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1 results

  • Chapter 15 - A Disembodied Voice, Yet the Voice of a Human Soul

  • from Part IV - Interactions
  • Edited by Suzy Anger, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Thomas Vranken, University of the South Pacific
  • Book:
    Victorian Automata
    Published online:
    15 March 2024
    Print publication:
    28 March 2024, pp 314-332

  • Summary

    In Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s L’Ève future (1885–6), a fictional version of Thomas Edison builds a mechanical female automaton as a replacement for a human woman. This chapter reads the novel and its gynoid Hadaly as works of decadent speculative fiction. After tracing the relationships of L’Ève Future to decadence as a literary movement via late nineteenth-century writers such as J.-K. Huysmans, Paul Bourget, and Arthur Symons, it argues that the work’s decadent tropes and commitments allow it to place a critical spin on automata and automatism. Villiers’s vision of automacy – as alluringly artificial yet both relational and entangled in cultural norms about the human – not only exceeds the analogous ventures of the real-life Edison but also resonates with attempts to come to terms with the nature and functions of autonomous artificial entities today.