Articulating Bodies

Front matter

aR! HEALTH, DISABILITY, CULTURE AND SOCIETY

The Narrative Form of Disability and Illness in Victorian Fiction

Kylee-Anne Hingston

Introduction

Text as Body and Body as Text: How Literary Form Textually Creates the Body

Negotiating Victorian Disability I Grotesque Bodies: Hybridity and Focalization in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris Hybridity, Disability, and the ‘Modern’ Novel

Focalization: Externally Authoritative or Internally Ambiguous

Reading Quasimodo: Interpretation or Empathy?

II Social Bodies: Dickens and the Disabled Narrator in Bleak House

Externally Focalizing on the Social Body

Smallpox and the Esther Industry: Critical Readings of Esther’s Facial Scarring

Focalization, Form, and the Fractured Self ‘Shape Structures Story’: The Disabled Narrator

III Sensing Bodies: Negotiating the Body and Identity in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone

The ‘Physiological Telegraph’: Genre, Form, and the Body in Aurora Floyd

Reading Disability and Reading Health

82 89 viii Articulating Bodies

Destabilizing Normalcy: Focalization, Identity, and the

Body in The Moonstone 96 Destabilizing Normalcy at the Shivering Sand 102 Linearity and Narrative Control of Deviance 106

IV Sanctified Bodies: Christian Theology and Disability in Ellice Hopkins’s Rose Turquand and Charlotte Yonge’s

The Pillars of the House 109 Individual Incarnation and the Single-Focused Narrative: Disability and Illness in Rose Turquand 111 Focalization and the Collective Body 117 Communal Incarnation and the Multiple-Focus Narrative: Disability and Illness in The Pillars of the House 123 Intellectual Disability, Focalization, and Closure 131

V Fairy-Tale Bodies: Prostheses and Narrative Perspective in

Dinah Mulock Craik’s The Little Lame Prince 139 Prostheticizing Maturity 143 Embodied Narrator and Readers 149 Focalization and Prosthesis 155

VI Mysterious Bodies: Solving and De-Solving Disability in the

Fin-de-Siècle Mystery 161 Constructing the Disabled Object: The Scientific Gaze in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 164 Diagnosing Hyde 167 Narrative Prosthesis and the Gothic Open Ending 170 Detecting Disability: Narrative Structure and Reading the Body in ‘The Crooked Man’ 175 Detective Fiction’s Drive towards Closure and Cure 177 Focalizating Disability’s Shifting Signification 180

Afterword 193 Works Cited 197

Index 217

Acknowledgements am grateful for the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities

Research Council of Canada, the Department of English and Faculty of Graduate Studies at the University of Victoria, The Centre for Studies in Religion and Society, and St. Thomas More College at the University of Saskatchewan. I also thank the publishers of Women’s Writing, Journal of Disability and Religion, and Nineteenth-Century Disability: Cultures and Contexts for permission to reprint material that originally appeared in their publications.

I owe a great deal of thanks to a great many people who contributed to the development of this project. Firstly, thank you to Lisa Surridge and Mary Elizabeth Leighton, who generously fostered my scholarship while I researched and wrote this manuscript. Thanks to Pamela Moss for reviewing early drafts with a disability studies perspective. I am grateful to Martha Stoddard Holmes for her insightful, productive feedback on an early draft. Likewise, I thank Karen Bourrier for spurring me to find the narrative shape of this book’s argument. I am additionally indebted to Vanessa Warne for encouraging me in Victorian disability studies, ever since my first VSAWC conference paper.

Maryanne Reed, Paisley Mann, Caley Ehnes, and Amy Coté: thank you for your support, humour, and patience, and for reading over bits and bobs of the manuscript as I struggled through writing and revising. Thanks to Julie Nord, Renee Vander Meulen, Kandice Sharren, Tiffany Parks, and Stephanie Keane, for academic comradeship and writing company. Thanks are also due to Dad, Tanya, Lynmara, Bronwyn, and Graeme for cheering me on, and to Ian for his unwavering belief in my ability to finish what I started, even on schedule.

x Articulating Bodies Permissions

Copyright © 2013 Women’s Writing. Chapter Two is derived in part from an article, ‘Prostheses and Narrative Perspective in Dinah Mulock Craik’s The Little Lame Prince,’ published in Re-evaluating Dinah Mulock Craik, a special issue of Women’s Writing, vol. 20, no. 2, 2013, pp. 370-86, copyright Taylor & Francis, LLC.

