Fairy tales continued to grow in popularity throughout Europe over the course of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. In Denmark, Hans Christian Andersen was writing about his Little Mermaid, his Ugly Duckling, and his Emperor with New Clothes; in England there were Jack and the Beanstalk, Goldilocks, and the Three Little Pigs. With the advent of the twentieth century and the slow rise of the United States as a storytelling power came L. Frank Baum and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – a story about a group of motley, arguably disabled characters (no heart, no brain, no courage) who banded together and made their way through a strange new land in search of wholeness.
In California, a man named Walt Disney began an animation studio, the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio, in 1923. In conjunction with his business partner and brother, Roy Disney, Walt built an animation empire that would eventually transform the world.
Before setting up in California, Disney had made a series of shorts called Laugh-O-Grams while working for a Kansas City advertising company. One of these told a modern version of Cinderella that sees our heroine scrubbing dishes in a kitchen with her only friend the cat. (In this black-and-white version there is no pumpkin and no mice – the fairy godmother instead transforms empty air in front of Cinderella into a Ford Model T and decks her out in a flapper’s dress and beads. At the end, the stepsisters aren’t mutilated – only lonely and miserable.) It was in Kansas that he also made his first film employing both animation and live-action techniques: a short starring four-year-old Virginia Davis based on Alice in Wonderland.
(Disney, it should be noted, was influenced by the works of cartoonist Paul Terry, who created and produced the Aesop’s Fables series of animated shorts under his company Fables Studios. The series launched with The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg in 1921 and continued under the Fables name until 1929, when Terry left the company. The remaining shorts in the series were completed under the Van Beuren Studios and ran until 1936.)
In California, Disney moved on to creating the character of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, an adventurous rabbit who already espoused the physical ideals that would be woven through Disney’s later films (Disney wanted the rabbit to be ‘peppy, alert, saucy and venturesome, keeping him also neat and trim’). A dispute over intellectual property rights to Oswald led to the abandonment of that character and the creation of the iconic Mickey Mouse in 1928 – a character that became so successful so quickly that it led to Disney being awarded an honorary Oscar for the creation of Mickey in 1932.
But Disney had bigger dreams. Specifically, he thought that full-length films offered more opportunities for animation – and with his fairy-tale training and knowledge behind him, he set out to remake the world.
In a way, this book begins here, because I also begin here. I begin with Disney in the theatre – the giant plush seats and my seven-year-old body folding into them, the way that I wasn’t big enough to keep the seat down all the way and so always sat in a slight upward V-shape.
I begin with Disney as a video release on VHS – the bulky smoothness of the tape, the way the TV screen wiggles when we rewind the tapes over and over again to our favourite parts.
I begin with One Hundred and One Dalmatians on an Easter morning when I’m ten. Whenever I see that film now I think of chocolate.
I begin with Beauty and the Beast, with The Rescuers, with Miss Bianca and Bernard the mouse in their original adventure, helping orphan Penny as she’s lifted down into the mine.
I begin with Jasmine and Aladdin, with Simba the Lion King, with beautiful Aurora and her magical, colour-shifting dress. I begin, over and over, with Ariel the Little Mermaid who sings under the sea.
I begin with Disney.
The ‘Disneyfication’ of well-known fairy tales – wherein the happy endings became even happier, and the darker elements of traditional tales were passed over in favour of less controversial storylines – became a hallmark of the twentieth century starting in 1937, with the release of Disney’s first full-length animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Walt Disney, who knew the original tale by the Brothers Grimm, felt that the tale had potential to fill out a feature-length animated film. In particular, Disney thought a great deal of comic relief could be had from the personalities of the dwarfs, who had not been named in the Brothers Grimm version of the tale and offered, Disney felt, a wealth of opportunity for the studio to expand and further endear the story to a modern audience.
And so: Happy, Sneezy, Grumpy, Bashful, Sleepy, Dopey, and Doc. Seven dwarfs to make fun of, seven dwarfs to counterbalance the princess and the prince and the evil, scheming queen. Seven bright faces to blot out the darkness. Seven different bodies to distract us from what’s lurking in the healthy ones.
It worked, as a strategy. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs cost almost us$1.5 million to make – well over the original budget of $250,000. The film grossed nearly $8 million worldwide in its first run. Proceeds from the film allowed Walt Disney to build new studios in Burbank, California, and within a year of the film’s premiere, plans were already underway for Disney’s next two animated feature films, Fantasia and Pinocchio, with other well-known tales – Peter Pan, Dumbo, Alice in Wonderland – soon to follow. Cinderella came in 1950, with Sleeping Beauty appearing in 1959. Nods to other European fairy and folk tales slowly appeared with films like Robin Hood (1973) and The Little Mermaid (1989); storytelling expanded to other continents with Aladdin (1992), The Lion King (1994), and Mulan (1998).
