Tactile Encounters in Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch

초록

This essay aims at situating the mid-Victorian sensation novel within the burgeoning field of sensory studies to argue for a conceptual redefinition of the genre as “fiction of the senses.” While traditional scholarship has historically framed the genre through the lens of “nervous disorder” and shocking contents, this essay claims that sensation fiction, specifically the works of Wilkie Collins, utilizes sensory representation to challenge ableist hierarchies and the hegemony of vision. Focusing on Poor Miss Finch (1872), this essay explores how Collins subverts the Victorian “medical gaze” by presenting disability not as a metaphor for moral lack or an object of charity, but as a site of empowered subjectivity. Central to this argument is the role of tactile compensation; drawing on the sensory theories, I examine how Lucilla Finch’s blindness is mitigated not by medical correction, but through a sophisticated “tactile seeing” that asserts her autonomy. By analyzing the tension between Lucilla’s self-sufficient tactile world and the corrective violence imposed by patriarchal and scientific authorities, this study demonstrates how Collins collapses the binary between the “abled” and “disabled.” Ultimately, the essay argues that through Lucilla’s narrative arc as a self-sustaining wife and mother, Collins critiques the nineteenth-century discourse of normalcy and validates the “differently abled” body as a legitimate and flourishing mode of being.

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