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Sari Altschuler
Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn; Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 (1799) opens with Brown’s narrator, later named Dr. Stevens, arriving home one night to the spectacle of a man leaning against a wall, only “a few paces distant.” Though a medical professional trained in the art of observation, the doctor strains but fails to see completely. It is dark, and he cannot make out exactly what lies before him – his sight “imperfectly assisted by a far‐off lamp” – but he nonetheless draws the “obvious” conclusion that the man has contracted yellow fever. While Stevens’s diagnosis is confident, the passage reveals far less certainty. Stevens cannot quite see the body; its angle combined with the time of night merely “suggested the idea of one disabled by sickness.” Stevens walks closer, watching the man’s movements, noting his lethargy, and feeling his forehead. The man’s “throbbing temples and burning skin indicated a fever, and his form, already emaciated, seemed to prove that it had not been of short duration” (Brown 2008: 5). This passage, rife with its uncertainties about what the doctor sees or how he (or we) should see it, is our introduction both to Arthur Mervyn and to its title character.
What has always drawn me to this scene is the difficulty of definitively knowing what should be obvious. A body infected with yellow fever announces itself in spectacular symptoms: chills, pains, yellow skin, and black vomit. While there hadn’t been an outbreak of yellow fever in the area that then composed the United States since the 1760s, Americans were quite familiar with the symptoms. There was little mistaking yellow fever for something else. Unlike the case of cholera a few decades later, a global pandemic in which medical professionals were nonetheless confused about what did and what did not constitute the disease, yellow fever was reasonably clear‐cut, even if its etiology was unknown. And yet, in Arthur Mervyn, nothing is so evident. In the novel, Stevens has difficulty reading Mervyn’s body, and the novel resolutely refuses to say whether Mervyn has definitively contracted the prevailing disease. In this landscape saturated with yellow fever, Arthur Mervyn may simply be a clever conman. Scholarly evaluations of disease in the novel are similarly split about Brown’s position on the yellow fever debates of the 1790s, divided over whether the novel understands yellow fever as contagious or “miasmatic,” the product of bad airs in an unhealthy environment. The current scholarly debates mirror disagreements about the disease at the time.1
The opening scene of Arthur Mervyn has long struck me as an apt allegory for our own critical enterprise – particularly when it comes to examining bodies and minds in the past. Over the last 50 years, the tension that structures this scene – between the materiality of the body and the difficulty of knowing it – has also structured our understanding of the body in early American literature and much more recently in burgeoning discussions of disability in the literature of the period. Not only are there epistemological difficulties in knowing the body, but those difficulties are also compounded in the scholarly literature with the difficulty in evaluating what literature can know (or tell us) about the body. Like Stevens, our ability to discern is impaired; we have trouble both knowing and also knowing how to know. At a literal level, we are unable to access bodies in the past directly because they have long moldered away in coffins, have been distorted by the preserving jars in which they sit, or have succumbed to desiccation by the years of exposure.
To access the minds and bodies of the past, then, we rely pricipally on text – necessarily mediated though it is by unstable signifiers and words that require double translation. We must explore, first, what those words would have meant to the historical actors who used them and, second, how the concepts they undergirded might be translated for contemporary scholars. Even the deceptively simple description of Mervyn’s fever, for example, meant quite a different thing in a time before germ theory and a world where many diseases might be classed as “fevers,” which is to say nothing of how we might interpret symptoms like a cough, heart palpitations, or lethargy. Because this is a fictional text we must also decide for ourselves whether the real‐life Caribbean doctor Edward Stevens, who believed yellow fever was contagious and told Benjamin Rush so, is the same as the Dr. Stevens of Brown’s novel, who acquired his name only in the second volume, possibly because of the actual doctor’s recent appearance in the news (Brown 2008: 193n5). Furthermore, are we meant to understand Mervyn’s body in terms of the novel’s broader instability, uncertainty, and resistance to knowing, where Stevens’s perceptions of Mervyn’s body should be taken as only one prevailing perspective among many? What is the “right” way to understand yellow fever in the novel? As a contextual clue, as symbol, or as a non‐human agent? Are we to understand it medically, socially, racially, politically, discursively, formally, or religiously? Should we draw our encouragement from the new materialist turn and take the microbes themselves seriously as agents – even though, of course, in the late eighteenth century Americans had no idea how yellow fever was communicated? And how, in the end, should we orient ourselves toward the bodies in Arthur Mervyn and to the scenes of caretaking?
