Disfigured, p.7
Disfigured, page 7
At Halle, Reil prescribed a litany of treatments, including electric shock therapy, magnet therapy, and an assortment of pills. In his letters to his brother, Wilhelm showed himself to be both frightened of his treatments – the electric shock therapy made his skin blister – and grateful for the fact that, effective or not, they allowed him to sleep once more at night. ‘I feel of course,’ he writes in a letter dated August 1809, ‘that I cannot be fully helped, and that I must die of it, but I am thankful to God with all of my heart for this improvement, under which I can live and work peacefully and with joy.’
Wilhelm returned to live with his brother after this treatment, and it is perhaps not surprising that many of the subsequent editions and revisions to the KHM have increased mentions of disability. After the first two volumes of the KHM were published in 1812 and 1815, Wilhelm assumed more responsibility for editing subsequent versions, and under his editorial hand the prevalence of disability throughout the tales – sixteen more versions of which were published from 1819 to 1858 – increased. This narrative prosthesis – wherein the narratives are added to and supplemented by additional character traits – infiltrates all subsequent editions of the text.
This increase in disabled characteristics and features in the tales is likely due not so much to Wilhelm Grimm’s desire to reflect the world – though disability was, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, certainly more of a visible fact of life due to the prevalence of many crippling diseases and conditions (polio, smallpox, scarlet fever, cholera, to name a few examples) for which there was no cure – as much as it was due to his sense of wanting to restore the tales and make them ‘complete.’
This ‘completeness,’ in turn, has much to do with what folk-tale scholar Vladimir Propp identified as the ‘lack-lack-liquidation pattern’ in folk-tale narratives. Essentially, the lack-lack-liquidation pattern highlights the way in which a tale starts out with a need or want on the part of the narrator (the desire for something that is lacking) and then moves through to the liquidation of that desire through fulfilment of the quest. In his Morphology of the Folk Tale, published in Russia in 1928, Propp outlines how the lack-lack-liquidation pattern moves from uncertainty to balance – essentially from struggle to triumph – so that the story might feel complete. Or, as Schmiesing puts it: ‘[the lack-lack-liquidation pattern] moves from disequilibrium to equilibrium, from disenchantment to enchantment, and from disability to ability and bodily perfection.’
The later insertion of disability into the Grimms’ tales increased the narrative arc of their stories, putting the protagonists at an increased disadvantage at the outset, giving them more to gain through the successful completion of their quests. The Maiden Without Hands is rewarded doubly at the end of her tale by virtue of having her hands grow back. Likewise, the ostracization of Hans My Hedgehog is made that much more severe and cruel due to the non-human nature of his disfigurement. He is quite literally transformed, at the end, from an animal into a human; had he been born a ‘normal’ boy, the tale itself would not have had the same journey, the same Naturpoesie heart and triumph over adversity that the Grimms were so determined to uphold.
Disability in the Grimm tales also operated as a way of further entrenching the characters of the tales and making them unforgettable. In the original version of ‘Old Sultan,’ a tale about a farmer and his faithful dog, the dog has no disability. In subsequent versions the dog is described as ‘toothless,’ and thus becomes all the more memorable. Healthy dogs are a dime a dozen; you remember the toothless dog, though, whether or not you’re repulsed by it.
In Disability Aesthetics, Tobin Siebers notes that modern art’s move away from traditionally classical forms – and the subsequent celebration of modernist palettes and the disabilities and so-called ‘flaws’ in the human body — is, in fact, the very thing that allows art to transcend time and memory. (In Les Menottes de cuivre, René Magritte’s revisioning of the Venus de Milo, for example, red pigment is splashed on the arm stumps of the Venus de Milo to give the impression of a recent and painful amputation.) ‘It is often the presence of disability that allows the beauty of an artwork to endure over time,’ writes Siebers.
It is, in effect, easy to forget a blandly beautiful human body. It is much harder to forget the body that arrests, the body that is different from the norm.
