The word ‘freaks’ generally refers to individuals or animals with physical anomalies or to sideshow entertainers able to perform acts which would be impossible or gruesomely painful for most people. For each of these groups, the title ‘freak’ is short for ‘freak of nature’. This terminology stems from a longstanding cultural belief that the usual processes of nature have set standards of normalcy for human form and ability. Freaks with physical anomalies are often called monstrosities because their deformities are congenital. Self-made freaks, on the other hand, define themselves according to their skills. These contortionists, sword-swallowers, glass-eaters, human-pincushions, geeks (those who eat live animals and raw meat), fully-tattooed men and women, and others who can safely hammer nails up their noses, refer to themselves as novelty act performers. Few exhibiting themselves as freaks before the early twentieth century found the term ‘freak’ denigrating. To a large degree, the current stigma associated with ‘freaks’ stems from the modern affiliation of physical deformity with illness.
In the historical record on freaks, from Aristotle to the twentieth century, several physical anomalies have consistently captured human interest. The most commonly cited types include cyclopes, giants, dwarves, joined twins, hermaphrodites, hirsuits and bearded women, individuals with severe skin disorders, living skeletons, the obese, and animals and humans born either without arms or legs or with extra pairs. Proclaimed animal-human mixes were also popular. Foreigners constituted another group of freaks. Sometimes freakish foreigners were purely mythical, like the reported races of men with tails. In other instances, the foreigners' freak status relied on Western European and North American fantasies of imperial and racial hierarchies. For example, nineteenth- and twentieth-century sideshow managers, doctors, and anthropologists alike described ‘freaks’ from Africa, South and Central America, the South Pacific, and Australia as the missing links in evolution, the last of the Aztecs, or savage cannibals. Known for her large buttocks and genitals, Saartjie Baartman (the Hottentot Venus) was the most famous ‘exotic savage’ in nineteenth-century Europe. Finally, there were the artificial freaks, the prime example of which was mermaids. P. T. Barnum's ‘Fejee’ Mermaid was apparently created by sewing the shaved head and torso of a red monkey onto the body of a fish.
The specific causes of many physical anomalies still remain a mystery, but present day doctors assert that most extreme cases result from genetic and chemical influences during the embryonic period, the first seven weeks of development. Dwarfism is one imperfection that doctors now trace to genetics. The thalidomide disaster of the late 1950s and early 1960s underscored the significance of toxic substances in reproduction. In this case, the thalidomide that pregnant women took to decrease nausea created a myriad of fetal deformities, including limb reduction. Doctors have also argued that maternal diabetes and multiple fertilizations increase the risk of birth defects.
Many other explanations for physical anomalies preceded today's. In ancient Greece and Rome, it was widely believed that monstrous births were caused by astrological forces or capricious gods. Interpreting deformities as portents or signs of divine displeasure continued well into the sixteenth century. As Ambroise Paré's treatise of 1537 shows, however, the Renaissance community also attributed unsightly births to the quantity and quality of seminal fluid, the size of the womb, maternal posture, heredity, accidental illness, bestiality, and maternal injury, as well as to divine or demonic influences. Since ancient times, communities have also asserted that maternal imagination and experiences could cause anomalies. Joseph Carey Merrick (the elephant man, b. 1862) revealed the persistence of this belief as he traced his deformity to the fact that his pregnant mother was nearly trampled by an elephant.
In 1981 the historians Katharine Park and Lorraine J. Daston observed that the Reformation heralded a shift away from the explanation of freaks as divine punishments. Instead, seventeenth-century communities saw freaks as relatively innocuous curiosities that revealed nature's power. By the late seventeenth century, the educated community believed in a nascent form of the embryological theory of reproduction. In addition, theories that deformities were caused by damage in utero gained momentum against the belief that anomalies were preordained and present within the seeds of life. Although philosophers and medical men continued to argue over the influence of God in human reproduction well into the nineteenth century, conceptualizing the body as a faulty biological system helped to justify the medical study of freaks. Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire's 1832 publication of Histoire général … des anomalies also marks a significant shift toward the modern study of physical anomalies. Rejecting the notion that freaks were sports of nature, Saint-Hilaire argued that teratology (the medical study of congenital monstrosity) should link normal and abnormal development.
