Mary Klages. Woeful Afflictions: Disability and Sentimentality in Victorian America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. ix + 250 pp. $37.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8122-3499-2.

Reviewed by Wendy Kline (Department of History, University of Cincinnati)
Published on H-Disability (September, 2001)

Sentimental Afflictions

Sentimental Afflictions

Recent works in the history of disability attest to the increasing scholarly awareness of its centrality in American culture. Mary Klages' Woeful Afflictions makes a significant contribution to the growing literature of disability studies by locating representations of disability within a powerful sentimental discourse in Victorian America. This association between disability and sentimentality "persisted into the twentieth century," she argues, and has "served to confine representations of disabled people within narrow parameters" (p. 5).

Klages draws on a unique combination of sources to establish the link between disability and sentimentality: institutional reports (primarily from schools for the deaf and blind in the antebellum era) and popular representations of the disabled (in fiction, biography, and autobiography). She suggests that these two seemingly different types of accounts were actually quite similar in their use of a sentimental portrayal of the disabled; both attempted to "create new meanings for disabled bodies" (p. 7). They produced new images of the disabled as not merely "posters" (to generate empathy in the viewer) but also agents in their own right, capable of transcending their "afflictions" to reach out to others. Yet because these images were contained within a sentimental framework, they remained limiting.

Though Klages addresses all types of disabilities in her analysis, her focus is primarily on blindness. Until the late nineteenth century, blindness and deafness were the most recognizable forms of disability and the ones that generated the most concern. While blindness is more prevalent and was considered more "pathetic," it has not received the same scholarly attention that deafness has (though since the publication of Klages' book, this is beginning to change).[1] Klages reveals a rich array of sources on blindness, including the works of moral philosophers such as David Hume; the Annual Reports of the Perkins Institution for the Blind and the accounts of its first Director, Samuel Gridley Howe; blind characters in popular fiction; two autobiographies of blind women published in the mid-nineteenth century; and accounts of well-known deaf-blind women, Laura Bridgman and Helen Keller.

Klages is particularly adept at drawing together varied sources in a way that strengthens her argument about the portrayal of disability in Victorian culture. Institutional and fictional evidence complement each other effectively here; each builds upon the ideas of the other. For example, in Chapter Two, Klages analyzes Howe's unsuccessful struggle to transform the blind into productive members of society rather than objects of charity. He could not resolve the tensions between capitalism and compassion, and determined that the blind would never become useful members of society. Yet fictional accounts of disability were able to resolve these tensions in a way that Howe could not. While Howe envisioned blind persons as contained within home-like institutions, fictions showed disabled characters "in the marketplace, not to be barred from production but to reform the essential selfishness of economic relations," as Klages argues. "What Howe had accepted as the immutable laws of trade are reworked in these stories, which show that the power of disability as a signifier of suffering and compassion is strong enough to erase and rewrite the heartless rules of economic competition" (p. 56).

Klages could go even further in her analysis of the interplay between fictional and institutional accounts. There was a clear connection between disabled "celebrities" Laura Bridgman and Helen Keller and sentimental fiction; Charles Dickens became a fan of Bridgman after their encounter, while William Dean Howells and Mark Twain were enthralled with Keller. These writers helped to promote their fame; as Klages points out, their life stories suggested that there was in fact a realistic side to the disabled images in sentimental fiction (or perhaps it is the reverse--their appeal lay in their resemblance to fictional sentimental heroines). Such connections underscore the fluidity between fiction and reality in representations of disability, a fluidity that undoubtedly strengthened its impact.

One effective example of the limitations of the new sentimental framework for disability was its inability to portray the disabled as sexual beings. For women, the nineteenth-century definition of sexuality centered on procreation rather than pleasure. Given the assumption that disabled women were "afflicted," procreation was not considered acceptable, for it might yield a "defective" child. At Perkins, Howe insisted on keeping male and female patients segregated for this reason. In fiction, many disabled heroines were on their deathbed by adolescence, thus avoiding the problem of sexuality. Disabled heroines could exert empathy and influence in sentimental literature, but they could not take part in one of the key definitions of nineteenth-century True Womanhood: motherhood. Here, Klages might have teased out more in the interplay between representations and reality, for both Bridgman and Keller lived well past adolescence. It would be interesting to know more about how these real-life, model heroines confronted a limited, asexual definition of womanhood (a topic that remains taboo for disabled women to this day, as Klages points out).

Nonetheless, this is a valuable contribution to a growing field that scholars can no longer ignore. By demonstrating the centrality of disability in nineteenth-century sentimental discourse, Klages convincingly asserts that bodily issues were as complex and significant then as they are today. Indeed, she has located some of the origins of the current confining representations of disability in the ideas and images of nineteenth-century Victorian culture.

Note

[1]. See Elisabeth Gitter, The Imprisoned Guest: Samuel Howe and Laura Bridgman, the Original Deaf-Blind Girl (Farrar Strous & Giroux, 2001); Ernest Freeberg, The Education of Laura Bridgman: First Deaf and Blind Person to Learn Language (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Catherine J. Kudlick, "The Outlook of The Problem and the Problem with the Outlook: Two Advocacy Journals Reinvent Blind People in Turn-of-the-Century America," The New Disability History: American Perspectives, ed. by Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umanski (New York: New York University Press, 2001).

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Citation: Wendy Kline. Review of Klages, Mary, Woeful Afflictions: Disability and Sentimentality in Victorian America. H-Disability, H-Net Reviews. September, 2001.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=5468

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