NOTES:
1. This text was originally published in Multilingua: Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication, 18.2/3 (1999): 267-280, in honor of Professor Paul Beekman Taylor: a hybrid work for an eclectic scholar, mentor, colleague, and friend of mine in Geneva, Switzerland. I have altered and expanded it slightly. The drawings and music are my creations (© Sarah Higley September 2004). Please do not reproduce them for any reason without my permission.
2. I base my version of Melusine--the fairy who becomes half woman half snake one day every week and must sequester herself in her secret bath--on the late Middle-English verse translation, The Romans de Partenay, or Of Lusignen Otherwise Known as the Tale of Melusine, (ed. Walter Skeat, Early English Texts Society, Old Series 22, London: Kegan Paul et al, 1866). This version is taken from La Coudrette's French poem, but the textus classicus is of course that by Jean d'Arras, ca. 1390 (Mélusine: Roman du XIVe siècle, ed. Louis Stouff, Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1974). The other English version is a prose translation of that text (ed. Donald, Mélusine, Compiled by Jean d'Arras, Englisht about 1500, Early English Texts Society, old series 68, London: Paul Kegan, et al, 1895).
In short: Melusine and her sisters were cursed by their mother, Presine, when they imprisoned their father for violating her taboo: never to visit her when she was giving birth. Melusine's prohibition laid upon her own husband, Raymond, is similar: never to seek to know what becomes of her on Saturday. She is attributed with the planning and building of great cities through Europe. See what becomes of her and her cursed sons when Raymond betrays her.
I recommend the 1996 anthology of articles devoted to Melusine (edited by Maddox and Sturm-Maddox, Melusine of Lusignan: Founding Fiction in Late Medieval France, Athens: GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996), especially, because so appropriate to my story, those articles by Kevin Brownlees and Gabrielle M. Spiegel on "hybrids" and "monstrous motherhood" respectively.
3. "For I compare this task with the dark sea, since there is no clear way of testing whether that rumour which has spread throughout the world with the gilded speech of marvelous report is true or steeped in lies, of which things the writing of the poets and philosophers, which always foster lies, expound the greatest part." Liber Monstrorum, in Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf-Manuscript, ed., trans. Andy Orchard, Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1994, p. 254-256.
4. "To know the wondrous things that happen to creatures is an excellent thing." This passage comes from La Coudrette, in early fifteenth-century Le Roman de Mélusine ou Histoire de Lusignan,, Leanor Roach, ed., Paris: Kilncksieck, 1982. It could equally apply, however, to Melusine's inquiries into artificial women. I've given it a somewhat earlier pronunciation.
5. Thomas Edison's Hadaly, made as a replica of the fiancée his friend has rejected, is lost in the storm because he takes her on board as an erotic possession in his packing case (a "dame du voyage") instead of as a woman in this late nineteenth-century novel by August Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, L'Éve future. Translated by M. Gaddis Rose, Eve of the Future Eden is probably the most popular English-language version (Lawrence, KA: Coronado Press, 1981, p. 121).
6. That Descartes made an automaton copy of his little daughter after her death from scarlet fever was a posthumous and popular fable in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Descartes' disinterest in sex has been rumored, and the conception of Francine on a servant girl was sneered at after his death as an experiment. See Stephen Gaukroger, in Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995, p. 2), who surmises that Francine may have been named after the engineers of the automata beneath the Royal Gardens at Saint-Germain. He cites this notion expressed by Julian Jaynes, "The Problem of Animate Motion in the Seventeenth Century," Journal of the History of Ideas, 31, 219-234. My guess is that she was named after the country from which Descartes was exiled.
7. Jack Rochford Vrooman describes this mishap (Descartes: A Biography, New York: Putname, 1970, p. 252). Descarte's Traité de l'homme was published after his death as L'Homme, and it furthered his notion that the body was an elaborate (but ensouled) automation. I do not know if this text was one of these rescued manuscripts, but Melusine includes it here for poetic effect.
