Novel, The

“His wound gives him his narrative power.” Arthur Frank is speaking of Tiresias, the ancient seer, who was blinded by the gods that he might “see” the future more clearly. Procne weaves the story of her sister Philomela's rape by King Tereus into fabric, her tongue having been cut out to prevent her telling the tale. Homer may have been blind, the better to remember the tale of the tribe and translate it into heroic dactyls. Such examples from classical literature suggest that the art of storytelling is intimately linked to a narrator's disability. Frank speculates that, at some fundamental level, the figure of the “wounded storyteller” may represent a “common bond of suffering that joins bodies in their shared vulnerability.” But the wound may also extend to the story itself, a tale that is often of self-inflicted blindness (Oedipus), hubrisgenerated madness (Lear), and socially redemptive suffering (Quasimodo, Tiny Tim). Although disabled figures seldom appear as main characters, they often appear in cameo roles as grotesques or exotics necessary to the novel's plot. Given the preponderance of disabled figures in fiction, what is the relationship between the body of the story and the story of the body?

This question has been crucial for disability studies in the humanities. Disabled figures appear in many novels, such as Melville's one-legged Ahab, the invalid narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper” and the limping Baby Suggs in Toni Morrison's Beloved, and most novels touch, in some [Page 1164]way, on themes of illness, disfigurement, and mental illness. Certain genres—mysteries, Gothic novels, science fiction—are built around nontraditional bodies and extreme psychological states. We may not think of Milly Theale's lingering illness in James's Wings of the Dove or of Bertha Mason's madness in Jane Eyre as disabilities, but once we do, we begin to see the extent to which novels rely on a figure of bodily infirmity or cognitive incapacity. This linkage has spawned a considerable interest in the novel within disability studies. Foundational works such as Lennard Davis's Enforcing Normalcy (1995), Rosemarie Garland Thomson's Extraordinary Bodies (1997), Diane Price Herndl's Invalid Women (1993), and David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder's Narrative Prosthesis (2000) address not only the prominence of the disabled figure in fiction but also the cultural meaning of disability in a genre founded on an ideal of verisimilitude and fidelity.

Many critics see the novel emerging in the eighteenth century as an extension of Enlightenment rationality, a vehicle for chronicling the emergence of a new middle class. The novel's ability to represent ordinary people in ordinary circumstances made it a significant genre for validating a certain type of average individual, l'homme moyen sensuel, as the Realists called it. But as Lennard Davis has observed, l'homme moyen was also a product of medical and positivistic sciences that emerged in the early nineteenth century and that reinforced certain ideas of bodily or cognitive normalcy and excluded others. The sciences of eugenics, comparative anatomy, psychoanalysis, and phrenology provided a host of new (often suspect) diagnostic methods for analyzing various types of bodies and mental states for which the new technologies of photography and film provided visual support. This nineteenth-century “hegemony of normalcy,” as Davis calls it, required a nontraditional or disabled body that could serve as a negative version of the statistical average. Often the disabled figure annexed other forms of deviance—racial, sexual, political—that threatened projects of imperialism and national consolidation. Thus, the disabled figure in fiction was a site for social anxieties within modernity for which there was as yet no name.

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