The Victorian Automaton: Technology, Agency, and Fiction
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THE VICTORIAN AUTOMATON: TECHNOLOGY, AGENCY, AND FICTION by Fiona Roisin Coll A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English University of Toronto © Copyright by Fiona Roisin Coll 2014 THE VICTORIAN AUTOMATON: TECHNOLOGY, AGENCY, AND FICTION Fiona Roisin Coll Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto 2014 Abstract This dissertation attends to the complex figure of the automaton in Victorian fiction. The metaphorical potency of this figure is based upon its conceptual instability; as either a machine that imitates the movements of a living being or a living being behaving mechanically, the automaton is an illusory, paradoxical entity that hyperbolizes the gap between what appears as autonomous movement and the obscure sources of that movement. This conceptual instability proves useful in nineteenth-century literary efforts to discover the nature of human agency in a world grown mechanically systematic and epistemologically opaque. At the heart of this investigation is the automaton as a textual phenomenon, an example of figurative language that thematizes the operation of narrative itself. By paying attention to the figurative work performed by the textual automaton, this dissertation complicates previous cultural and literary accounts that reduce the automaton to a symbol of technophobic anxiety centered upon the dehumanizing effects of industrial development. I explore a group of texts that instead evoke the technological register of the automaton to interrogate the manner in which human agency had been positioned as the foundation of existential meaning and knowledge of the world. In so ii doing, I supplement recent critical work on the relationship between technology and literary representation. I also contribute to discussions of how the Victorians conceptualized knowledge, particularly subjective knowledge of the human mind. Finally, I offer a new perspective on the way in which narrative mechanics encode a concern with agency on the levels of both form and content. In this study, the Victorian automaton emerges as an emblem of the volatile imaginative boundary between the categories of human and machine; as a textual tool for addressing the mechanisms that facilitate or limit subjective, scientific, political, and creative agency; and as a symbolic figure that short-circuits conceptual closure, narrative neatness, and efforts to establish certainties about the constitution of human being. iii Acknowledgements I would first like to acknowledge the guidance and unflagging support of Jill Matus, in whose office the idea for this project began. Alan Bewell and Audrey Jaffe have been insightful readers of, and influences on, this dissertation. I would also like to extend special thanks to my external examiner, Mary O’Connor, whose comments on and encouragement of the project were much appreciated, and to Danny Wright and Heather Murray for their thoughtful, suggestive responses to this work. The University of Toronto’s Department of English at large has supplied community and inspiration: I would like to thank John Baird, Nick Mount, Paul Stevens, Lynne Magnusson, Marlene Goldman, and Elizabeth Harvey for their good humour and unfailingly good counsel. Carol Percy, Katie Larson, and Jane Freeman have been professional and personal champions. Sangeeta Panjwani, Tanuja Persaud, Marguerite Perry, and Clare Orchard have been essential. Members of the Nineteenth-Century Reading Group and the Works in Nineteenth-Century Studies group, both based in the Department of English at the University of Toronto, provided inestimable feedback on my writing, as did participants in the Science and Culture Reading Group under Cannon Schmitt’s steadfast leadership. Librarians at the Robarts, Pratt, and Fisher libraries, as well as at the Library of Congress and British Library, were vital resources. Catherine Morrow at Library of Northern Ireland, Belfast was especially generous in her efforts on my behalf. Members of the Victorian Studies Association of Ontario, especially Anne Clendinning, Barbara Leckie, Matthew Rowlinson, and the inimitable David Latham, have been models of scholarly collegiality. This dissertation was written with financial support from the Social Sciences iv and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the English Department at the University of Toronto. I cannot fully express my appreciation to the friends I’ve made over the course of my graduate school experience. Eddie Kent, Daniel Martin, Gregory Brophy, Karen Bourrier, and Connie Crompton are gentlepeople and scholars. Andrea Charise and Simon Reader make food as well as they construct arguments. Claire Battershill, Cillian O’Hogan, and Tony Antoniades are possessors of infinite jollity. Alisha Walters has been an irreplaceable conference confederate. Emily Simmons, Erin Ellerbeck, Nick Bradley, Alexandra Rahr, Andrew Adams, Alan Galey, Jenny