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Love is infected by disease throughout Women in Love (1920). But for Rupert Birkin, the disease of love is also a potentially gratifying "disease" that he "do[esn't] want to be cured of' (LI 129). In the novel, metaphors about disease, illness, and disability stand on an uneasy footing poignantly captured by Birkin's anti-cure stance. Metaphors such as Gerald's "mute" speaking and Birkin's "blind" "body of reality" invite the reader to consider disability in the dis-ease/disease of self-expression (183, 319). This essay, the title of which is intended to evoke the culturally discomfiting associations of illness defined as a lack of able-bodiedness, draws on Lawrence's metaphors of disability and examines the intersection between disability studies and narratology. My hypothesis is that concepts such as "point of view" and "narrative voice" will be better understood when considered with disability metaphors about blindness and muteness. Concurrently, I suggest that narrative perspective and voice are pivotal in Disability Studies since these metaphors limn the prism of an ableist discourse that perceives and articulates who is considered disabled or not. Forging a dialogue between narratology and disability studies, I will explore how theories of narrative point of view and narrative voices in Women in Love are grounded in disability metaphors, which are intrinsically bound up with the ways in which the corporeal body sees and speaks.
In Disability Studies, the notion of "able-bodiedness" tends to sideline mental or cognitive disabilities. While critics have acknowledged the oblique - ness of mental disabilities, criticism is replete with bodily-oriented language that restores the body-mind division, if not dwarfing disabilities that are not physical in nature altogether. Although Disability Studiesscholar Fiona Campbell uses the compound expression "able-bodied/minded," the body is spotlighted in her definition of ableism, which refers to "[a] network of beliefs, processes and practices that produce a particular kind of self and body (the corporeal standard) that is projected as the perfect..." (44). The term "able-bodiedness" is also widely deployed in various configurations of ableism put forward by Vera Chouinard (1997), Kay Inckle (2015), and Robert McRuer (2018). To this extent, the vocabulary of disability scholarship continues to lean on a body-mind conundrum that does not necessarily contribute to, and may sometimes impede, the dialogue. To redress this issue, I draw on...