Transient disabilities: didactic illness, corrective pain and enforced care relations in the “Golden Age” of children's literature

• Main Author: Khaira, Tasreen Kaur
• Other Authors: Katherine Blyn Wakely-Mulroney
• Format: Thesis-Master by Research
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2023
• Subjects: Humanities::Literature
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/167067
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Hegemonic visions of what the human body and mind should be pervade the literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, especially literature that caters to child readers. The construction of normalcy with regards to the mind and body in the nineteenth century, coupled with the growing children’s literature market, resulted in the use of disability and sickness in children’s novels as narrative prosthesis—a crutch upon which these novels depended to drive their didactic plots. While childhood was often perceived to be separate from the adult world as a sacred period of fun and play, the nineteenth century’s preoccupation with the healthy mind and body collapsed the boundaries between childhood and adulthood. This thesis will examine the blurring of these boundaries in texts published during the long “Golden Age” of children’s literature, especially texts targeted at young girls, in order to trace how disability as a narrative tool worked to interpret and discipline the female mind and body. Given the additional role of the woman as the primary caregiver in a relationship between the carer and the cared-for during the long nineteenth century, this thesis questions how constructions of childhood and the processes of growing up vary when complicated by gendered differences. Drawing largely from Talia Schaffer’s take on the feminist theory of “ethics of care” in relation to the portrayal of disability in Victorian novels, the thesis will examine the care relations formed between the caregiver and the cared-for in children’s periodicals and books of the “Golden Age”. Doing so will highlight the extent to which these care relations reinforce the otherization of disabled bodies and the relegation of girls and women to the domestic sphere. Paying special attention to texts that continue to be reprinted and adapted today—such as Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden and its film adaptations—this thesis will trace the extent to which they continue to perpetuate hegemonic structures of able-bodied normativity and femininity despite the shifting social and cultural attitudes towards disability today.