FREAKS AND MASCULINITY: SIDESHOW PERFORMERS IN GERMAN AND AMERICAN CINEMA

Alexandra McCollum

A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS DECEMBER 2013 Committee: Dr. Geoffrey Howes, Co-advisor Dr. Edgar Landgraf, Co-advisor

ii ABSTRACT

Dr. Geoffrey Howes, Co-advisor Dr. Edgar Landgraf, Co-advisor

This project examines the portrayals of male sideshow performers in German and American cinema and literature. Specifically it investigates the manner in which the social expectations of the masculine social role are altered by the perceived physical and mental otherness in the figure of the freak. The main freak performers discussed here are the somnambulist Cesare from Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, Hans the dwarf from Freaks, Stan Carlisle from Nightmare Alley, who eventually becomes a geek with a travelling carnival, and Oskar Matzerath, the hunchbacked dwarf who is the protagonist of Die Blechtrommel. The examination of the male freak characters focuses upon three major areas which these works have in common: the portrayal of the freak as an unreliable narrator or signifying the presence of unreliable narration; the problematic interactions between the male freak and female characters, including romantic interests, and various manifestations of the male freak’s denial of responsibility.

iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my advisors, Dr. Geoffrey Howes and Dr. Edgar Landgraf, as well as the members of Dr. Landgraf’s Fall 2012 thesis workshop course, for their contributions to and assistance with this work.

iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................

1

The History of the Freak ............................................................................................

4

The Male Freak as a Locus of Instability...................................................................

8

CHAPTER I. DAS CABINET DES DR. CALIGARI .............................................................

16

CHAPTER II. FREAKS ........................................................................................................

33

CHAPTER III. NIGHTMARE ALLEY ..................................................................................

53

CHAPTER IV. DIE BLECHTROMMEL ..............................................................................

85

CHAPTER V. CONCLUSION ............................................................................................. 108 BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................................. 115

1 INTRODUCTION This thesis will analyze and compare four films (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, Freaks, Nightmare Alley, and Die Blechtrommel), along with the literary texts upon which three of the four films are based. Each of these takes place either entirely or partially in a circus or carnival environment, and features central characters who, due to their purported physical, mental, or behavioral anomalies, appear as performers in a sideshow—characters who are, in the language of the amusement industry, “freaks.” In accordance with the precedent set by Adams, Bogdan, and Fiedler, this paper will use the term freak both because it denotes a broader category of persons with anomalies than would be conveyed by more modern, clinical terminology, and because freak refers specifically to persons with such anomalies in the context of performance in some form of sideshow, and the sociocultural position which they occupy. This position is one that defies both the concept of the “normal” body and the assumptions that are made about one’s identity. Conformity with or deviation from both physiological and social norms is a significant factor in a performer’s classification as a freak, and also raises the question of how freakishness affects compliance with gender norms, specifically with the social expectations of masculinity. Certain traits commonly associated with masculinity (discussed in more detail later), such as physical fitness and strength, independence, authoritativeness in social interactions and relationships, and rationality as opposed to emotionality are called into question for male freaks. Whether justifiably so or not, freak characters are often portrayed as having not only physical anomalies or exceptional talents, but also as mentally unstable, untrustworthy or unreliable, infantilized or feminized, or otherwise aberrant from the picture of standard masculinity. The seeming instability of the male freak’s identity, especially in an entertainment setting that thrives on the dissolution of identifying

2 categories, generates further instability within his fictional universe—in particular, the unreliability of the narrative, the breakdown of male/female relationships, and the difficulty of establishing clear accountability. Two of the four works that will be examined here are of German origin, and two are of American origin. Similarly, two were produced in the period between the two World Wars, and two were written and filmed after World War II, thus offering a variety of perspectives on the perception of freaks and the performance of freakishness in conjunction with masculinity in each work’s respective cultural and temporal setting. Each work features a male freak as a protagonist or as a major character, presented in a manner that highlights his failure or refusal to fit into a traditional masculine role. The characters’ alternative performance of masculinity can be seen in three major elements which these four works have in common: the use of unreliable narrators, the portrayal of problematic male/female relationships, and the question of accountability, in terms of both accountability for one’s own actions and responsibility for the wellbeing of others. The first question, though, is just how to define a “freak,” and how does this description fit the seemingly diverse characters of the works under consideration? Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari features a protagonist, Francis, who is revealed to be a patient in a mental institution, as well as Cesare, another prominent character who is exhibited as a clairvoyant somnambulist by his manager-keeper, Dr. Caligari. Freaks has an entire ensemble of characters who are performers in a circus sideshow, including Hans, a dwarf who leaves his equally short-statured fiancée for a conniving trapeze artist. Nightmare Alley chronicles the downfall of Stan Carlisle, who is first introduced while observing a circus geek with contempt and revulsion, only to be reduced to one himself by the end. Finally, Die Blechtrommel is narrated by Oskar, a dwarf who

3 feigns mental retardation, later appears in a wartime theater troupe of performers billing themselves as “Lilliputians,” and eventually is confined to a psychiatric hospital. To determine how the characters described above all fall into the category of “freak,” one must realize that freakishness comprises several categories, and the line between “freaks” and “normals” can be blurry at times. There exists a stark lifestyle difference between, for example, a lawyer, teacher, or construction worker who happens to be a person with restricted growth, and a person with the same condition who performs in a sideshow. In the first case, the anomaly is incidental to his occupation; in the second, it is essential. Sarah Dellmann describes freaks as “Menschen mit außergewöhnlichen psychischen oder physischen Eigenschaften”1 (“persons with extraordinary mental or physical qualities”2). While Dellmann’s definition is a good starting point, it does not go far enough. Robert Bogdan elaborates further, describing freaks as “defined not by the possession of any particular quality but by a set of practices, a way of thinking about and presenting people with major, minor, and fabricated physical, mental, and behavioral differences.”3 The characters who appear in these four films and three literary works fall under the heading of “freak” not because of their inherent anomalies, but because of the way they present themselves (or are presented by others) in a circus, carnival, or theater setting—a distinction that is made evident when they appear outside of such a setting at other points in the narrative. The fact that collections of “freaks” once included not only those with deformities, but also persons with unusually long hair or numerous tattoos “attest[s] to the fact that freakishness is a historically variable quality, derived less from particular physical attributes than the

1

Sarah Dellmann, Widerspenstige Körper: Körper, Kino, Sprache und Subversion in Tod Brownings Freaks und Filmen mit Lon Chaney (Marburg, Germany: Schüren Verlag, 2009), 23. 2 Translations from Dellmann are my own. 3 Robert Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), 267.

4 spectacle of the extraordinary body swathed in theatrical props, promoted by advertising and performative fanfare.”4 Even outside of the performative milieu, however, the freak cannot always entirely avoid being defined by his exceptional qualities: Oskar in Die Blechtrommel, for example, abandons performance art and attempts for a time to lead an uneventful life as a stonemason after moving from Danzig to Düsseldorf, but is soon convinced to accept employment as an artist’s model due to his short stature and spinal deformity, and later rises to fame as a musician. Dellmann writes: “Freak thematisiert das Verhältnis zwischen der Betrachtenden und einer Person, deren Abweichung von der Norm zur Unterhaltung anderer ausgenutzt wird und unterstreicht so die soziale Konstruktion des Freaks als Position.” 5 The nature of performance and the relationship between audience and performer are brought to the forefront by the freak’s occupation of a unique social space, a space that is defined by the gaze of the audience, and one from which the freak cannot escape by merely stepping off the stage.

The History of the Freak The sideshow as it is remembered today is a distinctly American invention,6 but the display of freaks goes back much further. Adams writes that throughout history, “the prodigious body [has] inspired awe, terror, and eventually entrepreneurial activity. The practice of exhibiting human curiosities for profit extends back at least as far as the Renaissance.”7 During this time, the freak show’s “closest antecedents were found at English fairs where … almost all forms of human variation that would later adorn our sideshow platforms could be seen for a fee 4

Rachel Adams, Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), 5. 5 Dellmann, Widerspenstige Körper, 11. 6 Bogdan, Freak Show, 10. 7 Adams, Sideshow U.S.A., 10.

5 … Human oddities were shown as single attractions (as opposed to being part of a troupe) and moved from fair to fair.” 8 These travelling solo acts rarely had contact with one another, thus precluding the organization and sense of community that developed along with the later convergence of multiple acts in a single location.9 Similar to these traditions was the German Jahrmarkt, which, according to Dellmann, included the display of persons with physical anomalies, as well as those from non-Western lands which had been colonized by the Europeans.10 “Freak shows,” writes Adams, “were part of a broader development of mass entertainment that included amusement parks, circuses, dime museums, and vaudeville.”11 Museums included human oddities in the name of science or medicine, a practice eventually culminating in P.T. Barnum’s American Museum, which consisted chiefly of such exhibits. Other entrepreneurs followed suit, opening “dime museums” of varying qualities, devoted exclusively to the display of freaks, with the mode of exhibition and performance moving from one of scientific and educational interest to one that sought profit in return for providing entertainment, preferably entertainment as bizarre as possible. Often the performers’ extraordinary physical and mental differences were greatly exaggerated or even outright falsified.12 The enormous popularity of temporary dime museums set up in the vicinity of the World’s Fairs in Philadelphia (1876) and Chicago (1893) demonstrated to showmen the profitability of the display of oddities.13 They became a popular type of display at world’s fairs, then at amusement parks such as Coney Island, eventually becoming associated with the circus, 8

Bogdan, Freak Show, 25. Ibid., 26. 10 Dellmann, Widerspenstige Körper, 19. 11 Adams, Sideshow U.S.A., 10. 12 See Bogdan, Freak Show, 32-38. 13 See ibid., 28-29. 9

6 as well as the carnival (regarded as a form of travelling amusement park, and which often set up jointly with local agricultural fairs).14 With the advances of medicine in the twentieth century, certain types of freakishness came to be understood as the effects of diseases (for example, endocrine disorders). Public opinion came to view sideshows as a disreputable exploitation of persons who belonged in a medical or institutional setting, rather than an entertainment one, and by the 1940s, the freak show was on the verge of extinction.15 Performers who appeared as freaks can be classified as belonging to one of three distinct categories. These include born freaks: “people with real physical anomalies who came by their condition naturally”; that is, people who naturally were born with or developed their anomalous characteristics, such as conjoined twins, persons with restricted growth, and persons with congenitally missing or extra limbs; made freaks, people whose anomalies are not congenital, but acquired later in life, typically when people intentionally “do something to themselves that makes them unusual enough for exhibit, such as getting adorned with tattoos or growing their beards or hair exceptionally long”; and the novelty act, which “does not rely on any physical characteristics but rather boasts an unusual performance or ability such as sword swallowing … or snake charming.”16 Less reputable shows also included gaffed freaks, that is, people who presented a faked anomaly. This was considered quite different from falsifying an exhibit’s provenance and personal information, which was standard practice, as was presenting performers in a way that emphasized or exaggerated their anomalies, while the anomalies themselves were really present. Bogdan writes: “The state of science and the Jacksonian frame of mind which so relished 14

See ibid., 56-59. Ibid., 67. 16 Ibid., 8. 15

7 trickery provided an excellent opportunity for emerging showmen to embellish their exhibits with presentations that were in some cases half-truths and in others out-and-out lies.”17 Many exhibits supplemented their income by selling photographs and pamphlets that included an elaborate biography about the performer’s exotic homeland and the exceptional causes of his or her anomaly (often attributed to maternal impression).18 Such lies were to be expected as part of the freak show; the line between reality and fiction was inconsistent and difficult to distinguish, and depended heavily upon presentation, as did the entire concept of freakishness: “‘Freak’ is a frame of mind, a set of practices, a way of thinking about and presenting people.”19 The performativity associated with freakishness pervades the atmosphere in which the freak appears. Not only does he have his own social role that falls outside any traditional category, but the very setting in which freaks are to be found is a territory in which social norms blur and fade away: “War der Jahrmarkt doch der Ort, an dem die ordentliche Gesellschaft endete, der letzte Rand vor dem Abgrund, eine Versammlung des Verdrängten, in dem bürgerliche Gesetze nicht gelten und ein geregeltes Leben nicht einmal zur Disposition stand.”20 The atmosphere of the circus and carnival distorts meaning, turns expectations upside down, and dissolves the borders between recognizable social roles—roles such as masculine and feminine, which are defined through the recognition of differences. In such a setting, though, these differences are no longer adhered to or recognized, because they are overshadowed by the other types of differences that separate the freaks from the spectators: the differences between the ordinary and the extraordinary body and mind. “[T]he true Freak,” writes Fiedler, “challenges the conventional boundaries between male and female, sexed and sexless, animal and human, 17

Ibid., 31. Ibid., 110. 19 Ibid., 3. 20 Dellmann. Widerspenstige Körper, 25. 18

8 large and small, self and other, and consequently between reality and illusion, experience and fantasy, fact and myth.”21 The convergence of freakishness and gender categories reveals both to be social constructs constituted by performances. As Judith Butler, for example, argues in regard to gender, one can also understand freakishness as “the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being.” 22 That is, according to Butler, gender is a construct built upon the repetition of performances that include behavior and the alteration of one’s appearance, rather than a given set of immutable gendered characteristics. The challenging of gender and other boundaries in the performative setting of the carnival sideshow suggests that freakishness is just as much a performance as gender and normality.

The Male Freak as a Locus of Instability While the popular conceptions of masculinity have, of course, varied throughout history and by location, late twentieth-century studies from the United States and from Australia offer a picture of the general perception of contemporary western masculinity as intertwined with physical strength or ability, as well as logic, rationality, and competence. R.W. Connell observes that “[t]rue masculinity is almost always thought to proceed from men’s bodies—to be inherent in a male body or to express something about a male body,”23 and that “the constitution of masculinity through bodily performance means that gender is vulnerable when the performance

21

Leslie Fiedler, Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 24. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge: New York, 1990), 33. 23 R.W. Connell, Masculinities, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 45. 22

9 cannot be sustained—for instance, as a result of physical disability.”24 These statements reflect the idea that persons in contemporary western cultures tend to view masculinity as something that has its source in the male body. However, assumptions that masculinity is fundamental (and limited) to male-bodied persons have been called into question by writers in the field of gender studies, such as Judith Butler, who writes: “When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent to sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one.”25 Outside the realm of gender studies, however, the belief that gender and sex are inseparable persists in popular culture. The portrayal of male freaks in literature and film draws attention to the former idea by highlighting the performative aspects of sociocultural norms such as those of gender, sexuality, and beauty standards, and they blur the distinctions between those categories. The deviation from traditional patterns of gendered behavior in the sideshow particularly affects the male performer. Russell Shuttleworth writes that a “much-cited point by those who study the intersection of gender and disability is that masculinity and disability are in conflict with each other,” underscoring “the contradiction between disability which is associated with personal and physical weakness and masculinity which is associated with personal and physical strength.”26 Physical strength is not the only traditionally masculine trait that is at risk for the freak performer, as “Hegemonic masculinity is culturally linked to both authority and rationality.”27 Such views were not always the case, according to Claudia Liebrand:

24

Ibid., 54. Butler, Gender Trouble, 6. 26 Russell Shuttleworth, Nikki Wedgwood, and Nathan J. Wilson, “The Dilemma of Disabled Masculinity,” Men and Masculinities 15, no. 2, 175-176, doi: 10.1177/1097184X12439879. 27 Connell, Masculinities, 90. 25

10 Es verweist auf die vormoderne Geschlechterauffassung, nach der Frauen nichts grundsätzlich anderes als Männer sind, sondern eine graduelle Abweichung vom Grundtypus Mann. Sogar die Anatomen gehen bis Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts nicht von zwei unterschiedlichen Geschlechtskörpern aus, sondern von einem eingeschlechtlichen Modell, einem einheitlich strukturierten Organismus, in dem männliche und weibliche Geschlechtsorgane ganz in Analogie gedacht werden. Bei der Frau sind sie eben nur nach innen gestülpt, beim Mann nach außen. Erst seit der bürgerlichen Moderne, seit der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts, ist eine Geschlechterkonstruktion in Geltung, die die Frau anatomisch und psychologisch als konstitutiv anders als den Mann begreift: der ist Kultur, sie ist Natur; er ist Verstand, sie ist Gefühl; er ist aktiv, sie ist passiv.28 While Liebrand’s treatment of the subject focuses primarily on the “Denkbilder”29 of women as portrayed in literary works and the development of a literary criticism of female readers (Leserinnen), her assertion of the concept of the masculine as a contrast to the feminine is also enlightening: the literature of the late eighteenth century illustrates the idea of the masculine as active (as opposed to passive) and oriented toward Verstand, that is, reason or sense (as opposed to emotion or sentiment). The existence of these associations is also supported by a number of studies on popularlyheld beliefs about males analyzed by Cicone and Ruble, who found an overall tendency to believe “that men differ from women in being more ascendent (e.g., dominating, aggressive,

28

Claudia Liebrand, “Als Frau lessen?” in Literaturwissenschaft: Einführung in ein Sprachspiel, ed. Heinrich Bosse and Ursula Renner (Rombach: Freiburg im Breisgau, 1999), 387-388. 29 Ibid., 388.

11 ambitious), more logical, and less emotional.30 (Cicone and Ruble acknowledge the limitations of the existing qualitative studies, which “suggest that extremely polarized and stereotypic beliefs about males may not be as pervasive as normally thought.”31) They summarize the results of a study by Sherriffs and McKee, in which those researchers found that people tended to identify the “favorable traits” of men in three broad categories: “straightforward uninhibited social style … rational competence and ability … and … vigor, action, and effectiveness.”32 That is, a physically strong, able-bodied male exemplifies hegemonic masculinity, and with it often comes the assumption that he will behave in a direct, logical manner with assertive, effectual actions. In contrast, masculinity and the traits that go along with it may be reduced or called into question when that body is not in a healthy or “normal” physical condition. The purpose of the sideshow is to display and emphasize this condition to entertain (and perhaps shock) the viewer, rather than to attempt to cure or conceal it and thus return the freak to a normative role. The works of fiction to be discussed here, it is important to note, do not have as their sole purpose shock value or voyeuristic entertainment, but also the exposure of the sociocultural mechanisms of shaping normality and gender that are defied by freak performance. The masculine characteristics of the male freak performer are undermined by his perceived physical weakness, which in turn leads to a perception of weakness or lack in personality traits associated with maleness. Writing about disabled women, Asch and Fine explain that disability was considered more unnatural and tragic for a man than for a woman, since (prior to the late twentieth century), “Having a disability was seen a synonymous with

30

Michael V. Cicone and Diane N. Ruble, “Beliefs about Males,” Journal of Social Issues 34, no. 1 (Winter 1978): 8, accessed September 26, 2012, http://0search.ebscohost.com.maurice.bgsu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=16381534&site=ehostlive&scope=site. Emphasis in original. 31 Ibid., 12. 32 Ibid., 8-9.

12 being dependent, childlike, and helpless—an image fundamentally challenging all that is embodied in the ideal male: virility, autonomy, and independence. Yet this image replicated, if in caricature, all that is embodied in the ideal female: emotionality, passivity, and dependence.”33 Thus, male freaks, regardless of whether they consider themselves disabled, would likely be perceived that way, and along with the perception of disability comes the perception of helplessness, passivity, weakness. Going even further, Paul Longmore writes: “Disability has often been used as a melodramatic device not only in popular entertainments, but in literature as well. Among the most persistent is the association of disability with malevolence. Deformity of body symbolizes deformity of soul. Physical handicaps are made the emblem of evil.”34 A man who performs as a freak may be perceived as lacking these qualities in their most basic form. For example, “vigor, action, and effectiveness” are not traits that one typically associates with a sideshow performer; it is far more likely that he has some form of physical or mental disability, thus placing him (at least in the audience’s eyes) into exactly the opposite categories. Furthermore, someone who stands on a stage to be gawked at by an audience for their entertainment while a third party presents him to that audience certainly cannot be said to be behaving in a “straightforward social style,” but rather taking part in a most unconventional social interaction, one in which his role is passive and objectified. In such a situation, the freak typically refrains from direct participation, perhaps mirroring the inhibited behavior of a shy child upon introduction to adult strangers. Such infantilization can be difficult to distinguish from feminization, at least according to certain psychiatric arguments in the early twentieth century (when the sideshow was at its peak). Connell, for instance, notes how the Austrian 33

Michelle Fine and Adrienne Asch, introduction to Women and Disability: Essays in Psychology, Culture, and Politics, ed. Michelle Fine and Adrienne Asch (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 3. 34 Paul K. Longmore, “Screening Stereotypes: Images of Disabled People,” in Screening Disability: Essays on Cinema and Disability, ed. Christopher R. Smit and Anthony Enns (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2001), 2-3.

13 psychiatrist Alfred Adler argued that in “the familiar polarity between masculinity and femininity … one side of the polarity is devalued in culture and associated with weakness. Children of both sexes, being weak vis-à-vis adults, are thus forced to inhabit the feminine position. They develop a sense of femininity and doubts about their ability to achieve masculinity.”35 Certain freaks, especially those who had some level of developmental disability, were often treated as and referred to as children even when they had aged far beyond childhood (such as Maximo and Bartola, the “Aztec Children;” Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy; and Koo-Koo the Bird Girl, to name a few). This potential for infantilization that would prevent the freak performance from being a normative adult social interaction can also cause the audience to view him as lacking rationality and authority in the same way that children (and, in the past, women as well) lack these qualities. Additionally, the presentation of elaborate, exaggerated, or fabricated details about the freak’s condition and life lead to doubts as to the veracity of his other statements: Can a character who is a freak be trusted as a reliable narrator, or is he distorting what is presented to the audience? In the same way that the freak’s physical disability would appear to preclude his participation in the activities that typify a non-disabled man’s lifestyle, such as employment in a non-performative setting, and, for example, athletic pursuits, his presentation in a manner completely different from a standard social interaction also contributes to the impression that he is incapable of interacting with others in a regular manner, unable to adhere to the social norms of interpersonal relations. That is, his appearance challenges the ability of the non-freaks with whom he interacts to attribute to him the same assumptions of rationality and “normal” adult

35

Connell, Masculinities, 16.

14 behavior—possibly causing them to go so far as to consider him unreliable in the information that he relays. In a setting where gender roles and distinctions begin to break down as well, the nature of the male freak’s behavior toward and relationships with women also becomes unstable and leads to problematic situations. While Butler discounts the idea that one embodies one’s gender merely by “differentiation from the opposite gender…one is one’s own gender to the extent that one is not the other gender” because this dichotomy “presupposes and enforces the restriction of gender within that binary pair,”36 the fictional protagonist may not share such views. In fact, valuable insight may be gained from examining the portrayal of his interactions with members of both the opposite and the same sex, as his self-differentiation from women may very well bear a greater resemblance to the view criticized by Butler than to that which she endorses. Finally, the possibility of the audience conflating physical disability with atypical mental development raises further questions. For example, just what is the true mental capacity of freak performers such as Caligari’s Cesare and Die Blechtrommel’s Oskar, and to what extent can a person with diminished mental capacity be held accountable for his actions? Is it possible for a disabled person to exploit such assumptions, as Oskar does in pretending to have a developmental disability? Can the viewer consider such behavior defensible as a form of selfpreservation? How does a psychiatric disorder such as schizophrenia or alcoholism fit in with freakishness, in comparison to a person with a developmental disability, such as a person with microcephaly?

36

Butler, Gender Trouble, 22.

