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Musings: Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space by Amanda Leduc

 

cover of Disfigured by Amanda Leduc

Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space by Amanda Leduc ( Bookshop.org | Amazon.com  )

Coach House Books, 2020

ISBN-13 : 978-1552453957

Available: Paperback, audiobook, Kindle edition

 

Although Disfigured  focuses on the relationship between fairy tales and disability, there is a lot here that should provide food for thought in the horror genre, where disfigurement, disability, and illness are often used to indicate otherness, villainy, or monstrosity. Leduc examines well-known, mostly Western fairytale archetypes from literature and pop culture, how and why they were created, and the damage those narratives can do to perceptions and treatment of disabled individuals, using a disability rights framework. She explains that this is not a work of  fairy tale scholarship or of an expert on disability rights, but that she approaches it as an individual who has loved fairy tales for most of her life and is physically disabled, with major depressive disorder. As a white disabled woman, she notes that her ability to comment on the impact of Western fairy tale narratives is limited, and that there needs to be space for and attention paid to the perspectives and experiences of disabled people with multiple marginalizations about the impact these narratives have had on them as well.

Interspersed with her research and analysis are medical notes taken by the doctor Leduc’s parents consulted regarding her diagnosis and neurosurgery at the age of four, and autobiographical writings describing her childhood and young adulthood and how storytelling and fairy tales impacted her. This is an interesting structure, which personalizes the book, but it does lead to an idiosyncratic organzation of the material, with a fair amount of repetition. Leduc writes that “disabled identity is… inextricably bound up with how someone navigates the world,” literally, in her case, as she has cerebal palsy. Who tells her story and how cannot help shaping her view of who she is and will be, and the stories around her, and many other disabled people, also give them messages about their places in the world. As a child, many of those stories are fairy tales. Leduc writes that “we have used this storytelling form to illustrate that which is different; whether that difference is disfigurement or social exclusion, fairy tales often centre in some way on protagonists who are set apart from the rest of the world.”

In some stories, like “Hans My Hedgehog”, the protagonist, who is half-hedgehog, is treated cruelly and excluded as a child, even after he leaves home, excels, and shows himself to be generous. It is only after he is accepted by a princess in his half-hedgehog form that he reveals that he is actually a handsome young man. His transformation into an attractively formed man is his happy ending. Characters who are disfigured, disabled, or part-human(either born that way or as a punishment) often have this “happy ending”, (if they get one) that implies that there can be no happy ending without individual transformation to a fully functional, attractive human, even if a price must be paid. Leduc suggests that while that is a destructive message in general, it is particularly damaging to disabled people who grow up with fairy tales. In these stories, society doesn’t become more accessible; it’s the individual who must change, and sometimes that change isn’t possible (or preferable) on an individual level.  Leduc does a nice job of explaining different models and theories of disability, such as the medical model, charity model, psychological theories, social model, and complex embodiment (although not all in the same place. I suggest lots of bookmarks for this book).

Leduc says stories can be told in a way that calls for community and social structures to change so that anyone can succeed, or they can be told in a way that privileges individual triumph. She contends that under the surface, we have been taught through our stories that to be disabled is to be lesser, filled with darkness, and in pain, and therefore unhappy. Even when fairy tales have been written subversively, to encourage the disenfranchised, disabled people have still been represented as either pitiable, inspirational, or villainous. Leduc concludes that in real life, a disabled person isn’t necessarily transformed for a happy ending or permanently villainous. There is a complex, lived experience in the disabled body that isn’t represented by flattened archetypes and ableist language and symbolism, and she calls for envisioning these traditional stories in ways that make space for a new kind of fairy tale that does not privilege able-bodied, conventionally attractive characters or assume that happy endings are all identical.

