Text as Body and Body as Text: How Literary Form Textually Creates the Body

In Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (1864–65), Silas Wegg approaches a small, dimly lit shop that is crowded with the paraphernalia of taxidermy. Wegg ‘stumps’ with his wooden leg through the entryway and advances towards the shop's proprietor, Mr Venus. Since Wegg does not like the thought of being ‘dispersed, a part of me here, and a part of me there’ and would prefer ‘to collect [himself] like a genteel person’ (127), he has asked Venus to help provide him with a matching leg bone to complete his skeleton. During their conversation, a boy nearly absconds with a tooth in his pocket change from purchasing a stuffed canary, and Mr Venus threatens the boy, saying, ‘You’ve no idea how small you’d come out, if I had the articulating of you’ (126). In its earlier appearances in the novel, the word articulate and its variations indicate speech alone, but here, Venus uses it to refer to his profession as an ‘Articulator of human bones’ (128), relying on the word's anatomical sense: ‘to reassemble (individual bones) to form a skeleton’ (‘Articulate’). Yet Venus's use of the word nonetheless carries connotations of speech and conveys the potential for speech to shape the body. Likewise, Wegg's prostheticized body connotes literacy to his employer Nicholas Boffin, who repeatedly calls him ‘a literary man—with a wooden leg’ (93). Distinction between body and word frequently collapses in this novel teeming with unstable bodies, hidden wills, encrypted letters, incomplete literacy, and false identity.

Of course, Our Mutual Friend does not stand alone in Victorian fiction representing the conjoined instability of word and body; indeed, depictions of illnesses, deaths, accidents, and characters with deformities or chronic invalidism are central to a plethora of nineteenth-century novels. In the first instalment of his 1880 essay ‘Fiction, Fair and Foul,’ John Ruskin minces no words in condemning such fiction's fascination with ‘physical corruption’ (943). He claims that, in this ‘Fiction mécroyante,’ a reader ‘may gather into one Caina of gelid putrescence the entire product of modern infidel imagination, amusing itself with destruction of the body, and busying itself with aberration of the mind’ (950).