Sensational Deviance

Sensational Deviance: Disability in Nineteenth-Century Sensation Fic-

tion investigates the representation of disability in fictional works by the
leading Victorian sensation novelists Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth
Braddon, exploring how disability acts as a major element in the shaping
of the sensation novel genre and how various sensation novels respond to
traditional viewpoints of disability and to new developments in physio-
logical and psychiatric knowledge. The depictions of disabled characters
in sensation fiction frequently deviate strongly from typical depictions
of disability in mainstream Victorian literature, undermining its stigma-
tized positioning as tragic deficit, severe limitation, or pathology.
Close readings of nine individual novels situate their investigations of
physical, sensory, and cognitive disabilities against the period’s disability
discourses and interest in senses, perception, stimuli, the nervous system,
and the hereditability of impairments. The importance of moral insanity
and degeneration theory within sensation fiction connect the genre with
criminal anthropology, suggesting the genre’s further significance in the
light of the later emergence of eugenics, psychoanalysis, and genetics.
Sensational Deviance also uses modern disability theory to reflect on
sensation fiction’s interrogation of disability. Collins and Braddon repre-
sent disability as a cultural and medical construct that is gendered and
contingent on economic and social values. In this regard, their writing
prefigures the modern ‘social model’ of disability and begins to approach
an intersectional understanding of disability. Sensational Deviance will
reward readers interested in Victorian popular fiction, early detective
fiction, literary and cultural disability, critical disability studies, the his-
tory of medicine and psychiatry, the medical humanities, and biopower.

Heidi Logan holds a PhD in English from the University of Auckland, a

Master of Arts in English from Wilfrid Laurier University, and a Master
of Shakespeare Studies from The Shakespeare Institute, University of
Birmingham. Previous publications include monograph reviews for the
Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies (AJVS): “Review of Women
Writers and Detectives in Nineteenth-Century Crime Fiction”, in AJVS
19.1 (2014), 77–79; “Review of Science, Sexuality and Sensation Novels:
Pleasures of the Senses”, in AJVS 18.2 (2013), 42–44.
Routledge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature

32 Jane Austen’s Geographies

Robert Clark

33 Vision and Character

Physiognomics and the English Realist Novel
Eike Kronshage

34 Melville and the Question of Meaning

David Faflik

35 Inventing the Popular

Printing, Politics, and Poetics
Bettina Lerner

36 Writing Place
Mimesis, Subjectivity and Imagination in the
Works of George Gissing
Rebecca Hutcheon

37 Wilde’s Other Worlds

Edited by Michael F. Davis & Petra Dierkes-Thrun

38 Mark X
Who Killed Huck Finn’s Father?
Yasuhiro Takeuchi

39 Sensational Deviance
Disability in Nineteenth-Century Sensation Fiction
Heidi Logan

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com.

Sensational Deviance
Disability in Nineteenth-Century
Sensation Fiction

Heidi Logan
First published 2019
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an
informa business
© 2019 Taylor & Francis
The right of Heidi Logan to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
CIP data has been applied for.

ISBN: 978-1-138-31990-5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-45369-4 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
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Contents

List of Figures vii

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction 1

Part I
Wilkie Collins and Disabled Identities 23

1 Hide and Seek (1854) 25

2 The Dead Secret (1857) 57
3 Poor Miss Finch (1871–2) 88
4 The Law and the Lady (1875) 115

Part II
Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Disabled Identities 157

5 The Trail of the Serpent (1860–1) 159

6 Lady Audley’s Secret (1861–2) and
John Marchmont’s Legacy (1862–3) 192
7 The Lady’s Mile (1866) and One Thing
Needful (1886) 217
Conclusion 241

Bibliography 245
Index 259
List of Figures

4.1 The Graphic, Issue 260. Saturday November 21,

1874, p. 493. © The British Library Board 136
4.2 The Graphic, Issue 264. Saturday December 19,
1874, p. 589. © The British Library Board 137
4.3 The Graphic, Issue 266. Saturday January 2,
1875, p. 13. © The British Library Board 138
4.4 The Graphic, Issue 267. Saturday January 9,
1875, p. 37. © The British Library Board 140
4.5 The Graphic, Issue 271. Saturday February 6,
1875, p. 129. © The British Library Board 141
4.6 The Graphic, Issue 272. Saturday February 13,
1875, p. 157. © The British Library Board 142
Acknowledgements

A number of people have shown great kindness in supporting me through-

out this project, either academically, professionally, or personally.
Most of all I would like to thank Professor Joanne Wilkes and Dr. Rose
Lovell-Smith who acted as my doctoral supervisors when this project
first existed as a doctoral thesis. They both provided extremely valuable
guidance during that period and continued to do so thereafter. Both have
provided assistance by offering feedback on my work, offering other
kinds of professional advice, and offering general personal support.
I also had the benefit of a highly supportive PhD cohort during my time
as a doctoral student. From amongst that cohort I would particularly like
to thank Zachary Norwood, Kirby-Jane Hallum, Kerryn O ­ lsen, Greg
Olsen, Andrew Forsberg, Evija Trofimova, Richard Viskovic, and the late
Francisc Szekely. A number of lecturers and professors at the University
of Auckland were also supportive and helpful in various ways, including
Rina Kim, Eluned Summers-Bremner, Brian Boyd, Tom Bishop, and Erin
Carlston. I would like to express deep appreciation to all of them.
I would like to thank the University of Auckland for the award of
a University of Auckland Doctoral Scholarship that sustained me
throughout the time that I was a doctoral student and those lecturers
and professors who offered me tutoring and marking work, as this was
also of great assistance to me. While working on this project (both as
a doctoral thesis and in its present form) I attended a number of confer-
ences, including conferences hosted by RSVP, AAL, SHARP, AVSA, and
GANZA. I would therefore also like to thank those academics who read
my abstracts for suggested talks or otherwise assisted my being invited
to the conferences.
I would very much like to thank Martha Stoddard Holmes, with
whom I had the pleasure of corresponding a number of times. Every
time I contacted Professor Holmes she was always positive about my
project, accommodating, and extremely helpful. This was very encour-
aging to me. Prior to starting this project I also enjoyed encouraging
email correspondence with Richard Fantina while he was engaged in
co-editing Victorian Sensations. Judith Johnston was also helpful when
I contacted her with a question. I would also like to thank Routledge’s
x Acknowledgements
anonymous reviewers for their time and for some very helpful ideas,
and to thank my editor and assistant editor at Routledge. The British
Library, ­London, were also very helpful, allowing me to reproduce im-
ages from the V ­ ictorian serialization of The Law and the Lady in the
Graphic.
My parents and my siblings have all provided long-term personal
­support while I worked on this project. I would like to thank them for
their interest in it and belief that I could complete it. Other people who
have provided highly significant support to me throughout this project
include Issam Jebreen (formerly of AUT, Auckland), Marguerita Merrick,
and Bram Lauwers. Sarah Grimes has also been very encouraging about
the project.
I also want to thank my son, Alain, who has been unwaveringly sup-
portive in many ways and has at various times shown an interest in my
research. I hope that one day he will enjoy reading this book.
Introduction

