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The Lord of Hadaly's Rings: Regulating the Female Body in Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's "L'Eve future"

1996; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 13; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3189803

1549-3377

Jennifer Forrest,

Short Stories in Global Literature

Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's negative position regarding progressand particularly its utilitarian application in the machine-turns on a deeply felt disdain for materialism, reason, and good sense. When his principal character, a famous scientist/engineer, creates a female android, it is because ce qui interesse l'auteur de L 'Eve future, c'est moins le progres scientifique et technique en soi, que perspectives qu'il ouvre a l'imagination.' In this way, science and engineering function as the metaphysical intermediaries between the real and the ideal, permitting the technical expert to pierce les voiles dont s'enveloppe le monde sensible, and reveal les puissances cachees dans l'infini.2 Here, through science's ability to probe and grasp nature's mysteries, Villiers's original resistance to its practical applications is defeated by science's greater epistemological promises. And yet the metaphor of penetrating or even of removing nature's veils points to the gender specificity of the quest for transcendence acquired through science and technology;' the imaginative processes involved in the decision to fabricate an artificial being revolve on its identity as a woman. It is at this moment that L 'Eve future (1886) joins other literary works from the nineteenth century that dramatize the effort to physically reproduce, if not an entire woman, then fragments of women.4 The proliferation of artificial women in these novels firmly situates the central debate ofL 'Eve future within a particular socio-historical configuration of woman disseminated during the last half of the nineteenth century. In that configuration, an active redefinition of woman's social role often gets entangled with the advent of a middle-class and industrial economy.' An imaginative link established between women and the rise of the bourgeoisie creates problems for the decadent claim that the sole beauty of science lies in its fantastic access to the supernatural realms that constitute natural and human reality. L 'Eve future presents a flawed female, a Bourgeois Goddess whose physical perfection is betrayed by her mental allegiance to that same good sense which represents progress, technology, and middle-class sensibilities. Literature, art, and philosophy, however, will transfer the mediocrity of modem times-initially revealed in the utilitarian machine---onto the female body, notably that of la bourgeoise.