This weekend the Secret
Victorianist returned to one of the first museums I visited on moving to New
York—the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn.
Last time I visited, the
exhibition space was given over to the trappings of Victorian mourning—hair
work, death masks and post-mortem portraits. But the current exhibition
features works that were once part of Castan’s Panopticum—a collection of
waxworks and curiosities, which remained a crowd pleaser in Berlin for half a
century and has some parallels with London’s Madame Tussauds.
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| The exhibition |
This isn’t one fore the
squeamish. Expect disease-ridden genitalia, syphilitic skin, models of
dissected foetuses, and cross sections of complex births (complete with
disembodied physicians’ hands).
There are also ‘ethnographic’
busts, delineating racial differences between groups such as African ‘bushmen’
and Chinese noblemen, which bring you face to face with nineteenth-century
scientists’ now uncomfortable views on race.
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| Ethnographic busts |
A full size model of serial
killer Fritz
Haarmann, the ‘Butcher of Hanover’ (1879-1925), looms over you if you choose to
walk to the restrooms, only a metre away from the death masks of figures as
varied as Napoleon, Henrik Ibsen and Kaiser Wilhem I.
The exhibits
that were of particular interest to me included two models depicting the
effects of tight corsetry on internal organs (a topic I wrote about a couple of
years ago on this blog) and a couple of examples of intersex genitalia
(something I haven’t previously seen many Victorian references to).
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| The effects of tight corsetry |
It was also
fascinating to read about the often moralistic way in which the exhibits were
arranged—e.g. attractive female nudes sat side-by-side with examples of the
ugly effects of sexually transmitted diseases.
Both men and
women attended panoptica, but they were sometimes segregated by gender for the
more explicit rooms. I spent much of my visit imagining what it must have been
like for groups of women, with little biological knowledge and a strong sense
of modesty, to be left alone for their allocated time, examining a cankerous
penis or a uterus in the third trimester.
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| A C-section |
Put in
modern terms, panoptica (like Castan’s or Barnum’s in New York City) must have
been a mash up of a biology text book, obstetrician’s office, natural history
museum, sensational crime documentary and touristy house of horrors, with a
large dose of racism spooned out throughout. And attending a retrospective
exhibition on one now adds another layer of interpretative complexity.
If you’re in
Brooklyn and have an interest in the kind of popular exhibitions that
entertained generations, or just want to see the visceral side of the
nineteenth-century view of the body, then check out House of Wax before it closes on April 3.
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| Death mask of Henrik Ibsen |
Do you know
of any other NYC exhibitions you think the Secret Victorianist would enjoy? Let
me know! Here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.
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