I really liked The Star Child – I have actually never read Oscar Wilde’s short stories (I know, I’m terrible) but there is a real beauty in the way that he articulates meaningful messages, like in this one, to not “judge a book by its cover,” or, “you won’t appreciate what you have until it’s gone.” I thought of this in a general sense as the moral story of appreciating parent to child relationships. For example, when children grow up to be adults, some lose appreciation for their parents. Then, as they grow older, they realize they too are becoming old. They begin to wish for the relationship they had before with their parents.
Now, to talk about what interested me from a disability perspective. The mother. This is something I’ve seen in a lot of older adults in their life – that their age in itself is disabling them. Especially if they are financially unwell off or are in circumstances you cannot control in life. You can see this in jobs, in relationships, and even in families. People give up on older people. There are fewer opportunities and credibility given to older people because they… should already have their life together, undesirable, easily drifting into the background. I think this representation could especially be seen in the boy. I thought of it as his age was, in a fantasized way, accelerated. Then he, too, was ugly.
A critique I would say is that, just because he can “relate” to his mother in the end, it doesn’t mean that he should just all of a sudden be handsome again. Yes, it could be a lesson of, “if you were in my shoes,” but oftentimes for people with disabilities, their disabilities are invisible and it is harder for people to get a perspective of their experience. As we talked about in previous classes, disabled persons may not be represented medically or in “first person.” Or, their disabilities are visible and people look away in fear, disgust.
