Madame Tussaud and the Return of the Dead: A Mini-Essay

      In 1802, the French artist Anna Maria Tussaud was invited to join Paul de Philipsthal’s phantasmagoric show at the Lyceum Theatre in London. Although Tussaud did not benefit financially from the endeavor (Paul de Philipsthal collected half of her profits), the popularity of her wax figures quickly propelled her to stardom, allowing Tussaud to tour the British Isles for over three decades and eventually establish a permanent exhibit on Baker Street in 1835. The exhibition’s most popular attraction was a separate room – subsequently named the Chamber of Horrors – which featured effigies of executed criminals and guillotined aristocrats from the French Revolution. The public was mesmerized by this graphic depiction of the dead and flocked to its macabre presentation in droves. For some, as Pamela Pilbeam expresses, the exhibition “provided a safe environment in which customers could face their fears.” For others, it proved a frightening display of nightmarish atrocity and, as Lavinia Russ highlights, a reward of £100 was issued in 1909 “to any person, male or female, who [would] pass the night alone in the Chamber of Horrors…the only condition made [was] that the daring one [would] not smoke or drink or read during the twelve hours he pass[ed] with the wax figures of the world's noted criminals.” Given the show’s sadistic nature (especially for its time), the crowd’s reaction is understandable; however, as Linda Badley argues, the dismay invoked by Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors may have extended beyond the shock of gore and violence.
     Badley builds on the notions presented in Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, particularly his concept of eidolon. As Barthes explains, photography has the ability to capture fleeting moments in time, preserving people and events far beyond their passing. For example, a photograph taken of Abraham Lincoln in the summer of 1861 encapsulates that lone instance and allows viewers from future generations to return briefly to it. In doing so, according to Barthes, the photograph becomes a means of time travel and allows for “a return of the dead.” This transcendence of space and time holds a romantic connotation, but, as Badley stresses, it also possesses an unsavory implication. Just as the photograph of Abraham Lincoln can transport viewers to another time, the photograph of a beheading or mass genocide can yield the same results, freezing an instance of brutality forever. In the case of Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors, the lifelike depictions of criminals and guillotined victims – many molded directly from death masks – presented a graphic three-dimensional representation of incidents. Akin to photographs, the displays captured a moment of unspeakable atrocity and forced visitors to uncomfortably relive it in stunning realism. In doing so, Tussaud's chamber, according to Badley, “gave supernatural life” to the dead, allowing them to return and reenact their final carnage. Hence, it was not the gore and violence itself, Badley argues, which invoked so much fear, but the photo-realistic presentations which preserved some of humanity's more heinous barbarities. 

Works Referenced

Badley, Linda. Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995.

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1980.

Lavinia Russ. Forever England: Poetry and Prose about England and the English. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., 1969.

Pilbeam, Pamela. Madame Tussaud and the History of Waxworks. London: Hambledon and London, 2003.