Disabled Democracy: Figuring Disability in Early Nineteenth-Century Literary and Political Discourses
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Erlandson, Andrew
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 26, 2024
- Committee Members:
- Carla Mulford, Major Field Member
Christopher Castiglia, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Amy Greenberg, Outside Unit & Field Member
Michael Bérubé, Major Field Member
Hester Blum, Major Field Member
Janet Lyon, Professor in Charge/Director of Graduate Studies - Keywords:
- disability
democracy
literature
nineteenth-century
American
United States
figure
figurative
figuration
participatory democracy
democratic citizenship
citizen
institutional
institution
debility
revolution
revolutionary
Charles Brockden Brown
Francis Lieber
Benjamin B. Bowen
Mary L. Day
Hannah Crafts
William Wells Brown
James Fenimore Cooper
Walt Whitman
temperance
Hannah Arendt
antebellum reform
abolition reform
temperance reform
reformers
crip
crip theory
cripping
cripped
radical
radicalism
embodiment
novel
fiction - Abstract:
- This dissertation traces literary efforts by people with disabilities in the early nineteenth-century United States who figured disability to capture, and transform, the destabilizing nature of democratic thought. These authors recognized disability’s radical critical potential as it developed in early national and antebellum mainstream political discourses. Between 1780 and 1860, political and medical authorities deployed metaphors of bodily impairments to describe participatory forms of democracy and, by influencing the Constitution’s design, to discourage non-federal expressions of popular sovereignty. To cultivate a quiescent citizenry, federal politicians contrasted the flat figure of the disabled body with a democracy envisioned to be abstract and disembodied for the common citizen. As medical and political discourses became intertwined, the bodies of citizens who failed to affirm the prevailing political order could be identified as the source or result of political dissent, thereby delegitimizing the cause of political unrest. The authors examined in this study recognized the implications of this proto-disability discourse and drew upon it to create a symbolic order in which disability was aligned with local, radical, and active expressions of popular sovereignty. These authors created nuanced depictions of disability that allowed them to revise the mainstream political containment of democracy’s promises while retaining a focus on democracy’s material forms. Their texts developed what I term disabled democracy, or a method of using the disabled figure to recreate political ideals and transform theorizations of popular sovereignty while centering people with disabilities. By reimagining the body politic through the disabled body, these authors encouraged local and material engagement with political institutions while shaping abstract political ideals to the embodied realities of citizens. This project examines representational strategies in fictional and nonfictional works that utilized the disabled body to address topics relevant to the nineteenth century and today, including the nature of citizenship, the design and purpose of political institutions, the role of race and labor in shaping perceptions of democracy, and the methods of political association that can sustain a revolutionary spirit.