Eternal Despair
Recruit
★★★★
- Joined
- Jan 17, 2024
- Posts
- 395
5 ft 2 in (157 cm)
This endeavour was unsuccessful because Merrick's [The Elephant Man's] facial deformities rendered his speech increasingly unintelligible, and prospective customers reacted with horror to his physical appearance
Treves later recalled in his 1923 Reminiscences that Merrick was "the most disgusting specimen of humanity that I had ever seen [...] at no time had I met with such a degraded or perverted version of a human being as this lone figure displayed."
Merrick eventually told Norman that he no longer wanted to be examined at the hospital. According to Norman, he said he was "stripped naked and felt like an animal in a cattle market."
Treves observed that Merrick was very sensitive and showed his emotions easily. At times, Merrick was bored and lonely, and demonstrated signs of depression. He had spent his entire adult life segregated from women, first in the workhouse and then as an exhibit. The women he met were either disgusted or frightened by his appearance. His opinions about women were derived from his memories of his mother and what he read in books. Treves decided that Merrick would like to be introduced to a woman and it would help him feel normal. The doctor arranged for a friend of his named Mrs. Leila Maturin, "a young and pretty widow", to visit Merrick. She agreed and with fair warning about his appearance, she went to his rooms for an introduction. The meeting was short, as Merrick quickly became overcome with emotion. He later told Treves that Maturin had been the first woman ever to smile at him, and the first to shake his hand. She kept in contact with him and a letter written by Merrick to her, thanking her for the gift of a book and a brace of grouse, is the only surviving letter written by Merrick. This first experience of meeting a woman, though brief, instilled in Merrick a new sense of self-confidence. He met other women during his life at the hospital, and appeared taken with them all. Treves believed that Merrick's hope was to one day live at an institution for the blind, where he might meet a woman who could not see his deformities
He often said to me that he wished he could lie down to sleep 'like other people' ... he must, with some determination, have made the experiment ... Thus it came about that his death was due to the desire that had dominated his life—the pathetic but hopeless desire to be 'like other people'.
