What disgusts each of us is highly variable. So, too, what gives us pleasure and what evokes in us a sense of sublimity. Most people will readily admit these statements as truisms. But from a sublime landscape to a revolting odor, our aesthetic responses are often so visceral as to feel innate. We recoil, we shrink away from that which disgusts us. Overtaken by nausea, we gag. So, too, we may shudder with pleasure at or unconsciously lean towards the beautiful, or feel our heart quicken in the presence of the sublime. Although we implicitly acknowledge the constructedness of aesthetic responses when we acknowledge their variability, we nevertheless experience them as innate and necessary, written not only into the individual body but also into human nature. So what are the stakes—social, ethical, artistic, political, epistemological—of the moment at which a human body provokes a feeling of disgust or beauty or the sublime? How do our aesthetic responses to what are now called “disabilities” inform our social and ethical orientation, and how do they reflect on and help to construct our individual and collective concepts of “the human”? How do aesthetic qualities associated with disability—disfigurement or fragmentation, for example—create artistic opportunities and productively alter the relationships between author, reader, and text? How might the presence of such aesthetic qualities in literature, music, and the visual arts reflect back on the human bodies around us? Further, what are the stakes of aesthetically significant experiences that are enabled by non-normative states of embodiment? How can such experiences allow us to reconceptualize the various kinds of bodies—human, animal, mechanical, botanical, mineral, textual, imaginary—that populate our world, and how might they allow us to apprehend disability in new ways?
These questions, so critical to the current moment (see Tobin Siebers), are equally important to consider in relation to authors and thinkers of the Romantic period. The story I wish to tell in this book is of the productively diverse field of Romantic medicine and its relation to a correspondingly broad range of cultural attitudes towards those thought to be under the purview of medical authority—those who, by virtue of their non-normative bodies and minds, we might now call “disabled.” By delimiting my field of inquiry as “the aesthetics of disability,” I engage with aesthetically significant experiences enabled by non-normative states of body and mind, and also the aesthetic dimensions of non-normative bodies and minds, as considered from without. Various modes of non-normative embodiment factored critically into the era’s aesthetic debates and modes of aesthetic production. As Alan Bewell has detailed, in an “attempt to explain the normal functioning of the mind and senses and to establish general and universal principles governing human nature and knowledge,” philosophy “transform[ed] marginal peoples into living laboratories” (Wordsworth 25–6).1 Disability provided limit cases for ideas of humanity and sympathy, while encounters with the disabled provoked questions about the nature of disgust and the sublime. The epistemological and intersubjective consequences of non-normative embodiment encouraged authors to test the possibilities of language and form, and invited philosophers to rethink the relationships between the mind and the body, the self and the other, and the body and the external world.
This book focuses on a specific network of authors and thinkers: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Thelwall, Thomas Beddoes, Humphry Davy, Thomas (Tom) Wedgwood, and Charles Lamb. All were directly engaged with one another as collaborators on scientific or literary endeavors; friends, neighbors, and financial supporters or dependents; and philosophical, political, or poetic interlocutors. A set of secondary figures circulates around the primary authors I discuss—Robert Southey, Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Lamb, Thomas Poole, William Godwin, Erasmus Darwin, and Sara Coleridge, to name just a few. In the context of disability aesthetics these secondary figures deserve much more detailed treatment than I am able to give them here, and I look forward to scholarship that may begin to fill in these gaps.2 Because I take on a group of authors who collaborated and communicated extensively, and because I seek to highlight the sites of contact between them, the claims I make in this book are somewhat localized in nature. But similar claims can—and in my opinion must—be made of many other authors of the period, and I hope that the broad applicability of both my methodology and my lines of inquiry will be evident. I therefore intend to fill in a critical gap related to the ways that we understand specific Romantic-era authors and texts—but much more so I intend for this book to initiate conversations and open up important avenues of exploration into Romantic literature, medicine, and culture.
My choice to focus on the Wordsworth-Coleridge circle, rather than a broader range of Romantic authors, is partly due to the historically significant moment at which its authors came into maturity, as I will discuss later. More so, however, my choice is methodological. To responsibly excavate the meanings of non-normative embodiment and disability in the period, it is necessary to attend to the varied discourses through which they were constructed. One of the most effective ways to accomplish this is to focus on a single set of authors who communicated and collaborated with one another and to examine the various registers in which they explored disability. Accordingly, in discussing the Wordsworth-Coleridge circle and the aesthetics of disability I attend to medical and scientific texts, poetry, letters, notebooks, essays, and visual images.
