Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus: A Routledge Study Guide

Citation preview

Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus

Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984), a highly original and influential work of modern British literature, combines a fantastically creative plot with a strong political undertone. The result is an emotive and provocative novel, which has attracted much critical attention from a range of perspectives including poststructuralism, gender studies, postmodernism and psychoanalysis. This guide to Angela Carter’s richly complex novel offers: • an accessible introduction to the text and contexts of Nights at the Circus; • a critical history, surveying the many interpretations of the text from publication to the present; • a selection of new critical essays on the Nights at the Circus, by Jeannette Baxter, Heather Johnson, Sarah Sceats and Helen Stoddart, providing a variety of perspectives on the novel and extending the coverage of key critical approaches identified in the survey section; • cross-references between sections of the guide, in order to suggest links between texts, contexts and criticism; • suggestions for further reading. Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, this volume is essential reading for all those beginning detailed study of Nights at the Circus and seeking not only a guide to the novel, but also a way through the wealth of contextual and critical material that surrounds Carter’s text. Helen Stoddart is a lecturer at Keele University. She is interested in research on the circus, its history, cultural influences and implications and, most particularly, its representation in other forms such as literature and cinema.

Routledge Guides to Literature* Editorial Advisory Board: Richard Bradford (University of Ulster at Coleraine), Shirley Chew (University of Leeds), Mick Gidley (University of Leeds), Jan Jedrzejewski (University of Ulster at Coleraine), Ed Larrissy (University of Leeds), Duncan Wu (St. Catherine’s College, University of Oxford) Routledge Guides to Literature offer clear introductions to the most widely studied authors and texts. Each book engages with texts, contexts and criticism, highlighting the range of critical views and contextual factors that need to be taken into consideration in advanced studies of literary works. The series encourages informed but independent readings of texts by ranging as widely as possible across the contextual and critical issues relevant to the works examined, rather than presenting a single interpretation. Alongside general guides to texts and authors, the series includes ‘Sourcebooks’, which allow access to reprinted contextual and critical materials as well as annotated extracts of primary text. Already available:* Geoffrey Chaucer by Gillian Rudd Ben Jonson by James Loxley William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice: A Sourcebook edited by S. P. Cerasano William Shakespeare’s King Lear: A Sourcebook edited by Grace Ioppolo William Shakespeare’s Othello: A Sourcebook edited by Andrew Hadfield William Shakespeare’s Macbeth: A Sourcebook edited by Alexander Leggatt William Shakespeare’s Hamlet: A Sourcebook edited by Sean McEvoy John Milton by Richard Bradford John Milton’s Paradise Lost: A Sourcebook edited by Margaret Kean Alexander Pope by Paul Baines Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: A Sourcebook edited by Adriana Craciun Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels: A Sourcebook edited by Roger D. Lund Jane Austen by Robert P. Irvine Jane Austen’s Emma: A Sourcebook edited by Paula Byrne Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: A Sourcebook edited by Robert Morrison Byron, by Caroline Franklin Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: A Sourcebook edited by Timothy Morton The Poems of John Keats: A Sourcebook edited by John Strachan The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Sourcebook Edited by Alice Jenkins Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield: A Sourcebook edited by Richard J. Dunn Charles Dickens’s Bleak House: A Sourcebook edited by Janice M. Allan Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist: A Sourcebook edited by Juliet John * Some titles in this series were first published in the Routledge Literary Sourcebooks series, edited by Duncan Wu, or the Complete Critical Guide to Literature series, edited by Jan Jedrzejewski and Richard Bradford.

Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities: A Sourcebook edited by Ruth Glancy Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick: A Sourcebook edited by Michael J. Davey Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin: A Sourcebook edited by Debra J. Rosenthal Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself: A Sourcebook and Critical Edition edited by Ezra Greenspan Robert Browning by Stefan Hawlin Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler: A Sourcebook edited by Christopher Innes Thomas Hardy by Geoffrey Harvey Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles edited by Scott McEathron Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper: A Sourcebook and Critical Edition edited by Catherine J. Golden Kate Chopin’s The Awakening: A Sourcebook edited by Janet Beer and Elizabeth Nolan D. H. Lawrence by Fiona Becket Joseph Conrad by Tim Middleton The Poems of W. B. Yeats: A Sourcebook edited by Michael O’Neill E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India: A Sourcebook edited by Peter Childs Samuel Beckett by David Pattie Richard Wright’s Native Son by Andrew Warnes J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye by Sarah Graham Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love by Peter Childs Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things by Alex Tickell Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus by Helen Stoddart

Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus

Helen Stoddart

First published 2007 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor and Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

© 2007 Helen Stoddart All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Stoddart, Helen. Angela Carter’s Night at the circus / by Helen Stoddart. p. cm.—(Routledge guides to literature) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Carter, Angela, 1940– Nights at the circus. 2. Feminist fiction, English— History and criticism. 3. Gothic revival (Literature)—Great Britain. 4. Postmodernism (Literature)—Great Britain. 5. Magic realism (Literature) 6. Feminism in literature. 7. Magic in literature. 8. Circus performers in literature. I. Title. PR6053.A73N53 2007 823′.914—dc22 2006100811 ISBN 0-203-31207-4 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 13: 978–0–415–35011–2 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978–0–415–35012–9 (pbk) ISBN 13: 978–0–203–31207–0 (ebk)

Contents

Notes and references

ix

Introduction

xi

1: Text and contexts

1

Angela Carter: biography and writing Academic contexts Internationalism Recognition Britain in the 1890s and the 1980s: Margaret Thatcher Britain in the 1960s: cultural change Literary contexts and beyond Critical contexts

3 4 5 6 8 10 12 21

Walter Benjamin and the ‘angel of history’ Michel Foucault and the panoptican Laura Mulvey, female stars and ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ Mikhail Bakhtin: the carnivalesque and the grotesque Postmodernism: intertextuality, bricolage and metafiction Magical realism Masquerade and the performative

2: Critical history Reviews Gender, feminism and the carnivalesque Performance and masquerade Freakery and the grotesque History and politics Postmodernism and history Genre: picaresque, magic realism and Gothic

21 24 26 27 31 34 37

41 43 46 50 52 56 58 63

viii

CONTENTS

3: Critical readings ‘Metafiction, Magical Realism and Myth’ by Heather Johnson ‘Performance, Identity and the Body’ by Sarah Sceats ‘Postmodernism’ by Jeannette Baxter ‘Popular Culture, Carnival and Clowns’ by Helen Stoddart

4: Further reading and web resources Index

67 69 82 95 108

123 133

Notes and references

Primary text Unless otherwise stated, all references to the primary text are taken from Nights at the Circus, Angela Carter (London: Vintage, 1984). The initial reference in each part will contain full bibliographic details and all subsequent references will be in parentheses in the body of the text, stating the part number, chapter and page number, e.g. (Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 1). The part and chapter numbers are provided to help anyone reading an edition of the novel that differs from this one.

Secondary text References to any secondary material can be found in the footnotes. The first reference will contain full bibliographic details, and each subsequent reference to the same text will contain the author’s surname, title and page number.

Cross-referencing Cross-referencing between sections is a feature of each volume in the Routledge Guides to Literature series. Cross-references appear in brackets and include section titles as well as the relevant page numbers in bold type, e.g., (see Texts and contexts, pp. 1–39 ).

Introduction

Although Angela Carter died in 1991, in the year 2006 her work had never been more popular or celebrated. This year saw an abundance of activity, all confirming the enduring presence of the considerable range and quantity of writing she produced. Indeed, it is as though she has finally come into her own, as though the publishing industry and reading public alike required time to catch up and catch on to the pleasures and innovations laid out in her startling and provocative literary legacy. The publisher Vintage has relaunched many of her titles, including Nights at the Circus, in new editions, all of which include introductions by contemporary authors (Ali Smith, Michael Moorcock, Helen Simpson, Sarah Waters) who have been impressed and influenced by her work. All sport voguish cover designs by the fashionable Dutch graphic artist Pieter ‘Parra’ Janssen.1 The new series was launched in June 2006 with a day-long event of readings and talks at London’s South Bank Centre. Earlier that year, a musical stage adaptation of Nights at the Circus performed by Kneehigh Theatre toured England and received excellent reviews (see Further reading, p. 126). Carter’s work is finding new and wider audiences and there is a fresh understanding of its dramatic and theatrical qualities. Highly theatrical in style, content and structure, Nights at the Circus mimics the classic three-act play (including a final ‘Envoi’). It is divided into three sections as the narrative moves from the ‘London’ of Fevvers’ childhood and theatrical fame to ‘Petersburg’ where she joins Colonel Kearney’s circus on its ‘Grand Imperial Tour’ and is then literally and violently derailed in the ‘Siberia’ section when the circus train crashes in an expansive, freezing and threatening wilderness. On this journey, a vast array of unlikely characters make their entrances and exits, including the occupants of a female-run brothel in London, a troupe of clowns, a talking pig, a grand duke, an entire penal colony of female convicts and a shaman. Its touchstones throughout, however, are the controversially winged performer, Fevvers, her long-time companion and surrogate mother, Lizzie, and Walser, the young American journalist who is determined to make his reputation

1

Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus, London: Vintage, 1994. All further references shall be to this edition and will appear in the body text.

xii

INTRODUCTION

by exposing what he suspects is the fakery of Fevvers’ wings but who ends up falling in love with her. When Fevvers strikes her thigh on the first page of the novel, guffaws ‘uproariously’ and declaims ‘ “Lor’ love you, sir!” ’ to Walser, the reporter interviewing her, she also strikes three of the key notes of the novel: love, laughter and boisterously cheeky energy. The wit and inventiveness of Angela Carter’s writing, however, rules out sentimentality; the love and laughter that begin and end the novel are examined throughout for their destructive as well as their liberating effects and for the politics or power relations that lie within each. The novel’s theatrical structure and unlikely cast of characters are also crucial to the way it works to construct a highly fragmented, at times absurd, narrative that constantly plays tricks with time, not just moving backwards and forwards but also blurring the sense of separation between categories of time. In other words, the force and innovation of Nights at the Circus lies in the way that it continually breaks open so many of the structures that derive power from presenting themselves as ‘natural’ and therefore unchanging. The novel enjoys and indulges the pleasures of artifice – Fevvers is the embodiment of this indulgence – but in doing so it also lays bare the artifice, the workings through which so many constructs (time, literary narrative, the self, language, laughter, the social order) have, like Fevvers, been made up. Thus, both the novel’s intellectual challenge to its readers and its facility to engender astonishment and delight in them are borne out of a radical politics of reading. In showing how fictions are put together and how they might also be blasted apart, it lays open the possibility of putting things together again anew: to see, to understand and to read in new ways. As this summary of the novel indicates, Angela Carter is undoubtedly one of the most distinctive and daring voices in twentieth-century British literature, with Nights at the Circus her most dramatic novel and, as Sarah Waters confirms, also her ‘masterpiece’.2 Uniquely, it combines the intellectual ambition, social criticism and plundering of high art and popular or folk culture that characterizes Carter’s earlier works, with the same jovial good humour as Wise Children. It is a novel, therefore, that both charms and challenges its readers at all turns. Thus, the purpose of this guide to the novel, and the critical responses to it, is to open up and elucidate its challenges without mitigating its considerable charms. In doing so, it sets out a series of key literary, philosophical and historical contexts within which this novel can be placed and better understood: Angela Carter’s life and works, the political and social conditions of Britain in the 1980s, the work of other women artists during this period, the critical theory and philosophy which are woven into the fabric of the fiction, the literary genres with which the novel has been associated and the history of critical responses to the novel. Finally, four new essays have been commissioned for this guide, each one being both a map of an existing field of investigation (postmodernism, magical realism, performance and popular culture) as well as fresh approach to each of these key aspects of the novel.

2

Sarah Waters, quoted in Christina Patterson, ‘Angela Carter: Beauty and the Beasts’, Independent, 18 January 2006.

1 Text and contexts

Angela Carter: biography and writing Fevvers, the powerful central voice and character of Angela Carter’s novel, Nights at the Circus, makes much of her London birth and roots at the start of the novel. Carter herself, however, was denied this identity as a native-born Londoner by the Second World War (1939–45). Her mother took refuge from the Blitz, first in Eastbourne (a popular seaside resort on the Sussex coast) where Carter was born in 1940, and then subsequently in South Yorkshire, in the home of Carter’s grandmother, before returning to the capital when the war was over. In these bare facts, however, several issues emerge which are crucial to this novel in which questions of birth and origins are so central: London as a point of departure and return, the displacements caused by personal and historical change or conflict, the material and emotional protection offered by women and matriarchs; and, in Eastbourne, a place that has been associated with music hall and other forms of popular entertainment. Nonetheless, Nights at the Circus is also a novel that should make us cautious in our treatment of personal biographical information in that it clearly celebrates the inclination to fictionalize and embroider over the need to nail facts to the wall. Still, there are significant events, both from Carter’s own life and from the literary and historical contexts within which she worked, that bear on the novel in instructive ways. First, Carter is a writer who distinguished herself from many of her contemporaries by the scope and volume of her work across the fiction and non-fiction divide and who was interested in a variety of different media, writing for radio, film and television (see Further reading, pp. 125–6). She is the author of nine novels, including Nights at the Circus, four collections of short stories, four children’s stories, one book of verse, four plays for radio, two film screenplays and two television scripts, as well as a huge journalistic output. Having started working life as a reporter for the Croydon Advertiser, she eventually preferred journalism to reportage and was a prolific newspaper and magazine reviewer and essayist. She worked mainly for the British fortnightly review publications such as the London Review of Books and New Society, but also contributed to newspapers such as the Guardian, the New York Times, the Observer and the Washington Post. Her journalism is marked by the same playful, sharp-witted style which is

4

TEXT AND CONTEXTS

discernible throughout Nights at the Circus, as well as a facility for moving through a wide range of extremely diverse subject areas (books, fashion, art history, cookery and film) and cultural values. Even in her journalism, however, she tended to treat subjects of a popular, sensational or controversial sort, or from a revealingly subversive angle, challenged received wisdom and ‘good taste’; for example, her essay on D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love focuses on what she sees as evidence of Lawrence’s transvestitism in the novel.1 Her journalism also provides rich evidence of Carter’s powerful fascination with film and the film industry, most especially in the sexual politics of looking at images of women and in the role that women themselves might have in directing and shaping the pictures that circulate of them.2 In each of these respects – the facility to move effortlessly between ‘low’ and ‘high’ culture and to reverse the status they are traditionally accorded and the ongoing analysis of the formation of women’s identities through forms of spectacular performance – Carter’s journalism reveals itself as an important and instructive source and context for understanding Nights at the Circus. Like much of her fiction, the novel can be understood in terms of its continuity with her non-fiction. Indeed, if the question that hangs over Fevvers throughout the novel – ‘Is she fact or is she fiction?’ – were applied to almost any element of Angela Carter’s writing across the many genres and media in which she was engaged, it would be as erroneous and misleading as it is for her heroine since the two are frequently conjoined in her work.

