Towards Their Own Identity:
Persons With Disabilities In English Canadian Fiction
Adam Pottle
B.A., University of Northern British Columbia, 2006

Thesis Submitted In Partial Fulfillment Of
The Requirement For The Degree Of
Master Of Arts
in
English

The University of Northern British Columbia
April 2008
© Adam Pottle, 2008

1*1

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ABSTRACT
Although they make up one of the largest physical minorities in Canada, persons with
disabilities are not well represented in English Canadian fiction. Many stories that
feature persons with disabilities present them in unflattering, stereotypical ways. Persons
with disabilities are portrayed as dependent, pathetic characters that help perpetuate a
harmful vision of what disability is. However, certain works of fiction that have been
published in the last ten years—for instance, Frances Itani's Deafening and Lori
Lansens's The Girls—treat disability in a more multi-dimensional fashion. The
characters in these books are independent people who use their disabilities as a means to
identity and even language. With the help of disability scholars such as Lennard Davis,
Rosemarie Garland Thomson, and Erving Goffman, this thesis examines English
Canadian disabled fiction as a way of establishing the idea that disability constitutes a
cultural identity within Canada's multicultural mosaic and that each disability comprises
its own subculture.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract

11

Table of Contents

in

List of Tables

IV

Acknowledgements
Chapter One

Introduction
Defining Disability
Disability Theory and Canadian Literature
Canadian Culture

1
2
4
7

Chapter Two

MacDonald, Vanderhaeghe, Mistry
Itani, Lansens, McNeney

11
19

Chapter Three

Disability and Community
Disability and Small Towns
Unusual Births, Remarkable People
Bedspreads and Communal Values

31
32
41
45

Chapter Four

Language, Culture, and Disability
Arley McNeney and a Language for Paraplegics
Lori Lansens and Conjoined Twins
"Schizophrenese" and Languages for Persons
with Mental Disabilities

52
52
54
57

Chapter Five

The Permeability of Disability
Itani: The Growing Deaf Community
McNeney and the Wheelchair Community
The Periphery and Survival as Identity

61
62
64
66

Chapter Six

The Issue of Mental Disability
A Blurred Line
The Institution: Stigmatized House or Cultural
Gathering Place?

68
70
74

Chapter Seven

Towards an Ex-centric Context
Disabled Literature and the Canadian Canon
Disabled Diversity and Unity
The Path to Multicultural Unity

78
79
81
83

Works Cited

85

Pottle iv

LIST OF TABLES
Table 1: Dichotomy of English Canadian Disabled Literary Characters

7

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v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I'd like to thank my family for their support while I pursued this topic; my mother, Barb,
was especially encouraging. Thank you, Karin Beeler, for dedicating your time to
supervise this project despite the crunches of your own work. Rob Budde and Jacqueline
Holler came through down the stretch. Nicole Markotic was a supportive yet challenging
external examiner. Gordon Martel chaired my defence and repeated questions when I
needed him to. Bethany Haffner and Darlene Chilton: graduate administration
extraordinaires. Lorna Dittmar, disability advocate extraordinaire, took time out of a busy
schedule to chat with me. Heather Rolufs was a supportive friend when I needed one.
Lee Jenstad, Derrick Williams, Carol Sapergia, Amanda Miller, Shane Sarasin, and
Krystal Manson helped provide me with a confidence-boosting token in Fort St. James.

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1

I
Introduction
As Margaret Atwood claims in her famous book Survival, the "central
preoccupations" of Canadian literature are "survival and victims" (back cover, first
paperback edition). Indeed, Canadian literature is filled with various groups that could be
considered survivors and victims. Those of different race, religion, sexual orientation,
and social status have all been written about by authors such as Atwood, Rohinton
Mistry, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Hiromi Goto, and Michael Ondaatje. The many
different kinds of people that constitute such a large percentage of Canada's population
can be included in this survivor/victim dichotomy, due to marginalization, discrimination,
and other such practices. However, not all kinds of people have been equally represented
in the Canadian canon. One group in particular has largely been neglected in English
Canadian literature, seldom explored in depth and otherwise swept aside to the margins.
This group is persons with disabilities.
Persons with disabilities comprise one of the largest physical minorities in
Canada: 14.3% of the population—an estimated one in seven, or 4.4 million people—has
identified itself as disabled ("Participation and Activity Limitation Survey"). Yet
compared to the other minorities which make Canada multicultural and which accentuate

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and broaden Canadian literature with their distinct stories (East Indian, Asian, AfricanCanadian), persons with disabilities are seldom written about in progressive ways. Until
recently, authors have not expressed disability as a cultural entity, as opposed to a social
stigma. Only within the last decade have Canadian audiors truly begun to explore
disability for its literary and aesthetic possibilities. This interest coincides with
increasing studies of the cultural treatment of persons with disabilities, most of which
have taken place in the United States, led by such scholars as Lennard Davis, Sharon
Snyder, David Mitchell, and Rosemarie Garland Thomson, among others. This scholarly
interest has revealed a gap not only within the Canadian literary canon, but also within
Canadian academia and Canadian culture as a whole.

Defining Disability
Several different meanings (and stigmas) have been attached to the world
"disability." Persons with disabilities have had to wrestle with definition like any other
minority, as Ruth Enns points out:
Just as members of visible minorities have changed their group
nomenclature as they clarified their thinking about themselves, so disabled
people altered their terminology several times. "The handicapped," which
omitted their humanity making their disabilities into a noun defining their
whole identities, became "persons with disabilities" in an effort to put their
human status ahead of their disabilities. (90)
An evolution of political correctness has followed the disability movement, and as studies
on disability have increased, scholars have re-evaluated and re-appropriated its definition.

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3

Its various usages in the political and medical fields have been interrogated; and while it
is a convenient term, particularly for legal reasons (Davis, Enforcing Normalcy, 3), it also
ignores the diversity of disability. Hundreds of different physical and behavioural
conditions fit under this term, each accompanied by its own peculiarities. Disability's
diversity, though inconvenient for the purposes of definition, is further discussed in the
last two chapters, which suggest that each particular condition forms its own subculture
and exists under the umbrella term "disability."
The World Health Organization defines disability as "a restriction or lack.. .of
ability to perform an activity in the manner or within the range considered normal for a
human being" (WHO, The ICD-10 Classification of Mental and Behavioural Disorders,
8). Within this definition is the word "normal." "Normal" is a questionable concept,
ultimately defined by the majority of people. Lennard Davis outlines how normalcy
infiltrates almost every aspect of human life: to measure intelligence, cholesterol levels,
weight, height, and other propensities. He writes that "[t]here is probably no area of
contemporary life in which some idea of a norm, mean, or average has not been
calculated" (23). With regards to disability, Davis declares that "the 'problem' is not the
person with disabilities; the problem is the way that normalcy is constructed to create the
'problem' of the disabled person" (24). Disability and the definition attached to it
therefore suggest that disability is linked to social context. This idea of social context has
led to the popular notion that disability is not only a physical or mental condition; it is a
socially created condition. As Davis states, "[disability is.. .a social process that
intimately involves everyone who has a body and lives in the world of the senses" (2).
This description is sound not only because it indirectly acknowledges that anyone can

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become disabled (an idea explored in more depth in Chapter Five), but also because
everyone plays a part in defining disability. A number of disability scholars define
disability in relation to what is normal. When a wheelchair user comes up to a building
and finds no ramp, but only a flight of stairs, he in that instant becomes disabled. Until
one faces an obstacle created by "normal" society—a deaf person with a telephone, a
blind person without a cane—one is merely impaired (Davis, Bending over Backwards,
12). One's impairment, a physical condition, becomes a disability when faced with a
social obstacle. Disability, then, is a social process created by an exclusionist nucleus
that in turn labels it as a social stigma, a quality that is "not only different, but deviant"
(Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, 31). Deviance, in turn, is
constructed by the norm as "part of a communal acculturation process" and "legitimates
the status quo," as well as "naturalizes attributions of inherent inferiority and superiority"
(31). Seeing persons with disabilities as deviant devalues them. As a result of this
process, disability becomes a marginalized position. This idea of disability as both a
stigma and a marginalized position has appeared in English Canadian novels; in
discussing these novels, this idea will be both explored and exploded.

Disability Theory and Canadian Literature
Though not much has been written about disability in Canadian literature and
Canadian culture, there are certain literary and scholarly writings that apply to disability
fiction. In particular, Margaret Atwood's survival/victim terminology strongly resonates
in this regard:
The central symbol for Canada.. i s undoubtedly Survival, la Survivance. Like

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the Frontier and The Island, it is a multi-faceted and adaptable idea. For early
explorers and settlers, it meant bare survival in the face of "hostile" elements and/
or natives: carving out a place and a way of keeping alive. But the word can also
suggest survival of a crisis or disaster... (Survival 32)
Atwood's statement and the idea of Survival can be adapted to a disability context:
persons with disabilities are often referred to as "survivors" and "victims" of their
particular circumstances, the former term being more acceptable than the latter (Ruth
Enns, A Voice Unheard, 90). As discussed above, and like the roaming pioneers Atwood
writes about, persons with disabilities face obstacles—only they must deal with society's
expectations and the stigmatization of their respective conditions, rather than the harsh
wildernesses and terrains which Atwood writes about. Being a disabled survivor is an
ideal, as Ruth Enns points out:
They [persons with disabilities] prefer "survivor" to "victim" because the
latter plays to the stereotype of disability being a perpetual tragedy. The former
has positive connotations of living through a struggle, perhaps being permanently
marked by it, but nevertheless going on to lead a satisfying life. (90 - 91)
Canadian literature features several disabled victims, and, as shown in Chapter Two, has
only recently begun to acquire more survivors, or people that negotiate the (social)
obstacles around them and carve out their own place. Atwood's ideas therefore strongly
resonate within Canadian disabled literature.
Hutcheon's postmodernist ideas—particularly that of the "ex-centric" (Canadian
Postmodernism 3)—find a new level of applicability within Canadian disability literature.
Her 1988 book The Canadian Postmodern provides a strong analysis of Canadian fiction

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and Canadian identity with regards to negotiations between the centre and the margin.
Hutcheon's idea of the postmodern "ex-centric" (3) is a key idea in Canadian culture.
Since Canada is a nation composed of many different kinds of Others, of different
marginalized groups, Hutcheon's ideas have broad appeal. Her phrasing of "ex-centric"
suggests an existence on the outside ("ex"), while the word as a whole suggests
idiosyncrasy, defiance, and deviance. Hutcheon's "ex-centric" idea provides a twist on
disabled characters: persons with disabilities can be considered "ex-centrics" who defy
and deviate from what is normal. As Rosemarie Garland Thomson points out,
"Disability.. .is the attribution of corporeal deviance" (6). Thomson also maintains that
"the discourses of disability, race, gender, and sexuality intermingle to create figures of
otherness" (6). The disabled fictional character, then, is the newest "ex-centric" in
Canada, the newest identity on the margin. This is not a negative thing, however:
Hutcheon also suggests that existing outside the centre is encouraging, for "[t]he
periphery is also the frontier, the place of possibility" (3). Where Canadian disability
literature is concerned, there is ample room for development, and Hutcheon's ideas attest
to that. Her ideas can be paired with Atwood's to create a unique method of discussing
disability in English Canadian fiction.
Atwood's and Hutcheon's ideas create a binary by which English Canadian
disabled literary characters can be defined. Atwood's "disabled" survivor, who as Enns
suggests makes a life out of surviving on the margin, can be paired with Hutcheon's excentric, while Atwood's victim can be aligned with the centre, the antithesis of
Hutcheon's ex-centric. The following table illustrates this binary and explains the
qualities under which English Canadian disabled characters fall:

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Table 1: Dichotomy of English Canadian Disabled Literary Characters
Centric Disabled Victims
Ex-centric Disabled Survivors
-Resist/explode disability stereotypes
-Promote disability stereotypes, or the
"centre's" definition of disability
-Promote free agency and independence
-Encourage dependence on caregivers
-Dynamic characters
-Encourage development of identity within instead of independence
-Static, one-dimensional characters
a disability context
-Discourage development of identity as a
-Disability is a source of identity
person with a disability
-Disability is a source of language
-Examples: Grania O'Neal, Rose and Ruby -Disability is a stigma
-Encourage "normal" behaviour
Darlen, Nolan Taylor
-Examples: Nariman Vakeel, Harry
Vincent, Elizabeth Froelich

As shown in the following chapters, the literary disabled survivors handle their
disabilities with strength, creativity, and defiance. They handle and even embrace their
eccentricity (ex-centricity). Their lives are a kind of survival, negotiating society's
obstacles while setting a positive example for future literary representations and lending
to the Canadian canon a more progressive and less stereotypical structure of disability.
The victims are stereotypes, cookie-cutter figures moulded into form by the centre, onedimensional characters that do not help their own cause.

Canadian Culture
If a country's literature can be considered representative of its cultural concerns,
then the Canadian canon is often featured as multicultural in the literary anthologies that
periodically emerge. These anthologies are cohesive in that they claim to be inclusive;
just about every Canadian ethnic/racial/religious/gender minority is portrayed. However,
persons with disabilities are seldom found except perhaps as limited supporting
characters. Smaro Kamboureli, the editor of the multicultural anthology Making a
Difference, traces the beginnings of Canadian multicultural writing to the 1970s and

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1980s, stating that such "writing brings into play what was previously disregarded"
(Scandalous Bodies 131). Persons with disabilities, though, were omitted from this
progression. The reason for this neglect is perhaps because persons with disabilities have
not yet coalesced as a Canadian subculture. As mentioned above, the diversity of
different disabilities makes this difficult; however, each chapter of this thesis elucidates
specific disabilities—paraplegia, deafness, deformity, mental illness—and demonstrates
their potential as possible subcultures. Chapters Four and Five in particular suggest that
each disability can in fact exist as its own subculture if approached from a certain
perspective.
There is a multicultural agenda in this thesis, one that is—and should be—
distinctly Canadian. Comparing the situation of persons with disabilities to those who
have been racially/sexually/class discriminated is nothing new: in his 1995 book
Enforcing Normalcy, Lennard Davis reiterates this exact point, all the while addressing
academia's lack of focus on disability: "While the main attractions of race, class, and
gender continue to grab the attention of professors and students, as well as of the general
public, the concept of disability is safely hidden on the sidelines away from such
scrutiny" (158). Within a Canadian multicultural context, this neglect is significant.
Since Canada prides itself on being an accepting, multicultural country, it is imperative to
examine the cultural treatment of persons with disabilities while asking—even
answering—questions as to why they continue to be marginalized in English Canadian
literature and why authors have only recently begun to explore it.
To this end, each chapter in this thesis discusses a key topic of English Canadian
fiction about persons with disabilities. Chapter Two outlines how persons with

