"I am not an animal, I am a human being..."

While The Elephant Man was intruguing, it touched on a subject that has not gone away in literature. Deformity has long since played apart in many classics: "The Hunchback of Notre Dame", "The Phantom of the Opera" and the more modern movie, Mask. In all of these classics, the similarities between the deformed, are almost similar.

John Merrick is gentle as is Quasimodo in the Hunchback of Notre Dame. But unlike in the Phantom of the Opera, Erik becomes a man or murder and violence. Still, these creatures are treated with disrespect and can never attain the one true thing in which all "normal" human beings desire: love. For the deformed, the spectacle, the other--they never can full assimilate into society and are forever locked away in either, attics, bell towers, undergrounds or bedrooms. But yet, they are all masters of arts, be it in music, writing or crafting. They are all superhuman and beyond genius.

What does the deform actually do for the audience who views them? Do we become sympathetic with the other, or are we indifferent?

Taking into consideration of Edmund Burke's sublime, these "monsters" are the things in which are unseen. In being unseen, the human mind crafts these things with their imagination, and the thing which is unseen--is terrifying. Because of the uncertain, the darkness of the unseen, no pleasure can be derived from it. I take John Merrick (Elephant Man) and all his other deformed friends to be the unseen. A human mind can only imagine how ugly the creature in the bell towers of the Notre Dame are, as can only one imagine how gruesome the Phantom is in the undergrounds of the opera house. These people are hidden in darkness, away from society. Their existence can not be associated with pleasure, for they are unknown and crafted in the human mind, prior, as something monsterous.

As for Beauty, according to Burke, the taste is exclusive. But this idea that the monsters cannot find love, seems to distort Burke's beauty theory. If taste were exclusive, than why does no one romantically engage with any of these deformed men? It would seem that beauty is universal in this case. Deformity is a universal beauty in which everyone worldwide, seems to evade.