Huckleberry Finn on How the World Was Made (or Laid)

Reading Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I came across the following intriguing passage (in chapter 19), in which Huck tells the reader about a brief philosophical or rather cosmological argument he had with his friend and companion, the runaway slave Jim.

“It’s lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky, up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened  - Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened; I judged it would have took too long to make so many. Jim said the moon could a laid them; well, that looked kind of reasonable, so I didn’t say nothing against it, because I’ve seen a frog lay most as many, so of course it could be done.”

Jim’s reasoning is built firmly on experience: making a thing takes time, and making so many copies of a thing as there are stars in the sky would have taken an awful lot of time, so it is rather unlikely if not downright impossible that anyone would have taken the trouble to do so. But laying, giving birth, is a process that takes almost no time at all, at least that’s how it may appear to the casual observer: at one moment there is nothing, and the next there is. It is not quite happening, but not making either. Our parents haven’t made us, but neither have we just happened. We have gradually come into existence, in our secret hiding place, the maternal womb, before, at some point, we were suddenly thrown into the world. Our parents have set the whole process that eventually led to our existence in motion, but all the rest happened by itself, although clearly following a plan, a plan that was not devised by our parents. Perhaps the universe has come into existence in a similar way. Perhaps God didn’t make the world either. Perhaps he (or rather she) gave birth to it. (I have to admit I’m not entirely sure what that means, but I’m rather fond of the idea.)

Do Automatic Sweethearts Work?

A couple of weeks ago I briefly discussed, prompted by David Levy’s treatment of the issue in his book Love and Sex with Robots, whether a robot can be said to love a person if they say they do and act as if they did. Today I’d like to continue this discussion.

In his 1909 book The Meaning of Truth, the great William James asserts that a statement is only meaningful if it makes a practical difference whether or not it is true: “if it can make no practical difference whether a given statement be true or false, then the statement has no real meaning.” (p. 52) However, in a footnote later in the same book (p. 189), he corrects a claim that he made in his previous book, Pragmatism, where he declared the terms ‘God’ and ‘matter’ for synonymous “so long as no differing future consequences were deducible from the two conceptions”. Now, however, he no longer believes this, because even if the godless universe were exactly like one in which God does exist, believing the one or the other would definitely make a difference for us. “Even if matter could do every outward thing that God does, the idea of it would not work as satisfactorily, because the chief call for a God on modern man’s part is for a being who will inwardly recognise them and judge them sympathetically.” James then asks us to consider an analogy which he thinks will convince us that there is indeed a relevant, meaningful difference between the two hypotheses:

“The flaw was evident when, as a case analogous to that of a godless universe, I thought of what I called an ‘automatic sweetheart,’ meaning a soulless body which should be absolutely indistinguishable from a spiritually animated maiden, laughing, talking, blushing, nursing us, and performing all feminine offices as tactfully and sweetly as if a soul were in her. Would any one regard her as a full equivalent? Certainly not, and why? Because, framed as we are, our egoism craves above all things inward sympathy and recognition, love and admiration. The outward treatment is valued mainly as an expression, as a manifestation of the accompanying consciousness believed in. Pragmatically, then, belief in the automatic sweetheart would not work, and in point of fact no one treats is as a serious hypothesis.”

Yet just a year later, in December 1910, the philosopher Edgar Arthur Singer gave an address before the American Philosophical Association at Princeton, entitled “Mind as an Observable Object” (later published as the first chapter of his 1924 book Mind as Behavior), in which he directly attacks James for his alleged inconsistency. Pragmatically, a soulless person (that is, one that lacks subjectivity and any form of mental awareness) should be regarded as fully equivalent to the usual kind, to a person with a soul. Singer insists that it would not make any difference whatsoever whether the other really feels anything at all or just behaves in a way that is consistent with real feelings, that is, in such a way that we cannot detect any difference between what they do and what a real, conscious and self-aware person would do. Thus, contrary to what James suggests, for all intents and purposes an automatic sweetheart is just as good as a real human lover.

