A comparative study of disabled children and their adopted maternal figures in French and English Romantic Literature

浪漫主义时期的医学文献声称，怀孕期间母亲的想象力可能会导致孩子出生时残疾。因此，孩子“不完美”的责任被认为是由母亲承担的。我的项目探索了法国和英国浪漫主义文学中对残疾儿童和他们收养的母亲之间关系的描述，既考虑了残疾儿童和他们的照顾者之间的传统动态，也考虑了更非正统的关系。通过与海峡两岸的文本接触，该项目将标志着最近关于英语浪漫主义残疾研究的工作的一个新方向，并有助于更深入地了解围绕残疾儿童的跨文化交流思想。我首先将重点放在维克多·雨果的《巴黎圣母院》和玛丽·雪莱的《弗兰肯斯坦》；我还将考虑从法国作家玛席琳·德博德斯-瓦尔莫尔和阿尔方斯·德·拉马廷到英国作家如拜伦勋爵、安娜·莱蒂夏·巴尔鲍尔德和沃尔特·斯科特对残疾的广泛文学描绘。该项目将以朱莉娅·克里斯特娃、詹妮弗·巴克利和玛格丽特·霍曼斯的工作为基础，根据残疾研究分别考虑他们关于母亲语言、父亲想象和恶魔母亲的理论。使用各种方法，从严密的文本分析到历史背景分析，我将广泛地探索三种看待这些想法的方式。第一部分将考虑语言在收养母子关系中的作用。卡西莫多用弗罗洛教给他的手语进行交流，因此他依赖弗罗洛来调解他与世界的互动。在雪莱的文本中，这个生物通过观察德莱西家族和弗兰肯斯坦的笔记本学习；他的世界同样被他的创造者所限制。在克里斯特娃对语言的工作渴望的背景下，研究这些扭曲的语言教学(通过语言教学让孩子摆脱对母亲的依赖)的母性角色，将使我能够研究这种原始的父母互动是如何导致或塑造损害的。其次，我会从残疾是遗传的还是后来发生的事件的结果来思考残疾的起源。雨果对卡西莫多耳聋的描述存在差异，需要对他的残疾身份进行进一步调查。它最初被认为是先天性的，但雨果后来透露，弗罗洛让卡西莫多敲响了铃声，因此导致了他的耳聋。我打算研究这是如何将弗罗洛与母亲角色更紧密地联系在一起的。在《科学怪人》中，遗传性残疾与母亲身份的关系也需要分析。关于这种生物的残疾和维克多·弗兰肯斯坦作为创造者的地位，人们有不同的考虑；然而，这两个概念之间的相关性被忽视了，我的项目将解决这个问题。最后的设定可以被视为残疾身体的回声，更具体地说，是子宫的回声。在《科学怪人》一书中，这种生物的小屋被描述为“空间、子宫或门户”。[1]根据浪漫主义的科学价值观，在任何情况下都应该保护孩子的地方也可以被视为造成最大伤害的地方。在以这种方式建造生物的家园时，雪莱将子宫变成了一个充满敌意的空间。正如雨果所描绘的那样，巴黎圣母院是一个畸形的建筑化身。我很想知道，如何将背景的描绘映射到残疾儿童和他们母亲形象之间的关系上。

The medical literature of the Romantic period claimed that the maternal imagination during pregnancy could cause a child to be born disabled. Consequently, the burden of responsibility for the child's 'imperfection' was thought to lie with the mother. My project explores depictions of the relationship between the disabled child and their adopted maternal figure in French and English Romantic literature, considering both the traditional dynamic between the disabled child and their caregiver and more unorthodox relationships. By engaging with texts on both sides of the channel, this project will mark a new direction within the recent body of work on English Romantic disability studies and facilitate a deeper understanding of the cross-cultural exchange of ideas surrounding disabled children. My initial focus will be Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; I will also consider a broad spectrum of literary depictions of disability from French authors such as Marceline Desbordes-Valmore and Alphonse de Lamartine to British authors such as Lord Byron, Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Walter Scott. This project will build upon the work done by Julia Kristeva, Jennifer Buckley and Margaret Homans, considering their theories of maternal language, paternal imagination and demonic maternity, respectively, in the light of disability studies. Using a variety of methodologies from close textual analysis to historical contextualisation, I will broadly explore three ways of looking at these ideas. The first strand will consider the role of language in the adopted mother-child relationship. Quasimodo communicates with sign language taught to him by Frollo, on whom he therefore comes to rely upon to mediate his interactions with the world. In Shelley's text, the creature learns from watching the De Lacey family and through Frankenstein's notebooks; his world similarly circumscribed by his creator. Studying these distorted renderings of the maternal role of language teaching (through which the child moves away from reliance on the mother) in the context of Kristeva's work Desire in Language will allow me to examine how impairment is attributed to or shaped by this primal parental interaction. Secondly, I will reflect upon the genesis of disability in relation to whether it is inherited or the result of a later incident. There are discrepancies in Hugo's presentation of Quasimodo's deafness that warrant further investigation of his disabled identity. It is initially presented as congenital but Hugo later reveals that Frollo makes Quasimodo ring the bells and therefore causes his deafness. I intend to examine how this links Frollo even more tightly to the maternal role. In Frankenstein, the idea of inherited disability in relation to motherhood also demands analysis. There have been separate considerations of the creature's disabilities and Victor Frankenstein's position as a creator; however, the correlation between these two notions has been overlooked and my project will address this. Finally setting can be viewed as an echo of the disabled body but more specifically, the womb. In Frankenstein,the creature's hovel has been described as a 'carceral space, as womb, or as portal.'[1] The place that is supposed to protect the child in all circumstances, in accordance with Romantic scientific values, can also be viewed as the place where the most harm is caused. In constructing the creature's home in this way, the womb has been transmuted into a hostile space by Shelley. As a 'sort of living creature,' Notre Dame Cathedral, as portrayed by Hugo, provides an architectural embodiment of deformity I am curious to see how the portrayal of setting can be mapped on to the relationship between the disabled child and their maternal figure.