Expansive bodies : disability, prosthesis, and relationality in Samuel Beckett's dramatic work

What does disability have to offer the analysis of Samuel Beckett's dramatic work? What does Beckett's work have to offer in thinking disability? These two questions inform my consideration of the representation and roles of disabled bodies in Beckett's dramatic work. This thesis explores relationships of reliance, reciprocity, and vulnerability throughout Beckett's drama. It understands disability as potential, and therefore as key to the innovations of his writing. These disabled bodies are expansive. They reach towards one another, acquire prostheses both animate and inanimate, and resist boundaries both in terms of impairment and in terms of the literal boundaries of human form, as well as social limitations. The thesis begins with an examination of recognisable disabilities: disabled walking, blindness, and wheelchair use. What follows is thus grounded in an approach which establishes that the non-normative forms of embodiment seen throughout Beckett's dramatic œuvre bear a direct relation to disability. It then considers prosthetic relationships with objects and with people, considering the potential for both kindness and cruelty in such relations. Later chapters examine the idea of multiplicity, using a feminist disability theory approach to Beckett's restricted women, and what I term the delocated subject, whereby the heightened relationality of earlier chapters is taken to its logical conclusion: the staging of characters or figures who cannot be definitively separated from one another. Throughout the thesis there is consistent tension between the expansive possibilities of Beckett's depiction of disability and the desire to maintain an approach grounded in the social and material reality of the lives of disabled people.