ABSTRACT
This chapter examines intersecting discourses of disability and queerness in context of Victorian narratives about progress in general and progress vis-à-vis legacies and heritability in particular. The popular genre of the bildungsroman or, novel of education, provided the Victorians with progress narratives that reinforced their dreams for industrial and imperial expansion. The chapter demonstrates how, in the unique bildungsromane, the inherited curse does not reinforce but instead works against a genre otherwise characterised by impulses to enforce normalcy through compulsory able-bodiedness and compulsory heterosexuality. Nonetheless, reading Jude alongside Calmady, a contemporaneous bildungsroman frequently analysed within queer/crip frameworks, highlights similarities between the two novels that, taken together, make possible the arguments that these unique texts ultimately subvert late-Victorian discourses of progress, normalcy, sexuality, and disability. In the bildungsromane, the curse places certain things out of the protagonists’ reach, for instance able-bodiedness and ‘normal’ sexuality.
