Canadian Carnival Freaks and the Extraordinary Body by Jane Nicholas (review)

This book describes the complicating matter of a troubled and troubling historically fashioned category – the freak – and seventy years of Canadian freak shows that sparked the imagination of consumers and producers of Canadian spectacle. It is a book about the making of Canadian popular entertainment culture over the first seven decades of the twentieth century. It is impressive social and historical research about a subject matter that was so extraordinarily present and visible in Canada and yet so challengingly ephemeral as to compel so little scholarly attention – until now.

This is a singular and important full-length work on the freak show in its Canadian social, cultural, and legal contexts. But as a contribution to our understanding of exceptional bodies and the exhibitionary logics of display that framed them as freaks and of the logistics of travelling carnivals, exhibitions, and circuses that found these "different" people, negotiated their working contracts, advertised their exotic and erotic presence, and rendered them up as titillating forms of spectacle display and consumption, it is unsurpassed. The book entangles several strands of contemporary culture theory dealing with those "repulsive" bodies that were so fascinating to Canadian spectators, who were, at the same time, both hesitant and eager to pay their money to see the freaks. It develops a specifically Canadian sense, in its imperial context, of the grotesque hybrid body, focusing on the legal, moral, and logistical lives of these special bodies as spectacle: a crucial aspect of an emergent colonial settler (read white) Canadian popular culture.

Jane Nicholas also weaves a fascinating description of the twentieth-century development of the business of the carnival, the circus, and the sideshow in Canada, describing in detail the routes, routines, itineraries, and the labour relations and conditions of these travelling shows and how at mercy they were to ever-shifting economic conditions, current events, moral codes, and state regulations dealing with the display of bodies. The labour relations that transformed exceptional subjects into framed freaks as objects of display did so ambiguously and ambivalently. The question of their exploitation and protection is also the story of a group of entertainment artists who seemed less duped and exploited as they were ably employed. Just how would a fat lady, a micro-cephalic (pinhead), conjoined twins, congenitally challenged others of spurious gender, race, and age, or the otherwise disfigured find work and avoid institutionalization and, for that matter, that other force of spectacle logics – that is, the medicalized gaze that rendered up irregular bodies as unique health lessons and objects? The social world of the circus community could be relatively safe both emotionally and economically even though sideshow bodies were generally exploited as grotesque freaks to the public. Here, Nicholas details the rich contradictions of ability and age as she describes the complicated forces of freak show display rubbing up against the emotional and practical protections associated with those same shows, which stretched the notion of normality and possible social acceptability through the productive work offered to freaks in the Canadian entertainment industry. Concepts of the normal and the acceptable are the ones that Nicholas usefully challenges as she demonstrates how powerful they actually are in creating freak show narratives.

The book is written in six chapters with an introduction that outlines her methodology and a compelling epilogue, which is open-ended and curious. The chapters trace the concept of the freak in the making of a Canadian exhibitionary culture of spectacle consumption, examining the making of what the author calls the "carnival state" through a history of transformations in legal and moral codes and regulations in twentieth-century Canada. There is an impressive chapter on the popular entertainment business in Canada and the place of the freak show labour in supporting it, a chapter on the freak show itself in terms of questions of normality and race, a chapter on the role of the child freak and how those bodies were both produced and consumed, and, finally, a...