Automata, says Voskuhl, “are often taken to be forerunners and figureheads of the modern, industrial machine age,” a time when everything from the economic to the social to the biological became “mechanized.”31 We know, today, there is a cost to such meddling. If we recall Elting Morison’s questions—Who changes? Who gets hurt? Who profits?—we must reckon with the bits of humanity lost in the process. The harpsichord player sighs, as “though her heart would break,” but is affecting emotion the same thing as feeling? Descartes struggled against the notion, but inventors who came after largely dispensed with his “messy” philosophy about the mind and body. Or to put it another way, everything became body, all of it part of the works. The period between the 1730s and the 1790s, writes Jessica Riskin, was one of “simulation,” in which “mechanicians tried earnestly to collapse the gap between animate and artificial machinery.”32 That included building strange speaking devices, essentially floating heads with flexible mouths and artificial lungs, as well as the bits and pieces of torso or limb described by Vaucanson. Man and machine were so linked in these devices that a surgeon helped Jaquet-Droz build the writing automaton’s skeleton;33 likewise, though reversed, the best maker of steel trusses for ruptured human bodies was a surgeon who also worked as a watchmaker. William Blakey could construct personalized trusses for everything from hernia to prolapsed uterus using steel, ingenuity, and watch springs.34 The crossover of body and machine becomes increasingly tangled, and the title of La Mettrie’s very controversial—and very popular—L’homme Machine says it most clearly: Man a Machine. Regarded as a “radial materialist,” La Mettrie might be seen as the culmination or fruition of Descartes’s ideas, while entirely removing the concept of “soul.” The brain, he explains, is only “a well-enlightened machine” and the body “an immense clock.” Prefiguring the science fiction cyborg, La Mettrie introduces “the human body [as] a self-winding machine, a living representation of perpetual motion.” This biological automaton doesn’t radically differ from those invented by the clockmaker; his workings are all encapsulated within the living frame, just as the writing boy’s gears fit snug into his body. The animating principle resides “in the very substance of the parts [. . .] in short, the whole organization of the body.”35 In their work on artificial intelligence, Stefano Franchi and Güven Güzeldere point out that this way of conceiving the human being led to the mechanization of intelligence in the modern era.36 In other words, without Descartes and La Mettrie, we could not have a designer like Hiroshi Ishiguro or a robot like Toshiba’s ChihiraAico. But philosophy does not, by itself, manufacture the future.
Elting Morison claimed that whether or not there are such things as true inventions, “it is clear there are inventors, or at least there is a syndrome, as clearly defined as any neurosis, possessed by [those] who are said to invent.”37 And we can find at least two defining features belonging to everyone I’ve mentioned here, and also to Kepler, Newton, and Leibniz in chapter 1. First, though their reasons varied, each found himself unhappy with or opposed to the condition of things as he found it. For Descartes, the very system upon which knowledge had been based seemed little more than unsteady shale, crumbling away underfoot. He would find a new and better foundation. (And in fact, Newton goes on to finish what he started, almost literally, when he establishes his “laws.”) For Jaquet-Droz and William Blakey, the problems were localized: as makers, they spent their time investigating tools and methods and styles. Using the precision of the clockwork, they had a grand object in mind: a more perfect machine. That it had not been done before made no difference; they would do it. Jaquet-Droz created the first programmable machine—and Blakey turned to the latest in steel manufacture to design newly personalized trusses, so superior that his clients flocked from all over Europe. But the popularity of either “machinery” could never have come to be without the secondary trait of invention: the ability to, even the obsession with, spectacle, salesmanship—the show. Descartes, like Newton, claimed he was the chosen one; also like Newton, this story is “curated.” Neither man actually had a lightning strike of inspiration in quite the way they describe, and their journals and letters prove that events happened out of order, over time, and often with the aid of intelligent conversation with others. But inventing the modern world by committee doesn’t have the same flair, does it?
