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

[wahlee-98.livejournal.com]

Interesting discussion. In my grad-school Victorian literature class, we read several books that featured disabled characters in one way or another. One was George Elliot's The Mill on the Floss, which features a character much like Dean Priest-- someone who understands the heroine and is in many ways a good match for her, but ultimately can't have her because he's a hunchback. Another was an obscure 1800-page novel called The Pillars of the House by Charlotte Yonge, about a family of 12 orphaned children, two of whom are disabled. The most disabled (he's mentally retarded due to complications at birth) is portrayed as a bright spot in the family's lives, but is killed in an accident near the end of the novel. The other child, Geraldine, is portrayed as weak and sickly, but she's a talented artist, who achieves some measure of fame despite her disability. Of course, she never marries.

The most intriguing novel we read, though, was an equally obscure novel by Dinah Craik, called Olive: The Story of a Young Girl (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/22121). Although we would probably define Olive's limitations as a deformity rather than a disability (she has a slight hunchback and a short neck, but her movement is not impeded), in Victorian eyes she might as well have been a Barryaran mutie. Anyway, Olive also turns to art, in some measure as a palliative against what she believes she can never have-- love and marriage. But not only does she eventually fall in love, she also gets married. Shocking! Of course, she's also Mary Sue-ishly good, but it is, after all, a Victorian novel--one must make allowances. Fascinating, though, to find such a novel written in 1850.

I seriously considered concentrating on disability studies after taking that class--in fact, one of my good friends did end up writing about disability in Victorian literature for her thesis. It's an extremely interesting subject.

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's really interesting. In some ways we've come so far since the Victorian era in terms of the portrayal of people with disabilities, yet in so many other ways, not nearly far enough.

Mind you, I do think the availability of better medical care and therapy for people with disabilities has broadened the possibilities for living a full life with a disability in a way that was not so easy to do in the Victorian era, so no doubt that accounts for some of the differences as well.

Thanks for sharing your experience of taking this class and telling us about some of the books you read!

Not only medical advances

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

It is not only medical advances that have enabled people with disabilities to live fuller lives today than in generations past. In fact, I would assert that the SOCIAL advances are more profound in that regard. I am deaf. Yes, true, technology helps me a great deal--my hearing aid not as much as you might think (though it doesn't hurt), but video phones for example enable me to use the phone by hooking up to video relay service so I can use sign language over the phone. Captions allow me to watch television and movies. And so on.

But many of these technologies would not even exist (ie, people wouldn't have bothered to invest in developing them) if not for changing attitudes that say that people like me DESERVE fuller participation in life and should receive at least some of the things that could be so easily made available to us.

I have a responsible job--which among other things involve many telephone conference calls in which I work with other people out of state involved with the same three-year project I am to coordinate efforts. And I don't have this job JUST because of advances in technology. I certainly don't have it because I wear a hearing aid. I have it because the person hiring me recognized that, yes, a deaf person CAN do this job. That's a social advancement, not a medical one. And, at least for me, makes a more profound and pragmatic difference in enabling me to live a full life on my own terms.

Re: Not only medical advances

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

Yes, very true, and an excellent point. Without changes in the attitude of society, a person with a disability could have all kinds of medical and technological help but still be shut out of the opportunities they deserve.

And I think that the way people with disabilities are portrayed in fiction plays into that -- because those portrayals can and do have an influence on the way people think about disability (and whether they give thought to it at all). I just found out yesterday, for instance, that the Tourette's Syndrome-themed episode of Quincy, M.E. that I remember so vividly from my childhood made a significant difference in the passing of the Orphan Drugs Act. Narratives are powerful.

Thanks for coming by to comment and share your perspective and experiences.