Copyright © 2012, 2013, 2014 Nineteenth-Century Disability: Cultures and Contexts. Small portions of the Introduction, Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Five, and Chapter Six first appeared as ‘Fiction, Fair and Foul [Excerpt]; ‘The Hunchback of Notre-Dame [Excerpt], ‘Bleak House [Excerpt], ‘The Little Lame Prince and His Travelling Cloak: A Parable for Young and Old [Excerpt],’ and ‘The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde [Excerpt]; entries in Nineteenth-Century Disability: Cultures and Contexts. Project Dir. Karen Bourrier. http://www.nineteenthcenturydisability. org/.

Copyright © 2018. Chapter Four is derived in part from an article, ‘Interdependence, Incarnation and Disability in Charlotte Yonge’s The Pillars of the House; published in Journal of Disability & Religion, vol. 22, no. 2, 2018, pp. 187-98, copyright Taylor & Francis, LLC.

Introduction

Text as Body and Body as Text: How Literary Form Textually Creates the Body

In Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), Silas Wegg approaches a small, dimly lit shop that is crowded with the paraphernalia of taxidermy. Wegg ‘stumps’ with his wooden leg through the entryway and advances towards the shop’s proprietor, Mr Venus. Since Wegg does not like the thought of being ‘dispersed, a part of me here, and a part of me there’ and would prefer ‘to collect [himself] like a genteel person’ (127), he has asked Venus to help provide him with a matching leg bone to complete his skeleton. During their conversation, a boy nearly absconds with a tooth in his pocket change from purchasing a stuffed canary, and Mr Venus threatens the boy, saying, ‘You’ve no idea how small you’d come out, if I had the articulating of you’ (126). In its earlier appearances in the novel, the word articulate and its variations indicate speech alone, but here, Venus uses it to refer to his profession as an ‘Articulator of human bones’ (128), relying on the word’s anatomical sense: ‘to reassemble (individual bones) to form a skeleton’ (‘Articulate’). Yet Venus’s use of the word nonetheless carries connotations of speech and conveys the potential for speech to shape the body. Likewise, Wegg’s prostheticized body connotes literacy to his employer Nicholas Boffin, who repeatedly calls him ‘a literary man—with a wooden leg’ (93). Distinction between body and word frequently collapses in this novel teeming with unstable bodies, hidden wills, encrypted letters, incomplete literacy, and false identity.

Of course, Our Mutual Friend does not stand alone in Victorian fiction representing the conjoined instability of word and body; indeed, depictions of illnesses, deaths, accidents, and characters with deformities or chronic invalidism are central to a plethora of nineteenth-century novels. In the first instalment of his 1880 essay ‘Fiction, Fair and Foul,’ John Ruskin minces no words in condemning such fiction’s fascination with ‘physical corruption’ (943). He claims that, in this ‘Fiction mécroyante,’ a reader ‘may gather into one Caina of gelid putrescence the entire product of modern infidel imagination, amusing itself with destruction of the body, and busying itself with aberration of the mind’ (950). Using the language of pathology, Ruskin diagnoses the frequent appearance of decaying or aberrant bodies in the century’s fiction not just as symptoms of the era’s ‘moral disease’ (943) but even as ‘medical evidence ... of brain disease’ in the novels’ authors themselves—particularly in Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens (949). His twenty-two-page diatribe against literary representations of disability, disease, and death epitomizes how nineteenth-century England’s medicine and literature overwhelmingly conflated text and body.

The era’s professionalization of medicine and its popularization of phrenology and physiology increasingly made the body a decipherable text, and medicine and literary studies often intersected as a result. Medical journals could carry literary reviews,' and, as Ruskin’s ‘Fiction, Fair and Foul’ and Robert Buchanan’s The Fleshly School of Poetry (1872) make abundantly clear, literary reviews often resembled ‘[medical] diagnosis’ as much as ‘[literary] analysis’ (Arata, ‘Strange Cases’ 172). In ‘Fiction, Fair and Foul,’ Ruskin’s amalgamation of medical diagnosis and literary analysis at times even obscures whether he is addressing the author’s physical body or body of work. The frequency with which body and text are fused in Victorian thought and rhetoric suggests to me that Victorian fiction’s narrative form itself, to borrow Venus’s double meaning, articulated bodies. As such, Articulating Bodies investigates the way narrative form categorized bodies and negotiated their meanings as the era’s notions of disability and normalcy were developing.

