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A ≠ A: OR, FREAKY JUSTICE Cees Maris∗ I. IDENTITY A = A, or the principle of identity, constitutes a fundamental law of logical thinking. This principle prescribes that, once a concept A has been introduced in an argument in a specific definition (for instance, “man is a non-feathered biped”), A should be used in an identical way in the further course of the argument. If it is not, meanings become fluid, so that nobody can make sense of what is being said. Notions merge: A man may become a kangaroo, wine turns into blood, stones transform into gold, mud enlivens into worms, a rib changes into a woman. Opposites fuse, corrupting the logical law of non-contradiction: Good may be evil, lies turn out true, positive = negative, life = death, male = female, father = son, me = you, you = me. Therefore, logic requires that A = A. The principle of identity rules the order of thinking. However, it remains to be seen whether this logical law also applies to the world about which we think. In empirical reality, nothing is identical to something else, nor even to itself in the course of time: Day turns into night, full moon fades into new moon, ice melts into water, water evaporates into steam, caterpillars transform into butterflies. Similarly, no human being is interchangeable with another. Even identical twins are not completely identical: The one who leaves the womb first is often stronger and quicker than his or her brother or sister. Individual persons grow from quadrupeds, through bipeds, into tripeds. At the end of your life, no cell of your body is identical to the cells you had at birth—as with the ship of Theseus after all its planks had been replaced. As Heraclitus put it dramatically: Panta rhei—you cannot step into the same river twice, for other waters are ever flowing on to you. Likewise, everything is in a constant flux. In the real world, then, A ≠ A. These identity problems not only raise doubts about the correspondence of thought to reality, they may also provoke skepticism concerning justice. According to Aristotle, distributive justice requires that equal cases be treated equally and unequal cases be treated ∗

The author is a professor of legal philosophy at the University of Amsterdam.

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unequally. However, if in real life nothing has a stable identity; further stipulative criteria of relevancy are needed to categorize cases as equal or unequal. In a floating world, such criteria raise severe suspicions of arbitrariness. These problems at the heart of justice typically arise in borderline cases, where what is understood as essentially human is at stake. Exemplary are the cases of human “freaks,” who made their livings by exposing their deviancies. Tod Browning’s cult film Freaks1 focalizes the problem of freaky justice. Freaks signifies both the summit and the decline of the freak shows that were so popular in the preceding centuries. On the one hand, the film continued the exhibit of human oddities in dime museums and circuses via other, cinematographic means. On the other hand, it dissociated itself from traditional show business by critically focusing on the human-all-too-human relationships between freaks and nonfreaks. In doing so, the film implicitly hits upon central questions of justice, both distributive and corrective. More generally, Freaks questions the boundaries between human and non-human, normal and abnormal, depicting such categories as parts of a continuum rather than distinct categories set apart by essential differences. The critics did not like this. The New York Times typically reacted: “The difficulty is in telling whether it should be shown at the Rialto—where it opened yesterday—or in, say, the Medical Centre.”2 When the film turned out to be too offensive for the general public, it ushered in the end of Browning’s remarkable career as a movie director. It was officially banned in England for several decades. Since being rehabilitated at the Venice Film Festival in 1962 (the year of Browning’s death at the age of eighty-two), Freaks has gained new circles of fans and has evoked ongoing disputes about its ambiguous narrative.3 My contribution to the debate concerns freaky justice: How do freaks fit into the concept of justice? II. FREAKS Freaks presents a dramatic confrontation between the freak world and the normal world. The place of action is a traveling circus, where freaks perform side by side with normal entertainers, such as the strongman Hercules, the trapeze artist Cleopatra, the animal trainer 1 2

FREAKS (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios 1932). Freaks (1932): The Circus Side Show, N.Y. TIMES, July 9, 1932, available at http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review (search for “Freaks” and use “1932” as the date parameter). 3 See Joan Hawkins, “One of Us’’: Tod Browning’s Freaks, in FREAKERY: CULTURAL SPECTACLES OF THE EXTRAORDINARY BODY 266 (Rosemarie Garland Thompson ed., 1996).

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Venus, and the clown Phroso. The leading character is the midget Hans, who has fallen in love with the beautiful, full-sized Cleopatra. For her part, Cleopatra does not take the tiny antihero seriously as a lover or even as a person. She is interested only in the fortune the little Hans has inherited. In conspiracy with her real lover, Hercules, she plots to marry the midget, murder him, and take off with his money. When Hans’s fellow freaks find out that the newly wed spouse is poisoning their colleague, they close in on Cleopatra and Hercules to save Hans and take gruesome revenge on their full-grown enemies. While the drama unfolds, the audience is introduced to the daily life of the freaks. On one hand, they are shown with empathy: However odd they may look, they turn out to be intelligent human beings with normal concerns. On the other hand, Browning carefully selected professional freak-showmen who transgressed the standard markers of human identity. The midgets Hans (played by Harry Earles) and Frieda (played by Harry’s sister Daisy) challenge the distinction between grown-up and child. Hans has normal corporeal proportions, but he is only thirty-nine inches tall and speaks in a very high voice. During their wedding party, Cleopatra mockingly asks him: “What are you, a man or a baby?”4 Peter Robinson plays his real-life role as a sideshow performer. Weighing only fifty-eight pounds, he is “The Living Skeleton,” challenging the distinction between life and death. The “Bearded Lady” Jane Barnell subverts the distinction between male and female. So does—even more so—the hermaphrodite Josephine-Joseph, who appears feminine on the left side of her/his body while masculine on the other other, both physically and in dress. Joseph has a short haircut on the right side of her/his head, while Josephine wears long hair on the left side. As Siamese twins, the attractive Hilton sisters, Daisy and Violet, challenge the notion of individuality. Joined at their hips and buttocks, they simultaneously enter, spend, and leave life. In the film, Daisy’s husband Roscoe asks Violet not to drink too much because he will suffer from Daisy’s hangover.5 Aristotle would have classified the

4 In Browning’s earlier film, The Unholy Three, Earles played a midget who is disguised as a baby. He is in a criminal plot with his ex-circus mate, the ventriloquist Echo (Lon Chaney). Dressed up as a lady, Echo fools customers into buying parrots that appear to talk; as a ventriloquist Echo actually does the talking. When customers complain, “Mrs.” Echo makes a house call carrying her “baby” in a buggy. Once inside, the midget climbs out of the buggy to rob the clients. THE UNHOLY THREE (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios 1925). In real life, Hans performed with Frieda and two other dwarfish sisters as The Doll Family, singing and dancing, among other things, in the Barnum & Bailey circus. 5 The Hilton sisters performed in circuses and vaudeville acts as musicians and dancers. They also played leading roles in the 1951 film Chained for life. See ROBERT BOGDAN, FREAKS SHOW: PRESENTING HUMAN ODDITIES FOR AMUSEMENT AND PROFIT 62 (1988).

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twins as a “monster of excess.”6 Siamese twins are at one extreme on the sliding scale of monsters who also made their livings at freak shows but did not act in Freaks. Jean Libbera had a normal build, apart from a small torso with arms and legs that hanged out of his stomach and had its rudimentary head inside Jean’s body. He billed himself as the duo “Jean and Jacques”. The “Three-Legged Wonder” Francesco Lentini had a third leg and matching sexual organs growing out of his pelvis. This sliding scale of “monsters of excess” challenges the definition of the individual person: At what point does quality transform into quantity? Or, what is the turning point where one person becomes two?7 “Monsters of deficit” also figure prominently in Freaks. “Half Boy” Johnny Eck, born without legs, acrobatically moves around on his hands.8 By contrast, “Armless Wonder” Martha Morris and “Living Venus de Milo” Frances O’Connor lack upper limbs.9 Freaks instructs us how to eat with our feet (or less). The undisputed champion of the “monsters of deficit” is “The Human Torso” Prince Randian, who consists of only a head and a rump, moves around by crawling like a caterpillar, and uses a match to light a cigarette with only his lips. The distinction between man and beast is challenged by freaks with animal looks, such as “The Stork Woman” Elisabeth Green, “Koo Koo the Bird Girl” Minnie Woolsey (a bird-headed dwarf), and a “sealwoman” whose hands and feet grow directly out of her body. The microcephalic, mentally retarded “pinheads” Zip and Pip (Jennie Lee and Elvira Snow) and Schlitze, characterized by abnormally small craniums, also appear to live on the borderline between man and animal, or between civilized and savage man. Earlier in his career, Schlitze was billed as the “Last of the Aztecs.”10 Around 1860, P.T. Barnum’s American Museum avoided categorization mistakes by billing William Henry Johnson, a presumably microcephalic black man from New Jersey, as “What is it?” and “Nondescript.” Thus, Barnum, “the Shakespeare of advertising,” tickled the people’s curiosity by leaving it to them to decide whether the freak on show was a human being, a monkey, or something in between like the missing link. In short, the applicability of the principle of identity to reality (as is suggested by Locke’s definition “Whatsoever is, is”) is challenged by “What is it?” The paradigmatic borderline cases are found in love and marriage, where freaks enter into intimate relationships with each other or with 6 7

See infra Part VI. The Siamese twins Chang and Eng promoted themselves with the catchword E pluribus unum. They signed their letters with “ChangEng.” 8 In Barnum & Bailey, Eck showed acrobatic acts like his one-armed handstand. 9 The armless Charles Tripp and the legless Eli Bowen complemented each other’s handicaps while riding a tandem, the first pedaling, the second holding the steer. 10 In fact, Schlitze was born in the United States.

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“normal” persons. Significantly, Freaks has also been billed as Forbidden Love, a reference to the unequal match between little Hans and Cleopatra.11 Parallel to the central marital tragedy, other freaky love affairs enter the scene.12 While little Hans loves “big woman” Cleo, co-midget Frieda loves Hans. As a perfect embodiment of the interlock of Eros and Thanatos, “The Living Skeleton” begets a daughter with “The Bearded Lady”—at the delivery, the guests’ first question is: “Is she hairy, too?”13 One of the scenes cut from the final version of Freaks showed the “seal-woman” being chased by an amorous real circus seal. The female half of Josephine-Joseph falls in love with strongman Hercules. After walking by Hercules, s/he turns her/his body halfway back in his direction to give him a flirtatious glance. Filmed in profile, she looks completely feminine. When Josephine-Joseph turns to continue on her/his way, a bystander tells Hercules: “I think she likes you, but he don’t!” Daisy Hilton is married to Roscoe, a “normal” entertainer who stutters and dresses like a woman for his circus act. When Daisy’s twin, Violet, becomes engaged to the owner of the circus, this raises problems of privacy. Daisy introduces Violet’s new fiancé to Roscoe: Fiancé: You must come to see us sometimes. Roscoe: Thanks, you must to see us sometime t-t-too. Fiancé: I certainly will.

