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Chapter 4 - The Dead Hand: Realism and Biomaterial in the Nineteenth-Century Novel
from Part III - The Manufactured Body: From Wollstonecraft to Stoker
Peter Boxall, University of Sussex
Book:

The Prosthetic Imagination

Published online:

18 September 2020

Print publication:

03 September 2020, pp 149-200
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Summary

This chapter focuses on the picture of the dead hand, as it recurs across the nineteenth-century novel, from Wollstonecraft to Austen to Dickens, Zola, Eliot and Melville. It suggests that the obsession with the dead hand arises from the capacity of the novel to engage with biomaterial, and to make of such material the living stuff of being. The novel enters into a conjunction with the prosthetic – with the dead hand – to give animation to our being, as it is reshaped by the forces of industrialisation. But the chapter also argues that the novel encounters a resistance, a refusal of prosthetic material to give way to the demands of mind – a refusal which is central to the operation of the prosthetic imagination.