Neo-Victorian Freakery

The Cultural Afterlife of the Victorian Freak Show

Helen Davies

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137402561
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Neo-Victorian Freakery explores the way in which contemporary fiction, film, and television has revisited the lives of nineteenth-century freak show performers. It locates the neo-Victorian freak show as a crucial forum for debating the politics of disability, gender, sexuality and race within the genre more broadly.

1

Mixing (re)Memory and Desire: Constructing Sarah Baartman

Sarah Baartman was exhibited as ‘the Hottentot Venus’ in early nineteenth-century England and France. The facts of Sarah Baartman’s life – even down to her date of birth, date of death, and her name – are still contested.¹ She was a Khoikhoi woman born during the mid-1770s in South Africa.² Sarah spent much of her childhood living and working on colonial farms and also as a domestic servant. Whilst in the employment of Hendrik Cesars,³ she had been persuaded to perform for male patients in a nearby naval hospital (Crais and Scully, 2009, pp. 50–51). Western ethnographic narratives had a long-established fascination with the physical appearance and cultural customs of the ‘Hottentot’ people, namely the purported large buttocks and elongated genitalia of the women. It should be noted here that the term ‘Hottentot’ is now considered to be highly derogatory; it was the name given to the Khoikhoi people by colonial settlers, meaning ‘stutterers’, and referred to the sound of their language. A Scottish doctor, Alexander Dunlop, heard of Sarah and met with Cesars to negotiate bringing her to England to be displayed in the fairs and exhibitions, regularly featuring anatomical ‘curiosities’, which were becoming increasingly popular at this historical moment. Sarah seemingly consented to this new career in Europe under the promise of fame and fortune, and was first exhibited in Piccadilly in 1810. She was presented in a tight-fitting, flesh-coloured suit to emphasise her figure, and was exhibited as part-freak, part ethnographic specimen, and received a considerable amount of press attention and publicity. During the autumn of 1810, a campaign was started for a legal investigation into Sarah’s well-being, as abolitionists of the time suspected that she was an enslaved woman and objected to the degrading spectacle of her acts. The ensuing court case ruled that Sarah was performing under her own volition, and she continued to appear in public shows and private viewings. There are some absences in the surviving historical record of her life during 1811–13, but she travelled to Paris in 1814 under the management of Henry Taylor. In 1815, she was sold to a new manager, and was regularly displayed to high-society audiences. During this time, she attracted the interest of Georges Cuvier, a French naturalist, who persuaded her to submit to examination and drawings at the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle. Cuvier was obsessed with the racist theory of separating different ethnic groups into a hierarchy of ‘species’, and was keen to have the body of a ‘Hottentot’ woman in his natural history collection. Sarah’s health began to fail in 1815, and she died between 29–31 December of that year; the precise date and cause of her death is unknown.⁴ Her corpse was quickly claimed by Cuvier, who made a full cast of her body and dissected and preserved her brain, genitalia, and skeleton.

Perhaps more than any of the performers discussed in this study, Baartman’s life – and afterlife – has been extremely controversial and highly-publicised. Her remains were originally housed at the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle until 1937, when they were moved to Paris’s Musée de l’Homme. Her skeleton and body cast were publically exhibited until complaints from women’s groups in the 1970s led to their removal into private storage; they would make a brief return to public display in 1994. It was in 1995 that the South African government began a formal campaign to have Sarah’s remains returned to her homeland for burial.⁵ In many ways, the ‘ownership’ of Sarah’s remains became entwined with South Africa’s political reforms towards greater equality in the 1990s, and broader debates over the legacy of colonialism. It was not until 2002 that France agreed to these requests. The repatriation and burial of Sarah Baartman in her homeland received a great deal of press attention, and offered the opportunity for both political and cultural reconsideration of the discourses of colonialism, sexism, and ‘scientific’ racism which led to her exhibition in the first instance.

