Literary Celebrity and Public Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Bonnie O'Neill

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780820351575
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

Through extended readings of the works of P. T. Barnum, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, and Fanny Fern, Bonnie Carr O'Neill shows how celebrity culture authorizes audiences to evaluate public figures on personal terms and in so doing reallocates moral, intellectual, and affective authority and widens the public sphere. O'Neill examines how celebrity culture creates a context in which citizens regard one another as public figures while elevating individual public figures to an unprecedented personal fame. Although this new publicity fosters nationalism, it also imbues public life with personal feeling and transforms the public sphere into a site of divisive, emotionally intense debate.

Further, O'Neill analyzes how celebrity culture's scrutiny of the lives and personalities of public figures collapses distinctions between the public and private spheres and, as a consequence, challenges assumptions about the self and personhood. Celebrity culture intensifies the complex emotions and debates surrounding already-fraught questions of national belonging and democratic participation even as, for some, it provides a means of redefining personhood and cultural identity. O'Neill offers a new critical approach within the growing scholarship on celebrity studies by exploring the relationship between the emergence of celebrity culture and civic discourse. Her careful readings unravel the complexities of a form of publicity that fosters both mass consumption and cultural criticism.

CHAPTER 1

P. T. BARNUM
Commercial Pleasure and the Creation of a Mass Audience

IN THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY UNITED STATES, P. T. BARNUM’S NAME evoked the most wonderful, bizarre, and extravagant exhibits that could be devised by art or nature. “Barnum” was a byword for the new form of commodified pleasure that drew on the nation’s economic and geopolitical ambitions. More specifically, Barnum built an entertainment empire out of the raw materials of the national obsessions with race, gender, and cultural identity, obsessions he both shared and apparently embodied. His success hinged on his associating his enterprises with himself, and in creating those associations he pioneered modern advertising practices and generated a new discourse of self-referentiality.¹ He also managed to attract considerable attention to himself as the man behind Barnum’s American Museum, Jenny Lind’s American tour, and many other popular attractions. Celebrity enlarges Barnum’s public presence, so that he finds himself in the unequal position of being known by those he does not know. He demonstrates this experience in an episode from his autobiography Struggles and Triumphs (1855):

If I showed myself about the Museum or wherever else I was known, I found eyes peering and fingers pointing at me, and could frequently overhear the remark, “There’s Barnum.” On one occasion soon after my return, I was sitting in the ticket-office reading a newspaper. A man came and purchased a ticket of admission. “Is Mr. Barnum in the Museum?” he asked. The ticket-seller, pointing to me, answered, “This is Mr. Barnum.” Supposing the gentleman had business with me, I looked up from the paper. “Is this Mr. Barnum?” he asked. “It is,” I replied. He stared at me for a moment, and then, throwing down his ticket, exclaimed, “It’s all right; I have got the worth of my money”; and away he went, without going into the Museum at all!²

The purveyor of so many human curiosities became a curiosity himself, on par with the dwarves, plate spinners, “savage Indians,” and other human oddities and freaks he puts on display. Barnum is unable to set the terms of his own display as he does with his exhibits, however, and it is not clear exactly what the observer sees when he stares at Barnum.

Barnum’s reputation owed as much to his promotional strategies as to the entertainments he produced, and he was often criticized for the extravagantly misleading advertising claims that earned him the epithet “humbug.” He was especially proficient in generating newspaper puffs. As with most of his business endeavors, Barnum did not invent the puff, but he pressed the limits of the form. He defends his work as “the world’s way”:

If my “puffing” was more persistent, my advertising more audacious, my posters more glaring, my pictures more exaggerated, my flags more patriotic and my transparencies more brilliant than they would have been under the management of my neighbors, it is not because I had less scruple than they, but more energy, far more ingenuity, and a better foundation for such promises. In all this, if I cannot be justified, I at least find palliation in the fact that I presented a wilderness of wonderful, instructive and amusing realities of such evident and marked merit that I have yet to learn of a single instance where a visitor went away from the Museum complaining that he had been defrauded of his money. (ST 43)

The key word in this passage is “more”: Barnum represents himself as a man whose tendencies to excess reveal the characteristics of his times. He conveys the “go-ahead” spirit of the Jacksonian free market. As Bluford Adams notes, “Barnum was well aware of his own symbolic importance to middle-class masculinity.”³ Is this what the visitor saw when he gazed up at Barnum—the living embodiment of the zeitgeist? or did he regard Barnum as he would all of the showman’s exhibits, as a curiosity or freak of nature? In any case, the encounter between the observer and his object is defined in purely economic terms, as satisfaction for money well spent. The observer experiences the celebrity as a product of the marketplace. Through monetary exchange the observer “consumes” the celebrity figure in the sense that he obtains proximity to the celebrity that enables him to satisfy certain personal desires for and about Barnum.

