There’s something that gets bandied about a lot in workshops when people are talking to newbies. “You don’t have to kill your characters to up the stakes,” they say. “There are worse things that can happen to people than death.”
This is… well, I don’t know if it’s true, as stated. But there are certainly many things that are more fictionally interesting than death (in most cases) that one can do to one’s characters.
The art of character torture is one that all writers need to master. For those writers who wuv their characters, it can be a hard thing to force them into dangerous situations, to push them to emotional brinks, and to take away the things they love. For others of us who are more cold-hearted, character torture can be a fun way to pass the time. When I was in college, I used to spend hours with a friend of mine plotting ways we could torture our characters.
To torture your character effectively you have to really understand them. You have to know what their fears are so that you can force them to face those fears. You have to know what they love so that you can take it away. If your character has a deftly, deeply created psychology, then you can accomplish subtle and fascinating things by forcing them to face the things that they, personally, don’t want to face, instead of just forcing them to come up against the problems that scare everyone.
To use TV as an example, if you really want to torture Monk (or Felix Unger from the Odd Couple), you make him use a port-a-potty. If you really want to bother House (or Sherlock Holmes), you make him face a problem he can’t solve.
Those are big, bold characters with big, bold problems, but it applies to subtler characterization, too. It’s a little harder to find cultural touchstones to tap into here, but literature is full of moments where a character is crushed because of a seemingly small event that symbolizes a great deal more to them because of their history.
Now, if you wanted to push these characters’ buttons, you could do it with less subtle devices. They all fear death. None of them want to see their family members killed. But good characterization gives you more than one tool with which to up the stakes for your characters — not just the hammer that you can use to devastate any character, but also all the little pincers and hot irons that are tailored to your character specifically.
However, when I see this advice handed out in workshops, I usually see it being invoked in an ableist way. “Your character doesn’t have to lose his life to show he’s sacrificed to show that he’s lost something. There are other things you can do that are even worse. You can…”
And here comes the ableist parade: You could mutilate him. He could lose his arm. He could lose his legs. He could become disabled.
Now, I’m not going to argue that becoming disabled isn’t a bad thing for most characters who start out abled. Losing an ability that you used to have is no fun. But you know what it isn’t? Worse than death. Being disabled is not worse than death.
Yet I know I’ve sat in workshops where these statements were made, and I nodded along, and I probably even repeated the sentiment (hopefully not to students, but I certainly don’t remember every thing I’ve ever said in class). It wasn’t until I was sitting here, thinking about ableism, that suddenly an old piece of criticism someone gave me on a story drifted into my mind — he has to lose something, maybe you could have someone cut off his arm — that I realized: Oh, hello ableism. How are you today?
I know that writers have different techniques for writing, and so I wouldn’t submit this as being proscriptive for everyone. But I’d like to ask people, including myself, to think about what it would be like if we removed disability from the list of things that we can use to torture any generic character with, the things like death, and losing family members.
It would still be a tool we could use when we wanted to torture a character whose psychology made them specifically susceptible to fears of being disabled — doctors who pride themselves on being able to cure everything and can’t deal with their disability because it’s a constant reminder of their failure to do so (to bring us back to House), but also piano players who fear losing their manual dexterity, athletes whose careers are built on being able to run, or even just people who are really ableist.
What would it be like if disability was portrayed as something that specific people feared for specific reasons, rather than being used as something unilaterally feared and reviled?
I think the framing is everything in that workshop advice. If it just weren’t framed as “there are worse things than death” period, and instead were presented from the beginning as “there are certain fates that are, for certain people, the worst loss imaginable to them”, or something that conveys the singularity of those fears, it’d be better already. But this is from a temporarily able-bodied person, so reframing may not be the problem-solver I imagine it would be in this case.
Digression, but related: I was thinking about disability in literature after teaching Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” to my intro fiction class. This story threatens the narrator with blindness – not with loss of his own sight, but with the proximity to a blind character who seems far more happy and human that he (the narrator) is. At first the narrator hates being around the blind man, since he can’t understand how he can do normal things like eat and fuck, but in the end he warms up to the man: the narrator finds himself drawing with his eyes closed, able to empathize with another character for the first time in that story. I don’t love it – it’s a little pat, and I’m not sure how I feel about “using” blindness as a metaphor (get it? get it? The narrator was figuratively blind until he tried to see through the eyes of an actually blind man!). On the other hand, my students were still at a point in the semester where they tended to identify too easily with a narrator, no matter how unkind or unreliable, just because the “I” voice told them what’s what. They actually needed to go through that narrator’s process of learning to “see,” since at first they shared some of the narrator’s ablist attitudes toward the blind man. So I’m ambivalent, and I’d be very interested to see what other people think about this story as an example of “using” disability to change a character.
Great post, one nitpick:
rather than being used as something unilaterally feared and reviled?
I think you mean universally rather than unilaterally here.
I think one thing that helped with “House” and with other creative works I’ve seen where a character is disabled, is that they come in that way. E.g. I’ve read a romance novel in which a character has had a double radical mastectomy and is trying to get back her sense of herself as a sexual being rather than just Pink Ribbon Lady. I think it’s easier for the writer not to be ableist if the character starts out with that different body (or mind), because we know the character from the get-go that way. Whereas if it’s a plot twist, it’s harder not to be thinking about it as what’s “missing.” To take the Harlequin example, if your character started out without breasts, then your sex scenes will already have been “he tenderly brushed his fingers over her scars” rather than “he worshipped her breasts” and then the post-disabling scene is “OMG HER BREASTS ARE GONE!”
Now I’m trying to think of a romance in which a hero/heroine becomes disabled during the story. I can’t think of one other than the more literary stuff like Jane Eyre, where the analysis of Rochester’s becoming blinded and somewhat mobility-impaired seems to be “He needed that.” Not just to push back at his pride in his physical ability, but also to level the relationship between himself and Jane. I think that would be trickier to pull off nowadays, though, since we’re less into the Victorian Angel of the Hearth, in which women are measured as caretakers.
