to
the modern human subject. In her discussion of the metaphoric life of
the weatherglass, Castle notes how popular medical and psychological
theories began to universalize sensibility, so that over the course of the
eighteenth century the weatherglass, once figured as a femme-machine,
became increasingly associated with the psychic life of men. A “new male
type” emerges, she suggests, particularly within Romantic discourse: “the
man who must abide in the nonheroic realms of bourgeois existence, and
whose internal ‘weather,’ so to speak, obsessively charted, has become
his sole remaining source of interest. Acute self-consciousness,
symbolized by barometrical fixation, displaces the world of external
incident.”
243
This inner sphere becomes the site at which a sense of unity
not only with oneself, but all of nature, is pursued amidst a world
increasingly demystified by science and regulated by industry.
This pursuit was further substantiated by the Naturphilosophie of
Friedrich von Schelling (1775-1854), who wrote of the correspondence
between nature and spirit in terms of a unifying life force and applied
mesmerist notions of the rhythmic alternations of universal polarity to
the topography of the nervous system. Under the influence of his work,
the Romantic view, summed up in The Symbolism of Dreams (1814) by

243
Castle, 34.

243
Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert (1780-1860), a physician and advocate of
Mesmer, was that the nervous system consisted of two distinct systems
with opposite polarities: the cerebral system, located in the brain, which
was positively charged, supervised conscious thought and voluntary
activities of the body; the ganglionic system, located in the solar plexus,
which was negatively charged, controlled involuntary and automatic
actions of the body. The solar plexus was also identified by Schubert as
the body’s conduit for universal or subtle fluid, and therefore the site of
intuitive knowledge analogous to animal instinct, which connected man
to a natural force that transcended the bounds of spatial and temporal
limitations. As Tatar explains, this view was in line with Schelling’s
descriptions of a sixth sense “which penetrates the barriers of time,
foresees the future, and accounts for instinct in animals.”
244
The two
systems were connected via a sympathetic nerve, that served as a kind of
semi-conductor, inhibiting contact between upper and lower regions
during waking hours, but that increased conductivity during sleep and,
it was argued, other automatic states in which cerebral activity ceased,
including mesmerist trance, madness, poetic inspiration, and
somnambulism. Such states were courted by romantic artists and poets
in an attempt to break through the barriers held in check by the rational

244
Quoted in Tatar, 73.

244
conscious mind and enter into a more harmonious relationship with the
universe:
Romantic scientists, philosophers, and psychologists offered
competing, yet ultimately consistent, explanations for such
mental states. It mattered little whether the immense
network of communication allowing instantaneous contact
with the universe was powered by electricity, by a world-
soul, or by animal magnetism. What Romantic thinkers
considered essential was the unity of creation and the
special gift of some men to apprehend that unity.
245

To whatever extent the inner landscape intuited by mesmerism and
pursued by romantic poets produced a male psyche in league with
feminine sensibilities, it did little to change the instrumentality of the
female body, but instead, I would argue, reframed it in relation to the
male’s journey inward. In other words, the “female thermometer” was no
longer just an emblem of the correspondence between subtle phenomena
and the sensitive female apparatus, but an instrument of male
revelation. Like the iron rod in the mesmerist séance, it facilitated
contact with and helped conduct the “universal fluid” linking the male
soul to the cosmos.
The instrumental capacity of the female apparatus for the male
psyche, as well as the theory of universal and psychic polarity that
informs it, helps to explain not only the increase in female androids in
the nineteenth century (many of which appeared in Romantic fiction),

245
Tatar, 74. See also Gordon Birrell, “Kleist’s ‘St. Cecilia’ and the Power of Electricity,”
in The German Quarterly, Vol. 62, No. 1 (Winter, 1989), 75-76.

245
but also the logic through which they are simultaneously a symbol of
technology and nature. The work of E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) is
exemplary in this regard. Hoffman ran in the same circles as Kleist,
Schiller, and Schubert; indeed, Schubert introduced him to the ideas of
Mesmer. The same year that Schubert published his Symbolism of
Dreams, Hoffmann published a short story called “Automata,” which
provides a literary elaboration of Schubert’s theses through a narrative
(that will be repeated by Hoffman two years later in “The Sandman”) in
which a central male character experiences neurasthenia in proximity to
an instrumental female (who may be an automaton) under the control of
a Mesmer-like figure who, like Coppola (and Rotwang), is a mechanician.
“Automata” is not a formally structured tale, but a loosely
organized series of stories embedded within stories, each of which
involves supernatural events for which the characters ascribe both
rational (i.e., madness) and occult explanations, and none of which are
resolved. The title story, “Automata” revolves around the encounter
between two college friends, Lewis, and Ferdinand, the former a musician
and the latter an artist, and an automaton on exhibition in their town
called the Talking Turk, clearly inspired by von Kempelen’s Turk, which
toured Europe with Maelzel during Hoffmann’s lifetime. The Talking Turk
is not a chess player, however, but a kind of fortuneteller or seer who

246
answers spectator’s questions. To make an inquiry of the automaton, one
needed to whisper into his right ear, after which he would face his
questioner directly and respond, a palpable stream of air emerging from
his lips in a whisper that was often accompanied by a hand gesture. The
answers provided by the Talking Turk were so variable and so strangely
attuned to the questioner’s inner thoughts and feelings, that it had
garnered a reputation for being able to peer directly into the soul of
whomever stood before it.
On the evening that the two friends attend the exhibition,
Ferdinand puts a question to the Turk, and when the automaton
whispers his response, Lewis watches his friend turn pale with shock.
Ferdinand later confides to Lewis that the automaton devastated him by
making a horrible prediction about a mysterious woman with whom he
had fallen in love several years prior at a hotel where he was staying on
vacation. He then recounts the story for Lewis, which he has, up until
then, not told a living soul. On a particular evening, upon returning to
his hotel room after a day-long excursion, Ferdinand laid on his bed in a
state somewhere between dreaming and wakefulness, when he heard
coming from a nearby room a woman singing in a bell-like voice to the
accompaniment of a pianoforte. Under the influence of this unearthly
sound, he fell into a rapturous spell as “soul and body were merged in

