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LITERARY DISABILITY STUDIES

Amputation in
Literature and Film
Artificial Limbs, Prosthetic Relations,
and the Semiotics of “Loss”
Edited by
Erik Grayson · Maren Scheurer
 Literary Disability Studies

Series Editors
David Bolt
Liverpool Hope University
Liverpool, UK

Elizabeth J. Donaldson
New York Institute of Technology
Old Westbury, NY, USA

Julia Miele Rodas

Bronx Community College
City University of New York
Bronx, NY, USA
Literary Disability Studies is the first book series dedicated to the explora-
tion of literature and literary topics from a disability studies perspective.
Focused on literary content and informed by disability theory, disability
research, disability activism, and disability experience, the Palgrave
Macmillan series provides a home for a growing body of advanced scholar-
ship exploring the ways in which the literary imagination intersects with
historical and contemporary attitudes toward disability. This cutting edge
interdisciplinary work includes both monographs and edited collections
(as well as focused research that does not fall within traditional monograph
length). The series is supported by an editorial board of internationally-­
recognised literary scholars specialising in disability studies:

Michael Bérubé, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature, Pennsylvania

State University, USA
G. Thomas Couser, Professor of English Emeritus, Hofstra University in
Hempstead, New York, USA
Michael Davidson, University of California Distinguished Professor,
University of California, San Diego, USA
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Ohio, USA.

For information about submitting a Literary Disability Studies book pro-

posal, please contact the series editors: David Bolt (boltd@hope.ac.uk),
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More information about this series at

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 Erik Grayson • Maren Scheurer
Editors

Amputation in
Literature and Film
Artificial Limbs, Prosthetic Relations,
and the Semiotics of “Loss”
Editors
Erik Grayson Maren Scheurer
Department of English Department of Comparative Literature
Northampton Community College Goethe University Frankfurt
Tannersville, PA, USA Frankfurt, Germany

Literary Disability Studies

ISBN 978-3-030-74376-5    ISBN 978-3-030-74377-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74377-2

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To Maryam and Nick
 Preface

The origins of this volume date back to April 2012, when Erik attended
the first annual Embodiments conference hosted by the University of
Liverpool called “Paranoia and Pain: Embodied in Psychology, Literature,
and Bioscience.” The conference, which spanned three gray, drizzly days,
brought literary scholars, medical professionals, psychologists, and aca-
demics from a variety of other disciplines together to discuss the myriad
ways in which humans seek to understand physical and psychological pain
as well as the ways in which the experience of pain enables the individual
to better understand the human condition. Despite—or, perhaps, as a
consequence of—the somber content at the heart of the conference, those
in attendance quickly congealed into a friendly community of like-minded
scholars. In conversations over coffee in the morning or over drinks at the
Rose of Mossley in the evenings, attendees would marvel over how a con-
ference dedicated to some of the least pleasant aspects of human experi-
ence could have generated such a warm and convivial atmosphere. One
popular theory that emerged out of those conversations is that a subject
such as pain attracts individuals who, as a result of having experienced pain
themselves, either directly or indirectly, tend to be empathetic and expres-
sive of compassion. Put differently, one consequence of the lived experi-
ence of pain is the desire to connect with and understand others who have
experienced pain, too.
Erik returned to Liverpool the following summer to attend the second
annual conference, “Melancholy Minds and Painful Bodies,” where, as
chance would have it, he appeared on a panel alongside Maren. Like the
previous year, those of us in attendance bonded over discussions of

vii
viii PREFACE

physical and psychological suffering that continued long after we left the
Rendall Building to take in the sights at the Royal Albert Dock or share a
meal at The Pumphouse. It was during one of those conversations that
Erik and Maren hit upon a subject that seemed well suited for the next
year’s conference, which would focus on grief: the mourning an amputee
often experiences following the removal of a limb.
While our initial foray into the subject of amputation in literature was
no more ambitious a project than putting together a panel for a confer-
ence, we quickly discovered that our choice of topic offered the potential
for a far more substantial endeavor. Often, when we would discuss our
work with colleagues, we would be met first with a bemused inquiry
about why we would have chosen to focus on amputation, and subse-
quently with an enthusiastic suggestion to look at another text in which a
character loses a limb. Two things immediately emerge from such encoun-
ters. First, the fact that the subject of amputation strikes so many of our
fellow academics as an unusual or even bizarre focus for literary scholar-
ship highlights the marginalization of the topic even among those com-
mitted to inclusive discourse in the humanities. Second, the flood of
suggested texts for us to consider indicates that, despite its seeming rel-
egation to the periphery of academic inquiry into literature and film,
amputation nevertheless figures prominently in many of the cultural arti-
facts we study.
By the time we presented our research on amputation and grief in
J.M. Coetzee and Philip Roth at the 2014 Embodiments conference,
then, we suspected that our papers marked not the conclusion of our work
on the subject but the beginning of something larger. The enthusiasm
with which our panel was received confirmed our sense that a deliberate
study of amputation in literature and film would appeal to literary scholars
and the conversations we enjoyed with our fellow conference goers ham-
mered home the notion that any such study should be discursive in nature.
As it happened, one of the conference’s keynote speakers, David Bolt,
mentioned his work as an editor with Palgrave Macmillan for their Literary
Disability Studies series. After listening to Dr. Bolt and sharing our still-­
nascent ideas for a book with him, we decided that the series would be a
good fit for our project and we set about soliciting the chapters you will
encounter in the following pages with the goal of producing the book you
now hold in your hands.
As we see it, Amputation in Literature and Film: Artificial Limbs,
Prosthetic Relations, and the Semiotics of “Loss” is a focused continuation of
 PREFACE ix

the many conversations we enjoyed at the Embodiments conferences. In

fact, several of the chapters in this volume are direct descendants of those
discussions, written by fellow attendees. While we have included commen-
taries throughout the book to highlight some of the themes we find most
interesting, we envision them as the start of a conversation rather than the
definitive word on the subject. As with any conversation, some voices in
this book are more pronounced than others, some topics are covered
when others are not. It is our hope that readers find inspiration to build
upon the discourse we begin here, to address the lacunae, and to keep the
conversation going.

Tannersville, PA, USA Erik Grayson

Frankfurt, Germany Maren Scheurer
 Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the encouragement of
the many people who have supported us over the years. In particular, we
would like to thank our parents, Linda and Vincent Grayson and Sigrun
and Joachim Scheurer; our partners, Whitney and Martin; and Peter
Grayson. We are deeply grateful to Dr. Maryam Farahani, Dr. Nick Davis,
and the Embodiments Research Group at the University of Liverpool for
bringing us together.

xi
 Contents

1 Introduction: Amputation and the Semiotics of “Loss”  1

Maren Scheurer and Erik Grayson

Part I The Politics of Amputation  19

2 “Lame Doings”: Amputation, Impotence, and

Community in The Shoemaker’s Holiday and
A Larum for London 21
Rachel Ellen Clark

3 Complicating the Semiotics of Loss: Gender, Power, and

Amputation Narratives 43
Lena Wånggren

4 Stalin’s Samovars: Disabled Veterans in (Post-)Soviet

Literature 61
Oxane Leingang

Discussion: The Politics of Amputation85

xiii
xiv Contents

Part II Amputation’s Intersections  89

5 “She Had Wept So Long and So Much on the Stumps”:

Amputation and Embodiment in “The Girl Without
Hands” 91
Miranda Corcoran

6 Defective Femininity and (Sur)Realist Empowerment:

Benito Pérez Galdós’s and Luis Buñuel’s Tristana113
Andrea Gremels

7 “Even at This Late Juncture”: Amputation, Old Age, and

Paul Rayment’s Prosthetic Family in J.M. Coetzee’s
Slow Man137
Erik Grayson

Discussion: Amputation’s Intersections155

Part III Grief and Prosthetic Relations 159

8 The Penalty in Novel and Film: Grieving with the

Vengeful Amputee161
Susan Kerns

9 “The Blunt Remnant of Something Whole”: Living

Stumps and Prosthetic Relations in Thomas Bernhard’s
Die Billigesser and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America185
Maren Scheurer

