Bad Disability Tropes in Children's Fiction: Please Don't.

[rj_anderson]

I was reading a MG fantasy novel last weekend which I quite enjoyed. It had nice solid worldbuilding, a dynamic and resourceful MC, an interesting cast of supporting characters, and the stakes and dangers were high enough to keep the tension going. I was quite impressed with it overall, and became even more so when a new character appeared on the scene who had a disability and used a wheelchair.

Huzzah, I thought to myself. Well done, author! This lady is attractive, likable, vibrant, talented, holds a position of authority and respect, and even turns out to be the love interest of my favorite supporting character in the book! I look forward to getting to know her and seeing more of the two of them together, and watching this romance continue to develop.

Except.

My first impression of this character as healthy and energetic soon turned out to be wrong. She was in fact suffering from a degenerative disease which was slowly and painfully consuming her and would eventually result in her death.

So once again, as so often seems to happen in children's fiction, the character with a disability is portrayed as frail, sickly, and unable to live a full life. An object of pity, rather than a person with whom the non-disabled reader can identify.

That being said, degenerative diseases certainly do happen, and it would be unreasonable to insist that this aspect of life not be represented in fiction. But still, I began to have some misgivings about where the book was headed. I could only hope that, having introduced us to this lovely character, the author was not planning to have her die in the course of the story just for the purpose of adding emotional drama to the plot?

Alas, my hopes were vain. Not only did this character die shortly thereafter, she actually killed herself prematurely so that her lover would no longer be obligated to stay with her, and could then go after and rescue the book's young heroine -- a girl she barely knew, but who was clearly (as far as the plot and other characters were concerned) More Important than herself.

Which was the point where I put down the book and said, loudly and distinctly, "WHAT."

Why, why, WHY do we do this as authors? There are so few characters with a disability in children's literature as it stands, and so few are portrayed with any kind of vibrancy and power, why introduce one just to kill her off (worse, have her kill herself off) just so your central characters can have a bit more angst and interpersonal conflict for a while? I don't even have a disability, and for me the book was spoiled right there -- how much worse would it be for some unsuspecting reader who does have a disability?

Please, let's stop writing characters with disabilities as though they're all doomed to suffer nobly and die tragically, unable to marry or have families. That's what Madeline L'Engle did with the character of Matthew Maddox in A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and though I greatly respect L'Engle as an author, it angered and frustrated me that she would treat my favorite character in the whole book that way.

Let's also stop using disability as a metaphor for ugliness and deformity of spirit -- I could write a whole rant about the handling of Dean Priest in L.M. Montgomery's Emily books, but of course there are even more obvious ones like Captain Hook in Peter Pan.

Let's stop "rewarding" protagonists who have disabilities by having them magically cured once their quest is achieved* -- thus sending the message that those who have not experienced such a magical cure are inferior and unworthy, or have not yet experienced some needed epiphany in life. Kitkryan's post Dear Author, Please Don't Heal Me shows the response of one reader with a disability to a recent and popular YA novel in which a magical healing takes place, and it makes this point far better than I could.

And let's also try to steer our way between the Scylla of the angry, bitter person with a disability who has to be helped out of it by someone who is not disabled** and the Charybdis of the saintly, sunny person with a disability who acts as an Inspiration To Us All.

There are of course some wonderful exceptions out there -- characters with disabilities who learn to work with and around them to accomplish meaningful things; who experience natural disappointment, grief and even depression over their disability at times but manage to get past it without turning into marble saints; who love and are loved (romantically and sexually, even!); who play sports and drive vehicles and fight for accessibility and do all the things that real people with disabilities do every day. But there need to be more such characters.

And there need to be a lot fewer characters like the one I encountered in the book I read this weekend, who seem to exist only as props to be used to arouse the reader's and their fellow characters' pity before being tossed away.

***

I welcome your comments on this subject, especially from readers with experience of disability. I'd be particularly interested to hear what books you've read that contained good, well-rounded, interesting, dynamic portrayals of characters with disabilities. Tell me a little about the characters involved, and let me know why they are great!


--
* I have made this careless mistake myself, in a fanfic where I allowed my heroine to be (magically) cured of her (magically induced) blindness. I regret it, and would write those stories differently now.

** I've done this too to some extent in Faery Rebels: Spell Hunter, though I hope that it does not come across quite as one-sided and obnoxious as that. And I hope that future developments with that character also helped to mitigate it. But I am willing to be called out and corrected on this point by those with personal experience of disability, and to learn to do better in future.

Comments

[peanut13171.livejournal.com]

Not a fantasy, but the second book in Catherine Gilbert Murdock's Dairy Queen series, Front and Center has a main character who has just become paralyzed. I haven't read the third book yet, but I'm pretty sure he's not going to be magically healed.

I don't give a hang about football or dairies, but Dairy Queen and Front and Center are *excellent* books.

Also, Neil Gaiman's Odd and Frost Giants has a crippled main character. He's not totally healed by the end of the book. It's a charming story and I highly recommend the audio, which was read by Neil.

[scionofgrace.livejournal.com]

And after we'd finally got a fantasy hero who wears glasses and it's not commented upon...

That's one of my pet peeves: glasses as a bad thing. I remember reading a book once where a character dreams of not wearing glasses, and how beautiful she'd look, and in the end it was such a sacrifice to give up that hope. I've been wearing glasses since I was six, and in my family, they were perfectly normal. I didn't understand why anyone would have a problem with them.

