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Introduction: the Ugly Word Notes INTRODUCTION: THE UGLY WORD 1. To give a complete list would be exhausting and counterproductive, particularly as new ones appear every year. For any reader who would care to peruse some (with the caveats I articulate in the text following this footnote), I offer the following: Frederick Drimmer’s Very Special People: The Struggles, Loves, and Triumphs of Human Oddities (New York: Amjon, 1973); John Durant and Alice Durant’s Pictorial History of the American Circus (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1957); Daniel P. Mannix’s Freaks, We Who Are Not As Others (San Francisco: Re/Search, 1990) and his Step Right Up (New York: Harper, 1951); C. J. S. Thompson’s The Mystery and Lore of Monsters (New York: Citadel, 1970); more recently Darin Strauss’ novel Chang and Eng (New York: Penguin, 2000); Francine Hornberger’s Carny Folk (New York: Citadel, 2005); Marc Hartzmann’s American Sideshow (New York: Penguin, 2005); and the ongoing Shocked & Amazed: On and Off the Midway periodical edited by James Taylor (Baltimore: Lyons Press). 2. Books of serious scholarship on freak shows include Leslie Fiedler’s Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), Robert Bogdan’s Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), Rosemarie Garland- Thomson’s Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) and Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York: New York University Press, 1996), Carol Donley and Sheryl Buckley’s The Tyranny of the Normal: An Anthology (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1996); Rachel Adams’ Sideshow USA: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Andrea Stulman Dennett’s Weird and Wonderful: The Dime Museum in America (New York: New York University Press, 1997); and David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder’s Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000). This small canon represents the forefront of a new way of looking at freakery and its relationship to culture and society. Also please see Disability Studies Quarterly 25:4&5 (Summer and Fall 2005) for a collection of cutting-edge and important essays on freak studies. 142 Notes 3. P. T. Barnum was never once known to use the term himself in publicity, except to deny vehemently that his performers were “freakish”: please see Chapter 2. 4. See also Robert Bogdan’s Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 3–10; Leslie Fiedler’s Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 13–17; Rachel Adams’ Sideshow USA: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago P, 2001) 138–145. 1 STAGING STIGMA 1. Quoted in Goffman 1959, 173. 2. Groucho Marx, Groucho & Me: The Autobiography (New York: Virgin, 1994), 321. 3. Specifically: The Performance of Self in Everyday Life (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Social Sciences Research Centre, 1956); Asylums (Garden City: Doubleday, Anchor, 1961); and Stigma: Notes on the Management of a Spoiled Identity (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963). 4. Or so it says on his trading card that can be found in David Gauntlett’s Theory Trading Cards (New York: AltaMira, 2004). 5. For a very complete summary of Goffman’s interdisciplinary impact, please see A. Javier Treviño’s “Erving Goffman and the Interaction Order,” in Goffman’s Legacy, ed. A. Javier Treviño (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003): 1–49. 6. Goffman does not use the term “troupe,” choosing instead “team.” He would eventually abandon the theatrical metaphor as insufficient, as much of ordinary life, in his view, was untheatrical, even the theatre. He remarked that even theatres need to have, for instance, real buildings with real coat checks and real parking lots with real insurance against real theft (1974, 1; see also Treviño 2003, 18 and 36). Since theatre researchers generally acknowledge the dependency of theatre upon interaction between the “world of the stage” and the world outside the created theatrical artifice, the metaphor remains in my view extremely useful. Other sociologists have taken issue with the “theatre” metaphor in Goffman for not being moral enough: life is a complex attempt to pull the wool over the other guy’s eyes, and everyone is complicit. Theatre practitioners deal with this contradiction all the time, seeing theatre not as an elaborate hoax but rather as a unique medium for dialectics. 7. Goffman didn’t like this idea much; the idea of rendering one’s stigma the central feature of one’s life seemed to be exactly the opposite of managing it, indeed being forced to focus on one’s stigma is, he says, “one of the large pen- alties of having one” (21). Politicizing one’s stigma, furthermore, reifies its importance and underwrites its centrality to the social discourse, exacerbating Notes 143 the worst tendencies of identity politics to erase all aspects of the individual experience except those that relate to the identity (113–114). 