4 ideas
The young English aristocrat Lord Ewald is in despair because his mistress, the singer Alicia Clary, has the body of a classical Venus but a banal, mercenary, bourgeois mind, and the mismatch drives him toward suicide. Edison, who owes Ewald a debt of gratitude, builds him Hadaly, an android given Alicia's exact physical form and a voice fed by recorded speeches of elevated thought, and Ewald comes to prefer the machine.
Edison argues that a lover never loves the real person but the ideal he projects onto her, using her body only as a support for his own imagination. If the living woman constantly contradicts that projection, a manufactured object that never interrupts it is a more faithful vessel for love than she is. On this view, replacing the person with an artifact loses nothing essential, because the person was never what was loved.
To prove that desire already fastens on fabrications, Edison shows Ewald the case of Evelyn Habal, the seductress who ruined his friend Edward Anderson and drove him to suicide. He first projects a moving image of her dancing, alluring. He then displays the real, faded woman and the drawer of false hair, cosmetics, padding, and dentures that produced that allure. The point is that a man destroyed himself for an assemblage of props, so a deliberate artificial woman is only a more honest version of what seduction already is.
Hadaly speaks only from prerecorded phonograph cylinders, yet Edison argues that her lines will always seem to answer Ewald. Human conversation already runs on a limited repertoire of phrases, and the listener reads depth and responsiveness into whatever is said. Seen this way, the apparent inner life of a speaking machine, or of a person, is largely produced by the interpreter rather than contained in the speaker.