>> “Now I’m trying to think of a romance in which a hero/heroine becomes disabled during the story. “
Well, it’s not a romance, but there’s a romance in it: the male protagonist of Robert Sawyer’s Frameshift develops Huntington’s disease over the course of the book. And, in the case of DEFINITELY not a romance, a couple of the major characters in George R.R. Martin’s Ice and Fire books have become disabled since they were first introduced. I am disabled–actually, one of the disabilites that shows up in the series–and have in general been very impressed by how GRRM handles disabilities, characters who have had them since birth, and characters who have…acquired (no spoilers)…them.
I am fairly new to thinking consciously about ableism, so please do let me know if I’m being ableist and I’ll try to clean up my act; I apologize in advance if I am.
I agree that describing disability as worse than death is ableist and really kind of horrifying. But it seems to me that losing an ability that you currently have is pretty much universally feared. I would hate to, say, lose a hand – it would be a devastating blow, and it would take me a while to learn to live with it. Some of the impact of such a loss is ableism – I might think of one-handed people as being defined by their missing hand, I might think it wasn’t possible to live a fulfilling life with only one hand – but not all the impact is due to ableism. If I lost a hand I’d have to relearn to do all sorts of things, I’d have to rearrange my life, and there would be things that I enjoy now that I simply wouldn’t be able to do any more. Other disabilities might utterly change the course of my life. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to view imposing a disability as a major psychological impact on a character. But I certainly agree with you that it’s easy to fall into a poisonous ableist way of thinking about it.
One author that got me thinking about ableism is Lois McMaster Bujold. It was only after reading three books of her most recent series (“The Sharing Knife”) that it occurred to me to think of one of the main characters as disabled. He is missing a hand (since before the story stars, although characters talk about how he handled it (badly)), but he is competent, self-sufficient, and dexterous in a way that wasn’t compatible in my mind with the label “disabled”. Upon reflection, of course, that’s an ableist attitude, and the realization got me thinking about disability and ableism.
Bujold’s most famous character, Miles Vorkosigan, is disabled as well (and again it did not occur to me to apply the term to him for a long time); he has brittle bones from birth. She even has him born into an explicitly ableist society, and uses that as one of the major pressures on his character. Much later in the series, once he’s come fully to terms with his brittleness, she hits him with another disability (a form of epilepsy), and one of the books (“Memory”) is partly about coming to terms with this and its effects on his life.
PG,
Unilateral v. universal:
You may be right that I misspoke!
I meant unilateral as in “having only one possible side,” as if there were no conceivable opposition to the idea that disability should be feared and reviled. But perhaps this was a misuse.
Anne gets at something here: we all fear losing abilities, physical and otherwise, but we all fear them for reasons as specific as the pianist for whom the idea of the loss of a hand feels like “a fate worst than death.” The challenge, if you are going to write such a loss into your character’s life, even if your character starts out disabled, like House–since I would not assume that being disabled would render someone like him immune from feeling like the loss of his sight, or his ability to speak, would be a “fate worst than death”–is to figure out what those reasons are. Once you’ve done that, then the fate-worst-than-death-feeling becomes part of the conflict that character needs to deal with, not a universal truth about what the loss means.
I recognize this is different from the question of using the idea of disability-as-fate-worst-than-death in a workshop as a prod towards revision which, as Mandolin describes it in the post, strikes me not simply as ableist, but also as intellectually lazy. There is a difference between saying that for this character in this narrative losing an arm would be a more meaningful way of showing sacrifice than losing her or his life and using the idea of loss-of-ability as the universal signifier of that kind of greater significance. The former suggests that the one offering the critique has attended as fully as possible to the details of the story in question; the latter suggests that the one offering the critique is trying to impose her or his values, however unconscious and unconsciously, on the story.
Now I’m trying to think of a romance in which a hero/heroine becomes disabled during the story.
The hero of Georgette Heyer’s An Infamous Army loses his left arm at the Battle of Waterloo, and that happens towards the end of the novel.
Now I’m trying to think of a romance in which a hero/heroine becomes disabled during the story.
Not in the romance genre, but in Mukherjee’s Jasmine the narrator’s second husband has an accident that leaves him partially paralyzed. This book explores the limits and meaning of personal agency by torturing the narrator with difficult decisions. . . which in this case doesn’t mean loving a husband in a wheelchair (that’s easy for her), but leaving him for another opportunity to re-invent herself.
Even without the ableism complaint, I’ve always loathed the term “worse than death”. People will fight to their very last inch to live, even in the face of horrifying agony. The only sane people who actually seem to embrace the concept of “worse than death” are the ones who are in agony that will end in death _anyways_. Really, fates that are “agonizing slow death” are the only things that seem worse than “vanilla death”.
Just because fiction authors throw death around like candy so they can make their setting seem “dramatic” doesn’t mean death is less severe than other fates.
Mandolin,
I meant unilateral as in “having only one possible side,” as if there were no conceivable opposition to the idea that disability should be feared and reviled. But perhaps this was a misuse.
Ah, I see; I was thinking of “unilateral” as it’s often used in negotiations, e.g. “unilateral concessions” as opposed to “bilateral contract” or “multilateral agreement.” So as “one-sided,” but not quite reaching “having only one possible side,” which is a meaning for which I can’t think of a word off the top of my head.
Laura,
An Infamous Army
I haven’t read that one! Thanks for the suggestion. All of the ones that came to mind for me were where the hero is starting out in his relationship with the heroine with a “pre-existing condition,” so to speak. Several of Laura Kinsale’s have various kinds of disability (Sheridan’s PTSD; S.T.’s partial deafness and vertigo; Jervaulx’s cognitive speech impairment), but they’re all presented that way almost from the beginning of the novel, and tend to be more mental disabilities rather than overt physical ones like the loss of a limb.