10 “But the Damage … Lasted”: Phantom Pain and

Mourning in Moritz’s Anton Reiser211
Juliane Prade-Weiss

Discussion: Grief and Prosthetic Relations233

 Contents  xv

Part IV Philosophy, Language, Disability 237

11 Zhuangzi, Amputees, and Virtue (de)239

Danesh Singh

12 Speech—Amputation—Writing: Philomela’s Notalogy257

Thomas Emmrich

13 (In)complete Amputation: Body Integrity Identity

Disorder and Maurice Blanchot289
Monika Loewy

Discussion: Philosophy, Language, Disability311

Further Reading315

Index321
 Notes on Contributors

Rachel Ellen Clark has taught British literature at Wartburg since 2011
and has directed the Scholars Program since 2018. Her research focuses
on early modern English literature—Shakespeare and his contempo-
raries—with special interests in disability studies and the history of the
book. In 2018, she was selected as a National Endowment for the
Humanities Summer Scholar and participated in the summer institute
“Global Histories of Disability” at Gallaudet University in Washington,
DC. She presents regularly at the annual conferences of the Shakespeare
Association of America and the Sixteenth Century Society. Her recent
book project, Witchcraft and Disability in Early Modern England, exam-
ines witchcraft in the contexts of early modern disability and medicine to
help us understand the phenomenon of witch persecution in new ways.
Miranda Corcoran is Lecturer in Twenty-First-Century Literature at
University College Cork, Ireland. Her research interests include Cold War
literature, genre fiction, popular fiction, sci-fi, horror, and the gothic. She
is writing a monograph on adolescence and witchcraft in American popu-
lar culture. She is also the co-editor (with Steve Gronert Ellerhoff) of
Exploring the Horror of Supernatural Fiction: Ray Bradbury’s Elliott
Family (2020).
Thomas Emmrich is a lecturer at the Department of Comparative
Literature, Goethe University, Frankfurt. He has taught at the Seminar for
Classical Philology at Ruprecht-Karls-University, Heidelberg, the
University of Bern, and the University of Luxemburg. He is the author of
Ästhetische Monsterpolitiken: Das Monströse als Figuration des eingeschloss-

xvii
xviii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

enen Ausgeschlossenen (2020). His research interests include literary the-

ory, literature and philosophy, ancient literature and its reception, poetry
and prose in German, English, and French from the eighteenth to the
twenty-first century, and the aesthetics of monstrosity and infamy.
Erik Grayson is Associate Professor of English at Northampton
Community College. Previously, he was Assistant Professor of English at
Wartburg College and visiting Assistant Professor of English at Luther
College. He has published essays on J.M. Coetzee, Walter M. Miller, Jr.,
Don DeLillo, and Jamaica Kincaid, among others.
Andrea Gremels is a research associate and lecturer at the Department of
Romance Languages and Literatures, Goethe University in Frankfurt,
Germany. Her main research interests are Francophone and Hispanic lit-
erature and culture of the twentieth century, international surrealism,
transcultural studies as well as inter- and transmedial approaches. Her first
monograph deals with exile and transculturality in contemporary
Cuban literature in Paris (Kubanische Gegenwartsliteratur in Paris
zwischen Exil und Transkulturalität, 2014). Her second monograph (in
preparation) focuses on the transnational exchanges of surrealism
between Africa, Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean in the
first half of the twentieth century. To pursue this research in Mexico
City, Havana, and Paris, she has received several travel grants and an
Alexander von Humboldt-Scholarship. In May 2019, she was elected
into the executive board of the International Society for the Study of
Surrealism (ISSS).
Susan Kerns is Associate Professor of Cinema and Television Arts at
Columbia College, Chicago. Her scholarship on conjoined twins has
appeared in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Comunicazioni
Sociali, and Nip/Tuck: Television That Gets Under Your Skin. She also
writes about feminism, film festivals, and popular culture in the Journal of
Film and Video, The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Feminism, and
The Routledge Companion to Gender and Sexuality in Comic Book Studies.
She produced the documentary Manlife, has produced or directed numer-
ous short films, and holds a PhD from the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Oxane Leingang is a senior researcher and lecturer at TU Dortmund
University. She studied German and East-Slavonic philology and
­psychology at the Universities of Frankfurt and Exeter. Her PhD thesis
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xix

dealt with the discursive arrangement of childhood memories in the

“Great Patriotic War.” She taught children’s literature at Frankfurt and at
the University of Cologne. Her academic fields of interest and her publica-
tions cover children’s literature of Enlightenment, Holocaust, German-
Russian cultural transfers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, fairy
tales, and popular culture.
Monika Loewy received her PhD from Goldsmiths, University of
London, where she has taught psychoanalysis and film and undergraduate
modules in literature. She is the author of Phantom Limbs and Body
Integrity Identity Disorder: Literary and Psychoanalytic Reflections (2019).
Juliane Prade-Weiss is Professor of Comparative Literature at Ludwig
Maximilian University, Munich. In 2019–2020 she was a European Union
Marie-Skłodowska-Curie fellow at Vienna University with the project
Complicity: A Crisis of Participation in Testimonies of Totalitarianism in
Contemporary Literatures. In 2017–2019 she was a DFG research fellow
at Yale University to complete her habilitation, published as Language of
Ruin and Consumption: On Lamenting and Complaining (2020).
Previously, she was an assistant professor at the Department of Comparative
Literature at Goethe University, Frankfurt, where she also obtained her
Dr. Phil. in Comparative Literature, with a thesis on the infantile within
the human-animal distinction in philosophical and literary texts from
antiquity to modernity, published as Sprachoffenheit: Mensch, Tier und
Kind in der Autobiographie (2013).
Maren Scheurer is a researcher and lecturer at the Department of
Comparative Literature at Goethe University Frankfurt. Her research
interests include psychoanalytic aesthetics in contemporary literature, the-
ater, and television; late nineteenth-century realism; transmediality and
transdisciplinarity; and gender and disability studies. She is the author of
Transferences: The Aesthetics and Poetics of the Therapeutic Relationship and
co-editor, with Susan Bainbrigge, of Narratives of the Therapeutic
Encounter: Psychoanalysis, Talking Therapies and Creative Practice. With
Aimee Pozorski, she serves as executive co-editor of Philip Roth Studies.
Danesh Singh teaches at the Borough of Manhattan Community College
(CUNY) and is an assistant professor at the Department of Academic
Literacy and Linguistics. He mainly teaches Critical Thinking classes. He
obtained his PhD in Philosophy in 2013 from Binghamton University
(SUNY) and has published several articles on Zhuangzi and ethics.
xx NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Lena Wånggren is a researcher and teacher of English Literature at the

University of Edinburgh. She works in the fields of nineteenth-century
literature, gender studies, and the medical humanities. Her publications
include the books Gender, Technology and the New Woman and the edited
collection Corporeality and Culture, and shorter works on literature and
medicine, gender, intersectionality, education, and social justice.
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Amputation and the Semiotics

of “Loss”

Maren Scheurer and Erik Grayson

“Forget what you know about disability”: the opening line of Viktoria
Modesta’s 2014 music video “Prototype” promises us nothing less than a
realignment of our mental categories, and, in this respect, it offers us
images of amputated and prosthetic limbs that we are seldom allowed to
see. The video is framed by an abstract dance performance in which
Modesta, an amputee who decided to have her left lower leg removed
after a long history of illness, wears a pointed, black lacquer prosthetic
spike that seems to enable rather than hinder her in executing powerful yet
graceful and strangely spider-like dance movements. The music video itself
portrays Modesta as a desirable star who is also a symbol against a politi-
cally oppressive regime. Her artificial leg appears as a bone-shaped tube

M. Scheurer (*)
Department of Comparative Literature, Goethe University Frankfurt,
Frankfurt, Germany
E. Grayson
Department of English, Northampton Community College,
Tannersville, PA, USA