Descartes fought an engineer named Isaac Beeckman over his ideas of “physio-mathematics” (a general science of all mathematics including physics and alchemy) and music. Beeckman claims in 1630 that he communicated certain scientific problems to Descartes for his Compendium Musicae on the mathematics of music—and is accused of plagiarism for his trouble Like Newton and Galileo, Descartes refused to acknowledge his debt to the other man because, as Wootton puts it, “he had told himself that he was building a new philosophy single-handedly” and any dependence upon another “was intolerable to him.”38 The stage is a powerful tool, and the inventor does not wish to share it. The clockmakers and truss manufacturers had perhaps more practical reasons for not wanting to share the limelight; they competed quite literally for paying customers. Blakey’s indomitable wife helped to solve the problem for him: access to and communication with steelmakers and with the French court. As a “privileged merchant” she became the exclusive seller of steel in the nation.39 In applying spring-steel properties from watchmaking to trusses, Blakey secured a “privilege,” too, not unlike a patent. Establishing exclusivity allowed the Blakeys to advertise widely while cornering the market; they applied their advertisements to newspapers, leaflets, and even mailers.40 Vaucanson even evaluated Blakey’s instruments for the Académie des Sciences in Paris where he debuted his own automatons—the flute player, a galoubet (pipe) player, and the duck—in 1738. Excited crowds would gather, educated and otherwise, to see, to cheer, and even (in the case of a hoax called the Chess Player) to faint at how lifelike a machine might be. La Mettrie uses Vaucanson’s automatons as his examples par excellence, but by comparing humans to soulless animal machinery, he drew his own crowds through controversy (in which, it seems, he delighted). Disapproval or disdain of the usual course, plus a maddening desire to be the “chosen one,” to be first, to be best, to be only—and an equal ability to operate as stage manager, carnival barker, and salesmen: these inventors cast themselves as the heroes of an unfolding story. And together, they present the human machine and its well-ordered parts like the brass fittings and bright gears of the clockwork boy. “Each part contains its own more or less vigorous springs, according to the extent to which it needs them,” concludes La Mettrie, a historical antecedent to The Invention of Hugo Cabret. What could possibly go wrong?
The Mother Machine
A man stands in the center of the medical theater, surrounded by eager students. It’s the mid-eighteenth century and he’s delivering a baby. He fishes a spoon-like contraption on either side of the infant’s cresting head and then scissors them together for traction; these are the newly introduced forceps. A tug, and the baby slides forth from the womb to great applause. It’s an obvious triumph of new technology, but the doctor doesn’t press the infant into the waiting arms of its mother. In all likelihood, he’d spend the next few minutes shoving it back inside the womb. It may look like a flesh-and-blood woman, it may even be wearing a petticoat and stockings, but the figure on the table is actually a contraption, a machine. Following on the heels of Descartes’s hydraulic imagery and new dissection charts of the gravid (or heavily pregnant) uterus compiled by Drs. William Smellie and William Hunter, a new class of “Man-midwives” gives rise to a brand new idea. If the body was machinery, then surely reproduction itself, and the final breach of a human being into the world, might also be reduced to “clockwork.”41 As I say in an article for Feminist Formations, medical practitioners had begun meddling with the body’s hidden and chaotic interior to control “female fecundity” (or fertility), shake off the horror and mystery of childbirth, and make the entire process a workmanlike affair.42 But to do it, th
ey would need to understand the entire female economy and peep in at processes never before glimpsed (and certainly not experienced) by men. As critic Bonnie Blackwell claims, man-midwives with engineering ingenuity would go on to “manufacture the kind of woman they could not find in the world”43—a mechanical mother.
I first came across this strange device in old medical advertisements. I’d been researching mechanical habits, behaviors learned by rote and practiced without thinking. In late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Britain, women (particularly those of middle to upper rank) were expected to perform two different, though related, acts of “reproduction.” They were the begetters of sons, of heirs, of new British subjects. And yet, women were also responsible for the early education of their children. The dual emphasis of women’s primary (procreative) and secondary (educational) function overshadows any other duties, but they conflicted—at least in the minds of male physicians and educators. As vessels for bearing children, women need not be educated at all, they argued; in fact, some medical treatises suggested that all the blood would go to a woman’s brain and deprive her vital reproductive organs, rendering her sterile! Mary Astell, a seventeenth-century rhetorician, argues that men already thought of women as “machines, condemn’d every day to repeat the impertinencies of the day before.”44 To create a reproduction machine, they need only add the cogs and wheels and springs.
