Madness, Modernity, and Mechanization: Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, the Feminized Industrial Laborer, and the Rise of Automation (2020)
Paiella, Giorgina Samira (Author)
Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology
Volume: 28
Issue: 2
Pages: 255-280
Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness is a text preoccupied with modernization and mechanization anxieties. Many technological readings of Memoirs either overlook the ways in which Schreber’s account of the mechanization of his body is explicitly gendered or argue that Schreber is centrally concerned with what remains of virility in the wake of industrialization at the fin de siècle. By putting Schreber’s text into conversation with Charles Babbage’s reflections on division of labor and gendered tasks in the factory environment in his On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, I argue, rather, that Schreber’s imagined account of the “unmanning” of his body, the manipulation of his body by mechanical forces, and the repetitive tasks that he takes up in an attempt to combat his delusions align him with the feminized “mind worker” and—most profoundly—with the female factory laborer.
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