Disability, Representation and the Body in Irish Writing, 1800–1922 (review)

The publication of Lennard J. Davis’s edited collection The Disability Studies Reader in 1997 arguably marked the arrival of Disability Studies as a conspicuous field of research in academia. Mark Mossman’s Disability, Representation and the Body in Irish Writing, 1800–1922 illustrates one of the critical directions this field has since taken. Disability Studies has always been particularly suited to the kind of crossover that Mossman practices, being—as the author himself notes—one of any number of theoretical approaches concerned with interpretation and representation of the body. In the discipline’s relatively short lifespan, scholars have allied disability with Gender, Queer, and Race Studies, to name only a few. Thus, it is not altogether surprising to find Disability Studies paired with Irish Studies, and Mossman’s seminal analysis offers a productive look at the conjunction of these two fields.

The result of this conjunction is a series of readings of chiefly nineteenth-century texts from Irish authors, including Sydney Owenson, Maria Edgeworth, and Bram Stoker, although the examination is not limited either by the century and extends beyond strictly Irish authors. We find, for instance, analyses of Swift’s “A Lady’s Dressing Room” (1730), Joyce’s Dubliners (1914) and a couple of Keats’s epistles to his brother during a trip to Ireland—allowing Mossman to convey a significant feature of his theoretical approach: a claim that the place of disability cannot be delineated simply through a cohesive, chronological narrative but is instead articulated in moments, in literary instances or historical events that reveal the deeply rooted dynamics of a “disabled” perspective preconditioned in the culture. So, for example, when the English Keats details his confrontation with an Irish woman who cannot walk—a woman he monikers “the Duchess of Dunghill”—the poet expresses a fascination and despair symptomatic of the performance of disability. Specifically, the “Duchess” disrupts Keats’s normalizing gaze, linked here (and in other places) by Mossman with a British imperialist and socially privileged stance. The poet seeks, and fails, to reassert the woman into the normative structures of health and able-bodiedness.

The theoretical topography of this performance of disability is outlined in the opening chapter through an analysis of two “texts”: the aforementioned Swift poem, and the infamous episode in Oscar Wilde’s biography when the Irishman in England donned a coat shaped like a cello. Curiously, neither poem nor sartorial artifact explicitly exhibits disability; not in poet or performer, not in content or in costume. For Mossman, the disabled body need not necessarily be overtly present; rather, both texts demonstrate the interpretive structures and terms of Disability Studies. Wilde’s “fabulous” cello coat, joined as it is to queer criticism, is thus an example of “severe disability,” or, in other words, a physical abnormality that completely resists normative somatic boundaries and is therefore perceived negatively, turning the gaze into the “stare,” a term specific to Disability Studies. Swift’s poem illustrates the binarism of interiors and exteriors, seeking in both form and content to discipline the abnormal interiority of the female protagonist Celia—an interiority exemplified in a most Swiftian manner by the contents of her chamber pot. Thus, not only does the speaker of the poem remark how pleasurable it would be to bring order to disorder, to see “tulips raised from dung,” as Mossman notes, but also the poem itself in its strict adherence to form gives demonstration to this ordering, this disciplining.

That Swift’s poem and Wilde’s cello coat provide a means through which to establish the theoretical rhetoric of Disability Studies—without actually representing disability—is not problematic in its own right. But at times the very specificity of a disabilities approach—and thus, its distinctive value—is difficult to identify. Certainly terms like “severity,” the “stare,” and, later, “aesthetic nervousness,” are exclusive to Disability Studies; but interpretive grammars like the Foucauldian dialectic of normality and abnormality, or like the Lacanian (and Mulveyian) gaze, have long...