Melissa GilstrapWORKING CLASS CRIPS: QUEERNESS, DISABILITY AND CLASS IN DICKENS' OUR MUTUAL FRIEND*Robert McRuer opens his 2006 Crip Theory by pointing out that "despite a growing awareness of the intersection between queer theory and disability studies, little notice has been taken of the connection between heterosexuality and able-bodied identity" (1). In an amusing twist on the notion that the disabled perpetually depend on others, Crip Theory exposes the ways heterosexuality and ability depend on queerness and disability, their so-called opposites. My project, then, is to similarly lay bare the way Dickens' 1865 novel, Our Mutual Friend, depends on the infirm, the queer, and the working class to prop up the "compulsory able-bodiedness and heterosexuality" it presents as ideal (1). Of course, England's nineteenth-century industrial transformation made the "able-bodied" identity intelligible on a mass scale, for with the factories came an exploding population of laborers crippled—often physically and psychologically—by faulty machinery or cruel work masters. Defined in this capitalistic system as "those who cannot work," these disabled, non-productive bodies could at least be salvaged for the purpose of producing new bodies, either by having more children themselves or promoting other heterosexual unions. Because Victorians were often suspicious of the diseases or disabilities these parents would reproduce in their offspring, however, Our Mutual Friend directs its disabled characters toward the latter purpose. Yet, as Jenny Wren plays matchmaker and Silas Wegg searches for his gentility,they undermine the concept's "naturalness." Their necessary presence simultaneously troubles these impulses by revealing them to be disciplinary mechanisms, not instincts or choices. It's also likely that Jenny Wren and Sloppy would enter into a procreative relationship after the novel's end—upending the unwritten rule forbidding the disabled from having children and forming families. Whether the text's treatment of these "crip" characters is mostly subversive or conservative is thus frustratingly slippery, and, accordingly, class, disability, and queer scholars have penned widely differently readings of the novel. Though Jenny is often applauded for retaining her sexuality and her mobility throughout the novel, I would point out that she also very deliberately facilitates the "reproduction" of marriage and class hierarchies. This essay not only engages with these varied readings, but also argues that Dickens' "crip" characters are used to uphold bourgeois, hetero/able domesticity, though their needed presence necessarily suggests that this hegemony is always unstable, "always in danger of collapse" (McRuer 31). To briefly return to Crip Theory, however, it should be made clear that McRuer titled his work after the pejorative "Crip/Cripple" in a further attempt to put his work in conversation with the Queer movement, which re-appropriated the similar slur, "queer," in the early 1990s (Brontsema 4). Queer Theory, an academic reaction against the essentialism of identity politics, also took up the term not only as a noun, but also as a verb—wherein something can be queered, just as much as it can be queer. Like David Halperin, I define queer in its broadest (and, arguably, its most productive) terms, as any non-essentialized identity that finds its expression in opposition to hegemony (62). In this context, the term "identity" becomes a misnomer; instead, queer "demarcates not a positivity but a positionality" (62, emphasis my own). Despite popular notions of queerness, the word is certainly not limited to gays and lesbians, but "it is in fact available to anyone who is or who feels marginalized because of his or her sexual practices" (62). At a period in time when "asexual objectification, the assumption that sexuality is inappropriate in disabled women" was the norm, Jenny Wren's vibrant, defiant sexuality would certainly qualify as "cripped" or queered act (Garland-Thompson 285). Disability and queerness also feed into one another: to be disabled in an able-bodied society queers disabled subjects, and to be queer in a heteronormative society similarly disables queer subjects. Unlike the pathos-inducing Blind Bertha and Tiny Tim of Dickens' past, Jenny Wren is intimately involved with the many amorous affairs in this intricately plotted novel of nineteenth-century English society. Jenny both predicts and orchestrates Lizzie Hexam and Eugene Wrayburn's marriage, itself an event only made possible through Wrayburn's own severe crippling. Far from being excluded from this domestic realm, then, Jenny, the teenaged girl with the "bad back and queer legs," even ends the novel in a marriageable relationship with a minor character named Sloppy, a presumably intellectually disabled, but amiable, young man. Of course, there is much good to be said about Dickens' uncommonly powerful portrayal of Jenny as resourceful, wise, and sexually appealing. Dickens' depiction is not just unusual for his time, it also marks a departure from his wearying and "stereotypical presentations of angels, fallen sisters, and eccentric women" so prevalent in the rest of his oeuvre (Golden 17). As Sara Schotland comments, "Dickens was ahead of his time in providing a suitor for Jenny, and envisioning that a disabled woman can be beautiful," especially in light of the fact that most disabled women in Victorian literature were "denied a reproductive future" (n.p.). Because Victorians often feared the