'Just a singing-machine': The Making of an Automaton in George du Maurier's Trilby

This essay argues for a re-evaluation of the eponymous heroine of George du Maurier's 1894 bestselling novel, Trilby. Trilby's tragic end is generally understood to come at the hands of that archetypally evil impresario, Svengali, who purportedly mesmerizes and manipulates her into becoming Europe's greatest singing star. However, a closer examination of her life reveals that Trilby's fate in the novel can more properly be linked to a lifelong dehumanization that shatters her sense of autonomous self and reduces her to a most rudimentary version of the human. In her progression from aspiring subject to tractable 'singing-machine,' Trilby can, in fact, be positioned as belonging to the cultural genealogy of the automaton, a figure that symbolizes a particular nineteenth-century concern about the fate of human subjectivity in an increasingly rationalized, systematized world.