Freak Show

Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit by Robert Bogdan.  299 pages.

While the idea of attending a circus or carnival freak show is distasteful for many of us, from 1840 to 1940, these shows and displays were common across the U.S.   Author Robert Bogdan writes in his preface that "The meaning that disability has in our culture has been an interest of mine for a long time.  This book on 'freak shows' flows directly from a project in which I examined villains in horror and adventure movies."   Bogdan has done a lot of research and in this book presents the history of the traveling show in America, but also discusses the people, themselves.

I found the book to be interesting, and the author's take on this part of history to be sympathetic.   I knew some of the people he wrote about, like Tom Thumb and Lavinia Warren (a/k/a Mrs. Tom Thumb), and the Doll Family, but I didn't know much about the Hilton Sisters, or the history of "tattooed exotics."  The author included information on many people, including the managers and promoters of these shows.  It was also interesting to learn about how, as time went on, the ascent of professional medicine transformed these people from being seen as marvels to pathological specimens.   Bogdan did a lot of research, and his extensive notes at the back of the book are very helpful and insightful.

I thought Bogdan's philosophy to be thought-provoking.  He states, ""Our reaction to freaks is not a function of some deep-seated fear or some "energy" that they give off; it is, rather the result of our socialization, and of the way our social institutions managed these people's identities. Freak shows are not about isolated individuals...they are about organizations and patterned relationships between them and us. 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."  (Preface, p, x).