Miller Frank, The Mechanical Song (automata, femmes fatale)

[Dave Monroe]

... continuing on in Felicia Miller Frank, The Mechanical Song: Women,
Voice, and the Artificial in Nineteenth-Century French Narrative
(Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1995), Chapter 5, "Baudelaire and the
Painted Woman," pp. 118-42 ...

Baudelaire's preoccupation with the woman as frigid statue can be
enrolled in the catalog of masochistic fantasies of the fatal woman
[Mario] Praz [in his The Romantic Agony] finds typical of a certain
strain of romantic erotic pathology, anticipating or suggesting the
symbolist's privilieged image of the "cold majesty of the sterile
woman."  (132)

The topos of the artificial woman belongs, in a broad sense [no pun
intended, I'm sure ...], to the tradition of the automaton. (132)

[Jean-Claude] Beaune, who calls the automaton a "metaphysical machine"
that occupies the "center of frictions between logical categories"
(Beaune, [L'Automate et ses mobiles,] 10), writes that the history of
automata took a new turn with teh rationalism of Descartes and
Leibniz....  Informing all these philosophical uses of the model of the
machine is the prestige of the clockwork-mechanism metaphor of the
universe that lay close to the surface in this period and affected ideas
of social and even political function, as Otto Mayr has demonstrated in
Authority, Liberty and Automatic Machines in Early Modern Europe
[q.v.].  (133)

For Descartes ... automata can resemble human beings, while humans may
seem like automata.  Elsewhere, Descartes remarks that the people he
sees "pssing in the street might, under their cloaks and hats, be
nothing more than automata" (quoted in Beaune, 10).  (135)

[Anyone know just what Cartesian text this quote is from?  And do see as
well, of course, Julien Offroy de la Mettrie, L'Homme-Machine ...]

Advances in the watchmaker's art paved the way for a number of
mechanical musical instruments of all kinds.  These were sometimes
adorned with human heads whose movements could be regulated with the
expulsion of air ... (135)

There was also the hope of making automata that would imitate speech....
Marin Mersenne .... [Wolfgang von] Kempelen's Talking Head, a machine
that perfectly pronounced the word "exploitation."  (136)

The artificial woman has had a long history of her own.  Classicists are
familiar with the tradition of the false Helen sent to Troy, the real
Helen to Egypt.  In her article "Le Fantome de la Sexualite," [Nouvelle
Revue de la Psychanalyse: La Chose Sexuelle 29 (Spring 1984): 11-31]
speaking of Helen's slippery status as object of desire, of Helen as
lack or mirage, Nicole Loraux evokes the references to Helen doubled by
an eidolon in the poetry of Stesichorus and in Euripides' Helen, where
she is called a mimema, imitation, and an agalma, a jeweled terasure in
the form of a statue.  The familiar tale of Pygmalion ... (137)

... Jean Paul, Simple, yet well-intended biography of a new and pleasing
woman of pure wood, whom I long ago fashioned an married.... [E.T.A.]
Hoffmann's wind-up doll Olympia [in "The Sandman"] ... the artificial
woman conceived by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam [in L'Eve future].... a
series of talking dolls in whose manufacture Edison was induced to
participate.  (137)

Images of automata have been shown by Lieselotte Sauer [Marionetten,
Maschinen, Automaten: Der Kunstliche Mensch in Der Deutschen Und
Englishchem Romantik] to be central to the problems of german
romanticism.  Sauer demonstrates how the essentially optimistic metaphor
of the machine widespread  among post-Renaissance and Enlightenment
philosophical writers undergoes a shift in romantic literature to become
a negative literary image.... Jean Paul, Clemens Brentano, Achim von
Arnim, Hoffmann ... Mary Shelley's Frankenstein ... Ambrose Bierce,
Edwrad Bulwer-Lytton, Samuel Butler, and others.  Sauer argues that
these texts show an ambivalent response to the Industrial Revolution and
that in them "the central problems and questions of romanticism are
touched uopn in the context of metaphors and motifs connected with
artificial man" (138)

[Here, Miller Frank is quoting from Theodore Ziolkowski's review of
Sauer's text in Comparative Literature 38, no. 3 (Summer 1986): 302-4.
Hope somebody translates that Sauer book but soon ...]

