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Martha Stoddard Holmes. Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. 228 pp. Hardcover, $65.00.
Martha Stoddard Holmes's Fictions of Affliction can best be described as an attempt to dismantle our ability to uncritically accept "disability" as such by focusing our attention on its historical, cultural, and individual particularities. Well-grounded in disability studies, Holmes situates her work in relation to, and differentiates it from, work on sentiment and melodrama, "the body" and illness more generally, and "freaks." She engages with critics working on Victorian literature and on gender, class, and the body, seeking to press their analyses toward a more active engagement with the category of disability as "a historically provocative figure," not a universal one (72). As part of the University of Michigan Press series Corporealities: Discourses of Disability, Fictions of Affliction offers a nuanced explication of the concurrent, often conflicting meanings of disabled characters in Victorian culture. It should prove useful for studies in fields beyond disability and Victorian culture, given its historicist analysis of genre, medicine, gender, class, and social reform.
In an opening chapter, Holmes identifies melodrama as the genre toward which narratives of disability most often gravitate-both now and then-and points to three figures or types that recur in Victorian fictional and nonfictional texts about disabled bodies, creating a kind of gravitational force of their own. Her identification is not only convincing, with a wealth of examples from the period, but also useful for its clarification of the importance of gender and class identity in inflecting the roles available to people with physical impairments. For example, she examines the plight of the disabled woman, widely believed to be unmarriageable and unfit to bear children. In two chapters, Holmes focuses on the '"unmarriageable' woman" (60) in literary texts by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Dickens, Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, Charlotte Mary Yonge, and Wilkie Collins, although she moves beyond purely literary readings to discussions of medical theory and eugenics. Holmes traces this figure through melodrama and fiction, offering insightful readings of both canonical and noncanonical Victorian drama and novels. Holmes's discussion of Craik, Yonge, and Collins in relation to...