Radical History Review

(RE)VIEWS

Gender, Sex, and Disability from

Helen Keller to Tiny Tim

Sarah E. Chinn

Martha Stoddard Holmes, Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture.

Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004.

Kim E. Nielsen, The Radical Lives of Helen Keller.

New York: New York University Press, 2004.

Ah, Tiny Tim. His smallness, his frailty, his almost certain doom — averted at the
last moment by Christian charity. Tiny Tim has for over a century represented what
it is we “know” about disability: the mysteries of its etiology, the ways in which
it tugs at the heartstrings, how it separates the truly needy from the freeloaders.
Who could be more deserving of a turkey almost as big as himself as Tim Cratchit?
And who could more effectively embody the desexualized, feminized, infantilized
disabled subject than Tiny Tim, the crutch-wielding child whose triumphal ride on
his father’s shoulders on Christmas Eve transforms him into a prosthesis for able-
bodied fellow feeling?
This is all to say that, in Martha Stoddard Holmes’s words, “the specific
things we know as we read A Christmas Carol are part of a general knowledge of
bodies and feelings collaboratively produced by countless such narratives” (2). As
Stoddard Holmes explains, “We enter a world of pitying or heart-warmed tears,

Radical History Review

Issue 94 (Winter 2006): 240–48
Copyright 2006 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc.

240

Published by Duke University Press

 Radical History Review

Chinn | Gender, Sex, and Disability from Helen Keller to Tiny Tim 241

inner triumph, mirror-smashing rages, suicide attempts, angst and abjection, saintly
compassion, bitterness, troubled relationships, and courageous overcoming”: the
gamut of emotions by which we understand the concept disability (2 – 3).
These extremes of feeling are the raw material of melodrama and, as Stod-
dard Holmes ably argues, since the middle decades of the nineteenth century and
into the present day, melodrama has provided some of the most powerful language
about disability available to Anglo-American cultures. The storms of tears, the sexu-
ally endangered but chaste heroines, the virtuous heroes, dastardly villains, and
moral endings that characterize high melodrama have informed emotionally intense
public discourse about disability even in recent years, most notably in the life stories
and eventual deaths of Christopher Reeve and Terri Schiavo.1 And, as the précis
above suggests, the melodramatic imagination is at its core about gendered bodies,
an imagination in which masculinity and femininity are inextricable from the bodies
that weep, faint, rescue, terrorize, and triumph. Melodrama revels in the embodied-
ness of emotion. It adores the comparative weakness and strength of different kinds
of bodies; it is organized around the potential dangers that bodies face; it finds its
resolution in the symbolic merging (or tragic destruction) of the bodies of hero and
heroine.
Stoddard Holmes’s attention to melodrama’s gendering of disabled bodies is
hardly surprising. After all, feminist theorists have long engaged questions of the
body and its meanings. From Charlotte Bunch’s epochal statement that “there is no
private domain of a person’s life that is not political and there is no political issue
that is not ultimately personal,”2 the seemingly private world of our bodies and the
public world of politics have occupied overlapping spaces in feminist theory. As
Susan Bordo has argued, “culture’s grip on the body is a constant, intimate fact of
everyday life,” and our bodies are gendered from the moment we emerge from the
womb.3 The foundational texts of feminist history showed how cultural phenomena
that have been classified as personal, even biological — sexual desire, menstruation,
friendship — are in fact wholly imbricated with larger structures of gender, econom-
ics, and power.4
Both Kim E. Nielsen and Martha Stoddard Holmes have taken on, at least in
part, the project of working through the complicated interconnections of disability,
gender, and melodrama, both as lived and as represented. While Stoddard Holmes’s
book is in many ways a genealogy of the way we understand disability, Nielsen’s
biography of the adult Helen Keller shows how these assumptions about disability
and femaleness combined to challenge Keller’s formidable engagements with the
radical Left and her equally fierce demands for self-determination in her personal
and political lives. The popular, sentimental, melodramatic image of Keller, the wild
child transformed into docile girl by the civilizing influence of female devotion, may
have been the catalyst for Keller’s fame, but as Nielsen shows, it was as much a bar-

