Charles D. Martin

Department of English
Florida State University
cmartin@mailer.fsu.edu

 

Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

 
In the last two decades, much critical attention has been focused upon the cultural importance of the sideshow freak, emphasizing the effect of the exhibit on the audience. In his book Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self, Leslie Fiedler, reaching back initially to his own childhood experiences, uses a Freudian lens to demonstrate that the exaggerated corporeal difference of the sideshow attraction embodied childhood nightmares and anxieties over scale, the limits of the body, individuality, even the primal scene of the child’s creation. In exhibition, the freak helps constitute the “normality” of the audience. The advent of modern medical science, in Fiedler’s eyes, has “desacralized human monsters forever,” and has replaced the audience’s awe with a quotidian curiosity that diminishes the once-exalted status of the freak as a wonder and a miracle (19). Robert Bogdan also confesses a childhood experience with the freak show in the prefatory statement of his study Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit, as he was hurried away from the tent by his parents, leaving him with shame and a sense that he somehow had transgressed into a domain cordoned off by taboo. Bogdan advances the study of sideshow exhibitions by perceiving the construction of the freak in the hierarchical relationship between the attraction and the audience. “A ‘freak,'” according to Bogdan, “is a way of thinking, of presenting, a set of practices, an institution–not a characteristic of an individual” (10). Bogdan turns away from the use of the term “freak,” offering instead the seemingly more humanizing one of the “disabled” for those attractions with real, not manufactured, physical anomalies. Susan Stewart, in her book On Longing, extends the idea of social construction by succinctly declaring the lusus naturae, or freak of nature, instead a “freak of culture” (109). The exhibit of this social construction domesticates and naturalizes those bodies determined to be congenitally or ethnically different in a spectacle of colonialization. “On display,” Stewart writes, “the freak represents the naming of the frontier and the assurance that the wilderness, the outside, is now territory” (110). In the freak is evidence of the colonial impulse to know and to dominate the unknown, the exotic. Common to all three of these critical works is the emphasis placed upon the relationship between the exhibit–the spectacle of the anomalous body–and the audience, which places the burden of meaning upon the exhibit.

 

In her book Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, Rosemarie Garland Thomson envisions her mission as one of denaturalizing the disabled figure, and consequently that of the freak, by resacralizing it and giving it agency. Late in her introductory chapter, in a section which she calls a manifesto, she expresses her desire to rescue the disabled figure and to establish it as a political category alongside class, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender, among others. For Thomson, extending the arguments of Bogdan and Stewart, the figure of the disabled is as much a social construction as the freak. She also incorporates into those constructions the figure of the “normate,” a term she coins to define “the social figure through which people can represent themselves as definitive human beings,” a subject position which requires its antithesis–the figures, among others, of the disabled and the freak–in order to constitute itself (8). The exhibition of the “extraordinary body,” the term she prefers for the figure of the disabled and the freak, relies, as with most exhibitions, on the visibility of the body. At this point, a reader might expect a gloss on the Enlightenment shift to the institutional reliance on the visible that fueled the delineations of the natural world into rigid, authoritarian, easily discernable categories. But, unlike some of her predecessors–Bakhtin and Fiedler, for instance–she finds little difference in effect between the display of the extraordinary body as an anti-authoritarian exhibition of a world turned topsy turvy (a prelapsarian vision of folk culture before the Age of Reason); the Barnum presentation of the sideshow freak as prodigy and potential humbug, a spectacle to be deciphered; and the rational rhetoric of medical case history that diminishes the extraordinary body to an anomalous specimen of a malady in need of treatment. In each case, the exhibition reduces the body to one feature, a synecdoche that erases the rest of the whole that it represents.