Horror and dark fiction face some of the same issues. Protagonists are often set apart from the community by some kind of flaw, monsters and villains are often masked, disfigured, or disabled in some way, and the stories can have flattened characters or depend on “shortcut” tropes to quickly communicate a story’s schema to a reader or watcher.  Leduc examines this through the lens of Disney villains and heroines, and superheroes, but in the horror genre we see it in many of the great villains and protagonists of horror and Gothic literature and cinema such as the Phantom of the Opera, the Invisible Man, Frankenstein’s creature, Quasimodo, and more. Just as horror and dark fiction are making space for more versatile representations and stories with BIPOC characters and authors, we need to ensure that there is also space for new kinds of representations and reimagined stories with disabled characters and authors (and also where those intersect). There is food for thought here for those creating and consuming in the horror community.

Be cautioned that this is a long book, however. Leduc’s personal story is interwoven in many places so that it’s hard to skip around to just find the analysis and commentary on fairy tales and how they fit with the disability rights framework. This is deliberate, and while it’s interesting as a memoir, if you plan to use this book as a reference, it can get frustrating. As a disabled person who has been a children’s librarian and elementary school media specialist, has a Disney-obsessed daughter, and has been thinking about how disabled people are represented in horror fiction for quite some time, I found this to be a worthwhile and fairly unique read (Amazon shows me just one other book on this topic, a more narrowly focused academic study, and only a few on disability and horror), and it’s an intriguing topic, so I hope it is finding its audience. Recommended.

 

 

 

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Posted on September 2, 2020 by , Reply

Musings: Making Sense of Horror

One nice thing about reading is that a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end (except for a few left unfinished when the author died, like The Mystery of Edwin Drood). If the story is messy on the page, I can skip it, I can choose another. Outside the conventions of storytelling or the covers of a book, I have to live in an increasingly messy world that does not make a lot of sense (as do we all), and is frankly quite terrifying. I grew up in a nice little bubble where the ugliness of the world really didn’t infringe on my daily life and even now, despite many challenges, and with a lot more knowledge of the world, it doesn’t touch me the way it does for many, many others.

The past few years, and especially the time since the pandemic became a prominent part of our lives, have revealed a lot of that ugliness, but many of us thought surely there was a way forward for change. One story would end, we would get to start another with a new political season where we could change the system without tearing it apart. A vaccine for the coronavirus would be found, our lives could go back to the way they were. Not a happily ever after, but a story does end, even if another one begins right away.

There is a cloud of horror around the events taking place in Minneapolis and surrounding areas, and in other cities (including two in my own state) where peaceful protesters have been attacked with tear gas and rubber bullets. In a city near me, a medic center had its supplies taken by the police (including milk, used to treat tear gas) just before they sprayed tear gas on protesters. The rage and disorder have been building for a long time and the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis was the spark. I can’t make it coherent and I can’t see ahead.

Who are the monsters who come next in our fiction? Originally, Godzilla was a response to dropping the atomic bomb, zombies and vampires have come to mean different things as time has changed. Even as people are already writing pandemic fiction, there are still inequities the pandemic exposes, and the wounds it opens and salts provide a lot of fresh material. What horror awaits us in fiction that isn’t already here?

 

A note: Be kind to one another and give each other grace. We all need it, especially now.

Posted on May 30, 2020 by , Reply

Musings: Choosing Your Adventure: The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

 

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

Doubleday, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-0385541213

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook,  audio CD

 

The Starless Sea starts with a book-loving graduate student, Zachary Ezra Rawlins, who is writing his thesis on video games, finding a mysterious book of stories in his school’s library that includes a description of an incident from his childhood about a door he saw but didn’t open. Off he goes to find out more about the book and how he comes to be in it, that early on involves discussions of narrative and the differences between how it works in written works and in games. An inquisitive librarian tracks down information on the book for him, and between her help and a lot of searching the Internet, he is able to use clues from the book to connect it to a literary masquerade taking place in New York City in just a few days. Shortly, Zachary is on a quest, and the masquerade turns into a mystery, a chase, and an adventure that gives him the opportunity to walk through another door.

