Hybridity, Transgression, and Abjection: Toward Cyborg Embodiment Through Wegg’s Wooden Leg in Our Mutual Friend

Abstract

Abstract

Drawing on cyborg theory and Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, this article offers a fresh perspective on Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend by reexamining Silas Wegg’s wooden leg as a material and agentive entity rather than a mere symbolic construct. By foregrounding the narrative agency of the prosthesis and attending to Wegg’s representation as a disabled subject potentially informed by Dickens’s early encounters with bodily loss, this article argues that the prosthesis produces a form of cyborg embodiment that blurs the boundaries between human and object, organism and artifact, while enabling acts of corporeal, social, and moral transgression. Yet, as this cyborg embodiment becomes increasingly associated with ambiguity and excess, it is transformed into an abject presence that threatens systems of classification and social order. His final immersion in the dust-cart reduces him to refuse and enacts a process of purification through which the disruptive implications of the cyborg body are expelled. While Our Mutual Friend anticipates certain posthuman understandings of embodied hybridity and distributed agency through its depiction of Wegg’s wooden leg, Dickens ultimately contains the transgressive potential of this prosthetic embodiment by reaffirming Victorian ideals of bodily wholeness, moral discipline, and social stability.