The Life She Was Given

The novel explores biased attitudes about people with physical differences against the backdrop of the circus, exploring how sideshow performers are exploited for others’ personal gain and entertainment.

Those in charge of the circus use fear and manipulation to keep performers in line. While Merrick physically abuses the employees under his authority, his biggest threat is the fact that the circus is the only place where people with disabilities or physical differences can find community. Despite his mistreatment, Merrick often reminds performers that they are unwanted outcasts who are better off with him than anywhere else. He warns Lilly, “[T]ry escaping and see who you run into. There are men out there just waiting to examine someone like you. More than one freak has been cut up and had their brains and body parts pickled and put on display” (47). This horrible depiction of mistreatment rings true for Lilly, whose main experience of the world outside the circus is being imprisoned and then sold by her parents, who have instilled in her the idea that she is a monster who deserves this kind of cruelty.

To a large degree, Merrick is right. In the early to mid-20th century, people with disabilities had few rights to self-determination; viewed as either the work of the devil or as subhuman, they were often institutionalized or hidden by families ashamed of their existence. The novel shows that Merrick makes sideshow performers out of people he takes in from institutions or buys from their parents—both means of acquisition that highlight the lack of agency they have. Viktor is a prime example of someone who internalizes this rhetoric. Merrick took him out of the institution his parents had confined him to; now that Viktor feels beholden and attached to Merrick, Merrick uses Viktor to intimidate others because he can overpower them due to his size. Viktor’s devastation when Merrick is killed sets off the chain of events that critically injures Lilly and leads to Cole’s death.

Wiseman also illustrates how physically typical people view those with differences by juxtaposing how audiences react to big top acts and sideshow performers. While the big top performers receive applause for skill-based acts that highlight their acrobatic or animal handling talents, sideshow performers are objectified by being put on display. Literally segregated into a side area of the circus, they suffer contempt and taunts, positioned to be mocked and ridiculed. The division even creates a hierarchy within the circus community itself. Glory describes big top performers as superior: “[T]heir kind don’t get involved with the likes of us […] they don’t get tangled up with sideshow acts” (69). As a child, Lilly longs to be like Cole, wondering “why couldn’t she be like him and the rest of the big-top performers, beautiful and normal, admired for what they could do, not judged for what they looked like” (105). Her career success is marked by the transition from object of curiosity and fear to elephant handler lauded for her skill. During her first elephant show, Lilly is proud to have transcended her physical differences: “Who wouldn’t want to be the girl in the sparkling costume riding the beautiful elephant?” (248).

By centering the experiences of people with differences, Wiseman gives their inner lives depth and detail rather than turning them into spectacles, like the circuses of the 1930s. However, by making her central character a young woman whose physical difference isn’t as gender defying or atypical as those of the other performers, and by having Lilly’s eventual career rest on the fact that she is quite beautiful, Wiseman presses readers to question whether Lilly—or the novel—really has fully embraced the idea that people with physical differences should be valued.