For comic book fans, Barbara Gordon sounds like a great case study.
For people who only know 1960’s Batman shock, Barbara Gordon is “Batgirl.” Just like Batman, except smaller. And female. And a college graduate/ professional librarian whose secret identity had the word “Girl” in it.
In the 1980s comics, though, Barbara Gordon was shot through the stomach by the Joker, leading to permanent paralysis, and she is now confined to a wheelchair. This was used as just one example of the Joker’s sadism extending to “worse than death” style crimes (he also rapes Barbara’s father, Commissioner Gordon.)
Since then — after I believe a short period of moping — Barbara Gordon has become Oracle, leader of her own superhero team and go-to person for all technological issues. She has become so beloved as “Oracle” that when news came out last year that there was going to be a “new Batgirl,” there was an outcry among fans to “not give Barbara her legs back” because they didn’t want her to become just another bat-clone again.
Being disabled is not worse than death.
But then, what’s the point here? Is it what you think is “worse than death”, or what the character thinks/fears is worse than death? Your perspective on this may well be different than the character’s.
Perhaps it would be an interesting thing to write wherein a character fears disablement worse than anything, then becomes disabled and has to deal with it (as well as with whatever other conflicts still exist in their life and environment).
Now I’m trying to think of a romance in which a hero/heroine becomes disabled during the story.
A wonderful story of emotional victory over disablement is the movie The Piano. The protagonist comes to the story with a limitation (i.e., she doesn’t speak), evil antagonist cuts off one of the fingers that allows her to express herself, and yet she finds love and happiness in the end (after a short contemplation of death). (she also looses her piano – her “voice” – which is a stronger parable for disablement in the story than loosing the finger)
She is not happy at the end of the movie and also still severely mourning lack of finger, she is happy at the end of the movie because she finds that having a whole set of hands is not what happiness is all about for her.
You would think that for a character like this loosing a finger (and her piano) would be a fate worse than death, but she consciously considers death and finds that she’d rather live.
Similar (though more literal) in theme to the ending of The Piano, another “worse than death brings freedom” story is the movie Novocaine – at the beginning of the film, the protagonist talks about how he can’t imagine anything worse than losing one’s teeth (he is, of course, a dentist).
Obviously (spoiler), at the end of the film, he pulls out his own teeth to fake his own death, and thus escapes the mess his life has become, and lives Happily Ever After With His Dream Girl.
Ragtime, Oracle is a fantastic example of how a disability is NOT a fate worse than death. Barbara is stronger and more powerful and more interesting as Oracle than she ever was as Batgirl. She also has literally hundreds of “cures” at her disposal due to her ties with superheroes, magic and futuristic science types, yet she chooses to stay as she is. She’s happier and more confident now than she ever was when she was “able-bodied.”
@Chris
I think her failure to avail herself of any “cure” for paralysis that is available in the DC universe says less about her character and more about her writers. The fact is that she’s a better character as Oracle, and her disability is part of that character, so writers will keep her that way despite the obvious plot-hole of the fact that Gotham is part of the larger and more magical DC Universe that has treatments for such things.
It’s one thing to say “I’ve embraced my life after disability and am a better person than I was before this happened to me” and another to say “I would keep my disability if it were a choice”. I’ll admit that I don’t have much experience with disabled people, though.
Well, I don’t know . . . we (on this post) have come up with some pretty fabulous works about people overcoming fear of disablement and actual disablement . . . similarly, loss of family members and death are among the greatest engines for provoking thought and emotion in much great fiction.
But I can see how trite and insulting it is when so many stories end in random, senseless disablement of characters – not to move the plot intellegently and coherently – but just to up the emotional anty and raise the volume. It seems to be just lazy storytelling.
I don’t think you can say that as an absolute statement. There are some people who have decided to kill themselves rather than live with a disability; it depends on the individual. I agree that acquiring a disability should not been seen as Most Tragic Thing Ever, but I also think that those who choose death shouldn’t be written off as poor misguided creatures who are simply unable to free themselves from their internalized ableism. I’m thinking of Liz Carr’s obnoxious concern-tolling open letter in which she asks Noel Martin not to commit suicide.
I copied some of the details from Kinsale’s site about Flowers from the Storm before she took down almost all the pages on her website, and what she had so say about Jervaulx was that
You’re right that the cerebral hemorrhage occurs fairly early on (on page 31 of the edition I’ve got) but I think that gives the reader long enough to get to “know” him as he was before it.
I’ve thought of another one, though. How about Madeline Hunter’s By Design? The hero’s physically injured, towards the end of the novel, in a way which affects his ability to work as a sculptor.
SiF,
It’s one thing to say “I’ve embraced my life after disability and am a better person than I was before this happened to me” and another to say “I would keep my disability if it were a choice”.
But people sometimes do choose that, both in real life and in fiction. The most common example is the availability of cochlear implants for deaf people.
You’re right that the cerebral hemorrhage occurs fairly early on (on page 31 of the edition I’ve got) but I think that gives the reader long enough to get to “know” him as he was before it.
True — I guess in that sense it’s kind of a Rochester in Jane Eyre use of disability: take the big powerful hero down a peg and put him in a position where he needs the heroine more than emotionally. But the relationship with Maddie doesn’t really begin until after she finds him in the insane asylum.
I’m rather flummoxed as to how anyone can see House a positive representation of a person with a disability. Maybe he was in earlier seasons, but later seasons have not only strained credulity and consistency with regards to House’s disability, but have also strongly suggested that House’s misery and misanthropy is in large part due to his disability. And there has been a fair bit of him moping about using his cane. And the recent stuff with mental illness and psychiatric institutionalization has been absolutely unwatchable. I’ve given up on the show after the first episode this season for that reason.
