Poster Image for The Hour of Feeling. Credit: Actors Theatre of Louisville

This March, I spent the last few days of my spring break in Louisville, Kentucky.  As I may have mentioned in class, I am on the board of LMDA and for the past several years we have held our spring board meeting in Louisville during Humanafest at the Actors Theatre of Louisville.  It is a wonderfully dizzying two and a half days of play-going, panel discussions, and conversations about theatre in lobbies and in restaurants.  This year the festival featured works that varied in theme and genre quite a bit.  My personal favorite struck an emotional chord with me that now rarely happens with a show I have not worked on, or am not personally and professionally invested in.  Mona Mansour’s The Hour of Feeling is a haunting look at the meaning of home, set in 1967 in Palestine and London.  I do not mean this essay to be a review of the play.  You can find out more about the piece by watching this clip and reading this review (which opens with the line: “If you want to understand the Sixties, go back to the early 1800s, when Romantic poets like William Wordsworth rejected classical rationalism to celebrate the beauty of deep emotion and the sanctity of individual experience.”), and doing the usual googling routine.  I am writing about the play on this blog because of the connection it has to our class materials, particularly our discussions on prosthetics of imagination and memory and gender.

The protagonist of the play is Adham, a young scholar from Palestine who has been invited to London to give a scholarly lecture on Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks o the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798.”  He brings his new wife with him and, while they are in London, war breaks out in the Middle East (one they could not have known would be so short and yet so long).  On the evening after his triumphant lecture, while at a party, they receive news of the war.  Adham’s wife, Abir, is frantic to return home immediately.  Adham is less certain that he wants to return to Palestine (known then as Jordon, “sort of”) and to his mother, who appears to him during his more introspective and anxious moments in the play.

The title of the show is from another poem from Lyrical Ballads, “Lines written at a small distance from my House, and sent by my little Boy to the Person to whom they are addressed,”[1] and selected lines from it are projected on a scrim or quoted during the course of the play (the sections in bold are the ones projected or quoted during this production):

It is the first mild day of March:
Each minute sweeter than before,
The red-breast sings from the tall larch
That stands beside our door.

There is a blessing in the air,
Which seems a sense of joy to yield
To the bare trees, and mountains bare,
And grass in the green field.

My Sister! (’tis a wish of mine)
Now that our morning meal is done,
Make haste, your morning task resign;
Come forth and feel the sun.

Edward will come with you, and pray,
Put on with speed your woodland dress,
And bring no book, for this one day
We’ll give to idleness.

No joyless forms shall regulate
Our living Calendar:
We from to-day, my friend, will date
The opening of the year.

Love, now an universal birth,
From heart to heart is stealing,
From earth to man, from man to earth,
–It is the hour of feeling.

One moment now may give us more
Than fifty years of reason;
Our minds shall drink at every pore
The spirit of the season.

Some silent laws our hearts may make,
Which they shall long obey;
We for the year to come may take
Our temper from to-day.

And from the blessed power that rolls
About, below, above;
We’ll frame the measure of our souls,
They shall be tuned to love.

Then come, my sister! come, I pray,
With speed put on your woodland dress,
And bring no book; for this one day
We’ll give to idleness.

Adham’s lecture, however, is not on this poem, but on one of Wordsworth’s more famous poems, which I’ll abbreviate here as “Tintern Abbey.”  Throughout the play, Adham has several interesting discussions about the poem with other characters, especially the two scholars from University College who befriend him and play host to him.  However, rather than focusing on those (albeit significant) discussions, I would like to examine a topic present in the play that we have also discussed in class in relation to other romantic works.

In class we have discussed other works where concepts about imagination and gender are intertwined.  We have examined how Wordsworth took inspiration from his sister’s journals, turning her entries into, for example, his poem “A Night-Piece.”  In comparing the two, we note the actor in the pieces turns from female to male, and from passive to active.  Wordsworth uses Dorothy’s description of the night sky as an event of transcendence and sublimity.  Dorothy is a prosthetic to Wordsworth’s imagination, in so far as he re-appropriates her more embodied writing to reach a creativity believed to be beyond a woman’s grasp.

Similarly, in Neuromancer we see Molly as a body to Case’s mind.  She is the fighter, the one who actually physically ventures into danger.  She is the one who has altered her body with prosthetics such as altered vision and weapons under her fingernails.  She even wear a stim-sim, a way for Case to “plug in” to Molly’s body and experience the physical sensations that she feels.  In the world of Neuromancer, the female is grounded, earth-bound, connected to the body and to the physical, and the male is the mind and imagination, the quest, the transcendent.

