White Male Disability in Modernist Literature

Reading Lawrence, Hemingway, and Faulkner

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This study explores the representation of disability in three of the most well-known novels of the twentieth century, D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926), and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929). By signifying cultural demise and a loss of masculinity, white male disability in the literature of the 1920s represents a fear of a foundering patriarchal, white supremacist world order. However, if we take seriously what queer and disability studies have advanced, disabled bodies in literature can also help us redefine life and love in the modern era: forcing us to imagine possibilities outside of our comfort zones, they help us reimagine the elusive myth of independent, self-sufficient human existence.
Copyright Year:
2023
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ISBN:
978-90-04-52938-0
Publication:
16 Jan 2023
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ISBN:
978-90-04-52007-3
Publication:
19 Jan 2023
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Martina Kübler studied English and Economics in Heidelberg, Athens, GA and Munich. She obtained her PhD in English and American literature from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany in 2020. Her research interests include disability, gender, and queer studies, modernism, globalization, and autobiography. She co-edited the volume The Pleasures of Peril: Re-reading Anglophone Adventure Fiction with Tobias Döring.
Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

1 Foundations
 1 Wandering Rocks

 2 Representing Disabled Men in Modern Literature

 3 Disability

 4 Masculinity

 5 Modernist Deformations


2 Imperial Self and Sexual Other in D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover
 1 Feeling the Apocalypse

 2 Male Corporeality and Female Power
 2.1 Clifford’s Disabled Body

 2.2 Shifting Power Relations

 2.3 The Power of Connie


 3 The Thing Outside
 3.1 Wholeness and Disintegration

 3.2 Old England

 3.3 Imperial Discomfort

 3.4 Der Untergang des Abendlands

 3.5 The East Is a Career

 3.6 Colonizing the Body

 3.7 Children and Futurity


 4 Out of the Void


3 Crip/Queer Corporeality in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises
 1 Jake’s Joke Front
 1.1 Brett’s Female Masculinity

 1.2 Postwar Masculinity

 1.3 Shame and Concealment


 2 The Disability Closet
 2.1 Disability and (Homo)Sexuality

 2.2 Jake as Homosexual


 3 Jake’s Crip/Queer Interventions
 3.1 Coming Out Crip

 3.2 The Closeted Narrator

 3.3 Crip/Queer/Sex


 4 Disability as a Creative Alternative Corporeality

 5 It All Depends


4 Extraordinary Minds and Interdependence in William Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury
 1 A Tale Told by an Idiot
 1.1 Eugenics, Buck versus Bell, and the Idiocy Debate

 1.2 Understanding Benjy


 2 Rereading Benjy Compson
 2.1 He Been Three Years Old Thirty Years: Infantilization

 2.2 They Making a Bluegum Out of You: Blackness

 2.3 Disabling Reading

 2.4 Idiocy and the Avant-Garde


 3 The Compson Pathology

 4 Getting Tenderness: Webs of Care
 4.1 The Help: Race and Care Work

 4.2 The Mother: Gender and Care Work

 4.3 The Mammy: Race, Gender, and Care Work


 5 (Inter)Dependencies
 5.1 Southern Masculinity and the Self-Made Man

 5.2 Power and the Southern Woman


 6 Obverse Reflections


5 Conclusion

Works Cited

Index

Libraries, students and scholars interested in disability, queer studies and modernist literature; students and scholars interested in close reading/philological praxis; interested general public (accessible language was one of the key concerns in drafting this manuscript).
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