Page 184 - Cyberculture and New Media

Leman Giresunlu 175
______________________________________________________________
Beatrice’s ultimate preference was for being loved, and not feared.
Giovanni receives Beatrice’s cure from another scientist: Professor Pietro
Baglioni. However, the antidote instead of curing kills her. The subtlety and
ambiguity over the limits of science and technology, this time also infuses
into the context of romantic relationships. Therefore in the sacrifice of the
female element, poison, antidote, science, technology, art, and patriarchy (the
vial keeping the antidote) strives. Therefore, by means of the female element
as a vessel meaning is established.
Current cyborg goddesses appear to be more stoic and, omnipotent,
as opposed to Rappaccini’s Beatrice whose, choice for “being loved but not
feared” lead directly to her death. The current cyborg goddesses are capable
of good and evil, beauty and gore simultaneously, more or less consciously
they earn a godly attribute, and they manage to survive physically. They even
become more or less victorious over evil, yet at the same time, they do not
resist much to become evil, or at least they appear so. Current cyborg
goddesses have become the very being Rappaccini wanted her daughter to
become, which Beatrice had chosen to reject in Hawthorne’s story. Thus,
current cyborg goddesses become active shapers of the system itself. They
have all become Beatrices with a poisonous breath. Once resistant to the
system and willing to trade it with an alternative, they seem to realize that
“resistance is futile” and that there is no way out other than playing by the
rules of the system. With the powerful poison taking over their system, they
have become the system. It is also possible to say that they have appropriated
the system. Thus, they seem to delay their physical death. They are not total
losers any more, but they become themselves staunch manipulators. They
have a godly attribute on the one hand and we call them goddesses: since
they appear as an alternative to the male-order. However, at the same time
they look like the male-order and doing away with it whenever the occasion
occurs.
It appears, as if from Hawthorne onwards women’s representation
have changed. However, in this respect, ambiguities persist in the ideological
plane in regard of individual freedom’s compliance with a pre-programmed
decision making mainframe. In this context therefore, Hawthorne’s story is
also a critical note over the dilemma of choosing one’s loyalties. That is, just
as a cure may turn out to be poisonous and vice versa: thus, are loyalties. In
current movies, as noted in this paper, the cyborg goddesses occupy major
roles as carriers of good and evil, beauty and gore all at once. Dr. Hinemann
in the Minority Report is a female counterpart to Hawthorne’s botanist Dr.
Rappaccini. She is an exemplar for coercive inquisitiveness into the depths of
human consciousness. Times are long past since intrusive and manipulative
34
scientists were all males as in the style of Hawthorne’s Dr. Chillingworth or
Dr. Rappaccini as the sole inquisitors of the scientific world in American
literature.