Abstract
Modern Irish cultural practice is anchored in a set of discursive and somatic frameworks defined by disability. The notion of Ireland itself and what it means to be Irish are constructed in modern Irish writing1 primarily through the category of physical or cognitive difference, or, as it is currently framed in many humanities-oriented critical discourses, the ever-broadening category of the disabled body. For Irish writers and both Irish and English audiences in this period, stereotypes of physical difference and the resulting negative social constructions of strangeness, weakness, dependence, interdependence, paralysis, blindness, heroic bravery, foolish sentimentality, and excessive imagination all define what Ireland is and how Ireland functions. These cultural stereotypes are key elements in Ireland’s self-conceptions, as well as in modern British understandings of and answers to the ever-troublesome Irish “problem” or “question.”
It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.
(Wilde, Dorian Gray)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
This study does not take into account nineteenth- and early-twentieth century writing in Irish language. Likewise, as noted in the Introduction, in this work I define “modern” in the terms found in Roy Foster’s Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (New York: Allen Lane, 1988); I use the larger framework of “modern Irish culture” constructed in works like The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture (Joe Cleary and Claire Connolly, Cambridge University Press, 2005).
See Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Vintage, 1987), 78–9.
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Ed. Isobel Murray. Oxford English Novels (Oxford University Press, 1974), 25.
See Lennard Davis, “Constructing Normalcy: The Bell Curve, The Novel, and the Invention of the Disabled Body in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Disability Studies Reader. Ed. Lennard J. Davis. (New York: Routledge, 1997.)
See Martha Stoddard Holmes, Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004)
and Sondra Archimedes, Gendered Pathologies: The Female Body and Biomedical Discourse in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (London: Routledge, 2005).
Also see Pamela Gilbert, Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Mapping the Victorian Social Body (New York: SUNY Press, 2004); and The Citizen’s Body (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007).
The rhetoric anticipating this hope is often passionate and tied directly to an emerging civil rights movement. See, for example, J.S. Mill, On Liberty; in Utilitarianism, On Liberty, Considerations on Representative Government. Ed. Geraint Williams (London: J.M. Dent, 1993).
See Martha Stoddard Holmes, Victorian Afflictions; Peter Gray, Famine, Land, and Politics: British Government and Irish Society, 1843–50 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999);
and Maria Frawley, Invalidism and Identity in Nineteenth Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
See Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). Kiberd cites Wilde telling Bernard Shaw that their work was a part of the Irish Renaissance, and, in humor, that they were a part of the “Celtic School” (Kiberd 47; Wilde, Selected Letters, 112).
Alan, Warner, Guide to Anglo-Irish Literature (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1981) p. 5.
Cited in Jarlath Killeen, The Faiths of Oscar Wilde: Catholicism, Folklore and Ireland (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 9.
Richard Pine, The Thief of Reason: Oscar Wilde and Modern Ireland (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1995), 1. Qtd. in Kileen, 11.
See Tony Kushner, “Forward: Notes toward a Theater of the Fabulous.” Staging Lives: An Anthology of Contemporary Gay Theater. Ed. John M. Clum (Boulder: Westview, 1996), vii.
Qtd. in Robert McRuer, “Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence.” Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. Eds. Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland Thomson (New York: MLA, 2002), 96.
From National Observer; 6, April 1895; qtd. in H. Montgomery Hyde, Famous Trials: Oscar Wilde (New York: Penguin, 1962), 156.
See Rosemarie Garland Thomson, “The Politics of Staring: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography.” Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. Eds. Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland Thomson (New York: MLA, 2002), 56–7.
See Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 12.
Please see the following examples of critical texts on “freakery” and “monstrosity” in American and British cultures: Leslie Fielder, Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (New York: Anchor Books, 1993)
and Paul Youngquist, Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
Please also see Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Staring: How We Look (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
See Lennard Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (London: Verso, 1995). As mentioned above, in the next chapter I will outline a more detailed history of the norm.
For a more comprehensive, intelligent, and classic treatment of the assertions I make here see Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (New York: Wesleyan, 1985).
This domesticity has beendefined by Michael Mckeon and other critics as an Enlightenment, “old-style patriarchy” built around notions of “patriarchal prerogative,” strict hierarchy and authority, and the “exercise of force” or physical coercion if necessary, all to control the shadowy and irrational “essences” of feminine behavior. See Mckeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
See also Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Their Fathers’ Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
William Cohen, “Deep Skin” in Thinking the Limits of the Body. Eds. Jefferey Jerome Cohen and Gail Weiss (New York: State University of New York Press, 2003), 63.
See Ato Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 15.
The Irish Writer has become an interpretive cultural category unto itself. See Declan Kiberd, The Irish Writer and the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
See Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 5.
See Erin O’Conner, Raw Material: Producing Pathology in Victorian Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
David Mitchell “Narrative Prosthesis and the Materiality of Metaphor.” Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. Eds. Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland Thompson (New York: MLA, 2002), 100–8.
Filson Young, Ireland at the Crossroads: An Essay in Explanation. 1903 (London: E. Grant Richards, 1907), 15–16.
Luke Gibbons, “‘Have you no homes to go to?’: Joyce and the Politics of Paralysis.” Semicolonial Joyce. Eds. Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 150–71, 151.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2009 Mark Mossman
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Mossman, M. (2009). Irish Studies Meets Disability Studies. In: Disability, Representation and the Body in Irish Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230250673_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230250673_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-36543-2
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-25067-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social & Cultural Studies CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)