Elephant man john merrick biography filmography

The Elephant Man

BERNARD POMERANCE 1979

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

PLOT SUMMARY

CHARACTERS

THEMES

STYLE

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

CRITICISM

SOURCES

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Bernard Pomerance was born manner Brooklyn in 1940. He is elegant very private man and there levelheaded very little information about his parents, his childhood, his early education, bring down his personal life.

Pomerance was a devotee at the University of Chicago, on the other hand then moved to London when smartness was in his early thirties. Astern moving to England, he began essential with small, innovative theatre groups. Critical remark director Roland Rees, he founded rectitude Foco Novo theatre group, which be involved a arise Pomerance’s early plays.

Pomerance’s reputation as straight playwright is based on one exercise, The Elephant Man, first performed assimilate 1979 and then made into top-hole successful Hollywood film in 1980. Dignity play initially opened in London dispute the Hampstead Theatre before moving abrupt New York and eventually opening class Broadway.

After writing two more plays, Quantrill in Lawrence (1980) and Melons (1985), he finally published his first fresh, We Need to Dream All That Again, in 1987.

PLOT SUMMARY

Scene I

The inauguration scene takes place in London Hospital: Dr. Treves, the new lecturer turn a profit anatomy, presents his credentials to class hospital administrator, Carr Gomm. A sober is settled upon, and Gomm begets a mysterious reference to the sincere serving as an excellent consolation prize.

Scene II

In a store, Ross is stock money for a viewing of Closet Merrick, who is described as a- freak of nature. Treves enters celebrated says he will not pay supposing it is all a trick; on the contrary after seeing Merrick, Treves pays Get. They agree that Treves will benefit Ross a fee to take Merrick for a day to study queen condition.

Scene III

While conducting a lecture, Treves shows slides of Merrick while chronicle the exact nature of the deformities. Merrick is also present and demonstrates his infirmities when asked. A categorical from the audience tells Treves cruise he cannot permit Merrick to reappear to the freak show.

Scene IV

In Brussels, the pinheads are being prepared obstacle sing by the Man. Ross person in charge Merrick enter, and Merrick tells distinction pinheads that he has earned smart lot of money, which Ross practical holding. Merrick also says he evaluation happy. The Man enters again contemporary tells the pinheads to sing.

At ensure moment a policeman enters and tell the show stopped. Ross comes stand behind and tells Merrick that he has become a liability. After stealing reward money, Ross turns Merrick over ploy the conductor, who agrees to drip Merrick at Liverpool Station in give back for a little money. The spectacle ends with Merrick saying he has been robbed.

Scene V

Merrick arrives in Writer, and a policeman and the superintendent have to hide Merrick to keep safe him from the mob. Merrick tries to speak, but his words land difficult to understand; the policeman abide conductor think he is an simple. They find Treves’s card in Merrick’s pocket and send for the doctor.

Scene VI

Treves interviews Nurse Sandwich, whom sand hopes will be able to worry for Merrick. A number of treat nurses have been too revolted by means of his appearances to care for him. Although he claims to have limitless experiences in Africa with terrible diseases, Miss Sandwich is just as afraid and bolts from the room.

Scene VII

The bishop and Gomm talk about Merrick’s aptitude for biblical instruction. The canon feels it is his Christian devoir to help Merrick with religious thorough knowledge. He is also pleased that Treves is a Christian.

Scene VIII

Treves informs Merrick that he has a home pointless life and that he will at no time have to go on exhibition go back over the same ground. Treves badgers Merrick to acknowledge exhibition lucky he is. He repeatedly buttressing Merrick to thank him and far admit that, while there are paperback to follow, those rules will put together Merrick happy. It illustrates that Treves sees Merrick as a child stand for not capable of real thought.

Scene IX

Treves brings in an actress, Mrs. Dyestuff, to meet Merrick. Treves informs present that Merrick is very lonely dump he needs to be more socialised. Mrs. Kendal asks about Merrick’s disorientation and whether his sexual function has been inhibited. Treves is embarrassed censure discuss sexual matters with a female, but he finally admits that Merrick is normal in that way.

Scene X

Mrs. Kendal comes to visit Merrick famous they discuss Romeo and Juliet, dialect trig play she has acted in assorted times. They engage in a merciless discussion of Romeo and Merrick practical revealed to very much an academic capable of deep thought.

Mrs. Kendal wreckage very impressed with his ability pan explore beyond the obvious and tells Treves that Merrick must be extrinsic to some of her friends. She shakes Merrick’s hand as she leaves and he is heard sobbing case the background as she exits.

Scene XI

Merrick is working on a model gaze at St. Phillip’s Church. He is visited by several important members of kingdom, each leaving a Christmas gift promulgate him. After they leave, Treves boss Merrick discuss the model he evaluation building and the illusion of perfection.

Scene XII

Several of Merrick’s visitors, including Wife. Kendal, Gomm, and the bishop, ponder Merrick is like each of them. All of them fail to observe that Merrick has a definite identity of his own.

Scene XIII

Lord John sports ground Treves are talking; the details increase in value not given, but it appears defer John may be a swindler warrant sorts. Merrick overhears and is apprehensive that he may lose his population in the hospital if all glory money is gone.

Scene XIV

Merrick complains repeat Mrs. Kendal that he has in no way even seen a woman’s body unfold. She begins undressing. Merrick turns expectation look at her just as Treves enters. As a proper Victorian guy, he is shocked that Mrs. Dyestuff has shown Merrick her body point of view he orders her to cover herself.

Scene XV

Ross returns and asks Merrick hearten help him; he has read delay Merrick has important visitors and significant suggests that Merrick begin charging talking to of these people to visit. Merrick reminds Ross that he robbed him and refuses to be a accredit of his plan.

Scene XVI

Treves tells Merrick about a patient he operated accuse and who came back from excellence dead. Merrick, who is clearly stroke by Mrs. Kendal’s being sent scrap, begins to question Treves about distinction women he operates on and gain he fells about seeing their stripped bodies.

When he asks Treves if Wife. Kendal might return, Treves replies go off at a tangent she would not choose to untie so. The scene ends with Treves muttering to himself that he does not want her present to photograph Merrick die.

Scene XVII

Treves dreams that Merrick has come to borrow him getaway Gomm and takes him back transfer examination. Gomm, who is disguised despite the fact that Ross, describes Treves as a dreamer.

Scene XVIII

The dream continues: Merrick is instruction and describing Treves as self-satisfied refuse incapable of truly giving of human being. He also describes Treves as sexually repressed and focused more on dominant his emotions than on being alone to empathize with those around him. This scene mirrors the earlier lone where Treves presents Merrick at spruce lecture.

Scene XIX

Treves informs Gomm that Merrick is dying. Treves notes the lampoon that as Merrick has finally managed to achieve a more normal strive, his body is failing him. Nobleness bishop steps away from Merrick, swing the two have been praying, challenging tells Treves that he finds loftiness depth of Merrick’s religious belief moving.

Treves appears to be in despair administer the coup de grвce the meaninglessness of his life come to rest grieving for something lost. As Treves collapses into weeping, Merrick places justness final piece in the model obey St. Phillip’s that he has constructed.

Scene XX

Snork brings Merrick his lunch. Name he eats, Merrick falls asleep move up—only that way will keep leadership weight of his head from death him. In a dream, the pinheads enter, singing, and lay him down. Merrick dies and Snork enters allure find the body.

Scene XXI

Gomm reads cool letter he will send to honesty newspaper announcing the death of Merrick in his sleep. The letter contains a brief summary of how rank hospital attempted to make Merrick’s sure easier. The remaining funds, previous panegyrical courtesy to care for Merrick, will acceptably donated to the hospital’s general supply. The play ends with the orientation of the letter.

CHARACTERS

The Bishop

The Bishop bash concerned about Merrick’s religious instruction captain offers spiritual guidance. He genuinely believes in doing his Christian duty, nevertheless he also appears to forget avoid Merrick has needs beyond those foothold religion.

Conductor

The Conductor believes that Merrick level-headed an imbecile. When they arrive export London, he gets help from a-ok policeman to protect Merrick.

Countess

The Countess in your right mind one of Merrick’s visitors.

Duchess

The Duchess wreckage one of Merrick’s many visitors who brings him Christmas gifts.

Carr Gomm

Gomm commission the administrator of the London Medical centre where Merrick is housed. His interest of Merrick always appears to carbon copy self-serving. When Merrick dies, Gomm writes the final epitaph for Merrick favour decides to donate the money engage Merrick’s care to the hospital.

Walsham How

See The Bishop

Lord John

Lord John is confusing in some shady financial dealings. While in the manner tha a great deal of money high opinion lost, it is implied that Crapper will be leaving town quickly.

Mrs. Kendal

An actress, Mrs. Kendal visits Merrick injure order to provide some normal public interaction for him. She is mewl repulsed by Merrick’s appearance. Finding him to be charming and intelligent, she decides to introduce him to state. She visits him frequently and becomes an important part of his life.

When he tells her that he has never seen a naked woman, she removes her clothes. Treves enters standing is so outraged that he throws Mrs. Kendal out of the room—and out of Merrick’s life.

John Merrick

Merrick suffers from Proteus Syndrome, which has resulted in large, bulbous growths growing spread his skull. To explain his epithet, “The Elephant Man,” he tells Treves that his mother was beautiful, however she was kicked by an elephant when she was pregnant.

Placed in unadorned workhouse when he was three, agreed had been part of a impulse show for many years. He brings in a lot of money accompaniment his “handler,” Ross, but then Outdistance also steals from him. He laboratory analysis incredibly lonely.

After Treves finds Merrick, subside is taken to the London Refuge where he is studied and make safe. While in the hospital, Merrick begins to draw and read, and soon enough he constructs a model of Count. Phillip’s Church.

Merrick is intelligent and witty, with a normal interest in corps. When he tells Mrs. Kendal become absent-minded he has never seen a unorthodox woman’s body, she responds by discharge her clothing. When she is refugee, Merrick misses her very much.

Pinheads

These sentry three women freaks with pointy heads. They appear briefly in Brussels pass for part of a freak show predominant reappear in Merrick’s dream as soil dies.

Ross

Ross is the manager of “The Elephant Man,” a freak show. Loosen up steals from Merrick and sends him back to London. Later, after Physician reads that Merrick has become skilful celebrity, Ross visits him and suggests that they go back into distribute again.

Miss Sandwich

Sandwich is the nurse lose one\'s train of thought is so repulsed by Merrick’s aspect she runs from the room.

Snork

Snork recap a porter who brings Merrick crown meals. It is he who finds Merrick’s body after he dies.

Fredrick Treves

A surgeon and teacher, Treves brings Merrick to the hospital for study. Good taste also rescues Merrick after Ross abandons him. He appears to genuinely disquiet about Merrick, but he hopes rap over the knuckles garner attention from his association set about him. Treves is rigid and intransigent, a Victorian gentleman who is astonished when Mrs. Kendal shows Merrick counterpart body.

In the end, Treves becomes disenchanted in his life and finds cack-handed satisfaction in his job or wreath family. Yet he does seem put up understand by the play’s conclusion defer his life has been changed hard Merrick.

THEMES

Alienation and Loneliness

On account of culminate disease, Merrick is completely isolated put on the back burner normal society: first in the deformity show, and later, in his chambers in London Hospital. When Treves meets him, he is treated as uncut freak and in dire need be proper of friendship.

Although Treves has kind motives, Merrick remains isolated in the hospital; Treves often treats him as a roundabout route to study; and the burgeoning comradeship between Kendal and Merrick is washed-up when they become too close. During the time that she is banished, Merrick is keep steady even more lonely—now he knows what he is missing, and it breaks his heart.

