The dark side of the circus

In 2013 Tessa Fontaine joined up with the World of Wonders, a circus sideshow that travels around the United States each year displaying sword-swallowers, human-headed spiders, snake-charmers and fire-eaters to a marvelling/cynical public. Sideshows, as Fontaine writes, ‘are where people come to see public displays of their private fears’, and to probe their disgust reflexes and their yearnings. Here, too, they come to tread the line between relinquishing themselves to magic and uncovering, once and for all, the trick.

Yet as Fontaine discovers in her first flame-eating lesson, the trick is simply that there is no trick. Flame-eaters get burnt; sword-swallowers die of wounds inflicted by carelessly inserted blades. If you see pain, there is pain — or did you imagine that the show people were a special breed who feel nothing when they hammer nails up their noses? The only way is to feel the pain and fear and to overcome it. ‘Wow,’ says her flame-eating teacher, impressed: ‘You don’t have many instincts for self-preservation.’

Why do people do it? In Fontaine’s case, it was the result of a private tragedy. Two years previously, her mother had suffered a catastrophic stroke. Two years of slow steps towards recovery followed by fits and fevers that obliterated all her progress, of the family being repeatedly summoned to her bedside to say their last words. For her daughter, this ghastly emotional rollercoaster (sorry) was exacerbated by guilt at their difficult relationship. When her stepfather decided to take her mother on a longed-for holiday to Italy, Fontaine was convinced that her mother wouldn’t survive the trip. So she ran away to the circus.

The sinister side of the sideshow, to my mind, is not so much the car-crash voyeurism as the sense one has of applauding and rewarding self-harm; and it’s certainly true that some very damaged people pass through the tentflaps of the World of Wonder.