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

Abstract

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.