Comments | crip_crit: Good Women

elettaria in crip_crit

Good Women

Feb 21, 2013 19:25

There seems to be a strong trend, particularly in 19th century literature, of portraying disabled women as so saintly that few readers can actually stand them. Sometimes the author seems to be despising the character too, sometimes they seem to be terribly fond of them and not have realised that no one else is. A lot of these characters die. ( Read more... )

Comments 12

coldneedles February 22 2013, 13:49:54 UTC

Happens to an extent in Enid Blyton too, although more that disability or illness is shown as a punnishment for being too arrogant and ambitious.

Just in Malory Towers we have two examples. Mavis, who wants to be an opera singer, sneaks out to a talent contest, catches an awful illness in the cold and then looses her voice. She only gets her voice back when she learns to be less conceited.

Amanda is an aspiring Olympic swimmer who breaks the rules and goes swimming in the ocean and dashes her legs against the rocks. She becomes permanently disabled and has to resign herself to helping others with their sports. This makes her a nicer person.

sorry if this is a derail- I've just had a click moment coldneedles February 22 2013, 14:29:31 UTC

Actually, since both you and I have ME, I was just thinking about this idea of punnishment and how it relates to that illness. This kind of "taming", as lilacsigill calls it, is very gendered and since ME is statistically more common in women/associated with women in the popular imagination, it seems like the media narrative you get is similar ( ... )

elettaria February 22 2013, 15:15:09 UTC

I did the expected spluttering with rage from that article, but the second-last comment cheered me right up again. I should possibly request an icon of "I’d like to comment, but have the Ague and the Greensickness (not to mention my wandering uterus, which is playing Runescape on the other computer) and must retire to my fainting couch."

And we can passively accept medical opinion if we want. Many of us start out doing that. The snag is that it usually makes us much worse, so we either learn to fight for ourselves or continue to get worse. A friend's ex-partner died of ME at the age of 28 just before Christmas, in a way that wouldn't have happened if he'd been getting actual medical treatment instead of total neglect, so this is rather a sore point at the moment.

"And I can hear another suggestion in the thought, the subtle warning that feminism undermines the feminine body."

Sara Maitland wrote a very good novel about that, Daughter of Jerusalem. It was written in the seventies (possibly the eighties), when a woman who is ( ... )

coldneedles February 24 2013, 15:40:12 UTC

I'm so sorry about your friend.

You are absolutely right, we can passively accept (it's what I tend to do, tbh), I was just thinking about the false perception of ME patients as pushy and demanding.

I'll definitely check out Daughter of Jerusalem, it sounds my sort of thing.

nightengalesknd March 3 2013, 14:40:07 UTC

I always wanted to be as good as Beth in Little Women (and she was good before she was disabled, although one might argue she had a social anxiety disability pre-scarlet fever which I suspect was also rheumatic fever.) I was envious about how unselfish and good she was. Modern books had heroines who were more like me, but they didn't have many heroines who I wanted to be like myself ( ... )