Review

With the rise of disability studies in the humanities in the last decade of the twentieth century, critics such as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Lennard Davis, David T. Mitchell, and Susan L. Snyder have had discourses on disability. Still, Martha Stoddard Holmes' Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture (2003) had been the only book-length study that investigated disability in late nineteenth-century British literature.Now comes Clare Walker Gore's Plotting Disability in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (2020). Gore fills in the missing piece of the puzzle with her eye-catching and valuable study that examines disabled characters in a broad range of Victorian novels. Adopting an interdisciplinary critical approach, Gore emphasizes “understanding the fiction itself” (11) rather than an overtly political dimension by delving into the nuanced interplay “between disability as a social identity and disability as incapacity in novelistic characterization” (2). By “examining what disabled characters do in novels” (3) and by tracing “how disability has shaped novelistic characterization, and how the attribution of social disability to a character narratively dis/ables them” (6), Gore not only offers fresh insight into Victorian literary studies, but also uncovers the potential of disability studies in literary criticism.Indebted to Holmes' focus on the association between disability and excessive emotion, Gore's book provides a new perspective—the association between disability and plot—on interpretation of Victorian novels. Impressively concerning a wide range of genres including melodrama, the sensation novel, the feminine domestic novel, and the late Victorian realistic novel, she explores how the representation of disability varies in different forms. To fulfill this ambitious and worthy task, Gore features not only canonical writers like Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, and Henry James, but also minor writers like Dinah Mulock Craik and Charlotte M. Yonge. Besides “Introduction” (1–20) and “Coda” (232–37), the main body of Gore's book is divided into four interrelated chapters.Chapter 1, “A Possible Person? Marking the Minor Character in Dickens,” examines the peripheral positions of disabled characters in Charles Dickens' novels. In his fictional worlds, Dickens establishes a close connection between the physical disability and the marginalized disabled characters. As Gore claims, “Dickens trains his readers to understand physical distinctiveness and impairment as indicators of minor status” (15). However, it should be noted that Dickens never connives at such narrative injustice. Gore argues that “[Dickens] uses this connection in subtle ways to highlight the cruelties of the narrative order” (15).Gore begins her analysis with the crippled Smike in Nicholas Nickleby (1839), Dickens' third novel. For Gore, the primary narrative function of Smike, to borrow René Girard's term, is to move the plot forward as “the scapegoat” (32). Smike is used as the passive “object of affect” (32), whose suffering could elicit the gazer's—here, the protagonist—sympathy and caring, therefore promoting the protagonist's sentimental development without letting him suffer. As a marginalized character, Smike is never allowed to get involved in the marriage or family plot. Instead, “[g]etting out of the way at the right moment is a crucial part of Smike's narrative work” (32). This narrative order, however, is sometimes destabilized by Dickens himself. By exposing the possibility of characterizing Smike as “the true sentimental subject” (35), Dickens arranges this sidelined character to resist “his narrative role as a sentimental sacrifice” (33), posing “a subtle challenge to the novel's sentimental and melodramatic plot structures” (33).Gore's reading of The Old Curiosity Shop (1840) paves the way for a detailed analysis of Bleak House (1853) and Little Dorrit (1857), in which Dickens' representation of the disabling femininity is brought into focus. Little Nell and the Marchioness in The Old Curiosity Shop prefigure Dickens's later ideal heroines (Esther Summerson and Little Dorrit) through whom Gore goes deep into “the disabling nature of feminine goodness” (57). In both cases, Gore finds that the heroines' self-effacing functions are prerequisites for their central roles. Gore also argues that the self-effacement is deliberately externalized by Dickens as Esther's disfiguring scar and Little Dorrit's unusual stature. On one hand, the main narrative celebrates the heroines' selfless goodness. On the other hand, there exists a counter-narrative of the “disfigurements,” Gore argues, which is in fatal tension with the main