Through
a gap of almost 200 years and around the barrier between literary and life, the
link between the Victorians and prostitution can be found between the humans
and androids in Phillip K. Dick’s Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? This is an ideological link. These two societies may seem drastically
different on the surface—lace doilies and curios compared to penfield
machines and hovercrafts—but they are really quite
alike; both are technological societies, for example. It is important to note that ideologies are
not EXPRESSIONS of beliefs—such as, I
agree with this, but not that; this is opinion—but are instead a set of beliefs that acts as a way to ORGANISE
one’s thinking about one’s social system or way of life. These beliefs are anchored by core values
which, in turn, structure other ideas. If one does not have strong core values, one
is not particularly ideological. Also,
ideologies ‘carry with them prescribed attitudes and habits, certain
intellectual and emotional reactions.’[i]
However, Dick’s fictional world is
fairly flat, especially compared to real life, but there are many writings,
both primary and secondary, about the Victorians. By using the Victorians and their views on
prostitution, with the Contagious Diseases Acts as a frame of reference, and
comparing it to Dick’s humans and androids,—prostitution and androids being the Great Social Evil of their respective
times— it is possible to postulate on the
driving forces creating the ideology behind the life of Dick’s Americans of
2021.
THE THREE PILLARS OF
VICTORIAN IDEOLOGY: Empire, Class, and Morals—All Intertwined
Before
looking at the Dickisian Americans, it is necessary to first understand the
basis of the Victorian ideology. The
Victorian era was one of great change.
To fully understand all that was going on, it is important to start in
the middle of the 18th century with the beginning of the Industrial
Revolution. A direct result of the
advent of industry was the creation of two new social/economic classes. The first, and more influential, was more of
an expansion. Since the early modern
period, there have been ‘middling sorts,’ but with the Industrial Revolution
came the industrial middle class, and, as the country became more industrial,
this group, too, became stronger and stronger.
The second class that was created was the working class. It is these two classes that are important
for this analysis.
The
core of the British national identity is made up of two ideas, the first of
which is Empire. Empire has been part of
the cultural ideology since Britain started to colonise India and the Americas
in the 17th century, the First Empire. This cultural ideology only strengthened with
the Second Empire and the colonisation of Africa, the creation of the East
India Company, and the loss of the American Colonies. The Empire was at its height in the early
and mid 19th century, but by the second half of the century, it
started to gradually lose power and control of its colonies. Despite that, the British Empire was still
the hegemonic power of the world, and the years between 1815 and 1914[ii]
are referred to as the Imperial Century.
Additionally,
to understand British culture, it is imperative to remember that class plays a
large role. However, around the time of
the Industrial Revolution, the Aristocracy, which relied on agriculture for its
money, started to decline. At this time
in history, one needed a large amount of property to vote, and thus the
government was run by those who had a vested interest in agriculture. Because of this, the Corn Laws were passed,
causing the price of grain to rise, putting more money into landholders’
pockets. The practical effects of the
various incarnations of the Corn Laws[iii]
were that food—mainly bread, the
staple of the diet—became quite
expensive, especially if one lived in the city and was not able to supplement
one’s diet with vegetables grown in a small cottage garden. Most of the day’s pay went to housing, and
the rest went to food, neither of which was cheap in the cities. This created a poor working class, and it was
from this group that the majority of prostitutes came.
The
Victorians are stereotyped as being sexually repressed; however, this is not
entirely true. One way of thinking about
sexuality is that it is a social construction.
Seeing Victorian culture through this ideology, Michel Foucault sees
that Victorian society did not repress sexuality, but instead regulated it into
modes or practices that were seen as respectable and non-respectable.[iv] The pure woman and the fallen woman; the
Madonna and the Magdalene; the worthy and the unworthy.
‘Morals
are for the middle class,’ someone once said.
‘The poor can’t afford them and the Aristocracy doesn’t care,’ and the
British middle class loved its morals. The
construction of a public morality was a large part of Victorian culture. This was done by shoving the women into the
Cult of Domesticity. It was seen as
proper for her to care for the men in her life: husband, son, and father—actions that Marcuse would see as being ‘prescribed attitudes and
habits.’ One reason morality was so
important to the Victorians is tied up with the idea of Empire. The Empire was what made Britain great, and
the threat of its total decline was traumatic for its citizens. The Victorians decided on a bottom-up
campaign to strengthen the Empire, believing that, with a strong foundation,
the Empire would continue to expand and reflect the inherent greatness of the
British people. For this, their strong
foundation was the family. A moral,
upstanding family will perpetuate the Empire, they thought, and it was the
woman’s role to impart morals to her family.
