The explosion of the fairy tale in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries began in Italy, with the collections of writers including Giovan Francesco Straparola (The Pleasant Nights, sometimes translated as The Facetious Nights) and Giambattista Basile (The Pentamerone).
Straparola, about whom not much is known, published The Pleasant Nights when he was living in Venice in 1550. In her book Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice, and the Fairy Tale Tradition, scholar and folklorist Ruth Bottigheimer notes that the name Straparola likely derives from the Italian verb straparlare, which means ‘to talk too much’ or to ‘talk nonsense.’ In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was not uncommon for fairy tales to be published under pseudonyms due to the satirical nature of some of the tales. Indeed, one of the tales first published in The Pleasant Nights, ‘The Tailor’s Apprentice,’ was removed several years after first publication due to the influence of the Church, and the entire collection was placed on various lists of prohibited books from 1580 to 1624.
In a dedication at the beginning of the second volume of The Pleasant Nights, Straparola takes pains to note that the tales in the collection were not his original creations. It has also been put forth that some of the tales were actually taken from an earlier work by Italian lawyer Girolamo Morlini, who published a collection called Novellae, fabulae, comoedia in 1520. In any case, it is generally accepted that The Pleasant Nights, along with Basile’s Pentamerone, stand as examples of collected, rather than original, fairy-tale creations.
Giambattista Basile was a poet and courtier as well as a collector of fairy tales. He was born, depending on which source you consult, in either 1566 or 1575 and spent a great deal of time serving as a soldier and courtier in Naples; The Pentamerone, for which he is best known, contains many fairy tales set in and around the Neapolitan kingdom. After he died in 1632, Basile’s sister, Adriana, published The Pentamerone in two volumes in 1634 and 1636.
The Pentamerone contains some of the earliest known versions of several well-known Western fairy tales, including ‘The Young Slave’ (a variant of ‘Snow White’), ‘Pippo’ (a variant of ‘Puss in Boots’), and ‘Sun, Moon, and Talia’ (a variant of ‘Sleeping Beauty’). Like Straparola’s tales, the stories in these volumes were collected from the oral tradition, but instead of transcribing directly, Basile wrote the tales in the Neopolitan dialect, making heavy use of metaphor as fit the Baroque style of the time. Centuries later, the Brothers Grimm would praise The Pentamerone as the first ‘national’ collection of fairy tales.
In When Dreams Came True: Classic Fairy Tales and Their Tradition, Jack Zipes argues that as a port country playing host to a wide variety of merchants and businesspeople passing through on their way from the East to the rest of Europe and vice versa, Italy was an ideal breeding ground for the oral folk tale – and, as the world slowly began to disseminate more printed literature, an ideal place for these stories to be collected and spread throughout the populace.
Nonetheless, the stories of both Straparola and Basile remained outliers for a time. For much of the seventeenth century, many in France – where the next wave of interest in the folk tale would come – considered the folk tale beneath them, as it was by and large still being passed around in oral form at that time, often by the illiterate peasant class. But the advent of the Bibliothèque bleue – a series of small, light-blue chapbooks that began to be printed in France in the early 1600s and grew in circulation throughout the century, on subjects as wide-ranging as the theatre, etiquette, cookery, astrology, medieval verse, and folk tales – began to endear the fairy tale to a new, increasingly educated audience. In particular, French women of the aristocracy – who were not allowed to pursue higher education at the universities – began to organize literary salons where the tales were told and retold, polished and perfected into ‘literary’ form.
The major shift in the fairy tale’s popularity in France came in the 1690s, in response to the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, a debate among the aristocracy that pitted the ancient Greeks and Romans against modern French writers. Nicolas Boileau – a royal historiographer whose didactic work L’Art poetique, published in 1674, set out the rules of poetry composition in the classical tradition and partially ignited the debate – published an anti-feminist satire, ‘Against Women,’ in 1694, in response to the growing preference for modern French writers as arbiters of literary style. Boileau was part of a group who championed the ancient Greeks and Romans as models of art and literature for French society to follow. One of the main opponents to this thinking was Charles Perrault, the French author and member of the Académie française. ‘Perrault,’ notes Zipes, ‘took the side of modernism and believed that France and Christianity … could only progress if they incorporated pagan beliefs and folklore and developed a culture of Enlightenment.’