“House” as a show also has many other ableist portrayals of PWD. Often, it seems as though PWD are represented on the show only for House to come up with some sort of miraculous cure. The episode with the Deaf teenager linked to above was particularly ableist. Deaf culture and politics are mocked and dismissed. And medical inaccuracies aside, it’s suggested that it’s okay to implant a teenager with a cochlear implant against his wishes. Just so, so wrong. (BTW, cochlear implants are not a “cure” for deafness. People with cochlear implants are still hearing impaired.)
@Sarah, there was a similar episode about little people, with a similar resolution – the daughter was found to have a treatable condition that was causing her dwarfism (among other things).
but have also strongly suggested that House’s misery and misanthropy is in large part due to his disability. And there has been a fair bit of him moping about using his cane. And the recent stuff with mental illness and psychiatric institutionalization has been absolutely unwatchable.
Huh — I thought the show this season has been suggesting quite strongly that the misanthropy actually stemmed significantly from his addiction to painkillers; basically, that he was a drug addict and that he behaved poorly because of that. The last line of the most recent episode was Wilson saying sincerely of House, “See, he is getting better.” He seems to care more about people and to manifest that in slightly more appropriate ways than he once did. Moreover, it’s perfectly reasonable for a person in constant, unstoppable pain to be miserable about that; House doesn’t complain about the cane nearly as much as he does about the pain.
I think the show’s focus on House as Miracle Doctor (good grief, the last episode had someone practically resurrect!) makes it difficult to avoid ableist connotations. But you should never assume that House’s perspective on manners, morals, values, etc. is considered to be the “right” one — at best, he’s usually right about medicine, but not much else. In particular, Cameron and Thirteen often get pressed into service as the voice of a “minority” viewpoint that the writers seem to treat with respect.
These things are both explicitly stated in the post.
I’m not sure if you think that I said he was a positive representation of a person with a disability, but it’s not what I said. I said he was an example of a larger-than-life character (I think I said bold) with clear strings to pull if you wanted to make him freak out about something. I also said he couldn’t stand his own disability because it reminded him he wasn’t a perfect doctor. Neither of these things indicate a “positive representation of a disabled person.” Perhaps you were responding to someone else. Maybe PG?
I am not sure how House could be treated as a positive representation of any kind of person — he lies, cheats, steals, abuses those over whom he has authority, etc. Why do people think he’s being treated as a hero rather than as merely a protagonist?
@Silenced is Foo
Good points about Oracle. I am aware that the decision for her to remain wheelchair-bound is more of a writer/fan decision, and I don’t think it’s ever been addressed in canon, though I haven’t read comics in a few years. The idea that she chooses not to take a cure is more my own personal fanwank, but I think it’s what we have to believe in order for the character to make any sense.
I guess I was responding to comment 2, which seemed to suggest to me that House was a character with a pre-existing disability that “worked.” Because I don’t think it works, in the context of avoiding ableism. And no, I’m not objecting to the fact that House is a disabled character who is also deeply flawed. I’m objecting to the episodes (particularly those at the beginning of season 3) which have him transform into a nicer, happier person simply by virtue of a magical (short-lived) cure. I wrote a blog entry about it here, if anyone is interested. To paraphrase one of my commentators, the show started out as House being a misanthrope who was equally unpleasant before becoming disabled (season 1). But towards later seasons, there was a move towards suggesting that House’s misanthropy is the result of his disability. That’s where I have a problem.
It’s stated in the post that disability affects different people differently, and that for some it may mean that loss of something very meaningful to them, but the flat sentence “Being disabled is not worse than death” sounds like you’re laying it down as fact, applicable to everyone.
I suppose it’s a minor quibble. I just dislike the condescending attitude I often see towards disabled suicides–Alzheimer’s isn’t really that bad, you know! You just need to let go of your fears and resign yourself to losing your memory! It’s an issue that may affect my family soon, so it’s personal.
the show started out as House being a misanthrope who was equally unpleasant before becoming disabled (season 1). But towards later seasons, there was a move towards suggesting that House’s misanthropy is the result of his disability. That’s where I have a problem.
Since he still has the physical disability now, but no longer is high on painkillers and is becoming a better person, I think the latest season counters this take.
It seemed to me that Season 3’s brief miracle cure had a lot more to do with House’s not being in pain than with his ability to jog to work, and I don’t recall his ceasing to be a jerk (e.g. still plenty of cracks about Foreman’s being black). And I don’t think it’s ableist to portray a character who is in constant, severe pain in a bad mood; indeed, it seems a bit minimizing or condescending to have such a person be angelic despite/because of the pain.
That constant intolerable pain, rather than disability per se, is what makes some people unpleasant comes up again in the new season with the Canadian Vietnam vet who is a much nicer person at the end of the episode — even though he’s still disabled — because House figured out how to get him to stop clenching the muscles in the disabled arm. The guy doesn’t have his hand back, but the pain he’d been living with for 30+ years has greatly decreased, and that affects his personality.
Sure, some people can be in constant pain without becoming crankier than they used to be, but it’s reasonably realistic to depict certain personality types — in particular, domineering white males — as lashing out at those around them due to the pain they’re suffering.
@Medea… yeah, I have to agree there.
Terry Pratchett has a nice essay on his desire for an assisted suicide when his Alzheimers becomes unmanageable.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1203622/Ill-die-endgame-says-Terry-Pratchett-law-allow-assisted-suicides-UK.html
When it was first announced that he was dying, he said something to the effect of “I knew I was going to die one day, I had just thought I would be around to see it”.
I hear you. I was trying to walk the extremely thin line between not condemning euthanasia, which I whole-heartedly believe in, and also not contributing to the marginalization and oppression of people who live with severe disabilities.
