In the past several decades, a wealth of scholarship has emerged on a particular representation of disability: that of "freakery." From the foundational work of scholars like Leslie Fiedler and Robert Bogan, to Rosemarie Garland-Thompson's groundbreaking 1996 anthology Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, critics have carefully explored the representations, definitions, and experiences of the freak figure in a number of cultural contexts. With subject matter ranging from P.T. Barnum's nineteenth-century side shows to Hollywood's filmic representations of extraordinary bodies, this scholarship has proved invaluable to literary, historical, and cultural studies; however, it has thus far focused almost exclusively on American matters. Despite the presence and importance of freakery in the global landscape, there have been few sustained explorations of the impact and experience of freak figures outside of the United States.
Luckily, a new collection of essays from The Ohio State University Press attempts to rectify this particular omission. Victorian Freaks: The Social Context of Freakery in Britain provides a much-needed contribution to freak studies' ongoing critical conversation by focusing its attention on "freak instances" in Victorian Britain. Editor Marlene Tromp has assembled twelve essays by interdisciplinary scholars whose collective goal is to "seek to understand the effects of individual and ideological relationships to freakery and to situate freaks in their Victorian cultural context" (1-2). The pieces are grouped under four distinct yet deeply interrelated sections, each of which uses the lens of freakery to examine different aspects of Victorian life: capitalist consumption; science and medicine; race and Imperialism; sexuality, spectatorship, and art. Read together, these essays not only meet their goal of providing a nuanced look into the social construction of the freak figure in British culture, but highlight how freakery importantly contributed to the politics of mainstream culture as well.
The anthology begins by delving into the material production of freakery with its opening section "Marketing and Consuming Freakery." This first group of essays explores specific examples of freakery that ultimately call into question nineteenth-century Britain's concerns about the instability of socioeconomic class, the market, consumption, and enfreakment itself. For instance, Heather McHold's essay "Even as You and I: Freak Shows and Lay Discourse on Spectacular Deformity" suggests that the fictionalized biographies of late-Victorian freaks speaks to "the expansion of British middle-class ideologies into working-class consciousness" (26). She convincingly challenges the assumption held by many historians that the freak show lost its social influence in the mid nineteenth-century (a supposed consequence of the increasing sophistication of medical discourse) by showing how exhibits capitalized on the public investment in the domestic sphere to appeal to the audience. McHold's call to historians to reassess their conceptualization of the influence of the freak shows will usefully expand the critical conversation about this historical phenomenon. Joyce L. Huff continues the discussion about the influence of Victorian freaks on public consciousness in her essay "Freaklore: The Dissemination, Fragmentation, and Reinvention of the Legend of Daniel Lambert, King of Fat Men." In her careful examination of the life of Daniel Lambert, a seven-hundred-pound man who exhibited himself throughout England, Huff shows how the physical consumption of food was intertwined with concerns about public consumption in the marketplace, and suggests that this tension was exhibited in how middle-class audiences related to Lambert. While Huff provides a nuanced description of the cultural context of consumer anxiety that informed Lambert's reception, the essay's greatest strength is found in her discussion of Lambert himself. He ultimately emerges as a complex individual with the agency to control his own exhibition. The final essay in the section, Timothy Neil's "White Wings and Six-Legged Mutton," explores the interconnections between the enfreakment of animals and humans, focusing the analysis on the exhibition of animals, a little-studied topic that deserves further exploration. Neil argues that the process of animal enfreakment provided the context for the later exhibitions of humans, and provides a detailed description and analysis of the animal exhibits. Although all three essays explore the context of freakery in the nineteenth-century, they end their analyses by posing relevant questions about how we continue to "consume freakery" today.