Victor Hugo too, writing a few decades after Wordsworth, in his 1827 Preface to Cromwell,[2] points to a gendering of the physical versus the spiritual, as he asserts his account of the origin of drama:

“On the day when Christianity said to man: Thou art twofold, thou art made up of two beings, one perishable, the other immortal, one carnal, the other ethereal, one enslaved by appetites, cravings and passions, the other borne aloft on wigs of enthusiasm and revery, the former always stooping to earth, its mother, the latter always darting up toward heaven, its fatherland – on that day, the drame was created.  It is, in fact, anything other than this constant – on every day, for every man – contrast and struggle between two opposing principles which are ever present in life and which dispute possession of man from the cradle to the grave.” (306)

For Hugo, the perishable, the carnal, belongs to the mother, while the ethereal, the immortal, belongs to the father.  This duality is essential, in Hugo’s opinion, for the birth of drama.  Interestingly, and perhaps unintentionally, we see this duality, and this act of women as prosthetic, the connection of woman to body and to earth and, by extension, to place and to home, in The Hour of Feeling.

As I mentioned previously, Adham brings his new wife, Abir, with him to London (and, significantly, leaves behind his mother, who raised him alone as a refugee and was aggressive with his education, pushing him to become a scholar).  Abir is a farmer’s daughter and very smart.  She speaks French, though no English, and has a love of western pop culture.  It is in Abir that Adham sees all of his conflicts with his culture play out.  He is clearly attracted to her love of western music and film, but also expects her to be a dutiful wife, and is conservative when it comes to her desire to smoke and to drink alcohol (and to engage more fully with his colleagues in London, which is really what the other acts are symbolic of).  When Adham needs to think through his anxieties about his intellectual pursuits, her conjures the woman he ran away from, his mother, rather than confiding in his wife.  He draws his mother as a memory, near him in his imagination, but repels her bodily, abandoning her in Palestine and grouping her with all of the other things about his culture he finds distasteful, and would like to leave behind (he does exactly what Abir tells him he can not – pick and choose what part of his culture to take with him).  Beder’s lack of bodily presence allows him to “talk” to her (and she does actually appear on stage during these moments) in his imagination.  But he does not have these talks with his wife, who is actually physically present for him.  She must remain embodied, connected to the earth, and separate from his scholarly transcendence, even as his mother facilitates said transcendence.

A break occurs when news of the war comes to the couple.  Adham sees it almost as an opportunity to possibly abandon his home, not to return to his country but rather to become a refugee once more.  But Abir, for all of her love of western culture, does not consider London her home, and must physically return to Palestine to be with her family.  During their final argument, Adham says that he does not need his mother any more because she left her imprint on him forever and that she is inside of him, to be accessed when he needs her (perhaps as data in a database is accessed to form a narrative).  Abir does not (or can not?) have that – London feels like “Nowhere” to her and she must be physically present in Palestine.  After she has left to get on a plane to return home, Adham takes a book and read aloud a composite of lines from Wordworth’s “The Ruined Cottage” (another poem discussed in the play) while his mother, Beder, and his wife, Abir, both now appear to him in his mind, carrying their possessions in their hands, refugees now and perhaps always.  He recites:

“The house-clock struck eight:

I turned and saw her distant a few steps.

Her face was pale and thin, her figure too

Was changed. …

She told me she had lost her elder child.

Today

I have been traveling far, and many days

About the fields I wander, knowing this

Only, that what I seek I cannot find.

And so I waste my time: for I am changed. For I am changed.”

Clearly it is Adham who believes he is changed.  But I would ask if he truly has been changed, or if he is the one changing others.  Now that Abir is not physically present, he manifests her in the same space as his mother, perhaps to formulate her as the way he would have her.  To speak to her as he needs to in order to carry on his work, to decipher his dilemmas about home and tradition, and to craft his (new?) identity as he remains in this new world to make a home away from the land and culture in which he grew up and which is now experiencing an upheaval that perhaps his imagination can not fathom.  Perhaps he can only imagine it through the women he loves, while they physically experience and embody the upheaval.

“From earth to man, from man to earth,
–It is the hour of feeling.”

