Imagining the "Survival of the Unfit" in the Novels of Olive Schreiner and Mona Caird By Emily Ba... more Imagining the "Survival of the Unfit" in the Novels of Olive Schreiner and Mona Caird By Emily Baldys, Millersville University <1>In her most well-known novel The Story of an African Farm, New Woman writer Olive Schreiner compares the "woman's sphere" to a too-small shoe that creates impairment: "In some of us … [t]he parts we are not to use have been quite atrophied, and have even dropped off; but in others … they have been weakened and left. We wear the bandages, but our limbs have not grown to them; we know that we are compressed, and chafe against them" (155). A decade later, Schreiner's fellow New Woman author Mona Caird would use a similar image of deformity to allegorize the social constriction of women. In keeping with Caird's assertion that "the sphere of woman" was "the seed-bed of disease" (The Morality of Marriage 13), the heroine of Caird's most widely read novel TheDaughters of Danaus, laments, "I remember once … seeing a young ash-tree that had got jammed into a chink so that it couldn't grow straight … I felt like the poor sapling in the cranny, that … was forced to become twisted, and crooked, and stunted … I think most women have to grow in a cranny" (271). These images offer striking commentary on the oppressiveness of Victorian gender roles, and, notably, they use images of disability-missing limbs, stunted growth, deformed appendages-in order to do so.(1) In some respects, this gesture is not unexpected, as it aligns Schreiner and Caird with earlier Victorian feminists such as Charlotte Brontë, who, as Gilbert and Gubar famously observed, used mental illness as a metaphor for rebellion and physical illness as a metaphor for oppression.(2) This co-optation of disability as metaphor was especially common in reform literature of the nineteenth century, which, as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson observes in her study of sentimental novels, frequently positioned impairment as the "semiotic manifestation of social ills" (Extraordinary Bodies 84). Within the past twenty years, scholars of literary disability studies have thoroughly critiqued this gesture: Lennard Davis argues that what he terms "metaphorization" can be "problematic in terms of identity because it
This article analyzes the novels Barnaby Rudge and David Copperfield as they engage with the cont... more This article analyzes the novels Barnaby Rudge and David Copperfield as they engage with the contemporary psychiatric discourse of moral management, which significantly re-conceptualized madness and its treatment in the early nineteenth century. I examine the novels—alongside Dickens’s journalism and some medical texts—as works that trace the fluctuating boundaries separating sanity from insanity and ability from disability. Barnaby Rudge, written at the onset of popular enthusiasm for moral management, charts a conception of insanity in flux as traditional and Romantic models of the mind clashed with more clinical definitions and new modes of treatment. In its handling of Mr. Dick, David Copperfield works more actively to domesticate madness within a regime of moral management, reframing the insane as patients subject to rehabilitation. In light of recent scholarship in disability history, I argue that Dickens’s mid-century narratives thus contribute to a radically revised cultural construction of insanity as disability.
Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, 2012
In light of the recent proliferation of disabled characters in popular romance novels, this artic... more In light of the recent proliferation of disabled characters in popular romance novels, this article examines the implications for disabled sexuality of increased visibility within the popular romance genre. Focusing on a subset of novels with cognitively disabled characters allows us to see how these narratives move to contain and discipline disability, both by literally and figuratively incorporating it into able-bodiedness, and by rehabilitating it via the transformative power of heterosexual romance. In so doing, these narratives make plain the ideological conjunction between heterosexuality and able-bodiedness; moreover, they demonstrate how visibility within such a popular medium functions largely as an adaptive strategy to contain the threat that disabled sexuality represents, and to impose on disabled people the intertwined ideological demands of compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory able-bodiedness. Despite the limitations imposed by these ideologies, both disabled and nondisabled readers often express pleasure at seeing disability represented "realistically" in popular romance; their responses demonstrate how realism can be ideologically coercive, but also suggest a hunger for difference from which disability studies may benefit. Sexual oppression, Judith Butler observes, "works not merely through acts of overt prohibition, but covertly, through the constitution of viable subjects and through the corollary constitution of a domain of unviable (un)subjectsabjects, we might call them" (312). The sexuality of people with disabilities has historically been controlled through similar overt and covert measures: involuntary sterilization and institutional confinement aimed to eradicate its threat entirely, while relegation to marginal sites like freak shows, fetishistic films, and questionable web sites worked to deny disabled people viable sexual subjectivity. 1 Assigned the status of sexual abjects, people with disabilities have often struggled to be recognized as sexual beings. 2 Judging from recent trends in popular romance fiction, however, people with disabilities would appear no longer to be "unviable (un)subjects" of romance. Instead, disabled characters abound to the point where All About Romance, an online community of romance readers, can compile a list of 200+ novels featuring "less than perfect" main characters. AAR's list reads like a taxonomy of physical and cognitive impairment: there 1. For more on sterilization of people with disabilities, see Block, and Hubbard. For sexual marginalization, see Block, and Garland-Thomson (Extraordinary Bodies). 2. For personal accounts of this struggle, see O'Toole, Waxman Fiduccia, and Guter and Killacky.
