Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture

3 "My Old Delightful Sensation:" Wilkie Collins and the Disabling of Melodrama

3 "My Old Delightful Sensation" Wilkie Collins and the Disabling of Melodrama Where Collins got the idea for a deaf-mute heroine is co1tjectural. He had the chronic invalid's fascination for mental and physical deformities . (Ashley 37) Wilkie Collins was one of the twu most prolific producers of disabled characters in Victorian literature, along with his friend, colleague, collaborator, and competitor Charles Dickens. ½7 hile critics and biographers have narrated Collins's interest in disability as purely personal, the manifestation of his own experiences with chronic illness, or as evidence of his reliance on melodramatic claptrap to get a plot moving, his own statements about representing disability have much more to do with an interest in antimelodrama and realism. Collins specifically positions his two m~jor disabled heroines, Madonna Blyth in Hide and Seek(1 854) and Lucilla Finch in PoorMiss Finch (1872), as direct challenges to melodramatic modes of representing disability. He remarks in an end note to Hide and Seek, 74 "MyOld Delightful Sensation" 75 I do not know that any attempt has yet been made in English fiction to draw the character of a "Deaf Mute," simply and exactly after nature-or, in other words, to exhibit the peculiar effects produced by the loss of the senses of hearing and speaking on the disposition of the person so afflicted .... the whole family of dumb people on the stage have the remarkable faculty ... of always being able to hear what is said to them. (355) In the dedication to Poor Miss Fi,nch, similarly, Collins asserts, More than one charming blind girl, in fiction and in the drama, has preceded "Poor Miss Finch." But, so far as I know, blindness in these cases has been always exhibited, more or less exclusively, from the ideal and the sentimental point of view. The attempt here made is to appeal to an interest of another kind, by exhibiting blindness as it really is. (5) Collins thus announces his interest in disability not simply as a life experience or aesthetic theme, but as an issue of representation. Taken together, his remarks and the hard-to-reconcile critical responses to his disabled characters help us approximate the unwritten rules for representing disabled women at this point in the century, and the waysin which two highly melodramatic novels manage to offend those conventions. In his work with disabled women in marriage plots, Collins both shores up and dismantles conventions. He takes apart the "twin structure " by creating two successful novels, Hide and Seek and Poor Miss Finch, whose disabled heroines have no nondisabled sisters or friends who illustrate the disabled women's unfitness-or fitness-for marriage. Further, while the deaf heroine of Hide and Seek, Madonna Blyth, does not finally marry the man she loves, the problem is not disability or excess emotion but incest. Lucilla Finch, the heroine of Poor Miss Finch, survives a series of melodramatic plot twists including eye surgery and deception by two male twins; but when she marries, she is wilfully and happily blind. As a blind woman, she bears two children and ends the plot a happy, wealthy, married mother. As these details should suggest, Collins goes farther than any other writer of the period in his willingness to test melodramatic plotting as a framework for exploring disabled women's ability to love, marry, and bear children. Like The Last Days of Pompeii and The Cricket on the Hearth, 76 FictionsofAffliction Collins's novels construct disabled women as figures of eros rather than pathos. Like Craik, Yonge, and the later Dickens, Collins imagines disabled women as potential wives and mothers. Remarkably, however, Collins does both at once, creating a disabled woman who not only expresses sexual passion but also survives this display of excess to reap the traditional heroine's rewards of courtship and marriage-as well as articulating disability as a state of sexual delight and becoming a biological mother. Even more remarkably, in the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture, this disabled heroine is a blind woman, a figure other writers posit as so radically removed from "normal " life that even when they attribute desire to her, it is almost by definition unrecognized and unrequited. 1 Hide and Seek In his earliest representation of female disability, Hid,eand Seek'sdeaf heroine Madonna Blyth, Collins collapses two conventional and usually mutually exclusive roles for disabled women in melodrama by constructing...