Adham is in his hour of feeling.  But he, a man, needs the earth, meaning the woman, in order to feel, to transcend, to experience the sublime.  They, the women in his life, can not do so, but he can not do so without them.

Hadi Tabbal and Rasha Zamamiri in The Hour of Feeling, 36th Humana Festival of New American Plays, Actors Theatre of Louisville, 2012. Photo, Alan Simons.

When I have attempted to describe our encoding project to others outside of our class, many people are confused as to why it would be necessary to take an image of a work and do more than simply post it to a web site.  In order to explain our encoding work to these people, I have often described it as taking text and turning it into data via the encoding.  I have referenced the examples we examined in Mining the Dispatch and I have pointed out how these types of projects make it possible for the humanities to consider questions it might not have been able to consider prior to this technology.  But, first, I would like to touch a bit more on our project, and its significance as performance.

As Peter Stallybrass points out in his response to Ed Folsom, the Walt Whitman archive was a chance to “liberate Whitman from the economic and social constraints that govern archival research,” (1580) and the existence of digital archives may actually be encouraging visits to and use of the physical archives.  However, Stallybrass then continues, “databases are neither universal nor neutral, and they participate in the production of a monolingual, if not monocultural, global network.” (1583)  Jerome McGann, also in a response to Ed Folsom, is critical of Folsom’s description of the archive as a database, pointing out that, not only is database creation influenced by those who create the database, but that human perception and perspectives also influence how we interact with the database.  McGann says: “these tools are prosthetic devices, and they function most effectively when they help to release the resources of the human mind – in short, when their interfaces are well-designed.” (1591)

Folsom is correct that an archive is a database, as he says in his rebuttal, but I believe Stallybrass and McGann are also correct to point out the human component in database (and, hence, archive) construction and use, and our desire to craft narrative from a database.  After all, what is it that historians do if not take information from a database (whether it is a manuscript in a library, the letters of someone from the past, or the memories of a person being interviewed today, or other such information) and create a plausible, interesting story for a reader?  At both this stage and at the other end of the process, when I database (either physical or digital) is being created, I would argue something else is happening.  The very existence of this human component and the action required by a person in relation to an archive indicates that archives/databases are performed.

Image Credit: The Second Life Shakespeare Company (www.slshakespeare.com)

Our group took on the task of encoding Mary Shelley’s manuscript of Frankenstein for the Shelley Godwin Archive.  In a sense, we performed Frankenstein, page by page.  We had to make decisions as to what we were seeing on the page and what on the page was important, if we agreed with the transcript of the pages we had been given (if we thought they matched the image of the scanned page), how many of the non-language marks on the page were to be represented in the encoding and how to represent the page spatially using the XML language.  We had to do something, we had to act in order for the text, in order for the page, to become data.  I had to ask, for example, if the mark at the bottom of a page, a sort of curve under the last paragraph, was a doodle or just an errant mark.  Was this a mark of intention or accident?  And did it belong with the text, or represented as apart of the paragraph?  My typing laid claim to the author’s intention, and provided interpretation for how a reader would eventually view this as data.   For that mark to exist as data, first I had to perform it.

Diana Taylor writes in The Archive and the Repertoire,[1] “My particular investment in performance studies derives less from what it is than what it allows us to do.  By taking performance seriously as a system of learning, storing, and transmitting knowledge, performance studies allows us to expand what we understand by ‘knowledge.’  This move, for starters, might prepare us to challenge the preponderance of writing in the Western epistemologies. . .writing has paradoxically come to stand in for and against embodiment.  When the friars arrived in the New World in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as I explore, they claimed that the indigenous peoples’ past – and the “lives they lived” – had disappeared because they had no writing.  Now, on the brink of a digital revolution that both utilizes and threatens to displace writing, the body again seems poised to disappear in a virtual space that eludes embodiment.  Embodied expression has participated and will probably continue to participate in the transmission of social knowledge, memory, and identity pre- and postwriting.  Without ignoring the pressures to rethink writing and embodiment from the vantage point of the epistemic changes brought on by digital technologies, I will focus my analysis here on some of the methodological implications of revalorizing expressive, embodied culture.” (16)

Just as Lev Manovitch put the database and narrative in competition with one another, Taylor here has put digital space and embodiment at odds with one another.  To be fair, her study is not at all concerned with digital technology, and this section of her introduction is one of the few places she addresses virtual space.  But the contrast she makes between the virtual and the embodied are clear, and I would question that dichotomy as a false one.  Can the digital be embodied?  The digital can be performed, and those performance require not just a human mind, but also a human body – eyes to see the computer screen (or ears of hear the audio interpretation) and fingers and hands to type on the keyboard, at a minimum.  An establishment of the notion that database and (digital) archives are performed leads us to conclude that they are also embodied.  Database and archives also allow us to do, and open up possibilities for what we might do.

