What Has Become of Henry Johnson? Disability, Monstrosity, and Personhood in Stephen Crane's "The Monster"

This essay explores Crane's novella through the lens of disability studies, examining in both historical and theoretical terms how disability is made monstrous. The question of Henry Johnson's personhood—whether, burned faceless, he remains Henry Johnson—is at the center of both the nineteenth-century euthanasia debates the novella evokes and the uncanny encounter he represents for the community. If personhood is—philosophically and neurobiologically—a function of the story the self tells, then Henry Johnson is a man made of fragments, threatening to expose the fragility of the "normal."