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
E. Grayson, M. Scheurer (eds.), Amputation in Literature and
Film, Literary Disability Studies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74377-2_1
2 M. SCHEURER AND E. GRAYSON

light attracting insects or as an elaborate piece of crystal jewelry, and once,

we get a glimpse of the naked stump. In “Prototype,” impaired limbs and
prostheses are visibly staged and re-coded as sexually alluring, fashionable,
and enabling objects as well as symbols of power and resistance.
Modesta’s leg was damaged during birth, and she spent much of her
childhood in Latvia in hospitals. At about the age of fifteen, after the fam-
ily had relocated to London, Modesta “started thinking that her damaged
leg didn’t fit her identity. Worse, it was a reminder of years of pain and
operations done against her will. […] Five years later, armed with research
about how removing the lower part of her leg and using a prosthetic
would improve her life, a surgeon finally agreed to do it” (Saner). Modesta
became an alternative model and a performance artist in the London club
scene. In 2012, she was invited to perform as the “Snow Queen” at the
closing ceremony of the Paralympics with her “diamond-encrusted pros-
thetic” (“About”), which led to her involvement in Channel 4’s
#BornRisky project. The channel funded her video “Prototype” and had
it aired during the X Factor final, after which it garnered millions of views
online and has been featured in museum exhibitions from Boston to
Berlin. Maria Bee Christensen-Strynø observes that the video is notable
not only for its “awareness-raising message: that being born (or becom-
ing) disabled can be negotiated in creative ways of taking risks or that
bodily diversity should be considered as a location of originality,” but also
for its natural inscription of “the particularity of Modesta’s body” into
“mainstream visual tropes of pop culture” (69).
What makes Modesta’s video an intriguing example with which to open
this volume is the challenge her story and her work provides to our con-
ventional understanding of disability, and, more particularly, to the way we
perceive limb loss, artificial limbs, and amputation. The word “amputa-
tion,” as we understand it today, as the surgical “operation of cutting off
a limb or other projecting part of the body” (OED), entered the English
language in the seventeenth century, at about the same time that the
introduction of gunpowder into warfare had led to a critical increase in
limb removals over the previous century (Kirkup 1, 4). The Latin
“amputare,” or “putare,” originally referred to pruning, and it does not
appear in Roman texts to describe a surgical procedure—except for non-­
medical, punitive amputations (Kirkup 1). From its etymological origins,
we can infer that amputation has a long and complex history that is closely
tied to the history of medical progress.
 1 INTRODUCTION: AMPUTATION AND THE SEMIOTICS OF “LOSS” 3

Although there is evidence that amputations have occurred for natural

and accidental reasons since prehistoric times (Kirkup 21, 33)—as a last
resort for trapped individuals, for instance, or as a consequence of injury,
disease, or frostbite—elective medical procedures were extremely rare
before the seventeenth century (Kirkup 50). Meanwhile, the removal of
limbs for ritual, punitive, or legal reasons—as a form of punishment or
torture, ritual sacrifice or mourning—has taken place in numerous societ-
ies throughout history and up until the present time (Kirkup 35). In his
History of Limb Amputation, John Kirkup argues that, despite medical
descriptions of the procedure in antiquity, amputation was truly precipi-
tated by the advent of gunpowder and the printing press. In the case of the
former, its increasing use on the battlefield created complex wounds prone
to infection that required radical treatment. At the same time, the latter
allowed for a scientific exchange over the best procedures for treating such
injuries. The year 1517 saw the first book illustration of a medical amputa-
tion (7, 58), and many improvements of surgeons’ techniques and instru-
ments followed. The real breakthrough in treating severely injured limbs,
however, did not arrive until the discovery of general anesthesia in 1846
(68) and better means of controlling infection in the 1860s and 1870s,
which, against strong resistance from fellow physicians, were instigated by
Joseph Lister’s implementation of carbolic acid solution and Louis
Pasteur’s recommendation to sterilize surgical instruments (89–90). While
these discoveries radically reduced the mortality rates during surgery, the
use of increasingly destructive weaponry in wars, disease, and industrial
and traffic accidents augmented the numbers of individuals in need of
amputation at the end of the nineteenth and throughout the twentieth
century (92). While medical difficulties have not been solved by any
means,1 health considerations are hardly the only factors that influence
how we perceive amputation. Lifesaving as it often may be, amputation
remains an invasive procedure that many individuals and communities
around the world resist because of its radical impact on physical integ-
rity (4).
As a surgical intervention, amputation produces “a severe, sudden
impairment,” which, as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has noted of all
such sudden impairments, “is almost always experienced as a greater loss
than is a congenital or gradual disability” (14). Almost invariably coded as
“loss,” amputation is mostly seen as a tragic life event producing disability
that must be responded to with grief and readjustment. As Modesta’s
example makes clear, however, there are other ways to think about
4 M. SCHEURER AND E. GRAYSON

amputation. For her, amputation meant “[b]uilding an identity that [she]

was more comfortable with,” “a literal severing of the thing that was hold-
ing her back,” “upgrad[ing] [her] opportunities, [her] comfort, [her]
body” (Saner). Amputation may arrive suddenly, but one may also prog-
ress toward it gradually or even anticipate it; in other words, the temporal-
ity of amputation, through chronic illness or prolonged medical treatment
before and after the surgery, and the array of meanings produced by it are
not completely contained in narratives of sudden, unforeseen loss.
Our word “prosthesis” is also borrowed from Latin, via Greek, where
it denoted an “addition,” particularly in a linguistic sense. “Prosthesis”
refers both to the “replacement of defective or absent parts of the body by
artificial substitutes,” that is, the “branch of surgery” concerned with it,
and to the “artificial replacement for a part of the body” itself (OED). The
eldest surviving historical prostheses have been found in mummies, where
they were probably added as part of a ritual to ensure all their limbs would
be returned in the afterlife (Kirkup 157). Prostheses of all shapes and func-
tions have been worn following the loss of a limb throughout history, but
as the most elaborate or advanced models were often expensive and diffi-
cult to obtain, many individuals went without, or, where impossible,
resorted to sticks, crutches, or the comparatively inexpensive peg-leg
(156). Once again, wars stimulated social acceptance and technical prog-
ress in the replacement of amputated limbs. After the Napoleonic Wars,
the American Civil War, and—most decisively—World War I, impaired
veterans returned from the battlefield and desired to reenter society and
employment, increasing the need for reliable and affordable artificial limbs
(163). The concept of rehabilitation, in “the sense of a positive pro-
gramme to assist patients recovering from an injury or a major operation,”
did not, in fact, emerge until the twentieth century (168) when prostheses
became widely available and so specified and sophisticated that participa-
tion in competitive sports, robotized support, or osseointegration are now
routine considerations of prosthetic technology (166–67).
Nevertheless, potential connotations to prostheses are overwhelmingly
negative; from a foundation in defectiveness and absence to their function
as mere “substitutes” and “replacements,” prostheses remain signifiers for
loss and pain. In David Wills’s observation that prosthesis is about “noth-
ing if not placement, displacement, replacement, standing, dislodging,
substituting, setting, amputating, supplementing” (9), associations of sta-
bility are overcrowded with those of loss, disorientation, and substitution.
Prosthetics are seemingly related to the “artificial,” as opposed to the
 1 INTRODUCTION: AMPUTATION AND THE SEMIOTICS OF “LOSS” 5

more positively connoted “natural” (10), and may at first appear as a mere
metonym for that which is now gone. Through her artful prosthetic limbs,
Modesta defies such notions as well. Not only do her prostheses generate
meanings of their own, reminding us there is “as much of metaphor as
metonymy in prosthesis” (Wills 14), but they also question the artificial
limb’s function as a mere replacement limb. Modesta’s prosthetic limbs
were made by the Alternative Limb Project, which produces artful pros-
thetics for amputees. Company founder Sophie de Oliveira Barata first
sought to make prostheses “as realistic-looking as possible,” but after a
while, she started thinking that “there might be other ways of addressing
the space, rather than going for the obvious replacement. Why not turn it
on its head and see the limb as a medium to express oneself?” (Saner).
Modesta recalls that “regard[ing] the leg as a fashion item and an art proj-
ect” was “fun and exciting” but proved very challenging to others: “Some
had never stood next to a person with a prosthetic limb and the ideas they
might have of what an amputee might look or act like is, in most cases,
negative. […] [W]hen the limb is attached and I’m walking with it in my
full composure it has a power that is beyond something that can be
described” (altlimbpro).
We certainly do not want to suggest that Modesta’s statements and
performance represent typical experiences of people with disabilities, but
they do shed light on the great diversity of experiences and meanings allo-
cated to and produced by amputation and prosthetics. Amputation does
create sites of loss and grief, but it is also a multifaceted relational experi-
ence that cannot be contained in a single narrative, just as prosthetics are
not mere functional replacements but generate a variety of physical sensa-
tions, emotional responses, and interpretations of their own, in people
with and without disabilities. The aim of this volume is to explore this
multitude of narratives and meanings through a wide variety of canonical
as well as lesser-known literary texts and films from different historical,
cultural, and linguistic traditions.
When we first embarked upon this project of investigating amputation
in the arts, we were surprised how rarely the subject was tackled in critical
writing and assumed we had hit upon a potentially rich, but marginal topic
within literary and filmic history. When we told colleagues about our idea,
however, their reactions almost invariably transitioned from initial aston-
ishment and dismissal to excitement and an acknowledgment of the
importance of the topic after a few moments of deliberation. Upon
broaching the subject, nearly everyone found themselves reminded of yet
6 M. SCHEURER AND E. GRAYSON

