Take Up Thy Bed & Walk: Death, Disability, and Cure in Classic Fiction for Girls (review)

Lois Keith. Take Up Thy Bed & Walk: Death, Disability, and Cure in Classic Fiction for Girls. New York: Routledge, 2001.

Disability rights advocate Lois Keith, in her literary critical work Take Up Thy Bed & Walk: Death, Disability, and Cure in Classic Fiction for Girls, asserts that scholars have failed to note the pattern of disability and cure in classic girls' fiction. Her book, prompted by her re-readings of her girlhood favorites since her own paralysis after an auto accident, attempts to address the critical gap by examining perennially popular girls' novels for their uses of paralyzed characters. Like other commentators on What Katy Did, Jack and Jill, and Pollyanna, such as Anne Scott MacLeod and Ellen Kolba, Keith notes nineteenth- and early twentieth-century authors' symbolic use of physical crippling to represent a girl's passage into womanhood. Unlike these others, Keith moves beyond the books' messages about the restrictions imposed on female adolescence to explore their assumptions about disability.

In discussing the recurring image in children's novels of a lame character who recovers the ability to walk, Keith argues that the most popular versions of this story teach readers that:

there is nothing good about being disabled; (2) disabled people have to learn the same qualities of submissive behaviour that women have always had to learn: patience, cheerfulness and making the best of things; (3) impairment can be a punishment for bad behaviour, for evil thoughts or for not being a good enough person; (4) although disabled people should be pitied rather than punished, they can never be accepted; and (5) the impairment is curable. If you want to enough, if you love yourself enough (but not more than you love others), if you believe in God enough, you will be cured. (7)

Keith traces these attitudes in readings of Jane Eyre, Little Women, What Katy Did, Heidi, The Secret Garden, Pollyanna, Pollyanna Grows Up, and Seven Little Australians; these are her central texts, which she addresses in the order given. Keith uses Jane Eyre and Little Women, which do not feature a lame character, to lay a foundation of literary models for the beatifically good, physically frail character whose life and death inspires others. She then explores textual attitudes toward characters who cannot walk, finding that neither the characters nor their authors can imagine a full life for a person "bound" to a wheelchair or "tied" to crutches (116, 166). Keith demonstrates that the residue of these classic texts, demanding that disabled characters die, influence others, or despair of a full life, continues to appear in recent disability fiction, even in books acclaimed for their realistic or compelling portraits of people with mobility impairments.

Keith classifies literary invalids into types representative of cultural ideas about disability. Beginning in Chapter 2 with the "too-good-to-live" Helen Burns of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and Beth March of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, Keith observes that invalid characters often function as catalysts for the protagonist rather than resolving conflicts of their own: "Their illness is sanitized and clean, their suffering spiritual rather than physical. Above all, they must be self-effacing, leaving plenty of space for the non-disabled character to develop and learn" (55). In Chapter 3, Keith uses Katy Carr of Susan Coolidge's What Katy Did and Jill of Alcott's Jack and Jill as examples of girls who learn "to be perfectly good." Both of these characters, having absorbed the lessons of disability, recover the full use of their legs. The miracle cures of Clara in Johanna Spyri's Heidi and Colin in Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, discussed in Chapter 4, depend not only on faith but also on an energetic response from the person to be healed: "They also needed to believe that with sufficient energy and will they had the power to make their own lives better" (32). Yet another type of disabled character, embodied in the orphan boy Jamie of...