Out of Time: Disabling Normative Time in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White

Abstract

Responding to ableist and regimented notions of time, disabled activists and disability studies scholars alike have embraced “crip time” as a modality that better accounts for the ways disability transforms chronology. By applying this critical disability framework to depictions of time in Victorian literature, my paper reveals the generative potential of nonnormative understandings of time in two foundational and widely studied texts: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White. In each text, the presence of disability allows for the resistance to and subversion of hegemonic (and genre-based) modes of temporality.