In Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), Lucy Snowe is tasked to deliver a “little basket” to the mysterious shut-in Madame Walravens (396; ch. 34). After crossing an “inhospitable threshold” (398) that leads to an “inhospitable salon” (400), Lucy is told to wait for the lady of the house, who will serve as both grandmother and wolf in this Red Riding Hood revision. Caught in a dreamlike, “fairy tale” trance, Lucy focuses her attention on a curious picture, which “give[s] way” to expose an arched doorway and a winding staircase. The tapestry momentarily displaced, Lucy hears the taps of a walking-stick, and then spies a “substance” that eventually materializes into the distinct form of Madame Walravens: “She might be three feet high, but she had no shape. . .. Her face was large, set, not upon her shoulders, but before her breast; she seemed to have no neck.” Lucy proceeds to call her host “[h]unchbacked,” and “dwarfish” — a “barbarian queen,” an “uncouth thing,” and an “old witch of a grand-dame” (399–402; ch. 34), who is as “hideous as a Hindoo idol” (473; ch. 39). Most important, Lucy notes the “violence of a temper which deformity made sometimes demoniac” (403; ch. 34). Madame Walravens's physical abnormalities make her not just the villain of a fairy tale, but a supernatural terror. Lucy may only confront the reality of disability by transforming it into a “tale of magic” (399; ch. 34) — one that she escapes by re-crossing the “inhospitable threshold.”

This sort of representation was something of the norm in the nineteenth century. Walter Scott's The Black Dwarf (1816), for example, features the allegedly magical Elshie, and Quilp, the villainous dwarf in Charles Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41), appears several times to be “conjured up by magic” (463; ch. 60). Disability was regularly represented as a fantasmatic novelty that simultaneously delighted and disgusted. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson notes that disabled characters “usually remain on the margins of fiction as uncomplicated figures or exotic aliens whose bodily configurations operate as spectacles” (Extraordinary 9). Yet the many literary examples of treating disabilities as supernatural phenomena appear to be reserved for congenital malformations, the physical abnormalities exhibited at the Victorian freak show.Footnote ¹ Indeed, the representational disparity between causes of disability is unambiguous. Whereas Victor Hugo's Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) exhibits a “supernatural ugliness” (320; bk. 9, ch. 4), Walt Whitman's wounded soldiers (“the stump of the arm, the amputated hand”) endure in his dreams both “sweet and sad” (45, 63).Footnote ² This anxious othering of congenital disability speaks to the fear of biological degeneracy that would reach a fever pitch by the fin de siècle. In Degeneration (1892), for example, Max Nordau warned of “bodily modifications” in which “the entire being presents a strange and repulsive mixture of incompleteness and decay” (36). By the late nineteenth century, the dangerous amalgamation of disability and the supernatural could be read in characters ranging from Miss Havisham and Mr. Hyde to Dorian Gray and Dracula.

Accidental disabilities elicited different reactions from acquired ones, and followed a distinct set of rules.Footnote ³ “[S]udden impairment, as from an accident,” Garland-Thomson observes, “is almost always experienced as a greater loss than is congenital or gradual disability” (14). As this essay will demonstrate, nineteenth-century characters who acquire disability through everyday hazards remain subjects of the real world, never to be the stuff of nightmares. Since their afflictions result from the unfortunate dangers of ordinary life, they can be neither displayed as spectacles nor fully displaced from normalized social systems. Subjects who acquired physical disabilities were not cordoned off in hospitals, madhouses, or sideshow exhibitions. In general, moreover, representations of acquired disabilities can be further divided along gender lines. Male characters who become disabled generally learn difficult lessons from both the experience and the resulting life changes. For example, Dickens's Joe Willet in Barnaby Rudge (1841), Charlotte Brontë’s Rochester in Jane Eyre (1847), and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Romney in Aurora Leigh (1856) all become humbled heroes, their unbridled passions neutered through physical or sensory losses.

Conversely, female characters tend to gain agency through their acquired disabilities. In Ellen Wood's East Lynne (1860–61), for example, Isabel Vane is disfigured in a train accident following her exile from her community. Sporting a conspicuous facial scar, a noticeable limp, and a pronounced lisp, Isabel returns home disguised as Madame Vine to be employed as the governess to her children. Her disfigurements allow her certain freedoms in the house: “[S]he was altered beyond chance of recognition. She could go anywhere now” (389; ch. 31). In addition, J. M. Barrie's A Window in Thrums (1890) features a disabled woman named Jess McTaggart, who sits “looking at the world as through a telescope” (5; ch. 1), collecting information about passersby and influencing their lives.Footnote ⁴ The novels examined in this study — Harriet Martineau's Deerbrook (1839), Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers (1857), and Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (1864–65) — introduce characters who become trusted advisers, setting up hospitable salons for the consultation and protection of other characters. Perhaps more importantly, they also act as surrogate narrators, exploiting the particular capacities of their disabilities to observe with extraordinary authority.Footnote ⁵ In this sense, this essay offers new avenues to explore “narrative prosthesis,” David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder's term for the “perpetual discursive dependency upon disability” in literature (47). I argue that the narratorial power exerted by disabled women characters suggests that disembodied narration, whether omniscient or semi-omniscient, paradoxically draws on the unambiguously embodied experience of disability.Footnote ⁶ Narrative omniscience, after all, is a fundamentally abnormal power of observation that transcends the boundaries of the ordinary body and mind — what Jonathan Culler has christened a “godlike figure” (124) and Nicholas Royle has termed the “telepathy effect” (93).Footnote ⁷ This study will demonstrate that acquired disabilities stimulate discrete observational powers, affording women characters the narrative authority of disciplinary surveillance. Through the dual authorities of protective hospitality and acute observation, moreover, disabled women characters paradoxically function to maintain social norms by promoting appropriate romantic pairings. What Joseph Conrad calls the “sham of Divine Omnipotence” (287) — the implausible figure of omniscient narration — is merely the counter, original, spare, and strange bodies and minds that have been mistakenly mislabeled as disabled.

