The Government of Disability in Dystopian Children’s Texts (Critical Approaches to Children's Literature) 3031520335, 9783031520334

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
Introduction: Worlds of Difference
Disability in Literature, Film, and Television
Texts for and About Children and Young Adults
Discourse and Power
Discipline and Bio-power
Dystopia and Dis-topia
Chapter Outline
Bibliography
Chapter 1: Goblin-ology: Eugenics and Hysterisation in George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin (1872)
Victorian Discourses of the Body
Eugenics and the Goblins
The Hysterisation of Irene and Grandmother
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 2: “Lonely, tender, passionate heart”: Melancholy and Isolation in Dinah Mulock Craik’s The Little Lame Prince and His Traveling Cloak (1875)
Introduction
Craik’s Non-fiction
Disability Politics, Moral, and Confinement
Sentimentality, Melancholy, and Eugenics
Revolution and Double Closure
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 3: Building Beasties: Disability, Imperialism, and Violence in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954)
Introduction
Lord of the Flies
Civilisation
Imperialism and Religious Discourse
Death and Sacrifice
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 4: On the Fringes: John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids (1955) and Technologies of the Self
Introduction
Allegories and Faith-Based Politics
Measuring Disability
Policing, Surveillance, and Punishment
Geography as Propaganda
History as Propaganda
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 5: ‘A perversion of nature? How exciting!’: Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (1990), the Freak, the Monster, and the Limits of Inclusion
Genre and Scripts
The Freak in Edward Scissorhands
The Limits to Social Inclusion in Edward Scissorhands
The Monster in Edward Scissorhands
Conclusion
Chapter 6: ‘Blind. Deaf. Disabled. Wheelchair’: Community, History and Resistance in Jane Stemp’s Waterbound (1995)
Introduction
Politics and Surveillance
Histories
Resistances
Closure
Chapter 7: ‘This magic keeps me alive, but it’s making me crazy!’: Amputation, Madness, and Control in Adventure Time (2009–2018)
Introduction
Screening Disability in Adventure Time
“I Don’t Feel Anything”: Finn, Trauma, and Prostheticisation
“I’m Losing Myself”: The Ice King and ‘Madness’
Conclusion
Chapter 8: “Loss is loss is loss”: Embodying the Family-as-Trauma in Julianna Baggott’s Pure (2012)
Introduction
Bodies and Power
History as Disciplinary and Biopolitical Technique in Pure
“I Wanted To Be Alive”: Trauma, Physical Disability, and Bodily Autonomy in Pure
“Purity Is a Burden”: Resisting and Rejecting Purity
Family-as-Trauma
Conclusion
Conclusion
Bibliography
Legislation
Index

Citation preview

CRITICAL APPROACHES TO CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

The Government of Disability in Dystopian Children’s Texts Dylan Holdsworth

Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature

Series Editors

Kerry Mallan Queensland University of Technology Brisbane, QLD, Australia Clare Bradford Deakin University Burwood, VIC, Australia

Editorial Board

Shih-Wen Sue Chen SCCA Deakin University Burwood, VIC, Australia Nicola Daly University of Waikato Hamilton, Waikato, New Zealand Melanie Duckworth Østfold University College Halden, Norway Monica Flegel Lakehead University Thunder Bay, ON, Canada Nina Goga Western Norway University of Applied Sci Bergen, Norway

Elisabeth Gruner University of Richmond Richmond, VA, USA Anna Kérchy Institute of English & American Studies University of Szeged Szeged, Hungary Kristine Moruzi Deakin University Burwood, VIC, Australia Megan Musgrave Indiana University Bloomington, IN, USA Andrew O’Malley Toronto Metropolitan University Toronto, ON, Canada Keith O’Sullivan School of English Dublin City University Dublin, Ireland Michelle J. Smith Monash University Melbourne, VIC, Australia Andrea Mei-Ying Wu Department of Taiwanese Literature National Cheng Kung University Tainan, Taiwan

This timely new series brings innovative perspectives to research on children’s literature. It offers accessible but sophisticated accounts of contemporary critical approaches and applies them to the study of a diverse range of children’s texts - literature, film and multimedia. Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature includes monographs from both internationally recognised and emerging scholars. It demonstrates how new voices, new combinations of theories, and new shifts in the scholarship of literary and cultural studies illuminate the study of children’s texts.

Dylan Holdsworth

The Government of Disability in Dystopian Children’s Texts

Dylan Holdsworth Melbourne, VIC, Australia

ISSN 2753-0825     ISSN 2753-0833 (electronic) Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature ISBN 978-3-031-52033-4    ISBN 978-3-031-52034-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52034-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

For Tom

Acknowledgements

This book began as my PhD at Deakin University a decade ago. The PhD process was, like most tumultuous, exciting, and exhausting, but I am very grateful to have been able to pursue it with an Australian Postgraduate Award and with the expertise, guidance, and compassion of my peers and mentors. I would like to thank my principal supervisor, Ann Vickery, for all her patience, hard work, mentorship, and dedication. Without her supervision, kindness, and care, I don’t think I could have finished this project. I would also like to thank my secondary supervisors, Elizabeth Bullen and Clare Bradford, for all their passion, interest, and care over the years that has helped shape me as a scholar. A huge thank you also has to go to the hard-working Library staff at Deakin University, particularly Marina Minns for all her help and assistance navigating the Library’s resources.  I would also like to thank the editors, Clare Bradford and Kerry Mallan, for their hard work and support, and the editorial and production staff who have helped make this book a reality. However, the PhD was only one part of this process for me. As most academics know, the post-PhD world is a startlingly new reality where teaching work can often take precedence. I would like to thank Gilbert Caluya for reminding me of the passion and joy that research can bring and for re-instilling a confidence in myself. I would also like to thank the Deakin NTEU branch and my comrade members, particularly Piper Rodd, Audrey Statham, and Jack Kirne, for consistently reminding me to keep fighting for better in our workplace. There is also a long list of colleagues who have helped shape this book: Kerry Mallan, Sue Chen, Leonie Rutherford, Kristine Moruzi, Daniel Marshall, Lenise Prater, Sarah Hart, Emma Whatman, Jennifer Briguglio, Victoria Tedeschi, Hannah Garden, ix

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Laura Gobey – thank you all. Thank you to Kate McInally for all her love and passion; I will remember you always. My family and friends, thank you for your support, care, and guidance over the years, and your endless excitement for this book: my parents, Tina and Craig, and my brother, Jake, thank you for giving me so much love, care, and support throughout; Ann, Peter, Luke, Celeste, Abby, Archer, Jet, Noah, and Arden, thank you all for your support and love. A huge thank you to Brinagh Hassett, Suzan Gencay, Carly Witte – I don’t know who is more excited for this book, me or you all. There is one person, above all, I have to thank the most, my partner Tom Sandercock. You have been there for me every step of the way, helping me whenever I needed it, encouraging and supporting me constantly. I could not have done this without you. I love you and thank you. And a special thank you to our dog Bandit, who is as much of a rascal as he is cute. Thank you for making each day a bit brighter.

Contents

1 Goblin-ology:  Eugenics and Hysterisation in George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin (1872)  1 Victorian Discourses of the Body   2 Eugenics and the Goblins   4 The Hysterisation of Irene and Grandmother  12 Conclusion  20 Bibliography  21 2 “Lonely,  tender, passionate heart”: Melancholy and Isolation in Dinah Mulock Craik’s The Little Lame Prince and His Traveling Cloak (1875) 23 Introduction  23 Craik’s Non-fiction  24 Disability Politics, Moral, and Confinement  27 Sentimentality, Melancholy, and Eugenics  32 Revolution and Double Closure  36 Conclusion  41 Bibliography  42 3 Building  Beasties: Disability, Imperialism, and Violence in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) 45 Introduction  45 Lord of the Flies  47 Civilisation  49 xi

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CONTENTS

Imperialism and Religious Discourse  53 Death and Sacrifice  59 Conclusion  64 Bibliography  65 4 On  the Fringes: John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids (1955) and Technologies of the Self 67 Introduction  67 Allegories and Faith-Based Politics  69 Measuring Disability  71 Policing, Surveillance, and Punishment  73 Geography as Propaganda  78 History as Propaganda  82 Conclusion  86 Bibliography  87 5 ‘A  perversion of nature? How exciting!’: Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (1990), the Freak, the Monster, and the Limits of Inclusion 89 Genre and Scripts  93 The Freak in Edward Scissorhands  95 The Limits to Social Inclusion in Edward Scissorhands  100 The Monster in Edward Scissorhands  104 Conclusion 108 6 ‘Blind.  Deaf. Disabled. Wheelchair’: Community, History and Resistance in Jane Stemp’s Waterbound (1995)109 Introduction 109 Politics and Surveillance 111 Histories 117 Resistances 124 Closure 126 7 ‘This  magic keeps me alive, but it’s making me crazy!’: Amputation, Madness, and Control in Adventure Time (2009–2018)129 Introduction 129 Screening Disability in Adventure Time  131

 CONTENTS 

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“I Don’t Feel Anything”: Finn, Trauma, and Prostheticisation 134 “I’m Losing Myself”: The Ice King and ‘Madness’ 140 Conclusion 147 8 “Loss  is loss is loss”: Embodying the Family-­as-­Trauma in Julianna Baggott’s Pure (2012)149 Introduction 149 Bodies and Power 151 History as Disciplinary and Biopolitical Technique in Pure 153 “I Wanted To Be Alive”: Trauma, Physical Disability, and Bodily Autonomy in Pure 155 “Purity Is a Burden”: Resisting Biopolitical Discipline and Rejecting Purity 158 Family-as-Trauma 161 Conclusion 167 Conclusion169 Bibliography177 Index

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Introduction: Worlds of Difference

The histories of representation of disability in literature and art are extensive, found as far back as ancient Egyptian inscriptions, Greek tragedies, the Bible, and in numerous cultural mythologies.1 Recent scholarship has brought attention to the prevalence of disability throughout a wide array of more recent texts, from Medieval literature to canonised classics to contemporary popular fiction. Disability has a long-standing cultural pervasion. Even in broader social and political movements, discourses of ‘physical or cognitive inferiority’ have often informed other minority histories as explained by Mitchell and Snyder: “the Victorian equation between femininity and hysteria; the biological racism that justified slavery and the social subordination of racial minorities; psychiatry’s categorization of homosexuality as a pathological disorder; and so on” (2000:2). Clearly, disability and its representation has been, and remains, a crucial topic. With this proliferation of new scholarship and studies that highlight the significance of disability throughout history, new avenues of critical thought and methodology have opened, and gaps in knowledge are 1  An exhaustive list of scholarship is well beyond the scope of this book. Some notable examples are Stiker H-J (1999) A history of disability; Arwill-Nordbladh E (2012) ‘Ability and disability. On bodily variations and bodily possibilities in Viking age myth and image’, in Back Danielsson I-M and Thedéen S (eds) To tender gender: the pasts and futures of gender research in archaeology; Garland R (2010) The eye of the beholder: deformity and disability in the Graeco-Roman world; Mahran H and Kamal S M (2016) ‘Physical disability in Old Kingdom tomb scenes’; Millett-Gallant A and Howie E (eds) (2022) Disability and Art History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century.

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emerging. In imaginatively shaping worlds, textual representation in literature, film, and television has enormous potential as catalysts of change and, conversely, as technologies that perpetuate questionable and often competing discourses. Although the representation of disability in literature, film, and television for adults is receiving critical scrutiny, far less attention has been given to the representation of disability in children’s texts. Interrogating children’s texts has significant import because, as Barbara H. Baskin and Karen H. Harris explain, “It is during the period of childhood when understandings have not yet crystallized that the individual is most amenable to influence and fictional models may have great impact” (1977:1). Indeed, children’s and young adult (YA) texts provide a specific and significant space for their readers to grapple with subject positions outside of their own immediate frame of reference. Children’s literature is an influential means through which children are directed towards specific acts, ways of thinking, and ways of being in the world, socialising them into specific ideological positions, which often align with social norms. As such, “children’s literature scholarship has always paid close attention to the readers (and implied readers) of texts which are implicated in the processes of socialization” (Mallan & Bradford, 2011:6). However, trends in the growing body of scholarship on disability in children’s and YA texts highlight significant attention to nineteenth-century to early twentieth-century literature or contemporary representations, with a large swathe of twentieth-century representations going unexamined. This tight focus on specific periods also means that discursive and political connections across different periods are being overlooked. Furthermore, these studies tend to focus on realist representations, with little attention to other modes of writing that might offer distinct and substantive commentary on disability politics within their respective periods. As such, only some iterations of disability representation have been critically examined thus far. This book redresses this by analysing, and bringing into conversation, significant dystopian children’s and YA texts from four major historical periods in disability histories. Utopian and dystopian literature, as specific subsets of science fiction, are significant sites for challenging or reinforcing dominant belief systems and ways of being in the world. In the words of Michel Foucault, utopias “present society itself in a perfected form” (1984:3) and subsequently postulate a space inhabited by ‘perfected’ bodies. This ‘utopian impulse’ towards a perfected society is linked to discourses of progress, evolution, and development and therefore can often devalue ideas (and bodies)

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seemingly at odds with such an impulse. As Fredric Jameson wryly suggests, Utopia is “not so secretly supposed to manifest a will to power over all those individuals for whom you are plotting an ironclad collective happiness, and the diagnosis thereby, in more recent times, acquires a bad aesthetic dimension” (1994:53). What might be added is that the drive to universal ‘happiness’ or the ‘common good’ has historically impacted minority groups negatively, further marginalising, oppressing, and even ‘exterminating’ those who do not or cannot comply. In the case of representations of disability, utopia’s tendency towards the collective and uniformity has led to histories of erasure  – eugenics, prostheticisation, and institutionalisation. If “the face of happiness … looks rather like the face of privilege”, as Sara Ahmed argues (2010:11), then so too is the face of Utopia. Dystopian narratives, on the other hand, do not necessarily pertain to such lofty universalisations, and instead offer complex means of rethinking contemporary politics. Considering that “post-disaster [and, by extension, dystopian] fiction has consistently depicted the present as history and uses this temporal relationship as a strategy to foreground dystopian tendencies in present societies” (Bradford et al., 2008:13), temporality and dystopias are intricately tied together. However, not all experiences or valuations of temporality are the same. In Feminist, Queer, Crip (2013), Alison Kafer takes up this critical question of futurity and disability, pointing out how ‘idealised’ futures that are presumed to be universal often have no place for disability or illness (2–3), let alone one that can conceptualise disability “as political, as valuable, as integral” (3). Dystopian literature can, thus, offer ways to critically rethink history, contemporaneity, and futurity and can radically reshape how we understand the world and think of our place/s in it. In recent decades, there has been a significant increase in dystopian children’s and YA literature with the monumental successes of trilogies such as The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (2008–2010) and Divergent by Veronica Roth (2011–2013) and their film adaptations. The rise in dystopian YA fiction is aligned with anxieties regarding what discourses of power shape young people. As “[a] dominant preoccupation of much adolescent fiction is with how notions of identity are formed within specific contexts and shaped by larger social structures and processes” (Bradford et al.:17), dystopian texts encourage a critical engagement with

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these power structures.2 Subsequently, dystopian texts can explore the implications of power structures far more effectively than utopian fiction. The way that dystopian youth fiction can direct readers to respond to and consider certain politically invested representations of disability can also have ramifications for how disabled people are related to in the real world. In ‘Imagining disability futurities’ (2017), Carla Rice, Eliza Chandler, Jen Rinaldi, Nadine Changfoot, Kirsty Liddiard, Roxanne Mykitiuk, and Ingrid Mündel briefly touch on the idea of ‘dis-topia’, through which ‘futures may be built in response to disability, open to possibility rather than committed to perfectibility’ (224). While they do not go into substantive detail, Rice et al.’s dis-topias answer a way of thinking through the possibilities evoked in dystopian literature and addressing the critical intervention Kafer proposes. To examine how these power structures operate, Michel Foucault’s approach to power informs the explorations of representations of disability in dystopian youth fiction in this book. Shelley Tremain’s edited collection, Foucault and the Government of Disability: Enlarged and Revised Edition (2015), and David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder’s The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment (2015) offer key examples of the value in applying Foucault’s analyses of power to representations of disability. Through a focus on how power, specifically disciplinary and bio-power, operate in dystopian texts for young people across different historical periods, a deeper understanding of the histories and imagined futures of disability is made possible. This book takes up the task of mapping discursive shifts in the representation of disability in dystopian youth texts across four historical periods where major social, cultural, and political shifts were occurring in the lives of many disabled people. I have chosen to focus on British and American texts throughout the book due to the cultural dominance of both empires in Western culture across history, as well as their dominance in Disability Studies. The histories of representations of disability in other cultural contexts need critical attention and scrutiny; however, this is beyond the scope of this project. In engaging with discourses of disability and power, I understand disability as a form of government in the Foucauldian sense, specifically focusing on how various disciplinary and biopolitical techniques that inform disability-as-government are utilised to create and mobilise the disabled subject (both historically and textually). As Mitchell  The examples listed above are concerned with the place of girls in the world, as well as in potential dystopian futures. However, this can often involve a repudiation of some aspects of gender and can subject their protagonists to normalising discourses. 2

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and Snyder note, “the effort to represent is inevitably fraught with politics” (2000:40), and children’s literature should be approached not as simple, entertaining stories but as socio-cultural products imbricated in and responding to political discourses.

Disability in Literature, Film, and Television Throughout the last two decades, scholarly explorations of representations of disability in literature and film have emerged, offering more complex ways to understand and conceptualise the power of representation in relation to disability. Works such as David T.  Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder’s Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (2000) and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (1997) are foundational in approaching representations of disability. Angela M. Smith’s Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema (2011) adds to this growing interest in representations of disability, bringing specific focus to the early decades of horror cinema in the United States. In addition to these foundational works, Michael Bérubé’s The Secret Life of Stories: From Don Quixote to Harry Potter, How Understanding Intellectual Disability Transforms the Way We Read (2016) proffers more formalist and narratological ways of reading disability. In Narrative Prosthesis, Mitchell and Snyder argue that the literary utilisation of disability is as a ‘narrative prosthesis’; that is, “first, as a stock feature of characterization and, second, as an opportunistic metaphorical device” (2000:47). Their exploration of narrative prosthesis extends beyond its application in literary studies to disability in philosophical, medical, and ethical literature as well. In their analyses of various texts, Mitchell and Snyder concurrently map the histories of literary representations of disability and “key moments in the rhetorical history of disability” (1). Fiction, poetics, performance, film, and television are shown to occupy a specific and significant role in effecting socio-cultural and political discourses surrounding disability, drawing attention to how representations of disability operate in a variety of forms and genres. Garland-Thomson’s exploration of the representation and construction of disability in Extraordinary Bodies similarly reveals the prevalence of disability as a narrative device. Within cultural products, such as literature, film, and television, Garland-Thomson illustrates that an analysis of “cultural representations of disability reveals a politics of appearance in which

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some traits, configurations, and functions become the stigmata of a vividly embodied inferiority or deviance, while others fade into a neutral, disembodied, universalized norm” (1997:135). Through her analyses of the freak show, sentimental fiction, and black women’s liberatory novels, Garland-Thomson complicates more traditional analyses of disability in literature and culture. By considering the role of disability within texts “that already claim a position outside dominant discourse” (136), Garland-­ Thomson also critiques the categorising and hierarchising processes of the literary canon. While Mitchell and Snyder demonstrate the need to reread ‘canonical’ texts, Garland-Thomson suggests that even texts that are devalued or excluded from the canon need rereading to grasp a more complete idea of the place of disability in literature. Garland-Thomson illuminates the power of representations of disability from varied genres through moving beyond the simple locating of disability tropes and stereotypes in literary and cultural practices already moving outside the rigid structures of the norm (in all applications of the term). Smith’s Hideous Progeny explores the impact that eugenics discourses in the United States have had on the horror genre of cinema in the early- to mid-twentieth century. Smith’s analyses map the continued influence of eugenics discourse and the impact of discourses on/of disability in horror cinema. In analysing classic horror cinema, Smith resituates critical attention to representations of disability as something that can and should extend beyond the bounds of realism; that the hyperbolic, fantastic, monstrous creations of not only horror cinema but also science fiction and fantasy need to be closely analysed and critiqued as well. In doing so, the powerful discourses that affect, construct, hierarchise, organise, and manage the disabled subject through the representation of non-normative, sometimes nonhuman, bodies are exposed. In The Secret Life of Stories, Bérubé takes a slightly different approach to the studies mentioned above. His close focus on form delivers some complex and, at times, radical insights into how disability is deployed in a range of texts. His analysis draws attention to how disability functions, not only as content or theme, but also as a way of narrativising. His focus on how some narratives’ use of motive, time, and self-awareness can reflect disabled ways of being illustrates the disruptive potential of reading disabled. The radical possibilities of reading disabled are furthered in this present book through a close focus on those “fictional disabilities” (2016:2) that do not “announc[e themselves] as disability” (1, emphasis in original) within equally fictitious dystopias.

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The historicisation and contextualisation of these approaches are of vital importance to considering how understandings of disability have altered over time and place. Through analyses that consider the power of literature and film as socialising and normalising technologies, Mitchell and Snyder, Garland-Thomson, Smith, and Bérubé develop critical insights into discourses of disability. In understanding literary, filmic, and televisual texts as culturally and historically specific, the construction, use, and function of representations of disability can be mapped further. Although representation is only a fraction of the myriad ways disabled people are positioned, managed, and regulated within societies, they form a significant part of how ideologies of normativity and, inversely, non-­ normativity, influence public perceptions of disability. Representations of disability in youth literature and media inform and are informed by complex constellations of politics relating to various aspects of identity formation, social engagement, and dialogues around the body, illness, disability, life, and death. This list is in no way exhaustive; however, these political aspects of children’s and young adult literature are inherently concerned with the place of and anxieties about the body in texts and their potential impact on audiences. Discussions of these issues, however, are nonetheless specifically contextualised; the desired effects of such representations shift significantly depending upon the historical and geo-political periods under consideration. So too, it should be assumed that representations reflect and refract the politics of their periods of production and in relation to their implied audiences. Representations of disability in literature, film, and television for adults have come under close scrutiny, yet narratives for and about children and young adults have not been given the same level of close examination.

Texts for and About Children and Young Adults There are a very small number of monographs dealing specifically with disability in children’s literature. Lois Keith’s Take Up Thy Bed and Walk: Death, Disability and Cure in Classic Fiction for Girls (2001) examines the implications of representations of disability, illness, and cure in late-­ nineteenth/early-twentieth-century fiction primarily marketed to girls. The texts Keith analyses are primarily realist and largely engage with the tropes of the miraculous cure or death over disability. Covering novels from wide-ranging contexts such as Jane Eyre, The Secret Garden, Pollyanna, and Seven Little Australians, Keith delivers some focused,

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critical analyses of what these novels say to girls about who they are expected to be, and what these novels do with their disabled characters. Although it might be tempting to paint these texts with the same brush (and subsequently dismiss them), Keith takes each on their merits and failings in how they explore gender and disability. Keith’s analyses can sometimes veer too much into summation, but she produces valuable groundwork for engaged, sustained scholarship that takes its topic seriously. In Disability, Deformity, and Disease in the Grimms’ Fairy Tales (2014), Ann Schmiesing examines the prevalence of disability in a variety of the Grimms’s fairy tales across different editions and considers how the editorial work of the Grimms acts as a prostheticising of the tales. While Schmiesing does not approach her analysis from a children’s literature perspective, she does note the significance of the works in the history of children’s texts. Schmiesing’s work moves away from older models of discussing disability simply as a cipher for other meanings and instead treats the presence and the editorial deployment of disability as articulating meaning itself. In doing so, she reinstates disability as central to many stories. At times, Schmiesing belabours explaining psychoanalytic readings of tales, those that most articulate a cipher reading. While these are undoubtably significant to discuss, the overemphasis on them complicates the argument of analysing disability on disability’s terms in these tales. Elizabeth A. Wheeler’s Handiland: The Crippest Place on Earth (2018) offers some engaging analysis of a range of realist and fantastic disability representations, but I believe the true strength of Wheeler’s work is as a broader analysis of crip kid’s cultures. Her analyses of playgrounds, toilet humour, music, and schooling as well as children’s picturebooks, novels, and films open a wide range of experiences for analysis. Not only does Wheeler cover a variety of cultural texts throughout Handiland, but she also examines disability across a range of national, temporal, and experiential contexts, from late-Victorian fantasy through to Afrofuturist YA. Through considering a range of cultural case studies, Wheeler illuminates how creating a world that is fundamentally engaging, accessible, and equal for disabled people involves sustained efforts on a multitude of fronts. However, there is a somewhat incidental tendency to only read representations in positive, inclusive terms that avoids rich tensions and competing discourses in representations and lived realities of disability. While she moves into a critical position beyond a focus on negative

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representations, there is a touch of overcorrection here; sometimes representations herald more problems than they resolve. Although the monographs above offer extended critical engagements, majority of the scholarly discussions of disability in children’s and YA literature are articles and chapters. Greta Little’s “Handicapped Characters in Children’s Literature: Yesterday and Today” (1986), Ellen Rubin and Emily Strauss Watson’s “Disability Bias in Children’s Literature” (1987) and Kathy Saunders’s “What Disability Studies Can Do for Children’s Literature” (2004) are foundational early discussions of disability in children’s literature. They each stress the importance of critically engaging with representations of disability in children’s texts and recognising the power of such representations. While these works outline the productive potential and need for critiques of representations of disability in children’s texts, due to the relatively new emergence of these areas of study and the limited space of an article or chapter, there tends to be a substantial focus on justifying the research. The focus either on disability or on children’s literature (or, sometimes both) needs such thorough explanation that the core analysis can be truncated or minimised. In these ways, articles and chapters can, at times, be limited in their engagement. In 2004, Kathy Saunders commented that “in comparison to analysis of race and gender bias, an ongoing debate on the impact of disability images in children’s material, informed by an analysis of disability in contemporary society, has been slow to develop in the fields of both children’s literature and disability studies” (para. 3). Almost two decades later both fields are still somewhat reluctant to consider the significance of representations of disability in children’s and YA literature, and the impact of such representations. As a socialising technology, and subsequently also a technology of power, literature for and about young people constructs, hierarchises, manages, ‘informs’, and organises children. Furthermore, annotated bibliographies and educational praxes are technologies of power too, with the same inherent problems they seek to identify in the literature they use. While inclusion and education are both noble causes, I turn my focus to how dystopian youth texts are productive sites for discourses of disability.

Discourse and Power Foucault contends that the objective of his work “has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects” (1982:777). As such, the constitution of the disabled

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subject has, implicitly, been of central concern to his work. Such considerations can be seen in Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1961), The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1963), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge (1978), as well as many others. In this book, I apply his concepts of government, disciplinary power, and bio-power to consider how disability is both discursively constructed and mobilised in and by children’s and YA texts. Foucault suggests that the exercise of power is a total structure of actions brought to bear upon possible actions; it incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; in the extreme it constrains or forbids absolutely; it is nevertheless always a way of acting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action. (1982:789)

In this sense, he closes the exercise of power in the doubled meaning of ‘conduct’—‘to lead’ and ‘to behave’. It is this “conduct of conduct” (Tremain, 2015:17) which comes to be what Foucault terms ‘government’. As he explains, government “designated the way in which the conduct of individuals or of groups might be directed: the government of children, of souls, of communities, of families, of the sick” (Foucault, 1982:790). One method of governing children is through the literature to which they are socio-culturally directed. The production of ‘literature’ for any specific audience is already a means by which they are directed; consider the maintenance of the distinction between adult literature and children’s or YA literature—it is presumed the former category will contain depictions and information unsuitable for ‘children’, which itself is built on a set of assumptions about children. Furthermore, children’s literature (like adult literature) socialises and acculturates children into a given socio-­ cultural context. As a product of a specific historical, geographical, political, social, cultural, and economic milieu, children’s literature is inherently ideological. Part of this broader ideological management of children involves delivering particular messages about the world which suggest that the current formation of society, its norms, institutions, knowledges, political and economic structures, and so on are natural, progressive, and defensible. This doesn’t mean that every aspect of life does, or should, remain the same,

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but that through cultural texts (for young people or otherwise), broader structures of governance become entrenched, and subsequently, some recurrent discourses become difficult to shift. However, although texts can reinforce certain ideals, it is important to consider how children’s literature can resist dominant ideologies as well. As Foucault argues, “a power relationship can only be articulated on the basis of two elements which are indispensable if it is really to be a power relationship: that “the other” (the one over whom power is exercised) be thoroughly recognized and maintained to the very end as a person who acts; and that, faced with a relationship of power, a whole field of responses, reactions, results, and possible inventions may open up” (1982:789). For power to be exercised there must be the capacity for action by ‘the other’ and various potential outcomes including resistance. This has been somewhat powerfully seen with the discursive shifts within Disability Studies over the last 30–40 years where previous regimes of knowledge have been challenged, and yet entrenched structures become difficult to move. Tobin Siebers describes the ‘medical model’ as understanding disability “as an individual defect lodged in the person, a defect that must be cured or eliminated if the person is to achieve full capacity as a human being” (2008:3). This model, which aimed to pathologise, categorise, institutionalise, cure, and even eliminate people with disabilities, became seen “as natural, and individual and medical, and inexorable” (Shakespeare, 2000:160). However, during the rights movements of the 1950s–1990s, this model came under scrutiny. The 1975 discussion between the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) and the Disability Alliance, Fundamental Principles of Disability, was the first call from disability activism groups for a conceptual framework which understood “disability not as an individual defect but as the product of social injustice, one that requires not the cure or elimination of the defective person but significant changes in the social and built environment” (Siebers, 2008:3–4). Within this new ‘social model’ of disability, impairment became understood as a physical noted difference and disability as socio-­ cultural reactions to that difference and as a form of social oppression. However, in contemporary Disability Studies, the social model has also been seen to be insufficient as its emphasis on social dimensions of oppression can occlude lived, material realities. Furthermore, and most significantly for this study, the social model of disability generated a limited view of how power is exercised. According to Shelley Tremain, this model relied on “juridical conceptions [of] power … construed as a

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fundamentally repressive thing that is possessed by a centralized external authority, such as a particular social group, a class, an institution, or the state, and reigns over, and down upon, others” (Tremain, 2015:17). It is this “juridical conception of power that once prevailed in disability studies” (17). While there are several new approaches to disability, majority of these tend to privilege sociological studies, making them difficult to bring across to discussions of fictional representation, especially non-realist representations. This privileging of certain modes of knowledge inadvertently dismisses the force of representational strategies and their impact on socio-­ cultural engagements with disabled people. While these shifts in the discourse of disability can be seen as highlighting a move towards centring disability and taking it seriously as an area of study and analysis, this emphasis on ‘models’ is part of the broader structures of governance that I believe scholarship needs to move beyond. If “the presence of disability always disrupts, shakes up and interrogates the normative position” (Goodley & Runswick-Cole, 2016:4), then the proscriptive logic of the ‘model’ actively manages discourse—suddenly there are specific, structured ways to talk about disability. Instead, scholars such as Shelley Tremain, David T. Mitchell, and Sharon L. Snyder have suggested rethinking disability and power through the work of Foucault. Foucault’s conceptualisations of power, particularly disciplinary and bio-­ power, offer new and innovative approaches to the subject of disability. Drawing on Foucault, we can rethink disability not simply as an oppressive system but as a complex and dynamic government of bodies and subjects “that aims to shape, guide, or affect the conduct of some person or persons” (Tremain, 2015:16). Power, as a central point to the construction of the subject (in Foucault’s dual sense), is inherently a significant, and often overlooked, point of discussion when considering disability. As mentioned, the juridically inflected social model has had huge impact on how Disability Studies has formed and continues to shift. Foucault and the Government of Disability (Tremain, 2015) offers multiple perspectives on the use of Foucault’s work in thinking about disability. Tremain’s introduction in the 2015 edition, ‘Foucault, governmentality, and critical disability theory today: a genealogy of the archive’ (9–23), as well as her essay, ‘On the government of disability’ (2001), offers a critical starting point for considering governmentalities and a biopolitics of disability. Likewise, Mitchell and Snyder’s The Biopolitics of Disability (2015) takes this biopolitics of disability and establishes it firmly within a discussion of neoliberalism, exploring it in relation

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to its real-world effects. Both Tremain’s and Mitchell and Snyder’s works offer significant, critical engagements with the implications of a biopolitics of disability both theoretically and philosophically and in terms of its machinations in the real world. It is at this juncture this book intervenes. While Tremain’s and Mitchell and Snyder’s work explore real-world points of governance, I focus squarely on textual representation as a significant technique of the government of disability.

Discipline and Bio-power While governmentality designates the way in which conduct is conducted, discipline coerces and directs bodies towards action that benefits the State. In “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76 (1997), Foucault explains “that discipline tries to rule a multiplicity of men to the extent that their multiplicity can and must be dissolved into individual bodies that can be kept under surveillance, trained, used, and, if need be, punished” (242). In The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge (1978), he expands on this, arguing that disciplinary power is “centered on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls”; that is, “an anatomo-politics of the human body” (139, italics in original). Subsequently, disciplinary power individualises bodies to determine how to optimise the use of such bodies for the purpose of the State. The technique of normalisation becomes central to the way discipline operates, especially in relation to the disabled subject. In Discipline and Punish (1975), Foucault contends “Discipline ‘makes’ individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise” through “hierarchical observation, normalizing judgement and their combination in a procedure that is specific to it, the examination” (170). The constitution of a ‘norm’ enables a dissection of an amorphous population, making it possible to target specific individuals, specific bodies, that are subsequently deemed ‘abnormal’. This technique of normalisation is intrinsically linked to “the art of punishing, in the régime of disciplinary power” (182). The norm becomes “[t]he perpetual penalty that traverses all points and supervises every instant in the disciplinary institutions [as it] compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes. In short, it normalizes” (183). The constitution of the norm enables the ‘abnormal’ individual or body, that which in one

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way or another does not meet the requirements of disciplinary power’s subject (the ‘body-as-machine’), to be governed until new ways of utilising it emerge. The most salient means of turning the ‘abnormal’ body into something utilisable is through turning it into an object of knowledge production. Hence, the proliferation of disciplinary institutions such as the hospital, school, clinic, prison, rehabilitation centre, asylum, all spaces which centre around the ‘normalisation’ of disability through the manufacturing of knowledge. The significance of the norm is found through the fact that “practices of division, classification, and ordering around a norm have become the primary means by which people are individualized, come to be understood scientifically, and even come to understand themselves in this mode” (Tremain, 2015:14–15). One of the most subversive means by which normalisation, and the normalising gaze, is exercised is through representation. Through the means of textually representing disability, normalised understandings of the body, behaviour, emotions, reactions, responses, and mental processes are not only disseminated but imbibed by the reader. In the case of texts for and about children and young adults, these normalising judgements, implicit in the socialising technology of the text, the machinations of language and in the implied child reader’s experiential frame of reference, are being drawn out, constructing and reconstructing disability and, in the case of the disabled reader, the self. In this way, children’s texts operate as a disciplinary technology—directing understanding and responses to disability in a way that not only inculcates children into the ‘norm’, into exercising normalising judgements about others and the self, but ultimately reifying the disciplining of the disabled individual/body. The management of ‘individual bodies’ is achieved through discipline, but the management of populations is exercised through what Foucault terms ‘bio-power’ or ‘bio-politics’. Foucault explains bio-politics as focused “on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary” (1976:170). As such, “biopolitics will derive its knowledge from, and define its power’s field of intervention in terms of, the birth rate, the mortality rate, various biological disabilities, and the effects of the environment” (1997:245). Succinctly, Foucault suggests bio-power “is applied not to man-as-body [as discipline is,] but to the living man, to man-as-living-being; ultimately, if you like, to man-as-­ species” (1997:242). Biopolitics’ investment in life situates the disabled

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body as a problem for the nation-state. In this way, the myriad institutions, technologies, and strategies for managing ‘life’ mean, quite discriminately, managing the disabled body. Tremain argues that it is through the “vast apparatus” of biopolitics, “erected to secure the well-being of the general population … [that] has caused the contemporary disabled subject to emerge into discourse and social existence” (2015:14). Tremain elaborates: Among the items that have comprised this expansive apparatus are asylums, income support programs, quality of life assessments, workers’ compensation benefits, special education programs, regimes of rehabilitation, parallel transit systems, prostheses, home care services, telethons, sheltered workshops, poster child campaigns, and prenatal diagnosis. These (and a host of other) practices, procedures, and policies have created, classified, codified, managed, and controlled social anomalies through which some people have been divided from others and objectivized as (for instance) physically impaired, insane, handicapped, mentally ill, retarded, or deaf. (14)

While these biopolitical interventions may superficially seem positive, the extent to which disability is deployed to govern is immense. As mentioned, the constitution of people as objects of knowledge (objectivisation) is an integral part of how discipline makes use of bodies that fall outside the ‘norm’. However, here Tremain highlights how objectivisation is an integral aspect to the constitution of populations and manages them through constant reference to a still larger population (moving from more localised groups to national then/or global contexts). By referring (and deferring) to a larger population, especially in terms of ‘health’, ‘practices, procedures, and policies’ can be implemented. This often has severe ramifications for disabled lives, as Mitchell and Snyder argue, justifying not only “the primary eugenics period wherein lives with disabilities found their existences increasingly immobilized within the nation”, but also “[i]nstitutionalization (chronic human warehousing), marriage prohibitions, involuntary sterilization, confinement within one’s home, inaccessibility of shared public space, segregated education, and intensified immigration restrictions” (2015:7). Such “tactics employed by liberal governance practices” both “physically control” (discipline) and “statistically graph and determine in minute detail the cultural parameters of life within which disabled people find themselves enfolded” (biopolitically manage) (7). This is significant as Mitchell and Snyder demonstrate how disciplinary and bio-power are not easily and simply

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differentiated. Foucault contends that biopolitics “does not simply do away with the disciplinary technique, because it exists at a different level, on a different scale, and because it has a different bearing area, and makes use of very different instruments” (1997:242). Bio-power “does not exclude disciplinary technology, but it does dovetail into it, integrate it, modify it to some extent, and above all, use it by sort of infiltrating it, embedding itself in existing disciplinary techniques” (242). As such, any consideration of one must include (or at least imply) the other. As mentioned earlier, children’s and young adult texts involve a specific disciplining of the implied child audience, socialising them into both an acceptance and deployment of normalising judgements directed at the self and others. However, these socialising tactics also mean an engagement with the (bio) politics that utilise such tactics. Through representational strategies, not only are various understandings and misunderstandings of disability and disabled people being produced, disseminated, reiterated, engaged, and inculcated, but also larger historically and culturally located politics regarding the government of disabled people are being activated.

Dystopia and Dis-topia Children’s texts disciplinarily and biopolitically engage the implied child audience in socialising techniques, but they also offer modes of resistance. Science fiction and fantasy, in particular dystopian texts, offer child audiences a space to reflect upon contemporary politics. While there is a large amount of scholarship on dystopian texts, there are competing ideas of what necessarily constitutes a ‘dystopia’. Fredric Jameson argues that “the dystopia is generally a narrative, which happens to a specific subject or character”, as opposed to the “Utopian text [which is] somehow without a subject-position” (1994:55–56), yet Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan argue that there is a “deeper and more totalizing agenda in the dystopian form insofar as the text is built around the construction of a narrative of the hegemonic order and a counter-­narrative of resistance” (2003:5). They suggest that “As opposed to the eutopian [sic] plot of dislocation, education, and return of an informed visitor, the dystopia … generates its own didactic account in the critical encounter that ensues when the citizen confronts, or is confronted by, the contradictions of the society that is present on the very first page” (6). As Baccolini suggests dystopian texts “warn readers about the possible outcomes of our present world and entails an extrapolation of key features

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of contemporary society. Dystopia, therefore, is usually located in a negatively deformed future of our own world” (2003:115). As such, dystopia is the hyper-realisation of the complex political and power relations of the ‘present’ projected onto another place. Significantly, Baccolini uses the word ‘deformed’ to describe the future worlds depicted in dystopian texts. I suggest that the ‘deformed’ qualities of the worlds are underlined by the representation of, in various ways, the ‘deformed’ bodies of those characters who populate such texts, although this is often neglected in critical discussions. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, Naomi Jacobs explores the potential positivity of the posthuman in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis series and contends, “In the cyborg, the old human imperfections are prosthetically corrected; psychotropic technologies reconcile the spirit that is willing with the flesh that is weak” (2003:94). Again, like in Baccolini’s claim, disability becomes an integral point of reference but is overlooked. Jacobs concludes that “The posthuman body need no longer be confined to one gender, one sexuality, one race, one subjectivity … In its cyborg wisdom the posthuman body refuses fixity, definition, boundaries” (94). Subsequently, for the posthuman to be understood positively here, there is a utilisation of disability as referential (deformed, imperfect, weak), an oversight surrounding the normativising strategies that prostheses and ‘psychotropic technologies’ are part of and what this means for disabled subjectivities. Jacobs makes compelling arguments, but addressing disability would only strengthen the analysis. What becomes clear, nevertheless, through Baccolini’s definition and Jacobs’s analysis is that, as Michael Bérubé suggests, “the genre of science fiction is as obsessed with disability as it is with space travel and alien contact” (2005:568). Beyond this obsession, though, is the clarification that, even in criticism, disability is made to signal only a negative perception of the future—not only are disabled futures framed as ‘undesirable’ as Kafer explains (2013:3), but these futures are ‘undesirable’ precisely because they are disabled. The link between disability and the ‘deformed’ dystopian world is written on the surface  – a place deemed uninhabitable, broken, and alien/ating. This persistent link means that the resistance that forms such a significant part of the dystopian narrative operates doubly, suggesting new ways of theorising disability and imagining disabled lives and futures. Subsequently, analyses of disability in dystopian narratives can offer possibilities of resistance in the ‘present’ moment. In specifically considering resistance within a Foucauldian framework, new ways of subverting, engaging with,

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pushing back, rallying against, and existing in the nexuses of power relations can be explored. As mentioned earlier, Rice et  al.’s (2017) conceptualisation of dis-­ topias is a useful entry point to considering alternative representations of disability futures. In their brief discussion of it, Rice et al. link the concept with “the roaring chaos of Mad Max’s open desert and motley crew” as opposed “to the uniformity, sterility, and rigidity of Utopian paradise” (224). While this definition gives us an example, there is little further clarification of how we might theorise or understand the concept beyond this one representation. Extending Rice et al.’s conceptualisation, I recognise ‘dis-topias’ as SF/fantasy dystopian worlds where, through the temporal distance the futuristic setting of dystopias can provide, critical disability issues in the present are recognised as politically significant now and into the future. By framing these worlds as inherently ‘crip-political’, we can recognise that “[h]ow one understands disability in the present determines how one imagines disability in the future; one’s assumptions about the experience of disability create one’s conception of a better future” (Kafer, 2013:2). Thus, in ‘dis-topian’ texts disability and disability futurity “as political, as valuable, as integral” (3) come to the fore as something to fight for and write for. However, as outlined above, these worlds and these futures will always involve complex networks of politics and resistance, requiring audiences to approach disability from new vantages. It is in this juncture that an analysis of power, of how and through what processes disability is governed, can illuminate the variety of political dimensions of disability in dystopian children’s texts. While the texts under consideration in this book may not all be considered dystopias in a traditional sense, their focus on disability politics and futurity would make them dis-topias.

Chapter Outline This book is divided into four sections, each exploring texts from a different but significant historical period. The periods under consideration are the late-Victorian period of the 1870s, the post-World War II/early Cold War period of the 1950s, the post-rights movement period of the 1990s, and the contemporary neoliberal period of the 2010s. These periods have been selected due to their political anxieties about disability. Due to the historical specificity employed, the geo-political framing is limited to texts from the United Kingdom and the United States. While they have distinct and changing politics, especially over the course of 140 years between my

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first and last texts, both have had cultural dominance in the English-­ language world in these historical eras. Accordingly, Chaps. 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6 focus on texts from the United Kingdom (UK), whereas Chaps. 5, 7, and 8 analyse texts from the United States (US). Throughout the Victorian era, but especially the later decades, the management of disabled persons and people rapidly shifted worldwide. With the proliferation and validation of eugenics discourse in diverse nations worldwide, the effects of physiognomic discourses on disability, the management and deployment of sex, marriage and reproductive prohibitions, the incarceration of disabled people, and the use of others in freak and monster shows, the Victorian period is an important starting point for considering the government of disability. “Chapter 1: Goblin-­ ology: Eugenics and Hysterisation in George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin (1872)” examines how the goblins of the novel are constructed as degenerate and dysgenic creatures and how this impacts the marriage plot in the narrative. The chapter also considers the theme of hysteria through Princess Irene and her grandmother. Consequently, the intersections of disability, race, and class, and disability, gender, and sexuality, respectively, are examined. As such, the possibility of resistance is open only for some characters and through specific means. “Chapter 2: “Lonely, tender, passionate heart”: Melancholy and Isolation in Dinah Mulock Craik’s The Little Lame Prince and His Traveling Cloak (1875)” considers Craik’s novel in relation to her non-fiction writing. Her concern for disabled citizens in England is often intrinsically related to her beliefs, which subsequently impact how the protagonist Prince Dolor is constituted as disabled. Through a close analysis of the text and Craik’s non-­ fiction writing, the complex way The Little Lame Prince navigates late-Victorian social norms, methods of regulation and management of the disabled body, Christian sentimentality, and ideas of moral conduct are examined. Moving ahead, the next two chapters analyse texts from the post-War/ early Cold War period of the 1950s. With the return of physically, emotionally, and psychologically traumatised soldiers from World War II, the burgeoning distrust between the Soviet Union and the United States, and anxieties about the possibility of thermonuclear war, the 1950s is a politically and socio-culturally turbulent period. While the events mentioned above had a significant impact on global politics, the United Kingdom was dealing with the specific impacts of decolonisation and mass migration to its shores. The changing history and political positioning of England as

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nation and empire in the 1950s meant a restructuring and re-suturing of power relations within and a difficult shedding of colonialist and imperialist mentalities. “Chapter 3: Building Beasties: Disability, Imperialism, and Violence in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954)” addresses the long-forgotten victims of Lord of the Flies. This chapter examines the death of three key characters who are all marked as physically and behaviourally Other, and how their deaths are linked to broader imperialist and religious discourses of the period. In comparison, “Chapter 4: On the Fringes: John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids (1955) and Technologies of the Self” considers how the disciplinary and biopolitical practices of surveillance, policing, punishment, and the productions of historical and geographic knowledge constitute disability. Through processes of self-reflection and self-management, the people of Waknuk submit to techniques of control that serve to measure, eradicate, or exile disabled people. The Chrysalids as children’s or YA literature is, again, contestable, but like Lord of the Flies, the focalisation of the narrative through a core group of young people suggests a young audience, as does its influence on later YA science fiction texts.3 The normalising strategies of the novel’s society range from exile to extermination and offer pertinent commentary on the Cold War paranoia of the period. The significant geo-political shift at the start of the 1990s, with the formal end of the Cold War and the deconstructing of Soviet influence in Eastern Europe, as well as the formalisation and institutionalisation of rights movements and legislation (including disability rights), this period seems to be a time of possible monumental changes in representations. The ‘inclusion’ of disability in literature, film, and television in various ways has made considerations of disability more apparent. However, the impact of neoliberal inclusionist discourses make representations of disability problematically centred around the disciplinary and biopolitical techniques of normalisation. “Chapter 5: ‘A perversion of nature? How exciting!’: Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (1990), the Freak, the Monster, and the Limits of Inclusion” considers the role and limitations of inclusionist discourses in Burton’s iconic film. Drawing on the histories of the freak and monster, this chapter explores how Edward Scissorhands 3  Of particular significance is the influence Wyndham’s text has had on Jane Stemp’s Waterbound, the focus of Chap. 6. Stemp states, “My own Waterbound owes a certain amount of its genesis to my memories of reading The Chrysalids, which I acknowledged by naming one of my central characters Sophie” (2004:para. 4).

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deals with the limits of inclusionist discourses and the echoes of eugenics discourse inherent in the film. “Chapter 6: ‘Blind. Deaf. Disabled. Wheelchair’: Community, History, and Resistance in Jane Stemp’s Waterbound (1995)” examines how Stemp explores similar critical themes to Edward Scissorhands and The Chrysalids but with a pointedly clear disabled cast of characters. This chapter focuses on the policing, surveillance, and eugenic policies of the novel’s ‘utopic’ Upstream society, the silencing and erasure of disabled histories (group and personal), and what this means within the context of neoliberal inclusionist discourses. Resistances and movements against the government of disability in Waterbound are also considered. Like the chapters before them, Chaps. 7 and 8 consider normalising discourses, the power relations between characters and government, and the constitution of disability undertaken in early- to mid-2010s’ texts. The continuation of neoliberal inclusionist practices is combined with a looser distinction between implied audiences and a more fluid understanding of the body, producing texts that actively engage with new ways of thinking disability. Although it’s a challenge to analyse recent history, particularly as the implications and effects of the period are still unravelling, by addressing dystopian representations we can begin to theorise how the political moment was being formed and reformed creatively. “Chapter 7: ‘This magic keeps me alive, but it’s making me crazy!’: Amputation, Madness, and Control in Adventure Time (2009–2018)” specifically focuses on the characters Finn and the Ice King, and how they epitomise the series’ exploration of disability. The tenuous relationship between Finn, the Ice King, and the implied audience generates complex discussions regarding disability, trauma, and sanity. Through a critique of neoliberal representation, this chapter addresses some of the problematic and damaging ways the series presents disability and trauma. “ Chapter 8: ‘Loss is loss is loss’: Embodying the Family-as-Trauma in Julianna Baggott’s Pure (2012)” follows the theme of trauma throughout the titular first novel in the Pure trilogy. Initially, this chapter returns to the theme of history and how propagandist rhetoric generates and maintains unequal power structures, however, it also explores how the narrative thematises the family as traumatic through actions on the bodies of two main characters, Pressia Belze and Partridge Willux. Both characters, through their shifting relationships to history, family, and their bodies, resist power structures which seek to discipline and biopolitically manage them.

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While each set of chapters explore the same period, they each explore different yet interconnected elements of the discourse on disability. Some key elements reappear in different chapters, while others are central to one chapter only. Some texts are much easier to categorise as dystopian, while others are more thematically dystopian. All in all, though, this book demonstrates how central disability is to the stories we tell, and how stories reflect, and contribute to, the governmental management of groups of children, disabled people, parents, scholars, audiences. Stories, whether for young or old, are not ideologically bereft of value—they push us, position us, produce us—but they also are sites of resistance to the government of disability.

