Marvel Illustrated - Homer's The Iliad #6 (Marvel Comics) by Roy Thomas

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53, emphasis in original) Georgia Christian wrote shame onto Adah’s existence: “Recently it has been decided, grudgingly, that dark skin or lameness may not be entirely one’s fault, but one still ought to show good manners to act ashamed” (493, emphasis in original). The alternative African mystic vision of the eternal self beyond temporary physical aberration “abled” Adah. Similarly in The Bone People, Kerewin and Joe move out of isolation—and the self-destructive behavior that goes with it—only after near-death visions that are accepted by the text as mystic.

Suffering from his guilt and from other forms of distress, Tayo learns that his illness is part of a larger pattern of evil—the “witchery” brought about by those who seek the world’s destruction. Tayo is healed by a series of Pueblo and Navaho purification ceremonies and by a personal ceremony he performs for himself. During his quest he has an encounter with a mysterious young woman named Ts’eh, later identified as Spider Woman, a supernatural figure from Pueblo legend. The second work I will discuss is Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, a novel first published in 1984, by the Spiral Collective, an independent press formed in New Zealand to bring out the book after it had been rejected by the major publishers in that country.

Physical aberration in a literary character is indicative of mental, emotional, social, or spiritual aberration or any combination of those states. Physical difference marks the outsider or the monster, who rages or is isolated and dying inside unseen, for example, Ahab in Moby-Dick or the deaf narrator in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Dracula and his heirs, including the latest Anne Rice creation, are pigment deficient, dentally freakish, and daylight-challenged—in the best nineteenth-century tradition of the “freak” sideshow.