Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin: Out of the Natural Order (review)

A veritable wünderkammer of nineteenth-century performing arts, Jane R. Goodall's book dusts off dozens of curiosities in ye olde dramatic cabinet and sets them sparkling and spinning before our eyes in kaleidoscopic wonder. From the shopworn "Feejee Mermaid: the most stupendous curiosity ever submitted to the public for inspection" (24); to the Hottentot Venus, Saartje Baartman, trotting back and forth in her cage, poked, prodded, and examined naked by "men of science" who eagerly awaited the "even more fascinating experience of dissecting her post-mortem" (165-66); to Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show, all set against a backdrop of spectacle, spirit rooms, and chambers of horrors, Goodall takes us on a carnival ride so filled with monsters, missing links, minstrels, snake charmers, sword swallowers, whirling Dervishes, freaks, and fetishists—a ride so wild and fleeting we are left at the end of two hundred pages breathless and gasping but begging for more. With devilish wit and scholarly showmanship befitting Barnum himself, Goodall flicks backdrop aside to expose a shocking socioscientific coupling: a monocled fakery astraddle Darwinian riprap, busily conceiving the ghastly freaks and gruesome creatures infamous in both theatres surgical and theatres spectacular. For Goodall, the show is just beginning.

Goodall parallels the career of evolutionist Charles Darwin (1809-1882) with that of master showman P. T. Barnum (1810-1891), contemporaries in a time when "Europe and North America were developing an acute consciousness of themselves as the modernizing nations" (3), and a time when cabarets, music halls, circuses, and ballets reached a "zenith of popularity" (10). Darwin's The Origin of Species and Barnum's acquisition of the American Museum in New York were intertwining historical events, each reflecting the cultural and scientific fervor of the day. While Darwinians were scouring the world for species and missing links, Barnum was collecting "every known category of popular entertainment" (35) for his Museum and Lecture Hall. By so doing, he drew "the fairground and the museum together" and "reunited the traditions of the wondrous and the monstrous so that they could be assimilated into the self-conscious modernity of American and European society" (36).

The book is divided into six carefully researched and documented chapters and an introduction that provides a brief but thorough overview describing how the blossoming theme of evolution and the current vogues in performing arts infiltrated each other in convoluted, symbiotic ways. The first four chapters, "Out of Natural History," "Missing Links and Other Lilliputians," "Performing Ethnology," and "Varieties," are the wild carnival ride through a startling landscape of freak shows and grotesqueries.

The wild ride slows in the last two chapters, "Lowly Origins" and "Natural Vigor," to become more of a funhouse mirror reflecting dark, threatening images of society looking at itself and questioning the meaning of evolution and its cultural impact. Darwinism was morphing into social Darwinism, and with the publication of The Descent of Man (1871), a great fear of returning to "lowly origin" was unleashed. In these last two chapters, Goodall focuses on performers and writers of the era who specifically reflected the social change, among them Emile Zola, whose character Nana, in his novel of the same name, was "a force of nature whose trail of destruction reveals that female sexuality is the very principle of degeneracy" (160); Bram Stoker, whose Dracula was "the first of the great fin-de-siècle beast men of literature" (173); and Oscar Métenier, whose play En Famille,cast with criminals, described the gory details of an execution, the beast finally "slipping its confines" to "run riot" "through the murky area of audience taste" (180). The prevailing dichotomy of fear and fascination culminated in the Grand Guignol, humans as puppets, with the savage beast no longer a physical, viewable being at large but a "transformative energy" (183) drawing the audience inward, confronting itself. Freud met Darwin in the human psyche, and the age of innocence...