'Just a singing-machine': The Making of an Automaton in George du Maurier's Trilby

Abstract

This essay argues for a re-evaluation of the eponymous heroine of George du Maurier's 1894 bestselling novel, Trilby . Trilby's tragic end is generally understood to come at the hands of that archetypally evil impresario, Svengali, who purportedly mesmerizes and manipulates her into becoming Europe's greatest singing star. However, a closer examination of her life reveals that Trilby's fate in the novel can more properly be linked to a lifelong dehumanization that shatters her sense of autonomous self and reduces her to a most rudimentary version of the human. In her progression from aspiring subject to tractable 'singing-machine,' Trilby can, in fact, be positioned as belonging to the cultural genealogy of the automaton, a figure that symbolizes a particular nineteenth-century concern about the fate of human subjectivity in an increasingly rationalized, systematized world.