8. Also known as bruha, strix, and strega, she is the ultimate witch, vampire, and succubus. See Barbara Black Koltuv, The Book of Lilith, York Beach, MN: Nicolas-Hays, 1986, p. xi. The Haggadah tells how Lilith was the first wife of Adam, who demanded equality with him as she was created from the earth along with him (Genesis 1:26-28). She fled the Red Sea to mate with Samael, and Eve became Adam's second wife formed from his rib (Genesis 2:21-25). Much devotion is also given to Lilith in the Zohar, a mystical commentary on the Torah, attributed to Kabbalist Moses de Leon, d. 1305. See Willis Barnstone, The Other Bible, San Francisco: Harper, 1984, pp. 707, 736.
9. Raymondin, in Jean d'Arras' version (1390). His brother-in-law suggests that Melusine's disappearance is due to two things: extramarital sex ("tous les samedis elle est en fait de fornicacion avec un autre"--Every Saturday she is engaged in fornication with another), or a magical and monstrous transformation ("c'est un esperit fae, qui le samedy fait sa penance"--She is a fairy-spirit who must do penance on Saturday). Stouff, p. 241. Eventually, he spies on her, carving a hole in her bathroom door with the tip of his sword. Her "fornication" as I have conceived it is with science and technology, the secrets of God's creation, long considered a forbidden or unholy pursuit to men in the middle ages, much less women.
10. Rumor, or Fama as she is called in Latin, is a monstrous deity oft-referred to in classical and medieval writing. She flies by night (as rumors fly), and she has on her as many eyes, ears and tongues as feathers. Truly multilingual, she is eager to catch all the scandal abroad and reproduce it in as many languages as possible and I regard her as the organ of legend, balanced by the clarity of Truth. Both goddesses counsel Melusine in her experiment with mythology and technology.
In his Enigma 95, Old English cleric Aldhelm quoted Vergil's description of Fame in the Aeneid:
Ingrediturque solo et caput inter nublia condit
Monstrum horrendum, ingens, cui quot sunt corpore plumae,
Tot vigiles oculi subter, mirabile dictu,
Tot linguae, totidem ora sonant, tot subrigit auris;
Nocte volat caeli medio terraeque per umbras."She walks on the ground and hides her head in the clouds,
a huge and dreadful monster, on whose body the feathers
are matched in number by watchful eyes above, marvelous
to tell, and as many tongues and mouths sound forth,
as many ears prick up; she flies at night through the
shadows, midway between heaven and earth."Andy Orchard, trans., Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf-Manuscript, Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1994, pp. 98-99.
In the Liber Monstrorum, Fame is similarly described as a monster of the night: "monstrum quoddam nocturnum fuisse, quod semper noctu per umbram caeli et terrae volabat, homines in urbibus horribili stridore territans, et quot plumas in corpore habuit, tot oculos, totidem aures et ora" [...there is a certain monster of the night, which always used to fly by night through the shade of the sky and the earth, terrifying people in cities with its dreaduful cry, and it had as many eyes and ears and mouths as it had feathers." trans. Orchard, p. 99]. Chaucer's description of her in The House of Fame is a little lighter, but he gives her the many eyes, ears, and tongues of tradition:
I saugh a gretter wonder yit,
Upon her eyen to beholde;
But certain y hem never tolde,
For as feele eyen hadde she
As fetheres upon foules be...
And soth to tellen also she
Had also fele upstandyng eres
And tonges, as on bestes heres;House of Fame, ll. 1378-82; 1388-90.
Yet I saw a greater wonder
When I beheld her eyes;
But certainly I haven't described them,
For she had as many eyes
As there are feathers on birds...
And truth to tell she also
Had as many pricked up ears
And tongues, like hairs on beasts;
11. "Aphan dywettei Arthur yr ymadrawd techaf wrthyf o'r allei y dywedywn ynneu yr ymadrawd hwnnw yn haccraf a allwn wrth Vedrat. Ac o hynny y gyrrwyt arnaf ynneu Idawc Cord Brydein" [And when Arthur would say the fairest words that he could to me, I would say those words the ugliest way I could to Medrawd. And hence I was given the name 'Iddawg the Embroiler']. Breudwyt Ronabwy ("The Dream of Rhonabwy"), a middle Welsh text of the thirteenth or fourteenth century that highlights the diasters of communication, literacy, and memory. The text is from Melville Richards' edition (Caerdydd: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, 1948), p. 5. The translation is mine.
