Ableism in O Caledonia

Content note: ableism, sexism, sexual assault, physical and emotional child abuse, murder; spoilers

Caledonia was the name that the ancient Romans used for most of what is now called Scotland. This poetic name is still used today in literature and music, especially folk songs. Elspeth Barker’s 1991 novel O Caledonia begins with an epigraph from an 1805 poem by Sir Walter Scott:

“O Caledonia! stern and wild,

Meet nurse for a poetic child!”

It perfectly sets the tone for the many literary allusions in the novel, its young protagonist’s development, and the beautiful but harsh landscape. All the cultural references to Greek and Celtic mythology give a vivid sense of the setting, Janet’s imagination, and her wealthy, educated parents’ social class and values. As Maggie O’Farrell writes in the introduction and back matter, it was the only published novel by Barker, a brilliant author who died in 2022.

O Caledonia is a nuanced depiction of a lonely, bookish child’s consciousness, but it’s also consistently ableist. It depicts disabled people, particularly men with obvious, physical disabilities, as horrifying and violent. The novel never dispels this ableist impression. In fact, it foreshadows disabled men as threatening, leads up to this idea, and reinforces it in the final pages.

O’Farrell writes that O Caledonia begins with the discovery of teen, murdered Janet’s body, but it’s not a murder mystery. Janet’s thoughts and feelings up to this point are more important than her murder. I agree the murder is not the focus of the book, but it’s also significant who her murderer is. Jim, a disabled gardener on her family’s estate, murders her, and there’s no ambiguity about this. This is consistent with the novel’s characterization of disabled men, especially Jim, as horrific and sexually menacing. The novel depicts men (and again, particularly, disabled men) as a terrifying, threatening Other, in contrast to Janet.

There’s a long passage where Janet is terrified of disabled World War II veterans as a child:

“Then around the corner to fearful Institution Row, where the war-wounded lived in grim pebble-dashed houses with big square windows. If you looked in, you could see them, sitting mournfully by small electric fires or limping on crutches about the room. One lay propped upon a great heap of pillows staring unforgivingly at those who could pass by. Janet used to duck down and run past his window in case he saw her; she was afraid of his hard angry face and the shapeless shrouded rest of him. It was worse in summer when they would sit outside in the mean front garden, a strip communal to all the houses, a length of gravel punctuated by wooden benches constructed from the timber of sunken enemy ships. Some were crazed from shell shock and nodded and muttered to themselves, others displayed the magenta stumps of amputated arms and legs. One sat in a wheelchair and the bright sea breeze whisked about his empty trouser legs. But this November afternoon their windows were dark; there was not one to be seen. Janet’s spirits rose; she looked forward to the party.” (Barker 13)

This passage is full of ableist language and imagery objectifying the disabled veterans as frightening, almost nightmarish or monstrous. However, I try to read with an open mind and avoid judging characters or taking lines out of context. I hoped this long passage would lead to Janet eventually realizing she was wrong about the veterans and no longer fearing them. Instead, the book does the opposite. It reiterates the ableist descriptions and fears, until the novel’s conclusion suggests they were correct all along.

While one veteran is talking to her, Janet asks to touch the man’s amputated arm. He smiles and stares at her but does not answer. After she touches his arm, she thinks, “She had rid her life of one haunting fear. And she had known the toxic joy of power” (15). However, Janet is still afraid of visibly disabled men after this incident. Rather than empathizing with another person, getting over her fear was more like daring herself to touch a dangerous object or animal. It was about herself and her power over him, not about the man. Janet’s nanny punishes her for “talking to men,” not for being rude or asking personal questions. There’s not even condescension, pity, or an admonishment not to touch or stare at the veterans.

Later, Janet imagines God and angels visiting the disabled veterans: “wrapping them in loving warmth, bestowing that nobility on their mutilated limbs and lives, so that they, too, shone in glory. It was impossible” (18). She considers discussing this with her grandfather but can’t articulate her feelings. Children often can’t express their emotions, and Barker’s writing is nuanced. Janet may feel guilty for pitying and fearing the veterans, but her later experiences confirm to her that her ableism is justified. Here, she can’t even imagine angels and God conferring dignity on disabled people. She thinks dignity or nobility isn’t something they already innately have.

Janet’s ableist repulsion towards disabled people only deepens. When she hears a hymn in church mentioning “hobgoblin or foul fiend,” it reminds her of “hunchbacked Jim,” the gardener, and Miss Wales, another disabled servant (42). In “a pleasant dream,” Janet imagines the two disabled servants fighting each other. Janet watches calmly, “one of nature’s elect” (42). This may be satirizing the theological concept of God’s elect in Janet’s Calvinist upbringing, but it’s also literally calling her chosen by nature for being able-bodied.

