Gender Disassociation and Identity Displacement as an Effect of Victorian Depictions of Disability: John Halifax, Gentleman and ‘The Withered Arm’

In John Halifax, Gentleman (1856), Phineas Fletcher, feeling uncharacteristically strong and healthy, tells us that 'for that one night, at least, I felt myself a man'. 1 By telling us that only when he is unusually strong can Phineas feel truly masculine, the author, Dinah Mulock Craik, implies that, in his lifelong, inescapable infirmity, he is not ordinarily masculine enough to be considered a man.In 'The Withered Arm' (1888), Thomas Hardy plays with concepts of beauty in relation to disfigurement, presenting a disabled woman who feels unable to identify with her femininity.In these two texts, Craik and Hardy toy with concepts of gender, and associating with common tropes of one's gender, highlighting that gender expression and feelings of gender identity relate heavily to one's physicality.As a man enfeebled by his illness, Craik's Phineas Fletcher is consistently feminised and aligned with female characters.Conversely, Hardy's Gertrude Lodge, once considered delicately feminine, feels exhaustingly unable to perform her feminine duties as a wife due to her untreatable physical disfigurement, as she is 1 Dinah Mulock Craik, John Halifax, Gentleman (London: Readers Library Publishing Co.Ltd., 1856), p. 60.Further references to this edition are given after quotations in the text.pulled further and further from any form of gender identity.Through the acute feminisation of Phineas, and Gertrude's disassociation with her once 'evanescent' femininity, it is clear that Victorian writers assign disability a sense of gender in a disparaging way, creating a sense of disassociation of gender and identity displacement for disabled characters. 2 Throughout my exploration of the two texts, I will be analysing their presentation of gender disassociation.For the purposes of the essay, this term means how characters fail to identify to their gender in typical ways, and how they express concepts of androgynous or cross-gender identity.In Craik's John Halifax, Gentleman, disability is depicted as unmanly.Whether this is through depicting Phineas as child-like or feminised, he is rarely presented as an adult man, especially in comparison to the perfect masculinity of John Halifax.Phineas' disability comes in the form of extreme physical weakness and constant fatigue, leaving him unable to walk, either without support or at all at varying points of the novel.Partially, the feminisation of Phineas comes from the fact that he is housebound.Phineas is unable to work and is therefore bound to the domestic sphere of the home.This aligns Phineas more with Ursula than John Halifax, ultimately feminising him.Given that this novel endorses separate spheres for men and women, as seen through the constant naming of Ursula as simply 'the mother' following her marriage to John, it is especially pertinent that Phineas is housebound.Craik makes a distinct decision to show women in the home, and men in the workplace, so in keeping Phineas in the feminine sphere, she feminises the disabled character.Interestingly, Rosemarie Garland Thomson tells us that femininity and disability are often equated in literature, as they 'are cast as deviant and inferior; both are excluded from full participation in public as well as economic life'.3 We can see how Craik's characterisation of Phineas is aligned with a tradition of writing

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