Jamaica Inn

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussions of ableism.

The perceived link between aesthetics and morality was popularized in 19th-century Europe. Notions of morality held that a person’s appearance belies their moral character, so an “ugly” person, or someone with a physical disability, would have been deemed morally suspect or even morally “inferior” to a “normal” person. Such people would be treated as “freaks” and would often be ostracized or relegated to the edges of society. In Jamaica Inn, Mary echoes these ideas, even if she does not fully endorse them: “In the an­i­mal king­dom a freak was a thing of ab­hor­rence, at once hunt­ed and de­stroyed, or driv­en out into the wil­der­ness” (139). Many works of gothic literature play with this trope. Quasimodo, the titular Hunchback of Notre Dame in Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel, for example, was affected in his physical development and is treated as “grotesque” and a “monster”—but he has a kind and noble heart (Hugo, Victor. The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Wordsworth, 1993). The monster in Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818) is judged by his appearance and forced into becoming an actual monster by neglect and abuse (Shelley, Mary.