Global Disability Studies and Realist Representation

This chapter is in two parts. The first part provides a brief theoretical overview of the field of critical disability studies and its engagement with literary realism. Since the publication of David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s seminal Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse in 2000, literary realism’s representation of disability has come under considerable scrutiny from scholars and activists. With reference to four nineteenth-century realist works from France, England, and the United States, the chapter investigates how the move from the medical and charity models of disability to the social model, the development of the concepts of “disability pride” and “blindness gain,” and the importance of embodiment are foreshadowed, illustrated, and interrogated in realist fiction. The second part offers an example of a critical disability studies reading of texts by Honoré de Balzac and Wilkie Collins. These case studies reveal that disability (and specifically blindness) often functions in the realist text as a challenge to the realist writer’s desire to see and say everything. By challenging the usual interpretation of blind characters in nineteenth-century realist texts as the passive recipients of narrative and readerly pity, this part illustrates what happens when blind characters are reclaimed as both intriguing indicators of the fallibility of realism and a self-reflexive commentary on the art of the realist writer.