ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the novel Tomorrow’s Eve (L’Éve future) by Auguste de Villiers de L’Isle-Adam. The novel revolves around Thomas Edison’s creation of an android named Hadaly. She becomes the exact double of another female character, the vapid lover of an English baron, and functions as a concubine or sex bot. Tomorrow’s Eve raises questions about the birthing body. In what ways might men generate more pleasing life than women, and for what reasons? The fiction of being able to engineer an ideal woman interrogates women’s purpose, if their role as mothers is no longer needed. The transhuman figure of the android in this novel offers a fantasy in which men assert dominance over reproductive choice in the name of increasing pleasure, preventing degeneracy, and promoting beauty. In this way, Villiers hearkens back to Pygmalion, eighteenth-century narratives about the production of beautiful children, and Romantic skepticism about motherless creations. Ultimately Villiers suggests that the pleasure of the female android, like the pleasure human women offer men, is mutually destructive, even though it offers a technological solution to the ostensible social ills of degeneracy, population control, and racial impurity. The chapter supports this argument by examining the novel’s intersections with hysteria, the discourse of degeneration, the historical Thomas Alva Edison’s statements supporting eugenics, and family politics in France’s Third Republic.
