Waxworks: A Cultural Obsession (review)

Bloom's book argues that the specific qualities of wax, namely its ability to move rapidly between liquid and solid states, allows modern culture to map a number of obsessions onto it. Although wax was used to create portraits of the dead in the cemetery art of Roman Egypt two millennia ago, Waxworksis interested in stories that tie wax to Western modernity. In the first chapter, "A Brief History of Wax," Bloom traces the emergence of the modern waxwork display, first exhibited by Philippe Curtius in Paris in 1770. At numerous sites around Paris, Curtius displayed wax simulacra of eminent men such as Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin, and later added a "Cavern of Great Thieves"—an early version of the Chamber of Horrors. His niece, Marie Grosholtz, was trained in the business and after Curtius's death in 1794 took the collection on a tour of England. After managing an itinerant exhibition for thirty-three years, Grosholtz, who had married a certain Monsieur Tussaud, housed the collection in a permanent museum in Baker Street in London. Although the Musée Grévin, opened in Paris in 1882, has also had an illustrious career in the French imagination, it is Madame Tussaud's that has now become a global brand. Between 1999 and 2001, Tussaud's opened museums in Las Vegas, New York and Hong Kong and toured Australia (where the zipper on the model of Bill Clinton had to be sewn up to prevent lewd investigation by visitors). Despite a rather anxious conclusion claiming that the waxwork continues to be a relevant cultural form, Bloom's book suggests that Tussaud's global expansion, more than anything else, shows that the waxwork is still doing a lot of cultural work. Bloom returns again and again to the idea that wax melts: "The importance of the physical dissolution of wax lies in its function as an analogue for the aesthetic, psychological, moral, and gender dissolutions represented in wax fictions" (xiii). This means that the transformative potential of wax can figure for the dissolution of any number of boundaries—life and death, animate and inanimate, self and other, original and copy, male and female, and so on. In the end, a possibly marginal or eccentric concern with wax is safely relocated to the familiar territory of cultural studies.

Across six chapters, Bloom explores a diverse array of waxworks from the automaton of Hoffmann's "The Sandman" to contemporary art practice. Chapter two sets out the mythological framework from Ovid's Metamorphoses , arguing that fictions about waxworks are inevitably forged in relation to the Pygmalion narrative. The third and longest chapter offers a reading of three nineteenth-century texts that re-wire the male desire for the "copy": Hoffmann's "The Sandman," Balzac's "The Unknown Masterpiece" and Champfleury's "The Wax Figure Collector." Hoffmann inevitably invokes Freud's reading of the tale in "The Uncanny," and although Bloom fights valiantly against privileging uncanniness as central to the fascination and fear waxworks invoke, this is inevitably the formulation to which she returns in many of her textual readings. Chapter four then suggests that cinema might also be read through wax: "Wax figures strike me as compelling analogies for cinematic images, as they are empty shadows, pure exteriority" (110). Reading the waxwork in the horror films of the 1930s, Bloom tries to convince us that these marry form and content perfectly by equating waxy dissolution with the cinematic dissolve. Chapter five concentrates on two short horror tales set in waxworks—Villiers de l'Isle-Adams's "Les Phantasmes de M. Redoux" and Alfred Burrage's "The Waxwork." The latter tale, written in 1920, in which an over-imaginative journalist dies of fright after a night in the Chamber of Horrors, is a particularly useful find. Chapter six then examines the place of waxworks in Dickens's Old Curiosity Shop , before the book ends with a lengthy treatment of contemporary wax art. Bloom suggests that fine art has become the predominant vehicle...