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环境中，但她强调了一种“可察觉的反运动”，即试图将故事重新定位到社会背景中“(Sanders 2015)。从迪士尼，到抵制“迪士尼化”的改编，21世纪，人们渴望颠覆西方传统童话故事中典型的被动女性形象和异性恋者式的幸福结局。安吉拉·卡特指出，童话故事通常不是为了邀请观众分享生活体验而构建的(卡特，1990，Xi)。公主和野兽的世界与我们的世界是分开的，但有一种有意识的努力，以一种被历史忽视的方式来评论女性童话人物的生活经历。我认为，学术界和整个社会都远远没有对残疾的生活经历进行同样的调查，以至于即使是自觉地试图将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能力主义，因为它是一种需要更新的体裁比喻。我的项目概述了一个新的概念，‘断裂的假肢’，以充分调查当代断裂的童话故事中对残疾人物所做的更改、添加和删除。我认为，这一分析对于理解当代人们对能力和残疾的看法至关重要。然而，我将超越这个二元论来研究残疾的光谱以及社会强加给这些差异的潜台词等级。通过研究艾玛·多诺霍的《接吻女巫》、路易丝·奥尼尔的《表面破裂》和布里奇特·凯默勒的《诅咒如此黑暗和孤独》，我的研究将认为，依赖断裂的假肢来对抗童话类型的父权制比喻导致了一种支离破碎的能力主义形式。在我的创意作品中，我提议写一部混合的小说/短篇小说集，框架在长发姑娘的重述中，突出残疾人物的生活经历。主要叙事将讲述长发姑娘的生母，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因上肢残疾而在这个世界上航行。这些短篇小说将以长发姑娘听到的以残疾为中心的童话故事为特色。我的概念是“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》一书中，他们认为，文学中残疾的表现通常是一种象征性的刻画形式，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，安·施米辛用她自己的术语“编辑性假体”(Schmeing，2014)进一步推进了这一想法；她将其描述为“威廉和雅各布·格里姆的Kinder und Hausmachen的七个版本中引入、扩充或评论的叙事假体”(Schmiesing，2014)。然而，这两个概念都没有提供足够的框架来调查当代童话是如何以新的、往往是有害的方式使用残疾的。

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.