Although Guy Vanderhaeghe’s novel The Englishman’s Boy has been the subject of much critical attention since its publication in 1996, little notice has focused on the significance of disability in the book. As the substantial number of recent studies concerning disability in literature suggests, disability has exceeded the boundaries of medical and rehabilitative discourse. Indeed, works such as Narrative Prosthesis and Extraordinary Bodies have placed disability as a vital area of investigation in the humanities. However, disability has also occupied a problematic position in literature. In their discussion of disability in narrative art, David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder argue that while “disability has been used throughout history as a crutch upon which literary narratives lean for their representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight,” disability and bodily difference in many works have gone largely unnoticed by critics (49). The Englishman’s Boy is one such work, and this essay is an attempt to rescue disability in the book from this void in the criticism. The book is particularly exciting for a study of disability in narrative art as it is rich with representations of both disability and bodily difference. Although there are several characters in the book with disabilities, my focus is Harry Vincent, a young Canadian writer with a congenital limp trying to make his way in the movie business in Hollywood in 1923. In this essay, I argue that Vanderhaeghe uses Harry Vincent’s disability as a narrative device to critique the construction of masculinity in historical representations of the expansion of the American West and in the early American western. This concept of masculinity has been established largely at the expense of historical and contemporary marginalized figures. I concentrate here on the ways in which the novel interacts with assumptions about masculinity inherent in the early American western and with various stereotypes of persons with disabilities. Throughout the novel, the meaning of Harry’s disability shifts as he strives to find a place in the masculine world of Hollywood and as both Damon Ira Chance and Shorty McAdoo make their own assumptions about him as a disabled man in their desire for narrative control over the story of the Cypress Hills Massacre.

Suggesting the importance of nationality to his identity, Alison Calder writes that at the beginning of his narrative Harry is characterized as a “representative Canadian” (96). However, Harry’s Canadianness cannot be marked on his body, and he recognizes that most people do not see a difference between Americans and Canadians. Mitchell and Snyder note the “pervasiveness of disability as a device of characterization in narrative art” and argue that disability has the power to affect all other aspects of identity and to lend distinction to a character that differentiates him or her from other characters (9). Vanderhaeghe complicates Harry’s identity as the solitary Canadian in his narrative with a further marker of identity: his congenital limp. Although “Harry can choose whether or not to reveal himself as a Canadian” (Calder 97), he is, in fact, unable to make this same choice with his disability; it is an always apparent part of his identity and affects his navigation through spaces. It is Harry’s disability and the various meanings his disabled body invites that affect him most significantly in his progress through Hollywood. He alternately uses and denies the impact of his disability throughout his navigation of the city, and he must negotiate tensions in notions of masculinity and assumptions about the disabled male body.

Early in his narrative, Harry tells the reader how the meaning of his disability has shifted throughout his life in fundamental ways, as can be seen in the decisions he later makes while working in Hollywood. Disabled from birth, Harry has had a sense of being on the outside of normative male society his entire life. When war broke out in 1914, his disability saved him from the violence of the battlefield. He tells the reader that if “a bum leg ever had a silver lining, my luck was that being crippled preserved me from the slaughter in Flanders, probably saved my life” (Vanderhaeghe 33). His disability shielded him from the violence of non-disabled masculinity and destructive cultural norms such as war. However, his disability had a different meaning for his teachers. He reveals that “I hated those female teachers whose faces went sweetly vacuous and temporizingly benign when they turned to me. Although they didn’t mean them to, those looks thrust me on the outside. Outside became a state of mind” (33). R.W. Connell writes in Masculinities that masculinity is most often thought “to be inherent in a male body or to express something about a male body” (45). If masculinity is expressed in the “male” activities that Harry is exempt from by virtue of his disability, his body conveys his exclusion from normative male society. Excluded from traditional male activities and rites of passage by his disability and treated with an emasculating pity, Harry later takes the weight of this “outsiderness” with him to Hollywood, where he must learn how to “adequately embody and negotiate masculinity” (Shuttleworth 121) as a disabled man living and working in this hyper-masculine world.

