Artificial Generation: The Hybridization of Female and Form in Gautier, Villiers, Wilde, Hitchcock Public
Parker, Christina Marie (2010)
Published
Abstract
ABSTRACT
Artificial Generation:
The Hybridization of Female and Form in Gautier, Villiers, Wilde,
Hitchcock
By Christina M. Parker
Nineteenth-century French modernity rediscovers Ovid's myth of
Pygmalion - a
story that originated as a veritable founding myth for artistic
production as well as the
concept of the artificial woman - at a specific point in time when
traditional modes of
artistic representation were being threatened by their own
replication as something else,
as new modes of perception and representation emerged through
technological evolution.
Accordingly, the time period's economy of literary representation
becomes equally an
economy of simulation wherein literature imitates, or copies, the
effects of these
emerging forms of representation, specifically photography and its
prefiguration of the
cinema.
As French literature shed the traditional values Romanticism placed
on nature, it
began to reform itself according to increasingly visual and
artificial edicts. In turn,
literature reached great heights of heterogeneity, as the
amalgamation of modes of
representation permeated literature at the level of composition.
Yet this hybridization of
literary form also accentuated the need to recondition artistic
subjectivity. To do this, the
nineteenth-century author returned habitually to the
long-established Ovidian paradigm
of reproducing woman in art as a means to assert their particularly
modernized and
artificialized conception of literary reproduction.
In close readings of texts by Théophile Gautier, Villiers de
l'Isle-Adam, and
Oscar Wilde, I focus on the re-emergence of the figure of the
artificial woman less as a
theme and more as a generative idea foundational to textual
composition. I trace this
trajectory of what I call "artificial generation" - both a process
of artificially reproducing
woman in literature and a particular lineage of nineteenth-century
authors - into
twentieth-century cinematic representation, where I argue that
Alfred Hitchcock's
Vertigo belongs to the same literary genealogy. Ultimately,
I trace the genesis of artistic
subjectivity through "artificial generation" as a meta-level
concern and a method for the
de-formation of traditional forms of representation.
Table of Contents
CONTENTS
Introduction………………………………………………………………………..............................…. 1
Chapter 1
Love in the Literary Afterlife:
Gautier's Aesthetic of Resurrection in La Morte amoureuse…………………….........… 11
Chapter 2
Book of Genesis:
Literary Genealogy and Technological Re-production in Villiers's L'Ève future….. 62
Chapter 3
Womanproof:
The Villi-fication of Woman in L'Ève future…………………………………...............……. 102
Chapter 4
Salomania:
The Unnatural Order of Things in Wilde's Salomé…………………..........……….…..…. 135
Chapter 5
Regeneration:
Paradise Regained in Wilde's Salomé ………………………………................……………… 184
Chapter 6
Hitchcock's See-Through Woman in Vertigo:
From the Dead or There'll Never Be Another You …………….........………………..…… 210
Figures……………………………………………………………………..……...............................… 247
Bibliography…………………………………………………………….............................…………… 264
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