Disability, Representation and the Body in Irish Writing: 1800-1922

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Disability, Representation and the Body in Irish Writing

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Disability, Representation and the Body in Irish Writing 1800–1922 Mark Mossman Associate Professor of English Western Illinois University

© Mark Mossman 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–57465–6 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 18 17

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

This book is dedicated to my daughters, Pamela Dorothy Mossman and Irene Genevieve Mossman


Contents

Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction

1

1 Irish Studies Meets Disability Studies

8

2 Irish Girl Gone Wild

46

3 Sensation, Suffering, and Despair

81

4 States of Semiparalysis

122

Conclusion: States of Paralysis, a Sketch

151

Notes

160

Bibliography

177

Index

187

vii

Acknowledgements An earlier version of Chapter 2 appeared as an article in the journal European Romantic Review. I would like to thank the editors of this journal and I am especially grateful to Regina Hewitt for her help. Likewise, parts of Chapter 2 also appeared in an article in the journal Victorian Literature and Culture. I would like to thank the editors of this journal, and I am especially grateful to Abigail Bloom for all of her aid in this process. Versions of this larger argument have been delivered in papers presented at the following venues and meetings: the Poetry and Politics Conference in Stirling, Scotland in July 2003; at The International Association for the Study of Irish Literature (IASIL) conference held at University College Dublin, in Dublin, Ireland in July 2007; at the Midwest American Conference on Irish Studies held in Kansas City, Missouri in October, 2007; at the American Conference on Irish Studies held in Davenport, Iowa in 2008; and finally at the Modern Language Association’s Annual Convention held in San Francisco, California in December 2008. I would like to thank the organizers of these conferences and panels for all of their work and the audiences of these presentations for all of their questions and support. I would also like to thank Ken Monteith, who invited me to deliver a plenary talk on Ireland and disability at the Mid-Atlantic American Conference for Irish Studies held in New York, in October 2008. I would like to thank the librarians and staff at the Rare Books and Special Collections Division at the Hesburgh Library at the University of Notre Dame. I would especially like to offer thanks to Aedin Clements and Laura Fuderer. I would also like to thank Gerry Long in the Printed and Visual Collections division at The National Library in Dublin, Ireland. My colleagues Shazia Rahman, Bonnie Sonnek, Chris Morrow, Penny Kelsey, Merrill Cole, Alice Robertson, Amy Patrick, Sue Martinelli-Fernandez, Tama Baldwin, John Mann, and Judi Hardin also all read versions of this work, and I am thankful for their comments and encouragements. I am grateful to all of the brilliant scholars in disability studies, Irish studies, and general nineteenth-century viii

Acknowledgements

ix

studies with whom I have consulted regarding this project, namely Luke Gibbons, Martha Stoddard Holmes, Joep Leersson, Angela Bourke, Ina Ferris, and Ellen Carol Jones. I would also like to acknowledge the help and support of Christabel Scaife at Palgrave Macmillan, as well as the anonymous readers who have provided so much insight on this work and have really framed the development and completion of it. Finally, I would like to thank the University Research Council at Western Illinois University for providing me with funding to work on this project.


Introduction

The cultural work of scholars is to create new knowledge in the form of an ongoing critical conversation that considers a subject in increasingly fresh and complex ways. (Rosemarie Garland Thomson, “Freakery Unfurled” (ix)) Since its first emergence in the mid 1990s, disability studies has become an increasingly dynamic field in American and European critical discourses. One consistent feature in the evolution of disability studies has been the field’s ability to cross over into other disciplines, like queer studies, gender and performance studies, various kinds of working-class and race studies, the new biocultural studies, and so on. With this theoretical flexibility in mind, this book is an attempt to cross together and connect disability studies with Irish studies and the reading of modern Irish literature. Thus I argue here that a disability studies perspective can be articulated by focusing on the Irish body and the complicated dynamics involved in its representation in modern cultural practice. In the book I focus most often, but not exclusively, on literary works from the nineteenth century. In these contexts the Irish body is ultimately represented as a negatively disabled figure. As the century progresses and as Ireland continues to evolve (or devolve) in its complex relationship with Britain and the British Empire, the nation as a whole becomes a “disabled” cultural space in its everyday functions and meanings. Part of my engagement with these specific texts, then, is to simply provide an outline and an account of how such negative disablement works, and how the negotiations of Irish writers with 1

2 Disability, Representation and the Body in Irish Writing

the notion of the Irish body shape in this historical period the larger dynamic of Ireland and the body for later generations. As one would expect, there are numerous tensions in this argument and in the construction of it. In addition to the larger implications of reading disability into Ireland, one primary, specific anxiety in the criticism conducted here occurs between a chronology or periodization the book in one way locates itself within and a real urge and perhaps theoretical requirement to push out of that chronology and into a more elaborate meditation on the representation of Irish difference itself – on those remarkably intense single moments in Irish culture when all of the theoretical dynamics of disability, Irishness, and the body are simultaneously in play. It seems that this book should simply trace the slow unfolding of “disability” in Irish culture. I think that in a way it would be somewhat of an easier project if that was the case: one would simply define what Irishness or Irish identity is (probably impossible), define what disability is (just about as impossible), place both concepts into a traditional chronology, demonstrate how they link together and slowly emerge through the nineteenth century, and then celebrate one’s own brilliance. Unfortunately neither Irishness nor disability seem to work that way. Disability in Ireland seems instead to be caught up in patterns of being or articulation that resist such neat chronological narratives and all of their import. Irishness and disability disrupt such narratives, and as such are often overdetermined in their placements within such historical narratives. Rather than resolving this tension totally by choosing one side or the other I have decided to avoid even attempting to contain it. On the surface, then, the book follows a trajectory that aligns somehow with an emergence of “the modern” through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. I define this period through classic critical definitions in Irish studies like those found in Roy Foster’s construction of modern Ireland and modern Irish culture in his work Modern Ireland, 1600–1972.1 Again, in this chronology, my book focuses primarily on moments at the beginning of the nineteenth century (like the texts produced by writers actively engaged in the culture of the Act of Union) and moments at the end of the century (like the fabulous career of Oscar Wilde and the publication of Bram Stoker’s Irish horror novel, Dracula). The book concludes with a brief consideration of James Joyce’s 1914 publication of Dubliners. Inside of this

Introduction

3

built-in narrative, however, I read backwards and forwards, reading behind the proposed narrative into the eighteenth century, and again at the very end reaching out of this framework and into the twentieth century. By not containing this push to reach out of a single chronological narrative, I articulate several premises: as suggested above, disability, though it is tremendously historicized, is often a moment, an instant of perception and consequent construction; Irishness, and this is the point of the book, is the exact same thing. Irishness is historicized, but Irishness is also a moment, an instant, a thing that does not necessarily mean historical circumstance as much as it means immediate particularized perception – a single moment where one body from a particular space encounters another body from a different particular space and then deals with it. The Irish body is simultaneously saturated in history and profoundly ahistorical in its basic materiality. The result is that the Irish body becomes, more than anything, critical in its operation. In these terms, in Irish literatures the body and especially the disabled body become active, oppositional representations that articulate a “perspective of culture”2 rather than meaningful, often negatively allegorical configurations of impairment or disorder in a particular character or text. Irish literature engages and constructs Irishness, which in turn articulates a perspective best defined as “disabled.” This is crucial, for it allows readings of Oscar Wilde, Sydney Owenson, Bram Stoker and others that, in the end, locate arguments for radical transformation in the way that Ireland and the Irish body function. Not surprisingly, in the development of this argument, I build on the work of such scholars as Robert McRuer, Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell, Ato Quayson, Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Lennard Davis, Martha Stoddard Holmes, Pamela Gilbert, and others, all of whom in very different ways move the notion and analysis of disability towards this kind of transformative critical and theoretical practice in the humanities and this suggestion of sweeping change in our everyday cultural practices in Ireland, North America, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. I will add that the focus on Ireland in this book demonstrates the larger goal of this study. The desire here is to take a cue from both theoretical disability studies and queer studies and first expose the various frameworks and end-results of an instituted norm, and


then, in doing so, eliminate such structures that continue to allow the easy binary of the norm and the abnormal to exist in places like Ireland, or the US, or the UK. Thus I agree with Luke Gibbons and his assertion that Irish culture is often framed through “the dislocations between periphery and center, the country and the city, tradition and modernity. . . . Though it is usual to present these as opposites, both the strengths and weaknesses of Irish culture derive from its confounding of such neat polarities.”3 Like disability studies, the real push of Irish studies on one level is to deconstruct the dichotomy Gibbons speaks to above, to disturb and disrupt the logic of a binary built around the normal and the abnormal. As one would expect, when thinking of the nineteenth century and a modern Ireland this binary of the normal and the abnormal easily slips into a framework of Ireland and England. Historically, an Irish literature and often a critical Irish studies perspective have troubled these kinds of easy binaries – indeed the work on colonial and postcolonial Irish identity structures or Irishness connects directly to this mode of critique. And thus in these lines of thought I have built this study on the work of Luke Gibbons, Declan Kiberd, Seamus Deane, Colin Graham, David Lloyd, Claire Connolley, and many others who have attempted to think out the formation of Irishness and its often “strange” emergence and function in modernity. My work here, which I define as an Irish disability studies, is situated in this kind of critical and political framework. When Ireland is framed within the terms of disability and within the work being done in contemporary disability studies, it creates a very deep interpretive problematic that in turn sets up for the critic a unique and fascinating, wide-reaching theoretical situation, a kind of remarkable strangeness in “Ireland” – again the condition Seamus Deane and other critics have noted, and what David Lloyd has termed the “anomalous state”4 – that connects it to the modern and postmodern disabled body at large. Theoretically, then, in the same way that Irish bodies are simultaneously colonizer bodies and colonized bodies, disabled bodies to a large extent function on the same operational platform: they are colonized bodies, bodies with impairments and differences that are constructed often negatively as “disability” – by medical and scientific discourses – and yet simultaneously the whole notion or category of “the disabled body” is a Western one, so that disabled subjects have always functioned within the dominant

Introduction

5

culture, often participating within it fully and perpetuating the very structures of normative culture that oppress them and the officially colonized others in the “third world.” In wide terms, this book engages these complicated notions and attempts to unfold them so that a new kind of practice is envisioned, an everyday practice that avoids these kinds of binaries and their results. Indeed, that practice is in fact already in place and operating in modern Ireland – in writers from Sydney Owenson to Bram Stoker to the early work of James Joyce, and in the historical record of such events as the Act of Union, the Great Hunger, and the push towards Home Rule. *

*

*

I want to emphasize in this short introduction that this book is a performance of disability studies and not an application of disability studies. It is the demonstration and articulation of a perspective through a set of texts, rather than an application of a perspective upon a set of texts. In other words, unlike the recent scholarship on disability and more contemporary writers as Christopher Nolan, Christy Brown, and others, this book does not so much detect disability in Irish culture, as much as it is an attempt to lay the theoretical groundwork behind that detection and critique. Thus this work is not an attempt to bring disabled Irish writers into an established canon, as much as it is a theoretical engagement with the notions of both Ireland and disability and an attempt to read Irish literary production itself as an articulation of disability. And indeed, I will note that the writers I engage here are either often themselves in a complicated position in regards to Irishness – writers like Wilde, Stoker, Edgeworth – or indeed not even Irish – like John Keats. The book is organized as follows: In Chapter 1, I attempt to set up the theoretical context for the work. I discuss in detail Robert McRuer’s notion of fabulousness and severe disability and then place these notions in an Irish context. In the first half of the chapter I focus specifically on Oscar Wilde’s performance at the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery in the spring of 1877. Wilde’s decision to dress fabulously, wearing a cello-shaped coat inspired by a dream, is in itself a “severe” moment, a moment where a stare is purposefully invoked and the somatic dynamics that


will come to define disability for a writer like Audre Lorde (or queer subculture for Tony Kushner) are articulated and played upon by Wilde. From this point in the chapter I move back into the eighteenth century and train the focus on Jonathan Swift’s poem “The Lady’s Dressing Room.” This earlier poem connects to Wilde’s performance and to disability theory in its meditation on interiors and exteriors and in its desire to order disordered bodies. I end the chapter by briefly reflecting on the presence of disability stereotypes in Irish studies itself historically (from Filson Young at the beginning of the twentieth century to Luke Gibbons at the end of the century), and how these stereotypes in many ways inform the entire project of modern Irish literature. In Chapter 2, I attempt to historicize the concepts of the norm and the emergence of disability. I argue that the concept of the norm and the structure of Ireland emerge together after the 1800 union of Ireland with Britain. I anchor my work in Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl, a novel built around the son of an English aristocrat spending the summer in Ireland where he finds beauty, love, and the true nature of the Irish in a romance and eventual marriage to a “wild Irish girl,” a disenfranchised Princess named Glorvina. After focusing on the notions of political allegory, the Irish tour, the trope of the wild Irish girl, and the state of semicolonialism, I focus on the novel and on the character of the Prince of Inismore. This character is an invalided body and is intended to represent an Ireland weighted down with the history of conflict with Britain. The Prince is opposed to the Princess, who represents a new, beautiful Ireland working in union with Britain. I argue, simply, that a disability studies displaces this entire framework, this binary, and traces Owenson’s work into a very different, much more negative positioning. Thus the chapter ends with a discussion of the implications of the representation of the wild Irish girl in Owenson’s narrative, and this character’s transformation, in a dream, into the figure of Medusa. From this point, I move in Chapter 3 to a discussion of John Keats’ week-long trip to Ireland in 1818. In this journey, Keats encounters an elderly woman in a bog outside Belfast. In shifting the focus from Owenson to Keats I stage a different version of the Englishman touring Ireland, a different version of the wild Irish girl trope. This chapter theorizes Keats’ reaction to Ireland and the Irish woman he sees there (who he names the Duchess of Dunghill). I tie Keats’

Introduction

7

complicated reaction to this woman and to Ireland in general directly to Peter Singer’s utilitarian ethics and his controversial treatment of disability. The chapter concludes by swinging from the English Keats back to an Anglo-Irish novelist working in the period, Maria Edgeworth. Rather than a standard treatment of “the Irish tales” from Edgeworth I pay close attention first to a letter she writes in 1796 regarding rural violence near Edgeworthstown and the bodies of perpetuators of this violence, and second to the novel Belinda, which is Edgeworth’s attempt at an English domestic romance. I argue that this novel is a medical narrative – it is about the “fixing” of a disfigured body. In this narration, the novel becomes an allegory that represents a disfigured Ireland, its relationship with Britain, and its reconfiguration or “fixing.” Chapter 3 ends with a discussion of the disfigured Irish body. This discussion is continued through Chapter 4. This chapter concerns the way that Irish bodies and Ireland itself are metaphorically located wihin a semiparalyzed state. The chapter focuses on Dracula and the representation of the vampire’s body in this work – and the ways that this representation links directly to a configuration of Ireland as a whole. This discussion leads to the conclusion of the work, where I focus on James Joyce’s Dubliners and the way that paralysis is represented in this collection of stories. Put simply, semiparalysis has turned into paralysis. Joyce’s work is to accurately represent the Irish body as a nation that has become paralyzed in total. In doing so, in writing the body in this way, I argue that Joyce, like Stoker, attempts to break through the binary of ability and disability, animation and paralysis, that defines modern Irish culture. Unlike Stoker, Wilde, and all of the previous writers discussed here, I assert that James Joyce in a profound way succeeds.

1 Irish Studies Meets Disability Studies

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. (Wilde, Dorian Gray)

Introduction Modern Irish cultural practice is anchored in a set of discursive and somatic frameworks defined by disability. The notion of Ireland itself and what it means to be Irish are constructed in modern Irish writing1 primarily through the category of physical or cognitive difference, or, as it is currently framed in many humanities-oriented critical discourses, the ever-broadening category of the disabled body. For Irish writers and both Irish and English audiences in this period, stereotypes of physical difference and the resulting negative social constructions of strangeness, weakness, dependence, interdependence, paralysis, blindness, heroic bravery, foolish sentimentality, and excessive imagination all define what Ireland is and how Ireland functions. These cultural stereotypes are key elements in Ireland’s self-conceptions, as well as in modern British understandings of and answers to the ever-troublesome Irish “problem” or “question.” In the labor-oriented economics and cultural practices of the modern period, these same stereotypes also parallel the “problem” of the physically or cognitively impaired body, another material space that will come to embody the ever-repeated social construction of disability. Thus from these stereotypes and their function there derive a number of foundational interpretive structures framed by disability discourse through which both colonized Irish subjects and imperial 8

Irish Studies Meets Disability Studies

9

English citizens2 are able to conceptualize “Irishness” as an identity location and a political, social, and cultural reality.3 Ireland is defined through and rooted within the notion of disability. Irish literary production often results in the representation of the disabled figure. Engaging this representational matrix is the goal of this study, which in turn is a performance of what I call an Irish disability studies. I will note here that the very application of disability studies to Irish cultural and literary production is a hyper-dynamic, critical process, a process that can best be described as a cripping of the Irish body (by reading it as positively disabled) and a queering of the Irish nation (by reading it in material terms as a liminal, transformative cultural space). Indeed, the very detection of the structures noted above articulates this kind of critical perspective and constitutes a significant reframing or rewriting or opening up of the definitions of Ireland and Irishness so that one can see how postmodern Irish studies as well as modern Irish culture reproduce within their own constitution those ideologies of the body that is different. When examining modern Irish literary production, one result of these interwoven interpretive structures – always informing and operating within and without modern Irish cultural practice – is that in its emergence within British imperial modernity, Ireland or the body of the Irish “nation” often comes to possess the status of a “wild Irish girl,” or, when cripped, an Irish girl gone wild. In metaphoric terms, Ireland is a girl transformed into a monster, a type of Medusa, that often, when they cast their eyes upon it and then stare directly at it, turns the English policy makers at Westminster into stone. In the everyday practices of the modern empire “semicolonial” Ireland functions as a body, as Britannia’s sick sister, as a Gorgon who must be contained, regulated, and indeed in the end euthanized or decapitated by the heroic, shielded stability of an English Perseus (or rather, in the cartoons and sketches of many Victorian periodicals, a portly and confident John Bull). Likewise, yet another prominent example of conceptual intersection occurs within the moment of the stare. This significant cognitive dynamic captures and dramatizes, in often repeated, intensely single sets of timed instances, a different, contested transformation of the body into a nationalized textuality. In the grammar of empire, the stare becomes a troubling, constant experience that readers unknowingly and unwillingly fall into; it is an experience that is documented

10


in countless travelogues, sketches, paintings, essays, newspaper accounts, legal proceedings, government policy forms, fictive narratives, poems, dramatic presentations, and all of the other kinds of representations and media that come to build the matrix of Irish culture and the cultural imperialism that eventually, by the end of the nineteenth century, stretches out over all of Ireland like the blanketing snow in James Joyce’s “The Dead.” These are the moments when the wild Irish girl makes her appearance on the Empire’s stage, and these are the moments when a set of eyes trains anxiously upon that girl’s body; these are the meaningful moments of negative disablement, the moments when a norm is articulated and used as a vehicle for biopower;4 and indeed, these are the moments when a monstrous construction of Ireland as a whole is simultaneously imposed and resisted, the Irish nation becoming in this instant both porned and cripped, both trapped or frozen and made fabulously new. What follows in this book is a reading of several instances when Irish bodies are staged in writing to be gazed at, freaked and turned into spectacle, and in the end observed through a pseudo-scientific gaze that attempts a totality and results only in the failure articulated in a confused stare. Part of my account here is to demonstrate how Irish writing itself attempts to negotiate the gazes of its audience, and thus how the wild Irish girl or the diseased monster or the Irish writer herself becomes a space for this negotiation, this critique and this transformation. The rest of this first chapter will provide the theoretical and critical context needed for such an investigation. To this effect, at this point I would like to briefly describe a working definition for the book of disability and the current practices of disability studies in the humanities. I argue that Ireland is perfectly disabled. I say Ireland is perfectly disabled because a very specific set of aggressive meanings are now emerging and being attached to the word disability. Historically, the category of disability functions as a wide legal and social space defined in part by the emergence of medical, scientific, and labor-oriented legal discourse. Now, in many current critical and theoretical practices disability is reaching out of or rather beyond simple inquiries and critiques of the negative stereotypes attached to or “constructed on top of” bodies with impairments.5 Like gender, sexual orientation, and race, disability is being positioned to both articulate and to trouble many of the


11

binaries that have defined the larger sweep of modern cultural practice. Disability has become (and is still becoming) in academic circles one of many spatial articulations of a critical posture that both disrupts the modern cultural processes of constructing physical and cognitive difference in negative terms, and, in doing so, then pushes towards a larger transformation of cultural practice so that bodies are no longer organized through the medicalized framework of the positively normal and the negatively abnormal. As Lennard Davis has written, disability is “not so much the lack of a sense or the presence of a physical or mental impairment as it is the reception and construction of that difference.”6 Like the word “queer,” in its function “disability” is now attached to critique and critical transformation, to a theorizing of the reception of difference, and a resulting reconstruction of both this reception and this resulting difference. When one engages a text, a cultural practice, a nation through these specific terms, one articulates a disability perspective and one performs a disability studies. Disability equates transformative potentiality. In being the professional practitioners of an interdisciplinary academic endeavor, disability studies scholars have been able to borrow and to develop various kinds of conceptual and cultural orientations from the different investigations of embodiment that have defined queer studies, gender studies, and critical race studies. What has emerged is a critical biocultural studies, a wide investigation of what could be defined as a “relational autonomy,”7 a seemingly boundless field that is able to weave together the wide assortment of theoretical threads present in current humanistic and sociological critical discourses into a single, deep analysis of the normal and its discontents. To again cite Lennard Davis, “disability” is something that allows a “biocultural approach” to occur regarding the body at large, and such a method of analysis uses a “culture-based way of knowing” to understand “the scientificized and medicalized body in history, culture, and politics.”8 It is this fascinating theoretical and critical positioning that connects “disability” and a disability dynamic, or what Robert McRuer describes as “ability trouble,” to contemporary Irish studies, to contemporary disabled artists like Christy Brown or Christopher Nolan, and perhaps even further to complicated social issues like Irish peace accords, celtic tigers and post-tigers, the consumerist branding of Irish culture, massive tourism industries, massive emigration/

12


immigration, the Irish pub, the Irish home, the Irish landscape, and all of the everyday practices on the postcolonial emerald isle. In all of these forms, the Irish body is always a troubled body, a body that, no matter what the context may be, always invokes the disruptive problematics of marginalized identity and culture (in Irishness and in disability). This melding of Irish studies and disability studies also allows us in Irish cultural studies to again read backwards, redefining modern Irish cultural production critically in the new terms of disability and in the biocultural dynamics of the reception and implementation of a negatively rendered physical difference. Thus this project attempts to articulate the meeting of two seemingly separate academic investigations: Irish studies and disability studies. By pushing into this type of cross-disciplinary critical space, one can collapse different kinds of cultural formulations into a single inquiry. Both contemporary Irish studies and contemporary disability studies are concerned with (1) how bodies are received by audiences predisposed to a particular interpretation; (2) how bodies are historicized by cultures invested in particular kinds of national narratives; (3) how bodies are transformed or collapsed into textualities and read as symbolic structures; and (4) how bodies are controlled by normalizing gazes much more powerful than their own. Both enterprises deal directly with the perilous dynamics of social construction and the embodied reproduction of ideology, the problematics of representation and being represented by a seemingly distant normative center, the basic issues of power and naming, the bonds of categories of meaning and significance, the nightmares of history, the fracturing and overriding of identity. Reading backwards, reading the works of Joyce and Wilde, the historical events of famines, political revolutions and forced political unions, all through such established literary tropes as the wild Irish girl or the strange dynamics of the stare, one can detect how so very deeply “disability” is implicated in Irish cultural production – simultaneously demanding the writing and then the rewriting of physical difference itself and the Irishness that attends to it. Britannia’s sick sister, Ireland, fits into the very same inbetween, “semi” status now informs the current, evolving definitions of the category of disability itself. Ireland, in its sick sister status, embodies both the theoretical and practical senses of disability and the discourses that surround it.


13

To conclude this section, I would like to relay, briefly, an anecdote told by Seamus Deane, cited in an article by Claire Connolly.9 Apparently, a reporter once asked Samuel Beckett the following question: “Is blindness a tradition in major Irish writers?” This question came at a news conference where Beckett announced to the press and the public that he had glaucoma. Using as a backdrop both the anecdote of this news conference and the emerging significance of postcolonial theory in Irish studies, Seamus Deane reads this really very silly question of and connection between “Irish blindness” and “Irish writing” as a significant issue for the work that was being done in Irish studies in the 1990s. At the end of his description of this news conference Deane warns critics working in Irish studies that, “we have still to beware the tradition of blindness” and the “tradition of glaucoma in Irish letters.” In doing so, in making this warning, Deane makes a point of attaching physical difference (a visual impairment) to the reading of Ireland and to Irish studies itself. Thus, certainly without malice, Deane nevertheless uses physical difference as a negative metaphor heavily invested with negative symbolic import: the “problem” in Irish writing or in Irish letters, in the discourse framing Irish identity, the thing to be most afraid of perhaps to this day in Ireland, is “blindness.” These kinds of negative metaphors and stereotypes attached to blindness, paralysis, and other bodily impairments and their historical, metaphoric application to and definition of complicated cultural problems or negative symptoms of a society, function as metaphoric tags woven deeply into the basic conceptual foundations of Ireland and Irish identity. Modern Ireland writes itself through these structures; modern Irish writers construct texts within the fabric of these structures. To this day, metaphors attached to somatic difference are structured in the very practice of Irish culture and the experience and analysis of it, so much so that the very tradition of modern Irish writing is itself, in Deane’s formulation, an articulation often constituted by the negative stereotypes of physical difference – by the stigma of “blindness.”

Oscar Wilde’s fabulous cello coat If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated. (Wilde, The Importance of Being Ernest)

14


As an initial, concrete example of this kind of theoretical positioning, I would like to focus on a scene from Irish literary history that illustrates the many complicated notions and theoretical threads I am setting into motion here. On his way from Oxford to Greece in the spring of 1877, a young Oscar Wilde spent a few days in town. In this short period, Oscar Fingal O’fflahertie Wills Wilde10 made what he always thought of as his “London debut” into polite society and into the role of “the critic” in literary and other artistic circles. Wilde had been invited to take part in the event of the season, the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery by Sir Coutts Lindsay. The special-invitation event included a private showing of the gallery on 30 April, as well as the official opening of the building the next day. As Richard Ellmann describes in his 1987 biography, the then 23-year old Oscar Wilde thoroughly enjoyed the opening-day spectacle of the Aesthetic Movement gallery and the lavishness of the occasion itself. The official opening included such figures in attendance as the Prince of Wales, William Gladstone, John Ruskin, and Henry James, and the building was characterized by brilliant colors, a Palladian façade, and a new frieze by Whistler. The gallery would become one of the most popular sites of the London season, a site where Oscar Wilde would thrive. On this first very public occasion, again one of his first public performances on the Empire’s central stage, Ellmann gives the following account of Oscar Wilde’s fabulous appearance: Part of this spectacle was himself. No ordinary clothing would serve for what he recognized to be his London debut, so he was pranked out in a new coat . . . A contemporary diarist reports the answer he gave when questioned about his acquisition. He had had a dream, he said, in which a ghostly personage appeared in a coat of a shape and color that somehow reminded him of a violoncello. On waking, he hastily sketched out what he had seen and brought the drawing to his tailor. The coat was cut to meet the dream specifications: in some lights it looked bronze, in others red, and the back of it (Wilde was proud of his back) resembled the outline of a cello.11 Dressed as a musical instrument that changes color in different lights, Wilde began his perfect performance as the “Artist as Critic” or the


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“Professor of Aesthetics” and as a producer of intellectual work – it is at this event that Wilde reportedly decided to “take up the critic’s life.”12 Indeed, in short time Wilde would begin to fulfill this ambition by writing an essay describing the opening of the gallery and publishing it in Ireland in the Dublin University Review. Oscar Wilde, in 1877, is not impaired. As I will demonstrate, in 1877, depending on how one defines it, Oscar Wilde may not even be that Irish. Still, in the context of this study, standing tall and fabulous at the gallery, and wearing his brilliant cello coat, Wilde engages all of the issues of disability, the Irish body, and the Irish body’s function in modern imperial culture as a location for a larger set of disability discourses.13 To turn the individual nation into a unique body is a “modern” turn of mind; to turn Ireland into a wild Irish girl or a sick sister or a diseased patient – in the end a “dis-abled” body – is a result of modern British imperialism and the freak show rhetorics of the modern stare; to then turn that body into a set of fine clothes, a fabulously conceived outfit, and a cello-shaped coat, is a brilliantly critical response from Oscar Wilde, who is, at 23, an emerging cultural critic already in possession of the fashion secrets of a wild(e) Irish girl (that is, a semicolonial, subversive Irish writer who is, simply with his style of dress, able to fracture the disabling reproduction of an ideology that is normative, imperial, and profoundly somatic in its orientation). I believe that Wilde’s performance at the gallery on this day has a very distinct purpose. His central intention here, in wearing the costume of the cello coat, is to collapse his exterior surface, his visible bodily presentation, into the musical instrument itself. He seeks to embody the notion, then, of a shifting ghostly presence in the refashioned form of the European instrument. Wilde transforms his body into a particular kind of textuality to be read in a very particular set of parameters. In doing so he begins to control the reception of his body and all of its implications. The form of the cello coat – like the critical essay, the play, the novel, the poem, the children’s tale – is just one of many forms that Wilde can use to mitigate reception and frame what would become a life-long attempt to negotiate and aggressively re-shape the paralleled structures of somatic normalcy and global empire. Oscar Wilde’s fashionable clothing, layered and layered upon his uncomfortable body,14 catches the dynamic of closeting and carefully

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unveiling the materialities that embody deviance and abnormalcy in mainstreamed Victorian cultural practice. Further, then, Wilde’s wearing of his clothes on this day, his willingness to knowingly and cleverly play with the representation of his own body, is a demonstration of and a resistance to what the emerging, negatively constructed notion of disability actually means in the terms of nation in nineteenth-century culture – that is, the social reproduction of a character or a figure upon which, like one’s clothes, hangs the significances and the meanings of one’s circumstances and one’s essence. As Lord Henry Wotten tells young Dorian Gray, “The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”15 In the invisible privacy of his own mind, Wilde can dream of a ghost who wears a coat that looks like a violoncello; in the invisible privacy of his own room, Wilde can put on a newly made coat inspired by that dream and that replicates the instrument itself; in the visible, public space of the gallery, though, where people go literally to look and to look closely at things, what Wilde really puts on, carefully and perhaps even in a large way unknowingly, is the public notion of the Irish body itself. *

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Recent research in both theoretical and critical disability studies has persuasively demonstrated the distinct connection between the body and the nation in modern cultures. This research has also problematized this connection and its wider implications. For example, in theory Lennard Davis has drawn together the connection between disability and the nation, and further between national health and the disabled or “unfit” body. Davis writes, “The emphasis on nation and national fitness obviously plays into the metaphor of the body. If individual citizens are not fit, if they do not fit into the nation, then the national body will not be fit.”16 In more specific critical terms, and pertaining to the traditionally defined historical period within which Oscar Wilde is functioning in 1877, in the last ten years Martha Stoddard Holmes, Sondra Archimedes,17 and many others have begun to gauge in different ways the connections between health, gender, and the state of England in the Victorian era. Again, all of these scholars have argued that the connection is specific, direct, and wide.


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An example of this line criticism is the recent work of Pamela Gilbert. Gilbert writes the following on Englishness, citizenship, and the structuring of the social body: “The notion of the social body became a way to talk about the connection between the public sphere of nation and the private sphere of individuals, while citizenship – both as a way of defining the person as a member of the national social body and as the institutional link between nation and state – became the measure and goal of its health.”18 Gilbert continues: Thus Britishness equals Englishness equals, by the end of the period, the healthy (clean, isolated), white, masculine, middleclassed body. . . . Basic representative of a materiality that is malleable yet limited, the body became in this period both the index and the metaphor of the nation. Individual bodies and their ills, as representatives of classes and populations, became indices of the condition of that less tangible entity, the social body; early on, the social itself, in both its physical and its moral manifestations, came to be understood as a medicalized physical entity that could be fixed, observed, and dissected both through the individual bodies of its subjects and in toto (or en masse) in the form of statistics.19 The baseline notion here of the social body links together the private, individual body and the larger sense of the nation; the political functions of the state and the culture of the society, are articulated by a structure of citizenship, which hopefully will be the destiny of all the persons within the society.20 For this study the key is that upon this theoretical groundwork a turn can be made within the dynamics of the social body itself: bodies become larger nations; representations of individual bodies become representations of larger class and national structures. For British exponents of imperial discourses, these differences can again be located, controlled, and, in theory and as a goal, “fixed” or normalized into “citizenship”; for the objects of those discourses, the extraordinary bodies outside of “Britain,” these are the very discourses within which one must negotiate for a functional identity that falls outside of “Britishness” or “citizenship.” Not surprisingly, despite and perhaps because of a contextual resistance to normalization, in this set of wide historical, cultural, and

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social circumstances Irishness and the Irish body come to embody and perform a particularly negative, emptied social state for its audience. Like the female body in Victorian marriage economies or the impoverished body in Victorian readings of Malthusian social statistics or the invalided body in Victorian middle-class narratives,21 the Irish body is read through a larger social framework where distinctions between individuality, citizenship, and “the social body” all work in unison to further the ideologies driving both an emerging norm and the global empire. In the “pure” terms of the newly formed discourses of statistics, in the “instinctual” terms of an emerging hereditary, genetic, and evolutionary narrative, and in the “aesthetic” terms of an Arnoldian cultural metaphor of Celtic spirituality,22 the Irish body and Irishness itself are “abnormal” for the “normal” British reading/consuming public.23 In practice, the Irish individual will always be traced into these frameworks, will always be abnormalized by normalized British readers; the Irish body will always contain an Irishness that reflects, directly and indirectly, the identity formations required by the discourses highlighted in Gilbert’s and others’ work. Wilde’s own individual understanding of and performance within this context represents a second level of complication working here. Wilde’s understandings of Irish identity or Irishness are rooted in English identity or Englishness. This seemingly stable binary is what he most seeks to trouble. Like the binaries of the normal and the abnormal, or the abled and the disabled, Wilde’s sense of his own identity is built through being an outsider just inside of a modernized structure, just inside of a social body normalized as equating Englishness. In this sense, in his career Wilde disrupts the easy consumption and co-opting of Irishness by defiantly distinguishing it from Englishness, only to ultimately collapse the binary together into an even more defiant and more deeply troubling hybrid formation. Declan Kiberd writes the following on Wilde’s sense of Ireland and the specific opposition between Irishness and Englishness: Wilde’s entire literary career constituted an ironic comment on the tendency of Victorian Englishmen to attribute to the Irish those emotions which they had repressed within themselves. His essays on Ireland question the assumption that, just because the English are one thing, the Irish must be its opposite. . . . With his sharp intelligence, Wilde saw that the image of the stage Irishman


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tells far more about English fears than Irish realities, just as the “Irish joke” revealed less about Irishmen’s innate foolishness than about Englishmen’s persistent and poignant desire to say something funny. Wilde opted to say something funny for them in a lifelong performance of “Englishness” which was really a parody of the very notion. . . . To his mortification and intermittent delight, Wilde found that his English mask was not by any means a perfect fit.24 Wilde’s sense of Irishness is first oppositional and then paradoxical; it is built on the notion of collapse, instability, and disruption. Wilde’s Irishness and his Englishness are both consequently masks, playful constructions of an identity put together by an Irish writer who in many ways pushes into identity formations built through a hybrid internationalism much more than anything else.25 As Kiberd writes later, by “[w]earing the mask of the English Oxonian, Wilde was paradoxically freed to become more ‘Irish’ than he could ever have been back in Ireland. . . . English literature had a liberating effect on Wilde: it equipped him with a mask behind which he was able to compose the lineaments of his Irish face.”26 I should note that Kiberd’s reading here counters many previous readings of Wilde’s sense of nation. These readings suggest that there is “no Irish dimension” to his plays,27 that he is much more akin to the English side of the Irish/English binary than the Irish, and that Wilde is, simply, not Irish enough to be part of a canonical “Irish literature.” Kiberd’s responses to this line of thought attempt to engage Wilde as a figure outside of the binary always in play between Ireland and England. In doing so, Kiberd can write himself as a critic outside of that binary and thus, as he suggests, can then replicate Wilde’s own critical moves and “state of mind.” It is as Richard Pine has likewise written: “Wilde stood irreconcilably outside both worlds, the English society which, by virtue of his difference, he was to shock, subvert, and despise for the rest of his life, and the Irish home which became more of a state of mind than a home.”28 No matter what one’s position on Wilde’s Irishness may be, it is clear that his response to the larger cultural dynamic in which he existed was like James Joyce’s later move to cosmopolitanism. In other words, his response constituted a deeply complicated, problematic, and political move. Wilde is obviously an actively political

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figure. His performances involved dangerous solutions that invoked resistance, and, not surprisingly, critique. Wilde’s solution to this particular problem of a marginalized Irish selfhood and an English normalcy is, as Kiberd notes, “complex and daring: to become a very Irish kind of Englishman, just as in Ireland his had been a rather English kind of Irish family. The truth, in life as well as art, was that whose opposite could also be true: every great power evolved its own opposite in order to achieve.”29 And thus, “If the English used Ireland as a laboratory in which to test their society, Wilde was happy to use England as a testing-ground for Irish ideas and debates: for, in his mind, the two could not be separated.”30 In a profound way, Wilde’s solution to Ireland and England, to homosexuality and heterosexuality, to justice and injustice, is, simply, to be well dressed and elegant, to be fabulous. In his dress and in his body’s behaviors, he both engages what will become disability and envisions what will also become counter-culture rock music, queer politics, and the pop culture spectacle of such contemporary figures as Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Britney Spears, or perhaps more accurately, a figure like Morrissey. As I will now demonstrate, Wilde’s work certainly parallels and indeed embodies a disabled perspective of culture. This perspective is linked directly to Wilde’s to identity, to his conceptualization of Irishness. *

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What do all of these contexts mean when we read Ireland and disability together? How do these particular kinds of theoretical, critical, and historical accounts of the body’s function in Victorian-era culture shape Oscar Wilde’s sense of his own body and his engagement with London and Irish society? Mostly, what do they do to our reading of the great legend of Oscar Wilde’s fabulous cello coat? To answer this last, more specific question, I think one must again, with admitted hesitation, step back contextually. In doing so, one must ignore the historical precision articulated by such scholars as Gilbert and Kiberd, and even Wilde himself, and instead push into the theoretical operations within the moment of the cello coat itself. The critic Robert McRuer has written extensively on the queering of disability and on the significances of making such kinds of theoretical


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moves. One contemporary playwright McRuer has relied on in building these connections is Tony Kushner. With McRuer and Kushner in mind, the answer to the last question above, regarding the legend of the fabulous cello coat, perhaps begins with a queer/disability oriented definition of the notion of the fabulous itself. Tony Kushner has written the following on the term:31 Fabulous became a popular word in the queer community – well, it was never unpopular, but for awhile it became a battle cry of a new queer politics, carnival and camp, aggressively fruity, celebratory and tough like a streetwise drag queen: “FAAAAABULOUS!” Fabulous was the gay equivalent of that indefinable, ineffable thing young African Americans used to identify as soul, and later as badness, and def, and phat, and which Jews identify as menschlichkeit. If you possess it, you don’t need to ask what it is. Kushner continues: Fabulous is one of those words that provide a measure of the degree to which a person or event manifests a particular, usually oppressed, subculture’s most distinctive, invigorating features. What are the salient features of Fabulousness? Irony. Tragic history. Defiance. Gender-fuck. Glitter. Drama. . . . The Fabulous is not delineated by age or beauty. Style has a dialectical relationship to physical reality. The body is the Real. Style is Theater. . . . For style to be truly fabulous, one must completely triumph over tragedy, age, physical insufficiencies – just as importantly, one’s audiences must be made aware of the degree of transcendence, of triumph; must see both triumph and that over which the triumph has been made.32 Tied directly into one’s self-stylization and one’s self-presentation, the word “fabulous” articulates a set of characteristics, a set of identity terms or nuances or feelings. Being fabulous means being different and being openly and aggressively resistant within this difference. Being fabulous articulates a “battle cry” of transformative embodiment. Being fabulous communicates “defiance” directly to the audience, to the eyes that look at you and the ears that hear you (“FAAAAABULOUS!”). And finally, being fabulous expresses

