Maryssa Grayer
- M.A. (University of Northern British Columbia, 2020)
- B.A. (University of Northern British Columbia, 2018)
Topic
“[P]leasant things to him forbidden”: Disability, Sexuality, and Fatherhood in Victorian Marriage Plots
Department of English
Date & location
- Thursday, August 13, 2026
- 10:00 A.M.
- Clearihue Building, Room B007
Examining Committee
Supervisory Committee
- Dr. Lisa Surridge, Department of English, University of Victoria (Supervisor)
- Dr. Mary Elizabeth Leighton, Department of English, UVic (Member)
- Dr. Stephen Ross, Department of English, UVic (Member)
- Dr. Rachel Cleves, Department of History, UVic (Outside Member)
External Examiner
- Dr. Martha Stoddard Holmes, Department of Literature and Writing Studies, California State University San Marcos
Chair of Oral Examination
- Dr. Tatiana Gounko, Department of Educational Psychology and Leadership Studies, UVic
Abstract
In Victorian novels, both men and women with disabilities “are almost always depicted as unable to marry” (‘Of Wonderful’, Gore 120). Because of the primacy of a mother’s body in Victorian medical theories about disability and its transmission, however, scholars have tended to focus analyses on the scarcity of women with disabilities within conventional marriage plots. In comparison, there has been little written about men with disabilities in such plots. My study fills this gap by examining why men with disabilities are not considered suitable marriage partners in Victorian fiction. Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Heir of Redclyffe (1853), George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Trail of the Serpent (1860), Dinah Mulock Craik’s A Noble Life (1866), Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady (1875), Edith Nesbit’s “Uncle Abraham's Romance” (1893), and Lucas Malet’s The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance (1901) all exclude men with disabilities from marriage plots and depict various ways in which these male characters attempt to restore or “redeem” the masculine status lost to them as a result of their exclusion. The commonly accepted perception that disability is a feminizing experience, coupled with concerns that circulated in Victorian public discourse about the threat that the disabled body posed to national and evolutionary progress, underpins the exclusion of male characters with disabilities from Victorian marriage plots and their conventional happy endings. Yet, while men with disabilities in Victorian fiction are almost always denied the right to marry, they often gain access to fatherhood through adoption. This dissertation identifies and analyzes for the first time the role that adoption plays in Victorian fiction depicting men with disabilities. Such plots not only quelled fears about disability and its transmission but also sought recognition of masculine status and access to patriarchal power for their male characters with bodily differences.