There are many possibilities for the use of digital archives in relation to the study of theatre, theatre history, and performance.  I believe that the performative nature of digital archives makes the pairing between a database format and theatre quite natural.  There are in fact, several projects already in existence, including the Shakespeare Quartos Archive, Theatre Finder, and the Visual Accent and Dialect Archive at MITH, among others.  I would like to consider for a (brief) moment two other possible projects, and the implications for performed databases that each holds.

The first project is the American Theatre Archive Project.  As stated on its web site this archiving project “is a network of archivists, dramaturgs, and scholars dedicated to preserving the legacy of the American theatre. ATAP is guided by the work of four Committees, which help develop partnerships, facilitate communication, create guidelines, seek funding, and disseminate best practices. Location-based Teams help individual theatre companies evaluate their records, develop an archiving plan, and secure funding to support long-term archive health.  Once created and made accessible to theatre makers, scholars, patrons, and funders on premises online, and/or in a repository, a theatre’s archives support institutional integrity and development.”[2]

There is a brief mention of online archives in the above description.  The original goals of the project certainly include a consideration for digital technology, but the main objective was to simple identify where (and if) the archives of these individual theatre companies across the country exist, and in what form and shape.  This is a long-term, ongoing project, but I can not help to think on the day many years from now when a theatre historian might be able to find (and read, and, hence, perform) the archives from a theatre in Seattle from the relative comfort of her office in Atlanta.  I am actually on the Baltimore team for this project, and I hope the digital component of our conversation can always be a part of our thinking as we work through our local archives in relation to the national project, as it has implications for both theatre practitioners and theatre scholars.

The other project is in many ways just a dream in the mind of one particular writer.  Gwydion Suliebhan is a DC-based playwright and the DC representative for the Dramatists Guild.  He does a lot of thinking and writing about making plays and getting them produced, and the state of playwriting and theatre in the mid-Atlantic and across the country.  Back in February of this year he wrote an essay on his blog (with an abbreviated version over at HowlRound) about the need for technological intervention in the process of new play development and production here in America.  I will not dive in to his entire idea here, but he suggests, basically, a national database of plays, uploaded by individual playwrights or their agents, and accessible to any theatre looking to produce said plays.  This is all in hopes of ending what is quickly becoming an archaic, time-consuming, and one-way conversation of playwrights submitting copy after copy of their scripts to theatre companies, sometimes never to hear back from the theatre.  Gwydion basically asks what would happen if we took that process and, using all of the advantages of digital databases, turned it on its head.  This would be the performance of archives on a large scale.  While the original and primary goal of this “New Play Oracle” would be to change the way theatres and playwrights communicate with each other, there are profound implications for scholars as well, who would be able to (if the user interface was designed for it) search the database in order to find answers to questions about the state of contemporary American theatre that they might never have been able to ask before.

Most playwrights, I feel confident saying, work digitally from the beginning of their process now, which changes the difficulty of encoding and interpretation of a playscript.  However, the playscript for a play is not ever the only version of that play.  Each production essentially produces its own script.  What if there were a database that held, not just a new play as uploaded by a playwright, but also the promptbook of the stage manager from every production of that play?  Or the accompanying set, lighting, and costume designs?  Or the program and production notes?  What if they were all encoded so that they were searchable?  And there are countless other possibilities as well, including the notion of a play as video game (meaning, a play structured as a database where the audience must extract their own narrative).

It is easy to get carried away with grand ideas at this stage.  But the larger point rings true – archives and databases, because they are performed, are not situated in opposition to performance and embodiment (and even liveness, which I did not get to touch on here), but rather in agreement with them, and are therefore possible tools (prosthetics, even) for theatre practice and scholarship.  Our group encoding project of Mary Shelley’s manuscript made these ideas seem, not only obvious, but also practically inevitable.  Taylor, in the above quotation, states that “by taking performance seriously as a system of learning, storing, and transmitting knowledge, performance studies allows us to expand what we understand by ‘knowledge.’” (16) I believe that statement can be extended to database and archives, and to the relationship of the two to performance and the performative.

