The wondrous story of "Ape Woman" Julia Pastrana

The Victorian era was famous for its "freak shows," and in this context who doesn't know the story of the Elephant Man?

I sometimes wonder why Victorian Europe was steeped in a freak show culture. What was so gaze-worthy about disfigured humans? Why hold them in captivity and then put them in the same category of non-human species? Why construct entire circus shows around such folks? There are explanations galore and some touch deeply upon the possibility that freak shows were the era's mass media equivalent. 

We have our own freak shows, except that the freakishness is well-concealed behind glossy veneers.

My mind veered  toward Victorian freak shows because of the story of Julia Pastrana, both the hero and a victim of such shows in Victorian Europe.

Julia was a native of Mexico, but married to a gent who made money by turning Julia into a vehicle of mass-entertainment.

Here is, in a nutshell, the story of Julia:

Born in 1834, in Sinaloa, Mexico, Ms. Pastrana had two rare diseases, undiagnosed in her lifetime: generalized hypertrichosis lanuginosa, which covered her face and body in thick hair, and gingival hyperplasia, which thickened her lips and gums. A Mexican customs administrator bought Pastrana in 1854 and began showing her throughout the United States and Canada, part of a growing business of traveling exhibitions displaying human oddities. (Though slavery had been abolished in Mexico decades earlier, many circus performers were still sold.) In New York Pastrana married Theodore Lent, an impresario who became her manager.

I am thinking that Pastrana's freakishness was further compounded by her foreignness. A large number of freak show subjects were said to have been imported from non-European parts of the world.

But people like Pastrana were "human" as well.

Pastrana, variously described as revolting in appearance and "gorillalike" was a talented singer and dancer and was also recognized for her kind nature, and "perfectly" proportioned feet and hands.

Julia gave birth to a child with similar disorders; the child died in infancy and Julia followed suit. Lent, the husband, took the bodies of both mother and child and displayed them for entertainment. He went on to marry another bearded German lady around whom he organized yet another itinerant circus show.

Pastrana and her child's remains were found in a dustbin, close to a warehouse in Oslo, Norway, in 1976. Since then they were handed over to the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Oslo. 

Nearly 200 years later, Julia Pastrana's remains would be buried in her birth city in Mexico.

Pastrana has been the subject matter of many a modern show as well, but the modern shows have mined Pastrana for entirely different purposes:

In 2003 Kathleen Anderson Culebro, produced a staging of “The True History of the Tragic Life and Triumphant Death of Julia Pastrana, the Ugliest Woman in the World,” in Texas. That play, by Shaun Prendergast, had its debut in London in 1998 and is performed almost entirely in the dark. Mr. Prendergast said in an e-mail that the setting “seemed the perfect marriage — a woman known for her ugliness, but with a beautiful voice, presented in a way which would force the audience to conjure her with their imagination.

Read more about Julia Pastrana here.