Female Protagonists, Disability and Behaviour Disorders in Victorian Fairy Tales

Abstract

One of the major tendencies in British fairy tale writing between 1840 and 1880 was to use the fairy tale form ‘to raise social consciousness about the disparities among the different social classes and the problems faced by the oppressed due to the industrial revolution’ (Zipes, 1987, p. xix). In their new fairy tales, the female writers questioned and critiqued gender roles and the condition of women, they showed that motherhood can be of different kinds and began to address the theme of disability. The first part of this discussion will be centred on women and gender roles, as addressed in Nesbit’s The Last of the Dragons (1899) and Sharp’s The Boy Who Looked Like a Girl (1897). Another tale that challenges gender roles and stereotypes is Sharp’s The Restless River (1897). One of the peculiarities of Victorian fairy tales written by women must be the creation of new female (and male) protagonists. In several tales such as Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1862), the already mentioned The Last of the Dragons, Ewing’s The Ogre Courting (1871) and Sharp’s The Spell of the Magician’s Daughter (1902), the protagonists do not adhere to the stereotype in which girls are seen as damsels in distress and passive characters. In de Morgan’s Dumb Othmar (1900), the protagonist goes on a dangerous journey to find her lover’s voice, while in Sharp’s The Little Witch of the Plain (1897), the protagonist embarks on a journey to nullify her own spell and manages to overcome all the classical fairy tale tropes (evil faeries, dragons, saving a damsel in distress) by herself; meanwhile in The Spell of the Magician’s Daughter (1902), the protagonist takes on a journey both physical and psychological to find her role and place in the world. Another theme is the critique of the dichotomous categorization of women and Victorian gender roles, as in de Morgan’s A Toy Princess (1877), which contains a severe critique towards Aristocratic social norms and the expectations of women (who should be passive and silent) and The Seeds of Love (1877) in which de Morgan questions the institution of marriage. Finally, in the already mentioned The Boy Who Looked Like a Girl, the satire goes against the strict gender roles of the time by satirizing the differences between the expectations that society has regarding men and women. The second part of this discussion will concentrate on the theme of disability in Victorian fairy tales. As Amanda Leduc explains in her book Disfigured (2020), in fairy tales there is a fascination with disfigurement and disabilities, especially seen as punishments (Leduc, 2020, p.69). During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, thanks to new discoveries especially in the scientific field, the interest towards the human body increased both from a physical and a mental point of view. This newfound interest can be seen in Gothic literature (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1882) is a clear example) and also in Children’s one. The theme of disability and the imperfection of the body, although not prominently, is present in Victorian fairy tales. Some examples are Lucy Clifford’s Wooden Tony (1882) which is considered to be the first literary fairy tale with an autistic protagonist; Dina M. Craik’s The Little Lame Prince and His Travelling Cloak (1875) where the protagonist became disabled following a fall when he was a newborn; de Morgan’s Through the Fire (1877), in which the protagonist is a sickly kid who finds temporary relief in the fairy kingdom. Because of his generosity and compassion, the fairies gift him with an invisible belt that restores his health; finally, in Dumb Othmar (1900), the protagonist gets his voice stolen by a wicked fairy.