11

Racial Freaks

Unlike the United States, where puritanical blue laws held sway and sideshows had a hard time breaking into business, Britain enjoyed a long history of exhibiting human oddities and celebrating monsters of all sorts. The carnival spirit of Elizabethan bearbaiting survived well into the nineteenth century before finally falling victim to Victorian morality and middle-class decorum. The medieval fabliaux, saturated in scatological aesthetics and unbridled eroticism, applying a billingsgate language of abuse, curse, oath, and exaggeration, did much to propagate what Mikhail Bakhtin called “the grotesque concept of the body.”¹ Bowdlerizing the fabliaux and watering down the salacity and vulgarity, authors such as Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Rabelais channeled a profound appreciation and an unabashed celebration of the grotesque body—denuded, debauched, and debased. Especially during the decadent reign of Charles II (1660–1685), who had both stuffed and staffed his court with freaks, dwarfs, and jesters, a resurgence of the popular interest in monsters swept through England. In the words of historian Henry Morley, “the taste for Monsters became a disease” after the Restoration.²

In the eighteenth century, explorers to “newly discovered” parts of the world brought back a bonanza of exotic species that had once existed only in the wildest imaginations. A partial list of grotesque and fantastic bodies on display at the so-called monster shows in England included a Man-Tiger from the East Indies, “from the Head downwards resembling a Man, its fore parts clear, and his hinder parts all Hairy”; a monster from the “Coast of Brazil, having a Head like a Child, Legs and Arms very wonderful, with a Long Tail like a Serpent, wherewith he feeds himself, as an Elephant doth with his Trunk”; a woman with three breasts; a boneless child; and a freak with one body, two heads, four arms, and four legs. In 1726, when Jonathan Swift published Gulliver’s Travels, a satirical novel peopled by the likes of Lilliputians, Brobdingnagians, Houyhnhnms, and Yahoos, he both captured and parodied the era’s obsession with dwarfs, giants, hermaphrodites, and other fantastical and monstrous beings. It was a Zeitgeist best represented by the Bartholomew Fair, a carnival celebration that lasted for three days each year in West Smithfield, beyond the Alder Gate outside the city wall of London.

Originally founded in 1133 by a monk who had been a court jester to Henry I, the Bartholomew Fair by the turn of the nineteenth century had become a shrine for the grotesque, a monumental assemblage of the strange and exotic that William Wordsworth called the “Parliament of Monsters.” Henry Morley described the scene: “cripples about the altar, miracles of saints, mummings of sinners, monks with their fingers in the flesh-pot, ladies astride on the high saddles of their palfreys, knights, nobles, citizens and peasants, the toilers of idleness and industry, the stories that were most in request, lax morality, the grotesque images which gave delight to an uncultivated people.” It was a carnival site that mixed miracle plays with circus freaks, where the devil emerged dramatically from a Hell-mouth, surrounded by satyrs, fauns, griffins, goblins, rope dancers, puppeteers, fire-eaters, and animal trainers.³ Beginning as a tribute to a saint and held near the city gallows and a public burial ground, the fair was a perfect example of what Bakhtin termed “grotesque realism,” of which the essential principle is degradation, “the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble unity.”⁴

In November 1829, when the Siamese Twins opened to public view in London about a week after the private levée, the crowds that streamed into the Egyptian Hall were certainly familiar with the carnival spirit and aesthetics of the grotesque embodied by the Bartholomew Fair, which would continue to thrive until 1855, when Victorian morality finally won the day. But the twins also brought something different to the otherwise-familiar variety of the freak show, something that would redefine monstrosity and change the course of the Victorian sideshow business in England and America: racial freaks.

As described earlier, Thomas de Quincey was not haunted by ordinary nightmares; he was disturbed by dreams of the Orient. And, as he claimed, what triggered his torment was not a visit by any ordinary goblin or devilish messenger from the beyond, but rather a turbaned and inarticulate Malay—or, in other words, a “racial other.” By the time de Quincey wrote his Confessions and the twins were brought from Siam, the presentation of exotic bodies belonging to “inferior races” was about to become a staple of freak shows. The Age of Discovery had already brought ample specimens from all corners of the world, specimens that would fill up cabinets of wonders and museum collections or be installed as solo exhibitions. While most of those curiosities were inanimate objects, as in Bullock’s collection of items from Captain Cook’s voyages, increasingly more “live” samples were being brought back, including the aforementioned Man-Tiger from the East Indies and the serpentine monster from Brazil. Pretty soon, any exotic body of the racial other, with or without traces of disability, would become objects of curiosity. Especially with the rise of ethnology, phrenology, and other scientific or pseudoscientific fields and fads that all looked at “primitive races” as unevolved humans or “missing links,” the borderline between physical anomaly and the racial other became blurred, leading to the construction of racial freaks.⁵ Aborigines from Oceania, Asia, Africa, Australia, South America, or any part of the non-Western world were brought to be displayed in freak shows. In the candid words of a sideshow agent, “The fact they were different put them in the category of human oddities.”⁶

