Book contents
- Victorian Automata
- Victorian Automata
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Introduction
- An Afterthought on Victorian Automata as Afterthought (and Signifier)
- Part I Mechanical Automata
- Part II Automatism
- Part III Literary Genre and Popular Fiction
- Part IV Interactions
- Chapter 12 Sublime Puppets versus Uncanny Automata
- Chapter 13 The Strange Career of Topsy
- Chapter 14 George Eliot among the Machines
- Chapter 15 A Disembodied Voice, Yet the Voice of a Human Soul
- Index
Chapter 13 - The Strange Career of Topsy
The Problem of Automata in the Age of Slave Emancipation
from Part IV - Interactions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2024
- Victorian Automata
- Victorian Automata
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Introduction
- An Afterthought on Victorian Automata as Afterthought (and Signifier)
- Part I Mechanical Automata
- Part II Automatism
- Part III Literary Genre and Popular Fiction
- Part IV Interactions
- Chapter 12 Sublime Puppets versus Uncanny Automata
- Chapter 13 The Strange Career of Topsy
- Chapter 14 George Eliot among the Machines
- Chapter 15 A Disembodied Voice, Yet the Voice of a Human Soul
- Index
Summary
This chapter explains how and why Topsy – a “little negro girl” featured in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) – became a symbol of artificial life during the long wake of slave emancipation in the United States. It begins by recontextualizing Stowe’s abolitionist melodrama in relation to arguments about human–machine difference in the industrial North. Because the automated Black slave girl was a perfect foil to the autonomous white man, Topsy could critique slavery while affirming the race and gender hierarchies of white bourgeois society. Turning to the material history of plush “Topsy” dolls – the handicraft of enslaved women turned into factory-made commodities – the chapter argues that Topsy as doll gained its cultural power as a reaction to fears of Black autonomy in the South and white automatization in the North. It concludes by considering Topsy’s unruly afterlife in the “technopoetics” of Black modernism in the Jazz Age.
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- Victorian AutomataMechanism and Agency in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 272 - 288Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024