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Finished this weekend. Such an interesting read! Things I didnât like initially I loved by the end just because the arc is so perfectly and thoughtfully executed. Itâs rare for me that an ending makes a book, but this one really does.
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The evil stepmother is a fixture in European fairy tales because the stepmother was very much a fixture in early European societyâmortality in childbirth was very high, and it wasnât unusual for a father to suddenly find himself alone with multiple mouths to feed. So he remarried and brought another woman into the house, and eventually they had yet more children, thus changing the power dynamics of inheritance in the household in a way that had very little to do with inherent, archetypal evil and everything to do with social expectation and pressure. What was a woman to do when she remarried into a family and had to act as mother to her husbandâs children as well as her own, in a time when economic prosperity was a magical dream for most? Would she think of killing her husbandâs children so that her own children might therefore inherit and thrive? [...] Perhaps. Perhaps not. But the fear that stepmothers (or stepfathers) might do this kind of thing was very real, and it was that fearâfed by the socioeconomic pressures felt by the growing urban classâthat fed the stories.
We see this also with the stories passed around in Franceâfairies who swoop in to save the day when women themselves canât do so; romantic tales of young girls who marry beasts as a balm to those young ladies facing arranged marriages to older, distant dukes. We see this with the removal of fairies and insertion of religion into the German tales. Fairy tales, in short, are not created in a vacuum. As with all stories, they change and bend both with and in response to culture.
â Amanda Leduc, Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space
Fiction influences reality not in a âdepicting immoral behaviours makes people immoralâ way but in a âthe storytellerâs biases and beliefs permeate the narrative in subtle and unsubtle ways that contribute to a readerâs worldviewâ way.
One of my favourite examples in fairy tales:
It is almost always the protagonists themselves who transform in some way -- becoming more palatable, more beautiful, more easily able to fit into the mould of society already in place. The intervention is magical rather than surgical, but one can imagine the writers of these tales arguing in favour of the medical model: the life-saving surgery, where life is synonymous with social standing and regard. The child who has surgery to repair their club foot is the same child who, in a fairy tale, would likely be visited by a fairy godmother or an evil witch, the gift of able-bodiedness dangled in front of them in a way that's entirely irresistible. In fairy tales, the transformation of the individual relies on fairies and magic -- or the gods -- because it is understood that society itself can't (and indeed won't) improve. Again, when viewed in the historical context of the tales, this makes at least a small amount of sense; how to fix the world when you are a peasant with a disabled child, possessed of little to no power to change the place and society in which you live? And yet the power of magic in the tales also, strangely, has the opposite effect -- instead of imbuing the reader with a worldview in which change is possible and things can turn out positively for the disenfranchised, the prevalence of magic in fairy tales serves to reinforce the class and societal structures already in place, as well as traditional ideas of what it means to have a functional body in the world. That is possibly why there's almost always a price that a protagonist pays for the magic of their transformation. You cannot simply move from one place to the next -- society won't allow it. And so the protagonist must prove their worthiness -- through good deeds and gentle behaviour, as in the case of Cinderella, or, as with the Little Mermaid, through sacrifice and trial.
â Amanda Leduc, Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space
Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space by Amanda Leduc was a good nonfiction about how stories are never just stories. Through a mix of memoir and literary analysis, Leduc unpacks how fairytalesâboth the old versions and the new Disney-fied versionsâboth reflect and ingrain in us a certain perspective on what disability and disfigurement are, how they should be treated, and what kind of endings they incite.
Leduc parses excellent analysis to argue that disabled people deserve tales outside of the two that fairytales allow: despair and death or the return of able-bodiedness or beauty. I don't always agree with the analysisâsome interpretations miss intriguing opportunities, such as with Hans Christian Andersenâbut it's still a great breakdown of how these tales influence our idea of what's normal, what a happy life is, and how disability is leveraged too often only as a symbol, which then becomes useless as soon as it's fulfilled its purpose. A great analysis and reflection of disability in fairytale and fantasy.
Yet while the idea of being charitable certainly seems like a nice thing to aspire to - the philanthropist is inevitably seen as a more morally acceptable figure than Ebenezer Scrooge - it's worth noting that charity also functions as a way of reinforcing existing social structures. As long as individual people are charitable, as long as individual charities and charitable actions exist to make gestures toward those who are less fortunate, there is less need for the sweeping societal change that would do away with the hierarchies and gross economic and structural inequalities that disadvantage people in the first place. Essentially, the existence of charity, by making concern for one's fellow humans less a responsibility and more an active choice, works to undermine the eradication of poverty and injustice.
(I am not, of course, arguing against the presence of charities - I think charities can and do accomplish wonderful things. It's good to encourage people to think of ways they can give to the world, and especially to think of how they might consider those less fortunate; the key is that we need to stop thinking of those less fortunate as being so because of some specific circumstance [disability, say] and more because of structural inequalities that the more fortunate continue to uphold no matter how much money they give away.)
Amanda Leduc, Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space
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One of the primary ways disabled exclusion operates is through language: our tendency to associate disability and disabled characteristics with weakness and inferiority influences the metaphors we choose and the words we use. Disabilities and conditions are co-opted for use as the ableist labels and descriptors that pervade our ways of speaking. An unpredictable person is jokingly referred to as schizo; someone with mental illness is mental, bonkers, bat-shit crazy. Something (or someone) that disappoints is said to be lame.
People are confined to wheelchairs; they succumb to long illnesses, as though the strength required to fight said illness canât be mustered and giving in is somehow a choice; people who are ignorant of an issue are blind to it. Someone who isnât paying enough attention to the insensitivity of their language is tone-deaf. Bit by bit, the language we use reinforces the idea of disability as a thing of weakness, making the disabled person into someone weak, someone less. [...]
When you are taught that the disabled body is bad, when you use language that reinforces this viewpointâeven and perhaps especially when you use that language unconsciously, without considering what it might mean to speak of someoneâs lived reality as a metaphor for a difficulty in your own life, or when you use this language to reinforce the idea, however well-intentioned, that the disabled person can and should rise above their physical limitationsâyou participate in a world that seeks to further entrench disabled exclusion.
â Amanda Leduc, Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space;âThe Great Unravelingâ
Current non-fiction read!
Iâm about halfway through Leducâs Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space.
Hereâs some pedantic reactions/questions that have nothing to do with the main argument of the book:
Disneyâs Cinderella is based on Perrault (âthink Disney and its princesses...like... âCinderellaâ (...the stepsistersâ self-mutilation in pursit of Cinderellaâs glass slipper)â pg. 24)
Is Jasmine officially South Asian*? (âFifty-five years for a princess who was South Asianâ pg 92)
Is Moana specially Tahitian*? (âThe young Tahitian princess Moanaâ pg. 96)
I didnât think Maleficent had wings in the 1959 version (âMaleficent has that green skin and those wingsâ pg. 192)
Ursula has purple skin (âUrsula the Sea Witch has grey skinâ pg. 102)
*the fact that I thought these two were more generic in my head, is itself a problem. Iâve always seen Jasmine as Arab, but she really is a stand in for a wide swathe of identies, so choosing one seemed odd. As for Moana, itâs possible, but I remember her being more of a Polynesian princess than a specific region/island. (If this is been specficied somewhere, Iâd like to know.)
More on topic, but when Leduc was discussing Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, I kept expecting her to talk about the Evil Queen/Witch, since she literally turns herself into an old, limping woman. But maybe itâll come up in a later chapter.
