Category: Uncategorized

Meghan McDonagh’s Response to “The Sound and the Fury”

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner centers around the dysfunctional Compson family, a Southern family who are struggling with their deteriorating reputation and financial situation. The main narrator of the beginning section of the novel (labelled April 7th, 1928) is Benjy Compson, the fourth child who is just turning 33. Benjy is mentally disabled and cannot speak, but the reader can understand some of his thoughts. Despite the time being stated at the start of the chapter, the narrative jumps around in time quite a bit, highlighting the strangeness and confusion of the speaker. Benjy shifts between several moments in his life, such as sharing experiences when he was a young boy and in the present without much notice. This structure makes this chapter rather difficult to comprehend. However, most readers are used to consuming narrative through the able-bodied individual, so reading from Benjy’s point of view is surprising yet also extremely effective in creating the unique tone of the novel. The incoherence of the chapter is frustrating, but looking at the story from a disabled character’s perspective forces the reader to view life in Benjy’s disabled body.

We learn of Benjy’s various attachments such as his sister, Caddy, the only character who takes time to listen to Benjy, and how he is cared for by various characters throughout his life. Benjy has been said to have been “three for thirty years” and he struggles to communicate in many ways other than bellowing or moaning. The struggle of communication for Benjy reflects the entire family who refuse to listen to each other. Benjy uses his other senses to make sense of the world as illustrated by his reaction to smells and Caddy showing him how cold feels. Benjy cannot speak words, but he seems to be the only one who notices the declining state of his family. Benjy understands his sister’s name and her love for him, but he is othered by Frony, and several other characters who say he doesn’t understand anything, let alone a name. The only moment when Benjy is understood in this first chapter is when Caddy wears perfume, which upsets Benjy because she usually “smells like trees.” Caddy understands this after showing Benjy the perfume to react to. As the reader, we are frustrated when Benjy is not understood because it is written in first-person perspective, which inserts the reader in his shoes.

In many ways, there are similarities between Benjy and Lenny from the novel Of Mice and Men. Both of these characters are largely mistreated as simply bumbling idiots due to the insensitivity of the time periods the stories take place in and other characters. Both of these novels are structured to make disabled characters into sympathetic figures who are illustrated to be burdens to the people around them despite their good intentions. Looking at disabled characters this way is simultaneously problematic and important. Both of these works feature disabled individuals as main characters, and they are demonized by other characters, but not intended to be seen negatively by the reader. In spite of being generally positive forces, they both meet unhappy or tragic fates, Lenny’s death and Benjy’s castration. Benjy’s perspective as a disabled person enhances the novel’s narrative structure despite its confusing nature. The insight on his treatment and his observations capitalize on Faulkner’s themes of communication and family in The Sound and the Fury.

I pledge that I didn’t cheat and stuff

Word count: 566

Krista’s response to the Great Lives lecture on Oscar Wilde

On Thursday Nicholas Frankel presented on Oscar Wilde. The talk was mostly concerned with the construction of identity and the relationship between life and art.

After his release from prison, Wilde changed his name to Sebastian Melmoth to disassociate himself from the disgrace associated with his original name. He chose Sebastian after Saint Sebastian and Melmoth after a gothic novel character. The name implies his rootlessness and his willingness to be a martyr.

Wilde remade his identity several times during his life, connecting himself each time with a distinct cultural identity. His full name is full of Irish pride, but then at Oxford he remade himself as something of a celebrity and later as a bright young thing in London, using the name Oscar Wilde, before finally becoming Sebastian Melmoth in France after his release from prison.

Art is often said to imitate life and this can be seen in Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest. The characters in the play take on new names and identities like Wilde as Sebastian. Even in his last years of life and declining health, Wilde was always in the pursuit of beauty.

Frankel only passingly referenced Wilde’s short stories, some of which we have read for class and he didn’t really discuss disability, but I think some of his insights about the ways in which we construct identity can be useful in a disability framework.

Kenzie’s reading response to Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral”, and Tobin Siebers’ “Disability in Theory”

In the short story Cathedral by Raymond Carver, we are introduced to a story about a man’s wife and her friend who is blind. The husband is obviously uncomfortable with the idea of this man, not only staying in his house but also with his blindness. Earlier in the semester, we read Disability in Theory by Tobin Siebers and in his paper, he talked about disability, social constructionism, and people’s negative outlook on impairment. In the short story, it was clear that the husband’s perceptions of blindness were influenced by social construction. Not only did he strictly refer to his wife’s friend as “the blind man”, but as we read the story we notice just how uncomfortable the husband is when it comes to disability. This ableist man is compelled to recognize that there are other bodies besides the able body.