 

In her second chapter, “Theorizing Disability,” Thomson demonstrates a correspondence between feminist theory’s emphasis on the politics of the body and her analysis of disability discourse. Feminist theory, though, serves more as a guiding spirit for her study than as a critical foundation, influencing her to select in particular the disabled female body as her primary subject. Even though she refuses to conflate the female body and the disabled body, she uncovers conflation in works by Aristotle, Freud, and Veblen, who each envision the female body as disabled or mutilated in comparison to the culturally normalized male body. This conflation provides the occasion for the introduction of feminist theory. Thomson finds an analogue between the spectacle of the female body and that of the disabled body in the relationship each spectacle has with its spectator, a relationship in which the spectator–the normate, who is by cultural definition white, male, and physically abled–constructs his spectacle. “If the male gaze makes the normative female a sexual spectacle,” Thomson writes, “then the stare sculpts the disabled subject into a grotesque spectacle” (26). Thomson, though, is not a pure constructionist; she does not deny bodily difference. The disabled body is different from the abled. She maintains the flexibility of the constructionist view while refusing to erase the physical reality of difference, the materials from which the spectator constructs the category.

 

For her critical foundation, Thomson incorporates theories from three different sources: Erving Goffman’s theory of stigmatization as a cultural process, Mary Douglas’s theory of dirt as a cultural contaminant, and Michel Foucault’s docile bodies. The result of this hybridization illuminates the forces at work that identify, isolate, and ostracize the extraordinary body. According to Thomson, Goffman’s theory “untangles the processes that construct both the normative as well as the deviant and…reveals the parallels among all forms of cultural oppression while still allowing specific devalued identities to remain in view” (32). In order to establish and cultivate a definition of normality, a society needs to identify and stigmatize normality’s antithesis, creating and naturalizing categories of superiority and inferiority. Society maintains order by distinguishing the anomalous. In Thomson’s reading of Douglas’s theory, “[d]irt is an anomaly, a discordant element rejected from the schema that individuals and societies use in order to construct a stable, recognizable, and predictable world” (33). The anomalous, or the extraordinary as Thomson prefers, threatens the treasured uniformity of society. Thomson aptly fuses these two theories, asserting succinctly that “human stigmata function as social dirt” (33). Choosing to historicize at this point, Thomson introduces Foucault’s theories on the construction of the modern subject and the institutional processes set up to regulate the body, through measurement and classification, and to root out those anomalous bodies that violate the norm of the Cartesian solitary, autonomous, productive individual–in particular, the disabled bodies. As Thomson makes clear, “[d]isability is the unorthodox made flesh, refusing to be normalized, neutralized, or homogenized” (24). Since the disabled figure exceeds the rigid taxonomy of the modern subject and cannot be normalized, it must be institutionally identified and contained. Once again, in her too-brief discussion of the applicability of Foucault’s theories, Thomson neglects to note the importance of visibility to enforce this containment. One of the primary panoptical institutions of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the nascent natural history museum, designed not only to display the natural world in a rigid and highly visible hierarchical taxonomy, but also to influence and contain as well the behavior of its patrons. The freak show, a related institution of containment, developed out of the American Museum of Charles Willson Peale and its later proprietor, P. T. Barnum.

 

Thomson devotes her last three chapters to a limited, but distinctive, list of cultural and literary sites where the extraordinary body receives representation: the freak show, the sentimental novel of reform, and the African-American liberatory novel. Unlike her presentation of the history of the exhibition of the extraordinary body up to this point as unvarying objectification, she arranges these sites as gradual, if at times incremental, improvements in the cultural representation of the extraordinary body, a freak’s progress, if you will. Each of these sites performs specific cultural work, improving the lot of the extraordinary body as it climbs its way up what might be called a Great Chain of Representation and offering initially endorsement, then criticism of liberal individualism and the ideal American self promoted by Ralph Waldo Emerson in that bible of liberal individualism, “Self-Reliance.” Emerson’s ideal of broad-chested masculinity, fully naturalized as a self-governing, atomized individual, requires the opposition of the figure of the disabled, the invalid, the body ungovernable, unconforming, dependent.

