Sensational Dependence: Prosthesis and Affect in Dickens and Braddon
2008; Routledge; Volume: 19; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/10436920701884688
ISSN1545-5866
Autores Tópico(s)Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size I'd like to thank Peter Sinnema and my readers at LIT for their helpful feedback on earlier versions of this article. Notes For a broader critique of literary-based Disability Studies scholarship's preoccupation with characterization, see Martha Stoddard Holmes's Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture (2004) and Sharon L. Snyder and David Mitchell's Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (2000 ——— . Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse . Ann Arbor : U of Michigan P , 2000 . [Google Scholar]). This story's name is not to be confused with “Doctor Marigold's Prescriptions,” the title of the entire 1866 Christmas number of All the Year Round in which it appeared as only one piece among many. Only three of the issue's chapters were written by Dickens. My article deals only with the volume's opening story, Dickens's “Doctor Marigold.” Braddon's novel focuses on the efforts of mute detective Joe Peters to bring criminal mastermind Jabez North to justice, while Dickens's sentimental Christmas story depicts the paternal affection between traveling hawker, “Doctor Marigold,” and his adoptive Deaf-mute daughter, Sophy. For useful descriptions of the conventions of sensation fiction, see Ann Cvetkovich's Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (1992), Lyn Pykett's The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Women's Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (1992), Pamela K. Gilbert's Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women's Popular Novels (1997), and Walter Phillips's Dickens, Reade, & Collins: Sensation Novelists (1962); for sentimental fiction, see Susan K. Harris's Nineteenth-Century American Women's Novels (1990). Nor indeed do I claim here that such fiction is impenetrable by visually impaired readers when read aloud or translated into Braille—the genre's emphasis on visual surfaces and detail does not require that its readers actually have the ability to see. In conscripting their imagined audience, however, realist narrators call upon them to assess the world through visual evidence and careful viewing. In The Realist Imagination (1981), Levine writes, “there was no such thing as naïve realism—simple faith in the correspondence between word and thing—among serious Victorian novelists…[although] Victorian realists, recognizing the difference between truth and the appearance of truth, did try to embrace the reality that stretched beyond the reach of language” (12). Indeed, the mere designation of this group of texts as “sensational” indicates its consignment to the realm of the body rather than of the mind. While sensation and perception, as psychologist Harvey Schiffman reminds us, are necessarily allied and simultaneous, they have historically been viewed as separate experiences, the first associated with the subject's unmediated physical response to environmental stimuli, the second with the psychological organization and interpretation of that stimuli. While Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell are surely right to suggest that, in the eugenics discourse of the latter part of the nineteenth century, physical disability was often conflated with mental defect (Cultural Locations 78), the two forms of impairment were also distinguished within a rigid hierarchy of the body evidenced clearly and repeatedly in Victorian fiction and autobiography. Peters and North first meet at a riverside inn in which North is callously abandoning the mother of his child. Because Peters is mute, North assumes he is Deaf as well and thus fails to soften his words to his former lover. Peters's horror at North's undisguised cruelty forms the basis for his future suspicions and pursuit. Thus, the book suggests that North's downfall is brought about in part by his deadly underestimation of dis-ability. Dickens's friend Wilkie Collins faced a similar problem in his 1854 mystery novel Hide and Seek, featuring the Deaf-mute girl, Mary Grice. Collins first places his heroine in a third-rate circus where she is made to perform her Deafness by tramping sedately around the ring in a blindfold while spectators shout and clap at her. Only in her lack of reaction does her disability come into view. The subjugation of both Collins's Mary and Dickens's Sophy comes through their exposure to spectacular public scrutiny. As the cases of famous feral children such as Viktor of Aveyron and Genie suggest, children who are denied any (whether oral or signed) form of language in early life rarely learn language thereafter. In the sentimental world of the Christmas story, however, anything is possible. My use of this term follows Walter Benjamin's in “The Task of the Translator,” in which he describes translation as “the task [of]…finding that intended effect…upon the language into which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the original” (76). As Graham Storey notes, Dickens delivered the piece at over 75 performances (137). For more on the anti-sign language campaign, see Douglas Baynton's Forbidden Signs: American Culture and the Campaign Against Sign Language (1996); for more about eugenics and sterilization in Canada, see the NFB documentary The Sterilization of Leilani Muir (1996 The Sterilization of Leilani Muir. Dir. Glynis Whiting. National Film Board of Canada , 1996 . [Google Scholar]). Additional informationNotes on contributorsChristine FergusonChristine Ferguson is a Lecturer in the Department of English Literature at the University of Glasgow. Her publications include the monograph Language, Science, and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siecle: The Brutal Tongue (Ashgate 2006) and articles in PMLA, ELH, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and the Journal of Victorian Culture.
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