Sensational Deviance takes for its subject the representation of disabled

characters in selected works by the Victorian sensation novelists Wilkie
Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Sensation novels saturated the lit-
erary market throughout the 1860s and 1870s.1 In some regards, sensa-
tion fiction overlaps with mainstream realist Victorian fiction’s typical
style and content, but it has also been regarded as a form of Victorian
domestic Gothic. 2 But both then and now it has been marked out from
realist novels by its frequent focus on crime, family secrets, mystery, and
female transgression. Many sensation novels explore social issues that
caused great anxiety for the Victorians, such as the effects of industri-
alization, urbanism, and scientific development on gender roles, class
stratification, and public wellbeing. The frequent appearance of disabled
characters in sensation novels is in keeping with sensation fiction’s scien-
tific interest and fascination with social marginalization.
While making contextual reference to other sensation and realist writ-
ers of the period, Sensational Deviance concentrates on novels by Wilkie
Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Collins and Braddon were the two
most popular sensation novelists and the most influential in terms of
moulding the genre. Representations of physical and mental disability
are a prevalent feature of the sensation genre and the works of these
two writers feature the genre’s most complex engagement with disability.
Their works often explore the idea that ‘disability’ does not consist only of
a biological or mental condition: it is also a life experience influenced by
social and legal factors and by medical and psychiatric discourse. Collins
and Braddon appear convinced that by using specific narrative strategies
they can convey the experience of disability to their readers. This focus
on disability’s social aspect and on scientific knowledge differentiates
their writings from many other literary or non-fictional representations
of disability from the period. Notably, the philosophical underpinnings
of their empathetic representations of disability show strong similarities
to some of the ideological underpinnings of the modern ‘social model’ of
disability that was to emerge in the late twentieth century.
The period of Victoria’s reign (1837–1901) saw a proliferation of new
scientific theory and witnessed the effects of rapid industrialization and
2  Introduction
urbanization. The sensation novel responds with relish and alarm to these
developments, representing characters who are nervous, characters with
mental disorders, and characters injured in railway crashes or industrial
accidents. The genre repeatedly reveals anxiety with ‘identity’ and with
economic aspects of modernity.3 Complex legal issues make a frequent
appearance, as does the questioning of gender roles, with these two
concerns often linked via questions pertaining to the ‘Woman Question’.
The Victorians inherited areas of scientific enquiry from the Enlight-
enment but also developed new biological, psychiatric, and neurological
theories that further prompted and assuaged their curiosity about the
senses, cognitive processes, and physical, sensory, and mental ‘differ-
ence’. Sensation fiction directly taps into these concerns. Since these ar-
eas of knowledge are important to the novels analyzed in Sensational
Deviance, this chapter introduces concepts in Victorian science and
psychology that can inform critical understanding of sensation fiction’s
engagement with disability. It also outlines some of the most important
concepts and areas of concern that have emerged in modern disability
studies. While modern disability studies often conceives of disability and
impairment differently than the Victorians tended to, disability theory
can nevertheless illuminate the values behind Victorian ideas about dis-
ability and further our understanding of what sensation fiction achieves.
The Victorians show a profound concern with “the nature of ability
and its relationship to … citizenship, education, health, and aesthetics”.4
Accordingly, the Victorian period saw the first steps toward a ‘modern’
understanding of disability, including the ‘medicalization’ of disability
and framing disability in relation to economics and the professions. Im-
pairments came to be seen as pathologies, and often as hereditary. Under
the care of ‘experts’ certain impairments came to be seen as responsive
to rehabilitation. The Industrial Revolution, meanwhile, prompted the
view of bodies as commodities or machines, and a trend emerged of
judging bodies and minds in terms of whether they were fit or not fit
to contribute to capitalist enterprise. The ‘able’ body and mind were
constructed through defining and abjecting the ‘disabled’ body or mind.

The Scientific and Cultural Context of the

Mid-Nineteenth Century
Victorian sensation fiction shows a highly pronounced engagement with
scientific theories of importance during the 1850s to 1880s. This In-
troduction discusses the scientific theories and controversies that are
most pertinent to the sensation genre. It explains how disability is typ-
ically depicted in mainstream Victorian fiction, sometimes in response
to these scientific ideas. It then outlines ways in which sensation novels
question many of the connotations of these same scientific and psychi-
atric theories.
 Introduction  3
Victorian science mixed seventeenth and eighteenth century biological
and mental theories, new discoveries about physiology and neurology,
and new theorizations of insanity. During the mid-to late- nineteenth
century many modern scientific disciplines were developing rapidly.5 At
the same time, disability became increasingly apparent in Victorian cul-
ture: the expansion of industry created new industrial diseases; industrial
accidents created disabilities.6 The train crash became a Victorian phe-
nomenon. Soldiers returned injured from overseas wars. Beggars with
disabilities became more noticeable on the London streets (a phenomenon
reported in London Labour and the London Poor (1851; 1861)). Divi-
sions between able and disabled were ensconced in the “Poor Law” of
1834.7 Under the new Poor Law, bureaucrats scrutinized bodies “in order
to distinguish those who would receive financial support”.8 And bureau-
crats ordered a formal programme of building county lunatic asylums.9
Various scientists and social reformers, concerned with the condition
of the body politic, encouraged improved hygiene and fitness. Britain
battled cholera, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, and smallpox epidemics,
and experienced a very high child mortality rate. Poor nutrition, lack of
hygiene, and lack of reliable water supplies aided the spread of disease.
Vaccines or cures had not yet been obtained for some serious diseases.
Much of the population lacked access to reliable medical services, and
giving birth was dangerous.10 Vigorous sanitary reform contributed one
aspect of the perceived answer. In addition, the ‘Muscular Christianity’
movement emerged, advocating participation in sports and exercise to
create a healthy body and healthy mind. Propagated in various novels by
Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes, Muscular Christianity positioned
itself as one means of combatting the perceived growing enfeeblement of
British men. The cult of ‘Character’ and ‘Self-Help’, pushed by Samuel
Smiles, further emphasized self-improvement, including improving “the
physical attributes of oneself”.11 The apotheosis of the ‘able’ body and
mind and the improvement of public health were foundations for as-
serting British racial superiority and justifying Britain’s empire building.
Such developments have led Lennard J. Davis to suggest that the idea of
the disabled body first emerges in Victorian culture around the period
of 1840–1860. The concept of disability soon led to the concept of “the
norm” and deviation from that norm.12

