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Narratives of Blindness in the Long Nineteenth Century

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Narratives of Blindness in the Long Nineteenth Century View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by ScholarSpace at University of Hawai'i at Manoa SYMPATHETIC IMAGINATION AND THE CONCEPT OF FACE: NARRATIVES OF BLINDNESS IN THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAIʻI AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLISH AUGUST 2018 By Madoka Nagado Dissertation Committee: Craig Howes, Chairperson Cynthia Franklin Peter H. Hoffenberg Joseph O’Mealy John Zuern CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENT .......................................................................................................................... ii ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................................... iii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ................................................................................................................... iv Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 1 Chapter I: Recognizing Blindness .................................................................................................. 32 Section 1 Sympathy, Imagination, and Tears in Thomas Blacklock’s Poems ........................... 32 Section 2 The Self-/Portraits of Blindness: James Wilson’s Auto/biography .......................... 52 Chapter II: Representing Blindness .............................................................................................. 84 Section 1 Vision, Epiphany, and Dickens’ Creative Process ............................................................ 84 Section 2 “‘Blind me Again, My Eyes are of No Use to Me”: The Sense of Self and Blindness in Wilkie Collins’ Poor Miss Finch ................................................................................................................ 110 Chapter III: Retelling Blindness .................................................................................................. 136 Blindness and Otherness in Frances Browne’s My Share of the World ..................................... 136 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................................... 176 Works Consulted .............................................................................................................................. 183 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENT As much as my dissertation is a philosophical and historical project, it is also political and personal. I could not achieve any of this without people. I would like to thank my committee members, Professors Cynthia Franklin, Peter H. Hoffenberg, Joseph O’Mealy, and John Zuern for generously offering their time, support, guidance, and good will throughout my dissertation. Without their persistent help, this dissertation would not have been possible. I would like to express my deep appreciation to my committee chair, Professor Craig Howes. His exceptional intellect, integrity, and passion ceaselessly and convincingly conveyed to me the joy and excitement of learning new things. I owe my special thanks to my writing group members: Janet Graham, Dr. Ruth Dawson, Dr. Deborah Ross, and Dr. Kathy Phillips. Not only did they give me insightful feedback, but the group also taught me how to deal with writing, and “life.” And I would like to extend a special thanks to my friends and family, which are too many to address, for all their unflinching help and support over many years. iii ABSTRACT This dissertation explores how sympathy conditions blind narratives, and also how Otherness is constituted within them. Arranged in three sections, “Recognizing Blindness,” “Representing Blindness,” and “Retelling Blindness,” I examine the nineteenth-century uses of “sympathy” in the literary representation of blindness. Drawing upon Emmanuel Levinas’ (1906-1995) concept of “face,” I read each narrative as an example of how historically and generically people’s sympathy towards Others has been presented, transmitted, and re-presented. What I call the “sympathetic imagination” represents the point of contact between the understanding of disabilities in the nineteenth century and its relation to Levinas’ ethical encounter with alterity, as I argue that each narrative uses “face” as a trope to represent the extended sympathies and enduring dilemmas provoked by encounters with blindness. iv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS Works by Levinas AT Alterity and Transcendence DEL “Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas” DF Difficult Freedom EI Ethics and Infinity NTR Nine Talmudic Readings OBBE Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence PP “Peace and Proximity” TI Totality and Infinity AN American Notes by Charles Dickens CH “Cricket on the Hearth” by Charles Dickens GD Gift of Death by Jacques Derrida IG Imprisoned Guest by Elisabeth Gitter OCS Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens PMF Poor Miss Finch by Wilkie Collins SA The Star of Attéghéi by Frances Browne 1 Introduction The main objects of this thesis are nineteenth-century disability narratives, and particularly works written by and about individuals with visual impairment. Arranged in three sections, “Recognizing Blindness,” “Representing Blindness,” and “Retelling Blindness,” this study examines both nineteenth-century uses of the word “sympathy” and British understandings of the relationship between vision and ethics. Drawing upon Emmanuel Levinas’ concept of “face,” I seek to explore how sympathy conditions blindness narratives, and also how Otherness is constituted within them. Levinas’ two most important ideas on alterity are first, that we never comprehend others, and second, that we are nevertheless responsible for them. I will argue that disability life writing can offer valuable ethical insights into how nineteenth-century British writers viewed themselves in relation to unrelated others, and by extension, can illuminate how we ourselves consider those not ourselves. For reasons that will become clear, when analyzing blind narratives by “blind authors,” I confine the scope of research to individuals who were blind from birth, or from a very young and usually unremembered age. While not disregarding the experiences and representation of acquired blindness, this study engages with historically situated assumptions that not having vision from a young age impedes acquiring knowledge and memory. My concern is therefore with figures with literally no sense of sight, so individuals such as John Bird, a physician who lost his sight later in life, are not part of my discussion. My dedication to this topic began with my memory of my uncle, who was deaf from the age of six months. The first interaction with him that I remember occurred when I had just learned how to write. I remember no hesitation, confusion, or any uncomfortable feelings about how we communicated, via writing. I recognized no difference in him. The question, therefore, is 2 when exactly did I begin—indeed, anxiously—to become conscious of the term disability? Or more to the point, at exactly what age, or on what occasion, did I first see him as a person who fit in the category of disabled? Did this recognition come to me gradually? What I do recognize for certain is that this self-awareness of my inexplicable anxiety, somehow bred into me, is where my concern with “different” bodies came from. To cite some reliable statistics, according to recent research conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 56.7 million people in the United States—one out of every five adults—live with disabilities (Brault). At some point, it is more than likely that most of those with disabilities will be denied the full enjoyment of their basic human rights because of deep-rooted, systematic prejudices against their “different” abilities. In ways similar to the experiences of those distinguished negatively due to race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and religion, people of any age with any form of disability are often highly vulnerable and marginalized in society. Recognizing my own ability—or rather, my ability privilege—also allowed me to recognize that unconscious ableist assumptions1 percolate through nearly every level of society I know. I now find it necessary to try to imagine how my uncle felt, and what he thought, while we were “talking.” Although not to my relief, I later learned that I am not alone in this. As Martha Stoddard Holmes observes, when all her students, to a greater or lesser extent, expressed “discomfort” when discussing disability issues in class, at that moment she realized “where we might begin the real work of understanding ability and disability” (ix). The more I became aware of voices that have been silenced through the attempts of others to avoid, protect, defend, or 1 With respect to the term “ableism,” I will follow the definition given by Sharon A. Groch, as it captures how the distinction between ability and disability is determined by arbitrary characteristics and our subjective convictions, or ideology: “the belief in the natural physical and mental superiority of nondisabled people and the prejudice and discriminatory behavior that arise as a result of this belief” (151). 3 speak for them, the more perplexed I became, asking “Why not me?” instead of “Why me?” My attitude somewhat resembled survivor’s guilt. Instead of thinking about disabilities as misfortunes that happened to Others, I was
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