Victorian Fictions of Interdependency: Gaskell, Craik, and Yonge
Martha Stoddard Holmes [1]
Victorian fiction by Elizabeth Gaskell, Dinah Mulock Craik, and especially Charlotte Yonge offers alternate ways to imagine dependency and disability. Basic fictional elements such as plotting and genre produce a message of interdependency as both a social norm and a social good, catalyzing a range of relationships including, but not limited to, marriage. Later critics’ dismissal of all three writers’ Christian ideologies of self-sacrifice may reveal our pervasive devaluation of the interdependency that, like disability, is a universal experience.
Introduction
Dependency and independence are problematic keywords for contemporary culture because of our deeply held and unexamined feelings about both of them. Feminist philosopher Eva Feder Kittay describes our feelings about dependency as those of “fear and loathing” whose counterparts are various ideas about the desirable state of independence and our relationship to it: “we have been able to fashion the pretense that we are independent—that the cooperation between persons that some insist is interdependence is simply the mutual (often voluntary) cooperation between essentially independent persons” (“Love’s Labor Revisited” 248; Love’s Labor xii). This fiction of independence, Kittay argues, is both false and dangerous: “our mutual dependence cannot be bracketed without excluding both significant parts of our lives and large portions of the population from the domain of equality” (Love’s Labor xii). She wants to find “a knife sharp enough to cut through the fiction of our independence,” and does so in Love’s Labor with a “dependency critique” that attends to the social, economic, and political disadvantages public ideologies of in/dependence produce for all involved in relationships of asymmetrical dependency (xii).
One goal of Kittay’s critique is a reengineering of our perceptions about the normalcy of vulnerability across the life cycle. As she asserts in a later essay, “We need to see our dependency and our vulnerablity to dependency as species typical” (“Love’s Labor Revisited” 248). Another route to this goal is to explore narratives that invite us to imagine dependency, independence, and interdependency otherwise, seeking widely and not restricting ourselves to contemporary culture.
Surprisingly, one source of enabling narratives of interdependency is Victorian writing. Disability pervades Victorian medical and social discourses, reflecting the age’s fervor for clinical research and charitable action, both of which targeted the ‘afflicted.’ Victorian literature, similarly, is rich with disability representations, partly because life in nineteenth-century Britain offered so many ways in which to become disabled in a lifetime, including industrial accidents, diseases, poverty, and warfare.
Literary disability scholars often turn to the Victorians for examples of our most damaging public narratives of embodied differences. Charles Dickens, to pick the most common example, generated not only the iconic figures of boy cripple and malignant dwarf (Tiny Tim and Quilp) but also a host of angelic invalids, corrupt prosthesis users, and benign intellectually disabled people of both genders.[2] In writing by Dickens and his contemporaries, disabled characters often function “as a crutch upon which literary narratives lean for their representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight,” bearing out David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s important theory of narrative prosthesis (39).
As they are careful to point out, however, “it is easy to fall prey to the self-congratulatory belief that we occupy the most progressive moment of disability awareness in history” (xiv) and assume, for example, that Victorian texts are universally less evolved in their ways of imagining social relationships based on embodied differences. In fact, part of Narrative Prosthesis’s value is its sustained ability to catalyze other critical inquiries, and Victorian fiction in particular invites such investigation. The diversity of Victorian representations of disability as a social identity is as underexplored as the diversity of the period’s sexual practices once was; there is still a tendency to expect that all the period’s disabled characters are saints or sinners, Tiny Tim or Quilp. A wider and deeper analysis of Victorian literary engagements of disability tells us a more complex story, contributing to our investigation (and disruption) of received cultural notions about dependence, independence, and disability and their imbrication within social ideologies and institutions.
The domestic fiction of popular Victorian women writers Elizabeth Gaskell, Dinah Mulock Craik, and especially Charlotte Yonge exemplifies these fictional dynamics, overdetermining disability as an aspect of human interdependency through basic fictional elements such as plot, character development, theme, and subgenre. First, the fictions narrate the human situation as one of sequential and sometimes nested dependencies, through plots and characterization that normalize and valorize relationships built on vulnerability and need. While dyads of care are a common character development structure, ensemble plots construct disability as a feature of community life. In Yonge’s family chronicles in particular, bodily and mental variation is dispersed across too many characters for any metaphoric message about disability to cohere, even if the author wanted it to. Thematically, the fictions engage disability as a force that brings people into a wide range of complex relationships, transforming social institutions like marriage in the process. Finally, while all the works I will discuss are domestic fiction shot with sensational threads, disability is portrayed as the material of daily life, not the source of sensation.