8. From her landmark study, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). In it Butler describes how gender is col- laboratively manufactured in social encounters. 2 PRURIENCE AND PROPRIETY 1. This story is retold by Erich Auerbach in his Mimesis; The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. William Trask (Garden City: Doubleday, 1953). 2. The Jim Crow character’s patented refrain, written by Rice, remained the same in many incarnations: First on de heel tap, den on de toe, Ebery time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow Wheel about and turn about and do jis so, And ebery time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow. For more on this history, see Richard Moody, America Takes the Stage: Romanticism in the American Drama and Theatre, 1750–1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955), 36. 3. Barnum charged one shilling for the General’s levees at the Princess, which was twelve times the amount usually requested for a dwarf exhibit in England; this accounts for his initial poor reception. After his audiences with Victoria, both his box office and the behavior of his audiences improved dramatically. See Raymond Fitzsimons, Barnum in London (London: MacMillan, 1970), 72. 4. Please see the New York Atlas of May 18 and June 8, 1845. 5. Barnum reported this in a letter to Moses Kimball: see A. H. Saxon’s Selected Letters of P. T. Barnum (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 143. 6. Nutt’s height was, according to some dubious legends, a source of anxiety to the General. In Sketch of the Lives, the following encounter is recorded: “after look- ing down upon [Nutt] for some time, apparently moved by feelings of surprise and mortification at being outdone in littleness, [Thumb] exclaimed: ‘Well, Commodore, you are a hard nut to crack.’ ” I think, however, that this rivalry, like the supposed rivalry between Thumb and Nutt for Lavinia’s hand in mar- riage, was apocryphal, a publicity stunt cooked up by Barnum. Lavinia makes no mention of either event in her memoirs, rather she describes Stratton as a man “entirely devoid of malice, jealousy, or envy; he had the natural instincts of a gen- tleman. He was kind, affectionate and generous.” See Countess Mercy Lavinia Warren Magri (Mrs. Tom Thumb), The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb, ed. A. H. Saxon (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1979). 7. It seems only fair at this point to voice my own skepticism about this letter. Although I have uncovered no proof to support this claim, I believe that it is possible that Barnum himself or one of his aides may have written this letter. 144 Notes A stunt like that is within the vein of his promotional genius. This possibility does not invalidate the evidence of the letter, however: the particulars are verifiable in every respect (the General did meet on many occasions with the royal family and Wellington, among many other prominent European nobles, and thousands of respectable English subjects did witness Tom in his various presentations). 8. Please see the New York Atlas, September 7, 1845. 9. The version adapted for T. D. Rice and performed at the Bowery was the “least successful” of the three. 10. For an excellent discussion of methodological approaches to the complex his- torical problems of blackface performance, please see James V. Hatch’s “Here Comes Everybody: Scholarship and Black Theatre History,” in Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays In the Historiography of Performance, ed. Tomas Postelwait and Bruce A. McConachie, 148–165 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991). 11. Kathy Maher, curator of the P. T. Barnum Museum in Bridgeport, Connecticut, asserted this in a personal interview on March 16, 2001. Benjamin Reiss dis- putes the claim that Barnum freed Heth in The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum’s America (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2001). 12. Which is H. J. Conway’s Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, a Drama in Four Acts Founded on the Novel of the Same Title by Mrs. H. B. Stowe (New York: John W. Amerman, 1856); microcard courtesy of the Library of the State University of New York at Buffalo. It is interesting to note that an actor named Bleeker, who appeared in the production as “Frank Russell,” would later become the Thumb’s tour manager and remain in that position until Stratton’s death in 1883. 13. This was the letter to which Gloriana Westend responded above. Punch also called into question the half of a patron Haydon reported: “Did it run alone,” Punch asked, “or being brought to drink in High Art, was it a baby at the breast?” Raymond Fitzsimons asserts that it was in fact a little girl.
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