Date of Award

12-31-2025

Document Type

Open Access Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

History

First Advisor

Maria John

Second Advisor

Kelly Colvin

Third Advisor

Sari Edelstein

Abstract

In the fall of 1864, the infamous showman P. T. Barnum premiered a new human oddity exhibit at his American Museum in New York City. Unlike most of the other freak performers there, there was nothing inherently extraordinary about the body of the woman who he introduced as “Zalumma Agra, the Star of the East.” Instead, she had intentionally teased her hair into a mane of curls unfashionable and uncommon for Caucasian women, and dressed in a costume meant to evoke Turkish or more broadly Near Eastern aesthetics. To explain and elevate her unusual appearance, Barnum (or another of the museum’s impresarios) spun a tale for their audience of a noble people’s flight from foreign invasion, a young girl’s sale into sexual slavery, and ultimately her rescue by a representative of the American Museum itself.

This act, introduced by Barnum and Zalumma Agra, would be widely copied by other museums and itinerant performers across the United States through the 1880s. As a group, these performers are known as Circassian Beauties. This thesis addresses the character whom each of these women played, the singular Circassian Beauty, as a fictional construct representative of the time and place for which she was developed. Drawing on numerous interdisciplinary fields, I explore how the Circassian Beauty narrative embeds contemporary nineteenth-century values and anxieties within elements of classic and popular American literature; the design of her physical appearance and visual presentation, in the context of contemporary popular entertainments; the audience that her act was intended to appeal to, and the audience reaction she was intended to create; and the nature of the museum space which was uniquely able to introduce and support such a dialectically complex character.

Comments

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