Bonnie Smith points out in her introduction to Gendering Disability that the “complexity of disability is compounded when set in dialogue with issues of gender” (1). The Englishman’s Boy is essentially a masculine book. Harry’s first-person narrative depicts the intersection of tropes of masculinity found in the myth of the American West and the iconic American cowboy with those found in the American western of the early twentieth century, a genre that David Lusted writes can be “understood as male” (63). Harry’s narrative evokes a time in the history of movies when the western emphasized (male) ability, strength, and potency and the figure of the movie cowboy suggested ruggedly individualistic masculinity. These westerns influenced moviegoers’ deepest concerns about masculinity and marginality. Smith also argues that the “cultural meanings of disability, like the cultural meanings of gender, produce human actors, who act out all the rules and themes of disability and likewise the rules of gender” (2). During his time in Hollywood, Harry acts out both his disability and his gender in order to further his progress through Hollywood.

Although Harry cannot physically conceal his disability, he can, in fact, choose to perform it in order to seek the information that will keep him a part of what he sees as the masculine world of the Hollywood western. Early in his search for Shorty, Harry’s disability aids him in The Waterhole, a Hollywood-cowboy bar. As Harry enters the bar, the cowboys see that he is not one of them by his dress but also by his prominent limp. Suspicious of the outsider, the bartender tells Harry that Shorty “ain’t going to thank me if you’re police” (Vanderhaeghe 55). Rosemarie Garland-Thomson writes in “The Politics of Staring: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography” that “the history of disabled people in the Western world is in part the history of being on display, of being visually conspicuous” and that “staring registers the perception of difference and gives meaning to impairment by marking it as aberrant” (56). Relying on the attention that his pronounced limp would have attracted as he walked in, Harry uses the inevitability of this stare and the assumptions it elicits about his body and ability; he responds, “It’s customary to hire cops with two good legs. You saw me cross the bar” (Vanderhaeghe 55). Harry transgresses the boundary of the bar by performing his disability. He uses his limp, making very pointed reference to it, to convince the bartender that he could not possibly be a police office and that, therefore, he is not a threat. The figure of the docile, non-threatening disabled person, a representation regularly advanced by Hollywood and, indeed, by the westerns of the time, works to Harry’s advantage here.

As Harry performs his disability, he also attempts to perform his masculinity to further his progress through Hollywood. However, Russell P. Shuttleworth notes that the “notion of embodying masculinity refers to the incorporation of masculine standards and dispositions and also the sense of masculinity conveyed by one’s corporality and social performances in-the-world” and that “men with impairments that restrict their bodies” may not be able to “effect a normative masculine performance” (167). Harry attempts to perform masculinity with a body that has been inscribed, as Paul McIlvenny writes, with a cultural assumption of “failure or the inability to act or perform” (101). After he has found Shorty, through repeated performance of his disability Harry attempts to create a connection with him. With the use of guns, he buys into the romanticized image of the cowboy and the cultural assumptions about masculinity and constrained violence. Even with a gun that, as Shorty says, one just has to “‘point and squeeze,’” Harry consistently misses the target and feels as though a weight is dragging on his arm (Vanderhaeghe 161). Alluding to the instability of the masculinity advanced by the Hollywood western, Lee Clark Mitchell, in his book Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film, observes that the figure of the cowboy adopted by the western became the “instrument-body upon which Westerns practiced their favourite tune — the construction of masculinity, the making of men” (27). Part of this “making of men” necessitated the use of guns. The cowboy in the Hollywood western is a figure who, through his use of and expertise with guns, is recognized as manly. Suggesting Harry’s unsuitability for the space of Hollywood, the Hollywood western and, therefore, the masculinity implied by the genre, Shorty tells him, “Lose the gun, Harry. . . . It ain’t for you” (Vanderhaeghe 161). The cowboy in the Hollywood western is a man who knows how to fire a gun, and Harry cannot access this masculinity through the use of a gun. Harry is marked by his disability and positioned on the margins of the masculinity valued in Hollywood at the time and reinforced in the public venue of the western.

However, Harry occupies a shifting position on the margins of disability. Later in the novel, at a party at Chance’s mansion, Harry’s limp has the potential to push him further to the margins and he again attempts to perform masculinity in order to negate the impact of his disability. When he is unwilling to have sex with a Lillian Gish looka-like, the girl immediately identifies his limp as the reason for his reluctance. She asks him, “Why? Because of your leg? I saw you limping” (Vanderhaeghe 248). The implication here is that Harry cannot perform sexually, cannot be a “real man,” because of his disability. McIlvenny writes that the disabled male body is “one that, unusually for males in Western societies, is often excused or excluded from carnal knowledge” (104), and Shuttleworth argues that “masculine embodiment is also symbolically linked to the image of the functional or potent phallus in the larger cultural imagery” (170). Harry is not culturally located in society’s construction of manhood, and he is exempt from carnal knowledge by virtue of his disability. When Chance later comes to the door of the room looking for him, Harry, before he answers, instructs the girl to lie on the bed with her skirt in disarray and unbuckles his belt in a performance of masculinity. Harry’s performances of masculinity and disability suggest the instability of both of these identity categories — categories that are often assumed to be transparent.

