Of Elephants and Men: the Freak as Victorian and Contemporary Spectacle

Abstract

Queen Victoria’s lifespan (1819–1901) just manages to link two centuries, one renowned for Britain’s industrial and imperial might, strict values and moral codes, the other, a century which posterity may record as a period of British decline and decadence, of devolution from the international stage and fragmentation within the queendom. Further juxtapositions — between the years of Queen Victoria’s reign (1837–1901) and the final bi-centennial years of the twentieth century — reveal more substantial contrasts. Historically, Britain’s part in the European ‘Scramble for Africa’ (1880s) can be contrasted directly with African decolonisation eighty years later. Economically, Britain emerged from the Industrial Revolution with a strong production-base and colonial distribution network, whereas now, post-structuralists and postmodernists claim that Britain has entered a post-industrial age of computers and information technology where knowledge is (industrial) power.³ Sociologically, British society now no longer reflects the working/leisured class divisions which the Marxist historian E.P. Thompson once chronicled,⁴ for all members of the public can now work towards becoming politicians and archbishops, bankers, and officers in the armed forces — traditionally the blue-blooded pursuits of the aristocratic. The Victorian ‘Zeitgeist’, if you will, is modern and progressive, despite harping back to the civilising ideas and ideals of the Enlightenment: the Aquarian Zeitgeist, in contrast, is postmodern, characterised by a New Age barbarity and Jean-François Lyotard’s terse ’incredulity toward metanarratives’.⁵

‘Look at the nigger!... Mama, a Negro!... Hell, he’s getting mad.... Take no notice, sir, he does not know that you are as civilised as we...’

Frantz Fanon²