Metamorphosis: The Disabled Toy Made "Real" as an Eternally Abled Rabbit
Abstract
TVR seems to pursue an ableist view of disability. The boy’s scarlet fever is a temporary indisposition that functions primarily as a plot device, signaling his normal development into adolescence. For the rabbit, the narrative has the typical happy ending as the disabled toy with no functioning back legs is magically metamorphosed into a fully functioning able rabbit. For the ableist narrative of disability, there three outcomes: tragedy, cure, or death, and Williams chooses cure. Reward comes to the disabled who wait, and once again disability is reduced to an ableist trope. But there is another interpretation of TVR which opens the book up to a disabling reading, an antithetical path through Keatsian negative capability or what Nancy Mairs calls living with “ambivalences” without searching for a cure (or death or tragedy) or a way around the experience of disability.
Metamorphosis: The Disabled Toy Made "Real" as an Eternally Abled Rabbit
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TVR seems to pursue an ableist view of disability. The boy’s scarlet fever is a temporary indisposition that functions primarily as a plot device, signaling his normal development into adolescence. For the rabbit, the narrative has the typical happy ending as the disabled toy with no functioning back legs is magically metamorphosed into a fully functioning able rabbit. For the ableist narrative of disability, there three outcomes: tragedy, cure, or death, and Williams chooses cure. Reward comes to the disabled who wait, and once again disability is reduced to an ableist trope. But there is another interpretation of TVR which opens the book up to a disabling reading, an antithetical path through Keatsian negative capability or what Nancy Mairs calls living with “ambivalences” without searching for a cure (or death or tragedy) or a way around the experience of disability.