True histories of the Elephant Man: storytelling and theatricality in adaptations of the life of Joseph Merrick

In this chapter Benjamin Poore takes the example of ‘The Elephant Man’ as a test case for how Victorian narratives have been developed in a neo-Victorian theatrical context. After outlining the way that a neo-Victorian stage culture has been developed Poore argues that Bernard Pomerance’s play The Elephant Man (1977) and David Lynch’s 1980 film The Elephant Man can be regarded as twin foundational texts in the modern-day repurposing of the story of Joseph Merrick. The film, originally adapted in part from the surgeon Frederick Treves’s The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences (1923) was subsequently adapted back into a film novelization by Christine Sparks. Since the early 1980s, Merrick’s story in its various iterations has become a popular way to view nineteenth-century mores and to speculate on how far ‘we’ have come. However, Poore argues that there is a series of tensions between the lip-service paid to the condemnation of Victorian freak shows and the increasingly diverse uses, from comedy sketches to comic books, to which Merrick’s image and story are put. This chapter then considers the wider implications of the case of Merrick for nineteenth-century studies and the neo-Victorian.