The Freak(Show)Of Monsters, Myth, Memory, and the Other

in (Per)forming an Identity

Freak(Show) Rufa

Zachery RufaIndependent Research

Prof. Rebecca Schneider12-20-12

At the time of his death in 1926, it was reported that

approximately 100,000,000 people had seen William Henry Johnson

perform over the course of his roughly 65-year-long career.i And

yet, William Henry Johnson was not famous. William Henry Johnson

was just a man, his identity largely unknown save to those who

knew him personally, but through the gaze of an audience, he

became something much more, or, at least something else—he became

the freak “What Is It?” He was a performer between quotation

marks, a question comprising the proper noun of his constructed

performative identity. He had many other names, among them,

‘nondescript,’ ‘The Missing Link,’ the ‘Siamese-tree-dweller’ and

his most famous and often-used name, ‘Zip the Pinhead.’ As the NY

Herald-Tribune wrote at the time of his death, “He was the

veteran of the profession, the dean of the all American

exhibition freaks.”ii And that he was. He was a freak, and in

that role he was one of the greatest to have ever lived.

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Robert Bogdan writes in his seminal work on the subject,

Freak Show: “‘Freak’ is not a quality that belongs to the person

on display. It is something that we created: a perspective, a set

of practices—a social construction.” (xi) The concept that

Freakishness is a construction is not a groundbreaking assertion.

It would be supported not just by scholars, but also by those

directly involved in the act of constructing, itself: the

sideshow managers, the talkers, and the freaks. And yet it is a

major focus of Bogdan’s highly influential book, throughout which

he spends a great deal of time illustrating the myriad ways in

which the ‘Freak’ identity is created. He writes: “the people

themselves are not the primary concern. Rather, the focus is on

the social arrangements in which they found themselves, the place

and meaning of the freak show in the world of which they were a

part, and the way the resulting exhibits were presented to the

public. The social construction—the manufacture of freaks—is the

main attraction.” (3) Bogdan attempts to analyze and quantify the

construction, but in that pursuit self-admittedly diminishes the

significance of the people themselves and fails to fully realize

how significant people are to the constructing of freakishness. He

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focuses on the camera, rather than, and precluding, the

photographer and the subject, and in doing so limits the scope of

his analysis. This impulse is understandable—it is a desire for

absolutes, of easily discernible social processes with clear

results. The elements and techniques of construction can mostly

be identified, and their effects come together to create a fairly

clear narrative of a group’s identity. The Freak is a

performative identity, and Bogdan very much aligns it with the

formalized practice of the freak show. Ultimately, Bogdan’s

attempt to destabilize the notion of the Freak by identifying it

as a socially constructed identity is only partially successful.

Yes, he does establish, or rather he identifies, the Freak

identity as being constructed. But in doing so he establishes a

number of binaries or spectrums that ground the construction

rather than destabilize it: there is the spectrum of morality,

with ‘good’ and ‘bad’ at either end; there are the roles of

showman and performer, which are only troubled insomuch as that

they are roles that can be filled by a single person,

simultaneously; on the other side of the curtain, there is the

performer and the audience; and then, there is the Freak, and the

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non-Freak, which is presented as being something between a binary

and a spectrum.

But it is not in analyzing the modes of construction that

the Freak identity is destabilized. Rather, the Freak identity is

deconstructed in analysis of that which it relies upon—the

person. If that element is endowed with the same significance and

focus as the construction itself (the product), then instability

is generated by their proximity. Their overlay forces the

question: ‘which offers the more dominant definition of the

other?’ And even, depending on the dominant identity—Freak or

Person—must an overlay actually occur? Can it, even? The Freak

identity troubles the notion of personhood and identity, but that

very troubling in turn problematizes the notion of the Freak

identity so easily being identified in that way. In this

reciprocal struggle for the dominance generated by

quantification, substantiating existence, a third element,

temporality, is brought into focus. Ultimately, then, the tension

generated by the conflicting natures of freakishness, personhood,

and temporality create the opposition of identification that lies

at the center of the Freak eidos. It is through an understanding

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of those multiple elements that an attempt at a comprehensive

view of the concept of the Freak (if there is such a thing) and

its history might be formed. And in that understanding, or

perhaps in service of that understanding, we might come to locate

the freak show’s legacy now.

To move forward, we must begin by looking back. To start,

not too far back; I direct your gaze now only to the beginning of

this essay, to the question that is William Henry Johnson and to

the question that became the name of a freak: “What Is It?” I

offer that William Henry Johnson, the man, was not famous.

William Henry Johnson could not be famous, because ‘William Henry

Johnson’ presents a distinct identity defined by personhood. The

100,000,000 people that came to look did not come to look at a

definition, they came to look at an ambiguity, a question—they

came to look at an identity that troubled itself, both in the

internal opposition of its polyonymy and in its eponymous self-

referential and performative uncertainty. The question of the

relationship between ‘William Henry Johnson’ and ‘Zip’ is

superficially a question of pronouns, a dialectic of the

existential semantics of reference and identity. “He was the

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veteran of the profession, the dean of the all American

exhibition freaks,” the newspaper says. But who is meant in the

address of ‘he?’ Johnson? Or Zip? And what is the nature of the

relationship between those two identities? Is Johnson a part of

Zip, or vice versa? Or, can those two identities even truly exist

within or as a part of the other, when the essential qualities of

one preclude that of the other? It must be stated that this

question is very different from other considerations of multiple

identities, such as that of the author and his pen name, or even

of a performer and their stage name, for in those cases the

viewer has an understanding of the existence of the multi-faceted

yet ultimately unified identity. ‘Mark Twain’ does not need to not

be ‘Samuel Clemens’ for readers to receive The Adventures of Huckleberry

Finn, whereas for Zip to be Zip, he must not be William Henry

Johnson.

That concept is the nature of the freak show at its most

formalized level, in the simplest and most essential of terms,

and what characterized it in its existence in its purest and most

recognizable form in the roughly century-long period from 1840 to

1940.iii In that time the systematic and stylized presentation of

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Otherness reached its highest point in the exhibitions of the

circus Freak Shows, Dime Museums, and freak photographs. However,

the conditions that gave rise to this highly-complex cultural

phenomenon were not coincidental, nor were they spontaneous. The

mode of presentation may have been new, but what was essentially

being presented, corporeal Otherness, and the function of that

presentation, have existed for thousands of years. It is

necessary to understand what freakishness was before it became a

show if we are to analyze the complexities of the 19th century

exhibition. It is a mistake to think that freakishness only

became a construction with the rise of the show—the freak show

formalized and articulated the Freak identity in its

exhibitionist context, but really, this articulation was just a

modulation and re-naming of cultural conditions and practices

that had already existed in relation to physical difference and

which have been riffed upon and recontextualized across times and

cultures for centuries.

As Leslie Fiedler writes in Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret

Self, “Men have hewn out of rock and painted on the walls of caves

freaklike figures ever since art began, and these have usually

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been considered idols or icons based on the human form but

distorted for symbolic purposes.” (26) Fiedler’s work argues for

the freak as reflective of a person’s unconscious ‘secret self,’

displaying for us cultural fears regarding bodily scale

(dwarfs/giants,) autonomy and a distinct bodily self (conjoined

twins,) and gender ambiguity (hermaphrodites,) among others.iv

Though he largely focuses on the freak/viewer relationship to

form an understanding of the normalized-body’s identity, he does

so by framing the freak identity at various points in history,

opening with a general sketch of the abnormal body in ancient and

medieval history. Centuries before the Freak identity became the

‘Freak identity,’ defined in relationship to a frame of explicit

performance, it existed through the presentation of ritual and

myth. (It is worth noting that the freak identity’s relationship

to a frame defined by performance, as it became in the 19th

Century, includes the definition of a relationship that sees the

identity breaking out of the easily demarcated bounds of the

spectator/performer relationship. This will be explored in

greater depth later.) Cultures from the Babylonians through the

Greeks and Romans interpreted abnormal births with religious

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meaning, attaching specific significance to various physical

differences. Teratoscopy is a form of divination that studies the

presentation of ‘monstrous’ births, and its use is recorded as

far back as 2800 B.C, in Babylon. (Fiedler, 20) As in the

interpretation of any natural occurrence that was taken as a

supernatural omen, the exact meanings of specific culturally-

defined signifiers change with the culture in which they are

being interpreted; a two-headed child meant something different

to the Egyptians as to the Romans. Fiedler’s work explores much

more in-depth the psychological basis which may have given rise

to specific interpretations of certain abnormalities, but what is

important for our purposes here is not the specificity, but is

instead the existence of the trend as a whole, spanning across

times and cultures. The result of the impulse to mark and

interpret certain bodies as Other and signifying is secondary to

the impulse itself, for it is that action which, when seen as

being a repeated cross-cultural/temporal impulse, reveals itself

as originating at the collective human level and existing more

fundamentally than relatively mutable cultural-specific

ideological impositions. The interpretation is largely

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inconsequential—it is the interpreting which matters. Rosemarie

Garland Thomson writes: “the differently formed body is most

often evidence of God’s design, divine wrath, or nature’s

abundance, but it is always an interpretive occasion.” (1)

Considering this, the etymological progenitor of the freak

title, lusus naturae (mistake/joke of naturev,) is a misnomer, for

even from its origin freakishness has always been, in part,

defined by some form of intentionality. It was this perceived

intentionality that allowed the abnormal body to be seen as the

deliberate creation of a divine being, portending something and

marked by some non-human force. In this way the disabled or

abnormal body became aligned with the realm of myth, and

transference through proximity marked the abnormal body itself as

mythic. And so, small people became dwarfs and fairies,

exceptionally tall people became giants, and any body displaying

significant abnormality became a changeling, an Ogbanje.vi It is

perhaps arguable which came first—the idea of the monster with

which a certain abnormality would be aligned, or the abnormality

itself, but considering that physical difference predates such

organized structures of thought, it can logically be assumed that

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attempts at explaining the abnormal body gave rise to the complex

mythology so strongly imbricated with it.

