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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
by codeMantra
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,
4.3 The Graphic, Issue 266. Saturday January 2,
4.4 The Graphic, Issue 267. Saturday January 9,
4.5 The Graphic, Issue 271. Saturday February 6,
4.6 The Graphic, Issue 272. Saturday February 13,
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
18 Introduction
work prefigure the ‘social’ model of disability that many disability schol-
ars adopted during the late twentieth century. It can also be argued that
disability representations by Collins and Braddon pre-empt demands for
studies of intersectional disability. Their interest in marginalized sub-
jectivity, intersections of oppression, and ‘hybrid’ identities means that
their works often demonstrate how socio-medical judgments about dis-
ability operate in conjunction with beliefs and values about class, race,
and especially, gender.99
Notes
1 The most famous sensation novels appeared between 1859 and the late
1860s.
2 It has been referred to via such terms by Tamara S. Wagner, Richard Nemes-
vari, Tamar Heller, and Patrick R. O’Malley. Catherine Spooner notes that
the sensation novel participates “fully in Gothic conventions without having
always been critically recognised as Gothic” (Spooner, Fashioning Gothic
Bodies (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2004),
14). Literary scholars now often regard sensation fiction as an amorphous,
“hybrid” genre (see Harrison and Fantina, “Introduction”, Victorian Sensa-
tions: Essays on a Scandalous Genre. Ed. by Kimberly Harrison and Richard
Fantina (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006): ix–xxiii; xi and xii).
3 Jonathan Loesberg, “The Ideology of Narrative Form in Victorian Fiction”,
Representations 13 (1986): 115–138; 117.
4 Jennifer Esmail and Christopher Keep, “Victorian Disability: Introduction”,
Victorian Review 35.2 (2009): 45–51; 46.
5 See Lyn Pykett, Wilkie Collins. Authors in Context (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2005), 165.
6 Anthony S. Wohl, Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 206; 257–259; 264–265; 273.
7 See Jennifer Harris and Alan Roulstone, Disability, Policy and Professional
Practice (London: SAGE, 2010), 8.
8 Martha Stoddard Holmes, Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Vic-
torian Culture (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2004), 13.
9 Laurence J. Ray. “Models of madness in Victorian asylum practice”,
European Journal of Sociology 22.2 (1981): 229–264; 232.
10 Wohl, 12–16; 21–23; 34; 48; 51.
11 Chris Otter, The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in
Britain, 1800–1910 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 11.
12 See Lennard J. Davis, “Constructing Normalcy: The Bell Curve, and Novel,
and the Invention of the Disabled Body”, in The Disability Studies Reader.
Ed. by Lennard J. Davis (New York and London: Routledge, 1997): 9–28;
3–4.
13 Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture: 1850–1880
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 13; J.A.V. Chapple, Science and
Literature in the Nineteenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1987), 99.
14 L.C. Jacyna, “Somatic Theories of Mind and the Interests of Medicine in
Britain, 1850–1879”, Medical History 26.3 (1982): 233–258; 239–240.
15 Benjamin Brodie, The Works of Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, Bart., Volume
I, 159; qtd. in Haley, 38.
16 Combe’s best-known work was The Constitution of Man (1830).
Introduction 19
17 Jane Wood, Passion and Pathology in Victorian Fiction (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001), 30.
18 Jenny Bourne Taylor, “Nobody’s Secret: Illegitimate Inheritance and the
Uncertainties of Memory”, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 21.4 (2000):
565–592; 576.
19 Bruce Haley, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture (Cambridge, MA
and London: Harvard University Press, 1978), 35–36.
20 i> Sir David Brewster, The Edinburgh Encyclopaedia Volume 15 ( Philadelphia:
Joseph and Edward Parker, 1832), 629.
21 Wood, Passion and Pathology, 3–4.
22 See Haley, 38.
23 Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White. 1859–60 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999), 356.
24 Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Cul-
ture, 1830–1980 (London: Virago, 1987, 2008), 30.
25 Ibid., 29.
26 Sally Shuttleworth, “‘Preaching to the Nerves’: Psychological Disorder in
Sensation Fiction”, in A Question of Identity. Ed. by Marina Benjamin
(New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1993): 192–222; 200.
27 It is now sometimes seen as a precursor to modern ‘sociopathy’ and ‘anti-
social disorder’, although the similarities are highly contested.
28 Shuttleworth, “‘Preaching to the Nerves’”, 200. Kjersti Ericsson and Elaine
Showalter also discuss this trend.
29 See McCandless, “Dangerous to Themselves and Others”, and Shuttleworth,
“‘Preaching to the Nerves”’.
30 The full title is Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et mo-
rales de l’espèce humaine et des causes produisant ces variétés maladives.
31 Pykett, Wilkie Collins, 182; see also 184. See also Peter Logan, Nerves and
Narratives: A Cultural History of Hysteria in 19th Century British Prose
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), xii.
32 Donald K. Freedheim (ed.), Handbook of Psychology. Volume I: History of
Psychology (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2003), 320.
33 Roger Luckhurst (ed.), “Introduction”. Late Victorian Gothic Tales (Oxford:
Oxford World’s Classics, 2005): ix–xxi; xx.
34 Lombroso’s L’uomo delinquent (The Criminal Man) (1876) developed the
idea of the ‘born criminal’ and set up gendered and racial hierarchies. For
Lombroso’s influence on Nordau’s Degeneration, see Josephine Guy, The
Victorian Age: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (London and New
York: Routledge, 1998), 415.
35 Tamara Wagner discusses this in “Sports, Cruelty, and (Moral) Breakdown:
Theories of Degeneration in Wilkie Collins’s Man and Wife”. www.victori-
anweb.org/authors/collins/degeneration.html. 11 November 2002. Accessed
28 October 2009.
36 See Nordau, “Chapter III: Diagnosis”, Degeneration. Seventh edition (New
York: D. Appleton, 1895), 15–16.
37 Guy, op cit., 415–416.
38 See Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of
Human Heredity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 33.
39 Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical
Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1997), 5–6.
40 David M. Turner, Disability in Eighteenth-Century England (New York
and Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 2.
20 Introduction
41 David M. Turner, “Introduction: Approaching Anomalous Bodies”, in So-
cial Histories of Disability and Deformity. Ed. by David M Turner and
Kevin Stagg (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2006): 1–16; 3–4.
42 Turner, “Introduction: Approaching Anomalous Bodies”, 4.
43 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S.
Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 1; 2.
44 Ibid., 5.
45 Naomi Schor, “Preface”, Bad Objects: Essays Popular and Unpopular
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), xv.
46 David Mitchell, “Narrative Prosthesis and the Materiality of Metaphor: Lit-
erature and the Undisciplined Body of Disability”, in Disability Studies: En-
abling the Humanities. Ed. by Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann,
and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (New York: MLA, 2002): 15–30; 19.
47 Angelique Richardson, Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century:
Rational Reproduction and the New Woman (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2003), 2. Galton introduces the term in Inquiries into Human Faculty
and its Development (London: Macmillan, 1883), 24–25. See also Davis,
“Constructing Normalcy”, 7.
48 See Tobin Siebers, “Tender Organs, Narcissism, and Identity Politics,” in
Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. Ed. by Sharon L. Snyder,
Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (New York:
MLA, 2002): 40–55.
49 Holmes, Fictions of Affliction, 195.
50 Ibid., 194.
51 Mike Oliver, “The Individual and Social Models of Disability”, unpublished
paper presented at Joint Workshop of the Living Options Group and the
Research Unit of the Royal College of Physicians, 23 July 1990.
52 See Mark Jeffreys, “The Visible Cripple (Scars and Other Disfiguring Displays
Included),” in Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. Ed. by Sharon
L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (New
York: MLA, 2002): 31–39; 31; 32; 31; 35. See also Mike Oliver, “The Social
Model: A Victim of Criticism”. Disability Now. https://disabilitynow.org.
uk/2013/06/07/the-social-model-a-victim-of-criticism/. Accessed 19 Novem-
ber 2017.
53 Tom Shakespeare and Nick Watson, “The Social Model of Disability: An
Outdated Ideology?”, in Research in Social Science and Disability, Volume
2: Exploring Theories and Expanding Methodologies. Ed. by Sharon
N. Barnartt and Barbara M. Altman (2001): 9–28.
54 Janine Owens, “Exploring the Critiques of the Social Model of Disability:
The Transformative Possibility of Arendt’s Notion of Power”, Sociology of
Health and Illness 37.3 (2015): 385–403; 393.
55 Ibid., 389.
56 Dan Goodley, Disability Studies: An Interdisciplinary Introduction (London
and Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 2011).
57 For further discussions see C. Barnes, “Understanding the Social Model of
Disability: Past, Present, and Future”, in The Routledge Handbook of Dis-
ability Studies. Ed. by N. Watson, A. Roulstone, and C. Thomas (London:
Routledge, 2012): 12–29; see also Shakespeare and Watson, “The Social
Model of Disability: An Outdated Ideology?”.
58 Sharon N. Barnartt and Barbara M. Altman (eds.), Disability and Intersect-
ing Statuses (Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing, 2013).
59 Lennard J. Davis, Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism,
and Other Difficult Positions (New York and London: New York University
Press, 2002), 13–14.
Introduction 21
60 Ibid., 26.
61 Ruth Beinstock Anolik, “Introduction: Diagnosing Demons Creating and
Disabling the Discourse of Difference in the Gothic Text”, in Demons of
the Body and Mind: Essays on Disability in Gothic Literature. Ed. by Ruth
Bienstock Anolik (Jefferson and London: McFarland and Company, Inc.,
2010): 1–20; 5.
62 See Mitchell, “Narrative Prosthesis”, 17; 21.
63 See Narrative Prosthesis and Mitchell’s “Narrative Prosthesis”. Such plot
structures are discussed in Martha Stoddard Holmes’s articles “The Twin
Structure: Disabled Women in Victorian Courtship Plots”, and “Queering
the Marriage Plot”. Jenny Wren of Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864–5)
and Ezra Jennings of Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) are examples of
“freakish” figures who assist the normative love plots in their respective
novels (see Melissa Free, “Freaks that Matter: The Doll’s Dressmaker, the
Doctor’s Assistant, and the Limits of Difference”, in Victorian Freaks: The
Social Context of Freakery in Britain. Ed. by Marlene Tromp (Columbus:
The Ohio State University Press, 2008): 259–282; 259–260).
64 Mitchell, “Narrative Prosthesis”, 15; 16.
65 Ibid., 28.
66 Ibid., 23–24.
67 Ibid., 11.
68 Susan Wendell, The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on
Disability (New York: Routledge, 1996), 60.
69 See Sander Gilman, Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from
Madness to AIDS (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 2; 7.
70 See Colin Barnes, “A Legacy of Oppression”, in Disability Studies: Past,
Present, and Future. Ed. by Len Barton and Mike Oliver (Leeds: The Dis-
ability Press, 1997): 3–24; see also David Bolt, “A Brief History of Literary
Disability Studies”. Academia.edu. www.academia.edu/30918556/A_Brief_
History_of_Literary_Disability_Studies. Accessed September 2017.
71 See Davis, “Constructing Normalcy”.
72 See Anne Stiles, “Victorian Psychology and the Novel”, Literature Compass
5.3 (2008): 668–680. doi:10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00530.x.
74 See Holmes, Fictions of Affliction, and “The Twin Structure”, 222–223.
76 See Harriet Martineau’s “Letter to the Deaf”, 251, quoted in Fictions of
Affliction, 152–153, and Martineau’s Autobiography Vol. I, 95, quoted in
Fictions of Affliction, 155.
78 Sally Hayward, “Those Who Cannot Work”, Prose Studies 27.1–2 (2005):
53–71; 53.
79 R.L. Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1886), 43.
80 See Fictions of Affliction, 183. In John Halifax, Gentleman part of Phineas’s
role is to point toward John’s strengths of character, and another part to
encourage John to show tenderness.
81 Signora Neroni appears in Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers (1857).
82 Christine Ferguson, “Sensational Dependence: Prosthesis and Affect in
Dickens and Braddon”, Literature Interpretation Theory 19 (2008): 1–25;
3; 4–5.
83 Ibid., 3–4; 5. See also H.L. Mansel, “Sensation Novels”, Quarterly Review
113 (April 1863): 481–514; 492, and Margaret Oliphant, “Sensational Nov-
els”, Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, 574.
22 Introduction
84 Andrew Radford, Victorian Sensation Fiction: A Reader’s Guide to Essen-
tial Criticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 11. Here, Radford
refers to Mansel’s “Sensation Novels”. For further information on Victorian
reviews of sensation fiction see Radford, Lynn Pykett’s The Improper Femi-
nine, and Norman Page (ed.) Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974).
85 Mansel, “Sensation Novels”, 512.
86 “The 1860s was the decade of a second Reform Bill … as well as the estab-
lishment of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage (1866)” (Radford, 6).
87 Thomas Szasz, “Back Cover of I, Pierre Riviere”, ed. by Michel Foucault
(1975), qtd. in Nirmala Erevelles, “Signs of Reason”, Foucault and the Gov-
ernment of Disability. Ed. by Shelley Lynn Tremain (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press): 45–64; 45.
88 D.A. Miller, “Cage Aux Folles: Sensation and Gender in Wilkie Collins’s
The Woman in White”, Representations 14 (1986): 107–136; 107.
89 D.A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London:
University of California Press, 1988), 18.
90 Ibid., 8–10.
91 Recent titles include Victorian Freaks: The Social Context of Freakery
(2008), Spectacle of Deformity (2010), and The Victorian Freak Show: The
Significance of Disability (2011).
92 See Fictions of Affliction, 32.
93 Holmes, “The Twin Structure”, 222–223.
94 Mark Mossman, “Representations of the Abnormal Body in The Moonstone”,
Victorian Literature and Culture 37 (2009): 483–500; 483.
95 Martha Stoddard Holmes and Mark Mossman, “Disability in Victorian
Sensation Fiction”, in A Companion to Sensation Fiction. Ed. by Pamela K.
Gilbert (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011): 493–506.
96 See Tamar Heller, Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic (Yale University
Press, 1992).
97 Mitchell, “Narrative Prosthesis”, 23.
98 The idea of compensations, or of disabilities giving individuals special pow-
ers, is popular in modern culture. For example: the crime-fighter Daredevil,
who is blind, is represented as having exponentially heightened ability to
hear and to detect movements. Meanwhile, television’s recent interest in de-
picting neurodiversity and mental illness has sometimes led to situations
where shows seem to suggest that people with specific mental illnesses have
miraculous mental powers, such as in the depiction of Carrie’s bipolar disor-
der in Homeland (2011–2018).
99 Hybridity “Offers a way out of essentialist thinking (either/or)” and helps to
better represent the fluid ways in which people move between different sub-
ject positions” (Definition of “Hybridity”, in Disability and Social Theory:
New Developments and Directions. Ed. by Dan Goodley, Bill Hughes, and
Lennard J. Davis (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 325.
Part I
Wilkie Collins and