Garland-Thomson argues that “literature tends to imbue any visual differences with significance that obscures the complexity of their bearers” (Extraordinary 11). Very early in his narrative, as he anxiously waits for Fitzsimmons to collect him for his first meeting with Chance, Harry reflects on his own appearance. He tells the reader that he is a “very ordinary, common young man whose only uncommon feature can’t be detected in the glass at the moment. My limp” (Vanderhaeghe 7). Although this “uncommon feature” cannot be noticed as he sits in his office chain-smoking, its importance becomes evident once he begins to physically navigate Hollywood. Early in this first meeting, Chance tells Harry that he first noticed him moving through Hollywood: “I had a feeling about you. I used to watch you crossing the road. There was something about you” (20). Reflecting on Chance’s first impression of him, Harry surmises that it is, in fact, his disability that has gained him Chance’s attention. He writes that he feels that it was his disability and the sense of “outsiderness” it developed in him that first interested Chance: “that’s what Chance’s intuition detected in me, that, and a sense of grievance. Because of Chance, for the first time in my life I felt myself gratefully moving to the centre of something important, admitted to an inner circle” (33). Harry’s limp becomes the dominant feature of his identity to the other characters in the book and to himself.

While Lennard Davis writes that “it is unusual for a main character to be a person with disabilities” (Enforcing 41), the reader of The Englishman’s Boy sees Harry Vincent, a first-person narrator and a person with a disability, actively engaging with and contesting assumptions about masculinity and disability as he navigates Hollywood. However, this is as much power as Vanderhaeghe is willing to give him. Although Harry is a main character, his disability is not entirely “for” him. He becomes “enveloped by the otherness that [his] disability signifies in the text” (Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary 10). Vanderhaeghe uses Harry’s disability and other characters’ reactions to it in his assertions about the instability of historical representation. Ato Quayson writes in Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation that “the first and perhaps most obvious literary representation of disability is that in which it acts as some form of ethical background to the actions of other characters, or as a means of testing or enhancing their moral standing” (36). Harry’s obvious disability does work to enhance the characters of Shorty and Chance, the novel’s two most morally opposed men, and to reveal their positions regarding narrative truthfulness. The voices of Shorty and Chance illustrate two significant positions presented in the novel — one reliable, the other unreliable — and each man clearly interrogates the potential for narrative truth and, certainly, historical narrative generally. Importantly, their individual relationships to Harry — and their understanding of his disability — act as a moral backdrop to their actions.

How Harry is read by each of these men is a result of how each reads his disability. Both Shorty and Chance feel that Harry’s disability gives him some insight into, or understanding of, their intentions regarding their narrative of the Cypress Hills Massacre. The meanings ascribed to Harry’s disability by Chance and Shorty have resulted from the stereotypes regularly advanced in western cultures. Lennard Davis writes in Bending Over Backwards that “even ‘normal’ bodies signify moral traits as well as the traits ascribed to disabled characters. Beautiful (and noble, gentle, or bourgeois) characters should be morally virtuous; crippled or deformed people are either worthy of pity or are villains motivated by bitterness or envy” (45). Vanderhaeghe reduces Harry’s interaction with the novel’s main characters to a function of his disability, as both Chance and Shorty make assumptions about Harry based upon their understanding of his disabled body. Although Selena, Wylie, and Miles are included in the text in order to illustrate Shorty’s character and to emphasize his later disillusionment with Hollywood and the United States, this association with marginalized characters further explains why he eventually relents and tells Harry his story. Harry’s position as a disabled male in the masculine atmosphere of Hollywood during the western’s heyday, combined with Shorty’s behaviour toward other marginalized characters based on bodily difference, gives Shorty’s revelations to Harry a purpose that goes beyond financial compensation. Shorty sees Harry as a person existing on the margins like Selena, Wylie, Miles, and, indeed, himself, and he sees Harry as worthy of his trust. Chance’s reading of Harry’s disability, on the other hand, puts Harry at the other end of the spectrum of signification; Chance places Harry in the position of the limping villain and reads Harry’s disability as an indication of a moral deficit or evil. As he watches Harry move around Hollywood, Chance thinks that he senses something in Harry, something that he can use to further his cinematic intentions. He uses Harry’s position on the margins of normative male society to gain the information he wants from other characters and assumes Harry’s willingness to play this part.

