In Big and Small, Lynne Vallone attempts a synthesis of the extensive literature on the variation of sizes and shapes of the human body, as imagined in literature, art, commercial culture, and folklore. Big and Small ranges across the careers of the famous and obscure, actual and fantasy people, to reflect on how size has been a powerful register of difference, in and between cultures. Less a chronicle of extraordinary human bodies (such a history could be written from medical, legal, or political sources) Vallone’s work is rather an examination of size difference as it has been treated in imaginative productions in Western Europe and America.
Vallone’s special strength is her expertise in children’s literature and the new field of childhood studies; she connects her wide studies of cultural play with size to ideologies of childhood, growth, and development. More precisely, she shows that culture plays with growth and the apparent lack of growth and development, since in many stories and folktales, little people and giants come on the scene fully formed, without, as it were, normal childhoods. It is worth saying here that the book also touches upon, and draws on, disability studies.
The book is sensibly divided into two main parts, dealing with small bodies (homunculi, embryos, midgets, dwarves, and “miniatures”) and large bodies (the gigantic, the monstrous, and the obese), with an overview introduction to each part. Even with a generous word limit, Vallone has been forced to be selective in her choice of examples. It appears that she has dug more deeply into the interpretation of the small, as her book begins with a history of the tales of Tom Thumbs, from the seventeenth century to the present. These imagined miniatures, she shows, were connected to developing thought in embryology, as scientists wondered whence the embryo emerged and whether the fetus in utero was a fully formed being, a potential monster, or something else. She takes a close, engrossing look the history of the treatment of little people (dwarfs, as she terms them), including the use of Jeffrey Hudson in his attachment to the English royal family during the Revolution and Restoration. As court favorites, some European little people played an emblematic role for monarchs, appearing in processions, masques, and paintings, serving as concentrations of human virtues and associating them with monarchs. And yet, because they were persons as well as mascots, little people also performed a variety of other complex courtly tasks, acting as representatives or go-betweens, confidants, and ladies in waiting.
In a chapter-long study of the St. Louis World’s Fair performer, Ota Benga, a Congolese “pygmy,” Vallone takes up the ways race and orientalism interact with perceptions of the small. In Ota Benga’s long and sad career – he ended up essentially a prisoner, occupying a cage between the monkeys and the great apes at the Bronx zoo – Vallone finds even more uneasiness and conflicted thinking about small persons when they are seen as racially other. Was Ota Benga an emblem of savage nobility in American thought, or a register of black inferiority? He was, at a minimum, overburdened with racial hierarchy, social evolutionary thought, and notions of the primitive. Vallone connects early-twentieth-century racial thinking tightly to Benga’s “afterlife,” not least in children’s literature.
Discussing the very large end of the human scale, Vallone argues that the enormous can hold entirely different meanings than the tiny. Whereas the small are often benign, the very large can be monstrous and frightening, or perplexingly gentle. In literature and folklore, enormous out-of-scale girls and obese women are treated as threatening, while enormous men can be made tamer and filled with human virtues, for example, in Roald Dahl’s 1982 children’s book The BFG. Whether through size or disfigurement, she argues, monstrosity allows us to determine who belongs where: monstrousness is connected to ideas about who can fit in, or which people must be displaced. Size is as complexly tied to gender as it is to race.
Vallone has read widely in literature, early modern European history, the history of science, and art history. She has demonstrated well, and with wide-ranging examples, that size difference is a key principle organizing Western culture, and that we are eager to use difference to stand for an “otherness” that is often construed as unbridgeable by empathy or knowledge. She shows how varied the affective uses of this difference are. An especially useful feature of Big and Small is Vallone’s “updating” of discourses of size in her discussions of challenges to “size-ism” in modern art and literature projects, including writing for children and young adults.
This book will be useful for scholars of the body in many disciplines, and for folklorists it will be useful as background reading for undergraduate courses. Art historians will be disappointed at the very small size and poor resolution of the illustrations, given that Vallone conducts readings of court paintings by Velasquez and van Dyck, among others, and has much to say about how often size difference is perceived visually and interpreted in visual media. For graduate students in folklore this book will be useful, not least because it provides many jumping off places for reexaminations of familiar topics, from fairy lore to John Henry to sleeping giants. Certainly for scholars of performance and the body, Big and Small suggests many new projects, as well.
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[Review length: 890 words • Review posted on November 12, 2020]