When Violet’s lover passionately kisses her, Daisy initially looks away, indifferently reading a book; but in the next shot, she closes her eyes in delight, participating in her sister’s physical pleasure.14 Thus, Freaks subverts the boundaries between life and death, grown-up and child, male and female, and individuality and sociality. This raises questions of human identity: How do we define “human?” When in reality everything is constantly shifting, definitions are stipulative rather than essential. In these post-metaphysical times, we are suspicious that they draw arbitrary dividing lines. Yet, “human” is conceivable only by contrast to “inhuman.” Or, as Hegel put it more abstractly: “Identity is the identity of identity and non-identity.”15

11 See IMDb: The Internet Movie Database, Freaks (1932), http://www.imdb.com/title/ tt0022913/ (last visited Mar. 28, 2010). 12 Meanwhile, the normal artists also have shifting love affairs. Venus leaves Hercules to fall in love with Phroso, while Cleopatra takes care of Hercules. 13 In real life, Robinson married his colleague entertainer, the “fat lady” Baby Bunny Smith, 467 pounds, with whom he had two children. Marriages between complementary freaks were often arranged for publicity reasons. See BOGDAN, supra note 5, at 100. 14 In 1926 the Hilton Sisters performed the romantic love song “Me Too,” which included the lyrics “anywhere that she goes you’ll find/Haho! Ha ha! ME TOO.” 15 ANTOON VERGOTE, PSYCHOANALYSIS, PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND RELIGION 69 (Jozef Corveleyn & Dirk Hutsebaut eds., Leuven University Press 1998).

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III. WHAT IS IT? Unlike customary freak shows, Freaks depicts freaks as sympathetic human beings who compensate for their handicaps with admirable skills. The audience may even be moved to identify with their daily activities. The film opens with a “talker,” who talks the local crowd into visiting the freak show of the circus.16 Freaks are not only strange and horrifying, he declares, but also akin to us: “We didn’t lie to you folks. We told you we had living, breathing monstrosities. You laughed at them, shouted at them. And yet, but for an accident of birth, you might be as they are. . . . Their bodies may be twisted and deformed, but not their souls.” Within the narrative, some normal personages express mild opinions of the freaks. In its second scene, Freaks takes the perspective of the local community and explores its reactions to the strange circus that has just set up tents in the village. A villager alarms the landlord: “At first I could not believe my own eyes. That horrible twisted things, you know, crawling, gliding . . . .” The freaks’ escort pleads that they are not scary monsters at all, but rather they resemble innocent, playful children. In her eyes, freaks are equally children of God. Amused, the landlord allows the circus to stay. The humanizing approach of Freaks opens new perspectives onto the Freak Question that has long occupied the minds of both intellectuals and the general public. Of old, freaks were viewed as monsters whose humanity was in doubt. A 1751 advertisement for Blau Jan, a world-famous Amsterdam tavern that continuously exhibited curiosities between 1675 and 1784, announced in one and the same breath: 1. A pair of ostriches. 2. A young lion with its lioness. 3. Several tigers. 4. Two east-Indian birds, called Casuaris. 5. A farmer called WYBRANT LOLKES, born in Frisia, in the village of Oosten, who was 26 years of age at March 2, 1751, and not taller then 29 inches; behind whom is situated the notorious CAJANUS, who has been on show here for a long time, but died afterwards in the Boarding-house in Haarlem: His length was 8 Amsterdam feet and 9 inches. Within the Aviary diverse exotic Birds and Animals are shown in a circle of cages.17 16 Browning started his career in sideshows, carnivals, and circuses, performing as a talker, a clown, and as “The Living Corpse” who was buried alive. See DAVID J. SKAL & ELIAS SAVADA, DARK CARNIVAL: THE SECRET WORLD OF TOD BROWNING, HOLLYWOOD’S MASTER OF THE MACABRE 22-26 (1995). 17 See B.C. Sliggers, Het Geld is de Leus, Voor Dwerg en Reus: Expositiemogelijkheden voor de Wonderen der Natuur, in DE TENTOONGESTELDE MENS: REUZEN, DWERGEN EN ANDERE WONDEREN DER NATUUR 24 (B.C. Sliggers & A.A.Wertheim ed., 1993). All the same, Dutch

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At the outset of Western civilization, monstrous races supposedly lived at the margins of the world. In his Histories of the fifth century B.C., Herodotus described curious tribes like the Skiapods, or shadowfeet people: humanoids, with one leg extending in an enormous foot on which they used to hop through the desert; when the sun was too hot, they laid down on their back using the foot as an umbrella. Some of these species were later unmasked as mythical fictions. Others, like the Pygmies, turned out to exist. Still others, such as Cyclops, do not exist as a people but occur as deviant human births. Traditionally, monsters were viewed as signs of evil. A deviant birth passed for a bad omen. Twins or a cyclopic child with one huge eye would announce disaster; the mother must have mated with the Devil. Obviously, the best solution was to kill the freak. Chang and Eng narrowly escaped this fate when they came into the world as conjoined twins in Siam (Thailand) in 1811. Initially, the king judged it wise to put them to death, but on second thought he granted them life. The twins migrated to the United States, where they performed in the American Museum and similar theaters, becoming the godfathers of all Siamese twins.18 Aristotle took a more rational approach to monstrous births, looking for natural explanations. He believed too much semen during the conception caused monsters of excess such as Siamese twins and giants. Too little semen produced monsters of deficit: a being without head or legs, or a midget. Mixed semen, a consequence of mating between man and animal, produced double monsters, such as a dogheaded man. According to another theory, a man was born with an elephant-like appearance if his mother had a traumatic experience with an elephant during pregnancy.19 Lucretius was even more realistic. He rejected Aristotle’s double monsters as nonsense. Centaurs, for instance, could not possibly exist since the lifespan of a horse was much shorter than that of a human being. As for other monsters, the problem solved itself. In the materialistic world that Lucretius depicted in his didactic poem On the midgets and giants could have a life as well-respected citizens. See id. at 69-87. 18 For a general history of Chang and Eng’s lives, see IRVING & AMY WALLACE, THE TWO: THE STORY OF THE ORIGINAL SIAMESE TWINS (1978); see also S.G. GOODRICH, CURIOSITIES OF HUMAN NATURE 319-20 (Boston, Press of George C. Rand & Co. 1852) (“They never entered into conversation with each other, beyond a simple remark made by one to the other, which seemed to be rationally accounted for by the fact, that, their experience being all in common, they had nothing to communicate . . . . The most curious part of the story of Eng and Chang, is, that on the 13th of April, 1843, they were married to two sisters, Sarah and Adelaide Yeats, of Wilkes Country, North Carolina!”). 19 Joseph Merrick, “the Elephant Man,” believed that his elephant-like appearance had been caused by a shock his mother had experienced just before his birth, when she was knocked down by a circus elephant. The film The Elephant Man starts with this scene, a nightmarish stampede of elephants overrunning the mother. THE ELEPHANT MAN (Paramount Pictures 1980).

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Nature of Things20 of 50 B.C., an evolutionary process of mutation and selection took place in which only the fittest survived. In this struggle for life, monsters quickly died out, ill-adapted as they were to their environment: In those days also the telluric world Strove to beget the monsters that upsprung With their astounding visages and limbs— The Man-woman—a thing betwixt the twain, Yet neither, and from either sex remote— Some gruesome Boggles orphaned of the feet, Some widowed of the hands, dumb Horrors too Without a mouth, or blind Ones of no eye, Or Bulks all shackled by their legs and arms Cleaving unto the body fore and aft, Thuswise, that never could they do or go, Nor shun disaster, nor take the good they would. And other prodigies and monsters earth Was then begetting of this sort—in vain, Since Nature banned with horror their increase, And powerless were they to reach unto The coveted flower of fair maturity, Or to find aliment, or to intertwine In works of Venus.21

Lucretius’ solution to the Freak Question, however, was outdated by the rise of modern medical science. On the one hand, medicine is nowadays able to prevent many deficient births. On the other hand, it eases the struggle for life by enlarging the possibilities for the physically weak to survive.22 In Naturalis Historia,23 Pliny presented a milder alternative. He depicted monsters, not as frightening omens, but as objects of amusement. “These and similar kinds of human beings,” he wrote, “Nature has made to be playthings for herself and for us, creations at which to marvel.”24 Hermaphrodites and headless beings with eyes in their chests should not be killed, but rather shown in such places as Blau Jan or Barnum & Bailey, as a distorting mirror of humanity. Augustine made another step in the process of un-demonizing human monsters. In The City of God, he advocated Christian neighborly love for human beings with one eye in the middle of their 20 V LUCRETIUS, ON THE NATURE OF THINGS (William Ellery Leonard trans., 50 B.C.E.), http://classics.mit.edu/Carus/nature_things.5.v.html. 21 Id. at 837-55. 22 This is not necessarily so, however. Nazi scientists like Mengele put all their energy into gruesome experiments on midgets and other handicapped people before killing them. See ARMAND MARIE LEROI, MUTANTS: ON GENETIC VARIETY AND THE HUMAN BODY 148 (2003). 23 PLINY THE ELDER, NATURAL HISTORY: A SELECTION (1991). 24 Id. at 80.

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foreheads, pygmies, and persons with double heads, chests, and hands but just one belly and one leg.25 Like all rational mortals in possession of a soul, they too must have descended from Noah. Even though they may appear utterly monstrous to us, certainly they are not mistakes of the Creator. Indeed, only “God is the Creator of all, and he himself knows where and when any creature should be created or should have been created. He has the wisdom to weave the beauty of the whole design out of the constituent parts, in their likeness and diversity.”26 Mortals could not appreciate with which cosmic phenomenon a twelvefingered person was in harmony, but surely God made no miscount. Therefore, we should love these monsters as we love ourselves.27 In the eyes of God, then, beings with deviant outlooks may mirror His image as well as all other human beings do. In earthly life, however, freaks continued to be viewed with a mixture of curiosity and terror. Yet in modern times, the rise of the scientific worldview tended to replace imagination with a more detached view. The surgeon Ambroise Paré’s 1573 study Des Monstres et Prodiges is a typical work of transition.28 The thirteen causes of monsters Paré discusses include religious ones (the glory or wrath of God, demons and devils) side by side with biological ones (too much or too little or rotten seed, smallness of the womb, hereditary or accidental illnesses).29 In the modern disenchanted world, the chances of freaks have progressively decreased over the course of the centuries. In early modernity their presence was considered as utile et dulce: useful for the new science of teratology, or the study of monsters—pleasant by way of amusement. Human curiosities were collected and classified by scientists such as Linneaus and exhibited in Wunderkammer, public places like Blau Jan, and carnivals. Carnival freaks were a democratic version of the court freaks who amused the aristocracy in feudal times. P.T. Barnum claimed to combine teratological utility with entertainment when founding New York’s American Museum in 1841. He cleverly took up the theory of evolution Darwin expounded in On the Origin of

25 26 27

XVI SAINT AUGUSTINE, CITY OF GOD (Penguin Books 2003) (1467). Id. at 662. Augustine suggests two alternatives: Either these monstrous races do not exist at all, or upon closer inspection they may still turn out to be subhuman. Id. at 663-64. 28 See Janis L. Pallister, Introduction to AMBROISE PARÉ, ON MONSTERS AND MARVELS (Janis L. Pallister trans., University of Chicago Press 1982) (1573). 29 See id. at 92-93 (demonstrating that Paré is not fully uncritical of supernatural explanations, and that the seed of a dead man is no longer vital). “[I]t is an absurd thing for Pierre de la Pallude . . . to maintain that devils let the seed of a dead man flow into the lap of a woman, from which a child can be engendered . . . . Besides, Demons are immortal and eternal; what necessity, then, have they of this reproduction, since they have no use for offspring . . . . Now as for me, I believe that this cohabitation claimed [by others] is imaginary, proceeding from an illusory impression of Satan.” Id.

