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Publication of the Modern Language Association October 1989 |
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William E. Holladay / Stephen Watt Viewing the Elephant Man Man stands amaz'd to see his deformity
JOHN WEBSTER is not entirely correct: men in particular have stood "amaz`d" at their own
deformity, as the production in 1979 of Bernard Pomerance's drama The Elephant Man exemplifies. Based on the life of John
Merrick, a famous Victorian sideshow performer hideously disfigured by
neurofibromatosis, the play garnered Tony Awards, Obies, the Drama Desk Award, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award as the best play of the
year; but its success in New York, and in London the previous year, can hardly be
attributed to the reputation of its little-known
author or to the drawing power of the actors in the
principal parts. (1) Moreover, some critics, an ungenerous minority, maintained that the play's merit
did not originate in Pomerance's superior or even competent craft. John Simon, for
example, found the structure imbalanced and accused Pomerance
of suspending dramatic action in the later scenes to
create a vehicle for anti-imperialist polemic.(2)
Pomerance indeed may be less skilled than Bertolt
Brecht or Edward Bond at designing engaging
drama that at the same time furthers an enterprise
of social education, although he is quite obviously
influenced by Brechtian theory. But even if Pomerance were Brecht, this metamorphosis would in
no way account for the contemporary celebrity of
John Merrick: American audiences have seldom
given box-office support to materialist drama like Bond's, Breclit's, or John
Arden's. Why then were
most reviewers and large audiences captivated by
the play?
David Lynch's 1980 film The Elephant Man (in
which Pomerance had no hand) increased viewers'
knowledge of Merrick and, like the play, enjoyed
both critical acclaim and considerable popular success. Although more filmgoers lined up to see The
Empire Strikes Back, The Blues Brothers, and
Smokey and the Bandit, Part Two, audiences were
moved by this skillful black-and-white melodrama re-creating the gritty environment of late Victorian factories and back-alley
peepshows.(3) Lynch effectively represents industrialized London by deftly adapting the cinematic style of his earlier cult success Eraserhead (1977), a style punctuated by montages of urban
mechanization, the constant hum of Like much commercial cinema today, melodrama was the most popular form of theatrical entertainment in Merrick's time. More than a source of pleasure, melodrama offered audiences steeped in its conventions a ready vehicle for interpreting Merrick's experiences. His deformities, much like Quasimodo's in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, made him an outcast, and the true story of his fortunes and misfortunes-his mistreatment,as a show freak and his "rescue" by the eminent young surgeon Frederick Treves-must have read like something one might see at Drury Lane or, more likely, at the Adelphi, famous in London for its melodrama. Quite literally "read," for in addition to the many newspaper accounts of his life, there were a number of reminiscences, since few who had known Merrick could resist writing about him after his death. Strikingly similar in their melodramatic proclivities, these commentators reveal the extent to which their theatrical viewing informed their memories of actual events. Such interpretations of "facts," as Raymond Williams points out, result from living in a "dramatized society," one in which habitual spectating leads to perceiving the events of daily life as mediated by dramatic conventions: "The specific conventions of a particular dramatization . . . are not abstract. They are profoundly worked out and reworked in our actual living relationships. They are our ways of seeing and knowing, which every day we put into practice..." (18). Treves's own memoir of Merrick, a typical example of the way history can be not merely dramatized but melodramatized, serves as the source for most modern representations of Merrick, including Ashley Montagu's book, Pomerance's play, and Lynch's film. What the doctor describes, both playwright and director dramatize, at times amplifying Treves's sentiment and extending the reductive polarizations of his melodramatic account. Like many contemporary filingoers, nineteenthcentury London audiences were not ashamed to weep at the sight of a villain persecuting a virtuous heroine; they were eager both to have their emotions engaged and to indulge in the sensationalism and spectacle that skillful melodramatists like Dion Boucicault could create. While there were many successful types of melodrama, some elements remained fairly constant. Suffering heroines and sadistic villains are a staple of the recipe, and, as Martha Vicinus observes, melodrama "always sides with the powerless," the noble heroine over the powerful but depraved adversary (130). Such villains seem wholly possessed by their desires and will do anything to satisfy them .(4) As a result, the heroine and the hero face myriad injustices, but no matter how "helpless and unfriended," the heroine remains virtuous throughout the play. Domestic melodrama routinely rewards such paragons: the hero rescues the heroine, and their adversaries receive appropriate retribution as a larger moral order triumphs over a malign society. The appeal of such an order is obvious, as Vicinus explains: "Much of the emotional effectiveness of melodrama comes from making the moral visible" in the stock characters and in the plot (137). Treves evidently knew this paradigm well. When his account and the play are juxtaposed with Michael Howell and Peter Ford's The True History of the Elephant Man, his melodramatizing tendencies become apparent. Howell and Ford's somewhat pleonastic title indicates their efforts to distinguish their factual work from several fictions about Merrick, many of them introduced by Treves. They uncover information that Treves either never knew or had forgotten by the time he wrote his memoir in 1923, information that concerns Merrick's life before he entered London Hospital in 1884, a period about which Treves was uncertain since Merrick preferred not to speak of it. Howell and Ford show that Treves exaggerated many events on the side of the emotional or the sensational, turning the true story into the engaging drama that Pomerance and Lynch re-create. For instance, Treves reproaches Merrick's mother for "basely" deserting her son when he was "so small that his earliest clear memories were of the workhouse to which he had been taken." Less melodramatically, Howell and Ford contend that Merrick's mother was quite kind to him until her death, when her son was nearly eleven. Merrick did enter the Leicester workhouse, but at age seventeen and of his own initiative. An analogous, yet more subtle, "dramatization" of Treves's consciousness produces his account of first seeing Merrick. At this time the doctor did not perceive a future patient or the results of a devastating disease, only a figure of abject misery: The showman pulled back the curtain and revealed a bent figure crouching on a stool and covered by a brown blanket. In front of it, on a tripod, was a large brick heated by a Bunsen burner. Over this the creature huddied to warm itself. It never moved when the curtain was drawn back. This figure was the embodiment of loneliness. Here Treves stresses Merrick's