"Defects": Engendering the Modern Body

This collection of essays examines the emergence of the concept of physical defect in the early modern and Enlightenment periods. Disability studies has become increasingly relevant to literary and cultural studies as scholars look to disability as a social category—a category often ignored and undervalued in our own society—in addition to those of race, gender, and class. In the humanities in general, these studies have built upon recent work in the various disciplines: from literary theory and rhetorical studies, disability studies adopts the critical inspection of representation and of discursive constructions of reality; it extends the new social history’s attention to marginalized groups; and it espouses cultural studies’ contention of the implicit political orientation of research and pedagogy. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scholars, however, have only just begun to explore the concept of disability: Defects makes a critical contribution to this vital research.

In the introduction to Defects, the editors locate this collection in the two contexts of disability studies and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scholarship. Looking at disability within a historical and cultural context, these essays connect the history of women with that of disabilities, as emerging notions of sexual difference within the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries defined women in themselves as defective. Thus, this work not only makes a significant contribution to disability studies, expanding notions of a category of experience that is often marginalized, but to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century studies as well, by historicizing disability as a social category. As deformity emerged as a social class, Restoration and eighteenth-century culture attempted to understand disability within its burgeoning classifications of humanness. During this period, most often, the disabled and deformed were separated from the class of humanity since outer deformity was seen as a sign of one’s inner deformity. William Hays, one of the first eighteenth-century writers to discuss his own physical deformity, speaks against those that would see him as less than human by establishing the constructed nature of deformity. In his autobiographical essay Deformity: An Essay (1754), Hays locates deformity in the observer, an essential notion that figures predominantly in this collection.

Defects is also significant to early modern and Enlightenment scholars in its attention to the differences among disabilities. Literary and cultural studies that analyze disability’s cultural deployment have often examined societal discourses of disability in general, delineating a general historical experience that ignores particularities. Instead, this collection examines ideological and social contexts grounded in particular disability experiences.

“Disability,” the first section of the collection, notably redefines physical disability, not against the lack of ability, but as a socially constructed term in its own right. Co-editor Felicity Nussbaum helpfully questions the way in which fiction constructs femininity as monstrosity. Examining novels containing disabled characters by Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood, Nussbaum delineates the way in which women writers contest the notion of woman as naturally defective. Lennard Davis also examines disability as a social construction. Turning to Boswell’s biography of Johnson and Defoe’s Amelia, Davis usefully points to a shift in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from the belief in an ostensibly inherent connection between physical and moral integrity to the view of disability as representative of moral virtue. Finally, Nicholas Mirzoeff’s essay provides an important reconstruction of deaf culture in the eighteenth century by establishing sign language as an integral language, not a “primitive” language that precedes speech.

The second section, titled “Monstrosity,” significantly re-examines the early modern notion that the exterior is an index to the soul. Stephen Pender provides a fascinating overview of human exhibition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, distinguishing between the multitude of gazers who see outer monstrosity as a mark of inner defect and eighteenth-century collectors who begin to see deformity as a “sign” rather than a “cause” of moral deficiency (115). Barbara Benedict follows the eighteenth-century criminal case of the “monster,” a refined young man accused of attacking London’s aristocratic women. For Benedict, this case questioned the transparency of virtue in the sentimental man, a type integral to the formation of British national character in the eighteenth century. Similarly, Joel Reed examines natural philosophy texts on Ireland by Dr. Charles Smith, who uses the inclusion of “natural wonders” of human monstrosity in Ireland to formulate a unique and ideal national identity. In the final essay of this section, co-editor Helen Deutsch considers the contrast between Alexander Pope’s and Samuel Johnson’s physical deformity and literary success. In a novel understanding of these literary figures, she suggests that Pope lends his poetic imitations originality by incorporating his physical deformity within the form of his couplet. Similarly, Deutsch argues that Johnson displays his authority and intellectual prowess while seemingly overcoming his physical tics, said possibly to be a sign of Tourette’s syndrome, and deformity, a result of a childhood bout of scrofula (197).

Examining imperfection and deformity in terms of gender, the third section, “Imperfections,” takes up Locke’s argument that personal identity is static, even as a person changes physically, alongside the eighteenth-century belief that alterations in one’s appearance signal an inner change. Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook delineates the way in which studies of botany attempt to combine natural and social studies in order to naturalize female gender once Erasmus Darwin’s studies created a split between the natural and the social worlds. Jill Campbell writes on women’s “socially valued appearance” (229), investigating Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s poetic construction of the aging woman, which Campbell helpfully argues Montagu constructs as a vital experience. Finally, Robert Jones makes a noteworthy connection between virtue and ugliness, arguing that Sarah Scott’s novels, such as Agreeable Ugliness and Millenium Hall, create new forms of virtuous femininity.

In the conclusion to Defects, Cora Kaplan moves the debate concerning defect within the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through the Victorian period and into the 1990s. She argues that Victorian novels such as Jane Eyre ostensibly accept defect through the characters of Jane and Rochester, but that ultimately, the novel maintains national, moral, and racial purity. In looking at American and British politics of the 1990s, Kaplan similarly concludes that the discourse of defect remains “contested,” “gendered,” and “antidemocratic” (315). As Kaplan’s conclusions regarding twentieth-century notions of defect make clear, the ideas of deformity revealed in this collection are foundational. Building upon the earlier work of Restoration and eighteenth-century scholars in the areas of race and gender studies, Defects takes on the significant task of shaping our understanding of disability within the early modern and Enlightenment periods.