Published by Duke University Press

 Radical History Review

242 Radical History Review

rier to Keller’s self-expression as it was the door through which she accessed public
influence.
The spectacle of Keller’s childhood story, enacted most effectively in the play
and film The Miracle Worker (play by William Gibson, 1959; film dir. Arthur Penn,
1962), invokes the same language about disability that Stoddard Holmes identifies
in Victorian fiction: “A visual and performative realm of melodramatic extremes;
the intensity with which disabled people’s suffering, gratitude, fear, and affection
are drawn is mirrored by the equally intense pity or outrage expressed by the non-
disabled people who view, interview, and write about them” (30). Melodrama’s focus
on the suffering female body connects neatly with the medical, literary, journalis-
tic, and popular obsessions with disabled people that littered nineteenth-century
writing.
At the same time that Victorian literature was laying out a new way of under-
standing gender and class in the wake of rapid urbanization and industrialization, it
was also trying to make sense of how disability fit into these emerging categories. 5
The shift that Thomas Laqueur has traced from the “one-sex” to the “two-sex” mod-
els of the differences between women and men found its counterpart in theories of
disability.6 Disabled people were no longer just inferior versions of the able-bodied;
rather, they were constitutionally different. As Stoddard Holmes shows, Victorian
novels often “twinned” disabled and able-bodied characters to show that despite
surface similarities, the lives of disabled women in particular could never be like
those of their able-bodied sisters. As Stoddard Holmes argues, these novels thema-
tize what she calls, in a masterstroke of understatement, “the continuing difficulty
mainstream culture has in imagining disabled women as lovers, wives, and mothers”
(35). If in nineteenth-century Britain to be a woman was to be a wife and mother,
the hyper- or desexualization and dematernalizing of disabled female characters is
the sign of their “unwomaning.”
Blindness was the paragon of disabled difference for female characters. To
the extent that they can experience and express femininity, blind characters like
Nydia in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), or May Field-
ing in Charles Dickens’s The Cricket on the Hearth, suffer from a kind of hysteria,
incapable of controlling their feelings. Their blindness is the source of their emo-
tional excess, which stands in contrast to the emotional control of their nondisabled
counterparts.
The power of the melodramatic model over representations of disabled peo-
ple is most compelling in Stoddard Holmes’s analysis of disabled (auto)biographies.
Again and again, the Victorian morphology of disability reappears in disabled peo-
ple’s descriptions of their own lives: a slurry of suffering, overcoming, denial, and
self-abnegation. As Fictions of Affliction shows, self-image among disabled people
was intimately connected to class status. In his monumental study London Labour

Published by Duke University Press

 Radical History Review

Chinn | Gender, Sex, and Disability from Helen Keller to Tiny Tim 243

and the London Poor, Henry Mayhew interviewed impoverished disabled people,
often disconcerted by the stories they told of their lives.7 While these working-class
subjects seemed more able to juggle the sentimentalizing of their condition with a
healthy dose of humor and self-knowledge, bourgeois writers like Harriet Martineau
and Henry Fawcett made a virtue out of making minimal demands on their able-
bodied friends. This difference can in large part be attributed to the Poor Laws that
wielded significant juridical power over the disabled poor and working class, whose
“life and identity were materially constituted by a set of performative and relational
bodily events”: how much and well they could work, how worthy they were of public
assistance, and so on (Fictions, 186).
For disabled people of the middle classes, however, “Christian melodrama
can have the effect of effacing both the subjectivity of the disabled person and the
material and historical realities that shape his or her existence,” making available
a limited array of narratives of selfhood: the noble sufferer, the courageous over-
comer, the pathetic dependent (185). It was these very narratives that Helen Keller
struggled with her whole life, occasionally emerging to tell quite a different story.
Kim Nielsen’s project in The Radical Lives of Helen Keller is to give voice
to that story, which has been largely suppressed by the mythology around Keller’s
childhood. Emerging from the nineteenth into the twentieth century, Keller is a
fascinating figure — a woman whose life was spent negotiating the melodramatic
narratives into which she, as a deaf and blind child and adult, was inscribed. Keller
was ambitious and determined: she graduated from Radcliffe and worked for a liv-
ing until her death in 1968.
Keller occupied a highly contested space in terms of her status as a disabled
woman. On the one hand, she represented disabled people in the United States and
around the world: she worked for much of her life for the American Federation for
the Blind and was an unofficial goodwill ambassador for the United States, repre-
senting the possibilities for disabled people in a democracy. On the other hand, her
prominence was a product of her putative uniqueness; indeed, as Nielsen points out,
“an alliance with other people with disabilities would have destroyed her public
image as a one-of-a-kind miracle,” an image that lent her the influence she had in
the public sphere (12). Moreover, her political radicalism, which was long-standing
and committed (she joined the Socialist Party of America in 1909 and supported
the Industrial Workers of the World and Eugene Debs in the 1910s), was at odds
with her public persona as an apolitical “angel” and missionary of hope for disabled
people. Finally, Keller both traded on and resisted the sentimental image of women
as the world’s caregivers. While she identified her gender as a source of her altruistic
desire to help other people with disabilities, she was shrewd, business-minded, and
an enthusiastic world traveler. Moreover, she explicitly engaged with social issues,
particularly sexually transmitted diseases that were the cause of so much infant

