This thesis examines the double-voiced representations of disability and illness in several works by Montgomery, the <i>Emily</i> trilogy (1923, 1925, 1927), the novel <i>The Blue Castle </i>(1926), the novella <i>Kilmeny of the Orchard </i>(1910), and two short stories, <i>The Tryst of the White Lady</i> (1922) and <i>Some Fools and a Saint</i> (published in 1931 but written in 1924). Although most of Montgomerys fiction in some way discusses illness and disability, often through secondary characters with disabilities, these works in particular feature disability as a central issue and use their heroes and heroines disabilities to impel the plots. While with one voice these works comply with conventional uses of disability in the love story genre, with another they criticize those very conventions. Using disability theory to analyze the fictions double voice, my thesis reveals that the ambiguity created by the internal conflict in the texts evades reasserting the binary relationship which privileges ability and devalues disability. <p> This thesis uses disability theory to examine the double-voiced representation of disability in the fiction of L.M. Montgomery. Bakhtin describes the double voice as an utterance which has two speakers at the same time and expresses simultaneously two different intentions: the direct intention of the character who is speaking and the refracted intention of the author (324). In this thesis, however, I perceive the double voice not as the difference between the voices of the speaking character or narrator and of the authors intention. Instead, I will approach the double voice as simultaneous expressions of conflicting representations, whether or not the author intends them. These voices within the double voice internally dialogue with each other to reflect changing social attitudes toward disability. By applying disability theories, such as those by critics David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, Susan Sontag, Martha Stoddard Holmes, and Rosemarie Garland Thomson, that assess how texts invoke disability as a literary technique, this thesis shows that the narrative structure of Montgomerys fiction promotes the use of disability as a literary and social construct, while its subtext challenges the investment of metaphoric meaning in disability.

This thesis examines the double-voiced representations of disability and illness in several works by Montgomery, the <i>Emily</i> trilogy (1923, 1925, 1927), the novel <i>The Blue Castle </i>(1926), the novella <i>Kilmeny of the Orchard </i>(1910), and two short stories, <i>The Tryst of the White Lady</i> (1922) and <i>Some Fools and a Saint</i> (published in 1931 but written in 1924). Although most of Montgomerys fiction in some way discusses illness and disability, often through secondary characters with disabilities, these works in particular feature disability as a central issue and use their heroes and heroines disabilities to impel the plots. While with one voice these works comply with conventional uses of disability in the love story genre, with another they criticize those very conventions. Using disability theory to analyze the fictions double voice, my thesis reveals that the ambiguity created by the internal conflict in the texts evades reasserting the binary relationship which privileges ability and devalues disability. <p> This thesis uses disability theory to examine the double-voiced representation of disability in the fiction of L.M. Montgomery. Bakhtin describes the double voice as an utterance which has two speakers at the same time and expresses simultaneously two different intentions: the direct intention of the character who is speaking and the refracted intention of the author (324). In this thesis, however, I perceive the double voice not as the difference between the voices of the speaking character or narrator and of the authors intention. Instead, I will approach the double voice as simultaneous expressions of conflicting representations, whether or not the author intends them. These voices within the double voice internally dialogue with each other to reflect changing social attitudes toward disability. By applying disability theories, such as those by critics David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, Susan Sontag, Martha Stoddard Holmes, and Rosemarie Garland Thomson, that assess how texts invoke disability as a literary technique, this thesis shows that the narrative structure of Montgomerys fiction promotes the use of disability as a literary and social construct, while its subtext challenges the investment of metaphoric meaning in disability.

Victorians frequently conflated body and text by using terms of medical diagnosis to talk about literature and, in turn, literary terms to talk about the body. In light of this conflation, this dissertation focuses on the intersection between narrative form and disability in nineteenth-century fiction and interrogates how the shape of Victorian fiction both informed and reflected the era’s developing notions of disability. Examining this intersection of body and text in several genres and across seven decades, from Frederic Shoberl’s 1832 English translation of Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris to Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Crooked Man” (1893) from the Sherlock Holmes series, I show how the structural forms of these works reveal that disability’s conceptualization during the Victorian era was frequently dialogic, incongruously understood as both deviant and commonplace. My research thus contributes to our understanding of disability’s complex development as a concept, one that did not immediately or irrevocably marginalize people, but rather struggled to negotiate the limits, capabilities, and meanings of bodies in a rapidly changing culture. / Graduate / 2020-04-19

With his suicide in 1961, Ernest Hemingway seemingly cemented into place his legacy as the classic image of the able-bodied, masculine man; he was, to many, the anti-disability writer, the author who lived for ability, lost ability, and took his life once he realized no chance of regaining his ability existed. Such a narrative, however, ignores the truly complicated and dynamic shape his understanding of the body took. Through an analysis of The Old Man and the Sea, I examine the form this ideology of ability took at the end of his life when, like the novella’s protagonist, Santiago, his failing health forced him to focus on the realities of the inevitable failure of his own body. Through the application of research such as David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder’s theory of narrative prosthesis, Tobin Siebers’ work on the ideology of ability, and Andrew Farah’s research on Hemingway’s declining physical condition, I demonstrate the ways The Old Man and the Sea legitimizes the disabled body, avoiding, in the process, several common narrative tropes such as the overcoming narrative or the kill-or-cure dichotomy and creating a space in which the inevitable decay of the human body must be seriously and honestly addressed. Through this research, a new more nuanced picture of Hemingway emerges, one that recognizes the complicated and dynamic nature his view of the able-bodied individual took.