Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture Ross G. Forman (bio) Martha Stoddard Holmes , Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2004); xiv+ 228 pages, hardback, $65 (ISBN 0 472 09841 1). A few years ago, I visited Cambodia on holiday. My hotel advertised an in-house massage service, carried out by an organization called Krousar Thmey. This charity was established to provide an education to local children blinded by landmines and to train them for employment in the tourist industry. These were children who would otherwise end up as a burden to their relatives, or as beggars. The experience of having my flesh kneaded by a blind young man was, of course, a 'feel-good' one in [End Page 360] all senses of the word. Not only was the massage relaxing, it was also a self-congratulatory exercise in sympathizing with the handicapped. The incident also invoked many of the feelings that Martha Stoddard Holmes shows, in Fictions of Affliction:Physical Disability in Victorian Culture, became characteristic of the way in which able-bodied people have dealt with the disabled from the nineteenth century to the present. Bringing together fiction and life narratives, Stoddard Holmes's work probes the origin of the connection between disability and emotion. The book begins by reviewing the conventions of melodrama, historicizing the imbrication of melodrama and disability on the Victorian stage. Although the extensive critical corpus around melodrama and early film might have provided her with some tools to make this analysis more theoretical, nevertheless, Stoddard Holmes convincingly shows how melodrama came to frame disability both in literary and non-literary texts and in society more generally. She then offers an analysis of representations of disabled people in the work of novelists such as Charles Dickens, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Dinah Craik, and Charlotte M. Yonge. This section of the book focuses largely on depictions of women and their relation to conventional and unconventional marriage plots. Fictions of Afflictions moves on to deal with Victorian imaginings of disabled boys and men, drawing a distinction between innocent, child-like sufferers and those who use their disability – or counterfeit disability – in order to escape work. Here, Stoddard Holmes draws effective contrasts between Victorian moral censure of begging and historical information showing just how difficult it was for disabled men to remain independent, especially if they hailed from the working classes. Examining the administrators of the Poor Laws and the philosophy guiding organizations such as the Charity Organization Society, Stoddard Holmes uncovers the class biases that made them see disabled people of humble social origins as, in effect, guilty of their own destitution – if not their disability itself. She foregrounds the need for Victorian sympathizers to see disability in terms of the productive economy and to gain pleasure from charitable acts, just as I did in supporting, on a minute scale, the disabled poor of Cambodia. Stoddard then contrasts these views with a chapter reading biographies and autobiographies of Victorians with disabilities (principally the blind and the deaf). This chapter balances narratives of the lower-class disabled as recorded by Henry Mayhew in London Labour and the London Poor (1861-2) with life writings by Harriet Martineau, John Kitto, Henry Fawcett, and Elizabeth Gilbert. This material, while fascinating, is also undertheorized, and it ignores many of the insights of recent work on subjectivity and life writing in Victorian studies scholarship. [End Page 361] Fictions of Affliction concludes by reminding readers that it is a rare person indeed who will not experience disability during their lifetime – either their own or that of a friend or relative. She appeals to scholars to incorporate disability into 'our taxonomies of "difference" and our concomitant training of students as critical, questioning readers of literature and culture. These are not intellectual games but essential learning for anyone who has a body' (195). It is therefore all the more striking that her analysis ignores what my experience with the blind masseur in Cambodia reveals: that the continuity between Victorian attitudes towards disability and the West's own often lies in the way we treat the developing world, 'stuck' as it is in what...