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Notes on contributor
Sharrona Pearl is Assistant Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. A historian and theorist of medicine and the body, Pearl's first book, About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain, was published by Harvard University Press in 2010. She has published widely on Victorian medicine and science, the history of photography, digital culture and body studies, and the ethics of images, which was the focus of her edited volume Image, Ethics, Technology published by Routledge in 2015. Her book on face transplant surgery, Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other, is forthcoming by University of Chicago Press.
Notes
1. The coupling of looking and pleasure has its origins in Freudian psychoanalysis with the term “scopophilia,” literally “love of looking.” Freudian scopophilia is associated with the anal stage of development. Jacques Lacan built on Freud's concept when he posited the establishment of subject formation through relations of looking. The term has endured through Laura Mulvey's now classic feminist film theory essay on the objectification of women in visual texts, particularly cinematic ones. Mulvey's work established the concept of the male gaze, linking it with spectacle and fetish. One of my goals in this work is to trouble the seemingly inextricable overlap between looking, fetish, and voyeurism. See Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”
2. See Rosemarie Garland-Thomas, Staring: How We Look.
3. The Bernard Pomerance stage play The Elephant Man provides an important point of comparison to Lynch's film, particularly around the presentation of the title character. In the play, Joseph Merrick is styled without grotesque makeup or body prosthetics, a deliberate and fascinating choice on the part of Pomerance that raises numerous questions around the construction of fear and difference and the possibilities of habituation to extreme visual material. The Pomerance play also deals much more explicitly with Merrick's sexuality and erotic desire, and the fear that his desire and possible procreative capacity inspired in his doctors and patrons.
4. See, for example, Leslie Fiedler and Anthony Darke.
5. See, for example, Nadja Durbach, Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture and Sadiah Qureshi.
6. Here I borrow Kelly Hurley's representation of the Victorian gothic as human bodies between species (10).
7. While “A Hunger Artist” is the most apt example of Kafka's engagement with freakery, a number of his short stories deal with characters who use their bodies as spectacular canvases, including “The Metamorphosis,” “The Penal Colony,” and “A Report to the Academy.”
8. See especially Volume I of The History of Sexuality.
9. There has not yet been a comprehensive study of the economics of the Victorian freak show, which remains a fertile topic for further research. Some material dealing with the financial aspects of the freak show can be found in Bogdan.
10. For more on Victorian physiognomy, see Sharrona Pearl.
11. The manipulable nature of vision has been explored in depth by numerous scholars, including Jonathan Crary, Michael Leja, and Chris Otter. See also Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison.
12. There are, of course, numerous extant images illustrating these techniques; given that I am attempting to trouble our relationship to these historical materials, I have chosen not to show them here.
13. For example, Joseph Merrick's surgically removed “trunk” was reinserted, based on older negatives, in a series of pamphlets made in 1884 under the supervision of Sir Frederick Treves. See Jon McKenzie (25-28).
14. There was a tremendous literary outpouring of stories dealing with primates passing as humans, including Kafka's “Report to the Academy” and Wilhelm Hauff, “The Young Englishman,” first published in German in 1826.
15. Baartman's agency was the subject of an 1810 England court case brought by the abolitionist Zachary Macaulay. Macaulay argued that Baartman was being kept in bondage, contravening England's recent abolition of slavery. When Baartman was interviewed by the court, she apparently said that she chose to stay in England to make money, preferring to suffer the cold and reap the financial rewards. The court ruled Baartman a free woman, unable to show that she was being kept against her will. See “Records Regarding the Hottentot Venus.”
16. There have been multiple attempts to diagnose Merrick, and recent consensus has rested upon Proteus Syndrome, though for many years (and still, in some places today), neurofibromatosis was called “the Elephant Man disease,” often scaring those who carried this diagnosis. For more on the psychological implications of Merrick's various diagnoses for later suffers of these two conditions, see Joan Ablon.
17. For an account of this see Ferguson and Treves.
18. The costumers and makeup artists on the film spent a great deal of time with Merrick's medical evidence to craft his representation accurately. The makeup and prosthetics used in the film were so remarkable that the Academy Awards instituted the Oscar for best makeup the following year. Lynch's decision to recreate the appearance of Joseph Merrick has been the subject of much critical commentary, particularly in contrast to the stage play of the same title by Bernard Pomerance, which presented the title character without extreme makeup or prosthesis.
19. While the Lynch film deals with sex only by implication, the Pomerance play engages explicitly with the fears of Merrick's sexual potency.
20. Baartman's skeleton, genitals, and brain were displayed in Paris at the Musée de l'Homme until 1974, when they were removed from the permanent exhibition. There had been calls for the return of her remains from the 1940s, but her case only became a cause célèbre following the publication of Stephan Jay Gould's chapter entitled “The Hottentot Venus” (291-305).
21. A recent biography does attempt to address this silence. See Clifton C. Crais and Pamela Scully.
22. Much of the Merrick activism centers around correcting Treves's use of the name John rather than Merrick's given name, Joseph. There has also been a great deal of energy put into correctly diagnosing his condition. See Ablon.
23. For more on this see Steiner.