HESBURGH LECTURE SERIES 2012 Program - Alumni Association ...

Essaka Joshua, Ph.D.
Joseph Morahan Director, College Seminar, College of Arts and
Letters
Biography
Essaka Joshua, B.A. (Oxford), M.A. (Oxford), Ph.D. (Birmingham) is the Joseph Morahan
Director of the College Seminar and a specialist in eighteenth and nineteenth Century British
literature. She is the author of two monographs: Pygmalion and Galatea (2001) and The
Romantics and the May Day Tradition (2007) and is currently working on a book that explores
Categories
physical disability in British literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Our culture is saturated with examples of perfect bodies and robust minds, yet progress toward
Social Concerns
recognition of the perspectives of people with disabilities has been slow. Disability studies is
a new discipline that seeks to address this. Like the waves of feminist studies and race studies
before it, disability studies puts the fight for human dignity at the forefront of literary studies. This innovative approach to
understanding disability shows that disability is not a marginal part of our culture, but is central to it. Disability studies aims to
rethink disability history, to reclaim and refute stereotypical images, to question the categories of “normalcy” and “ability,” and
to recognize that disability is not defined by lack. Rereading classical texts such as Frankenstein and Jane Eyre, Joshua asks us to
rethink our ways of seeing disability in literature.
Lectures
“I began to see”: Biblical Models of Disability in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre
The Bible uses several models of disability; some are negative (e.g., association with sin and punishment), and some are positive
(association with disciplineship and spiritual worth). The allusions to biblical disability in Jane Eyre emphasize the spiritual
gains associated with it. Brontë centers her discussion of biblical disability on the spiritual roles of sight, blindness, and madness
and on the physical body’s relationship to the spiritual body. Reading the novel with attention to biblical references to disability
provides a more progressive understanding of the novel’s account of disability than has hitherto been suggested. If we read in
the light of Brontë’s consistently redemptionist agenda in her selection of biblical allusions, Edward Rochester’s disability is not a
punishment, but is an indication of his spiritual well-being.
Reimagining Disability in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
The concept of the voyeuristic viewpoint competes, in eighteenth-century historiography, with a multi-perspectival approach
to history. This lecture places Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in the context of the historiography of Edward Gibbon and William
Godwin, arguing that the novel changes eighteenth-century historiographical methods that base truth values on visual
perception. Frankenstein underscores, instead, the hierarchical superiority of words over visual evidence, and represents blindness
as a condition that encourages rationality. Shelley characterizes this distrust of sight through extensive use of the “gothic gaze”–an
oppressive, stigmatizing, disciplinary look that is implicated in the definition of normalcy, in social relationships, in moral and
legal culpability, and in narrative authority.
56 The Hesburgh Lecture Series, 2012 Program