Psychology and Psychiatry

Both Rick Rylance and J.A.V. Chapple identify the term “psychology”
as only acquiring its modern meaning and usage in the mid-nineteenth
century.13 From early in the period Victorian psychology and psychia-
try show an overwhelming concern with biological determinism – the
idea that biological inheritance determines destiny. This determinis-
tic concern runs throughout the discourses of phrenology, hereditary
4  Introduction
insanity, moral insanity, and degeneration theory and is fundamental
to the period’s devaluation of disabled subjects. L.S. Jacyna overviews
the early to mid-Victorian period’s two major competing fields of psy-
chiatric thought. For “the first half of the nineteenth century in Britain,
alienists [psychiatrists] had tried to find in the brains of the insane the
structural causes of their illness”. Such alienists aligned themselves with
phrenology (aka ‘craniology’), the study of how the structure of the skull
affected personality and behaviour. In contrast with this group, alien-
ists who located the origins of mental pathology within other areas of
the body were referred to as ‘physiological psychologists’. Physiologi-
cal psychology insisted “on the somatic origins of mental disorder” and
claimed that “these physical causes impinged on the mind” by means of
“a reflex model of nervous function”.14 Benjamin Brodie’s statement in
1854 that “mental alienation is generally the result of some wrong con-
dition of the body”, may be held as fairly representative of physiological
psychology.15
On the Continent, the main proponent of phrenology was Franz
Joseph Gall, while phrenological theory was promoted in Britain by
George Combe.16 Another field of study, physiognomy, propounded the
idea “that mental and moral attributes and deficiencies were discernible
in the physical appearance of the body”, especially the face.17 Although
physiognomy was considered old-fashioned by mid-century, Victorian
literature’s physical descriptions of characters are often highly reliant on
the belief that physiognomy yields clues about personality.
Jenny Bourne Taylor, meanwhile, conceives of nineteenth-century
psychology as based on “two distinct intellectual traditions”, one be-
ing phrenology’s interest in brain structure, and the other, associationist
psychology. Influential in Britain in the 1860s and 1870s, associationism
taught that identity was “based on the interplay between conscious and
unconscious associations in an intricate process of suggestion which is
dependent on memory”.18 Deriving from the philosophy of John Locke,
associationism “sought physical explanations for mental behaviour and
mental explanations for physical behaviour, hoping to find verifiable
links between the sound mind and the sound body”.19 Associationism
and phrenology were both made use of by the psychiatric ‘moral man-
agement’ movement which underpinned the asylum reform of the first
half of the century. Typically, lunatic asylum reform involved rejecting
the use of mechanical restraints (shackles and strait-waistcoats) and ad-
vocating ‘moral management’ of the emotions.
Psychology increasingly incorporated knowledge from physiology, the
study of the functioning of organs, and neurology, the study of nerves
and the brain. As early as 1830, Sir David Brewster writes that

it is obvious that the office of the nervous system is, to produce sen-
sation … The general doctrine on the subject is, that the brain is
 Introduction  5
the centre of the system … that the nerves receive impressions from
external objects, and transmit these impressions to the brain, where
they become sensible to the mind. 20

It began to seem logical to some psychiatrists and neurophysiologists

that “the nervous system formed the vital bridge between the body’s
sensations and the mind’s consciousness of them”. 21 Thus the “brain
and the central nervous system” were “the key to understanding the
operation of the mind” – as suggested by book titles such as Alexander
Bain’s Mind and Body (1873) and Thomas Laycock’s Mind and Brain
(1860). 22 Sensation fiction continually reflects the period’s concern with
the physical and mental effects of nervous disorders. One of Collins’s
most famous characterizations is Frederick Fairlie of The Woman in
White, who refers to himself as a bundle of nerves dressed up to look
like a man. 23
The psychiatric ‘moral management’ system previously referenced em-
phasized that “mental health was to be achieved by a life of moderation
and by the energetic exercise of the will”. 24 It was believed that “mania,
dementia, and melancholia might be brought on by moral causes”. By
‘moral causes’, doctors referred to strong emotions and psychological
stresses. 25 For psychiatrists who promoted the moral management of
emotions and beliefs, some forms of insanity “could be cured”. 26
The late 1830s onward saw the theorization of ‘moral insanity’, influ-
enced by earlier work on the continent by Phillipe Pinel, Benedict Mo-
rel, and Jean-Étienne Esquirol, but only fully developed in Britain by
James Cowles Prichard. 27 Although ‘moral insanity’ emerged as a new
psychiatric concept it provided a framework for long-standing questions
of why some individuals display a sudden shift toward crime or amo-
rality. Moral insanity was also often believed to have psychological or
spiritual causes (rather than biological ones), such as mismanagement of
the passions.
But, showing the effects of a trend towards more physiological and
neurological explanations of behaviour, the focus on moral management
began to be replaced by the more deterministic ‘psychiatric Darwinism’,
which was predicated on the idea that one’s biological inheritance was
inescapable. Such developments meant that “From the 1860s onward,
medical emphasis on hereditary and latent insanity increased”. Many
sensation writers (including Collins, Braddon, Ellen Wood and Charles
Reade) draw on “both these biologically deterministic theories of mad-
ness and on the theories of moral management”. 28
In the middle of this array of competing theories, the Victorian public
had a growing awareness of the apparent ease with which individuals
could be misdiagnosed as insane and wrongfully confined in asylums. 29
This became a compelling concern during the ‘Lunacy Panic’ of 1858–9,
a phenomenon that provides important context for Lady Audley’s Secret
6  Introduction
(1861–2) and The Law and the Lady (1875), and for other sensation nov-
els including Collins’s The Woman in White (1859–60) and Armadale
(1866), and Charles Reade’s Hard Cash (1863).