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disabilities have been portrayed in English Canadian novels. Writers such as Rohinton
Mistry, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Guy Vanderhaeghe, Frances Itani, and Arley McNeney
will be featured here. It discusses both positive (survivor/"ex-centric") and negative
(victim/centric) examples in the contexts of Canadian academia and disability studies.
Chapter Three explores disability in communities and outlines how disability can be
considered its own identity. By showing how persons with disabilities form their own
communities, the novels under discussion demonstrate the potential for disability being
embraced as a means to identity. Chapter Four discusses how it is possible for each
disability to have its own language. Using linguistic theories developed by Mihkail
Bahktin, it will examine Canadian literary representations of disability and trace the
origins of language in a disability context; because culture revolves around language, an
inclusion of linguistic exploration is necessary. Chapter Five states that disability is a
permeable condition—that is, anyone can become disabled—and that having a culture for
persons with disabilities is beneficial. Chapter Six explores the mental disability,
considering its invisibility, the fine line between eccentricity and mental illness, and the
possibility of viewing mental institutions as cultural meeting places. Chapter Seven
concludes by elucidating how disability can be used as an instrument for multicultural
inclusiveness and how it can ultimately comprise its own culture in Canada.
Several key things will be accomplished in this thesis. First, the portrayals of
persons with disabilities in Canadian fiction will be thoroughly examined with regards to
both Canadian scholarship and disability theory, as represented by above-named
disability scholars. These examinations will reveal that Canadian authors have begun to
take disability more seriously as a literary subject, thus providing the basis for a positive

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construction of Canadian disability. Second, disability will be shown to be a quality to be
embraced rather than stigmatized. The term "disability" will be extricated from its
stigmatic discourse and repositioned into a more progressive context. By advocating
disability as a cultural entity rather than a negative condition, the term "disability" will
acquire more positive connotations. If persons with disabilities—both literary and real—
can survive and even thrive with their respective conditions, and have resounding impacts
on their respective communities, then their stigmatization in both fiction and reality
should be lessened. Third, the differences between different disabilities—especially
physical and mental conditions—will be analyzed, creating a focused view of the
spectrum of disability. Persons with disabilities are usually considered as one group
under the umbrella term "disability." Through fictional constructions, each individual
condition must be examined and its cultural impact must be demonstrated. Fourth, by
including familiar Canadian ideas—such as those by Hutcheon and Atwood—within
examinations of disability, the cultural profile of disability studies will be raised within
the Canadian academic consciousness. Extensive Canadian studies of the cultural impact
of disability are virtually nonexistent, so this treatise will help to fill an urgent void.
Fifth, by looking at disability with a Canadian multicultural perspective, it will be
established that persons with disabilities can comprise a legitimate culture. Individual
disabilities, such as deafness or paraplegia, each come with their own customs, methods,
and vocabularies, so each of them can be considered their own subcultures. The term
"disability," then, acts as an umbrella term for many hundreds of conditions, just as the
term "aboriginal" is a moniker for hundreds of different First Nations.

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II
The last fifteen years has seen a steady flow of disabled characters in English Canadian
fiction. Several major writers—Guy Vanderhaeghe, Rohinton Mistry, and Ann-Marie
MacDonald, among others—have included such characters in their works in varying
degrees. The works discussed here form a sample of how persons with disabilities are
portrayed in Canadian fiction. They include unflattering portrayals—the disabled
victims—and more progressive presentations of survivors and ex-centrics.

MacDonald, Vanderhaeghe, Mistry
In English Canadian fiction, stereotypes run rampant where cultural
representations of persons with disabilities are concerned. As Rosemarie Garland
Thomson highlights: "Disabled literary characters usually remain on the margins of
fiction as uncomplicated figures or exotic aliens whose bodily configurations operate as
spectacles, eliciting responses from other characters.. ..main characters almost never have
physical disabilities" (8). Canadian authors are guilty of such portrayals, nudging their
disabled characters—who, more often than not, are one-dimensional beings—to the side,
playing them up to evoke sympathy, sentimentality, or frustration. MacDonald's
Elizabeth Froelich is one example.

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Set chiefly during the early 1960s, MacDonald's 2003 novel The Way the Crow
Flies is filled with characters from many different cultural backgrounds. There are
English Canadians, French Canadians, Metis, Germans, and lesbians.1 There is one
person with a disability, and when compared to the other characters in the novel, she
plays a very minor role. In Elizabeth Froelich, dubbed "retarded" (68) by the novel's
main character Madeleine McCarthy, MacDonald creates a stereotypical person with a
disability:
Her head lolls gently to one side...The hair is neatly brushed but appears to be
too big for her head, which is too big for her body...Her arms seem to be in
constant slow motion—as though she were under water. A shawl covers her legs
despite the warm weather.. .She is strapped in by a seat belt. (68)
This is a characterization of a dependent, pathetic person. MacDonald elaborates even
further, describing Elizabeth's wrist, which "looks permanently bent, her hand clumsily
closed. Is she waving? Is she looking at me?" (68), as well as her method of
communication by way of articulate grunting. Elizabeth tells Madeleine her name is
"Ewivabeh" (70), then bursts into laughter when Madeleine repeats it back to her. She
drools. She drinks from a cup like "the kind babies use, with a lid and a spout" (325).
Most importantly, she is kept on the story's margins. She remains a static character
throughout the entire novel, making brief, inconsequential appearances. Her most
important appearance, during which she appears in court to try and testify to her adopted
brother's whereabouts during a murder, is undermined by her disability. Though

1

In the book Telling It. Betsy Warland writes that lesbians have their own culture. In doing so, she lists
Gertrude Stein as "one of my culture's mothers" (198) and affirms that lesbians have their own language:
"we have phrases, code-words, reclaimed words which are specific to us" (197).

Pottle 13
Elizabeth is with her brother while someone else commits the murder, her inability to
communicate effectively discredits her testimony:
Karen [Elizabeth's mother] was there to translate. The Crown turned this to his
advantage, claiming the mother was putting words in her daughter's mouth, since
she was the only one who could understand what the poor girl was saying. It
ended with Elizabeth in tears, her testimony struck and Mr. Waller—and, by
extension, Karen Froelich—chastised by the judge for subjecting a "poor crippled
child" to such an ordeal. (499)
This outcome reinforces Elizabeth's existence on the margins. She is relegated by the
judge to the side where she must quietly remain. Her inability to testify in her brother's
favour encloses her in an overarching framework that often envelopes and stigmatizes
persons with disabilities: a framework of pity. This framework, supported by "the
presumption that disability is simply a biological fact, a universal plight of humanity
throughout the ages" (Davis, Enforcing Normalcy, 3), has been identified and discussed
by several disability scholars. Elizabeth's discredited testimony can be compared to a
real well-known Canadian court case involving a twelve-year-old girl named Tracy
Latimer.
The interplay between culture and society is crucial. Because persons with
disabilities have yet to establish a legitimate cultural identity, this interplay becomes even
more paramount because it creates a dialogue out of which cultural (and social)
significance can emerge. To this end, Tracy Latimer, who had cerebral palsy, was killed
by her father Robert on 24 October 1993, a situation that sparked much debate about
assisted suicide. According to the book A Voice Unheard, Robert Latimer drove with

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Tracy to the end of the family yard; he placed Tracy behind the wheel, connected a hose
to the tailpipe, ran the hose through the back sliding window, and started the engine
(Enns 11-12). Within a short time, Tracy was dead from carbon monoxide poisoning.
When considered in relation to Elizabeth Froelich's discredited testimony,
Tracy's story acquires a new layer. Both Elizabeth's and Tracy's situations expose a
process of devaluation: Elizabeth's testimony is discredited because of her disability, and
the value of Tracy Latimer's life is questioned because of her cerebral palsy. Such
situations and such cultural portrayals create a crossfire in which persons with disabilities
are caught. The idea of disability as a stigma is perpetuated. The words, actions, and
lives of persons with disabilities are cheapened as a consequence of this harmful dialogue
between culture and society. Cultural interpretations must then be refined so that
Canadian society's views are changed.
This dismissal of persons with disabilities is also portrayed in Rohinton Mistry's
Family Matters. In his 2002 novel, Mistry examines an Indian family living in 1990s
Bombay. The family patriarch, Nariman Vakeel, is beset with Parkinson's disease and,
after breaking his leg in an accident, is forced to remain in bed for most of the novel.
While at the beginning of the book he is an active and articulate man, he quickly
disintegrates, and becomes a burden in the eyes of his family:
Gripping the paper carefully, Nariman made a valiant effort to wipe
himself. He pivoted on one buttock to reach behind, and almost fell off the
commode.
"Forget it," said Jal, scared by the narrow escape. He put his hands under
his stepfather's armpits and eased him off the seat. "Hurry, I can't hold him for

Pottle 15
long."
Coomy conducted a few cursory passes with paper, gagging in the
process. "It's done." (Mistry 65)
At this point, Nariman is being cared for by his stepchildren Jal—a hearing impaired man
who will be discussed soon—and Coomy. Nariman's repugnance continues to strain his
family when he is moved to his biological daughter Roxana's house. Roxana's husband
Yezad resents Nariman's presence, particularly one morning at breakfast when Nariman
uses the bedpan while the rest of the family is eating. Yezad and his sons respond
candidly:
Yezad was silent until the smell began to fill the room. He felt his
gorge rise. Pushing his plate from him, he fled into the back room, and she
[Roxana] followed.
"Such a stink with my breakfast," he said, not caring to lower his voice.
"You couldn't wait a few more minutes."
... ."Chhee, Grandpa!" said Jehangir [Yezad and Roxana's son]. "It's an
atom bomb!"
Murad [Yezad and Roxana's other son] said more like a hydrogen bomb.
(154-155)
Nariman is a victim of his disability, affecting each member of his family in some way.
It is not long before he is unable to articulate himself and so becomes something of a
vegetable, proving Thomson's statement that "representation tends to objectify disabled
characters by denying them any opportunity for subjectivity or agency" (Thomson 11).
Another such victim that is denied subjectivity is Nariman's hearing impaired stepson Jal.

Pottle 16
Through Mistry's novel, Jal is easily cast away to the side of the action, his
dismissal usually the result of his sister Coomy's domineering behaviour. His passivity is
evident when Coomy decides to take Nariman to his biological daughter Roxana's house
without notice and let her and her family take care of him. Though Jal meekly protests,
Coomy is adamant:
"Go on, hurry," said Coomy. "Talk to Roxie."
He [Jal] looked up at the Chenoy balcony and saw clothes drying on the
line. "I have a feeling we are about to do a horrible thing."
"That's because we are such sensitive people. We need more sense and
less sensitivity. Isn't our plan the best choice for Pappa?"
"I hope so. But you come with me, I don't want to go upstairs alone."
"Stop worrying, Yezad is at work, and she'll agree immediately." Her
words denoted confidence.... (Mistry 92)
Jal succumbs to Coomy's will and spends the rest of the book feeling guilty but never
really taking action. He is static, never acting on his own behalf; he is merely an
instrument of Coomy's will.
Objectifying persons with disabilities makes them one-dimensional, robotic. Any
action outside their range of function—in this case, Jal acting against his sister—cannot
be tolerated in the same way a robot acting against its programmed function is
unacceptable.
In the same vein, the morality of persons with disabilities may also be called into
question, as Guy Vanderhaeghe demonstrates in his novel The Englishman's Boy.
Literature is riddled with characters whose disabilities are used to symbolize their moral

Pottle 17
waywardness. Indeed, it has been stated that disability within Canadian fiction represents
"a moral flaw" (Truchan-Tataryn 213). One such example is Vanderhaeghe's Harry
Vincent. At the beginning of this 1996 novel, Harry is a title writer for a Hollywood
movie studio in the 1920s. He is soon summoned by a wealthy movie mogul, Damon Ira
Chance, to interview a man named Shorty McAdoo, whose story will help Chance create
a "movie of poetic fact" (Vanderhaeghe 20). This situation, coupled with his gimp leg,
allows Harry's immorality to surface as he bribes, coaxes, and persuades McAdoo to tell
his story. Harry is aware of his leg's influence on his life and how it has marginalized
him:
.. .the nineteenth century had wrapped a warm muffler of sentiment around the
hearts of schoolmarms, Dickens having made cripples touching and lovable. I
hated those female teachers whose faces went sweetly vacuous and temporizingly
benign when they turned to me. Although they didn't mean to, those looks thrust
me on the outside. Outside became a state of mind. (33)
As Harry extracts information from McAdoo, his immorality is slowly unveiled. He does
not realize that he is taking McAdoo's life and selling it to someone who wants to use the
story for his own benefit. Only once the story is told does Harry decide to try and
extricate himself from the situation by declaring he is no longer willing to be involved,
but by then the damage is already done. McAdoo's life is sold, and the film is made. On
the night of the film's premiere—for which Harry is given tickets but cannot enter the
theatre due to his gimp leg—McAdoo tries to have a word with Chance as he leaves the
theatre: '"I come to ask you to write to the newspapers and tell them that feller in your
picture ain't me'" (320). Chance simply replies, '"Of course it isn't you... .Mr. McAdoo

Pottle 18
is dead'" (320). Harry watches the whole exchange from the side of the red carpet,
highlighting his outsider status: though his efforts allowed Chance to make the movie, he
is still outside the action, relegated to the margin. He watches as Chance's bodyguard
steps between Chance and McAdoo. He watches as McAdoo tries to step around the
bodyguard and is taken by the lapels and shaken until his old neck snaps. The bodyguard
is then shot dead by McAdoo's accomplice, who proceeds to shoot Chance (321 - 322).
Harry watches it all from the outside, powerless to stop this climax to a sequence of
events he helped set and keep in motion. His disability, then, serves two purposes: it
underlines his immorality and the damage his actions have done, and it shows how he is
always on the outside of the action, no matter how important his role.
Disabled literary characters are also often objectified and used for
metaphorical/rhetorical purposes, rather than directly addressing and exploring the
disability. The reason for this objectification is that "[i]f disabled characters acted, as real
people with disabilities do, to counter their stigmatized status, the rhetorical potency of
the stigma would be mitigated or lost" (Thomson 12). In other words, if disabled
characters took up their own agency, their stigmatization would lessen, if not dissolve.
To this end, Elizabeth's inarticulate, "retarded" nature encompasses Madeleine's inability
to confess to her family how she has been sexually abused at school. Harry's limp
demonstrates not only his physical slowness, but also his slowness to realize his
immorality in implicating Shorty McAdoo in Chance's moviemaking plans. Nariman's
Parkinson's certainly functions in a metaphorical way: the steady decline of his health
represents the steady corruption and decay of his family. His son-in-law Yezad is forced

Pottle 19
to gamble and concoct schemes in order to stay financially afloat; his grandson Jehangir
takes bribes from schoolmates who do not do their homework.
Such metaphors help construct and circulate the idea of disability as stigma. To
use Atwood's terminology, these are victims of disability, lying on the margin and
reduced to little more than their respective stigmas. These characters are forbidden an
active part in what goes on around them, catering to the centre's idea of them and
contributing to negative attitudes towards disability. In Canadian literature, this cannot
stand. Canadian authors should portray literary characters with disabilities more
progressively, with independence and multi-dimensionality. Disability must assume a
positive place in the Canadian literary canon alongside all other minority literatures.
Progress must be made to create more independent, dynamic disabled characters (read:
survivors) that explode the negative, condescending, and one-dimensional attitudes
towards disability. Such a progression will help persons with disabilities in that they may
be properly addressed and a disabled culture can develop.