Bibliography Adventure time. (2009–2018). [Television program] Cartoon Network, USA. Ahmed, S. (2010). The promise of happiness. Duke University Press. Baccolini, R. (2003). ‘A useful knowledge of the present is rooted in the past’: Memory and historical reconciliation in Ursula K Le Guin’s The Telling. In R. Baccolini & T. Moylan (Eds.), Dark horizons: Science fiction and the dystopian imagination. Routledge. Baccolini, R., & Moylan, T. (2003). Introduction: Dystopia and histories. In R. Baccolini & T. Moylan (Eds.), Dark horizons: Science fiction and the dystopian imagination. Routledge. Baggott, J. (2012). Pure. Headline Publishing Group. Baskin, B.  H., & Harris, K.  H. (1977). Notes from a different drummer. R R Bowker Company. Bérubé, M. (2005). Disability and narrative. PMLA, 120(2), 568–576. Bérubé, M. (2016). The secret life of stories: From Don Quixote to Harry Potter, how understanding intellectual disability transforms the way we read. New York University Press. Bradford, C., Mallan, K., Stephens, J., & McCallum, R. (2008). New world orders in contemporary children’s literature: Utopian transformations. Palgrave Macmillan. Burton, T. (director). (1990). Edward Scissorhands [motion picture], 20th Century Fox, USA. Craik, D. M. (1875/1964). The little lame prince and his traveling cloak. Whitman Publishing Company. Foucault, M. (1961/2001). Madness and civilization: A history of insanity in the age of reason (R. Howard, Trans.). Routledge Classics. Foucault, M. (1963/2003). The birth of the clinic: An archaeology of medical perception (A. M. Sheridan, Trans.). Routledge Classics.

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Foucault, M. (1975/2020). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Penguin Classics. Foucault, M. (1978/2020). The history of sexuality, volume 1: The will to knowledge (R. Hurley, Trans.). Penguin Classics. Foucault, M. (1982). The subject and power. Critical Inquiry, 8(4), 777–795. Foucault, M. (1984). Of other spaces: Utopias and heterotopias. Architecture/ Mouvement/Continuité (J. Miskowiec, Trans.). http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/ www/foucault1.pdf. Accessed 5 Oct 2016. Foucault, M. (1997/2020). “Society must be defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76 (M.  Bertani & A.  Fontana, Eds.; D.  Macey, Trans.). Penguin Books. Garland-Thomson, R. (1997). Extraordinary bodies: Figuring physical disability in American culture and literature. Columbia University Press. Golding, W. (1954/2006). Lord of the flies. Perigree Books. Goodley, D., & Runswick-Cole, K. (2014). Becoming dishuman: Thinking about the human through dis/ability. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 37(1), 1–15. Jacobs, N. (2003). Posthuman bodies and agency in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis. In R. Baccolini & T. Moylan (Eds.), Dark horizons: Science fiction and the dystopian imagination. Routledge. Jameson, F. (1994). The seeds of time. Columbia University Press. Kafer, A. (2013). Feminist, queer, crip. Indiana University Press. Keith, L. (2001). Take up thy bed and walk: Death, disability and cure in classic fiction for girls. The Women’s Press Ltd. Little, G. (1986). Handicapped characters in children’s literature: Yesterday and today. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 10(4), 181–184. MacDonald, G. (1872/2010). The princess and the goblin. Random House. Mallan, K., & Bradford, C. (2011). Introduction: Bringing back theory. In K. Mallan & C. Bradford (Eds.), Contemporary children’s literature and film: Engaging with theory. Palgrave Macmillan. Mitchell, D. T., & Snyder, S. L. (2000). Narrative prosthesis: Disability and the dependencies of discourse. Michigan University Press. Mitchell, D. T., & Snyder, S. L. (2015). The biopolitics of disability: Neoliberalism, ablenationalism, and peripheral embodiment. University of Michigan Press. Rice, C., Chandler, E., Rinaldi, J., Changfoot, N., Liddiard, K., Mykitiuk, R., & Mündel, I. (2017). Imagining disability futurities. Hypatia, 32(2), 213–229. Rubin, E., & Strauss Watson, E. (1987). Disability bias in children’s literature. The Lion and the Unicorn, 11(1), 60–67. Saunders, K. (2004). What disability studies can do for children’s literature. Disability Studies Quarterly, 24(1). http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/849/1024 Schmiesing, A. (2014). Disability, deformity, and disease in the Grimms’ fairy tales. Wayne State University Press.

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Shakespeare, T. (2000). Disabled sexuality: Toward rights and recognition. Sexuality and Disability, 18(3), 159–166. Siebers, T. (2008). Disability theory. University of Michigan Press. Smith, A. M. (2011). Hideous progeny: Disability, eugenics, and classic horror cinema. Columbia University Press. Stemp, J. (1995). Waterbound. Hodder Children’s Books. Tremain, S. (2001). On the government of disability. Social Theory and Practice, 27(4), 617–636. Tremain, S. (2015). Foucault and the government of disability: Enlarged and revised edition. University of Michigan Press. Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation and the Disability Alliance. (1975). Fundamental principles of disability, retrieved 31 October 2016. http://disability-studies.leeds.ac.uk/files/library/UPIAS-fundamentalprinciples.pdf Wheeler, E.  A. (2019). HandiLand: The crippest place on Earth. University of Michigan Press. Wyndham, J. (1955/1961). The chrysalids. Penguin Books.

CHAPTER 1

Goblin-ology: Eugenics and Hysterisation in George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin (1872)

Considered “one [of] the forefathers of fantasy literature” (Macineanu, 2019:69), George MacDonald’s works have influenced some of the most popular and significant fantasy writers, from C. S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien (Fisher, 2006; Macineanu, 2019), to Ursula K.  Le Guin (Swank, 2021:152). His children’s fantasies, particularly The Princess and the Goblin (1872), have generated a large amount of academic and creative interest. The fantastical elements of the novel have inspired different readings in relation to gender politics (Thacker, 2001; Jenkins, 2004; Wing Bo Tso, 2007; Jarrar, 2009), class politics (Jarrar, 2011), and faith (Merglesky, 2010; Long, 2013; Plourde, 2021). The novel is the story of Princess Irene’s battle with the goblins who live underneath her kingdom and attempt to kidnap her to marry their prince. Through conspiring with Curdie, a young miner, and her magical great-grandmother, they defeat the goblins, and a peace is established with them. Under its fantastic veneer the novel can be read as reflective of contemporaneous eugenics discourses, with a focus on degeneration and miscegenation. Through its depiction of the goblins as dysgenic objects, and through the text’s anxieties about Irene’s sexuality, MacDonald’s novel engages broader discourses of disability. Fiona McCulloch (2006) explores the significance of eugenics in relation to MacDonald’s novel, arguing that “MacDonald’s goblins can themselves be regarded as a foreign ‘strange race of beings’, highlighting the Victorian eugenic terror of degenerative races and social classes” © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Holdsworth, The Government of Disability in Dystopian Children’s Texts, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52034-1_1

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(55). Geoffrey Reiter likewise examines the novel in relation to degeneration, arguing that while MacDonald draws on degeneration theory, his “Christian worldview prevents his work from falling prey to some of the more problematic aspects of degenerationist thought” (2008:225). While both McCulloch and Reiter demonstrate how degeneration theory is central to the construction of the goblins, neither consider how this “supernatural hyperbole” (Reiter, 2008:225) might relate to disabled populations. Through its use of fantastic elements, the novel explores the ramifications of the government of disability, and the disciplinary and biopolitical techniques employed through eugenics and the hysterisation of women. As concepts like eugenics, degeneration, and hysteria have had immense negative impact on disabled populations, it is possible to read the novel as dis-topian.

Victorian Discourses of the Body During the Victorian era, the emergence of eugenics discourses had profound effects for disabled people. While people labelled ‘abnormal’ had long found themselves the objects of myriad techniques of power, the institutionalisation and formalisation of eugenics discourse in Britain signalled a new systemised form of governance. Although the biopolitical investment of/in life began in the seventeenth century (Foucault, 1976:139) and had always been relevant to disability and disabled lives, the advent of eugenics discourses resituated disability as one of the premier anxieties of society. Now, not only were the abstracted problems pertaining to the birth, life, illness, and death of populations of concern, but the procreative potential of those deemed ‘problems’. By managing and controlling this specific aspect, disability and disabled groups could be contained and slowly eradicated. However, alongside this eugenic concern came anxieties about the ‘health’ of the population. Women were also specifically targeted and transformed into medicalised, and disabled, subjects. The production and proliferation of political narratives of ‘hysteria’ refreshed patriarchal power over women—establishing another institutionalised and formalised knowledge to constrain the realm of possibilities for a specific group. Eugenics and the hysterisation of women,1 and their complex interrelationship, were part of what Michel Foucault refers to as 1  Here I am referring to ‘hysteria’ and ‘hysterisation’ in the broadest sense as it pertains to the sexuality of women. This is inclusive of the several ways women’s sexuality was subject to the intervention, pathologisation, and knowledges of medicine, and to the social denigration targeting female prostitutes, mothers, disabled women, and girls.

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a ‘deployment of sexuality’.2 This complex ‘deployment of sex’ is expanded on by Foucault, where he highlights a “series composed of perversion-­ heredity-­degenerescence”, which “formed the solid nucleus of the new technologies of sex” appearing in the Victorian Era (1976:118). While Foucault locates the hysterisation of women’s bodies within this framework, I argue that eugenics discourses were also central aspects to the development of technologies of sex and their deployment. These concepts of perversion, heredity, degenerescence, and even these ‘technologies of sex’, while affecting the population through directing sexuality and sexual activity, are, firstly, focused on disability. As these concepts came to the fore of discourses of sexuality in the Victorian era, disability became a central and sexual issue. Procreation and the spectre of heredity were of fundamental concern to proponents of eugenics discourses, forming the base of theories of degenerescence and anxieties of nationalistic biological security and futurity. In relation to the theories of degenerescence, which bound sexuality, disability, and eugenics together, Foucault suggests: it explained how a heredity that was burdened with various maladies (it made little difference whether these were organic, functional, or psychical) ended by producing a sexual pervert (look into the genealogy of an exhibitionist or a homosexual: you will find a hemiplegic ancestor, a phthisic parent, or an uncle afflicted with senile dementia); but it went on to explain how a sexual perversion resulted in the depletion of one’s line of descent— rickets in the children, the sterility of future generations. (118)

As can be seen here, the Victorian discourses of disability, health, and illness are tightly bound to these technologies of sex. Furthermore, the relationship between the hysterisation of women and the eugenics discourses which targeted the disabled is familial or, rather, made to seem familial. They both extend from a desire to medicalise (and thus also discipline and bio-politicise) groups who bear both the symbolic and literal burden of the procreative future and ‘health’ of the nation. It is no mere coincidence that by disabling women’s sexuality through producing it as something 2  While in his formulations and considerations of this he does not explicitly mention eugenics in his four “mechanisms of knowledge and power centering on sex” (1976:103), eugenics discourse undergirds these four mechanisms: “1. A hysterization of women’s bodies…2. A pedagogization of children’s sex…3. A socialization of procreative behaviour…4. A psychiatrization of perverse pleasure” (104–105, italics in original).

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that needed ‘healthful’ oversight, women’s bodies became objects of management more than they had ever been before. Foucault contends that this was a “threefold process whereby the feminine body was analysed”, pathologised, and distributed around and “within the social body …, the family space …, and the life of children” (104). As such, the construction and implementation of hysteria transmuted women’s bodies and agency into objects through disablement—women were simultaneously reduced to potential procreative capacity and, additionally, were responsible for the healthy future of the nation. Conversely, the anxieties surrounding futurity, as coded in the concepts of perversion, heredity, and degenerescence, meant that specific bodies, lives, and people were considered obstacles to the ‘health’ of the nation-state. Subsequently, this government of disability sterilised and incarcerated, medicalised and objectivised, disciplined and bio-politicised bodies that conflicted with the desired future envisioned by proponents of eugenics discourses. However, these bodies were also utilised simultaneously as chimeras of social, cultural, political, and economic deviance—that is to say, the ills of society, the other targets of eugenics discourses, including the poor, the racialised Other, criminals, ‘perverts’, and non-reproductive women, were all reconstituted within the image of disability. Unsurprisingly, such discourses are inevitably reflected in the textual representations of the period.

Eugenics and the Goblins Eugenics, as the active form of Social Darwinist discourse, utilised the pseudo-sciences of physiognomy and phrenology to establish methods of determining which people were suitable to procreate and genetically pass on what were considered ‘good’ characteristics for the preservation of civilisation against the threat of degeneracy.3 In her book The Gothic Body (1996), Kelly Hurley describes degeneration theory as “evolution reversed and compressed”: But for the idea of evolution towards ever-higher forms of life, degenerationism substituted a terrible regression, a downward spiral into madness, chaos, and extinction. Heredity was not the vehicle of progress: it was an 3  The fear of degeneracy refers to the gradual breakdown of society, civilisation, and the domination of the ‘superior’ white races through various means and formed the justification of eugenics discourse in practice.

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invisible source of contamination, with the infection jumping across bodies, across the generations, and manifesting itself in visible physical deformity … degeneration was rapid and fatal. A family line could suffer extinction in four generations, hardly more than a human lifetime; and a culture, too, could sicken and die almost as quickly. (66)

Hurley’s description here situates anxieties about disability and futurity, and what these mean for the individual, the family, and culture, at the centre of degenerationism. As such, eugenics discourse sought to control and discipline individuals and the larger population to strengthen the preferred ‘race’ through ‘breeding out’ undesired traits. These undesirable traits were related explicitly to disability, criminality, and racial markers, resulting in the conflation of all three groups where one became the sign of the others. As Lyndsay A. Farrall argues, eugenics was seen as “the basis of a scientific religion which could lead to the utopian situation where problems such as alcoholism, criminality, disease and poverty had disappeared” (1979:111). In the work of notable eugenicists Arthur de Gobineau and Sir Francis Galton, physiognomy and phrenology were utilised to articulate ‘differences’ between the civil societies of both England and France, respectively, and the marginalised groups targeted by eugenics discourse. Through the socio-culturally accepted fear of degeneracy, and the threat of the continuation of degeneracy through heredity, eugenics discourses gained momentum across the Western world and influenced social, cultural, political, and institutional relationships with disabled people. The influence of these theories extended beyond science itself into medicine. One major proponent of degeneration theory in 1860s–70s’ Britain was psychologist Henry Maudsley, who saw “mental pathology as both symptom and cause of evolutionary regression” (Sausman, 2007:44). For figures like de Gobineau, Galton, and Maudsley (and even later influential contributors like Cesare Lombroso and Max Nordau), disability was arguably a central feature in theorising degeneracy. Degenerationist theories that underpin eugenics discourses, particularly in relation to disability and its conflation with criminality and racial Otherness, are articulated from the outset of MacDonald’s novel. Through the characters of the goblins, the social, cultural, and political manifestations of eugenics discourse in the narrative come to light. An early description of the goblins renders them as objects of eugenics discourse:

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Those who had caught sight of any of them said that they had greatly altered in the course of generations …They were now, not ordinarily ugly, but either absolutely hideous or ludicrously grotesque both in face and form. There was no invention, they said, of the most lawless imagination expressed by pen or pencil, that could surpass the extravagance of their appearance. And as they grew misshapen in body, they had grown in knowledge and cleverness and were now able to do things no mortal could see the possibility of. But as they grew in cunning, they grew in mischief … and although dwarfed and misshapen, they had strength equal to their cunning. (1872:4–5)

As can be seen in this excerpt, concepts of degeneration and physiognomic logic are deployed to construct and describe the goblins. The goblins are exiled former humans whose living in subterranean caverns for generations has transformed them into a new species of beings that exist beyond or beneath the category of ‘mortal’. Their physical forms are positioned as completely beyond the realm of what could be considered human and beyond even the possibility of imagination. As these descriptions indicate, the narrator implies that the goblins have devolved into a lesser state of being—a literal degeneration. Significantly, the ways in which the goblins have ‘devolved’ are expressly physical and behavioural. The illustration by Arthur Hughes accompanying this description (see cover image) depict the goblins like old men; however, their bodies look disproportionately small in relation to their heads, beards, and mining equipment, echoing (and presaging) cultural representations of little people (4). Their beards seem to encompass their figures entirely, with a lack of distinction made between the beards and skin. However, there is a textual reflexivity here which implicitly questions the validity of eugenics discourses and the methods through which they establish knowledge. Although the narrator emphasises the idea that the goblins are beyond representation, this is immediately contradicted by the textual and pictorial representations that follow. Through this the narrator is demonstrated to be unreliable, and so too is the dysgenic description of the goblins and the discourses which underpin it. They are described as “dwarfed and misshapen”, and in editions with Hughes’s illustrations, the illustration discussed above can be found close by.4 Through describing these characters as being ‘beyond comprehension’, the text implicitly questions the 4  In the 2010 edition in the Looking Glass Library series (Random House) Hughes’s illustration appears directly above the quote concerning the impossibility of representation. In the 1911 edition, the illustration appears prior to the quote (https://archive.org/details/ princessgoblin00macd2, accessed 27/07/16).

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aggressive treatment of people by eugenics discourses, people who exist and are not beyond recognition. The act of representing the ‘unrepresentable’ invalidates the anxieties around futurity that the ‘series of perversion-­ heredity-­ degenerescence’ relies on. Significantly, the depictions of the goblins change throughout, with Hughes never settling on one distinct visual representation. While some of the illustrations suggest little old men, others show large, animalistic creatures. By juxtaposing the illustrations, there is an arbitrariness to how the narrative suggests eugenics discourses work. These contradictions between images (and text) serve to complicate the narrative of the goblins as dysgenic objects, instead situating eugenics discourses and physiognomy as flawed. As the novel continues its critique of physiognomy, it links up with another influential pseudo-science of the period, phrenology. Like physiognomy’s focus on reading character through the form of the face, phrenology sought to read the individual through skull shape and size. When investigating the underground labyrinth that is the goblin kingdom, Curdie overhears a conversation between two goblins, where they state, “The goblin’s glory is his head” (57). As the epitome of goblin morphology, the goblins’ heads have become hard and problematise the human’s attempts to injure or kill them as evidenced through the several physical fights between the humans and goblins. In 1839, Samuel George Morton published the now controversial study into skull size and implied ‘brain difference’ between races, Crania Americana; or, a comparative view of the skulls of various Aboriginal nations of North and South America, including a table replicated by Arthur de Gobineau in The Inequality of Human Races (1853–1855:111). In considering these descriptions of the goblins’ heads in relation to these phrenological ‘studies’, the large, hard, and presumably thick, heads of the goblins produce them as both racialised (as this study was specifically done to ascertain the different ‘civilising capabilities’ of different races) and disabled as it presumed that the hollowness (and thus also thickness) of the skull referred to intellectual capacity. However, this phrenological framing comes undone when considered in relation to the goblins and their intelligence. As noted earlier, the goblins are considered as having “knowledge and cleverness” and as being “cunning” beyond mortal comprehension, so their skull size and form do not correspond to low intelligence but rather suggest an evolutionary protection for their living underground. MacDonald’s narrative refutes the phrenological accounts of skull size and intellectual capability through creating thick-skulled, cunning, and clever goblins.

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While MacDonald’s narrative partially works to invalidate the defining concepts of both physiognomy and phrenology, it still places the goblins within the field of degeneration; however, it does play with the conflicting origin narratives posited by eugenics discourses. The novel puts forward two linked, but different, origin stories for the goblins. The first is evolutionary: “at one time they lived above ground and were very like other people”, but due to ill treatment by the king “instead of going to some other country they had all taken refuge in the subterranean caverns” (1872:2–3). While there are a variety of potential explanations, the core story is that after suffering an unknown severity from the king, the people exiled themselves to the subterranean caverns and began to degenerate over generations. On the one hand, their degeneration has been gradual and natural, a result of living in this space. But this origin story, as McCulloch notes, is rather elusive “and subject to the radical narrative malleability of generational oral tales: no certainties can be established except that they are refugees, displaced and forced to live on the fringes of their homeland, oppressed by economic circumstance” (2006:58). The truth of this story of ‘natural’ transformation becomes uncertain through this suggestion of ‘radical narrative malleability’, becoming gradually more multiple and unreliable as the goblins themselves gradually grow more complex and ‘unrepresentable’. This consistent referral to the unreliability of storytelling, like the contradictions mentioned previously, destabilises the logics of eugenics. The second origin story exists within the discussions of the goblins’ creatures, which reflects upon the goblins themselves. In stark contrast with the ‘natural’ degeneration of the goblins in the first story, and its validity being undermined by the unreliability of the narrative it is based upon, the second story relies on concepts of ‘interbreeding’: My readers will suspect what these were; but I will now give them full information concerning them …The original stocks of these horrible creatures were very much the same as the animals now seen about farms and homes in the country, with the exception of a few of them … which the goblins, from their proclivity toward the animal creation, had caught when cubs and tamed … But what increased the gruesomeness tenfold was that, from constant domestic, or indeed rather family association with the goblins, their countenances had grown in grotesque resemblance to the human … while their owners had sunk toward them, they had risen toward their owners. (MacDonald, 1872:106–108, my italics)

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The goblins’ creatures have also ‘devolved’ but through implied familial, read bestial, relationships. This logic is aligned with eugenic anxieties about ‘interracial breeding’ (which furthers readings in relation to race) but also in ideas of the ancestry of families with disabled children. However, similarly to the first origin story, this account is unreliable: it is a self-­ reflexive account of the creatures seen by the men-at-arms posted around the royal house. Through this interjection from the narrator, who has already been established as unreliable, this second origin narrative is presented as just as questionable as the first. However, in articulating these conceptions, The Princess and the Goblin demonstrates and iterates the anxieties of eugenics discourses, that perverse sexuality produces disabled children, and that disabled people enact perverse sexualities. Unlike the former story, this one closely aligns the goblins with animals, blurring the boundaries between human and animal. As Elizabeth  A. Wheeler notes there has been a long history of comparing disabled people and animals. Drawing on Mel Y.  Chen’s work on animacy, Wheeler highlights how methods of containment work to block the leakages between human and nonhuman life (2019:69). Although there are alternative ways to read this connection positively, the novel utilises this division to frame the goblins as inherently negative. This is often repeated throughout the narrative, where the goblins are described through reference to animals: “like a huge spider” (MacDonald, 1872:45), “the queen, with flaming eyes and expanded nostrils, her hair standing half up from her head” (151), “their mole-eyes” (154), “but the queen stood in front, like an infuriated cat” (229), “the goblins were disappearing through the hole in the floor like rats and mice” (231). This human/animal dichotomy colours all the other dichotomies constructed throughout the narrative, lightness/darkness, culture/nature, self/Other, good/bad, with the goblins relegated to the latter halves. In doing so, the narrative validates the fears of degeneracy propagated by eugenics discourses and its proponents. Through the utilisation of physiognomy, phrenology, and degeneracy the novel situates eugenics as a key way of thinking about disability at this point in time. However, as Reiter suggests “Fears about socioeconomic, physical, and mental degeneration were greatly exacerbated in the late Victorian era by a related and even more substantial fear: that of moral degeneration” (2008:229). This anxiety around moral degeneration meant that “certain “types” of people were believed to be more inclined to criminal lifestyles” where “perceived degenerates were considered malformed or grotesque in their features and deficient in their intellects”

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(226). In Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (1883), Francis Galton writes: The ideal criminal has marked peculiarities of character: his conscience is almost deficient, his instincts are vicious, his power of self-control is very weak, and he usually detests continuous labour. The absence of self-control is due to ungovernable temper, to passion, or to mere imbecility, and the conditions that determine the particular description of crime are the character of the instincts and of the temptation. (42)

This description of the character of the criminal comes with many marked associations linked with stereotypes (if not being downright straightforward in others); of specific interest is the immediate and outright association of ‘imbecility’5 and criminality. This conflation between disability and criminals also factors into the narrative with the goblins being involved in several criminal plots: treason in relation to their possible disobedience to the crown in their origin story (MacDonald, 1872:2–3), the implicit voyeurism when they look through Curdie’s bedroom window (49), the assault of Curdie’s mother (200–202), the attempted kidnapping of Irene and the house servants (225–234), and the attempted murder of the miners (241–243). These last two instances are of specific interest as their rationales are to disrupt the internal power dynamics of the narrative, as demonstrated in the speech given by the goblin king’s advisor: “Should His Majesty be successful—as who dares to doubt—then a peace, all to the advantage of the goblin kingdom, will be established for a generation at least” (74). In this sense, the ‘crimes’ of the goblins are framed more like wartime espionage or terrorism than individualised criminal behaviour. The “two plans” (72) the goblin king has developed consist of kidnapping Princess Irene and marrying her to their prince Harelip, a rather overt reference to disability and degeneration (designated here as plan A), and in the event of that plan not working, to flood the mines and kill the miners (designated here as plan B). Although the marriage of two heirs of different kingdoms was not uncommon historically, the anxieties of plan A coming to fruition stem from the fears of dysgenic reproduction. Thus, the real crime is not the attempted kidnapping—it is the possibility of Irene having to marry and reproduce beneath her rank and the 5  This is where the goblins’ ‘thick-headedness’ comes to be doubled as that which both validates and confuses the logics of phrenology.

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‘muddying’ of the royal line and kingdom’s population. Unlike other methods discussed above, this association between disability and criminality is shored up and justified, reasserting some of the detrimental and violent ways eugenics discourses intervened in the lives of disabled people. After the failing of plan A, the goblins attempt to flood the mines, and the novel ends with the goblins being “caught up in their own snare” (256), majority of them drowning. The ones who survived either fled or “grew milder in character”, and “Their skulls became softer as well as their hearts” (259). Despite the play with eugenics throughout the rest of the novel, most of the goblins end up dead, with the remaining adapting to their new lives alongside humans; however, the humans “were merciless to any of the cobs’ creatures that came their way, until at length they all but disappeared” (259). This conclusion to the narrative ultimately reinscribes eugenics discourses; the non-normative goblins must be either exterminated or submit to human control. Although Jack Zipes notes that “MacDonald … bring[s] out the need for the alteration and restructuring of social relations by questioning the arbitrariness of authoritarian rule and the profit motives of rulers” (2012:107), this conclusion implies that any individual considered degenerate, whether this designation is acceptable or not, must bear that burden and assimilate or otherwise face dire consequences, reinstating the authoritarian ‘rule’ of eugenics discourse. Through its depiction of the goblins, The Princess and the Goblin demonstrates how the government of disability operated in the Victorian era through eugenics. For Galton, the goal of eugenics was “to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had” (1883:17, footnote). As such, one of his central concerns was the improvement of the ‘race’, which was achieved through the disenfranchisement, as a broad term, and subsequent governance of people deemed ‘less suitable’. Thus, eugenics discourse was used to govern people with disabilities in multiple ways: to partition off these people to better govern them, to then categorise, regulate, and manage them through medicalised spaces, to discern ultimate power over who can and cannot reproduce, to regulate and monitor access to various spaces and institutions. Eugenics discourse itself, as well as its knowledges such as physiognomy, phrenology, and degeneration theory, had (and has) drastic effects on both the lives of and representations of disabled people. When we consider the pedagogic implications of narratives such as that of the goblins in The Princess and the Goblin, we reach a stage where the socialising technology of children’s literature

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becomes a technology of disciplinary and bio-power and, thus, in this instance, of the government of disability. In terms of its pedagogic function, it is significant to note that “children’s fiction belongs firmly within the domain of cultural practices which exist for the purpose of socializing their target audience” (Stephens, 1992:8). As a work of children’s literature, The Princess and the Goblin must contribute in relation to the socialising technologies of the late Victorian era through the circulation of specific concepts or in the critique of these concepts or, as seems to be the case, both. Despite the narrative’s subtle criticisms of many facets of eugenics discourse, it ultimately leaves a number of these concepts unquestioned. In relation to degeneration theories, as indicated through the several origin stories present in the narrative, The Princess and the Goblin, while questioning the stability of the categories themselves, still resolves that some types of people are indeed degenerate and in turn should be either eliminated or subject to assimilative practices and social management. The representations of the goblins serve to socialise readers into eugenics discourses and the belief that disabled people are indeed degenerate and, consequently, evil. Subsequently, the disciplinary and biopolitical outcomes of this socialisation are twofold: shoring up the concepts of degeneration and the persecution of disabled people and validating the idea that they are, and should be, the subjects of management by several institutions and technologies.

The Hysterisation of Irene and Grandmother Hysteria and other similar pathological categories have existed since antiquity and gained considerable interest in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Andrew Scull demonstrates the complexly arbitrary nature of the diagnosis of hysteria, arguing: such labels as “hysteria” and “hypochondria”, which admittedly were protean categories embracing disorders that mimicked other forms of disease, must necessarily have caught in their net numerous afflictions that today would be assigned to a wholly different realm of neurological pathology … [and specifically that] some of the people whom seventeenth- and eighteenth-­ century physicians diagnosed as hysterical would today be seen as suffering from some form of epilepsy, from multiple sclerosis or the effects of tertiary

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syphilis, or from malignant tumors that manifested themselves in mysterious bodily ailments. (2011:34)

Through these systems of pathologisation, a preoccupation with female sexuality came to the fore of these diagnoses. In the nineteenth century, several dramatic shifts occurred, as the “paradigm of hysteria as a disease … had reached the point where it did not readily explain either the empirical data or the variations in them”, resulting in “the paradigm fragment[ing] into three related disorders”, and disagreements between physicians (Maines, 1999:34). Nonetheless, in the nineteenth century female sexuality became the locus of significant interest socially, medically, culturally, and politically. As A. N. Wilson notes: Among the surgical outpatients at Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, one half had venereal diseases, mostly the deadly syphilis […] there was a crisis of the greatest magnitude […] It now became enshrined in British law that women were a source of contamination […and] many forms of sexual ‘deviancy’ were outlawed. (in McCulloch, 2006:56)

Ideas surrounding female sexuality, and the mass pathologisation of female sexuality in multiple arenas, became a significant issue. Women’s sexuality was transformed into a knowledge under the supervision and management of hospitals, police, asylums, analysts, turning it into an object of intense scrutiny, something ‘sick’ and in need of cure. In short, women’s sexuality became suspect and, where appearing to deviate, became something disabled. The influence of these issues undoubtedly effected the socialising processes of children’s literature in Victorian society and is reflected in The Princess and the Goblin through Irene’s journey towards finding herself. It is through the combination of an unsettled state of mind and the anxieties around her developing sexuality that Irene is constituted as a hysterical subject—that is, a young woman whose sexuality needs to be closely monitored and controlled through institutional power lest she becomes sexually deviant. Throughout the novel, Irene is presented as in a constant state of betweenness, confusion, and fragility. In the chapter titled “The princess loses herself” (MacDonald, 1872:6–9), Irene journeys up the stairs in her nursery and eventually finds her great-great-grandmother (affectionately termed Grandmother later in the novel). On her way up, she becomes frightened and attempts to find her way back to her nursery, “but she had

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lost herself long ago. It doesn’t follow that she was lost though, because she had lost herself” (8). This idea of Irene having ‘lost herself’ fractures the construction of her as a whole and complete entity and instead positions her as fragmentary. When she first meets her grandmother in the upstairs region of the house, Irene is informed of her role as Grandmother’s namesake: “Do you know my name, child?” “No, I don’t know it,” answered the princess. “My name is Irene.” “That’s my name!” cried the princess. “I know that. I let you have mine. I haven’t got your name. You’ve got mine.” “How can that be?” asked the princess, bewildered. “I’ve always had my name.” “Your papa, the king, asked me if I had any objection to your having it; and of course I hadn’t. I let you have it with pleasure.” “It was very kind of you to give me your name—and such a pretty one,” said the princess. “Oh, not so very kind!” said the old lady. “A name is one of those things one can give away and keep all the same. I have a good many such things.” (14–15)

This doubling of names, and the disruption of the giving/keeping dyad, emphasises an intimacy between Irene and her grandmother and the confusing of binaries and distinctions. This doubling of names then has extraordinary power in relation to Irene, “fracturing the child’s sense of self as well as threatening the civilised, knowable world that surrounds her” (McCulloch, 2006:60). This is amplified by the fact that throughout a large amount of the novel, Irene is unable to find her grandmother when she wants to, but only when her grandmother wants her to. Throughout the story as well, grandmother is visible only to Irene. This results in Irene constantly contemplating whether her grandmother is real or a dream, reiterating Irene’s fragmentation and confusion. In doing so, the reality of her grandmother is brought into question with the possibility of her being Irene’s projection. This doubling of names, confusion of distinctions, and her grandmother’s ‘unrealness’ suggests that her grandmother may just be a figment of her imagination. In these ways, grandmother can be read as a mirror of Irene. This becomes most apparent in relation to ageing in the narrative. Throughout the narrative, time is described seasonally with

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multiple references to the changing seasons, flora and fauna, and weather patterns. As such, Irene, without mention in the narrative aside from the reference to her being 8 at the beginning (MacDonald, 1872:6), ages and progresses towards a state of young womanhood and sexual maturity. Conversely, however, her grandmother appears younger each time Irene visits her: “The princess, though she could not have told you why, did think her very old indeed—quite fifty—she said to herself” (11); “in the middle of the moonlight sat the old lady in her black dress with the white lace, and her silvery hair mingling with the moonlight, so that you could not have distinguished one from the other” (91); “her hair, no longer white but of a rich golden color, …Her face that of a woman of three-and-­ twenty” (119); “She was dressed in white now and looking, if possible, more lovely than ever” (187). Thus, both Queen Irene and Princess Irene begin the narrative on similar but opposite positions in regard to sexuality—both are presumed to be without sex and outside sexual discourse, one as a young girl and the other as an old woman; however, an age of sexual maturity is the potential point of convergence. Significantly, this point of convergence is one where women are most valued and most in need of management under eugenics discourse: the age of sexual reproduction. Irene’s journey to sexual maturity takes place in two opposed but sexually symbolic spaces: the caverns of the goblin kingdom and the empty upper floors of her castle. Fiona McCulloch reads the goblins’ caves in relation to sexuality, positing: [T]he moist dark caverns’ ‘natural’ (p. 8) openings enwomb the eroticised outcasts, applying a feminine otherness whose hole is penetrated to extract jewels which generate the wealth of a patriarchal capitalist regime above. (2006:55)

The organic nature of the caverns is foregrounded in terms like “warm” (MacDonald, 1872:51) and “damp” (55; 68) and accentuated further in the description of the hall of the goblin palace. It is described as “a magnificent cavern of an oval shape” of “tremendous height, but the roof was composed of … shining materials”, and “The walls themselves were, in many parts, of gloriously shining substances” (70–71). This centre of the goblin kingdom is “immense” (70) and indeed ‘enwomb[s] the eroticised outcasts’ and, thus, as McCulloch suggests, is the feminised seat of sovereign power, whereas the human’s male ruler is constantly moving from town to town (135). This then positions both spaces, above and below,

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within a gendered hierarchy, and reifies the difference between the goblin and human kingdoms. Although the gendering of the caverns is feminised, it is also sexualised, through the coalition of its organic description and feminine positioning, and is articulated as a space of sexual excess, aligning it with the conception of hysteria as sexual ‘over-indulgence’. This is achieved through it being a space for the procreation of goblins and creatures, and their implied bestiality, a space full of natural resources to be exploited for profit, and as a space of “huge caverns and winding ways, some with water running through them” (2). However, this depiction of the caverns as overflowing with feminine sexual excess is juxtaposed with the image of the ‘upstairs’ of the house where Irene’s grandmother lives. In her initial journey which results in her finding her grandmother, and in which Irene loses herself, the space and her experience are described in complete opposition to the caverns as an empty maze of passages and doors. Once she finds a way out, a set of stairs going up, she comes across the only inhabitant of this space, her grandmother—an indeterminably old woman. This description of the space as empty resonates then with Irene’s grandmother’s presumed sexual capacity as an old woman and the concept of hysteria as ‘sexual deprivation’. At the pinnacle of the house sits her grandmother’s spinning room and her bedroom; the former described as having “hardly any more furniture … than there might have been in that of the poorest old woman who made her bread by her spinning” (14), and the latter, in the chapter “The old lady’s bedroom” (87–98), as “the loveliest room [Irene] had ever seen in her life!” (95). The description of her grandmother’s bedroom continues: It was large and lofty and dome-shaped. From the center hung a lamp as round as a ball, shining as if with the brightest moonlight, which made everything visible in the room, though not so clearly that the princess could tell what many of the things were. A large oval bed stood in the middle, with a coverlid of rose color, and velvet curtains all around it of a lovely pale blue. The walls were also blue—spangled all over with what looked like stars of silver. (95)

This depiction of grandmother’s bedroom, although certainly accentuated with excessive details, is rather ephemeral, as is the character of grandmother herself. Within the oppositional construction of these spaces, upstairs and the cavern, the reification of the culture/nature binary again shores up other dichotomous conceptions within the novel. This is

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furthered by the fact that it is Curdie who enters the hall of the goblin palace, a space of sexual excess, and Irene who enters her grandmother’s bedroom, a space of absent sexuality. Although Curdie does enter her grandmother’s bedroom (186–190), he cannot see her nor her bedroom, and instead sees “a big, bare, garret room…[with] a tub, and a heap of musty straw, and a withered apple and a ray of sunlight coming through a hole in the middle of the roof” (188). The description of the space as barren, broken, and, especially, the reference to the only organic matter as ‘withered’, further aligns these spaces with grandmother’s lack of reproductive sexual potential. However, this event reifies the doubling of Irene and her grandmother, highlighting the possibility of Irene’s fractured self. Considering that, as Rachel P.  Maines notes, “Physicians could not agree … whether sexual deprivation or over-indulgence caused any of the disorders [the whole composite of hysteric disorders], and whether masturbation was a cause or symptom of any of them” (1999:34), the narrative sets up two opposing notions of the aetiology of hysteria. Despite the novel’s ability to criticise the contradictory diagnostic practices that ‘fix’ hysteria, it allows hysteria and these diagnostic practices to retain their credibility in never fully questioning the diagnosis itself. Instead, the sexual overtones in the description of these spaces reinscribe the doubleness of diagnoses of hysteria. The overflowing sexuality of the goblin kingdom and the ‘withered’ sex of upstairs are then implicitly situated as the ‘reason’ behind the growing management of Irene. Due to the construction of these spaces as either sexually excessive or void, and the ‘degeneracy’ of the goblins, Irene is the focus of several systems of surveillance, regimentation, and management resulting in her imprisonment within the bounds of the domestic space.6 Given the ­eroticised nature of the goblins and the caverns, and the desexualised status of her grandmother and upstairs, these disciplinary systems are an attempt to curtail and direct Irene’s growing sexuality. Regarding the production of discourses of sex, and the various spaces of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that engendered them, Foucault explains: First there was medicine, via the “nervous disorders”; next psychiatry, when it set out to discover the etiology of mental illnesses, focusing its gaze first 6  Irene does constantly escape these minor disciplinary systems, at the fault of those who are supposed to be keeping watch over her; however, she cannot escape the larger systems of constraint imposed by society and culture as easily.

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on “excess”, then onanism, then frustration, then “frauds against procreation”, but especially when it annexed the whole of the sexual perversions as its own province; criminal justice, too, which had long been concerned with sexuality, particularly in the forms of “heinous” crimes and crimes against nature, but which, toward the middle of the nineteenth century, broadened its jurisdiction to include petty offenses, minor indecencies, insignificant perversions; and lastly, all those social controls, cropping up at the end of the last century, which screened the sexuality of couples, parents and children, dangerous and endangered adolescents–undertaking to protect, separate, and forewarn, signaling perils everywhere, awakening people’s attention, calling for diagnoses, piling up reports, organizing therapies. These sites radiated discourses aimed at sex, intensifying people’s awareness of it as a constant danger, and this in turn created a further incentive to talk about it. (1976:30–31)

Sex became of significant interest to several medicalised and social spaces which held the sexualities (or assumed lack thereof) of women, children, and disabled people as of the utmost concern. Surveillance, regimentation, and management in the novel, then, are already linked to sexuality and sexual discourses from the outset. This is explored in the novel in multiple ways, beginning with the assertion that “the little princess had never seen the sky at night” (MacDonald, 1872:5). While the narrator posits that “They [the house staff] were much too afraid of the goblins to let her out of the house then, even in company with ever so many attendants; and they had good reason, as we shall see by and by”, the need to surveil, regulate, and manage the princess is specifically related to fears of sexual ‘deviancy’. As McCulloch notes, “Denying Irene the pleasure of the night sky raises the question of whether she is being protected from the outside world or actually imprisoned in her fortress: ultimately the guarding of innocence appears to be perpetrated at the cost of the child” (2006:54). It is through this excess of attention to Irene’s sexuality and the anxiety that she will become ‘deviant’ that she is coded ‘hysteric’ and becomes subject to a wide range of control mechanisms. Throughout the narrative there are several instances which demonstrate these disciplinary systems of surveillance, regulation, and management, which operate on multiple levels in relation to Irene. The most prevalent of these are the keeping of information from Irene and the refutation of Irene’s experiences and understandings of situations. In the chapter “What the nurse thought of it” (MacDonald, 1872:20–25), which occurs after Irene’s first trip to see her grandmother,

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Irene’s nurse Lootie intimates that she has knowledge beyond Irene’s and keeps it from her, and disbelieves Irene’s account of her previous whereabouts, reifying the adult/child dichotomy and the dynamics of knowledge and power inherent within it (20–21). Due to this dichotomy, Lootie’s fear is idealised as more believable than Irene’s experience; however, given the implied reader’s awareness of the events of the previous chapter, Lootie is positioned as irrational and dismissive, aligning her too with concepts of hysteria. This is furthered in the first instance of Lootie and Irene venturing outside of the confines of the house and up the mountain, “Suddenly the shadow of a great mountain peak came up from behind and shot in front of them. When the nurse saw it she started and shook, and tremulously grasping the hand of the princess turned and began to run down the hill” (33). This brash and violent reaction is complexly tied between Irene’s personal safety and Lootie’s job security, as “It was against express orders to be out with the princess one moment after the sun was down” and “If His Majesty, Irene’s papa, were to hear of it Lootie would certainly be dismissed; and to leave the princess would break her heart”. Not only does this effort to secure Irene come from a social desire to protect her, but also from a parental and sovereign, and thus potentially legislative, place. This is furthered in the king’s visits to the house, where he leaves first, “six of his attendants behind him, with orders that three of them should watch outside the house every night, walking round and round it from sunset to sunrise” (86), and after visiting and leaving the second time, “he left the other six gentlemen behind him that there might be six of them always on guard” (137). However, the king’s attention is less on outside forces coming in, considering that “it was clear he was not quite comfortable about the princess” (86), positing his anxiety on the princess herself. Thus, the king’s anxieties are located on Irene and her potential sexuality, and it is this that she must be protected from. This fear finds validation precisely through the goblins’ plan A, the marriage plot, on the one hand, and through the kiss Irene promises Curdie after assisting her and Lootie when they were out on the mountain, on the other. Lootie’s anxiety about Irene’s sexuality, and her job security, comes to the fore in this exchange: “Lootie, Lootie, I promised Curdie a kiss,” cried Irene. “A princess mustn’t give kisses. It’s not at all proper,” said Lootie. … “Nurse, a princess must not break her word,” said Irene, drawing herself up and standing stock-still.

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Lootie did not know which the king might count the worse—to let the princess be out after sunset or to let her kiss a miner boy. She did not know that, being a gentleman, as many kings have been, he would have counted neither of them the worse. However much he might have disliked his daughter to kiss the miner boy, he would not have had her break her word for all the goblins in creation. …Formerly the goblins were her only fear; now she had to protect her charge from Curdie as well. (46–48)

Despite Lootie’s anxiety, the king would rather Irene begin her journey to sexual maturity with Curdie, an, by all means, eugenically appropriate male (especially given his royal lineage as explored in the 1883 sequel The Princess and Curdie), than adventure through the sexually charged spaces of the wilderness, the mountain, or the caverns beneath. Lootie’s anxiety itself stems from eugenic conceptions of ‘proper matches’, and her objections centre around the fact that Curdie is of lower social status than Irene, to the point that she even parallels the sexual threat of the goblins with that of Curdie. The issues of sexuality between Irene and Curdie are not resolved until the end of the narrative, where not only does Irene sleep in Curdie’s bed (244), hinting again towards the potential future matrimonial and sexualised nature of their relationship, but they finally do kiss after the king gives them permission (248–250). Through this kiss, the king’s ultimate control over Irene and her sexuality materialises. The king, as a parent and as a sovereign, decides Irene’s correct sexual progression and in turn justifies his extreme management of Irene’s sexual security. Thus, the narrative reifies ideas concerning the sexuality of women and children and their precariousness, specifically in the disciplinary need to control female sexuality from tipping into either excess or nonexistence, especially given Irene’s class position, and the need to direct and manage children’s sexuality into appropriate spaces and expressions. Similarly, these ideas and their imbrication with eugenics discourse demonstrate the biopolitical urge, as the ‘improvement of the race’, to contain, monitor, and govern sexuality and sex.

Conclusion George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin discusses power and politics more complexly than would be initially thought. Despite the novel’s closure which reinscribes the biopolitical and disciplinary need to

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govern disabled people and women, through closer consideration of some aspects of the narrative, there is an ambivalence to the discourses of eugenics and hysteria. Through unreliable narration, juxtaposition, and contradiction between text and image the novel suggests, through the goblins, that the ideas that underpin eugenics discourses, physiognomy, phrenology, and degeneration theory are flawed. Likewise, through doubling, the possibility of projection, and negotiations of space, Irene complicates the arbitrary diagnoses of hysteria. This, by no means, compensates for the closure, but it does unsettle the decisive aggression of it. While the narrative ends with both the submission of the goblins and the establishment of heterosexual security for Irene, the ambivalence, unreliability, and uncertainty of the rest of the novel remain. When considering The Princess and the Goblin in relation to other literary fairy tales prominent in the period, Victorian children’s literature exhibits a level of political significance that can promote and critique power discourses. While The Princess and the Goblin’s fantasy landscape and cast of characters enable a critique of powerful and influential discourses of the time, it also allows for the violent execution of them. However, this also implicitly suggests that discourses of eugenics and hysteria should (maybe) be left to the realm of the literary fairy tale.

Bibliography de Gobineau, A. (1853–1855/1967). The inequality of human races (A. Collins, Trans.). Howard Fertig, Inc. Farrall, L.  A. (1979/2011). The history of eugenics: A bibliographical review. Annals of Science, 36(2), 111–123. Fisher, J. (2006). Reluctantly inspired: George MacDonald and JRR Tolkien. North Wind: A Journal of George MacDonald Studies, 25(8), 113–120. Foucault, M. (1976/2020). The history of sexuality, volume 1: The will to knowledge (R. Hurley, Trans.). Penguin Classics. Galton, F. (1883/1973). Inquiries into human faculty and its development. AMS Press. Hurley, K. (1996). The gothic body: Sexuality, materialism, and degeneration at the Fin de Sièle. Cambridge University Press. Jarrar, O. (2009). Language, ideology, and fairy tales: George MacDonald’s fairy tales as a social critique of Victorian norms of sexuality and sex roles. North Wind: A Journal of George MacDonald Studies, 28(3), 33–49.

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Jarrar, O. (2011). MacDonald’s fairy tales and fantasy novels as a critique of Victorian middle-class ideology. North Wind: A Journal of George MacDonald Studies, 30(2), 13–24. Jenkins, R. Y. (2004). I am spinning this for you, my child’: Voice and identity formation in George MacDonald’s princess books. The Lion and the Unicorn, 28(3), 325–344. Long, R. (2013). Childhood and faith in The Princess and the Goblin. North Wind: A Journal of George MacDonald Studies, 32(3), 44–60. MacDonald, G. (1872/2010). The Princess and the Goblin. Random House. Macineanu, L. (2019). Women figures in George MacDonald’s and JRR Tolkien’s fantasy writings. Gender Studies, 18(1), 69–82. Maines, R. (1999). The technology of orgasm: “hysteria”, the vibrator, and women’s sexual satisfaction. The John Hopkins University Press. McCulloch, F. (2006). A strange race of beings’: Undermining innocence in The Princess and the Goblin. Scottish Studies Review, 7(1), 53–67. Merglesky, N.  L. (2010). Getting lost in The Princess and the Goblin. North Wind: A Journal of George MacDonald Studies, 29(3), 24–39. Plourde, A. (2021). George MacDonald’s doors: Suspended telos and the child believer. Victorian Literature and Culture, 49(2), 231–258. Reiter, G. (2008). Travelling beastward’: George MacDonald’s Princess books and late Victorian supernatural degeneration fiction. In R. McGillis (Ed.), George MacDonald: Literary heritage and heirs. Zossima Press. Sausman, J. (2007). Science, drugs and occultism: Aleister Crowley, Henry Maudsley and late-nineteenth century degeneration theories. Journal of Literature and Science, 1(1), 40–54. Scull, A. (2011). Hysteria: The disturbing history. Oxford University Press. Stephens, J. (1992). Language and ideology in children’s fiction. Longman. Swank, K. (2021). Ursula’s bookshelf. Mythlore, 39(2), 137–155. Thacker, D. (2001). Feminine language and the politics of children’s literature. The Lion and the Unicorn, 25(1), 3–16. Wheeler, E. A. (2019). HandiLand: The crippest place on Earth. University of Michigan Press. Wing Bo Tso, A. (2007). Transgression in the gender representation in MacDonald’s princess books. International Journal of Early Childhood, 39(2), 11–21. Zipes, J. (2012). Fairy tales and the art of subversion. Taylor & Francis. ProQuest Ebook Central. Accessed 10 Dec 2016.

CHAPTER 2

“Lonely, tender, passionate heart”: Melancholy and Isolation in Dinah Mulock Craik’s The Little Lame Prince and His Traveling Cloak (1875)

Introduction Recently, the life and work of Dinah Mulock Craik has gained critical interest. In her work on the golden age of children’s literature, Marah Gubar positions Craik within a “chorus of critically neglected women writers” (2009:40), celebrating her as a literary pioneer in utilising child narrators and (potentially) influencing later authors like Frances Hodgson Burnett (40). Likewise, Claudia Nelson also highlights her role as “literary benefactor”, advocating George MacDonald’s David Elginbrod to her publishers (2015: para. 23). The revival of Craik’s work is, ultimately, epitomised in the 2013 special issue of Women’s Writing focusing specifically on “Rereading Dinah Mulock Craik” and Karen Bourrier’s recent biography Victorian Bestseller: The Life of Dinah Craik (2019). Earlier reinvestments in Craik’s work tended to focus on a gendered analysis (Showalter, 1975; Mitchell, 1983; Richardson, 1993; Philipose, 1996); however, as Bourrier notes in her introduction to the special issue, “the majority of scholars at this critical moment are coming to Craik’s work through a disability studies perspective” (2013:292). These disability focuses likewise cover a range of topics such as interdependency (Stoddard Holmes, 2007), gender and disability (Sparks, 2013; Bourrier, 2016), © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Holdsworth, The Government of Disability in Dystopian Children’s Texts, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52034-1_2

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narratological approaches to prosthesis (Hingston, 2013, 2019), and the impact/power of genre (Walker Gore, 2019; Wheeler, 2019), among others. This emerging body of work, though, often takes up the disabled body as an object of study, overlooking the broader structural elements that contextualise Craik’s work and shape discourses of disability in the late nineteenth century. The Little Lame Prince and His Travelling Cloak  follows the life of Prince Dolor of Nomansland, the titular prince, who becomes both orphaned and physically disabled at a young age. His throne is usurped by his uncle, and he is sent to live out the rest of his days in a door-less, inescapable tower he calls Hopeless Tower. Through the magical gifts afforded him by his magical godmother, Stuff-and-Nonsense, including a travelling cloak, he is able to learn about the world outside the tower. After his uncle’s death, he is rescued and reinstated as the rightful king, and enjoys a long and relatively happy reign. Rather than focus on the prostheticisation of Dolor through his magical gifts, as other scholars have (see Hingston), in this chapter I turn to the novel’s use of confinement, concerns over nervous diseases and related eugenic imperatives, and anxieties about political unrest to examine how Craik challenges and reinforces discourses of disability. Like The Princess and the Goblin discussed in Chap. 1, The Little Lame Prince utilises fantasy as a means to critically examine themes, discourses, and systems that have managed disabled populations. Where eugenics, degeneration, and hysteria are central to MacDonald’s novel, eugenics, confinement, and melancholia serve to structure Prince Dolor’s dis-topian world.