Textual representations of Sarah played a significant role in highlighting the indignities of her posthumous possession by France; Diana Ferrus’s poem, ‘I’ve Come to Take You Home’, written in 1998, was read out by French Senator Nicolas About to the French Senate on 29 January 2002, the day they finally voted to release Sarah’s remains from the Musée de l’Homme for return to South Africa (Holmes, 2007, pp. 173–74). Clearly there were other complex political negotiations at work here, but the idea that a fictional reimagining of Sarah could have such an influence upon the attitudes of a nation – that such a text could offer some avenue for redressing the power relationships of empire and gender which continued into Sarah’s afterlife – is compelling indeed. As an introduction to the themes that I will be discussing in this chapter, I want to offer a brief reading of Ferrus’s text. The poetic voice imagines taking Sarah back to her homeland, to the ‘lush green grass’ of the Cape; the speaker explains: ‘I have come to bring you peace’ (Ferrus, 2010, p. 213). Such a formulation implies that Sarah is an unquiet spirit, who cannot find rest until her body receives a proper burial. Her posthumous exhibition in the French museum is explained in damning terms:

I have come to wrench you away

away from the poking eyes of the man-made monster

who lives in the dark with his clutches of imperialism

who dissects your body bit by bit,

who likens your soul to that of satan

and declares himself the ultimate God!

(Ferrus, 2010, p. 213)

The medical gaze is depicted as penetrative – masculinised and sexualised. The use of the term ‘monster’ is loaded, considering Sarah’s career as a freak show performer. As indicated by the Introduction, all ‘monsters’ are ‘man-made’ in the sense that freakery is a process of construction, defining (and sometimes thwarting) the precarious boundaries between the ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’. However, Ferrus’s terminology suggests that ‘monstrosity’ lies in the medical men such as Cuvier who used Sarah’s body to justify their own racist ideologies. Here, the mirror metaphor discussed in the Introduction is also relevant; the audience of a body perceived to be unusual will project their own distorted imaginings onto that form. The image of Sarah’s body being taken apart – dismembered – is particularly poignant, considering the focus on her body parts in life and in death. We are reminded of neo-Victorianism’s power of re-membering, of reconstructing nineteenth-century bodies that have been lost in a variety of ways. For the poetic voice to work to ‘wrench’ Sarah way from the anatomisation that she has suffered thus speaks of piecing together the fragments, to repair the literal and symbolic violence that she has experienced.

In this sense, we can understand Ferrus’s poem as reimagining and reappropriating several facets of Sarah’s oppression in her life and death. However, there are some more ambivalent images at work in the text. The speaker of the poem is consistently represented as an active presence: ‘I have come to take’ / ‘I have come to wrench’ / ‘I have come to sooth’ (Ferrus, 2010, p. 213). These acts of reparation offer a pointed contrast to the actions of the ‘man-made monster’, but he too has been an agent with ‘poking eyes’, dissecting powers, and the privilege of declaration. In either set of deeds, it is always Sarah who is having something done to her; she is never the active agent, but always the passive bearer of someone else’s volition. Furthermore, the speaker’s promised actions in relation to Sarah’s body are noteworthy: ‘I will cover your face with the palms of my hands, / I will run my lips over the lines in your neck, / I will feast my eyes on the beauty of you’ (Ferrus, 2010, p. 213). This imagined engagement is protective, emotional, sensual, and erotic in turn. To look upon Sarah as a woman of beauty is a significant reappropriation of her image, considering her denigration as ‘freakish’ in some nineteenth-century accounts which will be explored below. However, the prospect of ‘feasting’ on Sarah’s body is surely provocative, a quasi-cannibalistic image of consumption which signifies ambiguously. Even as Sarah is re-membered, the poem struggles to think of her as anything other than a passive victim, and invokes a discourse of eroticism and ‘savagery’ as it attempts to wrest her from the gaze of one audience to another.