247
ear.” When he finally succumbed to sleep, a beautiful woman appeared
in his dreams declaring that it was she who had sung to him so that he
would recognize her as the soul mate for whom he had been longing
since childhood. The next morning, as he gazed out of his room window,
he saw a young woman leaving the hotel and, as she turned to look back
before getting into her carriage, he recognized her as the woman from his
dreams, the singer of the prior evening. He was thereafter possessed by
the memory of her in a way that he could not shake. And although he
wore a gold locket containing an image that he had painted of her close
to his heart, he had kept the entire affair a secret until that evening,
when he inquired about her to the Turk. The automaton was at first
unwilling to answer and, when Ferdinand persisted, it whispered to him,
“I am looking into your breast; but the glitter of gold, which is towards
me, distracts me. Turn the picture around.” When Ferdinand did so, the
Turk told him that the next time he saw his beloved would be the
moment that he lost her forever.
Although Ferdinand is despondent over the automaton’s prophesy,
Lewis believes that there is a rational explanation (albeit one that may
involve occult influences), and in order to find it the two visit the Turk’s
inventor, Professor X, a chemist and natural philosopher with a special
gift for mechanics. An unpleasant man with the air of a mountebank, the

248
professor is eager to show off his mechanical talents and leads them to a
furnished hall filled with automata that recollect the “philosophical toys”
of the prior century. There is a male flute player and female
harpsichordist, two young boys with a drum and triangle, and a full
Orchestrion, which all start playing together as the professor
accompanies them on the piano. Although pitch perfect, the mechanical
orchestra is frighteningly disappointing, particularly to the sensitive
musical ear of Lewis, and the two friends leave abruptly without learning
anything more about the Turk. Afterwards, they have a discussion about
automata in which Hoffmann, as he proclaimed in the letter to the editor
of the musical journal to which he first submitted the story, expresses
through Lewis his opinions “on everything that is called an automaton,”
while paying “special attention to musical artifacts of this kind” as well
as the latest efforts of technicians, nature music, and the perfect
sound.
246

Lewis begins by expressing disdain for the attempt to imitate the
human body mechanically and, foreshadowing the narrative of “The
Sandman,” he imagines aloud what it might be like to dance unwittingly
with a mechanical partner, “fearful, unnatural, I may say terrible.” He
insists that however close to verisimilitude an automaton may be or

246
Quoted in Emily I. Dolan in “E.T.A. Hoffmann and the Ethereal Technologies of
Nature Music” in Eighteenth-Century Music 5/1, (2008).

249
however mechanically accurate its ability to play music, without an
investment of “the mind, the soul, and the heart,” it cannot help but
strike the spectator or the listener as anything but emotionally cold and
spiritually void. Echoing the anti-realistic aesthetic of Kleist, Lewis states
that:
… the more perfect that this sort of machinery is, the more I
disapprove of it; and I infinitely prefer the commonest barrel-
organ, in which the mechanism attempts nothing but to be
mechanical, to Vaucanson’s flute player, or the harmonica
girl.
247

However, he concedes that it would be possible to produce an instrument
that resonates with the soul by using such sensitive materials as metal,
glass, marble, or vibrating strings to capture the “mysterious tones of
nature,” since it is in “pristine holy harmony” with the natural world that
man finds perfection. The instrument that seems to come closest to such
an achievement is, Lewis conjectures, the glass harmonica (the
instrument that, we are reminded, Mesmer used during his séances to
help propagate “animal magnetism”).
248
Ferdinand offers the Aeolian harp
as an example, but Lewis counters that a more appropriate example
would be the “storm harp” in which thick wires are stretched out at great

247
E.T.A. Hoffmann, “Automata” in Best Tales of Hoffmann, edited by E.F. Bleiler (New
York: Dover Publications, 1967), 96.
248
The glass harmonica or “armonica” (the Italian word for harmony) is an instrument
that uses glass bowls or bells of varying shapes to produce musical tones through the
friction of the player’s fingers. Invented by Benjamin Franklin in 1761, it was a
mechanical means of producing the kind of sound created by rubbing a wetted finger on
wine glasses filled with varying amounts of water, a musical art with a longstanding
history.

250
distances apart on an open plain, producing powerful chords as the wind
strikes them. Ferdinand asks Lewis to elaborate on the connection
between the kind of “nature tones” produced by such instruments and
music, to which Lewis replies:
Can the music which dwells within us be any other than
that which lies buried in nature as a profound mystery,
comprehensible only by the inner, higher sense, uttered by
instruments, as the organs of it, merely in obedience to a
mighty spell, of which we are the masters? But, in the purely
psychical action and operation of the spirit—that is to say, in
dreams—this spell is broken; and then, in the tones of
familiar instruments, we are enabled to recognize those
nature tones as wondrously engendered in the air, they come
floating down to us, and swell and die away.
249

Within this explication of natural and psychical causality, are echoes of
Schiller’s nature philosophy and Schubert’s theory of dream states, as
well as an invocation of the “music of the spheres” in accordance with
Mesmerist practice. Moreover, this passage offers the most telling, if
ultimately inconclusive, clue to the mystery surrounding Ferdinand’s
beloved. Indeed, just as Lewis finishes speaking, a female voice, sounding
very much like a glass harmonica, begins singing the same song as the
woman of Ferdinand’s dreams. And as Lewis and Ferdinand peer
through the gate and into the garden from whence her voice comes, they
see none other than Professor X looking heavenwards “as if he were