12. "The Synthetic Lady" or "The Composite Mistress" flourished in troubadour poetry and Renaissance tradition: a poet/lover would combine the attributes of all the best women in one imaginary woman. For extensive study, see A. H. Schutz, "Ronsard's Amours XXXIII and the Tradition of the Synthetic Lady, Romance Philology I (1947): 125-136; and K.K. Ruthven, "The Composite Mistress," Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association 26 (1966): 198-214. The outstanding example is that by Bertran de Born, lamenting the loss of his mistress, "Dompna puois de mi no us cal," edited in the original with a translation by W.D. Paden et al. in The Poems of the Troubadour Bertran de Born, Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1986, pp. 152-153:
irai per tot agaran
de chas-cun'un bel semblan
per far dompna soiseu-buda,
troi vos me siats renduda."I'll go everywhere seeking a fair quality in each woman to make up an imaginary lady" (Paden, translator).
12a. The posthumous (or contemporary!) legends of "learned men" whereby rumor attributes golem or robot-making to them (Vergil, Simon Magus, Pope Sylvester II, Albertus Magnus, Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, Paracelsus, Rabbi Loew of Prague, René Descartes, Thomas Edison and on into the twentieth century) is explored in two articles of mine: "The Legend of the Learned Man's Android," in Retelling Tales: Essays in Honor of Russell Peck, eds. Thomas Hahn and Alan Lupack, Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997, pp. 127-160; and "Alien Intellect and the Roboticization of the Scientist," Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 40/41 (1997): 131-162.
13. Daughter of Theon of Alexandria, Hypatia is considered to be the first woman in historical record to make a significant contribution to mathematics and to become head of the Platonist school in a.d. 400. But when Cyril became the leading Christian Patriarch of Alexandria, a sect of monks faithful to him had her murdered, so history tells, because mathematics, associated with the demonic, was a threat to Christianity. Consequently, the city of Alexandria began to decline as a center for intellectual inquiry. See http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Hypatia.html.
14. Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), abbess, writer of sermons, visionary, artist, physician and herbalist, composer of music, and famous migraineuse, is best known for her work entitled Scivias, and less well-known for the language she invented, referred to as Ignota Lingua ("unknown language") in the two extant manuscripts that house it (Wiesbaden Codex and the Berlin MS, ca. 1200), and by her friend and provost Wolmarus in a letter to her. Perhaps because she had invented a language, she had no need to invent a robot, but one wonders, still, why there are no historical women gifted with the making of moving statues.
Hildegard was noted as well for her medical writings, of which the most famous is Subtilitates diversarum naturarum creaturarum, otherwise known as the Physica. Her Ignota Lingua draws heavily upon this and other medical texts, as witnessed by the long list of Korperteilen or "body parts" and the even longer list of trees, herbs, birds, and insects. Here is a sample of her linguistic prestidigitation. (Graphic shown is devised, and NOT a photocopy of the Wiesbaden Codex). I have selected those invented words that would fit the theme of this issue and my hypertext:
Hoil ("head"), Hochziz ("blindman"), Pasizio ("leper"), Ceril ("brain"), Ornalziriz ("curly hair"), Luzeia ("eye"), Luzerealz ("eye-socket"), Moniz ("mouth"), Gulzia ("gullet"), Laniscal ("breast"), Tirziel ("loins"), Scorinz ("heart"), Tilzia ("womb"), Manguiz ("excrement"), Creueniz ("scrotum"), Fragizlanz ("pudendum"), Minscol ("ulcer"), Razil ("poison"), Cruniz ("leg"), Funiz ("foot"), Maluizia ("whore"), Deiezio ("dwarf"), Logizkal ("giant"), Ornalzanzia ("hairband"), Naczuon ("necklace"), Rasinz ("veil"), Ausiz ("hemlock"), Galigiz ("cumin"), Pigizia ("savory"), Maschin ("valerian"), Clanzga ("tansy"), Nascuil ("deadly nightshade"), Pazia ("henbane"), Brumsil ("birthwort"), Nozia ("screech owl"), Ualueria ("bat"), Luxzia ("butterfly"), Zinzrinz ("winding staircase").
