The Mechanization of Feelings: Mary de Morgan’s ‘A Toy Princess’

Abstract

As argued in the Introduction, as early as in ancient times the term ‘nature’ was polyvalent, indifferently used to define the natural world and human nature alike. In the nineteenth century, the ‘natural historical way of knowing’, to draw upon John Pickstone’s phrase again, implied the breaking down into pieces of natural specimens and humans alike, as naturalists, scientists or medical professionals looked for ‘regularities’,³ recurrently comparing humans to machines to understand function. Moreover, because of the old and enduring association of women and nature, with the onset of the Scientific Revolution the mechanization of the world-view and the attendant increase in mechanistic models aimed at explaining nature saw women as disorderly beings that needed to be controlled, restructuring them in a way as machines. The reordering of the world through the machine metaphor – as an image of the power of humans and technology to control nature and human life – redefined reality. As Carolyn Merchant argues, ‘[r]ational control over nature, society, and the self was achieved by redefining reality itself through the new machine metaphor’.⁴ Since bodies were seen as marvellous machines made up of different pieces, the Scientific Revolution saw the making and popularization of automata, contraptions often defined as wonderful, all the more so because many of them came from the East.⁵