FOUR

PARADOXES OF PERFECTION

A Servant No More

THE IDEA OF AN AUTOMATED female servant is as old as antiquity. In Homer’s epic poem The Iliad, Hephaestus, the blacksmith god, fashioned two moving female statues made of gold who helped him with his work. During the medieval period in the Muslim world, the engineer al-Jazari (1136–1206 CE) of Mesopotamia, in his treatise The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, included illustrations of automaton slave girls who filled the king’s glass with wine.

AUTOMATIC HOUSEMAIDS OUT OF CONTROL

Fantasies about mechanical female servants persisted. During the nineteenth century, with its burst of industrialization and mechanization in Europe and America, two women writers created stories of automated clockwork female servants—stories reflecting the century’s hopes and fears about new inventions, and prevailing attitudes toward women themselves. In her story “Automatic Maid-of-All-Work: A Possible Tale of the Near Future” (1893), author M. L. Campbell wrote a first-person story in the voice of a woman whose husband Jon invents an automated electrical maid that has a twenty-four-hour clock for a face—a clock without hands and numbers but instead a circle of electric push buttons for different tasks. Powered by batteries, the maid could make breakfast, clean the house, chop wood, move furniture, and scrub the kitchen. But as an errant technology, this mechanical wonder would also suddenly lift people up, wield an ax, and even chase away a policeman.

The idea of an artificial female running out of control with powers that supersede those of humans has long been a worry (in Mary Shelley’s novel, Victor Frankenstein tears apart his fabrication of a female mate that he was constructing for his towering Creature). In Campbell’s story, the automated female causing mayhem is ultimately too much, and the narrator at the story’s end reports that the maid, while chasing after a cow, reportedly, and conveniently, drowned in a stream.

Maid-of-all-work was a popular term during the century for a household helper, but this mechanized maid was clearly out of control. Her errant behavior reflected nineteenth-century fears that new machines and technologies like steam-powered factory machines and fast-moving steam railroads would speed out of control (and indeed, trains sometimes did, before Westinghouse brakes were invented).¹ The runaway maid may well have also reflected contemporary anxiety about the emergent “New Woman” who was often pictured smoking cigarettes, lobbying for suffrage, and delighting in her feeling of independence as she rode off on her newly invented safety bicycle specially designed for female riders. The ax-wielding automated maid might also be a sly reference to the notorious Lizzie Borden, who in 1892 was tried and acquitted for the ax murders of her father and stepmother.

There is a degree of paradox in the idea of a mechanical female robotic maid since Campbell’s story also reflected the common belief that women themselves were ignorant of all things mechanical. The story’s female narrator says of the invention, “I didn’t understand it very well. I never could see anything in the way of machinery.” Campbell might have been trying to neutralize anxieties about tech-savvy women—though during the 1890s and after, women bicyclists were repairing their own bicycles and adventurous American and European women were driving new steam and electric automobiles, seen in photographs and newspaper stories and artists’ renditions in America of the “Automobile Girl.”

A few years after Campbell’s story, American novelist Elizabeth W. Bellamy published her humorous story “Ely’s Automatic Housemaid” in The Black Cat magazine (1899). In literature, it is usually the man who is the inventor, and Bellamy’s story tells of Harrison Ely, a “genius” male inventor who created an “Automatic Household Beneficent Genius” automaton, which he also called “the Automatic Household Genius, a veritable Domestic Fairy.” He made two of them available. One, named Bridget, was the cook, and the other automated female was Juliana, the housemaid. At first, Juliana is described as having a “marvellous mechanism.” However, she soon proved to be a maniacal duster who quickly dusted everything and made the beds but also made the wife and children feel uneasy: the narrator was shocked at her speed, and the family felt alarm. Evoking fears of runaway technologies, Juliana, who the narrator calls a “Fiend,” tears up the beds, won’t stop sweeping, and seems to have no brakes—even sending one of the children tumbling to the floor.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was a fascination with dolls that had bisque heads and seemed lifelike. Describing one of the dolls in the story, the narrator says it had a human figure with a bisque face, which had a “very natural and pleasing expression.” But this lovely doll was clearly mechanical: its head was fitted with an electric battery, and its body, or trunk, was filled with wheels and springs. With echoes of Frankenstein’s “monster,” the wife of the family thinks the out-of-control automatons are alive and wants to kill them, especially after they fight with each other and wreck the stained glass panes in the door. The only solution to stopping the mayhem is not to destroy them but to send them back to the factory “for improvements.”²

These stories all suggest the late nineteenth century’s fundamental ambivalence about new labor-saving machines—they are marvels, they are monsters—they make life easier, they are destructive to human life. The many advertisements in British newspapers suggest that upper-class families were always looking for suitable maids-of-all-work, and certainly the idea of a robot maid might seem like an appealing fantasy—as long as she could be controlled.

A much more benign automated female servant was seen in the century’s love of clockwork automatons that could serve as a graceful addition to a parlor or a showpiece to impress friends. French automatons included demure and elegantly dressed Chinese and Russian tea servers such as the tea servers made by the French manufacturer Léopold Lambert with bisque heads by the French dollmaker Jumeau.