another text that dealt with amputation and prosthetic devices. In their
landmark study Narrative Prosthesis, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder
describe a similar experience when they started to talk about their research.
While images of disabled people are pervasive throughout many national
literatures, we tend to “screen them out of our minds” (51). In just this
way, we quickly realized that the subject of amputation is not just not
marginal, but pervasive through some of our most canonical literary
texts—Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary,
and Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace among them. To provide a glimpse—
but certainly not a comprehensive overview—of the wealth of literary and
filmic works that address amputation, we have included a “Further
Reading” list in this volume that will hopefully prove surprising and inspir-
ing in the pursuit of further research into the much-neglected field of
amputation narratives.
In these and many other texts, the procedure of amputation as well as
its consequences often function as multifaceted “narrative prosthes[e]s”
(Mitchell and Snyder 47), mobilizing and stabilizing narrative plots and
serving as metaphors for a variety of individual, political, and social issues.
It seems patently true that “the scar, the limp, the missing limb, or the
obvious prosthesis—calls for a story” (Couser 457). The politics of such
storytelling are fraught with complications, however. While social encoun-
ters with a person with an impairment, as David Bolt highlights, do indeed
call for a story in which the person without an impairment often “assumes
a kind of authorship, indeed authority”—by assigning a disability story to
the impaired that “bolsters the normate subject position” (291)—aca-
demic encounters are still determined by what Bolt has called “critical
avoidance”: “it is often the case that the topic of disability is avoided, and
generally so that any engagements are not informed by disability studies”
(294). It is indeed striking that for most of the texts studied in this volume
it is difficult to find critical readings that engage with amputation other
than as an abstract signifier, and that—despite many individual insightful
readings of amputees in literature and film and medical or cultural histo-
ries of amputation and prosthetics2—no monograph or edited collection
has so far focused on amputation as a specific experience of impairment
and disability in literature and film.
This critical gap is particularly striking when we take account of the
prominent role that the idea of “prosthesis” has long played in the human-
ities within and outside disability discourse (Hall 64). From Sigmund
Freud’s impression that humankind’s attempt to become “a kind of
 1 INTRODUCTION: AMPUTATION AND THE SEMIOTICS OF “LOSS” 7

prosthetic God” (42) through scientific and technological advance to

Marshall McLuhan’s “Extensions of Man,” media and technology have
long been conceptualized as prosthetic devices—notions that now prolif-
erate in posthumanist theory and science fiction. Within disability studies,
pervasive and useful concepts like Mitchell and Snyder’s “narrative pros-
thesis” also make use of the metaphorical underpinnings of prosthetics to
develop a literary and cultural theory. But such figurative employments of
prosthetics may be problematic, as Kathleen Tolan’s “We Are Not a
Metaphor” makes clear. Metaphors may reinforce fetishization and alien-
ate “discussions from embodied, material experiences” (Hall 65). Vivian
Sobchack, for instance, points out that the

literal and material ground of the metaphor has been largely forgotten, if
not disavowed. That is, the primary context in which “the prosthetic” func-
tions literally rather than figuratively has been left behind—as has the experi-
ence and agency of those who, like myself, actually use prostheses without
feeling “posthuman” and who, moreover, are often startled to read about
the hidden powers that their prostheses apparently exercise both in the
world and in the imaginations of cultural theorists. (20)

Sobchack does not dismiss metaphor in general, but she dismisses a meta-
phorical and metonymical reading of prosthetics that forgets about or
silences its material grounding and uses prostheses as signifiers for disrup-
tion and an opposition between body and technology, when amputees’
actual (and quite mundane) experiences are often different and more
ambiguous than that (23–27). If they allow for a thorough engagement
with amputation and artificial limbs, narrative and metaphorical thinking,
for all their potential pitfalls, may not only be unavoidable but also pro-
duce creative responses to the challenges of disability (Hall 38). Precisely
because prostheses have become such prominent metaphors, we believe it
is important to study their underpinnings—and return to the “dynamic,”
“situated,” “ambiguous” and “graded” experiences of amputation
(Sobchack 27) that often (though not always and not exclusively) create
the necessity for a prosthetic device. A more detailed analysis of amputa-
tion in literature and film might deepen our understanding not only of the
material experience of impairment and disability but also of the critical
practices in the humanities that rely on the prosthetic metaphor.
In this volume, we are therefore opting for a variety of different and
interdisciplinary approaches to disability that engage critically with the
8 M. SCHEURER AND E. GRAYSON

historical, political, material, relational, and metaphorical texts and sub-

texts created by amputation. Through critical dialogue, rather than critical
avoidance, we hope to explore a range of questions that are raised by
amputation as a specific form of disability experience. The dialectics of
“loss” and “gain,” disability and ability, are particularly highlighted
through the surgical practice of amputation and prosthetic rehabilitation,
where loss and gain, acquired dis/abilities and other transformations, are
“written on the body,” to borrow Jeanette Winterson’s phrase. Recent
voices in disability theory have often criticized the field’s tendency to pro-
mote a mind-body-dualism, in highlighting disability over impairment,
social constructs and abstract theory over the material realities of the body
(Hall 26, 67). Tobin Siebers, for instance, has taken critics to task who
“mythologize disability as an advantage”: “Frequently, the objects that
people with disabilities live with—prostheses, wheelchairs, braces, and
other devices—are viewed not as potential sources of pain but as marvel-
lous examples of the plasticity of the human form or as devices of empow-
erment” (63). Clearly, the challenge is to attain an integrated understanding
of dis/ability, in which mind and body, metaphor and materiality, theory
and politics are no longer pitted against each other but understood as
interrelated and interacting aspects of our embodied experience of
the world.
The four thematic parts of this volume represent four different, yet
interconnected, forays into these questions. The first, “The Politics of
Amputation,” considers the socio-political implications of amputation and
the (dis)empowerment of the amputee. The second, “Amputation’s
Intersections,” brings together chapters examining the intersection of
amputation with sexuality, gender, and age. The third part, “Grief and
Prosthetic Relations,” explores the ways in which the processes of mourn-
ing over and grieving for an amputated limb affect interpersonal relation-
ships for amputees and those close to them. Finally, the fourth part,
“Philosophy, Language, Disability,” offers interdisciplinary engagements
with concepts like bodily integrity, Otherness, and authenticity that plague
discourses around amputation and prosthetic limbs. In light of our dia-
logic approach, we close each part with a brief essay discussing common
threads, points of debate, and open questions that connect the chapters
and may provide the ground for further comparative research into the
problems highlighted by the scholarship collected here.
Modesta’s “Prototype” can be read productively along these four
critical avenues, and we will briefly sketch such a reading to expand upon
 1 INTRODUCTION: AMPUTATION AND THE SEMIOTICS OF “LOSS” 9