This essay surveys a variety of critical approaches at the intersection of early American literature and the fields of literature and medicine and disability studies. I use the phrase “literature and medicine” advisedly here to describe the variety of health‐related approaches to the study of American literature, which may or may not be written self‐consciously within the specific field of literature and medicine. The journal Literature and Medicine describes its purview as the study of “representational and cultural practices concerning health care and the body,” including topics such as “disease, illness, health, and disability; violence, trauma, and power relations; and the cultures of biomedical science and technology and of the clinic, as these are represented and interpreted in verbal, visual, and material texts” (“Literature and Medicine” n.d.). Nevertheless, students and scholars interested in pursuing health‐related topics will certainly recognize that excellent and important work fitting this capacious description frequently appears outside of this specific field in areas that range from more closely related fields like the medical and health humanities to a variety of other disciplines such as gender and sexuality studies and critical race studies. In the first half of this chapter I outline five approaches to literature and medicine, broadly conceived: medicine as backdrop, context, and metaphor; medicine as subject of inquiry; literature and alternative health practices; medical/health humanities; and corporeal approaches to reading. In the second half of the chapter I examine the nascent critical approaches to disability studies in early American literary studies. In attending to both medicine and disability, the essay looks at closely related topics with a nonetheless fraught relationship, which Catherine Kudlick (2013) has aptly compared to “rival siblings or conjoined twins” (540). Following Kudlick’s lead this discussion does not work to smooth over or to reconcile the necessary friction between medicine and disability as approaches to literary study but maintains that friction while suggesting possible avenues for productive collaboration. To do so I return to Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn throughout as a useful text for opening up the variety of ways scholars have sought and might seek to understand the body in early America.
In outlining various strategies for analyzing “the body” early American literature, this essay inevitably intersects with a number of others in this volume. Discussions of health and disability are inextricably bound up with issues of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality, topics such as affect and aesthetics, and genres from the gothic to slave and captivity narratives. “The body” plausibly plays a part in many – if not all – topics covered in this volume, and the astute reader will undoubtedly trace discussions of the body across a number of its chapters. Comprehensiveness is, thus, impossible, and not something for which this essay strives. For the sake of clarity and concision, then, this essay will serve instead as an introduction to the relatively new and vibrant approaches to medicine and disability in early American literary studies and will, I hope, also serve as an invitation to students and scholars who may wish to embark in these directions.
Literature and Medicine
Interest in medicine has been rapidly growing among literary scholars in recent years. This development has likely resulted at least in part from the expansion of science studies as an increasingly popular critical approach, an increased interest in the medical and health humanities in both the humanities and the health professions, and a broader interest in health care in the United States. A national focus on health care has permeated US culture from the AIDS crisis in the 1990s to the prospect of a physician‐president represented by Howard Dean in 2004 and Ben Carson in 2016 to the recent debates over the Affordable Care Act. In the last few years these concerns have acquired a markedly global dimension. A variety of factors, from social and environmental justice movements to the Ebola and Zika crises, have helped spur a broader shift in the health professions from local public health initiatives to global health. Scholarly writing has echoed these developments, from monographs like Cynthia J. Davis’s Narrative and Bodily Forms: The Influence of Medicine on American Literature, 1845–1915 (2000), Jane Thrailkill’s Affecting Fictions: Mind, Body, and Emotion in American Literary Realism (2007), and Benjamin Reiss’s Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth‐Century American Culture (2008) to globally oriented works like Priscilla Wald’s Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (2008) and the scholarship of literature and global health experts like Karen Thornber and Alvan Ikoku. In the field of early American literature the development of this scholarship came somewhat later. Although work on medicine in early American literature dates back at least to the 1970s and 1980s, the recent scholarly conversation has been shaped by more recent books like Justine S. Murison’s The Politics of Anxiety in Nineteenth‐Century American Literature (2011) and Cristobal Silva’s Miraculous Plagues: An Epidemiology of New England’s Colonial Landscape (2011). In the last decade or so the work of theorists like Bruno Latour and Karen Barad has also widened the spectrum of possibilities by focusing critical attention on the materiality of health, while humanities‐based inquiry about health topics has received intellectual and institutional encouragement from increasingly popular and widespread medical and health humanities programs that set the stage for a more varied body of literature‐and‐medicine scholarship.
In what follows I trace the five distinct ways of approaching the topic of medicine in early American literature. The first, and by far the most pervasive, is the use of health and particularly disease as metaphorical and/or contextual for understanding early American literature. The second is an interrogation into particular issues in medicine during the period where health is at the center of the questions being asked about early America. The third develops this second approach but pointedly decenters traditional Western medicine to look at the relationship between literature and alternative health care practices formed with and used by distinct communities – of women, African Americans, and Native Americans in particular. The fourth and newest approach is one drawn from the health humanities in which early American literature helps answer questions about health more broadly. Finally, the fifth uses corporeal phenomena to explain readers’ encounters with texts. In sketching these five areas I do not mean to suggest them as wholly distinct approaches. The five certainly overlap, and it is common to see scholars adopt more than one approach. Nevertheless, I discuss them separately in what follows to indicate differences in emphasis, investment, method, and orientation.