degradation and loneliness, later remarking that Merrick was "as secluded from the world as the Man in the Iron Mask," the popular Dumas character seen often on the Victorian stage. Treves's terms for Merrickthe "creature," the "thing," and "it"-betray the same mixture of pity and revulsion that Hugo's Quasimodo or Verdi's Rigoletto might inspire. Though Treves's feelings are more intense, they parallel those of a Victorian audience watching the numerous other deformed or handicapped characters who, according to Peter Brooks, illustrate melodrama's "repeated use of extreme physical conditions to represent extreme moral and emotional conditions," its portrayal of "invalids of various sorts whose very physical presence evokes the extremism and hyperbole" of the melodramatic world (56). It is in this world that Treves intellectually placed Merrick at first sight. The doctor also sensationalizes the closing of Merrick's show in Belgium (on the grounds of indecency) and the subsequent return to England, in part by casting Merrick's showman as a stage villain. Treves was not in Belgium to witness the events he depicts, so his penchant for the theatrical was only minimally constrained by the bare facts: "Merrick was thus no longer of value. He was no longer a source of profitable entertainment. . . . He must be got rid of. The elimination of Merrick was a simple matter... He could offer no resistance" (Montagu 19). Regardless of what actually happened, Treves transforms Merrick into the helpless victim suffering at the hands of the cruel manager.(5) Not surprisingly, given this transformation, Merrick is cast in a role usually reserved for a woman: Merrick as heroine. He is ideal for the part because of his innocence, helplessness, and suffering. The theatricalizing impulse manifests itself again in Treves's narration of Merrick's return to London, which replicates the conventional harrowing journey of the outcast woman: "[Merrick] would be harried by an eager mob as he hobbled along... He had but a few shillings in his pocket and nothing either to eat or drink on the way. A panic-dazed dog with a label on his collar would have received some sympathy and possibly some kindness. Merrick received none" (Montagu 19). This characterization mirrors the portrayal of hapless victims on the Victorian stage, as in W. G. Wills's Jane Shore (1875), in which the title character is marched, starving and hounded by onlookers, through the streets of Christmastime London.(6) History becomes melodrama, an exciting dreamworld of black-and- white morality, sensation and strong emotion. Pomerance and Lynch continue Treves` melodramatizing practices, though in differing ways and through re-creations of different moments in Treves's memoir. For example, while Lynch elects to omit the workhouse detail, he substitutes lingering shots of the squalor of Merrick's show life. Pomerance, however, further exaggerates Treves` fiction of the helpless child abandoned to life in the workhouse; he has Ross, Merrick's manager in the play, explain "Found him in a Leicester workhouse. His own ma put him there age of three. Couldn`t bear the sight, well you can see why" (4), To complete the image, Pomerance surpasses his source by writing Merrick a moving speech detailing the horrors of the workhouse: "They beat you there like a drum. Boom boom: scrape the floor white. Shine the pan, boom boom. It never ends. The floor is always dirty. The pan is always tarnished. There is nothing you can do . . . "(26-27). Perhaps even more today than in the 1890s, the very term workhouse signifies abuse, poverty, and despair - the bleak urban world into which the unfortunates of Victorian literature are frequently thrust. In George Moore's Esther Waters (1894), for example, the homeless title character wanders London streets carrying her infant son and pondering her destitution: "Why should such cruelty happen to her? The Workhouse, the Workhouse, the Workhouse! ... What had she done to deserve it? Above all, what had the poor innocent child done to deserve it?" (150). Like Treves before them, Pomerance and Lynch induce their audiences to ask these conventional questions of domestic melodrama and to experience the pathos of such deplorable injustice. For other incidents that Treves narrates melo dramatically-his first sight of Merrick and the manager's abandonment of Merrick on the Continent-Lynch builds on the emotion of the original. (Pomerance, by contrast, minimizes the emotionalism of Treves's initial encounter with Merrick, both by keeping the audience outside the show tent and by not giving the doctor any extreme response) Lynch emphasizes the immediate impact Merrick has on Treves by capturing the overwrought surgeon in a memorable close-up just as tears gather in his eyes and finally trickle down his face. Similarly, even though both Lynch and Pomerance retain Dr. Treves's interpretation of the events in Belgium-the play and film audiences alike see a profit-hungry huckster robbing his charge-Lynch again exceeds the sensationalism of his source. Lynch's scene begins on the grounds of a Belgian carnival. It is a cold and rainy day, with Bytes attracting a small crowd to see his "creature." Merrick, half naked and totally exhausted, answers his "owner's" command-the thumping on the stage of the same cane Bytes uses to beat him-to step forward from behind a curtain. He falls to the floor and, although Bytes jabs the cane into his back, Merrick cannot summon sufficient energy to stand. A disgusted crowd expresses its revulsion at the spectacle, thus infuriating Bytes. Later, inebriated and convinced that Merrick is being deliberately spiteful, Bytes evicts Merrick from the show wagon, imprisons him in an animal cage, and throws his few possessions out onto the ground. Lynch has represented this kind of cruelty before, tincturing it with sexual ambivalence as Bytes refers affectionately to Merrick as his "treasure"-the valued possession whom he brutalizes. It is only through the kindness of other sideshow performers that Merrick is released from his confinement and placed on a ship for England. Yet when the ship docks in England and Merrick takes a train to London, his troubles are still not over. He has escaped his sadistic proprietor only to be threatened by an angry mob at the Liverpool Street station. In this scene both Lynch and Pomerance surpass their source in working on their audiences' emotions. Typically the melodramatist supplies a hero to save the helpless heroine just when the situation looks bleakest. When Dr. Treves, in his memoir, depicts Merrick's attempts to get back to London, he places the "heroine" in such straits, but the doctor is modest, even perfunctory, in assigning the hero's role to himself: "I had some difficulty in making a way through the crowd, but there, on the floor in the corner, was Merrick. . . He seemed pleased to see me, but he was nearly done. The journey and want of food had reduced him to the last stage of exhaustion" (Montagu 20). Pomerance does not re-create the train journey; rather, he opens scene 5 with policemen barring a waiting room against an offstage mob pursuing Merrick. Ignoring the real Treves's modesty about his own actions, Pomerance at the end of the scene brings his young surgeon onstage with the stride of a hero rescuing an innocent victim: TREVES: What is going on here? Look at that mob, have you no sense of decency? I am Frederick Treves. This is my card. POLICEMAN: This poor wretch here had it. Arrived from