The Victorian Freak Show: The Significance of Disability and Physical Differences in 19th-Century Fiction

The Victorian Freak Show: The Significance of Disability and Physical Differences in 19th-Century Fiction, by Lillian Craton; pp. xii + 244. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2009, $109.99, £65.99.

Lillian Craton's The Victorian Freak Show makes an important contribution to the growing study of physical difference in the nineteenth century, in part because it fleshes out aspects of difference to which we have been less attentive: those not typically considered medical or congenital disabilities, such as body size. One should not expect, therefore, a book that focuses solely on the types of physical difference by which freak performers earned their living; indeed, the subtitle more accurately describes the book's content. The most significant innovation of the project is the way in which Craton uncovers the often positively figured valence of such differences as they are depicted in literary texts. She argues that such representations apply pressure to the expectations for gender performance, crafting more flexible norms, and in this way she broadens the scope of our analysis.

Craton opens the book with a rich discussion of freak shows and bodily spectacle. In a Victorian social climate that laid the groundwork for eugenics and theories of human perfectibility, the representation of the nonnormative body was deeply significant. She also argues for the importance of fiction in offering ideals that both participate in and resist such a project. "The inclusion of grotesque bodies," she suggests, "expands and complicates the novels' implications for an increasingly proscriptive culture of physical normativity" (25). Craton divides the book into four broad themes: littleness, fatness, female masculinity, and bodily...