Handiland: The Crippest Place on Earth (Elizabeth G. Wheeler)

Reviewed by Michael Northen

On the book cover above the title, Elizabeth G. Wheeler’s Handiland: The Crippest Place on Earth, dark, capitalized letters read “Disability in Young Adult and Children’s Literature.” Because so few books have been written about disability in children’s literature, I was eager to dig in to find out what new books were on offer for teachers and parents and perhaps to find also if there were some books that needed to be avoided. Indeed, in her introduction to the book, Wheeler writers:

Handiland: The Crippest Place on Earth looks at the new prominence of youth with disabilities in contemporary young adult and children’s literature…As students with disabilities entered mainstream schools in the twentieth century, they also moved to the literary forefront. For the first time, writers featured main characters with disabilities and invited young readers to identify with them and see the world through their  perspectives. Finally, the disabled child no longer served only as sidekick, sibling or educational toy for the nondisabled main characters.”

This is good news.  Since reading Paticia Dunn’s Disabling Characters published in 2015, I’d been looking for something to pick up the gap.  Moreover, Wheeler promises something else very encouraging, “I intend this book for scholars of disability studies and literature for young people, but I also welcome a wider readership beyond my own small and jargon dependent professional circle.”  The elimination of scholarly jargon and discussion of issues in a clear way that intelligent and interested readers can understand is something that Wordgathering has both called for and aspired to.

Nevertheless, I have to admit my disappointment when I read further.  Two things in particular let a little of the air out of my balloon.  The first is that Handiland is not a straightforward review of children’s and young adult books, so there was no direct way for me to see just what specific work or authors Wheeler was evaluating. The second is that Wheeler is not merely looking at books but at multi-media.  In fact, not even all of the books actually contain disabled characters but merely “swims close to a disability epistemology.” Neither of these should be construed as criticism of the book itself since Wheeler has something very different in mind, but I wish she had not included the misleading words on the book’s cover.

The structure of Handiland is set up to mimic Disneyland and, like Disneyland, it is meant as an idyllic place where visitors are able to see the discrepancy between the real world and what we say that we value as a society. In the case of Handiland, it is the world as it could be for disabled children and youth. The book’s first section on public space serves as a sort of  Main Street while the spaces inhabited by disabled characters are Nature, School and Fantasy, reflecting Adventureland, Frontierland and Fantasyland, respectively.

While Wheeler’s organizational plan is meant to highlight the distance between where we are as a society and where we have to go, it also seems to have forced Wheeler into including material that, in a different structure, might not have been included.  As Wheeler herself notes, despite the fact that in the twenty-first century there has been a seismic shift in the representing disability in children’s literature, it still falls very short of reflecting the wide range of disability that children actually live with.  This seems to have forced Wheeler into the position of choosing Allie Brosch’s  graphic novel Hyperbole and a Half, which Wheeler says was never intended or marketed for young adults just so that she would be able to included a discussion of ADHD.

A similar situation could be argued around “intersectionality,” one of the obligatory talking points of disability studies. While no one needs to argue that a disabled African-American woman is subjected to more than one kind of marginalization, it does not necessarily follow that there have been children’s book that portray that situation. However, the inclusion Fen de la Guerre’s Orleans – whatever its merits as a sci-fi book– feels like an attempt to shoehorn in a book that only qualifies as disability literature via metaphor.

I want to mention two other considerations that, for me, emerge from trying to pull literature as it is created by authors into an idealized literary frame work with a checklist for admittance. They are issues that Wheeler is well aware of and tries to address at points throughout the book.  The first is that, just as Disneyland is based upon a very Amercianized values, Handiland includes cultural values that derive from disability as experienced in the United States (and similar countries).  What constitutes disability or attitudes towards disability is very different in the Middle East or Sub-Saharan Africa and applying the standards of Handiland to books by authors coming out of those countries is patently biased.  Wheeler takes up this concern in two of the books that she discusses in Part 2 (Nature) – Michael Foreman’s Seal Surfer and Meshack Assare’s Sosu’s Call.  The latter takes place in Ghana and, given the cultural views about disability in Ghana, can only push against stereotypes of disability by creating a hero who is a supercrip.  Without going into a prolonged discussion of supercrips, suffice it to say that books featuring  a supercrip narrator (one who overcomes his disability by incredible displays of prowess or heroism) in the United States tend tobr  panned, but to apply that criteria to a Ghana writer would be mean-spirited to say the least.

The other consideration in evaluating books by Handiland criteria is a psychological one.  As Wheeler observes…“novels for young readers accommodate some disabilities and some students better than others… protagonists are nearly always brilliant, immensely likeable and white.”  She is right.  The problem is that in order to do this, the protagonists have to distance themselves from others who have disabilities that garner even greater stigma.  Wheeler states it well:

Anticipating reader resistance, young narrators claim the power to speak for themselves by asserting, while showcasing their wit and intellect, that they are “not retarded.” This moment happens with startling frequency, I call it the Not Retarded Trope (NRT).