Itani, Lansens, McNeney
As Thomson points out above, main characters in novels are almost never
disabled. She writes that "literary texts make disabled characters into freaks, stripped of
normalizing contexts and engulfed by a single stigmatic trait" (11). However, Frances
Itani, Lori Lansens, and Arley McNeney provide three exceptions. These authors have
written novels that place disability at the forefront and allow it to be openly engaged
with. Their characters are dynamic, ex-centric survivors. They negotiate the obstacles
around them, explode the cornered objectification of persons with disabilities, and break

Pottle 20
down the borders surrounding their preceding functions as fictional characters. That
these novels were published within the last four years suggests an ongoing progression, a
steadily increasing interest in and acceptance of disability as both a literary subject and a
cultural entity.
Itani's 2003 novel Deafening focuses on Grania O'Neal, a five-year-old girl who
becomes deaf as a result of scarlet fever. Set in Ontario in the years preceding and during
World War I, the first third of the novel explores how Grania deals with her deafness and
develops into a young woman. When she is a young girl, she and her grandmother
improvise a kind of sign language, which she only uses when around her family. Grania
attends regular public school for a short while, but it is ultimately a failed experiment:
"What?" she cries to the circle of children, but her voice only makes them
laugh. "When the children taught [really 'taunt,' but misunderstood by Grania as
'taught' \ fight back,'" Mamo has told her.
"Tell!" Her voice soars.
They are jeering now. They will never tell. "Dummy!" they cry.
"Dummy!" (Itani 58, author's notes)
Grania then ends up going to a school for deaf students, where she learns to properly use
sign language as well as her voice. It is at this school that she slowly gains confidence as
a person, making friends and slowly developing her linguistic acuity. When she reaches
young adulthood, the stage is set for the rest of the novel, during which she gets married
and attempts to sustain her love while her husband is at war.
By effectively portraying the use of sign language and voice, Itani shows how
Grania establishes and maintains connections to people, hearing or deaf. Because she is

Pottle 21
better able to communicate, she can form friendships and better converse with her family.
Also, soon after she becomes a young woman, Grania meets and marries a hearing man
named Jim, or "ChinC (128), as it appears to her when she reads his lips. She becomes
comfortable with other people as she and Jim forge a unique relationship: "It was a
wonder.. .the way their bodies curled to each other after lovemaking; the way they fitted
perfectly together in deepest sleep" (136). Grania also maintains her privacy, her own
perspective on the world; she becomes comfortable with herself, possessing a private
strength to which even Jim has no access:
He saw how comfortable she was in her inner place, how private and peaceful
With him, she allowed this to be seen. When she wanted to focus on
the world outside herself, she stopped and made sense of the situation. After that,
she let in the extra cues.
The glimpse she allowed was enough. The inner place was one he could never
know. It was the source of her strength, her stillness... .Despite all that she
told him, despite all of the questions she tried to answer, he understood that he
was outside of that place. (137)
This strength comes from dealing with the discrimination she experienced. This
repository of determination sustains her as World War I approaches, as she finds herself
dealing with the fear every wife feels: the fear her husband may not return. To distract
her from this fear, she returns to her family home and volunteers for the Red Cross,
constantly hoping that Jim returns alive. Her strength also allows her to survive the
Spanish flu, an epidemic which leaves many people either dead or deaf (an issue
discussed in Chapter Four). After the flu has run its course, Grania is hairless and

Pottle 22
emaciated to the point where she thinks, "Jim might not recognize me" (372). Yet she
presses on. She is a dynamic being, not ruled by what goes on around her, but acting
according to her individual will. And when Jim arrives home at the end of the novel,
they immediately resume their emotional intimacy, encompassed by Jim asking Grania to
repeat his name in her own voice: '"Chim"' (378). Her voice is multi-dimensional—as
shown by her combined use of sign language and verbal English—and unique, even
embraced. Grania trumps the idea that "the deaf are seen as bereft of language, hence
humanity" (Davis, Enforcing Normalcy, 118). Grania is a woman of compassion and
vigour, rejecting any sort of assumption that the deaf and disabled are dehumanized.
Conjoined twins are another disabled group that has been dehumanized by being
promoted as freakish spectacles. In her book Extraordinary Bodies, Rosemarie Garland
Thomson discusses the idea of the freak, the spectacle. She states that "disabled bodies
can.. .seem dangerous because they are perceived as out of control" (37) and that
"disability always represents the extraordinary" (38). However, the pair in Lori
Lansens's 2005 novel The Girls is, despite the stereotypes, quite human. While Rose and
Ruby Darlen may appear extraordinary on the outside, they are quite ordinary on the
inside. Near the book's opening, their doctor tells them they have an inoperable
aneurysm and that they have three months to live. With their impending demise, the
twins begin to write their autobiography, an act that unveils a unique notion: although
they have been attached at the head their whole lives, they are quite different:
Our thoughts are distinctly our own. Our selves have struggled fiercely to be
unique and, in fact, we're more different than most identical twins. I like sports,
but I'm also bookish, while Ruby is girlie and prefers television.. ..We're rarely

Pottle 23
hungry together and our tastes are poles apart: I prefer spicy fare, while my sister
has a disturbing fondness for eggs. (4)
Even though they may be seen as one entity, Rose and Ruby are their own people. The
stories they tell highlight this fact: they have different perspectives on the same events,
and one sister will not even mention an event the other discusses in great depth. Their
seemingly simple life on a small farm in Ontario gives rise to vibrant, participatory
portrait(s) of disability. The way they see the world—and the way the world sees them—
is explored in great detail, lending the twins a depth of character seldom afforded to
disabled characters by their creators. The sisters are just as idiosyncratic and just as
fallible as any other human being. Contrary to stereotypes, their disability does not make
them susceptible to immorality; they make mistakes that anyone else would make, as
suggested by the following passage describing a chance sexual encounter:
But Frankie didn't kiss me. My [Rose's] turn never came. Frankiekept
kissing Ruby. Even when his fingers crept spider-like onto my shoulder and
dropped down inside my blouse to find the nipple of my right breast. And even
when his hand slid lower.. .Frankie kept kissing my sister.
And even when...
Even then.
I didn't protest. Neither did my sister. I believe we were struck by the
strangeness of the moment. (154)
Despite the twins' situations, their disability does not form their entire identities. They
are also women with sexual inclinations. The twins are one sexual being: Rose has the
fully formed "normal" body and Ruby has the pretty face. They are a sexual Yin and

Pottle 24
Yang, one sister's bodily features completing the other's. In this instance, both their
womanhood and their disability are objectified. Frankie first objectifies them for their
freakishness, as evidenced by his unease when he first sees them, and then does the same
for their sexuality. That he does not kiss Rose's crooked face or touch Ruby's malformed
body speaks to the sisters' bodily stigma and to humankind's inclination that what is
normal is attractive. Between them, the sisters possess a "normal ideal body" (Davis
Enforcing Normalcy 154), a Venus with a Medusa in between. They can only reach
sexual expression when both are involved in the act. They are two independently
thinking women, but one sexual being, allowing themselves to be exploited and
objectified.
The twins' narrative bounces between objectivity and free agency, with the
autobiography concept—and with it, subjectivity—always present throughout. They
have a strong focus on their family and their upbringing in the fictional farming town of
Leaford, Ontario. The sisters are not objectified or reduced to "freaks" who are
"engulfed by a single stigmatic trait" (Thomson 11) by their family or their small-town
peers, save for Frankie. They are individuals whose identities extend beyond their bodily
stigma and into their jobs at the library and their roles as daughters and sisters.
Arley McNeney's Nolan Taylor is another such character, though not as
stigmatized. McNeney's 2007 novel Post is in a class all on its own. It is the only
Canadian novel to be written about a person with a disability by a person with a
disability. While disability memoirs do exist—Canadian Ryan Knighton's Cockeyed
(2006) is one example—there are no other known fictionalized accounts based on
personal experience. Such accounts would provide a positive literary construction of

Pottle 25
disability while fortifying a disability niche in the Canadian canon. With the idea of selfrepresentation in mind, McNeney's Nolan Taylor is a high-performance wheelchair
basketball athlete in the midst of an identity crisis: she has surgery to replace the faulty
growth plates in her hip, and the resulting recovery period allows her to reflect on her life
and her disability. Though she can walk before her surgery, her hip has a "red-lightdistrict throb of inflammation" that affects her stride (8) and allows her to call herself'"a
gimp'" (McNeney 112). As the following passage demonstrates, Nolan's hip brings her
an exorbitant amount of pain and can be considered disabling:
I tried to fold myself into the car—the good leg first and then the bad—
but my body shifted so hard that I expected there to be a big, cartoonish sound.
The pain was structural, basic as marrow and so concentrated that I looked down
at my leg to check for swelling or blood, a shard of metal piercing me from
outside that could be removed, a wound to staunch. It was only when I looked at
my mother's face that I realized I was screaming. (91)
Nolan's disability arises when she is eleven years old. However, her disability does not
mar her ability to live a full life and create an identity for herself. Over the course of the
novel, she has two boyfriends, plays basketball, attends university, and goes out with
friends. She is bookish, quirky, and scathingly humorous. She reflects upon her
relationships in great detail, particularly her first. At the time, she is nineteen years old
and with Darren, an older paraplegic man. Here, she describes the evening she loses her
virginity, and unveils a unique outlook based on her disability:
For the first time, you felt a little sorry for yourself, as if the disability had taken
something. It suddenly seemed a shame that sex wouldn't be your first big hurt,

Pottle 26
that it wouldn't be demarcated from all the rest of your girlish pains, that the hip
had shifted your sense of perspective. (108)
The physical act of sex is tempered by her wayward hip. At this moment, she feels
different than other girls who do not experience their "first big hurt" until they lose their
virginity. And as the book goes on and Nolan gets older, her hip shifts her perspective in
other ways. As she recovers from the surgery, gets pregnant, and deals with a cheating
boyfriend, she asks herself, "Now that the hip's gone, am I still disabled" (316)? In truth,
her life is one bodily crisis after another, from a bad hip to recovering from surgery to
pregnancy. Her body appears to dictate her life: what she does, where she goes, who she
sees. Examples include the prenatal classes she and her partner—her second boyfriend,
an able-bodied man named Quinn—take, her wheelchair basketball team, and, of course,
the hospital. This situation therefore demands both a disabled and feminist examination.
Having one's life decided by one's bodily inclinations is an idea that runs through
both disability studies and feminist theory. To this end, McNeney draws a parallel
between disability and pregnancy when Nolan and her ex-lover converse during a
basketball practice: '"Why is it that when you're pregnant people only see your
belly?'.... 'Why is it that when you're disabled, people only see your wheelchair'" (368)?
These two statements question the notion that the body dictates identity. The body as
identity statement is rooted in feminist and disability schools of thought, particularly in
political and social matters. With regards to both disabled and feminist theoretical
schools, Adrienne Asch and Michelle Fine write that "[i]n order to pursue gender and
disability equality, activists have argued for the elimination of laws, institutional
structures and practices, and social attitudes that have reduced women or disabled people

Pottle 27
to one biological characteristic" ("Nurturance, Sexuality and Women with Disabilities"
252). To add to this argument, Rosemarie Garland Thomson writes that "[a] feminist
political praxis for women with disabilities needs, then, to focus at times on the
singularity and perhaps the immutability of the flesh, and at the same time to interrogate
the identity it supports" (Extraordinary Bodies 25). Nolan's identity must then be
interrogated the same way. She must be viewed both as a woman and as a person with a
disability. Her relationships are a constant source of self-examination; in her current
relationship, she wonders if she is a wife, partner, or girlfriend. In her previous
relationship with Darren, she faced the same sort of confusion: '"I wouldn't call it
dating,' I said... 'What would you call it?' asked someone... 'I don't know.' I didn't
know. It wasn't a boyfriend-girlfriend thing, we weren't really friends. There was no
good word" (McNeney 224 - 225). Nolan's disability and womanhood ultimately lend
her an identity that is based on her body. McNeney has created a narrative that belongs
in both disability literature and feminist literature. This novel reflects ideas that Helene
Cixous puts forward in "The Laugh of the Medusa":
By writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than
confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on
display—the ailing or dead figure, which so often turns out to be the nasty
companion, the cause and location of inhibitions. Censor the body and you
censor breath and speech at the same time.
Write your self. Your body must be heard. (2043)
Nolan's identity is based solely upon her body, branching from its disability and its
femininity. All of Nolan's roles and relationships as an athlete, friend, lover, teammate,

Pottle 28
and coach emerge from her body. Her body initiates her into the wheelchair community
and keep her in it through her relationships and friends. Even after she has her
"normalizing" hip surgery, she remains ensconced in the wheelchair community, as
shown with her coaching a young wheelchair basketball team and remaining friends with
Darren. She also becomes pregnant while recovering from her surgery, a condition
which, as shown above, McNeney equates with disability.
Nolan's continued involvement in the wheelchair community suggests that
disability is not just a physical attribute; it is a state of mind, a unique perspective, a
differently coloured lens through which to view the world. At the end of the book, while
her baby is being born, both Quinn and Darren are with her. When the baby is born,
Nolan finds herself thinking about the child in bodily terms: "My daughter wails her
pure, pure lungs out. The soft spot, the growth plates: she will gain new bones. She flails
her temporary legs, all of her unfused" (469). This scene encapsulates Nolan's thought
process. She engages with the world in bodily terms: she evaluates her every experience
through physical means. The body, then, is a means of perspective. While this idea may
be constrictive in feminist terms, limiting a woman to her body and its significances,2 this
notion counters disability's static, stigmatic status and promotes disability as a dynamic
point of view, as a method of learning. Nolan's disability, besides being a device of
community initiation, becomes a tool through which she thrives and survives.
These three novels feature what Atwood would call survivors. Grania, Rose and
Ruby, and Nolan are all survivors in their own ways. They negotiate obstacles while

2

Helene Cixous states that a woman is her body and nothing more. When describing a woman speaking at
a public gathering, Cixous states that "Her flesh speaks true. She lays herself bare. In fact, she physically
materializes what she's thinking; she signifies it with her body" ("The Laugh of the Medusa 2044). She
later goes on to say that "women are body" (2050).