In “Fiction, Fair and Foul” (1881), John Ruskin decries the “Divinity of Decomposition” (270) found in modern novels, which, among other things, explore the “mortal phenomena of the sick-room” (274). These texts, Ruskin argues, possess a “grotesque and distorting power” (279), infecting their readers with immorality and ugliness. Not surprisingly, Ruskin focuses much of his attack on Dickens, and in particular Barnaby Rudge, which is evidence of a “brain disease” that circulates images of “deformity, complicated with grossness” (278). By promoting regularity as the Keatsean beauty and truth of the world, Ruskin upholds the “hegemony of normalcy” (Davis, Introduction 10). But even in the late nineteenth century, the concept of normalcy was a relatively new social construct. For Michel Foucault, the systematic social advancement of norms in the eighteenth century was the “historical outcome of a technology of power centered on life” (History 144). Abnormal brains and bodies were, for the first time, differentiated, categorized, and controlled because they disrupted the life-sustaining productivity of reproduction and labor. Institutions ranging from prisons and madhouses to hospitals and psychiatric clinics were established so that abnormality could be corralled, studied, and corrected. As Shelley Tremain observes, these processes “caused the contemporary disabled subject to emerge into discourse and social existence” (5). Ruskin's objections demonstrate the reach of a growing body of literature in the Victorian period that chose to represent the physical, mental, social, and ontological complexities of disability.

Disabled characters appear in every nineteenth-century subgenre of the novel, from Gothic and science fiction to realism and naturalism. But disability was especially prevalent in sensation fiction, where it “disrupt[ed] a host of. . . binaries, generating shock, curiosity, and a sense of the uncanny” (Holmes, “Disability” 494). Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868) is perhaps the best example of this development, as it features two disabled women, Rosanna Spearman and Limping Lucy, who upset the social order of the novel. Yet it is evident that both of these characters possess congenital malformations (of the shoulder and the foot, respectively), and thus they are ultimately relegated to the novel's margins in order to reinforce the binary by which they were introduced. Characters who instead acquire disability offer the most forceful challenge to the normal/abnormal binary by demonstrating the potential fragility of the human body under the hazards of ordinary human activity. “That anyone can become disabled at any time,” Garland-Thomson argues, “makes disability more fluid, and perhaps more threatening, to those who identify themselves as normates” (14). Medical advancements and health programs (themselves evidence of bio-power) increased life expectancy throughout the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁸ But the technologies of industrialization, which used the body as an “instrument or intermediary” (Foucault, Discipline 11), proved hazardous indeed. Friedrich Engels noted in 1845 not only the deformities caused by the repetitive routine of labor, but also the dangers of the industrial machine: “Besides the deformed persons, a great number of maimed ones may be seen going about in Manchester; this one has lost an arm or a part of one, that one a foot, the third half a leg; it is like living in the midst of an army just returned from a campaign” (173). As Engels suggests, there were an unprecedented number of people who acquired disabilities in the nineteenth century through the very processes that were meant to sustain life. Lennard J. Davis argues that “industrialization was seen as a palpable force in quite literally reshaping the bodies of the body politic” (Enforcing 88). And this is not to mention the influx of war veterans, whose bodies were broken and dismembered in the name of the nation's wellbeing.Footnote ⁹ The presence of these subjects, particularly among the lower spheres of society, challenged what constituted being normal.

In the years following the Napoleonic Wars, a great number of discharged soldiers returned home to find that jobs were few and that no social programs existed to support them. The 1824 Vagrancy Act made homelessness a crime, and disfigured veterans were particularly targeted by the law: “Every Person wandering abroad and endeavouring by the Exposure of Wounds and Deformities to obtain or gather Alms. . . shall be deemed a Rogue and Vagabond” (McMullin 53). In the early 1820s, one American traveler pronounced that, “[a]mong the laboring classes [in England], one may remark a large number of diminutive and deformed persons. In London, indeed, almost every twentieth man seems to have been ‘curtailed of his fair proportions’ in coming into the theatre of life, or by some of the accidents and calamities which flesh is heir to” (Wheaton 193). That people with acquired disabilities were a relatively commonplace sight in the nineteenth century, especially in urban environments, suggests that they would have been subject to a different set of social experiences than those with congenital deformities. While the former were often characterized as victims and heroes, the latter were almost universally portrayed as freaks and villains, in spite of the effort of some novelists to humanize them.Footnote ¹⁰ As Garland-Thomson writes, “[s]eeing disability reminds us of. . . the truth of our body's vulnerability to the randomness of fate” (Staring 19). However, the unsettling confirmation of the body's tenuous materiality is most distressing when it involves acquired disability. Even the insulation of wealth could not prevent carriage accidents, syphilis, or gout.

