The Deviant Body: Object and Spectacle in The Old Curiosity Shop.

What is it about?

Charles Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop exhibits the Victorian period’s enchantment with the curious. At first blush, the items of allure are the inanimate objects on display in Nell’s grandfather’s curiosity shop. With more measured inspection the question of animacy blurs as both living and nonliving curiosities are subjected to the glare of fixation and fetishization. The Old Curiosity Shop is crowded with both inanimate and animate curiosities, the partition often obscured. As Victorian society obsessed over things and peculiarities, animacy distinction collapsed. Deviant body forms were not exempt, reduced to mere curiosities, interchangeable and without identity, resulting in their ultimate abstraction through commodity culture and displayed for profit in the spectacles of fairground sideshows. The Old Curiosity Shop embraces this fascination with body deviance, serving both as a reflection of cultural interest and as a vehicle to fuel societal captivation.

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Photo by Taha on Unsplash

Photo by Taha on Unsplash