Prosthetic Colonialism: Indian Removal, European Imperialism, and International Trade in Poe’s “The Man That Was Used Up”

Critics have often read Poe’s “The Man That Was Used Up” as a response to domestic pressures within the United States that arose due to its rapid industrial and geographic growth. Such scholarship tends to emphasize the new nation’s independence from European powers, rather than attend to the ways global markets, international conflict, and the cultural memory of life “under” European colonialism continued to influence domestic decisions and politics in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. In contrast, this article argues that for Poe’s original readers, General Smith’s prosthetics did not signify an artificial attempt to form a cohesive, new national body but instead symbolically indicated the encroachment of European colonial practices into the new and allegedly democratic nation. Contextualizing the story via the writings of Indian removal opponents, medical journals, and advertisements relating to early medical prostheses, as well as recent criticism on prosthetics, Chacón demonstrates that in “The Man That Was Used Up,” it is not anxiety over the new but fear of the old that Poe portrays in his first “specifically American” tale.