the ideas that drive our thematic parts and demonstrate how they, too, are
necessarily interconnected. Historical and political implications
enter Modesta’s video from the start. The narrative sequence begins with
a young girl watching television in what seems to be a 1940s setting. On
the television screen, a superhero cartoon version of Modesta chases a
menacing shadow, which she defeats with a kick of her prosthetic spike.
The girl, inspired, rips out the leg of one of her dolls and reenacts
Modesta’s defiant moves, only to be stopped by her worried mother. We
soon understand that, in the world we are shown, people invest Modesta
with the power of resistance and diversity. Modesta herself is eventually
arrested by the fictional regime, whose officials are reminiscent of early
twentieth-century fascist orderlies, but she remains defiant even through
interrogation, using her crystal prosthesis to redirect and weaponize the
laser beams that are supposed to restrain her. In this way, the video appar-
ently partakes in a tradition that Mitchell and Snyder have highlighted: the
use of disability as “a metaphorical signifier of social […] collapse” (47).
Modesta, however, reverses such metaphorical structures in that her video
does not figure disability as a marker of the effects of an oppressive regime,
but, instead, as a metaphor of resistance. And while such metaphorical
readings have usually been seen to detract from a political reading of dis-
ability itself (Garland-Thomson 9–10), Modesta’s metaphor returns us to
disability: it is ultimately a message about the right to be different within
a broadly normate culture. In other words, Modesta is not using disability
as a metaphor for historical or political developments, but (fictional) his-
tory as a metaphor for disability politics.
“The Politics of Amputation” addresses these entanglements between
historical, political, and metaphorical interpretation by situating the semi-
otics of loss in their historical contexts. The chapters in this part are not
seeking to address amputation as a signifier for history, but look instead at
disabled literary characters in history, and how their very embeddedness in
a historical and political moment inevitably creates new meanings and new
power relations within established structures of class, gender, race or eth-
nicity, and disability. Rachel Ellen Clark, in “‘Lame Doings’: Amputation,
Impotence, and Community in The Shoemaker’s Holiday and A Larum for
London” takes us to sixteenth-century England and its emerging discourse
of disability. Rather than figuring disability merely as “monstrosity” or a
sign of moral degeneracy, the plays Clark discusses turn to disability as a
signifier of middle-class powerlessness in the context of wartime experi-
ence and male community. Lena Wånggren’s “Complicating the Semiotics
10 M. SCHEURER AND E. GRAYSON

of Loss: Gender, Power, and Amputation Narratives” presents another

explicitly politicized and historical reading of late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century literature and film, arguing that power, control, race,
and gender are intricately linked in amputation narratives—shedding light
on the cultural and political significance of amputation that has often
been overlooked in readings that understand it primarily as a symbolic
expression of castration. In “Stalin’s Samovars: Disabled Veterans in
(Post-)Soviet Literature,” Oxane Leingang chronicles the treatment of
invalid war veterans in the Soviet Union through a reading of three select
(auto)biographical writings, highlighting the paradoxical role of the
amputee veteran in Soviet commemoration politics between hero cult and
stigmatization.
Inevitably, these historical readings have also paid attention to the
intersections of disability with other categories such as gender and age. It
is by now common critical fare that “disability as a category is entangled
with aging” (Gallop 5), and that the individual experiences and cultural
meanings of disability are radically different depending on class, race, eth-
nic and cultural background, gender, and sexuality. The paradoxes created
by these entanglements, however, still need unpacking. Amputation, in
particular, has been symbolically linked to castration and genital mutila-
tion, which suggests that the trajectory of the amputee is easily readable:
amputation, like aging, signals a loss of social and sexual capital and, like
womanhood, suggests effeminization. Hulga of Flannery O’Connor’s
“Good Country People,” for instance, who has lost her leg due to a hunt-
ing accident, is viewed by her mother as someone without any prospects
in life and love, and what appears to be an attempt at seduction by the
young Bible salesman who visits their house turns out to be a ploy to steal
her prosthetic leg and assert his superiority (194). This formula, however,
disguises a number of other meanings created by amputation related to
care, desire, and empowerment that cannot be easily mapped onto a
straightforward narrative of decline. Garland-Thomson, moreover, has
highlighted how disability is a paradoxical part of how Western culture
defines femininity: “Seen as the opposite of the masculine figure, but also
imagined as the antithesis of the normal woman, the figure of the disabled
female is thus ambiguously positioned both inside and outside the cate-
gory of woman” (29). The disabled woman is thus a recurrent symbol of
womanhood per se, but still often presented as unwomanly and desexual-
ized, a pattern against which Modesta’s video launches another strategic
attack. Modesta appears highly sexualized and even “hyper-feminiz[ed]”
 1 INTRODUCTION: AMPUTATION AND THE SEMIOTICS OF “LOSS” 11

(Christensen-Strynø 70), not despite, but because of her prosthesis, and

the video shows her in intimate acts with a man and a woman. It is perhaps
significant that it is during this moment of intimacy that the audience is
allowed a glance at her naked stump, to counter a fetishization of the pros-
thesis and confront the reality of her amputated limb at the very same time
that her femininity and sexuality are performed for us. Modesta rejects the
idea “that people with a disability can’t be alluring” and explains that this
is why in the video she “made every point of pushing [her] sexuality to the
level that [she’s] comfortable with” (Saner). As a result of the paradoxical
entanglements between disability, sexuality, and gender, however, it
appears that “[a]t one and the same time, disability and gender seem to be
stabilized and destabilized through the stylized staging of bodily particu-
larity” (Christensen-Strynø 70), and that, as an audience, it is difficult for
us to decide whether Modesta’s portrayal escapes objectification or par-
ticipates in confirming stereotypical assumptions about gender and
sexuality.
In “‘She Had Wept So Long and So Much on the Stumps’: Amputation
and Embodiment in ‘The Girl Without Hands,’” Miranda Corcoran turns
to fairy tales to unravel some of those contradictions. The removal of the
hands of the female protagonist in the fairy tale “The Girl Without Hands”
serves to reflect anxieties about womanhood as lack, about women’s
abject, leaky bodies, and their purported animal nature. In Corcoran’s
reading, amputation appears as neither liberating nor constraining, but as
a vehicle to navigate the complexities of embodied womanhood, especially
for female storytellers and listeners. Andrea Gremels’s “Defective
Femininity and (Sur)Realist Empowerment” looks at Benito Pérez
Galdós’s Tristana and Luis Buñuel’s film adaptation of the novel to con-
trast their differing approaches to the representation of amputation and its
links to femininity. In nineteenth-century Spanish society, disability con-
firms rather than creates “defective femininity,” and despite Galdós’s and
Buñuel’s efforts to stage a critique of contemporaneous gender politics
through Tristana’s response to the loss of her leg, their views of potential
empowerment remain bleak. Erik Grayson, in “‘Even at This Late
Juncture’: Amputation, Old Age, and Paul Rayment’s Prosthetic Family in
J.M. Coetzee’s Slow Man,” focuses on the gerontological implications of
amputation and their influence on self-understanding. Paul’s sudden and
intense desire for fatherhood in the aftermath of his surgery highlights the
complex entanglements of age, masculinity, and the need for human
connection.
12 M. SCHEURER AND E. GRAYSON

