My forthcoming novel, The True & Splendid History of the
Harristown Sisters, is about hair.
Long, vigorous yet soft,
feminine hair. Hair that flows in rich torrents from seven pretty heads. Hair
that can be put to work, making money for men who peddle long-tressed dolls and
quack medical products for the scalp.
For The Harristown Sisters is set in the 1860s, the age of arch
pseudo-medicine, when human perfectability was for sale in a bottle whose
contents could be advertised without any regulation as to truth or safety. A new power-base in the feminine purse, in the
mid nineteenth century, shared a cultural vortex with the Pre-Raphaelite
painters and the poets who both celebrated and problematized the hair of women
as an expression of passionate and unruly desires.
The English Poetry Database,
where I first began my researches, teemed with 19th century works
featuring ‘hair’, ‘curl’ and ‘tresses’. Browning, Rossetti and their lesser ilk
wrote longingly of lying under silky tents of feminine hair, or of being
strangled by the fatal tresses of supernatural sirens like Lilith, Adam’s
first, wicked wife, who alleged dined on human babies. Above is Monna Vanna, by Dante Gabriele Rossetti and below his Lady Lilith, now at the Delaware Museum (both paintings courtesy of Wikimedia Commons).
But it would be transcending
bliss to die in a coil of female hair, according to the poets, tapping neatly into
the post-Albertine Victorians’ fascination with all things deathly. Miniature
hair reliquaries were worn by fashionable women: glass fronted jewels
containing the hair of the lamented deceased.
And the matrons of England and
America were encouraged to spend on their hair, on the principle that a husband
would remain captivated by his wife’s long-flowing feminine charms while her sensible
housekeeping extracted only dry compliments.
It was the age of Edward’s
Harlene, Koko for the Hair and most of all the preparations of America’s Seven
Sutherland Sisters, who had thirty seven feet of hair between them. They are pictured in one their classic poses below - they performed in circuses and shows where they sold their Scalp Food and Hair Restorer, being living advertisements for the efficacy of these potions. These
sisters provided the inspiration for my novel, though I chose to set it in
Ireland and Venice, where the Pre-Raphaelites, the earlier artists who inspired
them, and the dawn of photography had more cultural resonance in my study of
hair.
In the course of my research I
also explored the problem of hair where hair should not be. In mid-Victorian times, this
was personified by Julia Pastrana, the diminutive Mexican ‘Baboon Lady’ who
danced the Highland Fling and sang on the stage to the horror and delight of
American and British audiences.
Weeds are sometimes described
as plants simply growing in the wrong place. Hair that grows abundantly in the
prescribed zones is a bio-marker of desirable breeding stock. A hand running
through a curl attached the beloved’s head finds only pleasure and sentiment.
But when hair appears in the wrong place – such as in our soup – we feel
revulsion and a sense of dirtiness.
Julia Pastrana – a gentle soul
who spoke three languages and loved sewing – suffered from hypertrichosis. She
was furred all over her body, had a beard and a simian visage caused by another
rare condition, Gingival hyperplasia.
Billed as ‘the ugliest woman in
the world,’ Julia was arguably the most celebrated ‘freak’ of the age. Even
after her death, her embalmed body, in a dancing pose, would be exhibited all
over Europe by unscrupulous sideshow managers, first and foremost her own
husband, Theodore Lent.
The treatment of Julia Pastrana
taps into two key moral debates of our own time: where does celebrity culture
cross over into criminal intrusion and venality at the expense of the prey? And
why is the ‘disgusting’ such a viable commodity? Embarrassing bodies, sexual
failure, eating disorders: there’s a pornography of body dysfunction paraded on
the television screens every night of the week.
A play and a film have been
written about Julia Pastrana, and a third is in production. The Ass Ponys recorded a song about her
mind, life and marriage, with a refrain ‘He loves me for my own sake’, highly ironic under the
circumstances.
It is less than two years since
Julia Pastrana’s body finally received a picturesque burial in her native
Mexico.
As an exercise in empathy,
during the writing of The Harristown
Sisters, I decided to write a personal essay as Julia Pastrana. People who
are monstered rarely have voices. It is the way of dehumanization to render the
victim silent. I wanted to give Julia the privilege of looking out of her anathematized
body, instead of merely being looked at. I also wondered what she would have
thought about her posthumous repatriation to Mexico, and finally concluded that
it would find small favour with her.