Pottle 29
striving to create an identity for themselves. They begin in flux and learn to handle their
disabilities as well as the world around them. In a way, they advocate for more cultural
representation, furthering the work that Ruth Enns identifies:
The achievements of disability advocacy groups did not come gift wrapped. In
order to achieve anything at all they had to break down a lot of barriers. They had
to demolish their physical isolation, their shyness, their inexperience....
They had to define themselves both as individuals and as a group. Before
they could do that they had to crawl out from under the oppressive attitudinal and
physical weights that had burdened them.... (82)
Itani, Lansens, and McNeney have written novels that, among other things, push for
emancipation—for the survival and flourishing of their respective disabilities—through
cultural engagement. As Atwood claims, "[o]ur (Canadian) stories are likely to be tales
not of those who made it but of those who made it back, from the awful
experience.. ..The survivor has no triumph or victory but the fact of his survival; he has
little after his ordeal that he did not have before" (33). For Canadian disabled characters,
or at least those who are survivors, there is a significant triumph: a means to an identity.
On the last page of Survival, Atwood asks, "what happens after Survival" (246)? For
persons with disabilities, living and surviving are synonymous.
Grania, Rose and Ruby, and Nolan are also true ex-centrics. They belong to excentric groups that fulfill the "postmodern desire to 'make and unmake meaning, effect a
simultaneous creative surge and destructive will'" (Clarke, qtd. in Hutcheon, A Poetics of
Postmodernism, 62). These characters break down meanings assigned by the centre and
create their own out of their disabilities. They affirm that it is possible to survive—even

Pottle 30
thrive—on the margin, helping to create a more positive disabled discourse. Disability is
not associated with decay or slowness like it is with MacDonald, Vanderhaeghe and
Mistry; it is a perspective, a way of life. As Ruth Enns states, "[a]ll people notice
differences and categorize them accordingly. Without that ability one wouldn't be able to
recognize people. Disability is simply another category" (114). Like race, gender, class,
and sexual orientation, disability is a social label. However, a more encouraging cultural
construction of disability—starting with Canadian literature—is needed so that when one
does recognize it in real life, it is with more accepting—or at least tolerant—means.
Such a construction will come as the result of disability's diversity being culturally
recognized.

Pottle 31

III
Disability and Community
Characters with disabilities appear sporadically in short stories and novels, often
with marginalized portrayals. Such treatment of persons with disabilities perpetuates
harmful stereotypes that affect both the reading public and the future creators of these
kinds of characters. As Rosemarie Garland Thomson writes, "[djisabled literary
characters usually remain on the margins of fiction as uncomplicated figures or exotic
aliens whose bodily configurations operate as spectacles, eliciting responses from other
characters or producing rhetorical effects that depend on disability's cultural resonance"
(Extraordinary Bodies 9). For disability to have cultural resonance, certain adjustments
must be made. One such adjustment is changing the idea that disability is a social stigma.
As shown in Chapter Two, this idea of disability as stigma occurs in a fair number of
English Canadian texts. These texts, with their representations of disability and how it
affects the characters and their communities, demonstrate that disability should not be a
stigma scorned by society, but an identity to be embraced. Like other survivors and excentrics—the racially, ethnically, and sexually marginalized—disability should be
recognized by scholars and artists in both the Canadian literary canon and as a cultural

Pottle 32
identity. Since Canadian literature already boasts a veritable mosaic of various cultural
identities, disability should be included. Itani's and Lansens's novels, with their
depictions of disability and its impact on the characters' surrounding communities, will
form the focus here.
Itani's and Lansens's narratives revolve solely around disabled characters,
exploring their disabilities and their accompanying idiosyncrasies. The communities the
characters live in play strong parts: Deafening tells the story of a deaf woman living in
small-town Ontario before and during World War One, and The Girls is a fictional
autobiography of a pair of conjoined twins living on a small Ontario farm. Both novels
were published within the last three years, perhaps illustrating an increasing amount of
attention on the significance—and the narrative possibilities—of disability. Even though
both Itani's and Lansens's novels portray different disabilities within different time
periods, they have several similarities. These similarities are strong enough to warrant
comparison, which in turn allows a theoretical discussion of disability to emerge. With
this in mind, three key similarities will be considered, all tying to the idea of community:
the use of small town settings; the unusual circumstances in which the protagonists are
born; and the use of bedspreads as a communal symbol. The works of disability scholars
such as Lennard Davis, Erving Goffman, and Rosemarie Garland Thomson will be
included when examining these similarities.

Disability and Small Towns
The community in which a person lives plays a crucial role in his or her
development. The size of one's town dictates the kinds of people one meets and,

Pottle 33
therefore, determines how one functions within that town. To this extent, both Itani's and
Lansens's novels are set in small-town Ontario. Itani's Deafening is set in the towns of
Belleville and Deseronto, Ontario, while Lansens's The Girls takes place in the fictional
farming town of Leaford. Though the disabilities and their means of acquisition are
different—Grania becomes deaf at five years old as a result of scarlet fever, and the twins
are born conjoined—the novels' respective settings play similar parts in helping the
characters mature. These novels suggest that living in a small town may be beneficial for
persons with disabilities, as opposed to living in a large city. As Rose Darlen points out
when quoting her adopted mother, "it's better to raise children in the country than in the
city.. ..The city, no matter how small, is corrupt and unrepentant, while the sun shines
brighter in the country, making the people more wholesome" (Lansens 47). This
statement applies especially to children with disabilities in these two novels. In
Deafening, because Grania remains in smaller communities with people she knows and
trusts, she is better able to function. Thus, living in smaller towns helps the novels'
protagonists accept themselves, for it lessens the effects of what Erving Goffman calls
"stigma" (Goffman, "Selections from Stigma," 203). Both novels and their communal
representations necessitate a discussion of Goffman's "stigma-theory" (205), which will
be considered now.
Grania and Rose and Ruby can initially be seen as, among other things,
stigmatized beings. Being disabled, they possess variations of what Goffman calls
"various physical deformities" (205). Goffman, a sociologist, describes his position in
the following manner:
By definition, of course, we believe the person with a stigma is not quite human.

Pottle 34
On this assumption we exercise varieties of discrimination, through which we
effectively, if often unthinkingly, reduce his life chances. We construct a stigmatheory, an ideology to explain his inferiority and account for the danger he
represents, sometimes rationalizing an animosity based on other differences, such
as those of social class. We use specific stigma terms such as cripple, bastard,
moron in our daily discourse as a source of metaphor and imagery, typically
without giving thought to the original meaning. (205)
In the context of disability, the "original meaning" involves acknowledging the
difficulties that one with a disability goes through, the reality of disability. Constructing
disability as a metaphor or image risks making it an idea that distracts from its reality,
absolving anyone of sympathy and/or social responsibility. Though literary
representations of disability are usually evocative of sympathy—Ann-Marie
MacDonald's Elizabeth Froelich is just one example—in real life persons with
disabilities do not want sympathy. As Goffman states, "if we show direct sympathetic
concern for his [the stigmatized's] condition, we may be overstepping ourselves" (213).
Itani's and Lansens's novels, meanwhile, address their respective disabilities without a
pitying agenda, exploring each disability's eccentricities without abandon and giving
names, faces, and contexts to these conditions. Grania's difficulties understanding those
around her and Rose and Ruby's unusual appearance are all clearly portrayed. The
characters have their flaws, but the flaws do not result from their disabilities. The
contexts given to these disabilities include the communities in which these novels take
place, and those communities' reactions to the disabled characters. Indeed, when

Pottle 35
juxtaposed with small-town communal values, stigma theory does not carry as much of
an impact, as these novels prove.
Though she is initially stigmatized, Grania O'Neil is eventually accepted in her
hometown of Deseronto, an actual town in southern Ontario. In the first years of her
deafness, she is made fun of by her schoolmates, who call her '"Dummy"' (Itani 23); she
is also questioned in her ability to have relationships later in life. Upon seeing Grania
with her sister Tress, a local woman asks, '"Who would marry that pitiful child when she
grows up?....If they don't find someone deaf and dumb, she'll end up living with her
mother the rest of her days'" (55). However, Grania ends up flourishing. After briefly
attending a local school, she leaves Deseronto and spends several years in Belleville at a
school for the deaf and hearing impaired. At this school, she is given the means to
participate within any community: language. She is taught sign language as well as to
control her voice, and because she is already a strong lip-reader (82), she is better
prepared to live in the hearing world. She then returns to Deseronto, where she rejoins
her beloved family and marries a hearing man, Jim, proving wrong her earlier childhood
detractor. Though she is initially what Goffman calls "shaky" (213) in social situations,
Grania is able to fully participate in society. Any previous discrimination dwindles off as
she works in her father's hotel, volunteers for the Red Cross during World War One, and,
like all the other wives, eagerly awaits her husband's return from Europe. Her means of
communication are also accepted by both her family and the locals: her brothers, sister,
mother and grandmother all use sign language with her, and her barber both speaks his
words carefully while attempting to use sign language (Itani 360). As Grania becomes
used to her deafness, so does her community, and those who might have detracted or

Pottle 36
rejected her in childhood accept her as she is. This acceptance is demonstrated with the
official end of World War One, in which the townspeople use hand gestures and visual
means to convey their happiness:
Everyone was waving and laughing. Children at the edges of the crowd were
striking pots and pans with sticks and wooden spoons. Grania watched rhythmic
hands rise and fall. Some of the arms were shaking handbells. Automobiles
draped in flags were driven up and down the road. Occupants waved their hats
in their hands and people jumped out of their way. (347)
This celebration, marked by the use of strong hand and bodily gestures, symbolizes the
acceptance of Grania's deafness. Grania clearly understands what is going on as she
watches from her bedroom window. Her community portrays a language she can
understand, a visual display of action. Visual language is made universal in this passage,
indicating Grania's successful integration into Deseronto. The use of gestures is even
more important because many returning soldiers "had been deafened during the war"
(371) and need to relearn communication. Grania's community is ahead of others in this
regard, as it understands what deafness is and how to address it. Itani also points out that
"blending in was something she was already good at. Every deaf person was an expert"
(371). This statement implies that not only Grania's community, but every community in
which deafened veterans live will be impacted, and already-deaf people will play
important, rehabilitative roles in those communities. Grania is now part of a newfound
"community" in which its "members consider themselves part of a cultural and linguistic
minority, rather than a disabled population" (Berger 153). With thousands of newly deaf
people, the deaf "minority" group has grown exponentially. Therefore, Grania's stigma

Pottle 37
and that of thousands of deaf people has been dramatically lessened, if not completely
extinguished.
In his book Enforcing Normalcy, Lennard Davis identifies a key distinction that
arises in Itani's novel. Davis separates the deaf from what he calls the "Deaf.. .that
community of deaf people who share language, cultural values, history, and social life"
(Davis 100). Conversely, "the deaf are simply those who do not hear" (100). In
Deafening, the physically deaf have been transformed through circumstance and
education into the culturally Deaf: from a smattering of isolated individuals into a
community. Grania is thus enfolded into this community, and brings her husband with
her. Although Jim is a hearing man, he may be considered culturally Deaf because he is
married to and uses sign language with Grania.
This kind of communal acceptance occurs in Lori Lansens's The Girls as well.
From the first pages of Lansens's novel, it is made clear that Rose and Ruby are aware of
their strangeness. The twins, joined at the head, are built quite differently: Rose has a
fully developed body but a malformed head, with a drooping right eye and
disproportionate face, and Ruby has a stunted body but a "very beautiful" face (Lansens
2). Rose carries Ruby like an infant, her "tiny thighs astride my hip, my arm supporting
her posterior, her arm forever around my neck" (3). They are a spectacle, and are aware
of themselves as such. Their stigma is therefore difficult to shed. However, as shown in
the following passage, acceptance is easier to come by in a smaller community:
We're known.. .to millions around the globe, those whose interest in people like
us is more than just passing, as conjoined craniopagus twins Rose and Ruby
Darlen of Baldoon County. We've been called many things: freaks, horrors,

Pottle 38
monsters, devils, witches, retards, wonders, marvels. To most, we're a curiosity.
In small-town Leaford, where we live and work, we're just "The Girls." ( 1 - 2 )
"The Girls" is an endearing term of acceptance, as casual as "Old Farmer Brown" or
"sweet Aunt Betty." Like Deafening, the small town setting plays a crucial part in
helping the disabled become accepted in their community. In what can be described as a
companion to Goffman's work, Lerita M. Coleman states that "[s]ocial rejection or
avoidance affects not only the stigmatized individual but everyone who is socially
involved, such as family, friends, and relatives" (224). In a small town, social rejection
and avoidance are less likely because everyone knows everyone. People know each other
enough that tolerance and acceptance of difference—of stigma—are taken in stride. In
this novel, the attitudes towards disability displayed by small town and city appear to
clash: the examining doctor of a Philadelphia (big city) hospital refers to Ruby as '"the
parasitic twin'" (105), an obviously demeaning term. Also, their adopted aunts and
uncles in the Michigan city of Hamtramck treat the twins with indifference, if not
coldness.
The big-city portrayals contrast heavily with the small-town acceptance. In the
fictional town of Leaford, Ontario, Rose and Ruby lead full lives without too much
concern for staring or derision. Like Grania in Deseronto, this has much to do with the
people around them. Encouraged by their adopted parents Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash,
the twins go to school, help run the family farm, and pursue their own interests. They
eventually move out on their own, getting jobs at the local library; one of them—Rose,
the twin with the fully developed body—has sex and gives birth to a baby girl, whom she
gives up for adoption. In this small community, the twins are able to experience the full

Pottle 39
spectrum of life's activities along with the thoughts and emotions that result from them.
The people who inhabit Leaford—friends, coworkers, passers-by—therefore form a
hamlet within which the twins comfortably exist, diminishing whatever stigma they
previously possessed.
Ryan Knighton's 2006 memoir Cockeyed provides a real-life illustration of big
city hazards. In articulating his deteriorating sight, Knighton describes several instances
that take place in larger cities, among them Vancouver and New Orleans. He tells stories
about car crashes, nightclubs, and near-muggings. The following scene, during which
Knighton attempts to cross a busy highway in Langley, B.C., portrays the difficulties that
big-city living presents for persons with disabilities:
We got off the bus, and she [Jane, Knighton's then-girlfriend] glanced at the
pause in traffic and said, "Quick, quick." She was off, so I ran after her with
particular abandon. The four lanes were clear for now, but Jane failed to mention
the median that interrupted the otherwise level street....
As I ran, I discovered the cement median for myself, with my foot. I
tripped, skidded on my hands, rolled, then landed on my back in a lane of
oncoming traffic. Jane raced back to fetch me and stop the approaching cars. (60)
Knighton quite literally stumbles through city living. Another example is when he is
dropped off at a townhouse complex in hopes of finding a woman he had met earlier that
evening. He eventually steals someone's phone bill—he wants to find the address on the
envelope—and enters the wrong house before finally giving up and going home (118124). By contrast, when he enrols in a camp for the blind, he finds comforts specific to
blind people. This camp, composed of thirty people and situated in a small forest

Pottle 40
community, brings out a sort of acceptance in Knighton, as shown when he describes his
fellow campers pouring syrup for each other:
The syrup business was a good lesson for me. I actually joined in the fun
for once. We all did it. We'd ask each other for help, pretend to give it, then
carry on, thanking our helpful fellow camper as we wiped our sticky hands on the
sticky tablecloth. It was a gentle anarchy, a dysfunctional politeness, and it was
ours. Sweet. (200)
Like Grania, Rose and Ruby, spending time in a smaller community among other blind
people helps Knighton articulate his own disability. Though he states that the blind do
not have their own culture—he contrasts the blind with "the deaf," who "have a language,
which makes community and identity" (199)—his experiences suggest otherwise. Even
though his fellow campers cannot "see in such radically different ways" and have
"fashioned such disparate lives out of blindness" (200), the potential for a culture does
exist. Like the deaf—or rather the Deaf—the blind have in Braille a linguistic tool
around which a (sub)culture can be built. They have a history into which they may
enfold themselves, from blind poet John Milton to institutionalization during the French
Revolution to modern figures like Stevie Wonder. A culture is created through its own
unique articulation of its accomplishments and trials, and the blind possess all of these
attributes. Therefore, a blind subculture—an actual subculture, not just a fictitious one—
is possible. Further comparisons between Itani's and Lansens's novels attest to this
notion.