 

In her third chapter, Thomson embraces Fiedler’s assumption that freaks help establish the normality of those who witness the spectacle and adds to the achievement of the cultural work of the American freak show the constitution of Emerson’s ideal American self. Simply put, the extraordinary body of the freak helps constitute Emerson’s ideal American self by displaying its antithesis, of which, to Thomson, Joice Heth was the best example. Presented by Barnum as his first major attraction and humbug, Heth was billed as the impossibly ancient nurse of the young George Washington. Thomson describes Heth as “[a] black, old, toothless, blind, crippled slave woman, she fuses a combination of characteristics the ideal American self rejects” (59). In presenting the body of Joice Heth to the reader, Thomson effaces the narrative of the exhibit, the humbug romance of the founding father Barnum uses to frame the extraordinary body, in order to offer an unalloyed narrative of her own. Thomson complicates the simple economy between spectacle and spectator with the examples of Sartje Baartman (the Venus Hottentot) and Julia Pastrana (the Ugliest Woman in the World), who, according to the author, disrupt rigid, naturalized categories “that underpin Western rationality,” those of race, gender, and sexuality (74). Thomson limits the liminality of the extraordinary body to binary constructions that do not apparently threaten the spectator’s ability to constitute himself.

 

In order to satisfy her mission, Thomson necessarily views the exhibition of the extraordinary body as unmitigated containment and objectification. Although she gives a brief nod to the carnivalesque properties of the extraordinary body, she does not linger long on the disruption the figure causes to the exhibition space in the attempts to contain it. She assumes that all disruptions are contained, all threats neutralized by the apparent hierarchy of the space. Thomson also erases distinctions between audience members, lumping them all into the construction of the ideal American self. Yet most patrons must have realized as they witnessed Barnum’s exhibitions of the extraordinary and the exotic that the same fate could await them. Beneath the glee that urban working class, rural poor, and immigrant populations experienced in being potentially normalized by the display of difference lay the anxiety that if they did not conform to expectations, they too could be exhibited as anomalous bodies, exiled from membership in Emerson’s ideal. Contemporary literary representations of Barnum disclose an anxiety concerning exhibition. In George Washington Harris’s Southwestern humor tale, “Sut Escapes Assassination,” Sut Lovingood meets up with P. T. Barnum, who threatens to stuff and display the gangly, rural poor youth as a nondescript (130). The presence of Barnum not only jeopardizes Sut’s status as an autonomous American self, it endangers his life, underscoring the anxiety experienced among audience members at the margins.

 

Thomson is more concerned with the theoretical demands of her mission than with the historical minutiae of the era she portrays, consequently (and ironically) homogenizing the concept of the freak show and its presentation. All exhibitions and exhibition spaces for the anomalous body are alike in her eyes, denying the changes in context and the complex set of relationships that arise from those changes. Around the name Barnum gave for his exhibition space (the Lecture Room), Thomson places quotation marks, an attempt, I imagine, to indicate a euphemism for a freak show stage, yet Barnum did use the space for lectures and temperance melodramas, as well for the display of the extraordinary body. Barnum, as Bluford Adams has recently demonstrated in his book E Pluribus Barnum, used his freak show exhibits between acts of his moral dramas, often to interesting effect. He added a General Tom Thumb in blackface to the cast of a dramatization of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred, which consequently mitigated the anti-slavery message of the play and disrupted the high seriousness of the melodrama at the same time as it helped constitute the normality of his audience (142). Thomson also oversimplifies the hierarchy between Barnum’s displays and his patrons. Not only did the audience have to resolve what Thomson calls an “affront” to the categories, the audience had to discern what kind of operation was at work (N. Harris 57). Those who could not discern the operation became, in a sense, part of the show, reduced in status in the hierarchy of Barnum’s exhibition space.

 

Thomson fares better with the literary materials of the sentimental novel of reform and the African-American liberatory novel. She capably calls attention to the disabled figures in each of these novels and demonstrates how integral they are to each novel’s purpose and structure. In her fourth chapter, “Benevolent Maternalism and the Disabled Women in Stowe, Davis, and Phelps,” Thomson seeks an analogue between the hierarchical relationship of the spectacle and the spectator in the American freak show, and that of the sentimental novel’s disabled women and the “maternal benefactress heroines,” as the author terms them. Even in the economy of sympathy generated by these two figures, the relationship remains largely parasitic. Like the sideshow freak, the figure of the disabled woman remains passive and objectified before the gaze of the benefactress, who benefits from the misery of the spectacle through the offer of compassion, a culturally approved response. The disabled woman, generating maternal affection in her audience, helps constitute a benefactress otherwise refused membership as an American self and gives her an opportunity at a public life. The benefactress can only achieve agency by witnessing the display of the extraordinary body: “The disabled figures thus legitimated the middle-class woman’s move out of the sequestered home while remaining within the maternal role” (89). Thomson successfully reveals the freak show template at work in the sentimental novel of reform, but she could have extended the analogue further concentrically to the relationship between the staged drama of the book–not unlike the melodramas on Barnum’s Lecture Room stage–and its readership.