In
this time, prostitution was seen as prolific and as a threat to domesticity
and, thus, the Victorian middle class and ultimately the entire Empire. However, it was not the only threat to the
middle class, but because of its visibility, it was a scapegoat of sorts; all
of the fears and anxieties of the British middle class were tied up together in
the idea of prostitution, the thinking being that, with prostitution gone, the
threat to middle class moralities would disappear. From this thinking comes the idea of the
Great Social Evil.
THE CONTAGIOUS DIESEASES
ACTS: What they were
This
analysis will focus on the Contagious Diseases Acts (1864, 1866, 1869) and the
motivations surrounding them and how this relates to Philip K Dick’s
novel. The Contagious Disease Acts were
designed to control the spread of venereal disease among enlisted men in ports
and garrison towns. With each successive
act, more parts of the country were under the jurisdiction of the acts and by
1869 there were eighteen districts in the country thusly affected. Under the acts, any woman could be identified
as a ‘common prostitute’ by plain-clothed police officers, and once so
identified, she had to submit to a biweekly internal exam[v]. If the woman was found to have gonorrhoea or
syphilis, she would be admitted to a lock hospital—a special hospital for those with contagious diseases with locked
wards to prevent the spread of disease.
The acts had a broad, very vague, definition of what a ‘common
prostitute’ was: basically, any woman who had sex outside of
marriage was considered a prostitute according to the C.D. acts.
The women
who were accused of being prostitutes were able to refuse the examination, but she
would then have to prove to the magistrate that she was not prostitute, which,
because of the vague definition used in the acts, meant that she had to prove
that she was virtuous and did not go with men, paying or not. One reason that
this was a next-to-impossible endeavour was because of the stigma associated
with prostitutes, and the poor working class in general, as being
unrespectable. The working class was
described as ‘residuum’ and the ‘Great Unwashed.’[vi] Not only were the
C.D. acts an outward portrayal of the Victorian’s opinion of a group of women
referred to as, in a general sense, fallen women, but it ‘crystallised and
shaped many...social views’ towards prostitutes and prostitution,[vii]
says Judith Walkowitz
ACTON AND THE VOIGT-KAMPFF
TEST
The
policy put forth in the acts was influenced by findings from William Acton in
his study titled, in short, Prostitution.[viii]
William Acton claims that the
purpose of Prostitution is to prove
that most prostitutes manage to escape and to better themselves and those
experiencing degeneration and death are exceptions. However, his work instead
conveys ‘Beware the Prostitute.’
Initially, Acton admits to the Prostitute is a ‘bogie’ man—something
meant to incite myth-based fears in outsiders—which he claims arose from Puritan
thought’s driving of prostitution underground and an unwillingness to address the
problem. [ix]
Whatever the reason for Acton’s biases, he
argues that disease is not the large cause of death which it is believed to be,
and that despite myths surrounding prostitution, it is possible for a woman to
escape the world of prostitution.
However, this writing has overtones of religious disapproval and a
general wariness towards prostitutes.
In
the early part of the Victorian age, there was a craze for collecting
statistical and empirical research, and Acton was a part of this movement. This type of work was social science and
Acton was a social investigator. Acton,
as a later social investigator, still saw prostitution as a ‘social evil,’ but
one that could be contained by a system of police and medical supervision.’[x] Acton’s findings, in effect, influenced, and
acted as a type of litmus test for the police officers enforcing the acts: This
woman is out on the streets alone; she is gaudily dressed; she must be a
prostitute.
In
Victorian England, ‘recognition entailed a social identification of the
prostitute,’[xi] and
the Voigt-Kampff test is Deckard’s way of identifying androids in Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The test is used to test the empathy of an
android and, although it is not as much a social identification as racial one,
the lack of empathy in a creature enables Deckard to recognise an android when
he applies the test. To Deckard, the
lack of empathy is the only way to visually asses if that person is a human or
an android.
The
Voigt-Kampff test is sufficient to segregate the T-14 androids from the humans,
but it is not as effective with the Nexus 6’s.
Deckard, while talking about the Nexus 6, says, ‘we had better just
accept the new unit as a fact of life...every police agency...clamoured that no
test would detect [the T-14’s] presence’[xii]
However, the Voigt-Kampff test did detect the T-14, just as the C.D. acts ‘detected’
prostitutes. Both the acts and the
Voigt-Kampff test act as a way to segregate and fix the problem of their time’s
great social evil.
