The Representation of Disability and Illness in Victorian England Novels - Essay Example

The Representation of Disability and Illness in Victorian England Novels The Victorian Period is d for the Queen of England during the time period from 1837-1901. This period of time had a lot of things happening. The Industrial Revolution brought a lot of change to the landscape, making factories and cities and introducing new machines that helped people move around more. At the same time, people were able to find new ways of gaining wealth so that people in the lower classes were able to earn enough money to compete with the upper classes. However, as people everywhere were finding it possible to create new lives for themselves in all this plentitude and opportunity, those who were somehow stricken with illness or disability were determined to be of somehow lower or disdainful quality. This was largely because people tended to judge others based upon their material acquisitions in these quickly changing times. Wealth was taken to be an accurate measure of the person’s character while illness or disability was seen to be a reflection of a diseased soul. These attitudes in society were explored in books written in the time. As will be discovered in this paper, novels emerged during this time period as society’s most accurate means of reflecting on the social ills of the day and novels such as those written by Charles Dickens or George Elliot repeatedly demonstrated that the ill or disabled Victorian was somehow held to be of lower quality or worth than whole-bodied individuals. During the Victorian period, the process of psychoanalysis had not yet been published, much less widely discussed and applied to social structures. The principle means of reflecting issues common to the contemporary society was through the explorations provided in the fiction produced during the period. Borislav Knezevic says of Dickens and his contemporaries: “Professional novelists became not only providers of relatively lucrative cultural products, but also voices of great social authority, and representatives of that middle-class wisdom and success. […] The novel became a locus of middle-class symbolic power” (Knezevic, 2003: 4). In the Victorian era, the novel was as much about information as about entertainment, as Salman Rushdie observes in his entry on The Nation: “The word ‘novel’ derives from the Latin word for new; in French, nouvelles are both stories and news reports. A hundred years ago, people read novels, among other things, for information. From Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby, British readers got shocking information about poor schools like Dotheboys Hall, and such schools were subsequently abolished. […] So until the advent of the television age, literature shared with print journalism the task of telling people things they didn’t know” (Rushdie, 1996: 18). In other words, society could only know what was wrong with its system and as a result change it, once it was made to realize what was wrong with it in the first place. This is really important, because many people forming the Victorian society thought of illness and disability as a ‘moral judgment’, and sincerely believed that those in need of aid or support were in the state they were in because God saw fit to have them punished for their imperfections. Thus, disgust and inaction, and not compassion, was considered the right attitude towards these people. This was an attitude that carried over from the Middle Ages. According to Marks, “During the Middle Ages disability was associated with evil and witchcraft. Visits to Bedlam (the first asylum in the UK) were a common form of amusement, and the practice of keeping ‘idiots’ as objects of entertainment was prevalent among the aristocracy (Ryan and Thomas, 1987). During Victorian times, and until as late as the 1950s, social Darwinists argued that allowing the ‘feeble-minded’ to propagate would bring about the degeneration of the species” (29). These attitudes towards poverty were similar or perhaps amplified when applied to those who were ill or suffered from some sort of disability. Charles Dickens brings the issue to light in his portrayal of Tiny Tim in his very popular classic A Christmas Carol. The cultural attitude of society noted by Inglis and others is shown in Ebenezer Scrooge’s attitude toward charity, “I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned – they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there … If they would rather die … they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population” (Stave 1). Meanwhile, Scrooge’s employee, Bob Cratchit, has a son who suffers from a mysterious form of disability that threatens his life. “The character Tiny Tim … is the clearest literary image of physical disability in the minds of many twentieth-century people. Tiny Tim is also the disabled character most objectionable to literary critics and disability activists alike. He is both an emblem of Victorian sentimental excess and the model for all the poster children of our time – the ‘patient … mild’ cripple who accepts his suffering and is sweetly grateful for the charity of the non-disabled” (Holmes, 1998). Through his gratitude and spiritual focus, Tiny Tim became the symbol of the crippled child, which was what Dickens intended. By making this child saintly, patient and eminently good, Dickens gave the picture of the disabled a different face that made it difficult for his contemporary audience to so easily turn away appeals for charity. Within this same novel, Dickens again uses children to symbolize the innocent suffering of others as he incorporates two “wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable” (Stave 3) children to represent Ignorance and Want. They are ugly because of their pitiful state but, because they are children, their miserable state is not considered to be the fault of the children. As Scrooge finally begins to piece together the ways in which society has made it impossible for the poor, the ill or the disabled to achieve any kind of sustainable livelihood in looking into the faces of these two children, he asks, “Have they no refuge or resource?” The spirit answers back in a way that responds to Scrooge’s first assessment of charity, “Are there no prisons … Are there no workhouses?” (Stave 3). The prevailing attitude of the Victorian era as shown through Scrooge at the beginning of the book is one in which the ill, the disabled and the poor are shunned because of a belief it’s the result of individual failures of character. However, Dickens brings his readers full circle to an understanding of these individuals as potentially the victims of an unjust society or an accident of birth in need of a little