Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture (review)

Spectacle of Deformity is a detailed and provocative history of the Victorian freak show in Great Britain. American audiences tend to associate the freak show with the depression-era carnival sideshow of train-enabled circus culture, but the centuries-old practice of bodily spectacle reached its zenith in British society some decades earlier. A flurry of marketing, scientific, and journalistic representations of freaks emerged in England in the second half of the nineteenth century. Coinciding with rapid imperial expansion, shocking scientific revelations, evolving class relations, and the incessant debate concerning gender roles, Victorian discourse about the life and body of the freak performer was deeply embroiled in other cultural debates and anxieties. Nadja Durbach artfully layers primary sources to demonstrate the complex cultural work performed by freak shows. She argues that, far from being the transgressive outsider contemporary audiences tend to imagine, the freak reveals a great deal about the Victorian cultural center.

Spectacle of Deformity looks closely at five specific performances popular in Victorian Britain, making arguments about the class, gender, racial, and scientific preoccupations through which these performances were created and understood. The first chapter exemplifies Durbach's method as it asks readers to look anew at one of the most sentimentalized figures in Victorian bodily spectacle—Joseph Merrick, the so-called Elephant Man. Many readers know of Merrick through David Lynch's 1980 film, a portrait of an exploited victim of the freak show tradition. Yet the film's content (and much of what is popularly known about Merrick) comes largely from a single historical source: the self-affirming memoir of Dr. Frederick Treves, who promoted himself as Merrick's savior during the performer's final years as an inmate at London Hospital. To reveal the biases that shape Treves's version, Durbach offers another account of Merrick's life, a response to Treves written by a showman who had marketed Merrick's performances years earlier. Unable to support himself through labor, working-class Merrick exhibited his unusual appearance as an escape from the work-house. Performance brought economic security and self-reliance, allowing Merrick to be his own master. Merrick's later life at the hospital afforded neither financial independence nor respect, but did include regular exhibition, justified in the names of science and hospital fundraising. The chapter establishes two important points. First, the experience of bodily spectacle is shaped by social class: performance could be a source, not of degradation, but of independence for members of the working poor. Second, late-Victorian medicine and science had more in common and more interaction with the traditions of showmanship than men like Treves would care to admit.

Durbach continues this mode of analysis throughout the book, telling interesting stories from the lives of freak performers while situating their performances within ideological and cultural debates. Her second chapter examines performances of conjoined twins—particularly Lalloo the Indian Boy and Siamese twins Chang and Eng—as barometers of Victorian anxieties about individuality, sexuality, and the ethnic other. Chapter 3 looks at the collision of sexuality and science in the marketing of hairy girls like Krao, who began performing in the 1880s as a "missing link" that justified the new theory of evolution (101). Chapter 4 analyzes spectacles of ethnic others presented as representatives of "declining civilizations and dying races" (115), including two mentally disabled Salvadorans marketed as the last of the ancient Aztecs. Durbach shows that physical difference was often read in light of England's hopes and fears about imperial expansion. Chapter 5 highlights the common recruitment of Irishmen and women to masquerade as Zulu and other exotic ethnicities within bodily spectacles, and teases out assumptions about both the Irish and residents of farther-flung corners of the Empire. The greatest value of this book is its historical specificity and avoidance of generalization: Durbach supports her arguments with a rich array of primary sources, including promotional posters and photographs reproduced within...