The Victorian Freak Show: The Significance of Disability and Phy ...

women, and perhaps an attempt to defend the middle class from the traditionally working-class entertainment of bodily spectacle—are reinforced through reaction to the unusual body. On the other hand, Pastrana's popularity demonstrates the pull that unusual bodies held for Victorian audiences. Both her live performances and postmortem display drew large crowds and sparked an outpouring of media attention. There are clear signs—the fact that Pastrana inspired poetry and fiction, as well as journalistic description, for instance, and the fact that Charles Darwin makes note of Pastrana in The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication—that the experience of viewing her unusual body constituted more than a cheap thrill for Victorian spectators. ² Pastrana and her physical difference clearly meant something to many who saw her, although there is no single understanding of what that something was.

In the study “Our Bear Woman, Ourselves: Affiliating with Julia Pastrana,” Rebecca Stern argues that the marketing materials for Pastrana's spectacle were a direct source of imagery in Victorian literature, including the characterization of Marian Halcombe in Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White (226–227). Stern offers two perspectives on the meaning Pastrana's image held for Victorian audiences. She first acknowledges the exclusionary nature of bodily spectacle: “the exhibition could be mobilized as a disciplinary medium that taught its audience to Other the bodies on display,” and thus “was a form of public entertainment with the potential to be a powerful ideological tool” to confirm normative culture and dominant beliefs (210). Invoking the language of Michel Foucault, this reading critiques the freak performance as part of the cultural system that maintains hierarchies of cultural power and fits the tone of much of the early work done in the field of disability studies. But Stern also offers a second, alternative interpretation of Pastrana's spectacle, one that focuses not on the freak's objectification by mainstream culture but on her place within it. Drawing on both Victorian responses to Pastrana and contemporary creative projects that make use of her story, Stern suggests that occasionally a “quiet sign of empathy with the disruptive body” appears in the artistic responses to Pastrana (225). She coins the term “affiliation” to denote audience identification with the