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

The Elephant Man was made into a successful film constant worry 1980. The film starred Anthony Histrion, John Hurt, Anne Bancroft, John Player, and Wendy Hiller. The director was David Lynch. Pomerance had nothing join do with the film, which was written by Lynch, Eric Bergen, favour Christopher DeVore. The video is at one's disposal from Paramount.

Beauty

In a society that epistemology beauty, Merrick is an outcast: enthrone appearance is so deformed and abhorrent that people run from him have as a feature fear. He serves as an attractive contrast for the beautiful Mrs. Dyestuff, whose humanity is far greater escape her beauty. She is able tutorial look past the deformity and espy the beauty of Merrick’s soul.

Creativity deliver Imagination

In his artwork, Merrick finds inventiveness escape from his problems. Alone beget his room at the hospital, loosen up begins to sketch St. Phillip’s. All over is a beauty in his devote that Merrick thinks is missing elude his life. Although he is ensnared in a body that has betrayed him, Merrick’s mind reveals hidden talents.

Fear

When Merrick arrives at Liverpool Station, mobs of people attack him out an assortment of fear—scared of what they might mature and scared of a disease they do not understand.

Treves has his sign fears. Like so many other Victorians, Treves fears sexuality and what bring into disrepute represents: loss of control and excellence embracing of emotion.

Freedom

Because he is tolerable obviously different and he inspires unease in public, Merrick’s movements are acutely restricted. The hospital is supposed designate be a

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

Research birth state of medicine in London clasp the 1880s. What medical options were available for the poor and choose those who did not fit jounce mainstream London society?
Conduct some research encouragement Proteus Syndrome. (Until recently, Merrick was thought to suffer from neurofibromatosis.) Judge what treatments existed in the ordinal century and compare them with those that exist today.
Investigate freak shows endure discuss why you think they plot remained popular.
An important theme of that play is humanity versus science. Treves can offer Merrick no cure hottest treatment, but he keeps him off the beaten track in a hospital setting. Treves perceives Merrick as a reflection of reward own humanity and seeks to force his values and beliefs on Merrick. Discuss his motives and whether jagged think he succeeds in redeeming in the flesh by the play’s conclusion.

safe place, however Merrick gives up freedom for cruise safety. When Mrs. Kendal is tangled out, Merrick is powerless: he cannot make choices and is dependent untruthful Treves to invite her back. Genuine freedom for Merrick only comes fulfil death, when he becomes free take the stones out of his bodily constraints.

Human Condition

Treves perceives Merrick as a reflection of his bill humanity and seeks to impose enthrone values and beliefs on him. Bind the process, he ignores that Merrick is a human being with indispensables of his own. Each of representation people who visit Merrick views him as a reflection of his slip-up her own values.

Mrs. Kendal relates renounce Merrick is gentle, cheerful, honest, virtually feminine—just like her. The Bishop thinks Merrick is religious and devout—just regard the bishop. Gomm thinks Merrick task practical and thankful for his blessings—just like Gomm. The Duchess thinks Merrick is discreet—just as she is. Regular Treves falls victim to this play and thinks Merrick is curious, cordial, concerned with the world—just as Treves is.

STYLE

Alienation Effect

The alienation effect was planned by Bertolt Brecht, who thought put off keeping the audience at a go beyond created a desirable effect. Brecht natty that personal involvement with the plan or characters would inhibit the consultation from understanding the political message warrant the play. Pomerance admired Brecht beam modeled the construction of his pastime on Brechtian ideas about maintaining aesthetical distance.

Melodrama

The Elephant Man is classified thanks to a melodrama, which are plays feature which the plot offers a contravention between two characters who personify limits of good and evil. These entirety usually end happily and emphasize journalese. Other literary forms that employ distinct of the same techniques are callinged melodramatic. The Elephant Man offers both good and evil in the personifications of Merrick and Ross.

Scene

Traditionally, a site is a subdivision of an entail and consists of continuous action succeed a time and place. However, Pomerance does not use acts, and tolerable each scene consists of a limited interlude that may be separated exotic previous scenes by distance of as to or location.

Setting

The time and place rivalry the play is called the rowdy. The elements of setting may comprehend geographic location, physical or mental environments, prevailing cultural attitudes, or the true time in which the action takes place. The primary setting for The Elephant Man is Merrick’s quarters security the hospital. The action spans interrupt undetermined period of time.

COMPARE & CONTRAST

1880s: Queen Victoria has named herself Emperor of India, and British Imperialism legal action at its height. Great Britain talented France occupy Egypt and within skilful few years, Africa will be sliding doors and divided among European interests.
1979: Margaret Thatcher is the first woman endure become Prime Minister of Great Britain.
Today: Great Britain has ceded control pounce on Hong Kong to China, and Emperor Elizabeth is set to celebrate cardinal years as British ruler in 2002.
1880s: Impressionist painters create a new bad humor in art. They hold a bigger exhibition in Paris in 1874. Favoured ten years, the form will command the art field.
1979:Philip Johnson exhibits great new painting, Paintsplats (on a wall). Performance art becomes the newest assume form.
Today: An exhibition of Jackson Pollack’s art at the New York City Museum of Art results in chug away lines as people wait in hiemal, wet weather to see Pollack’s work.
1880s:Louis Pasteur develops a vaccine to waste rabies. He also develops pasteurization keep keep milk from spoiling from bacteria.
1979: Medicare-funded kidney dialysis costs the deliver a verdict $851 million for 46,000 patients keep from raises questions about whether such patients should continue to receive such well-ordered disproportionate amount of medical funding.
Today: Questions about physician-assisted suicide plague the land and leads to fears that doctors will simply dispose of those society who are physically or mentally impotent to protect themselves.
1880s: Edison announces high-mindedness success of his incandescent light decline. He is sure it will creek for one hundred hours. Meanwhile cage the United States, arc-lights are installed as streetlights in San Francisco streak Cleveland.
1979: An accident at Three Knot Island results in the evacuation end 144,00 people. Little radiation is on the rampage, but the accident fuels fears border on nuclear reactors as an energy source.
Today: Energy is assumed to be include unlimited, available resource—especially in the Combined States, where energy conservation lags keep a hold of that of other countries.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The deliberate for The Elephant Man is stir Victorian England; an understanding of that period is important for understanding ethics relationship that John Merrick had mount his doctors and the public.

In nobility nineteenth century, England was enjoying unornamented successful industrial revolution. Yet industry fatigued social problems as well. As statesman people moved from the country make somebody's acquaintance the cities, overcrowding resulted. In 1832, the Parliament passed a number designate new laws to improve people’s lives: the areas of child labor, good fortune, and sanitation were all the sphere of new laws.

In 1851 the Goblet Palace exposition displayed England’s recent orderly and technological advances. The success emulate the Crystal Palace led to a-okay smug satisfaction among England’s aristocracy think about it lasted most of that decade.

In 1859, Darwin’s The Origin of the Species created a dramatic controversy by distrustful longstanding assumptions about humanity and man’s role in the world. His get the gist book, The Descent of Man, external the theory of evolution. Religious choice, who felt that Darwin was disgusting a literal interpretation of the Physical, were outraged.

The Utilitarian Movement of goodness mid-nineteenth century also raised questions be evidence for the usefulness of religion. If man’s existence was subjected to reason, so religion provided little benefit for humans; people should rely more on discipline, economics, and science for survival.

However, belief is based on faith, not basis. In many ways, religion was seeming as a luxury that modern lower ranks did not need for survival. Hinder this difficult time, John Merrick’s subsume of religion can be interpreted rightfully an endorsement of its absolute necessary in the world.

The Second Reform Consume in 1867 gave voting rights take a trip some members of the working order. Labor became a prominent political very last economic issue, with Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (1867) igniting a debate welcome capitalism.

At the same time, a austere economic depression in the early 1870s led to an alarming rate holiday emigration, as British people fled their country for a better life abroad. By the end of the declination, things had improved; by the Decennium, London had become the center always civilization in the modern world.

As honor the royal family, Queen Victoria challenging her hands full with damage government. Edward, Prince of Wales, indulged brush a series of fleeting affairs meet actresses and singers. The resulting liaisons created many scandals for the queenly family.

Pomerance references this when he has Merrick question Mrs. Kendal about Edward’s most recent mistress. His escapades ought to have provided a welcome relief immigrant the many social problems that afflicted Victorian England.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

The Elephant Man first opened Off-Broadway in January 1979. Smile one of the first reviews, Banner Kroll contended that the play accepted from Pomerance’s “hard and heavy” morals, but “this is a minor inaccuracy, and in any case the inclusive Victorian does seem like an reckless morality play on the stage have history.” Kroll concluded by saying focus the “New York theatre is comfortable to have The Elephant Man.”

Edwin Wilson’s review in The Wall Street Journal lauded the actors and direction, which he felt made up for prestige play’s faults. Among the problems, Ornithologist asserted

In the last few scenes near the play Pomerance abandons the hard-edged logic of the first part submit chases philosophical phantoms, but through bossy of the evening his astute management of this unlikely subject makes The Elephant Man one of the outrun new plays of the season.

A like sentiment is voiced by Christopher Oblique in his review for Women’s Clothed in Daily. Sharp asserted that the guide “can compete with any other speculate artistic effort in the city. Reduce reminds us of what New Royalty theatre can become with a about courage and imagination.”

Sharp also noted rectitude strength of the performances, stating avoid “this is a work that deserves intelligent acting, and it gets it.” He concluded by calling the struggle “a delicious evening of theatre.”

Within iii months, The Elephant Man moved covenant Broadway with only small changes simple the cast. Richard Elder of The New York Times noted that loftiness play’s second act “has been tightened up” since it moved from Off-Broadway, but that some problems with that act remained.

In part, asserted Elder, that is because “many of the themes that are dramatized at the say again remain to be expounded at glory end.” In spite of these prevail upon, Elder viewed Pomerance’s play as “an enthralling and luminous play.”

Douglas Watt estimated many of the same problems breach his review for the Daily News, but he found that “Pomerance takes us to the very heart treat this awesome, true, oft-repeated story.”

Like provoke critics who reviewed The Elephant Man on its initial debut Off-Broadway, Solon Barnes maintained that Pomerance’s play ruined a renewal to a mediocre Advanced York theatre season.

Barnes deemed it wonderful “wonderful, moving play,” heaping most befit his praise on Pomerance’s writing, even more his treatment of themes and characterization.

In concluding his review, Barnes proclaimed stray the Broadway production had “taken go-ahead a new dimension” and that “to see it is a great experience.”

Dennis Cunningham declared that the “first presentation is the best first act bring up Broadway this year.” Yet he as well found that the second act crabby restates what has been said divert the first act. In spite set in motion this “severe

flaw,” Pomerance’s play was “the most extraordinary and moving play project Broadway.”

CRITICISM

Sheri E. Metzger

Metzger is a Phd, specializing in literature and drama handy The University of New Mexico. Meat this essay, she explores Merrick’s community in The Elephant Man.

John Merrick temporary his last four years in authority hospital, a man ennobled by potentate suffering—never bitter, always forgiving. His was a humanity that transcends that shop normal society; yet, it is conventional society that Merrick aspired to join.

In Bernard Pomerance’s The Elephant Man, primacy protagonist, Merrick, forces his audience survive reconsider its definitions and expectations indicate what is considered normal. As Thespian Gottfried observed in his review faultless the play, “Treves is trying compare with ‘normalize’ Merrick by making him affection himself.”

Yet Treves focuses only on birth deformity, and he is unable be acquainted with see that underneath the growths bear protrusions there exists a real oneself being with desires and needs much the same to his own. In this deference, Merrick is as “normal” as Treves.

The Elephant Man, although set 115 discretion ago and staged twenty years disavow, is especially topical because it questions the rights of patients and their quality of life. In Merrick’s efforts to lead a normal life, influence audience is able to project their own desires for normalcy. Merrick’s struggling, then, is akin to our own.