Dyads of Care: Gaskell and Craik
The most common Victorian fictions of interdependence feature two characters in a caring relationship characterized by an emotional parity that subsumes their asymmetry as physical or social agents. The two works I will discuss, Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Well at Pen-Morfa” and Dinah Craik’s Olive (both 1850), exemplify dyads of sequential care, in which characters alternate the roles of carer and cared-for over time. While the characters’ need for each other is asymmetrical at some times, none of them is absolutely “independent” or “dependent,” especially given a cumulative picture of relationships as they change across many years. Both plots also negotiate the pervasive Victorian (and later) message that disabled girls do not marry, in the process offering a commentary on the limitations and possibilities of marriage as an institution.[3]
A theme of mothers and children joined by disablement and care defines “The Well at Pen-Morfa’s” frame narrative and its central story. In its first pages, a travel narrative set in a rustic Welsh landscape almost immediately introduces an image of a "stern and severe-looking" woman hiving bees that leads to a story of how this woman, once the town beauty, had gone into service in London, come home pregnant and unmarried, and borne a disabled child. The narrator paints a brief but memorable picture of this pair:
When I saw the mother, it had been for fifteen years bed-ridden. But go past when you would, in the night you saw a light burning; it was often that of the watching mother, solitary and friendless, soothing the moaning child; or you might hear her crooning some old Welsh air, in hopes to still the pain with the loud monotonous music. (79)
This brief narrative provides the terms for the main story of Nest Gwynn and her mother. Nest, like the first woman, is a local beauty, whose innocent enjoyment of her own loveliness creates the story's first crisis. Nest goes to the well in her Sunday best, falls on her cloak, and seriously injures her hip. When it is clear that she will neither die nor fully recover, her fiancé breaks off their engagement, leaving Mrs. Gwynn to help her daughter recover from her physical, emotional, and social injuries.
As Gaskell describes the ensuing dyad of care, she echoes the frame narrative only to complicate it with frustration and futility. Nest
revolted from her mother; she revolted from the world. She bound her sorrow tight up in her breast, to corrode and fester there. Night after night, her mother heard her cries and moans--more pitiful, by far, than those wrung from her by bodily pain a year before; and night after night, if her mother spoke to soothe, she proudly denied the existence of any pain but what was physical. (87)
When Mrs. Gwynn dies, Nest sees this as the culmination of a bitter fate: “’Come back, mother! Come back,’ said she, crying wildly to the still, solemn corpse; ‘come back as a spirit or a ghost--only come back, that I may tell you how I have loved you.’ But the dead never come back” (91). Gaskell might easily end the plot here. Instead, she produces yet another dyad of care. Nest finally heals her own grief by adopting an abused "idiot" girl, Mary, whom her mother had helped before her death. Mary's madness and cruelty replicate in extreme version Nest's behavior to her mother, but finally, while Nest is still alive, Mary "love[s] her back, as a dumb animal loves its blind master," explicitly responding to Nest’s unresolved experience with her dead mother (94).
Gaskell represents both care dyads as asymmetrical in physical and intellectual power, but not in emotional agency; the cruelty both Nest and Mary enact towards their would-be carers is at least as potent as the love that replaces it. The only more satisfying emotional exchange Gaskell offers is in Nest’s "happiest dream," in which all boundaries of embodiment and age dissolve as "her mother stretche[s] out her arms to her with a calm glad look of welcome" (95). The day after this dream, she returns to the well and dies peacefully beside it.
We may argue with many aspects of “The Well at Pen-Morfa,” including its use of narrative prosthesis. Like Louisa Musgrove’s disabling fall in Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818), Nest’s fall is clearly figurative as well as literal, a sign of and punishment for her sexual vanity. Her disablement is indeed a “material metaphor,” to use Mitchell and Snyder’s useful term, functioning as a handy sign of moral damage (63). Further, disablement has a prosthetic function in revealing the character of caregivers: the goodness of Nest’s mother, and Nest’s own humility and evolution, emerge as revealed by the presence of disabled children. We may also rankle at Gaskell’s implicit message that disabled children should be grateful to their parents before it’s too late.
Disability, however, is not the only condition on which the narrative relies for its motion and meaning. Above all, it leans on the heterosexual courtship plot, whose main function is to produce the damage that results in the interdependent caring relationships that are the story’s true and final emphasis. Further, if the story "The Well At Pen-Morfa" specifically designates heterosexual relations as the site that produces Nest Gwynn's misery (and her disability), by the end, the marriage plot is not even an important issue; the mother-child dyad is proclaimed the one truly satisfying relationship anyone can experience, in which injury is forgiven and physical and mental vulnerabilities embraced. Gaskell’s story makes dependency a central narrative concern, developing care as a lifelong process carried out across multiple relationships and negotiated many times within one Welsh community.