I have been the guest tweeter this week for the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas twitter account (@LMDAmericas).  One of the things I have tweeted about is our class, especially in the lead-up to the group teaching we did this week.  I got a response from Mary Wollstonecraft.  You can find her at @1759MaryWol1797.  Her response led me to her blog.  The blog (and twitter account) are actually run by a woman named Roberta Wedge.  Her reply to my tweet actually led me directly to this post on her blog, about Vindications readability.  Ms. Wedge ran a section of Vindication through a readability calculator.  Then she attempts to re-write the passage two times.  So we go from this:

“My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone. I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists—I wish to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonimous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are only the objects of pity and that kind of love, which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt.”

to this:

“Look, I’m sorry, but you’re a thinking person, right? I’m not going to flatter you by saying how amazing you are, like you’re a little girl or a doll. You can stand on your own two feet. I’m here to tell you what real happiness is about. Strengthen your mind! Strengthen your body! Soft chat, falling in love, doing what other people want, all these are weak. If people pity you, their love will turn to contempt.”

for readability suited to approximately a 5th grade reading level.

Check out her full post (and explore the blog) here.

It turns out Mary is a cyborg too.

I was familiar with the video my friend posted.  You can find it here:

Let’s Enhance

And here is the web site for Lytro.

Enhance!

**Also a warning that this is a long post, for which I apologize.  I attempted to cover a lot of ground in this essay; frankly, I think there is more I would like to cover.**

One concept we have not yet touched upon in our discussion is that of mimesis.  I’d like to use this essay to tease out some questions about mimesis, and explore it as a fundamental concept in Frankenstein, and use it to draw comparisons between Frankenstein, Karel Capek’s R.U.R., and the television show Dollhouse.  Common to each of these stories is the intermingling of birth narratives with mimesis.  How are these two related?  What might each of these, as drawn out in our various texts, tell us about notions of what it means to be human, and the borders between human and not-human?

Promotional Image for the TV show Dollhouse, copyright the Fox Broadcasting Company

Kara Reilly touches on many of these issues in her book Automata and Mimesis on the Stage of Theatre History, including a thorough examination of Hoffman’s “The Sandman” and the 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots).  Reilly notes in her introduction that “mimesis is among the oldest theoretical terms in theatre and performance theory and is often inadequately translated as ‘imitation’ or representation’; more often than not, mimesis is considered synonymous with realism.  However, mimesis has a genealogy that has shifted and changed over time.  Part of what is at stake in debates about mimesis is an ongoing tension between art and nature. . .Underneath this conversation about art and nature are anxious questions about the very make-up of reality.” (Reilly, 5)

Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf, in their book Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society, track this shift or change in the meaning mimesis over the course of western history.  They approach mimesis from a variety of angles. Mimesis is miming.  Mimesis is imitation.  Mimesis is emulation.  Mimesis is replication.  Mimesis is metaphor.  Mimesis is rehearsal.  Mimesis is becoming like someone.  Mimesis is aesthetics.  Mimesis is teaching.  Mimesis is about making images.  Mimesis is about making plot.  Works of art are even RECEIVED using mimesis.  Mimesis involves, most importantly for modern times, self-referentiality

So, if mimesis is imitation, mimicry, emulation, replication, then, the monster in Frankenstein learns via mimesis; he is mimetic.  But Frankenstein is also a birth story, with Victor attempting to usurp women’s role in creating human life – how much does mimesis have to do with birth?   Does what Victor attempts in creating the monster involve mimesis in relation to the birth narrative?  Is he doing mimetically what should never be done mimetically?  Also, of course, Shelley’s own writing involves mimesis.  And I wonder what could be said about the questions regarding how much of the novel she wrote, as Percy’s handwriting is all over the manuscript, which our class has come to see as we attempt to encode the manuscript into a digital archive using xml (this encoding is also mimesis).  How mimesis might help us understand Victor’s actions in the story, for I find him to be a supremely unsympathetic character (unlike the character of Mary Shelley – not the author but the character – in Patchwork Girl).