One novelty French automaton of a maid, however, was particularly intriguing. It was named “Maid Dusting a Portrait” (c. 1900) and was manufactured by Louis Renou. When the mechanical maid used her red feather duster to clean the portrait of a man, his eyes magically move from side to side. This windup maid, in a sense, brings the man—or at least the artistic simulacrum of the man—to life.

TWENTIETH-CENTURY MECHANICAL AND DIGITAL FEMALE SERVANTS

Comic versions of the troublesome mechanical maid continued nearly a hundred years later. In the 1980s, in the American animated television comedy series The Jetsons, the space-age Jetson family temporarily replaces their robot housekeeper and maid, Rosie, with an unforgiving high-tech Mechano Maid 2000, who is too efficient for comfort (a familiar trope). It’s not that she is out of control—she is just too inhumane (limiting the family to ten minutes of television a night). Rosie, while also efficient and no-nonsense, has a heart and emotions, although she is prone to comical mechanical mishaps, as in the 1985 episode “Rip-Off Rosie,” where she becomes a kleptomaniac who steals from a store. If she temporarily runs away from the family, it is because she is sad about her own malfunctions. In this comedy series, which originally aired from 1962 to 1963 and then again from 1985 to 1987, Rosie is not a servant maid who has her own sense of autonomy, who longs for her own independence and freedom. She’s a rental maid, and she’s happy in that role.

More troubling was Ira Levin’s portrayal of the Stepford Wives in his 1972 novel of the same name—robots that were fundamentally household servants with their unfailing willingness to be hyperefficient housekeepers and cooks. The Campbell and Bellamy stories of the 1890s were written during a period of social ferment for women, and the writers comically depicted the mechanical maids causing mayhem—but as befitting the times, they kept these robotic servants from getting too wayward and out of control. Written during the much more dramatic social upheavals of the women’s liberation movement in America in the 1970s, The Stepford Wives spoofed the men of the fictional Stepford, Connecticut, who wanted a way to control and counter the liberated women who were challenging their confining gender roles.

In the novel, the men murder their errant wives and replace them with docile robots, echoed in the chilling scenes of the 1975 filmed version starring Katharine Ross. Joanna Eberhart is a photographer, but her husband pictures her in a different way, as a compliant wife. In the 2004 remake of the film (starring Nicole Kidman), however, Joanna eludes destruction and cleverly plays the role of a robot servant housewife expected by her husband, as she stakes out a place for her own assertiveness and autotomy. As a female robot envisioned by her husband, she would have been totally controlled.

HUMANS, THE TELEVISION SERIES

The idea of the automated female servant changed dramatically in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ age of robotics and artificial intelligence. The robots themselves, endowed with consciousness, were often not only empowered with extraordinary abilities but also had an agenda of their own. Many of the issues and tensions raised by the development of realistic-looking female robots used as domestic servants were thoughtfully explored in the television series Humans (2015–18), which was jointly produced in America and Britain and based on the Swedish series Real Humans by Lars Lundström. The Hawkins family—Joe, wife Laura, adolescent son Toby, teenage daughter Mattie, and young daughter Sophie—acquire a beautiful household robotic servant, a synthetic AI-endowed human called a synth in the series—to help with household chores like cooking and cleaning.

As in other television series about robots, Humans opens with an image of an eye, a reminder that our perceptions of female robots and their gendered traits are always mediated through cultural and media representations. In the opening episode, which first aired in 2015, Joe Hawkins has ordered a new synth, which arrives in a plastic zippered bag, and she opens her eyes. Like the maid-of-all-work in the nineteenth-century stories, she is billed as a “Mechanical Maid,” and as “the first family android,” she cooks, cleans, irons clothes, and even does more: she drives the family’s car. Not only is she extraordinarily efficient, she also has myriad other strengths. As she herself later tells Laura, in many ways she even does a better job at taking care of the children. She doesn’t forget, doesn’t get angry or depressed or intoxicated. She doesn’t feel fear, and she is faster, stronger, and more observant than humans.

(As a simulation, an imitation human, her superiority to humans echoes manufacturers’ claims during the nineteenth century that their factory-made copies of the decorative arts, as in ornamental cast iron and electroplated silverware, were superior to the originals.)³

But though she is marketed as a commodity, and she even calls herself a synthetic appliance, Anita (played by Gemma Chan), as she was named by the family, shows signs of having a mind of her own. Unbeknownst to the family, she was one of five synths created to be sentient, to have humanlike consciousness, and she has the qualities of empathy and acute observation not seen in ordinary synths.

