Holiday

One of the things that interested me a lot in this story was this passage after the narrator sees Ottilie as a small girl, "Let her sit down quietly in her rickety chair by the stove and fold those arms, and let us find her like that, with her head fallen forward on her knees. She will rest then. I would wait, hoping she might not come again, ever again, through the door I gazed at with wincing eyes, as if I might see something unendurable enter through it" and also, "...for in some way that I could not quite explain to myself, I found great virtue and courage in their steadiness and refusal to feel sorry for anybody, least of all for themselves" (Porter 428). This passage got me thinking about how disabled and handicapped people are treated in the stories we have been reading. We have touched on this in class, but I thought I would post on the topic. In a lot of these stories there is a person who has some sort of a disability, whether it is a sever disformity or a missing leg. These things go along with the grotesque, but I am wondering why these authors choose to include people with physical (and sometimes mental) disabilities so often in their stories.

Another issue brought up by this passage is if people that are handicapped or disabled are better off dead than alive. Though the passage I quoted does not come out and say that that is what the narrator is thinking, I think it alludes to this line of thinking with the way she says, "She will rest then" and "ever again." Especially since her family treats her as a slave and do not care for her or respect her. I do not think that O'Connor and Porter are trying to say that people with disabilities are better of dead rather than alive, but I think it is interesting to consider why they do this in their stories and what effect it has on the reader.

I think these authors include people with disabilites so often in their stories so that we feel sympathy for these people. They give voices to these people that do not usually have voices and let us see their side of the story and how they are treated. I think they also let us come to understand thes people, and with understanding usually comes a sense of what is right. They are not able to step completely into the shoes of a person with disabilities, but by showing us how the people around them react, we start to reflect on how the people in our lives treat others, and also how we react to these people. I think overall they are trying to bring an awareness to something that they feel is important.

Any other ideas on why Porter and O'Connor include people with disabilities so often in their stories?