Waxworks: A Cultural ObsessionLondon, 1921. The world's greatest wax sculptor watches in horror as flames consume his museum and melt his uncannily lifelike creations. Twelve years later, he opens a wax museum in New York. Crippled, disfigured, and driven mad by the fire, he resorts to body snatching and murder to populate his displays, preserving the bodies in wax. "In a thousand years you will be as lovely as you are now, " he assures one victim. In The Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), director Michael Curtiz perfectly captures the macabre essence of realistic wax figures that have excited the darker aspects of the public's imagination ever since Madame Tussaud established her famous museum in London in 1802. Artists, too, have been fascinated by wax sculptures, seeing in them--and in the unique properties of wax itself--an eerie metaphoric power with which to address sexual anxiety, fears of mortality, and other morbid subjects. In Waxworks, Michelle E. Bloom explores the motif of the wax figure in European and American literature and art. In particular, she connects the myth of Pygmalion to the obsession with wax statues of women in the nineteenth-century fetishization of prostitutes and female corpses and as depicted in such "wax fictions" as Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop (1841). Filmmakers, too, have sought inspiration from wax museums, and Bloom analyzes works from the silent era to such waxwork-themed Hollywood horror films as Mad Love (1935) and House of Wax (1953). Bringing her discussion to the present, Bloom examines the work of contemporary artists who use the medium of wax in ways never imagined by Madame Tussaud. As extravagant new wax museums open in Las Vegas, Times Square, and Paris, Waxworksoffers a provocative cultural history of this enduring--and disturbing--art form. |
Contents
A Brief History of Wax | 1 |
Metamorphoses of Wax | 37 |
The Dissolution of the Pygmalion Myth | 55 |
Melting Wax in the 1930s Hollywood Horror Film | 113 |
Fantasizing about History in the Wax Museum | 159 |
The Business of Wax in Dickens | 191 |
The Art of Contemporary Wax | 211 |
Conclusion | 257 |
Notes | 273 |
Bibliography | 311 |
Filmography | 331 |
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Common terms and phrases
anatomical waxes animation Arcades Project artist Balzac Barbier blurring body boundaries Bourdette Catherine Lescault century Champfleury cinema Clones Series close-up Coyne Coyne's death desire Diart Dickens embodies Encaustic entails evokes exhibit fantasy female figures de cire film French Frenhofer Frenhofer's Gainsborough Galatea Gallery gender genre Gogol guillotine Hands of Orlac Hewson historical Hoffmann's human Igor Igor's imagination inanimate installation Installation Art ivory Jarley Jarley's Julie L'Homme aux figures literally Louis XVI Mad Love Madame Tussaud's Marie Antoinette melting metamorphosis mold Musée Grévin Mystery Narcissus's Nathanael object obsession Old Curiosity Old Curiosity Shop Olimpia Orlac Ovid Ovid's Paddock painting Paris photographic physical plastic portraits postmodern prostitute psychological dissolution Pygmalion Pygmalion's statue Quilp Redoux reflects reshaping role Sandman sculpting sculptures sexual shot story suggests texts tion trans Venus versions of Pygmalion Villiers Villiers's visual wax art wax fictions wax figures wax modeler Wax Museum wax's waxworks woman women Yvonne