Disabled Identities
1 Hide and Seek (1854)
Wilkie Collins’s interests in science, coupled with his fervent humani-

tarian interests, led him to produce some of the most ground-breaking
portrayals of disability in Victorian literature. While showing an aware-
ness of tropes common to traditional modes of representing disability,
and occasionally using these tropes, Collins’s representations of disabled
characters very often undermine many of the master-narratives about
disability present in mid-Victorian culture, rejecting both sentimental,
pathetic attitudes toward disability and the ‘medical’ viewpoint of seeing
disabled people as deficient and in need of fixing. Predominant aspects
of Collins’s novelistic career are his engagement with exposing the inac-
curacy or prejudice of various ideologies or values related to bodies and
minds and his pointing out such issues’ influence in contributing to the
discourse and stigma that affect disabled people. Many of his works en-
gage with issues that would now be referred to as examples of biopower,
with his approaches posing a direct challenge to ableist ideology. These
novels also achieve particular complexity by exploring how the identi-
fication of disability or situations of disability are often meshed with
issues of gender, class, race, and reproduction.
Several of Wilkie Collins’s novels focus on a disabled character, and
his novels depict a wide range of disabling conditions, both physical and
mental. Collins’s interest in the sensory, psychological, and practical life
experiences of people with disabilities is evident all throughout his ca-
reer. In Collins’s early novel Hide and Seek (1854) the central character
is deaf-mute, and in Heart and Science (1883) he depicts a character
with a brain disease. His work reveals his strong awareness of traditions
in artistic and literary representations of disabled people and familiarity
with both historical and contemporary medical and philosophical texts
relating to disabilities.
One overwhelming agenda can be distinguished in Collins’s writing
about disability: his works often repudiate the ‘pity’ response to impair-
ment by suggesting that impairment and difference need not diminish
anyone’s quality of life and that disability is not tragic. Via this re-
peated message his works radically undermine the ableist assumption
that it is better not to have any form of impairment. One of Collins’s
26 Wilkie Collins and Disabled Identities
acknowledged aims with forwarding positive representations of disabil-
ity is to console readers who are disabled. But his novels also engage on
deeper levels with many of the major concerns about disability expressed
during the mid-nineteenth century, such as its relationship with gender,
reproduction, and economics. His novels have aged well, largely because
of their readiness to question and subvert many of the mainstream so-
cial, political, and psychiatric assumptions of the mid-Victorian period.
In general, his work often deconstructs hierarchies and binaries. This is
particularly the case with his explications of disability’s cultural mean-
ing and how stigma is produced, making his explorations of disability
issues surprisingly anticipatory of some approaches in modern-day dis-
ability studies.
Hide and Seek is one of Wilkie Collins’s earliest novels, published
in three volumes in 1854.1 It is the first of his novels where a character
with a disability plays a major role. Its portrayal of a young deaf-mute
woman, Madonna, is the earliest detailed representation of a deaf-
mute person in the British novel, and certainly the first such depiction
in nineteenth-century British literature that might claim any scientific
accuracy. 2 Hide and Seek shows Collins working through his early ob-
servations about relationships between the biological and socio-cultural
aspects of disability. While Hide and Seek’s representation of Madonna
retains elements of a traditional ‘sentimental’ view of disability, its pre-
vailing tendency is to avoid lamenting Madonna’s deaf-mutism and to
eschew melodrama. Moving towards a realist representation evincing a
strong interest in psychology, Collins focuses on Madonna’s cognitive
and somatic experiences, on how her deaf-mutism affects her socializa-
tion, and on her use of other senses. By the end of Hide and Seek, it is ap-
parent that Collins rejects any view of Madonna’s deaf-mutism as tragic.
Displaying a fervent dedication to altruism and egalitarianism, Collins
represents Madonna’s thoughts and sensations in ways that encourage
the reader to feel and think along with someone who would commonly
have been regarded as ‘Other’. The representation of Madonna does not
merely elicit ‘sympathy’ for her in the form of moral feeling and pity. In-
stead, it elicits empathy, displaying and seeking physiological responses
to her representation, to be followed by ethical action.
Hide and Seek already innovates by seeking scientific fidelity in its
representation of deaf-mutism – a mimesis it tries to achieve via ac-
curate representations of signing and discussions of how deaf-mutism
may affect an individual’s use of other senses. The novel also responds
to debates about the desirability and efficacy of oral speech education
for deaf people by making it clear that deaf people already have a lan-
guage. In a period when deaf people were often pressured to give up
sign language or were told that it was a marker of inferiority, Collins
penned a novel that strongly endorses signing. Collins frequently en-
gaged in innovative forms of writing and gained a reputation for using
Hide and Seek (1854) 27
novels as means of fighting social injustice. In Hide and Seek, he rep-
resents Madonna’s deaf-mutism not as pathology, but as a fascinating
example of human diversity. As Collins represents it, deaf-mutism is
sometimes inconvenient and alienating for Madonna, but she is never
regarded by friends or family as deficient. Nor is she the passive heroine
expected of sentimental depictions of disability. This movement away
from pity and melodrama toward an emphasis on cognition and the
experiential allows Collins to avoid positioning Madonna as a locus
of pathos. Hide and Seek also promotes awareness that deafness may
have a compensation in deaf people’s stronger engagement with the
visual world.
Collins was certainly aware of the innovative nature of Hide and Seek.
In an explanatory note that accompanied the 1861 version of the novel,
he makes the following statement:
I do not know that any attempt has yet been made in English fiction
to draw the character of a “Deaf Mute,” simply and exactly after
nature – or, in other words, to exhibit the peculiar effects produced
by the loss of the senses of hearing and speaking on the disposition
of the person so afflicted. 3
Lennard J. Davis explains that “Deafness becomes of interest to

European culture, especially to philosophers and scientists, in the eigh-
teenth century”. Philosophers began asking questions such as “Are there
thoughts prior to language? Can a being be human without language?”4
However, deaf-mutism had never been depicted realistically in a novel
prior to Hide and Seek.5
The richness of Collins’s depiction of Madonna’s cognitive and emo-
tional experience and of her use of fingerspelling and home sign (two
forms of sign language) is partly attributable to his utilization of a
non-fictional resource, Dr. John Kitto’s memoir The Lost Senses: Deaf-
ness and Blindness (1845), as a reference. Even though Collins realized
the innovative nature of his planned novel, he was nevertheless surprised
when he was almost unable to locate any reliable sources about deaf-
ness or deaf-mutism. One previous fictional depiction of deaf-mutism,
Sir Walter Scott’s Peveril of the Peak (1823), proved unhelpful because
the character portrayed only pretended to have such a disability. Collins
rejected stage depictions of mutism: he noted that the “dumb people”
always seem “able to hear what is said to them”.6 Meanwhile, the
eighteenth-century soothsayer Duncan Campbell, who claimed to be
deaf-mute, published a memoir and was the subject of a biography. But
if Collins knew of writings by or about Campbell he may also have been
aware that Campbell’s claims were regarded with scepticism.7 Just as
Collins was about to give up his search for useful references, he became
aware of The Lost Senses, a text that contains detailed information
about John Kitto’s personal experiences of deafness and mutism. Hide
and Seek relies heavily on Kitto’s memoir for substantial information re-
garding the psychological effects of sensory difference but departs from
some of its major conclusions about deaf-mutism.
Sentiment and Spectacle

We are first introduced to Madonna in Chapter II, when she is in
her early twenties and living in the home of a semi-successful artist,
Valentine Blyth (48–49). While introducing Madonna the narrator
refuses to reveal Madonna’s real name or parentage. This parent-
age is sought for throughout the novel, providing the basis for the
novel’s subtitle, “The Mystery of Mary Grice”. After introducing us
to Madonna in Valentine’s studio, Hide and Seek leaps backwards
thirteen years, from 1851 to 1838, to reveal how Valentine rescued
M adonna from a traveling circus when she was ten years old. 8 Having
been orphaned, Madonna is forced to take part in circus routines by
Mr. Jubber, a tyrannical circus director. Madonna has recently fallen
from a horse during a performance (91–92), subsequently losing her
hearing and her will to speak. Undeterred by this, Jubber has begun to
exhibit Madonna as:
‘THE MYSTERIOUS FOUNDLING!… TOTALLY DEAF AND

DUMB!’.
(56)
Madonna is totally disempowered due to her youth, her poverty, her

deaf-mutism, and her lack of an effective guardian. Jubber profits from
the pathos evoked by the audience’s awareness of Madonna’s deaf-
mutism but disguises his exploitation of Madonna by presenting her
performance as a ‘conjuring’ show. In the scenes relating to Madonna’s
circus performances Hide and Seek mixes the affective power of deaf-
ness with the emotional effect of reading about child abuse. Madonna
cannot protest her exploitation; unable to speak, she can do little except
direct sorrowful looks to members of the audience (60). General feelings
of sympathy prompt the audience members to speak kindly to Madonna.
Some audience members reject Jubber’s suggestion that they should sub-
ject Madonna to tests of her deafness, and others correctly guess that
Jubber beats Madonna (60, 67). However, while the audience members
express pity for Madonna and annoyance at Jubber, they do not stop her
exploitation.
Hide and Seek therefore initially promotes an explicitly sentimental
view of Madonna; she appears in desperate need of someone to inter-
vene.9 Luckily, the highly empathetic Valentine Blyth stumbles upon
the circus. As Valentine takes a seat in the audience, Hide and Seek’s
narrator launches a rhetorical outburst that emphasizes Madonna’s piti-
fulness, presenting her as a lost sheep in need of guidance and angelic
protection:
Ah, woeful sight! so lovely, yet so piteous to look on! Shall she never
hear kindly human voices, the song of birds, the pleasant murmur
of the trees again? Are all the sweet sounds that sing of happiness
to childhood, silent for ever to her? … the young, tender life be for
ever a speechless thing, shut up in dumbness from the free world of
voices? Oh! Angel of judgment! hast thou snatched her hearing and
her speech from this little child, to abandon her in helpless affliction
to such profanation as she now undergoes?
(Hide and Seek, 61)
In literature and drama disability had often been represented sentimen-