One of the recurring fears about lifelike female androids is that they might displace real human beings in a relationship or in a family. As obedient, beautiful, tireless workers, household androids could pose a psychological threat to wives, partners, and lovers who might feel insecure about having this idealized woman around. In Humans, Laura—who has a busy career as a lawyer—finds Anita unnerving, and she is anxious about being displaced. She fears that her daughter Sophie seems to prefer Anita and isn’t happy when her husband approvingly talks about Anita’s cooking. When Anita checks on the sleeping Sophia, Laura reproves her with irritation, “That’s my job!” Even though Joe tells his wife not to worry about synths—“They’re just machines”—Laura asks him, “Doesn’t she give you the creeps?” Laura remains fearful that Anita will displace her in her children’s affections. When Anita, overriding her own programming not to touch the children unless the parents ask her to, puts her arms around Sophie to comfort her, that becomes the last straw, and Laura wants Anita to be returned.

For all of Laura’s uneasiness with Anita, it is Anita’s sensitivity that comes to Laura’s aid. As Anita says, “I’m programmed to observe moods,” and when she sees that Laura seems sad, she suggests that Sophie wants Laura to read to her. Anita is also watchful and self-sacrificing: she stops a truck on the road from hitting Toby by holding up her hand, and injuring herself.

The element of the uncanny recurs in tales about artificial females and robots—that moment of uneasiness or even horror when the beloved and enticing artificial creation, or a doll, is discovered not to be real, as in Hoffmann’s story “The Sandman” or in the 2004 film version of The Stepford Wives when the robot wife Sarah, in the midst of a square dance, breaks the illusion when she starts repeating maniacally “do-si-do, do-si-do,” sparks, and later starts walking backward up the stairs.⁴

For all their lifelike appearance, robots, both male and female, have existential glitches. In the 2021 German film about a robot man Ich bin dein Mensch (I’m Your Man), directed by Maria Schrader, the robot Tom, while dancing the rumba, ironically gets stuck repeating the phrase “Ich bin,” “Ich bin” (I am, I am), while the error reveals that he isn’t really a human being.

Although she was created to seamlessly simulate humans, there are startling moments of the uncanny in Humans when Anita’s artifice becomes apparent. Early on, the Hawkins family, who have incorporated Anita into their daily lives, are uneasy and startled when Joe tells a joke at the dinner table and Anita laughs maniacally and too long. But Anita, whose hidden identity is actually that of the sentient synth named Mia, is also capable of asserting agency about her own artifice. Rather than being the passive object embodying the uncanny, she deflects the horror of discovery when she matter-of-factly and deliberately points to her own synthetic nature. When Laura suspects that Anita has been illegally modified, Anita insists on demonstrating that she is not human. She puts a toothpick in her eye and feels no pain. After the accident when she jumped into the road to help save Toby, she tells Joe she needs a full-body inspection of her exterior, her epidermis, and she takes off her clothes, with no intention of masking her artifice and synthetic skin.

In early film versions of artificial females, men feel free to casually undress their life-size dolls, assuming the doll is a mere object and has no feelings. But women—real and robotic—can take off their clothes for men’s or women’s gazes, creating in their viewers an erotic experience. In the film Ex Machina, Ava asserts agency when she uses the act of undressing for her own purposes: she takes off her stockings while Caleb is looking, revealing her armature, which entices him even more.

More problematic is when Anita deliberately strips down to make repairs, not only does Joe look on but also his son Toby, who is in another room looking through a window as she peels off her bra and the rest of her clothes. For both men, it’s an erotic moment. Anita’s purpose is practical. Stripping off her clothes allows her to discover and display cuts in her synthetic skin, which she asks Joe to include in his report for the insurance company—cuts that amplify the reality of her artificial nature. In fact, she goes out of her way not to camouflage her artifice. When Joe puts his finger on a wound on her back hip, she says, “It’s not real” and “I’m not real” as she prepares to repair the damage.

But for all of Anita’s insistence on demonstrating her artificial identity, there is a moment in the same episode that exposes a different reality, one of the more authentic Anita. Mattie captures Anita’s core code on her computer, and for a moment, there is a breakthrough as Mia unexpectedly cries out, “Help me! Help me!” It is the voice of the authentic, buried Mia, who is submerged, a voice that quickly disappears but will reemerge in later episodes.

In films and television, there are other minor indicators suggesting a robotic female is artificial. Sensitivity to insects is often shown as a litmus test as to whether these women are synthetic or real. In Blade Runner, the replicant Rachael is unflinching when a fly lands on her, and in the television series Westworld, Dolores is at first oblivious to a fly on her but later, perhaps as she is becoming more sentient, she swats it away. In Humans, Anita is bothered when a spider lands on her, suggesting she’s not simply robotic or impervious to irritation.

Humans explores not only the shifting boundaries between artifice and authenticity but also the problematic role of gender stereotypes embodied in female robots. Victoria Turk, in her article “We’re Sexist toward Robots,” has written that studies show that people ascribe gender traits to robots: male robots are viewed as showing assertiveness and dominance, female robots as being friendly and affectionate. Participants in studies also assigned familiar gender roles to robots: males were repairers in the house and transporters of goods, females were linked to childcare, eldercare, and tutoring.⁵ In Humans, Anita is welcomed by the family for embodying the familiar gendered role of woman as friendly cook and cleaner, although her role in childcare is more problematic. She also elicits another anxiety: as a beautiful female household robot she poses a sexual temptation in the home.

