The Aesthetics of Artifice: Villiers's L'Eve Future (original) (raw)

South Atlantic Review, 2000

Abstract

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.

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