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

freak, “an effort towards alliance, collaboration, and understanding” that “recognizes difference but neither fetishizes nor seeks to erase it” (Stern 204). This phenomenon contrasts with the othering and exploitation that more “politically inflected” theorizations of disability tend to emphasize in their efforts to “reappraise the original dynamics of representation” (Stern 228). While the “dynamics of affiliation do not escape the problems of exploitation,” Stern argues that affiliation “can significantly complicate both how we envision the work we do and how we understand the cultures and bodies we explore” (228).

What does it mean for our understanding of Victorian society if the freak was more than the other, if he or she had a place within normative middle-class culture that went beyond serving as a foil for it? What if an odd body could influence normative culture, not just through transgression, but through subtle connections with and variations upon normative ideals? This book takes up those questions as they relate to a particular context: the popular fiction of the mid- and late-nineteenth century. By popular, I mean works marketed for commercial sale to the same middle-class audiences that filled the showrooms for spectacles like Pastrana's. These works, both products and shapers of Victorian concepts of the normal and ideal, resist a unified presentation of the meaning of physical difference, but they do show difference to be meaningful. Literature is a messy, contradictory record of the equally messy, contradictory discourses through which cultural ideology is negotiated, and so these novels offer a rich testing ground for ideas about cultural formation. In this case, the literature of the middle class will test two ideas: that the iconography of the Victorian freak show is an important image-base for the nineteenth-century imagination of normative ideology and social ideals, and that these images often play surprisingly positive roles in such literary imaginings.

Theorizing Physical Difference

In recent years, the growing field of disability studies has called for careful analysis of the ways in which the interpretation of physical difference reveals and underwrites a culture. As Rosemarie Garland-Thomson