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Biography 23.3 (2000) 579-582



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Mary Klages. Woeful Afflictions: Disability and Sentimentality in Victorian America. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1999. 247 pp. ISBN 0-812-3499-5, $36.50.

In the last ten years, scholars in the field of Disability Studies have interrogated and revised historical, cultural, and literary representations of disability. Klages contributes to that project in a number of interesting and useful ways. Focusing on nineteenth-century sentimental discourses, she argues that the moral theories of David Hume and Thomas Reid, which locate selfhood in one's capacity to experience benevolence and compassion, invite new understandings both of subjectivity and of disability. She investigates the ways in which social meanings inhere in disabled bodies, and specifically in blind bodies, to argue that despite the potentially liberatory implications of these new moral theories, in fact nineteenth-century cultural and literary practices typically reaffirmed the limitations of disabled [End Page 579] people and reconfirmed their status as "poster children." Such status is not fixed, of course, as Disability Studies scholars like Michael Oliver have convincingly argued; historically, cultural readings of disability have understood it as everything from signifier of sin to signifier of crime. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a medical model of disability evolves which diminishes the moral stigma attached to disability but which, in doing so, also reduces people with disabilities to the status of mere physicality. Within this paradigm, physical bodies become totalizing, and disability comes to be understood as a condition which can be--should be--treated and "overcome." The problem with such an approach, as noted by Simi Linton in Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity, is that we "'treat' the condition and the person with the condition rather than 'treating' the social processes and policies that constrict disabled people's lives" (11).

Locating her analysis of disability and subjectivity within this historical moment which emphasizes rehabilitation, Klages argues that these new definitions of selfhood and "empathic agency" are undermined by an increasing emphasis on individual productivity in an age of increasing industrialization. The question for men like Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the first director of the New England Asylum for the Purpose of Instructing the Blind, thus becomes not, How can the blind assume positions as subjects? but, How can blind bodies become a "site of productive labor just like the sighted body"? (34).

In Chapters 2, 5, and 6, Klages describes Howe's initial project of associating blindness with a rhetoric of "economic competition and self-sufficiency" rather than a rhetoric of charity (31). His ultimate failure to do so led him, ironically, to a complete reversal of his early view of the blind as "normal" people who simply cannot see. In the 1830s, his annual reports use the language of the sentimental novel to portray the blind at his Institution as moral, upright individuals living within a home-like atmosphere. But by 1848, after repeated failures of the blind to make a profit off their work, he concludes in his annual report that the blind are "'inferior to other persons in mental powers and ability'" (47). Such a complete turnabout is fascinating, and though Klages considers its political and economic implications to some extent, she does not do so as fully as she might. One such instance is her discussion of the "exhibitions" Howe regularly held, where blind people performed routine domestic chores for the viewing pleasure of an audience. Though Klages takes note of Howe's increasing reliance on statistical evidence and data (including notes on such exhibitions) to "objectively" support his changing conclusions about the blind, a reference to Lennard Davis's essay on how the Bell Curve was used in the nineteenth century to fix "deviance" in numerical and ostensibly scientific terms would [End Page 580] enhance her discussion. Likewise, her conclusion that such "exhibitions" had some positive benefit because they prompted audiences to understand the blind as human rather than as alien Other neglects to consider the ways in which such exhibitions might function performatively to reinscribe blindness as the subordinate term in a sighted/blind binary...

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