Historiographically speaking, the study of freak shows morphs from that of monsters (teratology) to the identity politics of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and disability of the late twentieth century. The trope – with freaks as ‘key to the production of the categories of “the self” and “the other”’ (p. 17) – is by now fairly worn, but Nadja Durbach makes a good show of it in five engaging and illustrated chapters focused on, in turn, ‘the Elephant Man’, ‘the Double-Bodied Hindoo Boy’, ‘the Hairy Belle’, the would-be ‘primitive’ Aztecs and ‘Earthmen’, and finally, ‘Cannibal King’ (for the further locating of the freak show within the larger history of Victorian and Edwardian entertainment and commercialised leisure, as well as British labour, social and economic history). Durbach has nothing to say on the etymology of ‘freaks’, but she makes it clear how in nineteenth-century British culture they became a potent source for the making up and corseting of what it was to be ‘human’ – be it in terms of body shape and size, colour, sexuality, and distinctiveness from those further down the chain of animal forms. Hence, freaks also served powerfully for the emerging-as-dominant evolutionary discourses of the second half of the century – of humans, races, and civilisations. Middle-class scrapbooks were lovingly filled with their photographs, suggesting how the nomativities were recreated and consolidated in domestic settings.
Durbach suggests that the images sold something else as well: the very idea of images as a means of mass communication. As intriguing is the material she provides on the culture of the freak show itself – its rise and decline, and the various fates and fortunes of the impresarios and ‘freaks’ alike: for example, if, like me, you uncritically consumed Frederick Treves’ famous essay on the Elephant Man – and had it compounded, oddly enough, in David Lynch’s film version – Durbach’s first chapter will lift the scales from your eyes. The Elephant Man (Joseph Merrick) may have had a hard time of it in the freak show trade from which Treves ‘rescued’ him, but he at least had the camaraderie of his fellow freaks, a degree of privacy, and the dignity of earning his own income. It was a different story in ‘the elephant house’ in the London Hospital (as it was popularly known in the medical culture of the 1880s): he was not only transformed into a piteous subject of Victorian philanthropy, but made a spectacle for the prying, prurient eyes of doctors and their friends, with no modesty spared. Treves frequently photographed Merrick in the nude and made his life sufficiently unbearable that Merrick willingly delivered himself to the workhouse and, after once again being captured by Treves, took his life in despair. Of course, from at least as far back as the sixteenth century, the ‘spectacle of deformity’ was as much within medical as it was in popular culture – think of the collecting and display of ‘anomalous’ body parts undertaken by John Hunter in the late eighteenth century; but in the nineteenth century it was increasingly in that context – with the ‘objects’ alive, rather than stuffed or pickled – that it found legitimacy. By the mid-twentieth century, with virtually all culture medicalised, it was in the medical arena alone that it survived: as one of Durbach’s sources suggests, the freak show that so benefited the medical profession, may have met its decline through the very act of appropriating its wares.
However, Durbach’s study is far from tending to the naïve view that doctors themselves make their own culture; as her other chapters also submit – albeit less with regard specifically to the culture of medicine – what the history of the freak show revealingly illuminates is the production, reproduction, and negotiation of dominant values and epistemology in relation to wider socioeconomic and political change. This surely is no less with regard to exhibiting freaks historically – as the epitome of the study of the Other – although on this and how it has served our own self-fashioning culture of ostensible self-fashioners, the Spectacle of Deformity remains silent.
