Survival of the Unfit

Abstract

The article adds nuances to “crip modernisms” and the terrain of “cripistemology” by scrutinizing the negative representations of disability/disfigurement in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out. While critical attention has been devoted to Woolf’s eugenic modernism, criticism tends to either undermine or over-interpret her eugenic sentiments as prostheses of her aestheticism. Alternatively, the article confronts Woolf’s eugenicist attitude where she directly but precariously engages with a critical disability discourse. The argument is that Woolf subverts her own eugenic and ableist rhetoric via a narrative shift that occurs in chapter 25. As pain becomes the focalizer of the chapter, Woolf deflects pain onto affective imperfections that do not quite fit into common documentations of disability. Disassociating pain from imperfections of bodyminds, Woolf suggests that the pain directed towards disability/disfigurement betokens a variation of what Anna Mollow calls an “undocumented disability” that medical narratives fail to diagnose (185). But rather than being “invisible,” Woolf’s work elucidates that some undocumented disabilities are perhaps “too visible.” Debunking pain as a proxy of the failure to understand others, Woolf suggests that undocumented disabilities hide under the plain sight of the normal business of living.