The Prosthetic Fantasies and Fallacies of Claude Wheeler

The chapter frames Willa Cather’s 1922 novel One of Ours within the context of the US government’s concern about wartime production’s depletion of American forests. Government rehabilitationists and foresters alike sought to place disabled soldiers in forestry-related vocations, which would provide employment and spiritual renewal in nature. These concerns mirror those of Cather’s protagonist Claude Wheeler, who suffers a spiritual amputation at age five when his father cuts down a tree with which Claude had developed an Emersonian kinship. In war he finds spiritual wholeness by offering himself as the prosthetic limbs for those intellectually and artistically superior individuals whom the war has physically and spiritually amputated. Claude’s wholeness comes, ironically, in seeing himself as the trees being cut down for the matériel needed to win the war and civilization to the western world. This self-conceptualization puts him in close company with Italian Futurism, which praises both human mechanization and violence.

Redeeming Reconstruction

The chapter assesses the government-sponsored periodical Carry On, which frequently used the term “spirit” not just to describe the resilience of individual disabled veterans, but also the intellectual and artistic capabilities that distinguished Anglo-Americans from other races and ethnicities. In its run from 1918 to 1919,Carry On showcased the federal government’s new rehabilitative and vocational services by implicitly and explicitly drawing on evolutionary frameworks to show that only Anglo-American men were capable of transforming a prosthetic into a soul-enriching, civilization-advancing device. To make this point clearer, the magazine features several disabled African American soldiers, whose evolutionary stagnancy renders them unable to make prosthetics spiritually transformative instruments. Their depicted deficiencies are similar to the articles’ renderings of German primitiveness and brutality. In this light, the magazine shows just how slippery and manipulative racial codification could be in the opening decades of the twentieth century.

From the Civil War to the Great War

The chapter first shows how the spiritualized version of prosthetics originated in the Civil War, which rendered approximately 60,000 veterans limbless. Prominent physicians such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. and S. Weir Mitchell postulated that artificial limbs gave both physical and emotional solace to shattered soldiers, especially among those who suffered phantom limb syndrome. The devices’ “spiritual” potential proved limited, if not illusory; in fact, they were often so fragile, cumbersome, and painful that amputees simply preferred to go without them. Upon entering World War I, the United States created a rehabilitation and vocational program that aided injured veterans to reenter the workforce. Reflecting the way in which “personality” had come to replace a more traditional notion of spirit, orthopedists such as Joel Goldthwait and David Silver, both employed at Walter Reed Hospital, designed artificial limbs for both physical and psychological compatibility.

Epilogue

The epilogue analyzes Johnny Got His Gun, Dalton Trumbo’s 1939 novel about a soldier who is so pulverized in World War I that he is more machine than man—and yet largely beyond the reach of prosthetic improvement. Like Dadists such as Raoul Hausmann, the novel rebukes the meliorist myth that as long as a disabled soldier has a functioning brain and a firm will, he can use prosthetics to live a life of spiritual and material purpose. As one whose corporeality has been reduced to little more than a brain, Joe Bonham anticipates a complete paradigm shift in which the very notion of the human soul gives way to cybernetics. Published at a time when mechanized warfare had paved the way for nuclear annihilation, Johnny Got His Gun shows that Bergson’s hope for the spiritualization of matter had collapsed at last into the mechanization of spirit.

Plumes Agonistes

The chapter assesses the Great War rehabilitation program’s effectiveness by focusing on screenwriter-novelist Laurence Stallings, whose 1924 novel Plumes is a semi-autobiographical account of his treatment for a leg wound. Initially protagonist Richard Plume refuses amputation, choosing instead a bone graft that requires a painful brace. The brace assumes a liminal prosthetic identity that reflects Richard’s own confused sense of resolve: he both refuses amputation and the support of family back home because he is afraid that accepting both would, as the pages of Carry On had warned a few years earlier, allow his prosthesis to overshadow his personality. The pain-inducing brace itself takes on a malevolent spirit, which sours Richard’s personality and threatens his relationship with his family. Only after amputation and committing to a prosthesis does Richard receive the spiritual rejuvenation that Stallings otherwise depicts in his 1925 silent film The Big Parade, directed by King Vidor.

Medieval Departures

Using John Dos Passos’s first novel, One Man’s Initiation: 1917, the chapter explains how facial prosthetics were complicit in the unravelling of the Christian concept of the soul. Drawing on the author’s time in France as a volunteer ambulance driver, the novel shows a clear preoccupation with faces—faces of soldiers with prosthetic noses and jaws to cover the ones blown off in battle as well as those donning hideous masks as protection from chemical warfare. Such preoccupation calls into larger question what really is at the core of human identity. As protagonist Martin Howe adjusts to the realities of war on the Western Front, his recognition of different faces aids him in understanding that America, by joining the conflict in 1917, has itself undergone an initiation, wherein the Platonic and Christian idealism that once guided the western world since the Middle Ages has given way to a soulless materialism.

A Return to the Face

The chapter assesses the American sculptor Anna Coleman Ladd, who crafted prosthetic masks for facially mutilated soldiers in Paris. Rejecting the distinction between ornamental and functional prosthetics, Ladd regarded the face, be it of flesh or of galvanized copper, as a conduit for a person’s personality or spirit. This belief offered a stark contrast to the facial representations of surrealists like André Breton, who worked at the same hospital that supplied most of Ladd’s clients. Relying on vitalist principles similar to Henri Bergson’s élan vital, she therefore created the masks to give mutilated soldiers, many of whom suffered shell shock, the emotional confidence to reconnect with their past lives and to see themselves as active participants in the postwar world—finding employment, marrying, and even conceiving and raising children. Ladd’s efforts in Paris were similar to America’s rehabilitation program, which at the same time was being promoted in Carry On.

Introduction

The introduction examines the concept of spirit, which, thanks to psychologists like Gordon Allport and theologians like Winifred Kirkland, had become synonymous with the term “personality.” Thus, to the extent that prostheses were regarded as spiritual extensions of their wearers, they could reveal the fuller dimensions of amputees’ personalities—their emotional and spiritual strivings, not just their practical or vocational aspirations. These prosthetic designs were in keeping with vitalist Henri Bergson’s hope that the war would instill in the Allied forces not a “mechanization of spirit,” but rather a “spiritualization of matter.” Then drawing on prosthetic theories outlined by Vivian Sobchack, the introduction articulates the book’s thrust: designed and depicted to transcend their materiality in the hopes of offering disabled veterans a new start in the postwar world, prostheses often possessed the insidious potential to physically and psychically mechanize their wearers. Finally, the introduction offers a chapter-by-chapter summary.