Big and Small: A Cultural History of Extraordinary Bodies by Lynne Vallone (review)

In Big and Small: A Cultural History of Extraordinary Bodies, Lynne Vallone centers size as an often overlooked, though easy to see, dimension of human identity that deserves careful consideration, along with race, gender, and class, in understanding how societal attitudes shape cultural norms and hierarchies. Examinations of perception of "out of scale" bodies offer particularly fertile ground for revealing cultural constructions of normality and difference because, according to Vallone, "[i] n ascribing values to those bodies that challenge us—the very big and the extra small—we also seek reassurance in the ordinary, the norm," and "[o]ur dismissal of the anomalous body, our disgust or fear of the extraordinary … as well our ongoing fascination with size difference are all cultural symptoms of an unease with difference" (2, 6). Vallone's project therefore not only encompasses a history of extraordinary bodies but also traces their significance as well as cultural mandates for their signification.

In delving into the meaning-making of these bodies, "big and small" describes not only the subject matter but the approach Vallone takes. Her ambitious examination of the "big" questions of understanding "complex social identities, power relations, constructions, and cultural categories of the miniature and the gigantic" eschews a single theoretical lens and sweeps across multiple disciplines, time periods, genres, methodologies, and discourses to tackle "aesthetic and epistemological" questions surrounding both imagined and real bodies (3). Whew! Such a scope necessitates limitation, which consists of going "small" in terms of an in-depth focus on particular figures—variations of Tom Thumb, depictions of dwarfs and pygmies, gigantic robots, and obese girls—that serve as encapsulations and indices of themes at issue in her larger questions. Following the logic in the book's title, Big and Small is divided into two parts: "Small Bodies" and "Big Bodies," also referred to as "Miniatures" and "Monsters" in the book's introduction. However, the analysis in each part does not really fall into a neat division between big and small; instead, Vallone weaves a consideration of the small relative to the big and vice-versa to shed light on questions of who counts as human, the future of bodies, and what becomes "normal."

The introduction to part one, "The Little Man," maps out the rationale for study of small bodies, more particularly small male bodies (Vallone notes that female thumblings have been well analyzed elsewhere and is more interested in constructions of masculinity in miniature). Vallone argues that consideration of how common threads of "youth … monkeys, patronage, costume, performativity, masculinity, portraiture, otherness, freakishness, civility, savagery… [a]nd, of course, size" (18) are woven into narratives of little men who loom large in the cultural imaginary. She demonstrates how the study of Jeffrey Hudson, Charles Stratton (better known in Barnum's shows as General Tom Thumb), and Ota Benga leads to understanding how these figures come to stand for abstracts beyond themselves, how they function at a symbolic or metonymic level as "emblem, epitome, index, or dictionary" (18) of humanity in order to address anxieties about human origins and preservations of social hierarchy and power.

The four chapters comprising "Small Bodies" constitute a robust exploration of the meaning of "little men" juxtaposed with "greatness" in various forms. Chapter one, "In the Beginning Was Tom Thumb," examines how various incarnations of what Vallone terms the Tom Thumb trope "dance delicately on the divide between faith and science" (31), particularly in the face of growing knowledge of the microscopic world, by illustrating preoccupations with conception, both in the sense of the act beginning life and in the broader sense of construction of modes of thought. Vallone then uses her tracing of this history to shed light on how contemporary incarnations of the Tom Thumb trope, with its competing images of the preciousness and potency of the small, continue to shape the emotionally fraught and polarizing contemporary discourse on abortion, embryonic stem cell research, and in-vitro fertilization. In chapters two and three, "The Dwarf in High...