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The Greatest Showman (2017, Michael Gracey)
04/09/2025
The greatest showman and the erasure of disabled history (cw: historical ableism and racism)
I haven't watched the greatest showman. It watched a review of it. I won't watch it, I won't even pirate it, because watching a movie like that would be deeply upsetting to me.
This movie is about P.T Barnum, a real person, a horrible, ableist, racist, disgusting person, who should not be celebrated.
In this movie, he's a saviour for disabled "freaks", a word that this movie believes he has the right to reclaim for disabled people.
In reality, he exhibited disabled people and people of colour as "freaks" to be ogled and jeered at, to be abused and discarded when the novelty wore off, to exist for the entertainment of non-disabled whites.
This movie is not about the disabled "freaks". It could never be, because that would require showing the truth about freakshows, and it would give the disabled characters too much agency. This is a tragedy in my eyes, that we never see the stories of the actual disabled people of colour.
It's not about the disabled person who joined the freakshow to provide for their family.
It's not about the disabled black person who was lied to and deceived into joining.
It's not about the disabled slave who was sold into the freakshow.
It's always the non-disabled person who profiting off of the humiliation and abuse they subject their disabled workers and slaves to. And this is portrayed as something inspiring, and something the "freaks" should've been grateful for.
It's never about Joice Heth, or Saartjie Baartman, or Charles Sherwood Stratton, or the indigenous people who were tricked kidnapped or enslaved, or the disabled people who never saw their family again, it's about PT fucking Barnum.
I've seen disabled people find empowerment in this movie, and i'm happy for them. But the greatest showman was not made for disabled people to feel empowered by "embracing their differences". It was made for non disabled people who want to be a saviour to disabled people. It's for non-disabled people who feel guilty about objectifying disabled people, to reassure them that disabled people are actually grateful. It shows disabled people succeeding, but only because they cater to non-disabled people. It's made to justify ableism to non disabled audiences.
This movie is disgustingly disrespectful, to the victims of P.T Barnum. Many of the "freaks" where based on real people. Real people who were often sold into slavery, abused, tortured. Real people who this movie turns into puppets who only exist to make P.T Barnum look like a saint, to fufill non-disabled fantasies of being mother teresa to a disabled kid.
This movie will go down as a disgusting, shameful movie, and I hope the true stories of the ableism and racism in freakshows become widely known, until freakshows and their members are given the respectful and solemn recounting they deserve.
Joice Heth and the Antebellum Depiction
An advertisement for Joice Heth from 1835 Source
Imagine, if you will, it is December of 1835. It’s the end of another week and you’re attending an exhibition in a hotel to settle down. You pay 25 cents at the door for admission, and you’re herded into the exhibition hall where a sea of white faces gathers around a central figure. In the middle of room, is an old black slave woman, filling the room with the smell of an old pipe.
Her face is a field of wrinkles, her eyes stare blankly out without movement, and her nails are long, unkempt, and filthy. This is Joice Heth, the main attraction, the supposed nanny (or mammy) of George Washington, the father of a country. She entertains the crowd with catholic hymns, historical stories, and warm quotes while the mass of people poke, prod, and examine her beyond any reasonable boundary.
Who and what is she? It would not matter if you were young or old, rich or poor, Slave owner or Abolitionist. You would simply be a face in the crowd, looking at her, examining her, and considering her. Is she really George Washington’s nursemaid? Is she an automation made of black tar, whale bone, and India rubber? Okay, granted she definitely isn’t an automation made of tar, but curiosity still parades the mind thanks to rumors, gossip, and discussion amongst the audience.
To funnel these thoughts into a single sentence, a viewer’s background, social class, culture, and race influence how they digest and interact with entertainment. In this case, the entertainment is an enslaved old black woman paraded around the country under a guise of historical connection. How would you look at her? Would you see her as a pitiful slave? A fellow deceiver of the masses? A mummy? An automation? An animalistic creature? The nursemaid of George Washington? To be more direct, how a society and culture creates racial concepts, class, stereotypes, and caricatures influenced how the audiences of Barnum viewed, interacted with, and discussed Joice Heth.
Throughout her travels with Barnum and Lyman, a curious multivalence marked the exhibit of Joice Heth. Did her decrepitude mark her as a human oddity, to be marketed like the Chinese woman with “disgustingly deformed” bound feet, the Virginia dwarves, and the Siamese twins whose paths she often crossed on the touring circuit? Was it her scientific value as an embodiment of the different aging processes of the different races that merited her display? Was she an attraction because of patriotic value as a living repository of memories of a glorious past? Because she was a storehouse of ancient religious practices? Or simply because she was a good performer? (Reiss 81).