Before the speaker met Robert, he couldn’t understand how he was happily married due to his blindness. He felt bad for him and then, in turn, felt bad for the woman because Robert would never see her and compliment her appearance. Later on, when the husband meets Robert in person he was immediately put off by the man’s appearance and his judgments got the best of him. “He also had this full beard. But he didn’t use a cane and he didn’t wear dark glasses. I’d always thought dark glasses were a must for the blind. Fact was, I wished he had a pair”(Carver 217).

The husband’s misconstrued idea of blindness was proven wrong as soon as he was introduced to Robert. He didn’t look like the stereotypical blind person the husband had pictured him as, and later on in the short story, he finds out that this man is more similar to what he would consider normal and exceptional. Like any other person, Robert openly smokes and drinks regardless of his blindness which succeeds in leaving the husband dumbfounded. He originally assumes that if you’re blind you can’t smoke because you can’t see the smoke. The man being uncomfortable with Robert not wearing glasses forces the husband to come face to face with his impairment. In fact, Robert wearing or not wearing glasses has nothing to do with the husband and in no way does Robert have to present his body in a way that appeases him.

Tobin Siebers discusses how “people easily perceive when someone is different from them but rarely acknowledge the violence of their perceptions”(Siebers 174). It wasn’t until much later when Robert was forced to acknowledge Robert’s blindness one on one, that he stopped perceiving him as someone lesser than him. Even though I don’t agree with the idea that temporarily blinding yourself allows you to truly understand blindness, the exercise he did with drawing the cathedral did help him communicate with someone he had a hard time connecting with. The short story in its entirety showed disability through the eyes of the able-bodied person. Not only are we looking through the lens of someone who is dependent on his own views of disability. When he is finally introduced to someone who isn’t of the “exceptional body” he is taken aback and has to interact with someone who is different from him.

Word count: 540

I pledge: Kenzie Ward

Works cited:

Siebers, T. “Disability in Theory: From Social Constructionism to the New Realism of the Body.” American Literary History 13.4 (2001): 737-54. Web.

Carver, Raymond. “Cathedral” web.

Rebecca Young’s Response to Great Lives Lecture on Oscar Wilde

Last Thursday, I attended the Great Lives lecture on Oscar Wilde, presented by Nicholas Frankel. This talk focused largely on Wilde’s personal motivations throughout life, particularly relating to his belief in the connection between life and art. While the lecture did not focus on disability, in relation to Wilde himself or his literature, it was a fascinating insight into Wilde’s life.

Frankel gave us a somewhat detailed biography of Wilde, including emphasis on the author’s belief that life itself is a form of art. According to Frankel, Wilde lived with the purpose of creating and imitating art. In regards to much of his writing, Frankel explained that Wilde used his trademark magical descriptions in an attempt to make life seem beautiful like art. According to this presentation, Wilde also believed that “mean things put on beauty like a dress.” Both of these themes are ones which I can see in the short stories which we read by Oscar Wilde earlier this semester. Understanding his personal background and motivation in life and writing is incredibly interesting, but also an insightful way to better examine these stories.

Again, this presentation focused very little time on discussing Wilde’s literature itself; additionally, Frankel largely ignored any details of Wilde’s life which some use to consider him disability-aligned. He did, however, spend a great deal of the lecture discussing the linguistic meanings and changes surrounding Wilde’s name. Throughout his life, he changed his name multiple times, from his original birth name of Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde to the shorter Oscar Wilde, and eventually to a name he chose himself, Sebastian Melmoth. Frankel’s explanation of these changes added to the rest of his lecture on Wilde’s life and interests to provide us with a unique perspective on the writer and his works.

On the whole, Frankel’s presentation gave a very interesting and unique view of Oscar Wilde’s life. While the lecture itself did not touch very much on the actual works of Wilde, or his potential links to disability, it did give insight into his personal motivations which connect to these topics. Ultimately, regardless of any direct connections between this lecture and our course, I felt that it was an informative and beneficial experience, which emphasized how understanding an author’s life and motivations can enrich one’s understanding of their works as well.