Storylines for the films were culled from cultures all over the world and pressed into a tried-and-true formula: plucky hero/heroine, quest, loyal sidekick often used for laughs. There was usually a broken family of some kind – one or more dead parents (Snow White, Bambi, Aladdin, The Little Mermaid, The Rescuers, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast …) and some element of ostracization of the main character through no fault of their own. (Belle in Beauty and the Beast is seen as eccentric because she loves to read; Ariel in The Little Mermaid is set apart from her fellow mermaids and mermen because of her fascination with the world above the sea; Jasmine in Aladdin is set up as a maverick because she does not want to go through with an arranged royal marriage; Aladdin himself is a street orphan and social outcast – even the Genie, arguably, is an outcast, kept as he is from the world due to the confines of his lamp.)
There was also generally some element of disability in the films that was played up for comic or tragic effect. Snow White had her dwarfs; Pinocchio had his nose; even Sleeping Beauty had a condition, magically bestowed though it was, that kept her apart from the world. Ariel could not walk for the first half of her film, though it was true she could move in other ways. Quasimodo, the lovable Hunchback of Notre Dame, was ostracized in his bell tower. Scar, the villain in The Lion King, was so closely associated with his disability and disfigurement that he didn’t even have a separate name.
I didn’t notice any of this when I was a child – or, at least, I didn’t notice it outright. I noticed it in the way that children always notice things – faithfully, unquestioningly – content to let the world I saw on television build the world I saw outside, even though I didn’t realize it at the time.
I came of age just before Disney expanded its franchise in several crucial ways. I was thirteen years old the year the Disney Store opened in my local mall. I never went to Disney-world or Disneyland. Because my world wasn’t inundated with Disney merchandise or trips, the tales I saw onscreen mostly remained stories – stories my siblings and I were happy to act out in our backyard, yes, but stories all the same. The world of Disney merchandise – and, arguably, the world of Disney we all now know and see – had not yet become quite a thing.
But still, the lessons were there. You don’t watch The Little Mermaid hundreds of times without learning a few crucial things: how important walking is, the desperate measures one might take to be with the person they love. What is and is not acceptable in polite society. Ariel walked toward her happiness in the end. Pinocchio’s happy ending came with a nose that was ‘normal.’ Quasimodo had friends at the end of his tale but he didn’t have romantic love. After all, how could he? Would Quasimodo fit in a Disney Princes line of merchandise if ever there was such a thing? Wouldn’t he spoil the effect, sticking out as he does in a line of princes all so bland and boring?
And Scar, the erstwhile villain who embodies disfigurement of both the body and soul? He dies in the end, eradicated in the way that all true evil should be.
Except it isn’t evil, really. Scar as a character is second in line to the throne, condemned to live in his older brother’s larger, more powerful shadow. (His original name was Taka, which means ‘dirt’ or ‘filth’ in Swahili. As legend has it, he took the name Scar to remind himself that jealousy and hate almost cost him an eye – but Jealousy doesn’t have as much of an impact as a name, does it?)
Who’s to say that the Beast in Beauty and the Beast isn’t made precisely as terrible as he is as a result of the world’s reaction to his disfigurement? It is the world’s shunning that causes so much of the problem – the social ills that Hans My Hedgehog so determinedly pushed against, the social pressures that made the princess Mama recognize herself as inferior and choose intelligence at whatever cost. The world did this.
The world does this.
But what’s the big deal? everyone says again. Everyone knows that Disney movies aren’t real.
It’s just a movie.
Grow up.
Get over it.
‘Remove imperfection from the body,’ says Tobin Siebers, ‘and one discovers the perfect recipe for what does not exist for the most part in the human universe.’
This is a paradox at once unique to both human nature and fairy tales. You cannot reach for a better society without recognizing that the society in which you live is also itself imperfect – the two go hand in hand. So if you’re going to tell an idealized story about a father who wishes for a child or a princess who wishes for intelligence or a son who wishes to go out and seek his fortune in the world, and if the fulfillment of that quest symbolizes perfection, the here and now of the characters themselves must somehow show the flaws through which they begin to shape their quest.
And what better, faster, easier way for a storyteller to show this so-called imperfection than through the metaphor of disability, an idea that is already so ingrained in society as emblematic of the imperfect?
