Victorian Fictions of Interdependency: Gaskell, Craik, and Yonge

Abstract

Victorian fiction by Elizabeth Gaskell, Dinah Mulock Craik, and especially Charlotte Yonge offers alternate ways to imagine dependency and disability. Basic fictional elements such as plotting and genre produce a message of interdependency as both a social norm and a social good, catalyzing a range of relationships including, but not limited to, marriage. Later critics' dismissal of all three writers' Christian ideologies of self-sacrifice may reveal our pervasive devaluation of the interdependency that, like disability, is a universal experience.