For this reason, people who possessed acquired disabilities were not subject to the same level of othering that made those with congenital disabilities suffer as spectacles for exhibition or derision. Whereas the list of nineteenth-century characters with congenital disabilities who are shunned and abused seems unending — Frankenstein's creature, Quasimodo, and Smike in Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39) are especially notable — characters with acquired disabilities in Victorian novels are, almost without exception, respected members of society. This is not to say, however, that they are not marginalized or controlled by the disciplinary powers of normalcy. For women, especially, disability of any kind often makes them not only unfit for marriage, but also unable to secure jobs that require standardized physical movements. Since they are generally prohibited from engaging in customary plots of romance or labor, disabled women fill other roles, most obviously the part of trusted advisors. Each of the women examined in this study — Maria Young, Madeline Neroni, and Jenny Wren — preside over sites that function as sanctuaries for secure dialogue. Yet these “hospitable salons” also serve as posts for extraordinary feats of observation — ones that mark the disabled women as narratorial figures and suggest that narrative omniscience, at a fundamental level, is a performance of disability.

Foucault argues that bio-power, which functioned to control labor and population, required the pretense of perpetual surveillance. Since it guarantees an “automatic functioning of power” (Discipline 201), the panopticon productively functions as a metaphor for the disciplinary network that regulates society as a whole. In his analysis of Balzac's narrative style, D. A. Miller argues that “omniscient narration assumes a fully panoptic view of the world it places under surveillance. . .. [T]his panoptic vision constitutes its own immunity from being seen in turn” (23–24). Nineteenth-century authors routinely attempted to articulate metaphors for the distinct performances of omniscience that they wished to achieve.Footnote ¹¹ Yet the most pervasive symbol for omniscience throughout the century was Asmodeus, the lame demon of Alain-René Lesage's Le Diable Boiteux (1707), who flies above Madrid, lifting rooftops to peer at domestic scenes within.Footnote ¹² Eve M. Lynch observes that, “[f]or the Victorian writer, this omniscient voyeur offered a cogent symbol for laying open the impacted problem secreted away in the private sphere” (69). Lesage's text was translated into English as The Devil upon Two Sticks (1708), which further specifies the extent of Asmodeus's lameness. While his conspicuously disabled body, evidenced not only in the text's titles but also in illustrations that accompanied later editions (Figure 4), has been overlooked by modern critics, it certainly did not escape nineteenth-century authors. In 1823, Lord Byron, referring to his own disability, remarks: “I am Le Diable Boiteux” (136).

Figure 4.

“Devil on Two Sticks.” Engraving from The Devil upon Two Sticks. London: C. Cooke, 1793. 4.

Although Asmodeus appears to be an early example of the congenitally disabled body rendered as supernatural, his disability is, in fact, acquired. The figure of Asmodeus first appeared in literature in Luis Vélez de Guevara's El Diablo Cojuelo (1641), which translates to “limping devil.” Legend has it that Asmodeus was the first demon to be banished from hell and was crippled when his co-conspirators subsequently fell on top of him. In Lesage's version, he is lamed by a “quarrel. . . with Pillardoc, the Devil of Interest” (10). In spite of his obvious signs of impairment, Asmodeus assures Don Cleofas, the man who rescued him from a bottle, “I can yet go pretty nimbly; you shall be a witness of my agility” (10). He delivers on his promise, springing from the window with his rescuer and landing on a church steeple.Footnote ¹³ The first English edition of Lesage's text was accompanied by an anonymous preface titled “Asmodeus's Crutches,” which remarks that the demon's “fine moral character. . . and the vast sense and discernment he shews in the course of his observations, do more than compensate for the deformity of his person” (2). Thus, Asmodeus's extraordinary abilities are inextricably linked to his disability. It is no surprise that the editor's recognition of disability and the implication that it has been overcome was a product of the mid-eighteenth century, which “discovered the body as object and target of power” (Foucault, Discipline 136). Following suit, Victorian novels would feature disability in a positive light only if it was counterbalanced by extraordinary ability. Whereas congenital disabilities were offset by the supernatural, acquired disabilities had to be counteracted by natural, albeit spectacular, performances of observation — ones designed to restore social normalcy.

As an ideal disciplinary mechanism, the panopticon maintains the illusion of perpetual surveillance through two cooperative, simultaneous operations: “in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen” (Foucault, Discipline 202). Unlike their male counterparts, female characters with acquired disabilities would seem to be under constant watch owing not only to their gender, but also to the novelty of their impairments. Garland-Thomson differentiates between the gaze, which “makes the normative female a sexual spectacle,” and what she terms “the stare” — a heightened form of the gaze that “sculpts the disabled subject into a grotesque spectacle” (Extraordinary 26). However, some disabled subjects shield themselves from view through the practice of masquerade.Footnote ¹⁴ Tobin Siebers argues that “masquerade represents an alternative method of managing social stigma through disguise” (5), and notes that it occurs when a disabled person “feels compelled to out himself as disabled so that able-bodied people will not be confused” (6). This performance, Siebers continues, “guarantees. . . that he will be rendered invisible” (6). Drawing attention to disability through masquerade, in other words, creates the “paradoxical consequence” that subjects “become even more invisible and vulnerable as a result” (6).Footnote ¹⁵ The characters in this study routinely flaunt their disabilities with the outcome that they escape the oppressive, othering dynamics of “the stare.” In Our Mutual Friend, for example, Jenny Wren highlights her disability through the repeated phrase “my back's bad, and my legs are queer.” In so doing, she stages a masquerade that allows her simultaneously to divert “the stare” and to be an extraordinary observer. In more subtle ways than Asmodeus, she acts like a sentinel in a panopticon. The cases that follow demonstrate the inherent abnormality of omniscience by imagining women with acquired disabilities as the clandestine enforcers of disciplinary surveillance. In addition, these characters wield a power that prevents unsuitable matches and promotes appropriate marriages, thereby paradoxically upholding the normalized reproductive networks from which they have been excluded.

