A Freakish Whiteness: The Circassian Lady as Sideshow Spectacle

We know lit­tle about Zublia Aggolia apart from her name. What we do know is that the woman depicted below fits the model of a kind of per­formed per­son­al­ity dubbed the “Cir­cass­ian Lady” in mid-19th cen­tury Amer­ica. As a type, the Cir­cass­ian Lady became quite famil­iar in the United States, espe­cially after the mid-1860s, when var­i­ous per­form­ers in cir­cus sideshows began play­ing this role. “Zublia Aggolia” was almost cer­tainly a stage name, given that prob­a­bly none of the women per­form­ing this part were actual Circassians.

To begin with a ques­tion: Why the Cir­cass­ian Lady? The fact is that the “Cir­cass­ian Lady” or the “Cir­cass­ian Beauty” was a fea­ture of 19th cen­tury sideshows, but not the “Cir­cass­ian Gen­tle­man.” With the occa­sional excep­tion of a “Cir­cass­ian” child (see illus­tra­tion below), all the pho­tographs we find of sideshow Cir­cas­sians are of women. Why?

The first thing to con­sider is the des­ig­na­tion “Cir­cass­ian” itself. Cir­cas­sia is a part of the Cau­cuses, a moun­tain­ous region on the north­east side of the Black Sea. Cir­cas­sia had been a bat­tle­ground between the Rus­sians to its north and the Turks of the Ottoman Empire to the south after Rus­sia invaded the Cau­ca­sus, start­ing in the late 18th cen­tury. The Cir­cas­sians were even­tu­ally over­run, and the Rus­sians dis­persed hun­dreds of thou­sands of them from their native land in the mid-1860s in what is now con­sid­ered a geno­cide. It is a cru­elly ironic twist of his­tory that the “Cir­cass­ian Lady” became an invented trope of cir­cus spec­ta­cle in the United States at pre­cisely the time that the actual Cir­cas­sians were being eth­ni­cally cleansed from their homeland.

For a cen­tury or more before that sad fate, the Cir­cas­sians had been an object of wider Euro­pean inter­est. In 1775, the Ger­man nat­u­ral­ist Johann Friedrich Blu­men­bach (1752–1840) pub­lished On the Nat­ural Vari­ety of Mankind, a work that became one of the most influ­en­tial texts in the emerg­ing Euro­pean sci­ence of race. Blu­men­bach was a spe­cial­ist in com­par­a­tive anatomy, and he ini­ti­ated the divi­sion of human beings into five dis­tinct “races” defined by region and color: the Cau­casian, or “white” race; the Mon­go­lian, or “yel­low” race; the Malayan, or “Brown” race; the Ethiopian, or “black” race, and the Amer­i­can, or “red” race. It is a tes­ti­mony to the influ­ence of Blu­men­bach that even today we still use the term “Cau­casian” to sig­nify “white” peo­ple, and of course the color scheme of white, yel­low, brown, black and red still has cur­rency, too, although in altered forms. This is the case despite the fact that con­tem­po­rary bio­log­i­cal sci­ence has com­pletely dis­cred­ited Blumenbach’s the­ory of the ori­gins and cat­e­gories of human beings.

Accord­ing to Blu­men­bach, the white race orig­i­nated in the Cau­ca­sus region, and all other human races derived from this orig­i­nal source as degen­er­a­tions of the Cau­casian as the high­est type. Here is the full con­text from Blumanbach’s On the Nat­ural Vari­ety of Mankind:

Blu­men­bach adds this foot­note to the word “Georgian”:

From a cloud of eye-witnesses it is enough to quote a clas­si­cal one, Jo. Chardin, T. I. p. m. 171. ‘The blood of Geor­gia is the best of the East, and per­haps in the world. I have not observed a sin­gle ugly face in that coun­try, in either sex; but I have seen angel­i­cal ones. Nature has there lav­ished upon the women beau­ties which are not to be seen else­where. I con­sider it to be impos­si­ble to look at them with­out lov­ing them. It would be impos­si­ble to paint more charm­ing vis­ages, or bet­ter fig­ures, than those of the Geor­gians.’ (Blu­men­bach, Anthro­po­log­i­cal Trea­tises, 269)