I hear so many stories from disabled women and men who used to be little disabled girls and boys. The stories all hurt in the same way.
I was never there in fairy tales. I never saw myself.
I saw myself, but I was always the bad guy. You never get to be the princess when you look different.
There’s the story of Irené Colthurst, who like me has cerebral palsy and as a young girl watched Cinderella put her foot into a glass slipper. Irené got her shoes from Nordstrom, the only store that allowed you to mix and match shoes of the same style but different sizes. ‘Some of the most unpleasant memories I have,’ she tells me, ‘are of sitting in the shoe department … the shoes rubbed so much that they could and often did rub sores in my feet. Sometimes to the point of bleeding.’
But Cinderella, Irené notes, never had trouble like this. ‘Nobody else fits into the dainty-foot shoe, and this is how easily she slips back into it? Voila, happily ever after?’
The story of Dominick Evans, a disabled trans filmmaker, who never saw himself in these stories growing up. ‘I wasn’t a pretty little girl,’ he remembers. ‘And all of those stories were about pretty little girls – never mind trans or disabled characters!’
The story of Sarah Jama, a Somali-Canadian disability organizer and co-founder of the Disability Justice Network of Ontario, who identified with the heroes in fairy tales because she was afraid to identify as the princess and the damsel-in-distress. ‘As a disabled immigrant, you can’t be weak, because weakness then translates into being a burden on the system.’
What messages do we internalize, as disabled children, when we see a world that looks so easy on the screen and then struggle with the world in real life?
‘If you get seven little people together in a car or an elevator,’ Rebecca Cokley tells me, ‘you can bet we’re going to make jokes about it. But that’s an entirely different thing from someone who is not a little person making the same jokes.’
Rebecca Cokley is the Senior Fellow for Disability Policy at the Center for American Progress. I speak with her in mid-February of 2019, a few weeks after President Donald Trump delivers his State of the Union address.
‘He mentioned the disabled in his speech,’ she notes, smiling faintly at the irony. ‘I worked for Obama for nearly ten years and we were never able to get the disabled in the State of the Union. So at least it’s there, I guess.’
Rebecca has achondroplasia, a common cause of dwarfism. She’s a second-generation little person – her parents met at a Little People of America convention in the 1970s. Growing up as a little person in a family of little people, she felt acutely aware both of how little people are portrayed in fairy-tale culture – from Rumpelstiltskin to the Seven Dwarfs, from Thumbelina to Tinker Bell – and how she did not fit into that idea. ‘You’ll find in many cases where there’s average-height parents who have children who are little people, they spend a lot of time trying to protect their kids from that kind of stuff,’ she explains. ‘But when the parents and kids are little people, we have no problem understanding we’re not magical creatures.’ Still, it’s not hard for Rebecca to see how disability runs as a narrative through most fairy tales – and from there, how it runs as a narrative in our stories, political, fantastical, and otherwise, today. It is, after all, such an easy way to show how someone is different.
Do you remember that version of ‘Hansel and Gretel’ where the witch comes to the door with a crutch and then cooks and eats the children? Rebecca does, for sure. ‘When you look at these stories,’ she says, ‘how they were written, what was thought about disability in those times – stories are one of those constructs that have the most power because they get you at such a young age.’
And while times might have changed, when it comes to the films of Disney, certain things have remained the same. The unmistakably evil sorceress, the stepmother, the sharpness of Jafar’s face in Aladdin. The slash across the face of Scar.
The princesses, beautiful and true. Red-haired and black-haired and blond-haired and brown. Funny and independent and so quick to fall in love. For several of them, sixteen years old when they fall in love and win their princes.
It took seventy-two years for Disney to make a film starring a Black princess. Fifty-five years for a princess who was South Asian. Fifty-eight years for an Indigenous princess. Sixty-one years for a princess from China.
No disabled princess yet, so far as I can see.
It’s important here to stop and recognize one crucial thing. Fairy tales exist in different forms all over the world. And yet despite their differences, there have been similarities found between many tales of different cultures – similarities so striking that they drove the creation of the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index, a method of cataloguing various fairy tales from across the world. The ATU was developed in Finland by Antti Aarne in the early twentieth century and subsequently modified by the American folklorist Stith Thompson and German folk-lorist Hans-Jörg Uther in 1928 and 2004, respectively. It comprises a vast database where all of the fairy-tale motifs we know and love are catalogued together – the stepmother, the boy or girl who makes their way out into the world, the friendly stranger, the animal helper, the ‘rule of three’ (Goldilocks and the Three Bears, the Three Little Pigs). Time and time again, one can root through the ATU and see similar themes popping up in tales told on opposite sides of the globe.