Who is Barnum? Seeking the answer to this question, the museum visitor is assured of insight into Barnum through the observation of his physical features. In this effort, he engages the very practices of spectatorship that Barnum’s museum and other enterprises promote. But the visitor’s assurance is misguided, and not simply because Barnum’s physical presence communicates so little. The visitor surely recognizes, as all Barnum’s patrons do, that Barnum is a humbug: he habitually deceives his audiences to attract their notice. He ought not to be trusted. In claiming he had gotten his money’s worth, the visitor asserts a judgment independent of Barnum’s persona and claims an authority based on evidence Barnum does not knowingly present. But Barnum collects the admission fee in any case, so the transaction is mutually beneficial even if it is not enlightening.

Although Barnum’s career thrives in this epistemological murk, he offers a crystal-clear explanation of his aims as a showman: he provides wholesome amusements for hardworking people. Barnum thus helps invent popular culture by transforming affect—here, amusement—into a commodity. This fact is significant in itself, but it is further complicated by Barnum’s methods, specifically his use of deceptive practices or humbug, and his exhibitions of human beings as objects for visual consumption. From his first success as a showman, the 1836 Joice Heth exhibit, Barnum regularly displayed human beings in a manner that emphasized their physical and racial differences from their white audiences.⁴ Thus shaping popular culture at the moment of its emergence, Barnum contributes to ideologies of racial identity and cultural belonging. That he does so through carefully stage-managed acts of deception suggests not simply the fiction of race—its constructedness—but, more potently, the assurances of superiority and mastery that accompany white subjectivity.

But what happens when Barnum is himself the subject of the white gaze? The opening anecdote is remarkable not only because it portrays Barnum as the object of public curiosity but also because, in relating the incident, Barnum attempts to claim it, repackage it, and extend it into the public sphere as an object of the gaze of a mass public. In this manner, he subsumes his individual spectator into the enlarged cultural object, the text of his autobiography. As a writer, Barnum constantly does this kind of repackaging: he recounts the details of his many exhibits, then explains his promotional strategies and public reaction to them. Recognizing public attraction to himself as a personality, he attempts to craft that public image in a manner that shows off and exercises his mastery as the impresario of his own celebrity. In doing so, he attempts to protect his private life from public exposure. Having promoted a culture in which spectatorship and authority are conjoined, however, the outcome is not assured. Landmark works of public relations, Barnum’s writings represent their author as a public figure, and they preserve the private Barnum from public view. This method would also separate the acts of deceit or humbug from the private person—Barnum implies that a separate set of moral values attains to the man in his public and private spheres of action, even as his exhibitions of persons of color deny them the same privilege. In these efforts, Barnum establishes precedents and practices that shape popular culture in the period, but he does not insulate himself against popular judgment. Barnum shows the incredible, inevitably frustrated effort of public relations and image making in the nascent celebrity culture, and he demonstrates as well why the limits of such self-authorship are politically resonant.

INTERPRETING BARNUM, THE MAN AT THE TICKET WINDOW SUBJECTS him to the same analytical process that patrons used to understand Barnum’s exhibits. Barnum was notorious for making false claims about his entertainments, and he invited audience members to determine the authenticity of the acts to their own satisfaction. At the same time, Barnum’s growing celebrity made his own authenticity suspect as many impostors flooded the marketplace. Bluford Adams explains, “By the late 1840s, Barnum had taken his place alongside Jack Downing and Davy Crockett as a universally recognizable persona that could be donned by anyone with access to a printing press.”⁵ The line emphasizes Barnum’s relationship to the American traditions of folk humor and tall tales, which he adapts and embodies in a popular culture of paid amusements. These antecedents indicate Barnum’s debts to American oral and literary traditions.⁶ He owes his self-presentation to the typical representations of the Yankee wag, and as an autobiographer he crafts himself as a Franklinian figure of his own self-making. But the proliferation of Barnums to which Adams alludes denotes the mechanistic character of Barnum’s project. He is a self-made man for the industrial age, in which self is not fashioned so much as manufactured.