In Blumenbach’s racial typol­ogy, then, the purest, most orig­i­nal “white” peo­ple came from the Cau­ca­sus region. Already in his 1775 text, Blu­men­bach specif­i­cally iden­ti­fied the Cir­cass­ian women among the peo­ples of the Cau­ca­sus as the sin­gle most beau­ti­ful rep­re­sen­ta­tives of this pure and pri­mor­dial “Cau­casian” type: “Take, of all who bear the name of man, a man and a woman most widely dif­fer­ent from each other; let the one be a most beau­ti­ful Cir­cass­ian woman and the other an African born in Guinea, as black and ugly as pos­si­ble” (Blu­men­bach, Anthro­po­log­i­cal Trea­tises, 363). In this pas­sage, Blu­men­bach is dis­cussing the fact that all human beings form part of the same species, because they can repro­duce together, despite the exter­nal dif­fer­ences of appear­ance; but his off-handed val­oriza­tion of the Cir­cass­ian woman as the ideal of white­ness and the Guinean man as the anti-ideal of black­ness could not be more evi­dent; while he holds that they form part of the same species, he clearly con­sid­ers the Guinean a devo­lu­tion from the Cir­cass­ian type, itself sup­pos­edly the most per­fect form of the Caucasian.

One hun­dred years later, around 1870, this eli­sion of the Cir­cass­ian and Cau­casian as the most per­fect rep­re­sen­ta­tives of white­ness had taken hold of the pub­lic imag­i­na­tion in the United States. The image below presents a woman of the “Cir­cass­ian” style who is labelled a “Cau­casian”; bear in mind that all these titles are fic­tions applied to a per­son per­form­ing an imag­ined type:

Apart from the influ­ence of the new sci­ence of race, another cause for this fas­ci­na­tion with Cir­cas­sians was that start­ing in the mid-1700s it had become a mat­ter of dra­matic and roman­tic lore that beau­ti­ful Cir­cass­ian women were being sold in the slave mar­kets of Istan­bul and through­out the Ottoman Empire, to serve in the harems of the sul­tan and other poten­tates as the most desir­able beau­ties of the realm. Lord Byron’s epic poem, Don Juan (1818–1824), con­tains this telling pas­sage (Canto IV, verses 114 and 115) about a slave mar­ket in Istanbul:

     But to the narrative:—The vessel bound
       With slaves to sell off in the capital,
     After the usual process, might be found
       At anchor under the seraglio wall;
     Her cargo, from the plague being safe and sound,
       Were landed in the market, one and all,
     And there with Georgians, Russians, and Circassians,
       Bought up for different purposes and passions.

     Some went off dearly; fifteen hundred dollars
       For one Circassian, a sweet girl, were given,
     Warranted virgin; beauty's brightest colours
       Had deck'd her out in all the hues of heaven:
     Her sale sent home some disappointed bawlers,
       Who bade on till the hundreds reach'd eleven;
     But when the offer went beyond, they knew
      'T was for the Sultan, and at once withdrew.

The leg­end of the white “Cir­cass­ian Beauty” being sold into sex­ual slav­ery had taken on such a life of its own that in the early 1860s P. T. Bar­num, the great Amer­i­can show­man and pro­moter of hokum, con­ceived the idea of buy­ing a Cir­cass­ian woman out of cap­tiv­ity in Turkey to exhibit in his wildly suc­cess­ful Amer­i­can Museum in New York City. In a let­ter of May 1864, Bar­num autho­rized his agent, John Green­wood, Jr., to spend up to $5000 in gold each (a vast sum in that day) for two Cir­cass­ian beau­ties if Green­wood could suc­cess­fully infil­trate the slave mar­kets of Istan­bul to buy them with­out being detected as a Westerner.

