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The idea of disability in the Victorian era rests on the survival of the fittest and the still prevalent faith on sin and religion. The chief intellectual analysis of the Victorian age challenged the very rigid norms of religion. Society with the ‘theory of evolution’ and the geology under Lyell labelled the claims of ‘Old Testament’ as invalid. Disability was an outward reflection of sin resting in the impure soul in the body. A person having disability meant having inner impurities accompanied by sin for the Victorians. In this purview the paper analyses disability and gender from the Victorian text Jane Eyre. Disability here covers intellectual disability of working-class Jane to see things clearly, subaltern disability among the workers of Mrs. Reed, Mr. Rochester’s disability which makes him unable to see beyond the socially desirable creole woman Bertha along with the dowry of 30,000 pounds to be utilized as capital in the wake of industrialization. Religious disability of the Lowood institution and their disability to protect the lives of girls during Typhus fever reflects the exploitation of working-class girls studying in a charitable institution. Locational deprivation and disability are portrayed through the burning of Thornfield Hall and breaking of chestnut tree into two due to thunderstorm. Rochester’s blinding is physical but also psychological portraying the bourgeois man’s greed and inability to see beyond profit.
Akshat Pandey. “Anatomical Discourse of Disability: Locating The Working Class Gendered Subversion in Literature.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 2, Apr. 2026, pp. 225–234. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n2.14.
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