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“glitter,” “transcendence,” “triumph,” and other such qualities and experiences, all of whose visible expression constitutes an aggressive re-writing of negative stereotype. Within these conceptual nuances, McRuer has argued that the word “severe” in the phrase “severe disability” has a functional parallel usage now in disability studies and/or crip culture. McRuer writes: [The use of] Severe, though less common than fabulous, has a similar queer history . . . severely disabled . . . reverses the able-bodied understanding of severely disabled bodies as the most marginalized, the most excluded from privileged and always elusive normalcy, and instead suggests that it is precisely those bodies that are the best positioned to refuse “mere toleration” and to call out the inadequacies of compulsory able-bodiedness. Whether it is the “army of one-breasted women” Audre Lorde imagines descending on the Capitol; the Rolling Quads, whose resistance sparked the independent living movement in Berkeley, California; deaf students shutting down Gallaudet University in the Deaf President Now action; or Act Up storming the National Institutes of Health or the Food and Drug Administration, severely disabled/critically queer bodies have already generated ability trouble that remaps the public sphere and reimagines and reshapes the limited forms of embodiment and desire proffered by the systems that contain us all.33 Like the “aggressively fruity” articulation contained in the word “fabulous,” severe disability disrupts and “refuses.” Severe disability communicates triumph and “that over which the triumph has been made.” Severe disability is a manifestation of an identity that has been manipulated; severe disability is a moment when a body does not pass and can not pass. Thus there is a surprising potential claim of agency in “severe disability” itself in that it is intense, effective, and sometimes intentional in its larger transformative power. In these terms, being “severe” is being “fabulous” and being both severe and fabulous articulates an agency that troubles existing norms. The critical and theoretical development of such fabulous and severe structures is, indeed, what the process of cripping entails and what a widespread “cripped culture” would allow.34


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With these complicated definitions and terms in mind, my position here is that Wilde’s wearing of his cello coat is both fabulous and, indeed, severe. Wilde’s complicated Irish body, no matter what kind of clothing covers it, is always being inserted into and working inside of the set of nationalized understandings of “the social body” outlined above. Oscar Wilde’s body will always be lifted up and remade, reconfigured into a material functioning of difference in the gaze and systematic practice of the empire. Thus in England, Oxonian Oscar Wilde still originates from Ireland’s Trinity College; in London, Oscar Wilde is still a Dubliner. In the infamous 1895 trials of Oscar Wilde, for example, Irishness suddenly and tellingly makes an appearance: “The obscene imposter, whose prominence has been a social outrage ever since he transferred from Trinity Dublin to Oxford his vices, his follies, and his vanities, has been exposed, and thoroughly to the last.”35 In 1895, in a functioning binary of Englishness and Irishness, where Englishness is normal, correct, proper, and a social goal, and Irishness is abnormal, incorrect, improper, and a social failure (and should, indeed, be fixed), Wilde’s vaguely Irish body is already in a subordinate position, is already in a sense disabled. In the fall-out of “gross indecency,” these kinds of theoretical positions are revealed and Oscar Wilde is punished for his sexual orientation and for, indirectly, his Irishness. The abnormalcies of his individual, diseased body are corrected so that the larger social body remains normal and healthy. Eighteen years earlier, what Wilde’s body does on a spring day in London,36 what his costume is positioned to do, is to carefully embody triumphant difference in the public sphere. Wilde articulates, reshapes (literally with his coat), and re-imagines, through the inspiration of a dream no less, the body’s performance in the public sphere and the meanings attached to that performance. This purposeful, punk-rock embodiment – the desire to draw the audiences’ eyes away from the newly displayed pictures hanging on the walls and onto his own fabulous, severe body – attaches itself theoretically to disability structures, to queer structures, in that it actively fractures the solidity and containment of a “compulsory able-bodiedness.”37 Wilde’s cello coat is linked to Lorde’s “army of one-breasted women” or the Rolling Quads in Berkeley. In the most provocative terms imaginable, standing large and magnificent in his cello-shaped coat, Oscar Wilde is gazed at by his entire society – by the royal, political,

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and artistic personages of his time. In the very elegant coat and in the punk-rock posture of the “artist-critic,” ready “to call-out” the “inadequacies” of “compulsory” Victorian norms, Oscar Wilde gazes back. Oscar Wilde bothers. Oscar Wilde disrupts. Oscar Wilde irritates. Oscar Wilde troubles. In all of these ways Oscar Wilde’s Grosvenor Gallery performance is “celebratory” and “tough,” “carnival and camp,” “aggressively fruity” and “severe.” Obviously, Oscar Wilde’s performance is and will always be linked directly to “trouble.” *

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Theoretically, this fabulous performance is determined to an enormous extent by the rhetorics of the stare. Like the severely fabulous functions of severe disability itself, and within the entire material dynamic outlined above, the moment of a stare becomes a primary vehicle for both the articulation of the norm and the disruption of it. One of the perceptual structures that Wilde plays with here is the fact that in modern Irish/British discourse, staring operates as a rhetorical practice that can create an understanding of Ireland as a particularized space in the evolution of the British Empire: Ireland, in its geography, in its culture, and in its “troubles,” is something that must be stared at, something that constantly and irritatingly requires a complicated negotiation with the bothersome, the disruptive, the uncertain, the mad, the bad, and the dangerous to know, and, most importantly, the abnormal.38 Irishness is not Englishness, and Irishness is, in an amazing sense, always visible. In her research on modern American culture and freakery, Rosemarie Garland Thomson has defined staring as a particular kind of rhetorical event, a particular kind of seeing: A more intense form of looking than glancing, glimpsing, scanning, surveying, gazing, and other forms of casual or uninterested looking, staring registers the perception of difference and gives meaning to impairment by marking it as aberrant. By intensely telescoping, looking toward the physical signifier for disability, staring creates an awkward partnership that estranges and discomforts both viewer and viewed . . . Staring thus creates disability as a state of absolute difference rather than simply one more variation in human form. At the same time, staring constitutes disability


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identity by manifesting the power relations between the subject positions of disabled and able-bodied.39 In this perspective, a stare is a moment of embodiment for both the able-bodied possessor of normalcy and the disabled body expressing abnormalcy. It is an initial perception of and then a social confrontation with a bodily surface that deviates from prescribed somatic parameters. Again, Thomson argues that within the confines of this moment the visibly different body becomes a corporeal location for “absolute difference,” for abnormalcy. In most contexts the moment of the stare is the moment when that somatic difference is made into negative disability. Garland Thomson writes elsewhere: In a first encounter with another person, a tremendous amount of information must be organized and interpreted simultaneously: each participant probes the explicit for the implicit, determines what is significant for particular purposes, and prepares a response that is guided by many cues, both subtle and obvious. When one person has a visible disability it almost always dominates and skews the normate’s process of sorting out perceptions and forming a reaction. The interaction is usually strained because the non-disabled person may feel fear, pity, fascination, repulsion, or merely surprise, none of which is expressible according to social protocol.40 As Garland Thomson’s other work suggests, this encounter, this intense, single form of interaction with visible disability quickly and easily transforms into a kind of nineteenth-century freak show, a moment of subject and object, a moment of the articulation of larger controls and conditions on behavior.41 These characteristics define what the stare is, what is happening in that single moment when one person’s eyes are, again, trained intently and intensely on another person’s body or what will be defined – in the very next moment of the encounter – as absolute difference. It is in these moments that disability as negative abnormalcy begins. It is in these moments that the entire dynamic of deviance, madness, and modernity that Foucault and others have diagnosed unfolds: the stare is ground zero in both the enforcement of and the resistance to normalcy;42 the stare is the tightly packed cultural

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moment of “biopower.” Garland Thomson’s suggestion is that the result of the stare is the assertion of power and privilege over another. This assertion comes through typing, specification, often through the rhetorics of the visual: the eyes become the somatic instruments of power. Simultaneously, in Garland Thomson’s view, within the stare itself, there exists the resistance to this typing and the always dangerous, always disruptive invocation of difference. This later disruptive element in this theoretical dynamic is what should be emphasized in an analysis of Irish literature and culture. In an Irish cultural context there is a significant shade of difference between the gaze and the stare. In the context of Oscar Wilde’s cello coat, in addition to “manifesting the power relations between the subject positions of disabled and able-bodied,” and in addition to a registering of what is normal and what is understood as “absolute difference,” staring here also constitutes a moment when socialized national relations are momentarily troubled, disrupted, and resisted. The stare is a rhetorical moment when the easy instrumentality of both a “compulsory able-bodiedness” and a compulsory Englishness fails. As a figure fabulously dressed as a musical instrument, Wilde purposefully shifts his body away from the gaze and into the anxious realm of the stare. He is stared at simply because in this encounter his body registers sudden difference. In the intentionality of this moment, Wilde’s own desire to be looked at freaks the entire rhetoric, crips the visibly different body in aggressively positive terms, and perhaps, in Gilbert’s larger context of the social body, queers the Irish “nation” as strange and as permanently beyond the understandings of an imperial logic of normalization. In this single moment, then, Wilde disrupts the economy of the gaze, and the system of privileges that conditions the workings and behaviors of the empire. Wilde’s body disturbs the logical ends and the purposeful conclusions of the empire itself because, at base, the moment of encounter with his fabulously dressed body fractures the grammar of the compulsory norm that is Englishness. Staring is a step out of the easy comfort of gazing. It is a step into real discomfort that exists outside of the norm. The stare is a very human moment where the normative ideological practices of the gaze are baldly present in social practice; it traces what occurs when those practices are touched just barely by something that troubles the quiet, steady progression of the norm. In this sudden opening,


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this momentary gap in the progression of culture and time, the gaze is transformed and becomes, again, a stare. Further, in modernity, this moment when impairment/visible physical difference openly becomes “disability” is caught in a perceptual framework where “disability” has already become and is continually becoming “abnormal” and “negative.” The rhetoric of this moment, the discursive play inside and outside of it, and the negotiation of it all are the very moments of queerness, of Irishness, of disability, of cripping. In the dynamics of these moments – and the amazingly rich visual implications of the entire scene at Grosvenor, moments of staring and gazing, looking and watching – “Ireland” is “disabled.” And indeed these moments are exactly what Oscar Wilde purposefully and actively creates in his cello coat, in his new found role of the critic on 1 May 1877. In this particular moment, Oscar Wilde, an Irish writer, begins the practices of the resistant intellectual whose critical processes will dismantle and rewrite empire and imperialist practices. Fabulously dressed, critically queer, severely disabled, Wilde defines in his dress a specific type of critical consciousness or subject status, connected directly to such theoretical enterprises as queer studies, race studies, and gender studies, and now, an Irish disability studies.

Raising “gaudy tulips” from “dung” Vision is the art of seeing the invisible. (Swift, Works) The nymph, though in this mangled Plight, Must ev’ry Morn her Limbs unite. (Swift, “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going To Bed”) One of the things that Oscar Wilde’s performance at Grosvenor Gallery teaches us is that articulating a disability studies perspective in an Irish context demands close attention to visual dynamics. Wilde’s performance at the gallery also indicates that the practices of reading the modern body are composed through a deeper orientation towards and investment in exteriors and interiors. Inside of this theoretical and harshly visual context, Wilde attempts to control his body’s reception through a costume and a pose. Through his dress and external behavior, Wilde can shape, for awhile, the perception

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of his interior, individual person. In its Irishness, sexual orientation, and even individualized, outer, somatic characteristics, Wilde’s body and its interiority must function from a marginalized position in the larger social body of British imperial society. This is where disability begins: it is in this kind of tangled space that Ireland as a whole is negatively disabled; it is also in this space that the transformative dynamic of severity and fabulousness begins to unfold. To anchor the implications of this complicated assertion in another specific text, I would now like to bring in an example from an earlier, perhaps even more complicated and more contested period of AngloIrish literary history. Jonathan Swift’s 1730 poem, “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” is an elaborate fantasy exploring the dynamic of interiors and exteriors.43 The poem represents the emerging, twinned conditions of modernity and colonization, as well as the ultimately inferior stature assigned to the Irish body in the complex cultural dynamics that are steadily working in and out of pre-normalization Ireland. Formally the poem is built through the generic traditions of the pastoral. The lover (Strephon) and the Lady (Celia) both possess the conventional poetic names used in pastoral poetry and, in the first four lines at least, the neoclassical poem follows an anticipated, Augustan pastoral structure in that at the beginning of the work the reader is presented with a bold, young, most likely supplicant lover and a goddess – a “haughty” Lady – who quite naturally emerges from her chamber in tissues and lace. Initially, on the exterior or the shell of the poem, the Lady (again named Celia) looks as a “Lady” should in a neoclassical Britain built through the matrix of patriarchy: Celia emerges from her dressing room, after “Five hours (and who can do it less in?)”, looking like a “goddess,” “Arrayed in lace, brocades and tissues.”44 In this initial posture, Celia fits into the normalized construction of aristocratic femininity. She is a “Lady” and on the surface looks as a Lady should, and so the initial image of her does not disrupt the voyeuristic patriarchal gaze of the reader, does not disturb the visual field that the pastoral is required to create and to articulate, does not contradict the dominant heterosexual definition and construction of eighteenthcentury, Augustan domesticity.45 Again, for the intended audience, the numerous readerly cues provided here require an anticipation of traditional neoclassical pastoralism – homely shepherds, gaudy


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goddesses, green fields, splendid trees, abstract truth, and ordered beauty will all likely follow. Very little of the poem is spent on this bodily exterior or skin, however. In its actual form, the poem’s pastoral pretense quickly evaporates, for the design of the poem is defined by interrogation and a displacement of form itself – an erasure of those formal kinds of exteriors like the pleasant gauze of a heroic couplet or the skin and hair of a living body. In its function the poem becomes a cruel, exquisite exercise in pornographic exposure. It is intended to “unmask” or undress Celia, to demonstrate that there is an inside, an interior to “Celia,” and that indeed her gaudy, laced, tissued, and “tuliped” surface envelops the truth or disgusting dung of a “disordered,” “female” materiality. The poem mocks the pastoral form, then, as Pope writes, in a similarly violent thematic mode, a mockepic in “The Rape of the Lock.” In other words, the poem’s form imitates its purpose – in its function it is a “mockery” of the pleasant “truths” delivered by the lengthy traditions of the pastoral. In this way the poem performs, especially in its satiric, vividly sadistic bent, the cultural task of articulating both a generally emerging structure of Foucauldian modernity (tagged here by the characteristic that there is an inside and an outside to things, and that there is certainly an inside and an outside to the performance of personhood or subjectivity), as well as a more specific, historically localized structure of, again, eighteenth-century domesticity (that is, violently articulated patriarchy and misogyny). And thus the poem under examination here is built on the male player in the text, “Strephon,” sneaking into Celia’s dressing room, literally crossing the boundary from exterior shell into interior matter, and then simply cataloging the material facts of this interior region, providing a kind of inventory of the monstrosity he finds there. What Strephon finds there are the disgusting problematics of Celia’s body. It is a body whose reality or unveiled truth is defined primarily by “dirt.” As I will demonstrate, the poem itself becomes the objectified body in motion that is caught by visual rhetorics, trapped by Strephon’s investigations and those resulting moments of intense gazes and sudden, nervous stares. In this metaphoric dimension the dressing room literally transforms, in bodily terms, and becomes Celia’s “dirty” interiority which is penetrated by the phallic instrument of an ordering rationality that is the male Strephon. The poem

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as a whole likewise becomes, in transformational allegorical terms, a cultural location of bodily normalization which will then radiate outwards through all of the bodies in the discursive dynamic – Celia’s body, Strephon’s body, the persona’s body, the reader’s body, Ireland’s and England’s bodies, the globe’s body. This transformation and its processes of discipline unfold as the poem details the discoveries Strephon makes. In the private space of the dressing room the following is discovered and then described: there is “a dirty smock . . . , / Beneath the armpits well besmeared”; there are combs “Filled up with dirt so closely fixt, / No brush could force a way betwixt”; there are other cosmetic devices that hide the dirt – powder, a “forehead cloth,” “puppy water” (urine), “gallypots,” “vials,” “pastes,” “paints and slops,” “ointments,” a “basin” that “takes whatever comes/ The scrapings of her teeth and gums, / A nasty compound of all hues, / For here she spits, and here she spews”; there are “towels” that do the same, being “Begummed, bemattered, and beslimed / With dirt, and sweat, and earwax grimed”; there are “greasy” stockings, “frowzy” petticoats and handkerchiefs, which are also “varnished o’er with snuff and snot”; there is a pair of tweezers too, which pluck the hairs on her “forehead,” and on her chin that “like bristles grow.”46 The most disgusting thing that Strephon finds in the dressing room is Celia’s chamber pot. In this reading, the chamber pot functions as an embodiment and containment both of Celia herself and of Strephon’s (and the reader’s) growing awareness (as the heroic couplets march on) of what “Celia” actually means: the pot’s disguised and “counterfeit” exterior hides from “vulgar eyes” a horrifying interior, which Strephon has “smelled . . . all the time before”: And must you needs describe the chest? · · · · · In vain the workman showed his wit With rings and hinges counterfeit To make it seem in this disguise A cabinet to vulgar eyes; For Strephon ventured to look in, Resolved to go through thick and thin; He lifts the lid, there needs no more, He smelled it all the time before.47


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Perhaps not surprisingly, given the general logic of Swift’s “excremental vision,”48 the entire second half of the poem is dedicated to the processes of discovering what the disguised chamber pot’s interior contents actually are. And so in the next several lines of the poem Strephon thoroughly explores the chamber pot, literally groping his hands inside of it: So Strephon lifting up the lid, To view what in the chest was hid. The vapours flew from out the vent, But Strephon cautious never meant The bottom of the pan to grope, And foul his hands in search of Hope.49 . Unfortunately, though we are told that he does not apparently intend to touch or feel the contents of the chamber pot, of course believing or “hoping” that there could really be nothing inside of it, Strephon does indeed do so and thus, to his (and our) “amazement,” “fouls” his hands with the contexts of the chamber pot or actually, and cleverly, with a quote from John Milton: Strephon discovers and feels “Those ‘secrets of the hoary deep!’.”50 At this significant juncture in the poem’s construction, there is described, literally, Celia’s bowel movements which: When plumped into the reeking chest, Send up an excremental smell To taint the parts from whence they fell. The petticoats and gown perfume, Which waft a stink around every room. It is at the end of this last detailed explanation of Celia’s now “tainted” body parts, her “wafting” stinks, that Strephon comes to the following unfortunate conclusion, which will be eventually, and not surprisingly, corrected by the persona: “Thus finishing his grand survey, / Disgusted Strephon stole away / Repeating in his amorous fits, / Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!”51 *

*

*

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Why does the poem describe the contents of Celia’s chamber pot? Why does the poem first shift away from a traditional pastoral and into a concern with Celia’s indelicate bodily characteristics – her body’s hair and her body’s smells – and then, ultimately, into an intense concern with Celia’s bowel movements? And why do Celia’s bowel movements consume so many lines, so many images, so many functional concepts in the material and cognitive economy of the poem itself? Inside this poem, the answers to these questions and the explanations of the poem’s and Strephon’s compulsions are seemingly clear. At its very end, the poem describes how, through this discovery of Celia’s chamber pot and its contents, Strephon is finally ruined in his larger conception of femininity, of what the female body means when it is unveiled and set into “real” practice. After his metaphoric journey inside of Celia, Strephon is unable to imagine femininity without simultaneously seeing the female body in conjunction with all of “her stinks”: “But Vengeance, goddess never sleeping / Soon punished Strephon for his peeping; / His foul imagination links / Each dame he sees with all her stinks.”52 Inside this poem, then, Strephon is punished for his discovery. In the interior of his own mind now, Strephon will always link his dreams or thoughts of “each dame” he sees to “her stinks.” His imagination has been “fouled”; his own interiority has been unveiled, troubled, and transformed. This is the punishment that never sleeps, and this punishment is the logical bedrock of the poem’s entire sadistically pornographic and profoundly sexist dynamic: there must be a violation of Celia’s privacy or her private self in order for the poem to work; and there must then be punishment for this violation in order for the poem to conclude and its own contents to be explained. In a continual series of replications, the poem itself becomes a chamberpot, and its own contents again must be explained – its own deviance disciplined. In the poem’s larger orientation or fantasy framework, this punishment comes through Vengeance, through another woman and another “goddess.” And again, this too is logically consistent, makes sense in the patriarchal sexual economy of the fantasy: the male lover who violates Celia’s most private, interior parts can only be punished through the violation of his own private interiority by a more powerful female figure, a goddess.


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Significantly, in the last four lines of the work we see that, unlike Strephon, the masterful persona of the poem is beyond this kind of imaginative devastation and corruption. According to the persona, innocent apprentice Strephon will hopefully also soon learn to appreciate and, indeed, relish making beautiful order out of such filthy confusion: “He soon would learn to think like me, / And bless his ravished sight to see / Such order from confusion sprung, / Such gaudy tulips raised from dung.”53 With the sexual connotation still present, the persona asserts in these last lines that there is a pleasure in seeing “tulips raised from dung”; there is a pleasure, in other words, in disciplining confused difference with rationality. As my italics intend to articulate, discipline and larger metaphoric explanation once again key on a visual dynamic. The final point of the poem/fantasy is that some day apprentice Strephon will learn to experience the same pleasure in seeing such somatic chaos transformed into superficial beauty. Strephon will learn the pleasure of deep order, so that when he sees “dung” he understands and indeed finds pleasure in knowing that “gaudy tulips” can be raised from it. The eyes, sight itself, are the primary instruments here of normalization and control, of discovering disorder, and then, eventually, of making order out of that disorder. What Strephon sees, feels, and smells in Celia’s room, from her body, sickens him and invokes, in terms of metaphor, another use of the eyes – a horrifying stare. It is repulsion that Strephon feels; it is his normalized gaze that fails. Sight, both actual sight (Strephon sees Celia’s bowel movement) and metaphoric sight (Strephon’s gaze, his ability to incorporate the totality of the world into his perception) are used as the chief structures that allow the poem to mean something. The actual process of reading the poem shifts the readers’ eyes away from what Strephon holds. The poem itself is a tool used to explain confusion and to make with its own form, within the pleasure of the ordered rhyming couplets, a beautiful, pleasing linguistic moment out of the mass of dung that constitutes language itself. This harmony, this order and organization, the words printed on the page itself, solve the problem of Strephon’s eyes – the persona/poet can conclude the poem, then, by in effect controlling the readers’ eyes as well as Strephon’s. With this move the poem undermines and eliminates the horror and deep abnormalcy contained within it. Swift’s poem becomes a super-articulation of biopower – it embodies the

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pleasure of disorder and the necessity of discipline in a simple literary form. The poem, and what it represents, is a gaudy tulip raised from dung. In the context of an Irish disability studies, this poem articulates a number of interties between Irish and English national identities. The poem constitutes an early engagement with the larger discourses that will now continue to emerge and that will negatively disable bodies that are different. In the terms of the nation, the United Kingdom, and the global empire, what the poem articulates is the beginnings of an attachment of disability to Ireland and Irishness itself. The poem demonstrates and performs Swift’s understanding of the Irish body. That body is different, is defined in negative terms through its difference, is functionally impaired, and is negatively disabled. It is a body that needs to be fixed. Thus in the poem/fantasy it is the dynamic of Celia’s interior and exterior, her seemingly beautiful, flower-like, gaudy tulip body and her filthy essence or core, again her “shit,” that is played upon, that is exploited and violated, and that allows such normalization to even proceed and function. Celia’s body collapses under the weight of Strephon’s investigation; her interior is exposed and her entire body, in the terms of metaphor, collapses. As demonstrated, what emerges is the controlling persona of the work. This persona is able to foresee Strephon’s eventual ability to see tulips raised from dung, and likewise provides the theoretical bridge that leads from despair and collapse to wholeness and order: again, in 80 years, this metaphoric bridge will lead to a United Kingdom. In these twists and turns the poem in the end promises, wickedly, that Irishness will eventually be made English. As also alluded to above, this bodily normalization is understood best through close attention to the poem’s form. The actual physical poem – again its form and space – is equivalent to Celia’s actual physical body – her form and space. The structuring of the text – a pastoral goddess potentially gone wild – collapses into the larger structure of “Celia” herself. Thus the catalog of bodily realities that constitutes the poem and what is Celia’s inside is formally enveloped by a skin – the first four lines and the last four lines of the poem, the heroic couplets, the language and images and other formal features of the text. This textual surface is initially and not surprisingly deceptive: the play is that the audience (localized) believes (a belief required by


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the locally-bound discourse) that the poem will be a pastoral. After the realization, through Strephon and a full experience of this satiric deception, the last four lines then explain to this same reader how surfaces like both Celia’s and Strephon’s and the reader’s own should be read and re-read back into the sanctioned order of a male performance of desire, back into an erection or a gaudy tulip – the skin envelopes the “shit” (and the messy desire) of an inside, which is contained, resolved, and transformed through a sanctioned bodily performance, again a “gaudy tulip” raised from “dung.” The potential “wildness” of Celia, her dressing room, is emptied, ordered, turned into a tulip (a flower whose genetic make-up is completely controlled by 1730). At a larger theoretical and nationalized level, then, “Anglo-Irish” Jonathan Swift’s often anthologized poem situates the Irish body in modern British political and social frameworks and establishes its meaning as something that is underneath the surface filthy, dirty, and that is at its core, literally, full of “shit.” But I believe that Swift’s poem pushes even further from this. On reading and making meaning of bodily surfaces or “skin,” William Cohen has written: What does skin cover? . . . The skin is the integument that encloses the visceral interior of the body, yet it is also the membrane within which, mysteriously and ethereally, the human essence is supposed to reside. The outside surface of the body and its first line of defense against the external world, the skin is also the psychically projected shield that contains the self within. Both tactile membrane and enclosure, the skin is a permeable boundary that permits congress between inside and outside, whether that interior is conceived in material or metaphysical terms. The skin thus forms the border not only between bodily interior and exterior, but between psychical and physical conceptions of the self as well. As a social signifier, moreover, the color, texture, and appearance of the skin have often been presumed to testify to what resides within or beneath it.54 If we apply this reading of the body’s surface to Swift’s poem, it can be argued that it is not just the body’s gross materiality or inside that Strephon discovers. The poem is not just an unveiling of a dirty core that means difference in the end. The poem also expresses “the

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congress between inside and outside,” the “psychical” dynamic of an interior being articulated through an exterior and the transformative reading of that exterior. As Cohen notes, what cannot be ignored here is how this dynamic easily plays into gender construction, into bodily status, into domestic practice, into nation and performance, and into the complex politics of culture. In terms of gender and patriarchy, in the poem Strephon learns the “truth” of Celia’s body by seeing, and literally groping, the embodiment of her interior “plumped” inside of her chamber pot. It is within all of these again historically localized frameworks that the truth of the Irish body is likewise discovered within the contents of Celia’s chamber pot. Thus the poem articulates the understanding of a relationship where disability and Ireland are linked and the Irish/disabled body emerges in negative terms as imperial modernity slowly and often violently unfolds across Western Europe, the British Isles, and North America. It is the localized influence upon the poem’s form that determines that the display of such gross materiality be assigned a particular gender status. When Strephon’s hands enter the chamber pot, when he gropes the matter inside the chamber pot, he is metaphorically exploring or groping Celia’s dirty, foul interior self, the “visceral interior” of her body. He is penetrating her hidden body, moving (in a sexualized intercourse) from exterior to interior. The poem is quite literally a discursive performance of misogyny – between biopowerful, rational penis and subjected, disordered vagina, between modern exterior and pre-modern interior, between powerfully male, normal England and the sick sister, abnormal Ireland. On one level, the poem is, again in Cohen’s words, permitted or sanctioned “congress between inside and outside” which allows the persona to instruct readers on the proper way to “read” or understand a body that is identified as female. In this reading, the description of defecation in the poem is an articulation of the dynamic of interiority itself, the orgasm, the climax of “the in” and “the out” – again, Celia’s inside “plumps” into the chamber pot, which Strephon’s hands now grope and feel and the readers’ brains simultaneously categorize and make meaningful in the terms of the old-style patriarchy of the Augustan era. This act is most certainly a metaphor for intense personal violation, for sadistic humiliation. It is also the very cornerstone of or structural key to the entire sadistic fantasy: in


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its sadistic logic, the haughty, female body must be disciplined, be punished. *

*

*

I argue that “The Lady’s Dressing Room” defines for its readers the terms of understanding Irish and English bodies in the emerging matrix of modern empire. In the poem Ireland is indirectly defined and made meaningful. The poem begins a theoretical engagement that allows Ireland to be read as a body: though it appears normal in form in its skin and in its surface, at its interior Ireland is made of “shit” and is disordered; it is female in a misogynistic culture; it is disgustingly abnormal in an increasingly normalized culture; it is a sick sister in British societal practice; it is negatively disabled in its function in British cultural development. Ireland must be disciplined, however, through its unveiling, through metaphoric intercourse, and through (in many cases) visual exposure. But Ireland can be made normal, and the poem is utterly hopeful, then, in that it is a demonstration of this very process of normalization.55 The key here is the larger theoretical processes the poem engages and begins. In the same way that childrens’ bodies are transformed into agricultural products for English consumption in Swift’s A Modest Proposal, Celia’s body is transformed into an Irish girl gone wild in this poem. Again, what Strephon finds in Celia’s dressing room is her inside, her interiority. What Strephon must learn is how to make order out of this confusion. Thus disciplining the inside is the basis for the fantasy, and the discipline happens when the inside is made to be the outside, when the interior is properly revealed or unveiled through the skin (the poem), and is pushed into the public exterior and made meaningful. The action of the poem is to capture the very disorder that seems to threaten the norm of the public realm, the health of the social body. In its action the poem works to ensure that those norms are maintained by defining Celia’s interior as “Celia.” In larger cultural terms, and in the terms of an emerging modernity, a paralleled colonial discourse, and the widening matrix of British imperialism, the poem becomes a demonstration of the use of bodies in modern praxis and then becomes, further, another example of how

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Ireland at large becomes (and in the 1730s is becoming) the locale for an inbetween disabled cultural space. Ireland is a location of negative physical difference and cognitive disorder. Ireland possesses a functionally negative disability in Swift’s imagination – it is the somatic landscape of stinks and of shits. Celia’s body first becomes or transforms into and then embodies and performs modern Ireland. This dynamic plays into a progression of evolving layers or a series of acts of becoming, of transformation and “performance” in Judith Butler’s theoretical sense of the term: the poem becomes the female body, the female body becomes Ireland, Ireland becomes “shit” in a chamber pot, “shit” in a chamber pot becomes a cultural field or space that is technically, in normative discourse, dysfunctional, impaired, or a signal of negative disability. The poem/fantasy writes or articulates the very same dynamic we will see shortly in Sidney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl and in John Keats’ short visit to Ireland. For the Protestant Ascendancy writer, failed career-churchman, frustrated lover (“Stella” dies in 1728), wicked satirist, embittered poet (in his own mind banished to Dublin), and in the end, disabled person (deaf, dumb, and blind) with an “excremental vision”56 Celia becomes Ireland, and Ireland, at its “truthful,” material core, becomes “dirt” or “dung” itself, embodying the “stinks” of the early empire and the physical characteristics of an abnormal, inferior, pitiable disorder and difference – all of which will lead to a disabled cultural configuration.57 The poem functions as an artifact demonstrating this cultural transformation, this quick back and forth movement from poem to body to subject again. The poem represents the many discourses of imperialism that push through each level of signification so that disability or rather stereotypes of physical difference become the single source of meaning or the defining principle of reception and readerly consumption. Underneath this dynamic, this veil of skin, at its formal base, is the simple, horrifying truth that the British male is always in the position of “reader” or “consumer,” and Ireland, the Irish body, the Irish text, is always being read and consumed.

Aesthetic formulation and an Irish disability studies The two examples I have provided above – Wilde’s coat and Swift’s mock pastoral – both speak to a larger interpretive framework now


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beginning to be put into place in this book. At the beginning of the next chapter I will add to this framework by briefly outlining a more historical context within which to place these readings of Irish culture. To conclude this first chapter I would now like to sketch the critical and more aesthetic impact of reading Irish culture and the practices of an Irish studies through an Irish disability studies perspective. One can argue that the disabled body and the Irish nation parallel each other in their invention and in their function in the work within imperial British culture. The negative disablement of Ireland ties directly into the often allegorical narratives of physical difference that emerge through the nineteenth century as British imperial organization stretches out and develops into a seemingly complete, networked global enterprise. In this context, individual Irish bodies are perceived, read, and understood within the biocultural dynamics of the social stigma, the statistical chart, the evolutionary narrative, the productive plantation, and the landscape of margin and center. In the structure of reading we have seen already, outside/inside Irish bodies are in practice transformed by powerful exterior discourses into texts through which a biological, medicalized nation is located. In a specific Irish context, representations of bodies equate the racialized social configurations of the nation and its troubles. The stereotyped methods of reading through normalcy that define general British imperial practices likewise define the entire relationship between Britain and Ireland in the development and the implementation of conceptual modernity and material modernization: the English, the possessors of power in this dynamic defined by Foucault as biopower, read the Irish through an increasingly strident scientific gaze and come to define the Irish colony directly (and the rest of the Empire indirectly) through the problematic terms or parameters within the stare and the reactionary behaviors prescribed by the gaze. The Irish writer engages these dynamics in the writing of an Irish literature that works to negotiate somatic differences and practices of marginalization. Thus the alternate negative/fabulous representation of disability is a part of what makes “modern Ireland” modern. On representation, Ato Quayson writes of a signature trait or condition that surrounds the social category of disability as it is produced in such literary frameworks. Normative behavior is replicated in modern literary productions; further, the production of

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disability both perpetuates and disrupts the replication. Quayson names this condition “aesthetic nervousness,” and argues that it “is triggered by the implicit disruption of the frames within which the disabled are located as subjects of symbolic notions of wholeness and normativity.” Quayson defines this condition further: Aesthetic nervousness is seen when dominant protocols of representation within the literary text are short-circuited in relation to disability. The primary level in which it may be discerned is in the interaction between a disabled and a nondisabled character, where a variety of tensions may be identified. However, in most texts aesthetic nervousness is hardly ever limited to this primary level, but is augmented by tensions refracted across other levels of the text such as the disposition of symbols and motifs, the overall dramatic perspective, the constitution and reversals of plot structure, and so on.58 Representations of disabled figures in literary texts lead to a disruption within the text itself – a nervousness that appears in the readerly space between the disabled and non-disabled characters, in the assignment of symbols or motifs, and in the make-up of the form itself. In an analysis of representation in Irish literary texts, this textual or aesthetic nervousness, this symptom of disruption on the surface of the representation, is evident inside of individual texts, and also in the larger traditions of Irish literature and literary work. There is, for example, the intense amount of experimentation in the form of a specific work by the Irish writer as well as the intense amount of diversity of forms produced by a long history of Irish writers. From the national tales in the early nineteenth century, to the Irish drama and the Irish Gothic, to Irish modernism, to the modern short story collection, to the Irish collection of poetry, Irish literary history is remarkable intense and diverse.59 I believe that this diversity signals a variety of troubles, one of which is “ability trouble.” “Ireland” is often made “nervous” as an entire representational category. Ireland itself becomes the textual location of negative disablement, and likewise the location of resistance to this textualized transformation. Ireland is negatively disabled and, inside of this category Irish writers articulate a “disabled perspective of culture.”


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In mainstream disability studies this ongoing and evolving critical application of disability studies to literary texts has focused in part on the use of disability as a formal literary device in modern narrative. For example, in the foundational work, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse, Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell conduct a rigorous investigation of how the disabled figure is historically represented in modern literary forms and traditions. In this book they argue that: Most basic to the identification of character through disability is the way in which physical and cognitive differences have been narrated as alien to the normal course of human affairs. To represent disability is to engage oneself in an encounter with that which is believed to be off the map of ‘recognizable’ human experiences.60 Modern literary traditions, more recent media and representation, and general cultural and political practice all demonstrate that to be disabled, to be physically or cognitively different, is to be “alien” or not-quite-human. This deeply negative construction of difference and its resulting discrimination are articulated consistently in the literatures of modernity, where, as Snyder and Mitchell maintain, “One might think of disability as the master trope of human disqualification.”61 To add to Quayson’s more formal critical assessment above, then, when disability or the disabled character is represented – written into a narrative or a play, or imaged in a poem, or documented in a travel account – the text, in addition to its specific formal workings, is engaging the larger, global issues of “human disqualification,” the issues of the alien, the issues of the abnormal in mainstreamed, normalized practice.62 As suggested, for the Irish writer this status of disqualification seemingly specific to the literary representation of physical abnormalcy or disability actually stretches into a larger, sweeping kind of conceptualization of culture and the mosaic of relationships within a culture or between cultures. Figuring the “abnormal” body, writing it into culture, pushes that body’s representation into an enormous role of signification and automatically attaches to it a tremendously powerful and persuasive metaphor of negativity. In modern practice the abnormal body becomes easily emblematic of larger societal issues,

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anxieties, problems. The abnormal body is “the raw material”63 through which the normative center can render and frame the irrational disorders or pathologies that plague the body of the society as a whole. As David Mitchell later writes: “Disability proves an exceptional textual fate in that it is deployed in literary narrative as a master metaphor for social ills; thus the characterization of disability provides a means through which literature performs its social critique while simultaneously sedimenting stigmatizing beliefs about people with disabilities.”64 In the literary text produced by the Irish writer the negativity easily assigned to the abnormal or disfigured or disabled body becomes the map through which one can trace the ideological tendencies of internal cultural and international practice. The Irish writer’s representation of the body that is different automatically becomes the cultural space that holds the binary of England and Ireland within it, embodying deviance and the resistance to that designation at the exact same time. What these representations of physical impairment explain is objectification; what they describe is being gazed at, and what they suggest is that when one is gazed at, one can always, like Oscar Wilde in 1877, look back through dress, through writing, through violence. One can always provoke a stare, and in the midst of stare, one can rewrite the body’s difference so that the Irish body becomes complete in its trouble and even visionary in its posture. Thus representing physical difference is the key discursive tool in the imagining and compulsory enforcement of imperial culture practice. The negative metaphor may be reapplied, reused, reimagined in different contexts by different Irish writers, but it is still there, and therefore is evidence that the same dynamic is basically in play in total when modern Ireland writes itself into existence. I will note that one of these contexts includes the writing of criticism and the practices of Irish studies in the academy (and Seamus Dean’s anecdote at the beginning of this chapter demonstrates this suggestion). In our own critical work we often understand Ireland and Irish culture through negative metaphors of physical difference. At this point, as a way to conclude this chapter and in a sense define what the impact of an Irish disability studies will be, I would like to focus on two very different moments of criticism concerning Ireland and the Irish body. Again, like the Irish writer, the Irish literary critic traces and replicates the ideological tendencies of


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conceptualizing the Irish body in negative terms. Thus in the early twentieth century, engaging the national tale and the British tradition of touring of Ireland, the English critic and novelist Filson Young famously writes of the despair he sees in his experience in making the tour. He writes: “The sands of national life have run very low in the glass; the people are physically and mentally exhausted, apathetic, resigned; the very soil of the country is starved and impoverished. So stands Ireland, weak and emaciated, at the crossroads; ready now, as I believe she has never been before, to be guided and directed in a more prosperous way.”65 Young’s critical and political experience of Ireland is the experience of a body, a body that is ill – Ireland, transformed into a sick body, “stands” (perhaps wobbles) at “the crossroads.” Young’s critical representation of that experience is something we have seen before: he frames it as a physician (the author) serving a patient (the subject of analysis) in a clinic or scientific narrative (the discourses of analysis themselves). The critical treatment mimics the rituals of the clinic, and the diagnosis of the body now requires the further intervention of the surgeon. In the theoretical context of disability, what the quote above does is to align a negative representation of the wobbling body of Ireland with a larger negative representation of the disabled body itself: Ireland is once again being read as a disabled space or even prosthetic character in a larger British narrative. Ireland is defined as a body in the stereotypical terms of weakness, exhaustion, emaciation, impoverishment, starvation, and so on. It is not the poet or the playwright imagining this moment. This time it is the critic who is configuring Ireland as a body that is ill and that must be treated; this time it is the critic who is using a representation of the disabled body as a new supplementary conceptual structure or prosthesis upon which to build a new, supplemented version of the Irish nation. What is also key to note here, however, is the absolutely static seemingly perpetual nature of this representation, of Young’s mode of critique. As we have already seen, Seamus Deane is also able to key into this line of thought and understand Ireland as fitting, perfectly, inside of it. One could argue that much of Irish studies continues to read Ireland through these metaphors. For example, the brilliant, highly sensitive contemporary Irish studies critic Luke Gibbons, when writing on Joyce’s Dubliners in 1996, uses part of this exact same quote from Young above and asserts: “One of the most

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interesting aspects of Young’s own diagnosis of the ills facing Ireland is that it is not poverty alone which is the cause of the problem, but the dysfunctional forms taken by post-Famine modernization.”66 I assert, with absolute and total respect to Professor Gibbons, that by framing Young’s “diagnosis of the ills facing Ireland” in the way that he does, even by finding it “interesting,” Gibbons accepts indirectly Young’s initial metaphoric configuration of Ireland as a disabled, ill body. His critical concern, a significant one, is the problematic imposition of external forms of modernity on rural Irish culture in the nineteenth century. My point is again that these forms themselves are collapsed from the start into bodily or somatic forms, and thus are problematic in that they are implicated in the larger modernity of normal and abnormal structures. Gibbons’ own analysis in a sense continues to push the metaphoric language of Young’s analysis into a deeper establishment of negative stereotype: he closes the door on the metaphor, allowing, now at the end of the twentieth century in 1996, Ireland to become further and further medicalized – again, “Ireland” is an ill body that is diagnosed by Young, and by proxy, Gibbons and the current practices of Irish studies as well. I will note that this is kind of imagery or representation is repeated throughout Gibbons’ excellent essay. For example, Gibbons continues in his analysis to reinforce the negative metaphor of bodily difference: “Hence the stunted world of Stephen Hero and Dubliners in which lives are numbed even by the very affections of family and home, the last outposts of intimacy in the disenchanted world of bourgeois private life.”67 What happens here is that the images of paralysis, which are first reinforced and perpetuated by Joyce as a kind of resistance are perpetuated and reinforced by Gibbons in his analysis – Ireland and Dublin are “stunted,” “numbed,” “disenchanted,” are paralyzed. This use of disability as a negative metaphor is not, of course, exclusive to Luke Gibbons’ research. The point here is that the categories of disability, and the negative implication of those categories, have pushed deep into Irish cultural practice, and are still the fabric critics use to define Ireland and Ireland’s past – and indeed are used to define and imagine colonial and postcolonial communities/nations/diasporas today. They are being used by both Irish and non-Irish critics. They are simply present, a tool in the trade of language and discourse that clusters itself around a nation.