Craik’s Non-fiction While Craik’s fictional work has several allusions to the era of Victorian anxiety she wrote and published in, her non-fiction writing articulates how and what Craik thought about disabled people and children in particular. ‘To novelists  – and a novelist’ was originally published in volume 3 of Macmillan’s Magazine (1861a) without an author,1 but later included in The Unkind Word and Other Stories (1870), published under the pseudonym ‘The Author of “John Halifax, Gentleman” ’ (195–207). In 1  I have phrased this as ‘without an author’ to emphasise the difference between articles published under ‘Anon.’ or ‘Anonymous’, and ones which actively avoid the inclusion of an author. This can have a number of effects, but most notably ‘without an author’ articles suggest a generalisable opinion.

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it, Craik posits fiction as having a moral and sentimental purpose. She contends that “the modern novel is one of the most important moral agents of the community” (196), and due to the popularity of the novel, “the novelist counts his audience by the millions”. Craik’s praise of the capacity of the novel to affect discourse due to its popularity continues, as she argues that: The amount of new thoughts scattered broadcast over society within one month of the appearance of a really popular novel, the innumerable discussions it creates, and the general influence which it exercises in the public mind, form one of the most remarkable facts of our day. (197)

Craik’s understanding of fiction as ‘moral agent’ positions her own novels similarly, as both affective and effected, and inherently imbued with Craik’s own senses of morality, which certainly include her own religious values. She subsequently discusses George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), critiquing the perceived lack of moral aid the novel gives young women: Ask, what good will it do? – whether it will lighten any burdened heart, help any perplexed spirit, comfort the sorrowful, succour the tempted, or bring back the erring into the way of peace; and what is the answer? Silence. (201)

As can be seen here, Craik’s religious values appear to influence her conception of morality. However, such morality comes hand in hand with a specific sentimentality; it is entirely based on the concept of aid. In the references to both ‘the tempted’ and ‘the erring’, the implication of moral, religious guidance is the most overt. However, the overriding idea of fiction’s ability to kindly and affectionately bring the ‘burdened’, ‘perplexed’, ‘sorrowful’, ‘tempted’, or ‘erring’ back ‘into the way of peace’ implies an emotional as well as moral responsibility. Subsequently, morality occupies a dual space in The Little Lame Prince that is more complex when considered in relation to its politics. This can be seen in her article ‘Blind!’ (1861b) originally published in Macmillan’s Magazine, volume 3, and in her essay series ‘Strolls with Invalid Children’ (1867a, b) published in Once a Week, volume 3,2 all republished in her collected short stories and essays The Unkind Word and 2  The series contains two essays originally published in the same volume, ‘No. I: My Dog and I’ (1867a:384–389) and ‘No II: The Fox Hunt’ (1867b:503–508), by “the author of ‘John Halifax, Gentleman’ ”.

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Other Stories in 1870 (223–230; 396–415). In ‘Strolls with Invalid Children’, Craik contends that this relaying of two walks, the first with her dog and the second by herself, is helpful because: When one is ill, the last person it is advisable to think about is oneself. It does no good; for we keep on growing either better or worse all the while, and it only makes us a weariness to ourselves, and a trouble to other people … I do not think, my poor sick children, that my thus making you see these unseen things will cause you regret or unhappiness. Sometimes we keenly enjoy hearing of pleasure we cannot actually share. (1867a:384–385)

Here Craik puts into practice her own ideas of what fiction should do: aid people, in this case by consuming themselves in a ‘stroll’. This is implicitly stated in the inclusivity implied in the use of the word ‘with’ in the title; although these children cannot physically join her, they are called upon to do so imaginatively, thus both mentally and emotionally. However, this is then altered in The Unkind Word with the stories re-titled ‘The Tale of Two Walks, Told to Sick Children’. This erasure of the inclusivity of the title articulates the power structures undergirding these stories, distancing the ‘sick’ or ‘invalid children’ to a space that consistently resignifies them as ‘sick’. This is further demonstrated in the changes to the quotation above, where the latter half is reworked into “Yes, my poor sick children, we sometimes keenly enjoy hearing of pleasures in which we can not actually share” (Craik, 1870:396). The difference in tone, from conversational and engaging to distanced and didactic, articulates a larger shift in how people more generally and Craik specifically think about disabled children and the moral imperatives of literature for and about them. Subsequently, Craik’s disability politics become more complex and create, at times, a contradictory tension, which can also be seen throughout The Little Lame Prince. Similar politics are in play in ‘Blind!’ (1861b). Immediately, the use of the exclamation mark in the title suggests both an emphatic and aggressive point, simultaneously calling attention  to and Othering the individuals who are the subject of the piece. This doubleness flows throughout the article, with the use of pitying terms (also in use in her other works featuring disability) as well as a respect of the working blind. This becomes most apparent, and most problematic, in her discussion of the workhouse. She visits “the workrooms of the men and women employed in the house from nine to six daily” where they do “brush-­ making, bead-work and leather-work” (55). Craik continues that without

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the Association for Promoting the General Welfare of the Blind, “they would be begging in the streets, or sitting in helpless, hopeless, miserable idleness—the lowest condition, short of actual vice, to which any human being can fall” (55). There was no real alternative for the blind who could not rely on family or friends for subsistence. However, she specifically draws a distinction between this space and the workhouse, which she labels “the honest man’s last horror” (55). Without any other option for many besides prison, this distinction positions the blind as either not ‘honest’ people or acceptable to exploit. Craik’s essays and articles demonstrate her ideological stance regarding disability. While she posits fiction as having a transformative moral imperative in ‘To novelists–and a novelist’ (1861a), and is intrinsically related to sentiment, her own writing in ‘Strolls with Invalid Children’ (1867a, b) and ‘Blind!’ (1861b) articulates a contradictory tension between this goal and her representations of disability. Her engagement with disability and disabled people is limited by her own perceptions of morality and a belief in Victorian governmentality, serving to mask issues rather than work to resolve them.

Disability Politics, Moral, and Confinement One of the most radical ways in which The Little Lame Prince deals with disability politics is the way in which Dolor comes to understand his body as non-normative. The narrative begins with Dolor’s birth, and he is immediately framed by able-centric discourse: “His nose—there was not much of it certainly, but what there was seemed an aquiline shape; his complexion was a charming, healthy purple; he was round and fat, straight-­ limbed and long—in fact, a splendid baby, and everybody was exceedingly proud of him” (Craik, 1875:11–12, my italics). From birth, Dolor is positioned in relation to discourses of normality, most notably in the insistence on his ‘healthiness’ and his straight limbs, emphasising the perceived unnaturalness of his ‘lameness’ later in the chapter. The socio-political framing of Dolor’s disablement, particularly the inferred unnaturalness of his body, aligns his body with the death and suffering of his parents. After his mother’s death, “everything seemed to go wrong with him”, and he “became sickly and pale, seeming to have almost ceased growing, especially in his legs”, which “withered and shrank” (23), aligning his mother’s passing with a decline in his health. When his father learns of his ‘lameness’, he wails, “It is terrible—terrible! And for a prince, too!” (25)

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and “Poor little man! He does his best, and he is not unhappy; not half so unhappy as I” (27), before dying from his resulting melancholy. Dolor’s ‘lameness’ is associated with the death of both parents: on the one hand, his body grows sick and withers with the death of his mother; and on the other, his father descends into a fatal melancholy upon the learning of Dolor’s ‘lameness’. These events then both distinguish between and link death and disability, positing that they are not the same but are not separable. This prefaces Dolor’s own contemplations of death and their relation to both his disabled status and his feelings of melancholy. However, Dolor’s body is linked with not only parricide but also regicide and subsequently acts as a catalyst for the political upheaval to come. Upon the death of the king, Dolor’s uncle is named Regent until Dolor is old enough to take the throne of Nomansland. The Regent becomes uncomfortable with Dolor’s presence; however, as “the sight of [Dolor] and his affliction made other people good and, above all, made everybody love him” (32), Dolor is sent off to live in a tower. The populace is informed that “[H]e had fallen ill on the road and died within a few hours” (33), leaving the Regent and his family the sole heirs to the throne of Nomansland. All of these instances demonstrate one of the central tenets of the novel and its positioning of disability politics; that disability is social and is applied from the outside to the individual. Through these events, Dolor is positioned as too young to necessarily comprehend the social implications of his body, and it is everyone else who understands him and positions him as disabled. As such, this depiction understands disablement as a complex social phenomenon impacted by power structures and institutions which govern and hierarchise bodies. The moment in which Dolor himself is forced to understand his body as disabled comes when his magical Godmother, Stuff-and-Nonsense, visits him for the first time in Hopeless Tower. Upon seeing him she calls him “my poor little boy” to which Dolor responds “Why do you call me poor?” The little old woman glanced down on his legs and feet, which he did not know were different from those of other children, and then at his sweet, bright face, which, though he knew not that either, was exceedingly different from many children’s faces, which are often so fretful, cross, sullen. (44)

Again, she notes “My child, I cannot alter your lot in any way, but I can help you to bear it”, to which Dolor replies “Thank you. But why do you

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talk of bearing it? I have nothing to bear” (45). As can be seen in these excerpts, Stuff-and-Nonsense applies disabling conceptions to Dolor, which he questions and opposes. It is in this interaction that the process of Dolor’s disablement truly begins, where he is forced to reconcile his conception of self with that of wider society. Subsequently, this disablement also signals the beginning of his process of maturation, suggesting that social engagement and awareness are what can/will turn him into a king. Considering these somewhat radical views of disability, the role of confinement in the narrative also serves as a critique of disability and institutional power in the late Victorian era. In Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1961), Michel Foucault studies the history of confinement and mental illness and points towards the complex histories of insanity, unreason, criminality, medicine, and systems of incarceration. However, Anne Borsay, in Disability and Social Policy in Britain Since 1750: A History of Exclusion (2005), critiques Foucault’s trans-European application as occasionally reductive, noting: In Britain, the central state was slow to extend its powers and the institutions which grew up as a result of charitable, commercial or local government initiatives were too few in number and too small in size to justify the degree of sequestration that Foucault advocated. But if he exaggerated the extent of impoundment, his emphasis on institutions flagged up what for disabled people was the ultimate ‘dividing practice’, a form of exclusion which denied them access to ‘the normal exchanges, practices and rights’ of their society. (19)

As both Foucault and Borsay discern, the measure of confinement was deployed in a number of institutions, the workhouse, the hospital, the asylum, the prison, and the school, among others, and subsequently these spaces came with the methods of confinement; Foucault, speaking of the Hôpital Général in the seventeenth century, says that, “it will have not only the aspect of a forced labor camp, but also that of a moral institution responsible for punishing, for correcting a certain moral “abeyance” which does not merit the tribunal of men, but cannot be corrected by the severity of penance alone” (1961:59). This analysis can be applied across all forms of confinement, not only in the seventeenth century, but as far as the late Victorian era is concerned, it can be most usefully applied to disability and eugenics discourses. Not only did confinement at this point imply labour, restraint, and/or ‘treatment’, but also a forced

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indoctrination into a historically and culturally specific moral order which forms the basis of eugenics discourses. When considering confinement within this framing, Dolor’s imprisonment takes on multiple aspects; it is then related not only to the political exploits of his uncle but also to the various disciplinary and biopolitical apparatuses—the medical, juridical, economic, and moral institutions—of Nomansland and late Victorian England. When Dolor is delivered to the tower, he is accompanied by a woman who will live as his nurse until either die. The woman is described as having “had a sad, fierce look, and no wonder, for she was a criminal under sentence of death, but her sentence had been changed to almost as severe a punishment” (Craik, 1875:37). As both Foucault and Borsay’s analyses demonstrate, there has been a long tradition of treating disabled individuals and criminals similarly; additionally, these two subject positions were often conflated in eugenics discourse as well. Not only is Dolor confined to make his uncle’s claim to the throne seem legitimate, but he is also subjected to the punishment of the nurse; conversely, she is also then subjected to the socio-cultural punishment of disabled status. Her punishment of caring for Dolor is framed as equitable to death, positing that confinement, like the workhouse, is acceptable for Dolor but is also “the honest man’s last horror” (Craik, 1861b:55). However, while her penance is labour intensive in that it consists of assuring Dolor’s survival, his is a moral penance which is predicated on his maturation into both a man and a king. This involves processes of overcoming, although it is not overcoming his ‘lameness’ but rather his melancholy. A large part is also the observation of both the social and natural worlds and learning through observation, afforded him through the gift of the travelling cloak. Dolor’s first two journeys on the cloak show him the countryside (Craik, 1875:64–66; 69–72); however this leaves him feeling lonely, sending him into a state of melancholy. On his third journey (76–90) he begs the cloak to take him to see a young boy about his age. As he watches the boy and his dog, they begin to have a race; “They did not seem to have anything to run for—but as if they did it, both of them, for the mere pleasure of motion” (87). Dolor continues his observation, the narrator noting: And what a pleasure that seemed! To the dog, of course, but scarcely less so to the boy. How he skimmed along over the ground—his cheeks glowing, and his hair flying, and his legs—oh, what a pair of legs he had!

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Prince Dolor watched him with great intentness and in a state of excitement almost equal to that of the runner himself—for a while. Then the sweet pale face grew a trifle paler, the lips began to quiver and the eyes to fill. “How nice it must be to run like that!” he said softly, thinking that never—no, never in this world—would he be able to do the same. (87)

Dolor’s journeys are related not solely to learning about the world through experience but also to understanding his position within socio-cultural discourse as a disabled boy through observation. In doing so, and in relation to the other arenas in which Dolor has/will come to have privilege, namely his status as royalty, a simple lesson is learnt; Dolor must accept his disability and be humble in his privileges. Although these events take place outside the tower, Dolor is still confined, both to the space of the travelling cloak and to the invisibility that it delivers. As mentioned earlier, Craik held the belief that fiction should give moral aid to its audience, where this moral aid was often both sentimental and religious, and The Little Lame Prince is no different. The narrator notes, “If any reader, big or little, should wonder whether there is a meaning in this story deeper than that of an ordinary fairy tale, I will own that there is” (61). On the next page it is noted: When we see people suffering or unfortunate, we feel very sorry for them; but when we see them bravely bearing their sufferings and making the best of their misfortunes, it is quite a different feeling. We respect, we admire them. One can respect and admire even a little child. (62)

This passage demonstrates a moral which is both sentimental and religious in tone. The theme of overcoming is reasonably common in the literature featuring disabled children, as is the theme of, as Ann Dowker (2004) notes, religious learning/living as “misfortunes were often treated as bestowed by God for the ultimate good of the individual” (para. 10). Having this moral that indicates the theme of overcoming serves to justify the events of the narrative. This repositions Dolor’s disabled status as something he must overcome to the extent that he must ‘bravely bear’ it to become both mature and respectable. However, tension, and again a doubleness, exists in what exactly he must overcome. On the one hand, the politics of the narrative which place disablement within social interaction suggest that it is social prejudice, the disabling aspects of society, and yet, the narrator’s and Stuff-and-Nonsense’s pitying remarks suggest it is

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Dolor’s own bodily limitations. Significantly, this moral then justifies Dolor’s confinement as necessary in the process of his maturation, again demonstrating the contradictory tension in The Little Lame Prince. On the one hand, he has been imprisoned by his power-hungry uncle, which is framed as a cruel act, and on the other, this imprisonment should be beneficial for Dolor as it is another obstacle he must overcome. On all accounts then, Dolor’s fate rests solely on his capacity to overcome rather than resist or push back against disabling discourses. These complex discussions of disability politics, confinement, and morality are undergirded by equally complex power structures, and it is the relationships between them that reveal this. Confinement operates as both a disciplinary and biopolitical technique within the novel. It operates disciplinarily through its position to guide Dolor’s maturation and his understanding of social interactions and, through its regulatory and managing effects, epitomises in the quartered and inescapable space of his home in the tower. As these ends are justified through the moral, which also guides Dolor’s development, it then also enables the effects of confinement to regulate and manage. Given this role of the moral, the disability politics of the narrative are also imbricated in the disciplining of Dolor. Both similarly and conversely, the confinement of Dolor has biopolitical reverberations for the external community, as the historical confinement of disabled subjects has as well. In confining Dolor, and justifying it through the moral, the narrative suggests not only is this beneficial for disabled individuals (as is also suggested in ‘Blind!’), but that this is also beneficial for society to have the disabled subject managed and regulated.

Sentimentality, Melancholy, and Eugenics Throughout his experiences of confinement, Dolor has several episodes of melancholia. In Elizabeth A. Wheeler’s discussion of the novel, she notes that “depression, dislike of one’s own body, and existential questioning plague many young people, especially in adolescence, and a physical disability only intensifies this state of mind”3 (2019:157). In The Little Lame Prince these feelings are also intimately tied to heredity through broader eugenics and psychiatric discourses. The use and definition of melancholy in medicine have altered significantly throughout history, from being 3  Here, depression and melancholy cover similar emotional states. While Wheeler refers to ‘depression’, melancholy fits more with the historical context.

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associated with bile, humours, and vapours to psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and mental disorder. In her extensive analysis of melancholia, The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva (2002), Jennifer Radden maps this evolution through several different theorists, including Henry Maudsley. In The Physiology and Pathology of the Mind (1867), Maudsley sets out his descriptions of insanity. In articulating what he calls “the insane temperament” (294), he makes two points of interest: firstly, the centrality of affectivity to his thoughts on insanity, arguing that insanity “is characterised by the disposition to sudden, singular, and impulsive caprices of thought, feeling, and conduct”; and secondly, the positioning of a “hereditary taint” as a “commonly detectable” cause (294). He continues, arguing that “extreme nervous susceptibility” can give “slighter shades and subtler delicacies of feeling and thought”, rearticulating Moreau de Tours’s assertion “that a morbid state of nervous element is the condition of genius” (297). Here, Maudsley reiterates the role of affectivity in potential insanity; however, he also prefaces Francis Galton’s claims in Hereditary Genius (1869) regarding genius and, in turn, eugenic conceptions. As explored in the previous chapter, the relationship between heredity and eugenics in the late Victorian era is quite close, with heredity being the cornerstone of the entire movement in practice and Maudsley being a key proponent of these discourses. Maudsley distinguishes two kinds of insanity, “one of these embracing all those cases in which the mode of feeling or the affective life is chiefly or solely perverted …; the other, those cases in which ideational or intellectual derangement predominates” (1867:301–2, italics in original). It is within this second category, ideational insanity, that he places melancholia proper.4 Maudsley’s further digressions into general and partial ideational insanity offer the most significant point with which to analyse Dolor’s feelings of melancholy. While “ [i]n cases of simple melancholia there may be no delusion”, however, in others, one may emerge wherein “the vast and formless feeling of profound misery has taken form as a concrete idea” (328). Maudsley also notes that these delusions are context specific, contending that “it takes different forms according to the degree of the patient’s culture, and the social, political, and religious ideas prevailing at the particular epoch” (328). Maudsley’s inclusion of delusions as part of ideational insanity has specific ramifications 4  On page 323 Maudsley has included a table differentiating between forms of melancholia and mania, and although he does situate ‘simple melancholia’ under ‘Affective or Pathetic Insanity’, it is the role of delusion which is central to Dolor’s melancholia.

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when considering Dolor’s considerations of suicide. Although this could also then position the ephemeral Stuff-and-Nonsense and her magical gifts as delusions, the constant iteration of death, and the expression that suicide is the only option, aligns more with Maudsley’s description of delusion in melancholia. In The Little Lame Prince, melancholy, while being closely related to genetics, is also positioned as an acceptable or inevitable response to disability. After the death of the queen, the king “never was quite the same”, and on Dolor’s naming day, “his Majesty was generally too ill and too melancholy to pay much heed to the child” (Craik, 1875:24). After the learning of Dolor’s ‘lameness’ the king declines and dies “as suddenly and quietly as the Queen had done” (27). Before his death, the king asks his brother, the Crown Prince and the thus newly appointed Regent, “In case of my death, you will take care of my poor little boy?” (27). This request implies the narrator’s next point that “He knew, and everybody knew, that it [the king’s death] was likely, and soon after it actually did happen” (27), articulating the king’s implied knowledge of his own imminent death. There are no real details of the king’s death, but his anticipation of it, and the immediacy of its realisation, could suggest suicide. The illness and the death of the king are thus embroiled in two events; the death of the queen begins his descent, and the knowledge of Dolor’s disability finishes it. This alignment between disability, melancholy, and death is repeated throughout the novel. In Hopeless Tower, Dolor is delivered books that “informed him of everything in the outside world and filled him with an intense longing to see it” (41). This longing changes his countenance; “He began to look sad and thin and to shut himself up for hours without speaking” and “For almost the first time in his life he grew melancholy—his hands fell on his lap; he sat gazing out the window-slit upon the view outside, the view he had looked at every day of his life and might look at for endless days more” (41). In this state of melancholy, Dolor contemplates his own death: He used to think, if he could only fly out of that window, up to the sky or down to the plain, how nice it would be! Perhaps when he died—his nurse had told him once in anger that he would never leave the tower till he died—he might be able to do this. Not that he understood much what dying meant, but it must be a change, and any change seemed to him a blessing. (42)

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The alignment between disability and death is again made apparent, with death being the only escape manageable or imaginable for Dolor. One of the most significant instances in which Dolor resigns himself to death is towards the end of the narrative, just before he is rescued from Hopeless Tower. He made up his mind to die. Not that he wished to die; on the contrary, there was a great deal that he wished to live to do; but if he must die, he must. Dying did not seem so very dreadful; not even to lie quiet like his uncle, whom he had entirely forgiven now, and neither be miserable nor naughty anymore, and escape all those horrible things that he had seen going on outside the palace in that awful place which was called “the world”. (119)

This consistent reiteration of suicide as the only means for Dolor to ‘escape’ both the tower and the world is indeed a delusion; as has been already established throughout the novel, his travelling cloak could and does give him the opportunities for the escape he so desires. However, as melancholy and disability are intrinsically linked in the narrative, then so too are disability and suicide. Dolor’s melancholic episodes are often in relation to his disablement and its repercussions: his confinement (41), confusion over the travelling cloak (50), loneliness (73), seeing the boy and his dog (87), and his final resignation to death (119). As melancholy is positioned as an acceptable if not inevitable response to disability, suicide is positioned as an acceptable end to the ‘suffering’ of disability; suffering implied in the socio-cultural positioning of Dolor and specifically the language to which he is subjected. However, during this period where Dolor resigns himself to death, he is rescued by his nurse who returns with an army and is installed as king. Craik’s criticism of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss in ‘To novelists – and a novelist’ (1861a) articulates a moral responsibility that fiction has to its readers, questioning, ‘[w]ill it influence for good any other real lives— this passionately written presentment of temptation never conquered, … seeing no future but possession, and, that hope gone, no alternative but death,--death, welcomed as the solution of all difficulties, the escape from all pain?’ (445–446) At the moment of contemplating his death, Dolor is saved, and Craik rights the perceived failure of The Mill on the Floss, resolving Dolor’s suicidal tendencies. Subsequently, his rescue also then signifies the resolution of the moral, both in the sense of the underlying moralistic

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and didactic imperative of the narrative and in the sense of his sentimentality and subsequent melancholy; he overcomes his suicidal delusions and is rewarded with rescue and ascendance to the throne. This then forms part of the disciplinary aspects of the novel’s politics. Not only does it suggest that melancholy can be successfully treated through confinement (or, at least, activated and treated through confinement),5 but that in being ‘cured’ of his melancholia Dolor is finally ‘good’ enough to ascend the throne; that is, Dolor is finally both a docile (enough) and biopolitically acceptable subject. However, Dolor’s contrived suicidal tendencies cannot be easily overlooked. If fiction has a moral responsibility to reject or at least dispel ideas of death ‘as the solution of all difficulties’, then the invention of Dolor’s suicidal tendencies, which ultimately suggests death may be better than disability (as the long history of such representations attests to), can only be understood as irresponsible.

Revolution and Double Closure On his last journey outside the tower, Dolor, after learning of his true identity, decides to visit his uncle, the king. As he does, he sees the city, and the narrator describes the experience of visiting a metropolis: Most of us have sometime or other visited a great metropolis—have wandered through its network of streets, lost ourselves in its crowds of people, looked up at its tall rows of houses, its grand public buildings, churches, and squares. Also, perhaps we have peeped into its miserable little back alleys where dirty children play in gutters all day and half the night, or where men reel tipsy and women fight, where even young boys go about picking pockets, with nobody to tell them it is wrong except the policeman, and he simply takes them off to prison. And all this wretchedness is close behind the grandeur—like the two sides of the leaf of a book. (Craik, 1875:100–101)

The implied child reader is encouraged to view large cities, as Dolor does, as places of both great wealth and inequality. For Dolor, this is his first recognition of people less fortunate than himself, which makes him “as bewildered as a blind person who is suddenly made to see” (101). This 5  Here, it is important to remember the aetiology of melancholia as hereditary disease. Thus, the seeds of melancholia were always already present in Dolor; confinement helped bring them to the surface to be expunged.

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scene, combined with Dolor’s newfound knowledge of his royal inheritance, begins his transformation into a ‘good’ king, a king who feels responsible for others’ welfare. From his position above the city, and his ability to “take in everything at once”, Dolor exclaims, “I can’t bear to look at it, it is so beautiful—so dreadful” (101), thus sympathising with the people of Nomansland through the ‘heightened sensibility’ his melancholy gives him. However, this description also rearticulates the doubleness that appears throughout the narrative and posits that both distance and sympathetic engagement can help distinguish the whole from the two sides depicted. After spying on the king, who had subsequently died either just before or during Dolor’s visit, a revolt begins, and Dolor watches it from a distance. The narrator notes that “the people gathered in crowds”, and “the murmur now and then rose into a shout, and the shout into a roar” (108). The narrator continues: When you children are grown men and women—or before—you will hear and read in books about what are called revolutions—earnestly I trust that neither I nor you may ever see one. But they have happened, and may happen again, in other countries besides Nomansland, when wicked kings have helped to make their people wicked, too, or out of an unrighteous nation have sprung rulers equally bad, or, without either of these causes, when a restless country has fancied any change better than no change at all. For me, I don’t like changes, unless pretty sure that they are for good. And how good can come out of absolute evil—the horrible evil that went on this night under Prince Dolor’s very eyes—soldiers shooting people down by hundreds in the streets, scaffolds erected, and heads dropping off, houses burnt, and women and children murdered—this is more than I can understand. But all these things you will find in history, my children, and must by and by judge for yourselves the right and wrong of them, as far as anybody ever can judge. (110)

This passage encompasses a large amount of conflicting ideas, again adding to the doubleness and the overall didacticism of the narrative. The narrator’s description of how revolutions happen positions the populace as either bad or flippant, either the subject of wickedness or the cause of it, and revolution as a simple event which occurs over a day. Subsequently, the intricacies of political life are glossed over. Then the narrator calls for children to judge for themselves. Yet, even with this call, the didactic,

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moralistic, and persuasive arguments put forth by the narrator make any judgement beyond ‘revolution is bad’ difficult; in fact, the implied child reader is interpellated by the narrator into thinking monarchism and the current state of affairs wherever they might be living (given the constant positioning of Nomansland as comparable to England, it remains fairly obvious this is Craik’s target audience), and it is best to leave it that way. This then positions English history as calm, ignoring the multiple riots, attempts at revolution, and changes in monarchical and governmental sectors that have coloured English history.6 Moreover, this positions the time of publication, 1875, as without need or attempts for radical social change, especially as it pertains to discourses surrounding class and improved rights. Following from this is that other than potentially seeing a revolt, which was certainly a possibility for the implied child reader, this description in fact forces them to read one. As this scene was originally accompanied by an illustration by F. McL. Ralston, this presentation in fact allows the reader to see one. As Kylee-Anne Hingston notes of this scene, “the tension between the text and the illustration … allows readers to view what the narrator trusts they will never see” and “reminds readers of the limitedness of their bodies and of textual representations that rely on sight and hearing” (2013:377). There is not only an inherent tension between text and image, but a direct contradiction; the image allows what the text refuses. This is then doubled through the description. Although vague, the violent imagery enables the implied child reader to ‘picture’ the events the image itself leaves out. While the image itself has men posed during a battle, seemingly between the populace and the army/guards, there is little to suggest the extent of violence suggested in the narration: “soldiers shooting people down by hundreds”, “scaffolds erected”, “heads dropping off”, “houses burnt”, or “women and children murdered” (Craik, 1875:110). The violent imagery used further positions the implied child reader to agree with the narrator and understand revolution as a ‘horrible evil’. However, the novel utilises this moment as a catalyst for two important things: Dolor’s last, and deepest, bout of melancholy, and the reinstating of Dolor as king. This resolution forms the first of the two closures of the novel. 6  Most notably, other than England’s involvement in the American Revolution are the War of the Roses, the attempted revolutions of 1848, which included the Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848, and the Fenian Rising occurred in 1867, just 8 years before the publication of The Little Lame Prince.

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The sight of the revolution and the violence demonstrated leaves Dolor in a deep melancholy and resigned to death. However, his contemplation is interrupted by “the sound of a trumpet” (120) and the return of his nurse with an army “to set upon the throne of Nomansland its rightful heir” (120–121). The narrator notes: Everybody tried to remember what a dear baby he once was—how like his mother, who had been so sweet and kind, and his father, the finest-looking king that ever reigned. Nobody remembered his lameness—or, if they did, they passed it over as a matter of no consequence. They were determined to have him to reign over them, boy as he was—perhaps just because he was a boy, since in that case the great nobles thought they should be able to do as they liked with the country. (121)

In the prospect of either continued revolt or a country without rule, Dolor’s ‘lameness’ can be overlooked. This then has two implications within the narrative, relating to ideas presented when Dolor first might take the throne. After the passing of Dolor’s father, the lords-in-waiting contest, “What a king, who can never stand to receive his subjects, never walk in processions, who to the last day of his life will have to be carried about like a baby. Very unfortunate!” and “It is always bad for a nation when its king is a child; but such a child—a permanent cripple, if not worse” (28). As can be seen in these exchanges, the very idea of ‘kingliness’ is predicated on the king being nondisabled. Thus, there has been a significant change in the idea of what makes a king, suggesting that even a ‘crippled’ child is better than no king at all. Again, there is a sense of doubleness here which overlays the disability politics in the novel: on the one hand, as disability is socially determined so too are the ideas of what a disabled subject can do and what a king should do; on the other, the threat of revolution is so horrible, and the previous king’s reign so harsh, that anyone with a claim outside the family is good enough (the narrator specifically notes that “the country … [had] no particular interest in the other young princes” [121]). Nonetheless, Dolor becomes Nomansland’s ideal sovereign and is rescued from the tower and installed as the king. Here ends the internal narrative of Dolor’s confinement and his ascendance to the throne; however, the narrative does not end at this point. The last chapter of the novel quickly runs through what is the rest of Dolor’s life as the king of Nomansland. The narrator notes that his lameness “was never cured”:

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However, the cruel things which had been once foreboded of him did not happen. His misfortune was not such a heavy one after all. It proved to be much less inconvenient, even to himself, than had been feared. A council of eminent surgeons and mechanicians invented for him a wonderful pair of crutches, with the help of which, though he never walked easily or gracefully, he did manage to walk, so as to be quite independent. And such was the love his people bore him that they never heard the sound of his crutch on the marble palace-floors without a leap of the heart, for they knew that good was coming to them whenever he approached them. (131)

Following from the previous point, the role of king itself has not changed much, and in fact it is Dolor who must be altered for the role to then be reconceptualised. The significance of walking here overshadows his quality as king; in the last sentence his walk prefaces his ‘goodness’. Most notably in this passage is the presence of surgeons as well as mechanicians in creating crutches for Dolor, pointing towards specific surgical alterations to Dolor himself as well as the use/invention of crutches. The narrator continues, noting that although “he never walked in processions, never reviewed his troops mounted on a magnificent charger, nor did any of the things which make a show monarch so much appreciated”, nor stood in his levees but sat “on a throne ingeniously contrived to hide his infirmity”, he was loved by his people (131). Despite these seemingly progressive points, there still exists a complex doubleness to them. While it is stated Dolor is not much of a ‘show monarch’, his ‘infirmity’ must be ‘hidden’ in his ‘ingeniously contrived’ throne, at least for some vague purpose. Indeed, this passage seems to suggest that it is acceptable for everyone to know he is ‘lame’ but unacceptable for people to always see it. The novel expresses an uncertainty around exactly how Dolor’s disability fits into his role as king. Despite the novel’s seemingly progressive disability politics at times, even after the internal narrative is resolved, there is still an imperative to keep disability out of sight, thus returning Dolor to a position of confinement. As Hingston notes of this closure, “the actual ending privileges physical normalcy and implies that the disabled body is the text’s central concern” (2019:148). The narrator also states, “He never gave them a queen” as “his country was his bride and he desired no other” (Craik, 1875:132). While this might seem a noble statement from a king who loves his country, there is an implicit call back to eugenic imperatives, most notably the sterilisation (or at least the discouragement) of disabled sexuality. Although his ‘lameness’ is acquired, it is his susceptibility to melancholy that must not be passed on, as, arguably, his father did to him.

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This then relegates Dolor to another space of confinement, a confinement in which sexuality is nonexistent. After installing his youngest cousin as Prince Regent, the now old King Dolor announces to his people he is going on a journey of which he will not come back. He unbundles his travelling cloak and flies off to the Beautiful Mountains. This ending to the larger narrative, the narrative of Dolor’s life, is rather open; however, his noting that “I do not think I shall come back anymore” (137) points either to a life of exile or to his imminent death. In either case, the narrative of Dolor’s life ends on this ambiguous note, rearticulating the doubleness and complexity of the narrative.

Conclusion Dinah Mulock Craik’s The Little Lame Prince and His Traveling Cloak exemplifies a doubleness of Victorian social politics emblematic of the disciplinary and biopolitical techniques deployed at the time. While the novel suggests Prince Dolor is an exemplar of what a good king and good person is, it frames socio-cultural barriers and their institutional manifestations as necessary for the development of a desire to overcome. This doubleness extends throughout the narrative as well as through Craik’s non-fiction writing, ultimately suggesting that disabled people should be admired and respected; however, the disciplinary and biopolitical apparatuses of the workhouse, the asylum, and the prison situated to manage more than help the disabled population (among others) do not need adjustment. Subsequently, the place of literature for and about children and young adults in the late Victorian period that features representations of disability, like Craik’s, is imbricated within the complex machinations of power discourses of its time. Craik’s work, although superficially promoting the respect of disabled people and their autonomy, serves to further validate problematic conceptualisations and further entrench techniques of disciplinary and biopolitical management in the minds of implied child readers, many of whom may one day influence future governmental discourses. In this way, the subtly eugenic closure of the novel, where Dolor, heirless, passes on the crown to his youngest cousin, is reconciled with the larger anxieties about national bio-futurity and the doubleness of the novel. The Little Lame Prince is, subsequently, a eugenic narrative, not simply in its closing off reproductive possibilities for Dolor, but in its capacity to promote the close management of disabled people in Victorian English Craik.

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Bibliography Borsay, A. (2005). Disability and social policy in Britain since 1750: A history of exclusion. Palgrave Macmillan. Bourrier, K. (2013). Introduction: Rereading Dinah Mulock Craik. Women’s Writing, 20(3), 287–296. Bourrier, K. (2016). Supported bodies: Prostheses, disability, and masculine friendship in the Victorian novel. Victorian Review, 42(1), 34–37. Bourrier, K. (2019). Victorian bestseller: The life of Dinah Craik. University of Michigan Press. Dowker, A. (2004). The treatment of disability in 19th and early 20th century children’s literature. Disability Studies Quarterly, 24(1). http://www.dsq-­sds. org/article/view/843/1018. Accessed 10 Dec 2016. Foucault, M. (1961/2001). Madness and civilization: A history of insanity in the age of reason (R. Howard, Trans.). Routledge Classics. Galton, F. (1869/1892). Hereditary genius: An inquiry into its laws and consequences. Macmillan and Co. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet. dli.2015.222974/page/n3/mode/2up Gubar, M. (2009). Artful dodgers: Reconceiving the golden age of children’s literature. Oxford University Press. Hingston, K.-A. (2013). Prostheses and narrative perspective in Dinah Mulock Craik’s The little lame prince. Women’s Writing, 20(3), 370–386. Hingston, K.-A. (2019). Articulating bodies: The narrative form of disability and illness in Victorian fiction. Liverpool University Press. Maudsley, H. (1867). The physiology and pathology of the mind. D Appleton and Company. https://archive.org/stream/physiologyandpa03maudgoog#page/ n8/mode/2up Mitchell, S. (1983). Dinah Mulock Craik. VictorianWeb. https://victorianweb. org/authors/craik/mitchell/1.html Craik, D. M. (1861a). To novelists – And a novelist. Macmillan’s Magazine, 3, 441–448. https://archive.org/stream/macmillansmagazi03macmuoft#page/ n3/mode/2up Craik, D. M. (1861b). Blind! Macmillan’s Magazine, 3, 53–57. https://archive. org/stream/macmillansmagazi03macmuoft#page/n3/mode/2up Craik, D. M. (1867a). Strolls with invalid children: No. I. My dog and I. Once a Week, 3, 384–389. https://archive.org/stream/onceaweek03dallgoog#page/ n10/mode/2up Craik, D. M. (1867b). Strolls with invalid children: No. II. The fox hunt. Once a Week, 3, 503–508. https://archive.org/stream/onceaweek03dallgoog#page/ n10/mode/2up Craik, D.  M. (1870). The unkind word and other stories. Harper & Brothers, Publishers. https://archive.org/stream/unkindwordandot00cragoog#page/ n2/mode/2up

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Craik, D. M. (1875/1964). The little lame prince and his traveling cloak. Whitman Publishing Company. Nelson, C. (2015). Children’s writing. In L. Peterson (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to Victorian women’s writing. Cambridge University Press. Philipose, L. (1996). The politics of the hearth in Victorian children’s fantasy: Dinah Mulock Craik’s The little lame prince. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 21(3), 133–139. Radden, J. (2002). The nature of melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva. Oxford University Press. Richardson, A. (1993). Reluctant lords and lame princes: Engendering the male child in nineteenth-century juvenile fiction. Children’s Literature, 21, 3–19. Showalter, E. (1975). Dinah Mulock Craik and the tactics of sentiment: A case study in Victorian female authorship. Feminist Studies, 2(2/3), 5–23. Sparks, T. (2013). Dinah Mulock Craik’s Olive: Deformity, gender and female destiny. Women’s Writing, 20(3), 358–369. Stoddard Holmes, M. (2007). Victorian fictions of interdependency: Gaskell, Craik, and Yonge. Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 1(2), 29–41. Walker Gore, C. (2019). Plotting disability in the nineteenth-century novel. Edinburgh University Press. Wheeler, E.  A. (2019). HandiLand: The crippest place on Earth. University of Michigan Press.

CHAPTER 3

Building Beasties: Disability, Imperialism, and Violence in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954)

Introduction By the end of World War II Britain was faced with substantial challenges. There was considerable economic strain with the cost of rebuilding, a large amount of temporarily and permanently disabled and traumatised civilians, soldiers, and medical personnel, as well as British involvement in 11 geopolitical events (including the Northern Campaign from 1942 to 1944 by the Irish Republican Army) in the decade after the end of World War II. These factors signalled the financial and human costs of war for Britain and contributed to the global weakening of British imperial authority and its ability to suppress and resolve geopolitical tensions, movements, conflicts, and shifts. The British Empire found itself confronted by uprisings and wars for independence (the Northern Campaign; Indonesian National Revolution from 1945 to 1949; the 1951–1952 Anglo-Egyptian War; the Mau Mau Uprising in British Kenya from 1952 to 1960; and the beginning of both the Jebel Akhdar War in Oman from 1954 to 1959 and the Cyprus Emergency from 1955 to 1959) as well as attempting to stem the expansion of Communism across Europe and Asia (the Greek Civil War from 1944 to 1948; Operation Masterdom in Vietnam from 1945 to 1946; the Corfu Channel Incident with the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania from 1946 to 1948; the Malayan Emergency from 1948 to 1960; and the Korean War from 1950 to 1953). Britain’s involvement in such © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Holdsworth, The Government of Disability in Dystopian Children’s Texts, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52034-1_3

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extensive conflicts demonstrates the implicit anxiety regarding its place in the post-War world. However, as Andrew Hammond summarises it, “Just as Britain helped to shape the course of global events, so those events shaped aspects of British life, from the Welfare State and the peace movement, through nuclearization, decolonization, unionism, and recession, to Labour’s retreat from socialism and the quandaries of post-imperial nationhood” (2011:663). Although Britain was exercising its might internationally, there were also several major political shifts which affected the lives of people at home. In 1948 the National Health Services (NHS) were founded, which consolidated the former institutions responsible for the welfare of disabled and elderly residents; the Disabled Persons (Employment) Act of 1944 meant entry into the labour market for a number of disabled men and women; and William Beveridge’s 1942 report Social Insurance and Allied Services proposed reforms for social welfare services. However, the promised advancements for disability rights and disabled lives that these changes implied were short lived and applied incongruously. The consolidation of institutions under the NHS did not improve conditions in a large number of places, as attested to by scholarly works such as Jenny Morris’s Pride Against Prejudice: A Personal Politics of Disability (1991), and Dorothy Atkinson, Mark Jackson, and Jan Walmsley’s Forgotten Lives: Exploring the History of Learning Disability (1997). The Employment Act had numerous problems as Anne Borsay illustrates in Disability and Social Policy in Britain Since 1750: A History of Exclusion (2005). Borsay finds comparable issues with Beveridge’s report and the developing ‘Welfare State’ that it engendered, demonstrating that despite Beveridge’s inclusion of disabled people as in need of social welfare advancements, “the rights of disabled people were a low priority within this agenda for rebuilding post-­ war Britain” (161). While these changes may not have afforded disabled people much assistance, they centralised systems of management, making disabled people more dependent on a smaller number of institutions. As such, this centralisation of management consolidated the government of disability in the 1950s and into the future. The most significant aspect of the Cold War period, however, is the tensions between the United States and the USSR, and Britain’s subsequent imperial obsolescence. David Seed, drawing on Tom Engelhardt, argues that “the grand narrative of national triumph [in American Cold War literature] over an evident and often subhuman enemy went into an extended crisis during the Cold War where it became increasingly difficult

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to identify even the general category of ‘enemy-ness’” (2003:117). Although Seed is specifically discussing American Cold War literature, British Cold War literature followed a similar pattern wherein the ‘enemy’ became more difficult to identify. In his analysis of British Cold War literature, Hammond highlights how “the dystopian genre offers a condensed guide to the multiple responses of British fiction to Cold War realities. From 1945 to 1989 dystopianism was an expressly Cold War literary mode and, far from having ‘little direct engagement’ with geopolitical currents, proved reluctant to engage with anything else” (2011:664). What becomes apparent is an increasing distrust in governmental and nationalistic discourses due to the “government-promoted minimization of the effects of nuclear war” (Seed, 2003:118). The threat of global nuclear war and devastation invested Cold War literature with an anxiousness of not only what the future would look like in such an event but also reflections on contemporary socio-politics and their tenuousness, epitomised in the “articulat[ion] in narrative form [of] fears of genetic mutation and civic collapse” (118–9). These major shifts and challenges—post-war themes of rebuilding, consolidation of systems of management, and anxieties around nuclear war—shaped how disability was explored in British Cold War dystopian literature.

Lord of the Flies Over the course of its almost 60 years in publication, Lord of the Flies has attracted discussion in terms of religious signification (van Vuuren, 2004), critiques of the ‘nuclear age’ (Dowling, 1987), the significance of ‘the island’ and the tradition of the Robinsonade (Beer, 1989), and analyses on imperialist ideology (Sinfield, 1997). As many critics have contended (those previously mentioned, as well as Singh, 1997; Schwartz, 2006; Wilson, 2014), one of the central concerns of the narrative is the nature of civilisation, and specifically its construction and de-construction. The government of disability in Lord of the Flies operates as a ‘civilising’ power structure which disciplines, regulates, hierarchises, and, most importantly, manages bodies in service of ‘civilisation’. Lord of the Flies follows a group of young boys who crash on an ‘uninhabited’ island and their attempts at survival and rescue. While they initially work together, their make-do ‘civilisation’ slowly breaks into two factions: Ralph, Piggy, Simon, Sam, and Eric (also referred to as Samneric), who keep rescue as their foremost concern; and the choir ‘tribe’ led by

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Jack, who become uncivilised1 in their preferences for hunting and killing. Through this disintegration, and the collective anxieties, irresponsibility, and antagonism between these two groups, three boys—the ‘Littlun’ with the birthmark on his face, Simon, and Piggy—are killed. The centrality of disability in the narrative is made apparent through the representation of these three boys. All three are ‘marked’ with a difference and are also the only characters noted to have died. As such, their deaths are integral to the narrative’s progression and the larger socio-political questions raised by the novel. While the larger narrative can be seen to involve a kind of mimetic rearticulation of British society and a macro-parodying of British imperialism, the deaths of these three characters call into question the role of disability in these acts. In Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain (1997), Alan Sinfield focuses on the significance of the concept of ‘the savage within’ during British decolonisation and how it functions to rearticulate British imperialism. He argues, “The myth of universal savagery is the final, desperate throw of a humiliated and exhausted European humanism. It is informed by both an anxiety about, and a continuing embroilment in, imperialist ideology” (160). This myth and literary trope “works like this: when it was just the natives who were brutal, the British were enlightened and necessary rulers. But if the British are (have been) brutal, that’s human nature” (160). On the one hand, Lord of the Flies can be read as imbricated in this rhetoric, implying, as some critics have suggested (Beer, 1989; Singh, 1997; Schwartz, 2006; Wilson, 2014), that inside us all and beneath our ‘cultural veneer’ we are ‘savage’. On the other hand, it can be read as a macro-parodying of this imperialist ideology, not simply that the boys enact a supposed ‘savage within’, but that they play a larger game concerned with British imperialism and indigenous resistance while also deploying a parody of British ‘understandings’ of indigeneity. Unlike Sinfield, Eric Wilson highlights the significance of the work of Thomas Hobbes and Rene Girard in his discussion of civilisation in the novel (2014). While there are a few significant instances Wilson overlooks (and, to his credit, he does make note of them in his footnotes), his 1  I have chosen this term for two reasons: firstly, it highlights the fact that Jack and his ‘tribe’ are still affected by civilising discourses, despite this slowly disintegrating; and secondly, given the history these other terms have in relation to colonialist discourse, racism, and the marginalisation and oppression of native peoples, it seems appropriate to not align Jack with them.

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application of Girard’s analyses of violence and religion to the novel provides insights into its construction of civilisation. In reading the deaths of the narrative in relation to sacrifice, unlike Sinfield, Wilson’s analysis offers a complex interpretation of these pivotal scenes. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his meditations on the development of civil society, posits communal unity through social pact as the founding moment. He contends that “the only way in which [people] can preserve themselves is by uniting their separate powers in a combination strong enough to overcome any resistance, uniting them so that their powers are directed by a single motive and act in concert” (1762:59–60). This social contract enables the constitution of a civil society wherein the individual gains “civil liberty and the legal right of property in what he possesses” at the expense of “natural liberty and the absolute right to anything that tempts him and that he can take” (65). However, he also posits this point, “the Moment that, united into one Body, [private persons] are obliged to compare themselves one with another”, especially in regard to “Riches, Nobility or Rank, Power and personal Merit”, is the basis of all inequality within civil society (1761:168). Within a state of nature, however, he also states that “Men … are naturally as equal among themselves, as were the Animals of every Species, before various Physical Causes had introduced those Varieties we now observe among some of them” (xlvii) and that this is “among Men the first Source of Inequality” (xlviii). What Rousseau overlooks here is how ‘inequalities’ in a state of nature are inherently still present once a social pact, and consequently a civil society, is formed. If inequality can only be registered through comparison, as Rousseau logically suggests occurs in a civil society, then the inequalities of a state of nature must also operate in the same way. Furthermore, these inequalities cannot simply vanish once a civil society is constituted but in fact must underpin the inequalities of civil society. Through this point of contention, Lord of the Flies establishes a clear concern with how disability is manifested, organised, and, ultimately, eliminated as part of the building of a fledgling new society. In these ways, Lord of the Flies exhibits a dis-­ topian political investment.

