Articulating Bodies: The Narrative Form of Disability and Illness in Victorian Fiction, by Kylee-Anne Hingston

Abstract

Reviewed by: Articulating Bodies: The Narrative Form of Disability and Illness in Victorian Fiction by Kylee-Anne Hingston Natalie Prizel (bio) Articulating Bodies: The Narrative Form of Disability and Illness in Victorian Fiction, by Kylee-Anne Hingston; pp. x + 221. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019, £80.00, $120.00. Reviewing a text concerned with how disability at times disrupts narrative linearity, one might do as well to start at the end as at the beginning, and it is indeed at the end that Kylee-Anne Hingston gives the origin story of her book, Articulating Bodies: The Narrative Form of Disability and Illness in Victorian Fiction, a study of how disability is formally articulated in nineteenth-century literature. Reading Robert Buchanan's indictment of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites, Hingston "wanted to know what allowed Buchanan to collapse body and text so thoroughly that he could consider poetic form susceptible to disease" (193–94). If Buchanan turns text into flesh in a manner that inspires Hingston's book, Charles Dickens shows Mr. Venus, the articulator of bones from Our Mutual Friend (1865), turning flesh into text, something to be taxonomized and, as he puts it, articulated. These two examples bookend Hingston's detailed treatment of the relationship between bodies and narrative in nineteenth-century fiction. Hingston's book joins several new endeavors to think about disability in formal and, here, narratological terms in an effort to complicate the hitherto dominant terms of disability theory. It attempts to move from the overarching claims of disability theory—claims that nonetheless underlie and inform Hingston's analysis—to the more contingent and local arguments of disability criticism. Dividing her chapters by subgenre (gothic fiction, social problem fiction, sensation fiction, "sentimental religious" fiction, fairy tales, and detective fiction), Hingston analyzes focalization and narrative shape (especially narrative closure) to account for the narrative workings of disabled bodies from the 1830s to the 1890s (9). Hingston begins with John Ruskin's critique of the presence of disabled, dying, and (to him) disgusting bodies in Fiction, Fair and Foul (1880), using his famously intemperate [End Page 310] response to certain texts to make claims about Victorian attitudes toward disabled fictional figures more generally. Ruskin calls Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) "the effectual head of the whole cretinous school" (qtd. 21). Hingston's treatment of Hugo is compelling, particularly her focus on on Hugo's aesthetics of incompleteness, his use of optical discourse, and the relationship between architectural and embodied form in the novel. While shifts in focalization are at the heart of the chapter, it is in reference to these other concerns that Hingston makes her strongest case for complexity and hybridity in Hugo's treatment of disability. (Hybridity might be considered the watchword of this study due to Hingston's insistence on the ambiguous narrative position of disability.) Nonetheless, Notre-Dame de Paris serves as a somewhat odd start to a book announcing itself as Victorian and otherwise concerned with British texts, particularly because much of Articulating Bodies is concerned with culturally contingent anxieties. Despite Ruskin's insistence on Hugo's text as foundational to a "cretinous" canon, it seems that cultural and social anxieties regarding the body might very well differ across the Channel. Ruskin drops out as a principal antagonist as the book goes on, but it is worth mentioning that his aesthetics might not be so diametrically opposed to Hugo's as Hingston (or Ruskin himself) suggests. She writes that Notre-Dame de Paris "insists that there is beauty in hybridity, in the incomplete, and in the ugly; it holds beauty and ugliness, normalcy and abnormality, as both distinct and indistinguishable from one another" (47). Here, Hingston actually sounds much like Ruskin, who writes in Modern Painters, "The ugliest objects contain some element of beauty; and in all it is an element peculiar to themselves, which cannot be separated from their ugliness, but must either be enjoyed together with it or not at all" (The Works of John Ruskin, edited by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, vol. 5 [London: George Allen, 1903–12], 58). In the second chapter, on Dickens's Bleak House (1852–53), Hingston's claim...