narrative and ironically reveals the mental sufferings of these ideal females. In this way, Gore discloses the true disabling power of ideal femininity progressing beneath the main narrative. Coincidentally, such a writing strategy is named by Prof. Dan Shen as “covert progression behind plot development,” which refers to “a very different and powerful dynamic that runs at a deeper and hidden level throughout the text” (147). According to Shen, “[t]he covert progression is often ironic in nature, and it either supplements or subverts the plot's thematic drive” (148). This view echoes with Gore's analysis of Dickens' disability plot.Chapter 2, “At the Margins of Mystery: Sensational Difference in Wilkie Collins,” is devoted to Collins' mystery novels. Gore is interested in how the disability plot sustains mystery and how it produces sensation. According to Gore, Collins establishes the sensational tradition of treating the body as an unreliable sign of identity in detective novels. To put it another way, characters' unstable relation to the plot, which remains unknown or unclear to readers until the entire riddle is revealed, becomes key to the sensational effect. Collins “engage[s] the reader's preconceptions about a disabled character's relationship to plot so that he can perform sensational reversals at the novels' conclusions” (15). Gore analyzes Collins' masterpiece The Moonstone (1868) to illustrate this point. While the able-bodied philanthropist Godfrey Ablewhite surprisingly turns out to be the real criminal, the disabled characters, Rosanna Spearman and Ezra Jennings, create suspense throughout the novel. Collins challenges the literary tradition of characterizing the disabled as the marginalized other, thereby complicating the plots of detective novels. As Gore states, “[gender], class, race and, above all, disability are no longer fixed hierarchies that are written on the body for us to read” (77).Gore progresses further in her analysis of The Law and the Lady (1875). For Gore, disability “enables Collins to put sensation to affective work” (15) in his characterization of legless Miserrimus. Collins refuses to characterize Miserrimus as a flat sign of deformed villain without any subjectivity or feeling. Instead, Collins successfully invests this disabled character with intense emotional complexity by exposing his desperate desire for love and his ambition to manipulate the detective plot. From the affective perspective, Miserrimus is by no means incomplete or “less than human” (97). He is the despicable villain who causes the death of Sara while, to readers' surprise, he's also the unlovable and pitiable invalid who suffers from the physical incompleteness. The ethical ambiguity of Miserrimus thus forces readers to reassess the inequity of narrative hierarchy. In Gore's words, Miserrimus's interrogation of what it means to be a ‘cripple’ speaks not just to the politics of disability, but to the politics of plotting: by the end of the novel, we are no longer confident that we understand who is beautiful, who is loveable, who has the right to play detective or romantic lead, or who must be consigned to narrative oblivion.” (93) In Gore's discussion of Collins, disabled minor characters, like Rosanna and Miserrimus, are unusually presented as affective subjects that herald the later narrative centrality of Lucilla in Poor Miss Finch (1872). In this regard, Gore's analysis of Collins' “politics of affect” (91) paves the way for further discussion in the following chapter.Chapter 3, “(De)Forming Families: Disability and the Marriage Plot in Dinah Mulock Craik and Charlotte M. Yonge,” mainly deals with the disability plot in two Victorian female writers' domestic novels. Unlike mainstream male writers discussed hitherto, both female writers took a bold move to position disability at the center of the narrative. Gore delves into this phenomenon and explores how the authors treat disability “as a central, rather than a marginal, human experience” (118).In Gore's view, there is an affective turn in both female writers' novels. For both writers, physical disability functions as the narrative strategy to foreground the “affective responses” (122) and emotional development of the disabled characters. In John Halifax, Gentleman (1856), for example, Craik is thought to deliberately choose a disabled narrator, Phineas, to tell the life story of John Halifax from an impoverished orphan to a successful tradesman. According to Gore, though structurally sidelined as a bystander, Phineas is placed at “the sentimental center of the narrative” (135) and “remains a troubling character” (136) to the main plot. Again, to borrow Prof. Dan Shen's theory, what Gore implies here is that Phineas' suppressed