Fluent speech, free of stuttering, lisping, and hesitation, has long been both a norm and an ideal in the West. Failure to speak fluently—what literary scholar Riley McGuire, in his new book, Dysfluent in Fiction: Vocal Disability and Nineteenth-Century Literature calls "dysfluency"—has historically prompted interventions aimed at eliminating ("curing") this difference. Making a case for studying these voices as they appear in certain nineteenth-century texts, McGuire shows that when people have embraced dysfluent voices, they have also challenged normative ideas of fluency.
While recent books such as Heidi Logan's Sensational Deviance: Disability in Nineteenth-Century Sensation Fiction (2018) and Clare Walker Gore's Plotting Disability in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (2019) have tended to focus on physical — often called "visible" — disabilities, McGuire's monograph provides an important appraisal of the representation specifically of vocal disabilities in nineteenth-century texts. In particular, this book examines the representation and depiction of vocal disability in nineteenth-century literature and writing, including "stammering, lisping, baby talk, and mutism" (3).
Because voice was viewed as central to establishing authority in the nineteenth century, the expectation of vocal normativity was promoted in texts of that era. Against this backdrop, McGuire writes, "dysfluency emerges as a sounding board to apprehend the voice's essential role in locating individuals within powerful nineteenth-century social institutions, including marriage, education, and enslavement" (9). Dysfluent in Fiction not only investigates ableist and negative portrayals of dysfluency in nineteenth-century texts, but it also explores how dysfluency was simultaneously corrected, in order to produce adherence to English language practices identified normatively as "standard," and embraced as a way to represent and promote vocal variation. To make his case, McGuire analyzes a variety of nineteenth-century texts including novels such as William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1847-48) and Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853) as well as texts by Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), Mary E. Braddon, and the playwright Tom Taylor; and advertisements regarding fugitive enslaved people.
Chapter 1, "Lisping Lovers: Plotting Dysfluent Union in Thackeray and Brontë," investigates dysfluency — specifically, lisping — in the conventional marriage plots of Thackeray's and Brontë's novels. McGuire identifies the characters of Paulina (Polly) Home in Villette and William Dobbin in Vanity Fair as "lisping lovers" who "overcome" their vocal dysfluency in order to achieve the end goal of entering in heterosexual marriage (31). After demonstrating that voice played an influential role in courtship during the nineteenth century, McGuire turns to these novels as texts that promote ableist positions, such as that a person needs to "speak normally," that is, to correct vocal dysfluent practices, in order to participate in the institution of marriage. Because Thackeray and Brontë "are united in their use of dysfluency to animate their realist novels and in their banishment of it to conclude their multi-marriage plots," (63) McGuire writes, they function as "correctional" texts that implicitly encourage readers to see vocal disabilities, including lisping, through an ableist lens, as problems to be fixed.
In the following chapter, "Refusing to Grow Up and Speak Right: Prosthetic Authorship and Dysfluent Choice in Dodgson," McGuire explores the potential subversion of dysfluency in Charles Dodgson's final novel, Sylvie and Bruno (1889/1893). McGuire contends that the novel depicts dysfluency as "ineradicable, despite community pressure, educational practices, and even personal desire" (96). This depiction very much unsettles the educational aims of Villette and Vanity Fair as set out in the previous chapter, and McGuire emphasizes the contradiction between nineteenth-century literature that aims to "fix" dysfluency and that which depicts the impossibility of correcting dysfluency. In contrast to Thackeray's William and Brontë's Polly, Dodgson's Bruno rejects all forms of corrective education and instead embraces his vocal differences — so-called "baby talk" and lisping. In McGuire's view, Bruno's rejection of vocal correction provides positive representation of vocal dysfluency in nineteenth-century literature. Reflecting on Dodgson's own vocal dysfluencies, McGuire points out that Dodgson's "narrative prominence and commitment to atypical speech make him a rare figure in the works of canonical Victorian authors" (96).
In Chapter 3, "'The Dumb Detec(k)tive': Braddon's Professionalization of the Mute Role," McGuire explores another form of dysfluency: mutism. In particular, the author examines the role of the mute detective in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's lesser-known sensation novel, The Trail of the Serpent (1861). McGuire ingeniously connects the performance of mutism on the Victorian stage to Braddon's depiction, in his novel, of the mute detective, a character who is especially interesting given Braddon's background in theater, where mute characters commonly appeared. In The Trail of the Serpent, Braddon transports "the melodramatic figure of the mute" into a new genre, the novel, and in doing so, "resignifies its representational power within the novel form, using her textual medium to expand the mute character's independence and narrative significance" (102).