249
Hoffman, “Automata,” 98.

251
contemplating that world beyond the skies, of which those marvelous
tones floating in the air like the breath of a zephyr, were telling.”
250

Whatever pleasurable resonance Ferdinand first experienced in
proximity to the voice is rendered sinister by the sight of the Professor,
whom the two friends agree exerts a strange influence over Ferdinand
and his fate. The story ends very abruptly thereafter, with the central
mystery left unresolved. And while we never learn whether the singer is a
real woman or an automaton constructed by Professor X, or whether
Ferdinand is engaged in a paranoiac fantasy or the Professor truly does
have a supernatural hold on him, our lasting impression is of the
instrumentality of the mysterious singer, who is able to strike
sympathetic chords within Ferdinand that might be either revelatory or
hallucinatory, but that nevertheless induce a state over which his
conscious mind has no control, thus rendering him automatic.
There is expressed within “Automata” an ambivalence surrounding
the female “subtle apparatus” and the “mighty spell” under which
Ferdinand falls in relation to her. On the one hand, she is the realization
of the harmonic nature instrument about which Lewis rhapsodizes and
its ability to bring its listener into communion with the universe. On the
other hand, its ability to bypass reason and will, rendering those under
its influence puppet-like, is portrayed as potentially destructive,

250
Hoffmann, 99

252
particularly when conducted by an ill-intentioned puppetmaster.
Hoffmann will elaborate on this theme in his story “The Sandman,” in
which Nathanael, another sensitive male, is brought under the sway of a
female automaton through the destructive influence of another Mesmer-
like figure. While the intoxication of music (Hoffmann’s first love) is
featured in the story, it is vision that is the dominant thematic and, in
particular, the juxtaposition (and ultimate collapse) of outer and inner
vision, embodied by the character of Giuseppe Coppola, who peddles in
both seeing apparatuses, such as eye-glasses and binoculars, and
instruments associated with the inner psyche, such as weatherglasses
and thermometers. After Nathanael’s first encounter with Coppola, when
the peddler attempts to sell him a weatherglass, he begins to exhibit
symptoms of possession, as if gripped by unknown entities, described by
Hoffman in simultaneously mystical and atmospheric terms:
He gave himself up to gloomy reveries, and moreover acted
so strangely ... His constant theme was that every man who
delusively imagined himself to be free was merely the
plaything of the cruel sport of mysterious powers, and it was
vain for man to resist them.
251

It is in this altered state that Nathanael becomes subject to the
subliminal powers of Olimpia, who sits in the window of the house across
the street from his flat and who becomes a source of fixation after

251
E.T.A. Hoffman, “The Sandman” in The Best Tales of Hoffman (New York: Dover
Publications, 1967),

253
Coppola conveniently sells him a pocket perspective through which to
gaze upon her. It is while looking through the spyglass that her lifeless
features and fixed gaze take on a mesmerizing aura; it is clear that this
instrument for seeing is both blinding him to the reality of her inanimacy
and putting him in touch with another realm, shaded by either
narcissistic solipsism or universal communion (about which the reader
will be left guessing). His fate is sealed after attending a singing
performance by Olimpia, which has been arranged by her “father”
Spalanzani, and which recalls both the female musician of the Jacquet-
Droz and the performance of Ferdinand’s beloved in Automata:
Olimpia played on the piano with great skill; and sang as
skillfully an aria di bravura, in a voice which was, if
anything, almost too brilliant, but clear as glass bells.
Nathanael was transported with delight; he stood in the
background farthest from her …. So, without being observed,
he took Coppola’s glass out of his pocket, and directed it
upon the beautiful Olimpia. Oh! then he perceived how her
yearning eyes sought him, how every note only reached its
full purity in the loving glance which penetrated to and
inflamed his heart. Her roulades seemed to him to be the
exultant cry towards heaven of the soul refined by love.
252

Looking through the spyglass, Nathanael’s gaze is turned inward. In this
light, his fiancé Clara, who is, like her name, a woman of clear intellect
and with whom “dreamers and visionaries had a bad time of it,” takes on
the impression of a lifeless automaton, while the mechanical Olimpia,

252
Hoffmann, “The Sandman,” 205

254
inspires the most profound passion in him.
253
And while this passion
seems to reach the height of Romantic ecstasy, it is at the cost of
Nathanael’s individuality and freedom, reducing Nathanael to a state of
subjection that seems to presage the rise of German fascism, in which
individuality would be subsumed within the romantically-inflected spirit
of the Volk.
254
. Thus, in both “Automata” and “The Sandman,” there is
both a longing for and ambivalence towards the ecstatic, as represented
by the female automaton, who serves as an instrument of both
awakening and control. And it is this tension that, I would argue, lies at
the heart of the relationship between automaton and automatism in the
film Metropolis, in which Hoffmann’s triadic scenario—between the
female instrument, the mad scientist who misuses her natural abilities
for evil ends, and the sensitive male—is replicated.
Maria, we should remember, is instrumental in Freder’s psychic
awakening even before her “vital force” is used as a weapon against his
father. Huyssen interprets the “hazed iris effect” that renders Maria

253
Although I am sidestepping the uncanny in this essay (despite its relevance), it is
interesting to note the extent to which Ernst Jentsch’s interpretation of the uncanny
(and its relation to Hoffmann’s story) echoes the view, held by the mesmerists and the
Romantics, of the nervous system as a sympathetic string upon which larger forces are
played, whose effects are stronger, according to Jentsch, “the weaker the critical sense”
and thus most frequent in “women, children and dreamers..” Indeed, Jentsch’s
masterwork was the two-volume Musik und Nerven (Music and Nerves) published
between 1904 and 1911. See Ernst Jentsch, 13.
254
Leo Alexander, the key medical advisor during the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi War
Criminals would later invoke “The Sandman” in his description of a collection of eyes
stolen from prisoners of concentration camps by Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, mentor
to Josef Mengele.

