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Reviewed by:
  • Take Up Thy Bed and Walk: Death, Disability, and Cure in Classic Fiction for Girls
  • Anne K. Phillips (bio)
Take Up Thy Bed and Walk: Death, Disability, and Cure in Classic Fiction for Girls. By Lois Keith. New York: Routledge, 2001

Inspired by her experiences first as a fully able and then as a wheelchair-bound woman, Lois Keith traces the history of disabled characters in classic fiction for girls. She dedicates individual chapters to Jane Eyre (1847), Little Women (1868/69), What Katy Did (1872), Heidi (1880), Pollyanna (1913) and Pollyanna Grows Up (1915), The Secret Garden (1911), and Ethel Turner's somewhat less well-known Seven Little Australians (1894). Defining the study's parameters, Keith notes that these books "start at home and stay at home, where the disabled character is always a child, never a menacing adult, and where disability is primarily used as a metaphor for dependency and weakness, providing a time for reflection and learning" (14). Following her novel analyses, she summarizes post-1950 representations of disability in children's and adolescent literature. Finally, she assesses the role of medicine and the media in the treatment of disabled persons, focusing in part on the case of Christopher Reeve, perhaps the most famous disabled person of our era. She also traces the connections between contemporary children's and adult treatments of disabled characters in such works as Arthur Miller's play Broken Glass (1994) and Lars Von Trier's film Breaking the Waves (1996). Keith concludes that the adult works, like the classic novels she discusses in Take Up Thy Bed and Walk, continue to reinforce "the widely held belief that 'not walking' is a passive and unhappy state which renders the victim powerless, and that a release from this state is desirable above all else" (249).

One strength of Keith's study is her willingness to consider how these books have affected our attitude [End Page 58] toward disabled people. Having experienced these books as a fully able and a disabled person, she brings a unique perspective to them. Discussing, for instance, the literal and symbolic role of the wheelchair in Heidi, Keith succeeds in making issues involving disability and literature more visible and meaningful. Also, readers will appreciate her assessment of the post-1950 books with disabled characters. Her conclusion—emphasizing the need for more disabled characters in children's and adolescent literature and calling for more disabled writers to draw on their experiences in fiction—is certainly laudable. Finally, readers may appreciate Keith's willingness to devote substantive analysis to novels that previously received little critical attention.

Unfortunately, the work as a whole is impaired by an inconsistent thesis, superficial research, and numerous textual errors. In the early chapters, Keith contrasts Bronte's Helen Burns and Alcott's Beth March with their more adventurous and ambitious counterparts, Jane and Jo, to show how the latter are subdued. In later chapters, however, she focuses more precisely on disabled characters and their fates—a project that squares more consistently with her introductory materials about disability and spinal injuries in particular. Keith ought to have dispensed with the discussions of Jane Eyre and Little Women and instead developed her brief references to Alcott's Jack and Jill (1881), a novel devoted to the (female and male) title characters' sledding accident and their individual recoveries from it. Here, she might have developed a more substantive analysis of gender and disability. In addition, although Keith writes that "[w]ith the exception of Jo March, all of the characters discussed in this book are motherless and even when the father is alive, he is usually distant and distracted" (120), Mrs. Minor, Jill's mother, is very much alive and an invaluable resource in her daughter's recovery—serving as a useful contrast to Keith's other examples and rounding out her study. Keith refers to individual entries from Alcott's journals as she develops a biographical analysis of Little Women; however, instead of directly citing the journals themselves (which are published and easily available), she quotes from Martha Saxton's biography of Alcott and a Horn Book article. Further, while researching this book, Keith seems not to...

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