Janet imagines that “Jim’s face was darkly murderous” (42). Although she’s imagining here, her fantasy ends up being strangely accurate, as Jim later murders her. In another scene, it’s implied that she sees Jim looking at porn and is horrified, although she reads porn, and SHE interrupts HIM. Disability should not be conflated with being a sexual threat. In other words, disabled people’s sexuality shouldn’t be marginalized as threatening, deviant — basically, abnormal.

I initially wondered why this short novel spent so long describing disabled people as grotesque and sinister without even implicitly refuting this impression. Then I realized the ableism was the point. O Caledonia is a Gothic novel, and ableism is often a deliberate storytelling element in Gothic fiction. Like with her family’s home, a castle, the novel uses Jim’s disability to create atmosphere, foreboding, or to try to horrify or unsettle the reader. In Gothic fiction, disabled people are also objectified to suggest their external appearances match or symbolize their evil personalities. Both approaches would be blatantly ableist.

Although it’s never specified that Janet is disabled herself, she may be. She gets motion sickness on car rides, and has many interests considered atypical for kids her age. Her peers consider her precocious, aloof, and socially awkward. For example, she tells her boarding school classmates that she loves the subjunctive tense, and they mock her for that. They, in contrast, consider academics the price they pay for sports and friendships at school.

Janet rarely makes friends, but when she does, they include Lila, an older cousin’s widow. Lila, an Eastern European immigrant, is depressed and eventually institutionalized. Janet later visits Lila in the asylum, but Janet is afraid of the other patients. She expects gratitude from Lila and the other patients for visiting there.

Janet also is the only true friend of Ellen, whom the other classmates cruelly nickname “Smellen” due to her eczema. So, I think it’s possible to read Janet as neurodivergent and relate strongly to her if you’re disabled. I had many similar experiences of feeling like an outcast in school.

Janet grows up in a sexist and ableist society. It’s particularly hostile to children and normalizes, even mandates, physical and emotional child abuse. Janet is frequently physically punished for being herself or for being unable to regulate her emotions — basically, for being a child. This is traumatic.

Janet’s parents disparage her, comparing her negatively to her siblings, whom they openly prefer. Janet even overhears her mother, Vera, implying to a friend that Vera dislikes Janet. Although Janet may not realize it, the physical and emotional trauma shapes her withdrawn personality. Her father, Hector, considers girls “an inferior form of boy” (55). He doesn’t anticipate she’d be constantly sexually harassed as the only girl student in a “boys’” classical school.

This 2022 article by Chelsea Jack Fitzgerald was the only mention of O Caledonia and ableism I could find, but unlike mine, Fitzgerald’s essay doesn’t call the book ableist. I agree with Fitzgerald’s observation “We are meant to see Jim as a villain.”

As Fitzgerald explains, Janet generally feels less judged by non-human animals than by her fellow humans. This is another trait many neurodivergent people may find relatable. I agree that the affinity between humans and other animals is important to the novel and valuing creatures for their supposed intelligence is dangerous, contributing to ableism.

Devaluing animals is violent in other ways too. It’s also a form of cultural imperialism that white Christians exert over religions that reject hierarchies of humans over other animals. I tried to say this on my blog in 2020.

Fitzgerald’s LARB article points out “man-made” disabilities, but does it matter to the book’s ableism whether the disabilities are “man-made?” Janet is horrified when she learns about the atrocities of war, but they’re not the only cause of disability in the book. Jim’s disability may be congenital.

Janet never moves beyond her initial, ableist horror of the veterans. When Janet is in high school, she meets a disabled veteran who remembers her. Presumably, he’s the same man whose arm she touched when she was a child. The man gropes Janet, grabbing her breast with his “wizened purple stumps” (179). Non-disabled men and boys also sexually harass and threaten her, but this incident uniquely horrifies Janet. According to the novel, the sexual assault is made worse by his limb difference — as if him having fingers would make this any less violating! This incident occurs only a few pages before Janet’s murder.

Jim murders Janet on the last page of the novel. Alone in her parents’ house at night, Janet performs a spell to make her crush, a boy named Desmond, fall in love with her. When a mysterious man arrives, she imagines the spell has somehow summoned Desmond, and runs out to greet him. The man, who turns out to be Jim, exclaims, “You filthy wee whore” and stabs her to death (188).

Janet’s murder is the culmination of her earlier fears of disabled men. At the end of the novel, it seems that Janet’s earlier, escalating encounters with disabled men, including Jim, led up to and foreshadowed this moment. The novel implies Janet’s specific fears of disabled men were not an unfounded prejudice. They were more like an eerie premonition, which turned out to be correct, and she was right to fear Jim, the unnamed vet, and other people like them. I’d expect a novel from 1991 to have outdated, ableist language. However, in O Caledonia, the narrative sets up the ableism and then tries to justify it. The ending suggests Janet’s fears of disabled men, particularly Jim, were completely warranted.

Work cited:

Barker, Elspeth. O Caledonia: A Novel. New York: Scribner, 2021 (orig. published by Hamish Hamilton Ltd. in Great Britain in 1991).