Ostend. TREVES: Good Lord, Merrick? John Merrick? What has happened to you? MERRICK: Help me! (15) In Pomerance's scene, the starved Merrick has presumably been hounded by onlookers, though we never actually witness their inhumanity; but in Lynch's film we see an angry crowd pursue Merrick through the station and ultimately trap him in a public restroom. As they draw closer, Merrick stops them with a desperate plea: "I am not an animal! I am not an animal! I am a human being!" The crowd backs away momentarily as several policemen come to Merrick's defense and, in the next scene, return him to Treves. Thus, both Pomerance and Lypch, in their different ways, build effective drama out of an incident that Treves invests with only minimal emotion. In both play and film, this rescue scene concludes with a stage picture analogous to the "big curtain" tableaux vivants of Victorian melodrama, and from then on Merrick's fortunes improve. As in any domestic melodrama in which the helpless woman in dire circumstances finds a home, Merrick finds his in Treves's hospital. Yet for Pomerance there remained one further authorial chore: to complete Merrick's characterization as virginal heroine by establishing his sexual innocence. Treves's account suggests this role by describing Merrick as a woman-and Pomerance supplies a test of Merrick`spurity to perfect the fiction his Victorian predecessor began. Lynch, significantly we think, chooses instead to develop Merrick's innocence as a child, skipping over the thornier issue of his sexuality. Both play and film accumulate evidence for their divergent representations in their early scenes. As the real Treves had done in a lecture to the Pathological Society of London, Lynch's Treves alludes briefly to Merrick's genitals, commenting on their normalcy. Though Pomerance appropriates materiaI from the same lecture, he handles the issue very differently, projecting our curiosity about Merrick's sexuality onto Mrs. Kendal, who receives Treves's permission to ask an indiscreet question: "I could not but help noticing from the photographs thatwell-of the unafflicted parts-ah, how shall I put 019 (30). This inquiry anticipates scene 14, which Merrick opens by noting that, since the prince and the Irishman (Charles Stewart Parnell) keep mistresses, he has "concluded" that he should acquire one as well. Admittedly, some sexual desire motivates this proclamation, but so too does his am- ition to conform socially: the most powerful men in society have mistresses; Treves compels him to learn the ways of this society; and the conclusion is obvious-a Victorian gentleman requires the company of a lady. Never having seen a woman's nude body, Merrick eagerly accepts Mrs. Kendal's offer in this scene to allow him to survey hers. But there is, finally, little evidence of desire in this incident: in a spirit of adventure or kindness, she disrobes so that women for him will no longer be, to borrow Treves's expression, "creatures of his imagination." His innocent response to her nakedness-"It is the most beautiful sight 1 have ever seen"-is supportive of her earlier opinion: Merrick is "gentle, almost feminine." In both the historical account and the play, Treves uses the same metaphor of femininity in his lecture when he compares Merrick's arms: the badly deformed, almost "shapeless" and "useless" right arm and his hand "like a fin or paddle" contrast with the "anomalous" left arm, a "delicately shaped limb covered with fine skin and provided with a beautiful hand which any woman might have envied" (6). In an elision of Treves's actual lecture, Lynch's character merely remarks, "And his left arm is entirely normal, as you can see." This small deviation from Treves's account suggests Lynch's decision to avoid the ferninization of Merrick that both the historical Treves and Pomerance develop. To be sure, Lynch borrows from Treves's memoir and reproduces minor details; the film's motif of burning gas jets, for instance, might be attributed to Treves's recollection of his first view of Merrick, which was illuminated "by the faint blue light of the gas jet" (Montagu 14). But while Lynch passes over the feminine imagery in Treves's account, Pomerance makes good use of it. In the play, Mrs. Kendal. sees Merrick as womanlike and supplies him with toilet articles so that he might "make himself" at the mirror "as I make me" (39). In this regard, Pomerance's characters follow their historical models, as Madge Kendal recalls in her autobiography: "Sir Frederick Treves states that his [Merrick's] troubles ennobled him and 'made him as gentle, affectionate, loveable, and amiable as a happy woman` (282). Here Merrick's feminine identity is based on prevalent idealizations of Victorian women and girls: the mid-Victorian "cult of dornesticity" configured women as innocent, pure, gentle, and self-sacrificing"-and submissive, totally dependent on men (Gorharn 6). All these adjectives describe Merrick, who is gentle, pure, domestic, and dependent on Treves. True to the melodramatic convention that involves the "violation and spoliation of the space of innocence" (Brooks 30), scene 14 depicts Treves interrupting the meeting between Merrick and Mrs. Kendal and repeating the words he had uttered when Merrick was surrounded by the hostile mob: "What is going on here? . . . Have you no sense of decency?" (49-50). Kendal's explanation-"For a moment, Paradise, Freddie" (50)-underscores the analogy between Merrick's room and Eden, the "enclosed garden, the space of innocence, surrounded by walls," invaded, in Brooks's words, by a "villain, the troubler of innocence" (29). This encounter therefore does not undermine Pomerance's depiction of Merrick's innocence; on the contrary, it communicates Merrick's virtue more resonantly by suddenly transforming Treves from hero into villain. Serving as a foil here to his morally superior patient, Treves is unable to separate, as Merrick can, nudity from sexuality. Mrs. Kendal's act provides a sufficient test of Merrick's character, and his purity remains intact. As treated in all three versions-Treves's, Pomerance's, and Lynch's-Merrick's life assumes the familiar narrative shape of a domestic melodrama. An innocent "woman" has been eking out a precarious living under the hungry eye of an unscrupulous landlord, mortgage holder, or employer. Finally the day arrives when, unable to pay her rent or otherwise satisfy a "lawful" indebtedness, she is turned out into the streets, penniless, soon to face starvation. Although suffering untold agonies as a social outcast, she maintains her honor, even when it is tested in the most severe of environments. Eventually, at the brink of destruction, a strong and equally untainted champion discovers her distress. Evil is crushed, virtue is rewarded, and the heroine becomes an inspiration to all who know hen Change the heroine to John Merrick, and we recognize one of the appeals of viewing The Elephant Man: the appeal of melodrama. What was in Treves's memoir the product of a powerful cultural construct becomes in Pomerance's play and Lynch's film a successful dramatic strategy. II Scene 14 in Pomerance's play, in which Treves interrupts and condemns Mrs. Kendal's exhibition of herself to Merrick, is provocative for reasons other than its association of Merrick with melodramatic heroines. For one thing, it is initiated by a reversal of gender roles: a woman looking at photographs of a naked man, a situation that disrupts the established patriarchal system of seeing and