Kerber, Eric Carlson, Jean Cichon, Ted McCoy, and Dominique Keller have enriched my life in more ways than I can count. Petra Hroch, Carolyn Veldstra, and Dustin Atlas have been co-conspirators of the highest order. Daniel Newman has been a friend, an ally, and a fount of shockingly good ideas. Derek Douglas’s support has been immeasurable. Reecia Orzeck’s timing is as impeccable as her advice is sound. Lila Knighton is entirely one of a kind. Robert McGill’s enthusiasms for literature and for living remain inspirational. This dissertation owes its completion to Jen Esmail’s friendship. I dedicate this to my family—Breid, Pat, Eoin, Neasa, Oisin, and Jen—who have been sources of boundless love and cheerful encouragement. v Table of Contents INTRODUCTION: The Victorian Automaton 1 A History of the Automaton 9 Critical Appraisals of the Nineteenth-Century Automaton 17 Automata and Agency in Victorian Fiction 26 CHAPTER ONE: The “Meaner Mechanism of the Human Machine”: Automata and Agency in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret 30 Sensation Fiction and Technology 32 Motivation and the Modern Man 38 Agency and Its Alternatives 47 Raging Against the (Gendered) Machine 58 Problems of Concluding Lady Audley’s Secret 64 CHAPTER TWO: Mechanical Motivations and Technological Ends in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon 71 Machine Being in the 1860s 73 Babbage’s Machine Mind 75 The Human Machine and The Coming Race 89 Narrative Mechanics in Erewhon 98 Erewhon’s “Book of the Machines” 108 CHAPTER THREE: “Absolute Machines”: The Conscious Automaton Debate 121 The Language of Science 123 Huxley’s Automaton 133 Problems of Definition 140 The Meaning of Metaphor 148 CHAPTER FOUR: “Keep Me at It Like a Steam Engine”: Mechanical Subjectivity in George Gissing’s New Grub Street 150 The Liberal Subject in Victorian Britain 154 Techno-Imaginary Instrumentalism in New Grub Street 167 Marian and the Problem of Self-Possession 174 Authorial Signature as Mental Property 183 Gissing as Frustrated Humanist 193 CHAPTER FIVE: “Just a Singing-Machine”: The Making of an Automaton in George du Maurier’s Trilby 194 From Mesmerism to Automatism 198 Female Performing Machines 204 Trilby as Machine 209 CONCLUSION 217 WORKS CITED 221 vi 1 Introduction: The Victorian Automaton The explicit subjects of fiction are not the only subjects of fiction. —Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things An important narrative turn in Jane Eyre (1847) takes place in the gardens of Thornfield Hall, in a scene set at the suggestive time of dusk on “Mid-summer-eve” (332). The sun-gorged hills are cooling in the settling dew, the air is scented with jasmine and rose, and Jane finds herself nearly overcome by the sensory excesses of this botanical surfeit. She is soon similarly overcome by the brooding, cigar-perfumed Edmund Rochester. In one of his more astonishingly manipulative moments, Rochester leads Jane to believe that he must send her away to a place called “Bitternutt Lodge” in Ireland on account of his impending union with Blanche Ingram. Rochester then blithely suggests that he and Jane sit and “talk over the voyage and the parting quietly, half-an-hour or so” (336). The distraught Jane, succumbing to a “vehemence of emotion,” is compelled to confess the powerful nature of her feelings for her place of employment and for Rochester himself (337). Rochester responds to this confession by asking Jane to stay at Thornfield after all. Having not yet realized that she is on the receiving end of one of the most sadistic marriage proposals in Victorian fiction, Jane erupts into the following protest: Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an automaton?—a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!—I have as much soul as you,—and full as much heart! (338). The significance of this moment in Jane Eyre lies in the fact that it is Jane’s first declaration of autonomy in the face of Rochester’s heretofore unchallenged dominion over Thornfield and all of its inhabitants. The novel has been building to such a declaration by tracing Jane’s progression through various stages of intellectual, spiritual, and affective development. As a result, this confrontation with Rochester, coming as it does at a weighty moment of seasonal maturation and diurnal transition, is not entirely a surprise. 2 What might be less expected in this scene is Jane’s invocation of the automaton as the figure around which her assertion of selfhood is constructed. An automaton, after all, is a machine built to imitate the movements of a living being, often constructed with the springs of that movement hidden so as to produce the illusion of autonomous operation. Jane Eyre shows little interest in machines; the novel as a whole is not particularly invested in exploring England’s industrial landscape, nor does it attend to many of the technological developments that gave shape to the contours of modern life during the first half of the nineteenth century.