255
auratic when she first enters the Pleasure Gardens as Freder’s rush of
sexual desire, which stands in contrast to the “channeled sexuality” of
the fountain behind which he stands. However, one might also interpret
her visual aura or air as the first whiff of a process not only of
desublimation but denaturalization, in which Freder will wake up to the
artificiality of the gardens and the vacuity of his former bourgeois life. As
part of this process, he will discover his true nature within the
subterranean world beneath the city, whose link to his own unconscious
is made explicit when the rising temperature of the machines propels
him into his first cataleptic fit. It is a journey that is, to a certain extent,
echoed in the film The Matrix (which, like Metropolis, contains numerous
biblical references), when the central protagonist Neo chooses the little
red pill (also facilitated by a female love interest). And as Neo’s descent is
part of an awakening in which he will recognize himself as the ONE (best
equipped to mediate between the virtual reality of the Matrix and the
Real), so too is Freder’s in accepting his role as Mediator between the
upper and lower worlds, which are represented in the film as the two
halves of a giant nervous system. Freder as neurasthenic is, then,
Schubert’s “sympathetic nerve,” which connects the solar plexus or
“heart machine” at the city’s core whose steam power generates the
electrical apparatuses above, and the brain that controls its activities

256
and under whose authority the hands (workers) perform. His newfound
awareness, both personal and social, of which the “true” Maria is the
instrument, stands in opposition both to the sexual frenzy induced in the
“Club of Sons” in the city above and the revolutionary rage in the
workers below by the “false” Maria.
While Huyssen calls the “montage of male eyes” (see figure 34) that
stare at the “false” Maria as she performs her erotic dance (which will be
repeated when she incites the workers to rebellion) an illustration of
“how the male gaze actually constitutes the female body on the screen,” it
can also be read in relation to a mesmeric kaleido-scopophilia in which
the automaton’s spiralling gyrations put her viewers in a trance through
which they are subject to the scheming will of Rotwang. This visual
blindness is contrasted with the newly acquired inner vision of Freder,
who is the only one who can see that the “false” Maria is an imposter and
who spends much of the film in a cataleptic trance, during which he has
clairvoyant visions, such as when he intuits the impending destruction of
the city. (And again, his horizontal acuity has parallels with that of Neo,
who is most enlightened when prone; for he is the only one who is able to
see the cascading code behind the simulated reality construct of the
Matrix while uploaded into it.)

257

Figure 34. Montage of Eyes

Thus the thematizing of the “male gaze and vision” within
Metropolis not only underscores the extent to which the female body is a
“projection of male vision,” as discussed by Huyssen, but also her
capacity for undermining the visual and rational order and for serving as
a conduit for unseen forces through which her spectators may be
controlled or enlightened. Although, as Huyssen points out, the female
android in the film becomes the convenient tool of an unsatisfactory
compromise between labor and capital achieved via her cathartic witch

258
burning, the galvanizing power that she is able to generate is marked by
an ambivalence that is also evident in the disparity between the film and
the novel that inspired it by Lang’s then wife, Thea von Harbou. While in
the film, the flooding of the “heart machine” (of which the android is the
agent), is represented as apocalyptic, it serves as the triumphant finale of
the novel. As Michael Cowan notes:
The narrator recounts how Fredersen, the head of
Metropolis, built his city over an ancient river, which he had
damned up, but which constantly threatens to flood over
again. The novel then ends with liberation of this vital source
in the form of a cathartic flood, which Harbou celebrates as a
metaphor for the return of life to a rigidified modern body:
“The stones of the dead city came to life.”
255

Cowan suggests that the tension created in the novel between the
organic flow of water and the mechanical rhythms by which it is
contained and rigidified is an invocation of the vitalist philosophy
(Lebensphilosophie) at the center of a reform movement in the early
twentieth century for reawakening the natural rhythms of a body subject
to the increased and repetitive pacing of modern life. Particularly
influential was the book The Nature of Rhythm (1923) by Ludwig Klages,
which expressed “the irreconcilable opposition between organic and
machinic rhythms—or in his terminology between Rhythmus and Takt” in
terms of repetition versus variation. The latter was discussed in relation

255
Michael Cowan, “The Heart Machine: ‘Rhythm’ and Body in Weimar Film and Fritz
Lang’s Metropolis” in MODERNISM/modernity, 14:2 (2007), 237.

259
to both biological and diurnal cycles, whose fluid polarity recalls
simultaneously both Mesmeric magnetism and Kleist’s marionette:
The upward movement glides into the downward movement
and vice versa in such a way that neither the upper nor
lower turning points display and hard edges. What appears
is rather a curve, which clearly shows us the unsegmented
continuity [unzergrenzte Stetigkeit] of a movement that is
nonetheless structured.
256

Various schools of rhythmic and eurythmic dance and gymnastics were
founded on these ideas, including those of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze,
Rudolf von Laban, Mary Wigman, and Rudolf Bode, all of whom appeared
in Wilhelm Prager’s 1925 film Paths to Strength and Beauty, featuring
numerous performances of “flowing body movements” often “staged at
the edge of a lake in front of the lapping waves.”
257

Tiffany views the body culture of the early twentieth century as an
outgrowth of Mesmerism, and he draws attention to its problematic
bifurcation within modernism between, on the one hand, the visual
avant-garde, and on the other, the mass spectacles of fascism. As Tiffany
notes, Rudolf Laban and his student Mary Wigman ran the “dance
collective” of an artists colony at Monte Verita in the Swiss village of
Ascona, active between about 1900 and 1920, which “served as the
context for influential ‘experiments’ in various activities, including

256
Cowan, 231.
257
Cowan suggests that Walther Ruttman’s celebration of rhythmic modernity in the
film Berlin. Symphony of a Great City, which was released two years after Prager’s Paths
to Strength and Beauty, may be read as, in part, a response to the filmic presentation of
“body culture as an answer to modernity’s neurasthenic dilemma.” See Cowan, 232.

