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  • “Sinful Creature, Full of Weakness”: The Theology of Disability in Cummins’s The Lamplighter
  • Claudia Stokes (bio)

After several decades of scholarship that discerned general patterns in literary representations of disability, recent years have seen a turn toward the specific and the particular, with a focused concentration on the ways in which individual texts and literary moments limn bodily difference. In a recent essay about disability in the early American novel, Sari Altschuler made a compelling case for this transition by showing that some of the standard claims about literary representations of disability simply failed to apply to the specific nature of early American fiction, and she consequently called for more particularized, historically grounded analyses of literary depictions of disability.1 Maria Susanna Cummins’s best-selling sentimental novel, The Lamplighter (1854), offers an important contribution to this endeavor because in numerous ways it starkly diverges from both standard literary treatments of disability and some of the precepts of disability studies. For instance, in its depiction of the maturation and socialization of the street urchin Gertrude Flint, The Lamplighter does not portray the atypical body as unusual or exceptional. Instead, Cummins’s novel includes a wide array of disabled characters, and she depicts impairment as a commonplace and even inevitable occurrence: men and women, adults and children, the working classes and the elite all experience the fragility of the body, and all transition from independence to a state of dependence, reliant on the care of others for their survival. Though scholars have noted that that disability is typically shunted to the margins of literature and even rendered invisible, disability is at the very fore of The Lamplighter, with caregiving an active subject of discussion and concern.2 [End Page 139]

The Lamplighter thus offers an important contribution to this scholarly effort to document the heterogeneity of literary depictions of disability. This novel provides a particularly rich site of analysis because it portrays disability as the fundamental state of all human beings and even characterizes dependence as an ideal condition worthy of aspiration. Douglas Baynton and Lennard Davis, among others, have shown that the nineteenth century was a pivotal era in the constitution of disability, with the emergence of new statistical and anatomical standards that created both a belief in bodily normality and the corresponding classification of any divergence from this norm as a clinical pathology in need of corrective medical intervention.3 The Lamplighter worked against the grain of this contemporary cultural development, for it instead presents disability as thoroughly normative and even beneficial, depicting it not as a condition in need of treatment but as itself a kind of remedy that effects dramatic improvement in character and belief: in The Lamplighter, disability is a cure, not a defect. Though The Lamplighter did not halt or even contest the institutionalization of these new statistical and medical norms, it nevertheless indicates the circulation of alternate views amid this cultural development and, in keeping with Sari Altschuler’s important recent argument, affirms that nineteenth-century literary depictions of disability were more heterogeneous than we may have generally presumed.

However, that is not to suggest that The Lamplighter is wholly anomalous or deviates entirely from the standard strategies by which nineteenth-century literature depicted bodily impairment. On the contrary, it visibly enlists several conventional tropes for the literary depiction of disability. For instance, it relies on the common sentimental perception of disability as a matter of grave religious consequence, and, in accord with sentimental convention, Cummins characterizes the suffering body as a vessel of divine grace.4 In her focused attention to the sufferings of a child, the orphan Gertrude Flint, Cummins also extends the long literary tradition of depicting the ailing child as sacrosanct. This tradition was evident as early as the seventeenth century in James Janeway’s A Token for Children (1671), and it reached its apotheosis in The Lamplighter’s immediate generic predecessor, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), with its famed depiction of the death of saintly Eva St. Clare.5 In addition, The Lamplighter also registers the influence of an alternate literary portrayal of disability as a bodily expression of depravity, as with such figures...

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