Pop Culture Text - St. Dominic High School

34 With Amusement for Allperiority. Spectators who were trying to make sense of the often terrifyingand confusing whirl of a rapidly industrializing, urbanizing society couldmeasure and define themselves against those strange Others whose presencehelped distinguish the normal from the deviant. In that regard, ofcourse, the nature of the exhibits revealed much about contemporary anxietiesconcerning sexuality, race, and power. 67Barnum thus toyed with issues of sexuality when he exhibited JosephineClofullia, his Swiss bearded lady. Ever mindful of the benefits of controversy,he encouraged rumors that she was, in fact, a man. After paying acustomer to accuse her of being a fraud, Barnum brought the phony case tocourt, where doctors, as well as Clofullia’s husband, testified that she wastruly a female. The big winner, of course, was Barnum, who used the case’snotoriety to boost his museum. Similarly, he profited from public speculationover the sex lives of Chang and Eng, the famed Siamese twins whoperformed all kinds of astonishing physical feats before enthusiastic audiences.Joined at the chest, they had escaped desperate poverty in Siam (laterThailand) by touring as a circus act. Never before had joined twins beenexhibited in the United States. By the time they joined up with Barnum,Chang and Eng were fairly wealthy U.S. citizens. In 1843, they married sistersand, soon thereafter, began having children—ultimately, twenty-two ofthem. Museum customers were curious about how Chang, Eng, and theirwives engaged in sexual intercourse. What, too, museum visitors wondered,about the sex lives of the fat woman and the thin man? Here was amysterious world full of ambiguity, one that, as a dime museum scholar haswritten, “challenge[d] the conventional boundaries between male, female,sex, self, and other.” 68Race as a subject was never more evident than in Barnum’s “What IsIt?” exhibit. In this instance, Barnum pressed beyond some of the racial issuesthat had surrounded his Joice Heth tour. In 1860, he undoubtedlytook advantage of intensified public speculation, following the recent publication(in 1859) of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, about connectionsbetween humans and monkeys. Barnum had devised earlierexhibits to suggest such connections, but never before had he used a blackman as, according to advertisements, the “connecting link betweenman and monkey.” The man was William Henry Johnson, under five feettall, with a small, pointed head, a large nose that seemed to start at thehairline, and diminished intellectual capacity. “Zip” was his stage name,perhaps echoing that of the “Zip Coon” minstrel character. AlthoughJohnson was more than likely born in New Jersey, Barnum claimed that agroup of explorers in Africa, looking for gorillas, had found him and anentire race just like him, living nude in the trees. Johnson had supposedlybeen the only survivor among the several of his species whom the explorersbrought to the United States. He reportedly walked initially on all fours