The Victorian Automaton: Technology, Agency, and Fiction

This dissertation attends to the complex figure of the automaton in Victorian fiction. The metaphorical potency of this figure is based upon its conceptual instability; as either a machine that imitates the movements of a living being or a living being behaving mechanically, the automaton is an illusory, paradoxical entity that hyperbolizes the gap between what appears as autonomous movement and the obscure sources of that movement. This conceptual instability proves useful in nineteenth-century literary efforts to discover the nature of human agency in a world grown mechanically systematic and epistemologically opaque. At the heart of this investigation is the automaton as a textual phenomenon, an example of figurative language that thematizes the operation of narrative itself. By paying attention to the figurative work performed by the textual automaton, this dissertation complicates previous cultural and literary accounts that reduce the automaton to a symbol of technophobic anxiety centered upon the dehumanizing effects of industrial development. I explore a group of texts that instead evoke the technological register of the automaton to interrogate the manner in which human agency had been positioned as the foundation of existential meaning and knowledge of the world. In so doing, I supplement recent critical work on the relationship between technology and literary representation. I also contribute to discussions of how the Victorians conceptualized knowledge, particularly subjective knowledge of the human mind. Finally, I offer a new perspective on the way in which narrative mechanics encode a concern with agency on the levels of both form and content. In this study, the Victorian automaton emerges as an emblem of the volatile imaginative boundary between the categories of human and machine; as a textual tool for addressing the mechanisms that facilitate or limit subjective, scientific, political, and creative agency; and as a symbolic figure that short-circuits conceptual closure, narrative neatness, and efforts to establish certainties about the constitution of human being.Ph.D.2016-11-30 00:00:0