lunabee34

You are so close to being finished. Yay!

On the whole, it's going a lot better than I dared hope at the beginning. You see, right out of the gate I had the sort of RL problems that you have to spend all your time solving, and that dragged on for the better part of a year, so I am a year behind my original schedule. But thankfully, my adviser is a kind man and he has so far considered my first drafts good enough (he always says "you have probably thought of all the stuff you *could* add and the few things you should...so I'll keep my mouth shut" - which tells you a lot about my perfectionist streak, I suppose). And so I am pottering along, trying to keep myself from going down every shiny tangent.

What a really cool project. What else are you discussing besides Frankenstein?

Well, my main argument is that the representation of disabled characters has shifted and broadened over the course of Western modernity and that this roughly correlates with a shift from seeing contingency primarily as something dangerous to seeing it first as an anbiguous and then as a positive resource. And I am offering one possible track through the jungle of literary history:

- William Shakespeare Richard III - kind of obvious, which is why I had to include it (I don't mind since I love Shakespeare - I think not being exposed to him until the tail-end of highschool helps here, judging from the groaning response you get in most general Internet discussions)

- Frankenstein

- Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White (a mid-Victorian Gothic/ sensation novel), which offers a critical commentary on how the madwomen in the attic might be patriarchal creations)

- Lady Chatterley's Lover

- The Holy City by Patrick McCabe an Irish neo-Gothic novel about a mentally ill murderer, whose mental delusions are related to the history of Irish Partition)

- some episodes of Call the Midwife, a recent BBC period drama set in the 1950s and 1960s, which featured pregnant disabled characters/ disabled characters in sexual relationships in recent episodes.

Sorry for keeping this relatively short, but I am very much afraid, I'd talk your ear off otherwise :) Thank you for taking an interest