Writing Sight and Blindness in Early Modern England

Abstract

“Writing Sight and Blindness in Early Modern England” explores two interlocking phenomena. First, I analyse the expressive power of non-normative visual conditions such as extreme visual acuity, partial sightedness, and blindness in texts ranging from Shakespeare to Milton. Second, I demonstrate how poetic language registers visual ability or lack, and how it changes in its systems of reference and at the structural level to bear and express variously-sighted creative aptitudes. This work draws on foundational concepts of contemporary disability studies (specifically that of disability as a kind of embodied knowledge) and current scholarship on the senses (especially sightedness) to contribute back to these fields and introduce to early modern studies a sense of the precise potential of patterned language to bear the weight of visual difference. As a historicist, I examine the cultural work performed by sight and blindness in early modern England; as a scholar of literature invested in the workings of language, I assess what it means to think of blindness in terms of language. The arc of the dissertation is from Shakespeare, a dramatic poet, imagining blindness, to Milton, a blind poet, imagining worlds. This is an arc from the limits of the sighted imagination, as compellingly owned and laid out by Shakespeare, to the capacities of the blind one, as evidenced by Milton.

I begin with Shakespeare. Blindness on the Shakespearean stage, I argue, is about the limits of vision, but also about the limits of knowledge and justice. Through an examination of the Simpcox episode in 2 Henry VI, where an audience is made complicit within the discovery of a blind fraud, and King Lear, where scenes of extraordinary inhumanity are performed onstage, Chapter I shows how this theatre calls extravagant attention to its own theatricality, and demonstrates that the arts of metaphor and language work as reparations in these blindingly violent worlds.

Chapter II contemplates a pivotal literary treatment of the presence of sight. I first use the three earliest witnesses of The Temple to assert George Herbert’s orchestration of a visual assembly of textual meaning in his poetry. Then, I read Herbert’s often troubled poetic constructions of sight to reveal the poet’s desiring of a kind of blindness—for only in the visually withdrawn and introspective state is it possible for him to access God’s regard.

I finally come to Milton and what I call his blind language (poetic language created while blind). In Chapter III, I read the shorter poems composed during Milton’s approaching and final blindness to place the visual loss centrally within his poetic achievements, and to argue for his decisive accommodation of visual difference through poetic language. In Chapter IV, I read Paradise Lost for blind language. I identify five characteristics of blind language—the metaphorical, structural, cognitive, rhetorical, and affective—and show how it celebrates its own mnemonic power, commands its reader’s participation, takes risks, and excavates words and concepts and linguistic formations that are darkness until made visible.