In Part II, "Science, Medicine, and the Social," Tromp's contributors explore the role of freakery in scientific and medical discourse, particularly as it plays out in relation to other Victorian social anxieties like imperialist expansion and sexuality. Each essay is also connected by its focus on the linguistic production of freakery; perhaps most interestingly, each author lends particular attention to the rhetorical strategies employed by scientific institutions in both presenting and symbolically "recovering" freak figures in the British public. For instance, Meegan Kennedy's essay "'Poor Hoo Loo': Sentiment, Stoicism, and the Grotesque in British Imperial Medicine" examines nineteenth-century case histories of "exotic" diseases and elucidates how the sentimental discourse that permeates these otherwise objective medical narratives acknowledges the limits of Western medicine while simultaneously "recovering" (and ultimately controlling) the patients through curative empathy. Likewise, Christine C. Ferguson's contribution focuses on the medical community's manipulation of language and its problematic relationship to ideas of cure and recovery. In her excellent essay "Elephant Talk: Language and Enfranchisement in the Merrick Case," Ferguson describes how in the absence of a scientific treatment for the physical condition of famed "Elephant Man" Joseph Merrick, medical narratives presented a rhetorical transition from animalized freak to noble human hero based upon a (largely fictionalized) story of Merrick's acquisition of language. Much like Kennedy demonstrates in the case of "Poor Hoo Loo," Ferguson reveals how Victorian scientific failure is erased in rhetorical moves: "recast as a casualty of language rather than of disease, Joseph Merrick becomes curable in a way denied him through the medical paradigm alone" (123). However, what makes Ferguson's essay particularly strong is the ways in which she deftly demonstrates the myriad problems that come with equating language with humanity, not only in Merrick's case but in modern scholars' (particularly those in disability studies) own "metaphors of liberation" (115). Ferguson asks readers to rethink and interrogate the largely ableist myth that language is enfranchisement, and that to lend the "silent" a "voice" is to reverse dehumanization; her compelling analysis of Merrick's case should certainly inspire one to do so. The third and final essay of this section, Nadja Durbach's "The Missing Link and the Hairy Belle: Krao and the Victorian Discourses of Evolution, Imperialism, and Primitive Sexuality" is also concerned with the manipulation of language, particularly how one hirsute woman's sideshow exhibitions were infused with the dominant messages of imperialism and evolutionary theory that effectively worked to justify British colonialism. Much like the cases of Hoo Loo and Merrick, Krao's managers also used scientific discourse to purposely downplay her "freakishness," only to "elevate" her to a different kind of spectacle: a "saved" primitive serving "as proof of the success of the [British] civilizing process" (150). Again and again, then, the essays in this section reveal the ways seemingly humanizing gestures in the scientific and medical presentation of Victorian freaks often situated the individuals within still other categories of the subaltern.
In an excellent example of the anthology's thematic overlap between sections, Durbach's piece provides an ideal transition into the next set of essays: Part III: "Empire, Race and Commodity." Like Durbach's work, the essays in this section demonstrate how freakery informs broader conversations about race and imperialism. Tromp's outstanding essay, "Empire and the Indian Freak: The 'Miniature Man' from Cawnpore and the 'Marvellous Indian Boy' on Tour in England" expands Gayatri Spivak's argument that every Victorian text speaks to issues of imperialism, by exploring how the performances of Mohammed Baux and Laloo "helped construct — as well as destabilize — the rhetoric of empire" (158). Drawing on both the American exploitation of race in nineteenth-century freak shows and the foundational postcolonial scholarship of Spivak, Edward Said, and Sara Suleri, Tromp offers a fresh reading of how gender, race, and enfreakment informed England's desire and anxiety regarding their empire, tensions manifested in the bodies of Baux and Laloo. Continuing the conversation about the psychological investment Victorian England had in the freaks they visually consumed is Kelly Hurley's "The Victorian Mummy-Fetish: H. Rider Haggard, Frank Aubrey, and the White Mummy." This essay provides a close reading of Aubrey's King of the Dead and Haggard's She, arguing that the white mummy figure in these texts symbolized England's desire for the immortal white subject/empire. By positioning the mummy as freak, Hurley helpfully expands the conceptualization of the category to include the "phantasmatic liminals" that populate the Victorian gothic novel, a trend that will hopefully be embraced by other literary critics (183). Lastly, in "Our Bear Women, Ourselves: Affiliating with Julia Pastrana," Rebecca Stern complicates the common critical paradigms used in disability studies through her reading of Pastrana's life by proposing a process she calls "affiliation" as a new kind of alliance between the critic and subject. Stern traces the numerous ways that Pastrana and her racialized, enfreaked body have been represented throughout different eras, including how she has been resurrected in plays, art, and music in the twenty-first century. By drawing on her own reactions to encountering Pastrana in various forms during her research, Stern powerfully demonstrates the value of feminist and disability scholarship that utilizes both theory and personal experience in order to come to a socially-just analysis.