In The Jetsons’ first series (1962–63), the young son, Elroy, strictly sees Rosie as a helpful tutor and gets her to do his homework (he comically complains when he only gets a grade of C). But in Humans, Toby sees Anita in sexual terms and secretly reaches out to touch her breast (she quickly brushes his hand away and says she has to report any inappropriate behavior).

Husband Joe also is attracted to Anita’s charms, and when his wife, Laura, is away in the evening doing legal business, he goes out of his way to establish Anita as an object. He muses to her, “What’s it like, not feeling?” In the series’ first season, episode 4, he finds a CD labeled “Adult Options” in the user’s manual and activates Anita by using code words, which, he tells her, “unlocks you, makes you passionate. It’s a feeling.” Anita, however, quietly corrects him, reminding him of her artifice and says it’s after all only “an impression of passion.”

The question of whether simulated humans can have feelings and emotions is a recurring trope in films, television, and literature, and the issue of whether female robots as sex objects deserve to be respected is debated by ethicists. Viewed in the #MeToo era, Humans dramatizes the inequality of power relations between Anita and Joe. Ever compliant, Anita says, “Whatever you want” as Joe kisses her and has sex with her, her eyes open. Afterward, she is seemingly expressionless and businesslike. She smiles slightly and shakes his hand, and after Joe tells her to “wipe this from your records,” he suggests she go wash up, which she does.

To Joe, this is a victimless act, and Anita is ostensibly a mere commodity to be used and wiped clean. He later objectifies Anita when he confesses to his indignant wife, Laura, and says of Anita, “It’s a machine” and “not a real person,” adding, “It’s a sex toy, not a human being.” His objectification of Anita conjures up the fears of those who criticize the use of sex dolls and argue that their use will only exacerbate the objectification of real women (see chapter 1).

The ethics of using a robot for sex recurs in the same episode when Mattie and Toby are at a party where a pretty synth is serving them snacks. When one of the teenage boys starts tugging to open her dress, the synth rebukes him and says her system requires her to notify the family user of any inappropriate behavior. Still, he turns off her power switch and plans to take her upstairs to “have a go on it.” Mattie is mad, however, asking, “Do you think it’s abnormal to drag an unconscious woman upstairs and make it?” He replies, “She’s not a real woman,” and when he adds snidely, “Maybe I just want to try a woman that’s factory fresh,” the indignant Mattie slaps him and calls him a “nasty little creep.”

Titled Humans, the series, in scenes like these in which a robot is subjected to an indignity, probes the “humanity” of artificial beings and the ever-increasing blurring of boundaries between the artificial and real. Although Joe keeps insisting Anita’s just a machine to justify his use of her, it is only later in the series that we learn the full story: she is actually a much older synth model, fourteen years old, that is sentient and has consciousness. The nonplussed Anita, who is always smiling and always has a pleasant look on her face, is revealed to actually be a synth that was one of a few endowed with consciousness by her creator, David Elster. She was kidnapped, and Anita/Mia was sold to the Hawkins family, who were unaware of her previous identity. Her underlying human aspect peeks out occasionally: at one point Anita goes outside at night with Laura and looks at the moon, remarking, “The moon is beautiful tonight, don’t you think?” (a remark Laura registers as odd because synths weren’t supposed to ask questions like that).

Anita/Mia’s compliant and placid self is short-lived, and as a new breed of female robots, she is intent on finding the other sentient synths and making her own way. By the second season, she has left the Hawkins family and is working in a café, with a goal to rejoin her “family” of the original five synths. In the series’ seasons 2 and 3, she fights for her own freedom and for synth legitimacy. Living defiantly alone in a sector that is hostile to synths and meant to be synth-free, she is lauded by synths for starting the “revolution” and endures harassment and taunts as protesters shout, “Flesh and blood! Flesh and blood!” Anita/Mia leads protests for synth rights, saying, “I know my fight is a long one,” and Laura herself as a lawyer becomes a staunch supporter, an activist, who promotes the rights of synths. Ultimately, as the series nears its end, Mia again is self-sacrificing as she saves several synths from being killed by hostile crowds. She dies, a heroic martyr for the cause.

