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 will 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 (Davis 4-5).
Victorian cultural and pseudoscientifical ideologies about the body being a surface in
which the individual’s personality could be read are commonly represented in the
period’s fiction. In the Victorian novel, especially, these popular ideologies were often
at the core of moral and anxiety-producing elements. Two of the most clear examples of
this 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 immoral
or the sinister are represented through bodies that are characterised by their physical
otherness or deformity, as evidenced by Mr Hyde’s bodily and ever present “impression
of deformity” (Stevenson 13), and Dorian Gray’s painted body’s “misshapen body and
failing limbs” (Wilde 139).
In doing this, my aim is to expose how the literary representation of bodies whose
sinister features are directly related to the concept of deformity can be read, in terms of
disability criticism, as comments on the moral and scientifical discourses of the period.
This will show, hopefully, the extent of Victorian fiction’s influence in contemporary
attitudes towards different bodies, while at the same time offering an insight in the
current state of a relatively newly-emerged theoretical field that works towards a new
understanding of culture: Disability Studies.
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