Davis and the Bell Curve: Normalcy, Literature, and the Eugenic Gaze

Lennard J. Davis’s paper “Constructing Normalcy: The Bell Curve, the Novel, and the Invention of the Disabled Body in the Nineteenth Century” offers a penetrating critique of how the concept of “normalcy” emerged historically—not as a timeless instinct, but as a statistical and cultural construct shaped by industrial modernity, scientific rationalism, and literary form. Davis shows that the language of “normal,” “norm,” and “average” only entered European discourse in the mid-nineteenth century, coinciding with the rise of industrial capitalism and the bureaucratic state. Prior to this shift, dominant ideals were rooted in mythology and classical aesthetics—unattainable perfections that individuals aspired to but were not measured against. The emergence of the norm, by contrast, introduced a measurable middle, a statistical average that redefined deviation as deficiency.

This transformation was not merely semantic—it was infrastructural. The development of statistics, particularly through figures like Adolphe Quetelet and Francis Galton, provided the epistemic tools to quantify human variation. Quetelet’s concept of l’homme moyen (“the average man”) framed the median human as a social ideal, aligning with bourgeois values of moderation and balance. Galton, building on this foundation, fused statistical reasoning with evolutionary theory to promote eugenics—a project aimed at improving humanity by eliminating deviation. Under Galton’s influence, the statistical norm became not just a descriptive tool but a prescriptive weapon. Disabilities, poverty, mental illness, and racialized identities were reclassified as biological threats to national fitness. The bell curve, once a neutral graph, became a moral landscape: those furthest from its leading edge were marked for correction, exclusion, or elimination.

Davis’s analysis extends beyond science into literature, revealing how the nineteenth-century novel functioned as a cultural technology of norm enforcement. Realist and naturalist narratives, particularly those influenced by Zola’s biological determinism, mirrored the statistical logic of heredity and deviation. Protagonists were often cast as embodiments of normative identity—white, able-bodied, middle-class—while disabled or physically marked characters were relegated to villainy, marginality, or symbolic excess. The novel, in Davis’s view, became a kind of social report: a narrative form that reproduced the average, reinforced the norm, and pathologized the Other. Readers were trained to identify with the “normal” and to view deviation as a narrative problem to be resolved or erased.

Central to Davis’s critique is the concept of the eugenic gaze—a way of seeing that categorizes bodies through the lens of statistical and hereditary ideology. This gaze does not operate in isolation; it is embedded in scientific discourse, public policy, and cultural representation. It groups disabled individuals with other marginalized populations—criminals, the poor, racialized subjects—under the rubric of deviation. It frames illness not as variation but as defect, a hereditary flaw to be managed or eliminated for the health of the nation. In doing so, it generates subjects and codifies ways of seeing: it teaches society to perceive difference as danger, and to equate visibility with pathology.

Importantly, Davis does not treat this gaze as a relic of the past. He warns that its logic persists in contemporary systems where statistical norms continue to govern who is seen, who is valued, and who is excluded. The eugenic gaze has not disappeared; it has mutated into new forms of surveillance, optimization, and spectacle.

In this context, Davis’s invocation of Hitler is not rhetorical excess but historical reckoning. He writes: “What Hitler did in developing a hideous policy of eugenics was just to implement the theories of the British and American eugenicists.” The genocidal policies of the Third Reich, Davis argues, were not aberrations but logical extensions of the eugenic ideologies already circulating in Anglo-American science and culture industries. Hitler’s language in Mein Kampf, which describes the elimination of the weak and diseased, echoes the rhetoric of Galton, Bell, and others. Galton coined the term eugenics which, in his framing, aimed for “race betterment” and which he further defined as follows: “the science of improving stock, which...takes cognizance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had.” The bell curve, once a symbol of scientific neutrality, became a scaffold for atrocity.

In sum, Davis’s essay reveals that normalcy and disability are not natural categories but historical constructions—deeply entangled with the rise of statistics, the logic of eugenics, and the narrative machinery of literature. His work challenges us to confront the ethical stakes of how we define, measure, and represent human difference. It is not enough to critique the past; we must interrogate the present forms of the gaze, the curve, and the story.

 

Beneath this spectacle lies a deeper violence—an ontological sorting that precedes and exceeds representation. The eugenic gaze does not merely categorize bodies; it adjudicates being. It draws the line between the fully human and the subhuman, between lives worth living and lives deemed  unproductive, or ungrievable. Each act of sorting is an act of erasure—a foreclosure of futures, a denial of complexity, a refusal to see beyond the metric. Statistical ontology—the fiction of the average—underpins this violence. To be normal is to be statistically central, but this centrality is a construct, a tool of exclusion masquerading as objectivity. Those who fall outside the bell curve are not simply different; they are rendered ontologically suspect. Their existence becomes a problem to be solved, a deviation to be corrected, a cost to be minimized. To name a condition is to fix a subject in place, often within a regime of surveillance, organized abandonment, and moral panic. This gaze asks what a body costs, what it risks, what it threatens. It is a gaze that sees through the lens of liability.

Copilot