The "Tiny Tim Effect": Stereotypes of Disability in Popular Stories
Sophie Jones sings Tiny Tim's solo on stage during a rehearsal on Nov. 9, 2017. Ellen Schmidt | MPR News
Whether they be casts of humans, cartoons, or Muppets, they all have one thing in common: Tiny Tim, everyone’s favorite cripple. He’s sweet, he’s optimistic, he’s got a little crutch – he’s a cliché. Tiny Tim is a prime example of a “holy innocent,” one of the many stereotypes of people with disabilities we see again and again in popular culture.
While we are living in a time of growing positive portrayals of people with disabilities in the media – or as I like the call it, the Age of Ali Stroker – it’s more important than ever to acknowledge the way disability has been depicted in the past and how it still affects our views on disability and people with disabilities today. And so, in the spirit of peace on Earth and goodwill, let’s go over a brief list of common stereotypes of disability in popular media.
Holy Innocents or Sweet Innocents
A staple of the Victorian Era, the Sweet Innocent is the cripple with a heart of gold who needs to be cared for and looked after, also known as the “Charity Cripple.” The emphasis of this stereotype is that every Holy Innocent is a capitol-V Victim of their circumstance. They’ll never survive in the big, scary world out there all by themselves, but who cares? They have such a good-natured temperament that we can’t help but want to take care of them, and they teach us so much about ourselves and how to appreciate life, that they’re worth keeping around.
You know when your mom tried to guilt you about the starving children in Africa to get you to eat the microwaved, un-seasoned veggies she served you? She’s using those Sweet Innocents to guilt you because at least you aren’t them, right?
Tiny Tim has no character arc, no development, no future beyond bringing endless joy to his family and making other people appreciate that they aren’t him. His father recounts Tim saying that he “hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk and blind men see.”
He does not exist as a character in his own right, but only to make Bob Cratchit all the more pitiable and to make Scrooge feel guilty. The Cratchit family becomes their own trope, the “Noble Sacrificer” - the caregivers who sacrifice all personal needs and desires in order to provide and care for their disabled charge, again lacking in any other depth, arc, or development.
Tim doesn’t have any goals in life other than living, presumably in the care of his family for the rest of his days. He pulls upon our heartstrings and perpetuates the patronizing idea that people with disabilities are dependents in need of charity, lower-class citizens who serve as both a lesson to us and a way for the able-bodied to increase their own feelings of superiority (I could delve into the world of Inspiration Porn and Pity Porn, but honestly that’s its own article). He’s so good-hearted, how can we not learn from his preternatural wisdom and shield him from all hardship? Pats on the back all around.
Other examples of this trope include John Merrick from The Elephant Man and Quasimodo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
The Villain
On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have people with disabilities who are the Villain. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly which came first, the disability or the villainy. They’re probably disabled because they’re evil, but it’s equally likely that they’re evil because they’re people with disabilities.
Either way, the two go hand in hand. This trope can actually be traced to the Middle Ages in Western Europe, where the cultural belief was that disability was a physical manifestation of moral corruption, or as Joanmarie Kalter wrote in TV Guide all the way back in 1986, “Deformity of the body is a sure sign of deformity of the soul.” This correlation between evil and disability has no shortage of examples in Western media, from Shakespeare’s Richard III to Captain Hook. An argument could even be made for The Grinch to fall into this cliché – his heart was literally two sizes too small. They x-rayed it!
The harm of this trope is twofold. On one hand, it casts the blame on the people with a disability for their disability. If they were a better person then God/Universe/insert Higher Power wouldn’t have struck them down like this, would they?
Any person with disabilities has only themselves to blame (or alternatively, the disabled person is a punishment to the parents for some transgression they’ve committed. I see you, Noble Sacrificer cliché). I personally had a grown woman once asked me if I’d ever tried eating organic to cure my genetic skeletal disability. No, ma’am, I was born like this, it’s not because the microwaved, un-seasoned veggies my mom guilted me into eating weren’t certified organic.
