Behind the Vitrine Glass: Revisiting Approaches to the Textual and Material Display of Sarah Baartman and Julia Pastrana

This chapter discusses the connection between human remains and economic wealth, and the multiple ways in which Victorian legacies continue to influence the way the (Victorian and contemporary) dead were, and are still, perceived and treated. Focusing on two neo-Victorian novels that treat ‘exhibited’ freaks and posthumous bodily exploitation: Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Hottentot Venus (2003) and Carol Birch’s Orphans of the Carnival (2017), the chapter discusses neo-Victorianism as a genre that interrogates contemporary assumptions about and fascinations with the bodily remains of humans who, living and dead, were exploited for monetary gain in the Victorian period, and continue to be so via museums and other popular exhibitions. It considers how and whether neo-Victorian fictions focusing on particular figures might reproduce or deconstruct these forms of exploitation.