“Numbed and Mortified:” Labor, Empathy, and Acquired Disability in King Lear and Titus Andronicus

Abstract

Through New Historicist lens of accommodation and the Social Model of Disability (SMD), as well as of labor and worth specified by Karl Marx, I analyze the violent disablings in King Lear and Titus Andronicus––specifically, the blinding of Gloucester and the rape and dismemberment of Lavinia, respectively. The SMD provides a more contextualized image of the lived experience of disability, especially in understanding the social consequences and implications of disability in these specific texts. As both of these characters are rendered disabled through violence, I delineate the ways in which their disablings function less as a narrative symbol than a lived and real trauma of social and physical inability widely impacted by notions of labor. Specifically, I do this in considering the lived experience of disability and labor in early modern England and how other characters’ empathy toward disabilities rely on or dismiss priorities of labor, which widely impacts the ways in which Gloucester and Lavinia attempt to adapt to both physical and social disabilities or ultimately fail to do so.