MDDM23: Female, as It Happens ...

[Dave Monroe]

   "'Wait, wait, this other Duck,-- it's male? 
female?  For that matter, which are you?'
   "'Moi?  Female, as it happens.  The other, being
yet sexually unmodified, is neither,-- or, if you
like, both.  Any Problem?'" (M&D, Ch. 37, p. 377)

>From 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 ...

   "The topos of the artificial woman belongs, in a
broad sense, to the tradition of the automaton." (p.
132)

   "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,' 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 Euripedes' Helen, where
she is called a mimema, imitation, and an agalma, a
jeweled treasure in the form of a statue.  The
familiar tale of Pygmalion itself centers on a
sculptor who falls in love with the statue he has
created ....
   "A reverse Pygmalion theme emerges in the
eighteenth century in an early work of Jean Paul,
Simple, yet well-intended biography of a new and
pleasing woman of pure wood, whom I long ago fashioned
and married.  Klaus Theweleit writes that Jean Paul
'had no trouble explaining in detail why nothing would
be lost if flesh-and-blood women were replaced by
wooden ones.  What would the real difference be, after
all?'  Hoffman's wind-up doll Olympia, of course,
beras kinship with both Jean Paul's wooden woman and
the perfected model of the artificial woman conceived
by Villiers de l"isle-Adam....
   "Images of automata have been shown by Lieselotte
Sauer to be central to the problems of German
romanticism...." (p. 137)

And see, sez Miller Frank ...

Loraux, Nicole.  "Le Fantome de la sexualite."
   Nouvelle Revue de la Psychanalyse: La Chose
   Sexuelle 29 (Spring 1984): 11-31.

Sauer, Lieselotte.  Marionetten, Maschinen,
   Automaten: Der Kunstliche Mensch in Der Deutschen
   Und Englishchem Romantik.  Bonn: Bouvier, 1983.

Theweleit, Klaus.  Male Fantasies.  2 vols.
   Minneapolis: U of Minnsota P, 1987.  356-7.

Ziolkowski, Theodore.  Review of Marionetten,
   Maschinen, Automaten: Der Kunstliche Mensch in
   Der Deutschen Und Englishchem Romantik, by
   Lieselotte Sauer.  Comparative Literature 38,
   No. 3 (Summer 1986): 302-4.

Among many, many others ...

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