Abigail Weber
Dr. Foss
ENGL 384
April 22, 2020
Once upon a time, in a faraway land, there lived a powerful king and queen. Although they had every luxury and ruled a vast kingdom, they were childless for many years. At last, the queen gave birth to a daughter to great fanfare and celebration in the kingdom.
But the couple’s joy was soon replaced by horror as they beheld their child. Her tiny legs were uneven and twisted. Her little face had wide apart eyes and a crooked mouth. Purple and red blotches swirled around her body.
As she grew, each milestone seemed to only deepen their revulsion. When the little princess learned to walk, her parents could only lament the limping of her uneven legs. When her smile first revealed a tiny tooth, her parents recoiled. When she first spoke, her parents forgot that all children’s first words are clumsy and cursed the twisting of her lips. But as she was their only heir, they did their best to cure her.
For years, an endless procession of clergymen, physicians, and conmen made their way to the grand palace, each attempting to curry favor by fixing the unsightly babe. Prayers and charms, relics and salves, potions and spells–all failed.
Finally, when the princess was seven years old, the king and queen gave birth to a son. His limbs were even and straight. His eyes were close, but not too close. The royal couple cooed over the baby, marvelling at his perfectly sculpted tiny limbs and features. They rejoiced at his birth, and told their most trusted servant to get rid of their loathed firstborn. This man could not bring himself to kill her, so he sent her to live with his mother, a weaver in a small river village far away from the castle.
The elderly woman adored the child as a granddaughter, and taught her all she knew of navigating the world. Years passed, and the princess acquired a reputation as a wise and clever woman. The people of the village came to her to solve their disputes, and eventually people began to come from all along the river.
When the princess realized this, she begged Grandmother to spin her a veil to hide herself.
“Whatever for?”
“Oh Grandmother, Grandmother, they will hate me when they see me.”
“Everyone here has already seen you,” Grandmother argued, but when she saw how distraught her granddaughter was, she finally agreed.
And so the princess continued to pose riddles and answer questions, never revealing her body. Her legend only became more fabulous for the mystery, and many a questioner came simply to ask to see her. She laughed at each and sent them on their way, telling them “oh my dear, oh my dear, you will fear me when you see me.” Some of the cleverer ones brought gifts of food to tempt her to lift her veil, but she would thank them for helping her to feed her good Grandmother and give it to her elder to eat instead.
One day, a scarred young man about the princess’ age came down the road to her little cottage, muttering to himself. The villagers stayed well away from him, and as he drew closer, the princess could hear his hoarse words.
“If only I could shudder, if only I could shudder!”
The princess asked what he wished to know.
“Oh, my lady, I will give you fifty thalers, which is all I have in the world, if you will teach me how to shudder!”
“How to shudder? However do you not know how to shudder?” The princess asked in disbelief.
“My father said I could never learn anything, but the only thing I ever wanted to learn was to shudder. At campfires, when people told stories about spirits and the devil, they would say ‘oh, that makes me shudder!’ But I have never shuddered, and I only wish I could.”
At this the princess laughed, but he looked so forlorn that she soon stopped. After much thought, she said,
“Listen. At the edge of town is a gallows where a murderer was hanged last night. Go there and spend the night, and you will learn how to shudder.”
The boy obeyed, and returned the next day.
“Have you learned how to shudder?” The princess asked.
“How could I?” The boy rasped. “The murderer made poor company. When I set him by the fire to warm himself, he let himself burn up, and I didn’t want to burn with him so I hung him back up!”
The princess marvelled at this, but quickly came up with another plan. “There is a place on the riverbank where a young boy drowned, and his ghost is still there. A girl I dared to stay there for five minutes as a child fled in terror. Surely he can teach you how to shudder.”
The boy obeyed, and returned the next day.
“Have you learned how to shudder?” The princess asked.
“How could I?” The boy rasped. “A little boy fell into the water, and so I jumped in and saved him. As soon as I had done so, he fell in again! I had no time to learn to shudder!”
“That was the ghost of the little boy!” The princess said.
“Well, if he died by falling in the river, he should know better than to do it again!” The boy said hotly.
The princess laughed, and so did the boy, but inevitably he returned to saying “if only I could shudder!”
“Come back tomorrow, and I will teach you how to shudder,” the princess promised. The boy agreed, and left.
“Oh Grandmother, Grandmother, he will fear me if he sees me!” The princess cried to her guardian. “And I so want him to shudder, for he is kind and funny and determined, and I cannot bear to see him so sad! If I am truly so horrifying, he will finally shudder when he sees me, and so I will be happy. If he does not shudder, I will be glad that at least one person does not see me as a monster, but I will be sad for him.”