260
anarchist politics, feminism, pacifism, vegetarianism, natural healing
(sun baths, air baths, water cures), nudism, and sexual freedom.”
258
Many
artists, writers, philosophers, and feminists lived at Monte Verita at
various points, and its dance collective became central to the Dada
movement, performing regularly at the Cabaret Voltaire. However, some
of the core themes of Monte Verita—including communion with nature
and the privileging of the emotional and intuitive over the intellect and
rational—were also echoed by the National Socialist movement in
Germany. And many of the figures mentioned above, in particular Bode
and Wigman (and to a lesser extent Laban) became key players in the
physical education program of the Third Reich.

259
As Cowan points out,
there is a distinct visual parallel between the flowing movements of the
performers in Paths to Strength and Beauty and the choreography of
divers in the filmed sequences of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin produced
by Wigman’s former dance student turned filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl
(see figure 35). There is, however, also a distinct, if less evident, dialogue
between the flowing movement of divers (as well as some of the
choreography of dancers by Wigman) in Olympia and the regimented and
mechanical parade of male bodies captured en masse in Riefenstahl’s

258
Tiffany, 148.
259
Von Harbou too joined the National Socialist German Workers party and divorced
Lang, who fled Germany, a split that perhaps casts further retrospective significance on
the two interpretations of the “flood” sequence in Metropolis.

261

Figure 35. Comparison: PATHS TO STRENGTH (left)/OLYMPIA (right)

262
Triumph of Will (1935), which suggests a dialectical relationship between
Rhythmus and Takt that complicates any reading positing the purity of
one free of the other. As Klaus Theweleit demonstrates, to the extent that
the hard male body that both gave rise to and was celebrated by the Nazi
movement was a form of psychic and physical armoring against the
erotic floods and streams associated with both the feminine and
unconscious, it was, to a large extent, constituted by and represented a
channeling of erotic and psychic flows in the same way that the
machinery of Metropolis sublimates and distills the primal river beneath
the city:
Fascism translates internal states into massive, external
monuments or ornaments as a canalization system, which
large numbers of people flow into; where their desire can
flow, at least within (monumentally enlarged) preordained
channels; where they can discover that they are not split off
and isolated, but that they are sharing the violation of
prohibitions with so many others (preferably with all
others).
260

In the opposition between the internal climate of the modern individual
and the mass formation aticulated by Theweleit are echoes of the tension
in Metropolis between the psychic awakening of Freder and the entranced
masses of both the city and the underworld. And while such a reading
suggests (and Siegfried Kracauer proposes explicitly) that the narrative of
Metropolis foretells the rise of Nazism, Cowan suggests that the film is

260
Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Volume 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 430

263
attempting to reconcile the individual and collective, inner and outer
spheres, and ultimately to “imagine motion pictures as a forum for
mediating between technological and organic rhythms.”
261
And while he
elaborates on this idea through an examination of the metaphor of the
“heart machine,” I would draw further attention to the kaleidoscophilia of
the “montage of eyes” generated by the female automaton, and the extent
to which it is paralleled by the mesmerizing performances of Loie Fuller,
a female dancer who set the stage, so to speak, for the combination of
rhythmus and takt, art and science, and high and low entertainment
achieved by cinema …
La Loïe
Loïe Fuller (1862-1928), was an American burlesque and vaudeville
performer turned dancer who made a splash in Paris (after which she
added the umlaut to her name), becoming a regular at the Folies Bergère
in 1892 with her famous serpentine dance (a dance later captured by
Edison in the black maria using “Annabelle” after Fuller refused his
repeated requests to film her dancing). Using hooked bamboo or
aluminum rods, she kept “500 yards” (so her advertisements claimed) of
silky cloth moving in large circles around her body, which she would
decorate with phosphorescent and radioluminescent paint, or against
which she would project lights (with colored gels) or abstract designs

261
Cowan, 239.

264
(painted on glass slides through which light was projected), sometimes
even multiplying her image with mirrors. The effect, a spiraling, mutating
whirl through which a brief glimpse of her (naked) body might materialize
only to vanish again, conjured (according to various writers at the time)
the evanescence of clouds or mist. Its weightless arabesques, like
hyperbola to an asymptote, inspired comparisons with “curves” and
“parabolas,” as though she were the human realization of Kleist’s puppet
(see figure 36). Her invocation of more than the eye could see, which
simultaneously invited and deflected the gaze of its spectators produced,
according to Mallarmé (who dubbed her “La Loïe”), insight over sight,
invoking both the inner terrain of the unconscious and the outer
expanses of the soul. As Felicia McCarren explains, Mallarmé, in his
poetic tribute to Fuller, ridiculed the attempt by spectators of ballet
performances to get a closer look through opera glasses, which he
insisted blinded them to the greater revelatory potential of what they
were seeing. In contrast, Fuller’s dances enacted the effect of Coppelia’s
spyglass in Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” through which Nathanael peers
into his own psyche when gazing upon Olympia: “[Cette] inconsciente
révelatrice … silencieusement écrira ta vision à la façon d’un Signe,

265

Figure 36. Loie Fuller

266
qu’elle est” (“[This] unconscious revealer … will silently write your vision
in the manner of a Sign, which she is.”
262

