Fairy-Tale Bodies: Prostheses and Narrative Perspective in Dinah Mulock Craik’s The Little Lame Prince

As a literary fairy tale, Dinah Mulock Craik’s The Little Lame Prince and His Travelling Cloak: A Parable for Young and Old (1874) employs a fantasy setting and magical circumstances to depict the moral, psychological, and physical development of its hero, Prince Dolor. The hybrid story combines fairy tale, Bildungsroman, and parable, defies conventional narrative closure, and produces incongruous understandings of disability. The story’s narrative trajectory moves towards closure, first reinforcing Dolor’s physical deviance and the eradicating it through magical prosthetic gifts; as such, the outer structure creates a story of disability as abnormal, restricting, and in need of compensation if not cure. However, by making readers aware first of the narrator’s physical limitations and of their own roles as spectators, and then by focalizing through the disabled hero while he is a spectator, The Little Lame Prince undermines its earlier use of Dolor as a sentimental spectacle. Moreover, moments in which readers focalize with Dolor through his magical prostheses reveal the limitations of all bodies and speculate on the beauty and infinite variety of physical difference. These colliding views of disability in The Little Lame Prince exhibit the complex, shifting role of the body in Victorian thought.

Afterword

This afterword reminds readers of how thoroughly Victorians conflated body and text in their literary and medical rhetoric, using Robert Buchanan’s The Fleshly School of Poetry as an example. Additionally, it reiterates the mutability of the Victorians’ understanding of the human body’s centrality to identity, noting that as disability became increasingly medicalized and the soul increasingly psychologized, the mode of looking at deviant bodies shifted from gaping at spectacle to scrutinizing specimen, and the shape of narratives evolved from lengthy multiple-plot novels to slim case studies. However, Victorian fiction narratives consistently remained ambivalent when categorizing disability, aligning it with both abnormality and the commonplace.

Mysterious Bodies: Solving and De-Solving Disability in the Fin-de-Siècle Mystery

This chapter argues that disability becomes fully specimen in the fin-de-siècle mystery, which grants authority to the professional discourses of medicine, science, and law. Comparing Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) to Doyle’s ‘The Adventure of the Crooked Man’ (1893), the chapter illuminates the interplay between scientific discourse and narrative structure in fin-de-siècle mysteries, revealing the ambiguity with which late Victorians understood and criminalized disability. Despite Jekyll and Hyde’s modern Gothic, open narrative structure, the novella confirms the conservative disability stereotypes associated with late Victorian criminology and physiognomy, which placed anxieties of cultural deviance upon the disabled mind and body. In contrast, despite the conservative drive towards closure typical of detective fiction, ‘The Crooked Man’ undermines those stereotypes and the supposed criminality of the disabled body. However, when either narrative focalizes through characters with freakish bodies, that focalization troubles the professional authority of scientific discourse and denies the possibility of controlling deviance or separating it from imagined normalcy.

Grotesque Bodies: Hybridity and Focalization in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris

This chapter argues that Victor Hugo’s historical Gothic novel Notre-Dame de Paris (1831)—especially in its popular English translation, Hunchback of Notre Dame (1833)—set a precedent in Victorian fiction for investigating the disabled body through narrative form and focalization. The chapter shows how Hugo uses external focalization from a perspective outside the narrative action to portray the disabled body as grotesque and thus inherently deviant but uses strategic internal focalization through characters inside the narrative to destabilize the boundaries between normalcy and abnormality. In particular, focalizing externally on Quasimodo, Hugo separates reader empathy from him and dehumanizes his body; but focalizing through Quasimodo forces readers to share his embodiment, removing the distinction between self and other. Moreover, the chapter contends that the novel’s structural hybridity, which combines disparate genres, enables the dialogic conflict of these two opposing voices and so provides a structural prototype whereby Victorian novels approached disability.

Introduction

Prompted by Victorians’ frequent conflation of body and text, the introduction argues that Victorian fiction’s narrative form, specifically plot structure and focalization, contributed to the development of disability as a concept; in particular, as fiction’s form developed from the massive hybrid novels of the early decades of the nineteenth century to the case-study length of fin-de-siècle mysteries, disability became increasingly medicalized, moving from the position of spectacle to specimen. The chapter addresses focalization’s evocation of the perceiving body, linking focalization to theories of staring and the specular in disability studies, and it provides a history of scholarship on Victorian illness and disability, thus placing the book’s argument in the fields of narratology, disability studies, and Victorian studies.

Sanctified Bodies: Christian Theology and Disability in Ellice Hopkins’s Rose Turquand and Charlotte Yonge’s The Pillars of the House

Comparing Ellice Hopkins’s Rose Turquand (1876) to Charlotte Yonge’s The Pillars of The House, or Underwode, Under Rode (1870–73), this chapter outlines how religion, form, and focalization interact in mid-Victorian Christian sentimental fiction to create discernible concepts of disability as corporealizing spirituality. Specifically, each author’s respective incarnational theology (the theology of Christ in human form) correlate substantially to the novels’ overarching narrative forms, Hopkins’s as a single-focus plot and Yonge’s as a multiple-focus plot. As a single-focus Bildungsroman that focalizes primarily through its heroine, Rose Turquand delineates spirituality and disability as individually experienced, depicting incarnation as the sanctification of the individual body through suffering. In contrast, The Pillars of the House’s multiple-focus family chronicle formulates religion and disability as communally experienced through interdependency as the locus for spiritual growth, reflecting Yonge’s Tractarian understanding of incarnation as existing through the Church as a community.

Sensing Bodies: Negotiating the Body and Identity in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone

This chapter illustrates how mid-Victorian sensation fiction responds to anxieties exacerbated by nascent Victorian psychology’s attempt to map the self on the corporeal body. Examining the form and focalization of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd (1862–63) and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), this chapter argues that bodies in sensation fiction function both as spectacle, exhibitions of physical instability, and as specimens, case studies on the source of identity. In Aurora Floyd, focalization through an authoritative external perspective provides ‘correct’ interpretations of bodies which have previously been misinterpreted by physiognomy, phrenology, and lineage. In particular, the narrator uses external focalization on disabled villains to manifest how identity appears in bodies and to place eugenic value on those with healthy bodies. By contrast, The Moonstone, lacking authoritative external focalization due to its multiple first-person narrators, uses plot to reveal misinterpretations of disabled bodies, in particular that of Rosanna Spearman. In addition, internally focalized interactions between normate narrators and disabled characters in the novel often cause the narrators to recognize the instability of their own identities and bodies, and thus of normalcy. However, the novel’s overall narrative structure works to control deviance through linearity, which imposes normalcy as a stable, final result.

Social Bodies: Dickens and the Disabled Narrator in Bleak House

Dickens makes disability central to his social condition novel Bleak House (1851–53) by revealing exactly midway through its serial publication that Esther Summerson, one of its two narrators, has disfiguring facial scars. This chapter argues that splitting narration between Esther and a disembodied third-person voice throws into relief the dissimilarities between external and internal focalization and their articulation of disability. Notably, while Bleak House’s externally focalized third-person narration usually marginalizes disability and illness by making them symbolize social corruption through humour and sentimentality, when focalizing through disabled narrators and characters, the novel repositions disability and disease as ordinary aspects of the body’s normal instability and uses humour to criticize sentimental metaphorization of disability. Both attitudes towards disability simultaneously exist in the novel through its hybrid form that lacks full narrative closure.