Because of the generic diversity of texts I take up, my approach to the topic of Romantic disability aesthetics may be said to be interdisciplinary—and indeed, throughout this book I engage with the methods and concerns of literary studies, Disability Studies, and the history of medicine. But I explicitly do not wish to attribute any sense of “interdisciplinarity” to the Romantic period itself. Doing so would reinforce a sense of divisions that did not exist at the time. One of the defining characteristics of Romantic medicine that I will underscore in Chapters 2 and 3 is its porousness: what counted as “medicine,” and what—and who—counted as “medical” was not only unclear, but was actively contested. I therefore take “the medical” as an ever-evolving mode constituted by rough correspondences of professional actions, methodologies, practical and conceptual concerns, and discursive conventions that could only be meaningfully identified in retrospect (by a reader or critic), if at all. I take other modes—“the literary,” “the scientific,” “the poetic,” “the metaphysical,” and so on—similarly.3 I use “mode” so as to avoid alternate formulations that invoke the very term (“disciplinary”) that they are meant to challenge. To use “adisciplinary” or “predisciplinary” would imply that, by the late eighteenth century, soon-to-be-distinct disciplines were nascent, in the early stages of coming into prominence. Viewed historically this is not quite untrue, but it does not accurately describe the reality experienced by authors and thinkers of the time.4
As recent scholarly work in Romantic science and literature has demonstrated, we gain insight into critical aspects of Romanticism’s literary and scientific cultures when we engage with its multimodality.5 To put ourselves in the mindset of the Romantics is to cultivate an openness to how imagination, creativity, and subjectivity had a place in, and helped to shape, Romantic scientific and medical endeavors, and how scientific and medical concepts and activities helped to shape poetry. The professional activities and personae of many Romantic authors vacillated between various modes, and most of the major thinkers of the period took an active interest in the scientific, the medical, and the literary. Quite simply, we miss critical aspects of Romanticism when we fail to engage with the era’s multimodality on its own terms.
Disability Studies scholars tend not to examine medical and scientific texts. Yet an interdisciplinary approach is, I believe, required by my subject matter—that is, the aesthetic dimensions of those bodies and minds that fell under the study and treatment of Romantic-era medicine, but that had distinct implications for narrative, poetry, metaphysics, politics, and other dimensions of culture and society. To understand Romantic disability requires paying attention to the cross-currents and correspondences between all of these various modes. In fact, I will argue that Romantic fluidity and multimodality helped to enable the kinds of nuanced responses to disability in which I am most interested in this book. Those individuals whose work engages with and incorporates multiple modes of inquiry are in a strong position to understand what it might mean to be disabled—not just in a strictly biological and medical sense, but also in political, metaphysical, social, poetic, and artistic senses. They are therefore more likely to acknowledge and appreciate—and capitalize on—the striking and sometimes unexpected yield of experiences of and encounters with disability.
Disability Studies
Disability Studies is a relatively new field that aims to examine and critique the sociocultural valences of what are usually pathologized non-normative embodiments, and thereby provides a non-medical, and in many cases an explicitly anti-medical, framework for understanding and articulating disability. Partly because of the age and diversity of the field—it brings together scholars primarily working in the humanities and social sciences with public intellectuals, activists, artists, and disability advocates—there is still little homogeneity in the use of key terminology and concepts. Especially among early Disability Studies scholars, constructivist definitions of “disability” tended to dominate as the field sought to challenge and displace medical understandings of embodied difference. For Simi Linton in 1998, disability was a “political category” and “a marker of identity,” and the disabled were “a group bound by common social and political experience” (11–12). For Rosemarie Garland-Thomson disability was a “pervasive cultural system that stigmatizes certain kinds of bodily variations” (“Integrating Disability” 76–7). The editors of the Handbook of Disability Studies discussed “disability” as a variable “experience” that could range from “a personal catastrophe” or “shameful condition” to a “source of pride and empowerment” (Albrecht et al. 1).
Even in the 1990s, however, some disability scholars were invested in the idea of an underlying biological reality that could not—or at least should not—be dismissed, even while engaging with the idea of “disability” as a primarily (or at least largely) socially-constructed category. Thus in The Rejected Body: Feminist Reflections on Disability (1996), Susan Wendell espouses a position that is neither strictly constructivist nor strictly essentialist. Wendell describes how “the biological and the social are interactive in creating disability,” and proposes that “the social response to and treatment of biological difference constructs disability from biological reality, determining both the nature and the severity of disability” (35, 42). Such understandings of “disability”—equally concerned with embodied difference itself and its cultural meanings and political implications—have since become predominant in Disability Studies.
Instead of emphasizing “the binary opposition of normal/abnormal,” a preoccupation of earlier scholarly work in literary Disability Studies, Ato Quayson proposed in his 2007 Aesthetic Nervousness that the importance and potency of disability is due both to its culturally constructed dimensions and to the affective impact of human difference itself. According to Quayson, literature represents and enacts “the dialectical interplay between unacknowledged social assumptions and the reminders of contingency as reflected in the body of the person with disability” (21).Similarly, in Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s 2009 formulation, the act of staring at a disabled person is a “dynamic struggle” that “creates a circuit of communication and meaning-making” (Staring 3). For these and other recent disability scholars, part of this circuit of communication and meaning-making is specific to individual literary encounters, which may put an instance of medieval disability in contact with a twenty-first-century reader. But depictions of disability also must be examined in relation to the time, place, culture, and individual(s) from which they issued, in order to better understand the complex and variable contexts that influence the representation and interpretation of non-normative embodiment. I am therefore following recent trends in literary Disability Studies by adopting a view of Romantic “disability” that is dynamic, both in its historicity and in how I understand it to “work” in the literature of the period.
In this book I primarily engage with disability as an epistemological, aesthetic, and social space that humans can be born into or come to inhabit, and that works of art can engage with both formally and conceptually. But I take “disability” to be, by its strictest definition, a sociocultural category of medical origin and organization. To be “disabled,” that is, one must have, or be thought to have, a kind of body or mind that is understood to demand medical attention, and “disability” is therefore the product of complex interactions between embodied human variation, medicine, and culture. My use of the phrase “kind of body or mind” is meant to emphasize durat...