Leslie Moreno Moreno 1
English 114 B
Professor Macklin
22, February 2012
What is Abnormal?
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 Bernard Pomerance’s play called The Elephant Man he writes about a, man who is abnormal and how a doctor tries to help him become normal. 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
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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.
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 now either. Yet, if I were to ask who they consider as abnormal people they would say people who are deformed. 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 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.”
Michel Foucault wrote in his book Madness and Civilization about the insanity during the Age of reason. The second chapter of his book 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
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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 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. In The Elephant man, Treves also took Merrick in to try to study Merrick’s condition and help him with his illness.
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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.
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.