15 In a story or film that takes place in a circus or carnival setting, the answers to these questions are uncertain, and the divisions between categories become unclear. The presence of freaks undermines the viewer’s ability to clearly distinguish between male and female, normal and freakish, and even sane and insane. As a consequence, the constructed nature of these categories is revealed, perhaps offering a haven to those who cannot, do not, or do not wish to adhere to physiological, behavioral, or gender norms.

16 CHAPTER I. DAS CABINET DES DR. CALIGARI This 1920 Expressionist film features disturbingly artificial set design, a carnival at which at least one freak performer is exhibited, and an increasingly perplexing plot and set of relationships which, in another twist of the film’s frame story, are revealed to be the account of an unreliable narrator. The inclusion of a frame narrative in the story’s structure as well as the sets’ lack of realism are both elements that demonstrate Caligari’s close ties to the conventions of fiction and drama, perhaps unsurprising, given the relatively young age of cinema at the time, along with its use in filming stage plays. The unreliability of the narrative also highlights the questions of responsibility for one’s actions as well as the effect of mental and physical otherness upon male-female relationships. While a framing device is typically intended to give clarifying perspective to the events of the main narrative, the frame story of Caligari serves not to explicate but rather to muddle the viewer’s perception of the events portrayed in the main plot. Far more than providing a satisfactory resolution to or explanation of the increasingly bizarre chain of events in the main narrative, the frame ending increases the audience’s confusion and leaves them with more questions than answers. The film opens with the apparent narrator-protagonist, Francis, interrupting the story of his nameless companion to relate the events that he and his fiancée, Jane, have experienced, which, Francis assures him, are “even stranger than what you have lived through.”37 Thus begins the main segment of the story, which initially centers on Francis and his friend Alan, both of whom are stated to be in love with Jane. When a carnival arrives in town, the two men attend a 37

Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, directed by Robert Wiene (1920, Germany: Kino Video, 2002), DVD.

17 performance in which the showman Dr. Caligari exhibits Cesare, who is presented as a clairvoyant somnambulist. After Alan is murdered according to Cesare’s prediction and Cesare attempts to kidnap Jane, Francis investigates further and discovers that Caligari is, in fact, the director of a nearby mental asylum, re-enacting the crimes of an eighteenth-century mystic and showman called Caligari, with a hypnotized somnambulist patient in the role of the original Caligari’s Cesare. 38 After Cesare dies fleeing his pursuers, Caligari suffers a mental breakdown and is imprisoned in his own asylum. At this point, Francis’s narration of the story proper ends and segues into the second half of the frame story, in which it is revealed that Francis himself is an inmate of the asylum. 39 Francis points out the still-alive Cesare to his companion, unsuccessfully proposes to Jane, and then attacks the asylum director, accusing him of being Caligari. Francis is subdued and the director proclaims that he will now be able to effect a cure. The varied and contradictory claims about the origin of Caligari’s frame story may be seen as a real-life echo of the uncertainty created by the frame story itself, and indeed have led to conflicting interpretations of the film’s main segment. Earlier film historians accepted screenwriter Hans Janowitz’s assertion (written years after the film’s production) that Caligari was initially conceived as the main story only, with the framing device forced upon the film in order to reverse its anti-authoritarian message: Siegfried Kracauer writes that Robert Wiene, the director, introduced the frame narrative, speculating that this may have been to make the story more palatable to audiences,40 while Lotte Eisner attempts to correct his account, contending that

38

For the sake of clarity, I will refer to the characters in the frame story by the same names they are given in Francis’s narrative, since their “real” names are never provided, i.e., Werner Krauss’s character will be called Caligari, the character played by Conrad Veidt will be referred to as Cesare, etc. 39 Robert Wiene, Carl Mayer, and Hans Janowitz, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: English Translation and Description of Action, trans. R.V. Adkinson (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), 43. 40 Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), 67.

18 the frame narrative was suggested by Fritz Lang, who was originally intended to direct the film.41 While Eisner dismisses the events of the main narrative as the delusion of the apparently insane protagonist, Kracauer cautiously acknowledges that while the stylized costumes and makeup worn by the characters in the main narrative are absent at the end, “The Expressionist style still exists in the frame story, leading the viewer to still question what is sanity.”42 More recent analyses, such as those of Thomas Elsaesser and Stefan Andriopoulos, have called these earlier accounts into question, citing the discovery of an early draft of Caligari’s screenplay, which already included a (different43) frame narrative which “neutralised”44 the main narrative, making the alteration to the existing frame story one that “merely emphasized an ambiguity already inherent in the original screenplay,” especially since “there are no visual indications that would lend more credibility to the world of the frame than to the internal story.”45 Although the last few minutes of the film appear to negate all or most of the main narrative as the paranoid delusions of a madman, populated by nightmarish caricatures of his fellow inmates, it is impossible to accept this conclusion without further consideration. Has Francis really fabricated the entire story, or is he sane and speaking the truth, only to be imprisoned by Caligari under the guise of a sympathetic, benevolent asylum director?46 Or does the truth lie somewhere between the two possibilities? One could speculate that some version of the events depicted in the main narrative did happen, but that Francis interprets and retells them differently, either from the beginning or after a certain point, filtering them through the lens of 41

Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt, trans. Roger Greaves (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 20. 42 Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 70. 43 S.S. Prawer, Caligari’s Children: The Film as Tale of Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 168. 44 Thomas Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary (New York: Routledge, 2000), 101. 45 Stefan Andriopoulos, Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction and the Invention of Cinema, trans. Peter Jansen and Stefan Andriopoulos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 100-102. 46 See Prawer, Caligari’s Children, 190-191.

19 his illness—raising the question (in the tradition of German Romantic literature, such as the texts of Tieck and Hoffmann): At what point does the main narrative descend from truth into madness? The audience must wonder: Has Francis fabricated the entire narrative, or is it reliable up to an event that causes Francis’s psychotic break—Alan’s murder, perhaps? “Weimar films,” Elsaesser writes, “often foreground the question of who authorizes or controls the act of narration.”47 If the reality within the world of Caligari is one in which Francis is insane, then the viewer cannot accept his version of events as reliable, but has no alternative account against which to compare them. While it is also possible that a narrator could be sane but still give an account contaminated with falsehoods, misunderstanding, or limited information, his narrative would still be largely coherent and would tend to adhere to what the audience understands as the rules of the real world, or at least acknowledge them. (For example, if a character behaves illogically within this narrative, or if an extraordinary event occurs that has not already been established as commonplace within the diegesis, then the reactions of the other characters would presumably reflect their surprise or confusion, rather than letting it pass by without comment.) Even if one dismisses Francis’s narrative as his delusion, one cannot help but notice that Francis himself is not even in control of the story he is telling—or at least is unable, even in his own fantasy, to present himself in an entirely favorable light, appearing ineffectual and without a clear motivation. While Francis is clearly a narrator whose reliability is dubious, how exactly does he relate to the category of the freak? While he is certainly mentally atypical, it does not seem at first glance that he appears in any performance context. Besides this, it is doubtful that Francis would be the first character to be designated a freak when Cesare fits into that role with far less 47

Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After, 81.

20 ambiguity. Upon closer examination, however, one realizes that Francis actually is providing a storytelling performance for most of the screen duration, as he is explicitly shown to be narrating the main story to his companion—one of several layers of performance in the film. While Cesare, in terms of the plot, is merely the secondary villain, the accomplice of Dr. Caligari, he “plays a central part” 48 in the film, and even the title emphasizes that Cesare, rather than the supposed protagonist Francis, is the focus of the story. Instead of, for example, “The Adventures of Francis and Jane” or “The Holstenwall Murders,” the title draws the viewer’s attention to Caligari, and in particular to his cabinet and its mysterious contents. It is, in fact, an indirect reference to Cesare, and echoes the showmanship of Caligari on the stage: The viewer, like the carnival-goers of the film, wants to find out what is in the titular cabinet. It is inevitable that the title should refer to the cabinet, rather than its occupant, because if not for the cabinet, the occupant himself would draw much less interest: it is the mode of presentation which causes Cesare to draw the attention and interest of the crowd. It should also not be forgotten that the title conveys possession: both the cabinet and its contents are the property of Dr. Caligari, though Caligari himself is pushed slightly out of the spotlight by the phrasing of the title, more so than if it had been, for example, “Dr. Caligari and his Cabinet.” The film’s (or, perhaps, the narrator’s) fixation on Cesare has led critics such as Bert Cardullo49 and Alexander Doty50 to interpret Cesare as a double for Francis within the main narrative—that is, Francis uses the character of Cesare within his own narrative as a

48

S.S. Prawer, Caligari’s Children, 179. Bert Cardullo, “Expressionism and the Real Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” Film Criticism 6, no. 2 (Winter 1982): 30, accessed October 5, 2012, http://0search.ebscohost.com.maurice.bgsu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=31286167&site=ehostlive&scope=site. 50 Alexander Doty, Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon (New York: Routledge, 2000), 32. 49

21 representation of himself, an interpretation that explains Francis’s detailed knowledge of the events of scenes in which he is not present, as well as his weak and illogical motivation throughout most of the investigation plotline. Cardullo refers to Cesare as Francis’s alter ego, 51 and Doty reads Cesare as Francis’s fantasy-projection of himself, acting upon desires that Francis cannot bring himself to admit.52 Although in Doty’s interpretation, the repressed desires are Francis’s romantic feelings toward his friend Alan, symbolically acted out by Cesare murdering Alan with a phallic instrument,53 it is even less of a stretch of the imagination simply to view Cesare as Francis’s fantasy-double committing the murder(s) for which he himself is responsible, but the guilt or responsibility for which he cannot accept. In a similar vein, the nature of Cesare’s interaction with Francis’s “fiancée” Jane is far more intimate (albeit unwilling) than that between her and Francis—perhaps signifying Francis’s repressed desires or attempts to seduce or assault her. And Francis’s response to Jane’s accusation of Cesare after she is rescued is also telling: he first rejects the possibility and then, when Jane insists that she speaks the truth, Francis rushes out of the room, perhaps in an attempt to avoid acknowledging the misdeeds of his fantasy-self. All of this is convincing evidence for reading the Cesare of Francis’s narrative as a double or projection of Francis himself. In fact, the two characters both form part of the chain that must be constructed if one is to fully explicate all levels of performance within Caligari: 1)

The real-life actors Frederic Feher and Conrad Veidt portray the characters Francis and Cesare at the seemingly stable level of narrative

51

Cardullo, “Expressionism,” 32. Doty, Flaming Classics, 32. 53 Ibid. 52

22 reality in the fictional universe of Caligari, that is, the reality of the frame story. 2)

At the level of the frame story’s reality, Francis puts on a performance for his companion as he tells of his past experiences. Francis and Cesare, as well as other characters from the frame story, appear in the story-world. The characters of the story-world are distinct from the characters of Caligari’s reality (the frame story).

3)

The story-world Cesare is not, in fact, Cesare, but rather an unnamed patient with a sleep disorder who is brought to the asylum, where the director experiments on him with hypnosis (making the homicidal hypnotized patient yet again a distinct role or persona from the harmless unhypnotized patient, who appears to return after the patient in his hypnotized state attempts and fails to murder Jane).

4)

The asylum director takes on the persona of the mystic Caligari, and compels his hypnotized patient to fill the role of Cesare, the original Caligari’s somnambulist exhibit.

5)

Story-world Francis watches a performance by Caligari and Cesare, who have different onstage personas from their offstage manner when they are still pretending to be Caligari and Cesare.

That is to say, Frederic Feher is portraying the character Francis, whose performance of narration relays the events of the main narrative, in which he appears as a character who watches a performance by a somnambulist patient who has been hypnotized into a murderous alternate personality who has assumed the identity of a historical somnambulist freak performer.

23 Besides this, when Cesare is onstage, he is not only performing as a somnambulist entertainer, but also performing his interpretation of the concept of freakishness, which, in this case, involves affecting an androgynous appearances, either by his own choice or by Caligari’s. Performances of freakishness and performances of masculinity coincide and inextricably intertwine in the character Cesare, for if Cesare presented a typical masculine appearance, he would be less shocking (and therefore less interesting) to the audience. Besides being less shocking, he would also run a higher risk of being viewed as a fraud, but if he appears to be freakish in other ways as well, then he can become the object of fascination and pity. A male clairvoyant who appeared no different from the average male audience member might find that the audience had difficulty suspending their disbelief, but an androgynous clairvoyant moves further from the realm of assumed masculine rationality and closer to that of intuition and emotional perception which is popularly attributed to women in comparison to men. 54 In fact, many critics have acknowledged Cesare’s androgynous appearance,55 including Elsaesser, who writes that “in the ‘Expressionist’ film…sexual difference is one of the most ambiguous and murkily articulated markers of division in the struggle for power and control—

54

Cicone and Ruble, “Beliefs about Males,” 8. R.J. Murphy, “Carnival Desire and the Sideshow of Fantasy: Dream, Duplicity and Representational Instability,” Germanic Review 66, no. 1 (1991): 50. Accessed November 4, 2012. http://0search.ebscohost.com.maurice.bgsu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=slh&AN=9104223449&site=ehostlive&scope=site. Theodore Price, Hitchcock and Homosexuality: His 50-Year Obsession with Jack the Ripper and the Superbitch Prostitute—A Psychoanalytic View (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1992), 318. Andriopoulos, Possessed, 95. Alice A. Kuzniar, The Queer German Cinema (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000) 30-31. Catherine B. Clément, “Charlatans and Hysterics,” in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: Texts, Contexts, Histories, ed. Mike Budd (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 198. 55

24 which, of course, can have its own bisexual and androgynous attraction, clearly manifest in the roles played by Conrad Veidt.”56 What, specifically, lies behind this perception of androgyny? James W. Chesebro and Koji Fuse explain what typifies the male appearance: “Certain physiological characteristics are consistently associated with manliness and men, such as more facial hair, a deeper voice, certain genitals, larger body sizes, a higher ratio of muscle to fat, and a greater upper-body strength.” 57 Cesare, in contrast to this description, is slender rather than muscular, clean-shaven instead of displaying facial hair, and “is pale and gaunt, an aesthete in any other life.”58 While this may be, as Elsaesser suggests, partially due to Veidt’s natural appearance, makeup and costuming choices also play a significant role. Cesare wears heavy eye makeup, the only character to do so besides Jane (and hers looks subdued in comparison). Furthermore, while the other male characters, including Caligari and the effeminate Alan, wear suits, hats, and ties or ascots while carrying canes or walking sticks (once again phallic representations), Cesare lacks all of these, wearing instead form-fitting black clothing that is neither male- nor female-specific, but rather a blank slate, the absence or refusal of both the feminine and the masculine. The few sex-specific characteristics that he does exhibit are conflicting, lending weight to interpretations of Cesare as a queer character,59 as ideas of gender and sexuality at the time tended to place nonheterosexuals in a separate category between that which was definitely female and that which was definitely male60—like Cesare, who fails to fit decisively into most other categories as well.

56

Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema, 214-15. James W. Chesebro and Koji Fuse, “The Development of a Perceived Masculinity Scale,” Communication Quarterly 49, no. 3 (2001): 212, accessed 26 September 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01463370109385628. 58 Cardullo, “Expressionism,” 32. 59 Doty, Flaming Classics, 27. Kuzniar, The Queer German Cinema, 30-31. 60 Richard Dyer, Now You See It: Studies on Gay and Lesbian Film (New York: Routledge, 1997), 33. 57

25 It is this rejection of categorization that explains why Cesare, as a somnambulist, should present himself (or be presented by Caligari) as androgynous. There seems to be no logical connection between the two until one realizes that Cesare is a character who inhabits a space between categories of identification, rather than falling neatly into any single group. He is, R.J. Murphy writes, “a highly ambiguous figure, simultaneously passive and active, innocent and evil, and peculiarly androgynous. Inhabiting a coffin-like cabinet, he appears neither clearly alive nor dead, awake nor asleep.”61 Cesare seems to hover somewhere between not only male and female, but also between sleep and wakefulness, victim and perpetrator, even life and death, with his presence at the end after dying in the main narrative (while Alan, who also died, is absent) hinting that he may be a supernatural creature, a prototype of the horror movie vampire62 or zombie.63 Kuzniar writes: “There is something oddly unstable about Cesare that the cinematic audience cannot precisely see, as it gawks before Dr. Caligari’s sideshow. The somnambulist’s unblinking eyes, painted heavily with kohl, mirror back the viewer’s own blind stare. Desperate, the viewer then looks for signs of homoeroticism in the film … But in this film it is less an issue of being able to glean homosexuality as it is one of the spectatorial hesitation about Cesare’s identity.”64 Cesare lacks not only the mode of dress and many of the physiological traits that would distinguish him as male, but also the independence and “rational competence” that are more difficult to denote visually (and which Francis, his double, also lacks). The androgynous appearance is only one way of illustrating Cesare’s (and Francis’s) irrationality, and, perhaps, insanity. Just as the carnival sideshow in which Cesare is to be found is a context that both 61

Murphy, “Carnival Desire,” 50. Price, Hitchcock and Homosexuality, 330. 63 Prawer, Caligari’s Children, 180. 64 Kuzniar, The Queer German Cinema, 30-31. 62

26 removes his agency and blurs the distinction between the real and the make-believe, between reality and performance, the setting of the asylum does the same to Francis, stripping him of the “rational competence” that the viewer would otherwise assume him to have. That is, until the viewer has been shown that Francis is not a model of hegemonic masculinity, by reason of his confinement in the asylum, they suppose him to be “level-headed … logical, realistic, stable, unemotional,”65 able to relay a logically constructed, objective, rational version of events (likely more so than a female narrator, who might be perceived as more emotional and subjective, especially by viewers in the earlier half of the twentieth century). The fact that the plot twist is able to surprise the audience serves to demonstrate this. At the beginning of the film, the viewer has no reason not to assume that Francis is a perfectly normal young man who will provide a truthful, straightforward account of events. He seems to be the most authoritative figure in the scene when compared to a woman who drifts unresponsively past and an older, seemingly weary man whose story, one infers from Francis’s change of topic, has begun to ramble. Francis is thus set up as the example of hegemonic masculinity within the trio, demonstrating assertiveness by interrupting the other man, and rationality by introducing a new topic that seems to follow from the one at hand via a logical transition. The eventual revelation that Francis is a mental patient, however, almost immediately nullifies the audience’s assumptions about him. That is, the realization that Francis is an unreliable narrator reveals that the audience’s reasons for previously assuming him to be reliable were based on his outward conformity with masculine conventions, and perhaps makes them examine these reasons.

65

Cicone and Ruble, “Beliefs about Males,” 11.

27 Events in the main narrative can also be explained by Francis’s lack of agency in the level of reality of Caligari. His investigation of Caligari and Cesare, for example, fails to provide any evidence in time to prevent further crimes after Alan’s death, and Francis is not even present to help rescue Jane. Many of the plot’s events happen to him or without his influence, rather than being instigated by him. Even his visit to the carnival where he meets Caligari and Cesare for the first time is at Alan’s insistence—Francis is merely drawn into the series of events without having much effect upon them. In the same way, Francis claims that Jane is his fiancée, but nothing in the main segment of the film gives any evidence of this relationship except a single instance in which he agrees with Alan’s statement that they are both in love with her. He ignores her for most of the film in favor of investigating Alan’s death, and he is not among the group that rescues her from Cesare. Even in his own fantasy version of events, Francis does not truly have a relationship with Jane, just as he does not really have any power to influence events. This lack of agency and its deleterious reflection upon his masculinity (or the audience’s intended perception of it) is highlighted at the end of the film, when Jane’s rejection of his proposal reveals that they never really had a relationship, and portrays Francis as incapable of romantic interactions with the opposite sex, turning him into a ludicrous and pathetic figure. In a similar fashion, he is also shown to be incapable of successfully exerting physical force, as his violent attack on the asylum director is poorly thought out and quickly subdued, suggesting that he is both impulsive and weak. As a result, he is locked up, powerless, losing what independence he might have had, though now promised a cure—placing him in a position of dependence upon the director, just as Cesare of the main narrative is dependent upon Caligari. In this way, the revelation of Francis as

28 a mental patient and an unreliable narrator directly results in his loss of the qualities that would be associated with him as a hegemonic male. If one seeks in the main segment of Caligari a turning point to mark the start of narrative unreliability, the murder of Alan seems an ideal moment. The events of the main narrative remain within the realm of plausibility until his death is discovered, at which point the logic of the story presented by Francis begins to break down. (For instance, why does Alan’s landlady notify Francis, rather than the police, of his murder? Why do Francis and Jane’s father investigate Caligari and Cesare themselves, rather than leaving it to the police? What reason does Caligari have for wanting Jane dead?) If Alan’s death is the point at which the narrative shifts from reliable to unreliable, from sanity to madness, is it, as Cardullo and Doty suggest, because Francis, rather than Cesare, is his murderer? If so, is his psychosis to be interpreted as the reason for his actions, or his attempt to escape from their consequences (or at least from his own guilt) by becoming incapacitated to the point that he can no longer be held accountable for his actions? Cardullo suggests that the alleged somnambulism of Cesare, as Francis’s double in the main narrative, is an indication of exactly such an attempt: “like Francis, he is not a somnambulist (he becomes one, in Francis’ story, even as Francis believes he himself must have become one to commit murder).”66 Regardless of whether one agrees with the interpretation of Cesare as Francis’s alter ego, it is difficult to ascertain the true nature and characteristics of his condition, both in the frame narrative and in Francis’s story. In the former, Cesare is clearly conscious and able to move unassisted through the courtyard of the asylum, but in the latter, he is exhibited as a somnambulist who remains in a trancelike state until he is awoken by Caligari, and who, when 66

Cardullo, “Expressionism,” 30.

29 awake, has psychic abilities. It is difficult to tell how much of this is true and how much is merely showmanship on Caligari’s part. While it can be inferred that Cesare’s predictions only come true because he carries them out himself, he also is shown offstage to be unable to care for himself: Caligari must manipulate him into a sitting position and feed him while he remains in an unconscious or barely conscious state. Later, however, he is shown to be physically capable (whether under Caligari’s orders or not) of travelling a long distance on foot, then overpowering and carrying off an adult woman. Is this an instance of narrative inconsistency, or evidence that Cesare is not physically disabled, despite spending most of his time stationary and asleep? Is he able to act only under Caligari’s direction? To what degree, if any, is he mentally or cognitively impaired? The viewer can discern neither his level of awareness nor his degree of complicity in the murders. Is he the doctor’s homicidal accomplice, or is he an exploited patient who is completely under Caligari’s control? Kracauer writes: “Functioning as a mere instrument, Cesare is not so much a guilty murderer as Caligari’s innocent victim.”67 Cesare is shown to be passive in the extreme, being fed, transported, and exhibited for profit by Caligari, who refers to himself as Cesare’s master.68 He is not even conscious for the entirety of his stage performance at the carnival, where he is displayed like a doll in a box (and is, in fact, replaced with a doll in one scene, a substitution that nearly passes undetected), becoming the passive recipient of the audience’s attention, both in the form of their gaze69 and their questions.