Representations of human and animal freaks in culture are numerous. In The Odyssey, Polyphemous is one of a race of giant cyclopes. Goliath and Og, king of Bashan, are the star giants of the Bible. Japanese prints from the Edo period (1615-1867) depict a variety of freaks including a king of freaks and demonic cyclopes. In the Tempest, Shakespeare's Trinculo suggests that if he painted Caliban, he might make a good fortune exhibiting this savage to the curious. Swift's Gulliver's Travels addresses Gulliver's own exhibition as a freak. Velásquez's painting Las Meninas reflects the popularity of dwarves in seventeenth-century Spanish courts. Sixteenth-and seventeenth-century European handbills and similarly illustrated wonderbooks depict both freaks known to have lived and others that could only have been mythical. Expressing the optimism of Baconian science and hoping to record all the wonders of the natural universe, seventeenth-century elite gentlemen formed academic and philosophical societies to discuss nature's oddities. They also collected specimens of human and animal freaks in private curiosity cabinets. Others took notes on the freaks they witnessed at local fairs. Well into the nineteenth century, doctors also avidly collected freak specimens in medical college museums, exhibited these specimens and living freaks in their medical lectures, and described them in the major medical journals. Freaks also featured in twentieth-century movies such as Todd Browning's Freaks (1932) and David Lynch's The Elephant Man (1980). In 1972, Diane Arbus' photographs of freaks were published posthumously in Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph.
The most notorious venue for freaks has been the travelling raree or sideshow. Cities like London and Paris were the focus markets, but showmen also travelled around the European countryside. Particularly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, freak shows could be quite casual, set up both inside and outside taverns. They were also common at the great fairs, the most reputed of which was the Bartholomew Fair, held at Smithfield for two weeks each year from the Middle Ages until 1855. By this time, several managers including P. T. Barnum, Uffner, Johnson, and Watson had already begun to consolidate the trade. They offered multi-starred spectacles in great rented halls, the most popular of which was the Egyptian Hall, Picadilly. Although freak shows still continue today, their age of glory ended in the 1940s. Their decline resulted from the combined effects of competition from new kinds of entertainment, the disability rights movement, and the redefinition of physical abnormality in relation to medical disease.
Within the sideshows, the balance of power between manager and freak varied. Some freaks handled their own display entirely, but most relied on business partners to advertise and schedule shows and to create the essential aura of mystery that drew audiences. Certainly some exploitation existed — freaks were kidnapped, and their corpses were sold without their permission. Nevertheless, and despite long work days, most entertainment freaks appear to have been content in their careers and to have lived in relative comfort. A few, for example the midget Charles S. Stratton (Tom Thumb), amassed great fortunes. In addition to profits from admission and from the sale of illustrated pamphlets, which recounted their life stories, skills, and physical features, exhibition freaks sometimes received gifts from private audiences. Queen Victoria was quite generous in this respect.
Audiences for the shows came from all classes, as entry fees varied according to one's class status or the time of the viewing. Most freak shows admitted women and children as well as men, although with some ‘delicate’ subjects women and children were barred. In nineteenth-century France several freak shows were banned for fear that the shocking spectacles would cause women to bear monstrous children.
Some of the more famous freaks in Western culture include the (mythical) Bird Boy of Ravenna illustrated by Paré and the two-headed Bengali boy whose joined skulls are in the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. Claude Ambroise Seurat (b. 1798) was the most famous ‘living skeleton’ and Patrick Cotter ‘O'Brien’ (b. 1760) and Chang Wow Gow (b. 1845-6) were well-known giants. The midgets ‘Tom Thumb’ (b. 1832) and his wife Lavinia Warren (b. 1841) are still the most celebrated little people. Since the exhibition of Chang and Eng Bunker (b. 1811), joined twins have also been called ‘Siamese twins’. Matthew Buchinger (b. 1674) was a skilled draftsman who had neither hands nor legs. In the tradition of armless freaks, Charles Tripp (b. 1855) performed tasks with his toes.
— Heather McHold
Bibliography
- Bogdan, R. (1988). Freak Show: presenting human oddities for amusement and profit. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
- Daston, L. and Park, K. (1998). Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750. Zone Books, New York.
- Gould, G. M. and Pyle, W. L. (1896, 1956). Anomalies and curiosities of medicine. Julian Press, New York.
- Wilson, D. (1993). Signs and portents: monstrous births from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. Routledge, London
See also dwarf; elephant man; giants; monsters.