For her Ignota Lingua, the most recent edition is Wörterbuch der unbekannten Sprache, ed. Marie-Louise Portmann and Alois Odermatt, Basel: Verleg Basler Hildegard-Gesellschaft, 1986. The most accurate edition is that by Friedrich Wilhelm Emil Roth, "Glossae Hildigardis," in Die Althochdeutsche Glossen, vol. III, ed. Elias Steinmeyer and Eduard Sievers (Zürich: Wiedmann, 1895, 1965), pp. 390-404. I am embarked on my own. See also my on-line article "Audience, Uglossia, and CONLANG: Inventing Languages on the Internet" in M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.1 (2000).
15. Because she exists beyond time and culture on these Saturdays, Melusine mixes her terms anachronistically: "android," "cyborg," "golem," "robot"--all have distinct connotations and venues.
16. Solomon was an eleventh-century poet and philosopher who, like Rabbi Loew of Prague and Albertus Magnus, acquired a posthumous golem story. Joseph Solomon del Medigo records the legend in the early seventeenth-century, and in citing it Moshe Idel remarks that we find the first reference to a female famulus ("servant")"that bears evidence. . .to the mechanical achievement of Ibn Gabirol, and not to his indulgence in magic" (Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid, Albany, SUNY Press, 1990, p. 223.
By unpinning his moving puppet, Solomon is showing his accusers that he is not a golem-maker, a spiritual act reserved for rabbis, but an artificer. In this way he avoids charges of blasphemy.
17. In his Poetria Nova, Geoffrey of Vinsauf demonstrates how to describe a woman using the most elegant metaphors:
Praeformet capiti Naturae circinus orbem;
Crinibus irrutilet color auir; lili vernent
In specula frontis; vaccinia nigra coaquet
Forma supercilii...
Excubiae frontis radient utrimque gemelli
Luce smaragdina vel sideris instar ocelli."Let Nature's compass draw the outline of the head; let the color of gold gleam in the hair; let lilies grow on the lofty forehead. Let the eye-brows equal black whortle-berries in appearance; ...Let the sentinels of the forehead gleam from both sides, twin little eyes with emerald lights, like a constellation."
Unlike the Composite Mistress, this woman's attributes are drawn from nature, but she is still entirely eclectic, and almost grotesque. Edition and translation by Ernest Gallo, The Poetria Nova and its Sources in Early Rhetorical Doctrine, The Hague: Mouton, 1971, pp. 44-45.
18. There are many versions of the automaton created by Albertus Magnus, Bishop of Ratisbone (1193-1280), but the only one where she is female seems late in origin; without citation, Joachim Sighart gives a melodramatic account of Thomas Aquinas' intrusion into his teacher's "laboratory" where, in a niche behind a veil, he finds the statue of a seductive woman who greets him ("Salve, salve, salve!") much to his horror, and he bludgeons her to death ("Begone, Satan!") in typical monkish and misogynistic panic. Albert the Great: of the Order of Friar-Preachers: HIs Life and Scholastic Labours. Trans. T.A. Dixon, London: K.R. Washbourned, 1876, pp. 127-128.
Pandora is perhaps best known from Thomas Bulfinch's Mythology wherein it is told how Prometheus angered the gods by stealing fire from the heavens in order to strengthen his creation: humanity. To thwart him, Zeus ordered Hephaestos to make a woman for Prometheus' brother, Epimethius, who was smitten. Her name was Pandora, "all gifts," for each of the gods bestowed qualities upon her: Aphrodite gave her beauty, Apollo gave her musical ability, but Hermes gave her curiosity and deception. She was shown a jar and ordered never to open it, which of course she did, and it unleashed all manner of ills that flew into the human world: violence, sickness, death, and old age. Only Hope remained in the jar, who comforted the weeping Pandora.