However, Harry is a complex character, and his disability is a complicating factor in his identity. He is not the perpetually innocent disabled character, nor is he the recognizably wicked disabled character. He is far too complicated to fit these ready-made and convenient disability types. Harry, at once burdened by his desire for truth, his need to be part of the “inner circle” Chance represents, and his obligations to his ailing mother, occupies a shifting position in the book and is never one stereotype. He destabilizes categories through his use of his disability to advance his career in Hollywood, his desire to be true to Shorty’s story, and his final recognition of the importance of narrative truthfulness.

Ultimately, Harry succeeds in obtaining Shorty’s story for Chance as well as for himself. However, the story Chance wants is not the counter-narrative Harry has been intending. Chance’s speech after Harry has written Shorty’s story for him highlights Harry’s complicity in Chance’s master plan. While the meaning of Harry’s disability has shifted across the spaces of his narrative, it shifts most significantly in light of Chance’s final speech. Chance, who feels the ending of Harry’s screenplay is not powerful enough because it depicts the enemy as human, tells him that the “sick hate the healthy. The defeated hate the victor. The inferior always resent the superior. They sicken with resentment, they brood, fantasize revenge, plot. They attempt to turn everything on its head; try to impose feelings of guilt on the healthy and the strong” (Vanderhaeghe 251). He continues his speech as Harry becomes increasingly aware of what it means for him: “The resentment of the weak is a terrible thing, Harry. The inferior always refuse the judgments of nature and history. They are a danger to the strong and to themselves. Resentment blinds them to reality, blinds them even to their own self-interest” (251). Harry, who has previously identified himself as an outsider, realizes that his disability makes him one of Chance’s targets in this long list of sick, weak, and inferior individuals, and therefore places him outside of the narrative Chance wants to create. Chance’s speech forces upon Harry the realization of how he has used his disability in his negotiation through Hollywood. To Harry’s horror, Chance, the novel’s quintessential “bad guy,” says to him, “you can’t deny your responsibility, pretend you had no hand in this. Even Judas played a part in Christ’s teaching” (297). Harry, while he is himself a marginalized man in Hollywood, has taken advantage of Shorty, another figure associated with bodily difference. Daniela Janes writes in “Truth and History: Representing the Aura in The Englishman’s Boy” that Shorty exists literally and physically on the margins of society (85). At the point when Harry finds him and transcribes his story, Shorty is a marginalized person in Hollywood; although many of the cowboys in Hollywood revere him and his legend, Shorty, Herb Wyile suggests, is “an old man who has reached the end of a career as a Hollywood cowboy” (24). He is a man who has been morally beaten down by a colonialism that functions on the backs of the marginalized and an industry in which the process of making movies demands that the able-bodied person become disabled.

The western has a long history of constructing, comparing, and deconstructing images of normality and abnormality. The instability of the masculine ideal focused in the cowboy is suggested by the fact that this ideal often requires a contrast to be effective. One of the best-known occurrences of this character type is seen in Chester Goode from the long-running television western, Gunsmoke (1955-75). Chester Goode has to stand in contrast to Matt Dillon, the larger-than-life marshal who is willing to use violence against his adversaries. To account for Chester’s non-violent approach to life, the producers of the show asked actor Dennis Weaver to develop a “minor” disability for the character, and Weaver presented them with Chester’s now famous limp (Brioux 167). While Chester became television’s first regular character “with any kind of a physical disability” (167), he nevertheless respects the conventions of the western genre by highlighting the masculinity of the marshal through the supposed limitations of his own disabled body. Reinhold Kramer, in “Nationalism, the West, and The Englishman’s Boy,” compares Vanderhaeghe’s novel to westerns like Rio Grande (1). This comparison is, indeed, appropriate, but another John Wayne movie, Rio Bravo, engages with disability and the construction of able-bodied masculinity. Lee Clark Mitchell writes that the masculinity of the cowboy is “confirmed by contrast with ‘the comic old man’” whose limp and ill temper “represent an alternative” to the cowboy (161). Rio Bravo’s “Stumpy” is the comic old man with a limp and bad temper. Just as Harry’s reference to his limp in The Waterhole calls attention to stereotypes of the disabled person’s non-threatening nature and inability to act while emphasizing the masculinity of the movie cowboys, Stumpy highlights the masculinity of the cowboys played by John Wayne, Dean Martin, and Ricky Nelson. When he is told that he cannot participate in the important gunfight, Stumpy responds with “You don’t gotta tell a cripple twice” (Hawks). However, he eventually disregards these instructions, joins the battle, and saves the day. He is there as a contrast to the masculine ideal but disrupts this ideal by showing himself to be capable despite his disability and, therefore, poses a threat to the construction of both masculinity and disability.