Context, Metaphor, Moral
The first approach to medicine in early American literature views health issues as largely contextual. Here scholars view histories of medicine and health as tools through which authors elaborate broader religious, social, and political conditions. These scholars are usually less interested in the health topics themselves than in the way they contextualize the literature, offer a structure for understanding other social and cultural phenomena, or elucidate the moral lessons of the text.
The first way readers and scholars employ this approach is to think about the ways health concerns intersect with political, social, or religious issues in the text. Such a reading is not precisely metaphorical – especially for non‐fiction writing – but rather chooses to understand health concerns in terms of something other than health. According to this approach, the debility and subsequent death of Mary Rowlandson’s child, for example, illustrates how during her captivity and as she narrates A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682) Rowlandson denies universal experiences (here the debility and loss of a child) that might allow her to develop an empathetic understanding with the Native people with whom she lives. Rowlandson does not use this experience of caretaking to reframe her experience of captivity by empathizing with a Native mother who has also lost her child but rather understands her loss as particular, unable to see basic human concerns like health and mortality as universal. In fiction like Arthur Mervyn, we might read the very real and disruptive yellow fever outbreak, as Martin Pernick (1972) suggests many did at the time, as a register of the period’s political and social unrest.
Another way readers and scholars employ this approach is to read health, especially in fiction, not literally but metaphorically. The most striking example of this appears in the popularity of scholarship engaging the yellow fever epidemic not as fact but as metaphor in Arthur Mervyn. Although scholars adopting this perspective understand that yellow fever was a terrifying epidemic and a traumatic lived experience with a high body count, they also understand the “contagion” of the 1793 epidemic in terms of commerce, politics, social relations, and discourse. Stacey Margolis (2012) usefully summarizes this critical perspective thus:
The reasoning generally runs as follows: the novel depicts yellow fever in sickening detail; yellow fever spreads rapidly through the population; yellow fever is therefore contagious; the novel is thus interested in the problem of contagion. From this starting point, critics have imagined the novel’s engagement with a variety of social issues in terms of contagion: benevolence is contagious; greed is contagious; revolutionary politics are contagious; commerce is contagious; “racial fear” is contagious; “racial violence and political unrest” are contagious; the emotions evoked by novels are contagious.
(346–347)
The disease, seen this way, is reduced to a symbolic device through which Brown communicates other information about late eighteenth‐century Philadelphia.
A third way of practicing this model is to understand health not only as metaphor but as moral as well. Yellow fever in Arthur Mervyn might be, as politicians of the time also feared, retribution for ill‐considered and possibly immoral political behavior. (Here, again, Martin Pernick’s 1972 discussion of the political history of yellow fever is useful.) In another clear example of this critical approach, the titular protagonist of Susanna Rowson’s novel Charlotte Temple, A Tale of Truth (1791) dies shortly after giving birth, but her death is not read as the result of pregnancy‐related complications or public health concerns; rather it is a lesson to readers about the unfortunate but predictable dangers of falling in love with a dashing but reckless soldier and disregarding parental wisdom. As scholars like Leonard Tennenhouse (1999) have observed, early American novels often kill off young mothers – a plot device intended to teach readers important lessons about virtue in the new republic.
Medicine in Literature
The second approach involves positioning medicine as the subject of study in literature and represents the most common form of literature and medicine scholarship. Unlike the first approach, medicine is not seen as simply a useful way of thinking about other issues in literature; rather, health lies at the heart of the study. One way of undertaking this work has been to think about the topic of health in recognizably literary texts. Here, we can think of critical analyses that take up the representational work of physical ailments in Anne Bradstreet’s poems or mental illness in Charles Brockden Brown’s Weiland (1798) as well as more recent literature and medicine investigations situated in the Atlantic world of texts like Caribbean physician‐poet James Grainger’s “The Sugar‐Cane” (1764). This approach to Brown’s fiction is exemplified in work by Bryan Waterman (2003) and Justine Murison (2011), both of whom offer particularly thoughtful and provocative examples; their work recognizes the fundamental nature of health to human experience, especially in a world in which the more limited capacity of medicine made health concerns commonplace and persistent features of everyday life, and both read literature in terms of that understanding. Historically, the literature‐and‐medicine approach focused much of its attention on communicable disease and ideas of contagion, but there has also been significant work on discourses of health and sickness, particularly as they relate to issues like race and gender.