being seen.' Or, as Mary Ann Doane has put it, the reason "men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses" is that "there is always a certain excessiveness, a difficulty with women who appropriate the gaze, who insist upon looking" (83). Following Laura Mulvey's theorizing, Doane and E. Ann Kaplan regard Western culture as "deeply committed to myths of demarcated sex differences, called 'masculine' and 'feminine,' which in turn revolve first on a complex gaze apparatus and second on dominance/submission patterns" (Kaplan 29). In theories of this apparatus, the gaze is most often posited as male and dominant; the object of the gaze female and submissive.' Moreover, as Patricia Mellencamp emphasizes, "More than other senses, the eye objectifies and masters" (145). Such theories of spectation can be enormously helpful in assessing modern audiences' fascination with Merrick and his story, because Pomerance and Lynch not only recognize the kinds of gender demarcation Kaplan mentions but also, through Merrick's powerlessness as a sideshow exhibit, reverse such constructions of maleness and femaleness. These and other spectatorial pleasures are the subject of what follows. Lynch's introductory sequences in The Elephant Man intimate his awareness of what Freud posits as one motive for scopophilia: the pleasure to be derived from seeing private, even forbidden things. Few directors, other than Alfred Hitchcock or perhaps Brian DePalma, understand this desire so well as Lynch does. The initial scenes signal the audience's eventual viewing of a horrible reality just beneath the surface of society. After a thematically rich opening montage, the first London sequence takes place on a crowded circus ground where Treves, who at this point does not know Merrick, wanders toward a sign upon which the camera focuses: "FREAKS." Treves follows a policeman through an opening marked "No Entry," past several exhibits cased in glass and advertised as "The Fruit of Original Sin," through yet another opening marked "No Entry," and finally along a labyrinthine passageway. Past more exhibits and customers, at the very back of the show tent, reside Bytes and Merrick. These shots mark the trail to Merrick with transgressions of natural and moral law ("Original Sin"): deformed sideshow performers are the products not of disease but of some moral lapse, some "sin." They are housed, consequently, on the periphery of the circus grounds, away from the center of activity. Seeing Merrick is also illegal in the fictional space of the movie; as Treves approaches Merrick's tent, the police close the exhibition (as they did in November 1884). The cinematic metaphor here suggests that what we are about to see, Merrick himself, lies on the margins of, or deep within, late Victorian culture. The prospect is horrible, yet enticing. In this scene, further, j Lynch not only thwarts Treves's desire to view Merrick but also delays satisfying the audience's similar curiosity. The film thus promises a very special gaze and then withholds fulfillment of the proniise, piquing viewers' interest in the spectacle. The topography of the opening, with its winding passageways leading to Merrick's secluded tent, is in reinforcing the expectation of a forbiddencrucial spectacle, so crucial in fact that Lynch repeats it for 1 Treves's second visit to Merrick. A boy appears at the hospital to inform Treves of Merrick's new location, one hidden from the eyes of the authorities. Treves moves down several alleys, past nurnerous laborers and steaming machines to a grimy, out-of- the-way room. There Bytes meets him and collects a fee, opens a locked door, and guides Treves down several dark hallways to Merrick. As the showman opens the darkened room, the audience catches a shadowy glimpse of Merrick before the camera cuts to an appalled Treves, whose eyes well up with tears. The sight of Merrick is still withheld when Merrick is brought to the hospital for Treves's lecture to the Pathological Society of London. Lynch places the camera behind a screen, revealing Merrick only in silhouette. The first full view of Merrick comes when he is back at the hospital after Bytes flogs him. The manager has had time, with his show closed by the police and his valuable commodity on loan to Treves, to drink himself into a fury, and when Merrick is returned Bytes inflicts such a severe beating that Treves must be recalled to minister to Merrick. The visual motif of remote quarters and darkened passageways is seldom repeated, and soon after Treves returns Merrick to the hospital, viewers are afforded the long, clear look of him they want. Treves has accomplished what both sides of the present feminist debate on pornography can claim as a victory: he has taken something once relegated to the margins of society and exposed it to the bright light of the central arena.9 Lynch's analogous articulation of this source of cinematic pleasure in a later film, Blue Velvet, seems to corroborate our reading of the cinematic style of The Elephant Man. A disturbing, at times horrific, parody of life in an idealized American small town, Blue Velvet presents an underlying oedipal drama with shocking clarity. The screenplay features the interactions of Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle Maclachlan), a college student; Sandy Williams (Laura Dern), a beautiful high school girl; and Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rosellini), a nightclub singer whose husband and son have been kidnapped by a local criminal, Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper). Like The Elephant Man, the film begins by foreshadowing forbidden sights. In the early scenes Lynch embeds two clues, one visual and one verbal, to the sinister events to follow. The opening montage is composed of idyllic shots of small-town life: blue kies, white picket fences, and red roses; children rossing the streets aided by safety guards; and an Merly man watering his lawn while his wife matches a murder mystery on television. 10 When the man, Jeffrey's father, falls from an apparent stroke, however, the camera follows him to the ground and then moves below, where insects battle ferociously. The long take on this subterranean warfare both undercuts the representation of Lumberton, USA, as an ideal community and suggests what is to come: under the surface, just below our normal field of vision, violence resides. Moments later, as Jeffrey takes a shortcut home through a field, he finds a severed ear, which we later learn Frank removed from Dorothy's husband. Jeffrey goes to the police station and explains his discovery: "Coming home through the field, behind our neighborhood, there behind Vista, I, uh, found an ear." Like the opening montage, Jeffrey's statement intimates a penetration of the familiar vista, taking us both beneath and behind it. Viewers are curious about what they will find, and Lynch does not disappoint them.In addition to the pleasure derived from seeing the private and forbidden, other pleasures are relevant to viewing Lynch's film, pleasures identified by feminist inquiry into cinematic spectation. One of these relates to what Kaplan regards as the oedipal content of much melodrama; another concerns domestic melodrama's construction of a female spectator. Appropriating Peter Brooks's notion that melodrama is concerned "explicitly" with "Oedipal issues," as intimated by characters' assumptions of the "primary psychic roles of Father, Mother, Child," Kaplan argues, following Doane's