tally, as involving suffering and hardship. Here, the sudden use of senti-
mental language seems calculated to provoke reader distress and to elicit
maximum sympathy for Madonna. The passage may be read straight
as indicating deafness’s affective power. However, the narrator’s abrupt
plunge into distress may mean the passage may alternatively be read as
an ironic parody of melodramatic responses to disability, or that it may
parody its own religious sermonizing. Hide and Seek does not adopt a re-
ligious viewpoint in relation to deafness throughout the rest of the novel.
The scene represents Valentine’s sense-perceptions of Madonna as
prompting various physiological effects. The ultra-sensitive Valentine
appears “suddenly to lose his senses the minute he set eyes on the deaf
and dumb child” (60; my emphasis). When Valentine sees Madonna, he
jumps up and down involuntarily, shouts uncontrollably, and seems to
lose his sense of hearing. Registering the forlornness in Madonna’s eyes,
he experiences sensory stimulation, vasoconstriction, and oppressed
breathing, a symptom of hysteria:
Was there something in the eager sympathy of his eyes as they met
hers, which spoke to the little lonely heart in the sole language that
could ever reach it? Did the child, with the quick instinct of the deaf
and dumb, read his compassionate disposition, his pity and long-
ing to help her, in his expression at that moment? … He saw the
small fingers trembling as they held the cards … he saw the innocent
young face … with the smile still on the parted lips, but with a pa-
tient forlornness in the sad blue eyes, as if the seeing-sense that was
left, mourned always for the hearing and speaking senses that were
gone — he marked all these things in an instant, and felt that his
heart was sinking as he looked. A dimness stole over his sight; a
suffocating sensation oppressed his breathing.
(Hide and Seek, 62)
Here, Collins’s novel seems to side with sentimentalism, as rather than
suggest that such strong emotions and sensory experiences have a
deleterious effect, Hide and Seek shows them leading to social altruism:
Valentine rescues Madonna from the circus. Visual cues prompt the cog-
nitive processes that promote empathy and the physiological processes
that accompany it. Valentine realizes and imagines Madonna’s sadness,
but also personally feels the constriction he imagines she feels – such
emotional contagion was later considered dangerous by critics who
sharply attacked the sensation genre. In turn, Madonna is able to read
Valentine’s face and detect his compassionate disposition. Compassion
is here represented as a decipherable ‘language’, and the passage reveals
Madonna’s tendency to read people’s character through their physiog-
nomy and expression: this ability is later to become very important in the
novel’s exploration of her sensory world. This scene is amongst a number
that emphasize how Madonna’s physical presence and display of emotion
has a somatic, often ‘sympathetic’ effect on the bodies of other charac-
ters.10 Valentine’s platonic yet highly emotional response to Madonna is
thought excessive by some members of the circus audience, who assume
that either he must either be ‘mad’, or he must be Madonna’s long-lost fa-
ther (60–61). But Jubber initially welcomes Valentine’s response, feeling
that it promotes interest in Madonna as spectacle (62–63).
Hide and Seek’s circus scene demonstrates that “a disability produces
the demand for a response, or … it is perhaps the response that produces
the disability”.11 And Valentine’s response is a model for the empa-
thetic response to deaf-mutism that Collins desires from readers of Hide
and Seek. Jubber’s advertisement emphasizes the “melancholy circum-
stances” of Madonna’s riding accident, revealing that “She was supposed
to be dead”, and asserting that “little particulars” about M
adonna shall
appeal “to an Intelligent, a Sympathetic, and a Benevolent Public” (57).
The advertisement appears to encourage identification with Madonna’s
feelings, yet the audience wallows in gratuitous pity for Madonna: they
do not mirror her feelings and do not assist her. Upon reading the adver-
tisement, Valentine instinctively recognizes that the circus act objectifies
Madonna. His immediate response is anger at “that dastard insensibility
to all decent respect for human suffering which could feast itself on the
spectacle of calamity paraded for hire” (57–58). Hide and Seek’s circus
scenes display pathos and sentimentality but suggest possible negative
consequences of regarding disabled people through such a framework.
Valentine helps Madonna, spurred by empathy. But these scenes oth-
erwise suggest that people who deliberately attend a show that turns
a deaf-mute girl into a performer may be inhumane and that scenarios
that use an individual’s pain to encourage pity, but not empathy, are
exploitative.
The circus scenes also raise a number of important issues related
to disability rights and legal and cultural practices. Both Victorian
studies and disability studies have recently developed a fascination
with the Victorian freak show. Although there is divided opinion,
the prevailing view of modern commentators has been that such em-
ployment was exploitative of disabled people, encouraging harmful
stereotypes by sensationalizing difference.12 Jubber’s circus exhibits
disability as spectacle and represents disability as pitiful. Moreover,
Madonna is pressed into the work, has no employment rights, and is
subjected to physical punishment (Hide and Seek, 106). Her guardians
Mr. and Mrs. Peckover are unable to protect her from abuse and ex-
ploitation, compromised by needing to keep their own circus jobs (91,
106–107).
As Martha Stoddard Holmes argues, events in Hide and Seek may sug-
gest that in the mid-Victorian period little formal procedure surrounded
the adoption of disabled children: Valentine simply uplifts Madonna and
attempts to hide her from anyone who could be her biological parent.
This may highlight “the ethical issues surrounding quick adoptions of
disabled and other children” perceived as “available” for the taking.13
This ‘adoption’ indeed seems to occur without formalities but is repre-
sented as possible largely because Valentine obtains proof of Madonna’s
having been abused. Increasingly agitated by this realization, Valentine
becomes determined to assist her. The rector Dr. Joyce is similarly indig-
nant, threatening Jubber with a fine or imprisonment for beating “‘the
child in the vilest manner’” (111). Dr. Joyce also questions the legality
of Jubber’s having detained Madonna as a worker – likely revealing a
recognition on Collins’s part that disabled people are especially suscep-
tible to personal and professional abuse. Dr. Joyce informs Mr. Jubber
“‘you are without a signed agreement promising you her services’”, and
makes it clear that he recognizes the potential for Madonna’s sexual
abuse, stating that she is threatened by “‘dangers to which I hardly dare
allude’” (105).
Christine Ferguson observes that Valentine’s rescue of Madonna ini-
tially makes it appear that the novel will portray Madonna as the kind
of “downtrodden but exemplary” heroine typically presented in previ-
ous literary and dramatic representations of disability.14 This appears
correct, but once rescued from the circus, the novel’s timeline and set-
ting shift to depicting Madonna as an adult in Valentine’s home. From
this point, interest in Madonna is no longer elicited via quasi-religious
lamentations. Instead, explorations of her psychological experiences, her
visual abilities, and her communicative methods generate interest and
suspense.
The Lost Senses

Collins’s depiction of Madonna differs from earlier representations
of deaf-mutism, which appeared in dramatic works for the stage.
Dramatists, forced to make use of mute characters due to limitations
on the number of theatres licensed to perform plays with spoken dia-
logue, began to explore how bodies might express emotion and elicit
affective audience responses. As a result, “throughout the first half of
the nineteenth century, deaf-mute characters were to appear in a host
of very successful melodramas”.15 Such melodramas include John
Farrell’s The Dumb Maid of Genoa; or, the Bandit Merchant (1820) and
B.F. Rayner’s The Factory Assassin; or The Dumb Man of M anchester
(1837) (a.k.a. The Dumb Man of Manchester; or, The Felon Heir).16
Hide and Seek’s distinction from these works is that it must describe
or depict sign language via written text. It does so quite successfully,
and not merely by depicting or describing gestures and expressions
with the aim of eliciting pity. The novel instead tries to evoke the lived
experience of deaf-mutism, which does not appear to have been an aim
of the stage melodramas. Hide and Seek is also a psychological novel:
it presents a kind of science of mind, exploring Madonna’s cognition,
emotions, sensory experiences, and physiological responses.
Much of Collins’s success in creating such effects convincingly is due
to his use of information from The Lost Senses: Deafness and Blindness
(1845). Its author, John Kitto, had been a stonemason’s assistant. When
about twelve years old, stepping from a ladder onto a roof he lost his
footing and fell thirty-five feet to the cobblestones below. He subse-
quently lost his hearing, and this affected the quality of his speech.
Many years later, Kitto wrote The Lost Senses, probably the first book-
length memoir about deafness ever written by a deaf person.17 In a
note written to accompany the 1861 edition of Hide and Seek Collins
acknowledges The Lost Senses as his authority for most of the traits in
Madonna’s character associated with her hearing impairment.18 Almost
every medical detail that Collins supplies about Madonna’s hearing
loss, and a large proportion of the psychological effects of her deaf-
mutism, are close reproductions or adaptations of information supplied
by Kitto. Collins likely felt that using The Lost Senses as a base for add-
ing anecdotal authority to the ideas explored in his novel would support
the conclusions that the novel draws about deafness and deaf-mutism.19
Like Kitto, Madonna is not congenitally or pre-lingually deaf, but be-
comes deaf as the result of a fall that causes damage to the inner ear or
nerves (the doctor who examines Madonna suggests that her auditory
nerve is damaged (Hide and Seek, 92)). Madonna’s mutism is initially
elective, but commentary by other characters implies that Madonna’s
reluctance to speak after becoming deaf finally leads to a real physical
‘loss’ of speech ability.
While recovering from his fall from the roof, Kitto began to realize
that he was deaf once he noticed “the unusual stillness of all things”.
At first he assumed his friends “spoke in whispers” and ascribed their
whispering to their “unusual care … in preserving silence” during his
recovery. But after some time, he finally asked his friends “‘Why do you
not speak?’”, which lead to the following result:
some one, more clever than the rest, hit upon the happy expedient
of writing upon a slate, that the book had been reclaimed by the
owner…
‘But,’ I said in great astonishment, ‘why do you write to me, why
not speak? Speak, speak.’
Those who stood around the bed exchanged significant looks
of concern, and the writer soon displayed upon his slate the awful
words – ‘YOU ARE DEAF’.
(Kitto, The Lost Senses, 11–12)
Kitto explains that “to a child the full extent of such a calamity could
not be at once apparent… It was left for time to show me the sad realities
of the condition to which I was reduced” (Kitto, 12).
Collins fictionalizes this scene in Hide and Seek. When Madonna
awakens after her accident, she also accuses her bedside attendants of
whispering and also tries to speak. However, while Kitto is at first too
tired to be much affected by the revelation that he is deaf, Madonna
is astonished and frightened. Mrs. Peckover’s description of the scene
emphasizes Madonna’s physiological responses, such as her red face, her
anxious shrinking, and her quick breathing:
‘What’s the matter?’ she says … ‘Why do you keep on whispering?’