Green­wood failed in his attempt, but that did not stop Bar­num, who had no qualms about find­ing some­one who could “pass” as Cir­cass­ian to put on exhi­bi­tion along with other remark­able indi­vid­u­als in his sideshow, such as Tom Thumb. Later in 1864, Bar­num put on show some­one he dubbed “Zalumma Agra” (“Star of the East”), a young woman who had come to his oper­a­tion seek­ing work whom he dressed up in the invented cos­tume  that then became the model for the “Cir­cass­ian Ladies” who then sprang up in cir­cus sideshows all over the coun­try. Zalumma was the first of sev­eral Cir­cas­sians in Barnum’s shows, and even her name was his inven­tion. The gallery below presents sev­eral views of Zalumma (var­i­ously spelled), a por­trait of another of Barnum’s Cir­cas­sians, Zoe Meleke (a made-up name again), and a group por­trait of the “freaks” in Barnum’s Cir­cus; note that all are white, includ­ing the “whitest” of the white, albinos:

And so Bar­num invented the Cir­cass­ian Lady, or the Cir­cass­ian Beauty, as a sideshow per­former of a par­tic­u­lar kind. The type included a num­ber of key fea­tures: the woman must be pretty, or even beau­ti­ful, by Vic­to­rian stan­dards; she would wear exotic cloth­ing, gen­er­ally more reveal­ing than that worn by Euro­pean and Amer­i­can woman of that era; she might dis­play strik­ing jew­elry and other orna­ments, such as strings of pearls or richly embroi­dered clothes. And the most telling fea­ture of all: the big hair. This extra­or­di­nary hair-do was entirely Barnum’s inven­tion, but it stuck as one of the defin­ing mark­ers of the “Cir­cass­ian” woman, no mat­ter what cir­cus or sideshow put a Cir­cass­ian per­former on the stage: a huge mass of hair, washed in beer and teased to a frizzy cloud resem­bling what might remind some­one today of an Afro from the 1960s or 1970s.

The carte de vis­ite of Zublia Aggolia dis­plays all of these fea­tures. Cards like this were sold at the cir­cuses and shows and by pro­mot­ers, the prof­its shared by the per­form­ers and the show own­ers. She wears a jew­eled cru­ci­fix and pearl-studded, low-cut dress, and the char­ac­ter­is­tic hair­style is unmistakable.

So now we are in a bet­ter posi­tion to answer our ques­tion: Why “Cir­cass­ian Ladies” but not “Cir­cass­ian Gentlemen”?

As Linda Frost has sug­gested, the “Cir­cass­ian” woman occu­pied a very pecu­liar place in the 19th cen­tury imag­i­na­tion, a place that chal­lenged the dom­i­nant clas­si­fi­ca­tions of race, gen­der, and sex­u­al­ity. Because this strange posi­tion enticed the 19th cen­tury viewer to trans­gress these cat­e­gories, at least in their imag­i­na­tions while view­ing the sideshow or in pri­vate while gaz­ing at a pho­to­graphic por­trait, the nat­ural place for this kind of per­for­mance was the strange and yet pro­tected and cir­cum­scribed space of the freak show, pio­neered so effec­tively by P. T. Barnum.

First of all, we have to take into account that the myth of the Cir­cass­ian included sev­eral inter­sect­ing ele­ments of over­whelm­ing inter­est, if not obses­sion, to 19th cen­tury white Amer­i­cans: race, slav­ery, and ideals of fem­i­nine virtue, beauty and sexuality.

The leg­end of the Cir­cass­ian woman involved a provoca­tive com­po­nent for white Amer­i­cans: the idea that the Cir­cas­sians were the most pri­mor­dial form of the white race, and there­fore also the purest and most beau­ti­ful exem­plars of white­ness, espe­cially their women; yet at the same time, these Cir­cass­ian women were sub­ject to the slave trade of the Ottoman Empire. The idea that a white woman might be sold into slav­ery, and espe­cially sold into a slav­ery that marked her as a sex­ual object in a potentate’s harem, was a mat­ter of both moral hor­ror and trans­gres­sive fas­ci­na­tion to the white imagination.