Degeneration Theory
Highly influential during the mid- to late-Victorian period, ‘degenera-
tion theory’ was a discourse about the physical, mental, and cultural
‘degeneration’ believed to be threatening Europe. The theory was first
fully developed in Benedict Augustin Morel’s Treatise on Degeneration
(1857).30 Degeneration theory arose partly in response to Darwinian
evolutionary theory, which states that, over time, organisms adapt in order
to survive. Explaining the ‘reverse’ of such improvement, degeneration
theory argues that species can degenerate to less evolved versions. Such
theory was familiar to the Victorian public from the 1860s onward due
to the work of the psychiatrist Henry Maudsley. ‘Degeneration’ was used
as an explanation for a perceived increase in “the incidence of insanity
and mental and physical disorders”. This increase was often blamed on
the pace and stress of modern life. While some elements of degenera-
tion theory suggest that society is descending into primitive atavism,
degeneration is also said to occur due to “the over-refinement of modern
civilization” and excessive sources of stimulation. 31 Such acquired debil-
ity was then “somehow transmitted by hereditary [sic] to offspring”.32
Degeneration theory therefore expresses fears that entire cultures and
body politics could degenerate due to “polluting inheritance”. 33 From
1860 onward, studies in criminal anthropology by Cesare Lombroso
further contributed to degeneration theory and beliefs about physical
appearance by theorizing the typical physical traits of criminals. 34
Numerous works by Collins and Braddon display a strong interest in
biological and mental ‘inheritance’. Lady Audley’s possible inheritance
of her mother’s insanity is the central concern of Lady Audley’s Secret
and in The Trail of the Serpent Jabez North inherits his father’s moral
insanity. In Ellen Wood’s St. Martin’s Eve (1866) (not examined in this
monograph) a woman inherits mental disorder from her father and is
subsequently unable to control her intense jealousy. But even if degenera-
tion could be caused by heredity it was thought that it could be worsened
by deliberately indulging in stimulations and passions. 35 Thus ‘degenera-
tion’ ties back to the importance of ‘moral management’.
Late in the century Max Nordau’s Degeneration (Entartung) (1892)
argues that certain social groups and races are pathological or inferior.
He also argues that ‘degeneracy’ is reflected in unhealthy contemporary
tastes.36 Amongst the degenerate are the aesthetes of the late nineteenth
century, “Distinguished by … a contempt for conventional custom and
morality”.37 Nordau’s theory soon became linked to Social Darwinism
and to Lombroso’s ideas of the born criminal.
 Introduction  7
One extremely sinister development of this anxiety about the apparent
‘degeneration’ of British and European health and morality, and about
‘deviations’ from what was held normal, was the emergence of ‘eugen-
ics’ late in the century. Eugenics was partly influenced by the statistical
formulation of the ‘norm’ (largely introduced by Francis Galton), and
partly by Social Darwinism. Embracing highly ableist values, eugenics
identified a range of marginalized people with ‘undesirable’ traits, such
as criminality, cognitive disability, or specific diseases and suggested
that such ‘unfit’ people should not be allowed to reproduce.38

Introduction to Disability and Disability Studies

Modern disability studies considers how social, economic, and geo-
graphic structures and environments, along with medical and psychi-
atric discourses, ‘disable’ people with impairments, marking them as
outside the norm and prompting their disenfranchisement. Disability
studies also provides alternative discourses that are positive about im-
pairment or about disabled identity. Disability activism and disability
theory first became prominent in the 1970s and grew in complexity and
influence throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
One prevalent approach in disability studies has involved theorizing
disability according to a ‘social model’ that emphasizes how ‘disability’
is distinguished from biological or mental impairment. The model con-
ceptualizes disability as a position of disadvantage created via socio-­
economic and medical forces. One of the best explanations of a common
aim within disability studies appears in Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s
Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Cul-
ture and Literature (1997), an early and highly influential disability
studies text:

Cultural and literary criticism has generally overlooked the related

perceptions of corporeal otherness we think of variously as “mon-
strosity,” “mutilation,” “deformation,” “crippledness,” or “physical
disability”.
… My purpose here is to alter the terms and expand our under-
standing of the cultural construction of bodies and identity by re-
framing “disability” as another culture-bound, physically justified
difference to consider along with race, gender, class, ethnicity, and
sexuality.39