These deliberations also raise questions about the relatedness and

relationality of disability more generally. Can we think about disability
outside of human relationships? How does disability change these
relationships? And does art allow us to develop empathy with the disabled,
through “imaginative identification” (Hall 35), as some have claimed?
Modesta’s “Prototype” provides an ironic reflection on these questions,
given that it reverses a long history of negative responses to disability in
many cultures through the portrayal of a widely revered and imitated
amputee. Amputation may offer a particularly useful entry point into these
questions because it links embodied with relational experience: many
amputees describe their experience of grieving for a lost limb as similar to
grieving for a lost loved one. In Guy de Maupassant’s “En mer,” the
amputated hand is even given its own ritual burial (744). Grief and
mourning may thus be key emotions to think through the embodied pain
and suffering amputation may entail without necessarily reducing them to
dismissals of a more wide-ranging and enabling experience of disability.
They may also offer new ways of thinking about the audience’s relationship
to disabled characters in literature and film, to take into account not just
the allure of the grotesque and the exotic, but also more complex emotional
and ambivalent entanglements like empathy, abjection, and shared
mourning.
Susan Kerns’s “The Penalty in Novel and Film: Grieving with the
Vengeful Amputee” tackles those questions in examining how the process
of adaptation of Gouverneur Morris’s 1913 pulp novel into a Wallace
Worsley film starring Lon Chaney works to increase the audience’s empa-
thy and allows for shared grieving with a character that might otherwise
fulfill the stereotype of the “monstrous amputee.” In “‘The Blunt Remnant
of Something Whole’: Living Stumps and Prosthetic Relations in Thomas
Bernhard’s Die Billigesser and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America,”
Maren Scheurer explores the ways in which the two texts use the point of
view of the non-disabled character to address the emotions disability
arouses in others, present their reflection on audience response, and
develop new imaginaries for prosthetic relations through mourning and
love. Juliane Prade-Weiss, in “‘But the Damage … Lasted’: Phantom Pain
and Mourning in Moritz’s Anton Reiser,” engages with a curious case of
an averted amputation with painful consequences. Prade-Weiss uses this
occurrence in Karl Philipp Moritz’s autobiographical novel as a starting
point to investigate the relationality of the self in autofiction, the roles of
pain and wounds in self-formation, and the ways in which unacknowledged
Another random document with
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shoes, stockings, and underclothes are comparatively unknown.
Only upon dress-up occasions does a man or woman put on
slippers.
The cooking and housekeeping are done entirely by the women.
The chief food is a coarse bread made of corn or millet baked in
thick cakes. This is broken up and dipped into a kind of a bean stew
seasoned with salt, pepper, and onions. The ordinary peasant
seldom has meat, for it is only the rich who can afford mutton or
beef. At a big feast on the occasion of a wedding, a farming nabob
sometimes brings in a sheep which has been cooked whole. It is
eaten without forks, and is torn limb from limb, pieces being cut out
by the guests with their knives.
 Next to the market where sugar cane is sold is the “Superb Mosque,” built by
Sultan Hassan nearly 600 years ago. Besides being a centre for religious
activities, it is also a gathering place for popular demonstrations and political
agitation.
 Cairo is the largest city on the African continent, and one of the capitals of the
Mohammedan world. Its flat-roofed buildings are a yellowish-white, with the towers
and domes of hundreds of mosques rising above them.

Of late Egypt has begun to raise vegetables for Europe. The fast
boats from Alexandria to Italy carry green stuff, especially onions, of
which the Nile valley is now exporting several million dollars’ worth
per annum. Some of these are sent to England, and others to Austria
and Germany.
As for tobacco, Egypt is both an exporter and importer. “Egyptian”
cigarettes are sold all over the world, but Egypt does not raise the
tobacco of which they are made. Its cultivation has been forbidden
for many years, and all that is used is imported from Turkey, Greece,
and Bosnia. About four fifths of it comes from Turkey.
Everyone in Egypt who can afford it smokes. The men have pipes
of various kinds, and of late many cigarettes have been coming into
use. A favourite smoke is with a water pipe, the vapour from the
burning tobacco being drawn by means of a long tube through a
bowl of water upon which the pipe sits, so that it comes cool into the
mouth.
The chicken industry of Egypt is worth investigation by our
Department of Agriculture. Since the youth of the Pyramids, these
people have been famous egg merchants and the helpful hen is still
an important part of their stock. She brings in hundreds of thousands
of dollars a year, for her eggs form one of the items of national
export. During the last twelve months enough Egyptian eggs have
been shipped across the Mediterranean to England and other parts
of Europe to have given one to every man, woman, and child in the
United States. Most of them went to Great Britain.
The Egyptians, moreover, had incubators long before artificial egg
hatching was known to the rest of the world. There is a hatchery
near the Pyramids where the farmers trade fresh eggs for young
chicks at two eggs per chick, and there is another, farther down the
Nile valley, which produces a half million little chickens every
season. It is estimated that the oven crop of chickens amounts to
thirty or forty millions a year, that number of little fowls being sold by
the incubator owners when the baby chicks are about able to walk.
Most of our incubators are of metal and many are kept warm by oil
lamps. Those used here are one-story buildings made of sun-dried
bricks. They contain ovens which are fired during the hatching
seasons. The eggs are laid upon cut straw in racks near the oven,
and the firing is so carefully done that the temperature is kept just
right from week to week. The heat is not gauged by the thermometer,
but by the judgment and experience of the man who runs the
establishment. A fire is started eight or ten days before the eggs are
put in, and from that time on it is not allowed to go out until the
hatching season is over. The eggs are turned four times a day while
hatching. Such establishments are cheaply built, and so arranged
that it costs almost nothing to run them. One that will hatch two
hundred thousand chickens a year can be built for less than fifty
dollars, while for about a dollar and a half per day an experienced
man can be hired to tend the fires, turn the eggs, and sell the
chickens.
 CHAPTER VI
THE PROPHET’S BIRTHDAY

