Valerie O’Brien’s article, “'A Genius for Unreality': Neurodiversity in Elizabeth Bowen's Eva Trout," from the Journal of Modern Literature's newest issue, is now available on JSTOR & Project MUSE. Below, Valerie discusses how using neurotypical capacities to define personhood distorts and neglects the complex interior lives of neurodivergent subjects.
When I first read Elizabeth Bowen’s idiosyncratic final novel, Eva Trout, I was drawn to Eva’s way of seeing the world. Uncomfortable with language and sensitive to sound, Eva focuses instead on the visual. Her mind translates abstract ideas, such as time and love, into colored patterns and concrete images. Eva often sees obliquely—she watches the sun rise through its reflection in a mirror and detects a swan’s movement in the rippling of light on her ceiling. These descriptions of visual imagery frequently convey Eva’s sense of wonder: “How the short days glistened in the transparent woods!” In a novel that offers only fragmentary and inconsistent insight into its enigmatic characters’ interior lives, Eva’s singular visual perspective produces some of the novel’s most striking and poetic descriptive passages.
I was surprised to learn that not everyone saw Eva this way.
Indeed, she is often perceived by both scholars and other characters as unthinking, incomplete, and two-dimensional. Characters frequently describe Eva as stone-like, that is, inflexible, monolithic, emotionless, “dumb as a rock”—descriptions which scholarship has not always questioned. Reflecting on the difference between these views of Eva and my own, I realized that many of the behaviors that have led characters and critics to such judgments are commonly associated with neurodiversity, or naturally-occurring cognitive variance: Eva avoids eye contact, struggles to express herself in conversation, dislikes loud noises, and has difficulty forming relationships.
I became interested in reading Eva in terms of cognitive difference to promote alternative ways of understanding her character that highlight her complexity and depth. My article shows that Eva’s neurodivergent behaviors do not preclude her from having a rich inner life—one which the novel itself provides access to through descriptions of Eva’s perception of and imaginative connection to her surroundings.
The stakes of how we understand Eva extend well beyond interpretations of Bowen’s writing. Stereotypes of neurodivergent individuals as flat, incomplete, unfeeling, and inaccessible—as not fully human—persist into the twenty-first century. Thus, the question Eva poses late in the novel—“What is a person?”—remains relevant to debates around both historical and contemporary attitudes about neurodiversity. Recognizing the complex interior lives of neurodivergent subjects requires interrogating how neurotypical values shape prevailing conceptions of the human, given that neurotypical capacities for language, reasoning, and emotion are still often used to define personhood.
When we reject the conflation of neurotypicality with personhood and understand Eva as cognitively and emotionally complex, we see that the novel both examines and challenges common attitudes about cognitive difference, decades before the term neurodiversity had been coined. Eva’s mind and responses to her environment—what first drew me to the novel—illustrate the truth of her personhood.
Although neurodivergent experience remains seriously underrepresented, fiction and memoir of recent decades increasingly promote more inclusive conceptions of phenomenological experience. The number of works that represent neurodiversity, and autism in particular, has grown significantly in recent decades, and includes memoirs such as Tito Mukhopadhyay’s How Can I Talk If My Lips Don’t Move? and Naoki Higashida’s The Reason I Jump, and novels such as Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. These works have emerged alongside a rise in autism advocacy promoting a shift from deficit- to difference-based characterizations of neurodiversity. In portraying the cognitive processes and phenomenological realities of neurodivergent individuals, this growing body of literature is expanding narrative structures and reimagining how stories can be told. These overdue stylistic changes open our eyes to different ways of seeing and being in the world.
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Valerie O’Brien is a PhD candidate in English literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Read “'A Genius for Unreality': Neurodiversity in Elizabeth Bowen's Eva Trout," for free now on JSTOR!
This post is part of a series that takes a closer look at the scholarship behind IU Press Journals. Primarily written by journal editors and contributors, posts may respond to articles, provide background, document the development process, or explain why scholars are excited about the journal, theme, or article.
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