1 See, for example, J.C. Bucknill’s review of Tennyson’s Maud and Other Poems in the Asylum Journal of Mental Science, October 1855. Although Bucknill notes the oddity of performing a literary review in a medical journal, his review is not the only one of its kind. The 1863 volume of the Medical Critic and Psychological Journal, for example, has two articles on psychology and sensation fiction (‘Sensation Fiction,’ ‘Baits for Suicide’).

Although nineteenth-century literary and medical theory’s conflations of body and text may seem excessive, current narrative theory includes a similar correlation of body and text in using somatic terms such as point of view, perspective, and focalization, all of which describe the textual act of representing a character’s or narrator’s bodily and mental perception in narrative. In an article on focalization in Henry James’s fiction, J. Hillis Miller points out that these terms metaphorically corporealize or even somaticize narrative. They falsely suggest a physicality that does not exist; they ‘evade the fact that novels are made of words[,] ... and elide the way the essential mode of existence of any literary fictional work is linguistic through and through’ (‘Focalization’ 124-25). Miller challenges these metaphors that link body and text: ‘No looking or bringing into focus exists in any novel, only the virtual phantasm of these as expressed in words’ (‘Focalization’ 125). Although Miller is not writing in the service of disability studies, his troubling of the body-text association reminds me that the linguistic rendering of bodies is incorporeal. In a similar way, many disability theorists maintain that disability itself is a sociolinguistic concept—a linguistic rendering of bodies—rather than a corporeal actuality; as Lennard J. Davis puts it, ‘the body is not only—or even primarily—a physical object’ (Enforcing Normalcy 14). Likewise, my book argues that body narratives, including the social norms that define the body and its functions, are likewise textual or ideological constructions, ‘virtual phantasms’ of actual corporeality.

Nonetheless, disability studies also maintains the metaphorical link between body and text in its own narratological theories, even while questioning the way that this link has been used to oppress and marginalize the disabled population. Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell’s theory of narrative prosthesis conflates body and language by arguing that narratives repeatedly use the disabled figure as a ‘prosthetic’ for plot impetus and resolution. Likewise, Ato Quayson uses the term ‘aesthetic nervousness’ in his book of the same name to describe moments in which ‘the dominant protocols of [literary] representation’ collapse in ‘relation to disability’ (15). Using similar conflation, Brett Smith and Andrew C. Sparkes not only claim that stories are ‘projected from and inscribed into the body’ but also that ‘the body is a storyteller’ (19). Taking this concept further, in a disability themed issue of the journal Narrative, Garland-Thomson writes, ‘I would like to suggest that [the idea that body] shape structures story is the informing principle of disability identity’ (114). In turn, Elizabeth F. Emens explains that, rather than implying that the physical differences categorized as disability provide the warrant for that constructed label, Garland-Thomson’s claim that shape structures story ‘celebrates the power of bodies beyond the “norm” to create beautiful and powerful stories’ (125).

These fusions of body and story exist because we fundamentally understand our bodies via social construction and narrative, and because we ultimately perceive those narratives and constructions through our bodies via the senses; as such, ‘disability is a cultural phenomenon rooted in the senses’ (Davis, Enforcing Normalcy 128), even though it is simultaneously a sociolinguistic concept. Thus, from a disability studies perspective, body and text cannot be wholly separated—and therefore Articulating Bodies does not try to separate them. Instead, maintaining awareness of body and text’s inextricability, this book examines Victorian fiction’s formal structure in addition to its thematic representations of disability, comparing what the text’s ‘body language’ (formal techniques and structural patterns) and its thematic language (narrative content) tell us about Victorian disability. Moreover, by identifying the tangible ways in which Victorian fiction correlated body and text, Articulating Bodies demonstrates that disability’s development was frequently dialogic, incongruously understood as both deviant and commonplace in its essence, neither immediately or irrevocably marginalizing a people, but rather struggling to negotiate the limits, capabilities, and meanings of human bodies.