Regardless, the association of the extraordinary body with

myth is a hugely significant point of consideration when

examining the formalized performative mode and identity embodied

in the 19th Century freak show, inheritor as it is to this

mythologization. Whereas the freak show relied on a contentious

relationship between the opposing dual identities of ‘person’ and

‘freak’ and recognized the interplay between them, much early

mythology surrounding disability necessitated a singularity of

identity. The changeling child was not a child at all, but a

fairy, a spirit, some mythic Other defined by an inherit lack of

humanity. To drown one of these beings, or to leave them at the

edge of the woods, was not an act of murder, but one of

banishment—there was no person to kill, and even if a sense of

personhood were allowed to exist within the myth, the personhood

was totally subsumed by the mythic, seen as a kind of intentional

fore-ordaining that obliterated any meaning attached to the

personhood, for from the moment of birth the body already was of,

and belonged to, anOther world. That total absence of a human

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element defined the mythologized Other as possessing a simpler

and more essential identity than that of the Freak—for the Freak,

without humanity, is the Monster. What I am calling the Monster

identity needs a corporeal form to substantiate it, but that

substantiation is purely physical—the monster possesses no human

consciousness or identity, and in fact, cannot. A consciousness may

exist, but when belonging to a monstrous body, the consciousness

is not that of a person’s, but is the consciousness of what the

identity labels it: the changeling consciousness, the monster

identity. A consciousness, however, does not need to exist for

the monster. As long as the human consciousness/identity is

absent, all that is significant is the corporeal form; a dead

monster signifies in the same way that a live one does. The

monster does not need to live; it just needs to have lived.

The qualities constituting the Monster identity are

important to isolate and formalize because many of these

qualities re-present themselves in the monster’s heir, the freak.

Those qualities thus having been articulated in their most

specific and essentialized definition, the link between the

monster and the freak can be clearly traced, and those elements

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which persist as the legacy of the ancient monster can be seen to

be partially comprising, rather than arising from, the Freak

identity.

The ‘monster’ being defined as a distinct identity, the

bounds of it can now be interrogated. For even at the time that

the identity was being inscribed, it was being troubled.

Aristotle discussed the nature of monstrosity in his Generation of

Animals, and Augustine said in City of God: “We say that all portents

are contrary to nature; but they are not so. For how is that

contrary to nature which happens by the will of God, since the

will of so mighty a Creator is certain the nature of each thing?”

(In Schaff, 459) The philosophers may have been ahead of their

time, but this sentiment would eventually become the culturally

predominant one, bringing the monster into the light of the real

world, and eventually into the realm of the pathological. As

medical discourse in the 17th and 18th Centuries would begin to

offer more numerous physiological explanations for physical

abnormalities, the cultural belief in the mythic monster would

wane. Before that time, however, a tension would exist and build

regarding the humanity of monsters. The question became, if

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they’re not monsters, what kind of humans are they? The answer

that would come to arise: the Freak. Thomson writes:

“The trajectory of historical change in the ways the anomalous

body is framed within the cultural imagination—what I am calling

here the freak discourse’s genealogy—can be characterized simply

as a movement from a narrative of the marvelous to a narrative of

the deviant…the prodigious monster transforms into the

pathological terata; what was once sought after as revelation

becomes pursued as entertainment; what aroused awe now inspires

horror; what was taken as portent shifts to a site of progress. In

brief, wonder becomes error.” (Thomson, 3)

This trajectory, though, was hardly linear, and far from fast in

its development. The place of the monster remained in flux across

times and centuries, and maintained a strong presence through the

Medieval Period.

The presence of the monstrous and the grotesque in European

Carnival is well-documented; it was this festive form that

allowed the Monster to persist and which, in part, provided for

the historical progression Thomson describes. Carnival was a time

for the suspension of reality—hierarchies were overturned, and

the bicameral divide between performer and spectator was

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suspended. Clowns, fools, and dwarfs joined revelers, for in

Carnival, difference is normalized and celebrated. Strangeness

and difference is assimilated into the group, individual

identities being hidden beneath masks and costumes. Acording to

Mikhail Bakhtin, in Carnival celebrations, “the individual body

ceases to a certain extent to be itself; it is possible, so to

say, to exchange bodies, to be renewed (through change of costume

and mask). At the same time the people became aware of their

sensual, material bodily unity and community. (155) Subversion of

cultural beliefs, practices, and relationships served to solidify

and re-inscribe them, and the festival, though celebrating the

monster and the deviant, nonetheless reaffirmed the reality of

the grotesque monster in its simple recognition of it. Carnival

is significant in the historical trajectory of the Freak because

it inserted a human presence into the monstrous. What matters is

not that, in the festival, the relationship between spectator and

performer, and monster and human, was troubled, but rather that

there was a relationship at all.

The myth of the monster separated the abnormal body from the

human, marking it as a separate entity, but Carnival allowed the

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human to become the monster through the performative ritual of

the celebration, and in this allowed the monster to become human.

This development, in itself, perhaps could have been enough to

give rise to the freak show, but Carnival contributed more; it’s

function in society as a regulatory mechanism and as a form of

entertainment included an element that Bahktin calls “festive

laughter.” Considering that Carnival was a space in which to come

together, Bahktin specifies that this laughter is not in reaction

to any one event, but is instead a kind of continuous and shared

revelry. “Carnival laughter is the laughter of all the people…it

is universal in scope; it is directed at all and everyone,

including the carnival’s participants.” (11) The monster and the

human, now joined together and in clear relationship in the

festive crowd, were bonded through this laughter. This laughter,

perhaps, is what allowed the human and the monster to exist in

proximity and in a kind of commiseratory relationship. The

relationship, itself, may not have been exactly clear—in the

festival, it could not have been concrete—but it is enough that

the relationship exists. Bahktin specifies another characteristic

of festive laughter, writing: “this laughter is ambivalent: it is

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gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding. It

asserts and denies, it buries and revives.” (11-12) This

ambivalence is an excellent way of describing the human/monster

relationship, affected as it was at the point of its

transformation into something else, and so possessing the

qualities of the old mythic wonder and fear, and the increasingly

prevalent curiosity and repulsion associated with pathologized

bodily Otherness.

As the world which gave rise to and celebrated Carnival

transformed into something new, so too did its monsters. At the

turn of the 18th Century the United States was struggling to

forge its own national identity, and just as increasing

modernization would come to transform and define America, it

would also re-define Monstrosity. With an inherited European

conception of monstrosity, and a humanist American belief in

individuality, conditions gradually appeared which would give

rise to the cultural phenomenon of the freak show and the freak

identity.

As mentioned, the first, and perhaps most important,

development was the shift in perception that allowed the

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monstrous and the human to share in one abnormal body. Now, the

monster could also be a human, stripped of superstitious belief

and relying instead fully upon the tangible presence of corporeal

Otherness. But the monster is defined by its lack of personhood,

it precludes it, and so though elements of the monstrous identity

could affect the identity of a person, the very person-ness of

that identity demanded that it become something else entirely.

Enter the Freak. The Freak was something new, an Otherized human

identity who’s extreme Otherness derived from the incompatible

identities of human and monster which were embodied in it.

Whereas the monster played on the fears and wonder of myth, the

freak plays on the fear and wonder of human psychology,

representing a form of what Freud would call “the Uncanny.” In

his 1919 essay on the topic, Freud identifies the Uncanny as

being “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something

long known to us, once very familiar.” (2) This is the Freak

ethos; observers recognize a connection on the basis of shared

humanity, and yet at the same time are repulsed, fascinated, and

awed by the idea that such a fundamental identity could connect

us to something so foreign and Other. The Otherization, then, is

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that much more extreme because of the need to definitively

distance oneself from the freak. As Fiedler writes: “The true

Freak…stirs both supernatural terror and natural sympathy, since,

unlike the fabulous monsters, he is one of us, the human child of

human parents, however altered by forces we do not quite

understand into something mythic and mysterious, as no mere

cripple ever is.” (24) The ‘true Freak’ in Fiedler’s vision may

perhaps be slightly idealized, but the crux of his statement

aligns with Freud’s conception of the Uncanny and identifies the

emergence of the Freak as that identity developed in 19th

Century.

