Mexico's “Misnomered Bear Woman”: Science and Spectacle in the Sideshows of Nineteenth-Century Europe
2011; Wiley; Volume: 47; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1540-5931.2011.00871.x
ISSN1540-5931
Autores Tópico(s)Race, History, and American Society
Resumo'Twas a big black ape from over the sea, And she sat on a branch of a walnut tree, And grinn'd and sputter'd and gazed at me As I stood on the grass below: She sputter'd and grinn'd in a fearsome way, And put out her tongue, which was long and grey, And it hiss'd and curl'd and seem'd to say “Why do you stare at me so?” Who could help staring? I, at least, Had never set eyes on so strange a beast— Such a monstrous birth of the teeming East, Such an awkward ugly breed: She had large red ears and a bright blue snout, And her hairy limbs were firm and stout: Yet still as I look'd I began to doubt If she were an ape indeed. Her ears were pointed, her snout was long; Her yellow fangs were sharp and strong; Her eyes—but surely I must be wrong, For I certainly thought I saw A singular look in those fierce brown eyes: The look of a creature in disguise; A look that gave me a strange surmise And a thrill of shuddering awe. Crowds of eager show-goers huddled into London's Regent Gallery in the summer of 1857, anticipating the arrival of Julia Pastrana. Billed by newspaper advertisements as the “Ugliest Woman in the World,” the “Bear Woman of Mexico,” and the “Nondescript,” Pastrana had gained widespread fame for possessing a rare medical condition, characterized by thick hair growth over her face and body, known today as hypertrichosis (Bondeson 241; “Singular History” 3–5). Protruding gums and a protracted jaw compounded her hirsuteness, creating a startling appearance that invited both fear and fascination among audiences already saturated in a culture of freak sideshows (Drimmer 367). Her performances had become so popular, and her name so commonplace, that during her heyday she attracted the attention of personalities ranging from P. T. Barnum to Charles Darwin. As her routine opened, Pastrana pranced onto the stage, donning a classic Victorian dress adorned with bows and ribbons. After assuming a number of provocative poses, she regaled her onlookers with a repertoire of songs that included “The Last Rose of Summer” and “Napolitaine,” all in a commanding but delicate soprano. She then proceeded to dance the waltz, schottische, polka, bolero, and Highland fling (“Singular History” 3–8). Her grace belied an otherwise beastly presence. Britons gawked, winced and found delight as this four-and-a-half-foot tall foreign oddity corrupted the ideal image of a docile Victorian lady. Born in 1834 in the Sierra Madre of northwestern Mexico, Pastrana first appeared in the United States in 1854, before reaching her highest popularity on the London stage three years later. Following her London stint, she headed out on the continental European show circuit, where she remained until her death from childbirth complications in 1860. Pastrana performed in a city with an unavoidable entertainment scene dominated by displays of human oddities. Her performances, like those of many of her contemporaries, served as exemplars of what nineteenth-century Europeans came to see as the racially inferior and sexually deviant peoples that populated far-off lands, particularly in Africa and the Americas. In this case, she became a popular representation of an indigenous Mexican at a time when foreign interest in Latin America was on the rise. Exhibitions of imported foreigners helped to create and reaffirm a normative model on which many British citizens based their understandings of sensible human aesthetics and behavior (Thompson 130). Her performances and body educated Britons about the outside world in racial and sexual terms by symbolizing a people in need of the civilizing hand of British imperial domination. Medical reports, newspaper advertisements, and show programs facilitated the circulation of the ideas of her primitiveness both to elite readers of medical journals and ordinary attendees of her shows. The scarce evidence that exists of her interactions with audience members and other enthusiasts confirms only that she incited a wide range of reactions. Nevertheless, these myriad responses—ranging from fear to disgust to pity—help explain why she became a curiosity for such a broad segment of the population. Pastrana and the rest of London's performing human oddities helped fashion Victorian cultural, ethnic, moral, and political imaginations of the world (Said 12–21). Pastrana's medical examiners attempted to categorize her along racial and sexual lines. By the mid-nineteenth century, understandings of racial stratification found expression in the new scientific method of craniology, which proposed a correlation between skull dimensions and characteristics common to certain races (GouldMismeasure, 20–23; Flamingo's Smile 266–76). Doctors and scientists who examined and described Pastrana worked within this scientific