Summary Of The Hottentot Venus

Imagine you are sitting in a crowd waiting for a show called “The Hottentot Venus” and you don’t know what the attraction is beforehand. Finally, the crowd gets silent and the curtain opens up. All of a sudden, you see a huge cage that is big enough for a gorilla. Then out comes a women with a collar around her neck and she’s struggling and fighting against the man holding her leash. He yells and she stands up and growls just like an animal. This is Saartje Baartman whose show you’re at and she is not an animal, she is a Khoi woman from Africa. She is now formally known as Sara, but back in the early 1800’s she was known as the “Hottentot Venus”, a great freakshow attraction for many in Britain and France. She was tricked into moving from her
She was living during the Victorian times and during that time period in Europe femininity, gender roles and norms were beginning to change. Hannah Aspinall discusses these changes in her article The Fetishization and Objectification of the Female Body in Victorian Culture. Aspinall writes, “The female body has long been idealised, objectified and fetishized and this can be seen particularly in Victorian culture. Social rules and guidelines on how the female body should look, and how it should be dressed, objectified the body and encoded femininity within these rules” (Aspinall). Perhaps the sexuallizing of Sara’s body for entertainment came with the times. European women in the Victorian era sexualized themselves with their clothing. For example, women wore corsets to make their waists look tighter and their butts look larger, Aspinall writes, “It was vital to the creation of the ideal feminine shape, cinching in the waist but remaining ‘desirably plump in other areas of the body’...”. This is ironic because Sara had a naturally larger buttocks, but not a tight little waist. It’s like the women of the Victorian culture were trying to fit this specific image that Sara already had naturally. The irony behind this is that they laughed at her and objectified her while they were modifying their clothing to have that image. Rachel Holmes, author of The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Death of Saartjie Baartman says, “at the time, it was highly fashionable and desirable for women to have large bottoms, so lots of people envied what she had naturally, without having to accentuate her figure,” which just goes to show how women in this time period accepted and, in a sense, sexually objectified themselves to fit a certain