Carly Rose’s Response to Snyder and Mitchell’s “Cultural Locations of Disability”, Lahiri’s “The Treatment of BiBi Haldar,” and Kafer’s “Imagined Futures”

When combining the theories found in Snyder’s “Cultural Location of Disability” and Kafer’s “Imagined Futures,” it becomes clear that able-bodied disability activists do not understand the social expectations people with disabilities are subjected to. The possible effects of such pressures are perfectly exemplified in Lahiri’s short story, “The Treatment of BiBi Haldar,” and the experience of author Kafer, which both show the “relationship”(Snyder)  between social pressures and actual disabled experiences and insist on an end in social bias against disability.

An example of able-bodied activists’ lack of understanding of the social pressures on the disabled is seen in Kafer’s example of “blindfold exercises”to simulate blind experiences.  (Kafer, 5) This exercise focuses on physical lack of sight, but fails to simulate anything about the social experience of the disability, thus not fully representing disabled bodies through not exemplifying any of the bias and social pressures they deal with throughout their life.

Societal pressures are a pivotal part of understanding disabled experiences, as Snyder asserts that there is a relationship between society’s belief of what disabled experiences are, and what people with disabilities actually experience on page 7. Without an understanding of this relationship, able-bodied people could never simulate a disabled experience in any simple exercise.

Society views disabilities as an obstacle to leading a normal life, and insists that they are destined for a less fulfilling future of “pain and isolation”(Kafer,1). Not only does this affect how society views the disabled, but this also affects disabled people’s views of themselves,  and therefore how they conduct themselves in life. Snyder compares this effect on the disabled to the obvious effect on “normal” people by saying, “If disabled people are subject to the internalization of dominant definitions and values of disability just like those who are nondisabled, then asking clients about their personal goals is not a pat solution…of intervention.”(Snyder, 8). This quote shows that a disabled person’s personal goals and true desires could be influenced and changed by these societal roles expected of them, because they have never seen themselves represented in another way.  

The fictional character BiBi is an example of such an affected disabled person. In her village’s opinion, the only good future a woman can have is to become a wife. Somehow, a person cannot be a woman and disabled in this society because her parents deem that her disability makes her “ineligible” for marriage. If she hopes to be a normal woman, she must hope for a cure. In this way, BiBi’s true desire is to be part of society and not locked away by her parents. However, she conflates true desire with the misconstrued desire  to be married, because her village tells her that is the only way to be cured, and therefore to be normal. Similarly, Kafer dreamed to be an academic of disability but was told that it was impossible because he was disabled and that he should focus only on curing his disability and not following his dreams. His dream, or his “goal,” was needing to be cured, just like BiBi; however, Kafer broke societal expectations, going on to become an educated academic.

The difference in BiBi and Kafer’s experiences fully shows that able-bodied disability activists do not understand what it is to be disabled, because the disabled’s true ailment is that society rejects them because of their physical differences. It is clear that disabled experience is built both on societal bias and the physical fact of their own abilities in this way, and for different people these characteristics have different outcomes. (Seen through BiBi and Kafer)  This is why Kafer asserts to “think of disability differently” through “asking questions” (page 18), because this will truly break society’s biased system of labeling and expectations.

WORD COUNT: 620.  PLEDGE: I have neither given nor received unauthorized help on this assignment

Bekah’s Response to Alison Kafer’s “Introduction: Imagined Futures”

            In another one of my classes I am currently exploring the legislation of the deinstitutionalization movement and its purported association with criminalization. That sounds super dense, but the gist is that there is an ongoing movement to provide the disabled–namely, the neurodivergent–with the most integrated living possible (e.g. assisted living rather than life in a psychiatric facility) and, given that the process so far has focused more on closing inadequate care facilities than providing more comprehensive care, there has been a large debate over the level of success attained. Some scholars (Slate) argue that the movement has opened the door not for desegregation, but for criminalization via trans-institutionalization; this claim is supported by the rise in numbers of arrested/incarcerated mentally ill individuals, as well as the reality that the majority of psychiatric care in a given state is administered in carceral contexts. Other scholars (Bagenstos) contend that criminalization was a pre-existing condition and that the number of disabled individuals in jails/prisons only rose due to the increase of the population in mainstream society. The perspective I found most interesting, though, was Kevin Cremin’s; he argued that regardless of whether the movement had succeeded or failed thus far, the reason it had not progressed much over the years was that legislation chose to define integration only through what it is not and, by extension, disability by what it is not. I feel that Alison Kafer’s work converses fairly directly with an analysis such as this, given the usage of binaries and defining concepts only through the process of othering.

