Neo-Victorian freakery : the cultural afterlife of the Victorian freak show

246 Pages·2015·4.07 MB·English

by  Davies

The Cultural Afterlife of the Victorian Freak Show
Neo-Victorian Freakery
Also by Helen Davies
GENDER AND VENTRILOQUISM IN VICTORIAN AND NEO-VICTORIAN
FICTION: Passionate Puppets
Neo-Victorian Freakery
The Cultural Afterlife of the Victorian
Freak Show
Helen Davies
© Helen Davies 2015
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First published 2015 by
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction: Distorted Images and Re-membered Bodies:
Constructing Neo-Victorian Freakery 1
1 Mixing (re)Memory and Desire: Constructing
Sarah Baartman 22
2 Separation Anxieties: Sex, Death, and Chang and
Eng Bunker 61
3 Excessively Feminine? Anna Swan, Gendering Giantesses,
and the Genre of the ‘True Life Story’ Pamphlet 92
4 Innocence, Experience, and Childhood Dramas: Charles
Stratton and Lavinia Warren 121
5 The Strange Case of Joseph and Jack: Joseph Merrick
and Spectacles of Deviance 159
Afterword: The Neo-Victorian Enfreakment of P. T. Barnum 197
Notes 207
Bibliography 222
Index 232
v
Acknowledgements
I am extremely grateful to Teesside University for the research sabbati-
cal I received in Autumn/Winter 2014 in order to complete this book,
and for the support from my colleagues in the English department
during this period and beyond. In particular, I would like to thank
Rachel Carroll for her advice on this project in the early stages. Thank
you to the reader of the project, who offered invaluable advice in shap-
ing the book from proposal to manuscript, and to Paula Kennedy and
Peter Cary at Palgrave Macmillan for their assistance during the entire
process.
Teesside University also provided funding for me to carry out some
research for Chapter 3 at the North Shore Archives and Anna Swan
Museum at the Creamery in Tatamagouche, Nova Scotia in September
2013. During this visit, I was fortunate to receive the expert guidance
of Dale Swan, one of Anna’s relatives, and I am indebted to him for his
knowledge, generosity, and kindness.
Thank you to James Mcgrath for his thoughtful feedback on the early
chapters of this book, to Nadine Muller for inviting me to deliver a
keynote address based on Chapter 2 at the ‘Neo-Victorian Cultures: The
Victorians Today’ conference in at Liverpool John Moores University
July 2013, and for Claire O’Callaghan for her comments on my initial
proposal for this book project. I am privileged to have James, Nadine,
and Claire as friends as well as colleagues. Especial thanks to Claire for
her ongoing support as a research collaborator, and her patience in
managing our other projects whilst I was preoccupied with this book.
I am delighted that Adam Paxman agreed to provide the original art-
work for the front cover of Neo-Victorian Freakery, and I am so apprecia-
tive of his creativity, talent, and time.
My thanks are inadequate to express the support I have received from
Madge and Peter Davies during the writing of this book, and in every
other way. I am lucky to have them as my family, and as my friends.
vi
Introduction: Distorted Images
and Re-membered Bo dies:
Constructing Neo-Victorian
Freakery
What are the politics of representation that are involved in neo-
Victorianism’s ‘reflections’ upon the nineteenth-century freak show?
Reflection – or the mirror – has been a significant metaphor in critical
accounts of neo-Victorian engagements with the nineteenth century.
For example, the titular concept of Simon Joyce’s The Victorians in the
Rearview Mirror (2007) invokes the motif of ‘looking back’ at Victorian
culture to make sense of past, present and future. However, he empha-
sises that the representations we perceive are ‘mediated image[s]’: for
him, there is a process of ‘the inevitable distortion that accompanies any
mirror image, whether we see it as resulting from the effects of political
ideology, deliberate misreading, exaggeration, or the understandable
simplification of a complex past’ ( Joyce, 2007, p. 4). Ann Heilmann and
Mark Llewellyn’s influential definition of neo-Victorianism considers
the genre as a process of self-conscious ‘(re)interpretation, (re)discovery and
(re)vision concerning the Victorians’ (Heilmann and Llewellyn, 2010, p. 4;
original emphasis). They elaborate upon one of these key terms – ‘(re)
vision’ – in a chapter focusing upon ‘Spectrality and S(p)ecularity’, sug-
gesting that ‘neo-Victorian literature sets up a mirror-like or reflective
stance between our own period and that of the nineteenth century’
(Heilmann and Llewellyn, 2010, p. 144). Yet they also highlight the ways
in which such ‘reflections’ are not accurate forms of representation. The
‘glass’ of neo-Victorianism’s mirroring of the nineteenth century con-
tains ‘shadows, spectres and written ghosts that never quite materialise
into substantive presences but instead remain simulations of the “real”’
(Heilmann and Llewellyn, 2010, p. 145). In other words, reflections are
never realities, but offer only distorted images of the Victorian past,
twisted and misshapen by contemporary culture’s desires. Sometimes
we might see our own images in the nineteenth century as a process of
1
2 Neo-Victorian Freakery
identification, but also sometimes we seek to distance ourselves from
the ‘otherness’ of the Victorians.
