From Idiot Beast to Idiot Sublime: Mental Disability in John Cleland's Fanny Hill

Abstract

This essay investigates an erotic encounter between the libertine Louisa and Good-natured Dick, foregrounding the way Dick's representation challenges early modern notions of idiocy as a fixed condition and Enlightenment assumptions (articulated in John Locke's Essay) that rationality and linguistic capability underwrite human superiority. Employing disability studies as a frame, it explores how cognitive impairment can serve as a device for elucidating the text's thematic preoccupation with valorizing signs and sensation over language and reason. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder's concept of “narrative prosthesis” comes into play as the piece interrogates the passage's sublime rhetoric and allusion to the theriophilic paradox. References to discourses concerning animal soul (René Descartes and Pierre Gassendi), sign language (Johann Conrad Amman), medical understandings of the nerves and sensation (Thomas Willis), and setting species boundaries (Julien de La Mettrie) illustrate that the episode is a locus classicus of anti-Lockean epistemology, one pointing forward to the abbé de Condillac and Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard (originator of special education).

The capacity contract: Locke, disability, and the political exclusion of “Idiots”

“…(1997,99) In the Essay, Locke similarly argues that the "Organs of the Body" are "the only confessed difference between [Naturals] and others" (1.2.27). Locke's understanding of idiocy as a bodily defect likely drew on the work of Thomas Willis -a medical contemporary and lecturer of Locke -who was among the first to chart multiple causes of idiocy (Gabbard 2008;Willis 1971). Importantly, Locke's indictment of the body's organs signals permanent bodily difference between idiots and other men.…”

Disability Studies and the British Long Eighteenth Century

“…While Pope’s metaphorical use of the slow witted for attacking enemies can hardly go unnoticed by anyone reading his later poetry, little consideration has been given to critiquing the era’s fetishizing of high intelligence. One exception comes from D. Christopher Gabbard in ‘From Idiot Beast to Idiot Sublime’ (2008). Gabbard argues that John Cleland’s The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748–49) goes so far as to celebrate ‘human mental imperfection,’ and, by doing so, unfolds ‘not just a dissenting Enlightenment vision with regard to John Lock’s theory of mind but also a locus classicus of anti‐Lockean epistemology.’ This is to say that the text ‘forcefully contests both Locke’s valorizing of reason and language and the presumption of a normative essence underlying his theory of mind’.…”