Harriet Martineau's Deerbrook is a “landmark novel” (Sanders xxx). Published at the end of the nineteenth century's most unwieldy decade, the 1830s, it provides a productive, if not sometimes frustrating, bridge between literary periods. The Edinburgh Review greatly underestimated the complexity of the novel's craft, arguing that the “events are few, tame, and trite. No great interests are brought into play” (“Deerbrook” 495). For Deerbrook expertly engages the potential exigencies of its readership — subjects that include poverty, gossip, and disease. Yet it is perhaps most important to note that Deerbrook is a landmark disability novel, which represents the complex personal, social, and economic challenges that face a disabled subject. Martineau depicts the village of Deerbrook as isolated and traditional; only recently has the “stage-coach . . . taken to passing through” (7; ch. 1). Much of the plot rests on how the townspeople will be affected by accepting new members into their sheltered community. When the Ibbotson sisters, Margaret and Hester, arrive from the comparatively sprawling metropolis of Birmingham, they are transported into a curiously outmoded world that nonetheless draws them in and keeps its hold. Deerbrook's local celebrity, Dr. Hope, has been similarly transplanted, and is initially endorsed as the “greatest acquisition our society ever had” (16; ch. 1). As the village's most prominent bachelor, Hope wins the affections of both sisters. Although he ultimately, and perhaps mistakenly, chooses Hester, he never openly swerves from his commitment, even after he turns from trusted physician to criminal pariah in the eyes of the village's superstitious, overzealous residents.

The horse-riding accident that nearly kills Hope — which turns out to be no accident at all — intriguingly parallels the event that earlier lamed the village's schoolteacher, Maria Young. While the violence of an upset carriage left Maria's father dead, she was “lamed for life” (48; ch. 5) and unable to walk thereafter without great pain. Martineau implicitly draws on her own experience with debilitating illness to illustrate Maria's disability. Not only did the author live with defective olfactory glands (subsequently affecting her sense of taste), but she was also afflicted with increasing deafness, which she articulated in her remarkable “Letter to the Deaf” (1834). In addition, shortly after the publication of Deerbrook, Martineau became an invalid for six years following complications from an ovarian cyst — an experience that inspired her Life in the Sick-Room (1844). In the dedication to the pioneering sociological text, she writes:

The powers that Martineau ascribes to disabled subjects approach the “godlike” authority of narrative omniscience. As Maria Frawley observes, “invalidism entailed a correlative focus on the psychological or emotional impact of extended illness and on what many Victorians represented as heightened imaginative abilities” (175). Immobility from illness or disability triggered particular mental powers that more than made up for physical limitations. Yet Martineau pauses to ask: “Is it necessary. . . to be sick, and apart, to see and believe these things?” (68). The answer, it appears, is yes. Normal bodies, Martineau suggests, are excluded from perceiving the extraordinary scenes of “providential administration.” In Deerbrook, Martineau had already explored the “peculiar privilege[s]” of disability through her heroine Maria, who establishes a salon for gossip and observation. “I am so lame as to make it inconvenient to pass over the ground oftener than is necessary,” Maria explains, “and I find it pleasanter to see trees and grass through every window here” (28; ch. 3). Critics have generally read Maria as a tangential figure, but the Edinburgh Review rightly included her as one of the novel's “three heroines” (496), contending that the scenes with the “poor young cripple, as she sits at the window on a soft spring day, watching the happy group, born to hopes and pleasures from which she has been cut off, are very touching, and replete with truth” (498–99). Maria's constant “watching” is her most significant attribute — one that gives her extraordinary authority over the novel's romantic plots, which are crucial to Deerbrook's return to equilibrium.

Although Maria is generally immobile, save for a special trip on horseback and the occasional excursion to see Margaret, she becomes an indispensable member of the village. Her role as a schoolteacher allows her to “see a good many little faces every day” (29; ch. 3). Maria becomes the leading figure of knowledge in the village, and her information about its inhabitants makes her influence circulate widely. Deborah May Fratz observes that Maria “pursues as much social contact as her disability and circumscribed social status permit” (120). Her principal “pleasure” is “in observing all that went on” (104; ch. 9), and her schoolroom becomes a sort of salon, a confessional space where visitors feel comfortable discussing their private affairs: “Maria was likely to know the facts, from her constant intercourse with the Rowlands” (260; ch. 21). While she does not masquerade her disability with the same gusto as Jenny Wren, Maria nonetheless delights in being “free from the observation of other guests” (179; ch. 15). Being “out of the game” (46; ch. 5) of the marriage market permits her to remain relatively unobserved. Alexis Easley astutely reads Maria as an “internal narrator,” whose “alienation [is]. . . a source of power” (88–90). Indeed, she becomes the receptacle for the “dismal stories which had travelled from mouth to mouth through Deerbrook during the day” (507; ch. 39). Much of the novel's plot unfolds as a result of not only Maria's clandestine meetings, but also the several lengthy passages in which Martineau's narrator steps aside in favor of revealing Maria's inner thoughts. It is during one of these latter monologues that Maria particularly performs like an omniscient narrator:

Anticipating Martineau's argument in Life in the Sick-Room, Maria's lameness activates her “providential administration,” which she exploits as the controlling influence over the novel's remaining marriage plot. Being “out of the game” in fact makes her a gamemaster; the novel's normal bodies are pawns under the command of its abnormal player.

