The Mechanical Song: Women, Voice, and the Artificial in Nineteenth- Century French Narrative (review)

In The Mechanical Song, Felicia Miller Frank explores a fascinating area of research: the relationship between the singing voice, women, and the artificial as it develops and changes in nineteenth-century French narrative. Utilizing a combined psychoanalytic and cultural-historical approach to her material, Miller Frank draws resourcefully on the theories of Didier Anzieu, Denis Vasse, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, J.J. Goux, and Jean-François Lyotard, among others, in order to suggest how the female voice becomes identified with modernity itself by the end of the century. A key figure in this development is, unsurprisingly, Baudelaire. A key figure, yes, but not alone, as Baudelaire joins up with an odd yet engaging parade of castrati, bel canto sopranos, angels, Edison talking dolls, and the voice of the Android, in this equally engaging book.

One of the strengths of Miller Frank’s book lies in her efforts to tie together two different kinds of analysis, the psychoanalytic and the historical. Such an approach can be fraught with difficulties. Thus one of the first things she addresses is precisely a question that has bedeviled feminist thought in particular: how to deal with essentialism, psychoanalytical and other, as a historical and cultural problem in the representations of women and the feminine. After rehearsing and critiquing some of the more pertinent arguments with respect to the maternal voice—those of Kristeva, Irigaray, and Cixous, joined later to the voices of Domna Stanton, Claire Kahane, and Kaja Silverman—she veers away from the notion “that the voice is inherently or predominantly a feminine mode. To do so suggests the maternal to be the feminine destiny.” And she continues: “I would prefer to emphasize the functional, culturally typified nature of the association of the voice with the feminine, and thus of its role in the formation of the psyche” (36). Elaborating further on the relation between voice and psyche, she concludes that “the maternal voice becomes in fact a primary and enabling agent of the individual’s assumption of subjectivity” (50). Like Kristeva, Anzieu, and Lacoue-Labarthe, she privileges the role of the auditory over the more prevalent visual model in establishing the foundations of subjectivity. But, as Miller Frank makes clear, yearning for the feminine, especially the maternal, voice is expressed in male writers like Proust and Rousseau within “a system based on the devaluation of the feminine” (3).

One could argue that it is precisely this tension between nostalgia and devaluation of the woman’s voice that which enables those historically analyzable moments that Felicia Miller Frank calls attention to in The Mechanical Song. For what she does in this study is to reconstitute culturally specific instances which produce and enforce “the tradition of objectification of the woman as material and other” (6), a tradition which makes representational and symbolic use of the feminine voice as an echo or simulacrum of itself by projecting deep-lying anxieties over technological and other changes and an increasingly inhuman modernity onto a voice now transformed into a mechanical song.

The examples she gives of this gradual evolution into a darkly hued modern sublime, following the lead of Lyotard in his L’Inhumain: causeries sur le temps (The Inhuman. Reflections on Time), range from the haunting to the chilling and culminate in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s disturbing vision of the objectified female in L’Eve future (1886). But her point of departure, along with the subsequent, suggestive linkages she makes with mechanical recording, the feminine voice and the modern sublime, really begins with George Sand’s Consuelo (1842–44) and the impact of a brilliant opera singer, Pauline Viardot (née García), on Sand’s novel. This subject allows Miller Frank an opening into the intertwined cultural history of literary romanticism and opera. As she does in later chapters on Baudelaire and the artificial woman and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam and recording technology, here she demonstrates her skill in...