Finally, the story’s sensational elements—the sexual sin of both the opening narrative and Nest’s disabling accident—do not define it for long. As in Persuasion, Nest’s accident is a narrative turning point. Her disablement does not begin or end the narrative, however, and thus fades in importance in the face of the ongoing narrative thread. This shifts the plot’s emphasis away from disability as the source of sensation, and away from sensation as the story’s objective; disability’s purpose is to produce mother-child relationships of dependency and mutual care and present the problems and satisfactions of these bonds.
Dinah Craik’s novel Olive also develops a mother-daughter dyad in relation to a heterosexual courtship plot whose pressures and damages it ultimately heals. Olive Rothesay is born prematurely to a frivolous young beauty whose husband is on an extended trip to the West Indies. When a physician pronounces her baby “deformed,” Sybilla is devastated: she has “learned since her birth to consider beauty as the greatest good" (14). Believing that her husband will see the baby as "a deformity on the face of the earth, a shame to its parents, a dishonour to its race....[a] poor cripple," Sybilla conceals Olive's condition until her husband returns a few years later (14-15). As it turns out, Mr. Rothesay has his own concealed secret--a passionate extramarital relationship and illegitimate mixed-race daughter—but these do not emerge until after his sudden death ends many years of troubled domesticity.
Olive is notable in its careful development of the social role of ‘deformed girl’ or ‘cripple’ and its purported emotional content, especially in the scenes of Olive’s adolescence in which friends and family painfully acculturate her into the idea that deformed girls do not marry. What Craik offers as a first balm to this pain, however, is Olive’s training and success as a painter and the satisfaction of supporting her widowed, blind mother after Mr. Rothesay leaves them in debt. The emotional acme of the book is the “wild devotion, less a sentiment than a passion” Olive feels for Mrs. Rothesay, and the pleasure she experiences from rescuing her mother and feeling (at last) that her mother values her (128). Olive’s tender care for the mother who initially could not care for her, and the careless young beauty’s transformation into someone who can reciprocate her daughter’s love, produce a narrative of disability as that which brings mothers and daughters together for a fulfilling intimacy predicated on interdependence.
Even more than Gaskell, Craik disperses disablement across multiple characters and different contexts, diffusing disability’s metaphoric and prosthetic potential. Olive’s mother is blinded; her father seems addicted to alcohol and stock market speculation; and her father’s illegitimate daughter is hysterical, a clinical diagnosis in the nineteenth century. Further, if Olive’s birth and her first appearance to her father are sensational moments, for the rest of the novel, Olive’s realm is domesticity; sensation is reserved for other characters and other forms of difference.[4]
With all this variation on a theme of disability, Craik effectively scrambles any predictable codes of its sensational or sentimental meaning. Further, she presents no one as fully dependent or fully independent; the characters that end up happy at the end of the plot are those who (like Nest Gwynn in Gaskell’s story) can form relationships with others rather than striving to fulfill their own individuality. Olive’s beautiful and vain nondisabled friend dies young after an unhappy marriage, but Olive marries the widower, adopts her friend’s child, and lives more or less happily after.
Disabled Communities: Yonge
Craik has many other novels that explore disability and interdependence as part of a domestic fabric, including several in which multiple characters are disabled.[5] The works of her contemporary Charlotte Yonge, however, more dramatically exemplify the narrative power of generalizing interdependence over a large cast of characters. By creating multiple same-gender and heterosexual relationships distinguished by disablement and care, Yonge imagines disabled communities in each of the family narratives for which she is famous, inscribing the message that caregiving, with disability as its occasion, prepares both men and women for lasting intimacies, including (but not limited to) marriage.[6]
The Clever Woman of the Family (1865) features several dyads of care, but it also weaves a more complex web of relationships involving disability, encompassing the heterosexual and the more generally social. The novel’s two heroines, both unmarried gentlewomen in their thirties, share the ambition of producing good in their lives and communities. In Rachel Curtis’s case, a well-meaning plan to fund an educational asylum for child lace-workers ends badly when the unscrupulous guardians she has hired abuse the children and cause one’s death. Ermine Williams, in contrast, does good in quieter ways, including publishing articles under the pen name “The Invalid.”[7] She has used a wheelchair since a domestic accident burned her legs over ten years earlier. The two women become close friends, memorably discovering that “they seemed to have a sort of natural desire to rub their minds one against the other” (45). While this moment surely presents an opportunity for a more evolved and interesting homosocial or even queer plot, Yonge has other plans. By the novel’s end, both women become wives and mothers, marrying cousins who have both returned permanently wounded from the siege of Delhi.