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Species30 and The Descent of Man31 by suggesting that “What is it?” might be the missing link between man and ape.32 Later in the nineteenth century, the progressive division of labor between scientists and entertainers drove Barnum to sell parts of his collection to specialized scientific institutions such as the Museum of Natural History. Nowadays, skeletons, wax models, and mummified remains of freaks can be seen in the exhibitions of the Vrolik Collection of the Amsterdam Medical Center, the Roca Collection of the Museum Guislain in Ghent, and the like.33 Barnum, himself, hit the road with a huge traveling circus of freaks who performed in the sideshows of “The Greatest Show on Earth.” In the course of the twentieth century, the popularity of circuses and dime museums declined, in part due to the rise of more advanced entertainment media, particularly film. In 1932 this process culminated in the film Freaks, which inadvertently announced the end of the freak show. The film proved too freaky for the general audience. IV. ONE OF US? Freaks gave a surprising turn to the traditional freak show. The film not only shows human curiosities and their acts, it also presents them in their daily lives. More importantly, it zooms in on the distorted relations between “freaky” and “normal” people. It situates human freaks in the margins of the civilized world—a circus that travels from town to town to amuse the inhabitants with its animal and human marvels. Here, the freaks have taken refuge within their own community. They mix with their “normal” colleagues, but they are not taken seriously by many of them. The reactions range from sympathetic and helpful to straightforwardly hostile.34 30 CHARLES DARWIN, THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES (Charles W. Eliot ed., P.F. Collier & Son Co. 1909) (1859). 31 CHARLES DARWIN, THE DESCENT OF MAN (Am. Home Library Co. 1902) (1871). 32 For a discussion of racist tendencies in Barnum’s show business, see James W. Cook, Of Men, Missing Links, and Nondescripts, in FREAKERY, supra note 3, at 139. 33 As Leroi states: Until one has walked around a collection such as the Vrolik’s it is difficult to appreciate the limits of human form. The only visual referent that suggests itself are the demonic creatures that caper across the canvases of Hieronymus Bosch . . . another Dutchma—that . . . now hang in the Prado. . . . And that, perhaps, suggests the best description of the Museum Vrolik. It is a Last Judgement for the scientific age. LEROI, supra note 22, at 67; see also KERMIS OF KENNIS: WASSEN BEELDEN UIT DE ROCACOLLECTIE: MUSEUM DR. GUISLAIN (2008); MUSEUM VROLIK: GIDS VOOR DE TERATOLOGISCHE EN DE PALEO-ANTROPOLOGISCHE COLLECTIE (B. Baljet & RJ Oostra eds., 1994); Bob Baljet & Roelof-Jan Oostra, Historical Aspects of the Study of Malformations in The Netherlands, 77 AM. J. MED. GENETICS 90–99 (1998). 34 The same happened during the shooting of the film. After complaints of MGM employees,

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This tension explodes at the wedding party of Hans and Cleopatra. The asymmetry between the wedding partners has already been shown in the preamble, when Hans develops his love for Cleo. We first see Cleo as she hovers acrobatically on the trapeze in the crest of the circus tent, performing as “the peacock of the air.” From far down below, Little Hans looks up at her in admiration. He neglects his equal, Frieda, who sadly observes the other two. After Cleo has descended to the floor, Hans still aims too high. When Cleo notices his languishing gaze, she lets her robe slip from her shoulders. Gallantly, Hans picks it up to put it back on her shoulders, but alas she is far out of reach. Cleo kneels to help him become the perfect gentleman he so much wants to be. The relationship of Hans and Cleo is not only asymmetrical in scale, but also in motives. While Hans adores the “big woman” and hopes to be elevated into the world of the normal people, Cleo looks down on him. She fakes affection, partly as a cruel game but mostly for his money. She does not accept him as a lover, nor as a person with fundamental rights to life and property. Frieda warns Hans: “To me you are a man, but to her you are something to laugh at.” But Hans denies the painful reality. During the wedding party, the freaks and other circus artists gather around a long dinner table, with the trio of Hans, Cleo, and Hercules sitting at the long end. The freaks are elated. Some contribute to the revelry by performing their acts: The sword-swallower swallows his sword; the fire-eater eats his fire; Koo Koo the Bird dances on the table in a feathered costume. But within the triangle of Hans, Cleo, and Hercules, things are going off the rails under the influence of alcohol. Cleo makes Hans jealous by embracing her lover Hercules and kissing him on his lips. Cleo taunts: “Oh my little green-eyed monster! . . . ha, ha . . . my husband is jealous! . . . Oh my little lover, drink to the happiness of your loving wife. Ha ha . . . .” Indignantly, Frieda walks out. The other guests are having too much fun to notice. A lilliputian mounts the table carrying a large bowl of champagne with which to initiate the bride into the freak community. While the other freaks rhythmically tap their spoons and forks on the table, he leads them in a tribal song: “We accept her, one of us! We accept her, one of us! Gooble gobble, gooble gobble, we accept her, we accept her!” Roaring with laughter, Hercules nudges Cleo: “They are going to make you one of them.” The lilliputian moves across the table to Cleo, takes a sip from the bowl, and offers it to the bride. Cleo, now completely inebriated, realizes what is happening. Standing up to her full height, she shrieks in abhorrence: “You . . . you filthy, slimy . . . Freaks! . . . Freak! Freak! Get out of here!.” The freaks shrink back. Cleo throws the freak actors were banned from the MGM canteen and had to eat separately (with the exception of the Earles).

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the champagne in the Lilliputian’s face: “You filth! Make me one of you!” Then she turns to Hans: “Well, what are you going to do? What are you, a man or a baby?” Hans: “Please, please, you make me ashamed.” Cleo: “Must I play games with you? Must Mama take you horsey-back ride?” Hercules lifts the midget from his chair and puts him onto Cleo’s shoulders: “Mama is going to take you horsey-back ride.” Thus, little Hans is carried to his wife’s caravan, where she continues her murderous scheme. Hans would have died, had not his co-freaks intervened to save him. In the end, during an ominous nighttime thunderstorm, they join in a retaliatory chase, armed with stilettos and guns. The Human Torso crawls over the floor with a knife in his mouth. Thus they follow the freak code of honor that the talker mentioned in his introduction: “Their code is a law unto themselves. Offend one—and you offend them all.” Even the strongman cannot resist their joint attack, and he is cruelly slaughtered. Cleopatra ends up severely mutilated, transformed into a duck-like creature. Only her face reminds us of the dazzling trapeze artist she once was. Her now legless body is covered with feathers: She is a double monster of deficit. Finally, she is one of them. V. FROM MONSTERS TO MUTANTS Upon the release of Freaks in 1932, Variety commented, “It is impossible for the normal man or woman to sympathize with the aspiring midget.”35 Thirty years later, the reception of the film was better, while freak shows had largely disappeared from the scene. Now biological science offers a natural explanation of physical deviancies. For example, the chromosomes of a hermaphrodite differ from those of a normal male (XY) or a normal female (XX), for instance by taking the form XXY. The difference between “freaks” and “normals” appears to be only gradual. Monsters no longer arouse superstitious fears, and deviations are seen as diseases. Moreover, thanks to applied science, humanity now lives in a safer biotope where it can develop a more refined moral sensitivity. In the present received view, freaks deserve concern and respect equal to that shown for persons with handicaps. Freaks is welcomed as an early critique of the traditional inhuman treatment of “very special people,” as they may be euphemistically called today.36 Doesn’t Browning’s film show that monstrosity is a matter of inner disposition, not of outlook? Doesn’t it reverse roles, unmasking the normal people as the real monsters while the freaks 35 36

See Hawkins, supra note 3, at 265. See generally FREDERICK DRIMMER, VERY SPECIAL PEOPLE: THE STRUGGLES, LOVES, AND TRIUMPHS OF HUMAN ODDITIES (1973).

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come out as the good guys? At present, the audience does not find it hard to sympathize with Little Hans. Even so, reactions to Freaks are still ambiguous. First of all, this is because a fresh look at Browning’s message reveals it is equivocal, fascinated as he was by the freaky extremities of human life. Secondly, viewers notice their own similar disturbing fascination. Freaks received a new lease on life in the ’60s. During the cultural upheaval of that decade, the ways of madmen and freaks were romanticized as alternative lifestyles. “Freak out!” became a new hippie slogan. The film The Mutations37 explicitly referred back to Freaks, combining the counter-culture of freaks of nature with mutants artificially created by a mad scientist (Donald Pleasance).38 More recently, with films such as Eraserhead39 and The Elephant Man,40 David Lynch has emerged as a worthy successor to Browning.41 Television, which has replaced film as the major medium of mass amusement, presents talk shows and infotainment that amuse audiences with ever more extreme curiosities of human life, including “freaks” such as transsexuals, very fat people, and Lori and George Schappell (Siamese twin sisters joined at their heads).42 In 1988, Freaks was adapted for the theatre by the French director Geneviève de Kermabon; its actors included a dwarf and a legless man. Freaks and Freaks also continue to fascinate writers and readers of that pre-postmodern medium, books. The literature on freaks of the past decades mirrors the development of interpretative perspectives in its larger cultural and scientific environment. In Very Special People, Frederick Drimmer discusses various motives for looking at human oddities, including astonishment, scientific curiosity, affirmation of one’s own superiority, and pity.43 His own approach is humanistic. He emphasizes that “[t]he human oddity is natural, but that nature has

37 38

THE MUTATIONS (Cyclone 1974). The Mutations quotes from Freaks’ wedding dinner. The mad scientist’s monstrous servant Lynch is invited to a birthday dinner of the circus freaks: You expect me to sit down with a bunch of freaks? We don’t mind if you celebrate with us, do we? No, he is one of us. We accept you. He is one of us. Id. When Lynch keeps on insulting them, the freaks retaliate and kill him. Id. 39 ERASERHEAD (Libra Films 1977). 40 THE ELEPHANT MAN (Paramount Pictures 1980). 41 The second scene of The Elephant Man introduces the main character, who is shown in a circus tent with a large signboard that reads “FREAKS” on top. Id.; see also JACK HUNTER, INSIDE TERADOME: AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF FREAK FILM (1998). 42 See JOSHUA GAMSON, FREAKS TALK BACK: TABLOID TALK SHOWS AND SEXUAL NONCONFORMITY (1998). 43 See generally DRIMMER, supra note 36.

