| Choi, Jung Sun. “Crip-Philia and Family-Making in Wilkie Collins’s Hide and Seek.” Studies in English Language & Literature 48.1 (2022): 119-138. This essay would deal with the ways in which Wilkie Collins explores his idea of crip-philia in the character of Mr. Valentine Blyth whose paternalistic affection and care is always oriented toward women with disabilities, particularly his wife with incurable spinal disease and his adopted daughter with deafness and dumbness. Differing from Victorian hegemonic forms of male gender, muscular masculinity and entrepreneur manliness, Mr. Blyth, a vicarious character of Collins, embodies moral sensibility and domestic masculine virtues that lead him to change the lives of women with disabilities as well as those of anyone who asks for his help. Mr. Blyth’s crip-philia is realized by domesticating women with disabilities and assigning them to the roles of a wife and a daughter, in spite of the relatives’ concerns and opposition and the public’s mockery and criticism acts. As this article points out, Collins sets Mr. Blyth as an ideal paternalistic gentleman to elucidate the changing ideas of Victorian family and furthermore, to redefine the idea of family to include not only biological ties but also non-blood relations, which could be manufactured through accidental or unlikely affiliations. The Victorians viewed family as a shelter that provides comfort and protects the family members from the harsh realities of social life. Just as conceptual changes concerning an idea of the home in the Victorian context took place, social and cultural understandings of the Victorian family underwent renovations in the changing composition of family members. This essay argues that gauging the social anxieties surrounding “artificial” family-making, Hide and Seek elucidates Collins’s interest in fostering social toleration of “living differently.” (Soongsil University) |