The lost parts of artificial women* SARAH HIGLEY Abstract The following is an experiment in erudition, story-telling, and language; it is a plunge in the dark; an anti-essay; a hybrid text. No scholar, in a learned article, could prove that the romance fairy-woman, the composite woman of medieval rhetoric and the automaton had anything in common, but Melusine, who has turned to alchemy and golem-making (having exhausted her talents building eitles), can: here she gathers the lost parts of artificial women before and after her time and muses on the fusions of woman and machine, äs surely äs she laments, every Saturday, the confusion of woman and monster, maligned by rumor, and replicated in many tongues and traditions. Notes provided for the curious. Ponto namque lenebroso hoc opus aequipero, quod probandi si sint uera an instmcta mendacio, nullus patei accessus eaque per orbem terrarwn aurato sermone min rumoris fama dispergebal, quorum maximam partem philosophorum et poetarum scriptura demonstrat, quae semper mendacia nutrit. (Liber Monstrorum) 'Hadaly, which in Persian means "Ideal", drifted down through the currents in her packing case, feet first, for her weighted shoes were the heaviest. "Sowana", "Alicia", "Dame de Voyage", she had many names, none of them coherent under water. When the latch sprung äs it jarred on a rock, she floated out - robbed of Multilingua 18-2/3 (1999), 267-280 'For I compare this task with the dark sea, since there is no clear way of testing whether that rumoui which has spread throughout the world with the gilded speech of marvelous report is true or steeped in lies, of which things the writings of the poets and philosophers, which always foster lies, expound the greatest part' (Orchard 1995: 254-257). 0167-8507/99/0018-026 © Walter de Gruyter, Berlin Brought to you by | Nanyang Technological Univ Authenticated Download Date | 5/31/15 6:14 AM