framework to determine where she fit into the racial order. Her examiners also attempted to categorize her by focusing on both her physiological and behavioral features, which confused their understandings of her sex and humanness. Doctors and scientists were unable to reach a consensus over exactly what sort of being she represented. They examined physical characteristics such as menstruation patterns and breast development, along with social criteria like intellect, demeanor, and speech, to determine the status of her sex. Some regarded her as a half-human, half-animal hybrid, others considered her part of an entirely different species, and still others labeled her a normal human woman—albeit one with an unfortunate affliction. The classificatory efforts undertaken by medical examiners reveal the extent to which social, cultural, and political considerations factored into their scientific inquiries and evaluations. The interplay between scientific explanation and popular enthusiasm made Pastrana into a human commodity (Thompson 131). Promoters advertised her, doctors probed her, and the public watched her. Her shows made money. Yet her ability to act and to shape her own experiences tempered this commodification. While those around her undoubtedly exploited and controlled her, she had the capacity not only to make decisions, but also to understand and shape her own circumstances according to her own needs. Her sorrow, happiness, humor, intellect, appearance, and talent, though expressed in the written record by others, indicate both how she experienced and influenced her daily existence. Furthermore, the ways in which she interpreted her own relationships, particularly romantic ones, indicate the power she had to get what she wanted out of seemingly one-sided arrangements. Julia Pastrana thus became swept up in a large matrix of political, historical, and scientific phenomena, but carved out her own place within it as well. Doctors and natural scientists found Julia Pastrana to be a curious specimen. Monstrous bodies had piqued the interest of medical professionals and common people alike from the early modern period onward, but not until the nineteenth century did biological explanations of them overtake divine or preternatural ones. The introduction of the scientific branch of teratology, literally the study of monstrous and abnormal bodies, in the early century reinforced increasing scientific curiosity in monstrosities (Braidotti 135–41; Park and Daston 14–19; Snigurowicz 173–76). From her 1854 arrival in New York to her 1860 death in Moscow, members of the medical and scientific communities analyzed, observed, and categorized her according to the models of the time. The conclusions they reached through their examinations helped to create representations of her that circulated among educated readers of medical journals and ordinary show-going folks alike. These professionals crafted a language to describe Pastrana that found reflection in the entertainment sector, as program pamphlets and newspaper advertisements shared common terminologies. At various points doctors called her a half-human, half-animal hybrid, while at others they affirmed her purely human status. In certain cases they emphasized her peculiarly masculine traits, and in others they made efforts to assert her womanliness. These contradictions exemplify the socially and culturally driven processes by which scientists articulated seemingly concrete, factual knowledge about sex, race, and humanness. Medical examiners focused on answering the question of whether Pastrana represented a human being or something entirely different. While several of their reports contained similar language, they never reached a clear consensus about her biological status. Alexander B. Mott, the son of the famed physician Valentin Mott, examined her in New York in 1854. He labeled her a hybrid, though he also noted that she exhibited characteristics of a woman, including rational thought and a gift for speech. In her case, he argued, the female elements predominated over her “brute” characteristics, which closely resembled those of an orangutan (“Singular History” 15). Dr. S. Brainerd of Cleveland went even further in 1855, claiming she formed part of an altogether distinct species, though he offered little further explanation. Other experts differed in their assessments (“Singular History” 15). After her arrival in Europe, British physician J. Z. Laurence wrote in the medical journal The Lancet that she possessed a quick wit and, despite a lack of formal education, great intelligence (Laurence 48). He, along with Samuel Kneeland, the onetime Curator of Comparative Anatomy of the Boston Society of Natural History, claimed that she conformed to the model of a woman (“Singular History” 15). Examiners also compared her with more familiar and clearly defined racial groups, especially Africans, in their efforts to categorize her. Brainerd wrote that he compared her hair under intense magnification and concluded that