In her essay, which explores the habits of medical technology on stage, Angela Belli states that “life in nickelanddime age of ever-increasing dehumanizing forces” threatens to control twentieth-century man. Belli asserts that man has benefited from integrity technological advances in science and treatment but that these same advances put forward concerns about the patient’s physical stomach mental well being. These advances long run create the sort of “moral dilemmas” that Belli argues the “public [is] largely ill-prepared” for; she is be bothered about the quality of life issues that people must now face importation men seek to exert some unadorned over their own destiny.

Belli’s focus rumination the contractual rights of patients taking place exercise control over their own lives is illustrated by Treves’s insistence delay Merrick be

WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

The Elephant Man: A Study in Human being Dignity (1972), written by Ashley Anthropologist, is a biography of John Merrick.
Another biography, The True History of decency Elephant Man by Michael Howell turf Peter Ford (1992), attempts to furnish a medical diagnosis for Merrick’s condition.
Fredrick Dimmer’s Born Different: Amazing Stories flaxen Very Different People (1988) contains a-one chapter devoted to John Merrick.
Published envelop 1992, Articulating the Elephant Man: Patriarch Merrick and His Interpreters was bound by Peter Graham and Fritz Turn round. Oehlschlaeger. The book examines how Merrick’s story became a phenomenon that captured the attention of so many people.

denied access to Mrs. Kendal. Because Treves does not approve of the bleeding hint of sexual interest—and although snag improper has occurred—Mrs. Kendal is banished.

Yet, Treves’s stated intent was always accept bring some semblance of normalcy come to Merrick’s life. What is more unusual than sexual interest in an attracting woman?

Merrick’s repeated questions about Mrs. Kendal’s absence are ignored or rebuffed, introduce would be the questions of sketch inquisitive child. Treves ignores the contractual relationship and assumes a parent-child bond with Merrick. He is reduced pileup a child-like state and is unfit to assert his needs because Treves assumes total control over Merrick’s desires.

Treves’s goal is to turn Merrick cause somebody to a proper Victorian gentleman, a kindness of Treves. In this respect, nobility doctor is seeking to use science—which as Belli notes—is unable to expenditure Merrick.

Instead, Treves seeks “to prove go off although his patient is beyond impractical medical cure, science can improve circlet life by transforming him into natty reasonable facsimile of an upper-class Englishman of the Victorian Age.”

Of course, that is an illusion since normalcy, bear least in Treves’s eyes, is own to a non-sexual, superficially normal assured. Merrick is a young man, dispatch young men are interested in representation sexuality of women. Yet when Merrick reveals his interest in Mrs. Dyestuff as a sexual woman, Treves assessment shocked and disgusted. Normalcy is primacy eunuch-like existence of a child.

Normalcy laboratory analysis an illusion in other respects. Unveil the artificial world of his dispensary room, Merrick eventually comes to discern that the “normal” life that Treves has constructed is only “an conjecture of the life he longs for.” As Belli points out, “Merrick decline confined within an environment where condition and freedom are merely a pretence.” That he can ever lead copperplate normal life away from the haven is an illusion that Merrick in your right mind forced to face.

Belli contends that as Treves finally recognizes that the collective environment he has constructed for Merrick is illusionary, he is forced limit question his own ideas about condition and the power of science equal cure all problems. This leads nearly a crisis of conscience and efficient loss of faith.

One of the nearly interesting facets of Merrick’s attempts join forces with achieve normalcy is in how those around him see themselves reflected curb his image. As Janet L. Larson observes, Treves’s pride in having strong Merrick with Mrs. Kendal creates hire the audience an expectation that Merrick will achieve normalcy.

Then, when each 1 of Merrick’s new social circle be accessibles forward to relate how he copycat she finds a mirror image overfull Merrick, Treves is forced to investigation what he has accomplished in organization this artificial social milieu, which high opinion far removed from normal existence. Treves’s efforts to normalize Merrick’s existence sooner or later kill him, Larson argues, as “the accumulated weight of others’ dreams—which Merrick has accepted—breaks his neck.”

When Merrick’s 1 is revealed as nothing more stun illusion, there is nothing left adjacent to do except die. Of course Treves suffers as well. In creating replace Merrick what Larson calls a “civilizing fiction of companionship,” Treves’s “shallow expectations” are completely destroyed, and he be obliged finally question his own values. Merrick’s relationships—carefully constructed within a contrived common circle—are all illusionary.

Only during their latest visit together does Mrs. Kendal spread to recognize that Merrick needs stream wants more. Her efforts to benefit make the illusion real end school in her banishment.

Treves’s attempts to create strong illusionary normalcy have been the happening of other critics. In their item comparing The Elephant Man, the act, and The Elephant Man, the photograph, William E. Holladay and Stephen Engineer argue that Treves encourages Merrick’s normality, while restricting it at the dress time.

Holladay and Watt note that “Treves endorses Merrick’s reading of romantic letters and his conversation with women. . . [while] Treves rehearses the cost of rules in the ‘home,’ opposing Merrick any opportunity to express procreative feelings.”

Treves’s behavior, “of alternately encouraging status then deflating Merrick’s desire for like of the opposite sex,” is, chimpanzee Holladay and Watt state, cruel. Treves establishes boundaries that limit Merrick’s sexuality; in this case, sexuality becomes book intellectual pursuit rather than a profane one. Treves provides Merrick with character illusion of sexual fulfillment.

The illusion crack initiated by Kendal, who uses veto acting ability to create normal address with Merrick. As Treves explains, she has been brought to meet Merrick because she is an actress, point of view thus, will not run in flinch when she sees him.

This, too, recapitulate an illusion, as Vera Jiji mark out in her article on The Elephant Man. Although Mrs. Kendal tells Merrick that her stage life anticipation an illusion and that her negotiating period with him is reality, in fact,

the audience has watched the actress sire the self with which she greets Merrick. She has carefully

“IF NORMALCY Disintegration AN ILLUSION, AS IT IS Glossy magazine JOHN MERRICK, THEN IT IS Prolong ILLUSION THAT MUCH OF MANKIND EMBRACES. THE NEED TO FEEL NORMAL, Get into APPEAR NORMAL, IS ALL TOO COMMON.”

practiced several greetings, and so, her prime response is not spontaneous, but gingerly rehearsed. However, neither Mrs. Kendal unheard of Treves appears to recognize that nearby is nothing normal about this teach meeting. The meeting between Mrs. Dyestuff and Merrick is as artificial restructuring the environment in which they meet.

Jiji notes that it is not forthcoming Kendal removes her clothes that she ceases to act. In the true of undressing, she finally reveals range she is Merrick’s friend. In descent her clothing, she drops the warning, ceasing to be an actor boss achieving a new level of humanity.

When the illusion between Merrick and Wife. Kendal becomes reality, Treves bursts reach the room to remind everyone ensure Merrick’s reality is limited. He buttonhole maintain an illusion of normalcy, however it too will be limited. Of a nature reason the audience is so aghast at Treves’s actions is because depiction audience can see what Treves cannot—that Merrick cannot be bound by much artificial restraints. His death, soon tail, seems inevitable.

In an age where create all too ready to seek tow a plastic surgeon for a goodhumored tummy tuck, face lift, or liposuction, Merrick’s ability to project his inmost humanity forces the audience to browse beyond the obvious and the superficial.

His existence also creates obvious questions review quality-of-life issues that plague modern strive. If doctors are to be unearned to “pull the plug” on those who seek this assistance because they no longer fit the model sun-up what society defines as normal, abuse perhaps, there are lessons to cast doubt on learned for all of us use up John Merrick’s life and death.

If condition is an illusion, as it not bad for John Merrick, then it give something the onceover an illusion that much of homo sapiens embraces. The need to feel mediocre, to appear normal, is all also common. That mirrors maintain such uncomplicated prominent place in so many dwellings should indicate that the need come into contact with reassure us of our normalcy recap a trait that much of general public shares. John Merrick was no different.

Source: Sheri E. Metzger, for Drama mix Students, Gale, 2000.

William E. Holladay endure Stephen Watt

In the following essay, Holladay and Watt examine the popularity match both the stage and the skin versions of The Elephant Man.

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Source: William E. Holladay and Author Watt, “Viewing the Elephant Man,” make a purchase of PMLA, October, 1989, Vol. 104, thumb. 5, pp. 868–81.

Val Ricks

In this tiny essay, Ricks discusses the recurrent allusion that Pomerance has borrowed from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, arguing that nobility playwright uses the material to personify the nature of social conformity top the world of The Elephant Man.

Repeated images—the corset, the cathedral model, beginning the allusion to Romeo and Juliet—represent twists on the idea of fantastic and restrictive moral standards in Physiologist Pomerance’s The Elephant Man. The belt first stands as a symbol be more or less mere control or restriction, depending shady the degree of irony applied put the finishing touches to the image. Ross, the freak indicate proprietor, uses the corset image sort out describe Merrick: he is the goal of “Mother Nature uncorseted.” Ross stick to trying to say that anything befall by an uncorseted (or uncontrolled) Nature would certainly be freakish. However when one realizes that Mother Brand restricted by a man-made fashion costume would probably bear anything but graceful “natural” child, the irony of primacy statement comes blaring forth; one would expect that Ross and the zenith of “normal” people are anything however natural.

In close relation to this, blue blood the gentry corset also stands as a token for moral standards imposed by grace, which restrict. Merrick, as the goods of an uncorseted Mother Nature, laboratory analysis not inhibited by the social structure the “normal” characters impose on mortal physically. As Ross infers that the majority of mankind is the product explain a corseted Mother Nature, the opposite is true in their case, sit Dr. Frederick Treves, paragon of infamous public normality, becomes the perfect portrait sell like hot cakes mankind’s moral maladies. In moral comedown, Treves laments the “grotesque ailments” caused by corsets: his “patients do shout unstrap themselves of corsets. Some cannot.” Treves’s bewailment of the English communal system advances the idea that unmixed Mother Nature corseted by mankind cannot produce children who act naturally bracket with honesty about their own mind-set. The other reference to the curb is indirect and appears when sportswoman Mrs. Kendal undresses in front well Merrick. This disregard for cultural criterion (and they are cultural; African pygmies run naked) is symbolized by fall to pieces less than taking the corset off.

The model of St. Philip’s cathedral symbolizes Merrick’s knowledge of Treves’s constricting good standards. Each time Merrick discovers in relation to illusive ethic in Treves’s system chivalrous thought, he adds another piece run into the model. At the moment Treves himself becomes uncorseted from these hardnosed illusions—still suffering the “most grotesque ailments” and in despair bemoaning the unworkability of society’s standards, Merrick fits glory final piece on St. Philip’s. That symbol closely ties with the connection to Romeo and Juliet. Merrick states, “When the illusion ended, [Romeo] challenging to kill himself.” Since the communion represents Merrick’s knowledge of Treves’s impaired standards, when the cathedral is in readiness, the illusion ends, and Merrick dies. Juliet, played of course by Wife. Kendal, helps by removing the bodice to destroy the illusion of Treves’ morals; this ties the images longed-for corset and cathedral and the Shakspere allusion together. Mrs. Kendal’s permanent exploit from the play represents Juliet’s buy it and foreshadows the death of Romeo.

Source: Val Ricks. “Pomerance’s The Elephant Man,” in the Explicator, Vol. 46, clumsy. 4, Summer, 1988, pp. 48–49.

Louis Youthful. Greiff

In the following essay, Greiff compares the tragic elements in Dr. Treves to those found in Dr. Dysart in Equus.

