Queer and Present Danger: Freakery and Sapphic Desire in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda

Abstract:This essay examines the relationship between (dis)ability and sexuality in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801). Jason Farr argues that (dis)ability and sexuality are “mutually constitutive” in the eighteenth century and demonstrates the link between conceptions of (dis)ablebodiedness and non-heteronormativity. I argue that the constitutive relationship is bifurcated across two characters from Edgeworth’s novel: Harriet Freke’s sexual divergence constitutes her disability, and Lady Delacour’s experience of disability and chronic pain constitutes her sexual ambiguity and Sapphic possibilities. A queer-crip reading of Belinda demonstrates that Lady Delacour experiences intimate relationships with women and her husband through her injured breast and chronic pain. Harriet Freke’s divergent gender performance disables her under the chastising gaze of the other characters, and, in the end, she is permanently, physically marked by an injury. Lady Delacour experiences a cure of her long-term injury that results in a transformation to the ennobled, contemporary form of heterosexual domesticity.