In 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered as the world’s first feature-length animated film. 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, showing symptoms closely resembling rheumatoid arthritis—part of a visual tradition rooted in European fairy tale illustration, where joint disease became a metaphor for moral decay.
The Arthritic Aesthetic in European Folklore
The Norwegian illustrator Theodor Kittelsen (1857–1914) was instrumental in crafting this visual lexicon. His supernatural beings—witches, trolls, and specters—frequently exhibit hallmarks of rheumatoid arthritis: enlarged knuckles, rigid fingers, and hunched spines. In The Witches at Kolsaas (1887), crones gather around a fire, their contorted postures and inflamed joints conveying unmistakable signs of rheumatic disease. One witch, delicately steadying another, suggests her companion’s joints cause her pain.
In “Isn’t Butterball at home today?” asked the Troll, an illustration accompanying the Norwegian folktale Butterball, Kittelsen applies the same strategy: the troll, described by Asbjørnsen and Moe merely as tall, large, and stiff in the back, appears in his illustration with visible finger deformities not present in the original text—embedding joint disease into the visual language of menace.
Even Kittelsen’s iconic Pesta, personifying the Black Death, is marked not with buboes, but with swollen finger joints and a hunched back. Being the Plague was not sufficiently wicked.
Kittelsen extended these traits to other 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 at the shoreline, his fingers twisted in a way that resembles arthritic deformity. These bodies do not simply convey menace—they also suggest pain.
This imagery was not unique to Norway. Across Europe, illustrators such as Germany’s Alexander Zick and England’s Arthur Rackham gave their villains bodily features associated with rheumatoid arthritis. Disney’s adaptation of Snow White drew from Grimm brothers’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812–1815), where the witch in Hansel and Gretel is described as a frail old woman leaning on a stick—her crooked back and frailty already metaphors for malevolence.
In Zick’s illustration, she appears with a curved spine and possibly deformed hands, supporting herself with both a cane and a wall. Rackham’s Tree of Mine! (1918) similarly depicts a witch with clearly gnarled fingers. The trope was already embedded across Europe long before it reached the silver screen.
At the same time that this aesthetic was taking shape, the medical field was beginning to understand rheumatoid arthritis in clinical terms. As physicians began defining it as a disease requiring diagnosis and care, Disney transformed it into a visual metaphor for something else entirely.
The timing is notable: just a decade before Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered in 1937, the International League of Associations for Rheumatology (ILAR) was founded, formalizing a field that had long been under-recognized. Even as medical knowledge advanced, metaphor retained its grip: in the clinic, inflammation; in the cinema, evil.
Disney adopted and globalized this imagery. The Evil Queen’s transformation in 1937 was a lavish restaging of the same visual metaphor—this time animated, dramatized, and distributed worldwide. Her fingers curl, her joints swell, and her spine bends as she descends into villainy. And it stuck. Nearly a century later, in an era of sensitivity readers and representational audits, the arthritic villain persists.
Selective Revisionism
Disney recently premiered its much-discussed live-action adaptation of Snow White, directed by Marc Webb. Met with lackluster critical reception and box office performance, the film has been dubbed “Snow Woke” by right-wing media. It has stirred debate over its contemporary revisions of the 1937 original.
Disney made considerable efforts to align the story with contemporary values: Snow White is given an active heroic role, racial identity is not a defining element of her portrayal, and the studio avoids perpetuating harmful stereotypes about people with short stature. Yet for all its updates, one motif remains untouched and unquestioned: the Evil Queen’s arthritic transformation—a visual shorthand for wickedness that has survived decades of increasing cultural sensitivity.
While Warner Bros. issued a public apology in 2020 for portraying witches with three fingers in Robert Zemeckis‘ The Witches, following criticism that the physical difference was used to imply evil intent, Disney’s remake preserves a trope no less ableist: a descent into villainy marked by visible, pathologized anatomy—twisted fingers, swollen joints, and postural collapse. A rheumatoid transformation in fast-forward—wickedness articulated through unmistakable symptoms of joint disease.
