Focusing on Cather’s 1931 novel Shadows on the Rock and her 1932 story “Old Mrs. Harris,” this essay explores prosthesis and the concept of “recessional objects” (a hypothetical late-life equivalent to D. W. Winnicott’s well-known “transitional objects.” It suggests that Cather’s attention to prosthesis indicates a radical questioning of conventional distinctions between subject and object, self and other.