self-inflicted marks—Grateful Dead tattoos for instance—p. 194might say something about your musical
tastes. But by and large a short leg is just a short leg, and scoliosis is just scoliosis.
But put that scoliosis on Richard III and, voilà, you have something else entirely. Richard, as morally and
spiritually twisted as his back, is one of the most completely repugnant figures in all of literature. And
while it might strike us as cruel and unjust to equate physical deformity with character or moral deformity,
it seemed not only acceptable to the Elizabethans but almost inevitable. Shakespeare is very much a
product of his time in suggesting that one’s proximity to or distance from God is manifested in external
signs. The Puritans, only a few years after him, saw failure in business—ruined crops, bankruptcy,
financial mismanagement, even disease in one’s herd—as clear evidence of God’s displeasure and
therefore of moral shortcomings. Evidently the story of Job didn’t play in Plymouth.
Right. The Elizabethans and Jacobeans weren’t politically correct. So now what? you ask. Meaning,
what about four centuries later?
Things have changed pretty dramatically in terms of equating scars or deformities with moral
shortcomings or divine displeasure, but in literature we continue to understand physical imperfection in
symbolic terms. It has to do with being different, really. Sameness doesn’t present us with metaphorical
possibilities, whereas difference—from the average, the typical, the expected—is always rich with
possibility.
Vladimir Propp, in his landmark study of folktales back in the 1920s, Morphology of the Folktale,
separates the story of the folk quester into thirty or so separate steps. One of the initial steps is that the
hero is marked in some way. He may be scarred or lamed or wounded or painted or born with a short
leg, but he bears some mark that sets him apart. The tales Propp looks at go back hundreds of years and
have scores of variants, and while they happen to be Slavic in origin, structurally theyp. 195resemble the
Germanic, Celtic, French, and Italian folktales better known in the West. Many of those tales continue to
inform our understanding of how stories are told.
You doubt? How many stories do you know in which the hero is different from everyone else in some
way, and how many times is that difference physically visible? Why does Harry Potter have a scar, where
is it, how did he get it, and what does it resemble?
Consider the ways Toni Morrison marks her characters. One quester, our old friend Milkman Dead
from Song of Solomon, bears an initial marking, one leg being shorter than the other. He spends much of
his youth adopting ways of walking that will hide his deficiency, as he perceives it. Later he will be
scarred twice, once on his cheek by a beer bottle in a fight in Shalimar, Virginia, and once on his hands
when his former pal Guitar tries to garotte him and Milkman gets his hands up just in time. In Beloved,
Sethe has been whipped so severely in her past that she wears elaborate scars resembling a tree on her
back. Her mother-in-law and mentor, Baby Suggs, has a bad hip. And Beloved herself is perfect, except
for three scratches on her forehead; on the other hand, Beloved is something else again, not merely
human. These character markings stand as indicators of the damage life inflicts. In the case of Sethe and
Beloved, that life involves slavery, so the violence that marks them is of a very specific sort. But even the
others bear signs illustrating the way life marks all who pass through it.
Beyond that, though, is another element: character differentiation. At the end of Sophocles’ Oedipus
Rex, the king blinds himself, which is very definitely a kind of marking—of atonement, guilt, and
contrition—and one that he will wear throughout the subsequent play, Oedipus at Colonus. But he was
marked much, much earlier. In fact, being good Greeks, we knew this before we arrived at the theater,
just from the meaning of the name, Oedipus—“Wounded Foot.” If we werep. 196headed to the theater
to watch a play called Wounded Foot the King (which is what that title means), we’d already know