Hope and Hester's marriage leaves Margaret, the novel's residual heroine, without a match. She quickly earns the attentions of Philip Enderby but rightfully distances herself after learning that he was once attached to Maria. The knowledge that Philip offered Maria “no tidings” (48; ch. 5) following her accident encourages Margaret to refuse the match. This history makes for the darkest storyline in a novel that also features the plague and mob violence. Maria and Philip were once Deerbrook's power couple, the agents of normative labor and reproduction who would ensure the village's stability. Her accident, however, is the first glitch in the system, causing an imbalance that seemingly ruptures civic and social boundaries and permits the arrivals of Hope and the Ibbotson sisters. Although Maria remains relatively mobile, her lameness immediately marks her as unmarriageable. Disability signals both the loss of love and the forfeiture of reproductive rights. One of the novel's lingering frustrations is that Martineau fails either to justify Philip's decision or to punish it. He breaks off his courtship with Maria only because she acquires a disability. He becomes a bachelor, and she becomes a spinster. Yet Maria's constant needlework might suggest that Martineau has styled her as a spinner of fates — one even more powerful than Dickens's Madame Defarge in A Tale of Two Cities (1859). The loss of character-hood allows Maria to flex her narrative muscles. As Susan Fraiman notes, Maria is “of particular interest as a border figure” (180). Once the plague is suppressed and peace is restored, Maria holds the thread of the novel's last remaining loose end. Before Margaret may move forward with her marriage, she must first obtain Maria's approval. Indeed, just three days before the wedding, the friends reunite to settle any remaining misunderstandings. Maria ultimately agrees to attend the nuptials, which conclusively reinforces her endorsement of the match. With a final word, Maria bids the lovers leave to “walk in the shrubbery” (600; ch. 46), thus ensuring that the norm is recalibrated. Deerbrook recovers its homeostasis.

Shortly following the publication of Deerbrook, Martineau was confined to a “couch of pain” for six years (Harriet 146). Her experience parallels the troubled existence of Madeline Neroni in Barchester Towers, which features the most remarkable literary couch since William Cowper's The Task (1785). Two interrelated searches dominate Trollope's novel: one involves a new dean for Barchester and the other a worthy husband for the widowed Eleanor Bold. Three suitors eventually emerge for the latter search, including Bertie Stanhope, a kind, but aimless drifter, and Francis Arabin, an introspective Oxford fellow. Obadiah Slope, the third option, hopes to win both Eleanor's hand and the deanship. However, he proves his inadequacy for either role through his unsettling obsession with Madeline — an open flirtation that catches the eye and ire of the demure and judgmental Mrs. Proudie. Like Maria in Deerbrook, Madeline exploits her disability to become a powerful observer. This narratorial authority gives her direct influence over the central marriage plot and ensures that Barchester recovers the stability it had achieved at the end of Trollope's previous novel, The Warden (1855). Whereas Maria requires seclusion to achieve her “providential administration,” Madeline often strategizes in public settings, employing the “attraction of her affliction” (2: 74; ch. 34) to manipulate the novel's characters. As one reviewer observed in 1856, a “good deal of the progress of the tale depends upon this lady” (Cauvin 46).

As with Deerbrook, Barchester is an insular, cohesive community that is disrupted by the arrival of new residents. After twelve years in Italy, Dr. Stanhope relocates his family, including his daughter Madeline, to Barchester. The family had recently reunited when Madeline returned to her father's house “a cripple, and a mother” (1: 75; ch. 9) following a disastrous marriage to an Italian man of ill repute:

Many villagers speculate that Madeline had been abused by her estranged husband, “that to his violence had she owed her accident” (1: 75). In either case, her impairment echoes contemporary medical discourse on injuries that healed abnormally. Two months before Barchester Towers was published, one medical journal reported the case of a woman whose leg was “shortened half an inch” following an accident (“Simple” 88). Another writer, five months earlier, reported the “shortening of three inches” of a leg following a compound fracture (“Compound” 408). To circumvent the pain of independent mobility, Madeline arranges to be transported by a team of servants, the number of which increases depending on the significance of the setting. Once situated, she lies on sofas, which are placed in deliberate positions to afford her access to the most party-going traffic.