Academic contexts The distinction between fact and fiction emerges as a dead end, mainly because Carter is a writer who was, above all, absorbed in ideas, which, by definition, transcend these two categories. Carter’s education is important in this respect. She took a degree in English at the University of Bristol (1962–5) with a particular focus on courses dealing with European medieval literature. She went on, throughout the 1980s, to hold a series of academic posts in creative writing in the UK, Australia and the USA, including three years teaching at the prestigious Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia. The programme at East Anglia was the first taught academic course in creative writing in the UK to be offered within the university curriculum and has been a formative influence on many of Britain’s most well-known contemporary novelists such as Ian McEwan, Pat Barker and Kazuo Ishiguro. Carter moved easily inside and outside of academic institutions and saw no conflict between creative and critical or theoretical work, nor did she see a necessary correspondence between intellectualism and elitism. She once said in interview that the character of Mignon in Nights at the Circus was constructed quite carefully as an allegory of Europe:

1 2

Angela Carter, ‘Lorenzo the Closet-Queen’ (1975), in Jenny Uglow (ed.), Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998, pp. 207–14. See, for example, the ‘Screen and Dream’ section of Jenny Uglow (ed.), Shaking a Leg, pp. 350– 400.

TEXT AND CONTEXTS

5

the unfortunate, bedraggled orphan – Europe after the war – which is why she carries such a weight of literary and musical references on her frail shoulders. But it does seem a bit of an imposition to say to readers that if you read this book you have got to be thinking all the time; so it’s only there if you want it.3 Like the character of Mignon as she is described here, Nights at the Circus as a whole is open to a wide variety of readers prepared to engage with it on different levels and perhaps at different times. Although this character has been carefully articulated with reference to twentieth-century European history, she is also available to readers as a purely melodramatic figure – a victim of constant male abuse – without either mode of reading excluding the other. Nights at the Circus has been both widely read and enjoyed by a popular readership and has also remained an intriguing challenge to academic critics of many backgrounds, and this aspect of Carter’s work is perhaps a product of the ease with which she herself was able to move between popular pleasures and academic challenges: popular challenges and academic pleasures.

Internationalism Another key aspect of Angela Carter’s life which is reflected in the novel is her internationalism. She was widely travelled and, as well as her teaching engagements in the USA and Australia, she spent three years living in Japan (1969–72), where she became interested in Japanese surrealism and where she could view western Europe from a position of ‘absolute otherness’.4 Intellectually and creatively, it is also striking how much Angela Carter’s writing, and Nights at the Circus in particular, is informed by other European cultures and non-Western traditions of literature and philosophy. Although the novel has London as its vivid foundation and starting place, the plan is always that Fevvers will slip away immediately on a ‘Grand Imperial Tour, to Russia and then Japan’ from where she will take a ‘ship to Seattle, for the start of a Grand Democratic Tour of the United States of America’ (Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 11). Of course, by the time she sets out to return to London at the close of the novel, this plan has been literally derailed: Japan and the USA are never reached, and the journey turns into a blind struggle and an improvisation. Likewise, the novel itself is unquestionably British, rooted as it is initially in London’s geography, idioms and popular culture – or at least a stage version of these. There is never any question that London is anything but a gateway to other lands and, as a result, cosy English parochialism is given no house room in the novel. Rather, as this book will demonstrate, it is a novel that is packed – both formally and thematically – with references to other literatures, philosophies and cultures. In the main, these connections are European, but also include the shamans of Siberia, for whom Western conceptions of history and

3 4

‘Angela Carter’, in John Haffenden, Novelists in Interview, London: Methuen, 1985, p. 87. Susan Rubin Suleiman, ‘The Fate of the Surrealist Imagination in the Society of the Spectacle’, in Lorna Sage (ed.), Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter, London: Virago, 1994, pp. 98–116 (p. 99).

6

TEXT AND CONTEXTS

geography are utterly strange and unknown, though they are shown to have a complex ‘cosmology’ of their own (Pt. III, Ch. 8, p. 253). Angela Carter, therefore, is a writer who, though steeped in British writers such as William Shakespeare and William Blake and as British as the ‘eel pie and a bit of mash’ (Pt. I, Ch. 2, p. 21) favoured by Fevvers, possessed a life experience and intellectual inquisitiveness that also made her an enthusiastic and curious internationalist.

Recognition Finally, it is important to know something of the status and popular recognition that Carter achieved in her lifetime and particularly of the role that Nights at the Circus had as the novel which finally brought Carter the critical praise and acknowledgement that had previously eluded her. Carter is now widely accepted as one of Britain’s most distinctive and original twentieth-century female writers, and it was with this novel, Nights at the Circus, that this reputation was finally established. As many observers have acknowledged, Nights at the Circus was the product of what Lorna Sage has described as ‘the hinge-moment or turning point’5 in Carter’s career, several years before in 1979, when both The Bloody Chamber and The Sadeian Woman were published. The key aspects of these works (one a short-story collection and the other a cultural polemic about the Marquis de Sade, women and pornography) as Sage sees it, is that here Carter finally ‘explained herself, unpacked her gifts’.6 Her work, therefore, ‘began for the first time to be read widely and collusively, by readers who identified with her as a reader and a re-writer’ and who began to grasp what the demands of her writing were and how they might rise to them. The sudden intelligibility of Carter’s earlier work through the explanatory prism of these new publications, Sage argues, ‘gave back her earlier work to herself and her readers’ and thus led to the rereading and eventual ‘canonization’ of these texts.7 Perhaps more importantly, however, it also appeared to clear the way for a new-found lightness and levity of tone that characterized her final two novels, Nights at the Circus and Wise Children. Thus, Nights at the Circus needs to be seen in terms of its being part of the culmination of a highly productive writing career which laid the intellectual groundwork – particularly for many of the feminist ideas – that it is therefore able to explore with a lighter touch. By the same token, its great success led to the retrospective reappraisal and rediscovery of much of the work that had gone before. Although her work before 1979 had attracted some positive reviews, Angela Carter was not, relatively speaking, a widely read or critically well-rewarded author before this point. Indeed, throughout her career she was never short-listed for Britain’s most prestigious book prize, the Booker (now the Man Booker) Prize, and received only three literary awards in her lifetime: the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for fiction for The Magic Toyshop (1967), the Somerset Maugham Award for literature for Several Perceptions (1968) and the James Tait Black

5 6 7

Lorna Sage, Moments of Truth: Twelve Twentieth Century Women Writers, London: Fourth Estate, 2001, p. 221. Sage, Moments of Truth, p. 221. Sage, Moments of Truth, p. 221.

TEXT AND CONTEXTS

7

Memorial Prize in 1985 for Nights at the Circus. In fact, the omission of both Nights at the Circus and then Carter’s final novel, Wise Children, from the Booker Prize shortlist helped spark the setting up of Britain’s women-only Orange Prize for Fiction. Certainly, The Bloody Chamber had engaged many feminist critics – academic and otherwise – before 1984, but Carter’s popularity and critical acclaim did not reach international levels until the publication of Nights at the Circus. A number of reasons have been given for this. First, as Merja Makinen notes, Carter’s narrative style in her final two novels (Nights at the Circus and Wise Children) has a ‘lighter tone and more exuberant construction’ than her previous work.8 Second, Helen Carr believes that Carter benefited from the voguish reputation in Britain during the 1980s of South American ‘magical realist’ writers such as Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Isabel Allende and Mario Vargas Llosa with whom Carter has often been critically linked (see Text and contexts, pp. 34–7).9 Third, Nights at the Circus was published in paperback by Picador with a print run which was far bigger than those of her previous publications with smaller presses. As Sarah Gamble points out, this wider distribution of her work coincided with ‘a general remarketing of it’, and Carter achieved a much higher public profile through interviews and public appearances attached to her writing and to her work for film and television during this period.10 As this book also demonstrates (see Critical history, pp. 46–65), Nights at the Circus struck a chord with many literary academics during the 1980s on both sides of the Atlantic, who took up the novel because its critical and theoretical reference points (Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud: see Text and contexts, pp. 21–49) coincided with their own. Especially in the area of gender studies, as Lorna Sage has already pointed out, a different set of ‘emphases’ emerged in the very late 1980s and through the 1990s to produce a ‘theoretical frame that fits Carter so much better that it seems to canonise her’.11 Angela Carter was certainly young when she died of cancer in 1992 (aged fifty-one) and it is clear that she died at the height of her powers with still a very great deal more to offer. Also, as the author Salman Rushdie put it in his obituary: ‘In spite of her worldwide reputation, here in Britain she had somehow never quite had her due.’12 Following her death, however, a burgeoning popular and academic interest in her work developed, both in Britain and internationally. Indeed, as Sarah Gamble points out, it became commonplace in the 1990s to cite the British Academy’s claim that, in the year after Angela Carter’s death (1992–3), they received forty applications for funding to support research projects on Angela Carter’s work, which was more than they received for all the projects concerning the eighteenth century.13 Though this frenetic level of interest 8 Merja Makinen, ‘Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and the Decolonisation of Feminine Sexuality’, Feminist Review, 42, autumn, 1992, pp. 2–15 (p. 7). 9 Helen Carr, From My Guy to Sci-Fi, London: Pandora Press, 1989, p. 45. 10 Sarah Gamble (ed.), The Fiction of Angela Carter: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001, p. 137. 11 Sage, Moments of Truth, p. 231. 12 Salman Rushdie, ‘Angela Carter, 1940–92: A Very Good Wizard, a Very Dear Friend’, New York Times Book Review, 8 March 1992, p. 5. 13 Sarah Gamble, Angela Carter: Writing from the Front Line, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997, p. 1.

8

TEXT AND CONTEXTS

may have receded somewhat in the years since her death, Carter’s writing has worked its way onto many library shelves and literary courses around the world, with Nights at the Circus remaining her most popular, influential and critically examined work. The sections that follow will present some of the literary, historical and cultural influences that shaped and informed the book. Subsequent sections summarize and assess some of the most influential and instructive critical assessments of her work before going on to offer some new ones.

Britain in the 1890s and 1980s: Margaret Thatcher Nights at the Circus is set in the year 1899, just ‘before the last cobwebs of the old century blow away’ (Pt. I, Ch. 2, p. 39) but before the first glimpse of the twentieth century. Critically and politically, it is just as much a novel about Britain in the 1980s, but it is also informed by a political intelligence which is identifiably a product of the cultural and intellectual revolutions that took place in much of western Europe and North America in the 1960s. The novel’s narrative voice, for example, certainly makes no bones about the fact that it speaks about the end of the nineteenth century from various different positions of twentieth-century knowledge. It is able to tell readers that the Shaman in Siberia who addresses Walser in ‘his native tongue’ speaks ‘an obscure Finno-Ugrian dialect’, not yet discovered but ‘just about to perplex three generations of philologists’ (Pt. III, Ch. 6, p. 237) and alludes to several works of literature, including poetry by W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot, that would not be written until the first decades of the twentieth century. Fevvers herself, is representative of this multiple historical reference. She is clearly the product of archetypal nineteenth-century institutions (the brothel, the music hall stage and the circus), yet we are also frequently reminded that she stands ever-poised on the brink of a new and promising twentieth century, something that is reinforced by the self-consciously twentieth-century narrative voice that articulates her as a woman of modern confidence. As Jeannette Baxter argues (see Critical readings, p. 104), there are many aspects of Fevvers’ character and actions that specifically relate to aspects of British culture and society during the period of Margaret Thatcher’s prime ministership (1979–90). ‘Thatcherism’, as it became known, was the very personal and charismatic brand of neo-liberal Conservative politics with which she left her mark. Like Fevvers, Thatcher combined a thirst for elevation, status and fortune with a powerful populism, given credibility partly from a continual reference to her humble origins as a grocer’s daughter. Baxter makes sense of the reference to Fevvers’ ‘Iron Maiden’ corset by reading it as a signal from Carter of the way Fevvers can be aligned to Thatcher’s politics of enterprise and capital accumulation; Thatcher, of course, came to be known as the ‘Iron Lady’ – a title given to her by the Russian people before her election to prime minister but which Thatcher herself appeared to enjoy. Fevvers, like Margaret Thatcher, is a self-promoting individualist, who emphasizes the importance of hard work and self-help, always with an eye on the main

