Telling New Stories: Disability and Determination in Contemporary Young Adult Fairy Tales

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Notes

¹ Though I assume an understanding of famous fairy tales as perpetuating a passive princess tradition, I also want to acknowledge that fairy tales have long seen versions that allow for women’s agency. See, for example, Elizabeth Wanning Harries’s Twice Upon a Time (2001) and Anne E. Duggan’s The Lost Princess: Women Writers and the History of Classic Fairy Tales (2023). However, the tales that have become iconic in Western culture tend to feature traditional gender norms, and the young adult fairy tale is part of a corpus of revisions that push back on those norms.

² While Marissa Meyer’s Cinder, a Cinderella who has prostheses due to a childhood accident, can certainly be read as disabled, her high-tech augmentations make her almost superhuman.

³ In her hallmark text Extraordinary Bodies, Rosemarie Garland Thomson coins the term “normate” to refer to the socially constructed able-bodied person. The normate “names the veiled subject position of cultural self, the figure outlined by the array of deviant others whose marked bodies shore up the normate’s boundaries” (Garland Thomson 8). In other words, the normate measures its sense of normalcy against those who are deemed “other.”

⁴ The original German term is “verbuttetes,” “a vulgar dialect expression” that means “retarded” or “stunted” (Murphy 109).

⁵ I recognize that the fairy tale itself is a speculative genre, and I use the phrase “speculative young adult fairy tale” not to be redundant, but to highlight the hybridity of this particular kind of text. These are not fairy tales set against a familiar real-world backdrop; they are stories that intertwine speculative genres as a way of envisioning alternative futures that interrogate cultural norms. Other texts that I see belonging in this category include Stacey Jay’s Of Beast and Beauty, Julianna Baggott’s Pure, Sarah Prineas’s Ash & Bramble and Rose & Thorn, Anna Sheehan’s A Long, Long Sleep, the novels in Marissa Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles series, Kalynn Bayron’s Cinderella is Dead, and Christina Henry’s The Girl in Red, though this list is not exhaustive.

⁶ French writer Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy popularized the term contes de fées, or “tales of the fairies,” in the late seventeenth century (Warner 47), giving rise to the phrase as we know it.

⁷ While fairy tales and folklore are not necessarily interchangeable terms, they are inextricably connected. Jack Zipes notes that “fairy tales have been in existence as oral folk tales for thousands of years and first became what we call literary fairy tales during the seventeenth century. Both the oral and the literary traditions continue to exist side by side today, interact, and influence one another” (2, emphasis original). Thus, a text like The Call, which uses Irish folklore for its world-building, is part of the world of contemporary fairy tales that draw on centuries-old traditions.

⁸ Interestingly, readers never learn in The Call what becomes of Melanie and a host of other humans who made similar deals with the Sídhe. Ó Guilín devotes a chapter to showing this betrayal in action, as the traitors work with a Sídhe leader to allow infiltration of both Boyle Survival College’s campus and the surrounding town. But other than a short scene in which one betrayer dies a nasty death, Ó Guilín leaves this part of the narrative unresolved. The Call’s sequel, The Invasion, does spend more time with Melanie, where she is imprisoned for being a traitor and never does become “whole.”

⁹ I do want to note here that The Invasion, the sequel to The Call, erases some of Nessa’s power as a disabled heroine. In this book, government officials deem Nessa a traitor, as they don’t believe she could have survived the Grey Land with her disability, removing much of the agency she gains in The Call.

¹⁰ While A Curse So Dark and Lonely is a progressive text in many ways, the kidnapping and the disregard of “other girls” is unfortunate, to say the least. It is beyond the scope of this essay for me to give this plot device the excoriation it deserves, but I do wish Kemmerer had found another way to bring young women to Emberfall.

¹¹ Grey has only one point of view chapter at the end of the book, but his comments to Rhen throughout the text show his assessment of Harper’s strength.