A compelling iteration of this literature‐and‐medicine approach, which I have also taken up in my own work, has been to think about how the tools of literary studies help us better understand the cultures of medicine and health in the period (Altschuler 2018). Here there is no better example than Silva’s Miraculous Plagues (2011), which offers, as its subtitle indicates, “an epidemiology of early New England narrative.” Silva not only brings literary analysis to bear on early American health but also uses epidemiological thinking to understand early New England differently, revealing new ways of understanding identity and community formation in the colonial period through a usefully anachronistic concept that defamiliarizes, and thus helps unsettle, traditional narratives. Newer readings of health narratives like Silva’s reframe how we understand the Atlantic world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the wake of the work of Silva and Wald (2008) contagious disease narratives have served as particularly useful methods for breaking the national frame that long held a tight grip on early American scholarship and helping to usher early American literature into Atlantic, transnational, and global conversations.
Non‐Traditional Medicine and Alternative Health Care
Related to this literature‐and‐medicine perspective is a third approach that uses some of the same techniques as the second but pointedly decenters the authority of traditional medicine by looking at alternative health care practices. While this orientation is often subsumed by the category of literature and medicine, it is important to distinguish health care fields that, at the time, were very much separate from the medical establishment, such as midwifery and Native and African health care practices and beliefs. Here, work like Susan Scott Parrish’s American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (2012), Monique Allewaert’s Ariel’s Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics (2013), Kelly Wisecup’s Medical Encounters: Knowledge and Identity in Early American Literatures (2013), and Britt Rusert’s Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (2017) are eye‐opening insofar as they reveal how the epistemologies and cultural practices of communities of African and Native origin contributed to, shaped, and resisted Anglo‐European systems of knowledge (Silva’s work also does this). From this perspective, we might read Absalom Jones and Richard Allen’s medical rebuttal of the popular white theory of black immunity during the yellow fever epidemic next to the portrayals in texts like Arthur Mervyn to draw new conclusions about the medical work of the novel, as Samuel Otter (2010) has (58–69). This approach is guided by thinking about the role that the alternative knowledge practices of individuals often excluded from traditional medicine – especially women and black and Native peoples – played in the production of ideas about health and the forms such knowledge took. An emphasis on alternative ways of knowing informs not only our understanding of the narrative forms of health care writing but also our readings of early American literature. As Kelly Wisecup and Toni Jaudon (2015) recently wrote about African and creole knowledge practices in the Caribbean, for example, “As obeah moved from medical treatises and natural histories into gothic novels and romances, its formal trajectory attested to colonists’ failure to locate natural causes for the forms of power they encountered in the Caribbean” (135). Focusing on alternative or non‐Anglo‐European practices allows us to interrogate the category of medicine itself as we bring it into conversation with literature.
Health Humanities
The fourth approach is one I think of as the health humanities approach to early American literature. Health humanities is an outgrowth of medical humanities, a field built in medical schools in the 1970s and 1980s largely to help doctors feel more for their patients and offer better care. Health humanities takes a broader approach to this pursuit by decentering medicine and thinking more broadly about what the humanities might offer health care. This fourth approach, then, involves importing the concerns of health humanities fields, broadly understood, into the study of early American literature. In some ways we can see its antecedents in historians’ use of literature to illustrate issues in the history of medicine, but in its current instantiation this work has a distinct genealogy. Often published in interdisciplinary journals rather than those more squarely devoted to American literature, such articles – by scholars like Rebecca Garden (2013) and Thomas Lawrence Long (2013) – look to texts like Cotton Mather’s Angel of Bethesda (1724) and Rowson’s Charlotte Temple for the shape of prevailing medical beliefs and information about illness and care before 1820. This approach might likewise look to Arthur Mervyn for accounts of the experience of being sick, not only as they relate to the period but also as they offer lessons for health care today. Since they often come out of explicit institutional connections to the health sciences, such readings of early American texts might also consider the therapeutic value of texts like Brown’s. Adopting this perspective we might connect Brown’s novel to contemporary theorizing about the healing properties of novels. Benjamin Rush, the most prominent American physician before the Civil War, promoted novel reading as therapy – a practice now called bibliotherapy – and Brown, who was quite familiar with Rush’s medicine, might have envisioned his account as useful not only for society (as he says explicitly in the preface) but also for patients at the local hospitals in Philadelphia and New York. Additionally, these readings of the past may be useful for bibliotherapy today, drawing patients’ conditions into a longer history of illness and reducing suffering through cognitive stimulation, escapism, or an acceptance of the more general uncertainty and pain involved in living. Arguments employing this approach often involve close reading, as other literature‐and‐medicine approaches do, but they are motivated by a desire to illustrate how the study of early American literature can be useful to broader, often contemporary, health concerns.