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played a bitter prank on him”44 as a consequence of genetic change or disease. Drimmer proposes to rename “freaks,” “monsters,” and “prodigies” as “Very Special People.” “Except for their appearance,” he writes, “the Very Special People are the same as ordinary beings.”45 In the following chapters, he goes on to describe The Struggles, Loves, and Triumphs of Human Oddities, as announced by the subtitle of Very Special People. In Freaks: Myths & Images of the Secret Self,46 Leslie Fiedler takes a psychoanalytic approach. He presents his book as a tribute to Browning’s Freaks and its characteristic nightmare images. Fiedler sticks to the name “freaks.” He rejects Drimmer’s euphemism because it neglects the awe we experienced in our childhood when we first saw human anomalies. Later on, films remind us of these horrifying encounters. Fiedler rejects the view that science “has desacralized human monsters forever.”47 On the contrary, they appeal to deep psychic needs that originate in our childhoods. Challenging the conventional boundaries between man and animal, masculine and feminine, self and other, reality and fantasy, freaks represent the confusion children experience as to what is normal versus abnormal. On his or her way to adulthood, every child faces existential problems of identity. First, he or she confronts problems of scale. By comparison to his or her Giant parents, the child may feel like a Midget; but compared to a younger sibling, he or she is a Giant. To make it worse, these proportions constantly change during the process of growing up. Second, children struggle with problems of sexual identity. A baby starts off “polymorphous perverse,” attaching its lust to any object that comes its way. Growing up entails learning to identify the proper sex objects that suit the social conventions. Fiedler references Freud’s remark that our basic sense of the uncanny (monstrous, freakish) arises from our first confrontation with the female genitals.48 The son sees his mother naked: The penis is missing! In its place he observes a gaping wound: She must have been castrated. In terms of teratology, the woman appears as a monster of deficit. Fiedler completes Freud’s analysis by adding that a girl seeing her father’s penis may find him a monster of excess.49 In sex life, proportions also 44 45 46 47

Id. at 11. Id. at 16. LESLIE FIEDLER, FREAKS: MYTHS AND IMAGES OF THE SECRET SELF (1978). Id. at 19. Fiedler also rejects the classical term “monsters” because nowadays that also includes artistic creations like Dracula, King Kong, and the Monster of Frankenstein. “The true Freak . . . stirs both supernatural terror and natural sympathy, since, unlike the fabulous monsters, he is one of us, the human child of human parents, however altered by forces we do not quite understand into something mythic and mysterious.” Id. at 24. 48 See SIGMUND FREUD, THE UNCANNY 151 (Adam Phillips ed., David Mclintock trans., Penguin Books 2003) (1919). 49 FIEDLER, supra note 46, at 32.

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change. When an adolescent boy notices that the size of his penis varies (“at times an imperious giant, at others a timid dwarf”), he grows anxious that he falls short of the standard. Confusingly, animal-like pubic hair comes up. A girl’s breasts start to grow, raising the question of whether she has too much or too little—“in either case a Freak.”50 Such existential fears continue to hover in the background even after we find more stable grown-up identities. In short, freaks fascinate us because they respond to our basic insecurities, “primordial fears . . . about scale, sexuality, our status as more than beasts, and our tenuous individuality.”51 In Prof. Pierre, Pianiste à Pied de Paris, Françoise Pierre concentrates Fielder’s approach in a psychoanalysis of Freaks.52 She takes up Fiedler’s remark that the horror of the film reaches its summit “during the nightmare chase, with its disconcerting Oedipal overtones; and it is increased when we are returned to . . . the end of the talker’s pitch. ‘How she [Cleopatra] got that way will never be known. Some say a jealous lover. Others . . . the code of the freaks . . . .’”53 According to Pierre, Freaks essentially depicts the Oedipal myth. In her view, the story of Little Hans’s misalliance expresses the basic fear of all adults that they may still fall short of the standards for a fullgrown human being. Likewise, the parallel freaky love affairs in Freaks hint at perversions such as necrophilia (the living skeleton), bestiality (the seal-woman), androgynous love (Josephine-Joseph), and transgressions of the standards of marital love, such as group sex (the Hilton sisters).54 According to Freud, these are likely to be signs of fixations or regressions during normal sexual development. As for Little Hans, he has never outgrown his attachment to his mother, personified by the big Cleopatra. In his desire to possess her, Hans dreams of joining her high in the air, where they will glide on the trapeze (i.e., consummate their marriage). Their union will also elevate him into the world of the normal people. Stubbornly, he denies the reality that this is an unattainable, indeed forbidden, love. Obviously, Hans and Cleo are unequal in scale. Moreover, he is no match for Cleo’s real man, Hercules. Just like an adolescent, the midget Little Hans must have been obsessed with the size of his penis. As the title of the Werner Herzog film points out, Even Dwarfs Started Small. Pierre’s hypothesis about Little Hans links up with Freud’s interpretation in 50 51 52

Id. at 31. Id. at 34. FRANÇOISE PIERRE, PROF. PIERRE: PIANISTE À PIED DE PARIS (2005). In this fascinating biography, Professor Pierre describes the travels of her great-grandfather, an armless foot pianist through nineteenth century Europe. Freud may have met Pierre when he performed in Vienna. Ms. Pierre wrote her study with her feet. 53 FIELDER, supra note 46, at 294. 54 Had Cleopatra answered Hans’ love, it might have suggested pedophilia.

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Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy: “We may conclude from his self-consolatory words (‘my widdler will get bigger as I get bigger’) that during his observations he had constantly been making comparisons, and that he had remained extremely dissatisfied with the size of his own widdler.”55 In Freud’s analysis, Little Hans first developed his penis envy when he compared his dick with that of a horse—this was also one of the reasons the boy caught a phobia that horses were out to bite off his widdler. According to Freud, Hans’s case is exemplary of the human condition in general: “[T]he neuroses of these other patients could in every instance be traced back to the same infantile complexes that were revealed behind Hans’s phobia. I am therefore tempted to claim for this neurosis of childhood the significance of being a type and a model.”56 The midget, then, must have been anxious that Cleopatra might ask the question: Is that the organ of a man or of a baby? For sure, Hercules’s member must be horse-like compared to Hans’s willie. Nevertheless, Little Hans blindly sticks to his love. The occasions on which Cleo is associated with a horse must frighten him all the same, touching on his phobia. Venus consoles Frieda by saying that Hans cannot be in love with “that horse,” meaning Cleo is much too big and stocky for him. At the climax of the wedding feast, Hans is forced to “horsey-back ride” on “Mama’s” shoulders. On their very wedding night, Cleo transforms into an unattainable mother-figure, as well as into an aggressive horse that joins with his phobia to unman little Hans. Hans does not ride Cleo as a man. Instead, his big rival Hercules degrades him into a baby. As a stand-in father, Hercules puts the midget onto the shoulders of Cleo, who carries him away against his will. Far from consummating his marriage, Hans faints. His incapacity changes love into hatred. According to Pierre, the freaks’ retaliation occurs in Hans’s revengeful dreams.57 The midget tries to master his impotence through fantasies of omnipotence. Now the roles are reversed. The freaks retaliate by castrating the full-grown parentfigures. Pierre points out that, in the original version of Freaks, Hercules is emasculated, singing in a falsetto voice like Hans’s, while Cleo’s bottom is shattered by a tree during the chase. Still, the midget has not overcome his attachment to his mother, so he will never be able to direct his love to an equal. Cleo is reduced to a fellow freak but, as a human duck, she has lost all sex appeal. Little

55 SIGMUND FREUD, Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy, in THE SEXUAL ENLIGHTENMENT OF CHILDREN 47, 75 (Philip Rieff ed., 1978). 56 Id. at 181. 57 See id. at 173 (“These were tendencies in Hans which had already been supressed . . . hostile and jealous feelings against his father, and sadistic impulses (premonitions, as it were, of copulation) towards his mother.”).

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Frieda is more appealing, but too much of an equal to be attractive to the midget. In the coda of the film, she consoles Hans as a soul mate, not as a lover. Freaks, Pierre concludes, expresses our fear of castration.58 This in turn symbolizes a wider basic fear of failure—our fear that we will never be full-grown human beings capable of performing the required roles. Little Hans is the dwarfish freak we all carry inside of us. In Freaks Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit,59 Robert Bogdan presents freaks as a social construction of the sort described by Erving Goffman.60 He explicitly rejects Fiedler’s psychoanalytic approach: Our reaction to freaks is not some deep-seated fear . . . it is, rather, the result of our socialization, and of the way our social institutions managed these people’s identities. . . . ‘‘Freak’’ is not a quality that belongs to the person on display. It is something that we created: a perspective, a set of practices—a social construction.61

Bogdan praises Browning’s Freaks as “my invitation to journey into the world of freak shows.”62 During this journey, he modified his initial moralistic view that freaks were victims of humiliation and exploitation. Reality proved to be more complex. Bogdan describes the freaks as “showmen” who acted in the lower ranks of an “amusement world” that had its own way of life and 58 Pierre also points to the castration symbolism in Browning’s earlier silent movie, The Unknown. THE UNKNOWN (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer 1927). In a gypsy circus “Wonder of Wonders,” Alonzo the Armless (Lon Chaney), acts as an armless knife-thrower who uses his feet for the throwing. He is in love with Nanon, the circus girl around whom he throws his knives (Joan Crawford). Later it turns out that Alonzo does have arms, but hides them in a straitjacket because the police are after him for having strangled Nanon’s father. Specifically, the police know that the murderer has two thumbs on the same hand, which is what Alonzo—a true freak of nature—attempts to hide beneath his straitjacket. The very same artificial handicap keeps him from marrying Nanon; marriage would unmask him as her father’s two-thumbed murderer. From her side, Nanon likes but does not love Alonzo. She would rather have fallen in love with the circus strongman, Hercules, but her phobia of men’s arms prevents this. Nanon’s phobia stems from her childhood where men often tried to put their dirty hands on her. Supposing that Nanon would marry him if only he were really armless, Alonzo decides to have them amputated. However, upon his return at the circus he finds out that Nanon has overcome her phobia and now passionately loves Hercules. She assists her lover in an act that gives the audience the illusion that by pure strength he is holding two wild horses. Tied to his wrists with ropes, the horses are galloping in opposite directions, but in fact they cannot make full speed as they are moving on revolving drums. Mad with jealousy, Alonzo stops the drums with his feet. Hercules’s arms are almost torn off by the horses, but assistants intervene. Alonzo is kicked dead by a rearing horse. Now Nanon can marry Hercules: in the end, love overcomes hatred. 59 ROBERT BOGDAN, FREAKS SHOW: PRESENTING HUMAN ODDITIES FOR AMUSEMENT AND PROFIT (1988) [hereinafter FREAKS SHOW]. 60 See id. at 3, 285 (referring to two books by Erving Goffman, PRESENTATION OF SELF IN EVERYDAY-LIFE (1959), and STIGMA: NOTES ON THE MANAGEMENT OF A SPOILED IDENTITY (1963)); see also Robert Bogdan, The Social Construction of Freaks, in FREAKERY, supra note 3, at 23. 61 BOGDAN, FREAKS SHOW, supra note 59, at x-xi. 62 Id. at viii.

