Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Thesis Format

Monograph

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

English

Supervisor

Rowlinson, Matthew

Abstract

This project meets at the intersections of critical disability theory and critical animal studies to interrogate the rhetoricability of mad and animalized rhetors. Insofar as disability theory argues that the values inscribed on the disabled body are the product of cultural, social, and historical determinants, I ask: how is the voice of madness constructed? Whereas mad characters of the nineteenth century novel frequently shout, laugh, cry, and even speak in fully formed utterance, these voices are just as frequently absent in dialogue and undermined in their authority. Madness comes to hold a distinctly (a)rhetorical presence, as authors grappling with the mad voice inevitably betray their own presumptions about speech: what constitutes ‘speech,’ whose speech matters, and what modes of communication are to be exiled from discursive participation. By placing these representations into conversation with the concurrent medical literature produced in and around the asylum, I reveal the ways in which pathological prescriptions of embodiment are read onto and against the mad rhetor in ways that align with the supposed silence of animals. I therefore examine the ways in which “the animal” functions as a rhetorically disabling gesture against both (mad) human and non-human animals through the denigration of the body and its “sensitive materiality.” I read Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria; or, the Wrongs of Woman (1798), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) and Heart and Science (1883), alongside the historically relevant medical literature surrounding the pathological and diagnostic frameworks of madness. By critically examining the ways in which animal and mad rhetors (de)mobilize throughout these texts, I seek to both expose rhetorical disablement at work and to re-assert the viability of the body as a valid site of rhetoricability.

Summary for Lay Audience

This project reads nineteenth century novels alongside the historical and social conversations surrounding insanity, exploring how people labelled mad have their voices represented in literature. By examining novels like Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria; or, the Wrongs of Woman (1798), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), and Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1860) and Heart and Science (1883), I reveal that people labelled mad frequently have their voice represented in animalizing and dehumanizing terms. I argue that the purpose of this kind of animalizing representation works to strip mad persons of the right to protest about their “care” by relying on the underlying assumptions of animal language—assumptions that claim animals do not possess either language or will, and that body language or embodied modes of communication are lesser than “human” speech. Each of these novels operates under the logic that by representing the mad as animal, the mad can (and will) be treated like animals. I argue, however, that whereas this is presented uncritically by Wollstonecraft and Bronte as the necessary consequence to humanism, this logic is challenged by Collins. I argue that where the villains of both novels seek to silence the mad heroine, Collins parallels his heroines with animals: these animals have “speech” represented through body language in the narrative, but suffer violence by the villains who speak over and against them in dialogue. By contrasting Collins’ novels with Wollstonecraft and Bronte, I hope to expose the logic and consequences to rhetorical disablement effecting both mad and animalized rhetors, and to challenge our assumptions surrounding “meaningful” speech.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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