she possessed no “Negro traits” (“Singular History” 15).1 Kneeland's analysis mirrored Brainerd's. Because of her opaque and cylindrical hair, he argued, he found that she had no mix of “Negro blood.” Nevertheless, he continued to describe her physical features along racial lines. According to his report, she had yellowish-brown skin and an unusually soft nose and mouth, along with large limbs (“Singular History” 15). These external indicators of race did more to confuse than to clarify. Curiously, Pastrana's examiners did not express a particularly profound interest in her place of origin. Few even mentioned that she was native to Mexico, and in their comparisons they never explicitly made reference to other human curiosities or monstrous bodies from Mexico, Central America, or elsewhere in the Americas. Robert Aguirre has argued that an understanding of the racial components of mestizaje, or racial mixing, became a critical component of British empire-building efforts in the nineteenth century (xvi). Yet medical reports of Pastrana did not reflect this interest. While Pastrana did not represent the mixed-race Spanish and Indigenous mestizo—a product of three hundred years of Spanish colonial rule in its American domains—it is surprising nonetheless that doctors did not more explicitly link her region of origin to what they understood to be her race. Nevertheless, doctors did not neglect to compare her to other racial groups, though they generally looked toward Africa, using so-called “Negro” examples as their basis of comparison. Popular advertisements devoted more attention to her native land and to her specifically American indigenous identity. The reasons for the absence of specific reference to Mexico or the Americas in the medical literature are not entirely clear. A lack of specimens from Mexico and the rest of Latin America could have prevented doctors from making more explicit comparisons simply because they lacked knowledge about the area and its population. By comparison, Africa and Africans appear to have occupied a more distinct presence in both the scientific and entertainment worlds. On the other hand, they may have in fact recorded direct references to her native country and the supposed racial characteristics of its inhabitants in documentation that simply has not survived. The relative dearth of references to Mexico in the medical reports of Pastrana is impossible to explain. Nevertheless, the specific topics on which doctors focused—as well as those on which they did not—suggests the role the medical and scientific community had in the literal invention of a race, and it formed one of the primary ways by which medical examiners evaluated Pastrana. Based on their comparisons and contrasts with the “Negro” race that they frequently mentioned, doctors created a means to classify Pastrana. Moreover, doctors never compared her to European racial groups typically designated as white. Rather, for the purpose of highlighting her inferior position within a racial hierarchy, they listed the traits she shared with other groups labeled as inferior. In the event that she exhibited any common traits with what they understood to be the “normal” white model, they described them as bewildering and anomalous. In their efforts to place Pastrana within a rigid biological hierarchy, doctors complemented their racial descriptions with sexual ones, targeting the features that either confirmed or complicated her identity as a woman. In his Lancet piece, Laurence stipulated that with one exception, Pastrana conformed to the biological model of a woman. He noted that the hairs all over her body predominated in areas where they would typically be most concentrated in men, especially in the hands and fingers. The exception seems trivial, especially by contemporary scientific standards, but it threatened Laurence's surety about Pastrana's sex. Otherwise, he stated, she exhibited all the traits of a woman: she menstruated regularly, had full and well-developed breasts, and had a feminine voice, especially when she reached the highest notes during her singing performances (Laurence 48). Kneeland complemented Laurence's analysis, asserting that Pastrana performed all the functions of her sex (“Singular History” 15). Brainerd, by contrast, supported his theory that she belonged not only to a different sexual classification, but to an entirely different species, by saying that she had peculiar breasts, though he did not provide more specific details (“Singular History” 15). Once again, her examiners did not see Pastrana's sexual traits in the same manner, and, thus, did not draw the same conclusions about her place in the broader schema of biological classification. Moreover, they relied on social criteria to draw conclusions about her sex and humanness, descriptions generally regarded as biologically determined. The medical reports about Pastrana give readers little insight into the specific methods by which her examiners came to understand her. Her final examination, undertaken