In 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered because the world’s first feature-length animated movie. Audiences watched the Evil Queen descend into her dungeon and return altered: with stiff fingers, misshapen joints, and a stooped posture. The animation lingers on her metamorphosis, displaying signs intently resembling rheumatoid arthritis—a part of a visible custom rooted in European fairy story illustration, the place joint illness turned a metaphor for ethical decay.

The Arthritic Aesthetic in European Folklore

The Norwegian illustrator Theodor Kittelsen (1857–1914) was instrumental in crafting this visible lexicon. His supernatural beings—witches, trolls, and specters—often exhibit hallmarks of rheumatoid arthritis: enlarged knuckles, inflexible fingers, and hunched spines. In The Witches at Kolsaas (1887), crones collect round a fireplace, their contorted postures and infected joints conveying unmistakable indicators of rheumatic illness. One witch, delicately steadying one other, suggests her companion’s joints trigger her ache.

In “Isn’t Butterball at dwelling in the present day?” requested the Troll, an illustration accompanying the Norwegian folktale Butterball, Kittelsen applies the identical technique: the troll, described by Asbjørnsen and Moe merely as tall, massive, and stiff within the again, seems in his illustration with seen finger deformities not current within the unique textual content—embedding joint illness into the visible language of menace.

Even Kittelsen’s iconic Pesta, personifying the Black Demise, is marked not with buboes, however with swollen finger joints and a hunched again. Being the Plague was not sufficiently depraved.

Kittelsen prolonged these traits to different folkloric figures: in The Ash Lad Beheads the Troll (1900), the troll is depicted with misshapen finger joints; in The Water Sprite, Fishing (1912), the nix, a water spirit, sits on the shoreline, his fingers twisted in a means that resembles arthritic deformity. These our bodies don’t merely convey menace—in addition they counsel ache. 

This imagery was not distinctive to Norway. Throughout Europe, illustrators reminiscent of Germany’s Alexander Zick and England’s Arthur Rackham gave their villains bodily options related to rheumatoid arthritis. Disney’s adaptation of Snow White drew from Grimm brothers’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812–1815), the place the witch in Hansel and Gretel is described as a frail outdated lady leaning on a stick—her crooked again and frailty already metaphors for malevolence.

In Zick’s illustration, she seems with a curved backbone and probably deformed fingers, supporting herself with each a cane and a wall. Rackham’s Tree of Mine! (1918) equally depicts a witch with clearly gnarled fingers. The trope was already embedded throughout Europe lengthy earlier than it reached the silver display screen.

On the identical time that this aesthetic was taking form, the medical discipline was starting to know rheumatoid arthritis in scientific phrases. As physicians started defining it as a illness requiring analysis and care, Disney reworked it into a visible metaphor for one thing else totally.

The timing is notable: only a decade earlier than Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered in 1937, the Worldwide League of Associations for Rheumatology (ILAR) was based, formalizing a discipline that had lengthy been under-recognized. Whilst medical data superior, metaphor retained its grip: within the clinic, irritation; within the cinema, evil.

Disney adopted and globalized this imagery. The Evil Queen’s transformation in 1937 was a lavish restaging of the identical visible metaphor—this time animated, dramatized, and distributed worldwide. Her fingers curl, her joints swell, and her backbone bends as she descends into villainy. And it caught. Almost a century later, in an period of sensitivity readers and representational audits, the arthritic villain persists.

Selective Revisionism

Disney not too long ago premiered its much-discussed live-action adaptation of Snow White, directed by Marc Webb. Met with lackluster vital reception and field workplace efficiency, the movie has been dubbed “Snow Woke” by right-wing media. It has stirred debate over its modern revisions of the 1937 unique.

Disney made appreciable efforts to align the story with modern values: Snow White is given an lively heroic position, racial id isn’t a defining aspect of her portrayal, and the studio avoids perpetuating dangerous stereotypes about individuals with brief stature. But for all its updates, one motif stays untouched and unquestioned: the Evil Queen’s arthritic transformation—a visible shorthand for wickedness that has survived many years of accelerating cultural sensitivity.

Whereas Warner Bros. issued a public apology in 2020 for portraying witches with three fingers in Robert Zemeckis‘ The Witches, following criticism that the bodily distinction was used to indicate evil intent, Disney’s remake preserves a trope no much less ableist: a descent into villainy marked by seen, pathologized anatomy—twisted fingers, swollen joints, and postural collapse. A rheumatoid transformation in fast-forward—wickedness articulated by way of unmistakable signs of joint illness.

Cultural critique stays selectively blind. The Brothers Grimm sanitized their tales for bourgeois audiences, excising cannibalism, incest, and extreme violence. Disney’s 1937 adaptation of Snow White additional filtered these parts to align with modern sensibilities. Virtually a century later, the 2025 model of Snow White meticulously updates quite a few points of the story whereas preserving—seemingly with out query—the arthritic transformation sequence.

This persistent blind spot reveals how deeply the affiliation between joint illness and ethical corruption has embedded itself in our cultural creativeness. The arthritic villain has weathered each wave of revisionism—a trope so naturalized we fail to acknowledge its stigmatizing implications.