My formalist analysis of Victorian fiction therefore focuses on the ‘body language’ of narrative form. As Quayson’s Aesthetic Nervousness encourages critics to read disability ‘within the wider discursive structure of relations among different levels of the text’ (25), Articulating Bodies inspects both the shape of the narrative’s plot (for example, the linearity of a Bildungsroman or the web-like network of episodic serial fiction and family chronicles) and focalization, the formal technique within the narrative that simulates physical sensation for the reader. My investigation of disability’s function ‘among different levels of the text’ differs from Quayson’s in two key ways, however. First, while his study follows ‘thematic clusterings,’ both to demonstrate how aesthetic nervousness transcends literary periods and representational modes? and to avoid ‘the suggestion of evolution and change in the representation of disability’ (28), this book aims to locate intersections of development between Victorian literary form and disability. Second, while Quayson considers focalization in his chapter on disability in Toni Morrison’s fiction, noting how her

2 For example, one chapter argues that aesthetic nervousness functions even within the history of Robben Island in the Caribbean.

narratives ‘encourage us to always be prepared to shift perspectives along with the characters’ in such a way that ‘the various meanings [of disability in the novel] themselves shift, dissolve, and blur into one another’ (87, 88), Articulating Bodies dwells on focalization as a central method through which Victorian fiction constructed human corporeality.

Early narrative theorists such as Norman Friedman originally called this formal technique point of view, but because the name ‘combined perspective with narration and thus mixed the figure who perceives with the one who narrates,’ later theorists such as Gérard Genette and Mieke Bal used the more abstract (though still somatic) term focalization to make a distinction between narrating and perceiving (Herman and Vervaeck 31, 71). Most recently, critics such as Burkhard Niederhoff, Tatjana Jesch, and Malte Stein have argued for a distinction between the terms perspective and focalization that separates focalization from the subjectivity of fictitious individuals, thus making it distinctly abstract. Arguing that Genette’s original use of focalization refers ‘to knowledge and information’ rather than to perspective (119), Niederhoff applies the term only to ‘selections of narrative information that are not designed to render the subjective experience of a character but to create other effects such as suspense, mystery, puzzlement, etc.’ (122). Jesch and Stein argue that even Niederhoff’s distinction is not strong enough and instead define perspectivization as ‘the representation of something from the subjective view of a fictive entity (narrator or character)’ (65) and focalization as ‘as the author’s temporary or definitive withholding of information from the reader’ which may or may not be filtered through perspective (65).

However, I assert that what Jesh and Stein call focalization is in fact a broader narrative technique of which focalization can be a part. Plotting necessarily requires the temporary withholding of information at points; narrative information cannot be given all at once. To make focalization refer to all methods of restricting knowledge in narrative proves not only confusing, since the term has referred to matters of narrative perspective since Genette first used it, but also somewhat etymologically unwarranted. The word focalisation entered the French language in the nineteenth century as a technical term in physics, referring to the action of focusing or to the result of that action (‘Focaliser’). It derived from the term focal, which referred to lenses and mirrors at the time of its derivation, but by the twentieth century was used figuratively to imply a convergence of elements (‘Focal, ale, aux’). Its etymological connotations are of narrowing in, of centring, rather than of leaving out. Thus, the term focalization refers to how narrative limits information by narrowing access to it through an agent, be it narrator, character, or non-human object (e.g. ‘Allegory’ in Bleak House), such that the narrative result may or may not be the ‘suspense, mystery, puzzlement, etc.’ that Niederhoff ascribes to it. Therefore, since most focalization theory still defines it as such, I will use the term focalization to refer to ‘the textual representation of specific (pre)existing sensory elements of the text’s story world as perceived and registered ... by some mind or recording device which is a member of this world’ (Margolin 42).

