SLEEPING BEAUTIES IN THE FAIRGROUND

Abstract

In 19th‐ and early 20th‐century fairgrounds, visitors encountered recumbent beauties: pretty young women dressed in white satin, with long dark hair. They reclined on silk‐draped couches, sometimes in glass cases. A particularly famous one—a model made of wax and mechanized so that her chest rose and fell as if she were breathing—graced the verandah of Pierre Spitzner’s Grand Musée Anatomique et Ethnologique when it was a fixed museum in Paris and later as it traveled the great fairground routes of Europe. The model enticed visitors into the world of the itinerant popular anatomy museum, where anatomy, ethnology, and the fairground freak show mixed and where life‐size recumbent female models had a prominent place. Focusing on Spitzner’s museum, which lasted for nearly 90 years, the essay sets its famed Anatomical Venuses, and the phenomenon of the popular anatomical museum, within a broader context of displays involving somnolent, dead, or pseudo‐dead women, including “Sleeping Beauty” shows, tableaux vivants, morgue displays, mortuary photographs, literature, film and art from Europe and the United States. It concludes that these displays reveal particular ways of envisioning the female body as an enticement to both knowledge and pleasure. They also reveal the middle‐ground between official museums and the fairground sideshow, and the ways in which public pedagogy, popular entertainment, commerce, and art were interwoven.