What might be called the ‘true Freak’ would not develop in

earnest until exhibition and performance framed it, but in the

time immediately before its realization into a complete and

fully-formed identity, at the dawn of the freak, a kind of proto-

freak identity began this emergence. Rachel Adams argues that

“freak is not an innate quality, but an identity imposed on

certain bodies to justify their exclusion from the privileges of

normality.” (103, Emphasis Adams) Certainly freakishness is not

an innate quality, just as monstrosity is not, but the idea of

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freak being a quality imposed on abnormal bodies requires further

interrogation, particularly in consideration of the Freak quality

at the point of its emergence. I offer that the Freak quality

might be more accurately discussed not as imposition, but as

reaction. Thinking of freakishness as a quality born of a reaction

frames the subject in several significant ways that ‘freak-as-

imposition’ and perhaps even Bogdan’s ‘freak-as-cultural

construction’ cannot. Firstly, it highlights a reciprocal

relationship between the Freak and the Observer, and

substantiates the personhood present in the Freak, for even if

the Observer’s reaction is to reify the Freak (as it often was),

it is the Observer’s reaction, and not the critic’s. Secondly, it

then offers (an admittedly limited) agency to the Freak, who must

offer an action for the response of identification to be

returned. The action of the freak can never be separated from

performativity and exhibition, for as the freak identity emerged

its reactionary definition demanded performativity—in this sense,

even existing, or being seen, is in the right context action

enough to generate Observer reaction. And lastly, the freak

identity as a reaction brings up the question of intentionality

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and mutability, for a reaction can vary in its intentionality,

from instinctual to highly-controlled, and this variation is

important in an understanding of the cultural construction of the

freak and the freak show, for it foregrounds several areas of

possible manipulation, both on the part of the subject being

deemed freak (through the manipulation of the stimulus) and the

Observer reacting with calls of freak (manipulation of reaction),

and it is this manipulability that underscores the contrivance of

the Freak identity.

And so, with the beginnings of the Freak identity emerging

in society, drawing upon the legacy of the mythic monster but

retreating from it into its own distinct identity in the present,

the literal stage was set, ready for the freak to mount it. The

formal freak show, or more generally, freak showing, involves

several necessary aspects to create the Freak identity that is

ultimately displayed as the product of the performance. Firstly,

a would-be subject is needed, what I will call the Potential-Freak.

This subject very much is in possession of a distinct human

identity, defined by a birth-name, relationships, and a

consciousness. The second needed element is the Spectactor,

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themselves possessing a distinct identity. The last element,

then, is the frame, jointly constructed through the relationship

between the potential-freak and the Spectator. When the Spectator

intentionally turns his focus to the Potential-Freak their gaze

becomes a stare, and the Potential-Freak is observed, and

perceived with considerations to the relationship between their

human identity and their abnormality (their Monster identity.)

The frame is defined by the limits of the Spectator’s perception,

the Potential-Freak contained within it. The Potential-Freak

positions themselves within the frame, and the Spectator’s stare

activates it. This activation, like a Polaroid flash of

perception, freezes the figure within the frame—what develops in

the light of consideration is the freak.

I argue that that is the generally constant mode of creation

for the Freak identity, and would be the predominant model of the

19th and 20th Century. The conditions for this form can be created

across multiple mediums and with varying results; the freak show

was not the only way that the Freak identity was actualized.

Equally significant, if not more so, were the dime museums, the

freak photographs, freak pamphlets, and other media

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representations.vii These will be addressed more in depth in a

moment, but the multiplicity of mediums they represent

illustrates that the Freak identity existed far beyond the show.

It became fully an identity unto itself, and though it may have

reached beyond the stage, the freak identity was nonetheless

always performative. Similarly to Judith Butler’s analysis of

gender identity, the freak identity could be thought of as being

constructed “through a stylized repetition of acts.” (270) The

reactionary nature of the Freak construction demands a continued

performance of identity within the frame of the Spectator’s

stare. And while Butler identifies this inscription as a non-

voluntary act in regards to gender, the same cannot always be

said of the freak.

To explore this more in-depth, let us turn our gaze now to a

specific time and event: the creation of one of the first

American freaks. Fittingly, complicit in this construction is the

father of the American freak show and show business, Phineas

Taylor Barnum. The subject in question is Joice Heth, an African

American woman whom in 1835 Barnum displayed as a public

exhibition, claiming that she was 161-years-old, and had been the

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nurse to George Washington. Upon her death, an autopsy concluded

that she had been no older than eighty years old. (Adams, 169)

But with the right spin, a proper framing, the frail body of the

old woman provided directly observable evidence substantiating

the claims that she was a fantastic person. That identity is the

freak’s identity, seemingly performing itself, because of the

nature of the Freak identity, the ‘normal’ Joice Heth could not

be a freak. The additional elements of the frame and the

Spectator are needed, for the freak identity precludes the human

and the freak from inhabiting the same space. These identities

can co-exist in one body, and can signify together and modify

each other, but they cannot be overlaid. There is an inherently

constructed element to the freak, and with ‘human’ being taken as

an innate identity, the Freak then, can not overlay in the space

of innate existential surety occupied by personhood. The Freak is

not an internally derived identity, but must come from beyond the

body—the freak identity evokes the past to define itself, in

part, recalling the Monster identity carrying with it a mythic

quality, something Other to the Human, and the Monster identity’s

association with the Human identity in the frame of the

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Spectator, ultimately, is combined in observership to create a

freak character.

Yes, the creation of Joice Heth’s freak’s identity may not

have been entirely voluntary on her part, but the fact is that

she remained within a frame intentionally constructed to mediate

and modify the significations of her ‘abnormal body,’ in this

case presented through age and blackness (sufficient

manifestations of physical Otherness given the historical

context,) and so again we see a kind of intentionality of

presentation in the construction of this identity that defines

the freak identity as being based on a different theoretical

foundation than gender in Butlers’ analysis. The difference

exists in the level of self-awareness associated with the

identities. Gender and freakishness may both be constructed

through performative actions, but the freak identity is very much

aware of, and relies on, its own self-creation. The Freak

identity possesses a kind of meta-theatrical performativity of

action that may not be apparent to the Spectator, but which

nonetheless exists on at least one side of the frame; though

Spectators may not have known that Joice Heth was not actually

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161 years old, surely Joice Heth, herself, along with Barnum

(though he would fervently deny it once his gaffe was revealed)

were aware of the non-theatricalized identity of the Potential-

Freak. It was that bicameral spectator/subject relationship which

would create and define the freak identity in the 19th and 20th

Centuries. It began, essentially, with Barnum’s exhibition of

Joice Heth, a single subject exhibited for the public gaze. The

‘true Freak’ as Fiedler might call it, was created at the moment

Barnum put Joice Heth in front of an audience and said that she

was not Joice Heth, but was “Joice Heth,” flattening her into a

two-dimensional sketch, a living object, defined in terms more

akin to an aesthetic than an identity. For that is what the

traditional freak is, really; it is the aestheticization of an

identity glossed with a superficial portraiture of an individual,

but which is really a palimpsestuous writing over and re-

inscription of the abnormal body providing the corporeal

substantiation of the freak identity perceived as genuine by the

receiving, staring Spectator. As the century moved forward, and

with it a quickly modernizing America, the relationship between

the Potential-Freak and the freak grew increasingly formalized

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and defined, as could be expected of any form of entertainment

associated with a growing institution of cultural amusement.

It is the relationship between the Potential-Freak and the

Freak, along with the Spectator, which has been neglected in many

of the works on this subject, but which is of utmost importance

when analyzing the particularities of the construction and its

function. This is understandable, because most works on the

subject focus almost exclusively on the freak show and Freak

identity as it related to the culture and time in which it was

created. Some points surely are missed in conflating the

potential-freak and the freak, but for the most part analysis in

that temporally contained way addresses, at least, many of the

most prevalent modes of presentation and their workings and

functions. But when observed from afar, through an intentionally

distanced lens of temporality, the necessity to separate the

Person and the Freak becomes clearer.

In that way, Joice Heth is not a representative freak; she

is recalled now as an anecdote, not as a character—her legacy is

the illustrative quality of her story as it reveals techniques of

freak exhibition, and when considered today, her identity is very

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much defined by her personhood. And what’s more, she was not even

a ‘true Freak,’ she was what is known as a ‘made Freak,’ or a

‘gaffed Freak.’ (Bogdan, 8) Her freak identity relied almost

entirely on belief on the audience’s part, and the moment that it

was revealed that her physical body could not substantiate the

Freak identity modifying it, “Joice Heth,” the identity, became

nothing more than a figure of the past. And that is where both

Joice Heth and “Joice Heth” remain for us today—decidedly

relegated to the past.