Disability studies is an interdisciplinary and actively evolving field that

reveals that the “meanings of disability are … historically and culturally
contingent”, changing according to context.40 While medical models of
disability represent disability as reliant on the presence of an individu-
al’s impairment or unwanted health condition, the social model explains
8  Introduction
that the concept of disability is constructed by law, medical discourse,
and social interactions. It can be a difficult and controversial matter to
delimit who, exactly, is ‘disabled’, but what connects groups of people
commonly regarded as disabled “is a shared element of stigma and sep-
aration from what dominant cultural and medical discourses define as
‘natural’ or ‘normal’”.41
A number of texts written by theorists working outside of ‘disability
studies’ or prior to its emergence have had great influence on the field.
Two such are Erving Goffman’s theorization of the practices and effects
of Stigma (1963) and Julia Kristeva’s theorization of abjection in Powers
of Horror (1980). Stigma and abjection both negatively affect the life
experiences of disabled people. Goffman’s book Stigma: Notes on the
Management of Spoiled Identity (1963) theorizes stigma “as a bodily
or intellectual marker that serves to devalue or disqualify an individual
from full social acceptance.”42
For centuries, beliefs that certain things are ‘abject’ have provided a
major impetus for inclinations to pathologize disabled people. In Pow-
ers of Horror (1980) the psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva explains that
‘abject’ objects disturb systems and ideas of order or identity. Because
they threaten to disrupt borders and rules, they are found disquieting
and are considered ‘taboo’. They may even be considered as ‘evil’. For
example, corpses are abject because they have been expelled from the
society of the living.43 The psychological purpose behind such ideas
of ­“defilement” is to maintain physical or social boundaries, whether
biologically natural or socially imposed.44 Naomi Schor notes in Bad
Objects: Essays Popular and Unpopular (1995) that “at any given time,
within the … academy, some critical objects are promoted to the status
of good objects … while others are tabooed” [or abjected].45 Writing in
2002, David T. Mitchell laments that disability “still strikes many as a
perverse interest for academic contemplation”.46
The most influential analyst of historical trends toward the medical-
ization of disability and the incarceration of the mentally ill is Michel
Foucault (1926–1984). Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic (1963) and
Madness and Civilization (1961) both emphasize how the nineteenth
century was dominated by the medical gaze. Both texts have had a
fundamental influence on disability studies, explicating the patholo-
gization, surveillance, and control of populations considered deviant.
Both Foucault and a number of disability theorists have written of a
post-­Enlightenment trend towards controlling, curing, or erasing ‘the
extraordinary body’.
One highly influential example of this trend was the previously ref-
erenced eugenics movement. ‘Eugenics’, meaning “good in stock”, is a
term coined by Francis Galton in 1883.47 Theories of eugenics were in-
fluenced by work on statistical concepts such as the ‘mean’ and ‘norm’
and the ‘normal distribution’ of intelligence. The general aim of eugenics
 Introduction  9
was that by allowing only selective breeding, the quality of a country’s
biological stock would increase. While now commonly associated with
the Nazis, the eugenics movement was popular in the United Kingdom
and the United States from the 1890s to 1920s, and the United States ac-
tually passed sterilization laws in 33 states. And in recent years disability
theorists and scholars of bioethics have expressed great concern about
genetic and psychiatric developments that seem to once more encourage
eliminating disability (for example, recommending the termination of
‘abnormal’ foetuses).
The desire to cure or elide disabilities is not as utopian as it sounds:
it emphasizes disability’s unacceptability, encourages the persecution of
disabled people, and can cause disabled people to feel internalized shame.
Very often a disabled person is pressured (by able-bodied people, or by the
medical industry) to ‘mainstream’ themselves and appear as ‘normal’ as
possible.48 Attempts to appear ‘normate’ (what is accepted as ‘the norm’)
when disabled are generally referred to as ‘passing’ within disability stud-
ies. Expectations that disabled people should try to pass as able-bodied,
neuro-typical, or not mentally ill do little to help disabled people – rather
they aim at making normate people feel comfortable. It can be argued
that since every person in the world has a body and a mind, disability
issues should be of interest to everyone. As Martha Stoddard Holmes re-
marks, “it will be an unusual person who does not have an experience of
disability in his or her life, either personally or contiguously.”49

