Caregivers, Caretakers: Sociocognitive Disability and Literary Care in Nineteenth-Century American Literature Restricted; Files Only

Abstract

Caregivers, Caretakers is a literary history of sociocognitive disability and care in the nineteenth-century United States. By “sociocognitive disability,” I indicate a category of impairments that has had many names: idiocy, feeblemindedness, intellectual disability, autism, etc. This reframing moves beyond current and historical diagnostic labeling, stressing the interplay between mental difference and social constructionism.

Historical scholarship on sociocognitive disability in the nineteenth-century U.S. has focused primarily on asylums, illuminating a history of medical care and abuse. This focus, like these institutions, is confining. Meanwhile, literary scholarship has endeavored to disentangle our understandings of disabled experience from textual representations of it, especially those written by non-disabled authors, following Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s call to “open up the gap between disabled people and their representations” (Extraordinary Bodies 10). My approach is not only to open this gap, but to explore the lives and relationships within it, revealing the complex interchanges between literary activity, literary representation, and historical experience. In my analysis of the work of James Fenimore Cooper and Catherine Maria Sedgwick, I illustrate how Early American frontier novels reveal an active cultural debate about the nature of sociocognitive disability along the lines of whiteness and indigeneity. In my chapters on Walt Whitman and Harriet Wilson, I examine cases in which acts of composition, publication, and distribution were integral parts of care labor. Finally, I write about the guardianship trials of the multiply disabled and formerly enslaved pianist, Thomas Wiggins, illustrating the historical consequences of literary representations of living sociocognitively disabled people.

 Through analysis of these literary lives, Caregivers, Caretakers models epistemic care, an archival method that seeks to recognize, write, and honor the lives and knowledge of sociocognitively disabled subjects. Understanding sociocognitive disability as simultaneously embodied and socially constructed requires reading lived experience alongside dominant cultural narratives. By centering sociocognitively disabled people, I show that those who have had their rights to self-representation denied and subsumed by guardians and caregivers can provide novel insights into the cultural history of the United States. Doing so not only re-establishes the importance of such figures to American literature but also uncovers liberatory practices of literary care. 

Table of Contents

Introduction: Giving and Taking. 1

I.     Cognitive Disability in the Nineteenth-Century United States. 4

II.   Literary Care and Sociocognitive Disability. 9

III.  Questions of Literary Representation. 16

IV.  A Case Study in Scholarly Carelessness: Elizabeth Jefferson and Little Sall 18

V.   Chapter Descriptions. 27

Chapter 1: “Compass Meant Us”: Indigenous Models of Disability, Care, and Kinship in Sedgwick and Cooper’s Historical Romances. 30

I.     Negotiating the Terms of Sociocognitive Difference on the Frontier 38

II.   Sedgwick and Cooper on Craniometry, Capacity, and Indigeneity. 61

III.  White Families, Indigenous Kin, and Disabled Belonging. 73

Chapter 2: “Feeling her Self-Dependence”: Disability, Dependency, Charity, and Self-Care in Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig. 91

I.     Choosing Charity: Frado/Wilson’s Proto-Autofiction. 95

II.   Displays of Disability. 103

III.  Claiming Dependency. 112

IV.  Practices of self-care. 123

Chapter 3: “Hang your whole weight upon me:” Literary Care in the lives of Walt and Eddy Whitman 137

V.   Epistolary Care. 143

I.     Democratic Care. 154

II.   Posthumous Care. 168

Chapter 4: “I’m Done...All Gone:” Narrative Guardianship and Epistemic Care in the Life of Thomas Wiggins. 180

I.     The Legal Guardianship of Thomas Wiggins. 187

II.   Public Pseudo-Guardianship. 203

III.  Epistemic Care. 215

Works cited. 233

About this Dissertation

Rights statement

• Permission granted by the author to include this thesis or dissertation in this repository. All rights reserved by the author. Please contact the author for information regarding the reproduction and use of this thesis or dissertation.

School	Laney Graduate School
Department	English
Degree	Ph.D.
Submission	Dissertation
Language	English
Research Field	History, United States American Studies Literature, American
Keyword	History of Disability Representation Literary Studies History of Medicine Nineteenth-century American Literature Disability American Literature Care Intellectual Disability
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Benjamin Reiss, Emory University
Committee Members	Lauren Klein, Emory University Rachel Adams, Columbia University Kylie Smith, Emory University

Last modified

Primary PDF

Thumbnail	Title	Date Uploaded	Actions
	File download under embargo until 27 May 2032	2026-04-16 20:23:13 -0400	File download under embargo until 27 May 2032

Supplemental Files

Thumbnail	Title	Date Uploaded	Actions