I’d Rather Date a Robot!
Nathaniel prefers Olimpia, the limp, frozen object, to Clara, the living, breathing girl. I could easily declare he has strange tastes and move on. But Hoffman arguably characterizes Nathaniel this way to prove it’s when women are docile and unresponsive to a fault that men receive the most pleasure. Hoffman does so by emphasizing eyes, a consistent motif representing the ‘window to the soul.’
To Nathaniel, eyes are a point of battle and contention between his loves. Clara has “bright eyes” that smile “charmingly,” reflecting “the pure azure of the cloudless sky, the forests and flowery meadows, and the varied, happy life of the fertile landscape.” Meanwhile, Olimpia’s eyes are “great” and “radiant” like the “clear colour of a brook,” though the size and importance of a brook are nothing compared to the sky, the forests, or the “varied, happy life” of nature. We infer only from eyes that Olimpia is preserved and taciturn, while Clara possesses fresh, lively fluctuations.
Yet Nathaniel thinks Clara’s frequent conversing with him betrays a “cold” and “prosaic” nature, regarding her as an “accursed lifeless automaton.”
Why? Because Clara’s eyes are alive: they change, they morph, reflecting feeling and consciousness, and they betray opinion. Clara has opinions. When angry, her eyes become an “ever-deepening blackness.” But Nathaniel doesn’t enjoy the female opinion. At one point, when she rebukes him, he writes:
Really, who would have thought that the spirit that shines from such clear, gracious, smiling, child-like eyes, like a sweet and lovely dream, could draw such intellectual distinctions, worthy of a university graduate?
So Clara’s eyes shatter his idealized feminine naivete. Here, Olimpia triumphs: unlike Clara’s “ever-deepening blackness,” Olimpia’s eyes are simply “black caverns.” They’re fixed and hard, lacking further depth. Her “ice-cold” pre-programmed lips speak only one word—“Oh!”—and her inability to think means she humours Nathaniel’s whims, listening to his poetry readings without falling asleep. Her rigidness is a passivity juxtaposed with Clara’s spirited temperament. In choosing her, Nathaniel chooses the impossibly passive woman devoid of individuality or opinion.
Psychological choice aside, Nathaniel’s body rejects Olimpia. He shudders a “hideous, deadly frost” and feels a primitive revulsion when kissing her: Hoffman’s implication that his infatuation with rigid docility is unnatural. As for the psyche, Nathaniel suppresses his contradictory revulsions through desperate justifications. When recalling how “passive and taciturn” Olimpia is, for instance, he sputters,
Words? What are words! The look in her heavenly eyes says more than any terrestrial language. Can a child of heaven ever adjust itself to the narrow confines drawn by miserable earthly needs?
And when Siegmund probes him for a deeper reason why he finds Olimpia charming, Nathaniel aggressively spouts counter-accusations: his accusers are “cold” and “prosaic” like Clara! He never answers the question.
I thought The Sandman was a paradox. Through longing stares and fleeting gazes, Nathaniel sees the living and breathing—Siegmund and Clara—as emotionless, insensitive robots, while the actual machine, Olimpia, becomes soft and warm. To Hoffman, a man seeking impossibly docile femininity will prefer flat, pallid eyes over genuine, emotional ones.