The same, perhaps, cannot be said of all freaks, however. In

fact, I would argue that the same can not be said of most freaks,

for the Freak identity, when fully realized, achieves a unique

relationship to time and its ability to preserve a subject. This

is understandable, considering that soon after the Joice Heth

debacle, Barnum would go on to buy Scudder’s American Museum in

1941, renaming it Barnum’s American Museum and building it into a

major attraction featuring the display of human’s with

extraordinary bodies among other curious objects like his famous

“Feegee Mermaid,” and since that time the freak has been strongly

linked with the museum. (Adams, 30) Barnum’s Museum was a marvel

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of modern advertising techniques and public-relations management,

with Barnum employing a wide-range of methods for attracting

audiences, even famously hiring the worst musicians he could find

in the hope that the sounds of their terrible playing would drive

audience’s inside to escape the cacophony. Barnum’s museum was

considered at the time to provide family entertainment, and was a

hugely popular attraction. The museum format of display is

significant in its reaffirmation and strengthening of the

exhibitionist mode of Freak display, with those being seen at the

museum being presented on stage. In this way, the only thing the

audience encountered was the freak identity they were complicit

in constructing, the Potential-Freak out of sight in the wings of

the theatrical frame. Apt that this display occurred on the

stage, for that is essentially what the Freak identity was

becoming, a variation on a stage name. However, there is one key

difference to the freak identity, and is what defines it so

strongly as an identity: the freak does not ask for a suspension

of disbelief. For the freak to maintain its identity, a degree of

faith must be maintained on the part of the audience, for it is

that faith, however slight, that maintains the strain of the

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mythic which sustains the element of the monstrous present in the

freak. The audience is invited by the freak to disbelieve, to

challenge, to look, to touch. Disbelief was allowed; it was the

refutal of actually knowing that was not. And the audience was more

than willing to oblige; in his book chronicling the history of

American advertising, Jackson Lears identifies this time as being

defined by the rise of an artifice that the public gladly took to

be real. He writes: “The tension between authenticity and

artifice was at the heart of Anglo-American Protestant culture.”

(53) It is in this tension that the freak lives, for it is

derived from a combination of faith and disbelief on the part of

the audience; they inextricably define the other and must come

together simultaneously. The physical Otherness of the freak must

be affirmable and tangible to satisfy the disbelief, and also to

substantiate the fantastic identity presented and modifying the

potential-freak, with this presented identity in turn inviting

disbelief and testing. In this way the freak identity constantly

renews itself, challenging audiences to disprove its reality but

at the same time substantiating itself through that challenge, a

kind of self-fulfilling identity. In professing its own truth,

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the Freak identity makes itself genuine; and when the Freak

identity is taken as being something separate from the potential-

freak from which it arises, this claim of truthfulness is not a

lie. As Lears says of this time as a whole, and very applicably

to the freak show, “it was possible for naturalness to become a

performance and sincerity a pose.” (85) Barnum understood this,

and realized that there is a direct relationship to the perceived

extent of deviance of an abnormal body and the extent to which

that body can be appropriated by the re-inscription of the freak.

Essentially, the more abnormal a body is, the greater the

disparity between the identity of the potential-freak and the

freak can safely be; I add the modifier ‘safely’ because freak

exhibition involves an element of risk on the part of the showman

and potential-freak, who must assess how much disbelief can be

sustained through the substantive power of the abnormal body. To

illustrate, consider the story of Bill Jackson, recounted in a

circus showman’s memoir. Jackson’s body was used to create the

freak identity of a Zulu warrior, displayed before a paying

public. His black body was enough to bear the disbelief of an

audience, providing for them, as it did, a corporeal

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corroboration of the showman’s speech. The identity could not be

maintained, however, when two women recognized the amazing ‘Zulu

warrior’ as Bill Jackson, who “worked over here at Camden on the

dock.”viii That’s not disbelief; it’s knowing. And so, like Joice

Heth, the freak identity is utterly destroyed in its relegation

to the past through the personhood of Jackson subsuming the freak

back into itself. As Barnum himself, wrote, “The public appears

disposed to be amused, even when they are conscious of being

deceived.” (198-99) The key point that Barnum fails to add

(though he was very much aware of it after his public failures

with Joice Heth, along with the Feegee Mermaid and ‘Cardiff

Giant’), is that the public is only inclined to be deceived

insofar as that they do not know the specificities of the

deception.

This very much brings the element of the frame to the

forefront, for it is the frame that freakifies the subject and

which mediates what the Spectator sees, and the limits of the

framing dictate the limit of the freak’s identity. The scope of

the frame, the space of performance, dictates the scope of the

identity. One of Barnum’s most famous freaks, General Tom Thumb,

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is an interesting case to consider in relation to this, for in

addition to being a well-known and well-travelled freak, he was

also Barnum’s most ambitious freak. It may seem odd to consider

an identity as being ‘ambitious,’ and it is, for freakishness

possesses a unique element of virtuosity, a result of the

intentionality present, which is integral to maintaining the

frame. In the case of General Tom Thumb, for example, it is

difficult to ascertain where the freak’s identity ends and the

person’s identity begins. Certainly, the human identity must be

there, the identity of Charles S. Stratton, who, for the first

several years of his youth, before Barnum encountered him, was

only a potential-freak. Bogdan says that “The onstage freak is

something else off stage. ‘Freak’ is a frame of mind, a set of

practices, a way of thinking about and presenting people. It is

the enactment of a tradition, the performance of a stylized

presentation.” (3) This statement has been elaborated upon and

very much supported throughout this essay, and now turning this

sentiment upon Tom Thumb, it can be seen how the freak identity

could extend far beyond the literal stage.

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Tom Thumb was a celebrity of his age, touring not only

America but making several European tours, as well, where he was

popular amongst the royalty. (Bogdan, 150) In America, the

newspapers printed stories of his performances and accounts of

his popularity. An article in the Providence Journal in 1847 read:

“Owing to the great concourse of persons who have crowded the

General’s levees, and by the request of many families of

distinction, he will remain in Providence till Tuesday night

next, and POSITIVELY NO LONGER, as he performs in New Bedford on

Wednesday next.”ix And at his performances, souvenir books

detailing an account of his life were sold. The front page reads,

in part, “Sketch of the Life, Personal Appearance, Character, and

Manners of Charles S. Stratton, The Man in Miniature Known as

General Tom Thumb, Twenty-Two Years Old, Thirty-Two Inches High,

and Weighing Only Thirty-Three Pounds.” Within the book, aspects

of his life are explained, with the following being a

representative example: “In strength, activity, and vivacity,

the General is remarkable. He often amuses himself by taking hold

of a cane with one or both hands, and being carried about the

room, which a man can easily do with one hand.” (6) And when Tom

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Thumb married Lavinia Warren, herself a little person, it was a

national news story, with the newspapers, and the reading public,

closely following the approaching nuptials and virtually every

aspect of their lives.x

Charles S. Stratton’s identity could be made to be so

secondary and overwhelmed by the freak identity of Tom Thumb

because, in this instance, Barnum manipulated truth as opposed to

fabricating it. His only major alteration was marketing him as

being older than he really was when he was exhibited as a child

so the public would perceive him as decidedly abnormal as opposed

to just being a small young child. Because of this, the

identities of the potential-freak and the freak are not that

different in detail. Essentially, the only difference between

them is that one is seen through a Spectatorial lens. The

specificity of this difference shows us the nuance of the freak’s

identity and, if anything, casts it as construction and in

starker contrast to the human identity. To clarify this further,

consider the differences in the terms of what Erving Goffman

calls “the front.”xi As Goffman defines it, the front is “that

part of the individual’s performance which regularly functions in

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a general and fixed fashion to define the situation for those who

observe the performance.” (55) As it relates here, the human

identity could be thought of as being perceived through the

mediating presentation of the front, drawing support from the

identity of the person offering it; the freak’s identity, on the

other hand, is utterly a front—there is no real human there

behind it to support it. Another identity gives rise to the freak

front, but that front then professes itself to be based in

another identity that does not really exist—if the front is

stripped away, there is nothing there to be discovered except the

potential-freak, standing far off in the corner. Tom Thumb’s

framing was extensive; the frame, in its intentionality, involves

a kind of permission, signifying the limits of itself, and in

this case the limits encompassed most of his daily life. He was

one of America’s first tabloid personalities. Tom Thumb’s front

was never fully stripped away, though the identity of the person,

Stratton, would gradually receive increased recognition through

time, but nonetheless it still persists. Even today he is

remembered as a ‘fantastic human’, the Freak identity persisting

in its alignment with the truth of his physical form and his

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human identity. And so, when Charles S. Stratton is considered

through a performative frame, as we are considering him in part

now, General Tom Thumb is again constructed. Bogdan argues that

“freaks were what you make them.” (95) I argue that freaks are

what we make them.

As we have seen, the freak is an inherently ephemeral

identity, and the frame in which the identity is performed

determines the duration of the performance. In the case of

Charles Stratton and Tom Thumb, the performance lasted most of

Stratton’s life (and made up the entire life of Tom Thumb.) But

this derives more from the Freak identity as a whole than from

Tom Thumb specifically, for even as freaks moved from museums and

dime-store stages to the midway bally, the effect of the frame

remained constant, allowing something about the Freak identity to

persist through time. As soon as the freak is created from the

potential-freak, it takes on a (constructed) life of its own. The

front is presented, and if the identity is correctly created,

then the front of the freak can elicit the same reaction as that

of a human front (and more.)