You don’t forget the man who has a hedgehog’s upper body, or the woman who has no hands. And chances are you’ll forever remember the writer who told that story to you, too.
I start writing stories when I’m five years old. This is also, like the dress I wear when I leave the hospital after my first surgery, something that makes me feel special. I write stories about animals: about my family dog, about birds, about dinosaurs. In Grade 1, I write a story about a rabbit and glue cotton balls to all of my rabbit illustrations. I write stories about my family and about owls and about love. I write a story about the boy I have a crush on – at the end of the story, we get married. (I still don’t really understand what marriage means, but I draw myself wearing a beautiful white dress at the wedding.) One year, for Thanksgiving, I write a story on special paper that’s cut in the shape of a turkey.
I write about princesses. If they are not already beautiful (mostly they are), they are always made beautiful by the end of the story. They have raven-dark hair or golden-blond hair and their eyes are never anything but blue. They are always kind, even when those around them don’t deserve it.
I never write stories about princesses in wheelchairs, or princesses who have to hang their legs out of the tub when they’re taking a bath. I don’t write about girls who have crutches. I don’t write about girls who are told they are ugly because they walk differently than everyone else. I don’t write stories that don’t have happy endings.
I am five, then six. My mother reads us The Swiss Family Robinson and Anne of Green Gables and books about Clifford the Big Red Dog. No one is disabled in any of these stories, not that I notice at the time.
After I get out of the hospital for my second surgery, the one that gives me a cast, I read the Little House books from beginning to end again. Mary Ingalls has scarlet fever and loses the sight in both her eyes. She is still beautiful and blond and good – like a princess, only not a fairy-tale one. Ma Ingalls and Laura make her a trousseau when she travels away to the school for the blind. They make her a beautiful gown of rich brown cashmere. She is blind, but she has Laura to guide her through the world and then, when at school, she learns to be more independent.
I don’t see her as disabled when I read the novel as a girl. The only disabled people I know of have canes or use wheelchairs. Eventually I don’t have either of those things anymore, so I don’t see myself as disabled either. I can walk like the princesses in the stories I read.
I can’t wear their shoes, though. No matter how I try.
In subsequent editions of their work, the Brothers Grimm also made more than a few editorial adjustments in response to complaints about the stories not being suitable for children. The burgeoning middle class in Germany and other countries meant both a growing literate population and, as the population shifted slowly and inexorably toward cities and away from the work cycle of growing up on a farm, an increased focus on childhood and what did and did not constitute ‘acceptable’ points of focus in child-rearing.
The Grimms were raised as Calvinists, and their strict adherence to their faith permeates many aspects of their tales, particularly with regard to gender roles – it’s no surprise, then, to discover that even their disabled protagonists are expected to act and behave in ways befitting the religious beliefs around gender roles at the time. Hans My Hedgehog is allowed to be forthright and loud about his disability in a way that the Maiden Without Hands is not. He is allowed to demand things of his father, of his town, whereas the Maiden refuses her father’s help and casts herself out into society instead. It is arguably because of her meekness and her acquiescence to power (God) that her hands grow back in the end, whereas Hans My Hedgehog gains his comely human form through use of his own cunning. There are lessons here that even the youngest of children can learn.
It’s important to remember that the Napoleonic wars were in full swing when the KHM was first published, and parts of Germany were occupied by France. Some of the revisions made to subsequent editions of the tales involved removing mentions of France and allusions to things traditionally associated with French culture; further additions and embellishments were made in the interest of boosting German nationalism. (Thus the removal, in many of the tales, of fairy godmothers, replaced instead by God and other patriarchal figures suitable to German tastes of the time.) A suite of German stories made gentle for children offered a perfect way to subtly instruct a populace on the ways to be a good German, to be good boys and girls in the world. The princess in ‘The Frog King’ is admonished by her father for being rude to the frog that has retrieved her beloved golden ball from the well (‘You must keep your promise, no matter what you said’). She is disgusted by the frog, slimy and other as he is, but she does as she’s told because she’s a good daughter. And what does she get in return? A handsome prince, and a love story to last the ages.
