In the Country of the Blind, the Two-Eyed Man Must Have His Eyes Removed: Disabling Utopia in H.G. Wells's "The Country of the Blind"
| dc.contributor.advisor | Hingston, Kylee-Anne | |
| dc.contributor.committeeMember | Banco, Lindsey | |
| dc.creator | Chatlain, Marie | |
| dc.creator.orcid | 0000-0002-4570-8083 | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2022-09-14T16:40:31Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2023-09-14T06:05:06Z | |
| dc.date.copyright | 2022 | |
| dc.date.created | 2022-11 | |
| dc.date.issued | 2022-09-14 | |
| dc.date.submitted | November 2022 | |
| dc.date.updated | 2022-09-14T16:40:32Z | |
| dc.description.abstract | Utopian literature's success is predicated on its ability to communicate its vision across spatial, temporal, cultural, and interpersonal boundaries. In H.G. Wells's short story "The Country of the Blind" (1904), protagonist Nuñez stumbles upon a seemingly peaceful and prosperous rural utopia but for the fact its members have been congenitally blind for generations. The tale features a society that seems to be a utopia for its blind inhabitants but proves to be a dystopia for the sighted outsider. Ultimately anti-utopian, "The Country of the Blind" erases disability by positioning its blind citizens as the normate. Because of their differences, Nuñez and the blind villagers are unable to engage in what Fatima Vieira terms the "speculative discourse" (7) typically associated with the utopian journey. This paper examines how the characters' respective cultural and embodied positions act as limitations, especially in the absence of social understandings of disability and normalcy in the blind community. This representation of disability provides insight into the evolution of late Victorian understandings of disability and its place in society. In this paper, I take a critical disability studies approach to examine the representation of blind characters who do not and can not comprehend blindness and are, as a result, limited by what David Bolt terms ocularnormativism. I explore the intersection of genre, narrative, and disability, expanding Mark Bérubé's concept of disabled narrative to discuss how Wells's text is prevented from achieving the goals implied by its genre and narrative framework by its construction of disability. I argue that Wells's tale demonstrates a surprisingly complex awareness of the role of disability in late Victorian society, anticipating social, medical, moral, and even cultural models of disability. | |
| dc.format.mimetype | application/pdf | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/10388/14158 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.subject | disability studies | |
| dc.subject | H.G. Wells | |
| dc.subject | utopia | |
| dc.subject | dystopia | |
| dc.subject | anti-utopia | |
| dc.subject | blindness | |
| dc.subject | Victorian literature | |
| dc.title | In the Country of the Blind, the Two-Eyed Man Must Have His Eyes Removed: Disabling Utopia in H.G. Wells's "The Country of the Blind" | |
| dc.type | Thesis | |
| dc.type.material | text | |
| local.embargo.terms | 2023-09-14 | |
| thesis.degree.department | English | |
| thesis.degree.discipline | English | |
| thesis.degree.grantor | University of Saskatchewan | |
| thesis.degree.level | Masters | |
| thesis.degree.name | Master of Arts (M.A.) |