Embodied Reading
The example of bibliotherapy straddles the health humanities perspective and the fifth and final approach to thinking about literature and medicine: a focus on the role and health of the body while reading. Here we can think not only about the mechanisms that make possible literature’s therapeutic effects, but, following scholarship like James Dawes’s “Fictional Feeling: Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and the American Gothic” (2004), Michael Millner’s Fever Reading: Affect and Reading Badly in the Early American Public Sphere (2012), and Gillian Silverman’s Bodies and Books: Reading and the Fantasy of Communion in Nineteenth‐Century America (2012), the relationship between the body and the act of reading. Such scholarship focuses on the embodied nature of reading and the degree to which early Americans themselves understood reading to be an embodied practice. For Millner and Dawes especially this close connection between reading and the body is not always salubrious. Millner (2012) worries about pathologized reading, or what he calls “fever reading.” Dawes (2004) does not necessarily see literature’s enfeebling effects as negative, but he persuasively argues that eighteenth‐century readers sought out or avoided the novels of writers like Brown because they understood and expected them to produce physical effects. As one of Brown’s contemporaries wrote, reading the author’s novels produced “the liveliest sense of danger” in readers. “If we do not return to [his novels],” the reviewer continued, “it is to avoid suffering” (quoted in Dawes 2004: 438). This last approach dovetails nicely with a more contemporary cognitive science approach, interested in understanding the recorded bodily feelings of historical actors through the findings of modern science and medicine.
The question of thinking about literature and medicine is thus more complicated than it may first seem. These five approaches offer distinct visions of literature and its uses, which range from the descriptive or metaphorical to the therapeutic. The range of scholarly approaches to the topic of medicine are likewise varied, spanning historical theories of disease to modern medical perspectives. And, finally, the kinds of evidence used, analytical strategies employed, and understandings of the body that undergird these five approaches are diverse. “The body” is variously located in the ailing bodies represented by texts, in the contexts involving bodies that frame the text, in metaphors that operate at various textual levels, and finally in the readers themselves whose bodies interact with early American literature. On the surface, given the diverse lines of argument drawn together through this field of inquiry, it may appear logical to add disability as a sixth approach and call it a day, but scholars should at least pause before bringing the study of disability under the auspices of literature and medicine. For ethical and historical reasons that will shortly become clear, scholars will want to think carefully before bringing medicine and disability together as approaches to literature and subjects of investigation.
Disability
To introduce the topic of disability in early American literature, I would like to return to Arthur Mervyn to consider a second body that structures the novel’s plot: Thomas Welbeck’s. If the novel opens with Mervyn’s ailing body through Stevens’s narrative, the novel seems to start again with Mervyn’s own account of how he came to be in Philadelphia. A self‐proclaimed country bumpkin, Mervyn travels to Philadelphia looking for a new life. Hapless in his initial endeavors, savvy urbanites quickly con the rube – Mervyn – out of his money and property. Virtually destitute, Mervyn is on the verge of leaving the city when he meets Welbeck, the first Philadelphian to give Mervyn a chance. Welbeck takes Mervyn in, tests his writing skills, and offers him a job. Mervyn fills the part almost uncannily well, his body a precise fit even for the wardrobe Welbeck offers. Once inside the home, the penniless Mervyn learns that his employer sought his services because Welbeck’s “maimed hand […] the forefinger of which was wanting” prohibits him from writing “accurately or copiously.” It is “for this reason,” he tells Mervyn, “I have required your aid” (Brown 2008: 44).
Mervyn’s employment as a writer is the first indication to himself and to the reader that he is not hopelessly out of place in the city, but rather that, as an ambitious young man with a useful skill, he shares much with the growing US capital and its dwellers. His body parts literally standing in for those of the urban Welbeck as his amanuensis, Mervyn gains his place in Philadelphia because Welbeck has, to some degree, lost his own. Welbeck’s missing finger is, thus, the device that makes Mervyn’s bildungsroman possible. Here we can newly see that the bildungsroman – a form that tracks the growth and development of a young man – is itself a narrative of ability. Its form is, at root, ableist, structurally contingent on the protagonist’s capacity. In Arthur Mervyn, as in many such novels, the protagonist’s ability is both mental and physical: Mervyn can become his own man in Philadelphia both because he is able to write and, implicitly, because he has ten fingers to Welbeck’s nine.
