Beyond Narrative Prosthesis: Subaltern Identities in Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady and Poor Miss Finch

Abstract: Of the novelists active in the mid-nineteenth century, there are few who parallel Wilkie Collins in incorporating elements of realism into their depictions of disability. The strict social hierarchies and rigid gender roles of Victorian England, rather than ensuring propriety among the middle and upper classes, instead “produc[ed] an anxiety about bodily identity to which sensation fiction responded” (Hingston). As such, the figures of Collins’s novels are fundamentally concerned with embodiment and its implications for an individual’s agency. In two such novels— The Law and the Lady and Poor Miss Finch —disability is treated as a nexus point for nonconformity, containing subversive depictions of disabled figures exercising a level of social agency comparable to their able-bodied counterparts. Drawing on theoretical frameworks established by Tobin Siebers and Martha Stoddard Holmes, this article explores the narrative significance of superimposing queerness onto an already “discomfiting body” in the context of sensation fiction.