Imagining the "Survival of the Unfit" in the Novels of Olive Schreiner and Mona Caird By Emily Ba... more Imagining the "Survival of the Unfit" in the Novels of Olive Schreiner and Mona Caird By Emily Baldys, Millersville University <1>In her most well-known novel The Story of an African Farm, New Woman writer Olive Schreiner compares the "woman's sphere" to a too-small shoe that creates impairment: "In some of us … [t]he parts we are not to use have been quite atrophied, and have even dropped off; but in others … they have been weakened and left. We wear the bandages, but our limbs have not grown to them; we know that we are compressed, and chafe against them" (155). A decade later, Schreiner's fellow New Woman author Mona Caird would use a similar image of deformity to allegorize the social constriction of women. In keeping with Caird's assertion that "the sphere of woman" was "the seed-bed of disease" (The Morality of Marriage 13), the heroine of Caird's most widely read novel TheDaughters of Danaus, laments, "I remember once … seeing a young ash-tree that had got jammed into a chink so that it couldn't grow straight … I felt like the poor sapling in the cranny, that … was forced to become twisted, and crooked, and stunted … I think most women have to grow in a cranny" (271). These images offer striking commentary on the oppressiveness of Victorian gender roles, and, notably, they use images of disability-missing limbs, stunted growth, deformed appendages-in order to do so.(1) In some respects, this gesture is not unexpected, as it aligns Schreiner and Caird with earlier Victorian feminists such as Charlotte Brontë, who, as Gilbert and Gubar famously observed, used mental illness as a metaphor for rebellion and physical illness as a metaphor for oppression.(2) This co-optation of disability as metaphor was especially common in reform literature of the nineteenth century, which, as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson observes in her study of sentimental novels, frequently positioned impairment as the "semiotic manifestation of social ills" (Extraordinary Bodies 84). Within the past twenty years, scholars of literary disability studies have thoroughly critiqued this gesture: Lennard Davis argues that what he terms "metaphorization" can be "problematic in terms of identity because it
This article analyzes the novels Barnaby Rudge and David Copperfield as they engage with the cont... more This article analyzes the novels Barnaby Rudge and David Copperfield as they engage with the contemporary psychiatric discourse of moral management, which significantly re-conceptualized madness and its treatment in the early nineteenth century. I examine the novels—alongside Dickens’s journalism and some medical texts—as works that trace the fluctuating boundaries separating sanity from insanity and ability from disability. Barnaby Rudge, written at the onset of popular enthusiasm for moral management, charts a conception of insanity in flux as traditional and Romantic models of the mind clashed with more clinical definitions and new modes of treatment. In its handling of Mr. Dick, David Copperfield works more actively to domesticate madness within a regime of moral management, reframing the insane as patients subject to rehabilitation. In light of recent scholarship in disability history, I argue that Dickens’s mid-century narratives thus contribute to a radically revised cultural construction of insanity as disability.
Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, 2012
In light of the recent proliferation of disabled characters in popular romance novels, this artic... more In light of the recent proliferation of disabled characters in popular romance novels, this article examines the implications for disabled sexuality of increased visibility within the popular romance genre. Focusing on a subset of novels with cognitively disabled characters allows us to see how these narratives move to contain and discipline disability, both by literally and figuratively incorporating it into able-bodiedness, and by rehabilitating it via the transformative power of heterosexual romance. In so doing, these narratives make plain the ideological conjunction between heterosexuality and able-bodiedness; moreover, they demonstrate how visibility within such a popular medium functions largely as an adaptive strategy to contain the threat that disabled sexuality represents, and to impose on disabled people the intertwined ideological demands of compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory able-bodiedness. Despite the limitations imposed by these ideologies, both disabled and nondisabled readers often express pleasure at seeing disability represented "realistically" in popular romance; their responses demonstrate how realism can be ideologically coercive, but also suggest a hunger for difference from which disability studies may benefit. Sexual oppression, Judith Butler observes, "works not merely through acts of overt prohibition, but covertly, through the constitution of viable subjects and through the corollary constitution of a domain of unviable (un)subjectsabjects, we might call them" (312). The sexuality of people with disabilities has historically been controlled through similar overt and covert measures: involuntary sterilization and institutional confinement aimed to eradicate its threat entirely, while relegation to marginal sites like freak shows, fetishistic films, and questionable web sites worked to deny disabled people viable sexual subjectivity. 1 Assigned the status of sexual abjects, people with disabilities have often struggled to be recognized as sexual beings. 2 Judging from recent trends in popular romance fiction, however, people with disabilities would appear no longer to be "unviable (un)subjects" of romance. Instead, disabled characters abound to the point where All About Romance, an online community of romance readers, can compile a list of 200+ novels featuring "less than perfect" main characters. AAR's list reads like a taxonomy of physical and cognitive impairment: there 1. For more on sterilization of people with disabilities, see Block, and Hubbard. For sexual marginalization, see Block, and Garland-Thomson (Extraordinary Bodies). 2. For personal accounts of this struggle, see O'Toole, Waxman Fiduccia, and Guter and Killacky.
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