On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears

by Asma, Stephen T.

  Barnum drummed up public interest in this specimen by first tantalizing newspaper reporters with a phony story about trying to convince “Dr. Griffin” (also a Barnum fraud) to exhibit his astonishing specimen. Barnum invented a “curating drama” and then complained about it loudly, after which he printed posters and fliers, including illustrations of half-nude women, and eventually, when frenzy was high, announced that Griffin had acquiesced.22 The public, and the media, swarmed.

  In the weeks that followed, newspapers vacillated between astonished credulity and skeptical disgust.23 But Barnum had succeeded in making significant profits, and he planned to make more. In a letter to his friend and Mermaid co-conspirator Moses Kimball, Barnum reveals his new taste for profitable monsters: “I must have the fat boy or the other monster [or] something new in the course of this week….don’t fail!”24

  In addition to bogus taxidermy, Barnum offered a steady stream of real extraordinary bodies to the paying public; some of the most well-known were Tom Thumb (Charles Stratton, a midget), the Siamese Twins (Chang and Eng Bunker, conjoined twins from Thailand), and Jo-Jo the Dog-faced Boy (Fedor Jeftichew, a Russian with hypertrichosis, or werewolf syndrome). Current-day sentiments may find it difficult to see Barnum’s relationship with his “curiosities” as anything but exploitive, but in fact the relationship between the exhibitor and the exhibits was more complex. Tom Thumb was trained and displayed by Barnum from the time he was four years old, but he eventually became a contracted partner with Barnum and a wealthy man as a result, even lending money to Barnum when certain speculations failed. Some curiosities were presented with little dignity (Jo-Jo the Dog-faced Boy was expected to bark like a dog); the Siamese Twins, the Bearded Lady, and William Tillman the Colored Civil War Hero, among others, were respectfully framed and compensated.

  Chas Eisenmann’s photograph of Fedor Jeftichew, the Russian Dog-faced Boy (ca. 1884). From Michael Mitchell, Monsters: Human Freaks in America’s Gilded Age: The Photographs of Chas Eisenmann (ECW Press, 2002).

  Barnum himself was a character of contradictions—in other words, quite human. His letters reveal a mixture of kind-hearted benevolence, awe, and disdain toward his grotesques. As a showman, he appealed to the most sensationalist side of popular audiences, but he also became a teetotaler and implored his audiences in leaflets, posters, and lectures to abstain from drink and to live piously.

  One of Barnum’s favorite strategies for luring the gazing public was to make the most of the liminal creature, the unnatural intermediate between natural kinds. A particularly significant liminal monster was Barnum’s famous “What Is It?” exhibit. This “non-descript,” as Barnum promoted him, was a diminutive man with abnormal physical features (real name, Harvey Leach). Barnum describes his new project in a letter to Moses Kimball: “The animal that I spoke to you…about comes out at Egyptian Hall, London next Monday, and I half fear that it will not only be exposed, but that I shall be found out in the matter. However, I go it, live or die. The thing is not to be called anything by the exhibitor. We know not and therefore do not assert whether it is human or animal.”25 But the exhibit failed to draw the British public, and Barnum shelved the idea for over a decade.

  The supposed appeal of “What Is It?” was the seemingly timeless interest we have in finding some creature that bridges the human-animal divide, something that mixes the ultimate taxonomic domains. Although Harvey Leach, the first “What Is It?” failed in 1846, Barnum’s second “What Is It?” an African American man named William Henry Johnson, worked like a charm after 1860. The idea behind the exhibit had come into better fashion after Darwin’s 1859 Origin of Species put such matters before the public again. Barnum played up the “missing link” question with his new “What Is It?” suggesting in his ads that the creature was a “man-monkey.” His flier describes Johnson as “a most singular animal, which, though it has many of the features and characteristics of both the human and the brute, is not, apparently, either, but, in appearance, a mixture of both—the connecting link between humanity and the brute creation.”26 One wonders if the racist dimension of the exhibit, offering a black man as an uncivilized transitional animal, must have played better to an American audience struggling with abolition and race questions than to the earlier audience in England, where slavery had been abolished a century earlier.27

