The hideous ugliness of normalcy is perhaps best demonstrated in the mob scene where Merrick is trapped in an underground station, and cries out that he is not an animal, but a human being. In truth, the so-called normal persons have been acting like a stampede rather than compassionate creatures, unlike Merrick who still retains the individualism, that is humanity's truest birthright. This reversal or world upside down where the persons dehumanized with animal or medical names actually exhibit the values that make human beings distinct from animals validates the suggestion that the way that both popular and medical culture celebrates health, symmetry, and beauty is profoundly misguided.
In her essay, "From The Crooked Timber of Humanity, Beautiful Things Can Be Made," Anita Silvers makes a profound call that the standards of symmetry and wholeness be rewritten as a standard for human health in a way that is sounded like a clarion call throughout the film "The Elephant Man." Merrick's unique plight is not simply tragic, rather his presence elevates the lives of others, and shows the valuable moral contribution that persons with so-called disabilities can make to society. Because of Merrick's unique presence in their lives, the cold medical professionals gain insight into the need to view human subjects and illness in a mode that is not simply mechanical, but humane and compassionate. The concept of how health is understood...
However, Merrick's desire to sleep as other men, lying down rather than sitting up, does in some ways prove his undoing. Silvers might observe that this attempt to become normal, which Merrick decides after a period of delight, watching his beloved actress in the theater, shows how the so-called disability of Merrick's condition lies not in his condition at all, but in the equation of happiness with wholeness, health, and a fairly narrow standard of beauty that Merrick cannot help but internalize, given he knows no one else that truly resembles him, in the world. Merrick keeps a picture of his beautiful mother by his side as a memento of her life but also as a reminder that he is not alone. Yet her profound pictorial difference in appearance from his own guise in the mirror only seems to reinforce societal hatred, and ultimately his own self-hatred, that must, Silvers argues, be undercut by a more positive understanding of what is called 'disability' in modern language.
Works Cited
The Elephant Man." Directed by David Lynch. 1980.
Silvers, Anita. "From The Crooked Timber of Humanity, Beautiful Things Can Be Made." From Beauty Matters. Edited by Peg Brand. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2000.