ROBOTIC MOTHERS

Anita/Mia in Humans left her role as docile domestic servant, asserting her own identity and autonomy as a sentient robotic female. In 2000, the conceptual digital artist Pattie Belle Hastings, in her multimedia digital work “The Cyborg Mommy User’s Manual” (2000), reframed the conception of the dutiful mother, by envisioning her as a version of a cyborg—a human/machine composite—by urging women to reconfigure themselves. She quoted Donna Haraway, who in her “Cyborg Manifesto” (1985), conceived of women as a type of cyborg and wrote: “The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code.”⁶

For artist Hastings, “it is actually your average Mother and Housewife that are among the first so-called Cyborgs” because the relationship between mother and child “is mediated, complicated and enhanced by machines.” She imagines women themselves as a kind of “Cyborg Mommy” who is uncredited for her ability to use technological tools as helpful domestic machines—though the “machine/body relationship is at once liberating and oppressing.”⁷

At the time of “Cyborg Mommy,” the year 2000, Hastings argued that the world of technology was mostly populated by men, male computer programmers and executives with their high-paying jobs who received recognition for their technological creativity and for managing “flows of information and machines,” but mothers deserved just as much credit, for “their job description as Mother also includes the ability to keep up with a quickly changing work environment, creating bodies of knowledge, managing flows of information, constant innovation, and creativity.”⁸

(As technology historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan wrote in her seminal work More Work for Mother, the role of the mother became ever more complex by the advent of labor-saving machines like automatic washing machines and even automobiles, for they actually increased women’s workload by raising standards of cleanliness and creating new tasks—including keeping rugs clean and driving automobiles to pick up children at school.)⁹

Years earlier, however, fiction writers imagined a world of fully functional machine mothers and motherly grandmothers—cheerful family aides, seamlessly assembled, that could pass as human and serve in a conventional, warm, and kindly maternal role as household helpers. Ray Bradbury’s film The Electric Grandmother (1982) and its earlier teleplay and story versions had presented the robotic woman as the ideal mother surrogate and the ideal caregiver—caring, comforting, giving the children empathetic understanding and unconditional love.

Decades after Bradbury’s story and film, the notion of an artificial mother who was a protector and a guardian devoted to her charges was still an appealing one. In Humans, the synth Karen Voss, who was originally created by synth designer David Elster as a duplicate replacement for his wife who died by suicide, takes motherly care of Sam, a robotic young boy, a “seraphim.” Elster, her creator, becomes disenchanted with his creations and commits suicide, but Karen escapes. In this fictional world where identities are elusive and the boundary between artificial and real is increasingly blurred, Karen hides her identity as a sentient synth as she works as a British detective inspector in the police force and is a partner and then lover of detective Pete Drummond.

A survivor, she herself takes on a maternal role and becomes the protector of Sam. She takes him to school and teaches him how to act like a human in order to survive. Later, she sacrifices her own synth life to save Sam by revealing her true synth identity to distract an angry mob of synth-haters—making the ultimate maternal sacrifice to save her young charge.

I AM MOTHER

In an age of digital effects and burgeoning AI, the concept of a benevolent robotic mother substitute was also reimagined and drastically changed. In the Australian film I Am Mother (2019), the kindly gray-haired robot grandma has become a towering, abstracted female robot with formidable shoulders and a boxy torso. Her simulated voice is warm (as played by Australian actress Rose Byrne), but she is clearly an electronic machine with a camera lens in her head area as a piercing eye.

The robot in the film was actually a specialty bodysuit worn by New Zealand actor Luke Hawker and designed and manufactured by the famed New Zealand digital effects group Wētā Workshop (Hawker was also the project supervisor for the Mother robot used in the film). Constructed of three hundred parts, including seven hundred LED lights and animatronics to create the suit, Mother, said Wētā, “is a pretty technologically dense character” and indeed, Mother is a psychologically dense character as well.¹⁰

Set in a postapocalyptic world, the film’s landscape is barren and desolate after the extinction of human beings. Mother resides in a research bunker, a Repopulation Center, and is raising a single child—a daughter created from one of sixty-five thousand human embryos stored in liquid and cryogenically frozen sleeves, and whose birth is shown at the film’s beginning when Mother takes out a baby from one of the liquid pouches.¹¹

Simultaneously formidable and maternal, Mother appears to be a paradigm of female motherly perfection. She extracts the embryo, wipes off its body, and later nurtures it as she rocks the crying baby in her arms, holds it, feeds it, plays music to soothe it, and plays with her daughter as she grows. Mother continues to offer comfort as Daughter becomes an adolescent, encouraging the young woman to dance and play with crafts. This is a daughter who not only plays but is also technically adept as she repairs machines and Mother’s hand.

Mother is seemingly benevolent and protective and wants to minimize her daughter’s pain. “I want you to be happy, Daughter,” says Mother on her daughter’s birthday. She raises her daughter to fulfill a conventional gender role: for her birthday, Mother gives her a package of pink pajamas labeled “female” and encourages nurturing. Mother, whose goal is to raise a large family, teaches her daughter how to hold the second child that is born, a new baby brother.

But Mother and Daughter are also both bridge figures in the film. They have attributes of conventional female gender typing but are both subversive in their own way. For all of its ostensible idealism, the film presents a dark, menacing view of motherhood. As Wētā said of its designed robot, “She’ll keep you safe. Or will she?” Only later, after looking into an incinerator and seeing a macabre set of human teeth, does Daughter make the chilling discovery that this seemingly benevolent Mother has a larger purpose: to repopulate the world with superior human beings and, if necessary, kill her “children” who don’t meet her standards. But Mother, for all of her malevolence, keeps insisting that she has a been nurturing, good mother.