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Until this context is broken, Irish studies and Ireland itself will always be caught in this web of representation, always pulsing – on one side or the other – through the networks of normative culture. What is being articulated here in this study is a way to break this context – through an emergence of an Irish disability studies.

2 Irish Girl Gone Wild

Introduction This book asserts that modern Irish literary practices are rooted in and defined through representations of disability. In Chapter 1 I outlined several theoretical frameworks that build connections between disability, Ireland, and “Irishness.” When these frameworks are connected through either dynamic moments of staring or through the manipulation of literary and/or cultural forms (like dress or like the pastoral poem), a compelling representational matrix is established – a matrix between disabled bodies and Irish bodies, between “disability” and “Irishness.” The interties within this set of representations and the metaphors that such moments of connection often produce all come to define the dynamic of Irish culture and nationality. The manipulation of these larger images by Irish writers, critics, and artists likewise comes to redefine and then further the development of a larger cultural field of general discursive practice, namely the space that is called Ireland and the meta-discursive foundation within which Irishness as an identity formation is anchored. To follow this line of thought another step further, I will push this reading of Irishness as disability into a more historical framework. Thus I will begin this chapter by first outlining the allegorical and political emphases placed on physical difference in another specific Irish text from another specific moment in Irish literary history, that is Sydney Owenson’s intensely nationalistic narrative of 1806, The Wild Irish Girl. In this novel, an English protagonist, Horatio 46

Irish Girl Gone Wild

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Mortimer, is sent to Ireland by his father to study law. Horatio has become a “dissipated” rogue, jailed at one point and implicated in an affair with an older woman in Oxford. His father, an absentee Irish landlord, thinks that studying law on his estate in the west of Ireland will steady young Horatio and will remove him from the excesses of student life at Oxford. As the epistolary narrative unfolds, Horatio, in the guise of an artist, leaves the estate and eventually meets in Connaught, Glorvina, who plays the role of “the wild Irish girl” and who is the daughter of the now disenfranchised and invalided Prince of Inismore. As he notes in his letters, though he initially despises Ireland and the Irish, through his experiences in the country Horatio eventually learns the “true” and “beautiful” nature inherent in Irish culture. Not surprisingly, the Princess Glorvina is the embodiment of and indeed advocate for this version of Irish civilization and intelligence: she plays the harp, studies classical languages and knows Gaelic, is stunning, moral, and intelligent. As the expected romance between Horatio and Glorvina intensifies, the complication likewise grows – slowly it is revealed to Glorvina and the Prince (again Glorvina’s invalided father) that Horatio is not the landscape painter he pretends to be, but instead the direct descendent of the family responsible for the disenfranchisement of the Prince of Inismore’s own ancestors with the coming of Cromwell’s army. At the end of the romance, though, Horatio and Glorvina marry, and thus enact a symbolic reconciliation and union between the two deeply historical families, indeed between colonized Ireland and colonizer England (Thus this fictive union speaks directly to the Act of Union passed just five years before the publication of the work).1 Owenson’s work can be understood as an Irish novel formally engaged with a definition of post-union Irishness and, in turn, the early negative construction and implication of the category of disability. With a set of formal approaches to postcolonial narrative in mind, my larger suggestion here in this chapter is that in Owenson’s narrative the definitional category of disability is tied directly into both the larger, increasingly complicated political structure of “Britain” or the newly “united” kingdom2 and that structure’s vexed conceptualization of Ireland and Irish identity frameworks. Briefly, Sydney Owenson’s work articulates the wider cultural problematic of the Irish body in the political, administrative, and cultural functioning of the new United Kingdom. Owenson’s 1806 narrative is intended to be a

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proposition – a proposal written in the context of the chaotic failure of the rebellion of 1798, of the revolutionary Wolfe Tone’s capture and suicide, of the resulting policies and contested politics of the 1800 Union with Britain and the creation of a United Kingdom, and of the beginnings of Daniel O’Connell’s career and intense push for Catholic emancipation and representation. Owenson’s work is situated as a politicized vision that attempts to normalize Irish culture and an increasingly abnormal, racialized Irishness. I assert here and will argue in detail in the pages that follow that ironically this text indirectly contributes to Britain’s eventual definitional narrative of Ireland as both an abnormal space to be normalized and a larger somatic field that is, technically, in every sense of the word, dis-abled and in need of social care and management by the able-bodied and the efficient – that is, by British policymakers in Westminster, the United Kingdom’s political center. As with my discussion in Chapter 1 of Wilde’s cello coat and Swift’s pornographic pastoral, this claim can again best be made by sliding away from the outside chronological narrative within which the text so easily belongs and instead reading closely into the aesthetic dynamics and organization within the formation of the text itself, which in turn replicates the formation of disability and Irishness as a single, negative, dangerous construction that must be fixed. Once again, then, my treatment of Owenson in this chapter both is and is not about staking out historical precision and historical claims; the treatment of Owenson here is informed by textual movement or play itself, by the aesthetic nervousness a text like The Wild Irish Girl creates and, in the framework of an Irish disability studies, performs. Most of the research on The Wild Irish Girl has focused on either Horatio Mortimer, again the narrative’s English protagonist, or Glorvina, the actual “wild Irish girl” herself, and the object of Horatio’s attentions and affections. Initially in this chapter, I will shift the focus on to Glorvina’s father, the Prince of Inismore. This shift follows the critical approach outlined above at the end of Chapter 1. Within the political terms just noted, my primary concern with The Wild Irish Girl is the way that the disabled body functions in an allegorical narrative. The representations of disability in the narrative – the dynamics between characters framed as able-bodied and those characters framed as disabled, and the set of symbols and meanings the disabled characters invoke – all contribute to the larger political


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signifiers and cultural work of Owenson’s narrative when viewed through an Irish disability studies perspective. Though I do return to Glorvina’s character in my discussion of this text, the character in the novel most visibly disabled and most thoroughly engaged at the start here is the Prince of Inismore. In reading the narrative initially through the Prince, what is discovered are the beginnings of what Maria Frawley has termed “the culture of invalidism,”3 a cultural phenomenon which, like the Irish national tale or the “wild Irish girl,” is now understood to be a larger motif that radiates outward into general British cultural practice throughout the industrialized, labor-obsessed nineteenth century. It is within the category of the invalid, the figure unable to work, that a representation of the new theoretical and organizational category of the able/disabled body likewise exists and in this case is used by Owenson to define for early-nineteenth-century readers the Irish and the historical results of the relationship between the Irish and the English. By having this work on the Prince in place as a critical context I will be able to demonstrate the larger implications of Owenson’s novel. I argue that, while the novel articulates the problematic of the Irish body, the novel also simultaneously attempts to envision a politically emancipated and normalized Ireland in union with the embodiment of the normal itself, that is the United Kingdom. This work, and the pattern of thinking it represents, emerges in part as an answer to the unstated question often felt by many British tourists, political activists (like Percy Bysshe Shelley), and military and political personnel visiting Ireland in the first decades of the Union: what happens to the Irish body when it is “made” British? My position is that in The Wild Irish Girl an unintended severely fabulous disability is formed in the space between this question and Owenson’s answer. In other words, a disruptive disability dynamic is invoked in that space between Englishness and Irishness, between Horatio’s and Glorvina’s allegorical union. I argue, with Ato Quayson’s work again in mind, that approaching the text through an Irish disability studies perspective allows the Prince’s character to slip into this inbetween position of aesthetic nervousness. Owenson’s proposed answer to this dangerous question is that the Irish body becomes British or normal. Thus in this intersection between body and nation, in a text like The Wild Irish Girl, there is

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constructed for the British reader a “new” Ireland, a feminine, young, aesthetical,4 able version of Ireland that is meant to replace the old, failed, male, now invalided or negatively disabled Irish/Gaelic/Old English culture. This new representation is packaged and delivered to the reader, with numerous footnotes included, not so much in the shape of an extended travel brochure, but again in the compromised form of a political allegory. In the terms of literary or discursive form and rhetorical strategy, this new version of Ireland is likewise meant to be a newly, easily consumable Ireland, an Ireland that is not overly complicated, problematic, brutish, non-productive, or uneconomical, but is instead functional, able, and, significantly, desirable in Arnoldian, aesthetic, and somatic terms – in its landscapes where one will find spirituality and poetry, and in its bodies, where one will find sympathy and Celtic beauty. Thus Glorvina is Owenson’s vision of a new Irish body. In the character of Glorvina there is placed before Horatio and the English readers of the text a particular kind of body, mind, and “character,” an object to look at, to enjoy, to tour, to consume, again a new, “modernized/normalized” version of material Ireland and Irish culture, designed specifically for British readers and consumers. In this chapter and in the chapter that follows, also using texts from John Keats and Maria Edgeworth, I will demonstrate that in fact this argumentative assertion or promotional framing of Ireland by Owenson fails for most of her audience, for the English reader and tourist. Ireland is not normalized, does not achieve (metaphorically) an ablebodied status. Indeed, in her own moment, and in the critical machinery of early-nineteenth-century periodicals, Owenson’s allegorical assertion is read as a kind of moral failure, described most intensely by Irish Protestant John Wilson Croker’s twenty-year, darkly critical, almost obsessive engagement with Owenson’s work. In the terms of critical postmodernity, Owenson’s narratives, her assertions of gender and national equality, can be understood as a kind of rhetorical failure as well: cultural and disability studies allows us to place critical emphasis on the character of the Prince, a disruptive, historicized ghost that looms – like Wilde’s dream of a cello coat or like Celia’s chamber pot – behind the actual functioning of the political narrative, and that severely complicates the presentation of Glorvina’s utopian body. The easy binary Owenson proposes – the wild Irish girl is able-bodied and youthful, while the Prince is disabled


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and elderly; the wild Irish girl is Ireland’s future, while the Prince is Ireland’s past – collapses under the pressure and weight of an Irish disability studies, under the investigation of negative stereotype and the problematic representation here of physical difference. So again, what happens when the Irish body is made British? Owenson’s answer to the question is, perhaps, an eventual state of “sweetness and light.” I assert that Owenson’s own construction of the soured and darkened body of the Prince problematizes this answer. The ultimate issue in Owenson’s text (and later in Keats’s and Edgeworth’s work for that matter) is not the somatic and cultural locations of Irishness, or the utopian revisioning of Irish history, or even the way the disabled body itself appears in a text. The issue is not what Ireland is. Rather, the disruptive question is, why does a disabled body always appear in the text when an Irish or English writer is indeed constructing those things called Ireland and Irishness?

Normative history, political allegory, and the semicolonial national tale Ireland in the nineteenth century was a confused and devastated place . . . (Kiberd, Inventing Ireland) Before I move directly to a close analysis of Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl, I would like to situate the narrative within the more general conceptual circumstances of early-nineteenth century Ireland as well as within a critical framework offered by several postcolonial perspectives on narrative and language. As alluded to above, the larger framework of the modern gaze within which Oscar Wilde, Sydney Owenson, and others came to exist is built upon on a binary that opposes in functionary terms the normal and the abnormal. Using the current parameters of mainstream disability studies to read backwards – to re-interpret moments of difference in the nineteenth-century, like Wilde’s cello coat or indeed like the often promotional Irish National Tales at the beginning of the century by Sydney Owenson and, in more complicated terms, Maria Edgeworth – one can now detect both an ever-pervasive, continuing binary of the normal and the abnormal, as well as the resulting establishment and embodiment of normalization and the

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desire for normative bodily and, indeed, societal structures. This kind of organization of physical difference controls the representation and the structural embodiment of “disability,” and again has its origin in and is built upon the historical rise of the concept and category of the norm or the normative body. Disability studies in the humanities has demonstrated that the norm as we now know it (and perform it) is relatively recent in its inception and dissemination and is likewise a modern notion and social construction that in part comes to define the dynamics of modernity itself. In his employment of a postmodern critical disability studies, Lennard Davis has argued repeatedly that the modern and also the more fractured postmodern conception of the norm surprisingly does not appear in European and North American cultures until the end of the eighteenth century and at the beginnings of the nineteenth century. For example, in a much cited essay, Davis writes that, “a common assumption would be that some concept of the norm must have always existed,” that “people seem to have an inherent desire to compare themselves to others,” but that “the idea of a norm is less a condition of human nature than it is a feature of a certain kind of society.” Davis then asserts that this “kind of society” is a modern one, and that the norm first emerges in “the set of practices and discourses that are linked to late eighteenthand nineteenth-century notions of nationality, race, gender, criminality, sexual orientation, and so on.” Indeed, by consulting the OED, Davis conclusively argues that “it is possible to date the coming into consciousness in English of an idea of ‘the norm’ over the period 1840–1860.”5 Much of the work on disability and modernity in the nineteenth century has been to flesh out the implications of Davis’ assertion. In even more further specific terms, then, according to Davis (and David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder and others as well) the definition of the norm and the resulting pervasiveness of its practice in culture and society are tied directly into the development of the statistical and then eugenicist, criminologist, and sexologist discourses that come to control the way the body is made through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in England, North America, and Western Europe. A specific example here is the field of statistics. Statistics first develops as a mathematical discipline within the high Romantic intelligentsia of early-nineteenth-century


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London, and is indeed a fully functioning intellectual endeavor by the 1830s: In England, there was an official and unofficial burst of interest in statistics during the 1830s. A statistical office was set up as the Board of Trade in 1832, and the General Register Office was created in 1837 to collect vital statistics. All of this interest in numbers concerning the state was a consequence of the Reform Act of 1832, the Factory Act of 1833, and the Poor Law of 1834. The country was being monitored and the poor were being surveiled. Private groups followed, and in 1833 a statistical section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science was formed in which Quetelet as well as Malthus participated. In the following year Malthus, Charles Babbage, and others founded the Statistical Society of London. The Royal London Statistical Society was founded in 1835.6 The establishment and legitimization of statistical interpretive practice, as well as numerous others, provides a framework through which a modern empire can coherently read physical difference and then separate such difference from the normalcy that it desires to contain within itself. This desire allows Davis to then identify, by in part using Foucault’s notion of biopower, a kind of cultural formulation that leads to the significant, meaningful transformation of bodies that are impaired. Davis writes in another essay: “By the mid nineteenth century, . . . the impaired body became disabled – unable to be a part of the productive economy, confined to institutions, shaped to contours defined by society at large. The disabled body became “abnormal’.”7 More recently, Pamela Gilbert, in her work cited above on citizenship, health, and the social body, furthers this conceptual historization of the norm and its resulting practices in her analysis of the development and function of the discourses of cleanliness and public health in the Victorian era. Gilbert argues persuasively that in Victorian era society the kind of cultural formula that Davis identifies dominates English and by extension the British Empire’s sense of identity and purpose. In theoretical, more abstract terms, as Davis asserts, the formula of impairment = disability = abnormal was in place and fully dominant in cultural practice by 1860; in specific

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terms, though, this formula in its function and relatively quick implementation had nationalistic, racial, and gendered attachments throughout the Empire from the 1830s onwards. In nineteenth-century practice, an impairment becomes abnormal (through disability) and culturally dynamic, a place where meanings are located. As abnormalcy becomes embodied in both social and geographical regions (like Ireland and the Indian subcontinent for example), “spoiled”8 identity structures are quickly established and provide a kind of network through which imperial culture can work and develop. Like race, gender, and sexual orientation, the body’s abilities and the body’s appearances are attached to wider and deeper identity formations and social performances. Gilbert writes: Basic representative of a materiality that is malleable yet limited, the body became in this period both the index and the metaphor of the nation. Individual bodies and their ills, as representatives of classes and populations, became indices of the condition of that less tangible entity, the social body: early on, the social itself, in both its physical and its moral manifestations, came to be understood as a medicalized physical entity that could be fixed, observed, and dissected both through the individual bodies of its subjects in toto (or en masse) in the form of statistics.9 Statistics and other scientific and medical discourses allow for a conceptual link to form between the material body and its socialization and practice. It is in these terms that Ireland becomes both a “devastated place” and a disabled space. What has been suggested to many by the research above is that as the easy binary of the normal and the abnormal is disseminated and circulated throughout cultural, imperial practice, as it becomes a characteristic organizational device for “Englishness” and the empire that follows behind it, the possession of normalcy is likewise the tautological possession of power over those who do not fit into the increasingly narrow statistical parameters of the norm. This dynamic stretches beyond the relational engagements of subjectivities and into the cultural matrices of nation and empire. In the terms of imperial power, by the early to mid 1830s the state in England was beginning to establish and already, in fact, implement a notion of the norm in its organization


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and identification of domestic and colonized populations (like the rural Irish), and in its development of actual policies regarding and ultimate control of those populations and those definitions.10 The objective of these policies was political control, social order, and, in vague terms, Englishness. I will note here that the single most important bodily event in nineteenth-century Ireland, the Irish Famine or the Great Hunger, occurs in the midst of this organization and development. Though I will consider the famine itself in Chapter 4, it should be pointed out here that the failures of these statistical models and the policies generated from them are traced in the images of those ghostly, famished bodies wandering on Irish landscapes throughout the late 1840s. These bodies articulate in profound terms an abnormalcy that can not be normalized: when the Irish body becomes English it simply starves. At the same time, it should likewise be noted that both in theoretical terms where normalcy equated Englishness and in the context of a developing of this normalcy, in addition to being the location of often confused and excessive violence, hunger and devastating famine, basic impoverishment, and eventually mass emigration, nineteenth-century Ireland was also a space of great social experimentation and sometimes social success. Though the execution of plans was often uneven and shaky, especially due to such factors as famine and emigration, Ireland in the nineteenth century as a whole did see the eventual implementation of numerous normalizing structures and practices, such as a number of public educational programs and national schools, other such kinds of social and organizational programs, the expansion and development of market towns and commercial centers, technologies like sewage systems, access to clean water, gaslit street lamps, accurate systems of mapping and acreage measurement, and eventually a network of trains and accessible roads. As much as it is defined as “a confused and devastated place,” then, nineteenth-century Ireland can likewise be defined as an increasingly normalized space. Thus in this period, Ireland very much becomes a test case or laboratory for the implementation of the norm (defined officially as British sophistication, industrial expertise, and imperial superiority) onto the abnormal, the premodern, or the traditional (defined as Irish backwardness, rural provinciality, and native inferiority).

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To swing back to a more critical reading again, in addition to these more material changes, changes in the landscape and changes in the make up of the culture, making Ireland normal was also a medicalized/scientificized project as well. British policy towards Ireland in the nineteenth century can be framed in general terms as being simply more than an articulation of the master and servant or the teacher and the student dynamic. As noted above in the brief discussion of Filson Young’s tour, an Irish disability studies perspective allows us to more accurately describe such policy formations and social orientations as being the knowledgeable physician and the ignorant patient, the healthy body and the ailing, wobbling body, and the normal citizen and abnormal subject that needs to be normalized or fixed. These are functional as well as theoretical relationships: they define the day-to-day practices of Ireland and Irishness and they demonstrate the locations of an Irish identity replicated over and over again into negative disability. What they demonstrate is akin to what Homi Bhabha has suggested in his theoretical work on the liminal spaces in colonial and postcolonial discursive organization: “The objective of colonial discourse is to construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction. . . . Disciplinary power is exercised through indirection on the basis of knowledge of the subject-races as ‘abnormal’.”11 In the nineteenth century, the basic, “indirect” assumption inside of the British imperial narrative of Ireland is that Irish natives are inferior, “abnormal,” “subject-races”; the location of this inferiority is the body itself and the mind or interiority that that body envelopes and holds. In a wider sense, as noted above, it is never a real surprise to find that Swift’s beautiful Celia has a disgusting chamber pot in her room, or that likewise close to 200 years later Oscar Wilde is found to have sheets stained with traces of “Vaseline, soil and semen” in the Savoy Hotel,12 sheets that will be made public in his famous trial of “gross indecency.” Irish bodies are always traced into states of abnormalcy. Ireland is always a problem that needs to be solved. In the nineteenth century, and in the discursive formations of British imperialism, the body is the index of the nation. Thus through the nineteenth century, and within the dynamics of imperialism, the failure to normalize Ireland, the failures of numerous modern


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“systems of administration and instruction,” further confirm the eventual definition of both Ireland and the Irish body as “abnormal,” “semicolonial,” and “disabled.” Ireland is a dysfunctional space in relation to the normalized, modern discursive space actually defining it – a set of discourses possessed by the able-bodied, franchised British policy makers in Westminster and imposed upon the disabled and disenfranchised “Irishry.” *

*

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This oppositional, powerfully violent dynamic of modernity and premodernity, of colonialism and the colonized, of normal and abnormal, of ability and disability, is the backdrop for Irish literature during the modern period, as well as for the categories of experience (like the newly emerging structure of disability) being constructed and engaged within literary and other cultural forms. This extraordinarily wide contextual platform informs and indeed produces a certain mode of representational practice in nineteenth-century Ireland and a certain quality in the framing of consciousness. In these terms, Luke Gibbons has defined modern Irish cultural practice as a generally allegorical, culture-wide attempt to enact or perform the normalcy of England itself: “Allegory in an Irish context belongs to the politics of ‘the unverbalized.’ It is not just a poetic device, but a figural practice that infiltrates everyday experience, giving rise to an aesthetics of the actual.”13 The emergence of an Irish literary realism and the performance of Irish identity as both negatively disabled and severely fabulous are represented in discursive terms by literary form, by allegorical device, by a certain kind of formal mimicry, by a production of the culture-wide, troubled positioning of the Irish simultaneously under and within a British gaze. It is in this very sense that Seamus Deane has written the following regarding English readings of Irish history and the Irish narrative tradition that is formed through the nineteenth century: When a history is so fragmented that it cannot provide a climactic moment from which a “Whig interpretation” can be derived, there is no normalizing procedure available. . . . In Irish discourse, the compensatory stratagem for this is the generation of a narrative of strangeness, the story or stories of a country

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that is in a condition that cannot be represented at all or that still has to be represented. That is, indeed, an explicit position adopted by English writers on Ireland, most especially after the Union. Basic to the creation of modern Ireland is a problematic (Ireland is strange; Ireland is not normal) and a frustrated process (Ireland will always be strange; Ireland cannot be made normal). In this passage Deane continues to develop this assertion, shifting emphasis onto the Irish community itself: Thus the Irish community is consistently portrayed as one that is impossible to recruit into the nineteenth-century normalizing narrative of progress and economic development. Linguistically, it is incoherent; its Irish or English, converted or perverted into one another, its dialects and esoteric vocabularies, indicate as much. Alcoholism, political violence, and economic backwardness are additional marks of the community’s improvidence and fecklessness. It is a community that is always in extremis, whether racked by crisis or constantly manufacturing crisis. Worst of all, even when parts of the Irish community were recruited into existing institutions, like the army or the police, they were often castigated as aliens, traitors in their own country.14 This is Irish difference; this is Irish abnormalcy; this is theoretical disability. The working of the Irish community constitutes a performance of dysfunctional abnormalcy, of a cloaking of strangeness and then a sudden, unintended visibility – again the dynamics of disability. It is what “Irishness” is. In the terms of this book, it is here that both the space of disability identity is constructed and likewise, for many Irish writers, that a potentially fabulous, severe re-positioning of the Irish body is possible. In other words, walking the tightrope of a highly contested language or rhetoric, performing a complicated strategy of resisting certain negative representations and then simultaneously and carefully establishing a new or contradictory representation, becomes the required, often “strange” cultural project of those Irish artists writing from the years immediately following the failed rebellion of 1798 and the formal, forced union with Britain, to the decades that follow.


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The result, again, is a particular kind of identity that can be called Irishness. As Kevin Whelan so accurately describes: This obsessive discursive focus on cultural differences ensured that Irish national character – itself described by Seamus Deane as “one of the supreme fictions of the century” – became the central theme of Irish fiction. This concern to exhibit national character was inhibiting, with the possibility of easy collapse into caricature, resentful humiliation or pathology . . . Even in more skilled hands – like the Banims, Griffin, Carleton or Edgeworth – the technical problems of writing Ireland while reading England could be insurmountable.15 This exact sensibility, this obsessive need to write Ireland and the perpetual failures to do so, parallels a disability formation and perspective. In a larger historical framework, by 1806, then, Ireland is now in the position of a disabled figure within the larger emerging narrative of the British Empire. As suggested above, it is key to recognize that in the moment of writing Ireland, in the moment of forming an Irish perspective tied theoretically to an emerging disabled perspective of culture, the chronology itself – the easy historical movement from 1798 to 1806 established and then developed by Whelan and others – is itself arguably destabilized by those texts produced within this period. The texts trouble the notion of placing the Irish body and Irish identity within that very narrative – thus the “strangeness” detected by Seamus Deane. *

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Sidney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl is written within these conceptual tensions and historical circumstances. Not surprisingly, research on Sydney Owenson, who later becomes Lady Morgan,16 has often been within the general context of form or genre, rhetorical or linguistic strategy, and the complicated politics and historicism of travel or tour writing.17 With the Union as a profoundly influential backdrop, Owenson is often understood to be doing the work of the National Tale, a genre formulated at base to attempt to not only represent Ireland and the problem of Irish history (in such works such as

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Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent) but also to reconstruct Ireland in a more linguistically positive, again tour-oriented set of terms: if at this cultural moment Ireland is being read by the English as something that is abnormal or strange, and if the culture nineteenth-century Ireland produces is likewise understood as being hopelessly confused and incoherent, strange and beyond interpretation, contradictory at its core (being simultaneously violent and passive, sensuous and grotesque, dull and brilliant, native and imperial), then the forced formal purpose of much Irish writing in this mode is to attempt to reformulate this reading, to persuade English readers that Ireland is, vaguely and obscurely, something else. During the initial years of the Union much Irish writing is in this complicated argumentative and oppositional mode. It is a difficult, awkward posture of positioning Irishness in terms of a nuanced assertion of normalcy and a simultaneously persuasive resistance to stereotypes of difference. Thus Owenson claims metaphorically in novels like The Wild Irish Girl or Florence McCarthy that yes, Ireland is “wild,” and somewhat chaotic or incoherent, but it is still “normal” and even Herculean or superior in many ways. As Deane points out, often these arguments are situated in writing that is meant to order and organize this tense dynamic of representation and reading that consistently and often violently defines the Irish/British relationship in the modern period. Owenson’s writing is branded, then, is written in a language that is trying to negotiate the contradictory pressures of Gaelic and English, as well as intense cultural complication in the pressures of Anglo-Irish tradition, Catholic dispossession, and the Act of Union. At the same time the purpose of the writing is to resist and reformulate the imposed definition of abnormalcy and the historically framed processes of a progressive English normalization. It is not surprising that in Ireland in 1806 these negotiations, tensions, and cultural moments are formulated through narrative. This is especially true when one considers the assertion by David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder in their notion of narrative prosthesis that modern fictions are “issued to resolve or correct.”18 Indeed to cite Roy Foster, in nineteenth-century Ireland and in its representations of itself and Irish history, “one is struck by the importance of the narrative mode: the idea that Irish history is a ‘story,’ and the implications that this carries about it of a beginning, a middle, and a sense of


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an ending.”19 Representation in nineteenth-century Ireland is built around narrative, the narration of a story or a tale. In a cultural analysis of this period keyed around the discourses of disability, I think one is most often struck by the way that this mode, this sense of a story or a tale, is always co-opted into politically driven representations of the Irish body and into the articulation of politically resistant postures and argumentative assertions regarding Ireland as a new, emerging social body. The narrative is often situated, as Luke Gibbons has asserted, in the device of allegory and in an aesthetics of the actual. One literally lives within the intense awareness of a larger cultural narrative or story that is in play and that defines one’s own actions, behavior, and body.20 The Irish writer’s engagement with this set of circumstances is characterized by a desire to control and to manipulate the telling and the reception of the tale. As suggested above, recent work has situated both the Irish writer and Ireland inside of this kind of cultural framework. The suggestion is that in modern Ireland there is a rendering of subjectivity characterized and determined by collapse, by larger “anomalous states.”21 For example, historian Michael DeNie argues that imperial Britain’s controlling definition of Ireland in the mid- to late-nineteenth century formed a particular kind of critical ambivalence, and a type of hybrid cultural and semi-national status evident in Irish cultural practice. To many more progressive policy makers at Westminster the Irish were vaguely semi-competent, and thus, while certainly not “Anglo-Saxon/Anglo-English” and not exactly capable of self-government, in these larger nineteenth-century British conceptualizations of the empire and the state modern Ireland was similar to Wales, Scotland, and Cornwall and was considered to be potentially, through a careful, progressive anglicization, a future partner in the administration of the global British Empire:22 the widely canvassed solution to the Irish question – anglicization – entailed making Ireland more British . . . In other words, commentators hoped to fashion a social and economic reformation in Ireland that would lead to it becoming a full participating member of a united kingdom on the same terms as Scotland and Wales. While the Welsh and Scots might have had their humorous idiosyncrasies in English eyes, they were full partners in Great Britain and the administration of the empire.23

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Again, as noted by numerous theorists in the 1990s and early 2000s, the cultural dynamic that is set into motion with this kind of assumption in policy making is that Ireland and Irishness are defined by hybridity, by compromise and collapse, by the creation of a “strange,” uncanny national and social status – in a word, by the dynamics of semicolonialism.24 Working in an Irish context, I take the term semicolonialism specifically from Marjorie Howes’ and Derek Attridge’s Semicolonial Joyce (2000), although the ambiguous, perhaps unnameable hybridity the word “semicolonial” attempts to define has been and still is being engaged by numerous scholars working in the wider, more immense field of Irish postcolonial studies.25 In Semicolonial Joyce Howes and Attridge write of “what is widely regarded as the most central and contentious question in contemporary Irish studies: [that is] in analyzing the centuries-long relationship between Ireland and Britain, is it appropriate and useful to call that relationship ‘colonial’ in any or all periods of its history.”26 Howes and Attridge further write of the real problematic of exactly how and when to define Ireland as a colonial society and as a postcolonial nation: “If Ireland can be said to have been a British colony . . . when can colonialism in Ireland be said to have ended? With the treaty of 1921? The 1937 constitution? The 1949 repeal of the External Relations Act? The recent peace accord? Or some future final resolution?”27 Howes and Attridge note that in their attempts to answer these questions critics and theorists have articulated the troubling facts of Ireland’s own implication in the policies and the administration of the empire, imperialism, and the colonization of the Indian subcontinent, parts of Africa, and many other parts and places across the geography of the planet. Howes and Attridge write: further reason for controversy over Ireland’s relation to the postcolonial is that Ireland clearly belongs on both sides of . . . [the] dichotomy. While Ireland under British rule was underdeveloped and deindustrialized compared to England, twentieth-century Ireland has far more in common with Europe than Africa or Asia in terms of economic performance and living standards. And, in social, cultural, and religious terms Ireland is clearly of the West rather than opposed to it. . . . Ireland, particularly Protestant Ireland, helped build and maintain the British imperial


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system, and Catholic Ireland enthusiastically pursued the civilizing and christianizing missions that were an important part of the empire.28 Modern Ireland is a geographical site that is an anomalous state of “semicolonialism” characterized most prominently by a minority discourse that is in itself defined by “subjugation” and “opposition.”29 Modern Ireland sits, simultaneously, on both sides of such easy, traditional dichotomies as the colonizer and the colonized. Due certainly to its proximity to Britain both on the map and on the surface of the body, its sameness in land and in skin, nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century Ireland becomes the location of the tense dynamics of empire, nation, and modernity, for in its function Ireland is simultaneously both oppressor and oppressed, both white and nonwhite, both a participant in the imperial projects of western Europe and the very object of many of those projects: Ireland is the ultimate experiment or test case for the most progressive and enlightened and the most retarding and exploitative of colonial enterprises. As Alvin Jackson writes: “Ireland was simultaneously a bulwark of the Empire, and a mine within its walls. Irish people were simultaneously major participants in Empire, and a significant source of subversion. For the Irish the Empire was both an agent of liberation and of oppression: it provided both the path to social advancement and the shackles of incarceration.”30 *

*

*

An Irish disability studies allows one to focus on the articulation of a semicolonial status and culture in very particular somatic terms. Through an Irish disability studies approach, one can establish that the cultural production coming from within an Irish semicolonial framework articulates complicated hybridity and locates the Irish body as the template upon which these discursive formations are written and through which they are circulated, debated, and countered. The emphasis on both allegory and on the dynamics of a semicolonial state – the emergence of the genre of the National Tale – illuminate the fact that in the discourses of empire and modernity Irish and impaired bodies function on the same operational platform. Ireland is disabled and the articulation of a semicolonialism

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consistently through representations of disability demonstrates this cultural condition. Like the conflicted, oppressed/oppressor Irish subjectivity described above, in modern Europe and North America the impaired subject functions within a larger, dominant, imperialist culture (a culture that colonizes, with medical and scientific discourses, bodies that are different). It also functions without that culture (being the object of those same discourses). In the nineteenth century these subjectivities participate fully within an imperialist narrative, perpetuating the very structures of normative culture that oppress the officially colonized others within the “third world” body. Simultaneously, these subjectivities are also built as the abnormal bodies that are the targets of a normative culture that desires things to be fixed. I argue that the result of this doubled tension is a transformative disabled perspective and a destabilization of the entire discursive complex. In other words, in the terms of literary form and in the terms of political allegory, being Irish and being impaired requires the same critical posture – that is, the performance of a subject position defined both by a paralyzed inability to define, regulate, and control subjectivity and identity, and by an anxious ability to generate narratives of critique, to produce nervous discursive moments that fracture and disrupt. As we have seen already, Irish girls and Irish boys31 go “Wilde,” become artists as critics, professors of aesthetics, gaudy tulips, and even chamber pots hidden in the aristocratic Lady’s dressing room, all in order to negotiate the gazes of empire, a compulsory able-bodiedness, and the imposition of abnormalcy. The National Tale emerges as a prominent literary form in early-nineteenth century Ireland for these very reasons. In the current critical readings of nineteenth-century Irish literatures, Sydney Owenson’s novels, along with many of the novels of Maria Edgeworth, are often discussed in the context of this genre. One can link these works to theories of semicolonial narrative and the use of allegory discussed above with relative ease, for, by definition, the genre of the National Tale embodies the strategy of a political allegory and the aesthetics of the actual. One can also link them – as both Katie Trumpener and Ina Ferris have – to the travel culture and travel writing of the entire period, and to the ways in which that specific cultural production or identity and that genre attempt to conceptualize and represent Irishness and Ireland.


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In my reading, the long-term effect of this representational genre, of this complicated, diverse discursive project on the realities of political union, is to further codify a functioning, modern binary within the dynamic of Britain “reading” Ireland. The semicolonial national tale becomes the story of Ireland, which more accurately becomes the story of the Irish body being negatively disabled by discourses outside of its control. In the end, the forced terms of Union, the genres of tour-writing and national tales that emerge after it, the failure of these genres to normalize Ireland for British readers, tourists, and consumers, all create a two-fold stereotype of what Ireland constitutes to the English reading public. Through the nineteenth century Ireland is most often ubiquitously represented as either “a political timebomb or . . . a picturesque idyll”:32 Ireland is a nation/body that is abnormal and is a dangerous, corrupting agent or disease to the normalized body of the United Kingdom; Ireland is a nation/body that is both beautiful and the location where one will find poetry, or “truth and beauty.” In one sense, the national tale endeavors to work against these kinds of binaries and ultimately negative representations, against the suggestions in early-nineteenth-century English tour-texts that the Irish are in essence politically unsound and provincial, pastoral, “pretty” sometimes, but really just “strange.” For example, Ina Ferris writes that “the national tale was an explicit response to the civic and English genre of the Irish tour,”33 and that “To travel in Ireland in the early nineteenth century, these British tour-texts suggest, was not to know quite where you were.”34 In a similar vein Seamus Deane writes, “for over a century after Burke, the same ambiguity prevailed – between the representation of a country that is foreign and unknown, in which the conditions are phantasmagoric, especially to the English reader, and a country that is, at the same time, part of the British system, perfectly recognizable and part of the traditional world that the French Revolution had overthrown.”35 The National Tale attempts to reconcile the numerous tensions denoted by “Ireland,” which has become, especially after union, an uncanny geographic and cultural space that is not quite other to early-nineteenth-century English travelers and readers and at the same time not quite the same. While this tension is being embedded in the narratives of the national tale – documented in the machinery of the genre itself – it is being negotiated metaphorically through images of the Irish body.

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The failure of this negotiation can be seen in these representations of the body and the landscape – the material presence of body and land that is so apparent in these narratives of Ireland. The semicolonial genre’s intention is an overtly political engagement and discourse, a kind of reconciliatory argument or utopian vision of the future empire, which includes, of course, a peaceful, prosperous, normalized Ireland – an Ireland that is framed for the English reader or viewer (the audience in possession of the norm) in a persuasive way (an argument for sameness). In the terms of representation, the failure of these narratives happens in those inbetween moments when the Irish body becomes British. In these moments an aesthetic nervousness rooted in an attempted representation of the body’s essence spins out of the narrative as well. For example, in ways that are strikingly similar to Oscar Wilde’s sense of public and private personas, for Sydney Owenson the act of writing the national tale means a complicated representation of the personal and the public, a conflation of the interior self and the exterior body. The Irish writer’s own assessment of her work suggests that such a dynamic, such a consciously allegorical, semicolonial, disabled mode, is in play when the Irish body is made in her work. In the Preface to The Wild Irish Girl, actually written decades after the novel’s initial publication, Owenson (now Lady Morgan) seems to anticipate Oscar Wilde’s essays on Home Rule at the end of the century. Owenson writes: “Born and dwelling in Ireland, amidst my countrymen and their sufferings, I saw and described, I felt and I pleaded; and if a political bias was ultimately taken, it originated in the natural condition of things.” Ina Ferris interprets these comments to suggest the following: Re-charging the categories of discourse with categories of presence, Morgan here foregrounds not so much the truth of her representation as the truthfulness of her act of representing. The suffering body of Ireland makes “natural” her political intervention, while this intervention, itself rooted in feeling, takes the form of a “pleading,” a term conflating both the agnostic public speaking of the law court and the personal appeal of a woman’s voice.36 The novel is rhetorically charged with and has its origins in the personality and “natural condition” of the Irish body of Owenson


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or Lady Morgan herself. This condition of the narrative – a condition of “suffering” – contributes to the kind of larger moral assertion the novel attempts to make: the identity of Owenson/Lady Morgan is conflated with the allegorical narrative of Glorvina, the official wild Irish girl; Owenson/Lady Morgan/Glorvina acts, or intervenes, because a body suffers. An assertion of political allegory, then, is in part demonstrated in the novel’s very composition, as well as the material presence, the nervousness of the Irish body’s condition. Again, Owenson/Lady Morgan/Glorvina/the Irish writer/advocate is supremely present in the narrative. The footnotes to the text, which explain Irish history, Irish custom, Irish folklore, and Irish religious practices, are an example of how this assertion is structured into the very framework of the narrative/larger representation itself. Thus the distinction between individual writer (and all of her identities) and larger cultural narrative here is utterly blurred, so much so that ultimately the private subjectivity of the author becomes the public performance of a particular point of view. The actual result is the construction of a powerful cultural formulation or representation of the body: “Ireland” is a suffering body, while the author/main female character is its advocate (a “sweet physician” as Glorvina is called) seeking its healing and convalescence. In formal terms, as a national tale the novel is built rhetorically in “a woman’s voice” to be a vehicle for political perspective, an argument to the British public on the behalf of the suffering body that is the Irish nation. The vision of such a novel is that a transformative reading by British readers will lead to a re-casting of the Irish character, a new relationship between England and Ireland, a crumbling of the stereotypical formulation and binary of the oppressor and the oppressed. The narrative is a kind of cultural criticism, a particular type of “pleading” argumentative discourse. Claire Connolly, in writing on the spectacle of the novel’s publication history and the highly personal criticism of it by John Wilson Croker and other remnants of the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, makes a similar point: it is worth noticing the primacy of criticism as the privileged mode of expression. Political unease seeks not only a cultural expression, but also a critical vocabulary. . . . The explicitness of Croker’s attack on Owenson enables us to embed such literary judgements

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in the politics of nineteenth-century Ireland, making visible how aesthetic categories operate along national lines.37 This attack, in turn, requires the “pleading” embodiment Owenson moves towards in her work. Kevin Whelan suggests: Owenson deliberately inserts herself between audiences, making explicit and thereby engaging her address to the other. By self-consciously – almost hyper self-consciously – stressing her in-betweenness, Owenson is able to make this positioning a liberating rather than debilitating one. Her space is the no-woman’s land between cultures: the hesitant, hybrid, hyphenated crossing between binaries, the space of the encounter. Through her intelligence, Owenson is able to inhabit the AngloIrish hyphen rather than being inhibited by it.38 The encounter, the moment readers (through Horatio) see the Irish body in play, this is the moment when a mediation and a transformation are introduced to take place. Owenson’s own celebrity as the Irish writer is indeed simultaneously configured to place this hybrid body itself in play. Thus in using contemporary modes and critical strategies of reading, or in again using specifically the theory of political allegory in colonial narrative and Ferris’ critical investigation of the national tale, it becomes clear that The Wild Irish Girl is a novel or “tale” keyed entirely around a particular formal dynamic or posture: in the text distinctions are blurred and conceptual oppositions are collapsed; when the text identifies and represents abnormal Irishness nineteenth-century English readers are aware that a larger set of concepts is in play, that an argument is in essence being made. That argument is embedded in a literary form, which requires simultaneously an aesthetic judgement or evaluation and a political response. It is also on the surface of every Irish body in the narrative – a signal to the readers of the text that the narrative is in fact very dynamic and unstable in nature. It is this same narrative posture – again a simultaneously literary and critical mode – that allows the deeper, more complicated process of representing disability to begin to occur. When the body of Ireland becomes a contested image in the narrative, as we will see


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a battle between the wounded body and the beautiful body, that is when in a larger sense the fabulous discourses of postmodern disability simultaneously begin to be articulated. In the space between Horatio and Glorvina there sits the Prince, a character who wears his difference openly and even aggressively through a severe body. It is a problematized representation, and a representation that in a sense undermines Owenson’s more radically conceived assertions of political and gender equality.