Well, you say, that’s hardly surprising, is it? Stories, after all, are universal.
Except that they aren’t, not wholly. Stories as we know them are inextricably bound up in the social and societal expectations of the cultures in which they arise – they arise because of a culture, not in spite of it. And so the plucky girl or boy who defies their parents and sets out to make their fortune speaks to a universal experience not simply because the desire to go out into the world is universal, but because the societies that keep these boys or girls back – whether through patriarchy, income disparity, barriers to the disabled, or some other means – are themselves the overarching universalities that hold us all together.
The evil stepmother is a fixture in European fairy tales because the stepmother was very much a fixture in early European society – mortality in childbirth was very high, and it wasn’t unusual for a father to suddenly find himself alone with multiple mouths to feed. So he remarried and brought another woman into the house, and eventually they had yet more children, thus changing the power dynamics of inheritance in the household in a way that had very little to do with inherent, archetypal evil and everything to do with social expectation and pressure. What was a woman to do when she remarried into a family and had to act as mother to her husband’s children as well as her own, in a time when economic prosperity was a magical dream for most? Would she think of killing her husband’s children so that her own children might therefore inherit and thrive? Would she argue, like the stepmother does in ‘Hansel and Gretel,’ that the children must leave the house in order for the husband and his wife to survive? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But the fear that stepmothers (or stepfathers) might do this kind of thing was very real, and it was that fear – fed by the socioeconomic pressures felt by the growing urban class – that fed the stories.
We see this also with the stories passed around in France – fairies who swoop in to save the day when women themselves can’t do so; romantic tales of young girls who marry beasts as a balm to those young ladies facing arranged marriages to older, distant dukes. We see this with the removal of fairies and insertion of religion into the German tales.
Fairy tales, in short, are not created in a vacuum. As with all stories, they change and bend both with and in response to culture. And Disney knew this.
‘There’s a real kind of connectedness and savviness to the way that Disney told tales,’ author and scholar Sarah Henstra tells me. We speak in Toronto on a bright day in March, as the last vestiges of winter are gathering themselves on the wind. Sarah teaches a course at Ryerson University called ‘Fairy Tales and Fantasies.’ In it, she introduces students to the archetypes that permeate most of the fairy tales we know in the Western world – as well as the countless spinoffs, revisionings, and interpretations of these tales that make their way into mainstream Western media.
‘It’s not like Disney went in with some nefarious agenda to make everything saccharine and palatable – he was trying to fill the movie house. Fairy tales are always a product of the cultural preoccupations of the time,’ Sarah says. ‘Even Snow White herself, in the film – she’s always talking about attitude adjustments. Audiences in the 1930s needed to hear something more than “grit and positive thinking will pull you through,” something packaged differently, because at the time, nothing else was working.’
It’s no coincidence, in other words, that Disney chose Snow White – a magical princess, displayed on a screen with new technology that has its audience instantly enamoured – to exhort the dwarfs to whistle while you work, encouraging her gruff and humble new friends to find what joy they could in a hardscrabble, earthy existence. It’s one thing to hear this from the government or other sources of power – it’s another thing entirely to be romanced into the thinking via a cinematic experience unlike any other. In 1937 the Great Depression had tumbled back into a recession and the need for both escape and encouragement was high. What better way to bring magic back into the world than through story, packaged in a way no one had quite seen before? What better way to encourage people to be cheerful and optimistic than through a beautiful princess who continues to smile and dance despite the darkness in her life?
(It’s also no coincidence that there’s a fetishization of the dwarfs as a kind of earthy, ‘common’ folk – in their cheerfulness and willingness to take in a stranger and share what resources they have, one can see echoes of both the charity model [be kind, do good, do unto others] and the condescension therein – look at these cheerful dwarfs, doing so much with so little! – as well as the communism that was stirring in opposition to fascist regimes on the rise in other parts of the world. Was it intentional, the connecting of these othered individuals to the values of humility and collective good – values that would eventually come to be demonized in their own way, associated with a negative kind of simplicity and otherness once again? Perhaps not consciously, but the drawing of those lines was still pronounced. Snow White is different from the dwarfs – she can learn from them, as they can from her, but at the end of the day they are still different people. They have their humble cottage, and she goes on to live in a castle.)
