Freakery and the Discursive Limits of Be-ing in Julia Ward Howe's <em>The Hermaphrodite</em>

Abstract

In 1841 Julia Ward visited Perkins Institution for Blind and was swept away by noble rider on a noble steed whose arrival claimed her attention (Howe, Reminiscences 82). Ward had not journeyed to Perkins to see that man, Samuel Gridley Howe, whom she would go on to marry in 1843. Instead, she was there to see Bridgman, his protegee. Under Howe's tutelage, had become first blind and deaf person to be able to communicate. She was a miracle, a beacon of hope, and a symbol of potential of science to heal humanity's ills and unlock sours greatest potential. (1) But she was also, various observers described her, an almost peculiar case a most remarkable being, a wonderful child (Stevens 273; Laura Bridgman Feb. 1841, 33; Laura Bridgman 15 May 1843, 145). She was not a thing, perhaps, but not a whole person--a subject or an agent--either. Ironically, Bridgman's objectification resulted from Howe's attempts to counter public understandings of disabled individuals less than human (Klages 118, 144-45). To that end, he publicized her achievements in public exhibitions and through his published records. Bridgman's status as a major tourist attraction in Boston's guidebooks attests to popularity of her public appearances (Gitter 5). Nearly popular herself were Howe's widely circulated annual reports of her physical, intellectual and moral progress, which contained information on everything from her head measurements to her growing vocabulary to her manipulative relationships (Laura Bridgman 1 Feb. 1841, 41). (2) Rather than fully humanizing Bridgman, Howe's narrative control rendered her symbol to be described and interpreted by others, an image to be manipulated, much like, Elisabeth Gitter observes, freaks in P. T. Barnum's freak shows (Klages 144; Gitter 106). And if was freak, Howe was her manager, who, [no less than Barnum ... mastered art of manipulating public's interest in her story, capitalizing on their concern in order to advance both his career and his institution (Freeberg 3). (3) As Samuel Gridley Howe's wife, Julia Ward Howe also benefited from an anomalous body, albeit in more personal and psychological ways. In approximately 1846 she began crafting what was in 2004 published The Hermaphrodite but what she called the history of a strange being (Scrap-book 30). (4) It is worth remarking that her protagonist, Laurence, intersexual extraordinary case of anomalous humanity, has much in common with Laura, blind and deaf anomalously conditioned human spirit who made Samuel Gridley Howe famous (Howe, Hermaphrodite 194; Stevens 273). Both and Laurence are individuals ensnared in a web of popular and scientific discourses that converged in concurrent production of normal and so-called deviant bodies; both of their stories are infused with language of otherness; and both are objectified and spoken of but rarely spoken to. However, at least one key difference separates and Laurence, and it is this: Laurence has a voice. Samuel Gridley Howe's control of Bridgman's story follows a long tradition of denying disabled people's ability to speak for themselves. (5) By contrast, Julia Ward Howe's Laurence self-narrates, telling his story in first person. In giving Laurence a voice, Howe offers a kind of counternarrative to those stories that had muted, or entirely silenced, disabled. Her use of first person provides an intimate glimpse into emotional and relational consequences of othering process deployed in categorization of bodies. Scholars from a number of theoretical backgrounds have unpacked ways that popular entertainments such freak shows and elite professions such medicine and comparative anatomy converged in their attempts to determine and stabilize physical and behavioral norms for body. (6) These and other discourses focused both on interior biological differences that render [ed] invisible and on exterior ambiguities that freak shows--with their displays of hermaphrodites, dwarves, giants, and others--made patently visible (Wiegman 31). …