Chapter 5 - Disability’s Disruptions

Summary

After providing an overview of modernist disability studies, this essay uses three prone modernist bodies to explore some of the ways weakness, illness, madness, and disability suggest a revisitation of what Paul Saint-Amour has called “the politics of force or strength.” The prone and potent bodies of Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz and Elizabeth Bowen’s Madame Fisher and Josephine Mather blur the distinction between active and passive, their strength inseparable from their weakness. Disability in these texts is able to infect the self of the “normate,” replacing the oppositions of self and other, normate and abject, with characteristically modernist instability. By highlighting the ways the prone bodies of these characters collapse such distinctions, this essay sheds light on the ambivalence folded within modernism’s embrace of the active and the fit.