Pottle 41

Unusual Births, Remarkable People
Within the spectrum of human beings, uniqueness manifests itself in different
ways. For persons with disabilities, distinctiveness often arises out of their respective
conditions. Rose and Ruby's uniqueness, like Grania's, is informed by the unusual
circumstances of their birth. In their respective novels, Grania and Rose and Ruby are
born during extraordinary events. Grania is born during what is called "the Great Fire"
(Itani 30), a massive blaze that consumes almost all of Deseronto (ironically, Grania's
family's home is untouched by the fire [33]). Rose and Ruby, meanwhile, are born
during a tornado that kills two people, including their neighbour Mrs. Merkel's four-yearold son (Lansens 15). These events form a parallel crucial to the discussion at hand. The
uniqueness of these occurrences encapsulates the characters' uniqueness as people, which
presents itself through disability. Being born during a town-consuming fire—combined
with the irony that her family home is untouched by the flames—foretells Grania's
distinctiveness within her community. In this novel, the fire works on a number of
symbolic levels. First, the fact the fire occurs on Grania's birthday instantly makes her
unique. The strangeness of the fire foretells Grania's separateness as a deaf person.
Second, the irony of Grania's family's home being untouched by the chaos anticipates
Grania's deafness. The fire, a roaring, tumultuous event, leaves Grania's home relatively
quiet and calm (Itani 33), indicative of the lifelong silence she is to receive when she
contracts scarlet fever. All the noise in the world can go on, but Grania is untouched by
it; like her house, Grania's "silence also protects.. ..Being inside the silence is like being
under water" (xiv). She is born unique, the fire anticipating her future unawareness of

Pottle 42
the world's commotion. And last, the symbolic properties of fire—passion,
tempestuousness—are engrained into Grania. Because of her disability, she becomes an
aggressive, fiery child, always demanding to know what is going on, giving the command
'"Tell!"' (71) whenever she misses something. The fire and its absence from Grania's
house therefore symbolize three things: Grania's uniqueness as a person; silence,
encompassed by her deafness; and her angry childhood personality, a direct result of her
disability.
Like the fire in Deafening, the tornado in Lansens's novel functions as a symbol
for disability. In The Girls, Rose and Ruby Darlen are born during a tornado, an image
that functions symbolically in two ways: as a simultaneously wondrous and horrific
thing; and as a symbol of confusion. The tornado is described as though it is associated
with their birth: after the twins are born, their photograph is placed in the Leaford
Museum, with a caption that reads '"Rose and Ruby Darlen. Born joined at the head on
the day of the tornado—July 30, 1974—at St. Jude's Hospital, Leaford'" (Lansens 16).
To take this association even further, Rose, the narrator, states that "St. Jude's
Hospital.. .was not equipped for disaster, and the staff didn't know where to start after the
tornado had come and gone" (17). Like the "disaster" of the tornado, the hospital staff is
not emotionally prepared for the twins' birth, as evidenced by the "hushed round of 'Oh
my Gods' and 'Lord in heavens,' and 'Holy Mackerels'" (29). Goffman's stigma theory
re-emerges here: for the twins, the stigma is immediate. Their physical grotesqueness
instantly marginalizes them. Coupled with the tornado, then, the twins' birth symbolizes
a rare sort of abnormality, one with the power to fascinate and even frighten. The

Pottle 43
churning mess of the tornado is reflected in the jumbled-up nature of their bodies, which,
as Rose states, presents an evocative image:
I was the longer one, my legs perfectly formed, my torso somewhat
shorter than normal, making my arms appear somewhat longer. My sister's legs
hung limply from her hips, two clubbed feet annexed by her shortened femur
bones. Ruby's upper body was normal, but very petite. I can imagine what the
silent staff at St. Jude's Hospital saw as they looked down at us: our heads welded
together, my crooked face looking this way, and Ruby's pretty one looking that.
(29)
Rose goes even further, pointing out the self-aware statement of "(after what they'd just
seen, nothing would ever seem shocking again)" (29). Just as the tornado can be
considered freakish, simultaneously inducing curiosity and horror, so can the twins. As
Rosemarie Garland Thomson points out: "[t]he constructed freak occupies the alarming
and chaotic space at the borders that delimit the 'average man'" (Thomson 63). Both the
twins and the tornado, then, represent the abnormal, the strangely different. Unlike the
metaphors seen in Chapter Two, in which disability is viewed in demeaning ways, the
tornado is both strange and fascinating. The sisters live their lives keenly aware of their
difference, but at the same time, they, and the people around them, take it in stride—for
like the weather, they cannot control it. They can only adapt to it and accept it.
In addition to representing the abnormal, the tornado also acts as a blender into
which many things are swept and then oddly distributed. As shown above, Rose and
Ruby's anatomy is unique, as though their body parts have been jumbled together in their
mother's womb. They form the picture of a stifling being: of confusion, of human debris

Pottle 44
clumped together. Their strikingly different personalities are further testimony to this
idea, as shown in the previous chapter which describes how Rose likes sports, books, and
spicy food while Ruby prefers television and "has a disturbing fondness for eggs" (4).
The twins form a strange unit of differing characteristics, sharing between them an array
of human qualities that encompasses a number of various interests. Such a composition
can be seen as confusing, as the twins' encounter with a boy named Frankie
demonstrates. Their different responses to being caught in his bedroom (the particulars
of which are discussed below) confuse him: after Ruby makes a certain comment, Rose
pinches her and tells her '"Don't"'; Frankie responds to this quarrel with, '"You guys are
freaking me out'" (149). The tornado and the twins, then, are associated as both
extraordinary and confusing things. These notions, along with those from Itani's novel,
give rise to a discussion of these symbolic relationships and how they contribute to an
examination of the impact of disability within a given community.
Along with the fire during which Grania is born in Itani's novel, the parallel
between the tornado and the twins illustrates disability's significance in a given
community. These events and the characters that arise from them suggest that disability
is an unusual, but strong presence. Though the fire and the tornado may have initially
been tragic events—damage was done to the towns, people were hurt and even killed—
the communities rebuild and adapt, just like they do when accommodating Grania and
Rose and Ruby. It suggests communal strength, the ability to move on and accept things
as they are. Grania's community endures the fire, her disability, and even the losses of
World War One; but, as shown above, they end up celebrating the war's end, despite the
tragedies that came from it. Grania's sister Tress's husband Kenan comes home from the

Pottle 45
war disfigured and with a non-functioning arm (Itani 294), yet Tress is able to celebrate
the armistice (349). Similarly, the twins' hometown rebuilds after the tornado and
accommodates them in a similar manner: one man, a friend named Nick, goes so far as to
design and build a special wheelchair for the twins (Lansens 301), on which Ruby, the
twin with the stunted body, rides so to relieve the pressure on her sister. The parallels
between these events and the disabled protagonists demonstrate a community's ability to
adapt and adjust when necessary.

Bedspreads and Communal Values
These two novels also both contain another comparative set of symbolic
relationships that explores their respective disabilities in relation to their own
communities: the communities of the deaf and conjoined. These relationships are relayed
through the use of bedspreads. Using this symbol, this section will further discuss the
ideas of disability and community with respect to integration and separateness.
Many novels use very specific symbols to focus on a particular idea. Itani's and
Lansens's novels use bedspreads—sheets and blankets—to symbolize disabled
communities in contrast to the able-bodied: in Itani's case, the community of the deaf,
and in Lansens's case, the community of conjoined twins. These communities will be
addressed here in the context of their narratives as well as in a theoretical manner, with
Lennard Davis and Rosemarie Garland Thomson forming the theoretical context.
Early in Itani's novel, Grania tries to determine where she belongs. Though she is
later accepted into her hometown of Deseronto, as a young girl she does not possess the
maturity or the means— that is, language and emotional security—to integrate herself

Pottle 46
into this community. Grania and her sister Tress invent a way to try and keep Grania
both secure and alert in the night, in case of emergencies. They tie a sheet to each other's
ankles before they go to sleep, the effects of which are described in the following
passage:
She [Tress] reaches under the blanket and pulls out the homemade rope, tosses a
looped end to Grania, loops her own end and ties it firmly around one ankle.
Grania watches through the shadows and does the same... .From separate beds
they kick and move their feet and legs until they are satisfied with the rope's
position....
Grania does not think about falling into sound. She dreams the softness of
rope secured around an ankle—a scarf, a sock, a tie. She is bound to shore, no
longer adrift in the dark. She is not afraid. She sleeps a deep and restful sleep.
(Itani 19-20)
The sheet securely ties Grania not only to her sister, but to the centre, the world of the
hearing, in which she is merely "deaf." And while Grania may at first feel comfortable
with this, she is obviously uncomfortable as a child dealing with her newfound deafness.
She attends a local school where she is soon left behind, her teacher's words "fly[ing]
through the air and fall[ing], static and dead" (43). Therefore, a different approach must
be taken for her to be educated. She is consequently enrolled at the Ontario Institution
for the Deaf and Dumb in Belleville (74), and when she leaves to attend this school, she
breaks away from her sister—and the hearing world—and joins a new community,
making the transition from being "deaf to becoming "Deaf." Within this Deaf school,
she learns how to manage her disability through unique applications of language, which

Pottle 47
she later uses to her benefit when she returns home to Deseronto. She learns sign
language, "learns to own the sign language" (96), which can be considered the cultural
language of the Deaf. She is taught to use her voice properly so she can function in the
hearing world, and once she returns to Deseronto, she continues to use sign language with
her family and friends. She is not tied to one world or the other—she negotiates the two.
Her Deafness is not compromised, but rather accommodated. With her husband, she
exists as a Deaf person in the hearing world. As a generic example, just as the friends of
an Indian man may learn his language and follow his customs, so the people of Grania's
hometown learn her language and adapt to her Deafness.
Considered in the novel's later context, the sheet-rope can also symbolize the
merging of the Deaf world with the hearing world. Initially, Grania moves away from
the hearing world, but for the purpose of realizing her own Deafness. Once she is able to
communicate properly, she rejoins her family in Deseronto and marries Jim, a hearing
man, with whom she creates a private language of both touch and voice, as shown here:
She had taught him the alphabet and some of the sign language and he could
make slow words, but they had also begun to create a language of their own. It
arose as naturally as the love between them, an invented code no one would ever
break....
"Place your fingertips over my mouth. Lightly now. Feel the word. Now to
my throat, back to the lips. Let the shape of the word fall into your fingers.
Scoop it up with your hand."
He had never known a language that so thoroughly encompassed love.
She had never felt so safe. (131 - 132)

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This passage also demonstrates the merging of the Deaf and hearing worlds: the Deaf s
sensitivity of touch is blended with the sound of the hearing world. Grama feels safe
because she is accommodated and ensured, by her marriage, that such accommodation
will be everlasting. As a representative of the Deaf community, Grania is both separate
from and integrated into the hearing world, as the sheet-rope symbol suggests. She is
addressed on her own terms, spoken to in her own language, allowed to fully participate
within society. She is a Deaf woman merged almost seamlessly into the hearing realm.
And, while their acceptance is not as seamless, Rose and Ruby Darlen are able to balance
their unique identity with being integrated into society.
Instead of a sheet, the bedspread symbol used in Lansens's novel is an old quilt.
Just as Margaret Atwood metaphorically uses quilts in her novel Alias Grace. Lansens
uses it symbolically. However, while Atwood uses the quilt for various metaphors—
constructing a narrative (Sharon Wilson 121) and female emancipation (Edina Szalay
173) among them—Lansens's quilt is a family heirloom. The quilt, a family heirloom,
has the design of "entwined blue and red paisley hearts on a cream background" (Lansens
62) sewn onto it, and Rose and Ruby sleep under it at night. This blanket, originally
meant for their adopted parents, symbolizes the twins as two people coming together as
one. The entwined (conjoined) hearts show them to be one unit of two people, and in the
context of community, the twins occupy a unique place. They are not as closely tied to
their "normal," able-bodied community as Grania, but rather they are members of a
community of conjoined twins who have been born throughout history. Rose names her
and her sister's predecessors in casual terms, as though they are related to them: "Chang
and Eng Bunker, twins from old Siam, the original Siamese twins," who were born in the

Pottle 49
1800s (11); "the pickled remains of infant craniopagus twins, joined not at the side of the
head, like Ruby and me, but at the back of the head, so that one looked forward and one
behind" (12); and "Minnie and Marie," born joined at the chest in 1959, two "physically
beautiful babies with porcelain complexions and thick black curls" who, in an irony that
addresses the quilt symbol, "shared one heart" (13). Upon seeing the picture of the
infants in the jar, Ruby sobs (12)—not out of pity, but empathy. She feels connected to
the infants, like members of a community are connected to other members. The quilt,
therefore, does not attach Rose and Ruby to the "normal" world like the sheet-rope
attaches Grania—it represents their separateness from it. The entwined hearts symbolize
the twins' distinctness: while they do not share a heart, they "share a web of one hundred
veins as well as [their] skull bones" (4). Unable to be separated, they must accept
themselves and, in turn, help others to accept them. They must forge a role for
themselves in both Leaford and among their conjoined predecessors. Taking their place
alongside their predecessors, they become part of the community of conjoined twins, and
this relationship both helps them understand themselves and helps others accept them.
The twins are aware of their unique nature, and their self-awareness helps them get
through each day. An example of this arises when they accompany their adopted father
on a chore to fix a friend's pipes. The girls, aged sixteen at this time, venture into the
bedroom of the friend's teenaged son, Frankie, and when Frankie catches them there,
they use their uniqueness as an excuse for not knowing where they are:
"Uncle Stash said to go down and look for leaks. We didn't know your
bedroom was down here," I [Rose] shot.
"Everyone knows my bedroom is down here." Frankie glared at me from

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behind bis bangs.
"Well, we're not exactly everyone, in case you hadn't noticed, and we
didn't know what everyone knew."
He seemed to have trouble processing what I said, then gave up altogether.
He did not ask us to leave. (148)
Self-awareness and self-acceptance breed the same things in others. Frankie allows the
twins to stay in his room and hang out with him. They smoke pot and drink whiskey
before Frankie and Ruby begin kissing, and soon Rose, whose body is fully developed,
has sex with Frankie (154). This scene and its unassuming casualness show Rose and
Ruby's (self-)acceptance. Like Grania, the twins can act on their own terms without
worrying about the repercussions. They are separate from the able-bodied citizens of
Leaford, and they grow to be comfortable with this, just as Leaford's citizens grow to be
comfortable with them. Such comfort and reassurance are necessary when creating an
identity for oneself.
In her book Extraordinary Bodies, Rosemarie Garland Thomson states that
"[although categories such as ethnicity, race, and gender are based on shared traits that
result in community formation, disabled people seldom consider themselves a group"
(14). However, as Itani's and Lansens's novels attest, communities can arise for those
with similar conditions. Grania participates in the Deaf culture she experiences in
Belleville, which she later introduces at home, and the twins take their place in the
history of conjoined twins. As mentioned above, a certain comfort arises from belonging
to such a community. These communities assure Grania and Rose and Ruby that there
are or have been others like them, that they need not feel alone or ashamed. Even further,

Pottle 51
all persons with disabilities can relate to being different. The similarities between these
two very different novels testify to this fact. Grania and the twins know what it is like to
be different; this entire chapter has discussed this fact. Therefore, if an all-encompassing
disabled community were to be formed in Canada, made up of different disabled
subcultures—the Deaf, the blind, paraplegics, the brain injured—the basis for acceptance
could be difference. Canadian society takes so much of its meanings and prompts from
culture; with regards to disability, the novels discussed here can have an impact on how
society perceives real persons with disabilities. By parlaying this impact through
continued study and artistic exploration of disability, a real cultural identity can be
formed.