  William Henry Johnson (1842?–1926), also known as “Zip the Pin-head,” was an African American from New Jersey whose head remained small and severely tapered while the rest of his body developed normally. Some have argued that he was a genuine microcephalic, someone with a neurological disorder resulting in reduced head size, but Johnson’s normal intelligence throws doubt on that diagnosis. The normal size of his jaw and nose were accentuated and exaggerated by the steep slope of his forehead, and this allowed Barnum to make the “biological” suggestion of “missing link” status. Barnum dressed him in a furry suit, told audiences that he had been captured in Africa, and choreographed a show that portrayed Johnson’s increasing “civilization.”

  Chas Eisenmann’s photograph of William Henry Johnson, otherwise known as Zip the Pinhead (ca. 1885). Zip is pictured on the left, sparring with a “negro turning white.” He worked for both Barnum and Ringling. From Michael Mitchell, Monsters: Human Freaks in America’s Gilded Age: The Photographs of Chas Eisenmann (ECW Press, 2002).

  Johnson drew a good salary from Barnum and eventually outlasted the Prince of Humbug, moving on to exhibit himself with the Ringling Brothers Circus. Altogether he worked as a freak for over sixty years. A year before his death, when the famous Scopes monkey trial was raging, the enterprising Johnson even offered to make himself available to the courts as “evidence” of missing links.

  Many of us have seen drawings and daguerreotype images of Barnum’s famous attractions, but we also have a unique “moving image” access to one of Barnum’s late prodigies, “Prince Randian.” Prince Randian was born in the 1870s in Guyana with no limbs, just a head and a short torso. Barnum brought him to the United States and displayed him as the “human caterpillar.” He was eventually featured in Tod Browning’s highly controversial film Freaks (released in 1932 and banned in the United Kingdom for more than thirty years), where his onscreen presence is both profoundly surreal as he wriggles his body through a mud puddle, carrying a knife in his mouth, and also strangely mundane as he rolls and lights a cigarette using only his mouth. In real life Randian was an intelligent man who spoke several languages, lived with his wife in New Jersey, and fathered five children. He died shortly after Browning’s film was made.28 The film’s narrator cryptically underscores the “scientific” view of monsters, as opposed to the spiritual or moral view, when he says, “But for the accident of birth, you might be even as they are.”

  The three audience responses I analyzed when discussing Shakespeare’s monsters seem relevant here, too. One could see a sideshow monster and respond with credulity, skepticism, or some intermediary reaction. In Bar-num-style hucksterism, we have completely fabricated monsters, such as the Feejee Mermaid, but also real disabled or abnormal individuals who were cloaked in fabricated exotic narratives. Often those fabricated narratives had implicit (and explicit) moral and political significance, as when white gawkers were inclined to read some monsters as evidence of a racial chain of being, an old hierarchy to which social Darwinism had given new, though spurious, credence. Monsters were intrinsically exciting but also extrinsically useful in giving audiences a sense of relief and possibly even gratitude about their own station in life.

  Beyond these social implications, the purely fantastic monsters were also remarkably popular. Even when the press had definitively unmasked the hoax of some pasted-together specimen, people would line up for a firsthand experience of the spectacle. Like Shakespeare’s Blemmyae, these “natural history” monsters captured the hearts of audiences, even while their minds barred entry to the creatures. Barnum regularly claimed that the American people “loved to be humbugged,” but this was n
ot an insult so much as a declaration of solidarity. The emotions of wonder and amazement are highly pleasurable, even when our own senses (and our mass media) turn out to be lying to us.

  10

  The Medicalization of Monsters

  A woman gave birth to a child having two heads, two arms, and four legs, which I opened; and I found inside only one heart (which monster is in my house and I keep it as an example of a monstrous thing).