So resolved, she met him the next morning and invited him into her cottage. She drew the curtains and lit candles. At last, she removed her veil.
He did not shudder or look on in fear, but even more, he was not confused or revolted by the sight of her, and his eyes didn’t linger on her as something to be picked apart, examined, fixed. She could no sooner imagine him among the procession of physicians than she could imagine him shuddering.
“How are you going to teach me to shudder?” The boy asked, oblivious to the princess’ self-consciousness.
“Lay down on that mat and go to sleep,” the princess ordered. “When you wake up, you will have shuddered.”
Once he was asleep, the princess opened his shirt and poured the flopping tadpoles all over him. He awoke shuddering.
“Oh my lady, my lady, look how I shuddered! You’ve taught me how!” He embraced her with joy and spun her around, setting her back down carefully so she could balance on her wobbly legs.
The boy never shuddered again, but it mattered not, for he was satisfied. In time, he and the princess were wed, and when the royal family died and left the kingdom without a ruler, the faithful servant retrieved the princess and invited her back to the throne. She was a kind and wise queen, and she was never cured as long as she lived.
Word count: 1262
Writeup:
In my project, I decided to combine my love of fairy tales, particularly The Youth Who Went Forth To Learn What Fear Was, with disability studies. The result is a retelling that aims for the style similar to traditional fairy tales while avoiding the ableist tendency of such stories to cure disability. In this piece, I wanted to particularly engage with the ideas introduced during this course of freakery, societal expectations of ability, the cure narrative, and the way disability and neurodivergency affect relationships.
The story primarily engages with freakery through the character of the princess. The theory piece for this consideration was Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s Introduction: From Wonder to Error–A Genealogy of Freak Discourse in Modernity from Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. As a child, her highly visible disability horrifies those around her and is highly emphasized by her parents’ desire to fix her. Her difference is exploited and speculated about both by physicians and clergymen, capturing both scientific interest and religious wonder as described by Garland-Thomson. The throng of people attempting to cure her makes the palace itself into a freak show with one exhibit, objectifying and exoticizing the princess even as the gawkers attempt to remove her disability. As an adult, the princess interacts with freakery again as her fear of prejudice drives her to cover her disability. Here, again, people flock to the strange and unknown, her fame growing in part because of the mystery surrounding her body. Even though she is engaging in the opposite of the traditional freak show by covering instead of revealing and leaving things to mystery instead of describing a fictionalized backstory in elaborate terms, her deviation from an expected norm is still greeted with curiosity, and her petitioners’ desire to see her face is an effort to categorize and understand–an entitlement to knowledge of her body that also defines the attitude of a freak show audience.
The story engages with the cure narrative and societal expectations of ability through both main characters. The princess’ experience of a cure is inherently negative, and she views escaping those who seek to cure her as a triumph, to the point that it is a part of her happy ending. Her parents had a clearly defined expectation for their child that did not allow disability, and so the princess labored under the pressure of an unattainable expectation. Like many cure-focused parents of disabled children, the king and queen view disability as stealing their child: a cure will return to them the child they should have had and that they actually want. On the other hand, the boy’s main goal throughout the story is to find a cure for one of the symptoms of his neuroatypicality. He is highly aware of his difference from other people, and sees his inability to shudder mainly through a social lens; he talks about how he cannot fully enjoy the social experience of campfire stories because he does not shudder at them with others. In the end, his happy ending is found in the satisfaction of experience. He has shuddered without truly changing his inability to feel fear, achieving satisfaction without a real cure to his disability.
Finally, my last goal with this story is to offer a nuanced relationship between a neuroatypical boy and a physically disabled girl. The main struggle was the constraints of the genre. Fairy tales are not long enough for nuanced and deep love stories, and often rely on instantaneous love and telling instead of showing. Despite these constraints, I set out with two goals: to portray how the two main characters’ disabilities bring them together, and to show they have reasons to love each other beyond those similarities. In particular, as the focus is on the princess, I wanted to make sure I did not simply portray her as falling for the first man who was not afraid of her. She falls in love with the boy for his compassion toward the drowning ghost, his sense of humor, and his determination. Although he cannot be afraid of her, he does not negatively react to her appearance in any of the many ways he still could. As with any fairy tale romance, it happens quickly from the audience’s view, but I believe I successfully included nuance and insight into their relationship.
Word count: 721
I pledge that I have neither given nor received unauthorized help on this assignment. -Abigail Weber
