Problems of Knowing: Sensation Fiction, Form, and Disability

Criticism on Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch (1872) has noted the strong contrasts Collins sets up between binaries such as sight and touch and able-bodiedness and disability. This article proposes that these structuring binaries cohere around three interdependent “problems of knowing”: the near-incommunicability of subjective, embodied experience; the ways in which sensory hierarchies transform normative forms of knowledge into totalizing forms of knowing; and, lastly, the problems of knowing inherent in narrative depictions of lived experience. While sensation fiction has been increasingly reexamined and revalued, much of the radical potential of its embodied reading techniques remains to be explored. This article argues that Poor Miss Finch seeks to bridge the gap created by the three problems of knowing, drawing on sensation fiction’s formal features of melodrama and sudden disruptions of domesticity to create moments of sensory disorientation and heightened affect, enabling imaginative immersion in nonnormative embodied and perceptual experiences.