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This introductory chapter first sets out the purpose of the book, which is to argue that freak shows should not be dismissed as merely marginal, exploitative, or voyeuristic forms of entertainment. In fact, displays of freakery were critical sites for popular and professional debates about the meanings attached to bodily difference. The book focuses on Britain from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. This is in part because it was here and during this moment of “taxonomic frenzy” that the European freak show arguably reached its apotheosis. The discussion then turns to the freak show and commercialized leisure, the freak show and the body, and the medicalization of monstrosity.

This chapter discusses the decline of the freak show, which began in the second decade of the twentieth century. Although many show shops, seaside resorts, and freak museums continued to flourish until well after the Second World War, the end of the Edwardian period was also the end of an era for human oddities. By the late twentieth century the British public had deemed the exhibition of human anomalies inappropriate, indecent, and indefensible. When referred to at all in late twentieth- and early twenty-first century discourse, the freak show has been widely condemned as a product of “the worst traditions of Victorian ghoulishness,” an institution that inhabited “the backwaters of civilisation in the nineteenth century.”

This chapter juxtaposes two competing narratives of Victorian Britain's most famous freak—“Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man”—to offer a reappraisal of the place of the freak show within the social, cultural, and economic history of labor, charity, and the state. These narratives come from surgeon Frederick Treves's memoir, The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences, and Tom Norman's account of “the Elephant Man”—which appears not only in his letter to World's Fair but also in the showman's own memoirs. It is argued that despite its inherent prejudices, Norman's interpretation of Merrick's life is a critical historical document as it insists that we interrogate the assumption that the freak show is always already exploitative, offering instead a more nuanced understanding of its economic and social role in the lives of deformed members of the working poor. In addition, this analysis of “the Elephant Man” interrogates late nineteenth-century medicine's relationship to deformity—which Treves uncritically championed as purely scientific, objective, and explicitly redemptive—suggesting that scientific medicine's engagement with human anomalies was dependent upon and deeply enmeshed in more popular and commercial discourses and practices surrounding the display of spectacular bodies.

In the late nineteenth century it was relatively common knowledge that freak show entrepreneurs who could not afford to import troupes of exotic foreigners regularly employed locals, often working-class Irishmen, to play the role of African “savages.” While scholars have examined the exhibition of non-Western peoples at freak shows and noted that many of the “cannibals” and “savages” on display were actually fakes, none have explored in earnest either the preconditions for, or the ramifications of, this particular artifice. This chapter interrogates the cultural attitudes that bound class, ethnic, and racial otherness together, and the ways in which these relationships were embodied and performed, in order to explain what made these fake African shows not only possible, but appealing to a broad public.

This chapter explores the novel Nightwood by modernist writer Djuna Barness. It argues that the novel combines the arts of the freak show with the decadent aesthetics of the fin de siècle to protest both fascist and capitalist instrumentalization of the subject. It looks into the notion that against these repressive forces, the novel poses the freak dandy, a subject/object of sustained and unrequited desire whose freedom inheres precisely in the status as a commodity fetish. It challenges the views of decadence by proposing that the novel critiques the longstanding view that decadence is the unwitting progenitor of fascism, by suggesting that through becoming a commodity fetish, the freak dandies solicit and prolong desire, enabling them to resist both fascist control and embourgeoisement.

In 1883 the great Canadian impresario G. A. Farini unveiled his latest discovery: “Krao, the Missing Link.” Krao was a seven-year-old girl from what Victorians called “Indochina” whose small, dark-skinned body was covered in soft brown hair. Farini exhibited her in the United Kingdom for seven months as “A Living Proof of Darwin's Theory of the Descent of Man,” the missing link between man and monkey. Whether or not freak show audiences were convinced of Farini's claims about Krao, they were nevertheless attracted by the link to Darwinian theory. This chapter argues that Krao's exhibition was successful because, whether she was “real” or not, she literally embodied popular interpretations of evolutionary theory, reflecting back to the freak show audience its own understanding of the processes of human evolution and encouraging them to participate in the advancement of scientific knowledge. At the same time, Krao reinforced British beliefs about the distance between their own civilized and evolved bodies and “primitive” Others.

At the same moment that “the Elephant Man” was admitted to the London Hospital in the summer of 1886, “Lalloo the Double-Bodied Hindoo Boy” began to exhibit himself across the United Kingdom. Lalloo was what was frequently referred to in the medical literature as a “double monstrosity,” the scientific term then used for what are now called conjoined twins. But rather than being attached to a fully grown brother, Lalloo had a much smaller sibling growing out of his chest. This chapter argues that as both a spectacular entertainment and a pathological exhibit, Lalloo's double body generated popular and professional debate about the boundary between the self and the other, and the distinction between male and female. However, his act also raised concerns about the sexual potential of a double-sexed body. Although they never explicitly addressed the sexual relationship between Lalloo and Lala, the promotional materials that accompanied the exhibition and the medical case reports that circulated in professional journals suggested that this body was intriguing because of the ways in which it exploited late Victorian anxieties about masturbation, incest, pedophilia, and child marriage.

This chapter examines the freak show silent films of Lon Chaney, the so-called Man of a Thousand Faces. It argues that the revival of the freak-garde in film occurs amid revolutionary changes in the medium of cinema and the opportunities they presented for new models of subjectivity. It outlines the landscape of Hollywood cinema during the 1920s when the film industry erupted in experimentation due to technological innovations. It argues that these experiments unhinged sound and image from one another in the cinematic spectacle, which resulted to radical instability. It highlights films featuring Chaney such as The Unholy Three and The Unknown and analyzes their disintegration of the senses which leads to the liberation of repressed desires and rogue subjectivities.