pains and desires should be understood as the “covert progression,” an undercurrent in parallel with the main plot of John's journey to worldly success, which affectively and effectively pulls readers into the story. The affective approach also applies to Craik's A Noble Life (1866) and Yonge's The Heir of Redclyffe (1853).What's worth mentioning is the feminist approach that Gore adopts to analyze both female writers' disabled characters. For Craik and Yonge, disability expands their narrative scope in expressing femininity. Their disabled figures are the ones endowed with the “ideal” femininity to affectively influence and morally unite the communities. Influenced by her evangelical beliefs, Craik held women should be self-sufficient, which was opposed to the Victorian stereotype of passive angelic roles. At the same time, she was not that progressive; she firmly clung to the tradition that the true calling of a woman should be domestic (126). Craik's “true form of femininity” (125), which was difficult to achieve in reality, is fully embodied in her disabled heroine of Olive (1850), who is a self-made woman and the perfect complement to her husband's ideal masculinity (125–26). Disability actually becomes the perfect carrier of Craik's ideal femininity. Sparing Olive from the pursuit of physical loveliness and girlish flirting, the disabling experience equips her with praiseworthy qualities of “inexhaustible patience and stoicism” based on “religious faith” (126), facilitating her material and spiritual independence while surprisingly maintaining her meekness as the perfect daughter and wife. In Gore's words, disability enables Craik to “expand the narrative possibilities of the ‘feminine novel’ without jettisoning the very femininity she seeks to vindicate” (123). As for Yonge, a pious Tractarian, ideal femininity is staunchly conservative, as reflected in the disabled character Margaret May in The Daisy Chain (1856). Margaret's spiritual bildung is only realized through her experience of disability, which prepares her for the devotion to God, and enables her to become the moral example to those around her. In this way, Yonge's treatment of disability, never disentangled from femininity, is believed to be “both metaphoric and metonymic of all Christian experience” (152). It's important to acknowledge that both writers' ideal forms of femininity are problematic to some extent. Gore indicates that their idealized femininity is rendered possible only when accompanied by the distorted sense of inadequacy, the core experience of disability.Chapter 4, “Terminal Decline: Physical Frailty and Moral Inheritance in George Eliot and Henry James,” analyzes the reconstructed redemptive disability plots in the works of George Eliot and Henry James from the ethical perspective. Redemptive disability plot usually refers to a narrative that treats disability “as an experience enabling moral growth and endowing the disabled character with a moral legacy that they need to pass on” (175). While confronting an increasingly materialistic world in which faith was declining and Darwinism rising, both George Eliot and Henry James departed from their Victorian predecessors, reshaping the redemptive disability plot “in ways that reflected their diminishing readiness to offer narrative solutions to social and moral problems through the neat resolution of plot” (176). For Gore, their writing strategies are entangled with a strong sense of “proto-modernist anxieties about heredity and futurity” (176), which mirrors the “increasing skepticism about the possibility of creating plots that were both morally satisfying and, in any meaningful sense, realistic” (176).Gore starts with how Eliot rewrites the disability redemptive plot in The Mill on the Floss (1860). She emphasizes Eliot's realist representation of “the difficulty of living in the world” (176). The plot of moral redemption is evident because the disabled character, Philip, achieves moral growth through his sufferings. Meanwhile, Eliot arranges a counter-narrative of “the Darwinian plot of evolution” (187), making Philip, the moral heir, excluded from marriage and biological inheritance as a result of the “natural” selection. In this case, the moral legacy could not be passed on any further. The inner opposition between moral inheritance and biological disinheritance, from Gore's perspective, testifies to Eliot's gloomy view that reality is shaped by natural evolution rather than moral inheritance (187). Gore observers that disability “acts as a potent symbol for the injustice of a world in which those who are morally fitted to further ‘the onward tendency of human things’ may be biologically unfit to do so” (187). This idea is further illustrated in