Clare Mullaney
University of Pennsylvania
Clare Mullaney is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania where she works on nineteenth- and early-twentieth century U.S. literature, disability studies, and material culture. Her dissertation, “American Imprints: Disability and the Material Text,” considers how turn-of-the-century writers grappled with the social problem of disability at the level of textual form.
This panel brings critical disability studies in conversation with histories of healthand wellness in nineteenth-century America. By employing an “ecological” lens, we attend not only to the interactions between ill and disabled bodies, and health professionals and practices, but also to how the sociopolitical climate produced by slavery and the Civil War shaped these encounters. From nurses and physicians to exercise aficionados and other caretakers, both professional and lay health practices gained traction in the latter half of the nineteenth century. While disability and illness became transitory states for some, other individuals were perceived as permanently flawed or defective. This panel takes up entwined notions of illness and disability in order to take stock of the textual treatments of embodiment in nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture.
Clare Mullaney’s paper, “Whitman’s Waste: Bodies, Bandages, Bedsides, and Books” looks to Whitman’s manuscripts as commentaries on the poet’s shifting understandings of embodiment. In taking up contemporary disability theory’s concept of “compulsory able-bodiedness,” she contrasts Whitman’s recently rediscovered 1858 collection of essays entitled Manly Health and Training Serieswith Drum-Taps (1865) and his entries in Specimen Days (1882), which detail his observations of “ill” and “wounded” soldiers during the Civil War. When he writes “the real war will never get into the books,” Whitman explores how material forms other than text, what he calls “the minutiae of deeds and passions”—including habits of care surrounding soldiers’ clothing, blankets, and bandages—attest to bodily limitation in a way that conventional textual forms cannot. For a poet who strove, but ultimately failed, to literalize the physical body via his books of poems, Mullaney’s paper explores how injured (as opposed to healthy) soldiers’ diverse relations to texts—diaries, letters written home to friends and family, and canvassing books—reimagined nineteenth-century reading practices as inherently flawed approximations of physical experience.