The first section of this chapter begins with an analysis of the terms under which Sarah was exhibited as ‘the Hottentot Venus’, and examines a selection of notable textual representations dating from her lifetime. In the Introduction to this book, I highlighted Robert Bogdan’s definition of the construction of freakery as ‘the enactment of a tradition’ (Bogdan, 1988, p. 3); as a context for exploring how neo-Victorianism revisits and re-enacts the exhibition of ‘the Hottentot Venus’, we need to understand something of the ‘traditions’ in which her original presentation were located. In Sarah’s case, this involves both the freak show and ethnographic display. Much of the contemporary debate around Sarah’s exhibition relied upon the distinction – or potential lack thereof – between the performance of freakery and the ethnographic show as a vehicle for colonial exploitation. In this vein, I examine a series of legal documents and letters published in newspapers dating from 1810 which debate Sarah’s exhibition and the extent to which she ‘chose’ this, rather than being coerced as an enslaved woman. Ultimately, Sarah’s exhibition was deemed lawful, but there are ambivalences in these documents which deserve further scrutiny in terms of the anxiety they reveal about her agency: an uncertainty which is also a key theme in her neo-Victorian afterlife. However, the emphasis which is placed upon the freak show as a forum for performers to exercise their own volition is also important, a theme which becomes particularly apparent in my analysis of the anonymous ballad published the year after this legal wrangle. The Hottentot Venus: A New Song (1811) constructs Sarah was a knowing agent in control of her own presentation. Of course, there are still racial and gendered ideologies at work in this construction, which problematize her exhibition even as it is celebrated. The final text I wish to explore in this section is the French play by Théaulon, Dartois, and Braiser, The Hottentot Venus, or Hatred of Frenchwomen (1814).⁶ Despite the play’s colonialist ideologies, it can also be interpreted as representing the boundaries between ‘respectable’ Western femininity and the ‘otherness’ of the Hottentot Venus as being permeable, performative, and unstable. The play thus might point towards the ways in which the representation of freak show performers such as Sarah offered an avenue for rethinking the borders between ‘self’ and ‘other’ in her own cultural moment, a theme which becomes central in her neo-Victorian afterlife.

Exhibition; agency; re-membering; sexuality; haunting; consumption: these are the tropes which shape Sarah Baartman’s representation in neo-Victorianism. Via a brief reading of the concept of ‘re-memory’ in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), I suggest that the metaphor of haunting becomes pertinent to conceptualising the tension between victimhood and agency in Baartman’s cultural afterlife. My analysis of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus (1990) highlights the play’s problematizing of uncovering the ‘real’ Sarah via re-memberment. She is a complex, sexualised subject who is complicit in her own exploitation to an extent. However, the audience is also embroiled in her posthumous ‘consumption’, and we are forced to reflect upon our own participation in this feasting on her body. Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Hottentot Venus (2003) has some significant parallels with Parks’s play, for it also engages with the themes of agency, the freak show, and the politics of re-memberment. Both texts depict science – in the form of fictional versions of Cuvier – as more exploitative and objectifying than freak show presentation. As we shall see, the play and novel also are self-conscious about their own continued ‘exhibition’ of Sarah yet sometimes struggle to re-member her without reiterating the discourses which made her a spectacle in life and death.

Ethnographic exhibition and the enfreakment of Sarah Baartman

Sarah’s billing as ‘the Hottentot Venus’ overtly presented her in terms of race and expectations of femininity, and the ways in which a ‘Hottentot’ woman would have signified to an early nineteenth-century audience demand further consideration. As we shall see throughout this book, the public exhibition of unusual bodies has always been shaped by ideologies of gender, race, and sexuality, and these are heightened in the case of Sarah. She appeared in freak shows alongside other performers with perceived physical anomalies, but her own purported differences signified as racial spectacles as well. Her exhibition was not only invested in freak show discourse, but those of ethnographic display. As Bernth Lindfors explains: ‘displaying foreign peoples for commercial and/or educational purposes’ has a substantial historical precedent before the nineteenth century, which is bound up with new geographical circuits of trade which emerged from 1500s onwards (Lindfors, 1996, p. 207). Of course, such overseas encounters rapidly became avenues for colonial expansion, and nineteenth-century attitudes towards ‘Hottentots’ were informed by accounts of the Khoikhoi people proffered by Dutch travellers and colonisers from around 1600s. Sadiah Qureshi offers the following summary of the imperialist implications of these depictions:

Wildness and savagery characterized depictions of the Khoikhoi during the seventeenth century, quickly establishing them as the ‘link’ between ape and human in nature’s great hierarchy. Images suggestive of cannibalism and depicting the consumption of raw flesh, alongside women with simian proportions and pendulous breasts, were characteristic.