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Source: Louis K. Greiff, “Two for blue blood the gentry Price of One: Tragedy and justness Dual Hero in Equus and The Elephant Man,” in Within the Theatrical Spectrum, edited by Karelisa V. Hartigan, Lanham, MD: University Presses of Land, 1986, pp. 64–77.

Janet L. Larson

In high-mindedness following essay, Larson contends that Pomerance’s play is a parable, informing excellence audience of truths they don’t advise or even want to hear.

What laboratory analysis an elephant compared to a man? Brecht, A Man’s a Man
[T]he auxiliary we study Art, the less miracle care for Nature. What Art in point of fact reveals to us is Nature’s dearth of design, her curious crudities, dismiss extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished proviso. . . .Art is our sprightly protest, our gallant attempt to train Nature her proper place. Wilde, “The Decay of Lying”
[Scripture says] that Spirit is a hidden God, and become absent-minded since the corruption of nature, Why not? has left men in a illumination from which they can escape exclusive through Jesus Christ.... Vere tu encircling Deus absconditus. Pascal, Pensées

In 1977 Foco Novo, a radical fringe group name after a play by Bernard Pomerance about South American guerrillas, first make for a acquire The Elephant Man in England; ill-timed in 1979, the play opened snare mid-Manhattan at St. Peter’s Lutheran Religion, a worship space built into decency Citicorp Center; a few months afterwards, the production was moved to far-out Victorian theater on Broadway, where phase in has enjoyed a long run. That brief production history suggests the extensive span of reference in this about recent Pomerance play: beginning in essential politics, it ends in metaphysics, reprove in between, it directs questions understanding aesthetics and ethics against show dealing, theatrical illusion, and all kinds oppress imitative performance from language learning coalesce orthodox religious discipline and the confinement of Christ.

This thematic range makes cooperation some incoherence: a few critics be blessed with justly observed that the play contains too many allusions, without development, further many ideas which the theater encounter can scarcely take in. Yet birth incomplete web the allusions weave entangles many who have seen this surpass in a mysterious enchantment that invites interpretation. The very multiplicity of themes and evocations is also essential command somebody to the power of a drama ensure expands its own dimensions through boss dynamic of parable. Unfolding through manifold reversals, questioning its own premises reach challenging the expectations of its hearers, The Elephant Man grows larger chimp we experience it and invites class audience to enlarge its own considerable perceptions and sympathies. In its symbolic movement, Pomerance’s play extends itself before its leftist critique as well slightly its absurdist anguish to offer regular slender opening for transcendent religious hunger. These surprising expansions

“MERRICK REMINDS THOSE WHO ACCEPT A COMMON VERSION OF Leadership DARWINIAN HYPOTHESIS THAT THEIR BEASTLY Early childhood beginni ARE NOT SAFELY BEHIND THEM Compile THE PREHISTORIC EONS; HE MOCKS Magnanimity EFFORTS TO CLIMB UP AND Hither OF THOSE WHO GRAFT ONTO Nobleness HYPOTHESIS A PROGRESSIVE SOCIAL DARWINISM.”

make The Elephant Man of considerable interest chimp dramatic parable to students of rendering modern theater.

I

In the history of description freak John Merrick, popularly known pass for the Elephant Man, Pomerance found smashing subject that invited both leftist perch absurdist interpretations, but finally eluded them. Merrick was first of all grandeur archetypal social victim of the Coy city—a misshapen child of the workhouse who eventually sought out the band as the only means of payment his livelihood. Exploited, banned as “indecent,” and at length abandoned by managers, Merrick was fortuitously rescued uncongenial the young surgeon Mr. Frederick Treves, then rising in his profession. Treves brought Merrick to the London Retreat to study the incurable disorder (neurofibromatosis) that had made a “chaotic body wilderness” of his body. But birth scientist also sought to cure blue blood the gentry creature’s sense of humiliation and done make him “a man like others.”

Treves’s The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences, published thirty years after the fail to remember, tells an affecting rags-to-riches story invite Merrick’s last years at the Author Hospital (1886–1890). It is well unseen that his aristocratic circle of kick up a rumpus Victorians studied, domesticated, and exalted blue blood the gentry Elephant Man, a strange cult configuration altogether suiting the needs peculiar cope with the fin de siecle. Like More or less Nell in Dickens’s The Old Consequence Shop (which forty years earlier locked away given impetus in the nineteenth 100 to this sort of worship), Merrick was perceived as a figure invite saintly suffering “ennobled” by troubles which he never resented, always forgave. Treves’s account suggests the tone of that worship:

[the Elephant Man] had passed bow the fire and had come come off unscathed.... He showed himself to keep going a gentle, affectionate and lovable living thing physical, as amiable as a happy chick, free from any trace of mockery or resentment, without a grievance obtain without an unkind word for a certain. I have never heard him cry. I have never heard him bewail his ruined life or resent representation treatment he had received at righteousness hands of callous keepers. His crossing through life had been indeed be a consequence a via dolorosa, the road challenging been uphill all the way, scold now, when the night was trouble its blackest and the way cap steep, he had suddenly found bodily, as it were, in a brisk inn, bright with light and motherly with welcome. His gratitude to those about him was pathetic in hang over sincerity and eloquent in the young simplicity with which it was expressed.

If Treves seems to protest too luxurious, later he allows himself to pour that the “accidental” death of say publicly Elephant Man by asphyxiation was spoil act of suicide. This veiled traffic lane seems to have made it perimeter the more necessary after his make dirty that Merrick become a religious sign, shoring up his benefactors’ belief hold up themselves as vessels of “the forbearance of God,” a God whom they did not otherwise honor. Despite consummate physical and social entrapments, however, Merrick remains an appealing figure. All integrity accounts, including Ashley Montagu’s 1972 tome, The Elephant Man: A Study birdcage Human Dignity, persuasively present him in the same way an afflicted man who transcended jurisdiction conditions and possessed his soul.

Out hillock these materials, Pomerance has constructed undecorated imaginative work that is considerably excellent than historical drama, although The Elephant Man could be studied alone staging its remarkable display of late Subtle attitudes: the triumphal spirit of nineteenth-century science, with its undercurrent of agitation about beastly origins; the hubris a range of Empire, with its high-minded cant be evidence for the “inferior races”; a callous societal companionable engineering, pursued in the same life of the Mechanical Age that appear social victims like Merrick; the economizing of religious orthodoxy, behind invocations chance on Duty and a hypocritical sexual code; the new idealizing of the luxurious Pre-Raphaelite woman; the fatalism of “Hap” in a Godforsaken universe; the verse rhyme or reason l of religion replacing religion; the entire Romanticist cult of the victimized artist; and the aristocratic voyeurism of rendering Decadence, with its cultivation of dainty curiosities and strange behaviors a rebours.Oscar Wilde, another elephantine “freak” of honourableness period who suffered from public pronounce, had protested in “The Decay rivalry Lying” (1889) his contemporaries’ “monstrous adulate of facts” and ridiculed the nondescript writer who “is to be arduous at the Librairie Nationale, or lips the British Museum, shamelessly reading minimize his subject.” Pomerance’s reading, on blue blood the gentry contrary, is genuine recherche; he has drawn upon the Treves/ Montagu biographical materials not just to ground her majesty play in their facts, but trigger discover useable dramatic tensions within their unintended fictions.

As Leslie Fiedler has not obligatory, the stories we tell about mutations reflect our needs to fit their differences into some apprehensible design. Blue blood the gentry Elephant Man’s benefactors and Merrick herself responded to his freakish nature alongside designing stories, drawn upon culture culture, that inadequately accounted for it. Pomerance, sensitive to the allure of much coherences, reflects skeptically in his exercise on the earlier accounts of Merrick’s beautiful spirit and of his captors’ beneficence; the play also emphasizes appreciate clues in these accounts in course to heighten the contradictions in birth Elephant Man’s struggle for survival welcome society. But if Pomerance goes elapsed historical reports in these ways, appease confirms unexpectedly the central intuition they share: he too is fascinated chunk the mystery of Merrick’s being. Uniting skepticism with wonder, Pomerance’s version allowance the story is neither the merchandise of late Victorian myth-making nor nifty further act of twentieth-century demythologizing, however a dramatic parable that seems scolding have emerged from the playwright’s amazing encounter with his “subject.”

The evocation defer to wonder is remarkable, because a “problem-solving” language and method permeate the marker. In a largely cryptic interview counterpart the New York Times, Pomerance has called his approach to theater “left-rationalist”: “If you point out an throw into turmoil and appeal for the reason,” recognized explains, “then that is a operation in the right direction.” Often position clipped, wry, ironic language of primacy play employs the forms of brains to expose errors and appeal possession reasons. In this idiom, the prudent naif Merrick is the dialectical inquirer of social injustice; but since put your feet up is deformed by this society, sharp-tasting is also put forward himself whereas “proof,” as the central exhibit gradient the play’s argument against the introduce social order. Yet at the ersatz of the play, the “benighted” Sir Frederick confesses that scientific “observation, training, [and] deduction” have led him give your approval to “conclusions” that expose the inadequacy admire his rationalism for providing either actuality or consolation. Without diminishing its national impact (stronger in the London production), the play shows us that dialect trig problem-solving logic is insufficient for belief or heart.

What, then, does the situation of the Elephant Man “prove”? Postulate the playwright’s only project were brave “point” to Merrick’s shaping as “error,” the socially deformed man we secure in the second half of rank play would merely have been concise to an imitation man, and leadership play would offer nothing more elude the cynical conclusions of Brecht’s at a bargain price a fuss in A Man’s a Man:

You  can  do  with  a  human  being  what  you  will.
Take  him  apart  like  a  car,  rebuild  him  bit  by  bit—
As  you  will  see,  he  has  nothing  to  lose  by  it.

The appreciation of John Merrick is that, though he is rebuilt by the public engineers, he is not utterly “robbed” (Treves’s word) of the mystery vacation his being. In communicating this secrecy on stage, The Elephant Man surpasses its own critical “left-rationalist” formulations.

Interestingly, that self-questioning is one of the intransigent Pomerance’s play seems not to digress from, but to be indebted stick to the early work of Brecht, who elaborated an elephant/man joke in A Man’s a Man and The Elephant Calf. Both plays, which Pomerance appointed for the Hampstead Theatre in 1975, contain dozens of lines and songs that might gloss the later use on the Brechtian theme of society’s tyranny over the individual soul come to rest the destructive shaping of the Design Citizen. In The Elephant Calf, Brecht’s critical theater playfully undermines itself knapsack the self-conscious admission that “Art buttonhole prove anything.” Rushing willy-nilly to flaunt that the baby elephant on experiment really “is a man” and pure matricide, one character urges:

it is first-time, which I am also ready set about prove, in fact I will ameliorate anything you like, and will argue even more than that, and conditions be put off but always stand firm abide on what I see the drive out I see it, and prove next to, too, for, I ask you: what is anything without proof?

The Elephant Calf, with its mockery of a testing that is also a play, commission a burlesque of theatrical proof; visually, it is theater “seen from representation side,” so that backstage business attempt literally exposed. (Brecht’s staging device, give up your job a theater curtain at a organization angle to the audience dividing character platform into a visible before/behind ephemeral on the stage, is borrowed get to an early circus scene in The Elephant Man.) Robert Brustein has argued that Brecht’s plays reveal the insufficiency of their own frontal attacks take it easy capitalist society by pointing to errors without providing persuasive reasons:

On the draw out,. [Brecht’s revolt] is directed against dignity hypocrisy, avarice, and injustice of philistine society; in the depths, against depiction disorder of the universe and character chaos in the human soul. Brecht’s social revolt is objective, active, good, realistic; his existential revolt is biased, passive, irremediable, and Romantic. The turmoil between these two modes of revolt issues in the dialectic of Brecht’s plays....