Fuller, in fact, felt a great kinship with “The Sandman” and, late in
life, produced two adaptations: a 1925 dance-pantomine called L’Homme
au Sable and a 1927 film, Les Incertitudes du docteur Coppelius. Although
the film is no longer extant, the stage production, described by Rhonda
K. Garelick in some detail, omitted the second half of the story in which
Nathanael falls in love with the mechanical woman, focusing instead on
the figure of the Sandman who steals children’s eyes, played by Fuller. In
explaining the omission of the automaton, Garelick suggests that,
considering the extent to which Fuller’s dances were able to mesmerize
(without recourse to the human body), the animate-inanimate doll would
have been redundant:
After all, nearly every one of Fuller’s theatrical projects
featured a (partially mechanical woman (herself), a
mechanical stage, special lenses, and gadgets—the
mechanization of dance itself. Sometimes, like Coppelius
tinkering with his doll, Fuller even played with fragmented
images of human body parts, permitting hands, arms, even
heads to whirl about via filmic projections, shadow trickery,
or mirrored reflections. In other words, Fuller’s entire oeuvre
was devoted to the very questions addressed by Hoffmann’s
tale.
263

262
Quoted in Felicia McCarren, “The ‘Symptomatic Act’ circa 1900: Hysteria, Hypnosis,
Electricity, Dance” in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 21, No. 4 (Summer, 1995), 756.
263
Rhonda K. Garelick, Electric Salome: Loie Fuller’s Performance of Modernism
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 143.

267
Fuller’s association with the kind of subtle forces—both psychic and
supernatural—explored by both Hoffmann and the romantics was further
encouraged by the life history that she recounted in her autobiography.
She was purportedly raised in a spiritualist family and was influenced,
early on, by both mesmerism and mediumistic phenomena. Her
serpentine dance was conceived while performing in a theatrical parody
of hypnosis, in a vaudeville play called “Quack M.D.” which premiered at
the New York music hall in 1890. Fuller played a hypnotized woman in
the play and, as she claimed, actually fell into a trance in the scene in
which she appeared and began producing the visual effects of hypnosis
by waving around her gauzy skirt (in a kind of improvisation of the “skirt
dance,” which she had once performed on the burlesque circuit):
Unknowingly, she begins sculpting her costume into
decorative shapes in which audience members—like sky-
gazers seeing shapes in the “clouds” of her robes—discern
various pleasing images. “It’s a butterfly!” “It’s an orchid!”
they cry out, thus sparking an entire career.
264

Following this initial success, Fuller both perfected the performance and
its presentation, innovating configurations of electrical lighting and
mirrors. Although she patented many of her inventions, the serpentine
dance inspired numerous imitations, as well as sparking a trend for
performances in which the female body was literally outfitted with
electrical lights. The electric goddess, as Julie Wosk calls her, became an

264
Garelick, 211.

268
emblem of the curative and dangerous potential of the “magical fluid” of
electricity, which was lighting up the world’s cities in the last decade of
the nineteenth century. Some goddesses danced, as in the case of Marie
Leyton, who triggered lights with her movements, as if she were “dancing
in a rainbow,” as one reviewer said of her 1892 premiere at the Tivoli
Music Hall in London.
265
Others sang:
New York’s Koster & Bial music hall in 1892 featured the
female entertainer Nada Beyval, billed as a “chanteuse
electrique,” singing French songs in her costume studded
with rows of minature electric lights that flashed
dramatically on the darkened stage.
266

Although these performers induced a similar sense of awe as earlier
experiments and spectacles using Leyden jars, they were, according to
Jody Sperling,

267
in many cases hindered by the technology from
achieving full mobility.
268
Like many early vaudeville acts, they may be
seen as a precursor to cinema (indeed, Edison would premiere his
Vitascope film projector at Koster & Bial only four years after Beyval’s
performance), however, as Sperling suggests, they may be more
analogous to video in their light-emitting capacities than film, whose

265
Quoted in Jody Sperling, “Sublime or Ridiculous?: Some Thoughts on Marie Leyton’s
Electrical Serpentine Dance of the 1890s” in Society of Dance History Scholars
Conference Proceedings, 2006.
266
Julie Wosk, Women and the Machine: Representations from the Spinning Wheel to the
Electronic Age (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 71
267
Jody Sperling is a contemporary dancer who recreates Fuller’s serpentine dance
techniques using modern technologies.
268
I find an interesting parallel between the problems of these early danseuse and
chanteuse electrique, who often attempted to hide large storage batteries in their
costumes, and current-day humanoid robots, which (at present) are forced to wear their
power sources like a backpack.

269
evanescent qualities are more akin to the weightless projections of Fuller
(who steered clear of the electrical apparatuses that she used to achieve
her special effects):
Fuller’s costumes create a moving screen for the luminous
projections, but she refrained from becoming herself the
source of illumination—although she created that illusion.
Fuller’s art consisted in the words of one contemporary
writer, the ‘transformations of tissues of living light.’ That
lovely phrase encapsulates the visceral, diaphanous and
morphic quality of her presence.
269

Fuller’s (dis)embodiment of light and motion simultaneously described
the harmonious curves of nature within which were intuited psychic
revelations by Symbolists such as Mallarmé, and evoked a spontaneity,
speed, and “sexual electricity” that made her equally beloved by the
Futurists. Her performances not only achieved a balance between
rhythmus and takt but, as Tom Gunning points out, they forged a link
between the aesthetic and technological, as well as between elite and
popular entertainment, in a way that paralleled both the appeal and
impact of cinema. When asked how she felt about performing in venues
that catered to ‘delicatessen dealers from Seventh Avenue,’ Fuller replied:
The Delicatessen man is indeed more likely than the
educated man to grasp the meaning of my dances. He feels
them. It is a question of temperament more than culture. My

269
Jody Sperling, “Sublime or Ridiculous?: Some Thoughts on Marie Leyton’s Electrical
Serpentine Dance of the 1890s."

270
magnetism goes out over the footlights and seizes him so
that he must understand—in spite of his delicatessen.
270