genetic transmission of disability, handicapped men and women (but more often women) were sexually stigmatized, being "culturally enjoined from reproducing their defect" (Klages 77). The scene in which Sloppy and Jenny initially meet is both charmingly comical and full of whimsy, an effect heightened by Jenny's repeated allusions to fairytales. "'Why, you're like the giant,' said Miss Wren [to Sloppy], 'when he came home in the land of the Beanstalk, and wanted Jack for supper" (Dickens 787). Jenny then reveals herself not just as a Cinderella—as Riah is apt to call her—but also a Rapunzel, as "she shook her hair down," eliciting "a burst of admiration" from Sloppy, who exclaims, "'What a lot, and what a colour!'" (Dickens 787). While obviously proscribed from any outright displays of sexuality, Dickens does use Jenny's sensual presentation of her golden locks as a striking image of her desirability. Keeping with this theme of fairy tales, Elizabeth Gitter explains that the Victorians' fascination with female hair "coincided with a literary vogue of fairy tales, many of which involve golden-haired heroines or quests for golden hair" (943). "[S]teeped in a culture that insisted on the preciousness of hair…golden hair in particular," Dickens rewards the unselfish Sloppy with "true gold," the love of an attractive, kind woman—with a veritable goldmine of voluptuous tresses (Gitter 943). As Schotland sums up, "Jenny's gorgeous hair is a multi-layered metaphor" in that it not only "evokes the magical realm of fairy tales," but it also "offers corporeal compensation for her bodily deformity." In her "'Who Is This in Pain?' Scarring, Disfigurement, and Female Identity in Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend," however, Helena Michie finds less to celebrate. As she argues, Jenny's presence in the novel is marginalized as "Lizzie Hexam and Bella Wilfer, the double heroines of Our Mutual Friend, construct selves over the crippled and enabling body of Jenny Wren" (209). McRuer further echoes this assertion, writing that "'heterosexual epiphanies'…often happen over and through disabled bodies" (25). In other words, the normative heterosexuality of able-bodied characters (like Lizzie and Bella) are systematically privileged over the non-normative sexualities and subjectivities of disabled characters, who (like Jenny) are usually relegated to smaller roles in the plot. Michie concludes that Jenny can indeed exude a certain sexuality, but only within her non-threatening role as a minor character. In her view, "Dickens can allow Jenny fantasies of an erotic future precisely because she is crippled, precisely because she does not function traditionally as a heroine" (212). In accordance with Michie, I would also propose that the power of the "progressive" Sloppy/Jenny match is slightly dampened, in light of the fact that Dickens could only imagine Jenny in a match with a similarly disabled man, who is suggested to be "slow." If Jenny is incomplete in body and Sloppy in mind, then only married can they become "whole" people, an indication that the disabled "lack" something that the able do not. To be sure, I am neither as optimistic as Schotland nor as dismissive as Michie. Schotland's piece, though a superb analysis of Jenny, fails to take into account the full effect every disabled character (whether temporarily or permanently disabled) has on this novel's rendering of the queer/disabled presence. Michie's criticism, on the other hand, overly infantilizes Jenny; she claims that Wren's "body, encased and encoded in childishness and deformity…creates a large and accommodating space for the sexual at the center of Victorian realism" (212, emphasis my own). As Dickens repeatedly reminds us, Jenny's class position often calls for her to assert herself as an adult, sometimes more frequently than the "real" adults. One need only look to her "disgraceful boy," her inebriate father, to see that age or looks do not determine maturity within this text (Dickens 522). As Riah confirms with Miss Potterson, she is a "[c]hild in years…woman in self-reliance and trial" (Dickens 435). On that account, then, I would maintain that scholars should neither take Jenny's sexuality so lightly, nor dismiss it quite so quickly. To address my critique of Schotland, however, I first turn to Ernest Fontana's thesis in "Darwinian Sexual Selection and Dickens' Our Mutual Friend," which contends that Dickens employed the theory of natural selection to determine which males would enter marriages and thus be "worthy" enough to procreate. Most germane to this discussion, however, is how Fontana's analysis reveals that both the queer and disabled characters in this novel are routinely characterized as mere evolutionary "dead ends." Taking the off-balanced Mr. Headstone for example, Fontana explains that "Headstone's unfitness to procreate is underlined by Dickens' repeated references to Headstone's seizures, his epileptic-like loss of physical and mental control" (38). The school teacher is also handicapped by the homosocial/erotic connection he forms in his irrational conflict with Wrayburn; Headstone's endeavor "to batter a man from behind in the dark," then, not only makes him a coward, but also contemptibly effeminate (691). Wrayburn, a socially powerful suitor, must similarly "emancipate himself from his non-procreative homosocial/homoerotic relationship with Lightwood" before he can be properly merged into the traditional integrative novel (Fontana 38). And while Headstone's