TEXT AND CONTEXTS

9

chance when it comes to national and international money-making opportunities. Yet the reference is complex because not only is Fevvers often philanthropic in the use of her personal finances (Pt. I, Ch. 5, p.86), but also the corset is a harsh and painful mode of female bodily constraint that dates back beyond the Victorian period to the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603), another determined and reformist female leader of Britain who gave her corset the nickname of the ‘Iron Lady’. No doubt Fevvers also enjoys its historical association with Elizabeth I who was, after all, known as the ‘Virgin Queen’.14 Still, the corset, we are told, ‘cantilevered’ Fevvers’ body into an exaggerated symbol of a woman like one that might appear on ‘the prow of a ship’ (Pt. I, Ch. 1, p.15). Although it is by peddling such mythical images of women that Fevvers accumulates her fame and fortune, she also learns that the same symbols, rather like the corset itself, can be painfully imprisoning unless they are intelligently directed and controlled. Fevvers suffers the ‘worst crisis of her life’ when she worries that her male audience, in this case Walser, determines her identity: ‘Am I what I know I am? Or am I what he thinks I am? (Pt. III, Ch. 19, p. 290). Like Fevvers, much of Margaret Thatcher’s appeal and power lay in her successful direction of her own image in conjunction with her vision for the nation as a whole. Peter Clarke points out that Thatcher worked her relatively modest start in life into an asset by ‘projecting a populist appeal to the thwarted subaltern class of Conservative loyalists who recognized her as one of their own’.15 In this respect, her gender only further added to her appeal as an outsider battling the status quo. He goes on to argue that the basis of Thatcher’s initial success was not so much the actions or influence of others but ‘her own facility in escaping from the wreckage’, by which he means the troubled, outdated, aristocratic and backward-looking Conservative Party of the 1970s, which she transformed as she took over the leadership of it.16 But the parallel with Fevvers here is striking: she also escapes from the wreckage (of a train crash in Siberia caused by an excessively masculinist bunch of self-destructive outlaws) in Nights at the Circus. In the aftermath of this upheaval, she suffers a crisis of identity when she loses the symbols of male power (Fevvers’s ‘Victory’ sword taken from Ma Nelson’s brothel and Lizzie’s ‘Father Time’ clock) which have presided over her life since leaving the brothel. In the same section, Lizzie’s handbag is lost, found and then lost again (Pt. III, Ch. 5, p. 226 and p. 228, and Pt. III, Ch. 9, p. 277). When found, the handbag yields only playing cards – a game of chance – perhaps a sly dig at the relative weakness of Margaret Thatcher’s power which came to be symbolized by the ever-present bags fixed to her arm and her unbending monetarist trust in the fortunes of marketplace. In this respect, the novel constructs an ingenious mirroring through reversal of the rise of Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher’s success in government depended on the way she quickly appropriated what had previously been seen as masculine values and symbols. Perhaps the most dramatic example of this occurred when she led the country into a war against Argentina over General Galtieri’s invasion

14 See (Accessed 18 November 2005). 15 Peter Clarke, Hope and Glory: Britain 1900–2002, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004, p. 359. 16 Clarke, Hope and Glory, p. 359.

10

TEXT AND CONTEXTS

of the Falkland Islands (19 March – 14 June 1982) following his disputed claim to the territory. To many, the action seemed to herald a backward step, embracing the legacy of Britain’s now-faded days of empire. Her cultivation of herself in ‘the image of the new Boadicea’ confirms that, like Fevvers, Thatcher’s power in the public realm also drew on her manipulation of male mythologizing of women and confirmed that she too understood ‘the importance of mythic construction and the value of publicity’.17 Sarah Gamble argues that, for Carter, ‘Thatcher becomes a symbol of fiction run out of control and of government through the exercise of pure simulation’, in which an emphasis on pure image overtakes any underlying meaning.18 Fevvers, on the other hand, begins the novel with these symbols and fictions which seem to bolster her confidence in her fabricated and highly commercially successful public image of a powerful woman who defies existing categories of what it is to be a woman. By the time she emerges from the wreckage of the crashed train, however, she has lost them, together with ‘her feeling of invulnerability’ (Pt. III, Ch. 9, p. 273). Her new-found confidence in the ‘essence of myself’ (Pt. III, Ch. 10, p. 281) and her self-reliance, therefore, must be freshly constructed – a new spin on the concept of the ‘self-made’ woman – rather than the product of her faith in symbols of the past and the patriarchal. In other words, the wreckage for Fevvers represents the final disintegration of her faith in male symbols and fixities, not, as they were for Margaret Thatcher, the beginning. It acts as a spur to take these symbols over by re-launching her show of perpetual performance, disguise and artifice. For Carter, the important question, therefore, is who controls and directs these performances, and to what ends?

Britain in the 1960s: cultural change In order to understand the way in which Nights at the Circus paints its portrait of 1890s and 1980s Britain, it is also important to have a perspective on the huge social and political upheavals that took place in the decades between the Second World War and the writing of the novel. Carter’s fiction constituted pioneering work within a new generation of writing that emerged as a response to the counter-culture of the late 1960s. She was part of a generation of men and women, born during or immediately after the Second World War, who benefited from Britain’s welfare state and the various health and education reforms initiated in the post-war period. In terms of British fiction, the key innovation during this period was the 1944 Education Act which greatly extended opportunities for further and higher education with the creation of a new grants system to enable young people from all classes to attend universities. In doing so, it offered a whole generation of children and young adults access to ideas, qualifications and selfconfidence which had previously been much more restricted in terms of both gender and economic background. Rather than contributing to a new and more consensual and cohesive society, however, many of the beneficiaries of these social 17 Patricia Waugh, Harvest of the Sixties: English Literature and its Background, 1960–1990, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 18–19. 18 Gamble, Angela Carter, p. 147.

TEXT AND CONTEXTS

11

reforms went on to form the backbone of the ‘counter-culture’ in the 1960s, critical of what they saw as the outmoded class structures, culture and sexual politics of post-war Britain. By the 1970s, many of the same people had gone on to form their own consensus of left-leaning intelligentsia, something that has since been labelled ‘left culturalism’.19 They expressed their disaffection with existing social and political institutions such as marriage, the family and race relations and turned their backs on what they saw as tired or outmoded traditions of culture by inventing new kinds of art, poetry, music, fiction and film. Much of this work, like Carter’s, was formally innovative and challenged the separation between socalled mass or popular and ‘high’ culture. As Patricia Waugh notes, ‘between 1964 and 1968 there was undoubtedly much radical and popular optimism about the dawn of a new social order’ and ‘enormous transformations in attitudes to authority, sexuality and censorship, and civil liberties’ took place which ‘all helped finally to bring to an end the more deferential and consensual culture which had gradually been eroded since the early fifties’.20 She goes on to chart the ways in which the period of Margaret Thatcher’s government witnessed an attempt to stamp out the social and sexual permissiveness of the 1960s (for which it blamed many contemporary ills) together with left culturalism, in order to return to more recognizably Victorian values of ‘discipline and self-restraint’. Yet, even while Thatcherism appropriated the counte-culture’s emphasis on freedom and individual liberties, it also attempted to co-opt and redirect these values so that they might underpin its own agenda of the ‘free market’ economy. Thus, for some, Thatcherism looked like an attempt to return Britain to its own past, taking it backwards to a pre–1945 or even Victorian Britain, where there was still an empire to be defended, when women returned to the home and the welfare state could no longer ‘interfere’ in people’s lives. Economically, however, the emphasis was on moving forwards through radical economic reform and ‘modernization’. Under Thatcher, then, Britain appeared to be going in two directions simultaneously.21 Through this perspective, therefore, the peculiar combination of modern and Victorian resonances in Nights at the Circus begin to make sense. Like Thatcher, Fevvers is a woman who looks both forwards and backwards, as the novel itself does. Clearly, however, she not only belongs to the ‘other’ side of Victorian culture from the one constructed by Margaret Thatcher (prostitution, pornography, the circus), she looks forward with bright optimism to the new century that will include the 1960s, the decade so vilified by Thatcher. If, as Carter claims above (see Text and contexts, pp. 4–5), Mignon can be read as an allegory for twentieth-century Europe, then it is also possible to see the novel’s Siberian train wreck as an allegory for the 1960s. Its effects involve the tearing apart of familiar symbols and conventions, the questioning – and in some cases abandonment or fragmentation – of identities, as well as the understanding of time, space, language, history and truth as relative rather than fixed or eternal concepts. Walser and

19 Alan Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989, pp. 241–50. 20 Waugh, Harvest of the Sixties, p. 5. 21 See Alastair Davies in Alastair Davies and Alan Sinfield, British Culture of the Post-War, London: Routledge, 2000, p. 54.

12

TEXT AND CONTEXTS

Fevvers are to become a ‘New Man’ and a ‘New Woman’ (Pt. III, Ch. 10, p. 281) in the ‘new era that begins tomorrow’ (Pt. III, Ch. 10, p. 285). Thus, the crisis, loss and dislocation which are all products of the train wreck are taken at the end of the novel as triggers for opportunities and for laughter. Patricia Waugh sees this sense of loss and dislocation as characteristic of the work of many writers in the 1980s whose identities (as, for example, women or postcolonial subjects) meant that they had no stake in preserving a social order which appeared to be collapsing from the late 1960s onwards. As she puts it: Writers in the eighties were more inclined to see as a virtue what had previously been a cause for apocalyptic gloom; . . . the rise of the grotesque and the eccentric, the break-up of universal representativeness into culturally differentiated styles and voices; the construction of cosmologies which defy known laws of space and time; the carnivalesque which disturbs ontological and elemental categorization.22 In this respect, the novel belongs distinctly to the category of novels which celebrates constructions of identity and history that stress the temporary and the contingent rather than nostalgia for past certainties. It also helps explain why a novel might express its abandonment of the importance of continuity (of character, identity, belief, history) and distinction (of fact and fiction, male and female, past and present) through newly ‘grotesque and eccentric’ and ‘carnivalesque’ modes of transformative fiction such as Nights at the Circus.

Literary contexts and beyond One striking, and at times a little overwhelming, aspect of Nights at the Circus is the way that it continually alludes to other works of fiction (as well as paintings, theatre, film and philosophy) through quotations and paraphrase. For example, within the first chapter alone, Carter comically pastiches both Faustus’s question ‘Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?’,23 as ‘this Helen launched a thousand quips’ (Pt. I, Ch. 1 p. 8), and the famous opening lines of Moby Dick,24 ‘Call me Ishmael’ as ‘Call him Ishmael; but Ishmael with an expense account’ (Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 10). She also refers to the literary genre of the picaresque (see Text and contexts, pp. 63–4) and includes the French writers Colette (1873–1954) and Alfred Jarry (1873–1907) (Pt. I, Ch. 1, p.11) as characters whom Fevvers apparently meets on her European travels; this is not to mention the numerous references to real painters, music-hall artists, buildings and songs along the way. It is important at this stage, however, to distinguish between Carter’s consciously placed references to other literary, musical and visual texts and the way in which her writing as a whole in this novel – its structure, mode of characterization, tone and thematic preoccupations – can be seen to echo or to revise the work of literary predecessors and contemporaries. 22 Waugh, Harvest of the Sixties, p. 184. 23 Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, 1604. 24 Herman Melville, Moby Dick, New York: Harper and Bros., 1851.

TEXT AND CONTEXTS

13

Perhaps because Angela Carter herself tended to discuss her writing predominantly in relation to non-British literary traditions of various sorts (see Text and contexts, p. 5), native influences have tended to be overlooked. Yet Carter is also regarded as a particularly British writer, and this aspect of her identity appeared to come to the fore most notably in her final two novels, Nights at the Circus and Wise Children, so it is important to examine the roots of this aspect of her identity. The most striking literary influence, though he is not mentioned or alluded to directly in Nights at the Circus, is Charles Dickens (1812–70). It may be that the line of influence from Dickens to Carter was overlooked for many years because it does not come into full focus until her final two novels. But perhaps it is also because feminist critics, following the influential American critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, have sought to establish the existence of female literary traditions within which direct lines of association and dialogue can be traced between female authors of different periods. Such influences could therefore be read as distinctively and identifiably female or feminine, or a female reworking or response to some male author’s work.25 It is also true that at first this may sound like an unlikely pairing, since Dickens has so frequently been cast as one of the great nineteenth-century realists while Carter is seen as an anti-realist or at least a magical realist (see Text and contexts, pp. 34–7). In other words, Dickens has been associated with realism because of his vivid portrayal of the way in which that certain pressing social and political issues of the day – poverty, education, legal bureaucracy – shaped the lives of ordinary people of different classes. Carter, on the other hand, is regarded as an anti-realist because, although her writing is also socially and politically engaged, it tackles issues more indirectly (through allegory, fantasy and myth) and is underpinned by the assumption that objective reality does not exist. Yet there has always been another side to Dickens, suffused with theatricality, surrealism and a ghostliness that has pressed against and disrupted the social realism of his subject matter and plots.26 For example, this is the Dickens that describes Marley’s face as being lit like a ‘bad lobster in a dark cellar’ in A Christmas Carol and who loved the circus but imagines Coketown’s cotton mills in Hard Times as ‘the melancholy-mad elephants, polished and oiled up for the day’s monotony’.27 Across Dickens’s novels’ a vast cast of supporting characters emerge, full of comic strangeness, haunting eccentricities and grotesque power. The connection is important because it highlights the way in which Carter’s attraction to comic exaggeration, grotesque bodies and high-blown language places her work within a pre-existing, though often neglected, strain of British writing, albeit one which has not always been critically approved within a culture that still prizes ‘restraint’ and ‘good taste’ over display and theatricality. On the one hand, therefore, Guido Almansi chooses Carter and Dickens to illustrate his category of ‘maximalist’ writers – ones who ‘narrate ample stories on a grand

25 Susan Gilbert and Sandra Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979. 26 See, for example, John Bowen, Other Dickens, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 27 Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843), London: Penguin, 1985, p. 54, and Hard Times (1854), London: Penguin, 1995, p. 73.

