Disfigured, p.1
Disfigured, page 1
DISFIGURED
ON FAIRY TALES, DISABILITY, AND MAKING SPACE
AMANDA LEDUC
COACH HOUSE BOOKS, TORONTO
copyright © Amanda Leduc, 2020
first edition
Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also gratefully acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Title: Disfigured : on fairy tales, disability, and making space / Amanda Leduc.
Names: Leduc, Amanda, author.
Series: Exploded views.
Description: Series statement: Exploded views
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2019014453X | Canadiana (ebook)
20190144564 | ISBN 9781552453957 (softcover) | ISBN 9781770566057 (PDF) | ISBN 9781770566040 (EPUB)
Subjects: LCSH: Fairy tales—History and criticism. | LCSH: Disabilities in literature. | LCSH: People with disabilities in literature.
Classification: LCC PN3437 .L43 2020 | DDC 398/.3561—dc23
Disfigured is available as an ebook: ISBN 978 1 77056 604 0 (EPUB), ISBN 978 1 77056 605 7 (PDF).
Purchase of the print version of this book entitles you to a free digital copy. To claim your ebook of this title, please email sales@chbooks.com with proof of purchase. (Coach House Books reserves the right to terminate the free download offer at any time.)
For Dorothy, who showed me the path into the woods;
For Jael, who helped me to see that I was brave enough to follow it;
And for all of my disabled brothers and sisters, who held my hands so that I did not go down the path alone.
No one ever sees Sophocles’ play as a drama about a cripple and a blind man fighting over Thebes.
– Tobin Siebers
Your once-silken voice will desert you, your legs
will make every step on land a torture.
There will come a time when you miss
the seaweed and seals, your old ways,
your old body. Now fit for neither land
nor sea, your sacrifice long in the past now.
Comb your hair, which keeps growing,
though you’ve lost your prince.
You know the time is coming
where you’ll pay the price
for your short time in the sun.
– Jeannine Hall Gailey
Introduction
Rather appropriately, the idea for this book came to me while I was in the forest. In the summer of 2018 I had the extraordinary good fortune to participate in a three-week writing retreat at Hedgebrook Farm, on Whidbey Island off the coast of Seattle. I was working on a novel, and after a particularly challenging day took myself out to the woods to try and find some solace. There was a walking stick at the front door of my cottage, and I took it without thinking, then set off toward the back of the property. Somewhere at the far north end of the farm was a blackberry bush, and I was eager to reach it and fill my hands with berries.
As I walked, I thought idly about how much easier going it was with the walking stick – an inanimate companion to help me along through all of the forest’s dips and swells and hollows. It was helpful even on the paved ground closer to my residence. With the walking stick in my hand, I felt sure of myself, confident. It balanced my weight as I shifted from foot to foot in a way that was thrillingly surprising.
Does this mean I should use a cane in regular life? I wondered as I made my way to the blackberries. Would it be helpful? How would that change the way I move through the world?
I don’t use a cane in my day-to-day. I have mild cerebral palsy and spastic hemiplegia, and though I walk with a visible limp, my balance has been good enough, for my first three and a half decades, to allow me to walk unaided.
But I do stare at the ground when I walk, a fact that I was completely unaware of until a chiropodist pointed it out at an appointment when I was twenty-seven. It took a few more years for me to realize that I stare at the ground because the ground is full of danger – unpredictable and capricious, with gaps between concrete blocks, uneven bricks, cracks in the sidewalk. If I do not pay attention to where my feet are all the time, it’s pretty much guaranteed that I will fall at some point in my walking.
A cane, I thought, would probably be helpful.
For many of us with physical disabilities, the forest is often a dangerous place to be. There’s no hope of taking a wheelchair into the trees unless there’s a clearly marked and flattened path; it can be difficult to navigate a forest even with a guide dog at your side. I’d wager that the forest presents trouble perhaps even for those whose disabilities are often deemed invisible – it can be a dark place, filled with all manner of smells and sensory onslaughts, a place where even the able-bodied can lose themselves.
A princess in a wheelchair would have trouble finding those blackberries, I thought as I crept through the bushes. And then I stopped, briefly, and smiled. A princess in a wheelchair? Whoever heard of such a thing?
But by the time I reached the blackberry bush, that unknown princess in her wheelchair was all I could think about. That princess, and the seven dwarfs who helped Snow White, and Rumpelstiltskin, and the ugliness of the Beast in ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ the evil queen in ‘Snow White’ who transforms herself into a hunchbacked old woman, the prince who goes blind after the witch casts Rapunzel from her tower, the princess who falls into a long, enchanted sleep. The witch with the crutch in ‘Hansel and Gretel,’ the stepsisters who get their eyes plucked out by doves in ‘Aschenputtel’ – the Brothers Grimm version of ‘Cinderella’ – and all the ugly princes and princesses who gain the throne by their cunning and then are made or revealed to be beautiful after all.