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In both the museum and in the most commonly recognized

presentation of freak, the freak show, the circus side-show, a

kind of tableux vivant is created. The side-show reached the height

of its popularity as a modernizing America was emerging as a

world power, and scholars have analyzed in-depth the myriad ways

in which the freak show and the circus as a whole reflected

various elements of culture at that time, including racism,

imperialism, and technological advances. Much has been written

regarding the implicit significations that were attached to

various forms of the freak: ‘wild men’ from ‘the darkest jungles

of Africa’ arose from racist ideologies, ‘Giraffe-necked women of

Burma’ illustrated America’s imperialist reach, etc.xii The

character created and the significations of it might have varied

depending upon the nature of the physical Otherness, but in all

cases the general mode of presentation remained the same, based

in a variation on the tableux vivant that signified a still

image. Or rather, at least a flattened image, for the freak is in a

specific relationship to time which influences the way in which

the performance is enacted.

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The freak identity is performed in the present, but at the

same time, that performance looks to the future. The body of the

freak is what is being observed in the ‘live’ event of the freak

show, and its existence is the action that substantiates the

performance, offering it verisimilitude—the product generated,

which the audience can take with it through memory, and also in

pictorial souvenirs (more on that in a moment) is a genuine

identity. Tom Thumb, Chang and Eng the Siamese Twins, Zip…these

identities are defined by a contested possession of identity, for

without the Spectator the identity does not exist, offering the

audience partial ownership of it; this ownership is enacted

continuously through time through the reconstitutive action of

Spectatorial memory. Like the monster, it is not important that

the freak is, what matters is that the freak has been. Upon leaving,

after staring at Zip, a Spectator would not be able to point at

the corporeal form of him to say that is Zip, but would still be able

to reconstitute the identity of Zip in directing their gaze at

memory, allowing them to say Zip exists, the freak exists.

And so, Zip the Pinhead can exist for as long as those with

a memory of the observable existence of his substantiating form

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live. William Henry Johnson may die, but what the continuation of

the freak’s identity illustrates despite Johnson’s death is that

the freak does not live, it exists. This idea is the most

supportive argument for the concept that the potential-freak and

the freak are two distinct identities, and that in comprehensive

analysis of the form of the freak show both must be taken into

account. Much contemporary criticism focuses on the myth of the

freak, the spectacle surrounding the identity and the most

visible element of it, which is understandable in that it was

this performed identity that was the ultimate product of freak

performance. (Seemingly redundant, but differentiated by identity

performativity and theatrical performativity, which in the freak

overlap to an extreme degree.) But in conflating the potential-

freak and the freak, the element of temporality is diminished,

and the freak is relegated to the past, buried in memory and

insulated by anecdote, no different from Joice Heth or Bill

Jackson. But the un-corrupted Freak identity is not so easily

banished, and the place of the freak’s identity must be re-

evaluated. To illustrate the importance of time to the freak,

which in turn supports the separation of the living body from the

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freak, we must now turn our attention to the last medium of old

freak performance, perhaps the most influential and enduring of

any manner of showing freaks: freak photography.

And so, let us turn our attention there.

“SO STEP RIGHT UP STEP RIGHT UP LADIES AND GENTLEMAN, WHAT YOUARE ABOUT TO SEE WILL SHOCK AND AMAZE YOU—I PRESENT FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION A TRUE FREAK, A WONDER OF THE HUMAN BODY—IF YOU CAN EVEN CALL IT HUMAN!!!”

Consider us in the present time,

staring at this photograph. All of the

necessary elements for the creation of

the freak’s identity are in place. We,

the Spectators, are observing the

physical form of an abnormal body,

signifying to us that it has existed,

and through the frame of the

Photograph and time we stare at the form before us. We do not see

the potential-freak—we are the

Spectators, and that privilege is not

afforded to us here. Instead, we receive the freak. ‘Koo Koo the

Bird Girl.’ Here, before us, is a freak’s identity. It is perhaps

Fig. 1: “Koo Koo the Bird Girl.” Photo Courtesy of the World Circus Museum Archive inBaraboo, WI.

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easy to quickly dismiss this image as belonging to the archive,

relegating it safely to the past, but Koo Koo will not let us off

that easily, I believe. It would be a different matter entirely

were we to be staring at a candid photo taken without the

subject’s knowledge beforehand, but we are not. Here before us is

a clearly intentional photo, the subject knowingly being the

object of a gaze and explicitly posing for it. This is not an

archival remain, it is not a fragment of memory, it is not a

record of performance; this photograph is the performance.

Barthes writes in his Camera Lucida: “What the Photograph

produces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph

mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.”

(4) But in consideration to the freak photograph, the Photograph

does so much more, for the freak photograph, rather than

repeating a frozen moment of the existence of a thing of the

past, actually enacts the existence of the identity within it.

Barthes goes on soon after to say that “a pipe here, is always

and intractably a pipe.” (5) Similarly, the freak here is always

and intractably just a freak, distinctly separate from the

potential-freak. The Photograph offers strength to the already

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two-dimensional figure of the freak, creating an illusion of

perspective. Like a photograph of a highly realistic cardboard

cutout, the freak in a posed photograph can create the appearance

of truth and depth.

Rachel Adams acknowledges that “the freak show’s ascendancy

in the mid-nineteenth century coincided with the birth of

photography, and sideshow promoters rapidly learned to exploit

the potential of the new visual technology as a publicity tool.”

(Adams, 114) And so they did, selling souvenir pamphlets and

cartes de visite, essentially just photographs of various freaks,

intended to be shown once the circus had moved on. Whether the

sideshow promoters knew it or not, the proliferation of freak

photographs did more than just publicize the freakshow, they

proliferated the show itself, for each photograph contained

within it a continual performance activated through a

Spectatorial gaze. The Photograph at the very least existentially

equalizes the potential-freak’s identity and the freak’s, and

very likely actually leans in favor of the freak, for as Barthes

says: “‘Myself’ never coincides with my image; for it is the

image which is heavy, motionless, stubborn, and ‘myself’ which is

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light, divided, dispersed…for the Photograph is the advent of

myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from

identity.” (12) Here, he identifies an important feature of the

Photograph—it’s ability to separate an identity from a

consciousness. This is what the Freak identity is constantly

striving to do, and it finds a medium for doing so in the

Photograph. I say that the Photograph may favor the freak

identity as possessing a greater existential weight because, as

Barthes says throughout his work, the Photograph very often takes

death as its center, it being a remainder of what has been, as

might be the case in a candid photo of a potential freak (though

even that is questionable, as the elements of freak creation are

technically present,) but the freak photograph takes immortality

as its center. The freak, here, only exists in the Photograph, and

so the freak identity will persist as long as the picture remains

observed.

The performance is only actualized upon the creation of the

photograph—or, rather, is actualized or re-actualized at the

moment that the freak photograph is seen. Again, the element of

intentionality is included in the photograph, with the potential-

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freak on the other side of the frame, just out of our sight,

being made a freak in our staring in this moment. The stare is

invited, and the frame is positioned for us. Rebecca Schneider

speaks to this in Performing Remains, writing:

“If the pose, or even the accident captured as snapshot, is a kind

of hail cast into a future moment of its invited recognition, then

can that gestic call in its stilled articulation be considered,

somehow, live? Or at least, re-live? Can we think of the still not

as an artifact of non-returning time, but as situated in a live

moment of its encounter that it, through its articulation as

gesture or hail, predicts? This is to ask: is the stilled image a

call toward a future live moment when the image will be re-

encountered, perhaps an invitation to response? And if so, is it

not live—taking place in time in the scene of its reception?”

(141)

Considering the freak photo as an explicit hail is to situate the

freak performance, and thus the freak’s identity, as existing in

the now. This is no record, it is the thing, itself, as there is

no history to the identity before the photograph is taken. The

flash of the camera is the animating spark, and our reaction to

the image before us is the completion and continuation of the

freak performance. Koo Koo, and Tom Thumb, and Zip, continue to

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perform in their photographic image. And yet, Charles S. Stratton

and William Henry Johnson are now long dead, and no photographic

remnants of them can bring them back. Those identities were

defined by their personhood, and personhood is defined by its

mortality.

With William Henry Johnson dead, and with Zip continuing to

perform, in a way, for the Spectators that continue to stare at

him, the distinction between the potential-freak and freak

becomes clear. The Photograph, then, might be thought of as being

a more truthful, and certainly more enduring, freak show than

even the circus freak show Barnum and others worked so carefully

to construct.

At the height of its original form, the freak show was so

much more than a source of income or a means of entertainment; it

offered the conditions for a modern-American apotheosis. The

freak show makes use of the mutability of signification and the

power of faith implicit in the speech act.xiii The freak is a

story that got taken as real, a kind of secular icon in which

Americans could put their belief. Or probably, in which they put

their belief still, in a way. It didn’t matter if the Wild Man

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was from Georgia, it didn’t matter if the Bearded Woman was the

result of careful and strong gluing, it didn’t matter if Jo-Jo

the Dog Faced Boy really barked—the talkerxiv, or the pamphlet, or

the back of the photograph, or the freak themselves said that

they were these things, and look, here, you can reach out and see

for yourself! Their bodies were the surface on which the speech-

act of their identities were written, and once the initial

definition had been inscribed, the identity persisted even past

corporeal death and is true until proven false.