DECKARD
AND THE METROPOLITAN POLICE: The Implementations
Deckard
and the police are an obvious connexion. Both are police, and yet, not. Also, both
are responsible for dealing with the problem group, the people involved in the
Great Social Evil. The plain clothed
police officers were actual police; they were part of the metropolitan police,
but were working outside of their usual geographic jurisdiction. This is because the C.D. acts came from the
Admiralty—the acts were originally
for port and garrison towns—and in due to
the 1960 Metropolitan Police Act the metro police had jurisdiction of Portsmouth
and Devonport, England’s two naval bases. Therefore, these new police officers did not
belong to the local police organisation; they were outsiders. Deckard, as a bounty hunter, is also an
outsider in his police department. They
patrol the same areas, but have different jobs and are part of different
institutions, if it can be said that the bounty hunters have an
institution.
Additionally,
there are similarities in the ways, the metropolitan
police and Deckard, and bounty hunters in general, enforced their rules. While Deckard is talking to Rachael, she
mentions police dragnets[xiii],
out to catch androids. This is similar
to what the metro police did. As plain-clothed
officers, they would roam the streets prostitutes were likely to be, and if
they saw someone suspicious, that person would be arrested. However, as mentioned before, the definition
of what a prostitute is was very vague and often women who were not prostitutes
were accused of this crime, just as the Voigt-Kampff test can identify humans with
‘underdeveloped empathetic abilities,’[xiv]
as androids who are then killed, Eldon Rosen says.
Also,
Eldon says that the police and bounty hunters’ are ‘morally bad,’[xv]
which is a similar accusation hurled at the C.D. acts which were condemned for being
morally unfair.[xvi] The condemnation was partly because of the
invasiveness that characterised the physical exams. These exams can be compared to the bone
marrow tests used to definitively determine the status of a being as human or android. If a woman was said to have a venereal
disease of some sort, it was assumed that she was a prostitute. This is because of the belief that ‘excessive
sexual intercourse’[xvii]
caused syphilis, and therefore, if one had a venereal disease, one was
therefore a prostitute. However,
according to a one Mr. Moore—a medical
officer in the Plymouth magistrate court— and many others in society, when queried as to whether venereal
diseases can exist in couples who are faithful, yet have ‘excessive intercourse,’
the answer is ‘I should not think it probable.’[xviii] These medical diagnosis, just like the Voigt-Kampff
test fears, are not particularly reliable.
EMPATHY AND MORALS
Empathy
and morals play the same role in both Dick’s 2021 American society and that of
the Victorians. These entities are a
vital part of their religions, Mercerism and Evangelical Christianity. Mercerism, through the empathy box, creates a
social consciousness and those without the ability to join in, those without
empathy—androids — are the
other. Deckard says that, according to
Mercerism, there exists ‘an absolute evil [that] pluck[s] at the threadbare
cloak’ of society and that ‘a Mercerite is free to locate’ that evil other and
kill it.[xix] Evangelicals
believed in the patriarchal society in which men and women occupy different
spheres. The cultural mores associated
with these spheres are expressed by the morals which are being embraced and
practiced.
The Evangelicals held very moralist
beliefs. One such belief was in the
sanctity of marriage, and they saw the prostitute as a threat to this. Because of the high importance placed on the
sanctity of marriage, ‘their demand for the purity of sexual relations was
uncompromising.’[xx] Anyone
who threatened this was considered to be evil.
Additionally, because this is a patriarchal society,—and therefore, men
are so obviously of a higher importance—the woman is blamed for being a ‘source
of pollution and a constant temptation to the middle class sons.’[xxi]
William
Tait, and evangelical writer, would fully support Deckard in his quest to
banish androids from Earth. He, and
writers like him, branded prostitutes as ‘public enemies, criminals, and
outcasts’[xxii]
and used Parent-Duchatelet’s phrase with
which he described Parisian prostitutes as women who ‘“abandoned the prerogatives
of civil liberty”’ to classify prostitutes, indicating that they were less than
human. Similarly, Deckard believes that,
since androids are evil according to Mercerism, they do not need to be
considered in the same way that humans are: to Deckard, androids are not part
of productive society; they are evil and thus he is following Mercer thought when
he kills them.[xxiii]
In Dick, androids are simply a threat to
humans, Earthlings, a general threat. But
for the Victorians, prostitution was a more specific threat, both to the family
and to the individual. Empathy and
morals, set in their respective religions form the societies’ Great Social
Evil.