14

TEXT AND CONTEXTS

scale, with a rich and highly imaginative language without qualms or shame’.28 On the other hand, however, James Wood also makes the connection between Dickens and Carter, though he does so critically, when he argues that ‘Dickens has been the overwhelming influence on postwar British fiction’. He goes on to argue that so many ‘of Dickens’s characters are, as Forster put it, flat but vibrating very fast’. In other words, they have an extremely vivid impact, but their ‘vitality is a histrionic one’ and, as such, he believes, Dickens is ‘an easy model for writers unable to, or unwilling to, create characters who are fully human’.29 Wood views Carter as an ‘intensely theatrical’ writer in this sense, and it is true that many of her characters work as performers and her work contains many references to performance-based arts such as theatre, music hall and film. More importantly for Wood, however, it is because in Angela Carter (and Martin Amis), Dickens’s legacy lies in their ‘interest in the self as a public performer’ and ‘an interest in grotesque portraiture and loud names, and in character as caricature, a vivid dab of essence’ at the expense of attending to the private self and the interior life.30 Of course, Wood’s criticism of Carter and Amis here belies a critical preference on his part for literary realism (‘characters who are fully human’) and maintains a corresponding distaste for writing that works outside realism’s limits. By implication, he holds in his firing line all the modes of fiction – such as melodrama, allegory, satire, myth and fairy tale – that channel meaning into vivid surface details which ‘vibrate’ outwards rather than move inwards through ‘depth’ of characterization. A critical distaste for non-realist modes, such as the one exhibited by Wood, therefore, has led to the dismissal of the work of Charles Dickens, as excessively sentimental or melodramatic, in the same way that Carter’s has often been rejected as overblown or ‘stagey’. But this is also to sacrifice much of the complexity present in the writing of both authors. At first, Wood’s account appears to work perfectly as a description of Fevvers, who bursts into the start of the novel with a voice ‘that clanged like dustbin lids’, offering glimpses of ‘marbly thigh’ and ‘indecorous eyes’ (Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 7). Yet these striking ‘vibrations’ in Fevvers’ character also continually lead outwards to other questions: to genealogy and identity (‘the unusual circumstances in which I come ashore’), fiction (‘ “Believe it or not!” ’), and myths of women (‘Helen of Troy’, ‘ “Cockney Venus” ’, Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 7). Neither does Carter abandon altogether the project of constructing characters with a sense of selfhood and interiority. (Fevvers, after all, manages a secret ‘grin in the mirror’ [Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 7] to herself as she performs her life story.) Above all, however, it is important to remember that Nights at the Circus is much more a novel about the importance of human selfhood and the fictions that sustain it than one that seeks to create fictional illusions, as Wood suggests, of ‘fully human’ selves. Carter is certainly more overt, strategic and thorough than Dickens in her subversions of literary realism, but both were also prolific social and cultural commentators through their journalism as well as writers of fiction. Carter’s

28 Guido Almansi, ‘In the Alchemist’s Cave: Radio Plays’, in Sage (ed.), Flesh and the Mirror, London: Virago, 1994, pp. 216/17. 29 James Wood, The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel, London: Jonathan Cape, 2004, pp. 173/4. 30 Wood, The Irresponsible Self, pp. 173 and 277.

TEXT AND CONTEXTS

15

work is also infused, albeit indirectly, with, as I will demonstrate shortly, a real engagement in contemporary politics and cultural debates, especially those that touch on the lives of women. Carter mainly connects to Dickens through a shared theatricality, therefore it is not so surprising that there should also be echoes of William Shakespeare (1564–1616) in Nights at the Circus, as well as elsewhere in Carter’s writing. When Lizzie exclaims that both she and Fevvers ‘dearly love the Bard’ (Pt. I, Ch. 3, p. 53), she also draws attention to the fact that they do so for very different reasons: she for the ‘spiritual sustenance he offers’ and Fevvers for his high drama (Romeo and Juliet), villainy (Richard III) and slapstick comedy (Twelfth Night). Both are at the heart of his great appeal to the lively popular audiences they describe at the Old Vic theatre on London’s South Bank who weep, boo, hiss and laugh in response. Although there is a dash of all these elements in Nights at the Circus, it is the Shakespeare of the comedies, most especially of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, that held the most powerful fascination for Carter throughout her work.31 As she explained to Lorna Sage in interview, her love for A Midsummer Night’s Dream was ‘almost beyond reason, because it’s beautiful and funny and camp – glamorous and cynical’. She goes on to explain that the play taps into a deep vein in English popular culture that has ‘some very odd and unreconstructed elements in it. There’s no country in the world where you have pantomime with men dressed as women and women dressed as men’.32 Shakespeare’s comedy, with its magical transformations, fairy princes, theatrical performances and narrative of lost paths and foundlings resounds throughout this novel’s plot, though it does so more explicitly in her next novel, Wise Children. Oddly, though the ‘sustaining’ benefits of his words are acknowledged, it is not the esteemed literary Shakespeare that Carter celebrates. Rather, it is a reclaimed popular version of him which emphasizes transgression and acting out (the bawdy, the glamorous, the absurd and the emotional), both on the part of the players and their audiences. Carter was a keen reader of women’s writing and promoted both new writing and the neglected work of women writers of the past through her work during the 1970s and 1980s with the London-based Virago Press, one which was founded specifically to publish the work of past and present women writers. Yet there are no clear precedents or self-consciously appropriated models for Nights at the Circus in work from women authors. Several female critics, however, have signposted important formal and aesthetic connections between the novel and the work of at least two other women writers: the Danish author Karen Blixen (1885–1962), who wrote under the name Isak Dinesen, and the English modernist writer Virginia Woolf (1882–1941). It was the American novelist Alison Lurie who pointed out the connection to Dinesen in her obituary of Carter. In this, she argues that although ‘[s]ome critics have seen Carter as a follower of magical realism’, in fact ‘she is, even more, the natural heiress of a northern Gothic tradition’. Lurie believes that Carter’s short-story collections such as The Bloody

31 See also her short story, ‘Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (1982) and final novel, Wise Children (1991), both of which rework elements of the play more overtly than Nights at the Circus. 32 Lorna Sage, ‘Angela Carter interviewed by Lorna Sage’, in Malcolm Bradbury and Judith Cooke (eds), New Writing, London: Minerva Press, 1992, pp. 186–7.

16

TEXT AND CONTEXTS

Chamber and Black Venus (1985) ‘look back to the baroque fantasies of Irish and British writers like Lord Dunsany, Arthur Machen and Walter de la Mare – and beyond them to Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater’. She goes on to note, however, that the ‘20th-century writer Angela Carter most resembles . . . the Danish author Isak Dinesen, whose Seven Gothic Tales features a similar mixture of bizarre, haunted northern scenes and bejeweled prose’.33 She might have added that Carter also often shared something of Dinesen’s wry, comic wit which fuses decadence and irony of tone, much of which derives from her use of fairy-tale settings refracted through a modern sensibility. ‘The Monkey’ by Isak Dinesen, for example, is a tale that involves a prioress, always accompanied by a spider monkey on her shoulder. She attempts to fix up a marriage between her nephew (who must restore his name and reputation, tainted by ‘clouds of strange and sinister nature’,34 after gossip circulates about his involvement in ‘Greek’ practices) and a neighbour’s daughter, Pallas Athene. Like Fevvers, Pallas Athene is an extremely tall young woman who is warrior-like in stature and attitude, and is ‘both son and daughter’ to her father.35 Of course, the arrangements go badly and violently wrong with the Prioress playing her manipulative and brutal part until the final paragraph sees her transformed into a monkey. Both Carter and Dinesen are involved in exploring the incompatibility between human desire and the gendered bodies, social expectations and institutions which stand to repress and distort it. They do so through characters which are theatrical, self-conscious of the roles they are playing out, and who operate in a semi-fabulous, fairy-tale realm where the laws of gravity are often suspended. Isobel Armstrong notes that, in the context of British fiction, Carter’s work is indebted to Virginia Woolf, and Nights at the Circus comes, most especially, ‘out of the possibilities for bravura fantasy’ in Orlando (1928), a novel for which, she notes, Carter had drafted a libretto.36 Orlando is the tale of a young nobleman who begins life as a youthful and naïve poet in the seventeenth century who goes on to transform into a woman, maintaining his/her existence and youthful appearance through into the twentieth century. Though the narrative mostly depicts the past, it is told through a knowing, twentieth-century sensibility, something which is a source of much of the novel’s wit. It is also a novel, therefore, in which a concrete sense of place and time is cast aside as Orlando takes off for adventures, travelling as far as Constantinople and living through successive historical periods. In the same way, a concrete sense of space and time is suspended for much of Nights at the Circus, opening to question other sorts of boundaries and distinction, most notably the boundary between fact and fiction.37 In other words, Woolf’s writing, and Orlando in particular, constitutes an important modernist precedent for Nights at the Circus. It unfastens both realist fictional conventions and cultural distinctions and assumptions about gender, power, authority and personal identity (as well as time and space) in order

33 Alison Lurie, ‘Winter’s Tales’, New York Times, 19 May 1996. 34 See Isak Dinesen, ‘The Monkey’, Seven Gothic Tales (1934), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005, pp. 75–120, p. 77. 35 Dinesen, ‘The Monkey’, p. 98. 36 Isobel Armstrong, ‘Woolf by the Lake, Woolf at the Circus: Carter and Tradition’, in Sage (ed.), Flesh and the Mirror, p. 258. 37 Armstrong, ‘Woolf by the Lake’, p. 271.

TEXT AND CONTEXTS

17

to imagine what it might be like to begin to piece these together again from zero. Carter’s novel, therefore, is just one example of what Patricia Waugh also claims is the ‘reincarnation’ of Orlando, ‘though now in the garb of magical realism, the carnivalesque, and the new science, and in the wake of the gender theories of Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, and Mikhail Bakhtin, in the most innovative feminist fiction of the eighties’.38 Some of the relevant ideas from this ‘wake’ of theories will be discussed below. These influences on Nights at the Circus are important to establish because although so much is new, radical and innovative in the novel, its freshness and inventiveness must also be seen as a product of Carter’s attachment, both intellectual and sentimental, to a variety of European literary figures and traditions. The sense of inventiveness that Carter brings to this novel is often, therefore, much more a result of revisiting, revamping or adapting past styles and narratives than it is about creating from scratch. As Lorna Sage has observed, Carter is an ‘addicted re-writer’ for whom the point is ‘escape from tales already told: how to find or make a narrative clue that will lead out of the labyrinth’.39 A crucial aspect of the way Carter retells tales and reimagines familiar characters in new ways is the way that she updates them by cloaking them in what is, very clearly, a late twentieth-century consciousness or sensibility. For example, in the ‘Siberia’ section of the novel, Walser lies unconscious in the presence of Vera and Olga, the escaped women prisoners. Vera responds to Olga’s enquiry about how they will wake him with the suggestion that the ‘old tales diagnose a kiss as the cure for sleeping beauties’, a line we are told she delivered ‘with some irony’ (Pt. III, Ch. 4, p. 223). Thus, Carter evokes the figure of the Sleeping Beauty only to reimagine and distance it from past versions through a double irony. First, the passively sleeping figure is a man and, second, the two women contemplating what to do with him are both in love with each other and so well aware of the conventions of fairy tales that they are in a position to comment ironically on the scene. One of the key genres, therefore, through which Carter has exercised her skills as a ‘reworker’, is the fairy tale. The fable and the fairy-tale form were influential modes for both Isak Dinesen and Angela Carter. Both recognized in them a transformative potential and a literary space in which a degree of abstraction could be acceptable and intelligible since fables and fairy tales frequently work through symbols and allegory rather than realism. Carter went on to explore her fascination with the genre when she edited two collections of fairy tales for the Virago Press. In doing so, she was building on a long-standing creative engagement which is perhaps most intriguingly explored in her short-story collection, The Bloody Chamber and Other Short Stories (1979) which contains reworkings of European fairy tales such as ‘Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Bluebeard’ and ‘Beauty and the Beast’.40 Yet it also emerges again in her final two novels, which are both full of journeys, transformations, beasts, innocents and mysterious origins. Nights at the Circus can be seen as borrowing from the fairy tale in two key

38 Waugh, Harvest of the Sixties, p. 187. 39 Lorna Sage, ‘Breaking the Spell of the Past’, Times Literary Supplement, 18 October 1985, p. 1169. 40 Angela Carter (ed.), The Virago Book of Fairy Tales, London: Virago, 1990 and The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales, London: Virago, 1992. Collected together as Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales, London: Virago, 2005.

18

TEXT AND CONTEXTS

ways. First, in the words of Jack Zipes, fairy tales ‘chart ways for us to become masters of history’ and ‘transform time into relative elements’.41 The fact that the novel is not governed by a rigid sense of time or history is expressed most clearly at the start of the ‘Petersburg’ section. The narrative voice appears to address the reader directly as it imagines St Petersburg as a ‘Sleeping Beauty’ (Pt. II, Ch. 1, p. 97) and thus distances itself from the idea that it might present ‘authentic history’ (see Text and contexts, pp. 23 and 32). The way is thereby prepared for Fevvers’ moment of (terrifying) liberation in the first chapter of Section III when she has lost the ‘mastery’ over time she believes was conferred on her by her ‘mascots’ of patriarchy (‘Father Time’ and the Ma Nelson’s toy sword ‘Victory’). When Lizzie points out to her, ‘You are Year One. You haven’t any history and there are no expectations of you except the ones you create’ (Pt. III, Ch. 1, p. 198), she, typically, captures something of the politically radical potential of the novel’s fairy-tale suspension of time mastery and division for the construction of newly imagined female selves. Second, as Lorna Sage points out, there is both a ‘quickness and lightness’ in the narrative detail and pace of the fairy tale and a ‘ “performative” sense of cultural history as travelling clothes’ which Carter transports into her late novels.42 In other words, Nights at the Circus perpetually imagines the details of culture, history and identity in the form of tales to be told and retold, objects which can be lost and found, and identities, like Fevvers’, which can be undressed, refitted and newly acted out but never as figures permanently lodged inside the self. Finally, it is also important to place Nights at the Circus in the context of an extensive body of work by British and North American women writers and artists of other sorts which began in the late 1960s and which was engaged in reimagining archetypal and mythical images of women or retelling the narratives associated with them. The point was to expose the ways in which myths have worked to consolidate Western conceptions of restrictive gender relations, disguising as essential what are in fact historically and socially prescribed gender roles. Although, as Elaine Jordan neatly puts it, ‘demythologising depends on exposing lies that enthrall people, . . . new myths have no obviously superior status’.43 In other words, all mythological versions of women are a form of ‘enthrallment’, even a new, more ‘modern’ female mythology. The important question for Jordan, therefore, is only who the myths serve and what possibilities they open up or close down. She also makes the point that demythologizing is ‘always secondary: subordinate to the tradition “with” which it claims to break’. Like parody, pastiche and irony, it is a mode which is always engaged in a dialogue with the past – a rebirth rather than an original, therefore its effects, ‘liberatory or oppressive’, always depend on ‘how things are at the point when it is read’.44 Though a great many women were involved in projects of this nature, the work

41 Jack Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell, London: Heinemann Educational, 1979, p. 220. 42 Sage, Moments of Truth, p. 238. 43 Elaine Jordan, ‘Down the Road, or History Rehearsed’, in Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iverson (eds), Postmodernism and the Re-Reading of Modernity, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992, pp. 159–79 (p. 166). 44 Jordan, ‘Down the Road’, pp. 166–7.