Rheumatoid Arthritis as Narrative Shortcut

The affiliation of joint deformity with ethical corruption isn’t any coincidence. It stems from a selected visible custom—fairy-tale illustration and animation—the place options of rheumatoid arthritis have lengthy been used to mark villainy. As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue in Metaphors We Stay By (1980), metaphors are usually not merely ornamental—they form how we expect, really feel, and make sense of the world. Over time, that visible logic—casting rheumatoid signs as alerts of ethical decay—hardened into cognitive infrastructure.

David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s idea of “narrative prosthesis” (2000) illuminates how incapacity in storytelling not often exists as genuine expertise however serves as metaphorical shorthand. This handy gadget props up standard narrative frameworks. When rheumatoid signs grow to be visible signifiers of ethical corruption, they operate exactly as a prosthesis, rendering advanced bodily situations into simplistic symbols of moral failure whereas reinforcing normative conceptions of the wholesome physique. This reductive method stands in marked distinction to narratives that authentically painting sickness from inside, exploring its nuanced influence on id formation and social relationships.

The Tales That Are Lacking

Different persistent situations have fared otherwise. Alzheimer’s is given voice in Glatzer and Westmoreland’s Nonetheless Alice (2014), the place the viewers follows language itself unravel from inside. David de Vos’ The Idea of Every little thing (2014) charts the bodily decline and mental resilience of Stephen Hawking, framing ALS not as a metaphor however as a lived expertise. Persistent ache, too, is portrayed from the within in Daniel Barnz’s Cake (2014).

These movies try to inhabit sickness, to let it communicate, providing counter-narratives by which the sick physique is allowed interiority somewhat than being decreased to an indication. Arthritis, nevertheless, stays a logo, not a narrative. One may marvel why tales of rheumatoid arthritis stay so uncommon. Maybe the reply lies in cultural associations too entrenched to unlearn. How does one craft a sympathetic protagonist from signs which have lengthy served to mark wickedness?

Carrying Symbols of Persistent Sickness

Our perspective is formed by distinct vantage factors: considered one of us is a literary scholar residing with rheumatism, the opposite a social anthropologist with intensive fieldwork in rheumatology clinics. We have now witnessed firsthand how persistent joint ache narratives dissolve into silence. Preliminary sympathy meets persistent struggling with a well-known sample: concern, quiet discomfort, and indifference.

The edge the place empathy exhausts itself marks a vital juncture: the second when ache, unacknowledged as reliable expertise, should rework into one thing else totally. Maybe that is exactly the place irritation acquires its sinister cultural connotations. The situation turns into coded as malevolence—as a result of malevolence, not like struggling, requires neither understanding nor consolation.

Is a part of the problem of residing with rheumatoid arthritis the necessity to distance oneself from a tradition by which joint irritation is visually coded as evil? The signs themselves—ache, irritability, fatigue—overlap with outdated tropes of the witch: offended, hunched, withdrawn. Perhaps that’s why the arthritic crone nonetheless lingers within the cultural creativeness. Not as a result of she invitations pity, however as a result of she justifies its absence.

One may hope that modern storytelling may dismantle these entrenched associations and diminish the stigma surrounding arthritis. But the metaphorical burden that joint illness bears in our visible lexicon appears proof against such revisions. A century of visible conditioning proves tough to unlearn. The correlation stays stubbornly intact: twisted our bodies home twisted souls—a visible shorthand so environment friendly that even our most progressive cultural productions proceed to make use of it, typically with out recognizing what they perpetuate.

Works Cited

Asbjørnsen, P. C. & Moe, J. (1844). Norske Folkeeventyr: 2den Deels 1ste Hefte. Johan Dahl.

Cottrell, W., Hand, D. & Jackson, W. (1937). Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Walt Disney Productions.

Kittelsen, T. (1882–1883). “Isn’t Butterball at dwelling in the present day?” requested the Troll [Drawing]. NG.Okay&H.B.05247. Nationwide Museum of Artwork, Structure and Design, Oslo, Norway. Photographed by Dag Andre Ivarsøy.

Kittelsen, T. (1892). Troldskab. Aschehoug og Co.s Forlag.

Kittelsen, T. (1894–96). Pesta on the Stairs [Drawing]. NG.Okay&H.1982.0026. Nationwide Museum of Artwork, Structure and Design, Oslo, Norway. Photographed by Børre Høstland and Morten Thorkildsen.

Kittelsen, T. (1900). The Ash Lad Beheads the Troll [Oil on canvas]. NG.M.00555. Nationwide Museum of Artwork, Structure and Design, Oslo, Norway. Photographed by Jacques Lathion.

Kittelsen, T. (1912). The Water Sprite, Fishing [Pastel and watercolor on paper]. RMS.M.00654.

Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Stay By. College of Chicago Press.

Snyder, S. L. & Mitchell, D. T. (2000). Narrative Prosthesis: Incapacity and the Dependencies of Discourse. College of Michigan Press.

Metal, A. S. (2016). English Fairy Tales. MacMillan Collector’s Library.

Webb, M. (2025). Snow White [Motion picture]. Walt Disney Productions.

Zick, A. (1975). Märchen für Kinder. Mit 50 farbigen Bildern von Alexander Zick. Englisch Verlag.