Pottle 52

IV
Language. Culture, and Disability
One of the true indicators of a culture is its language. As Hodder M. Westropp
states, "when applied to the great divisions of mankind, language is a test.. .and in most
cases it must be so when applied to the several subdivisions (of mankind)" ("A Few
Words on the Origin and Development of Language" xlvi). When it comes to disability,
the Deaf appear to be the only group with its own subculture, which revolves around sign
language. As Lennard Davis states, the Deaf "[see] themselves as a linguistic subgroup
like Latinos or Koreans" (Enforcing Normalcy xiv). The blind have Braille, a linguistic
tool around which a subculture can be based. Other disabled groups, such as paraplegics,
do not have an identified language that can assist with establishing a subculture. By
exploring fictional representations of these other groups with the help of linguistic
theorists, the possibility of creating languages for disabled groups is explored.

Arley McNenev and a Language for Paraplegics
One's use of language ultimately depends on the context—the environment in
which one speaks and to whom one speaks. According to Mikhail Bakhtin,

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"Language.. .is never unitary" ("From Discourse in the Novel" 1211). It can be said,
then, that the English language takes on many forms and can be adapted for different
purposes. It can conceivably be divided for use by various cultures. Betsy Warland
elaborates on this idea when defending the notion that lesbians have their own culture:
There are, in fact, many cultures which don't appear to have their own
language.. .And there are cultures which, for example, seem to speak the same
language (such as English), yet true communication is very difficult and rarely
occurs. Lesbian culture certainly has elements which suggest our own language:
we have phrases, code-words, reclaimed words which are specific to us. (197)
When applied to wheelchair users as (self-)represented in English Canadian fiction by
Arley McNeney, Warland's ideas—particularly the last sentence in the passage—finds
new applicability. Indeed, wheelchair users have phrases, code-words, and nuances that
are specific to them. One example of wheelchair-specific language—code-words, as
Warland calls them—is the system used to classify one's paraplegia. McNeney's
narrator Nolan Taylor describes herself as "a class 4" paraplegic (McNeney 112),
meaning she is mostly mobile. Nolan's friend, meanwhile, is "a class 1.5" (112) and not
as mobile as Nolan. Another example comes when Nolan and her friend/lover Darren
arrive at the gym for wheelchair basketball practice and Nolan asks Darren to repair her
chair for her. He uses tools that could be used for bicycle tires: "Allen keys, spoke
wrenches, a pump, tire irons" (139). However, these tools and their names have been
detached from their "normal" practice and reclaimed in a wheelchair context. As Bakhtin
states, "It (the word) becomes 'one's own' only when the speaker populates it with his
own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own

Pottle 54
semantic and expressive intention" (1215). The tools have been appropriated for
wheelchair use, and so become wheelchair-specific. This wheelchair intention is further
illustrated when Nolan corrects a woman who asks her to speak publicly about her
experiences as an athlete:
"When working with the, um, special needs athletes, we find that those who
are in a wheelchair are much more popular with the children. Especially the
guys who're missing a leg. Children love to see the stump. They just love it."
"We actually prefer the term 'disabled athletes,'" I [Nolan] say, since
what I want to tell her would get me fired before I even started. (McNeney 196)
In this passage, Nolan is establishing the correct means of addressing wheelchair athletes.
She not only employs a more politically correct term with "disabled athlete," she uses it
as a means to demand respect for wheelchair users. The woman she speaks with is quite
disrespectful—Nolan later calls her '"the world's dumbest woman'" (197)—and needs to
be taught the proper language.
McNeney's novel demonstrates how wheelchair users—both fictional and real,
since McNeney is writing from experience—decontextualize the English language and
re-appropriate it for their own use. Wheelchair language comes with its own coded and
reclaimed words. Wheelchair users possess their own contexts and use the English
language accordingly.

Lori Lansens and Conjoined Twins
Conjoined twins are another disabled group that reclaims English in the same
way. Lori Lansens's fictional conjoined twins Rose and Ruby Darlen participate in the

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same sort of language as McNeney's Nolan. Language, to borrow Bakhtin's phrase, is
not unitary as the twins form their own "[sjocial stratification" (Bakhtin 1212), their own
context, in which they speak, write, and act. This context is informed by how the world
sees them and how the twins see themselves. According to Rose, "We've been called
many things: freaks, horrors, monsters, devils, witches, retards, wonders, marvels"
(Lansens 2). They live in a way in which they "are challenged.. .and uncomfortable,
sometimes, but neither [twin] would describe [their] conjoinment as painful" (3). The
sisters reject all the cliches associated with twins and in doing so create their own unique
context:
We hate doing things in unison, such as answering yes or no at the same time.
We never finish each other's sentences. We can't shake our heads at once or nod
(and wouldn't if we could—see above). We have an unspoken, even unconscious
system of checks and balances to determine who'll lead the way at any given
moment. There is conflict. There is compromise. (4)
This "unspoken, even unconscious system" is the result of the twins sharing "a common
blood supply," with blood flowing between the two heads in "a web of one hundred
veins" (4). The twins emerge from this situation with a unique perspective: "I (Rose)
understand that I am me, but that I am also we" (8). They live within this perspective of
simultaneous individuality and community which adds to their language a layer specific
to their being conjoined. The twins take words that may be used in a "normal" context
and re-appropriate them for a conjoined angle. For instance, the term "telepathy" (3)
finds a different use for the twins because of the link they share. Because the twins are
joined at the head, the term takes on a different twist and makes one think that telepathy

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is actually possible between the twins. Another re-appropriated phrase is "story of my
life" (14). As Rose mentions above, this story is not just hers; it is also her sister's.
There is no true individuality here, no privacy of thought or word or action. When one
sister acts or speaks, the other sister is always inextricably involved.
The twins also have code words. The term "craniopagus twin" (1), meaning
being joined at the head, occurs a number of times and has no other context except
conjoinment. Like the classification system in McNeney's novel, "craniopagus twin" is
only applicable within a disability discourse. This term found real applicability when real
craniopagus twins were born in Vancouver on October twenty-fifth, 2006 (Jane
Armstrong, "Tissue 'bridge' joins twins' brains," globeandmail.com), the year after
Lansens's novel was first published. These coinciding occurrences demonstrate a crucial
ricochet effect between Canadian culture and Canadian society. The real sisters, Tatiana
and Krista Hogan, were born joined at the head in a manner not unlike Rose and Ruby.
The similarities between the fictional twins and the real twins go even further: the Hogan
girls share a common link, "a 'bridge' of tissue," between their brains (Armstrong). As
the Hogan twins get older, they may be taught to engage with their conjoinment and
develop a subculture for which they have their own linguistic methods. They are
participants in a history of conjoined twins that Lansens identifies (the original Siamese
twins, the pickled remains of craniopagus twins, and Minnie and Marie [Lansens 1 1 13]), and the linguistic methods to engage with that history has been recently made
available by Lansens's novel and identified in this chapter. The coincidental timing of
Lansens's novel can help those surrounding the Hogan sisters to engage with them

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without stigmatizing them—that is, without using detrimental terms like freak, monster,
or retard. The linguistic context is highly specific, almost private.

"Schizophrenese" and Languages for Persons with Mental Disabilities
Another specific language for persons with disabilities is what Roy H.
Wolcott calls "schizophrenese" ("Schizophrenese: A Private Language" 126). In his
1970 article "Schizophrenese: A Private Language," Wolcott identifies a language
specifically for people with schizophrenia. In doing so, he presents the possibility not of
a schizophrenic subculture, but of subcultures for different mental disabilities as shown
with Strange Heaven by Lynn Coady. Though Wolcott admits that "schizophrenese is a
private language that is based on a private meaning system of private objects which are
inner, unknown, and unshared" (126), he states that "intersubjectivity is still possible"
(126). Using linguistic theory, he explores the formation of the language, how the
language is applied, and—perhaps most importantly—to whom the language belongs.
His ideas can be applied across the spectrum of mental disability, where linguistic
obscurity, esotericism, and misunderstanding run rampant.
Wolcott does not deny that schizophrenics use language that is idiosyncratic,
incomprehensible, and even delusional. However, in answering the question "Is
schizophrenese a language?", he states that "schizophrenese is a language in that it has a
vocabulary, rules, and criteria for the application of rules" (129). These rules include
"Formation rules: The conditions (context) under which a set of signs is meaningful";
"Truth rules: The conditions under which a set of signs is true"; and "Derivation rules:
The conditions under which a set of signs can be deduced from a given set of signs or

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statements" (132). All of these rules point back to Bakhtin's statement that language is
not unitary. One's use of language depends upon the context—the conditions—in which
he/she speaks. Wolcott even suggests the possibility of a schizophrenic community:
To contend that language is used instrumentally implies that verbal repertoires
function in a speech community. Users of schizophrenese may commonly have
the label "schizophrenic" attached to them. Thus, one might talk about a
"community of schizophrenics" on the basis of their usage of schizophrenese.
(127)
Just as the Deaf community is characterized by its use of sign language, so are
schizophrenics dubbed so in the way they use language. However, the problem of
establishing a schizophrenic community—and, indeed, any community for specific
mental disabilities—is the subjectivity or privacy of one's own use of language. While
the paraplegic classification system is widely used among wheelchair users in
McNeney's novel, a dialogue between a community's members must take place for that
community to sustain itself. The difference between schizophrenese and wheelchairspeak is that wheelchair-speak is a public language. It is specialized, but it is accessible.
Schizophrenese, meanwhile, is a private language; however, Wolcott states that, by
"establishing joint-meanings" within schizophrenese (130), intersubjectivity is possible.
Through the intersubjectivity of schizophrenese, other persons with mental disabilities—
real or fictional, as Wolcott writes from a medical perspective—can be understood and
even build a language of their own.
Wolcott's term "joint-meaning" refers to the "reciprocally shared meaning"
between two speakers (127). In his view, a schizophrenic already has his/her own

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language, made up of "neologisms (newly-coined words), word-salads (scrambled
sentences), or verbigerations (continual repetition of certain words)" (127). This same
logic applies to Bridget Murphy's psychiatric ward inmates in Coady's novel, particularly
Byron, the pimpled paranoid teenaged boy: "The disfunctionals began acting oddly
towards her (Bridget) once they found out that Bridget was leaving. Byron kept saying,
'You think you're leaving? You're not leaving'" (Coady 81). Byron keeps saying this
phrase and variations of it, telling Bridget she is not going home and that he is glad to be
in the ward and that his parents are stupid and that he is adopted (82 - 83). He speaks
within the context of the psych ward, his language informed by his condition and his
surroundings. His phrases are often delusional and detrimental towards Bridget, the
psychiatric ward, and his parents. In one scene, he pretends to put a hex on Bridget to
show her that he "can do things" (64). When she reacts against him, he yells '"Haaaaah"'
(66)! His language is comparable to that of Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl,
quoted in Wolcott's article: "the meaningless, recurring syllables, 'icthiou, gao, itivare,
gibastow, ovede' and the like" (Sechehaye in Wolcott 128). His language is esoteric,
self-centred, and megalomaniacal; yet he is understood. Bridget, though annoyed by him,
understands him. Byron's condition does not keep him from being linguistically
marginalized. As Wolcott states, "Language is most often used in interactions with
others. The distinction between a private language and a public language is made
primarily on the basis of whether the categories employed (i.e., terms of the vocabulary)
are shared or unshared by others" (126 - 127). Even those terms that Byron uses that are
unshared—for example, the '"Haaaaah!'"—are comprehended in that their purpose, their
meaning, is understood. Wolcott writes that "joint-meanings are based on the realization

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that source and receiver are keeping to the same general topic" (131). Schizophrenics,
then, are understood the same way as Byron: by understanding the purpose of words and
phrases. If intersubjectivity is possible between schizophrenics, paranoids, people with
depression, and anorexics, then each condition can form its own subculture with its own
specific language.

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V
The Permeability of Disability
Besides being a stigmatized social condition, disability is also a permeable
condition. It transcends race, gender, sexual orientation, geography, and social status. It
is something that involves everyone—not just because of its permeability, but because it
is "a social process that intimately involves everyone with a body and lives in the world
of senses" (Davis Enforcing Normalcy 2). Anyone can become disabled, and Canadian
authors—particularly Frances Itani and Arley McNeney—are aware of this. They are
also aware of the blurry line that can exist between disability and normalcy—between the
margin and the centre. These two ideas and the novels that articulate them allow for a reexamination of Canadian identities while proving the benefits of having a disability
community. Frances Itani's novel Deafening and Arley McNeney's Post are the two
fictions which will be examined through the lens of disability theory and Linda
Hutcheon's postmodern ideas.
Hutcheon's idea of the postmodern "ex-centric" (3) helps to insinuate persons
with disabilities into Canadian literature and Canadian academia. In her 1988 book A
Poetics of Postmodernism, she writes that "[t]o be ex-centric, on the border or margin.. .is

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to have a different perspective, one that Virginia Woolf (1945, 96) once called 'alien and
critical'" (67). This "different perspective" allows for the expansion of both literary and
academic consciousness. With this in mind, the idea that anyone can become disabled
suggests that not only are human beings vulnerable, but also that the centre, the world
that "'normal' people have constructed.. .physically and cognitively" (Davis 10), is
vulnerable. This idea empowers the disabled margin, as it has the potential to both grow
and solidify. As Hutcheon points out, "those on the margins.. .have the power to change
the perspective of the centre" (The Canadian Postmodern 103). Not to say there is a
middle ground between margin and centre. For disability there is none. As Lennard
Davis puts it, "[o]ne cannot be a little disabled any more than one can be a little
pregnant" (Enforcing Normalcy 1). The boundary dividing these two categories is
porous, victim to circumstance. It is possible that one day, after further study of
disability, the porous boundary will grow and become its own category, a median
between margin and centre, disability and normalcy. However, this is currently not the
case. There is no middle ground; the dividing line is just yielding, allowing for growth of
disabled groups in both fiction and reality. This questionable stability of the centre, of
normalcy, and the power of the disabled margin are demonstrated in Itani's Deafening
and McNeney's Post.