in Moscow approximately six months after her death in 1860 by J. Sokolov, a noted Russian professor and expert in human embalming, proves the lone exception to this. In his report, Sokolov meticulously measured numerous parts of Pastrana's body, especially distances between extremities, limbs, and joints. Pastrana's head drew the greatest attention from Sokolov. He argued that the head presented the most striking appearance, and that he considered it unprecedented in the history of human development. He took great pains to plot its basic dimensions, including its circumference and distances between various points. He noted the excrescence of the upper jaw, the overly developed occiput, and the exaggerated mouth and lips. He couched these relatively few qualitative descriptions in a much longer list of quantitative measurements (Sokolov 447–49). Unlike the rest of her examiners, Sokolov did not attempt to provide a judgment of Pastrana's relative humanness. While his report did not explicitly state his position, he wrote it as though he were treating any other human case. Sokolov's focus on rigorous quantitative measurement and recording differentiates his report from those of his contemporaries. Nonetheless, his approach fit within the relatively new methods of craniology, which scientists had come to use as tools for racial classification with increasing frequency in the period (Gould Mismeasure, 63–137). In all likelihood, the other doctors and scientists who examined Pastrana also engaged in similar methods in order to arrive at their more clearly articulated conclusions about her racial characteristics. The various reports, while disparate in how they expressed both their conclusions and the methods by which their authors arrived at them, uniformly suggest that physicians and naturalists aligned their approaches to human evaluation and examination with the prevailing understandings of scientific racism common to the nineteenth century. Pastrana's examiners brought their own culturally and historically specific mentalities to bear on their observations and discussions of her. Brainerd described her supposedly peculiar breasts in order to justify his assertion that scientists should create a new species to accommodate her. Such facile conclusions provided flimsy evidence, and he did not accompany his conclusion with even a vague physical description. His claim suggests that he allowed preconceived understandings of race and sex to guide his own analysis, forming his observations around a prescribed outcome. While one cannot ascertain the degree to which these scientists permitted their expectations to color their descriptions, clearly the prevailing discourses of race and sex shaped their reasoning (Thompson 134–40). More importantly, newspaper advertisements reinforced their assertions by bringing the language the doctors used to describe her to the masses. Newspaper advertisements invariably drew the paradoxes that defined her identity—graceful movement and brutish appearance, civil domesticity and primitive origin—into focus. The interaction between medical reports and popular ephemeral advertisements helped introduce Pastrana's peculiar condition to a curious public. The enormous popularity of sideshows, combined with written accounts and artistic renderings of her exoticism and inferiority, suggests their ability to shape popular mentalities about the racial and sexual order of things. The interactions between scientific discourses of race and sex with popular culture and mainstream media guided the process by which knowledge of Mexico and its indigenous inhabitants came into the Victorian worldview. Pastrana arrived on the London show scene in July of 1857. She and her new promoter, Theodore Lent, whom she had met in New York, had recently married, and they enthusiastically set out to make a fortune in London's enormous sideshow culture. Pastrana shared the limelight with a number of other human oddities displayed for profit. South Africa's Saartjie Baartman, known as the Hottentot Venus and famed for her large buttocks, along with the microcephalic children of the ruined Aztec race, talking pigs and walking skeletons, midgets and giants, fire eaters, and even the Fattest Man on Earth, all found a place on the Victorian stage (Altick 1–5; Fausto-Sterling 29). Foreign attractions generated particular enthusiasm, and ethnographic displays from Mexico and Central America occupied a large presence. The exhibits of the Aztec Children in 1850s London provide one such example. Though these young performers actually came from El Salvador, a place with Maya indigenous roots, promoters nonetheless displayed them as testaments to a ruined Aztec civilization. The children suffered from microcephalitis, or abnormally small heads. The tiny-headed children bolstered the racist mentalities of the day, as one's rank within the human hierarchy rested on craniological fitness. In this case, as Robert Aguirre argues, the microcephalic children provided British citizens