This chapter focuses on theatrical engagements with evolution during the nineteenth century. The Victorian era witnessed a cultural landscape in which “curiosity was a great leveler.” Every type of theatrical performance was on offer, from melodramas to pantomime to music hall to fairground shows, circus, tableux vivants, and public exhibitions. Theater had a decisive role to play in the public taste for biology. Plays about everything from the “birds and the beasts” to physiognomy and galvanism testify to the public appetite for biologically based entertainment. This chapter explores the stage's incorporation of the abstract notion of geological “deep time” as well as the inner lives of animals. It also considers the influence of naturalism on specific plays, playwrights, and scenography during the period. It builds on, and complements, the existing scholarship on performance modes outside mainstream theater, such as freak shows and exhibits of commercially displayed peoples in the newly founded zoological gardens of cities like Paris, London, Berlin, and Copenhagen. Finally, it discusses counter-evolutionary forces in the popular theater that ridicule and parody Darwinism.

This concluding chapter explores the history of the freak-garde and their descriptions about posthuman subjectivity and corporate personhood. It emphasizes Matthey Barney’s Cremaster cycle and its exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum of New York. It argues that the work constitutes a freak show that presents posthuman subjectivity that is genealogically rooted in corporate personhood. It addresses the feature of the double-amputee track athlete Aimee Mullins, and looks into how the Cremaster cycle critically exposes the fantasy of self-making, propagated in popular constructions of the “cyborg” and in theoretical elaborations of prosthetic subjects. It argues that the freak show does not reject posthuman subjectivity but attempts to recover its antihumanist potential, revealing the vital links between posthuman subjectivity and the ontological condition of corporate personhood. It also suggests that the cycle implies a corporation’s right to deny a mode of personhood to American citizens.

Orning raises questions about the provocative work of Patricia Piccinini, a contemporary sculptor and artist. Piccinini’s work often stages encounters between what look like human figures and what look like hybrid creatures with both human and nonhuman characteristics. Orning’s focus in these “humanimal” encounters is on the potential they hold for questioning easy distinctions between “the human” and “the animal”, while also drawing attention to the fact that human beings today can already be seen as hybrid, whether we have tissues or organs implanted from nonhuman beings or we recognize that human bodies are made up of cells and micro-organisms that are not necessarily human. Orning connects the uneasiness associated with unsettling what it means to be human to a longer genealogy of putting “monstrous” or “freakish” bodies on display, whether in the form of humans with animal-like features, or animals with human features, particularly in nineteenth-century circus sideshows. But the “species intermingling” that is staged by Piccinini, according to Orning, holds more potential for ethical engagement with “others” of various kinds or species than earlier settings such as freak shows.

This chapter explores aspects of nineteenth-century popular culture that contributed to the emergence of the cave man character. References are made to previous works from history, cultural and literary studies and the history of science. These show how long-standing ideas about the earth’s history were challenged by geological, archaeological and paleontological evidence of ancient and extinct mammals, dinosaurs and hominids. Elite ideas were popularised for a mass public by scientists themselves, and through evolutionary freak shows that exploited scientific controversies for profit. Increasingly, scientific ideas were generalised and disseminated by mass-market, heavily illustrated books and magazines. A new style of comic magazine introduced ‘cartoons’ which poked gentle fun at current sensations, as did an emerging entertainment industry centred on music hall, pantomime and other forms of popular theatre. New steam-powered transportation meant that books, magazines and performers travelled farther and faster than ever before. Britain was the hub of this new mass culture, both spreading and receiving ideas through a continuous, reciprocal dialogue with the emerging empire and America.

This chapter explores the role that Collyer Brothers syndrome played in hoarding’s historical formation. This cultural history of Homer Collyer and Langley Collyer surveys sensational reports regarding two of the most famous hoarders in modern America. It argues that representations of the Collyers facilitated a cultural shift in hoarding as a curious abnormality. Descriptions of these two eccentrics in newspaper articles after their deaths in 1947 treated their disorderly mansion in Harlem and their belongings as a freak show. Magazines and novels supported this image of these men as pathological hoarders, and they influenced the concept of hoarding as a form of chronic disorganization. Exploring how these early accounts of hoarding also connected to depictions of Harlem and its residents, the chapter finds that reports on individuals treated as insane hoarders were influenced by social anxieties over urban social disorder.

‘Curiosity’ explores the varied world of exhibitions in the West End. The district became home to a variety of popular exhibitions that stood side-by-side with sites of ‘official’ art and culture such as the new National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. The West End visitor could enjoy spectacular panoramas, which dazzled the eye, or poses plastiques where models made classical paintings come to life. There were also freak shows and events where non-white peoples were placed on exhibition. These included the Hottentot Venus and the Aztec Lilliputians. Exhibition-mania was particularly centred on Leicester Square but could also be found on Piccadilly, site of the Egyptian Hall, that offered curiosities, art works, popular lectures, dioramas, and automata. Pleasure districts abounded with what were seen as distorted bodies. This gave them the quality of what Michel Foucault terms ‘heterotopias’ which draw upon, but disturb, the culture at large.