The novel centers on Joseph Peters, a mute detective who overcomes his dysfluency by solving mysterious, difficult cases. As McGuire points out, Peters corresponds to the supercrip model of disability, which is a type of ableist thinking that champions and celebrates people who "overcome" their disabilities (Clare 360). Although the novel's praise of Peters for overcoming his disability is quite ableist, Braddon's character nonetheless provides another positive representation of vocal dysfluency in mid-nineteenth century literature. In particular, McGuire argues, because Braddon's depiction of Peters "fails to affirm an array of social, generic, and ableist assumptions about mutism," it "sidesteps the curative logic prominent in nineteenth-century fiction" as depicted in Thackeray's and Brontë's novels (120-121). Specifically, ableist assumptions about Peters' mutism (such as, that Peters cannot hear if he cannot speak) enable him to become a powerful spy who can collect information from unsuspecting characters. Thus, as McGuire highlights, Braddon's The Trail of the Serpent celebrates dysfluency in its positive portrayal of Peters's mutism.
In the next chapter, "Our American Cousin, Our Dysfluent Nation: Celebrity Speech Disorder on the Transatlantic Stage," McGuire explores the portrayal of stammering in a popular transatlantic play written by Tom Taylor. In this play, a character named Lord Dundreary appears as "a silly English aristocrat" who is known for stammering and lisping, and these vocal dysfluencies are meant to entertain the audience (122). Essentially, as McGuire argues, Dundreary in Our American Cousin "highlights the mismatch between the daily inhabitation and the fictional representation of dysfluency, proffering the theater as a space of exploitation and possibility, cruelly instrumentalizing a stammer for humor, while also positioning it as a constitutive element of stardom and a form of articulation to emulate" (124). Dundreary's stardom as a dysfluent character simultaneously ridicules vocal disability as a joke while also gaining recognition for it, thanks to his popularity. Essentially, Dundreary is at once an ableist and a transgressive representation of vocal dysfluency, and McGuire considers both of these aspects in detail. Again, McGuire does not entirely denounce the characterization of Dundreary as outright bad or wrong; rather, he considers the influence of this character within the play as a complicated portrayal of vocal disability.
In Chapter 5, "'I Have Cut Loose Your Stammering Tongue': Enslavement, Dysfluency, and the Vocal Metaphors of Freedom," McGuire examines fugitive-to-slavery advertisements in order to challenge the white supremacist notion that the removal of a stammer was solely a "white man's burden." In fact, it was more than that. Fugitive-to-slavery advertisements, as McGuire calls them, are ads in which "white enslavers concede the vocal particularity of self-liberated individuals to instigate their recapture" (153). Extending this point, the author contends that "discourses on race and dysfluency mutually informed one another in the period, with vocal disability understood as resulting from both the pressures of civilization apparently faced by white men and from the resistance of enslaved Black people to the violences of racial dysfluency" (153). In reality, the fugitive-to-slavery advertisements, which described a variety of vocal dysfluencies of Black enslaved people, illustrate how trauma and abuse within slavery led to the development of disabilities such as stammering, lisping, and stuttering. Altogether this chapter explores the relationship between freedom and fluency, especially how slavery impacted the speaking abilities of both enslaved and formerly enslaved people. The practice of dysfluency by enslaved and formerly enslaved people, according to McGuire, threatened the institution of slavery by being "non-compliant" and non-normative (that is, involving those who were not white and male) within this system.
The strengths of Dysfluent in Fiction: Vocal Disability & Nineteenth-Century Literature include its detailed analyses of primary texts, including fugitive-to-slavery advertisements and popular literary works. McGuire painstakingly provides evidence to support his analyses of stammering, lisping, and mutism in both real and fictional lives. However, the book is not as coherent as it might be. Chapter 5, on the fugitive-to-slavery advertisements, does not quite fit with the other chapters, which are focused more narrowly on literary texts that do not include an overt racial element. The book's coherence might have been improved had McGuire pursued the investigation of disability and race in every chapter, rather than just the last one.
McGuire's Dysfluent in Fiction altogether highlights the importance of analyzing representations of vocal dysfluency in nineteenth-century texts, especially as white supremacist, ableist assumptions, such as the pressure to speak "proper" English, continue to harm vocally dysfluent people. Using a range of sources, from realist fiction to advertisements, this monograph provides a fascinating and engaging perspective on the influence of voice in various contexts during the nineteenth century. Readers who are interested in the representation of vocal variations in nineteenth-century texts will greatly benefit from reading this book. In its discussion of dysfluency, Dysfluent in Fiction connects disability studies with Victorian studies, discovering common ground between these fields.
Links to Related Material
- Major Bagstock's Native in Dombey and Son — Nameless and Mute
- "Language Is Our Rubicon": A Review of Jennifer Esmail's Reading Victorian Deafness
Bibliography
Mcguire, Riley. Dysfluent in Fiction: Vocal Disability and Nineteenth-Century Literature . Columbus, OH: Ohio University Press, 2025.
Clare, Eli. "Stolen Bodies, Reclaimed Bodies: Disability and Queerness." Public Culture 13.3 (2001): 359-365.
Created 10 September 2025