I look back to the First World War and the immediately preceding years from a position informed by a blend of contemporary theories, notably cyborg theory, to argue that the conflation of human subject and mechanical object dramatically demonstrated in the tank and its embrace by the popular press engenders a new hybrid form of modern subjectivity, a kind of proto-cyborg, that also found expression in modernist representations of the human-machine hybridity.
Building on previous seminal interventions into the field, including Tim Armstrong’s Modernism, Technology and the Body, Alex Goody’s Technology, Literature and Culture and Trudi Tate’s Modernism, History and the First World War, I focus my inquiry into human and technological integration on the particularities of the gender implications of the cyborg figure conceptualized within the context of British wartime culture.
Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, all involve cyborgs embodying masculine prerogatives of domination and reproducibility. The three main stories I tell, about the British Army’s revolutionary weapon, Jacob Epstein’s Rock Drill, and D. In this essay I bring together interrelated stories about wartime fusions of humans and machines to explore overlaps and cultural continuities and to argue that these cyborgic entities harbor masculine fantasies of self-reproduction.
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