she asks. ‘Why don’t you speak out loud so that I can —,’ and then she
stopped, seemingly in a sort of helpless fright and bewilderment. She
tried to get up in bed, and her face turned red all over… ‘We must
quiet her at all hazards,’ says the doctor, ‘… She feels what’s the
matter with her, but don’t understand it; and I’m going to tell her by
means of this paper. It’s a risk,’ he says, writing down on the paper in
large letters, You Are Deaf … and holding the paper before her eyes.
She shrank back on the pillow, as still as death, the instant she
saw it; but didn’t cry, and looked more puzzled and astonished, I
should say, than distressed. But she was breathing dreadful quick.
(Hide and Seek, 95)
Hide and Seek repeats Kitto’s idea that a child might not immediately
understand their “calamity”. But Madonna seems to understand some-
thing of the nature of her situation before she is told she is deaf, and the
news is broken more easily as she is attended by a benevolent doctor and
by Mrs. Peckover. In contrast, although Kitto suggests that he was not
initially very distressed by his deafness, the language he uses suggests
that he later adopted a more negative view: that he has been “reduced”
to his current “condition” and its “sad realities” (Kitto, 12).
Hide and Seek’s Engagement with the
‘Manualist/Oralist’ Debate
Much of Hide and Seek’s innovation derives from its resistance of ‘oral-
ist’ ideology. The novel’s opposition to the oralist education of deaf peo-
ple leads it to depict sign as an effective communicative medium and to
focus on Madonna’s psychology and intelligence. In the mid-seventeenth
century, John Wallis, who attempted to teach a deaf boy to speak,
acknowledged “that the deaf have their own pre-existing language”. 20
In the mid-eighteenth century, the philosopher Johann Gottfried von
Herder put forward the idea that “any sign system can be language”. 21
His theories emphasized that “Meanings or concepts are to be equated –
not with the referents involved … but instead … – with usages of
words”, which are themselves “bound up with (perceptual and affective)
sensation”. 22 During the first half of the nineteenth century some deaf
schools allowed the natural development of sign while also encouraging
oralism. But the second half of the nineteenth century saw increasing
debate between ‘manualists’ – deaf people and deaf advocates who sup-
ported deaf people’s use of sign – and ‘oralists’ – primarily hearing, who
attacked sign for its apparent lack of sophistication and felt that deaf
people should abandon sign and learn to speak. 23 Hearing educators,
especially in Europe, claimed that deaf people would remain limited in
mental understanding if they did not acquire (oral) language, or that they
would be alienated from hearing people.24 Deaf people were increasingly
forced to give up sign. This trend occurred despite numerous representa-
tions, including at the 1880 International Congress on Education of the
Deaf (in Milan), that the majority of deaf people regarded sign as their
preferred language. The following prohibition of sign language and the
pressure exerted on deaf people to speak prevailed in many countries for
over 150 years.
Showing typical foresight, Collins wrote Hide and Seek decades before
the controversy over deaf education reached its apex. By mid-century
educationalists’ general tendency in Europe and the United States was
to promote oralism. From 1778 to 1790 Samuel Heinecke operated an
oralist school in Germany, and schools specializing in oral instruction
grew in importance in Europe throughout the first half of the nineteenth
century. By the 1860s oral schools had a strong presence in the United
States. 25 Collins would have been highly familiar with details of Charles
Dickens’s 1842 visit to Perkins School for the Blind (in New Hampshire),
when he met Laura Bridgman, a deaf-blind girl who had been taught
English and discouraged from using home sign. 26 In 1864, a few years
after Hide and Seek, the National Deaf-Mute College (now Gallaudet
University) was established in Washington D.C.
The situation in England at mid-century was slightly different. Deaf
education in Britain was greatly influenced by the teaching methods
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"I'm not arguing, Baby. I'm trying to keep this thing within the bounds
of reason. We haven't a single bit of evidence yet to prove it isn't a
natural disease, so why go overboard?"
"The structure of the virus isn't normal."
"So far, that seems to be so, but that doesn't prove it's synthetic
either."
"But what if it does cause permanent damage to the ovaries?"
"Then, Toots, this old continent of North America is in one hell of a
fix."
"I can't imagine how I'd feel if I got a disease and knew I could never
have children."
"There are plenty of people that way now."
"Not millions of them, and not me! I always wanted babies but my
husband wanted to wait. He was too busy making money ... and
having a good time."
"A good time with whom?"
"That's the question that finally broke it up. It's just as well there were
no children, I suppose." She leaned over towards me and put her
hands on mine. "If I ever marry again, I want a man who wants
children."
This time I looked straight at her, and the hell with my blood pressure.
"I want your kids," I said, and pulled her down into my arms.
She broke loose after a while, though I could feel her quivering. It was
always the same. I had never been able to break down that last little
bit of resistance, that fear of being hurt again. Maybe I never would. I
sighed resignedly and sat up.
"Might as well go fishing," I said and I went to lay out the lines and
hoist the mainsail.
The wall of fog had been moving towards us over the empty sea like
a great, flat-topped Antarctic iceberg, shining whitely in the gold light
of the Western sun. Beside me, the mainsail hung slackly from the
mast, the edge flipping idly in a stray puff of wind. Slowly the white
cliff approached, and as slowly changed to an amoeboid mass of
vapor, tumbling lazily, sending out streamers that twisted and
vanished as they reached too far from the cool mother mist. One,
stronger than the rest, waved a filmy pseudopod over my head and,
for an instant, the gold light whitened. Another came, and another,
and then we were gone, into the soft wet coolness of the seaborne
cloud. The light faded, both from the fog blanket and from the setting
of the sun. I hauled in the fishing lines and stowed them. I lit the
running lights. I was shivering as I secured the sail, checked the gear
and went below.
In the little triangular cabin, tucked under the forepart of the sloop,
Pat was busy. The hissing of the pressure lamp and the crackling of
hamburgers on the stove made a pleasant, home-like sound. It was
cosy and warm here, in contrast to the fog-chill above. The smell of
onions and beef drifted back to where I stood and I sniffed hungrily.
She'd be a good wife, I thought as I watched her, and a good mistress
too. She was still wearing her bathing suit and, as I looked from her
full brown thighs up over the curving hip-line to the small breasts
pushing against the thin bra, I felt the slow pounding pulse and deep
excitement of desire. Quietly I came close behind her. She started as
my cold hands touched her, the instant of realization passed, and
then she came back hard against me and her eyes were on mine as
she turned her lips for my kiss. For a moment only she stayed, then,
with a backward shove of her body, she tried to push me away.
"Look, darling, this is all very nice, but the hamburgers are burning."
"Let them," I whispered, my hands roving a bit. "I'm burning too."
"That can wait." Her eyes seemed to promise me as she brushed at a
stray brown curl with the back of her hand. The spatula, waving
above her head, flashed in the flickering gas light. I let her go.
"Why don't you fix us a drink? There's time before we eat."
"If I drink too much I won't want you or the hamburgers either," I
complained, but I went to the cooler and pulled out the gin and
vermouth. "Someday," I thought morosely, "someday, she must give
in."
I put her drink in the shelf where she could reach it as she worked
and squeezed between the bench seat and the folding table while I
watched her toss a salad. As a medical technician she was good, and
the same thoroughness and skill went into her cooking; into
everything she did for that matter.
The drink was good and the salad sat before me in its green
crispness. Pat was lifting the hamburgers off the fire and, as the
cracking ceased, I felt a low, insistent, base rumble rise above the
hissing of the lamp. The night was quiet, no foghorns because there
were no ships near enough. We had drifted fairly close to the
mainland, behind some small islands, off the usual channels. The
auxiliary motor was still shut down and for a moment I wondered if
the currents had carried us in towards the rocks; but the noise was
not the splash of waves on shore, it was too steady. Now Pat was
standing, frying pan and spatula in either hand, and her straight dark
eyebrows down in a frown of concentration.
"Do you hear it too?"
She nodded.
"Keep the hamburgers warm, I'm going up to have a look."
She moved back to the stove as I climbed up into the cockpit.
In a rising breeze the mist was swirling and, from the east, as the fog
patches thinned out, the lighter cloud showed where a full moon lay
hidden. The noise was louder now, and coming fast, a beat of
engines rising above the splash of wavelets against the bow of the
