Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture

2 Marital Melodramas: Disabled Women and Victorian Marriage Plots

2 Marital Melodramas Disabled ivomen and Victorian Marriage Plots As darkness, too, favors the imagination, so, perhaps, her very blindness contributed to feed with wild and delirious visions the love of the unfortunate girl. ... what wonder that in her wild and passionate soul all the clements jarred discordant; that iflove reigned over the whole, it was not the love which is born of the more sacred and soft emotions? ... There were moments when she could have murdered her uncomcious mistress, moments when she could have laid down life for her. These fierce and tremnlous alternations of passion were too severe to be borne long. (Bulwer-Lytton 230-34) Henriette: You have separated me from a poor child whose only help in lite I am; whose misfortune commands the respect of criminals even worse than yourself. She is dependent upon me alone; -without me she cannot take a single step, for she is blind! OMNES: Blind? Henriette: Yes, blind and alone! (Tremblingvoice.)Alone in Paris, without money, without help, wandering through the streets, sightless, homeless, wild with despair. (Bursts into tears. Half aside.) What will become of her? (Again bursting erul.)She is blind! Gentlemen, do you hear me? She is blind! Chevalier (moved):"Oh, this is too horrible!" (Oxenford 2 1) 34 Marital Melodramas 3.li (7t useful understanding of the melodramatization of disability demands 1'\..Jocal analysis. What kinds of characters and plot,;;show up often-or never? If certain disabled figures are indeed melodramatic, what purposes does the emotional excess they carry serve in the plot and in the larger culture ? vVhatis compelling about thinking of them on the terms melodrama offers us-emotional excess, visual display, and clear plot resolutions? One figure that can guide us to'ward answers to these questions is the recurrent melodramatic trope of a young disabled woman involved in a marriage plot to which she is denied access and the variations to that plot that allow her to marry. These Victorian narratives, fascinating in their own right, also give us a ground from which to approach the continuing difficulty mainstream culture has imagining disabled women as lovers, ,vives, and mothers. Each of these possibilities produced for the Victorians (and produces for us) a particular form of anxiety. 1 Such plots are exemplified here by five popular fictional works across a thirty-year span of the centmy: Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton 's The Last Days ofPompeii (1834), Charles Dickens's The Cricketon the Hearth (1846), Dinah Maria Mulock Craik's Olive ( 1850), Charlotte MaryYonge's The Clever Woman of the Family (1865), and Dickens 's last novel, Our Mutual Friend (serialized 1864-65). These fictions are usefully approached with a sense of disabled women's double participation in cultural conventions of women and disabled people as "feeling bodies," particularly well represented by a latecentury stage melodrnma, D'Ennery and Carmon's 1874 Les deux orphelines . In various adaptations and translations, this Victorian work retained its popularity into the twentieth century. The play was performed for decades on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as in Moscow under Stanislavsky's direction; it was rendered multiple times in silent film. Because Les deux orphelines reprises the treatment of blindness and sexuality in earlier stage melodramas like John Wilkins's The Blind Wife (1850), it is not so much a new model of disability, ability, and marriage as the reinscription of a preferred model after decades of exploration. The fictions that precede it suggest the ways in which earlier "Writersuse emotional excess to mark disabled women as unfit for marriage, and how later ones shuffle the plot's emotional and structural dynamics to give disabled women the traditional heroine's ending, minus the biological children. Readings of these fictions will prepare the way for speculations about the other cultural contexts that shaped these plot'i and finally favored the one in which a blind woman is the site of pathos, not eros. 36 Fictions of Affliction Feeling Bodies: Women, Disability, Melodrama Writing of melodrama in the twentieth century, Tania Modleski asserts that [i]ntuitively ... we ally melodrama with the feminine insofar as it is a genre quintessentially concerned with emotional expression. Women in melodrama almost always suffer the pains of love and even death ... while husbands, lovers, and children remain partly or totally unaware of their experience. Women carry the burden of feeling for everyone. (331) Michael Booth confirms the historical reach of...