19. A wonderful on-line edition and translation of E.T.A. Hoffmann's horror story entitled "Der Sandmann" (1817) can be found by John Oxenford at http://www.fln.vcu.edu/hoffmann/sand_e_pics.html, complete with black and white illustrations. Nathanael, Hoffmann's disturbed protagonist, falls in love with what he thinks is a real woman, Olympia, actually a robot made by the evil Coppelius ("eye socket"), the very same man who destroyed his father. Her hands are cold, when he dances with her, but they warm at his touch; her lips are cold, but they warm to his kiss. Her repeated remarks are "Ah, ah!" But Nathanael in a classic case of projection thinks she is the perfect conversationalist, telling him what he wants to hear. Sigmund Freud thought enough of this story to include an analysis of it in his 1925 essay on "The Uncanny," in which he discusses "The Sandman" in terms of one of humanities greatest fears: the "intellectual uncertainty whether an object is alive or not, and when an inanimate object becomes too much like an animate one," a feeling associated with childhood fascinations of the doll come to life. Click here for an excerpt from that essay.
20. This delightful story is included in Ovid's Metamorphoses (ca. 100 b.c.): Unhappy with the loose women of his region, the young sculptor Pygmalion carves his ideal woman out of ivory and falls so in love with her that he dresses her and brings her gifts--but of course she is motionless. In a prayer to Venus, he wishes for a woman "like" his Galatea, and the Goddess of Love, understanding his real wish, brings his statue to life. For an English translation of the story, along with the famous painting by Jean-Leon Gerome, click here.
21. Blodeuwedd from the "Fourth Branch" of The Mabinogion (ca. 13th century) was created by Math and Gwydion out of flowers to override the geis ("prohibition"--or rather in Welsh the tynghed, "destiny") that Aranrhod placed on her rejected son: he will never marry a woman of the human race. In becoming an owl after her infidelity, Blodeuwedd joins the ranks of Lilith-like women, and an excellent retelling of her dark story can be found in Alan Garner's young adult novel The Owl Service (Magic Carpet Books: 1999).
22. Edmund Spenser, in The Faerie Queene, Book III, Canto viii, 5-7, describes a witch's construction of a counterfeit made of the virtuous Florimell. The skin of snow, the vermilly of the complexion, the "siluer sockets shyning like the skyes," the golden wires of the head are clearly satires of poetic metaphors, but here Spenser intends us to take them as the physical elements of the robot's body, animated by a demon. It is as if Geoffrey's Rhetorica were made up of real lilies and whortleberries, like Blodeuwedd of The Mabinogion.
22a. From Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, 1918. Victor Frankenstein promised to create a mate for his creature, but destroyed it when he saw the ghastly product on the table. Melusine has given her the name "Prodigia," a medieval Latin word of several meanings: from prodigium, "a marvelous or wonderful sign," but also a "portent of evil nature." Both prodigium and portentum came to mean "monster," as it is used in the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville (seventh century; see his chapter "De Portentis"), i.e., an unnatural event such as a deformity: giants, limbless human beings, dwarfs, two-headed goats, and in Portenta's case, a corpse come to life. Our modern word "prodigy" of course means an extraordinarly gifted human being, such as Victor Frankenstein and Melusine, but it also means an event that inspires wonder.
23. In Fritz Lang's 1926 film Metropolis, Hel is refashioned in the likeness of the "good Maria," friend of the co-workers, and incites them to rebel. This evil, mechanical doppelganger of an ethical woman resembles Spenser's False Florimell. Clearly, Melusine takes pity on both uncanny creatures and attempts to restore to them something of the virtue of their models.