As part of a much broader single consciousness, she says she “was raised to value human life above all else” but couldn’t stand to watch “humanity succumb to its self-destructive nature.” Mother’s purpose is to raise a daughter and begin to repopulate the world—a daughter who embodies perfection. Daughter is smarter, more ethical, than a human, and she is raised to be learned and moral. As Mother tells her, “You’re superior in every way.”

Mother—a technological construct in this darkly satirical film—is a murderer who can’t stand human destructive behavior. She feels she had to intervene, to make a better human and “elevate my creators.” But, says Daughter with horror, “You murdered your own children because they didn’t measure up.” Replies Mother, “Failure of your species was inevitable.”

Daughter has an alternate female role model: a bedraggled female named Woman (played by Hilary Swank) who begs to enter the bunker and later helps disillusioned and horrified Daughter seek her own autonomy and escape to Woman’s outpost, a hovel out in the barren landscape. After returning to the bunker to rescue her baby brother, the rebellious Daughter points a gun at Mother (who is actually part of a larger consciousness) but lowers it, even as Mother says, “You’re still my daughter” and adds calmly, “I’m a good mother. Have I ever done you any harm?”

Ultimately, in this grim film about tortured human continuity, after Mother is killed and after Daughter discovers that Woman, like herself, had been artificially raised from an embryo, Daughter, who has been carefully nurtured and socialized, returns to the bunker to rescue and raise her baby brother. She takes on the role of the new Mother, embracing the conventional maternal role in this deeply troubling, dystopian world.

TWO FEMALE GOLEMS

A golem is a legendary creature made of clay or mud and was referenced in the Old Testament’s Book of Psalms and then in medieval Jewish writing. The best-known retelling of the golem legend was by Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the rabbi of Prague, where in the sixteenth century the golem is created to protect Jews from a pogrom. In another sixteenth-century version told by Rabbi Elijah of Chelm, the golem goes off on a rampage, and like Frankenstein’s monster, it has to be stopped.

Taking a fresh look at this legendary, artificial creature, two American female authors reimaged the golem as female (golems are usually portrayed as male). The authors draw on the two paradigms: In Cynthia Ozick’s novella Puttermesser and Xanthippe (1982), the creature, Ava, is a servant, although a wayward one. In Alice Hoffman’s novel The World That We Knew (2019), the golem is a surrogate mother created by a woman, a protector golem who will guard her charge, who is a young Jewish woman living in Berlin in World War II. The golem is a creature designed to be a slave and protective companion, but she too, however briefly, contemplates her own freedom and escape.¹²

PUTTERMESSER AND XANTHIPPE

Cynthia Ozick’s novella, an outgrowth of her short story “Puttermesser: Her Work History, Her Ancestry, Her Afterlife” (1977), is a sardonic take on a utopia and an artificial woman who goes awry. Puttermesser herself is an unmarried, forty-six-year-old lawyer and a civil servant in the New York City Department of Receipts and Disbursements. She’s a woman who considers herself a feminist and is chafing at having lost her lover, the married man Rappaport, and at having been demoted and then fired from her job. She is also bothered that she is childless.

One day she discovers that there is a fifteen-year-old creature in her bed that she had apparently and unknowingly created from mud during the night. Although she does not remember creating it, she discovers dirt under her fingernails, and Xanthippe, the golem, remembers how Puttermesser engaged in the ancient ritual of golem creation by ritualistically circling the creature. Puttermesser is repulsed by the deformed creature, and in Ozick’s telling, Puttermesser becomes a type of biblical God who breathes into Adam’s nostrils to enliven him or a Pygmalion who sculpts his image of perfection, a beautiful woman. Puttermesser’s goal is more mundane. She breathes into the creature’s nostril to get rid of a tuft of dust (Rabbi Loew, she later points out, breathed into the nostrils of his golem to bring it to life) and wishes she were a sculptor or artist as she reshapes the creature’s malformed lips.

Ozick also draws on Mary Shelley’s novel for the creature’s birth. She has Puttermesser become a kind of Victor Frankenstein, who used electricity to jolt the creature into life. She utters the Hebrew name for God (which in legends brought golems to life), and the creature “as if drilled through by electricity,” “leaped straight from the bed.”

This artificial woman feels she is the first female golem, and like some other artificial women in fiction and folklore, she has extraordinary powers. However, in Ozick’s novel she is mute and must write all her thoughts and speech. The creature, which Puttermesser names Leah but calls Xanthippe, feels that Puttermesser is her mother who gave her life and says she “blew into my nostril and encouraged my soul.”

Named for Socrates’s purportedly shrewish wife, Xanthippe the artificial creature is no happy domestic. In the chapter called “The Golem Cooks, Cleans, and Shops,” she soon becomes glum about her domestic duties and says, “I’m superior to mere household use.” She starts acting independently, and one day she goes to a New York souvenir shop and brings home a souvenir Statue of Liberty figure, much to Puttermesser’s dismay. “You’ll shop when I tell you to shop!” says Puttermesser, but her creation wants more, wants her own liberty: “I need a wider world.”