            My take on the entire situation is that criminalization of the disabled was absolutely existent prior to deinstitutionalization; however, because the legislation created defined individuals as only worth reintroducing to society based on their level of potential danger, a definition of disability was created that warranted excessive surveillance and evoked fear from the general public and the criminal justice system. Let’s first start with Kafer’s phrase “how one understands disability in the present determines how one imagines disability in the future; one’s assumptions about the experience of disability create one’s conception of a better future” (2). While the reading uses this most directly with the common oppositional notions that disability must either be tragic by nature or by society (i.e. medical or social model), it can definitely speak to this practice of practically speaking into existence the incarceration of integrated individuals.[1] This leads to an interesting point later on in the reading, in which a “focus from the inability of the body to the inaccessibility of the space makes room for activism and change” by way of a simple exercise in measurement of accessibility of a public space (Kafer 9). Kafer suggests this works as an example of the success of the “political/relational model” that calls for the acknowledgment of the disabled existence as politicized and I absolutely love how well it fits with Cremin’s point. In the example, individuals are not simply told what is inaccessible, but they are informed what accessibility is in order to give them the ability to imagine an accessible future. I find that this reading will help advance my point that legislation thus far has been incomplete and has, at the very least, left stigma and criminalization unchallenged.

Word Count: 582

I pledge: Rebekah Stone

Works Cited

Bagenstos, Samuel R. “The Past and Future of Deinstitutionalization Litigation.” Cardozo Law Review, vol. 34, no. 1, Oct. 2012, pp. 1–52. EBSCOhost, umw.idm.oclc.org/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=83408541&site=ehost-live.

Cremin, Kevin M. “Challenges to Institutionalization: The Definition of ‘Institution’ and the Future of Olmstead Litigation.” Texas Journal on Civil Liberties & Civil Rights, vol. 17, no. 2, Spring 2012, pp. 143–180. EBSCOhost, umw.idm.oclc.org/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lgh&AN=83474830&site=ehost-live.

Kafer, Alison. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2013. Web.

Slate, Risdon N. “Deinstitutionalization, Criminalization of Mental Illness, and the Principle of Therapeutic Jurisprudence.” Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal, vol. 26, no. 2, Spring 2017, pp. 341–356. EBSCOhost, umw.idm.oclc.org/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lgh&AN=123799180&site=ehost-live.

[1] To clarify, I am not suggesting that there is any association between disability and crime other than the crime of poverty/necessity; the media’s insistence that neurodivergent individuals are violent is incredibly unnerving and unsupported by facts and statistics.

Olivia Bridges’ Response to Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird and Alison Kafer’s, “Introduction: Imagined Futures”

In To Kill A Mockingbird, Mr. Underwood equates Tom Robinson’s death to the killing of a songbird; in doing so, he codems the treatment of Tom as cruel, but also depolitizeses disability by ignoring the structural inequality of disability in an ableist society. Alison Kafer argues disability has been removed from realm of politics, which leads to a loss of power that can enact change. As a result, the ablist interpretation of disability is seen as common sense. Thus, rather than striving to understand how the lack of accommodations disabled individuals, people center their attention on the disability itself and what they interpret the person to be losing.

Such attention is vital in a context in which, as Susan Schweik notes, disability-based discrimination and prejudice are often condemned not as a marker of structural inequality but of cruelty or insensitivity; this kind of rhetoric “sidesteps the reality of social injustice, reducing it to a question of compassion and charitable feelings” (Kafer 10).