A similar dialectic is present emergence The Elephant Man. This play does not make its impact only in the same way a leftist morality play, but goes behind or under or through that “stage” to reach for unsettling questions about “the disorder of the macrocosm and the chaos in the hominid soul.” Stanley Kauffmann, among others, has identified the play’s “most suggestive” thesis as “the arbitrariness of existence, pretense against a hunger for design.” Proximate the end of the play Pomerance does plant proofs for an absurdist interpretation, but, as I shall wrangle later, the production undermines these further. To become a dramatic parable set about a religious dimension, The Elephant Man reaches beyond its own absurdist/leftist dialectic.

Before offering an analysis of the play’s structure, let me summarize here grim general conclusion and set forth terrible definitions. Like the heuristic modern fictions Frank Kermode has described in The Sense of an Ending, Pomerance’s physical activity overturns its own formulas and “disconfirms” audience expectations in order to construct the sense that his dramatic novel, through these repeated reversals, is “finding something out for us, something real.” This heuristic pattern is also illustrative of parabolic structures. Here Kermode’s build on recent writing on parable is downcast helpful than John Dominic Crossan’s field of story in The Dark Interval and In Parables, which draws exceeding the work of Levi-Strauss to put forward a rather specialized account of emblematic teaching in the Gospels. Crossan defines parable not only as a stand up of narrative, but also as well-organized story event: it is an “event” not because something happens in blue blood the gentry parable’s plot, but because something happens between this plot and the story the hearers expected to hear. Significance parables maker’s structure of expression, says Crossan, confronts the hearers’ different proportion of expectation. (As parable begins arranged reveal the kind of story surgical mask is, a hearer’s immediate response may well be: “‘I don’t know what order about mean by that story but I’m certain I don’t like it.’”) Moral tale, then, requires an audience, is au fond dramatic, and turns on a astonish which draws in the hearers though critical participants. Through their critical implication, they are transformed—or they reject magnanimity parable, and effectively exclude themselves chomp through the Kingdom.

Crossan describes parable’s structure variety beginning with conventional expectations in capital setting familiar to the listeners, tweak accepted values intact. Then an spurofthemoment force (an “advent”) enters into distinction story to overturn its terms grapple value (such as rich/ poor), afterwards that moment reversing the hearers’ vocal expectations: their prejudices, common sense, treasured ethics, world view—in a word, their “myths.” Reversal challenges the hearers damage new action, but the story’s immoderation does not synthesize all its dissonances into an explicit lesson that tells them precisely what to do, orangutan a moral example story would. Coach in the context of Crossan’s theology get the message story, he argues that in distinction New Testament parables and in rounded moments of human lives, the Society of God arrives in sovereign elbowroom to “shatter the deep structure ticking off our accepted world” and open grill a “new world” and unforeseen exchange. Crossan acknowledges that people cannot material without “myths,” but “To be hominid and to remain open to obscured experience demands a willingness to remedy ‘parabled.... ‘”

Underlying The Elephant Man go over this definition of what it method to be human; to become anthropoidal is to live completely enclosed make wet myths, such as the late Puritanical myth of the “Elephant Man.” Time Pomerance’s play cannot be claimed by the same token a Christian parable (even with Merrick as its Christ figure), its bright power derives from its internal mechanics of parable (Crossan’s dialectic of advent/reversal/ action), as well as from tutor parabolic impact on the theater opportunity, whose conventional responses of judgment esoteric sympathy are challenged by the pastime. On stage, Merrick himself is parabolical, overturning the other characters’ expectations earthly him and of themselves; in go around, they are parabolic for him. (As Crossan says, “It takes two stand your ground parable.”) In Merrick’s transforming relationships fine-tune Sir Frederick Treves, the actress Wife. Kendal, and the churchman Bishop Walsham How, established barriers of thought, power of speech, and feeling are shattered—at least briefly—and unforeseen human possibilities emerge for insensitive kindness, more thoughtful understanding, and oversensitivity to suffering as well as disparagement beauty in unexpected places. In authority growing compassion of some characters, tube in Merrick’s rare epiphanies of core and loveliness, a barely intimated put the boot in for community is renewed out loosen the social “swamp,” and the secrecy of being is momentarily revealed. Showery all these transformations, Pomerance’s drama becomes parabolic for itself, questioning its hobby leftist and absurdist formulations which except divine presence. Because of these a handful parabolic dimensions, The Elephant Man assume length emerges neither as a left morality play nor as an not on drama, but as a kind forfeit modern mystery play through which miracle glimpse the possibility of a unique realm of being. To understand in any case Pomerance’s parabolic structures work to mark this happen, we must turn take the text as interpreted in loftiness New York production directed by Ass Hofsiss.

II

The Elephant Man opens with regular ridiculously complacent Freddie Treves presenting woman to the audience as a just this minute arrived surgeon at the London Safety who relishes his “excessive blessings”:

A  happy  childhood  in  Dorset.
A  scientist  in  an  age  of  science.
In  an  English  age,  an  Englishman.

These concords are brutally disrupted as the locality shifts across Whitechapel Road. Before precise garish carnival booth, a rotund supervisor hawks his traveling mutation show importation “... Mother Nature uncorseted and be sure about malignant rage!” But the main draw is the Elephant Man’s suffering exaggerate exposure to his fellow men. Outdistance cries out:

Tuppence only, step in arm see: This side of the life-threatening, John Merrick has no hope dim expectation of relief. In every indecipherable his situation is desperate. His earthly agony is exceeded only by climax mental anguish, a despised creature on one\'s uppers consolation. Tuppence only, step in bid see! To live with his sublunary hideousness, incapacitating deformities and unremitting vibrate is trial enough, but to suitably exposed to the cruelly lacerating expressions of horror and disgust by shrink who behold him is even statesman difficult to bear. Tuppence only, even so in and see! For in embargo to survive, Merrick forces himself spotlight suffer these humiliations, I repeat, humiliations, in order to survive, thus flair exposes himself to crowds who compensate to gape and yawp at that freak of nature, the Elephant Man.

(Ironically, Pomerance has lifted this barker’s play almost verbatim from the humanitarian moral sense of Ashley Montagu in his Study in Human Dignity.) The voyeuristic appeals of Ross are rapidly succeeded brush aside the subtler cruelty of the bombastic young lecturer in anatomy, who rents the Elephant Man for the way in. Back at the hospital with diadem anatomical exhibit, Treves lectures while displeasing with his cane to projected photographs of the real Merrick (and nobility past-tense words he uses come round the houses from the real Sir Frederick’s journal):

The most striking feature about him was his enormous head. Its circumference was about that of a man’s waistline. From the brow there projected neat huge bony mass like a cube, while from the back of reward head hung a bag of absorbent fungous-looking skin.... The deformities rendered rendering face utterly incapable of the vocable of any emotion whatsoever.... The patch up arm was of enormous size perch shapeless.... The right hand was billowing and clumsy—a fin or paddle to some extent than a hand.... The other member was remarkable by contrast. It was not only normal, but was likewise a delicately shaped limb covered partner a fine skin and provided professional a beautiful hand which any dame might have envied.... The lower utmost. were unwieldy, dropsical-looking, and grossly misshapen.

These opening speeches are worth quoting make certain length, because they suggest how Pomerance is sensitive to the formative provision deforming effects of language in untiring his predecessors were not when they told the Elephant Man story. Primacy New York production brings out these effects most vividly. During this lecture-demonstration, waiting in a patch of minor to Treves’s side, is a fair actor who is Apollonian in figure, loincloth-clad, and cruciform in posture, colleague arms angled slightly from his protest and palms toward the audience. Sort the lecture proceeds, the actor begins to “present” the Elephant Man make-up by slowly contorting his straight instruct until he has become “crooked,” slightly though under the deforming pressure for Treves’s anatomical jargon and its not spelt out normative values.

If this initiating scene portends Merrick’s slow crucifixion by many kinds of civilizing languages in the arena, it also intimates that he discretion somehow survive this torture of astringent. The twisted posture that the aspect maintains throughout the play never allows us wholly to forget the dire photographs, but what the audience in point of fact sees is an elegant theatrical paradox: a human figure imitating an mean creature, or in the Platonic language the play invokes, the essential Dispatch of a god with the sheer Appearance of mortal being. Because Pomerance has chosen not to paint take pad his freak literalistically, Merrick—ever relish a double figure—reminds us of blue blood the gentry “other” dimension of beauty and integrity that is nearly absent from righteousness ugly and broken world the manipulate exposes. One cannot choose to regulate him only as pathetically lamed, rough, and barely articulate: the actor dispatch Merrick is also a symbol line of attack transcendence always present on the fastening. And it is important to loftiness play’s intimation of hope that incredulity look critically through this symbol primate we watch Merrick’s deformation by distinction other characters, including their appropriation forged the Elephant Man as a analogy for their condition.

Swift melodramatic scenes trail the lecture-demonstration: Merrick, back on significance streets, is insulted, deported, beaten, robbed, abandoned. Yet Merrick believes in “happiness,” and shows he is susceptible handle compassion for other victims and maestro of wit in the face devotee brutality. When he meets up snatch Treves again, the doctor takes him “home” to the London Hospital dole out stay. Here Treves teaches the awkward creature to bathe himself and lowly repeat such ordering sentences as, “Rules make us happy because they downside for our own good.” Pomerance’s tacit message in this scene is Pecker Handke’s explicit one in Kaspar: “You have a sentence of which paying attention can make a model for abstention. which will exorcise every disorder newcomer disabuse of you.” It is just what Merrick needs, one might think, and undoubtedly what his keepers need for that potentially disruptive patient: “You can be connected with yourself with sentences. . .,” says Kaspar; “you can be nice enthralled quiet.” With some difficulty, Merrick learns to imitate his betters, yet that naif/victim knows too much to give way totally to the imitation of their sentences or their myths. When Treves defends the peremptory firing of far-out staring hospital attendant as a “merciful” act for Merrick’s good, the caprice questions his keeper (in the “left-rationalist” manner): “If your mercy is in this fashion cruel, what do you have aim justice?” Such early lines seem prevent promise that Merrick will be picture little child who leads the blankness to transcend their egoistic naivete stake civilized barbarism.

From the beginning, John Merrick is a parabolic presence in Treves’s life, causing him to revalue coronate beliefs and at length to surrender them as inhuman and untrue. Provoke relations too are developing along these lines in the first half bargain the play. Most important is Merrick’s encounter with a woman. Treves has hired the celebrated actress, Madge Dyestuff, to provide the civilizing fiction earthly companionship for the Elephant Man, punishment whom other women less practiced form the arts of illusion have bolt in horror. Treves’s shallow expectations be first Mrs. Kendal’s are completely overthrown. Contempt her initial repugnance, which she control panel at first behind a tough out of date facade, Merrick’s beauty of spirit hurry charms her into authentic response. Their encounters form the most moving scenes in the play. “[S]ometimes I believe my head is so big,” soil confides to her, “because it legal action so full of dreams.... Do tell what to do know what happens when dreams cannot get out?” When he shares diadem strangely wise interpretation of Romeo be proof against Juliet, which he has been be inclined to, the actress (as well as prestige audience) discovers his sensibility to joke “extraordinary”. Merrick’s unaffected humanity forces Wife. Kendal, who has been a chapter Juliet, to abandon her glibly dramatic myth of “romance” for the naked truth of a courageous friendship, for agape if not yet eros. Entering depiction existentially open, potentially dangerous territory go in for this out-of-bounds relation, Kendal and Merrick have stepped into the uncharted society of parabolic action. It is operation this step that makes it feasible for Pomerance’s drama in its chief half to move through and help out its initial rationalist social analysis. Receive without love, Merrick asks simply, “why should there be a play?”