The image of teh artificial woman taht emerges in French writing may be
seen in part as reflecting teh influence of German romantic imagery, or
perhaps more accurately, as expressing some of the same uneasy responses
to teh technological transformations taking place during teh period.  At
teh same time, this image fuses with the motif of the fatal woman that
[Mario] Praz argues to eb a major topos of romantic erotic pathology in
his chapter "La Belle Dame sans Merci" in The Romantic Agony.  Praz
shows that while teh romantic imagery of teh first decades of teh epriod
was dominated largely by passive, suffering women and their cruel
persecutors, latter-day sons of "the Divine Marquis," a shift took place
taht reversed these roles toward the middle of the century ... (138)

It is curious to follow the parabola of teh sexes during the nineteenth
century: the obsession for the androgyne type towards the end of the
century is a clear indication of a turbid confusion of function and
ideal.  The amle, who at first tends toward sadism, inclines, at the end
of the century, towards masochism. ([Mario] Praz, [The Roamntic Agony,]
216)  (138)

... Cleopatra ... Helen ... the frequent use of Salome as a figure of
the cruel "lynx-eyed" enchantress in numerous texts ... (139)

If these women are cast as feral, demonic, or vampiristic, demanding the
submission of hapless young lovers to their insatiable and bloody
passions, they are also called cold, statuelike in their pallor and
cruel indifference in a way that recalls Helen, the jeweled agalma, or
the female automaton ... [Theophile Gautier's] Nyssia ... "the fingers
of a bronze statue animated by some marvel" ... Prosper Merimee's Venus
d-Ille ... "her arms of bronze" ... Swinburne's Faustine, who, like his
ghostly Venus (Laus Veneris), is eternal, a frighetning "love-machine
with clockwork joints of supple gold" made for the destruction of her
lovers (Praz, 240).  Other charcterizations of teh fatal woman portray
her as frighteningly pallid, like a statue (like Balzac's Jane la Pale),
or beautiful and dead (like Very, seven years dead, in Heinrich Heine's
"Florentine Night" (Salon, iii).  The attraction of necrophilic amours
closes the circle back to Baudelaire.  (139)

[Frank] Kermode treats some related material in Romantic Image where he
discusses the motif of the masklioke dead face of teh dancer. (139)

... he calls the concept of the dead face and the dancer the cenbtral
icon of Yeats and of the whole romantic tradition ... (141)

It may be useful to remember that dance during the nineteenth centurt
had devloped into a highly artificial, stylized form ....  The topos of
teh fatal woman, icy, cruel, and statuelike .... and of teh remote
dancer ... are both affiliated with the new valualtion of artificiality
as a defining term of modernity first given form by Baudelaire ... (141)

The inhumn woman of the romantics is thus a hypostasis of
self-reflective images of masochistic romantic sexual pathology, of it's
aesthetic theory with its newly valued art for art's sake, and finally,
of teh ancient dream--or nightmare--of an uncanny artificial being:
Helen as jeweled statue.  (142)

... okay, so we've got modernity, femininity, artificiality,
romanticism, symbolism, coldness, cruelty, masochism, automata, jewels,
Egypt ... see as well ...

Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty.

Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil
    in Fin-de-Siecle Culture.

__________, Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality
    and the Cult of Manhood.

Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatale.

Marie Lathers, The Aesthetic of Artifice: Villiers' Futue Eve.

Michelle A. Masse, In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism,
    and the Gothic.

Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony.

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs.

Suzanne R. Stewart, Sublime Surrender: Male Masochism
    at the Fin-de-Siecle.

Gaylyn Studlar, In the Realm of Pleasure: Von Sternberg,
    Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic.

... and, on that SF S&M cybergoth tip,

Richard Calder, Dead Girls.

... that one has it all going on ...