When we occasionally call a lover “soulless”, we do, according to Singer, in fact refer to a certain (already observed or predicted) behaviour, so if there is a difference between the soulful and the soulless it is a difference in behaviour: “If I imagine myself come to believe that my mistress, with all her loveliness, is really without soul, I cannot think what I should mean by this if it be not that I fear her future conduct will not bear out my expectations regarding her. Some trait or gesture, a mere tightening of the lips, hardening of the eye, stifling of a yawn, one of those things we say are rather felt than seen, would have raised in my mind the suspicion that she might not to my fuller experience of her remain indistinguishable from a spiritually minded maiden.” If the distinction between ‘soulless’ and ‘soulful’ means anything, then it is this. “Consciousness is not something inferred from behavior; it is behavior.”

James’s point, of course, was that we wouldn’t be happy with a lover of whom we knew that they didn’t really feel anything for us and that all their seemingly loving actions deceive us to the extent that they indicate some kind of emotional involvement on the part of our lover. Yet Singer could respond that we might well be unhappy with an automatic sweetheart, but that we really shouldn’t be because to react like that is completely irrational, given that a real human lover would do nothing different from the automatic one.

It is interesting, though, to see how neatly Singer’s description of a “soulless” lover (where the term can be meaningfully ascribed) fits with the descriptions that we find in literature of equally unsatisfying women and with the accompanying eulogies on the virtues of the artificial lover (as, for example, in Ovid’s Pygmalion, Hoffmann’s The Sandman, or Villiers’ The Future Eve). Once again, it is the real human lover who is decried as soulless, the one that turns out not to be completely reliable, completely with us, completely there for us. It is the yawn that indicates the lack of soul, a less than interested gaze. That is the danger that always exists when we risk getting involved with real human beings. They might lose interest in us, might grow cold and unresponsive, might stop loving us. If that is an indicator of soullessness, then each and every one of us is soulless, and only an automatic sweetheart, one whose eyes will always gaze lovingly at us and will never lose their shine, whose lips never tighten, but are always soft and welcoming, and who will never have to stifle a yawn, only such a one can be said to have a soul.

Thus it appears that the effect of denying that there is any difference between a real person and a fake person, between a real human lover and an automatic sweetheart, is that the soulless becomes, or comes to be regarded as, the truly soulful, and the soulful the truly soulless.

E.T.A. Hoffmann's Olimpia

Here’s yet another tale about a man’s erotic obsession with a female android, or automaton as it used to be called at the time: E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman”, which was first published in 1817 as part of the story collection Nachtstücke (Night Pieces). It is the story of a young university student called Nathanael who, haunted by the memory of a traumatic childhood experience connected to his father’s death and a mysterious malevolent figure called Coppelius whom as a child he used to identify with the monstrous, eye-stealing Sandman, and who might or might not be real, gradually slides deeper and deeper into madness and eventually throws himself off a tower and kills himself.

But before he does, he becomes infatuated with what at first seems to be a beautiful young woman called Olimpia, who appears to be the daughter of his neighbour (and professor), but later turns out to be nothing but a cleverly constructed (moving and talking) wooden doll. This might be evidence of his growing insanity or a factor contributing to it, but in any case it is rather odd given that he seems to be the only one who does not realize that there is something seriously wrong with the object of his infatuation. Although Olimpia is so superbly crafted and so life-like that when she is introduced to people at a ball, they do not immediately recognise her as what she is, namely a machine, they all sense her strangeness and want nothing to do with her. They find her “strangely stiff and lacking in animation”, her eyes lifeless, as if they were blind (which they are, of course), “as though her every movement were produced by some mechanism like clockwork” (which it is). They believe her to be a “complete imbecile, who plays music and sings “with the disagreeably perfect, soulless timing of a machine”, as if “she was only pretending to be a living being”