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worldview. As such, the outside world distrusted them. For their own part, freaks denounced outsiders as “rubes.” Showmen scornfully rejected conventional life. It was “us” against “them.” Their aim was to extract as much money as possible from the rubes by tricking them. They justified their trickery as self-defense, or as a normal reaction to the stupidity of the audience. The exploitation and contempt, then, were mutual. The popular amusement industry used special techniques to present the freaks in theatrical ways that would excite the audience. Bogdan discusses two modes of presentation, the exotic and the aggrandized.63 An example of the former is the way Barnum presented “What is it?” According to the ads, this “Nondescript” was captured in the African jungles, where its race lived naked, walking on four feet or swinging in trees, and eating raw meat. After its capture, “It?” had been civilized so that, by now, it could walk like a biped and had developed a taste for cakes. In fact, Johnson was born in the United States. Exemplary of the aggrandized mode was the custom of exaggerating the size of the giants by visually enlarging them with a top hat and exposing them side-byside with a dwarf. Midgets would adopt impressive (though ironic) titles, such as General Tom Thumb. In these ways, most freaks created a fraudulent public identity.64 Since the show-freak was a social construction, freaks could very well distinguish between their onstage and offstage personas. Therefore, Bogdan argues, freak shows are not degrading in themselves. He disagrees with modern social scientists who “advocate a view of people with physical, mental, and behavioral anomalies as stigmatized, rejected, and devaluated.”65 Admittedly, freaks were often exploited and discriminated against. Yet, exhibiting their oddities did not, in itself, affect their human dignity. Precisely because “freak” is a social construction, acting as such does not affect the person behind the social mask. Moreover, within the show world, freaks were accepted as professional participants.66 The more competent freaks negotiated profitable contracts. Chang and Eng, deviant in build, race, and culture, became respected citizens. Bogdan embraces the name “freaks”: “The word freak offends most people. Disability rights activists find words such as midget, giant, and pinhead degrading. I use them here because individuals in the business used them.”67 63 64

See id. at 104. As a publicity stunt, their managers used to organize fake marriages between them. Even protests against the degrading character of freak shows were often arranged for publicity reasons. See id. at 100. 65 Id. at 268. 66 See id. (“During its prime the freak show was a place where human deviancy was valuable.”). 67 Id. at xi.

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In Mutants, Armand Leroi prefers molecular biology to Fiedler’s psychology and Bogdan’s sociology as a fruitful perspective on freaks.68 Here, freaks are “mutants” resulting from genetic mutations.69 Leroi rejects the view of cultural anthropologists like Margaret Mead that gender identity and sexual preferences are matters of nurture.70 In Leroi’s eyes, deviant births are interesting because they give insight into the genetic laws that regulate the development of the human body: “[L]ooked at the right way, such deformed infants can reveal those laws.”71 An armless baby is evidence of a gene that makes arms grow in normal cases. Leroi admits collecting and studying extremely deformed people for scientific reasons may seem distasteful: “To seek out, look at, much less speak about deformity brings us uncomfortably close to naive, gaping wonder (or, to put it less charitably, prurience), callous derision . . . . It suggests the menageries of princes, the circuses of P.T. Barnum, Tod Browning’s film Freaks (1932) . . . .72 However, what used to pass for “monsters” are now demystified as “part of the spectrum of human form”73—although Leroi admits that his book also expresses a fascination with bizarre and macabre deformities.74 Mutations produce a wide variety of human bodies, from normal individual differences to pathological handicaps. “At the most extreme are deformities so acute that it is hardly possible to recognize those who bear them as being human at all.”75 In other words, we are all mutants, but some of us are more mutant than others. Concepts like “mutants” and “mutation” seem to presuppose a standard of normality or perfection, but Leroi denies such objective standards exist. The only criterion for evaluating genetic variants is their Darwinian fitness, their capacity to enhance the chances of the survival of their bearer. All other preferences are aesthetic, and beauty is a matter of taste. In fact, most mutations are harmful to the health of their bearers. 68 69

See LEROI, supra note 33. Errors of the machinery that copies or repairs DNA caused deficiences in particular genes. See id. at 13-14. 70 See id. at 243 (“Whatever the source, such social constructivist notions of gender are swiftly losing ground to the molecular genetic study of sexual behaviour.”). 71 Id. at 48. 72 Id. at 12-13. 73 Id. at 13. 74 See Bert van Raaij, Interview: Ontwikkelingsbioloog Armand Leroi denkt dat Schadelijke Mutaties zich ook Uiten in Menselijk Gedrag: “We Zijn Allemaal Monsters”, DE VOLKSKRANT, Sept. 10, 2005. In an interview with Bas Heijne in NRC Handelsblad, Leroi declared that his book also intends to revive the wonder about what can happen with the human body. He applauds the closing down of the freak shows, but rejects the puritanical aversion to the human body that has come in its place. Bas Heijne, Grote Vragen: “Wij Zijn Allemaal Mutanten”, NRC HANDELSBLAD, Aug. 6, 2005, at 8. 75 LEROI, supra note 33, at 12.

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No one completely escapes this mutational storm. But . . . we are not all equally subject to its force. Some of us, by chance, are born with an unusually large number of mildly deleterious mutations, while others are born with rather few. And some of us, by chance, are born with just one mutation of devastating effect where most of us are not.76

That said, Leroi proceeds to expound on the mutations that produce Siamese twins, cyclops, people with deformed or missing limbs, dwarfs, pygmies, hermaphrodites, hairy people, and other mutants. What to make of the diverging views on freaks that have evolved since the 1960s? Are freaks Very Special People, representatives of existential fears, social constructs, or mutants? They are all of these things. Obviously, the various views are complementary. Bogdan realizes that the fraudulent social face freaks maintain in the amusement world is built upon an underlying biological basis of real physical deformities. In the case of freaks of nature, these are caused by genetic mutations à la Leroi. For his part, Leroi recognizes social influences interplay with genetic natural laws. Moreover, he admits his scientific motives for writing Mutants were mixed with a fascination for the macabre. This psychic need connects with Fiedler’s Images of the Secret Self. None of the authors show nostalgia for the callous and cruel gloating in the freak shows, nor do they propose to reintroduce the label “monsters.” All join Dimmler in his emphasis on the human dignity of freaks and describe their struggles, loves, and triumphs with empathy. What, then, of freaky justice? How do freaks fit into the concept of justice? VI. FREAKY JUSTICE: GEEKS AND GREEKS According to Aristotle, justice is the all-embracing virtue of the political community, more sublime than the evening or the morning star.77 This virtue stands for a well-ordered state, where citizens can cultivate more specific virtues in accord with human nature. A prominent specific virtue is distributive justice: Goods such as money and honor should be distributed in proportion to the merit of persons. Equals should be treated equally, and unequals unequally, in proportion to their (un)equality in merit. This supposes persons are to be compared based on excellence in their attitudes and actions. In addition, Aristotle mentions corrective justice. This specific virtue requires equivalence of exchange in the intercourse between individuals, irrespective of their merits. Corrective (or commutative) justice informs contract law and 76 77

Id. at 18-19. ARISTOTLE, THE NICOMACHEAN ETHICS 134 (J.E.C. Welldon trans., 1912) (1892).

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penal law. It is secondary to distributive justice, for corrections can only be fully just if the parties start from a situation of just distribution. Aristotle was far from advocating an egalitarian conception of distributive justice. Since, in his eyes, people fundamentally diverge in merit, they should be treated unequally. This follows from Aristotle’s essentialist, perfectionist view of human nature and of reality in general. Aristotle tried to bridge the gap between logical thinking and floating empirical reality by supposing the latter springs from an immanent rational and purposeful order. In the Aristotelian worldview, the essential difference distinguishing man from animal is human reason; besides, man is essentially a social being. According to his perfectionist ethics, man’s end is to develop his potential fully. Within mankind, Aristotle again distinguishes different categories. Greek men are far more rational, and thus more human, than women and barbarians. Therefore, only Greek men have full citizen’s rights and duties; women and barbarians are closer to animals and should obey their rational superiors like the body obeys reason. On the grounds of such differences within humanity, Aristotle distinguishes four kinds of social relations: The economic relations between (Greek) men are equal; principally unequal are the relations between parents and children, man and wife, and master and (barbarian) slave. How do freaks fit into this scheme? That depends on how far removed they are from Aristotelian perfection: How do Geeks relate to Greeks? When freaks are identified as subhuman monsters (as the villager suggests in the second scene of Freaks), they fall into an underclass below the barbarians. In that case, they should be eliminated from society. When considered to be children (as the escort claims in response to the villager’s ominous testimony), by analogy they fit into Aristotle’s class of unequal parent-child relations; paternalism is the suitable treatment. However, in this scene, the images of Freaks sharply contrast the escort’s words. While the escort likens her freaks to children, the camera moves along the pinheads, the half-man Johnny Eck, the living skeleton, and other freaks. Apart from the retarded pinheads, all have an undersized but adult appearance. In the following scenes, the film shows the freaks are mentally mature despite their physical handicaps. Based on this account, freaks may satisfy Aristotle’s standard for human rationality. However, critics of Freaks object that Browning’s message is equivocal. In‘‘One of Us’’: Tod Browning’s Freaks,78 Joan Hawkins maintains that the first half of the film “normalize[s]” freaks,79 while the final chase scene transforms Freaks into a horror film.80 Hawkins 78 79 80

Hawkins, supra note 3, at 265-76. Id. at 267. Id. at 269 (“But if the freaks’ revenge inscribes the film as part of the horror genre, it also

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points out that, in the chase sequence, the freaks exactly live up to the dark portrait the horrified villager sketched of them in the film’s second scene. The innocent “children” have changed into “horrible twisted things,” “crawling and gliding” through the mud.81 Moreover, this seems to be a custom among freaks, required by their retaliative code of honor. Hawkins’ critique, however, seems overcharged. The freaks’ revenge on Cleo and Hercules can be justified as an act of corrective justice, equivalent to the latter’s attempt to murder Hans. After all, the “code of the freaks” is only defensive. In a context of distributive injustice, they have little choice but to strike back when they are cornered. More generally, it is too much to ask victims to be noble heroes as well. Browning may have directed Freaks with a macabre fascination with the extremes of humanity, but he surely does not depict freaks as monsters. Nowadays, such premodern views would not be taken seriously, as shown by the studies of Drimmer, Fiedler, Pierre, Bogdan, and Leroi. It is safe, then, to promote freaks from the class of monsters and children to the class of fully human persons. Even so, Aristotle’s theory of justice does not offer freaks much solace. Aristotelian justice is concerned with human merit and excellence, not with human needs, and certainly not with the needs of disadvantaged people. As showmen in the margins of society who cash in on their physical deformities, freaks do not deserve much merit.82 Female and exotic freaks are even worse off. Freaks will not regret, then, that in these post-metaphysical times Aristotelian essentialism and its standards of perfection and merit have lost their credibility. VII. FREAKY JUSTICE: THE LEAST ADVANTAGED Does the modern liberal version of equal treatment present freaks with better opportunities for emancipation? In liberal justice, every individual, perfect or imperfect, counts as one. That seems like a good start. But is it enough? How, for instance, would freaks fit into John Rawls’s theory of justice?83 Rawls’s political liberalism abandons all comprehensive doctrines of human perfection. It confines itself to a fair distribution of neutral “primary” goods that every individual needs, whatever his ideal of life may be. Rawls points out that no consensus can be expected reinscribes the freaks as monsters within that genre.”). 81 Id. 82 Male Siamese twins are an exception to this, as they deserve special merit in the light of Aristotle’s definition of man as a social being. 83 See JOHN RAWLS, A THEORY OF JUSTICE (Harvard Paperback 1981) (1971).

