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.
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