1. Marked for Greatness
Marked for Greatness – from How to Read Lit Like a Professor by Thomas Foster
Quasimodo – a hunchback
Shakespeare’s (literary) Richard III – hunchback
Frankenstein’s monster – you guessed it.
Oedipus – damaged feet and a limp
Grendel – again, a monster…
All are as famous for their shape as for their Behavior.
Their shapes tell us something about them or others in their stories.

2. Marked for Greatness
In real life, a scar, deformity, etc… doesn’t tell us anything about you thematically, metaphorically, or spiritually. Tattoos, scars, etc… just tell us about your experiences or cultural ideals.
BUT, if you put scoliosis on Richard III, you get something entirely different. He is one of the most repugnant characters in all literature – as morally and spiritually twisted as his back.
This is not very PC of writers, but it works.
To the Elizabethans, for example, this seemed acceptable and inevitable.

3. Marked for Greatness - ARchetype #2
Elizabethans believed that proximity to God was manifest in external signs. Miscarriages were seen as products of sin and God’s displeasure.
The Puritans saw failure in business, ruined crops, bankruptcy, disease in one’s herd, etc. as evidence of God’s displeasure and therefore of moral shortcomings.
Biblically – famine equaled God’s displeasure – as did flood. And locusts.
In literature – physical deformity has to do with being different. Sameness doesn’t present metaphorical possibilities.

4. Marked for Greatness - ARchetype #2
Vladimir Propp in Morphology of the Folktale (1920s) separates the story of the quester into 30 or so steps – one of the first - the hero is marked. Scarred, lamed, wounded, born with it, etc. The mark sets him apart.
Why does Harry Potter have a scar? Where did he get it? Where is it? What does it resemble?
Toni Morrison – Song of Solomon – one leg is shorter than the other. Spends his youth adopting ways to hide his deficiency. Later, scarred twice more.
Beloved – Sethe has been whipped so severely in her past that she wears elaborate scars on her back in the shape of a tree.

5. Marked for Greatness - ARchetype #2
Beloved – the child Beloved, who was killed as a baby, has 3 scars on her head, but is otherwise perfect. Since she isn’t merely human, the markings stand as indicators of the damage life inflicts. In Beloved these marks are commentary on the damage of slavery on a people in general.
Aside from the quester - another element – character differentiation
Oedipus Rex – at the end of the play, he blinds himself.
This is out of guilt, atonement, and contrition
But he was marked much much earlier…

6. Marked for Greatness
And the audience knew it – the literal translation of the play is Wounded Foot the King. Aside from knowing the myth already, the audience would have known that something was up.
The obviousness of his name suggests that this aspect of his identity will come into play. In the end, it is his lack of inquisitiveness earlier in his life (to find out why he limps and where his scars came from) that causes his downfall – the basis of which is his inability to know himself.
Modern examples? The Waste Land and The Sun Also Rises. Both about societies rendered barren by war.

7. Marked for Greatness
Both societies are barren spiritually, morally, sexually and intellectually, by war.
Traditionally, the wasteland myth concerns the struggle, the quest, to restore fertility (Oedipus, eg.) And the quest is undertaken by the Fisher King – a character who often exhibits physical damage.
Hemingway’s Fisher King is a newspaper correspondent and wounded war veteran. His wound – there is only one thing that can make a grown man, looking at himself in the mirror, weep. Hemingway’s real war wound was in the thigh; his hero’s is a little farther north. And, he goes on an extensive, therapeutic fishing trip.

8. Marked for Greatness
In a nutshell, the injury is symbolic of the destruction of possibilities, spiritual as well as procreative, as a result of the war.
When millions of men die n war, they take with them not merely reproductive possibilities but also tremendous creative, intellectual, and artistic resources.
The war was, in short, the death of a culture.
Those who survived, like Hemingway, were damaged from the experience.
And he wrote about this damage time and time again.

9. Marked for Greatness
Mary Shelley – What does her Monster’s deformity represent? He doesn’t carry historical baggage like Hemingway’s characters.
Look at where he comes from – Victor builds his masterpiece out of a graveyard and a specific historical situation. The Industrial Revolution was just starting, and this world threatened everything people knew during the Enlightenment.
And science, and the new faith in science, including study of anatomy, threatened many religious and philosophical tenets of English society.
In the novel, it’s the IDEA of the monster that is scary.

10. Marked for Greatness
The monster represents forbidden insights – a modern pact with the devil, the result of science w/out ethics.
This isnt new – every time there is an advance in the state of knowledge, a movement into a brave new world someone informs us that we’re closer to meeting a Frankenstein (meaning the monster). The real monster in the novel is the creator
Romanticism gave us the notion of the dual nature of humanity. No matter how well raised we are, how socially groomed, that a monstrous OTHER exists. (Darth Vadar?) The Picture of Dorian Gray, Jekyll and Hyde, Prince and Pauper

11. Marked for Greatness
Opposite idea from Beauty and the Beast or Hunchback
Are then scars and deformities always significant? More often than not, physical markings by their very nature call attention to themselves and signify some psychological or thematic point the author wants to make.
and now…blindness…
A lot has to happen when a writer introduces a blind character. Every move, statement by or about the character has to accommodate the lack of sight; every other character has to notice and behave differently.

12. He's Blind for a Reason
In other words, the author has created a minor constellation of difficulties for himself by introducing a blind character into the work, so something important must be at stake when blindness pops up.
Clearly, the author wants to emphasize other levels of sight and blindness beyond the physical.
In OR, every scene, and every ode by the chorus references seeing, and images of light and dark which have everything to do with seeing.
When literal blindness is introduced, it is nearly always the case that figurative seeing and blindness are at work.

13. He's Blind for a Reason
BUT, seeing and blindness are generally at issue in many works – even when there is no hint of blindness on the part of windows, alleys, speculations, or persons.
So why put it out there? The Indiana Jones Principle: if you want your audience to know something important about your character (or the work at large) introduce it early, before you need it. Indie and snakes.
Back to Oedipus, the blind man who could see, who symbolically blinds himself and gains sight: he’s suffered greatly, and it redeems him in the eyes of the gods, and he is welcomed into the next world with a miraculous death. Blind, he walks toward his death without assistance, as if guided by unseen power.