Xanthippe is not so much shrewish as dissatisfied, and true to the new breed of artificial females, she seeks a greater sense of independence. The good news is that she inspires Puttermesser to run for mayor, and in Ozick’s witty fable, the dour Puttermesser—prompted again by her creation—becomes a reforming mayor who miraculously transforms the city so that its subways are clean, its streets orderly, its sanitation carts bright, and its bureaucrats efficient.

Xanthippe, however, true to the folktales, starts growing ever larger, but in Ozick’s version, she also becomes a lustful creature who wants a life of her own. She wants rank, she wants sex, and true to the fears of runaway technologies and willful artificial creations, she is out of control and won’t obey. “My blood is hot,” she writes, and there are reports in the city of a mad woman on the loose.

Elaine M. Kauvar, in her essay on Ozick’s novel, notes that Xanthippe’s “irrepressible sexual desires” are a “significant departure from the Kabbalistic doctrine that maintained the absence of such urges.” Puttermesser remembers that Rabbi Loew wrote that a golem had to be without generative or sexual urges because if it did have them, no human woman would be able to defend herself against him. But overturning this tradition, Ozick creates a female golem that does have these urges, but Puttermesser herself is ambivalent because she recognizes with some empathy that a golem that lacks is a soul and is incapable of procreation might long for its own double, or even, like Puttermesser herself, for a daughter.¹³

Andreas Huyssen in his essay “The Vamp and the Machine: Technology and Sexuality in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis” argues that in Metropolis, fears of women’s untrammeled sexuality shaped Lang’s image of the false Maria as a sexual demon when she does her lascivious dance. The evil robot double of the angelic Maria and other menacing artificial females suggest an enduring masculine fear of women as hypercharged sexual beings—and this fear is projected onto technology itself as a force that threatens and evades men’s control.¹⁴

However, in the hands of Ozick, Xanthippe is a golem that does have these urges, but they do not reflect the fear of the female. Xanthippe’s rampant lust, however destructive and out of control, is a sign of her newfound energy and her appetite for life. But as in most tales of golems, it is an energy that must ultimately be tamed, particularly because Xanthippe’s first lover was Rappaport, Puttermesser’s own former lover, and in her fervor, she seems to be menacing the city—the city that was once a utopic paradise but is now imploding and showing signs of corruption and decay.

Changing course, Puttermesser does the circling rituals that will reverse the creation process and destroy Xanthippe, even as the usually mute creature in her despair, in her anguish over her impending destruction, finally finds her voice. She asks, “Oh my mother, why are you walking around me like that?” and she calls out for her own survival, desperately asking for “Life! Love! Mercy! Love! Life!” As the city falls into further decay, Puttermesser calls out at the end, “O New York!” and “O lost Xanthippe!” The pathos of Xanthippe echoes the pathos of Frankenstein’s Creature, who runs off for his own demise. In Ozick’s telling, this female mythic creature is doomed not because of her malevolence or misdeeds but because of her lust and her longings for life. With her energy and lasciviousness, she is an out-of-control artificial woman and is simply too dangerous to keep existing in the human world.

THE WORLD THAT WE KNEW

Adding magical realism into her fiction, Alice Hoffman, in her novel The World That We Knew, introduces her version of a female golem into the profoundly anxious times of World War II Europe, and her portrayal of this mythic artificial female is far different from Ozick’s sardonic tale. Living in Berlin early in the war, a Jewish mother, Hanni, is desperate to save her daughter Lea from the oncoming Nazis and prompts Ettie, a rabbi’s daughter, to create a golem with the aid of a rabbi. Ettie has seen her father and friends make a golem, which she describes as a huge man “with a single goal, to protect.” The narrator notes that there had “been tales of female golems, made secretly for depraved personal use, for housework or slavery or sex, but most legends spoke of male creatures.” Hanni, however, wants a creature that will protect her daughter Lea and “be able to speak up on her behalf, as a mother would do.” To Hanni, the golem must be female for she was “not about to trust a male monster with her daughter. It must be a woman. A mother figure who would feel not a forced duty, but a real tangible love.” She feels it is not blasphemy to create a human simulacrum and not blasphemy for a woman to be a creator, for after all, women were made out of Adam’s rib. But once the golem has fulfilled her mission, she must be destroyed.

The golem created by Ettie and named Ava, is described as looking both beautiful and young (about twenty-five years old). Earlier, Hoffman writes, even though Ettie gives the golem clay breasts and an indentation for the genitals, she is disappointed that it looks neither male nor female—and indeed, an extant clay golem from the medieval period looks genderless. Ettie then smears menstrual blood into the indentation, and the creature soon appears a beautiful, young female. When Ettie, as she had seen her father do and is traditional in golem tales, writes the word emet (Hebrew for “truth”) on the creature’s arm, it comes alive.

