To
compare Philip K. Dick’s post-nuclear-fallout America with Victorian England
may seem like complete folly—penfield
machines and hovercrafts are about as different from lace doilies and curios as
it is possible to be.[i] These, however, are just symbols, not integral
parts of the societal ideology. Both
societies are highly industrial / technological, divided along class lines, are
highly moral, and have colonies. Because
of the similarities between the two societies, by looking at Dickisian
Americans through the lens of Victorian prostitution and the Contagious
Diseases Acts, one can further understand these foreign Americans, and by
understanding, extrapolate as to the motivation behind the desire to kill the
androids.
A Brief Introduction to
the Victorians and the Place Prostitution Has in the Society
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.[ii] The pure woman and the fallen woman; the
Madonna and the Magdalene; the worthy and the unworthy. [integrate
how Dickesian American society is divided between human and android?]
‘Morals
are for the middle class,’ someone once said.
‘The poor can’t afford them and the Aristocracy doesn’t care.’ The British middle class loved its morals,
and this morality ties directly into their view of prostitution. 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[iii]—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.[iv]
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. [Additionally,
there was the belief that prostitution was about the rich aristocrat seducing
the poor working class girl. In other
words, it was seen as a class issue. Does this need more historical context
about the social aspirations of the middle class emulating the aristocracy, or
is this well-known?] However, prostitution
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 will disappear
and the Empire will flourish. 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 eighteen districts in Britain were 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 who had 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
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 better themselves and those experiencing degeneration and
death are exceptions. However, his work actually 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, compared
to earlier social investigators, 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: androids and prostitutes. 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—remember:
although they spread to many parts of the country, the
acts were originally for port and garrison towns—and due to the 1960 Metropolitan Police Act the metro police had
jurisdiction of Portsmouth and Devonport, England’s two naval bases. The metropolitan 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. Neither the tools for identification nor the
people who wield them are totally foolproof.
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 a
prostitute. However, according to a one
Mr. Moore—a medical officer in
the Plymouth magistrate court— and many
other medical personnel 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 and because of this,
neither the metropolitan police nor Deckard are 100 percent accurate in their
dealings with the social evil.
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 this
belief, ‘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, an 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 Dickesian America, 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[will you take my word for this, or do i
have to prove how prostitution is a direct effect of industrialisation?]. Both societies’ Great Social evil is an effect
of 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. The Victorians’ views on prostitution stemmed
predominately from their moral system.
One outcome of the comparison done in this paper is that there is an
underlying cause for the hatred of androids.
This reason goes beyond Mercerism; androids threaten life as it is known
on Earth. When a family immigrates to
Mars Colony, they are given an android and it is this association which prompts
Deckard and his fellow Dickisian Americans to kill all the androids. Deckard and the Victorians have the same
motivation for getting rid of their social evil—to ensure
that their world does not decline and fail.
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. (London
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).
Need, Lynn, ‘The Magdalen in Modern Times: The
Mythology of the Fallen Woman in Pre-Raphaelite Painting’ in Oxford Art
Journal , Vol. 7, No. 1, Correspondences (1984),
Walkowitz, Judith, Prostitution
and Victorian Society, Women, Class, and State, (Cambridge
1980)
[iii] Lynn Need, ‘The
Magdalen in Modern Times: The Mythology of the Fallen Woman in Pre-Raphaelite
Painting’ in Oxford Art Journal , Vol. 7, No. 1, Correspondences (1984), pp. 26-37
[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
1 comment:
You begin with the important (not obvious, but important) claim that DADES is really about societal ideology - that the Science fiction trappings are *merely* trappings. That's a step, if a small one, toward beginning with a clear argument.
In your second paragraph: yes, you should integrate DADES at this point. You need to find a way of presenting a clear argument sooner, not later - this is one way to do so.
2nd question - I dont' think you really need more historically context about aspirations. It's secondary to your paper, *and* general knowledge. What you need more is a credible ways of addressing DADES in terms of victorianism - that's where you've always struggled.
You continue to need *some* way of justifying in more detail your choice to bring DADES together with testing/identification of prostitutes. I continue to think it's a great concept, but why we *should* bring them into dialogue with one another continues to be the unanswered question haunting this essay.
I would, indeed, like at least a footnote about the connection between prostitution and industrialization. Especially since prostitution is so old and so varied!
Overall: Your research is interesting, as in all earlier drafts. The connection seems interesting and worthwhile, as in all previous drafts. You are struggling to make the leap from it being a historical paper to a critical paper, though. Your challenge is to articulate throughout (including at the beginning) why we *should* read DADES through this critical lenses. A plausible connection isn't good enough - a vision that articulates why and how we should make that plausible connection is what you need.
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