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 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-56755-3 ISBN 978-1-137-40256-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137402561 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India. 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