TEXT AND CONTEXTS

19

of four women in particular stands out as being closely related to Carter’s and specifically to Nights at the Circus: Caryl Churchill (1938–), Cindy Sherman (1954–), Marina Warner (1946–) and Paula Rego (1935–). By the time of publication of Nights at the Circus in 1984, a distinctive and sizeable body of British women novelists had begun to emerge. Authors such as Iris Murdoch (1919–99) and Muriel Spark (1918–2006) who had started to establish their reputations in the 1950s were joined by Doris Lessing (1919–) in the 1960s and Fay Weldon (1931–), Emma Tennant (1937–), Margaret Drabble (1939–), Anita Brookner (1928–), Beryl Bainbridge (1934–), A. S. Byatt (1936–), Pat Barker (1943–) and the Canadian author Margaret Atwood (1939–) in the 1970s and early 1980s. Other studies of Carter have discussed her work alongside these writers, however, given the clear the way that Nights at the Circus is so clearly engaged with other arts – especially visual media such as painting and photography – it is not surprising that many of the novel’s most challenging features are echoed in the work of women working in different areas of cultural production. Caryl Churchill is probably Britain’s most acclaimed woman playwright of the twentieth century. She has produced a body of dramatic work over five decades which, like Carter’s, is heavily inflected by her intellectual engagement with European philosophical thinkers such as Hannah Arendt (1906–75) and Michel Foucault (1926–84, see Text and contexts, pp. 24–6). Typically, her plays break up dramatic continuities of time, place, dialogue and narrative and radically reimagine the relationship between past, present and myth. Her play The Skriker (1994), for example, is named after its central dramatic character – a shapeshifting creature that emerges from a dark mythological underworld. The most famous example of her work in this respect, however, is Top Girls (1982), which gives life to literary, historical and mythical women from the past and inserts them into a contemporary drama of two sisters. Marlene is the ‘high-flying’ sister who is succeeding economically in early 1980s Britain, whereas her younger, more caring but less economically successful sister Joyce has been left to bring up Marlene’s daughter Angie. Like Nights at the Circus, the play breaks up clear distinctions between past and present, history and myth, fact and fictional embodiments in order to reflect on the problems and choices presented to women in Britain under Margaret Thatcher.45 Cindy Sherman, on the other hand, is not a writer but a performance artist and photographer, based in New York. Her collections during the 1980s included Untitled Film Stills (1977–80), Centerfolds (1981), Disasters, Fairy Tales (1985) and The History Portraits (1989–90) which feature Sherman disguised in a variety of female roles ranging from mock glamour (Film Stills) to the grotesque (Disasters). The artist’s manipulation of her own appearance through the performance of imaginary versions of women and femininity in each photograph works to question continually the roles, choices and long-standing constraints that shape the images of women which circulate for consumption in Western societies. Many of these photographs also contain unmistakably ironic or critical

45 For more details of Caryl Churchill’s work, see Elaine Aston, Lancaster University, ‘Churchill, Caryl’, 30 January 2004, The Literary Encyclopedia, (accessed 30 January 2005).

20

TEXT AND CONTEXTS

references to concepts of femininity and female myths or ideals constructed for male consumers (Centerfolds) or by male artists such as the British film director Alfred Hitchcock (Untitled Film Stills) and the ‘Old Masters’ of art history such as Rembrandt and Vermeer. In both these respects, Sherman’s work, like Carter’s, subverts historical, mythical and male-mediated images of women through performance and pastiche. Perhaps the most striking parallels are those between Carter and Paula Rego, a Portuguese artist who has lived in worked in London since the 1960s. In the course of her career, Rego’s paintings and graphic etchings have worked up hundreds of dark and vivid images that offer illustrative images for mythical figures and nursery rhymes as well as literary narratives such as J. M. Barrie’s. Peter Pan (1928) and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847).46 Characteristically, Rego focuses on the bodies of women and children but does so in a way that, like Sherman, dramatically confronts the viewer with the sinister and sexualized subtexts of the tales or poems in question, often borrowing or extending fabulous, erotic or grotesque elements from the original. Just as Fevvers in Nights at the Circus sends up the long-standing myth about circus aerialist’s bodies being able to confound the laws of gravity with her enormous, bawdy and inelegant body, Rego’s women rebuff ethereal or demure mythical embodiments of women, cast as they frequently are in solid, squatting, open-legged frames.47 Similarly, both Carter’s ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and her chilling portrayal of traditional children’s entertainments (‘The child’s laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown’ [Pt. II, Ch. 4, p. 119]) echoes Rego’s impulse to expose and explore, respectively, myths of female passivity and the innocence of childhood. Many of the academic and intellectual links between these figures can be traced through the work of Marina Warner. Although Warner is also a novelist, she is best known for a considerable body of work in the fields of literary and cultural history. Through this work she has grappled with a huge variety of mythical and literary embodiments of the female and the feminine – from the Virgin Mary to the Blonde – and of the powerful and dark sexual subtexts of stories for children. Warner has written appreciatively and insightfully about these aspects of Carter’s and Rego’s work. Her work makes her a leading example of an important critical direction within the discipline of women’s studies which also emerged during the 1970s. In works such as Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism, she interrogates the history of our understanding of key historical, religious and mythical women while also exposing the assumptions and prejudices that underpin these accepted versions of the females in question.48 The function of this work was also to go back into history (or ‘herstory’) reinserting tales into the absences and gaps left where women’s voices and achievements had been ignored, excised

46 For examples of these images, see ‘Pendle Witches’ (1996), ‘Nursery Rhymes’ (1989), ‘Peter Pan’ (1992), ‘Jane Eyre’ (2002), in T. G. Rosenthal, Paula Rego: The Complete Graphic Work, London: Thames and Hudson, 2003. 47 For an account of female aerialists in the nineteenth century, see Helen Stoddart, Rings of Desire: Circus History and Representation, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2000, pp. 166–77 and Brenda Assael, Circus and Victorian Society, Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 2005, pp. 108–35. 48 Marina Warner, Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1981.

TEXT AND CONTEXTS

21

or told for them by men. In this respect, the Virago publishing house was of central importance with its project, mentioned above, to recover and relaunch neglected or forgotten literary voices. All of this helps to suggest some of the impulses behind the creation of the extraordinary character Fevvers who represents both a mischievous bringing down to earth of an assortment of female myths (Helen of Troy, Venus, ‘L’Ange Anglaise’), while also foregrounding the voices of previously unheard women: the working class, prostitutes and circus aerialists.

Critical contexts From the early 1970s onwards, feminist practice, in literature as well as other fields, began to be distinguished by its close engagement with critical theory and philosophy. Nights at the Circus is both characteristic and exceptional in this respect. In common with the work of writers such as Margaret Atwood and Emma Tennant, it articulates feminist concerns about female identity, history and the body in a way that clearly demonstrates a knowledge of philosophers and theorists on these subjects. Yet it is hard to think of any other novel that showcases this knowledge quite so overtly and, indeed, that now appears to have captured a snapshot of the literary theorists, philosophers and critical trends that dominated the literary and cultural debates of the 1980s – and beyond. What is important about the novel, however, is the way in which, rather than simply offering a critical checklist, it frequently extends and complicates our understanding of the issues involved. The following section constitutes an attempt to summarize and explain some of the key terms and ideas in order to aid an understanding of how they bear on possible readings of the novel.

Walter Benjamin and the ‘angel of history’ One important reference point that hovers over the text as a whole is an essay by the Jewish/ German Marxist philosopher, Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, which was published ten years after his death.49 The essay is composed of thirty distinct and often poetic paragraphs/theses and is an attempt to understand the relationship between imagining or enacting future change through new forms of remembering and understanding past events and figures. Underpinning the essays is Benjamin’s commitment to Karl Marx’s (1818–83) reading of history as a series of events behind which the driving force of progress is not individual acts or ideas but rather mankind’s relationship to the means and materials of production, an approach which has come to be known as historical materialism. Thus, for historical materialists, individual actions and beliefs must always be read against the context of the wider and more powerful economic and industrial forces that carry them forward. Historical materialism

49 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1950), trans. Harry Zohn, in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations, London: Fontana, 1992, pp. 245–55.

22

TEXT AND CONTEXTS

also argues that official versions of history stress the determining role of certain ‘great’ individuals in historical movements or conflicts – usually ‘great white men’ such as Napoleon, Churchill and Stalin. In doing so, they erase the contribution of the many millions of other unrecorded individuals of smaller or no reputation whose actions, initiatives and sacrifices must also be examined for the true complexity of historical events and the nature of progress to be understood. The most resonant of Benjamin’s theses for Nights at the Circus is Thesis IX in which Benjamin contemplates the German artist Paul Klee’s picture, Angelus Novus (1920) which depicts the figure of an angel in a state of flux: A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.50 Following my discussion (Text and contexts, pp. 8–12) of the way in which Nights at the Circus is perpetually caught between a past (1890s) and the contemplation of a future ‘progress’ (the twentieth century) which has not yet – by definition – arrived, Carter’s construction of Fevvers begins to look very like a fictional (and female) articulation of Benjamin’s imagined ‘angel of history’. The narrative gives us a ‘chain of events’ which for Fevvers culminates in the ‘catastrophe’ or ‘wreckage’ of the Siberian train crash, an event which is forced upon her but without which she would not have been able to move towards future progress with confidence. Carter makes her further interest in Benjamin’s essay clear through several explicit references. As I suggested above, Benjamin called for a radical rereading of history through a historical materialist approach which would recover marginalized or silenced events or figures that had fallen out of historicism’s limited vision. The task of the historical materialist, Benjamin argues, is ‘to brush history against the grain’, to counter historicism’s empathy ‘with the victor’ and to foreground ‘the anonymous toil of their contemporaries’.51 It is something which is echoed, for example, in Fevvers’ triumphant speech towards the end of the novel. Here she re-presents Walser as a historical materialist of sorts; he will write into history ‘all those whose tales we’ve yet to tell him, the histories of those women who would otherwise go down nameless and forgotten, erased from

50 Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, p. 259. 51 Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, p. 248.

TEXT AND CONTEXTS

23

history as if they had never been’ (Pt. III, Ch. 9, p. 285). Her utopian zeal (‘all the women will have wings’, Pt. III, Ch. 9, p. 285) is, however, checked by Lizzie whose historical analysis adopts a rather more cautious stance: ‘It’s going to be more complicated than that,’ interpolated Lizzie. ‘This old witch sees storms ahead, my girl. When I look to the future, I see through a glass, darkly. You improve your analysis, girl, and then we’ll discuss it’ (Pt. III, Ch. 9, pp. 285–6). The train crash may be behind them at this point, but Lizzie’s commitment to Marxism has never been in doubt. It falls to her, therefore, to point out that history is, as Benjamin vividly argues, a perpetual process of change, bringing about sudden and chaotic upheavals or ‘storms’ that will continue to emerge in the twentieth century. Even women who imagine they have ‘wings’ could not escape the wind of these storms because to avoid the storm would mean being removed from the momentum of historical change and therefore altogether without power. One such immanent storm is the Russian Revolution (beginning with the anti-government riots of 1905 and culminating in the 1917 October Revolution). In Walser’s typewritten, florid newspaper copy, indicated in the text by italics, he constructs a myth-sodden version of St Petersburg, outside of which, he indicates, is ‘limitless Russia and the approaching storm’ (Pt. II, Ch. 1, p. 96). The narrative voice compounds the fairy-tale effect by describing the pre-revolutionary city as a ‘Sleeping Beauty’ waiting for the ‘bloody kiss that will awaken her, tugging at her moorings in the past, striving, yearning to burst through the present into the violence of that authentic history to which this narrative – as must now be obvious! – does not belong’ (Pt. II, Ch. 1, p. 97). The effect of this clear double reference to Benjamin’s metaphor of a storm that blows in progress is to register the idea that an historical moment, though it is always caught like the ‘angel of history’ in the flux between past events and future change, can never actually offer up a clear sight into the future. The narrative voice – and Walser’s newspaper copy within it – betrays its knowledge of twentieth-century history to come. In doing so, it is made clear not only that it is ‘inauthentic’ because of its twentieth-century knowledge, but also that ‘authentic history’ presents itself in moments of flux, violence and change and therefore resists continuous narration. Indeed, like the train that crashes, these moments can appear ‘disarticulated’ (Pt. III, Ch. 5, p. 225) or, like Walser’s life which, after the crash, comes to him in ‘concrete but discrete fragments’ (Pt. III, Ch. 6, p. 238) which he doesn’t yet understand. Finally, though Fevvers holds on to her ‘Father Time’ clock from Ma Nelson’s brothel as a form of protection when she moves out into a world of sometimes dangerous patriarchs, the clock itself appears to depict a rather angelic Father Time whose time-telling arms, always at midday or midnight, are ‘folded perpetually together as if in prayer’ (Pt. I, Ch. 2, p. 29). In doing so, the clock captures ‘the dead centre of the day or night . . . the still hour in the centre of the storm of time’. Fevvers reports that, for Ma Nelson, it was only in these moments of time suspended amidst the ‘storm’ of forward movement that an ‘hour of vision and revelation’ could be rescued (Pt. I, Ch. 2, p. 29). Fevvers herself achieves a form of ‘vision and revelation’ about herself later but only after she loses the symbol of Father Time and lives out her own still moment in Siberia. It is a place, we are told, which is as yet ‘before history’ or at least where ‘European history’ has not yet ‘extended its tentacles’ (Pt. III, Ch. 8,

24

TEXT AND CONTEXTS

p. 265). Carter’s explicit allusions to Walter Benjamin’s radical, and at times iconoclastic, essay on history, therefore, underline its influence on two key aspects of her novel. First, it underlines her commitment to recover the stories of those figures to whom previous accounts of the past may have been blind. Second, it reinforces her imaginative investment in symbols, allegorical figures, moments of spectacle, self-reflection and suspended or discontinuous narrative; in other words, the indirect ways into understanding the dynamics of historical change.

