In fairy tales, disability is never part of the happy ending
By Louise Kinross
Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space is a fascinating new book that explores the roles of disabled characters in Western fairy tales and how they continue to influence perceptions about atypical bodies and minds today. It's written by Amanda Leduc, a Hamilton, Ont. author who is also communications and development coordinator for the Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD). Amanda grew up with cerebral palsy and a limp that made her the target of school bullies. The book alternates between a study of disabled characters in classic tales and their Disney adaptations, and Amanda's own childhood medical record and memories.
BLOOM: Why did you want to write this book?
Amanda Leduc: I got the idea for the book about two years ago. I've been disabled all my life, but its only in the last five years that I've become comfortable with my identity as a disabled woman. I was on a writing retreat and walking through the forest, and I was struck with this connection between fairy tales and disability. The forest is historically a very inaccessible place, and it's associated with fairy tales. You would think fairy tales would be inaccessible for people with disabilities, but at the same time, disabled people are featured quite prominently as villains. It got me thinking about the way we've portrayed disabled people in fairy tales, and continue to portray them in superhero movies and television shows. We seem to stick with the same story of the 'happy ending' or 'not happy ending' idea. I was going to write an essay about it, but the more I researched it I realized there hadn't been much written about it, and the essay became a book.
BLOOM: How is disability seen in fairy tales?
Amanda Leduc: In fairy tales the disabled person is often a villain, or the disability is eradicated by the fairy tale's end. There's a lesser-known tale about a boy who was born with his upper half as a hedge hog, and the lower half of his body is human. His whole tale is about trying to get society to accept him as he is. But at the end, we find out his 'hedgehogness' is something he can get rid of.
BLOOM: Yes. It turns out to be a costume he can remove.
Amanda Leduc: And he becomes a handsome young man at the end. There are a couple of other characters who are stereotypically disabled: An ugly dwarf or ugly hunchback characters who are made beautiful by the end of the tale and fall in love with the princess.
Those tales were trying to get at some idea of inner beauty. The moral was you're supposed to love what's on the inside, not the outside. But the fact remains that when the tale ended, the character who was ugly at the beginning was transformed to become beautiful on the outside as well. We can talk about how we don't subscribe to those views in this society anymore, but we really do when it comes to the disabled.
I went to the grocery store a couple of weeks ago and used a car service. I live near an assisted living facility, and a man with crutches came out and the driver said 'That poor man. His life must be so hard.' I thought why are you making a value judgment about his life? We see the disabled as objects of pity and charity, and that's tied to this rigid idea in our society of what it means to live a successful life.
The disability in fairy tales usually belongs to a villain and marks them as bad. Or the main character is disabled, but through good works or deeds, that disability goes away and the character gets to have their happy ending. You don't get to have a happy ending unless the disability is taken care of.
BLOOM: Yes. You make the point that Disney took traditional fairy tales and made their endings happier. But disability is never part of a happy ending.
Amanda Leduc: It's not an exaggeration to say Disney had a huge part to play in the way the fairy tale, happy ending has become such a part of Western culture. A story begins with a conflict, and stuff the narrator works through, and then the conflict is resolved. There's still the idea that for a narrative to really feel wrapped up and complete, there has to be some sort of resolution. For a lot of people there is something unfinished about the disabled body. The disabled body can't accomplish or do as much as the abled body, so to be left disabled at the end of the story is not as happy an ending as it could be.
BLOOM: That reminds me of the fairy tale in your book called The Maiden Without Hands.
Amanda Leduc: She doesn't have hands at the beginning, but by the end she gets them back. The sense of the broken being mended is synonymous with the happy ending.
Superhero films and stories are a little more advanced than fairy tales in portraying disability in more complex ways. A lot of superheroes you encounter are disabled in some way, but they have technology or superhuman abilities in other areas that allow them to, once again, rise above the limitations. So they're not defined by their disability, but by their other abilities. You know that phrase 'differently-abled?' Superheroes are like the original differently-abled. Marvel's Daredevil doesn't have eye sight, but he has superhuman hearing that comes about in response to the taking away of an ability.
BLOOM: So it's not okay to just not be able to see. You need to have an exceptional ability that in some way compensates, or balances things out.
Amanda Leduc: Yes. Just having a disability leads to a discontent.
BLOOM: When reading your book it struck me that the fairy-tale ending leads to a feeling of inadequacy for most readers, whether they have a disability or not. Because it's not real life.
Amanda Leduc: Fairy tales are a real simplification of the world and the way we look at our lives, and they do a disservice to everyone. Particularly the North American or Western focus on getting married, or meeting the one true love. If you think of romantic comedies in Hollywood, the story builds and builds and it ends once you meet that person. When, in actual fact, a marriage, or making a commitment, is not an end of anything, so much as a beginning. It's the start of another story that may have other conflicts.
BLOOM: As a child growing up with cerebral palsy and an unusual gait, how did you internalize the messages you got from Disney movies?
