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

many of the premises of Foucault's work. Grotesque imagery is transgressive, yet the impossibility of any rigid ideological consistency in a collective, multi-vocal carnivalesque environment—one which grotesque imagery can conjure up in literature long after the carnival itself has ended—forbids any simple binary between the grotesque and the normative ideal.

Bakhtin's interest in fiction, odd bodies, and folk traditions makes his work important for analysis of literature's response to the freak show. Problems arise, however, for the application of Bakhtin's notion of carnival to the freak performances and literature of Victorian England. The carnival experience Bakhtin describes was determined by historical circumstances of pre-capitalist Europe that no longer existed by Victoria's reign. Bakhtin was sharply critical of much of the nineteenth-century use of the grotesque. Rabelais and His World traces the evolution of carnival spirit in the literary practice of grotesque realism; a cultural form that he argues ultimately replaces the carnival itself. As the grotesque became formalized in literary genre in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries, it retained its carnivalesque quality and served “to consecrate inventive freedom, to permit the combination of a variety of different elements…to liberate from the prevailing point of view of the world, from conventions and established truths, from clichés, from all that is humdrum and universally accepted” (Bakhtin 34). Bakhtin suggests that the impact of odd bodies persists far beyond Renaissance folk culture: “This boundless ocean of grotesque bodily imagery within time and space extends to all languages, all literatures, and the entire system of gesticulation; in the midst of it the bodily canon of art, belles letters, and polite conversation of modern times is a tiny island” (319). Yet, however timeless and universal grotesque imagery may be, Bakhtin laments that the role of such imagery has been greatly diminished from its Renaissance incarnation within the modern canon.

Bakhtin saw the nineteenth century as a period of degeneration in the original carnival functions of the grotesque, “a process of gradual narrowing down of the ritual, spectacle, and carnival forms of folk culture, which became small and trivial” until “the carnival spirit with its