Take, for example, John Rutherford, a white mariner who had jumped ship in the Pacific, taken up with a Maori woman, and had his body tattooed. A year before the twins’ arrival in England, Britons were treated to the sensational exhibition of Rutherford. In this case, mere adoption of primitive, barbaric practices, such as tattooing, would turn even a white man into a freak. It was a grim prospect that frightened Tommo, Melville’s alter ego in his first novel, Typee, when the Polynesians tried to tattoo his face and make a convert of him. Or, when the Siamese Twins returned to the United States after this trip to England, they would make a museum appearance in New York next to Afong Moy, billed simply as the “Chinese Lady.” An otherwise perfectly ordinary woman, she was exotically Chinese and had “monstrous” bound feet, thus relegating her to the freak category.

Racial freaks, it seems, were everywhere, but few were as extraordinary as the Siamese Twins, who combined a rare physical anomaly with racial exotica—the best type of specimen, as the Times put it, “to gratify the curiosity of John Bull.”⁷ As soon as the door opened, Britons from all walks of life hurried inside the Egyptian Hall, each paying a half-crown. With their coiled queues and Eastern costumes, the twins entertained hundreds of visitors each day, answering questions and performing acrobatic acts. At this point, they had mastered the game of battledore and shuttlecock, a predecessor of badminton, usually played by two people standing several feet apart. Since their band could stretch no more than a few inches, the shuttlecock traveled between their rackets like a bouncing bullet, evidence of their amazing dexterity.⁸

Mere viewing, however, was not enough to quench the curiosity or skepticism of some visitors, who proceeded to poke or feel the twins’ fleshy band. One such curious John Bull, who signed his name “M. R.,” arrived on the first day of the exhibition and then wrote to the editor of the Times about his own examination of the connecting cord: “Immediately on my applying my hand, one of the boys exclaimed, ‘Your hand is cold, Sir’; and I have indeed no doubt that it is quite as sensitive as any other part of the body.”⁹

CHANG AND ENG PLAYING BADMINTON, 1830

Other letters poured in, and the newspaper editors were more than happy to print them, capitalizing on the door-busting frenzy at the Egyptian Hall. Some letter writers drew comparisons between the twins and the Biddenden Maids, while others dug up the history of the Scottish Brothers. In late November, when a two-headed Sardinian girl on display in Paris died, a newspaper article speculated that an invitation to the Siamese Twins would soon come from France. Sir Anthony Carlisle, an eminent physician who had attended the private preview, also chimed in and published an account of his own encounter with the wonder boys, opining with authority and ending on a note of dry, strained humor: “If, indeed, Nature had not carefully provided against its frequency to the human race, the occasional appearance of united twins would give rise to many legal perplexities.”¹⁰ Everyone, highbrow or lowbrow, seemed to be having fun with the twins. As in carnivals where the crowds celebrated, worshipped, mocked, and ridiculed the clowns who reigned over the festivities, Chang and Eng were poked, pinched, probed, and later even punched by gawkers.

In their perennial fascination with a rare specimen, the medical professionals continued to run tests on the twins. Dr. Peter Mark Roget, secretary of the Royal Society of London, came up with an experiment on the fleshy band: “A silver spoon was placed on the tongue of one of the twins, and a disk of zinc on the tongue of his brother: when the metals thus placed were brought into contact, the youths both cried out ‘Sour, sour.’ This experiment was repeated several times with the same result, and was reversed by exchanging the positions of the metals, when a similar effect was produced.” According to Dr. George Buckley Bolton, who chose April Fools’ Day in 1830 to present a report on the twins at the Royal College of Surgeons, Roget’s experiment proved “that the galvanic influence passes from one individual to the other, through the band which connects their bodies, and thus establishes a galvanic circuit with the metals when these are brought into contact.”¹¹ Perhaps what’s even more remarkable is that the galvanic influence found to exist between two conjoined twins might have added fuel to one of Roget’s lifetime obsessions, a work that earned him a name in history—the compilation of Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases (1852). A dictionary of synonyms, or words having the same or nearly the same meanings, Roget’s Thesaurus was a landmark of English lexicography. Its countless reprints and new editions have graced the bookshelves and desks of every educated person working in the English language. Roget had started cataloguing words in 1805 but didn’t publish the Thesaurus until 1852.