Michel Foucault and the panopticon The other European philosopher/historian whose work is explicitly cited in Nights at the Circus is Michel Foucault, who wrote prodigiously and influentially on the origins or ‘archaeology’ of European social orders since the seventeenth century. An understanding of his work on social control and surveillance is central to any reading of the ‘Siberian’ section of the book, especially Chapters 3 and 4 in which the escape of a group of women prisoners is dramatized. Although this episode may at first seem like a narrative interruption or digression, when read through the work of Foucault, its emphasis on the power of the human gaze to control and socially imprison its objects has important ramifications for Fevvers who, after all, makes her living from courting the gaze of her paying customers. Foucault is particularly focused on the way that social order is exercised and maintained through institutional practices or ‘discourses’ that exert punitive and bodily control over select and potentially disruptive individuals. Control is imposed in such a way that the exercise of power is apparently invisible and thus is without general recourse to violent or physical intervention. Such control is achieved, therefore, through what he terms a ‘political technology of the body’.52 When Carter refers to Clown Alley as ‘a place where reigned the lugubrious atmosphere of a prison or a mad-house’ where the clowns display a ‘willed and terrible suspension of being’ (Pt. III, Ch. 4, p. 116), she alludes to two of Foucault’s most influential early studies, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975) and Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1965).53 More specifically, however, she gives life to Foucault’s discussion of the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s (1748–1832) design for a prison in the shape of a panopticon in her account of the same structure used by the Countess P. for her ‘private asylum for female criminals’ (Pt. III, Ch. 3, p. 210).54 Here the prisoners have been forced to build their own panopticon, which is ‘a hollow circle of cells shaped like a doughnut, the inward-facing wall of which was composed of grids of steel and, in the middle of the roofed, central courtyard, there was a round room surrounded by windows’ (Pt. III, Ch. 3, p. 210) where sits the chief prison guard, the Countess P.

52 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), trans. Alan Sheridan, Aylesbury: Peregrine Books, 1979, p. 30. 53 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1965), trans. Richard Howard, London: Vintage, 1988. 54 For a detailed discussion of the relevance of this figure within the novel as a whole, see Joanne M. Gass, ‘Panopticism in Nights at the Circus’, Review of Contemporary Fiction, 14(3), 1994, p. 71.

TEXT AND CONTEXTS

25

What is striking about Foucault’s detailed description of the architecture of the panopticon is his consistent emphasis of its theatrical effects: By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery. They are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible. The panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately. In short it reverses the principle of the dungeon; or rather three of its functions – to enclose, to deprive of light and to hide – it preserves only the first and eliminates the other two. Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap.55 Carter picks up this theatrical rhetoric precisely when she describes ‘the hours of darkness’ in the female penitentiary during which ‘the cells were lit up like so many small theatres in which each actor sat by herself in the trap of her visibility’ (Pt. III, Ch. 3, p. 211). Thus, as Foucault observes via Bentham, power is always ‘visible and unverifiable’ because the structure ensures that inmates will always feel they may be being watched but can never be sure whether the invisible supervisor is watching them, somebody else or nobody. It is ‘this invisibility’ of the observer, combined with the ‘fictitious’ impression of total visibility amongst the observed that operates as ‘a guarantee of order’.56 Clearly the use of theatrical and fictional rhetoric opens up the relevance of this episode beyond the remote prison and its disappearing escapees to Fevvers’ own predicament. The precarious terms of her theatrical superstardom depend on the maintenance of the balance of power between herself and the audience who gaze at her night after night; she is an ‘actor’, backlit and ‘constantly visible’ in ‘so many small theatres’. All the places Fevvers inhabits (from Ma Nelson’s brothel to the circus) revolve around an economy of looking in which Fevvers struggles to hold her own. Like Vera the escapee, however, she learns that prisons are not only made of bricks and mortar because, as the narrative voice points out, ‘to look is to coerce’ (Pt. III, Ch. 4, p. 222). The critical context of Michel Foucault’s writing on the panopticon, therefore, helps both to make sense of the Siberian section of the novel and to relate its key events and figures to the rest of the novel. It reveals the extent to which Carter broadens her exploration of the power dynamics involved in looking beyond the theatre to more sinister and explicitly punitive spaces and in doing so underlines the underlying connections between them. Her explicit implication in this drama is that male power over women should be understood as a set of invisible or psychological relations as well as material facts and concrete practices. Female theatrical performance, therefore, cannot be exempt from this pervasive authority which means that performers always tread a fine line between empowerment and entrapment. Nonetheless, what is also important is that Carter does not merely reproduce Foucault’s closed and perfect regime of powerful

55 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 200. 56 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 200–2.

26

TEXT AND CONTEXTS

subjection. Instead, she depicts inmates resisting and escaping entrapment by smashing the ‘fiction’ upon which the prison depends: that each inmate exists in an individual cell separated and removed from the experience of every other inmate. In their desire for each other, Olga and Vera create a charge of ‘electricity’ that ‘leapt across the great divide between guard and guarded’ (Pt. III, Ch. 3, p. 216) and between all the other prisoners so that a newly intangible but liberating force takes over.

Laura Mulvey, female stars and ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ Another important influence on Carter’s presentation of the problems and pleasures of the female body as spectacle appears to have been the newly emerging academic discipline of film studies which began to take root in British universities from the mid-1970s onwards. Again, this is a key context for understanding the terms of the novel’s presentation of the power relations involved in constructing female bodies as a commercial spectacle. Many of the initial debates that proved to be formative within film studies were heavily influenced by broader contemporary critical trends which included feminism, Marxism and psychoanalysis – often in combination. The work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901–81) was particularly appealing because he frequently used metaphors based on the visual relations between objects, and this appeared to make his work highly adaptable to the language of film. Certainly, the most influential early essay on the construction of the female body as cinematic spectacle was Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, which makes reference both to the work of Lacan and Sigmund Freud (1856–1939).57 Although the traces of this piece are more widespread in Carter’s earlier novel, The Passion of New Eve, several of its most important premises also clearly resonate through Nights at the Circus, although some of its key observations are not relevant here since they relate to the specific circumstances and conventions of cinematic spectatorship and narrative as well as the institutional history of cinema. None the less, Mulvey’s central thesis about the implications of female exhibitionism relate directly to Fevvers: In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.58 Men, Mulvey argues, are the active ‘bearers’ of the look, while women are the passive objects of it. Carter unmistakably echoes Mulvey’s thesis with Fevvers’ claim: ‘I was nought but the painted, gilded sign of love and, you might say, that so it was I served my apprenticeship in being looked at – at being the object of

57 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16(3), 1975, pp. 6–18. 58 Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, p. 11.

TEXT AND CONTEXTS

27

the eye of the beholder’ (Pt. I, Ch. 2, p. 23). The emphasis in both statements is on the codification of female display and the implication that follows, which is that female exhibitionism is a set of socially acquired gestures, signs and codes which are learnt through ‘apprenticeship’; they adorn the female but do not constitute her and are therefore not essential to her. For Fevvers, this permits an escape route in her early years because in Ma Nelson’s brothel she can occupy the ‘sign’ of love by enacting various sexually symbolic women without ever having to give herself over to the act of sex itself. Yet Carter has also engaged with Fevvers’ distinctiveness as a literary character; unlike Mulvey’s film stars, she is a fictional presence through literary language, not images, therefore she is not perpetually coded visually and has a more complex relationship to the male gaze than her statement above suggests. For example, the first chapter of the novel presents an elaborate dynamic of multiple and mutual looks between Fevvers and Walser involving the challenging and flirtatious flashing of her ‘indecorous eyes’ at Walser, his failed attempt to frame and define her, her ‘impersonal gratification’ as she looks at herself in the mirror and her wink at Walser through the medium of the mirror (Pt. I, Ch. 1, pp. 7–9). There are many other accounts of such complex and unstable power relations relayed through the literary descriptions of the look in the novel as a whole. It becomes clear, therefore, that Carter’s project is to present the varieties of destructive or controlling male ‘phantasy’ that Mulvey claims may be projected on to the (passive) female object caught by and constructed for the (active) gaze of the male subject. The novel both exposes the power mechanisms behind the look while also imagining a fictional female figure capable of evading and defying these.

Mikhail Bakhtin: the carnivalesque and the grotesque Many critical treatments of Nights at the Circus refer to its carnivalesque qualities. In using this term, they are explicitly invoking the work of the Russian structuralist critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), who employed the term in a study of the Russian novelist Feodor Dostoevsky to define the manner in which he believed popular carnival festivals ‘become textualized’ in distinctive narrative forms. Thus, he argues, to some extent, literature is ‘carnivalized’ when it takes on the characteristics of these festivals in narrative form.59 Bakhtin’s thesis is that carnival ‘itself . . . is not, of course a literary phenomenon’ – on the contrary it is ‘a pageant without footlights and without a division into performers and spectators’ which is communal, live, impulsive, beyond contemplation and, as such, is inimical to the novel.60 What novels can do, however, is present what he terms ‘a carnival sense of the world’, and Bakhtin provides a clear list of four interconnected textual features or attributes which may contribute to this ‘sense’. First is the suspension of distance between individuals, leading to a ‘free and familiar contact among people’, especially between people who might normally be separated by social hierarchies and class divisions. Second is the emergence of ‘a new 59 Sue Vice, Introducing Bakhtin, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997, p. 149. See Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929), trans. Caryl Emerson, Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2003, p. 122. 60 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, p. 122.

28

TEXT AND CONTEXTS

mode of interrelationship between individuals’ through physical and ‘concretely sensual’ and ‘eccentric’ forms that are ‘half-real and half-play-acted’. Third, the carnival results in ‘carnivalistic mésalliances’: not only people, but also ‘values, thoughts, phenomena, and things’ – the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’ the ‘wise’ and the ‘stupid’ which would otherwise be ‘self-enclosed, disunified, distanced from one another’ – are freely brought together. Fourth, the carnival alliances are underpinned by an impulse of ‘profanation’ that results in a ‘whole system’ of ‘carnivalistic debasings, and bringings down to earth, carnivalistic obscenities linked with the reproductive power of the earth and the body’ and ‘carnivalistic parodies on sacred texts’.61 Carnivalization also takes shape through a series of highly physical ‘carnivalistic acts’ or rituals that dramatize the dual energies of destruction and renewal within the carnivalesque. Characteristically, the ‘primary’ act of the ‘mock crowning and subsequent de-crowning of the carnival king’ gives way to a palpable sense of the ‘pathos of shifts and changes, of death and renewal’. Given that the crowning always inevitably ‘contains the idea of the immanent decrowning’, this is a ‘dualistic and ambivalent ritual’ in which every act is contained in an ongoing cycle in which it simultaneously produces or contains its reverse or opposite. At the heart of carnival is the idea of shifting and the ‘process of replaceability’; it matters not, therefore, what the item to be replaced might be, only that it is part of cycle in which everything will shift.62 Finally, parody is the form of laughter that is ‘organically inherent’ to the carnivalesque because it is the literary manifestation of a ‘decrowning double’ through which a mock copy is made that renews an object through its ‘laughing aspect’ without involving ‘naked rejection of the parodied object’.63 Bakhtin’s carnivalesque might initially sound like a literary precursor of postmodernism (see Text and contexts, pp. 31–4), with its stress on playfulness and relativity. In carnival, Bakhtin argues: ‘What is suspended first of all is hierarchical structure and all the forms of terror, reverence, piety, and etiquette connected with it.’ He goes on to describe it as ‘the place for working out, in a concretely sensuous, half-real and half-play-acted form, a new mode of inter-relationship between individuals’ and as something that ‘brings together, unifies, weds, and combines the sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low, the great with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid’. The carnival, however, also has a physical, even visceral quality which lends it a potentially aggressive edge and sanctions its participants to indulge in obscene or profane behaviour: ‘carnivalistic blasphemies . . . debasings, bringings down to earth, carnivalistic obscenities’.64 In this sense, its temporary but violent suspensions and subversions need to be distinguished from postmodernism’s ongoing playfulness. Finally, Bakhtin highlights the ‘primary carnivalistic act’, which is ‘the mock crowning and de-crowning of the carnival king’ and argues that what is important about it is the fact that the ‘crowning already contains the idea of immanent de-crowning; it is ambivalent

61 62 63 64

Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, pp. 122–3. Bahktin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, p. 125. Bahktin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, p. 127. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, p. 123.

