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Narrative Prosthesis
Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse
By David T. Mitchell, Sharon L. Snyder The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2000 University of Michigan
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-09748-7
CHAPTER 1
Representation and Its Discontents: The Uneasy Home of Disability in Literature and Film
Introduction: The Uneasy Home of Representation
This chapter surveys disability studies in the humanities. As will become evident, scholars have unearthed an impressive array of works that take disability as a significant feature of characterization. This dependency upon disability as a distinguishing facet of literary and filmic depictions establishes the pervasiveness of narrative prosthesis. Disability scholars in the humanities, particularly since the 1990s, have provided a large and varied criticism for the interpretation of images of disability. We divide this scholarship into five methodologies: studies of negative imagery, social realism, new historicism, biographical criticism, and transgressive reappropriation. Collectively, they demonstrate the array of critical tools already at work in disability studies, as well as the potential for significant revisions to current methodologies.
Disability's prominence in narrative discourses and the relative absence of critical commentary upon this fact prior to the advent of disability studies in the humanities suggest that disability is, for the critical enterprise, both promising and discomforting — as proves true of all prosthetic interventions. In this sense, disability studies in the humanities shares an approach with our readings of the literature, which is to expose rather than disguise the prosthetic relation of disability and characterization as a contrivance. This inverse ideal grounds our concept of narrative prosthesis throughout this volume.
Beginning nearly thirty years ago, a resurgence of concern over the consequences of dehumanizing representations (monster, freak, madman, suffering innocent, hysteric, beggar) resulted in suspicion over the ultimate utility of representational studies about disability. Truly, literary and historical texts have rarely appeared to offer disabled characters in developed, "positive" portraits. Does literary/cultural studies have anything to offer our apprehension of disability other than demeaning portraits of disabled people in history and the archive? Can findings in this inquiry be connected to the contemporary situation of disabled people? The idea that literary study has little to offer our politicized understandings of disability experience rests uncomfortably with us. Yet how do humanities scholars justify their work in an area historically dominated by medical and scientific concerns?
Previously, proponents of the universality in art sought to salvage disabled literary characterizations as evidence for inherent frailties in "the human condition." For example, Herbert Blau defends literary portraits of disability by explaining that they cause us to "concede that we are all, at some warped level of the essentially human, impaired" (10). A catalogue of representations in literature include some of the most influential figurations of "suffering humanity" across periods and cultures: the crippled Greek god Hephaestus; Montaigne's sexually potent limping women; Shakespeare's hunchback'd king, Richard III; Frankenstein's deformed monster; Bronte's madwoman in the attic; Melville's one-legged, monomaniacal Captain Ahab; Nietzsche's philosophical grotesques; Hemingway's wounded war veterans; Morrison's truncated and scarred ex-slaves; Borges's blind librarians; Oë's brain-damaged son. Astonishingly, this catalog of "warped" humanity proves as international as it does biologically varied. Why does characterization of disability so often result in indelible, albeit overwrought, literary portraits?
We suggest that the problem disability studies scholars perceive in the representational study of disability is the result of two predominating modes of historical address: overheated symbolic imagery and disability as a pervasive tool of artistic characterization. Yet while scholars in literary and cultural studies have produced important readings of individual disabled characters and the centrality of disabled types to specific genres, we have largely neglected to theorize the utility of humanities work for disability studies in particular, and disabled populations in general. This chapter surveys developments in the study of disability across the humanities in an effort to provide a governing logic for the necessity of the humanities to the evolution of disability studies in general.
We also seek to explain the myriad ways that scholars have complicated the question of "negativity" without surrendering a usable politics. Recent studies of disability in the archives provide a manifestly multifaceted base upon which to build our own period's address of disability representations. Consistent throughout will be our own efforts to assess both the pervasive and the hypersymbolic nature of disability as a grounding for our later theorizations of narrative prosthesis. Somewhere between these difficulties, humanities scholars make their uneasy home in disability studies.