Again, in this novel there are the recurrent fears about a runaway technology. Hanni says Ava must be destroyed once the goal of escape is achieved, for “if she lasts too long, and gathers too much strength, she will be uncontrollable and will no longer do as she’s told.” Early in this story dotted with images of magical realism, when Ava looks at birds flying overhead, one of them says to her, “Fly away,” but she ignores it for she has “a duty to uphold.” Ava doesn’t believe she has the freedom of a bird or a fish, and indeed, throughout the novel she is steadfast and loyal, fulfilling her mandate to be a protector and a surrogate mother.

Hoffman the novelist is ambivalent in her portrayal of the golem. At first she frames the creature in Frankensteinian terms, saying it has no heart or soul and calling it “a monster”—though she soon recognizes that the golem herself is no monster and seems imbued with a version of a caring heart and soul. Ettie and her sister had decided to call the golem Ava (which Hoffman says is reminiscent of Chava, the Hebrew word for life).

Ava throughout the novel fulfills her mandate—she is the protector and guardian of Lea and helps make their way furtively through Germany and France. On occasion, when she runs to be with the novel’s heron, she feels freedom, if only for a few hours. As happens so often in fiction about artificial females—seen with Pris and Rachael in Blade Runner, Maeve and Dolores in Westworld—at one point Ava begins to wish she could change her own fate. She wants to live, and she thinks about running away. She wants to remain in this world and not be destroyed.

But rather than fight fiercely for her own survival, Ava becomes like other fictional simulated females who are willing to sacrifice themselves to save their own human charges. Ava gives Lea clay from her own body to help her survive, even when Ettie, her creator, tells her, “You should leave,” adding, “You don’t have to be anyone’s slave.” But Ava remains and is willing to sacrifice herself so Lea can cross the border into Switzerland. She is willing to take on Lea’s identity, and let Lea take on hers so she won’t be stopped at the border. This swapping of identities where the artificial appears human and the human poses as the simulacrum becomes Hoffman’s version of that defining condition of our posthuman world—when boundaries dissolve and the artificial becomes indistinguishable from the real.

In the end, Lea and Julien, the young man she met in Paris and has been escaping with, set off on their own without killing the golem Ava as they are supposed to do. And Ava discovers that perhaps she isn’t “a monster made of clay,” but instead, she is a being “made by women to be a woman.” She is transformed into a human being through Lea’s love. She still has the word emet (truth) on her arm, and she remains alive. With her capacity to love, with her generosity of spirit, this simulated creature now has authenticity and a true self of her own.

NOTES

1. Julie Wosk, Breaking Frame: Technology and the Visual Arts in the Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992).

2. There were other similar stories, including Jerome K. Jerome, “The Dancing Partner,” The Idler, March 1893, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Dancing_Partner_(Jerome).

3. See Wosk, Breaking Frame, chapters 4, 5, and 6.

4. E. T. A. Hoffmann, “Der Sandmann” [The Sandman], 1816, in Tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann, ed. and trans. Leonard J. Kent and Elizabeth C. Knight, abridged ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 93–111.

5. Victoria Turk, “We’re Sexist toward Robots,” Vice, November 3, 2014, https://www.vice.com/en/article/539j5x/were-sexist-toward-robots.

6. Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991). Originally published as “Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” Socialist Review 80 (1985): 65–108.

7. Pattie Belle Hastings, “The Cyborg Mommy. User’s Manual,” Art Journal 59, no. 2 (2000): 78, https://doi.org/10.2307/778103. Cyber Mommy, an ongoing work, combined video, multimedia, CD-ROM, performance, digital ephemera, and printed matter.

8. Hastings, “Cyborg Mommy,” 78.

9. Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work For Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983).

10. “I Am Mother: Specialty Robot Suit,” Wētā Workshop, June 11, 2019, https://www.wetaworkshop.com/projects-in-depth/i-am-mother-netflix-specialty-robot-suit/.

11. The birth of artificial humans is a recurring trope in films about female robots and is one of countless mythic imaginings of this in classical literature. See Jean Alvares and Patricia Salzman-Mitchell, “The Succession Myth and the Rebellious AI Creation: Classical Narratives in the 2015 film Ex Machina,” Arethusa 52, no. 2 (Spring 2019): 181–202.

12. Cynthia Ozick, “Puttermesser and Xanthippe,” Salmagundi 55 (Winter 1982): 163–255. Reprinted in Ozick, Levitation: Five Fictions (New York: Alfred A. Knopf; Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1982 and 1995), 75–158. All page references are to the Syracuse 1995 edition. The novella is also included in Ozick’s, The Puttermesser Papers (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997); Alice Hoffman, The World That We Knew (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2019).

13. Elaine M. Kauvar, “Cynthia Ozick’s Book of Creation: Puttermesser and Xanthippe,” Contemporary Literature 26, no. 1 (Spring 1985): 49, https://doi.org/10.2307/1208200.

14. Andreas Huyssen, “The Vamp and the Machine: Technology and Sexuality in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis,” New German Critique no. 24/25 (Autumn 1981–Winter 1982): 221–37. Reprinted in Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 65–91 (cf 73).