But no one believes bedtime stories, you say. Those are only for children. We know they aren’t real.
The Nazis were also interested in the German Naturpoesie, as we now know. They believed in the unifying power of story for the German people, and, like the Grimms, in the freshness and the power and the purity of the German countryside – as opposed to the cities, places where vermin ran, places where all kinds of unsavoury characters – and races – might mingle. It isn’t a stretch to draw a line from the Grimms’ treatment of stories and storytelling as a nationalistic device through to Nazi Germany and the depiction of the disabled, othered body as something that needs to be extinguished.
There were no fairy godmothers in Nazi Germany, no benevolent strangers waiting to bless a mutilated body so its hands might grow back. There were only those who saw an ideal of the human body – the muscular German male so lionized in Nazi propaganda art, the female with her ample breasts and healthy hips. There were only the stories of the disabled-as-other that so many believed, and would continue to believe as the tales were told and retold – before bedtime, before the nighttime fire. Rumpelstiltskin the evil dwarf. The stepsisters of Aschenputtel, the Grimms’ version of Cinderella, who willingly cut off their toes and parts of their feet so they might fit into the glass slipper and thereby win the prince. The deformed body giving face to the deformed heart – first in stories told for adults, then in stories told for children, then in stories repackaged and repurposed and told for adults again on posters and in film, broadcast across a country.
Fairy stories are not real, no. But neither are they ever only stories.
For most of my nine years in elementary school, I have a crush on a boy who we’ll call John. John is an athlete, and I am not. He is popular, and I am not. He says maybe fifteen words to me the entire time we’re in school together. I watch him on the playground every day; I steal furtive glances at him when we sit in class. He isn’t mean to me, not exactly, but it’s quite clear that he couldn’t care less that I’m alive.
In Grade 4 – we are nine – he starts dating the new girl in class. Her name is Grace. (This is also not her real name, but what better name for her than one that belonged to a real princess?) She is small and blond and dainty. She is also not mean to me, not exactly, but I do not belong to the popular circles, and she fits in there right away. I walk funny, I get my breasts and my period before everyone else. I have half-frizzy, half-scraggly straight hair that never knows what to do. My eyebrows are huge caterpillars. When I look at photos of myself, I know that I am not the kind of girl that anyone could love.
I am wrong about this, which I realize years later, looking back over all of those photos from school. The pictures show a shy young girl with a hesitant smile and brown eyes that gleam when you ask her to tell you a story. My head tilts ever so slightly to the left in almost all of my pictures. I see this now all the time – back then, I noticed it only at the hairdresser, when the stylist would continually straighten my lopsided head in the mirror, and also sometimes at school, when the other kids around me would tilt their heads and I was never sure if they were mocking me or not.
I grow up fantasizing about ballet shoes, leotards, the theatre stage. When I am twelve and enrolled in figure skating lessons, I choreograph an imaginary routine to the soundtrack from The Lion King. I close my bedroom door and twirl alone for hours in the centre of the carpet.
But the realities of dance class and figure skating are very different. My feet are stiff, my hip bones lopsided, my right leg two inches shorter than my left. My spine is curved by the whisper of scoliosis – a side effect of the cerebral palsy, along with increased likelihood of any or all of the following: early adult-onset arthritis, tendonitis, excessive fatigue as one grows older, and constant pain. Hands and feet that know what I want them to do but will not always do it. Thighs given to trembling. Knees given to spasms. An imagination that goes everywhere. A body that will not always follow.