Given how ableist our society is, I think it’s a difficult line to walk, in supporting both groups without hurting either. (Or perhaps I just suck at writing rhetoric.) At the moment, in this space — where I think most people support euthanasia — I would rather undercut that rhetoric a bit, because I think most of us understand it, and try to focus on not rhetorically injuring people who have conditions that are often stereotyped as worse than death (such as paralysis, severe chronic pain, and so on).
What would it be like if disability was portrayed as something that specific people feared for specific reasons, rather than being used as something unilaterally feared and reviled?
I think that in getting specific about the issue of disability/ableism in fiction-writing, you’re losing perspective. Yes, a writer has to look at a particular character’s motivation and psychology and play with it and make bad things happen and all, and fear and revulsion can play a role. But more generally, impairments are in the long list of difficulties that a writer can use to make a characters life more interesting — in a bad way, in a good way, ambiguously, tangentially, tragically. Part of the ableism in the problem you’re exploring is the assumption that impairment will be all about fear and not, say, an opportunity for hilarity.
@ Mandolin
That makes sense.
It’s one thing to say “I’ve embraced my life after disability and am a better person than I was before this happened to me” and another to say “I would keep my disability if it were a choice”. I’ll admit that I don’t have much experience with disabled people, though.
For a person who is doing well with a disability and has already dealt with the problems it causes, it may simply be too much trouble to fix it. Trivial example, but I have very poor uncorrected vision. I may be over the limit to legally blind, maybe not. So, a disability of a sort. However, a simple technical aid (glasses) fixes the problem. As a result, I’ve never thought it worth the trouble to pursue the “cure” i.e. radial keratotomy. Not because I love being nearsighted and chose it but simply because it is not worth the time, trouble, and risk to fix it.
My knowledge of the DC universe is severely limited, but I can imagine the Oracle thinking something like, “I really should deal with this paralysis some day…but right now Gotham’s experiencing a crime wave and everyone’s after me for gadgets and furthermore I haven’t had time to play with this new idea I have for a better rocket car…screw it, I’ll wait.” In short, maybe it’s on her eternal to-do list but not high priority because she simply doesn’t care that much any more.
A question: Can anyone think of potrayals of people with disabilities in which the disability is just A characteristic of the character rather than THE central characteristic? The only example I can think of that comes close is Thea in DTWOF: she has MS and has mobility problems because of it but she’s also an artist, has a flirtation with Mo, rants about politics and does her work without anyone either mentioning how great it is that she has overcome her disability or noting how little she can do because of it. But even there, her disability is a major plot point when she is introduced and the first thing that you are led to notice about her. So, kind of half works.
Diane wrote:
What was the name of the woman on ER who had to walk with a cane? (I’m not actually sure if that device is properly called a cane.) And wasn’t she also a lesbian? My memory of the show is very vague, since I did not watch it regularly, but I think she would fit this bill.
Joey on The West Wing (played by Marlee Matin) might qualify, I think. It certainly came up that she was Deaf, but storywise, the central aspects of her character were that she was a pollster, and a romantic interest.
Richard,
You’re thinking of Kerry Weaver, who apparently had her disability from birth. It was part of some plotlines, but you’re right that her abrasive personality — which seemed to stem from ambition and her concerns about being discriminated against due to her sex and sexual orientation — was her defining feature, rather than anything directly related to her disability.
Let’s not forget the one of the most infamous disabled characters in Science Fiction:
Darth Vader.
Search your feelings, you know it to be true.
I think that what is ableist about these “fate worse than death” slash “overcoming the torture of disability” fictional storylines is that they’ve just been overdone and overdone and overdone some more. You all are listing a few exceptions (Kerry Weaver) but they are few and far between. It is similar trope to a black matronly maid or a flamboyant gay interior designer. Its not that there is anything inherently wrong with being a black matronly maid or a flamboyant gay interior designer, certainly there are real life people who fit these categories. It is just that it would be nice to not see every single person with that minority characteristic shoved into these roles in fiction.
Disability, like any other aspect of life, affects people in 1000 different ways. For every person who is indeed a tortured piano player with their hand cut off, there is someone else out there who was drifting through life with no direction and found a path that became their life’s joy through disability. (The example off the top of my head is someone like Mark Zupan, the famous quad rugby player, who for all practical purposes was just a weekend drunk with a dead-end job before his injury.) I know plenty of people who had no opportunity to go to college and get out of a dead-end town until they became disabled and were able to qualify for Voc Rehab services that changed the course of their lives for the better. Or her found their twu wuv via disability channels, or whatever. Disability, for the vast majority of people (I will not say everyone of course) is something that happens like the death of a spouse or child or another great loss. It is a great loss and you work through the grieving process and then you go on with your life. It would be nice if almost all the examples of disabled people in literature did not focus on this grieving process as if it was terminal and goes on forever and instead looked at other dynamics in the character’s personality, disability just being one of those.
I also have trouble understanding why euthanasia and disability issues get so awfully conflated. To me, euthanasia rights are an end of life issue and disability is a life issue. (There are functional overlaps in the Venn diagram, but that is it.) Talking about an Alzheimer’s patient who is at or near the end of their life and wants to choose when to die is entirely different than your “Million Dollar Baby” scenario where a newly disabled quad is a hero for ending her life. Why, in every other example of a person who is suicidal, do we focus on how to help them and get them the mental health care they need whereas with a disabled person we hand them the gun and applaud them for killing themselves when they are in the middle of the grieving process. This is stereotypical ableism that is often found in literature. If we had fiction characters that were applauded and even helped to commit suicide after they discovered that they were gay or when they discovered that their blackness caused them to be unfairly discriminated against, there would be an outcry. But it is a common trope for disabled characters.