Yet Nathanael is blind and deaf to her mechanical nature and only sees and hears what his imagination prompts him to perceive. He flatly refuses to pay heed to the warnings of his friends whom he deems “cold and prosaic”, and prefers to project his own self into the invitingly blank slate that the automaton offers him - which he obviously finds so enjoyable and rewarding that he completely forgets his fiancée Clara who waits for him in his home town and who not only loves him dearly, but is also very bright, sensible and down-to-earth. Yet precisely that may be the problem. When she writes to him and very competently tries to argue him out of the gloom that has come over him as a result of an encounter with what he perceives to be a new incarnation of his childhood nemesis, the Sandman, he writes back to her brother Lothar, complaining about her attempt to dissuade him from his fears in her “damnably sensible” letter and voicing his suspicion that it was really Lothar who had taught her to argue like that. Obviously he finds it inappropriate for a woman to be so clever: “Really, who would have thought that the spirit which shines from such clear, gracious, smiling, child-like eyes, like a sweet and lovely dream, could draw such intellectual distinctions, worthy of a university graduate?” Apparently he feels that there is something unfitting about a sharp intellect in a woman, something that threatens to destroy the “sweet and lovely dream” that her features evoke. And he is right of course. A sharp intellect is by its very nature critical and unobliging. It resists the projection of another’s self. It insists on, and serves as a constant reminder of, its bearer’s independence. And, vain and self-absorbed as we usually are, that is not necessarily what we want in a lover. (I was tempted to write: not necessarily what a man hopes to find in a woman, but I’m not entirely sure that this is, on the most fundamental level, an issue that men have with women, rather than one that human beings have with other human beings.)

The narrator describes Clara as follows: “Clara had the vivid imagination of a cheerful, ingenuous, child-like child, a deep heart filled with womanly tenderness, and a very acute, discriminating mind. She was no friend to muddle-headed enthusiasts (...) Many people accordingly criticized Clara for being cold, unresponsive, and prosaic.” Although Nathanael is reported not to belong to those people, his words and actions indicate that in fact he does. When it becomes clear to him that she doesn’t believe in “the mystical doctrine of devils and evil forces”, Nathanael blames her disbelief on her “cold and insensitive temperament”, and when she persists in her gentle and loving attempts to talk some sense into him, he accuses her of being a “lifeless automaton”.

Olimpia, on the other hand, “the beautiful statue”, who really is a lifeless automaton, strikes him as the ideal woman. It appears to him that she “gazes at him yearningly” when he sits with her, holds her hand and talks to her about his love “in fiery, enthusiastic words”. And although she never says anything in response but “oh! oh! oh!”, Nathanael feels himself, apparently for the first time in his life, completely understood. Enraptured, he exclaims: “O you splendid, divine woman! You ray shining from the promised afterlife of love! You profound spirit, reflecting my whole existence!” What an interesting choice of words: the machine is addressed as a goddess, the less than human as more than human. She is all that a woman is meant to be and that a real woman can never be. She makes good on the promise that her beauty has made, and she does that by reflecting his whole existence. Yet it stands to reason that whatever reflects another’s whole existence cannot have an existence of its own. A real person can never be a pure reflection. But a machine can. That is of course its greatest advantage. It can be anything we want it to be, and it allows us to be whatever we want to be. In return, we only too willingly allow its essential vacuity to masquerade as profundity. Characteristically, Nathanael is unperturbed by Olimpia’s taciturnity and interprets her persistent sighing as proof of a deep mind: “she doesn’t engage in trivial chit-chat, like other banal minds. She utters few words, certainly; but these few words are true hieroglyphs, disclosing an inner world filled with love and lofty awareness of the spiritual life led in contemplation of the everlasting Beyond.” She is of course a “perfect listener”, who is never distracted by other things, never in need of concealing “her yawns by a slight artificial cough”. With the peculiar binary logic that may work just fine when applied to humans, but fails utterly when we apply it to machines, her undistractibility is perceived as attentiveness, as utter concentration on what he has got to say and an implicit acknowledgement of its importance. If she doesn’t speak then that’s because words are too profane for her. She is a “child of heaven” that cannot “adjust itself to the narrow confines drawn by miserable earthly needs”. Her lack of earthly needs is reconstructed as a clear indicator of a higher, more “heavenly” existence. Absences are turned into presences.