sloop. I couldn't see where the ship was. There was no foghorn;
neither the doleful groaning of the deep sea ships nor the sharp
cough of the coastal steamer, bouncing its sound waves off the island
hills, told me where it lay.
"The stupid oaf," I muttered to myself. "What's he doing in this
deserted channel, and why doesn't he signal?"
There was no time to wonder. I jumped to the stern and grasped the
tiller while I pushed down firmly on the starter button. The engine was
cold and coughed reluctantly in the foggy air. I was still prodding the
starter and working the throttle when the fog bank broke apart.
Above, to the east, the mottled moon, pale grey and blue like a
Danish cheese, had risen over the Coast Range. Across the waters
of the channel ran a rippling bar of light, cutting in half the white-
walled arena of fog as the late afternoon sun pierces the dust of a
Mexican corrida. Charging out of the misty north, like a Miura bull
from the gate, came a black, high-prowed ship, moving fast through
its phosphorescent bow wave. It came on, straight for us, and the
sputtering motor still did not respond. I stood up and worked the tiller
back and forth, trying to scull with the rudder and swing our bow to
starboard.
"Pat, Pat, for God's sake get on deck! It's a collision!"
I was still yelling when the thick black mass rose over me and the
bowsprit of the sloop splintered and buckled. The jolt threw me to my
knees but I held the rudder hard over and we slid by, bumping and
scraping along the port side of the vessel.
It was not a big ship, but bigger than a halibut boat. It seemed about
the size and shape of those floating canneries I'd seen in Hokkaido
when I'd worked with the Japanese National Police in 1952. I don't
know whether that thought was first in my mind or whether it came
later but I do know, in the middle of all the confusion I heard a
command screamed out in Japanese, and the answering "Hai"
barked back as only the Japs can say it. I thought I must have been
mistaken when, a moment later, I saw the man. The moon was full on
his face as he leaned out over the side, near the stern. For an instant
we were quite close as I stood up, cursing the stupid so-and-so's who
were ruining the beautiful woodwork of my boat. He was fair-haired,
with a short brush cut. The eyes were deep set and shadowed too
much to see the color. His face was broad, with high cheek bones,
and the mouth wide and heavy under a short nose. I couldn't tell his
height, but he looked strong and stocky. His hands, gripping the rail,
seemed powerful even in that light. As we passed, the moonlight
caught them and was reflected in a dull red glow from some large
stone, a ring I presumed, on the back of his left hand. He didn't move
or speak and I lost sight of him a second later when the pitching of
the yacht in the stern wash threw me again to the deck. By the time I
recovered, the steamer was across the open space and plunging
back into the fog. In the swirling mist of its passage the flag at the
stern fluttered out straight. It looked like a red ball on a white field.
"The hamburgers! My God, the hamburgers are on fire!"
I turned around, still dazed, to see Pat unscramble herself in the
cockpit and drop back into the galley. I left her to it while I checked
the wreckage of the port side fittings. We weren't holed, thank
Goodness, so we could run for home under our own power. I steered
in close to the shore of one of the islands where the fog had lifted,
and dropped anchor. Then I went below. Pat was at the stove again.
A new batch of hamburgers was under way and only a stain on the
floor showed what had happened to the first lot.
"Mix us a drink, a big drink," was all she said, then.
The hamburgers were gone and we sat over our coffee. I was drowsy
from the warmth and the hot sweetness of the Drambuie felt good as
I took it slowly. Pat was rolling hers around the liqueur glass and
watching the oily liquid slide back to the bottom. A quiet woman
ordinarily, she was extremely so this night.
"Why so quiet, darling?" I reached for her hand. She looked at me
and said nothing.
"Is it that damned ferret again?"
She nodded.
"Don't let it worry you so much, sweet. It's only a hunch and I don't
think he's right."
"What if he is right, what then?" She went on without waiting for an
answer. "I want children, I don't want to be sterile."
"Well you aren't, or at least I don't suppose so. Probably you won't
be."
She looked at me scornfully. "What chance have I of avoiding the flu
when millions of others are getting it?"
"Oh Lord, you women! Can't you see there's absolutely no evidence
for this silly fear of yours? Damn Hallam and his wild ideas! Why don't
you forget it?"
"Because I think he's right, that's why." She stood up abruptly. "Let's
go on deck."
I followed her out into the cockpit. We were still at anchor, intending
to start back after a few hours sleep. The sloop was as quiet as a
resting seabird in the black shadow of a rocky point. It was cold. In a
few minutes Pat shivered and came close to me, her arms about my
waist. The keen air had awakened me, and, as I caressed her,
smoothing away the little pebbles of gooseflesh on her shoulders and
back, her warm body against mine stirred again the desire I had felt
before the collision. She must have known. Slowly her arms came up
and around my neck. Her head, cushioned on my chest, lifted and her
full lips brushed mine lightly. For a moment I hesitated. Through the
thin suit she felt naked under my hands, trembling with cold and
excitement.
"I can't take much more of this, Pat," I whispered. "Either you quit
right now or you go down to bed."
Her eyes opened. She looked straight at me for a long moment.
"Will your bunk hold both of us?" she asked as her lips closed hard
on mine.
CHAPTER 4
We came back through the big glass doors hand in hand. The night
watchman, making his last round, nodded and smiled at us as we
wound up the stairs to the penthouse. We went through the showers
together since nobody else was about. I scrubbed her back to get rid
of the salt sea crystals and was rewarded with a warm, wet kiss. We
reached the living room just as Dr. Hallam, freshly shaven and bright,
came in for his breakfast.
"Welcome back, kids!" he boomed at us. "Did you have a good time?"
He looked closely at Pat.
A slow flush deepened the color of her cheeks and he grinned
elfishly. "I see you did. Well, let's have some breakfast. I have news
for you and plenty of work, so eat heartily."
He pushed the toaster buttons and the bread dropped out of the
cooler-keeper and lowered itself into the heating element. I set three
cups and three glasses under the dispenser and dialled tomato juice
and medium strong coffee. Pat cracked six eggs into three plates,
added bacon and pushed them into the slots in the electronic oven. A
minute later, with his mouth full of toast and egg, Hallam mumbled,
"After you left I waited for about two hours before Smith phoned. He
had a preliminary report on the female ferrets. You'll be glad to hear
this, both of you. He couldn't find a thing on any of them."
"Wonderful!" Pat breathed, and smiled at me radiantly.
"What about the pregnant one?" I said.
"There were only the usual changes in the ovaries associated with
pregnancy. Mind you," he went on, "even with the new techniques,
frozen sections are far from perfect, but I must admit I'd be
disappointed if I weren't so relieved."
"Did the male ferrets show anything?" I said.
"He wasn't sure. He thought there were some inflammatory changes
in the testicles but he wanted to wait for the paraffin sections to
confirm it."
"Was there anything else?" Pat asked.
"Nothing except bronchial irritation, which one would expect."
It was eight o'clock when the telephone rang and I picked it up.
"Dr. Macdonald here," I said.
"Mac, is the boss in?" Smith asked.
"He's busy right now. Can I take a message?"
"Yes. Tell him the H and E's on those ferrets show only mild ovarian
inflammation. The testicles are definitely inflamed ... a low grade thing
with a lot of lymphocytes. There is swelling and some degeneration of
the sperm cells but it doesn't seem to affect the hormone secreting
elements."
"What about other organs?"
"Aside from nasal and bronchial inflammation, essentially negative."
"Have you any suggestions?"
"It's too early to come to any conclusions but I'd like to follow up on
this. How about taking biopsies on the male ferrets rather than
sacrificing them. Then maybe we can see what is happening, I mean
what the progression of the disease is, in the same animal. You could
snip out a piece of ovary on some females too!"
"It isn't easy but we can do it."
"How about the other animals?"
"Some of the mice look a bit sick this morning, but the monkeys are
still healthy."
"Well, if you can get the biopsies to us soon, we should have a good
idea, late tonight or tomorrow morning, of what's going on. Say, I just
had a thought! Didn't George inoculate some ferrets when the
epidemic first broke out?"
"I wasn't here but I believe he did. Why don't you ask Harry? He was
working with the Chief when I was away. All those animals are in the
other section anyway."
"I'll do that. With yours in the acute stage and the others
convalescent, we should get a good idea of the progress of the
disease. I'll let you know later."
Hallam was in the ferret room. I joined him there and told him of
Smith's suggestions.
"This is going to be quite a day," he grinned wryly.
He was so right. It took several hours, and innumerable bites and

