The Girl Born Without a Mother

[Mark Kohut]

Richard Fiero offers:
Alice has offered McLuhan's "Mechanical Bride" along with the Wikipedia.org 
canard that "the title The Mechanical Bride is derived from a piece by the 
Dadaist artist, Marcel Duchamp." That remark must have been inserted by Phillip 
B Meggs since it appears in exactly the same language on the Gingko Press site, 
the book's publisher.

Gingko Press edition is a reprint with Meggs intro of a 1951 Vanguard Press 
first edition, in which McLuhan referenced Duchamp's 1926 work: 


The exhibition’s name paid homage to Canadian theorist Marshall McLuhan’s first 
book, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, published in 1951. 
Interestingly, McLuhan derived the book’s name from Marcel Duchamp’s 1926 work 
The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even, also known as The Large Glass. 
Duchamp’s hybrid drawing-sculpture depicted an imagined factory run by a 
literally mechanical bride. McLuhan’s reference to the work was loaded; like 
Duchamp’s bride and her captive bachelors, postwar America could easily be 
viewed as a closed system of producers and consumers divided along gender 
binaries and fuelled by sex.