UC Santa Cruz UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Speculative Agency of the Nonhuman: Animal, Object, and Posthuman Worldings Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5r34v19k Author Magnone, Sophia Booth Publication Date 2016 License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 4.0 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ THE SPECULATIVE AGENCY OF THE NONHUMAN: ANIMAL, OBJECT, AND POSTHUMAN WORLDINGS A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in LITERATURE by Sophia Booth Magnone June 2016 The Dissertation of Sophia Booth Magnone is approved: Professor Carla Freccero, Chair Professor Kimberly J. Lau Professor H. Marshall Leicester, Jr. Dean Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright © by Sophia Booth Magnone 2016 Table of Contents Abstract v Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 Anthropocentrism and its discontents . 1 Why speculative fiction? . 8 Defining nonhumanity: the “who” and the “what” . 15 Nonhuman agency . 20 Worlding . 23 Chapters: the cyborg and the beast . 27 I Decadent Posthumanism: Loving the Object in Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus 32 Prologue: “un unique monstre” . 32 “Je fais tout le contraire de ce que j'ai promis”: reading the Decadent writer . 35 Inventing vice: Raoule the artist . 46 Monsieur Galatée: Jacques the objet d’art ....................... 52 Authoring the idol . 60 The agency of the object . 67 Reading hysteria in Monsieur Vénus .......................... 69 Rachilde as hysterical author . 73 Raoule as hysterical author . 79 Conclusions . 89 II Eves of the Future: Cyborg Gender in Villiers’s L’Eve future and Carter’s The Passion of New Eve 92 Yesterday’s Eve of the future: situating Villiers and Carter . 98 1. “Ah! qui m’ôtera cette âme de ce corps?”: Miss Alicia Clary . 106 2. “I never knew a girl more a slave to style”: Leilah . 115 3. “Ecce puella!”: Evelyn Habal . 124 4. “The perfect man’s woman”: Tristessa de St Ange . 134 “To be a pane the sun shines through”: affirming feminine objectification . 145 iii Conclusions . 150 III Woman/Animal/Object: Monstrous Agency in Carter’s Nights at the Circus and Darrieussecq’s Truismes 155 Speculating feminine monstrosity . 158 The enduring trope of the womanimal . 161 Objectifying the womanimal . 168 “She felt herself turning, willy-nilly, from a woman into an idea”: the significance of difference . 171 “The wonderful quality of my flesh”: carnivore sexuality . 178 The hazards of love: Jack and Yvan . 185 “Think of him as an amanuensis”: co-authoring a love story . 186 “A lovely way to die”: love as consumption . 195 Monstrous appetites: eating as resistance . 202 Humanist and posthumanist appetites . 208 Conclusions . 219 IV Cyborg Companion Species: Stapledon’s Sirius and Bakis’s Lives of the Monster Dogs 221 Theorizing man’s best friend . 233 Reading and writing dogs . 237 “After all, I am a novelist”: Robert’s self-authorization . 240 Resurrection through text: Cleo and Ludwig . 246 Textsandtraces..................................... 252 “Glimpsed by the quickened mind everywhere”: Sirius and the spirit . 254 “The spaces in between”: Ludwig’s theory of love . 261 Dogs and masters: being-for-the-other . 266 Love and/as domestication . 272 Conclusions . 281 Bibliography 284 iv Abstract The Speculative Agency of the Nonhuman: Animal, Object, and Posthuman Worldings by Sophia Booth Magnone This dissertation explores representations of nonhuman agency across the diverse literary tradition of speculative fiction. I identify speculative fiction as a site where cultural discourses of personhood, species, and power might be challenged and reworked; a loosely defined genre, SF insists on an openness to disruption, exploiting the creative and politically radical possibilities of imagining the world otherwise. The project draws upon an archive of nineteenth- and twentieth-century French, English, and U.S. American texts that adopt a speculative mode in order to literalize long-standing associations of the feminine, animal, and object in the Western patriarchal imagination, populating their pages with figures of feminized cyborgs, animalized women, and mechanized animals. By worlding a range of beings defined by their difference from the human norm, the texts intervene in longstanding anthropocentric discourses of “who” versus “what,” proposing a more inclusive notion of personhood that recognizes collective, interdependent, and passive forms of agency. I draw upon feminist theory, gender and queer theory, animal studies, and posthumanist scholarship to articulate an intersectional approach to multispecies ethics. The four chapters separate into two parts, each concerned with one vector of