Civilisation The construction of civilisation on the island takes several forms and demonstrates the complexities of such an endeavour. With British society as their frame of reference the boys are, to a certain extent, re-creating or

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imitating its version of ‘civilisation’ on the island. Subsequently, this construction engenders division, hierarchisation, and differentiations based on age, disability, and ‘race’; attempts at order and management; and concerns about food, shelter, hygiene, and rescue; in short, a whole set of disciplinary and biopolitical techniques, reflective of British society, are employed. Minnie Singh argues that, “If the project of government may be understood macropolitically as civilization, then its micropolitical counterpart is education, with civility as its project” (1997:206). While the government constructed in Lord of the Flies is concerned with civilisation and its continuation, it is also concerned with a kind of ‘civility education’ in an unknown land. This ‘civility education’ refers not only to the presumed foundational elements of civilisation itself, but also to the socialising, and ‘civilising’, tendencies of British society larger. Thus, the boys’ island government is akin to the imperialist and ‘civilising’ endeavours of the British Empire historically and the decolonisation of the 1950s to which Sinfield refers, requiring disciplinary and biopolitical techniques to replicate a British civil society. The initial projects of assembly, democratisation, and order cogently demonstrate the utilisation of division and hierarchisation as replicating British social structures. One of the first issues the boys face is of quantifying, organising, and managing the groups of boys. This involves an immediate division and hierarchisation on the grounds of “physical appearance and power” (Erkan & Razmi, 2018:122). The first division created is between the affectionately termed ‘Littluns’ and the ‘Biguns’. Age, then, becomes the first point of governance, where differentiation engenders ‘civilising’ disciplinary and biopolitical techniques. Through this reiteration of the archetypal relationship between adults and children, ageist differentiation characterises and determines the role of the littluns in the novel. This then makes the littluns subjects of the re-civilising process and subjected to bigun control. However, the means of this differentiation become difficult, especially in the throng of the littluns, and subsequently they become homogenised. Although some littluns are named throughout the narrative, their homogeneity codes their relationship to the biguns and to the larger socio-political issues. However, it is the role of the littluns that decides the vote for Ralph as chief; the littluns are only given as much power as necessary to engender democratic bigun power. In this way, ageist differentiation always already positions the littluns as subjects of bigun power regardless of the democratic process involved. Through

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these means of division, hierarchisation, and subjectivisation, the biguns manage the littluns disciplinarily and biopolitically. As well as age, ‘race’ and disability also play a significant role in the project of civilisation as further means of division and hierarchisation. Although ‘race’ only comes into the discussion when the group breaks up, it is arguably one of the most significant aspects of the narrative. The division of the boys engenders this differentiation regarding ‘race’ and in this way can be understood as an extension and parody of British imperialist ideology. Jack’s ‘tribe’ becomes rendered as racially Other without being racially Other. This tension then propels the narrative and legitimates the three deaths in the narrative. Moreover, the role of ‘race’ in the narrative also validates the civilisation on the island; without a point of comparison ‘civilisation’ cannot be called ‘civilisation’, so Jack’s ‘tribe’ as ‘savage, primitive, Other’ exists only as a counterpoint to Ralph’s ‘civilisation’. Disability is more far reaching than both the differentiations based on age and ‘race’. Through differentiation and hierarchisation, Piggy, Simon, and the Littlun are the most marginalised characters due to their perceived physical and behavioural differences. From his introduction, Piggy is positioned as secondary to Ralph, constantly being ignored and viewed as burdensome. He is described as “very fat” (Golding, 1954:7), and he notes, “My auntie told me not to run … on account of my asthma … I was the only boy in our school what had asthma … And I’ve been wearing specs since I was three” (9). Piggy’s characterisation relies on his asthma, weight, and sight to position him as marginal, making him a subject of the government of disability. This is exemplified in the act of naming, which sets in place several power structures in the novel and further situates Piggy as without authority. Piggy’s initial attempt to become close to Ralph by revealing his secret, noting, “I don’t care what they call me … so long as they don’t call me what they used to call me at school … They used to call me ‘Piggy’ ” (11). Zeynep Z. Ayaturt notes that although “he makes it clear to Ralph that he does not want to be called “Piggy” and thus he rejects the cultural logic that would make him the marginal figure worthy of ridicule … [t]he boys, nonetheless, build their camaraderie on the island in part by bullying him” (2010:54). Although he is assertive and clear in this moment, his willingness to trust Ralph with an example of a deeply personal humiliation leaves him “marginalized by his difference, disregarded, and ridiculed” (53). It is also a testament to the hierarchisation of British society to which Piggy has already been subject. His internalisation of attitudes towards his weight further underscores the

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pervasiveness of these discriminatory attitudes, which is reinforced and perpetuated when Ralph betrays his trust by telling the other boys to call him Piggy. Ralph’s rationalisation of betraying Piggy’s trust reiterates his power over Piggy: “Better Piggy than Fatty … and anyway, I’m sorry if you feel like that. Now go back, Piggy, and take names. That’s your job” (Golding, 1954:25). This demonstrates Ralph’s position of power in his ability to both name and order Piggy but also reveals the tenuousness of such explanations. As such, any and every time the name ‘Piggy’ is mentioned, it is as a form of humiliation, an act of governance, and a symbol of power. Unlike Piggy, Simon is simultaneously included yet ex-centric to the narrative. Although a bigun, it is Simon’s status as disabled subject that ultimately marginalises him. When he is introduced, he is an unnamed choirboy who faints upon reaching the lagoon for the meeting. Jack notes, “He’s always throwing a faint … He did in Gib.; and Addis; and at matins over the precentor” (20), which both dismisses and derides Simon’s physical response and possible underlying condition. Jack’s remarks also call Simon’s honesty into question, presenting the possibility that he purposefully ‘throws a faint’. This positions Simon at the bottom of an already established hierarchy within the choirboys, and Jack, like Ralph with Piggy, uses derision of Simon to both assert dominance and gain popularity within the larger community. In doing so, Jack demonstrates the disciplinary techniques involved in the government of disability, that is, the means through which Simon is rendered disabled. Throughout the narrative, Simon’s fainting spells are consistently linked to his sanity (55; 89; 111), most notably through the boys’ references to him being ‘batty’ and in his conversations with the Lord of the Flies. These conversations are the only times when the narrative is not focalised through Ralph or Jack and relate Simon’s significance to moments where he is rendered disabled. The Littlun with the birthmark on his face, although a minor character in the narrative, is hugely influential in the narrative’s progression. His introduction into the narrative comes after both Piggy and Simon’s and is minimal in comparison. However, his introduction demonstrates the extent to which differentiation and disability form a significant part of the construction of civilisation and the imperialist ideologies present in the novel: The older boys first noticed the child when he resisted. There was a group of little boys urging him forward and he did not want to go. He was a

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shrimp of a boy, about six years old, and one side of his face was blotted out by a mulberry-colored birthmark. He stood now, warped out of the perpendicular by the fierce light of publicity, and he bored into the coarse grass with one toe. (35)

Rather than being differentiated by name, the Littlun is differentiated and Othered by his birthmark, both by the other littluns and by the biguns in turn. However, it is due to this marked physical difference that he is noticed as missing later, both singling him out and making his absence noticeable. He is also the first to remark upon the existence of the ‘beastie’, and this in turn engenders the construction of a religious discourse in the narrative. All the biguns refute the existence of the ‘beastie’, except Simon who contemplates its existence later. There is a further differentiation between the littluns and biguns, rearticulating the ageist power structures that engender civilisation. The ‘beastie’ becomes a sign and site of anxiety within the narrative, a formless, omnipresent, and peripheral fear circling the boys, and is only superseded with both the Lord of the Flies and Jack’s tribe. Here we return again to age, ‘race’, and disability as the means of division, hierarchisation, and differentiation in the narrative. These disciplinary techniques are most overt in the construction of a religious discourse, the impact of imperialist ideology, and the figures of the ‘beastie’, the Lord of the Flies, and Jack’s tribe in the narrative.

Imperialism and Religious Discourse While the three deaths are significant to understanding how the government of disability operates in the novel, these deaths are all precipitated by an imperialist and religious discourse. Alan Sinfield demonstrates the impact imperialist discourse and its gradual transformation in the post-war era had on the literature being produced at that time. The long history of British imperialism came to a critical point in the 1950s with the projects of decolonisation and independence, as well as “awareness of Nazi cruelty, Stalinist oppression, the atomic bomb and the general success of science” (1997:159). In the light of the horrors of World War II, “Imperialist ideology was readjusted, to produce a myth of ‘human nature’: it is savage. Other motifs contributed to this formation, but imagery of the savage returns again and again” (160). As Sinfield suggests, the concept of ‘the savage within’ is an extension of imperialist ideology. Sinfield, as well as Singh, utilises William Golding’s oft-quoted analysis of the atrocities of

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the War, noting that, “They were not done by the head-hunters of New Guinea, or by some primitive tribe in the Amazon. They were done skilfully, coldly, by educated men, doctors, lawyers, by men with a tradition of civilization behind them, to beings of their own kind” (Golding in Singh, 1997:209). While Singh overlooks the implications of this quote, Sinfield notes how it also is an extension of imperialist rhetoric: European atrocities are understood through comparison with Third-World people, who are taken as the benchmark of savagery. In this further tactic of cultural plunder it is not our superiority to the natives that is demonstrated, but our likeness: they are positioned as the image of the worst truth about us. (1997:160)

Although Sinfield’s analysis makes some cogent and significant links between Golding’s writing and imperialist ideology, he overstates the implied relationship between the Indigenous people and ‘civilised’ people. Instead, Golding deploys the imperialist fantasy of the ‘barbarous savage’ that populates the jungles, islands, and far-off lands of boys’ adventure fiction to highlight the exaggeration of imperialist representations of indigenous peoples in the face of the atrocities of ‘civilisation’. To put it another way, whatever fantasies of ‘savagery’ imperialism constructs of indigenous cultures cannot match the horrors of World War II. It is not ‘likeness’ that is being demonstrated here but complete ‘difference’. Even Sinfield demonstrates this, as he continues, “the implication of Golding’s last phrase is that people in Brazil and New Guinea are not of our ‘kind’” (160). While Golding’s ‘last phrase’ does certainly rely on imperialist ideology, it is in relation to the idea of different ‘kinds’, and to that extent an inherent difference, rather than a demonstration of ‘the savage within’. Although there is certainly a line of imperialist thought in Golding’s discussion, there is also a call for civilisation and imperialism to reveal themselves as truly violent and atrocious and, in turn, to release indigenous peoples from such stereotypes. Through this line of inquiry, the roles of imperialism, religion, ‘race’, and disability in Lord of the Flies are exposed. It is only after the introduction of a new religious discourse into the narrative that the community the boys are creating begins to come undone. Eric Wilson contends that this is the necessary succession of events:

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[A]s the unruly protagonists learn for themselves, the successful completion of the legal and political order (‘the State’) can only come with the institutionalisation of a formalised mechanism of ritualistic sacrifice—or ­ Religion. The established (or permissible) Church cannot be separated from the State; rather, it must be collectively accepted as the true foundation of the community. (2014:151)

After the establishment of a ‘political order’, the next step is the establishment of a ‘religion’, or ‘formalised mechanism of ritualistic sacrifice’, thus recreating ‘civilisation’. It is, in fact, the Littlun with the birthmark who introduces the religious element. This comes to be the most significant contribution to the society any littlun offers and sets in motion the whole gamut of ritualistic and religious events in the narrative. After the vote for chief, and after Ralph, Jack, and Simon’s journey to the top of the mountain, they call a meeting. After discussing their discoveries, the Littlun with the birthmark is introduced and asks to speak: He was muttering and about to cry … “He wants to know what you’re going to do about the snake-thing.” Ralph laughed, and the other boys laughed with him. The small boy twisted further into himself. “Tell us about the snake-thing.” “Now he says it was a beastie.” “Beastie?” “A snake-thing. Ever so big. He saw it”. (Golding, 1954:35)

As the originator of the ‘beastie’ narrative, the Littlun engages with complex political and ideological structures. Of significance here are the issues of both ‘cultural production’ and ‘cultural plunder’ and their political associations. In his construction of the ‘beastie’, the Littlun is engaging with colonialist and imperialist discourses regarding indigenous spaces and belief systems. As well as constructing a narrative, albeit not necessarily intentionally, he is constructing the space of the island and the religion the boys soon follow. Sinfield, drawing on Louis Althusser, notes that, “Societies need to produce … And they need understanding, intuitive and explicit, of a system of social relationships within which the whole process can take place more or less evenly” (1997:29). Subsequently, as a product of ‘cultural production’ the Littlun’s ‘beastie-telling’ is both a part of a larger storytelling matrix of civilisation building, that is, the recreation of British civility, and a part of a development of a new religious discourse on

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the island. However, it is also an act of ‘cultural plunder’, albeit of a homogenised and metonymic ‘indigeneity’. On the one hand, this can be understood, like the entire narrative’s depiction of the ‘savage’, as another imperialist and colonialist exploitation of indigeneity, a mimicry of supposed indigenous religions and culture; but on the other hand, it can be read as a critique of Western imperialist ideology and its misrepresentation and misunderstanding of indigenous cultures, that is, as an imperialist-­ coded indigenous culture.2 In both cases, the imitation of a presumed indigenous religion is the result of ‘cultural plunder’, whereby not only are ideas of indigeneity being played out, both literally and figuratively, but are also being folded into this ‘new’ British civilisation being re/created. This is repeated throughout the narrative in two ways: the constant concern about monsters (the beastie/the Lord of the Flies/the parachuter/ ghosts) and the actions of Jack’s tribe, both of which conflate towards the end. After the split, Jack’s tribe come to embody this imperialist-coded indigeneity. This is most overt in the construction of the Lord of the Flies both physically and spiritually. The killing of the sow emulates the ideas of indigenous savagery and demonstrates the violence of civilisation, in both its violent sadism (as when Robert uses a spear to anally penetrate the dead sow [1954:135]) and in its violent misrepresentation of indigenous culture. Moreover, Jack decides to leave the sow’s innards and head “for the beast. It’s a gift” (137). This scene, in which the Lord of the Flies is erected, demonstrates the extent of this doubled violence: Jack held up the head and jammed the soft throat down on the pointed end of the stick which pierced through into the mouth. He stood back and the head hung there, a little blood dribbling down the stick. Instinctively the boys drew back too; and the forest was very still. They listened, and the loudest noise was the buzzing of flies over the spilled guts… The silence accepted the gift and awed them. The head remained there, dim-eyed, grinning faintly, blood blackening between the teeth. All at once they were running away, as fast as they could, through the forest toward the open beach. (136–137)

Not only do the boys demonstrate an excessive disrespect for the sow, literally beheading and displaying their kill in a way reminiscent of historical (and European) executions, they fully construct a (semi-) new religious 2  I use this term to refer to the specific culture Jack and his tribe create—a reconstituted imperialist idea of what ‘indigeneity’ signifies.

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discourse and give form to their fears. Rather than take this new faith up entirely, Jack’s tribe, the former choirboys, combine their Christianity and this new religious discourse. As E. L. Epstein, among others, has noted, “The ‘lord of the flies’ is a translation of the Hebrew Ba’alzevuv (Beelzebub in Greek)” (2006:205). Thus, this ‘new’ religious discourse is in fact a combination of Christianity and an imperialist-coded indigenous religious discourse. Jack’s tribes’ need for a religious form is directly related to the context in which their education and, presumably, life up to this point has been informed by, and so this new religious discourse takes on a vital role, as demonstrated most cogently in the ritual at Jack’s feast on the beach (Golding, 1954:148–153). This scene begins as Jack’s recruitment ploy, coercing other boys to join his tribe with meat. A storm begins and Ralph notes, “Going to be a storm … and you’ll have rain like when we dropped here. Who’s clever now? Where are your shelters? What are you going to do about that?” (151). To which Jack responds, “Do our dance! Come on! Dance!” Again, the direct juxtaposition of Ralph’s ‘civilisation’ and Jack’s ‘tribalism’ are demonstrated. However, Jack’s dance rearticulates the imperialist-coded indigenous culture he must perform. The passage continues: He ran stumbling through the thick sand to the open space of rock beyond the fire. Between the flashes of lightning the air was dark and terrible; and the boys followed him, clamorously. Roger became the pig, grunting and charging at Jack, who sidestepped. The hunters took their spears, the cooks took spits, and the rest clubs of firewood. A circling movement developed and a chant. While Roger mimed the terror of the pig, the littluns ran and jumped on the outside of the circle. Piggy and Ralph, under the threat of the sky, found themselves eager to take a place in this demented but partly secure society. They were glad to touch the brown backs of the fence that hemmed in the terror and made it governable. “Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!” (151–152)

This ritual serves both to articulate Jack’s ability to develop something that engenders a sense of security and as a process through which to cleanse the community of fears, violence, and disunity. Eric Wilson argues, “The necessary precondition for the historical survival of the community is the successful exorcism of the unclean spirit of revenge” (2014:153). This ritualistic dance, to ward off both the storm and the Beast, is another act of a presumed imperialist ‘cultural plunder’ of indigenous cultures:

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presumed as there is no real linkage to any indigenous culture, only to the imperialist imaginings of indigenous culture. Moreover, in attempting to ward off the Beast, which has now become associated with the sow (the chant also accompanies the hunt), there is the implication of an expected reprisal from the Beast/sow or the island itself for the boys’ violence. In this way the ritual is both disciplinary, articulating and coercing a new structure of power and authority on the island, and biopolitical, in its attempts to secure the tribe from the reprisals of violence, fear, and the Beast. However, this does not last due to the violent murder of Simon, and the ritual becomes defunct. The violence between the boys, and between imperialism and the ‘colonised subject’, comes to a head when Ralph, Piggy, and Samneric confront Jack’s tribe at Castle Rock (Golding, 1954:173–182). Piggy, and eventually Ralph, asks Jack’s tribe three rhetorical questions: “Which is better— to be a pack of painted Indians like you are, or to be sensible like Ralph is?”, “Which is better—to have rules and agree, or to hunt and kill?”, and then Ralph asks, “Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?” (180). In these questions, the opposition between Ralph’s community and Jack’s tribe, between ‘civilisation’ and ‘savagery’, is completed. Through these questions an imperialist rhetoric is instantiated, where the answer to be ‘civil’ is an attempt to colonise the ‘tribe’ that rejects it. This distinction is the epitome of the construction of civilisation. Without an/Other to compare and position against, civilisation is not ‘civilisation’; civilisation and savagery are shown to be mutually constituted. Listed on the side of imperialism and civilisation are sensibility, order, acquiescence, subjectivisation, law, and salvation, and on the side of ‘savagery’ sit indigeneity, violence, anti-order, and ritual. This ‘anti-order’ does not refer to an absence of structure, obviously Jack has ultimate power here, but rather to a rejection of systems of order that civilisation demands, that is, civilisation’s disciplinary power. Thus, the fight between the boys comes to signify the fight for decolonisation and for independence in colonised nations. Due to civilisation’s need for ‘savagery’, and Jack’s desire for power, Jack and his tribe fill that role. However, this larger ‘playing at’ imperialism engenders systems of violence not easily escapable. While this violence reaches its various peaks, colonialist and imperialist ideologies, both in the claiming of space and in the imperialist-coded indigenous culture the boys create, demand sacrifices. For Wilson, religion in the narrative becomes “the institutionalization of a formalised

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mechanism of ritualistic sacrifice” (2014:151), for the purpose of ridding the “unclean spirit of revenge” (153). He continues, “This is secured through the periodic enactment of the rituals of the machinery of sacrifice, which is itself the mimetic repetition of an earlier killing of a designated victim (the scapegoat) which successfully broke the cycle of retributive violence”, furthering that: Out of necessity, the scapegoat must always be socially marginal in some way, an ‘expendable’ victim, human or animal, whose death will not cause violence to rebound because no one will bother to avenge them but which, for whatever reason, can serve as the focus of universal opprobrium. (155)

Although Wilson locates Piggy as the ultimate scapegoat of the narrative, each death is closely linked to the major points of tension between ‘civilisation’ and ‘tribalism’: the Littlun’s death becomes clearly linked to his position as ‘beastie-teller’; Simon’s death occurs immediately after the feast; and Piggy’s death occurs at Castle Rock immediately after the questions mentioned above. Not only does Piggy’s death not curb the violence of Jack’s tribe but such a reading ignores the pivotal roles of the Littlun and Simon as victims.

Death and Sacrifice Critical attention to the deaths of Piggy, Simon, and the Littlun is key to understanding the role of the government of disability in the narrative. Wilson notes the significance of religion and its relationship to violence and ritual, but he overlooks the resounding significance of violence to the construction of civilisation itself. As previously noted, the re/construction of civilisation on the island is a ‘playing out’ of imperialist and colonialist ideologies. Part of this involves the creation of a ‘savage Other’ to justify and direct both its violence and its status as ‘civilisation’. Wilson notes that, “Violence within the human community can be nothing other than endemic, or contagious” (154). This imperialism produces violence, and without a ‘real’ racialised Other, the violence builds and must find its targets elsewhere; in the most marginalised characters within the space, those rendered disabled. The Littlun’s death is implicitly tied to the colonialist approach the boys take to the island itself. Ralph notes, on their first expedition to find out more about the island, “This belongs to us” (Golding, 1954:29). This

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claiming of the island comes prior to any consideration of whether the island is inhabited. Subsequently, this implies the colonialist rationale of terra nullius as Ralph later claims, “There’s no village smoke, and no boats … We’ll make sure later, but I think it’s uninhabited” (29–30). As such, any possible anxieties about using and destroying the island and its inhabitants (plant, animal, and human life) as a means of escape are diminished as it is ‘theirs’ to exploit. Subsequently, the biopolitical need for fire and rescue are, in part, terms of colonialist endeavour. Due to a lack of knowledge and the internalisation of imperialist and colonialist rhetoric, specifically in relation to the claiming of space and the disregarding of life, the fire they build is too close to the forest, too large and uncontrollable. The forest catches on fire as a direct result of the boys’ need for rescue. It is through their attempted recreation of British civilisation, and the subsequent ‘playing at’ imperialist discourses, that they come to inadvertently kill the Littlun: A tree exploded in the fire like a bomb. Tall swathes of creepers rose for a moment into view, agonized, and went down again. The little boys screamed at them. “Snakes! Snakes! Look at the snakes!” In the west, and unheeded, the sun lay only an inch or two above the sea. Their faces were lit redly from beneath. Piggy fell against a rock and clutched it with both hands. “That little ‘un that had a mark on his face—where is—he now? I tell you I don’t see him.” The boys looked at each other fearfully, unbelieving. “—where is he now?” Ralph muttered the reply as if in shame. “Perhaps he went back to the, the—” Beneath them, on the unfriendly side of the mountain, the drum-roll continued. (46–47)

Here, the violence of the boys’ colonial conquest of the island causes a degree of irresponsibility and results in both a large forest fire and the death/disappearance of the Littlun. The Littlun is noted as absent because his physical difference marks him as highly differentiated, and thus noteworthy, from the other boys. The disciplinary techniques of the government of disability ensure his presence (and absence) is recognisable. However, it is the disciplinary and biopolitical push of colonialist enterprise that affords the circumstances for his death. Moreover, the Littlun is

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again associated with the ‘beastie’/‘snake-thing’, and his death sets in motion a more complex relationship between the ‘beastie’ and the boys. This amplified concern about the ‘beastie’ then creates the means for not only Jack’s separation from the community but also Simon’s death. Simon’s conversations with the Lord of the Flies are, ostensibly, the most significant events in the narrative. Not only do they reiterate the religious significance of the Lord of the Flies and its relation to the construction of civilisation in the narrative, but they also rearticulate Simon’s marginalisation within this community as a direct result from his disability. Most significantly, they culminate in a premonition of his death as tied to his position as disabled. As Simon begins to lose consciousness, the Lord of the Flies says to him “we shall do you? See? Jack and Roger and Maurice and Robert and Bill and Piggy and Ralph. Do you. See?” (144). The threat of the Lord of the Flies is in coalition with the other boys, inscribing the ‘murder-plot’ with themes of marginalisation, discrimination, and disability. Additionally, it is also coded in religious practice/pretence as this threat comes from the religious idol Jack has erected. Even from this premonitory threat, the complex structures of civilisation, religion, the government of disability, and imperialism undergird Simon’s existence on the island and his death. The ritualistic dance Jack and his tribe do to ward off the storm (151–152) is, as previously mentioned, part of an imperialist-­ coded indigenous religious discourse which validates the distinction made for civilisation’s realisation. It is during this ‘frenzied’ dance, which is a re-enactment of the killing of the sow/Lord of the Flies, that the premonition of Simon’s death becomes reality. The littluns screamed and blundered about, fleeing from the edge of the forest, and one of them broke the ring of biguns in his terror. “Him! Him!” The circle became a horseshoe. A thing was crawling out of the forest. It came darkly, uncertainly. The shrill screaming that rose before the beast was like a pain. The beast stumbled into the horseshoe… The sticks fell and the mouth of the new circle crunched and screamed. The beast was on its knees in the center, its arms folded over its face. It was crying out against the abominable noise, something about a body on the hill. The beast struggled forward, broke the ring, and fell over the steep edge of the rock to the sand by the water. At once the crowd surged after it, poured down the rock, leapt on to the beast, screamed, struck, bit, tore. There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws. (152–153)

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Most significantly here is the fact that Simon is misinterpreted as the ‘beast’ as a direct result of two things: the context he enters, that is, the ritualistic, performative dance of the ‘tribe’, and his physicality after ‘one of his episodes’ (143–147). It is at once centrally about both disability and religion. The interruption of the storm-dispelling ritual the boys engage in by terrified littluns running from the ‘thing’ and their “shrill screaming … like a pain” transmits, to use Teresa Brennan’s term (2004), their terror to the older boys. The anxiety of the littluns spreads from person to person, infecting one after the other, until all the boys, big and small, are caught up in an affective network. Subsequently, this context, wherein the littluns abruptly draw the terror and anxiety of the ‘beast’ out of the mimetic, ritualised dance and into the reality of the forest-bordered beach, both engenders and justifies the violence the biguns exhibit. It is due to this abrupt interruption of their imperialist-coded indigenous religious ritual, the affective transmission of the littluns, and the environmental conditions (also contributing to the affective intensity of the moment) that the biguns interpret Simon as ‘beast’ and threat. Significantly, during the attack the boys recognise Simon’s presence and the human-ness of the ‘beast’; however, due to the intense panic they feel, they are unable to fully comprehend the situation. Despite his humanness, the biguns cannot see past Simon’s possible beast-liness. Moreover, Simon’s inability to force the biguns to recognise him because of a previous episode and Simon’s physical response to finding the rotting corpse of the parachuter directly link his death with disability. However, Simon’s attempts to be recognised are overpowered by the biguns’ need to kill the ‘beast’; or, rather, that the biguns need to kill the ‘beast’, and anything that signifies the ‘beast’, means Simon, as surrogate ‘beast’, must be killed. As Piggy’s weight, asthma, and glasses, and the government of disability, engender his discrimination and dismissal, he draws on a scientific rationalism to construct an authority over the other boys. Although this forces the other boys to momentarily listen to him, as in the initial case of the missing Littlun (Golding, 1954:46–47), often it further damages the relationships between Ralph and Piggy, and Jack and Ralph/Piggy. He also uses scientific rationalism to shirk his and Ralph’s responsibility for Simon’s death, yet he calls upon it later to place blame onto Jack. Piggy’s reliance on scientific rationalism, and his use of it as both a source of authority and a method of appearing reasonable (through which he uses it as a political manipulative tool), ironically aligns him with the voice of ordered civilisation. This irony comes from his inability to conceive of

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psychologies and acts that eventuate from civilising processes such as his ‘naming’ and the hierarchisation of the boys, and his reverent attachment to the conch as endowed with the power to order. After the separation of the groups, Jack’s tribe raids Ralph’s camp at night. They taunt Piggy from outside the shelter before physically attacking them (166–167). After losing the fight Piggy notes, “I thought they wanted the conch” but that “They didn’t come for the conch. They came for something else”, which is revealed to be “Piggy’s broken glasses” (168). Piggy’s reverence to order, and thus the conch, causes him to overlook the realities of the situation and the differentiation between the need for fire and the need for order. In the morning, after the signal fire has been extinguished, Ralph, Samneric, and Piggy decide to go and confront Jack. While the other boys decide to carry spears, Piggy carries the conch and says he will try and appeal to Jack’s sense of civility: “I’m going to him with this conch in my hands. I’m going to hold it out. Look, I’m goin’ to say, you’re stronger than I am and you haven’t got asthma. You can see, I’m goin’ to say, and with both eyes. But I don’t ask for my glasses back, not as a favor. I don’t ask you to be a sport, I’ll say, not because you’re strong, but because what’s right’s right. Give me my glasses, I’m going to say—you got to!” (171)

This appeal relies on Piggy’s reverence to both order and English civil society on the one hand, both of which have become defunct over the course of the narrative, and the government of disability and an economy of pity on the other. He calls upon moral codes of conduct through the abstract idea that ‘what right’s right’, despite the reality of two deaths and physical violence between the two groups, but he also calls upon Jack’s sense of pity, by aggrandising Jack’s non-disabled physicality through diminishing his own. However, given their previous exchanges, it is precisely this that enrages Jack and again highlights Piggy’s inability to think beyond civilising notions. As discussed previously, when they do confront Jack and his tribe, Piggy asks them three rhetorical and imperialist questions. All three questions, binarise civilisation and primitivism3 through the concepts of order and disorder. The violence with which Piggy proffers choice/life/civilisation, as without compromise, egocentric, 3  Although ‘uncivilisation’ is a better term for what Jack’s tribe is, Piggy’s comparison to ‘Indians’, while pointing towards an implicit racism that hierarchises peoples, posits Jack’s tribe and indigenous peoples as ‘primitive’.

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demanding, and ‘right’, is answered by the violent opposition of Jack’s tribe and, ultimately, the rock Roger launches from the fort: Ralph heard the great rock before he saw it … Then the monstrous red thing bounded across the neck and he flung himself flat while the tribe shrieked. The rock struck Piggy a glancing blow from chin to knee; the conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist. Piggy, saying nothing, with no time for even a grunt, traveled through the air sideways from the rock, turning over as he went. The rock bounded twice and was lost in the forest. Piggy fell forty feet and landed on his back across the square red rock in the sea. His head opened and stuff came out and turned red. Piggy’s arms and legs twitched a bit, like a pig’s after it has been killed. Then the sea breathed again in a long, slow sigh, the water boiled white and pink over the rock; and when it went, sucking it back again, the body of Piggy was gone. (180–181)

In taking Piggy’s glasses, Jack not only takes the power to produce fire but also disables Piggy from being able to see and react to an attack. Piggy’s reoccurring figurative difficulty in seeing the imperialist origins of the antagonism between Ralph’s group and Jack’s tribe is made literal at his death. Moreover, given Piggy’s ironic position as the voice of imperialism and domination (especially in the rhetoric mentioned earlier), his death is what defines winning the ‘game’ of war for Jack’s tribe, not the destruction of the conch. Even in death Piggy is likened to a pig, furthering the discriminatory tactics of the boys, but also linking his death with the practice of hunting that defines Jack’s tribe. Similar to Simon’s body, Piggy’s is washed out to sea, and any physical evidence of him, like the conch, ceases to exist.

Conclusion The government of disability in Lord of the Flies is far more complex and central than it initially appears. Disability’s presence in the narrative is constant, and critical analysis of the role of disability in the novel produces detailed and considered commentaries on decolonisation, post-war and Cold War politics, and civilisation. While Rousseau contends that inequality begins with a comparison between people after a social pact in civil society, Golding’s narrative implicitly critiques this basis. From the beginning of the narrative, despite not yet having made a social pact, the boys

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already compare themselves, hierarchising, distributing, and managing in the process. Those found wanting, especially regarding their physicality and behaviour (those rendered disabled in the narrative), are the boys who die throughout—the Littlun, Simon, and Piggy. Through having these specific characters die, all three at the hands of the other boys, Lord of the Flies explores the social marginalisation and devaluation of disabled lives in 1950s’ Britain. Furthermore, the novel also links the social marginalisation and devaluation of disabled people to both the histories of civilising practices, including colonialism and imperialism, and to the philosophical traditions which validated and engaged with such erasure. The exploration of decolonisation and the decline of the British Empire also have ramifications for disabled lives in the novel. In its macro-parody of British imperialism and ideology, Lord of the Flies links the deaths of its disabled characters directly to racialised forms of oppression. While problematic in its doubled erasure (both textually and politically) and performative engagement of indigeneity, the novel highlights the interconnectedness of the egregious and violent oppression of colonised peoples by the British and the absolute inability of British governments to supply disabled populations, both domestically and within colonised spaces, with opportunities for meaningful engagement. Through critiquing British cultural superiority, and the clear linkages this has with British imperialist ideology, through the destabilisation of the myth of ‘the savage within’ and British civility, Lord of the Flies exposes civilisation as a violent, anxious, juvenile construction.

Bibliography Atayurt, Z. Z. (2010). ‘Kill the pig!’: Lord of the flies, ‘Piggy,’ and anti-fat discourse. In E. Levy-Navarro (Ed.), Historicizing fat in Anglo-American culture. Ohio State University Press. Atkinson, D., Jackson, M., & Walmsley, J. (Eds.). (1997). Forgotten lives: Exploring the history of learning disability. BILD Publications. Beer, G. (1989). Discourses of the Island. In F. Amrine (Ed.), Literature and science as modes of expression. Kluwer Academic Publishers. Borsay, A. (2005). Disability and social policy in Britain since 1750: A history of exclusion. Palgrave Macmillan. Brennan, T. (2004). The transmission of affect. Cornell University Press. Dowling, D. (1987). Fictions of nuclear disaster. Macmillan Press. Epstein, E. L. (2006). Notes of Lord of the flies. Lord of the flies. Perigee Books.

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Erkan, M., & Razmi, M. (2018). Indocile bodies in Lord of the flies. A Journal of Iranology Studies, 1, 117–126. Golding, W. (1954/2006). Lord of the flies. Perigee Books. Hammond, A. (2011). The twilight of utopia’: British dystopian fiction and the Cold War. The Modern Language Review, 106(3), 662–681. https://www. jstor.org/stable/10.5699/modelangrevi.106.3.0662 Morris, J. (1991). Pride against prejudice: A personal politics of disability. Women’s Press. Rousseau, J.-J. (1761). A discourse upon the origin and foundation of the inequality among mankind. R. and J.  Dodsley. https://archive.org/details/discourse uponor00rous Rousseau, J.-J. (1762/1968). The social contract, or principles of political right (M. Cranston, Trans.). Penguin Books Ltd. Schwartz, R. A. (2006). Family, gender, and society in 1950s American fiction of nuclear apocalypse: Shadow on the hearth, Tomorrow!, The last day, and Alas, Babylon. The Journal of American Culture, 29(4), 406–424. Seed, D. (2003). The debate over nuclear refuge. Cold War History, 4(1), 117–142. Sinfield, A. (1997/2004). Literature, politics and culture in postwar Britain. Continuum. ProQuest Ebrary. Accessed 24 Dec 2016. Singh, M. (1997). The government of boys: Golding’s Lord of the flies and Ballantyne’s Coral island. Children’s Literature, 25, 205–213. Van Vuuren, M. (2004). Good grief: Lord of the flies as a post-war rewriting of salvation history. Literator, 25(2), 1–25. Wilson, E. (2014). Warring sovereigns and mimetic rivals: On scapegoats and political crisis in William Golding’s Lord of the flies. Law and Humanities, 8(2), 147–173.

CHAPTER 4

On the Fringes: John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids (1955) and Technologies of the Self

Introduction The Chrysalids is set in a post-nuclear disaster future in Waknuk, a frontier-­ like town in Labrador, Canada. The narrative follows David Strorm, a young telepath, and his survival in and beyond Waknuk’s fundamentalist Christian society. David is joined by his youngest sister Petra, cousin Rosalind, and other children from around the district, Michael, Rachel, Anne, Sally, and Katherine, as they all try and keep their telepathy a secret. In Waknuk, and the wider Labrador, this fundamentalist Christian society vehemently opposes anything that deviates from the norm: in crops and livestock any deviation is referred to as an Offence, and it is either razed or slaughtered; in people it is referred to as a Blasphemy, and they are sterilised and sent to live in the Fringes, the furthermost border between Labrador and the Badlands. This is State sanctioned through deference to religious beliefs that extend from two scriptures, the Bible and Nicholson’s Repentances. The latter is a mysterious sacred text written in the aftermath of Tribulation, a cataclysmic event rationalised as God’s punishment of humanity. While The Chrysalids deals with similar subject matter to other dystopian World War II and Cold War texts its focus on discussions of evolution, eugenics, and fundamentalism through the experiences of child and

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Holdsworth, The Government of Disability in Dystopian Children’s Texts, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52034-1_4

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teenaged protagonists differentiates it from others. Although the differences in the physiology of the novel’s ‘Deviations’ can speak to anxieties around nuclear and radioactive fallout, they also speak directly to a broader disability politics. In the world of the text, physical and behavioural differences are seen as a threat to social structures and an affront to God. Wyndham draws complex politics reflective of his contemporary moment into his story-worlds to comment on them, which made him as popular an author during the 1950s and 1960s as Agatha Christie (Krome et  al., 2015:52). However, despite their huge popularity in the post-war period, Wyndham’s works have been somewhat overlooked by critics (Clareson & Clareson, 1990; Wymer, 1992; Ketterer, 2000; Seed, 2011; Hanson, 2013). In his oft-quoted critique, Brian Aldiss characterised Wyndham’s works as ‘cosy catastrophes’ (1973:294), dismissing the radical critiques that his works can provide. In the last decade or so, there have been some substantial revisitations to Wyndham’s novels showcasing the richness and vibrancy of his work examining his use of evolutionary theory (Link, 2015; Krome et al., 2015), eugenics and nuclear war (Hanson, 2013), posthumanism (Downey, 2023), coloniality and decolonisation (Oliver-Hobley, 2022), and mourning (Downey, 2022). Such a rich array of critical reflections demonstrate that far from being ‘cosy’ or uninteresting, Wyndham’s works both engage “with key issues that preoccupied scientists and the wider public in [the Cold War period]” (Hanson, 2013:73) and speak to “the cultural fears and anxieties … of both the known and the unknown in the present” (Stock, 2016:440). Like the novels mentioned above, The Chrysalids operates as a political allegory in several ways, engaging the faith-based politics that underpinned Hitler’s Nazi Germany. However, Wyndham centralises disability, exploring how technologies of the self have been deployed in the Christian tradition as well as anxieties around Christian Truth and the norm. In doing so, the novel is an apt example of dis-topian fiction with its critique of Cold War culture, drawing on themes of exile and ghettoisation, surveillance and propaganda techniques, and its centralisation disability-­ specific issues such as medico-political and religious techniques of measurement, sequestration, sterilisation, and extermination. By foregrounding the government of disability, The Chrysalids engages readers with disabled history and highlights continued abuses in the 1950s while advocating critical attention to the positions of other marginalised groups through its science fiction conventions. By depicting young protagonists, Wyndham taps into anxieties for and about the youth of the day and their

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loyalty to the nation-state and religious Truth. The teenage protagonists and the allegorical presentation of the themes speak to an interest in “an awakening superior generation” (Link, 2015:76), and the possible futures young people will inherit and forge. The Chrysalids occupies a significant space in the development of young adult dystopian narratives, being a clear influence on Jane Stemp’s Waterbound and Julianna Baggott’s Pure (covered in later chapters).

Allegories and Faith-Based Politics As a political allegory, The Chrysalids employs the technologies of the self that underpinned the “faith-based politics” (Lackey, 2009:138) and the “sacred imagined nation-state” (140) of Hitler’s Nazi Germany and the Cold War cultures of the United States, Britain, and the USSR. Michel Foucault explains ‘technologies of the self’ as that: which permit[s] individuals to effect by their own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality. (2003:146)

He proceeds to analyse self-examination as a technology of the self deployed in ancient Greco-Roman and early Christian philosophy, illuminating the shift from the Greco-Roman practices of “epimeleisthai seautou”, “to take care of yourself”, and “gnōthi seauton”, “know yourself” (147), to the early Christian practices of “exomologēsis” and “exagoreusis”. This shift is significant as it demonstrates the extent to which Christianity took the practice of self-examination from ‘pagan’ institutions and turned it into a hierarchised, disciplinary technique. Foucault concludes that: [I]n the Christianity of the first centuries, there are two main forms of disclosing self, of showing the truth about oneself. The first is exomologesis, or a dramatic expression of the situation of the penitent as sinner which makes manifest his status as sinner. The second is what was called in the spiritual literature exagoreusis. This is an analytical and continual verbalization of thoughts carried on in the relation of complete obedience to someone else; this relation is modeled on the renunciation of one’s own will and of one’s own self. (167)

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The reformulation of self-examination in Christianity, turning it from a reflective, private practice focused on an ethical consideration of self, action, and life (as “epimeleisthai seautou”) into an anxious self-­surveillance in the effort to attain entry to a higher state of being forms the basis of how technologies of the self are utilised within Nazi Germany and Cold War cultures. While exomologēsis and exagoreusis operate differently, Foucault notes one specific similarity: “You cannot disclose without renouncing” (167). Thus, for Foucault, the practice of self-examination in the Christian tradition is entirely tied to a renunciation of self. Michael Lackey applies Foucault’s argument to the ‘faith-based politics’ of Hitler’s Nazi Germany. He argues “that it is impossible to understand the origins of totalitarianism and fascism without taking into account a distinctly religious conception of the political subject” (2009:129). Lackey argues that: Having internalized, at the level of desire, the view that there exists a God-­ created, metaphysical reality, Christian subjects must renounce thoughts and impulses that are incompatible with their faith-constructed Truths. Moreover, Christian subjects, instead of engaging with others in the production of a mutually agreed upon and culturally negotiated system of ‘truth’, must demonize, denounce, or dismiss those individuals whose ‘truths’ are at odds with the permanent Truth that God has authored. It is, I contend, this hierarchical model of knowledge that created the conditions for fascism to flourish [in Nazi Germany]. (132)

The imbrication of this ‘hierarchical model of knowledge’ with the nation-­ state then causes the citizen to be subject to two forms of authority simultaneously—religious and political—creating the ‘sacred imagined nation-state’. Through deploying and politicising the technologies of the self of exomologēsis and exagoreusis, the sacred imagined nation-state disciplines subjects to self-examine and surveil others to seek out that which is at odds with ‘true’ Christianity and ‘true’ nationalism. As Lackey demonstrates, the deployment of these technologies of the self, and their imbrication in nationalist discourses, renders the citizen docile, enabling the sacred imagined nation-state to “do with its citizens what it will, and the citizens will consider their sufferings, losses, and even death an Ultimate Gain, because they have, in giving their lives for their nation, ultimately given their lives to God and His Eternal Truths” (141). Although Lackey’s analysis focuses on the development of support under

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Hitler, this framework can also be applied to the Cold War cultures of the United States, Britain, and the USSR, where nationalist anxieties were also underpinned by Christianity and its technologies of the self. Surveillance of both the self and others is central to how these technologies of the self in the sacred imagined nation-state operate. In seeking out ‘impurity’, in the self and in society, the citizen renounces the self and denounces others to preserve society, demonstrating their faith in Divine and national Truths. However, as new political enemies arise, these technologies are expanded, chiefly using propaganda. Throughout The Chrysalids, propaganda, in the form of education and literature, is used to disseminate information that bolsters the faith-based politics of Labrador and secure its technologies of the self. History and geography operate as propagandist technologies deployed in the faith-based politics of Labrador to orchestrate social obedience to a ‘higher’ authority. As the narrative is set in a post-disaster future, history is not only a univocal and politically biased narrative of how the present has come to be but also a disciplinary system of how things should continue to be in accordance with faith-based political values. Geography, too, is weaponised to keep the population physically contained and controllable, ensuring no ideas that problematise the religio-social structures of Labradorian society can enter. In this sense, both history and geography, and the control of these knowledges, become propagandist and, thus, a disciplinary technique. As technologies of the self, surveillance and propaganda solidify the disciplinary and bio-power of the sacred imagined nation-state, making citizens docile and the population manageable, helping to root out groups deemed ‘impure’ by constituting them as against ‘true’ Christian and national values.

Measuring Disability In The Chrysalids, organic life can and has been subjected to mutation after an event referred to as Tribulation that decimated a large part of North America and affected the world at large. While the actual events cannot be known beyond its narrative history, it can be interpreted both as a nuclear holocaust to readers but is understood by the residents of Labrador as ‘penance’ for “what had very likely been a phase of irreligious arrogance prevailing at the time” (Wyndham, 1955:40). In framing Tribulation as penance, the disciplinary and biopolitical techniques within the fundamentalist Christianity of the narrative are immediately exposed, subsequently reorganising personal and social life around a need to survey

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and self-monitor to maintain religious and social orthodoxy. This surveillance in service to Labrador’s faith-based politics undergirds their preoccupation with bodily normativity as informed by religious documents. At the time the narrative begins, no one who lived through Tribulation is alive, and the only things that inform the current population of Labrador are the sacred texts, the Bible and Nicholson’s Repentances. David explains the history of these texts stating that, “Only Nicholson’s Repentances had come out of the wilderness of barbarism, and that only because it had lain for, perhaps, several centuries sealed in a stone coffer before it was discovered. And only the Bible had survived from the time of the Old People themselves” (39). As the oldest historical and theological documents, they become sites of reverence for the communities of Labrador. Repentances comes to inform their religious, political, moral, and everyday lives to the extent that David’s family home has “a number of wooden panels with sayings, mostly from Repentances, artistically burnt into them” which form “the nearest approach to decoration” (18). However, Repentances also serves as a delimiting, historical account of what the human body was and, according to the population, should be. These sayings largely relate to the concept of ‘purity’ and situate the position of the community on mutation: The one on the left from the fireplace read: ONLY THE IMAGE OF GOD IS MAN.  The one on the right: KEEP PURE THE STOCK OF THE LORD. On the opposite wall two more said: BLESSED IS THE NORM, and IN PURITY OUR SALVATION. The largest was the one on the back wall, hung to face the door which led to the yard. It reminded everyone who came in: WATCH THOU FOR THE MUTANT! Frequent references to these texts had made me familiar with the words long before I was able to read, in fact I am not sure that they did not give me my first reading lessons. I knew them by heart, just as I knew others elsewhere in the house, which said things like: THE NORM IS THE WILL OF GOD, and, REPRODUCTION IS THE ONLY HOLY PRODUCTION and, THE DEVIL IS THE FATHER OF DEVIATION, and a number of others about Offences and Blasphemies. (18)

The doctrines of Repentances espouse a patriarchal order within Christian ideology and a eugenics discourse based on sustainability rather than progress. It is within a binary framework that “Deviations” take on ideological significance. Concepts of Purity and Deviation are aligned with God and the Devil, respectively, highlighting anxieties over Deviations

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and demonstrating their centrality to the technologies of the self in the faith-based politics of the narrative’s sacred imagined nation-state. However, it is with the policing of the ‘true image’ that Purity and Deviation, and indeed God and the Devil, come into conflict. The ‘true image’ has specific reference in the narrative: The Definition of Man recited itself in my head: ‘…and each leg shall be jointed twice and have one foot, and each foot five toes, and each toe shall end with a flat nail…’ And so on, until finally: ‘And any creature that shall seem to be human, but is not formed thus is not human. It is neither man nor woman. It is a blasphemy against the true Image of God, and hateful in the sight of God’. (13)

As such, it is through the ‘true image’, and comparison to it, that a Blasphemy may be known. This hierarchisation of bodies deftly sets in opposition the body that is a ‘true image’ and the body that is a Blasphemy, stressing that not only are they religiously opposed but that the discrimination such a definition engenders is sanctified and necessary. It becomes a religio-political decree to ensure the reporting and removal of Blasphemies for both the individual and society to be more attuned with God’s ‘Truth’. This surveillance and policing subsequently become absolute—any deviation from the ‘true image’, however small, is ‘hateful’. The religious aspect of this cannot be stressed enough, as the presence of any kind of Deviation drastically affects the agricultural livelihoods of the communities. However, what this also reveals is that the methods of determining a Blasphemy are largely quantifiable, literally counted and measured, which makes the issue of qualitative evidence more difficult and subsequently more disturbing to the people of Labrador.

Policing, Surveillance, and Punishment The maintenance of a ‘pure’ population through surveillance and policing demonstrates the society’s biopolitical eugenic agenda. Overtly disciplinary, each district has an Inspector who evaluates the ‘purity’ of crops, livestock, and people. However, the reporting of Deviations and surveillance of the community falls to the people, like the surveillance and political indoctrination of Nazi Germany and Cold War McCarthyism in the United States. However, the policing and surveillance would be inept if it were not for the role of punishment in the narrative. The punishment

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exercised is intrinsically related to the religio-political agenda of Labrador and subsequently demonstrates the ruthlessness of Labradorian society. Throughout the narrative, there are three significant instances of policing, surveillance, and punishment: that of Sophie Wender, of Aunt Harriet, and of Sally and Katherine. All three events demonstrate the extents to which Labradorian society go to ensure ‘purity’ and the ‘true image’. The fact that all three cases centre on controlling, monitoring, and punishing women has particular significance when considering the government of disability and the eugenic impulses of the faith-based politics in the narrative. The narrative begins with David meeting Sophie, a young girl who lives on the outskirts of Waknuk with six toes on each foot. Almost immediately, David recalls his religious lessons. Yet their vagueness and hyperbole cause him to question their import. After talking to Sophie’s parents, David keeps Sophie’s existence a secret. As such, the disciplinary tactics of Labrador’s religious laws, namely the incitation of fear and anxiety of Blasphemies, fails in David. David argues, “Surely having one very small toe extra – well, two very small toes, because I supposed there would be one to match on the other foot – surely that couldn’t be enough to make her ‘hateful in the sight of God …’?” (14). The absolutist rhetoric of the fundamentalist faith-based politics is weakened through its own systems of measurement  – David cannot understand how God could hate Sophie because of the minimal nature of her difference. Due to the intensity of surveillance, policing, and enforcement, Sophie and her family flee Waknuk. However, they are caught by a patrol and exiled to the Fringes, the liminal space between Labrador and the Badlands. Later in the narrative, after David, Petra, and Rosalind flee Waknuk for the Fringes, Sophie’s fate is further revealed—she has been sterilised by the government before exile. Discussing her existence and relationship with Gordon, David’s long-lost Deviant uncle who rules the camp, Sophie laments: He’s kind to me, David. He’s fond of me. You’ve got to have as little as I have to know how much that means. You’ve never known loneliness. You can’t understand the awful emptiness that’s waiting all around us here. I’d have given him babies gladly, if I could. …I – oh, why do they do that to us? Why didn’t they kill me? It would have been kinder than this. (167)

Sophie’s punishment has been a permanent isolation  – her family and friends are gone, her relationship with the emotionally, physically, and

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sexually abusive Gordon is tenuous and only minimally satisfying, and she is certain that death would have been a kinder fate. While at this point in the narrative Sophie’s past has rendered her an example of the disciplinary and biopolitical ends of Labrador’s government, she nevertheless goes on to resist the determination of her present life and future as meaningless. She becomes an adept warrior and actively fights to protect David, Petra, and Rosalind from both the Fringes people (especially Gordon) and from the invading Waknuk army. The tactics of punishment employed by Labrador are initially effective, but their sheer cruelty and violence also generate resistance. Resistance is enacted not only through a rebellion from outside, but also from refusals of compliance from within, as in the case of Aunt Harriet, David’s aunt, and her newborn baby. After the birth of Petra is formally recognised through the official judgement of the Inspector, Harriet visits with her newborn to persuade her sister to swap babies for the Inspection as hers has a Deviation. David listens in to the conversation from the next room, and the religious conviction of his mother Emily is demonstrated. As Frederic Krome, Gregory Loving, and C.  Phoebe Reeves note, “Emily’s orthodoxy is remarkably unmaternal, foreshadowing the unemotional and purposeful philosophy of the Sealander woman later in the story” (2015:57). Harriet says to Emily, “It’s such a little thing, you see. It’s nothing much”, causing Emily to reproach her: “Nothing much!...You have the effrontery to bring your monster into my house, and tell me it’s nothing much!” (Wyndham, 1955:70, emphasis in original). Harriet reveals: This is the third time. They’ll take my baby away again like they took the others. I can’t stand that – not again. Henry will turn me out, I think. He’ll find another wife, who can give him proper children. There’ll be nothing – nothing in the world for me – nothing. I came here hoping against hope for sympathy and help. Emily is the only person who can help me. I – I can see now how foolish I was to hope at all. (71–72)

When David’s father chastises her for not showing shame or remorse, Harriet refuses such affective proscription: “Why should I? I’ve done nothing to be ashamed of. I am not ashamed – I am only beaten” (72, emphasis in original). The next day “Aunt Harriet’s body had been found in the river, [and] no one mentioned a baby” (74) in what is implied as a suicide. Suicide, here, is a political act, one which denies the State’s power over life and death. As Chloë Taylor suggests, “Suicide is thus a

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withdrawal of one’s life from the tactics of biopower. It is perhaps the only way to escape biopolitical regulation through one’s own agency. Suicide is hence a problem for power today, but it is a problem of evasion rather than seizure” (2015:196). However, in the face of certain punishment, Harriet’s suicide also disrupts the government’s exercising of disciplinary power. Although it does little to change the politics of Waknuk, it does “make David realize the irreducible otherness between him and his family” (Krome et al., 2015:60), sparking the absolute need to flee to the Fringes. Labrador’s faith-based technologies of the self make the mother responsible for the ‘purity’ of her child. If the child is found to Deviate, a whole system of social marginalisation ensues. This marginalisation is tantamount to a life of destitution, not all too dissimilar from a life in the Fringes, due to the patriarchal and religious laws of Labrador that will leave Harriet childless, husbandless, and destitute. The implications of this extends both politically and economically, literally leaving her with nothing. Harriet, however, resists and defies these codes: firstly, by trying to dupe the system with a stand-in child; secondly, by refusing the shame forced upon her; and thirdly, by rejecting this system and the probability of a life of destitution in suicide. Demonstrating various acts of resistance, she also causes David to begin to reevalute his beliefs. The last case, and certainly the most significant to the narrative, is the surveillance and policing of David and the group of telepaths, specifically Sally and Katherine. The youngest telepath, Petra, is the strongest and most uncontrollable, causing pain and dazing the others when she is under distress. When this happens, members of the group instinctively seek to calm her. After responding to one of Petra’s cries, Sally and Katherine are taken in, and David, Petra, and Rosalind are forced to flee to the Fringes. Michael says of the arrest, “It was a deliberate surprise. If they do know much about us, they’ll have tried to time it to send a party for you, too – before you could be warned. They were at Sally’s and Katherine’s almost simultaneously just over ten minutes ago” (Wyndham, 1955:122–123). There are two points of significance here: firstly, the subtlety of the surveillance implies the extent to which these techniques and attitudes are internalised; and secondly, the shift from a purely quantifiable system of determining Deviations to one that takes account of qualitative evidence and considers it even more dangerous to society. Realising the group’s telepathic powers, surveillance and policing increase, and the disciplinary and biopolitical scope of Waknuk’s techniques widen and intensify. While David, Rosalind, and Petra are on their way to the Fringes,

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communication comes in from Sally revealing the authorities have tortured Katherine into confession: ‘They’ve broken Katherine. They’ve broken her … Oh, Katherine, dear … you mustn’t blame her, any of you. Please, please don’t blame her. They’re torturing her. It might have been any of us. She’s all clouded now. She can’t hear us … Oh, Katherine, darling …’ … ‘Katherine has admitted it; confessed. I have confirmed it. They would have forced me to it, too, in the end. I –’ she hesitated, wavering. ‘I couldn’t face it. Not the hot irons; not for nothing, when she had told them. I couldn’t … Forgive me, all of you … forgive us both …’ (130)

When asked whether Katherine has informed on the rest of them (excluding David, Petra, and Rosalind), Sally responds: ‘No. We’ve told them that there isn’t anyone else. I think they believe it. They are still asking questions. Trying to understand more about it. They want to know how we make thought-shapes, and what the range is. I’m telling them lies. Not more than five miles, I’m saying, and pretending it’s not at all easy to understand thought-shapes even that far away. …Katherine’s barely conscious. She can’t send to you. But they keep on asking us both questions, on and on … If you could see what they’ve done to her … Oh, Katherine, darling. … Her feet, Michael – oh, her poor, poor feet …’ (131)

The severity of their treatment is due to their successful integration. As Michael surmises, “[N]othing shows. We’ve been living among them for nearly twenty years and they didn’t suspect it” (131). The telepaths are considered more dangerous than other Deviations, as their Deviation is not visible or measurable. In this way, Wyndham links this anxiety of an ‘unseen’, domestic threat to broader Cold War paranoia. David Seed, drawing on Tom Engelhardt, suggests that “the grand narrative of national triumph [in American Cold War literature] over an evident and often subhuman enemy went into an extended crisis during the Cold War where it became increasingly difficult to identify even the general category of ‘enemy-ness’  ” (2003:117). Although Seed’s critique here is about American literature, Wyndham clearly draws parallels to the world of The Chrysalids. As their form of Deviation is focused on heightened powers of communication, telepathy makes a counter-cultural or underground formation possible. However, the faith-based politics of Labrador continue to refuse them recognition within the social, for they are “non-human [by

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the ‘Definition of Man’] and therefore not entitled to any of the rights or protections of human society” (Wyndham, 1955:131). Later in the narrative, the direness of Sally and Katherine’s situation is briefly discussed, with Rachel noting that, “Well, Katherine’s been unconscious so long we’re wondering if she’s – dead”, and regarding Sally, “We think – we’re afraid something queer must have happened to her mind … There’ve been just one or two little jumbles from her. Very weak, not sensible at all, so we’re afraid” (143). The implications, that Katherine has been killed and Sally either unable to communicate or gone mad, further suggest the lengths to which the Labradorian authorities will go with their torture to contain the threat that the telepaths embody. Labrador’s disciplinary and biopolitical tactics of surveillance, policing, and punishment demonstrate the lengths to which they will go to control and maintain the population. The sterilisation and exile of people deemed Deviations point to an idealised and ideological textual history, one that reflects religious anxieties over difference that can be conquered and one that is justified through religious scriptures. However, it also points to a history of eugenics, sequestration, and internment that has affected the lives of disabled people the world over. Similarly, suicide in the face of social marginalisation and destitution articulates histories of oppression, not just based on disability but on all minority oppressions, as too does torture, and its long-standing history as a disciplinary political tool of oppression and its effects on both the individual and society.