Not surprisingly, many of the women who were telling literary fairy tales in the French salons of this time were also supporters of the modernists, a fact that is underlined by the subversive nature of the tales passed around by Perrault, Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville (the Baroness d’Aulnoy), and other writers of the time. ‘[Many] tales,’ Zipes writes, ‘displayed a certain resistance toward male rational precepts and patriarchal realms by conceiving pagan worlds in which the final “say” was determined by female fairies … [I]t is clear that the gifted French women writers at the end of the seventeenth century preferred to address themselves to a fairy and to have a fairy resolve the conflicts in their fairy tales, rather than the Church with its male-dominated hierarchy.’ Indeed, the literary fairy tale became a powerful tool for the women of the court, who replaced traditional patriarchal figures of power not only with magical fairies, but with all-knowing wise women who acted as guiding forces for the protagonists. As well, many of their tales focused on love, again as a method of subversion – this time, speaking out against the prevalence of arranged marriage within the aristocracy itself.
The rise of the French literary salon was also a response to the increasingly stringent rule of Louis xiv; by the 1690s the king had created a system of absolute monarchial rule in France, angering many among the French nobility and aristocracy. The shape-shifting, seemingly innocuous nature of fairy tales became a subversive way to speak out against the administration. As Zipes points out, ‘the French writers of fairy tales … continued the “modernization” of an oral genre by institutionalizing it in literary form with utopian visions that emanated from their desire for better social conditions than they were experiencing in France at that time.’
Here we once again encounter the element of the fairy tale as utopian vision – a vision that, in reaching for a better world, sought to subvert expectation and press against structures of power in subtle yet crucial ways. Far from banal and innocuous – it’s only a story, after all – fairy tales have often operated as coded messages, simultaneously spreading encouragement and hope to the disenfranchised and delivering scathing indictment of authorial figures, all within seemingly innocent trappings. The fairy godmother, for instance, spoke to the fact that Perrault thought a patron was necessary for an individual to triumph in the arts, offering a subtle yet damning pronouncement on the realities of making it as an artist in an increasingly capitalist world.
This is a tradition that has continued into modern times – writers like Angela Carter (whose story ‘The Bloody Chamber’ we will look at in Chapter Eight) and Kelly Link (author of the short story collections Magic for Beginners and Get in Trouble, among others) have explored the subversive nature of fairy tales in their own work, while many of the fairy-tale motifs that we know and love – the rags-to-riches princess (or prince), the animal helper, the fairy godmother – continue in popularity precisely because they can be subverted and used as allegories for larger social concerns. Princess Elizabeth, the titular heroine of The Paper Bag Princess, by Robert Munsch, subverts the standard damsel-in-distress trope after a dragon burns down her castle and kidnaps Prince Ronald, her fiancé. Instead of waiting for someone to come along and save them, Princess Elizabeth tracks down the dragon – clothing herself in a paper bag, as it’s all that’s left for her to wear out of her castle’s ruins – and then challenges the dragon to burn forests down and fly around the world. When the dragon, having completed its second round-the-world trip, falls into an exhausted sleep, Princess Elizabeth rescues Ronald and saves the day.
But Ronald is ungrateful. Repulsed by her paper-bag trousseau, he tells her to go away and come back when she looks more like a princess. Instead of capitulating, Princess Elizabeth calls Ronald out – ‘You look like a real prince, but you are a bum’ – and the two do not, in fact, get married – a rallying cry for feminists everywhere.
Of note, however, is the conspicuous absence in these tales of subversion when it comes to disability. These stories might purport to reach for a better world, but the disabled body is only ever viewed by them as broken, and often only as worthy of a happy ending once the disability has been eradicated or otherwise ‘overcome.’ What does it say when some of the most subversive narratives we know continue to entrench and perpetuate static ideas about the disabled body?
In 1985, when I’m three years old, I dress up as a bride for Halloween. I have a white dress and a white veil and a tiny bouquet of pinkish-purple silk flowers. My sister is one and a half. She is dressed up as a superhero – a generic version, pre-Marvel Universe, with a red cape and a blue leotard and a dumbbell fashioned from cardboard that my mother covers over in foil – but doesn’t really understand what’s going on.
