White Male Disability in Modernist Literature

This study explores the representation of disability in three of the most well-known novels of the twentieth century, D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926), and William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1929). By signifying cultural demise and a loss of masculinity, white male disability in the literature of the 1920s represents a fear of a foundering patriarchal, white supremacist world order. However, if we take seriously what queer and disability studies have advanced, disabled bodies in literature can also help us redefine life and love in the modern era: forcing us to imagine possibilities outside of our comfort zones, they help us reimagine the elusive myth of independent, self-sufficient human existence.