scratches from indignant animals, fortunately the plastic gloves were
tough enough not to tear, before the last snarling male writhed back
into his cage to lick his smarting personal property. We stopped for
lunch and went back to the more complicated task of operating on the
females in the afternoon.
In the meantime, the testicular biopsies, in their fluid-filled bottles,
were on their way to Tissue Path., to join those that Smith and his
residents were already preparing from the convalescent ferrets.
Speaking into Dictape machines, the junior residents described and
numbered the specimens while deft-fingered girl technicians wrapped
them in little packets and put those in tiny perforated boxes. They
dropped the boxes into beakers filled with fixative which they then set
up on the Technicon machines. The dials were set, the clock ticked,
and hour by hour, as the timer clicked into the grooves of the wheel,
the arms of the Technicon lifted, dangling their clusters of dripping
boxes, turned like soldiers on parade, and dropped them again into
the next beaker. On they went through the fixative that preserved the
cells as they had been in life, the alcohols that slowly and carefully
removed the water, the xylol that replaced the alcohol and, finally, the
hardened shreds of tissue lay in melted paraffin, ready for the cutting.
But first they had to be embedded in paper boats full of melted wax
which, when it hardened, held them securely. Then, in millionths of a
metre, the incredibly fine edge of the microtome sliced off a ribbon of
tissue, as a bacon slicer cuts pork. The technician laid the ribbons on
a bowl of warm water, separated off each individual slice with her
needle and guided it on to a prepared glass slide which was then laid
aside to dry. That was not all. Now the process had to be reversed,
the paraffin removed with xylol, the xylol with alcohol, the alcohol with
water, before the pale white dots of tissue could be stained. There
was no way of hurrying the process. Chemicals need time to react,
and time they took, regardless of our impatience. At last the blue
color of the Hematoxylin and the red of the eosin had been added in
their turn and taken up by the tissues; the protective balsam and the
slip cover had been placed over the sections; the slides had
hardened enough to be put under the microscope.
With mounting excitement, Smith and his senior residents racked
down the binocular microscopes to focus on the minute blue and red
dots that lay beneath. Silently they looked, moving the slides jerkily
but accurately with their fingers to view all the sections. Still silent,
they swapped slides to check and re-check their findings. At last
Smith straightened up and removed his spectacles. He rubbed his
eyes wearily. He looked along the table at the three young men who
had worked with him.
"Any doubts about this?" he said.
Three heads shook slightly. There was nothing to say. They were too
tired for casual chatter. He pushed the Intercom switch.
"Dr. Hallam. Smith calling."
The sound came into the living room as we sat at midnight coffee.
The rasping voice jarred us out of the apathy of exhaustion.
"This is Hallam."
"George, we've just read those testicular biopsies. There's a sub-
acute inflammation in those with the flu, as we saw before; in the
convalescent ferrets there is complete absence of spermatozoa with
no evidence of new formation."
I looked at Pat. "Now who should be worried?"
"I've never heard of this before in ferrets with the flu," Hallam was
saying. "I'd think of mumps except that it isn't easily transmitted to the
weasel tribe and this isn't like mumps clinically."
"What do you propose to do now?"
Hallam thought for a moment. "Carry on with our animal experiments;
but we can't afford to wait for the monkeys. We shall have to start
working on people."
"How?"
"Get in touch with the Public Health Department and see if you can
round up volunteers for testicular biopsy in convalescents from the
first attack. If they don't want a biopsy maybe you can persuade them
to give us a sperm count."
"You know we can't keep this hushed up if we do that. The papers are
bound to get hold of it."
"I realize that," Hallam said grimly, "but they're going to know sooner
or later. Maybe this will soften the blow when it does come."
"OK George, you're the boss. We can't do anything until morning. I'm
going to close up shop and let everybody get some sleep."
"Good idea. Keep away from the flu if you can."
"Huh, fat chance. I've got my family anyway. It's my kids I'm worried
about."
"There are times when I'm glad I'm a bachelor," Hallam replied and
shut off the speaker.
"Doesn't look too good, does it?" I said.
"We'll know by tomorrow night, I hope."
"I can't figure this thing at all. An inflammation that destroys the
testicular cells should give a lot of swelling and pain. Those ferrets
were frisky enough and they didn't show any signs of orchitis."
"Neither did most of the human victims," Hallam said.
"Perhaps it's only a temporary arrest in the maturation of the sperm
rather than destruction of the spermatogonia themselves. That could
be the explanation for the low grade inflammation and the minimal
symptoms."
"You mean there might be some interference with an enzyme
system?" Pat said.
"Yes. We see it in anemias where the cells don't mature properly
because of a lack of some vitamin like B12. The same sort of thing
could be happening here, I suppose."
"Then it might be only temporary?"
"I sincerely hope so, especially if Smith finds the same in man as he
reports in the ferrets."
"I wish I could share your optimism John," the Director said, "but if
this is a weapon it won't have just a temporary effect. There would be
no point to that." He yawned. "Sufficient unto the day is the evil
thereof, as the Good Book says. Let's go to bed."
The alarm jarred me out of deep sleep. As I groped beside the bed
for the still vibrating clock, I regretfully abandoned my dreams for the
austere grey walls of my temporary room, and the dreary window
view of a wet Vancouver dawn. The tide was out and the slimy green-
spattered mud and rocks of the estuary looked like a surrealistic
painting of a hangover. At the water's edge, a school of fishing boats
angled in the mud, their tilted trolling masts reminding me of the
broken antennae of some strange crayfish, stranded and dead on a
fishmarket floor. And dead they were. No smoke came from their
humpbacked little cabins; no fisherman climbed the slanted decks.
I wondered if the epidemic had silenced their motors, or was it just
not the season for fishing. Were the lusty trollers and seiners worrying
about their lost virility and gone home to test it out? The newspapers
had been asked to play down their sterility stories, which had caused
so much consternation yesterday, but even so it was common
knowledge that those who had had involvement of the sex glands
might be sterile.
I turned down the corridor to the kitchen and started the coffee
dispenser. Pat was still asleep after a late night coaxing reluctant
male and female ferrets into the same cage and to be friends instead
of messily murdering each other. Chivalry among ferrets is not highly
regarded, even with females in season. We wanted to see if they
could produce families, not to see which one was the stronger sex.
Tranquillizers are fine for the purpose but it takes a neat balance to
eliminate the fight and keep the desire. Hallam was not around. He
was an early riser and could probably be found watching the
monkeys if I cared to go there. They had shown no symptoms as yet.
Probably the incubation period was about the same as in man, and if
so there had not been time for the fever to start.
I moved on again to the shower, taking it cool to clear my fuzzy head.
Now there was little to do but wait; wait for the ferrets to get amorous;
wait for the chattering monkeys to fall ill; wait for more biopsies of the
human volunteers out there beyond the virus-proof walls of our
chosen prison. I thought of the previous day, the second after our
brief excursion. After breakfast we had rechecked the animals while
Pat had transferred cultures, brought our records up to date and then
Hallam and I sat in the living room playing cribbage while we waited
for Smith's reports.
As he had predicted, the newspapers soon heard of the new
investigations and the noon headlines, shown over the TV, were large
and frightening. "Are Flu Victims Sterile?" the Daily Mail screamed
hysterically in three inch letters and went into a long discourse based
only on a cautious statement, attributed to Dr. Smith, that some
experimental animals, after the flu, showed a decrease in procreative
powers. The Sun was more cautious but the tune was the same. An
hour after the papers appeared, Hallam ordered all telephone lines to
the Laboratory shut down and a short dictated speech, intended to
calm the hysteria, was played continuously over the trunks and
repeated on both radio and TV.
The mayor came to the hospital, as mad as a clucking hen whose
eggs have been disturbed, as indeed they had. She cooled off
considerably after Hallam spoke to her on the inside telephone, and,
in cooperation with the local director of the RCMP, the head of the
Metropolitan School Board, the Medical Officer of Health and various
other officials summoned to the spot, agreed to form a Public Safety
Committee to take immediate action if the need arose. They too, after
their meeting, could only sit and wait for Smith's report.
"Why didn't you go down and talk to them sir?" I said later.
"I don't want to get the flu."
I smiled condescendingly. "Oh? I didn't think it would mean that much
to you."
"It doesn't," he said levelly, "but it would to you and Pat if I brought it
back up here with me."
There was nothing I could say. I have seldom felt so foolish.
Later in the day, I played a lazy game of cribbage with Hallam while
Pat knitted and watched TV at the other end of the room. Deciding to
have some fun, as the Chief dealt a new hand, I picked up the paper
that was lying on the table.
"Say, Pat, here's a little item that should interest you," I said, and
pretended to read. "Lovely woman scientist, possible Nobel prize