Traces of disability Writing on Irish artist James Barry’s 1770 etching “Philoctetes on the Island of Lemnos” Luke Gibbons asserts that: “The image of Ireland as a wounded body . . . pervades the literature and art of eighteenthcentury Ireland.”39 Gibbons suggests here that the image of the body in pain functions as one piece of a larger political allegory for Ireland as a whole in its early stages of modern development. In a chronological framework, as Ireland evolves out of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century, out of American and French inspired notions of citizenship and into the subjected political circumstances of Union, this image of the wounded, invalid, failed, disabled body comes to dominate cultural practice and Irish notions of selfhood. As argued above, by attempting to re-write this nationalized image in The Wild Irish Girl, by attempting in other words to transform wounded Ireland into a beautiful young girl, Sydney Owenson also engages the basic discourses of normalcy that are beginning to form the category of the disabled body and that are coming to define everyday Irish experience, identity formation, and cultural performance. In this way the first description of the Prince and his daughter Glorvina in the narrative is very striking. This scene is narrated by Horatio, who first describes the Prince as: a form gigantic in stature, yet gently thrown forward by evident infirmity; limbs of Herculean mould, and a countenance rather furrowed by the inroads of vehement passions, than the deep trace of years. Eyes still emanating the ferocity of an unsubdued spirit, yet tempered by a strong trait of benevolence; which, like a glory, irradiated a broad expansive brow, a mouth on which even yet

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the spirit of convivial enjoyment seemed to hover, though shaded by two large whiskers on the upper lip, which still preserved their ebon hue; while time or grief had bleached the scattered hairs, which hung their snows upon the manly temple.40 Perceived by Horatio initially from a distance, and as a stationary object, this is a body with dignity and “Herculean” greatness, a kind of super-body read by the Englishman (and presented to the text’s readers) as the embodiment of the historical grandeur of Ireland. However, the current “infirmities” and monstrosities of the great body become apparent or “evident” first when it moves – when it performs the same kind of textual awakening that one sees later in the birth of the creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, that is when it is set into motion, “The chieftain moved with dignity – yet with difficulty,” and next when it is drawn in contrast to yet another Irish body, that of Glorvina, “and his colossal, but infirm frame, seemed to claim support from a form so almost impalpably delicate, that as it floated on the gaze, it seemed like the incarnation of some pure etherial spirit, which a sigh too roughly breathed would dissolve into its kindred air.”41 Here, in this text, in the first viewing of Ireland’s transforming body, we have the novel’s two versions of Ireland contrasted, again staged for the targeted audience, gazed at by English Horatio and his fellow readers. Glorvina is the new, barely visible, deeply ethereal vision of the future Union, a “vision” that floats on the gaze, that is the embodiment of hope, and that is, at the start of the narrative, delicate and fragile and has the substance of air, the tangibility of an idea. Her father, the Prince, is positioned to represent the heavy physical, material effects of English power and oppression, which lead to infirmities, difficulties, weaknesses, again tangible, material disasters and monstrous behaviors. In the intended allegorical formula of the novel the Prince/ contemporary Ireland is a suffering, “infirm,” invalid, historicized body (again the narrative embodiment of Barry’s Philoctetes) while political union/Glorvina is the hopeful, barely conceivable advocate for this body/nation, the political idealism that presently has the tangibility of air, of words on a page, but that is clearly the prescribed medicine that will cure the body and the nation in the future. The narrative is often and again I think is intended to be read as the


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dramatization of this historical crisis, represented by the two contemporary contrasting versions of the nation: Owenson’s intended questions in the narrative are, which Ireland will emerge from the present state of crisis, and what will Ireland become in the future? Or, as asked earlier, what will happen to this body now with political union? What will happen when the Irish body is made English? An Irish disability studies perspective allows one to assert that the representations of the Prince in the narrative actually undermine this structure, even the assumption behind these basic questions. While Glorvina passively rests on the gazes of Horatio and the text’s readers, the Prince in a sense gazes back, again his “eyes still emanating the ferocity of an unsubdued spirit.” Thus the dynamic of the Prince’s resistant character and fabulous body represents something larger and much more complicated in nature. The Prince’s character demonstrates how disability is being formulated and put into function in 1806 Irish culture: the Prince is the prosthetic device behind the machinery of the narrative, a floating figure invested with various sets of negative metaphors and symbolic meanings that unintentionally disturb the text’s likely intention, which is to reread Irish culture and Irish identity in positive, touristic terms for post-Union English readers. The basic formula of the novel, that of suffering body and healing advocate, is further an establishment of the category of the invalid, and is then in turn a bridge that links the concepts of Ireland and invalidism/disability together into a single representation and notion. In these terms, the novel becomes a text that contributes to the larger use of the functional notion of disability now emerging in nineteenth-century Irish cultural practice: the real objective of the narrative is to make Ireland and Irish culture viable in the minds of British readers, that is to make the strange normal, or, to make the disabled body able-bodied again. Maria Frawley has argued that in the nineteenth century the invalid does not signify “crisis,” but instead “a state of lingering, stasis, and inertia.”42 The Prince fits the definition of an invalid, and as such his character works against the element of historical crisis seemingly and again intentionally built into the structure of the narrative. Earlier in the text, when he first arrives in western Ireland, Horatio hears the following characterization of the Prince: “the Prince being in a bad state of health, having nearly lost the use of his limbs, and his heart being heavy, and his purse light; for all that

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he keeps up the old Irish customs and dress, letting nobody eat at the same table but his daughter, not even his Lady, when she was alive.”43 As suggested, what is interesting here and elsewhere in the novel is that the Prince’s body and his state of health are always linked to his Irishness and to the larger nation of Ireland. The implication is that the historical crisis has already passed and has already been resolved, then, and further that its results have already been made real: Ireland is now a disabled space, the location of “stasis” or a kind of cultural invalidism. Glorvina’s future union with English Horatio will hopefully reverse this historical condition, and make the now disabled body of Ireland able-bodied and viable. But again, if the critical focus stays on the Prince and the aesthetic nervousness that the Prince’s situation in the narrative provokes, the text comes to a very different kind of articulation. In my reading here the Prince as an invalid is also the Prince as a disabled figure, and is also, simultaneously, the Prince as a threatening monstrosity.44 This representation in turn becomes a larger statement on Ireland itself. In other words, the Prince’s body has the same practical function as the creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: for Dr. Victor Frankenstein, in his mind, when the creature is a stationary object, an experiment on a table, it is “beautiful,” “ideal,” “perfect”; when the experiment succeeds and the object moves, begins to function, when specifically the creature’s yellow eye first opens, that is when the nightmare begins and the experiment becomes “monstrous,” and the “hideous daemon” who will haunt the rest of Victor’s days becomes the reality behind the idealization – indeed this is the moment when Victor shrieks and first runs away. In this sense, the novel is not so much about Glorvina the healing advocate taking action at a moment of historical crisis, as much as it is a subtle conflating of Ireland and disability through a single representation of the Prince’s historicized body. And indeed, when one shifts away from Owenson’s intention and instead reads this conflation into the center of the novel, one can then begin to critique the basic formula of the narrative as being stereotypical in its politicized construction of physical difference. In this reading of reversal, a moment of Irish disability studies in action, Glorvina suddenly represents, especially in her union with Horatio, the normative center, while the Prince is, and always will be, the marginalized, abnormal body, the body that does not fit the statistical standards of the state


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and the Royal Society of Statistics, the Irish body that is designated as abnormal and needs to be “cured” or “fixed” by a union with modern British systems of administration. Significantly and not surprisingly, the image of the disabled/invalid body is replicated in the narrative, radiating out from the Prince’s body into the entire Irish landscape. For example, the same formal dynamic is used in the description of the Prince’s castle. Horatio perceives it from a distance, again as a stationary object to be gazed at. Allegorically, Horatio eventually transforms the Prince’s castle into a framed picture of Ireland itself: “Towards the extreme western point of this peninsula, which was wildly romantic beyond all description, arose a vast and grotesque pile of rocks, which at once formed the site and fortifications of the noblest mass of ruins on which my eye ever rested. Grand even in desolation, and magnificent in decay – it was the Castle of Inismore.”45 Like the Prince’s monstrous body, his house is itself a “mass of ruins,” something that is “wildly romantic” and “magnificent in decay”; like the Prince’s body, it is again something that needs to be fixed, cured in a sense. As it stands, again as a mass of ruins on a wild and romantic landscape, it is something that arrests the eye, a sublimity that distracts and disrupts the coherence of Horatio’s vision or gaze, something that causes him initially to stare before it is, with the dash, enveloped as “The Castle of Inismore.” As when Horatio encounters the Prince for the first time, the staging of his first sight of the castle openly articulates the prevalence of the norm that is working in the narrative. Because Horatio is the possessor of the normal gaze, it is not surprising that throughout the text he is constantly categorizing Ireland, holding it in place, naming it and framing it as a static picture rather than a dynamic, fluid cultural process. It is his job to do so, his role in the politicized function of the National Tale. In this way, even in the narrative’s surface-level advocacy, even in Horatio’s marriage with Glorvina, ultimately Ireland/the Prince is still made monstrous, an abnormal type and a disruptive problem that needs to be solved: in an unintentionally ironic mode, the formal function of the narrative itself as a political allegory determines the attachment of such stereotypes, and guarantees that Ireland is theoretically disabled in negative terms. This formal dynamic is likewise apparent in the opening pages of the novel, when a reluctant Horatio first lands on the Irish

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coast. Horatio describes his arrival in Dublin in the following manner: As we had the mail on board, a boat was sent out to receive it, the oars of which were plied by six men, whose statures, limbs, and features, declared them the lingering progeny of the once formidable race of Irish giants. Bare-headed, they “bided the pelting of the pitiless storm” with no other barrier to its fury, than what tattered check trowsers, and shirts open at the neck, and tucked above the elbows afforded; and which, thus disposed, betrayed the sinewy contexture of forms, which might have individually afforded a model to sculpture, for the colossal stature of an Hercules, under all the different aspects of strength and exertion.46 Like the Prince, these Irish bodies are initially perceived as “Herculean” in form. The significance of this is that it suggests a certain dynamic being written in the text. To Horatio Irish bodies are always interesting specimens: again like Frankenstein’s creature, the native Irish body is strong, impervious to cold and wind, gigantic in stature, seemingly super-human, Herculean; and like Frankenstein’s creature, Irish bodies are not quite human, are instead monstrous, abnormal, and are continually the objects of the normalized English gaze, consistently the odd subjects for scientific and cultural investigation and easy explanation. What Owenson is doing with her narrative is reframing the actual encounter – again walking a kind of tightrope in the discursive practice that is now defining Ireland in union with Britain – so that Horatio will always see this different space, this “Ireland” in positive, inclusive terms. The unstated message in the novel and in the genre is that other English readers should follow this lead, should read and reread Ireland and Irishness into a united, placid normalcy. This intention fails. In the workings of this text, Ireland as a body becomes what Homi Bhabha defines as “hybridity.” According to Bhabha, theoretical hybridity in colonial discourses is: a process of splitting as the condition of subjection: a discrimination between the mother culture and its bastards, the self and its doubles, where the trace of what is disavowed is not repressed but


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repeated as something different – a mutation, a hybrid. It is such a partial and double force that is more than mimetic but less than symbolic, that disturbs the visibility of the colonial presence and makes the recognition of its authority problematic.47 In The Wild Irish Girl, the Prince is the wrecked derivative of a decimated “mother culture,” the mutated double of his historic predecessors, while his daughter, Glorvina, is the assertion of something new, the desired paradigm shift, the medicine that cures the sickness of that Irish body. It is Frankenstein’s creature split in two – Glorvina is the superior mind, the educated, sensitive, brilliant nature, while the Prince is its monstrous, base materiality. Again, the narrative’s purpose is to gracefully and carefully end the monster, and place the beautiful, sylph-like, Celtic element in its stead. As we will see later in another Irish monster (a semi-paralyzed Count from Eastern Europe named Dracula), the problem here is that rhetorically the monster never leaves, never really fades from the realities of the narrative and the national status it is attempting to rewrite – Glorvina/Owenson may succeed in the controlled dream of the narrative, of the brief presentation, but in actual practice, which, as noted, keeps spilling into the problematic framework the text, the monstrous body of the Prince is always present, always in a sense corrupting the brilliant possibilities of an Ireland in union with Britain, always reminding readers of Ireland’s actual historic function. The Prince will not stay still, will not fit totally into the role of an emptied invalided figure: even if unwillingly, his eyes “still emanate” the fires of resistance.

Glorvina and a dream of Medusa Yet another fascinating moment of this spilling of the actual into the organization of the narrative occurs in the description of a dream Horatio has of Glorvina early in their courtship. Ina Ferris has written the following on Owenson’s presentation of Glorvina: “In the act of advocacy that constitutes The Wild Irish Girl, Glorvina herself is best understood as a provocative figure, a selfconscious stylization shaped by an acute sense of historical crisis.”48 Ferris’ assertion coheres with the underlying suggestion above that Glorvina’s destiny is Ireland’s destiny, while her father the Prince’s

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destiny is carefully regulated to the past through the organization of a national tale. Glorvina’s role is to act at this moment of crisis in Irish history as the stylized new Ireland. Glorvina is simultaneously an advocate for and an embodiment of the nation itself. In the development of the narrative, Glorvina’s union/marriage with Horatio, an English aristocrat and again a direct descendent of one of Cromwell’s conquering army, suggests a larger, hopeful, politically viable union and a modern reconciliation between Ireland and England, between the oppressed and the oppressor. Glorvina’s beautiful body resolves all of the hopeless anxiety surrounding “Ireland” and its ugliness; Glorvina’s behavior rights the wrongs of the past between Ireland and Britain; Glorvina’s knowledge and explanations – as well as Glorvina/Owenson’s footnotes – makes the strange or abnormal normal again; finally Glorvina’s union with Horatio, her action, will make Ireland “modern” and a legitimate piece of a now united kingdom. Indeed, this union can even become a reversal of power: in the initial meeting between Horatio and Glorvina, Horatio assumes the role of a patient (he has fallen through the roof of the castle) and Glorvina (again the body of Ireland) is his nurse and care giver. I want to focus briefly now on the very real materiality of this rhetorical move in the construction of the narrative. Glorvina’s body is collapsed into the form of the narrative itself. Like the intention of the narrative, then, Glorvina’s actual beautiful body is meant to be one of the cures of Irish ugliness. Readers consume this pill and the innate problems with the Irish body, its difference, begin to evaporate. Her character is composed as a surface-oriented image, again a hollowed-out pill or medicine. In a profound way, her character lacks an interior. Glorivina’s body is beautiful, spiritual, the effect of an almost transparent white mist. On the level of political allegory this fashioning of her character possesses a coherence and works well – Glorvina is a glossy photo, an idea more than anything. It is the surface of her body that does the work of the National Tale: Glorvina’s youthful, brilliant body of the future opposes in direct terms her father the Prince’s aged, broken body of the past. The problem for Owenson is that the easy split between Glorvina and the Prince can not hold together in the aesthetics of the body


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that the narrative engages. As Ato Quayson writes, when one reads “the disabled character within the wider discursive structure of relations among different levels of the text” the meanings behind the characters, their “roles,” can “shift quite suddenly.” As noted earlier, this process of shifting and transformation in the text is what Quayson defines as a condition of “aesthetic nervousness.”49 It is within this nervousness that the failure of Owenson’s narrative lies. The text fails to resolve the tensions it negotiates, the problems it opens, in the very midst of its representations of the body and its use of a disability dynamic. As a pill, then, Glorvina is just a faulty placebo. Indeed, she is too much of a wild Irish girl. Glorvina’s interiority reaches out, beyond the control of Owenson, into the realm of nervousness and disorder. For example, at one point in the narrative Owenson’s perfect bodily representative of traditional Irish culture transforms into the body of a Gorgon. In this moment, Owenson’s wild Irish girl loses her stature as a clear rhetorical assertion and instead turns into a monster that, indeed, turns all those looking upon her into stone. Early in the text, right after his fall through the roof and right before he actually sees the face of Glorvina, Horatio falls asleep. Horatio explains: While given up to such reflections as these – while the sound of the Irish harp arose from the hall below, and the nurse muttered her prayers in Irish over her beads by my side, I fell into a gentle slumber, in which I dreamed that the Princess of Inismore approached my bed, drew aside the curtains, and raising her veil, discovered a face I had hitherto rather guessed at, than seen. Imagine my horror – it was the face, the head, of a Gorgon!”50 This dream of Medusa, like Wilde’s dream of a ghost that looks like a violoncello, has for us a certain kind of symbolic significance in the play of images that drives the narrative forward. As with the Prince’s potentially monstrous body, always just under the surface of the narrative there is a possibility of fracture and disruption. Though the incorporation of Ireland is framed as a coherent process in the narrative, though it seems like it will be steadily normalized, there is always a basic orientation that suddenly appears here in the Englishman’s dreams. In allegorical terms, the beautiful body of Glorvina,

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which again is a new, able-bodied Ireland, can always transform suddenly out of surface-level normalcy and back into the abnormal, into the deviant and the dangerous. In the dream when she draws aside the curtains and lifts up her veil she freezes Horatio for just a moment, stops him and the processes of normalization he invokes and with which she complies and within which she functions. Again, this is an unintended moment in the text when Owenson’s not-so-wild Irish girl goes wild, lifts a veil and disrupts the gaze, invoking instead a horrified stare from the good Horatio in his sleep. As mentioned in Chapter 1, this is an encounter framed by difference and staring. Again, Lennard Davis, Rosemarie Garland Thomson, and others suggest that the normal’s everyday encounters with the abnormal invoke the stare and theoretically perform the scenario of biopower diagnosed by Foucault in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. It is also framed by the Medusa narrative. Davis also points out that these intense, “extraordinary” moments,51 can follow the Medusa story from Greek mythology, which becomes a kind of cultural allegory of confrontation between the normal and the abnormal body, or the monstrosity that is difference. Davis writes on these moments: “The ‘normal’ person sees the disabled person and is turned to stone, in some sense, by the visual interaction. . . . The visual field becomes problematic, dangerous, and treacherous.” These problematic, disruptive moments are the moments of the stare. They are moments where control is lost and the gaze fails. In time, these moments are then controlled by a quick, almost-immediate assertion of rationality or order: “Rationality, for which Athena stands, is one of the devices for containing, controlling, and reforming the disabled body so that it no longer has the power to terrorize.”52 And thus these are the moments when a biopower is articulated and disability as a social category is performed. The even larger indication of the dream, the bigger signal that the text is sending here, is that in the national narrative of Ireland and England, Ireland and the Irish body is always in possession of a basic instability. In political and allegorical terms, this moment of The Wild Irish Girl, Glorvina reveals the potential horror and monstrosity of the Irish body by simply lifting a veil. Like Celia, Glorvina as Ireland has a secreted, dangerous interior – a chamber pot hidden in her room. At this juncture in the narrative, Declan Kiberd’s formulation of the


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invention of Ireland is articulated. Irish difference is fully present. Kiberd writes the following on the long history between Ireland and England: If Ireland had never existed, the English would have invented it; . . . Ireland was soon patented as not-England, a place whose peoples were, in many important ways, the very antitheses of their new rulers from overseas. . . . From the later sixteenth century, when Edmund Spenser walked the plantations of Munster, the English have presented themselves to the world as controlled, refined and rooted; and so it suited them to find the Irish hotheaded, rude and nomadic, the perfect foil to set off their own virtues.53 It is this binary that Owenson’s text is trying to collapse. When Glorvina’s body becomes Medusa’s body, the attempt fails, however, and the text begins to fall apart. From here, from the unveiling of the Irish body, the rest of the narrative, which again includes the ghostly Prince, unfolds into a deceptive re-embodiment of those old Irish and English behaviors. Not surprisingly, in Owenson’s text English Horatio is a male, stable, rational body; the Irish Glorvina is a female, unstable, irrational body. Horatio’s somatic narrative, therefore, will likely lead to peace, prosperity, and calm security; Glorvina’s somatic narrative, her evolutionary destiny, will likely lead to violence, turmoil, and destruction. These somatic characteristics articulate the emergence of disability and Irishness. Theoretically, for an Irish disability studies, this textual moment is deeply problematic and the key to the critical reading of the text through disability. In this moment, Glorvina’s body unwillingly transforms, shifts from advocacy to exploitation, from aesthetic beauty to monstrosity. Glorvina is transformed in her movement from a character in a controlled rhetorical assertion to an object placed directly under the British gaze. As a whole, then, as the narrative proceeds Glorvina becomes a complicated object of desire, in one sense the embodiment of this purportedly new vision of a new and improved and strikingly beautiful Ireland, but in another sense a hollowed-out object delivered or offered up, like the rest of Ireland, for English consumption. In the interest of Union, perhaps without Swiftian intelligence and critique, and certainly without the

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excremental preoccupation, Owenson props Glorvina up as the new Irish body, the idealized, positive body for the British readers to consume. This move in turn demonstrates the built-in problematic in the formulation of modern Irish culture. In its birth into modernity Ireland itself is claiming that it is not the Prince, not a strange, disabled body, but instead the beautiful, theoretically functional body – Glorvina.

3 Sensation, Suffering, and Despair

Introduction Part of the goal of Chapter 2 was to situate Sydney Owenson’s 1806 romance, The Wild Irish Girl, in a larger social context. In doing so, I was able to trace disability and its metaphoric function into the basic structural relationships of the novel. Likewise, in the chapter I was also able to link the emergence of disability dynamics to the wider culture of post-union Ireland itself, which ultimately allowed me to further develop in critical practice an Irish disability studies perspective. In The Wild Irish Girl, the character of the invalid Prince is the initial focus point for such a critical endeavor. The Prince’s body, its simultaneously visible impairment and deep Irishness demand scrutiny and close reading. After conducting an analysis of the Prince, however, I ended the chapter with a brief look at Glorvina, the wild Irish girl herself. What I discovered in the investigation of both of these characters is a set of critical dynamics that suggest in theory more instability than stability, more trouble than resolution. Thus when Horatio, an English traveler in disguise, either gazes at the Prince or dreams of his daughter Glorvina, of her transformation from Princess to the Gorgon Medusa, there is articulated a dangerous trace of abnormalcy, an understanding of Irish difference that is negative. In this chapter I will further my reading of disability and Irishness by first focusing on another English traveler, John Keats, and his short trip to Ireland in 1818. I will then conclude the chapter by 81

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engaging the work of an increasingly important figure in this period and in the continued critical work on the Anglo-Irish tradition, Maria Edgeworth.

Part I: John Keats and the Duchess of Dunghill The dynamics articulated for just a moment in a dream of Glorvina’s transformation into Medusa are likewise present in John Keats’ journey to Ireland in the summer of 1818. During this summer, John Keats went on an abbreviated walking tour through the north of England and Scotland. At the end of the tour, Keats made a brief, unexpected stop in the northern part of Ireland, walking with his friend Charles Brown from the coastal town of Donaghadee to Belfast, and then quickly back to Donaghadee again. His stated goal was to visit the Giant’s Causeway, a region on the Antrim coast of Ireland that famously consists of roughly 40,000 interlocking basalt columns. This intended tour of Ireland was just a side journey, though, not a part of the real purposes of his trip to the north, and not a part of what has since been most often noticed and most often considered in the scholarship on it. In the course of the summer walk, Keats would first visit the Lake District in northwest England where he would stop at Wordsworth’s home in Rydal (empty of course of Wordsworth himself); he would eventually see Burn’s grave in Scotland and compose a sonnet memorializing Burns at the Burns cottage; he would wander the highlands of Scotland and write three more ballads in imitation of his hero Robert Burns; he would contemplate and expound, in letters and journals, on the beauty of the lakes, the mountains, the flowers, the long fields and glens, and the expansive skies of Wordsworth’s Cumberland and Burns’ Scotland. And finally, before returning home where he would find a beloved brother, Tom, in failing health, he would complain himself in a letter of a sore throat, which many now see as the first signs of the tuberculosis that would kill him, ultimately, in Rome. By all accounts, Keats went on this tour for very specific reasons. He walked to the Lake District, to Scotland, and eventually to Ireland to experience directly the countryside and provincial life, and to write poetry and beautiful prose accounts of this life. Thus in the tradition embodied by the influential Lake Poets just a generation before, Keats went to the north, to places like the Lake District, Scotland,

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and Ireland to find Nature and sublimity (in the Giant’s Causeway for example) and to engage this ecology, like Wordsworth, in some deep, metaphoric, transcendental way. It was simple: he’d climb a mountain, kiss a wild Irish girl, write a poem about it, and in doing so experience the transcendental bliss of immortality. All indications are that Keats’ short, thwarted, frustrated tour of Ireland is a narrative that in many ways can be framed as being diametrically opposed to Horatio Mortimer’s brilliant tour of Irish landscapes in Sydney Owenson’s persuasive allegory The Wild Irish Girl. Unlike aristocratic, Oxford-educated Horatio, who again finds historical glory, Herculean beauty, and eventual marital and physical bliss in the arms of a disenfranchised princess named “Glorvina,” in Ireland the poor, common, cockney John Keats finds only political crisis, forms of ugliness, and both philosophical and physical suffering and despair. Specifically, he encounters a city in Belfast that was “like a scene from Dante” that included an emerging outbreak of typhus”;1 and on his way out of Belfast, rather than the young, beautiful Glorvina, Keats’ engagement with a “wild Irish girl” is primarily seeing a “squat old woman” smoking a pipe who he names The Duchess of Dunghill. Keats’ side-journey into “little Ireland” (as he names it to his brother Tom) was not pleasant to him. Keats explains to Tom that, “On our walk in Ireland we had too much opportunity to see the worse than nakedness, the rags, the dirt and misery of the poor common Irish” (11). Keats’ response to the “poor common Irish,” which involves this letter to Tom as well as several others, is complex and complicated. It involves components of fascination, despair, and ultimately a pose of scientific, scholarly observation, a desire to sort, to categorize, to catalog, and to compare. In the first letter to Tom, Keats continues, for example, his initial explanation of his short trip into Ireland by describing his entry into and then escape from Belfast: We had the pleasure of finding our way through a Peat-Bog – three miles long at least – dreary, black, dank, flat and spongy: here and there were poor dirty creatures and a few strong men cutting or carting peat. . . . What a tremendous difficulty is the improvement of the condition of such people . . . with me it is absolute despair. . . . On our return from Bellfast we met a Sadan – the Duchess of Dunghill – It is no laughing matter tho – Imagine

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the worst dog kennel you ever saw placed upon two poles from a mouldy fencing – In such a wretched thing sat a squalid old Woman squat like an ape half starved from scarcity of Buiscuit in its passage from Madagascar to the cape – with a pipe in her mouth and looking out with a round-eyed skinny lidded, inanity – with a sort of horizontal idiotic movement of her head – squab and lean she sat and puff’d out the smoke while two ragged tattered Girls carried her along – What a thing would be a history of her Life and sensations.2 Underneath such notes and descriptions to his brother, Keats captures one part of the complicated dynamic that will come to define Ireland, Irish culture, and the Irish body throughout the nineteenth century, that is the imposition of essentialized differences and the construction of negative physical stereotypes or what Erving Goffman defines as stigma. His construction of the Duchess here as a “half starved” “ape . . . from Madagascar,” for example, anticipates both the complicated famine narrative that will dominate British representation of Ireland in the mid-century, as well as the general representations of the “Paddy Irishman” with simian features and a corncob pipe so often portrayed in later Victorian periodicals and theorized most famously in L.P. Curtis’ Apes and Angels in 1968 and most recently in 2004 in Michael de Nie’s The Eternal Paddy: Irish Identity and the British Press, 1798–1882. Indeed, Keats’ use in this passage of the word “idiotic” likewise holds a subtle, medicalized significance in that it anticipates the set of classifications of physical and cognitive differences used both by later Victorian scientists, doctors, and theorists, and, in becoming a part of the larger terminology of eugenics in the final decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, by eugenicists in the analysis of “deviant” bodies or bodies with hereditary cognitive disorders.3 I argue that directly in this letter, and indirectly in the single, intense moment narrated within it, Keats gazes at the “common” Irish, at the peat bog, at the “poor dirty creatures” and the “few strong men” in the bog, at the small city of Belfast, at the “old Woman” in the “Sadan” who he names “the Duchess of Dunghill,” and at those two “ragged, tattered girls” who carry her – he gazes at all of this through the eyes and social position of a normalized and thus privileged Englishman who is in possession a powerful,


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easy gaze. At the end of the passage above, this gaze has been disrupted, and it is with horror that Keats contemplates a “history” of the Duchess of Dunghill’s “sensations.” Significantly, this description recalls one of the significant moments in Keats’ own short or “little” life, arguably a key moment in his development as an artist and certainly a key moment in the later tradition surrounding Keats’ biography and Keats’ poetry. It is recorded in the letters just a year before, where he laments to his brother George: “O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!”4 There is a deep difference working here between the larger conceptual development of the artist and this specific letter on an impoverished Ireland, though. The difference is that sense of Shelleyan horror, as well as a sense of the sublime, of fascination: on one hand, as an Englishman, Keats’ sensations are unconsciously privileged, are indeed, in the end, beautiful, natural, and again somehow, in a rudimentary sense, “normal”; on the other hand, Keats thinks that the Irish woman’s sensations, if one could actually experience them (which one cannot), would be a “thing” strange, a “thing” fantastic, and horrifying and, in the end, perhaps depraved and “abnormal.” Within these Radclyffian dynamics, a history of these sensations would not be a moment of truth and beauty.5 A history of these sensations would not lead, necessarily, to the immortality of an urn or a nightingale’s song. What lies buried here beneath Keats’ response is that in the practice of 1818, for him, a history of the Duchess of Dunghill’s life actually requires a history of Ireland itself – a history of Gaelic chieftain and Old English culture, the Ulster plantation, of Wentworth, Monro, and Owen Roe O’Neill, of Cromwell, Restoration politics, and the Protestant Ascendancy and Anglo-Irish tradition, of the Belfast textile industry and Protestant solidarity in the north, of Catholicism in the south, of Robert Emmet in Dublin and the agrarian violence of the Whiteboys and others in the south, and finally of, in the summer of 1818, the intense popularity of Daniel O’Connell or “the Liberator,” and the push for Catholic emancipation in all of Ireland, which would in turn lead to 1823’s Catholic Association, to political representation in the 1830s, to the Tithe War, and seemingly on and on and on. Once again, then, a functional, unverbal political allegory is at play in this articulation of the Irish/English dynamic, in Keats’ seemingly

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simple representation of the Duchess and her crew of tattered girls to his brother. As I will demonstrate it appears that Keats’ representations here are driven by cultural stereotype, by wider circumstances, and indeed thus feed the larger cultural project involved in Britain’s reading of Ireland as a negatively disabled space. In these letters and in his own mind Keats is able to collapse the Duchess’ life and body into an entire reading of her nation. My point here is that it is the wider, predetermined reading of her nation present in Keats’ mind that then determines the articulation and performance of the entire discursive occurrence that constitutes Keats’ encounter with and understanding or conceptualization of this particular body. When Keats gazes at Ireland and then stares at the unanticipated appearance of the Duchess, when he stares with horror specifically, then, at those poor Irish bodies, at those two tattered girls carrying the monstrous Duchess in the filthy sadan, and ultimately at the Duchess herself, he is for a moment frozen, turned to stone, terrorized to his core. It is through writing, through his letter to Tom, that he is able to gain control over the disruptive power of the Irish body (significantly here, yet another group of female bodies, that is yet another set of wild Irish girls). Keats is able to reclaim and again perform normalcy or “rationality” through the definition and exclusion of Irish difference, and thus avoid the total collapse of his own marginalized subjectivity into an unspeakable identification and alliance with the wild bodies before him. He is able to claim a position of normalcy, of an ability. In specific political/cultural terms, in writing the letter to Tom he is able to reclaim the privilege of an ablebodied status. This status is threatened by the Duchess’ body; Keats loses himself, for a moment, in that body; he is lifted by it, through his own eyes, out of normalcy and into the realm of the abnormal and marginalized. In writing the letter, though, Keats is able to articulate the very ability to define the abnormal, to assign this value and to regain control. Keats’ responses link directly to Horatio’s dream in The Wild Irish Girl discussed at the end of Chapter 2, and indeed both to the allegory of Medusa in that dream and the discussion of the stare outlined in Chapter 1. As the Medusa allegory suggests, there is an innate, potentially violent conflict attached to the gaze of normalcy. At this particular moment of the stare, the disabled/Irish figure possesses a kind of power, and it is a power that must emptied from the


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object at all costs. This violence erupts, seemingly out of nowhere, at the foundational moment of staring that occurs in the moment of the able/severely disabled encounter: when the normalized gaze is unknowingly applied to the abnormal body, when the normalized person looks at the person in the wheelchair or in this case the “sadan,” or at the person who is disfigured in some way or at the person who is impoverished, old, dirty, “squat,” and “ape-like,” it is an instant of insubordination and then subordination, a single complete instant on the edge of normalized cultural practice where that wild, undisciplined, incoherent, “wondrous” and “irrational” body disrupts the smoothness of the gaze, of normalcy, and of time itself. Eventually, on the other side of the encounter, the disruption, the deep-down threat and “zero-at-the-bone” fear of looking into Medusa’s eyes is mediated, reasoned, administered, and controlled. For the Irish Medusa here who invokes Keats’ stare, it is a moment where despite the disruptive power of her exterior, her bodily surface, she is still eventually controlled by the processes of biopower which are far, far away from her own management – in Keats’ letters, for example, which continue to represent her in powerful cultural terms to this day.6 And thus this woman’s body, its history and its sensations, are not under her own control but another’s; this woman’s body, apparently wondrous in nature, in a sense never existed as itself but has always been just inside of the laws of the body erected and maintained by a history she could not remotely understand. What if the Duchess of Dunghill could read Keats’ letters about her to Tom? This question is not even close to being available in the economy of the writing of that letter; the Duchess’ personhood and the obligations to that personhood are simply not present in this context or framework. For Keats, the Duchess is simply a fabulous object that has disrupted the gaze of the normal and that must now be quickly contained and easily explained. For poor Keats this instant of a stare is a moment of terror and horror, a moment when the steady cultural gaze operating through his own body and his body’s performance is disrupted, a moment where meaning breaks down and when a stare is invoked. Like Glorvina in Horatio’s dream, then, the Duchess, sitting on her sadan in front of John Keats, has metaphorically drawn back a curtain and lifted her veiled interior for him (and for the readers). The stare is that initial moment of terror. But the stare only holds for only so long.

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In true Romantic fashion, it will become “a recollection written in tranquility,”7 that will be understood, and that will be managed through the letter and through vivid descriptions written for Tom back home. It will become “re-formed,” transformed, normalized out of disruptiveness. In theoretical terms, this moment of articulated difference, this moment when a veil is lifted, draws a clear distinction between the normal and the abnormal. Keats resists any kind of solidarity with the Duchess, does not really attempt to place himself within the experience of the Irish woman and the “poor dirty creatures” around her, does not attempt to become the Duchess of Dunghill at all, as he has already become or will become in future letters, the sparrow on the gravel walk, or the cloud in the sky, or the flower, or the bee, or the wild deer, or any of the other “identities” that the “camelion Poet” is supposed to be able to assume. In this resistance to identification or again subject solidarity with the Duchess and her crew, Keats betrays his own theory of negative capability, then, his own notion that “What shocks the virtuous philosop[h]er, delights the camelion Poet,”8 for he is shocked, muted, and fascinated, and his response goes no further, really, than that. In the end, the “old Woman” is simply “poor common Irish,” that is different, abnormal, strange, an object causing terror, and then confusion, and then complication and despair. In the end, the work that the poet does here in these letters is to keep this distinction or difference complete. He prohibits through a careful reasoned ordering of the experience, that is through the instrument of rationality and its primary articulation (writing), any kind of collapse from occurring. Despite a moment of terror, in this dynamic John Keats operates almost entirely from a position of power and privilege. The interpretational crisis he experiences is that this assumed privileged position is consistently (if only momentarily) threatened by the simple materiality of the duchess and her visibly disabled body. To again cite Ina Ferris, what Keats experiences in his brief and limited tour of Ireland is a common experience for the English traveler immediately following the Union. Keats experiences a sense of strangeness, a sense that he does not “know,” exactly, where he is (or perhaps who he is as well). Keats does not find poetry or pleasure in the Irish landscape; he does not find the beautiful body of a wild Irish girl, a Glorvina. Instead, Keats finds “Ireland,” which he articulates as a negatively


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disabled space. Ireland is a landscape that is not what it seems to be; Ireland is a place where a seemingly empty, pleasant glen that looks remarkably English is in reality composed of “mass rocks,” “holy wells,” fairy forts or wraiths, and violent hostility; Ireland is a landscape that is in this case a stinking peat bog filled with dirty creatures, rather than sprightly daffodils or pleasing bodies. Upon investigation, then, Ireland is a monstrous body, like Swift’s fully exposed Celia or Horatio’s dream of Glorvina. It is an abnormalcy that can only be negotiated through an outside apparatus of a cold rationality and that indeed must be remade, re-ordered, and controlled somehow – through writing, through political manipulation, through violent discipline. It is no surprise that John Keats quickly gets out of Ireland (in just a week), for his experiences of it unknowingly demand the crisis of encounter described above, which again leads the sensitive Keats to confusion, to “despair,” to a “laughing matter,” and then, in his initial letter concerning Ireland, to a controlled description of the horror of it all. A few days later when he is back safe at Port Patrick in Scotland, back within a more normalized context and set of cultural practices, his reflection on his experiences in little Ireland leads to a further imposition of control. He provides in another letter a detailed racial comparison of the Irish and the Scots. We must recognize that the tangle of emotions and understandings Keats constructs and reconstructs here in this comparison and in his reflection on the entire encounter are built entirely upon the perception of somatic difference and the eventual construction of the racialized other. As Keats stares at Ireland, as he then constructs that experience for his brother back home in England, he others the Irish, configures them primarily in terms of strangeness, fascination, and troubling despair. In these letters he makes the Irish totally and absolutely somatically different from himself, a Londoner (the city at the very heart of a burgeoning empire), as well as his sister and brother, and even as well as the Scots, who despite their “difference,” are apparently closer in race and, therefore, in normalcy to the English than the abnormal Irish. This kind of pseudo-rationality and deep lack of awareness in regards to the functioning of privilege signals Keats’ articulation of a normative, able-bodied perspective, or at the very least his own desire to embody such a perspective.

