The Mechanical Song: Women, Voice, and the Artificial in Nineteenth-Century French Narrative

Examining the privileged relation of women to the singing voice in nineteenth-century literary works, the author argues for an emerging identification between women and artifice in the period. Beginning with texts by Rousseau and Proust that show a link between nostalgia for the maternal voice and the writer's self, the book then turns to the psychoanalytic literature on the role of the voice in the formation of the psyche. In the process, it analyses feminist polemics on the maternal voice...