Sick Ecologies and Outsourced Flesh in Willa Cather's Sapphira and the Slavegirl

Theodora Danylevich concludes the panel with her paper entitled “Sick Ecologies and Outsourced Flesh in Willa Cather’s Sapphira and the Slavegirl.” Taking Willa Cather’s Sapphira and the Slavegirl as an illustrative... [ view full abstract ]

Theodora Danylevich concludes the panel with her paper entitled “Sick Ecologies and Outsourced Flesh in Willa Cather’s Sapphira and the Slavegirl.” Taking Willa Cather’s Sapphira and the Slavegirl as an illustrative text, she looks at the affective climate that the institution of slavery casts over the household in the late 1850s, just prior to abolition. Sapphira is a woman who inherited slaves, and treats them as her property. Sapphira’s health is deteriorating as she suffers from dropsy, becoming less and less mobile. She imagines and accuses her husband of having an affair with a slave girl named Nancy, whom she then proceeds to threaten and torment until Sapphira’s daughter takes it upon herself to help Nancy escape. From an analysis of the novel’s storyline Danylevich illustrates how the notion of ownership over other humans leads Sapphira, who is also paradoxically a practicing lay nurse in her community, to treat her slaves as “outsourced flesh” of her own body in the context of her physical illness and disability. This paper thus seeks to trouble understandings of disability, attending to the power structures by which an apparently able-bodied subject might have a daily lived experience of disability.