And suddenly I was no longer alone in the forest; suddenly I was thinking about these connections, disability and fairy tales, how obvious, how had I not considered these things before?
This needed to be an essay, I thought. But no doubt it was already an essay; no doubt the link between fairy tales and disability had been written about a million times before. There was so much in there that one could write about. People far smarter than I had no doubt already done it, and done it well. I filled my soul with blackberries and went back to my cottage. I went back to working on the novel.
I also kept thinking about that long stretch of moments in the forest. Disability and fairy tales. Disability in fairy tales. When I got home I did some research and found surprisingly little on the topic; sure that I was missing something, I dug a little harder. My digging brought me Ann Schmiesing and her wonderful book Disability, Deformity, and Disease in the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. My digging brought me to Sharon Snyder and David T. Mitchell and their work on narrative prosthesis, to the work of disability-studies scholar Tobin Siebers, to the fantastic breadth of scholarship afforded by Jack Zipes.
And it brought me, again, to the fairy tales. So many darker versions of the Disney stories that I’d known as a child – and so many darker moments in the Disney stories, too. Why was Scar, the villain of The Lion King, known only by the mark that slashed his face? Why did the depiction of the ‘hunchback’ Quasimodo make my skin crawl? Why hadn’t I ever thought of The Little Mermaid’s Ariel in those moments just after she’d arrived on land with legs and seen myself in her unsteady posture and stumbling?
Why, in all of these stories about someone who wants to be something or someone else, was it always the individual who needed to change, and never the world?
Disfigured is my attempt at unravelling some of the more well-known Western fairy-tale archetypes in light of a disability rights framework. In order to understand how we move on from the damage that these archetypes can do, we first need to understand what put them in place – why the disfigured body has historically been seen as less than whole; why fairy tales, narratives so often associated with seeming empowerment, have provided a breeding ground for anti-disability narrative; and how the allure and the potency of these stories has continued to influence the perceptions of disability today. To reclaim disability narrative in storytelling, we need to understand why stories like fairy tales have been fascinated with it right from the very beginning, and how the stories we tell have maligned difference – and disability – in order to make sense of it in the world.
A few notes. As someone who grew up on Western fairy tales and their various interpretations, it is my intention to stay in my lane, as it were, and focus the majority of this book on fairy tales and several pop culture hero narratives that are familiar to a Western audience. While I make mention of several tales from other cultures in an effort to show the pervasiveness of certain archetypes, the bulk of this book remains focused on Western stories and several modern interpretations that stem from predominantly European frameworks. I very much hope this book can contribute to the conversations around disability in fairy tales from other cultures, and look forward to continued learning around this.
It’s also important to note that this book is not a work of fairy-tale scholarship. My intention is to approach fairy tales from the perspective of someone who has loved them but operated with what amounts to a layperson’s knowledge of the tales throughout most of her life. I am interested specifically in where the fairy-tale narrative and its archetypes intersect with disability representation, and have used that framework to guide the book. As such, my interpretations of several tales and their relationships to di sability may at times seem to group certain tales together that have traditionally been considered very different from one another (for example, in the sections on the tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’).
Nor is this book meant to be a work of disability scholarship. I am a physically disabled woman who also deals with a major depressive disorder, and while I use my own experience to explore fairy tales and their cultural impact in the world, it is not my intention here to speak for the field of disability studies or for all disabled people, or for all those who likewise deal with their own mental health challenges on a regular basis. Disability is not a monolith – every disabled person’s experience in the world is different, and the way that we all navigate the world is likewise varied and complex.
I also think it’s important to note that my experience as a white disabled woman makes my ability to comment on multiple marginalizations within the disabled community necessarily limited. We need to make space for, pay attention to, and elevate the stories of disabled people from IBPOC (Indigenous, Black, and People of Colour) communities. The question of how the Western fairy-tale framework has contributed to the colonialist and capitalist structures that continue to disenfranchise IBPOC disabled communities today is one that all white disabled people should be asking, no matter the intersections within our own communities, and I hope that the questions posed in this book can help to spark further conversations around how fairy tales have impacted and hurt disabled IBPOC communities in particular. It is my hope this book can speak to people in whatever way they need, and that in telling my own particular story and exploring the way disability operates in some of the Western world’s best-known fairy tales, this book can help further the conversation around disability representation in the stories we tell in our modern world.
Interspersed throughout Disfigured are doctor’s notes from the initial consultation that my parents had with the neuro-surgeon who operated on me when I was four. I have included excerpts from these notes because understanding the story my parents were told about my disability – and, indeed, the story my doctors told themselves about it – has been crucial to my own understanding of how my disability operates in my life today. In sharing my doctor’s words here, my aim is to take back the narrative. However, I want to stress that medical records are not something disabled people should be expected to share as a part of our stories, and while I have been incredibly fortunate – and privileged – in my experience with the medical world, I am well aware that this is not the case for many.
