손의 마법: 『가련한 핀치 양』의 위험한 동화

초록

This essay aims to analyze Wilkie Collins’s later novel Poor Miss Finch to point to its unique position among a set of nineteenth-century literary texts that feature disability. Different from these texts in which disabled people are consigned to the periphery, Poor Miss Finch reveals unprecedented interest in representing the body and sexuality of a blind woman, Lucilla Finch, at the forefront of its narrative. The novel significantly reclaims the disabled woman’s right to marry a man of her choice and become a mother. However, I contend that the novel's real radicality is achieved by its rewriting of the way the senses operate in Lucilla’s disabled body. Specifically, the novel intervenes in the prevalent accounts of blindness either as a lack of sight or a mystical charm and attempts to redefine it according to the surplus of other senses. I particularly draw on the notion of touch-sense to delve into the prospect of physical potentiality of blind bodies that the novel inquires into through Lucilla Finch. Examining the ways in which the novel thinks about the surprising potency of Lucilla Finch’s touchsense for identifying and satisfying her sexual desires, this article argues that Collins construes blindness as a status of full sovereignty and of enabling a vibrant engagement with myriads of sensations surfacing on bodies.

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