Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer Reviews Amanda Leduc's Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space

Amanda Leduc. Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space. Coach House Books. $19.95, 235 pp., ISBN 9781552453957

Fairytales are strange creatures — aggregates of many voices arising like gossip, in the sense that they are transmitted time out of time firstly from one teller to the next. The collective nature of fairytales suggests a certain beautiful collaboration in which we are all welcome to participate. The texts and discourses of the fairytale are malleable, strange enough they can be borrowed and stolen from to make some new thing to our liking. We do not really know their origins, with some said to date back to Bronze-Age (wo)man. We get the image of firelight dancing on the faces of rapt listeners, the teller swaying gently to some internal rhythm as the story emerges, word by word, enchanting their audience. Only later are they written down, archived, starting in eighteenth century — in this way they are pinned down and stopped in time. Amanda Leduc rightly comments that it is “through [fairytales] that we give shape to and understand the world.” In some way, it is story that gives us world at all. This is so because fairytales, as one of our earliest iterations, document and chronicle our collective understanding of that world. In this way, for better and/or for worse, they also reify ancient modes of interaction.

As a disability activist and as a disabled person [1], Leduc interrogates precisely the ways in which fairytales reinforce negative tropes of disability. She shows us the ways in which the fairytale form is hegemonic, how it vilifies, undermines, re-constitutes disabled characters as abled characters or antagonists. She finds herself dismayed by her own seduction by these stories despite the ways in which they fail to offer her a positive reflection. I, too, reveled in fairytales as a child; (arguably I still revel in them, can’t stop writing them, or writing around them). I, too, find I am often flummoxed by their reductive endings, by the cruelty of their modes of knowledge transmission. What are we to make of Little Red Riding Hood being devoured by a talking wolf, or the wee, black, and rageful Rumpelstiltskin ripping himself in two, or of the ugly sisters in Cinderella chopping their toes off in their rampant lust for a royal future? 

Leduc shows us that these stories convey only a particular type of data, one that seems to school and limit the freedom of many to the advantage of one — for only one perfect person (often freed from some diabolical enchantment) will live happily ever after. The exceptionalism inherent to fairytales, as Leduc rightly points out, seems to bar the rest of us from the possibility of happiness. Read for their endings, fairytales do much harm to the disabled, to women, to less than heroic men (and even to heroic men). Insofar as the fairytale is adhering to ancient coded systems, it keeps us in a structure of ableism, sexism, patriarchy, racism, and heteronormativity. It tells us that we might live happily ever after if only we can comply with a set of impossible attributes, rules, and restrictions. That did not stop me, as a child, from imagining that I could or did. 

It is only as one grows up, enters into the objectively real spaces of school and workforce that the avid reader of fairytales is re-aligned and that the dream is shattered. The fact is that none of us really live happily ever after — that aspect of the fairytale is patently false in all instances. Life is various and fraught. Our bodies cannot adhere to the program set out by these stories, much less the barrage of advertising that often trades on it. Leduc’s point that fairytales have an adverse affect on disabled readers and that disabled bodies are particularly targeted in the old stories is apt. It certainly had me looking closer at the stories and in a new way. For if in my abled body, I find myself disappointed and rejected (too fat, too smelly, too boyish, too unpredictable, too unruly) by these old narratives, the disabled self must further contend with villains, typically presented scarred, discoloured, and monstrous. Leduc’s thesis is underpinned with moving accounts of her life story, growing up as she did with surgeries, with visible physical challenges, and later with invisible, psychological ones. I loved these aspects of Disfigured especially, where Leduc courageously presses her own story into service in order to show us how the fairytales failed her. In this way, she finds a path through, as if the stories themselves provide a sort of quest for her to undertake. 

This is a good moment to note that fairytales have been fabricated, as if out of fever dreams, throughout the history of the genre by Madame D’Aulnoy, the Marquis de Sade, Hans Christian Andersen, Oscar Wilde, Italo Calvino, and much later by Angela Carter, Sara Maitland, Kate Bernheimer, and others. Leduc, in her own fiction, has employed the tropes of fairytales to convey the complexity of the human body and mind (The Miracles of Ordinary Men). I take solace in the fact that the form can be made flexible to incorporate new data, and thus can be leveraged to re-narrate some better, more inclusive narrative — that is, indeed, magic.

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer is the bestselling  author of the novels All The Broken Things, The Nettle Spinner, and Perfecting, as well as, the story collection, Way Up. Her work has been published in Granta Magazine, The Walrus, Maclean’s, Storyville, and The Lifted Brow. Kathryn holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Toronto. She teaches creative writing at Colorado College and supervises MFA students at the University of Guelph. 

[1] Leduc notes that “the general consensus among disability activists is that person-first language, while well-meaning, separates disability from identity and thus continues to malign disability and perpetuates the idea that it is a negative thing.”.