The Victorian seance

An interview of Arthur Conan Doyle: The film was shot in October 1928 for Movietone News in his garden at his Windelsham estate, with his Irish terrier, Paddy.

Few know about Conan Doyle's deep interest in matters of spirituality; Sherlock Holmes, Doyle's famous detective doesn't show any obvious signs of being spiritual, however, the manner in which he dashes off into corners of reclusivity between bouts of scientific crime-solving, tells us that Sherlock too had his mystical moments.

Conan Doyle was one of those late Victorian males who got drawn to Madame Blavatsky's teachings. Blavatsky, variously known as a con and the mother of modern spirituality, opened an otherwise rational era's--the Victorians were anxious to define themselves as a rational and scientific people, against the superstitious Orientals--eyes to the psychic part of human existence.

Doyle made secret visits to Blavatsky's seance parlors in the London suburbs; in this interview, he bravely defends his views on spirituality.

Gibbons tied up in the ribbons of my memory

This is a book that adorned the bookshelves of a majority of book-loving, a bit of Anglicized, Indians, especially Bengalis.

It probably lay in my father's bookcase as well, but I never got a chance to read Edward Gibbon's famous seven volumes on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire (I just checked, it's now available in WalMart, indicating not only a decline and fall in the value of such books in contemporary America, but a total eclipse of it as well).

I carry with me an impression of the book as a "male" book, the product of male cogitation, i.e. greatly worried about things tangential to the minutiae of daily living in Victorian England.

Nonetheless, I am moved by what Gibbons said after he finished writing the book:

I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and perhaps the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober, melancholy was spread over my mind by the idea that I had taken away everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that whatsoever might be the future date of my history, the life of the historian must be short and precarious.

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.

Are we Victorians?

According to William Gibson, in many ways we are:

In my lifetime I’ve been able to watch completely different narratives of history emerge. The history now of what World War II was about and how it actually took place is radically different from the history I was taught in elementary school. If you read the Victorians writing about themselves, they’re describing something that never existed. The Victorians didn’t think of themselves as sexually repressed, and they didn’t think of themselves as racist. They didn’t think of themselves as colonialists. They thought of themselves as the crown of creation. 

Of course, we might be Victorians, too.