Once Upon a Blind Girl: Disability and Fairy Tale in Charles Dickens’s The Cricket on the Hearth

Abstract

Abstract The paper offers a close reading of Charles Dickens’s Christmas novella, The Cricket on the Hearth: A Fairy Tale of Home (1845), through the lens of fairy tales and disability studies. One of the main characters of the story is Bertha Plummer, a blind doll’s dressmaker. Since her father deceives and hides the truth from her, Bertha is unaware of the real nature of her economic and social circumstances as a disabled, working-class woman. Her disability is crucial to the plot as it is strongly connected to the novella’s themes of domestic infidelity, disguise, and the lack of perspective or understanding. The paper analyzes how Dickens explores these ideas through Bertha’s blindness with the use of fairy tales. It relies on academic sources written about Bertha, fairy tales, as well as disability and Victorian gender roles. (GyK)