My gloss of reflective imagery in neo-Victorian criticism deliberately
invokes the vocabulary of deformity, as the concept of the mirror has
also been important for understanding the combination of fear and
fascination attached to making a spectacle of extraordinary bodies.
Elizabeth Grosz gives the following account of why the display of peo-
ple with unusual anatomies can be a source of horror and allure:
The freak illustrates our […] fascination with our mirror-images […]
The relation we bear to images of ourselves is drawn from this simul-
taneous and ambivalent reaction: the mirror-image threatens to
draw us into its spell of spectral doubling, annihilating the self that
wants to see itself reflected. At the same time, it gains pleasure from
the access it gives to the subject’s exteriority, from an illusory mas-
tery over its image. […] The freak confirms the viewer as bounded,
belonging to a proper social category. The viewer’s horror lies in the
recognition that this monstrous being is at the heart of his or her
own identity, for it is all that must be ejected or abjected from self-
image to make the bounded, category-obeying self possible.
(Grosz, 1996, p. 65)
According to Lacanian psychoanalysis, the child gazing at her or his
reflection begins to develop a sense of independent self by perceiv-
ing their image as an illusory wholeness. This is, of course, a delusion:
a disjuncture between the reflected representation of ‘complete’ self
and the fragmented reality of an infant unable to fully control its
body and movements. Nevertheless, there is a pleasure in this looking.
Furthermore, a distinction between self and other begins to develop.1
In Grosz’s example of the ‘freakish’ body as a distorted mirror, there is
also pleasure for the subject who looks – a power relationship of gaz-
ing which designates the audience as ‘normal’ and the unusual body as
‘other’. But this demarcation of boundaries is also an illusion, for the
‘monstrous’ other also bears some resemblance to the ‘normal’ self in
terms of representing all of that prior fragmentation and amorphous-
ness that has been repressed, ‘ejected’ or ‘abjected’.2
And perhaps it is in this sense of rejecting that which has come before
that these two deployments of mirror metaphors – the neo-Victorian
and the freakery studies perspective – coalesce. Marie-Luise Kohlke
and Christian Gutleben have already made this connection in their
introduction to Neo-Victorian Gothic: Horror, Violence, and Degeneration
Introduction: Distorted Images and Re-membered Bodies 3
in the Re-Imagined Nineteenth Century: ‘On psychological and ideological
levels, the Victorians function as our threatening doubles and distorted
freak show/funhouse mirror images, disclosing something akin to
rejected atavistic or archetypal selves, our superseded progenitors who
are nonetheless still with us, if only as an evolutionary vestige’ (Kohlke
and Gutleben, 2012, pp. 4–5). In this telling formulation, Kohlke and
Gutleben imply that all neo-Victorian representations of nineteenth-
century subjects have the potential to be understood as ‘freakish’. The
Victorians might be constructed as the monstrous other, irrevocably dif-
ferent but still disturbingly familiar. But, to use a suitably degeneration-
inflected analogy, what of the missing link that has been skipped in this
chain of association? More specifically, what of neo-Victorian construc-
tions of nineteenth-century freak shows?
An important criticism of a psychoanalytic explanation for under-
standing the complex reactions to and meanings placed upon extraor-
dinary bodies is that it does not take into account the social and
cultural contexts for constructing ‘otherness’ at any given historical
moment. As disability activists and scholars have argued, what is
deemed ‘abnormal’ – or, indeed, ‘normal’ – in terms of the body is not
fixed or essential.3 So, to return to the metaphor of the neo-Victorian
mirror, what does contemporary culture wish to see when looking back
at the people who performed in nineteenth-century freak shows, and
the audiences who came to view them? How are nineteenth-century
narratives of freak show performers revisited by neo-Victorian culture,
and what are the politics of such re-presentations? To what extent does
the representation of freak show performers in neo-Victorianism think
beyond oppressive and exploitative understandings of bodily difference
in the Victorian era and our own cultural moment, extending the ethi-
cal work of neo-Victorianism in terms of redressing past inequalities of
gender, sexuality, race, and class? Or does neo-Victorianism distort freak
show performers beyond all recognition, compounding nineteenth-
century abuses of vulnerable people?
Neo-Victorian Freakery: The Cultural Afterlife of the Victorian Freak Show
is a study of how the lives of nineteenth-century freak show performers
have been revisited and reinterpreted by contemporary literature and
culture. A chapter will be devoted to each performer: Sarah Baartman,
exhibited as ‘The Hottentot Venus’ in early nineteenth-century Europe;
Chang and Eng Bunker, the original ‘Siamese Twins’; Anna Swan,
a Canadian woman of height who was exhibited as a ‘giantess’ in
P. T. Barnum’s American Museum; Charles Sherwood Stratton (billed
as ‘General Tom Thumb’) and Lavinia Warren, his wife who was also