In other words, while a missing finger may not generally seem like much of a disability, in Arthur Mervyn it is the impairment that makes the plot possible. Furthermore, it is one that should signify heavily. Not only is Welbeck’s missing finger the means (or the excuse) by which Mervyn’s Philadelphia life is made possible, but, in a novel heavily concerned with narrative, authenticity, and forgery, it ought to be quite significant. Welbeck’s missing finger is the physical mark of his actions and his sins. Welbeck’s corporal punishment is both legal and moral, “disabling” him both in the modern sense of the term – taking from him the ability to perform the tasks of everyday life – and in the eighteenth‐century use of the term (which often did not name a stable corporeal or cognitive impairment) from further participation in law and society. A missing index finger is the sign of punishment for forgery that draws Mervyn in as a forgerer’s substitute. As Patrick Brancaccio (1970) summarizes, “It was as a copyist that Arthur was first employed by Welbeck, who displayed his maimed hand. […] Thus through the pen Arthur becomes identified with the financial intrigues and sexual exploitations which make up Welbeck’s career” (25). Thus, Welbeck’s extraordinary body should be at the center of his character and the novel, but it is not.
This is all the more remarkable because it seems as though it would have been simple for Brown to do so. In a novel obsessed with forgeries and confidence games, Welbeck’s missing finger is the stable physical fact in a world of deception that nonetheless draws Mervyn into the sordid world of 1793 Philadelphia. If, throughout the novel, what is written is what we cannot trust, we might expect Brown to return both symbolically and practically to Welbeck’s maimed hand, but he does not – because that is not how disability worked in Brown’s world.
Instead, we strain to recall Welbeck’s disability in a novel that has a dizzying array of characters, plot points, and narratives. One of the most compelling features of the novel, from a critical perspective, is its (in)famous narrative fragmentation. From a twenty‐first‐century perspective it may seem quite remarkable that, in 500 pages, the novel mentions the impairment of Mervyn’s sometime antagonist Welbeck only this once and never again, but early Americanists are not surprised by the lack of sustained interest in this feature of Brown’s novel. After all, Brown’s novels are famous for dangling intriguing details (like the unexplained changeling in one of the novel’s opening scenes) only to drop them and never return. Welbeck’s impairment is thus represented quite differently from those in later American texts. Unlike, say, Ahab’s prosthetic leg or Ethan Frome’s limp, Welbeck’s missing finger is not a focal point of the novel. Welbeck may be many things, but he is certainly not reduced to his impairment, as critics like David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder (2000) and Rosemarie Garland Thomson (1997) have argued he would likely have been in later American literature. As I have argued elsewhere, this is not unusual for pre‐1820 American fiction. Particularly before the War of 1812, representations of disabled bodies did not do the same kind of cultural or political work that they would come to perform in later American texts (Altschuler 2014).
And yet, while the idea of disability as we now understand it does not play a central role in the novel, the word itself does. In fact, characters repeatedly describe themselves as disabled from action, and the word appears 16 times over the course of the novel. The most familiar use of the term is, as in the opening scene, a description of bodies “disabled by sickness,” but characters in Arthur Mervyn are also disabled by a lack of experience, by “ignorance,” by emotions, and by distance (Brown 2008: 5, 43, 117, 413, 294). Ships are disabled by storms (153). Thus, the novel uses the word disabled not to describe bodies and minds that are structurally excluded and oppressed but rather to name temporary and situational states of impairment that are just as often not corporeal. Disabled here means, quite literally, that an object or character is unable to perform a task for whatever reason. In material written as late as the turn of the nineteenth century, then, we can see the need to slow down before applying more contemporary‐oriented disability studies and theory directly to early American literature: neither the word nor the concept nor the representation of disability function as we expect they might from our own contemporary perspective.
In this way, Arthur Mervyn also helps us see why early Americanists are coming to disability later than scholars in other fields of literature. Early Americanists cannot simply import the tenets and moves of disability studies into their own period of study but must first carefully consider how to do so. Because of the historical inchoateness of the term, because of the differences between ideas of disability in early America and today, and because of the difficult fit between disability studies scholarship (based in present‐day politics) and early American studies, the meeting of the two fields is more difficult than it might first seem, and care is required (Altschuler and Silva 2017). Put otherwise: the fundamental problem facing anyone embarking on such work is that, while impairments of the mind and body were certainly central, even quotidian, features of early American life, the word disability would only come to be the key term associated with stigmatized impairments in the mid‐nineteenth century. Before that time, early Americans used a variety of words – feeble, idiot, lame – alongside the term disabled to signify various states of impairment. Helen Deutsch has shown that deformity “reigned supreme” above these other terms in the eighteenth century, but the variety of terms and their various significations indicate the inchoateness of the idea of disability before the word disability subsumed the other categories of impairment beginning in the mid‐nineteenth century (Deutsch 2015: 52; Altschuler and Silva 2017).
