Miller Frank, The Mechanical Song

[Dave Monroe]

... well, accidentally sent of my notes from Felicia Miller Frank's The
Mechanical Song: Women, Voice, and the Artificial in Nineteenth-Century
French Narrative (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1995) whilst saving them as
a "draft" this morning, I see.   Had not only a bit further to go, but
had also wanted to edit a bit, then break them up into two more
manageable (length, theme) posts, but ...

But was, more relevantly, hoping to suggest something not only of the
lineage and function of "female" (or, at any rate, gendered as such)
automata in history and fiction, but was also hoping to suggest the
possible resonance/influence of Charles Baudelaire's The Painter of
Modern Life with/on Thomas Pynchon's V., particularly in that (not so?)
peculiar nexus of the feminine, the artificial, and modernity ...

Which reminds me, Terrence, et al., Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and
Painted Women: A Study of  Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870
(New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1982), which (ass-backwardly? back-asswardly?
retrospectively, at any rate ...) led me to Herman Melville's very
wonderful The Confidence Man in the first place.   Anyway, to continue,
from Felicia Miller frank, The Mechanical Song, Chapter 5, "Baudelaire
and the Painted Women" ...


Karen Halttunen,