Body Politics in the Age of Mechanical Invention: A Cultural Reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man That Was Used Up”

Abstract

In his short story "The Man That Was Used Up", American classical writer Edgar Allan Poe presents a popular figure General John A. B. C. Smith who, after having been dismembered in the Indian War, not only reconstructs himself into an amazingly fine-looking man with the help of prosthetic devices, but also gains political and socializing capitals with his war experience. As a cultural code of the particular historical moment, his assembled body not only reveals the craze for technological products, but also reflects the way the white Americans viewed the frontier conflict. The huge discrepancy between Smith's sublime body and his mutilated flesh actually becomes a perfect case with which Poe mocks the self-adulation and pompous arrogance of the political world and the fetishism of technological products in the American society.