Consider: a woman at the turn of the eighteenth century might give birth twelve times in her life. Twelve times she faced the possibility of torn sphincter muscles, fistula (a gaping wound between the vaginal wall and the rectum or bladder), ruptured organs, or prolapsed uterus, where the uterus would hang down between the legs. It should be no surprise that William Blakey made a great deal of trade with damaged mothers, and delicate letters survive that show the embarrassed, painful state such women were left to live with. But despite these terrors, or maybe because of them, young women were shown pregnant wax dolls before marriage to prepare them for their destiny, and to be non-procreative remained the deepest of shames. But even with improved anatomies and models, most people had no idea how the woman’s body actually functioned. Half of London was ready to believe Mary Tofts, a woman from Godalming, who claimed to have given birth to rabbits in 1726, and the papers carried stories of monster births well into the nineteenth century—even recycling bits from the 1500s and the star-crossed damnations of Tycho Brahe’s nova. What lay in the writhing, roiling deeps of the womb? What procreative powers—and even what dread? Male doctors, bent on taking over midwifery from women practitioners, would take control of this mystery by fulfilling the worst fears of intellectual women like Mary Astell and Judith Drake. Just as La Mettrie dispensed with the second half of Descartes’s mechanics by removing the concept of soul (and so collapsing the distinction between body and mind), the mother machine reduced a birthing woman to the disposition of her organs.
For centuries, the womb had almost a life of its own—the Greeks thought it could “wander,” could get away from its usual housing and, in want of a baby, cause incredible havoc with a woman’s health (this is, in fact, the root of “hysteria”—and also of hysterectomy). Remedies that now seem ludicrous were applied by healers, such as burning incense between the legs to coax the errant womb back into place. In one sense, the inventions of male midwives improve upon these mythologies by recognizing the actual structures and movements of the body. At the same time, rendering the female interior readable also meant simplifying it, and most of the early attempts were admittedly crude. It was with some suspicion, then, that I read the advertisements of Dr. William Smellie, a man-midwife of Lanark, Scotland, practicing in London in the 1730s. Come witness!—the papers, letters, and journals suggested—come see this “most curious machine,” a “mock woman,” a “celebrated Apparatus.” The scant bits of information available tantalized in their details . . . She had a belly of leather, complete with a bag full of beer to simulate the bladder and other organs.45 Her figure crisscrossed with ligaments, muscle, and skin to make it more lifelike; her supple form rested on real human bones, which gave her, in the words of eyewitnesses, the “Motion, Shape and Beauty of natural Bodies [. . .] with great Exactness.”46 Contemporary pamphlets describe the use of levers so that the machine’s uterus contracted while in “labor,” and the sale catalogue produced upon Smellie’s death explained that she could be manipulated so as to demonstrate problems like malformation of the pelvic bones and their effect on birth. She wore clothes, petticoat, stockings, and shoes. And a surgeon, Peter Camper, claimed that the mannequin-machines were made with such remarkable skill that “hardly any difference is to be noticed between these, and [features] in natural women” (my italics).47 Though, rather importantly, she didn’t have a head. The female mind they considered dispensable . . . a horrific conclusion to the debate about Cartesian dualism that leaves us with a body and stumps, but no voice, no face, no self [Fig. 5].
The machine (or machines, if you count the machine’s “babies”) replaced the mother; but more than that, she’s an improvement upon the mother in the eyes of would-be physicians. Smellie constructed elastic, reforming craniums for his doll fetuses . . . and once again, students refer to them as “more natural” than cadaver fetuses they had before practiced upon. Without flesh and blood, without the messy effusions of real biological beings, machines offered a comfortable simulation that did not feel. What a change from the clockwork musicians and their heartfelt sighs. I spent two years hunting this mad, strange device, following a trail that led from anatomy theaters to the close quarters of home delivery, from the pages of startling atlases to an archive lost to the Dublin fire, on two continents, in four countries. What I reconstructed defies classification but doesn’t provide answers, so much as raise new questions.‡ Even so, in her mechanism, this mother machine carried the seed of an idea: machines do it better. As hauntingly explained by one of the onlookers, mechanisms like this laid “every material circumstance [of a woman’s body] open to the naked Eye.”48 The device, hailed as a great success and engineering marvel, succeeded in revealing what lay hidden under curtains of flesh and blood and bone. This, more than any other technology of automation, far more than the clockwork boys and writing machines, shakes the foundation of what it means to be a body, a creative body, a female body. She helped train nine hundred man-midwives in ten years, she fascinated and horrified the public, and she vanished before the nineteenth century—but the mother machine changes the landscape of our greatest desires and most consummate dread. Boundaries do not elide; they bend and snap, and the consequences in fiction, but also in scientific and medical fact, are dire indeed.
