Degree
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
English
Document Type
Dissertation
Abstract
In my dissertation, I explore the ways that disabled characters in three Victorian novels of various genres become the center-point of chosen families or communities of care, formed collaboratively and voluntarily because of their disabilities. These novels highlight the Victorian middle class’s negotiation of institutional, individual, and community forms of care alongside the additional factors associated with evolving ideas of identity. First, I discuss Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, which portrays a family-of-choice formed on the basis of reciprocity and care in which disability disrupts the idealized hierarchical family structure characteristic of the Bildungsroman genre and in doing so, reveals the flexibility of the Bildungsroman to reveal familial and life possibilities against the dominant cultural narrative. Next, I interrogated Charlotte Mary Yonge’s attempts at portraying conservative family structures in The Clever Woman of the Family, demonstrating how the disruptive force of disability among the novel’s characters undercuts the normative hierarchical ideology her plots uphold on the surface through their personalized, compassionate care prioritizing comfort over cure for characters with disabilities. Finally, in my discussion of Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch, I consider how the narrative subverts contemporary social and genre conventions by removing the handsome, able-bodied suitor from the marriage plot, instead centering the formation of a family unit by and around characters who experience disability or physical difference. I argued that in this Victorian sensation novel, the narrative inversion presenting disability as more desirable than able-bodiedness (both in the main character herself and in her choice of suitor) allows for the plot’s happy and successful resolution, further emphasizing the cultural capacity of disability to break open conventions of Victorian genre fiction. In my conclusion, I explore how the ideas presented in this dissertation would work in popular modern genres, examining how families of choice formed by, for, and around characters with disabilities factor into questions of care, community, and reciprocity within these modern texts to open my ideas up to more diverse, future inquiry, demonstrating the ongoing capacity of disability to create space to alternate, more flexible definitions of family and community despite changing times, countries, and cultures.
Date
4-15-2026
Recommended Citation
Barrett, Krista A., ""Conditions of Happiness": Disability and Family Formation in the Victorian Novel" (2026). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 7074.
https://repository.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/7074
Committee Chair
Rovee, Christopher
LSU Acknowledgement
1
LSU Accessibility Acknowledgment
1