The war-wounded and the congenitally impaired: Competing categories of disability in John Buchan's Huntingtower (1922)

Abstract

<![CDATA[Physical disability has been described as a ‘social process in which no inherent meanings attach to physical difference other than ones assigned by a community’. This article scrutinizes John Buchan's war-wounded ex-soldiers from the perspective of the community for whom Buchan wrote, readers of popular fiction. In his 1922 novel Huntingtower John Buchan's response to the war-disabled soldier is aimed at their ‘regeneration’, and to ‘recover their constrained agency’. But his interpretation also subordinates congenitally impaired civilians to wounded ex-soldiers, which has disturbing implications. This article argues that in making a line of moral demarcation between the war-wounded ex-soldier and the disabled man who could not serve, Buchan’s novel reflects a troubling aspect of post-war British society in his alignment of inimical political systems with physical and moral inadequacy.]]>

Keywords:

• wounded
• ex-soldier
• disabled
• cripple
• discrimination
• moral