When my dad takes a video of the both of us, I smile straight into the heart of the camera.
‘What are you, Amanda?’
‘I’m a bride, Dad,’ I say. You can tell that I know I am beautiful – that I love my white dress, the way that it twirls. I don’t understand yet what being a bride really means, but I love the way that it feels. I seem special when I’m wearing the dress in a way that I don’t when I have my regular clothes on. Like the dress that I’ll wear out of the hospital in the not-so-distant future, I never want to take it off.
It is a gateway to something, though I don’t yet know what that is. It whispers of possibility and happiness.
Years later, when I’m in university, I’ll watch the 1989 Disney version of The Little Mermaid for the first time in years and think about how the last image I have of Ariel is of her on the wedding ship, joyously kissing her prince. About the way her story moves to a white dress as sign of completion. This is her happily ever after, this is the moment when she freezes in time.
She has more movement as a mermaid, as the body that is different from other bodies I know. This is the body that gets splashed across the movie promos, the body that sits on the cover of the DVD. The body without legs, the body that doesn’t look like the bodies of everyone else.
I do not spend hours pretending to be Ariel in her wedding dress when I’m a child. I pretend that I’m a mermaid. I splash around in the pool and pretend that I don’t have legs at all.
There is disfigurement and disability a-plenty in these old fairy tales from France, forgotten though so many of them may be. Specifically, there is a fascination with disfigurement and death as punishment – and, conversely, with the bestowing of beauty as the ultimate reward.
In ‘Riquet with the Tuft,’ an embedded tale within Catherine Bernard’s 1696 novel Inés de Cordoue, the main character is a noblewoman, Mama, who is endowed with the outward traits of beauty but is intellectually disabled to such an extent that it ‘make[s] her appearance distasteful.’ The princess meets Riquet with the Tuft, an ugly little man who is king of the gnomes, and he makes her a bargain: if she agrees to marry him in a year’s time, she will become intelligent. He gives her a verse and tells her to repeat it as often as possible, for it will teach her ‘how to think.’ Mama returns to her father’s house, where she swiftly moves from ‘coherent’ to ‘intelligent’ to ‘witty,’ winning the hearts of all the men she encounters. But she loves only one: a man named Arada.
After the year has passed, Riquet with the Tuft returns for her hand in marriage. Mama is distressed, but Riquet gives her an ultimatum: remain intelligent and marry him as king of the gnomes, or return to her kingdom as the intellectually disabled woman she once was.
Mama chooses intelligence and marriage to the gnome – and she is now clever enough to conceive of ways to continue meeting Arada while still being married to Riquet. When her husband finds this out, he transforms himself to take on the likeness and manners of Arada, so that Mama is doomed to live the rest of her life with the two men, not knowing which of the two is her husband and which is the deceiver.
In Charles Perrault’s version of ‘Riquet with the Tuft,’ published only a year after Bernard’s novel, the intellectually disabled girl is a princess, and meets Riquet with the Tuft in the forest. Riquet himself is a prince, though ugly and misshapen, and has been given a gift by the fairies: he can endow his level of intelligence on the woman with whom he falls in love. Riquet is enchanted by the princess’s beautiful portrait, which has circulated throughout the land, and has left his own kingdom to go in quest of her hand in marriage. In exchange for her hand – again in a year’s time – he promises the princess a peculiar gift: ‘“I am able, madam,” said Riquet with the Tuft, “to bestow as much good sense as it is possible to possess on the person whom I love the most. You are that person, and it therefore rests with you to decide whether you will acquire so much intelligence. The only condition is that you shall consent to marry me.”’
Longing to move on the intellectual level of her peers, the princess agrees. Almost immediately, she becomes ferociously intelligent. She returns joyously to her kingdom and wows the court; she garners friends; her father the king comes to her for political and nation-building advice.
She also falls in love with a man, tall and handsome, and in a year, when the time has come to marry Riquet with the Tuft, she is overwhelmingly reluctant. Marry Riquet, the misshapen dwarf, when she has been pursued by a handsome man at court?
‘With the exception of my ugliness,’ says the dwarf, ‘is there anything about me which displeases you? Are you dissatisfied with my breeding, my brains, my disposition, or my manners?’ ‘In no way,’ replies the princess. ‘I like exceedingly all that you have displayed of the qualities you mention.’