When Nathanael eventually learns the truth about Olimpia, that she is in fact merely a wooden doll, he completely breaks apart:”Madness seized him with its red-hot claws and entered his heart, tearing his mind to pieces.” And as the story of his fate spreads, those who hear it, instead of congratulating themselves on their own good sense, start doubting their own judgement and suddenly see robots lurking in every corner and behind every human face: “In order to make quite sure that they were not in love with wooden dolls, several lovers demanded that their beloved should fail to keep time in singing and dancing, and that, when being read aloud to, she should sew, knit, or play with her pug-dog; above all, the beloved was required not merely to listen, but also, from time to time, to speak in a manner that revealed genuine thought and feeling. The bonds between some lovers thus became firmer and pleasanter; others quietly dissolved. ‘One really can’t take the risk’, said some.”

Although this passage strikes a rare humorous note in an otherwise pretty depressing tale, what is being described here is actually the most uncanny event in the whole story. It is the moment when Nathanael’s insanity turns epidemic. Everybody has been infected with uncertainty. The difference between humans and machines has become blurry: no longer can people tell for sure which is which. Your neighbour, your best friend, your lover, could all turn out to be machines. This is Descartes’s methodological doubt turned into a fact of life. Nobody is unquestioningly certain anymore. The existence of the human other has become problematic, their actual non-existence a permanent possibility. It is the same uncertainty that is later so hauntingly brought out by Don Siegel in his 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. And contrary to what Sigmund Freud argued in his highly overrated essay The Uncanny (1919), this uncertainty is indeed at the heart of that peculiar feeling that the events related by Hoffmann excite (whatever you want to call it). Freud famously analysed Hoffmann’s Sandman in his essay, but he focuses entirely on the figure of Coppelius alias the sandman (who, in Freud’s analysis, embodies the son’s fear of being castrated by his father) and all but ignores Nathanael’s relationship to Olimpia and Clara (which is odd considering that Clara with her superior intelligence and moral strength may quite reasonably be seen as threatening to “castrate”, i.e. emasculate Nathanael). For Freud, there is no uncertainty: the reader knows that Olimpia is an automaton, and we also know that the strange events witnessed by Nathanael are all real and not just a figment of his overwrought imagination. But of course we don’t really know any of this. Nathanael might be haunted to his grave by unnatural forces, or he may just be insane and imagine the whole thing. Ernst Jentsch whose paper on the “The Psychology of the Uncanny” Freud references (and promptly dismisses) captures the essence of Hoffmann’s tale far better than Freud does when Jentsch emphasises the role of the “doubt as to whether an apparently inanimate object really is alive and, conversely, whether a lifeless object might not perhaps be animate” (Jentsch’s paper was originally published in 1908; an English translation appeared in 1997 in Angelaki. Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 2/1: 7-16).

There is, however, one passage in Freud’s essay that I think may well prove relevant to a proper understanding of not only Hoffmann’s Sandman, but also of all related tales about men who develop an erotic obsession with artificial women, such as Ovid’s Pygmalion or Villiers’s The Future Eve. “It often happens”, Freud informs us, “that neurotic men state that to them there is something uncanny about the female genitals. But what they find uncanny (‘unheimlich’ = lit.: unhomely) is actually the entrance to man’s old ‘home’, the place where everyone once lived.” This would certainly explain the appeal of the artificial lover (whose genitals are new and ready-made and do not threaten us with annihilation as that from which we have originated, the old home, does).

