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The Tin Woodman of Oz
Tor.com has just posted the latest Oz post, The Tin Woodman of Oz.
I didn't discuss it that much in the post, but from a disability perspective, this is one of the most fascinating of the Oz novels (The Patchwork Girl of Oz, with its happily defiant heroine, is the other). The Tin Woodman, after all, started out with a prosthetic leg, then two prosthetic legs, then a prosthetic arm, and so on...until his entire body becomes tin. As a tin person, the Tin Woodman is automatically marked as distinct and different, but the Tin Woodman embraces this distinction, and indeed, insists that the transformation into tin is an improvement. After all, as an ordinary human woodcutter, he was just that - ordinary. As the Tin Woodman, he gets to go on adventures and rule a kingdom, surrounded by happy devoted lackeys who want nothing more than to create even more creatures of tin.
Which leads me, I suppose, to the model of the "happy disabled" - you know the trope: the disabled person who becomes a kinder and gentler person who can teach us all about what Life Really Means, or What's Really Important, and who is always cheery and faces illness/disability with a smile. (In other words, Not Me.) But I don't think the Tin Woodman fits this model. In the first place, as this book notes, and other books hint, he is hardly flawless: deeply vain about his personal appearance (he spends significant time polishing his body), fussy, and a moral absolutist whose narrow mindedness often leads him to make unfair judgements, causing pain and annoyance to other characters. (See both The Patchwork Girl of Oz and The Lost Princess of Oz.) In the second place, the Tin Woodman does not regard himself as disabled - indeed, he regards himself as superior to ordinary humans. And that in itself is a deeply subversive statement.
I didn't discuss it that much in the post, but from a disability perspective, this is one of the most fascinating of the Oz novels (The Patchwork Girl of Oz, with its happily defiant heroine, is the other). The Tin Woodman, after all, started out with a prosthetic leg, then two prosthetic legs, then a prosthetic arm, and so on...until his entire body becomes tin. As a tin person, the Tin Woodman is automatically marked as distinct and different, but the Tin Woodman embraces this distinction, and indeed, insists that the transformation into tin is an improvement. After all, as an ordinary human woodcutter, he was just that - ordinary. As the Tin Woodman, he gets to go on adventures and rule a kingdom, surrounded by happy devoted lackeys who want nothing more than to create even more creatures of tin.
Which leads me, I suppose, to the model of the "happy disabled" - you know the trope: the disabled person who becomes a kinder and gentler person who can teach us all about what Life Really Means, or What's Really Important, and who is always cheery and faces illness/disability with a smile. (In other words, Not Me.) But I don't think the Tin Woodman fits this model. In the first place, as this book notes, and other books hint, he is hardly flawless: deeply vain about his personal appearance (he spends significant time polishing his body), fussy, and a moral absolutist whose narrow mindedness often leads him to make unfair judgements, causing pain and annoyance to other characters. (See both The Patchwork Girl of Oz and The Lost Princess of Oz.) In the second place, the Tin Woodman does not regard himself as disabled - indeed, he regards himself as superior to ordinary humans. And that in itself is a deeply subversive statement.