assistance through no true fault of their own. In Our Mutual Friend, Dickens presents the figure of Jenny Wren, another child suffering from a form of disability. Jenny Wren consistently describes herself to others with the words, “my back’s bad and my legs are queer” (222). She falls into the genre of the hunchbacks who are reviled because their physical deformity is seen to be the physical manifestation of either their own or their parents’ shortcomings. In the case of Jenny Wren, her deformity is caused by her father’s alcoholism, which causes her to act much more like an adult or a parent than a child. Although her given name is Fanny Cleaver, she has taken the initiative of renaming herself to something she likes better. She spends her days working as a doll’s dressmaker as a means of earning money to support herself and her father, whom she refers to consistently as her child. The hardships of her life are illustrated as she describes the differences she noticed between herself and other children. “The children that I used to see early in the morning were very different from any others that I ever saw. They were not like me: they were not chilled, anxious, ragged or beaten; they were never in pain” (239). However, she has been bent and broken by her lifetime of living with alcoholic parents, as is patiently explained by Lizzie to her brother, who has automatically characterized Jenny as a “little witch”, as the rest of his society tends to do. “This poor ailing little creature has come to be what she is, surrounded by drunken people from her cradle – if she ever had one, Charlie” (227). In this statement, Dickens attempts to illustrate to his society that, like Tiny Tim, the deformed and diseased of society are not necessarily responsible for their condition in life despite the quickness with which others are eager to blame them, and suggests that the conditions of their lives have made them what they are. Only compassion and understanding permit understanding sufficient to release the brilliance and true creativity of these characters. This is shown as Jenny’s love for Lizzie because of Lizzie’s understanding eventually makes it possible for Lizzie to make an advantageous marriage. George Eliot also employs a hunchbacked character to illustrate her society’s conception and understanding of disability as a signal of personal flaw, often as the result of family fortune. Philip Wakem has a hunched back that prevents him from participating in ‘normal’ activities as they are defined by Tom. This is seen to be the result of his father’s ‘rascaly’ ways as his father is an attorney who is not averse to using tricks of the law to overcome complaints by the uneducated citizens of St. Oggs. Although he is often described as womanly and apparently worthless, he is very intelligent and perceptive, anxious to help others and bitter about the way society has treated him in life. He is aware of Maggie’s intelligence and encourages it, which is much different from the treatment she has received from others in her life, most of whom have seemed to feel that education is completely wasted on a woman, but it is this education that enables her to take up a position as a teacher and thus support herself rather than be obliged to others for her support. Although he is in love with Maggie himself, his perception that Stephen and Maggie share a mutual affection that they fight against for the sake of others causes him to work to bring Maggie and Stephen together. This marks him again as quite different from the social definition of the disabled individual as someone internally flawed and unworthy of compassion or charity. Both of these authors reveal a social belief in disability or illness as a sign of personal failure or internal flaws, but reveal these characters to be highly sensitive and compassionate people more worthy than most of charity and understanding. Charles Dickens concentrates many of his stories on showing the lives of the little people of the city. As his characters move through their world, they encounter members of the upper class, all of whom seem pretty silly. These members of the elite continue to insist that the old social orders are still in place and that they should be given respect and prestige based on their birthright alone even when they are ill or disabled despite what they might think of others. This concept that the individual is responsible somehow for whatever afflicts them is carried through in other Victorian novels as well. George Eliot’s character Philip Wakem is criticized and ostracized for his deformity throughout this life but is one of the most intelligent and compassionate characters in the novel. Through these types of novels, it becomes clear that the authors were attempting to draw attention to the flawed reasoning that prevailed in their society regarding the causes and proper responses to individuals suffering from illness or disability. Works Cited Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. New York: Maynard, Merril & Company, 1892. Dickens, Charles. Our Mutual Friend. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Eliot, George. The Mill on the Floss. New York: Penguin Classics, 1985. Ellison, Eugenia Adams. The Innocent Child in Dickens and Other Writers. Burnet, TX: Eakin Press, 1982. Frick, Katie L. “Women’s Mental Illness: A Response to Oppression.” Women’s Issues Then & Now: A Feminist Overview of the Past Two Centuries. (2002). April 23, 2009 Gissing, George. “Dickens’ Satiric Portraiture.” The Dickens Critics. George H. Ford and Lauriat Lane, Jr. (Eds.). Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1961. Inglis, K.S. Churches and The Working Class in Victorian England. London: Routledge, 1963. Holmes, Martha Stoddard. “Literature Annotations: A Christmas Carol.” Literature, Arts and Medicine Database. New York: New York University, 1999. Knezevic, Borislav. Figures of Finance Capitalism: Writing, Class, and Capital in the Age of Dickens. London: Routledge, 2003. Levine-Clark, Marjorie. “Engendering Relief: Women, Ablebodiness, and the New Poor Law in Victorian England.” Journal of Women’s History. Vol. 11, I 4, 1991. Lukacher, Ned. “The Dickensian ‘No Thoroughfare’.” Modern Critical Views: Charles Dickens. Ed. by. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987. Marks, Deborah. Disability. New York: Routledge, 1999. Reed, John R. Dickens and Thackeray: Punishment and Forgiveness. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1995. Rushdie, Salman. “How News Becomes Opinion, and Opinion Off-Limits.” The Nation. Vol. 262, N. 25, 1996. Sorenson, Jane. “Conflict Between Emotion and Passion in Jane Eyre and Through the Looking Glass.” The Victorian Web. 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