Disability Studies and the British Long Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Disability studies approaches the British eighteenth century as a period in transition, with the conception of disability as spiritual sign of wonder or warning giving way to an understanding of it as pathology and abnormality. Period‐appropriate terms for disability are ‘deformity,’‘defect,’ and ‘monster,’ which were used for exotic bodily configurations and gender and racial differences: women and non‐Europeans were perceived as defective. John Milton, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, Elizabeth Inchbald, and William Hay have generated interest on account of their disabilities, while Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Mary Wortley Montagu, Sarah Scott, Sarah Fielding, Henry Fielding, John Cleland, Francis Burney, and William Godwin have received attention for disability thematics. Topics of concern include disability and old age, physiognomy in characterization, joke book humor and sensibility, ugliness as aesthetic category, defect in tropes of national identity, deafness and sign language, intellectual disability and Lockean epistemology, the exotic deformed, disfigurement from smallpox as well as political rhetoric associated with the disease, and femininity as monstrosity.

The Historicist Turn of Romantic‐Era Disability Studies, orFrankensteinin the Dark

“…Romantic studies lag a bit on this front. Literature Compass , for example, has already published wonderful essays on disability in several other literary periods: Dwight Gabbard's “Disability Studies and the British Long Eighteenth Century,” Taylor Hagood's “Disability Studies and American Literature,” David Wood's “Shakespeare and Disability Studies,” and Courtney Andree's “Reproducing Disability and Degeneration in the Victorian Fin de Siècle.” Did the Romantics simply not take much time to theorize abnormal embodiment? In their foreword to Disabling Romanticism , Tom Shakespeare and Peter Kitson note that Romantic writers, even as they grasped for sublime transcendence of things like mundane embodiment, were still very much aware of their disabled bodies: “Byron's club foot; Coleridge's mental depressions and addictions; Mary Robinson's lower‐body paralysis; Mary Lamb's and John Clare's psychiatric disabilities; and George Darley's stutter” (vii).…”

“Its Own Concentred Recompense”: The Impact of Critical Disability Studies on Romanticism

“…Tobin Siebers, for example, points to the cult of the rational mind and belief in the importance of non-dependence on others as examples of an eighteenth-century morality which perpetuated the exclusion of those with disabilities (Siebers 2008). As D. Christopher Gabbard argues, "During this time the criteria by which the question of what constituted the human were shifting from those based on physical shape and presence of a soul to those dependent on mental capacity and especially linguistic capability" (Gabbard 2011). There is clearly a direct line from this observation to further research on Romantic irrationality and creative "madness" re-evaluated through a theorized sense of cognitive difference and neuro-divergence, and a historicized view of the treatment of people who are different in mind.…”