Madness, distress and the politics of disablement (original) (raw)
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Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture (review)
Literature and Medicine, 2006
Martha stoddard Holmes's Fictions of Affliction can best be described as an attempt to dismantle our ability to uncritically accept "disability" as such by focusing our attention on its historical, cultural, and individual particularities. well-grounded in disability studies, Holmes situates her work in relation to, and differentiates it from, work on sentiment and melodrama, "the body" and illness more generally, and "freaks." she engages with critics working on victorian literature and on gender, class, and the body, seeking to press their analyses toward a more active engagement with the category of disability as "a historically provocative figure," not a universal one (72). As part of the University of Michigan Press series Corporealities: Discourses of Disability, Fictions of Affliction offers a nuanced explication of the concurrent, often conflicting meanings of disabled characters in victorian culture. it should prove useful for studies in fields beyond disability and victorian culture, given its historicist analysis of genre, medicine, gender, class, and social reform. in an opening chapter, Holmes identifies melodrama as the genre toward which narratives of disability most often gravitate-both now and then-and points to three figures or types that recur in victorian fictional and nonfictional texts about disabled bodies, creating a kind of gravitational force of their own. Her identification is not only convincing, with a wealth of examples from the period, but also useful for its clarification of the importance of gender and class identity in inflecting the roles available to people with physical impairments. For example, she examines the plight of the disabled woman, widely believed to be unmarriageable and unfit to bear children. in two chapters, Holmes focuses on the "'unmarriageable' woman" (60) in literary texts by edward Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Dickens, Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, Charlotte Mary Yonge, and wilkie Collins, although she moves beyond purely literary readings to discussions of medical theory and eugenics. Holmes traces this figure through melodrama and fiction, offering
Studies in Canadian Literature-etudes En Litterature Canadienne, 2010
In The Englishman’s Boy (1996), Guy Vanderhaeghe uses Harry Vincent’s congenital limp as a narrative device to critique the construction of masculinity in historical representations of the expansion of the American West. Throughout the novel, the meaning of Harry’s disability shifts as he strives to find a place in the masculine world of Hollywood, and as both Damon Ira Chance and Shorty McAdoo make their own assumptions about him as a disabled man in their desire for narrative control over the story of the Cypress Hills Massacre. Harry destabilizes categories of stock disabled characters by using his disability to advance his career, by pursuing his desire to be true to Shorty’s story, and by ultimately recognizing the importance of narrative truthfulness.
Return to Dilemma: Addressing the Notions of Disabled Masculinity in Thomas Hardy's
The intersection of gender and disability is that masculinity with each other because disability is associated with being dependent and helpless whereas masculinity is associated with being powerful and autonomous, thus creating a lived and embodied dilemma for disabled men (Shuttlewor both the cases, the determiners are the rigid conventional structures, which habitually associate images with personalities. A disabled person is typically expected to be fragile whereas a masculine figure is always im odds. In Thomas Hardy's novel Yeobright, a successful diamond merchant, returns to Egdon representative image of the masculine figure, respected by the all and wins the love of Eustacia Vye, a beautiful and passionate young woman who dreams of escaping the heath and its insular ways. She is infatuated with Clym and
Potrayal of Disable Characters in English Literature - A Study of Disability Literature
2019
Societal frames of mind towards people with disability have changed from time to time. Various factors add to these evolving dispositions. Gender, training, religion, occupation, income, nationality, significantly affects the dimension of inability cognizance. Portrayal of disabled characters have dependably been found in Writing, regardless of whether oral or composed. Alongside typical characters they attempt to make spaces of their own in stories. Be that as it may, the anecdotal space or position concurred to such characters is never equivalent to that of other standard characters. They are displayed contradictorily or as subsidiaries to the typical characters making due at the outskirts of the universe of the normals. This paper investigates the distinctive parts of portrayal of disability in writing. The methodology is interdisciplinary as it goes for acclimatizing the mental and sociological viewpoints in breaking down the fiction of disable characters. The present research p...