67

Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 65. Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari. 69 Kuzniar, The Queer German Cinema, 30-31. Murphy, “Carnival Desire,” 50. 68

30 The majority of the exhibition consists of Caligari subtly demonstrating his dominance over Cesare as he issues orders to him and repeatedly gestures toward him with not one, but two walking sticks, at one point appearing to hold out one of them in offering only to take it away as Cesare awakens. In this, Caligari shows that he possesses multiple phallic power symbols which he could share with the somnambulist, but chooses not to—a representation of emasculation before the crowd. Kracauer even suggests that the only instance in which Cesare is shown to speak (as he answers Alan’s question) is also one in which he “seems to be dominated by a terrific, hypnotic power emanating from his master.”70 The nature of Cesare’s freakishness makes him appear to lack responsibility for his own actions, but because he is presented as the Other, the audience does not have the opportunity to experience events from his perspective, leaving his actions ambiguous, as Elsaesser writes: “One is never sure whether the medium’s nightly sorties are all planned and ordered by his master or take on a momentum of their own.”71 The evidence is inconclusive. Even as Cesare appears to come out of his hypnotic trance as he fails to murder Jane, he kidnaps her, and the viewer has no indication whether this action is meant to appease Caligari, whether Cesare desires Jane for himself, or whether he simply panics. And what of the Cesare of the frame story? Is he really as destructive and dangerous as Francis suggests, a harbinger of death? Or is he truly as “timid” and “peaceful” as he appears in the final scene?72 The manner in which the frame narrative presents him as harmless is worth examination, since it does so by portraying him in ways that would traditionally be more fitting 70

Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 63. Thomas Elsaesser, “Weimar Cinema, Mobile Selves, and Anxious Males: Kracauer and Eisner Revisited,” in Expressionist Film—New Perspectives, ed. Dietrich Scheunemann (Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2000), 63. 72 Cardullo, “Expressionism,” 30-31. 71

31 for a woman or a child73. He stands meekly off to the side and “caresses a little flower”74 without initiating any interaction with the other patients. Cesare-the-patient is innocuous because he deviates from the behavioral norms for an adult male, and in doing so, loses the association of authority and power (and therefore ceases to be a threat). With a more unambiguously masculine appearance, but decidedly non-masculine-associated behavior, Cesare is marked as harmless in the world of the frame story, while in the main narrative, Cesare-the-somnambulist’s androgynous appearance, paired with a conflicting combination of both passive and active behavior, is cause for alarm because he is not easily identifiable; one does not know what to expect of him or how to determine whether he is dangerous. The inability of the viewer to accurately predict Cesare’s behavior or potential behavior based upon his appearance contributes to Cesare’s image of freakishness just as much as the genuine abnormality of his behavior and mental processes. The presentation of a narrative about or by freak characters disrupts the constructed categories and hierarchies through which the viewer makes sense of his or her observations about the world, demanding a re-ordering or examination of what he or she views as normality. While Francis’s freakishness is solely mental-behavioral, Cesare’s is also physical, though the affected androgyny of his appearance could categorize him in this respect as a made freak in the same way that the “Circassian Beauties” were made freaks, altering their appearances to be unusual but without any permanent alterations.75 The next film I want to discuss, Freaks (1932), illustrates the same question of the unpredictability of the freak and the

73

Doty, Flaming Classics, 34. Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 66. 75 See Bogdan, Freak Show, 237-241. The Circassians (currently known as the Adyghe) an ethnic group from the Caucasus region, were considered the “purest and most beautiful whites” by monogenist anthropologists such as Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. 74

32 difficulty of classification, but with an emphasis on physical malformation, rather than behavioral deviation, illustrating the difference between concepts of freakishness in German and American cinema.

33 CHAPTER II. FREAKS The next film, Freaks (1932), was made more than a decade later in the United States. The film was directed by Tod Browning, based on the short story “Spurs” by the American author C.A. “Tod” Robbins, whose work Browning had previously adapted to film in The Unholy Three (1925)—a film which also involved one of the same actors, the German-born Harry Earles, who appears in Freaks with his sister, Daisy, in the role of his fiancée. Freaks was a commercial failure that effectively ended Browning’s career; he made only a few more films before retiring.76 Adams speculates that the reasons for the film’s failure include its emergence “in the context of the sideshow’s growing obsolescence” and “the shocking effects of its severely disabled actors on viewers who had recently witnessed the wounded veterans of the First World War.”77 Besides this, she writes, “the narrative itself seems contrived, even by its own terms: the bodies of the actors engaged in the motions of daily life are more fascinating than the thin story of love and vengeance that makes a flimsy pretext for gathering them together.”78 Although Adams points out that the film’s main plotline of the love triangle is not complex, the simplicity of the story allows the viewer to more easily examine freakishness in the context of “the motions of daily life.” Freaks, in contrast to Caligari, features multiple freaks who appear in a diegetic performance setting and who have obvious physical anomalies (though these too are enhanced to a certain degree). A further difference between this film and Caligari is that while the former takes place in the distinctly more European Jahrmarkt, Freaks takes place in a circus which features a Ten-in-One, a sideshow that included ten (or more) freaks, often positioned on 76

Adams, Sideshow U.S.A., 62. Ibid., 62-63. 78 Ibid., 67. 77

34 separate platforms as seen in the background at the beginning of the film.79 Despite these differences, Freaks deals with the same themes of narrative unreliability brought about by a framing device and potentially duplicitous characters, instability and distrust in relationships, and the question of personal accountability. In Robbins’s short story, Jacques Courbé, a dwarf who performs in a French circus with his large, vicious dog, St. Eustache, proposes to Jeanne Marie, a bareback rider with no physical anomalies. Initially repulsed and amused by his offer, she accepts after learning that he has come into a large inheritance, although she was already romantically involved with another rider, Simon Lafleur. At the wedding banquet, a drunken Jeanne Marie humiliates Courbé by placing him on her shoulders and boasting that she could carry him from one end of France to the other. One year later, she returns to beg Lafleur for help escaping her husband, who is punishing her for her earlier remark by forcing her to carry him the equivalent of the distance across France, driving her on with his tiny golden spurs. At that moment, Courbé bursts into the room with St. Eustache, who attacks Lafleur. Courbé then stabs Lafleur to death and forces Jeanne Marie to carry him away once again. 80 Browning’s film adaptation has little in common with Robbins’s story aside from a portion of the basic premise. The setting has been changed to America, St. Eustache no longer appears, and most of the characters and events have been changed beyond recognition, with the exception of the love triangle between Hans, Cleopatra, and Hercules, the film counterparts of Courbé, Jeanne Marie, and Lafleur, as well as a wedding banquet at which the short-statured

79

Bogdan, Freak Show, 45. Fiedler, Freaks, 282-283. 80 Tod Robbins, “Spurs,” in Adaptations: From Short Story to Big Screen: 35 Great Stories That Have Inspired Great Films, edited by Stephanie Harrison (New York: Random House, 2005), 161-175.

35 husband is abused and degraded by his larger wife. Even the motivation for the husband’s revenge changes: Jeanne Marie assumes that Courbé will die early from medical problems and only begins to contemplate poisoning him after he becomes abusive (though she never actually carries out an attempt), and is ultimately punished for publicly ridiculing her husband. In contrast, Cleopatra is attacked by the freaks not because she disrespects Hans, but because she makes repeated attempts to murder him as soon as they are married. In addition, Freaks contains a framing device that is not present in “Spurs,” and which derives in part from the change in setting: The film opens with a circus talker guiding a crowd through a Ten-In-One sideshow, trying to create excitement for a pit-show,81 likely the Ten-inOne’s “blow-off” act, which Fiedler describes as “a last super-attraction for which there is an extra charge,” often “placed in a railed ‘pit’ into which we have to look down.”82 The talker announces, “You are about to witness the most amazing, the most astounding living monstrosity of all time,” confirming that he is likely introducing the show’s final act. A woman in the crowd looks down and screams, then turns away, covering her face, while the rest of the audience moves in for a closer look. Although the talker’s audience can see into the pit, the camera does not reveal what they see, and he continues, “She was once a beautiful woman. A royal prince shot himself for love of her. She was known as the ‘Peacock of the Air’.”83 The following flashback, which makes up the majority of the film, takes place in a travelling circus, where Hans, a dwarf performer, becomes infatuated with the beautiful trapeze artist Cleopatra, much to the dismay of his fiancée, Frieda (who is also a dwarf). Meanwhile, Venus, the seal trainer, leaves Hercules, the strongman, because of his loutish behavior, and 81

Bogdan, Freak Show, 45 Fiedler, Freaks, 283. 83 Freaks, DVD, directed by Tod Browning. 1932 (United States: Warner Home Video, 2004). 82

36 takes up with Phroso the clown, while Hercules begins an affair with Cleopatra. Hans also becomes involved with Cleopatra and eventually leaves Frieda to marry her. In the infamous wedding scene, the freaks start a chant and pass around a goblet of wine, welcoming Cleopatra as one of their own, even though she is a “normal.” She rejects their acceptance, throwing the wine at them and abandoning any pretense of concealing her disgust. Afterward, Hans becomes ill from her poisoning attempts. When inclement weather during the journey to the circus’s next stop causes Cleopatra’s wagon to overturn, she flees into the night, pursued by the freaks. At this point, the frame story returns, and the talker states: “How she got that way will never be known. Some say a jealous lover. Others, that it was the code of the freaks. Others, the storm. Believe it or not, there she is.”84 Finally, the camera reveals the occupant of the pit: Cleopatra, now in the form of the legless, disfigured “Chicken Woman,” able only to squawk in misery as the spectators look on in horror and revulsion. In a subsequent epilogue, Hans, who has left the circus, lives in isolation in his mansion and refuses all visitors until he is confronted by Phroso and Venus, accompanied by Frieda, who has come to comfort him. Though the narrator in this case is not a freak himself, the viewer still has reasons to question the events of the story. First, it is the talker’s job to attract an audience by emphasizing and even exaggerating the fantastic or grotesque elements of the act, including the personal history of the freak performer. Since the presentation of such falsehoods was common practice in circus and carnival sideshows, it is highly probable that the talker’s statements to the audience in Freaks are embellished, if not outright false. Second, the presentation of the main narrative makes it impossible to determine whether the talker is relating the story to his audience exactly as the film presents it, or whether the main narrative is merely a flashback sequence recalled by 84

Ibid.

37 his words. That is, the talker may only provide the setup for the main segment, perhaps prompting either an unknown narrator, or Hans, at some later point in time, to recall the events of the story, which take place at the same level of diegetic reality as the frame narrative. The talker’s mention of the storm in the second framing segment would make it appear as if he has told the story, or at least portions of it, to the crowd, but the main segment’s inclusion of numerous subplots entirely unrelated to the story of the love triangle is a strong indication that the main narrative does not match the talker’s version of events. The frame segment becomes even more unreliable when the viewer is finally met with the sight of Cleopatra as the Chicken Woman. Was she really mutilated by the freaks, or is it all a story concocted to sell her act? Has she really become the Chicken Woman, or is she merely a gaffed freak? It remains ambiguous whether she is meant to be recognized as a fraudulent act, or whether this results from the limitations of makeup effects at the time of the film’s production. Because Freaks was initially a failure and did not become the subject of serious critical examination until its revival in the 1960s,85 the reaction of audiences at the time—at least regarding the perceived verisimilitude of the Chicken Woman—are reduced to speculation. Later critics have conflicting opinions on the question. Oliver Gaycken writes that “[m]aking Cleopatra ‘one of us’ involves making her into a phony exhibit.”86 Sally Chivers agrees that the freaks “transform Cleopatra into a different kind of ‘freak,’ a true physical impossibility,” and that the “transformation is an excess even within a realm of melodramatic excess.”87 Chivers

85

Adams, Sideshow U.S.A., 63. Oliver Gaycken, “Tod Browning and the Monstrosity of Hollywood Style,” in Screening Disability: Essays on Cinema and Disability, ed. Christopher R. Smit and Anthony Enns (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2001), 79. 87 Sally Chivers, “The Horror of Becoming ‘One of Us’: Tod Browning’s Freaks and Disability,” in Screening Disability: Essays on Cinema and Disability, ed. Christopher R. Smit and Anthony Enns (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2001), 62-63. 86

38 interprets Cleopatra’s unwilling metamorphosis to the Chicken Woman as a metaphor that “adheres to narrative dictums” (illustrating her punishment for her cruelty via her transformation to that which she hates), and which, through its conspicuous falsity, eradicates any sense of identification audience members might have felt with the film’s genuine disabled characters. By asserting that Cleopatra’s condition is so incredible that she can only be a gaffed freak, these critics discount the main narrative as the sensational invention of the talker. Fiedler, however, argues that the case is not so simple, citing both critical response to the film and his personal experience observing audience reactions: Then looking down, we see at last what the carnival audience has presumably watched throughout: the Chicken Woman, a creature reduced in height to scarcely more than two feet, but with the face of Cleopatra, a feathered breast, no visible legs, and claws in the place of hands. It is a finale so atrocious that it risks breaking the illusion completely. And I have sat in audiences which, not believing it for a moment, have laughed aloud, as if in relief at a welcome anticlimax; while others, absolutely convinced, have screamed or sat so silently that every intake and release of breath was audible, before the scuffle of feet and the rush toward daylight began. Critics, on the other hand, even after they had begun to take Freaks seriously, have been driven to reflect on the moral and metaphysical implications of the ending. Either they have argued that the spiel which frames the story, like most side show ballyhoo, is a hoax, and the whole enclosed plot is therefore a lie; or they have decided that it is true and that, therefore, despite

39 Browning’s editorial assurances that Freaks are no different from any of us88 in action they prove to be ‘creatures of darkness and practitioners of black magic.’89 Despite the evidence in favor of the “hoax” interpretation, the placement of the film’s epilogue outside the frame narrative presents another challenge to this theory, suggesting that some or all of the story did in fact occur, since Hans, Frieda, Venus, and Phroso do exist outside of the talker’s narrative, and are furthermore shown in an environment far removed from the sideshow. Alternatively, one could interpret all events before the epilogue as Hans’s retelling of the story, or even his private re-imagining of it. Possibly Cleopatra was actually killed by the other freaks, and Hans attempts to console himself by imagining that her life would be far worse if she had lived, imagining her as a sideshow act as he unwillingly relives memories of their relationship. Frieda’s reassurance that Hans is not to blame does not make specific reference to Cleopatra’s fate, not ruling out the possibility of her death. (Additionally, their reconciliation raises the question of what Hans and Frieda plan to do if Cleopatra is still alive and, presumably, still married to Hans.) The film’s unusual structure, with a separate epilogue occurring after the ending frame segment, is not the only way in which Freaks defies cinematic and narrative convention. Rather than maintaining a clear focus on the plot carried over from “Spurs,” the film includes many episodic scenes depicting everyday life in the circus which do not advance the plot, but rather seem to serve as a showcase for the freaks in everyday situations—making their actions in a nonperformative context into a performance through the medium of film. By doing so, Freaks

88

The epigraph to which Fiedler refers was in fact inserted by a later distributor of exploitation films, and was not a part of Browning’s original version of the film. Adams, Sideshow U.S.A., 71. 89 Fiedler, Freaks, 295.

40 “retains the fragmented structure and playful reversals of illusion and reality of the ten-in-one.”90 The film not only eschews a narrative structure that remains focused on the main plot, but also lacks a hero in the conventional sense. Dellmann writes: “[A]uf der Ebene der Handlung gibt es keinen ‚guten Charakter‘, keine Heldenfigur, sodass das Hinsehen der Zuschauenden ständig durch Unkonventionelles irritiert und Identifikation erschwert wird,”91 supporting Chivers’s argument that it is difficult to imagine audience members identifying with one of the seriously disabled freaks, even before the Chicken Woman appears and (potentially) breaks the viewer’s suspension of disbelief. Even if this were not the case, none of the freaks besides Hans and Frieda figures significantly into the plot. Though Hans might initially appear to fill the role of the protagonist, he quickly loses audience sympathy by behaving unpleasantly to Frieda while trying to initiate a relationship with Cleopatra. While events later in the film evoke the pity of the audience on his behalf, Hans becomes too pathetic and remains too passive to be seen as the film’s hero. Frieda likewise evokes the sympathy of the audience, but is too resigned to be a protagonist. (Even the scene in which she confronts Cleopatra is more of a plea than an assertion of her position as Hans’s fiancée.) Venus, in contrast, does stand up for herself, but is portrayed as promiscuous (likely perceived as a more serious character flaw in 1932 than it would be by contemporary audiences), leaving Phroso as the best contender for the position of hero, although he is portrayed at times as ineffectual and clearly less powerful than Hercules, who gets the better of him in a fistfight during the film’s climax. Connell writes: “‘Hegemonic masculinity’ is not a fixed character type, always and everywhere the same. It is, rather, the masculinity that occupies the hegemonic position in a

90 91

Adams, Sideshow U.S.A., 65. Dellmann, Widerspenstige Körper, 32.

41 given pattern of gender relations, a position often contestable.”92 Phroso, who does not appear to be disabled, is portrayed as attractive to women, and behaves in a friendly, paternal manner to the freaks, occupying the position of hegemonic masculinity when Hercules is not present. Hercules, while unequivocally a villain, is higher in the hierarchy of the circus performers’ community by virtue of his superior physical strength, and therefore supplants the unassuming Phroso as the hegemonic male, even though Hercules is disliked by many characters because he uses exactly the characteristics that afford him this position to assert his dominance over others through intimidation and violence. Furthermore, while Phroso does not have a visible disability, both Stuart Rosenthal93 and Dellmann94 interpret the film to imply that he is impotent, which further reinforces Hercules’s position as the hegemonic male, as he exemplifies the historical stereotype that “‘real men’ have been cast as lustful, as driven almost mindlessly by sexual desire, a sexual desire of intense longing that rules and dominates, and in some cases manifests itself in a violent self-indulgent character.”95 Hercules is sexually aggressive toward women, and defensive of his image as a heterosexual male, unsurprising in light of the idea that, by the twentieth century, heterosexuality has become “a required part of manliness.”96 When JosephineJoseph, a gender-ambiguous performer who is billed as “Half Woman, Half Man,” pauses outside the doorway to Cleopatra’s trailer as Hercules and Cleopatra embrace, Hercules follows her to another wagon and punches her in the face. This act of violence is not entirely due to Josephine-Joseph’s seeming voyeurism, but likely also because Josephine-Joseph had given Hercules a flirtatious glance earlier, which caused him to be ridiculed by Roscoe, another circus

92

Connell, Masculinities, 76. See Stuart Rosenthal, “Tod Browning,” in The Hollywood Professionals, Volume 4, ed. Kingsley Canham (London: The Tantivy Press, 1975). 36-37. 94 Dellmann, Widerspenstige Körper, 49. 95 Chesebro and Fuse, “The Development of a Perceived Masculinity Scale,” 222. 96 Connell, Masculinities, 196. 93

42 performer. In contrast, although Phroso comforts Venus at the beginning of the film after she leaves Hercules, Phroso does not make any advances toward her until halfway through the film. After he kisses her, Venus says, “That’s the first time you’ve ever done that,” to which Phroso replies, “It ain’t the first time I felt like doing it.” Phroso clearly has the same impulses as Hercules, but keeps them in check, rather than let them dictate his actions, as Hercules does. While Rosenthal and Dellmann may infer from this dichotomy that Phroso’s lack of aggression must be due to impotence because he has no other evident disability or anomaly, this inference itself perpetuates the assumption that the film itself—in its portrayal of Hercules— seems to question as dangerous and unsympathetic, namely, the desirability of the traits of traditional hegemonic masculinity which he possesses and flaunts. (In the original draft of the screenplay, Hercules was meant to appear in the ending frame segment, having been castrated, rather than killed, by the freaks, but studio executives at MGM required Browning to change the film’s ending.97) In comparison, Phroso, the most positively-portrayed male character, is easygoing, kind, and respectful to others, though still assertive when, for example, Venus makes disparaging generalizations about men. (This also serves to differentiate him from Hans, whose pleas against Cleopatra’s mistreatment of him have little effect). In this, the film promotes the opposite message of Robbins’s story, in which Courbé far more resembles Hercules than Hans, in that he achieves a position of dominance and gains revenge on those who have wronged him through violence, abuse, and murder. (This reversal of the story’s moral may not be surprising,

97

Adams, Sideshow U.S.A., 74.

43 given Browning’s tendency to make films with protagonists who are disabled, freakish, or otherwise experience an existence as outsiders.98) That is not to say, however, that Phroso is exempt from the blurring of gender distinctions that affects a number of the characters in Freaks. The name Phroso is a diminutive of Euphrosyne, one of the Three Graces of Greek mythology.99 Whether the use of a traditionally feminine name100 for a male character was intentional on Browning’s part is unknown, although his 1928 film West of Zanzibar also features a male character named Phroso, who is a freak performer. This is just one example of the way that the carnival setting in Freaks overturns gender conventions: Adams writes that “Browning’s contradictory film celebrates the freak show as a vibrant, antihierarchical arena of sexual and social multiplicity, while condemning its potential for exploitation.”101 Dellmann also explores the confusion of gender in the film, explaining that in some interpretations “Freaks bringe langsam die Grenzen zum Schwinden und lasse dadurch jegliche Klarheit verlieren—sowohl auf der Ebene der Gattung (Monster/Mensch), als auch auf der Ebene des Geschlechts (männlich/weiblich)….Die Geschlechterordnung wird in Freaks zu einer Geschlechterunordnung: Die bärtige Frau ist eine Verkehrung von Geschlecht und Attribut, Roscoe tritt im Zirkus als römische Frau auf, als er sein Kleid ablegt, zieht er vor seinem Wagen den BH aus...Joseph/Josephine als Hermaphrodit/in ist gleich beide Geschlechter 98

This description applies to several of Browning’s films which feature Lon Chaney as a protagonist. In The Unholy Three (1925) (also written by Robbins), Chaney plays a ventriloquist who leaves the circus sideshow with the strongman and a dwarf (Harry Earles) in order to commit more profitable acts of fraud while posing as a family, with Earles passing himself off as a toddler and Chaney masquerading as his elderly grandmother. In The Blackbird (1926), Chaney appears as a criminal who feigns disability to disguise himself, and eventually actually becomes disabled in an accident. The Unknown (1927) takes place in a circus, where Chaney is a gaffed freak who pretends to lack arms in order to hide an extra thumb on one hand. Eventually he has his arms amputated to avoid being identified as the murderer of the circus owner through this distinguishing characteristic. His character Phroso in West of Zanzibar (1928) is a magician and vaudeville performer who loses the use of his legs from injuries sustained in a fight, later retreating from Western society to live in a small African village. 99 Edith Hamilton, Mythology, (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1942) 39. 100 The name Euphrosyne, along with the diminutive Phroso, was used for a female character as late as 1897 in the novel Phroso by Anthony Hope. 101 Adams, Sideshow U.S.A., 17-18.

