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

the process of reification: she is changed from a person to a commodity in her postmortem display.

Cultural products like art, literature, and spectacle play a role in both creating and critiquing dominant ideology. Literature, for Marx, has potential to reveal disjunctions between that ideology and the real nature of existence. Its value lies in its ability to be co-opted by the proletariat in order to deflate beliefs of the governing class that have become internalized by individuals within that society. Marx's vision of cultural texts as potential challenges to the dominant culture has proven remarkably seductive for literary critics. However, it also demands a shift away from Marx's core socioeconomic concerns into more specific discussion of the role of language, literature, and cultural texts in the manufacture of ideology.

Twentieth-century Western critical theory places great emphasis on analyzing the linguistic, psychological, and social structures that underlie human thought and culture, as well as on questioning the stability of such structures. Ferdinand de Saussure's notion of all communication as the subjective interpretation of signs revolutionized the field of linguistics and had ramifications far beyond that discipline. By envisioning communication as a complex system built upon arbitrary connections between the components of a linguistic sign—the signifier and its signified—Saussure's work highlights the extent to which communication and language depend on the interpretation of differences rather than on a positive, concrete relationship between words and their meanings. Language, a product of culture, is the foundation for coherent thought: “Without language thought is a vague, uncharted nebula. There are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language” (Saussure 112). Saussure's ideas motivated further philosophical explications of the role that the structure of communication plays in the production of the subject, both psychologically and culturally.

Jacques Lacan applied a Saussurian approach to linguistic structure within his study of the human mind, thereby demonstrating the extent to which identity hinges on symbolic thought and the subject's relationship to otherness (which might be described as the quality of being outside a subject's conception of self). Lacan reinterprets Freud by reasserting