ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes a female motherless creation, the musical automaton Olympia in Hoffmann’s novella The Sandman. E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose work inspires the ballets Coppélia and The Nutcracker, portrays the project of creating life without mothers as a conspiracy that turns people into puppets. Hoffmann’s novella rebukes Cartesian models of physiology, the idea of the body as a clock, professors, and hucksters like the infamous Cagliostro. The Chess Player, which Edgar Allan Poe wrote about in “Maelzel’s Chess Player,” was the most well-known exhibition of a supposed android, and Hoffmann previously wrote about this phenomenon in his story Automata. In The Sandman, the motherless creation provides hucksters with yet another way to swindle people. The Sandman warns against manufacturing improved humans, for such a project destroys families, gives power to unscrupulous inventors, and creates artificial women. For Hoffmann, attempts to create life without mothers produce deadly results if the body’s visceral response to doubles—Freud’s concept of the uncanny—goes unheeded. The danger of constructing androids lies in their ability to pose as pseudo-humans. Comparisons are made to two other motherless creations discussed in this book: Pygmalion’s statue and Homunculus in Goethe’s Faust. The chapter reflects on the modern legacy of Hoffmann’s fiction, which resonates with Mori’s Uncanny Valley, individuals who form relationships with dolls, and deceptions that lead people to fall for what we now recognize as romance scams.
