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rj_anderson) wrote2010-05-10 11:26 pm
rj_anderson) wrote2010-05-10 11:26 pm
Entry tags:
Bad Disability Tropes in Children's Fiction: Please Don't.
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.
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.
no subject
I think I've talked to you about this before, but one of my own favorite characters is Alfred, who is blind. Alfred has his roots in a couple of previous characters, however. I first created a blind character when I was in my early teens (I was always thinking of ways characters could be different, being terribly in love with the outsider trope). I wasn't really that comfortable with a character actually behaving like a blind person, though. I loaded him up with magic so he could get around just fine, read print, and of course, he was even more awesome than the characters who could see. (Or he would've been if every character in the story wasn't so incredibly overpowered.) He was still a musician, though, like I couldn't think of any other job a blind person would do. I should point out that I was terrified of going blind as a little kid (thanks to a convergence of a terrible fever and an episode of Little House on the Prairie) so I think this was my way of working through that.
Not long after that, I guess awareness came with age and I started growing very concerned about how I represented my characters. I started actually doing research on things and decided this character just wasn't where I wanted to go with this. What was even the point of this guy being blind if he had so many powers? I switched over to another character, who had lost his sight in his teens and...well, I think he was a pretty good character. He was angry that he'd lost his sight, but he didn't stay stuck there, nor did he come to some amazing revelation due to a sighted person (or any person, for that matter, he had to work through it himself). He also had some compensating magic, but in some ways, it frustrated him more because people around him would say, "But you have that magic, could've been a lot worse." I wrote stories about him spanning thirty years and he eventually came to terms with his disability (mostly, but then, he was depressed even before he lost his sight), got married and had children. I loved that character, but he was not a very good YA character at all. Most of his arc happened in adulthood. (Plus he cursed like crazy...) And his life was way too boring for a fantasy book character.
Alfred happened kind of accidentally from a little side story, but I was glad he did. For one thing, all that research didn't have to go to waste... For another thing, as the blind heir to an organized crime family, he came preloaded with lots of...well, STORY. He's a dynamic character but not terribly gifted, magic-wise. But man, has it been hard to write him. It's taken a lot of tweaking of passages for me to stop getting comments from critiquers like "Why doesn't he want his sight back?" and "How does he know X happened if he's blind?" It was very frustrating because after all my research and years of writing three different blind characters, I could barely even remember what I had originally thought about blind people.
But, looking back, it was sort of like I went through these different stages of coping with a disability via my characters and my feelings about disability really changed over the years, so I hope that translates into writing better characters.
On another note, my significant other has pretty severe arthritis that goes back to his teens, and when I got together with him, and shared my writing with him, he really liked that I had blind characters in my stories who do things because he didn't see a lot of good disabled characters in stories either. Which has made me more aware of how less obvious disabilities like juvenile arthritis are almost NEVER represented. It's always the obvious sort of blind/deaf/wheelchair/missing limb. So, someday I want to write a character drawing from his experiences and broaden the field a bit too.
It's pretty hard to think of good disabled characters in stories... Ergh.
(wow, this got so long I actually exceeded the maximum character length. what the heck I DIDN"T KNOW THERE WAS A MAX CHARACTER LENGTH IN LJ! I need to go eat lunch!!)
no subject
It seems that blindness is popular because it's one of the most cosmetically attractive of the visible disabilities; you can give it to a character and still have most readers find that character attractive, as well as believing that this person could live more or less independently with the help of a cane and/or a guide animal. There's even a weird sort of romanticism that's grown up around the portrayal of blindness in literature and on television -- usually it's a beautiful young woman who is blind, and there will inevitably be a moving scene in which she feels the hero's face just before they kiss, etc.
But once a character's disability causes their body to be contorted in a way that does not conform to conventional beliefs about beauty or virility, or if their mobility and speech are limited by the disability in a way that might cause others to perceive them as physically or mentally weak... you find a lot fewer characters in literature that could be described in those terms. And they're definitely not allowed to be romantic, any more than middle-aged or elderly people are supposed to be romantic. It's so crazy on the surface, and yet so deeply ingrained in people's expectations...
Anyway, I digress! But thanks for maxing out my comments, I enjoyed it. :)