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about what is perfect or good in a plural society. Since people may reasonably disagree over ideals of life, it would be unreasonable to enforce one of those ideals through the state. In a just society, then, every individual has an equal right to live his life according to his own ideals. Therefore, Rawls’s first principle of justice grants equal liberty rights and political rights. On top of that, Rawls’s egalitarian theory of justice seeks to improve the position of the least advantaged. All this suggests that egalitarian liberalism creates a better life for freaks. Alas, by “least advantaged” Rawls does not mean individuals who are ill-endowed by nature, but rather unskilled laborers and other economic stragglers. Rawls’s second principle of justice sees to a fair distribution of social-economic goods. According to the difference principle, inequalities are allowed provided they further the position of the economically worst off. Additionally, Rawls’ principle of fair opportunity requires that better-paid positions and offices must be open to all with the required talents. All should have equal opportunities, irrespective of their economic class. Therefore, the state must guarantee equal access to education for people with similar talents. Rawls recognizes this arrangement may still seem unjust because it only eliminates the influences of social contingencies, while allowing for inequalities resulting from the unequal distribution of natural abilities and talents. This raises some concerns because “distribution shares are decided by the outcome of the natural lottery; and this outcome is arbitrary from the moral point of view.”84 Rawls partly addresses such concerns. His principle of fair opportunity leaves some room to redress lack of natural endowments, for instance by offering extra education to the less intelligent. However, the state should not try to even out handicaps. On the contrary, the difference principle requires that the better endowed receive better education if the least advantaged would profit from this. In other words, variations in talents and abilities should not be equalized, but used for the benefit of all. Rawls expects this moderately egalitarian arrangement will be “acceptable . . . both to the more advantaged and to the less advantaged individual.”85 Rawls’s goal is explicitly not to grant additional favors to persons who already have a good start in life: “Those who have been favored by nature . . . may gain from their good fortune only on terms that improve the situation of those who have lost out.”86 Rawls rejects perfectionist theories of justice that distribute goods in proportion to excellence of character, such as Aristotelian ethics. One reason for this rejection is that one’s character is largely determined by accidental social circumstances. Therefore, “[n]o one deserves his greater natural 84 85 86

Id. at 74. Id. at 104. Id. at 101.

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capacity nor merits a more favorable starting place in society.”87 Moreover, even reasonable people fundamentally disagree about standards of perfection. In short, on the one hand, Rawlsian justice attaches equal worth to each individual; on the other hand, it does not require the elimination of, or even compensation for, distinctions in natural capacities. It only demands that the basic structure of society is arranged so that these contingencies optimize the position of the economically least advantaged. It follows that freaks may expect equal opportunities in education and employment, but no compensation for their bad luck in the natural lottery. This “tendency to equality” of Rawls’ theory of justice is an important step forward for freaks. Liberal justice may offer them even further progress. One may amend Rawls’s difference principle by introducing a distinction between disadvantages resulting from voluntary choices and disadvantages caused by sheer luck.88 The state should not compensate for the first category because such disadvantages are matters of individual responsibility; by contrast, the state should compensate for inequalities caused by bad genetic luck. Ronald Dworkin proposes a model of a hypothetical insurance to determine the level of compensation (and the taxes to finance it): it is the level that reasonable people would have bought if wealth were equally divided among them.89 The U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities contains a catalogue of rights that may follow from Dworkin’s model.90 The Convention’s object is to ensure disabled persons enjoy all human rights with dignity. Disabled persons have a right to equal access to public places, transport, and other facilities, as well as the right to be free from discrimination. States should guarantee special accommodations in the fields of work, education, and health. 87 88

Id. at 102. For a discussion on legal disadvantage based on mere happenstance, see generally Stanley Fish, The Fugitive in Flight: Law, Freedom, and Liberalism in a Classic TV Show, 31 CARDOZO L. REV. 1113, 1119-21 (2010) (discussing The Fugitive’s lead character, Richard Kimble’s, adherence to society’s core values despite the legal system’s intention to prosecute him for a crime he did not commit). 89 See RONALD DWORKIN, SOVEREIGN VIRTUE: THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF EQUALITY 320-50 (2000). For critical amendments to Dworkin’s insurance model in the case of unequal endowments, see ERIC RAKOWSKI, EQUAL JUSTICE 120-48 (1991). 90 Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, G.A. Res. 61/106, art. 1, 61st Sess., U.N. Doc. A/RES/61/106 (Jan. 24, 2007) [hereinafter Persons with Disabilities] (“The purpose of the present Convention is to promote, protect and ensure the full and equal enjoyment of all human rights and fundamental freedoms by all persons with disabilities, and to promote respect for their inherent dignity. Persons with disabilities include those who have long-term physical, mental, intellectual or sensory impairments which in interaction with various barriers may hinder their full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others.”), available at http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N06/500/79/PDF/N0650079.pdf?Open Element.

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The Convention also specifies freedom rights that coincide with Rawls’s first principle of justice, such as rights to life and liberty, freedom of expression, respect for privacy, and freedom from exploitation, violence, and abuse. For freaks, this rules out the exploitation and servitude that were common in the freak shows of the nineteenth century and later. Still, it leaves some specific questions concerning individual autonomy. VIII. AUTONOMY AND DISCRIMINATION What about freak exhibits conducted on a voluntary basis? In this case, individual liberty rights seem to collide with the duty of nondiscrimination. Critics advocate a prohibition because freak shows would corrupt human dignity and reinforce discriminatory stereotypes. In contrast, Drimmer, Fiedler, and Bogdan defend the right of freaks to exhibit themselves if they so choose. Drimmer agrees with the Supreme Court of Florida, which in 1972 overruled a legal ban on freak shows because it violated fundamental individual liberties.91 Drimmer points out that, from their early youth on, Very Special People suffer from continuous negative reactions from their environments. Finding a normal job is very difficult. What else can they do but flock together in show business where they are among themselves? Here, they can live in accordance with their own standards of normality. It is no surprise that many VSP have settled in the city of Gibsonton, the carnival capital of America: “In such a town normalcy counts for little. Sometimes you can even get the fleeting impression that the normal human being is the exception–and the oddity is normal.”92 Bogdan uses the showman Otis Jordan as an example. A man with underdeveloped limbs, Jordan “The Frog Man” performed tricks that resembled those of Prince Randian. In 1984 he was removed from the center of a sideshow at the New York State Fair after a disability rights activist complainedt: Jordan’s act was an “intolerable anachronism,” he was the victim of exploitation. Jordan disagreed. His work as a showman was of his own choice, he enjoyed it, and he made a relatively good living—the alternative would be living on welfare. The activist objected that Jordan’s exhibition was symbolic of the degradation of disabled people in general: It sent the message that they are freaks.93 91 Fielder seems to express the same sympathy. He adds that it was Selo the Seal Boy and Poobah the Pygmee who challenged the prohibition, insisting “on their right to earn a living as their kind had done for centuries.” FIELDER, supra note 46, at 258 (“Where are they gonna send me? Back on the farm? No, thanks, I’d rather be dead!”). 92 DRIMMER, supra note 36, at 16. 93 See BOGDAN, supra note 5, at 281 (“Their exhibition presents the disabled as so different

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Bogdan sympathizes with Jordan: Otis’s view, however, is that of a showman. The issue as he sees it is his right to make a living, to live a particular life-style, not the negative imagery or the harm that might be done to future generations of disabled people by the symbolism of the freak show.94

In The ‘‘Careers’’ of People Exhibited in Freak Shows: The Problem of Volition and Valorization,95 David Gerber criticizes Bogdan for taking Jordan’s words at face value. Gerber denies that the Frog Man really had a free choice. Moreover, “[i] f an individual consents, by virtue of what appear to be acts of free choice, to being degraded, exploited, or oppressed, does that act of consent end the moral problem that his or her situation seems to constitute?”96 Gerber appreciates Bogdan’s intention “to empower disabled people by establishing their agency and removing them from the category of victims.”97 Understandably, activists who set themselves up as patronizing spokesmen for the disabled irritate Bogdan. However, says Gerber, Bogdan misjudges the problems of free choice: Consent is free only when an individual has a meaningful set of options to choose from. In fact, “the freak show hardly emerges as a universe of free choices.”98 Gerber rejects Bogdan’s thesis that freak shows do not offend humanity because the freak is a social construct, not a person.99 According to Bogdan, the person behind the masquerade is not degraded as long as he performs his role voluntarily. Moreover, disabled persons have had good reasons to choose the entertainment world. It could bring them commercial and artistic success; they found value and status in their roles; and they did not make a moral issue of it, themselves. Gerber objects that social constructions and conventions often originate in unequal power relationships that leave individuals little choice. In fact, freak shows were part of larger patterns of discrimination in society as a whole. As a consequence of their physical anomalies, freaks were “driven into their work by a lack of options and a desire to escape from a hostile world.”100 On stage they could cash in on the “oppression of unwanted attention” to which they were that they have to be set apart, so incapable that exhibiting is the only way they can make a living.”). 94 Id. 95 David Gerber, The “Careers” of People Exhibited in Freak Shows: The Problem of Volition and Valorization, in FREAKERY, supra note 3, at 38. 96 Id. 97 Id. at 39. 98 Id. at 43. 99 See id. at 38-54. 100 Id. at 47.

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constantly exposed in daily life, “that desire of others to stare at them that forms a basis of the marketing power of the freak show. . . . At least then one might be paid for being stigmatized.”101 Now they could take revenge on the “normal” people by swindling them. Bogdan’s “Frog Man,” for instance, had no options other than acting as a freak or being on welfare. Jordan’s choice of the freak show only proves he made the best of his unfair living conditions. Therefore, Gerber questions the value of his self-declared pride in his showmanship. As an alternative, Gerber proposes the “minority group model”: The living conditions of the disabled should be improved to the extent necessary for them to get normal jobs. Dwarfs, for example, are able to perform well in many regular professions if only the necessary adaptations to their size are made. In fact, history shows that stigma pushed them into the freak show. “Infantilized, patronized, stared at, mocked, and lacking significant power over much of their lives, many dwarfs have had problems with self-esteem and have experienced arrested psychosocial and sexual development.”102 Fortunately, they now seek redress by organizing themselves as a minority group: Little People of America was founded to be a self-help as well as an advocacy organization, precisely because of the need to deal with these psychological consequences of stigmatization, which have caused some dwarfs to participate in their own debasement and most to experience doubts about their worth.103

What to make of this dispute? Gerber rightly expects the state to create equal opportunities for all disabled people in the sense of the U.N. Convention. However, does this include a prohibition of freak shows? Imagine that in a just society with a wide range of options for all, some individuals with extreme physical disabilities still choose to act as freaks. Should they be allowed to do so? In Gerber’s terms they do have free choice. On the other hand, this particular option might still be seen as degrading. Show freaks would probably still react to prejudices and fascinations that are hard to stamp out completely.104 Indeed, 101 102

Id. at 48. Id. at 50. A similar argument could also lead to a prohibition of films that show freaks. In Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies, Martin Norden does not draw this conclusion. Yet he argues that “movies have tended to isolate disabled characters from their able-bodied peers,” to the effect that “it enhances the disabled characters’ isolation and ‘Otherness’ by reducing them to objectifications of pity, fear, scorn, etc. . . . in short, objects of spectacle.” MARTIN F. NORDEN, CINEMA OF ISOLATION: A HISTORY OF PHYSICAL DISABILITY IN THE MOVIES 1 (1994). As an example, Norden refers to the revenge scene in Freaks. Id. at 116. 103 Gerber, supra note 95, at 50. 104 On the other hand, Bogdan rightly calls for a “sociology of acceptance.” See Robert Bogdan & Steven Taylor, Toward a Sociology of Acceptance: The Other Side of the Study of Deviance, 18 SOC. POL’Y 34, 35-36 (1987). Bogdan reacts against the one-sided emphasis that