But Riquet has another gift. ‘Let me tell you,’ he says, ‘that the same fairy who on the day of my birth bestowed upon me the power of endowing with intelligence the woman of my choice, gave to you also the power of endowing with beauty the man whom you should love, and on whom you should wish to confer this favor.’
The princess agrees to this, too, and Riquet is transformed into the handsomest man the princess has ever seen. This is followed by speculation from the narrator that Riquet, in fact, hasn’t changed – only that the princess has been overcome with love for him and manages to ‘see past’ the qualities that she previously found so abhorrent:
Some people assert that this was not the work of fairy enchantment, but that love alone brought about the transformation. They say that the princess, as she mused upon her lover’s constancy, upon his good sense, and his many admirable qualities of heart and head, grew blind to the deformity of his body and the ugliness of his face; that his humpback seemed no more than was natural in a man who could make the courtliest of bows, and that the dreadful limp which had formerly distressed her now betokened nothing more than a certain diffidence and charming deference of manner. They say further that she found his eyes shine all the brighter for their squint, and that this defect in them was to her but a sign of passionate love; while his great red nose she found naught but martial and heroic.
It’s not surprising that the Perrault version of this tale is the one that has survived in ways that Catherine Bernard’s version – and the tales of other French fairy-tale writers – have not. It is palatable in a way that the other version is not – softer and kinder, more given to beauty. There is a happy ending in this tale that is reminiscent of the bright Disney versions of fairy tales we’ve all come to know in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. More importantly, however, in the overt moralizing of his tale, and the shaping of disability and deformity in particular as a kind of moral narrative that moves toward ability, Perrault’s tale of ‘Riquet with the Tuft’ led the way to the stories that would go on to become the world’s most famous: the collected fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm.
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were born in the town of Hanau, Germany, in 1785 and 1786, respectively. Three of their nine siblings died in infancy. In 1791 the Grimms moved to the town of Steinau, where their father, Philipp, worked as a magistrate. The family enjoyed relative wealth and prosperity until 1796, when Philipp died of pneumonia – a death that forced Jacob and Wilhelm, as the eldest sons, into positions of caring for their family’s financial well-being while still only children themselves.
The brothers left home in 1798 for school, attending the Friedrichsgymnasium in Kassel. They graduated in 1803 and 1804, each with top honours, and went on to study at the University of Marburg, where their low social and economic standing made them acutely aware of their status as outcasts – a theme that would arise repeatedly in the tales they went on to collect and publish.
Originally intending to follow in their father’s footsteps and practise law, Jacob and Wilhelm were sent on a meandering path toward folklore by dint of one of their law professors, Friedrich Karl von Savigny, who introduced them to the ideas of Johann Gottfried Herder, a German philosopher and literary critic who had, during his lifetime, championed Naturpoesie, or ‘natural poetry,’ as a superior and uniquely German method of storytelling.
According to Herder, Naturpoesie stood in opposition to Artspoesie, or ‘artistic poetry,’ because it preserved the robust nature of the German peasant life and with it those things that were thought to correlate to health and wellness – the fresh nature of the countryside as opposed to the damp, dank nature of cities and the havoc industrialization was wreaking upon landscapes moral, social, and economic. (The literary fairy tale, having begun its circles around the French court during Herder’s lifetime, was seen – with all of its airs and literary figures of speech – to be encroaching on this nationalistic, ‘true-to-nature’ mode of storytelling.)
Jacob Grimm accepted a post as court librarian to the King of Westphalia in 1808, and Wilhelm followed some time later, after a visit to the region of Halle – financed by his brother – where he consulted with a physician about his ill health.
Wilhelm Grimm, of note, had been a strong and healthy child but grew ill with scarlet fever and asthma when he was sixteen; he was home from school for half the year and, though he recovered, illness returned in 1808, increasing in severity until he travelled to Halle in 1809 to seek treatment. His health remained precarious for the rest of his life, though he lived until the relatively old age of seventy-three. The physician he sought treatment from in Halle, Johann Christian Reil, diagnosed him with ‘atony of the heart muscle’ – though, as Ann Schmiesing notes, his diagnosis has since been put forth as essential paroxysmal tachycardia, a condition in which the heartbeat accelerates to two to three times its normal rate. These episodes can last from several minutes to several hours and are accompanied by dizziness and light-headedness, a condition that greatly affected Wilhelm’s ability to function in his daily life.