Published by Duke University Press

 Radical History Review

24 4 Radical History Review

blindness, as well as malnutrition and industrial accidents, resisting her contempo-

raries’ tendency toward a eugenicist etiology of disability.
Throughout her life, Keller engaged in an energetic but exhausting dance
between stereotypes of disability, “from the politically manipulated and publicly
pitied deaf and blind young virgin to the politically safe, but glorified, superblind
saintly spinster” (50). In fact, Keller was closer to the New Women of her genera-
tion — women like Eleanor Roosevelt, Alice Paul, Ida B. Wells — than she was to
the disabled subjects of Martha Stoddard Holmes’s study: college educated, middle
class, politically savvy, and sexually knowledgeable. However, as Nielsen shows, rep-
resentations of disability drew on the melodramas of the previous century, leaving
few options for Keller to represent herself openly without endangering her cause
and her livelihood.
We might see Keller’s enthusiastic, even compulsive traveling (between 1937
and 1957 alone she visited thirty-six countries on every continent but Antarctica)
as an attempt for her to counter the assumption of frailty that accompanied her, or
even to outrun whatever images of her the American public wanted to construct.
Similarly, her smiling, open public image stood in direct opposition to the close
privacy with which she conducted her personal life. But Keller complicated the
public-private divide through her advocacy and even through her visibility as a dis-
abled woman. As Nielsen shows, Keller “disrupt[ed] the visual field” of gender and
embodied normalcy: she was a public woman “in which her femaleness and disabil-
ity imposed seclusion in the private sphere” (136).
It is hard to know whether a male Helen Keller would have had to be so
circumspect about his political affiliations, whether his radicalism would have been
so carefully scrubbed out of his public legacy. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a male
Helen Keller at all, so closely connected are Keller’s achievements and her gen-
dered identity. Certainly, Nielsen argues that the representation of Keller’s legacy as
“teary-eyed internationalism” and her disability as “a personal tragedy that gener-
ates . . . sainthood” is directly connected to the ways in which she negotiated femi-
ninity (141).
Both Stoddard Holmes and Nielsen are particularly interested in the ways
disability and conventional womanhood are measured in relation to each other, but,
strikingly, neither acknowledges the remarkable queerness of many of the images
they discuss. While Stoddard Holmes does discuss the homosociality of representa-
tions of disability in much of Victorian fiction, she does not extend her argument
to explore the homoeroticism that emerges in many of these novels. In a scene in
Dickens’s The Cricket on the Hearth that she calls “passive-aggressive,” but that
might more accurately be classified as sadomasochistic, the blind Bertha Plummer
near-hysterically blesses the upcoming marriage of her beloved Tackleton to her
friend May Fielding: “While speaking, she had released May Fielding’s hands, and
clasped her garments in an attitude of mingled supplication and love. Sinking lower