‘There’s this pattern that we map onto fairy tales and mythology,’ Sarah notes. ‘You have a landscape strewn with obstacles, a chosen or unchosen hero – someone who refuses the call and then follows. There is often a magical helper who sees to it that the hero goes out into the open world, into the space of adventure. If it’s a female protagonist, there tends to be a moment of disobedience, or a moment of disruption that leads to a bad bargain, and from there the need for the protagonist to overcome these obstacles and triumph.’
The Maiden Without Hands is the result of a bad bargain, when her father unwittingly turns her over to the Devil, thinking he’s only given away his apple tree. In Disney’s The Little Mermaid, Ariel makes her own bad bargain with Ursula the Sea Witch; in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, the parents of Princess Aurora make an arguably bad bargain with the fairies to protect her from harm; in Disney’s Cinderella, the bargain struck with the fairy godmother is perhaps not as bad as some but still makes for difficulty when the clock strikes twelve. The young Tahitian princess Moana learns the hard way what it means to cast oneself away from the comforts of home on the fairy-tale quest. And yet, as their narratives cycle through to completion, all of these female narrators manage to triumph. Slowly, subtly, Disney has managed over the years to champion the virtues of independence and strength – as well as kindness and beauty – in a way that’s perhaps not as overtly political as the indestructible cheerfulness of Snow White but every bit as powerful.
What does it mean, though, to champion an independence that looks and talks and walks a very certain, particular way? To imaginatively respond to cultural pressures and change and yet manage to stay immobile and still when it comes to depictions of the disabled body? As a young girl growing up with a wheelchair, then crutches, then a limp, what does it mean to watch a princess put her foot into a glass slipper and understand that this glass slipper holds all promises of her dreams come true?
What happens when you know that your own foot would never fit in a slipper like that, much less be good for dancing? The Disney Princesses, as most families and young children know them today, became a brand in 2000, after Disney executive Andy Mooney attended a showing of Disney on Ice and noticed that young girls were dressed up in bespoke princess costumes at the event. Inspired by the possibilities for commercial expansion, Mooney returned to his Disney office and ordered his creative team to start thinking about merchandise geared specifically around the most well-known princesses in the Disney movie line.
The line grossed $300 million in its first year; by 2012, annual revenue was over $3 billion. The line started with Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Pocahontas, Mulan, and Tinker Bell, but Tinker Bell left the line shortly after inception to head the Disney Fairies. Tiana, the African-American main character in The Princess and the Frog, took over Tinker Bell’s spot in 2010; in 2011, Rapunzel joined the lot. The eleventh member, Brave’s Scottish princess Merida, joined the franchise in 2013.
It’s a line of princesses who are at once all different and yet entirely the same – all young, all beautiful. Mostly white. Four women of colour. They have open smiles and bright, trusting natures. With the exception of Merida, they all find love – but then Merida isn’t really looking for love, so love doesn’t matter.
Together, they sing the same song, over and over: be kind, be bold, be true. Whistle while you work and have faith in your dreams and, as Cinderella sang, ‘someday your rainbow will come smiling through.’ Ask for adventure, ask for love. Trust in yourself and your story and happily ever after will be yours, too.
This is also a political message, positive and pure though it might seem. It assumes a whole manner of things that go unsaid: beauty; a largely heteronormative approach to romance; the privilege of resources and pluck. (We aren’t all of us able to wrest a future from hardscrabble origins, nor are most of us the lucky recipients of a fairy godmother’s love.) From a feminist perspective, the Disney Princesses champion female empowerment while also drawing that empowerment clearly within the lines of adjacency to male privilege and power – even bow-slinging, bear-tussling Merida, singular as she is, proves her worth in part because she’s just as good as the boys.
Most importantly, it’s a message that assumes absolute and unrealistic able-bodiedness. No one with glasses. No crutches, no wheelchairs, no visible differences from girl to girl apart from the colour of their eyes and hair. Perfectly symmetrical faces abound. Some of the princesses – Mulan and Merida in particular – are athletes, with the kind of unrealistic body control and power that even able-bodied people often struggle to obtain. The message is that heroism isn’t possible without physical ‘perfection,’ especially for girls.
(This longing for perfection in the form of physical prowess is so insidious that it pervades even the way we think about disability; disabled people who can achieve some measure of physical participation in sport are inevitably placed higher on the physical hierarchy than those who cannot, leading to the dichotomy of the ‘super-crip’ narrative, where the disabled athlete is seen as more powerful than their non-athletic disabled brethren. In actuality, the issue is not that some disabled people are more capable than others and thus more worthy of consideration in the realm of sport, but that sport is not adapted on a wider level and made accessible to all disabled people.