A subtle apparatus for the modern age, Fuller mesmerized audiences
with a dance between the organic and mechanical that achieved the
spontaneity and mobility of Kleist’s puppet, while heralding the age of the
cinematic “art-machine.” Like the female conductive medium whose
magnetism, as Fuller claims, makes the audience understand, the
cinema would inspire the same ambivalence over its induced automatism
as expressed about the female automaton in Hoffmann’s tales. As Walter
Benjamin noted, for those who expected the contemplative and
associative qualities of prior art media, the cinema was disconcerting, as
it was for Duhamel who stated, “I can no longer think what I want to
think.”
271
For Benjamin, however, such propulsive qualities constituted
the “shock effect” of cinema that, like the chain of bodies around a
baquet or Leyden jar, had the potential to galvanize the individual as part
of a collective. And while Benjamin pits the conductive force of cinema,
which “politicizes art,” against the fascist spectacle, which “aestheticizes
politics,” its successful use by such filmmakers as Eisenstein and
Riefenstahl underscores the extent to which, like the female apparatus, it

270
Quoted in Gunning, “Loie Fuller and the Art of Motion: Body Light, Electricity and
the Origins of Cinema” in Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette
Michelson (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press), 83.
271
Quoted in Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken
Books, 1968), 238.

271
is but an indiscriminate tool equally capable of enlightenment or
propaganda.

272

Conclusion

In her essay “Woman as Hieroglyph” Francette Pacteau describes the
aura of indecipherability that accumulates around the image of the
beautiful woman (or a part of the beautiful woman), whose promise of
unmediated access to a singular truth “beyond words or even life itself”
is reminiscent of the hieroglyph in its use by Renaissance humanists:
Beyond the appearance of beauty, lies the unknowable
presence of she who is not man. Difference is disavowed
through the integration of woman as phallic into the man’s
narcissistic system. Woman made image is the outcome of
the tensions between the imaginary and the symbolic,
between a subject that wants itself whole and a subject that
can only exist as split. The knowledge of a ‘beyond’ the
visible that marks the recognition of sexual difference, tears
the smooth surface of the image to reveal an otherness, but
an excessive otherness that takes on the status of a
mystery.
272

The mystery is, she suggests, the precondition for desire: “The riddle of
the sphinx must not be answered, for to answer it is to destroy desire.”
273

As in the parable of Pliny the Elder in which the mysterious trompe-l’oeil
curtain arouses an insatiable curiosity to see behind it, woman must

272
Francette Pacteau, The Symptom of Beauty (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1994), 112.
273
Pacteau, 119.

273
remain ‘”beyond the veil,” an accessible impossibility, whose enigmatic
otherness Pacteau compares to “the nocturnal smile” of the Mona Lisa.
In her essay, “Film and Masquerade: Theorizing the Female
Spectator,” Mary Anne Doane discusses the association between women
and hieroglyphics made by Freud in his famous lecture on “Femininity”
in which he recites four lines from a poem by Heinrich Heine that
inscribes, or so Freud would have us believe, the riddle of femininity:
Heads in hieroglyphic bonnets,
Heads in turbans and black birettas,
Heads in wigs and thousand other
Wretched, sweating heads of humans…
274

However, as Doane points out, Freud enacts a slight of hand by omitting
the next two lines of the poem:
Tell me, what signifies Man?
Whence does he come? Whither does he go?

The “question of femininity” is thus less a riddle than “a pretense,
haunted by the mirror-effect by means of which the question of the
woman reflects only man’s own ontological doubts.”
275
This displacement,
as well as woman’s role as hieroglyph, is realized most pointedly in
cinema, according to Doane, which projects “a writing in the images of
women, but not for her.” The cinematic image of woman, which enables

274
Quoted in Mary Anne Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female
Spectator” in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, edited by Patricia Erens (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1990), 41.
275
Doane, 42.

274
the male spectator to engage his “own ontological doubts” at a safe
remove, deprives the female spectator of the same interpretive distance
due to its iconic resemblance to her: “for the female spectator there is a
certain over-presence of the image—she is the image.”
276
Doane then
proposes “masquerade”—an excessive femininity akin to “a mask which
can be worn or removed”—as a strategy for distancing the female
spectator from the image of woman. As she puts it, “to masquerade is to
manufacture a lack in the form of a certain distance between oneself and
one’s image.”
277

The artificial female, particularly when she refuses verisimilitude,
distances the image in a manner not all that dissimilar from the “mask”
or the “masquerade” proposed by Doane, for she highlights the
“production of femininity” and the ways in which it is perpetrated by
both women and men. She also offers unique possibilities for unmasking
or enacting a doubled vision or anamorphosis that destabilizes not only
the image, but also the signifying system in which it appears. Moreover,
as is made clear by the many female androids discussed in the previous
chapters, to the extent that she offers a strategy for creating distance,
she also enables the male spectator to collapse the distance implied by
the “mirror-effect” through a self-reflexive rupture in which he recognizes

276
Doane, 43.
277
Doane, 49

275
himself in the image of the Other. Such an effect is the equivalent of
Duchamp’s parodic addition of a mustache and goatee to the “nocturnal
smile” of the Mona Lisa, the production of an image whose impossible
vacillation underscores the signification of the signifier in a way that is
arguably more faithful to the apophatic tradition of the Renaissance
hieroglyphic than the untouched version.
One can sense the productive possibilities of such intentional
artificiality and rupture in the two films discussed in the “Introduction,”
which use Realdolls as characters. In both cases, the inertness of the
dolls defamiliarize what are otherwise stereotypical encounters between
men and women, raising uncomfortable questions about the
programmatic nature of sociality and the extent to which, like the dolls,
real people are used as actors and actresses in the “private theater” of
projective fantasy. Unfortunately, in both Love Object and Lars and the
Real Girl, the resonance of such questions is muted by the
pathologization of the central male protagonist and the careful placement
of his artificial encounter within the distancing frame of social
aberration.
The desire to pathologize arises wherever the artificial female
appears, and it is, admittedly, difficult to avoid in relation to objects that
we associate with childhood. Dolls are, as D.W. Winnicott once