Disability is everywhere in The Clever Woman of the Family. In addition to Ermine and the two heroes, another character is blind, Rachel's mother is chronically ill, and Rachel herself is altered by serious illness after the tragedy at the asylum. Mutual weakness and care, moreover, are central to all the happy relationships in the book, including the heterosexual ones, in which disability, nursing, and interdependence are not bars to courtship, but rather, its bases, enveloping both genders: as Kim Wheatley points out, the two heroes’ “familiarity with bodily suffering gives them a feminized capacity to nurture” (902) that adds to their attractiveness. Sally Mitchell’s observation about Craik’s novels applies just as aptly to Yonge’s: “the constellation man-woman-illness-pain often exudes an erotic tension” (112). After marriage, when Rachel bemoans her dependency on her husband, Ermine consoles her with the idea that this dependency is not only inevitable, but also "will make you much more really useful and effective than ever you could have been alone" (283). The novel’s overt message is that disability draws people close and creates the interdependency that is the basis of stronger and better marriages and communities.
Like Gaskell and Craik’s fictions, Clever Woman’s formal elements defuse any sense that disablement is a plot starter, plot ender, or source of sensation. The incident that burned Ermine takes place before the main action begins, and is only recounted later in the plot. While there are disablements and deaths that produce excitement in the main action of the story, including both the child worker’s death and a remarkable fatality involving a croquet wicket, the main characters’ disabilities are developed in a much more gradual and integral way. In keeping with her refusal of disability as the currency of sensation, Yonge generally envisions permanent disabilities, and narrates them as part of the dailiness that is her fictional emphasis.[8]
Care is part of this dailiness; in depicting scenes of care, however, Yonge refuses the stereotype of disabled people as care objects and non-disabled people as caregivers. By the end of The Clever Woman of the Family, for example, it is impossible to dichotomize care relationships in any neat way, partly because there are so many of them and the main characters in the book occupy many different roles within them, including carer and cared-for. Mitchell and Snyder’s memorable characterization of their own family as a relationship in which “we no longer differentiated between who was and who was not disabled” often seems to fit community life in The Clever Woman of the Family (xi).
The same dynamic is apparent in many of Yonge’s other novels. The Daisy Chain (1856) and The Trial (1864) tell the story of a country physician’s large family. The first volume begins with a significant plot crisis in the form of death and disablement, when a carriage accident results in Dr. May’s injury, his eldest daughter Margaret’s disablement, and the death of Mrs. May. Neither the accident nor any of its results, however, is the main crisis of the story or its defining moment. Disability resolves nothing; neither does it initiate much, beyond a traumatic but temporary shift in the domestic comedy that defines the book’s first chapters. After a nuanced exploration of the large and emotionally diverse family’s adjustment to the death of their beloved mother, the novel’s main focus is the developmental narratives of each of the twelve children.
Margaret’s disablement has its moments of drama, especially as she approaches death. Because her illness and dying extend over three years, however, there is neither sharp dramatic effect nor neat metaphoric meaning to her disability. Her disability experience seems mostly to diversify the kind of leadership she offers to the rest of the family. She gains more responsibilities after her injury, taking the place of her dead mother in educating her younger siblings, but also contributing new knowledge to that task, as when in one scene she directs and mentors her sister Ethel both in patience with an annoying governess and in moving a disabled person (Margaret herself) without causing pain.
Yonge extends the network of interdependency in The Daisy Chain even farther than she does in The Clever Woman of the Family by developing Margaret’s need for companionship as a longing that stretches beyond her family, fiancé, and social milieu to a working class woman, Cherry Elwood, who is also disabled. The Daisy Chain thus uses disability to disrupt two notions of asymmetrical charity and care—that between non-disabled and disabled people, and that between two social classes. Further, while Margaret’s injury does not end the engagement that preceded her accident, Cherry’s baker fiancé does leave her. This is partly the result of socioeconomics: Alan Ernescliffe, though he is not robust, has no need to evaluate Margaret for her usefulness in the bakery or (like Nest Gwynn’s fiancé) field. More crucially, however, Margaret’s family situation supports their mutual desire to stay engaged. Given the web of family support that Yonge so enticingly weaves in this novel, in which the May family’s many members’ capacities and needs chart a wide spectrum, Alan has no social barriers to his desire.
The engagement is never fully tested: Alan dies at sea, and Margaret dies not long afterward. The affirmation of disability’s place in marriage, however, is continued in the next book in the saga, The Trial, at whose close a young woman the family has known for years is brought back from Civil War U.S. an invalid, and marries the younger Dr. May, Margaret’s brother. The ending of The Trial works in brilliant ways with the intersection of disability, illness, love, and marriage, meaningful life events typically narrated as discrete situations.