TEXT AND CONTEXTS

29

from the start’.65 Carnival may be ‘all-annihilating’, but it is also ‘all-renewing’. There is no such thing in the carnivalesque as ‘absolute negation and destruction’; things which are destroyed or killed are never replaced by their opposite, only by a renewed version of them. The carnivalesque, therefore, emphasizes both dualism and ambivalence with each element always in a circular or shifting dynamic with an opposite, but without final resolution or replacement of one by the other. The episode in the novel which is most carnivalesque in this sense is the clown’s act as it is described in ‘Clown Alley’ (Pt. II, Ch. 4). Carter, however, claims that she did not read Bakhtin’s thesis until after the publication of Nights at the Circus, so the detailed knowledge of carnival rituals she demonstrates in Chapter 4 is likely to be the result of her own extensive interest in and knowledge of the European medieval literature, which is also one of Bakhtin’s central references.66 In this chapter, Buffo is caught up in a perpetual circle of mock life and death. His circus funeral provides the spectators with a violent and elaborate death ritual, a ‘turn called “the Clown’s Funeral” ’ (Pt. II, Ch. 4, p. 117). Just as this is but a ‘turn’ amongst other circus acts, however, so his ‘[t]umultuous resurrection’ sees him reborn into a mock life where he exists only through a series of empty masks and disguises. Carter goes on to make the political limitations of the clowns’ activities very clear when she stresses the emptiness and impotence of the clowns – even when they are at their most violent. Their carnivalistic circus act may give them licence to commit the most ‘ferocious piracies’ and even to ‘detonate[d] the entire city’, but this is allowed precisely because ‘nothing would really change’ and the ‘exploded buildings’ will land back on ‘earth again in exactly the same places where they had stood before’ (Pt. II, Ch. 7, p. 151). The carnivalesque in Nights at the Circus, therefore, is only ever a temporary shaking up and release of pressure: it leaves nothing behind it changed in any way. Bakhtin went on to provide an account of a second and related literary genre, ‘grotesque realism’, partly derived too from his study of the medieval literary period. It is also a genre that has a very specific history and set of meanings which resonate strongly throughout Nights at the Circus with its heavy emphasis on bodily functions, performances and rituals.67 Grotesque realism is an exuberant, ‘festive and utopian’ form that has at its core a positive celebration of the materiality of the body – not the individual body, ‘but in the people, a people who are continually growing and renewed’.68 Because the body at the heart of this genre is a social and representative one, it ‘becomes grandiose, exaggerated and immeasurable’. The ‘essential principal’ of grotesque realism, is the ‘degradation . . . of all that is high, spiritual, abstract’ down to ‘the material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble unity’ and to ‘turn their subject into flesh’. There is laughter in the genre but it is ‘laughter that degrades and materializes’. A key figure in this characteristically parodic activity of degradation is the medieval clown whose responsibility is the ‘transfer of every high ceremonial gesture or ritual to the material sphere’.69 65 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, pp. 124–5. 66 Sage, ‘Angela Carter interviewed by Lorna Sage’, p. 188. 67 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (1965), trans. Hélène Iswolsky, Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1984. 68 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 19. 69 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, pp. 19–20.

30

TEXT AND CONTEXTS

Like the carnivalesque, there is ambivalence at the heart of the grotesque that is mapped with reference to the birth and renewal through death of the human body: Degradation here means coming down to earth, the contact with earth as an element that swallows up and gives birth at the same time. To degrade is to bury, to sow, and to kill simultaneously, in order to bring forth something more and better. To degrade also means to concern oneself with the lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and the reproductive organs; it therefore relates to acts of defecation, and copulation, conception, pregnancy and birth. Degradation digs a bodily grave for a new birth; it has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one.70 Thus, grotesque realism often has a strikingly ‘carnival aspect’.71 As Sue Vice points out, however, Bakhtin’s account of the genre harbours a familiar gender alignment: ‘Earth and the reproductive body are associated with the feminine; heaven and the rational body with the masculine. Bakhtin concludes, “Grotesque realism knows no other lower level; it is the fruitful earth and the womb. It is always conceiving.” ’72 What is interesting about Nights at the Circus, therefore, is that Bakhtin’s gendering of grotesque realism is upended. On the one hand, Fevvers’ body certainly has grotesque aspects to it; Carter continually emphasizes her ‘earthiness’ (‘Such a lump it seems!’, Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 16) through reference to her immense frame and weight, her odorous body dressed in ‘rancid silk’ (Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 19), her messy, gargantuan appetite, ‘lips smeared with grease’ (Pt. I, Ch. 3, p. 53) and ‘feminine squalor’ (Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 9). Yet, on the other hand, it is not fertility and conception that are twinned with this earthy, downward-weighted body – quite the opposite. Fevvers’ publicity (dubiously, we later discover) declares her to be the only ‘fully feathered intacta in the history of the world’ (Pt. III, Envoi, p. 294). She may have spent her early years in a brothel where ‘a sub-text of fertility underwrote the glittering sterility of the pleasure of the flesh available’, but in this place she exists ‘only as an object in men’s eyes’ (Pt. I, Ch. 2, p. 39). Indeed, Fevvers is disassociated with conception to such an extent that even her own conception is doubly obscure with, she claims, her ‘father and my mother, both utterly unknown’ and having been, of course, ‘hatched’ (Pt. I, Ch. 2, p. 21). Thus, Fevvers’ weightiness connects her to the Earth, but the fecundity that would make this ‘regenerative’ in Bakhtin’s terms is symbolic rather than actual. With Jack Walser as her partner and ‘amanuensis’, she plans to give birth retrospectively to ‘the histories of those woman [sic] who would otherwise go down nameless and forgotten’ (Pt. III, Ch. 10, p. 285). Fevvers’ peculiar combination of weight, flight and symbolism (the conception of ideas and history) mean that she is, all the time, linked both to Earth and regeneration and to the upward, heavenward movement that Bakhtin situates with males and masculinity. 70 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 21. 71 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 23. 72 Vice, Introducing Bakhtin, p. 156.

TEXT AND CONTEXTS

31

Postmodernism: intertextuality, bricolage and metafiction Angela Carter is often referred to as a postmodernist writer, yet, as the further discussions of postmodernism in this book indicate (see Critical history, pp. 58–60), Nights at the Circus is by no means a straightforward fit into the category of the postmodern novel. It is worth exploring here, therefore, both the nature and extent of the novel’s postmodern characteristics while also signalling its limits in this respect. Postmodernism has been a notoriously difficult term to pin down, and many competing claims about its definition exist. Postmodernity was identified by a several philosophers, social scientists and critical theorists during the mid-1980s as a phase in the development of late (global) capitalism. It was characterized by the acceleration of electronic technologies and media and the commodification of all aspects of human life and exchange (including art practices of various sorts) into readily consumable images and products. In postmodernity, commodification, simulation and performance reach into all aspects of human existence and exchange, leaving no space for the persistence of rationality, belief or truth. Perhaps most importantly, postmodernity, as Jean-François Lyotard (1924–98) argued, involved the erosion of what he labelled the ‘grand narratives’ or ‘metanarratives’ of Western civilization; these he regarded as ideologically or institutionally based credos and knowledge systems that functioned to lend credibility to long-standing paradigms within science, religion and philosophy. Since these narratives worked to explain existence, define rationality and promise progress, their sudden vulnerability meant that the humanist concept of the individual human subject as a coherent, rational, knowable self was also now regarded as highly questionable. Thus, postmodernism was identified as the manifestation of postmodernity’s profound social and philosophical shifts in the field of numerous art practices, including architecture, film, painting, fashion and photography, as well as literature. In terms of literary practices postmodernism was characterized by narrative discontinuity and fragmentation; highly subjective, self-reflexive and playful styles of narration; a rejection of resolutions, truths and endings; an emphasis on surface, image and commodification rather than depth, privacy or singularity; a lack of seriousness expressed through modes of pastiche, parody and irony; the blurring of critical boundaries between high and low art, historical and present time, different genres, and also between individual texts because postmodernist literature often plays host to multiple intertextual references to literary and other – for example, visual – media. In the following paragraphs, I will fill out some of the relevant terms within discussions of postmodern literature that can be related to Nights at the Circus before spelling out the ways in which the novel displays some very ‘unpostmodern’ turns. As Andrzej Gasiorek notes, one of the ways in which Carter’s fiction as a whole operates is to deconstruct culture and ‘cultural codes’ through her ‘depiction of characters as intertextual ciphers, who are quite literally put together out of bits and pieces of other writing’.73 Gasiorek’s claim is a useful starting point for the way it brings together two related ideas about Carter’s writing – intertextuality

73 Andrzej Gasiorek, Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After, London: Edward Arnold, 1995, p. 125.

32

TEXT AND CONTEXTS

and bricolage (to ‘put together out of bits and pieces’) – that require some explanation and clarification here. The concept of intertextuality is one that emerged from semiotics (the study of linguistic and other signs) through the poststructuralist theorist, Julia Kristeva (1941–).74 She conceived of texts existing along two overlapping axes: a horizontal axis which connects an author and reader and a vertical axis connecting the text to other texts. Shared codes connect the communications that take place along these distinct axes since all acts of communication take place in the context of a vast network of pre-existing codes. In this way, all texts can be understood as intertextual because all are, to some extent, a ‘transformation’ of existing language terms, references, myths and so on. Thus, in the context of literary analysis, intertextuality does not just refer to the way a reader may identify the influence of one writer on another, or a writer’s explicit reference to the work of another through quotation, pastiche and so on, but also to a broader sense that writers and their readers are themselves ‘written’ by the networks of culture, language, history and representation that have produced them. By implication, therefore, reading and interpretation is itself an intertextual process in that, as this book will demonstrate, the reading of a novel such as Nights at the Circus always and increasingly falls under the shadow of previous ways of understanding it as well as new contexts of interpretation. Thus, no text can ever be regarded as truly ‘original’ because to some extent all are a product of the literary (and other) cultures that have gone before. Also, when the energy of the text is understood to lie in the dynamic interchange between a text and its context, the boundaries of what lies ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ the text become difficult to draw. In this sense, therefore, all literature is intertextual, but postmodern literature is somewhat distinctive in that it demonstrates a selfconsciousness about its intertextual debts. It does this by signposting them through dramatic or complex types of textual reference such as pastiche or bricolage and by reflecting overtly on the role of both the writer and the reader of fiction through explicit forms of self-reference or direct address. Nights at the Circus, therefore, is intertextual not just because it contains so many references to other literary and visual intertexts but also because, with its deliberate meshing of the contemporary and historical, fact and fiction, it actively promotes critical detachment and reflection on the shifting and perpetually renewable processes through which texts produce meaning, rather than emotional engagement. Intertextuality, therefore, is a term that refers both to an understanding that literature – and other arts – creates spaces where multiple and contested meanings are generated and to the textual strategies within postmodernism that allude to this process. Whereas the concept of intertextuality highlights the co-dependency and potential reversibility of critical and fictional texts – old and new, writing and interpretation – bricolage highlights the energy and agency of assembly (the bricoleur) that brings diverse cultural materials together with specific and concrete results. The terms bricolage and bricoleur (the agent of bricolage) come from the French and refer to the process of doing odd jobs and of making or fixing objects

74 Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, New York: Columbia University Press, 1980, p. 69.

TEXT AND CONTEXTS

33

from the bits and pieces that have been left over from other jobs. Their postmodern emphasis is derived from their use by the French anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–) who conceives of the work of myth within culture as a form of bricolage that turns social discourse into ideology.75 The bricoleur, therefore, works with existing (and therefore limited) materials or fragments and communicates through these – though of course ‘materials’ in this context may also be taken to refer to existing linguistic signs and signifiers. It is this process of bricolage through its dynamics of contrast, addition, subtraction and transposition that creates new objects from the old. As Jeannette Baxter points out, it is the concept of bricolage, with its emphasis on the concrete and the material and its potentially explosive and transformative results, therefore, which greatly appealed to Carter as a writer (see Critical readings, pp. 100 and 107). Jago Morrison refers to Carter’s construction of history in the novel as being ‘no longer [in] the domain of facts’ but, instead, ‘a self-contradictory, problematic, conglomerated inheritance of meanings’. In doing so he draws our attention to the troublesome but generative potential of a bricolage or ‘inheritance of meanings’ that might produce new ways of thinking about historical ideas, texts and figures, and Baxter explores this potential extensively within her essay.76 Intertextuality and bricolage are both important features of metafiction, a genre of writing which is associated with postmodernism, coming into focus from the 1970s onwards. The term ‘metafiction’, was probably used first by the American writer and critic William Gass in 1970, and its emergence during this period reflects a growing Western self-consciousness from the 1960s onwards about the forms and structures (visual, literary, musical) that mediate our experience of the world. In metafiction, this anxiety about mediation is expressed in a number of ways, though principally it takes the form of a self-conscious presentation of the novel, not (as in realism) as a represented world which seems to us to be ‘true’, but rather as a piece of writing. Metafiction employs devices that constantly remind us that what we are reading is fictional; it does not allow us to enter a believable or familiar world in which we would lose sight of the novel’s textuality. Among the devices that create this effect of textual self-consciousness are techniques of characterization, references to the act of writing, the use of different language registers, exaggerated style and distinctions explicitly drawn between fact and fiction. Thus, metafiction: self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. In providing a critique of their own methods of construction, such writings not only examine the fundamental structures of narrative fiction, they also explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary text’.77

75 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (1962), London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974, and Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. 76 Jago Morrison, Contemporary Fiction, London: Routledge, 2003, p. 155. 77 Waugh, ‘What Is Metafiction and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things About It?’, in Mark Currie (ed.), Metafiction, London: Longman, 1985, p. 40.