lead, that melodrama constructs a female spectator who participates in "what is essentially a masochistic fantasy" (25, 28). This participation, one assumes, is effected by the audience's identification with virtue rather than with rapine, with the suffering heroine, not the villain. And in melodrama this virtue is generally rewarded, thereby reinforcing and valorizing the heroine's masochism. The gratification of female spectatorship is available to the audiences of both Lynch's film and Pomerance's play even though each lends itself to a different psychoanalytic reading. The scene of Mrs. Kendal's banishment in the play, for example, reenacts the oedipal situation, with some interesting variations: Treves, the figure of the law, plays the punishing father, but Mrs. Kendal has the role of transgressing son, with Merrick portraying the virtuous wife-possession. By contrast, the opening montage of the film suggests a somewhat different psychoanalytic interpretation, illuminating the importance of the preoedipal mother-son relationship in Merrick's story. The first shot of the film, a tight close-up of a woman's eyes, evolves into a slow downward shot of her nose and mouth. As the camera pulls away, we see that the woman's face is actually a framed photograph of Merrick's mother. The sequence continues with shots of elephants and of Merrick's mother lying on the ground, screaming an inaudible scream, and writhing in pain. The next shot is of a billowing cloud from which a baby's cry is heard: the "elephant man" is born. In a later sequence, Bytes, in his capacity as barker for Merrick's show, perpetuates the same mythology of Merrick's origin: on an "uncharted African isle," Merrick's mother was "struck down in the fourth month of her maternal condition by an elephant, a wild elephant." Throughout the film, Merrick gazes at his mother's photograph, displays it proudly to both Kendal and Treves's wife, and finally returns to his mother in death. The film closes with her face in the heavens, welcoming her son back to her and promising him eternity: "Nothing ever dies."" His submissiveness has finally been rewarded and if we have identified at all with his gentleness, his humanity, and his passivity, the "female" construction of the spectator is completed. While the notion of a female spectator may explain one pleasure of viewing both film and play, the story of the "elephant man" told by Lynch and Pomerance also reveals the more typical operation of the gaze: the construction of a dominant male spectator observing and thereby controlling a submissive feminine object. Lynch develops the issue of voyeurism with rare clarity in Blue Velvet, a development related to this source of pleasure in The Elephant Man. Jeffrey, obsessed with discovering the mystery behind the severed ear, gains access to Dorothy's apartment and conceals himself in a closet. From here, he watches Dorothy undress until she discovers him and forces him to strip, in a moment that reverses the dynamics of most cinematic spectation. Before she can accomplish a greater reverW-raping him at knife point-Frank is heard at the door, and Jeffrey is compelled to return to the closet. Booth, we now learn, is keeping Dorothy for himself so that she can play "Mommy" to his domineering "baby"-his terms, not ours-a practice that involves not only sexual intercourse but also physical abuse and the fetishistic use of a piece of blue velvet. Integral to this practice is Frank's demand to "see it"-Dorothy's genitals-and his insistence that during the ritual she not look at him. This sadistic oedipal drama plays itself out with Jeffrey watching and Dorothy excluded from the spectation.11 While the outrageousness of the scene, combined with Lynch's frequent use of parodic devices, distances the audience somewhat, the male empowerment of the viewer remains a predictable source of cinematic pleasure in Blue Velvet. This more common variety of spectating seems integral to Merrick's story, in all its versions, and involves the viewing of both sideshow freaks and scenes of explicit sexual activity: a kind of pornographic gaze. This gaze replicates one pleasure of the cinema, as Blue Velvet demonstrates: the "pleasure of using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight" (Mulvey 10). In the typical pornographic representation, women, "for all the graphic display of their body parts, are the excluded term" (Elmer 48). Merrick, as the denuded object of a stranger's gaze, performs a role usually relegated to women. In Victorian London, Lynch and Pomerance imply, the businesses of pornography and the exhibition of "freaks" often merged, for "natural oddities" like Merrick and scenes of sexual intimacy were commonly displayed together. Proprietors of attractions like Merrick also often managed sex shows, as Lynch's Bytes hints to Treves: "I move in the proper circles for this type of thing. In fact, anything at all, if you take my meaning. " Legal history confirms the relation between these two entertainments. George Hitchcock, an associate of Tom Norman, Merrick's real manager, was tried with John Saunders on several counts of indecency (The Queen v. Saunders and Another [Hitcheock]). In May of 1875, Hitchcock and Saunders operated a show tent divided into two peepshows outside the Epsom Downs racecourse. In one booth, Hitchcock presented two 'fat ladies"; in the other, a black husband and wife appeared "naked" to "perform" (Law Reports 13). What is the relation between the viewing of obese women-or of John Merrick-and the viewing of sexual performance? For Leslie Fiedler the viewing of "freaks" provokes sexual desire: "All freaks are perceived to one degree or another as erotic. . . . They induce a temptation to go beyond looking to knowing in the full carnal sense the ultimate other' (137). Whether or not we agree with Fiedler's analysis, clearly Lynch does-and by extension so does the great body of film theory that locates one pleasure of the cinema in voyeurism and dominance. In Lynch's film, when the porter brings a crowd of onlookers to the hospital to see Merrick, the camera captures and returns to a man who, while he forces two young women to look at and even kiss Merrick, fondles and licks them in perverse sexual arousal. Because Victorian sideshow and sex-act performers were often taken from one or another of England's colonial possessions, this specular dornination is not only physical, in that the objects of the gaze are often naked and certainly defenseless, but also ideological, since they are denigrated as socially or racially inferior-another reason for the mythologies of Merrick's birth in Africa. Pomerance understands the colonial aspect of such viewing and like other contemporary dramatists-Caryl Churchill, Margaretta D'Arcy and John Arden, and David Hare, for instance-probes the racial and sexual dimensions of British imperialism, both Victorian and modern." The emphasis in Pomerance's play follows that of much recent cultural and i historical criticism as well. As Abdul R. JanMohamed points out, "the imperialist configures the colonial realm" as "irremediably different," as a world at the boundaries of civilization" that is therefore "uncontrollable, chaotic, unattainable, and ultimately evil" (65, 64). For Sander L. Gilman, Victorian medicine and iconographic convention joined in representing sexuality as perhaps the most "incontrollable" and "animallike" difference of the colonial black, as "scientific" studies of exaggerated genitalia complemented