When the family and community at home discusses the intersection of marriage and illness and the impact of marrying in the shadow of a soon-expected ending, for example, some want to discourage the couple. The best-respected characters in the plot, however, see it as a good action for both husband and wife. Dr. May, concerned that Averil will not even survive the ocean crossing, says “It is a mournful ending for that poor boy's patience—it will sink very deep, and he will be a sadder man all his days, but I would not hinder his laying up a treasure that will brighten as he grows older” (362). Cynical readers may consider Tom’s desire to marry Averil predicated in large part on this assumption of her nearness to death, the shadow of which increases Averil’s attractiveness, given the long literary and theoretical affirmation of the idea that there is nothing so poetic as a beautiful dead woman, nor so desirable as a beautiful dying one.[9] However, Yonge refuses this ending. When the senior Dr. May examines his new daughter-in-law on her return, he finds that Averil is not dying after all: “the organic disease is in the way of being arrested. Good health of course she cannot have; but if she weathers another winter, I think you may look for as many years of happiness with her as in an ordinary case” (373). Yonge thus converts Averil from acute to chronic illness, embracing the relation of disability and marriage as a longterm and positive thing, as demonstrated by the conversation the bride has with her father-in-law on hearing her diagnosis:
“Oh Dr May, I beg your pardon. If I had known, I would never—“
“Never what, my dear?’
“Never have consented! It is such a grievous thing for a professional man to have a sick wife.”
“It is exactly what he wanted, my dear, if you will not fly at me for saying so. Nothing else could teach him that patients are not cases but persons…” (374)
The novel closes with Averil’s position reconstituted as a permanent part of the May family:
Her sofa is almost a renewal of the family centre that once Margaret’s was; the region where all tidings are brought fresh for discussion, all joys and sorrows poured out….not his honours as a scientific physician, his discoveries, and ably-written papers – not even his father’s full and loving confidence and gratitude, give Professor May as much happiness as that bright-eyed delicate wife, with whom all his thoughts seem to begin and end. (375)
Invalidism is surely here enshrined as that which expands the notion of the angel in the house; at the same time, however, both Averil and Margaret’s disabilities are marked as a central thread in the social development of the family, and of family life, not as sudden, singular, or radical changes to individuals.
While I have noted the ways in which Yonge, like Craik, explicitly envisions disability as no bar to marriage, it’s also important to note, as Talia Schaffer and her class have done, the ways in which Yonge troubles our limited set of paradigms for human relationships: “Yonge uses disability to construct non-nuclear, non-traditional, non-erotic familial structures…that can be envisioned as a more generous and capacious view of familial relations that was based on affection rather than eros and did not assume heterosexual reproductive pairs as the norm” (“Re: Yonge, 29 May 2007).[10] Not only Yonge, but also Gaskell and Craik, frequently present the flip-side of this vision, the limitations of young women’s dreams of heterosexual romance and marriage. While many of the terms in Robert McRuer’s important concept of “disabled domesticity” would be unfamiliar to the three writers, his argument that living arrangements built on “feminist, queer, and disabled relations of interdependency” are productive in a number of ways, including their power to “expose the inadequacies of the able-bodied/heterosexual family” resonates with all three writers’ visions of domesticity (101).
Victorian Fictions of Interdependency
These few examples of interdependency and disability are part of a much larger universe of nineteenth-century fictions that feature dyads of care, particularly symmetrical and homosocial ones. A memorable example is Diana of the Crossways by George Meredith, in which the strong-willed protagonist Diana literally holds Emma Dunstane in her arms during her friend’s cancer surgery, stepping in for Emma’s squeamish husband. Later, Emma nurses Diana back from her lover's rejection. Scenes like this are reminders of Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s important study of emotionally and physically intense relationships between nineteenth-century American women, which argues that such bonds were both common and socially accepted, forged by women’s participation in the significant physical events of each others’ lives: pregnancy and childbirth or miscarriage; menopause; and illness, dying, and death. Smith-Rosenberg does not specifically identify disability as a catalyst for relationships of “mutual dependency and deep affection,” but disablement was obviously one of the common life experiences that nineteenth-century women might have negotiated with intimate friends rather than in isolation (27).[11]
While many other dyads of care in Victorian fiction seem on the surface to be asymmetrically dependent instead of interdependent, they are less easily categorized as such if we look beyond a limited definition of dependence. If Jenny Wren, a disabled dressmaker in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, is more passionately drawn to her non-disabled friend Lizzie Hexam than her friend is to her, it is clearly Jenny who is the more capable one, intellectually as well as imaginatively; she is also a much more finely drawn character than Lizzie.[12] Similarly, if Dickens’s novel Nicholas Nickleby catalyzes Nicholas’s moral development through his care for Smike, a younger man who has been abused and disabled in body and mind, it is patently wrong to say that Smike gives Nicholas nothing in return for financial and physical protection.
