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124 ] •7• the anatomiCal Gaze in Tomorrow’s Eve allison de Fren For the following essay, Allison de Fren won the SFRA’s Pioneer Award for 2010. In the words of the selection committee, her article “reconfigures our understanding of how a defining figure of science fiction—the female cyborg— emerged and why,” and it “makes important connections among some of the best known texts in sf criticism and the very early days of the genre, enriching our sense of its engagement with questions of embodiment and gender” (SFRA Review no. 293 [Summer 2010]: 11). Allison de Fren is also the writer and director of the documentary film The Mechanical Bride, which explores the Pygmalionesque world of “perfect” artificial women—from the fembots and gynoids in sf literature, cinema, and television to today’s growing industry of life-sized silicone love dolls. This essay originally appeared in SFS 36, no. 2 (July 2009): 235–65 In the early sf novel L’Eve future (Tomorrow’s Eve) by Philippe Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1838–89), the female body is dissected repeatedly. The novel—which appeared in serialized form in La Vie Moderne between 1885 and 1886 before the definitive text was published in 1886—follows the creation of a female android by a fictionalized Thomas Alva Edison for a British patron and friend named Lord Celian Ewald, a poetic type who is on the verge of suicide due to a failed love. The object of Lord Ewald’s torment is a young singer named Alicia Clary, whose unearthly beauty he compares to that of the Venus de Milo, but whose banal personality destroys whatever romantic sentiments her image inspires. Edison, whose goal is to create a factory for the manufacture of ideal The Anatomical Gaze in Tomorrow’s Eve [ 125 women, sees his friend’s plight as an opportunity to bring to fruition the robotic prototype he has been secretly developing in his underground laboratory . He proposes to transfer onto his mechanical template Alicia’s image and voice, while disposing of the interior self that his patron finds so distasteful . Although Lord Ewald is skeptical of—if not somewhat offended by—the idea that a mechanical doll could possibly live up to his nobility of feeling, Edison sets out to convince him through a series of lengthy conversations that form the bulk of the novel, many of which deconstruct female beauty in order to substantiate its replicability. Such deconstruction is literalized as dissection in a scene in which Edison opens the female android for his patron, providing not only a thorough examination of her innards but also a medico-technological inventory of her components and their functions . This initial dissection is then repeated in textual form: various parts of the android’s body are given their own chapters—Flesh, Rosy Mouth, Pearly Teeth, Physical Eyes, Hair, Epidermis—and explained at length by Edison. The dissection of the android not only serves as the narrative nucleus of Villiers’s novel, it is also the matrix within which a variety of discourses about the novel intersect. Considering the novel as a work of proto-science fiction, this scene is of note for its use of an actual inventor/scientist and of scientific exposition that references recent inventions—such as the phonograph and photosculpture (the former is how the android will speak, the latter the process used to transpose the image of Alicia onto her frame)— for narratological ends.1 The detailed explanation of the android’s inner workings both enhances verisimilitude and establishes Edison’s scientific authority in an undertaking that is—by the standards of readers both then and now—speculative. From this demonstration, we are to surmise (as Lord Ewald starts to suspect) “not only that the engineer was going to resolve all the problems raised by this monstrous set of affirmations, but that he had already resolved them, and was simply concerned to set forth the proof of established facts” (129). Edison’s technological-anatomical demonstration is, in this sense, reminiscent of the “mise-en-abyme mini-lessons of scientific fact” embedded within the fiction of Jules Verne (Evans 84). As Arthur B. Evans argues, “Here, many of the same narrative elements used to facilitate such didacticism are present: e.g., the dialogue format, the incredulous interlocutor serving as intermediary for reader identification, the systematic and logical presentation, itself constructed around linear causeeffect ‘scientific’ principles, the de rigueur valorization of the travail and patience required to bring the...

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