Tuberculosis and Disabled Identity in Nineteenth Century Literature. Invalid Lives Alex Tankard
Palgrave Macmillan
Literary Disability Studies
ISBN 978-3-319-71445-5
Until the nineteenth century, consumptives were depicted as sensitive,
angelic beings whose purpose was to die beautifully and set an example
of pious suffering – while, in reality, many people with tuberculosis
faced unemployment, destitution, and an unlovely death in the workhouse.
Focusing on the period 1821-1912, in which modern ideas about disease,
disability, and eugenics emerged to challenge Romanticism and
sentimentality, Invalid Lives examines representations of
nineteenth-century consumptives as disabled people. Letters, self-help
books, eugenic propaganda, and press interviews with consumptive artists
suggest that people with tuberculosis were disabled as much by
oppressive social structures and cultural stereotypes as by the illness
itself. Invalid Lives asks whether disruptive consumptive characters in Wuthering Heights, Jude the Obscure, The Idiot, and Beatrice Harraden’s 1893 New Woman novel Ships That Pass in the Night
represented critical, politicised models of disabled identity (and
disabled masculinity) decades before the modern disability movement.
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