In fact, even Dickens, whose novels often inscribe messages of the limitations of disability as a social identity, or make disability transparent to a reductive sense of moral character (as in angelic Tim and demonic Quilp), produces so many representations of disability that his constructions of disability and dependency chart a fairly wide spectrum. His shorter work Mugby Junction, for example, features an angelic disabled woman, Phoebe, who lies supine by her window all day long because of a spinal impairment. The fact that Phoebe is the most emotionally capable character in this story of alienation is predictable; elsewhere in the story, however, are other messages about the normalcy of disability and its appropriate integration into all aspects of life. Lamps, Phoebe's father, tells the protagonist Barbox Brothers that Phoebe’s mother was subject to “very bad fits”:
“as she had never mentioned she was subject to fits, they couldn't be guarded against. Consequently, she dropped the baby when took, and this happened."
"It was very wrong of her," said Barbox Brothers with a knitted brow,” to marry you, making a secret of her infirmity."
"Well, Sir!" pleaded Lamps in behalf of the long-deceased. "You see. Phoebe and me, we have talked that over too. And Lord bless us! Such a number on us has our infirmities, what with fits, and what with misfits, of one sort and another, that if we confessed to 'em all before we got married, most of us might never be married."
"Might that not be for the better?"
"Not in this case, Sir," said Phoebe, giving her hand to her father.
"No, not in this case, Sir," said her father, patting it between his own. (492)
This message about disability and marriage is not the same as the one we might glean from Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, The Cricket on the Hearth, or any other of the numerous disability plots in Dickens, nor is it even reducible to Mugby Junction’s own use of Phoebe as a material metaphor.[13]
To say that relationships of interdependency pervade Victorian fiction is by no means to say that Victorian novels present such relationships as idyllic. Care is often depicted as not only asymmetrical in terms of social power and function, but also unloving and psychologically damaging on an intimate level, such as the bond between the congenital double amputee Miserrimus Dexter and the intellectually disabled cousin he treats as a slave and calls Ariel, in Wilkie Collins’s novel The Law and the Lady. As Tamara Wagner points out, Yonge’s novels themselves demonstrate significant differences in how families respond to intellectual disabilities as compared to their response to physical ones.[14] The key thing, however, is that all these fictions imagine social relationships structured by a mesh of interdependencies, not organized around the false binary of pure independence and pure dependency.[15] They flesh out an imaginative world in which interdependence is indeed a species norm.
Conclusions
Despite their particular strengths in imagining social interdependencies shaped by bodily differences, Gaskell, Craik, and Yonge’s contributions to fictions of disability have rarely been investigated. A major reason, particularly in the case of Craik and Yonge, is the discomfort their ideologies often produce in twentieth and twenty-first century readers.[16] All three had strong religious affiliations, whether inside or outside the state church; Gaskell was the wife of a Unitarian minister; Craik the daughter of a nonconformist clergyman, whose works and life are permeated with Christian messages; and Yonge, the most famous “Christian lady novelist,” was the friend and disciple of John Keble, a key figure in the Oxford Movement.[17] While their religious agendae were far from identical, all three writers’ narratives of disability and caregiving relationships are (not surprisingly) often framed in terms of an overall culture of Christian interdependency.[18] Their contemporary Elizabeth Gilbert, an activist for the blind and blind herself, captures this ethos in her comments about blindness and dependency. The goal of advocacy for the blind, she argues, should be to:
reduce the dependence of the Blind as far as possible, while endeavouring, by Christian instruction, to enable them to accept the unavoidable dependence of their condition in a spirit of humility and thankfulness which will soften and sweeten it to them, and will turn this dependence into one of their greatest blessings, as it will be the means of uniting them more closely to their fellow-creatures. (Charity Organisation Reporter 11 November 1874: 321)
Even as Craik and Yonge develop and honor their protagonists’ subjectivities and individual development in ways that make them memorable characters, both valorize the outcomes of caring interdependency over what they represent as selfish individualism. Readers wedded to concepts of autonomy and self-expression have rankled at this ethos, particularly its gendered aspects and Christian imprint. This response has surely contributed to the twentieth-century dismissal and rejection of Craik and especially Yonge.
