A good deal of critical attention has been given Neuromanceras an expression of a new "postmodern"sensibility. The slick, surface detail, the quick-cut style and the focus on cybernetics and electronic non-spaces make the novel appear to represent and to celebrate how modern technology has radically altered the way we live our lives. Much of this critical writing on Neuromancerhas viewed the novel as ultimately devaluing the body, replacing the limited and vulnerable flesh with a disembodied mind achieved through technology. This perspective on the text, however, misses a major thrust of the narrative, focusing only on the relationship of technology to the body articulated early in the novel. Such readings tend to ignore the way the vision and uses of technology evolve within Neuromancerin order to achieve a revaluation of the vulnerable physical body by the end of the novel. This reversal is achieved through the masculine assimilation of the feminine made possible by the technology Gibson constructs. Such assimilation can be read as a reworking of certain gendered practices critics have pointed to in the work of the canonical male Romantic writers. By tracing the way this assimilation works within the novel, it become clear that instead of developing a new sensibility, Neuromancersimply reinscribes traditional Romantic strategies onto the technologically infused landscape it presents.

The "hero" of Neuromanceris a familiar Romantic type, the lone "artiste" caught in a self-destructive spiral. When we first meet him he desperately wants to kill himself because he can no longer leave his body by accessing the matrix. For Case, the body is a meaningless "prison"from which he wants to escape. Once Case's access to the matrix is restored, the narrative works to give meaning to that "prison of [the] flesh." Neuromancer's plot moves towards Case's acceptance of embodiment, of the "meat" container which traps his cyberspace consciousness. Gibson uses the technology of simstim to achieve this reconciliation by allowing Case to experience pain through Molly's body. Primarily, Case experiences first-hand the agonizing collapse of Molly's control over her body initiated by the bone fracture in her leg and advanced by further injuries. When Molly's "brawn"completely fails her, Case must leave his safe haven in order to complete the mission and save Molly. Thus, the failure of the female body spurs Case to revalue his own, intact, male body.

That reconciliation and revaluation is dependent on the gendered relationship to embodiment within the novel. As Thomas Foster has argued, within Neuromancer, embodiment is figured as a feminine state opposed to the "masculine"disembodiment of the matrix:[1]

For Case, who lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh (6).

In this passage, Gibson effectively rewrites the story of original sin in terms of the freedom from the "flesh"that virtual technology can afford its users. The bodiless/"meat"dichotomy is then mapped onto gender in so far as the female characters are denied access to the "bodiless" space of the matrix.[2] Case's experience of Molly's pain allows him to incorporate that feminine state and achieve an equilibrium between embodiment and disembodiment, privileging neither. In this way, Case is able to "colonize the feminine" in the same way that Alan Richardson has argued Romantic writers did. [3 ]

Anne Mellor follows Richardson's argument, but pushes it further to assert that through the assimilation of the feminine, the female voice is erased and the figure of the female body is destroyed. Neuromancer's narrative of masculine assimilation of the feminine (in this case, embodiment) rehearses what Mellor has defined as one of the central characteristics of what she terms "masculine Romanticism. " In her book Romanticism and Gender, Mellor argues that the Romantic reaction against Enlightenment rationality requires an assimilation of the feminine by the male subject. Through this assimilation attributes traditionally understood as feminine become incorporated within the masculine identity creating a more complete identity for the male subject.[4] Similarly, as a reaction to the disembodiment imposed by technology, the narrative of Neuromancerworks towards Case's incorporation of the feminine state of embodiment which serves as a balance to the "bodiless exhaultation of the matrix."

The novel achieves this assimilation of the feminine through the character of Molly and the use of the simstim technology. Simstim allows those equipped with the right hardware (or "wiring") to access the sensory experience of another person, referred to in the novel as the "sensorium." In other words, this technology allows one to be virtually re-embodied, with complete access to the other person's sensory perception, but no access to his/her consciousness. The link is, not surprisingly, "one-way"so that Case may readily adopt and narrate female embodiment, but Molly has no access to the male sensorium. In this way, the structure of narration echoes that of the virtual technology itself, in that its unidirectional logic allows the male subject to vicariously experience female corporeality but not the reverse. Through the simstim link, Molly's sensory experience pushes a recognition of embodied reality onto Case's experience of technology. By the end of the novel, Case has rejected the possibility of existence solely in the matrix and come to revalue his own body.