Of course, our Frankenstein is now just as likely to be mechanically-based, as sewn together from other body parts.  One of the first works to imagine that scenario is R.U.R., the Czech play that coined the term “robot” (from the Czech word robota, meaning “servitude” – Reilly also notes that “robotnik is Czech for both worker and serf or peasant.”)  (Reilly,148)  As Reilly summarizes: “while other early science fiction tales, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or the Rabbi Loew and the Prague Golem, involve creatures rising up against their creators and harming them, R.U.R. is the first tale that shows the total destruction of human beings by their own technology.” (Reilly,148-9)

Briefly, R.U.R. is set on an island at a factory where Robots are manufactured as a replacement for human workers – with a Robot workforce, humans now have more time for leisure activities.  The humans do not see the Robots as having souls, and when a Robot on occasion refuses to work or expresses emotion, it is seen as a product defect.  Human birth rates are already plummeting, but the Robots, even as they rise up and kill their human creators, also cannot reproduce (this might also remind some readers of Battlestar Galactica).  The two things that separate human beings and Robots at the beginning of R.U.R. are emotional response and the ability to procreate.  These two distinctions disappear over the course of the play.  More thorough plot summaries can be found online, but this is enough to see that mimesis is integral to the plot of R.U.R., as well as its performance.

WPA Marionette Theater Poster for R.U.R.

And notice too the anxiety over reproduction inherent in the story.  The play ends on a hopeful note that the last pair of Robots, who manage to fall in love, will be able, because of that love, to procreate.  (Alquist, the last human alive in the play and a builder of the robots, ends the plays by saying “Go, Adam, go Eve.  The world is yours.”) (Gassner, 433)  All of the Robots in R.U.R. look alike – an obvious bit of Freud’s uncanniness – so will this new race all look like exact copies of each other?  Has the phenomena of love between these two Robots somehow changed them into human beings?  What is the difference between human and Robot now?

Reilly includes an interesting letter in her chapter on R.U.R., written by an audience member of the New York production and included in the program.  The audience member tries to give a nickel to a waitress when a machine (from an automat restaurant) dispenses his muffin but returns the coin.  The waitress is so stuck on following protocol at the restaurant, that she will not accept the nickel.  The letter writer concludes:

“To myself I said ‘She is one of those Robots that are being manufactured down at the Garrick Theatre in R.U.R.  One of those creatures who can only do what they have been trained to do.’ We all come in contact with Robots every day.  The human being who has been turned into a machine.  They are one of the problems of our time.” (Reilly, 154-5)

Ultimately, this a shared anxiety in Frankenstein, in “The Sandman,” R.U.R., and in the TV show Dollhouse – what makes humans human, and what separates us from monster or from machine?  We have seen one exploration of this in Blade Runner, and there are many others (Battlestar Galactica and Caprica, Terminator, Doctor Who – to name a few that come to mind right away) and procreation is a constant theme in all of them.  Specifically, procreation wound up in mimesis.

Dollhouse premiered on the Fox network in January of 2009.  Starring Eliza Dushku, the show was created by Joss Whedon, a television and film producer, writer, and director, with a loyal fan base (possibly there are a few in our class).  The premise of the show is that there are 20 dollhouses around the world where human beings, known as “actives” or “dolls” are wiped of their identities in order to be imprinted with other temporary identities and sent on a variety of missions.  The dollhouses are owned by the Rossum Corporation (a direct reference to one of the shows inspirations – R.U.R.), a powerful global entity with deep ties to governments around the world.  The “dolls” have come to Rossum through a variety of means (some by choice, some coerced or forced).  The missions can also range from the innocent and altruistic, to the sexual and devious.

When the dolls are in the dollhouse, without an imprint, they walk around calmly saying things like “I try to be my best,” and “friends help each other out.”  Over the course of the TV show, we realize that the main character, played by Eliza Dushku, is not necessarily Caroline, Dushku’s political activist who stumbles upon the Dollhouse and is forced to then become one herself, but Echo, originally the imprint-less doll played by Dushku (each dolls name is based on military alphabet – Echo, Whiskey, November, Victor, etc.).  The dolls develop personalities and relationships in spite of the science, which becomes important as they realize Rossum has a large plan for this imprinting technology (that, of course, causes the end of the world).

Dollhouse can be looked at through the lens of the Frankenstein story, and there are many moments of parallel imagery.  In re-watching a few key episodes one of the most obvious is the chair in the Los Angeles house where the dolls receive their “treatment,” meaning where they are imprinted or de-imprinted with a personality.  This is similar to how the novel imagines and the films visualize Victor’s lab, and the use of some sort of machinery or electricity to bring life into the monster.  In this case, mimesis is instantaneous, as the human brain (and body) is equated to a computer that can be programmed. But the dolls themselves also become aware to some extent.  In the episode, Needs, Adelle, the head of the Los Angeles house, and her staff hatch a plan to allow some of the dolls who are “glitching” to wake up as their original personalities in order to satisfy whatever primal need is causing the “glitch” before shutting them down and restoring them to their imprint-less selves.