(Qureshi, 2004, p. 234)

The alleged ‘savagery’ of the indigenous people of European colonies acted as justification for their subjugation; spurious stories of cannibalism and bestial inclinations positioned ‘Hottentots’ as closer to the state of animals than humanity, and in need of controlling. Such racist ideologies continue, most troublingly, into Sarah’s afterlife; the concept of ‘cannibalism’, as suggested by Ferrus’s ‘feasting’, will loom large in a variety of ways. Furthermore, as Z. S. Strother has also pointed out, these stereotypes were also gendered: ‘Hottentot’ women were a source of especial fear and fascination in relation to their bodies, namely their supposedly overgrown buttocks and elongated labia (Strother, 1999, pp. 21–22). There was considerable debate in travel writing as to whether the latter was a natural phenomenon – thus indicative of ‘Hottentots’ being a different species – or a manipulation of the body dictated by cultural norms, either to enhance a woman’s desirability or to ensure her chastity.⁷

The presumption that there would be an audience for the spectacle of such stereotypes surely motivated Alexander Dunlop’s interest in bringing Sarah to Europe for exhibition. Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully comment upon how during her employment as Hendrik Cesars’s servant, Sarah was also encouraged to ‘show herself’ to European patients at Cape Town’s military hospital. The specifics of this exhibition are not recorded, but Crais and Scully interpret her interaction with Western men in this context as being motivated by colonial desire for ‘exotic’ women (Crais and Scully, 2009, pp. 50–51). Dunlop’s work as a doctor in the same area brought him into contact with Sarah: he ‘no doubt watched the sailors’ titillation and wondered at the possibilities of showing Sara Baartman not to hundreds of sickly people but to thousands of people with money in their pockets’ (Crais, 2009, p. 54). In addition, Dunlop’s travels across the globe meant he was well-versed in the trade for and exhibition of exotic artefacts – the paraphernalia of empire – in European cities (Holmes, 2007, p. 46). It was under these terms which Sarah’s exhibition in London was initially to be couched: on arriving in Britain with Sarah in 1810, Dunlop approached William Bullock who owned the Liverpool Museum on 22 Piccadilly, London. This museum prided itself on an extensive collection of ‘Natural and Foreign Curiosities’, which, in Rachel Holmes’s phrasing, ‘exemplified the hoarding instincts of imperialism’ (Holmes, 2007, 58). Dunlop attempted to persuade Bullock to buy the rights to Sarah’s exhibition along with a giraffe skin; significantly, Bullock accepted the skin, but declined Sarah, stating that ‘such an exhibition would not meet the countenance of the public’ (Strother, 1999, p. 47). It seems that Bullock’s ethnographic displays did not extend to live human exhibits at this point in his career;⁸ ‘he was a museum director, not the keeper of a freak show’ (Holmes, 2007, p. 59).

Nevertheless, the boundary between ethnographic display and the more general exhibition of extraordinary bodies – the freak shows – was not clearly defined, for Piccadilly was an area of London which housed Bullock’s museum and numerous other displays of human curiosities and ‘wonders’. Indeed, Dunlop and Cesars ultimately secured the address of 225 Piccadilly for Sarah’s exhibition, very close to the site of Bullock’s ostensibly more educational institution (Holmes, 2007, p. 61). Z. S. Strother has argued that Baartman’s presentation departed from the performances of ‘freaks’ in the sense that the latter were exhibited on the grounds of their ‘uniqueness’ and ‘individuality’, whereas ethnographic ‘types’ were supposed to emphasise the ‘typical’ characteristics of a whole group of people (Strother, 1999, p. 25). However, such a perspective belies the extent to which the presentation of freak show performers would regularly invoke national and racial identities as a framing discourse for the bodies on display. Strother also fails to recognise that freak show presentation does tend to generalise ‘otherness’, as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson explains:

at the same time that enfreakment elaborately foregrounds specific bodily eccentricities, it also collapses all those differences into a ‘freakery’, a single amorphous category of corporeal otherness. By constituting the freak as an icon of generalised embodied deviance, the exhibitions also simultaneously reinscribed gender, race, sexual...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Distorted Images and Re-membered Bodies: Constructing Neo-Victorian Freakery
• 1 Mixing (re)Memory and Desire: Constructing Sarah Baartman
• 2 Separation Anxieties: Sex, Death, and Chang and Eng Bunker
• 3 Excessively Feminine? Anna Swan, Gendering Giantesses, and the Genre of the ‘True Life Story’ Pamphlet
• 4 Innocence, Experience, and Childhood Dramas: Charles Stratton and Lavinia Warren
• 5 The Strange Case of Joseph and Jack: Joseph Merrick and Spectacles of Deviance
• Afterword: The Neo-Victorian Enfreakment of P. T. Barnum
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index