That potent com­bi­na­tion of hor­ror and fas­ci­na­tion was evi­dent at least as early as the dis­play of Hiram Pow­ers’ statue, “The Greek Slave,” at the Great Exhi­bi­tion in Lon­don in 1851. Pow­ers was an Amer­i­can scu­pltor who worked in Flo­rence, and his depic­tion of a white woman, stripped naked with only chains cov­er­ing her gen­i­tals, about to be sold in a Turk­ish slave mar­ket, cre­ated a sen­sa­tion as well as a tremen­dous con­tro­versy when exhibited.

Greece was very much in the public’s mind at the time, for the coun­try had fought a suc­cess­ful war of inde­pen­dence from the Ottoman Empire from 1821 to 1830. Euro­peans had sym­pa­thized with Greece not only for its being the font of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion and its ideal of free­dom but also in its resis­tance as a Chris­t­ian nation against the Mus­lim Ottomans. Those inter­lock­ing themes of slav­ery, white­ness, Chris­tian­ity and free­dom res­onated deeply in the United States, and when the sculp­ture went on tour there, it sealed Pow­ers’ fame, despite the debates that the statue aroused.

Indeed, arousal was pre­cisely the point of con­tention. Pow­ers insisted that the naked­ness was not offen­sive but rather ele­vat­ing, that it was no incite­ment to lust but rather an instance of what he called an “ideal type,” a form that tran­scends the human body and sym­bol­izes pure prin­ci­ples of human virtue. In the case of “The Greek Slave,” he meant to por­tray a Chris­t­ian woman fac­ing a ter­ri­ble fate with faith, mod­esty, and for­ti­tude. But there was no mis­tak­ing the mean­ing of that fate, even then: as a slave, her body would be at the dis­posal of her buyer, and it was pre­cisely this fact that would be star­ing the statue’s view­ers in the face as they stared, in turn, at her white gran­ite body — or the many pho­to­graphic repro­duc­tions of that body.

The idea of a woman being at the sex­ual mercy of her owner was not for­eign to the imag­i­na­tion of the white pub­lic at the time: it was well known that slave-owners in the United States often entered into sex­ual rela­tion­ships with their enslaved women, rela­tion­ships that involved a range of coer­cion, almost all of which we would clas­sify as rape today. Since the begin­ning of the 19th cen­tury, Thomas Jef­fer­son him­self had been rumored to have sired chil­dren with his slave Sally Hem­ings, who was her­self the child of an enslaved mother and a white mas­ter — and the half-sister of Jefferson’s deceased wife.

As another exam­ple, in 1868, the Eng­lish sculp­tor John Bell pro­duced a sculp­ture enti­tled “The Octoroon.” Clearly influ­enced by Pow­ers’ “Greek Slave,” Bell’s statue depicts an octoroon, that is, a per­son of one-eighth African ances­try, as a naked woman in shack­les, per­haps await­ing the auc­tion block, her mod­esty pro­tected only by her inor­di­nately long hair. It is worth under­lin­ing this use of hair as a marker of for­bid­den sex­u­al­ity, for it turns up again with the Cir­cass­ian Ladies, but in a more sub­tle form. Pho­to­graphic repro­duc­tions of Bell’s statue cir­cu­lated at stere­oview cards in the United States (see below), which allowed view­ers to get a three-dimensional sense of the figure.