paintings of "The Hottentot Venus" and of white prostitutes with their cornplicitous black servants. Pomerance's Treves betrays a common Victorian method of confronting "otherness" in his seemingly innocuous first question to Ross concerning Merrick: "Is he foreign?" (4). The "pinheads" exhibited with Merrick in the play are advertised as imports from the Congo, "the land of darkness," and Nurse Sandwich remarks later that in Ceylon and on the Niger she has treated horrible diseases, "dreadful scourges quite unknown to our more civilized climes" (17). And if deformity and bestial sexual appetite can be ascribed to the colonized, so too can defective cognition, as a policeman in The Elephant Man assumes: "People who think right don't look like that then, do they?" (14). Thus, in exhibiting figures like Merrick, the late Victorian peepshow produced a pornographic view based on a double dominance: mastery through gender and the supremacy of imperialism. More so than Lynch's film, Pomerance's drama illuminates both levels of subjection. Much of Merrick's intrigue, therefore, is explained by feminist theories of cinematic spectatorship, based as they are on a pattern of dominance and submission.14 It is possible, as Pomerance shows, to go beyond the gender distinctions inherent in such theories and apply this dynamic to the dominance and submission of colonialism. On the one hand, both film and play empower viewers to occupy a superior position and to enter imperiously the forbidden territory they want to see. On the other hand, as the powerless Merrick attains his moral victory-which, in Lynch's film, crucially involves going to the theater as a spectator, acquiring the specular power that he had been deniedviewers also identify with him and in so doing may occupy his "feminine" space of masochism. In short, Pomerance's play and Lynch's film embrace several levels of spectating and provide several pleasures. Of special interest is the relation between the pornographic and the melodramatic, both of which foreground women and involve the imposition of sexual or other demands by the powerful on the powerless. Like pornography, the cinema and melodrama empower the viewer even as they commodify the viewed object, marking her submission. III Of course, Lynch's The Elephant Man offers more than the emotional satisfactions of domestic melodrama and the voyeuristic pleasure of the cinema. Through the film's narrative content and cinematic style, Lynch advances sometimes indirect and sometimes more overt criticism of industrial conditions and class inequities in late Victorian England. In the film's first sequence at London Hospital, for instance, Treves is completing an ugly operation on what is presumably a factory worker. The dialogue specifies the cause of the patient's mutilation-unsafe industrial practices-as Treves bemoans, "We're seeing a lot more of these machine accidents. . Abominable things, these machines. . . . Despite such observations and the shots of sweating laborers and steaming machines, Lynch elects for the most part to focus on personal rather than political issues. Here he differs from Pomerance, to whom we now turn. Again, the differing narrative structures of the film and play account for Pomerance's more substantial critique: while Lynch's audience is emotionally engaged in Merrick's plight, Pomerance's audience is more detached, in part because the issue of Merrick's safety is resolved early in the play. Treves's movement to center stage serves as a catalyst not only for his self-reflection but for the viewers' as well. When Treves begins to express doubts about both modern science and the society that this science serves, he realizes one of the chief ends of the materialist theater: the creation of a moral self-consciousness, what Edward Bond refers to as a 'Mable knowledge of the self in relation to practical involvement in the world" (x). Although Treves earns this knowledge slowly and painfully, his newly acquired insight may provide the greatest intellectual satisfaction for the play's audience. Beginning in scene 16 when Treves tries to explain his banishment of Mrs. Kendal, continuing through his soul-searching in the dream sequence of scenes 17 and 18, and concluding with his plaintive "Help me" in scene 19, the dramatic focus of Pomerance's play shifts from Merrick to Treves. Recently, Franco Moretti has compared what he calls a "novelistic event"-one that "to achieve meaning" requires the"fundamentally unchallenged stability of everyday life and ordinary administration" - with a "tragic event" of personal crisis. The differences between the novelistic and the tragic define Treves's crisis of faith: The very fissures and chasms which dismantle such stability [the comforting repetitions of everyday life] constitute the most typical instances of the tragic event, whose meaning lies in being a unique turning-point, a sudden illumination after which one's previous existence-one's novelistic existence-appears irredeemably false. This "moment of truth" precipitates an unveiling of social structure or of fetishization, a "dereification of everyday life" and a consequent repositioning toward society. Merrick finally causes Treves's crisis of faith, his moment of social truth, in Pomerance's play. Following Treves's admission that "perhaps [he] was wrong" to expel Mrs. Kendal (57), his dream exposes his entrapment within Victorian class structure. In the dream Treves plays Merrick and Merrick plays an inquisitive doctor who requests Carr Gomm's permission to examine Gomm's "bloody donkey." Gomm, the governor of London Hospital cast in Ross's role as showman, is reluctant to surrender Treves, a "mainstay of our institution": "He is very valuable. We have invested a great deal in him. He is personal surgeon to the Prince of Wales" (59). Nevertheless, Treves is a negotiable commodity in this scene, since he is also a valuable specimen to "Doctor" Merrick. A "gentleman and a good man," as Gomm promotes him, Treves is "exemplary for study," a characterless representative of his social class devoid of any individuality that might skew results. The dream attempts to redress the impoverishment of thought and experience Treves has suffered as a "mainstay" of the institution. Treves's evolving understanding also allows him insight into science's co-optation by class and colonial domination. That is, Pomerance is especially concerned about seeing, about what viewing Merrick entails and calls into question. In fact, the play contains critiques of several levels of viewing; the most obvious concern is the authority science and medicine grant for presumably value-free objective viewing. The anatomy theater of the London Hospital in scene 3 authorizes scientific viewing, an authority not shared by the storefront in which Merrick is displayed. Yet when Treves sees Mrs. Kendal expose herself to Merrick, she is condemned as having "no sense of decency." Unfamiliar with social legislation concerning appropriate viewing, Merrick asks about Treves's operation on a patient for a "woman's thing": "Did you see her? Naked? . . . Is it okay to see them naked if you cut them up afterwards?" (56). Treves replies that his occupation as a surgeon legitimizes this viewing: "That is science. . . . Science is a different thing. This woman came to me to be. 1 mean, it is not, well, love, you know" (56). But Merrick does not "know" that his seeing Mrs. Kendal is a "different thing" (45) from Treves's examining his female patients.