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Thus it is this sudden, fascinating encounter with difference, that leads Keats a few days later to make a number of comparisons between the Irish and the Scots, which are configured as a kind of rational analysis or scientific comparison. All of these comparisons are negative, stereotypical, and again are inventions and invocations of a normative set of cultural practices. For example, Keats writes to Fanny that “A Scotchman will go wisely about to deceive you, an irishman cunningly – An Irishman would bluster out any discovery to his disadvantage,”;9 and he notes earlier that, “A Scotch cottage, though in that some times the Smoke has no exit but at the door, is a palace to an Irish one.”10 After more deliberation, he finally concludes that, in the end, the Scots are superior: “The Scotchman is farther in Humanity than the Irishman.”11 He explains to Tom his preference for the Scots and why he thinks they are, again, “superior”: I must incline to the scotch – They never laugh – but they are always comparatively neat and clean – Their constitutions are not so remote and puzzling as the irish – The Scotchman will never give a decision on any point – he will never commit himself in a sentence which may be refered to as a meridian in his notions of things.12 In the final analysis, “the Irishman” is a loud-mouthed, silly, dirty buffoon, while “the Scotchman” is a close-vested, clean, secretive misanthrope; the Irish “constitution” is “puzzling” and “remote,” while the Scotch constitution is noncommittal and careful. And thus Keats confirms what stereotype dictates: put simply, the Scotchman’s “character” is “higher” or “farther in humanity.” I want to be absolutely clear. The quality of Keats’ writing here is certainly mild when compared to the more violent and rabid kinds of discourse on Ireland and the Irish that appears in the British press during this period and throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. As Michael de Nie notes, nineteenth-century stereotypes of Ireland, “blended” with emerging notions of race and nation, were often hostile and violent. Again, these attitudes and judgements were “explained” in the modern nineteenth century as the result of scientific investigation: The cultural differences and violent outbreaks that marred Anglo-Irish relations for hundreds of years could now be explained


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by supposedly scientific reasoning. Simply put, the Irish came to be seen by many as “a subrace or people with habits antithetically opposed to English norms of thought and behavior,” a people whose telltale and inherent defects were theirs alone.13 My point here is that John Keats actually performs this kind of discursive act. He allows himself to assume a certain rhetorical position in making Ireland mean something. Keats conducts an analysis built on evaluation and a rating of “essential character.” No matter how mild, this move in itself demonstrates Keats’ own understanding of his position in relation to that Irish woman in that Irish bog. It is a political relationship, it is a national relationship, it is an aesthetical relationship, and it is a bodily relationship.14 In encountering Scotland and Ireland, Keats can sort and categorize and invent such types. He can read, in critical terms, Scotland and Ireland as textual objects or types that can be defined, interpreted, and organized accordingly. He can do so because he is in Ireland in 1818 and because he is English, the ultimate type or reader, the English type or reader, and the possessor of the power to make such judgements (through a discourse, a discourse of political, scientific, and cultural truth). In this encounter and the unstated cognition that stretches out from it, Keats understands himself to be the possessor of a normalized and therefore authentic interiority or self. In being English, Keats owns an ability to make meaning, while the Scots, and most certainly the Irish, are in different degrees “disabled” and “abnormal,” and simply unable to determine what the space of these landscapes and bodies signify. In these moments, moments of racial comparison, moments where an aesthetics of race is constructed and employed in order to negotiate the meaning of that significant encounter with an Irish body, Keats articulates a somatic imperialism, which here means he operates through a normalized gaze, an “objective,” essentializing pose. It is, in reality, in these written moments, more than any other, that Keats plays into the larger cultural narrative in which he is required to perform a role in constructing the dichotomy of what is normal and what is abnormal, and in doing so he constructs deviance or abnormalcy in the Irish, and again to a lesser degree, the Scots, and thus embodies and articulates the norm. Further, as mentioned above, in an even larger sense, Keats’ analysis transforms physical difference into “Ireland” as an entire discursive location: as in The Wild

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Irish Girl where Ireland in function becomes the Prince rather than Glorvina, in Keats’ letters, Ireland becomes, in reality, the Duchess of Dunghill (here, rather than a land of poetry and beauty, a land of impoverishment and suffering). Though it may be, it should not be surprising, given Keats’ historical circumstance, that he does adopt such a perspective and makes this conceptual choice and discursive configuration. In these larger terms, the construction of “empire” itself and the ideologies of race and difference that form its base, is flowering in 1818, and indeed London and its suburbs, so much a part of the cockney John Keats, are becoming the center and location and very source of such imperialist discourse and construction. As Sarree Makdisi has argued in a book concerning Romantic imperialism and William Blake: Carried through the sinews and tissues of those [commercial] and other networks, the spatio-temporal experience, of London – of modernization – has spread out from the city of London, coextensively with the ever-increasing spread of what Blake calls the “Universal Emprie,” a spatial system of unequal and exploitative relations and exchanges gradually overspreading four continents and thirty-two nations of his world.15 The commercial networks Makdisi names here are tied into the forced political union with Britain and the social reality that Ireland is now, in 1818, a political, commercialized space within the margins of the United Kingdom, and also a space for tourists to explore, for the tourist industry to develop, and for great British landowners to hunt. It is a space that is being normalized; it is a space to which Londoner John Keats carries modernization, exploitative relationships, the dichotomies of evolving modernity, like that of normalcy and abnormalcy. This modernization, and again his Romantic obsession with finding the transcendental in the material, seeing “poetry” in landscapes, in part explains Keats’ own motivation to tour Ireland, to include it in his larger engagement with Britain, British landscapes, and British literary culture – like Burns and Wordsworth. It also explains Keats’ own subjectivity in the moment of the encounter: Keats is framing his response in a discourse saturated with and characterized by the implications of empire and romantic ideology.16 In making a side-tour into little Ireland, Keats is, in effect, haphazardly


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and perhaps regrettably tapping into the entire discussion of Ireland, union, and modernization that defines both Sydney Owenson’s and, as I will suggest later, Maria Edgeworth’s work. Thus in his Englishness, Keats’ discursive role in the encounter with the Duchess is already determined in countless ways. In order to move into the next section of this chapter, I will add here that Keats’ own dubious position or status within early-nineteenthcentury British societal structure, his own victimization within the hierarchies of class, his own anxieties and insecurities about his identity as a poet, as well as his perhaps already failing health, all contribute to his need to draw a racial distinction between himself and the poor common Irish, to his desire to be able-bodied and normal, and more importantly to his even deeper desire to avoid being defined as abnormal and disabled.

John Keats’s despair and Peter Singer’s ethics Euthanasia is an excellent, comforting word! I am grateful to whoever invented it. (Stoker, Dracula) The one reported emotion that John Keats experiences in Ireland that comes close to a sense of solidarity with and an advocacy for the Irish is “despair.” It is a response documented in the letter to Tom just before Keats begins his comparison of the Irish and the Scots. It is located again in this statement: “What a tremendous difficulty is the improvement of the condition of such people . . . with me it is absolute despair.”17 One could argue that this specific emotional response fits into the readings of John Keats that Nicholas Roe, Jeffery Cox, and several others began to construct within the massive amount of criticism and scholarship on Keats and his work written in the 1990s.18 The response likewise fits into the earlier, groundbreaking reading of Keats by Donald Goelnicht in 1984, where he convincingly argues that much of John Keats’ work and life is motivated by a noble sympathy for suffering, and that, indeed, like his initial exploration of medicine, Keats’ decision to become a poet is rooted in the desire to alleviate the same kind of pain he saw in his mother’s death, in his brother Tom’s death, and then in his work at Guy’s hospital

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in London – the kind of impoverished suffering he once again encounters in that Irish bog between Donaghadee and Belfast in the summer of 1818. I should note here that a reconsideration of the walking tour itself and the entire, week-long experience of Ireland has led biographer Andrew Motion to claim that on this tour Keats discovered “new ways of thinking about suffering.”19 For Nicolas Roe, Keats’s actual understanding of his labor as a poet is ultimately envisioned as a kind of social vocation and a posture of agency. In this view, Keats’ work embraces Leigh Hunt and the rest of the Hampstead Heath set and easily aligns with Shelley’s arguments in A Defence of Poetry – that is, that poetry, written by “unacknowledged legislators of the World” functions as a platform for changing cultural values and, potentially then, for ending the suffering in the world.20 Thus Roe concludes that for Keats, “The cure of suffering that had not proved feasible through political revolution or medical practice might be yet achieved through the pharmacy of imagination.”21 In this same framework, Roe claims that the famous reaction to Keats’ first book – a reaction rooted in a larger response to Leigh Hunt and his circle – engenders a critical paradigm (what one could define as a disability paradigm) that will dominate the reading of Keats for generations. Roe writes of this general reaction, and of the critic John Gibson Lockhart in particular: At all stages of European history, medical metaphors have been employed to denote and stigmatize the deviant, the disenfranchised, the alienated. Z’s [John Gibson Lockhart’s] pathological account of Keats’s poetry as a “malady,” an “infection,” “a violent fit,” a “disease,” exactly conformed to this pattern while highlighting – with “sorrow” – the particularly distressing case of an apprentice healer who had succumbed to infection and become the transmitter of sickness.22 Roe’s analysis of Lockhart’s criticism is basically to turn the reading upside down. In doing so, he demonstrates the way that the traditional reading of “poor Keats” works, and again explores a new way to critique and ultimately undermine this critical paradigm. Working within the irony of John Gibson Lockhart’s review of Keats’ first volume, where he describes Keats’ poetry as a “malady” and an “illness,” Roe instead argues that for John Keats it is poetry, the very fantastic,


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erotic “sickness” of the poet’s ethereal works of excessive imagination, that is actually intended to be the practical cure to sickness or suffering in general. Keats’s poetry, rather than being the embodiment of illness and suffering or “distemper”23 is instead meant to provide a vigorous tonic to those very ailments. Adding to this work, in the late 1990s Jeffrey Cox conducted a significant book-length study that, like Roe’s work published a year earlier, situates Keats in an active, deeply political project with direct, immediate social goals and that would again seem to require from the poet a thoughtful, sympathetic reading of Ireland rather than the reactionary, stereotypical reading just outlined above.24 In this political, sympathetic-to-suffering paradigm Keats is primarily working – writing poetry, again moving in the political circles of Leigh Hunt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and so on – in a posture that advocates an immediate political and social response to suffering or pain, again a desire to alleviate the circumstances that cause such conditions to exist. Keats’ feeling of “absolute despair” when he sees the “poor common Irish” fits into this larger, policy-oriented paradigm, then, and suggests that Keats should align himself further with the Irish and become a fellow subaltern, a fellow victim of discrimination and harsh economic exploitation, a metaphoric member of “the Irishry” from which in reality he seems to simultaneously and desperately attempt to distance himself.25 Like his Hampstead Heath associates, and like his fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, the very fact that Keats would journey to Ireland does open up the possibility of some “higher,” “noble” purpose in his activities. The problem here is Keats’ actual reaction to the Irish woman he names, with cruelty, the Duchess of Dunghill. Keats’ negotiation of this person’s body and the issues surrounding her body does not fit into this kind of framework; Keats’ initial reading and later formation of her body do not entail alignment, solidarity, and the development of a practical cure. Keats’ response is, primarily, repulsion, and that is all. The moment he sees the Duchess a paralyzed stare is invoked from him, and the despair he feels moving out away from that moment and into animation again is linked primarily to a further definition of this repulsion and a clear demarcation of difference. Before I move to a larger discussion of the implications of Keats’ despair, I want to note that these more recent readings of Keats

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give my own perspective on this single moment context, depth, and some paradox. I recognize that Keats’ encounter with the Duchess of Dunghill is a single, rather obscure moment in the Keats biography. An analysis of this moment does not equate an exhaustive treatment of his career and life and the perspectives he embodies and articulates. Indeed, the significance of the work of scholars and biographers like Walter Jackson Bate or Andrew Motion, or critics like Roe and Cox is that they construct a critical paradigm that goes against the very traditional notion of John Keats as “poor Keats,” as a passive figure, a figure too good for the world as Shelley would later configure him (“I weep for Adonais – he is dead!”), or a fragile figure too fragile whose life was like a candle “snuffed out” by a bad review (as he appears in Byron’s Don Juan). These more recent kinds of readings instead set Keats up as a kind of alternative, counter-culture figure, a member of the Cockney School, an “artist-critic” (to use this term yet again), who defines himself as resistant to “mainstream” cultural practices, as oppositional, and who is defining himself in active terms as being oppositional and defiantly different from the norms emerging to carefully govern bodily practice in his society. Indeed, in the theoretical terms developing this book, what all of this means is that in theory, like Wilde, Keats has a “fabulous” agency: despite his illness, short stature, and other physical impairments, Keats is more queerly disabled than passively abnormal, more fabulously severe than quietly strange. Through this distinction it is possible to see that the somatic dynamic within which Keats exists creates for him a disabled perspective of culture: Keats in many ways articulates a disability perspective in his work, and one could say that “Keats” in many ways is a field still dominated by issues of the ill or impaired body.26 Yes, Keats is victimized by his body, by the material circumstances of his body (again his height, his poverty, his ultimate illness), but no, no, Keats does not accept this victimization, this stereotype of passivity, this stigma of physical difference. Instead he resists it completely. Regardless, in the line of thought articulated by Roe, Cox, and others, Keats becomes the image not of “heroism” or “the youngest of the martyrs,” as Wilde would later say, but simply of ability, advocacy, political and social activism. Keats is a person who “works” and works hard to end oppression, suffering, and the larger, convoluted


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problems (the “suffering”) of his world. As he says of himself, Keats is a person who is always trying “to do the world some good.”27 *

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We know that in his trip to Ireland John Keats experiences a sense of displacement and the tense confusion of vague difference. We know that for a whole set of reasons, Keats’ walk in Ireland is a profoundly uncomfortable one: by being English in an Ireland that is now, after 1801, technically in “union” with Britain, he is “notquite” a stranger in a “not-exactly” strange land. By the indication that he has a sore throat, and through an awareness of how Keats’ life is going to end, we likewise know that physically John Keats in Ireland is likely exhausted, weak, and ill. We can observe that these political and bodily factors are further complicated by Keats’ own class position which is cockney. Thus we recognize that in general and specific terms, being in Ireland at this moment requires a very complicated negotiation of displacement and confusion, which Keats accomplishes by the writing of several letters to his brother and sister back home. Finally, we now further recognize that in these letters Keats engages in a kind of typing or cataloging, and in doing so articulates a definite preoccupation with bodily difference and an attempt to understand their difference and its meanings. This typing amounts to at least one solution for Keats; the Duchess of Dunghill is explained by her Irishness. To focus this argument again with all of this context as a backdrop, we should now ask the following questions: what does John Keats actually see in Ireland? Why does this encounter, this highly visualized moment of interaction, engender the emotion of “despair” that Keats feels and records in his letters? And, what is the real significance of “despair” in this context? What Keats sees is impairment. What Keats engages, performs, and documents is embodiment, transformation, and the dangerous dynamics of a negatively constructed status. In other words, in his journey to Ireland, sore throat included, John Keats engages impairment and does disability. Keats encounters and then experiences a theoretical severity. And he rejects it.

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I apologize for the redundancy here, but at this point I feel it would be beneficial to quote the letter on the Duchess once again. The Keats letter to Tom contains the following description: What a tremendous difficulty is the improvement of the condition of such people . . . with me it is absolute despair. . . . On our return from Bellfast we met a Sadan – the Duchess of Dunghill – It is no laughing matter tho – Imagine the worst dog kennel you ever saw placed upon two poles from a mouldy fencing – In such a wretched thing sat a squalid old Woman squat like an ape half starved from scarcity of Buiscuit in its passage from Madagascar to the cape – with a pipe in her mouth and looking out with a round-eyed skinny lidded, inanity – with a sort of horizontal idiotic movement of her head – squab and lean she sat and puff’d out the smoke while two ragged tattered Girls carried her along –28 The woman Keats sees here is being carried through the peat bog by younger, apparently more able-bodied women. The woman Keats focuses his vision on here is seemingly unable to walk. It appears that, due to bodily impairment, the woman does not have the ability to do certain kinds of able-bodied activities (like walking through an Irish bog) or most likely any kind of rigorous, physical labor (like cutting peat). In addition to these physical impairments, this Irish woman is also elderly and apparently both impoverished (Keats describes her as dirty and lean, her sadan is like a dog kennel, and so on) and physically repulsive to him, or at the very least unattractive and not a part of the heterosexual economy in which Keats participates (his descriptions of her are that she is “squab,” and “squat,” smokes a pipe, moves her head with a “skinny-lidded inanity,” and so on). When Keats is in the bog, then, he sees a spectacle. He sees dirt, impoverishments in body and class, and he sees, whether he is accurate or not (and he certainly may not be), a lack of ability and a form of suffering. Imagine the moment: first, a wet, dark, cold, soggy wetland filled with numerous laborers of a rougher sort, vigorously working, cutting and carting peat moss; then, an elderly woman being carried through the splashing water by two wild-looking girls in tattered clothing; and then, two travelers, likely English, appearing on foot,29 one of whom is a pale, small-featured, wide-eyed, likely feverish young man in travel garb and of a short stature; and finally


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this traveler in particular gazing and then pausing to stare intently at the elderly woman being toted across the landscape. The scene is certainly a dramatic performance of the doubled workings of imperialism and modernity. But above all the scene is a documentation of the emerging structure of normative behavior, normative culture, and normative identity structures. A person who has accessibility issues is negotiating an inaccessible space. At the same time a young man, who may also have hidden accessibility issues here, is the figure who, in this marginalized region of the United Kingdom, is most in possession of a biopower, of the ability to articulate what is normal and to define what is not normal for the entire environment around him. Indeed, this particular young man is the one with the skill and power to provide the account and description people will continue to read more than 200 years later. I argue that this scene and the dynamic it registers absolutely engage the tensions involved in Irish body formation. The result of this particular account is the signature of “ability trouble” – the moment when the easy gaze transforms into the troubled stare, when power unexpectedly swings out of the control of the normalized body that gazes and into the extraordinary body troubling the ordering of the world. This body invokes a change in visual activity, literally a redefinition of both a material landscape and a field of reading. As seen before, in this moment it is the Irish body that plays the role of the extraordinary body that troubles and the English body that is forced to stare, to negotiate, to resolve in conceptual terms this sudden, fabulous tension. In very immediate, individual terms, within this single, sudden moment of the stare, the Irish Duchess’ exterior defines the English Keats’ entire evaluation of her interiority. John Keats is repulsed. What he sees before him is a body that is shocking, and that is behaving in abnormal, unusual ways – being carried, for example, in a “saddan” rather than walking. Again, in specific terms, the duchess’ exterior difference determines her interior subjectivity. Keats perceives her body, and reacts, seemingly without any kind of careful cognition. Negative disability, then, operates as a larger, longer, determinant social construction, a framework for that construction of interiority, which is here stereotypical and eventually imposed onto the Duchess from the outside. Specifically, Keats’ feelings of “absolute


despair” are constructed after the encounter and within this emerging kind of outside disability framework. An Irish disability studies allows us to see that what further complicates this emotion of despair is the fact that, on top of the possible stereotypes of difference, on top of the specific concerns of disability politics in this specific encounter, Keats collapses the Duchess’ body and “character” into a larger reading of Ireland itself. When Keats sees the Duchess and is literally turned to stone by her monstrous difference, when he is then forced to resist his own collapse into her body, and when he is then finally only able to negotiate this whole encounter through a suspicious racial comparison and notes of difference, it is not “Keats” and the other individual or “person” before him, or a “man” and a “woman,” or even “the poet” and the muse of the “Duchess of Dunghill.” It is instead “England” encountering “Ireland,” as it encountered Scotland just a few weeks before. Further, in the letter to Tom that describes the entire event, it is England’s “despair” regarding “such people” – England’s horror at Ireland’s “history of sensation.” England sees Ireland, and stares at it, and is turned to stone for a moment, and then rearticulates this moment into distinction, negative difference, a sick sister, a Duchess of Dunghill. What happens, then, is that in these kinds of political terms, rather than solidarity and psychological or philosophical alignment in identity formation, Keats’ despair instead leads to a formulation akin to Edmund Spenser’s critical conclusions in A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596). In this work, Spenser, who spent a great part of his life as a planter and government official in Munster, argues for brutal violence and, in effect, genocide in Ireland – he argues, simply, for martial law in the country and for either execution or an imposed famine on the Irish persons and the communities that do not submit to English authority. In Spenser’s calculus, Irish bodies (or Scythians) are a corrupted, barbaric excess that should be eliminated because, in the end, they disrupt English prosperity and larger ambitions for an Irish colony or plantation. This kind of hard, nationalized discourse, written by a poet Edward Said once sadly described as “humane” and a poet John Keats himself often imitated in his formal development, trips up the chameleon poet who is so determined to become everything he sees. Rather than being totally turned to stone, eliminated in the recognition that his own body, in its lack, its inability, its abnormalcy,


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functions in parallel with the Duchess, instead Keats quickly finds Spenser and England in this moment, quickly locates racial difference as a possible explanation of the encounter, and then with ease defines the differences between Ireland and Scotland for his brother back home. Policy wins out; Ireland is inferior; the aesthetics of a Cumberland Beggar and the truth of a Wordsworthian, organic oneness in the universe are easily leveled and displaced by a lisping of Spenser’s destructive policy statements, and by a simple desire to be something other than the starving, aging, wildly undesirable “Irish girl” now in front of him. Put simply, and contextually, the Duchess John Keats sees here is not the Prince of Inismore’s daughter. Perhaps Keats could resist the pressures of a normalizing perspective. He could reject Englishness/ability at this very moment. But instead the potential relocating of identity fails; the alignment does not happen; normalcy is claimed and negative difference is articulated. Despite all of the obvious somatic and cultural indications of his own difference, Keats claims a kind of able-bodied status by making sure that Tom knows that the Duchess is different (and thus negatively disabled and stigmatized). *

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Based on the analysis of his letters on Ireland outlined above, it seems that in his understanding and comprehension of the Irish John Keats is never able, really, to leave the position of the 1818, normalized, shopkeeping, empire-building Englishman that a figure like Napoleon (and later Byron) so despised.30 Keats’ push in these letters seems more geared towards a kind of desperate claim of a position within the norm and the imperial society that constructs it, rather than a critique and deconstruction of the concept and the culture it creates. Surprisingly perhaps, Keats’despair traces in clear terms the outline of the Duchess’ shadowy power. In its constitution and performance, the Duchess’ body threatens the norm Keats desires to embody. Like Glorvina and Celia, the Duchess demonstrates the problematic of the Irish girl gone wild. This single, individual moment that John Keats so honestly documents is a moment that radiates outwards, far, far outwards into the wide practice of the United Kingdom and its global networks. It is national, hemispheric, mythic.


Ireland becomes a wild Irish girl who has slept in Poseidon’s temple, who is now Medusa, who is now, strangely, in possession of a power that makes no sense, that does not fit into the framework of an imperial gaze that John Keats himself can not comfortably possess to begin with. What the martyr of poetry stumbles into, just a year before his Annus Mirabilis, is that, from ancient Greece to today, there is perhaps an almost magical dynamic working behind the Gorgon’s power. The trick of the Gorgon’s power, the truth behind Medusa’s eyes, is this emotion of “absolute despair.” When one stares the sick sister in the eyes one is saddened into stone: Keats is sad when he remembers looking at the Duchess; in those letters Keats despairs, absolutely. And he manages it. He negotiates despair. He figures out a solution to an Irish problem by defining it as “the Irish problem” and as an Irish body. He finds metaphor through materiality. Thus though that despair embodied in the language of the letters is certainly a luxury of power and cultural control, it is most certainly not an act of placing or playing oneself in the position of the economically marginalized Irish, of the Duchess of Dunghill. Keats can not do so. He fails to do so. Instead, in the fabric or tangle of the rushed writing in the letters to Tom and his sister Fanny, his expressions of despair are in the end utilitarian in nature – responses built out of a dim awareness of an objective, cold, reasoned formula always present and always accessible in nineteenth-century England’s larger political narrative and treatment of Ireland. The Irish are strange (while the English are not). The Irish are abnormal (while the English are not). The Irish are, in effect, disabled (while the English are, certainly, not). In this troubled threading together of ideas, this easy slip into oppressive binary, despair becomes utilitarian ethics, and the conceptual utterance of a eugenic sensibility. Henri Stiker has written: We should not hide from the fact that major disability, especially mental, generates such an urge to make it disappear that it must be called by its name. In embryonic form the desire to kill, to see dead, is extended to all those who are stricken. The practice in antiquity of doing away with deformed children originates in a sense of eugenics, in the will for a pure race, and thus reveals what lies in the human heart. Let’s not have any illusions; we carry within ourselves the urges to kill, because death and fear,


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like aggression, have their roots there. It is obvious that this violence toward the different resolves itself in other ways than in the elimination of the disabled, thanks to socialization, with its rules, its prohibitions, and its institutions. Social systems are more or less murderous, that is, more or less astute in diverting and channeling spontaneous savage violence.31 Stiker’s assertion is that this moment that poor Keats experiences, this moment of sudden repulsion, the moment that could be defined as scapegoating,32 as taboo,33 this moment constitutes an innate response that is an “urge to make it disappear” and that is in “the human heart.” Frameworks are invented to control this urge. Systems are constructed to negotiate its meaning. Repulsion can become despair, and then further that despair can become the transformation of the Duchess’ individual body into the entire nation of Ireland; this transformation can then allow Keats, in a comparison of the Irish with the Scots, to solve that early despair and empty himself of that initial repulsion. John Keats applies the framework of meanings attached to nation and to body to this encounter with the impaired individual he names the “Duchess of Dunghill.” Again, the Duchess becomes the nation becomes the problem – to be solved, perhaps, by acts of union, by military presence, by rewriting the Irish body so that it is English – all “problems” to be solved by Westminster and in the end perhaps a poem or two about the autumn and a nightingale. As noted at the start of this section, the real problem here, the thing that can not be negotiated is that semicolonial, disabled Irish bodies keep reaching out of these frameworks. Irishness is too severe and too, too fabulous. Irish bodies are abnormal; Irish bodies are, elusively, normal. Ireland is a space inbetween. And thus Irishness as a modern identity formation is always reaching out of systems of administration built on binaries and easily defined categories of organization – systems rooted in statistical society, philosophic treatise, medical practice. Irishness is fabulous and severe; it is always disruptive and problematic, always, at every level, making good Englishmen stare. Again, the power of Medusa’s eyes, of the Duchess of Dunghill’s face, is simply that when one gazes upon her body one turns, even if only for a moment, into stone. *

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It is possible to ground Keats’ experience in Ireland and his reaction to suffering in a dangerous utilitarian ethics. I argue that Keats’ despair demonstrates the disruptive power of the Duchess of Dunghill’s fabulous body. Again, Keats must negotiate this disruption, this body. And later, he must resolve the intense tension that that body creates; he must move away from the stare that has engendered this residue of conceptual tension, this memory that will not be still. Despair is the magic ingredient that makes the stare work, the prelude to the culturally sanctioned emotion that fuels the entire dynamic and that shapes the results of the encounter. Despair is a part of the contract of staring. Despair is the allowance made in Audre Lorde’s army of one-breasted women and the Rolling Quads of Berkeley – they are dangerous and fabulous, as the Duchess of Dunghill is dangerous and fabulous, precisely because they all in one way or another, knowingly or unknowingly, engage this ingredient of absolute despair. In doing so they disturb the entire dimension and circumstance. Thus when Keats reconstructs the scene for his brother, the articulation of despair is a requirement in the rhetoric of the presentation. Keats must recognize its practical function in his experience, its great ability to turn one to stone. Keats desperately needs for it to exist in fact so that he can indeed replicate it and use it to maintain his own status in the encounter’s larger memory. The easy challenge for cockney John Keats, who again also desperately needs to be English more than cockney, is to override the Duchess’ Irish body and take control of it. Keats is able to do so, again easily, through the appropriate paths of cognition and emotion: he feels absolute despair; he links the Duchess’ interior to her exterior; he links her interior Irishness to the larger problem of the Irish body. By giving the Duchess a history of sensations (an “Irish problem”), even if it is only imagined, Keats can manipulate her significance, her body as a whole, her national identity. He can transform her into the kind of self/body/object that allows for the establishment of his own normalcy and power. Thus Keats’ containment of the severe is to make those kinds of moves that essentialize difference into a set of identity characteristics and qualities. In the context of an Irish disability studies framework, both Keats’ despair and Edmund Spenser’s policy recommendations that the Irish be exterminated cited earlier can be linked theoretically to Peter Singer’s current, controversial arguments concerning severe


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disability, suffering, and the practices of euthanasia. For years disability activists and scholars have opposed Singer’s utilitarian ethical perspective, a perspective outlined in such earlier works as Animal Liberation and Practical Ethics. Concerning a very painful, severe, fatal disability in infants, Singer has written specifically that: It is . . . plausible to suppose that the prospects of a happy life are better for a normal child than for a haemophiliac. When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. . . . Therefore, if killing the haemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others, it would, according to the total view, be right to kill him.34 Singer continues in this passage, discussing at this point the “tragedy” of children being “born without arms or legs” due to the consumption of the drug thalidomide by pregnant women in Australia, England, and the European continent in the late 1950s and early 1960s: If we really believed that there is no reason to think of the life of a disabled person as likely to be any worse than that of a normal person, we would not have regarded this as a tragedy. . . . The children would merely have been “different.” . . . If this sounds grotesque, that is only because we are all in no doubt at all that it is better to be born with limbs than without them. To believe this involves no disrespect at all for those who are lacking limbs; it simply recognizes the reality of the difficulties they face.35 And earlier, in the same text, Singer asserts: It is one thing to argue that people with disabilities who want to live their lives to the full should be given every possible assistance in doing so. It is another, and quite a different thing, to argue that if we are in a position to choose, for our next child, whether that child shall begin life with or without a disability, it is mere prejudice or bias that leads us to choose to have a child without a disability. If disabled people who must use wheelchairs to get around were suddenly offered a miracle drug that would,


with no side effects, give them full use of their legs, how many would refuse to take it on the grounds that life with a disability is in no way inferior to life without a disability?36 In these passages and in the larger philosophical framework he sets up, Singer argues that it is ethical and appropriate to end suffering in order to ensure a greater happiness – in the end, this means that killing a severely disabled infant so that the birth of another infant without disabilities, or again with “better prospects of a happy life,” may occur. Importantly, in Singer’s work, these “practical ethics” have a larger, idealistic, societal application and purpose. For example, in a more recent book, A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation, Singer writes that, “For as long as the left has existed, it has sought a society in which all human beings live harmoniously and cooperatively with each other in peace and freedom.” Singer further maintains that: If . . . the materialist theory of history is correct, and social existence determines consciousness, then the greed, egoism, personal ambition and envy that a Darwinian might see as inevitable aspects of our nature can instead be seen as the consequence of living in a society with private property and private ownership of the means of production. Without these particular social arrangements, people would no longer be so concerned about their private interests. . . . The riddle of history can be solved only if this antagonism is a product of the economic basis of our society, rather than an inherent aspect of our biological nature.37 The force of Singer’s writing here is a basic idealism, a utopian desire, and a belief that one can build a society where such things as freedom and fairness exist across the board: all one needs to do is to solve the “riddle of history.” Singer claims to begin to do so by reconciling the contrary figures of Marx and Darwin, a reconciliation which will, hopefully, create a better understanding of human behavior and therefore lead to more progressive steps in the way that human societies are built. Again, though it may seem so, it is not a great stretch to ground John Keats in these kinds of traditional utilitarian ethics; nor is it


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a stretch to link him with a very contemporary figure like Peter Singer. With the work of Jeremy Bentham, William Godwin, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Malthus, and others in mind, it is key to recognize that Keats was functioning within an intellectual milieu where such philosophic frameworks were being established. Malthus’ work on population, in particular, is relevant and will be cited in the British treatment of Irish famine at the midpoint of the century (and discussed here in the following chapter). In 1821, only three years after Keats’s visit to Ireland, J.S. Mill, a central figure in the development of Peter Singer’s contemporary notions of society and culture, is famously converted to utilitarianism after reading Jeremy Bentham, who also plays a central role in Singer’s controversial early arguments concerning animal rights in the book Animal Liberation. Only a year later in 1822, Mill forms the Utilitarian Society to further the thinking and the cause of utilitarianism. Mill defines utilitarianism as: The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure. Mill argues further “that pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends”38 for a society and a culture. Keats’ responses to the Duchess of Dunghill trace lightly through this ethical framework. His despair slants towards what Stiker defines as “a sense of eugenics,” which he begins to articulate in the outline of difference between Ireland and Scots identity. These moments of feeling and thought – a mini-history of Keats’ own sensations – drift, again ever so lightly, in the direction of Peter Singer and the logic of euthanasia in a response to suffering. It is only an orientation, a posture that Keats is demonstrating. The point here, though, is that that posture is engaged and is available in the relationship between Ireland and England. As the century moves forward, as 1818 turns into 1848 and The Great Hunger, this posture and orientation takes on much, much deeper consequences.


Part II: Maria Edgeworth and a body’s Irishness Reading the Irish face The previous sections of this chapter focused on two letters written by John Keats to his brother Tom. In these concluding sections I would like to focus on another letter and a domestic novel written in the same period by a different writer in a very different set of identity circumstances in her relationship with Ireland, Irishness, and the Irish body. In a letter to Fanny Robinson written when she was in her early twenties, and which was later, after her death, printed by her stepmother (Mrs Frances Edgeworth)39 Maria Edgeworth describes the dangers and real fears that she felt in 1796 while living through a violent, crudely revolutionary period in Irish history.40 As a member of the Protestant, Anglo-Irish aristocracy, a resident of the big house, a prominent “Edgeworth” in rural “Edgeworthstown,” Maria Edgeworth felt the insecurity of being targeted by the “defenders” of the 1780s and 1790s – bands of Catholics who roamed through the countryside at night determined to destroy Protestant holdings and properties. In the letter Edgeworth writes the following to Fanny Robinson: All that I crave for my own part is, that if I am to have my throat cut, it may not be by a man with his face blackened with charcoal. I shall look at every person that comes here very closely, to see if there be any marks of charcoal upon their visages. Old wrinkled offenders I suppose would never be able to wash out their stains; but in others a very clean face will be in my mind a very strong symptom of guilt, clean hands proof positive, and clean nails ought to hang a man.41 What Edgeworth refers to here is the “tradition” of rural violence and political agitation that dominates eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Ireland. One aspect in this tradition, practiced by the “defenders,” was to hide one’s identity and camouflage oneself for the night’s work by blackening one’s face or hands with charcoal powder or dust. Thus as the sun set, the bodies of the defenders – the bodies of servants and laborers on the increasingly gothic landscape – transformed, becoming disfigured, monstrously violent


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creatures, surrounded by fire, blackened with dust, and bent on destruction. Not surprisingly, in this letter we see several key visual rhetorics in play. These rhetorical dimensions parallel all of the dynamics exampled thus far in this book – Keats’ letters, Owenson’s presentation of the Irish body in The Wild Irish Girl, Oscar Wilde’s fashioning of himself in his appearance at Grosvenor’s Gallery in 1877, and Swift’s pornographic pastoral in “The Lady’s Dressing Room.” The passage cited above describes a way of reading, a decision by young Maria Edgeworth to read the surfaces of Irish bodies, their “visages,” in a certain way: with revolution in the countryside afoot, one must look for and be able to detect signs of potential violence, indications of “cleanliness” and “dirt,” in order to be safe and to make sure that one does not, again, get one’s throat cut. Irish bodies roaming the countryside at night contain monstrosity and corruption and thus like Swift’s Strephon, Maria Edgeworth must now learn to read through the exterior of the Irish body and into its interior make-up – Owenson must learn how to see the authentic Irishness that is often hidden in the daylight. At a certain social and political level, due to Edgeworth’s very decision or commitment to “look at every person who comes here very closely,” the bodies of Edgeworth’s servants and the laborers in the surrounding townland are located in a very practical problematic position. No matter what, the servants and laborers will always be outside a circle of somatic normalcy and somatic acceptability: if they have the evidence and the remnants of charcoal dust on their faces, then Maria Edgeworth will read this as evidence of the “guilt” and “crime” within their interior person; if they are “clean,” in possession of a clean face, hands, and nails, then once again a simple surface-level fact indicates that, indeed, they “ought to hang.” These “symptoms” are built into a preset reading of the bodies of the “common Irishry” as being, more often than not, guilty: again, they are either monstrous in their blackened exteriors – guilty, violent, revolutionary, and significantly, especially with the word “symptom” in mind, diseased – or deceptive in their cleanliness or appearance of normalcy. It is the surface of the body, the Irish face, that Edgeworth attempts to read. As again we saw in Swift’s poem on the gaudy tulip named Celia, the real, true Irish face is not a clean one, but a blackened one.


If it is clean, beautiful, gaudy, then it is deceptive and it is simply attempting to appear normal. This deception speaks to the theoretical positioning Edgeworth now invokes: at night the Irish body covers its face, its exterior, with the stuff of its interior, marking with the dust of the coal its authentic interior upon its deceptive exterior; at night, as in Celia’s dressing room, the Irish body is unveiled, so that its exterior transforms and its severe difference is openly performed and articulated. In these terms, Edgeworth reads Irishness as monstrous difference, a kind of severe disability. By reading the exterior of the bodies of her Irish servants closely Edgeworth is able to read their Irishness and their difference against her own “Anglo-Irishness” and claims of normalcy; as we saw in the emotional tangles of Keats’ reaction to the Duchess of Dunghill, Edgeworth herself is able to claim a normalcy primarily through Irish difference. It is a classic, much theorized move in imperialist culture, and in this sense, we cannot ignore that the bodies represented here are black bodies and thus are linked immediately to a larger set of imperialist discourses, discourses that are likewise themselves “symptomatic” of the patriarchal Anglo-Irish tradition of Burke, Swift, Goldsmith, and so on. In the larger framework of Ireland it is Edgeworth’s business to locate herself, perhaps at her father’s behest, within this particular tradition.42 It is a complicated move, for the Edgeworths are in a complex social position and Maria Edgeworth is in a sense forced to assert a complicated identity construction here. Kevin Whelan writes: In Edgeworth’s scheme, the backsliding Irish gentry had first to save themselves, shedding their inappropriate feudal privileges and lifestyle; only in this way could they recuperate the Hibernians, leading both groups into a newly created state of Irishness entirely compatible with Britishness. . . . It was Hibernianism which inflicted backwardness on Ireland: its national character needed to undergo remedial education, tutored by a responsible Protestant landed class. By a proper balancing of Hibernian and English traits, a new reconciliation with Britishness could be achieved. (190–1) Kevin Whelan argues that what both Maria and her father Richard Edgeworth attempt to do in their work is to collapse the hard


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binary between Irishness and Englishness. They must do so by creating a new kind of Irishness, one that balances “Hibernianism” and “Englishness.” Thus in this letter Edgeworth’s blackened faces represent the kind of abnormal Hibernian Irishness that can be resolved by normalizing nationality. To again cite Whelan: One can also see how readily – and ruthlessly – this Enlightenment ethos consigned regional cultures to erasure under the sign of progress – and endorsed military or state power in inflicting that erasure. . . . By consigning such ‘barbarous’ cultures to the dustbin of history, this eminently rational discourse also endorsed ethnocide – the deliberate destruction of embedded cultural formations in the name of stadialism and inexorable progress.43 Whelan continues his exploration of this notion: Regions are therefore forms of spatio-temporality – not stable configurations. It is the intersection of the trajectories of space and time that creates and defines regions. All regions are unstable and shifting, not static permanences, and they are all equally embedded in time as in space. Political agency is comprised of the relationship among material produces, symbolic forms and narrative strategies, which become very clear when we analyze Ireland under the Act of Union. When we conduct an analysis of this period through an Irish disability studies, we see that the “regions” upon which to configure narrative strategies of political agency often drive backwards, as when in her reading of the Irish face Maria Edgeworth works within and through those narratives to the body and then into the body. Like the geographical region itself, the mapping of the Irish body becomes the central point of concern for both Irish and English readers in this spatial and temporal moment of cultural practice. Again, Edgeworth’s position within this juncture of space, time, and culture is awkward, contradictory, and pressure-filled. If the Irish body is a contested space, then her obligation is to write it in a certain way. Thus, as the logic steps forward, Edgeworth will normalize the Irish body by


reconstructing Irishness or its face for Ireland itself and then for its often confused English readers. Whelan, in a sense, concurs. He comments in the same essay quoted above on the pressures defining Irish writers in this moment: Their self-imposed function became the representation of Irish life for the education and edification of an invincibly ignorant and incredulous British audience, which had to be brought to a proper realization of its Irish responsibilities.44 Writing to British audiences, Irish writers had to represent Ireland in certain terms. This representation could be done through the Irish body; this move to normalize the body – as again we see with Maria Edgeworth – becomes a required move in a game with a limited number of moves or plays. Through such theoretical, economic, and political positioning, that is through an inside status in the dynamics of colonialism and imperialism, the Anglo-Irish junta was able to achieve and claim a limited normalcy, to be understood at points as “normal” within the circles of power in Westminster, and further to be able to then articulate and perform this normalcy at home in Ireland. In Edgeworthstown, Maria Edgeworth is able to claim a separate status, then, is in effect able and is able (in this dynamic, ability is power) to impose a definition and a meaning onto the bodies she sees and reads. Like Keats, Edgeworth possesses in a limited conditioned amount, the social power of the visual, the power of the norm. As she writes, “As we were neither born nor bred in Ireland, we cannot be supposed to possess [the] amor patriae in its full force: we profess to be attached to the country only for its merits” (182, qtd. in Foster). She can pick and choose, align herself with the country she is in based on its merits. Put simply, her face is clean. In this mode of reading and writing, of cultural consumption and production, Maria Edgeworth is placing herself in a position of power, is drawing a line that separates her “Anglo-Irish” body from those “Irish-Irish” bodies that she is reading closely. She is gazing at her servants, attempting to detect disguise, to see through masks, to define what is underneath or inside the surfaces or exteriors that she sees and confronts – all by just looking at a face. Again, like Strephon in Swift’s poem, Edgeworth is engaged in a kind of clinical investigation,


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a dynamic of seeing, an act, ultimately, of control. The troubling truth of the Irish body – its ability and its disability, its pleasure and its despair, its tulips and its dung – is recognized by a close, careful reading. Then, and only then, can one begin to argue upon the basis of strengths and weaknesses, merits and deficiencies. Thus in the passage from the letter to Fanny Robinson cited above, at base a dynamic is being performed: Maria Edgeworth is the player who operates from a position of power, from a particular somatic or bodily position, and thus in this role performs normalcy; the blackened faces of her servants, blackened indeed by the very materials of labour, are the players who perform abnormalcy. These abnormal bodies apply the dust of coal to their faces and in doing so register on their bodies the abnormalcy that they already experience in broad terms every day in practice. Maria Edgeworth, at this point in her youth, fears this difference, is threatened (in both real and imaginary terms) by it, for she is in a sense both the arbiter and the target of it. In the letter she means to negotiate this complicated role. In these terms, and as with Keats’ typing of the Irish and the Scots, inside Ireland yet another typing takes place in regards to Ireland and Irishness, now between classes of Irish society, between Catholic and Protestant, between Irish, Anglo-Irish, and Old English, between Celts, Saxons, Hibernians, and Celtiberians, and every identity structure imagined in Ireland’s history. In the same letter to Fanny Robinson quoted above, Maria Edgeworth writes the following impressions of the native “Irish peasantry”: “The Irish are perhaps the laziest civilized nation on the face of the Earth; to avoid a moment’s present trouble they will bring on themselves real misfortunes. . . . They live in a hut whose mudbuilt walls can scarcely support their weather-beaten roofs; you may see the children playing before the cabin sans stockings sans every thing.”45 A certain kind of distinct Irishness is being built here and being built as something that will slide easily into abnormalcy, into Keats’ absolute difference and his treatment of the Duchess of Dunghill. For Edgeworth the distinction is between the Anglo-Irish Protestant tradition and the Irish-Irish Catholic formations in the countryside. For this study, the key is that the distinction itself is written through the body, through metaphors of difference that eventually, as the century progresses, bleed into negative disablement and a negative, metaphoric use of impairment.


