Trying to run headfirst into disability studies, after writing a paper about the importance of the gaze and trauma in relation to Titus Andronicus, has got me plunging down too many rabbit holes.
I. “Ethical Staring.”
Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood, in their book Recovering Disability in Early Modern England define “ethical staring” as “mandat[ing] that we stop refusing to look or that we, equally problematically, cease gawking unilaterally at the extraordinary; instead, it proposes engagement in a reciprocal interaction which disability, disability histories, and disability representations stare back (2).” This is relevant particularly to the cultural model of disability, which “emphasizes the reciprocity between body and culture, between lived corporeal difference and social perception of that lived difference. It destigmatizes disability while still preserving the individual, lived experience… (5).”
II. Nancy Vickers’ “Diana Described” on Trauma and the Gaze as it relates to the myth of Actaeon and Diana.
Diana and Actaeon is a familiar myth, namely occurring in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Actaeon the hunter stumbles across Diana whilst she is bathing, and infuriated with the violation, she transforms him into a stag; the ultimate resolution of the encounter is Actaeon being devoured by his own hounds. Nancy Vickers points out that “Actaeon sees Diana, Diana sees Actaeon, and seeing is traumatic for both.” Vickers’ sentence itself impressively exerts the relationship between both; “Actaeon sees Diana, Diana sees Actaeon” makes clear the relational mirroring between the two, which transforms into the occasion for trauma.
I wish here to make a note on the relationship between trauma, power, and the gaze, and how it seems to relate to disability. Through the power of his gaze, Actaeon renders Diana helpless, transformed from goddess to object. The power of his gaze is the occasion for his transformation: out of vengeance, Diana transforms him into a stag, an animal, to be torn to pieces and rendered both object and consumable. All because, to borrow from Hobgood and Wood, of Actaeon’s unilateral gazing.
In other words, there is a power inherent to the gaze. Lennard Davis defines disability in Bending Over Backwards as “a disruption in the sensory field of the observer. Disability, in this sense, is located in the observer, not the observed, and is therefore more about the viewer than about the person using a cane or a wheelchair (50).”
III. Samson Agonistes and the early modern eye.
Stuart Clark notes in Vanities of the Eye that even in the fourteenth century, “appearance and reality most obviously clashed— in delusions, dreams, optical illusions, hallucinations produced by fevers, the manipulation of demons, and so on (20).” Appearances are literally deceiving, and the plot of Othello may be, in my opinion, one of the clearer representations of this divide.
The organ of the eye is physically unstable as well and not only prone to misrepresenting the material world. According to Simone Chess in “Performing Blindness” (which appears in Hobgood’s and Wood’s book), eye sight was generally accepted as “in the process of failing, either gradually or entirely (133).” John Milton himself was completely blind by his early forties after years of deteriorating sight.
Samson, therefore, would seem to be a compelling subject in relation to disability. If we are all temporarily able bodied, no one exerts this point quite like him after he loses both his strength and his hair. He laments that “God, when he gave me strength, to shew withal/
How slight the gift was, hung it in my Hair. (58-59).” Thrice is the loss of Samson’s eyes referred to them as being “put out,” linking the instability between his strength and eyes. Samson’s eyes were put out by his enemies just as easily as his hair was shorn.
IV. Observations of a Mediocre MA Student.
- Trauma is located in the eye, and in the power of the gaze, particularly the unilateral gaze.
- Maybe it’s just me, but a unilateral gaze in real time is limping to the pharmacy for pain management supplies and a fifty-something year old woman giving you the up-and-down “what’s wrong with you” pity stare. By “you,” however, I do mean “me.” Most harrowing seconds of my life.
- I stared back. But she did not transform into a stag.
- New level: Actaeon was transformed into a “stag” through the act of seeing her. You know yourself only through knowing others. It is, through several levels, relational? (Typing this is giving me a headache.) Woman who stared at me in the pharmacy knows herself and knows herself to be “normal” because I was limping, and she wasn’t. It returns to Davis’s sense of what is and isn’t “normal.” Hopefully I conveyed that properly.
- I don’t think it’s pure coincidence that the power of theater has been classically linked to mirroring and identification. You gaze at what’s happening onstage, and maybe, if you’re Aristotle, you’re supposed to pity and fear something tragic (to put it extremely, extremely simply).
- Clearly I hope my tragic limp was feared. Being able bodied is only temporary, after all. Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, which appears to be my condition and disorder I will always try to raise awareness for now, is itself progressive. In a span of six months, my own symptoms have become borderline debilitating. The human body really is unstable.
- I wonder if a drama which features two non-normative bodies (Samson, who is blind, and Harapha, a giant) is an instance of gazing back. The language of instability, for me, was really clear and striking. I wonder if it’s a sense of the human body is actually a really unstable thing, particularly in regards to the eyes.