The Social Model of Disability, Criticism of the

Social Model, and the Movement Toward Critical
Disability Studies
The social model of disability argues that the experience of disability
involves more than impairment. Martha Stoddard Holmes offers the
insight that disability is “the experience of living in a body for which
your culture is not designed”.50 A theorist invoking the social model of
disability may, for example, observe that ambulatory people commonly
believe that a wheelchair user’s ‘disability’ is to be equated with their
physical impairment and that any limit to movement or any disadvan-
tage that they face is a natural consequence of the impairment. But if
a wheelchair user’s environment was designed so that all ingress and
egress of buildings and methods of transport were easy and convenient,
the wheelchair user might no longer experience a situation of disability.
The social model of disability is first mentioned in Mark Oliver’s The
Politics of Disablement (1990). As in the example above, Oliver draws
a distinction between ‘impairment’ and ‘disability’. Oliver observes that
disabled people are treated as socially inferior and that this spills over
into institutional discrimination. He argues that the social model con-
trasts with the “individual” model of disability that concentrates on
10  Introduction
“personal tragedy” and “medicalisation”. 51 Over time, use of the social
model has diversified. But, generally speaking, theorists using the social
model of disability critically question the political, social, and medical
structures that present impairment as a problem or that place impaired
individuals in disabling situations.
While it is acknowledged that the social model has sometimes helped
to combat barriers that disabled people experience, criticisms of the
model have emerged. One major criticism argues that it is problematic to
claim that disabilities are only culturally constructed, as this downplays
the material reality of physical impairment and its effects. 52 For exam-
ple, in “The Social Model of disability: An Outdated Ideology?” Tom
Shakespeare and Nick Watson observe that “we are not just disabled
people, we are also people with impairments”.53 Carol Thomas theo-
rizes a “social relational model” to make further room for the discussion
of impairment effects such as physical pain.54 And Janine Owens notes
that the social model’s assumption that “In solidarity people may gather
and challenge oppression” may leave “little room for recognition of the
[diverse] individual body”. 55 Dan Goodley’s introduction to Disability
Studies: An Interdisciplinary Introduction (2011) provides an excellent
overview of a number of disability models that have appeared in the last
few decades.56
The past five to ten years have seen the development of new methodol-
ogy for a new ‘critical disability studies’. While there is no o
­ verwhelming
consensus of methodology within the new critical disability studies,
one prominent feature has been an increased interest in intersectional
­disability – for example, recognizing that for a person of colour the ex-
perience of disability may be different than it is for a white European. 57
One example of such work is the recent edited collection Disability and
Intersecting Statuses (2013) that examines (among other topics) inter-
sections between disability and aging, disability and parenting, and so-
cial class and learning disabilities. 58
The intersectionality between disability and queer identity has be-
come a focal point, often within ‘Crip’ studies, as have intersections
between disability and gender, or disability, race, and gender. Prior to
the development of the new critical disability studies, Lennard J. ­Davis’s
Bending Over Backwards (2002) argued that “disability may turn out
to be the identity that links other identities”: disability is the one iden-
tity that any person in the world has the potential to experience. 59 But
Davis also wonders, provocatively, if disability studies may move be-
yond theorizing in terms of disabled identity, given that identity is un-
stable and “malleable”.60 Davis’s idea is to some degree approached by
some other theorists’ criticism of the categorizations of “disabled” and
“able-bodied” and by arguments that it might be more accurate to think
in terms of each person occupying “a random and temporary position”
on a “spectrum of ability”.61
 Introduction  11
Literary Disability Studies and Criticism of Disability
Meta-Narratives
A number of monographs containing studies of literary disability have
demonstrated that disability theory can be a valuable tool for revealing
insights about literary works. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder’s
highly influential Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies
of Discourse (2000) outlines many of the recurring meanings disability
has carried in western culture and literature over the centuries. Mitchell
and Snyder argue that despite the abundance of disability “in literary
history”, disability is very often used in literary works as a ‘narrative
prosthesis’ that serves to support normalcy.
Because of their averageness, ‘normate’ characters may not create the
“extraordinary circumstances” needed to drive a plot. Writers therefore
bring in “deviance”, in the form of a disabled character.62 Another re-
curring example of ‘narrative prosthesis’ involves the plotline relating to
a disabled character serving the main function of furthering a love plot
between two ‘normative’ characters. Having served their function, the
disabled character is not rewarded. They may even be eliminated from
the story.63
Disabled characters in literature are often used as a means of signi-
fying some form of social collapse or “crisis” via their “physical and
cognitive anomalies”.64 This use of disability as “corporeal metaphor”
for social problems may further embed “the body in a limiting array of
symbolic meanings”.65 Moreover, although narratives often use disabled
characters as catalysts of disruption, those same narratives almost al-
ways finally act to ‘contain’ such characters’ deviance. The character’s
disability may be ‘fixed’ through treatment or the disabled character
may be punished, even killed, for their non-conformity.66
Problems of stereotyping may even arise in representations of dis-
ability put forward by the media as ‘positive’ or ‘heart-warming’ and
accepted as such by the public. Such representations may celebrate the
cure of a disability or the ‘overcoming’ of a disability through a par-
ticular achievement. Such forms of ‘overcoming’ are suggested to be
‘inspirational’, without considering the impact of the connotations that
disability is something negative that needs to be overcome, that disabled
people cannot be happy as they are, and that their assimilation into
mainstream culture cannot occur until their disability has been veiled or
eradicated.67 Increasingly, disability scholars and disabled bloggers have
hit back against such representations, referring to them as ‘inspiration
porn’ and revealing their ableist underpinnings.
The kinds of narratives that have typically been associated with deaf-
ness have been discussed by Lennard J. Davis in Enforcing Normalcy,
while narratives commonly associated with blindness are discussed in
David Bolt’s The Metanarrative of Blindness and Georgina Kleege’s Sight
12  Introduction
Unseen. As Susan Wendell remarks, literary narratives often discourage
us from regarding disabled people “as subjects of experience with whom
we might identify” and instead encourage us to see them “as symbolic of
something … we reject and fear”.68 The ramifications of such representa-
tions are important because, as Sander Gilman emphasises, once an im-
age of disease or illness is represented within literature or art, the public
often take that image as a representation of the reality about that illness.69
I recommend that readers investigate the work of well-known theo-
rists such as Tom Shakespeare, Dan Goodley, Robert McRuer, Michel
Bérubé, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and David Bolt in order to become
aware of some foundational and influential ideas in disability theory
that cannot be covered fully here. In addition, Colin Barnes’s “A Legacy
of Oppression” and David Bolt’s “A Brief History of Literary Disability
Studies” provide interesting overviews of the history of disability and the
development of disability studies.70

