Body Language: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing
Susannah B Mintz2016, Life Writing
As much as we may like to evade or minimise them, illness and disability inescapably attend human embodiment; we are all vulnerable subjects. So it might seem natural and inevitable that the most universal, most democratic form of literature, autobiography, should address these common features of human experience. And yet self-life writing has reckoned with embodiment only relatively recently. In the Western tradition, we can date first-person life writing about illness and disability (which I have named autosomatography) from classic texts like John Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, and Several Steps in My Sickness (1624) and the essays of Michel de Montaigne. But such texts are rare-few and chronologically far between-until well after the birth of the clinic in the eighteenth century. Granted, in the United States, the post-Civil War period saw a flurry of narratives of institutionalisation by former mental patients, a subgenre that adapted older American life writing genres, the captivity narrative and the slave narrative, to protest the injustice of the confinement of those deemed insane. But for the most part, autobiographical writing expressive of illness and disability remained quite uncommon until the second half of the twentieth century, when it flourished concurrently with successive civil rights movements. Women's liberation, with its signature manifesto Our Bodies Ourselves, supported the breast cancer narrative; the gay rights movement encouraged AIDS narrative in response to a deadly epidemic; and the disability rights movement stimulated a surge in narratives of various disabilities. Conversely, the narratives helped to advance the respective rights movements. Such writing, then, has been representative in two senses of the term: aesthetic (mimetic) and political (acting on behalf of). It has done, and continues to do, important cultural work. Academics began to pay attention to these subgenres of autosomatography only around 1990. Although I was hardly aware of it at the time, I realise in retrospect that my interest in illness narrative had autobiographical stimuli. My mother survived breast cancer in her fifties only to succumb to ovarian cancer at the age of 64, in 1974, when I was a graduate student; a cousin my age died of breast cancer several years later. So I was intimately acquainted with stories I thought deserving of inscription and publication. For that and other reasons, as memoirs of illness and disability proliferated in the 1980s, I became convinced they were a significant new form of life writing, worthy of scholarly scrutiny. Though not a scholar of British literature, nor a devotee of Virginia Woolf, when I stumbled on Woolf's marvellous essay 'On Being Ill', I was struck by its recognition of 'how tremendous [is] the spiritual change that [illness] brings, how astonishing when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed' (9) and by its related claim that, 'considering how common illness is … it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place … among the prime themes of literature' (9).
