Cultural Critique Reveals Profound Truths about Disability Experience in America
Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, by Rosemarie Garland Thomson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
Reviewed by Laura Hershey
Reading academic theory sometimes feels like either a chore or a luxury but, either way, an exercise in abstraction -- a good workout for the brain, but hardly necessary for real-life survival.
Rosemarie Garland Thomson's book offers a very different experience. In Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, Thomson probes the intricacies of disability identity, as imagined and inscribed by U.S. cultural producers ranging from prototypical individualist Ralph Waldo Emerson, to freak show promoters, to novelist Toni Morrison. In her thoroughgoing examination of our culture's images and interpretations of physically disabled people, Thomson offers more than just elegant academic concepts. Her revelations help to explain the experience of living with a disability in a nation devoted to self-control, self-sufficiency, and competition.
Exploring both broad historical trends and several specific works of literature, Thomson sets ambitious goals for her study. She sets out "to theorize disability in the ways that feminism has theorized gender... [to] challenge existing social relations;... resist interpretations of certain bodily configurations and functioning as deviant;... question the ways that differences are invested with meaning;... examine the enforcement of universalizing norms;... interrogate the politics of appearance;... explore the politics of naming;... forge positive identities." (p.22) By the end she has done all that, and more. By describing and criticizing various examples of disability viewed as deviant, Thomson helps make possible the alternative -- an understanding of disability as something both extraordinary and natural, empowering rather than shameful.
From the early days of the republic, Thomson explains, the new American imagined himself as supremely normal -- defined as male, white, heterosexual, self-governing, self-supporting, and fully equipped to participate in egalitarian democracy and free-enterprise capitalism. This "average man" was required to have full physical abilities; his status as normal "depend[ed] upon a body that [was] a stable, neutral instrument of the individual will." (p.42) The body was expected to serve the individual's quest for achievement, without making demands of its own. "It is this fantasy," Thomson adds, "that the disabled figure troubles." (p.42) Bodies which looked different, or failed to perform as expected, threatened not only the success of the individual, but the basic ideological assumptions upon which society itself was founded.
That threat had to be contained and managed. The popular freak shows of the nineteenth century offered one strategy for isolating and coping with the chaos suggested by physical differences. People who were congenitally disabled, or nonstandard in size or weight, or ethnically different, were featured in sideshow attractions. Members of the public paid to see elaborate presentations of these "freaks." Hyperbolic narrative, exotic costumes, and dramatic lighting and music served to highlight and exaggerate the anomalous characteristics of the "freaks," to the extent that in the mind of their audience, they ceased to be fellow citizens and became instead something completely Other. This transformation followed what Thomson calls "the cardinal principle of enfreakment: that the body envelops and obliterates the freak's potential humanity." She adds, "When the body becomes pure text, a freak has been produced from a physically disabled human being." (p.59)
This deliberately constructed image of disability served several purposes in the rapidly-changing U.S. -- it entertained while pretending to educate; it "flattened" the differences among audience members, affirming their essential sameness; and it gave viewers a safe taste of the exotic, allowing them to gawk without having to come to terms with something different from themselves. Most significantly, the freak shows allowed people to reassure themselves of their essential normalcy -- indeed, to establish, define, and circumscribe that normalcy.
Freak shows are now (mostly) a relic of the past, scorned by most people as tacky and exploitive. But the decline of the freak shows did not necessarily signal either the liberation of people with disabilities, or the resolution of American cultural contradictions. Instead, new forms of oppression pushed people with disabilities into a new deviance role. It was no longer the sideshow promoter who wrote the "pure text" of the physically disabled body -- it was the physician. "By the end of the [nineteenth] century, medicalization rather than freakdom legitimated such notions as white supremacy and such political practices as colonialism, eugenic legislation, and compulsory institutionalization or sterilization," Thomson writes. "The extraordinary body bias shifted from its earlier visible, public position as strange, awful, and lurid spectacle to its later, private position as sick, hidden, and shameful, producing finally the fully medicalized freak who after 1940 was removed from the stage platform to the teaching hospital amphitheater, the medical text, and the special institution." (p.78)
In the book's next section, Thomson examines several late nineteenth-century "sentimental novels" promoting liberal social reform. She looks at the works of three women writers, of whom the best-known is Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin. In these novels, Thomson argues, middle-class nondisabled white women characters are developed as heroines by juxtaposing them against disabled women characters, either slaves or impoverished white women. The latter characters are portrayed with sympathy, but they have little or no capacity for changing their own lives; instead they depend on the powerful, nondisabled, idealized heroines. They are at the mercy not only of their oppressive circumstances, but of their own flawed bodies. Just as earlier generations established their own identities as "average men" through contrast with disabled "freaks," these writers advanced their ideas about liberated womanhood and social reform by stereotyping helpless disabled characters.
These analyses offer an important insight -- related not just to literature and history, but to an important aspect of living with a disability. Our inequality, and our often strained relations with other people, might be partially explained by this phenomenon, in which the citizenry measures itself -- its capacities, its acceptable ordinariness, its fitness for work -- against us, people with disabilities. That practice must taint and distort any number of interactions among people with and without disabilities.
A liberating alternative emerges in the final section of Extraordinary Bodies. In the writings of African-American woman authors Ann Petry, Toni Morrison, and Audre Lorde, Thomson finds a new kind of disabled woman character. Thomson argues that these writers, influenced by their own outsider/minority status and by the ideals of the civil rights movement, have portrayed disabled women in more favorable, or at least multidimensional, ways. These powerful women are distinguished, not ruined, by their disabilities. Their physical differences set them apart from their communities, yet also bind them to their communities by affording them a unique perspective, from which they make important contributions.
In her tour through several key territories of the U.S. cultural landscape, Thomson gives readers the opportunity to understand and reject the traditional view of disability as deviant -- and to embrace disability as extraordinary.
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