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

[branquignole.livejournal.com]

Great post! Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this.

I have a friend with a degenerative disease whom I got to know through the internet (it's actually the one I convinced to read KNIFE, which she loved), and she has to use a wheelchair. She actually can't go without one and I think she never could. She can do only some things on her own, and sometimes even eating with her own hands is something unfeasible when the cutlery is too heavy for her. But although she requires permanent assistance, she is living on her own, very independently, enjoying her life, working towards her professional goals, doing many awesome things, and being generally awesome.

Lately, when we saw a girl in an electrical wheelchair, another friend of mine said that she would never want a child thus disabled because she was of the opinion that with such a constraining disability, they would never be able to be happy. This point of view made me kind of sad, since I know that it is perfectly possible for someone with a disability to be happy. I haven't come across many disabled characters, but they are mostly portrayed as doomed or unable to live their lives (and disability should never be confused with the unability to be an independent person), which really annoys me. I actually was very satisfied with the way things turned out in KNIFE in the end; and I don't think it's too bad that the character had to be helped out of his bitterness a bit, because I think it's different with people who have to learn to cope with their disability, especially if they were very active before, in sports or otherwise. But it is just the wrong way for people who have been living with their disability since birth or childhood. They've never known another life, and that means that, although they are different from other people in some (frankly minor) aspects, they are mostly just as other people in terms of living their life. They acknowledge their difference, of course, but they don't sit back and decide that they can't be part of our society because of them. They bring variety, just as everyone does, and they are just as wonderful and annoying as other people.

People, and authors, who cannot see through disabilities and see the person beyond, are just narrow-minded in my eyes. And I think that, as an author, you have a responsibility towards the readers, as well as towards people you portray through your characters. The thought that disabled people live unhappy lives didn't come out of the blue; it's caused and enforced by the unrealistic portrayals in literature.

ETA: Dear me, this comment is a lot longer than I intended it to be. :D

Oh - just thought of something-

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

Elvenjaneite's comments about Gen reminded me of another series Deirdrej and I both love: the Farsalatrilogy by Hilari Bell. There's a character in these books who has been injured, and thus deprived of his life's work. He's a wonderful character with a very satisfying arc; his name's Kavi.

Also, my wheelchair-bound friend is a beginning writer and is working on a fantasy novel with a wheelchair-bound protagonist - and also on a SF universe in which, after the apocalypse, the normal people are at war with the mutant cyborgs. He's totally on the side of the mutants, who are oppressed as freaks by the normal people. Some interesting ideas there, and I'm looking forward to seeing more from him as he polishes his craft.

Which brings me to another question, RJ. Are there any good fantasies BY disabled people? My friend is still in college and has a way to go before he comes up with anything publishable, but there would seem to be a crying need for this. As it is, all I could think of are the novel and (especially) the autobiography of Christopher Nolan - cold, hard fact, that one, but there are sequences in it that read like fantasy.

Hope you don't mind my rambling on like this!

Re: Oh - just thought of something-

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the rec of Hilari Bell's books! I'll have to keep my eye out for those.

As for fantasies written by people with disabilities, I would love to know about them! Off the top of my head, I know that the Wikipedia entry for Libba Bray tells how she was involved in a major car accident in her teens, required thirteen surgeries to reconstruct her face, and now has an artificial eye (about which she apparently has a robust sense of humour).

I have met a few other fantasy authors with disabilities but they don't always like to talk about them for fear that they will get labelled "that author with [insert disability here]", so unless they talk about it publicly themselves I don't feel it's my place to do so!

As an aside, does your friend like the term "wheelchair-bound"? I know some people with disabilities object to it, so I've been reluctant to use it here. But I also know there are a broad range of opinions among PWD's about what terminology they prefer, so I'm not giving you the smackdown or anything -- I'm just curious.

Re: Oh - just thought of something-

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

That's an interesting question! I never asked Dave what he thought - he did frequently get called "the kid in the wheelchair" by other library patrons, but those of us who knew him just called him by name. "Wheelchair-bound" struck me as more courteous than "the kid in the wheelchair" and less offensive than "crippled", certainly, or even "disabled". And I don't know the exact medical term for his condition. Had I known it, that's what I would have used, but it hadn't occurred to me that "wheelchair-bound" might be offensive.

And yes, I can see that "disabled writer" could be as problematic as "Christian writer" - whatever one is, one wants to be a person and a writer first and foremost, and not be shoved into some ghetto where one's work may be minimized. But the interesting thing that Dave is doing, I think, is dealing with his condition head-on in his fiction. In high school, some of his teachers urged him to focus less on fantasy and to write what he knew, but he was writing what he knew the whole time. I think, when he develops as a writer, he could have some very good things to say. I wasn't that far along with writing what I knew when I was his age.

Changing gears, I highly recommend Christpher Nolan's Under the Eye of the Clock It's not an easy read, but it's very striking.

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the lovely kind words about KNIFE (I'm honoured and touched that you thought it good enough to share with a friend who is living with a disability!) and your other thoughtful observations from experience.

I think this is especially excellent:

The thought that disabled people live unhappy lives didn't come out of the blue; it's caused and enforced by the unrealistic portrayals in literature.

Yes, yes, a million times yes. Thank you for saying in two lines what it took me two hundred. :)