Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture

Conclusion

Conclusion (7,"homas Elsaesser has observed that the popularity of melodrama and I other "romantic" dramas "coincides with periods of intense social and ideological crisis" (45). The particular nineteenth-century crises most critics identify as pertinent to melodrama are those of women and the poor, for whom it functions as both a social control and a potential source of power. Disabled people, while they were not perceived as central to any widespread social or ideological crisis, were decidedly constituted as a social problem in need of a program of management. 1 Both literary and nonfictional texts constituted part of this program, even when the placement and management of physically disabled people within Victorian culture was not the solitary or even primary goal of such cultural work. In making a significant aesthetic place for disabled characters, melodramatic literature fashioned potential identities for disabled people in Victorian culture. These identities were probably mostly constructed to fulfill the wishes and allay the fears of nondisabled people; however, some women characters may be read to convey agency and confer rewards to disabled people. Melodrama, like detective fiction and other popular genres, is habitually constructed as either a conservative or subversive cultural force, but as Elsaesser points out, these very categories are "relative to the given historical and social context," and 192 FictionsofAffliction melodrama not only has the potential to be subversive or conservative, but also the potential to do both at once, as the culture requires it (47). The wide range of nonfictional texts that addressed disabled people as a newly visible group within Victorian culture simultaneously activated and attempted to manage the idea that disabled people's place might be within the marriage bed and the productive economy, in the mainstream of culture, rather than at its afflicted and isolated margins. Melodrama and fiction, rather than hermetically sealed sanctuaries for essential truths about disability, worked with nonfiction to process these and other emotionally charged concerns-and in the process, change the landscape in which disability had meaning. The question of how to feel about disability, and why, is far from settled . It is a question that many of us actively face or refuse to face on a daily basis, regardless of where in culture we locate ourselves or our bodies . If we are seen as "different" by the culture in which we live, we may choose to avoid or embrace, disown or engage, this status; we may find it impossible, however, to ignore others' assumptions about the radically different identities we inhabit as a result of our different bodies. If, on the other hand, our culture sees us as "same" or unmarked, the problem of how culture assigns meaning to bodily difference will be easy to push out of our consciousness. This unawareness-or forgetting-might go on forever, but for the fact that while most people will never experience a change of gender or racial identity, we will all experience impairment some day, given the fact oflife's unpredictability or simply the fact of having lived a long life. As the baby boom ages, it will become statistically normal in the United States to be physically impaired in some way. There is no telling what this experience will be like. The cultural category "disability" houses a widely heterogeneous group of conditions, its contents shifting based on different cultural contexts. The physical experience of impairment may be minor or severe, a constant or intermittent life focus, the subject of one or many medical interventions. We may have to live with a greater degree of dependence on other people or agencies than we had before; or we may not. The changes in our bodies may or may not require a realignment of perspective, a change in life priorities , or a reevaluation of ourselves, our work, and our relationships with others. If our impairment and the accommodations for it are visible and noticeable-if others see us and we see ourselves as disabled, rather than Conclusion 193 able-bodied-we may have major, potentially traumatic, adjustments to make for which our culture has prepared us mostly in negative and destructive ways. If we become disabled after living identified as ablebodied , the big adjustment may not be to accommodate our changed bodies, but rather to accommodate attitudes (including our own) toward physical impairment, corporeal difference, and perhaps toward the interdependency that characterizes all of our lives. Our worst daily struggle, for example, may be...