This difficulty has presented an opportunity to a handful of scholars who have been working through these thorny issues, and I both hope and suspect that before long many others will be joining our ranks. Writing about disability and Cotton Mather’s miracle cures, for example, Nicholas Junkerman (2017) provocatively draws our attention to what he calls the “particulars of disability” in seventeenth‐century literature, which he defines as an attention to the “impaired bodies that were transformed by miracle, [that] in their arresting variety and particularity, have left a distinctive trace. […] These particulars remain in the text, available for our continuing consideration […] contributing to, and helping to construct, an important early American discourse of disability, rooted in the exercise of Protestant piety” (54). In another excellent essay on disability in the early Americas, Stephanie Kennedy (2015) reveals how the discourse of disability emerged through the practices of the slave trade in the British Atlantic world in the eighteenth century. Meanwhile, Greta LaFleur (2017) and Andrea Stone (2017) reveal the complicated, unexpected, distinct, and often uncomfortable forms of disability in the eighteenth century. LaFleur describes disability as “an eclectic and promiscuous term, inclusive of a wide range of vocabularies, epistemologies (legal, religious, print cultural), and representations.” In her study she demonstrates that impotence was a significant and legislated disability, encouraging us “to identify the many, and sometimes conflicting strands of cultural, legal, and theological ideology that, together, constituted popular definitions of ability or disability with regard to sex” (80). Finally, in her study of an enslaved man who suffers “fits and lunacy” and killed his master, Stone shows how impairment could be used to resist the law and expose its contradictions (124). In short, as Altschuler and Silva have argued (2017), any study of disability in early America should “consider what the word meant in the early America, what the idea of disability meant during the period in question, and what the word and concept mean for the field of early American studies today” (2).
It is an exciting time to be thinking about disability studies in early American literature, a field that, in comparison to later American literary studies, has thus far had little to say about disability. Disability studies offers a variety of new tools for reexamining texts. It encourages us to think about the ways in which author and character impairment shape works of literature. It inspires us to think about the ways in which discourses of disability were mobilized in early America, as well as the ways in which we might rethink our own critical discourses through the lessons disability studies teaches us. It helps us reframe our own methods of reading and our own archival and critical practices.
But while disability studies scholars offer much encouragement to those intrigued by the promises of disability studies for literary studies, they also offer some useful cautionary notes for those looking to embark in this direction. Disability studies scholars have long issued important warnings to literary critics about their uses of disability in scholarship – particularly the desire to diagnose characters or historical actors retrospectively. Here we should heed the observations of scholars like Garland Thomson (1997) and Mitchell and Snyder (2000) about the ways in which narrative, and fiction in particular, has tended to reduce disabled individuals – or in Garland Thomson’s landmark formulation, “extraordinary bodies” – to their impairments and relies on such characters to advance the plot. Michael Bérubé (2016) has also warned about the limiting and possibly destructive nature of readings that aim to “solve” texts through the retrospective diagnosis of characters (20). We must not rush to diagnose previously unidentified conditions and reduce our explanations of history and biography to those categories, or we risk reproducing the very moves against which disability studies was organized in the first place.
This caution about retrospective diagnosis returns us to the topic of medicine, which, up until this point, I have largely avoided talking about in conjunction with disability. While there is a wide range of exciting approaches to the topic of medicine in early American literature and much work remains to be done, it is worth first considering what is at stake in incorporating medicine and medical models into our analysis of disability, before continuing in this direction. To begin with, the history of medicine in early America also offers its own cautionary tales about asking bodies to speak that suggest the possible pitfalls of incorporating medical discourse into discussions of disability. Beginning in the 1820s, after all, skull collectors like Richard Harlan and Samuel George Morton began drawing conclusions about the past from stolen body parts, disrupting grave mounds to make their inhabitants speak. For early nineteenth‐century Americans, they told about the past all the way back to pre‐Columbian times and had messages for the present, especially about the ways in which characteristics like race, sex, and intelligence were biologically determined (see, for example, Ann Fabian’s Skull Collectors [2010]). In other words, like other forms of discourse, medical knowledge is deeply embedded in its cultural and historical context, and while we can certainly learn much from bringing medical topics and approaches to bear on early American questions, we should also take care to attend to the aspects of medicine that exist within and are structured by racist, sexist, classist, xenophobic, and ableist paradigms.