In another of his tales, “The Automata” (which may not have been translated into English), Hoffmann has one of his characters express his disgust for all automata that attempt to assume a human shape. He calls them “those true statues of a living death or a dead life” (“diese wahren Standbilder eines lebendigen Todes oder eines toten Lebens”). This sums up the ambiguity quite nicely.

Animal Nature Disgust in Ovid's Pygmalion

The story of Pygmalion, as it has been related to us by Ovid in the tenth book of his Metamorphoses, is characterised by an astonishing ambivalence towards women and the idea of sexual love. Pygmalion is not just a sculptor who one day creates a statue that he then happens to fall in love with (which is how most people will remember the story), but rather somebody who deliberately sets out to create a being that is worthy of being loved by him. Ovid introduces him as a man who is disgusted by the whole female sex after seeing the daughters of Propoetus prostituting themselves in public (which is not entirely voluntary, but rather a punishment inflicted on them by the goddess Venus for having offended her). They are being described as having “lost all sense of shame” and “the power to blush, as the blood hardened in their cheeks”

This loss of shame is clearly understood as a decisive step in a process of dehumanisation: a little more hardening, we are told, and they would be indistinguishable from flint. (Compare this to Lord Ewald’s claim in Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s The Future Eve that Alicia has no “soul” because she is too earthly.) Appalled by so much female depravity, Pygmalion decides (just as many centuries later Celia’s disillusioned lover in Swift’s “Lady’s Dressing Room”) that he no longer wants to have anything to do with women and is determined to stay a bachelor. Yet entirely happy with his wifeless (read: sexless) existence he is not, because soon enough he carves a statue that looks exactly like a woman and is so exceedingly lifelike that one has the impression that she might move any second now and that it is only modesty that keeps her from doing so. And Pygmalion falls in love with his own creation. Here is, finally, the woman that he has been waiting for, that all men (if we take Pygmalion to represent the male sex) have been waiting for: a woman who knows how to behave properly and who is pure and free of all unseemly desires and inclinations, and this purity and freedom makes her much superior to all real women. In Pygmalion’s mind, the statue is actually more human than any real woman could ever be. All real women are ultimately like the Propoetides: natural born sluts, and as such less than human (less than what humans, or at least human females, should be), more like stones, almost like living statues. The actual statue, on the other hand, is as a woman should be. The statue, in its immaculate ivory-whiteness is the true woman.

Curiously, however, Pygmalion has a very sexual relationship with this statue. He clearly desires her: “Often he runs his hand over the work, tempted as to whether it is flesh or ivory, not admitting it to be ivory. He kisses it and thinks his kisses are returned; and speaks to it, and holds it, and imagines that his fingers press into the limbs”. He dresses his new love, gives her presents, gets her jewellery, and most importantly, takes her to bed and sleeps with her. For a while that seems to work, but for obvious reasons (a statue is unlikely to make a good sex doll) it is not very satisfactory in the long run. So Pygmalion approaches the goddess Venus and begs her to bring his ivory maiden to life. She obliges, and ivory becomes human flesh. He kisses her, and she “felt warm: he pressed his lips to her again, and also touched her breast with his hand”. Gradually her body yields to his touch, loses its hardness and becomes malleable under his caressing hands. “The lover is stupefied, and joyful, but uncertain, and afraid he is wrong, reaffirms the fulfilment of his wishes, with his hand, again, and again. It was flesh!” Soon enough, the no-longer ivory maiden becomes aware of what Pygmalion is doing with her, and in the same moment that she becomes fully awake to the world, in the very moment of her birth, acknowledges him as her rightful lover: “The girl felt the kisses he gave, blushed, and raising her bashful eyes to the light, saw both her lover and the sky.” She cannot help loving him back, and since we are told that nine months later she gives birth to a son, she is obviously not reluctant to have sex with Pygmalion, nor he with her.

