Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture (review)

Martha Stoddard Holmes's Fictions of Affliction can best be described as an attempt to dismantle our ability to uncritically accept "disability" as such by focusing our attention on its historical, cultural, and individual particularities. Well-grounded in disability studies, Holmes situates her work in relation to, and differentiates it from, work on sentiment and melodrama, "the body" and illness more generally, and "freaks." She engages with critics working on Victorian literature and on gender, class, and the body, seeking to press their analyses toward a more active engagement with the category of disability as "a historically provocative figure," not a universal one (72). As part of the University of Michigan Press series Corporealities: Discourses of Disability, Fictions of Affliction offers a nuanced explication of the concurrent, often conflicting meanings of disabled characters in Victorian culture. It should prove useful for studies in fields beyond disability and Victorian culture, given its historicist analysis of genre, medicine, gender, class, and social reform.

In an opening chapter, Holmes identifies melodrama as the genre toward which narratives of disability most often gravitate—both now and then—and points to three figures or types that recur in Victorian fictional and nonfictional texts about disabled bodies, creating a kind of gravitational force of their own. Her identification is not only convincing, with a wealth of examples from the period, but also useful for its clarification of the importance of gender and class identity in inflecting the roles available to people with physical impairments. For example, she examines the plight of the disabled woman, widely believed to be unmarriageable and unfit to bear children. In two chapters, Holmes focuses on the "'unmarriageable' woman" (60) in literary texts by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Dickens, Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, Charlotte Mary Yonge, and Wilkie Collins, although she moves beyond purely literary readings to discussions of medical theory and eugenics. Holmes traces this figure through melodrama and fiction, offering insightful readings of both canonical and noncanonical Victorian drama and novels. Holmes's discussion of Craik, Yonge, and Collins in relation to the melodramatic convention of the "unmarriageable woman" is especially insightful in illuminating new aspects of these novels.

If Victorian culture construes marriage as the necessary but unattainable end for the disabled woman, work fills that role for the disabled man. Holmes deftly articulates the distinctions between the two "types" available to disabled men and boys: the "afflicted child" or the "begging imposter," neither of which accommodates the disabled worker, that goal of many a social reformer (95–6). With familiar characters from Dickens set alongside a thorough and persuasive reading of the trope of disability within an impressive array of educational, legal, and social reform texts, such as Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, Holmes demonstrates the crucial role of "work" in Victorian masculine-identity formation while she parses the often contradictory distinctions between, and responses to, the "deserving" and "undeserving" dependent poor. Her chapter on disabled men, steeped in the various minutiae of Victorian documentary responses to disability, is particularly strong, insisting on the inevitability of the child-imposter dyad while demonstrating the many different incarnations of that dyad in particular texts and situations.

Holmes also engages with fields and methodologies other than disability studies and Victorian studies. With attention to the field of autobiographical studies, Holmes offers rich and particularized portraits of Victorians like Harriet Martineau or John Kitto, showing how their life texts are shaped narratives that negotiate a space for individual identity, necessarily in some relation to the constraining cultural tropes she has identified. She similarly, although briefly, discusses the implications of performance theory when considering these self-authored lives.

While Holmes offers a productive model in identifying the three strongly conventional roles for physically impaired Victorians, she does not fully acknowledge an additional role, the "overcomer," that cultural ideal that valorizes rare achievements and makes individual impairments invisible. The discussions of the lives of Henry Fawcett and Elizabeth Gilbert in particular...