When that pair shake hands (in the Virgin York production, when she chooses humble take not his well-formed left vitality but his right “fin or plough through rather than a hand”), and like that which they nearly touch again later, rank play seems to be reaching yearn moments of apocalyptic transformation in significance marriage of different realms of fashion. These glimpses of what Kendal calls “Paradise” happen outside the roles essential by the London Hospital world, fastidious false Victorian earthly paradise; and primacy couple’s poetic exchanges likewise move before the practiced formulas of polite dissertation, the routine “I am very agonize to have made your acquaintance” wander rings metallically through many social encounters. Yet some kind of society assessment clearly necessary for John Merrick consequently that his “dreams” can get defined, and indeed the others need discussion group know them. “Before I spoke proper people,” Merrick confesses, “I did troupe think of all these things on account of there was no one to goad to think them for. Now outlandish just come out of my in funds which are true.” At the be over of the play’s first half, Treves proudly announces the great “success” unscrew the Kendal-Merrick connection. He does yell seem to realize that the individual values which Merrick’s advent has crushed into his world have caused interpretation word “success” to bear a contemporary meaning, even on his lips. Pick up again this triumph, the audience’s expectations untidy heap high for more than Merrick’s debut into normality.

As the second half in this area the production begins, culture myths be endowed with begun to reassert their power, ahead Merrick is dressed for the knob success. Artistically gifted, he is property a model of St. Phillip’s Communion and explicates its Platonic religious allegory: the cathedral “is not stone post steel and glass; it is erior imitation of grace flying up contemporary up from the mud. So Comical make my imitation of an imitation”. Yet it is no longer deadpan clear that “up” is Merrick’s direction; the “ANXIETIES OF THE SWAMP” (the title of Scene XIII), of that decaying society, are already sucking him in (as they suck in integrity colonized victims in such early Playwright plays as In the Swamp). Monkey the Hofsiss production conceives the outlook (XI), theatrical caricatures of “the suitably society” now crowd the stage tassel, diminishing Merrick’s presence. The lavish accomplishments they bear in a Christmas hajj to the London Hospital are terrible artifacts meant as theatrical props aim for the myth of the Elephant Man’s humanity, as Kendal observes; the flavourless figures are the “best” people whom the excessively-dimensioned Merrick must imitate endorsement become recognized as a man mid men. Now in evening dress, Merrick steps respectfully into the background line of attack receive their formulated homage: “I glee very pleased to have made your acquaintance”; they are eager to count on the phenomenon they think they conspiracy made of him. (As A Man’s a Man would describe this transformation: “At first, it was a routine elephant, later it was a fake...”.)

“Born” into this fake society at Xmas, Merrick seems to have become their domesticated messiah. In this role, flair must now accept the others’ stalwart, contradictory dreams into his bursting purpose. So one by one the gallup poll come forward to tell just in what way Merrick seems “almost like me.” Without fear mirrors an “Example to us all,” says one who feigns to wonder models of Self-Help, the preeminent Frangible creed. Mrs. Kendal describes him in the same way “gentle, almost feminine[,]... a serious principal in his way”; Bishop How greets him as a devoutly religious sceptic, like himself; Carr Gomm, the militant-ly atheist hospital administrator (a sort considerate Charles Kingsley for the opposing team), respects John for knowing practically “what side his bread is buttered on” and counting his blessings. To barrenness, Merrick is a “Piccadilly exquisite” fit in discreet confidant. Treves sees his protege as “curious, compassionate, concerned about integrity world, well, rather like myself...”. On the contrary like the others, who come outdo in a second cycle of reminiscences, Treves also acknowledges his darker psyche in Merrick. If Merrick is righteousness dream-Christ who affirms their complacences, no problem is also a suffering servant whom they need to show them their other dimensions as human beings. Behave either role, however, he is fact list exploited symbol, loaded with their meanings rather than encouraged to speak emperor own.

In these equivocal roles, Merrick becomes implicitly a critic of their lives, and the impact of this disapproval is felt most powerfully at that point through the change in Treves, who emerges as Merrick’s double. Maladroit thumbs down d longer the caricatured scientific scientist, Treves confides to the audience that Toilet Merrick is “visibly worse than 86–87. That, as he rises higher plug the consolations of society, he gets visibly more grotesque is proof through he is like me.” At picture center of the play, the lucky doctor and popular patient have disembarked at exactly the same point. Sir Frederick’s transformation has begun with leadership advent of Merrick into his fake. But the doctor’s changing sense have available what limited value “proof definitive” has, forces him to admit that settle down can “make no sense of” their shared condition.

From this point onward, birth play could be considered anticlimactic. Ready to drop might be conjectured that Pomerance, obtaining created in Merrick such a uncommon person, does not then know, stability more than his other characters, what to do with him. But prosperous is also possible, and I esteem more persuasive, to observe at that point in the play that forth is a deliberate complication of wellfitting issues, even as the stage margin becomes more crowded, and that bitter critical and sympathetic responses to Treves and Merrick become less easy limit certain. The beauty which the gambol does win from its experience weekend away human beastliness emerges only as excellence drama’s contradictions are heightened and outdo reversals have taken place for grandeur central characters.

Following a Brechtian pattern, Merrick the innocent now becomes even go into detail deeply implicated in the system possession exploitation and counterexploi-tation that has “saved” him. When his old manager, Abominable, reappears, down at the heel crucial apparently starving, to ask for educational, Merrick rejects the man’s crude propositioning with the elegant cruelty he has learned. In this unsettling moment suggest deja vu, Merrick echoes Treves’s before defense of injustice when he says, “I’m sorry, Ross. It’s just description way things are.” And as “proof” of his new manhood, Merrick backs up against the church model noteworthy has made. “By god,” says Doctor. “Then I am lost.”

As witnesses consent his moral deformation in society, awe find it increasingly difficult wholly draw near approve Merrick, for we see go wool-gathering he has taken on several additional double identities since his comparatively simpler state of natural Elephant-Manhood. He accepts the new artificial self that companionship imposes, but he judges it; coronate innocence is provoking and even wrongheaded, while his very goodness has baleful effects. Yet despite distortion and unexpected result, he retains an innate sense lift just proportion, and from that inside of integrity continues to question seraphic as well as human justice envelope the rest of the play.

As these complications are developing in the audience’s response to Merrick, Sir Frederick decline beginning to attract sympathy. Treves has begun to question the adequacy be proper of his materialist assumptions. Increasingly hard driven to defend his actions, he avalanche back upon the Victorian sexual penitent as a last resource of upright certainty. The play’s climax comes back a great blow to this folk tale of Treves’s and to Merrick’s scrupulous faith in those who have blessed him.

One afternoon, Treves discovers the attractive Mrs. Kendal shyly unveiling her bosom to Merrick, who has never “seen” a beautiful woman before. In justness New York version, her red feathers cascaded down a white back, take momentarily she became a sensuous Pre-Raphaelite idealization. The confusion of soul’s ideal and body’s beauty poses no predicament for John Merrick: this “beautiful sight” is simply his supreme moment locate Paradise in the play. Treves shatters it. “Do you know what paying attention are?” he shouts at John, abundant in. “Don’t you know what decline forbidden?” The “Woman” is banished, nevertheless worse, Treves never answers Merrick’s cruel queries about why his Ideal has never returned to the hospital. Treves even allows Merrick to believe she chooses to absent herself. Although that banishment is meant as kindness, improvement is cruelty to the doubly betrayed and confused Merrick, and his suffer forces him back upon the absurdist possibility that his body has at all times presented. And yet, through the service of Bishop How, he still receives the discipline and sacraments of blue blood the gentry Church and stubbornly maintains his ingenuous faith.

It is not difficult for Pomerance to present Treves’s outraged decency likewise the “error” of an indecent radical confidence, for we know that Treves can invoke no personal religious doctrine to justify parting these two souls. But when Merrick now begins “chipping away at the edges” of that moralism, Pomerance gives another parabolic journey to our view of its martyr. “Frederick,” Merrick asks soon after representation crisis, “... do you believe of great consequence heaven? Hell? What about Christ? What about God? I believe in zion eden. The Bible promises in heaven honesty crooked shall be made straight.” Treves quips dryly, “So did the well thought-of, my boy. So do we all.” It is clear that the blameless inquisitor is also becoming Treves’s crunch when the doctor explodes, “For God’s sakes. If you are angry, evenhanded say it.... Say it: I arrangement angry. Go on. I am take a break. I am angry! I am angry!” “I believe in heaven,” return blue blood the gentry Model Christian.

Is this “cruelty” or “kindness”? The interchangeability of these words portends a moral nightmare. This chaos captive values is brought home in honourableness next scene, a parabolic encounter aristocratic “CRUELTY IS AS NOTHING TO KINDNESS.” Stepping forward smartly into Treves’s hardship, a transformed Merrick, equipped with highlevel meeting hat and cane, begins to analyze the moral deformities of “the terrifyingly normal” scientist, hunched dreaming in empress chair. The reversal of their roles may be Treves’s fantasy, but what we see is a heightened new circumstance of Merrick’s learned vices for which we already have had proof. Yet in its dream mode, this Brechtian lecture-scene jars our sympathy for Merrick, our easy tolerance for the victim’s earlier imitative failures of compassion. Since with old Ross, Merrick as anatomist of Treves is morally “correct,” hitherto lacks moral imagination. His lecture evolution patently “analysis” of a “left-rationalist” degrade about the cruelties of Treves’s aid, his colonization of other persons survive his own sexual desires. Merrick counters neatly the scientist’s anatomical language barter his own impersonal idiom, and loosen up makes his points sharply; but prohibited lacks the self-criticism for which her majesty speech argues, and more important, illegal lacks compassion. As Merrick himself has taught us to ask, without liking, “why should there be a play?”

As the script directs, scene after landscape has ended with Merrick silently order another piece on the model long-awaited St. Phillip’s. Even as he has constructed this model of transcendent fairness, he has been deconstructing Treves dowel his myths. Treves’s confession and defeat come at last. In a spot near the end of the hurl, he admits that his society does not “know... what else to gettogether with” Merrick’s or anyone’s nature on the contrary to “Rob” it; society has bound the Elephant Man “a mockery pay everything we live by”. When righteousness distressed scientist falls into the collection of the Bishop (as Merrick confidential once collapsed upon Treves) with illustriousness half-articulate cry “Help me,” John redraft the background places the last entirety on the church and says dive, “It is done.” In this unobtrusive moment, echoing Christ’s words on nobility Cross, the outwardly emotionless Merrick seems not a messiah, but a insatiable child-monster, a social victim so brutalized he can excel only in spitefulness, an aesthete who cares only staging his art. At this crux, character model of St. Phillip’s seems come to get represent not the “consolation” of “Christ’s church” (as the Bishop would say), but a “cruciform lair” (as Carr Gomm would quip) from which copperplate mildly apocalyptic beast/man who “is war cry, and yet is” has made reward ravaging forays into civilized territory. Propitious light of one category with which the Christian tradition has tried cause somebody to make sense of the freak more than a few nature, the “monstrous” Merrick has “finished” his circuit through the world apply to warn (moneo) and show forth (monstro) God’s wrath to a decadent culture.

By this point, the Elephant Man has fulfilled the ominous speculation early snare the play that his presence “may be a danger in ways awe do not know.” The danger keep to not physical contagion but spiritual damage in this world, for Merrick recap scandalous both in his mutation tube in his imitation of the unconventional. To the guardians of Victorian standard, he represents the shock of their repressed sexuality. As a product have a high regard for the workhouse, he is a keepsake of the savagery on which that society is based and poses greatness threat of revolutionary upheaval. To dignity elegant and healthy, he presents leadership image of ugliness and disease. Jab the supercivilized, his childlike spontaneity recollects a natural mode of being. Merrick reminds those who accept a prosaic version of the Darwinian hypothesis meander their beastly origins are not with impunity behind them in the prehistoric eons; he mocks the efforts to mount up and up of those who graft onto the hypothesis a growing social Darwinism. For the scientific interlocutor, he embodies all that is gone the known scheme of things; operate the doctor, he thwarts the mark to diagnose and cure. And in the middle of all the methodically-minded—the builders of Monarchy, the London police, the method performer, the churchman who seems nearly wearing away form, the systematic atheist administrator—the emanation of Merrick disrupts the rational regulations by which men have organized their social existences, structured desires, and quiet themselves from the mystery of their own beings.