The dolls are clearly Frankenstein’s monsters, always cycling through birth and death.  Mimesis happens during the imprinting process, mimesis is the imprinting process.  And, despite the best efforts of the scientists at Rossum (particularly the genius programmer, Topher, played brilliantly by Fran Kranz – a Frankensteinian name if there ever was one), mimesis “happens” to these dolls or through these dolls.  Topher is the most obvious referent to Victor, for he is the one who imprints the dolls (at one point in the series, a distressed Topher asks, “If I think I can figure things out, is that curiosity or arrogance?“), but the show actually takes this idea further.  In one of the most well constructed episodes of the first season, The Man on the Street, the main story is intersected with interviews of citizens on the streets of L.A.  This episode reveals that the dollhouse is a persistent urban myth in LA – a secret lab under the streets of the city, where people are deprived of their personalities and put to work for those who can afford it.  The people react in a wide variety of ways – while some are horrified, many other are tantalized by the idea of being a doll or hiring one, and others think of all the good that could be done so long as the dolls are all human volunteers.  Near the end of this episode, an imprinted Echo has her first encounter with Paul Ballard, an FBI agent (played by Battlestar Galactica’s Tahmoh Penikett) who has been searching for Caroline and the dollhouse.  She has been sent to beat him up and delay him from returning to his new girlfriend and neighbor (who is at that moment being assaulted by an agent from the dollhouse).  But someone inside the dollhouse has corrupted Echo’s programming and she is able to deliver a message to him.  She tells him he is going about his search the wrong way.  She tells him the dollhouse’s business is pleasure and “that is their business but that is not their purpose.”

The audience glimpses that larger purpose in the unaired season one finale Epitaph One (funny enough, my DVD of that episode opens with a trailer for Wolverine – the creation story for the X-Men favorite).  Epitaph One opens in Los Angeles in 2019 (perhaps a nod to Blade Runner?) to a post-apocalyptic scene where the tech that had imprinted the dolls has gone worldwide (via phones, mobile phones, computers, radios, etc. – “ditch the tech” is a common refrain) and brought down the end of civilization.  As a character states in an earlier episode, “We’re all just cells in a body.”  When another character asks, “Interchangeable?” he answers in the affirmative.  As several characters note – the technology exists, there is no going back; it is out there – perhaps now with a mimetic life of its own.  Epitaph One follows an unfamiliar team of un-imprinted humans trying to find safety in L.A.  They would like to escape L.A., to what is known as Safehaven, where, as one character states, “you die as you are born.”  They find a set of tunnels and accidentally stumble on the underground dollhouse, now empty.  A familiar face eventually shows up, but we learn it is not Caroline, but Echo/Caroline, now a compilation (a patchwork?) of her imprints and a unique personality (is she human?), who is leading a resistance and can get the team out of L.A.

This is the world of forced mimesis.  Birth and death are blurred by the imprint technology.  Those who could – the wealthy and the powerful – could eventually take advantage of this technology, not to hire dolls, but to become them.  If you can be, not who you are, but who you desire to be, in whatever body you desire to be (originally known in the show as an “upgrade”), the multiple “who” who you desire to be, a series of “who” whose personality never has to die, is that a line between human and not-human?  (In 2019 L.A., the resistance team will ‘birth mark’ you – tattoo your name on your back.  If you begin to act abnormally, they can ask you who you are and check this against your tattoo.)  If we can each birth ourselves, then we have no need for motherhood, or for mimetic phenomenon anymore?  Each story we have examined seems to indicate that attempting shortcuts to either leads to the end of what we know as human.

LaRonika Thomas

Works Referenced:

Capek, Karel. R.U.R. Trans. Paul Selver and Nigel Playfair. A Treasury of the Theatre (from Henrik Ibsen to Arthur Miller). Ed. John Gassner. 1950. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954. 411-433. Print.

Gerauer, Gunter, and Christoph Wulf. Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society. Trans. Don Reneau. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Print.

Reilly, Kara. Automata and Mimesis on the Stage of Theatre History. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Print.

Whedon, Joss. Dollhouse. DVD. California: 20th Century Fox Television, 2009-10.