Abstract
Describing someone as disabled means evaluating their relationship with their environment, body, and self. Such descriptions pivot on the person’s perceived limitations due to their atypical embodiment. However, impairments are not inherently pathological, nor are disabilities necessarily deviations from biological normality, a discrepancy often articulated in science fiction via the presentation of radically altered environments. In such settings, non-impaired individuals can be shown to be unsuited to the world they find themselves in. One prime example of this comes courtesy of H. G. Wells’s “The Country of the Blind.” This paper demonstrates science fiction’s capacity to decouple disability’s normative quality from classical medical models stemming from the medical Enlightenment movement by challenging the idea of the biologically normal. It first provides a brief account of disability before exploring the concept of medical normality. It then problematizes the biologically consistent being, arguing that health is only understandable when environmentally situated. Next, the paper provides an overview of “The Country of the Blind” before analyzing how it challenges the idea of biological normality, framing it as a social product rather than a universal constant. Finally, the paper concludes that science fiction narratives effectively interrogate our world’s seemingly consistent trends by envisioning (un)desirable alternatives.
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The author would like to thank Dr. Bryanna Moore and Dr. Lisa Campo-Engelstein for their insightful comments on this article. Additionally, the comments provided by the anonymous reviewers and the journal editor have proven indispensable.
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Endnotes
1 While common, the idea that disabilities are restrictive is not universally accepted. Some see disabilities not as restrictive but rather enhancing or as a core part of their identity (for example, those involved in the Disability Pride movement).
2 Frankenstein, considered by many to be the first modern science fiction story, held biological deviancy and the judgements attached to it at its very heart. This theme is even seen in pre- and proto-science fiction works predating the 1818 publication of The Modern Prometheus, such as in Margaret Cavendish’s 1666 The Blazing World and Jonathon Swift’s 1726 Gulliver’s Travels. Indeed, this trend goes even further back to the works of the ancient Greeks (if one is willing to accept their works as containing the seeds of modern science fiction).
3 It should be noted that this paper is concerned with the philosophical understanding of disability—that is, what disability is in and of itself. However, other usages for the term convey different meanings and can, in themselves, be powerful. For example, the word disability has effectively galvanized necessary political and social change vis-à-vis the Disability Rights Movement. The intention here is not to discredit other usages of the phrase or to take away from their importance but to examine disability’s ontology.
4 It should be noted that while there is a link between increased age and disability, this does not necessarily translate across to how older persons and disabled persons self-identify. Both groups can resist conflation, with some older persons wishing to avoid disability-associated stigma (Naue and Kroll 2010) and disabled persons considering age-related impairments as not being disabilities per se (Priestley and Rabiee 2001).
5 Often called the Gaussian law of error, this law states that “the measurements of a given quantity which are subject to accidental errors are distributed normally about the mean of the observations. More precisely, the law infers that any set of measurements of a given quantity may be regarded as a sample taken from a very large population—the aggregate of all the observations that could be made if the instruments and time allowed—and that this population is normal” (Topping 1972, 72).
6 Wells considered a third ending that saw Nuñez return to the village after leaving to face the surgeons and spend his life with Medina-Saroté. Additionally, there are multiple other possible endings to the story as envisioned by Wells in his notes and workings (see Parrinder 1990).
7 As Huxley outlines, “Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of another, which may be called the ethical process; the end of which is not the survival of those who may happen to be the fittest, in respect of the whole of the conditions which exist, but of those who are ethically the best” (Huxley 2009, 33).
8 While studying at South Kensington’s Normal School of Science, Wells was, in fact, a student of Huxley. The biologist had such an impact on Wells that, in his 1934 autobiography, Wells claimed Huxley to be comparable to Darwin, Plato, Aristotle, and Galileo (The British Library, n.d.).
9 For more on H. G. Wells’s views on eugenics, see Partington (2000, 2003, 2016), Danahay (2012), and Cole (2021).
10 For example, see Tiny Tim in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol or Lucilla Finch in Wilkie’s Poor Miss Finch. For an in-depth comparison between Wells’s disability representations and those of his contemporaries, see Tyrrell (2017a).
11 This most notably took the form of Francis Galton’s eugenics project in which he sought, via state-regulated marriage and mating, to reduce the prevalence of those judged as having low civic and genetic worth and the increase of those of high value (Gillham 2001).
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Gibson, R.B. Normality and Disability in H. G. Wells’s “The Country of the Blind”. J Med Humanit 44, 311–326 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-023-09792-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-023-09792-3