| This dissertation examines the relationship between disabled subjects and their helper or caretaker counterparts, whom this project identifies as "satellites." Employing textual and cultural examples primarily from the Victorian period, and informed largely by nineteenth-century concerns about identity and corporeality, this thesis argues that the satellite-disabled relationship is typically charcterized by a contest for power, by a struggle over who will represent, manage, control, or profit from the appearance or existence of disability. Though people with disabilities and characters with disabilities have often been dismissed, overlooked, or marginalized, this dissertation looks past these stereotypes of victimization to explore the attraction of disability and its kinship with celebrity. It focuses particularly on how satellite figures tend to gravitate toward disability, being drawn into a circle of attention and power constructed around the presence of disability. It observes, further, that this connection between disabled and satellite ultimately generates an extraordinarily unstable partnership: Satellites often appear to be performing some "service" in relation to disability (e.g., doctoring, nursing, teaching, guiding, interpreting, reading, mediating, etc.) and disabled subjects often appear as the passive beneficiaries of these practices, but within this relationship, satellite and disabled are often enmeshed in complex power struggles over the nature, meaning, and ownership of disabled identity. Victorian texts examined by this dissertation include: Several short poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as well as Aurora Leigh; Charles Dickens' American Notes, A Christmas Carol, The Cricket on the Hearth, and David Copperfield ; and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. |