So why is Pygmalion not disgusted by her? What is it about her that makes her so different from all other women that he can accept her and even have sexual intercourse with her without being repelled by her? It must have something to do with the fact that she is not an ordinary woman, but a statue come alive, and that she carries the modesty, the bashfulness of the inanimate thing, over to her new existence. She doesn’t move on her own. She doesn’t follow her own will. She has no own will. She is a perfect mirror of her lover’s desires, without having any desires of her own that might threaten her purity. She lives only for her lover, who is her one and only. He is, quite literally, her world. She is a supposedly living woman, but without the flaws, a living paradox. She is perfect and pure, but also perfectly usable, obedient and ready to serve her one and only master. She does what she is told. She is the ideal woman, the Eve of the Future, a precursor of today’s or tomorrow’s sexbots, a tailor-made, always-willing, never-tiring sexual companion, a Stepford wife.

Isn’t it odd how little our desires have changed over the last two thousand years?

Pygmalion with a Twist: Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's The Future Eve

In 1886, the French symbolist Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam published The Future Eve (L’Ève Future), which gives a new twist to the story of Pygmalion and the artificial woman that he creates for himself out of disgust for the impurity of all real women.

The Future Eve tells the story of the inventor Thomas Edison (a fictionalised version of the real Edison), who has been experimenting with the creation of a female android for some time when an English friend of his, Lord Ewald, asks him for help. Ewald has fallen in love with an exceedingly beautiful woman, an aspiring actress called Alicia Clary, who is in fact the exact likeness of the Venus de Milo exhibited in the Louvre. In other words, she looks as if that statue had come alive. Unfortunately, however, Ewald finds to his dismay that Alicia’s beautiful, goddess-like appearance is not matched by her character. Outside and inside are at odds. What her body promises, her soul cannot fulfil: “her inner self was in absolute contradiction to her beautiful form. Her beauty was quite foreign to her words, her conversation appeared out of place in such a voice.” It is almost as if “this woman has strayed by accident into the form of the goddess – that this body does not belong to her”.

So what exactly makes Alicia so unworthy of her beautiful exterior? There are various things that Ewald dislikes about her: she doesn’t sufficiently appreciate her own beauty and makes no attempt to live up to it. She has no “lofty aspirations” or “high ideals”. She sings to make a living, rather than for the sheer beauty of it. She eats heartily (i.e. not at all like a lady). She is interested in money. She has no principles. She tells him without embarrassment about an unhappy love affair that she has gone through, unaware that such openness is likely to “destroy all the sympathy and admiration” the high-minded Lord might have had for her. She is not exactly foolish, but she is silly. She has talent, but no genius, is a virtuoso, but no true artist. She doesn’t like Wagner (whose music, admired by Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, is “just a lot of bangs, just noise” to her) and when her admirer takes her to the Louvre and alerts her to her likeness with a particular marble statue, she exclaims: “Yes, that’s me, except that I have not lost my arms, and I am much more aristocratic-looking.” I’m sure most people would agree that there is nothing really repulsive about her character. She is just an average woman, not too bright, certainly no intellectual, a bit selfish or self-absorbed perhaps, but her flaws are nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that she does not have in common with millions of other people. For Ewald, however, this is exactly the problem: she is too common. The contrast between her divine features and her all-too-human character is unbearable. A woman who looks like that should not have any flaws. She should be perfect, ethereal, and the fact that she is not constitutes a moral outrage, a sacrilege, a violation of nature and reason. She is a living contradiction, a monster really: “Imagine a commonplace goddess! I have come to the conclusion that all physiological laws were overthrown in this living, hybrid phenomenon.” Ewald concludes his damning assessment of Alicia’s character by proclaiming that he “cannot love a woman who has no soul.” So Alicia, because she is disappointingly average and has no lofty aspirations (and also because she does not seem to be inclined to be as devoted to Ewald as he is to her and as he imagines he deserves it), is denied a soul. In Ewald’s eyes, she is merely a beautiful, but essentially hollow, form, which makes him cry out in desperation: “Oh, who could put a Soul into that body!”

