Sensational Deviance

Disability in Nineteenth-Century Sensation Fiction

Heidi Logan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429843471
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Sensational Deviance: Disability in Nineteenth-Century Sensation Fiction investigates the representation of disability in fictional works by the leading Victorian sensation novelists Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, exploring how disability acts as a major element in the shaping of the sensation novel genre and how various sensation novels respond to traditional viewpoints of disability and to new developments in physiological and psychiatric knowledge. The depictions of disabled characters in sensation fiction frequently deviate strongly from typical depictions of disability in mainstream Victorian literature, undermining its stigmatized positioning as tragic deficit, severe limitation, or pathology.

Close readings of nine individual novels situate their investigations of physical, sensory, and cognitive disabilities against the period's disability discourses and interest in senses, perception, stimuli, the nervous system, and the hereditability of impairments. The importance of moral insanity and degeneration theory within sensation fiction connect the genre with criminal anthropology, suggesting the genre's further significance in the light of the later emergence of eugenics, psychoanalysis, and genetics.

Part I

Wilkie Collins and Disabled Identities

1Hide and Seek (1854)

Wilkie Collins’s interests in science, coupled with his fervent humanitarian interests, led him to produce some of the most ground-breaking portrayals of disability in Victorian literature. While showing an awareness of tropes common to traditional modes of representing disability, and occasionally using these tropes, Collins’s representations of disabled characters very often undermine many of the master-narratives about disability present in mid-Victorian culture, rejecting both sentimental, pathetic attitudes toward disability and the ‘medical’ viewpoint of seeing disabled people as deficient and in need of fixing. Predominant aspects of Collins’s novelistic career are his engagement with exposing the inaccuracy or prejudice of various ideologies or values related to bodies and minds and his pointing out such issues’ influence in contributing to the discourse and stigma that affect disabled people. Many of his works engage with issues that would now be referred to as examples of biopower, with his approaches posing a direct challenge to ableist ideology. These novels also achieve particular complexity by exploring how the identification of disability or situations of disability are often meshed with issues of gender, class, race, and reproduction.

Several of Wilkie Collins’s novels focus on a disabled character, and his novels depict a wide range of disabling conditions, both physical and mental. Collins’s interest in the sensory, psychological, and practical life experiences of people with disabilities is evident all throughout his career. In Collins’s early novel Hide and Seek (1854) the central character is deaf-mute, and in Heart and Science (1883) he depicts a character with a brain disease. His work reveals his strong awareness of traditions in artistic and literary representations of disabled people and familiarity with both historical and contemporary medical and philosophical texts relating to disabilities.

One overwhelming agenda can be distinguished in Collins’s writing about disability: his works often repudiate the ‘pity’ response to impairment by suggesting that impairment and difference need not diminish anyone’s quality of life and that disability is not tragic. Via this repeated message his works radically undermine the ableist assumption that it is better not to have any form of impairment. One of Collins’s acknowledged aims with forwarding positive representations of disability is to console readers who are disabled. But his novels also engage on deeper levels with many of the major concerns about disability expressed during the mid-nineteenth century, such as its relationship with gender, reproduction, and economics. His novels have aged well, largely because of their readiness to question and subvert many of the mainstream social, political, and psychiatric assumptions of the mid-Victorian period. In general, his work often deconstructs hierarchies and binaries. This is particularly the case with his explications of disability’s cultural meaning and how stigma is produced, making his explorations of disability issues surprisingly anticipatory of some approaches in modern-day disability studies.