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removing the “oppression of unwanted attention” is beyond the reach of the state. However, a prohibition would make little sense for this very same reason. In an imperfect world, aspiring freaks have no choice but to make the best of it. Paternalism would degrade them by treating them like children. The same goes in a society that still is on its way to achieving justice. According to Article 8 of the U.N. Convention, the state should foster respect for the rights and dignity of disabled persons and combat stereotypes, prejudices, and harmful practices.105 Since freak shows do not cause direct harm to freaks, it should be left to the individual to choose whether he participates them as an actor or as a spectator. Justice forbids treating persons merely as objects; but in showbiz, the actor does not converge with his role. Some freaks, notably Siamese twins, pose special problems regarding individual autonomy and liberties. In 1931 at the age of twenty-three, the Hilton Sisters proved autonomous individuals when— just before shooting Freaks—they won a lawsuit against their manager liberating them from servitude. After acquiring their rights to liberty and property, they became successful entertainers. Their union, however, called for principled controversies. In 1950, the sisters starred in Chained for Life (or, Love of the Monsters), a film based on a case of real Siamese twins. One twin is sentenced to jail because of murder; the other twin is innocent. What to do? In real life, the Hiltons confronted similar problems. When Violet tried to marry her fiancé in 1934, their request was refused in several American states on grounds of morality and decency: The bride was a Siamese twin! As Freaks illustrates in the scene where Violet kisses her fiancé, this may lead to adultery.106 Now, this legal problem is outdated because it stems from a moralistic view of law that is forbidden by liberal theories of justice—in contrast to the lasting problem of individual responsibility in corrective justice that Chained for Life articulates. Violet later married in 1936, and Daisy married in followers of Goffman and Becker have put on the stigmatizing, labeling, and rejecting of deviant people. Id. at 34. Bogdan points to the many cases of accepting relationships between “normal” persons or groups and deviant individuals, who are suitable objects for sociological research. Id. at 36. As motives for acceptance Bogdan mentions family ties, religious commitment, humanitarian reasons, and friendship. Id. at 36-38. Bogdan also refers to the trend of integrating in society “different” (for instance mentally challenged) people who used to be locked away in custodial institutions. Id. at 39. 105 Persons with Disabilities, supra note 90, art. 8. 106 Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus by John Arbuthnot, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope and other Scriblerians broaches a similar problem. In chapter XIV, The Double Mistress, the hero marries Lindamira, a Siamese twin, while her sister Indamora has a secret marriage with an African dwarf. This leads to a trial to determine who belongs to whom. If the sisters have but one vagina, they could be guilty of adultry. Did not Martinus rape Indamora when he slept with Lindamira? In the end, the court decides that this is an invalid double marriage. JOHN ARBUTHNOT ET AL., MEMOIRS OF MARTINUS SCRIBLERUS (Charles Kerby-Miller ed., 1988).

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1941—not happily, though—both separated within a few months. In The “Exceptions That Prove the Rule”: Daisy and Violet Hilton, the “New Woman,” and the Bonds of Marriage, Allison Pingree claims freaks can have natural advantages compared to average people.107 Pingree gives a feminist interpretation of the Hiltons’ role in Freaks. The twins represent the emancipated, independent “New Woman,” a symbol of “disorder and rebellion”: “The power behind the image of Daisy and Violet was that they were both permanently single because they were permanently doubled. They were already each other’s ‘other half’; their bond thus superseded, and rendered unnecessary, the companionate, heterosexual spouse.”108 In Freaks the twin sisters easily overrule Daisy’s husband, the stutterer Roscoe, which may explain why Violet and Daisy, as an emancipated monster of excess, did not have lasting marriages in real life: Roscoe: Say, you’re going to d-d-d-do as I say. I’m the b-b-boss of my home. Violet: Half of it, you mean. . . . Come on, Daisy, let’s get out of here. Roscoe: Oh no, she d-d-don’t, she’s going to stay right here. Violet: Come on, I gotta go.

Pingree comments: Placed as a representative of all husbands, Roscoe is emasculated directly, through Violet’s rebellions, and in more subtle ways— linguistically through his stuttering and visually through his female circus act. These emasculations, combined with the twins’ undifferentiated sexual pleasure, ultimately comment not only on Daisy and Violet, but also on other types of single, yet united, women.109

In short, particular kinds of freaks may raise specific problems that, as is typical of borderline cases, prove hard to solve. In general, it is clear that freaks are entitled to the basic classical and social rights of an egalitarian liberal society. On the other hand, neither Rawlsian nor Dworkian justice guarantees full compensation for their poor natural endowments. Freaks run the risk that, even under a just constitution, their extreme deviations will drive them into the margins of society. They cannot escape the “oppression of unwanted attention.”

107 Allison Pingree, The “Exceptions That Prove the Rule”: Daisy and Violet Hilton, the “New Woman,” and the Bonds of Marriage, in FREAKERY, supra note 3, at 173. 108 Id. at 177. 109 Id. at 182.

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IX. SELF-RESPECT Still, Rawls’ theory of justice may have more in store for freaks by way of another primary good: self-respect. Rawls includes self-respect in the primary goods because no plan of life makes sense without selfesteem. Since freaks are an endangered species in the domain of respect and self-respect, it is to be expected that Rawls should offer them extra accommodation. In the context of self-respect, Rawls still allows for an “Aristotelian Principle”: A person builds up self-respect by developing his capacities in accordance with a rational plan and by experiencing his environment’s appreciation of his performance. To achieve this, he must have qualities that others would like to acquire, such as imagination, wit, beauty, and grace. These are natural assets that are enjoyed by others as well: They form the human means for complementary activities in which persons join together . . . in their own and one another’s realization of their nature. This class of goods constitutes the excellences: they are the characteristics and abilities of the person that it is rational for everyone (including ourselves) to want us to have. From our standpoint, the excellences are goods since they enable us to carry out a more satisfying plan of life enhancing our sense of mastery.110

Whoever lacks such conditions of human flourishing is struck by shame. “Thus one may be ashamed of his appearance or slowwittedness. . . . With these defects our way of life is often less fulfilling and we receive less appreciative support from others.”111 What about envy? Won’t the difference principle lead to great inequalities that arouse feelings of envy, which in turn threaten social peace? According to Rawls, envy is fed by a lack of self-confidence in one’s own worth combined with a sense of impotence to improve one’s situation. This destructive tendency is reinforced by confrontations with humiliating situations. “The discrepancy between oneself and others is made visible by the social structure and style of life of one’s society. The less fortunate are therefore often reminded of their situation, sometimes leading them to an even lower estimation of themselves and their mode of living.”112 Rawls is well aware of this risk, but that does not move him to make further accommodations. Instead, he reassures his readers with the hope that feelings of envy will be strongly mitigated in a just society. Since all have the same basic rights, Rawls notes, nobody has 110 111 112

RAWLS, supra note 83, at 443. Id. at 444. Id. at 535.

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reason to see himself as inferior. This will make it easier to accept inequalities. However, does this reassurance also apply to freaks? As they are worst off in natural endowments, their shame and envy will be extreme. They belong to the underclass of humanity with regard to very striking features like beauty and grace. Inevitably, “oppression of unwanted attention” will be their fate, carrying all its destructive consequences for their self-esteem. These disadvantages will strongly diminish their chances of success in important spheres like labor and love. Indeed, such inequalities may prove too huge to bridge. It is hard to imagine that Julia Pastrana, who performed as “The Ugliest Woman in The World,” did not envy ravishing beauties like Lee Miller, who was tagged as one of the five most beautiful women of the world. Pastrana entered the world completely covered with hair. Because of her hairy, ape-like face, she was also billed as “The Baboon Woman.” Though well proportioned, she never grew taller than four and a half feet. Making a virtue of necessity, Julia earned her living in freak shows. Her manager, Theodore Lent, isolated her from the social world as much as possible. Fortune appeared to smile on Julia when a competing manager offered her a higher salary—or so the story goes. Anxious not to lose his source of income, Lent responded with a marriage proposal. The newspaper headlines read “Man Marries Monster!” In interviews, Julia declared they really were in love. Whatever the case may have been, she became pregnant shortly after their marriage. She nervously awaited the moment of birth, obsessed by the very same question as the bearded lady in Freaks: Would her baby be a hairy freak, too? Alas, the child came out as ugly as his mother and died soon after his birth. Overcome by grief, Julia departed life shortly afterward. At her deathbed visitors heard her say: ‘‘I die happy; I know I have been loved for myself.” This proved her husband really did love her. Even death did not part them: Lent had Julia and their child mummified so he could show his family at carnivals for another couple of decades. Nowadays, the mummies are preserved in the Oslo Forensic Institute.113 Julia’s life inspired Marco Ferreri’s film La Donna Scimmia (the Ape Woman),114 with Annie Girardot playing the hairy lady. Nature’s unfairness may be shown by comparing Julia Pastrana’s fate with the life of Lee Miller.115 Miller was born with a silver spoon

113 See also A.E.W. Miles, Julia Pastrana: The Bearded Lady, 67 PROC. ROY. SOC. MED. 160 (1974). 114 LA DONNA SCIMMIA (Compagnia Cinematografica Champion et al. 1964). 115 On Lee Miller, see generally the biography written by her son. ANTONY PENROSE, THE LIVES OF LEE MILLER (1985).

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in her mouth in 1907 in New York.116 Growing up in a wealthy upperclass environment, she developed into an intelligent, creative, and strikingly beautiful woman. In 1925, Lee moved to Paris where she joined the Surrealists and befriended Max Ernst, Paul Eluard, and many others.117 She became a fashion model, attaining the cover of Vogue in 1927.118 She acted in Jean Cocteau’s film The Blood of a Poet (1930);119 Picasso painted her picture in 1937.120 In 1929, she formed a loving couple with the photographer Man Ray, acting as his model and becoming a surrealist photographer herself. Man Ray could not bear her amorous adventures; they split up in 1933.121 During World War II, Lee lived in London with the surrealist painter Roland Penrose, recording the bombardment of London in original and moving pictures.122 In 1944, she followed the Allied troops onto the continent as the only female war photographer and correspondent.123 Upon arrival in Munich in 1945, Lee took a bath in Hitler’s deserted house.124 In Vienna, she visited her old acquaintance, the legendary dancer Nijinsky, who was by then a demented old man.125 Back in England, she married Penrose in 1947 and settled in the countryside, where she was at the center of a large cultural circle.126 When she began to lose her beauty in 1955, she partly withdrew from social life.127 She went on to develop an expertise in the art of cooking.128 Since her death in 1977, Lee Miller has continued to draw admiration in posthumous exhibitions and biographies that portray her as an amazingly multi-talented, adventurous, and liberated woman.129 By comparison to Lee Miller’s life, the struggles, loves, and triumphs of Julia Pastrana yielded extremely poor results. Miller had it all; Pastrana began and ended life in utter misery. It seems irrelevant here to speak of relative deprivation.130 The unfair accumulation of advantages in some persons, and of 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130

See id. at 9-10. Id. at 13-14. Id. at 16. Id. at 36. Id. at 77. Id. at 21-23. Id. at 96-116. Id. at 118-44. Id. at 142. Id. at 154. Id. at 183-96. Id. at 194. Id. at 198-212. See generally id. A similar tragic fate befell “The Elephant Man” Joseph Merrick, who lived from 1862 until 1889. See PETER W. GRAHAM & FRITZ H. OEHLSCHLAEGER, ARTICULATING THE ELEPHANT MAN: JOSEPH MERRICK AND HIS INTERPRETERS (1992); MICHAEL HOWELL & PETER FORD, THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE ELEPHANT MAN (1980).