Edgeworth’s letter on a dirty Irish face can be still further framed within biography. Maria Edgeworth was not born in Ireland, but in Black Bourton, Oxfordshire. As suggested above, in such letters as the one cited above, then, the author is playing with an Irish identity, is, literally, in these discursive moments framing and constructing herself as Anglo-Irish, becoming Anglo-Irish in a sense. The space of this distinction is the tension that defines Edgeworth’s eventual, very functional sense of Anglo-Irishness, and her positioning of the role of Irish writer. As suggested by Kevin Whelan, her job is to build Anglo-Irishness into normalcy; to do this, she must establish that Anglo-Irishness is an exclusive, privileged identity and is not articulated within a corrupted, blackened body. Her job parallels Sydney Owenson’s. The difference is the notion of Ireland itself: Maria Edgeworth is simultaneously located inside a circle of normalcy and outside a circle of normalcy. Unlike Owenson, then, who is always claiming something she does not have, Edgeworth, like Keats, is most concerned about being mistaken for something she is not. It is this real slippage of reality, though, this seemingly required assertion of definitional power that indicates that a disability dynamic is firmly in place. The slippage and necessary claims of a particular identity formation are rooted primarily in the body. In other words, as we have seen and will continue to see, Edgeworth shares with Keats a need to assert control, to claim a certain identity structuring or performance role. This desire has been thoroughly noted by Irish studies scholars; it has been theorized completely in terms of class, gender, historicism, and Empire politics. It has not been read through the dynamics of disability and the motivation to disable – in metaphor – the body. As with Keats, I argue that this role that Edgeworth desires to assume can be articulated as “ability.” When one is cockney or perhaps even when one is midland Anglo-Irish, one is always in danger of losing privilege, and one is in effect run into a social status that parallels disability. It is an engagement and performance of disability; indeed, it works through the same very real material circumstances, through the stuff of the body. The claim of power works in the easiest ways by simply reaching into the material circumstances or the immediate ecology of the place. Keats and Edgeworth can write the place and the body. These complicated identity moves appear throughout Edgeworth’s work, both in the novels and in the non-fiction prose. In the next


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section, as a conclusion to this chapter, I will discuss a novel from Edgeworth’s canon. A specific, more minor example to illustrate the point here is the short preface she writes for Mary Leadbeater’s little known Cottage Dialogues Among the Irish Peasantry. The dynamic of reading prevalent in Edgeworth’s early personal letters is also articulated in Leadbeater’s work, which is a text that functions as a kind of anthropological study of the “quaint,” “semi-barbaric” practices of the native Irish. It is no surprise, then, that Edgeworth writes the preface to it. In her essay, Edgeworth writes the following on Leadbeater’s accuracy and detail: It contains an exact representation of the manner of being of the lower Irish, and a literal transcript of their language. . . . [the conversations in the text are not “productions” but] seem to have passed in real life; the thoughts and feelings are natural, the reflections and reasonings, such as appear to be suggested by passing circumstances, or personal experiences. . . . Prudence and economy, morality and religion, are judiciously and liberally diffused through the whole, without touching upon peculiar tenets, without alarming party prejudice, or offending national pride. . . . If, some centuries hence, an Irish Herculaneum should be discovered, and if some future munificent and enlightened prince were to employ the skill and patience of one of his ingenious subjects to explore Hibernian libraries, this humble volume would perhaps reward his labours better than Grecian manuscripts have yet repaid the laborious researches of our contemporaries.46 In addition to a prediction of a future Irish or Hibernian Studies, these quotes also align, clearly, Leadbeater with Edmund Burke and an Anglo-Irish tradition. To establish both Leadbeater’s Anglo-Irish credentials and moral clarity, in the preface Edgeworth writes: Mrs Leadbeater, the author of this little book, is granddaughter to the first preceptor of Edmund Burke. She has in her possession several letters of that great man, which she at present withholds from the public, from a delicacy that seems overstated; but her motives are certainly honorable; and there are few examples of such scrupulous respect for the feelings of relatives in this age of gossiping anecdote, and epistolary publicity.47


The purpose of Leadbeater’s study is to read the “common Irish.” In doing so, she will articulate a set of practical terms that will determine what “lower Irish” and Anglo-Irish identity structures are and what the purpose is of Protestant Ascendency Irish figures like Swift and Burke, or now Leadbeater and Edgeworth herself. In the preface, then, we can see Edgeworth working hard to frame a certain reading practice – to define the terms through which Leadbeater’s text and her own work are read. What this hard work demonstrates is an anxiety about the AngloIrish body itself. It is a repetition of the dynamics we have seen above. In the text and in its preface or “Advertisement” both writers attempt to set up a dynamic where the Anglo-Irish body and subjectivity are in a normalized position, while the common Irish bodies and minds are in the role of abnormal objects being analyzed. Significantly, according to Leadbeater, some of these objects are in possession of merit and, perhaps, can be folded into a cultural coherence – perhaps they can be normalized.

Writing the Irish body: Lady Delacour’s suffering Belinda is not one of Edgeworth’s Irish novels. The narrative is located in England, all of the characters in the text are members of the English aristocracy, and the story centers itself around the norms of eighteenth-century English domestic life. In the novel a young Belinda Portman is forced to engage the marriage market in London. In this setting, a moral, sound Belinda is initially figured against the wicked, self-interested Mrs Stanhope and then, more compellingly, against the dissipated and utterly corrupted Lady Delacour. Due to her sound morals and good character, through the course of the narrative Belinda eventually befriends a new, excellent mentor in Lady Anne Percival, avoids the numerous traps of Lady Delacour’s friend and possible mentor, Harriet Freke, contributes to the moral reformation of Lady Delacour, and in the end marries the wealthy gentleman, Clarence Hervey. My reading of the text here focuses on Lady Delacour, rather than Belinda herself. Again Lady Delacour is not Irish, is not an Irish body. She is also not the lead character. I have chosen to focus on this character and indeed this novel because the narrative of Lady Delacour replicates in many ways the dynamics and tensions of an Ireland


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in union with Britain. As we saw with The Wild Irish Girl, and as a critical disability studies has asserted through the work of Mitchell and Snyder, Garland Thomson, Davis, Quayson, and others, the figuring of disability often occurs in narrative in minor, more marginal characters. Here, then, the writing of Lady Delacour and the relationship between Lady Delacour and Belinda define how disability is traced into the narrative and then further out into a larger conceptualization of Ireland’s body in English practice. In other words, the novel engages directly the way that negative disability works and how Ireland as a whole is being poured into this category or cultural structure. This novel captures the theoretical slippage noted above, then, and articulates this basic, frustrated tension through a re-tooling, re-writing, and normalizing of the body. Indeed, in theory an Anglo-Irish writer can and should write fewer Irish novels and more works about English domestic life – such a practice articulates real union.48 Belinda is built around Lady Delacour’s disfigured body, her “scarred” breast, which she injures in a duel (where she is dressed as a man). The description of Lady Delacour’s wounding of her breast is described as follows: “I was not used to priming and loading – my pistol was overcharged – when I fired, it recoiled, and I received a blow on my breast, the consequences of which you have seen.”49 In the context of disability in modern Irish culture outlined above, Lady Delacour’s disfigurement situates itself in sweeping allegorical terms. The novel is about domestication and also bodily normalization. Through the kind, moral Belinda, Lady Delacour is transformed. In a larger sense, in Belinda, Maria Edgeworth engages the dynamic of excessive Irishness being ordered by reasonable Englishness: Edgeworth’s narrative brings order to the confusion of Lady Delacour’s body; it “raises tulips from dung.” The narrative parallels the Keatsian encounter, or Horatio’s gaze in The Wild Irish Girl, or, again, Swift’s pastoral and the investigation of Celia. In the work there is articulated an engagement with the body, an articulation of a disability dynamic, a construction of difference that is translated into larger policies and meanings as the relationship between Ireland and England progresses into the nineteenth century. That relationship is built on the problematic dynamics of dirt and beauty, on Herculean bodies that are diseased, and now on aristocratic bodies that are disfigured. The end goal for the Edgeworth narrative is


that the disfigured body of Lady Delacour – a disfigured body that is hidden behind powders, paints, and creams – can in fact be made authentically beautiful again. The larger end goal for Edgeworth’s work is that the corrupted Irish body can also be normalized and made able-bodied again. Thus Lady Delacour is an Irish girl gone wild now being disciplined and trained: metaphorically, in the narrative England trains Ireland yet again. In the context of the Irish body and all of the narratives that are circulating around it at this crucial moment in Irish history (narratives of science, of nationalism, of race, of imperialism, of capitalism), the production of Lady Delacour’s normalization, (again a character defined by monied Englishness, by “wild” behaviors and excess, by physical disfigurement and pollution) equates a serious attempt to situate Ireland and Ireland’s disabled body into an able-bodied status. This kind of move has been noted by critics concerned with Edgeworth’s engagement with issues of race in this novel, as well as Edgeworth’s engagement with issues of gender and domesticity. For example, Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace has argued: Much of Maria Edgeworth’s interest in reforming an indigenous Irish depended on her assumption that they represented an infantilized “body” to be “domesticated” and made safe. . . . To reclaim Lady Delacour is implicitly to argue that all women can have an important place in a domestic order and that every woman, no matter how conflicted in her sense of self, can find a meaningful role in the patriarchal family.50 Significantly, Kowaleski-Wallace connects the bent of the narrative to Edgeworth’s own understanding of her role as an Irish writer: “Belinda’s role approximates the author’s own: at the conclusion both Belinda and the author have labored to ‘shape’ a rehabilitated Lady Delacour who triumphantly assumes her proper role as wife and mother. In short Belinda is not about Belinda.”51 Like Sydney Owenson’s own identity collapse into the character of Glorvina, and like Keats’ unwillingness to become the Duchess, Belinda is a novel of becoming; and in this context, it is an English domestic novel that is about becoming Anglo-Irish, written by an Anglo-Irish writer laboring now to reshape Ireland itself.


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In an Irish disability studies perspective, it is likewise appropriate to say that “Belinda is not about Belinda.” Rather the goal of the work is to reshape Lady Delacour’s body so that it approximates Belinda’s body. Lady Delacour’s corrupted body is connected to her corrupted interior; Lady Delacour’s abnormal, disfigured body must be normalized. Belinda’s body is the normalized, able body of English domesticity and morality. The novel is situated within a larger allegorical context that envelopes everyday existence and social practice in post-union Ireland. Irishness is built to embody disability. Thus, the function of the narrative is to remake the disabled body of Lady Delacour, in the same way that Maria Edgeworth and her father Richard Edgeworth believe that they can remake those native Irish minds through education. The key here is, again, the dynamic of disability: abnormal, disabled bodies (the Irish) must be made into normal, able bodies. The text of Belinda demonstrates these points. For example, the revulsion Belinda feels when she sees and looks upon Lady Delacour’s “ruined” breast in a sense replicates the revulsion Maria Edgeworth sees when she gazes at the faces of those Irish bodies blackened with charcoal dust. The actual passage is as follows: Lady Delacour, whose motions were all precipitate, like those of a person whose mind is in great agitation, looked from side to side of the room, without seeming to know what she was in search of. She then, with a species of fury, wiped the paint from her face, and returning to Belinda, held the candle so as to throw the light upon her livid features. Her eyes were sunk, her cheeks hollow – no trace of youth or beauty remained on her deathlike countenance, which formed a horrid contrast with her gay fantastic dress.52 Lady Delacour then says, “ ‘You are shocked Belinda . . . but as yet you have seen nothing – look here –’ and baring one half of her bosom, she revealed a hideous spectacle.”53 Visual engagements with the body are the constant focus of the text. Innocent Belinda must see the corruption of Lady Delacour. Lady Delacour’s nakedness in front of Belinda, which later that night causes sleeplessness in Belinda because “the face and form of Lady Delacour” haunt her, is likewise a fabulous moment. It causes intense staring. Lady Delacour, whose history is defined by shock,


by severity, by the fabulous postures (like cross-dressing with Harriet Freke), performs another severe act by displaying her aged face and her disfigured breast to Belinda. For Lady Delacour, it is a unveiling moment of Medusa-like power. It is more than that. Elizabeth Grosz has written: “Nakedness is a lure to intimacy and proximity because it invites the other’s care and solicitude. Nakedness is a state of vulnerability, not simply because one is open to the elements, at the mercy of the environment, unprotected, but also because one is prone, more prone than usual, to the affect and the impact of the other.”54 This then is a moment of interdependency, a moment of positive social transformation. Lady Delacour’s nakedness signals a kind of value that is then cultivated as the novel progresses. Unfortunately, in my perspective, the novel does not trip into the interdependency narratives of later nineteenth-century writers like Charlotte Yonge. Instead, the novel represents the matrix of medical and pathological discourse that slowly encircles Lady Delacour. Lady Delacour’s body has provoked a stare and must now be negotiated. Lady Delacour must be defined in certain terms. These terms are again medical and are embedded with the eighteenth-century’s concept of hysteria. For example, in the narrative a doctor is eventually brought in to look at Lady Delacour’s mysterious illness. In his first medical consultation, “Dr X” speaks to Belinda of Lady Delacour’s person: “These high spirits do not seem quite natural. The vivacity of youth and health, miss Portman, always charms me; but this gaiety of Lady Delacour’s does not appear to me that of a sound mind in a sound body.”55 As we have seen before, here one sees the dynamics of the impatient patient, the rational medical man curing the hysterical woman. Metaphorically, science/medicine can be used to define and make Ireland right and normal. And, according to this medical man, Lady Delacour’s exterior difference connects directly to her interior “unsoundness.” This notion of the body and the body’s link to an interior moral character has been an obvious focus in the criticism on this novel. On Lady Delacour’s character Katherine Montwieler has argued: She believes her own body betrays her internal corruption: Lady Delacour assumes she has cancer. But the breast she believes diseased is eventually revealed as healthy. Through Lady Delacour’s


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body that temporarily appears corrupt Edgeworth dispels one of sensibility’s key tenets, “unhealthy soul equals unhealthy body,” or she suggests that Lady Delacour’s dissentious behavior is salutary. . . . the body becomes a metaphor for one’s emotion and intellectual health, the physical manifestation of one’s soul. . . . Lady Delacour . . . must pay for verbal transgressions with bodily pain.56 Likewise, John Mullan has argued: “The woman’s body is the mediator of the truth of sentiment; it is beyond her control yet displays her virtue. It is, we are asked to believe, natural. The moral condition must have its physical embodiment” (113). These critics and others have argued effectively that these dynamics translate directly into an engagement with gender and domesticity in late-eighteenth, early-nineteenth-century British society. My position is that when one reads domesticity alone into Edgeworth’s novel in effect one quietly displaces nationalism, Irishness, and the problematics of the disabled that all also appear in her narrative. In these wider terms, in the terms of disability, Edgeworth’s writing links national character to national body function. My position is that the problematic that Edgeworth falls into is not defined by gender and even nationality alone; instead the tangle is comprised mostly of disability discourse.

4 States of Semiparalysis

Bodies in crisis The previous three chapters of this book engaged the theoretical dynamic of disability in an Irish context and explored, through the development of an Irish disability studies, how such a dynamic allows a critical interweaving of such cultural structures as Irishness, the body, the disabled, and the stare. These chapters also drew attention to certain specific textual examples of the allegorical disablement of Ireland itself, moments where all of the just-mentioned structures work together to locate Ireland as a negatively disabled space and Irishness as a spoiled or troubled identity location. Most of these examples were works from the early nineteenth century written in the decades immediately following the 1800 Act of Union. In this final chapter, I will further this argument by focusing primarily on a now tremendously popular, iconic, increasingly mythic set of figures and events that are first constructed at the very end of the nineteenth century in a poorly written horror narrative by a frustrated London stage manager originating from Dublin’s professional classes. This chapter will engage the representation of the body in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Before I move to the late-Victorian Irish novel and the context within which it was written, I believe it absolutely necessary to consider in this study, even if only for a brief moment, what is arguably one of the most significant events of the Irish body in the modern era, that is An Gorta Mór or the Great Hunger. As an extension of the arguments made previously in this project, and when framed 122

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underneath the overarching terms of disability and representation, the Irish famines of the 1840s demonstrate the workings of the Irish body in crisis. Rather than a crisis in representation and aesthetics for Irish writers, which is what this book concerns, the Irish famines constitute a crisis of interpretation by an audience now in total control of a larger cultural narrative – unknowingly in control of another person’s stories and another people’s communities. The famine is a political crisis that occurs once again within the metaphors of the visual and the intense dynamics of the stare. The events of the famished body in Ireland and then in England function in one frame as opportunities for the British press to stage spectacle and in another frame as an opportunity for the British parliament to further establish and police Irish difference. Simultaneously in yet another frame these events involve those powerful moments of embedded difference, those moments which are constituted by disruption, by the failures in the logics of the gaze, and by the intense dynamics of the stare. The Irish famine confirms for the British (and in many ways for the Irish) that Ireland is a negatively disabled cultural space. Inside the conceptualization of and the policy response to the starving Irish body there is articulated both the basic problem of bodies that push outside of what is normal and the crisis in finding that those abnormal bodies are beyond normalization, beyond being fixed. To again swing back to the issues of representation, then, for writers like Bram Stoker, this is the complicated process that will define the semi-state of disability itself and that will give semicolonial Ireland a disabled status in imperial cultural practice. In order to give this writing focus, I will center my short engagement with the Irish famine on a scene described by Terry Eagleton in his work on Ireland and Irish cultural practice. Eagleton begins his important book, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, with a brief sketch of the life of Branwell Brontë. In this brief sketch he notes the impact of the Irish famine on Liverpool (and indeed suggests that Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is of Irish origin). Eagleton writes, “In August 1845, Branwell took a trip from Haworth to Liverpool. It was the very eve of the Great Famine, and the city was soon to be thronged with its starving victims. By June 1847, according to one historian, three hundred thousand destitute Irish landed in the port.”1 Eagleton then quotes directly the just cited historian,


Winifred Gerin, who writes in her 1971 Emily Brontë of the emaciated Irish bodies pouring into Liverpool in the late 1840s: “Their image, and especially those of the children, were unforgettably depicted in the Illustrated London News – starving scarecrows with a few rags on them and an animal growth of black hair almost obscuring their features.”2 Though the Irish diaspora was already in place, many historians have noted that these moments (moments where hundreds of thousands of Irish bodies washed up onto the shores of Northern England, North America, Western Europe, and beyond) push the Irish diaspora into a new and immense level of functioning. In the nineteenth century Irishness becomes a fully global enterprise, an increasingly cosmopolitan identity built around the discourses of “here” and “there,” of home and away. It is a discourse built around a narrowly defined place called Ireland and a wide, complicated identity called Irishness. In terms of the Irish body, its difference, and its rooting in a geographical space defined by disability discourse, this scene of famished Irish bodies transformed into scarecrows covered in a growth of lanugo hair now pouring into Liverpool indicates two deeply relevant things: (1) the total breakdown that occurred in the famine years between Ireland and English policy makers; and (2) the way that the starved Irish body itself is able to provoke repulsion, which slowly works its way through general national cultural practice in Victorian England (indeed allowing Terry Eagleton to provocatively and convincingly suggest that Emily Brontë’s writing of moody Heathcliff’s “gypsy-like” origins is, perhaps, connected directly to the representations of those Irish bodies escaping from the apocalyptic collapse that was occurring at home). The Act of Union and its failures engendered the set of specific political, economic, agricultural, and social policy failures that led to these starving Irish scarecrows flying into northern England and out into the rest of the world in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. In his book, Famine, Land and Politics: British Government and Irish Society, 1843–50, Peter Gray attempts to capture the extraordinarily intense political, social, and cultural breakdown between Ireland and Britain in the years of the famine. The breakdown was slow and complete. Gray is quick to point out that this fracture point was in fact firmly in place from the start of the United Kingdom in 1800:


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The 1800 Act of Union gave the British parliament and executive direct responsibility for Irish social policy, but the state’s interest in legislative intervention was at first decidedly muted. Only when the Irish economy entered serious difficulties after 1815 was substantial attention directed towards it. The early decades of the Union witnessed an increasing economic divergence between the two countries that by the 1840s had rendered Ireland extremely vulnerable to social disaster. The “Irish problem” had hitherto been constructed primarily as a matter of military security and political control; with growing perceptions of agricultural malaise, proto-industrial collapse and rural over-population, British observers began to search for the roots of Irish instability in the “backward” structure of Irish society.3 For the British in the 1840s, there is an assertion that the problem is not policy as much as it is the facts of the Irish social body – overpopulation, instability, backwardness, and so on. The conclusion to this assertion, then, which I have shown is already in place and indeed the root of the disasters occurring from 1843 to 1850, is that the Irish body itself and the Irishness it houses are different and perhaps beyond normalization. The famine confirms negative disability: policies that work in Scotland and Wales simply do not work in problematic Irish contexts. As with actual policy, in the more abstract theoretical realm, in the first decades of the nineteenth century the movement towards the disasters of the famine was already in place. In their performance in this theoretical realm, that is in their search for “the roots of Irish instability” and their simultaneous establishment of British stability and ability, British theorists, observers, and policy makers often use particular sociological formulas, like those of Thomas Malthus, in addition to the economic policies of Adam Smith, to explain these Irish problems. To again cite Peter Gray: “By 1815 T.R. Malthus’s thesis on the connection of population growth, poverty, and ‘positive checks’ such as famine had entered both the mainstream of economic debate and popular perceptions, and had stimulated argument on his ‘principle of population’ along a number of lines.”4 Within this debate, Irish famine and Irish suffering can be theoretical and explained through abstraction. As we saw in Chapter 3, “despair” read in increasingly utilitarian terms does not equate policies of


intervention, but rather the acceptance of “positive checks” on overpopulation and societal instability. It is this conceptual neglect that led to the basic breakdown and the lack of solution. What the policy breakdown indicated was a larger social posture towards Ireland and Irish bodies. The arguments cited above, the discussions that Owenson, Keats, and Edgeworth all exist within, led to the practice to designate Irish bodies as abnormal and English bodies as normal. In practical terms, then, in the famine years Ireland once again functions as a negatively disabled space – it is not given access and unable to claim any real power in its own development as a participant in the economics of the United Kingdom. Indeed in theory Ireland’s only moments of legitimate engagement in real cultural practice are those moments when Irish bodies are repulsive and, to again refer back to Seamus Deane, “strange.” In those moments, Irish bodies provoke stares from normalized eyes; they can claim a measure of power when they pour en masse into Liverpool or when they are observed by sensitive English travelers on summer walks. In literary and larger cultural practice, in these moments the Irish gothic begins. In these moments the circumstances for the writing of Dracula are put into place. In practice, the Irish body is inserted into normalized practice as an embodiment of abnormalcy and physical difference. In the workings of the United Kingdom, Ireland is a political problem; in the practice of British culture, Ireland is an imaginative space of repulsion, horror, and what is increasingly unnameable.

Visual rhetorics in Dracula, Part I In the Victorian horror narrative of Dracula Bram Stoker engages and attempts to represent Ireland and the Irish body. I believe that Stoker’s popular novel demonstrates the set of political and cultural circumstances driving the representation and external manipulation of Irish society in a fully modernized and therefore fully medicalized Western European culture. In engaging these circumstances, in a popular form of gothic narrative, Stoker describes and then undermines a set of terms that define Ireland in total within the particular discourse of medicine and, more specifically, the state of paralysis or the condition of a resistant semiparalysis.


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The character of Count Dracula, when read through the context of a transformative Irish disability studies discourse, demonstrates exactly how Ireland was constructed and reconstructed as an abnormal, deviant, expendable space at the end of the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century. As pre-modern Ireland is read into modernity, that is as Ireland is fully co-opted into systems of management and social organization (like networks of trains, new, easily accessible roads, large public, English language educational programs, and so on), it comes to occupy the stereotypically negative social space of the disabled or the “defective” body. In the rest of this final chapter, I will demonstrate that Bram Stoker’s narrative attempts to write itself out of these circumstances by, in completely ambivalent terms, always giving into the temptation of a vampire’s eyes. In its structuring of temptation and then its refusal to resist, the novel comes to revalue the disabled, marginalized figure, embodied in cognitively and physically different (and horrible) characters such as the dynamic, malleable body of a Lucy Westerna or the Count himself. Like the novels of Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson, Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula is defined in very large terms by the complicated hybridity of semicolonialism. The novel, which has been called “Ireland’s first postcolonial work of literature,”5 is a unique Irish narrative that simultaneously rehearses for its audience the arguments of fin-de-siècle imperialism while undermining these same such arguments through a complex positioning of the narrative itself. This work, in addition to the author’s own biographical sketch, signals an articulation of a semicolonial Irishness which is linked to a larger disability perspective. To reference a passage from Seamus Deane quoted earlier, in Irish writing a strategy is often to produce “a narrative of strangeness” or “a condition that cannot be repeated at all.”6 The Count’s bodily habits, behaviors, and characteristics, all capture this imagining of such an unnameable status and all narrate a particular somatic positioning of the vampire narrative: the goal of the vampire is to have a particular somatic condition – vampirism – repeated through a population; the goal of the normalized bodies in that population is to prevent this repetition from happening. Reading Irishness through such figurings and through the larger process of locating Ireland in such genres as the Irish Gothic,7 fits into the larger conceptualization of


Ireland itself as a semicolonial or again, in my argument, disabled space. To cite just some of the voluminous amount of research on Dracula, a specific example of this kind of complicated reading of a semicolonial or as he puts it, “metrocolonial,” Ireland applied directly to Stoker’s text is found in Joseph Valente’s work on “the Irish Dracula”8 in Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood (2002). In this work, Valente argues that Dracula is “the objectification of Stoker’s own eccentric (peculiar/decentered) Irishness, a form of identity that both lacks and exceeds coherence or closure and so perpetually both desires and threatens itself” (18). Bram Stoker’s Dracula – and by extension Bram Stoker’s own sense of Irishness – is a dangerous doubled rhetoric, then, that writes through the objectification of a deviant other as it embodies, celebrates, and invokes excessive otherness at the exact same time. Dracula is a narrative of strangeness, a narrative that mirrors or doubles Stoker’s own sense of incoherence and fracture.9 This sense of doubledness is pervasive, and again for many critics has suggested a general sense of aesthetic and thematic collapse in this particular work, in Stoker’s entire canon (like The Jewel of the Seven Stars and Lair of the White Worm), and again in the life of Stoker himself. David Glover’s critique of the novel and of Stoker as an Irish writer, for example, is likewise delivered in this kind of framework: I read Stoker’s work as public and primarily conscious fantasies, narratives that are formally structured and designed for popular consumption, despite the occasional intrusion of recherché elements or references belonging to the author’s individual myth. Indeed, it is essential to see that the anxieties that animate these novels are inextricably bound up with the most deeply rooted dilemmas facing late Victorian culture.10 In this view, Stoker’s fantasies of the vampire, the mummy, and the monster, collapse into larger public anxieties about and considerations of race, gender, sexuality, youth and age, disease and the body, ability and disability, education, capitalist and imperial economics, and all of the issues or “dilemmas” of “modern” life in the empire. This sense of collapse allows a linking of the novel directly to previous cultural and literary structures in Ireland, like the National Tale.


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Thus when considered through all of the contexts described above, this sense of radical textual collapse and of a pervasive “rhetoric of resemblances”11 bleeds (pardon the pun) into a fully aesthetic nervousness or textual construction that is built into a larger nationalized allegory of the body. Critics have noted that Dracula is built on a “geographical doubling,”12 so that Irish landscapes appear in the representations of places like the Eastern Europe that Jonathan Harker describes in his travel diary in the first chapter of the narrative. These critics have persuasively suggested that if, indeed, “Ireland [is] analogous to Transylvania,”13 then one can argue that the novel is a narrative of immigration, an engagement with the problematic of the Irish subject re-locating itself inside of the empire’s center – one again thinks of those famished, animalistic bodies pouring into Liverpool in the years of the Great Famine. The vampire aggressively reverses Harker’s journey outwards from England, then, and journeys himself, by alternate circuitous routes, back into the empire’s pumping, bleeding heart, indeed with the intention of consuming it in total. In writing out the reversal of Harker’s journey, in replicating and transforming the process of it, Dracula reverses the entire pattern of the Irish tour and the National Tale genre. These landscapes in Stoker’s narrative look strikingly similar to those landscapes we saw in Chapter 2 of this study when we considered Sydney Owenson’s national tale, The Wild Irish Girl. Here again is the description of the Prince of Inismore’s castle: Towards the extreme western point of this peninsula, which was wildly romantic beyond all description, arose a vast and grotesque pile of rocks, which at once formed the site and fortifications of the noblest mass of ruins on which my eye ever rested. Grand even in desolation, and magnificent in decay – it was the Castle of Inismore. The setting sun shone brightly on its mouldering turrets, and the waves bathed its rocky basis, reflected on their swelling bosoms the dark outlines of its awful ruins.14 Compare this to Stoker’s description of Dracula’s castle hanging on a cliff in the heart of the Carpathians: Suddenly, I became aware of the fact that the driver was in the act of pulling up the horses in the courtyard of a vast ruined castle,


from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the moonlit sky.15

Once again there is a castle that appears before an English traveler’s eyes; once again the castle is ruined, broken, awful, and jagged. In Stoker’s revision of Owenson’s National Tale, the castle is not bathed in light, but in darkness; it is not the source of Irish warmth in the body of a wild Irish girl, but rather the source of Irish corruption and disintegration in the body of the count. Indeed, Horatio’s dream of Medusa has come true. Thus in his horrific transformation of the genre into a journey out of Ireland and into London, the vampiric Count is the invalid Prince, a body from an old world that seemingly has no value or utility in a new modern world. Again, the same basic dynamics of representation are in play: the castles embody the Prince and the Vampire; their bodies are then repeated through the landscapes upon which they move. The threats are likewise linked: the Prince’s invalided, historicized, Irish body is always potentially embodied within all of Ireland, so that the entire landscape becomes a disabled figure, again his daughter at one point becoming Medusa; in theory the Count’s undead body likewise will be able to transform all of England into an undead space of corruption, an abnormal space of darkness and ruin. As already demonstrated in the discussion of the Prince in Chapter 2, theoretically in its very attempt to engage such notions, and such landscapes, and in its ambition to write on “Irishness,” that is to undermine the negative rendering of those notions and identities, this narrative becomes in part a detailed description or mapping of the structure of the norm. England is the normalized zone. While in The Wild Irish Girl this zone (as the newly constructed United Kingdom) is represented as a place of hopeful political structures, in Dracula it represents a place of technological innovation and new scientific knowledge or explanation. Regions or spaces like Ireland or Eastern Europe or beyond are the abnormal, the exotic, and the strange; indeed, Ireland and Eastern Europe specifically are the liminal places where one begins to leave Europe and to enter the exoticism of “the East,”16 where one encounters “the wildest and least know portions of Europe,”17 where indeed one learns to fear a reversal of imperialism and the likely arrival at home of the exotic,


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the deviant, and the loathsome (and then the disablement of cultural blindness, deafness, and paralysis). This is the real horror of Stoker’s fantasy, which begins with Jonathan Harker’s “Irish tour” of the Carpathians at the start of the text. The real danger is when the pathologized body of the Count reverses the process, rewrites colonization, becomes a traveler and even an “immigrant” himself, and comes to penetrate (at every level) the circle of a nationalized normalcy. When he purchases property in London, walks unnoticed through its public venues, surveys its teeming streets, and even enters (through a bite on the neck) the bodies of its most valued (in terms of sexuality) citizens (namely aristocratic Lucy Westerna and solidly middle classed and deeply prudish Wilhelmina Harker), then the narrative spins incoherently into the threatening intellectual realm of bodily difference, theoretical disability, and the dangerous dynamics of Oscar Wilde’s fabulous severity. In its provocative representations and its vague suggestions, in its strategies of consumption and its unwillingness to be consumed, in its overwhelmingly aggressive articulation of modernity and its sudden and terrifying pushes into atavism and regions of folk or premodern culture, Dracula writes into consciousness all of the tensions of semicolonialism and the compromised, inauthentic semicolonial subject status of “Irishness.” My point here, a point that again intends to further this theoretical framework through a reading of the Irish/disabled body, is that in the larger symbolic framework of the narrative, these complex national ambiguities and cultural positionings are themselves tied directly into the ambiguities of the vampire’s semidisciplined body, into primarily the strange, compromised logic of the undead’s compulsory sleep, a necessitated state of a “semiparalysis.” Through the dynamics of semiparalysis, the physical characteristics of the vampire are collapsed, like everything else in the novel, into a larger explanation of empire and its discontents, a description of Irishness and its unnameable lack or somatic emptiness. *

*

*

Dracula is a narrative built through the rhetorics of gazing and staring. Many of the novel’s signature moments are scenes when a character or more often a group of characters gazes or stares directly


at a body. In that moment, the body is often turned to stone or paralyzed by the gazes from that group of eyes. In turn, often in the same moment, that same body is likewise activated so that power is suddenly reversed and a disruption of the gaze can occur with the provocation of a stare. It is in these moments that Stoker invokes in his narrative a doubled rhetoric of the voyeuristic gaze and the disruptive stare, and as a result it is in these moments that disability and Irish semicolonial identity link together in a textual construction of strange abnormalcy and fabulous difference. When the gaze is performed in Stoker’s narrative, the object of this particular visual rhetoric becomes initially the location of a type of imperialist modernity. The body becomes a surface-level space in the text where those numerous competing discourses of modernity in places like Ireland can be engaged and expressed. In Dracula, the body that is essentialized as abnormal, and thus the body that is disabled into a textual semiparalysis, is in metaphor the Irish body and is, therefore, always indirectly collapsed into a larger set of oppositional discourses. In those carefully staged and highly wrought textual moments of gazing and (then staring), the vampire’s body – either “the Bloofer Lady,” or the semi-vampirized Mina Harker, or the Count himself – is often placed in a semiparalyzed, semi-deviant state, so that all those gazing at the body are able to construct its difference as the ambivalent abnormalcy that signals Irishness. In these moments those eyes possessing normalcy are able to discipline and, eventually, eliminate or transform Irish difference so that it loses both its provocative deviance, and its expression of those contrary discourses of significance: the Bloofer Lady is decapitated and a stake is driven through her heart; the Count is vaporized into nothingness at the conclusion of the novel; Mina is de-vampirized and returned to the amnesia of domestic tranquility and motherhood. In terms of the gaze alone, it is within the intensely theatrical performance of the novel’s moments of looking that the process of negative disablement occurs in Dracula: the narrative works hard to situate or stage deviant bodies so that they are momentarily static and paralyzed, unable to move, unable to escape, and indeed only able to escape through somatic transformation. When they are initially caught in such moments in the narrative, these paralyzed Irish bodies become the locations and embodiments of monstrosity and horror, the platform upon which imperial Englishness is articulated


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and performed. The work of the narrative is to slowly but surely move to that smooth, unknowing gaze possessed by Mina and Jonathan at the novel’s end. The narrative does so by carefully and violently disciplining bodies that are disruptive, that cause stares rather than gazes. The dynamic tension here is that the performance of those bodies that are the objects of the gaze articulates resistance and an unresolved unwillingness to be disciplined. It is in these moments that the gaze and its resulting effects of momentary paralysis are reversed: the normalized gaze is disrupted; the character who looks is forced to stare. For example, there is one of the first signature scenes of the novel, when Jonathan Harker observes the Count climbing out of a window and crawling down the castle wall, head first or face down. Importantly, when the ultra-normal, upwardly mobile, hyperEnglished, steadily middle-classed, and quietly-dressed Jonathan Harker first sees the increasingly exotic and flamboyant Count go out of the window and down the castle wall in “his lizard fashion”18 and thus first becomes truly aware of the Count’s extraordinary bodily or somatic difference, it is Harker who is turned to stone, who is paralyzed for just a moment, as if he had looked at Medusa. The Count has become a lizard, has transformed out of static stability, is no longer “human,” but (as Harker faithfully documents in his “private,” soonto-be “public” journal) is instead actually crawling down the castle wall like a reptile: I saw the whole man slowly emerge from the window and begin to crawl down the castle wall over that dreadful abyss, face down with his cloak spread out around him like great wings. At first I could not believe my eyes. I thought it was some trick of the moonlight, some weird effect of shadow; but I kept looking, and it could be no delusion. I saw the fingers and toes grasp the corners of the stones, worn clear of the mortar by the stress of years, and by thus using every projection and inequality move downwards with considerable speed, just as a lizard moves along a wall. Though he can not believe his eyes, and is for a moment taken back and again shocked into stillness by the image, Harker must “keep looking” at the Count, must really stare at the count, and finally, in his horror at the Count’s performance and transformation into a


lizard-like creature, must ask himself, “What manner of man is this, or what manner of creature is it in the semblance of man?”19 This question is compulsory. It is compulsory because, as suggested a few paragraphs above, this kind of question begins the central process and the tension that the novel constantly invokes: the Count violates the norm and must be re-defined, re-understood, and thus normalized; at the same time, it seems that the Count cannot be defined, understood, or normalized. To control the Count and the threat he embodies, to capture his body and stabilize its difference, to save Mina, Jonathan, and the teeming streets of the metropolis from the contamination that the Count threatens, the difference in the vampire’s body must be diagnosed and cataloged (like Seward’s definition of Renfield’s madness), pathologized and medicalized, must be in some way encircled and controlled by the chief discourse of imperial modernity – medical science. The great nineteenth-century dichotomy of doctor and patient must be articulated, then. The roles are easily assigned – the Eastern-European count, like Ireland, is an unwilling patient, and Van Helsing, Seward, and others are the male, normalized Northern-European doctors/scientists who will give him his normalizing medicine. Mina Harker, the stereotypical middleclassed Victorian female, is like her male companions in her “man’s intelligence” while at the same time possesses a “female” vulnerability (or, according to Elizabeth Grosz, a theoretical nakedness) that is used to ensnare the Count in the end. Cesare Lombroso, Max Nordau, and all of the Victorian scientists of criminology, physiognomy, and degeneration are thus invoked by Stoker through the narrative in yet another articulation of modernity, as the description of an inevitably normalized modern world deepens and deepens, making more and more distinct the pre-modern, abnormal Count, despite all of his fabulous cloaks. The problem is that, as the very first cover of the text demonstrates,20 and as the seemingly out-of-control progression and unfolding of the narrative likewise shows, the Count keeps coming out – as a queer body, as an impaired or extraordinary body, as a lizard-like monster. The Count comes out of the coffin. The Count’s abnormalcy can not be contained or closeted; it can not be made normal. The ever-evolving narrative demonstrates that the Count will always disrupt controlling gazes; he must be stared at, and he always will be stared at; that is his danger. The scene cited above and


