Abstract:
Why are there so many disabled characters in James Joyce's Ulysses? "Disabled
Legislators" seeks to answer this question by exploring the variety and depth of
disability's presence in Joyce's novel. This consideration also recognizes the unique
place disability finds within what Lennard Davis calls "the roster of the disenfranchised"
in order to define Joyce as possessing a "disability consciousness;" that is, an empathetic
understanding (given his own eye troubles) of the damaged lives of the disabled, the
stigmatization of the disabled condition, and the appropriation of disabled representations
by literary works reinforcing normalcy. The analysis of four characters (Gerty
MacDowell, the blind stripling, the onelegged sailor, and Stephen Dedalus) treats
disability as a singular self-concept, while still making necessary associations to
comparably created marginal identities-predominantly the colonial Other. This effort
reevaluates how Ulysses operates in opposition to liberal Victorian paradigms,
highlighting disability's connections to issues of gender, intolerance, self-identification
and definition.