In a sense, Madeline sets up a mobile panopticon in which the central tower of her sofa surveils the community circulating around her. She is several times referred to as a Basilisk, perhaps alluding to the threatening power of her stare: “She opened her large bright lustrous eyes wider and wider, till she seemed to be all eyes” (2: 109; ch. 37). Moreover, not only are subjects mesmerized by her eyes, but the couch itself bottlenecks passersby: “The sofa had certainly been so placed that those who were behind it found great difficulty in getting out” (1: 95; ch. 11). Madeline's panoptic technique is unusual, however, because she deliberately exposes herself to “crowds of people gazing” (2: 106; ch. 37). Thus, her observational strategy relies on a bewildering combination of passing and masquerade. On the one hand, she hides her impairment both by concealing it through layers of dress and by refusing to walk, limpingly or otherwise. In this way she passes, concealing her disability and adopting normative physical behavior. On the other hand, the scene she presents on the couch is pure masquerade. Going to such obvious lengths to conceal her disability ultimately draws attention to it. As Tobin Siebers argues, the “more visible the disability, the greater the chance that the disabled person will be repressed from public view and forgotten” (6). Madeline Stanhope, the “acute. . . observer” (2: 122; ch. 38) remains invisible, while Signora Neroni, the disabled, sexual object is inescapable. Unlike Martineau's Maria, who establishes a salon based on honesty and virtue, Madeline's disciplinary performance relies on ensnaring its subjects through the “attraction of her affliction.” Once she holds them under her sway, Madeline begins to control their decisions. An “indomitable letter writer” (1: 78; ch. 9) and a practiced, calculated conversationalist, Madeline becomes the center of the Barchester social scene, working to repair the social fractures initiated by Slope's schemes.

The men of Barchester are spellbound by Madeline's “ghostlike, ghastly love” (1: 276; ch. 27), and the women cannot restrain themselves from gossiping about her disability. “She has got no legs” (1: 89; ch. 10), one asserts. And even Mrs. Proudie speculates whether Madeline “has any feet” (2: 256; ch. 51).Footnote ¹⁶ In either case, few of Barchester's residents can resist her intoxicating presence: “the signora was a powerful spider that made wondrous webs, and could in no way live without catching flies” (1: 270; ch. 27). For Slope, however, Madeline's charms become an obsession, ruining his twofold plan to win both the deanery and Eleanor. “[P]erpetually before his eyes” (1: 135; ch. 15), Madeline obscures his ambitions. Her hold over Slope takes on narratorial authority: “she had turned him inside out, and read his very heart as she might have done that of a young girl” (2: 129; ch. 38). By embarrassing Slope publicly, Madeline ensures that he will not succeed at winning Eleanor's hand. In the end, it is reported that she has “absolutely ruined that man” (2: 112; ch. 37). Mrs. Proudie levels him in one final tirade before he disappears from both Barchester and the narrative. As with Maria in Deerbrook, Madeline's most important role in the novel is to manage the terms and outcome of the central marriage so that civic stability is restored. Similar to Maria's deferred acceptance of the union between Margaret and Philip, Madeline must assess the suitability of the match between Eleanor and Arabin before allowing it to advance. To do so, she tests Arabin's virtue: “As the Eastern idler swallows his dose of opium, as the London reprobate swallows his dose of gin, so with similar desires and for similar reasons did Mr. Arabin prepare to swallow the charms of the Signora Neroni” (2: 121; ch. 38). He ultimately resists, however, proving himself to be not only the appropriate pairing for Eleanor, but also the best candidate for the deanery.

Yet Barchester cannot be fully restored until the Stanhopes depart. Critics have considered Madeline's return to Italy as evidence that Trollope wished to remove her tainted presence from the narrative. Kate Lawson and Lynn Shakinovsky argue that Madeline's body is a “source of pollution and defilement in the Barchester community,” and that Trollope “expel[s] it from the community's midst” (43). Cindy LaCom similarly asserts that “Trollope's eradication of Madame Neroni constitutes an attempt. . . to diminish and dismiss cultural anxiety around illness and, more specifically, around female sexuality” (193). Yet Madeline's removal from the narrative is neither expulsion nor eradication. She has, instead, served her purpose by repairing the novel's equilibrium. Madeline's disability, in other words, is crucial to resolving the novel's main plots. Her abnormal body functions as the disciplinary power that regulates the norm. Like Foucault's bio-power, it polices and expunges threats to normative systems of reproduction and labor. Without Madeline's presence, Slope may have won both the job and the girl, rupturing Barchester's productive cohesiveness. When Madeline returns to Italy, it is no more a banishment from the narrative than when Asmodeus triumphantly “disappear[s]” (325) in Le Diable Boiteux after having ensured the happy marriage of his rescuer. As with the narrator of Barchester Towers, who leaves his characters in the “hands of his readers” (2: 280; ch. 53), Madeline may disappear once her work is complete, allowing Barchester to undergo new chronicles.

The most significant connection between Maria and Madeline is that they remain “out of the game”; acquired disabilities disqualify them from the marriage market.Footnote ¹⁷ Although both function as disciplinary agents of social normalcy, they are unable to participate fully in the community that they have restored. Martha Stoddard Holmes argues that “Victorian medical science's concern about the transmission of physical illness and impairment. . . made it irresistibly interesting to imagine a disabled woman as a sexual being, but far too alarming to allow her to reproduce” (Fictions 7). We may trace the development of this cultural phenomenon through Deerbrook and Barchester Towers: Maria is denied marriage following Philip's rejection, but her disability is never eroticized; Madeline is similarly deprived, but the “attraction of affliction” makes her a sexual object. In Our Mutual Friend, Dickens transforms the narrative of the disabled female body by featuring a character who is neither sexualized nor denied the prospects of marriage and family. This marks a significant shift, not only for the representation of disabled characters in literature, but also for cultural attitudes towards disabled bodies. In his last complete novel, Dickens widens the scope of what constitutes normalcy through a disabled body that is both extraordinarily productive and potentially reproductive, while avoiding the pitfalls of either supernatural or sexual objectification.Footnote ¹⁸