Barnum’s promotional methods generate the Barnum image. More than a persona or projected, rhetorical identity, the image is assembled from a variety of visual and verbal signs circulated through mass media. Images are “polysemus,” according to Roland Barthes. “They imply, underlying their signifiers, a ‘floating chain’ of signifieds, the reader able to choose some and ignore others.” The meaning of the image is therefore not fixed, despite the author’s efforts to effect “an anchorage,” a limitation on the possible meanings for an image.⁷ In celebrity culture, the individual celebrity is the image’s author and text in one, as Barnum illustrates: as an autobiographer, he literally authors his own image in deliberate effort to shape or even counter popular interpretations of him. Indeed, the inevitable tension between audiences’ claims to interpretive authority and the celebrity’s claims to authorial control are complicated by the shared assumption that the image is finally limited by the celebrity’s identity or self. Barnum’s astute consumer must determine whether the image is really Barnum’s—a hopeless quest, in that the image by definition is a representation, not the man nor the self that animates him. Curiously, the museum patron who confronts Barnum in the ticket office presumes to sidestep this interpretive confusion altogether, but as a spectator, he objectifies the man and converts flesh to image. Relating the incident, Barnum returns the favor. Similarly, in his autobiography, Barnum relishes anecdotes in which strangers share their knowledge of Barnum, unaware that they address the man himself (see ST 229–32). In such moments, Barnum encounters his own image, the representation of him that circulates beyond the physical person in the culture at large. He recognizes that image as his greatest hoax; audiences presume to understand what they do not see—to know Barnum in an essential way—even as they fail to identify the man in the flesh.

Such false encounters and false assurances are central to Barnum’s work, which relied on exaggerations and deceptions to attract public attention. Neil Harris calls Barnum’s playful use of fraud the “operational aesthetic” and associates it with other frauds and hoaxes popular at the time, such as the Great Moon Hoax of 1835, and confidence games, often called “diddles” in the popular lexicon. In Barnum’s use of the operational aesthetic, audiences took as a given that his explanations for his exhibits were incomplete or deceptive. As viewers, their job was to solve the puzzle of the exhibit using practical knowledge and common sense. This technique empowers audiences to assume an authoritative role in generating knowledge and undermines the influence of institutions and experts in the age when intellectual authority was increasingly concentrated in academic institutions and specialized professions.⁸ Barnum’s earliest exhibit tells the story: in 1835 he toured the country with Joice Heth, an aged slave whom he claimed was 161 years old and the former nurse to the infant George Washington. Audiences lined up to hear her tell stories of baby George and sing hymns. Barnum skillfully orchestrated newspaper coverage that drew attention to Heth’s backstory and her physical characteristics, including her black skin and arthritic body. Unable to straighten her legs, she sat with them drawn up; her left arm was also bent at the elbow and immobile. The fingernails of her left hand were four inches long. Readers saw her likeness in illustrated advertisements, and newspaper reviews corroborated the grotesque images: several compared her appearance to “an animated mummy” or “an Egyptian mummy just escaped from a sarcophagus”; another associated her longevity with stereotypes of women’s behavior: “The dear old lady, after carrying on a desperate flirtation with Death, has finally jilted him.”⁹ When crowds began to thin, Barnum altered his strategy. Taking a hint from European impresario Johann Maelzel, Barnum placed newspaper puffs claiming that Heth was not a human being at all but “a curiously constructed automaton, made up of whalebone, india-rubber, and numberless springs ingeniously put together” (Life 157). The repackaging of Heth as an automaton was a turning point for Barnum: whereas he first claimed he was himself taken in by the improbable story of Heth’s past, he now advertised claims about her that he knew to be untrue. In a final twist, on Heth’s death Barnum staged an autopsy to determine if in fact she were human and, if so, how old she really was. Judging by the ossification of her arteries, the chief examiner, Dr. David L. Rogers, determined Heth’s age to be no more than eighty years. Richard Adams Locke, the editor of the New-York Sun and perpetrator of the Moon Hoax, was present at the autopsy—he claimed to have been hidden behind a curtain—and published an exposé of the “dissection” that identifies Heth as “one of the most precious humbugs that ever was imposed upon a credulous community” (Life 172). Locke’s exposure of the Heth hoax might have brought it to an end and publicly discredited Barnum. Instead, the affair escalated further when Barnum’s assistant, Levi Lyman, managed to convince New York Herald editor James Gordon Bennett that the autopsy was itself a humbug—the autopsy of “an old negress who had recently died at Harlem”—and that Heth was alive and well, still meeting crowds in Connecticut (Life 173). This final hoax won Barnum even more publicity, though it cost him the goodwill of Bennett, who never forgave Barnum for the humiliation of humbugging him and his paper.