  AMBROISE PARÉ

  WE HAVE SEEN THAT THE ANCIENTS interpreted monsters as omens or signs. Whether it was the birth of a hermaphrodite child or a one-horned ram, many believed the event to be a message about future military campaigns, the political wind, or the general social welfare. Monsters continued to function as portents throughout the medieval era and well into the modern. In 1642, for example, a London pamphlet reported on a frightening creature that got tangled up in a fishing net, which set the whole region on edge with worry. The pamphlet heralds, “A relation of a terrible monster taken by a fisherman near Wollage, July 15th 1642, and is now seen in King’s Street Westminster. The shape whereof is like a toad, and may be called a toad-fish. But that which makes it a monster, is, that it hath hands with fingers like a man, and is chested like a man—being near five foot long and three foot over, the thickness of an ordinary man.”1

  Between four and five o’clock in the morning, Thomas West was casting for salmon when the weight of his submerged net became unaccountably heavy. Thinking he had hit upon a thick school of fish he happily struggled it to the surface, whereupon he drew back in horror. He saw, in the net, “a fiend, not a fish; at the least a monster, not an ordinary creature.” The hefty five-foot creature seemed part giant toad and part man, capable of gulping with its wide toothy maw for prey, but also able to paddle-swim with humanoid arms. The posterior of the beast terminated with a whalelike tailfin. Here the author of the pamphlet breaks off from the reportage and muses on the history and significance of this toad-fish monster: “Now the coming up of this monster into the fresh river, and so nigh the shore, is more than remarkable (never any of this strange kind ever having been seen by any age before).” One exception, the reporter notes, is that Pliny “the naturalist” did describe something like a monster toad-fish, but the beast lived far under the sea. Pliny “never saw or heard of any taken upon any coast save one, which was in the year that Nero (that never-sufficiently detested tyrant) was born.” Pliny notates this correlation of the toad-fish and Nero by saying “Monstrum praecessit monstro” (an omen precedes the monster). Pliny “plainly divined that its arrival was ominous, as indeed all histories do with constant consent maintain and write, that all unusual births, either in men or brute creatures, in sea or upon land, especially out of their seasons, have ever been the forerunners and sad harbingers of great commotions and tumults in states and kingdoms, if not mournful heralds of utter desolation.” At the end of the pamphlet the author crumbles into a stream of prayers, beseeching the Lord for mercy.

  The precise significance of a particular prodigy was often turned to some political purpose. In the Reformation era Catholics and Protestants used monsters to foretell the destruction of their opponents. Martin Luther published a pamphlet in 1523 that discussed a monstrous cow born in Freiburg that year. The calf was born with a thick folded skin around its neck and back, making it appear as if clothed in a monk’s cowl. In addition to a woodcut depiction of the “monk-calf,” Luther’s pamphlet included a woodcut of a “pope-ass” monster (part sea creature, part donkey) supposedly caught in the Tiber River a few years earlier. These monsters were taken to be living symbols of the corruption and eventual decay of the Roman Church. The monk-calf was like a typical Catholic monk: pious and humble on the outside, but base and brutish on the inside.2 Luther claimed that two other monsters, one born without a head and another with inverted feet, constituted omens foreshadowing the death of Frederick the Wise.3

  MONSTROUS BIRTHS

  In addition to large-scale social meanings, monsters born of human parents continued to indicate moral or spiritual depravity in the specific kin. Without any medical understanding of madness, a British broadsheet from 1652 demonstrates the way aberrant behavior was punished with aberrant issue. The sad story of Mary Adams, a resident of Tillingham in Essex, involves her heretical decline into “wickedness.”4 The pregnant woman began to tell her neighbors that she was the Virgin Mary and that “she was conceived with child by the Holy Ghost, and how all the Gospel that had been taught heretofore was false; and that which was in her, she said, was the true Messiah.” Mary’s revelation was very badly received by her neighbors, who quickly had her locked up in jail. When she eventually went into labor, she struggled for eight days and nights in great agony. On the ninth day she delivered “the most ill-shapen monster that ever eyes beheld; which being dead born, they buried it with speed, for it was so loathsome to behold; for it had neither hands nor feet, but claws like a toad in the place where hands should have been, and every part was odious to behold.” “And as for Mary,” the pamphlet continues, “who had named herself to be the Virgin Mary, she rotted and consumed as she lay, being from the head to foot as full of botches, blains, boils, and stinking scabs, as ever one could stand by another.” All this was a terrible lesson, the pamphleteer explained, reminding us to stay committed to the true faith. Mary had been a pious member of her community until she began to fall in with the “heretical” Anabaptists. After associating with these fringe believers in adult baptism, her entire life unraveled to its monstrous end.

