Mental Inversion, Modernist Aesthetics, and Disability Exceptionalism in Olive Moore's <em>Spleen</em>

Abstract

This article argues that Olive Moore's 1930 novel Spleen investigates the appropriative relationship between experimental modernism and disability. While the text takes up the disabled aesthetics of broken statues and incapacitated narratives, it also dramatizes how modernists articulate their own exceptional capacity, mobility, and able-bodiedness in ways that reinforce eugenic understandings of disability. Specifically, Moore demonstrates how feminist and emerging queer politics in the inter-war period borrowed disabled aesthetic tropes in order to recast understandings of sexuality and gender through exceptionalism, but did so by reifying disability and race as supposedly immutable categories. This reading of Spleen, via disability studies and a detour into suffragist art vandalism, insists that modernist studies must address the legacy of appropriating disabled modes of perception and expression.

Olive Moore: a new biography

“…These advances, in combination with the renewed vigor of feminist modernist studies, mean that this is a potentially pivotal moment for Moore which will hopefully finally prompt the full-scale recovery that she deserves. Thus far, Jane ), Matt Franks (2014, Joanna M. Wagner (2016), Maren Tova Linett (2017, and Erin M. Kingsley (2017) have provided extensive analysis of Spleen. 105 Renee Dickinson has also written on Spleen (2009) and has provided the only analysis of Fugue and Moore's work at the Daily Sketch (2009, 2018), whilst Benjamin D. Hagen provides the only analysis of Celestial Seraglio (2020).…”