And finally, I can see how there might be some disabled people who want to be cured, but it certainly isn’t all of us. And even for those who do wish to be able-bodied, it usually isn’t the main focus of their life. So that trope gets old, too. It has to do with looking at disability as a loss rather than as a characteristic that is a normal part of the human condition. And also, looking at it as an inherent failure or deficit rather than looking at how much societal attitudes affect the disability experience. We don’t have a million stories about black people wanting to become white, and when we see it happening (Michael Jackson comes to mind, or when magazine covers photoshop Beyonce to look lighter) we disparage it. We don’t (or are moving towards) not having gay or transgendered characters always yearn to be heterosexual, even though arguably it would make many aspects of their lives easier if they were. So why does nearly every media depiction of a disabled character focus on wanting to be cured or “not accepting their disability?”
This is long, but my point is that yes, people are going to feel the way they feel about their own disability. But this isn’t always the tortured, grieving fictional character who either a) wants to die, b) rises above their disability in an awe-inspiring way; or c) searches the ends of the earth (and very often in fiction) finds a cure. People feel different things at different times and most eventually just move on and incorporate their disability into their new normal and persue all the other interests they have in life. It would be nice to see some of these other things expressed in fiction, rather than the same-ole, same-ole tired tropes.
Lexie,
You seem to be making two comparisons that don’t fit well together. First you compare becoming disabled to “something that happens like the death of a spouse or child or another great loss,” where you are expected to have a grieving process and then move on with your life. Then you compare being disabled to being black or gay, which I assume you do not expect people to have a grieving process about.
The gap between these comparisons strikes me as relevant to whether it’s socially acceptable to portray someone’s choosing suicide. You’re right that we would be horrified by a creative work that showed someone’s committing suicide once he realized he was gay. But there are so many creative works that depict people committing suicide after they’ve lost a loved one (Romeo & Juliet, for the most commonly known, but something that repeats in many other tragic romances). We don’t necessarily consider these people a model of mental health, because as you say they’re generally doing this when they’re still grieving (in the case of the Shakespeare, while the loved one’s body is still warm), but we’re not horrified by it the way we would be by someone’s committing suicide because he’s gay.
In the case of Million Dollar Baby, there’s a tragic-heroic element because she was obsessed — “in love” you might say — with her ability to succeed as a boxer. After the loss of that love, and while still grieving it, she decided life wasn’t worth living. There’s a kind of Nietzchean, broken-superman element to this, and it’s clear that her relationship to her body’s abilities is exceptional. The average desk jockey like myself just doesn’t have that same love and obsession. (I’d probably be more like the Alzheimer’s patient, far more upset by the loss of mental abilities than physical ones.)
(Incidentally, someone mentioned Noel Martin, and I read up on him a bit. He seems to have begun thinking of euthanasia not immediately after he became disabled, but after his wife passed away. That chronology makes him sound more like the tragic lover of another person — the Romeo who doesn’t find life worth living without his Juliet, albeit presumably without the rushed decisions and teenage dramatics — than someone who is grieving his disability.)
Well, there are different ways to become disabled. Someone who is completely able-bodied and suddenly becomes disabled in seconds (as in a spinal cord injury) is going to have a different experience than someone who is born disabled or someone whose disability is slowly progressive. As, I’m sure, it is different for someone who has always known they were gay and someone who suddenly comes to the realization as a teenager after hearing her parents talk in hateful terms about homosexuals to someone who grew up with gay parents vs. someone who deals with the issues surrounding being transgendered and having to come out (i.e. Chaz Bono) as someone who has changed sexual identification. The point is, there are a million different ways to experience, and grieve, and incorporate disability into a character and the vast majority of fiction sees it in a very narrow view through able-bodied perspective.
Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy BECAUSE the two teenagers committed suicide when it all could have been avoided if they had received the appropriate communication and because they are so young that they can’t see beyond their grief. Not because they fell in love in the first place. No one looks at Romeo and Juliet and thinks, yeah, if I were them, that’s exactly what I would do, too. And no one would look at two modern day teenagers and go, “Oh, yeah, your love is not going to work out and its complicated so yeah, you might as well just kill yourselves. You are so heroic for sacrificing yourselves. Here is the knife.” But this is exactly what happens in Million Dollar Baby.
Not because they fell in love in the first place.
Well, yes, the falling in love is what makes it a romance. The dead bodies littering the stage at the end is what makes it also a tragedy. I don’t recall having suggested that falling in love, rather than body count, makes a tragedy.
No one looks at Romeo and Juliet and thinks, yeah, if I were them, that’s exactly what I would do, too.
You knew much more rational teenagers than I did. There’s a reason R&J is so popular to teach in junior high: if you first encounter it when you’re much older and more experienced, it’s difficult not to see them as just stupid kids. Teenagers who think they’ve found the love of their lives and contemplate losing that person suddenly and violently — especially if due to their family’s opposition — can believe there’s nothing worth living for.
But this is exactly what happens in Million Dollar Baby.
That’s extremely reductive of the movie’s plot. Maggie doesn’t seek death immediately after realizing that she is paralyzed and will never fight again. Initially, she looks forward to her family’s visiting her, and talks to Frankie about moving to a cabin; it’s only after she realizes that they will never be a source of any love or affection in her life that she becomes despairing. And also with Frankie’s euthanizing her, it’s not at all that he says, “Oh, yeah, your love is not going to work out and its complicated so yeah, you might as well just kill yourselves. You are so heroic for sacrificing yourselves. Here is the knife.”
On the contrary, Maggie asks Frankie to kill her painlessly, and he refuses. Maggie then attempts suicide by biting her tongue to choke to death on her own blood. She almost succeeds, and rips out the stitches, and then has to live with her tongue padded. Frankie only euthanizes her when he realizes that she will keep trying to kill herself. He certainly doesn’t feel happy and chipper about it. And if the movie doesn’t make the ambiguity of his action clear enough, Eastwood has said, “I’ve gone around in movies blowing people away with a .44 magnum. But that doesn’t mean I think that’s a proper thing to do.”