24. Zhora is one of two female "replicants" that "blade runner" Rick Deckard stalks in Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner. She poses as an exotic dancer, and he pretends to be investigating sexual harassment. In a scene eerily reminiscent of Melusine's bath, he asks her, as she sets aside her python and prepares to shower, if she has noticed any "holes" in her dressing room through which lewd men could spy on her. "Are you for real?" she laughs in incredulity. Of course, she herself is not real, which is the focus and philosophy of this film based on Philip K. Dick's Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep, and neither is Deckard, as is suggested in the Director's Cut. Think of her drying her hair in the electric dryer: for an instant, as her tresses swirl around her, she is the Medusa, woman of snakes.
25. Geoffrey Chaucer's most complex character in The Canterbury Tales has been much argued over as to whether she represents a sympathetic portrait of a successful and aggressive woman or whether she is the culmination of the "clerical misogyny" (summed up mostly by the Patristic writer Saint Jerome) that she rails against. Is she a portrait of a real woman or is she a borrowing from Jean de Meung's Duenna, the talky, dishonest nursemaid to "Fair Welcome," who instructs him in the false ways of guileful women (Roman de la Rose, 12th century)? Alisoun, the Wife of Bath, tells us in her prologue how experience, not the authority of written texts, has taught her the woes of marriage (she's had five husbands), and she reveals all her sexual tricks including the most important one: lying. In being honest about her lying, she produces a further conundrum that Melusine wishes to simplify.
26. Lilith is reminding Melusine that they both owe their origins to the snake-woman or "Lamia," shown in so many medieval and renaissance illustrations as the serpent who tempted Eve. See expecially Françoise Clier-Colombani, "La Satanisation de Mélusine" (in La Fée Mélusine au moyen age: images, mythes, et symbols, Paris: Le Léopard d'Or, 1991, p. 182) and the plates at the end of her book.
27. Melusine had ten sons with Raymond, most of them deformed but valorous. Geoffrey of the Great Tooth was the instigator of her downfall, for he slew his brother and the other corrupt monks of Marlezais Abbey, turning Raymond against her for engendering monstrous sons. Horrible of the Three Eyes was wicked, and before he could further damage their family, Melusine herself had him slain, furthering her own connection with Lilith as child-killer.
28. In her award-winning novel Possession, A.S. Byatt has given birth to Christabel LaMotte, author of "The Fairie Melusine," quoted in part in the novel (pp. 289-298).
29. In Handlyng Sinne, Middle English author Robert Mannyng equates the horns of late medieval women's headdresses with "gret pryde and vyle outrage (ll. 1983, 3224); Suzanne Craymer in a lecture she gave at the South Eastern Medieval Association in 1997, gives examples in medieval art and literature where the headdress is equated with the horns of a beast and the women who wear it with monsters. Villiers de L'Isle-Adam in L'Eve future has Edison denounce the cosmetic aids of Evelyn Habal, whose name is reminiscent of "Cabal," and who has led men to their ruin with her artifice (pp. 136-139). His android, Hadaly, will replace such counterfeiting women who, in their bustles and corsets, their rouge and their lipstick, their hose and their false hair, are as engineered as the horned women of the fourteenth century.
30. Melusine's city, Filia, made from the lost parts of artificial women, has never yet been found. Perhaps she never built it, as her reign came to a tragic end when her husband, having spied on her, eventually betrayed her secret. Melusine then turns into a dragon and flies about the ramparts of her castle, crying out in grief, from whence we get, I presume, the French expression crie de Mélusine which enacts horrible paralyses on those who hear it, weirdly resembling the goddess Rumor who flies and cries and produces social havoc; but her transformation also recalls that of the unfortunate Blodeuwedd, turned for her infidelity into an owl. Magical women, whether enchanted or engineered, seldom go without punishment.
31. Christine de Pisan's Book of the City of Ladies (Le Livre de lat cité des dames, 1405) is the most famous of her many works, and in it she protests Jean de Meung's Roman de la Rose and other books that reveled in negative portraits of women. Assisted by Reason, Rectitude, and Justice, female deities, she assembles all the virtuous women of history and legend to form the foundations and pillars of her City.
32. Rumor and Truth seem largely applicable to different intellectual projects: fiction and exposition. In grafting them together like this I have discovered all over again how hard it is to make loose connections in source studies and tight connections in short stories.