Itani: The Growing Deaf Community
Itani's book Deafening unravels the life of Grania O'Neal, a young deaf woman
living in Ontario prior to and during World War I. At the beginning of the novel, Grania
is five years old and just learning to deal with her deafness, acquired as a result of scarlet

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fever. She and her family try to construct a means for her to communicate, improvising
sign language and helping her with lip-reading. She then attends public school for a short
time, but she soon finds that public school does not work. Though she can understand
her family most of the time, she is not able to keep up, for the teacher "has no extra time
to look in Grania's direction"; as a result, "[w]ords fly through the air and fall, static and
dead" (43). She is subsequently moved to Belleville to the Ontario Institution for the
Deaf and Dumb, where she learns proper sign language and how to use her voice, among
other things. Grania grows into a young woman in this school, and when World War I
approaches, she moves back to her hometown to be with her family while her husband is
in Europe. Wartime plays a crucial part in this novel: the brutal noise of the war and the
Spanish flu that erupted during this period left hundreds of people deaf. With the
emergence of the newly deaf, Grania sympathizes with what they will all have to endure:
She thought of the soldiers returning, the ones who had been deafened during the
war. There were so many in this area of Ontario, classes were being held in the
Belleville school, in the same rooms in which she had studied as a child. A lipreading system had been adapted for them; she did not know who was doing the
teaching....
War and flu. Separate causes, similar losses. (371)
Though at the beginning of the novel she feels vulnerable, Grania ultimately is not alone
in her vulnerability. These men and women have become deaf just like she has: through
circumstance. And like Grania, they must learn to deal with it by relearning how to
communicate and learning how to exist as deaf persons—how to participate in the deaf
culture.

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Grania's tenure at the deaf institution and the notion that the newly deaf will be
taught at the same institution present a crucial issue. This school and its juxtaposition to
the public school Grania first attended prove that a disabled culture on the margins is
beneficial. When the centre can no longer accommodate, there is this place of refuge, of
acceptance, of re-education towards a slightly different self. If anyone can become
disabled, an accepting and supportive niche is vital. In his book Enforcing Normalcy,
Lennard Davis writes that "[t]he odds are pretty good that many 'normal' people reading
these words will become disabled within twenty or thirty years" (8 - 9). Though such a
prediction cannot truly be proven, it nevertheless highlights people's vulnerability to
disability, and Itani's novel presents the possibility of developing an identity with one's
disability. The margin is not a negative thing in this novel, nor in a disability context. It
is a place that is steadily gaining strength, ready to welcome those who are pushed out of
or who willingly leave the centre. The school, the flourishing (Deaf) deaf community,
and the language all testify to the positive influence the disabled margin can have.
Another such example is shown in McNeney's novel Post.

McNeney and the Wheelchair Community
Arley McNeney's novel is a strong portrayal of the permeability of disability.
McNeney's protagonist, Nolan Taylor, is a member of the wheelchair basketball
community, thanks to the faulty growth plates in her hip. Her disability arises casually
and unexpectedly while she is on the ferry with her family: "my body shifted so hard that
I expected there to be a big, cartoonish sound" (McNeney 91). Like deafness, paralysis,
partial or complete, can happen to anyone. And like the Deaf community, the wheelchair

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community comes with its own customs, as shown with the classification system the
athletes use to define their paralysis: "She was a class 1.5; I was a class 4: the 'more
disabled than thou' hierarchy had yet to be established" (112). This community also has
its own habits and means of engaging with the world, as shown when Nolan is introduced
to sex by an older man, a paraplegic named Darren. They use certain methods to
compensate for his withered legs and her faulty hip: "Something about your bodies fit,
though it was no position you'd ever heard of. You couldn't bend and he could bend too
much and together you found a right angle" (107). Her immersion in the wheelchair
community is encapsulated by her relationship with Darren: while she is with him, she
grows both as a person and into her disability, defining herself as '"a gimp'" (112) along
with her basketball team-mates. In Nolan's case, though, disability is not just a bodily
thing; it is circumstantial. This notion highlights both the vulnerability of human beings
and the permeability of disability.
A few years later, as Nolan starts to focus more on school and more "normal" or
"centric" activities, she meets a man named Quinn, an able-bodied man who eventually
becomes her partner. While she is with Quinn, she undergoes hip replacement surgery,
followed by a long period of recovery. During this period, she is idle, staying at home
while Quinn works. With so much time on her hands, she retreats into her mind, and
ends up asking herself, "Now that the hip's gone, am I still disabled" (316)? Though her
faulty hip has been removed, she is disabled by circumstance. She is denied most
physical activity, which puts a strain on Quinn who becomes sexually frustrated; Quinn's
frustration, in turn, further disables Nolan, albeit in a relationship manner. She attempts

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to look for a job, but because the only real experience she has is wheelchair basketball,
she is discouraged and unable to find anything:
I should be practising for job interviews, working on the old can-do smile. Hello,
my name is Nolan and I am a—I was an elite wheelchair basketball player. The
centre for Team Canada. The Big Girl. The Post. Now, I am a...former elite
wheelchair basketball player: the post-Post. (235)
It is a common experience for persons with disabilities to be dispirited when seeking
employment. Here, Nolan faces what are called "artificial barriers" (Dittmar, personal
interview), where she does not meet the qualifications of a certain job and so is
discouraged from applying. Nolan's life is an overlapping series of various disabilities,
both physical and circumstantial. As shown in Chapter Two, Nolan's pregnancy can be
considered a kind of disability, as it hinders her ability to work and to coach. Though not
without grudges, Nolan takes these occurrences as they come because she understands
that they are all a part of life: when her baby is born, she tells herself, "I am fine, selfcontained" (469). She is comfortable with herself because she knows that disability
comes about in one way or another. These considerations highlight the ideas of
permeability and survival.

The Periphery and Survival as Identity
As Linda Hutcheon suggests, "there have been liberating effects of moving from
the language of alienation (otherness) to that of decentering (difference)" (A Poetics of
Postmodernism 62). In other words, moving away from the language of the centre—the
language that stigmatizes and alienates persons with disabilities—and assuming a place

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on the margin while reclaiming language for one's own purpose is an emancipating act.
Therefore, a disabled culture would benefit not just persons with disabilities, but also the
centre. The centre benefits in two ways: one, from being able to correctly engage with
persons with disabilities without resorting to stereotypes; and two, by knowing that if
anything does happen—if any circumstances lead to disability—then there is a
community in which they can choose to participate.
It must also be acknowledged that the line between disability and normalcy can be
distorted. This notion of instability is both typically postmodern and typically Canadian:
as Hutcheon points out, "Canada may like to see itself as a nation that has resisted the
more American model of unification" (The Canadian Postmodern 19), of easy definition.
She also states that "[i]nstead of feeling threatened by this un-fixing of certainties,
postmodern culture tends to find it liberating and stimulating" (19). It is liberating
perhaps because there is opportunity for development. And where disability is
concerned, development is required on all fronts. With the Canadian disabled population
steadily increasing (Canada, Participation and Activity Limitation Survey), innovation
and creativity are needed to implement a community in which persons with disabilities
can participate and feel at home.

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VI
The Issue of Mental Disability
The academic study of disability within the last decade or so has focused
exclusively on the body. There are two main reasons for this. First of all, the body has
long been a central cultural subject. Scholars specializing in racial, gender, and sexual
issues have studied the body in countless ways, infusing it with significance specific to
their scholarly interests. Indeed, "[s]ince we can no longer essentialize the body, we can
no longer essentialize its differences, its eccentricities, its transgressions" (Davis,
"Introduction," 5). The body is vulnerable to all sorts of explorations. Secondly, bodily
disabilities are visible, and because of their visibility, their symbolic/metaphorical
properties are more easily identified. As Lennard Davis points out, "disability studies
aims to challenge the received (ideas of other academic arenas) in its most simple form—
the body—and in its most complex form—the construction of the body" (5). Indeed,
disability has been discussed as a bodily subject by numerous scholars, such as Davis,
David Mitchell, Sharon Snyder, Michael Berube, and G. Thomas Couser. "Disability is
the unorthodox made flesh" (Extraordinary Bodies 24), as Rosemarie Garland Thomson
states. It is therefore easy to spot—and stigmatize—someone based upon his/her
wheelchair, crutches, cane, hearing device, or disfigurement. As a result of this focus on

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the body, there has been hardly any exploration conducted on mental impairments—that
is, beyond medical and political realms of interest.3
There is perhaps a third reason as to why mental disability has been seldom
explored in academia, a reason that is directly related to the first two. Because one
cannot see a mental disability, one cannot tell if an individual is mentally disabled (excentric) or merely eccentric. It is difficult to tell whether that person is an ex-centric
survivor or just has an unusual personality. The variety of terms used to define mental
disability—disorder, illness, handicap—further hinders definition. The World Health
Organization makes no separation between mental disorder, mental illness, and mental
disability, grouping depression, anorexia, and paranoia along with Alzheimer's,
schizophrenia, and mental retardation (The ICD-10 Classification of Mental and
Behavioural Disorders). This difficulty of identifying a person with a mental disability
has a particular impact on the idea of the Canadian Other, who is usually visible and
therefore easy to categorize as "ex-centric."
Though it may seem that the margin and the centre are two stable categories, the
subject of disability necessitates a re-examination of this construction. Even though
Lennard Davis states that disability "is an absolute category without a level or
threshold... .One cannot be a little disabled any more than one can be a little pregnant"
(Enforcing Normalcy 1), his statement is made in a bodily context. Physical impairment
is easily labelled. The fictional characters discussed in the previous chapter are
absolutely disabled through hearing loss, disfigurement, paralysis, and other visible

3

Though literature, particularly Gothic fiction, has featured examples of mental disability, they have been
interpreted in non-disabled terms. For instance, Bertha, the madwoman in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre,
has been explored in both feminist (Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic-) and
colonial (Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea) terms rather than disabled.

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physical means. In a mental context, however, Davis's statement—in addition to
disabled Others and the Canadian Other as a whole—need to be scrutinized. Two pieces
of English Canadian fiction will be explored in this chapter. Lynn Coady's 1998 novel
Strange Heaven and Alice Munro's 2001 short story "The Bear Came Over the
Mountain" will help emphasize two key aspects. First, because a mental disability is
invisible and therefore not as susceptible to marginalization, the margin and centre are
exploded. There is a fine line between "normal" and mentally disabled; it becomes
impossible to tell where the centre ends and the Other begins. The second aspect of this
chapter is the notion of the institution and whether it helps or hinders the possibility of
subcultures for persons with mental disabilities.

A Blurred Line
The visibility of any bodily difference carries great weight with regards to
stigmatization. As Lerita M. Coleman states, "[pjhysical abnormalities.. .may be the
most severely stigmatized because they.. .represent some deficiency or distortion in the
bodily form, and in most cases are unalterable" ("Stigma" 217-218). This statement
applies not only to disability, but also to those of different races and ethnic groups.
Persons with disabilities, then, can be enfolded within a Canadian multicultural
marginalized discourse. Anyone who has been discriminated because of his/her skin
colour can relate to one who has been stigmatized because of his/her wheelchair. There
is a commonality at work here, a dialogue among Canada's margin—at least among those
who are visibly different from the centre. For those who are not visibly different, a
separate discourse is needed—not necessarily a stigmatic discourse, but one that helps to

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understand mental disability and its cultural implications. To this end, Lynn Coady's
novel provides a fascinating portrait of mental disability.
Coady's novel tells the story of Bridget Murphy, a seventeen-year-old who is in
the psychiatric ward of a Halifax hospital. In this place, she is surrounded by a unique
cast of characters. There is Byron, the nonsensical, paranoid megalomaniac who wonders
aloud if he was adopted and who constantly rants and invades Bridget's privacy. There is
Jimmy, the childish young man who is "always laughing for no reason" (Coady 65). And
there is Mona, the temperamental young woman whose words are laced with profanity.
Bridget is on the ward because she is '"apathetic"' (51), a condition that is clearly evident
in her behaviour; in the psych ward, she is "famous" for the phrase "T dunno'" (49). The
extent of Bridget's apathy is articulated after she takes part in ridiculing Byron:
Mona decided she liked it [ridiculing Byron]. She said Bridget was showing
progress and told her that the two of them were going to have many great
adventures together.. ."Doesn't say a word for two months," she [Mona] kept
saying, "and then crucifies some poor schmuck in the kitchen."....
The doctors liked it, too. Bridget had finally done something. Something
odd and concrete and cruel. She had reached out to a fellow human being,
grabbed hold of a vulnerable extremity, and given it a good yank. (49)
Bridget's apathy places her outside the action; as this passage shows, more often than not
she is an observer, a spectator. She is a stereotypical person with a disability,
marginalized and pushed aside by circumstance. When she goes home for Christmas, her
role does not change. She remains apathetic, "sit[ting] and drink[ing] tea until about
three in the afternoon and then switching] to rum" (103), whiling away her days at

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home. Another similarity between the hospital and home, besides Bridget's attitude, is
the inhabitants. Bridget's family is just as eccentric as her mates on the psych ward, and
in fact there are strong parallels between certain characters: Byron finds his paranoid
double in Bridget's invalid grandmother Margaret P., who bangs her bedpan against the
wall and rants endlessly; Jimmy's childishness and laughter are comparable to Bridget's
mentally handicapped brother Roland, or "Rollie" (129) as he is called; and Mona is
strikingly similar to Bridget's father, who also frequently blurts profanity whenever the
opportunity arises. The same sort of parallel arises in Alice Munro's story.
"The Bear Came Over the Mountain" tells the story of Fiona and Grant, an older
couple who end up having to deal with Fiona's Alzheimer's. Before her diagnosis and
subsequent institutionalization, Fiona is an eccentric person. During her college years,
she makes fun of sororities and politics: "she liked to play 'The Four Insurgent Generals'
on the phonograph, and sometimes also she played the 'Internationale,' very loud, if there
was a guest she thought she could make nervous" (Munro 274). She is zany to the point
that Grant thinks she is joking when she later proposes marriage to him on the beach:
'"Do you think it would be fun—' Fiona shouted. 'Do you think it would be fun if we
got married'" (275)? Fiona is so eccentric that Grant at first cannot tell the difference
between eccentricity and actual disability. When Fiona starts becoming forgetful, Grant
tells the doctor, '"She's always been a bit like this.. ..Once she left her fur coat in storage
and just forgot about it'" (277). Because Alzheimer's is an unpredictable condition,
Fiona's memory is sometimes clear and other times weak. Her condition leaves Grant
thinking, "She could have been playing a joke. It would not be unlike her" (291). Like

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Bridget's institutional mates and her biological family, Fiona's eccentricity and disability
are quite similar.
These parallels suggest that the line between disability and normality is very fine,
if not outright blurred; they also suggest the relative nature of normality. Put together,
both of these ideas show that the centre is unstable and therefore susceptible to change.
In this regard, Hutcheon states that "the centre and the periphery do not simply change
places" (3). With mental disability though, it is possible for the centre and the margin to
change places. The similarities between the ward mates and Bridget's family make it
difficult to tell where the margin ends and the centre begins. The centre is therefore in
flux, and this has a huge impact on the formation of identity. The instability of the centre
disrupts the margin, for the margin defines itself in relation to the centre. Defining and
creating oneself, then, is made extremely difficult. This idea has applications not just in
disability studies, but in other areas as well: for instance, if a person is the product of an
interracial union, he/she may be unclear about his/her identity. Bridget Murphy seems to
accept this lack of definition. She goes on as anyone else does, as the novel's last page
suggests: "once she (Bridget's grandmother) had known Bridget, but then she started
thinking Bridget was other people, that everyone was somebody else, and then that
everyone was a stranger" (Coady 198). Bridget's grandmother's delusions render Bridget
anonymous; there is no difference between her or anyone else. Fiona is the same way,
sliding between margin and centre. At the end of Munro's story, she leaves the
institution with Grant, telling him, '"You could have just driven away... Just driven away
without a care in the world and forsook me.'" (Munro 322). This idea of being
forsaken—that is, of being abandoned in an institution—necessitates an exploration of

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institutionalization and its impact, positive and negative, on the possibility of forming
subcultures for persons with mental disabilities.