Cultural critique remains selectively blind. The Brothers Grimm sanitized their tales for bourgeois audiences, excising cannibalism, incest, and excessive violence. Disney’s 1937 adaptation of Snow White further filtered these elements to align with contemporary sensibilities. Almost a century later, the 2025 version of Snow White meticulously updates numerous aspects of the story while preserving—seemingly without question—the arthritic transformation sequence.
This persistent blind spot reveals how deeply the association between joint disease and moral corruption has embedded itself in our cultural imagination. The arthritic villain has weathered every wave of revisionism—a trope so naturalized we fail to recognize its stigmatizing implications.
Rheumatoid Arthritis as Narrative Shortcut
The association of joint deformity with moral corruption is no coincidence. It stems from a specific visual tradition—fairy-tale illustration and animation—where features of rheumatoid arthritis have long been used to mark villainy. As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue in Metaphors We Live By (1980), metaphors are not merely decorative—they shape how we think, feel, and make sense of the world. Over time, that visual logic—casting rheumatoid symptoms as signals of moral decay—hardened into cognitive infrastructure.
David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s concept of “narrative prosthesis” (2000) illuminates how disability in storytelling rarely exists as authentic experience but serves as metaphorical shorthand. This convenient device props up conventional narrative frameworks. When rheumatoid symptoms become visual signifiers of moral corruption, they function precisely as a prosthesis, rendering complex physical conditions into simplistic symbols of ethical failure while reinforcing normative conceptions of the healthy body. This reductive approach stands in marked contrast to narratives that authentically portray illness from within, exploring its nuanced impact on identity formation and social relationships.
The Stories That Are Missing
Other chronic conditions have fared differently. Alzheimer’s is given voice in Glatzer and Westmoreland’s Still Alice (2014), where the audience follows language itself unravel from within. David de Vos’ The Theory of Everything (2014) charts the physical decline and intellectual resilience of Stephen Hawking, framing ALS not as a metaphor but as a lived experience. Chronic pain, too, is portrayed from the inside in Daniel Barnz’s Cake (2014).
These films attempt to inhabit illness, to let it speak, offering counter-narratives in which the sick body is allowed interiority rather than being reduced to a sign. Arthritis, however, remains a symbol, not a story. One might wonder why stories of rheumatoid arthritis remain so rare. Perhaps the answer lies in cultural associations too entrenched to unlearn. How does one craft a sympathetic protagonist from symptoms that have long served to mark wickedness?
Carrying Symbols of Chronic Illness
Our perspective is shaped by distinct vantage points: one of us is a literary scholar living with rheumatism, the other a social anthropologist with extensive fieldwork in rheumatology clinics. We have witnessed firsthand how chronic joint pain narratives dissolve into silence. Initial sympathy meets persistent suffering with a familiar pattern: concern, quiet discomfort, and indifference.
The threshold where empathy exhausts itself marks a critical juncture: the moment when pain, unacknowledged as legitimate experience, must transform into something else entirely. Perhaps this is precisely where inflammation acquires its sinister cultural connotations. The condition becomes coded as malevolence—because malevolence, unlike suffering, requires neither understanding nor comfort.
Is part of the challenge of living with rheumatoid arthritis the need to distance oneself from a culture in which joint inflammation is visually coded as evil? The symptoms themselves—pain, irritability, fatigue—overlap with old tropes of the witch: angry, hunched, withdrawn. Maybe that’s why the arthritic crone still lingers in the cultural imagination. Not because she invites pity, but because she justifies its absence.
One might hope that contemporary storytelling could dismantle these entrenched associations and diminish the stigma surrounding arthritis. Yet the metaphorical burden that joint disease bears in our visual lexicon seems resistant to such revisions. A century of visual conditioning proves difficult to unlearn. The correlation remains stubbornly intact: twisted bodies house twisted souls—a visual shorthand so efficient that even our most progressive cultural productions continue to employ it, often without 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 home today?” asked the Troll [Drawing]. NG.K&H.B.05247. National Museum of Art, Architecture 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.K&H.1982.0026. National Museum of Art, Architecture 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. National Museum of Art, Architecture 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 Live By. University of Chicago Press.
Snyder, S. L. & Mitchell, D. T. (2000). Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. University of Michigan Press.
Steel, 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.