The sociological perspective of the freak is altered when

one considers the unique separation of the identities at work,

especially when considering them in relation to the larger

context of American culture. The Freak, though definitely a

social construction, and perhaps a reflection of our ‘secret

self,’ is even more importantly a part of our contemporary

American mythology. In front of the freak, audiences found

themselves in a place to doubt and to believe, in a place to

laugh and to fear, to be connected and repulsed, a modern

American Carnival that joins us together in our ambivalence. But

now, it is not ambivalent laughter, but ambivalent staring.

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The Freak form has now retreated in our culture, and though

some critics identify the practice as having ended entirely, a

death sentence can not so easily be proclaimed, for, as we’ve

seen, freaks can be hard to kill. After all, look at us now,

staring together through a frame of analysis at the freaks’

identities and the Freak identity, and here it is, ready to

receive us, performing in the present of our observation.

Consider the words of Ward Hall, one of the last famous American

showmen, who said in an interview with James Taylor: “I exhibited

freaks and exploited them for years. And right now you are going

to exploit these people. The difference between Ward Hall and you

is when Ward Hall exploits these people, I pay them very well to

do so. These authors, newspaper columnists, and television

companies don’t pay them a frigging penny.” (Qtd. In Taylor, 17)

He’s speaking right at us, he’s anticipated us; this is hardly

surprising, considering that that is what the freak show does—it

is the controlled and intentional performativity of an identity

that aspires for truth, and in doing so manipulates even the

future, looking into it, falling forward in the faith that we,

the Spectator, will be here to offer our life-giving gaze. The

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true freak even anticipates death, and uses death to perpetuate

its identity.

The autopsy report of the original Siamese Twins Chang and

Eng was published for public purchase, along with the death

certificates and autopsy reports of countless others. After all,

what is more corporeally substantiating than the body that

remains abnormal even when all consciousness has left it? And do

not think that even this practice is a thing of the past—as of

this writing the Mütter medical museum in Philadelphia will soon

have on display an exhibit titled “Grimms’ Anatomy,” with a

website description reading: “Though many fairy-tale bodies

belong to the realm of the marvelous, some have real-world

counterparts. In honor of the 200th anniversary of the

publication of The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, this

exhibit will present real-world examples of the sometimes

gruesome or grotesque fairy tale bodies…”xv

The power of the old true freak may have faded now; ours is

no longer a culture that offers faith easily, but we do maintain

a belief in science, and so though the mythic element attached to

the freak image that used to elicit a reaction of the fantastic

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has been diminished by our understanding of the medical causes of

physical abnormality, the fantastic reaction is nonetheless

maintained in our understanding of the genetic rarity attributed

to the bodies capable of being ‘born freaks.’ Even today, genetic

physical abnormality remains at the height of the freak

potential, a fact collaborated by a modern day talker at Coney

Island, Scott Baker: “The royalty of the sideshows are the ones

that were born that way, the freaks.”xvi

And so, the echoes of the old freak show remain: looking at

freak photographs now, we may recognize the medical cause of the

physical abnormality before us, and in this understanding we

invoke the ghost of the human who lived once, and who’s

personhood was appropriated by the freak that would live through

performance. That human identity lingers, but is by its mortal

nature not capable of being fully recalled, and so we look at

these photos as a kind of existential palimpsest, the human

identity translucently trying to stare through past the overlaid

freak, performing into the future of our present, where the

costumes, and props, and even camera angle offer for us a pocket

sized version of the Greatest Show on Earth.

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With the nature of the classic freak identity now clearly

defined for us, and even visibly observable for us in the

present, we can hold the printed freak in our hand against

today’s heirs of freakishness in a way that critical relegation

of the freak show utterly to the past cannot provide. So now to

ask, where did the Freak Show go?

The show practice never fully disappeared. Eventually,

around the 1940s, the freak show’s popularity would wane, but the

classic performance style would decidedly linger for a few

decades yet. The freak carried on through a combination of

increasingly rare in-the-present bodily exhibition and

photographic perpetuation. The popular freak photos of Charles

Eisenmannnxvii and others continued to fascinate, and those who

had lived long enough to see the popular form in its golden age

perpetuated the freaks’ identities in their collaboration of the

physical substantiation of the freak.

The 1960s would see a distinct shift in the place of the

freak in culture. The label and its signification of Otherness

would begin to be appropriated by counter-culture movements, but

that form of the “freak” is so far from the Freak identity that

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it will receive no further consideration here. Of much greater

significance is the work of a single individual, Diane Arbus,

whose photos riffed on the Freak identity she had enjoyed

observing in her youth. Arbus’s photos mark a shift in the

construction of the Freak identity, and serve to link the classic

freak show with modern-day variants of it. (More on the latter in

a moment.) Her photographs often depict individuals with abnormal

bodies, and some of her most famous works focus on subjects who

could be identified as ‘born freaks,’ the title of them offering

description enough: “Russian midget friends in a living room on

100th Street”; “Mexican dwarf in his hotel room in N.Y.C.”; “A

Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx.”xviii

Arbus wrote about taking freaks as subjects, saying:

“Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot. It was one of the first

things I photographed and it had a terrific kind of excitement for

me. I just used to adore them. I still do adore some of them. I

don’t quite mean they’re my best friends but they made me feel a

mixture of shame and awe. There’s a quality of legend about

freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands

that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading

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they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their

trauma. They’re aristocrats.” (3)

It is clear, here, that Arbus maintained a memory of the original

freak show, and the persistence of the Freak identity very much

informed Arbus’s work. But Arbus’s photos, though perhaps trying,

maybe even very hard, to return to the practice of freak

photography, instead achieve something different; there is still

an element of the Freak present, but these photographs can be

seen to actually be enacting a massive shift in the Freak form.

They are important because they see a reversal of the identity-

creation dynamic. Whereas personhood was once the substantiation

for the freak identity, in Arbus, freakishness is in service to

personhood. It is not a complete freak identity; it can’t be—

there is a resistance to performativity in her photos—but

elements do carry over in the framing of an abnormal body for

purposes of obvservation. What is missing, though, what

differentiates Arbus’s photographs from Eisenmannn’s, is simply

intentionality. The pose is gone, and with it, the freak

performance. These photos may still be hailing the future, but

the hail comes on Arbus’s side, not from the subject within. She

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said, “I have never taken a picture I’ve intended. They’re always

better or worse. For me the subject of the picture is always more

important than the picture.” (15) Arbus had no intention of her

pictures enacting a performance, and her subjects offer none—many

are candid. And those that are not, even those in which the

subject looks directly into the camera, are nonetheless missing a

sense of intention from the subject, they have no desire to

perform, and they do not. They are giving themselves over to the

signification of mortality the Photograph offers to most living

subjects. And because of this, their personhood is maintained,

recognizing the element of the freakish that is present, but not

performing it.

Sontag wrote of Arbus: “Though most viewers are ready to

imagine that these people, the citizens of the sexual underworld

as well as the genetic freaks, are unhappy, few of the pictures

actually show emotional distress. The photographs of deviates and

real freaks do not accent their pain but, rather, their

detachment and autonomy.” (36) And so, the work of Arbus marks a

point in which the Freak identity underwent a change—it certainly

still existed, but a paradigmatic shift allowed the construction

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of the freak to operate under new rules. Now, finally, personhood

and freakishness could be contained within a single identity. As

Sontag says, Arbus’s photos do not accent the pain of their

subjects. Instead, the pain accents the subjects; as Alexander

Pope is often quoted as saying, “to err is human,”xix and the

error of Arbus’s subjects is a physical one, a deviance that is

uniquely and definitively human. The spectacle of the old freak

photos is absent in Arbus’s work. She cites them, certainly, and

the freak show as a whole; one of the most obvious ties being the

series of “Untitled” photos she took late in her career at a mental

health facility. The subjects of the photos clearly posses both

physical and mental abnormalities, and in terms of the classic

potential-freak, these subjects present themselves as easily

being identified as possible real freaks. And yet, Arbus refuses

any such identification of them, not even offering the detached

statement-titles of her earlier work. At the height of her

career, Arbus created a series of photos that don’t profess to be

anything, photographs that don’t perform, and which perhaps don’t

even hail—they simply try to be. Adams says the Freak “is a

concept that refuses the logic of identity politics. (10) This

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idea applies both to the Untitled photos as well as to the freaks

of the 19th Century. Zip, and the subjects of the Arbus series

display the same physical abnormality—microcephaly—and both, as

Adams says, in many ways defy easy identification. The difference

is that Barnum made a spectacular performance of the uncertainty,

making the questioning the performance, the identity, the name

‘What Is It?’; Arbus, on the other hand, offers no title, no

potential explanation. The implication is that no answer is

needed; they are people, and that identity is enough.

