In 1882, a woman named Nora Hildebrandt debuted at a New York dime museum covered in 365 tattoos, earning one hundred dollars a week at a time when a factory worker earned five. She told audiences she had been captured by Sitting Bull's tribe, tied to a tree, and forcibly tattooed for six hours a day for a full year while her father watched. Her father was not her father. He was her common-law husband. The kidnapping never happened. The story had to be that story for a specific reason: in Victorian society, a woman who chose to be tattooed was a woman who had made a decision about her own body, which implied things about her character that the era was not prepared to accept. Remove the choice, make her a victim, and suddenly the revealing costume was testimony rather than scandal. Captain George Costentenus had established the template before her, earning a reported thousand dollars a week from P.T. Barnum with a fabricated story of Chinese Tartar captivity and three hundred and eighty-eight tattoos applied over three months of forced punishment. The tattoos were real. The stories were marketing. This episode examines what the sideshow actually was, who it served, and what it meant that one of the very few ways Victorian women could earn a professional income, travel independently, and have their names in the newspaper was to get covered in ink and lie about how it got there.
More info: tattooarchive.com/history/hildebrandt_nora1.php victorianvisualculture.blog/2023/11/16/nora-hildebrandt-tattooed-ladies-and-captivity-narratives
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