ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that disability served an enabling function in mid-Victorian women’s writing. It demonstrates that female novelists working in the domestic realist tradition used their representations of disability to encode the power of ‘feminine’ ideas and behaviours and to explore both the pleasures and frustrations of domesticity. In particular, it examines how a pair of mid-Victorian texts by Elizabeth Gaskell and Charlotte M. Yonge, The Moorland Cottage (1995/1850) and The Clever Woman of the Family (1985/1865), use the figure of the exemplary invalid and the ‘instructive invalidism’ plot as vehicles for what might be considered their conservative feminism. In these examples, the idealised invalid shows the heroine how to reconcile herself to domesticity and how to wield power in that sphere, but the terms on which she might do so, and the rewards she might thereby enjoy, are represented as highly fraught. Ultimately, it is argued that the characterisation of the invalid and the plotting of disability in these texts capture the complexities of the authors’ thinking about femininity and power and complicate their otherwise conservative gender politics.