Gore's subsequent reading of Daniel Deronda (1876). Gore splits the novel into “realist and non-realist halves, with the latter structured by the redemptive disability plot”(191) in which Mordecai, the embodiment of “the archetypal disabled angel with a legacy”(190), manages to pass on his moral and spiritual inheritance to the able-bodied protagonist, Daniel, while he himself fails to survive. Probing into the ethics of Mordecai's “yearning for transmission” (187), Gore points out that Mordecai is not altogether selfless because he secretly desires to live on through Daniel, the physically fit one “who will inherit the earth” (201). In this way, the ethical ambiguity in Eliot's writing not only deconstructs the Victorian image of “the saintly invalid,” but also draws readers' attention to “the plight of the losers in the struggle for existence” (201).Gore attends to the same topic in Henry James' masterpiece novels, The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and The Wings of the Dove (1902), with a different conclusion. In Gore's reading of The Wings of the Dove, the redemptive disability plot is completely broken down; the tragedy of Milly's illness-caused death is not compensated by the moral elevation she has expected. Instead, James plots against her goodness and forgiveness by making them eventually rejected by the heroine, Kate, whose lack of morality reveals to readers that the law governing this fictional world is “the mere aesthetic instinct of mankind” (223). According to Gore, the damaging effects of such aesthetic instinct are subtly implied by James with his disclosure of pervasive revulsion against physical disability throughout the book. Therefore, Gore highlights James' ethical reflection on the “willed and systematic blindness” (224) toward disability, a byproduct of the rising eugenic thinking in the Victorian era. It is only in this light of ethics that James' writing is “anti-eugenicist, a kind of lament for the values that social Darwinism would accord no place in the modern world, testifying to the ongoing need for the moral scrupulousness, charity and forgiveness that such a world-view largely discounts” (223).In general, by “[plotting] disabled characters across the field of Victorian fiction,” Gore has “discovered them in the act of performing an astonishing variety of narrative work, the social identity arising from their impairments actually enabling them to play a host of necessary plot roles”(3). Gore's work is highly valuable in the following aspects. First, she notes that the narrative roles of disabled characters in nineteenth-century fictions evolve from the assistive ones to leading ones. Second, her analysis highlights the affective turn as well as the ethical one in Victorian writers' treatment of disabled characters. Third, through a feminist reading of disabled females in the works of Dickens, Craik and Yonge, Gore discloses the disabling aspects of ideal femininity in nineteenth-century culture through deconstructing the cultural image of Victorian angelic roles. Last but not least, Gore's analysis of the disability plots in texts like Bleak House, Little Dorrit, John Halifax, Gentleman and The Mill on the Floss echoes Shen's theory of “covert progression.” As Shen puts it, “[i]f we miss the covert progression, we may only get a partial (in the supplementary case) or distorted (in the subversive case) picture of the thematics, the characters, and the narrative's aesthetic value” (172). Likewise, Gore's discussion presents a fuller picture of nineteenth-century social, historical and cultural views, offering an important clue to the interpretation of Victorian literary texts.Still, Gore's study is not without flaw. Some of Gore's discussion lacks detailed contextualization. For example, Gore claims that “disability was frequently characterized as feminizing in fiction of the period” (95). But why were male disabled characters labeled “feminine” in that certain period? Was that related to the debates concerning “who is fit to work”? Gore simply states an argument without providing necessary background information, leaving readers unfamiliar with this field confused. As for her reading of Henry James's eugenic anxiety, Gore's argument would certainly be more convincing and clearer if she could on James's with nineteenth-century in and in Plotting Disability in the Nineteenth-Century Novel is an and the Victorian into a fresh of literary disability studies, Gore offers a new interpretation of these nineteenth-century texts and characters. in disability studies, she puts her discussion in with other important in this not only the of literary disability studies but also new for in this

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