Negative Imagery
From the outset the majority of critical approaches to disability representation sought to theorize negative imagery. As with many investigations by scholars in the humanities into the social construction of identity, disability scholars first interrogated common stereotypes that pervaded the literary and filmic archives. Disability was viewed as a restrictive pattern of characterization that usually sacrificed the humanity of protagonists and villains alike. A few characters continually surfaced as evidence: Shakespeare's murderous, hunchbacked king, Richard III; Melville's obsessive, one-legged captain, Ahab; and Dickens's sentimental, hobbling urchin, Tiny Tim. The repeated citation of these three figures as central to disability characterization initially demonstrated, at the most basic level, that disability existed in canonical literary works. Literary scholars promoted the idea that disabled characters, unlike racial minorities and homosexuals, for example, played a visible role in several of the most important works in European and American literature. While the recourse to these three examples gave the impression that this presence was hardly overwhelming, interpretations of negative disability images nonetheless secured the argument that disability had been neglected in the critical tradition. The early scholarship also demonstrated literature's complicity in the historical devaluation of people with disabilities.
One of the first collections to devote space to literary and media images — Gartner and Joe's Images of the Disabled, Disabling Images — emphasized the pernicious nature of stereotypes. In it such writers and scholars as Leonard Kriegel, Deborah Kent, and Paul Longmore exposed representation as a devious device of mainstream and artistic mediums. Kriegel's essay, "Disability as Metaphor in Literature," took on the entire literary tradition, boldly declaring that depictions of disability fell far short of realistic portrayals of human complexity. In his analysis of a performance of the coronation scene in Richard III, he located what he believed to be the two most pervasive and insidious images in the literary tradition:
In the ascent, the red-caped figure crawls up the steps [to the throne], like some gigantic insect, to take that which he has cheated others of. Imposing its limitations to rob legitimacy, the broken body begs for compassion. In the history of Western literature, both before and after Shakespeare, there is little to be added to these two images, although there are a significant number of variations upon them. The cripple is threat and recipient of compassion, both to be damned and to be pitied — and frequently to be damned as he is pitied. (7)
Importantly, Kriegel's sense of outrage is paralleled by many disability critics who see the metaphoric opportunism of literature as a form of public slander. In establishing the two poles of disability characterization — threat and pity — Kriegel provided a shorthand method for disability scholars to gain control of a limiting literary archive. Richard III represents an early example of stigmatizing cultural dictates to which even Shakespeare capitulates. The writer's world, according to Kriegel, evidenced the "vantage point of the normals" (7), and characters with disabilities could be expected to evidence a scapegoating attitude rife in culture and history writ large. As Shari Thurber pointed out, "The disabled have a bad literary press" (12). Even so, the literary archive would at least serve as a repository for documenting demeaning attitudes toward people with disabilities.
Kriegel's commentary proved emblematic of the negative-image school of criticism, which diagnosed literature as another social repository of stereotypical depictions. Unlike other minority (such as race and sexuality) studies of literary representation that found a desired counter to demeaning cultural attitudes in their own literary traditions, literary scholars of disability found little refuge in creative discourses. The negative-image school found literary depictions to be, at best, wanting, and, at worst, humiliating: "While metaphoric use of disability may seem innocuous enough, it is in fact a most blatant and pernicious form of stereotyping" (Thurber 12). The core of this argument centered upon disabled characters as one and the same with disabled people. There was a direct correlation, argued these scholars, between debasing character portraits and demeaning cultural attitudes toward people with disabilities.
In this way, the negative-imagery school set out to establish a continuum between limiting literary depictions and dehumanizing social attitudes toward disabled people. In his seminal essay "Screening Stereotypes: Images of Disabled People in Television and Motion Pictures," Paul Longmore diagnosed film and television as influential reinforcers of cultural prejudice against disabled people. Rather than Kriegel's two predominant images in literature, Longmore found three stereotypes commonly perpetuated by electronic media: "disability is a punishment for evil; disabled people are embittered by their 'fate'; disabled people resent the nondisabled and would, if they could, destroy them" (67). Longmore's analysis of popular media paralleled Kriegel's arguments in that both saw contemporary attitudes about people with disabilities as informed by repeated paradigms and plots.