Immediately after the dream ends, the relation between science and identity emerges in Treves's conversation with Bishop How. Building on the implication of his dream, Treves compares gardening with a science that has "pruned, cropped, pollarded, and somewhat stupefied" the human subject: "Is that all we know how to finally do with-whatever? Nature? Is it? Rob it? No, not really, not nature I mean. Ourselves really. Myself really. Robbed, that is. . . . I. I. I. I" (66). In his inarticulateness, Treves realizes that the mastery of nature-which, along with the mastery of human beings, has always been an aim of both science and civilization-exacts a blinding cost on subjectivity. His friendship with Merrick has rekindled Treves's self-consciousness, eroding in the process his belief in science as a phenomenon separable from human society (and in himself as excluded from human participation). His "Help me" echoes Merrick's cry at the train station, and the parallel indicates the depth of Treves's doubts. Affected by the dream and his subsequent questioning of his relationship with Merrick, Treves moves from an incapacity for "selfcritical speech," thus an inability to "change" (61), to "despair in fact" (65). The "scientist in an age of science" is now inconsolable, and the daily practice of his vocation offers no relief.. "Science, observation, practice, deduction, having led me to these conclusions, can no longer serve as consolation. I apparently see things others don't" (65). In his confession, Treves evinces a newly formed political vision of the ways in which society has determined his scientific labors: "I have so little time . . . to keep up with my work. Work being twenty-year-old women who look an abused fifty with worn-outedness; young men with appalling industrial conditions I turn out as soon as possible to return to their labors" (65). He recognizes that inhumane labor conditions form the basis of not only his clinical practice but also his research, which includes a pamphlet on the dangers of wearing corsets. Treves approaches a "totalizing" recognition of his position in London society. At the instant that Treves, at the climax of his despair, begs Bishop How for help, Merrick pronounces, in Christlike fashion, "It is done" (66). While the "it" refers to Merrick's completion of his model of Saint Phillip's Church, his "Consummaturn est" also proclaims Treves's redemption. The salvation, though, is not religious but political, for Treves has already rejected the "mere consolation" of "Christ's church" (65). What is "done" is the opening of Treves's eyes, the maturing of his dialectical awareness of his participation in society-a realization that, for Fredric Jameson, defines selfconsciousness: For the Marxist dialectic . . . the self-consciousness aimed at is the awareness of the thinker's position in society and in history itself, and of the limits imposed on this awareness by his class position-in short of the ideological and situational nature of all thought and of the initial invention of the problems themselves. (340)Like Treves, the play's spectators have been brought to interrogate the interconnections between Merrick's exploitation and the society in which they live If they experience only a small part of the insight Treves achieves, then they have participated in-and profited from-the critical pleasure of the political theater. IV So, regardless of John Webster's observation, men do stand amazed to see their own deformity. But why? What was it about Merrick that amazed Victorians and continues to attract contemporary audiences? One answer involves the pleasure derived from seeing the secret or the forbidden, from traveling Lynch's dark alleys. Another originates in the voyeuristic pleasures of sideshows and pornography. But if pornography allows the viewer to objectify and dominate the viewed, so too does melodrama. Both foreground issues of power and powerlessness, of possession and dispossession, of sadism and masochism. In addition to experiencing dominance, this "male" prerogative, spectators who identify with Merrick and take pleasure in the poetic justice of his victory are also psychically endorsing his submission, his "female" qualities. In short, in both Lynch's film and Pomerance's play, Merrick provides viewers with opportunities to play both roles, to occupy both positions. To these private, libidinal satisfactions, Pomerance adds an intellectually gratifying criticism of Victorian society and its claim to moral ascendancy, and he does so in a generic vehicle that encourages his spectators, those "other Victorians," to contemplate their own cultural superiority. In transforming Victorian culture into a hypocritical, somewhat barbaric counterpart of today's highly evolved and sophisticated society (Progress with a capital P is really now, was never then), Pomerance also implicates modern audiences in the smugness they despise in his Victorians. Not only have they enjoyed a melodrama and identified with the position of the advanced culture-much like the Victorians who felt superior to Britain's colonial peoples-they have paid to see a "freak show." Indeed, their participation in the pornography exceeds the Victorians' in that their gaze actually transforms an actor into a freak. Pomerance forces such viewing by insisting that the role of Merrick be played without maketip; when Philip Anglim contorts himself before the spectators' eyes, the metamorphosis is as much theirs as his. Even more so than Treves, and for reasons not nearly so selfless, the audience is setting Merrick up for private viewing." Indiana University Bloomington
