Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture

1 Melodramatic Bodies

1 Melodramatic Bodies (7t first step toward discussion of specific texts is to particularize the nmeaning of "melodrama" and the concept of emotional excess that is central both to it and to contemporary discourses of disability. Critics have already anatomized melodrama's shifting shapes, its relations to other popular dramatic and literary forms, and its potential for conservatism or subversion. There is general agreement about certain recurrent characteristics: melodrama features victims and villains in suspenseful conflicts that, through a series of coincidences and revelations, are neatly resolved by the end of the play, often with reference to Providence . Conflicts and resolutions take place in a surface world; we need not look for meanings hidden below the immediately visible or audible. On the Victorian stage, these surfaces became increasingly visible and audible. Actors used extravagant acting styles and technical staging effects to reach large audiences within an expanded theater space, making melodrama even easier to read as a genre opposed to the interior, the psychological, and the individual. Melodramatic characters have little "character" per se; their Manichaean moral states can be seen in their Melodramatic Bodies 1 7 bodies and heard in the tenor of their words. The emotions they express and inspire arc physical and unalloyed: the villain performs pure malignity (and we hiss him); the victim, pure pathos that brings our tears. If melodrama begins on the stage, by the play's end it reshapes the audience in its own image, enmeshing both sides of the stage in a universe of unthinking, expressively feeling bodies. 1 This is melodrama's primary emotional work. With this affective purpose as a guide, the boundary drawn around the terms melodrama and melodramatic can be capacious and imprecise, blurring historical distinctions among popular genres. 2 The texts I discuss as melodramatic have also been called sensational, or sentimental, with the three terms often overlapping or competing. For example, while Charlotte Yonge's The Clever Woman of the Family has decidedly melodramatic and sensational threads-a public trial, for example-it is probably most properly termed a sentimental and domestic novel. While Wilkie Collins actually subtitles Poor Miss Finch "a domestic story," both its improbable coincidences and its comic subplots feel more like melodrama, and critics term its plot "sensational."3 For all that distinguishes these two novels, however , both use affect to represent disability and ability. While most if not all literary works represent emotion and engage our emotional participation, melodrama enacts emotion as a visual, performative , and social entity, an aspect of the social body. Further, it both defines the world as a place of emotional excess and attempts to transform that excess, through plotting, into a particular kind of social order. The visual nature of melodrama, which has predisposed it to a rich afterlife in film, lends itself to an ordering of its emotional world based on visual identification.4 Differences of the body-biological sex, performed gender, skin color, bodily signs interpreted as ethnic or class identity, and those visible variations from perceived norms of function and configuration we term "impairment," "defect," or "disability"-are evoked as the core of character. Melodrama codes them with reference to the flow of vision and places them within a dynamic of looking and knowing (or failing to know). Through its dual emphasis on the visible and the emotional, melodrama shows us who we and others are, and how to feel when we see each other. When Bertha Plummer of Dickens's The Cricket on the Hearth cries out, "O Heaven how blind I am! How helpless and alone!" her visible identity ("Blind Girl," as the text announces) and her emotional state are so transparent to each other that they dictate our response of pity (222). Millicent, the heroine ofJohn Wilkins's play The 1 8 FictionsofAffliction Blind Wife (1850), aggrandizes and sacralizes her love for her gambling husband and her physical identity as correlated truths: The Breath! The Blood! The Spiritual Essence of the Divinity that lurks ·within the soul! The selfl The incarnated Being of the Heart's Creation! That lives thro' all perils, all dangers, to the end, and dies not save with the gentle life of which it formed the best, and holiest, noblest part ... such a love is the love of the Blind Girl, beaming like a bright star thro' her eternal Night. (N.p.) .Milly'sverbal hyperbole, in turn, is matched and substantiated by the sheer...