Moreover, I would argue that the use of focalization necessarily evokes a sense of a perceiving body and that it is therefore central to understanding how narrative articulates bodies. In her seminal work on satellite theory, Julia Miele Rodas explains that the underlying purpose behind the freak shows and museums of deformity prevalent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was not to ask, as P.T. Barnum did, ‘What is it?’ but rather to pose the ‘greater and more immediate query’: ‘who or what am I in relation to this other creature?’ (59). In narrative, authors both ask and answer a similar question for their readers through focalization: ‘Who or what am I in relation to this character?’ Whether readers share focalization with certain characters, at an ironic distance or at a personal closeness as the narrator’s tone dictates, or whether they focalize on characters from a point external to the narrative, affects how they view their own subjectivity in relation to those characters.* While Miller and other narratologists may feel uncomfortable with how the terms perception, point of view, or focalization seem to ‘suggest there are centers of perception in a narrative text that approximate human beings and that apparently think and feel as we all do’ (Herman and Vervaeck 71), ultimately that is precisely what the technique ought to do—it acts to inform readers of what human beings are, and what they might think or feel, by textually producing a centre of perception.

Moreover, as disability theorists have noted, perception—especially visual perception—is integral to the construction of disability. Davis contends that ‘Disability is a specular moment’ in which a normative-bodied observer responds to the sight of non-normative bodies and behaviours with ‘horror, fear, pity, compassion, and avoidance’

3 A recent study by psychologists Geoff F. Kaufman and Lisa K. Libby corroborates this argument. Their research shows that the depth at which readers identify with characters is affected by focal distance (that is, first-person vs third-person description) as well as by the timing with which the character’s marginal characteristics (such as race, gender, or sexuality) are revealed.

(Enforcing Normalcy 12). Likewise, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson describes staring as an ‘interactive process’ through which ‘identity emerges’ (Staring 10). Elsewhere, she explains that ‘staring constitutes disability identity by manifesting the power relations between the subject positions of disabled and able-bodied’ (‘The Politics of Staring’ 57). Herein, then, lies narrative articulation of body: through focalization, narrators convey the bodies and minds of those through whom they are focalizing, of those who are being perceived, and occasionally even of the ‘narratees, implied audiences, and flesh and blood readers’ (Phelan 51) and of the narrators themselves. Therefore, because this argument focuses on how fiction creates bodies through focalization—of characters, but also of readers and even non-character narrators—Articulating Bodies deliberately avoids referring to narrators as he or she, unless the stories deliberately gender them. To assign a gendered pronoun, even a neutral s/he, to a narrator is to assign it a body, one that the text itself may not have given.

Since focalization articulates bodies in fiction, it is not a coincidence that nineteenth-century novels are known for having multiple and many-layered focalizations. In fact, Henry James’s aesthetic grievance concerning the ‘large loose baggy monsters’ of Victorian fiction is ultimately with their focalization: he valorizes narratives streamlined through a single centre of consciousness or through a consistent variation between consciousness and ‘scenic conditions’ (‘Preface’ xvi), whereas focalization varies widely in Victorian novels. According to James, those multiple focalizations and multiple plots create pictures ‘without composition’ and generate stories ‘cheated of [their] indispensable centre[s]’ (‘Preface’ x). Of course, Victorianists have since argued that ‘the ostensibly casual form’ of these novels actually possesses ‘formal structures and strategies’ that reflect the contemporary concerns of the era (G. Levine 14-15). Indeed, formalist scholars of Victorian fiction have already established that this kind of narrative structure indicates cultural insecurity born from radical transitions in religion, science, and industry. George Levine argues that ‘the Victorian novel is one of the most obvious symptoms of these transformations’ and that its structure ‘reflect[s] a deep sense of instability everywhere, not only in class relations’ (16-17). J. Hillis Miller likewise claims that ‘the new metaphysical situation’ wrought by scientific and historical challenges to Christianity caused Victorian fiction ‘to take the form of an incomplete self-generating structure ... [that] often presupposes a concept of society not as a web of commensurate elements supported by some creative principle outside itself, but as a pattern of incommensurate elements’ (Victorian Fiction 33-34). He notes that this pattern has a distinct ‘play of sameness and difference’ that creates ‘its own immanent basis for meaning’ (Victorian Fiction 34).