When it comes to Mulan in particular, the aspect of the title character being marginalized as a result of her ‘inferior’ female body raises an interesting question. Disability, notes Siebers, ‘[has] served to justify oppression by amplifying ideas about inferiority already attached to other minority identities.’ The scholar Talila A. Lewis expands on this in her working definition of ableism available on her website – a working definition, she notes, that is grounded in community work and conversation:
Ableism is a system that places value on people’s bodies and minds based on societally constructed ideas of normalcy, intelligence, and excellence. These constructed ideas of normalcy, intelligence, and excellence are deeply rooted in anti-Blackness, eugenics, and capitalism.
This form of systemic oppression leads to people and society determining who is valuable and worthy based on people’s appearance and/or their ability to satisfactorily produce, excel, and ‘behave.’
Under this definition of ableism, it is possible to see how Mulan, perceived as inferior through dint of her female body, could be seen to have experienced ableism. In the film, she overcomes others’ perceptions of her as unworthy by proving that she is, indeed, just as good or even better than any man who has enlisted in the army alongside her – in short, she triumphs not by getting others to recognize that her own different body is just as valuable as the next, but by making her body fit a constructed idea of what it means to be productive and valuable in society. She is not valuable until she is the same as everyone else.)
The spell of sameness can only be broken, it seems, by the villains. Differences, when we find them in Disney, lie not with the princesses but with their antagonists – the sorceress, the evil witch, the stepmother. A crooked nose and green skin and horns, and we know, instantly, who we have to root for, and who must be defeated.
When Rebecca Cokley was young, one of her favourite parts of fairy tales were the villains. She loved Maleficent, in the original animated Disney version of Sleeping Beauty, in particular – how striking she was, how different from those around her. Her green skin, her horns, her pointed chin, and wings. ‘She carried herself,’ she tells me, ‘with such confidence and power.’
Errol Kerr, based in Newcastle in the UK, tells me much the same. He was diagnosed with autism at the age of six, and then diagnosed with hypermobility syndrome at fifteen. Like Rebecca, he grew up with stories – in his case, with a father who read to him from all manner of fantasy and fairy-tale stories, from The Lord of the Rings through to Dune through to the Brothers Grimm. And as a child of the nineties, he was exposed to all things Disney and found the narratives comforting in their familiarity. It’s a familiarity and comfort that he recognizes as problematic now, but still the nostalgia remains.
‘The 2014 film’ – Maleficent, with Angelina Jolie – ‘took the Sleeping Beauty story in a direction I was afraid it wouldn’t have the guts to do,’ he says. ‘Particularly with regard to the forcible removal of a particular kind of mobility as tantamount to rape. I think that’s definitely something that can and should be discussed more.’
(In Maleficent, it is Maleficent herself who is violated when she is drugged, and her fairy wings are taken from her by her old friend Stefan. But as we will see in Chapter Seven, the spectre of rape in ‘Sleeping Beauty’ is actually a very old part of the story.)
Errol studied at Newcastle University and sits on the executive committee of Autistic UK. Like me, like Rebecca, he’s a Disney fan of the it’s complicated variety. He is skeptical, for example, that the planned live-action remake of The Hunchback of Notre Dame will bring any particular gains.
‘Other than Maleficent, all of the films that Disney is currently making appear to be identical to their animated versions,’ he says. ‘And the Disney version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame was very family-friendly, pitiful inspiration porn.’ He doesn’t see much hope for growth and inclusion with regard to disability in retellings like these, and we are both agreed on this: for fairy tales to keep their power as we move into the twenty-first century, growth and change are essential.
Essential because the nostalgia that keeps drawing us back to the brightness of Disney films and their ilk also has its dark underpinnings. Like the nostalgia that the Grimms evoked for the bygone paradise of rural German life (a paradise that was itself non-existent, as it doesn’t take a historian to recognize how difficult life was for the peasantry), it’s a nostalgia that yearns for a time that never actually was. There was never a time when magic ruled the world; there was never a time when plucky Jack could climb a beanstalk and defeat the giant, upending the social order. Even in the story of ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ itself, the triumph is contained – it’s only Jack and his mother who are well-fed at the end of the tale. Society, as we have seen, does not change in fairy tales. The transformation is individual, never systemic.
So, too, with Disney. Transformation is all well and good, but if it’s only an individual who changes, what does that mean for society at large? What does it mean for a young, physically disabled girl who might dream about being a princess to also know, at the same time, that the wider world doesn’t believe in a princess who might use a wheelchair – but is more than ready to believe in a witch who uses crutches or an evil queen who transforms herself into an ugly hag?
