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

shuttered as a public health risk when a pediatrician claimed the performance could endanger the unborn children of pregnant viewers.

Pastrana died after a difficult childbirth in 1860, which for most performers would signal the end of a theatrical career. That was not to be the case for Pastrana. Theodore Lent sold her body—and that of their newborn son—to a Russian scientist to be preserved for continued exhibition. After reclaiming the bodies, Lent took them to England for a series of exhibitions and travelling entertainments in 1862–1864, and then resumed a tour of Europe with the addition of a second wife, Zenora, of similarly unusual features. After Lent's death, Julia's body changed hands several times but continued to appear at European fairs until at least 1895, and it is now in storage at the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Oslo. The end of Pastrana's story—the presentation of her and her child's lifeless bodies—emblematizes both the Victorian fascination with physical difference and the exploitive nature of much bodily spectacle. This final phase of Pastrana's career reveals freak show practice at its most troubling: the odd body is merely an object, deprived of will. Presented under glass for the gaze of middle-class consumers, Pastrana entertains her audience and validates their normalcy without any voice in how her difference is perceived. Yet her postmortem profitability also shows the remarkable appeal of grotesque imagery. Though it is difficult to conceive of Pastrana as a powerful person, clearly the image of her odd body was powerful enough to warrant continued scrutiny. It still does today: Pastrana has been the subject of a wide range of recent critical studies and creative interpretations. ¹

The Victorian relationship to images of physical difference was complex, marked by conflicting impulses to reject, exploit, and celebrate the odd body. On one hand, the closure of Pastrana's 1857 performance series reveals cultural anxiety about the ramifications of bodily spectacle by confirming a fear that middle-class normalcy (at least the bodies of unborn middle-class children) faced contamination from freaks. This anxiety points to Victorian normative ideology and the impulse to protect, even perfect, future generations of human bodies. Such an effort to defend physical normalcy also hints that elements of gender and class ideologies—an elevated status for motherhood that justified special protections and restrictions for