Representations of Disability in Mainstream

Victorian Literature
Mid-nineteenth century British literature was dominated by the main-
stream ‘realist’ and ‘domestic’ novel, genres that generally reflect a
commitment to representing “everyman” characters.71 Despite this,
mainstream Victorian realist and domestic novels actually represent dis-
ability fairly frequently. However, these disability representations, if not
overtly negative, are almost uniformly accompanied by sentimental or
moralizing messages. They seldom regard disability in terms of disabled
people’s social experience. The most common paradigms through which
mainstream Victorian literature represents disability are to regard it in
medical terms as a defect, or to emphasize disability’s affective power.
In the affective paradigm, disability is an ‘affliction’: tragic, pathetic,
limiting, something to fear. Although a number of accomplished Victo-
rian novelists had strong interests in science, this does not seem to have
encouraged them to challenge traditional conceptions of disability.72
In Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture
(2004) Martha Stoddard Holmes provides a comprehensive overview of
the “melodramatic conventions” typically followed in mainstream Vic-
torian representations of disability, noting that they are intended to evoke
“pure pathos”.73 The recurring disability master-narratives Holmes
identifies in mainstream Victorian literature, life-writings of Victorians
with disabilities, and scientific writing include the following: a) Having
or gaining a disability is a calamity that will ruin one’s life; b) Disabled
people are always isolated and always suffering; c) Disabled people are
passive, helpless victims; d) Physically disabled people are not capable
of working; and f) People with disabilities cannot be sexually active or
get married (either other people will not find them attractive, or they
 Introduction  13
risk passing impairments to their children).74 Even the life-writing of
some disabled Victorians accepts and reinforces ableist attitudes.75 For
example, Harriet Martineau, herself hard-of-hearing, argues that deaf
or hard-of-hearing people should not go into society, because their mix-
ing with hearing people makes the hearing people feel inconvenienced
and because the deaf or hard-of-hearing person will feel embarrassed.76
Mainstream Victorian novelistic representations of disability tend to
represent the disabled person as lonely, of limited effectiveness, and sep-
arated from the ordinary milestones experienced by able-bodied char-
acters. In Dinah Mulock Craik’s John Halifax, Gentleman (1856) the
disabled character Phineas is represented as physically feeble. He can
only admire the achievements of his robust friend John Halifax. Harriet
Martineau’s Deerbrook (1839) represents the governess Maria Young’s
hopes of marrying as dashed once she is involved in a carriage accident.
In The Mill on the Floss (1860) even the highly intellectual George Eliot
decides not to have Maggie Tulliver marry Philip Wakem, who is dis-
abled, despite their seeming well-suited to one another. Some other rep-
resentations of disabled characters encourage pity for the ‘sufferers’ of
disability, such as the representation of Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol,
(1843) and Smike in Nicholas Nickleby (1838–9).
Mainstream Victorian fiction also usually represents disability as
excising the character from any serious profession. This likely reflects
common social views: Martha Stoddard Holmes suggests that for Vic-
torians “the disabled worker” was “the one figure that was hardest to
imagine”.77 Meanwhile, in Henry Mayhew’s non-fiction work London
Labour and the London Poor (1851 and 1861) “he ‘who cannot work’
represents a monstrous masculinity”.78
At times, mainstream Victorian novels replicate the historical associa-
tion of disability with spiritual ‘deformity’ and spiritual evil, which has
a foundation in Biblical ideas associating disability with being cursed by
God. Dickens’s Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–1) is one such
example. Late in the century, R.L. Stevenson represents Mr. Hyde, the
‘evil’ side of Henry Jekyll, as having “a haunting sense of unexpressed
deformity” that hints at his moral degradation.79
At the other end of this spiritual scale Victorian literature sometimes
represents disability within a framework of Christian faith, either as a
means of consoling the disabled person via their future in heaven or to
encourage them to think of their disability as a blessing or as a test of
patience, resilience, or faith. While this provides a way to understand
disability more favourably, it embeds disability within a sentimental par-
adigm, suggesting that that the disabled person’s life role is to benefit
others by being a good spiritual example, or by encouraging charity in
those who are able-bodied.80 And the idea that God chose the person
to have a disability may encourage economic or social complacency. Ex-
actly such an idea is put forward by a disabled, wealthy conservative
14  Introduction
politician in Braddon’s One Thing Needful (1886), with the aim of influ-
encing a working-class audience to accept their deprivations.
Such frameworks that distance readers from disabled characters or rob
disabled characters of agency do little to challenge traditional perceptions
of disabled people. The most famous disabled characters in Victorian
fiction, Charles Dickens’s Tiny Tim, Smike, Silas Wegg, and Smallweed,
George Eliot’s Philip Wakem, and Anthony Trollope’s ­Signora Neroni
all have storylines that reproduce some of the master-­narratives I have
outlined. Dinah Mulock Craik’s sympathetic portrayal of Olive (1850)
is one of the few remarkable exceptions: Olive, who has a fairly minor
physical impairment, eventually gains love – but only after years of being
treated with pity or disgust.81

Victorian Critical Responses to Sensation Fiction

Many middle-class literary critics of the mid-Victorian period were
unimpressed by the perceived quality, aims, and content of sensation
­fiction, providing denunciatory reviews of specific novels or of the entire
genre. The realist novel was considered to encourage readers to culti-
vate social wisdom and a “more ethical gaze”.82 In contrast, influential
critics insisted that sensation fiction had only a somatic, not intellectual
effect, existing simply to thrill readers and electrify their nerves.83 A
number of works by sensation novelists do indeed aim to provoke read-
ers’ physiological responses. But this is not always to promote suspense
or excitement: sometimes the aim is to evoke impairment and encourage
reader empathy with physically or mentally impaired characters. How-
ever, the previously mentioned Victorian critics view the genre’s interest
in ‘deformity’ as a sign of its pathological and “unwholesome interest
in deviant figures”.84 H.L. Mansel associates sensation novels with
­sickness, regarding them as “by no means favourable symptoms of the
conditions of the body of society”.85
Adding to sensation fiction’s reputation as degenerate and unsavoury
are the genre’s unusual main female characters, who are sometimes
criminal. The period’s concern with women’s rights is a vitally import-
ant context for the genre.86 Victorian reviewers often find sensation her-
oines overly assertive, inappropriately interested in physicality, or simply
immoral. But the genre’s focus on what exactly makes certain women
deviant and what discourses are used to pathologize them delivers some
of sensation fiction’s most sophisticated social commentary.

