Throughout the nineteenth century, people flocked to see sideshow performers like the Siamese twins and General Tom Thumb. But their intense curiosity about different physical traits and afflictions was quickly tainted by pity, disgust and exploitation.
This is why, as medical advances unmasked backstories and mythology became a thing of the past, freak shows started to lose popularity.
Origins Freak Show
During the Victorian era, freak shows evoked a range of reactions from spectators: fear, horror, disgust, pity, and humor. Rebecca Stern argues that this was the result of people’s desire to tame and classify the odd body using cultural and medical frames of reference. The bodies displayed in a freak show served as a reminder of what was acceptable and what was not, reinforcing Victorian racial, able-bodied, gender, and sexual hegemony.
A burgeoning middle class, the introduction of Saturday half-holidays, and new railways and steamships propelled a freak show industry that took hold across the globe. Barnum’s foray into freakery began with a senile and paralysed slave named Joice Heth, whom he billed as the 161-year-old nurse of George Washington and later claimed to have publicly dissected. Barnum cultivated Heth’s public image to attract audience members and to gain the reputation of being a man of science.
With the advent of medical advancements, a more sophisticated understanding of anatomy, and biomedicine’s rise to prominence, the popularity of freak shows plummeted. As physical disability became reconceived as a medical pathology, deformity was no longer seen as a wonder of nature to be admired and celebrated, but rather something that should be treated with utmost care.
By the 1940s, a combination of social factors led to the waning popularity of freak shows. The entertainment tax, competition from movies, radio, vaudeville, and national sports spelled the end of the carnival sideshow. However, the allure of titillation and voyeurism lingers to this day in forms such as talk shows, bodybuilding and wrestling contests, and reality television.
The first season of American Horror Story begins with a troupe of curiosities in the sleepy hamlet of Jupiter, Florida, in 1952. The series follows a group of freak performers and their struggle to survive amidst the dying world of American carny culture. The show’s opening episode, titled “Cabinet of Curiosities,” introduces us to the members of the troupe as they set up camp in town and try to earn their paychecks. Then a dark entity invades and the lives of the freaks are turned upside down.
Spectacles Freak Show
For centuries, humans have exhibited bodies considered abnormal for the sake of public entertainment. Whether exhibited in medical museums, side shows, or as part of the Olympic Games, human deformity has fascinated the fields of medicine, art, and entertainment. But the focus of these explorations has often been centered on the human body as a whole, rather than the individual experiences and bodies of those who have more extreme differences in the way that their limbs, organs, or other features function.
In the nineteenth century, however, these displays of bodily anomalies shifted from the museum context to become a highly popular and commercial form of family friendly entertainment in Europe and North America. This was largely due to the marketing genius of P.T. Barnum, who developed a series of “American Museums” that showcased his collection of human curiosities including Tom Thumb, the Siamese Twins, and the famous Elephant Man.
Yet, despite the commercial success of these shows, most “freaks” were not well-treated. Many were forced to live a life of isolation unless they had a family member who was willing to care for them throughout their lifetime. For those who did not have such a person, their only option was to join a freak show and hope that they could earn enough money to survive.
As a result, freak shows were often shady and exploitative enterprises that made a fortune off the suffering of those who participated in them. But this did not mean that the shows were unquestionably evil or without redeeming social values.
It was important for the audiences of the time to see that there was a greater moral dimension to these shows and that they did have a redeeming social purpose in terms of promoting an appreciation of the differences between human beings.
Today, while there are few true freak shows left, the internet and television have brought us a variety of new ways to explore the variant body. The content that receives mass attention ranges from innocent videos of an infant biting his brother’s finger to teen girls getting into fist fights with one another. But the fascination with the abnormal body is alive and well, as evidenced by such programs as the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow, Circus Amok, Tokyo Shock Boys, the Kamikaze Freak Show, and Mat Fraser’s one-man show, “Sealboy: Freak.”
Disappointment Freak Show
Unlike many of the previous American Horror Story incarnations, this season has a lot to say about our culture’s relationship with its freak show history. It is rife with references and allusions that suggest the show is aware of both the historical underpinnings of its theme and the way our society still exploits these anomalies today.
Freak shows were not only a form of entertainment, but they also served as social commentary, providing audiences with an opportunity to view and compare the differences between human beings. Aside from the rare instances in which a sideshow performer had a loving family to care for them, most “freaks” were abandoned by their families or shunned in their communities. As a result, they resorted to the carnival circuit for work.
Sideshows employed a number of techniques to exaggerate their freakery, including visual contrast. For example, small people were often paraded next to giants to demonstrate their relative size discrepancy. Emaciated or obese individuals were also featured in sideshows, since they could provide a striking contrast to the thin and muscular “normals” of the day.
But the more empathetic viewers of the era would have quickly noticed the lack of humanity and compassion in the performances. They might have even sat with their jaws open, aghast at the sheer cruelty of this type of display.
This sense of disconnection is the main reason why Freak Show hasn’t quite worked for me. Yes, there are some terrific performances from the ensemble cast, particularly Jessica Lange and Evan Peters. But the rest of the show feels like a perfunctory rehash of all the spooky, catty, and lurid (this series’ approach to sex is both sex positive and deeply shaming) tropes that have worked in the past for other seasons.
There’s nothing wrong with this formula on its own terms, but after four seasons of the series it has begun to feel tired and unoriginal. It’s hard to imagine what the writers could do with this premise that isn’t already well-worn.
Demise Freak Show
Although a number of academic and popular scholars have written about the demise of the freak show, such claims are generally problematic. As Marina Warner suggests in her book Fantastic Selves, Other Worlds, images of corporeal transformation tend to proliferate during periods of rapid cultural change. In her analysis, she argues that the popularity of side shows during the Victorian era was part of a broader movement to reconceptualize gender and sexuality, as well as the idea of body itself.
Indeed, one of the reasons for the disappearance of the traditional freak show is that it began to be perceived as morally dubious. As Bogdan explains, it was common for people to be attracted to freak shows but become uncomfortable with them once they discovered that their performers were often exploited and dehumanized. This, in turn, caused audiences to avoid them, and eventually the freaks themselves began to distance themselves from the business.
This sense that the era of the freak show is coming to an end permeates recent fictional representations of side shows. For example, the narrator of Arthur Munby’s poem “Pastoral” experiences feelings of anxiety when he first encounters Julia Pastrana, who more closely resembles an ape than a woman. The narrator is afraid that his masculinity is under threat and feels that her presence is a reminder of a changing social order.
The Bottom Lines
In addition, the idea that the freak show is disappearing has also been reinforced by the increasing number of medical and sociological studies that have emphasized the risks associated with such attractions for both the freaks themselves and their audiences. These studies have also contributed to a growing sense of nostalgia for the days when side shows were more popular.
Thus, while Dandy’s massacre of the freak show may have been a tragic ending for many of the characters in American Horror Story, it also served as a reminder that these people, like everyone else, live on the edges of society. They have to band together and form communities if they are going to survive. It is this reality that makes the reemergence of freak shows, and their re-invention in 21st century America, so interesting.