Barnum’s manipulations of Heth’s story invite audiences into speculations about the exhibit’s composition and meaning. In her first incarnation, Heth offers a window into America’s founding. As Benjamin Reiss explains, she gave audiences a way to talk about serious social issues of race and northern attitudes toward slavery: “The Barnum-Heth tour was a traveling, shape-shifting, improvised forum for public discussion—and just as often, public avoidance—of the racial issues that were coming to dominate political and social discourse, and which were newly shaping nineteenth-century America’s self-perceptions.”¹⁰ But this conversation is carefully framed by the terms of her display as a freak or grotesque. Rosemarie Garland Thomson links the freak show to Jacksonian ideologies of equality that in fact accentuate bodily difference of race and physical ability: “This black, disabled woman commodified as a freakish amusement testifies to America’s need to ratify a dominant, normative identity by ritually displaying in public those perceived as the embodiment of what collective America took itself not to be.”¹¹ Hence Heth is doubly objectified, both by her public display and also by her transformation into a commodity for visual consumption—a transformation, moreover, that replicates her commodification as a chattel under slavery. Like all freak shows, the Heth exhibit participates in the process of shaping a cultural identity by defining physical characteristics that exclude one from the civic body.

What I find most extraordinary about the Heth exhibit and Barnum’s other displays of human beings is their fraudulence—the efforts Barnum exerts to fabricate and sell the body as a spectacle. Over and over again, Barnum rehearses the stages of his deceptions, acknowledging and indeed reveling in the falsehoods he generated to promote his exhibits. Viewers already suspected they were being lied to—the advertising claims stretched credulity—and took pleasure in discerning the truth of the exhibit. James Cook argues that the operational aesthetic is intrinsic to the commercial marketplace. The uncertainty or built-in perceptual “fuzziness” of Barnum’s advertisements and exhibits underscores the risks inherent to all commercial transactions, and it requires consumers to approach transactions prudently.¹² Barnum’s own experience as a businessman bears out this advice: as he relates in his autobiographies, he encountered many business schemes that were little more than scams. He presents his career as a difficult effort to get ahead in an economic world beset with “sharp trades, especially dishonest tricks and unprincipled deceptions” (Life 39). His own tricks are innocuous by contrast because they offer something in return for the deception—the pleasure of figuring out the trick or the fun of being bested by a worthy humbug. But the exhibits were not just puzzles for viewers to solve. Barnum’s active presence in managing and presenting the exhibits made them contests between him and his patrons, who attempted not just to figure out the puzzle but, in doing so, to beat Barnum at his own game.¹³ The Heth exhibit establishes the techniques that Barnum returned to throughout his career as a purveyor of what James Cook calls “artful deceptions.” As Cook explains, the artful deception is not simply a lie, because the audience knows it is being lied to. The artful deception is “a calculated intermixing of the genuine and the fake, enchantment and disenchantment, energetic public exposé and momentary suspension of disbelief.” Cook extends Harris’s idea of the operational aesthetic to better account ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Celebrity Culture in the Public Sphere
• Chapter 1: Commercial Pleasure and the Creation of a Mass Audience
• Chapter 2: Mediation, Affect, and Authority in Celebrity Culture
• Chapter 3: The Impersonal in the Personal Public Sphere
• Chapter 4: Celebrity, Privacy, and the Embodied Self
• Chapter 5: Celebrity’s Revolutionary Power
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index