Technology, Labor, and Mechanized Bodies in Victorian Culture

Syracuse University SURFACE English - Dissertations College of Arts and Sciences 12-2012 The Body Machinic: Technology, Labor, and Mechanized Bodies in Victorian Culture Jessica Kuskey Syracuse University Follow this and additional works at: https://surface.syr.edu/eng_etd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Kuskey, Jessica, "The Body Machinic: Technology, Labor, and Mechanized Bodies in Victorian Culture" (2012). English - Dissertations. 62. https://surface.syr.edu/eng_etd/62 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Arts and Sciences at SURFACE. It has been accepted for inclusion in English - Dissertations by an authorized administrator of SURFACE. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ABSTRACT While recent scholarship focuses on the fluidity or dissolution of the boundary between body and machine, “The Body Machinic” historicizes the emergence of the categories of “human” and “mechanical” labor. Beginning with nineteenth-century debates about the mechanized labor process, these categories became defined in opposition to each other, providing the ideological foundation for a dichotomy that continues to structure thinking about our relation to technology. These perspectives are polarized into technophobic fears of dehumanization and machines “taking over,” or technological determinist celebrations of new technologies as improvements to human life, offering the tempting promise of maximizing human efficiency. “The Body Machinic” argues that both sides to this dichotomy function to mask the ways the apparent body-machine relation is always the product of human social relations that become embedded in the technologies of the labor process. Chapter 1 identifies the emergence of this dichotomy in the 1830s “Factory Question” debates: while critics of the factory system described workers as tools appended to monstrous, living machines, apologists claimed large-scale industrial machinery relieved human toil by replicating the laboring body in structure and function. Chapters 2 examines factory workers’ autobiographies which record their experiences of being treated like machine parts, disposed of when broken by gruesome factory accidents. Chapter 3 analyzes Trollope’s Michael Armstrong and Tonna’s Helen Fleetwood, in which merely occupying the space of the factory initiates workers’ transformations into a dangerously politicized yet mindless “community of automata.” Chapter 4 analyzes Babbage’s mathematical theory, his Difference Engine, and Dickens’s representation of Babbage in Little Dorrit to argue that representations of mechanization were crucial to debates about the category of mental labor, which we continue to define as productive of intellectual property through its categorical opposition to mechanized manual labor. The conclusion looks at Butler’s Erewhon and argues that the particular forms of technophobia and technophilia that dominate today—in which humans become increasingly mechanical, or machines become increasingly life-like—are a direct inheritance of Victorian constructions of human and mechanical as categorically opposed, and of the resulting metaphor of the mechanized laboring body. THE BODY MACHINIC: TECHNOLOGY, LABOR, AND MECHANIZED BODIES IN VICTORIAN CULTURE by Jessica Kuskey B.A., Central Connecticut State University, 2002 M.A., New York University, 2004 Dissertation Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English. Syracuse University December 2012 Copyright © Jessica Kuskey 2012 All Rights Reserved TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter 1: “That Tyrant Power” and the “Living Appendage”: Monstrous Machines and Mechanized Labor, from the Factory Question to Capital 21 Chapter 2: “Shew your limbs”: Working-Class Autobiography, Factory Accidents, and the Narrative of Deformity 69 Chapter 3: Scenes of Labor: Town and Country in Michael Armstrong and Helen Fleetwood 104 Chapter 4: Math and the Mechanical Mind: Charles Babbage, Charles Dickens, and Mental Labor in Little Dorrit 136 Conclusion: Technophobia / Technophilia 182 Bibliography 193 Vita 209 v 1 Introduction “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” (215-16). Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, 1847 “The machinery of all my nature, the whole enginery of this human mill: the boiler which I take to be the heart, is fit to burst” (497). Charlotte Brontë, Shirley, 1849 In Jane’s angry outburst at Rochester, she accuses him of treating her like an “automaton,” a mere mechanical simulation of a human being. This kind of comparison between a person and a machine can be traced back through the history of automata, and it functions by extrapolating from the automaton a label for a person who acts, as Jane explains, “soulless and heartless,” like “a machine without feelings.”1 In the passage from Shirley, Robert Moore’s description of his impassioned change of heart employs a different category of metaphor in likening the body to a factory that operates through the cooperation of its various mechanisms, all linked and powered by a steam engine “heart.” The cultural lineage for this second kind of metaphor includes the Cartesian view of a 1 See Wendy Beth Hyman’s thorough analysis of the OED’s multiple definitions for “automaton” (5-6). 2 clockwork universe in which the body was similarly mechanical in the cooperation of its many internal moving parts.2 As seen in the example from Shirley, with the rise of steam power in the nineteenth century this metaphor of a mechanical body came to incorporate the images and technologies of the new industrial factory. Both of these kinds of metaphors assume some existing basis of comparison between bodies and machines: either that people can seem mechanical in their personalities, feelings, and actions, or that living bodies can seem mechanical in the structure and function of their internal parts and processes. This dissertation looks beyond these two versions of the mechanical body by identifying a third category of metaphor that emerged in early-nineteenth-century British literary and cultural responses to industrialization. Instead of assuming a fundamental similarity between bodies and machines, critics of the burgeoning “Factory System” objected to the ways factory labor forced the machine’s mechanical movements onto the worker’s body, and based their argument upon a categorical opposition between human and mechanical labors. Caroline Norton’s anti-industry poem “A Voice from the Factories” (1836), for example, describes the mechanization of a small child laboring alongside the machine in an industrial factory: There the pale Orphan, whose unequal strength Loathes the incessant toil it must pursue, Pines for the cool sweet evening’s twilight length, 2 See David F. Channell’s The Vital Machine for an overview of the development of the mechanical worldview of a clockwork universe and mechanical organisms in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The Cartesian view of living things as mechanical remained compelling throughout the nineteenth century, as evidenced T. H. Huxley’s revision of the Cartesian mechanist philosophy in “On the Hypothesis That Animals Are Automata, and Its History” (Fortnightly Review, 1874). 3 The sunny play-hour, and the morning’s dew: Worn with its cheerless life’s monotonous hue. Bowed down, and faint, and stupefied it stands; Each half-seen object reeling in its view— While its hot, trembling, languid little hands Mechanically heed the Task-master’s commands. (XLVI) Norton’s assumption of a categorical opposition between body and machine is highly typical, characterizing the machine’s labor as “incessant” and “monotonous” and contrasting this “mechanical” labor against the child’s inherent desire to move in time with the rhythms of nature along a schedule of “morning’s dew,” “play-time,” and “twilight.” Heedless of the child’s “unequal strength,” the machine—Norton’s “Task- master”—forces its mechanical speed, rhythm, and motions onto the child’s body. Nineteenth-century cultural responses to industrialization generally came to rely on this categorical opposition between an idealized, natural, human labor and the mechanical movements forced onto factory workers, resulting in the emergence of this third kind of metaphor of mechanized body and the proliferation of this new image of laboring bodies turning into machines. As in Norton’s poem, through laboring with the machine, the factory worker is forced to labor like a machine—incessantly, monotonously, “Mechanically”—and thus the child who “must pursue” this mechanical labor becomes mechanized, transforming from an “Orphan” to an “it.” This opposition between the labor of the machine as precise, tireless, incessant, and monotonous and human labor as having more “natural” rhythms, movements, and speeds has gone unidentified because it has not yet been disentangled and differentiated 4 from other kinds of metaphors of mechanical bodies. This particular type of mechanized body based in the opposition between human and mechanical labor in fact became pervasive in Victorian literature and culture beyond scenes of industrialization. John Ruskin’s chapter “On the Nature of the Gothic” in Stones of Venice, for

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