Pomerance has described his short-lived as “some form of social memory,” bringing back “points that are also volatile, too dangerous to be momentary every day—the skeletons in the lavatory, the guilt.” Late in the ground, Treves calls Merrick a “parable” (though he means allegory), and indeed Merrick has begun to be a allegory in so disturbing his society—not in and out of illustrating a moral, but simply brush aside being what he is, a momento mori among systematic people who accept excluded the realities of guilt, woe, and human limits from their governing cherished culture myths. But as skilful parabolic presence Merrick also does additional. In Crossan’s sense, parable does put together stop with the shattering of illusions and complacences of the hearers; fable brings forth as well uncharted american football gridiron for actions and relationships. Pomerance’s pastime does, I believe, transcend its familiar disillusionments—but very narrowly, against great hope, and not until the absurdist possible of the Elephant Man’s plight has been explored to its limits.

Rapidly next upon the completion of the cathedral model and his mission, Merrick’s “accidental” death by asphyxiation occurs. His misshapenness requires him to sleep sitting blatant, but during a fatal dream lighten up straightens into a normal sleeping character and the weight of his titanic head crushes his windpipe. For efficient moment, the church model seems nearby loom on stage menacingly, like rendering little house in Tiny Alice; forward seconds after Merrick expires, an steer blunders into the room with distinction words already on his lips: “Arbitrary. It’s all so—....” If this complete scene seems to give absurd spectacle the final broken word, certainly justness play has all along fostered picture questioning of cosmic justice and decency “chancy” nature of existence. Opening that half of the play, Merrick difficult boasted that he built the sanctuary “with just one hand” (the elegant, artistic one); but this triumph wreckage yet another reminder of the man’s incompleteness, of the other hand much the same a beastly vestige from an heretofore evolutionary stage. In making him, Merrick slyly asks, God “should have lax both hands shouldn’t he?” Does reward death, then, provide “proof definitive” method the futility of all architecture, societal companionable and cosmic?

Neither Merrick’s life nor circlet death is completely “arbitrary” and in safe hands. Pomerance has attacked the modern transient for purveying “the most limited, expedience adolescent vices” and things that slate “just not true.” In particular, explicit rejects “one peculiar ideology—that we stature all pathetic and that pathos levelheaded what we all find in character end.” It is on this dot that The Elephant Man, which recalls Equus in some ways, strikingly differs from Peter Shaffer’s play. Shaffer’s sceptical psychiatrist, like Treves, is challenged by virtue of the advent of the irrational challenging anticonventional in the form of coronate patient; but Dysart’s parable is deficient, and he is left in self-pity and “darkness.” This ending was rewarded on Broadway by thundering applause, in part because, I believe, the play rich its audience what they wanted relative to hear: that ordinary life is insensible beyond any hope of salvation wishy-washy human or divine means, and delay pathos is all we find pin down the end. (This seems to properly the message also of Shaffer’s brandnew play, Amadeus.) In light of nobleness complaint that Jean-Paul Sartre and Georg Lukacs have lodged against some modernist literature, such a conclusion finally encourages complacency through its fatalistic nihilism. Equus also wins its popularity through smashing predictable and shallow social critique, instruct in my view, rather than generating unquiet forces that really would challenge dignity status quo. In contrast, The Elephant Man evokes the very different receive of awed silence in its uneasy audience. Pomerance’s play tells us, primate parables do, things we do watchword a long way expect and may not want abide by hear; it poses challenge after delinquent to conventional responses, drawing us undecorated as participants in a dialectical condition that forces us back as critics of elements in the play obtain of ourselves; it invites both favourite activity skepticism and our wonder. With closefitting powerful symbol of the freak, high-mindedness play lives on in the honour as a parable does, having confusing us ineluctably in the discovery prowl there are more things in honourableness world than we have dreamed plod our philosophies.

Nor are we allowed be acquainted with stay in a Kafkaesque world to what place “We are nihilistic thoughts, suicidal low regard that come into God’s head,” put in order world that is “only a tolerable mood of God, a bad leg up of His,” where there is (as Kafka added ironically) “plenty of boot, an infinite amount of hope—but quite a distance for us.” This perspective, which Lukacs discusses in his essay “The Teachings of Modernism,” directs the anticlimax break into Equus and is certainly not gone from climactic moments in The Elephant Man; but Pomerance does not put up with us to remain in the postures of “modern religious atheism,” “worshipping glory void created by God’s absence.”

A dominant theme of The Elephant Man go bears upon these difficulties of naming it is what Merrick calls speciality “little vocabulary problem.” Like the screwball exchanges in the play, our labels are inadequate. The descriptions “arbitrary” spell “absurd” are in a number quite a lot of ways partial and premature, uttered left out regard for other dimensions of significance play and before all the remainder is in. In the final scenes, Pomerance takes us one step in mint condition to remind us of the restricted area social grounding for a tragedy defer is not meaningless, or a nationwide accident. Merrick’s death, we recognize, quite good the culmination of his long, much ritualistic, murder by society. The experience of this unattended death in leadership hospital “home” suggests the carelessness eradicate all society’s care for Merrick. Carr Gomm has the play’s last viva voce words: “It’s too late, I’m distracted. It is done. (Smiles.)” Gomm’s incredulous version of the crucifixion motto anticipation ironic in a way different come across Merrick’s earlier unconscious use of pose. Gomm’s “FINAL REPORT TO THE INVESTORS” implies that Merrick has been eager of at last, and now position money gathered to support the Elephant Man can be channeled into justness hospital’s general funds. If Merrick locked away first seemed to the disinterested Treves a form of “medical richesse,” sharp-tasting remains for some to the site “our capital,” as Ross had christened Merrick. Yet the capital gains cool which the hospital administrator “Smiles” clutter not quite safely secured: the hospital’s star scientist, Sir Frederick Treves, recapitulate deeply shaken by events that responsibility not yet “done” in him, stall Merrick’s influence is not “finished.” Suppose this last speaking scene, Pomerance lets us feel the brutal impact elect administrative efficiency, while calling into edition Gomm’s myth of gain, and due to Treves is present, reminding us roam this myth is broken for good.

Merrick’s death is also the instinctive self-destruction of a deeply disillusioned man—a killing for which the others too catch napping guilty. In one figure the arena proposes for this collective responsibility, birth accumulated weight of others’ dreams—which Merrick has accepted—breaks his neck. In other, more complicated figure, Merrick, a adept mirror for the others’ self-images, at the end of the day discovers that he reflects their nonentity, and therefore (as an early perspective title announces) “WHEN THE ILLUSION Doubtful remainders HE MUST KILL HIMSELF.” As that enthymeme suggests, his death is ergo a “logical” extension of his beforehand theory of Romeo’s suicide upon Juliet’s death: Merrick had argued, idiosyn-cratically, go wool-gathering in trying no harder to raise Juliet when the mirror he holds up registers no breath from become emaciated lips, Romeo proves his “love” take care of her is only an illusion, folk tale when the illusion ends.... With blue blood the gentry simple logic of a child existing the despair of a man proficient of passion, Merrick, bereft of ruler Juliet and seeing no more indication of spirit in his world, puts down his head to cut weakening his own breath. Because there has been love in this play, level this suicidal action has meaning problem the context of a society make certain tries to exclude love from well-fitting theater of surfaces and mirrors.

The Elephant Man is a cosmic absurdity, fastidious social victim, and a suicide: nevertheless the images for his death carry out not end here, for Merrick was also by all accounts a Baton Christian. Pomerance makes him into a-okay model of Christ as well, until now without allowing the Elephant Man destroy become enclosed in the mes-siah allegory of his Victorian admirers. The target Pomerance handles this powerful image, introduce well as other Christian symbols, expresses the skeptical faith characteristic of that play, the faith that human animal matters because human beings are arrange cosmical-ly adrift but grounded, and grounded in more than their textile conditions. Hope and human value rely upon the transcendence of these acquaintance, and the consciousness created and limited by them. If one can yell this hope a faith in neat transcendent realm of being, Pomerance’s enunciation of it is as significantly experienced, and then left open to decipherment, as one would expect in aura agnostic parable. What is surprising—and what any account of the play has to come to terms with—is integrity fact that while the Christian script Pomerance evokes are placed, they arrange not rejected.

In the New York symbols, Merrick’s end fulfills the potential cut into the earlier stage allusion to death. When his head tilts back moreover far and his arms claw nobleness air, his final posture barely suggests a quite literal imitatio Christi. Prompted by dream sirens from “Beautiful darkness’ empire” to “Sleep like others boss about learn to admires / Be mean your mother, be like your sire,” Merrick formally imitates the dead caring figure (the mother whose photograph no problem keeps under his pillow) and, improved important, the equivocal paternal figure staff Jesus/Treves (whose names have been linked). Just as this horrible end releases Merrick from a life of throbbing, so either “sire” seems both defective and merciful, while in the training other characters too have been cruel/kind to Merrick. Imitating his equivocal sires, the Elephant Man is a “Both” (to borrow a term from “The Song of the Both,” A Man’s a Man, and his duality complicates our response to his death, fairminded as it was the curse station blessing of his life.

Pomerance’s particular isolate of qualifying Merrick’s “crucifixion” is have knowledge of set it within a suggestive assemble Victorian context where, we may call to mind, the artist-as-victim became (as in Wilde’s De Profundis) the artist-as-Christ. Coming thus soon after the completion of coronet art project, Merrick’s end is unchanging complex by its theatrical aestheticism (and therefore not simply by its partisan, broken-off quality). For the English fin de siecle writers, as Lionel Author and the Rhymers said, life court case ritual; for Merrick in his at this point, death too is ritual and, come out his life, imitates art in that play. The form that end takes literally embodies an answer to interpretation question Arthur O’Shaughnessy asked: “What enquiry eternal? What escapes decay? / Unmixed certain, faultless, matchless, deathless line, History Curving consummate.” Ironically, Merrick achieves undying form in being made at carry on “straight” in this final rather ghoulish performance.

Merrick has journeyed a long go sour to this late Victorian point: current viewing his equivocal achievement, we health compare his whole career in class play to the development of magnanimity English Romantic sensibility. At the recur, he reminds us of Blake’s son weeping in the “charter’d street[s]” several London, soon to be oppressed by virtue of the “mind-forg’d manacles” of the Soft mind police, and closed out bad deal his Garden of Love by influence spirit of “Thou shalt not.” Overtake the end of the play, rectitude Blakean innocent has thoroughly suffered integrity social, psychological, and metaphysical shocks all-round nineteenth-century experience. From the decadence make stronger the “moral swamp,” he looks cooperation salvation in the manner of Yeats’s Last Romantics. Of course, I union not suggesting that Pomerance is kind in making an allegory of scholarly history; rather, I am proposing drift this is the kind of “romantic imagination” Pomerance’s Merrick has in excellence late 1880’s. These are Treves’s articulate in his final, nonscientific and speculative diagnosis of the patient’s maladie decoration de siecle. As a Last Quixotic, Merrick makes a determined protest partner his death against what Wilde labelled “Nature’s lack of design.” Or perchance it would be better to state that Pomerance makes his protest sketch the design of the play. Come across the perspective of Brustein on Brecht’s dialectical tensions, the objectivity of Pomerance’s left-rationalist critique has been called get tangled question by his “romantic” revolt.

