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

For Morris, the dialogic nature of Dickens' work reveals ideological discord surrounding social class and economic status: she envisions the novels as representations of the debates of their day rather than as the rhetorical efforts of an individual author. Critic Nicholas Morgan echoes Morris's analysis: “It seems to me that the only a priori judgment one can make about the Dickensian universe is that it represents a pluralistic collection, not a unified, internally consistent system, of artworks” (23). Thus, our critical methodology “must be flexible” as “Dickens's world teams with self-contradictions” (Morgan 21). In light of these arguments, Dickens' fiction presents a more complex worldview than can be explained in terms of satire or individual rhetoric. Victorian use of the grotesque deserves an equally nuanced analysis. Just as the intrusion of working-class voices expands and complicates the class commentary in Victorian fiction, so the inclusion of grotesque bodies expands and complicates the novels' implications for an increasingly proscriptive culture of physical normativity.

Traditions of Bodily Spectacle

For pre- and early-modern England, as for Bakhtin, spectacles of physical difference were rooted in the carnival traditions of the fairground. Fairs, like London's late-summer Bartholomew Fair of literary renown, hosted displays of human oddity. The freak show was a key institution for much of the fair's tenure and drew crowds eager to view the body in its most extreme forms. Though the nineteenth century brought diminishment of the fairground traditions and the closure of Bartholomew Fair, Victorian society did not set aside its connection between bodily spectacle and popular entertainment. Celebratory, festival uses of bodily spectacle persisted. Historian Michael Diamond notes that Queen Victoria's coronation festivities included “menageries, waxworks, marionettes, conjurors, acrobats, jugglers and other circus acts, not to mention peep-shows, roundabouts and a display of giants, dwarfs, the woman with two heads, the living skeletons and the pig-faced lady” (9) and that freak shows maintained their popularity throughout her reign. Like the