Published by Duke University Press

 Radical History Review

Chinn | Gender, Sex, and Disability from Helen Keller to Tiny Tim 245

and lower down, as she proceeded in her strange confession, she dropped at last to
the feet of her friend and hid her blind face in the folds of her dress” (46).
Similarly, a queer analysis of the relationship in Our Mutual Friend between
Lizzie Hexam and Jenny Wren (who describes herself as disabled because “my back’s
bad and my legs are queer”) would deepen our understanding of the ambivalent feel-
ings Dickens had about disabled women’s sexuality more generally. A scene in which
Lizzie and Jenny comb each other’s hair is not, I would argue, “homosocial” — in-
deed, it is typical of much Victorian pornography, up to and including its invocation
of a male lover outside the frame of the scene:
[Jenny] loosened her friend’s dark hair, and it dropped of its own weight over
her bosom, in two rich masses. Pretending to compare the colours and admire
the contrast, Jenny so managed a mere touch or two of her nimble hands, as
that she herself laying a cheek on one of the dark folds, seemed blinded by her
own clustering curls to all but the fire, while the fine handsome face and brow
were revealed without obstruction in the somber light.
“Let us have a talk,” said Jenny, “about Mr. Eugene Wrayburn.”
(quoted on 58)

The eroticism of this scene, rooted in male voyeurism and same-sex desire, cries out
for an analysis sensitive to the interweavings of sexuality, gender, and disability, but
Stoddard Holmes does her otherwise astute discussion a disservice by steering clear
of the homoerotic elements of Jenny and Lizzie’s relationship. Any number of other
relationships within Victorian representations of disabled people might benefit from
a similar attention to non-normative desires of all kinds: not just homoeroticism,
but sadomasochism, sexual desire of able-bodied adults for disabled children, and
the like.
The Radical Lives of Helen Keller shows a similar gingerliness in relation
to Keller’s sexuality. On the one hand, the marketing of the book seems to invite
a queer reading: the cover features an arresting photograph of a beaming Helen
Keller extending her sensitive fingers over the mouth and cheeks of a curious
Eleanor Roosevelt. While Keller’s gaze is artificially brightened by glass eyes and
impossible to assess, Roosevelt looks directly at Keller, her eyes expressing a mix of
bemusement and tenderness. Keller and Roosevelt are symbols of a specific demo-
cratic socialism, to be sure, but they are both lesbian icons (and, as Blanche Wiesen
Cook has shown, Roosevelt’s lesbian bona fides were more than iconic).8 Moreover,
Nielsen’s final invocation of Keller’s complexity finds its expression in a strikingly
butch image: “She liked Scotch, not tea” (142).
Nonetheless, Nielsen’s discussion of Keller’s rumored lesbianism is measured,
up to but not quite to the point of timidity. Certainly, in comparison to the febrile
homoeroticism between disabled and nondisabled in the novels Stoddard Holmes
examines, Keller’s life provides slim pickings. Nielsen is right, I think, to resist the

Published by Duke University Press

 Radical History Review

246 Radical History Review

equation of political radicalism with sexual nonconformity (although they do often

go together). Moreover, Keller’s modus operandi both invited and resisted sexual
overtones; she “lived a very sensual life. Her entire means of communicating with
other individuals, of companionship, was tactile” — finger-spelling into her inter-
locutors’ hands, feeling their mouths and throats (131). Nonetheless, Nielsen’s reluc-
tance to even entertain the possibility that Keller was a lesbian is striking. After all,
if there is no evidence of Keller’s sexuality, why might not she have been a lesbian,
particularly given her intimate friendships with other women? I am not suggesting
that Keller was or was not a lesbian; rather one powerful rhetorical, political, and
erotic tool queer theory gives us is the supposition that an absence of evidence of
sexual involvement is not inevitably the sign of heterosexuality in abeyance.
In talking about the representation of disabled people’s sexuality, we cannot
forget the eugenicism, ranging from paternalistic to vicious, that characterized both
the images of and prohibitions on the sexual lives of people with disabilities. As
Stoddard Holmes shows, nineteenth-century authorities concerned themselves with
preventing marriage between disabled people. Ascribing to a eugenicist belief that
“disability pointed not only backward, to parental transgression and defect, but even
more urgently forward, to future generations” (Fictions 68), and that disabled par-
ents would inevitably produce even more severely impaired children, the cultural
assumption that disabled people would not marry transformed into a command that
they should not. Ironically, the sensuality disabled characters are allowed in these
novels is as often as not homoerotic.
As Patrick White has shown in his suggestively titled “How the Blind Became
Heterosexual,” official encouragement of disabled people’s sexuality has invariably
been filtered through the lens of heterosexuality.9 In the effort to represent disabled
people’s sexuality as normative, as “normal,” educators “recast [disabled people]
in the image of the sighted heterosexual.”10 Ironically (and, I think, unwittingly)
Nielsen and Stoddard Holmes follow this same pattern. In their critique of able-
ist visions of disabled people, they have at the same time evacuated their subjects
of a different kind of resistance to normativity, the shimmering possibility of their
queerness.
Nonetheless, both these books mark significant achievements. Fictions of
Affliction is an ambitious overview of a complex subject, bringing into its purview
novels, memoir, biography, medical journals, social reform tracts, and religious lit-
erature. Stoddard Holmes’s goal here is to reshape the way we read nineteenth-
century fiction, and she surely succeeds. I challenge a reader of The Old Curiosity
Shop, Daniel Deronda, Treasure Island, or Villette, to name a few, to pass over the
“crippled” characters that fill nineteenth-century novels almost to overflowing.
Nielsen’s ambition is more modest, to be sure, given the more limited story
she tells. But her clear-eyed analysis of Helen Keller’s adult life, a story that begins