The restrictive elements of stories about disability helped create an uncompromising public belief in the limited options for people with disabilities: "Disabled characters abound, but the ways in which they are portrayed and the development of narrative around them is relentlessly negative" (Pointon and Davies 1). From the outside, the meager nature of these disabled characters' lives were depicted as inevitably leading toward bitterness and anger that made them objects of suspicion. In fact, Kriegel and Longmore argued in tandem that disability portrayals could be understood as a cathartic revenge by the stigmatizers, who punish the stigmatized to alleviate their own worries about bodily vulnerability and inhumane social conditions.
What stands out in the analyses of the negative-image school is the importance of plots that emphasize individual isolation as the overriding component of a disabled life. The angst surrounding the status of people with disabilities surfaced in expressive discourses as a desire to seclude the offending party within a drama of his or her own making. Longmore first identified this element as the most pervasive and debilitating aspect of disability representation. By depicting disability as an isolated and individual affair, storytellers artificially extracted the experience of disability from its necessary social contexts. The portraiture of disability in literature and electronic media "psychologized" the cultural understanding of disability. Disabled characters were either extolled or defeated according to their ability to adjust to or overcome their tragic situation. Longmore and others pointed out that "[social] prejudice and discrimination rarely enter into either fictional or nonfictional stories, and then only as a secondary issue" (74). Because representations of disability tend to reflect the medicalized view that restricts disability to a static impairment entombed within an individual, the social navigation of debilitating attitudes fails to attain the status of a worthy element of plot or literary contemplation.
The failure of a politicized interest to show itself in the disability plot could be evidenced in any number of ways within a variety of genres. Hafferty and Foster, for example, argue that the defining feature of disabled experience is "an awareness that issues when disabilities and handicaps are created through interactions between people with physical impairments and an unyielding and antagonistic environment" (189). Yet their analysis of disabled detectives in crime novels discovers that the reading public is encouraged to "view matters that are rightly located within social settings as residing in individual achievements and/or failures" (189). Literary techniques such as passive dialogue and readerly identifications with individual protagonists serve as stylistic conventions in the detective genre that help "shape the messages being delivered" (193). Hafferty and Foster's focus upon negative representations was humanities-based "proof" that discrimination against disabled people not only existed but was fostered by the images consumed by readers and viewers.
While the analysis of the negative image was carefully supported by a largely structuralist model that slotted disability types into generic classifications and representational modes, the unearthing of discriminatory images tended to collapse all representations into a sterile model of false consciousness. In The Cinema of Isolation, Martin Norden extended Longmore's argument about isolating media portraits by drawing up all of film history into a net of conspiracy. The Hollywood filmmaker, according to Norden, participates in an exploitative scheme that capitalizes upon the visual spectacle that disabilities offer to the camera eye. Film has taken the place of the nineteenth-century freak show "in the name of maintaining patriarchal order" (6). In spite of the historical prevalence of disabled people in film, Norden condemned nearly every image as the product of filmic castration anxiety and discriminatory beliefs. As Pointon and Davies point out, "It is too simplistic to talk about 'negative' compared with 'positive' images because although disabled people are in general fairly clear about what might constitute the former, the identification of 'positive' is fraught with difficulty" (1). Scholarship on the negative image strained beneath the weight of such wholesale condemnations of representational portraits.
In spite of research that saw most artistic and popular representations of disability as debilitating to the social advance of disabled people the analysis of negative images helped to support the idea that disability was socially produced. Identifying common characterizations that reinforced audiences' sense of alienation and distance from disability began an important process of scholarly attempts to rehabilitate public beliefs. Literature and film provided a needed archive of historical attitudes from which to assess ideologies pertaining to people with disabilities. While social scientists sought to understand contemporary beliefs about disabled populations, humanities scholars began to sift through expansive representational preserves. These materials solidified arguments in disability studies about disabled peoples' position as historical scapegoats. In many ways this impulse still undergirds a humanities-based politics of critiquing the trite and superficial portraits churned out on a daily basis by the mainstream media. To change negative portrayals, a powerful commentary was needed to make authors more self-conscious of the conventions at work in their own media.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Narrative Prosthesis by David T. Mitchell, Sharon L. Snyder. Copyright © 2000 University of Michigan. Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press.
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