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the visual representation of it that appears on the first edition of the text articulate this dynamic in the larger set of metaphoric dimensions and allegorical frameworks being engaged. Harker is England; the Count is Bram Stoker’s incoherent, semi-civilized, semi-paralyzed Ireland. The Irish Count comes out, literally, through the window, and the effect is a stare, a reversal, a momentary semiparalysis for English Harker. Like Wilde in his cello coat, through the Count’s strange and provocative materiality Ireland’s abnormal interior is suddenly articulated and performed, and the result is the disruption of a gaze by invoking a stare. In allegorical terms, the novel moves from a specific articulation of these roles and an easy policing of physical difference (a narrative demonstrating England’s necessary and inevitable control of those “wild” spaces – from geographies to bodies to sexualities) to a more general and complicated engagement with imperial culture written by an author with a complicated, semicolonial subject status. The novel becomes a larger cultural narrative and Count Dracula’s body is, again, a stage that can be used by not only the characters in the text (and the writers/readers of the text) to reinforce normate culture, but also by an Irish disability studies critical perspective. This perspective can theorize and problematize the evident cultural processes of normalization, and in turn redefine Irish studies itself perhaps and write postmodern Ireland out of the semicolonialism of the modern past. In the context of all of these contemporary critical issues, the Count’s body really is what two critics have recently argued: it is “the perfect monster because of the sheer number of anxieties collapsed into his transgressive body and seductive embrace.”21 *

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Later in his private journal, Jonathan Harker, playing the role of normalizing, modern English traveler in an uncanny, profoundly not-quite-English space, comments on the functioning of modernity and on the failure of its ability to police and end “superstition”: “the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill.” David Glover’s sensitive response to this and other similar assertions by Harker at the start of the text is to draw further focus on to the larger dynamics and meanings of the Count’s


body and the popular “horror” novel in the context of modernity and empire: The terror inspired by Count Dracula is a terror of biological difference both masked and free-floating. . . . The vicissitudes of the law and its ethnological and criminological supports suggest a flawed modernity, a modernity still struggling with the powers of the past, even when equipped with phonographs, telegrams, cameras, newspapers, and typewriters, a world of mechanical and electronic reproduction.22 Stoker’s narrative engages this struggle of modern social organization; it attempts to write through the ruptures that haunt a placid, normalized modernity. In this frame, the Count’s body is simultaneously ultra-modern and deeply non-modern. The Count’s body is the embodiment of this kind of constant revision, constant remaking, constant transformation, so that, if nothing else, his body represents an uncertainty in a world that demands certainty and explanation. In other words, the Count’s body possesses an instability that disgusts, fascinates, and repulses, an undeveloped semi-status that is non-modern in its operation (and postmodern in its unraveling). Harker’s job in the first parts of the novel is to diagnose and then articulate this status and this difference. As a legal agent of the empire, brave Jonathan gazes at the extraordinary landscapes, buildings, and bodies of the Count’s Eastern Europe. Through his gaze those spaces and bodies are defined within the logics of British imperial culture. With the help of Van Helsing, Seward, and Goldaming, as the narrative progresses Harker further defines this complex materiality as not so much superstitious, backward, and atavistic, but more as abnormal and deviant, as pathological and as dangerous as a disease. In these terms, the vampire constitutes a dynamic, non-modern threat that will disturb and undo all of the brilliant structures of modernity itself – structures of patriarchal heterosexuality, capitalism and industrialization, technology, the nation, and, of course, normalized ability and a particular set of compulsory bodily practices. Dracula’s difference is subtle; his practices parallel that of disability; his behaviors embody social disability. His body is able to pass, but his body is absolutely different. Later in the novel, Harker uses the


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term “orderly disorder”23 to describe Dracula’s papers at his house in Piccadilly. This phrase captures perfectly the function of the character as a whole. Dracula is a disordering disease within the ordered body. Conceptually, Dracula’s body represents a nonmodernity inside of modernity. His body’s threat is more intellectual than anything: his body equates rupture, disruption, a disorder of Englishness from the inside – a shifting from the ordering gaze to the disordering stare. Harker’s first actual description of the Count’s body is as follows: “I had now an opportunity of observing him, and found him of a very marked physiognomy. His face was a strong – a very strong – aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils; with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples but profusely elsewhere.”24 Not surprisingly, in this early scene, Harker, like the modern ethnographer or phrenologist, conducts a closer and closer analysis of the Count’s face, head, and eventually body, training his fully normalized gaze in acute terms upon the specimen. Within this even tighter investigation, Harker finds yet more physical anomalies, more and more markers of difference: the Count has “peculiarly sharp white teeth,” ears that are “extremely pointed,” hands that are “rather coarse – broad, with squat fingers,” and with “hairs in the centre of the palm” and nails that are “long and fine, and cut to a sharp point”.25 The Count, from a distance, is able to pass, can claim a normalcy of appearance; but it is clear that when the Count is gazed upon, and when the gaze of modernity fully envelopes the Count’s resistant cloaking devices, that deviance and abnormalcy are slowly unveiled and begin to invoke the visual rhetorics of the stare. This stare becomes fully articulated in the very moment the Count does a most extraordinary thing: as discussed above, he jumps out of a window and climbs, head-first, down the smooth side of the castle wall. I would now like to briefly shift the focus here onto one particular non-visual material characteristic of the Count’s body. Harker writes: As the Count leaned over me and his hands touched me, I could not repress a shudder. It may have been his breath was rank, but a horrible feeling of nausea came over me, which, do what I would, I could not conceal. The Count, evidently noticing it, drew back; and with a grim sort of smile, which showed more than he had yet


done of his protuberant teeth, sat himself down again on his own side of the fireplace.26 The Count’s breath stinks. Importantly, this particular somatic characteristic, the stench of the vampire’s breath, indeed the stench of the vampire’s body and his lair, is repeated throughout the text. At the Count’s lair in Carfax Abbey, for example, the primary characteristic is its noxious smells, a “stench,” a “nauseous whiff” of which causes Harker and the others to have an “involuntary shrinking” back from “the loathsome place.” Harker describes the smell in the following way: There was an earthy smell, as of some dry miasma, which came through the fouler air. But as to the odour itself, how shall I describe it? It was not alone that it was composed of all the ills of mortality with the pungent, acrid smell of blood, but seemed as though corruption had become itself corrupt. Faugh! it sickens me to think of it. Every breath exhaled by that monster seemed to have clung to the place and intensified its loathsomeness.27 And again later in the novel, the house in Piccadilly likewise stinks, which is an indicator for Harker, Goldaming, and then the others that Dracula has been there: “ ‘The place smells so vilely’ said the latter [Lord Godalming] as we came in. It did indeed smell vilely – like the old chapel at Carfax – and with our previous experience it was plain to us that the Count had been using the place pretty freely.”28 This characterization or feature of the Count’s body is crucial in Harker’s and eventually the others’ treatment of it and engagement with it. The Count’s body – the smell of this body – makes Jonathan Harker shudder and repulses Lord Goldaming. Again, in practice the Count’s breath and other odors are markers or traces of the abnormal body’s presence and its function. In theory, then, the odor of the Count’s breath matches the smells of Celia’s chamber pot in Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room.” The odor engenders a shudder, which like a stare, is a moment that openly activates for the reader the dynamics of exclusion and, simultaneously, a resistance to exclusion; the shudder is a performance of modernized normalcy when it encounters the failures of its own aesthetics of normalization.


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In other words, the vampire’s breath embodies the “unnatural” traces of deviance or physical difference itself – the exterior body functions as a hieroglyphic of a deeper, internal, hidden abnormalcy. The logic of the novel is this: the Count exhales his inside; poor Jonathan inhales, and the essence of the Count penetrates Harker’s body; and of course that corrupted essence stinks. What the Count’s breath signals in this moment is that inside of this passably ordered, modern body is a disordered, monstrous interiority – a corruption. When Harker watches the Count climb down a smooth castle wall, or when he smells the Count’s breath, it is a moment when the Count is totally unveiled, and the truth of his corruption, this fabulous difference, is made evident. *

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The Vampire’s filthy body and stinky breath connect to a semicolonial Irishness; they also connect to the dynamics of disability. Bram Stoker’s Dracula articulates a particular kind of identity location within the framework of disability and thus offers a specific critical perspective – a disabled perspective of Irish culture. When an Irish disability studies is applied to Stoker’s text there unfolds a critique of the entire process of normalization. Further, when the novel is directly implicated in the larger reading of Ireland and meanings assigned to Irishness, then a specific kind of social condition and cultural performance, what I will define as a condition of semiparalysis, suddenly emerges. Through somatic characteristics alone – through the body’s sights and the body’s smells – the Count’s materiality is in part a critical assertion and a progenitor of an Irish disability studies. Importantly, the dangers and the disruptive potentialities driving Bram Stoker’s 1897 narrative are not simply the transformative characteristics and sickening bodily differences of the Count. They are not just this character’s ability to change from a seemingly normal body into a lizard climbing down a wall or a bat clamoring at the window; they are not just this character’s bad breath or the narrative’s overhanging feature of noxious smells, blood, putrefaction, and horror. All of these textual elements locate the narrative in a particular literary and cultural tradition; all of them certainly contribute to a disabled perspective of culture. But they are not, necessarily, the primary indicators of a disability studies perspective.


The real danger that the text negotiates, the real crime that the text will punish (and also celebrate), and the real indication of an Irish disability studies is the free oscillation of power, the dynamics of the stare, and the often blurred distinctions between gazing and staring presented at the core of this novel of the Gothic body. In the narrative, the dynamics of looking, gazing, and staring move back and forth along a whole spectrum of the visual, so that in the narrative one is able to objectify a body and make it different (thereby excluding it) through a gaze, and simultaneously one is always in danger of being turned to stone by that same body looking back (the “normalized” characters in the novel all fear the eyes of the vampire). Powerful characters in the novel always gaze at others; resistant or severely embodied characters in the novel are always stared at by others. The novel is built, in very mechanical terms, on these dynamics. The terms of articulation here actually define an assertive critical perspective engaged with representations of physical difference: when Jonathan Harker sees the Count climbing down the castle wall in a “lizard fashion,” it is a narrative of a reversal of power, a movement from a gaze to a stare. The staging of it in the narrative indicates a larger intention, indeed a moment close to Wilde’s wearing of his cello coat and Audre Lorde’s army of one-breasted women. Another example of this dynamic is the pornographic and visually orientated presentation of Lucy Westerna’s sexuality. The construction of Lucy’s character is tied directly into the highly charged writing of the body’s eyes and the author’s and the reader’s eyes. In her first letter to Mina Murray, Lucy describes the bodies of the three suitors at her home. She then writes about the way that one of them, Dr John Seward, looks at people and indeed the way that Lucy likewise now looks at herself in a mirror: He seems absolutely imperturbable. I can fancy what a wonderful power he must have over his patients. He has a curious habit of looking one straight in the face, as if trying to read one’s thoughts. He tries this on very much with me, but I flatter myself he has got a tough nut to crack. I know that from my glass. Do you ever try to read your own face? I do, and I can tell you it is not a bad study, and gives you more trouble than you can well fancy if you have never tried it.29


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Lucy describes here a negotiation of penetration. Seward’s “power” “over his patients” is the discursive made visual, is the ability to look into a face and read its thought. This power is acquired through a manly science of physiognomy. Through his training and his practice at an insane asylum, Seward is able to penetrate one’s face with his eyes, to probe through the exterior and to read the truth of an interior. This power to penetrate is again tied into the eyes, into an intense “look” or gaze. Simultaneously, Seward’s own face, wearing that manly mask of science, has a power or ability to be “imperturbable.” Perhaps the better word is impenetrable. Seward is in possession of a power, a privilege, that in everyday practice will protect him from the dangers of those bodies that likewise penetrate, and that can provoke stares. Seward is the English physician; like Harker, and like Keats and Horatio before him, Seward is in practice an unknowing agent of the empire and the possessor of the male, normalized, now scientificized gaze. It is a gaze that, in the logics of empire, can not be disturbed or disrupted. But it is both disturbed and disrupted by Lucy Westerna. Lucy’s response to this dynamic, to Seward’s reading of her face, is not passive, but fabulous and severe. In her description to Mina, Lucy notes that she is herself practicing the penetration dynamics of gazing. Indeed, she is presenting those dynamics to Mina in the letter, reading her own body through the gaze of the others, and asking Mina, indirectly, to gaze at her, at Lucy’s body as well. Lucy co-opts the entire dynamic, then, looking in the glass in private and then predicting and performing the sight of her own body in another’s eyes. Like Irish Oscar Wilde’s performances of Englishness, Lucy Westerna is learning how to perform the scientific gaze, how to operate within it, and how eventually to disrupt it. In the same letter, for example, Lucy then applies the gaze onto overly prudish Wilhemina Murray’s body and articulates the same normalized male desire/reading practice of desiring the exotic, abnormalized female body: “I wish I were with you, dear, sitting by the fire undressing, as we used to sit; and I would try to tell you what I feel. I do not know how I am even writing this to you. I am afraid to stop, or I should tear up the letter, and I don’t want to stop, for I do so want to tell you all.”30 Seward’s gaze, his attempted penetration of Lucy’s face and his reading of her thoughts, has now been


incorporated and applied upon Mina: Lucy desires to be with Mina, unveiling and “undressing” herself – both her body and her mind – so that, in turn, Lucy can “tell” Mina how she feels. Lucy is learning how to control being gazed at. She is learning how to use the gaze to then express her own desires within it, so that she can redefine it further in her own terms and in her own interests. Indeed, she reports in this letter that she has practiced privately in front of a mirror; she now wishes to practice further with childhood friend, Mina Murray. This kind of co-opting of a visual rhetoric and the visualized dynamics of desire is repeated over and over by Lucy through the first half of the text, in all of Lucy’s letters. Lucy’s danger to the suitors and to the readers is her emerging, uncontrollable ability to reverse dynamics and take possession of aggression while maintaining a normed role of passivity. In another letter, for example, Lucy famously and dangerously writes: “I know now what I would do if I were a man and wanted to make a girl love me.”31 In effect, in Victorian-era culture Lucy has co-opted a male perspective here – as Mina will do later – and she has done so dangerously, because it is couched in male heterosexuality and simultaneously in samesex desire: Lucy now knows how to “make a girl love me,” and the audience for her letter is, indeed, a “girl,” a young, unmarried, Mina Murray. In the same letter to Mina, then, when she describes a marriage proposal from the American Quincy Morris, Lucy baldly articulates a sexualized desire. The articulation of desire is normalized for males, but for females in the Victorian era it often is represented as hysteria or madness, as abnormalcy. Lucy’s desire is indeed that which Stoker’s nightmarish text will punish her for later in a lurid scene that serves as a horrific metaphoric gang rape. Lucy writes: “Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?” Significantly, the very next lines in this passage read, “But this is heresy, and I must not say it. I am glad to say that, though I was crying, I was able to look into Mr. Morris’s brave eyes.”32 In the midst of a desire outside of parameters of acceptability and normal female behavior, it is Quincy Morris’ “brave eyes” that locate stability and certainty. Morris’ eyes contain within them what is normal, and Morris’ eyes have the normalized ability, a power to look upon her disordered body and find order and organization in it. Like Seward’s “habit of looking,” Morris’ eyes are again able to normalize Lucy, to


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bring forth “tulips from dung,” and through them Lucy can again do what Stoker’s vampires always do for at least awhile: she “passes” as normal. At the same time, by looking into Morris’ “brave eyes” Lucy is able to literally reverse the normalized ritual of penetration by repenetrating – by looking herself into Morris’ interior. At this moment she passes, her deviance unrecognized, her body’s status maintained. In terms of sexuality and gender, Lucy’s moments of passing have been noted in critical assessments of the text. For example, Marjorie Howes has famously written that, “Lucy’s seemingly inappropriate sexual desire is expressed in a series of retractions and corrections of her expression of heterosexual desire.”33 Lucy’s progression through the text is a slow building of an inability to pass, to ease assertions that can not be contained. When her transgressions finally exceed her own control, Lucy is punished. In these same terms, Charles Prescott and Grace Giorgio have written the following on Dracula, and on Mina’s character in relation to Lucy: Stoker’s vampire story, especially its lurid description of Lucy’s staking, shows what can happen to a woman who transgresses strict gender codes, but just as important is the way Mina attempts to re-constitute her normality in reaction to this discipline. Mina Harker, the proper woman with the man’s intelligence, is actually the most dangerous nascent vampire in the text because what makes her an exceptionally proper woman is also what links her to the vampire.34 These same critics likewise comment on the way Van Helsing gazes or “reads” Lucy Westerna’s body: “Besides reading Lucy’s letters to Mina, Van Helsing reads her body as well, a part of his quest to identify the ‘true nature’ of the vampire. Lucy’s condition, the newest example of Dracula’s circle of corruption, must speak the simple truth of vampirism with every word and motion; the quest of the novel is to recognize these stigmata and exterminate the threat.”35 In my reading, the goal of the novel is a universal, modernized version of ability, and an elimination of physical difference or disability – even in its theoretical terms. Thus, when viewed from an Irish disability studies perspective, it is clear that theoretically Lucy Westerna’s body performs visible physical difference and thus


engages directly the dynamics of stereotype, colonialism, and the negative embodiment of deviance: Lucy’s body is both fabulous and severe, aggressive and, in the end, violent. She is always passing and then coming out; indeed this dynamic and the realization of violent assertion or crime and equally violent discipline and punishment shapes Lucy’s narrative’s touching on Mina Murray/Mina Harker’s narrative. Unlike Lucy, Mina as a more “proper woman” may simply be better at passing. As mentioned above, both Lucy Westerna and Mina Murray have Irish names. Both characters are written by an Irish writer who actually exploits his Irishness.36 The novel is Irish. Thus in theory the vampirizing of Lucy Westerna aligns the vampire’s deviant body with the disabled body and with the Irishness of the vampire Lucy herself. These structures are all clustered into a single alignment, all folded into an abnormal materiality that troubles deeply and aggressively a normalized center. As the narrative progresses, and as Lucy is fully corrupted, fully abnormalized, her position changes and she becomes overtly disruptive, invoking stares rather than co-opting gazes. For a brief moment as the Bloofer Lady, she can claim power as an “Irish girl gone wild” or a Medusa character. She can turn those staring at her into stone: The beautiful colour became livid, the eyes seemed to throw out sparks of hell-fire, the brows were wrinkled as though the folds of the flesh were the coils of Medusa’s snakes, and the lovely, bloodstained mouth grew to an open square, as in the passion masks of the Greeks and Japanese. If ever a face meant death – if looks could kill – we saw it at that moment.37 Lucy, now transformed into the Bloofer Lady/Medusa, has become an Irish girl gone very, very wild; in this single moment, Lucy possesses the power of looking, of looking back, of throwing sparks with her eyes, of turning others to stone. She is openly in possession of power, no longer passing, but an active disruption provoking stares: she is, in effect, a gorgon wearing a cello coat; she has become an aggressively, fabulously cripped body. And of course in the compulsory, able-bodied logic of the Empire there must be the enforcement of normalcy and Lucy must be disciplined and punished. The world has been confused; it must be


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ordered again. Thus the men, “Little England,” as Valente names them, find a highly sexualized Lucy in her coffin, which initially causes them to stare and shudder: When he again lifted the lid off Lucy’s coffin we all looked – Arthur trembling like an aspen – and saw that the body lay there in all its death-beauty. . . . She seemed like a nightmare of Lucy as she lay there; the pointed teeth, the bloodstained, voluptuous mouth – which it made one shudder to see – the whole carnal and unspiritual appearance, seeming like a devilish mockery of Lucy’s sweet purity.38 And the men perform their role; they articulate power and control through a form of penetration; they execute Lucy with a stake: Arthur placed the point over the heart, and as I looked I could see its dint in the white flesh. Then he struck with all his might. . . . The Thing in the coffin writhed; a hideous, blood-curdling screech came from the opened red lips. The body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions; the sharp white teeth champed together till the lips were cut, and the mouth was smeared with a crimson foam . . . But Arthur never faltered. He looked like a figure of Thor as his untrembling arm rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake, whilst the blood from the pierced heart welled and spurted up around it.39 In this highly charged, sexualized dynamic, a dynamic that is working on the levels of metaphor and allegory, a wild Irish girl is sexually assaulted and destroyed. Glorvina has become Lucy, and Lucy has transformed into an openly wild Irish figure who is executed by the most aristocratic and, perhaps, the most English of the men of “Little England.”

Visual rhetorics in Dracula, Part II It is within this dynamic of the visual and of visual penetration that Dracula simultaneously engages the disabled body and Irishness. The core trick to Bram Stoker’s extraordinary tale of horror is what


happens when the increasingly nervous object captured by the seemingly stabilizing gaze defiantly looks back, reaches out of its imposed paralysis and static objectification, and thus invokes the deeper and deeper horror registered again and again on all of the now staring faces. The larger tension that continues to surround the reading of this narrative is provoked by this trick and the compulsive need by normalized cultures to stage it over and over and over again. As Lucy Westerna’s vampirized body is defined by a sudden, dangerous ability and active sexuality – a reaching out of the dynamics of the passively feminized, the negatively disabled, the hysterically abnormal – Count Dracula’s body is also a body defined by destabilization and excessive anxiety, a body indeed always shifting into different forms, becoming young, old, a bat, a hound, and so on. Dracula’s body is positioned so that he is in direct opposition to the stable, static paralysis invoked above in a normative gaze. The vampire’s body is semiparalyzed; the vampire’s body is undead; the vampire’s body is disabled. Thus I argue that the Count’s body is a register of the excessive, uncontrollable anxiety that can disturb and fracture the monolithic structure of modernity, the certain and easy dichotomies of British imperialism, the truth of statistical norms, the logic of cause and effect, and the normative culture that is built around those norms and those logics. Again, when Dracula’s body is lying in a coffin it is semiparalyzed; when it is moving about the streets of living London it is undead; when it is functioning on the level of metaphor and allegory, it is semicolonial. The textual examples of these states are numerous. In terms of materiality and the norms of the body’s functions, in the span of twenty-four hours, Dracula’s strange body will move, provokingly, from ability to disability, from a passable norm to extreme abnormalcy. His body is closeted in a coffin, but only for part of the day; his body is seemingly frozen, dead, in a vampire’s sleep, but it awakens, is remarkably animated and transformative, becoming a mist, a bat, and so on; his body is of the Carpathian Mountains, the soil of Eastern Europe,40 of a far flung region at the edge of empire and only reached by the legal agents of imperial culture, but yet that body comes back home and indeed owns a part of “home,” of the empire, by buying property in London itself. Dracula’s body is an extraordinary, wonderful paradox defined by “unnatural” laws. The job of Van Helsing and the others is to define


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both what this body is and how it is “unnatural” and something that must be destroyed. After listing the Count’s transformative powers, his super-strength, and so on, Van Helsing details the Count’s specific impairments: He can do all these things, yet he is not free. Nay; he is even more prisoner than the slave of the galley, than the madman in his cell. He cannot go where he lists; he who is not of nature has yet to obey some of nature’s laws – why we know not. . . . His power ceases, as does that of all evil things, at the coming of the day. Only at certain times can he have limited freedom. If he be not at the place whither he is bound, he can only change himself at noon or at exact sunrise or sunset. According to Van Helsing, other functional impairments for the vampire include his inability to pass over running water at any other point other than “the slack or flood of the tide” and his lack of mobility and power when confronted with garlic, the crucifix, and a “branch of wild rose.” Likewise, another important feature of the vampire’s unnatural, undead body is the way it must be killed or “made dead.” Van Helsing explains that they must fire “a sacred bullet . . . into the coffin” so that “he be true dead”; Van Helsing then notes “and as for the stake through him, we know already of its peace; or the cut-off head that giveth rest. We have seen it with our own eyes.”41 The theoretical functionality of both semiparalysis and the rhetoric of the stare come together in Jonathan Harker’s first direct encounter with the Count in the daylight. This encounter occurs when Harker is trying desperately to find a means to escape the castle. Harker finds himself in the bowels of the Castle, in what appears to him as “a ruined chapel” which, not surprisingly, had been “used as a graveyard,” and through which “came a deathly, sickly odour,” which is in the text as we saw earlier a material trace of the vampire/disabled body. The scene is then described as follows: There, in one of the great boxes, of which there were fifty in all, on a pile of newly dug earth, lay the Count! He was either dead or asleep, I could not say which – for the eyes were open and stony, but without the glassiness of death – and the cheeks had


the warmth of life through all their pallor; the lips were as red as ever. But there was no sign of movement, no pulse, no breath, no beating of the heart. Here, indeterminacy is embodied; here, a conflicted subject-status is made material; here, the exterior and the interior are collapsed and made visible in a single dead and undead body, its eyes wide open, its heart apparently not beating. At this moment the corpse, the material for forensic examination, the absolutely stable object of the normalized scientific gaze, is in possession of an unnameable, animated presence, is horrifyingly able to disrupt the gaze and invoke the stare. In Harker’s searches of the Count’s prostrate, frozen, paralysed body for the keys to the Castle, he describes the Count’s face again: “I thought he might have the keys on him, but when I went to search I saw the dead eyes, and in them, dead though they were, such a look of hate though unconscious of me or my presence, that I fled the place.”42 The monster, in his frozen state, looks back. Harker’s response is the horror invoked by the Count’s semiparalysis, a paralysis that is not certain, a body that is extraordinary, a disability that is disruptive. Eventually, the next morning, Harker returns and is forced to look upon the Count lying in the coffin again: I knew I must reach the body for the key, so I raised the lid, and laid it back against the wall; and then I saw something which filled my very soul with horror. There lay the Count, but looking as if his youth had been half renewed, for the white hair and moustache were changed to dark iron-grey; the cheeks were fuller, and the white skin was redder than ever, for on the lips were gouts of fresh blood, which trickled from the corners of the mouth and ran over the chin and the neck. Even the deep, burning eyes seemed set amongst swollen flesh, for the lids and pouches underneath were bloated. It seemed as if the whole awful creature were simply gorged with blood. He lay like a filthy leech, exhausted with his repletion. I shuddered as I bent over to touch him, and every sense in me revolted at the contact; but I had to search, or I was lost. . . . I felt all over the body, but no sign could I find of the key. Then I stopped and looked at the Count. There was a mocking smile on the bloated face which seemed to drive me mad. . . . A terrible desire


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came upon me to rid the world of such a monster. There was no lethal weapon at hand, but I seized a shovel which the workmen had been using to fill the cases, and lifting it high, struck, with the edge downward, at the hateful face.43 In the coffin the Count has transformed. He is now younger, fuller, gorged. As Harker sees the body he stops and looks closely. The look transforms into a stare. The Count wears a mocking expression; not only is the transformed body a “filthy leech,” it is an active body, a body that is, indeed, in the very moment of easy observation, doing something. The body before Harker is not paralyzed in total; it is not static and stable underneath Harker’s normalized gaze. The Count’s body is simply disabled, is simply fabulous. And his body engenders the stare, and then, importantly, an urge to kill. This is severe disability and must be euthanized; the Count must be put out of his misery for the sake of others and for the sake of himself. Looking at the Count, Harker experiences absolute terror and “absolute despair.” As the passage goes on, he grabs and then swings a shovel. As he does so, the Count moves: But as I did so the head turned, and the eyes fell full upon me, with all their blaze of basilisk horror. The sight seemed to paralyse me, and the shovel turned in my hand and glanced from the face, merely making a deep gash above the forehead. The shovel fell from my hand across the box, and as I pulled it away the flange of the blade caught the edge of the lid which fell over again, and hid the horrid thing from my sight.44 As Harker swings the shovel at the Count’s face, there is a moment of reversal. The power of the Count’s eyes falls full on Harker and Harker, in an instant, is turned into stone. The semiparalyzed Count, the disabled body, paralyzes Harker. In my positioning of this text, the passage just cited is arguably the most important moment in the novel. All of the dynamics of this study are in play. The Count will wear the mark, the gash on his forehead, throughout the rest of the text.45 The scar on his forehead is yet another visible marker of the Count’s difference, another exterior manifestation of the Count’s interior corruption. The larger marker of this difference, though, is the state of semiparalysis itself, that


major requirement of the vampire’s body. Thus one of the tensions that define and drive the text is the fear, a fear possessed mostly by both middle-classed Jonathan and Mina Harker (who will also wear a mark on her forehead), of becoming “paralyzed,” a fear of becoming imprisoned (like the clerk Renfield) forever and made “undead” within such a rhetorical category – a category that, again, collapses Irishness and disability together. These moments are the rhetorical focus points of the text, points where such cognitive and physical difference is defined, an argument is made, abnormalcy and negative disablement occur. I should note that in very specific critical terms, the use of paralysis here in Stoker’s text constitutes in itself a full-blown articulation of the negative stereotypes that often define representations of disability and physical difference. As Robert McRuer (in his discussion of As Good As It Gets), John Nguyet Erni (in his work on AIDS and representation), and many other accounts of disability/crip identity have noted, a trope of ableist narrative is to treat disabled bodies, especially “severely” disabled bodies, as being already dead, as embodiments of material deterioration. In contemporary, international cultural practice, one could argue that the disabled body is still undead, is still in a sense vampirized. In Stoker’s Irish text, the sleeping vampire body, the deviant body rendered motionless and paralyzed by the light of day, is the narrative prosthesis that eventually allows the full articulation of English normalcy to occur. The semiparalyzed body becomes the larger metaphor that dominates the text, the place where such deviance is located, where the problem, an Irish problem, is located and solved. Van Helsing and the rest of the men of Little England eventually trap the Count and his fabulous body. Eventually, the Count himself is eliminated and the world is made normal again.

Conclusion: States of Paralysis, a Sketch

To be average in Ireland is to be eccentric. (Ellmann, James Joyce) In the last chapter I outlined the visual rhetorics and resulting constructions of semiparalysis in Bram Stoker’s Victorian horror novel Dracula. As a conclusion to this book I will suggest that the modernist writer James Joyce also engages the same intensely allegorical representation of Irish physical difference in his early short-story collection, Dubliners. In Dubliners Joyce unfolds the disabled body in modern Irish culture, transforms it completely into a metaphoric vehicle of political commentary so that it becomes the location of cross-cultural interconnection and a kind of potential newness or way out of the binaries of paralysis and volition, or disability and ability. Joyce builds these representations on the work and the cultural produce from over 100 years of an Irish history officially in union with Britain. Though I will only be able to just begin to touch on it here in this sketch, I believe that in his work James Joyce attempts to shift and finally succeeds in shifting the representation of the Irish body into something outside of that binary of Irishness and Englishness, or abnormalcy and normalcy, or disability and ability, and, again, into something remarkable, extraordinary, and entirely new or beyond those seemingly inescapable binaries organizing modernity. In other words, rather than remaining uneasily within the location of “the abnormal” in a binary of the norm and its opposites, in Joyce’s diagnosis of Irish culture, the disabled/Irish body goes “lame” in total. It does not push against abnormalcy but rather allows 151


the designation of abnormalcy to accelerate and to be, seemingly, complete. In doing so, I assert that Joyce begins to crack open and indeed dissolve the Irish somatic and Irish identity itself – like Gabriel Conroy’s identity at the end of the last story in the collection, “The Dead,” Irishness itself, and all of its markers of distinction or difference are obliterated by the falling snow of James Joyce’s tightly controlled language. This move will lead to the cosmopolitan revisioning of identity in Ulysses and, especially in Finnegans Wake, to the celebration of the very linguistic incoherence that Seamus Deane notes as being problematic in his compelling definition of Irish strangeness in the nineteenth century. In these later works from Joyce the binary of the normal and the abnormal, the able and the disabled, will completely collapse and the excesses of a real globalization – in experience and in language – will begin. It should be emphasized again that Joyce makes his diagnosis of Ireland and his fellow Dubliners with the nightmares of an Irish nineteenth century behind him – the works of Anglo-Irish writers like Maria Edgeworth, the political events of union, famine, and constant military intervention, the issues of Catholic emancipation, the national dynamics of the Abbey Theatre, and the emergence of both Oscar Wilde and William Butler Yeats all inform Joyce’s writing of these short stories and his intentions for them. In a larger sense, all of these complicated cultural positionings and dynamics inform Joyce in his development as an artist and in his understanding of the artist in modern Ireland and in the modern world. I will note that within this much studied development there should also be included the limited medical training that Joyce received in Paris as well as his own numerous bodily issues and a growing visual impairment. From the beginning stages of his writing career, Joyce was hyper-sensitive to the body and the body’s place in cultural practice. This sensitivity would only deepen with his own blindness and with his daughter Lucia’s eventual mental illness. With these specific cultural and biographical issues in mind, it makes sense to begin the final stage of this book on disability and Ireland with at least some historical and critical context of Joyce’s 1914 short story collection, Dubliners. No matter what the particular theoretical framework may be, James Joyce’s Dubliners has almost always been understood on some level – textual or otherwise – as a

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representation of paralysis. Joyce himself is the first to diagnose this textual condition and set up this critical paradigm in the reading of the collection as a whole. According to Joyce in the character of Stephen Daedalus (Joyce’s pen name in The Irish Homestead, where he published the first stories in 1904) Dublin is a “centre of paralysis.”1 Likewise, in Joyce’s letter to Constantine Curran in 1904, a letter in which he first proposes and describes a collection of short stories called Dubliners, he writes, “I call the series Dubliners to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider the city.”2 There are numerous other examples of Joyce framing Dublin and Dubliners in these terms as well. One of these is found in a letter to Grant Richards, this time in 1906, where Joyce writes: “My intention was to write a chapter in the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the center of paralysis.”3 Significantly, in an earlier essay, “A Portrait of the Artist,” Joyce describes the artist in general as working “amid the general paralysis of an insane society.”4 And finally, in a moment of frustration Joyce comments in a letter to his brother Stanislaus that, Dublin “is suffering from a hemiplegia of will. I’m not afraid to live.”5 The basis of my argument here is that in Dubliners Joyce articulates a condition of being caught in a bind of negative political representation. In a very broad sense, his collection of short stories is an attempt to articulate the suffering of colonized Dublin and to demonstrate the direct effects of cultural imperialism and exploitative economic policies – all of which contribute to “the nightmare of history” from which the same Stephen Dedalaus in Ulysses (on 16 June 1904) is “trying to awake.” James Joyce the artist is making a critical argument with his collection. He is performing the role of the Professor of Aesthetics, the same role that Oscar Wilde performed in his spectacle of musical Irishness on 1 May 1877. Rather than witty, wicked, often stunningly beautiful stage performances, Joyce creates the opposite here – the 1914 collection of sparse, mean, tremendously painful stories that are all set upon the nightmarish landscape of Dublin, a city that has itself been emptied and that can not move. In doing so, Joyce is attempting to make an argument, to diagnose the paralysis of Dublin and to trace it back, carefully, to its origin. That origin is the imposition of English administration and the personal failures


and misreadings of Irish citizens again like Gabriel Conroy in “The Dead.” To make this argument, to articulate this colonial/semicolonial/ postcolonial perspective, Joyce uses the allegorical representations of paralysis. These kinds of representations, and their negative import, are already built into an early-twentieth century Irish culture now soaked through with both disability and nationalistic discourse. Joyce uses paralysis as a way to express a larger political resistance that is linked, cautiously, to the nationalism of the moment. Again, the realism of Dubliners – the grim, linguistic impoverishment for which the stories are famous – is in this perspective an indication of the text’s larger critical purpose. For example, in somewhat defensive language, Joyce writes on Dubliners: “It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass.”6 Like Lucy Westerna’s mirror in Dracula, the mirror in which she practices both looking at herself and resisting the gazes upon the body, the polished looking-glass of Dubliners is both a staging area for the looks and the stares of others as well as a way to begin to resist those rhetorics. Reading Dubliners equates “a good look” into a mirror; writing Dubliners likewise includes a “good look” into the mirror. Behind this moment of both writing and reading is a belief that the look in itself – a look that may become a stare – will lead to transformation in the end. It is, quite simply, a leap of faith. But as Joyce will discover later, the use of disability in Dubliners is more of a demonstration of looking into the “cracked looking glass of a servant,” more of a self-diagnosis of an Irish body that desires to embody Ireland’s ills, than an epiphany and a visionary remaking of Ireland and, in turn, Britain, Europe, and the rest of the world. At this point, though, by driving Dublin, Ireland, and Irish identity in total into a representation of paralysis, Joyce is in a sense able to avoid any kind of claim of normalcy. And in doing this alone he is able to disturb the binary of abnormal and normal, disabled and abled, Irish and English. Put simply, then, more than either Stephen Hero or Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners is the early step towards the radical transformations that will be articulated in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

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With the role of the artist and the mirror in mind, I should note that according to Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland, Ireland’s progression, and perhaps now its contemporary, vital state of economic exhilaration and/or exhaustion, is indeed due to the work of the artist, to the ability of the artist to provide “honest” mirrors: “The debt we owe to the artist is that he impels us to address moral issues honestly while offering imaginative insights into the human condition. It is hard to imagine what progress would be possible without the efforts of the artist who liberates us from cant and paralysis” (qtd. in Beja, xviii). The artist “liberates” the body from paralysis – animates the body, awakens it from its lifeless condition. The artist as critic performs the role of the physician for the Irish patient. The Dubliners in Joyce’s short-story collection are patients, are all in one way or another ill. With the work of art, the artist is healing these Dubliners, liberating them from the paralysis that retards civilization. Joyce’s job, then, is Glorvina’s job from The Wild Irish Girl: he will be Ireland’s healing physician and he will deliver the country and the culture from pain. Like Mary Robinson, many critics have taken Joyce for his word here and have read Dubliners in the terms of paralysis and the resistant artist attempting to animate the paralyzed body so that it may be healthy again. These critics have followed Joyce, then, in his insertion or, as perhaps he would argue, mirroring of paralysis into a modern configuration and representation of Ireland. The health of the body equates the health of the state: Ireland is unhealthy; Ireland is paralyzed. A critical example of this reading is “Counterparts” by David Lloyd: “This spare and desolate story, together with many others in Dubliners, is bitterly diagnostic of the paralysis of Irish men in colonial Ireland, of their alienation and anomie which, so often, is counterpointed by drinking.”7 And likewise, there is this larger point on Dublin, modernity, and paralysis by Luke Gibbons: It is this failure to fully interiorize paralysis as an ailment of the individual which accounts for its functioning as a “culturalsomatic,” and not just a psycho-somatic, condition in Ireland. These links between the public and the private survive in the endangered traces of unofficial street or public culture, and it is perhaps from this recalcitrant border zone that Joyce launched his own powerful raids on the inarticulate. Notwithstanding the jingle


in Ulysses, more than Plumtree’s Potted Meat is required to make home complete, or “an abode of bliss,” in the emotional void of Joyce’s Dublin.8 Colonial Ireland is a “spare” and “desolate” place of “isolation,” “drinking,” and “paralysis”; Dublin is an “emotional void,” a reflection of a “cultural-somatic” condition of a deepening interior “paralysis.” Joyce’s work, in representing this condition, and in making everyone – including the Irish themselves – gaze into “his nicely polished looking glass” will be a cause to stare and will, as a result, a cause of the re-animation of Ireland and the Irish themselves. I think these critics are absolutely correct in their analyses. My contestation is with the use of this base metaphor of paralysis in the building of these readings. The issue here is the surface-level use of the metaphor of paralysis in Dubliners, and the way writers and critics who follow imagine Ireland within this framework and then position Ireland within a particular set of meanings or theoretical positionings. Those meanings and positionings themselves need to be theorized, as I think Joyce himself does explicitly later in his career and more implicitly in these stories. When it is theorized, this particular critical location of Joyce becomes very complicated, then, because of the foundational stereotype that drives the actual images of the paralyzed Dubliners forward. To again bring in the work on disability and narrative, Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell describe the complication of this particular kind of disability representation as: “This double-edged formulation [that] makes literature both a utilitarian tool of transformation and a medium for further stigmatizing disability in the imaginations of its audience.”9 Dubliners fits perhaps a little too well with the second part of Mitchell and Snyder’s point. Paralysis is in effect further stigmatized in reading and rereading the stories exclusively through this image: a critical tradition is built and a stereotype is put firmly into place. My point is that it seems that instead we should question the image itself – and indeed that is the function of an Irish disability studies. As noted above, I believe that Joyce does question this metaphor, and my assertion is that, in doing so, in writing paralysis so completely and so tightly – centering it in Dubliners by saying that Dublin is the center of it – in the work Joyce is able to push through the

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image itself, through the utilitarian use of stigma and indeed through the kind of representation such stigma invokes, into a larger critical reach. On a surface level, Joyce seems to fall into the negative mode of representing Irish difference within the framework outlined and organized in the pages above: even though Joyce treats the disabled body – the bodies of the Dubliners – as a space victimized by discourses beyond its control, a body to be gazed at, that treatment literally articulates and participates in the negative reading of Ireland that has been developed by the British reading of its own empire. At this textual and readerly level, in documenting this relationship, Joyce is reinforcing the reality or “nightmare” from which he is trying to escape/change/awake. Simultaneously, though it is perhaps barely articulated, I believe that the push of the image, the constant use of it, draws out the concept of Irish difference and lifts the participants in the text – the writer, the reader, the context – up and through the binaries of English and Irish, able and disabled, animated and paralyzed and into the realm of Joycean epiphany. Numerous examples from the stories articulate this tension inherent in the frozen Irish body. There is, for example, the “peculiar case,” which is unnameable in the first story of the collection, “Sisters.” This first story concerns the relationship between a boy and an elderly priest, named Father Flynn, who has been relieved of his duties because of a mental breakdown, which centered on the breaking of a chalice. In the story the boy is troubled by his relationship with the priest. Mostly, he is troubled by the priest’s illness and death, and what has happened to the priest’s body. The voice of the child defines the unnameable strangeness of the priest’s dying body in one sentence: “I softly said to myself the word paralysis.” This word, the word “paralysis,” sounds “strangely” to the boy – it fills him with “fear” while yet he desires to see “its deadly work.”10 And then there is also the story “Eveline.” In the story the young woman named Eveline must choose between running away to South America with a sailor named Frank and staying at home, in Ireland, to take care of her father. Eveline is seemingly unable to make this choice, and, at the crucial moment, she is indeed unable to move. Again, just two lines from the sparse story allow this reading to begin: “She gripped with both hands at the iron railing. . . . It was impossible. Her hands clutched the iron in frenzy.” Eventually, Eveline becomes


“passive,” becomes “like a helpless animal,” her eyes emptied out, giving “no sign of love or farewell or recognition.”11 Over and over again, from the physical to the emotional, the image of paralysis is repeated, is reworked into the stories and the larger fabric of the collection itself. Indeed, as alluded to above, the very last image of the collection repeats these images. Gabriel Conroy turns “sleepily” to the window, his “identity . . . fading out into the grey impalpable world.” He watches the snow fall, and as he does so Ireland as a whole has come to embody the paralyzed grayness of the undead, the living dead, the state of paralysis. Ireland has become a living body that is buried in the snow. As Gabriel “watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight,” the snow becomes “general all over Ireland.” This, in turn, transforms into snow “falling faintly,” over everything, “upon all the living and the dead.” Ireland is buried in obliterating snow that destroys all detail; Ireland is semi-paralyzed, is frozen into stillness, unable to really move. The unique individual, Gabriel himself, is nothing but a mist caught in a larger material framework – a framework where the material of his body and mind – that desire that for Gabriel has led to book reviews, to cycling in Belgium, to Gretta herself – is leveled into simple abnormalcy, into being on the wrong side of an oppressive binary, which in turn equates a profound nothingness, an emptiness that means the exact same thing in all of Ireland, the east and the west, the Bog of Allen and “mutinous waves of the River Shannon,” again, “the living and the dead.” Vincent Cheng reads Gabriel’s final waking moments in similar terms, except through the lens of gender and then, ultimately, a postcolonial sensibility: Gabriel’s self-conscious willingness finally to grant Gretta a private space of her own, in which she can be her own emotional subject, inscribes a possible alternative by which to break free from the culturally-encoded male pattern prescribed by his mental framing of his wife as an aestheticized painting; . . . Gabriel’s final vision of the falling snow which “was general all over Ireland” attempts to break down the barriers of difference constructed by the patriarchal ego he is so deeply (if unconsciously) implicated in.

