Invalid Feelings: Affect in Crip Literature

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century autobiographical narratives of illness, placing them in broader cultural discourses on invalidism and constructing a Victorian archive of crip feelings. Assembled from a range of literary, medical, and visual texts composed between 1830s and 1930s, my archive reveals emotions and moods associated with illness that have been culturally delegitimized as invalid. Relying on the methods of close reading, comparison, and historicization, I show that in Victorian Britain crip feelings were monitored and regulated through a variety of discursive channels. Visual and fictional representations of invalids as well as medical texts were mechanisms of affective control, through which crip affect came to be pathologized. However, I argue that in their autobiographical narratives, invalids painted a different picture of their crip experiences and affects. They contested affective disciplining, rearticulating crip feelings as conduits to surprising and subversive knowledges and ethical practices. A crip progeny of affect studies, my dissertation expands and transforms inquiries into the cultural histories of feelings, centering crip autobiography as a site of discursive self-crafting and resistance to affective discipline. In each chapter, I focus on one self-proclaimed invalid author, analyzing their life-writings and other autobiographically inflected texts not only for the crip feelings they articulate, but also for the crip feelings and epistemologies they perform. The introduction establishes the theoretical framework of the project through a reading of Virginia Woolf’s essay “On Being Ill,” in which Woolf argues that illness changes how one feels, acts, and knows, generating an anti-sentimental and therefore anti-anthropocentric worldview. Drawing on Woolf’s crip lambasting of sympathy, Chapter 1 reads invalid poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s writings about her dog as crip erotica, a queer utopian reimagining of suffocating norms of cross-species sympathy. Chapter 2 moves from the domestic household to the imperial ship to examine Charles Darwin’s accounts of seasickness written aboard the Beagle. Reading Darwin’s description of being hammock-ridden while his specimens eerily come to life, I locate in his diaries the mood of uncanniness, which, I argue, has been associated with the states of mental illness in literature and psychiatry alike. Moving from imagined to real horrors, Chapter 3 explores Victorian litterateur John Addington Symonds’s articulations of queer anxiety. Reading his Memoirs and private correspondences against the late-nineteenth century medical writings on inversion, I show that Symonds’s anxiety writings emerge as queer counter-discourse to psychiatric knowledge, wherein he purposefully deploys his experience of trauma to challenge the medical correlations of homosexuality to neurosis. Finally, in the Conclusion I examine the fragmented archive of Joan Procter, the chronically ill herpetologist and the first female Curator of Reptiles in London Zoo. Speculating on her experience of illness, I reflect on the social conditioning of crip silences, and the methods for imagining and reconstructing the unrecorded crip histories.