Chapter 3 - Blindness as Metaphorical Death

Summary

Chapter Three begins with a reading of Everyman, and deals with the persistent narrative use of disability as a kind of metaphorical death. This is not just the case in medieval or early modern drama, but persists in the present day where it is still evident in the dangerous (and deadly) ideological fantasy that insists that disabled people’s lives are less worth living than those of enabled people. As well as examining this trope in texts like Seneca’s Oedipus, and through characters such as Lamech in biblically-inspired drama, this chapter also begins to address some of the problems of the model of a classical tradition as a way of figuring reception. The chapter closes with some thoughts on the relationship between this eugenicist conflating of disability and closeness to death, and gender.