The Down Syndrome novel

In this chapter, the author investigates recurrent themes and tropes in the ‘Down Syndrome novel’ and explores how they privilege mother/child relations to the exclusion of broader, more inclusive representations of Down syndrome (DS). She offers a textual analysis of a specific style of narrative written by writers largely without an intellectual disability, but often with lived experience of DS. The author shows how the mother/disabled child narrative eclipses the experiences of people with DS in favour of foregrounding the mother's trauma and struggle to accept DS. The DS novel builds plot from the inclusion of an intellectually disabled character and makes the acceptance of this character essential to the story. The representation of DS within narrative fiction is dissimilar to many other intellectual disabilities because of its visibility. When a character with DS arrives in the parental DS novel, the narrative must halt to inspect them and diagnose their disability.