Sensation Fiction’s Representation of Disability and

Response to Disability Discourses
The resurgence of interest in the sensation novel began with Kathleen
Tillotson’s introduction to “The Lighter Reading of the 1860s”. From
 Introduction  15
the mid-1980s to early 1990s, critics including Thomas Boyle, ­Winifred
Hughes, and Patrick Brantlinger helped to re-instigate interest in sensa-
tion fiction. This interest was further developed through monographs
and articles by Tamar Heller, Jenny Bourne Taylor, Lillian ­Nayder,
and Kate Flint, and by studies that recuperated the reputations of fe-
male writers of popular fiction. Two extremely influential studies of
­nineteenth-century female madness also appeared: The Madwoman in
the Attic (1979) by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, and The Fe-
male Malady (1985) by Elaine Showalter.
Throughout this period the work of the cultural theorist Michel Fou-
cault acquired a pervasive influence on the study of the history of psy-
chiatry and systems of discipline. A number of Foucault’s works explore
how “social institutions in nineteenth-century Europe collaborated to
birth “‘the psychiatrization of law, the medicalization of crime, and the
therapeutization of justice’”.87 Foucauldian influence on the study of
sensation fiction took an exponential leap as a result of D.A. Miller’s
critical work. In “Cage aux Folles” Miller famously claims that sensa-
tion fiction “renders our reading bodies … theaters of neurasthenia”
and that the genre addresses “itself primarily to the sympathetic nervous
system”.88 His highly accomplished The Novel and the Police (1988)
describes Foucault’s work as exploring how ‘power’ invisibly disciplines
its subjects, putting in place “a perceptual grid in which a division be-
tween the normal and the deviant inherently imposes itself”.89 Miller
uses ­Foucauldian theory to consider discipline and injunction in The
Moonstone and The Woman in White.90
Early in the twenty-first century, a small number of critics began to
note the frequency of disabled characters in Wilkie Collins’s fiction. This
has been followed by a gradual increase of interest in disability depic-
tions by some other sensation novelists, and interest in the Victorian
freak show.91 Martha Stoddard Holmes emerged as the leading scholar
of disability in Victorian literature. In Fictions of Affliction (2004), she
asserts that novels were “a major vehicle for the transfer of cultural val-
ues about disability”.92 One major focus of Holmes’s work is how Vic-
torian fiction almost always depicts disabled characters as barred from
matrimony or child-bearing.93
Some other accomplished writing on Victorian disability has fol-
lowed within Victorian studies and critical literary disability studies,
such as Patrick McDonagh’s Idiocy: A Cultural History (2008), Lau-
rence ­Talairach-Vielmas’s Wilkie Collins, Medicine, and the Gothic
(2009), the edited collection The Madwoman and the Blind Man (2012),
­Jennifer Esmail’s Reading Victorian Deafness (2013), and Karen Bourri-
er’s The Measure of Manliness (2015). Mark Mossman, meanwhile, has
explained how “representations of abnormalcy in [Collins’s] The Moon-
stone” critique socio-cultural hegemony and exclusion.94 Mossman and
Holmes’s collaborative book chapter, “Disability in Victorian Sensation
16  Introduction
Fiction”, for Blackwell’s A Companion to Sensation Fiction (2011) ar-
gues that disability is central to sensation fiction – in fact, one of the
features that ‘sensationalizes’ it – and that the genre often uses disability
to disrupt binaries.95 While some critics have read sensation fiction as
having a conservative tendency, I agree with Holmes and Mossman that
it is generally a dissident genre and its approach to disability is generally
one of dissidence.
The potential overlaps between Victorian disability and the more
­extreme ‘freakery’ and ‘monstrosity’ are one way that the sensation novel
harks back to the Gothic’s interest in transgression.96 Since sensation fic-
tion partakes in the Gothic it also shows a strong interest in psychology,
family history, and traumatizing events. As a result, psychoanalytic the-
ory and traumatology contribute to analyses in Sensational Deviance.
Jill Matus, Peter Logan, Nicholas Dames, and Anne Stiles, scholars
of Victorian science, psychology, or neurology, have all written mono-
graphs or articles or edited collections that I found helpful. Since sensa-
tion fiction segues into detective fiction, monographs about the history
of criminology or about forensic narrative have also proved very useful.
A range of feminist and queer theory also provides background to con-
clusions reached in Sensational Deviance. Further insights into literary
disability are offered by work in the fields of embodiment, affect, cogni-
tive literary theory, cognitive literary historicism, bioethics, psychiatric
disability, and neurodiversity.
Sensational Deviance often focuses on representations of disability
by Collins that have not previously been examined in much detail. And,
aside from the strong interest shown in Lady Audley’s Secret and much
smaller degrees of interest in The Trail of the Serpent, Eleanor’s Vic-
tory, and John Marchmont’s Legacy, the study of physically or men-
tally disabled characters in Braddon’s work has not been common.
The most impressive work on Braddon’s deviant characters appears in
Andrew Mangham’s Violent Women in Sensation Fiction (2007). But
there remain excellent novels by Collins and Braddon which have not
been studied extensively (if at all) in terms of their engagement with
disability. And representations of disability appear in sensation works
by Ellen Wood, Charlotte Yonge, Sheridan Le Fanu, and Charles Reade.
Regretfully, Sensational Deviance cannot discuss works by all of these
novelists. I look forward to analyzing some of these novels in the future.
The sensation novels examined in this study, dating from 1854 to
1886, stand out from mainstream Victorian depictions of disability due
to their stronger than usual interest in the disabled person’s sensory, psy-
chological, and social experience. Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth
Braddon’s depictions of disability often undermine prevailing assump-
tions about specific disabilities or about hierarchies of value attached
to bodies and minds. They often appear to deliberately aim to amend
attitudes toward disabled people through commentary on experiential,
 Introduction  17
scientific, and philosophical issues surrounding disabilities. These at-
tempts are assisted by their decisions to largely eschew depicting dis-
ability through a lens of pathos, fear, or revulsion. The works examined
here do not merely reflect and agree with Victorian scientific knowledge
and theories, but enter into dialogue with them. This engagement, cou-
pled with awareness of the social and institutional functions of stigma,
provides insight into social hierarchies and conceptions of deviance and
inferiority. Perhaps the most overwhelming concern of sensation fiction’s
engagement with physiology and psychiatry is its resistance of psychia-
try’s more deterministic conclusions about the power that heredity holds
over individual lives.
David T. Mitchell observes that literary narratives often approach dis-
ability as though it is an exotic “alien terrain that promises the revelation
of a previously uncomprehended experience”.97 Some of Collins’s novels
introduce sensorially disabled characters this way. But the end goal of
these novelistic representations is always to demystify the disability, to
show readers what disability is really like, and to encourage readers’
identification with disabled characters.98
The four Collins novels analyzed in Sensational Deviance also reveal
Collins’s preoccupation with nervousness, insanity, and ‘degeneration’.
Nerves, neurology, and anxiety emerge as important concerns in The
Dead Secret and The Law and the Lady, and in Poor Miss Finch’s rep-
resentation of epilepsy. The Law and the Lady (1875) undermines ap-
parent connections between rationality and sanity which were central
to psychiatric ‘moral management’, while also exploring the legal and
social rules that keep Victorian women, especially married women, in
positions of social disability.
The Trail of the Serpent, Lady Audley’s Secret, and John March-
mont’s Legacy display the increasing sophistication of Mary Elizabeth
­Braddon’s responses to the period’s theories of hereditary insanity and
moral insanity, dramatizing the implications of such discourses, espe-
cially the implications for women. The Trail of the Serpent’s represen-
tation of a communication disability is just as challenging, making its
central mute character a skilled professional detective who uses phrenol-
ogy, physiognomy, and sign language to catch a habitual criminal.
Collins and Braddon emphasize social and political aspects of their
characters’ disabilities, such as their legal or psychiatric disenfranchise-
ment and pressures they face to normalize themselves. As part of their
movement away from comprehending disability according to a ‘medical’
model, both writers usually avoid representing a disabled character as
desiring or receiving physical therapy or surgery to lessen or eradicate
a disability. In fact, they represent sensory or communication disability
as an acceptable or even positive difference. And by encouraging reader
identification with disabled characters they profoundly unsettle the bi-
naries of able-bodied/disabled or normal/abnormal. Such trends in their