Articulating Bodies argues that the ‘play of sameness and difference’ informs the basis for the meanings of the body and disability in the Victorian era, and that the irreconcilable tension of bodily ‘sameness and difference’ in fiction dwells in the discord between thematic and formal patterns. In the Victorian multi-plot novel, multiple perspectives and focalizations linguistically shape numerous identities with differing bodies and contrasting social and economic classes; this structure parallels the era’s rhetoric that combined somaticism with textuality as well as with civic, national, and social identity. However, as Caroline Levine notes, ‘Forms will often fail to impose their order when they run up against other forms that disrupt their logic and frustrate their organizing ends, producing aleatory and sometimes contradictory effects’ (Forms 7). As the following chapters show, the various formal structures and thematic patterns in Victorian fiction collide to create conflicting ideas of disability, suggesting an abiding ambivalence in disability’s development as a concept despite increased medicalization by the turn of the century.* Overall, Victorian fictional depictions of the disabled or diseased body structurally and thematically encode the Victorian sense of instability, and the body’s connection with social identity manifests itself in the Victorian novel’s narrative structure.

To examine this manifestation of body and identity in Victorian narrative structure, Articulating Bodies analyses the shape of the narrative in question, measures to what extent the narrative’s form engages in conventions of its genre(s), and considers the role played by disability and the body in creating that shape and in fulfilling those conventions. In ascertaining narrative shape, I not only assess whether or not the tale is told in linear progression or whether its ending is open or closed; I also use Rick Altman’s concept of following, which he articulates in A Theory of Narrative. Altman’s narrative theory maps narrative structure by the character or characters on or through whom the narrative focuses; therefore, following relates to reader subjectivity and the place of the body in a parallel way to focalization. Surveying a multitude of stories from several centuries and regions, Altman argues that Western narratives always take one of three forms based on the number of

4 Similarly, in Aesthetic Nervousness, Quayson argues that such ambivalence regarding disability pervades all literary texts and so suggests that ‘the social treatment of disability has historically been multifaceted and sometimes even contradictory’ (14).

characters or groups of characters that the narratives follow: single-focus narratives, which follow single characters and emphasize the importance of the individual;> dual-focus narratives, which follow two characters or two groups of characters and emphasize social order and boundaries;° and multiple-focus narratives, which follow several seemingly unrelated characters or groups of characters and emphasize interconnectedness and external social forces.’ As Altman explains, the three following patterns lend themselves to certain genres: for example, Bildungsromane are most effectively told as single-focus stories, whereas pastoral stories and melodramas tend to be dual-focus. Thus, I at times combine Altman’s narrative theory with genre theory to demonstrate how structure, genre, focalization, and theme overlap and collide to produce conflicting Victorian concepts about whether and to what extent bodies produce or reflect individual morality, social corruption, personal psychology, Christian spirituality, and criminality.

To consider the structural conventions of genres as part of form, and to trace the nineteenth century’s development of the formal articulation of the body, Articulating Bodies examines texts from across the nineteenth century, covering genres of fiction that typically rely upon disabled or diseased characters—the Gothic, social problem, sensation, sentimental religious, fairy tale, and detective genres. By tracing the patterns of focalization and narrative structure across six decades of the nineteenth century and across six genres, Articulating Bodies demonstrates that, as fiction’s form developed from the massive hybrid novels of the early decades of the nineteenth century to the case-study length of fin-de-siécle mysteries, disability became increasingly medicalized, moving from the position of spectacle to specimen. In her history of nineteenth-century physiognomy, Sharrona Pearl finds a Victorian self-consciousness of this shift as early as 1855 (38-39), when Punch’s ‘Progress in Waxworks’ satirically argues that Madame Tussaud’s renaming of the wax model criminal display from the ‘Chamber of Horrors’ to the ‘Chamber of

5 Altman provides Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) as an example (160): the novel follows its heroine Elizabeth Bennet, stressing the importance of her thoughts and actions.

6 Altman uses the twelfth-century The Song of Roland as the main example, noting how the text moves back and forth spatially between the French and the Saracen forces (32).

7 Altman explains how George Eliot’s Middlemarch, though it begins with a focus on Dorothea, ‘spins out to a much broader following-pattern’ that provides the stories of disparate characters, making the novel multiple-focus (272-73).