This theme repli­cated itself in fic­tion, too. For exam­ple, in 1859, a play by Dion Bouci­cault called The Octoroon opened in Lon­don. The play tells the story of Zoe, the “octoroon” of the title: a per­son of one-eighth African descent. Zoe looks white and lives free on a plan­ta­tion in the Amer­i­can South. The white nephew of the plan­ta­tion owner falls in love with Zoe and seeks to marry her, even after she tells him the truth of her ances­try. In the British ver­sion, they do marry, despite the taboo (and the laws) against mis­ce­gena­tion, and they live out their lives together, but not before fend­ing off another man who attempts to see her enslaved as a declared Black woman so that he can buy her as his own mis­tress. The play was a huge hit in Eng­land, but when it came to the United States, the end­ing changed: there is no mar­riage, and Zoe dies along with her lover in a final fiery cat­a­clysm. For an  Amer­i­can audi­ence both tit­il­lated and pan­icked by the prospect of race-mixing, trans­gres­sion of the taboo could go only so far before being sealed with disaster.

And so the very idea of the Cir­cass­ian Lady played into an already well-established, if poten­tially explo­sive fan­tasy, of white women (or at least a white-seeming woman) sub­jected as slaves to the sex­ual whims of real or poten­tial own­ers. It was an explo­sive idea because it raised ques­tions about the assump­tions that white peo­ple in the United States might have held about the sup­pos­edly nat­ural invi­o­la­bil­ity of the white race when it came to slav­ery and sex­ual virtue: here were white women, sup­pos­edly from the stock of the purest and most beau­ti­ful white women, who were nev­er­the­less no longer able to enjoy the cer­tainty of free­dom to which their race, at least in the United States, would have enti­tled them. White­ness, then, might be seen as no longer a guar­an­tee of lib­erty and mas­tery, and so the prospect of the Cir­cass­ian Lady offered the sub­tle thrills of dan­ger and ambi­gu­ity. Even more sub­ver­sively, the very idea of white women as sex­ual slaves must have pre­sented a tit­il­lat­ing object to the imag­i­na­tion, at least for white men. The Cir­cass­ian lady lit­er­ally embod­ied a taboo.

This last point helps to explain the cos­tume of the “Cir­cass­ian Ladies” in the sideshow: their out­fits were inven­tions, hav­ing noth­ing to do with the actual cloth­ing of women from the Cau­ca­sus region. What the “Cir­cass­ian” cos­tume did do was invoke a cer­tain Ori­en­tal exoti­cism, a hint of the harem and the seraglio. They offered the viewer an oppor­tu­nity to view, and stare at, a sex­u­al­ized white woman and to imag­ine her pos­si­ble fate as a slave were she not “spared” it by appear­ing in the sideshow. (Although we must remem­ber that this was almost always a fan­tasy: the “Cir­cas­sians Ladies” were per­form­ers play­ing a part.) The cos­tume did much to accent both exoti­cism as well as sex­u­al­ity, by using strange cuts, fab­rics, jew­elry and embroi­dery, and by often by expos­ing arms, legs and busts in ways that would oth­er­wise have been out of bounds for a white Vic­to­rian woman. How inten­tional this expo­sure was is evi­dent in the por­trait of Zublia Aggi­ola: in high mag­ni­fi­ca­tion, one can see that the pho­tog­ra­pher has retouched the neg­a­tive to accen­tu­ate the cleav­age of her bust — some­thing that would never occur in an ordi­nary por­trait of a Vic­to­rian “lady.” But at the same time, at her throat, just above the bust, hang­ing like a pro­tec­tive tal­is­man, lies a large, ornate cru­ci­fix, an item com­mon to Cir­cass­ian por­traits. The cru­ci­fix also shows up in Pow­ers’ statue of “The Greek Slave,” where it can be seen, along with her removed clothes, just beneath her hand on the post she leans on. Like the Greek slave of Pow­ers, the pre­sumed Chris­t­ian faith of the Cir­cass­ian Beauty puts into play another para­dox: the sex­u­al­ized Other who is nev­er­the­less both con­tained and made vir­tu­ous by her deep faith, despite her ter­ri­ble fate.

