ABSTRACT
The blonde Venus, the beast actor and the Grand Guignol lunatic played upon the fraught nerves of a society that was becoming obsessively concerned with its own symptoms. From one point of view they may be seen as embodiments of these symptoms, projections of a fevered cultural imaginary. Yet the performers who created the roles on stage skewed the deadly serious figures of the whore, the lunatic and the animal human towards the burlesque, exposing their status as phantasms. Here, though, burlesque itself was tinged with hysteria and melancholy. The anxious hypotheses of social Darwinism did not lend themselves to the kind of hilarious treatment that suited the broad themes of evolution taken up in the circuses and variety theatres of the mid-nineteenth century. While the Barnum principle of humbug remained strong in the freak shows through to the end of the century, the recklessly exuberant sense of diversity conveyed in the variety theatres across the middle decades of the nineteenth century was fading in the harsh light of a new kind of analytic scrutiny focused on the figure of the performer. Dancers and acrobats could be seen as a social threat, and the circus itself a dangerous counter-zone to that of civilised society.
