Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies

Queercrip Temporality and the Representation of Disability in Lady Audley’s Secret

Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies (2018), 12, (4), 407–422.

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2018.33
Language
English
Pages
16

Abstract

The article examines the operation of temporality within Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s 1862 novel Lady Audley’s Secret and its relationship to both queerness and disability vis-à-vis the novel’s titular character, Lady Audley. Although many scholars approach Lady Audley’s madness as a metaphorical device reflective of the character’s struggles against conventional gender norms, the article evokes Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’s concept of “surface reading” to suggest that Lady Audley’s madness be considered as a constitutive element of a disabled, “crip” ontology. The article also proposes that Lady Audley be read as a queer character due to her bigamy and her failure to adhere to heteronormative cultural scripts. This queerness combines with Lady Audley’s crip ontology to produce an abject queercrip subjectivity that poses a radical challenge to hegemonic ableism and heteronormativity. Drawing on Jack Halberstam and Alison Kafer’s work on temporality, the article explores how this radical subjectivity is articulated in the novel through Lady Audley’s relationship to both queer and crip temporality.

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Author details

Boyd, Nolan