On the other hand, this stereotype can also serve to exonerate genuinely heinous acts in the name of illness or disability. These characters are consumed with unending rage for what others have that they’ve lost. A character with a mental disability is implied to have a separate sense of morality that can’t be reconciled with. This has become particularly trendy in films as of late, with Angelina Jolie’s live-action Maleficent shown to have her wings cut off and Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker implied to have schizophrenia.
The storytellers are using disability as a way to explain what makes these characters do what they do, while simultaneously implicating every person with disabilities as being equally capable and likely to commit such harmful acts. Because they’re people with disabilities. Richard Crookback himself tells us right off that bat that he’s not capable of enjoying his life because he’s deformed and ugly, so he might as well be a villain.
“And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.”
I completely understand the motive behind these implications – we live in an increasingly violent world and we are seeking to understand what would make a person do bad things. It’s really easy to single out a minority group and say that the badness is just inherently within them.
The problem here is that we are not only hurting a group that has already been historically persecuted and marginalized, but we are also turning hatred and violence into something “other.” We aren’t going to resolve the hatred and division in our society by continuing to make it only something that the “Others” do until we can recognize the potential for harm in each of ourselves.
Tragic Life Sentence/The Search for the Cure
I’ve smushed two opposing stereotypes together to point out how ridiculous it is that they somehow both exist in the minds of the non-disabled, and wouldn’t you know it, Tiny Tim embodies them both. Tiny Tim somehow exists as both a hopeless case/life-long charity case and yet also someone to be cured and “fixed.” I do admit, he canonically suffers from a mystery condition, so it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what his needs are. He wears a leg brace and uses a single crutch, and the Ghost of Christmas Future shows us that he’ll be dead in a year (Sorry for spoilers, but it was written in 1843).
The world of disability is so vast and diverse that I’m not even going to attempt a hypothetical diagnosis. But there’s the crux of these stereotypes – disability is diverse! There is no one journey with disability, so the idea that we can shuffle people with disabilities into one of these two categories is absurd and harmful. A person is either a tragic life-long drag on their family or something that’s broken and needs to be fixed? I’m not buying it.
I think we’ve gotten caught up in the modern medical dramas like House and Grey’s Anatomy where a never-ending cast of patients come through the doors with mystery ailments and don’t leave until they’re cured. Failing being restored to perfection, the “uncurables” just die. Heck, growing up with my own disability I shared in the “Medical Model” belief that modern medicine has the answer to everything and they’d eventually “fix” me.
Any people with disabilities or chronically ill person will tell you that in reality there is so much more grey area than is portrayed. Millions of disabled people live day-to-day lives, full of hopes and dreams and life, managing their symptoms as best as they can. We need to grow beyond the mindset that disability needs an endless fight for “fixing” broken people or abandoning them as hopeless pity-parties. Another character that falls into this cliché is Beth from Little Women.
Disability is a social construct – eliminate the structures in our society that prevent people with disabilities from thriving, and their disability will cease to be an issue. The Social Model of disability argues that a wheelchair user isn’t disabled until the building they need to enter doesn’t have a ramp. You wouldn’t ask a fish to climb a tree, you know?
The Dying Girl
Falling somewhere in between The Villain and The Sweet Innocent is what I call The Dying Girl, a really specific trope where a Manic Pixie Dream Girl gets sick and spends the story romantically dying so her male lover gets to learn a lesson about living life to the fullest. She’s a sexually loose woman who probably got her sickness from her own ~immoral ways~ (*cough slut-shaming cough cough*) but we can’t help but root for her and see her as a victim in the end. Examples include Mimi from Rent and Satine from Moulin Rouge!
Aaron Tveit (Christian( and Karen Olivo (Satine) in “Moulin Rouge! The Musical. Photo by Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
A leftover from back when slowly withering away from Tuberculosis was all the rage (no, really), this cliché is specifically about characters with a terminal illness who seemingly exist to teach us about appreciating our lives (and thank God they’re not as pitiful as theirs.) The teen film market in recent years has been seemingly flooded with movies about terminally ill teens in ill-fated romances (pun intended), like The Fault in Our Stars or Five Feet Apart.