Geography as Propaganda While the post-disaster landscape in The Chrysalids holds its own dangers, it is only through Labrador’s faith-based politics that geography becomes a defining point of social life. The novel’s districts and borders, notably mainland Labrador, Wild Country, the Fringes, the Badlands, and the Blacklands, are defined through the faith-based politics that engender fear and anxiety of Deviations and, by extension, the spaces they inhabit. By keeping knowledge of geography limited, the crossing of borders becomes more difficult because of misinformation and fear. Uncle Axel articulates this when he discusses geography with David when he plans to run away: [W]hen people are used to believing a thing is such-and-such a way, and the preachers want them to believe that that’s the way it is; it’s trouble you get, not thanks, for upsetting their ideas. Sailors soon found that out in Rigo, so

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mostly they only talk about it now to other sailors. If the rest of the people want to think it’s nearly all Badlands outside, they let them; it doesn’t alter the way it really is, but it does make for peace and quiet. (57)

As Uncle Axel points out, socio-cultural beliefs play a role; however, these are mediated by the limited information supplied under Labrador’s faith-­ based politics. The internalisation of these beliefs, coupled with the suppressive actions of the preachers and politicians, means that any information that expands (or contradicts) the popular and political understanding of geography is suppressed. This becomes even more apparent as Uncle Axel informs David of all he knows about the geography of the world which is itself significantly limited due to the lack of information available. This is emphasised by Uncle Axel’s belief that the earth is flat. It also highlights the minimal amount of seafaring undertaken by the people of Labrador considering that “to the east … the sea [could go] on for ever” (58). The assessment of other places, specifically the ‘great land’ to the north-east, demonstrates the power of its faith-based worldview. Not only is everything compared to Labradorian society and history but if it does not reflect it, it is deemed Deviational, feared, and considered “Very godless indeed” (57). Most significantly is the implicit idea that if a society is matriarchal or has differing gender roles, it is not only labelled Deviational but also subjected to unsubstantiated rumours of cannibalism. As such, geography is utilised as a biopolitical technique to limit migration by creating the world outside of Labrador as irreligious, frightening, and dangerous. The extent to which rumour affects the interpretation of knowledge on geography is significant in the suggestion that beyond Labrador lies an endless expanse of sea, places devoid of human life, full of cannibalistic and monstrous human simulacra, or poisonous environments.1 Such rhetoric serves to not only engender fear of other places, but also eliminate the possibility that a more desirable space and social structure exists. Uncle Axel recalls the only non-religious text on geography, a published journal by a man named Marther. “Marther’s work is threatening”, argues Adam Stock, “because in inverting existing understandings of the world it undermines the precarious stability of Waknuk” (2016:437). Reading the landscape scientifically (or at least as scientific as can be in this

1  These are only a select few examples of the way travel outside of Labrador is rendered in the narrative.

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highly religious, preindustrial State), Marther offers an alternative to the religious orthodoxy. He notes of the geography: The Black Coasts would appear to be an extreme form of Badlands. Since any close approach to them is likely to be fatal nothing can be said of them with certainty but that they are entirely barren, and in some regions are known to glow dimly on a dark night. Such study as has been possible at a distance, however, does not confirm the view of the Right Wing Church Party that they are the result of unchecked deviation. There is no evidence whatever that they are a form of sore on the earth’s surface destined to spread to all impure regions. Indeed, the contrary appears more likely. This is to say that just as Wild Country becomes tractable, and Badlands country slowly gives way to habitable Fringes country, so, it would seem, are the Blacklands contracting within the Badlands. Observations at the necessary distance cannot be detailed, but such as have been made indicate consistently that living forms are in the process, although in the most profane shapes, of encroaching upon this fearsome desolation. (Wyndham, 1955:60–61)

Marther’s more tempered view of Blacklands and Badlands, and subsequently Deviations too, clashes with the fear-inducing assessment of the ‘Right Wing Church Party’. While the ‘Right Wing Church Party’ contends that the Blacklands and Badlands are uninhabitable and drastically distinct from other landscapes because of Deviations, Marther argues that it is the uninhabitable and damaged land that causes Deviations. Similarly, while the ‘Right Wing Church Party’ contends that the Blacklands and Badlands are slowly enveloping the Earth, Marther counters that they are in fact contracting. These points of conflict highlight how the ‘truths’ of observational knowledge are outweighed by religious thought in Labrador. Marther’s excerpt further reveals the role of Deviations in faith-based politics. Not only are Deviations the sign of the Devil, but they are also solely responsible for the ongoing effects of Tribulation. Through a religious spatial mapping, Deviations come to be viewed as even more dangerous. The suppression of Marther’s work, betrayed in the secrecy of Uncle Axel in communicating this information to David, is “necessary to prevent citizens from learning how to inquire more successfully about the world” (Stock, 2016:438) and maintain control over the population. The imperialist underpinnings of Labradorian faith-based politics are exposed as Uncle Axel continues describing the world beyond Labrador:

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The lands down there aren’t civilized. Mostly they don’t have any sense of sin so they don’t stop Deviations; and where they do have a sense of sin, they’ve got it mixed up. A lot of them aren’t ashamed of Mutants; it doesn’t seem to worry them when children turn out wrong, provided they’re right enough to live and to learn to look after themselves. Other places, though, you’ll find Deviations who think they are normal. There’s one tribe where both the men and women are hairless, and they think that hair is the devil’s mark; and there’s another where they all have white hair and pink eyes. In one place they don’t think you’re properly human unless you have webbed fingers and toes; in another, they don’t allow any woman who is not multi-­ breasted to have children. You’ll find islands where the people are all thickset, and others where they’re thin; there are even said to be some islands where both the men and women would be passed as true images if it weren’t that some strange deviation has turned them all completely black  – though even that’s easier to believe than the one about a race of Deviations that has dwindled to two feet high, grown fur and a tail, and taken to living in trees. (Wyndham, 1955:62)

There are several oppressive discourses that are bolstered here by Labradorian faith-based politics. All are positioned as Deviations, which both delimits the ‘Definition of Man’ and places all conceived difference under the government of disability. Again the ‘Definition of Man’ is found to be lacking, and its quantitative evidence is made to give way to qualitative evidence. The rule of Deviation is extended to include bodies that might align with alopecia, albinism, and syndactyly, going even further to include differences in weight, height, race, and species. This highlights the roles geo-politics play in the interpretation of others. While Labrador’s geographical location and environment engender an atmosphere and discourse where difference is Deviation, they apply that knowledge to other places and cultures. This demonstrates both the extreme internalisation of Labradorian faith-based politics and its oppressive and xenophobic nature. Here, Wyndham raises the need of a posthuman outlook in contesting the valuation of life from positions of privilege. The Chrysalids engages with a “radical decentring of the traditional sovereign, coherent and autonomous human in order to demonstrate how the human is always already evolving with, constituted by and constitutive of multiple forms of life and machines” (Nayar, 2013:11, italics in original). In doing so, The Chrysalids resists normativising disciplinary strategies which shore up binaries and instead demonstrates the dangers inherent in such systems of evaluation. This involves a complete rejection of hierarchisation and the Christian

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tradition of exagoreusis. By articulating that the institutionalisation and politicisation of faith is intimately linked to oppression, Wyndham rejects not only the need to be obedient but the very acts of hierarchisation and the evaluation of beings that are inherent. Furthermore, telepathy itself works against verbalisation and destabilises delineations between Self and Other. Through this, the novel radically critiques traditional social, cultural, and geographic demarcations, enabling new ways of thinking about relations and networks intra- and intersubjectively, as telepathy itself suggests.

History as Propaganda The cataclysmic event called “Tribulation” is the founding moment of Labrador’s faith-based, political agenda. Interpreting and positioning Tribulation at the crux of its faith and its value system gives it historical legitimacy. The very name ‘Tribulation’ frames Labradorian society as a form of penance for man’s rejection of God. The values informing social life are rationalised as enabling the people of Labrador to “[climb] back into grace” (Wyndham, 1955:40) with God. In doing so, they will regain the world of the Old People, the way society was prior to Tribulation. This is explained to David through his Ethics lessons: The penance of Tribulation that had been put upon the world must be worked out, the long climb faithfully retraced, and, at last, if the temptations by the way were resisted, there would be the reward of forgiveness … Tribulation had been another such punishment, but the greatest of all: it must, when it struck, have been like a combination of all these disasters. Why it had been sent was as yet unrevealed, but, judging by precedent, there had very likely been a phase of irreligious arrogance prevailing at the time. Most of the numerous precepts, arguments, and example in Ethics were condensed for us into this: the duty and purpose of man in this world is to fight unceasingly against the evils that Tribulation loosed upon it. Above all, he must see that the human form is kept true to the divine pattern in order that one day it may be permitted to regain the high place in which, as the image of God, it was set. (40–41)

Through this religious interpretation of history, Labrador utilises history as a disciplinary technique to direct social life and justify unequal power relations. Accordingly, the entirety of Labrador is performing exomologēsis: recognising a history of sin and reconstituting citizenship as penitence. As

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“Penance is the affect of change, of rupture with self, past, and world” (Foucault, 2003:164), the renunciation of the self (that of this world) is a means of reasserting devotion to God. In turn, this reifies the strict delimitation of the ‘human’ through the ‘true image’ and the policing and punishment of transgressions. To ‘faithfully retrace’ the path to the “peaks from which [they] had fallen” is to follow the path society sets: “Only the authorities, ecclesiastical and lay, were in a position to judge whether the next step was a rediscovery, and so, safe to take; or whether it deviated from the true re-ascent, and so was sinful” (Wyndham, 1955:40). History, society, and religion are therefore all intertwined, and to not follow ‘the authorities’ is considered sinful as well. Moreover, it becomes the ‘duty and purpose of man’ to police the ‘true image’; otherwise society will be unable to reach these ‘peaks’. As such, the successful extermination of Deviations and the re-ascent to grandeur form the logical endpoints of history. In constructing history this way, Deviations are paradoxically both central and Other to Labrador. The mythos of the ‘true image’ and the Old People are also utilised to justify Labrador’s faith-based politics. In line with the interpretation of Tribulation as a rebirth of society, the world of the Old People is the desired primal state (analogous to Christianity’s Eden). To achieve this return, there must be repetition of the ‘true image’ that the Old People are assumed to have been. However, the only source materials are the Bible and Repentances. This foregrounds the issue of interpretation for, as Uncle Axel argues, “They think they are the true image – but they can’t know for sure” (78). He continues: And even if the Old People were the same kind as I am and they are, what of it? Oh, I know people tell tales about how wonderful they were and how wonderful their world was, and how one day we’ll get back again all the things they had. There’s a lot of nonsense mixed up in what they say about them, but even if there’s a lot of truth, too, what’s the good of trying so hard to keep in their tracks? Where are they and their wonderful world now? (78)

As the voice of dissent, Uncle Axel raises some significant questions. Perhaps the most significant is why there is a need to return to the world and the assumed life of the Old People when it resulted in Tribulation. Uncle Axel’s questioning threatens the very basis of Labrador. He states, “that however wonderful the Old People were, they were not too

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wonderful to make mistakes – and nobody knows, or is ever likely to know, where they were wise and where they were mistaken” (79). His interrogation of the truthfulness of sacred discourse enables him to resist, to a degree, Labrador’s disciplinary power. Embodying the role of the sceptic, Uncle Axel further questions the logic of the scripture. As he reasons, “We’ve got to believe that God is sane” and that “this instability, this mess of deviations … makes no sense” (78). Yet for God to create Deviations He could not be sane; therefore either God is not sane and the strict religious line is completely flawed, or Tribulation was not something sent by God. Either idea critiques the propagandist logic of Labrador’s rendering of history and, by extension, its faith-based treatment of Deviations. This is furthered by passing his scepticism onto David, who subsequently comes to be classified as a Deviation. In offering this capacity of critique, Uncle Axel enables David to also begin to resist Labrador’s disciplinary use of history, enabling him to understand history as a construction to justify present social values. By far, the largest implication of this use of history is the act of positioning Deviations as historical subjects, subjects who are interpreted as the unwanted consequence of an event deemed to be both social punishment and ‘disaster’. Deviations come to be aligned with a past that is terrifying, while absent from a more nostalgic past that is linked to a desired future. This is highlighted in the comparison between Waknuk, and Labrador larger, with Sealand, a mysterious place beyond the borders of Labradorian maps. A conversation that Petra has with a woman from Sealand who aims to rescue Petra, David, and Rosalind suggests that the woman considers the people of Labrador primitive as they have not all developed telepathy. In one of the closing scenes of the novel, the Sealand woman arrives during a battle between the people of the Fringes and the people of Labrador over David, Rosalind, and Petra. During this scene, her ship unleashes long tendrils that entwine and kill everyone from both parties, except Michael, David, Rosalind, and Petra. At this point “The reader suddenly realizes that the new order of the Sealanders, the rescuers for whom we have been waiting, contains its own brutalities” (Krome et al., 2015:62). This murderous act of killing anyone not telepathic, literally not like her, might be viewed as an act of imperialism and a form of Social Darwinism, as destructive and cruel as the faith-based politics of Labrador. The woman notes:

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‘It is not pleasant to kill any creature,’ she agreed, ‘but to pretend that one can live without doing so is self-deception … And just as we have to keep ourselves alive in these ways, so, too, we have to preserve our species against other species that wish to destroy it – or else fail in our trust. ‘The unhappy Fringes people were condemned through no act of their own to a life of squalor and misery – there could be no future for them. As for those who condemned them – well, that, too, is the way of it. There have been lords of life before, you know. Did you ever hear of the great lizards? When the time came for them to be superseded they had to pass away’. (Wyndham, 1955:195)

While the woman presents her eugenics theory through biological discourse, Labrador presented its eugenics theologically. In justifying the extermination of the Fringes people as alleviating their suffering and the elimination of the ‘primitive’ Waknuk people as evolutionary process, Wyndham foregrounds the logics of colonisation and genocide. The woman continues, arguing, “In loyalty to their kind they cannot tolerate our rise; in loyalty to our kind, we cannot tolerate their obstruction (196).2 This simplistic division between ‘kinds’ raises parallels not only with more recent histories of oppression, but older ones questioning distinctions between the morally ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ following World War II utilising the faith-based politics that underpinned Hitler’s Nazi Germany and under McCarthyism. The racist and specist superiority inherent in Labradorian faith-based politics and the rhetoric of the woman from Sealand articulate systems of classification, differentiation, and hierarchisation on a mass scale, inflecting constructed values based on the aesthetics, distribution, and characterisation of bodies. In critiquing this constellation of techniques which constitute discourses of superiority, concepts of authority are destabilised. Just as ‘geography’ unmoors the obedience which underpins exagoreusis, ‘history’ dismantles exomologesis. Through this, The Chrysalids rejects the evaluation and eventual act of exomologesis through a critique of hierarchisation and classification, exposing both exagoreusis and exomologesis as disciplinary acts in the Christian and Western political tradition.

2  This note on ‘kinds’ links back to Golding’s criticism of World War II discussed in Chap. 3.

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Conclusion Focusing on physical and behavioural differences, The Chrysalids establishes a society which uses its faith to hierarchise, classify, and persecute those deemed ‘Deviations’. Any diversion from a very strict norm is met with suspicion and concern, causing citizens to monitor each other and to regulate their own behaviours. These acts of surveillance have neighbours, friends, and family turn on one another in service of governmental, faith-­ based dictums, leading to exile, sterilisation, and even suicide. To shore up this level of obedience, information about geography and history are managed through misinformation and propaganda. In these ways, Wyndham’s work is far from ‘cosy’ and unassuming but clearly reflects on the political paranoia of the Cold War period. But the novel does not leave us powerless, stuck in an oppressive regime, like other Cold War speculative fiction novels. As Krome, Loving, and Reeves note, “The Chrysalids ends with hope, but also with a healthy dose of ambivalence, never giving us a firm place to stand” (2015:63). Looking towards the future, David thinks about all the women he has known whose lives have been decimated by Labradorian policy, grateful that Petra’s fate won’t be theirs (Wyndham, 1955:197). He fails, however, to witness their resistance—Aunt Harriet chooses suicide over a life of exile, hardship, and childlessness, forcing David to rethink his place in Waknuk; Sally and Katherine stay by each other’s sides, enduring torture for as long as they can to save the others; Sophie makes a life in the Fringes before fighting and dying to save David, Petra, and Rosalind. David’s ability to reflect, to have survived along with Petra and Rosalind, and to make their way to Sealand is the very evidence that the resistance of these women was not in vain. As hopeful as we are that Sealand will be a safe haven for the children, the rescue has a eugenic undertone (Krome et al., 2015:59). The woman from Sealand has already demonstrated her faith that they are “homo superior” (italics in original, Wyndham in Stock, 2016:439) who should eradicate those ‘less evolved’ so, like Waknuk and the Fringes, Sealand could prove to be ultimately inhospitable. Although there is an ambivalence here, a lingering question of whether anywhere will be safe, Wyndham leaves us with one static point: there will always be resistance.

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Bibliography Aldiss, B. (1973). Billion year spree: The true history of science fiction. Doubleday. Clareson, T., & Clareson, A. (1990). The neglected fiction of John Wyndham: ‘Consider her ways’, Trouble with lichen and Web. In R. Garnett & R. J. Ellis (Eds.), Science fiction roots and branches: Contemporary critical approaches. The Macmillan Press Ltd. Downey, A. M. (2022). Mourning The Chrysalids: Currere, affect, and letting go. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy. https://doi.org/10.1080/15505170. 2022.2098207 Downey, A.  M. (2023). Critical posthumanism, The Chrysalids, and educational change. Changing English, 30(1), 66–76. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 1358684X.2022.2124150 Foucault, M. (2003). Technologies of the self. In P. Rabinow & N. Rose (Eds.), The essential Foucault. The New Press. Hanson, C. (2013). Eugenics, literature, and culture in post-war Britain. Routledge. Ketterer, D. (2000). A part of the … family [?]’: John Wyndham’s the Midwich cuckoos as estranged autobiography. In P. Parrinder (Ed.), Learning from other worlds: Estrangement, cognition and the politics of science fiction and utopia. Liverpool University Press. Krome, F., Loving, G., & Reeves, C. P. (2015). The concept of the human in John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids: Puritanical imagery, female agency, and theistic evolution. Interdisciplinary Humanities, 32(2), 52–64. Lackey, M. (2009). Foucault, secularization theory, and the theological origins of totalitarianism. In C. G. Prado (Ed.), Continuum studies in continental philosophy: Foucault’s legacy (1). Continuum. ProQuest Ebrary. Accessed 2 Jan 2017. Link, M. (2015). A very primitive matter’: John Wyndham on catastrophe and survival. The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, 14, 63–80. Nayar, P.  K. (2013). Posthumanism. Wiley. ProQuest Ebook Central. Accessed 6 Dec 2016. Oliver-Hobley, C. (2022). All et by the cannible savidges’: Decolonisation, heteroglossia and the nuclear/unclear spiders in John Wyndham’s Web. Foundation, 51(141), 63–77. Seed, D. (2003). The debate over nuclear refuge. Cold War History, 4(1), 117–142. Seed, D. (2011). Science fiction: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press. Stock, A. (2016). The future-as-past in dystopian fiction. Poetics Today, 37(3), 415–442. Taylor, C. (2015). Birth of the suicidal subject: Nelly Arcan, Michel Foucault, and voluntary death. Culture, Theory and Critique, 56(2), 187–207. Wymer, R. (1992). How ‘safe’ is John Wyndham? A closer look at his work, with particular reference to The Chrysalids. Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction, 55(25–36). Wyndham, J. (1955/1961). The Chrysalids. Penguin Books.

CHAPTER 5

‘A perversion of nature? How exciting!’: Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (1990), the Freak, the Monster, and the Limits of Inclusion

In the wake of the successes of other rights movements, disability rights ostensibly became a central concern in the 1980s and 1990s. With the 1976 discussion between the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) and the Disability Alliance, a new way of conceptualising disability emerged: the social model of disability. Rather than focusing on disability as an individualised, medical issue, the social model (via social constructionist thought) sought to understand disability as an effect of external factors (environments, attitudes, discourses, etc.) to which disabled people are subjected. That same year the United Nations declared 1981 as the International Year of Disabled Persons with the theme of ‘Full participation and equality’ (1982). The year 1982 also saw the first disability anti-discrimination legislation in the world introduced in Canada, with countries around the world to follow. Most significantly for this study are the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA)1 from the United States and the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA)2 from the  This act was amended in 2008 to broaden the definition of ‘disability’.  The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 was later repealed and replaced with the Equality Act 2010. 1 2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Holdsworth, The Government of Disability in Dystopian Children’s Texts, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52034-1_5

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United Kingdom. The ADA is categorised as a labour law and covers employment, transport, and services, while the DDA is categorised as a civil rights law and covers issues relating to employment, goods and services, education, and transport.3 While all these changes are, ostensibly, well intentioned, they also display new strategies for the management of disabled populations. “Inclusionism”, argue David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, “has come to mean an embrace of diversity-based practices by which we include those who look, act, function, and feel different” (2015:4). Within a neoliberal, capitalist system, this ‘embrace’ can be seen through shifts in representation, changes in language and marketing techniques, ‘new’ and ‘improved’ policies, or the celebration of ‘high-value’ examples, but “inclusionism obscures at least as much as it reveals” (4). As Mitchell and Snyder go on to argue, “the social model is itself a creature of late liberalism’s strategic embrace of devalued identities and its corrective efforts to include rather than exclude” (37). Likewise, a similar criticism can be levied at the UN’s International Year of Disabled Persons celebration and its attendant World Programme of Action Concerning Disabled Persons (1982). While on the one hand, the programme sought to increase acceptability, participation, and inclusion, these are also processes that sought to enfold disabled people into normalising discourses within their own nation-states and internationally by the United Nations’ explicit concern for “prevention and rehabilitation at all levels” (para. 5), and cast them as potentially valuable consumer-citizens to “participate fully in … social life” and “enjoy living conditions equal to those of their fellow citizens” (para. 4). Furthermore, as Georgina Peacock, Lisa I. Iezzoni, and Thomas R. Harkin report, by 2015–25 years after the ratification of the ADA—“substantial disparities remain in areas of employment, earned income, access to the Internet, transportation, housing, and educational attainment. Each of these disparities contributes to poorer health for this segment of our population” (2015: para. 3). The continuing disparity between disabled and non-disabled demonstrates that while potentially making some impact on the lives of some disabled people, legislative shifts are largely unable to institute the significant changes for which they seem to exist. This critique is not meant to dismiss these changes but to highlight how these 3  There are a number of laws preceding the ADA in the United States. Most significantly is the Education for All Handicapped Children Act 1975 (later changed to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act 1990).

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‘successes’ signal the presumed successful completion of disability rights movements. In signifying the ‘completion’ of rights movements, these acts grant disabled citizens access to specific arenas that coincide with a neoliberal reconceptualisation of disabled citizens as consumers. This ‘inclusion’ of disabled citizens is also an enfolding within the neoliberal disciplinary and biopolitical society of normalisation and regularisation. This inclusion, however, is not extended to all members of the target group equally, with some being considered more ‘assimilable’ than others. Even if an individual is extended this ‘embrace’, there are always conditions attached: do not disrupt the status quo, try and approximate the norm, and any failing to do so is the individual’s responsibility. And yet, difference is a stain. As Garland-Thomson highlights, these constructions have a particular resonance for disabled communities, where disabled bodies “defy the ordinary and mock the predictable, exciting both anxiety and speculation among our more banal brethren” (1996:1). But no matter how close to approximating the norm a minority member is, they are always still Other/outsider/freak. However, to break the covenant of inclusionism renders an individual a threat to the norm, the status quo, and society at large, and they are reframed as a monster. As constructs that are centrally concerned with how bodies look and behave, the freak and the monster occupy a socio-cultural space that both rails against and reiterates what the normative body should be and do. Throughout literary history, the constructions of the freak and the monster have been invariably tied to disability. Regardless of what the freak or monster comes to symbolise, at base it is preoccupied with tensions between the normative and non-normative body. As such, the constructions of the freak and monster are often utilised to sequester people with non-normative bodies and behaviours into socio-cultural spaces of exceptionality. As Rosemarie Garland-Thomson phrases it: By its very presence, the exceptional body seems to compel explanation, inspire representation, and incite regulation. The unexpected body fires rich, if anxious, narratives and practices that probe the contours and boundaries of what we take to be human. (1)

In literature and film, the freak and monster often occupy roles which conflict with the moralism of normative society and often end with their destruction. As such, the freak and monster as political ciphers activate a variety of feelings, discourses, and themes related to disability which can

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be interpreted from a number of different perspectives. Thus, it can be argued that the presence of the freak or monster, treated negatively by society, would qualify the film as dis-topian. Freak or monster characters, traditionally within the genres of horror, science fiction, and fantasy, are powerful narrative devices which can validate and reinforce normative discourses or enable radical critiques in narratives where the freak or monster are constructed sympathetically. These two perspectives on the freak and monster tend to be divided between target audiences. Children’s and ‘family’ films tend to portray outsider characters sympathetically, positioning their implied viewer, often normative, to agree with neoliberal inclusionist discourses.4 This chapter takes up this line of criticism, examining how the constructions of the freak and monster reflect the demands and limitations of inclusionist discourse in Tim Burton’s 1990 film Edward Scissorhands. Edward Scissorhands follows the eponymous protagonist, the creation of an elderly, reclusive inventor as he attempts to belong to a mid- to late-­ twentieth-­ century, nondescript, American suburb. Transformed from a machine, Edward resembles a young man in most ways except in his hands, made of scissors and left unfinished, and his lack of acculturation into human society. After the death of his creator, he is found by local housewife and Avon lady Peg and brought to the suburbs. While the narrative is set in the United States, the exact time and place are uncertain. There is a generalised atmosphere of the 1950s and 1960s; however, mention of certain products, VCRs, waterbeds, CD players, and big screen televisions, also situate it in the late 1980s. The rejection of a distinct time and place situates the narrative’s concerns about normalcy and belonging as widespread and transhistorical. Edward’s outsiderness is initially framed as something exotic, exciting, and attractive to the neighbourhood, but after he fails to approximate the norm, he is then reconstituted as a danger to society. While he is initially accepted as freak, ultimately Edward is reconsidered as monstrous and exiled from society. As such, the narrative can be divided into two parts: the first concerns his positioning as freak and the second concerns his positioning as monster. When Edward is situated as freak, his experiences are largely positive; however, given his naivete, he is often objectified and exploited. When he breaks specific social codes and resists systems of management 4  Films within the superhero genre or contemporary fantasy and science fiction tend to have freak or monster characters as protagonist/heroes.

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and categorisation as a freak, he is transformed into a monster to be systematically punished.

Genre and Scripts Tim Burton’s films are often considered “magically wonderful and grotesquely grim” (Odell & Le Blanc, 2006:13) and tend to focus “on the outcasts of society” (11) while positioning “[t]raditional narrative techniques … secondary to image and feeling” (11). This predilection for the outcast and for the stylised lead Helena Bassil-Morozow to describe “the typical Burtonian male character” as: a strange little boy who grows up to be a weird, but talented, misfit. The misfit invariably has a dark imagination, is never accepted by the common people, and is sometimes even hunted down by them (Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Willy Wonka). (2013:1)

Burton has developed a distinct narrative style that speaks to experiences of marginalisation, particularly of being set against a norm which, by virtue of different bodies and ways of being in the world, can never be approximated fully. For Edward, his scissorhands and his non-normative birth and childhood permanently set him apart from the rest of human society. Thus, both physically and socially, Edward is different to the others he meets and diverts from the norm. Through establishing Edward as his sympathetic protagonist, Burton invites the viewer to approach suburban American culture and its reigning politics from an outsider perspective. As Bassil-Morozow summarises: Burton always questions the validity of ‘normalcy’, of the ordinary, of established patterns of behaviour. He displaces the ordinariness of the pastel world he has never been able to understand or accept, by planting a Gothic castle nearby, in which a creative madman assembles a punky-looking, bedraggled, sad creature, and leaves him alone to explore the hostile environment outside. (55)

By pairing the gothic castle with pastel suburbia, the ‘bedraggled, sad’ outsider with the girl-next-door, Burton draws together different genres to stage his critique of normalising discourses. Although Edward Scissorhands defies an easy delineation in terms of genre, it draws on gothic

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romance, horror, and the teen film where the social outsider is an oft-used trope. By utilising the conventions, atmosphere, and events these genres provide, the figure of the outsider can be engaged with in meaningful ways, moving beyond the limitations of any one genre. Although teen films may represent an outsider bullied at school, in horror the outsider can be a serial killer, but the combination of the two genres can produce something more complex. “The true consistency in virtually all teen horror films”, argues Timothy Shary, is “their concentration on youthful fears of being different, becoming sexual and confronting adult responsibilities” (2005:56). In drawing on teen and horror genres, Burton delivers a sympathetic protagonist who is reminiscent of horror villains, one who fits the description supplied by Bassil-Morozow. Joshua David Bellin (2005) notes the allusions to classic horror texts, while Burton himself says Edward Scissorhands “is not a new story. It’s ‘Frankenstein.’ It’s ‘Phantom of the Opera.’ It’s ‘Hunchback of Notre Dame,’ ‘King Kong,’ ‘Creature From the Black Lagoon,’ and countless fairy tales” (in Easton, 1990:2). The elements of the gothic are aesthetic as much as they are atmospheric in Edward Scissorhands, with an emphasis on the difference between Edward and others. Edward dons a full-body, black, leather-belted outfit, sometimes sporting a white-collared shirt, brown pants, and suspenders, with a very pale, scarred face.5 By comparison, the rest of the cast are fresh-­ faced, wearing bright colours, often pastels, generating an ‘All-American’ feel. This also reflects the castle/suburbs division but also enables an ‘opposites attract’ romance narrative between Edward and Kim. Unlike other gothic romances, however, Burton lets his tragic misfit live at the end. Burton’s film can be seen as a response to these various genres and their depiction of the non-normative outcast. For Joshua David Bellin, Edward Scissorhands operates as a “metacinematic commentary … [through] a pervasive texture of artificiality, an abiding sense that the film’s narrative— indeed, film narrative as such—is a contrivance, a made-up thing” (2005:184). By taking up a role of metacommentary, Burton explores the complex ways the outsider shapes and is shaped by broader networks of power. Through specific reference to discourses of inclusionism and outsiderness, Edward Scissorhands uses the figures of the freak and the

5  Peg draws particular attention to how pale Edward is when she attempts to mix a makeup blend for him early in the film.

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monster to intimate both the historical oppression of disabled people and their exploitation as narrative devices.

The Freak in Edward Scissorhands Throughout history, the exhibition of physical differences has captured the attention of audiences of all class positions and status. These kinds of performances are more commonly known as ‘freak shows’, and their performers were often considered ‘freaks’. Although these kinds of shows have histories dating back at least to the seventeenth century (Bondeson, 2000; Baratta, 2016), they reached their height in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At this point, particularly with figures like P. T. Barnum, the freak show became an institution, with the freak becoming a commodity to be exhibited for profit. In the travelling shows of the United States (which often made their ways to the United Kingdom and Europe on tour), “Americans gathered … to gaze raptly at the ineffable other who was both the focus and the creation of the freak show’s hyperbolic conventions of display” (Garland-Thomson, 1996:5). As the popularity of these shows grew, more performers were drawn in, displaying their talents and bodies for the gaze of others, and often prostheses, narratives, staging, and even taxidermy were used to create and exaggerate the ‘freakery’ of the show. In these ways, the freak show, despite its liminal subjects, operated as a space where boundaries between normal and abnormal humanity were starkly defined. For everyday onlookers, this created a mild sense of superiority as, in the words of George C. D. Odell, “the freaks of the dime museum served the purpose of raising dull persons from the throes of their inferiority complexes” (in Stulman Dennett, 1996:318). As Andrea Stulman Dennett summarises, for Odell, “pleasure seekers could not look at such ‘monstrosities’ without convincing themselves that, after all, their normal selves were ‘pretty good, if not beautiful’ ” (1996:318). The freak serves a powerful biopolitical and disciplinary purpose—to occupy the borderland between acceptable and offensive, normal and abnormal, ugliness and beauty, facilitating a sense of adequacy in the audience, providing evidence for the value of eugenics programmes and policies, and activating broader normalising discourses. Burton plays with these politics from the immediate outset of the film. Although majority of the film follows Edward’s transition into society, the film’s narrative framing is objectifying, resonating with the logic of the freak show. It begins with retrospective narration by Kim, telling the story of Edward’s

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entry to and exile from the community to her granddaughter. On a seemingly snowy evening, Kim’s granddaughter asks, “Why is it snowing … Where does it come from?” (Burton, 1990) As is revealed at the end of the film, the ‘snow’ is in fact shavings from Edward’s ice sculptures descending from the high-up mansion. Kim explains to her granddaughter that the story begins with scissors and a “a man who had scissors for hands”. From the outset, the narratological features ensure this is not Edward’s story to tell. Instead, he is the object the narrative centres around, underlining Edward’s simultaneous centrality and marginality, reflecting dynamics of the freak show itself. For the individual to be positioned as ‘freak’ rather than ‘monster’, consigned to the borderlands rather than the outlands, they cannot complicate the already existing systems which bolster normativity. For the freak-as-outsider to be welcomed into the community there are a whole set of proscriptions, the most significant of all being not to disrupt systems of power and privilege. In supporting normativity, the freak leaves the associated defining binaries of us/them, subject/object, and self/Other intact. This conditional and limited entry into society comes at a price, specifically compliance to exploitation. Not only is the freak used to validate the audience’s self-perception, but they become integral to the construction of normalcy itself. This is the covenant of inclusionism the freak must abide by; otherwise they are violently reconstituted as a monster. Edward must tread a thin line to not upset the status quo; however, this becomes more and more challenging as his social interactions become more and more dangerous.6 Edward is initially embraced and celebrated for his peculiar differences. When the internal narrative begins, Peg, Kim’s mother, is selling Avon products door-to-door and decides to try and sell at the mysterious and dilapidated mansion. There she meets the solitary Edward and, as an act of goodwill, takes him to live with her and her family. As Edward adapts to life in the suburbs people are initially unsure of him, but he quickly demonstrates a keen artistic eye and a deftness with his scissorhands. Soon the whole neighbourhood calls on his services as topiarist, dog-groomer, and avant-garde hairdresser. These services structure Edward’s role as freak throughout the rest of the film. Although Edward’s

6  While the freak and monster and their social roles can be read as affective constructs (Holdsworth, 2018), my focus here is on their disciplinary and biopolitical roles through neoliberal inclusionism.

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physical body and presence make him novel curiosity, Edward’s inclusion and capital in social life is centred on his artistic and tactile skillsets. Edward’s movement from topiarist to dog-groomer to hairdresser demonstrates the progression of his value within a capitalist economy. When Peg initially visits the inventor’s mansion, she is greeted by various topiaries at the front gate. While these topiaries seem to be for Edward’s own personal pleasure, they become the entry point for his exploitation by others. During the scene when Edward creates the dinosaur topiary, Bob Boggs is shown half-heartedly trimming a different bush while trying to listen to a baseball game on the radio. Edward, seeing Bob’s lacklustre gardening, creates the dinosaur topiary, delighting Bob, his son Kevin, and another boy. Soon after, the gardening is left entirely to Edward while Bob reclines in a deck chair with a beer in hand, listening to the radio. This moment of shared pleasure, and even an opportunity for Bob to learn from Edward, is transformed into the first of many exploitations of Edward’s goodwill and lack of understanding regarding social (and economic) structures. Following this, during a social barbecue for Edward to be formally introduced to the neighbourhood, several of the neighbours ask Edward to do gardening for them. It is revealed in a conversation around the dinner table later that Edward is “not charging for [his] gardening” (Burton, 1990). Despite the demand for Edward’s skills, no one except Kim sees this as exploitative. In fact, for the Boggs, Edward’s widespread exploitation heightens their social status. During a topiary job for a neighbour, Edward finds and grooms a shaggy dog. After a positive reception, a makeshift dog-grooming salon is set up in the Boggs’ backyard, and its high demand is demonstrated by the long queue of local dog-owning housewives. Once again, there is no mention of financial compensation for Edward or the Boggs, however, Peg’s attendance on the waiting housewives procures social capital. Peg is now at the centre of her social circle thanks to Edward’s work. At the front of the line is the flirtatious Joyce who asks Edward to groom her dog so that its fur looks “big and kinda bouffant … Kinda like mine” (Burton, 1990). As he grooms her dog, she expresses her delight with a series of pleasurable moans, her desiring glances at Edward suggesting a further level of potential exploitation. As he finishes grooming her dog, Joyce notes, “Oh Eddie! Is there anything you can’t do? You take my very breath away, I swear” before requesting that he cut her hair. Joyce delights in controlling the situation through her sexual teasing, while Edward must silently accept the conditions imposed on him. He begins by delicately moving

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her head from side to side and backwards, and Joyce, with her eyes closed, softly moans, indicating sensual, if not sexual, pleasure. As he cuts her hair the pitch of her moans increases, and she begins curling her toes. Once he has finished, she remarks, “That was the single most thrillin’ experience of my whole life.” While other women demand to have their hair cut as well, none experience a similar orgasmic reaction. The scene provides an important precursor to what results in Edward’s construction as monster. All three roles, topiarist, dog-groomer, and hairdresser, indicate the value and novelty of Edward’s abilities in the neighbourhood, and the sheer popularity of his work (various examples of his work are seen in the background throughout the film) signals a widespread appreciation. Although Edward and the Boggs are never financially compensated for his work, they accrue social capital. For Edward, his compensation is his continued inclusion in his new community. Edward’s tenuous inclusion because of the value he brings is made explicit when he is a guest on a local television talk show. Stulman Dennett argues that “The most obvious modern form of the freak show is the television talk show” which is “an environment in which dysfunctional human beings parade themselves in front of an audience” (1996:320). Like the freak shows of the past, the talk show often displays people as ‘real’ examples of abnormality, strangeness, and freakishness and, like Barnum, will use embellishment and exaggeration to entertain and generate profit.7 These too are produced and consumed to shore up the norm and to comfort the viewer with the knowledge that there are stranger, more dysfunctional people out there. As Amit Kama argues, “this genre cold-heartedly exploited disabled characters, turning them into post-modern beggars who practice their ‘vocation’ in television studios instead of on street corners” (2004:463). The construction of space in this scene works to make these links between the talk show and freak show, reconstituting Edward’s ‘freakishness’ for live and televisual audiences. The scene opens with applause from the audience, implied to be from a recount of Edward’s story and the host patronising quips, “Quite a story, yes?” (Burton, 1990) reflecting how “these representations are stereotypical and place disabled people outside the ‘regular’ stream of existence in order to elicit feelings of pity, terror, and/or adoration” (Kama, 2004:449). Not only does the talk show narratively establish Edward as freak, his pale complexion and monochromatic black-and-white outfit set outfit against the soft pastels 7

 Arguably, reality television has now taken the reins from talk shows.

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and muted colours of the talk show set dressings further position him as freak. This layering of perspectives and audiences—live, televisual, and filmic—sets Edward up as a triple spectacle. Just as the film’s narration permits Kim to frame Edward’s story for the audience, the talk show, by inviting invasive questions from its studio audience, limits Edward’s capacity to give an open account of himself, to disrupt the hegemonic norms, or to define his value beyond his status as freak. However, as the covenant of his inclusion requires the maintenance of the status quo, he is not allowed to decline questions or answer negatively. The first audience member asks, “What’s been the best part of your new life here in town?” (Burton, 1990). This question exemplifies the affective and political economy that the freak show/talk show produces. While the audience member asks Edward to determine presumably positive events, there is an implicit negation of any negative experiences for him. The terms ‘best part’ and ‘new life’ are understood as dependent on being ‘here in town’, and so the question is less about Edward’s experiences and more about his endorsement of the generosity, friendliness, and openness of the town and its residents. Edward is subsequently coerced into a positive answer: “The friends I’ve made”. This earns sighs of approval and applause from the audience, and a smile from Peg, furthering the validation of the town and specifically those closest to him. While this is ostensibly a sincere answer, any critical response, sincere or not, would have broken the terms of his inclusion. A negative response would have reflected negatively on him rather than society. He is then asked by another audience member, “Have you ever thought of having corrective surgery or prosthetics? I know a doctor that might be able to help you”, reiterating several calls for medicalised intervention throughout the film. Responding “I’d like to meet him”, Edward validates the norm. Yet his acquiescence is questioned by other audience members who note that, “But if you had regular hands, you’d be like everyone else” and “Then no one would think you’re special. You wouldn’t be on TV or anything”. Although these questions raise some conflict with normalising strategies, Peg cuts in to assure Edward (and the audience) that he will always be special. This call to intervention is not uncommon for talk shows or reality shows where, beyond the initial judgement of participants, the impetus to ‘fix’ the individual is central (Kama, 2004). Despite the ongoing need to normalise the non-normative body, the uncertainty of these other audience members is predicated on the value of celebrity as cultural capital and the possible loss of an object of fascination. These exchanges, with two

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separate attempts to regulate Edward’s body and feelings, further articulate the centrality of Edward’s ‘freakishness’ in enforcing social hierarchies. On the one hand, this call for medicalised intervention highlights the discomfort Edward’s physical appearance has for others and, as such, needs to be ‘fixed’ to relieve that discomfort. On the other hand, his continued existence as an object of fascination, one to measure oneself against, outweighs the discomfort it brings. The line of questioning continues, asking Edward about his future in town with clear trajectories being mapped out: opening a unique beauty salon (“I wonder, do you have any plans to open your own beauty salon?” [Burton, 1990]) and heterosexual coupledom (“do you have a girlfriend?”) before Edward accidentally electrocutes himself by touching the cable leading into the microphone. Even the stage is not set up for his body difference, again highlighting the exploitation of these kinds of TV programmes. These final questions direct Edward towards specific, normative ways of being in the world that structure the rest of the plot of the film but are also key sites of anxiety regarding his inclusion.

The Limits to Social Inclusion in Edward Scissorhands Edward’s movement from freak to monster is the community’s collective response to him breaking the covenant of his inclusion. For Edward to be included, he cannot trouble the status quo of the community. If he does, his inclusion is negated, and he is reconstituted as monstrous. Throughout the film, Edward is the beneficiary of ‘kindnesses’, which are often merely thinly veiled expressions of pity. “Objects of pity are not normal human beings”, argues Kama (2004): but doomed creatures who, without pity, cannot survive. Their humanity is thus severely damaged. Moreover, commiseration permits non-disabled people to momentarily absolve themselves, instead of taking steps toward sincere social change that will allow integration … Pity also positions disabled people as worthless; people with whom no ordinary relationship is possible. They become mere objects; the process of exclusion is now final and irreversible. (458–459)

Pity ensures Edward is allowed entry into society, but not permanent residence. In using Edward as a point of comparison and an ‘object of pitying

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sentiment’, social order is maintained. Pity can engender unwanted ‘commiseration’, but it can also be weaponised to justify cruel and harmful behaviours. The initial responses to Edward that position him as ‘freak’ can be put in the commiseration category, and there are three significant moments in the film when pity (or the perception of pity) become dangerous. For Joyce, Edward is an object of pity and sexual desire which informs her gestures of ‘kindness’ to Edward that could deepen his inclusion in society. As noted, Joyce experiences an erotic response to Edward and his scissorhands when he cuts and styles her hair. In turn, Joyce recognises the capitalist potential of Edward’s hairdressing and decides to open a salon with Edward as the star attraction. While showing him the salon she aggressively pushes him into a reclining chair and offers to model some smocks for him before climbing on top of him and undressing herself. Joyce’s purposeful oversight of Edward’s limited knowledge of social conventions results in her assuming his consent to her sexual advances. As she seductively unbuttons her top, she plays the song “With These Hands” by Tom Jones, a pointed choice given the song’s specific romantic idealisation of sensual touch. If, as the song suggests, hands are integral to romance, the use of this song reinscribes the impossibility of a relationship for Edward and that Joyce’s sexual advances, however unwanted, are framed as a ‘kindness’. Edward is a captive and passive victim of Joyce’s sexual advances, and Joyce continually wilfully misinterprets his nervous and confused response as consent. Given Edward’s lack of knowledge regarding sexuality, he may, as with other groups of disabled people whose access to sexual knowledge is prohibited, “have little idea what constitutes [or does not constitute] acceptable sexual behavior” (McCabe et  al., 1994:298). While sitting on Edward, Joyce undoes her blouse and leans in to (presumably) kiss him, placing her hands on either side of his head, further confining him with her body. In doing so, Joyce tips the chair over, and Edward, in a panic, quickly leaves. In this quick escape, Edward’s boots can be seen knocking together, often used to signal consensual sex metaphorically and symbolically. As Edward leaves, Joyce yells, “Edward! Edward, you come back here! You can’t do that!” (Burton, 1990). Joyce outlines the parameters of the social covenant of Edward’s inclusion—he must acquiesce to all the demands of the social body, even if/when they violate his personal freedoms, to be ‘gifted’ inclusion. Edward’s refusal of Joyce’s advances is the first social code he breaks that secures his inclusion. The expectation of sex Joyce expresses reiterates the ideology of rape

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culture that sex is something owed to the culturally dominant. While the film overtly critiques the position society puts those considered ‘outsiders’ in, it does little to challenge Joyce’s demands for sex. Furthermore, the critique of rape culture’s treatment of people with disabilities, namely the idea that sex with them, especially disabled men, is a ‘kindness’, is undercut emphatically by the visual ‘knocking boots’ analogy. There are shortcomings in representing Joyce’s sexual assault of Edward, but the film critically examines methods and means of discrediting (disabled) male victims of sexual assault and rape through gossip, depicted as a series of phone calls between neighbourhood women. In the calls they discuss an altered version of the encounter where Edward is described as having ‘practically raped Joyce’. Joyce has constructed herself as the victim of an attempted rape and Edward as a potential rapist and a possible threat to teenaged Kim. Joyce’s false allegations articulate a second breaking of social codes—this time the law. The belief that Edward has broken the law is enough to warrant distrust and concern in the community. In another scene, Edward is coerced into assisting with a break-and-enter burglary with Kim and her boyfriend Jim, where he is caught and kept in jail overnight. He is released because he is psychiatrically evaluated as not knowing right from wrong. Significantly, both scenes, which constitute Edward as a dangerous criminal, reiterate discourses of exclusion whereby Edward, as disabled, is spoken about and judged while having no right of reply. While these events reshape the communal perception of Edward, it is his blossoming romance with Kim that becomes his most significant ‘crime’. Throughout the film, Edward and Kim grow close as she realises his caring nature, especially in contrast to the selfish and cruel Jim. After the break-and-enter, she begins to develop romantic feelings for Edward. Initially, however, these relate more to his ability to bear the burden of social derision for a crime in which she was complicit but begin to grow beyond this pity and guilt. Their romance builds up until Christmas when Edward is fully reconstituted as a monster. As Peg prepares for the Boggs’ annual Christmas party, Kim notices snowfall outside and goes outside. As she rounds the corner of the house, she discovers Edward frantically carving an angel out of a block of ice, and the ‘snow’ flakes are in fact ice shavings. Kim is in awe at the ‘snow’ Edward is making, and she begins gently dancing as the camera circles around her as the haunting choral song ‘Ice Dance’ by the film’s composer Danny Elfman plays. This scene is the pinnacle of Edward’s constitution as freak, generating a sense of the sublime within Kim and the audience (Holdsworth, 2018). When Jim surprises

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them both, Edward accidentally cuts Kim’s hand. She attempts to placate Jim, who remarks “Touch her again and I’ll kill ya!” (Burton, 1990). He continues: Stay away from her ok? I mean it. You can’t touch anything without destroying it. Who the hell do you think you are hanging around here anyway, huh? … Get the hell outta here! Get out! Go! Freak!