Fortunately, Ewald couldn’t have come to a better place to ask that question: “’I can!’ exclaimed Edison. ‘I shall put a wonderful soul into that beautiful body!’” The irony here, probably not intended by the author, is of course that it is not, as we would expect, the statue (or the android that is eventually going to replace Alicia) that is said to be without a soul, but the living, breathing woman who has the temerity of deciding for herself what is important to her, what kind of life she wants to live, and whom she wants to love and whom she does not. That real and very much alive woman can only be denied a soul because the word “soul” is here just the name for an allegedly ideal condition, a mode of existence that has transcended all the apparent pettiness and coarseness of our common human concerns and that is entirely devoted to the higher realms, whatever that means exactly. Conveniently this mode of existence coincides with a complete submission under the wishes and desires of the man who wants to see her thus transformed. And it this kind of “soul” that the professor promises to provide: “Twenty-one days from now, at this same hour, Alicia Clary will stand before you, not only transformed, not merely a delightful companion, with a mind of the highest intellectual type, but reclothed in a phase of immortality.” She will no longer be a woman, but “an angel”, “not the cold Reality, but the Ideal.”

Edison then sets out to work and gradually transforms the prototype android that he had already created (an entity or rather “an electro-magnetic thing”, “a being of limbo”) into a perfect duplicate of Alicia (with soft, caressable flesh and skin), except that the new Alicia (or Hadaly, as Edison calls her), the “future Eve” of the story’s title, has a “soul”, meaning that she meets all the expectations that a male member of genteel society might have when looking for a suitable female companion. Tellingly, the creation of a soul for Alicia is described as an eliminative process. It is in reality the creation of an absence: her “selfish frivolity” is ‘annihilated’, her “insipid animality” ‘destroyed’. The new Alicia may even be “less conscious of herself”, perhaps not conscious at all, but “what does that matter” if her behaviour is “suggestive of impressions a thousand times more beautiful, more noble, more elevated”? I take this to mean that it is not even necessary for the new Alicia to actually feel or think anything at all, as long as she (or her creator) manages to make people believe that she does. Thus the desired “soul” is located exclusively in her appearance, in what the new Alicia says and does. What she feels or not feels is entirely irrelevant – she might just as well not feel anything at all. It is only the expression of certain sentiments (love, devotion, tenderness) that her lover needs, and that expression of a sentiment is to all intents and purposes the sentiment itself. That is why Ewald, as the professor assures him, will actually feel less alone with the new, artificial Alicia (even if she should turn out to be “less conscious”), than he does presently with the real one (who quite naturally is not focussed entirely on her lover and does not live for him only). “I do not think that it will be a very great loss if Hadaly is lacking the kind of a conscience that her model has – do you? It will be to her advantage not to have it, at least, in your eyes, since Miss Clary’s conscience seems to be deplorable, a blot on the masterpiece. The conscience of a worldly woman – bah!”

However, occasionally it is suggested in the text that the new Alicia most likely will have feelings of some sort. Thus Edison warns Lord Ewald that when he and she are going to take the ship back to England, it is best if she spends the journey in a coffin-like box (just like Count Dracula in Bram Stoker’s novel, which was to be published 11 years later, in 1897). Why? Because her “serenity should not be ruffled; she should not be humiliated by the sight of the defective organisms of her human companions.” So she is expected to be capable of feeling humiliated, though it is unclear why she should feel humiliated (instead of proud) by the fact that she is more perfect than ordinary, “defective” human beings – unless, on that occasion, she identifies with humanity. What is suggested here seems to be a curious reversal of Gunther Anders’s Promethean Shame: instead of us humans feeling ashamed about our own inferiority when we compare ourselves to the wonderful machines that we have created, it is here the machine that feels humiliated (perhaps on behalf of us humans, who don’t know yet how inferior we actually are?).