CONCLUSION
Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep?
is only 220 pages of a fictional world, and because of this, we, as
readers, do not know much about the society and culture therein. The one fact that links the together the
Victorian and Dickisian societies is that they are both industrialised nations,
and this industrialisation created both the android and the prostitute. Both societies’ Great Social evil is an
affect of the Industrialisation. Because
of the similarities between Dick’s 2021 America and the Victorians, we can use
the later as a pattern card for understanding Dick’s society. As mentioned before, the three pillars of
Victorian ideology are Empire, class, and morals. These do not line up exactly with Dick’s
Americans, but they are still valid.
Empire
is not important to these humans, but colonialism is. This is because America is no longer the
power; it, and the entirety of Earth is on its way to becoming completely
obsolete and extinct; the real power centre is on Mars—presumably. However, in a
desire to compel people to emigrate to Mars, the government provides android
servants as incentives for picking up and leaving Earth. If it were not for the androids, there would
not be this social evil plaguing the country.
For this reason colonialism, which is tightly associated with the idea
of Empire, forms an important aspect of Dickisian American Ideology.
As
explained earlier, morals, in the guise of empathy, shape how these androids
are viewed. It is through this lens, and
Mercerism, that Deckard knows how to deal with androids...kill them—think Marcuse and prescribed actions. Just as morals dictated that prostitutes were
a threat to the family, empathy, and the fact that androids do not have any,
dictates that they are evil, not human and must be removed.
Class,
while important to Victorian ideology, is not a major influence of the
Dickisian ideology in regards to androids. All that is important is that humans are
above androids in the cultural hierarchy.
However, this does not invalidate the other two aspects as important
foundations of the Dickisian ideology.
Empathy and Colonisation have ‘prescribed attitudes and habits,’ and
these are shown through Deckard’s actions and thoughts. By finding similarities between two cultures,
it is possible to extrapolate aspects of the more well-known one to deduce
facts about the second. However, issues
arise when the biases and prejudices of one of these societies, or in this
case, a third, society is falsely attributed.
Because this is fiction, and there is no definite answers as to the
nature of the ideology, this is just one possible explanation behind the
beliefs expressed in Philip K Dick’s Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Primary
Sources:
Acton, William, ‘The Career of Prostitutes,’
Prostitution, Considered in Its Moral, Social,
& Sanitary Aspects, In London and other Large Cities. With Proposals for the Mitigation and Prevention of its Attendant Evils. (1857).
Dick, Phillip K., Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (New York 2007).
Secondary
Sources:
Foucault, Michel, Hurley, Robert, Trans, The History of Sexuality: Vol 1, (New
York 1978).
Walkowitz, Judith, Prostitution
and Victorian Society, Women, Class, and State, (Cambridge
1980)
[i] Herbert Marcuse, One
Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society,
(Boston 1964). Chapter 1
[ii] These years, between
the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the Great War were years of peace in
Britain, however, not so much for the colonies.
The closest problem was Ireland and its fight for Home Rule. Despite this, the peace on the island made it
possible for the Industrial Revolution to fully take hold in the cities creating
a metropolitan society, as opposed to an agricultural one.
[iii] First enacted in
1815. Incidentally, it was not the
working or middle classes that enacted the repeal of these laws in 1847, despite
that many of the middle classes men became enfranchised in 1932, but the Famine
in Ireland. However, it was a case of
too-little-too-late, because even with cheap grain being imported, the Irish
had no money to buy the grain.
[v] Earlier, before the
acts, an attempt was made to require the men to undergo scheduled exams, but
the officers feared it would ‘lead to the demoralization of their men.’ However, it was ok to do this to prostitutes
because they, obviously, had no self
respect. Judith Walkowitz Prostitution and Victorian Society, Women,
Class, and State, (Cambridge 1980) p
4
[viii] The entire title is Prostitution, considered in Its Moral, Social, & Sanitary
Aspects, In London and other Large Cities.
With proposals for the mitigation and prevention of its attendant evils.
[ix] William Acton, ‘The Career of Prostitutes,’ Prostitution, considered in Its Moral, Social, & Sanitary Aspects, In London
and other Large Cities. With proposals
for the mitigation and prevention of its attendant evils. (1857) Excerpt 1
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