Jim’s separation of Edward and Kim is achieved through a reconstitution of Edward as violent and dangerous. Edward then begins to act as others perceive him by going on a neighbourhood rampage. The positive effects/affects Edward has achieved through his artistry are undone in this positioning of him as unwelcome, dangerous, and inherently destructive. Jim’s paranoia over Edward is also clearly linked to Edward’s acceptance within the community, and the threat he poses to the status quo which values Jim: JIM: KIM: JIM: KIM: JIM: KIM:

He tried to hurt you. No he did not and you know it! Are you nuts? I just saw him! Jim, I don’t love you anymore. I just want you to go. Okay? Just go! Are you serious? I’m going to lose you to that? He isn’t even human. Just get out of here okay! Just go!

Jim’s incredulity at Kim’s feelings for Edward is built on the belief that Edward ‘isn’t even human’. This rhetoric, which is informed by the extensive ableism of the community,8 articulates the real underlying anxiety of Kim and Edward’s relationship, namely, that it is a dysgenic pairing.

8  At this point in the film this has been reflected in a number of ways, such as the reconstruction of him as a potential and attempted rapist; the discriminatory religious rhetoric of Esmeralda, who refers to him as ‘a perversion of nature’ ‘sent by the devil’; the continued exploitation and objectification of him; the derogatory use of terms like ‘retarded’, ‘freak’, and ‘cripple’; the shunning of the Boggs and the entire neighbourhood’s absence at their Christmas party as a punishment for Edward; and the community’s aversion to interaction with him in favour of police intervention.

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As discussed in Chaps. 1 and 2, eugenics discourse significantly affected the lives and representations of disability in the nineteenth century. However, the continued rhetoric and anxieties around disability, relationships, and sex have proved pervasive and continue to have significant socio-cultural import. This is demonstrated in the positioning of Edward as sexually violent and predatory, which undergirds Jim’s anxiety about Kim and Edward’s budding relationship.9 This is demonstrated when the spurned Jim tells a friend, “Forget holding her hand. Picture the damage he could do other places”. Jim’s automatic fantasy of Edward enacting sexual violence against Kim reflects the ease by which Joyce depicted him as sexually out of control and an attempted rapist. As such, despite being highly stylised and fantastical, the film reflects pervasive negative stereotypes about sexuality and disability, especially disabled men. Ultimately, the refusal of Joyce’s sexual advances, Edward’s coercion to break-and-­enter, and the possible romantic and sexual relationship between Kim and Edward are points when Edward as freak fails to abide by social rules. As outsider whose inclusion is provisional, he must not challenge the status quo by refusing ‘kindnesses’, breaking the law, or disrupting eugenic coupling. By doing so, Edward is no longer a benign freak whose differences bolster normalcy but a threat to the safety and security of the neighbourhood. To save the current social order, the threat must be eliminated.

The Monster in Edward Scissorhands As Alexa Wright notes, “Monstrosity is never an intrinsic quality. It is a narrative imposed on certain appearances or behaviours at particular times in specific social contexts” (2013:3). While the freak, as a conditional member of society abiding by and reinforcing the status quo, is afforded limited community protection, the monster must be expelled from the community. In his combined refusal of total compliance and ‘kindnesses’, his law-breaking, and his dysgenic relationship with Kim, Edward resists disciplinary and biopolitical control. He demands full, unconditional membership of society and the ‘humanisation’ that this delivers; however, such a need for recognition also requires a realisation on the part of the community of their similarities to the monster and their own monstrousness. If, as Garland-Thomson notes, “Monsters are unusually formed 9  Significantly, all these ‘crimes’ have historically been used to criminalise Black men; however, the violent punishment visited on Black men far exceeds anything this film represents.

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beings whose bodies are simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary” (2009:163), then the community is interpellated into a consideration of the similarities between the monster and themselves, and the foundations and boundaries of normalcy and the self are questioned. Edward’s full social inclusion would require a radical restructuring of hierarchical and value systems, something that the community will not do. Instead, Edward is reconstituted as a monster who threatens normalcy and must be annihilated. After accidentally hurting Kim and being threatened by Jim, Edward storms off, taking his anger out on objects around the neighbourhood including cars and topiaries. Seeing him chop the leg off her ballerina topiary, neighbour Helen calls the police. Once he calms down, Edward evades the police and is returning to the Boggs’ house, when he sees Kim’s brother Kevin about to be hit by a van. In moving Kevin to safety, he accidentally cuts Kevin’s face. Kevin screams out “Ow!” (Burton, 1990), and Helen, along with another neighbour, calls for others to help against the perceived threat Edward poses. This perceived attack on a child adds to the long list of social codes Edward breaks or appears to have broken. His act of protection and concern for Kevin results in a series of misinterpretations. Firstly, Helen assumes that Edward has attacked Kevin, an assumption based on a presumption that Edward is a violent criminal. This belief, extending from Joyce’s story and the break-and-enter, is reinforced by Edward’s rampage where he damages her topiary. Helen’s response generates a broader aggressive response among the community. As Edward attempts to calm Kevin, Joyce’s husband grabs his arm and yells, “What are you doing? Get away from him!”, again denying Edward a right of response and presuming violent action on his part. While Joyce’s husband assumes Edward’s answer and negates his chance at response, this time Edward responds by trying to push Joyce’s husband away, accidentally cutting him too, further cementing the perception of him as impulsive and aggressive. In the chaos and tumult of accidentally slashing Joyce’s husband, Edward becomes visibly confused and afraid, while Bob and Peg pick Kevin up and take him inside. Jim then jumps on top of Edward, trying to throttle and punch Edward, before also getting slashed as Edward raises his hands to defend himself. The film’s audience are aware that his attack on Edward is motivated more by a hatred of Edward than over the presumed attack on Kevin. Edward’s involvement in the fight is initially as a victim defending himself, but the community view his response as inappropriate and perceive him as criminal and monster. Edward flees down

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the street towards the mansion, as a police car and the community-turned-­ mob follow. Caught up in a collective rage, the mob passes Peg’s house without question as she yells, “Kevin’s all right! He is! It was just the tiniest scratch! Ed—he’s gone! Let’s not bother him, all right? Let’s just leave him alone!” This highlights just how dangerous the reconstruction of Edward as monster has become and the real level of concern the mob have. No one asks after Kevin’s condition despite his safety being presumably the catalyst for this mentality. Instead, the mob demands some semblance of violent restitution as they chase Edward towards the mansion. As Edward escapes back up to the mansion, Detective Allen fires a few shots into the air, scaring Edward further. While this shocks Kim, it follows the community’s desire for Edward’s death. Ignoring Detective Allen’s assurances that “It’s all over” and that “There’s nothing more to see”, the community demands evidence. They ask Detective Allen a jumble of questions, starting with “What happened? Is he dead?” and ending with “Where is he? Where is he?”, all to ascertain if the threat to normality has really been annihilated. As the only non-white character in the film, Detective Allen is consistently and conspicuously ignored and his role derided, despite his authority within the police force. These reactions to Allen signal deeper discriminatory and exclusionary behaviours that undergird the normalising politics of this community. The community demand that Edward’s threat to normativity be punished and that everything returns to a ‘natural’ order. Joyce, not believing Detective Allen nor following his instructions to return home, decides to venture up to the mansion for evidence. Her determination instils courage in the rest of the community, and they collectively, strengthened even more as a mob, proceed to the mansion. Kim reaches the mansion before the mob and goes up to the attic to find and console Edward. Unlike the rest of the community, Edward inquires after Kevin, checking to see if he was seriously hurt. Arriving soon after Kim, Jim tries to shoot Edward. This results in Kim’s protective gesture to use Edward’s hand as a weapon, threatening, “Stop it, or I’ll kill you myself”. This positioning of Edward’s hand as weapon implicates Kim in an ongoing use of Edward’s body without his consent, even though this time it is for Edward’s benefit. While Jim hits and kicks Kim, Edward attempts to protect her. Raising a piece of wood above his head menacingly, Jim repeats, “Hey! I said stay away from her!” This final reiteration posits the tension between Jim and Edward as centred on Kim. It expresses both Jim’s misogynistic

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objectification of Kim and the larger anxieties of dysgenic unions. In response, Edward stabs Jim and pushes him out of the window. Jim’s death solidifies Edward’s reconstitution as monster; murder, even in self-defence, is the ultimate, uncrossable line. After Edward kills Jim, the crowd can be heard approaching in the background. The long procession of people, led by Joyce and Esmeralda, enter the courtyard to see Jim’s dead body. Kim appears and is asked “Is he in there?” to which she responds, “He’s dead. The roof caved in on him. They killed each other. You can see for yourselves. See?” and produces a scissorhand. Kim’s response produces a disappointed look from the crowd, with several people aghast and Joyce clutching her chest. Despite the crowd’s bravado, its members are visibly disheartened when told that Edward is dead. A degree of shame can be seen in the downcast look of the crowd, and in Helen’s announcement, “I’m goin’ home”. To some extent, this shame may be generated more by Kim’s sadness than Edward’s death, but with no monster to hunt, the mob dissipates and returns home. The narrative ends with the return to the framing from the beginning of the film as Kim finishes relaying the story to her granddaughter. She notes that she “never saw him again. Not after that night”. Significantly, anxieties about dysgenic couplings that undergird the narrative are relieved in this revelation. Even when the granddaughter suggests that she go up there, Kim dismisses it, stating, “I would rather he remember me the way I was”. Through deferring her desire for Edward under the guise of a belief in her own youthful perfection, Kim ultimately validates the narrative of Edward’s persecution and permanent exile from society, despite Edward’s protecting her from the brutalising actions of Jim. Even though her life has continued, and the world and neighbourhood have changed, it is better for Edward to remain up at the mansion alone than for her to go see him. Kim’s responsibility and care for Edward ends when she lies to the mob about his death. The film’s closure echoes the many stories of disabled people abandoned in institutions. Responding to her granddaughter’s question of how she knows Edward is still alive, Kim states, “I don’t know. Not for sure. But I believe he is. You see, before he came down here, it never snowed. And afterwards it did. If he weren’t up there now, I don’t think it would be snowing. Sometimes you can still catch me dancing in it”. This is said over alternating shots of Kim speaking and Edward at the mansion trimming topiaries and carving ice sculptures. Edward’s sculptures in this scene are of suburban life, with one of younger Kim dancing in the snow prominently positioned. The prominence of the

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Kim sculpture within this suburban display articulates both a longing to return for Edward despite his experiences and intimating a contentedness with the ‘kindnesses’ he has experienced. This closing scene elides the critique of normalising society established throughout the rest of the film. The ice shavings from Edward’s sculpting drift out and over the mansion’s grounds as a clip of younger Kim dances in the snow. Once again, the film returns to its framing, centralising Kim, and relegating Edward to a background.

Conclusion Edward Scissorhands offers a critical perspective of the normalising and inclusionist, and thus disciplinary and biopolitical, tactics of American society and culture. Through drawing on the genres of teen, horror, and gothic romance cinema, Tim Burton creates an iconic outsider whose struggles to fit in speak to a wide audience. Edward’s physical and social differences immediately set him apart from the rest of the neighbourhood, and he struggles to make sense of the social codes of his new society. While most neighbours welcome him, Edward’s assimilation and inclusion are predicated on a set of unclear, shifting, and contradictory prohibitions: don’t refuse, even if you are being exploited or are uncomfortable; don’t break the law, even if you are asked to; and, most significantly, don’t disrupt the status quo. When following these rules, Edward is constituted as ‘freak’—a figure whose presence is acceptable and useful; as a measuring-­ stick for normalcy; as an object of fascination, intrigue, and desire; as a machine of capitalist and cultural exploitation. But when Edward breaks (or is perceived to have broken) these rules, he is recast as a dangerous, violent ‘monster’ that needs to be eliminated for the social good. As the film indicates, there are strict limits imposed on people who do not fit the norm, and their place in the social order is always highly scrutinised and under threat through the media, gossip, and surveillance. However, the film also illustrates the limits of this line of critique through a medium that is itself imbued with structures of marginalisation and exploitation. The fairy/folktale framing device, which situates Kim as a narrator, pushes Edward to the periphery of his own story and troubles the reliability of scenes she is not present for. This is particularly significant in the scene when Joyce sexually assaults Edward and which forms a basis for the neighbourhood’s growing concern and distrust of him. Not only are there limits to Edward’s social inclusion, but to his narrative inclusion as well. Edward Scissorhands offers some poignant scenes of the fraught nature of inclusionist discourses, yet it faces challenges in its delivery.

CHAPTER 6

‘Blind. Deaf. Disabled. Wheelchair’: Community, History and Resistance in Jane Stemp’s Waterbound (1995)

Introduction In “Devices and Desires: Science Fiction, Fantasy and Disability in Literature for Young People” (2004), Jane Stemp, author of Waterbound, recounts a triple history: her own personal history of her relationship to science fiction and fantasy literature; a history of representations of disability in science fiction and fantasy; and, implicitly, a history of dismissal and erasure of disability and disabled representations. She recalls how “In the mid-1970s [she] found that the areas in which characters with disabilities did not appear—with a few noteworthy exceptions—were science fiction and fantasy” (para. 3, italics in original), but “[w]hen [she] did encounter disabled characters in fantasy or science fiction, the sense of recognition was so strong as to add an extra dash of reality to what were otherwise unreal situations” (para. 4). The difficulty in locating texts with explicitly disabled characters, an issue which bore Waterbound as Stemp explains, has more to do with the active exclusion and erasure of disabled people as participants in socio-political life. This concern with the erasures of disabled history is the central aspect of Stemp’s writing, in both the essay and Waterbound. She recalls:

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Holdsworth, The Government of Disability in Dystopian Children’s Texts, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52034-1_6

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The first book, so far as I remember, in which I experienced this sense—I would almost go so far as to say, this shock—of recognition, was The Chrysalids, by John Wyndham. While it shares with many science fiction scenarios an assumption that apartheid between “the norm” and “the different” will be operating in the future, at the same time it portrays the exiled caste as living their own lives with dignity, although on the edges of society. (para. 4)

Stemp’s own recognition of and with the disabled representations in The Chrysalids comes with a critical attention to the power relations articulated in the novel. Although the above quotation may suggest a criticism of science fiction’s ‘scenarios’ of ‘apartheid’, Stemp employs a similar political framework in Waterbound. While she does not explicitly note this, she admits that “Waterbound owes a certain amount of its genesis to my memories of reading The Chrysalids” (para. 4). Waterbound taps into several of the anxieties that underpin the role and power of government and religion in The Chrysalids; however, it still retains a specific focus on the disability politics of the 1990s with its emphasis on equality, human rights, and inclusion. In the world of Waterbound, two connected but distinct spaces are represented: the upper, City space, often referred to as ‘Upstream’, overseen by the bureaucratic Admin who regulates social life; and the subterranean, labyrinthine ‘Downstream’, a space where communities of disabled people, called the Waterbound, live after escaping extermination. Gem Rannesen, an Upstreamer and the narrative’s protagonist, is taken by her friend Jay Delaiah to meet the Waterbound—Jon/J2 (Jay’s brother), Mike, Theo, Sal, Robin, and Sophie, the leader of Strand Seven—and becomes politically and emotionally invested in their struggle for freedom. The histories of the Waterbound are revealed to Gem throughout the narrative, and she must come to terms with the literalised underside of Admin’s normalising and regularising society. Through active attempts at resistance, the Waterbound are ultimately given their freedom once the wider population is made aware of their existence and struggles. In these ways, Waterbound establishes a dis-topian world where disabled populations are explicitly negatively valued in order to critically explore modes and means of resistance. Waterbound follows The Chrysalids with its close focus on the role of history in the disciplining and management of individuals and communities. Through articulating the significance of minority histories and

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geographies (both personal and communal), Waterbound rescripts remembrance and excavation, both literally and figuratively, as sites of political resistance. As techniques which can de-subjugate knowledge, both acts push back against the propagandist versioning of history and the exclusionary demarcation of space deployed by Admin (and exemplified in Wyndham’s novel), enabling a destabilisation of disciplinary and biopolitical techniques of power. Like The Chrysalids (and majority of the other texts in this study), Waterbound expressly posits the young adult as the locus of these possibilities of resistance. As Elizabeth Braithwaite, Rebecca Hutton, and Alyson Miller (2012) argue, the “parents of the young people who live in the aboveground city are portrayed as physically present, yet emotionally absent” and “are exiled from their children because of fear” (95). This ‘fear’, linked directly to Admin’s techniques of surveillance and their investment in their citizen’s personal lives, make majority of the parents and other adults incapable of resistance. Subsequently, it is the young adults of the narrative, Gem, Jay, and the Waterbound, who find the courage to resist Admin’s control (97). As such, it is the de-­ subjugation of disabled histories and geographies through remembrance and excavation that the Waterbound, Gem, and eventually the citizens of Upstream can resist and fight back against the systematic discrimination of the government.

Politics and Surveillance It is the complex relationships between the politics of the Waterbound and Admin in the novel that illustrate Waterbound’s own political engagement with the disability politics of the 1990s. In exploring disability politics on both a macro- and micro-scale, Waterbound operates pedagogically, teaching young adult readers about various histories of oppression and neglect, and the use and politics of language and interpersonal engagement. While the text’s engagement with disability politics illustrates histories of oppression, it is only in juxtaposition to the heavily regulated City or Upstream that these politics stimulate a critical perspective. Admin’s deeply invasive use of surveillance technology suggests anxieties about their regulatory practices, the extent of their power over citizens, and potential sites of resistance within (and beneath) the City. The rise of computer technologies, in particular, has changed how information is accessed, used, and shared in the contexts of education, politics, and surveillance.

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The construction of Admin’s politics is predicated on a strict and anxious frugality; as Gem phrases it, the citizens of the City are “‘[l]iving between fences, always having to be careful about, quote, resources natural and human-made, because people [she] never knew or heard of weren’t” (Stemp, 1995:5). While Admin, as quoted by Gem, expresses an anxiety about resource management, particularly space and the environment, this is quickly demonstrated to be easily circumvented by the wealthy. Gem notices “in the distance a wisp of green” which means that “someone was rich enough to buy a piece of land for something as frivolous and unproductive (inside the City) as a tree. Trees belonged Outside, in the environment” (11). The presence of a single tree both undermines the spatial and environmental concerns of Admin and demonstrates the extent of class divisions within City society. Moreover, this illustrates the immediate extent to which Admin’s particular version of history is used as a propagandist technique to manage the behaviour of the City population, similar to how Waknuk officials utilise history in The Chrysalids (1955). This is taken further through Gem’s historical research for a class project on ‘Protest Songs of the Nineteenth to Twenty-First Centuries’. In researching for their project, Gem’s research partner Ness Brenault brings her a stack of old papers stolen from a recycling store. Just as water and space are considered high-priority resources for Admin, so too is paper, and any use of it is heavily monitored. On one of these pieces of paper Gem finds the words “Blind. Deaf. Disabled. Wheelchair”, which she enters into the databank, an online collection of information. She receives the responses, “  ‘now figurative use only’; ‘now figurative use only’; ‘obsolete’; ‘word not found’ ” (Stemp, 1995:9). This scene signals the erasure of disability and disability history by Admin and the role of language in such erasure. In their analysis of dystopian science fiction, Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan argue that “Language is a key weapon for the reigning dystopian power structure” (2003:5–6), and this is seen in Admin’s control over language which serves to underpin their violent regime. Additionally, after finding a paper flower floating in the stream Outside, Gem looks up maps of the water system under the City to find out where it came from. She calls up, “City history, maps, water, non-­ system” and is told “Map file outdated, still required?” (Stemp, 1995:17). While she accesses and prints a map this time, the next time she tries to, she is told “Data erased, refer Admin” and then “Previous access unauthorised, alert” (18). In addition to erasing disability history from their records, the close monitoring of online resources and information further

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articulate the extent of Admin’s management and control. By erasing information and maps, Admin actively rescripts history, geography, and the existence of people who embody a challenge to the established social system. After receiving the alert, Gem hides the map in her waistband as two Admin officers, Chris Peters and his younger protégé Morgan Smith, arrive at her house (19). Peters patronisingly asks her vague but pointed questions such as, “You been having trouble with your screen?”, “You’re doing a history project, aren’t you?”, and “Maybe hunting around for old material?” (19–20). This is furthered when Peters notices the paper flower Gem brought back from Outside. He comments it is “[r]ather a waste of paper”, and when Gem refutes this arguing that she “doesn’t think it’s wasted if it’s beautiful”, he dismisses her outright saying, “Doing philosophy too?” (20). While these questions dismiss Gem’s intelligence, especially in the implication she cannot use her databank correctly, they also demonstrate the intrusiveness of Admin’s knowledge of City citizens. Ivan Manokha observes, computer technology has radically changed the way surveillance operates. As “collected information [has become] storable, potentially perennially, as well as easily searchable and accessible” (2018:227), powerful actors can both manage that information and collect data on its usage. Their knowledge of Gem’s schoolwork and, as revealed later, how much she has printed and recycled, demonstrates how the monitoring of online spaces and Admin’s pseudo-concern with environmental conservation are closely aligned with the desire to control information. The extent of this surveillance and data collection works to inhibit (or prohibit) the development of political consciousness, individually and communally, and enabling intimidation, blackmail, and harassment by government officials (Richards, 2013). Throughout the novel it is revealed that Admin monitors a wide range of areas: schoolwork, as well as exercise quotas (Stemp, 1995:96), how many people enter and exit any given house (54), decibel levels at parties (42), the use of and recycling of paper (40), and the entrance to Downstream from Outside (136), as well as contraceptive implants for girls on their fourteenth birthday (97). While this excess of surveillance articulates an anxiety about order and control, its scope makes resistance and the liberation of the Waterbound more difficult from inside the City. Throughout the remainder of the narrative, Gem and Jay are followed and closely monitored by Morgan and Chris, respectively, which further problematises any attempts at resistance from inside the City. As such, it is only from Downstream that significant resistance against Admin is possible.

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The politics of the Waterbound differ greatly from those Upstream, most significantly in terms of disability. Through Admin’s complete erasure of disability and disabled histories, the Waterbound form a community based not simply on similar subject positions but an intersubjective and minority politics. The politics of staring, language, and assistance are all strongly discussed, with Gem learning how to engage with the Waterbound on their terms. On her initial journey Downstream, Gem is unsure of how to act faced with people she never knew existed. “[S]taring is”, suggests Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “an interrogative gesture that asks what’s going on and demands the story”, but beyond that it “creates a circuit of communication and meaning-making” (2009:3). But while “Staring is a high-stakes social interaction for everybody involved”, “Stareable people have a good deal of work to do to assert their own dignity or avoid an uncomfortable scene” (84). At one point Gem visually notices J2’s dysmelia and begins to stare, to which he responds, “I have a face too. You can look at that if you like” (Stemp, 1995:31). This aggressive response repositions Gem and her fixed line of sight. Rather than shying away from his frustration and anger, J2 pushes Gem to realise and reflect on her staring. In this space, Gem is pushed into a position of outsiderness, and she is made acutely aware of the fact that she is a culturally illiterate visitor in Waterbound space. As an Upstreamer (and implicitly nondisabled), Gem cannot fully understand or comprehend the oppression of the Waterbound, but through the Waterbound’s resistance to her inadvertent but no less potent acts of ableism she both learns and empathises. When she is introduced to the rest of Strand Seven of the Waterbound (the strand J2 is in), she recalls a memory of going to a children’s party and “the long moment in the doorway, then stepping in as if over the edge of a cliff. And everyone suddenly rushing forward to find out all there was to know about her” (51). Instead, she finds that they briefly look at her then return to what they were doing. She, somewhat disappointed, comments to Jay that “You’d think I wasn’t here”, and he responds that “Bad manners to stare when you meet new people” (51). In recalling this specific memory, Gem draws on and maps an affective experience which enables her to empathise and engage with the Waterbound rather than objectify them. The mapping of this affective memory onto her current situation signals a shift in Gem’s conceptualisation of interpersonal engagement. Significantly, the rules the Waterbound lay down for Gem are ones they also follow. This is in stark comparison to the way the law operates in the City, where wealth and social status can afford some

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advantages. While Gem expresses anxiety about receiving attention, her social privileges have developed her latent desire for it, and she and the reader begin to understand the implications of staring for the Waterbound. Assistance is a major aspect of the relationship between Gem and Jay as Upstreamers and the Waterbound. When discussing the Waterbound’s first plan to inform Upstreamers of their existence, Jay expresses anxiety and doubt due to Admin’s level of security and control (63). J2 reminds him of an agreement they have, which he then reveals to Gem as “the big rule here”. He continues, “Help isn’t wanted until it’s asked for. That applies to you and Jay and Kate and Bill [the only other people who know about the Waterbound] more than to the rest of us, because we understand ourselves and you don’t. However hard you try, you don’t” (64). This rule is valuable as it disrupts discourses that structure nondisabled people as superior, and as agential providers of needed assistance, to disabled people. As the impact of unwanted assistance can range from a loss of self-assuredness to potential physical danger, respecting the autonomy of disabled people is paramount to respectful relationships. In their comprehensive analysis of strategies around assistance, Dawn O. Braithwaite and Nancy J. Eckstein found that “dealing with help numerous times each day, especially unwanted help, can be a negative experience for persons with disabilities and managing these interactions requires a measure of patience and grace under pressure on their part” (2003:18–19). There are several instances throughout the rest of the novel where Gem desires to ‘help’ but must remember her outsider status, though there are few times she is asked to assist. After going for a swim, Sophie invites Gem to help her into her chair (Stemp, 1995:71). Although this perplexes Gem, she does it and learns how and when assistance is allowed. J2 and Sophie note her uncomfortableness and make a joke at her expense, leaving her feeling excluded. However, she learns from this too and begins to respect the boundaries and rules laid down by the Waterbound. Feeling left out she notes, “But that’s what I am, she thought: an outsider, an Upstreamer, I just have to hope they’ll invite me in one day” (72). In accepting her outsider status and paying attention to the Downstream rules and conventions, Gem is able to better understand and engage with the Waterbound. The use of language is also demonstrated to be significant to how the Waterbound define themselves and communicate. Language is a key component in broader political and social discourses, and how particular groups are spoken and written about informs how people engage, advocate, and care for others. Conversely, dismissive or negative terms or

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phrases can “evoke distress and promulgate a perception of disability as intrinsically negative” (Andrews et al., 2019:113). When Gem first meets Mel Talmann, the daughter of her former neighbours and the maker of the paper flower, she asks Jay “What’s wrong with her?” He aggressively responds, “And what precisely would you call wrong? … With her, or Sophie, or Mike? They are who they are, and wrong or right is none of your business” (Stemp, 1995:50). This response, like staring, restates Gem’s outsiderness and her Upstreamer ignorance and privilege. The determinative dimensions of a right/wrong binary is fully rejected by the Waterbound (and Jay), and Gem comes to realise the falsity of it. Gem learns the full impact language can have after her friend Ness visits the Waterbound late in the novel. Gem and J2 find her and decide to take her Downstream. When she is introduced to Mel whose room’s floor is filled with paper flowers, she calls her crazy (149). Mel momentarily stops folding, then continues as Ness, Gem, and J2 leave. However, later it is revealed that Mel has left and gone Downstream beyond, that is, beyond the borders of Downstream and into the stream, a euphemism for suicide (152). Given the proximity of this interaction to Mel’s suicide, it is implied that Ness’s comment was the deciding factor for Mel. Like Aunt Harriet’s suicide in The Chrysalids (discussed in Chap. 4), Mel’s suicide is a catalyst to action for others. The differing politics of Upstream and Downstream both serve to manage and regulate Gem. Through methods such as surveillance, both physical and online, social conditioning, tactics of manipulation and intimidation, and rigid social hierarchies, Admin maintains and exercises its power over the City citizens. The Waterbound instead use secrecy and social rules to consistently remind Gem of her outsider, and privileged, status. In doing so, the Waterbound do not simply make her entry into Downstream difficult but force Gem to recognise their humanity in the face of their oppression. The Waterbound wield the power to decide who is allowed to enter their community and communal spaces and the terms of their inclusion. Gem must learn the impact of language, assistance, and staring, and the sometimes disastrous effects they can have. In having Gem learn these lessons, the novel pedagogically engages readers, promoting and discussing significant aspects of disability rights and disability studies. The narrative takes this one step further, imbricating these politics within both macro- and micro-histories of oppression.

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Histories History in Waterbound forms a significant aspect of how Gem and the implied young adult reader understand the worlds of the narrative. As Admin has erased disability and disabled histories, as discussed previously with the erasure of language, the only discussions of these histories in the novel are from the perspective of the Waterbound. The origins of the Waterbound and their stories articulate a rich culture and vibrant community Downstream, furthered by their own personal narratives of how they became Waterbound. Conversely, history becomes a political mechanism Upstream, controlled and utilised by Admin to demarcate spaces and isolate its citizens. As Baccolini and Moylan argue: the process of taking control over the means of language, representation, memory, and interpellation is a crucial weapon and strategy in moving dystopian resistance from an initial consciousness to an action that leads to a climactic event that attempts to change the society. (2003:6)

By taking control of these areas, the Waterbound are able to take collective action to fight for liberation. Despite the fact that many of the families Upstream have a family member Downstream, there is never any interpersonal discussions of loss from the citizens of the City. While some characters have positive memories and relationships with their loved ones and family members, others have mixed feelings towards absent parents and siblings. However, these histories complicate how politics within the novel play out, especially in the interconnections of varied personal and family histories and the politics of oppression in the narrative. After discovering the water-systems map, Jay takes Gem Downstream to meet the Waterbound. Sophie informs Gem of the origins of the Waterbound: ‘In the days when it all began,’ Sophie said in a dry ironical voice, ‘which was a great while ago, they – and they weren’t called Admin in those days – realised that there wasn’t enough credit around for the City to run the medical service. So they held a meeting, or cast a vote, or maybe they just flipped a coin (it was that long ago, they still had coins as well as credit) to decide whether what credit there was should be spent on normal people making a normal contribution to City life, or on people who might not be able to contribute to a life that was designed against them, and who were in any case too young to be allowed to put their point of view. Perhaps I

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s­ implify’ – the irony deepened – ‘but since they in the City were all, heaven help us, normal, guess who lost. That was the Ruling. Ever since then, babies like us officially die when they are born. The parents are told their baby can’t be saved. Unofficially – if the baby is one of the lucky ones – it ends up down here’. (Stemp, 1995:52)

This act of remembrance by Sophie forces Gem to radically reconsider her previous assumptions about Admin’s disciplinary and biopolitical acts. By recalling an alternative history to that purported by Admin, exposing Admin’s deception, and articulating a history of genocidal practice, Sophie enacts political resistance. Although Gem is made aware of Admin’s surveillance and manipulation of information, the scope of broader governmental oppression of disabled people is fully realised. The most significant point Sophie makes is about Admin’s rescripting of medical practice. As Sophie articulates, it is through political intervention in the medical institution that Admin (and the previous government) can so thoroughly control the population. While financial reasons are given for the reconstruction of the medical institution, there is a clear delineation of normality occurring. To shore up the borders of a normalising society, those who cannot be easily normalised—disabled citizens—are executed. The parents of these children are either implicitly ashamed and never discuss loss or are complicit in the enactment of the Ruling. This then complicates easy delineations of enemies/allies for the Waterbound within the novel. Sophie’s revelation that it is the structure of society that disables them closely aligns with the social model of disability that found ground in the 1990s. The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA) defines a person as having a disability “if he has a physical or mental impairment which has a substantial and long-term adverse effect on his ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities” (UK) c 50, s 1. As Sophie critiques, the idea of ‘normal day-to-day activities’ is dependent on the idea of a ‘normal’ person, with little consideration of context and environment (Gooding, 1996). Subsequently, legislation such as the Ruling or the DDA is written from this ‘normal’ perspective, which actively excludes and renders voiceless the people it attempts to represent. In normalising societies, these constructs serve to produce normal/abnormal subjects to categorise, manage, and discipline. Waterbound takes this critique a step further, aligning these legislative ‘representations’ with histories of extermination and internment. The denial and erasure of these histories by Admin reflect the same histories in the real world and their continuation in the 1990s despite

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attempts at affirmative legislation. The effect that this cycle of disenfranchisement has taken on the Waterbound as individuals and community is reflected in Sophie’s dry and ironic tone. The need to explain a history that has been erased by Upstreamers like Gem, both knowingly and unknowingly, is evidently a source of both profound frustration and sadness. As J2 explains later, the Waterbound ‘put on a show’ to avoid pity or hide disappointment from Gem and Jay as outsiders (Stemp, 1995:132). The speech is continued by Robin who notes: ‘And before the Ruling … about twenty years before – it was a long slow business, so slow that nobody could be quite sure what was happening until it was too late – there was the Decision. They balked at ‘disposing of’ the adults who were like us … So once upon a time, as a reward, or consolation, or maybe something else entirely, those adults were allowed to retire, and go to City Two before their time. We know this, because of the story. Admin may know, but has no records.’ ‘What we don’t know,’ Sophie said, ‘is whether those who were sent had any choice in the matter. They were, as far as we know, never harmed, but some of them, who maybe suspected something, chose to come back.’ ‘They travelled by night,’ Robin went on, ‘and in winter, because they thought it might be too late come spring. Some of them died in the snow, and some – it is rumoured – were picked off by what was to become Admin. But some of them found their way Downstream, here, and were in time to take care of the first babies saved from the Ruling.’ (52–53)

As Robin and Sophie relay, the former government may have manipulated older disabled people to ‘retiring’ to City Two. Whether or not the people sent ever arrived at City Two, where Jay and J2’s mother often goes to perform as a singer, is uncertain; however, the return of some to Downstream positions the former government as untrustworthy. The genocidal impulses of Admin’s normalising society complicate easy delineations of complicity. As so much of this history is unclear, withheld, and erased, understanding exactly what has happened becomes impossible. Subsequently, it is left to those who have not yet become complicit in the network of medical management (those who have not had children but have a degree of agency, particularly young adults) who can affect change. In response and outrage to these histories, Gem suggests leaving through the door in Jay’s room; however, as Jay points out, the level of surveillance makes this impossible. Mike adds that “The real problem … is fear. That’s all. Ours, theirs. If they can push us down here once they can

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do it again” (54). Fear, then, becomes the guiding principle with which the Waterbound can make Admin and the former government’s actions intelligible. But given the rumours above, the violence and manipulation of Admin and former governments, coupled with their excessive surveillance, make resistance both frightening and difficult. Sophie and Robin’s recitation of the history of the Waterbound forces Gem to reconsider the foundation of Upstream society. However, it is another recounted history that makes her completely reject Admin’s authority. After Gem delivers the map to the Waterbound, they begin to explore new areas. On one expedition, J2, Sal, and Gem discover a wall of cement, revealed to be a ‘tomb’ from 60 years before. Perturbed by J2 and Sal’s distraught response, Gem enquires about who is buried inside. J2 hesitates, saying “I don’t particularly want to tell you. It’s our story” but, after Gem’s insistence, informs her of the history of Ken and Gina: ‘Oh well,’ he said. ‘You saw the date. It was then. They say Ken was – oh, thirty I suppose. He was deaf. Gina was a few years younger, she was expecting their baby. They were desperate to have the baby Upstream, they thought they could make sure somehow that the baby at least had a life there.’ J2 hesitated, and went on. ‘Ken was digging through in a deserted place. They did tell a few friends; not enough, or they might have been stopped from going. And we can only guess, someone must have found out Ken was digging. He broke through to Outside, and went back down to help Gina. And then, when they were crawling through—’ J2 stopped again. ‘You saw the cement. So did their friends, but it was too late’. (78)

In response to this story, Gem is horrified and deeply disturbed and has a difficult time understanding how or why this violent suppression and cruel execution could have happened. J2 explains to her that this reality of violence and the story of Ken and Gina is part of why the Waterbound are hesitant about leaving Downstream. By finally understanding the oppressed history of the Waterbound, and the extent of force used to suppress them, Gem begins to fully realise and reject Upstream society and its foundations, which is literally and figuratively built upon the erasure of disabled people. While a large part of the Waterbound’s history is troubling, Sophie excavates and constructs two encyclopaedias of disability history—one of facts and one of opinions. The encyclopaedia of facts contains “anything [they] might need to know” (58), including assistive device instructions

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and schematics (59). While the encyclopaedia of facts is described as “a pile of large pages held together by a piece of string threaded through one corner”, the encyclopaedia of opinions is “pinned, pasted, fastened somehow, all across the wall” (59). Significantly, the ordered and contained nature of ‘facts’ juxtaposed with the ever-growing, sprawling wall of ‘opinions’ articulates long-standing histories of talking about disability and disabled people. Gem notices the paper she had that began her research into disability is present among the ‘opinions’, as well as excerpts from several different texts. These ‘opinions’, “[s]ome in favour, some definitely not”, are nonetheless a positive experience in their current state of erasure, demonstrated in J2 noting, “[i]t is nice to feel that once our existence was at least acknowledged” (58). Through these encyclopaedias, Stemp demonstrates that “disabled people themselves play an active role in both creating and re-creating the various meanings that get attached to experiences with impairment” (Burch & Rembis, 2014:2). However, for Gem, having an entire new linguistic and cultural history to consider and connect to her own is difficult. Her privileged Upstreamer status becomes complicated by her new Downstream knowledge of histories, and slowly Gem’s identity becomes unstable. Not only is she complicit in a society that both exterminates and erases disability, but she becomes personally affected by this through both her romance with J2 and the revelation of her older sister Alice was Waterbound (Stemp, 1995:109) but has since gone Downstream beyond (153). The Waterbound are not simply a community but also individuals with differing histories and experiences. After being scolded by Jay, Gem talks to J2 about “what’s wrong with [Mel]” (56). J2 responds, “Well, don’t put it like that for a start”, then proceeds to tell Gem Mel’s personal history: ‘As it happens, there is nothing wrong with Mel; not physically. She was born Upstream, and if she’d stayed there all would most likely have been well.’ ‘But what happened, then?’ ‘She was born with a strawberry birthmark across her face,’ J2 said slowly. ‘It looked horrific, but it was going to vanish in a few years. Kate Avrassian [the Upstreamer doctor the Waterbound rely on for medical attention and the current Upstream ally who sends babies Downstream] tried to tell that to Mel’s mother, but she obviously didn’t believe her. Mel was found on the edge of the water a few days later. She was quite safe, she’d been packed in one of those safety floating cradles’. (57)

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Although the Waterbound have become a close-knit community, Mel’s story articulates the turbulent history of many of them. The biblical link between Mel’s arrival and the story of Moses is acknowledged in the text with Sophie, who has a similar story, calling them ‘Moses babies’ (73). This personal history entwined with the story of Moses is significant as it underlines themes of necessary disconnection from family to avoid genocide as well as themes of oppressed people being liberated. The extent of Admin’s power, as implied in Mel’s personal history, is far reaching and deeply internalised in the City citizens. Despite Kate’s assurances that the birthmark will fade, Mel’s mother instead decides it is a better course of action (for her or for the baby is debatable) to send Mel down the river. The conversation that ensues indicates there is no clarity if Mel’s mother knew whether sending Mel down the river would save or dispose of her child (57). This level of uncertainty complicates Mel’s and other Moses babies’ memory of and relationship with their parents. Whether the knowledge of Downstream is common is unknown, but other parents seem to be genuinely surprised at their children’s continued life later in the narrative. Nonetheless, this history has a drastic effect on Mel: Mel was as happy as the rest of us, as far as that goes. Until the birthmark faded, and then someone told her how she came down here. After that, slowly, she shut herself in, or shut us out. We have to take care of her, but so what? We all look after each other. (57)

The effect of this new knowledge of how she came Downstream causes Mel to withdraw. Significantly, while the birthmark superficially signifies her as different, it is her mother’s actions that result in psychological and emotional trauma and Mel’s introversion. This then complicates Mel’s sense of self within the Waterbound community; not only has her visual marker, which garnered her entry Downstream, vanished, but she is so affected by her own history that she cannot engage as she once did. While for others the question ‘what’s wrong with you’ is part of an identifiably ableist rhetoric that they can push back against by, as Sophie puts it, “flashing [their] differences around” (72), Mel cannot. The internalisation of Admin’s control and surveillance not only affects Mel’s mother, but also other Upstreamer adults, as is revealed in J2’s personal history. J2 and Jay’s personal histories are deeply imbricated, not simply because they are brothers but because Jay’s actions irrecoverably impact J2’s life. When Gem and Jay spend a night Outside, Gem asks how Jay knew J2 was

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his brother, and he reveals he first lived in the City for six years (89). Wealth enabled the family to avoid prenatal testing and to have a private home birth; however, J2 was actually one of two twins, the other having died. Bethan, one of Kate’s predecessors “registered a single stillbirth” (90), which meant there was no record of J2. Strong efforts to keep J2 a secret were derailed by their father’s position in government, and Jay confesses to Gem that he believes this was ultimately his own fault, explaining: ‘I was born a year after J2. I always wanted him to be with me, do what I did. His arm—’ Jay’s voice faltered. ‘I thought maybe lots of people were like that.’ His grip tightened on Gem’s hand. ‘I was five. It was a hot day, I wanted J2 to come into the garden.’ Gem’s fingers were almost numb, but she kept quiet. ‘He was always so willing to please. Heaven help us, we never thought. Someone saw us from one of the high-risers and reported Ma that afternoon … I didn’t realise what I’d done. There weren’t hundreds of callers. Only someone came next day and took J2, to the hospital Ma said, he was ill. And the next day …’ Jay hugged his knees to his chest. ‘They really did say he was ill. And then they told Ma they hadn’t been able to save him. Whether she believed them … she never said anything else.’ (90)

The internalisation of Admin’s rhetoric and the extent of their power in City citizens are mirrored by Jay’s own internalisation of responsibility. While Jay overtly blames himself, he implicitly places blame on Admin and the manipulation of City citizens and situations. The coded means of exterminating disabled subjects, through a fabricated medical intervention, articulates and reinscribes histories of violence against disabled people by the medical institution and professionals. Significantly, however, this story is only partly about J2. Largely, Jay co-opts the story of J2’s personal history and makes it his own, rendering J2 more like a pet than a brother. In focalising the story through his perspective, ‘…what I did’, ‘I thought…’, ‘I wanted…’, and taking the burden of the situation, Jay further silences J2. This continues as he recounts how he went to the hospital and Kate took him Downstream to see J2 (91). Kate even organises ‘therapy’ sessions for him which are a cover so he can go see J2. But this is complicated when Gem hears J2’s side of the story. After hearing of Jay’s later betrayal of the Waterbound, J2 is incredulous, telling Gem how when Jay was born he “felt as if he was the twin, come back” (144). However, when Gem tells J2 that Jay’s reasoning was because of his unrequited desire for Gem and jealousy over their

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relationship, J2 recounts that “He always did go into a raging fury when we were small, if I had something he didn’t” (145). Through this revelation, Jay’s character and version of the story become contentious. This rearticulation of J2’s personal history with Jay, accompanied by Jay’s betrayal, repositions Jay as selfish, jealous, and vindictive, which throws further doubt on his account of events. Additionally, this is coded in Jay’s renaming of his brother, from Jon to J2, positioning him as the secondary Jay. In doing so, Jay takes the ‘first-born’ status from Jon, evidently still significant for him even though Jon’s falsified death and removal to Downstream already solidify this. The re-locating and rewriting of collective and personal histories is a significant step for the Waterbound in creating and understanding themselves. This process of rewriting and relearning histories is, on the one hand, a meaningful resistance to Admin’s attempts at erasure; however, on the other, this can have long-lasting and damaging effects for individuals. Through several retellings of the histories of the Waterbound, collectively and individually, Gem and Jay are not only made to question the politics of Upstream, but they are also enabled to resist Admin authority and join the fight against the oppression of the Waterbound as allies.

Resistances Throughout the novel resistance is a common theme, from the Waterbound’s two attempts at resistance against Admin, to Gem’s resistance against the unwanted advances of Jay and Morgan Smith, and the radical nature of her and J2’s relationship. All these examples of resistance are directly informed by both Admin and/or Waterbound politics and the collective and personal histories of the Waterbound. Moreover, the narrative combines these events and, in doing so, juxtaposes them to the point that J2 and Gem’s freedom to be in a relationship is presented as having the same stakes as the Waterbound’s fight for freedom against Admin. When Gem delivers the map of the waterways, Sophie formulates a plan for escape. The details of the plan are kept secret from both Gem and Jay, “even after Jay brought Sophie the map of the City sound lines that she had asked for” (69). After Gem finds out that Sophie needs four ‘Ahlfor’s keys’, which operate as electronic skeleton keys, she manipulates Ness into acquiring them for her (118). By delivering the keys to Sophie, Gem earns enough trust to be told the plan. The Waterbound’s first plan is to disseminate information to the City citizens via sound lines, revealing their

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existence and Admin’s violence and lies. In doing so, the Waterbound believe change will be enacted and that other Upstreamers will be similarly angered by Admin’s actions. However, they decide that this must be done on Upstreamer terms, that they must be on their ‘best behaviour’. Although their plan suggests hope, there is an implicit tension in how best to communicate their message to ensure resistance and liberation. As they are revealing systematic and institutionalised discrimination, a history buried by the Upstreamer governments, past and present, there is a concern about if and how this message will be received. For them to be liberated, there is an intuition that this eugenics history must be communicated in a palatable manner that can appeal to the City citizens while not alienating them by imbricating them with the oppressive state practices. As the plan moves forward and reaches its final act, Sophie practises her speech which Gem only hears the last part. She finishes with the following quotation from Nabil Shaban’s The Fifth Gospel (1990): You have no need of miracles. You are complete as you are. God gave the fish of the sea fins, and the birds of the air wings. Yet man, who hath not these things, thinks no less of himself. Verily I say unto you, you are not impotent because you are different: you are impotent because you have believed the lies that the world has told you. Your differences are God’s gift for the everlasting enrichment of the world. I will cure no one: for I wish not to sow the seeds of discontent: I wish not to sow the seeds of self-hate. Love the light in thyself. That is enough. (129)

The use of this quotation, although attempting to marry disability and Christianity in an affirmative manner, nonetheless relies on some problematic ideologies. The alignment of disabled people with finned fish and winged birds suggests that these ‘differences’ are natural. While this is true for some of the Waterbound, and some disabled people, this naturalising rhetoric displaces people who have an acquired disability. This further isolates characters like Mel, who, through their experiences, do not necessarily fit this limited model. While the rest of the narrative positions and understands disability as a form of oppression that, on one level, is socially constituted and applied to people with bodies, behaviours, and minds that differ from a rigid norm, this passage resituates disability and powerlessness with the individual. It implies that resistance to ideology is easy, that it is a matter of no longer believing ‘the lies that the world has told’. The next line instead repositions disabled people as objects of the world that

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exist as examples of God’s magnificence rather than subjects with their own personal beliefs, histories, and desires. Sophie’s appeal to the citizens of the City attempts to position them to accept the Waterbound’s ‘differences’ as divinely ‘natural’ and utilises religious discourse to persuade the Upstreamers rather than using social justice or pointing to Admin’s lies. However, this plan does not work as Ness has, at Jay’s request, coded one of the Ahlfor’s keys to shut down the power grid when used. As mentioned previously, his reasoning for betraying the Waterbound is his jealousy of J2 because of his romance with Gem, who repeatedly refuses Jay’s advances throughout the novel, which become increasingly aggressive (124). Significantly, it is directly after Jay forcibly kisses Gem and she physically resists him (124) that Jay instructs Ness to code the Ahlfor’s key to disrupt the plan. Without the aid of technology, the Waterbound opt to attempt liberation by reusing the paper flowers Mel had made, and writing their names and personal stories on them before sending, they send them off as a last-ditch attempt. The choice to reuse Mel’s flowers as vessels for the personal and communal history of the Waterbound is another act of remembrance and political resistance. The next morning Jay returns after avoiding Downstream because of his betrayal. He informs them of the success of their venture: “You picked your day for it … First real sunshine for weeks, and half the City out enjoying it … You know that sandbank about a kilometre down? Lots of them came around there. People were unfolding them and reading the messages” (157). Soon people start entering Downstream looking for family members, including Mel’s mother. A majority of the Waterbound are reunited with family, and others are taken in by Kate and other Upstreamers, until only Gem, J2, Jay, and Sophie remain.

Closure Although the return of long-lost family for both the Waterbound and Upstreamers is the deliverance of freedom for both groups, this is achieved despite the tenuous family history some, if not most, have. The degree of complicity that all adults in the narrative have with Admin is never fully explored nor is the long history of genocide fully addressed. Instead, this resolution reinscribes separate familial dynamics over the communal structure that enabled the Waterbound to survive in exile. While the

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background and secondary characters find their closure in a return to the City, Sophie and Jay decide to go Downstream beyond to see what is out there, and Gem and J2 go to resolve the prophecy of the Waterbound, that the suffering of the Waterbound would only be over if someone climbs out the Upstream way (out under City Bridge) (165). The novel ends with Gem looking down, already having scaled the wall out, to J2 as he begins to climb. While this ending suggests possibility and symbolically articulates how far disability rights still must go, there is still a large amount unresolved, especially when it comes to personal and communal histories. What becomes apparent is that for the Waterbound to be included in City society and move “towards the light, the way a flower grows” (167), there must be a communal forgetting. Just like in Edward Scissorhands, normative society cannot be held responsible for their actions. Instead, it becomes the responsibility of the Waterbound to forgive histories of oppression, genocide, and exclusion as payment for entry. In this sense the Waterbound (and, more largely, disabled people) are immediately interpellated as consumers, needing to pay a social, cultural, and physical cost of memory, history, and experience to be included in normalising society. Through its teenage protagonists Waterbound enables a critical engagement with the possibilities of social change and the culpability of adults imbricated in discriminatory systems. Throughout the novel, the remembrance and excavation of minority history is shown to be a powerful form of political resistance. Additionally, Waterbound articulates the significant need for disabled communities to be self-determining and to mediate the terms of their own social engagement with nondisabled people. However, like Edward Scissorhands, the novel’s closure problematically reinscribes normalising discourses which come at social, cultural, and physical costs. The return to family and inclusion into the society responsible for their subterranean lives erases histories of oppression. As a result, the novel closes without drastic social change which would value disabled lives, instead ending with disabled people having to be responsible for demonstrating their worth. The 1990s were an important time in social and political reconfigurations of disability. While rights movements throughout the 1970s and 1980s pushed for changes in perception, language, and access to economic, social, political, and cultural arenas, it was not until the 1990s that governments in the United States, United Kingdom, China, Australia,

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New Zealand, and Zimbabwe adopted anti-discrimination laws,1 however, in regard to a limited area of social life.2 However, due to the difficulty in changing public perception, due in part to the long history of negative and ableist representations of disability, the efficacy of these changes depend on a case-by-case basis. While this demonstrates an increase in the visibility and acknowledgement of disability-specific issues, the actual benefits of any of these must be considered in tandem with cultural products. Narratives such as Edward Scissorhands and Waterbound complexly engage with disability politics and, in several ways, present alternative and powerful perspectives regarding stereotypes, neoliberal inclusionism, and alternative models of geography and history. However, the uncertainty in the closures of both texts speaks to larger uncertainties regarding disability rights in both the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1990s. These anxieties and uncertainties do not vanish in the new millennium, but the landscape of disability rights changes dramatically. With broader austerity measures emerging post-global financial crisis and a further entrenchment of neoliberal individualisation, we see more emphasis on self-determination and autonomy at the expense of community.

