RT Conference Proceedings
T1 Sinister Bodies: The Victorian Novel, Deformity and Normalcy
A1 Hueso-Vasallo, Manuel
K1 Literatura inglesa - S.XIX
K1 Wilde, Oscar (1854-1900) - Influencia
K1 Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850-1894) - Influencia
AB In this paper I seek to address two popular Victorian novels through the theories at workwithin the contemporary field of disability studies. This area of literary criticism placesthe human body as a powerful representational construct in which whole ideologies canbe placed through disability, while at the same time arguing how disability in literatureis used as a multi-purpose tool. I will especially focus on Lennard J. Davis’s theory ofthe concept of Normalcy being an idea developed around the human body in theNineteenth century (Davis 4-5).Victorian cultural and pseudoscientifical ideologies about the body being a surface inwhich the individual’s personality could be read are commonly represented in theperiod’s fiction. In the Victorian novel, especially, these popular ideologies were oftenat the core of moral and anxiety-producing elements. Two of the most clear examples ofthis are Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886),and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). In these two novels, the immoralor the sinister are represented through bodies that are characterised by their physicalotherness or deformity, as evidenced by Mr Hyde’s bodily and ever present “impressionof deformity” (Stevenson 13), and Dorian Gray’s painted body’s “misshapen body andfailing limbs” (Wilde 139).In doing this, my aim is to expose how the literary representation of bodies whosesinister features are directly related to the concept of deformity can be read, in terms ofdisability criticism, as comments on the moral and scientifical discourses of the period.This will show, hopefully, the extent of Victorian fiction’s influence in contemporaryattitudes towards different bodies, while at the same time offering an insight in thecurrent state of a relatively newly-emerged theoretical field that works towards a newunderstanding of culture: Disability Studies.
YR 2016
FD 2016
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10630/38909
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10630/38909
LA eng
DS RIUMA. Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Málaga
RD 19 ene 2026