Woeful Afflictions: Disability and Sentimentality in Victorian America

by Mary Klages

From Tiny Tim to Helen Keller, disabled people in the nineteenth century were portrayed in sentimental terms, as afflicted beings whose sufferings afforded ablebodied people opportunities to practice empathy and compassion. In all kinds of representations of disability, from popular fiction to the reports of institutions established for the education and rehabilitation of disabled people, the equation of disability and sentimentality served a variety of social functions, from ensuring the continued existence of a sympathetic sensibility in a hard-hearted, market-driven world, to asserting the selfhood and equality of disabled adults.

Unique in its focus on blindness and its examination of the interplay between institutional discourse and popular literature, Woeful Afflictions offers a detailed historical analysis of the types of cultural work performed by sentimental representations of disability in public reports and lectures, exhibitions, novels, stories, poems, autobiographical writings, and popular media portrayals from the 1830s through the 1890s in the United States.

Woeful Afflictions combines contemporary scholarship on sentimentalism with the most recent works on the cultural meanings of disability to argue that sentimentalism, with its emphasis on creating emotional identifications between texts and readers, both reinforces existing associations between disability and otherness and works to rewrite those associations in portraying disabled people, in their emotional capacities, as no different from the ablebodied. This book will interest anyone concerned with disability studies and the social construction of the body, with the history of education and of public institutional care in the United States, and with autobiographical writings.

Genres: Disability, History, Nonfiction

256 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1999

Reviews

[C. B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A useful foundational text for studies of disability in the nineteenth century. The book claims its focus is America, but in fact the book draws a lot from British literature (I’ve always found the use of the word ‘Victorian’ for nineteenth-century America to be jarring).

[Dylan]

indispensable account of how disability (along with its relationship to language) was understood in the 19th century through literary, philosophical, and institutional discourses. this is such a robust and careful examination of how meaning is made with and through the disabled body: in literary representation, in a more diffuse cultural “semiotics” (i.e. the victorian attitude called “sentimentality”), and through public debate about disabled people’s use of language. klages traces the origins and lifespan of a long-dominant idea about disabled people, which is that they possess a circumscribed existence whose primary goal is to provoke feelings of empathy and pity—a limited way to experience the world even if it provides a comforting notion of empathic, if not physical, equality. with the turn of the century, and with Helen Keller specifically, Klages argues that this gradually gave way to the “modern” understanding of disability as a transcendable ontological obstacle: a form of difference which can be surmounted through the sameness-identifying power of language. all of which raises important questions about how we ought to characterize disabled personhood. emphasizing alterity has been a powerful way of decentering dominant liberal models of rights-bearing citizenship. and the idea of “transcending” disability has taken on individualist associations that put pressure on disabled people to conform and assimilate (to “be more like Helen Keller”). Klages’s book helps us to think about the prehistory of contemporary debates about the value of humanism in disability politics. i’m not sure where my thinking will go from here but there is certainly a lot to chew on

[J. Pearce · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was not what I expected when I picked it up, and I strongly suspect I was not the intended audience. It is primarily about literature, and I am an historian, so I struggle a great deal with the early chapters, and never quite got into the later ones as a result.

That said, I think this book would be outstanding for people who are interested in way people with disabilities are presented in literature. Klages analyses a variety of textual sources, varying from Dickens' "The Old Curiosity Shop" to Gibson's "The Miracle Worker", from Cumming's "The Lamp Lighter" to Annual Reports from the Perkins Institute for the Blind and various autobiographical works by blind women, most notably Helen Keller.

I had difficulties with some of Klages' jargon, likely because we come from different disciplines. However, I also had problems with repetition throughout the book: How many times do we need to be reminded what is meant by "poster" in the sense of "poster child"? How many times does she need to repeat Howe's assertion that all blind people need "a comfortable home!", complete with exclamation mark? Combined with the lack of concluding chapter, I was left with the impression that I was reading a series of loosely-connected journal articles, rather than book.

However, I admit that Klages presented many interesting and informative ideas that I do plan to apply to my own work. I especially appreciated her discussion of the language of Annual Reports from Institutions for the Blind in Nineteenth Century US, because it helps situate the Annual Reports I'm reading in the broader literature at the time.

I would recommend chapters of this book to historians, and likely the whole book to literary scholars, but not as an intro-book to issues around disability and representation.

[Jenna · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an interesting book that attempts to explore how disability, especially blindness, was understood or imagined by the ordinary people in Victorian America, and furthermore both how reformers, educators, and famous authors (i.e. Charles Dickens) influenced and at times changed the prevailing notions and understandings of blindness, and often were both attempting to changes meaning while at the same time caught up in assumptions of their time. The author uses a very theoretical lens of semiotics, which some may find as a bit of a deterrent, particularly if they were expecting a more "straightforward" historical account. This semiotical reading of the disabled body does provide a literary framework for the author to use both fictional accounts as well as essays and papers by reformers (i.e. Howe) or popular press, but does result in a more scholarly tone that may not appeal to the casual reader.