living proof of a region inhabited by hopelessly backward and physically and mentally underdeveloped residents who needed the saving hand of British imperial domination (Abu-Lughod 784; Aguirre 103–34).2 Staged displays contributed to the British population's knowledge of the world through ethnological exchange. The notion that Britons had a moral obligation to save the culturally deficient and biologically inferior indigenous Americans lay at the heart of Britain's imperial project. These performers exemplified the broad general interest in the indigenous peoples of the Americas that helped propel Pastrana to fame. Advertisements of Pastrana and her contemporaries inundated the British print media. Most of the city's major newspapers featured detailed announcements of her Regent Street shows. They heralded her as the “Nondescript” Root-Digger from Mexico (“Singular History” 15). The description clearly mirrored the confusion scientific and medical examiners experienced in trying to classify her, as she fit no preexisting taxonomic mold. The Morning News perhaps best showcased the contradictions that made her a confusing but delightful performer for Victorian audiences. The newspaper declared that she had ankles worthy of a ballet dancer's envy and wore a short skirt with silken hose and scarlet boots. Moreover, she sang a host of songs in both Spanish and English in a pleasant manner, and skillfully danced the bolero (“Singular History” 15). The Theatrical Observer further noted her range of talent, emphasizing her ability as a dancer, and for these reasons labeled her as perhaps the greatest performer of her kind, exceeding Tom Thumb and other headliners (“Singular History” 15). Advertisements pointed out striking contrasts between her feminine attributes and her grotesque deformities. According to the Morning News, she had the head not of a Negro, Chinese, hippopotamus, Lascar, or a normal female, but elements of all, and with a spongy, shapeless tongue, broad nose, and primitive brow. The Morning Post offered a similar description of her facial features, claiming that her spongy nose, thick lips, elongated ears, and large gums gave her a clearly male resemblance (“Singular History” 15). A number of other newspaper announcements also testified to her unique and paradoxical nature. Knowledge about Mexico and the Americas circulated through these forms of popular entertainment, likely to the chagrin of the Mexican elite. The mid-nineteenth century proved a formative period in the development of the nation, as government officials and elite groups made every attempt to portray their nation as modern, developed, and sophisticated, both at home and abroad. Constructing collections of artistic representations of the nation became a strategy to influence understandings of the country's virtuous past. According to Luis Gerardo Morales Moreno, this included a deliberate effort to diminish representations of the nation's indigenous history. The displays in the First National Museum projected the idea that the period of independence struggles, and the pantheon of heroes who defined those struggles, gave birth to the nation, revising the more dominant narratives that rooted their country's historical experience in a splendorous indigenous civilization (Morales Moreno 18). More importantly, exhibitions of folk art allowed foreign speculators to see a civil and stable nation primed for investment (Oles 46). Shows like Pastrana's contradicted this effort by representing Mexico as a little-understood land that spawned beastly human-animal hybrids. Through Pastrana's body, and the multiple meanings people derived from it through their various forms of interactions with her, Europeans gained knowledge of the Americas and its people (Said 2–6, 12, 21). Julia Pastrana's performances thus helped to shape and to reinforce European mentalities about Mexico and Latin America more generally. The newspapers advertising her emphasized not only her own primitiveness, but also the savagery of her native land, about which they knew very little. One advertisement misspelled her home state of Sinaloa as San Ulloa and called her a nomadic Root Digger Indian who subsisted outside the margins of modern society (“Singular History” 5–8). These forms of popular cultural expression served a didactic purpose for the newspaper-reading and show-going public in Europe, especially Victorian London. Pastrana and her shows stood between parallel processes of Victorian British empire building and Mexican nation building. Five decades after seeing Pastrana, a now well-known English civil servant, Arthur Munby, wrote a lengthy poem, quoted as the epigram of this article, entitled “Pastrana.” The work, which he wrote after seeing her in Leipzig, Germany in 1857, after she had left London, described a brief, chilling encounter with her in a garden hotel (Bondeson 217; Munby 1–5). His poem described the myriad ways Pastrana taunted him, grinning and chewing flat one of the chain links that tied her to the