Demystifying the Fantasies of Normalcy: The Discursive Construction of Disability in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

During the past few decades, postmodern theories challenge the grand narratives which deride bodies and experiences that do not fit within the standard norm. Their studies on body in critical discourse cover issues related to race, gender, sexuality, and class, while neglecting disability, despite the fact that people with disabilities compose the largest physical minority. Given the preconditions, the essay, drawing on the concepts of discursive formation and bio-power, begins by calling into question what is regarded as normal to scrutinize a range of widely endorsed practices and ideas surrounding normalcy and disability in the nineteenth century, including the historical roots and configurations of the concept of normality and disability, the belief in heredity, the emergence of eugenics, and industrialization in the nineteenth century.The second part of the essay tackles how disabled characters in the nineteenth century literature are constituted to maintain the able-bodied public's ideological projections and investments of normalcy which excludes disability as an other or ”alterity” and how the concept of normalcy has accorded a common set of stigmatizing social values to disability that has determined the treatment and positioning of the disabled people in society. It aims to highlight that physical difference does not carry inherent, deterministic, and essentialized meaning; instead, it must be understood as a social, political, and cultural construction from a culturally created web of meaning as well as a physical phenomenon. Moreover, through the disclosure of the symbolic investments that produce and reproduce disabled subject, the essay also exemplifies the ways that the physical difference is normalized, metaphorized, promulgated, and commodified in the nineteenth-century literary texts. In its broadest application, the essay attempts to challenge the prevailing ableist ideology and transfigure the myth imposed on the disabled body, which is often considered a synonym of deficiency and lack. Finally, the study also reveals how the physical differences from the norm have been insinuated into the social interactions, relational identity, and subjectivity of the disabled characters. By all means, the aim of this essay is not to cover up its difference or deviance from the norm; instead, it begins by recognizing and naming its own incomprehension to avoid essentializing the differences. Through the survey and analysis of the uses of disability in these narratives, the essay also provides a framework for assessing the literary narratives on disability in the nineteenth century.