mental incapacitation deprives him of chances with a "mate," Wrayburn's lesions and gashes actually serve as the marker of his potent virility. Fontana concludes: His wounds signify both the rage his manly 'plumage' inspires in his competitors and a vulnerability that invites the sickroom care of Jenny Wren and Lizzie herself. It is this vulnerability that transforms Eugene, in the eyes of Lizzie, from seducer to potential husband (39). Rather than ending his prospects, then, this temporary affliction actually makes the heterosexual match possible. In all these narrative situations, indeed, disability is employed in favor of fecundity, of "normal" sexual relations. So, while I grant that Schotland's assessment of Jenny is absolutely accurate—in that Dickens was quite progressive in his representation of Wren as a rounded character and as an intelligent woman—this novel, overall, still subscribes to many hegemonic, stereotypical notions of disability. Taken in this context, we can also see how queerness acts as a kind of "disability." Any same-sex "passion" (as in the clash between Headstone and Wrayburn), after all, must be eliminated before these suitors can be allowed to share in middle-class values, participate in a domestic life, and raise more (similarly heterosexual) children. Few critics, including Schotland and Michie, take into consideration the significant influence of social class on Dickens' depictions of disfigurement and disability, however. These two markers come to bear most powerfully on Silas Wegg, of course, who finds himself diminished after a hospital amputation. In a strange scene that blurs the boundaries between physical and economic capital, Wegg haggles for the price of his leg with the ironically named Mr. Venus, an articulator of human and animal bones. As Goldie Morgentaler reflects, "Silas's equation of himself with his leg, while grotesque and comic, forces us to consider the meaning of identity and the extent to which our sense of ourselves is tied not only to our physicality, but also to our social position" (94). Silas even overtly articulates this association of able-bodiedness with class/social position in his declaration that as a newly deemed social climber, he "should not like—under such circumstances, to be what I may call dispersed, a part of me here, and a part of me there, but should wish to collect myself like a genteel person" (Dickens 88). No longer a poor street merchant (at least in his mind), the "parvenu" sees that his purchases no longer have to be limited to utility; as Morgentaler points out, the leg's "only value is to restore Silas's sense of himself as a full-fledged member of the respectable world of the fully abled," not as a usable limb (94). The same logic seems to work in Wrayburn's case as well, though exactly in reverse. Unable to wed the lower-class Lizzie as a fully capable man of gentility, only a severe blow to his person and his social standing allows them to marry on equal terms. When Eugene calls Jenny to act as his bed-side nurse, her touch poses no competition to Lizzie for the same reason: her disability and class status makes her virtually asexual. While this scene does invert the typical dependency roles of disability, for it is the able-bodied man of high status who must depend on the disabled woman for comfort and succor, it also here where Jenny's queerness/disability is most fully deployed in service of able-bodied heterosexuality. As the interlocutor between "the long bright slanting rows of [angelic] children" and Wrayburn, she is the one to suggest that Eugene finally articulate the word "wife" (Dickens 718). Not only does this carry all the connotations of J. L. Austin's "performative utterance," but Jenny's link to an angelic presence also suggests that this heterosexual match is heavenly ordained, thus naturalizing able-bodied, hegemonic sexuality and marriage in the highest order. To sum up this reading, I return to McRuer's idea of the complementary function of compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory able-bodiedness. Although Jenny Wren is not similarly pushed out of this social institution and "asexually objectified," her match with Sloppy, a mentally impaired man, does suggest that both disabled characters feel a sense of lack or loss. In order to become whole, they will need to join mind with body in (what else?) a heterosexual bond. She also serves a necessary role in weaving together one of the main romantic plots of the novel, a romance ensuring the homosocial and homoerotic energies of this novel are safely contained. Most significantly, however, her "crip" status is used to further naturalize this marriage, helping to conceal it as a compulsory social institution. Because Jenny Wren's presence is necessary in order to hold up this hegemonic/queer and able-bodied/disabled binary, however, it exposes the not-so-natural way that hegemony often functions. The working-class characters here, on one hand, are essential to ensuring capitalism's reproduction of itself; to be sure, however, these working-class crips also shake the "natural order of things" to its very core.
*"Working-Class CripsQuot; was originally presented at the "Dis/ability in 19th-Century British Literature and Culture" panel during the 47th annual Northeastern Modern Language Association convention in Hartford, Connecticut. The "Works Cited" for this essay is fairly extensive. To see the the entire list click Works Cited.
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