From: “How to Type – By the Touch System”, published by the Toronto Printing Plant of Underwood Elliott Fisher

Demonstrating Gender

Navigating gender/gendered discourse in the context of typewriter history is problematised by the extreme degree of uncertainty and ambiguity which prevents any neat demarcation of the subject. We might hurtle down several (roughly) parallel paths, considering a history of gendered writing (Kittler 186), of gender-coding machines (Keep 405), of the variance between popular representation and lived experience (Keep 410), or of shifts in the labourer’s access to the processes of production (Gitelman 206). Moreover, as emphasised repeatedly (Gitelman 208; Keep 405; Kittler 183), a slippage occurs from the very onset of any investigation into “typewriters”: do we mean the machine or the operator? The two cannot exist in isolation – the machine cannot operate itself, and being a typist is predicated on working “with” a typing-machine (c.f. Heidegger, in Kittler, 198). Thus, unpacking how gender operates with and around typewriting must necessarily begin with an admission that the familiar male/female binary is already mechanically complicated.

Identifying the typist as a “new species”, with a sort of “natural destiny” (Kipling, in Keep 401), complicates reading the typewriter as an emergent feminist by joining the bodily (female) and the machine (typewriter); efforts to categorise, understand, and demark the limits of the typewriter all point towards the typewriter’s role as transformative (Gitelman 185), transgressive, and nebulous. The role of the gaze (in relation, variously, to the machine, workers/work-space, and mass media), is paramount: “the fear and fascination” (Keep 401) about identifying the female as feminine, rather than unsexed (402), or mechanical (Gitelman 203, 208), was assuaged, in large part, through visual confirmation/creation of the type-writer girl as profoundly (if not pornographically) corporeal, human.

Despite the gaze and attempted control of hegemonic patriarchy, the typewriter was yet able to “[resist...] subjection” (Keep 418) and literally work “from within the structure of exploitation” (420) – particularly in remaining “in constant flux” (419), being both visible and viewing, mechanical and sensuous, and resisting an easily identifiable (and thereby controllable) subjectivity. The most dangerous position for the typewriter is one of repose – “becoming” (ibid.) “with” the machine, and casting off the antiquated conception of the female as having “limited physical resources” (402) allows for a freer subjectivity. One mode of achieving this floating subjectivity is in maintaining the initial, fundamental ambiguity in “typewriter” – we mean to stray into the realm of the post-human, to sustain a (pre-electric) cyborg-process, to be the machine and the operator!

Liminality, Touch-Typing, and Positioning the Typewriter

In considering the visual dynamics of typewriting, two distinct economies of gaze are readily identifiable: that of the body of text produced (by means of a visible or invisible inscription process), and the scopophilia in watching the typist. Relevant to both of these foci is the positioning of the typist’s body proper, with attendant implications of desire, both for economic efficiency (in the case of concrete typed copy) and, more humanly physical, the employer’s desire of the typist herself. In both cases, the typewriter hovers between granting clear images, providing visual confirmation of (re)productivity, and maintaining non-visual/non-physical (mechanical) process. Here, Lisa Gitelman’s formulation of the upstrike typewriter as a “black box” (Gitelman 204) is useful, taking the device as “not a public or a human matter, only a secretarial and technological one” (ibid.); the typewriter is at once private, mysterious, and profoundly industrial – in its adjectival signification “secretary” is rendered mechanical. As with Twain’s typesetter who “composed as he composed” (ibid.), the typewriter typewrites… And yet, the black box is not without a certain appeal, its own “seductive enigma” (Keep 401), maintain by obscuring processes (the real) enough to be suggestive, tantalising.

The sensuality of the typewriter is so pronounced, so inextricable from the any mention of the technology, that the machine itself becomes invested with a “new”, potentially unsettling, cyborg-allure. Typewriters(’)/bodies were never free from scrutiny and control – when not observed they self regulated, with body, body type, and fashion dictating their successful entry into and negotiation of the workplace (see Keep, throughout, but especially 404-405, 410; Gitelman 207, 211-212). This is, in fact, in keeping with the assertion that “media is message” – rather than obsess over what is arguably peripheral (the operator’s sartorial deportment), aesthetics takes a turn towards the (non-human) technologic.

This move towards the beauty of the machine is manifest in cover image of the above Underwood pamphlet: being the cover to a brief practical manual on touch-typing, the only suggestion of anything organic, much less human, in the image is the decorative (and, it should be noted, useless) ribbon in the cover’s lower right quadrant. Juxtaposed with the “objective” photographic reproduction of the Underwood typewriter, the hand-drawn ribbon, coupled with the skewed angle of the “card” which it superimposes, softens the manual’s presentation, suggesting that the “black box” which looms in the background can be rendered a touch less daunting. However, this does not connote any precedence being granted to the human operator; indeed, the pamphlet devotes its first sections to a schematic of the device, subsequent to which, the human-typewriter may be addressed. When the human does enter into the manual, it is in a shape subservient to the machine (see Figure 1, above), placed to promote efficient production, and accuracy when working the keys. That which is stereotypically identified as sensuous (the typist) is here transformed into the profoundly sensible, placing the limbs not to stimulate human response, but to kinetically translate energy into the smooth functioning of machined parts. Similarly, there exists an unresolved binary complication on the cover of the Royal Typewriter Company’s user’s manual for the “Gray Magic” typewriter:

Cover to the user’s manual for the Gray Magic (Quiet De Luxe) Portable Typewriter, Royal Typewriter Company. Circa 1949.

Notwithstanding the attempt at visual subterfuge in the richly coloured background of the pamphlet’s cover, and the effort made to add a sense of chromic brilliance to the words “Gray Magic”, the machine itself remains mercilessly matte gray. How then, would this machine’s practical metal casing interact with its operator’s potential desire to appear distinguished, stylish? Would investment in a (not-too-intrusive) desk bibelot or nattily put together suit provide the balm for the bland aesthetics of the machine proper, or were the two more mutually reinforcing, with the machine throwing the typewriter’s own attractiveness into sharper relief (inviting the male gaze only to reject it in favour to ministering to the machine)? What, moreover, of the purported impulse to “wear “rational” dress” (Keep 407)?

With this last query, we return to the Underwood touch-typing manual, more specifically, the brief notations made on the booklet’s back:

With hand-written inscription of measurements.

Inscribed, rather ironically, in pencil, are a series of measurements (bust, waist, hips, and lengths) for a set of woman’s clothing. While it is impossible to directly relate this “markup” (see Andrew Stauffer’s work with nineteenth century marginalia) with typewriting, that a typewriting manual be at hand, and deemed an acceptable surface upon which couture might be inscribed reinforces a reading of the typewriter as always-already in flux, perforating and changing female subjectivity at all levels…

Works Cited

Gitelman, Lisa. “Automatic Writing.” Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Keep, Christopher. “The Cultural Work of the Type-Writer Girl.” Victorian Studies 40.3 (Spring 1997): 401-427.

Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. [1986] Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Writing Science. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

– Christopher Chaban

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