The Historicist Turn of Romantic‐Era Disability Studies, or Frankenstein in the Dark

The field of disability studies has recently matured from its abstractly polemical origins to its current historicist orientation. This turn has allowed disability to become a key feature of mainstream contemporary literary scholarship. Romantic studies, though, has been relatively slow to adopt the new discourse. This essay offers a tentative explanation and a state‐of‐the‐nascent‐field assessment of Romantic‐era disability studies. Applying theory to practice, I show how both literary criticism and disability studies by themselves miss the point of Mary Shelley's Romantic‐era novel Frankenstein (1818). For example, a literary critical approach reads the theme of blindness as a metaphor for a kind of paradoxical insight, whereas a disability studies reading takes umbrage at the exploitation of the blind for narrative gain. Moving past this ideological impasse requires a more synthetic discourse that leverages the historicist turn of disability studies to model a more honest interpretation. By positioning the novel against Enlightenment theories of blindness, I argue that Shelley offers a more nuanced account of abnormal embodiment than disability scholars have traditionally allowed.