Attending the School of Pain: Disabled Children in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction
Emma Jett, Spring 2023
Thesis Director: Lindsey DiCuirci
Committee Members: Drew Holladay, Michele Osherow, and Sharon Tran
My study offers a reading of some of the many disabled child characters that filled both popular children’s literature and domestic literature of mid-nineteenth-century America. As these genres of literature are concerned with the bildungsroman, the presence of disability complicates our expectations and understanding of childhood growth. When we look to the disabled children that populate these texts, we find the core of many harmful views of disability that activists are still disputing today. By attending to these fictional texts and character archetypes, we can reveal the early undercurrents of unresolved cultural debates as well as the critical roles that children served as the subjects, vehicles, and audience of these conversations. To this end, this study centers representations of disabled children in American fiction, creating space for their experiences and lives to play a central role in the discourse of past and present disability justice and advocacy.