Disabilità e diversità

Abstract

In the context of the vast literary production of young people, there has always been a sensitive attention to "diversity" and, specifically, to disability. Strangely deformed creatures and victims of bizarre infirmities constantly characterize the complex fairy tale device, offering opportunities for reading that are often useful pedagogical tools for social reflection and awareness. Alongside the anomalous smallness of Tom Thumb and the horrible ugliness of Henriet of the Tuft, both published in the collection The Tales of Mother Goose by Perrault in 1697, monstrosity and malformation also mark Beauty and the Beast by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont in 1757 and Gian Porcospino by the Brothers Grimm in 1812. In the same thematic context, Andersen's tenacious and resolute Lead Soldier (1838) is inserted with fervent invention, which, different from the others and with only one leg, finds itself living a sad experience of marginalization, and the Little Mermaid (1836) who endures the worst sufferings to the point of giving her voice for a "normality" pleasing to the prince (Acone, 2022). A theme, that of mutism, which we also find in the Grimmian fairy tales The Twelve Brothers (1812-1815) and The Daughter of the Virgin Mary (1812-1815): bitter descriptions of marginality, condemnations and punishments. In the same collection of fairy tales, other forms of disability are blindness present in Rapunzel, the story of a prince who, having played with his eyes, wanders sadly through the woods crying, and the mental disability of the fool as a reason for misunderstanding and derision in The White Dove, The Three Feathers, The Queen of the Bees and The Golden Goose. A narrative space, that of the fairy tale, in which the disabled characters tell of a forced and painful experience of the human condition, of an uncomfortable, disturbing, unknown condition that inaugurates a way of life imprisoned only in the dimension of the wounded body. Emblems, in body and spirit, of a huge gray area in which it is not easy to enter and that society keeps away in clandestinity (Di Pasquale, 2003, p.7).