Professor of English Chris Foss
Professor of English Chris Foss has published a refereed article entitled “Reconsidering the Role of Pity in Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Star-Child’” for the current number of Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, one of the top venues for scholarly work on disability and literature. This piece will serves as the basis for the second content chapter in Foss’s Waple Professorship book project tentatively called The Importance of Being Different: Intersectional Disability and Emotional Response in Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales, and on the basis of this and other work already completed on the manuscript Foss recently has been offered an advance contract for his book from the University of Virginia Press.
The article aims at a critical reconsideration of pity through a close reading of Wilde’s fairy tale “The Star-Child,” exploring how it seems both to replicate stereotypically pejorative assumptions about disability and to contain more progressive aspects. Through the disability-aligned characters of the Star-Child (initially the embodiment of physical perfection, but eventually transformed into a scaly toadfaced freak) and his mother (a queen turned beggar-woman so physically repulsive her son finds her too horrible to look upon), Wilde’s text requires one to consider the extent to which its representation of pity reinforces a hierarchical division between the fortunate and the unfortunate while encouraging a view of disability as an “evil” fate, but also the extent to which it endorses a more empowering version of pity founded upon love, reciprocity, and action. It may remain unclear whether Wilde is teasing readers for allowing themselves to be manipulated into sentimentalized pity for his protagonist or offering them a sincere attempt at theorizing a more properly humanizing and efficacious version of the much maligned emotion, but, regardless, the complexities of parsing such complicated and contradictory possibilities within “The Star-Child” justify the importance of an earnest reconsideration of the relation between pity and disability.