Abstract
This chapter explores Charlotte M. Yonge’s representation of disability in relation to her Anglo-Catholic theology, focusing on two of her best-known family chronicles, The Daisy Chain (1856) and The Pillars of the House (1873). It argues that the resurgence of Anglo-Catholicism in this period brought a renewed interest in the figure of the broken, suffering, embodied Christ, and that this emphasis upon Christ’s physical frailty and pain shaped Anglo-Catholic representation of and response to those members of the Church most strongly associated with these experiences. In fact, for some Tractarians, disability came to seem emblematic of the Christian life, a worldview which shapes Yonge’s novels, which portray disabled characters as typical rather than exceptional members of the Body of Christ.
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Notes
- 1.
For example, disability theorist Lennard J. Davis has argued that “strategic essentialism” needs to give way to “a new ethics of the body,” which will “begin with disability rather than end with it” (2013, 269, 271).
- 2.
There is a strong echo here of 1 Corinthians 7:8–9: “I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, it is good for them if they abide even as I. But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn.” This view of marriage as a lapse from celibacy was particularly associated with the Tractarian movement, which was seen by many critics as perverse in its support for celibate religious communities and tolerance for celibate clergy. For further discussion of this controversial aspect of Tractarianism, illustrated by Charles Kingsley and J.H. Newman’s published disputes, see Buckton (1992).
- 3.
There is an echo of Margaret and Ethel’s relationship in The Clever Woman of the Family (1865), in which the tactless and wayward Rachel Curtis learns from the ideally feminine invalid Ermine Williams “how intellect and brilliant powers can be no snares, but only blessings” (Yonge [1865] 1889a, 367).
- 4.
The idea of a disabled character acting as a “crutch” to another calls to mind David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder’s argument that disability functions as a form of “narrative prosthesis” in literature, but as it cannot be said that Yonge fails to “take up disability as an experience of social or political dimensions,” her work is not readily assimilable to Mitchell and Snyder’s model (2000, 48).
- 5.
The especially close relationship between Geraldine and Felix echoes, in a more realistic and restrained form, that of the invalid Charles Edmonstone and his Christ-like cousin, Guy Morville, in The Heir of Redclyffe (1853). There, too, the seemingly healthy hero succumbs to terminal illness, while the permanently disabled Charles goes on to a long and contented life at the centre of his family, “of wonderful use to every body” as surrogate parent to his niece, private secretary to his brother-in-law, and adviser to his parents (Yonge [1853] 1888, 363). In both cases, the disabled character occupies an especially close relationship to the Christ figure, without having to share their ultimate fate of an early and self-sacrificing death.
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Walker Gore, C. (2020). “Our Ordinary Lot”: The Cross, the Crutch and the Theology of Disability in the Novels of Charlotte M. Yonge. In: Ludlow, E. (eds) The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century . Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40082-8_13
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