The movie also places Maggie in a certain class context: she thinks it’s OK to kill someone or something you love because it’s what her father did with a dog. She sees her body as the only tool she has and a tool that got her what she wanted for a while. Now that she sees the tool as broken, she doesn’t think there is anything more for her. It’s a highly individualized choice on her part that comes out of the combination of her class background, her aspirations, the lack of love and affection in her life. It’s not a prescription for all disabled people.
I think it’s possible there’s some miscommunication because I’m doing writer-talk? I’m not talking about ALL representations of disability. I’m talking about deploying disability as a revision tactic to –up the stakes– or to –act as a punishment for the character–.
OK, for instance:
A common speculative fiction plotline is called the try/fail cycle. A protag tries something, it fails. They try something else, it fails. They try a third thing, and it either fails (sad ending) or succeeds (happy ending).
There’s a truism that the character must be *changed* by the end of all this.
At each point in this cycle, you’re supposed to “up the stakes.” So maybe the first time, the character is trying to stop an infestation of space weasels from getting into their ship. The second time — stakes upped! Now he has to stop the space weasels from eating the grain supply for an entire world, which woudl cause mass starvation. Third time — stakes upped again! Now he has to eradicate the horrible demon god that he summoned from another dimension to get rid of the space weevils, which is now threatening to destroy the universe.
At the end of this, the character learns that … I don’t know… he needs to keep a tidier ship so that space weasels never get a toe-hold in the first place. That’s his change.
Sometimes, instead of making things more dramatic by upping the stakes in this way, people use disability (or are advised to use disability) instead. “He failed at his first attempt to break his brother out of jail, and now he’s making a second. But it’s more complicated this time BECAUSE HE HAS ONLY ONE ARM LEFT. CUE SCARY MUSIC.”
And sometimes, instead of creating an emotional change at the end (the character learns to cope with loss), they may use disability to make him change. “The battle was hard, and he won, but in the end, he LOST THE USE OF HIS ARM. CUE SCARY MUSIC.”
This is very different from writing a story about disability because youw ant to explore the concept of disability. Or even discovering in a revision that you want to include a disability, as long as you’re willing to do the emotional work of figuring out how that affects character in a way that’s interesting and non-stereotyped.
Instead, it’s reaching into a bag marked “plot complications” and drawing out the card that reads “LOSES AN ARM” instead of the card that reads “SPIDER ATTACK” or “ROBOT FLEET ARRIVES” or “ATTACK OF THE ROBOT SPIDER FLEET.” It’s deploying disability as a trope to create generic plot complications, which you rely on your audience to interpret (without the work on your part to create a character’s realistic, ambiguous and individual reactions) what disability means, based on stereotypes.
It’s lazy writing, among other things.
Let’s not forget the one of the most infamous disabled characters in Science Fiction:
Darth Vader.
Not sure what this means, but the first time I saw Star Wars I assumed that Darth Vader’s mask wasn’t a sign of disability but rather an enhancement of some sort, like an extra special version of the suit the soldiers wore. Not sure what that means to the whole issue of disability or lack thereof in fiction. If anything.
Or in another genre, you might up the plot stakes by having someone who seemed sort of perfect at the beginning do increasingly stupid things. See, e.g., the plot progression of “Mad Men.” At least this is how I explain what’s going on in the series to friends who are puzzled as to why Don is increasingly self-destructive in his choice of women.
I’m talking about deploying disability as a revision tactic to –up the stakes– or to –act as a punishment for the character–. . . . It’s lazy writing, among other things.
Well, I’m ambivalent about lazy writing. Bad writing is bad no matter whose tired trope is used.
Though “punishment” is a seriously loaded term with regard to disability and character (fictional or not). But generally, I don’t have a problem with the writerly concept of deploying disability/impairment as a way to raise the stakes. It all depends on the execution.
@Dianne, that was mostly a joke… although technically he’s a triple-amputee who can’t breathe without the assistance of a respirator. I tend to think that most science-fiction cyborgs don’t really count as “disabled”, anymore than a person who uses glasses is “disabled” in modern day.
Silenced is Foo,
“I tend to think that most science-fiction cyborgs don’t really count as “disabled”, anymore than a person who uses glasses is “disabled” in modern day.”
Why not? That sort of thinking poses a problem in accessibility accomidations along with literature portrayals. If you’re shown using an aid in a lot of sci fi you’re considered fixed, such as it is. Your premise seems to think that if there’s an aid, all is better, or at least, all is workable – when in reality, some things are easier to do, and some things, well, are still difficult to impossible, just like with everyone else. Those aren’t mutually exclusive categories, there, and a lot of writers fail at the distinctions when portraying a character with a disability. Literature seems to prefer it as all or nothing. As for your example, I wear glasses, two pairs – a regular pair that doesn’t fully correct my vision (because a lot of times that isn’t possible, not that anyone else can tell upon a brief visual inspection, though they do demand to know why I’m wearing sunglasses indoors) and a second pair of fit-over glasses that are, basically, glorified sunglasses used to manage light problems and contrast issues. There’s more than just the Blind / Full Vision dichotomy for disability, and that goes for everything else as well.
Another issue in sci-fi is a bit of a …hypocrite issue. In sci-fi futuristic aids are considered good, since they often make a character better than ‘normal’. But have an aid in life and that isn’t so. I’m thinking in particular of allowing an excellent runner that has an artificial leg to compete, whether it would give an ‘unfair advantage’, no matter that they’ve beaten and have been beaten in races by others. Damned if I can remember the name, though, I don’t usually follow sports. Myself, I can draw whatever I see, provided it’s still. Seems to be a neuro quark, most likely created by an odd vision situation I had in childhood when vision in the brain is still developing. If I advertized that fact in ‘real life’, I have doubts that people would want me to compete in art contests as well, as the usual reaction I get with art from others when they realize my vision is off is “You shouldn’t be able to do that if I can’t.” What a shitty sentiment.
