A comparative study of disabled children and their adopted maternal figures in French and English Romantic Literature

The medical literature of the Romantic period claimed that the maternal imagination during pregnancy could cause a child to be born disabled. Consequently, the burden of responsibility for the child's 'imperfection' was thought to lie with the mother. My project explores depictions of the relationship between the disabled child and their adopted maternal figure in French and English Romantic literature, considering both the traditional dynamic between the disabled child and their caregiver and more unorthodox relationships. By engaging with texts on both sides of the channel, this project will mark a new direction within the recent body of work on English Romantic disability studies and facilitate a deeper understanding of the cross-cultural exchange of ideas surrounding disabled children. My initial focus will be Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; I will also consider a broad spectrum of literary depictions of disability from French authors such as Marceline Desbordes-Valmore and Alphonse de Lamartine to British authors such as Lord Byron, Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Walter Scott. This project will build upon the work done by Julia Kristeva, Jennifer Buckley and Margaret Homans, considering their theories of maternal language, paternal imagination and demonic maternity, respectively, in the light of disability studies. Using a variety of methodologies from close textual analysis to historical contextualisation, I will broadly explore three ways of looking at these ideas.
The first strand will consider the role of language in the adopted mother-child relationship. Quasimodo communicates with sign language taught to him by Frollo, on whom he therefore comes to rely upon to mediate his interactions with the world. In Shelley's text, the creature learns from watching the De Lacey family and through Frankenstein's notebooks; his world similarly circumscribed by his creator. Studying these distorted renderings of the maternal role of language teaching (through which the child moves away from reliance on the mother) in the context of Kristeva's work Desire in Language will allow me to examine how impairment is attributed to or shaped by this primal parental interaction.
Secondly, I will reflect upon the genesis of disability in relation to whether it is inherited or the result of a later incident. There are discrepancies in Hugo's presentation of Quasimodo's deafness that warrant further investigation of his disabled identity. It is initially presented as congenital but Hugo later reveals that Frollo makes Quasimodo ring the bells and therefore causes his deafness. I intend to examine how this links Frollo even more tightly to the maternal role. In Frankenstein, the idea of inherited disability in relation to motherhood also demands analysis. There have been separate considerations of the creature's disabilities and Victor Frankenstein's position as a creator; however, the correlation between these two notions has been overlooked and my project will address this.
Finally setting can be viewed as an echo of the disabled body but more specifically, the womb. In Frankenstein,the creature's hovel has been described as a 'carceral space, as womb, or as portal.'[1] The place that is supposed to protect the child in all circumstances, in accordance with Romantic scientific values, can also be viewed as the place where the most harm is caused. In constructing the creature's home in this way, the womb has been transmuted into a hostile space by Shelley. As a 'sort of living creature,' Notre Dame Cathedral, as portrayed by Hugo, provides an architectural embodiment of deformity I am curious to see how the portrayal of setting can be mapped on to the relationship between the disabled child and their maternal figure.