Introduction: Blindness and Literature

I have often contemplated teaching a Disability Studies class on literary depictions of blindness. It is safe to say that blindness has held a particular fascination in every culture since the beginning of time. Since sight is understood to be the predominant sense in humans, the loss of sight is assumed to be tantamount to a loss of life, or a loss of a fundamental quality that makes someone human. In English, as in many languages, blindness is synonymous with prejudice, obliviousness and ineptitude. Texts that represent blindness as a metaphor for unmitigated disaster as well as those that consider blindness as a lived experience are so numerous and various that I would have no trouble compiling a syllabus to fill a semester. I might begin the class with the classical figures of Oedipus and Tiresias. Then, I might skip ahead to survey representations of the hypothetical blind man in texts by Enlightenment thinkers such as Descartes, Locke, and Diderot. Having introduced the ever-popular Molyneux question, which considers what happens when the hypothetical blind man has his sight restored, I would look at fictional depictions such as Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch and Brian Friel’s Molly Sweeney, set against autobiographical accounts by John Howard Griffin and Mike May. I might pair José Saramago’s Blindness with the earlier novel of the same title by Henry Green. I would certainly want to include autobiographical accounts by Helen Keller, among many others, and short fiction by H. G. Wells, D. H. Lawrence, Raymond Carver, V. S. Pritchett, Anthony Doerr… The list could go on and on, and I have not even mentioned all the poetry.

It is especially gratifying, then, that the essays in this issue deal with authors and texts that are not on my list. This suggests additions and substitutions to the syllabus I imagine compiling, and even that I could compile four or five different syllabi with multiple sub-themes without having to repeat texts from one version to the next. In her essay, Julia Miele Rodas speculates on a staggering array of blind idioms and meditates on two blind figures, the Cyclopes and Samson, as constructed by blind poets, Homer and Milton. Tory Vandeventer Pearman’s essay examines Thomas Chestre’s fourteenth-century Middle English Sir Launfal, where Queen Gwenore is blinded as punishment for her adultery, and discusses how the text challenges common medieval notions of justice, gender, and disability. Heather Tilley examines the life and work of Frances Browne, known as the Blind Poetess of Ulster, who was considered a kind of literary novelty for mid-nineteenth-century sighted readers and as a sort of role model for the blind. Martin Halliwell analyzes the figure of the blinded war veteran in two World War II demobilization films, suggesting the ways adaptation to blindness served as a useful metaphor for the reordering of post-war American society. Finally, Michael Melancon describes the ways that the poetry of Stephen Kuusisto represents a direct challenge to artistic and cultural notions about language and embodiment. The main body of the issue concludes with a wide-ranging conversation between Stephen Kuusisto and Ralph James Savarese, touching on the former’s work as poet, memoirist, and Disability Studies scholar, while offering a tantalizing preview of his forthcoming volume of verse.

I am grateful to all the contributors to this issue for sharing their scholarship and insights. Their work expands and enriches my thinking about cultural depictions of blindness and opens up new avenues of inquiry for future scholars. Like all readers of the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, I am indebted to David Bolt for founding this important journal. His generosity, graciousness, and skill at every phase of this issue’s production, has made the entire process nothing but pleasure for me. Although editorial policy prevents him from contributing his own fine work on blindness to this issue, those of us who think about blindness in literature will feel his influence here as we eagerly anticipate reading his words elsewhere.