Uncanny Realism: Stephen Crane's Phonographic "Monster"

Abstract

In the late nineteenth century, commentators from various cultural fields imagined that Thomas Edison’s phonograph would usher in an era of unprecedented realism by removing human fallibility from record-keeping. In his 1878 North American Review essay introducing the phonograph, Edison envisioned that his technology would allow businessmen to produce a “perfect record” and “dispense with the clerk.”1 E. E. Kellett’s narrator in “The New Frankenstein” (1900) The commotion started the phonograph for an instant, and it gave one wailing gasp that sounded startlingly like a groan. The figure writhed on the floor, as though suffering terrible agony .... Little clouds of dense smoke poured out of the figure’s body, and a terrible smell of burning rubber filled the room. They found afterward that every wire in the figure was twisted out of shape, the phonograph burned out, and the face melted into a shapeless lump of rubber.