Such criticism has shared an assumption, a concept of individualism that these writers’ works are charged with repressing in various ways. Twentieth- and twenty-first century critics tend to value independence, self-assertion, and individuation, and see dependence, self-effacement, and attachment as dangerous forms of self-erasure, whether they occur within the family, in the context of heterosexual relations and institutions, or in class relations. David Brownell comments, for example, that “Yonge’s picture of the family world makes clearer how the Victorian family could be at once sustaining and imprisoning for a child, supporting him while crippling him for life outside” (177). Like its perspective, the assertion’s disability metaphor merits more investigation.
Further, all three writers, but particularly Yonge, have inspired numerous critiques for their antifeminism by directing their messages of self-sacrifice and other-directness more emphatically to women than to men, even as they all contributed to the carving of a discourse of women’s roles and rights—including the right to higher education and to retain their earnings--and affirm those beliefs, as well as the more incendiary ones, in their fiction. As important as it has been to interrogate antifeminist and Christian ideologies in these and other Victorian writers, these concerns have inevitably obscured other analytical pathways.
Literary disability studies as a way of rethinking texts and interpretive assumptions has already engendered powerful questions about Victorian fictions of disability and their resilient, largely negative cultural scripts. It may be time to mobilize new questions about the assumptions that have fueled our earlier dismissals of the period’s representation of disability and dependency. Critical rejections of Victorian plots of feminine self-sacrifice have obscured an especially valuable imaginative message of these texts: that most of us live together; that we all depend on each other, all the time; and that interdependence is not only a species norm, but also a productive dynamic in all senses of the word: it does not preclude a sense of distinctness in character even as it generates collaborative growth and development. Further, it’s important to notice that in the works of all three writers, both men and women are exhorted to think of themselves in such terms. When Tom May makes the decision to leave Paris and the promise of a research appointment to come home to his father’s practice in Yonge’s The Trial, it is not a simple decision or one that he and others (such as his father, and his sister Ethel) regard as such. While the reader may continue to wish that Tom would stay in Paris, or that Ethel would not sacrifice so much to her family, Yonge’s vision of these hard choices as the source of happiness makes her family narratives more useful on some level than ones that urge the reader to break all ties in service of self-expression--as much as we have been trained to privilege the latter ethos.
I want to suggest that one way to read the recoil against this often didactic ethos of self-sacrifice is to see it as a cover story for contempt for the relationships of dependency and disability in which other relational ideologies such as self-sacrifice emerge most strongly. Twentieth and twenty-first century critics may indeed be simply rejecting the idea that service to others is a greater good than the pursuit of individuation or self-expression. Because our ideals of independence (including those of second-wave feminism) are built on and anchored to concepts of dependence, however, we can read these rejections as always on some level a sign of fear of or contempt for those who care for others. They also suggest a deeper fear of and contempt for those who are cared for by others, which is one of the identities habitually imagined for people with disabilities.
The fact that we all inhabit these care-based identities many times during our lives only tends to heighten our antipathy towards situations of need and care; fear of becoming disabled and/or ill is a hallmark of contemporary life, its irrational elements constantly reinforced by the real medical, political, and social dangers and disadvantages that we see resulting from anything diverging from the impossible narrative of perfect health and individuality.
If we can move beyond our recoil at the frameworks in which these novelists present their ideologies of interdependence, we can find in them useful paradigms of domestic and community life that model ways to neutralize “the kinds of alienation that pervade social views of disabled people,” and the stigma attached to all persons involved in interdependent relationships (Mitchell and Snyder 22). Many twentieth and twenty-first century narratives, with their reliance on independent and often nondisabled protagonists, exacerbate the gap between imagined lives and the lives most of us will lead. These Victorian fictions, in contrast, provide a tenable way of imagining life in the body, mind, and society over the life span. Their varied fictions of interdependence may contribute to the necessary dismantling of our damaging fictions of independence.[19]
Notes
[1] Dr. Martha Stoddard Holmes, Department of Literature and Writing Studies, California State University San Marcos.
[2] See, for example, Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop; Silas Wegg in Our Mutual Friend; and Mr. Dick in David Copperfield.
[3] Nineteenth-century British literature and culture emphasizes the marriage plot as a woman’s main route to status, despite the fact that it also meant becoming the property of one’s husband and a legal infant. Many novels also comment on both marriage and disability by engaging disabled characters in a marriage plot to which they are ultimately denied access. For more on this dynamic, see Stoddard Holmes, Fictions of Affliction, and Gitter.
[4] Mixed-race, hysteria, and illegitimacy, enacted as mutually defining social identities in Olive’s half-sister Christal Manners, are the site of much of the novel’s sensationalism.
