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The story has been told in so many versions in the modern age that most readers will recognize the essential narrative. It involves a man who finds women unsatisfactory as companions, whether in their capacity as sexual partner or wife. The solution he comes across is a technological one-the building of a female robot designed to fulfill all of his desires. Certain elements of this story have pre-modern origins, most notably in the ancient myth of Pygmalion, the king of Cyprus who loved a statue of his making, turned into a real woman by Aphrodite, the goddess of love.1 This paper deals with the specifically modern narratives in which the creation and the animation of the artificial woman are realized through the male manipulation of machines, rather than through magic or divine intervention. The technological aspect of the story is what constitutes its modernity, placing it in the historical and cultural context of the industrialization of the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The central purpose of my analysis is to highlight the subversive potential of the narrative, especially in relation to notions of woman's nature. The most important text for this discussion is Villiers de l'Isle Adam's 1886 novel L'Eve future [Future Eve], which involves a fictional version of the American inventor Thomas Edison who builds a female android for a friend. Much of the scholarship on this work has concentrated on the overtly misogynistic ideas in the narrative. Asti Hustvedt, for instance, analyzes the story in connection with research being conducted at the time by Jean-Martin Charcot on female hysteria and concludes that Edison's android "is the ideal hysteric, a woman-machine stripped of any threatening pathology or degeneracy, reinscribed with male language: an Eve for the future to absolve the sins of the Eve of the past"(Anzalone 46).2 Julie Wosk also sees the construct as a "man's slave," a product of the traditional dual view of woman as a saintly angel and a destructive whore, which is also behind the image of the false Maria robot in Fritz Lang's 1926 film Metropolis (68-88). There is no doubt that the stories center around the male desire to construct a woman ideal in body and personality, and to maintain total control over her.
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