  In 1636 John Sadler wrote a book titled The Sick Woman’s Private Looking-Glass, designed for women who might be worried about giving birth to a monster. In it he gives us evidence of the conceptual turn that was symptomatic of the era, from a spiritual view of monsters to a materialistic view. Sadler begins by reminding his readers that God can punish parents by giving them deformed offspring: “The Divine cause proceeds from the permissive will of God, suffering parents to bring forth such abominations, for their filthie and corrupt affections which are let loose unto wicked-nesse, like brute beasts that have no understanding.” This explains, Sadler continues, why monstrous or otherwise disabled people are not allowed in temples or churches. God does not want monsters to “pollute” his sanctuaries “because the outward deformity of the body is often a signe of the pollution of the heart, as a curse layd upon the child for the parents incon-tinency.” Then Sadler’s discussion makes the naturalistic turn that slowly pivots physicians from the seventeenth century right down to Darwin’s age: “Yet there are many borne depraved which ought not to bee ascribed unto the infirmity of the parents. Let us therefore search out the naturall cause of their generation, which…is either in the matter or in the agent, in the seed or in the wombe.”5

  John Sadler is symptomatic of the sea change in monsterology, but the man who is usually credited with rescuing monsters from the melodramatic arena of spiritual and moral meaning is his predecessor, the French surgeon and scholar Ambroise Paré (1510–1590). His influence was not enough to effect a complete revolution in monsterology, and he himself was highly superstitious, but he paved the way for future medical scientists to study birth anomalies. In the conceptual history of monsters he certainly represents a turn toward the more naturalistic explanation of extraordinary beings.6

  Paré’s book On Monsters and Marvels took a relatively empirical approach to monsters, preferring the collection and dissection of oddities rather than the pursuit of hearsay natural history. In fact, he had little interest in the traditional taxonomy pursuits of the natural history tradition that I examined in the previous chapter. Monster races like the Blemmyae and Cynocephali were of little interest compared with human monstrosity.

  Paré’s On Monsters is really a transitional work, steeped in the superstitions of the day but struggling to extricate itself from dead-end research avenues. One finds all the usual ingenuousness about unicorns, sea creatures, and such, but also an attempt to put some monster legends to rest.
For example, the incubi and succubi stories reappear in Paré’s work, but now they are reconsidered. Recall that these demonic monsters were thought to lure human men and women into sexual encounters, then steal the male semen and plant it in different women. Paré argues against these legendary monsters in a way that demonstrates his naturalistic approach. He says it is “an absurd thing” to believe that devils can take seed from a man and transport it to a woman to effect a pregnancy: “In order to disprove this empty opinion, I shall say only that seed, which is made of blood and spirit [and] which is apt for reproduction, if transported very little [or slowly], or not at all, is immediately corrupted and altered, and consequently its force is completely extinguished, because the warmth and spirit of the heart and of the whole body is absent from it, so much so that the seed is no longer free of excesses, either in quality or in quantity.”7 The seed must go immediately into the woman or it is useless; this is why men with very large penises are usually sterile, because “the seed, having had to take such a long journey, is already cooled before it is received into the womb.” Other, similar stories (such as the case of the woman who got pregnant from her contaminated bath water, and the case of the woman who got pregnant from semen she retrieved from the ground) are equally disproved. But then Paré scolds the reader with some basic erotic metaphysics: “You must not believe at all that demons or devils who are of a spirit nature can have carnal knowledge of women; for in the execution of that act flesh and blood are required, which spirits do not have….Besides, demons are immortal and eternal; what necessity, then, have they of this reproduction, since they have no use for offspring, in as much as they [themselves] will always exist.”