Often these characters tend to brazenly flaunt their care regimens in favor of “living life to the fullest” in a way that makes chronically ill people everywhere shake their heads and sigh. Elsie Tellier, in an article for The Mighty, a site for those with health challenges and disabilities, summed it up really nicely: “Terminally ill people are not alive just to make healthy people ‘appreciate their lives’ more.” Boom.
The Superhero/The Savant
Austin Nedrow (Christopher) and Ian Merrill Peakes (Ed) in Walnut Street Theatre's 2019 production of "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.' Photo by Mark Garvin
This final stereotype is the one I see the most often reflected in our real-world beliefs about people with disabilities. Countless news stories extoll the virtues of disabled people who are “brave” and “heroes” for…. Living their lives? Every time I had a surgery growing up I would have adults comment to me on how brave I was, what a trooper, how they couldn’t imagine having to go through what I was. What they and every non-disabled person seem to misunderstand is that people are not simply brave for living their lives, for existing in the bodies and minds they have.
Bravery is being scared to do something and choosing to do it anyway, and people with disabilities do not choose to live their lives with disability. I was not imbued with a special proclivity for bravery along with my joint problems, just a proclivity for anti-inflammatories.
The stereotype that people with disabilities somehow have special abilities because of/to make up for being disabled is absolutely everywhere. In Daredevil Matt Murdock was blinded and his other senses heightened to astronomical heights. In Forest Gump, a man with implied autism who’s been written off by his community lives an amazing, heroic life that he seemingly stumbles into effortlessly. Christopher in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is incredibly gifted mathematically (a play adapted from a book that originally advertised the main character as having Asperger’s despite the author doing little to no research on the autistic community, but has since gone on to critical acclaim despite protests from the autistic community as being a harmful misrepresentation).
I’m not trying to imply that having superheroes or successful people with disabilities in popular media is a bad thing. Quite the opposite, we need so much more. The problem is that we need accurate representations. We need heroes who aren’t heroes because of their disability, or in spite of their disability, we need heroes who are simply heroic while having a disability, because human beings who are disabled aren’t heroic because of or in spite of being disabled.
These media representations are defining characters entirely around being people with disabilities, ignoring the many facets that make a person who they are, and reducing these characters solely to their disability. Even more harmful is when stories like Curious Incident are used to educate the public on disability, showing up on school reading lists or school theatre trips as an educational tool despite outcry over misrepresentation. Artists with disabilities are already denied a seat at the table, do we really need to be appropriating their stories, inaccurately at that, as well?
Some traits of a disability might give someone a knack for a certain thing, but everyone has a multitude of traits, disabled or not, that could benefit them in some way (See: Are they good at basketball, or are they just tall?). The only thing I can really say that being disabled gives you in abundance is empathy, and if empathy is my superpower then I am here to tell you that you can be super too.
While I’ve given you a look at some of the most common stereotypes of the people with disabilities in popular storytelling, they are by no means the only clichés that appear.
Look, they said it in Hamilton: “You have no control who lives, who dies, who tells your story.” Many of these tropes are from places in history where life with a disability was extremely limited and viewed in a much harsher light, and the able-bodied writers telling these stories were understandably (though not justifiably) biased. As we move forward with our storytelling, however, we have the power to take control of our stories back and tell them truthfully this time.
We need to be smart listeners and remind ourselves that just because we see a story told one way does not mean that it is accurate in real life. people with disabilities are complex, multi-faceted human beings, just like our non-disabled counterparts, and we deserve to have our stories told with the same care and attention. And hey, I’m not telling you not to enjoy your annual viewing of A Christmas Carol. All I ask is for you to take note that Tiny Tim’s disability is the story, not Tim himself, and then go and support more inclusive, informed storytelling.
And personally, my favorite is The Muppet Christmas Carol. I like the songs and the rats.