Amanda Leduc: The thing that had the most impact on me was being bullied in school. Disney movies and the other stories I consumed through reading or television or film were an escape from the bullying reality. The way I internalized the Disney version was the sense that if you're a good person, things will work out, things will be okay. It was similar to that 'It gets better' slogan for kids who are LGBTQ. Bullying is just a moment of trouble in your life and you will get better, you will find community and connection. This too shall pass.
In some ways that's true, but in other ways it's not. There are certain difficulties I encountered as a child with cerebral palsy—like people who look at me differently because I walk differently, or pain, or difficulty moving in certain spaces or doing certain things because of the way my body was constructed. Those things are still difficulties in my life today. The physical reality of being disabled has difficulties. Life does go on and change, but I sometimes wonder if it's not disingenuous to say it gets better. It is, in its own way, a simplification of things.
We need to make room for the fact that the lives we live, both disabled and non-disabled, are very complicated. You will have wonderful moments and things will not be wonderful, and won't work out. Just because things are difficult doesn't mean life is somehow worth less.
When you look at that man walking on crutches and say poor guy, who are you to say his life is somehow less than yours? How do you know? Maybe he's had crutches his whole life, and it's just the life he knows? Maybe it's not difficult, or not difficult in the way you perceive. I want to start that conversation.
BLOOM: Because you were able to walk, you didn’t identify as disabled growing up. How did the value of walking feature in some of the fairy tales, like The Little Mermaid?
Amanda Leduc: That example is so interesting. Disney did a wonderful job of making the underwater world so exotic and exciting and beautiful, especially through a child's eyes. I was seven when the movie came out, and my sister and I watched it over and over again. We imagined what it would be like to have no legs, and be Ariel swimming under the water. At the end of the day she essentially makes a choice that in order to have what she really wants, she needs to be able to walk. She needs to be a human. She's not getting married to Eric in a wheelchair with her mermaid's tail and the whole kit and caboodle.
The disability is a metaphor you impose on the tale. She wants to be human, and having legs is part of that. At the end, she stands in her beautiful crown and white dress and marries the prince, and that was synonymous for me with the happy ending when I was that age. It wasn't until years later that I started to think about that narrative of walking, and how it continues to be repeated in the shows we watch. It's unusual to see a mainstream TV show or romance feature a bride who moves in a wheelchair down the aisle.
I did walk as a child, and I could run and do all of those things. I wasn't allowed to play contact sports in elementary school, but I hated them anyway, so it was a good way to get out of gym class.
Instead of saying 'You shouldn't bully me because I walk this way,' I took it for granted that I would be treated differently. In my mind, the only way I could change the bullying was by trying to walk as normal as possible. I really tried to ignore the fact that I was disabled.
I can remember being in my early twenties talking to friends about cerebral palsy, and going through my childhood story of wheelchairs and crutches, and I never, not once, thought of myself as disabled, even though I was. That was because I'd been fed stories that disability was a very black and white thing. It means your life is so hemmed in by disability and physical restriction that you can't do anything.
A lot of people continue to think that way. And that's why you have so many concerns and confusion and misunderstanding around disability benefits and accommodation in the workplace and at school. People think if you're not in a wheelchair or bed bound, you can't call yourself disabled.
People, and administrations, put so much time and energy into punishing people who ask for accommodations, or refusing them on the grounds that they're not fair. But they don't stop to think about the fact that disability and class structures disadvantage people in a very particular way, and accommodations are a way of levelling the playing field.
BLOOM: You make the argument that being disabled means navigating the world in a different way, and that there is richness and value in that.
Amanda Leduc: The dominant narrative we're told about disability is that it's a flaw in the system, and the energy should go to eradicating that flaw, or changing the person so there is no disability. When really it's a kind of super power. You see this especially now, in the time of the quarantine.
There's a U.S. activist, Imani Barbarin, who wrote a thread when the coronavirus first hit, and people were reeling. It was to the abled community from the disabled community. She said here are some tips disabled people have used to adapt to an inhospitable world for decades. They were practical suggestions like if you're feeling touch deprivation, get a weighted blanket. They illuminated for me this idea that living a disabled life makes you see the world in a particular way. In times of rapid change, we have the opportunity to dismantle structures that are in place, and I think disabled people, because they've been on the margins for so long, are in a unique place to advise on what should be done to make the world a more inclusive place. Disability does become a super power in that sense.
BLOOM: What do you hope people take away from your book?
Amanda Leduc: I really hope the book helps people to view the world differently. I wrote it for disabled and non disabled audiences alike. I think my hope was it would have a broader impact on the non-disabled audience.
I was doing an interview for the book and I was getting my makeup done and I was telling the makeup artist about how characters in fairy tales have disabilities. She was holding the foundation brush and she had a look of shock on her face, but also of recognition, because it had clicked for her. 'I never thought of it that way before, but you're totally right.' We so rarely think of these characters as disabled people. We're taught not to see the disability in the villain. We equate it with some kind of moral failing. If you stop looking at disability as a marker of whether or not someone is equal, it becomes everyone's responsibility to look at how to build a more just and equitable society.