Hide and Seek is one of Wilkie Collins’s earliest novels, published in three volumes in 1854.¹ It is the first of his novels where a character with a disability plays a major role. Its portrayal of a young deaf-mute woman, Madonna, is the earliest detailed representation of a deaf-mute person in the British novel, and certainly the first such depiction in nineteenth-century British literature that might claim any scientific accuracy.² Hide and Seek shows Collins working through his early observations about relationships between the biological and socio-cultural aspects of disability. While Hide and Seek’s representation of Madonna retains elements of a traditional ‘sentimental’ view of disability, its prevailing tendency is to avoid lamenting Madonna’s deaf-mutism and to eschew melodrama. Moving towards a realist representation evincing a strong interest in psychology, Collins focuses on Madonna’s cognitive and somatic experiences, on how her deaf-mutism affects her socialization, and on her use of other senses. By the end of Hide and Seek, it is apparent that Collins rejects any view of Madonna’s deaf-mutism as tragic. Displaying a fervent dedication to altruism and egalitarianism, Collins represents Madonna’s thoughts and sensations in ways that encourage the reader to feel and think along with someone who would commonly have been regarded as ‘Other’. The representation of Madonna does not merely elicit ‘sympathy’ for her in the form of moral feeling and pity. Instead, it elicits empathy, displaying and seeking physiological responses to her representation, to be followed by ethical action.

Hide and Seek already innovates by seeking scientific fidelity in its representation of deaf-mutism – a mimesis it tries to achieve via accurate representations of signing and discussions of how deaf-mutism may affect an individual’s use of other senses. The novel also responds to debates about the desirability and efficacy of oral speech education for deaf people by making it clear that deaf people already have a language. In a period when deaf people were often pressured to give up sign language or were told that it was a marker of inferiority, Collins penned a novel that strongly endorses signing. Collins frequently engaged in innovative forms of writing and gained a reputation for using novels as means of fighting social injustice. In Hide and Seek, he represents Madonna’s deaf-mutism not as pathology, but as a fascinating example of human diversity. As Collins represents it, deaf-mutism is sometimes inconvenient and alienating for Madonna, but she is never regarded by friends or family as deficient. Nor is she the passive heroine expected of sentimental depictions of disability. This movement away from pity and melodrama toward an emphasis on cognition and the experiential allows Collins to avoid positioning Madonna as a locus of pathos. Hide and Seek also promotes awareness that deafness may have a compensation in deaf people’s stronger engagement with the visual world.

Collins was certainly aware of the innovative nature of Hide and Seek. In an explanatory note that accompanied the 1861 version of the novel, he makes the following statement:

I do not know that any attempt has yet been made in English fiction to draw the character of a “Deaf Mute,” simply and exactly after nature – or, in other words, to exhibit the peculiar effects produced by the loss of the senses of hearing and speaking on the disposition of the person so afflicted.³

Lennard J. Davis explains that “Deafness becomes of interest to European culture, especially to philosophers and scientists, in the eighteenth century”. Philosophers began asking questions such as “Are there thoughts prior to language? Can a being be human without language?”⁴ However, deaf-mutism had never been depicted realistically in a novel prior to Hide and Seek.⁵

The richness of Collins’s depiction of Madonna’s cognitive and emotional experience and of her use of fingerspelling and home sign (two forms of sign language) is partly attributable to his utilization of a non-fictional resource, Dr. John Kitto’s memoir The Lost Senses: Deafness and Blindness (1845), as a reference. Even though Collins realized the innovative nature of his planned novel, he was nevertheless surprised when he was almost unable to locate any reliable sources about deafness or deaf-mutism. One previous fictional depiction of deaf-mutism, Sir Walter Scott’s Peveril of the Peak (1823), proved unhelpful because the character portrayed only pretended to have such a disability. Collins rejected stage depictions of mutism: he noted that the “dumb people” always seem “able to hear what is said to them”.⁶ Meanwhile, the eighteenth-century soothsayer Duncan Campbell, who claimed to be deaf-mute, published a memoir and was the subject of a biography. But if Collins knew of writings by or about Campbell he may also have been aware that Campbell’s claims were regarded with scepticism.⁷ Just as Collins was about to give up his search for useful references, he became aware of The Lost Senses, a text that contains detailed information about John Kitto’s personal experiences of deafness and mutism. Hide and Seek relies heavily on Kitto’s memoir for substantial information regarding the psychological effects of sensory difference but departs from some of its major conclusions about deaf-mutism.