Historians of medicine and disability have recently taken up the challenge of bringing the two fields together and offer some important insights for literary students and scholars looking to do the same. While some historians of medicine see our own moment as a wonderful opportunity to reintegrate disability into medicine, Kudlick (2013) wonders about the stakes and potential pitfalls of such a move. While it is important to think about the intersections of disability and the history of medicine, especially in cases of unwell disabled individuals, Kudlick warns, “Before rushing to tear down these divides between history of medicine and disability history, it behooves us to understand the substance of these divides and what they bring to future scholarship” (540). Kudlick continues to outline the differences in the fields, which can be summarized thus: (i) medical history’s emergence from and continued work in the service of the medical profession, (ii) disability studies’ emergence as a field explicitly opposed to medical models of disability, (iii) distinct and often divergent political investments of disability studies and medical history, and (iv) the power differentials between those allied with medicine as a field. Agreeing with others that disability studies is now robust enough to be able to reengage medicine on its own terms, Kudlick nonetheless cautions, “historians who challenge the divide between pathology and social models of disability […] need to confront it with better questions and critical tools. Scholars in both subfields must have a deeper appreciation for where it comes from, what is at stake, and who benefits most/least by removing this particular binary” (549). Following Kudlick’s work, then, as literary scholars we might also begin to think about how to bridge medicine and disability in a way that respects these differential histories, power structures, and orientations.
If, in thinking about early American disability, we are not hunting for legible diagnoses, what are we looking for? One answer is an approach. As Altschuler and Silva (2017) have argued,
this intersection of the contemporary and the historical prods us to consider how present‐day disability studies understands its constitutive elements before we proceed headlong into the archival work that is most familiar to us. Only when being attentive to the critical histories and political valences of disability in the late twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries do we leave ourselves open to the contributions that disability studies can make to our understanding of the literatures of the early Americas, and only then can we begin to imagine the contributions that early American literary studies can make to the field of disability studies. (2)
In other words, while it is temping to apply disability studies scholarship directly to early American texts, joining the two fields requires more care. Each field emerged from its own set of contexts, and only after we understand the elements that drove and structured that scholarship can we return to examine disability in its early American context. To this end, Altschuler and Silva (2017) have suggested three fruitful areas for future scholarship: “to identify which conditions were disabling in the period, to trace the network of terms that gave meaning to the word disability over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and, drawing on the practices of literary criticism, to explore how historical epistemologies and reading practices of disability can help us evaluate the period anew” (14).
Thus, disability studies not only offers literary scholars new ways of understanding the topic of disability and its social and cultural history but it also teaches us new ways of thinking about and understanding early American literature more generally. Central to this more fundamental work are recent developments in disability theory like Tobin Siebers’s “disability aesthetics” (2010) and Merri Lisa Johnson and Robert McRuer’s “cripistemologies” (2014). Siebers’s term “disability aesthetics” shows scholars how to rethink the category of the aesthetic through the lessons of disability studies, a move that will be of interest to those considering the recently renewed conversations about aesthetics that currently animate early American literary studies. Siebers’s argument about the potential for disability to be a source of reinterpreting art and culture is grounded in the observation that the “body is, simply put, where everything in human culture begins and ends” (136). Johnson and McRuer’s term “cripistemologies” builds on this work to theorize knowledge more broadly, as the “varied, unstable crip positions [that] could be constructed as deeply imbricated in, and trying to do justice to, a range of necessary and queer turns in disability studies: phenomenological, transnational, [and] affective” (133). How, these scholars ask, can we use what disability helps us know to understand the world differently? How might we rethink basic categories like the body, narrative, beauty, and truth with the insights that disability offers us? I hope and believe that future scholarship will profit from the productive insights of scholars like Siebers, Johnson, and McRuer and continue to uncover not only the ways in which our understandings of the world are shaped by ableist assumptions and presuppositions, but also the ways in which the language of ability frames the representations of other identity categories like race, gender, and sexuality. Kennedy (2015) shows us one example of how this works with regard to African slavery in the Atlantic. Future scholarship will likely also build on the insights of Thomson (1997) and Mitchell and Snyder (2000) to ask how particular genres in early American literature – the novel but also the captivity narrative, the jeremiad, the slave narrative, and the sermon – relied on and deployed the language and tropes of disability, as well as how those genres were shaped by developing discourses around impairment.
Taken together, literature and medicine and disability studies approaches offer both a rich array of possibilities and a note of caution for early Americanists. On one hand, an exciting array of new approaches, techniques, methods, and perspectives are newly available to the student or scholar interested in thinking about the body and disability in early America. In many ways, this work has just begun. On the other hand, a sustained examination of these approaches makes clear that studying bodies from the past can be an ethically complicated and fraught exercise. My closing advice to those interested in pursuing this line of work would be to do so with gusto (!) but also with vigilance, respect, and care. With growing interest in fields such as health humanities, science studies, and disability studies, it is a very exciting moment to be pursuing such work, and there is so much left to be recovered, assembled, explored, and analyzed. Still, we ought approach such work with thoughtfulness, humility, and a nuanced sense of the history, always striving to consider the potential stakes and consequences of our arguments and investigations.
References
See also: chapter 17 (gender, sex, and seduction in early american literature); chapter 27 (charles brockden brown and the novel in the 1790s).
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