Preternatural Laughter: Rhetorics of Animality in the Literature of Insanity, 1798-1882
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.