The Uncanny, Normalcy, and the EnLIGHTenment: Reversing the Hegemony of Vision in H. G. Wells’s “The Country of the Blind”
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H. G. Wells’s 1904 story “The Country of the Blind,” in which a Western explorer happens upon a village in an isolated valley where all the citizens are blind, produces multiple effects by reversing the hegemony of normalcy. Following the protagonist Nunez’s cognitive path, the reader experiences the uncanny that can be summed up as “cognitive estrangement” and “estranged familiarity.” Encountering something familiar yet strange in this otherworldly setting, the readers sense something has long been repressed in the process of constructing normalcy keeps returning. The blind townspeople’s way of treating Nunez’s eyes questions the ideas of disability in nineteenth-century Britain and suggests alternative ways of thinking about the abnormal by exposing how blindness has been conceived in society. Blindness in this story also brings the hegemony of vision to the front and functions to unravel it as Nunez’s failed project of enlightenment to educate the townspeople debunks ocularcentrism associated with the project of enlightenment in Western Europe. Depicting Nunez’s downgraded status in the valley, the story undermines vision’s firm connection with the notions pertinent to the Enlightenment such as knowledge, power, and freedom. The story encourages readers to question the hegemony of normalcy constructed in their own society and to reconcile between estrangement and familiarity.
Abstract
H. G. Wells’s 1904 story “The Country of the Blind,” in which a Western explorer happens upon a village in an isolated valley where all the citizens are blind, produces multiple effects by reversing the hegemony of normalcy. Following the protagonist Nunez’s cognitive path, the reader experiences the uncanny that can be summed up as “cognitive estrangement” and “estranged familiarity.” Encountering something familiar yet strange in this otherworldly setting, the readers sense something has long been repressed in the process of constructing normalcy keeps returning. The blind townspeople’s way of treating Nunez’s eyes questions the ideas of disability in nineteenth-century Britain and suggests alternative ways of thinking about the abnormal by exposing how blindness has been conceived in society. Blindness in this story also brings the hegemony of vision to the front and functions to unravel it as Nunez’s failed project of enlightenment to educate the townspeople debunks ocularcentrism associated with the project of enlightenment in Western Europe. Depicting Nunez’s downgraded status in the valley, the story undermines vision’s firm connection with the notions pertinent to the Enlightenment such as knowledge, power, and freedom. The story encourages readers to question the hegemony of normalcy constructed in their own society and to reconcile between estrangement and familiarity.
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