Notes 1 Merrick suffered from an extreme enlargement of the skull, curvature of the spine, a withered right arm, a hip disease that left him lame, and chronic bronchitis. In addition, several thick folds of skin hung from his body, most of which was covered by disfiguring growths. His doctor, Frederick Treves, speculated that it was these hideous skin abnormalities that gave Merrick the name'Tlephant Man." See Howell and Ford 45-54. Merrick was played by Philip Anglim in New York and by David Schofield in London, Treves by Kevin Conway in New York and by David Allistair in London. 2 Simon complains that in the second act of the production (after Pomerance's scene 10), "things fly apart; neither the center nor the periphery can hold" (403). 3 In fact, Lynch's film was not among the year's top boxoffice successes in 1980, though it opened in September and by December ranked fourth in Variety's weekly list of top gross earners. It also became the fourth-largest-grossing film ever released in Japan (Hoberman and Rosenbaum 250). 4 Gay contends that while actors in pornographic fictions are "presumably engaged in the most liberated play . . . they appear to be prisoners of some unappeasable appetite, less than natural and less than human at the same time" (369). The same point might be made of villains in melodrama. 5 When TReves's memoir appeared, Tom Norman was stung into writing a letter to the Times asserting that he always had Merrick's best interests at heart, that their arrangement was profitable for all concerned, and that it allowed Merrick a far better life than he might otherwise have expected. See Howell and Ford 73-80. 6 Wills's Jane Shore is a particularly striking example of the skillful melodramatist's ability to move audiences; even Bernard Shaw, who opposed the melodramatic and spectacular excesses 'of late Victorian theater, admitted to weeping at a performance of Wills's Olivia, an adaptation of Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield. See Shaw 3: 35. 7 See Doane 77-82 for a discussion of "blockages in conceptualisation" of a feminine spectator. One difficulty is that such a reversal, a female appropriation of the gaze for her own pleasure, is often 1ocked within the same logic" or "system of ing sexual difference with a subject/object dichotomy" (77). Similarly, Kaplan asks, "[W]hen women are in the dominant P0. sition, are they in the masculine position?" (28). See Studlar for an "alternative model" of spectating in,' which the pleasure is masochistic rather than male and sadistic. 9 Eliner discusses this repositioning of pornography, ite removal from a juridically defined marginal place to the center of society (53-56). 10 The television in this sequence functions ironically, given Lynch's demystification of life in a small town. The notion that' murder is committed only in the distance of a television progrM is undercut by the persistent message in Blue Velvet that sucwthings happen in one's own neighborhood.
11
This ending resembles that of Lynch's surrealistic Eraselc
head, in which, after several unsuccessful relationships
women, Henry Spencer is united with the Lady in the Radiator,
about whom he has dreamed. This union occurs in the bright
white light of heaven and involves absolute possession of the
other, as the lady's song confirms:
Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination. 1976. New York: Columbia UP, 1984. Churchill, Caryl. Cloud 9. Rev. ed. New York: Methuen, 1984.D'Arcy, Margaretta, and John Arden. Vandaleur's Folly. London: Eyre Methuen, 1981. Doane, Mary Ann. "Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator." Screen 23.3-4 (1982): 74-87. Dworkin, Andrea. Pornography. Men Possessing Women. New York: Perigree, 1979. Elmer, Jonathan. "The Exciting Conflict: The Rhetoric of Pornography and Anti-pornography." Cultural Critique 8 (Winter 1987-88): 45-77. . Fiedler, Leslie. Freaks. New York: Simon, 1978.Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Random, 1973. Gay, Peter. Education of the Senses. New York: Oxford UP, 1984.Gilman, Sander L. "Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late NineteenthCentury Art, Medicine, and Literature." Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 204-42. Gorham, Deborah. The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982. Hampton, Christopher. Savages. London: Faber, 1974.Hoberman, L, and Jonathan Rosenbaum. Midnight Movies. New York: Harper, 1983. Howell, Michael, and Peter Ford. The 7~ue History of the Elephant Man. London: Allison, 1980. Jameson, Fredric, Marxism and Form. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971. JanMohamed, Abdul R.'The Economy of Manichean Allegory: TheTunction of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature. " Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 59-87. Kaplan, E. Ann. Women and the Film: Both Sides of the Camera. New York: Methuen, 1983. Kendal, Madge Dame Madge Renda4 by Herself London: Murray, 1933. Lynch, David, writ. and dir. Blue Velvet. DeLaurentis, 1986.-, dir. The Elephant Man. Screenplay by Christopher DeVore, Eric Bergren, and David Lynch. Paramount, 1980. -, dir., writ., and prod. Eraserhead. Libra, 1977.Mellencamp, Patricia. "Seeing Is Believing: Baudrillard and Blau. " Theatre Journal 37 (1985): 141-54. Montagu, Ashley. The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity. New York: Outerbridge, 1971. Moore, George. Esther Waters. Chicago: Academy, 1979.Moretti, Franco. "The Moment of Truth."New Left Review 154 (1986): 39-48. Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema." Screen 16.3 (1975): 6-18. Pomerance, Bernard. The Elephant Man. New York: Grove, 1979.
Queen v. Saunders and Another [Hitchcock]. Law Reportsfor the Year 1876. London: Edward Bret, 1876. 11-14. Shaw, Bernard. Our Theatres in the Nineties. 3 vols. London: Constable, 1932. Simon, John. "The Elephant Man." Hudson Review 32 (1979): 403-10. Studlar, Gaylyn. "Masochism and the Perverse Pleasures of the Cinema." Quarterly Review of Film Studies 9 (1984): 267-82. Vicinus, Martha. -Helpless and UnfriendeX: NineteenthCentury Domestic Melodrama." New Literary History 13 (1981): 127-43. Webster, John. The Duchess of Malft. Ed. John Russell Brown. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1964. Williams, Raymond. Writing in Society. London: Verso, 1983.Wills, W. G. Jane Shore. BL Addit. ms. 53146 Q. Lord Chamberlain's Collection, Manuscript Div., British Library, London.
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