Abjection and the Fragmented Body: Reflections on Monstrosity and Vulnerability
By Alexia Heasley
N.A. Abildgaard, The Wounded Philoctetes, 1775, Oil on canvas, 123 x 175.5 cm, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen.
Image courtesy of Statens Museum for Kunst.
As many of us settle in to watch Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein (2025), conversation arises regarding the film’s divergence from Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, Jacob Elordi’s monstrous makeup, and Mia Goth’s astonishing transformation as she gracefully moves between the roles of Victor’s mother and Elizabeth. Crucially, the visual and thematic language of monstrosity and abjection is brought once more to the forefront of popular media.
When Penguin Classics published the paperback of Shelley’s novel in the early 2000s, the cover featured N.A. Abildgaard’s The Wounded Philoctetes (1775). The nude figure stares at the view in torment, and, at a glance, appears as if he could be Frankenstein’s creature, or perhaps even Prometheus, the novel’s mythic shadow. Instead, the work’s subject is lesser-known Greek hero, Philoctetes, whose mythic tale is shrouded in abandonment, physical suffering, and social exile. The seemingly rogue pairing begins to make sense.
In Sophocles’ Philoctetes, the eponymous tragic hero is a famed archer and the pride of the Greek army. En route to Troy, he is bitten by a serpent on the underside of his foot. As the wound festers, it releases both pain and a stench so unbearable that the Greeks abandon him on the island of Lemnos, shunning him due to his his disfigurement. He survives in a state of agonised isolation for ten years, supported only by his bow and his rage. When the army recognises that the war cannot be won without him, Odysseus and Neoptolemus are sent to retrieve him. Philoctetes’ anger makes him hesitant to return with them, however after Herakles advises him to return in exchange for a healed wound, he agrees. Now that his suffering is no an inconvenience, his community welcomes him once more.
Created during Abildgaard’s time in Rome, the painting does not depict the familiar triumphant classical hero carved in marble serenity. The figure recoils from the viewer’s gaze, caught in a moment of private agony made unbearably public. His torso twists away in a defensive corkscrew motion, one leg stretched outwards as if clinging to some lingering strength, while the other withdraws beneath him, hiding from its own mutilation. The wound itself is withheld from view, but it can be felt in the strained, pronounced muscles, the contracted hand, knuckles white from pain, and the half-shadowed grimace whose furrowed brow can only do so much to mask the tears pooling over his glossy, white eyes. Even the lighting appears complicit in his misery, illuminating his twisted body with forensic precision while casting his only emotional window into shadow, isolating him in his concealed pain. Emotionally and visually exposed, Philoctetes is denied even the dignity of meeting our gaze.
Shelley’s creature is, in many ways, Philoctetes’ modern mirror. His palimpsestic body reanimated by the feverish ambition of one man’s intellect destabilises everything the Enlightenment society sought to keep separate: the living from the dead, the natural from the unnatural, man from monster. If it is Philoctetes’ wounds that cast him out from society, it is the monster’s very existence that becomes a wound in the fabric of rational order. His perceived monstrosity is not a result of some moral corruption or evil doing, he simply reminds others of what they wish to deny. Bodies decay, suffering demands recognition, and the nobility of society appears a fragile mask.
By connecting the two figures in print, Penguin prompts a quiet interpretive provocation. Philoctetes becomes the companion that Frankenstein refuses to create for his creature, associating the two outcasts together in a strangely comforting union. Whether in Abildgaard’s neoclassical canvas, Shelley’s Gothic novel, or in del Toro’s cinematic reinterpretation, artists continue to find beauty and importance in the abject. Through art, the wounded body is transformed from a spectacle of horror to an indictment of the societies that abandon it. The outcast figures are made visible.