If you happened to wander the puzzle-box warren of exhibit halls and saloons that made up Phineas Taylor Barnum’s American Museum in the mid-1800s, no one would have blamed you for feeling bombarded. Frankly, that was sort of the point: this five-story destination in lower Manhattan was a living, thrumming organism that strove to do nothing so much as overwhelm the senses. For a quarter’s admission, visitors could take in fine portraiture and exotic taxidermy, live theater and a lemonade stand, antiquities both real and imaginary, wax sculptures, stereographs, a Canadian beluga whale in the basement aquarium, and — capitalizing on an American strand of the Victorian-era “deformito-mania” — a rotating assortment of human, biological rarities, whose unusual bodies demonstrated the breadth and depth of creation.1
Some of these “living wonders” walked the venue’s halls, speaking with guests and offering souvenir carte-de-visite photographs for sale. Other performers were presented to the public in grand staged receptions known as “levees”. Alongside the likes of conjoined twins, a seven-foot “giantess”, the bearded lady, and the celebrated General Tom Thumb in his Napoleon costume was an act that endured through Barnum’s era and into the twentieth-century sideshow: an enigmatic, captivating woman known as the Circassian beauty, whose only “deformity” was her lack of imperfection.
A staple of dime museums and traveling shows throughout the nineteenth century, Circassian beauties were alleged to be from the Caucasus Mountain region, and were famous for both their legendary looks and their large, seemingly Afro-textured hairstyles. The Circassian beauty was an attraction that required audiences to hold a number of ultimately unresolvable stereotypes in tension with each other. These women were presented as chaste, but were also billed as former harem slaves. They were supposedly of noble lineage but appeared as sideshow attractions. And they were displayed to predominantly white audiences for an exoticism that traded on hair associated with Black women, which came coupled with the paradoxical assurance that, being Caucasian, Circassian beauties represented the height of white racial “purity”.
The pseudoscience of race in the nineteenth century, the development of mass media and entertainment venues at that time, and the employment of women who performed race as though it were a theater role all combined in a jarring and beguiling mix of stereotypes that kept the Circassian beauty attraction going for decades, and has had a lasting impact on how we think about race, class, and gender today.