Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, English

Pathology and Pity traces the interdependence of medical and moral models of disability in American literature of the long nineteenth-century, from Royall Tyler's The Algerine Captive (1797), to several short stories by Edgar Allan Poe in the 1840s, to the promotional materials of stuttering school literature from the 1880s to the 1920s, to Herman Melville's Billy Budd, unpublished at the time of Melville's death but composed 1888-1891. The interdependence of these models shapes not just the way that disability is represented in the works examined, but also the way that disability functions in and shapes the narratives. Each chapter focuses on how medical and moral discourses related to a particular disability - blindness, madness, and stuttering - in contemporaneous philosophical, medical, journalistic, and promotional writings influenced the literary works examined. Throughout nineteenth-century America, the relationship between medical and moral models of disability produced a number of related discourses that tie into Foucault's concepts of disciplinary power and biopower: compulsory ablebodiedness; disability as an object of and barrier to sympathy; the push toward cure; the ability of diagnosis to reliably read pathological and moral defects; the connection between willpower, self-awareness, and ability; the benevolence of medicine; and the elevation of expertise. Some works of American nineteenth-century literature reinforce these discourses, others challenge them, and some exhibit a tension between the two positions. Disability functions as a narrative device to speak to national debates in American culture and to comment on the very nature of storytelling and reading. Tyler's novel uses the cure of blindness to reflect on the proper way of seeing America and telling the story of becoming a proper American citizen. Poe's stories incorporate anxieties about madness and psychiatric diagnosis to address concerns about criminal responsibility and the role of (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Amy Shuman (Advisor); Molly Farrell (Committee Member); Elizabeth Renker (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; American Literature; American Studies; Epistemology; Ethics; History; Literature; Medical Ethics; Science History