Arbus’s early photos, though, functioned differently and had

a different relationship to the Freak identity; her later work

moved away from it, but American culture was already on a

trajectory that was re-shaping a place for the freak. A seemingly

duller (i.e. less theatrical and spectacular) Freak identity was

being created, but this variation on the identity was

significantly more substantive and could really be defined as

finally truly being an identity in the way that most other

critics on the subject claim it to have already been. It’s a

difference of definition; in the classic freak show as I have

considered it, ‘identity’ meant simply having a state of being, a self,

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whereas the newly emerging freak identity was much more a

modifier, a condition of existence. The new ‘freak identity,’ the kind

that defines a culturally constructed group created through

societal conventions, denied explicit performativity. The meta-

theatrics of the freak show had disappeared, and with it the kind

of intentionality that defined the Freak/Spectator relationship.

Now, the Freak identity did not need to preclude personhood,

ceased to create a character, and the element of the mythic

faded. But the core ethos of freakishness, the kind of

existential spectacle that would make use any kind of abnormality

and signification to fuel the limelight illuminating the illusory

identity of the exhibition, did not. Gone was the illusion, and

now the freak’s aesthetic served to highlight the personhood of

the subject. We look at this kind of subject and say for example,

‘oh, his arms are extremely deformed, but look at him; he’s still

so clearly a person! How amazing, how inspiring!”xx And so the

spectacle does not fade, it just moves on, like the circus,

quietly packing up in the night and reappearing in a different

time and place.

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It is crucially significant that the ambivalent awe and

repulsion of the original freak does not disappear in ‘the new

freak.’ And certainly, it has not; the elements of awe and

repulsion are perhaps now more accurately called inspiration and

pity, but the product is essentially the same. The Freak

aesthetic modifies and deepens the human identity of the subject,

and the new freak is derived from our perception of the human

spirit being reaffirmed. We look at the disabled body

ambivalently, but the spectacle of it is created in the seeming

victory of the human identity in its simple existence, despite

the monstrous freak elements that affect it.xxi And so the person

‘overcoming the adversity of the freakish body’ is still very

much marked as Other by their existential victory, they remain a

source of wonder, and so a seemingly paradoxical identity is

created, but one which nonetheless very much becomes a reality.

When a physically deviant person denies or overcomes the echoes

of Freak performance that their bodies inherently signify, they

are marked by an observer as wondrous, and this marking gives

rise to set of significations that by its nature must be

different from the original Freak identity, but which nonetheless

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presents a similarity of relationship and function that disallows

the new identity, in this context, from being called anything

other than Freak. As far as perceptions of disability and

disability discourse go, the new significations of the ‘new

freak’ are perhaps a small step forward, as this specific

presentation of the freak in our culture doesn’t allow itself to

be called ‘freak’ in a negative context—for the moment the term

is applied in a negative way the wondrous victory of the disabled

body over itself fails to be realized, but so with it, the power

of the word. Like other (negative) words associated with other

identities, the use of ‘freak’ as epithet is simply an invocation

of the past, a recalling of the shadow of the truly negative

associations it once bore, and like similar identities, perhaps

soon ‘freak’ will be able to be re-appropriated for use in a more

positive, or at least neutral, context.

It remains to be seen what will be the direction of the

trajectory of the freak as our culture continues to develop. The

shift begun in Arbus’s time continues to be seen today, and the

‘new freak’ is still very much a part of our culture. Almost half

a century after Diane Arbus began photographing abnormal bodies,

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and 175 years after Barnum exhibited Joice Heth in front of an

audience, the freak show still continues. Again the medium has

changed, and the performative mode has varied, but a frame still

continues to be placed around abnormal bodies. The most recent

shift is of particular interest, because it represents yet

another development in the freak show’s history; now, the new

freak is performing in a similar way to its 19th Century

counterpart. Though at its emergence the identity was created

through a lack of intentional performativity, it would seem that

our culture has accepted the new freak’s identity to the point

that it can now, again, sustain intentional exhibition.

The frame, now, is provided through television, and critics

have identified the talk show as the new freak bally of the late

20th Century.xxii But the speed at which our culture shifts due to

technological influence has seen this re-configuration of the

freak show continue even further. The mediating commentary of the

talk show host is no longer necessary—now, television programs

set us up to watch in a form that will be familiar to us here:

the abnormal body, along with the very much human

identity/personality it modifies, are now available for us,

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Spectators, to watch, observing through the frame of the

television, in which the potential-freak intentionally places

themselves. Two exemplary examples of this format have premiered

in recent years, both on the television network ‘TLC.’ (The

unabbreviated form for ‘The Learning Channel. Fitting,

considering the freak’s museum origins.)

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The first, the reality show Little People, Big Worldxxiii, which

premiered in 2006, follows the day-to-day

activities of the Roloff family. The

parents, Matt and Amy, are both affected

with dwarfism, as is one of their four

children, Zach. The show aims to give

audiences a view of their lifestyle,

focusing on the family as they run a

successful business on their large farm

estate that they’ve opened as a public

attraction. The new freak ethos is very

much at work, here, with much of the program consisting of

‘typical’ daily activities, but the audience’s wonder at the

‘personhood’ of these daily activities must be re-affirmed with

the occasional scene showing one of the three dwarfs using a

creative solution to their height challenge, or, more often, and

more explicitly, the show takes a documentary-style structure in

which the scenes of daily life are intercut with interviews with

the family members. Here, the freak pose is reconfigured for the

21st Century, and the performers are fixed through the action of

Fig 2: The Rolloff family in a publicity photo for Little People, Big World. Image

from TLC’swebsite.

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the camera. The television has become the new freak bally, and

the Internet the ten-in-one multiplied infinitely. In the

anonymity of cyberspace we are provided the unique ability to

read people’s reaction, often blatantly unfiltered. In the

comment chain of the youtube.com video “Zach Rolloff’s First

Date,”xxiv user ‘LandSquirrels’ comments: “Do little people ever

date average size people? Cause little people are adorable”. In

the same chain, ‘2pacexpert’ writes: “You gotta wonder if Zack

hates that fact that he was born a dwarf while his siblings are

normal size and attractive.” These (relatively tame) comments are

representative of the hundreds of comments posted across the many

videos and clips available online. The more

profusely the family professes its

normality, the more that normality is undercut, perhaps a sense

of The Uncanny returning here in the daily actions audiences take

to be familiar but which here are recontextualized in a frame of

bodily Otherness. Let me direct your attention for a moment (as

though our gaze hasn’t already strayed over there) at the images

of Fig. 2 and Fig. 3. The top image is a promotional still for

Little People, Big World, and the bottom is a picture from the 1920s of

Fig. 3: The Doll family with an unidentified family of circus-goers. Courtesy of the Circus World Museum.

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members of the Doll family with an unidentified family,

presumably circus-goers. The similarities between these images

are striking—the composition, the arrangement of the bodies, even

the background—so much so that one must wonder if it is

intentional citation.

With the success of the Little People, Big World (it ran for six

seasons and has just received a spin-off show with Matt and Amy

attempting to start a wedding planning business), TLC premiered

another freak show in 2012: Abby and Brittany, which follows the

lives of 22 year old identical conjoined twins Abby and Brittany

Hensel. The program’s structure mimics the documentary structure

of Little People, Big World, and in terms of its nature, works in

essentially the same manner. If anything, The Uncanny is pushed

even farther in the more recent show, with the majority of the

explicit focus placed on the ‘normalcy’ of the girls. Often

times, these statements of normalcy will be made up of the girls

alternating speaking individually and in perfect overlap. Of

course, the cognitive dissonance that occurs in this abnormality

just serves to increase the wonder of the audience, captivated by

the spectacle of their framed existence. The show’s opening is

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exemplary of the essence of the show. I have attempted to

properly attribute the quote below, made up as it is of the

girl’s typical manner of speaking:

Brit: “We like to think that the most amazing thing about us

is…”

Both: “…we’re just like everyone else.”

Abby: “We really are normal, but I’m definitely more normal

than Brit.”

Brit: “Whatever. Anyways…”

Both: “This is the story of our normal, regular life. Well,

our normal conjoined life. This

is our life!”xxv

The freak show may now be colored with post-modern irony, but it

would seem that it is not as diminished as we might think. The

modern day freak show denies that that is what it is, passing

itself off as a reality show focusing on human personalities, but

now, having identified the essential qualities of the freak show

and Freak identity, it can be seen that the exhibition style of

the 19th Century has found a new form, with a new audience, using

old techniques.

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And so, when the practice of the freak show, and all that

comes along with it, from the creation of the freak’s identity,

to techniques of construction, to sociological implications, is

observed in its totality, it can be seen that the traditions of

the show has changed over the years, but since its inception, it

has never ceased. It is the nature of the freak to persist. Like

Koschei the Deathless, the fairytale character who hid his soul

in a needle, which is in an egg, in a duck, in a rabbit, in a

chest, the freak similarly displaces its essence into an object,

reifying themselves, the very ethos of it defying death. The

freak show can be defined in terms of its historical trajectory,

but might better be thought of in terms of its accumulation. Tom

Thumb still captivates Spectators who stare at his image, not

caring that his body has died, simply being amazed in the fact of

his having lived at all.

