The Genre of Blindness

Abstract

Abstract This chapter looks at genre painting and domestic fiction to show how aberrance is nearly normalized in the period through representations of blindness. Blindness becomes a signifier of the generic, domestic, or quotidian itself. The chapter includes discussions of genre paintings and historical genre paintings and drawings by Michael Halliday, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, David Wilkie, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais. In these works, blindness becomes a site through which to articulate the boundaries of genre itself. The chapter then turns to Wilkie Collins’s 1872 novel, Poor Miss Finch, featuring a blind protagonist. Collins explicitly labels this novel “A Domestic Story,” and the chapter traces the ways in which the blind Lucilla Finch resists but also conforms to the conventions of domestic fiction, even in the context of a wildly sensational narrative. The novel demonstrates the ways in which the extranormativity of blindness is—almost—made normative.