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Cheng believes that Gabriel’s epiphany, his perhaps reluctant and certainly problematic willingness to acknowledge Gretta’s own privacy: allows for the acceptance of others as subjects, breaking down the unified self into a consciousness of a shared or collective subjectivity, allowing the walls of the ego to dissolve and for identities to mix in a vision, however momentary or melodramatic on Gabriel’s part, of uncompartmentalized, non-hierarchical falling, equally and non-preferentially, over everyone, living and dead, usurper and usurped.12 I argue that these stories of paralysis equate the states of paralysis – complete paralysis. It is in this completeness that the shift begins. In Gabriel’s mind it is a moment of “non-hierarchical falling,” a moment of recognition. In my argument it is a moment of breaking: a regulatory binary snaps apart and a fabulous, severe body begins to emerge.

Notes Introduction 1 See Roy Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (New York: Allen Lane, 1988) as well as the framework of “modern Irish culture” constructed in works like The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture (Joe Cleary and Claire Connolly, Cambridge University Press, 2005). 2 See Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell, “Exploring Foundations: Languages of Disability, Identity, and Culture” (Disability Studies Quarterly 17:4 (1997): 241–7). 3 See Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press and Cork University Press, 1996), 3. 4 See David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Postcolonial Movement (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993).

1


1 This study does not take into account nineteenth- and early-twentieth century writing in Irish language. Likewise, as noted in the Introduction, in this work I define “modern” in the terms found in Roy Foster’s Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (New York: Allen Lane, 1988); I use the larger framework of “modern Irish culture” constructed in works like The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture (Joe Cleary and Claire Connolly, Cambridge University Press, 2005). 2 In the first pages of The Citizen’s Body: Desire, Health, and the Social in Victorian England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007), Pamela Gilbert outlines the notions of the social body and the citizen in Victorian England. I use this work to oppose the problematic and incomplete possession of citizenship to Ireland’s “total subject” status, which suggests a lack of practical citizenship. 3 I believe that these structures themselves still shape the current practices of postmodern Irish studies as a whole in contemporary academic institutions and institutional practices – including the development of degree and certificate programs in Irish studies, the construction of course profiles in Irish language, culture, and history, the establishment and function of numerous scholarly organizations, the presentation of regional, national, and international conferences, the actual conduction of scholarship, and the writing of criticism and theory. This starts with Matthew Arnold’s establishment of the Chair of Celtic Literature at Oxford. Again, I will demonstrate in this book that theoretically these institutional structures are consumed by a framework of disability – that is, a set of interpretive 160

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discourses built through the dynamics of what Michel Foucault describes as biopower and used to read, define, negotiate, and ultimately marginalize bodies with physical and cognitive differences or deviations from the norm. 4 The specific term, which will be defined and discussed in the following pages, comes from Foucault’s History of Sexuality. In this work, Foucault writes, in a rather lengthy passage: During the classical period, there was a rapid development of various disciplines . . . there was also the emergence, in the field of political practices and economic observation, of the problems of birthrate, longevity, public health, housing, and migration. Hence there was an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations, marking the beginning of the era of ‘bio-power.’ . . . The bio-power was without question an indispensible element in the development of capitalism; the latter would not have been possible with the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes. (140–1) Foucault continues, arguing that hierarchal societal institutions, like the law and the police, the family, the army and the school, developed to enforce and reinforce the growth of biopower and the biopolitical instrument. He writes, If one can apply the term bio-history to the pressures through which the movements of life and the processes of history interfere with one another, one would have to speak of bio-power to designate what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life. . . . It is no longer a matter of bringing death into play in the field of sovereignty, but of distributing the living in the domain of value and utility. Such power has to qualify, measure, appraise, and hierarchize, rather than display itself in its murderous splendor; . . . I do not mean to say that the law fades into the background or that institutions of justice tend to disappear, but rather that the law operates more and more as a norm, and that the judicial institution is increasingly incorporated into a continuum of apparatuses (medical, administrative, and so on) whose functions are for the most part regulatory. A normalizing society is the historical outcome of a technology of power centered on life. (143–4) 5 I will demonstrate in this book as a whole, and specifically in Chapter 2, that the contemporary definition of disability is enmeshed within the dissemination and critique of the binary between what is normal and what is not. It appears that the notion of disability emerges in modern culture

162 Notes

6 7

8 9

10

11 12

in part as a catch-all term tied to the discourses of labor, industry, and the medical sciences. In the postwar theorization of these discourses there develops an awareness of the negative social processes involved in organizing physical difference through such terms and dichotomous structures. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues in her work on gender, these structures constitute “a chronic, now endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition, indicatively male, dating from the end of the nineteenth century” (1). Disability in these terms is read by contemporary scholars as something “constructed on top of impairment” (Corker 3); disability is “not so much the lack of a sense or the presence of a physical or mental impairment as it is the reception and construction of that difference” (Davis Bending 50); disability is “a linchpin in a complex web of social ideals, institutional structures, and government policies” (Linton 10). In turn, the current or “New Disability Studies” is “a system for interpreting and disciplining bodily variations” and the “relationship between bodies and their environments,” an analysis of the “set of practices that produce both the able-bodied and the disabled,” and, ultimately, “a radical critique” of the “set of practices that produce both the able-bodied and the disabled” (Garland Thomson, “Making Freaks,” 132); disability studies grounded in humanistic or cultural methodologies is likewise something that allows a “biocultural approach” to occur, a method of analysis that uses a “culturebased way of knowing” to understand “the scientificized and medicalized body in history, culture, and politics” (Davis, “Stumped,” 91). See Davis, “Stumped,” 50. For a working definition of this term, see Susan Martinelli-Fernandez, “Abortion, Autonomy, and Quality of Life: Polyphonic Narratives and Kantism” (Teacing Ethics: A Journal for Educators 2005). See Davis, “Stumped,” 91–2. See Claire Connolly, “Postcolonial Ireland: Posing the Question,” European Journal of English Studies (2003): 255–61; Theorizing Ireland (Basingstoke: Palgrave – now Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 7. Wilde’s name is itself an embodiment of Irish myth and history. According to Wilde (who at one point wanted to be known simply as “The Oscar”), to his parents, and to other contemporary accounts and more recent biographies, “Oscar Fingal O’fflahertie Wills” refers to the Fianna, a group of mythological Irish warriors, to the Ossian cycle, and to the group of chieftains that controlled far western Ireland, and that Sir William Wilde, Oscar’s father, was fascinated with. Though while in Ireland the Wilde family often felt more English than Irish, they were still Irish: William Wilde was born in Roscommon, was educated in Dublin at the Royal College of Surgeons, and ran a hospital in Dublin; Lady Jane Wilde was born in Dublin and was connected intimately with the nationalist movement, writing nationalist and anti-British poetry under the pseudonym of Speranza. See Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Vintage, 1987), 78–9. Ibid., 79.

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13 During and after his imprisonment, Wilde was surrounded by impairment issues. These included Constance Lloyd’s fall down the stairs and resulting paralysis. 14 Wilde’s anxiety about his body is well documented. 15 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Ed. Isobel Murray. Oxford English Novels (Oxford University Press, 1974), 25. 16 See Lennard Davis, “Constructing Normalcy: The Bell Curve, The Novel, and the Invention of the Disabled Body in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Disability Studies Reader. Ed. Lennard J. Davis. (New York: Routledge, 1997.) 17 See Martha Stoddard Holmes, Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004) and Sondra Archimedes, Gendered Pathologies: The Female Body and Biomedical Discourse in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (London: Routledge, 2005). Also see Pamela Gilbert, Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Mapping the Victorian Social Body (New York: SUNY Press, 2004); and The Citizen’s Body (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007). 18 See Gilbert, Citizen’s Body, 8. 19 Ibid., 9. 20 The rhetoric anticipating this hope is often passionate and tied directly to an emerging civil rights movement. See, for example, J.S. Mill, On Liberty; in Utilitarianism, On Liberty, Considerations on Representative Government. Ed. Geraint Williams (London: J.M. Dent, 1993). 21 See Martha Stoddard Holmes, Victorian Afflictions; Peter Gray, Famine, Land, and Politics: British Government and Irish Society, 1843–50 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999); and Maria Frawley, Invalidism and Identity in Nineteenth Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 22 See Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). Kiberd cites Wilde telling Bernard Shaw that their work was a part of the Irish Renaissance, and, in humor, that they were a part of the “Celtic School” (Kiberd 47; Wilde, Selected Letters, 112). 23 I will define these terms in the next chapter. 24 See Kiberd, 36. 25 In this way, Wilde’s thinking on Ireland pushes past his mother’s nationalism and nationalist poetry. 26 See Kiberd, 48–9. 27 Alan, Warner, Guide to Anglo-Irish Literature (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1981) p. 5. Cited in Jarlath Killeen, The Faiths of Oscar Wilde: Catholicism, Folklore and Ireland (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 9. 28 Richard Pine, The Thief of Reason: Oscar Wilde and Modern Ireland (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1995), 1. Qtd. in Kileen, 11. 29 Kiberd, 37–8. 30 Ibid., 47. 31 I apologize for the long quotations here, but I do think that they are necessary to the argument being worked out in these pages.

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32 See Tony Kushner, “Forward: Notes toward a Theater of the Fabulous.” Staging Lives: An Anthology of Contemporary Gay Theater. Ed. John M. Clum (Boulder: Westview, 1996), vii. Qtd. in Robert McRuer, “Compulsory AbleBodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence.” Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. Eds. Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland Thomson (New York: MLA, 2002), 96. 33 McRuer, “Compulsory,” 96. 34 This usage of the term “cripped” and the kind of culture articulated in that term can be found in the work of such activists as Marta Russell and Mary Johnson, and such publications as The Disability Rag and the website, Ragged Edge Online. 35 From National Observer; 6, April 1895; qtd. in H. Montgomery Hyde, Famous Trials: Oscar Wilde (New York: Penguin, 1962), 156. 36 According to Richard Ellmann, earlier Wilde famously experimented with dress in Genoa and later in Wilde’s tour of the United States Wilde would feature additions to his costume, like hose and shoes. 37 See McRuer, “Compulsory,” 88–9. 38 This language comes from Caroline Lamb’s famous line about Lord Byron – “Beware,” because Byron is “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” 39 See Rosemarie Garland Thomson, “The Politics of Staring: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography.” Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. Eds. Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland Thomson (New York: MLA, 2002), 56–7. 40 See Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 12. 41 Please see the following examples of critical texts on “freakery” and “monstrosity” in American and British cultures: Leslie Fielder, Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (New York: Anchor Books, 1993) and Paul Youngquist, Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). Please also see Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Staring: How We Look (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 42 See Lennard Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (London: Verso, 1995). As mentioned above, in the next chapter I will outline a more detailed history of the norm. 43 For a more comprehensive, intelligent, and classic treatment of the assertions I make here see Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (New York: Wesleyan, 1985). 44 Lns 1–3. 45 This domesticity has been defined by Michael Mckeon and other critics as an Enlightenment, “old-style patriarchy” built around notions of “patriarchal prerogative,” strict hierarchy and authority, and the “exercise of force” or physical coercion if necessary, all to control the shadowy and irrational “essences” of feminine behavior. See Mckeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). See also Elizabeth KowaleskiWallace, Their Fathers’ Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

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46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

Lns 11–68. Lns 70–82. See Norman Brown, 31. Lns 89–94. Ln 98. Lns 110–18. Lns 11–122. Lns 141–3; italics mine. William Cohen, “Deep Skin” in Thinking the Limits of the Body. Eds. Jefferey Jerome Cohen and Gail Weiss (New York: State University of New York Press, 2003), 63. 55 This normalization process can be in part defined through Judith Butler’s famous passage in Gender Trouble: Judith Butler has famously written: The figure of the interior soul understood as ‘within’ the body is signified through its inscription on the body, even though its primary mode of signification is through its very absence, its potent invisibility. The effect of structuring inner space is produced through the signification of a body as a vital and sacred enclosure. The soul is precisely what the body lacks; hence the body presents itself as a signifying lack. That lack which is the body signifies the soul as that which cannot show. In this sense, then, the soul is a surface signification that contests and displaces the inner/outer distinction itself, a figure of interior psychic space inscribed on the body as a social signification that perpetually renounces itself as such. (Gender Trouble, 40) 56 See Norman O. Brown. 57 I should note that in the 1754 edition of Swift’s poems, the poem that immediately follows “The Lady’s Dressing Room” is “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going To Bed.” In that poem the same dynamic is replayed: the poem catalogs a young “nymph” named Corinna going to bed and, in doing so, unmasking herself, her exterior, so that the ugly interior is suddenly articulated. 58 See Ato Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 15. 59 The Irish Writer has become an interpretive cultural category unto itself. See Declan Kiberd, The Irish Writer and the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 60 See Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 5. 61 Ibid., 3. 62 I should note that Ato Quayson’s reading of Mitchell and Snyder is complicated. He quotes Mitchell and Snyder’s definition of the term “narrative prosthesis”: “Our notion of narrative prosthesis evolves out of this specific recognition: a narrative issues to resolve or correct . . . a deviance marked as improper to a social context. . . . Narratives turn signs of cultural deviance

166 Notes

into textually marked bodies” (Narrative Prosthesis 53–4; qtd in Quayson 26). Quayson argues that his notion of “narrative prosthesis” differs in the following way: Again, their method is defined by an assumption of narrative pragmatism or instrumentalism; that is to say, the literary text aims solely to resolve or correct deviance that is thought to be improper to a social context. Unlike them, I will be trying to show that this prostheticizing function is bound to fail, not because of the difficulties in erasing the effects of disability in the real world, but because the aesthetic domain itself is short-circuited upon the encounter with disability. . . . I want to stress that as linguistic creations, the disabled in literature may trade a series of features with the nondisabled, thus transferring some of their significance to nondisabled and vice versa”. (26–7) This is aesthetic nervousness. 63 See Erin O’Conner, Raw Material: Producing Pathology in Victorian Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). 64 David Mitchell “Narrative Prosthesis and the Materiality of Metaphor.” Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. Eds. Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland Thompson (New York: MLA, 2002), 100–8. 65 Filson Young, Ireland at the Crossroads: An Essay in Explanation. 1903 (London: E. Grant Richards, 1907), 15–16. 66 Luke Gibbons, “ ‘Have you no homes to go to?’: Joyce and the Politics of Paralysis.” Semicolonial Joyce. Eds. Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 150–71, 151. 67 Ibid., 152.

2

Irish Girl Gone Wild 1 The 1800 Act of Union, which was in reality two separate acts passed first in 1800 in the British and then in 1801 in Irish parliaments, merged the “Kingdom of Ireland” and the “Kingdom of Great Britain,” to create the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. 2 Practical political definitions are important here; imperial contexts are equally significant. For example, Christine Kinealy, in an essay on the Irish famine, writes of the emergence of the United Kingdom as a political structure: “The United Kingdom had been created as a consequence of the Act of Union of 1800 when Irish politicians had been persuaded . . . to vote the parliament in Dublin out of existence and instead to send representatives to Westminster” (48). 3 See Maria Frawley, Invalidism and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 32. 4 I assert that in On the Study of Celtic Literature Matthew Arnold argues this same basic point – he famously wants to “infuse” Celtic spirituality

Notes

5 6 7

8 9 10

11

12 13 14 15

16

17 18 19

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or “the Celtic genius” into English or “Saxon” rationality. See Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature (New York: Bibliolife, 2008; 1867). See Lennard Davis, “Normalcy,” 9–10. Ibid., 13. See Lennard Davis, “Nation, Class, and Physical Minorities” in Beyond the Binary: Reconstructing Cultural Identity in a Multicultural Context, Ed. Timothy B. Powell (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 18. In the practices of modern British imperialism, “disability” is constructed as negative inability and dangerous difference. It is often embodied by configurations – in maps, in writing, and in images – of colonized geographical regions like the subcontinent of India, or Africa, or Asia, or North America. As very recent work in postcolonial disability studies has demonstrated, colonial subjects and disabled identity structures are linked together in the conceptual workings and ideological development of Empire. See Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Old Tappan, NJ: Prentice Hall 1963). See Gilbert, Citizen’s Body, 9. Among other discursive and cultural artifacts, this is evidenced by the fact that, again, the OED dates the first appearance of the word “abnormal” in 1835 (specifically in an anatomical encyclopedia), by the Anatomy Act of 1832 (which allowed licensed physicians to use the corpses of prisoners for anatomical study), and by the slow erosion through the 18th century of such complicated, traditionally gendered social practices as Midwifery (which, combined with all of the factors above, signified the rise of a set of male-dominated, scientific, medicalized discourses and arguably the beginnings of the larger medical industry as we now know it today). See Homi K. Bhabha, “DisseminNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation.” Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), 154–5. Qtd. in Morris Kaplan, Sodom on the Thames: Sex, Love, and Scandal in Wilde Times (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 245. See Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press and Cork University Press, 1996), 20. See Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing Since 1790. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 146. See Kevin Whelan, “Writing Ireland: Reading England” in Ireland in the Nineteenth Century: Regional Identity, Eds. Leon Litvack and Glenn Hooper (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000) 189. I will note here that it is significant that, historically, even Sydney Owenson’s name lacks stability, and indicates a kind of “incoherence” and “fecklessness.” For example, see Ina Ferris, The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Mitchell and Snyder, Prosthesis, 53. Roy Foster, “The Lovely Magic of Its Dawn: Reading Irish History as a Story” The Times Literary Supplement (16, December 1994): 4.

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20 In this same theoretical context, though in admittedly much more problematic terms, Fredric Jameson argues that in general the narratives of colonial and postcolonial cultures are formally structured as “political allegories.” In his review of several novels coming from cultures historically enmeshed within imperialist designs, Jameson asserts that in these narratives “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society.” In a larger sense, Jameson further suggests that there is a distinct difference in subjectivity as it is constructed in what he defines as “first-world” capitalistic cultures and “third-world” non-capitalistic cultures. This difference is evident in everyday life: “one of the determinants of capitalist culture . . . is a radical split between the private and the public, between the poetic and the political, between what we have come to think of as the domain of sexuality and the unconscious and that of the public world of classes, of the economic, and of secular political power: in other words, Freud versus Marx” (69). According to Jameson, in “third-world” cultures, and in the narratives they produce, this split between the private interior and the public exterior is simply not articulated. Significantly, the collapse of those characteristically first-world structures – an interiority somehow separate from the body’s material exterior – is evident within the literary and other kinds of perceptual artifacts of the particular colonized culture under analysis, again within the narratives that that culture itself produces. 21 See David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Movement (Dublin: Lilliput Press; Durham: Duke University Press, 1993) elsewhere, in Ireland After History, Lloyd writes that “non-modern” languages, like Irish Gaelic, are “neither modern nor traditional, developed nor backward, but . . . occupy a space that is uncapturable by any such conceptual couples. The non-modern is the name for such a set of spaces that emerge out of kilter with modernity but none the less in a dynamic relationship to it” (2). 22 This persistent notion of partnership in tension-wrought Irish and English political relations is perhaps best demonstrated by Eamon De Valera’s notion of “external association,” a 1921 proposal that “meant that Ireland would retain a position extant to the Empire, as its citizens would become Irish citizens as opposed to British subjects and Ireland would maintain sovereignty in domestic affairs; however, it would be associated with Britain in external affairs. Ireland was both in and simultaneously out of the British Empire” (Flannery 449). 23 Michael de Nie, The Eternal Paddy: Irish Identity and the British Press, 1798– 1882 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 22. 24 It is generally understood that this term comes from Marxist theoretical application and originates in the Trotskyist movement in the early twentieth century. The term is intended to define a country or region that is dominated and controlled by another country or region despite its own official independence.

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25 I will note that this includes Joyce studies and Beckett studies, as well as Irish studies in general. And I will note that this mode of critical approach is still controversial and complicated. 26 Howes and Attridge, Semicolonial Joyce, 7. 27 Ibid., 5. 28 Ibid., 8. 29 The actual definition of minority discourse, as presented by Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd in the preface to The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse, allows my more formulaic assertion here to be made: By “minority discourse,” we mean a theoretical articulation of the political and cultural structures that connect different minority cultures in their subjugation and opposition to dominant culture. This definition is based on the principle that minority groups, despite all of the diversity and specificity of their cultures, share the common experience of domination and exclusion by the majority. The common experience does not induce any kind of homogenization, but it does provide the grounds for a certain thinking in solidarity across the boundaries of different identities – which, as often as not, are imposed rather than autonomously constructed. (ix)

30

31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

JanMohamed and Lloyd argue that minority discourse creates a solidarity of separate, marginalized communities, because the cultural structures that create such marginalization, such discursive communities, are in a way treated and understood as universal, as are the minorities who, across the board, despite real diversity and large gulfs of difference, suffer the same imposition of negative stereotype. My suggestion here is that the novels of Owenson and Edgeworth are in a sense articulations of this formulation of minority discourse. Further, the articulation is defined by this use of a particular form, that is allegory. Alvin Jackson, “Ireland, Union, and the Empire,” in Ireland and the British Empire, ed. Kevin Kenney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 123. See Charles Maturin, The Wild Irish Boy (London: D&G Bruce, 1808). See Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 10. See Ferris, 11. Ibid., 18. Deane, Strange, 17–18. See Ferris, “Narrating National Encounter,” 290. See Connolly, “Media Event,” 107. Whelan, 194. See Luke Gibbons, Edmund Burke and Ireland, 39. Owenson, 47. Ibid., 48.

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42 See Frawley, 13. 43 See Owenson, 40–1. 44 In his work, Paul Youngquist links together concepts of monstrosity, romanticism, and the deviant body. He writes: “In its earliest uses, ‘abnormal’ denotes monstrosity, deviation from a corporeal norm. That anatomy provides the precedent for this meaning suggests that medicine, at the historical moment of its emergence as a distinct institutional and professional practice, produces and enforces a cultural norm of human embodiment. Monstrosities offer medicine a material occasion for such operations” (Youngquist xi). 45 See Owenson, 44. 46 Ibid., 14. 47 See Bhabha, Location of Culture, 111. 48 Ferris, Romantic Tale, 56. 49 Quayson, 8. 50 Owenson, 60. 51 See Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Literature and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 52 Davis, “Nude,” 55. 53 Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 9.

3


1 Andrew Motion, Keats (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 279. 2 Keats, Letters, 119–20. 3 See, for example, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, Cultural Locations of Disability (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006). 4 Keats, Letters, 37. 5 See Jerrold Hoggle, “The Gothic-Romantic Relationship: Underground Histories in ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’,” European Romantic Review, 14 (June 2003), 205–23. 6 As St Paul tells us, and Thomas Hardy confirms, “The letter killeth.” 7 See William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads . . . 8 Keats, Letters, 157. 9 Ibid., 127. 10 Ibid., 119. 11 Ibid., 127. 12 Ibid., 126–7. 13 DeNie, 6; DeNie quotes, L.P. Curtis, Apes and Angels, pg 21. 14 I want to emphasize again that for Keats the walk was an exploratory mission to find beauty and art: he believes that his walk/tour will lead to his finding “poetry” in the landscapes. 15 See Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 157. 16 See Jerome J. McGann, Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).

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17 Keats, Letters, 119. 18 See Jeffery N. Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and Their Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Donald C. Goellnicht, The Poet-Physician: Keats and Medical Science (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984); Nicholas Roe, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). 19 Motion, 280. 20 See Percy Bysshe, Shelley, A Defence of Poetry in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977). 21 Roe, 187. 22 Ibid., 20. 23 Ibid., 191. 24 I should note that Cox and Roe do have subtly different postures on the political Keats. For Cox it is Keats’s association with the Cockney School of Poetry that ties him into a larger, politically active “countercultural movement”: The very things that bothered the Cockney School’s critics – its attacks upon the government and organized religion, its celebration of sexuality, its very status as a coterie – identify it as a countercultural movement, rejecting established authority, embracing eroticism rather than violence as a means for revolutionizing life, and offering in its own communal organization a model for a society remade. (61) Here Keats stands as a full-fledged member of this radically expansive cultural movement. The implications are significant: Keats, in this light, is inherently active, embodying movement and all of its action rather than passivity and victimization; like Shelley, Keats is read as a figure who goes against the mainstream of culture and class, and is, therefore, resistant, volitional, a kind of Promethean voice in the wilderness. In his suburban association with both Hunt and Shelley, as well as Reynolds, Haydon, and the other “cockney” artists of the Hampstead set, Keats is understood to embrace postures of defiance, alternative modes of living and such, rather than, like Southey and the later Wordsworth, writing and working towards the perpetuation of the ever-increasingly repressive establishment and status-quo. 25 In 1812, after leaving Oxford, Shelly went to Ireland with his new wife Harriet Westbrook to fight for the “welfare of general man” (qtd. in Holmes 116; Shelley, Letters I No. 165, 249). 26 Arguably, within the traditions of modern literary criticism, John Keats has always in a sense been understood in the stereotypical terms associated with physical difference, physical illness, and what we now define as visible disability. This is the current mode, for example, of Amy Leal, who writes of Keats’ poetry being an “autobiography of his body” and who is working on the actual physical causes of Keats’ somewhat mysterious death (b15–b16). It is also from this theoretical perspective that one

172 Notes

can locate, strangely enough, Keats in the extremely positive, idealistic political posture that Jerrold Hogle has recently argued: I now see Keatsian Romanticism as very much a part of, though not uncritically conscripted by, a distinctive social and political movement, counter-Wordsworthian as well as more widely counterestablishment, that, for want of a better name, can most aptly be called ‘the Cockney-School’ under Leigh Hunt’s leadership, after the pejorative label applied to it first in 1818 by some of Hunt’s reactionary opponents in the periodical press. (208)

27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

And indeed, it is this same line of criticism through which one can attempt to rework Keats into yet another critical framework (and thus “disability” and “Keats” can be linked). Indeed, perhaps Susan Wolfson said it best when she asserted that, “Dying, it turns out for Keats’s fame, was a good career move” (“History” 22), for again from Byron’s note that he was “snuffed out by an article” (Don Juan 11.480), to Shelley’s “I weep for Adonais – he is dead!” (1), from Leigh Hunt’s biographical memoir in 1828, to Richard Monckton Milnes’ first official biography in 1848, from Oscar Wilde’s comment that Keats is “The youngest of the martyrs” at the end of the nineteenth century, to Chistopher Ricks’ assertion of his “delicate humanity” (221) in the middle of the twentieth century, John Keats has always been a viable subject of critical discussion in literary studies, and in that discussion John Keats has often been understood as “poor Keats,” as a “martyr of poetry” (Leavis 241), as a “beautiful weakling,” as delicate, passive, frail, embarrassed, aesthetic, ultimately apolitical, and, when all of these characteristics work in unison, heroic. “Keats” has meant, in simple terms, traditional high Romanticism itself: martyred youth, high-flown idealism, ethereal selfhood, organic unity, aesthetic, transcendental purity. Keats, Letters, 158. Ibid., 119–20. As noted above, a close companion named Charles Brown accompanied Keats on this tour. See Andrew Motion, Keats, A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Napoleon famously said, “L’Angleterre est une nation de boutiquiers.” Stiker, 8–9. See Rene Gerard, The Scapegoat (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). See Sigmund Freud, “Totem and Taboo,” The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud and Other Works, Vol. 13 (New York: Vintage, 2001). Singer, Practical Ethics, 186. Ibid., 189. Ibid., 54. Peter Singer, A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 24, 27. Mill, Utilitarianism, 7.

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39 See A Memoir of Maria Edgeworth, with a Selection of Her Letters by the Late Mrs Edgeworth. I would like to thank Laura Federer and Aedin Clements at Notre Dame’s Hesbough Library for access to this and other works in the Loeber collection. 40 A period that featured the United Irishmen, a failed French invasion, Wolfe Tone’s imprisonment and likely suicide among other things. 41 Edgeworth, Memoir, 68–9. 42 Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Maria Edgeworth’s father, was a founder of the Royal Irish Academy, an inventor, and a theorist of education and educational methodologies. He lived most of his life on his estate in Edgeworthstown. He was also a strong advocate for Catholic emancipation. 43 Kevin Whelan, “Writing Ireland: Reading England.” Ireland in the Nineteenth Century: Regional Identity. Eds. Leon Litvack and Glenn Hooper (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), 190–1. 44 Ibid., 185–91. 45 See Kowalski-Wallace 142; quoted in Butler 90. 46 Edgeworth, Preface, Leadbeater, etc. (i–iv) 47 Ibid., 3. 48 I will note that in his decidedly English dramas Oscar Wilde is able to further disrupt, in even more complex terms, this hard binary between Englishness and Irishness and the vision of union. 49 Edgeworth, Belinda, 51. 50 Kowalski-Wallace, 98, 104. 51 Ibid., 110. 52 Edgeworth, Belinda, 31. 53 Ibid., 32. 54 Grosz, Elizabeth. “Nakedness.” 55 Edgeworth, 115. 56 Montweiler, 348–9.

4

States of Semiparalysis 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Eagleton, The Great Hunger, 5. Gerin, Emily Brontë, 225–6. Gray, Famine, 2. Ibid., 8. Robert Smart and Michael Hutcheson, 5. Seamus Deane, Strange Country, 146. To provide some context, I will quote again from the article by Christopher Smart: “Stoker moved well beyond the Gothic romance towards a distinctly modern form, one which allowed him to imbed within the story references to Irish history, particularly the Famine, so that the development of the vampire story shadows the historical events his mother had recounted to him while he convalesced as a young boy” (114).

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8 See Moses Valdez, “The Irish Vampire: Dracula, Parnell, and the Troubled Dreams of Nationhood” Journal X (Fall 1997). 9 This fracture is felt on a bodily level: there is, for example, this letter to Walt Whitman where Stoker describes himself in the following terms: “I am six feet two inches high and twelve stone weight naked and used to be forty-one or forty-two inches round the chest. I am ugly but strong and determined and have a large bump over my eyebrows. I have a heavy jaw and a big mouth and thick lips – sensitive nostrils – a snubnose and straight hair.” He tells Whitman that he knew he [Whitman] was “a keen physiognomist,” and that he [Stoker] was “a believer of the science myself,” and that he is “in a humble way a practicer of it. I was not disappointed when I saw your photograph – your late one especially” (qtd. in Belfield 42). Stoker continues, “I am equal in temper and cool in disposition and have a large amount of self control and am naturally secretive to the world . . . I take a delight in letting people I don’t like – people of mean or cruel or sneaking or cowardly disposition – see the worst side of me. I have a large number of acquaintances and some five or six friends – all of which latter body care much for me. Now I have told you all I know about myself. (qtd. in Belford 43) 10 Glover, Vampires, Mummies and Liberals, 15. 11 Seed, 199. 12 Glover, 33. 13 Milbank, 20. 14 Owenson, 44. 15 Stoker, 23. 16 See Joseph Allen Lennon, Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2004). 17 Milbank, 1–2. 18 Stoker, 43. 19 Stoker, 43. 20 It is key to note that this same image of the Count coming out of the window and crawling down the side of the wall, like a lizard, was on the cover of the very first edition/printing of the text. The decision to make this sketch the cover of the novel provides crucial interpretative evidence: this is the moment, the scene that embodies what the Count is – he is becoming a monster, declaring his monstrosity. He is coming out of a closet. 21 Prescott and Giorgio, 498. 22 Glover, 44. 23 Stoker, 306. 24 Bram Stoker believed and was well versed in the nineteenth-century pseudoscience phrenology, which is the practice of connecting the patterns and material traits of a skull – its shape, its size, fractures, fissures, etc. – as an indicators of the personality type and social orientation of the person the skull belongs to. 25 Stoker, 27. 26 Ibid., 27–8.

Notes

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

175

Ibid., 257. Ibid., 305. Ibid., 64. Ibid., 65. Ibid., 67. Ibid., 68. Howes, 104. See Prescott and Giorgio, 501. Ibid., 500. There is evidence that Stoker knowingly played with his Irish identity. For example, Joseph Valente reports the following on Stoker’s voice: he took care to preserve his native accent, and his thickish brogue served as both a bait to his more condescending English colleagues and a self-assertive check on his Anglophilia. While busy cultivating signifiers of English respectability, Stoker persisted in an index of his Irish arrivistism with the power to neutralize or transvalue them. . . . while the primary codes of racial difference are usually visual, the audible dimension provided the dominant cue for distinguishing the Irish from the English. (39)

37 38 39 40

Dracula, 218 Ibid., 220. Ibid., 222. Christopher Smart writes the following on the Irish Famine: The most important signs of this doubled narrative construction are the native soil without which Dracula cannot travel, the proliferating coffins – perhaps the most powerful and recognizable symbol of the Famine, the devastation of the vampire’s victims, who bear a striking resemblance to the starving victims of An Gorta Mor, and the trademark teeth pricks which are the surest indication that the vampire has done his silent and lethal work. All of these now familiar signs of the vampire were added to the genre by Bram Stoker. (114) Smart continues: The wasting away of Dracula’s victims surely reflects the many accounts of Famine suffering and death that were carried to him by both newspapers and by his mother Charlotte Stoker. The slow decline and death of Lucy Westerna, whose name is Irish – as is Mina Murray’s – mirrors the suffering of Famine victims, who died in droves from diseases and fevers that they couldn’t see or understand. (115) In this way the box becomes an extended metaphor or conceit in the text – the box represents a state of being, literally a category defined

176 Notes

41 42 43 44 45

by physical difference. Dracula is able to get out of the box for part of the day, but he is nevertheless tied directly to it. This inbetween state is, essentially, a disabled state. Dracula, 245–6. Italics mine. I simply point that this is yet another moment where visual rhetorics are in play. Ibid., 57 Dracula, italics mine. Ibid., 60. As Synge would demonstrate just a few years later at the Abbey Theatre, a shovel or loy could be very easily read as a symbol for the Irish “peasantry.”

Conclusion: States of Paralysis, a Sketch 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Joyce, Letters II, 134. Joyce, Letters I, 55. Joyce, Letters II, 134. Joyce, Poems and Shorter Writings, 211. Ellmann 132. Qtd. in Ellemann 222. Lloyd, “Counterparts” 129. Gibbons, “Politics of Paralysis,” 168–9. Mitchell and Snyder, The Body, 13. Joyce, Dubliners, 9. Ibid., 41. Cheng, 12.

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Index A Darwinian Left, 106 A Modest Proposal, 37 A View of the Present State of Ireland, 100 Abbey Theatre, 152 ability trouble, 11, 22, 40, 99 Act of Union, the, 2, 5, 47, 60, 11, 122, 124–5 aesthetic nervousness, 48, 49, 66, 72, 77, 129 Anglo-Irish tradition, the, 82, 85, 110, 115 An Gorta Mór, 122 Animal Liberation, 105 Antrim coast, 82 Arnold, Matthew, 50 “Artist as Critic,” 14 Augustan domesticity, 28 Barry, James, 69–70 Belfast, 6, 82–5, 94 Belinda, 7, 116–20 Bentham, Jeremy, 107 biopower, 39, 53, 78 Blake, William, 92 Brown, Charles, 82 Brown, Christy, 5, 11 Burke, Edmund, 65, 110, 115, 116 Burns, Robert, 82, 92 Byron, Lord Gordon, 96, 101 Catholic Association, the, 85 cello coat, 13–19, 20–1, 23, 26, 27 Celtic School, the, 163 n22 Cottage Dialogues Among the Irish Peasantry, 115 cripped, 9, 10, 22, 144 Crocker, John Wilson, 50, 67 Cromwell, Oliver, 47, 76, 85 Curran, Constantine, 153

Darwin, Charles, 106 Duchess of Dunghill, the, 6, 82–113 Edgeworth, Mrs Frances, 108 Edgeworth, Richard Lovell, 110, 119 Emmet, Robert, 85 External Relations Act, 62 Fabulous, the, 5, 21–3 fin-de-siècle imperialism, 127 Foucault, Michel, 25, 39, 53, 78 French Revolution, the, 65 Freud, Sigmund, 168 n20, 172 n33 Giant’s Causeway, the, 82–3 Gladstone, William, 14 Godwin, William, 107 Goldsmith, Oliver, 110 Great Hunger, the, 5, 55, 107 “gross indecency,” 23 Grosvenor Gallery, 23 Guy’s Hospital, 93 Hampstead Heath Set, the, 94–5 Hunt, Leigh, 94–5 invalid, the, 49 Irish diaspora, the, 124 Irish Dracula, the, 128 Irish drama, the, 40 Irish Famine, the, 55, 107, 123–5 Irish Gothic, the, 40, 126–7 Irish literary realism, 57 Irish modernism, 40 Irish problem, the, 102, 104, 125, 150 Jackson, Michael, 20 James, Henry, 14 Keats, Tom, 83

187

188 Index

Lake District, 82 Lake Poets, 82 Leadbeater, Mary, 115–16 Liberator, the, 85 Lindsay, Sir Coutts, 14 Lloyd, Constance, 163 n13 Lockhart, John Gibson, 94 Lombroso, Cesare, 134 Madonna, 20 Malthus, Thomas, 18, 53, 107, 125 Marx, Karl, 106 Medusa, 6, 9, 75–9, 81–7, 102, 103, 120, 130–3, 144 Mill, John Stuart, 107 Monckton Milnes, Richard, 172 n26 Morrissey, 20 Napoleon Bonaparte, 101 Narrative Prosthesis, 41, 60 National Tale, the, 40, 43, 49, 51–76, 128–30 Nolan, Christopher, 5, 11 Nordau, Max, 134 O’Connell, Daniel, 48 O’Neill, Owen Roe, 85 political allegory, 6, 50, 51, 64–76, 85 “poor” Keats, 94–6 Poor Law, the, 53 Pope, Alexander, 29 Port Patrick, Scotland, 89 Practical Ethics, 105, 106

Prince of Wales, 14 Protestant Ascendency, the, 116 Richards, Grant, 153 Robinson, Fanny, 108, 113 Robinson, Mary, 155 Romantic imperialism, 92 Royal London Statistical Society, the, 53 Ruskin, John, 14 semicolonialism, 6, 62–3, 127, 131, 135 Severe, the, 21–3 Shelley, Mary, 70 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 49, 94–6 Singer, Peter, 93–107 social body, the, 17–18, 23, 26, 28, 37, 125 Spears, Britney, 20 Spenser, Edmund, 100–1, 104 Speranza, 162 n10 Swift, Jonathan, 27–38, 110 Tithe War, the, 85 Tone, Wolfe, 48 Ulster plantation, 85 Wentworth, 85 Whistler, James, 14 Wilde, Lady, 162 n10 Wilde, Sir William, 162 n10 Wordsworth, William, 82–3, 92, 101 Yonge, Charlotte, 120 Young, Filson, 43–4, 56

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