The charged ambi­gu­ity of the Cir­cass­ian Beauty, strad­dling sex­ual trans­gres­sion and reli­gious tran­scen­dence, marks this type of per­son with a cer­tain mys­ti­cal value grounded in her freak­ish white­ness. This seems to have been even more accen­tu­ated in the case of some albi­nos, the “whitest” per­sons of all, who adopted the cachet of mys­ti­cal pow­ers, such as mind-reading, as a fea­ture of their sideshow acts:

Return­ing to the images of the Cir­cas­sians, what might be par­tic­u­larly strik­ing to the mod­ern viewer, again, is the big hair, which looks so much like the “Afro” of the late 1960s and 1970s, then as much sym­bol of Black Power as a fash­ion state­ment. This asso­ci­a­tion that we today might sense between the Cir­cass­ian hair and the Afro may be largely an anachro­nism, but not entirely. We have to remem­ber that the explo­sion of frizzed hair in the por­traits of “Cir­cass­ian” women was an entirely arti­fi­cial effect, both cos­met­i­cally and cul­tur­ally: it had to be cre­ated with beer sham­poo and teas­ing comb; it had noth­ing to do with how actual Cir­cass­ian women wore their hair. The untamed hair evoked exoti­cism; it served as a marker that this woman who looked in all other ways white was in fact some­thing Other. This Oth­er­ness was sug­gested in other ways, too, not just by the cloth­ing. It is remark­able that so many “Cir­cass­ian” women’s stage names began with “Z”: the let­ter itself is largely for­eign to Eng­lish and Amer­i­can names — almost none begin with it. Fur­ther­more, white view­ers would have had one very strik­ing point of com­par­i­son for frizzy hair: this was the hair tex­ture they would attribute to Black peo­ple (even if African Amer­i­cans then did not wear their hair in styles resem­bling the Afro). This is con­firmed by the por­trayal of other “types” in the cir­cus sideshows of the period, such as this “Egypt­ian” (another per­formed persona):

So here we land in yet another seem­ing para­dox: the puta­tively purest, most pri­mor­dial, most beau­ti­ful form of the white race, the Cir­cass­ian, is con­structed to share, how­ever sub­tly, its sig­na­ture fea­ture — a wild mane of hair — with Africans. In this way, the purest “White” is made an Other — by asso­ci­at­ing it, how­ever sub­con­sciously, with the white Amer­i­cans’ phys­i­o­log­i­cal stereo­types about Blacks. And we can account for this by con­nect­ing the dots: both African slaves and Cir­cass­ian slaves were sub­ject to sex­ual exploita­tion, even if the lat­ter were sup­pos­edly res­cued from that fate, and this is the point of con­tact that played so pow­er­fully on white Amer­i­cans’ imag­i­na­tion: wild­ness, even a con­tained and con­strained wild­ness, sug­gested that the sex­ual exploita­tion was in some sense nat­ural to the enslaved women’s own instincts, char­ac­ter, and desires. African women were rou­tinely por­trayed as sex­u­ally las­civ­i­ous, and there­fore in some sense will­ing and com­plicit in their sex­ual exploita­tion. Surely that is part of what was so tit­il­lat­ing to the white male viewer of the Cir­cass­ian Beauty as a type: her narrowly-avoided fate as a harem slave, her strange clothes, her exposed flesh, her half-mad hair all inti­mate an unin­hib­ited, if restrained, sexuality.