walnut tree in which she sat. Chilled by the encounter, Munby returned to his room, only to be startled by a second accidental interaction following a dinner party later that night. Again, the shock sent him into cold sweats, and he promptly left the hotel the next day (Bondeson 6–13). Scholars have awarded Munby wide exposure in contemporary historical literature. His obsession with earthy and rustic working women constituted a fetish that linked class with sexuality. His domestic servant turned wife, Hannah Cullingham, posed for Munby's camera in costumes ranging from men's business suits to angels' robes in order to feed his appetite for sexual domination of women from lower social ranks. Munby had delicate and impotent male characteristics by Victorian standards, as he never raised a family, gained financial independence from his family, or even entered into a conventional marital arrangement. Thus, it comes as little surprise that he found Pastrana's appearance horrifying (Davidoff 114–40; McClintock 77). He clearly exercised great poetic license in his poem, written a year before his death. One cannot be sure if his descriptions, particularly about her ape-like qualities, came from a general image he associated with primates, a faulty memory of something that had happened a half-century earlier, or an intentional literary embellishment. In all likelihood his work stemmed from both a selective memory and an unconventional personality. Munby's poem exaggerates but nonetheless exemplifies the frightened expectations people brought with them when they went to see Pastrana. A strange mixture of fear and fascination often fed people's desire to gaze at her, though others gained a more benign impression than the one Munby articulated. Francis T. Buckland, the famed enthusiast of oddities, described the warm and engaging demeanor Pastrana displayed in his conversation with her. He also noted that she spoke three languages and exhibited the highest degree of courtesy (150–51). She reportedly formed a friendship with the Countess Prokesch-Osten of Austria, formerly an actress named Friederike Gossman, during her stay in Vienna. And she proclaimed her belief in Lent's love to Hermann Otto, a German circus owner, with whom she conversed freely (Gylseth and Toverud 60–61). From the scattered evidence available about her relationships with the people who came to see her, one gains some insight into the variation in their responses to her. Some, like Munby, reacted in disgust, while others expressed piteous attitudes. These various reactions help explain the widespread appeal of Pastrana and other performers with unusual bodily features. Moreover, they help elucidate the ways in which Pastrana shaped her own experiences and her understandings of them as an historical actor in her own right. The relationship Pastrana formed with her promoter and husband, Theodore Lent, adds a personal element to Pastrana's story. Most accounts characterize Lent as a ruthless impresario who stopped at nothing, including a sham marriage, to keep Pastrana on the show circuit so she could line his pockets (Drimmer 368–70). Pastrana's understanding of her relationship differed from Lent's. Authors allege that she vigorously defended her marriage, saying that Lent loved her for her own sake (Drimmer 370). While Lent's history of marrying his performers suggests otherwise, one must avoid the temptation to conceptualize their relationship strictly as an exploitative arrangement. Pastrana suffered to spin profit for Lent, to be sure. Nevertheless, she very likely also gained many of the benefits of a more conventional marriage. Lent facilitated her entry into a social world where money passed freely among Victorian socialites, a decidedly better alternative to the social alienation she would likely have faced on her own. Her own sense of Lent's affection, dubious though it seems in light of his behavior, provided her a rare human relationship that at least appeared to bring her into the realm of normality, not to mention sexual fulfillment. Viewing the marriage in these terms highlights the disparity between how one might judge in hindsight a seemingly obvious sham based on exploitation and how Pastrana understood her own situation and even used it to her benefit. Clearly Pastrana functioned in a position of relative subordination through much of her life and career. She came from an inauspicious material background and possessed a socially debilitating physical condition. Yet despite the limitations she faced, she did not operate without power. Noted showman George Van Hare accompanied the world's foremost impresario of human oddities, P. T. Barnum, when he went to see her in 1857. He noted that she had a private room, where she stayed until her performance later in the evening. Furthermore, Pastrana refused to remove the veil over her face until Theodore Lent had returned to the room, as he had stepped out at the time of their arrival (46). H
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