Olympia’s Legacy

Abstract

The eighteenth-century Enlightenment love affair with the automaton underwent a radical shift in the early nineteenth century when the automaton transformed into a terrifying uncanny Other. The uncanny Other this chapter examines is the ravishingly beautiful automaton Olympia from German Romantic E. T. A. Hoffmann’s famous short story ‘Der Sandmann’ (1816–17), a major text in the literature of the fantastic. Nathanael, the protagonist of ‘The Sandman’, falls madly in love with Olympia, thinking she is the perfect woman. The shocking revelation that Olympia is an automaton drives Nathanael into a state of psychosis. Olympia’s story is contemporaneous with the historical irruption of the uncanny and the Enlightenment. Prior to the Enlightenment, experiences that might be categorized as uncanny could be safely contained within existing religious paradigms. The historical irruption of the uncanny coincides with the Enlightenment era, as Terry Castle explains, the ‘“invention of automata” was also an invention of the Uncanny.’¹ The advent of Enlightenment rationalism gives birth to the grotesque, as though the uncanny were the perverse irruption of so much rationalism.² Olympia is a lens through which we can read not only this irruption of the uncanny, but also the growing cultural anxieties about women’s roles outside the domestic sphere that are expressed in literature of the fantastic.³