Joice Heth was P.T. Barnum’s breakout humbug, the 161-year-old 46-pound nanny of George Washington. Barnum quickly discovered as he carried out exhibitions of Joice Heth, that the exhibit was not popular because it was extremely believable but because it wasn’t. The possibility that it was both real and not real enabled layers of discussion to build onto the act. This also preyed upon the growing concerns over identity and deceptions in the growing urban space, especially over increasing anxieties about race with identity in increasingly Abolitionist northern states.
P.T. Barnum played his role in presenting himself in that growing anxiety about deception, but Joice Heth played her own role as well. Race in the period of Joice Heth was beginning to be further looked at (this is ironically reflective of our current issues), especially in regard to identity and the desire for scientific assertions. (79).
Barnum’s first humbug manages to continue postmortem of both Joice Heth and P.T. Barnum, for little is known truthfully about her. The most information about her we have is from a twelve-page pamphlet published by Barnum, which was used for advertising so the information in it is questionable minimally and completely fabricated at worst (I lean for the latter).
A depiction of Heth and Barnum from the Potsville Herald, 1835. Source
Joice Heth was legally purchased by P.T. Barnum from John S. Bawling, who had previously been exhibiting her, for the price of 1000$. Barnum in future years made contradictory claims about his ownership of her as a slave. “In 1854 he claimed to be "the proprietor of the negress," while in 1869 he wrote that his payment only made him "proprietor of this novel exhibition”. These differing claims were made to save face, as the American Anti-Slavery Society had already been founded in 1833 and slavery was illegal in the North in the areas where Barnum was exhibiting the woman (The Joice Heth Exhibit).
The only definite thing we can say is Joice Heth died in 1836 of natural causes (despite Barnum’s claims and people’s theories that she wasn’t dead, the corpse was a fake, the autopsy was a hoax, and that she was preparing a tour of Europe as a phial of ashes) and that she was blind, paralyzed in both legs, and toothless. At the time of her autopsy (which Barnum still made an exhibition of at 50 cents a ticket) she was declared to be somewhere in her 80s, which is still pretty good considering the average lifespan of a slave was somewhere in the mid-20’s (Reiss 78).
The cover of the 12-page pamphlet published by an unknown author (presumably P.T. Barnum and co.) Source
“Joice Heth, the subject of this short memoir, was born on the Island of Madagascar on the coast of Africa, in the year One Thousand Six Hundred and Seventy-four. Of her parents little or nothing is known, save what she herself relates of them…At the age of fifteen she was cruelly torn from the bosom of her parents and her native land by one of those inhuman beings, who in those days, to enrich themselves, made merchandise of human flesh” (Cook 104).
To fully view how people from different Antebellum backgrounds viewed Heth, we first can look at how Barnum presented Heath. In his pamphlet overviewing her, he mixed both Abolitionist wording with the Antebellum narrative of slave and slave owners. In the above except he says she was “cruelly torn from the bosom of her parents” but later on stating “A highly respectable gentleman of Kentucky…who has generously offered to set them free on being paid two-thirds of what they cost him” in regards to a deal from the owner of her great-grandchildren (a story that was created in face of Abolitionist criticism). This is to both satisfy the increasingly Abolitionist North and the Slave-owning south majority, though we cannot ignore that both sides had elements of the other in them at the same time.
He emphasizes that Joice was “treated by them (the Washingtons) as an hired servant rather than a slave” and “as to accommodate her in the enjoyment of the constant company of her helpmate (Peter)” referring to her transfer to another owner. The narrative continues like this, implying she has “great thankfulness” and she “is highly pleased with the idea of her remaining as she is, until death may finally close this mortal scene with her”, her life ended in Barnum’s possession. One cannot say if she was truly complicit in the act, satisfied with her role, mistreated as an object, or otherwise as the only account we have is from the mouth of Barnum who I personally would take with a grain of salt (as he was the proprietor of family-friendly deceptions) (Cook 105).
Top: The depiction of Joice Heth used in advertising from 1835 to 1836. Source
Bottom: An illustration from P.T. Barnum’s autobiography, Source
Furthermore, we must look at how Barnum and others presented her in depictions and in writing as many newspapers ran stories about the hoax. Many drawings, paintings, and sketches of Joice Heth depict her very differently, from alien-looking, to human, to more animalistic in nature from caricature to truthful depiction. The drawing above on the left is from the advertising poster used by Barnum, depicting her with dark, bark-like skin, elongated hands (referencing her supposed long, talon-like nails), and the clothing of the traditional mammy character (a bonnet and an aproned dress).