In any case the new Alicia will be a creature that is completely under the control of her lover, who can activate and deactivate her and direct her movements and speech by pushing certain buttons cleverly hidden on her anatomy. “She is loyal to only one person, she will recognize one only – her master.” So her newly gained “soul” shows itself primarily in a loss of freedom and autonomy. She is no longer her own master, which is just as it should be. And she will not only be exactly what it says on the tin, but she will also stay that way. Deplorably, every real woman ultimately proves illusive. She can never live up to what her beauty promises. What we see in her is just an illusion, facilitated by “cosmetics, creams, powders, and beauty patches”. Strip her of this, and what remains is an “old witch”, a grotesque imitation of the ideal that she pretended to be. In any case, she will soon lose all her charms to middle age. So “why not build a woman who should be just the thing that we wanted her to be”, one who is always beautiful by her very nature, and beautiful forever? This would definitely solve the problem that the over-curious young man in Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room” after his look behind the scenes struggles with, namely how to live with the fact that no woman is a goddess. The answer suggested by Villiers de l’Isle-Adam is simple: don’t live with it. Make your very own Goddess instead. And why not? Every man, it is suggested, has in fact a natural right to his own goddess. If the plan succeeds, then Man’s “lost paradise” will be restored to him, life will be as it should have been all along, and he will once again be master of the situation, or in short, “the dominator”. The new Alicia, who is the real Alicia, that is Alicia as she was meant to be, will always say what her lover wants to hear. “Her conscious utterance will no longer be the negation of yours, but will become the semblance of the soul that responds to your melancholy. You will be able to evoke in her the radiant reality of your exclusive love, without fearing, this time, lest she repudiate your dream. Her words will never disappoint your hopes. They will always be sublime (...). Here, at least, you will have no fear of being misunderstood, as with the living woman”.

In the end, Edison delivers what he has promised, and it turns out that he has not promised too much. Lord Ewald is entirely satisfied with the outcome: “The false Alicia was more perfect, more natural, than the living personage.” What a strange thing to say: that the android, an artificial thing, is not only more perfect, but more natural than the woman on which it was modelled. But then again, for Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, it is only the perfect that is natural, only the ideal that is (completely) real. What we commonly take for real is just a bad, defective copy of the ideal, which is, in a Platonic sense, the really real. The machine allows us to introduce the world of ideas into the world of appearance, to merge the two worlds into one, to bring heaven onto earth. Thus the (dead) machine is more real than the living human who is nothing but a “phantom” in comparison.

The new Alicia knows no sickness or death, and she never changes, which also means that she will never stop loving Ewald as he wishes to be loved (and don’t we all wish to be loved unconditionally and eternally on some level?). She will always stay devoted to him, and to him only: “I shall be the woman of your dreams – all that you would have me be.” The author seems to fully endorse this idea. Yet towards the end of the novel, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, almost despite himself, nonetheless gives voice to a certain unease that sheds doubt on the whole project of replacing admittedly flawed, annoyingly wilful, and constitutionally unpredictable human beings with flawless, completely reliable and always obliging machines. “Her heart”, we learn, “will never change, because she has no heart.” Can we really want that? Isn’t that too high a price to pay for the illusion of eternal love? L’Isle Adam seems to sense this himself when he lets his Edison reflect on the greatness of his achievement after Ewald and his future Eve have left him to live happily ever after in England (only for her to perish in a fire soon afterwards): “This is the first time that science has been able to prove that she can cure man – of love.”

So love is seen as a problem, or more precisely a disease, and technology provides the cure, not by facilitating the fulfilment of love, but instead by getting rid of it altogether. If that is what truly happens here, then that would also explain a remark that Edison made earlier in the novel and which, at the time, seems rather out of character. When Ewald has to decide whether he really wants the professor to go ahead and create a new, purified Alicia for him, he is initially undecided and asks Edison what he would do, and he replies: “I would blow out my brains first”, which is a very odd thing to say really, given that it was his idea in the first place and that at all other times he seems absolutely committed to the project.