This part of my research was
not published, but it informed a great deal of what I wrote about in The True & Splendid History of the
Harristown Sisters.
I wonder if others among you
find that some of your most interesting work stays off the published page?
Examples, please!
This post really ends with that
question, but below, as an optional extra, is my personal essay as Julia
Pastrana.
Unless otherwise attributed, the pictures are courtesy of Wellcome Images, which has recently made its wonderful historical collection available for general use.
The True & Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters is published on June 5th by Bloomsbury
Julia Pastrana
Eighteen thirty-four, I’m born
in Mexico, a baboon of a baby, hooded whiteless eyes filled up with lucent
brown. My jaw thrusts out like an orange, or a bustle, split by two great slugs
of lips snug over double rows of teeth. My forehead slopes steeply back;
there’s fur on my feet, and shags and tufts and gouts of hair everywhere,
everywhere that hair shouldn’t be.
By three my beard was tied with
string. My tribe in Sinaloa de Leyva
mumbled things about my mother but they let me live. Ma slapped children when
they screamed at the sight of me, but I guessed from her averted eyes and
sparing hands that she wished me unborn.
I could not crawl back inside her so I grew away from her.
I peaked at four and a half
feet, with breasts, beckoning thighs, a supple dancing style, a melodious
voice, a tongue for languages, a cool hand for pastry, and a desire to please
the men with hair where hair should be.
A pink ribbon round my beard
now, tight-laced in a Spanish dress, I was hired as a servant girl to the
governor of Sinaloa. My mother’s eyes were opaque as the cart took me away. She
did not wave
The governor brought me out
after dark to serve port to male guests. One of them, a Mr Rates, watched me
with long eyes through the candle flames. Late in the night, he threw a purse
across the table.
Mr Rates was my first handler.
He handled me onto the stage: Gothic Hall, New York, was deemed the best place for
a gothic beast like me. I was twenty then; sang and danced with fluent grace to
jungle roars from the stalls, and roses flung, quite hard. Behind my whiteless eyes, I learned English
and dreamt of soft hands parting my fur with caresses and a man who’d let me
dance for him, unpaid.
My billing was ‘The Marvelous Hybrid or Bear Woman’, she
of the gorilla’s jaw, ape’s eyes, and hair where hair should not be. The New
York papers showed their love: ‘terrifically
hideous’, they said I was.
The doctors lifted, inserted,
prodded till I cried. Mott from the Medical Society pronounced me ‘the most extraordinary being of the present
day’, being the result of my Mexican mother mating with an orang-utan. Proof
of her depravity: she’d sold me to the circus. If I mentioned otherwise, Mr
Rates told me quietly, he’d skin me for my pelt and stuff me.
‘Then,’ he reflected, ‘you’d be
pure profit. No cost in food and board. Remember this.’
The demi-monkey waltzed with
soldiers at a military gala, knowing the fellows had been dared, feeling their reluctance
through the tense fingers on my back, where my gown crushed the fur almost but
not quite flat.
In Boston I was styled ‘the Hybrid Indian: The Misnomered Bear
Woman’ – by the Horticultural and the Boston History Society. Neither could
decide whether ‘animal’ or ‘vegetable’ best described the thing I was.
Mr Rates sold me to J.W. Beach
of Cleveland. From him, I came into the possession of one Theodore Lent, my
small-eyed darling, my bearded destiny, who, judging me worth the passage, carried
me off to London, where they went mad for me and the hair that grew where hair
should not be, while I fell deep in love with Lent, and he not at all with me.
How it clamped my heart when my
love billed me ‘The Nondescript’. He claimed it meant my marvels surpassed
description. It did not. ‘The grotesque’s
dancing is like a fairy’s,’ the London papers wrote. ‘The monster sings romances and lilts Highland Flings to perfection.
Charles Darwin wrote of me
kindly, but published me in The Variation
of Animal and Plants under Domestication.
By now I spoke a lady’s English.
My knitting was a credit to me, though my Theodore refused to touch the gaiters
I made him. He’d swallow my little suppers with an averted face.
He coached me to tell of twenty
marriage proposals turned down: to say that no admirer had yet proved rich
enough to catch my glistening eye.
‘There will be someone,’ he
promised, ‘There’s always someone with an itch for a thing like you.’