The question is, what is to be done about this?  In the early days of the United States education, all literature was moralistic. Readers were told what they should believe. The remnants of those days remain in non-fiction children’s books that try to describe why discrimination against children with disabilities (or anyone else) is wrong. But catechisms don’t convert.  It is the fiction and the kinds of books that Wheeler discusses that do the work of getting young readers who have stereotypes about disability to let loose of them by getting readers to identify with a narrator. As any teacher who has been through a reading comprehension course knows, this is only achieved when the gap between the  reader and that of the characters he is reading about is not too great.  Fair or not, one of the reasons for Harry Potter’s success is that readers can see aspects themselves in him and although Wheeler claims him for disability,  Harry is brilliant, immensely likeable and white.  He can hardly be said to be a link to those who seem much more “other.”

There is no way of reducing the amount of scholarship that Wheeler brings to Handiland or the wide range of issues that she discusses to just a few paragraphs. In what follows, what I would like to do is simply choose a few of the highlights from the work that I feel deals most directly with disabled characters and might encourage others to investigates those books further. They are all from books I have not read myself and Handiland has prompted me to want explore further.  I’ll take one from each section.

One of those books is the picture book Seal Surfer, mentioned above. What seems noteworthy about this books, as presented by Wheeler, is that while the pictures in the book allow readers to see that the main character has a disability through the subtle portrayal of a crutch or wheelchair, without mentioning it in the text.  The book takes place in a Cornwall fishing village where Ben, the book’s protagonist, is seen as both comfortable in nature and as part of the community.  As with boys in many children’s books over the past century, Ben forms a companionship with an animal – in this case a seal – who grows along with him.  Ben is a strong swimmer but when his surfboard is overturned and he is saved by the seal, the others in the community react to his almost drowning as they would have to any other community member.  Neither the incident nor his saving is disability-based.  While he has what Wheeler terms a prosthetic community, in Ben’s case the accommodation that he needs and is given is implied rather than overt.

From the book’s “School” section I was caught by Wheeler’s description of R. J. Palacio’s Wonder. While Auggie Pullman, the book’s ten year old protagonist, may be a typical genre hero in Wheeler’s analysis, there is nothing typical about the genetic condition that causes abnormal facial features ostracizing him from mainstream society.  As befitting the section that Wheeler has placed the book in, it begins with Auggie’s being main-streamed into school where he faces a host of problem that being visibly marked in a public space creates for young people.  There is certainly truth to Wheeler’s analysis that “Wonder’s message of ‘choose kindness’ is important but insufficient to creating inclusion,” and that it can easily be dismissed by critics as attempting to be “inspirational,” one could also argue that if the novel allows readers to begin to identify with characters like Auggie it is a step forward closing the gap that difference creates.

Wheeler does not restrict herself to the most recent texts for children and one of the more unexpected books that she takes a look at Dinah Maria Murlock’s The Little Lame Prince published in 1875.  Wheeler deserves credit for cutting Murlock some slack inasmuch as the book was publish almost a century and a half ago and the author clearly did not anticipate that there would be a field called disability studies that might be evaluating her book.  One of the reasons that The Little Lame Prince still works today is that it is fantasy (hence its inclusion in the Fantasy section).  While Prince Dolor is literally exiled and set apart from society, as are many disabled children, his magic rug allows in access back in to society.  Though he is aware of his difference, he is able to work against setbacks to fight for himself and his community.  Moreover, when he becomes a king himself, Dolor models how a ruler uses his power for the good of the country.  Wheeler’s discussion of the Prince as an example of the Fair Unknown, an archetype of a disenfranchised or humble person marked for fame is a useful one in exploring contemporary disability literature as well.

Finally, in the Tomorrowland chapter, there is Gail Giles’ young adult novel Girls Like Us.  To say the least, it is an exception to the “brilliant, immensely likeable and white” protagonists that characterize much disability YA literature.  Its portrayal of two teenage girls whose actions reveal them as having cognitive challenges is particularly sobering in light of what one of them says to the other after she has been raped, “Police or nobody else care what happens to girls like us.”  At the same time, it is a story of empowerment. While not an emotionally easy book, it is one I believe teachers of high school students would want on their “to read”  list. I know it is on mine.

Books exploring the representation of disability in children’s literature are genuinely welcome, particularly with the greater awareness of the need for that literature. Handiland takes an unconventional approach that will please some readers and frustrate others. Perhaps because it is published by the University of Michigan Press, it leans more heavily in the direction of trying to cover the concerns that occupy disability scholars and away from including the greater number of available books for children and young adults available that teachers and parents might actually have preferred.  Nevertheless, Wheeler provides readers much to think about and demonstrates how there are no simple solutions to what disability fiction for young readers should look like.

Title: Handiland: The Crippest Place on Earth
Author: Elizabeth G. Wheeler
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Date: 2019

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About the Reviewer

Michael Northen is the former editor of Wordgathering and an editor with Jennifer Bartlett and Sheila Black of the anthology Beauty is a Verb: the New Poetry of Disability. He is also an editor of the recent anthology of disability short fiction, The Right Way to Be Crippled and Naked (Cinco Puntos Press).