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Freak Show Aesthetics: Exceptional Bodies and Racial Citizenship in Nineteenth- Century America

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Freak Show Aesthetics: Exceptional Bodies and Racial Citizenship in Nineteenth- Century America Freak Show Aesthetics: Exceptional Bodies and Racial Citizenship in Nineteenth- Century America Jean Louise Franzino Fort Wayne, Indiana B.A., University of Michigan, 2005 A Dissertation Presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Language and Literature University of Virginia May 2015 1 Table of Contents Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………....3 Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………..5 Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..8 Ch 1. Antebellum Attractions: The Rise of the Freak Show and the Emergence of African-American Autobiography……………………………………………………….30 Ch 2. “The Biggest Little Marriage on Record”: Union and Disunion in Tom Thumb’s America…………………………………………………………………………………..71 Ch. 3. “Extraordinary Twins” and “Unaccountable Freaks”: Mark Twain’s Freak Show Aesthetics……………………………………………………………………………….130 From Invisible Man to “Ballad of a Thin Man”: A Coda………………………………174 Notes………………………………………………………………………………...….181 Illustrations……………………………………………………………………………..267 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………….272 2 Abstract Freak Show Aesthetics: Exceptional Bodies and Racial Citizenship in Nineteenth- Century America argues that the performance conventions from the mass cultural form known as the “freak show” significantly shaped the archive of nineteenth-century writings on slavery, abolition, and their aftermath. Proceeding from the suggestive fact that the “Golden Age” of the U.S. freak show coincided with the height of abolitionism through the citizenship debates of the post-Reconstruction period, my project suggests that the freak show provided U.S. print culture with imaginative resources for confronting the crisis in racial representation brought about by abolition. While many areas of the dominant, white press drew on the freak show to forward racially circumscribed visions of the body politic, other texts from U.S. print culture invoked the freak show in less predictably regressive ways: questioning the reliability of visible physical identity, probing the relationship between disability and race, and interrogating the embodied requirements of citizenship. In making these claims, the project revises and expands an earlier body of scholarship on the freak show by authors such as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Rachel Adams, and Benjamin Reiss. While the earlier work on freakery tended to see it as solidifying the racial status quo--making blackness, as it were, “freakish”--Freak Show Aesthetics suggests that the performance conventions of the freak show did not reflect so much as transform the language of race. At the same time, the project complicates the large body of American studies scholarship on the depiction of the wounded or pained enslaved body, suggesting that the terms of the freak show provided a number of authors with language that could represent, without reducing black subjectivity to, the materiality 3 of the body. From the Barnum-esque narrative strategies of both slavery apologists and slave narrators, to the numerous freak show echoes in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the texts of American slavery relied, I argue, upon a “freak show aesthetic” that continually revised the relationship between blackness, disability, and national belonging. 4 Acknowledgements I owe my greatest debt of gratitude for the completion of this project to my excellent dissertation committee: Christopher Krentz, Eric Lott, and Victoria Olwell. I had the good fortune to enroll in Chris’s “Disability Studies” class my first semester of graduate school, and the critical tools I gained in this course have shaped the entirety of my academic work since. Having entered the course with a somewhat inchoate interest in “the body” in literature and culture, Chris taught me that there was a rigorous and exciting field that theorized embodiment and value in endlessly productive terms. I am grateful for his intellectual generosity as I first got my feet wet in this field, his faith in this project from its inception, and his wonderful mentoring throughout graduate school. I first began thinking about the freak show and its relationship to print culture in Chris’s course, and brought this interest with me when I enrolled in the formative “American Cultural Studies” course with Eric Lott. I distinctly remember sitting in the yellow chair in Eric’s office, pitching him my idea for a final paper focused on the Tom Thumb wedding, now Chapter Two of this project. I thank Eric for encouraging me to follow through on this topic, and credit him, as well, for helping me to think rigorously about the relationship between politics and culture. I enrolled in Vicki’s “Modern Love” class during the fall in which I was reading for orals, and found myself immediately enrolling in another class of hers, “Realism and Naturalism,” the following spring. I think Vicki for helping me to think cannily about citizenship and material culture, and for always asking the big-picture questions of my work that have proved so immensely generative. 5 I am also grateful for the many other UVA faculty members who have materially impacted this project, whether they know it or not, by helping to advance my thinking in coursework and in hallway conversations. I thank especially Stephen Railton, Anna Brickhouse, and Susan Fraiman. Thanks, as well, to Randy Swift and Colette Dabney for their indispensable assistance, and to Colette for many enjoyable conversations in the English department front office over the last several years. Grants from the UVA English department have allowed me to visit the Mark Twain Papers and Project, the New York Historical Society, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. They have also supported my attendance at conferences and institutes such as the American Studies Association Annual Meeting, the Modern Language Association Annual Convention, and the Dartmouth Futures of American Studies Institute, all of which have greatly enriched my work. I am particularly indebted to the members of Professor Colleen Boggs’ 2010 and 2012 seminar groups at the Futures of American Studies Institute, who provided me with insightful feedback on early versions of the Mark Twain and Tom Thumb chapters. My graduate school experience was significantly enriched by the presence of friends and fellow Americanists Laura Goldblatt, Anna Ioanes, and Lindsay O’Connor. These pages bear the marks of many fruitful conversations with them over the years. I am indebted, as well, to the many other colleagues and friends who sent me references to “freakish” phenomena with regularity. Finally, a giant thank-you to my parents, who fostered my initial interest in reading and writing, who continued as my stalwart supporters throughout graduate school, and who even indulged my interest in freakery by reading Melanie Benjamin’s 6 The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb and taking me to see Grace Church in New York City. This project is for them, and for Will, who knows more about the freak show now than he ever wanted to know. 7 Introduction This project takes up what may seem, at first glance, to be mere historical coincidence: the overlap between, on the one hand, the consolidation of abolitionism and its print organs through the citizenship debates of the post-Reconstruction period, and, on the other, the rise of the freak show as an organized mass cultural form through its heyday as a popular live entertainment genre. As the project hopes to show, however, the historical concurrence of these two phenomena over the period that spanned from the 1830s through the 1880s indicates not so much coincidence as an important chapter in the related genealogies of the categories of “disability” and “race” in America. Following the model of work such as Bryan Wagner’s Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power After Slavery, which argues that vagrancy arose as a trope to delimit definitions of blackness after the social relations of slavery had been overturned by Emancipation, I argue that a “freak show aesthetic” appeared in the print cultures of slavery and abolition as a way of imaginatively confronting the crises of racial definition taking place in the political and social spheres. As notions of blackness became unhinged from their relationship to a non-citizen, enslaved population, slave narratives, literary reviews, novels, newspapers, and activist discourse drew upon the content and style of the freak show to make sense of national and individual racial identity. In doing so, nineteenth-century print culture inaugurated a longstanding and dynamic relationship between models of African American citizenship, formulations of whiteness, and representations of (freakish) disability. In making this argument, Freak Show Aesthetics revises and expands, even as it draws upon, an earlier body of scholarship on the freak show. American cultural studies 8 work on freakery flourished in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when scholars such as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Rachel Adams, and Benjamin Reiss posited that the freak show offered an arena on which Americans worked out ideas about identity, normality, and communal and national belonging, with implications for the way they thought about which bodies were “fit” for the full privileges of citizenship. Following the work of these scholars, it was no longer possible to see the freak show as a mere fringe entertainment genre; rather, the freak show came into focus as a central location in U.S. mass culture where visions
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