Metaphors: The Demons in Society

From a young age, people use metaphors to describe the unfamiliar. By offering a basis of comparison, people are able to use the information they already possess to familiarize themselves with something foreign. This mode of creating correlations, however, can also have a negative effect on someone’s perception and foundation of knowledge. This negative effect can be seen in the way people identify and address certain illnesses as illustrated in Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor. In this article, Sontag exposes readers to a variety of metaphors created about illnesses and describes how these metaphors not only affected the victims of the illnesses but also affected how society viewed and responded to the illnesses. In Sontag’s literature, the metaphor demonic pregnancy places cancer as an invincible force that is caused by a deficiency of will in the sufferer. Similarly enough, this same stigma was created when the metaphor of gay cancer arose to describe AIDS/HIV in the early 80s. The metaphors of both these illnesses prevented victims from receiving adequate treatment and placed stereotypes upon them. The metaphor associated with cancer helped create the metaphor for AIDS/HIV as both illnesses came about in the same way. From this, it can be said that Sontag’s metaphor of cancer being a demonic pregnancy extends the metaphor of AIDS/HIV being gay cancer.

Although metaphors can be beneficial in the medical field, they can also work to create false stereotypes and bias perceptions by using unrealistic comparisons. An example of this is from Sontag’s article, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. In this article, Sontag brings up the metaphor, “cancer is a demonic pregnancy”. During the time period when this metaphor emerged, which dates back to the late 17^th and 18^th century, all people knew was that it was a disease that promised death. The only “scientific” knowledge that was collected was based on people’s symptoms, which is where the metaphors of this time period, including “demonic pregnancy”, stemmed from. From this initial description of symptoms, the negative perception of cancer grew through the meaning of the words given to describe it. The word demonic can be described as an adjective with a negative connotation. With the word demonic, things such as the supernatural nature, possession and an invisible force come to mind. In addition, the word also comes with moral equivalencies such as the devil, evil, and hell which correspond to a “bad” person or someone with lack of will and self-control. As for pregnancy, the thought of living creature inside a womb comes to mind. This creature can be seen as a parasite that sucks the life out of the host. Combining these two concepts, one would derive that cancer is an uncontrollable parasitic creature that possesses and feeds on its host. It would also be assumed that this disease results from the evils that were performed by the victim throughout their life. In Sontag’s article, there is an excerpt from Alice James’ journal which reads, ”…this unholy granite substance in my breast…but this lump is alive, a fetus with its own will.” This representation of cancer matches the metaphor but is incorrect as cancer is actually defined as an organic disease in which abnormal cells divide uncontrollably and destroys body tissues. In addition, it is not caused by sinning but by genetic and environmental factors that are natural occurrences. However, despite the metaphor being so misleading, people did not have access to the information to make them think otherwise, therefore, these kinds of metaphor had a huge impact on society and their perception of the unknowns like cancer. In the case of the cancer metaphor previously mentioned, people treated those with cancer as though they had no hope of survival. Doctors wouldn’t even try to offer treatment as it was just assumed that there was no cure. Victims often lived in solitude and became depressed as they waited to die because they were falsely under the impression that they would never be cured of the “demonic parasite” inside of them. These metaphors are what led to the misconceptions of the past and misconceptions that continue to today in regard to diseases that we have limited information about. In particular, a more recent metaphor that played just as large a role in society’s perception was a metaphor about AIDS/HIV.

In the 1980s, the emergence of HIV/AIDS in gay men sparked a metaphor that would have a lasting effect on society and particularly on the LGBTQ community for years to come. Here we have a similar circumstance to the emergence of cancer. Both diseases appeared suddenly out of nowhere and both diseases were causing definite death among those that developed/caught the disease. The metaphor that arose for HIV/AIDS was that it was gay cancer. At the very start of the epidemic, in 1981, a newspaper from the New York Times read, “RARE CANCER SEEN IN 41 HOMOSEXUALS”. This article shows the comparison of the AIDS/HIV made to cancer and how the group targeted for the disease was homosexuals, as the illness had not been seen in any other groups of people (Altman 14). From physicians to researchers, professionals all over America were baffled by the development of this mystery disease. At a loss for words, health professionals used the term gay-related immune deficiency (GRID) or “gay cancer” because it was the best description they could come up with from the information they knew (Krim 5). This then led the media and others to mistakenly suggests an inherent link between homosexuality and the new disease with cancer-like properties (Krim 5). From this metaphor, we can deduce that HIV/AIDS was perceived as a disease that will kill you from the inside out, a disease without much hope for survival, and a disease that only affects the gay community which adds a whole other dimension to how society viewed the disease. Due to the time period when this metaphor emerged, being gay was looked at as being taboo, immoral, and dirty. This can be compared to the moral component of cancer as a demonic pregnancy. In this case, both metaphors reflect a level of sinning or dishonest carried about by disease carrier. Most people who practiced their sexuality at the time kept it secret as they were afraid of being judged by society. All these traits that followed the homosexual term were applied to AIDS/HIV. Therefore, those who developed the disease were automatically thought to be a gay male and you were not, you did not have AIDS/HIV at the time. If you did not fit into what they believed to be the norm, they assumed you had a different disease and you were turned away. These two examples of metaphors turning illnesses into something unrealistic and driving society away as, as a result, luminates the reality of what metaphors can do to the image of an illness and the perception of that illness from society thereafter. The two exhibit the same results on society despite the slight variations the illnesses have in terms of the effects of the actual diseases directly.

In conclusion, the metaphor “demonic pregnancy” mentioned by Sontag extended the metaphor for AIDS/HIV. Both illnesses went along the same lines of being misinterpreted and perceived in an incorrect light, which hindered the extent of work that health professionals could provide for the patient and how society saw the patient with the illness. These metaphors can be used to teach others that metaphors can only be helpful if they indicate the correct facts, and the only way to know if something is completely factual is to continue researching the topic and asking questions. Both of the metaphors of these diseases caused research to cease and left many open-ended questions to be answered by yet another metaphor that is more than likely to also be incorrect. The incorrect metaphor of both these diseases dissipated when the real facts were presented and actual metaphors with correct comparisons could replace the old incorrect ones. All in all, metaphors are power tools in literature, and when applied to the medical field, it is the responsibility of healthcare providers to pick and choose which metaphors are actually informative and which are there as fillers in order to protect our patients.

 

Works Cited

 

Altman, Lawrence K. “RARE CANCER SEEN IN 41 HOMOSEXUALS.” The New York Times, 3 July 1981, www.nytimes.com/1981/07/03/us/rare-cancer-seen-in-41-homosexuals.html.

Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988.

“Thirty Years of HIV/AIDS: Snapshots of an Epidemic.” AmfAR: Thirty Years of HIV/AIDS: Snapshots of an Epidemic: The Foundation for AIDS Research: HIV / AIDS Research, www.amfar.org/thirty-years-of-hiv/aids-snapshots-of-an-epidemic/.