At Halle, Reil prescribed a litany of treatments, including electric shock therapy, magnet therapy, and an assortment of pills. In his letters to his brother, Wilhelm showed himself to be both frightened of his treatments – the electric shock therapy made his skin blister – and grateful for the fact that, effective or not, they allowed him to sleep once more at night. ‘I feel of course,’ he writes in a letter dated August 1809, ‘that I cannot be fully helped, and that I must die of it, but I am thankful to God with all of my heart for this improvement, under which I can live and work peacefully and with joy.’
Wilhelm returned to live with his brother after this treatment, and it is perhaps not surprising that many of the subsequent editions and revisions to the KHM have increased mentions of disability. After the first two volumes of the KHM were published in 1812 and 1815, Wilhelm assumed more responsibility for editing subsequent versions, and under his editorial hand the prevalence of disability throughout the tales – sixteen more versions of which were published from 1819 to 1858 – increased. This narrative prosthesis – wherein the narratives are added to and supplemented by additional character traits – infiltrates all subsequent editions of the text.
This increase in disabled characteristics and features in the tales is likely due not so much to Wilhelm Grimm’s desire to reflect the world – though disability was, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, certainly more of a visible fact of life due to the prevalence of many crippling diseases and conditions (polio, smallpox, scarlet fever, cholera, to name a few examples) for which there was no cure – as much as it was due to his sense of wanting to restore the tales and make them ‘complete.’
This ‘completeness,’ in turn, has much to do with what folk-tale scholar Vladimir Propp identified as the ‘lack-lack-liquidation pattern’ in folk-tale narratives. Essentially, the lack-lack-liquidation pattern highlights the way in which a tale starts out with a need or want on the part of the narrator (the desire for something that is lacking) and then moves through to the liquidation of that desire through fulfilment of the quest. In his Morphology of the Folk Tale, published in Russia in 1928, Propp outlines how the lack-lack-liquidation pattern moves from uncertainty to balance – essentially from struggle to triumph – so that the story might feel complete. Or, as Schmiesing puts it: ‘[the lack-lack-liquidation pattern] moves from disequilibrium to equilibrium, from disenchantment to enchantment, and from disability to ability and bodily perfection.’
The later insertion of disability into the Grimms’ tales increased the narrative arc of their stories, putting the protagonists at an increased disadvantage at the outset, giving them more to gain through the successful completion of their quests. The Maiden Without Hands is rewarded doubly at the end of her tale by virtue of having her hands grow back. Likewise, the ostracization of Hans My Hedgehog is made that much more severe and cruel due to the non-human nature of his disfigurement. He is quite literally transformed, at the end, from an animal into a human; had he been born a ‘normal’ boy, the tale itself would not have had the same journey, the same Naturpoesie heart and triumph over adversity that the Grimms were so determined to uphold.
Disability in the Grimm tales also operated as a way of further entrenching the characters of the tales and making them unforgettable. In the original version of ‘Old Sultan,’ a tale about a farmer and his faithful dog, the dog has no disability. In subsequent versions the dog is described as ‘toothless,’ and thus becomes all the more memorable. Healthy dogs are a dime a dozen; you remember the toothless dog, though, whether or not you’re repulsed by it.
In Disability Aesthetics, Tobin Siebers notes that modern art’s move away from traditionally classical forms – and the subsequent celebration of modernist palettes and the disabilities and so-called ‘flaws’ in the human body — is, in fact, the very thing that allows art to transcend time and memory. (In Les Menottes de cuivre, René Magritte’s revisioning of the Venus de Milo, for example, red pigment is splashed on the arm stumps of the Venus de Milo to give the impression of a recent and painful amputation.) ‘It is often the presence of disability that allows the beauty of an artwork to endure over time,’ writes Siebers.
It is, in effect, easy to forget a blandly beautiful human body. It is much harder to forget the body that arrests, the body that is different from the norm.
You don’t forget the man who has a hedgehog’s upper body, or the woman who has no hands. And chances are you’ll forever remember the writer who told that story to you, too.
