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

form of social criticism far less meaningful than open, multi-vocal social regeneration achieved by Rabelais's generation.

Bakhtin questions the complexity of the “naturalist empiricism” of much nineteenth century Realism but acknowledges exceptions to the trend. He groups Dickens with Hugo, Balzac, and other Realists of the “grand style” whose work reflects the folk culture of Rabelais, Cervantes, and Shakespeare (Bakhtin 52). No one accuses Dickens of a lack of playfulness in his fiction, nor is his work easy to dismiss as part of a “vulgar comic genre” (Bakhtin 45). Dickens resists the Victorian temptation to “complete each individual outside the link with the ultimate whole” (Bakhtin 53). Rather than dwell on the individual psychology of his characters, Dickens creates meaning through subplots, character clusters, novel-to-novel revisions of familiar character types, and extreme images of the body—techniques that defy the limits set for individual discourses and bodies, and thus invoke the dialogic and the grotesque. Just as the grotesque “seeks to grasp in its imagery the very act of becoming and growth, the eternal incomplete unfinished nature of being,” (Bakhtin 52) Dickens' imagery grows and transforms across his corpus, ultimately linking characters and ideas that seem to accomplish very different ideological purposes.

Respondents to Bakhtin have recast the grotesque in terms that more readily apply to the cultural tendencies of the nineteenth century. In their book The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White argue for carnival as “a mobile set of symbolic practices, images and discourses” (15) employed within the negotiation of dominant power structures throughout history. Despite the diminution of the nineteenth century's use of grotesque imagery, the transgression of “high” culture by elements of the “low” strata remain significant to ideological formation: “The carnival, the circus, the gypsy, the lumenproletariat, play a symbolic role in bourgeoisie culture out of all proportion to their actual social importance” (Stallybrass 20). They posit that the carnivalesque serves “as an instance of a wider phenomenon of transgression” that enables a “political anthropology of binary extremism in class society” (26). In the nineteenth century, the grotesque served most often as a transgressive force against which middle-class culture could define