Ann Schmiesing’s disability studies approach to the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen rests on a theory of narrative prosthesis developed by David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder. Here Schmiesing extends their theory, including Vladimir Propp’s defining concept, “lack liquidated,” and adding a parallel concept, “excess limited” (2); “editorial prosthesis” denotes the editorial intervention that results in achieving the narrative condition of lack liquidated and excess limited (3). In a provocative aside Schmiesing points out that “ableist” criticism has long viewed literary disability as metaphor rather than as lived experience, an outlook that she claims has limited critics’ recognition of ways in which fictional disabilities may function as plot determiners (11).
Schmiesing also adopts an idea put forward by Lennard Davis: nineteenth-century Romanticism marked a pivotal moment in literary perceptions of disability, deformity, and disease. Before this, Davis says, critics and readers accepted disability as a regular part of the population at large, whereas afterward an ideal of able-bodiedness became the norm and made disability an exception (17). With respect to the KHM tales themselves Schmiesing notes that the Grimms’ long-term editing “enhanced or added portrayals of disability” (2), on which they relied “to further the plot or delineate a character” (3), with the result that they regarded “able-bodiedness principally as an ideal that can be only magically or divinely conferred” (18, 19).
In light of the brothers’ own chronic ill health, chapter 1 examines the first edition’s prefatory praise of the “wholeness” of Märchen. Along the way, she emphasizes Wilhelm’s metaphor for editing as wielding a “critical knife”; it is verbal surgery, she says, that produces “aesthetic prostheses,” that is, textual improvements that parallel real-life surgical improvements to physical functioning by the addition of physical prostheses (25-26). In Schmiesing’s view, the Grimms’ efforts to restore the tales they collected are conceptually linked to “challenges faced by characters in the KHM as they attempt to restore the human body” (46).
Chapter 2 delineates prosthesis and surgery in “The Three Army Surgeons,” “Brother Lustig,” and “Hans My Hedgehog.” It incorporates a detailed and fascinating account of Wilhelm’s months-long spa regimen and treats doctors and surgeons in the KHM in relation to contemporaneous field medicine in the German military. Schmiesing speculates that tales told by the Grimms’ iconic storyteller Dorothea Viehmann drew on her experience of the Napoleonic Wars, in particular “in the context of historical attitudes toward the amputation and prostheticization of limbs” (58) as well as reflecting her and her contemporaries’ frequent sight of disabled veterans (63). Continuing her equation of editorial and surgical interventions, Schmiesing asserts that “[p]rosthesis defines the very act of not only surgical but also editorial intervention” through which Wilhelm strove to produce “wholeness” in the KHM.
In chapter 3, “Gender and Disability,” Schmiesing zeroes in on “The Maiden Without Hands.” She observes that “[f]emales are typically given disabilities that make them more passive, whereas males often—but not always—have disabilities that mark them as Other without significantly reducing their agency” (82-83). This chapter, which also considers “The Frog King” and “One-Eye, Two-Eyes, and Three-Eyes,” offers corrections to some of Alan Dundes’s psychological readings of Grimm tales (89). More typical of Schmiesing’s approach is the question she poses: “Does the erasure of physical anomaly at the end of ‘The Maiden Without Hands’ and ‘The Frog King’ represent an ableist reinscription of able-bodiedness as ‘normalcy’ or, alternatively, a transformation of the protagonist into an ideal state?” (108). Genres (or in this case Märchen sub-genres) have specific conventions, as Schmiesing recognizes (“The ideal is achievable [in Märchen] but cannot be achieved elsewhere, such as in the Schwänke examined [earlier],” 108-109), but her discussion here would benefit from a more closely defined set of terms. Technically a Schwank is a subset of Märchen, as are the Zaubermärchen with happy endings that we commonly call fairy tales; Schmiesing’s usage, on the other hand, suggests that Märchen and “fairy tale” are equivalent, with Schwank somehow antipodal.
Chapter 4 introduces the concept of “supercripple” in characters such as the medieval Asinarius (the plot of whose tale underlies the Grimms’ “Hans My Hedgehog”) and focuses on “others’ enfreakment of [supercripples], their own self-enfreakment, and their ‘overcoming’ of disability” (112). Schmiesing concludes with a question: “Do these tales enforce or challenge normalcy, and to what extent do they help to redefine ‘wholeness’ in the KHM?” (145).
Jacob Grimm’s essay on old age informs chapter 5, which explores his conviction that one lost faculty (for instance, sight) fosters the development of compensatory abilities in other senses. With reference to specific disabilities in the KHM, Schmiesing notes that Thumbling characters remain short (148), but the disability of being a dummy, whom the Grimms define as “despised, inferior, and small” (161), appears to be considerably more complex. Are dummies really stupid? Or are they simply misperceived by their families? Does their disability fade away in the Grimms’ tales? Or does being stupid just not matter all that much? Is it significant that the KHM sidesteps these issues?
In her conclusion Schmiesing focuses on an aged and hunchbacked character in “The Goose Girl at the Well.” Mistakenly identified as a witch by those around her, she is physically more able than a young man in the story (180). For Schmiesing, this character thematizes the true wholeness of a character who is narratively depicted as disabled (181).
Han-Jörg Uther’s 1981 Behinderte in populären Erzählungen catalogued and catagorized disabled characters in brief popular narratives as a whole, whereas Schmiesing adds an element of implicit advocacy to her analysis. As a whole her book widened my view of the range of functions played by disabilities and disabled characters in all literary genres, as well as in fairy tales as a whole. In particular her discussion of disability in the Grimm collection aroused questions about Ludwig Bechstein’s fairy tales and made me wonder if they differ from the Grimm corpus with respect to disabilities, or if they communicate a similar mix of ableist and disability-focused values.
I hope Ann Schmiesing will continue her studies of disability in literature, and perhaps address that question. I also hope that the prostheticizing vocabulary that accompanies her disability studies approach will be modified, simplified, or reduced. If Schmiesing does so, the significant perceptions that she achieves by her disability studies point of view will make her analyses of so important a human issue readily accessible.
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[Review length: 1061 words • Review posted on April 1, 2015]