I start writing stories when I’m five years old. This is also, like the dress I wear when I leave the hospital after my first surgery, something that makes me feel special. I write stories about animals: about my family dog, about birds, about dinosaurs. In Grade 1, I write a story about a rabbit and glue cotton balls to all of my rabbit illustrations. I write stories about my family and about owls and about love. I write a story about the boy I have a crush on – at the end of the story, we get married. (I still don’t really understand what marriage means, but I draw myself wearing a beautiful white dress at the wedding.) One year, for Thanksgiving, I write a story on special paper that’s cut in the shape of a turkey.
I write about princesses. If they are not already beautiful (mostly they are), they are always made beautiful by the end of the story. They have raven-dark hair or golden-blond hair and their eyes are never anything but blue. They are always kind, even when those around them don’t deserve it.
I never write stories about princesses in wheelchairs, or princesses who have to hang their legs out of the tub when they’re taking a bath. I don’t write about girls who have crutches. I don’t write about girls who are told they are ugly because they walk differently than everyone else. I don’t write stories that don’t have happy endings.
I am five, then six. My mother reads us The Swiss Family Robinson and Anne of Green Gables and books about Clifford the Big Red Dog. No one is disabled in any of these stories, not that I notice at the time.
After I get out of the hospital for my second surgery, the one that gives me a cast, I read the Little House books from beginning to end again. Mary Ingalls has scarlet fever and loses the sight in both her eyes. She is still beautiful and blond and good – like a princess, only not a fairy-tale one. Ma Ingalls and Laura make her a trousseau when she travels away to the school for the blind. They make her a beautiful gown of rich brown cashmere. She is blind, but she has Laura to guide her through the world and then, when at school, she learns to be more independent.
I don’t see her as disabled when I read the novel as a girl. The only disabled people I know of have canes or use wheelchairs. Eventually I don’t have either of those things anymore, so I don’t see myself as disabled either. I can walk like the princesses in the stories I read.
I can’t wear their shoes, though. No matter how I try.
In subsequent editions of their work, the Brothers Grimm also made more than a few editorial adjustments in response to complaints about the stories not being suitable for children. The burgeoning middle class in Germany and other countries meant both a growing literate population and, as the population shifted slowly and inexorably toward cities and away from the work cycle of growing up on a farm, an increased focus on childhood and what did and did not constitute ‘acceptable’ points of focus in child-rearing.
The Grimms were raised as Calvinists, and their strict adherence to their faith permeates many aspects of their tales, particularly with regard to gender roles – it’s no surprise, then, to discover that even their disabled protagonists are expected to act and behave in ways befitting the religious beliefs around gender roles at the time. Hans My Hedgehog is allowed to be forthright and loud about his disability in a way that the Maiden Without Hands is not. He is allowed to demand things of his father, of his town, whereas the Maiden refuses her father’s help and casts herself out into society instead. It is arguably because of her meekness and her acquiescence to power (God) that her hands grow back in the end, whereas Hans My Hedgehog gains his comely human form through use of his own cunning. There are lessons here that even the youngest of children can learn.
It’s important to remember that the Napoleonic wars were in full swing when the KHM was first published, and parts of Germany were occupied by France. Some of the revisions made to subsequent editions of the tales involved removing mentions of France and allusions to things traditionally associated with French culture; further additions and embellishments were made in the interest of boosting German nationalism. (Thus the removal, in many of the tales, of fairy godmothers, replaced instead by God and other patriarchal figures suitable to German tastes of the time.) A suite of German stories made gentle for children offered a perfect way to subtly instruct a populace on the ways to be a good German, to be good boys and girls in the world. The princess in ‘The Frog King’ is admonished by her father for being rude to the frog that has retrieved her beloved golden ball from the well (‘You must keep your promise, no matter what you said’). She is disgusted by the frog, slimy and other as he is, but she does as she’s told because she’s a good daughter. And what does she get in return? A handsome prince, and a love story to last the ages.
But no one believes bedtime stories, you say. Those are only for children. We know they aren’t real.