The introduction of Jenny Wren in Our Mutual Friend initially appears to be following the example set by Charlotte Brontë in Villette: “A parlour door within a small entry stood open, and disclosed a child — a dwarf — a girl — a something” (271; bk. 2, ch. 1). Jenny's indescribable form echoes the “substance” that Brontë’s Madame Walravens assumes, which suggests antagonism based solely on physical abnormality. Yet Dickens had already established such a cornucopia of diminutive characters in his novels that readers could not have known what to expect. Whereas Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop is evil incarnate, Amy Dorrit in Little Dorrit (1855–57) is virtue embodied. Jenny Wren falls firmly in the latter camp and has become one of Dickens's most celebrated characters, admired for her wit and studied for her impact on the plot.Footnote ¹⁹ Gregg A. Hecimovich, for example, calls Jenny the novel's “unacknowledged poet” (965), and Garrett Stewart reads her as its “symbolic center” (105). This well-deserved acclaim, however, is decidedly a modern reaction. Although one contemporary review praised Jenny as a “fresh creation” (“Literary” 246), another accused her of “approaching that boundary-line of caricature” (Chorley 174). In his 1865 review, Henry James would level the most biting attack: “Miss Jenny Wren is a poor little dwarf. . .. Like all Mr. Dickens's pathetic characters, she is a little monster; she is deformed, unhealthy, unnatural” (“Limitations” 156). It is no coincidence that James's review appeared during the initial stages of the cultural concern over degeneration, but it seems that the author missed the novel's actual degenerates — the violent schoolteacher Bradley Headstone and his protégé Charley Hexam, who is a “curious mixture. . . of uncompleted savagery, and uncompleted civilization” (60; bk. 1, ch. 3). In any case, critical attention to Jenny Wren has focused on her disabled body, which is “difficult to classify” (Mckinney 183) because its origin remains relatively obscure.

James's claim that Jenny is “unnatural” implies that her disability is congenital in nature. Many other critics have followed this line of thought, suggesting that her father's crippling alcoholism indicates “hereditary taint” (Holmes, Fictions 60).Footnote ²⁰ However, Dickens subtly suggests that Jenny actually possesses an acquired disability, one brought on by the severe physical demands of childhood labor: “How can I say what I might have turned out myself. . . when I was young!” Jenny relates. “I had nothing to do but work, and so I worked” (801; bk 4, ch. 9).Footnote ²¹ Jenny's suffering not only parallels Dickens's own childhood torment at a blacking factory, but also echoes contemporary protest literature. In “A Voice from the Factories” (1836), for example, Caroline Norton writes of a young worker's “limbs cramped up; his body weakly bent; / Toiling obedient, till long hours so spent” (397–98). In 1845, Engels investigated the effects of “insufficient bodily nourishment,” which was “extremely common among the children of the working-class. The hardening of the bones is delayed, the development of the skeleton in general is restricted, and deformities of the legs and spinal column are frequent” (112). Although this description adequately diagnoses Jenny's disabled body, it fails to account for the severe labor that she endured. Engels also mentions the industrial trade of silk manufacturing, which “employed the youngest children of all” (163). The repetitive motion of this textile labor had a “stunting effect upon the growth of the operative. In the throstle-room of the cotton mill at Manchester. . . I do not remember to have seen one single tall, well-built girl; they were all short, dumpy, and badly-formed, decidedly ugly in the whole development of the figure” (173). Although the 1833 Factory Act promised to decrease the hours children worked, it was not enforced in silk mills. Thus, Jenny's disabled body, unlike the accidental impairments possessed by Maria and Madeline, is a text that potentially exposes the deformities of England's textile industry.Footnote ²² What is more, her adult occupation as a doll's dressmaker suggests her continued dexterity at the trade that crippled her childhood. Yet the same hands that formerly made clothes for humans are now only able to form dresses in miniature. Like the leftover patches of clothing she collects for her dolls, Jenny's disabled body is the waste product of industry.

As the proxy parent to her dissipated child Mr. Dolls, Jenny controls the family's domestic affairs. “I'm the person of the house,” she authoritatively declares (271; bk. 2, ch. 1). As with Maria in Deerbrook, Jenny sets up a salon for conversation and observation. Dickens describes Jenny's eyes as “bright and watchful” (403; bk. 2, ch. 11). She positions herself strategically to “see from that post of observation” (794; bk. 4, ch. 9), concealed within the “golden bower” of her dazzling hair. To find new models for her doll-making, Jenny negotiates London with extraordinary dexterity. Patricia McKee notes that “she moves through the city in spaces unavailable to other people” (90). Her ability to “squeeze among the crowd” (496; bk. 3, ch. 2) unseen is directly tied to her physical presence (Figure 5). Lillian Craton observes that Jenny's “performance of identity hints that bodily spectacle can be empowering. . . when power rests in the proper hands” (80). Jenny's chorus of “my back's bad, and my legs are queer” masquerades her disability. Repeatedly drawing attention to her physical abnormalities renders her figure so commonplace that she may fade into the background. In fact, Jenny's “slight transparent hand” (334; bk. 2, ch. 5) might demonstrate her vanishing acts — the points at which she straddles the boundary between character and narrator. Most important, Jenny achieves a panoptic view via the dolls that are disseminated throughout the city. To place Headstone under surveillance, for example, she positions a doll in a “corner against the wall, where [its] blue eyes can shine upon [him]” (397; bk. 2, ch. 11). This operation does not suggest that Jenny can magically see through the doll's eyes — like Odin sees through his ravens — but rather that the dolls serve as a constant reminder that she may be watching. Foucault writes that the “major effect” of the panopticon is “to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action” (Discipline 201). The unblinking eyes of Jenny's dolls put myriad households under the threat of constant surveillance. She ensures the “automatic functioning of power” by negotiating urban networks and invading domestic scenes with the authority typically reserved for narrators.

