Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (review)

Born in poverty in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, in Southern Africa, Sara Baartman came from a segment of the colonized world where few are destined to become subjects of biography. Yet because Baartman was exhibited from 1808 to 1815 in Southern Africa, Britain, and Paris as the so-called Hottentot Venus, she experienced a different fate. As the Hottentot Venus she was nothing short of sensational, drawing crowds of gawkers, even public figures (such as abolitionist Zachary Macaulay and scientist Georges Cuvier) to pay, to observe, and to be titillated. These viewers made the Hottentot Venus a tragic, almost absurd figure, where the site of racial difference was not just her body in general, but her genitals and posterior in particular. Nor would this fascination end with her death: her body was subsequently dissected and cast in plaster for exhibition.

To many scholars this will be a familiar yet terrible story. Having been so widely known and written about in the early 1800s, Baartman has often required a footnote (or more) in subsequent works. Dozens of articles and several books have been written about her. This latest retelling comes in the form of a lively, well-crafted book with an eye to a broader audience and a captivating attention to detail. To those familiar with Baartman, perhaps not much will be new, though her story is presented in an unusually accessible way. Pamela Scully and Clifton Crais pivot Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus on the conceit of separating—as the title suggests—Baartman the woman from the figure of the Hottentot Venus. The Hottentot Venus generated extraordinary attention and a thick paper trail, as "an object for public consumption, a european fetish wrapped in a garb of ethnography, sex, and science" (116). Crais and Scully argue that the Hottentot Venus began as a performance, as labor, but quickly became more interesting and valuable to paying and viewing audiences than Baartman herself. In the course of her life the figure of the Hottentot Venus came effectively to subsume her, relegating Baartman to a ghostly presence.

In no small part this came from Baartman's position as a poor, powerless, colonized, non-white woman. The prurient circumstances of her exhibition have long raised questions of exploitation, consent, agency, and subjectivity. As Crais and Scully put it, she was "a victim of race, class, and above all her gender" (57), produced as spectacle to support the cost of making a living for her and a parade of men associated with her. British abolitionists raised such questions explicitly during Baartman's time in London, and Crais and Scully provide parallels to these debates in the present. Though the issue of Baartman's freedom was the abolitionists' putative concern, their interests worked more to silence than hear her. This remains a core problem in engaging the Hottentot Venus.

As Crais and Scully put it, Baartman's life "deeply constrained Sara Baartman's chance to talk to history. Her words slip away, they mimic what might have been" (101). This comment catches the wider mood of the book, and the nub of what makes it interesting, if not always persuasive. Crais and Scully will often reflect or speculate about what might have been. Contextual sketches of places and moments are eased into imagined appearances of Baartman, what she might have seen, experienced, or known. This is an effect some readers might find compelling; others might find it dubious. A book of witnessing and a tale of tragedy, the authors place some weight on suggestion and conjecture: "one is tempted to imagine," "the Baartmans must have lived" (20), "Sara would have" (34), and so on. This is the book's chosen strategy of recognizing and trying to address silence.

This remarkable durability of concern with the Hottentot Venus—both during her life and after—is...