1  Legislation in Japan and Canada which operate to give legal social protection to disabled people against discrimination were adopted in 1970 and 1985, respectively. Japan’s legislation was amended in 1993. 2  Several other nations have laws prior to 1990 which protect disabled people; however, as Isabelle Chopin and Catharina Germaine-Sahl (2013) note in relation to 28 EU member states, the EU candidates the FYR of Macedonia, Turkey, and Iceland, as well as 2 EEA countries, Norway and Liechtenstein, “these stem from the context of social security legislation rather than anti-discrimination law” (21).

CHAPTER 7

‘This magic keeps me alive, but it’s making me crazy!’: Amputation, Madness, and Control in Adventure Time (2009–2018)

Introduction Unlike the prior periods under consideration, the 2010s is still a somewhat uncertain period. Due to its proximity to the current moment, it is challenging to conceptualise it as history. From the impact of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) to Donald Trump’s US Presidency to Brexit, the 2010s was a period of major political, economic, social, and cultural crises. The GFC set the stage for the early years of the decade with ongoing economic crises in several nations, while others consolidated their power, and antiestablishment and anticapitalist protests across the world. The resultant ‘austerity’ discourse served to shore up the institutions responsible for the crisis while making “the lives of ordinary … people more vulnerable and precarious” (McRuer, 2018:1). As Robert McRuer demonstrates throughout Crip Times (2018), these new political and economic formations that emerged at this time had direct impacts on disabled people worldwide and, through passing these responsibilities on to citizens, produced conditions that could cause and amplify disability, illness, and mental health crises. But as life became more precarious for people, representation emerged as a key battleground.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Holdsworth, The Government of Disability in Dystopian Children’s Texts, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52034-1_7

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Throughout the decade (and into the 2020s), there have been calls for representation to be more inclusive and to speak to a range of experiences. As Richard Sandell and Jocelyn Dodd summarise, “[t]here has long been a sense within the disability rights movement and amongst disability scholars that representation matters” (2010:3). Representations of disability have, of course, been varied over history but have often been negative. However, some have argued that the sensibilities that led to the demise of [negative] images … have paved the way for alternatives that … have done little to lend support to the reconceptualization of disability fought for by the disability rights movement. (6)

While representation is important, by centring representational politics as the issue par excellence, neoliberal capitalism is reinscribed as the means through which identity, community, and the self are conceivable. Combined with the new ‘golden age of television’, the wide accessibility of the internet, and the intensification of mass media, consumer, communication, and social media cultures, the 2010s saw a new era of neoliberalism take precedence, one which is continuing to expand today. More than ever, identity is tied to consumerism through representation. This then speaks to the value in crip readings, particularly in ways that move “beyond the cultural signs of disability that are identified and made useful for neoliberalism” (McRuer, 2018:174). Rather than buying into neoliberal representational politics, and the idea that any or more representation equals progress, a crip reading approach can unearth the limitations of these discourses. This chapter and the following one take up this issue of neoliberal representational politics in, respectively, two distinct and dominant media forms for young audiences: animated television and the young adult novel. Both pivot from the ‘medical model’, whereby disability is a flaw or fault with the individual, often considering social and familial contexts in how disability is produced and in which it functions. In doing so, these texts figure into an emerging focus on trauma and mental health, particularly in post-apocalyptic scenarios, something often overlooked in dystopian narratives. While disability is a clear and present feature of both texts, the politics therein still rely on negative and normalising discourses.

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Screening Disability in Adventure Time The text analysed in this chapter is the cartoon series, Adventure Time, which, in both its narrative content and structure, resists traditional conceptualisations of children’s media. Across its ten seasons it has engaged with a range of themes, such as adventure, love, relationships, trauma, parental abandonment, history, and identity. Through using comedy to convey complex emotional and philosophical points, Adventure Time has gained a multi-generational following as well as winning several awards including six Primetime Emmy Awards. As Lev Grossman in his TIME interview with Pendleton Ward, the show’s creator, phrases it, “Adventure Time is a lot darker and more complex than you’d expect from a show where some of the characters are literally made of candy” (2014:51). However, the show’s meditations on these ‘darker’ and ‘more complex’ themes have raised concerns about its suitability for younger audiences. Parenting advice sites such as Common Sense Media (Ashby n.d.) and the Australian Council on Children and the Media (20 October 2012) offer reviews and recommendations for age-appropriate viewing due to the show’s use of violence and often frightening visuals. Other reviewers have also noted similar ‘lines’ to be drawn in Adventure Time’s content. Larry Bartleet lists “11 ‘Adventure Time’ Moments That Are 100% Not For Kids” (30 September 2016), Remy Carreiro questions “Has Adventure Time Gotten Too Dark” (12 August 2013), and Jennifer Luxton suggests that “ ‘Adventure Time’ might not be the right show for kids” (27 March 2013), demonstrated in the level of censorship in different international contexts.1 The show follows the adventures of Finn, the ‘last’ human, and his adoptive older brother Jake, a magic dog, on the continent of Ooo. Ooo is the site of several kingdoms, home to a plethora of nonhuman and anthropomorphised characters. In the show, this is epitomised in the range of royalty introduced throughout the narrative, such as Princess Bubblegum, the Breakfast Princesses, Lumpy Space Princess, Flame Princess, Ghost Princess, and the Ice King. Due to the extensive number of kingdoms and the complex history of Ooo itself, sites of power become 1  This is noted on fan sites, but little has been said in other contexts. For a list of censored content see: http://adventuretime.wikia.com/wiki/Censorship_of_Adventure_Time

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complicated in Adventure Time. In having varied sites of power, sometimes contested, the roles of disciplinary and bio-power can be difficult to pinpoint. While majority of the episodes are focalised through Finn and Jake, their relationships with other characters and their personal narratives offer an array of critical commentaries. This results in a disjointed but connected narrative where one narrative arc may extend over seasons with unrelated (or seemingly unrelated) episodes in between. This results in a narrative that can be difficult to comprehend and to analyse due to its often convoluted and sprawling story arcs. Furthermore, while majority of episodes conclude a smaller storyline, some end abruptly with no immediate continuation or resolution in later episodes. Due to these large story arcs and its resistance to easy resolutions, the show maintains a light comedic tone while exploring more difficult and troubling themes and character histories over a long period. In his chapter on the series, Elijah Siegler reads this narrative complexity in relation to longer histories of mythologising, particularly through the show’s “Eliadian mythic themes” (2017:75). Like Siegler, many others have noted the philosophical and intertextual influences on/in the show from Lovecraftian cosmic horror (Tandoğan, 2020), Nietzsche’s ‘eternal return’ (Thomas, 2021), interrogations of the show’s depiction of justice (Wasylak, 2014), and subversive usages of cuteness (Czemiel, 2017). Through this structure and preoccupation with philosophical themes, Adventure Time explores challenging and existential ideas in more complex ways than its 10- to 12-minute episode length would typically allow. Adventure Time’s core cast broadens traditional conceptualisations of what animated characters can be. All are anthropomorphised, but their bodies range from different types of food to natural elements to animals to machines and even combinations of these. In this way, Adventure Time engages in representing, as Stacy Alaimo suggests, the ‘trans-corporeal’. Alaimo argues that by “[i]magining human corporeality as trans-­ corporeality, in which the human is always intermeshed with the more-­ than-­human world, underlines the extent to which the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment’ ” (2010:2). While a large proportion of the characters are, ostensibly, ‘unnatural’ (especially the candy people), trans-corporealities between humans and the environment are most prevalent in Adventure Time’s explorations of disability. However, these representations tend to be also closely tied to themes of trauma, particularly parental abuse and troubled family relationships.

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Adventure Time, like all mass media produced by adults for child consumers, is a disciplinary and biopolitical technology that socialises its viewership. The show is inevitably, no matter how transgressive or progressive its depictions are, encoded with hegemonic understandings of disability. Eric Tribunella’s analysis of trauma in American children’s literature notes the disciplinary function of disability in children’s texts. He explains that “trauma works to transform the child-protagonists and … the child-reader in ways that are culturally valued” (2010:xii). In understanding the representation of trauma in children’s literature in this way, Tribunella positions children’s literature, and these representations specifically, as disciplinary and biopolitical technologies. He explains: Trauma is therefore represented in them [children’s texts] as beneficial, a kind of inoculation by which the toxicity of loss is introduced into the life of the child in order to help the child develop a resistance to extratextual realities, both the extremely damaging experiences we call traumatic and the more minutely but cumulatively oppressive banalities of life. That these texts are meant to discipline children and to induce their transition into adulthood seems clear, but what kind of adult are they meant to produce…? (xii)

As such, trauma in children’s texts has several consequences in relation to representations of disability: to discipline young people into a specific way of thinking about and engaging with disability and disabled people. This contemporary turn to trauma signals just how vital discourses of disability have become to contemporary lived experience and, in particular, how media has become an important means for exploring and understanding traumatic experiences and responses. This investment in trauma as topic and theme, particularly when coupled with more explicit manifestations of disability, demonstrates an ongoing political interest in dis-topian representations that needs critical exploration. By and large, scholarly interest in the series has centred on the show’s depictions of gender, focusing on gender diversity (Jane, 2015; Olson & Reinhard, 2017; Walsh, 2020; Sandercock, 2023) and gender stereotypes (Leslie, 2015) as key areas where the series develops engaging, complex, and interesting stories, “creating new, more expansive models of being and social interaction” (Valentín, 2019:175). This diversity in gender representation is by no means the only way Adventure Time showcases a wide variety of lived experiences. These are sometimes made explicit (such as the depiction of body types, some queer relationships, or different

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languages being spoken), and sometimes through metaphor, however, as examined by Al Valentín (2019), these still do have limitations. Disability does have a substantial presence within Adventure Time with multiple characters being embraced by viewers as reflective of disabled experience (Elliot, 2013; Webb, 2014; Lady Geek Girl, 2014; Figa, 2015), yet there has been very little scholarly engagement with these representations. Valentín offers some evaluation of Finn’s transhumeral amputation and the Ice King’s madness (2019:201–3); however, much more can be said about the function of trauma, history, and power in both these cases, as this chapter will demonstrate. Sandercock, while focusing on variant depictions of gender in the series, signals the narrative (and historical) connections between gender diversity, pathologisation, and institutionalisation (2023:94–8). As mentioned above, this chapter focuses on two of the show’s main characters, Finn and the Ice King. Finn is the central protagonist, and his personal history of abandonment and trauma is consistently a focus of the narrative and affects how he perceives and understands himself and the world. In one particular narrative arc, Finn discovers his long-lost father and, in the process, has his arm torn off. Adventure Time’s navigation of acquired disability complicates ideas of what children’s media can represent; however, in doing so it relies on problematic scripts of disability. Similarly, the Ice King, who is often positioned as antagonist, has a complex history that interconnects with the history of Ooo. His actions are regarded by Finn and Jake as villainous, especially his consistent kidnapping of princesses, but through revelation of his history these compulsions are contextualised, and perceptions of him change for both Finn and Jake and for audiences. Ice King’s actions are closely tied to his growing madness, the effect of his Ice Crown which gives him magical powers. In considering the role of disability in Adventure Time, trans-corporeality and trauma become integral aspects of representations of disability in the series.

“I Don’t Feel Anything”: Finn, Trauma, and Prostheticisation Finn, the central heroic protagonist of Adventure Time, was orphaned and adopted by Jake the Dog’s family, and his relationship with his lost birth parents forms impactful storylines in later seasons of the series. Finn ages from 12 to 18 across the series, and a key aspect of his development is addressing his trauma of abandonment, which becomes interlinked with

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the loss of his arm in season six. Finn’s disablement is part of a six-episode story arc, but there is foreshadowing prior to this, particularly in season five. Foreshadowing is evident in alternative realities or future visions with a cybernetic prosthetic which can be seen in “Mortal folly” (2.24), “King worm” (4.18), “Finn the human” (5.01), “Jake the dog” (5.02), “Puhoy” (5.16), and “Dungeon train” (5.36). The repeated foreshadowing and representation of Finn’s prostheses cements the significance of physical disability as well as the interlinked trauma for the implied child audience. The season five episode “The vault” (5.34) provides crucial foreshadowing and demonstrates Adventure Time’s fraught relationship to disability. In this episode, Finn explores the past life where he was a woman with one arm named Shoko, who lived when Princess Bubblegum was first building the Candy Kingdom. Shoko reveals her parents sold her arm before abandoning her, making it the most explicit foreshadowing of Finn’s experiences in season six. For providing some assistance, Bubblegum gifts Shoko a prosthetic arm, an act of ‘charity’ that Shoko feels conflicted about as she had secretly planned to steal Bubblegum’s amulet. After she takes the amulet, she falls into a stream of nuclear waste, and when she crawls out, she has transmogrified into an oozing, slug-like creature who happily notices she now has a regenerated arm, before quickly dying. Despite beginning with a reasonably positive disabled representation, the linking of disability to parental abuse that leads to a life of crime, the focus on charitable prostheticisation, and joyful regeneration of an amputated limb ultimately represents disability as negative in this episode. The memory of Shoko’s life in season five pre-empts the loss of Finn’s arm in season six, which is connected to the trauma of his estranged father abandoning him for a second time. In the season five finale, “Billy’s bucket list” (5.52), it is revealed that Finn’s biological father, Martin, is alive and imprisoned in the Crystal Citadel, an intergalactic prison, and the two episodes which comprise the season six premiere, “Wake up” (6.01) and “Escape from the citadel” (6.02),2 focus on the reunion of father and son. Finn and Jake are inadvertently part of a mass escape from the Citadel orchestrated by the Lich, one of the series’ ongoing antagonists. While battling the Lich, Martin tries to leave through a portal with other escapees. Finn tries to 2  These episodes were refused broadcast in the UK, Spain, and Poland, and the scene which features Finn’s arm being torn off were removed from Australian and Latin American broadcasts according to fan documentation (http://adventuretime.wikia.com/wiki/ Censorship_of_Adventure_Time).

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make Martin stay, resulting in his arm transforming into a large, grassy claw due to the magic of his weapon the Grass Sword, which is fused to his arm, culminating in Finn’s arm being torn off. Like Shoko, Finn’s disablement is connected to parental abuse and neglect as Martin actively pushes on with the escape despite the physical danger this presents for Finn. Newly physically disabled, several episodes explore Finn adjusting to his disabled embodiment as well as his psychological state with revealing depictions of how Finn, as disabled and seemingly unstable, is managed by others and the state. The episode “The tower” (6.04) provides further meaningful depictions of disability beginning with Finn depicted with a candy prosthetic arm provided by Bubblegum, which he struggles to adjust to, with several mishaps, before the arm eventually explodes. Jake consoles Finn and offers two other prosthetic options donated by princesses, a hot-dog arm and a slime arm, although he cautions: “All these princesses donating all these gross, fake arms—they mean well, but they’re throwing you off your game! You got to go at your own pace” (6.04). Jake’s advice reiterates the significance of anthropocentric bodily norms, even in a world populated with a diverse array of bodily forms. The words ‘donating’, ‘gross’, and ‘fake’ all rely on conceptions associated with the normative  understanding of, assessment of, and response to disability, namely charity, disgust, and artificiality. These negatively inflected terms undercut a potentially significant exploration of trans-corporeality and complex social positioning. The gifting of prosthetic arms indicates a broad desire to ‘correct’ Finn’s disability, but “The Tower” also further explores the government of disability. After rejecting the other prostheses, and still enraged by his father’s second abandonment, Finn manifests a “telekinetic electro-emotional prosthesis” (6.04), a phantom arm powered by his anger, and begins to build a tower into space to find his father and seek revenge, while Jake and Bubblegum try to help Finn navigate his trauma and manage his unstable behaviour. Detecting high levels of power coming from Finn’s phantom arm, Bubblegum expresses concern that he could be “a danger to himself or others” explaining to Jake she has “quarantined the area till [she] can coax him down” (6.04). This concern frames this scene as a potential suicide attempt, using identifiable scripts associated with suicidality and psychiatric institutionalisation. Yet, Bubblegum is far more concerned with Finn’s power than his well-being, and as a result, Bubblegum is seemingly more interested in the disciplinary management of Finn and the wider biopolitical issues of his tower and new powers. Finn’s single-minded obsession with finding and punishing his father

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poses problems for Bubblegum as it makes him unavailable in his regular duties but also because it presents a version of Finn she is unable to control. Bubblegum’s concerns are ultimately warranted as, despite Finn’s long-standing self-definition as a hero who protects his world, the construction of his tower wreaks havoc on Ooo. With the aid of his new telekinetic powers, he builds the tower out of a range of raw materials, removing large chunks of land from various places, including from populated kingdoms and elsewhere disturbing ecosystems and displacing animals. Finn’s destructive behaviour as well as the instability of the looming tower itself poses an immense threat to Ooo. Throughout this episode, Finn’s amputation is linked to Martin’s abandonment, and his desire for revenge is situated as a direct response to both his physical amputation and his father’s severing of their relationship, a symbolic ‘cutting off’. This is emphasised by a song Finn sings as he climbs up into space with lyrics that include explicit reference to tearing off his father’s arm as a revenge (6.04). While this links disability and trauma, the episode and story arc situates Finn’s anger as in response to parental abuse and neglect. As Finn climbs too high he begins to lose consciousness and is picked up by Bubblegum, posing as his father, Martin, after passing out. Waking up in a spaceship (later revealed to be a Candy Kingdom bunker), Finn finds ‘Martin’ and tries to rip off his arm. After being unsuccessful, Finn realises that his revenge fantasy would be unsatisfying and not provide closure. Bubblegum’s ‘lesson’ re-disciplines Finn, causing his rage and, subsequently, his prosthesis to dissipate. Finn, no longer needing his tower, knocks it down, destroying part of the Candy Kingdom. Transforming Finn back into a docile subject reasserts Bubblegum’s authority and limits the power Finn can exercise. Disability becomes intricately bound up with threatening antisocial behaviour and, despite Finn’s status as a hero, audiences may be strongly positioned to agree with the extreme intervention by Bubblegum to manage and discipline Finn as a traumatised and disabled subject. Beyond the obsessive desire for revenge against his father, Finn’s disability is interconnected to other negative feelings and experiences and normativising ableist discourses. The episode “Breezy” (6.06) continues the fraught depiction of disability in Adventure Time, again emphasising negative feelings about being disabled and deriding interactions between disabled characters. In “Breezy”, Finn is being treated by Doctor Princess because the flower growing from his residual limb is now drooping. In response to the question of how he feels adjusting to the amputation, he

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says “I guess I don’t feel anything”. Despite the ambiguity in this response, Doctor Princess diagnoses him as depressed and prescribes him “to go out and have fun”. His real feelings become apparent as he makes his way to a party. He is depicted walking extremely hunched over with the top half of his body dragging along the ground between his legs while singing “I’m lost in the darkness/What will this bring?” This indicates a far more melancholic temperament than previously suggested. At the party, Finn spends time with Rag Doll Princess, a character who has no arms. She asks Finn to assist her in drinking her juice but ends up spilling it all over her. The presence of a character without arms is another opportunity to represent disabled people in an affirming manner, including the important dynamics and relationships between disabled people, but this interaction is ultimately framed as a joke at the expense of disability. The episode “Breezy” (6.06) also explores the problematic discourses of sexual desire, objectification, and consent concerning disabled people. The episode title refers to a new minor character, Breezy, a bee, who is first seen watching Finn from a distance as he makes his way to the party, transfixed by the sight of Finn’s flower growing from his residual limb. She follows him to the party and without warning flies in and grabs onto the flower. He shakes her off and she apologises, saying “Oh, I’m so sorry, I didn’t realise—” with Finn responding “Didn’t realise what? That there’s a person attached to this flower?” Breezy apologises again, but ultimately justifies her conduct, saying “I’m sorry. But it’s only because your flower’s the greatest miracle of all time. It’s just doing something to me”. Being transfixed by the flower, grabbing onto it, and describing the flower as ‘doing something’ to her implicitly connote sexual attraction to one part of Finn’s body. Her unwanted comments and physical advancements (especially given the sexual symbolism concerning flowers) ultimately constitute sexual harassment and assault and resonate with the notion of unwanted amputee devoteeism. Breezy’s deep and obsessive attraction reflects the hyperfixation and overwhelm that, in the words of Alison Kafer, characterise part of “the desire and disgust dynamic that pervades devotee discourse” (2012:342). Finn’s response underlines the dehumanisation of this experience, pointing out that Breezy could not even see that there was “a person attached”. As the night continues Breezy continues to land on Finn’s flower, saying, “Your flower feels good, yes”. He shakes her off again and she responds, “Ha ha! I’m just messin’ around. We’re buddies, right?” (6.06) The extent to which Breezy sexually harasses Finn and tries to touch his flower is extenuated in a montage of Breezy with

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orchestrated accidents between the two. Later, Breezy ‘accidentally’ runs into Finn, and they tumble on the ground, with Breezy slowly closing in on the flower, whispering, “That’s right. Everybody’s havin’ fun”. After this, Breezy makes further advances towards Finn and demands or expects that Finn will or should reciprocate her feelings, which he does not. Overall, the fetishisation of Finn’s body and repeated unwanted touching throughout the episode are framed as comedic but nonetheless normalise attitudes of sexual harassment and objectification of the disabled body. Not only is Finn the victim of repeated unwanted sexual assault as a disabled person in this episode, but he also tries to ‘overcome’ his depression interlinked with his amputee status, through acts of sexual veracity by trying to kiss as many princesses as he can. After the Breezy incidents, Finn spends time with Lumpy Space Princess, who is aware of Finn’s promiscuity and requests a kiss. They kiss, and as Finn tries to leave, she says “I didn’t wait infinity for a dip in the kiddie pool! We’re taking this to the deep end!” Finn objects that he is “not a good swimmer”, but Lumpy Space Princess responds, “Don’t be scared, Finn. Lumpy’s on lifeguard duty”. The next abrupt scene shows Lumpy Space Princess asleep in a sleeping-bag and Finn in another. It is unclear what exactly took place, but there is an overwhelming suggestion in the transition between scenes of sexual activity (even if just extensive kissing, now seemingly unwanted by Finn), which is problematic given Finn’s evident uncertainty indicating an absence of consent. Breezy reappears and begins singing at the sleeping Finn, a further act of unwanted romantic and sexual act, which causes the sleeping Finn’s flower to grow into a tree which then explodes revealing a regenerated arm in place of the flower/tree. The only remnant of Finn’s amputation is a small thorn in the middle of his palm, indicating the presence of the Grass Sword as “a type of organic prosthesis” (Valentín, 2019:202). This closure returns Finn to his former self and abruptly discards the overt representation of ‘physical disability’ in previous episodes. As such, this episode’s exploration of sexuality and disability frames this in extreme and stereotypical terms with a focus on objectification and unwanted advancements as well as hypersexuality by a disabled subject to ‘overcome’ disability. In the seasons that follow, Finn once again loses his newly regenerated arm and receives a metal prosthesis designed by Bubblegum in the episode “Reboot” (8.13) which he has throughout the rest of the series. Once again, the show explores traumatic experiences associated with disability and prostheticisation with a convoluted plot line in which Finn uses his

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metal prosthetic as a weapon to battle a Grass doppelganger of himself, made from the Grass Sword previously fused to his hand. As such, the show focuses on Finn’s complex and ongoing negative feelings directly attached to amputation and prosthesis. Unlike his initial reactions to prostheticisation mentioned above, at this point he accepts his new prosthesis happily. Although Finn’s prosthesis is present throughout seasons eight through ten, as Valentín writes, “it feels frustrating that the writers chose to keep Finn disabled but make his disability invisible in a media landscape where so few children who are disabled get to see characters that look and live like them” (2019:202). The quick prostheticisation of Finn speaks to Adventure Time’s reluctance to treat physical disability as a worthy and substantial subject matter, instead choosing to write it into his characterisation but only with negative associations. Rather, it seems physical disability functions symbolically and as a plot device to jettison conversations of psychological trauma. The impact and significance of physical disability becomes minimised, and amputation functions as a metaphor to underline Finn’s trauma of his father’s absence. While this corporealising of Finn’s trauma articulates trauma’s physical dimensions and makes the effects of Finn’s personal history visible, the series asserts several damaging and disturbing ideas concerning disability representation. The association of disability with parental abuse, neglect, revenge, sexual harassment, and sexual assault minimises the significance of both disability and these traumatic events. “Breezy” even goes so far as to implicitly suggest that by accepting unwanted, even charitable, objectifying sexual advances, the disabled subject can ‘overcome’ their disability, which is literalised by the magical regeneration of Finn’s arm in this episode. Largely, while promising in many ways, Adventure Time’s depiction of Finn’s physical disability and psychological trauma encapsulates a neoliberal approach to representation—present and included but missing many opportunities and lacking in substance that moves beyond negative inflection.

“I’m Losing Myself”: The Ice King and ‘Madness’ Throughout the series, Ice King operates as a central manic antagonist with a (seemingly ludicrous) penchant for kidnapping princesses. However, several narrative arcs and episodes provide backstory that characterises him as sympathetic and underline how his princess obsession is connected to a traumatic past that led to his ‘madness’. As an antagonist, and one who actively kidnaps princesses, Ice King is often subject to policing,

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surveillance, and punishment at the hands of Finn and Jake, routinely at the behest of Princess Bubblegum. Although a monarch in his own right, Ice King must be monitored and managed by others to keep his mad behaviour in check. However, as the show explores, his madness is connected to both a traumatic personal history and an isolation from others, neither of which are fully appreciated or understood by Finn and Jake. Ice King’s personal history is intrinsically tied to the history of Ooo and its post-apocalyptic state, which is revealed in the two-part Christmas episodes “Holly jolly secrets  – part 1” and “Holly jolly secrets  – part 2” (3.19, 3.20). In these episodes, Finn and Jake watch the Ice King’s “evil secret tapes” to learn his secrets. Majority of these are recent video diaries that reveal Ice King is highly anxious and desperately lonely, but the final tape, from before the apocalyptic events, depicts his transformation from a regular human named Simon Petrikov into the manic, magical Ice King. It is revealed Simon was “training to be an antiquarian of ancient artefacts” when he bought the Ice Crown. After wearing it he began to have visions which eventually scared away his fiancée Betty, whom he called his ‘princess’, explaining his ongoing obsession with princesses. The earlier diary entries show slow changes in his physiology as he declines into madness, and the world outside becomes slowly blanketed with snow. He acknowledges significant changes in his mental state, explaining “I know my mind is changing … but I’m already too far gone to know what to do”. The final clip shows a recognisable amalgamation of Simon and the Ice King, with Simon’s glasses and clothes still present but with the Ice King’s long, thin, pointy nose, razor-sharp teeth, long, white hair, beard and moustache, and light blue skin. This time he pleads amid sobs, “Just watch over me until I can find my way out of this labyrinth in my brain and regain my sanity! And then maybe Betty, my princess … maybe you will love me again”. The confused and distraught Ice King, who has lost his partner, his sanity, and a familiar world, resituates him not an evil villain but as an object of sympathy, if not pity. Ice King’s memory loss comes to the fore, and his eccentric behaviour and beliefs are now understood by Finn and Jake and the audience as effects of a deepening madness affected by the magical crown. Now with a better understanding of Ice King, Finn and Jake treat him with a bit more kindness underlined by Shelby the worm, who summarises this as “the day when Finn and Jake had a fleeting moment of empathy for the biggest weirdo in Ooo” (3.20). As such, Ice King (who for much of these episodes is upset with being excluded) now finds himself routinely included because his madness is better understood.

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No longer is “the biggest weirdo in Ooo” excluded due to his disability, and Valentín contends that, largely, “Rather than his lack of ‘sanity’ ostracizing him from others, it is his decision to do bad things that the other characters denounce, not him as a whole” (2019:202). Shelby’s words deride Ice King but signal a growing awareness by Finn and Jake to (ostensibly) be a bit more considerate towards people with mental illnesses. Yet, the consistent dismissal of the Ice King, rather than engagement with him, complicates the heroic view of Finn and Jake and the show’s disability discourses. These efforts to characterise Ice King as a sympathetic disabled antagonist rather than an outright villain are further explored in the season four episode “I remember you” (4.25). After deciding to write a song to get princesses to love him, Ice King seeks help from Marceline, a demon and vampire who is also friends with Finn and Jake. Using journals and scrapbooks he found in his ‘past room’, more information about Simon’s history is revealed. His relationship with Marceline is shown to span around a thousand years, when Ice King was more Simon, and through the final song in the episode, ‘Remember you’, his feelings towards his encroaching insanity are articulated. This song is improvised by Marceline from Simon’s notes on the back of a photo of Marceline as a little girl. Marceline, reading the notes, sings: Marceline, is it just you and me in the wreckage of the world? That must be so confusing for a little girl. And I know you’re going to need me here with you, But I’m losing myself and I’m afraid you’re going to lose me too.

For the audience, this is a revelation of a meaningful relationship between two seemingly unrelated central characters and provides further history of the world of Adventure Time. History is present in the song, but it serves as a backdrop to explore the development and severing of the close relationship between Marceline and Simon. Crucially, Simon willingly forgoes his sanity to save Marceline, repeatedly putting on the crown to protect her as they navigate the hostile world they inhabit. The lyrics articulate Simon’s anxieties about his sanity and the effect the degradation of the world and his mind will have on the young Marceline. The plaintive lyrics are consistently undercut by interjections from the Ice King, who cannot remember writing the notes or what they refer to. This further positions him sympathetically, and given how Marceline is upset that Ice King does

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not recall their relationship, it also signals the challenges when a loved one experiences mental illness and cognitive decline. Ice King tells Marceline to continue, and picking up another note, she sings what becomes the chorus: This magic keeps me alive, But it’s making me crazy. And I need to save you, But who’s going to save me? Please forgive me for whatever I do When I don’t remember you.

The lamenting lyrics articulate Simon’s awareness of his mental illness and the deterioration of his memory. In demonstrating Simon’s awareness, the song implicates him in this process: despite having options to avoid further degradation (and the pain this is causing/will continue to cause Marceline), he is unable to resist the addictive power of the crown with its lure of immortality. Caught up in the nostalgia for the lost bond, and hoping to jog Ice King’s memory, Marceline hands him another note, which he sings: Marceline, I can feel myself slipping away. I can’t remember what it made me say, But I remember that I saw you frown. I swear it wasn’t me, it was the crown!

Ice King remains ignorant of his past, but this operates as a cathartic moment for Marceline. Reading, singing, and now hearing Simon’s apology give her the opportunity to resolve her own feelings regarding her trauma (expanded on in “Stakes two: everything stays” [7.07]). As they sing the chorus together, Marceline cries, followed by a flashback of when Marceline and Simon first met and detailing his caring treatment of her (4.25). This is expanded on in the fifth season episode “Simon and Marcy” (5.14) with flashbacks of Simon and young Marceline surviving in the wake of the apocalypse. Hearing rustling in a bush, Simon puts on the crown to protect Marceline; although it is a harmless deer, Simon has great difficulty resisting the power of the crown. Marceline throws a snowball to knock the crown off his head and makes him promise not to wear it again. The effects of the crown are shown to be growing in duration

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after it has been removed. The strain this has on him physiologically, psychologically, and in his relationship with Marceline is reflected in the post-­ apocalyptic landscape. The difficulty and dangerousness of the landscape, both in terms of its instability and incomprehensibility, reflect and enforce Simon’s use of the crown. Simon’s desire for the crown and its worsening effects on his psychology and physiology—as well as potentially intensifying the unsafe conditions for Marceline, even as they already navigate a post-apocalyptic world full of ooze monsters—may resonate analogously in different ways with experiences of addiction and its effects on mental health. This episode (5.14) provides more explicit detail to Simon’s full transformation into Ice King and highlights the reasons for Simon’s cognitive decline in much more profound, humanising ways than previously explored. To entertain Marceline, Simon gets inside an old broken television and performs an improvised montage from the sitcom Cheers (1982–1993), including singing its theme song. The lyrics about the difficulties and stress of ‘Making your way in the world today’ and the urgency of friendship underline both the inhospitable setting and the significance of Simon and Marceline’s relationship. Yet, surviving in this world ultimately means their bond will lessen as Ice King slowly becomes insane from his magic crown. When Marceline becomes ill, they seek supplies and are repeatedly assaulted by oozing zombies. Ice King is forced to wear his crown to save Marceline. As he uses his magic to fight the mutants, he tries to hold on to his sanity by singing the Cheers theme song, which, rather than merely being nostalgic for the loss of the pre-apocalyptic world, is now attached to the father-like relationship he has with Marceline and cheering her up with an outdated cultural reference. His gradual loss of sanity and memory becomes more apparent in the final part of the flashback when he calls her “Gunter”, which is the name of Ice King’s main penguin companion and also later revealed also to be the name of the assistant to the creator of the magic ice crown in the distant past in “Evergreen” (6.24). A seemingly minor reference, this nonetheless indicates the effects of the crown are growing, including memory loss and disorientation. At the end of the episode, Ice King, having listened to the story as well, asks Marceline how the story ends to which she explains that they “lived happily ever after”. This rewrites their history to avoid explicitly discussing her unintended abandonment to ensure that Finn and Jake truly understand her different relationship with Ice King to many other people and to provide Simon (now lost to insanity) a happy ending rather

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than his current life. Ice King’s inability to remember his own life is reiterated again in this exchange, demonstrating the damaging and all-­ consuming effects of the crown. These episodes detail intimate personal histories amid large-scale social and ecological collapse and provide crucial information concerning Simon’s positioning as disabled and, through Marceline, a character who endures her own trauma and loss, and models thoughtful and generous caregiving to a loved one experiencing significant cognitive decline. Throughout the series, Ice King is portrayed as desperately lonely, and his overwhelming need to be liked, loved, and included causes him to act recklessly and criminally. In his first appearance, “Prisoners of love” (1.03), Ice King freezes trespassing Finn and Jake and takes them to his prison where he is holding six princesses captive. Ice King interrogates the princesses about their interests and attempts to have fun, betraying his desperate need to be loved in the process. Finn and Jake use this against him and trick him into believing his plan is working by having all the princesses to pretend they like him in order to then incapacitate him and escape. At the end of the episode, Ice King hallucinates flying through space and asks, “Why don’t people like me?” and “What’s wrong with me?” Despite Ice King’s misconduct, these introspective questions from the lonely and confused antagonist may encourage viewers to see him in a sympathetic light and to judge Finn and Jake’s trick as cruel. However, this is undermined in Ice King’s hallucination where he meets the Cosmic Owl and gets a response to his questions: “Because you’re a sociopath” (1:03). While the ostensibly sociopathic acts of Ice King alienate people, these acts, as is uncovered throughout the series, are by and large effects of the ice crown on his mind, which has transformed him from a responsible and caring hero into a myopic magical villain. Ice King’s supposed sociopathy and his desire to be loved at any cost are most poignantly explored in the Frankensteinian episode “Princess monster wife” (4.09), where Ice King steals body parts of several different princesses to make a bride for himself. Finn and Jake, being called upon by the princess victims to help, assume Ice King is responsible and go to his castle to interrogate him. He introduces them to his unnamed titular Princess Monster Wife whose appearance causes them to faint. This recurs several times, and at later stages, Finn and Jake also scream at her appearance, which, given the context of living in a world populated by unending variation of diverse morphologies, demonstrates a particularly unusual example of appearance-based discrimination, also often referred to as ‘lookism’ (Granleese, 2016; Minerva,

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2017). Although Finn and Jake act as heroes in this episode, their actions have extensive adverse effects for Ice King and Princess Monster Wife. The latter becomes highly self-conscious, questioning how and why she exists when she is “not normal”. In contrast, Ice King does everything he can to make her feel ‘normal’ and valued, which is repeatedly undermined by Finn and Jake’s lookism and ableism. Ice King organises a ‘family’ dinner, wherein Princess Monster Wife, unable to chew and swallow fully due to her tripled mouth, spills mashed potato on herself. Ice King copies and spills potato on himself, exclaiming “How fun! You’re so fun!” Despite her socially determined physical imperfections, made apparent by Finn and Jake, Princess Monster Wife and Ice King develop a mature, loving relationship. In addition to the dinner, they are seen sharing in recognisably typical domestic behaviour such as washing dishes, touring the Ice Kingdom, and watching television. The lengths Ice King goes to make and keep his wife happy and to assuage her fears and anxieties about her body are shown to be quite romantic with him creating ice sculptures of the two of them, serenading her, and frequently comforting her after Finn and Jake’s repeated hostility. She is particularly upset when they outright call her a monster, and she retreats to the kitchen to examine her reflection in the sink, saying to herself “You are not normal. You are a monster. Monster. A monster!” On hearing this, Ice King rushes to console her, telling her, “Nobody’s a monster. All I see in this room is a young, kind-­ hearted, intelligent, hot-looking Ice King and his beautiful princess bride. That’s you, sweetie”. Ice King’s response, although self-aggrandising, rewrites cultural scripts of beauty, even though she asserts that she “does not feel beautiful”. To remedy this, Ice King has his princess bride assume the role of fashion model for his penguin minions. This briefly works, boosting her confidence; however, when she starts blowing kisses to the audience of penguins, they vomit and beat themselves with chairs, leaving her feeling uglier than before and causing her to lock herself away. To prove his love, Ice King reveals how she came to exist, claiming that “the parts don’t matter, it’s you who matters”, resulting in a deeper identity crisis for Princess Monster Wife. The episode ends with her de-­constructing herself and returning the parts to their original princesses, effectively committing suicide in response to the belief that she should not exist, a line of thought directly connected to the lookism of Finn, Jake, and the penguins. The many kingdoms of Ooo host an endless variety of bodily forms, but some bodies are marked as unworthy of dignity if they especially deviate from ableist ideals of appearance. This episode featuring the creation

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of Princess Monster Wife signals the intersecting gendered and ableist ideals of appearance that make some lives unliveable, while also, reasserting how desperately lonely and isolated Ice King is, confirming his place as the central object of pity. While Ice King is constructed as a complex, sympathetic antagonist, the series does little to offer meaningful engagement with him as an ostensibly disabled character. He is relegated to the margins and dismissed as evil, despite other characters, primarily Finn and Jake, having a working understanding of how his madness influences his actions. Furthermore, they understand that his madness and compulsive behaviour extend from a traumatic personal history, yet he is rarely embraced or negotiated with compassion as a mad subject. Unlike majority of the other characters in the series, he is rarely sought out or included in social life, except by Marceline, who offers a rare glimpse of some non-ableist engagements. Instead, his madness becomes an indicator of his selfish and evil nature, making his sympathetic characteristics moot. Instead, he is largely framed as a problem and pest, unworthy of care and compassion by Finn and Jake.

Conclusion Adventure Time’s explorations of disability are complex. The series offers nuanced negotiations of trauma, personal history, and power than many other animated series; however, these representations, while fruitful, often inevitably reinscribe ableist beliefs and problematic models of governance. Finn’s negotiation of his trauma of being abandoned builds over several seasons and heavily impacts his conception of himself as a hero; the six-­ episode story arc of Finn’s amputation relegates disability to the role of metaphor and problematically resolves it through a regeneration narrative resulting from unwanted sexual and romantic advances. Furthermore, the links made between parental abuse, neglect, sexual harassment, assault, and disability in turn minimise the gravity of all these distinct events. Although absurd, Finn’s narrative situates disability within ableist discourses of normalisation, suggesting physical difference needs resolution. Finn and Jake’s mistreatment of Princess Monster Wife, who effectively commits suicide due to an identity crisis partly engendered by their disgust at her appearance, underlines how the show has a highly fraught relationship to disabled representation. Similarly, in Ice King’s personal history of loss—the loss of Betty, his sense of self, his sanity, and the world around him—madness is also treated in the series as a metaphor for being evil.

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Finn and Jake’s treatment of him throughout the series, and especially after they learn of his personal history, reasserts scripts of social exclusion and marginalisation rather than of engagement, empathy, and care. This unchanging relationship to Ice King negatively situates those with mental illnesses and cognitive decline as people to avoid, further marginalising and isolating them in society. The four-part finale to the series “Come along with me” (10.13–16), opens a thousand years in the future where two new characters, Beth and Shermy, uncover Finn’s prosthesis. They take it to the new and mysterious King of Ooo, revealed to be Finn and Jake’s robot roommate, BMO, to learn more. With such a small detail, the series highlights the oft-forgotten fact that disability histories are human histories. BMO recounts the history of the Gum War and ‘the end of the world’ for Beth and Shermy. The framing hints at Finn’s death, but, in fact, his prosthesis is lost in battle. As such, material artefacts can illustrate existence, but they cannot always provide precise details. Such material artefacts like prostheses provide evidence of some disabled groups, and few materials tell of madness. In the finale, Ice King’s madness is cured, and he reverts to Simon permanently. The only record of Simon, Ice King, and his madness is BMO as storyteller. In this way, Adventure Time closes out with a meditation of disability histories and storytelling. Although there are clear moments when the series could have explored disability more meaningfully, and “each depiction could have been improved” (Valentín, 2019:203), the narrative emphasis on storytelling for disabled history is powerful. With the series’ adult animated spin-off Fionna and Cake (2023) now airing, it will be interesting to see how these stories continue for a new audience.

CHAPTER 8

“Loss is loss is loss”: Embodying the Family-­as-­Trauma in Julianna Baggott’s Pure (2012)

Introduction Julianna Baggott’s Pure trilogy of young adult (YA) dystopian novels, consisting of Pure (2012), Fuse (2013), and Burn (2014) depicts disabled and trans-corporeal bodies resulting from a nuclear disaster. Like The Princess and the Goblin, The Chrysalids, and Waterbound, Pure’s central concern is with social and geographic divisions between those deemed ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’. In contrast, in Pure it is the largely non-­ normative group of protagonists who resist and fight against normalising, exclusionary society,1 which is threaded meaningfully with notions of adolescent maturation, as Clare Clark signals in her review of the novel: This is an apocalypse for a generation on the cusp of adulthood, who must choose between the authoritarian Dome, where safety comes at the price of parental tyranny, and the dark and dangerous wastelands of the world beyond, where, in pursuit of their freedom, they must face their greatest fears. (2012: para. 7)

 Even Waterbound tends to privilege the perspective of its nondisabled protagonist, Gem, and her ability to enact change. Conversely, in The Chrysalids the protagonists do not fight back against society but are forced to flee it. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Holdsworth, The Government of Disability in Dystopian Children’s Texts, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52034-1_8

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This tension between safety and domination in the Dome and danger and freedom outside is not new in dystopian YA fiction; however, in Pure, maturation is heavily imbricated in the power dynamics between adults and youth concerning ideal and desired embodiment. Emerging scholarship on the series has identified impactful themes and representation. Jill Coste has highlighted the important role ‘The Swan Maiden’ fairy-tale has had on the narrative, linking the series with other popular YA dystopian series in the same vein (2020, 2021). Malin Alkestrand analyses the oppression of young people in dystopian YA and, in discussing the novel, focuses on the representation of the powerful expectant teen mother, Lyda (2021:186–203). For Alkestrand, Lyda “becomes a mighty adolescent by rebelling against the intersectional oppression of the Dome” (203). Alkestrand points specifically to Lyda’s framing as ‘crazy’ and how this contributes to her “fluctuation between [a] controlled and mighty” adolescent (203). Ferne Merrylees finds significance in how Pure conceptualises the adolescent body. Merrylees examines how the posthuman body operates as “a metaphor not only for the angst our culture associates with being an adolescent, but also for the condition of being human”, wherein “to be human is no longer dependent on an isolated subject who controls his or her own destiny, but rather it is part of a fluid, dynamic system” (2018:93). Angela Andonopoulos also finds the posthuman significant in exploring coming-of-age, Otherness, and technofuturity in a range of dystopian novels written by women in the late-2000s and early-2010s (2021). Andonopoulos contends Pure’s depiction of “varying forms of posthuman embodiment” is able “to undermine humanist categories of the biological human” (120). It is clear that fairy-tale studies, youth oppression, and posthumanism have informed most of the frameworks in present scholarship on the novel. In these discussions there is a clear interest in how power relationships and bodily variations form (and inform) the political valences of the novel. In this way, the political significance of disability is manifested through the bodies and traumas of the characters that populate Pure’s dis-topian world. As such, a focus on the government of disability can yield further insights into the significance of Pure and other twenty-first-century dystopian YA texts.

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Bodies and Power Pure, as the first novel of its series, develops but does not necessarily resolve its central tensions and critiques related to the post-nuclear space and systems of power. Unlike other post-disaster narratives analysed so far, Pure is set only a short time after the cataclysmic event, referred to as the Detonations. In doing so, the novel’s temporality explores the physical effects of radiation and its social implications in more detail and with greater veracity, investigating issues of the mediation of bodily normativity and power relations in the post-disaster space. These central themes, which unfold in multifaceted ways throughout the narrative, are intrinsically concerned with the distribution and utilisation of power—specifically the dynamic between those inside the Dome (the ‘Pure’) and those who were left outside (the ‘wretches’). These emerge through the narrative’s polyvocality. At the beginning of each chapter, excluding the prologue and epilogue, a focalising character is established. These shifting perspectives, which sometimes converge on the same event but often explore different scenes and experiences, articulate a deep concern with how space, bodies, and power are interrelated. The focalisation shifts between four of the six central characters; however, the plot closely follows Pressia Belze, a ‘wretch’ with a doll-head fused into her hand who is caught up in the political games of the Dome, as well as Partridge Willux, a Pure, whose father, Ellery Willux, controls the Dome and who escapes to find out the truth about his mother. In her journey Pressia meets Bradwell, a slightly older conspiracy theorist who has birds fused into his back, and El Capitan and Helmud, two brothers who have been fused together and are soldiers in the OSR, originally “Operation Search and Rescue”, which, over time, has transformed into “Operation Sacred Revolution”, a pseudo-regime eventually revealed to be a Dome proxy. El Capitan is another focalising character; however, in this novel, Bradwell and Helmud are not. Lyda, who is the last person to see Partridge before his escape from the Dome and suffers for her discretion, is also a focaliser. The narrative is made up of several strands that eventually intersect. For example, Pressia and Partridge come together when it is revealed they are half-siblings and their individual goals become the same: to find their mother, Aribelle, and put an end to the Dome’s power. Their radically different lives underline the distinctions between the lives of the Pure and the wretches. The shared quest for Aribelle is framed as a search for a missing part of both Pressia and Partridge, defining parental relationships (and abandonment) as

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intrinsic to self-knowledge, similarly explored in Adventure Time. Elsewhere, dystopian YA has been argued to offer “a range of constructions of family relationships, in particular those between parent and child” even as they still idealise conventional understandings of family (Braithwaite et al., 2012:106). The drive for family connection is fundamental in Pure. Conversely, narratives like Pure and Adventure Time illustrate just how traumatising familial relationships can be. When Partridge and Pressia are finally reunited with their mother, Ellery remotely detonates a bomb which has been implanted inside her other son, Sedge (who was previously transformed by Ellery into an animal-machine super soldier), killing both Aribelle and Sedge. In their refusal to give up on their quest and in their continued survival, the adolescent characters resist the disciplinary and bio-power exercised by Ellery and the Dome. As such, the evaluation, modification, control, use, and disposal of bodies as represented in Pure have multiple implications concerning the government of disability and critical approaches to understandings of disabled life and bodies in and beyond the text. Throughout the novel, the body is a significant site where power is exercised. The narrative is set just outside of Baltimore a few years after a nuclear event and is divided up into two distinct spaces: inside the Dome, constructed to protect a select few from the Detonations; and outside the Dome, which comprises various destroyed sites. The people who were inside the Dome at the time of the Detonations, including Ellery, Partridge, his brother Sedge, and Lyda, remain free from the effects of the radiation, whereas those who were outside the Dome either died or became fused with objects, sometimes completely changing their physiology and becoming trans-corporeal. While some people like Pressia and her grandfather have become fused with objects, others like Bradwell, El Capitan, and Helmud have been fused to other living beings (Bradwell is fused with birds, while El Capitan and Helmud are fused together). Furthermore, some people have been fused to the landscape (referred to as ‘Dusts’), to groups of people (‘Groupies’) or to animals (‘Beasts’), and, due to the degree to which this fusing occurs, are framed as more animalistic than the novel’s protagonists. For Merrylees, however, these figures demonstrate the posthuman interest of Baggott’s trilogy where they “are the epitome of the consequences wrought by technology, yet they are better suited for survival in the post-Detonation world than the less-used humans” (2018:79). Unlike in The Chrysalids or Adventure Time, everything in the protagonist’s immediate frame of reference outside the Dome has been

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drastically physically altered through the effects of the Detonations.2 While the Dome may superficially offer some protection, the rule of Ellery produces its own problems for the characters inside. Inside, there are different opportunities for men and women along the lines of traditional gender roles. Girls are reduced to their reproductive capacity and, if deemed unfit (largely in relation to political and social subversion), are sterilised. As Alkestrand highlights, girls have limited education in the Dome, which has serious consequences in relation to the knowledge of reproductive health and sexuality (2021:192). Boys, however, are subjected to ‘coding’ wherein their physical and mental capabilities are altered, and in some cases, such as with Sedge, they are modified to be elite super soldiers. As such, delimited definitions of bodily and behavioural normativity inform the setting and narrative and are imbricated with discourses and mechanisms of power. The novel’s thematisation of the body has several ramifications for how bodies are constituted, managed, and reckoned with disciplinarily and biopolitically in the world of the narrative. Subsequently, this chapter will consider how the body is thematised, the impact of power and means and methods of resistance, and the script of family-as-­ traumatising in the narrative through the two central characters, Pressia and Partridge. While these two characters are positioned as members of specific categories of people—Partridge as ‘pure’ and Pressia as ‘wretch’— both their bodies have been altered by Ellery’s exercising of power.