Figure 5.

Marcus Stone. “Trying on for the Doll's Dressmaker.” Illustration from Our Mutual Friend. Boston: Estes & Lauriat, 1890. 2: 233.

As with Maria and Madeline, the principal function of Jenny's disciplinary surveillance is to restore civic stability by promoting appropriate romantic pairings. Lizzie Hexam, one of the novel's troubled heroines, seems magnetically drawn to Jenny's business following her father's death. Under Jenny's watch, Lizzie remains sheltered from Headstone's violent advances: “Don't go out of my sight to-night,” the dressmaker warns her lodger (405; bk. 2, ch. 11). Even more significant, Jenny subtly encourages a suitable match for Lizzie — the lawyer Eugene Wrayburn. During her first interview with Eugene, Jenny “lean[s] back, attentive” (288; bk. 1, ch. 2), carefully appraising his assets. In fact, Eugene is able to win Lizzie's affection primarily because he holds “private acquaintance with the Court Dressmaker” (595; bk. 3, ch. 10). The marriage is not confirmed, however, until one moment during Eugene's lengthy convalescence. At the lawyer's bedside, Jenny whispers the word “wife” to Mortimer Lightwood, who eventually delivers it in like manner to Eugene. “[T]he discovery was hers,” Lightwood reveals (812; bk. 4, ch. 10). Eugene, it appears, cannot articulate his feelings about Lizzie until Jenny imagines them into existence. As Hilary Schor observes, Jenny is a “figure of enormous imaginative power” (200). Indeed, she wields such an authority in the novel that her imaginative pursuits — including her dreams of marriage — are ultimately fulfilled. She is, quite literally, a spinner of fates.

Unlike Maria and Madeline, Jenny operates under no pretense that her disability disqualifies her from marriage. She remains very much “in the game,” and regularly refers to the certainty of future nuptials. As she says, “when I am courted, I shall make Him do some of the things that you do for me” (284; bk. 2, ch. 2). When Sloppy, the “giant” orphan, finally enters Jenny's shop, she suggests that the meeting was preordained: “I have been looking forward to knowing you” (880; bk. 4, ch. 16).Footnote ²³ Sloppy, now an amateur carpenter, offers to craft Jenny a “rare handle for [her] crutch-stick,” but nevertheless notes that she “hardly want[s] it at all” (882; bk. 4, ch. 16). Although Dickens declines to confirm the strongly suggested marriage of Jenny and Sloppy, the scene does act as a fitting conclusion to Jenny's narrative labor. Her “equipage,” or crutch (787; bk. 4, ch. 8), which rather explicitly makes her resemble the lame demon Asmodeus, becomes an ornamental prop after her narratorial work has concluded.Footnote ²⁴ Normalcy for the characters in Our Mutual Friend is reestablished by its most abnormal figure. As Garrett Stewart observes, she “stitches, and binds, and seams. . . to repair the chaos of her days” (105). In the postscript to the novel, Dickens refers to the “story-weaver at his loom” (893), comparing the writing of text to textile production. In this sense, Jenny's work throughout the novel — stitching discarded fabric into a complete and consistent social garment — has been no different than that of the novelist. The connection becomes even stronger when we acknowledge the “unwonted troubles” that Dickens suffered while writing the novel, which included “lameness” in his left foot caused by having “worked [himself] into a damaged state” (Forster 2: 278–79).

Characters with acquired disabilities would become more common in literature of the early twentieth century, especially following the First World War.Footnote ²⁵ However, the extraordinary authority ascribed to women characters with acquired physical disabilities appears to be a nineteenth-century phenomenon — one that is not limited to the novels featured in this study. Although they were excluded, distanced, or discouraged from the regulated networks of labor and reproduction, women with acquired disabilities were not removed from society to be hidden behind asylum walls or exhibition curtains. And Victorian novelists represented these subjects not merely as reminders of the capriciousness of fate, but as agents of disciplinary power. That they seem to occupy textual margins is evidence of their ability to perform extraordinary acts of observation and manipulation unnoticed. In the Victorian novel, especially, disability disguises ability. It gives characters, however paradoxically, discreet autonomy by releasing them from the bonds of normalcy. Being “out of the game” permits active participation in not only the narrative routine of matchmaking, but also the regulatory maintenance of social order. The novel, it has been argued, participates in disciplinary mechanisms via the invasive surveillance of omniscient narration.Footnote ²⁶ Characters with acquired disabilities are the unacknowledged legislators of the literary justice system.