Which is not on the same level as, say, quadriplegia, but it still suffers from the same perceptions. Anything that can be perceived as a weakness is written as a hurdle: either it makes someone angry and bitter, or all the sweeter for enduring it. But now we have Harry Potter, a hero with glasses whose eyes are never healed, and we take it in stride. That, I think, is the direction we should be heading for with greater forms of disability. He is no more nor less heroic for being nearsighted. It affects him, but not like we'd come to expect.

I've read your book, btw, and I was glad Paul wasn't healed. It would have come off like a cheat.

[alybee930.livejournal.com]

Thank you for penning this post. It is an issue that is often skirted around or completely ignored. I have taught children with disabilities for many years as well as spent two years as a hearing person living within the deaf community. My two years at Gallaudet were incredibly insightful. It was there that I learned a lot about the fact that for many Deaf people they did not wish for a *cure* but were quite happy with their lives. Anyway, I learned a ton from that experience. Books need to portray people who are differently abled in a positive manner. Just as we need to positively reflect children of color in stories. Most children want to find a way to connect or relate with a main character. How cool when we see ourselves in that character. Imagine how sad it is when every book you read has no one that looks like you? Or in the case of a disability - is fully-abled. And imagine how cool it is for a child to finally connect with a main character for the first time because an author chose to reach beyond that which is easy to write.

Thanks for sharing...and the comments have been great to read as well.

Books BY Deaf authors

[wecando.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

Marlee Matlin, Oscar winning actress who happens to be deaf, has written (or I think co-written) a series of children's books featuring a deaf girl. I've only read one so far but it's good. Not fantasy. The book I read also has a minor character who is autistic. I do wonder what autistic people would think of how that character is portrayed.

WARNING: Self promotionary comment up ahead: I'm deaf and published a fantasy novel ages ago, in 1990, no longer in print, called Flute Song Magic. Most of the characters in it don't have disabilities, except for one who cannot walk well, has a deformed mouth, and speaks with a bit of a lisp. If I were doing that character over, I would have researched the disabilities he had more carefully and maybe modified them. (I was 16-18 at the time I wrote the book and had this notion at the time that a FICTION writer doesn't need to do research. Of course I know differently now.) There is one very very minor character who is deaf. Readers don't even meet her directly--they just see the main character's memories of meeting her once.

I haven't published any other fiction since then, though I've taken a stab at a few things and have had ideas. I do other things in my life. But maybe some day I'll get back to fiction writing. (At this rate, maybe when I retire :-) )

I want to add a comment to this thread about my personal reaction to a deaf character in a book that I read when I was a little girl. But I do have to work for a living, so I had better go do that and come back to this later. Thanks for doing this post--and especially for raising this issue among mainstream authors who maybe haven't really thought about these issues before. I wish some of the authors I had read as a child could have participated in a discussion thread like this one.

[mandyhubbard.livejournal.com]

5 FLAVORS OF DUMB by Antony John is about a deaf girl who becomes manager of a rock bad, and DAMN, does she get ticked off about people acting like that's the most absurd thing they've ever heard.

She's independent and smart and she rocks, and she just wishes everyone else would stop acting like she's disabled.

LOVED IT.

[tokahfang.livejournal.com]

I would recommend "The Speed of Dark", which features an autistic narrator. It is definitely my favorite book with a disabled main character. I also very much saw "Time Traveler's Wife" as a disability story, even if it is a rather odd disability.

I have a neurodegenerative disease, and people are always surprised by my casually upbeat demeanor. Is it because books don't have people like me?

[c-canadensis.livejournal.com]

This isn't literature, but a TV example of a disabled character that I thought was handled reasonably well, if you're interested: there was a show called Ed about a small town lawyer. Many of the characters were quirky to the point of being ridiculous, but in the later seasons there was a regular character in a wheelchair. There were a couple of episodes about the difficulties he faced, and he was occasionally bitter, but mostly very positive, active, and ended up dating a beautiful and non-disabled woman who told him he was an idiot for thinking they couldn't get past his disability. The character was played by Daryl Mitchell, who was paralysed in an accident as an adult.

[g33kgrrl]

Sarah Monette's (<lj user="truepenny") Doctrine of Labyrinth books feature two main characters who would probably be considered disabled. Mildmay has a physical injury that he has had to learn to live with and Felix - ok, here is where I realize I do not actually know the appropriate terminology for this aspect, but some combination of life-induced PTSD and magically-induced Other Issues that change his ability to function. And that is really clunky sounding and is ringing kind of false to my mind but I can't find a better way to phrase it right now, so I would like to apologize if I've said anything poorly here. I'm pretty sure I've seen Monette talk about this in her blog at some point, but it might have been a few years ago. She handled the issue in the books, in my decidedly non-expert opinion, very mindfully.

[jessara40k.livejournal.com]

Not YA, or a book, but one of the Liaden short stories, available free here (http://www.webscription.net/chapters/1587872145/1587872145___3.htm), includes a character who has some form of (I think) bipolar disorder, and I think he's treated well. He's actually the 'saviour' for the main character in some ways, making her see that her life doesn't have to be bound by the strictures of her culture, especially since she's been rejected by what should have been her main support in that culture.