Leslie
Moreno
Moreno 1
English
114 B
Professor
Macklin
May
11, 2012
Abnormal is Normal
How
does one define deformed? There are many different definitions for the word
deformed, such as disfigured, misshapen, morally perverted, and even so badly
formed or out of shape as to be ugly. These definitions are the worst thing to
ever call another human being. The world that we live in now is driven by the
outward appearance of another human being. People are split into two
categories: normal and abnormal. What I did not understand about this
categorization of people was how they define a person as normal? Was a person
normal if they had blond hair? Were they abnormal if they had black hair? Was
an abnormal person someone with a big head? Someone who had a mental illness? Some
people who are considered abnormal were put on display at shows where they are
made fun of and tortured. In The Elephant
Man, Pomerance uses logos and pathos to persuade his audience that humans
are all the same inside even if they look different outside.
If
I were to ask a person what they think is a normal person, most people would
find it difficult to answer because they themselves don’t fully know either.
Yet, if I were to ask who they consider as abnormal people they would say
people who are deformed or mentally challenged. The Elephant Man by Bernard Pomerance is a play about a man named
John Merrick who is publicly humiliated because of the deformation of his
head. He is called the elephant man
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because when his mother
was pregnant she was hurt by an elephant and so he was born deformed. In The Elephant Man Ross the manager of
Merrick says, “Tuppence only, step in and see! For in order to survive, Merrick
forces himself to suffer these humiliations.”(The Elephant Man 3) What Ross said was unfortunately true because
Merrick is not treated like a normal person he can’t work like everyone else
can. “Normal” people can work and walk on the street like nothing, they can do
whatever they want because they are normal.
People even used to try to completely separate normal from abnormal
people by putting them into “hospitals.” Pomerance used hospitals to show how
people separated “abnormal” humans from society.
Merrick
is taken to a “hospital” which is where Treves worked to help people. In class
we read the second chapter from Michel Foucault’s book Madness and Civilization which is about the insanity during the Age of reason. The chapter is called
The Great Confinement, and he writes about how hospitals were “assign the same
homeland to the poor, to the unemployed, to prisoners, and to the insane.”
(Foucault 39)All of these people were put to live under the same roof, and
those who could work were put to work inside the hospital. “In its functioning,
or in its purpose, the Hospital General had nothing to do with any medical
concept. It was an instance order, of the monarchical and bourgeois order being
organized in France during this period.” (Foucault 40) He believed that
hospitals were supposed to be a place for medical needs not to house prisoners
and insane people together. Although these hospitals did help in some ways, for
example they provided work for people who were poor and had no job. These
hospitals also put a roof over the heads of poor people who had nowhere to
live. As for the insane people, since they could not work what they did with
them is that they studied their mental illness to try to understand it more.
The doctors studied what kind of illness it was, what it did to the person and
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what could they do to
make it better or prevent it. Even though it seems like these hospitals seemed
to do good Foucault disagreed for the main reason that in these hospitals they
were trying to change the people to be just like everyone else.
The
purpose of these hospitals were to separate the normal people from the abnormal.
Society did not want the normal humans to be interacting with the abnormal
humans so they separated them. While doing so they had the people inside work
to keep the hospitals going, even though it did not last. They were just way
too complicated places to keep so many different people, with different needs,
living together. They had to keep the prisoners in check and take care of the
mentally ill plus make sure the poor people were doing their jobs. Pomerance
also has other characters that demonstrate that there are people who see that
humans are all equal. In The Elephant man,
Treves also took Merrick in to try to study Merrick’s condition and help him
with his illness.
Treves
is the doctor in The Elephant Man,
who takes Merrick in so that he could help him. Treves studies Merrick to see
what it is that Merrick has and how he can fix it. While he studies Merrick he
also teaches him how to be normal, he teaches him what it is to be a normal
person. Treves start discovering that Merrick is normal, he is intelligent
event thought he has a disease. Merrick said, “But sometimes I think my head is
so big because it is so full of dreams,” and I believe him. I believe that he was
a normal person because he was just like every human on this planet, he had a
heart and he dreamed. Personally I think
that a normal human is one who has a heart and who dreams, and the good thing
about that is that every single human is born with both.
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I
hear the phrase, “All men were created equal,” so why did the people not
understand that and treat abnormal people as unequal. The categorization of
people into normal and abnormal is unjust; because all humans are suppose to
have been born the same, with a beating heart. It is unjust because not only do
we not recognize them as one of us but it makes these “abnormal” people feel
they don’t belong, and that there is no place for them in society. Society is
built upon the principle that “all men are created equal,” it is the law of the
land so why don’t we obey the law and consider each other equal.
There
is one small difference between the world today and the world before, that it
is filled with people who are friendlier to “deformed” humans than in older
times. In older times “deformed” humans were treated horribly and worst than
they are treated today, they were displayed as “objects” to be made fun of by
people who paid to see them. Personally I am against the discrimination of
“deformed” humans and I never like the thought that they were once put on
display to be made fun of; the world is a cruel place. Yet in this cruel world
I believe that people are not bad and that they don’t mean to judge they were
just raised in a society where it is normal to judge. Deep down I think that
everyone feels guilty about it and sometimes even do something to change it.
Now a day I see people standing up for “abnormal” people, I even see them
hanging out and laughing together. People have changed and have begun to realize
that no matter what we are all humans born into the same cruel world.
Works
Cited
·
Pomerance,
Bernard. The Elephant Man: A Play. New York: Grove, 1979. Print.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New
York: Pantheon, 1978. Print.
·
Foucault, Michel. Madness and
Civilization; a History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. New York:
Pantheon, 1965. Print.
