No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Limping Lucy's Queer Criptopia: Narrative Sidestepping in The Moonstone
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 September 2022
Abstract
Although there has been extensive scholarship on Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone—including recent commentary on disability and queerness—there has been no extended engagement with the character of Limping Lucy, a Marxist misandrist working-class disabled lesbian. This piece serves as a corrective to that gap and a justification of why we should study her. Lucy appears in only six pages of the novel, but this essay embraces the minimal amount of text and performs a microreading. In doing so, we can learn a great deal about Lucy, her abnormal body, her radical politics, her role in the narrative, and the queer criptopia she imagines for herself and her disabled beloved, Rosanna. This reading will also demonstrate a mode of reading and ethical reading praxis I call narrative sidestepping—which explores and embraces expansive plot potentials for disabled characters. Using these theoretical tools, I will argue that Lucy, uninterested in the closure of the normative narrative (the solving of the mystery and the resolution of the marriage plot), intentionally delays it, focusing instead on her sidestepped narrative, her plan for a queer criptopic future with Rosanna.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press
Footnotes
I would like to thank the large number of people who helped with this piece in its various iterations, including Will Arguelles, Emily Foster, Lindsay Lehman, Julie Fuller, Anastasia Valassis, Laura Eldridge, Ryan Everitt, Jon Rachmani, Danny K. Bernstein, Nancy King Bernstein, Justin Blake, Wayne Koestenbaum, Karen Bourrier, Caroline Reitz, and especially Talia Schaffer.
References
Works Cited
Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Knopf, 1984.Google Scholar
Castle, Terry. The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. 32 weekly installments. All the Year Round. January 4–August 8, 1868.Google Scholar
Davis, Lennard J. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. London: Verso, 1995.Google Scholar
DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Writing beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.Google Scholar
Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Fiedler, Leslie. “Pity and Fear: Images of the Disabled in Literature and the Popular Arts.” Salmagundi 57 (1982): 57–69.Google Scholar
Fraiman, Susan. Extreme Domesticity: A View from the Margins. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Free, Melissa. “Freaks That Matter: The Doll's Dressmaker, the Doctor's Assistant, and the Limits of Difference.” In Victorian Freaks: The Social Context of Freakery in Victorian Britain, edited by Tromp, Marlene, 259–82. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Staring: How We Look. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Goodlad, Lauren. The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic: Realism, Sovereignty, and Transnational Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gore, Clare Walker. Plotting Disability in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heller, Tamar. Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Hingston, Kylee-Anne. Articulating Bodies: The Narrative Form of Disability and Illness in Victorian Fiction. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019.Google Scholar
Jagose, Annamarie. Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Joshua, Essaka. Physical Disability in Romantic Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.Google Scholar
Levine, Caroline, and Ortiz-Robles, Mario, eds. Narrative Middles: Navigating the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Lewis, Victoria Ann, ed. Beyond Victims and Villains. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2005.Google Scholar
Mangham, Andrew. Violent Women and Sensation Fiction: Crime, Medicine, and Victorian Popular Culture. New York: Palgrave, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Markovits, Stefanie. “Form Things: Looking at Victorian Literature through Diamonds.” Victorian Studies 52, no. 4 (2010): 591–619.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: New York University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Milbank, Alison. Daughters of the House: Modes of the Gothic in Victorian Fiction. London: Macmillan Press, 1992.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, D. A. The Novel and the Police. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Mitchell, David T., and Snyder, Sharon L.. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Mossman, Mark. “Representations of the Abnormal Body in The Moonstone.” Victorian Literature and Culture 37, no. 2 (2009): 483–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Nayder, Lillian. Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Victorian Authorship. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Plotz, John. Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Preston, Shale. “Esther Summerton's Estate: The Queer, Quasi-Monarchical Line of Beauty, Family, and Inheritance in Bleak House.” In Queer Victorian Families: Curious Relations in Literature, edited by Dau, Doc and Preston, Shale, 36–56. New York: Routledge, 2015.Google Scholar
Prizel, Natalie. “Beside Women: Charles Dickens, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Reparative Lesbian Literary History.” GLQ 24, nos. 2–3 (2018): 267–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Quayson, Ato. Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” [1980]. In Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, edited by Snitow, Ann, Stansell, Christine, and Thompson, Sharon, 177–205. New York: Monthly Review, 1983.Google Scholar
Richter, David. Fable's End: Completeness and Closure in Rhetorical Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974.Google Scholar
Schaffer, Talia. “Maiden Pairs: The Sororal Romance in The Clever Woman of the Family.” In Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel: Rereading Nineteenth-Century Women Writers, edited by Wagner, Tamara Silvia, 97–115. Amherst: Cambria Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Stacy, Enid. “A Century of Women's Rights.” In Forecasts of the Coming Century by a Decade of Writers, edited by Carpenter, Edward, 86–101. London: The Labor Press, 1897.Google Scholar
Stoddard Holmes, Martha. “‘Bolder with Her Lover in the Dark’: Collins and Disabled Women's Sexuality.” In Reality's Dark Light: The Sensational Wilkie Collins, edited by Bachman, Maria K. and Cox, Don Richard, 59–93. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Stoddard Holmes, Martha. Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Taylor, Jenny Bourne. In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology. New York: Routledge, 1988.Google Scholar
Torgovnick, Marianna. Closure in the Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.Google Scholar
Warhol, Robyn. “Neonarrative: Or How to Render the Unnarratable in Realist Fiction and Contemporary Films.” In A Companion to Narrative Theory, edited by Phelan, James and Rabinowitz, Peter, 220–31. Malden: Blackwell, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Warhol, Robyn. “‘What Might Have Been Is Not What Is’: Dickens's Narrative Refusals.” In Counterfactual Thinking – Counterfactual Writing, edited by Birke, Dorothee, Butter, Michael, Köppe, Tilmann, 227–39. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Welsh, Alexander. Strong Representations: Narrative and Circumstantial Evidence in England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Woloch, Alex. The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.Google Scholar