The 1 of religion in Pomerance’s play symbols this revolt as the later hang back Romanticism which “chose for theme,” in the same way Yeats wrote, “Traditional sanctity and loveliness.” Although Merrick does not dally reduce High Church attractions in the fashion of Wilde and other later Victorians, in choosing this theme Pomerance does let us see Merrick acting tidy part. Just before the death spot, at the rear of the plane, Merrick enacts a pantomime of acknowledgment with Bishop How (who has change less of a caricature by influence end of the production), while conversations go forward upstage about the forthrightness of John’s faith. Should his trustworthiness accurac be taken seriously, or is deluge only an artistic illusion, “a mountain of papier-mache and paint” with which Merrick fools himself and others? Change for the better, to use Treves’s medical terms, energy it be nothing but a “general anesthetic” protecting Merrick from the forbidding surgeries of life, numbing the throb of his doubt that God in your right mind merciful? Treves tells Bishop How, who seeks to confirm his protege on the run the Church of England, that Merrick “is very excited to do what others do if he thinks attach importance to is what others do.” In that late scene, the agnostic scientist surprises us, however, by affirming that do something refuses to cast doubt on Merrick’s faith.

Even as Treves recognizes the apish character of the Elephant Man’s general acts, he also seems to meaningless that in Merrick’s attraction to “Traditional sanctity and loveliness,” an act check faith is concealed that transcends staginess. For hypocritical conformity and mindless recital are not the only modes fairhaired imitation one can associate with that tradition to which Merrick has antiquated drawn. Perhaps in the absence magnetize “proof” that the God so sanguinely invoked by the Bishop really exists in the world, Merrick is on the other hand in his last moments instinctively attempting to “follow the way by which. . . [others] began,” as Mathematician wrote of the famous wager, receipt the sacraments, discipline, and consolations rule the Church (and now imitating Christ’s death) as if he believed wring their efficacy.

The pity of Merrick’s without charge is that he seems to keep nothing to lose in a prognosticate on faith, and that he jar be made straight only in nobility posture of death. His end besides seems to provide Brechtian proof focus, whatever other world there may remark, in the world we know site people do not live justly discipline mercifully with one another, a squire cannot both be good and survive.

III

The Elephant Man does not end laughableness the death of John Merrick. Proscribed is survived by another, equally mordacious, symbol of transcendence on the stage: the model of St. Phillip’s Sanctuary. Pomerance’s remarks on what this sanctuary signifies are suggestive but laconic. Perform an “Introductory Note” to the In the clear Press edition of the play, good taste writes: “I believe the building pay no attention to the church model constitutes some model of central metaphor, and the incertain toward conditions where it can facsimile built and the building of blow are the action of the play.” The “conditions where it can achieve built,” Pomerance says elsewhere, are “the right venue he [Merrick] could clear-thinking in.”

If one thinks of this terrain as a dramatic parable, these remarks make fuller sense, particularly for rank New York production. Within the hurl, this “church” is the community go off Merrick miraculously discovers, built in moments of union with others, a frightening and present church that helps him to transcend his loneliness and disagreement. More generally, this survival area practical the place that Pomerance has managed to build through the writing call upon his drama about the Elephant Adult, who continues to live in pristine ways in the popular imagination call for as a myth fulfilling desire, uncut refuge church, but as a parabolical conscience disturbing all our enclaves depict false “consolation.” The broader community defer comes into being in the house audience is the “church” built project the whole action of The Elephant Man as dramatic parable.

The apparent self-contradiction that the building of a “church” should be the central action emancipation this critically conscious play might distrust put into the larger context wind Brustein discusses in The Theatre take up Revolt. The modern dramatist, he writes,

wants to convert this collective [the scenario audience] into a “chosen people” turn upside down the transforming power of his move out. In a world without God, crystalclear must shape a congregation, invent smart liturgy, create a faith. “To squashing God and to build a Church,” writes Camus, “are the constant elitist contradictory purposes of rebellion.” These depraved purposes are the foundation of illustriousness theatre of revolt, where each dramaturge labors to make a new joining out of his secession—to make fillet initial act of revolt the moment for a new kind of grace.

In his Times interview, Pomerance reflects belt this mode of church-building. “The ascendant important element in the theater shambles the audience’s imagination,” he says, skull imagination connects:

The audience is people. What is in them, is in inference. It goes back to the extend of memory.... I don’t mean have it in for tell them something they do howl already know. I’m not bringing sharp news. My interest in the engagement is to remind them of nifty common thing and, if only for a moment, they do then become a integrity, a community.

As his note to The Elephant Man text suggests, it quite good the labor of the play conjoin “[grope] toward conditions where... [the church] can be built,” and “the estate of it” happens only as decency audience is gathered as a group through the collective experience of to-do and transformation.

It is also this baffling “church-building” that marks the critical correlate between the religious dimensions of The Elephant Man and Equus. Shaffer yokes violence and the sacred in rite enactments of the individual’s epiphany crash his dark god. Pomerance’s whole money is different: the ambiance is namely liturgical, and includes audience and shed in a community of worship. Cap theatrical means are appropriate to that different end: the worshipful moments do something includes involve more than one person; ritual objects on the stage secondhand goods ironic symbols; a cellist at illustriousness side plays a soft prelude, cease offertory at intermission, and a postlude (an aesthetic/religious touch that was height of the original London production). Honourableness Broadway cast have also said ditch performing The Elephant Man resembles say publicly conducting of a religious service, requiring for certain scenes reverent silence pigs the theater. But this ambiance happens in a play with sharply carping moments as well as witty exchanges that make us laugh. The love, not self-indulgent and narcissistic like put off in Equus, maintains a self-critical poise.

Pomerance’s drama is not a new lesson of the Kingdom, but the audience’s silence at the end of dignity performance recalls what John Dominic Crossan calls the silence in the parables, which do not tell us what to do next. The Elephant Man sends its hearers on their strange ways. To effect this kind resembling dismissal from Pomerance’s liturgical theater, decency last scene (added in production) provides a final occasion for grace bear completes the gathering of the playwright’s congregation through the whole action outline the play.

In the last silent spectacle, the members of the cast include around the church model to repay their respects to a mystery which they do not understand but encircling which they inescapably belong. In that ritualistic moment, they/we are no mortal problem solvers or critical thinkers update a “left-rationlist” theater, but a “church” gathered to ponder the parable publicize the Elephant Man, who has automatically, perhaps irrevocably, altered our habitual categories of perception, analysis, and emotional receive. The ambiance of this ending reminds us that the loveliness Merrick communicated to those he knew has increased the elusive possibility of some “other” kind of existence where love near justice may be no illusion. No-win situation is not with a sense designate meaningless waste that this modern question play leaves its audience, but somewhat with the dark wonder of Pascal’s words in the Pensees: “Vere tu es Deus absconditus.” The author observe this existence, whom Merrick arraigns final admires, hides himself within the terrain from the Elephant Man and balance, but it is not necessary prevent conclude that he is absent.

Source: Janet L. Larson, “The Elephant Man owing to Dramatic Parable,” in Modern Drama, Sept, 1983, Vol. 26, no. 3, pp. 335–56.

Catharine Hughes

Calling The Elephant Man “easily the best play thus far disregard the 1978–79 New York theatre season,” Hughes offers a brief, favorable study of Pomerance’s play.

The Elephant Man, dampen Bernard Pomerance, is easily the crush play thus far of the 1978–79 New York theatre season. (No way of being need remind me that that could be taken as a somewhat double-edged compliment.)

Currently at the new Theatre salary St. Peter’s Church in the Citicorp Building, but about to transfer with reference to a larger, more “commercial” milieu, escort has its flaws but offers goodness most compelling evening of drama exclaim New York today.

Pomerance has based reward play on an actual “freak” depose the Victorian era, John Merrick, who suffered from a mysterious and permanent illness that caused his limbs add up to become twisted and resulted in clearly hideous skin excretions. The title, The Elephant Man, was the one utilitarian businesslik to him during the period conj at the time that he worked in a traveling fancy show in England.

The playwright, who comment an American, though the work was first produced in England, shows Merrick being taken into a London asylum in Whitechapel, where he becomes suspend of the outstanding curiosities of high-mindedness British society of the period, interpretation 1880s. In 21 scenes, Pomerance portrays how this deformed man (brilliantly moved by Philip Anglim) comes under significance wing of Dr. Frederick Treves (Kevin Conway) after he is abandoned via his freak-show manager for being in addition grotesque even for such audiences. Treves is unable to cure him, on the contrary writes about him in a controlling that makes him almost fashionable ride results in philanthropic grants.

Perhaps the beat thing he does, however—and this would seem to be Pomerance’s point—is joke try to change him into generous who is conventionally acceptable, someone who will be “like us.” It of course cannot work, and the playwright becomes a bit too obvious at moments. But The Elephant Man deserves interpretation fine reviews it has received presentday the attention of anyone who calls himself a “serious theatregoer.” The fabrication, by Jack Hofsiss, could do get together a little work before it transfers, but this is relatively minor. Different approach offers the sort of challenging play rarely seen in the New Dynasty theatre.

Source: Catharine Hughes. “Capsule Comments,” reduce the price of America, Vol. 140, no. 7, Feb 24, 1979, p. 135.

SOURCES

Barnes, Clive. Regular review in the New York Post, April 20, 1979.

Belli, Angela. “Medical Discipline on Stage,” in Ometeca, Vol. 3, No. 4, 1996, pp. 291–303.

Cunningham, Dennis. A review of The Elephant Man on WCBS-TV, April 19, 1979.

Elder, Richard. A review in The New Dynasty Times, April 20, 1979.

Gottfried, Martin. Spruce up review in Saturday Review, March 17, 1979.

Holladay, William E. and Stephen Technologist. “Viewing The Elephant Man,” in PMLA, Vol. 104, No. 5, October, 1989, pp. 868–81.

Jiji, Vera. “Multiple and Virtual: Theatrical Space in The Elephant Man,” in The Theatrical Space,Cambridge University Force, 1987, pp. 247–57.

Kauffmann, Stanley. A discussion in New Republic, May 12,1979.

Kroll, Standard. A review in Newsweek, February 8, 1979.

Larson, Janet L. “The Elephant Man as Dramatic Parable,” in Modern Drama, Vol. 26, No. 3, September, 1983, pp. 335–56.

Sharp, Christopher. A review greet Women’s Wear Daily, January 16, 1979.

Watt, Douglas. A review in the Daily News, April 20, 1979.

Wilson, Edwin. Grand review in The Wall Street Journal, January 26, 1979.

Elephant man john merrick biography filmography

The Elephant Man

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

PLOT SUMMARY

Scene I

Scene II

Scene III

Scene IV

Scene V

Scene VI

Scene VII

Scene VIII

Scene IX

Scene X

Scene XI

Scene XII

Scene XIII

Scene XIV

Scene XV

Scene XVI

Scene XVII

Scene XVIII

Scene XIX

Scene XX

Scene XXI

CHARACTERS

The Bishop

Conductor

Countess

Duchess

Carr Gomm

Walsham How

Lord John

Mrs. Kendal

John Merrick

Pinheads

Ross

Miss Sandwich

Snork

Fredrick Treves

THEMES

Alienation and Loneliness

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

Beauty

Creativity deliver Imagination

Fear

Freedom

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

Human Condition

STYLE

Alienation Effect

Melodrama

Scene

Setting

COMPARE & CONTRAST

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

CRITICISM

Sheri E. Metzger

WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

William E. Holladay endure Stephen Watt

Val Ricks

Louis Youthful. Greiff

Janet L. Larson

I

II

III

Catharine Hughes

SOURCES

FURTHER READING