Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-08T23:07:39.306Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 1 - Giving Up the Ghost

The Dead Child versus the Amputated Limb

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2024

Sarah E. Chinn
Affiliation:
Hunter College, City University of New York
Get access

Summary

Chapter 1 traces the antebellum faith in the non-finality of death and its antithesis in the irreparable change wrought by amputation. In sentimental theology, the dead are never wholly gone – they live on to inspire and save, awaiting reunion with those they leave behind. The dead child embodies the reality of unpredictability and at the same time operates within a narrative that soothes. The author contrasts antebellum postmortem photography and images of amputees and amputated limbs. Postmortem photography of children reinforces the sense that the family has not really been ruptured, that death isn’t really the end. Photographs of amputee Civil War soldiers do quite the opposite. Rather than operating as postmortem photography does, as a mediator between the living child, its dead body, and the family left behind, the portrait of the amputee is insistently in the present, even as the lost limb is consigned to an unrecuperable past. While nineteenth-century pictures of dead children often encouraged the fiction that the photograph’s subject was an ongoing member of the family, amputation photography – both medical and vernacular – insists on the permanence of bodily change.

Type
Chapter

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Giving Up the Ghost
  • Sarah E. Chinn, Hunter College, City University of New York
  • Book: Disability, the Body, and Radical Intellectuals in the Literature of the Civil War and Reconstruction
  • Online publication: 13 June 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009442657.002
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Giving Up the Ghost
  • Sarah E. Chinn, Hunter College, City University of New York
  • Book: Disability, the Body, and Radical Intellectuals in the Literature of the Civil War and Reconstruction
  • Online publication: 13 June 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009442657.002
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Giving Up the Ghost
  • Sarah E. Chinn, Hunter College, City University of New York
  • Book: Disability, the Body, and Radical Intellectuals in the Literature of the Civil War and Reconstruction
  • Online publication: 13 June 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009442657.002
Available formats
×