He toured me in Berlin and
Leipzig to raise my price. I acted in a play, Der curierte Meyer. A German boy falls in love with a veiled woman.
But when he goes offstage, I lift the gauze, convulsing the audience with
hilarity at the horror of my baboon face. When my lover sees me unveiled, his
cure is instant. I rehearsed with Theodore, till I could take it without
flinching.
No rich suitors came to marry
me, but other handlers loomed in, offering terms and smiles. Theodore proposed.
On our wedding night, he closed his face, the shutters, the curtains and put
out the light. He divided me rough and sudden from my girlhood. In the morning,
he was gone, and stayed gone for days. I did not allow the stained sheets changed
and lay sleepless on my hardened blood, remembering. My heart beat like jungle
rain when he appeared again; I cried from joy if his lips curved upwards. His
eyes never smiled when they looked on me.
In Vienna he let more doctors
pay to do what he had done in the darkest part of me, with sharp cold tools
instead of his hard heat and shouted obscenities. He locked me in our rooms by
day. In Poland and Moscow, he grew crueller and harder though I stood on tiptoe
in everything to please him. He still came to me some nights, roaring on gin.
He clapped his hand over my great lips, grasped the bedstead rungs and laboured
on me. Afterwards he’d fling himself from me, groaning, to vomit in his chamber
pot and strode swearing from the room.
Yet he got a child on me.
No baby ever had such a delightful
layette, every item stitched by me. The nursery I had painted all the colours
of hope. Of course I wondered what was growing inside me, the little stranger
was already beloved. Theo kept away. If I saw his face, it was in profile only.
He did not burn the anonymous
letters but left them for me to see. You
have mated with a beast. You have stained mankind with bestiality.
The birth tore my narrow hips
apart. Worse than pain was the sight of my son who took after me with whiteless
eyes, bustle-jaw and hair where hair should not be. I slapped myself so as not
to scream at the sight of him. His hours of life were thirty five.
‘Put it in a bucket and throw
it in the river,’ Theodore told the maid.
Puerperal sepsis seized me like
a serpent, poisoned me, shook me, till I saw Sinaloan ghosts again, the New
York stage, Theodore’s face. My widower did not visit my deathbed, sent the
photographer instead. He was in deep negotiations to sell our two corpses to
Professor Sukolov at the Anatomical Institute in Moscow, and had gone to buy a
monkey the height of a two-year-old child. The public, he told the maid, loving
horror as they did, would not accommodate a baby, even semi-human, stuffed.
‘Better this,’ he said, wringing the monkey’s neck and kissing the maid’s.
At the sound of his lips on her
skin, my hairless soul rose from my corpse. No funeral. Instead, I watched
Sukolov dissect the monkey and me side by side on stained slabs. I saw the
scalpel separate my skin, cried out soundlessly when he chose a finer blade for
the poor small creature. I began to feel for my monkey child a fierce new love.
For six months, the professor
hovered over us, extracting, scouring, packing, stitching us to such perfection
that we retained our colour and our form. My sawdust-stiffened limbs were
mounted in my old dancing pose, hand on hip. A crucifix hid the seam that held
my breasts together. Sewn into a short Spanish dress, I was set up in a glass
case, my false simian son in a sailor suit on a pedestal in a separate box
where I might stare at him as the paying customers did.
News came to Theodore of the
great crowds we drew and the great sums made for Sukolov. Our marriage
certificate, presented to the American consul, robbed the Russian professor of
his hard-won profits. That gaunt February of sixty-two, Theodore shipped us
back to England; charged a shilling a look at the ‘Embalmed Nondescript’ and
her progeny. Then he hired us out to a travelling museum of curiosities, I, the
monster with hair where hair should not be, still topped the bills and filled
the tents.
By now Theodore had found a
girl near as hairy as myself. He set her up as “Zenora Pastrana”, my sister. He
married her as well. The four of us, two living and two dead, toured till
Theodore tired – his calculating mind slowed for the first but not the last
time to a sick ticking. He rented his first wife and supposed son to a Vienna museum.
With my corpse retired, he claimed that Zenora was me. The two repaired to St
Petersburg, bought a waxworks. It was there my Theodore, Zenora’s Theodore, the
stock exchange’s Theodore went mad. In the asylum, my spirit watched him long days
writhing on his bed. It danced my Highland Fling for him, combed the hair where
it should be, and touched him till he shrieked. He died insensible or perhaps
fully sensible of me for the first time.