In Whitechapel Gods, Grandfather Clock ticks along in perfect order, a body of logic and equations, like the writing boy with his unseen gears and perfect number of parts. But Mama Engine does not run like clockwork; hers is the filth and grinding noise of industry, the same shadowy, murky swill that Dickens describes in Hard Times or that can be pieced together from nonfiction reports like Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor. Mama’s world does not tick and tock; organic as well as mechanized, Mama Engine’s interior heaves up “a savage universe of pulsating desires given form in random and hideous shapes of iron, linked across distant leagues by strings of luminous, fiery coal.”49 She, just like Grandfather Clock, runs on “calculations,” but these spin “like a flock of shining swallows, picking infinitesimal bits of data from the memories to link together and compile.”50 In other words, she works less like an algorithm and more like our own messy and importunate processes. More particularly, she is a great mystery, a creature with priests and rituals and servants and monsters. “The layers of her essence unfolded in sequence, revealing progressively deeper levels,” honed at last to “an exacting point of fire, hungry to consume and smelt and mould.”51 Like the “wandering wombs” and their demonic births, Mama Engine spawns unknowables. This makes her power and her terror, and the reason why, from the start of the novel to the finish,
characters on both sides attempt to control, contain, or destroy her. Mama Engine’s own consort, Scared, takes a potion to enable him to couple with her. Now her master, he “reads” his bride “instant by instant with a knowledge as complete as God’s.”52 The object is to know. The other simulation machines and automatons also created knowledge—but the comparisons remain positive, laudatory, exalted. In the seventeenth (and early eighteenth) century, says historian Minsoo Kang, the automatons and clockwork boys invited readers to appreciate “what a piece of mechanical work is man.”53 In contrast, the mother’s “machinery” begs for intervention. A woman must be activated and “put right,” her mysterious, messy, inefficient apparatus controlled and contained.54 Instead of proving a mechanical order, the mother machine almost demonstrates the reverse; the body is not running like clockwork, but it can (and must) be made to do so. As doctors increasingly perceived “birth” as a scientific—or even pathological—affair, the woman’s role either as the midwife or the mother shrinks, becomes secondary, subservient, even unnecessary. The machine, the forceps, and the doctor take her place; technology does the work. The mother has been erased, subsumed in the machinery.
Somewhere along the way, the worm turned; the very thing mankind meant to contain or control returned to sting at the heel. Many scientific, technological, and medical innovations begin exactly this way. Petroleum started as a replacement for whale oil, and has now driven the deadly wars of our age. Petroleum’s derivative plastics make for excellent prosthetics and household goods, and yet pollute our oceans with particulate that lodges in the food chain and refuses to break down. But the horror of the replacement woman operated on a new level for her contemporaries, and especially for flesh-and-blood women. Elizabeth Nihell, a woman midwife who practiced at the same time as Smellie, complained that his “ingenious piece of machinery” missed the point: As much as it may looks human, she insisted, it cannot feel pain.55 We return again to feeling, to the sensations that—more than our processing power—seem to separate the actual and virtual. Man-midwives trained upon something indistinguishable from the human body, but that could not cry out, could not call for help, and could not die. In short, by replacing the woman in labor with a machine all through the training, schools unleashed a generation of freshly minted doctors who may not be able to distinguish between feeling woman and unfeeling machine. The clockwork boy seemed to prove all was right with mechanism, that the human and the machine were ordered and orderly. If machines actually replaced humans, or if we manufactured (as Ishiguro has done) copies of ourselves in pristine laboratories, then perhaps some polite coexistence might come of our relationship with mechanism. But the mother machine doesn’t reproduce her own kind; she gives birth to a dangerous overlap, a place where the machine does not become more human; rather the human becomes more machine. The mother’s body turns like cog and wheel, rendered senseless by anesthesia—but not invincible by it. Her body may be torn asunder, sewn back together, and so on with the same gut-wrenching collision of flesh and tech we see in Whitechapel Gods. The worst of our fears exist at these borderlands, at the site of intersection, where we see, but cannot tell the difference.
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