disability

In the original “Reading The Waste Land with the #MeToo Generation” Modernism/modernity cluster, Erin Templeton suggests an imbrication of gender and mental disability foundational to the creation of The Waste Land through her analysis of Vivien Eliot’s contributions to “A Game of Chess.”[1] Templeton observes that as Eliot’s incorporated Vivien’s marginal notes, the poem came to “[feature] material traces left by an actual female hand.” More specifically, though, such traces are left by a disabled female hand, the hand of a reader and collaborator for whom experiences of gender, sexuality, and mental and physical health were inextricably linked. Following on Templeton’s work of making visible the corporeality of women as characters and creators in modernist literature, this essay applies a #MeToo framework to canonical modernist narratives in which sexual abuse and disability collide.