This thesis explores how Wilkie Collins’s portrayal of disabled female bodies disrupts the Victorian opposition between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ bodies, and, in doing so, offers an alternative to the prevailing contemporary ideal of femininity, as passive, pure, and spiritualized. In Hide and Seek (1861), The Moonstone (1868), and Poor Miss Finch (1872), I argue Collins reconfigures traditional readings of both disabled and able-bodied women. Drawing on theories in disability and gender studies, my thesis examines how prevalent understandings of the disabled body offer insight into how we think about the human body in general, and how in Collins’s novels the disabled body is used to question gendered norms placed upon all members of society.
