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From Idiot Beast to Idiot Sublime: Mental Disability in John Cleland's Fanny Hill

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

D. Christopher Gabbard
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Abstract

This essay investigates an erotic encounter between the libertine Louisa and Good-natured Dick, foregrounding the way Dick's representation challenges early modern notions of idiocy as a fixed condition and Enlightenment assumptions (articulated in John Locke's Essay) that rationality and linguistic capability underwrite human superiority. Employing disability studies as a frame, it explores how cognitive impairment can serve as a device for elucidating the text's thematic preoccupation with valorizing signs and sensation over language and reason. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder's concept of “narrative prosthesis” comes into play as the piece interrogates the passage's sublime rhetoric and allusion to the theriophilic paradox. References to discourses concerning animal soul (René Descartes and Pierre Gassendi), sign language (Johann Conrad Amman), medical understandings of the nerves and sensation (Thomas Willis), and setting species boundaries (Julien de La Mettrie) illustrate that the episode is a locus classicus of anti-Lockean epistemology, one pointing forward to the abbé de Condillac and Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard (originator of special education).

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 123 , Issue 2 , March 2008 , pp. 375 - 389
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 by The Modern Language Association of America

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