In the final section of the book, Tromp has compiled three essays that explicitly consider the role of artistic representation — specifically, literary and photographic representation — in the cultural production of freaks. Part IV: "Reading and Spectating the Freak" opens with two essays that, each working from Robert McRuer's concept of the alliance between queer theory and critical disability, both attempt to demonstrate how variously enfreaked and "queer" characters in the novels of Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens are used to facilitate the hetero-normative plot resolution of marriage. The two essays — "Queering the Marriage Plot" by Martha Stoddard Holmes, which focuses on a single "critically" disabled character in a Collins novel, and Melissa Free's "Freaks that Matter," which examines Collins's and Dickens's characters in conjunction — may effectively be read as companion pieces in dialogue with one another, particularly as Free directly addresses (and takes issue with) aspects of the Stoddard Holmes piece. Both examine to what extent freakish bodies in literature become textual receptacles for other kinds of "difference," and, while coming to divergent conclusions, demonstrate the importance of wrestling with these very questions. The final essay by Christopher R. Smit, "A Collaborative Aesthetic: Levinas's Idea of Responsibility and the Photographs of Charles Eisenmann and the Late Nineteenth-Century Freak-Performer," turns attention to visual arts, and offers an alternative understanding of the standard reading of freak performance. By exploring the collaborative relationships between nineteenth-century photographer Charles Eisenmann and his "freak" clients, Smit urges readers to reconsider the usual assumptions of powerlessness on the part of freak performers, and suggests ways in which performers were proactive in their own extraordinary image construction. As with many other essays in this collection, Smit's emerges as particularly effective because it offers a new way of thinking not only about specific experiences of historically enfreaked individuals, but also about any forum in which disability, nondisability, and art coincide. The "collaborative aesthetic" he outlines has important implications for future scholars' work.
In fact, perhaps the most valuable aspect of Victorian Freaks is not the questions it answers about freakery in nineteenth-century British society, but the questions it poses concerning our current cultural and scholarly assumptions about a number of topics. Huff's piece, for example, leaves readers considering what new consumer dilemmas are displaced upon "extraordinary" bodies today; Ferguson asks us why we have naturalized connections between voice and autonomy; Tromp suggests her work has implications for looking at international relations and rhetorics of "difference" in general; Smith and Stern offer new ways of reading and interacting with all kinds of bodies. Throughout, the essays also interrogate the very discourses through which modern commentators articulate the experiences of the freak individuals of the past; while paying careful attention to the specific material and historical context of Victorian freakery, the contributors repeatedly draw attention to how and why we work with "freaks" and their stories today.
Victorian Freaks is a relevant text for anyone who is interested in the Victorian period in general, and more specifically for those who are invested in coming to a greater understanding of the social construction of freakery in British culture and its ramifications on the present historical moment (particularly those interested in its comparative aspect to earlier American-based freak studies). However, the collection may prove especially useful for literary scholars, particularly those with additional interest in fields like queer, postcolonial, or disability studies. While the contributors come from a diverse range of disciplines, many of the essays directly address a variety of works of literature, including fiction, prose, drama, and poetry. Furthermore, the authors refuse to fall into the now increasingly interrogated practice of interpreting disability as a metaphor in the literary texts they explore, instead insisting upon placing materiality and humanity at the forefront of each analysis. In doing so, they provide an important model of new ways of reading and talking about representations of disability in literary scholarship — a model that will surely come in handy for any future scholar willing to rise to the challenge of responding to and expanding upon all the critical questions Victorian Freaks asks its readers to consider.