I do not grow up in a time and place with Nazi posters, or with the overt idea that the disabled body is bad. (The disabled body is not really talked about, as such, in school or out in the world.) What I have, instead, are brightly coloured VHS tapes with soft edges. A mermaid princess with red hair and a purple seashell bra; a brown-eyed French brunette who loves books and swings like Tarzan from the moving ladders of her library. A black-haired Arabian princess who falls in love with a street urchin and journeys with him on a magic carpet; an Indigenous princess, tall and statuesque, who runs barefoot through the forest without a single thought of stumbling. A blond-haired, blue-eyed princess who is tricked into touching a spindle and falls into a deep sleep but is rescued by her love and able to dance triumphantly at the end of the tale, her princess’s dress plunging from pink to blue and back again. A Black princess who kisses a frog and changes her life. Princess meets prince and falls in love, over and over and over again.
And I have Quasimodo, misshapen and kind, who finds friends at the end of his story and is happy about it, because that is the only kind of happiness he is allowed to have.
4
Someday My Prince Will Come: Disney and the World Without Shadows
Fairy tales continued to grow in popularity throughout Europe over the course of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. In Denmark, Hans Christian Andersen was writing about his Little Mermaid, his Ugly Duckling, and his Emperor with New Clothes; in England there were Jack and the Beanstalk, Goldilocks, and the Three Little Pigs. With the advent of the twentieth century and the slow rise of the United States as a storytelling power came L. Frank Baum and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – a story about a group of motley, arguably disabled characters (no heart, no brain, no courage) who banded together and made their way through a strange new land in search of wholeness.
In California, a man named Walt Disney began an animation studio, the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio, in 1923. In conjunction with his business partner and brother, Roy Disney, Walt built an animation empire that would eventually transform the world.
Before setting up in California, Disney had made a series of shorts called Laugh-O-Grams while working for a Kansas City advertising company. One of these told a modern version of Cinderella that sees our heroine scrubbing dishes in a kitchen with her only friend the cat. (In this black-and-white version there is no pumpkin and no mice – the fairy godmother instead transforms empty air in front of Cinderella into a Ford Model T and decks her out in a flapper’s dress and beads. At the end, the stepsisters aren’t mutilated – only lonely and miserable.) It was in Kansas that he also made his first film employing both animation and live-action techniques: a short starring four-year-old Virginia Davis based on Alice in Wonderland.
(Disney, it should be noted, was influenced by the works of cartoonist Paul Terry, who created and produced the Aesop’s Fables series of animated shorts under his company Fables Studios. The series launched with The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg in 1921 and continued under the Fables name until 1929, when Terry left the company. The remaining shorts in the series were completed under the Van Beuren Studios and ran until 1936.)
In California, Disney moved on to creating the character of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, an adventurous rabbit who already espoused the physical ideals that would be woven through Disney’s later films (Disney wanted the rabbit to be ‘peppy, alert, saucy and venturesome, keeping him also neat and trim’). A dispute over intellectual property rights to Oswald led to the abandonment of that character and the creation of the iconic Mickey Mouse in 1928 – a character that became so successful so quickly that it led to Disney being awarded an honorary Oscar for the creation of Mickey in 1932.
But Disney had bigger dreams. Specifically, he thought that full-length films offered more opportunities for animation – and with his fairy-tale training and knowledge behind him, he set out to remake the world.
In a way, this book begins here, because I also begin here. I begin with Disney in the theatre – the giant plush seats and my seven-year-old body folding into them, the way that I wasn’t big enough to keep the seat down all the way and so always sat in a slight upward V-shape.
I begin with Disney as a video release on VHS – the bulky smoothness of the tape, the way the TV screen wiggles when we rewind the tapes over and over again to our favourite parts.
I begin with One Hundred and One Dalmatians on an Easter morning when I’m ten. Whenever I see that film now I think of chocolate.
I begin with Beauty and the Beast, with The Rescuers, with Miss Bianca and Bernard the mouse in their original adventure, helping orphan Penny as she’s lifted down into the mine.
