The subversive semantic power of the revenant or reanimated corpse in Victorian literature serves as a crucial indicator of the era’s preoccupation with the body as
a cultural domain. Deeply entwined with the uneasy relationship between the advancement of anatomical science and criminality, the body is marked as the site of fraught
boundaries imbued with social order and its attendant anxieties. This paper explores
the narrative strategies of Stevenson’s short story “The Body Snatcher” (1884) where
resurrectionist motifs resist the enforcement of the condition of anonymity that was
entailed by anatomical dissection and signal the impossibility of closure through the
trope of return of the repressed sub specie of the dissected cadaver. This dual ‘resistance’ culminates in the symbolism of the revenant corpse’s movement, abandoned in
its progress towards the future. Stevenson’s story reveals a hermeneutic complexity that
intertwines the themes of contamination, ethical collusion, the commodification of the dead
body through the entanglement of medical practice and narrative opacity. This offers
further insights into the Victorian resurrectionist imagination, in the light of that ‘aura’ of
the corpse which the regulation of the 1834 New Poor Amendment Act failed to dispel.