Published by Duke University Press

 Radical History Review

Chinn | Gender, Sex, and Disability from Helen Keller to Tiny Tim 247

when most narratives of Keller end, makes for an invaluable contribution to our
understanding of the multiple pressures on radical women, disabled and not, to
trim their sails to an increasingly conservative wind over the course of the twentieth
century (one wonders what Keller would have made of the social changes of the late
1960s and early 1970s had she lived to experience them).
In the melodramatic narratives of disability, our choices are limited: we are
either cursed or blessed, loved or loveless, pure or defiled. But in fact, as the working-
class disabled people Henry Mayhew interviewed made uncomfortably clear, melo-
dramas can be entertaining, but they hardly represent actual relationships and liv-
ing people (and thank God for that). After all, after the curtain goes down on Tiny
Tim, Little Nell, and Helen Keller standing at the pump, water splashing down on
her hand, we need more than miracles to sustain us. Perhaps, like the adult Keller,
we could do with a stiff Scotch. At the very least, we can demand more complicated
stories, narratives that do justice to the variety of bodies we all live in.

Notes
1. The gold standard of discussions of melodrama remains Peter Brooks’s The Melodramatic
Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976). More specific to the American
scene are David Grimsted’s Melodrama Unveiled: American Theater and Culture,
1800 – 1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), and Bruce McConachie’s
Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820 – 1870 (Iowa City:
University of Iowa Press, 1992).
2. See Charlotte Bunch, “A Broom of One’s Own: Notes on the Women’s Liberation Program,”
in Passionate Politics: Feminist Theory in Action. Essays 1968 – 1986 (New York: St.
Martin’s, 1987): 27 – 45, 29.
3. Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993), 17. For a detailed theoretical discussion of the ways
in which our bodies are gendered even prior to birth, see the introduction to Judith Butler,
Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993). Butler
expands on the ways in which we are brought into gender by being “girled” or “boyed,”
that is, by the statement “It’s a girl!” which can be spoken even before birth, given the
sophistication of sonogram technology.
4. See, for example, Nancy Cott, “Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual
Ideology, 1790 – 1850,” Signs 4 (1978): 219 – 36; Barbara Welter, Dimity Convictions:
American Women in the Nineteenth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976); Carroll
Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in
Nineteenth-Century America,” and “Puberty to Menopause: The Cycle of Femininity in
Nineteenth-Century America,” in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985): 53 – 76, 182 – 96.
5. Strikingly, Stoddard Holmes does not consider the rapid increase in the number of disabled
people as a direct result of industrialization. Or perhaps industrial accidents were not
as common a part of the British literary tradition as they were in other countries. While
commentators on the industrial scene from Friedrich Engels to Rebecca Harding Davis
to Herman Melville were quick to point out the violent impact industry had on workers’

Published by Duke University Press

 Radical History Review

248 Radical History Review

bodies, work-related accidents do not show up in the work of Charles Dickens, Wilkie
Collins, or Margaret Yonge, who repeatedly (one might even say obsessively) represent
disabled people in their novels.
6. See Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1990).
7. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 4 vols. (1861 – 62; reprint New York:
Dover, 1962).
8. See Blanche Wiesen Cook, 1884 – 1933, vol. 1 of Eleanor Roosevelt (New York: Viking,
1992).
9. Patrick White, “How the Blind Became Heterosexual,” GLQ 9 (2003): 133 – 48.
10. Ibid., 139.

Published by Duke University Press