Sentiment and Spectacle

We are first introduced to Madonna in Chapter II, when she is in her early twenties and living in the home of a semi-successful artist, Valentine Blyth (48–49). While introducing Madonna the narrator refuses to reveal Madonna’s real name or parentage. This parentage is sought for throughout the novel, providing the basis for the novel’s subtitle, “The Mystery of Mary Grice”. After introducing us to Madonna in Valentine’s studio, Hide and Seek leaps backwards thirteen years, from 1851 to 1838, to reveal how Valentine rescued Madonna from a traveling circus when she was ten years old.⁸ Having been orphaned, Madonna is forced to take part in circus routines by Mr. Jubber, a tyrannical circus director. Madonna has recently fallen from a horse during a performance (91–92), subsequently losing her hearing and her will to speak. Undeterred by this, Jubber has begun to exhibit Madonna as:

‘THE MYSTERIOUS FOUNDLING!… TOTALLY DEAF AND DUMB!’.

(56)

Madonna is totally disempowered due to her youth, her poverty, her deaf-mutism, and her lack of an effective guardian. Jubber profits from the pathos evoked by the audience’s awareness of Madonna’s deaf-mutism but disguises his exploitation of Madonna by presenting her performance as a ‘conjuring’ show. In the scenes relating to Madonna’s circus performances Hide and Seek mixes the affective power of deafness with the emotional effect of reading about child abuse. Madonna cannot protest her exploitation; unable to speak, she can do little except direct sorrowful looks to members of the audience (60). General feelings of sympathy prompt the audience members to speak kindly to Madonna. Some audience members reject Jubber’s suggestion that they should subject Madonna to tests of her deafness, and others correctly guess that Jubber beats Madonna (60, 67). However, while the audience members express pity for Madonna and annoyance at Jubber, they do not stop her exploitation.

Hide and Seek therefore initially promotes an explicitly sentimental view of Madonna; she appears in desperate need of someone to intervene.⁹ Luckily, the highly empathetic Valentine Blyth stumbles upon the circus. As Valentine takes a seat in the audience, Hide and Seek’s narrator launches a rhetorical outburst that emphasizes Madonna’s pitifulness, presenting her as a lost sheep in need of guidance and angelic protection:

Ah, woeful sight! so lovely, yet so piteous to look on! Shall she never hear kindly human voices, the song of birds, the pleasant murmur of the trees again? Are all the sweet sounds that sing of happiness to childhood, silent for ever to her? … the young, tender life be for ever a speechless thing, shut up in dumbness from the free world of voices? Oh! Angel of judgment! hast thou snatched her hearing and her speech from this little child, to abandon her in helpless affliction to such profanation as she now undergoes?

(Hide and Seek, 61)

In literature and drama disability had often been represented sentimentally, as involving suffering and hardship. Here, the sudden use of sentimental language seems calculated to provoke reader distress and to elicit maximum sympathy for Madonna. The passage may be read straight as indicating deafness’s affective power. However, the narrator’s abrupt plunge into distress may mean the passage may alternatively be read as an ironic parody of melodramatic responses to disability, or that it may parody its own religious sermonizing. Hide and Seek does not adopt a religious viewpoint in relation to deafness throughout the rest of the novel.

The scene represents Valentine’s sense-perceptions of Madonna as prompting various physiological effects. The ultra-sensitive Valentine appears “suddenly to lose his senses the minute he set eyes on the deaf and dumb child” (60; my emphasis). When Valentine sees Madonna, he jumps up and down involuntarily, shouts uncontrollably, and seems to lose his sense of hearing. Registering the forlornness in Madonna’s eyes, he experiences sensory stimulation, vasoconstriction, and oppressed breathing, a symptom of hysteria:

Was there something in the eager sympathy of his eyes as they met hers, which spoke to the little lonel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: Wilkie Collins and Disabled Identities
• PART II: Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Disabled Identities
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index