ONCE UPON A CUR(S)E: Disability and fractured prosthesis in contemporary fairy tale retellings

朱莉·桑德斯认为，童话故事是重新想象的合适场所，因为它们存在于抽象的社会和地理背景中，但她强调了一种“可察觉的反运动”，这种运动试图将故事重新安置到社会背景中。从迪斯尼到抵制“迪斯尼化”的改编，二十一世纪已经看到了一种颠覆传统西方童话中典型的被动女性角色塑造和异性恋式的幸福结局的愿望。安吉拉·卡特（Angela Carter）指出，“童话故事通常不是为了邀请观众分享一种生活体验而构建的”（Carter 1990, xi）。公主和野兽的世界与我们自己的世界是分开的，然而有一种有意识的努力，以一种历史上被忽视的方式来评论女性童话人物的生活经历。我认为，学术界和更广泛的社会还没有对残疾人的生活经历进行同样的调查，即使是那些有意识地试图使传统故事与当代女权主义价值观保持一致的文本，也忽视了残疾主义作为一种需要更新的类型修辞。我的项目概述了一个新概念，“骨折假体”，以充分调查当代骨折童话中对残疾人物的改变，添加和删除。我认为，这种分析对于理解当代对能力和残疾的看法至关重要。然而，我将超越这种二元性来研究残疾的范围以及社会强加给这些差异的不言而喻的等级制度。通过对艾玛·多诺霍的《亲吻女巫》、路易丝·奥尼尔的《表面破裂》和布里奇特·卡默尔的《黑暗与孤独的诅咒》的研究，我的研究将证明，依靠断裂的假体来对抗童话类型的父权隐喻，导致了残疾歧视的断裂形式。对于我的创意作品，我建议写一本混合小说/短篇小说集，以《长发公主》的复述为框架，突出残疾人角色的生活经历。主要的故事将讲述长发公主的生母，她的养母，以及这两个不同的女人试图用自己的方式征服的父权世界。与此同时，读者目睹了长发公主带着上肢残疾在同一个世界里穿行。这些短篇故事将以长发公主在成长过程中听到的以残疾人为中心的童话故事为特色。我的概念，“骨折假体”，建立在大卫·米切尔和莎伦·斯奈德的工作基础上。在“叙事假体”中，他们认为文学中对残疾的表现通常是一种象征性的特征形式，或者被用作其他社会问题的隐喻（Mitchell和Snyder， 2000）。在童话学术领域，Ann Schmiesing用她自己的术语“编辑假体”进一步深化了这一观点（Schmeising, 2014）；在威廉和雅各布·格林（Schmiesing, 2014）的七个版本的《Kinder und Hausmachen》中，她将其描述为“格林兄弟引入、增强或评论的叙事假体”。然而，这两个概念都没有提供一个足够的框架来研究当代童话是如何以新的、往往是有害的方式利用残疾的。

Julie Sanders suggests that fairy tales are suitable sites for reimagining because they exist in an abstract social and geographic context, yet she highlights a 'detectable counter-movement' which attempts to relocate the stories back into a social context' (Sanders 2015). From Disney, to adaptations that resist "disneyfication", the twenty-first century has seen a desire to subvert the typically passive female characterising and heteronormative happy ending of traditional western fairy tales. Angela Carter states that 'the fairy tale is not usually constructed so as to invite the audience to share a sense of lived experience' (Carter 1990, xi). The world of princesses and beasts is set apart from our own, and yet there is a conscious endeavour to comment on the lived experience of female fairy tale characters in a way that has been historically overlooked. I argue that the same investigation into the lived experience of disability is so far from being engaged with by both academia and wider society, that even texts which self-consciously attempt to bring traditional tales in line with contemporary feminist values ignore ableism as a genre trope that needs updating. My project outlines a new concept, 'fractured prosthesis', to adequately investigate the alterations, additions and erasures made to disabled characters in contemporary fractured fairy tales. I argue that this analysis is vital in understanding contemporary perceptions of ability and disability. However, I will go beyond this binary to examine the spectrum of disability and the unspoken hierarchy society imposes on these differences. Examining Kissing the Witch by Emma Donoghue, The Surface Breaks by Louise O'Neill and A Curse So Dark and Lonely by Bridget Kemmerer, my research will argue that the reliance on fractured prosthesis to counter patriarchal tropes of the fairy tale genre results in a fractured form of ableism.For my creative piece I propose to write a hybrid novel / short story collection framed within a retelling of Rapunzel, foregrounding the lived experience of disabled characters. The main narrative will tell the story of Rapunzel's birth mother, her adopted mother, and the patriarchal world these two different women attempt to conquer in their own ways. Meanwhile, the reader witnesses Rapunzel navigating this same world with an upper limb disability. The short stories will feature as disability-centric fairy tales Rapunzel hears growing up.My concept, 'fractured prosthesis', builds on the work of David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder. In 'narrative prosthesis' they argue the representation of disability in literature is often a symbolic form of characterisation, or used as a metaphor for other societal issues (Mitchell and Snyder, 2000). Within fairy tale scholarship, Ann Schmiesing furthers this idea with her own term 'editorial prosthesis' (Schmeising, 2014); she describes this as 'a narrative prosthesis introduced, augmented, or commented on by the Grimms' in the seven editions of Kinder und Hausmachen by Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm (Schmiesing, 2014). However, neither of these concepts provide an adequate framework to investigate how contemporary fairy tales are using disability in new and often harmful ways.