UCLA

This dissertation explores the evolution of the representation of physical and mental disability in novels written by French women over the course of the nineteenth century. In this study, I analyze how women authors engage with their precarious status, one that had historically resulted in their relegation to the sentimental genre and the exclusion of their work from consideration as serious texts. The sentimental genre embodies the often-contradictory predicament of women authors: as a potential agent of social upheaval and source of toxic feminine sensibility but also as a frivolous supply of entertainment for bourgeois women. It thus serves as a vector through which women authors engaged with shifting medical and philosophical discourses that asserted theirs and disabled individuals’ inferiority, and that this is effected through their depictions of disabled individuals. I examine this through the following research questions: How did nineteenth-century French women novelists write about disability? How did they select the disability they wrote about and why did they choose it? How did the type of disability chosen shape and inform the narrative structure of their novels?At the intersection of Literary, Gender, and Disability studies, my dissertation employs a variety of theoretical frameworks to trace the evolving dynamics of French female authorship as they are mediated through nineteenth-century sentimental novels featuring physically and/or mentally ‘abnormal’ protagonists. I analyze a sampling of novels that best exemplify this phenomenon to identify and study three trends in the type of disability represented in them that occurred over the course of the century: 1). Invisible physical disability; 2). Visible physical defect in women; 3). Neurosis. I contend that French women authors chose disabilities around which they could construct a compelling narrative that would at times transgress conventions of the sentimental genre and conventional representations of gender dynamics therein. While discussions of women-authored sentimental novels preoccupy many scholars (Cohen 1999, Bertrand-Jennings 2005, Louichon 2009, Wang 2011), my dissertation targets the subgenre that emerged when relegated authors (nineteenth-century French women) wrote about relegated people (disabled individuals) in a relegated genre (the sentimental genre) and how it changes over time.