Disability and Female Sexuality in Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch

Abstract

This article will explore how Wilkie Collins deals with social issues including both social prejudice against female disability and sexism in Poor Miss Finch. Both types of prejudice are oriented in discriminating against bodily difference from the normative “able” and “male” body. The novel’s narrative is structured to construct an alternative figure of female disability in the character of Lucilla Finch, who finds in her physical impairment the advantages of an extraordinary “ability” as a gift. Collins deliberately insists on his female protagonist defying an array of Victorian social norms that defines women with disabilities as social dependents dis-embodied and de-sexualized. This article will examine how Collins invests his narrative energy in representing Lucilla as a heroic figure of female disability. In the meantime, this article will also give some attention to Collins’s treatment of gender, which entails some narrative contradictions, and will argue that it is worthwhile to explore Collins’s difficulty as a storyteller in simultaneously dealing with two social problem issues, disability and gender. The later part of this article will explore how Collins’s construction of a disabled female character has to bow down to gender conventions by compelling Oscar to overcome his non-normative masculinity.