The troubling nature of this masculine assimilation becomes evident when one realizes that, for Case, the experience of the feminized state of embodiment almost always involves the vicarious experience of the female body in pain. The simstim technology allows Case access to the pain experienced by Molly without any threat to his own "meat." Through this experience, Case comes to reject the total disembodiment offered by a permanent existence in the matrix. Case's reconciliation requires a reversal of the positions of power Gibson establishes at the beginning of the novel. When the novel opens, Case is depicted as self-destructive and out of control while Molly is figured as powerful and self-possessed. For a good part of the novel, Molly appears to destabilize gender insofar as she occupies a traditionally male role. In fact, many critics have pointed to Molly's "masculine"characteristics to assert that, within the almost all-male world of cyberpunk, Molly represents a strong female figure, similar to those found in feminist science fiction.[5] Yet, within Neuromancerthe narrative works to gradually empty Molly of both her strength and her attitude until she eventually becomes small and "broken." She, like other "strong"female characters in cyberpunk texts , is "effectively depoliticized and sapped of any revolutionary energy."[6] While she begins as a traditional "hero,"she ends as a "broken"victim. Neuromancerempties Molly of the ability to "save herself"necessitating the conventional male rescue which reinforces the primacy of the male subject position and affirms the traditional gender hierarchy. Simstim, as both a narrative structure and a fictional technology within the novel, allows for Case to experience first-hand the gradual disempowerment of Molly.

According to Mellor, such violence against the woman who makes the assimilation of the feminine possible is standard for this Romantic strategy. In the work of the Romantic poets, Mellor argues, an assimilation of the feminine requires that "the woman must finally be enslaved or destroyed, must disappear or die"(Mellor, 26). Figures like the Old Man and the Pedlar in Wordsworth's The Ruined Cottage who find Margaret's suffering a source of "comfort" use the female pain they witness to achieve a more complete and authoritative male subjectivity while Margaret suffers and dies. Since Case can experience Molly's pain "first hand," Gibson's construction of simstim makes visceral the experience of pain that is mediated in narratives like that of The Ruined Cottage.

However, despite the immediacy of Case's experience, he still remains outside of the pain in that he does not have to suffer any of its consequences. Gibson's description of this "shared pain" sets up this dichotomy between the male and female figures' relationship to the physical experience:

Case hit the simstim switch. And he flipped into the agony of broken bone. Molly was braced against the blank gray wall of a long corridor, her breath coming ragged and uneven. Case was back in the matrix instantly, a white-hot line of pain fad ing in his left thigh (64).

Case retreats easily to the non-physicality of the matrix when the pain becomes too much for him. He may have a lingering "white-hot line of pain" in his thigh, but his bones remain intact. The episode progresses so that Case flips back into Molly's agony two more times. There is no clear need for him to keep going back to her pain because an alternate communication system is available, yet he forces himself. This distanced, third party physicality drives the narrative to its conclusion as Case moves out of the matrix and into the physical world once Molly's leg completely gives out. Claire Sponsler points to this episode in her brief discussion of simstim as a moment of blurred identity and reality boundaries. "[W]hen she breaks her leg, he feels the pain as if his own leg had been broken...Troubling as this is for identity, it also calls into question the ability to know reality."[7] What Sponsler overlooks in this reading of the scene is the strikingly different gendered re lationship to the boundaries simstim blurs. Case feels the pain as ifhis own leg were broken, but his leg is not broken. Simstim enables him to feel the pain of the injured female body without any threat to his own, safe male body.

This engagement with the pain of the female body relates to what Steven Bruhm has argued is the Romantic concern with "the implications of pain on the transcendent consciousness." [8] Bruhm argues that the body in pain stands as an icon for the Romantic contemplation of the relationship between the mind and the physical body. The experience of pain underscores and complicates a central concern of Romanticism in that the "body in pain attacks the self that recognizes that pain"(Bruhm, 9). This "attack"makes vivid both the divi sion and the interdependence between the mind and the body. This paradoxical nature makes the body in pain a particularly charged site for the Romantic challenge to Enlightenment rationality and Cartesian mind/body dualism.

Bruhm's argument gives us a tool to examine the way Case's experience of Molly's pain works to overcome his privileging of bodilessness. The spilt between the body undergoing the pain and the subject feeling and narrating that pain is made literal in the construction of simstim. Case is able to move easily between the experience of pain and the contemplation of that pain. Gibson constructs the narrative so that the female body in pain becomes the figure of the "infinite intricacy" (239) of the human body which always surpasses the complexity of the man-made matrix. By recognizing and accepting the vulnerabilty of the physical body, Case is able to construct an identity for himself that oscillates between the "bodiless exhaultation" and the "infinite intricacy "without sacrificing one for the other.

Gibson uses the female body in pain to put in question the primacy of the technologically disembodied mind in the same way that Romantic writers used pain to challenge rationality. Case overcomes his "wish to die" (262) (which can be seen as simply a wish to leave his body as other "cowboys "have done, becoming nothing more than "personality constructs") through the assimilation of the feminine embodiment which he had been so ready to reject. This assimilation parallels the fusion of the two Artificial Intelligence constructs. "Wintermute had won," we are told, "has meshed somehow with Neuromancer and become something else" (268). At the end, Case has also "become something else" so that he no longer needs the connection to the feminine represented by Molly. He throws away the shriuken, the only gift Molly ever gave him, and says, "I don't need you" as a symbol of his independence from her because he has successfully assimilated the understanding of embodiment necessary for him to construct a technologically enhanced version of the Romantic male subject.