The drawing on the right is Barnum’s autobiography in 1855, in it she looks immensely less grotesque. The depiction used as advertising by Barnum is obviously an exaggerated caricature for the purposes of drawing in a crowd. It brings to my mind the concept of a “Tar baby” from the stories of Briar Rabbit, who also had roots from slave tales.
A depiction of Tom Rice, a popular minstrel show actor. Source
Caricatures of Black people and other people of color would be not foreign to the audiences of Joice Heth. Afterall, minstrelsy would have been in full swing by the time P.T. Barnum got possession of Heth. Even before then, caricatures of black faces, racist archetypes (specifically in our case the mammy), and exoticism (specifically the mystical minority concept) would be in the minds of the white faces observing her. Caricatures of these people would depict dark, almost pure black skin, exaggerated anatomy, and archetypical clothing, all of which is seen around Joice Heth.
Newspapers at the time described her in various ways, multiple from the New York area calling her an “animated mummy” (a bit harsh if you ask me). The New-York Evening Star describes her as “very much like an Egyptian mummy escaped from the Sarcophagus” while the New-York Sunday News said “This living mummy, on whose head 161 winters have sprinkled their snows” (Cook 108). A letter to the Editor of the New York Transcript shows some beliefs about “blacks” in relation to Heth’s passing and autopsy:
Another important physiological fact should be stated, which is, that blacks have a much greater tenacity for life than whites, and were it not that, like the domestic horse, they are broken down by servitude, they would live to much greater ages than the Circassian race -- and in the case before us, had it not been for the affectation of the lungs… together with what must have been fatigue to her, travelling and being subjected to the annoyance and importunity of her visitors, it is not improbable that the vital spark might have continued to flicker considerably longer (The Joice Heth Exhibit).
While this belief may seem completely odd and illogical to us at this point, let us not forget that a small population of our culture believes the world to be flat. People of the Antebellum era held the black individuals in their society at a different level, wherever that be on a lower one or a mystical one, typically both.
A political cartoon by Mark Knight of the Herald Sun of Serena Williams. Source
Blacks and other races in American society (among others) typically face racial based Dehumanization and Objectification, where the individuals presumed humanity is metaphorically taken from them and then the belief they have conscious, independent thought. This process obviously was done to slaves as they were treated as property rather than conscious individuals. It still occurs today, for example Serena Williams as well as many other Black Americans being called “gorilla” amongst other things and portrayed animalistically like the controversial political cartoon above.
Barnum does this with Joice through several points, from presumably purchasing her as legal property, to claiming and indulging in the fact she enjoys “Animal food” (it is unclear if that means horse, chicken, or dog), to creating an entire rumor that she is an Automation created from “India rubber, Whalebone, and springs” which only pushed audiences to further prod and examine her to further his humbug, “Her debility was a draw, too, for many came to gaze on- even to touch her- marvelously decrepit body” (Cook 105-106, Reiss 79).
Moreover, from the various newspapers and media calling her a “mummy” to Barnum publicizing, dramatizing, and broadcasting her autopsy as a “spectacular display of race”. As Benjamin Reiss puts it further, the autopsy “dramatized some of the new meanings of Racial Identity and provided an opportunity for whites to debate them (in a displaced register) as they gazed upon or read about her corpse” (79). Joice Heth was continually objectified by the masses, as a topic for discussion, as a thing to examine, and as a being to figure and unearth it’s identity.
The audiences of Joice Heth were probably never made up of one individual group. Poor or rich, Young or Old, Abolitionist or Slave owner, Southerner or Northerner. Each face in that sea of individuals had an individual thought and concept of Joice Heth, if she was real or fake, human or machine, aged beyond human limit or simply mundanely old, a pitiful slave held under Barnum’s thumb or a fellow deceiver who was comfortable in her servitude.
For whoever and however the viewer may have seen her, their opinion was influenced by what they were presented and what rumors they digested, their view of Black americans and slavery as a whole, and their fears or beliefs of identity and race. Joice Heth served to the masses as a way for them to further their concept of identity, race, deceptions in the growing urban site, and assert their influences on the new Antebellum era.
