It is commonly held that we in the West have only recently begun to denounce the exclusion of people with disabilities from full participation in society. In the words of Colin Barnes, “there is evidence of a consistent bias against disability and disabled people which has only recently been seriously challenged.” In some ways, this is undoubtedly true: for example, not until 1975, with the manifesto of the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) – “nothing about us without us!” – did Western societies begin to take seriously the idea that people with impairments were disabled by built environments that precluded their participation. This led in the USA to the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, which sought to remove many of these barriers to inclusion, which has resulted in a more inclusive society. Nonetheless, as Barnes observes, an “essentially distorted and inherently negative view of disabled people … continues to be produced today” in literature and art.
My research in seventeenth-century English literature shows, however, that countercurrents of resistance to negative disability stereotypes existed then as now, in remarkably similar ways. Consider, for example, the 1599 Elizabethan play A Larum for London, Or the Siege of Antwerp, in which a physically potent one-legged character nicknamed “Stump” is unquestionably the hero of the narrative. His integrity, courage, and martial prowess contrast greatly with the play’s other characters – the cowardly English soldiers, the rapacious Spanish invaders, and the slothful burghers of Antwerp. He rails against the mistreatment of wounded veterans, the greed of the Dutch and English who refuse to pay their military, and the banditry and graft of the Spanish. The play sets him up as both a prophet and a judge. Stump also repeatedly embraces his prosthetically-aided identity in the play, even using it to encourage his fellow-soldiers to continue their fight against the Spanish: “my poor stump and I have stumbled through a thousand shot, & yet we halt together … it has been four times a fire under me, and yet we scramble together, trotting, trotting … I’ll halt before you, follow me as straight as you can,” he urges them, to which the soldiers reply, “lead us, and we’ll follow you to the death.” Just as Stump is inseparable from his prosthetic identity, he is also inseparable from his privileged place as a paragon of bravery, virtue, and tenacity – in short, the play presents him as a model Englishman, not in spite of his impairment, but alongside it.
The stories we tell about disability have changed very little over the centuries. Too often, they are negative, in the mold of Shakespeare’s Richard III, whose physical “deformity” serves as a marker of his inward faults. Richard declares that since he is “cheated of feature by dissembling nature,” he must, therefore, “prove a villain,” becoming perhaps the most villainous of all Shakespeare’s tragic kings. This trope still exists in our stories—think about Two-Face in the Batman series, Darth Vader from Star Wars, or any number of villains whose disfigurement reflects their evil. But we would do well, in our storytelling and our lived experience, to remember the lessons offered by Stump: impairment need not connote deficiency, inferiority, or defectiveness. Stump’s affirmation of disability and his divergence from negative tropes emphasize the difference between narrowly hostile and expansively sympathetic ways of thinking about disability, thereby generating new possibilities for rethinking disability’s relationship to cultural ideas, social attitudes, and personal identities.
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About the Author
Matthew Mullin is a Ph.D. candidate in English, a recipient of a University Presidential Fellowship in Humanities and Social Sciences, and a 2024-25 distinguished graduate fellow with Notre Dame's Institute for Ethics and the Common Good. His research investigates narratives of physical disability in Early Modern England, focusing specifically on authors and characters who embrace and affirm physical difference as a generative aspect of identity formation.
Originally published by at eitw.nd.edu on February 04, 2025.