“A Human Bundle”: The Disaggregated Other at the Fin de Siècle

Sweet, Ryan

doi:10.1353/vcr.2014.0022

Cited by 4 publications

References 5 publications

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Constructing and Complicating Physical Wholeness

Sweet

2021

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture

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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.

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Constructing and Complicating Physical Wholeness

Sweet

2021

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture

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“The Infurnal Thing”: Autonomy and Ability in Narratives of Disabling, Self-acting, and Weaponized Prostheses

Sweet

2021

Prosthetic Body Parts in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

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Focusing on the themes of agency and ability, this chapter examines the power play at work between person and prosthetic part in various nineteenth-century imaginaries. The chapter draws from mechanical and materialist understandings of the human body and attitudes to automatic machines to place literary and cultural representations within wider historical contexts pertaining to ability, autonomy, and wholeness. Exploring the extent to which artificial body parts were seen to enhance or assume the agency of the user, the chapter argues that a range of prosthesis narratives produce transgressive prosthesis users or false body parts that threaten the dominance of the physically whole. It investigates three key tropes: narratives of disabling, self-acting, and weaponized prostheses.

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Physical ‘Wholeness’ and ‘Incompleteness’ in Victorian Prosthesis Narratives

Sweet¹

2021

Literature and Medicine

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I think you had better not go to look at him. He's a dreadful object-the worst I've seen. They cut off his legs close to the trunk, his arms at the shoulders, the nose and ears. He was such a handsome fellow, too! But I tell you, sir, now he's nothing better than a human bundle-a lump of breathing, useless flesh.Ernest G. Henham, 'A Human Bundle' (1897). 1 Published in the metropolitan middle-class family magazine Temple Bar in 1897, Canadian-British author Ernest G. Henham's short story 'A Human Bundle' is a text that in hyperbolic terms perpetuates fears about physical 'loss'-anxieties central to nineteenth-century Western bodily discourse. 2 The quotation above, from a horrified medical student who has witnessed the shocking amputation of an unfortunate young man's legs, arms, nose, and ears suggests what the 'loss' of body parts meant in the nineteenth century. For the medical student, the patient is neither human nor useful but rather 'nothing better than a human bundle'. 3 The student's harsh assessment is partly justified by the egregious nature of the medical procedures undertaken, but such a response raises a series of questions about what constituted physical 'normalcy' and difference in this period, which historical factors underpinned negative attitudes to 'non-normative' bodies, and to what extent the apparent hegemony of physical 'wholeness' was complicated by literary representations.

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“A Human Bundle”: The Disaggregated Other at the Fin de Siècle

Cited by 4 publications

References 5 publications

Constructing and Complicating Physical Wholeness

Constructing and Complicating Physical Wholeness

“The Infurnal Thing”: Autonomy and Ability in Narratives of Disabling, Self-acting, and Weaponized Prostheses

Physical ‘Wholeness’ and ‘Incompleteness’ in Victorian Prosthesis Narratives

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