A Brief Literary History of Disability

203 Pages·2022·3.023 MB·English

by  Fuson Wang

A BRIEF LITERARY HISTORY
OF DISABILITY
A Brief Literary History of Disability is a convenient, lucid, and accessible entry point
into the rapidly evolving conversation around disability in literary s tudies. The
book follows a chronological structure and each chapter pairs a well-known liter-
ary text with a foundational disability theorist in order to develop a s imultaneous
understanding of literary history and disability theory. The book as a whole, and
each chapter, addresses three key questions:
• Why do we even need a literary history of disability?
• What counts as the literature of disability?
• Should we even talk about a literary aesthetic of disability?
This book is the ideal starting point for anyone wanting to add some disability
studies to their literature teaching in any period, and for any students approach-
ing the study of literature and disability. It is also an efficient reference point for
scholars looking to include disability studies approaches in their research.
Fuson Wang is an assistant professor of English at the University of Califor-
nia, Riverside, where he is currently the co-director of the Medical and Health
Humanities Studies program. He has published widely in British Romantic
literature, disability studies, and medical humanities.

A BRIEF LITERARY
HISTORY OF DISABILITY
Fuson Wang
Cover image: Getty
First published 2023
by Routledge
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© 2023 Fuson Wang
The right of Fuson Wang to be identified as author of this work has been
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and Patents Act 1988.
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-1-032-15508-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-15507-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-24440-0 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003244400
Typeset in Bembo
by codeMantra
CONTENTS
Introduction 1
Part 1
Early Modern 15
1 A Pre-History of Narrative Prosthesis 17
2 Renaissance Historiography 31
Part 2
Eighteenth Century 43
3 An Age of Enlightenment 45
4 An Age of Satire 57
Part 3
Romantic 71
5 Human Flourishing 73
6 Approaching Normal 85
vi Contents
Part 4
Victorian 103
7 Spectacular Metaphors 105
8 Why Tonga Must Die 117
Part 5
Modernism/Postmodernism 129
9 We Normals 131
10 Destigmatizing Difference 143
Part 6
Contemporary 159
11 Disability Autobiography 161
12 The Coalitional Politics of Disability 177
Index 191
INTRODUCTION
A Brief Literary History of Disability models how and why we should integrate
disability theory into our encounters with the deep, literary historical archive.
Disability studies as a field, despite the recent surge in interest and publications,
remains relatively new and still surprising to students and academics, but literary
disability studies might be even more unfamiliar. My title reflects an interdiscipli-
nary gap that I have felt in both academic inquiry and in the literature classroom.
I have found that interest in the intersection between literature and medicine is
ever-growing, even before the COVID-19 pandemic brought us face mask to
face mask with these pressing issues. Yet, there still is not a ready-at-hand ac-
count of how disability theory reconfigures our usual literary historical schemes
of periodization. In each of these short chapters, I have paired some of the most
well-known literary texts (from early modern to contemporary literature) with
foundational disability theorists. With theoretical interlocutors at the heart of
each chapter, the book develops a simultaneous understanding of literary history
and disability theory. We all at least vaguely intuit the stakes in investigating our
literary historical representations of disability, but what I offer is a convenient,
lucid, and accessible entry point into that rapidly evolving conversation.
Amazing and important work is now being done in the field of literary
disability studies, and academics and students alike have taken notice. That
excitement is evident at my own university, where I have co-led the creation
of a new u ndergraduate minor in Medical and Health Humanities Studies. And
in my own specialized field of British Romantic studies, Michael Bradshaw’s
Disabling Romanticism (Palgrave 2016), Emily Stanback’s The Wordsworth-Coleridge
Circle and the Aesthetics of Disability (Palgrave 2016), and Essaka Joshua’s P hysical
Disability in British Romantic Literature (Cambridge University Press 2021) are
wonderful testaments to the historicist turn in disability studies.1 These stud-
ies have recovered much about the changing historical attitudes toward what
DOI: 10.4324/9781003244400-1
2 Introduction
we now call disability. We are, however, limited in just how much we can do:
first, by whose writing has survived for archival research and second, by what
writers have been willing to commit to the page about difficult issues concern-
ing trauma, debility, illness, and disability. Even given these potential stumbling
blocks, this book will insist on the importance of at least approximating a bird’s
eye view of disability representation across a long span of literary history.
Three Questions About Normal
To make the book’s contributions as transparent as possible, I have condensed
my ideological framework into three big questions that I hear frequently when
teaching, discussing, presenting, and publishing research in the field of literary
disability studies. The first question is an eminently pragmatic one: Why do we
even need a literary history of disability? After all, according to this question’s
insistent subtext, disability has always meant more or less the same thing. It is
