Disability Aesthetics

The cover of a Norton Critical Edition often tells us where scholarship is heading. Midway through the writing of The Prosthetic Arts of Moby-Dick, I was pleased to see that Norton had put Ahab’s whalebone leg on its cover.  The illustration, done by the Russian artist Oleg Dobrovolski, highlights the role that disability and prosthetics play in this novel.  (Ahab is not the only impaired character in the book, and Moby-Dick is just one of Melville’s writings that meditate on injury, prosthetics, and disability.)  How have you imagined Ahab’s ivory leg?