The Aesthetics of Artifice: Villiers¿s L¿¿ve future: 254 (North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures) - Tapa blanda

A detailed reading of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's 1886 novel L'Eve future, this study explores the author's construction of the android woman from two angles: science and art. Marie Lathers shows that the novel is a satire of the era's belief that science would cure the ills of the modern world and redeem the femme fatale. She also exposes Villiers's prescient discussion of technologies that form hybrids of science and art. The only lengthy study of Villiers's novel in English, Lathers's book engages significant thinkers of nineteenth-century French aesthetic, medical, and scientific discourse. Contemporary cultural and feminist criticism, particularly that of Roland Barthes, Mary Ann Doane, and Judith Butler, forms the framework of her analysis.

Drawing on feminist and psychoanalytic theory, this study exposes the ideological foundations of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's "L'Eve Future", a late 19th-century revision of the Genesis story. Villier's future Eve, who owes her "life" to man's manipulation of sculptural techniques, photography, and film, symbolizes the complex conjunction of literature, art, technology, and the feminine in the late 19th century. The novel thus charts modernity's restructuring of traditional aesthetics to accommodate the age of mechanical reproduction. The female body becomes the locus of this manifesto of technology, producing a discourse on artificiality and and the feminine which Lathers's study exposes in detail. It also relates this monstrous tale to other versions of woman's fabrication in this and the last century, and interrogates theories of the aesthetic, the technological, and the feminine from Hegel and Baudelaire to Benjamin and Barthes. It is a contribution to current debate centering on the construction of gender and its place in literature and art.