‘As a cripple I swagger’: resenting and consenting to disabled selfhood
Societal judgements of ability or disability are not completely arbitrary but are in fact based upon a variety of prejudices embedded within culture and social practice. These prejudices decide and dictate human interaction. Abelism is predicated upon the argument that the ideal state of being is able-bodied and that the disabled being outside of the normative are if not inferior then are at least limited in ways that make them sub-normal and/or grotesque Abelism is re-enforced by social practice, the disabled is encouraged to remain silent and unseen. Their inability to conform to societal ideas of the normal is punished with a social stigma that surrounds them and an unwillingness to consider them a part of society. Ableism continues to be a part of our society due to a variation of things: The relative absence of the disabled voice, a medical community that still views disability as something to be corrected or cured and an acceptance of these things as being natural and right. Within the framework of an abelist society disability is viewed with pity, revulsion and occasionally fear. In this essay I intend to draw upon the writings of Ervin Goffman, Nancy Mairs and Toby Siebers to look at the creation of ability and disability within society and attempt to utilise ‘The Tempest’ to highlight the way in which Caliban’s disabled and Prospero’s hyper-abled self hood has little to do with actual ability or disability but rather arbitrary value judgements and the significance society places upon them.
Disability studies as a discipline borrows widely from racial, gender and queer theory in that it seeks to challenge societal ideas of the normative and interrogate their origins and legitimacy. Where disability differs from race, gender or sexuality is that only fifteen percent of self identified disabled people are born that way and so the state of “able” and “disabled”, Far from being static, is in constant flux. Toby Siebers suggests that: “the cycle of life runs in actuality from disability to temporary ability back to disability”[1] this is particularly pertinent when looking at ‘The Tempest’.’The Tempest’ contains within it a series of dislocations, disruptions and deviations from the norm with each one shifting and adjusting the power/ability dynamic. This can be contextualised within the three main settings of the tempest: the Island, the ship and the unseen city. The first scene demonstrates a clash between ability and authority. The storm creates a confusion as to who is in power and why. When the Boatswain asks “what cares these roarers for the name of king?” (1:2 Boatswain) he calls in to question the legitimacy of the noble’s authority and reflects the transient nature of ability.
“Disability, of course relies on the physical and mental impairment of bodies. But also depends significantly on social convention. What represents ability in one environment defines a disability in another”
In light of the fluidity of environment and social convention, ability and disability should likewise be considered as transient. Within the play the power/ability paradigm shifts several times occasionally due to environment but also because of the re-enforcement of cultural and social practice ability transforms into a disability fluidly. Upon the boat in a storm a sailor is of more use than a king or king’s councillor however in the city nobility is the definition of ability: “you are a councillor, if you can command these elements to silence and work the peace of the present we will not hand a rope more”(1:2 Boatswain) and yet upon a storm ravaged ship the nobles are worse than useless as they “mar [our] labours” (1:2 Boatswain) and “assist the storm” (ibid). during this disruption of the storm the nobles relinquish their authority and submit to the boatswain’s command to get below the ship Just as Prospero usurped the authority of Caliban upon the island, he previously being usurped by his brother, the boatswain disrupts the expected hierarchy and imposes his own value system wherein the skills and abilities he posses are considered to be most valuable and this value system is accepted by those that surround him.
The setting of the Island is a perfect place in which to look closer at the shifting dynamics of value systems and interrogate normality. One way in which judgements of ability are made and upheld is in terms of norm or the majority. Without a general populace on the island with which to define the normal or the ideal against the paradigm reverts back to nought. Caliban is aware of this:”thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else/ this isle with Calibans”(1:2 Caliban) his attempted rape of Miranda is not an act motivated by base lust but one where he seeks to once more become the majority and redefine normality. In failing to repopulate the island in his own image Caliban gives Prospero another weapon to use against Caliban and re-enforce his own superiority, Prospero relates Caliban’s actions to his status as a sub-human.
As a former duke Prospero should be as disabled upon the island as the nobles are upon the ship: he is not conditioned to self sufficiency, and he does not know the island as well as Caliban, indeed most of the scenes in which Prospero is present occur within his cell showing his reluctance to venture far from the part of the island that he has claimed as his own. Caliban on the other hand knows the island, well which he demonstrates in his speech in Act Three: “the isle is full of noises/ sounds, and sweet airs that delight and hurt not”. (3:2 Caliban) The hyper-ability of Prospero steams from his command of language. Language re-enforces ideas of normality: “invalid” “cripple”, “monster”, ‘slave’ are all pejorative value judgements created and contained within words this is true within the logic of the play and within society as a whole. Nancy Mair’s analyses the impact language has upon our perception of disability
“People—crippled or not—wince at the word “cripple,” as they do not at “handicapped” or “disabled.” Perhaps I want them to wince. I want them to see me as a tough customer, one to whom the fates /gods /viruses have not been kind, but who can face the brutal truth of her existence squarely. As a Cripple, I swagger.”[3]
By referring to herself as a “Cripple” Mairs simultaneously consents to and constructs her disabled selfhood Nancy Mairs names herself “cripple” because she “[likes] I like the accuracy with which it describes my condition: I have lost the full use of my limbs. “Disabled,” by contrast, suggests any incapacity, physical or mental. And I certainly don’t like “handicapped,” which implies that I have deliberately been put at a disadvantage,.”