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disadvantages in others, may well be a natural tendency. According to Leroi, beauty partly coincides with wealth and health from an evolutionary viewpoint. The natural purpose of physical beauty is success in reproduction. Therefore, over the course of time, sexual selection promotes an increase in average beauty.131 Obviously, beauty is a sign of health insofar as it concerns simple features like clear skin and white teeth. However, research does not confirm the further hypothesis that physical symmetry is also a certificate of health. Leroi conjectures that this lack of evidence might be a consequence of enhanced living conditions, at least in the more developed nations. Deforming illnesses have lost terrain; in the western world, goiters and cretinism have largely disappeared. As a result, strikingly ugly physical traces caused by bad health are absent, so the symmetry-health correlation does not appear in research. Moreover, it is difficult to grasp the advance of beauty: While it increases in an absolute sense, relative differences attract ever more attention. “Beauty is like wealth. It increases over time, yet its distribution remains unequal. However much of it we have, it always seems someone else has more. In part this is because beauty, as the consequence of health, is also the consequence of wealth.”132 Leroi proposes a thought experiment to show that relative deprivation will continue to rule judgments of human beauty. Imagine a wealthy and egalitarian society where all are equally healthy (in the sense that they are spared poor childhood nutrition and exposure to pathogens)—according to Leroi, the Netherlands approaches this model. Still, its inhabitants will be unequal in beauty.133 This variance is caused by our genes, says Leroi: “Mutation is a game of chance, one we must all play, and at which we all lose. But some of us lose more heavily than others.”134 We are all subject to manifold harmful mutations, but the harm from most of them is limited: They cause minor ailments such as a weak back, misaligned teeth, graceless noses, and asymmetrical ears. The true meaning of beauty, Leroi concludes, is the absence of genetic error: What makes physical beauty so wonderful? What enables it to take us by surprise? . . . It is about the imperfections that are absent: the machine errors that arise from the vicissitudes of the womb, childhood, maturity and old age, that are written all over our bodies and that are so ubiquitous that when we see someone who appears to 131 Standards of beauty are partly universal: Relative youth and a symmetrical face are admired all over the world. Tastes for hairiness, color of body and hair, and perhaps also body shape vary. 132 LEROI, supra note 33, at 353. 133 Id. (“However beautiful the average Dutchman may believe himself to be, some of his compatriots will be more beautiful yet.”). 134 Id. at 354.

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have evaded them, however fleetingly, we pause to look with amazed delight. Beauty, Stendhal says, is only the promise of happiness. Perhaps. But it is equally the recollection of sorrow.135

If Leroi is right, this has at least two consequences. First, inequalities in natural endowments such as beauty and grace will easily stir deep feelings of shame and envy. As the worst off in this respect, freaks will feel extremely deprived. Second, as much as beauties remind us of the absence of threatening mutations, freaks represent the excess of those threats. This may make the “oppression of unwanted attention” incurable. To be sure, in exceptional cases freaks may be able to somewhat compensate for their deformities with their wealth. In the eighteenth century, the hunchbacked prince of Palagonia (Sicily) had such a low opinion of his natural power of attraction that he tried to compel happiness by creating an artificial world in his image. The prince filled his baroque palace, Villa Palagonia, with distorting mirrors and statues of monsters. Here he lodged his bride, the most beautiful girl of Sicily. He hoped that by constantly mirroring herself in the distorted images of “The Villa of Monsters,” the Beauty would eventually identify with the Beast. Most freaks, however, lack the power and wealth to transform the world according to their will. Like beauty, love is a scarce good among freaks.136 Quasimodo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Charles Haughton), in the 1939 film of the same name,137 is convinced that the heroine, the gorgeous gypsy girl Esmeralda (Maureen O’Hara), is unattainable: She is beautiful, he is neither human nor animal. A monster, he identifies with the sculptured harpies and griffins decorating the gothic cathedral where he has taken refuge. Even these sculptures are better off because they cannot be broken-hearted. When the hunchback sees the girl ride off with her lover, he desperately sighs to a gothic fellow-monster: Why am I not made of stone, like you? Better healthcare for freaks may partially compensate for nature’s unfairness. Dworkin’s hypothetical insurance model might even allow them a special social right to plastic surgery in order to make up for their lack of advantage in beauty. But all that will not suffice to take away their shame and envy as the least advantaged in natural physical endowments. Freaks will still be stared at and excluded from informal social circles because of their deviant looks. As the negative of the beautiful and the graceful, they will receive the negative of appreciation. 135 136

Id. at 356. Exceptions make the rule. Sometimes an excess may render a freak extra attractive: Francesco Lentini (1889-1966) was billed as The Three-legged Wonder with the extra attraction of having two sets of genitals. 137 THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME (RKO Radio Pictures 1939).

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What good, then, are liberties and income? Where respect and selfrespect are lacking, their life plans will not make much sense. Yet, Rawls’s theory of justice may offer them some more comfort. When building up self-respect, Rawls says, individuals do not necessarily need to measure themselves against the general social ideals of perfection. If they did, only the artistic and intellectual elite could live without shame; this elitism would run counter to Rawls’s egalitarian intuitions. Therefore, Rawls modifies the conditions for selfrespect: It is sufficient that each individual is appreciated in a small association of kindred spirits at his own level. Judged by the doctrine of perfectionism, the activities of many groups may not display a high degree of excellence. But no matter. What counts is that the internal life of these associations is suitably adjusted to the abilities and wants of those belonging to them, and provides a secure basis for the sense of worth of their members.138

To freaks, however, Rawls’s escape route via a social niche is of little help. In this way, freaks will be thrown back into the apartheid of their closed communities at the edges of the human world. As their status will remain marginal, they cannot expect much respect from the rubes, and negative consequences to their self-respect will result. X. THE SLEEP OF REASON PRODUCES MONSTERS Freaks presents an ambiguous message. Browning’s film does not show freaks as monsters or children, but as normal human beings, albeit ones with extremely deviant appearances. In this respect, it makes a humanitarian moral point: The prejudices concerning freaks are wrong; we “normals” should accept them as fellow men. Simultaneously, Freaks’ freaks are freaky, provoking fascination and horror by challenging our fragile identity as normal and healthy human beings. Like most good art, the film does not converge with a specific moral message, but above all expresses the ambiguity of the human condition. It subverts the daily order from which we derive our identity in a diffuse and instable world. The fragility of human existence is articulated par excellence in the poetry of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.139 Arachne transforms into a spider, Battus into basalt, Hyrie into a lake; Hermaphroditus fuses with Salmacis; after coupling with a bull, Pasiphaë gives birth to a bullheaded man, the Minotaur. When Narcissus dies broken-hearted, confused about the relation of self and other, his relatives vainly come 138 139

RAWLS, supra note 83, at 441. III OVID, METAMORPHOSES (Samuel Garth et al. trans., 1 A.C.E.), available at http://classics.mit.edu/Ovid/metam.3.third.html.

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to bury him: When, looking for his corps, they only found A rising stalk, with yellow blossoms crown’d.140

This floating world does not allow for science or justice. When endangered, what should Narcissus appeal to: the rights of man or the rights of plants? In the world of poetry, and of art in general, nothing seems secure. Some say that art, myth, dreams, or meditation reveal a deeper reality behind the artificial order of common sense. Likewise, rational science has no access to a real, higher world that escapes the principles of identity and non-contradiction. That is why myth locates monsters at the edges of the known world.141 “The sleep of reason produces monsters,” as the title of one of Goya’s etchings has it.142 More skeptical minds conclude that art, myth, metaphysics, and science all belong to the realm of imagination.143 Yet, although both scepsis and the belief in a deeper reality cannot be refuted, in daily life it is sensible to accept some presuppositions within which science and ethics do make sense. In practice, we may assume that we are actors and spectators in an empirical world that shows more stability and predictability than do dreams or Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This makes it suited to the rational reconstructions of science. Nonetheless, borderline cases such as freaks keep on inspiring philosophical wonder: As they challenge what seems self-evident, they invite critical scrutiny. Yet, even in this case, science can make progress. Mythical monsters have turned out to be natural mutants— who may still seem uncanny as they signify the fragile identity of humanity. Ethics requires further presuppositions that may be more contested. As its minimal point of departure, liberal justice assumes that all human beings are rational (able to plan their lives) and reasonable (have a sense of fairness, or equal concern and respect for their fellow men). Once this framework is accepted, science can establish that freaks are rational and reasonable human beings who fit well into the liberal concept of justice. But what can justice promise them? According to liberal justice, the state should restrict itself to securing equal liberties for all individuals, as well as equal opportunities 140 141

Id. In the worldview of the archaic Greeks, earth was a finite stretch of ground bordered by a boundless, formless and diffuse ocean, so as to distinguish order from chaos. See JAMES S. ROMM, THE EDGES OF THE EARTH IN ANCIENT THOUGHT 11 (1992) (“The ‘boundless’ earth . . . had to be given boundaries before it could be made intelligible.”). 142 Francisco José de Goya, Los Caprichos: El Sueño de la Razon Produce Monstrous (1799). This can be read as a defense of reason—without reason, imagination produces nightmares; in cooperation, imagination and reason produce art—but also as a plea for the romantic imagination (and agony). 143 See, e.g., C.W. Maris, The Tao of Jurisprudence, VII LAW AND CRITIQUE 115, 126 (1996).

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in the socio-economic sphere of income and wealth. The latter may require special accommodations for severely disabled people like freaks. Rawls assumes that this arrangement will be acceptable to all citizens: Since all have the same basic rights, nobody has a reason to consider himself inferior. In the case of freaks, however, this will not be sufficient to develop the self-respect that everyone needs to make a meaningful use of his liberties and wealth. Indeed, freaks belong to the least advantaged class in the distribution of natural physical endowments. As losers in life’s beauty contest, they will be excluded from much of social life and they will suffer from the “oppression of unwanted attention.” Shame and envy will be their part. Nature is extremely unfair, and liberal justice is impotent to cure that wrong. A just state can fight discrimination, but it cannot force love in the form of either caritas or eros. Freaks can do no more than make the best of an ambiguous, unjust world. The tragedy of Freaks started when the midget Hans, in his longing for acceptance by the grown-up world, preferred the mismatch with big Cleopatra to the true love of his equal Frieda. In rejecting Frieda, he also rejected himself. Humanly, integration with maintenance of his own identity was too high an ideal for little Hans.