 

In her fifth chapter, “Disabled Women as Powerful Women in Petry, Morrison, and Lorde,” Thomson sees the extraordinary body as a vehicle for empowerment and agency. The obese, heavily scarred Mrs. Hedges in Ann Petry’s The Street presents a transitional figure in the recovery of the extraordinary body. Generating sympathy, she still represents the misery and abjection of the sentimental novel’s disabled figures, yet she achieves empowerment through her body, an empowerment that Lutie, the character who attempts to normalize herself, cannot accomplish in the racist, sexist society of the book. The culmination of Thomson’s critical achievement is her extended discussion of the disabled figures in Toni Morrison’s novels, in which she deftly shows the ubiquity of these extraordinary bodies and their importance to Morrison’s work. The marked bodies of Morrison’s novels–the amputee Eva and her birthmark-afflicted daughter in Sula, the blind Therese in Tar Baby, Sethe and her scarred back in Beloved, among others–give testimony to the hardships inflicted by the dominant society. These afflictions, though, as they mark a physical deviation from the norm, also indicate “the markings of history,” a history that each character needs to embrace in order to achieve empowerment (122). The extraordinary bodies of Morrison’s novels indicate “a transformed social order, one that reconfigures value hierarchies, norms, and authority structures” (123). Thomson, in this chapter, abandons the idea that the disabled body still serves to constitute Emerson’s ideal, even though the process is still much in evidence. Morrison denaturalizes the Emersonian ideal American self and renders it perverse and evil. Reducing African-American slaves to the status of natural history exhibit, the schoolteacher in Beloved obsessively enters inconsequential measurements into his notebook. Even though Morrison’s characters repudiate the ideal American self as Emerson constructed him and struggle with the social order that embraces the figure, they still embody the spirit of self-reliance; by Thomson’s admission, “they literally constitute themselves with a free-ranging agency whose terms are tragically circumscribed by an adversarial social order” (116). The newly empowered extraordinary body still bears the residue of the ideal American self.

 

To counter the hegemony of Emerson’s ideal, Thomson proposes the constitution of a postmodern self, a politicized recovery of the pre-Enlightenment grotesque body as a celebration of difference and the transgression of boundaries that dismisses the authoritarian construction of the ideal American self as mundane and undistinguished. The authors of the African-American liberatory novel–Morrison and Lorde, in particular–renounce the objectification of the freak show, imbue the extraordinary body with a mythic glow, and imagine their disabled figures as metaphoric goddesses and priestesses.

 

The mythic becomes critical to Thomson’s mission to lift the disabled body from the objectification of the freak show. She embraces the spiritual subtext of Morrison’s and Lorde’s works as a vehicle of the disabled figure’s redemption and applies the same terminology to achieve her goal, a critical laying on of hands, as it were, to cast a nearly divine light on the disabled figure and invest it, it appears, with the goddess myth from popular psychology. The effect, even if unintentional, is unfortunate.

 

The shortcomings of Extraordinary Bodies do not diminish the achievement of its mission. Thomson accomplishes her goal of rescuing the figure of the extraordinary body, denaturalizing the categories of freak and normate in the process, and adding to the ongoing literature of the freakshow and its cultural work in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Most important to future work on freakshow exhibitions, Extraordinary Bodies testifies to the role the freakshow played in the institutions of liberal individualism and in constituting the Emersonian ideal of the masculine, autonomous self.

 

Works Cited

 

• Adams, Bluford. E Pluribus Barnum: The Great Showman and U. S. Popular Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997.
• Bogdan, Robert. Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988.
• Fiedler, Leslie. Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978.
• Harris, George Washington. “Sut Escapes Assassination.” High Times and Hard Times. Ed. M. Thomas Inge. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 1967.
• Harris, Neil. Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1973.
• Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, N. C.: Duke UP, 1993.