the infinitely multiple field of the nonhuman. The first two focus on artificial, machinic life as one v alternative to human species-being; Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus in Chapter 1 and Villiers’s L’Eve future and Carter’s The Passion of New Eve in Chapter 2 employ cyborg figures to challenge dominant discourses of gender propriety and authorial agency. The second two chapters focus on animals and animality as a second alternative to humanity; Carter’s Nights at the Circus and Darrieussecq’s Truismes in Chapter 3 and Stapledon’s Sirius and Bakis’s Lives of the Monster Dogs in Chapter 4 attend to the perils and pleasures of bestial life on the margins of human-dominated society. Together, the chapters build toward a notion of worlding as collaboration—between humans, animals, and machines; between genders; between storytellers and stories, authors and texts. vi Acknowledgments This project was completed under the generous support of the Division of Graduate Studies at the University of California Santa Cruz, through the Chancellor’s Dissertation-Year Fellowship (2015-2016). Additional support for research and travel came from the UCSC Department of Literature, the UCSC Institute for Humanities Research, and the UCSC Science and Justice Research Center. Research for this project was conducted at the Angela Carter archives at the British Library. For their guidance, support, and attention, I thank the members of my dissertation committee: Carla Freccero (chair), Kimberly Lau, and Marsh Leicester. As teachers, mentors, and interlocutors, each of them has contributed immensely to this project and to my intellectual growth at UCSC. I am inspired by the ways each of them weaves enthusiasm and passion into rigorous scholarship. I am especially grateful to Carla Freccero for her thoughtful feedback on my work over the past seven years, as well as her unflagging encouragement. Thanks are also due to the UCSC faculty whose teaching has shaped my thinking in myriad ways: Wlad Godzich, Peter Limbrick, Jim Clifford, Warren Sack, Matthew Wolf-Meyer, Martin Berger, Christine Hong, Vilashini Cooppan, Dan Selden, and Andrew Matthews. I give tremendous thanks to all my graduate colleagues, past and present, in the UCSC Literature department. My fellow members of the 2009 cohort made this path seem possible, even at its most difficult. This dissertation owes its existence in no small part to the members of my dissertation writing group: Kendra Dority, Joanna Meadvin, and Keegan Finberg. I could not ask for more attentive, enthusiastic, and helpful readers. Though our final projects stand vii alone, we are collaborators in the profoundest sense, and I cherish the threads that stitch our work together across disciplines, genres, and traditions. I also thank Dennis Brand, Bethany Sweeney, and Sam Skinazi for many years of conversation on animals, cyborgs, science fiction, and other topics dear to my heart. Thanks are due to all of my undergraduate students at UCSC, especially the members of Gender and Speculative Fiction (Fall 2014), whose enthusiastic dedication to everyday critical thinking and to issues of inclusion and justice helped me become a better teacher and scholar. For training me in the everyday joys and obligations of companionship, I owe thanks to the many nonhumans who have shared my life, especially to Gertrude, the feline collaborator who was never far from my side as I wrote this dissertation. I also thank the Santa Cruz Derby Girls for showing me what bodies are capable of, and for providing much-needed balance on long days spent lost in thought; special thanks goes out to Rhiannon Soto for her constant friendship and support, and for hitting me hard when I needed it. I extend heartfelt thanks to Amey Mathews and Kendra Dority (again) for enriching my life with their compassion, generosity, and love. I’m proud to be associated with you. With love and gratitude, I thank my wonderful family: Sonya Booth, Steve Magnone, Celia Magnone, and Louis Diamond. I am lucky to be kin to people who value curiosity, creativity, and critical thinking in many forms; their influence shapes my life and work in countless ways, and their affection and encouragement has been crucial to this project. Finally, for love and support beyond words, I thank my partner Carroll L. Wainwright. You make this one the best of all possible worlds. This dissertation is dedicated with love to the memory of Victoria Rogers Booth. viii Introduction Anthropocentrism and its discontents In a short article entitled “Ms. Found in an Ant Hill,” a pair of literary scholars undertake a close reading of a found text. Their work is hindered by material difficulties: “the messages are fragmentary,”