44 in einem und dadurch weder noch.”102 The freaks include Josephine-Joseph, whose “‘freakishness’ besteht in der Irritation eindeutiger Geschlechtsidentität,”103as well as Olga Roderick, a bearded lady, and Schlitzie, a performer with microcephaly who provides a real-life example of such confusion: although Schlitzie was actually male, he often wore a dress and was at times mistaken for a woman104 (likely because he was sometimes presented by showmen under names such as “The Monkey Girl” 105 and “Maggie, the Last of the Aztecs”106) and in fact is referred to with female pronouns in Freaks. In the film, Cleopatra, too, is repeatedly referred to with the title “Peacock of the Air” for her beauty, although the peacock is, of course, the male bird, far more colorful and flashy than the peahen, underscoring Cleopatra’s immodesty and aggressive behavior. She is the aggressor in her relationship with Hans, and her exploitation of his sexual attraction to her is clearly conveyed in a scene in which she visits his trailer, the opening shot of which is a close-up of Hans stirring a drink while Cleopatra holds the cup and exhorts, “Yes! Yes! Don’t waste any of it!”107 (only one of several appearances of Freudian themes that critics have seen in the film108). Phroso’s name also seems unsuitable to the character for other reasons, and the same can be said of the names of the other three major non-freak characters, despite the likelihood that they adopted these names to fit their stage personas. The four major “normal” characters, whether portrayed positively or negatively, all have names with mythological or historical

102

Dellmann, Widerspenstige Körper, 47-48. Fiedler, Freaks, 41. 104 Even Robert Bogdan, writing in 1988, incorrectly refers to Schlitzie as female. Bogdan, Freak Show, 134. 105 See Marc Hartzman, American Sideshow: An Encyclopedia of History’s Most Wondrous and Curiously Strange Performers (New York: Penguin, 2005), 210-211. 106 Bogdan, Freak Show, 134. 107 Freaks. 108 See Adams, Sideshow U.S.A., 78-80. 103

45 associations, all of which seem particularly unfitting.109 While the mythological Euphrosyne is the goddess of joy or mirth, Phroso himself appears to be a sad clown, based on his style of makeup at the beginning of the film. Venus is by no means in control of her love life: at the beginning of the film, she is in an unhealthy relationship with Hercules, and when she leaves him, she expresses her fear that she is not attractive enough to find a new love interest. While Cleopatra is conventionally attractive, she is neither noble nor intelligent, but rather greedy and conniving, and her attempts to gain power through her good looks and her relationships with men are ultimately unsuccessful. Neither is she the passive foil to masculine strength; she pursues an affair with Hercules and, after learning of Hans’s wealth, decides to actively encourage him rather than merely accepting his extravagant gifts. Her treatment of him at their wedding approaches physical abuse, and her reasons for marrying him, as well as her plot to murder him, are transparent in the extreme. Her relationship with Hercules fails to protect her from the freaks’ vigilante justice. Though the reasons behind the strongman’s name are obvious, he is not courageous and heroic like the mythical Hercules, but rather a bully who uses his strength to prey upon others: in the course of the film he is shown abusing women and disabled persons. Misleading character names are just one example of the way language is used to highlight ambiguity within the film. In comparison to the normals who perform novelty acts and use names of mythological origin, nearly all of the freak characters are given the same names under which they performed in real life, and, Fiedler writes, “[s]omewhere between such side show performers playing themselves and the featured actors playing fictional roles come Harry Earles … and his sister Daisy.”110 Interestingly, these two German-born performers had decidedly

109 110

Dellmann, Widerspenstige Körper, 46. Fiedler, Freaks, 292.

46 American-sounding real-life names, while the film re-christens them with the thoroughly Germanic names Hans and Frieda. In other instances, language itself is used both by characters and by the filmmakers as a means of confusing the narrative and (potentially) denying the audience information, as well as distorting perception. For instance, Hans remarks that Cleopatra is “the most beautiful big woman I have ever seen.”111 Cleopatra is, of course, “big” in comparison to Hans and Frieda, but not in comparison to persons falling into a more typical height range. Hans’s statement reveals that he perceives himself as normal and other people as oversized (a motif that is repeated when Cleopatra visits his scaled-down trailer and appears much too large for the space), illustrating Fiedler’s observation that “[w]e do not ever, of course, experience the size of others—even in the normal range—in terms of meters or inches, but only relative to our own size, so that inevitably we exaggerate one way or the other.”112 The words chosen by the characters reflect not only their differing perceptions of themselves in relation to their physical environment, but also, in at least one case, a means of overcoming a form of freakishness. One of the circus performers, Roscoe, has a speech impediment which he circumvents at times by replacing a word he has difficulty saying with another that is less accurate. In one instance, he keeps stammering while trying to say the word “excuse,” and substitutes “alibi,” even though the latter does not particularly fit the context. It is almost as if the peculiarities of Roscoe’s speech point out that the language used in the circus world and the film cannot necessarily be trusted, and the statements made are not

111 112

Freaks. Fiedler, Freaks, 103.

47 incontrovertible—Madame Tetrallini, for example, insists that the freaks are harmless, but their pursuit of Cleopatra with knives and razors at the film’s climax belies her claim. On multiple occasions, Frieda and Hans speak German without any use of subtitles—in fact, they are the first characters to speak in the main segment of the film, first commenting on Cleopatra in German before switching into English to continue their discussion. Throughout the film, both of them occasionally lapse into German or use German words mixed with English, and when Hans loses his temper as he overhears some of the men making lewd remarks about Cleopatra, he shouts and curses at them in German. The lack of subtitles is a means of withholding information from the viewer and potentially distorting meaning by leaving the audience to guess by context what is being said. In addition to this, the two characters speak heavily accented, rather stilted English, often using German syntax (improperly) in English, while the foreignness of some of the normals is never emphasized or even acknowledged beyond the fact that they speak with accents: Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova) has a strong Russian accent, while Hercules (Henry Victor) is also German, but they both speak fairly idiomatic English. The exaggeratedly unconventional English of the diminutive Frieda and Hans serves not only to exoticize them, but also to infantilize them, with their speech reminiscent of children who have not yet mastered the language. Infantilization of freaks is a theme that is made explicit throughout the film, as when Madame Tetrallini, the caregiver of some of the freaks, pleads with the owner of the property they have wandered onto not to drive them away, telling him, “I like to take them into the sunshine and let them play like children—for that is what most of them are,”113—though the

113

Freaks.

48 events of the film later contradict this problematic assertion. Even the (somewhat) hopeful future implied by the epilogue is brought about by Venus and Phroso, the “good” normals, acting as parent figures and facilitating the reunion between Frieda and Hans. Their depiction as parental substitutes is made obvious by Venus ushering a reluctant Frieda into the room and by the indulgent smile the two share at the end before they tiptoe off-screen to allow the other couple a moment of privacy—a reaction that views them as cute rather than emotionally traumatized. Hans is similarly treated like a child by Cleopatra and Hercules, particularly during the wedding banquet, where Cleopatra, indignant at being proclaimed “one of us” by the other freaks, orders them away and demands of Hans: “Well, what are you going to do? What are you, a man, or a baby?”114 As the other freaks file away, Cleopatra and Hercules continue to derisively refer to Hans as a baby, stating that Cleopatra is his “Mama” who has to carry him home, and placing Hans on her shoulders as she drunkenly dances about and he covers his face in shame. Afterwards, Hercules bullies Hans into agreeing that they were “having a little fun.”115 When Hans, by now visibly ill from the poison he has ingested, states that he blames only himself, Hercules slaps him on the back and says in approval, “Now you’re talking—talking like a man!” thus insinuating, first, that in his view, one is only a “real man” if one takes responsibility for one’s failings (an expectation which Hercules himself does not fulfill). Second, Hercules’s statement indicates that, in his opinion, Hans truly is to blame for the situation, and if he were to protest otherwise, he would only add to the emasculation he has already experienced from Cleopatra’s public flirtation with Hercules at the wedding banquet, Hercules taking on the role of Cleopatra’s defender when Hans will not send the other freaks away, and, of course, being unable to defend himself physically from their ill-treatment. Hans’s humiliation is 114 115

Ibid. Ibid.

49 compounded by Frieda looking on in pity as his new wife ridicules him, and eventually leaving the table to avoid seeing any more of their behavior. In the epilogue, Hans kneels with his head in Frieda’s lap as she strokes his hair, placing him once again in a childlike position, this time in relation to a woman who is also a freak, symbolizing his complete loss of power. Is the position of powerlessness in which Hans lets himself be placed at the end of the film really a manifestation of his plight as a freak, a symbol of his failed masculinity, or does he voluntarily relinquish his power as an attempt to absolve his guilt for his complicity in Cleopatra’s mutilation? The epilogue’s setting in Hans’s mansion makes a case for the latter option. It is the only scene which does not take place in a circus or sideshow setting, and an indeterminate amount of time has elapsed between the ending of the main narrative and the frame story (and there is also no reason to assume that the epilogue takes place at the same time as or immediately following the second frame segment). The altered setting of the epilogue as well as its placement within the narrative structure of the film make it appear oddly disjointed from the narrative flow and provide it with temporal and spatial distance from the story’s previous events. This feeling of displacement reflects Hans’s attempts to distance himself from his life with the circus and the other freaks—and from his complicity in their attack on Cleopatra through his self-imposed isolation. From the information provided, the viewer is able to piece together that Hans orchestrated the freaks’ attack on Cleopatra, though he neither participated nor intended it to be carried so far. Frieda reassures him, “But Hans, you tried to stop them. It was only the bracelet you wanted. It wasn’t your fault,” ostensibly referring to the valuable jewelry Hans had given Cleopatra earlier in the film. Regardless of Hans’s intentions, the fact remains that he is the

50 instigator of the attack, raising the question: to what extent can he be held accountable for the other freaks’ actions? Hans appears to be mentally fully competent, unlike some of the other freaks who participated in his plan, such as those with microcephaly, a condition accompanied by (often severe) mental retardation. While Hans arguably has a greater capacity than some of his colleagues to understand the magnitude of the atrocities committed, he does not carry them out himself. Rather, he induces others, some of whom certainly cannot be held responsible for their actions, to act on his behalf, without taking into consideration the possibility that he cannot be certain that the others will act as he has directed (whether they are developmentally disabled or not). Viewed in this light, Hans is exploiting some (though not all) of the other freaks, which places him in a position that is hardly morally superior to Cleopatra and Hercules. On the other hand, the actual events in question are not explicitly shown, and, the sideshow talker reminds the audience (albeit somewhat unconvincingly) that no one knows what really happened, leaving open the possibility of the freaks’ innocence. In “Spurs,” Jacques Courbé has no camaraderie with the other freaks, and is eager to leave them and the circus behind.116 He does not work with them to overcome his opponents, instead acting alone to kill Lafleur—or at least acting without human aid. His dog, St. Eustache, is initially both Courbé’s companion and his protection, but comes to be used by his owner as a weapon without which Courbé would never be able to terrorize his wife and overpower Lafleur. In this way, he is retaining power through an intermediary, just as Hans does in Freaks in an even more obvious manner—he is not even a part of the group that attacks Cleopatra, because he has been incapacitated by her poisoning attempts. (Similarly, in both “Spurs” and Freaks, the only use of weapons is by the freaks against the normals; when they mistreat the freaks, their size 116

See Robbins, “Spurs,” 161-163.

51 and able-bodiedness are sufficient to give them an advantage, and when the normals fight among themselves, they are on relatively equal terms.) Adams writes of the film’s altered plot: “[t]he effect of this shift is to highlight the fearful collective power of the freaks, but also to diminish Hans’s capacity for avenging his own wounded pride.”117 The use of a group rather than an individual avenging himself reflects the solidarity that came from the institution of the sideshow, the freaks joining together to protect themselves and “work[ing] together to react to a threat to one of their ranks,”118 but it also serves to further incapacitate Hans by portraying him as too weak to participate himself. While Freaks portrays Hans as lacking the in qualities that define an adult male due to his powerlessness (both physically and in his interactions with others), the film at the same time questions aspects of traditional images of masculinity, such as physical strength and aggressive romantic conquest, suggesting instead that a more positive (and less brutish) image of masculinity can be assembled from internal traits, as illustrated with Phroso. He displays responsibility for his own actions as well as concern for the welfare of others who are less fortunate (in this case, the freaks), rather than using their disabilities to his own advantage. In this way, Phroso represents a more humanistic view in comparison to Hercules, who acts to needlessly demean and infantilize the freaks in order to further assert his (in his view) superiority over them. In this way, Freaks suggests that a traditional view of hegemonic masculinity, as represented by Hercules, is no longer the ideal in a modern (Western) society, and that the concept of masculinity need not be tied to the body itself. Freaks, too, can embody masculinity, 117 118

Adams, Sideshow U.S.A., 81. Chivers, “The Horror of Becoming ‘One of Us,’” 60.

52 and Hans’s failure is not because of his size, but because of his behavior—his refusal to own up to his deception and his acts which have harmed others. Hercules, at least, has the characteristics of traditional masculinity, but Hans seems to have no traits in his favor, either physical or behavioral. This new image of masculinity brings with it a new image of freakishness as well, one which need not be rooted in the appearance of the freak, but rather in his actions. The type of freakishness that comes from behavior, rather than from a physical anomaly, specifically from the utter rejection of personal responsibility, makes the freak of the next work, Nightmare Alley, a figure truly reviled by both audiences and by other freaks.

53 CHAPTER III. NIGHTMARE ALLEY Nightmare Alley, published in 1946, was the first novel of the American author William Lindsay Gresham. The novel, which incorporates elements of vaudeville, fortunetelling, religion, and psychoanalysis, was inspired by stories of carnival life told to Gresham by a fellow volunteer soldier during the Spanish Civil War, and by Gresham’s reported childhood fascination with the Coney Island sideshow.119 Gresham wrote only one other novel and a few works of non-fiction, none of which achieved the success of Nightmare Alley, which was adapted to film in 1947 by director Edmund Goulding. Much of the novel’s contents had to be revised or eliminated from the film due to its incompatibility with content standards enforced by the film industry (in the form of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, later the Motion Picture Association of America) at the time, according to Matthew Kennedy’s biography of Goulding: “There was so much material that appeared unfilmable by Production Code limitations.”120 Because Fox executive Daryl F. Zanuck doubted the film’s ability to draw in audiences, it received limited studio promotion and ran for only two weeks, to mixed critical reception.121 William Lindsay Gresham, after a series of personal difficulties including divorce and his own struggles with mental health and alcoholism, committed suicide in 1962 after being diagnosed with cancer.122

119

Nick Tosches, introduction to Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham (1946; reprint, New York: New York Review of Books, 2010), vii-viii. 120 Matthew Kennedy, Edmund Goulding’s Dark Victory (Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 242. 121 Ibid., 251-252. 122 Charles Taylor, “A Wink and a Con,” Nation 291, no. 14 (October 4, 2010): 27. Tosches, introduction to Nightmare Alley, xii. Massimo Polidoro, “Blind Alley: The Sad and ‘Geeky’ Life of William Lindsay Gresham,” The Skeptical Inquirer 27, no. 4 (July/August 2003): 17.

54 Nightmare Alley opens with the ambitious young carnival magician Stanton Carlisle finding himself simultaneously repulsed and fascinated as he watches the geek show, a “Wild Man” act who bites the heads off live chickens. A short time later, Stan begins an affair with Zeena, a phony psychic, although she is still married to Pete, who was once a successful mentalist but is now an alcoholic who assists behind the scenes in Zeena’s act. Stan accidentally causes Pete’s death, and, fearing a murder charge, covers up his own involvement. Soon after, he induces Zeena to share with him the code that Pete developed for the two-person mind-reading act that he and Zeena used to perform, persuading her that the two of them could revive the act. Once he has learned the code, however, Stan leaves the circus with the younger, more attractive Molly Cahill, an orphaned teenager who performs as “Mademoiselle Electra,” a novelty act. 123 Their psychic act evolves from nightclub shows to private séances, and eventually Stan founds a Spiritualist church. Despite his improved financial and social position, Stan remains unsatisfied and convinced that he can climb still higher, while Molly expresses increasing misgiving with the ethical implications of their actions and becomes ever more reluctant to participate. Suffering from insomnia and stress, Stan becomes a patient of Dr. Lilith Ritter, an unscrupulous psychiatrist who joins forces with him to exploit one of her elderly patients, the wealthy industrialist Ezra Grindle. At first, Grindle remains skeptical, but is convinced by Stan’s falsified psychic phenomena and his seemingly impossible knowledge of Grindle’s past, and gives a large donation to the church. When a faked apparition of Grindle’s long-dead sweetheart (played by Molly) goes wrong, Stan abandons Molly and attempts to abscond with the money, only to find that he’s been double-crossed by Lilith. Stan goes on the run, imagining himself pursued by the police, while his drinking problem and mental instability become increasingly severe. In

123

William Lindsay Gresham, Nightmare Alley (1946; reprint, New York: New York Review of Books, 2010), 18.

55 desperation, Stan seeks out work at a carnival, and the owner agrees to give him a chance—as the sideshow’s new geek.124 The ending of Goulding’s film adaptation, however, is not quite so bleak: “In [screenwriter Jules] Furthman’s first screenplay draft, Molly divorced Stan and married circus strongman Bruno while Stan ended up a geek. The Production Code Administration insisted this resolution be softened.”125 (In the novel’s ending, Molly marries a man who has children with her, and who, like her beloved father, is Irish-American and a gambler.) In the final version of the film, Molly and Stan both return separately to the same carnival at which they originally worked, and are reunited after Stan’s violent emotional breakdown at his new circumstances alerts Molly to his presence. She promises, “Everything’s gonna be all right now. I’ll look after you,”126 indicating their transformation from the young, hopeful couple earlier in the film to “a mirror reflection of Pete and Zeena at the beginning—the loyal wife who saves her boozing, failed husband from absolute madness,”127 an ending which, the film implies, is a more merciful fate for Stan than life as a geek would have been. This was just one of the numerous changes made to the film, since other “[k]ey plot points were also taboo.”128 In the novel, for example, Stan and Molly never married, but in the film, Bruno forces Stan to marry Molly on the spot after realizing that Stan has seduced her. The marriage necessitated a change in the portrayal of the relationship between Stan and Lilith in order to avoid violating the Production Code standard that “The sanctity of the institution of marriage and the home shall be upheld … Adultery and

124

This ending parallels that of Der blaue Engel, the 1930 film adaptation of Heinrich Mann’s novel Professor Unrat, in which a man who has attained social respectability is ruined through an unwise relationship with a dangerous woman, and is eventually reduced to a humiliating entertainment career in a venue he once despised. 125 Kennedy, Dark Victory, 249. 126 Nightmare Alley, DVD, directed by Edmund Goulding (1947: Los Angeles, CA, 2005). 127 Kennedy, Dark Victory, 247. 128 Ibid., 243.

56 Illicit Sex, sometimes necessary plot material, must not be explicitly treated, or justified, or presented attractively.”129 While Stan and Lilith are romantically involved in the novel, the film makes no reference to this, depicting them instead as merely co-conspirators in the exploitation of Lilith’s patients. For the same reason, Zeena only becomes involved with Stan after Pete’s death, and shares the psychic code with Stan before her husband’s death (though against Pete’s express wishes) in order to make money to “put him in a cure”130 (that is, to place Pete in rehabilitation treatment for his alcoholism), demonstrating her loyalty as his wife. The film also includes a discussion between Stan and Molly in which it is explicitly stated that Stan is neither a minister nor making reference to any particular faith in his pretense of communicating with the spirits of the dead, though this is certainly not the case in the novel—again satisfying the Production Code’s requirement that “No film or episode may throw ridicule on any religious faith” and “Ministers of religion in their character as ministers of religion should not be used as comic characters or as villains,”131 the latter of which undeniably describes Stan. The revision of essential plot elements is not the only alteration that took place. Major changes were also made to the characters themselves: In the film, Stan states that he grew up in an orphanage, while in the novel, he is deeply affected by his troubled relationship with his parents. Molly is no longer a naïve teenager with a fear of men, but older and more aggressive, expressing resentment at Bruno’s attempts to interfere with her love life. Grindle, too, becomes a man lonely in his old age rather than one wracked with guilt over the death of his college girlfriend from an illegal abortion.132 These changes from the source material necessarily alter

129

“Appendix: ‘The Production Code’” in Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen & the Production Code Administration by Thomas Doherty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 352. 130 Nightmare Alley. 131 Doherty, Hollywood’s Censor, 354.

57 the way in which masculinity and freakishness are portrayed in the film in other ways. In the film, Stan is effectively rescued from unwillingly becoming a made freak by the love of his wife, while in the novel, he becomes a freak through the actions that drive away even Molly, who is far more helpless and submissive than in the film’s portrayal of her character. Similarly, in the novel, Stan holds deeply misogynistic beliefs about women, but because much of the related content would have violated the Production Code with its mentions of prostitution, adultery, promiscuity, sexually transmitted diseases, and incest, his attitude in the film is strongly toned down. Despite all these alterations, at least one part of the story, the geek, “surviv[ed] the script, the production, even the publicity, by achieving a pitch of horror which the new medium [cinema] had seemed for a while too slick and conventional to portray.”133 Even so, while the geek in the novel is described in detail by Stan (“a thin man who wore a suit of long underwear dyed chocolate brown. The wig was black and looked like a mop, and the brown greasepaint on the emaciated face was streaked and smeared with the heat and rubbed off around the mouth.”134), the geek in the film never confronts the audience directly, but rather stays in the distance, “a shadowy figure, seen only in nighttime long shots shrieking from alcohol withdrawal.”135 His image on the show’s advertising banner is visible in the background of some scenes, and his implied presence lends them an ominous air, an uneasy reminder of the possibility of sinking to his position. The appalling nature of the geek’s act overshadows the freakishness of the other sideshow performers, although these include Major Mosquito, a dwarf; Bruno, who performs as 133

Fiedler, Freaks, 287. Gresham, Nightmare Alley, 3. 135 Kennedy, Dark Victory, 247. 134

58 “Herculo,” the strongman; Sailor Martin, a heavily-tattooed man; and Joe Plasky, the “Half-man Acrobat” with malformed legs, who later marries the widowed Zeena and becomes a farmer. Though some of them have unpleasant personalities, they all seem more or less “normal” in comparison to the geek, who is the real focus of freakishness in both versions of Nightmare Alley. Fiedler explains the history of this attraction: “The title ‘Geek’ was originally given to any side show ‘Wild Man’ presented in a cage with snakes; while those who chewed and swallowed down living animals were known as ‘glomming Geeks’. But ‘Geek’ alone has finally come to describe them all.”136 A geek was typically presented as a subhuman creature, “an island castaway [or] a feral child”137 whose natural inclination was to eat live chickens or snakes138. While the stars of such acts sometimes did actually consume live animals before an audience, their provenance was falsified: “Nowhere is it suggested that some human beings enter on such a career because they crave warm blood and the savor of still-living flesh,”139 Fiedler writes, explaining that “even the most genuine Geeks are fakes, turned by their billing, the banners above their heads, and the announcer’s spiel into living metaphors for a nonexistent species that straddles the line between us and our animal brothers.”140 Their true origin, though, is even uglier: Typically a geek was “some hopeless vagrant, a down-and-out black or a luckless white wino in quest of a warm bed or a few bucks,”141 “an alcoholic or drug addict who was out of his head all the time,”142 a person “driven to the black abyss of debasement by alcoholism or the accident of being born black, deformed, and not very bright.”143 Often the enticement to the job

136

Fiedler, Freaks, 162. Ibid. 138 Kennedy, Dark Victory, 242. 139 Fiedler, Freaks, 344-345. 140 Ibid., 163. 141 Ibid., 162. 142 Polidoro, “Blind Alley,” 14. 143 Fiedler, Freaks, 344-345. 137

59 was only an exploitation of the reluctant performer’s addiction or misfortune, since geeks were “paid with a place to sleep and all the liquor they could drink,”144 effectively making them entirely dependent upon their employers. Although Nightmare Alley does not have the same type of formal frame narrative that is found in the other three texts, the novel has a bookended structure (one which is present but less striking in the film as a result of the altered ending), beginning and ending with the carnival’s geek show. Gresham himself considered the motif of the geek a framing device, stating: “the story of the geek haunted me. Finally, to get rid of it, I had to write it out. The novel, of which it was the frame, seemed to horrify readers as much as the original story had horrified me.”145 Stan’s question to the sideshow talker in the first chapter, “How do you ever get a guy to geek?”146 is answered, after some initial evasion, by the talker, Hoately: “You want to know where geeks come from. Well, listen—you don't find ’em. You make ’em.” He let this sink in, but Stanton Carlisle never moved a muscle. “Okay. But how?” Hoately grabbed the youth by the shirt front and drew him nearer. “Listen, kid. Do I have to draw you a damn blueprint? You pick up a guy and he ain’t a geek—he's a drunk. A bottle-a-day booze fool. So you tell him like this: ‘I got a little job for you. It’s a temporary job. We got to get a new geek. So until we do 144

Kennedy, Dark Victory, 242. Tosches, introduction to Nightmare Alley, vii-viii. This introduction to the 2010 reprint of Nightmare Alley contains a more in-depth history of Gresham’s friendship with a former carnival worker whose anecdotes inspired Gresham to write Nightmare Alley. 146 Gresham, Nightmare Alley, 6. 145

60 you’ll put on the geek outfit and fake it.’ You tell him, ‘You don’t have to do nothing. You’ll have a razor blade in your hand and when you pick up the chicken you give it a nick with the blade and then make like you’re drinking the blood. Same with rats. The marks don’t know no different.’” Hoately ran his eye up and down the midway, sizing up the crowd. He turned back to Stan. “Well, he does this for a week and you see to it that he gets his bottle regular and a place to sleep it off in. He likes this fine. This is what he thinks is heaven. So after a week you say to him like this, you say, ‘Well, I got to get me a real geek. You’re through.’ He scares up at this because nothing scares a real rummy like the chance of a dry spell and getting the horrors. He says, ‘What’s the matter? Ain’t I doing okay?’ So you say, ‘Like crap you’re doing okay. You can’t draw no crowd faking a geek. Turn in your outfit. You’re through.’ Then you walk away. He comes following you, begging for another chance and you say, ‘Okay, but after tonight out you go.’ But you give him his bottle. “That night you drag out the lecture and lay it on thick. All the while you’re talking he’s thinking about sobering up and getting the crawling shakes. You give him time to think it over, while you’re talking. Then throw in the chicken. He’ll geek.”147

147

Ibid., 7.

