Metamorphosis: The Disabled Toy Made "Real" as an Eternally Abled Rabbit
Title and/or Affiliation
Professors of English, Christopher Newport University
Presenter Bio
Dr. Kara Keeling is Professor of English and the Tracey Schwarze Endowed Professor in Arts and Humanities at Christopher Newport University, where she teaches courses in children's and adolescent literature. With Dr. Scott Pollard, she has published Table Lands: Food in Children's Literature (2020) and edited Critical Approaches to Food in Children's Literature (2009).
Scott Pollard is Professor of English at Christopher Newport University. He and Kara Keeling co-wrote Table Lands: Food in Children’s Literature (UP of Mississippi 2020) as well as numerous articles on the topic on a number of children’s authors (including Pamela Muñoz Ryan, Polly Horvath, Neil Gaiman, Beatrix Potter, and Maurice Sendak). They co-edited Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature (Routledge 2009). Pollard also co-edited with Margarita Marinova her translation from the Russian of Mikhail Bulgakov’s dramatic adaptation of Don Quixote (MLA 2014), and he edited a special volume of Children’s Literature Association Quarterly on disability in 2013.
Session
Panel: Reading Classics Through Other Eyes
Location
Zoom
Start Date
8-7-2022 2:45 PM
End Date
8-7-2022 4:00 PM
Abstract
At first glance, The Velveteen Rabbit seems to pursue a conventionally ableist view of disability. For the boy, scarlet fever is a temporary indisposition that leaves no lasting effects and functions primarily as a plot device—the burning of his childhood possessions—which signals his normal development into adolescence. For the rabbit, functioning as toy mirror to the boy, the narrative has the typical happy ending as the disabled toy with no functioning back legs is magically metamorphosed into a fully functioning, living and able rabbit. After his physically limited existence as a toy, he is rewarded by being incarnated as an eternal, real, and conventionally abled rabbit. Williams writes what all “normate” narratives do, using a term coined by Garland-Thompson: she would erase disability from the Boy’s and toy’s present and future, so that readers no longer have to worry, because “the traces of disability” have been eradicated and the future is full of promise.
But there is another interpretation of The Velveteen Rabbit—worth pursuing as a counter-narrative to ableist closure—which opens the book up to a disabling reading, what Nancy Mairs characterizes in Carnal Acts as living with “ambivalences” without searching for a cure (or death or tragedy), a resolution, or a way out of or around the experience of disability. There are two points in the book where abled and disabled blur, become inseparable, and in which disability leaves an indelible trace. First, when the Velveteen Rabbit asks the Skin Horse what makes a toy become real, the horse claims love, a process which happens over time and that results in the wearing down, the disabling, of the toy body. The toy becomes real once it is no longer pristine, ideal, normate. Love makes disability real, makes the disabled body visible (and not repugnant). Second, at the end of the book, the recovered Boy witnesses the visible traces of his beloved toy in the magically metamorphosed rabbit, made real twice over and, thus, preserving the trace of the disabled body.
On the one hand, in The Velveteen Rabbit Williams pursues a conventional ableist narrative, but on the other the book remains a receptacle “capable of being in uncertainties” (Keats), open to the possibility—as Micah and McTiernan define Disability Studies—“that a life that includes impairment can also include positive change over time. It can include growth.”
Metamorphosis: The Disabled Toy Made "Real" as an Eternally Abled Rabbit
Zoom
At first glance, The Velveteen Rabbit seems to pursue a conventionally ableist view of disability. For the boy, scarlet fever is a temporary indisposition that leaves no lasting effects and functions primarily as a plot device—the burning of his childhood possessions—which signals his normal development into adolescence. For the rabbit, functioning as toy mirror to the boy, the narrative has the typical happy ending as the disabled toy with no functioning back legs is magically metamorphosed into a fully functioning, living and able rabbit. After his physically limited existence as a toy, he is rewarded by being incarnated as an eternal, real, and conventionally abled rabbit. Williams writes what all “normate” narratives do, using a term coined by Garland-Thompson: she would erase disability from the Boy’s and toy’s present and future, so that readers no longer have to worry, because “the traces of disability” have been eradicated and the future is full of promise.
But there is another interpretation of The Velveteen Rabbit—worth pursuing as a counter-narrative to ableist closure—which opens the book up to a disabling reading, what Nancy Mairs characterizes in Carnal Acts as living with “ambivalences” without searching for a cure (or death or tragedy), a resolution, or a way out of or around the experience of disability. There are two points in the book where abled and disabled blur, become inseparable, and in which disability leaves an indelible trace. First, when the Velveteen Rabbit asks the Skin Horse what makes a toy become real, the horse claims love, a process which happens over time and that results in the wearing down, the disabling, of the toy body. The toy becomes real once it is no longer pristine, ideal, normate. Love makes disability real, makes the disabled body visible (and not repugnant). Second, at the end of the book, the recovered Boy witnesses the visible traces of his beloved toy in the magically metamorphosed rabbit, made real twice over and, thus, preserving the trace of the disabled body.
On the one hand, in The Velveteen Rabbit Williams pursues a conventional ableist narrative, but on the other the book remains a receptacle “capable of being in uncertainties” (Keats), open to the possibility—as Micah and McTiernan define Disability Studies—“that a life that includes impairment can also include positive change over time. It can include growth.”
Comments
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