The Small Boy Was “Other”: Disability in James’s Fourth Phase

Abstract

Abstract: Henry James’s fourth phase memoirs A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother benefit from a disability studies perspective. Furthering the social criticism of The American Scene , James’s life-writing disclosed his alterity—queer, neuro-divergent, and chronically ill—to resist regimes of normalcy and hegemonic masculinity, epitomized by Theodore Roosevelt. His intent to adopt Hendrik Andersen demonstrated this shift in his gay identity. Disability connects James’s life-writing to his fictional protagonists whose impairments include chronic illness and the non-normative cognitive and sexual difference of Jamesian artist figures.