276
explained, what children use to help them transition from un-
individuated dependence to autonomous selfhood, and to interact with
them past childhood, especially in an erotic fashion, bespeaks
regression. Moreover, it is difficult to maintain distance between the
image of femininity and what it represents; if a female doll is decapitated
(in the manner of Kokoschka’s doll-fetish) or amputated like a Bellmer
poupee, the violence to a female body, however artificial, serves as a
reminder of a misogyny that is all too real for far too many women.
However, to the extent that I had an agenda in my dissertation, it was to
underscore the tension that arises in work that represents artificiality
278

between psychoanalytic and socio-historical interpretations. Bellmer’s
dolls are readable as both a form of social critique and sadistic fetishism,
a contradiction whose finer points are worth examining.
In their contradictory blasphemy, Bellmer’s dolls anticipate the
“partiality, irony, intimacy and perversity” of Donna Haraway’s cyborg,
which is, as she states, at once the realization of militarism and
patriarchal capital and a site of feminist resistance. Indeed, the cyborg is
the figure that lurks throughout these pages and who will shape my
future research on the artificial female. The cyborg—part machine, part

278
However blurred the line can become, I’m making a distinction here between
someone like Slade, the Realdoll doctor, who uses dolls to stage a certain kind of
performance and those for whom they are girlfriends. It is the psychoanalytic
interpretation of the doll as representation with which I am grappling in my work, not
the doll as female surrogate.

277
human—embodies a chimerical hybridity that hearkens back to the
allegorical and emblematic tradition discussed in the first chapter; it
enacts a visual vacillation—between wholeness and partiality, outside
and inside, organic and technological—that mirrors the disassembled
android so admired by the ASFRians presented in the second chapter;
and the theory of cybernetics, which posits a functional equivalence
between humans and machines as systems of control subject to flows of
data signals, is arguably the most recent update of the discourse of
pneuma and corpuscular flows explored in the third chapter. The cyborg
will also take my research back to where I initially started in the
Introduction: the theory of the uncanny valley and its modern invocation
of traditional Japanese aesthetics. Indeed, an example par excellence are
the gynoids of Japanese erotic artist Hajime Sorayama, female cyborgs
that are part metal and part flesh, illustrated in the style of Victor Vargas
as high-tech pin-ups (see figure 37). I interviewed Sorayama for my
documentary and he drew an interesting analogy between his gynoids
and Japanese cooking, which reminded me of Tanizaki’s “praise of
shadows”:
In Japanese cuisine, when we serve something sweet
(there’s a dessert called oshiruko), we typically add some
salt to bring out the sweetness. Just adding more and
more sugar is not the professional way. When we want to
emphasize cuteness or kindness, we do it by using
something macho, a gorilla or a yakuza or mafia, and
make them do something only slightly nice, it appears by

278

Figure 37. Sorayama Gynoid

279

contrast to be extremely nice. In the same way, by using
something hard or something totally unerotic—fetish
people use vinyl, PVC, or leather, but I’m saying rocks or
metal—will bring the woman’s femininity to an even
higher level.

Although he doesn’t like to admit it, Sorayama was hired by Sony to
design their robotic dog, the AIBO (see figure 38), a fact that underscores
the nuanced relationship between fantasy and material reality within the
Japanese robotics industry, a relationship that Haraway describes as
critical to her cyborg and “any possibility of historical transformation.”
279

Aside from charting the cross-cultural terrain of the cyborg, I plan,
in future work, to trace a line between the feminist appropriation of the
cyborg imaginary and the “resistant Galateas” of the past. There are, of
course, important differences between the two: the latter employs the
technological as a means of invoking an organic unity tinged by a
transcendentally-inflected nostalgia, while the former represents an
explicit disavowal of the natural order, the organic body, and the
invocation of holism or unity of any kind. Both, however, blur the
distinction between the organic and the machinic, enacting a
contradiction that points simultaneously towards embodiment and away
from it, as a form of social critique. While the “failed Galatea” of the
Romantics has been the subject of a great deal of feminist critique, she

279
Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto” in Simians, Cyborgs, Women: The Reinvention
of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 150.

280

Figure 38. AIBO

281
also represents the philosophical (and one might argue repressed) origins
of the postmodern female cyborg. As in the previous chapters, by tracing
historically the (often problematic) tropes and themes that give rise to a
contemporary symbol of (in the case of the cyborg) female empowerment,
I hope to open a space in which boundaries are breached in a mutual
celebration of vacillation.

282
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Asset Metadata

Creator de Fren, Allison (author)

Core Title The exquisite corpse: disarticulations of the artificial female

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 10/15/2008

Defense Date 08/14/2008

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag anatomy theater,Android,artificial female,asfr,automata,bellmer,Dissection,female robot,fembot,gender and technology,l'eve future,Metropolis,OAI-PMH Harvest,realdoll,robot,Surrealism,the sandman

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Renov, Michael (committee chair), Anderson, Steven F. (committee member), Lippit, Akira Mizuta (committee member), McPherson, Tara (committee member)

Creator Email adefren@conncoll.edu,defren@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m1672

Unique identifier UC1170080

Identifier etd-Fren-2417 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-123923 (legacy record id),usctheses-m1672 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Fren-2417.pdf

Dmrecord 123923

Document Type Dissertation

Rights de Fren, Allison

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu