L'Ève Future: HADALY or l'andréide

HADALY (2015)

[2019 book review]

The Future Eve (L'Ève Future), by Villiers De L'Isle-Adam (1886) is short, deep and luscious. A true philosophical essay, from metaphysics to ethics, in the form of a little ghost tale: the ghost of love itself. It's normally cited as the book where the word 'android' was first introduced; but the actual neologism was 'andréide', which is much more subtle and meaningful: the andréide is not an emulation of man —i.e. an android— nor an emulation of woman —i.e. a gynoid—, but an artificial being made in the image of man's romantic ideals of femininity. Villiers said in the voice of a fictionalized version of Thomas A. Edison: 

If our gods and hopes became scientific matters, why wouldn't our love as well? [...] I offer you a scientific Eve. Chimere by chimere, sin by sin.

This is so because, rather than a true woman —which would be Lilith, created equal to man from the same red clay— Eve could be labeled as the first andréide: a female made from man —from his rib, in fact— as a proper partner for him. However, religion and myth no longer hold in the positivistic Europe of late XIX century; thus the need for a quite rimbaldian modern reinvention of love. L'andréide, named 'HADALY' purportedly meaning 'ideal' in farsi, is this personification of man's eternal beloved, that he will always fail to find in any real woman since what he seeks is merely a projection of himself: 

You said it yourself: the being that you love in the living one and who, for you, is the only REAL one, it's not the one that appears as a walking human, but the one of your desire. The one that does not exist and, moreover, that you know as non-existent, since you aren't fooled by that woman, nor by yourself. [...] It's only this shadow what you love: it's only her what you're now willing to die for [...] and which is nothing but your own soul unfolded on her. Yes, there you've got it, your love.

This commentary on women and love is usually taken as mysoginistic, especially since Villiers openly accuses women who exploit man's misplaced love: 

Animal is exact. Nature gives it life with this fatality. Man, on the contrary, and this is what constitutes his mysterious nobility, it's subject of development and error [...] he wonders where he is and palpates his intelligence through his doubts [...] such is the real man. [...] Those neutral women whose thought starts and finishes in the waist, and whose drive consists in carrying to that waist every thought of man, they really are closer to animal species than ours and a man worth of such name has right in high and low justice over that gender of feminine beings. [So] I declare that I find it fair denying to that woman the free right to abuse of human misery. [...] Indeed, divesting those women from their deleterious charms, it only remains on them what it does on the poison ivy when deprived of her caterpillars. [...] Farewell then to that alleged reality, to that ancient impostor. I offer you to try instead the artificial and its new signs [...] I represent science with the omnipotence of its mirages; you, humanity and its Paradise Lost.

However, Villiers admits that this self-artificialization of women to attract men leaves both parts unsatisfied, which could also hint a protofeminist call for women to find their own path, independently of man's. At any rate, his distinction between feminity and womanhood is enlightening enough as to elicit reflexion on both directions.

[SPOILER] The ending, however, is rather conservative and pessimistic: HADALY is finally revealed to be animated —by some sort of electric metempsychosis— with the soul of an actual woman of noble nature who wills to truly love... and then she dies. The insufflation of spirit into matter, is thus finally kept as a privilege of God or nature, to which men and his science can only aspire. The prestigious fiction was thus false, a fraud: it was a real woman all along, pretending to be and aiming to become much better and much more. But not long before this, during her brightest monologue right after being rejected, HADALY laments what would be her fate as a true andéide: 

It's me, the august daughter of the living, the flower of Science and Genius resulting from a suffering of six thousand years [...] My unfortunate breast is not even worth to be called sterile! [...] the lightning alone will dare to pick the false flower of my vain virginity. [...] Alas! if only I could live! If I had life! Oh! how beautiful it is to live! Happy are those who throb! [...] To be able to breath, if only one time. To be able, only, to die!