In another test, asparagus was served to Chang only, and the doctors checked their urine four hours later, only to find that Chang’s had a distinct asparagus smell, but Eng’s urine was not affected. Based on that, the doctors determined that “the sanguineous communication between the united twins is very limited.”¹²

The asparagus experiment apparently not being enough, the twins were also stripped naked and had their genitalia examined. The doctors found their sexual organs to be “regularly formed,” although they noticed that “the youths are naturally modest, and evince a strong repugnance to any close investigation on this subject.”¹³ As much as the doctors wanted to investigate thoroughly what they called “so curious an object of philosophical inquiry,” they at least refrained from some of the more dangerous or even deadly experiments, such as the use of mercury. As Bolton, who had been hired as a personal doctor for the boys, acknowledged, “Because I am averse to the administration of mercury, unless it be imperatively demanded, I have not had an opportunity of knowing whether the mercurial influence would pervade the one youth, if applied exclusively to the other.”¹⁴

Dr. Bolton recorded an incident that he found fascinating:

On the 9th of December they were both attacked with bronchial catarrhs, became pale and languid, coughed severely, and complained of pain in their throats; each of them had also slight pains during strong inspirations. Their skins were dry and cold, respirations hurried, pulses ninety beats in a minute, rather hard and small; the tongue of Eng was glazed and pallid as usual, Chang’s became furred and dry. The bowels of both had been naturally relieved the day previous, and each was directed to take such medicines as experience had shown to be proper in the malady now common to both. Under this discipline and suitable diet, together with the additional clothing of leather waistcoats, and a leather coverlet for their bed, then considered to be required on account of the inclement winter, they both regained their ordinary state of health.

What fascinated Bolton was, he wrote, that “they have been treated as two distinct persons, although from the very unusual circumstance of their conjunction, the same causes of disorder are presented to both, and similar consequences have thence ensued.”¹⁵ In other words, are they really one or two? As all these experiments and records showed, the twins were actually both—they constituted one inseparable unit, yet they were two unique individuals. Such an ambiguity, the centerpiece of their attraction as a displayed object and a pathological specimen, challenged the corporeal limits of subjectivity. They defied the norm that had been the bedrock underlying the definition of a human being as an individual. Individual, as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it, is “a single human being, as distinct from a particular group, or from society in general.” As a result, like a hermaphrodite, whose sexual identity is fluid, the Siamese Twins evoked fascination and horror. In an insightful essay, Elizabeth Grosz points out that the twins made for an object of prurient speculation while at the same time threatening the definitions that viewers had long used for classification of humans and identities. Echoing Fiedler, Grosz believed that “the perverse pleasure of voyeurism and identification is counterbalanced by horror at the blurring of identities (sexual, corporeal, personal) that witness our chaotic and insecure identities.”¹⁶

Here we have finally discovered the root cause of Thomas de Quincey’s nightmares: the fear of being incorporated into an alien other, what Grosz defines as an “intolerable ambiguity.” Since that fated day when a turbaned Malay knocked on his cottage door, the English opium-eater had never recovered from the shock at the sight of a figure that was so outlandish and yet human just like himself. In his magisterial essay “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth,” de Quincey brooded over his initial inability to comprehend the significance of the heart-pounding knock in the Shakespearean drama, which broke up the deathlike stillness after Duncan’s murder in the bedroom. “However obstinately I endeavored with my understanding to comprehend this, for many years I never could see why it should produce such an effect.” A first-rate essayist, de Quincey was able to write his way out of the hermeneutical conundrum by arguing brilliantly that the spine-chilling knock forced us to “throw the interest on the murderer”—or, in other words, to feel the fragile and fallible humanity of the murderer who panics at the sound. “Our sympathy must be with him,” he insisted. “Of course I mean a sympathy of comprehension, a sympathy by which we enter into his feelings, and are made to understand them—not a sympathy of pity or approbation.” In an elaborate footnote, de Quincey further drew a distinction between “sympathy with the other” and “sympathy for the other,” emphasizing that the interpretation of Macbeth relied on the former.¹⁷ But in the case of a knock on his own door, de Quincey was never able to reach a moment of sympathy with or for “the other.” For their unimaginable ambiguity and unassimilable difference, the Siamese Twins were racial freaks to Britons as much as the exotic Malay was to de Quincey.

“Macbeth: Whence is that knocking?”