61 This process, described as “deliberate sadism” by one of the novel’s reviewers,148 is repeated at the end of the novel, this time between a different carnival owner and the now-alcoholic Stan. Though the novel ends with the owner’s offer of a job, concluding with the casual disclaimer: “Of course, it’s only temporary—just until we get a real geek,”149 the reader is left with little doubt that Stan will accept, and because of Hoately’s grim description, little doubt what this means—by the end of the story, Stan has become the ideal candidate for the position. In contrast to the type of freakishness portrayed in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Freaks, the freakishness of the geeks in Nightmare Alley is not the cause of their unreliability as narrators, nor does it hinder their ability to embody an idea of masculinity. Rather, the process has become reversed here. Stan’s (and Pete’s) transformation to freakishness is brought about by their failure to fulfill their roles as men—or their own ideas of what constitutes this role—and as a result they are driven to behavior that deprives them of their rationality and coincides with the emergence of traits that make Stan’s perception, and therefore, his account of events unreliable, ultimately leaving him with no other option than to become a geek. The lack of connection between freakishness and the “extraordinary body” in Nightmare Alley is made evident in the character of Joe Plasky, who appears in the sideshow at the beginning as a “Half-man” whose legs are paralyzed and deformed due to polio. By the end of the novel, he has married Zeena and become a farmer, and the two also run a mail-order business selling horoscopes, while Stan, who is able-bodied with no physical anomalies, becomes a geek. That is to say, the disabled man leaves the carnival, succeeds in business, and is happily married to a “normal” woman, while the non-disabled Stan has destroyed himself along with his 148 149

Taylor, “A Wink and a Con,” 28. Gresham, Nightmare Alley, 275.

62 livelihood and his relationships due to his behavior, and becomes so unstable that he has nowhere to turn besides the carnival. This points to a continuation of the concept of masculinity seen in Freaks, in which masculinity is tied not to the body but to one’s personal and behavioral characteristics. Any attempt to pinpoint the exact moment at which Stan’s perceptions can no longer be considered in line with external reality leads to the realization that Stan’s outlook is slightly skewed even from the beginning. He begins with a hostile, misanthropic worldview which does not initially appear any different from the attitudes of most of the other carnival workers, who openly lie to, swindle, and take advantage of others, “lust and larceny in the heart of every one of them,”150 according to Fiedler—or at least most of them. The novel’s narration does not attach itself solely to Stan’s point of view, but switches at times to other characters, both major and minor, though typically only for short periods of time, and reveals many of them to be just as hostile, predatory, and hypocritical as Stan. (The brief glimpse provided into the thoughts of Major Mosquito, for example, reveals a bitterness and a barely contained homicidal rage reminiscent of Robbins’s characterization of Courbé in Spurs, as well as the character Tweedledee, a dwarf sideshow performer in The Unholy Three151.) Stan views others as naïve, foolish, and easily exploitable, and prides himself on his ability to do a cold reading, that is, to give a convincing performance of psychic ability to a person about whom he actually knows nothing. He wins the admiration of the other carnival workers by successfully performing a cold reading on a sheriff who is trying to shut down the carnival, eventually winning his sympathy. Rather than simply wanting to save the other 150 151

Fiedler, Freaks, 286. C.A. Robbins, The Unholy Three (New York: John Lane Company, 1917).

63 performers from arrest, though, Stan is actively contemptuous toward the sheriff, and afterwards cynically observes to himself: “The world is mine! I’ve got ‘em across the barrel and I can shake them loose from whatever I want. The geek has his whisky. The rest of them drink something else: they drink promises. They drink hope.”152 Stan’s attempts to deny the existence of hope as a naïve delusion reinforces his view of himself as a strong, capable, worldly man, unable to be deceived by false promises while deliberately delivering them to others. The positive reactions of the other characters to his success make it clear that Stan does indeed have reason to assume that every person he encounters thinks and behaves in just as self-serving and predatory a manner as he himself does. He makes no pretense to himself of viewing the people with whom he interacts as anything but potential sources of material or social benefit to him: “He approaches every human, from the carnival patrons to the women he beds, with an eye toward advancing himself.”153As the story progresses, taking place over a period of fifteen years, Stan meets with increasing success, but his attitude does not change, except perhaps to become even more selfserving. As Stan experiences increasing pressure to keep up with his own subterfuge, his belief that others are just as ruthless and vindictive as he is leads to paranoia and delusions of persecution, as well as other indications of mental instability: lack of control over his own behavior, disordered thoughts and speech, and acts of violence culminating in the murder of a police officer. The narration, when attached to Stan—that is, when it reveals or coincides with his internal monologue—starts off assuming the worst of everyone he encounters, and slips from there to fearing other characters’ malicious intentions (even when it is clear to the reader that none are actually present) and willfully misconstruing others’ statements and motivations in 152 153

Gresham, Nightmare Alley, 79-80. Taylor, “A Wink and a Con,” 28.

64 order to reinforce his own distrust and hatred of them. For example, midway through the novel, Stan thinks, “You can only trust yourself. There's a rat buried deep in everybody and they'll rat on you if they get pushed far enough. Every new face that showed up at the séances now seemed charged with suspicion and malice and sly knowledge. Could there be a cabal forming against him in the church?”154 The subtle transition between Stan’s interior monologue (indicated by the statements written in the second person) to free indirect discourse in the following sentences (still laden with ambiguity from their use of verbs of perception and phrasing as a question) makes it difficult for the reader to determine whether the narration consists entirely of Stan’s perceptions or not. Nevertheless, most readers can determine from dialogue, other characters’ reactions, social norms, and basic understanding of cause and effect that Stan’s thoughts are at times unrealistic and his behavior inappropriate. In the same chapter, Stan momentarily believes that a dog barking outside on the street is his childhood pet, and upon realizing that this is false, becomes so incensed that he begins destroying the contents of his office: Laughing, and strangling, Stan began to beat the projector against the floor; something snapped, and the light went out. He crawled to his feet and couldn’t find the door and stopped laughing then, feeling his way around and around. He counted nine corners. He began to shout and then he found it and let himself out, dripping with sweat. In his office the day was breaking gray through the Venetian blinds. The desk light wouldn’t come on and he seized it and jerked it out of the wall plug and tossed it into a corner. The blinds got tangled with the cord; he gathered them in

154

Gresham, Nightmare Alley, 154.

65 his arms and wrenched; the whole business came down on top of him and he fought his way free of them.155 Moments later, he flips through his disordered card index, convinced that someone “stole the R’s,” before he finds them, and takes it as a personal affront that a woman walking down the street, whom he is surreptitiously watching from his window, is not as scantily-clad as he would like.156 These events illustrate Stan’s increasing inability to control his anger, and his tendency to blame others both for his own emotions, and for events which have not even occurred— attributing the results of his own absentmindedness the malicious acts of others, despite priding himself on his own mental and emotional self-control. As in Caligari, the institution of psychiatry is present in Nightmare Alley, serving as a tool to be used against the protagonist by the characters who control it, and to diminish his credibility to the reader. (This negative portrayal of psychiatry, it is speculated, was influenced by Gresham’s own unhappy experiences with mental health practitioners.157) Rather than alleviating Stan’s distress, Lilith Ritter uses heavy-handed Freudian methods which only result in more emotional torment for Stan, as well as engaging in an affair with him and taking advantage of his psychological insecurities in the context of their relationship. Stan comes to believe the two of them are psychically connected via a “golden thread which carried the current of life into him”158 and through which she is literally able to control his actions. Eventually, when Stan’s scheme fails, Lilith denies any complicity, insisting that Stan is merely a delusional patient who has imagined both the affair and the conspiracy carried out by the two of them, and makes

155

Ibid., 154-157. Ibid. 157 Tosches, introduction to Nightmare Alley, ix. 158 Gresham, Nightmare Alley, 173. 156

66 arrangements for him to be hospitalized at the local psychiatric ward (much like the ending of Caligari). She is so convincing that Stan doubts his own sanity, but flees before the ambulance arrives. In the novel (though not in the film) a brief scene from Lilith’s point of view is the only evidence to contradict her claims and assure the reader that Stan’s relationship with Lilith was not merely his delusion. Eventually Stan believes himself pursued by detectives hired by Grindle. Initially, this is a realistic fear, since Grindle does employ private security agents and Stan has just defrauded him of a large amount of money, as well as assaulting him and, it is implied, inducing a stroke. 159 However, as time goes on, Stan remains convinced that Grindle’s men are on his trail, though Stan has become nearly unrecognizable, and the reader knows, as Stan does not, that Grindle has actually suppressed the entire matter out of embarrassment. Later, Stan meets a labor agitator pretending to be a fellow hobo who takes his disturbing behavior for a guilty conscience and invites him to unburden himself, to which Stan immediately reacts with suspicion, though the man had saved his life only moments before as he tried to board the train. At other times, Stan’s lack of control over his own behavior is even more noticeable and dangerous: He harms (and possibly rapes) a call girl; attempts to attack Lilith upon his first visit to her office; savagely beats (and possibly kills) another vagrant for kicking a stray dog; and makes a public spectacle of himself by going into an uncontrollable laughing fit while trying to sell horoscopes, frightening away his potential customers. Finally, he murders the policeman who arrests him during the final incident, attacking first in self-defense when the officer begins

159

After Grindle regains consciousness, his speech is slurred, and he cannot move one side of his body, stating that “Something’s the matter with one side of my face.” Ibid., 225-227.

67 to beat him, but continues applying a martial arts move he knows to be deadly even after he has incapacitated the policeman: The mountain on him wasn’t moving. It was resting. Stan got one foot free and rolled them both over so he was on top. The massive body was perfectly still. He tightened the choke still more, until his knuckles felt as if they would burst, and he began to tap the cop’s head against the cobbles. Rap. Rap. Rap. He liked the sound. Faster.160 In addition, Stan displays increasingly disordered speech patterns, at times finding himself making statements inappropriate to the context (such trying to put on a sermon for another vagrant, only for it to become an obscenity- and blasphemy-filled tirade depicting a bleak existence presided over by a malicious deity). His interior monologue eventually degenerates into total incoherence before the narrative point of view switches away from Stan and to the carnival owner for the novel’s final scene, by which point the reader must doubt the validity of all of Stan’s blurred perceptions. The last paragraph from Stan’s point of view mixes in memories of his childhood and his recent confrontation of his father for having beaten to death his dog, Gyp, concluding: I’ll slip them yet and work it in a Hindu outfit with dark makeup but there was one more drink the damn thieves somebody sneak in here and lap it up let me out of here got to get air oh Jesus the goddamned chairs are sliding back and forth back and forth and if I hold on tight to the carpet I won’t slide and hit the wall with his fist beating away on the mantelpiece she sits straight up on the edge of

160

Ibid., 261.

68 the sofa looking at herself in the glass sign in front of the church when they boarded up the attic door and his hands bunching up the tablecloth as I rammed it into him, Gyp. That fat bastard I hope I blinded him following the star that burns in his lantern head down from the living wood.161 Throughout the story, Stan’s judgments about other characters’ attitudes and motivations have been unreliable, but by the end, when his interior monologue becomes indistinguishable from, or perhaps overtakes, the more objective narration, one cannot even trust his reporting of events themselves. The persistence of Stan’s paranoia leads to his worsening alcoholism as he seeks a means of steadying his nerves. The alcoholism, while debilitating enough on its own, combines with Stan’s mental illness to make him almost completely incapable of functioning. It is this cycle which leads to his freakishness and his exploitation at the hands of others—and which in fact becomes his freakishness. He has reached a point where becoming a geek is the most attractive option available to him, the alternatives being imprisonment or execution for the murder he committed, or a life of vagrancy with intervals of “the horrors,” i.e., delirium tremens. This type of freakishness, the abject powerlessness of the geek, appears to be a possibility open only to men. (In fact, the only female characters in the sideshow are both novelty acts, rather than true freaks.) When the women in Nightmare Alley lack any means of supporting themselves, they can resort to the striptease act or the “crib house” (brothel), as Stan reminds Molly on numerous occasions. Women who became as disturbed as Stan does would end up as prostitutes, turning their bodies into a commodity. Stan finds himself in the same position, forced to turn his own body into a commodity, but he must prove himself worthy of attention by becoming a spectacle as shocking and grotesque as possible. Because he, like the other men of 161

Ibid., 273-274.

69 the novel, has the opportunity to attain a position of power which is not available to women (except at a great price, as exemplified by Lilith’s backstory), he falls a greater distance when losing his claim to this position and thus descends to such an extreme level of helplessness. As Taylor writes, “[t]he down-and-out dipsos carny managers sucker into working as geeks for the promise of a bottle and a better job are people caught at their most helpless.”162 This helplessness is the opposite of a socially-sanctioned performance of masculinity: a geek lacks even the most basic autonomy and self-control, not to mention the ability to adhere to the audience’s idea of respectable or even civilized behavior. Perhaps because he realizes this distinction, or because he feels that he himself has only a tenuous grasp on his position of authority, Stan particularly hates women in positions of power, whether it is merely power over him personally, or whether it is a broader social power equivalent to or approaching that of a man. In the former case, Stan feels strong resentment toward Mrs. Harrington, a wealthy woman who hires him and Molly to entertain at a private gathering, particularly after she sends him a note requesting, “Kindly do not mingle with the guests,”163 but he limits himself to privately making disparaging remarks. In an example of the latter case, Stan feels so disempowered upon his first meeting with Lilith Ritter (who, as a prominent and successful psychiatrist, wields both social and financial power that Stan lacks) that he attempts to physically attack her; however, she is also skilled enough in martial arts that she is able to immediately subdue him, despite her slight stature. Lilith is not, however, portrayed as a positive character, but rather one who is just as corrupt as Stan. She has merely gained power by learning to negotiate with men for it: it is revealed that she established her practice by sleeping with a judge, along with the (problematic) implication in the same passage 162 163

Taylor, “A Wink and a Con,” 27. Gresham, Nightmare Alley, 114.

70 that she has no reservations to using her body as a commodity after being sexually assaulted by a group of boys as a teenager,164 suggesting that she is no different from the other, less powerful female characters who have far less choice in the matter. Stan’s first visit to Lilith is preceded by an incident which illustrates the intensity of Stan’s misogyny: as increasing stress causes Stan’s mental state to deteriorate, he checks into a motel under an assumed name and hires a call girl, only to attack her after becoming enraged that she does not look sufficiently like his idea of a prostitute: “They used to look like whores. Now they look like college girls. Why don’t they go to college, then? They wouldn’t be any different from the others. You’d never notice them.”165 He believes that the prostitutes “wouldn’t be any different” because the other women attending college (and, in fact, most or all women) are sexually promiscuous or of negotiable affection, a sentiment that he repeats throughout the novel. Here again he willfully carries his negative assumptions about others to unreasonable lengths and does not consider the possibility that these assumptions are problematic, but rather shifts the blame onto the people to whom he applies them. In addition to women, Stan hates older men, especially those who remind him of his father and particularly older men with white stubble, which he repeatedly compares to “fungus on a dead man.”166 When Hoately, the carnival owner, reprimands him, “the call-down by the older man burnt into him. No woman or man his own age could drive the gall into his system like that.”167 This likely stems from the oedipal overtones of Stan’s childhood relationships with his

164

Ibid., 180. Ibid., 160. 166 Ibid., 74. 167 Ibid., 38. 165

71 parents, revealed through flashbacks and later explicitly thematized in Stan’s consultations with Lilith. In the flashbacks, the reader learns that Stan idealized his mother, going so far as to name his romantic fantasy companion after her, with a seemingly perfunctory statement differentiating the two: “He began to dream. He and Lady Cynthia rode through the forest. Cynthia was Mother's name, only Lady Cynthia was not like Mother except that she looked like her. She was just a beautiful lady on a while palfrey and the bridle was set with gems and jewels that winked in the dappled light through the branches.”168 At one point, he sneaks into his parents’ bedroom to sniff his mother’s pillowcase, and resents his father for upsetting his mother and starting arguments, often centered on his objections to her friendship with Mark Humphries, her voice teacher. Stan recalls a day that the family went on a picnic in the nearby woods: “Sudden anger rose up in him when he thought how his dad had had to spoil the day by having a fuss with Mother about something....She was smiling at the others the way she did when something was wrong. Stan had felt that delicious shudder go up between his shoulders.”169 She takes advantage of her son’s devotion to her by creating secrets between the two of them, which later causes more tension between Stan and his father, and progresses into Stan lying to his father to protect her. When the two wander into a clearing in the woods on the day of their picnic, “all of a sudden, as if she had felt the magic of the place, she had knelt and kissed him. He remembered the perfume she had on. She had held him off at arm's length and she was really smiling this time, as if at something deep inside herself, and she said, ‘Don't tell anybody. This place is a secret just between us.’”170 Later, Stan returns to the spot alone, only to find that it is a meeting 168

Ibid., 96. Ibid., 97. 170 Ibid., 97. 169

72 place for his mother and Humphries, who are in fact having an affair. The discovery is particularly traumatic for Stan, who happens upon them as they are engaged in intercourse, though they are unaware that he has seen them: He peered further over. Two people were lying on an Indian blanket and with a hot rush Stan knew that one was a man and the other was a woman and this was what men and women did secretly together that everybody stopped talking about when he came around, only some grownups never talked about it at all .... Stan’s fingers tightened on the grass hummock under his hand. Then he spun around, dragging Gyp by the collar, and stumbled, sliding and bumping, down the slope to the road. He ran with his breath scorching his throat, his eyes burning with tears. He ran all the way back and then went up in the attic and lay on the iron bed and tried to cry, but then he couldn’t.171 Later, Stan finds his mother’s handkerchief in the clearing and buries it, symbolizing the death of his love for her, though he still lies for her when the incident prompts another outburst from his father. In return, his mother buys him a magic kit, precipitating his entry into show business. Stan’s idealized image of his mother is destroyed and replaced, through her, by his learning of magic tricks, which he was originally taught by Humphries, and which eventually leads him to the carnival. Though Stan is only eleven at the time of this incident, it is his coming-of-age moment: “she wasn’t a grownup any more. Or he wasn’t a kid any more. There were no more grownups. They lied when they got scared, just like anybody. Everybody was alike only some

171

Ibid., 98.

73 were bigger.”172 With this disillusionment develops Stan’s hatred of women and his belief that they are all unfaithful and promiscuous. Lilith suggests that Stan wanted to emulate Humphries, or rather wished to actually become Humphries, his mother’s lover, though Stan himself insists that he only wanted to be taken along when the two ran away, leaving him with his abusive father, who beats Stan’s dog to death in rage over her desertion. Lilith questions Stan about his parents and points out his habit of smoothing his hair, which he explains as his “get-set”: “Every vaudeville actor has some business: something he does in the wings just before he goes on.” Lilith eventually elicits from Stan that he unconsciously picked up the gesture from Humphries, who had also been in show business, and whom Stan claims to hate. Lilith points out the ways in which Stan has imitated Humphries: “You ran away, didn’t you? You went into show business, didn’t you? And when you start your act, you run your hands over your hair, just like Humphries. He was a big, strong, attractive man, Humphries. I think you have become Humphries—in your mind …. I think you wanted your mother in the same way.”173 Lilith openly discusses the oedipal implications of Stan’s feelings toward his parents, though Stan reacts with rage and vehemently denies her assessment. In the first part of the novel, Stan is able to act out his oedipal fantasy with Zeena and Pete, though it is not immediately recognizable as such because the information about Stan’s childhood is not revealed until later in the story. Zeena easily fits the role of the mother-figure: she is an older woman174 who, in her act as a psychic, dispenses motherly advice and wisdom on personal matters. Additionally, she takes care of Pete, her drunken husband, giving him money 172

Ibid., 101. Ibid., 169. 174 Ibid., 25. 173

74 and imploring him to use it for food rather than liquor, and becomes a protector to Molly, offering to share hotel rooms with her, and warding off any unsuitable men who show an interest in her. Stan’s affair with Zeena is his first serious romantic relationship, and although Stan initiates the affair, he refers to himself as having been “seduced”175 by Zeena, thus playing a passive role. Perhaps this is why he blames Zeena for committing adultery, though he does not appear to feel any guilt or attach any blame to himself for his part in it, though it is a topic on which he has strong feelings due to the breakup of his parents’ marriage. Though at one point he blames his father for driving his mother away and to Humphries, Stan still maintains a double standard in his views of men and women committing acts of infidelity. When Stan eventually returns home to visit, he finds that his father has married Clara Carpenter, seemingly vindicating his mother’s accusations of an affair between the two, though the reader would initially assume these accusations to be Mrs. Carlisle’s attempt to deflect attention from her own affair with Humphries. Stan, however, does not feel the same resentment toward his father for this that he does toward his mother. (Though he does already hate his father for different reasons, adultery is not among them, while it is the major factor in his hatred of his mother.) When Stan overhears Zeena casually lie to Pete about why Stan is in the bathroom of their hotel suite, he is shocked: “She had never turned a hair, lying to Pete about him being in the bathtub. It comes natural in women, he thought. That's the way they all do when they have guts enough. That's the way they would all like to do. He found himself trembling.”176 Later, he voices the same sentiment when he reads Pete’s notes on his code act and finds records of the 175 176

Ibid., 33. Ibid., 34.