Said mindset results in feelings of sympathy, which innately dehumanizes people with disabilities because it reduces them to their disability in the eyes of others. For example, the novel describes Mr. Underwood as a bitter man; however, when he hears of Tom’s death he calls it sinful, not because Tom’s only crime is being an African American, but because of his disability. In his mind, killing a person with a disability is the same as killing a songbird. Not only does he attribute Tom’s disability as animalistic, Mrs. Maudie states the reason it is a sin to kill a mockingbird is because they can only sing. “They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us” (Lee 103). Mrs. Maudie’s emphasis on what songbirds don’t do parallels the ablist focus on the limitations of an individual’s disability; therfourth, when Mr. Underwood alludes to Tom being like a songbird, it has the underlying implication that Tom is only capable of simple tasks such as singing and nothing else due to his physical impairment. Tom is not only discriminated against because of his disability, his mental capacity is brought into question as well and his ability to contribute to the working class. The comparison of Tom to a songbird aligns with the ablist notion that people with physical disabilities or deformities are also mentally incapacitated and incapable of being a productive member of society. Additionally, Mr. Underwood does not acknowledge that if it is not for Tom’s disability, he would have survived. According to Atticus, the guards at the jail believe there is a chance Tom could have escaped the prison. “They said if he’d two good arms he’d make it, he was moving that fast” (Lee 268). The guard’s attributes Tom’s death to his disability; however, Tom’s lack of two arms is only a disability if he is not accommodated. It is not that Tom is incapable of escaping because he has the athletic ability to do so. If the fence is more accessible he could have escaped; of course, it is unrealistic to expect a prison to accommodate a prisoner in their escape. However, it is highly unlikely the prison provides accommodations to Tom while he is in their custody.

Word Count: 544

I pledge: Olivia Bridges

Tobin Siebers, “Disability in Theory: From Social Constructionism to the New Realism of the Body”

“Disability exposes with great force the constraints imposed on bodies by social codes and norms. In a society of wheelchair users, stairs would be nonexistent, and the fact that they are everywhere in our society seems an indication only that most of our architects are able bodied people who think unseriously about access.”

Last class, we discussed the article by Tobin Siebers and this quote really stuck out to me. We do live in a society that stairs are more prevalent than ramps. I feel like the statement that architects think unseriously about disabilities isn’t entirely true. However, it’s probably not in their list of top priorities as opposed to stucture and making sure things will stay up and be safe.

Amanda’s Response to Joy Harjo’s “The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window”

In Joy Harjo’s poem, “The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window”, the author portrays an unnamed female character contemplating to commit suicide by falling off the thirteenth floor of a tenement building in East Chicago. Looking at the poem through a disability lens, a crucial key passage shows the character’s feelings in the environment around them at present, morph together to create a person that is struggling with decisions of suicide and severe depression. The key passage is as follows:

And the woman hanging from the 13th floor window

          hears other voices. Some of them scream out from below

          for her to jump, they would push her over. Others cry softly

        from the sidewalks, pull their children up like flowers and gather

         them into their arms. They would help her, like themselves.

        But she is the woman hanging from the 13th floor window,

          and she knows she is hanging by her own fingers, her

          own skin, her own thread of indecision. (l.41-48)

The author states that the woman can hear voices from below. Some call “for her to jump” and some say they will “push her over” to her death, while others “cry softly” and pled that they “would help her” (l.43,45).  These people at the bottom can be interpreted as the able-bodied people of society and their reactions to this woman’s disability. On one hand, people are condoning her suicide because having a disability a hardship or a difficult for which helping her end her life might be a way of escaping that burden. As the author addresses, “She thinks she will be set free” (l. 7). On the other hand, there are people who see her suffering and are compassionate. They are supportive and want to help her. When they say “they would help her like themselves” (l. 45), it could the interpreted as those in the community who suffer from disability if not from depression like the character. Whether the people want her to jump or not, it is still not their decision in the end.

  Towards the end of this passage, it is stated “but she is the woman hanging from the 13th-floor window” indicating the decision to end her life or live with her depression is ultimately up to her, not society, she is the only one hanging from the window. With the lines, “she knows she is hanging by her own fingers, her/ own skin, her own thread of indecision” (l. 47-48) The character understands that it is not the effects of the society below that are hanging her in the balance of her indecision, it is her own fingers, her own choice to allow her to fall or not. It goes to show that the disabled individual or any disabled person has the capability to make the decision for themselves, not anyone else.   

Overall, this passage put to questions some aspects that can be applied to disability studies, these being the concept of society’s influence on the disabled individual and the capability of a disabled individual to make a decision for themselves.

Works Cited

Harjo, Joy. The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window, 19 Feb. 2019, www.amerinda.org/newsletter/13-3/harjo.html.

Word Count: 524

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