Stand with me on the Hill of the Citadel and take a look over Cairo.
We are away up over the river Nile, and far above the minarets of
the mosques that rise out of the vast plain of houses below. We are
at a height as great as the tops of the Pyramids, which stand out
upon the yellow desert off to the left. The sun is blazing and there is
a smoky haze over the Nile valley, but it is not dense enough to hide
Cairo. The city lying beneath us is the largest on the African
continent and one of the mightiest of the world. It now contains about
eight hundred thousand inhabitants; and in size is rapidly
approximating Heliopolis and Memphis in the height of their ancient
glory.
Of all the Mohammedan cities of the globe, Cairo is growing the
fastest. It is more than three times as big as Damascus and twenty
times the size of Medina, where the Prophet Mohammed died. The
town covers an area equal to fifty quarter-section farms; and its
buildings are so close together that they form an almost continuous
structure. The only trees to be seen are those in the French quarter,
which lies on the outskirts.
The larger part of the city is of Arabian architecture. It is made up
of flat-roofed, yellowish-white buildings so crowded along narrow
streets that they can hardly be seen at this distance. Here and there,
out of the field of white, rise tall, round stone towers with galleries
about them. They dominate the whole city, and under each is a
mosque, or Mohammedan church. There are hundreds of them in
Cairo. Every one has its worshippers, and from every tower, five
times a day, a shrill-voiced priest calls the people to prayers. There
is a man now calling from the Mosque of Sultan Hasan, just under
us. The mosque itself covers more than two acres, and the minaret
is about half as high as the Washington Monument. So delighted
was Hasan with the loveliness of this structure that when it was
finished he cut off the right hand of the architect so that it would be
impossible for him to design another and perhaps more beautiful
building. Next it is another mosque, and all about us we can see
evidences that Mohammedanism is by no means dead, and that
these people worship God with their pockets as well as with their
tongues.
In the Alabaster Mosque, which stands at my back, fifty men are
now praying, while in the courtyard a score of others are washing
themselves before they go in to make their vows of repentance to
God and the Prophet. Not far below me I can see the Mosque El-
Azhar, which has been a Moslem university for more than a
thousand years, and where something like ten thousand students
are now learning the Koran and Koranic law.
Here at Cairo I have seen the people preparing to take their
pilgrimage to Mecca, rich and poor starting out on that long journey
into the Arabian desert. Many go part of the way by water. The ships
leaving Alexandria and Suez are crowded with pilgrims and there is
a regular exodus from Port Sudan and other places on this side of
the Red Sea. They go across to Jidda and there lay off their costly
clothing before they make their way inland, each clad only in an
apron with a piece of cloth over the left shoulder. Rich and poor
dress alike. Many of the former carry gifts and other offerings for the
sacred city. Such presents cost the Egyptian government alone a
quarter of a million dollars a year; for not only the Khedive but the
Mohammedan rulers of the Sudan send donations. The railroad
running from far up the Nile to the Red Sea makes special rates to
pilgrimage parties.
Yet I wonder whether this Mohammedanism is not a religion of the
lips rather than of the heart. These people are so accustomed to
uttering prayers that they forget the sense. The word God is heard
everywhere in the bazaars. The water carrier, who goes about with a
pigskin upon his back, jingling his brass cups to announce his
business, cries out: “May God recompense me!” and his customer
replies, as he drinks, by giving him a copper in the name of the Lord.
The lemonade peddler, who carries a glass bottle as big as a four-
gallon crock, does the same, and I venture to say that the name of
the Deity is uttered here more frequently than in any other part of the
world. It is through this custom of empty religious formulas that I am
able to free myself of the beggars of the city. I have learned two Arab
words: “Allah yatik,” which mean: “May God give thee enough and to
spare.” When a beggar pesters me I say these words gently. He
looks upon me in astonishment, then touches his forehead in a polite
Mohammedan salute and goes away.
On my second visit to Egypt I was fortunate in being in Cairo on
the birthday of the Prophet. It was a feast day among the
Mohammedans, and at night there was a grand religious celebration
at the Alabaster Mosque which Mehemet Ali, that Napoleon of Egypt,
built on the Citadel above Cairo. Its minarets, overlooking the Nile
valley, the great deserts and the vast city of Cairo, blazed with light,
and from them the cry of the muezzins sounded shrill on the dusky
air: “Allah is great! There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is the
Prophet of Allah! Come to worship! Allah is great! There is no God
but Allah!”
As this call reverberated through the city, Mohammedans of all
classes started for the Citadel. Some came in magnificent turnouts,
bare-legged, gaudily dressed syces with wands in their hands
running in front of them to clear the way. Some came upon donkeys.
Some moved along in groups of three or four on foot. The Khedive
came with the rest, soldiers with drawn swords going in front of his
carriage and a retinue of cavalry following behind.
The Alabaster Mosque covers many acres. It has a paved marble
court, as big as a good-sized field, around which are cloisters. This is
roofed with the sky, and in the midst of it is a great marble fountain
where the worshippers bathe their feet and hands before they go in
to pray. The mosque is at the back of this court, facing Mecca. Its
many domes rise to a great height and its minarets seem to pierce
the sky. It is built of alabaster, but its exterior has become worn and
pitted by the sands of the desert, which have been blown against its
walls until it has nothing of the grandeur which it must have shown
when its founder worshipped within it.
 The interior, however, was wonderfully beautiful that night, when
its gorgeous decorations were shown off by the thousands of lights
of this great service. Under the gaslight and lamplight the tinsel
which during the day shocks the taste was softened and beautified.
The alabaster of the walls became as pure as Mexican onyx, and the
rare Persian rugs that lay upon the floor took on a more velvety tint.
See it all again with me. In the eye of your mind cover an acre field
with the richest of oriental rugs; erect about it walls of pure white
alabaster with veins as delicate as those of the moss agate; let these
walls run up for hundreds of feet; build galleries around them and
roof the whole with great domes in which are windows of stained
glass; hang lamps by the thousands from the ceiling, place here and
there an alabaster column. Now you have some idea of this mosque
as it looked on the night of Mohammed’s birthday.
You must, however, add the worshippers to the picture. Thousands
of oriental costumes; turbans of white, black, and green; rich gowns
and sober, long-bearded, dark faces, shine out under the lights in
every part of the building. Add likewise the mass of Egyptian soldiers
in gold lace and modern uniforms, with red fezzes on their heads,
and the hundreds of noble Egyptians in European clothes. There are
no shoes in the assemblage, and the crowd moves about on the
rugs in bare feet or stockings.
What a babel of sounds goes up from the different parts of the
building, and how strange are the sights! Here a dozen old men
squat on their haunches, facing each other, and rock back and forth
as they recite passages of the Koran. Here is a man worshipping all
alone; there is a crowd of long-haired, wild-eyed ascetics with faces
of all shades of black, yellow, and white. They are so dirty and
emaciated they make one think of the hermits of fiction. They stand
in a ring and go through the queerest of antics to the weird music of
three great tambourines and two drums played by worshippers quite
as wild looking as themselves. It is a religious gymnastic show, the
horrible nature of which cannot be described upon paper.
When I first entered the mosque, these Howling Dervishes were
squatted on the floor, moving their bodies up and down in unison,
and grunting and gasping as though the whole band had been
attacked with the colic. A moment later they arose and began to bob
their heads from one side to the other until I thought their necks
would be dislocated by the jerks they gave them. They swung their
ears nearly down to their shoulders. The leader stood in the centre,
setting the time to the music. Now he bent over so that his head was
almost level with his knees, then snapped his body back to an erect
position. The whole band did likewise, keeping up this back-breaking
motion for fifteen minutes. All the time they howled out “Allah, Allah!”
Their motions increased in wildness. With every stoop the music
grew louder and faster. They threw off their turbans, and their long
hair, half matted, now brushed the floor as they bent down in front,
now cut the air like whips as they threw themselves back. Their eyes
began to protrude, one man frothed at the mouth. At last they
reached such a state of fanatical ecstasy that not for several minutes
after the leader ordered them to stop, were they able to do so. The
Howling Dervishes used to cut themselves in their rites and often
they fall down in fits in their frenzy. They believe that such actions
are passports to heaven.
 A great occasion in Cairo is the sending of a new gold-embroidered carpet to the
sanctuary in Mecca, there to absorb holiness at the shrine of the Prophet. The old
carpet is brought back each year, and its shreds are distributed among the
Faithful.
 The mosque of the Citadel in Cairo was built of alabaster by Mehemet Ali, the
“Napoleon of Egypt.” When Mohammed’s birthday is celebrated, its halls and
courts are choked with thousands of Moslem worshippers and are the scene of
fanatical religious exercises.

In another part of the room was a band of Whirling Dervishes,

who, dressed in high sugar-loaf hats and long white gowns, whirled
about in a ring, with their arms outstretched, going faster and faster,
until their skirts stood out from their waists like those of a circus
performer mounted on a bareback steed, as she dances over the
banners and through the hoops.
There were Mohammedans of all sects in the mosque, each going
through his own pious performances without paying any attention to
the crowds that surrounded him. In his religious life the Mussulman
is a much braver man than the Christian. At the hours for prayer he
will flop down on his knees and touch his head on the ground in the
direction of Mecca, no matter who are his companions or what his
surroundings. He must take off his shoes before praying, and I saw
yesterday in the bazaars of Cairo a man clad in European clothes
who was praying in his little box-like shop with his stocking feet
turned out toward the street, which was just then full of people. In the
heel of each stocking there was a hole as big as a dollar, and the
bare skin looked out at the crowds.
The Moslems of Egypt, like those elsewhere, have their fast days,
during which, from sunrise to sunset, they do not allow a bit of food
nor a drop of water to touch their lips. Some of them carry the fast to
such an extent that they will not even swallow their saliva, and in this
dry climate their thirst must be terrible. The moment the cannon
booms out the hour of sunset, however, they dash for water and
food, and often gorge themselves half the night. You may see a man
with a cigarette in his hand waiting until the sun goes down in order
that he may light it, or another holding a cup of water ready while he
listens for the sound of the cannon. This fasting is very severe upon
the poor people of Egypt, who have to work all day without eating.
The rich often stay up for the whole night preceding a fast day, and
by going to bed toward morning they are able to sleep the day
through and get up in time for a big meal after sunset.
The poor are the best Mohammedans, and many of the more
faithful are much alarmed at the laxity in religious duty that comes
through contact with Europeans. A missionary friend told me of a
Moslem sheik who was offered a glass of cognac by a brother
believer on a fast day. Shortly after this he met my friend and spoke
of the incident, saying: “I don’t know what we are coming to. Good
Mohammedans think they can drink without sinning, and this man
laughed when I told him it was fast day and said that fasts were for
common people, and that religion was not of much account, anyhow.
We have many infidels among us, and it seems to me that the world
is in a very bad way.”
The Moslems have many doctrines worthy of admiration and the
morals of the towns of Egypt which have not been affected by
European civilization are, I am told, far better than those of Cairo or
Alexandria. A traveller to a town on the Red Sea, which is purely
Mohammedan, says that the place has had no litigation for years,
and there is no drunkenness or disorder. The people move on in a
quiet, simple way, with their sheik settling all their troubles.
Mohammedan Cairo is quite as orderly as the part in which the
nobility and the Europeans live. It contains the bazaars and the old
buildings of the Arabian part of the city, and is by all odds the most
interesting section.
 CHAPTER VII
IN THE BAZAARS OF CAIRO