75 frequency with which each question is asked by audience members: “The question ‘Is my wife faithful?’ had only about a third the number of entries as the one about the husband. ‘The chumps,’ Stan whispered. ‘Either too bashful to ask or too dumb to suspect.’177 It seems at that point in the story as if he is leaping to a conclusion, generalizing from his bleak outlook on human nature. Only later does the reader realize that Stan’s hatred of women goes far deeper, and is influenced by his mother’s affair. Stan’s involvement with Zeena as a lover/mother-figure places Pete in the position of his romantic rival/father-figure: he is Zeena’s husband, clearly past his prime both mentally and physically, as indicated by his alcoholism and inability to care for himself. (In the film, Pete acknowledges that Zeena’s intervention is the only thing preventing him from becoming a geek, while in the novel, this is evident but never stated.) The rivalry ends with Stan causing Pete’s death through a deliberate attempt to temporarily debilitate him, though it remains ambiguous whether Stan actually intended to kill him or not. Stan feels resentment that he must compete against Pete for Zeena’s attention, and at the realization that Zeena is still loyal to Pete, if not faithful, when she states that she will continue to take care of him and must limit the time she spends with Stan. Stan pressures Zeena to meet with him again even as she is trying to help Pete sober up temporarily to conduct important business. When she does not acquiesce, Stan decides to derail her plan of keeping Pete’s alcohol hidden from him by providing him with liquor, but upon finding the bottle nearly empty, he replenishes it with what turns out to be the wood alcohol (methanol) that Zeena uses to burn fake questions onstage. Though Stan’s internal reaction seems to indicate that he did not wish to kill Pete, but merely to provide the means for him to become intoxicated enough that Zeena would spend time with Stan instead, the narrative does 177

Ibid., 63.

76 not specify exactly what he intended to do: “There was only an inch or two left in it [the bottle]. Stan turned back and crept up the steps of Zeena's theater. A few moments later he came down and squeezed into the understage compartment. The bottle, more than half full now, was in his hand. ‘How about a drink, Pete?’” In the film, it is shown unambiguously to be an accident— Stan has just purchased a bottle of moonshine from a peddler, and, not wishing to share with Pete, hides it in Zeena’s prop trunk. Shortly after, he takes pity on Pete’s pleas for a drink and absentmindedly hands over a bottle from the trunk, which appears identical to the first one, but is not. This, too, is presumably the screenwriter’s means of working around the Production Code’s stipulation that “CRIMES AGAINST THE LAW…shall never again be presented in such a way as to throw sympathy with the crime as against law,” including murder, and that “Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation,” that is to say, characters who commit deliberate murder must be punished.178 Stan feels resentment toward Pete in this scenario as the father-figure, an older man with whom he must compete for Zeena’s attention and affection, and he takes out this aggression by feeding Pete’s addiction and taking advantage of his evident weakness in order to incapacitate him, and (apparently unintentionally) killing him. While Lilith does not know about Zeena, she does tell Stan, when deliberately traumatizing him after Grindle’s discovery that “Dorrie” is actually Molly, that Stan views Molly as a mother-figure: “When you were a child you saw your mother having intercourse. Therefore tonight in hallucination you thought you saw Grindle, the father-image, in intercourse with your mistress—who has come to represent your mother.”179 Lilith’s statement is intended to further destabilize Stan so that she can have him committed, and, in fact, is false. If anything, the 178 179

Doherty, Hollywood’s Censor, 352. Gresham, Nightmare Alley, 233.

77 relationship between Stan and Molly is exactly the opposite of the way Lilith describes it. Molly is fixated on her deceased father, and fears other men ever since a stable boy attempted to sexually assault her when she was fifteen. After her father’s death (the cause of which is never stated, but implied to be murder at the hands of his gambling associates), she is taken in by her grandparents, though her grandfather makes her uncomfortable, having “a funny way of looking at her and several times he seemed about to get friendly and then he would chill up.”180 When she tries to win him over through affectionate behavior, he throws her out, and she gets a job in a dance/striptease act that is travelling with the carnival until Zeena finds her a position in the sideshow. Perhaps this is why Molly thinks nothing of the implications in wishing her father were in the audience of the sideshow, since it is comparatively more modest than her previous act: “Don't forget to smile; Dad always said that. Golly, I wish Dad was here. If I could only look out there and see him grinning up at me everything would be hunky dory. Time to drop the robe and give them an eyeful. Dad, honey, watch over me.”181 According to Kennedy, “In the book, the character of Molly was sexually abused by her father,” though, in fact, this is never explicitly stated and Kennedy, unfortunately, does not offer any details to explain his assertion.182 While Stan may not be aware of the extent to which Molly wishes to find someone just like her father, he does treat her as a child and behaves as an authority figure toward her, though there is only a five-year age difference between them (and Molly is only sixteen when the two become involved, though she appears to be older in the film, in which her age is never stated). His delight at having control over her is evident from the beginning of their relationship: Stan feigns doubt at Molly’s statement that she’s never been with another man: “‘Are you sure?’ Stan thrilled at his

180

Ibid., 17. Ibid., 11. 182 Kennedy, Dark Victory, 243. 181

78 power over her. He wanted to hear her voice with fear in it.”183 He doesn’t relinquish this power over her as time goes on, but rather finds reasons to berate her for her mistakes and naiveté, and for her difficulty adjusting to their switch to a more respectable career, admonishing her for wearing too much makeup and forbidding her to drink more than a single glass of champagne. Molly herself is childlike and repeatedly cries or expresses disappointment when Stan reprimands her or forbids her to do something. When she becomes less and less willing to participate in Stan’s increasingly fraudulent plans, he takes advantage of her emotional and financial dependence upon him, threatening more than once to throw her out. Since they are not married, she will have no means of legal recourse, and she lacks the education and skills necessary for most employment. Stan reminds her repeatedly that she will be left with no other option besides the striptease show or the brothel. Behind Molly’s back, Stan habitually has affairs and even expresses contempt toward Molly for not doing the same, as well as ridiculing her dependence upon him. He admits that he has not yet deserted her only because her slight resemblance to Dorrie, Grindle’s deceased girlfriend, can be of use in his efforts to defraud the industrialist. Later, after he has become an alcoholic, Stan thinks fondly of her for a moment, but then “disgust mounted—she would leech onto him and drain the life out of him.”184 Although Stan enjoys having power over her—power that she accepts unquestioningly—he does not want the responsibility that comes with having a wife or mistress who is as obedient as he wishes her to be, namely, the responsibility of providing for a person who depends entirely upon him, rather than acting or thinking for herself.

183 184

Gresham, Nightmare Alley, 81. Ibid., 251.

79 The characters’ deliberate refusal to take responsibility for the effects of their actions eventually leads to their further (and involuntary) incapacitation. At least, this is true of the male characters, though not the women—perhaps indicating an idea on Gresham’s part that personal accountability was less of an integral trait to women, or a tacit acknowledgement of their subordinate social position. Zeena and Molly both accept this position and choose instead to achieve financial security as well as social standing through relationships with men, while Lilith, who is portrayed very differently from the other women, gains these through her own actions. It is this refusal of responsibility that Stan has in common with Grindle, and Grindle’s past actions that reflect this refusal are what allow Stan to take advantage of him. Stan, with clues provided by Lilith, investigates Grindle’s past and discovers that his college girlfriend, Dorrie, died following an abortion after she became pregnant and Grindle refused to marry her, because to do so would have been inconvenient to his plans for his own future. This incident takes place in 1900, a time when having a child out of wedlock carried severe social stigma. In such a situation, it would be expected that Grindle marry Dorrie and financially support her and their child, but he refuses to do so. Due to the conventions of the time period and the fact that Dorrie had left school and “run off” from her parents’ home185, it is almost certain that as a single mother, she would have had no means to support herself, placing her in a position similar to Molly’s. Grindle feels remorse for his decision throughout his life, as he never marries, and attempts to atone for his actions by “endowing homes for unwed mothers.” 186 Stan preys on Grindle’s guilt by giving a sermon in his presence about earning forgiveness from the spirits of 185 186

Ibid., 188. Ibid. 192.

80 those whom one has wronged, and by using information he has obtained through bribery and fraud to give the apparitions he stages the appearance of being genuine (e.g., “proving” that the spirit he has pretended to contact is Dorrie by providing details that Stan ostensibly could not know about). He even coerces Molly into participating and appearing as Dorrie, despite her initial unwillingness to do so. Although Molly participates in Stan’s plans, she does so with increasing reluctance and raises objections to what she considers unethical behavior, cooperating only under Stan’s manipulation, emotional abuse, and threats to throw her out. Molly is portrayed as a victim, rather than an accomplice, because the objections she raises are disregarded by the person who maintains power over her both financially and socially. In addition, Stan manipulates and verbally abuses her, taking her on a vacation and promising her a child if she will behave as he directs. Even though she does take part in Stan’s schemes, Molly is not punished for her actions, but rather gets a happy ending, at least in her eyes, though not one that would be compatible with 1940s bourgeois ideals—she marries a gambler, who, like her father, is constantly on the move, a few steps ahead of legal and financial disaster. (Lilith, too, experiences no negative consequences of her role as Stan’s collaborator, but instead gains a wealthy husband by the end of the story—Grindle.) Stan, in contrast to Grindle, repeatedly denies responsibility for his actions or seeks to justify them, even when his intent is to swindle or harm others. Through his various descriptions of himself and his activities to others, the reader sees that Stan portrays himself as a sympathetic victim of circumstance (and he may genuinely see himself this way). He does not believe that he is doing anything wrong in breaking promises, being unfaithful to Molly, and swindling the

81 elderly, instead maintaining an attitude of superiority—he blames the victims of his actions for being naïve and gullible enough to be taken advantage of. Stan also objects to exerting effort to meet his goals, choosing the easiest path, even if it is dishonest. For example, when it appears that a fight might break out between the sideshow workers and a group of carnival-goers, he becomes nervous: “Stan looked enviously at the sculptured muscles of Bruno Hertz. It wasn’t worth the time and backbreaking effort it took to get that way. There must be an easier way.”187 A short time afterward, he finds himself able to get out of a similar situation by giving a cold reading, feigning knowledge about the sheriff and seeking out aspects of his life which will cause him distress. Later, Stan blames Molly when his deception of Grindle is exposed, and when Stan murders a policeman who arrested him, he justifies it to Joe and Zeena as self-defense (and may even be convinced of this himself), claiming that the policeman in question was notorious for his brutality. The event that resurfaces throughout the novel, though, and that for which Stan feels the most guilt—which he attempts to repress—is Pete’s death. Although it does not appear as though Stan intentionally caused Pete’s death, his actions that led to it are nevertheless not particularly defensible: his intention is to provide Pete with liquor so that he will become intoxicated, despite Zeena’s attempts to keep him sober. Eventually Stan tells Lilith of the incident after imagining that the brandy she offers him smells of wood alcohol and reacting with alarm. Stan tells her: “I gave him the alky to pass him out I didn’t know it was wood or I’d forgotten he died I was afraid they’d pin it on me but it blew over.”188 Later, when Stan is taken in by Zeena and Joe, Zeena admits her suspicion that Stan gave Pete the wood alcohol and asks him to tell the truth: “Pete wouldn’t ever have drank that bad alky. And you didn’t know it was poison. Now come 187 188

Ibid., 67. Ibid., 167.

82 clean.”189 Even in a situation in which he would suffer no consequences from admitting his role in Pete’s death, Stan still evades the question, instead distracting Zeena by pretending psychic ability that allows him to tell her Pete’s surname, which Pete and Zeena never used (and which Stan found out from Lilith after she checked up on the case). Stan starts out as an ambitious swindler, but is left paranoid and mentally unstable by his own dishonesty, reduced to an alcoholic who cannot hold a job or conduct normal interactions with others, let alone care for himself—just like the geek at the beginning, a figure who is portrayed as pathetic and incapable of self-sufficiency, as well as ludicrously exoticized as a foreign “savage.” When the strain of seeking power without being willing to accept responsibility for the effects of his actions becomes too much, Stan loses (or relinquishes) control and responsibility as he sinks into delusion and alcoholism. In fact, part of his rage and hatred of others seems to stem from his feeling of powerlessness, his perceived lack of control over his own life. He uses those weaker than him or whose weakness he can exploit (Molly, Major Mosquito, Grindle) while gravitating toward those who can exert some form of control or power over others (Zeena, Lilith). Stan’s delusions start out having some basis in reality, stemming from his knowledge of his own wrongdoing (or at least the knowledge that others consider his actions punishable, even if he disagrees). His mental instability comes directly from his refusal to be held accountable for his own actions that harm others. His eventual acceptance of a job as a geek is the endpoint; he can go no lower. Becoming a geek is the ultimate denial of responsibility both for others, and for oneself: “The geek remains in Nightmare Alley the symbol of carny life at its absolute lowest, or humanity sunk to pure animal.”190 Stan comes to the realization early in the story that the geek is created from fear, a fear that he believes universal, 189 190

Ibid., 266. Kennedy, Dark Victory, 247.

83 and which he himself wishes to exploit in others as a vulnerability: “The geek was made by fear. He was afraid of sobering up and getting the horrors. But what made him a drunk? Fear. Find out what they are afraid of and sell it back to them. That's the key. The key! He had known it when Clem Hoately had told him how geeks are made.”191 Hoately himself is aware of the cycle of exploitation inherent to the geek show but appears to have no qualms about perpetuating it. When a new geek realizes what he must do to keep his job, he chooses (if one can call it a choice) to “become a participant in his own dehumanization,”192 “a creature disgusting even to his own sodden self.”193 Stan ends up in the position of the geek—the exploited—after his own actions cross the line from entertainment of his audiences to exploitation of them (more specifically, of individual audience members). While Zeena’s psychic act provides advice and some measure of emotional comfort to those dealing with personal problems, it is primarily for entertainment purposes, and the audience is aware of this. In contrast, Stan’s eventual Spiritualist scam takes advantage of the distress of individuals who have lost loved ones, and who genuinely believe, due to his skill at faking supernatural phenomena, that his ability to contact the spirits of the deceased is genuine— and his primary motivation is financial gain. Stan exploits others through pretending to have power that he does not, and in order to gain power that he lacks, that is, in order to create a reality in which he does have power, as he pretends (albeit in the form of wealth and social standing, rather than actual psychic ability). He manipulates his victims by presenting the illusion of power and control, which, in his mind, are or should be inherent to his identity as a man. When he ends up a geek, he not only loses any 191

Gresham, Nightmare Alley, 64. Ibid. 28. 193 Fiedler, Freaks, 345. 192

84 power or control that he had (over others and over himself) but also the ability to create even the illusion of it. His very real powerlessness is necessary to the mixture of illusion and reality that makes up the geek show: while the geek is a gaffed freak with only the barest pretense of an exotic origin, the act depends upon the actual debilitation and exploitation of the performer himself (and, perhaps for the more cynical members of the audience, this is the true attraction of the show). While psychic acts like Zeena’s have as their basis a pretense of power or ability and draw upon the audience’s hope for the future, the geek show in which Stan eventually becomes a participant centers on the geek’s complete powerlessness and provokes the fear of the audience. The degradation of the geek disturbs them and frightens them with its inhumanity, but at the same time provides, if not hope, then at least comfort in the knowledge that there exists a worse position than their own. While Stan gains power through the illusion of already having it, the protagonist of the next work does just the opposite, obtaining more power than he would otherwise have had through his pretended powerlessness.

85 CHAPTER IV. DIE BLECHTROMMEL Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum), published in 1959, is the first novel written by German author Günter Grass, though he had previously published poetry and plays. A number of details surrounding Die Blechtrommel’s protagonist, Oskar Matzerath, are strikingly similar to those of Grass’s own life, leading critics such as Julian Preece to classify the novel (as well as Grass’s other earlier works) as “autobiographical fiction” in which “Grass attached some of his own experiences to a series of central characters, ”194 and Volker Neuhaus likewise identifies “eine stark autobiographische Komponente” 195 in Die Blechtrommel, though Grass denies that the novel should be interpreted as a biography196. Like Grass, Oskar is the son of a Catholic197 Kashubian198 mother and a German Protestant father who, like Matzerath, was a Lebensmittelhändler (grocer).199 Similarly, Grass, like his creation Oskar, spent his childhood in Danzig and later was forced to relocate to Germany, where he worked for a stonemason and studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.200 Unlike Grass, however, Oskar manages to avoid actually serving in the Wehrmacht, while Grass was conscripted to the Waffen-SS near the close of the war, a fact which he did not reveal until 2006, to much controversy.201 In 1979, Die Blechtrommel was adapted to film by director Volker Schlöndorff, and while the adaptation remains relatively faithful to the original text, a few aspects of the novel were altered,

194

Julian Preece, “Biography as Politics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Günter Grass, ed. Stuart Taberner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 10. 195 Volker Neuhaus, Günter Grass: Die Blechtrommel Interpretation (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1982), 9. 196 Ibid., 9. 197 Gerrit Bartels, “Zum 85. Geburtstag Günter Grass: Ich und die Welt,” Tagesspiegel, October 16, 2012, http://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/zum-85-geburtstag-guenter-grass-ich-und-die-welt/7257496.html. 198 Neuhaus, Günter Grass, 11. 199 Bartels, “Zum 85. Geburtstag.” 200 Neuhaus, Günter Grass, 13. 201 Stuart Taberner, introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Günter Grass, ed. Stuart Taberner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1.

86 presumably due to its length—even after having dispensed with the frame narrative and covering only the first two-thirds of the story, the film still has a runtime of nearly two and a half hours. The biographical similarities are brought to an end, however, by the question of freakishness—Grass obviously does not have the same physical anomalies which characterize Oskar. These anomalies are not immediately revealed to the reader, although Oskar himself is the narrator of the novel. In the film, however, his freakishness is more evident, since the visual nature of the medium, as well as Schlöndorff’s choice to drop the frame narrative, make it difficult, if not impossible, to conceal either Oskar’s body or his unlikely claims from the viewer for any amount of time. At the start of the story, Oskar is a patient in a West German psychiatric institution, from which he describes episodes from his life in a series of flashbacks, as well as events in the lives of other family members, despite the impossibility of his presence at, or knowledge of some of these events. This allows the diegetic time to span the period from 1899 to the Wirtschaftswunder of the 1950s, even though Oskar is only thirty years old by the conclusion of the story. Oskar’s mother, Agnes (allegedly conceived in a potato field when her mother, Anna Bronski, conceals the arsonist Joseph Koljaiczek beneath her skirts as he flees from the police) marries the German soldier Alfred Matzerath, but simultaneously engages in a love affair with her cousin Jan Bronski, leading Oskar to consider each of the two men his “mutmaßlicher Vater.”202 Oskar himself claims to have been born with fully developed mental abilities: “Ich gehörte zu den hellhörigen Säuglingen, deren geistige Entwicklung schon bei der Geburt abgeschlossen ist und sich fortan nur noch bestätigen muß,”203 causing him to become discontented with his kleinbürgerlich milieu and disgusted with the adults who populate it after observing their (unintentionally candid) behavior in his presence. As a result, he decides to cease 202 203

Günter Grass, Die Blechtrommel (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1959), 147. Ibid., 52.

87 growing on his third birthday, when he receives his first tin drum. After staging an apparent traumatic injury, Oskar feigns cognitive impairment, dropping the pretense only around select persons such as Bebra, another dwarf, and the members of Bebra’s theater troupe, which Oskar later joins, as well as the gang of teenage criminals of which he later takes leadership. After the end of World War II, by which time all three of his potential parents have died, Oskar begins to grow again, still not attaining average height, but now developing kyphosis. He, his stepmother Maria, and her son, Kurt, relocate to Düsseldorf, where Oskar becomes first a stonemason, then an artists’ model, and eventually a professional musician before he is convicted of a murder which he claims not to have committed, and is interned in a psychiatric institution. The novel ends with the news that his conviction will soon be overturned in light of new evidence, much to Oskar’s dismay. In a setting much like that of Caligari, the novel Die Blechtrommel opens with a frame narrative that takes place in a mental institution, but makes no attempt to conceal this from the reader, instead highlighting the fact in its opening sentence: “Zugegeben: ich bin Insasse einer Heil- und Pflegeanstalt.”204 The phrasing of this admission seems to imply that some justification of the story’s validity or the narrator’s reliability will follow—some refutation of the assumption that Oskar’s mental state warrants his confinement there—but none appears. Rather, Oskar plunges ahead directly into the story, which quickly divides itself into “zwei Handlungsebenen: die erste ... Oskars Lebensbericht”205; and the second “wenn Oskar vom Leben in der Heil- und Pflegeanstalt erzählt, von seinen Besuchen, den Ärzten, dem Pfleger, seiner Trommel, dem Fortschreiten seiner Autobiographie.”206 Again, unlike the frame story of Caligari (but perhaps 204

Ibid., 9. Neuhaus, Günter Grass, 19. 206 Ibid., 21. 205

88 showing more similarity to the motif of the geek in Nightmare Alley) Die Blechtrommel’s frame, or rather, the Handlungsebene of the asylum, reappears at numerous points, and even within the scenes from his Lebensbericht, Oskar makes frequent references to future events such as the death of his mother—that is, references that are flash-forwards in the context of the vignette being narrated, but flashbacks from the present time of the frame story. From its first words, the frame narrative identifies Oskar as a potentially unreliable narrator, but the earliest manifestations of his unreliability in relaying past events have at their root not Oskar’s physical anomalies, which are not revealed to the reader (assuming that he or she is not already familiar with the story) until the fourth chapter, but rather the unlikely claims that Oskar makes not only in narrating events in his life, but also in relation to their causality. For example, Oskar raises the unlikely possibility (which he first claims not to believe, but later refers to as if it were fact) of his grandfather Koljaiczek escaping from a situation in which he must almost certainly have been drowned or shot and instead emigrating to the U.S. to become a wealthy businessman (in a description featuring details impossible for Oskar to know, as he was not yet born and his mother only a small child). Even less believable is Oskar’s account of the moment of his own birth, at which he also claims to have had full cognitive ability, and later his ability to “singshatter” glass (“Glas zu zersingen”).207 Equally implausible is the self-inflicted nature of Oskar’s physical anomalies—his assertion that he simply stopped growing by his own willpower at age three. A psychological reading of the text might interpret this claim as Oskar’s means of coping with his disability if he did cease growing after such an (unintentional) injury, with the eventual distortion into the belief that he stopped growing of his own volition with the fall occurring only 207

Grass, Die Blechtrommel, 75.

89 incidentally as a cover story. Oskar is portrayed here as a type of made freak, practicing what might be viewed as an extreme form of body modification (though assuredly different from the usual variety practiced by the made freak, such as growing one’s hair to unusual lengths or acquiring numerous tattoos). Oskar’s choice to become a freak, as well as other aspects of the text that establish it as magic realism (such as excessive coincidence, Oskar’s virtually supernatural abilities, and the “handwaving,” i.e., dismissal or non-treatment of realistic difficulties) challenge any psychoanalytic interpretation of the text. One must instead focus on Oskar’s freakishness, rather than the possible psychological motivations behind it, since this freakishness (or rather, the fact that it is deliberately chosen) is what defies attempts at a psychological reading. Seeking an alternative reading suggests that Grass exposes the constructedness of normality and perhaps even of psychopathology. Arnds, for instance, offers a psychological interpretation of the text in which he goes so far as to diagnose Oskar with schizophrenia, offering the following (rather questionable) evidence: “That Oskar is schizophrenic reveals itself primarily in the style of his narration, the switch from first-person narrative to third person, at times even in the same sentence.”208 While there are numerous other clues beside the shifting focalizations that would offer greater support for an argument that Oskar experiences schizophrenia, Arnds, rather disappointingly, makes no mention of details such as Oskar’s delusions of both grandeur and persecution, nor of his probable hallucinations (such as the “miracle” of the Jesus statue drumming), as well as his left-handedness,209 since non-right-

208

Arnds, Representation, 98. Breon Mitchell, “Translator’s Afterword” in Günter Grass, The Tin Drum, trans. Breon Mitchell (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), 575.

