The Discourse of Normalcy and Deformity in the Victorian Novel: a Disability Studies' Perspective.

Abstract

In this paper I seek to address two popular Victorian novels through the theories at work within the contemporary field of disability studies. This area of literary criticism places the human body as a powerful representational construct in which whole ideologies can be placed through disability, while at the same time arguing how disability in literature is used as a multi-purpose tool. I especially focus on Lennard J. Davis’s theory of the concept of Normalcy being an idea developed around the human body in the Nineteenth century.