Literary References to Club Feet

From the Club Feet wiki, the following is a list of known literary references with club-footed characters. I am quite certain there are more, just waiting to be dug up:

• The main character, Philip Carey, in W. Somerset Maugham's novel Of Human Bondage, has a club foot, a central theme in the work.
• Hippolyte Tautain, the stable man at the Lion D'Or public house in Gustave Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary is unsuccessfully treated for clubfoot by Charles Bovary, leading to the eventual amputation of his leg.
• Charlie Wilcox, the main character in Sharon McKay's novel Charlie Wilcox had a club foot.
• In Yukio Mishima's seminal novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion the character Kashiwagi has club feet which parallels the stutter of the main character, Mizoguchi.
• In David Eddings' Malloreon series, Senji the sorcerer has a club foot.
• In Caroline Lawrence's Roman Mysteries series, a character called Vulcan the blacksmith appears in the book "The Secrets of Vesuvius". He reveals that he gained the nickname because of his club foot.
• In Bernard Cornwell's "Warlord Chronicles," Mordred, King of Dumnonia, has a club foot that is often used as a symbol for his ugliness and weakness as a ruler.
• In Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon Gimpy, one of Charlie's co-workers at the bakery, has a club foot.
• In Heinrich von Kleist's play The Broken Jug, the main character Judge Adam has a club foot, betraying him as the culprit who broke the jug.

(The entire wiki contains some good material, but there are still, in my view, errors and misconceptions about adult post-club feet therein. I'll expand on that in a later post.)

If you've had a chance to read any of these books, it should come as no surprise how people with club feet are presented - most often s characters who are untrustworthy, somewhat slippery and dark, or pathetic.

It is only with the gods that we have a chance, as it were - Hephaestus and Vulcan - one and the same, actually (Greek and Roman). Here, we are the creators, the makers. This god was the only god in either pantheon to actually work. They made the armor and the weapons of the gods, including Zeus' thunderbolts. Heck, Hephaestus even won the love of Aphrodite. Not bad for a clubby, eh?

This negative depiction seems like an origin story for all the nastiness some of us experienced from other kids growing up - because we were "different," we had to be less than they were.

Wouldn't you just love to go back and throw that Aphrodite thing in their faces? :-)