With the release of the Hollywood movie Wonder in November 2017, the poster advertising the film shows a young boy wearing an astronaut’s helmet. It is Auggie on his first day at school because until now he has been home schooled by his mother and thus protected from his peers’ reactions to his severe facial disfigurement caused by the congenital Treacher Collins Syndrome. Without his astronaut’s helmet, which used to shield him from stares and shocked reactions, he is now visibly exposed. The visible stigma of his deformed face, according to Erving Goffman, triggers mainly negative responses in people, with two exceptions: ‘the Wise’ and ‘the Own.’ The latter are those people that are stigmatized in similar ways, whereas the Wise are people who, out of empathy, are willing to look behind the mask of disfigurement and recognize the real and whole person. Along the lines of Levinas’ ethics of the face, I intend to illustrate that the movie, as well as the novel on which it is based, go way beyond the scope of a children’s book/film. Levinas says that we encounter each other face-to-face, and that it is the Other’s face that expresses the command that I respond ethically to them, affirming the holiness of the wholeness of the Other. When the Other’s face is disfigured, however, our gaze reduces the face to its disfigurement and loses sight of the person to whom it belongs. In Wonder, several children (and adults) meet the challenge that Auggie’s face poses to them with an ethical mind and an open heart, and thus turn into ‘the Wise’ in more than the sense implied by Goffman. The film/book teaches a moral lesson as to how to encounter the Other whose face deviates drastically from the norm.
About the presenterGudrun Maria Grabher
Full Professor of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, where she chaired the Department of American Studies for 13 years. She has a PhD in American Studies, and MA degrees in German Philology, in Philosophy, and in English. She taught as a guest professor at the American Studies Department at the University of Notre Dame, IN, in 2007. Her special fields of interest are American poetry, American literature and philosophy, literature and the arts, medical humanities; law and the humanities. She is currently working on a book about facial disfigurement in American narratives.