Document Type

Article

Publication Date

10-9-2024

Publication Title

Humanities

Volume

13

Issue

5

Pages

1-11

Publisher Name

MDPI

Publisher Location

Basel, Switzerland

Abstract

Chris Bush’s Faustus: That Damned Woman (first performed in 2020) is a feminist and contemporary adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. The magus is a woman who travels through time from the seventeenth century to the far distant future. In the process, Johanna Faustus becomes a brilliant scientist who attempts to create digital immortality by uploading the minds of billions of human beings to the Cloud. When a power failure destroys almost all of humanity, it is uncertain whether the universal outage is caused by Mephistopheles (in accordance with the expectations of Faustian fantasy) or is simply an unforeseen but predictable accident (in accordance with the expectations of technophobic versions of science fiction). I argue that Bush’s play traces the chronological and generic arc from magic/fantasy to science/science fiction, blending the two so that the age-old monster, the Devil, enabled by Faustian arrogance, is reimagined as an avatar for an unreliable technology that destroys what it is designed to preserve.

Comments

Author Posting © The Author(s). This article is posted here by permission of MDPI for personal use and redistribution. This article was published open access in Humanities, Vol. 13, Iss. 5, (October 9, 2024), https://doi.org/10.3390/h13050134

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Download

Share

COinS