This differs from Caliban who seems to be content to accept his disabled identity from Prospero. In the first folio the dramatis personae describes Caliban as “a salvage and deformed slave”. The word “salvage” is an archaism of “savage” the progression of this description is interesting he is savage- dangerous, deformed- deviates from the normative and a slave- inferior: He has been compared to a Darwinian missing link figure “not wholly irrational brute, the animal approximating in form as attributes as nearly to man as the lower animal may be supposed to do while still remaining a brute.”[4] This comparison legitimatises Prospero’s mistreatment by couching prejudice in pseudo-scientific terms. When Prospero refers to Caliban he does so in relation to his physical appearance which he sees as being less than human; “a freckled whelp, hag born not honor’d with human shape”(1:2:283 Prospero) Prospero’s judgement of Caliban’s ability is tied linguistically to Caliban’s appearance and as a result his relative status. It is Prospero’s art with words that pacified and charmed Caliban “thou strokes’t me and made much of me” (1:2 Caliban). It is not so much his magic but his promise that bonds Ariel to him. In contrast Caliban’s illiteracy and inarticulacy makes him partly abled “you taught me language; and my profit on’t/ is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you/ for learning me your language”. Linguist ability is no more a skill on a desert island than the ability to paint stained glass windows. It is the cultural and social practices that Prospero brings to the island that produce the hyper-ability of Prospero.
The “deformity” of Caliban is used to re-enforce his status an inferior being and to justify Prospero’s inhumane treatment of him. Prospero practices a form of epistemic violence in the way that he forces his own set of societal values and rules upon the island which places linguistic ability above physical strength and forces Caliban to consent to his idea of normality, an ideal from which Caliban is barred.
In his presentation ‘Literary Disabilities: The Long Awaited Response’ Dr David Bolt suggests that the discipline of disability studies is particularly conspicuous in its general absence from the landscape of contemporary literary criticism. He states that “disability is implicitly and/or explicitly present in all literary works, but too frequently absent from literary criticism”[5]. Within literature we often see disability used as a literary device wherein legible and non legible disabilities are presented as a manifestation of internal unsoundness or moral lack. The disabled are often represented as villains: Shakespeare’s twisted and bitter Richard III who is not “shaped for sportive tricks”, the first Mrs Rochester, Long John Silver, and Captain Hook and of course Caliban “hag born and not honor’d with human shape” (1:2:283 Prospero)
Yet within our society the disabled voice is not given a forum in which to craft an identity of their own and so are absent from the makeup of the normative. This absence is symptomatic of the status of the disabled in society in her essay ‘On Being a Cripple’ Nancy Mairs describes the societal expectation for the disabled to remain as unobtrusive as possible remaining on the fringes of society:
“One way and another, then, I wind up feeling like Tiny Tim, peering over the edge of the table at the Christmas goose, waving my crutch, piping down God’s blessing on us all. Only sometimes I don’t want to play Tiny Tim. I’d rather be Caliban, a most scurvy Monster”[6]- She explains that not only is the disabled voice absent from society it is apparently not missed.”Society is no readier to accept crippledness than to accept death, war, sex, sweat, or wrinkles.”
In his essay ‘Selections from Stigma” Ervin Goffman links manifestations of difference with signifies of inferiority “the Greeks […] originated the term stigma to refer to bodily signs designed to expose something unusual or bad about the moral status of the signifier”[8] this is also true to some extent today today’s signify would be signs of legible disability, i.e. a wheelchair, a cane or callipers.
The argument that disability is present in all literary works is one the Alyson Hobgood furthers in her essay ‘Caesar Hath the Falling Sickness” she argues that “The epileptic body is in fact extraordinary but only in so far as its illegibility confounds early modern methods of knowing and articulating disability”
Disability theorist make and interrogate the differentiation between legible and non-legible disability In Hobgood’s essay she refers to ‘Julius Caesar’, ‘Richard III’ and to some extent ‘The Tempest’ as “disability narratives” she cites Caesar’s “falling sickness” or epilepsy as an example of a non-legible disability one of the ways in which judgements of ability are made is simply through legibility Hobgood argues that Caesar’s disabled selfhood or identity is one that he performs rather than one that is thrust upon him. His disability is non-legible so it does not necessarily impact upon instant judgement of ability. She goes on to argue in the vein of Siebers that not only is Caesar’s disability transient that in that it only really exists when Caesar is actually having a fit.
There is no place in which the rules of the judgements of ability are co-defied and catogoriesed for the most part these judgements are made instantaneously informed by prejudices and misnomers lodged deep within our minds, a product of up-bringing, environment and hierarchal social structures. It is said that in the land of the blind, the one eye-man is king. Although not strictly a politically correct term the sentiment stands up to scrutiny. The state of able and disable changes throughout the course of a person life: a child being less able than an adult, an adult less changes depending on location, cultural mores or historical context. It is never fully static and so why then would the way we judge such things remain stationary? Within upon the Island The relative merits of Caliban’s and Prospero’s abilities are never compared and contrasted in a bid to discover who was most able and who least able because judgements of ability and disability do not function in any logical sense, more often the group of people deemed more able are those who by some quirk of fate happen to be in the majority. Caliban consents to his identity as disabled in comparison to Prospero and accepts Prospero’s supposed superiority. This creates Prospero’s comparative hyper-abilty and Caliban’s disabled selfhood.
Bibliography
Bolt, David ‘Literary Disability: The Long Awaited Response’
Shakespeare, William ‘The Tempest’
Hobgood, Alyson ‘Caesar Hath the Falling Sickness: The Legibility of Early Modern Disability in Shakespearean Drama’ Disability Studies Quarterly, 29.4 (2009).
Goffman, Ervin ‘Selections from Stigma’ Rutledge: New York (1997)
Wilson, Daniel Sir ‘Caliban: The Missing Link’ Macmillan and co: London, (1873)
Mairs Nancy, ‘On Being a Cripple’ (1979)
Wilson, Daniel Sir ‘Caliban: The Missing Link’ Macmillan and co: London, (1873)
Siebers Toby ‘Words Stare Like Glass Eyes from Literary to Visual Disability Studies and Back Again’ (2004)
