The Future Eve by Villiers de l’Isle-Adam: from the puppet to the phantom

Abstract

The Future Eve is a meditation on the aesthetic operation: the intrusion into the insufficient reality of the imaginary dimension the artist pulls out of its secluded domain in order to introduce it into the field of perceptible existence, to transfigure the reality and conform it to the requirement of human desire. By transporting the living woman, Alicia Clary, into her mechanical and fantastic double, the android Hadaly, impeccably endowed with the original’s physical features, Edison, thanks to the assistance of Lord Ewald and Sowana, pure spirit of a deceased woman to whom the final say belongs, transforms the puppet into a phantom. As model of the artist, Edison makes the unreal (the phantom) real by undoing the reality (the puppet) and rendering it surreal. Edison cancels the poor theatre of ordinary life to substitute for it the sublime performance of lofty words and gestures, bestowing to it the exhilarating interiority it lacks. He makes happen a superior modality of Illusion in a world of unsubstantial appearances and illusions. Bringing into being unrealized human aspirations, Edison completes and achieves the commonplace reality, so that, with no more need to escape from it, it becomes the object of an unconditional assent.