Although Harry does not participate in the equivalent of a western-style gunfight in The Englishman’s Boy, he does evoke the frequently used character of the disabled sidekick of the western and calls attention to stereotypes of disabled persons and persons with bodily differences. After the momentous shootout in which Shorty kills Chance, Harry, demoralized by Hollywood and by the realization of his unscrupulous behaviour, returns to his home in Saskatchewan. He recognizes that he is out of place in Hollywood and, according to Calder, “flees what he sees as a corrupt Hollywood for what he hopes will be a more meaningful existence in his native Canada” (97). However, Mitchell and Snyder note that “a marred appearance cannot ultimately be allowed to return home unscathed” (56). Harry, Shorty, and Wylie — men on the social margins of Hollywood — are relegated to the literal margins. In the end, Harry returns to Canada, Wylie commits suicide, and Shorty disappears. Harry is neither cured nor killed and his disability stays with him throughout the remainder of his life; it grows “a little worse each year” (Vanderhaeghe 326). He returns to “legitimate” history and consults Canadian history books in an attempt to find a truthful narrative of the Cypress Hills Massacre. He finds “a sentence here, a paragraph there” that condemn “the wolfers as American cutthroats, thieves, and renegades” with no mention of the Canadian cutthroats involved in the massacre and very little mention of the native people most devastated by the slaughter (326). Nor does he find the marginalized figures that played an integral part in Shorty’s narrative.

Populated as it is with disabled and otherwise marginalized characters, The Englishman’s Boy has much to say about bodily differences and gender. Throughout his narrative, Harry very consciously uses his disability in his progress through Hollywood, and ultimately it becomes difficult for the assumed normative reader to pity him. The shifting nature of Harry’s identity as a disabled man destabilizes normative, simplistic, and/or traditional constructions of the experience of disability and, thereby, implicitly disrupts the construction of masculinity found in historical representations of the American West and in early Hollywood. Quayson writes that disabled characters “establish affinities between historically peripheral figures” in order to reclaim the stories of the marginal figures upon whom history rests (86). Harry’s difference in Hollywood is produced through his disabled body. He symbolizes for Vanderhaeghe otherness, and he speaks for the marginal characters in history, the characters that have been “left out” of history or demonized in historical representations. There are opposing meanings ascribed to Harry’s disability and identity as a disabled man, and these meanings provide many implications for the reader’s understanding of the text and what it has to say about history. The dual focus on disability and masculinity informs the reader’s understanding of the difficulties inherent in representations of history.

A study of disability and bodily difference in The Englishman’s Boy brings together a multiplicity of conflicting values. Harry’s narrative, as it illustrates the struggle between the powerful and the weak, reveals that the masculine aura of the early Hollywood western and of Hollywood itself obscures an industry in which the marginalized are exploited. Although he is unable to meaningfully establish Shorty’s story as a counter-narrative to the story Hollywood tells about the history of the American West, Harry’s own narrative presents an alternative depiction of the movie business in Hollywood in the early part of the twentieth century and of the period’s hypermasculine western. Both Shorty’s narrative of his life in the late nineteenth century and Harry’s narrative of his time in Hollywood in 1923 reveal the importance of bodily difference to the expansion of the American West and to the movie industry in the early twentieth century. In its exploration of Harry’s position as a disabled man in Hollywood and of the vastly differing narratives of the Cypress Hills Massacre, The Englishman’s Boy demonstrates the inadequacies of narrative representations for telling complete historical truth. Vanderhaeghe presents narrative reliability as subject to changing degrees of intent and motivation, and Harry’s narrative adds an additional and integral layer to his critique of historical representation. Vanderhaeghe uses this depiction of disability to expose the instability of the construction of non-disabled masculinity supported by historical representations of the American West and epitomized in the figure of the American cowboy. Through his depiction of Harry Vincent, a disabled narrator, Vanderhaeghe suggests the complexity of historical narratives and presents the reader with a commentary on the indiscriminate influence of the powerful over the weak. The Englishman’s Boy reminds the reader that much in history is built on the experience of the marginalized.