Comparative Physiognomy’ means that ‘the horrible no longer affords any attraction’ to the average viewer, who now ‘demands the scientific’ (‘Progress’ 67). This shift also implies an altered mode of looking: viewers no longer ‘gape with morbid interest’ but instead scrutinize ‘for the purpose of studying the lineaments of those villains, with a view to proper precaution against gentlemen of similar aspect’ (‘Progress’ 67). Formerly objects of freakish spectacle inspiring horror, the wax figures under their new name become a scientifically authorized method of viewing and categorizing the other. Likewise, in Victorian fiction, the mode of looking at corporeal difference in fiction becomes increasingly scientific. Notably, however, the mid-century fiction I examine tends to focalize through disabled characters more than the earlier or later fiction does, displacing those characters from the objectification that the spectacle and specimen positions engender, potentially because this fiction is the chronological hinge between the Gothic spectacles of anomaly on the one end and the neo-Gothic medical specimens of abnormality on the other.

The works covered in Articulating Bodies each address somatic concerns specific to their time and to their genre. Prompted by Ruskin’s identification of Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) as the urtext of fiction on deviant bodies, my first chapter argues that Hugo’s pre-Victorian Gothic historical novel and its early English translations set a precedent for investigating the disabled body through the dialogic conflict between focalization and narrative form in Victorian fiction. With its monstrous yet humane hero, the novel responds to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century scientific and philosophical theories that challenged the division between human and animal, using hybridity in form to do so. Like Ruskin, current critics have noted that Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852-53) takes up Notre-Dame de Paris’s ‘loose, decentralized, and structurally uneven’ novelistic form as well as its ‘obsess[ion] with “otherness” (Zarifopol-Johnston, To Kill a Text 15, 16). However, like the other Condition-of-England novels popular from the late 1830s to the early ’50s, Bleak House responds to the class disparity caused by industrialism and explores the differences and connections between the bodies of divergent classes to do so. By examining how Bleak House extends the dialogic conflict established in Hugo’s Notre-Dame between external focalization on the disabled body and internal focalization through non-normative bodies, Articulating Bodies’s second chapter upends literary critics’ conventional interpretation of disability in Bleak House as a symbol of social corruption, showing how the novel destabilizes that metaphorization when one of the novel’s narrators reveals her identity as a person with a disability.

Moving from social to scientific concerns, the third chapter focuses on the most popular genre of fiction in the 1860s, sensation novels; it argues that sensation fiction used the disabled body to explore the cultural anxiety aroused by nascent psychology’s challenges to the traditional belief in the soul as an entity separate from the body. Applying my methodology to two novels by the masters (if not inventors) of the genre, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd (1862-63) and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), Chapter Three suggests that the form and focalization of these two major sensation novels reveal the anxiety with which Victorians were determining the body’s connection to identity. Mid-Victorian Christian sentimental fiction was likewise invested in understanding this connection and therefore mapped the religious soul on the body. Though the heyday of Christian sentimental fiction may be said to have occurred in the 1850s or ’60s, I focus on Charlotte Yonge’s The Pillars of the House (1870-73) and Ellice Hopkins’s Rose Turquand (1876), because their emphasis on incarnation theology demonstrates distinctly how Victorian Christianity connected spiritual identity to the physical body.

The 1860s and ’70s also saw the emergence of the Victorian literary fairy tale, which placed child protagonists in fantasy settings to depict their moral, psychological, and physical development. These fantasy Bildungsromane, such as George MacDonald’s Princess and the Goblin and Charles Kingsley’s Water-babies, were often democratic in impulse, suggesting that behaviour and action rather than heredity and class determined heroism. In The Little Lame Prince (1874), Dinah Mulock Craik explores how the body affects an individual’s development; she brings her disabled child hero to maturity (and relative normalcy) using magical prostheses—yet these prostheses also serve to remind readers of the instability of all bodies, including their own. Responding to fears about bodily and identity instabilities, the fin-de-siécle mysteries of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story ‘The Adventure of the Crooked Man’ (1893) return to the Gothicism of Hugo’s novel, but this time with a modern attention to degeneration theory and the developing sciences of neurology and criminology, the latter of which pathologized the criminal body and criminalized the disabled body. This survey of novels and stories reveals that as the understanding of the human body and of disability transformed according to changing social and scientific frames, Victorian fiction across genres and across time consistently both constructed and destabilized the notion of physical normalcy through the dialogue between narrative shape and focalization.