about a missing limb, a malformed organ, or some form of prosthetic: a crutch,
a wheelchair, or a cochlear implant. Beyond mere passing interest, what use is it
to stretch out this ostensibly stable story of human suffering across literary his-
tory? Blindness during the Enlightenment era, for example, may be important to
document but perhaps not that complicated. And even if it is complicated, surely
there are more important matters of contemporary public policy to tackle such
as the troubled legacy of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. Yes, those
discussions are important, but so are discussions about our cultural constructions
of and attitudes about disability that led to something like the ADA. Disability
studies as a field is relatively new; it is a field that only fully took off after the
ADA, and perhaps because of that, the field dwells in ideological presentism. The
current edition of the Disability Studies Reader (fifth edition, Routledge 2017), for
example, has a section on “Historical Perspectives” that features essays that only
go back as far as the nineteenth century. And Alice Hall’s Literature and Disabil-
ity (Routledge 2015) primarily taps into a twentieth- and twenty-first-century
literary archive—novels like Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) and Coet-
zee’s Slow Man (2005)—to chart the eponymous intersection between literary
representation and disabled lives.2 These books have been crucial to discovering
the proximate causes for our modern attitudes and policies about disability. A
Brief Literary History of Disability suspends that teleological orientation toward the
present in favor of developing a longer literary history of disability, a literary his-
tory that turns out to be much more unstable than just wheelchairs and cochlear
implants.
In our present moment, the valuable insights gleaned from critical studies in
race, gender, class, or sexuality might be more familiar. In those older discourses,
we begin with the premise that binaries like self and other, white and black, man
and woman, straight and queer are in fact unnatural, constructed, coerced, or
policed by arbitrary cultural rules. Two hundred years ago, Mary Wollstonecraft,
for example, made it her duty to remove women from the sphere of domesticity
Introduction 3
and sensibility to join men on an equal footing. And in the present, Judith Butler
has gone even further to show how our notions of gender—masculine, feminine,
queer, straight—are performative rather than biological.3 A lot of these notions
about the social constructions of culture are just obvious or even axiomatic to
us now, especially to younger generations. So, why has it taken so long to apply
these hard-won lessons to the constructions of disability? These discourses are
centuries old, after all, but disability studies as a field has only taken off in the past
few decades. A longer literary history of disability immediately makes available
these more mature discourses of race, gender, class, and sexuality and centers
intersectional perspectives right away.
Literary history also offers a potential path out of ingrained prejudices.
Anti-ableist discourse exposes the systemic harm of everyday life, but the
unimaginable scale of that work can render political activism difficult, draining,
and ultimately exhausting. It takes intense, active labor to undo cultural con-
structions of race, gender, class, sexuality, and disability when we are part of
those policing cultural norms ourselves. We inhabit a systemically ableist world,
so we necessarily absorb—whether consciously or unconsciously—those same
ideas about normative bodies from parents, teachers, and friends. Unthinking
ingrained prejudices and restructuring humanistic models of the world from that
standpoint are far from easy tasks. But since this book deliberately starts its dis-
ability studies inquiry from an intersectional and coalitional perspective, some
proven strategies are already available. Significant progress has been made, for
example, just by rethinking language, tweaking representation, and question-
ing our vocabulary. The cultural authority of commonplace words like “bitch,”
“chink,” or “fag” has waned because the pioneering arguments of gender studies
and critical race studies have revealed the historical consequences of these sexist,
racist, and homophobic words. Disability studies, however, arrives late to these
arguments: phrases like “crippling debt,” “blindsided,” or “deaf to reason” still
circulate in common speech without much analysis. With a literary history of
disability, we could begin to understand the intentional or unintentional harm
caused by our ableist worldviews.
In addition to centering intersectional methods and practicing close readings
that pay particular attention to ableist language, my third answer to the ques-
tion about literary history is about history itself. If disability is at least partially
defined as a social construction, it must have a history, a record of change across
time. This might seem rather obvious, but it has taken a while to even think
about disability as something other than universal, transhistorical suffering. Peo-
ple have thought this way since the beginning of time, one might say, so there
is no pressing need to historicize differences. In this view, a missing limb in the
twelfth century or a face marked by smallpox scars in the eighteenth were both
considered abnormal. These ideas of “normal” and “abnormal” seem perfectly
innate to us now: nature provides a physical template of the average and what-
ever deviates from that is the abnormal. Ability is normal; disability is abnormal.
However, as Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault, and Lennard Davis have