209

90 handedness (that is, both left-handedness and ambidextrality) is a feature that has been noted to occur in a greater percentage of persons with schizophrenia than in the population at large.210 While one could certainly make an argument for such a psychological interpretation, these features of Oskar’s narration also indicate his noncompliance with the expected traits of masculine authority and communication as discussed earlier. That is to say, Oskar is not straightforward in his communication (instead pretending to have the speech and communicative faculties of a young child). He does not leave the reader with an impression of “rational competence”211 (instead openly undermining the reader’s confidence in his truthfulness and ability to understand the implications of the events he relays). Finally, rather than being vigorous and active, he deliberately cultivates an image of childlike weakness, and he is largely passive throughout the story, rather than instigating events. These aspects of Oskar’s narration—his feigned cognitive impairment, his evident dishonesty, and his deliberate passivity— rather than being seen as signs of mental illness, can instead be understood as indications of the subversion of the masculine role exhibited by Oskar as a male freak. Even if one accepts his physical anomaly as a direct result of his unusual mental status, it raises the question of just why Oskar’s decision should be taken to indicate mental illness—do we assume that choosing to become a freak, that is, to intentionally deviate from the sociocultural image of the ideal or “normal” body, is a decision that can be made only by someone who is already mentally “abnormal”? The assumption that an “abnormal” psyche must be the basis for such a decision suggests far more a criticism of “normality” (or at least of the 210

Milan Dragovic and G. Hammond, “Handedness in schizophrenia: a quantitative review of evidence,” Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica 111, no. 6 (June 2005): 410-419, (accessed July 2, 2013), http://0search.ebscohost.com.maurice.bgsu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mnh&AN=15877707&site=ehostlive&scope=site. 211 Cicone and Ruble, “Beliefs about Males,” 8.

91 perceived normality of Grass’s time and culture), since it is this “normality” which drives Oskar to extreme measures in order to distance himself from it. Since Oskar’s voice is the only one providing a narrative for the majority of the novel, the reader gradually grows to accept the preposterous premise and Oskar’s incredible claims, which may be seen as an effect of Grass’s use of the character to challenge the expectations of the reader regarding the boundaries between the concepts of “normal” and “abnormal,” and, indeed, the concepts themselves. This acceptance on the part of the reader highlights the malleability of “normality.” This may be best illustrated by the chapter “Wachstum im Güterwagen” (the last chapter in the second of the novel’s three books), which is narrated by Bruno. The new, painstakingly precise writing style feels like an unwelcome intrusion into Oskar’s by now familiar (if still unusual) narrative style, showing that even if it is more straightforward, it is a deviance from the established mode of narration to which the reader has become accustomed. The termination of Oskar’s growth at age three coincides with his fall down the basement stairs, and his later resumption of growth at age twenty with a blow to the head from a thrown rock, his resultant fall into Matzerath’s grave, and his subsequent illness. Yet Oskar denies any supposition that these events have any relation to his physical condition, other than providing a cover story to confound attempts at medical diagnosis. Oskar’s insistence upon both instances being solely the result of his own decisions may be interpreted as his refusal to accept the role of a victim due to his disability, as well as a refusal to equate freakishness with victimhood—again, a challenge to the idea of “normal” versus “abnormal.” He similarly resists the pathologization of freakishness, that is, the change in public opinion that shifted the idea of the freak from a

92 horrifying spectacle to a victim of disease who should be “fixed” by proper medical treatment (e.g., amputation, endocrine treatments, etc.).212 By deliberately choosing his condition and by rejecting a viewpoint that considers this condition a defect, Oskar implicitly asserts that it is not, in fact, a defect at all. From his perspective, it is merely a difference, albeit a rather uncommon one. Viewed from a political standpoint, Oskar’s refusal of victimization in regard to his body ties in with his refusal to be victimized by the Nazis, instead finding other avenues to avoid institutionalization and death. Oskar is clearly established as “the unreliable narrator par excellence,”213 or, more accurately, he establishes himself as this, since he takes no pains whatsoever to convince the reader of his reliability, but instead seems to take the opposite route: he “immediately erodes any confidence readers might have in this narrative by placing himself in a potentially delusional setting.”214 Furthermore, he repeatedly and openly returns to incidents he has already described in order to alter details of them (such as Jan Bronski’s last game of skat in the Polish Post Office), and admits under questioning that he is making inaccurate statements (such as those regarding Luzie Rennwand’s presence in the train from Danzig to Düsseldorf). In doing this, Oskar rejects the authority with which a narrator is traditionally invested (just as he rejects authority and personal responsibility throughout the novel) and instead embraces others’ perception that “[t]he dwarf is typically seen as not only physically disabled but, because he

212

Bogdan, Freak Show, 67. Dagmar C.G. Lorenz, “Teaching The Tin Drum from the Perspective of Jewish Cultural Studies and Holocaust Studies” in Approaches to Teaching Grass’s The Tin Drum, ed. Monika Shafi (The Modern Language Association of America: New York, 2008), 160. 214 Jane Curran, “The Conflicting Claims of Fiction and History in The Tin Drum: Humor, Fairy Tale, and Myth” in Approaches to Teaching Grass’s The Tin Drum, ed. Monika Shafi (The Modern Language Association of America: New York, 2008), 128. 213

93 looks like a child, as mentally less developed, even insane as well.”215 It would be an oversimplification, however, to claim that the reader’s suspicion of Oskar’s unreliability comes solely from this idea, not to mention inaccurate, as his short stature and excessive spinal curvature are not revealed until later in the story. But what causes the reader to classify Oskar as a freak rather than simply as a man who is likely mentally ill in addition to having potentially disabling physical conditions? It is Oskar’s repeated decision to pursue work that places him in an arena of performance or exhibition, one that he returns to even after a period of giving up his drum and making a relatively successful effort to assimilate into the adult (and West German capitalist) world. He appears first as part of a circus-like theater troupe for the German Propaganda Corps, then works as a model for art students, and eventually joins a jazz band and becomes a successful soloist. Upon his first meeting with Bebra, who at the time is a circus clown, Oskar rejects his advice to become a performer, and once again declines his offer to join Bebra’s wartime theater troupe at their second encounter,216 until finally agreeing to leave home and travel with them after his mother has died. While it may initially seem that Oskar joins the Propaganda Corps troupe as a means of escaping Nazi euthanasia and therefore has little choice, it is actually not until Oskar’s return home that this threat is mentioned. In fact, his disappearance and return are what draw the authorities’ attention to his case and precipitate the influx of letters urging Matzerath to surrender Oskar to the state’s care.

215

Peter O. Arnds, Representation, Subversion, and Eugenics in Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum. (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004), 97. 216 Grass, Die Blechtrommel, 222.

94 Oskar appears almost indifferent to the danger of Nazi euthanasia despite being a “prime victim”217 for it, not only because of “his stunted physical growth and supposed mental retardation,”218 but also because of “the ugliness of his dwarfish body… his aimless wandering and his criminal nature [that] all combine to mark him as useless in the eyes of society, a parasite on the margins of society.”219 While Jewish people were the largest group among victims of the Holocaust, “[i]t was not only Jews,” Fiedler writes, “but Freaks as well, whom Hitler tried to liquidate,”220 with dwarfs being “favorite targets,” 221 serving to highlight “the situation of all Dwarfs everywhere and always: the vulnerability implicit in their special status and high visibility.”222 Despite the Nazis’ efforts to exterminate those persons with what they viewed as physical and mental imperfections, Die Blechtrommel illustrates how persons with these qualities took on a different status when they made use of their extraordinary features in a performance context. Though Oskar implicitly criticizes Bebra for “finding his own master in Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda,”223 the choice is a matter of self-preservation. “The lives of both dwarves would be greatly imperiled if it were not for their usefulness as entertainers, for as long as they entertain the Nazis they can escape from being classified as Ballastexistenzen, ballast life.”224 In this way, Oskar proves that he has a use to society, even if it is a nontraditional one such as entertainment of high officials, much like the dwarves who historically were a part of various royal courts, often as jesters or fools.225 By deliberately choosing a position that may have historically been a last resort for persons with an unwanted physical anomaly, Oskar is 217

Arnds, Representation, 13 Brodsky, “Resistance in the Borderlands,” 45. 219 Arnds, Representations, 13. 220 Fiedler, Freaks, 242. 221 Ibid., 255. 222 Ibid., 86. 223 Günter Grass, The Tin Drum, trans. Breon Mitchell (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), 159. 224 Arnds, Representation, 13. 225 Fiedler, Freaks, 62. 218

95 again protesting notions of desirability, both in terms of the condition of one’s body, and the type of employment one seeks. Though Bebra and Roswitha appear to be admired and respected by the members of the military who attend their performances and request their autographs, this treatment indicates that they are a group of freaks presented in what Bogdan terms the aggrandized mode, “which endowed the freak with status-enhancing characteristics.”226 While Oskar and the other dwarfs perform essentially the same types of entertainment acts that characterize the carnival or circus sideshow, the performers are given high ranks or titles (here, they are given military rank— Bebra is a captain227—and outfitted in military uniform as their troupe tours to perform for the German soldiers during the Second World War) and presented as people of extraordinary talent beyond their unusual physical appearances (Oskar shatters glass with his voice, Roswitha appears as a somnambulist, Felix and Kitty are contortionists, and Bebra is a clown). There is the appearance that they have autonomy, although Bebra openly admits that he has joined the Propaganda Corps in order to avoid being its target. Bogdan’s exoticized mode—“which cast the exhibit as a strange creature from a little-known part of the world,”228— also comes into play, as Oskar appears as “Oskarnello Raguna,” the brother of the Italian Roswitha. This also “illustrates the common strategy of attributing non-Western origins to people with developmental disabilities,”229 though here, the classification of “non-Western” is replaced by non-German, perhaps significant enough a distinction during the Nazi regime.

226

Bogdan, Freak Show, 97. Grass, The Tin Drum, trans. Breon Mitchell, 301. 228 Bogdan, Freak Show, 97. 229 Adams, Sideshow U.S.A., 30. 227

96 Although Bebra, Roswitha and Oskar are treated with dignity and respect by virtue of their positions, Oskar’s physical otherness is amplified nowhere more than in these interactions with Bebra and Roswitha, primarily because they behave toward him as other “normal” adults would interact with one another. Oskar’s relationship with Roswitha is perhaps the only romantic relationship he has which is not marked by a highly problematic treatment of women, and by questions of consent. From their first meeting onward, Bebra addresses Oskar with the formal Sie, even though Oskar is only twelve at the time (though mistaken by Bebra for fifteen), a stark contrast to the way that Oskar’s parents and other adults treat him as a small child. Though Oskar first rejects any feeling of solidarity with Bebra and his troupe—essentially refusing to become a freak via his refusal to join them or even identify with them—Bebra clearly considers himself and Oskar as belonging to the same group: “Bebra’s use of ‘unsereins’ indicates an emerging group identity and the implicit hope that Oskar will fight for himself and others like him ... The ironically exclusionary term ‘our kind’ implies those who are visibly different from the Nazis’ Aryan ideal.”230 While Oskar’s life is at risk due to his stature and feigned developmental disability, “his race, religion, or ethnicity is not involved; he is undeniably German.”231 Not so for Bebra, at least in the film adaptation, in which he whispers “Mazel tov” to Oskar before the latter’s first appearance onstage, suggesting that Bebra may also be Jewish232. If Oskar and Bebra typify that which is reviled by the Nazis, then just how does their ideal model of German masculinity look and behave? That question is answered, at least to a certain extent, by examination of the greengrocer Greff, who, like Matzerath, is the very thing

230

Elizabeth C. Hamilton, “‘Unsereins muß auf die Bühne’: The Tin Drum and the Stage” in Approaches to Teaching Grass’s The Tin Drum, ed. Monika Shafi (The Modern Language Association of America: New York, 2008), 141. 231 Lorenz, “Teaching The Tin Drum,” 153. 232 Die Blechtrommel, DVD, directed by Volker Schlöndorff (1979; West Germany: The Criterion Collection, 2004).

97 that Oskar wishes to avoid becoming. As a small-business owner and leader of a Pfadfinder troop, Greff is a politically-involved capitalist who is useful, in publicly visible ways, to both his community and to society. He wholeheartedly (and excessively) “embrace[s] many of the manly virtues central to fascist ideology”233 as well as the accompanying masculine aesthetic. With his ardent vegetarianism and exercise regime that involves bathing in the frozen Baltic Sea, his “exaggerated subscription to the Nazis’ body ideal and body culture reveals his fear of discovery and persecution at a time that sees manliness in crisis and aspires to reassert its heterosexuality not only by eliminating all homosexuals but also by rooting out any effeminacy in the male body, whether in real life or in artistic representation.”234 Despite all these efforts, however, there are two areas of his life in which Greff never finds success—the first is with his mechanical inventions, which only raise the suspicions of the Bureau of Weights and Standards, and the second is his relationship with his slovenly wife, Lina, whom he largely ignores. He eventually commits suicide after the death of his favorite former Pfadfinder, and, perhaps, out of fear of persecution by the Nazis, for it turns out that Herr Greff is gay.235 Even though he “exemplifies trends in thought (his liking for mystical literature) and behavior (his cult of the body beautiful) that underpinned Nazism,”236 he finds that he may not have a place in “a state that places the highest possible value on a militarized form of masculine camaraderie but that cannot tolerate even a hint of homosexuality.”237 Like androgyny at the time of Caligari (and perhaps still today), homosexuality in the era of Die Blechtrommel, with its seeming rejection of socially233

Todd Kontje, “The Tin Drum as Historical Fiction” in Approaches to Teaching Grass’s The Tin Drum, ed. Monika Shafi (The Modern Language Association of America: New York, 2008), 34. 234 Peter Arnds, “Teaching Race in Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum” in Approaches to Teaching Grass’s The Tin Drum, ed. Monika Shafi (The Modern Language Association of America: New York, 2008), 170. 235 Julian Preece, “Modes of History in The Tin Drum” in Approaches to Teaching Grass’s The Tin Drum, ed. Monika Shafi (The Modern Language Association of America: New York, 2008), 17. Kontje, “The Tin Drum as Historical Fiction,” 34. Arnds, “Teaching Race,” 170. 236 Preece, “Modes of History,” 17-18. 237 Kontje, “The Tin Drum as Historical Fiction,” 34-35.

98 constructed norms, also expresses a form of freakishness in that it is a deviation from the only (at the time) socially-sanctioned option of heterosexuality, and yet proves itself a subject of fascination in the form of both gender-ambiguous sideshow performers (whose lack of adherence to the norms of a single gender necessarily implies the impossibility of a strictly heterosexual relationship) and in the form of quasi-exploitation films treating the subject of homosexuality as early as the 1919 German film Anders als die Andern. Oskar, too, prior to his relationship with Maria, has experiences that might appear to add homosexuality to the list of his “undesirable” qualities according to Nazi standards—such as his close friendship with Herbert Truczinski, which involves frequently touching the scars on Herbert’s exposed back and engaging in misogynist jokes and behavior in the Maritime Museum in order to dispel their fear of a female presence in the figurehead Niobe. Not to be overlooked is Oskar’s encounter with a statue of the baby Jesus in the Sacred Heart church: “Als Oskar das Gießkännchen des Jesusknaben, das fälschlicherweise nicht beschnitten war, eingehend betastete, streichelte und vorsichtig drückte, als wolle er es bewegen, spürte er auf teils angenehme, teils neu verwirrende Art sein eigenes Gießkännchen, ließ daraufhin dem Jesus seines in Ruhe, damit seines ihn in Ruhe lasse.”238 The sentiment expressed by Oskar here parallels that which he cites as his motivation for remaining small—he rejects and distances himself from the “normal” adult society surrounding him in a way that simultaneously causes “normal” society to reject and distance itself from him. That is to say, Oskar’s objection to engaging with those around him causes him to effect the same type of reciprocal in-Ruhe-lassen that he decides upon in this scene. Despite the suspicions that might be raised by these incidents, Oskar never makes mention of any attraction to men, and pursues relationships only with 238

Grass, Die Blechtrommel, 181.

99 women, with Becker-Cantarino noting “Oskar’s relationship vis-à-vis women—his guilt or innocence” 239 as one of the novel’s key themes. The relationships in question are largely exploitative (from one side or another) and laced with an undercurrent of hostility—as are the majority of the other male/female romantic relationships depicted in the novel: Koljaiczek’s first meeting with Anna quickly progresses to a sexual encounter in which Anna’s consent can, at best, be viewed as questionable; Jan and Agnes’s relationship is, by modern standards, incestuous as they are first cousins, and later adulterous as Agnes continues the love affair with Jan while married to Matzerath; Scheffler ignores his wife, who desperately wants children that he cannot or will not provide; Greff is gay and also ignores his wife, who is overweight and has poor hygiene (implied to be a result of Greff’s indifference); and Corporal Lankes is both verbally and physically abusive to his girlfriend Ulla. Oskar’s first relationship, with Maria, is also highly questionable by modern standards, as both are underage, and as far as anyone knows, Oskar is developmentally disabled. Maria’s relationship with Matzerath, too, can be viewed as an adult man becoming inappropriately involved with a teenage girl who is working for him after his wife’s death, and he only marries her after he (or possibly Oskar) impregnates her. Oskar’s next relationship is with Lina Greff, again, a married, adult woman who, as far as she knows, is taking advantage of a disabled teenager who lacks the cognitive capacity to consent. Later, Oskar’s “relationship” with Dorothea is less of a relationship in any sense than stalking and invasion of privacy, including an incident in which he clandestinely enters her apartment and masturbates in her wardrobe. The disregard he exhibits for Dorothea’s autonomy, space, and privacy is only a foreshadowing of his 239

Barbara Becker-Cantarino, “‘The Black Witch’: Gender, Sexuality, and Violence in The Tin Drum” in Approaches to Teaching Grass’s The Tin Drum, ed. Monika Shafi (The Modern Language Association of America: New York, 2008), 177.

100 final encounter with her, in which he attempts to rape her. Immediately following, she moves out of the boarding house in distress, only for Oskar to later find, keep, and worship her severed fingers (although he claims not to have detached them himself, but merely to have found them). He never actually speaks to her except during their final meeting when she mistakes him for the devil: “Oskar is stalking her [Dorothea] instead of communicating with her.”240 Furthermore, Dorothea’s eventual consent to the encounter results from her belief that Oskar is in fact Satan (due to his short stature and the coconut-fiber mat he is carrying at the time, which she mistakes for a pelt), though she quickly changes her mind when she finds that he is in reality a human, and her neighbor. Dorothea’s attraction to Oskar is dependent upon her mistaken belief that he is even more “extraordinary” than he really is, perhaps indicating an erotic fascination with freakishness on her part, a theme that is brought up slightly more explicitly in Oskar’s interactions with hospital nurses (who are fascinated by his deformed back) and with the women he meets at an artists’ party, with whom he appears to have some sort of sexual encounter. The majority of the women with whom Oskar has had sexual relationships have, as far as they are aware, been taking advantage of Oskar, but he is also taking advantage of them by deceiving them about his true mental capacity and not being particularly scrupulous about obtaining consent: Oskar displays “a naïve, self-centered, and disturbingly militant and animalistic concept of masculinity in his predatory, sexual approach to women.”241 As much as he may attempt to assert himself over women by ignoring their personal autonomy and harboring negative, generalized views about them, Oskar fears them, primarily in the form of the Schwarze Köchin.242 But he also seeks comfort from them, most notably from Lina Greff, to whom he 240

Ibid., 181. Ibid., 180. 242 Ibid., 178. 241

101 resolves to “carry [his] helplessness”243 after finally accepting the end of his relationship with Maria at Kurt’s christening party. The question of his guilt and accountability is inseparable from his relationships with women—the nature of these relationships is an issue that coincides with that of the masculine role as defined by accepting responsibility, in this case most significantly in questions of paternity: “Grass links the question of moral responsibility with that of fatherhood. In Die Blechtrommel, no one quite knows who his progenitor really is …. This confusion about questions of creation is all the more significant since it points to a much larger confusion about questions of accountability.”244 By his very insistence that he is the father of Maria’s child Kurt (despite the fact that she has apparently slept numerous times with Matzerath and only once with Oskar), Oskar sows doubt in the reader’s mind—and certainly, no one in the story believes him. Kurt thus has two potential fathers (Oskar and Matzerath), as does Oskar (Matzerath and Jan Bronski, his mother’s cousin and lover). Elisabeth Krimmer writes that “the confusion regarding the most basic questions of origin, of cause and effect, may be as much the result of accidental circumstances as of conscious choice. In the petit-bourgeois milieu of Blechtrommel, where the preferred method of birth control is coitus interruptus, male characters do not underwrite their actions.”245 Krimmer’s analysis applies not only to the case of Oskar’s and Kurt’s respective paternity, but also in the (possible) scene of Kurt’s conception: Oskar, who claims to be in love with Maria, catches her in the midst of sexual intercourse with Matzerath and attacks Matzerath by leaping upon his back. As a result, “Es gelang ihm, mich abzuschütteln, als es schon zu spät

243

Grass, The Tin Drum, trans. Breon Mitchell, 286. Elisabeth Krimmer, “‘Ein Volk von Opfern?’ Germans as Victims in Günter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel and Im Krebsgang,” in Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 44, no. 2 (May 2008) accessed January 20, 2012: http://0search.ebscohost.com.maurice.bgsu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=32168959&site=ehostlive&scope=site, 279. 245 Ibid. 244

102 war.”246 In other words, Oskar prevents Matzerath from practicing coitus interruptus, while also altering the scene from a standard heterosexual liaison into both a spectacle and a form of ménage a trois, with Maria and Matzerath less than willing to participate in such a configuration. Matzerath blames Oskar, and then Maria, for the incident, and Maria blames Matzerath, then Oskar, thus confirming Krimmer’s assertion that “where the originator of an action, the father of the child, cannot be determined, responsibility cannot be properly attributed to any party. Consequently, wild accusations abound throughout the novel.”247 Oskar’s “wild accusations” about both others and himself are indeed a constant motif: aside from his insistence that he is the father of Maria’s child and that Bronski is his, Oskar’s, real father, Oskar also insists that he is responsible for the deaths of his mother, Matzerath, Bronski, and Roswitha. (And, of course, he allows himself to be convicted of Sister Dorothea’s murder, though it is doubtful whether he actually committed this crime.) Oskar’s childhood and adolescence provide many examples of his avoidance of responsibility from an early age by means of his choice to remain in a child’s body (which has later ramifications in his eventual need to claim guilt for events which are not his doing, or at least not directly). His mother commits suicide by food poisoning, Bronski is executed for following him into the Polish Post Office, Matzerath is shot by Russian soldiers when he chokes while trying to swallow his Nazi Party insignia pin after Oskar hands it to him, and Roswitha leaves their transport vehicle during an air raid for a cup of coffee when Oskar refuses to bring one to her. This series of events culminates in Oskar “engineer[ing] his arrest for a crime he did not commit because his ill-defined guilt needs a focus.”248 Oskar may indeed feel guilt for these incidents, and his exaggerated acceptance of blame for them may be an act meant

246

Grass, Die Blechtrommel, 375. Krimmer, “‘Ein Volk von Opfern?’” 279. 248 Preece, “Biography as Politics,” 12. 247

103 to further absolve him of any responsibility for them. His physical freakishness, which gives him the appearance of a child, allows him to avoid responsibility for actions of which he actually is guilty (either because others believe him to actually be a child, or because they assume that he is cognitively impaired), but this strategy backfires when Oskar discovers the drawbacks to this side of freakishness. Because others’ assumptions of his inability to understand his actions prevent him from being held responsible for them, he comes to crave the guilt which he has deflected from himself, and thus willingly attempts to take it on even for deeds which cannot reasonably be attributed to him. These attempts, however, merely lead others to further insist upon his innocence due to the exaggerated manner in which he casts blame upon himself—an assumption of innocence which he exploits in order to further absolve himself of any responsibility he might actually have had for the situations in question. Those who are unaware of his true mental abilities do not hold him accountable for many of his actions, while those who are aware—chiefly Bebra and Roswitha—recognize his tactic of claiming such an exaggerated share of the blame for events for which he does have some degree of responsibility that one must react by doubting his culpability. Oskar tells Bebra of his mother’s death: “Wegen Oskarchen wollte sie nicht mehr weiter leben, er hat sie umgebracht!” Ich übertrieb reichlich, wollte womöglich Signora Roswitha beeindrucken. Es gaben schließlich die meisten Leute Matzerath und besonders Jan Bronski die Schuld an Mamas Tod. Bebra durchschaute mich. “Sie übertreiben, mein Bester. Aus purer Eifersucht grollen Sie Ihrer toten Mama. Weil sie nicht Ihretwegen, vielmehr der anstrengenden Liebhaber wegen ins Grab ging, fühlen

104 Sie sich zurückgesetzt. Böse und eitel sind Sie, wie es sich nun einmal für ein Genie gehört!”249 Oskar is confronted and his exaggeration exposed by Bebra, who has repeatedly advocated that Oskar, rather than avoiding accountability as a defensive measure, instead utilize his unusual qualities to become a freak and thus gain power by pretending to lack it, but this time in front of an audience rather than in the background. Bebra’s philosophy of freak performance is: “Unsereins darf nie zu den Zuschauern gehören. Unsereins muß auf die Bühne, in die Arena. Unsereins muß vorspielen und die Handlung bestimmen, sonst wird unsereins von jenen da behandelt. Und jene da spielen uns allzu gerne übel mit!”250 In creating and insisting upon this group identity, Bebra is in a way attempting to convince Oskar that his social role or function is determined by biology, that is, the unusual features of his body (just as Oskar tries to convince himself after moving to Düsseldorf that his role as an adult man is to financially support his family and marry the mother of his presumptive son, though he later rejects this notion as well). Oskar resists Bebra’s exhortations, however, at least for a time, because he does not yet wish to become a freak, particularly not one with a political agenda—and can choose an identity as a “normal” so long as he stays off the stage. In another sense, though, Bebra is offering Oskar a chance to reclaim the social power that he lacks because of his appearance—that is, others do not attribute to him the personality and characteristics of an adult, non-disabled man (though they can hardly be blamed in the instances when Oskar deliberately pretends to be a young child). Only by projecting his extraordinariness into view of a larger, public audience can Oskar gain a form of power; his insistence upon limiting himself to his current surroundings gives him power only in a relatively insignificant sense over those in his building and neighborhood with whom 249 250

Grass, Die Blechtrommel, 219. Ibid., 144.

