COGNITIVE DISABILTY AND NARRATIVE by EVAN CHALOUPKA Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY May 2018 2 CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES We hereby approve the dissertation of Evan Chaloupka candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.* Committee Chair William Marling Committee Member Kimberly Emmons Committee Member Athena Vrettos Committee Member Jonathan Sadowsky Date of Defense February 9, 2018 * We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein. 3 Table of Contents List of Figures .....................................................................................................................4 Acknowledgements .............................................................................................................5 Abstract ...............................................................................................................................6 Chapter 1: Introduction The Possibility and Realization of Cognitive Disability and Narrative ......................7 Chapter 2 Reader Engagement with Cognitive Disability in American Literary Naturalism…35 Chapter 3 Trying to See Cognitive Disability: The Promise and Problem of Vision ................ 84 Chapter 4 History, Pathology, and Form in Modernist Narratives of Disability ......................133 Chapter 5 The Cognition of Connection: Narrating Family Experiences of Cognitive Disability in the 1950s ..............................................................................................................180 Chapter 6: Conclusion Coming to Know Cognitive Disability in Narrative ................................................233 Endnotes ...........................................................................................................................253 Works Cited .....................................................................................................................282 4 List of Figures Fig. 1. Character Development in Norris’s Fiction........................................................... 81 Fig. 2. Illustrations in Chapter One and Two of Bly’s Ten Days ..................................... 94 Fig. 3. Illustration in Chapter Five of Bly’s Ten Days...................................................... 97 Fig. 4. “Quiet Inmates out for a Walk” ............................................................................100 Fig. 5. First Photograph in The Kallikak Family .............................................................109 Fig. 6. Three Kallikak Children .......................................................................................112 Fig. 7. First Hereditary Chart ...........................................................................................115 Fig. 8. Later Hereditary Chart ..........................................................................................116 Fig. 9. Cumulative Object Chart ......................................................................................147 Fig. 10. Illustration from How Retarded Children Can Be Helped .................................193 5 Acknowledgements Thanks to Kayla, for her love and support, of course, but also for her unwavering commitment to keeping my sights on what makes the study and teaching of English meaningful. Thanks to William Marling for his mentorship and guidance. Thanks to Kimberly Emmons, Athena Vrettos, and Jonathon Sadowsky for their excellent feedback. Thanks to my colleagues within and outside of the Case English department, whose insights have shaped what this dissertation says and have clarified why it matters. Thanks to my students who have allowed me to rediscover these texts as readers first see them. Thanks to Avery, Jackie, and Steve, for making me a part of their home and cluing me into features of our world that many overlook. Thanks to my family and friends who have grounded me throughout this dissertation writing journey. Linda, Scott, Adam, Ryan, Maryann, Karen, Randy, Nikki, and Emily – there, your names have been said. 6 Cognitive Disability and Narrative Abstract by EVAN CHALOUPKA This dissertation reveals how cognitive disability’s formal and rhetorical potential developed in the U.S. from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, detailing the ways in which writers determined the reader’s engagement with cognitive others. Scientific pathology inspired literary authors to experiment with narrative mechanics. Conversely, literature and popular nonfiction revealed to psychologists unrecognized features of cognitive identity as well as narrative’s methodological and political potential. Cognitive disability, never fully assimilable, emerges as a force that can reorganize narrative events and aestheticize their telling. My work challenges theories of disability that prefigure difference as fixed or known in narrative. Great authors redefine disability as a force that is always coming to be known. I introduce a heuristic to help scholars understand this process, specifically how stories introduce tenuous ways of representing and narrating disability, put forth conflicting ontological claims about the mind, and withhold what can be known about disability at key moments. As readers struggle to pin down what exactly disability is, narrative places them in a space where they can reflect not only on the abilities of the disabled subject, but their own. 7 Chapter One Introduction: The Possibility and Realization of Cognitive Disability in Narrative “We’ve hit a turning point in our understanding of autism, but I think it comes from literature, not science. Not to downplay the science: the newest studies on amino acid deficiencies, faulty neurotransmitters, and disruptions in the cortex may shine light on the whys of the disorder. But to find out the whats — what it’s like to be autistic, from the inside — there’s now a critical mass of books written by those on the spectrum. They are extraordinary, moving, and jeweled with epiphanies.” – Katharine Whittemore, “Journeys into the Autistic Mind” in The Boston Globe (2014). What makes for good disability fiction? In Whittemore’s view, the best stories about cognitive disability allow the reader to inhabit the mind of the Other, to witness disability experience “from inside.” Only the present day has availed this possibility, which marks an important moment in literary history. At last the normal reader can access a state that has sat secret for so long. One can easily see how this new space might invigorate existing critical schools like cognitive approaches to literature.1 For other fields, foundational questions become less interesting. When disability studies critic Alice Hall asks whether literature can “offer the possibility of empathizing or even entering the consciousness” (4) of the disabled other, the response is simple: yes. It can. After all, the opening lines of Daniel Tammet’s autobiography Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Mind of an Autistic Savant (2006), which Whittemore reviews, seem to teleport normal readers to a foreign mind replete with fascinating new ways of seeing the world.2 “I was born January 31, 1979—a Wednesday. I know it was a Wednesday, because the date is blue in my mind and Wednesdays are always blue, like the number 9 or the sound of loud voices arguing” (1). Who isn’t intrigued by a blue Wednesday, and how cool is it that this storyteller allows us to experience Wednesday – the emblem of workweek drudgery – 8 like this? Prior to the bloom of life writing that Whittemore now revels in, the mind of the autist was a tomb foreclosed. But now the stone that sealed it has been rolled away. Readers enter a space “jeweled with epiphanies” that had once sat darkened. Its coruscant treasures sit ready to delight and instruct whoever enters. The “dumb” mind has always been a crusade for authors and scientists. Prior to the new age of accessibility that Whittemore proclaims, representing cognitive disability involved traversing far more difficult terrain. Consider Frank Norris’s McTeague (1899). When John D. Barry reviewed the book in the Literary World, he noted that many readers were alarmed by the novel’s attention to characters who lived “on the verge of the criminal class” – a location that was intimately tied to cognitive disability in the late 19th century (88).3 Norris faced a problem that today’s autistic life writers do not: the problem of writing in harmony with the disabled mind. How can Norris, an able-minded author, faithfully represent the world as the slow-witted dentist (and eventual murderer) of Polk Street sees it? At times, Norris succeeds, and Barry praises the book’s “profound insight into character” (88). But at other times, he doesn’t, and Barry highlights Norris’s struggle to rise to this challenge: Now and then the reader sees the author pulling the strings, so to speak, standing off and explaining characters in a way that suggests superiority. This is a fault to which I have already referred in these columns in connection with the work of nearly all our writers of fiction. Mr. Norris would have gained in power if he had not only projected his characters and allowed them to explain themselves as much as possible, but also used, whenever he spoke in his capacity as author, language wholly in harmony with theirs. (88) 9 For Barry, Norris is at his worst when he acts as an animator, tugging and prodding characters in ways that prompt