Haunting the ‘Proper Body’: Disability, Contagion, and Citizenship in Irish and Scottish Novels of the Union

Abstract

The national tales of Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott function by enforcing the normalcy of the bounded, self-reliant body through the gothic representation of the disabled body as threatening to undo, dissolve, or haunt the ‘normal’ body and its body politic. Whether through the exclusion of physically disabled characters or through the containment of the threat of ‘performance’ of mental disability, the National Tale reveals the instability of the distinction between able-bodied and disabled. The gothicized threat of disability in the national tale reveals the awkward constructedness of the space between dis- and abled. By reading these Romantic national tales through the relationship between deformity and citizenship, the exclusion of improper bodies not only conveys gothic anxieties over bodily ability, but also constructs a national community that enforces corporeal normalcy. Ultimately, the national tale reveals the capacity of the newly-formed state to condition citizenship upon a shifting concept of bodily normalcy in a way that will continue to shape and haunt the body politic long after the Romantic period.