I spoke with many disabled individuals over the course of writing Disfigured, and as a general rule use identity-first language throughout the text, unless otherwise requested. Identity-first language (‘disabled person’) holds that the disabled identity is an important part of what makes someone a person in the first place, inextricably bound up with how someone navigates the world. Person-first language, by contrast, argues that an individual must be seen as a person first and someone with a disability second (‘person with a disability’). The general consensus among disability activists is that person-first language, while well-meaning, separates disability from identity and thus continues to malign disability and perpetuate the idea that it is a negative thing.
The disabilities and pronouns of every individual cited in this book have been expressed according to their wishes.
I am grateful to all of those who chose to share their time and expertise with me. It is my fervent hope that the explorations in this book do everybody justice.
1
The Child Whose Head Was Bathed in Darkness
It begins, as all fairy tales do, with a problem. Once upon a time, a woodcutter and his wife lived alone and had no children. Once upon a time, a wealthy man’s wife died and he was lonely, so he married another woman who was cruel to his child. Once upon a time, a mermaid, looking out beyond the sea, longed to find herself walking on land.
In this case, a mother and father have a seventeen-month-old daughter who has not yet learned to walk. This is not always a problem – some children walk sooner, others take their time – but these parents are worried. They read the literature on standard milestones and ask questions of the doctors, who tell them not to worry. They whisper the same thing to themselves and each other at night: Don’t worry. Everything will be okay.
They’ve already lost a child – another daughter, dark-haired and silent, who came into the world already dead. It happened a year and a half before their second daughter was born. Her ashes sit in a little grey box on their bedroom closet shelf. They are terrified but also filled with hope.
Sometimes it can take a while, they remind themselves. Every child is different. Their second daughter’s other milestones are fine. She laughs, she cries, she crawled with no trouble. She eats anything and everything they put in front of her. (Such a good little eater, her grandfather says. Years later, it will be their longest-running family joke.)
When she does take her first steps, just before turning two, they are overjoyed but still worried. Their daughter’s right foot turns inward, so that her right leg collapses against the left. She doesn’t drag it, not exactly, but the way she walks doesn’t look quite right. There are no mentions of this in their baby information books, no pictures of a leg that slants just so. They take her to the doctor, who agrees that something doesn’t look the way it should.
More than this, though: the doctor trusts them, believes them, understands the dark river of uncertainty that flows deep within a parent.
‘I listen to the mothers,’ she tells them. ‘They always know.’
She refers them to a neurologist, who sends them to another city an hour’s drive away, so that doctors can put the girl into a machine and look at her brain.
Fairy tales, as we understand them in the modern Western world, have a rich and varied history. The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales defines them as ‘narratives of magic and fantasy, which are understood to be fictional.’ The specific term fairy tale comes to us from the 1697 publication of the French noblewoman Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy’s Les contes des fées, but fairy tales existed in both oral and written form much earlier than this. In fact, many such tales were oral in nature long before they were written down, which means the form is, in its power to keep shape over thousands of years, stronger than most other stories we tell – and yet, subject to the whims of oral retelling, also that much more delicate.
Some fairy tales are a subclass of the folk tale, a term that has grown to be quite wide-ranging and references a body of work that encompasses the stories, tales, and myths and legends of a particular culture. (While the lines can sometimes blur, the folklorist William Bascom has noted that folklorists tend to distinguish myths and legends from fairy tales in terms of the attitudes that people hold toward them. Myths, according to the scholar Elliott Oring, ‘are seen as both sacred and true,’ while legends focus on a single, miraculous episode in a story. Fairy tales, by contrast, are known to be magical and fictional right from beginning to end.)
Still other fairy tales come to us not from the oral tradition but are original creations with known authors. There are fairy-tale elements in The Golden Ass, the only surviving novel from Greek antiquity; there are elements of fairy tale in ‘Bel and the Dragon,’ which appears in the book of Daniel in the Old Testament and is usually dated to the fifth or sixth century BCE. Hans Christian Andersen wrote original fairy tales, as did Lewis Carroll and Edith Nesbit. Peter Pan, by J. M. Barrie, brought fairy-tale elements into a book treasured by children and adults alike, as did L. Frank Baum, the writer of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
Though the term fairy tale as we understand it in Western culture generally applies to the European tales, the umbrella of folk tale encompasses stories told all over the world. In many cases, versions of classic European fairy tales have similar counterparts in other countries, some stories preceding their European counterparts by centuries, if not more. Stories like ‘Jack and the Beanstalk,’ ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ and ‘Rumpelstiltskin,’ in their varying forms around the world, have had their origins traced to over four thousand years ago.