People want you to stay squarely in the pitiable category, which might be a reason disability and disfigurement is used so heavily in the portrayal of villians.
(note: I am new to anti-ableism and English is not my first language. There is a good chance that I will screw up my wording (an spelling).Please, point out any mistakes so I can learn and to better in the future. And of course, please also point out any ableist ideas that I am having without being aware of it.)
I see several problems with the use of “disability is worse than death” trope as it is described in the specific circumstances of try-fail cycles.
One is that not all tropes are equal. It might be almost impossible to write certain stories without resorting to any tropes at all, but there are some that should be avoided because they contribute to “bigger” social issues. In this case, if a character fails at fullfilling his task and then becomes disabled as a consequence- then this is veering dangerously close to the “disabled people are disabled because they are being punish for some kind of failure” rhetoric that sadly, is still present to this day. So, even if it is possible that someone becomes disabled as a consequence of a personal mistake or failure, one should really think very hard about the message that is being send of one insists in tellin that particular story. Because people who believe these things are still out there, and they really don’t need encouragement.
This might ( I am not knowlegable enough to say for sure) be similar to not writing a story about a boy who is gay with an absent father, an overbearing mother and a connection to the mother that is “too close” etc. These people may exist, but that story would still be following the ideas of the “Ödipus comlex” as the reason a child “ends up” gay, which has been very harmfull employed against gays in the past.
The second problem I have is that disability is far too often written about as somethin that “happens” to a formerly able-bodied person. Not that these are not stories worth telling, but there is a disproportionate interest in stories that are about “overcoming the trauma” and “learning to live in the direct aftermath”. Stories that do not focus on what happens directly after a person became disabled but that show a person who is disabled facing problems that do not stem from that “loss of ability” or people who were disabled from birth dealing with issues that non-disabled people also have, like love, friendship, employment and show how similar-and in some aspects how different- those experiencces are, are comparably rarer. And again,this contributes to and/or is caused by the idea of disability as being less-than, the person looses something they had before and becomes limited by that loss.
Third, the sentence “disability is worse than death” is not the same “a character might fear disability more than death”. I think this is an important distingction to make. Because if we say that disability is worse than death, then we are implying that disabled people would be better of dead. Which might not be the message that is intended, but it is there if you take the sentence literal. On the other hand, a story that examines the fact that a character fears a certain type of disability that much, a story that forces the character to examine that fear and maybe take measures to make it less frightening (in the case of the piano-player, even if he never loses his hand, he would still benefit from having a fullfilling social life so as not to lose all reason for living if he were to lose the ability to play) might allow the readers to see that a disability to do certain things is not the same as not being able to do anything worthwhile. Which I think is an important anti-ableism message that could use all the advocators it can get.
This also ties into the euthanasia-debate:
Maybe this is because my home country has a horrible history of using the excuse of “euthanasia” to rationalize the murder of thousands of mentally and/or physically disabled people,but I am afraid I can not be counted as completely “in favour”. I see a real danger of using the “right to a dignified death” (which I agree every human should have) as a way of shifting responsibility. Conditions, illnesses or disabilities that are hard to live with, then, would no longer be society’s problem to deal with. “No need to look for ways to make that live “worth living”, to accomodate the needs of people and help them be as happy as they can possibly be if instead we can just offer those people the choice to die if they are unhappy with the way things are.”
Note that I am also not completely opposed to euthanasia (although I hate the term for the historical implications), I just think there are dangers that need to be addressed. In the case of fictional representation, every time that a story caters to the idea of “better dead than disabled”, it adds a little bit more weight to that idea in the the minds of the readers. And maybe when the time actually comes that one would ask “do I want to continue living like this”, having been exposed to more positive portrayals of life with disability, and society actually taking actions to make that life easier by removing barriers, fighting prejudices and working on a more accessable view of itself, might lead to a person choosing not to die.
I am not saying that someone who really doesn’t want to continue living should be forced to. I am saying that what a person wants can be influenced by what society tells zeir to want. In a case of disability, when all kinds of sources are giving people the idea that a live with disability is worse than not having a life at all, this could be a decisive factor. And this would be a completely different situation from, for example, someone who will die no matter what chosing not to have to live through more pain, or someone saying that the pain they are in, and which can not be treated, is to much to bear.
Narratives in the media matter. If I do not know of anyone who lives with my illness or disability, I might believe it is not possible to live with at all. Of course, in the end it should be an individual choice, but still, I believe that it is societies job, and our responsibility as members of society, to do what we can to make sure there are viable alternatives to death as the only way out.
That turned into a really long rant. Sorry.
lauren,
I agree with all of what you are saying, but it seems to me on an empirical basis that it’s generally societies which provide more support (at least at a legal/ state-support level) to disabled people that tend to legalize assisted suicide. For example, I would be comparatively more anxious about a state like Texas legalizing assisted suicide than having the District of Columbia do so; I would be more concerned at a national level about having Japan legalize assisted suicide than having the U.S. do so. Of course, both DC and the U.S. as a whole could be doing more to integrate disabled people, but relatively speaking the U.S. at least seems to be at the patronizing “you’re so inspirational” stage rather than the hostile “you’re a freak” stage.
(Which is not to say that Japan hasn’t improved in this respect — it has, tremendously, mostly due to a very large elderly population that has become disabled due to aging. But a lot of things like financial assistance with devices that would allow disabled people to be employed or run their own businesses, rather than just be able to get around their homes, are still difficult to obtain — there isn’t the same political pressure for them because it’s not what the elderly voters are seeking.)