‘Why don’t he Send the Girl to the Asylum?’: Adaptation, Disability and the Social Body in Boucicault's Dot and The Colleen Bawn

Abstract

This article examines disability in Dion Boucicault's adaptations Dot (1859) and The Colleen Bawn (1860), arguing that Boucicault uses disabled characters both to construct and to complicate the ideal communities formed in the plays’ conclusions. The article traces how Boucicault alters the representation of disability in his source texts, Dickens's The Cricket on the Hearth (1845) and Gerald Griffin's The Collegians (1829). It demonstrates that this is a vital aspect of Boucicault's revision of these texts’ constructions of the social body and that his revision of their disability plots has significant political implications.