TAKE UP THY BED AND WALK
Death, Disability and Cure in Classic Fiction for Girls
Lois Keith
'Bow we shall be able to come up here together every day, and just go where we like; and you will be able all your life to walk about as I do, and not be pushed about in a chair ... it is the greatest happiness we could have had!'
from Heidi, Joanna Spyri, 1880
What Katy Did, Heidi, The Secret Garden and Pollyanna are all classic novels featuring a miracle cure; a character who literally gets up and walks away from illness or paralysis. Such stories were commonplace in the second half of the nineteenth century, and implicit in them was the idea that disability and physical suffering were a punishment for wrongdoing. Girls who got into scrapes could not enter womanhood unless they were tamed, and an accident was the perfect plot device through which this could be accomplished. Other characters, like Beth in Little WOmen, were simply too good to live, and died so that another character could be redeemed by their example.
All of these novels were products of their time. However as Lois Keith points out in this remarkable study, the temptation to kill or cure disbled characters has had surprising tenacity, and not just in literature. Even today there is a belief that disabled people can get up and walk or that patients can cure themselves through mind over matter. It seems that both literature and culture are still untouched by any awareness that a disbled erson can live a full life.
Lois Keith
is a writer and teacher and an active supporter of civil rights for disabled people. She is the editor of Mustn't Grumble: Writing by Disabled Women, winner of the MIND Book of the Year Award 1994 and the author of a teenage novel, A Different Life, selected for the Book Trust's 100 Best Books of 1998. Her book for children Think About People Who Use Wheelchairs was shortlisted for the Nasen Special Education Award in 1999. She lives in London with her husband and their two teenage daughters.