The Nazis were also interested in the German Naturpoesie, as we now know. They believed in the unifying power of story for the German people, and, like the Grimms, in the freshness and the power and the purity of the German countryside – as opposed to the cities, places where vermin ran, places where all kinds of unsavoury characters – and races – might mingle. It isn’t a stretch to draw a line from the Grimms’ treatment of stories and storytelling as a nationalistic device through to Nazi Germany and the depiction of the disabled, othered body as something that needs to be extinguished.
There were no fairy godmothers in Nazi Germany, no benevolent strangers waiting to bless a mutilated body so its hands might grow back. There were only those who saw an ideal of the human body – the muscular German male so lionized in Nazi propaganda art, the female with her ample breasts and healthy hips. There were only the stories of the disabled-as-other that so many believed, and would continue to believe as the tales were told and retold – before bedtime, before the nighttime fire. Rumpelstiltskin the evil dwarf. The stepsisters of Aschenputtel, the Grimms’ version of Cinderella, who willingly cut off their toes and parts of their feet so they might fit into the glass slipper and thereby win the prince. The deformed body giving face to the deformed heart – first in stories told for adults, then in stories told for children, then in stories repackaged and repurposed and told for adults again on posters and in film, broadcast across a country.
Fairy stories are not real, no. But neither are they ever only stories.
For most of my nine years in elementary school, I have a crush on a boy who we’ll call John. John is an athlete, and I am not. He is popular, and I am not. He says maybe fifteen words to me the entire time we’re in school together. I watch him on the playground every day; I steal furtive glances at him when we sit in class. He isn’t mean to me, not exactly, but it’s quite clear that he couldn’t care less that I’m alive.
In Grade 4 – we are nine – he starts dating the new girl in class. Her name is Grace. (This is also not her real name, but what better name for her than one that belonged to a real princess?) She is small and blond and dainty. She is also not mean to me, not exactly, but I do not belong to the popular circles, and she fits in there right away. I walk funny, I get my breasts and my period before everyone else. I have half-frizzy, half-scraggly straight hair that never knows what to do. My eyebrows are huge caterpillars. When I look at photos of myself, I know that I am not the kind of girl that anyone could love.
I am wrong about this, which I realize years later, looking back over all of those photos from school. The pictures show a shy young girl with a hesitant smile and brown eyes that gleam when you ask her to tell you a story. My head tilts ever so slightly to the left in almost all of my pictures. I see this now all the time – back then, I noticed it only at the hairdresser, when the stylist would continually straighten my lopsided head in the mirror, and also sometimes at school, when the other kids around me would tilt their heads and I was never sure if they were mocking me or not.
I grow up fantasizing about ballet shoes, leotards, the theatre stage. When I am twelve and enrolled in figure skating lessons, I choreograph an imaginary routine to the soundtrack from The Lion King. I close my bedroom door and twirl alone for hours in the centre of the carpet.
But the realities of dance class and figure skating are very different. My feet are stiff, my hip bones lopsided, my right leg two inches shorter than my left. My spine is curved by the whisper of scoliosis – a side effect of the cerebral palsy, along with increased likelihood of any or all of the following: early adult-onset arthritis, tendonitis, excessive fatigue as one grows older, and constant pain. Hands and feet that know what I want them to do but will not always do it. Thighs given to trembling. Knees given to spasms. An imagination that goes everywhere. A body that will not always follow.
I do not grow up in a time and place with Nazi posters, or with the overt idea that the disabled body is bad. (The disabled body is not really talked about, as such, in school or out in the world.) What I have, instead, are brightly coloured VHS tapes with soft edges. A mermaid princess with red hair and a purple seashell bra; a brown-eyed French brunette who loves books and swings like Tarzan from the moving ladders of her library. A black-haired Arabian princess who falls in love with a street urchin and journeys with him on a magic carpet; an Indigenous princess, tall and statuesque, who runs barefoot through the forest without a single thought of stumbling. A blond-haired, blue-eyed princess who is tricked into touching a spindle and falls into a deep sleep but is rescued by her love and able to dance triumphantly at the end of the tale, her princess’s dress plunging from pink to blue and back again. A Black princess who kisses a frog and changes her life. Princess meets prince and falls in love, over and over and over again.
And I have Quasimodo, misshapen and kind, who finds friends at the end of his story and is happy about it, because that is the only kind of happiness he is allowed to have.