It is difficult to say if the freak show has come full

circle, for it very well may be moving in a spiral, but today, it

is at least apparent that a new form of freak has emerged

alongside the old freaks still performing for us in the bounds of

their black and white and sepia framings. The freak began in myth

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and museums, proliferating through the Photograph, and then

moving into the traveling circus; in the course of my research, I

have pursued the freak show in reverse, traveling to them, to

stare at them in archives, and in museums, where they now exist

only in their photographic forms, or in their skeletons. But

still, they exist, they persist, and now, with the rise of the

Internet, which might be thought of as serving the same function

for our society as the old myths did, the freak show is only a

click away. The Eisenmann photos have been digitalized,

perpetuating the anticipatory hailing performance of freak

photography,xxvi and even Barnum’s Museum, itself, has been

recalled through the invocative power of the virtual,xxvii despite

the fact that the building has long since disappeared, having

burned down (for the second time) in 1868. The Museum has been

digitally recreated, and we as observers can direct our gaze

where we wish—guided by our mouse we can explore recreations of

Barnum’s various exhibits. The Feegee Mermaid is there, and a

click pulls up a large amount of additional archival material

relating to the exhibit; many items in the ‘Museum’ can be

interacted with in this way. Of particular note is the Chang and

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Eng display—they are represented as digital wax figures. Perhaps

some meta-commentary could be read into this; the medium of the

performance doesn’t matter, as long as the performance is

intentional, the freak can remain. But the greatest point of

interest is the ‘What Is It?’ display, which is just a rendering

of the exhibit set, essentially just a backdrop of virtual

painted jungle trees. The digital can realize the fake through

its own artifice, and yet, the display is empty. There is no What

Is It?, Zip is absent, even William Henry Johnson is nowhere to

be seen. We cannot say for sure why he is not there. In all

likelihood the digital curators considered depicting an ‘actual’

freak exhibit distasteful in a culture that considers the

practice to be a thing of the past. But maybe, there is another

reason, one that we can’t understand on this side of the frame.

Over the course of this essay I have argued for a change in

the way in which we think about the freak show, the freakish, the

Freak identity, and individual freaks’ identities, and when the

whole thing is considered in its entirety, it should be apparent

that the presence of the person, and of the corporeal body, is

absolutely essential to any analysis of the freak. It is easy for

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me to say, sitting here typing and staring at the freaks before

me, that I know how this works, that we can objectively analyze

and understand the construction of a freak. And yet, I cannot

escape the confusion I encounter when I stare at one of these

photos for too long. What is real? Where do I assign truth? Am I

invoking the live performance of this miniaturized performer in

the act of my staring, or is this really just a ghost pretending

to be (a)live? These are questions that I perhaps cannot answer,

I can distinguish the frame, and the potential-freak, and

recognize the essential need for a Spectator—this is how a freak

gets performed. This is how a freak is born. And yet, I must

offer a degree of faith here, the freak demands some

subjectivity, and I will give it. I must have faith that the

freak is letting me look at it in the way that I think I am. In

all likelihood, though, I have missed something, some element

that has been withheld from me, hidden away on the other side of

the frame. But there is a truth, of a kind, in that, I suppose.

Or, maybe all the truth is in that. Because that is the freak show,

really, it is a lie that builds into its own structure the

disclaimer ‘this is a lie.’ And still we make it real. The

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identity that was once nothing more than a character, really,

costumed in an abnormal body, has become, through our belief in

it, a real form of identity and a continued source of

entertainment.

It is impossible to anticipate the next development in the

Freak identity, though it can be said for certain that what has

been will remain. They will continue to shock and to amaze, and

they will continue to be seen. Zip the Pinhead was seen by

100,000,000 people in the course of his life, in the time in

which his heart was beating—it is impossible to estimate how many

more people have stared at him since then, how many times he has

been recalled. The medium of display might have changed, from

exhibition on the stage to exhibition in the photograph, but the

performance has not; Zip continues to perform his identity, and

we continue to receive it. Robert Bogdan, in his critical

considerations of Zip, describes the character, as well as

William Henry Johnson, as suffering from mental retardation, and

dismisses any claims to the contrary, for he refuses to separate

the potential-freak from the freak. (134) Zip will always be

mentally retarded—he is, after all, the ‘missing link from the

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darkest jungles of Africa’—for that is his identity, and in it he

is one of the greatest freaks that has lived; similarly, William

Henry Johnson was a tremendous performer, and for over sixty

years he supported Zip’s identity as mentally incompetent.

William Henry Johnson, the man, though, was no idiot, and he knew

exactly what he was doing.xxviii Zip was incapable of coherent

speech, but the man that allowed Zip to exist was very much

capable of it, and his last words, perhaps, are the answer to the

question that became his freak identity’s name, answering a

question with another question: “Well, we fooled ‘em for a long

time, didn’t we?”xxix

Yes. He did. And he will have continued to, for as long as

Zip remains. And for the time being, it seems he’s still on

display.

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Notes

72

i Johnson, Nunnally. “Zip.” NY Herald-Tribune 29 Apr. 1926.

ii Ibid

iii For an understanding of the context of the freak show within the

circus, and the circus in American culture, see Davis’s The Circus Age.

iv See Part I of Freaks, with each chapter exploring the particularities

and significations of several distinct types of physical abnormality.

v “Lusus Naturae, N. : Oxford English Dictionary.” Web. 21 Dec. 2012.

vi Regarding the Ogbanje’s pathological origin, see Ilechukwu’s

“Ogbanje/abiku and Cultural Conceptualizations of Psychopathology in

Nigeria.”

vii For a more in-depth examination of the relationship between each

medium, as well as their exact function, see Adams’s Sideshow U.S.A.

viii George Middleton, as quoted by Bernth Lindfors in “Ethnological

Show Business”

ix This article appeared in the Providence Journal on July 5th, 1847.

x A full-page spread depicting the couple at the altar appeared on

the front page of Harpers on February 21st, 1863.

xi For Goffman’s full definition of the front, as well as other

relevant topics in regards to the performance of the self, see The

Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.

xii For a full-examination of the ways in which cultural ideologies of

the day were reflected in various freak forms, see Davis’s The Circus

Age.

xiii See Austin’s How to Do Things With Words. The freak, as a performative

identity, is partially constructed through the performative utterance

of naming.

xiv The ‘talker’ is the proper term in circus jargon for what is

widely mistakenly called the circus barker.

xv For more information see the Mütter Museum’s website:

http://www.collegeofphysicians.org/mutter-museum/exhibitions/

xvi This quote is from a personal interview with talker Scott Baker,

whom I encountered at the Coney Island Sideshow in September 2012. A

note concerning the absence of significant discussion in this essay

regarding the modern day ‘Sideshows at the Seashore’ at Coney Island:

I have been to watch the performances there, but today the show only

features made freaks and working acts, and the lack of exhibition of

true physical abnormality precludes the show from demanding in-depth

consideration here.

xvii Charles Eisenmannn, born in Germany in 1850, and after

immigrating to the United States had established himself as the

premier freak photographer. For more information and for examples of

his work, see the online Becker Collection at Syracuse University.

xviii These photos are all collected in Arbus’s Aperture Monograph,

which contains photos spanning the length of her career.

xix From Pope’s “An Essay on Criticism,” digitally reproduced at:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/237826

xx For an artist interrogating similar issues in his work, see the

work of Mat Fraser, a disabled performance artists citing and

subverting elements of the freakshow. Videos and media can be viewed

at his website at http://www.matfraser.co.uk/index.php.

xxi Modern day made-freaks are not able invoke the spectacle mentioned

here; they generate, instead, a reaction through their seeming

rejection of the human, which significantly diminishes their

freakishness. They seem to be attempting to return to the Monster

identity, but that identity has disappeared from modern culture.

Tattoos are becoming increasingly common among the general

population, as are piercings, making the ‘tattooed person’ excessive

not as a freak, but more as a parody. And we know now that there is a

technique to the other acts like fire-eating or sword swallowing—the

awe is gone. It is for these reasons that the Coney Island sideshow

could never display the old Freak exhibition.

xxii For more discussion regarding the talk show as freak show, see

Andrew Stulman Dennett’s essay on this topic in Freakery.

xxiii Additional material and media featuring the Roloffs can be found

at TLC’s website at http://tlc.howstuffworks.com/tv/little-people-

big-world

xxivTo watch the video, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81CkD1oU14Q

xxv The video can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=vKm9c03PJDM

xxvi See the online Becker Collection at

http://library.syr.edu/find/scrc/collections/diglib/eisenman.php

xxvii The museum can be explored at

http://www.lostmuseum.cuny.edu/home.html

xxviii In support of Johnson’s mental competence, see p. 182-183 of

Davis’s The Circus Age.

xxix I was not able to find a definitive primary source or a reliable

secondary source confirming this quotation, though a simple Google

search of ‘Zip the pinhead last words’ yields a large number of pages

attributing the quote to having been repeated by his sister in an

interview. Regardless of whether or not it actually happened, there

is a truth to existence of the belief. As in the freak-show, it is

the truth of a thing not proven false.

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Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” (1919): 339–76. Print.

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“Zach Roloff’s First Date (Little People, Big World) - YouTube.” Web. 21

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