Commerce, AI, and the Woman Question: In the Shadow of Alice W. Fuller’s ‘A Wife Manufactured to Order’

ABSTRACT

In this article, I examine Alice W. Fuller’s short story 'A Wife Manufactured to Order' (1895) to show how it incorporates artificial intelligence (AI) to advance debates surrounding the rights of women. Fuller’s story appeared at a period when the Woman Question was warmly debated in periodicals and imaginative fiction. Nevertheless, it has received inadequate scholarly attention. This article offers a corrective by attending to its treatment of the marriage between man and machine and by recovering Fuller's economic metaphors. It argues for the cultural significance of her project by revealing it to be a precursor to influential works such as Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives (1972); and by attending to the currency of this conversation as it manifests in Bryan Forbes’ 1975 and Frank Oz’s 2004 film adaptations. By examining the commonalities between these works and by analysing the economic thread that connects them, this article foregrounds Fuller’s contributions to debate about the roles, rights, and responsibilities of women, and it suggests, to some extent, the persistence of her concerns in our own time.

KEYWORDS:

• Fuller
• Levin
• robot
• AI
• New Woman
• Stepford Wives
• Woman Question

Acknowledgements

I thank Simon Bacon, Selmin Kara, Diana Maltz, Blu Tirohl, and Alec Wills; the students in my “Foundations of Science Fiction” and “Writing for the Arts” classes at Dalhousie University and NSCAD University respectively; and the staff of Dalhousie University Libraries. This article was completed with the aid of an Insight Development Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and I am grateful to this institution for its support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I have examined some of these dynamics in my entry on the ‘New Woman’ for The Companion to Victorian Popular Culture.

2. Compare with Joanna Russ’ ‘An Old-Fashioned Girl’ (1974), where the first-person narrator introduces her female guests to her robot Davy, ‘[t]he most beautiful man in the world’: ‘Priss was staring and staring. “Is he expensive?” she said (and blushed). I let her borrow him – we had to modify some of his programming, of course – so we tiptoed out and left them; it was the first time, Priss said, she had ever seen such soul in a creature’s eyes’ (Russ, 1974, p. 131, 135). Davy is a more advanced model than Margurette. He ‘laugh[s] at the right places in the conversation (he takes his cues from [her] face)’ (Russ, 1974, p. 131), and he responds to her commands: ‘“Stay, Davy.” This is one of the key words that the house “understands”; the central computer will transmit a pattern of signals to the implants in his brain and he will stretch out obediently on his mattress; when I say to the computer “Sleep,” Davy will sleep. He’s a lovely limb of the house’ (Russ, 1974, p. 134).

3. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘Stepford, adj.’ as ‘[r]obotic; docile; obedient; acquiescent; (also) uniform; attractive but lacking in individuality, emotion, or thought’ and it attributes the word’s first usage to a 1972 article discussing the novel (‘Stepford, adj.’).

4. See, by contrast, the episode ‘Be Right Back’ (Brooker & Harris, 2013) in Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror (2011-). Following the death of her spouse Ash (Domhnall Gleeson) Martha (Hayley Atwell) invests in an expensive robot version of him. At first, she relishes in his company. The robot may be created from a composite of material relating to Ash, and so they look and sound identical. Yet she comes to realize how different their personalities are. Where Ash is distant, and the episode routinely shows how absorbed he is on his phone, the android is far more attentive and submissive to her wishes. Like Margurette, the robot seems to have no particular feelings, and yet Martha does not wish him dead. By the end of the episode, we learn that she keeps him concealed in her attic.

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Tom Ue

Tom Ue researches and teaches courses on nineteenth-century British literature, intellectual history, and cultural studies at Dalhousie University. He is the author of Gissing, Shakespeare, and the Life of Writing (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming) and George Gissing (Liverpool University Press, forthcoming), and the editor of George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming). Ue has held the prestigious Frederick Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship and he is an Honorary Research Associate at University College London.