Speaking through “the Wearisome Machine”: E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops”
Speaking through “the Wearisome Machine”: E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops”

Summary/Abstract: This article aims to explore how E. M. Forster’s ground-breaking story “The Machine Stops” manifests the notion of space, the air-ship, and the machine as a metonymic extension of capitalist modernity and Anthropocene. In doing so, within the framework of spatial criticism, it examines the concepts of universal commodification and cultural hegemonization, regarding the imposed lock-down of the machine that leads to immobility in Vashti and her son Kuno’s lives. The mapping of space in the shape of a hexagonal cell of a bee transgresses the boundaries between the self and the machine because the buttons decode the satisfaction of such characters as Vashti, who feel in a hurry all the time. However, the result is limbo mobility and mass destruction in a crisis, emerging from Kuno’s individual desire to find his way out of the economic expansion of the world space. The machine’s cognitive mapping for Vashti, which is incompatible with Kuno, delineates the maladaptation of machine life to cultural practices of survival.

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