Once through the door, it is permanently closed behind him, and a different story begins for him. Zachary has entered a Harbor on the Starless Sea, an underground world where books and stories are safely kept. He is in a maze, or maybe it’s a hotel, or a library, with many doors, some locked and some open, where paths in time sometimes cross and sometimes do not, and people who meet in one room may not see each other again after leaving through the door. In addition to the Keeper and Zachary, there are just a few other people who appear in the underground world behind the door: Rhyme, the last guardian of the stories; Dorian, who may or may not be Zachary’s savior, killer, or true love, or a combination; Allegra, who wants to close all the doors so the story of the Starless Sea can never end;  Simon and Eleanor, lovers who lost each other in time; and Mirabel, their daughter. All of them appear in different incarnations across different times and spaces as Zachary travels through the lands of the Starless Sea, and the sea itself.  The world Zachary enters is dark, empty, often lonely and sometimes frightening or beautiful. His purpose once he arrives is unclear: even the Keeper of the Harbor doesn’t know, or want him there.

Erin Morgenstern writes gorgeous, lyrical, visually evocative prose. She started out as a visual artist and you can really tell from the way she has used words to create her worlds on paper. And if you are a person who loves books and stories and storytelling, who has always wanted to go through a portal or door to adventure, that might be enough for you to fall in love with this book. The weakenesses in plot and characterization are serious flaws, though. While Morgenstern starts out strong, once Zachary is through the portal, we lose the thread of his quest and it doesn’t get picked up again for a very long time (although there are a number of nods to the Narnia books throughout). There are multiple side stories that make you, as the reader, want to know where things went next, like the story of Simon and Eleanor, which has one foot in our reality for at least part of the time, and the story of the innkeeper falling in love, which feels like a fable but might not be.

The tales and fables in The Starless Sea are transformative, tragic, bleeding and dark. I was willing to try to track Zachary, as the anchor to the narrative, through his adventure because I wanted to know how some of these stories connected with his, but in many cases they were just vignettes, with the threads left hanging, or they returned in another incarnation. Then about three-quarters of the way through the book, Morgenstern, having constructed this elaborate, recursive story,  suggested that Zachary, the Alice in this wonderland, might be an unreliable reporter. That is, that nothing I had experienced (as a reader) with him could be trusted, and that he might not actually even be in the world of the Starless Sea. Although she backtracked shortly after that, it derailed the story. Once it’s out there, it can’t be unsaid.

Morgenstern was able to create a fairytale atmosphere, but in attempting to make her characters archetypes, she weakened them to the point that it was hard to care what happened to them, and this betrayal of the reader made that even more difficult. In constructing and connecting multiple layers and versions of potentially linked stories that reflected the possible choices of the characters, she left them adrift.  In interviews she has said plot is her weakness, and that she knew she had shortchanged her characters, and that’s really obvious here.

Because of Morgenstern’s amazing worldbuilding and gorgeous writing, and because I think she had some really interesting things to say about the way we structure stories in books (where the reader has a single path), versus games (where the player has many choices and can try different ones if the first ones don’t work), The Starless Sea was worth getting lost in. I feel like Morgenstern tried to present what it could look like to see what happens when a character makes different choices (like going through a door or not) by giving us a bird’s eye view of what it could look like to see the branchings and connections, outside the format of a game or a “choose your own adventure” book.

It’s an interesting experiment, but the observer’s position is unsatisfactory to me when I’m reading for enjoyment.

In adventure games, you get to be the active participant making decisions and dealing with their consequences.  “Choose your own adventure” books are written in second person, making “you”, the reader, the decision maker, with the ability to go back through your chain of decisions and change them, hoping for a different ending (getting to make your own choices is so vital that Chooseco just developed a series of board books). I just wasn’t invested enough in Zachary’s story to want to watch him make decisions (often random) without having more direct interaction.  Storytelling, if it doesn’t involve the reader or listener directly in participation, engages us when the storyteller invites us in. As gorgeously written as The Starless Sea is, it didn’t feel inviting to me as a reader. While the author created a memorable fictional world, she never opened a door.

 

Posted on May 1, 2020 by , Reply
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