A New Book by Dorothy Kelly. Before the Stepford Wives: Fantasies of Creating the Ideal Woman
Thomas Edison decides to create a mechanical replica of a wo
man for his troubled friend, Lord Ewald. This android woman would have all the perfections of Alicia Clary, the woman Ewald loves, with none of her flaws. Using sound recordings, chemically created skin, electricity, and photosculpture, Edison succeeds in crafting an ideal, working Alicia. Ewald accepts her and sets out to take her back to his estate; however she is lost at sea in the wreck of the ship on its voyage. This is the plot of L’Ève future, the 1886 French novel written by Villiers de l’Isle-Adam.
In her new book, published in print and online by Penn State University Press, Reconstructing Woman: Gender and Scientific Thought in Nineteenth-Century French Narrative, Professor of French Dorothy Kelly investigates the reasons for and meanings of this literary fantasy. She reaches back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Balzac’s character, Raphaël de Valentin, wishes to turn his beautiful neighbor, Pauline, into an artificial creation, into his idea of what she should be. Kelly goes on to explore in Flaubert’s texts the preference for dreams of women and the rejection of real women, as well as Zola’s images of man’s need to cure woman’s nature, which he views as having been corrupted by modern life. Because all of these novelists were influenced by scientists and the science of the time, Kelly explores their favorite scientific inventions, fads, and ideas, as well as other cultural influences, to show how they allow these authors to imagine the invention of an artificial woman.