[5] A good example is John Halifax, Gentleman, whose primary relationship is between a disabled man and his non-disabled friend.
[6] Over a prolific fifty-year career, she published a host of very popular novels “charting the development of that great Victorian social unit, the nuclear family” (Schaffer 246). These include The Heir of Redclyffe (1853), Heartsease (1854), Hopes and Fears (1860), The Pillars of the House (1873) and Magnum Bonum (1879). The Daisy Chain (1856) extended its family saga with a sequel, The Trial (1864). Some scholars consider Yonge the originator of a literary subgenre, the family story (Berg v). For discussion of Yonge and the phenomenon of the sequel or series novel, see Langbauer and Sturrock.
[7] Maria Frawley notes that “in the nineteenth century ‘the invalid’ functioned as a legitimate authorial identity” (17).
[8] For more on dailiness in Yonge, see Langbauer.
[9] Poe’s comments on this subject are particularly well-known. See Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846).
[10] Schaffer and some of her students at CUNY Graduate Center speculated that “perhaps one reason Yonge has suffered in the critical record is that critics have read this as a failure of the marriage plot instead of a useful exercise in imagining alternative family units” (“Re: Yonge,” 29 May 2007).
[11] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men builds on Smith-Rosenberg to argue for the striking absence of the same sense of continuum, in which “the homosocial” can encompass “the erotic, social, familial, economic, and political realms” in concepts of men’s relationships with other men--a point Smith-Rosenberg supports (Sedgwick 3). The project of Sedgwick’s 1985 book is thus to “draw the ‘homosocial’ back into the orbit of ‘desire,’ of the potentially erotic” and “hypothesize the potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual – a continuum whose visibility, for men, in our society, is radically disrupted” (1-2). While illness becomes a thread in Sedgwick’s later works on homosociality, however, it is not a part of Between Men.
It is not that Sedgwick asserts that men did not provide mutual care, only that such relationships were not culturally acceptable in the same way that women’s parallel bonds were. Whitman’s the “Wound-Dresser,” for example, is a reminder of the fact that while women were sharing their lives’ bodily events, men in gender-segregated military communities were doing the same; Yonge and Craik’s depiction of men’s care for each other, as well as for women, suggests a milder form of the passionate tenderness of Whitman’s poem.
[12] Another important example is Limping Lucy’s passion for her friend Rosanna Spearman in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone; unlike Jenny, whose sharpness is considerably softened by Dickens’s resolution of the novel, Lucy carries the banner of Rosanna’s anger against class, body, and gender prejudice after her friend’s suicide.
[13] For a particularly fine discussion of disability in Dickens, see Rodas, “Tiny Tim, Blind Bertha, and the Resistance of Miss Mowcher: Charles Dickens and the Uses of Disability.”
[14] I am indebted to Wagner’s email correspondence on Yonge’s novels and their treatment of disabilities.
[15] This binary is nonetheless quite visible in Victorian discourses of disability. See my Fictions of Affliction for more discussion.
[16] See Schaffer for a memorable analysis of this discomfort.
[17] Yonge is known as the novelist of the Oxford Movement, a crisis or transformation (depending on one’s perspective) in the Anglican church in the 1830s and 40s. As a teenager, she became a protégé of High Anglican churchman John Keble when he became the vicar of her parish in Hampshire and a close family friend. Yonge embraced the Movement’s emphasis on individual “truthfulness, self-sacrifice, true courage, self-control, filial piety” and other virtues (Hayter 18) as well as its goal of reenergizing and reauthorizing the enervated Anglican church by reaffirming key doctrines (such as a belief in Apostolic Succession) and practices (the sacraments of Baptism, Confirmation, and Communion; frequent churchgoing).
[18] See Sturrock, “Catholic Anti-heroines,” for a comparison of Craik’s and Yonge’s representations of Roman Catholicism.
[19] I am grateful to Robert McRuer, Penny Richards, Talia Schaffer, Leslee Thorne-Murphy, and Tamara Wagner for their help on various aspects of this essay. Special thanks are due Julia Miele Rodas, Michael Davidson, and above all, David Bolt.
Works Cited
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---. “From Caricature to Character: The Intellectually Disabled in Dickens's Novels (Part Two).” Dickens Quarterly 23.2 (2006): 67-84.
---. “From Caricature to Character: The Intellectually Disabled in Dickens's Novels (Part Three).” Dickens Quarterly 23.3 (2006): 169-80.
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---. “Tiny Tim, Blind Bertha, and the Resistance of Miss Mowcher: Charles Dickens and the Uses of Disability.” Dickens Studies Annual 34 (2004): 51-97.
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