CN: discusses genocide, antisemitism, ableism, and other forms of violence
First, most importantly: Free Palestine. You can sign this petition calling for an immediate ceasefire and contact your representatives too. Israel is an apartheid state, as people much more knowledgeable than I have also said. The Israeli government is committing genocide against Palestine. They gave Gazans no time to evacuate their homes. Malala Yousafzai recommends donating to Anera to provide humanitarian aid to Palestinians. I am against imperialism, including military imperialism. The US and Israel’s governments are defending imperialism, not really defending democracy, because Palestinians are not given equal rights in Israel’s democracy.
Many Jewish people around the world have often spoken out against Zionism and pointed out the huge power imbalance Israel has over all Palestinians. Muslims around the world constantly condemn Hamas and other terrorists. It’s completely wrong to equate Jewish people with the violence of the Israeli government or to equate Muslims with the violence of Hamas. We all need to condemn imperialism, hate crimes, and bigotry wherever they happen.
My latest BR article on fairy tales
I wrote this article and the rest of my blog post weeks ago. Published today on Book Riot:
In this article, I linked my 2022 Medium post on Fairy Tale by Stephen King. I might have forgotten to mention this in the original blog post, but “the gray” (the curse in the book) also affects Dora’s speech (another example of disability). Charlie doesn’t understand her speech when he first meets her. It also affects Princess Leah’s speech. She literally speaks through her horse, and I think it’s the elaborate setup to Charlie joking, “I heard it straight from the horse’s mouth.” Ouch.
Here’s a good article from 2015 on the origins of “Cinderella.” I think calling her stepsisters the “ugly stepsisters” undermines the message of not judging by appearances.
I recently saw the Grimm tale “Snow White and Rose Red” on a list of fairy tales Disney hasn’t adapted yet. I don’t think it should be adapted–at least not without rewriting it and removing the ableism. Snow White and Rose Red, two sisters, befriend a talking bear and let him stay in their house. The girls later meet a “dwarf,” and they save him several times. He’s always rude and ungrateful to them. The magical bear reappears and kills the dwarf. The bear transforms into a prince and says the dwarf turned him into a bear and stole the prince’s gold.
Fairy tales conflate people with dwarfism and other disabilities with imaginary and often malevolent creatures. This dwarf character is dishonest, greedy, contemptuous, and punished partly for being ungrateful to average-height people who helped him. This story type is sometimes called “The Ungrateful Dwarf.”
I’m not sure where the online rumor that Disney’s Snow White is 14 and the Prince is 31 comes from. It’s not in the movie or the many earlier versions of the story!
Speaking of fairy tales, here are my old Medium blog posts analyzing A Curse So Dark and Lonely, A Court of Thorns and Roses, and a second post on ACOTAR. Both loosely start with Beauty and the Beast retellings.
Beauty by Robin McKinley
I recently read another Beauty and the Beast retelling: Beauty by Robin McKinley from 1978.
I vividly remember sitting in my yard when I was about 9 years old and reading it, then losing or abandoning it. That’s probably why I remembered it and always wanted to finish it.
The writing is beautiful but slow-paced. Disney wasn’t the first to make Belle a bookworm in 1991. Neither was this book, 13 years earlier. Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve’s 1740 French novel La Belle et la Bête originated Belle’s love of reading. The Beast’s library in McKinley’s novel contains books that haven’t been written yet in Beauty’s time: Robert Browning, Sherlock Holmes, The Once and Future King, etc. This reminds me of Merlin wearing a Victorian top hat in 1000 CE in The Once and Future King. I like intertextuality!
Maybe someone from Disney read this before 1991 and was inspired by a few unique details. There’s also a scene when the Beast tells Beauty he can’t eat with utensils, so she doesn’t use them, either. The food they eat is different, but otherwise, almost identical scenes later appeared in the Disney movies.
The 1991 movie, in turn, may have influenced the 1990s cover art. I once owned the 1993 Harper Trophy paperback. On the cover, Beauty has pale skin, dark brown hair, and dark brown eyes, wears a yellow gown, and sniffs a yellow rose in a Gothic castle. She looks way more like Disney’s Belle than the descriptions of Beauty in the novel. In the book, she has golden-brown hair and brownish hazel eyes.
There are also a lot of mythological references in McKinley’s novel that I never would have understood when I was nine. Beauty compares herself to Persephone, eating pomegranate seeds from Hades in the Underworld. I didn’t even understand the reference to “King Cophetua’s beggar-maid” now, at 34. Alice Munro’s short story “The Beggar Maid” is another reference to the myth.
The Beast’s transformation takes only about a paragraph, which is kind of anticlimactic.
[Doctor Who New Series 1-4 spoilers] On Doctor Who Confidential in interviews, Billie Piper compared her character, Rose Tyler, kissing the Metacrisis Doctor (a half-human duplicate of the Tenth Doctor) to Belle’s reaction at the end of Beauty and the Beast. “It’s him, but it’s not him.” Earlier, Rose had a similar reaction to the Ninth Doctor’s regeneration into the Tenth. In the short “Born Again,” the Doctor eventually convinces her he’s still the same person.
Speaking of TV, I enjoy the new season of Our Flag Means Death. And Reservation Dogs.
In 2021 on BR, I analyzed the legend of The Pied Piper.
Years ago, I blogged about the ableist slur in the song “Life’s for the Living” by Passenger. Passenger rewrote the song and removed the slur in their recent 10th anniversary edition. I try to update my blog (including my old Medium posts) if I learn that musicians more recently apologized for, or removed, slurs in their lyrics.
More recently, I blogged about ableism online and offline. I’m glad Medium does not train AI on our posts. To anyone who still finds my work, even without Twitter, thank you!
Grace Lapointe 