105 he interacts. Overall, however, he remains relatively powerless because he cannot break character in front of others and reveal his true abilities, having “come to depend on his self fashioned victim status,”251 even when his pretense inconveniences him, such as when he cannot get Matzerath to understand that he needs a new drum after his mother has died. Up to that point, Oskar, with his apparent disability, finds himself at home and raised mostly by women, who, historically, have had diminished responsibility and often assumed a subordinate role in relation to adult men. By deliberately avoiding the areas of masculine presence which he would otherwise be expected to join as a “normal” young boy, Oskar deflects responsibility from himself in a subversion of the masculine role that he is expected to fill, including eventually taking over the family business. Krimmer writes, “[p]aradoxically, Oskar’s victimization is, at least in part, the result of his own agency, whereas his guilt results largely from his failure to act.”252 That is, the actions for which he is (or believes himself to be) morally culpable are those which he effects indirectly (such as inducing others to steal from shop windows that he has removed the glass from) or in which he directly refuses to take action (Roswitha’s death, which occurs when he denies her request to bring her a cup of coffee). In contrast, the instances in which Oskar is inconvenienced or subjected to indignities are typically the result of his conscious choice to remain small (resulting in the other, physically larger children bullying him) and to keep up his pretense of mental retardation (preventing him from simply telling others what he needs or wants). Oskar’s attempts to maintain his self-created image as a freak appear, to an outside perspective, to be easily disposable should Oskar tire of such experiences, but to him they form his identity, even if that identity becomes one of moral ambiguity. 251 252

Krimmer, “‘Ein Volk von Opfern?’” 275-276. Ibid., 276-277.

106 Oskar himself refuses to claim any sort of moral stance, particularly in relation to his disruption of Nazi political rallies: “Ich trommelte nicht nur gegen braune Versammlungen. Oskar saß den Roten und den Schwarzen, den Pfadfindern und Spinathemden von der PX, den Zeugen Jehovas und dem Kyffhäuserbund, den Vegetariern und den Jungpolen von der Izinbewegung unter der Tribüne.”253 He creates chaos and disrupts any sort of order or organization, always denying any political or moral affiliation. His pretended lack of power actually brings him more power, because through it and the assumptions that adults make about him, he is able to escape notice most of the time and act as he pleases, wandering into locations that would otherwise be restricted to him, such as the Maritime Museum and the Polish Post Office, and committing acts for which a child in full possession of his mental capacity would be punished, such as damaging the statues in the church and destroying Dr. Hollatz’s bottled specimens. He gains information because he is able to witness and overhear things that would otherwise be concealed from him if the adults thought there were a possibility of him comprehending it, such as their prognosis of his condition and his mother’s affair with Jan. Even when his actions cause destruction and require reimbursement for damaged property, no one holds him personally accountable or believes that he is knowingly causing damage. Oskar’s feigned helplessness, his apparent physical and mental disability, allows him to take on the role of a child and have the adults around him behave accordingly: “Because Oskar pretends to be mute and because his stature is diminutive, people treat him as though his mental capacities were correspondingly small.”254 This is a reversal of the freak as unreliable narrator that appears in the earlier works discussed here, since it is first Oskar’s presence in a mental institution and second the fantastic events of his stories that cause the reader to doubt him, rather 253 254

Grass, Die Blechtrommel, 158. Curran, “Conflicting Claims,” 132.

107 than his actual stature. Furthermore, he wants to be considered unreliable and incapable of rationality and logic so that he will not be held responsible for his behavior. He wishes to appear devoid of the qualities that are associated with a rational (and masculine) adult, and thus to avoid accountability for his actions. While Oskar deliberately chooses to proceed in this order, Stan Carlisle and Hans do the opposite, wishing instead to retain these characteristics, or at least the outward appearance of them, without actually performing the corresponding behaviors. (Cesare, on the other hand, appears to be partially, if not fully, under the control of Caligari throughout most of the film.) Although the circumstances through which personal responsibility is lost, denied by, or taken from these characters differ between these four works, the relationship between responsibility and the male freak is one that appears as a major theme in each of them.

108 CHAPTER V. CONCLUSION The examination of the four films and, when applicable, the accompanying literary texts—Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, “Spurs”/Freaks, Nightmare Alley, and Die Blechtrommel— reveals both overarching themes in the portrayal of sideshow performers in fiction, and differences between the German and American perspectives on freakishness, as well as those of the pre- and post-WWII eras. The two American works, “Spurs”/Freaks and Nightmare Alley, portray their respective freaks in groups, the sideshow attached to a travelling circus or carnival, and both works emphasize the sense of solidarity and community that exists among the performers—in Freaks, by their banding together to punish Cleopatra and Hercules for their adultery and their attempted murder of Hans, and in Nightmare Alley, by the performers’ willingness to help those of their number who have fallen on hard times—Zeena at the death of her husband, Stan when he is on the run from the law. In contrast, the two German works—Caligari and Die Blechtrommel— focus on performers appearing as single acts. While this is clearly the case with Cesare in Caligari, Oskar, too, can be said to fit this description despite his initial debut into show business with Bebra’s troupe—only by joining and then leaving Bebra’s troupe can Oskar learn and repeatedly demonstrate to the reader that life as a part of a group is impossible for him. He does not have a sense of belonging, despite Bebra’s attempts to convince him otherwise, insisting instead that be belongs not on the grandstand, but rather beneath it, that is, working alone and unaffiliated. He finds commercial (and perhaps personal) success only near the end of the novel when he becomes a drum soloist, rather than working with Bebra’s troupe, collaborating with the

109 model Ulla, or performing in Klepp’s jazz band (the latter of which is perhaps an intermediate step, with its opportunities for both musical collaboration and recognition of solos). In this way, Oskar’s repeated dissatisfaction with becoming part of a group perhaps reflects an attitude toward community opposite that which brings about Stan’s downfall in Nightmare Alley—a downfall which comes from rejecting the community of the group and trying to find success on his own while burning his bridges—leaving Zeena for Molly after causing Pete’s death, and dashing Bruno’s hopes in the process. That is to say, Oskar’s decision to end collaborations with other performers throughout the story does not result in any negative consequences for him, while Stan’s decision to leave his fellow performers is one that must be punished. Similarly, in Freaks (and “Spurs”) Hans/Courbé’s misfortunes begin when he makes the decision to leave the circus, while Caligari’s Cesare brings death and madness to anyone who has close contact with him, his separateness underscored by his enclosure in his coffin-like box. The American works’ stress on the importance of the community of freaks may be grounded both in the historical reality of the sideshow as an American invention (as opposed to the occasional collection of single exhibits at the European Jahrmärkte) and in the history of the United States itself, which (from the point of view of the European settlers, at least) was developed by the formation of communities of immigrants where no community previously existed (or none that met their ideas of a community). This idea of blended communities is present in both Freaks, with its collection of performers of various nationalities, and Nightmare Alley, in which immigration is briefly but explicitly thematized in the form of the character Bruno, an Austrian immigrant whose hopes for a relationship with Molly are thwarted by his

110 embarrassment and fear of appearing foolish due to his limited English. Even among a community of freak performers, Bruno (who is arguably an example of hegemonic masculinity within that community) is isolated due to the “abnormality” of his culture and language, demonstrating again the malleability of the criteria used by a community to define “normality.” Another comparison to be drawn is that of the texts and films originating before and after the Second World War. In the earlier two films, Caligari and Freaks, the physical otherness of the sideshow performers—particularly the male sideshow performers, though Freaks features a number of female performers as well—is emphasized, even though Caligari could have easily enough left Cesare’s freakishness to his alleged psychic abilities and potentially abnormal mental condition. In the latter two works, however, both of the freak performers—Stan and Oskar— become freaks due to mental abnormality and character flaws that direct their behavior when they could otherwise easily have avoided performance venues had they so chosen. (While Oskar may have political reasons for joining Bebra, he does so apparently of his own volition, before the Nazis take notice of him.) These two works reflect that ideas of freakishness may, in fact, have moved, from those in the earlier half of the twentieth century which were tied to the physical anomalies of the freak, to those of the latter part of the century, which focus on mental instability and aberrant behavior as the measure of freakishness. Indeed, both of the later works attempt to get to the cause of their protagonists’ instability, with mental institutions and psychiatry appearing as major, explicit themes of both works. (Although a mental institution is also the setting for part of Caligari, Cesare appears as a patient only at the very end, and only as an explanation for his appearance as a character in Francis’s delusion; never is Cesare himself shown to be the subject of any psychiatric

111 evaluation.) Both Die Blechtrommel and Nightmare Alley at times make obvious reference to ideas with origins in Freudian psychoanalysis, but defy attempts to read the characters of Oskar and Stan as simply suffering from a typical Oedipus complex. While this can be easily identified in both cases, and while both characters also are fixated upon the experience of witnessing their respective mothers in sexual acts at an early age, it is also clear that Stan and Oskar have serious character flaws that do not stem from these experiences, even if they try to attach the blame to them—providing a strong argument against a purely psychoanalytic interpretation of both these works and of freakishness, since such interpretations rely upon some of the notions of normality called into question by these texts. Similarly, while both Stan and Oskar have clearly disturbing childhood experiences, both of them ultimately end up as they do (Stan utterly incapacitated, Oskar institutionalized) due to their own, later behavior that reflects, perhaps allegorically, their excessive, relentless pursuit of goals that grossly distort their respective national tendencies and stereotypes regarding accountability and self-determination. Oskar, throughout his diegetic lifetime (but created by Grass after WWII and the Holocaust) expends an enormous amount of effort to avoid any responsibility whatsoever for his actions (including actions which have had detrimental effects upon the Nazis, since he disavows any political affiliation), which eventually causes him to seek blame for acts which he has not committed. Stan, on the other hand, badly abuses and distorts the American ideal of the self-made man, pursuing capitalistic and social-climbing goals ruthlessly and at the expense of many innocent victims. Eventually, the selfish nature that allows him to succeed for a time alienates everyone who is in a position to help him and causes him to be entirely alone and beyond help (or at least beyond anyone’s willingness to help him) when he is driven to become a geek.

112 In all cases, in the portrayals in these works, the physical freakishness—even when it is only the barest pretense, as seen with the geek more than the others—is a visual marker for behavior and personality traits that differ noticeably from those that characterize the traditional image of masculinity. The implicit (and sometimes explicit) unreliability of the narratives in all four works is tied to both the masculinity of the protagonists and the presence of a form of frame story. If, for example, the characters in question were female, this revelation of unreliability would not have as strong an impact, because the reader or viewer may be more inclined to discount their reliability from the beginning, as a female narrator might be perceived as more emotional and subjective, especially by readers and viewers in the earlier half of the twentieth century. At the same time, the frame narrative serves as another reminder to the reader or viewer that the story being told (or shown) is a performance by its narrator, and subject to the same embellishments and falsehoods as any other performance. Most significant to the viewer or reader’s perception of the frame narratives of the above films and texts is the perception of the narrator’s reliability, that is, his appearance of rationality and unemotionality (which, perhaps in a false dichotomy, implies logic). With these qualities, one would assume that a male narrator would relay a logically constructed, objective, rational version of events (more so than a female narrator), but the qualities of logic, stability, and realism are exactly what is missing from the frame narratives, and the uncertainties that stem from this reflect the uncertainty surrounding the social and gender roles of the male narrator-performers. These characters’ interactions with female characters provide a contrast between the manner in which the narrative treats male and female characters, as well as freak and non-freak characters of both sexes. The protagonists’ observations of female characters’ interactions with other male characters is also significant, as it may reveal a difference in behavior toward those

113 viewed as normals and those viewed as freaks. This interaction goes along, of course, with the same male characters’ deflection of responsibility from themselves, which was a large part of the expectation of fulfilling the masculine social role, particularly in the earlier part of the twentieth century when it was an economic necessity, as most middle-class women did not work outside the home. Both the hostile and indifferent treatment of women by these characters, as well as the denial of responsibility for their actions (especially while exercising power over others) are manifestations of the characters’ unreliability and causes leading to it, particularly when these traits appear in character who further deviate from socially constructed gender expectations. Similarly, the male protagonists’ often problematic interactions with female characters are clearly influenced by their own perception of a male/female dichotomy, often one in which they seek to perform their idea of masculinity. The resulting interactions reflect a character’s uncertain or problematic conception of his own gender identity and the performance of it. Furthermore, the characters’ assertion or denial of the traits of adult masculinity—as it is traditionally conceived— becomes visible in these works through the protagonists’ failure or refusal to accept responsibility for the well-being of themselves and those who are directly affected by their actions, or to accept blame for the results of their own unlawful or damaging acts. Further related study of these works might pursue topics such as the portrayal of female freaks or focus upon gender-ambiguous sideshow performers (including the history of such performers as well as the current philosophical implications of this type of performance), perhaps also examining whether the same themes discussed here are equally prominent in works focusing on the female freak. Another topic might include the portrayals of characters with “extraordinary

114 bodies” by authors and cinematographers from regions beyond North America and Europe. Possibly a similar study might be made focusing on the portrayal of freakishness in relation to mental illness rather than physical anomalies, perhaps maintaining a focus on the relation between American and German-language works on this topic.

115 BIBLIOGRAPHY Adams, Rachel. Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001. Andriopoulos, Stefan. Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction and the Invention of Cinema. Translated by Peter Jansen and Stefan Andriopoulos. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. “Appendix: ‘The Production Code.’” In Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen & the Production Code Administration by Thomas Doherty. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Arnds, Peter O. Representation, Subversion, and Eugenics in Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. ———. “Teaching Race in Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum.” In Approaches to Teaching Grass’s The Tin Drum, ed. Monika Shafi, 164-175. The Modern Language Association of America: New York, 2008. Bartels, Gerrit. “Zum 85. Geburtstag Günter Grass: Ich und die Welt.” Tagesspiegel, October 16, 2012. http://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/zum-85-geburtstag-guenter-grass-ich-und-diewelt/7257496.html. Becker-Cantarino, Barbara. “‘The Black Witch’: Gender, Sexuality, and Violence in The Tin Drum.” In Approaches to Teaching Grass’s The Tin Drum, edited by Monika Shafi, 176184. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2008.

116 Bogdan, Robert. Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988. Brodsky, Patricia Pollock. “Resistance in the Borderlands: Outsiders and Opposition in The Tin Drum.” In Approaches to Teaching Grass’s The Tin Drum, edited by Monika Shafi, 4355. The Modern Language Association of America: New York, 2008. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge: New York, 1990. Cardullo, Bert. "Expressionism and the Real Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari." Film Criticism 6, no. 2 (Winter 1982): 28-34. Accessed September 20, 2012. http://0search.ebscohost.com.maurice.bgsu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=31286167 &site=ehost-live&scope=site. Chesebro, James W. and Koji Fuse. “The Development of a Perceived Masculinity Scale.” Communication Quarterly 49, no. 3 (2001): 203-278. Accessed 26 September 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01463370109385628. Chivers, Sally. “The Horror of Becoming ‘One of Us’: Tod Browning’s Freaks and Disability.” In Screening Disability: Essays on Cinema and Disability, edited by Christopher R. Smit and Anthony Enns, 57-64. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2001. Cicone, Michael V. and Diane N. Ruble. “Beliefs about Males,” Journal of Social Issues 34, no. 1 (Winter 1978): 5-16. Accessed September 26, 2012, http://0search.ebscohost.com.maurice.bgsu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=16381534 &site=ehost-live&scope=site.

117 Clément, Catherine B. “Charlatans and Hysterics.” In The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: Texts, Contexts, Histories, edited by Mike Budd, 191-204. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990. Connell, R.W. Masculinities, 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Curran, Jane. “The Conflicting Claims of Fiction and History in The Tin Drum: Humor, Fairy Tale, and Myth.” In Approaches to Teaching Grass’s The Tin Drum, edited by Monika Shafi, 125-137. The Modern Language Association of America: New York, 2008. Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari. DVD. Directed by Robert Wiene. 1920; Germany: Kino Video, 2002. Die Blechtrommel. DVD. Directed by Volker Schlöndorff. 1979; West Germany: The Criterion Collection, 2004. Dellmann, Sarah. Widerspenstige Körper: Körper, Kino, Sprache und Subversion in Tod Brownings Freaks und Filmen mit Lon Chaney. Marburg, Germany: Schüren Verlag, 2009. Doty, Alexander. Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon. New York: Routledge, 2000. Dragovic, Milan and G. Hammond. “Handedness in schizophrenia: a quantitative review of evidence.” Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica 111, no. 6 (June 2005): 410-419. Accessed July 2, 2013), http://0search.ebscohost.com.maurice.bgsu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mnh&AN=1587770 7&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

118 Dyer, Richard. Now You See It: Studies on Gay and Lesbian Film. New York: Routledge, 1997. Eisner, Lotte H. The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt, translated by Roger Greaves. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Elsaesser, Thomas. Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary. New York: Routledge, 2000. ———. “Weimar Cinema, Mobile Selves, and Anxious Males: Kracauer and Eisner Revisited.” In Expressionist Film—New Perspectives, edited by Dietrich Scheunemann, 33-71. Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2000. Fiedler, Leslie. Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978. Fine, Michelle and Adrienne Asch. Introduction to Women and Disability: Essays in Psychology, Culture, and Politics, edited by Michelle Fine and Adrienne Asch. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988. Freaks. DVD. Directed by Tod Browning. 1932; United States: Warner Home Video, 2004. Gaycken, Oliver. “Tod Browning and the Monstrosity of Hollywood Style.” In Screening Disability: Essays on Cinema and Disability, edited by Christopher R. Smit and Anthony Enns, 73-85. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2001. Grass, Günter. Die Blechtrommel. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1959.

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120 search.ebscohost.com.maurice.bgsu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=32168959 &site=ehost-live&scope=site. Kuzniar, Alice A. The Queer German Cinema. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Liebrand, Claudia. „Als Frau lesen?“ Literaturwissenschaft: Einführung in ein Sprachspiel, edited by Heinrich Bosse and Ursula Renner, 385-400. Rombach: Freiburg im Breisgau, 1999. Longmore, Paul K. “Screening Stereotypes: Images of Disabled People.” In Screening Disability: Essays on Cinema and Disability, edited by Christopher R. Smit and Anthony Enns, 1-18. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2001. Lorenz, Dagmar C.G. “Teaching The Tin Drum from the Perspective of Jewish Cultural Studies and Holocaust Studies.” In Approaches to Teaching Grass’s The Tin Drum, edited by Monika Shafi, 150-163. The Modern Language Association of America: New York, 2008. Mitchell, Breon. “Translator’s Afterword.” In The Tin Drum by Günter Grass. Translated by Breon Mitchell, 565-577. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010. Murphy, R.J. “Carnival Desire and the Sideshow of Fantasy: Dream, Duplicity and Representational Instability.” Germanic Review 66, no. 1 (1991): 50. Accessed November 4, 2012. http://0search.ebscohost.com.maurice.bgsu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=slh&AN=91042234 49&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

121 Neuhaus, Volker. Günter Grass: Die Blechtrommel Interpretation. Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1982. Nightmare Alley. DVD. Directed by Edmund Goulding. 1947; United States: 20th Century Fox, 2005. Polidoro, Massimo. “Blind Alley: The Sad and ‘Geeky’ Life of William Lindsay Gresham.” The Skeptical Inquirer 27, no. 4 (July/August 2003): 14-17. Prawer, S.S. Caligari’s Children: The Film as Tale of Terror. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. Preece, Julian. “Biography as Politics.” In The Cambridge Companion to Günter Grass, edited by Stuart Taberner, 10-23. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. ———. “Modes of History in The Tin Drum.” In Approaches to Teaching Grass’s The Tin Drum, edited by Monika Shafi, 15-30. The Modern Language Association of America: New York, 2008. Price, Theodore. Hitchcock and Homosexuality: His 50-Year Obsession with Jack the Ripper and the Superbitch Prostitute—A Psychoanalytic View. Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1992. Robbins, Tod. “Spurs.” In Adaptations: From Short Story to Big Screen: 35 Great Stories That Have Inspired Great Films, edited by Stephanie Harrison, 161-175. New York: Random House, 2005. ———. The Unholy Three. New York: John Lane Company, 1917.

122 Rosenthal, Stuart. “Tod Browning.” In The Hollywood Professionals, Volume 4, edited by Kingsley Canham, 7-66. London: The Tantivy Press, 1975. Shuttleworth, Russell, Nikki Wedgwood, and Nathan J. Wilson. “The Dilemma of Disabled Masculinity.” Men and Masculinities 15, no. 2 (2012): 174-194. doi: 10.1177/1097184X12439879. Taberner, Stuart. Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Günter Grass, edited by Stuart Taberner, 1-9. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Taylor, Charles. “A Wink and a Con.” Nation 291, no. 14. (October 4, 2010): 27-30. Tosches, Nick. Introduction to Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham, vii-xiii. 1946; reprint, New York: New York Review of Books, 2010. Wiene, Robert, Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: English Translation and Description of Action. Translated by R.V. Adkinson. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972.