Journal Article

The Anatomical Gaze in Tomorrow's Eve

de Fren, Allison

2009

Overview

In the sf novel L'Eve future [Tomorrow's Eve, 1886] by Philippe Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, the female body is dissected repeatedly: a female android is technologically disassembled, a living woman is poetically blazoned, and a dead woman is cinematically deconstructed. This article explores the novel's central thematic of dissection, tracing its rhetorical and visual coding to the anatomy theater of the Renaissance, and in particular to the work of Andreas Vesalius, to whom the scientist-anatomist Thomas Edison (a character in the novel) is explicitly compared. Within the anatomy theater, the medical investigation of the body was conducted within a highly symbolic and ritualized environment in which the act of dissection was intended not only to foster empirical analysis but also to inspire metaphysical awe. Such awe was cultivated via an anamorphic or doubled vision, which encouraged a sublime reading of grotesque phenomena— that is, a reading in which dissection is simultaneously a revelation of the interior wonders and horrors of the body and of larger, universal truths that defy both vision and intelligibility. This doubled vision via dissection is reproduced in the novel with the help of modern technological inventions that encourage the kind of \"cognitive estrangement\" and \"sense of wonder\" that will become associated with later science fiction.

• Publisher: SF-TH Inc,University of California Press
• Subject: Anatomy / Anatomy & physiology / Dissection / Human body / Literary criticism / Magicians / Movies / Narratives / Novels / ON PROTO/EARLY SCIENCE FICTION / Renaissance period / Science fiction / Science fiction & fantasy / Skeleton / Statues / Technology / Villiers de L Isle-Adam, Auguste de (1838-89) / Visual fixation