Abstract
Examining the ambivalent place of the sideshow and the laboratory within Victorian culture and its reimaginings, this essay explores the contradiction between the narratively orchestrating role and peripheral location of the sideshow in Leslie Parry’s Church of Marvels (2015) and the laboratory in NBC’s Dracula (2013–2014), reading these neo-Victorian spaces as heterotopias, relational places simultaneously belonging to and excluded from the dominant social order. These spaces’ impacts on individual identity illustrate this uneasy relationship. Both the sideshow and the laboratory constitute sites of resignification, emerging as “crisis heterotopias” or sites of passage: in Parry’s novel, the sideshow allows the Church twins to embrace their unique identities, surpassing the limitations of their physical resemblance; in Dracula, laboratory experiments reverse Dracula’s undead condition. Effecting reinvention, these spaces reconfigure the characters’ senses of belonging, propelling them to places beyond their confines, and thus projecting the latter’s heterotopic qualities onto the city. Potentially harmful, yet opening up urban space to include identities which are considered aberrant, these relocations envision the city as a “heterotopia of compensation”: an alternative, possibly idealized, space that reifies the sideshow’s and the laboratory’s attempts to achieve greater extroversion and visibility for their liminal occupants, thus fostering neo-Victorianism’s outreach efforts to support the disempowered.
Highlights
The ethical impetus to engage with the Victorian past in order to rescue the disempowered and disenfranchised of the nineteenth century from oblivion, and make, even in retrospect, amendments for their predicaments has recurrently been read as a defining feature of neo-Victorianism (Gutleben 2001, pp. 124, 168; Sanders 2006, p. 19; Kohlke 2008, pp. 11, 13)
Emphasizing the tensions which are typical of the relationship between the sideshow and the laboratory and Victorian society, the preceding discussion defined them as heterotopias
Through his condemned struggle for integration and belonging, Grayson incarnates the tensions that render theVictorian laboratory a heterotopia: in effect, he embodies a conflict between the suffering of injustice, the weakness of vindictiveness, and the need for vindication that cannot ever be resolved within the narrative universe of the series, seeing as the show was cancelled after the first season
Summary
The ethical impetus to engage with the Victorian past in order to rescue the disempowered and disenfranchised of the nineteenth century from oblivion, and make, even in retrospect, amendments for their predicaments has recurrently been read as a defining feature of neo-Victorianism (Gutleben 2001, pp. 124, 168; Sanders 2006, p. 19; Kohlke 2008, pp. 11, 13). Movements, highlighting relations between different spaces and their seemingly secluded inhabitants, and compromising borders and boundaries Seeing that both sideshow performances and scientific demonstrations simultaneously evoked wonder and skepticism in the Victorian era, these spaces placed their practitioners at the intersection of marginality and social acceptance. The poisoning, the quarantine, and the explosion succeed in first isolating and thereafter literally and dramatically expelling the laboratory, the public space of the demonstration, from its urban surroundings, reiterating its liminal and controversial status This destructive incident draws attention to another aspect of the conflict between Dracula and the Order, which, on account of Grayson’s nationality, becomes an instance of international competition, offering an interesting twist on the series’ source material. Its quality as an ambivalent heterotopic space that is simultaneously detached and adjacent, participatory and withdrawn, liminal and focal
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