‘Fairy tales are formative pieces of work when you’re a child,’ Errol says. ‘In my case, they established my viewpoint particularly with regard to those who have facial differences, and not in a way I’d like. I’ve rectified that now, but when you see as a child how the Evil Queen [in Snow White] uses ugliness as a disguise – and uses it as a way to gain pity from someone who is innocent and trusting, while we as the audience are made aware of the deception within it – that teaches you a lot, even if you’re unaware of it at the time.’
One of the things it teaches a child is a sweeping – and incorrect – idea about the nature of good and evil in the world. Disney fairy tales, and many traditional fairy tales as well, operate in a world where things like good and evil are clearly defined – where the heroes and heroines are good and good-looking, kind and sweet or at the very least likeable, and where the villains are literally marked as such by their difference. The villains in Disney are sharp-edged and angled. Maleficent has that green skin and those wings. Aladdin’s Jafar is tall and thin (in contrast to the plump, kindly Sultan), while Ursula the Sea Witch has grey skin and spiked white hair and is fat, in contrast to the slender nature of Ariel and the other mermaids. Scar is physically smaller than his Lion King rival, Mufasa, and also painted in a paler shade; Dr. Facilier in The Princess and the Frog is, like Jafar, tall and thin, sharp in both personality and countenance. To look at them is to know that they mean harm – to understand that the darkness of their hearts is made manifest in the way they move through the world.
But navigating the world doesn’t actually work this way. And while this is something we might understand on the face of it (Obviously this isn’t the real world, this is ONLY A MOVIE!), often we internalize the fairy tale to a largely unconscious degree. Sometimes, when happy endings and obvious villains are all that you’re fed, it becomes difficult to square your own experience of the world with that story. If you’re shown the different body as other over and over as a child, it becomes hard to see your own different body as something that might, in turn, belong.
This goes for bodies and children of all kinds. For myself as a disabled child, it had a particular kind of staying power. Sometimes I feel like the bright colours and bright bursts of song in Disney films are as delicious and as deceptive as the witch’s candy cottage hidden deep inside the woods.
You might eat, but this kind of candy will never fill you up.
Rebecca has three children now, and their experience of Disney and fairy tales is very different from the experience she had growing up. Still, so much of what she remembers has stayed the same. Two of her children are little people. All of her children are biracial, and this makes for many an interesting conversation around the Disney films they all love so much. ‘My son once said to me that in Disney films, the characters are either Black or they have a disability, but they don’t often have both.’
Rebecca, who is white, talks often with her children about what it means to move through the world with multiple marginalizations. Her children are still young, but already they’re beginning to grasp the intricacies of a world that Disney glosses over – simply by occupying a space that’s not traditionally talked about in films. ‘I asked them if they thought that Elsa had a disability and my son said he’d always thought of her as having a superpower.’
(Elsa, for the uninitiated, is – along with her sister Anna – one of the heroines of Frozen, Disney’s massively popular 2013 film about a girl [Elsa] with the power, initially uncontrollable, to manipulate the ice and snow, and the sister who saves her. It is very loosely based on the plot of ‘The Snow Queen,’ a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen.)
The equation of Elsa and superhero is, we can hope, telling; when it comes to Disney villains, as well as villains in mainstream media in general, Rebecca does see the beginnings of a cultural change. It’s a change that has been more prevalent in the superhero stories of comic books and action movies over the last decade or so. ‘The villain has an antiquated view, or doesn’t understand, as opposed to them being intrinsically bad,’ Rebecca says. The growing social shift – encouraged by social media movements and conversations – toward awareness and recognition of physical differences is beginning, however slowly, to be reflected in the stories that we tell. Perhaps we see this more in comic books because comics have had a stronger push for diverse writers and teams. Revisionings like Maleficent are harbingers of a change that’s also happening in the fairy-tale world, but change, when it comes, is a trickle.
‘It would be great to get to a point where disability isn’t exotic anymore,’ Rebecca says. For both of us, it’s a dream and an idea that feel almost as distant as becoming a princess. Imagine: you turn on that Disney film and the protagonist picks up their cane or pulls out their wheelchair and goes off on that quest. A princess puts on her glasses, a prince gets up from his walker and calls his faithful guide-dog companion to his side. It feels revolutionary the way that fairy godmothers, in how their magic works to transform a life, feel revolutionary.
But then, fairy godmothers are everywhere in the stories we tell now. They are one of the oldest fairy-tale clichés. See how easily the magical becomes commonplace?
Would that we can all get to a point where disability feels as ordinary as a fairy godmother, too.
