Neo-Victorian Freakery: The Cultural Afterlife of the Victorian Freak Show by Helen Davies (review)

Helen Davies's Neo-Victorian Freakery: The Cultural Afterlife of the Victorian Freak Show combines historical richness, astute literary analysis, and critical reflection that explores the enduring appeal of nineteenth-century freak show performers in and across contemporary culture. By considering what the exhibition of individuals with extraordinary bodies in the nineteenth century can tell us about our own attitudes towards physical difference, Davies offers a compelling analysis of the diverse ways in which the politics of representation—particularly those surrounding disability, gender, sexuality, and race—intersect with questions of exploitation, curiosity, medical and scientific ethics, and contemporary and historical morality.

Through a comprehensive case-study approach, Neo-Victorian Freakery revisits the lives of several nineteenth-century freak show performers as they were constituted within their own time as well as how they have been remembered (or re-membered, to borrow Davies's play on the term) in contemporary literature and culture. Narratives exploring the life and death of Sarah Baartman, exhibited as "The Hottentot Venus"; the "original" "Siamese Twins" Chang and Eng Bunker; the "giantess" Anna Swan; Charles Sherwood Stratton (billed as "General Tom Thumb") and his wife, Lavinia Warren; and Joseph Merrick, the infamous "Elephant Man," are the subjects of enquiry. Through her readings of biofictions and biodramas concerning these individuals, Davies's book raises provocative moral and ethical questions for scholarly consideration: How are the thorny issues of agency and consent revisited in neo-Victorian conceptions of "the Hottentot Venus"? How are the politics of sexuality rendered as "disabling" in re-creations of the private lives of Chang and Eng Bunker? How are the themes of monstrosity and "otherness," which plagued the life of Joseph Merrick, negotiated in modern re-presentations of "The Elephant Man"? For Davies, there are few easy conclusions to be gleaned from the neo-Victorian afterlives of these cultural figures. While some contemporary reproductions reimagine questions of agency and articulate modes of resistance to exploitation through creative revisioning, others are fairly sensationalist in their rendering of the subjects in question. But this is also only half of the picture, for as Davies's book also considers, these texts also participate in complex debates surrounding the term freak, which will be of interest to those in the field of disability studies.

It is within the broad and insightful exploration of historical narratives that Davies's readings of extraordinary bodies in contemporary mediums is most insightful. Situating side by side Victorian medical studies, autopsy reports, legal enquiries, press cuttings, and promotional pamphlets within and against her readings of neo-Victorian literature, film, and television, Davies offers the first full-length study of disability and bodily difference in neo-Victorian studies. By bringing a disability studies perspective to neo-Victorian criticism, Davies interrogates the ways in which the textually "re-membered" lives of freak show performers raises crucial (and ongoing) questions about the ethics of the animator as much as those of the audience/reader who participate in their re-viewing. As Davies concludes, while many neo-Victorian revisions are "sensationalist, cynical, trivialising" (ideas rendered particularly visible in Davies's reading of the reimagined sex lives of the Bunker twins and Sarah Baartman's genitalia), nonetheless the performative component of the extraordinary bodies in question sheds light on the discursive construction of dis/ ability and the ethics of representation more broadly (8). Of course, not to simplify this complex issue, Davies is persistently aware of her own complicity in this dual enterprise. Her reflexive assessment of ideological frames is invaluable to literary and cultural studies of disability. In addition, Davies's book forces neo-Victorian studies further down the road of self-reflection and ethical awareness than it has been before, highlighting the point that while the interrogation of representation is worthy of further scrutiny, rarely is it as simplistic as it may...