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Abstract

Emerging as one of the fin de siècle’s most influential technologies, the typewriter is a rich device for exploring the physical and rhetorical interplay of bodies and machines. Originally designed as an assistive technology for blind users, across its literary representation the ‘typewriter’ (device) transforms into the ‘type-writer’ (occupation), culturally mapping the experience of women in the nineteenth-century clerical workplace. By unpacking how the type-writer girl lies on the intersection of gender, (dis)ability, class, and race, this thesis is interested in reading the type-writer as a vessel of prosthetic connection and alternative communication that extends past its nineteenth-century origins. More specifically, this thesis will apply pressure to the figure of the type-writer as a nineteenth-century literary and cultural trope for socioeconomic change and demonstrate how it is poised for antinormative intervention in literary studies. This thesis will read Grant Allen’s Type-Writer Girl— one of his few nineteenth-century novels published under the female pseudonym of ‘Olive Pratt Rayner’— in conversation with Kana Akatsuki’s Violet Evergarden— a contemporary work of Japanese steampunk featuring a physically disabled typist, to examine the prosthetic capacity and generic evolution of the type-writer girl. Drawing from disability studies, crip theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and considerations of gender and sexuality, this thesis foregrounds the prosthesis as a revitalized method for intersectional reading and writing, particularly in relation to deconstructing narrative form and point of view. This thesis theorizes how the typist’s prosthetic literary identity and practice is rich for the development and nurture of crip, queer embodiments belonging to women and people of colour, and their capacities to not only reauthor social, economic, and political structures, but complicate one’s participation in such. By reading Victorian and neo-Victorian literatures side-by-side, this thesis observes the evolution and application of the overlap between their represented anachronistic technology (and by extension, anti-capitalist artistic practice), and the urgency and extension implicated in the cultural dominance of contemporary media and technology.