In the Footsteps of Julia Pastrana. Cultural Responses to an Ape-woman's Stay in Warsaw in 1858 and Reaction of Polish Press to Her Extraordinary Body
In the Footsteps of Julia Pastrana. Cultural Responses to an Ape-woman's Stay in Warsaw in 1858 and Reaction of Polish Press to Her Extraordinary Body

Summary/Abstract: Julia Pastrana is one of the best known personalities of the mid-19th-century freak show business, understood as institutionalized exhibitions of human oddities. Born in 1834 in Mexico, she suffered from a genetic disorder which resulted in abnormal hair growth. Her career as a profit-making exhibit began in 1854 and lasted till 1860. Together with her impresario and husband Theodore Lent she toured the US, Canada and the British Isles from where she moved to Berlin, Vienna and Warsaw. Pastrana further headed for St. Petersburg and Moscow where she died in childbirth. While her odyssey in the US and Britain is well known, her stay in Central and Eastern Europe and Russia remains shrouded in obscurity. The aim of this article is to fill this gap in Pastrana's biography. Reconstructing her itinerary in Eastern Europe, I will focus especially on her visit to Warsaw. Drawing mainly on press accounts and unpublished iconographic sources, I will analyze both Pastrana's ‘enfreakment’ and commodification. My point is to see how her embodiment of difference was conceptualized at the eastern borders of Europe and how local artists and entrepreneurs reacted to her performances and the possibilities for making money that the freak show business offered.

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