Reproducing Disability and Degeneration in the Victorian Fin de Siecle

Understandings of disability were in flux in the Victorian fin de siecle as eugenic thought and degeneration theory gained in popularity. Increasingly imagined as a marker of national and familial decline in the scientific and popular literature of the day, people with disabilities were refigured as domestic threats in the late-19th century, and increasingly immersed in a culture of shame and secret keeping. While fin de siecle works from Conrad, Haggard, and Wells banished disability to the ends of empire and projected it into the distant future, New Woman novelists like Emma Frances Brooke and Sarah Grand sought to contain and ultimately eradicate disability from the British home by rationalizing women's role in marriage and reproduction. Brooke's A Superfluous Woman (1894) synthesizes late-19th century outlooks on degeneration and heredity as it locates disability and deviance in the upper class home. By engaging with recent histories of disability and literary studies of degeneration and eugenics, this article identifies the dearth of literary scholarship on disability in the fin de siecle and points to future opportunities for inquiry.