History as Disciplinary and Biopolitical Technique in Pure Like in The Chrysalids and Waterbound, history in Pure is utilised as a disciplinary and biopolitical technique to manage populations inside and outside the Dome. As the people outside the Dome have completely different sets of experiences to those inside, different narratives of the history of the Detonations have come to exist. On the one hand, there is the ‘official’ history supplied by the Dome, as Partridge relays: I was told that everything was awful here before the bomb, and that everyone was invited into the Dome before we were attacked by the enemy. But some people refused to come in. They were the violent, sickly, poor, 2  In Fuse, it is revealed that other parts of the world have not been as severely impacted by the Detonations.

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s­tubborn, uneducated. My father said that my mother was trying to save some of these wretches. (Baggott, 2012:142)

As can be seen in this excerpt, there are enough contradictions to imply that this is a falsified and sanitised version of events which position those inside the Dome as benevolent and those outside as unlucky, undesirable, or deserving of death. The simultaneous expressions of disdain for the city, and the world, and the surprise at the happenstance attack from an unnameable enemy throw into doubt the inclusivity of this image of the Dome. Moreover, the implicit marginalisation of disabled people (‘sickly’) and people of lower socio-economic status (‘poor’, ‘uneducated’) further unmoors the Dome’s grounding in benevolence. While the Dome contends everyone was invited inside, this listing suggests the inverse, that specific ‘kinds’ of people were denied entry. However, this version of events comes from Partridge after he has escaped the Dome and has begun to question all that he has been told inside. As such, his reliability in relaying this information is questionable. Nonetheless, it is clear that the Dome’s version of history functions to legitimise the Dome and to privilege them in contradistinction to the wretches outside. Conversely, Bradwell’s ‘shadow history’ lectures offer a powerful alternative; even though when Pressia firsts hears one of these lectures, she is incredulous of his theories: He spouts off his theories about the Dome officials, stating that he has proof that they caused total destruction so that they could wipe out all but a fraction of the world’s population while they were Dome-protected, that the Dome was designed for this purpose – not as a prototype for a viral outbreak, environmental disaster, or attack from other nations. They wanted only the elite to survive in the Dome while they waited for the earth to renew itself, at which point they’d return. A clean slate. (48–9)

Elizabeth Braithwaite, Rebecca Hutton, and Alyson Miller explain that a key task that adolescent protagonists in dystopian texts face is to “reveal the truth behind the deceptions that have been set up … by adults” (2012:94). The reconstitution of historical narratives reveals what passes as truth as deception and is a form of resistance against the Dome and its exercise of power. In questioning the authenticity of the Dome’s accounts and offering a counter-history, Bradwell exposes the Dome’s propaganda. Bradwell instigates both Pressia and Partridge to rethink power structures,

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history (both personal and world), and to imagine the possibility of change. Bradwell’s theories are proven correct later in the narrative when Pressia and Partridge find their mother, Aribelle Cording. Aribelle confirms Bradwell’s theories and reveals her first-hand perspective of what happened, as well as why she has been in hiding. She tells Partridge, “Your father was going to [and did] release this biosynthesizing nanotechnology purposefully into the cocktail of bombs for the sole purpose of fusing survivors to the world around them, just to create a subhuman class, a new order of slaves, to serve them in New Eden once the earth was rejuvenated” (Baggott, 2012:413). The bodies of those outside are intrinsically related to Ellery’s desire for and exercising of power (with clear allusions to seeking a God-like position, evident through intertextual allusions to a Genesis-like destruction and the creation of a ‘new’ Eden). Through setting up the Detonations as the defining event for the world, the narrative already implicates the non-normative body as central to issues of power. Ellery’s plan relies on an implicit hierarchisation and disciplining of those outside the Dome. The purposeful creation of mutations and fusings to subjugate the non-‘Elite’ to serve the ‘Pure’ as subhuman slaves is intrinsically both disciplinary and biopolitical. However, it already relies on a specific hierarchisation of bodies whereby non-normative bodies are always already subjugated. In this way, Pure’s representation of the body within hierarchical structures offers a complex critique of able-centric norms that inform discourses of power.

“I Wanted To Be Alive”: Trauma, Physical Disability, and Bodily Autonomy in Pure Throughout the novel, Pressia must navigate a changing relationship to her body due to the revelation of information, interest, and intervention of others. At times these changes emerge in a straightforward social engagement with other people who have fusings and at other times through forced interventions which make her and her body objects of power. As an object of power, Pressia’s body and her relationship to it also highlight issues of gender throughout the novel, resulting in a drastic shift in political engagement as well. Pressia’s relationship to her body as ‘wretch’ is revealed to be the effect of Ellery’s power and Aribelle’s late attempts at prevention, imbricating familial trauma in the alteration of her body. Pure signals to implied adolescent readers that the body is not a

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natural, immutable, and apolitical form but exists as a complex nexus of social and political investments that, especially in the context of women’s bodies, are made the objects of power. From the beginning of the novel, Pressia’s body is a source of discomfort and her doll-head fist is a site of loss and shame. As Sara K. Day suggests, the “baby head provides a clear metaphor for Pressia’s relationship with her body as a whole: she understands the doll to be a part of her body, but she also struggles with and is even disgusted by it” (2014:82). Pressia notes that when “[s]he runs her good hand over the doll’s head” “[s]he can feel the ripple of her finger bones within it, the small ridges and bumps of her knuckles, the lost hand fused with the rubber of the doll’s skull” (Baggott, 2012:12). The language she uses to differentiate hands demonstrates discomfort with her body. She has a ‘good’ hand and subsequently a ‘bad’ one; the ‘bad’ hand, though, signifies everything she has lost. The doll-head, as a permanent feature of her body, now encases her hand and is a reminder of the trauma of the Detonations including the death of her (adoptive) mother. As emblematic of girlhood, the doll-head is a constant reminder of her inability to escape the social and cultural confines of girlhood. As Day surmises, “Pressia remains linked to childhood by the presence of the doll she cannot put down” (2014:82). Pressia explains the way she feels about her hand is “the way she feels about the Before [the time prior to the Detonations] – it’s there, she can feel it, the light sensation of nerves, just barely” (Baggott, 2012:12). Her doll-head fist stands as both a literal and symbolic tomb for what she has lost: her childhood, hand, and family. Pressia’s association between her doll-head fist and her traumatic past has several ramifications. She reveals later in the novel that once she tried to remove the doll-head from her hand (140; 343–4). Third-person narration focalised through Pressia explains: Once, when she was twelve, she tried to cut her doll head off. She thought she could free herself from it. The pain was sharp, but only at first. When she slid the razor in deep at the back of the doll’s neck where it met her wrist, it wasn’t as painful. But the blood flowed so brightly, and with such force, that it scared her. (140)

Her relationship with her doll-head fist, and what it comes to represent, is felt distinctly as traumatic and in need of separation, and her actions are analogous to self-harm. The narration in this part suggests that Pressia

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wanted to rid herself of the doll-head, but when she discusses this with Bradwell, the discussion explores a possible desire for suicide. When she shows Bradwell the scar from the attempt to cut off the doll-head, he asks her “Were you trying to take it off or…”, his trailing off captured by the ellipsis insinuating a desire for self-harm or suicide. Pressia confirms “Or” before adding, “Maybe I was tired. I wanted not to be lost. I missed my mother and father and the past” (344). As much as Pressia wants to separate herself from her traumatic past by removing the doll-head, this could have come close to ending her life, and as she explains to Bradwell, “I wanted to be alive. That’s what I learned as soon as I saw the blood” (344). Through the expression of her feelings about her body to Bradwell, Pressia comes to terms with her altered and disabled body. Similarly, through her developing relationship with her half-brother Partridge, the shame she feels for her doll-head fist is renegotiated. After initially meeting Partridge, Pressia quickly becomes anxious about what he might think of her fist. She attempts to hide her fist as she thinks “[t]he Pure would see it as grotesque and maybe as a sign of weakness” (140). However, when he does see it, she notes that it “surprises him, but he doesn’t let go. Instead he looks into her eyes” (178). Pressia’s pre-­ emptive anxiety articulates a projection of her shameful feelings about her body onto Partridge. It underlines the ableism which informs the extreme hierarchies of their post-disaster world. Such feelings never quite resolve, and even towards the end of the novel, she is still surprised by Partridge’s acceptance of her hand (393). However, as Partridge understands it, “[i]t is part of her. It isn’t with her, but of her. He can feel the humanness of it  – the warmth, the play beneath the skin of a real hand, alive” (394). Although never fully resolved, there is a distinct difference in how Pressia relates to her body between the beginning and end of Pure and a continued, slow progression towards accepting her disabled body across the trilogy. Self-acceptance of one’s physical variations in an ableist world makes this an important representation, but it is limited to some degree by the gendered implications: these developments are all framed in relation to the responses of men. That both Bradwell and Partridge’s acceptance drastically transforms Pressia’s relationship and valuation of her body unintentionally re-establishes women’s bodies as objects of disciplinary power. Ellery’s interventions in Pressia’s relationship with her body are part of his larger systems and techniques of management and control. As Merrylees signals, not only are “adults … frequently responsible for the cyborgian features of the adolescent character’s body in these narratives … [but these

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characters’ bodies] serve as pawns in the adults’ political battles” (2018:81). As discussed earlier, Pressia’s body, as it exists within the temporal frame of the novel, is the direct result of Ellery’s biopolitical reconstitution of the bodies of those outside the Dome. The trauma and loss that Pressia is slowly processing is the desired result of Ellery’s actions. After Pressia is captured and forcibly recruited into OSR, she is sent to visit Ingership, who is the Dome liaison on the outside. There she is drugged, has surveillance devices implanted in her eyes and ears, and a ‘ticker’ (bomb) in her head. This forced implantation of devices is overtly a violation of her bodily autonomy but also coded as physical and sexual violence. When she returns to El Capitan she is described as “leaning against the far window, legs crossed, a hand covering her eyes … she looks shrunken and bruised” (Baggott, 2012:273). Her trauma at the hands of Ingership is palpable, and she uses the doll-head to answer El Capitan’s questions truthfully which lets him know that “[s]omething’s happened. Something bad” (274). The bugging of her eyes and ears specifically makes Pressia’s body a site of continued power for Ellery, who uses her to expand his techniques of surveillance and control and resituates her body as compromised within the larger narrative. Ellery’s bugging of Pressia enables him and his forces to find Aribelle when Pressia does, ultimately implicating Pressia in the murder of Aribelle and Sedge. This bugging also then situates Pressia as an unwilling surveillance device between the outside and the Dome. After the murder or Aribelle and Sedge, Partridge uses Pressia to swear vengeance on Ellery, callously screaming into Pressia’s face to deliver his message. In this heated moment, Pressia is objectified in her reduction to a tool used to facilitate a power game between two male characters. As such, Pressia’s body is the site of a multiple series of traumas and is repeatedly modified and reconceptualised throughout the narrative that resonates meaningfully with disability politics.

“Purity Is a Burden”: Resisting and Rejecting Purity Children and adolescents inside the Dome are also subjected to physiological manipulation by Ellery, however, in vastly distinct ways to ‘benefit’ the Dome society. Boys undergo ‘coding’ where their physicality, intelligence, and moral values are reconstituted to fit the Dome’s needs. Girls, however, do not undergo coding due to the Dome’s need for them to

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‘reproduce’, unless they are deemed ‘unfit’ for reproduction. During coding sessions, the boys are subjected to various procedures such as the “strange mix of drugs coursing through the bloodstream, the radiation, and, worst of all, being trapped in body casts so that only certain parts of [the] body and brain are exposed during a given session” (17). Unlike the other boys, however, Partridge’s coding does not fully take due to Aribelle’s early intervention. Partridge’s body becomes an arena where the competing influences of Ellery and Aribelle battle. As with Pressia’s, Partridge’s body becomes a site of the exercising of power and, subsequently, not his own. Throughout the narrative, his body also undergoes a process of alteration, or rather ‘de-Purification’, and his body transforms into a much more complex site than initially presented. Conversely to Pressia’s life of wretch-hood, Partridge’s life is presented as one of privilege. Through the novel’s multiple focalisers and polyvocal structure, the stark comparison between the lives of the wretches and the Pure (as compared between Chapter 1 “Cabinets” and Chapter 2 “Mummies”) makes for an immediate implicit judgement of Partridge’s life. Even the subtitles of each chapter and the content they point towards significantly mark Partridge as privileged. The ‘cabinets’ of Pressia’s chapter denote her literal living space, whereas the ‘mummies’ of Partridge’s articulate coding (through the body casts the boys refer to as ‘mummy moulds’), education, and specifically an education in history and anthropology—knowledges largely inaccessible and perhaps logistically unnecessary outside the Dome. The processes through which both their bodies are altered also signify privilege. The coding in the Dome is a much less violent means of alteration and, unlike the Detonations, seemingly does not involve such extensive measures of trauma and death. However, as Aribelle reveals, coding has its consequences. Due to Ellery’s overuse of coding technology, his body begins to go through “Rapid Cell Degeneration”; “The classic signs are a slight tremor of the hands and head, a palsy. Eyesight and hearing weaken. The skin deteriorates next, becoming thin and dry. Eventually, bones and muscle erode, and organs fail” (404). While wretch-hood has its own implications for longevity, so too does the coding, which can likely also lead to mass disabling. The coding, as a reconfiguration of physiological material, is a means to discipline the body for biopolitical ends. When preparing for his escape and the upcoming dance, Partridge notes how his roommate, Silas Hastings, has begun to act differently due to his coding, specifically his anxiety over being late to the dance as “[p]unctuality is a Dome virtue” (63). Seeing

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these small changes in Hastings causes Partridge to question coding as he “can’t imagine how it would feel to start acting differently, just in the littlest ways”. This implicit erasure of autonomy situates coding as a specifically disciplinary and biopolitical exercise, re-creating and manipulating the genetic material of individuals to organise, control, utilise, and manage them easily. Partridge is acutely aware of this, contending he “doesn’t want to change at all. He wants to know that what he does comes from himself – even if it’s wrong”. Even though Partridge’s coding does not take full effect, he still experiences some benefits and drawbacks. When he and Pressia are attacked by a Dust, his coding enables him to rip it out of the ground; something Pressia “didn’t know … was possible” (127). Conversely, when he and Bradwell are attacked by the Mothers, a group of warrior women who have their children and parts of their prior suburban houses fused into their bodies, Partridge feels the coding kick in and wonders if “he can trust his own brain” (235). As such, the coding, in different ways, engenders experiences akin to commonly understood mental illnesses, such as anxiety, paranoia and a lack of  impulse control, as demonstrated respectively with Silas and Partridge. In Partridges’ case, this delicate balance between the benefits of coding and the erasure of autonomy leaves him questioning his every move. The genetic manipulation of the people in the Dome is not too dissimilar from those outside— they are all left grappling with their altered bodies and identities in the face of the exercising of disciplinary and bio-power by Ellery. However, outside the Dome there is still the semblance of freedom. Although OSR’s patrols and Death Sprees (a free-for-all blood sport where OSR members hunt and kill wretches) heavily impact this freedom, the ability to have some sort of autonomy enables the people outside the Dome to resist the disciplinary and biopolitical tactics the Dome employs via OSR. Resistance consistently occurs throughout the novel and has specific ramifications for Partridge’s body. Partridge requests help from the Mothers—who refer to men as Deaths for their part in the Detonations and the oppression of women both before and after—in finding and saving Pressia and to garner protection in their search for Aribelle. For their help, they demand Partridge make a sacrifice of cutting off his pinky finger and, consequently, undermining his status as ‘Pure’ and all it stands for. Partridge is hesitant, but the leader of the Mothers, Our Good Mother, only offers an ultimatum: “If you want to find your mother, you will need our help. The matter is whether or not you’re willing to sacrifice for your goal” (311). Just like coding, Purity, as an ideological and physical

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burden, impedes Partridge from being able to understand himself as connected to and part of the world outside the Dome. As Our Good Mother informs Partridge, “Purity is a burden … That’s what we’ve found. When you are no longer Pure, when you no longer have that to protect, you’re free of it” (311–2). In giving Partridge this ultimatum, his Purity for their assistance, Our Good Mother positions this as a gift noting, “I can end your Purity. You will never truly understand, but I can make you one of us, in some small measure” (312). As such, both Our Good Mother and Partridge enact and embody resistance against the Dome and Ellery’s control. Through amputating his pinky, Partridge rejects the designation of himself as Pure, distancing himself and his body from those of the Dome and his father. While partially coerced, it is an act he makes himself and a means by which he can also reclaim autonomy over his body and rejects the ideological framings of and binary designation as ‘Pure’ or ‘wretch’. The Mothers, as instigators and executors of this de-Purification, also resist the Dome and its positioning of them as inferior subjects. The process of amputating Partridge’s pinky also operates as a form of symbolic castration. The Mothers symbolically enact revenge against the men who oppressed, abandoned, and mutilated them and their children while seeking comfort and refuge in the Dome. Partridge’s sacrifice not only enables him to find his mother and protect Pressia but also grants him a new perspective on, and sense of ownership over, his body and identity. Just like Pressia, Partridge faces several issues concerning his body. The process of genetic manipulation as a means of exercising disciplinary and bio-power by his father, and the resistance he had imbibed as a child from his mother, situates Partridge’s body as a complex and competed site for power. Outside the Dome, Partridge freely engages with the ideological structures his body signifies and finds resistance in a physical and embodied rejection of Purity. Despite his and Pressia’s resistance, however, the ongoing battle between his parents, in which he, Pressia, and Sedge are pawns, results in the deaths of Aribelle and Sedge.

Family-as-Trauma Both Pressia and Partridge experience family relations as traumatic. Prior to the revelation that they are half-siblings, the two consistently fantasise about their absent or lost parents (both parents for Pressia, and his mother for Partridge). The figure of the absent parent haunts them both, impacting their actions, decisions, and means of relating to others and the

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environment. Partridge finds solace in the memories he has of his mother and physical mementos of her existence, while Pressia is left only with scraps of memory intermixed with the falsified stories of her adoptive grandfather. However, after their familial status is revealed, neither Pressia nor Partridge can reconcile the ideas of family they had with their reality. Roberta Seelinger Trites (2000) explores the theme of teen rebellion against parents in adolescent fiction, arguing that “regardless of whether or not the adolescent has an actual parent figure to rebel against … the child must create … a parent figure, a symbolic parent, to murder” (57). Trites notes three distinct parent-child struggles (what she calls ‘Oedipal struggles’) in adolescent fiction: “in parentis”, actual parents (58–60); “in loco parentis”, surrogate parents (60–1); and “in logos parentis”, a parent made of language (61–9). Although surrogate parents make a small appearance in Pure (primarily Pressia’s grandfather and El Capitan to an extent), the role of ‘in parentis’ and ‘in logos parentis’ informs the action of the novel. At the beginning of the novel, Pressia’s only family is who she believes to be her paternal grandfather who has a small, plastic fan embedded in his throat. Through his role as a storyteller, she comes to, seemingly, know her parents. The image of her parents he produces in his “well-worn speech … about the day of the Detonations” is one of a modern model family: her Japanese mother “was so beautiful … so young” (italics in original), while her American father was “[a]n accountant with light hair, he was pigeon-toed … but a good quarterback” (Baggott, 2012:10). Pressia has difficulty with these descriptions as “[s]he can’t tell the difference between the stories her grandfather’s told her and memory”, marking Pressia’s conception of family as intangible. She questions, “But what does it mean, anyway, that my father was a pigeon-toed quarterback if I don’t remember him? What is a beautiful mother worth if you can’t see her face in your head?” The intangibility of these images and her lack of memory surrounding them situate them as unreal entities, haunting Pressia’s idea of family and her relationships with others. As literal ‘in logos parentis’, Pressia’s ephemeral idea of her parents has a bittersweet impact on her, giving her a romanticised, largely positive sense of her past while constantly reiterating a pervasive and personal sense of loss. Most significantly, however, is how for her this intangibility makes herself unknowable: “Her parents are unknowable, that’s what kills Pressia, and if they’re unknowable, how can she know herself? She sometimes feels like she’s cut off from the world, like she’s floating – a small lit fleck of swirling ash” (11). Pressia

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consistently finds her own identity undercut by the intangibility of her memory and can only understand the idea of family within this context. On her 16th birthday, the age when OSR forcibly recruits people, she wishes she could see them and talk to them about her life, but even this is expressed in intangible terms. She notes that “[e]very once in a while, she can almost feel them watching – her mother or her father? She’s not sure” (77). The use of modifiers, such as ‘once in a while’ and ‘almost’, further positions her parents as haunting intangible concepts rather than actual people who have died—the ghostly omnipresence of her parents becomes so indeterminable that they are indistinguishable as objects of language and fantasy. Due to the effects of the Detonations, a biopolitical disciplining and management of the population, ‘memory’ of family and that of associated trauma are inseparable and impact her daily life. Outside the Dome, memory is used as a trust currency, gift, and game, referred to as ‘I Remember’. When Pressia attends one of Bradwell’s ‘shadow history’ meetings, she is repulsed by his violent, painful memories: “Why is he telling them this story? It’s sick. I Remember is supposed to be a way of giving people gifts, small sweet memories, the kind Pressia likes to collect, needs to believe in” (53). Throughout the narrative, Pressia slowly discovers her own memories again; however, they are only ever fragments: a small tank with fish swishing back and forth, the feel of the woollen tassel on her mother’s pocketbook, that soft yarn in her fist, a heating duct under a table that seemed to purr. She remembers sitting on what must have been her father’s shoulders as he walked under flowering trees, being wrapped in his coat as she was asleep and being shuttled from the car to her bed. She remembers brushing her mother’s hair with a wire brush while a song played on a handheld computer – the image of a woman singing a lullaby about a girl on a front porch, and someone is begging her to take his hand to ride with him into the Promised Land … Her mother smelled like soap made out of grass – clean and sweet. Her father smelled like something richer, more like coffee. (89)

The relationship Pressia develops through memory to her parents is one built on sensory, embodied experiences. However, her earlier inability to distinguish between her grandfather’s stories and her actual memories positions this new memory as unreliable. Even her ability to remember Before-specific objects (such as a heating duct or computer) but being

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unable to remember the actual object it designates (for example, ‘handheld computer’ could be a digital device such as a personal digital assistant, mobile phone, or tablet) further positions this memory as unreliable. When playing I Remember with Partridge, Pressia, using advertisement pictures Bradwell had saved from the Before, actively ‘creates’ memories to impress and relate to Partridge. She tells him that “we once bought a car with a giant red ribbon on top of it. And I remember Mickey Mouse and his white gloves … Do you remember dogs wearing sunglasses? They were funny, right?” (134). However, those same advertisement images trigger the memory in the excerpt above and an overwhelming, embodied realisation of her loss: The picture of the people in the theater, for some reason, jolts her memories, and she’ll miss her parents so deeply that sometimes she can’t breathe. Even though she doesn’t remember them in any whole way, she remembers the feel of being enveloped by her mother – the softness of her body, the silkiness of her hair, the sweetness of her scent, the warmth. When her father wrapped her in his coat, she felt cocooned. (89)

Pressia’s loss of her parents is a tense experience, where she misses them so much it momentarily physically incapacitates her, but that sense of loss is also for an incomplete and ephemeral construct of parents. As the descriptions of her mother and father indicate, this construction reflects hegemonic conventional and binary understandings of mothers and fathers from the Before. As such, despite this world of drastically altered versions of kinship depicted the novel underlines Braithwaite, Hutton, and Miller’s claim that dystopian YA often “privileges traditional, and gendered, notions of family” (2012:106). Despite their incompleteness, the embodied, sensory nature of these memories differs greatly from the ‘memories’ Pressia creates. This then situates Pressia’s relationship to her parents as beyond ‘in logos parentis’ to a deeply felt and embodied memorialisation of them. However, this complicated relationship with memory has multiple consequences: if memory is a form of currency, then Pressia has little to feasibly offer; and if she cannot wholly remember her parents, and if her identity rests on her knowledge of them, then she cannot fully ‘know’ herself. Subsequently, Pressia’s ‘creating’ of memories, whether actively or passively, is a project of self-identity in lieu of material or mental anchors. Partridge has vastly different experiences to Pressia when it comes to familial relationships. Although Aribelle is also absent for most of

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Partridge’s life, he has immediate access to his memories of and with her to draw from. Unlike Pressia, Partridge has a relationship with his father, Ellery, although it is one of neglect and distance. Although Partridge and his father have a relationship, Ellery’s neglect positions him still as an absent figure in Partridge’s life: “Partridge is used to being ignored by his father” (Baggott, 2012:21). Unlike Pressia’s experience of ‘in logos parentis’, Partridge rebels against his actual father. With Aribelle presumed dead, and Sedge publicly acknowledged as dead, Partridge’s only family is his neglectful father, forcing him to find some way of connecting with his absent mother. On a class trip to the Personal Loss Archives, a space where boxes of mementos of and from the dead are kept, Partridge finds the boxes of both Sedge and Aribelle. The implication of these objects as both of and from the dead has specific significance here as both Sedge and Aribelle are revealed later to be alive. Aribelle and Ellery both use Partridge’s desire to connect with the presumably dead Aribelle to encourage Partridge to escape the Dome and find her. When he reaches Sedge’s box, “[h]e can’t bear” to open it and “see what his brother has been reduced to” (43). However, when he comes to Aribelle’s box, he “will take any memory of her he can find, fitted into a box or not”. This drastically different interaction suggests that although Partridge has memories of his mother, she remains largely unknown to him. He “finds a birthday card with balloons on the cover without an envelope written by his mother to Partridge on his ninth birthday … a small metal box, and an old photograph of him and his mother at the beach” (43) and “a necklace and pendant  – a swan made of gold with a bright blue stone for an eye” (44). While these objects hold significant sentimental value for Partridge as mementos of his mother and of their relationship, they also operate as tools for finding her. The birthday card was planted by Ellery and embedded with a tracking chip to follow Partridge to Aribelle. Just as Pressia’s memories are unreliable due to the socialising processes she is subjected to on the outside, specifically the valuing of memory and her grandfather’s ‘stories’, Partridge’s are also already imbricated within the power discourses that inform his parents’ relationship and the biopolitical management of the Dome and outside. In this way, loss and remembrance are positioned as means for manipulation and the larger exercising of disciplinary and bio-power. Although Partridge and Pressia have distinct but similar relationships to the memory of their parents, when it is revealed that they are half-siblings

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their conceptualisation of family grows and shifts. This revelation gives new weight to each other’s memories, experiences, and understandings of their family but also imbricates one another in the process of comprehending trauma. However, they both are still manipulated and utilised by both Ellery and Aribelle to attack the other. Part of the trail of clues Aribelle leaves for Partridge is a modified fairy-tale she made him remember as a child. In summation, the story relays the tale of a ‘swan maiden’, forced into marrying a ‘bad king’ who gave her two sons, escaping to the land of a ‘good king’ with “the one like her who didn’t resist her” (319) to stop the bad king’s plan. While there she has a daughter, but she and the good king are unable to stop the bad king’s plan in time. She returns her son to the bad king and gives her daughter to “a barren woman to raise” (320). Her son pleads for her to “not to fly away”; instead “Burrow underground … so you can always be watching” (321), which she does. As the disguised story of Aribelle’s journey, this ‘swan maiden’ interpretation delivers several revelations for Pressia and Partridge, most significantly that they are half-siblings. In using this specific tale to deliver a message to Partridge, one he will eventually be able to decipher, Aribelle expresses how she feels about Ellery and their relationship. Through her identification with the ‘swan maiden’, the relationship between Aribelle and Ellery is shown to be abusive. As she phrases it in her story, he “stole her wings”, “forced her to marry him” (318), and “gave her two sons” (319). Furthermore, she had to abandon Sedge and Partridge and “fly off to join the good king – because the bad king would kill her” (320–1). Through this story, Aribelle expresses her fear and hatred of Ellery and exposes his abusive and threatening behaviour to Partridge. This then repositions Partridge’s and Pressia’s relationship to her and forces them to re-evaluate her absence. Although Aribelle implicitly warns Partridge and Pressia about Ellery’s abuse, the journey to find her is nonetheless complicated by Ellery’s use of both children as a means to locate and kill Aribelle. Due to Pressia’s bugging, when she and Partridge find Aribelle they are immediately joined by Special Forces, including Sedge. Sedge allies himself with the group against Special Forces and is fatally wounded in the fight. Aribelle runs to his side, and as she kisses his forehead as he dies, his ticker (the bomb implanted in his head) explodes, killing him instantly and “shatter[ing] … his mother’s face” (425), in front of Partridge and Pressia. This does not immediately kill Aribelle, and Pressia, in an act of mercy, shoots her – “Her mother’s face is gone” (428). This scene is the culmination of Ellery’s long-standing plan to exact revenge on Aribelle for

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leaving, betraying his secrets, and loving another. When considering the relationship between Ellery and Aribelle as centrally one of abuse, this scene develops more powerful overtones in terms of the family-as-trauma theme. After watching them reunite, Ellery, using one child as a weapon, kills his son and mortally injures his ex-wife in front of her two other children, while using one of those children to watch and act from a distance. Although the blast does not kill Aribelle, through Pressia, Ellery can vicariously murder his wife from a first-person perspective. Ultimately, Ellery forces his own sons and Aribelle’s daughter to be complicit in his abuse and murder of his ex-wife exhaustively underlining how, through this depiction of complex familial violence and trauma, the story meaningfully entangles the personal and the political.

Conclusion Through its explorations of apocalyptic scenarios, the body in Pure emerges as highly dynamic and modifiable on many fronts. In establishing a narrative centrally concerned with the effects of power (parental, technological, disciplinary, biopolitical) in producing bodily difference, Baggott’s novel addresses how bodies are acted upon within discourses of power. Although this may seem to reduce bodies to inert matter, they are in fact enmeshed within discourses of power. Pressia’s body is often reduced to an object of power, but she finds creative ways of resisting the disciplinary and bio-power Ellery exercises (however not the power Bradwell or Partridge exercises). Partridge’s body is also made an object of power as it is transformed into a biological battleground between his parents with competing visions of social order and bodily autonomy, and he too finds ways of resisting the power exercised by his father. However, both Pressia and Partridge find themselves being manipulated by both Ellery and Aribelle, ultimately being implicated in Aribelle’s murder as an extension of a broader history of abuse and domestic violence. This situates familial relationships as traumatic and abusive, complicating traditional conceptualisations of family, even as Pressia in particular longs for a highly romanticised conventional family structure from the Before which would be highly recognisable to the implied contemporary adolescent reader. Unlike other post-nuclear texts examined in this book, and unlike other contemporary dystopian young adult texts, Pure’s exploration of various benign and fantastical bodily variations that meaningfully resonate with understandings of disability articulates a trans-corporeal enmeshment with the environment, objects, and other living beings, underlining social nexuses of relationships, ecology, and power.



Conclusion

Representations of disability in texts for young people are powerful things. They can provide readers with a sense of place in the world, with a friend who is like them, with adventures and ideas and spaces new and exciting and radically different; in short, they can be a place to belong—a “HandiLand” to borrow Elizabeth A. Wheeler’s term (2019). But they can also be a space to challenge, to find vent for frustrations with the world around us, for new ways of thinking and being in the world. Dystopian texts draw attention to how our current moment is connected to a world-to-be and how what is currently occurring (be it the climate crisis, the return of religio-fascist politics, or our on-going battle with COVID, etc.) can, or rather will, lead to worrying futures. These texts put on display the power relations, systems, and structures that instantiate and constitute the oppression of various groups, both in the text and in the world. As Alison Kafer (2013) has shown, disability and disabled people are often framed as having no future or not belonging to a desirable one. And yet, as this book has shown, disability is a central concern of much dystopian (SF and fantasy) fiction because the key concerns about bio-­ futurity, governmental oppression, and ecological collapse speak to and through disability issues: these texts, as I call them, are ‘dis-topian’. How can texts address issues of eugenics, nuclear war, or exterminationist politics without also addressing disability? However, this only addresses one part of a critical discussion around representations of disability futures. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Holdsworth, The Government of Disability in Dystopian Children’s Texts, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52034-1

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What the texts analysed in this book demonstrate is, to return to Foucault (1982), wherever there is power, there is resistance. These texts advocate for change or resistance, new ways of doing and being that create a world better than our own. For minority groups, and for young people, this has a particular resonance; a world of the future where we are safe, respected, and understood. In these ways, dystopian literature for young people operates as a system of management, directing energies towards particular goals and critiquing particular ideas and systems while leaving others unquestioned. This capacity for dystopian fiction to speak to various forms and levels of power makes it a potent site thinking about how disability, disabled people and communities at large are imbricated within broader networks of power, management and governmentality across time. In these ways, the texts this book has focused on occupy interesting positions; they emerge at times of significant change in how disability is being understood, managed, and experienced at differing times and places. The late Victorian period is a significant start point for thinking about how disability, politics and dystopian youth literature intersect. These two chapters have demonstrated how various forms of eugenics discourse, from its anxieties about women’s sexuality and fantastical creatures to its preoccupation with heredity resulting in confinement and prostheticisation, populate late Victorian literature for young people. The government of disability in late Victorian British children’s and young adult literature articulates both socio-political anxieties about disability and documents multiple representational attempts to manage disabled people. As Chap. 1 demonstrates, eugenics discourses were so culturally pervasive in the late-­ nineteenth century they can be found in youth texts, like George MacDonald’s The princess and the goblin (1872). As a ‘social science’, eugenics had (has) a monumental impact on how disability was (is) conceptualised and understood. MacDonald’s titular goblins are constructed as dysgenic and degenerative, leading them to be violent, aggressive and cruel, ultimately justifying their mass extermination towards the end of the novel. This representation dovetails into the hysterisation of Princess Irene and her Grandmother. After being kidnapped, Irene is almost forced into a dysgenic marriage with the goblin prince, but she is rescued and redirected toward a normative heterosexual romance with Curdie. Through the ends of both the goblin race and the story, order is reinstated and eugenics is to thank. In comparison, Dinah Mulock Craik’s The little lame prince (1875) gives us a disabled character whose experiences of disability,

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confinement, and melancholia make him sympathetic rather than monstrous. In addressing Craik’s nonfiction work as well as her children’s novel, Chap. 2 directly takes up issues of religious charity, morality and disability. The views Craik espouses in her nonfiction writing link up with questions about the representation of Prince Dolor, the titular little lame prince, and his place in the world. The little lame prince is ultimately a story of Dolor’s exclusion, sadness and pain which Craik justifies as a means for him to overcome his disability and become a good King before he disappears, never having produced an heir himself. Craik’s work ultimately recycles some negative ideas about disability while justifying institutional management and reinscribing eugenics as a guiding discourse. The anxieties present in these two Victorian British novels do not simply vanish. While eugenics discourses fell out of popular favour around the world in the first few decades of the twentieth century, it was not until the Holocaust that the horrifying extent to which eugenics could be utilised was recognised. While there is a significant temporal gap between the 1870s and 1950s, with global events having an immense impact of British government, policy, geography, society and culture, the 1950s marks a major turning point in British, and world, history. With the atrocities of the Holocaust still fresh, the beginning of the end of British imperial power in the face of Soviet and American superpower status, the anxiety of possible global nuclear war, pushes for independence from colonised nations and the subsequent decolonisation of these nations, ways of understanding and managing populations had to rapidly change. Chapter 3 addresses the role of disability in the critical discussions of imperialism, civilisation and ritual in William Golding’s Lord of the flies (1954). Three characters, the Littlun, Simon and Piggy, who are all marked by physical or behavioural difference, are all killed within the novel. The boys on the island attempt to recreate the conditions of civilisation through recourse to imperialism and a religious discourse, or ‘beastie telling’. In doing so, they instantiate hierarchies which inevitably situates these ‘marked’ figures as undesirable and fit for sacrifice and link the oppression of disabled people with colonised and racialised peoples. Like the ‘beastie telling’ of Golding’s novel, The chrysalids (1955) by John Wyndham also examines how faith-based discourses can be weaponised against those ‘marked’ as different. In the novel, Labradorian politics relies on a certain model of existence drawn from religious texts, and anything that deviates from this norm must be exposed and dealt with accordingly. Through a consideration of how

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difference is measured and monitored, Chap. 4 examines the ways these faith-based politics through technologies of the self shore up bodily norms and relate to broader Cold War anxieties in the 1950s. The chapter also considers how Wyndham uses history and geography as forms of propaganda to bolster the exclusionary and limited norms of Waknuk. These dystopian texts from the 1950s offer a more complex reckoning with disability history and the history of representation than initially thought. Through critically engaging with how knowledge is produced and reproduced, both novels open possibilities for rethinking power structures not necessarily possible in other times and places. Both texts articulate criticisms of the tactics of power in Britain and the United States in the 1950s in ways that call for critical revaluation. In the time between the 1950s and the 1990s significant alterations in discourses related to disability occurred. Most significant was the proliferation of rights movement and activism organisations and the resulting impact this has had on geopolitical discourses of disability. Since the 1950s, there has been a sizable increase in visibility, attempts at inclusion, and pseudo-celebration of disability and the diversity it signifies. However, as David T Mitchell and Sharon L Snyder (2015) have demonstrated, these come as the effects of disciplinary and biopolitical tactics employed by neoliberalist States. Chapter 5 examines the limits of inclusionist discourses as a disciplinary and biopolitical technique of a neoliberal governmentality in Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (1990). The film critically explores how disabled people are constituted as either freak or monster depending on how or why they are included in society. For Edward, when he provides a service to the community as hairdresser or dog-groomer he can be allowed provisional inclusion as a freak, but once he breaks specific codes of inclusion (most egregious is his potential dysgenic relationship with Kim) he is reconstituted as a monster and must be dealt with accordingly. While the film critiques these strategies of management, its narrative framing minimises the power of this critique. Jane Stemp’s Waterbound (1995) works with similar neoliberal politics, but from a disabled perspective. As examined in Chap. 6, Stemp’s novel pays close attention to systems of management but also to the radical potential of disability politics and histories, both personal and communal. Waterbound engages remembrance and excavation as critical techniques of minority resistance against the disciplinary and bio-power of Admin. In doing so, Stemp also highlights the power of self-determination of disabled communities and of alternative histories and geographies. The novel ends with the possibility

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of Upstream social change, however, it comes at a significant physical, social and cultural cost. What is clear through both of these texts, though, is that discourses about disability and disabled people are changing; that disabled people can and should be enfolded into society and culture and, more importantly, should have their autonomy respected. Although the successes of disability rights movements signalled substantive change for disabled people in the USA and UK, the actual, real impact of this would not be seen until later. Thus, we can see the uncertainty in the closures of both texts as speaking to larger uncertainties regarding disability rights in both the USA and the UK in the 1990s and into the future. When this project was initially undertaken as a PhD, the 2010s was relatively new. The full extent of what would occur throughout the decade was completely unknown and so, initially, the impetus was on what was happening at the point of writing. With a little hindsight, the 2010s illuminated a number of trends, some completely unexpected, but a clear throughline of continuing neoliberal investment in disability still emerged. Chapter 7 analyses the role of neoliberal representational politics in the Cartoon Network series Adventure time (2009–2018). While the series features two prominent, key characters, Finn and the Ice King, who experience disability, it tends towards narratives of normalisation and exclusion. Despite an ostensible commitment to a ‘social model’ of disability and a desire to ‘represent’ disabled groups, the series reinscribes problematic, stereotypical and negative ideas of disability. The series does explore themes of trauma and abandonment with some care, however, with a growing interest in mental health and trauma throughout the period, this may point to new avenues of neoliberal investment. Julianna Baggott’sPure (2012) also explores issues relating to parental abuse, trauma and abandonment, but avoids the reductionism present in Adventure time’s narratives. Through a specific attention to bodies, history and family, Baggott’s novel takes power as a central element of critique. Chapter 8 takes up this thread in Baggott’s novel and examines how the family is reconceived as traumatising, and how the central characters resist the control of an abusive father figure. Although both Pressia and Partridge’s bodies are changed irreparably by their father, Ellery, they both find new ways to connect with others and understand their new trans-corporeal bodies. When I initially started this project, the number of monographs about disability in children’s literature were incredibly few. Thankfully, I can now see a wide variety and spread of works focused on this intersection and,

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even more so, I know there are more to come. With that said, however, I do believe there are further avenues for scholarship that this book can hopefully be a start point for. Genre is a powerful tool that structures our engagement with particular discourses on the page and in the world, as this book has sought to demonstrate. Works like Emily Baldys’ “Disabled sexuality, incorporated” (2012), Kathryn Allen’s Disability in science fiction (2013, ed.), and Ria Cheyne’s Disability, literature, genre (2019) highlight how fruitful and engaging genre can be for discussions of disability. These works, though, only scratch the surface of the possibilities of genre research for broader discusses of disability and art. In this book, I have minimally expounded the potential of a term like ‘dis-topia’ to capture a particular tendency in a selection of dystopian SF and fantasy texts, set in futuristic or otherworldly settings, to foreground disability issues as politically vital. I believe there is much more to be said about such a tendency and, moreover, that these tendencies cannot be solely the domain of one genre. I would be very interested to see where this kind of critical trajectory could lead in the future. There is also adequate space for more critical engagements with disability in children’s and young adult fiction. As this focus continues to grow, I would like to encourage scholars to continue to develop rich and complex analyses such as Keith’s (2001) and Wheeler’s (2019) monographs, as well as Abbye E Meyer’s From wallflowers to bulletproof families (2022). This requires scholars interested in these topics to keep drawing on the excellent scholarship being produced in the field of Children’s Literature, not just on Literary Studies. However, there has been a tendency of late to focus on a good/bad dyad when approaching texts, and for criticism to propound analysis that takes symptomatology, diagnosis and reality as unproblematic yardstick. This kind of approach reinforces a medical model of disability and can often oversimplify the complexity of the field. Instead, I think more critical analyses that take the interests, critical interventions and epistemologies of Disability Studies as a base would strengthen this burgeoning intersection. Lastly, further studies of works from outside of the USA and UK are needed. While the landscape is no longer as bleak as it once was thanks to the efforts of scholars from a variety of cultural and linguistic contexts, further engagement with national literatures outside of the United States and Britain would enable a richer and more comprehensive understanding of the representational significance of disability as well as the range of disability contexts throughout the world. While I have not sought out works

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outside of the USA and UK for this book, this is sorely needed as disability in children’s literature begins to develop as an area of scholarship. Both within this are and beyond it, we need to be able to account for the specificity and limitations of an American model of disabled experience that has become an academic norm. The way America ‘does’ disability, is not the same as anywhere else, so we should avoid universalising American experiences. Likewise, we should not look to former (and current) imperial powers for models either. For a more comprehensive and vibrant sense of disability in the world, we need to emphasise and foreground disability experiences from the Global South, from a various of cultural and linguistic contexts, and from experiential positions that challenge structures of social and cultural domination. As these suggested areas of future research demonstrate, there is much to be said about how power and politics utilise, shape and govern disability in children’s and young adult literature.

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Index1

A Abandonment, see History, personal Ableism, see Disability, and discrimination Adventure Time (Nickelodeon), xxxv, 129–148, 152, 173 Amputation, xxxv, 129–148 B Baccolini, Raffaella, xxx, xxxi, 112, 117 and Moylan, Tom, xxx, 112, 117 Bérubé, Michael, xix–xxi, xxxi Biopolitics, xviii, xxiv, xxvi–xxx, 3, 12, 20, 30, 32, 36, 41, 50, 58, 60, 71, 73, 75, 76, 78, 79, 91, 95, 104, 108, 111, 118, 132, 133, 136, 152, 153, 155, 159–161, 163, 165, 167, 172 definition of, xxviii

Bio-power, see Biopolitics Borsay, Anne, 29, 30, 46 Bradford, Clare, xvi, xvii C Children’s literature as field, xxiii, 174 and socialisation, xvi, xxiii, xxiv, xxviii, xxx, 11–13 Chrysalids, The (Wyndham), xxxiv, xxxivn3, xxxv, 67–86, 110–112, 116, 149, 149n1, 152, 153, 171 Civilisation, 4, 4n3, 47–65, 171 Colonialism, see Imperialism Confinement, xxix, 24, 27–32, 35, 36, 36n5, 39–41, 68, 78, 170, 171

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Holdsworth, The Government of Disability in Dystopian Children’s Texts, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52034-1

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192 

INDEX

D Degeneration, 1, 2, 4–6, 8–12, 17, 21, 24 Disability and discrimination, xxv, 48n1, 49, 52, 61, 62, 64, 65, 73, 76, 78, 82, 85, 93, 95, 103, 104, 108, 109, 111, 114, 116–118, 123–125, 127, 128, 128n1, 137, 145–148, 150, 154, 155, 157, 160, 169, 171 and futurity, xvii, xviii, xxxi, xxxii, 3, 5 medical model of, xxv, 89, 130, 174 social model of, xxv, xxvi, 28, 31, 39, 89, 90, 118, 130, 173 Disability Alliance, 89 Disability Studies, xviii, xxiii, xxv, xxvi, 23, 116, 174 Disciplinary power, xviii, xxiv, xxvi– xxix, 3, 12, 17, 17n6, 20, 30, 32, 36, 41, 47, 50, 52, 53, 58, 60, 69–71, 73–76, 78, 81, 82, 84, 85, 91, 95, 104, 108, 111, 118, 132, 133, 136, 137, 152, 153, 155, 157, 159–161, 163, 165, 167 definition of, xxvii Discrimination, see Disability, and discrimination Dis-topias, xviii, xxx–xxxii, 2, 24, 49, 68, 92, 110, 133, 174 Dysgenics, see Eugenics Dystopias, xvii, xx, xxx–xxxii definition of, xxx, xxxi E Edward Scissorhands (Burton), xxxiv, xxxv, 89–108, 127, 128, 172 Eugenics, xvii, xx, xxix, xxxiii, xxxv, 1–21, 24, 29, 30, 32–36, 40, 41, 67, 68, 72–74, 78, 85, 95, 103, 104, 107, 125, 169–172

F Foucault, Michel, xvi, xviii, xxiii–xxviii, xxx, xxxi, 2–4, 17, 29, 30, 69, 70, 83, 170 Freaks, xx, xxxiii, xxxiv, 89–108, 172 G Galton, Francis, 5, 10, 11, 33 Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie, xix–xxi, 91, 95, 104, 114 Geography minority, 110 as propaganda, xviii, 71, 78–82, 85, 86 Gobineau, Arthur de, 5, 7 Government of disability, xviii, xxii, xxiv, xxvi, xxvii, xxx, xxxiii, xxxv, xxxvi, 2, 4, 11, 12, 21, 41, 46, 47, 51–53, 59–64, 68, 74, 81, 136, 147, 150, 152, 170 H Heredity, 3–5, 32, 33, 36n5, 170 Hingston, Kylee-Anne, 24, 38, 40 History minority, xv, xvii, 109, 110, 112, 114, 117, 119, 121, 125–127, 148 personal, xxxivn3, xxxv, 109–111, 114, 117, 121–124, 126, 127, 131, 132, 134–137, 140–145, 147, 148, 151, 155, 162–167, 172, 173 as propaganda, 71, 82–86, 112, 153, 172 Hysteria, xv, xxxiii, 2, 2n1, 4, 12, 13, 16, 17, 19, 21, 24 definition of, 2, 2n1, 12, 16

 INDEX 

I Imperialism, xviii, 45–65, 80, 84, 171 Inclusionism, xviii, 90–92, 94, 96, 96n6, 100, 101, 104, 108, 110, 127, 128, 130 Insanity, see Madness Institutionalisation, xvii, xxxiv, 2, 107, 134, 136 J Jameson, Fredric, xvii, xxx K Kafer, Alison, xvii, xviii, xxxi, xxxii, 138, 169 Keith, Lois, xxi, xxii, 174 L Little lame prince, The (Mulock Craik), xxxiii, 23, 170, 171 Lord of the flies (Golding), xxxiv, 45–65, 171 M Madness, 4, 29, 33, 52, 129–148 Mallan, Kerry, xvi Marginalisation, see Disability, and discrimination Maudsley, Henry, 5, 33, 33n4, 34 McCulloch, Fiona, 1, 2, 8, 13–15, 18 McRuer, Robert, 129, 130 Melancholia, 24, 28, 30, 32–40, 32n3, 33n4, 36n5, 138, 171 Memory, see History, personal Mitchell, David T., xv, xviii–xxi, xxvi, xxvii, xxix, 90, 172 Monsters, xx, xxxiii, xxxiv, 56, 75, 79, 89–108, 144, 146, 172

193

N Neoliberalism, xx, xxi, xxvi, 90–92, 128, 130, 140 Normalisation, xxvii, xxviii, xxx, xxxiv, 90, 91, 93, 95, 99, 106, 108, 110, 118, 119, 127, 130, 147, 149, 173 Normativisation, see Normalisation Nuclear war anxiety of, xxxiii, 47, 68, 171 and mutation, 47, 72 O Oppression, see Disability, and discrimination P Phrenology, 4, 5, 7–9, 10n5, 11, 21 Physiognomy, 4, 5, 7–9, 11, 21 Posthumanism, xxxi, 68, 81, 150, 152 Princess and the goblin, The (MacDonald), xxxiii, 1–21, 24, 149, 170 Propaganda, 68, 71, 78–86, 154, 172 Prostheticisation, xvii, 24, 95, 99, 134–140, 170 Pure (Baggott), xxxv, 69, 149–167, 173 R Reiter, Geoffrey, 2, 9 Religion and fundamentalism, 71 and imperialism, xxxiv, 53–59, 61, 171 and sentimentality, 25, 31 Resistance, xxv, xxx–xxxiii, xxxv, xxxvi, 36–41, 48, 49, 75, 76, 86, 109–128, 132, 133, 149, 153, 154, 160, 161, 167, 170, 172

194 

INDEX

Revolution, see Resistance Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 49, 64 S Sacrifice, 49, 55, 58–64, 160, 161, 171 Saunders, Kathy, xxiii Sequestration, see Confinement Sexuality, xxxi, xxxiii, 1, 2n1, 3, 9, 13, 15, 17–20, 40, 41, 101, 104, 138, 139, 153, 170 sexual violence, 104, 108, 138–140, 147, 158 Siebers, Tobin, xxv Sinfield, Alan, 47–50, 53–55 Smith, Angela M., xix–xxi Snyder, Sharon L., xv, xviii–xxi, xxvi, xxvii, xxix, 90, 172 Stephens, John, 12 Sterilisation, 40, 67, 68, 74, 78, 86, 153 Suicide, 34–36, 75, 76, 78, 86, 116, 136, 146, 147, 157 Surveillance, xxvii, xxxiv, xxxv, 17, 18, 68, 70–78, 86, 108, 111–116, 118–120, 122, 141, 158

T Technologies of the self, xxxiv, 67–86, 172 definition of, 69 Trans-corporeality, xxi, 132, 134, 136, 149, 152, 167 Trauma, xxxv, 122, 130–140, 143, 145, 147, 150, 155–159, 163, 166, 167, 173 Tremain, Shelley, xviii, xxiv–xxix U Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS), xxv, 89 Utopias, xvi, xvii W Waterbound (Stemp), xxxivn3, xxxv, 69, 109–128, 149, 149n1, 153, 172 Wheeler, Elizabeth A, xxii, 9, 24, 32, 32n3, 169, 174 Wilson, Eric, 47–49, 54, 57–59 Y Young adult texts, xvi, xviii, xxi–xxiv, xxviii, xxx, 111, 130, 150, 167