In eighty-eight, Zenora left
Russia, reclaimed our bodies, toured them. Wooed by a young man, she sold us to
an anthropological exhibit in Munich. J.B. Gassner put our bodies on the German
fair circuit. At a circus convention in Vienna, he auctioned the monstrous
Madonna and her brute baby. For a quarter of a century we passed from hand to
calloused hand for cash.
The new century felt the old disgust
for a pair of creatures with hair where hair should not be. In ‘twenty-one,
Haakon Lund bought us for his Norwegian chamber of horrors. That was the year
my name was divided from my body. ‘Julia Pastrana’ was not listed on the bill
of sale. The new generation of shilling-payers did not think me real, but a
diabolical confection of horsehair and leather, a relic of more barbarous times
before Modernity, its brute lines, featureless towers, slot windows, slack
chairs and inhumanly pale renders. I thought Modernity a diabolic confection of
vanity and laziness. Modernity and I agreed to disagree.
When the Nazis thundered into
Norway they ordered us destroyed. But Lund made them believe an Ape woman tour
would line the Third Reich’s coffers, while showing to a hairy nicety miscegenation’s
awful perils. On the strength of the world’s worst ever idea, my monkey son and
me outlasted the war and the pale blue eyes that despised us up and down the
Rhine.
‘Fifty-three and the good times were over for
monsters. Lund stored his chamber of horrors, including us, in a warehouse
outside Oslo. Rumours spread of a ghastly ape haunting the midnight dust.
Teenage horror-seekers broke in, surrounded us, opened their mouths in ‘O’s and
screamed till I thought our glass would shatter. Lund’s son Hans saw new money
in the teenage stories in the press. He set us back to earn.
But now at last, someone
remembered the old ape lady Julia Pastrana. In ‘sixty-nine, Judge Hofheinz,
collector of curiosities, hired detectives to hunt down the Female Nondescript.
Hans set up a bidding war for our corpses, only to withdraw from the sale to
profit from the press’s frantic delight. He put us on the circus routes of
Sweden and Norway, then shipped us to America. Here a New Age public finally
found its conscience and cried out against the poor corpses paraded. So Hans
rented us to Swedes. Again I travelled until people, month by month, grew
ashamed of seeing me. I settled into years of peaceful warehouse dust, tender
as fingers on my cheek.
Then the vandals came. They
tore off my son’s arm, punched his little jaw, threw him in a gutter where the
mice ate him. By the time he was found, he was in small scraps. I was left
alone in my glass case looking at his empty pedestal, year on year.
‘Seventy-nine, I was stolen in
the night. Once more, I was separated from my name. Children found my arm
protruding from a ditch. The police pulled an entire woman, with hair where it
should not be, from the mud and leaves. A crime against a woman dead a hundred
years could not be chased. And who would
charge dead Theodore with selling his wife, living and dead?
They delivered me to the Norwegian
Institute of Forensic Medicine. I lived in its basement, a friend to mould and
unsolved case files.
Nineteen-ninety, I felt the old
cold draft of a journalist swooping down on me. I sold more newspapers when my
ugly tale was knitted to my old body again.
Norwegian priests pressed for a
Christian burial. A compromise – a
sarcophagus in Oslo’s Museum of Medical History, a small DNA extraction first.
Twenty-twelve they sent me back
Mexico, a burial my home country. A Roman Catholic mass was said over me. My
coffin was borne to the cemetery in Sinaloa Province where I had begun. Instead
of dirges the band played jaunty music, as if it were a fine thing to lay the
dancing baboon-lady in earth at last.
But I shall hardly rest in
peace.
For why was I repatriated to a
backwater I left gratefully at twenty? Was I not celebrated worldwide, a star
of the stage, the newspapers’ darling? Should I not have had a hollow in the
actors’ graveyard in Covent Garden? Or lie with the other famous clever ladies
in Saint Pancras field?
Or better still, I should have
been allowed to sleep beside my Theodore, to lie and lie beside him for
immemorial nights; to watch him gyre in his grave as the muscles died and shrank
and danced his bones on leathery strings. Everything would drip from us, except
my deathless hair, wrapped around his every place, a black wreath, a furring, a
stirring of living hair everywhere on Theodore, everywhere my hair should
justly be.