It is ironic then how I, another white face in the crowd, am looking upon Heth and considering her for myself in this era of racial discussion. That I am yet another white individual talking for Heth, in place of her own voice.
i thought i hated the greatest showman before, but i just found out about joice heth and it turns out my previous feeling was merely strong dislike. i now hate the greatest showman with the death of a thousand suns and the bile of the great sleeping serpent who will judge us all, but especially everyone who made that bullshit, white-washing, history-erasing piece of fuckass disguised as a feel good movie. rest in peace joice. sorry.
Joice Heth- The story you didn't see in "The Greatest Showman"
In this ‘woke’ era it surprises me that the musical “The Greatest Showman” didn’t get cancelled. Even more amazingly it was a huge success, even though it probably was one of the biggest history revisions ever to hit the cinema and later on TV and streaming services. Joice Heth was one of the ‘performers’ of the P.T Barnum show. Often buried deep within the Barnum mythology is the shocking…
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Joice Heth- The story you didn't see in "The Greatest Showman"
Joice Heth- The story you didn’t see in “The Greatest Showman”
In this ‘woke’ era it surprises me that the musical “The Greatest Showman” didn’t get cancelled. Even more amazingly it was a huge success, even though it probably was one of the biggest history revisions ever to hit the cinema and later on TV and streaming services. Joice Heth was one of the ‘performers’ of the P.T Barnum show. Often buried deep within the Barnum mythology is the shocking…
View On WordPress
The Humbuggery
The Oxford English Dictionary defines a humbug as “a thing which is not really what it pretends to be; an imposture, a deception, fraud, sham.” This definition gives the factual meaning of the term without the social connotations; a humbug is typically socially acceptable because it is a deception for entertainment purposes rather than that of ill-intent. The idea of a humbug can be seen in many modes of modern life and entertainment such as reality television or holiday celebrations. The century-old tradition of a jolly, fat man in a red suit who brings gifts once a year is nothing but a sham for the purpose of entertainment and tradition, and a budding romance amidst a competition-reality television show (that promptly ends once filming is over) is more than likely a deception produced to boost the popularity of the show and entertainment of the viewers. It is important to strike a pleasing balance between factual and fraudulent content in the production of entertainment. The audience could become offended or put off by overproduction of falsities, yet could also be deterred by any overbearing or encapsulating realities. Entertainment is used as a means to escape reality in a way that is deemed worthwhile or significant while having no risks to the audience.
While humbugs can be seen as gimmicks solely used for the publicity or longevity of an event or happening, they can also convey underlying import regarding certain issues or topics. Relating to Barnum’s Joice Heth exhibit, the racial implications of the created spectacle are hard for contemporary audiences to overlook.
The ideal created history of Heth is grounded in many racial stereotypes. Perhaps audiences would not have felt any sense of truth without these racial foundations in which they could pinpoint a sense of familiarity in their own minds. The false history of Heth is a perfect melding of truth and fiction; the “otherness” of Heth felt truthful while the absurd age felt ridiculous. Moreover, Barnum played into both sides of entertainment during his run of the exhibit. In the Joice Heth promotional materials on pages 106 to 107, the believability of the exhibit was relying on the familiarity of racial stereotypes:
When I first remember Aunt Joice, as we called her, she was totally blind and unable to work, which must have been fifty-five years ago. It was always understood that Joice was the nurse of George Washington, and slave to his father. She is very religious and honest, and I believe the most implicit confidence may be put in her word, for nothing in my opinion would tempt her to utter a falsehood.
The idea of a slave remaining blindly faithful to their master and God for a hundred years is nothing but propaganda for the exhibit. In modern minds, the idea of a faithful, docile slave is uncomfortable and, frankly, difficult to fathom (much like a 106-year-old woman to Barnum’s contemporary audiences); however, the minds of Barnum’s audiences had a closer mental-step to those racial ideas already. In this way, Barnum played into a believable reality while simultaneously planting fantastical falsities in a pleasing balance for an entertainment that allowed the audiences to escape the reality of everyday life to see a part of American history or to gawk at a wrinkled mound of flesh. Regardless of the truth of the exhibit, the audiences were entertained by an elaborate humbug that did not cause any obvious or serious harm to the producers or viewers.
I hate the greatest showman. Like if you want to tell the story of P.T Barnum, great, but let’s not celebrate him. Let’s make a movie about how he exploited people, let’s talk about how the first person to join his circus was Joice Heth, she was blind and almost completely paralyze and Barnum exhibited her saying she was 161 years old and when she died he sold tickets to her fucking autopsy! So no P.T Barnum’s legacy isn’t that he made people like Charles Stratton famous, it’s that he exploited an exhibited people like Joice Heth.