The Institution: Stigmatized Housing or Cultural Gathering Place?
The mental institution has long been viewed as a stigmatized place. The very first
institutions opened "between the sixth and thirteenth centuries when leprosy became a
major health concern" (Margaret Winzer, "Disability and Society," 98). These places
later acquired in the early modern period what can be considered their current stigma:
The practice of confining mad people and other exceptional persons that became
widespread in mid-seventeenth century constituted a response to.. .the perceived
need for society to protect itself against the harm that the deviant, the defective, or
the dependent person might incur. (99)
This stigmatization carried through the twentieth century—particularly in Nazi Germany,
a regime which ran institutions primarily used for killing persons with disabilities
(Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell, Cultural Locations of Disability, 121)—and into
contemporary Canadian culture. In English Canadian novels, such as Margaret Atwood's
1996 Alias Grace (a historical novel set in the Victorian period, but written
contemporarily), the institution is little better than a stable: "This room has only a little
window high up with bars on the inside, and a straw-filled mattress. There's a crust of
bread on a tin plate, and a stone crock of water, and a wooden bucket with nothing in it
which is there for a chamber pot" (Atwood 31). A doctor featured in this novel
complains in a letter of the institution's conditions, stating "we had many Cholera
outbreaks, perforating Dysentries, intractable Diarrhoeas, and the whole deadly Typhoid

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family, which were plaguing the Asylum" (48). However, in Coady's and Munro's
stories, a new perspective emerges: the institution as a place of healing and friendship,
even burgeoning culture.
As shown above, Coady's novel features a variety of characters with mental
disabilities. Once Bridget leaves the psychiatric ward, she maintains contact with some
of her fellow inmates, namely Maria, the anorexic. While staying in contact, a strange
connection develops between Bridget and her inmates: their problems are her problems.
For instance, Maria's refusal to eat, illustrated below with her letter to Bridget, coincides
with Bridget's refusal to do anything:
Hello Bridget. I am home for X-mas. Myfamly dont try to make me eat becas
they no I wont anyway. Kelly was discharjed and Byron was discharjed, but they
are still outpatients....
Everyone els gets discharjed but I never get discharjed. Kelly has to see a
nutrishonist (spelling?) and gos on her own. Shefolows a meal plan now. I will
never do it. (Coady 126)
Bridget mirrors Maria's stubbornness in every aspect of her life: "Bridget was too
stubborn to sleep....Bridget was too stubborn to be properly penitent and instead spent all
her time stubbornly wallowing in whatever it is she was wallowing in" (128).
With the time away from the ward, Bridget misses her inmates. She eventually looks
past their odd habits and comes to appreciate their individual integrities, such as with
Mona:
Mona once said that when she was in Florida and her father had reported his
credit cards stolen, she had to work as a stripper for a while... .She [Bridget]

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thought it was possible that Mona was on the ward because she was a pathological
liar. After a while, though, she came to see they were all true, all of Mona's
stories. They were funny and appalling, like real life. (156)
Bridget finds and appreciates the camaraderie between herself and her former inmates.
The psychiatric ward, then, is not a stigmatic place, but a meeting place for like-minded
people. The same idea goes for the institution in Alice Munro's story.
Shortly after her Alzheimer's diagnosis is confirmed, Fiona is taken by her
husband Grant to Meadowlake, an institution for people who are old and/or mentally
disabled. When Grant makes his first visit a month after Fiona's admittance—the rules
are that visitors are not allowed for the first thirty days (Munro 279)—he finds that Fiona
has been completely enveloped into Meadowlake's community. This community is so
tight that it is exclusive; Grant is warned by a nurse to '"just go up and say hello and try
not to startle her'" (288). He then approaches Fiona and finds she has become a fullfledged resident:
She [Fiona] looked a little puffy in the face, the flab on one cheek hiding the
corner of her mouth, in a way it hadn't before. She was watching the play of the
man she sat closest to. He held his cards tilted so she could see them. When
Grant got near the table she looked up. They all looked up—all the players at
the table looked up, with displeasure. Then they immediately looked down at
their cards, as if to ward off any intrusion. (288)
Grant finds that Fiona has made friends with the man by whom she was sitting, a
wheelchair user named Aubrey. Fiona and Aubrey's friendship soon becomes so
involved that Aubrey looks at Grant with "sombre consternation," and purposely drops

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his playing cards so that Fiona will have to pay attention to him (294). In this institution,
a community—a subculture of mental disability—is formed. Grant attempts to penetrate
it in an attempt to spend time with Fiona, but she has been absorbed into the community
with all its subtleties: the card games, the nurses, the television room, the conservatory,
and the residents. Grant, who represents the centre, cannot participate in Meadowlake's
infrastructure, which has been designed specifically for ex-centrics—people like Fiona.
All he can do is '"Learn to take it day by day'" (291) in hopes that Fiona's memory will
return enough—that she becomes normal enough—for them to be together again. The
psychiatric ward in which Bridget lives works the same way, having been designed with
the same sort of purpose: to serve as a refuge for persons with mental disabilities.
The mental institution in Canadian literature, then, is not a disgraceful place, but a
sanctuary in which persons with mental disabilities can establish their own subcultures.
This idea of the mental institution as a positive place can help both Canadian culture and
actual persons with mental disabilities. It discourages previous stigmatic discourse by
promoting more positive portrayals of asylums, and it encourages those who need mental
guidance to seek and take advantage of these institutions. Though the diversity of
disability can make it difficult for a person with a certain condition to relate to another
person with a different condition, Coady's and Munro's stories illustrate the
transferability of disabled experience, and how institutions promote community and
personal development.

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VII
Towards an Ex-centric Context
For disability to be embraced as a cultural identity by Canadian society, the
stigma attached to disability must be minimized. For this to happen, Canadian authors
must continue the progress of the last five years by creating dynamic characters with
disabilities. Further study and cultural exposure of such study are also needed to more
deeply insert disability into Canada's academic and social consciousness. Unresolved
issues requiring more involved exploration include appropriation of voice when writing
about disability as well as studies comparing persons with disabilities to other minorities,
such as aboriginal people. Such comparisons will place disability on the same level of
consideration as other cultures, thus helping to secure it in Canada's multicultural agenda.
Being a surviving ex-centric is a positive thing, for the margin is, as Hutcheon
notes, the place of possibility, of creativity, of progress. Much Canadian writing of the
last thirty years involves marginalized perspectives. Those from different countries and
races (Rohinton Mistry and Michael Ondaatje), religious backgrounds (Miriam Toews),
and sexual orientations (Timothy Findley and Ann-Marie MacDonald) have written
important and engaging Canadian literature, all the while inserting themselves into the

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Canadian cultural eye and the Canadian literary canon. Writing from different
perspectives has perhaps, at least in part, orchestrated the emancipation of these
marginalized people, allowing them to be taken seriously by showing others their ways of
living, helping the centre to understand them. The word "immigrant," seen at first as
"synonymous with social failure" and parasitism (Kamboureli 49), is now, after the
Canadian Multiculturalism Act "legitimize[d] ethnic difference" (x), seen as an integral
piece of Canadian culture. The legalization of homosexual marriage is another important
development towards cultural acceptance. The same sort of progression must take place
for persons with disabilities.
Granted, reducing the stigma of disability is not an easy task, with centuries of
literary representation and cultural attitudes weighing against it. As Ruth Enns puts it,
"[disabled advocates are facing a major hurdle. Once again they must convince other
Canadians that they have a right to the same services as everyone else, that they have a
right to be here, that their lives are as valuable as anyone else's" (165). However, the
novels discussed here, coupled with a Canadian multicultural perspective, allow the
possibility of reducing the stigma of characters and actual persons with disabilities.

Disabled Literature and the Canadian Canon
Within the last five years, progress has been made to earnestly explore disability
in English Canadian literature. The novels examined here—particularly Itani's,
McNeney's, and Lansens's—form a foundation which must continue to be built upon if
disability is to insinuate itself in both the Canadian literary canon and in Canadian
culture. The cornerstone for Canadian disabled literature has been constructed; it must

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now be fleshed out by more fiction, poetry, and drama, exploring as many different
disabilities as possible to reflect Canadian diversity and inclusion. To flesh out Canadian
disabled literature, a few things need improving. One key ingredient of any culture's
literature is that that culture is represented by its own authors. As Margaret Atwood
points out, "[ajuthors are.. .transmitters of their culture" (12). Disabled writers need to
come out and speak for themselves. With the exception of Arley McNeney, every fiction
writer mentioned here does not have a disability or does not predominately identify
themselves as a disabled writer. The writers without disabilities—Itani, Lansens, Coady,
Munro, among others—discussed in this thesis were used because they compose the
extent of Canadian disability literature. Their works compose a starting point for
disability literature. They outnumber writers with disabilities and so make up the
majority of disability literature; but to build a true place in the Canadian literary canon,
disabled writers need to speak for themselves in order to construct a positive framework
within which disability can be engaged. While Canadian disability memoirs do exist—
Ryan Knighton's Cockeyed is one example—fictional constructions are arguably more
culturally and canonically influential. Including disability literature within the Canadian
canon will also continue literary developments that Smaro Kamboureli identifies.
In speaking about multicultural literary anthologies, which feature various ethnic
writers, Kamboureli states that "[e]thnic voices are no longer segregated within the space
of individual ethnic groups; they converge as they speak with each other, but—the most
important element here—they do so without being reduced to sameness" (Scandalous
Bodies 161). Literary anthologies including disability or even dedicated solely to
disability would provide tremendous support to this cultural cause. The diversity of

Pottle 81
disability must be similarly reflected in order to inject it into the Canadian literary canon.
To paraphrase Lorna Dittmar, a long-time social advocate who has helped and supported
persons with disabilities for over thirty years, when people first hear the word
"disability," they think of a person in a wheelchair (personal interview). This limited
categorization must be exploded. The broad extent of disability represents a microcosm
of the Canadian values of multiculturalism and diversity: each disability, like each
Canadian cultural minority, is accompanied by its own qualities, vocabulary/terminology,
and customs. Just as Canadian immigrants have written about their specific
circumstances in building lives in Canada, disabled writers (or writers with disabilities)
must do the same. As shown above with Itani's Deafening, Lansens's The Girls, and
McNeney's Post, a disability is not just a physical or mental impairment; it is a means of
engaging with the world, a unique perspective, a point of initiation towards constructing
an identity. In this regard, each impairment can be considered its own subculture,
existing under the umbrella term "disability."

Disabled Diversity and Unity
Just as there are hundreds of different First Nations that fit under the political term
"aboriginal," there are hundreds of different impairments that exist under the moniker
"disability." And like each First Nation, each disability has its own idiosyncrasies. This
is one of the chief problems preventing a disability community from forming: there are
too many disabilities and not enough commonalities—save for "the shared experience of
stigmatization" (Thomson 15)—to allow for the coalescence of such a culture. As
Lennard Davis states, "to be culturally Disabled is at this point perhaps only a Utopian

Pottle 82
wish that is gaining ground" (Davis Enforcing Normalcy xiv). In Canada, government
funding policies keep disabled societies apart, as they compete against one another for
monies needed to maintain their programs (Dittmar, personal interview). However, a
unique Canadian perspective allows a re-examination of Davis's statement.
If each impairment is recognized by Canadian society as its own subculture, and if
the Canadian values of multiculturalism—unity among diversity, recognition of
individual cultures and customs—can be imposed on the spectrum of disability, then a
disabled community is not a Utopian wish. It is a Canadian reality. As shown in the
novels above—particularly Deafening, The Girls, and Post—the characters' impairments
give them unique means of engaging with the world. Their impairments have histories,
habits, customs, and even languages which they can use to help create their identities and
articulate their respective positions. Creating individual disabled subcultures will
promote disability as an encouraging source for identity, strengthening it for cultural and
political purposes. Disabled subcultures will also allow each impairment to engage with
others in a cultural way, in the same way a tourist may try the food or language or
customs whatever nation she visits. This engagement will ultimately encourage unity
among persons with disabilities. The creation of a disabled community—in which each
disabled subculture will be enmeshed—is an urgent issue, as "[disabled people trying to
fit into their communities will accept their society's norms, even those destructive to
them" (Enns 113). A disabled culture would also add value to persons with disabilities,
an urgent response to the process of devaluation that renders the lives of persons with
disabilities as less worthy than those who are able-bodied and able-minded. To prevent
discrimination and discouragement, persons with disabilities must embrace their ex-

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centric status and create their own culture through their own impairments. Those in the
centre—the "normate" subjects (Thomson 8)—must not only recognize that disability can
be considered a positive thing, but also that it is permeable, that anyone can become
disabled. This simple idea serves as a solution to the problem of Canadian multicultural
unity.

The Path to Multicultural Unity
The value of Canadian multicultural policy has often been debated. At the centre
of the debate lies the question of "whether or not multiculturalism promotes national
unity in Canada" (Zong, "New Racism, Cultural Diversity and the Search for a National
Identity," 120). With so many different cultural minorities, it is difficult to encourage
unity. However, a solution can be taken from disability theory. Specifically, Lennard
Davis offers a new concept:
As with race, gender, and sexual orientation, we are in the midst of a grand
re-examination. Disability, as the most recent identity group on the block, offers
us the one that is perhaps least resistant to change or changing thoughts about
identity. And, most importantly.. .disability may turn out to be the identity that
links other identities.. .with something I want to call "dismodernism."
(Bending over Backwards 13 - 14)
Because disability is permeable and transcends the categories named above, it can be
considered a solution to the problem of achieving multicultural unity. Dismodernism,
Davis states, "argues for a commonality of bodies within the notion of difference" (31).
This statement is true of both the broad variety of disability and the assorted cultures that

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compose the Canadian population, for it encourages unity despite difference. Disability
and dismodernism can therefore be seen as instruments of promoting unity among
Canadian peoples. As Stephane Dion puts it, "Canadian multiculturalism is not a series
of closed ghettos, and it must not become one. It expresses the conviction that human
beings are better serve by cultural exchanges than by cultural assimilation or separation"
(95). Such "cultural exchanges" will take place once persons with disabilities coalesce as
a cultural identity. Including persons with disabilities in the Canadian multicultural
mosaic will help create a more positive discourse for disability while heightening the
individual value—personal, cultural, political or otherwise—of persons with disabilities
as a whole. Disability is, in Lennard Davis's phrasing, a social process, one in which
Canada, its artists, and its people have an obligation to participate on every possible level.

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