Revealing the Commonalities Existing in Depictions of Disabled Female Characters in Prose Fictions: A Study of Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone and Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif”

Abstract

Literature has numerous dimensions, among which novels and short stories are worth the mention. Stories from the past have been including disabled male and female characters in their plots, but the question of how these characters have been depicted is still debatable. When it comes to writers of the disability study, it has been noticed that they have been trying to establish the present state of people with impairments with the help of their deformed or disabled characters. It has been witnessed that novels and short stories concentrate on bringing out the darker side of a disabled person by focusing on his/ her issues and sufferings. The objective of this paper is to expose that literary works rarely focus on the brighter facet of a disabled character, especially a woman. It projects the differences that are endured by fictional individuals. The analysis undertakes the theory of Intersectionality to support its arguments of projecting the discrepancies in the picturisations of disabled female dramatic personas in novels and short stories. Hence, the research with the aid of select prose narratives brings out the conventional sketches of fictional impaired women.