Cairo is the biggest city in Africa. It is larger than St. Louis and one
of the most cosmopolitan cities in the Orient. The Christians and the
Mohammedans here come together, and the civilizations of the East
and the West touch each other. The modern part of Cairo has put on
the airs of European capitals. It has as wide streets as Paris, and a
park, full of beautiful flowers and all varieties of shrubs and trees, lies
in its very centre. Here every night the military bands play European
and American airs, and veiled Mohammedan women walk about with
white-faced French or Italian babies, of which they are the nurses.
People from every part of the world listen to the music. The
American jostles the Englishman while the German and the
Frenchman scowl at each other; the Greek and the Italian move
along side by side, as they did in the days when this country was
ruled by Rome, and now and then you see an old Turk in his turban
and gown, or a Bedouin Arab, or a white-robed, fair-faced heathen
from Tunis.
The European section of Cairo now has magnificent hotels. It is
many a year since the foreign traveller in Egypt has had to eat with
his fingers, or has seen a whole sheep served up to him by his
Egyptian host as used to be the case. To-day the food is the same
as that you get in Paris, and is served in the same way. One can buy
anything he wants in European Cairo, from a gas-range to a glove-
buttoner, and from a set of diamond earrings to a pair of shoestrings.
Yesterday I had a suit of clothes made by an English tailor, and I
drive about every day in an American motor car. There are, perhaps,
fifty thousand Europeans living in the city, and many American
visitors have learned the way to this great winter resort. The bulk of
the Europeans are French and Italian, and the Mouski, one of the
main business streets, is lined for a mile with French and Italian
shops. There are thousands of Greeks, and hundreds of Jews from
Palestine, the states of southern Europe, and Asia Minor. One sees
every type of Caucasian moving about under dark red fezzes and
dressed in black clothes with coats buttoned to the chin.
The foreign part of Cairo is one of great wealth. There are
mansions and palaces here that would be called handsome in the
suburbs of New York, and property has greatly risen in value. Many
of the finest houses are owned by Greeks, whose shrewd brains are
working now as in the classic days. The Greeks look not unlike us
and most of them talk both English and French. They constitute the
money aristocracy of Alexandria, and many of the rich Greek
merchants of that city have palatial winter homes here. As I have
said, they are famed as bankers and are the note-shavers of Egypt.
They lend money at high rates of interest, and I am told that perhaps
one fifth of the lands of the country belong to them. They have
bought them in under mortgages to save their notes. The lower
classes of the Greeks are the most turbulent of Egypt’s population.
 FROM CAIRO TO KISUMU

Embraces the right shoulder of Africa which for centuries withstood the attempts
of rulers and traders to establish their dominion over the continent

The tourist who passes through Cairo and stays at one of the big
hotels is apt to think that the city is rapidly becoming a Christian one.
As he drives over asphalt streets lined with the fine buildings of the
European quarter, it seems altogether English and French. If he is
acquainted with many foreigners he finds them living in beautiful
villas, or in apartment houses like those of our own cities. He does
his shopping in modern stores and comes to the conclusion that the
Arab element is passing away.
 This is not so. Cairo is a city of the Egyptians. Not one tenth of its
inhabitants are Christians and it is the hundreds of thousands of
natives who make up the life blood of this metropolis. They are
people of a different world from ours, as we can see if we go down
for a stroll through their quarters. They do business in different ways
and trade much as they have been trading for generations. Their
stores are crowded along narrow streets that wind this way and that
until one may lose himself in them. Nearly every store is a factory,
and most of the goods offered are made in the shop where they are
sold.
Although the foreigner and his innovations are in evidence, native
Cairo is much the same now in characters, customs, and dress as it
was in the days of Haroun Al Raschid. Here the visionary Alnaschar
squats in his narrow, cell-like store, with his basket of glass before
him. He holds the tube of a long water pipe in his mouth and is
musing on the profits he will make from peddling his glass, growing
richer and richer, until his sovereign will be glad to offer him his
daughter in marriage and he will spurn her as she kneels before him.
We almost expect to see the glass turned over as it is in the story,
and his castles in the air shattered with his kick. Next to him is a
turbaned Mohammedan who reminds us of Sinbad the Sailor, and a
little farther on is a Barmecide washing his hands with invisible soap
in invisible water, and apparently inviting his friends to come and
have a great feast with him. Here two long-gowned, gray-bearded
men are sitting on a bench drinking coffee together; and there a
straight, tall maiden, robed in a gown which falls from her head to
her feet, with a long black veil covering all of her face but her eyes,
looks over the wares of a handsome young Syrian, reminding us of
how the houris shopped in the days of the “Thousand and One
Nights.”
Oriental Cairo is a city of donkeys and camels. In the French
quarter you may have a ride on an electric street car for a few cents,
or you may hire an automobile to carry you over the asphalt. The
streets of the native city are too narrow for such things, and again
and again we are crowded to the wall for fear that the spongy feet of
the great camels may tread upon us. We are grazed by loaded
donkeys, carrying grain, bricks, or bags on their backs, and the
donkey boy trotting behind an animal ridden by some rich Egyptian
or his wife calls upon us to get out of the way.
The donkeys of Egypt are small, rugged animals. One sees them
everywhere with all sorts of odd figures mounted on them. Here is an
Egyptian woman sitting astride of one, her legs bent up like a spring
and her black feet sticking out in the stirrups. She is dressed in
black, in a gown which makes her look like a balloon. There is a long
veil over her face with a slit at the eyes, where a brass spool
separates it from the head-dress and you see nothing but strips of
bare skin an inch wide above and below. Here is a sheik with a great
turban and a long gown; his legs, ending in big yellow slippers, reach
almost to the ground on each side of his donkey. He has no bridle,
but guides the beast with a stick. A donkey-boy in bare feet, whose
sole clothing consists of a blue cotton nightgown and a brown
skullcap, runs behind poking up the donkey with a stick. Now he
gives it a cut, and the donkey jerks its hinder part from one side to
the other as it scallops the road in attempting to get out of the way of
the rod. Here is a drove of donkeys laden with bags for the market.
They are not harnessed, and the bags are balanced upon their
backs without ropes or saddles.
The ordinary donkey of Egypt is very cheap indeed, but the
country has some of the finest asses and mules I have ever seen,
and there are royal white jackasses ridden by wealthy
Mohammedans which are worth from five hundred to a thousand
dollars per beast. The best of these come from Mecca. They are
pacers, fourteen hands high, and very swift. The pedigrees of some
of them are nearly as long as those of Arabian horses. It is said that
the Arabs who raise them will never sell a female of this breed.
But to return to the characters of the bazaar. They are of the
oddest, and one must have an educated eye to know who they are.
Take that man in a green turban, who is looked up to by his fellows.
The dragoman tells us that he has a sure passport to Heaven, and
that the green turban is a sign that he has made the pilgrimage to
Mecca and thus earned the right to the colours of the Prophet.
Behind him comes a fine-featured, yellow-faced man in a blue gown
wearing a turban of blue. We ask our guide who he may be and are
told, with a sneer, that he is a Copt. He is one of the Christians of
modern Egypt, descended from the fanatical band described by
Charles Kingsley in his novel “Hypatia.” Like all his class he is
intelligent, and like most of them well dressed. The Copts are among
the shrewdest of the business Egyptians, and with prosperity they
have grown in wealth. They are money lenders and land speculators.
Many of them have offices under the government, and not a few
have amassed fortunes. Some of them are very religious and some
can recite the Bible by heart. They differ from their neighbours in that
they believe in having only one wife.
The crowd in these streets is by no means all men, however.
There are women scattered through it, and such women! We look at
them, and as their large soulful eyes, fringed with dark lashes, smile
back at us, we wish that the veils would drop from their faces. The
complexions which can be seen in the slit in the veils are of all
colours from black to brunette, and from brown to the creamy white
of the fairest Circassian. We are not particularly pleased with their
costume, but our dragoman tells us that they dress better at home.
The better classes wear black bombazine garments made so full that
they hide every outline of the figure. Some of them have their cloaks
tied in at the waist so that they look like black bed ticks on legs.
Here, as one raises her skirt, we see that she wears bloomers falling
to her ankles, which make us think of the fourteen-yard breeches
worn by the girls of Algiers. The poorer women wear gowns of blue
cotton, a single garment and the veil making up a whole costume.
Astride their shoulders or their hips some of them carry babies, many
of whom are as naked as when they were born.