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Limping Lucy's Queer Criptopia: Narrative Sidestepping in The Moonstone

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2022

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Abstract

Although there has been extensive scholarship on Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone—including recent commentary on disability and queerness—there has been no extended engagement with the character of Limping Lucy, a Marxist misandrist working-class disabled lesbian. This piece serves as a corrective to that gap and a justification of why we should study her. Lucy appears in only six pages of the novel, but this essay embraces the minimal amount of text and performs a microreading. In doing so, we can learn a great deal about Lucy, her abnormal body, her radical politics, her role in the narrative, and the queer criptopia she imagines for herself and her disabled beloved, Rosanna. This reading will also demonstrate a mode of reading and ethical reading praxis I call narrative sidestepping—which explores and embraces expansive plot potentials for disabled characters. Using these theoretical tools, I will argue that Lucy, uninterested in the closure of the normative narrative (the solving of the mystery and the resolution of the marriage plot), intentionally delays it, focusing instead on her sidestepped narrative, her plan for a queer criptopic future with Rosanna.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 50 , Issue 3 , Fall 2022 , pp. 461 - 487
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I would like to thank the large number of people who helped with this piece in its various iterations, including Will Arguelles, Emily Foster, Lindsay Lehman, Julie Fuller, Anastasia Valassis, Laura Eldridge, Ryan Everitt, Jon Rachmani, Danny K. Bernstein, Nancy King Bernstein, Justin Blake, Wayne Koestenbaum, Karen Bourrier, Caroline Reitz, and especially Talia Schaffer.

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