Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature by Jason S. Farr

Abstract

Reviewed by: Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature by Jason S. Farr Jeremy Chow FARR, JASON S. Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2019. 206 pp. $99.95 hardcover; $34.95 paperback; $34.95 e-book. With his recent monograph, Jason S. Farr showcases the constellated nature of disability and sexuality in the literature of the long eighteenth century by emphasizing, one, how this intersectional lens has been heretofore limited in extant scholarship and, two, how eighteenth-century writers implicitly and explicitly gesture towards their layered integration. Novel Bodies bridges the established fields of eighteenth-century disability studies and queer studies, which have—until recently—been conducted separately, to become an astute model for intertwining theories of disability and sexuality. Farr argues that eighteenth-century conceptions of disability plague the formation of subjectivity (by Locke’s definition at least) and that the literature of the period encodes “disability as a manifestation of queer desire” (27). In so doing, Farr embarks upon crip-queer/queer-crip readings that can enrich eighteenth-century studies and its continued investment in elucidating marginalized representation within the canon and beyond. The two-word title, Novel Bodies, lays bare Farr’s bipartite goals. First, by way of tackling theories of embodiment, Farr engages the lived realities of disability and sexuality as they “stage an array of eighteenth-century debates covering contemporaneous topics as diverse as education, feminism, kinship, medicine, and plantation life” (1). And second, with his pun on “novel,” Farr excitingly reads the [End Page 346] eighteenth-century novel as a literary form that replicates disability and ableist politics and representation within its very narrative structure. Novel Bodies thus innovatively envisions what I will call “crip-formalism” (crip, of course, a word that has been recently recuperated by disability theorists and disabled individuals) that extends from recent explorations of new-formalism and queer formalism: necessary revisions of staid formalist approaches so as to center literary form as it uncovers historically and culturally situated political, social, and identity-based significance. Farr’s crip-formalism opens realms by which culturally-inscribed and institutionalized attitudes towards and descriptions of disability are framed by narrative form, and thus positions the novel as a structural mirror to “various kinds of disability… vital to the social, physical, and psychological makeup of Georgian Britain” (27). By focusing primarily on the emergence of the novel in the period (Richardson, Haywood, Smollett, Scott), Farr’s crip-formalism navigates a parallel track by which to understand the rise of the novel discourse that has long been heralded as integral to understanding the eighteenth century. Farr’s take plaits identity and embodiment with form. Four chapters and a coda comprise Novel Bodies, which moves chronologically from 1720 to 1817, though Farr draws from Restoration-era (Rochester, Wycherley) and earlier seventeenth-century primary sources (Bulwer, Bacon) by which to historicize his claims of disability or “deformity”—the latter a more analogous term for the eighteenth century. The introduction adumbrates the theoretical territory and offers a reading of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto as a litmus test that realizes one of Farr’s most provocative close readings: Conrad, presumed and murdered heir to the Otranto throne, as a “crip haunting of heteronormativity” (18). The introduction patiently traces the evolution of disability, deformity, degenerescence, sound-ness, and other critical terms that valuably lay out the provenance of eighteenth-century disability studies. However, I wish this same patient attention was paid to “queerness” or “queer”—terms that alongside disability and crip share parallel recuperative, reparative, and weaponized histories. Farr’s capacious use of queerness signifies interventions in sexuality, gender, and sex. Chapter 1 addresses the social deaths and histories of deaf subjectivity in Enlightenment Britain by examining three representations of Duncan Campbell—a celebrity deaf prophet feted for his divination talents—by Christopher Krentz, Eliza Haywood, and allegedly Campbell himself. Farr’s visual analysis of the frontispiece to John Bulwer’s Philocophus, or, the deafe and dumbe man’s friend (1648), which is likewise captured on the cover of Novel Bodies, emblematizes his lamination of disability and queer close readings. Chapter 2 pairs Samuel Richardson...