How would you compare Bernard Pomerance's The Elephant Man, Carson McCullers' The Ballad of the Sad Café, and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon?

While Bernard Pomerance’s play The Elephant Man, Carson McCullers’ novella The Ballad of the Sad Café, and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomonmay all initially seem like wildly different works that address disparate characters, settings, and themes, there is one thread that ties these seemingly different texts together: Pomerance, McCullers, and Morrison all use grotesque elements to emphasize the troubling relationships contained within their works. These three authors use grotesque characters to foreground...

While Bernard Pomerance’s play The Elephant Man, Carson McCullers’ novella The Ballad of the Sad Café, and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon may all initially seem like wildly different works that address disparate characters, settings, and themes, there is one thread that ties these seemingly different texts together: Pomerance, McCullers, and Morrison all use grotesque elements to emphasize the troubling relationships contained within their works. These three authors use grotesque characters to foreground the uncanny and horrific qualities of their stories.

Indeed, Pomerance centers his play on John Merrick, the famously deformed sideshow performer better known as the Elephant Man. Not only does Pomerance use the grotesque figure of Merrick, but he also incorporates “pinheads” in an effort to make his play even more surreal. The pinheads are meant to be unnerving figures and grotesque caricatures. Their unsettling qualities are wholly on display as the pinheads tuck Merrick into bed:

“We are the Queens of the Cosmos

Beautiful darkness’ empire

Darkness darkness, light’s true flower,

Here is eternity’s finest hour

Sleep like others you learn to admire

Be like your mother, be like your sire” (56).

Similarly, McCullers uses grotesque characters to give her novella an eerie, melancholic feel. Amelia Evans falls in love with a hunchback claiming to be her cousin before he robs her at the end of the story. Much like Pomerance, McCullers incorporates an individual with a disability and gives this man unsettling qualities.

Finally, Morrison utilizes the grotesque in her characterization of the relationship between Macon Dead III and his mother. Their relationship has unusual undertones, and Morrison uses this uneasy mother and son bond to unsettle readers. More specifically, Macon was breastfed by his mother at an age that is unusual:

“My mother nursed me when I was old enough to talk, stand up, and wear knickers, and somebody saw it and laughed and—and that is why they call me Milkman and that is why my father never does and that is why my mother never does, but everybody else does” (78).

Thus, while these works initially seem to have little in common, they actually all incorporate grotesque characters and defamiliarize familial relationships in order to foreground the unusual interactions that these writers emphasize.