winner, knits little things and dreams of rose-covered cottage. I
always wanted at least ten children, our reporter quotes Mrs.—" I
started loudly, cocking one eye over the top of the paper; but I didn't
finish.
Pat got up abruptly. For an instant I thought she would throw the wool
at me, needles and all.
"You stinker ... you absolute stinker," she spat at me, and almost ran
from the room.
"Lord! She must be getting stir crazy," I said, bewildered.
"John, sometimes I think you spent too many years overseas,"
Hallam said quietly. "You still can't imagine how a woman thinks."
That broke up the crib game. Neither of us had the heart to continue.
For the first time I really began to imagine a world full of sterile
people; the falling population; the frustrated family life; the emptying
houses; the already empty schools.
"God, what a dreary prospect," I said aloud. "And we were worrying
about overpopulation."
The Chief caught my train of thought but he just nodded. There was
no answer.
An hour later the phone rang. He answered it and then turned to me
with a smile. "That was a report from Smith about the ovaries of those
convalescent ferrets I inoculated with the first cases of flu. They seem
OK. Maybe it affects only a few females after all."
"Well, we can't go peeking into the tummies of all the ladies in
Vancouver just to find out," I said.
"No, but we could try to get permission to biopsy ovaries on women
who have abdominal operations in the city hospitals. Many of them
have had the flu. It should tell us something."
He turned back to the telephone and in a matter of minutes Bruce
Thompson had agreed to cooperate and to pass the word on to the
surgical departments of the other hospitals in town.
Pat showed up to make us afternoon tea but she was clearly
disturbed ... even more so when she heard the news.
"I thought you'd have been pleased to hear about the females," I said
dubiously.
"Suppose it does apply to women. What good are active ovaries to a
prospective mother if all the men are sterile?" she said, scornfully.
"Well, you could always marry a Russian, when they take over the
world."
"Fool," she sneered. "That probably will be years from now, and I'll be
too old. For another thing, I don't want to be part of anybody's harem,
even for a baby."
"Where do you get that harem stuff?" I grunted. "The Russkis aren't
Moslems."
"This isn't your good day, John," Hallam interrupted. "It is obvious that
there will be a tremendous demand for fertile males, and I can even
visualise the female voters of this country and the United States
demanding a quota for Russian immigrants to this continent. Just how
the disgruntled American males would react I don't know. It could lead
to a very nasty situation, and maybe to that retaliatory war the Reds
are trying to avoid. Of course, it could also mean civil war ... a war
between the sexes ... with our males trying to revenge themselves on
the Russians and our more realistic females trying to prevent it so
they could use the Slavs to rebuild the nation ... on Communist terms
of course."
"Boy, this is really science fiction gone wild," I said. "Seems as if I
picked the wrong place to live, unless I can avoid the flu."
Pat didn't even look at me after that crack. The day dragged on.
Radio reports came every few minutes and the interruptions of the TV
programs to announce the spread of the epidemics were almost as
frequent as the commercials.
By now the Chinese had admitted that thousands were dying in the
big cities of Peiping and Shanghai, while panic had disrupted
communications to the interior. The first frightened reports were in
from India, where efforts to block the Himalayan passes were too late
and refugees had spread the deadly "measlepox", as it was now
called, to Assam and Upper Bengal. There were rumors of flu in
Texas and the Rangers had redoubled their efforts to keep the
Mexican "wetbacks" from sneaking across the Rio Grande. All trans-
Pacific air travel was cancelled.
About that time, the Intercom lit up again.
"Are you there, George?" It was Dr. Smith.
"Yes. What have you found?"
"We have the reports on thirty sperm counts taken today from
professional personnel in this hospital. They are all negative."
"You mean normal, I hope."
"I mean negative for sperm. Three are from doctors who are just over
the fever. They show a few abnormal forms in the secretion but no
live ones. All the others are several days convalescent and show
nothing but epithelial cells, a few polymorphs and more lymphocytes."
"What about the biopsies?"
"We have half a dozen that we rushed through. The slides aren't the
best but it's perfectly obvious that something serious is happening.
The spermatogonia are degenerating. The Sertoli cells seem all right
and the interstitial cells are apparently untouched."
"What's he mean?" Pat whispered to me.
"He means the cells that form the sperm are dying but the ones that
give a man his masculinity are intact."
"How many more biopsies have you?" said the Chief.
"About fifty."
"That's not enough. We're going to need at least several hundred.
There must be absolutely no doubt in anyone's mind that this is a
national emergency when we present the facts to the Government. I
know that the statisticians can prove that this present number is
highly significant but a politician is much more impressed with a lot of
people than with a small group."
Joe Armstrong came on the line. "George, I'm convinced now that
this virus does have serious after-effects. Let me talk to the other
hospitals. We can get enough specimens in another twenty-four
hours to prove your point." He paused, obviously considering his
words. "I can't go along with this secret weapon idea yet.... I don't
think there's enough evidence. What do you say?"
"There isn't any evidence for the weapon theory," Hallam admitted,
"but Gordon is well on the way to showing that the structure of the
virus is synthetic. What I mean is that it looks more like a crazy
mixture of mumps and flu than like any of the natural viruses or their
known mutations."
"I still don't think we'd better let that story get out. There'll be enough
hell raised as it is."
"All right ... just as long as we stop this thing."
"How do you suggest we go about it?"
"Joe, there isn't time to search for a way of preventing it by vaccines.
It will take months to manufacture enough, even if we succeed. Our
only hope is to alert the civil authorities to its after-effects and get a
strict quarantine set up. Frankly, I think it's almost hopeless by now.
The Eastern Seaboard started reporting cases just a short time ago.
Agents must be working in seaport cities like Montreal, New York,
Charleston and all the others. I'm afraid we're licked except for
isolated communities in the far north or in some rural areas which can
be ringed around with guards to prevent contamination. Every male
we can save must be protected either until the disease dies out or we
can devise a vaccine."
"Do you have any other ideas?"
"You could get a Blood Donor Program going to collect blood from
those who have had the flu. We might be able to separate out
antibodies from convalescent serum strong enough to give a
temporary protection to those who haven't had the disease ... and
then hope for a vaccine."
"OK, George," said the Intercom. "Why don't you three stay in there
and work on the vaccine since you haven't had the flu yet. I'll alert the
Minister of Health. The Public Safety Committee is already back in
session."
"Do that, Joe," Hallam said, "and tell Harry Cope and Polly Cripps to
stay on call. We're going to need help with the electron pictures and
other procedures."
So that day had gone by and here was another one, a day of coffee
drinking and waiting, a day of writing reports, of listening to the
mounting clamor in the outside world. In the Vancouver area, schools
were closed at noon. The Public Safety Committee, impressed
sufficiently by yesterday's preliminary reports, barred all public
meetings and ordered theatres, bars and dance halls to close.
Families not yet affected by the flu were urged to stock up on
supplies and then remain home. Quarantine regulations were put in
effect to protect them. This reversal of the usual procedure in which
those who had not had the disease were kept isolated, was explained
as necessary since the majority of the people had already been
victims and therefore were unsalvageable. By nightfall the day's
biopsy reports were coming in from all the city hospitals. There was
no doubt. Every male who had had the flu was sterile!
The extras hit the streets an hour after dark. The Lieutenant Governor
came on the TV and radio to declare a state of emergency. Curfew
was to be enforced, beginning the next night, for all except essential
medical services and food supply. At least the country was aroused.
All trace of former unconcern had disappeared.
I went to bed early. There was nothing more I could do.
CHAPTER 5
At midnight I awoke suddenly. My mind was alert and bright, with that
extreme clarity which comes sometimes after working hard on a
problem. The moon was pouring a pale light over the window sill. It
bathed my face in its lambent glow as I lay there for a moment,
wondering what chemical time bomb had exploded in my brain. I
looked at my watch. It was midnight.
I got up and looked out. Spreading up from the delta, curling over the
fishing fleet and the canneries, flowing between the houses and filling
the streets as the incoming tide runs in the channels and covers the
stones of a rocky shore, the fog filled the hollows and smoothed over

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Sensational Deviance Disability in

Nineteenth Century Sensation Fiction

Fashioning Spaces Mode and Modernity in Late Nineteenth

The Soul of Pleasure Sentiment and Sensation in

Schooling Readers Reading Common Schools in Nineteenth

Energy Ecocriticism and Nineteenth Century Fiction

Victorian Science and Imagery Representation and

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

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

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

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