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This chapter traces representations of male and female prosthesis users in the marriage plot, the nineteenth-century narrative form most heavily populated by users of prosthetic devices. Building on the work of scholars such as Martha Stoddard Holmes and Talia Schaffer, who expose the important roles that disabled characters perform in Victorian marriage plots, this chapter identifies the prosthesis-marriage plot as a related yet separately identifiable formulaic plot structure. As the chapter argues, when viewed collectively, and at times also individually, prosthesis-marriage plots present unstable affective and imaginative treatments of prosthesis users. These representations shed light on the complex ways in which discourses of gender, class, and ableism intersect and how, in particular instances, the bodily status quo is challenged, brought into question, or even outright rejected.

This chapter explores the construction of the concept of physical wholeness and the way in which fears of physical loss were perpetuated. The chapter addresses nineteenth-century contexts such as changing understandings of the human condition, new models of work, and changes in legislation. It considers these factors alongside analyses of literary texts that stimulated anxiety regarding the neurological impact of body loss, including Frederick Marryat’s Jacob Faithful (1834) and Silas Weir Mitchell’s “The Case of George Dedlow” (1866). The chapter ends by investigating how the burgeoning prosthesis market reinforced preferences for physical normalcy in advertisements as it exploited them for capitalist ends.

This chapter reveals that the cultural association of cosmetic prostheses with ageing stems, at least in part, from satirical sources that paradoxically both bulwark and mock the hegemony of physical wholeness and youth. Emphasizing the extent to which preferences for youth were intertwined with demands for physical completeness, this chapter exposes how the dominance of these two physical states was undermined by stories that either ridicule the process of concealment for elderly users or present unlikely prostheticized heroes in unconventional ways. The chapter draws from genres such as the Gothic, sensation fiction, and imperial adventure fiction. It argues that, despite their differences, the depictions of ageing prosthesis users selected challenge the dominance of physical wholeness/youth by laughing at the absurd results that these demands effected.