“‘I began to see’: Biblical Models of Disability in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre” in The Madwoman and Blindman: Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability. Edited by David Bolt, Julia Miele Rodas and Elizabeth J. Donaldson. Forthcoming with Ohio State University Press. Preface by Lennard J. Davis
Shorter version isforthcoming in Special Issue, Brontë Studies 37 (2012). Conference paper version of item 10. Publication date: November 2012.
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) is undeniably one of the most widely read and widely written about novels in the... more Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) is undeniably one of the most widely read and widely written about novels in the English language. Its enduring interest, from both a popular and a scholarly viewpoint, has resulted in countless studies of the text from a variety of perspectives. Indeed, as its meaning and context shift depending on cultural and historical variables, the novel continues to demand frequent reinterpretation and new scholarship. The Madwoman and the Blindman: Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability is a breakthrough volume of critical essays on Jane Eyre, the first to examine Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre from a disability studies perspective, offering fresh insight into Brontë’s classic nineteenth-century novel from a vantage that is of growing importance both academically and culturally. Grounded in Victorian studies, the book also draws on theory and criticism in disability and cultural studies, linguistics, and gender and film studies.
On the Spectrum: Rereading Contact and Affect In Jane Eyre
Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 4.2 (Summer 2008). Web.
“‘On the Spectrum’: Rereading Contact and Affect in Jane Eyre” engages the early writing of autism pioneers Leo Kanner... more “‘On the Spectrum’: Rereading Contact and Affect in Jane Eyre” engages the early writing of autism pioneers Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger and considers Jane’s unusual affect and sociality within the context of medical, theoretical, and autobiographical writing on autism, ultimately suggesting that Jane occupies a place on the autistic spectrum. Rodas argues that readers tend to contextualize Jane’s emotional experience, the interiority of her passionate emotional life, her reduced affect, and the concealing of her deeply rooted feelings in terms of cultural history, understanding her extreme self-control and apparent poise as fitting with historically appropriate social conventions. This article points out, however, that because readers experience this self-control from the inside, Jane’s passions are highly visible and her most obvious autistic characteristics, her silence, flattened affect, and remoteness have rarely been noticed or questioned beyond a feminist context. This essay claims that Jane’s aloofness and social idiosyncrasy do not represent a tacit acceptance—as some have argued—of the exploitation and oppression of subject peoples, but point rather to the political significance of solitude. Thus, Jane achieves new political stature, becoming a model for effective resistance to social control, her “private fecundity seeding possibilities for oppressed and marginalized peoples, especially autistic persons,” who reject the punishing demands of “compulsory sociality.”
Mainstreaming Disability Studies?
Victorian Literature and Culture 34.1 (Spring 2006): 371-84. Print.
AMIDST THE CAST OF Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers (1857) is the stunningly beautiful “Signora Madeline Vesey... more AMIDST THE CAST OF Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers (1857) is the stunningly beautiful “Signora Madeline Vesey Neroni,” who turns the heads of readers and characters alike. “It was impossible,” the narrator informs us, “that either man or woman should do other than look at her” (ch. 10). Dark and mysterious, brilliant and alluring, Madeline Neroni entices the swains of Barchester to pay her court, then toys with them mercilessly and enjoys watching them writhe. The fact that she is both beautiful and without compunction may do little to set her apart from other Victorian villainesses, Trollope's Lizzie Eustace, for instance, Wilde's Mrs. Cheveley or, more infamously, Thackeray's Becky Sharpe, but while Lizzie, Mrs. Cheveley, and Becky ultimately meet with poetic justice, their fortunes descending as their ruthless self-interest becomes increasingly apparent, Madeline keeps herself carefully protected. Pristinely beautiful from first to last, La Signora Neroni guards her virtue and maintains an even temper, bemused both by those who hate her and by those who court her, ultimately returning with her family to their home in Italy, apparently unchanged by her experience in Barchester society. Madeline has a strange kind of integrity; she is a powerful figure, a force to be reckoned with, able to stand up with equal ease and self-assurance to the daunting Mrs. Proudie, the earnest Arabin, and the slick Mr. Slope.
Tiny Tim, Blind Bertha, and the Resistance of Miss Mowcher: Charles Dickens and the Uses of Disability
Dickens Studies Annual 34 (Summer 2004): 51-97. Print.
While Dickens is often criticized for his sentimental and apparently objectifying representations of people (or... more While Dickens is often criticized for his sentimental and apparently objectifying representations of people (or characters) with disabilities, seeming to render disabled figures as helpless and pathetic victims, as villains, or as objects of fun, his relationship with disabled identity and his representations of disabled bodies (and minds) appear to be more complex than some would believe. This essay, part of a larger work on representations of disability in Victorian literature and culture, looks closely at four figures–Laura Bridgman in American Notes, Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol, Blind Bertha in Cricket on the Hearth, and Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield–in an effort to understand Dickens's ambivalence about disability. Specifically, the essay proposes a new theory–a study of the "satellite" –which helps us to read the relationships of power and identity that surround the presence of disability. The essay employs this theory to argue that the disabled body becomes a locus around which Dickens forms and centers his identity, his sense of himself as a writer and narrator.
“‘Blind Vacancy’: Sighted Culture and Voyeuristic Historiography in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” European Romantic Review 22.1 (2011): 49-69.
The concept of the voyeuristic viewpoint competes, in eighteenth-century
historiography, with a... more
The concept of the voyeuristic viewpoint competes, in eighteenth-century
historiography, with a multi-perspectival approach to history. This article places
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in the context of the historiography of Edward
Gibbon and William Godwin, arguing that the novel challenges eighteenthcentury
historiographical methods that base truth values on visual perception.
Frankenstein underscores, instead, the hierarchical superiority of words over
visual evidence, and represents blindness as a condition that encourages
rationality. Shelley characterizes this distrust of sight through extensive uses of the
“gothic gaze” – an oppressive, stigmatizing, disciplinary look that is implicated in
the definition of normalcy, in social relationships, in moral and legal culpability,
and in narrative authority.