'Normal' Bodies: Disability and Victorian Ideologies in Fiction

Abstract

The advent of Disability Studies as a critical area that aims to explore and re-think cultural and literary representations of the disabled body, has supposed a reassessment of the extent until which the Victorian era has had an impact on the creation of what we consider 'normal'. In his 1995 monograph Enforcing Normalcy, in fact, Lennard J. Davis pointed out clearly that the concept of normalcy in itself is deeply rooted in Victorian social and medical expectations. Following this trend of thought, critics like Martha Stoddard Holmes or Karen Bourier have reconsidered fictional representations of disability and their complexity in relation with several aspects of Victorian literature. In this paper I aim to explore some of these aspects by addressing the previously mentioned relationship between normalcy and the disabled body in Victorian literature and fiction.