And yet, at the same time, because the Cir­cass­ian was thought to be the purest, more pri­mor­dial exem­plar of the white race, that may have led the white viewer to yet another thought: that the sex­ual fate and the sex­ual pro­cliv­i­ties of the “Cir­cass­ian Lady” (no true “Lady” then by Vic­to­rian stan­dards because of these very pro­cliv­i­ties) might just as well be those of any given “Amer­i­can Lady,” who must be, after all, the be racial descen­dent of the ancient ances­tors of the woman on exhibit. And that, in turn, would sug­gest that the white Amer­i­can “lady” was, at bot­tom, in her unadorned, uncul­tured nature, no dif­fer­ent from the Cir­cass­ian — and so no dif­fer­ent from the African. From there, the viewer — pri­mar­ily the white male viewer — could con­tem­plate a fur­ther ques­tion: whether the sideshow depicts an erotic truth that is or ought to be more than a sideshow in ordi­nary domes­tic life. Add to this the fact that the “Cir­cass­ian Ladies” were no Cir­cas­sians at all but ordi­nary Amer­i­can women cos­tumed and frizzed to “pass” for a purely invented “Cir­cass­ian” type, and the ambi­gu­i­ties rise to an even greater height: these trans­gres­sive women were not the Other at all but the white view­ers’ own kind. The self as Other, and the Other as self: in this lim­i­nal zone, which one defines the mean­ing of white­ness, of free­dom, and of accept­able sex­ual license?

But the very appear­ance of the Cir­cass­ian Lady in the cir­cus sideshow, along­side other human types des­ig­nated “freaks,” must have blunted all such ques­tions. P. T. Bar­num per­fected the sideshow as a form of exploita­tion and enter­tain­ment, imi­tated by hun­dreds of car­ni­vals and cir­cuses through­out the nation, that allowed the vis­i­tor to depart from a cus­tom­ary world of lim­its and expec­ta­tions, but only in a tem­po­rary way, and in a con­text that marked the expe­ri­ence as deci­sively excep­tional, ques­tion­able, and pos­si­bly fraud­u­lent — in a word, freak­ish. The very nature of the sideshow allowed the viewer to dis­place any gen­uinely dis­com­fort­ing ques­tions into the realm of ambi­gu­ity, where they could then be safely bun­dled up and for­got­ten, just as we today con­front our fears in the safety of a hor­ror movie or a roller coaster ride: as mere enter­tain­ment, a thrill to expe­ri­ence and then purge as at bot­tom unreal. Such adven­tures bring no last­ing insight or trans­for­ma­tion; quite the reverse, in fact: they tend to shunt a dis­qui­et­ing expe­ri­ence or ques­tion off into a limbo that has the effect of mak­ing it dis­ap­pear from active reflec­tion. In this sense, the sideshow served as an inoc­u­la­tion against gen­uine ques­tions that if given a real voice might unset­tle the pre­vail­ing cat­e­gories and assump­tions of human clas­si­fi­ca­tions such as race and gen­der. The sideshow there­fore only exploited the ambi­gu­i­ties; it never truly chal­lenged them, and the Cir­cass­ian Lady never really allowed the Vic­to­rian world to call into ques­tion the divid­ing lines of race, free­dom, and sex­ual self-possession that she embod­ied, if only as a per­for­mance of an imag­i­nary human type.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blu­men­bach, Johann Friedrich, and Hunter, John, The Anthro­po­log­i­cal Trea­tises of Johann Friedrich Blu­men­bach, trans. Thomas Benyshe (Lon­don: Long­man, Green, Long­man, Roberts, and Green, 1865)

Robert Bog­dan, Freak Show: Pre­sent­ing Human Odd­i­ties for Amuse­ment and Profit (Chicago: Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press, 1988)

Crane, Sylvia E., Gree­nough, Pow­ers and Craw­ford, Amer­i­can Sculp­tors in Nine­teenth Cen­tury Italy (Coral Gables, FL: Uni­ver­sity of Miami Press, 1972)

Frost, Linda, “The Cir­cass­ian Beauty and the Cir­cass­ian Slave: Gen­der, Impe­ri­al­ism, and Amer­i­can Pop­u­lar Enter­tain­ment,” in Never One Nation: Freaks, Sav­ages, and White­ness in US Pop­u­lar Cul­ture, 1850–1877 (Min­neapo­lis: Uni­ver­sity of Min­nesota Press, 2005)

Wun­der, Richard, Hiram Pow­ers: Ver­mont sculp­tor, 1805–1873 (Newark: Uni­ver­sity of Delaware Press, 1991)