Title: A Wife Manufactured to Order
Author: Alice W. Fuller
Year: 1895
Themes: ANDROID, RETRO SF, WOMEN WRITING MONSTERS
Critical Summary: “Wives made to order! Satisfaction guaranteed or money refunded.”
Alice W. Fuller’s short story “A Wife Manufactured to Order” opens with her hapless, recently self-admitted bachelor-for-life stumbling across a store front that, of all possible wares and services, advertises the sale of artificial wives. The narrator thinks on his bachelor status and decides it might be time to settle down, only to then fixate on the progressive mentalities of the single women in his life, being so preoccupied with suffrage movements and independence. He contrasts this burgeoning new reality with that of his friends, who appear to spend their days being needlessly nagged at by their wives, who demand attention from their husbands at every turn.
Deciding he doesn’t want to be a bachelor, but also doesn’t want to endure a woman with a mind of her own, the narrator allows his curiosity to get the best of him. He enters the shop and is introduced to the shop owner, the implied creator of the “wives,” who is an oafish pig of a man that elicits disgust in the narrator. However, the narrator’s feelings of distrust and revulsion are quickly dismissed upon meeting one of the constructs, which he claims to be “the most beautiful creature [he] had ever beheld.” Smitten with the creation, the narrator is instructed on how to control his constructed wife’s verbal behavior through the application of a series of tubes, and he swiftly brings her home, christening her as Margurette.
The protagonist is at first overjoyed with his financial decision of having purchased a wife, never having to deal with a woman who might talk back or have differing opinions to him, unlike his married friends. However, when hard times strike and the narrator is faced with economical hardship and the threat of complete financial loss, he finds Margurette’s automated placations to be maddening rather than comforting. He comes to despise the “creature,” what he once deemed so beautiful and desirable, and rushes to one of his close friends, a woman whom he once considered too progressive for his desires, only to admit his bigotry and idiocy in choosing a false woman over a real one.
The story concludes with the main protagonist realizing his faults and the fast-approaching reality that is a progressive world where women may demand recognition for their own individuality. He ultimately comes to terms with the fact that this reality is not necessarily a bad one, nor would it result in hardship placed upon men – instead, through his encounter with the automaton wife he purchased, the narrator is forced to recognize the maddeningly solitary reality that would result from a life without a real companion. “A Wife Manufactured to Order” is a fascinating contribution to the library of retro sci-fi works, having been written in the late Victorian era at the end of the nineteenth century, which navigates the shifting narrative of women’s rights through a chilling, but oddly humorous, marriage of man and manufactured woman.
Adminsitrative Notes: Emilee Gibbons