In my twenties, in the mid- to late-2000s, a real princess comes to the world’s attention. She begins her life as Kate Middleton.
These are the stories I hold on to, which may or may not be true:
Once, when she was shopping near her family’s home in Buck-lebury, England, a man she’d purchased goods from asked her what he should call her. Well, my name is Kate, she said, smiling, so that will do just fine.
When she and Prince William lived in Anglesey, in Wales, she used to do all of their grocery shopping. Once, as I stood in line to buy my own groceries, I saw a tabloid photo of her pushing a shopping cart into Tesco and thought, I will never look as beautiful dressed up as that woman does buying chicken.
One night before they were dating, she rescued William from the unwanted attentions of another woman by slinging her arm around his neck and proclaiming him to be her boyfriend.
She wore wedge-heeled shoes a fair bit before marrying into the royal family, but doesn’t that much anymore. Apparently the Queen doesn’t like them.
She has a scar on her head from a surgery in childhood that you can sometimes see in photos when they’re close-cropped and zoomed-in. No one in the family has ever publicly talked about it, or said what the surgery was.
Not that it matters – I’m only curious. A year or so after my own surgery at age five, another girl in my class at school had an infection that required her own shaved head and operation.
I don’t know the details of that either, and also wish I did. How often does this kind of thing happen to children? How many of these experiences do we get to share? I don’t know all that much else about Kate. She is married to the future king of England. They have three children and at least one dog. They live in Kensington Palace and also have a country home. She’s an amateur photographer and loves to be outdoors. Apparently, the furniture in the children’s rooms all comes from IKEA.
‘She knows … that to be royal is to be yearned for, and to be yearned for is a thing to be managed,’ writes Brian Phillips in his essay ‘The Once and Future Queen.’ ‘[People] will project onto you the fantasies whose reality they most long to see confirmed. They will love you if you reflect those fantasies back to them.’
She must have, I imagine, an amazing shoe collection. Other than her wedges, I’ve never seen her in anything other than four-inch heels. She can, and has, stood in them for hours.
My own feet have never, and will never, fit into shoes so high and pretty.
‘People search for significance in the events of her youth,’ writes Phillips, ‘because her life looks, from the outside, like magic, and things that look like magic are easier to explain the more like magic they look.’
Of course a life only looks like magic from the outside – magic isn’t real, and what looks like a fairy tale is often just an amplified version of a regular, run-of-the-mill happy story. Girl from wealthy upper-middle-class family meets boy and falls in love, and boy happens to be second in line to the throne. They went to school together; they walked the same St. Andrews streets a few years before I did as a graduate student.
But it is hard, isn’t it, to not be taken in by the power of it. The dresses, the palace, the trips to countries all over the world. One day she will be the Queen consort of England; right now, She is a princess. She is beautiful and kind and so warm on camera, so present and genuine.
Hello, she says to a little boy at a charity event. The children have just finished singing; she crouches down in her high heels and reaches out to shake the boy’s hand. Was that you singing just now? You sound just like my Georgie. She is a woman who knows how to talk to children. she brings warmth and class wherever she goes, a genteel grace at once genuine and savvy, calculated and fresh.
I have a crush on her, I’ll admit it. More than that: for a long time, I wanted so badly to have her life. Her beautiful dresses and her beautiful hair and her smiling, gorgeous children. Everything about the way that she moves through the world feels blessed, magical, extraordinary.
We are taught that extraordinary looks and walks and talks a certain way, too. In 2018, when Meghan Markle marries Prince Harry, I watch the royal wedding on my laptop in the early hours of the morning and feel the same old longing ache throughout my limbs. That beautiful dress. The beautiful shoes she wears to the reception. The magical nature of that story.
I wish I had a life like that. I wish I had a body that seemed to fit, as if by magic, into a life like that.
Sure, it isn’t everything. Sure, it’s only shoes – shoes and a dress and a body that looks a certain way, acts a certain way. The kind of body that can step into a fairy tale, as opposed to the kind of body that does not belong in a fairy tale, or at least not in a fairy tale’s happy ending.
Princess.
There is something insidious about the way we conceptualize beauty, about the way we associate gendered values of goodness and purity with what is dainty and pleasing and small. It isn’t hard to move from this through to the way we frown upon anything that is larger or unusual or doesn’t fit the status quo. It isn’t difficult, in other words, to move from the way fairy tales have helped us to conceptualize beauty and goodness through to the way that our ideas of beauty and goodness actually operate in the world.
Perhaps it isn’t magic, but for those of us who’ll never fit in those shoes no matter how we try, it might as well be.