Reflection: Carson McCullers and why disabled women writers need to be included in the literary world
Can you name any disabled writers? No? I struggle to do it too and I am one.
Whilst many other marginalized communities are finally getting their day in the literary sun (think of writers of colour and LGBTQ authors), disabled writers remain sadly hidden, with D Lit — as it’s apparently known. It says a lot that I didn’t know this was a genre, being both a literary editor and writer — really not having proper representation in the writing and publishing world.
Statistically, we’re a pretty large minority, with one in five worldwide facing a physical or mental illness in their lifetimes, but, apart from the positive work which has been done to promote the presence of mental health narratives in both fiction and nonfiction, physically impaired and chronically ill writers unfortunately remain marginalised in the literary sphere.
This may be because so few disabled people are present in the publishing industry and so we aren’t the ones making decisions and thus are not able to dispel myths about these sorts of authors and their marketing powers (because, yes, some of us can’t physically do a book tour) and the kinds of work we can and should write.
Indeed, I once had a top publishing figure decide not to follow through with reading the rest of my first novel, Welcome to Sharonville, after showing a strong initial interest because I featured a secondary character who was dying of cancer and so in a wheelchair. Based on simple personal prejudice against books which featured illness, by her own admission, this powerful figure dismissed a novel which later went on to be longlisted for The Guardian First Book Award.
Indeed, even as I am jubilant at the rise of Black women authors and feminist work in general, I can’t help feeling disturbed that we disabled sisters are still not getting our due.
It’s like we’re the last acceptable underrepresented section of writers.
In the U.S., there are niche publishers, but it’s a struggle to find them here in the U.K., let alone specific funding or support, as, arguably, being the segment of the literati who struggles the most to write, in terms of often facing not just poverty (because we so often cannot do standard work), but also heightened prejudice due to right-wing governments positing us as ‘scroungers’ and all the other issues of patriarchy that other women face in terms of having to do more domestic work, childcare and emotional labour. On top of this, we also frequently face physical impairments which make typing and screens hard to handle, as well as often an immense pain and fatigue which makes any part of life a challenge, let alone creativity.
And yet our work, with its joys and many trials, often remains unchampioned.
This situation is especially difficult for women who sit at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities, such as being a disabled woman of colour, or being lesbian or trans too.
But I think it goes beyond offering proper arts-funding and social and logistical support to disabled authors to help them create – I think it also means agents and publishers taking disabled women writers’ work more seriously and being willing to not only adapt marketing and editing protocols to suit their distinct abilities.
And, perhaps most importantly, to actively celebrate the disabled community’s literary contributions, as we now do those of LGBTQ writers.
Because, you could be reading the work of a disabled or chronically ill female author right now and never know it.
Like a dirty little secret, a writer’s disabilities are often brushed to one side, or, sentimentalised as a way to sell their books, disabled folks ever being posited as figures of inspiration when we’re only ever standard brilliant humans.
I challenge you then to look further into the lives of the authors you admire and consider if they were disabled – for one, the Brontës were frail and died young, but what about the Queen of Southern Gothic, the prodigiously talented Carson Mccullers, who suffered rheumatic fever which destroyed a promising musical career at a young age and then was never the same, facing multiple strokes, including one which left her half-paralysed at thirty? She died of a heart attack at fifty.
I bring this side of McCullers to light as I don’t feel the distinct health and disability issues so many of our authors confronted aren’t properly covered – in fact, they’re mostly elided when what perhaps we disabled writers need to do is to bring these issues to the fore so contemporary publishers will more confidently take a punt on disabled writers, knowing that we’re just part of a longlasting and luminous literary canon.
After all, McCullers’ amazing first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, was published when she was just twenty-three and became a sensation.
Putting a deaf-mute at the centre of her world of misfits, McCullers not only ensures that disabled characters have much-needed significance, but she also dismisses the rest of the lonesome cast of figures’ projections onto him as some kind of mystic guide as nonsense.
Thus she shows us how disabled characters can be featured in literature without being drenched in mawkishness or made into figures of embitterment, often becoming stereotypical or token.
Indeed, she also queers up the rest of the town, showing the strangeness and longing of its many viewpoint figures, delicately ensuring that the central disabled figure is not fetishized in his difference.
Thus, McCullers’ presents a roadmap for writers of any ability who want to represent disabled characters with vivid complexity – after all, why should disabled writers just write about disability, or be the only ones to do so? – as well as showing disabled authors, like myself, that we can do amazing things, despite the additional tests we face in terms of physically writing and getting published when the literary world which still seems to refuse to embrace the enthralling nature of our work and our vibrant and diverse community.
Like the images of a disabled Frida Kahlo painting from her bed, Carson McCullers shows that those of us with physical impairments and chronic conditions can overcome the creative barriers we face – but having the support of arts funding, the publishing world and more open-hearted and aware readers, who don’t resort to ableism, would help no end.
Perhaps in the Western world which seems to run away from any suggestion of illness and mortality, our challenge to become visible and to make disabled characters’ stories more appealing is a bigger one.
But McCullers and the hunchback who wins the heart of the town heiress in the fabulous story, “The Ballad of a Sad Café” prove that, whatever we face, however physically and mentally challenged we are, we deserve representation on the page as important members of society and to also be a celebrated part of the literary world.
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