“Those Ill Things”:

On Hidden Spectacles and the Ethics of Display

Abstract

Angela Carter’s short story ‘Black Venus’ (1985) and John Wood’s collection of poems Endurance and Suffering: Narratives of Disease in the 19th Century (2007) are revisionist projects which also rewrite life stories of people suffering from syphilis. This paper inspects to what extent these undertakings succeed in re-imagining marginalised minorities. The validity of these endeavours is measured against the visibility of individuals and their bodies, and their positioning vis-à-vis the gendered and oppressive cultural scripts surrounding syphilis. On the basis of this discussion, the paper enquires into the modes of display of the nineteenth-century syphilis sufferers as an example of Victorian minorities and asks to what extent such ‘exhumations’ are ethically justifiable.