Edited by David Bolt, Julia Miele Rodas, and Elizabeth J.
Donaldson
This breakthrough volume of critical essays on Jane Eyre from a disability
perspective provides fresh insight into Charlotte Brontë’s classic novel from a
vantage point that is of growing academic and cultural importance. Contributors
include many of the preeminent disability scholars publishing today, including
a foreword by Lennard J. Davis.
Though an indisputable classic and a landmark text for
critical voices from feminism to Marxism to postcolonialism, until now, Jane Eyre has never yet been fully
explored from a disability perspective. Customarily, impairment in the novel
has been read unproblematically as loss, an undesired deviance from a condition
of regularity vital to stable closure of the marriage plot. In fact, the most
visible aspects of disability in the novel have traditionally been understood
in rather rudimentary symbolic terms—the blindness of Rochester and the
“madness” of Bertha apparently standing in for other aspects of identity. The Madwoman and the Blindman: Jane
Eyre, Discourse, Disability resists
this traditional reading of disability in the novel. Informed by a variety of
perspectives—cultural studies, linguistics, and gender and film studies—the
essays in this collection suggest surprising new interpretations, parsing the
trope of the Blindman, investigating the embodiment of mental illness, and
proposing an autistic identity for Jane Eyre. As the first volume of criticism
dedicated to analyzing and theorizing the role of disability in a single
literary text, The Madwoman and the
Blindman is a model for how disability studies can open new
conversation and critical thought within the literary canon.
“Literary academics who have been meaning to investigate
disability studies but have not done so will discover, with pleasure, an
approach that can open up well-known texts to fresh readings. Not only that:
they will also experience some consciousness-raising. The Madwoman and the Blindman is a welcome addition both to
Brontë scholarship and to disability studies.” —Beth Newman, associate
professor of English and Director of Women’s and Gender Studies, Southern
Methodist University
“The Madwoman and the
Blindman engages, interrogates, and carries out disability studies
scholarship and critical approaches to a singular and major literary text,
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. To
my knowledge, it is the only volume of its kind and it will be a much-discussed
contribution to disability studies.” —Brenda Jo Brueggemann, Professor of
English, The Ohio State University
Purchase from The Ohio State University Press.