34

TEXT AND CONTEXTS

By continually reflecting on its own assumptions and construction, metafiction works to collapse the separation between writer and reader and between the fictional work and the ‘reality’ of political, cultural and historical discourse to which it belongs. As Robert Scholes observes, metafiction is ‘a border-line territory between fiction and criticism’.78 Since metafiction constitutes an attitude to fiction rather than an identifiable set of concerns or themes, it is not so much a genre of fiction but a ‘tendency within the novel’.79 Although, as Patricia Waugh points out, this tendency began as an anxiety in the 1960s and 1970s about fiction’s inability to escape itself, this dominating paranoia began to give way in the 1980s ‘to celebration’ and ‘to the discovery of new forms of the fantastic, fabulatory extravaganzas, magic realism’. Fiction’s ‘moment of crisis’, she argues, ‘can also be seen as a moment of recognition’.80 It is important to recognize, therefore, that Nights at the Circus certainly belongs to the latter phase of metafictional writing. The novel’s ‘recognition’ of its own status as fiction becomes a rich source for wit, while the proximity of critical and fictional discourse in the novel (for example, the reference to Foucault’s account of the panopticon, described above, Text and contexts, pp. 24–5) appears to extend rather than limit its fictional and critical scope. Finally, it is also important to remember that, although Nights at the Circus clearly has many postmodern tendencies, it is by no means straightforwardly postmodern in all respects. As should be obvious from the account of Carter’s life and political engagements, with feminism in particular, her firm political beliefs and commitment to the idea of social change cannot easily be reconciled with postmodernism. Her political concern to draw previously silenced or marginal voices into the foreground of representation appears to stand in tension with the kind of political and moral relativity and abandonment of progress that otherwise typifies postmodern literature. Far from rejecting the concepts of commitment and change, however, critics such as Aidan Day (see Critical history, pp. 58–9) argues that Nights at the Circus nurtures elements of the fantastic only to direct them from an identifiable and in some ways quite traditional feminist position – both thematically and formally.81 Carter, therefore, deploys identifiably postmodern strategies, especially in her opening up of our understanding of what history is and her introduction of previously missing events, ideas or figures from the past that have not yet been defined as history or historical. Yet she is not typically or comprehensively postmodernist in Nights at the Circus, since her literary strategies, as Day suggests, are rooted in a set of discernible and politically ‘material’ bases.

Magical realism While some critics argue that magical realism (or magic realism) is a key element of postmodernist literature, others regard magical realism as a distinct literary

78 79 80 81

Robert Scholes, ‘Metafiction’, in Currie (ed.), Metafiction, p. 21. Waugh, ‘What is Metafiction’, p. 46. Waugh, ‘What is Metafiction’, p. 46. See Aidan Day, Angela Carter: The Rational Glass, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998, pp. 168–9.

TEXT AND CONTEXTS

35

and artistic genre with its own distinct cultural history and aesthetic definition. The term ‘magical realism’ denotes a combination of the fantastic and the realistic, specifically informed by a narrative tone of banal response to the fantastic elements, treating them as equally real to those that are apparently more realistic. Not only has Carter’s work frequently been read in terms of magical realism, but John Haffenden goes so far as to suggest that ‘[t]he term “magical realist” might well have been invented to describe Angela Carter’.82 It does, however, have a more long-standing history which it is important to trace in order to situate the place of Nights at the Circus within it. It is generally agreed that it was the German art critic Franz Roh (1890–1965) who made claim to the term ‘magic realism’ in his 1925 thesis characterizing a new trend in German painting of the Weimar Republic. He found these paintings to contain a peculiar mixture of ‘attention to accurate detail, a smooth photographlike clarity of picture and the representation of the mystical, non-material aspects of reality’.83 When describing narrative manifestations of this genre, the term ‘magical realism’ is commonly used. In the context of the literary genre of magical realism, therefore, Roh’s characterization of painterly magic realism is translated through works that deal with figures and events which are often familiar and recognizable from daily or historical reality. Crucially, however, there is a double action at work in magical realism: ordinary events are treated as if they were fantastic (in a revision of what is ‘normal’ or ‘real’) and extraordinary events are treated as if they are entirely ‘ordinary’. In its challenge to fixed assumptions about ‘real reality’ (Pt. III, Ch. 8, p. 253), Nights at the Circus engages with the question of ‘what is real and what is not’ (Pt. III, Ch. 7, p. 244). One of the most important and influential novels in discussion of magical realism is One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by the Colombian writer, Gabriel García Márquez. Indeed, several Latin American novelists are associated with the critical development of the genre including Márquez’s precursor, the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) as well as Chilean writer, Isabel Allende (1942–), Alejo Carpentier (1904–80) from Cuba and Mario Vargas Llosa (1936–), from Colombia. Bowers distinguishes this work from European appropriations of the genre wherein, she argues: ‘Magic realism remains a narrative mode that is chosen for the purposes of literary experimentation and does not have its source in the writer’s mythological and cultural context.’84 Certainly, this is debatable in Carter’s case since the novel is indeed packed with references to European myths and all aspects of literary, visual and popular culture, though these could not be described as being ethnically distinct or even exclusively British. Bowers, however, does go on to make the important point that ‘in postcolonial and cross-cultural contexts, and particularly those in the English-speaking world’, writers such as Salman Rushdie and Ben Okri have ‘adopted magical realism’ precisely to ‘express their own non-Western mythological and cultural traditions’.85

82 Haffenden, Novelists in Interview, p. 76. See also, Flora Alexander, Contemporary Women Novelists, London: Edward Arnold, 1989, p. 1 and Sage ‘Angela Carter interviewed by Lorna Sage’, p. 191. 83 See Maggie Ann Bowers, Magic(al) Realism, London: Routledge, 2004, pp. 9–14. 84 Bowers, Magic(al) Realism, p. 65. 85 Bowers, Magic(al) Realism, p. 65.

36

TEXT AND CONTEXTS

Carter’s own particular debt to Latin American fiction of the twentieth century, however, is well known. As Johnson argues (see Critical readings, pp. 70–81), Carter’s personal as well as literary affinity with this genre of the fantastic is related to her feminism. Rosemary Jackson explicitly identifies the effect of Carter’s use of magical realism, arguing that she ‘employed the fantastic to subvert patriarchal society’.86 Even in the 1980s there were critics who dismissed fantastic or magical realist novels as self-indulgent and decadent in their extravagance, but in Carter’s case, this ignored her political and intellectual drive.87 Indeed, towards the end of the novel, she reflects on the subject jokily. When Fevvers wonders how Lizzie, ‘from a family of anarchist bomb-makers’, can ‘reconcile her politics with her hanky-panky’ (Pt. III, Ch. 5, p. 225), Carter puts in place a metafictional jest about her own brand of magical realism, a combination of incredulous, time-stretching narrative ‘hanky-panky’ and political engagement. Use of magical realism, then, enables Carter to make observations about society, gender and the power of myth, and she is particularly sceptical about any construct that has been naturalized and accepted without question. A good example of the way in which Carter uses magical realism to undermine the ideologically naturalized is her manipulation of time throughout the novel. In the third chapter, the young, male journalist Walser, having been taken back to Lizzie and Fevvers’ house in Battersea, is forced to urinate the ‘brown arc of the excess of her champagne’ in the same room as them, while ‘earthiness reasserted itself all around him’. His privacy is only precariously secured by a screen, though a hand appears around the side of it to empty the cold contents of a teapot into the ‘dirty bathwater’ in front of him, ‘on the scummed, grey surface of which the last deposit of tealeaves already floated’ (Pt. I, Ch. 3, p. 52). The narrative scenesetting in this chapter is full of such ‘earthy’ attention to vivid, everyday, physical and almost vulgar realist detail. Yet Walser is then immediately thrown further off his guard when Big Ben strikes midnight for a second time that evening, a time that is echoed indoors by Fevvers’ prized but broken clock (discussed above, see Text and context, p. 9) from Ma Nelson’s brothel: ‘Inside and outside matched exactly, but both were badly wrong. H’m’ (Pt. I, Ch. 3, p. 53). Such magical but disorientating manipulation of time is typical of Carter’s stretching and convergence of time elsewhere in the novel – St. Petersburg is already framed as a city that ‘does not exist anymore’ (Pt. II, Ch. 1, p. 96). Yet it also reinforces the idea that time is a relative concept which can be used and refigured, both in the service of patriarchy and to undermine it; Walser, whose confidence partly rests on his certainty in obtaining proof and establishing objective reality is certainly unnerved. It reminds us again that we are reading a story and that one of the facilities of fiction is to stretch, compress and converge time. Time plays a further trick on all of them much later in the novel when Walser is discovered by Fevvers and Lizzie living with the Shaman, wearing a beard whose length indicates that, during his absence from them, much more time has passed for him than for them. When Lizzie observes from this that ‘Father Time has many children’ (Pt. III, Ch. 9, p. 272), she underlines the fact that even time, which seems so tied up with 86 Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, London: Routledge, 1981, p. 104. 87 See, for example, Alan Massie, The Novel Today: A Critical Guide to the British Novel 1970–1989, London and New York: Longman, 1990, p. 55.

TEXT AND CONTEXTS

37

natural laws, is not universally understood in the same way and is therefore seen as being subject to ideological variations of conception and use.

Masquerade and the performative As Sarah Sceats points out (see Critical readings, pp. 84–94), Nights at the Circus is remarkable for the way in which it anticipates Judith Butler’s radical intervention into philosophical debate about the relationship between the categories of sex and gender. More specifically, this is because Butler argues that gender identities are performative; that is, they are performed on and through the surfaces of the body and are therefore neither intrinsic nor interior to it.88 One of her central claims is that: Acts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface of the body, through the play of signifying absences that suggest, but never reveal, the organizing principle of identity as a cause. Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and discursive means.89 In other words, the idea of a gendered body is exactly that, an idea, and one that exists only through the acts and performances that give it meaning. The idea that an ‘interior essence’ or ‘core’ of gender might exist is, Butler argues, ‘an illusion discursively maintained for the purposes of the regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality’.90 She argues that once gender is understood as a ‘psychological “core” ’, then its fabricated and political nature is buried away from analysis and, by implication, from change. By the same token, an understanding of gender as performative and gestural, provisional and political, makes gender identities available for revision and subversion. One of the important reference points of Butler’s argument is the much-cited article ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’ by Joan Rivière, a French psychoanalyst writing in the 1920s.91 Rivière’s work re-entered critical debate in the mid-1970s when it was picked up in a number of key articles, several of them in the field of film studies, and was then reprinted in 1986.92 Her analysis struck a chord with contemporary thinking on gender theory for a number of reasons. Rivière had observed that the professions, previously dominated by men and therefore seen as masculine spheres, were beginning to admit women. She noted that these women ‘seem to fulfill every criterion of complete feminine development’ in that ‘they are

88 89 90 91

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London: Routledge, 1990. Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 136. Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 136. Joan Rivière, ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’ (1929), reprinted in Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Caplan (eds), Formations of Fantasy, London: Methuen, 1986, pp. 35–44. 92 See, for example, Claire Johnston, ‘Femininity and the Masquerade: Anne of the Indies’, in Claire Johnston and Paul Willemen (eds), ‘Anne of the Indies’: Jacques Tourneur, London: BFI, 1975, pp. 36–44. Mary Ann Doane, ‘Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator’, Screen, 23(3/4), pp. 74–87; John Fletcher, ‘Versions of Masquerade’, Screen, 29(3), 1988, pp. 43–71.

38

TEXT AND CONTEXTS

excellent wives and mothers, capable housewives’ and ‘have no lack of feminine interests’.93 One such woman had consulted Rivière after feeling a disproportionate amount of anxiety both before and after public performances such as speechgiving; she recognized that she continually sought reassurance and compliments from older men or ‘father figures’ from whom she would seek both praise and sexual attention after her speaking performances. Rivière calculated that this ‘flirting and coquetting’ was an attempt to ‘ward off the anxiety which would ensue on account of the reprisal she anticipated from the father-figures after her intellectual performance’.94 In other words, the woman felt she had to court approval through flirtatious performance in order to pre-empt the anger she feared might ensue for taking her place in what she perceived to be a male domain of power. Another woman, known to Rivière personally, was observed to have a ‘compulsion to hide all her technical knowledge’ and ‘great ability’ from workmen, indeed to ‘show deference’ in what she saw as ‘typically masculine matters’ and made ‘her suggestions in an innocent and artless manner, as if they were “lucky guesses” ’.95 Not only did these observations seem newly pertinent in the 1980s when women on both sides of the Atlantic were negotiating the difficult relationship between the new positions of influence open to them (such as, for example, prime minister) and their gender and sexual identities as women, but Rivière’s terms were also intriguingly suggestive. ‘Womanliness’, she argued, was something that ‘could be assumed and worn as a mask’, in a way that both covered up the assumed masculinity (as it was perceived) and diverted attention from it, ‘much as a thief will turn out his pockets and ask to be searched to prove that he has not the stolen goods’.96 The radical implication of this, Rivière argues, is that there is ‘no difference’ between ‘genuine womanliness’ and masquerades of it; masquerade is simply the strategic use of womanliness for specific social and psychological purposes.97 Thus, the idea that ‘the mask of femininity’ could be employed strategically by women in their daily encounters both with men and other women was appealing to critical theorists such as Butler for the way that it uncoupled a straightforward link between biological categories of gender and sexual identities and social behaviour. Although Butler goes on to question many of the assumptions and claims within Rivière’s thesis, as should be clear from this brief summary Rivière’s work has had a fundamental influence on more contemporary gender theory with its articulation of femininity as a set of complex social and private practices and performances rather than an intrinsic identity. Clearly, Carter’s novel, with its perpetually theatrical heroine, plays out a full range of feminine masquerades and, as Sceats points out (see Critical readings, pp. 87–94), it also explores the dangers and power-brokering involved when displays of femininity become the currency within commercial enterprise, exploiting dangerous sexual obsessions with the female body itself.

93 94 95 96 97

Rivière, ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’, p. 36. Rivière, ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’, pp. 36–7. Rivière, ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’, p. 39. Rivière, ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’, p. 38. Rivière, ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’, p. 38.

TEXT AND CONTEXTS

39

Finally, a key element of Butler’s argument that relates to Nights at the Circus involves her revision of the relationship between the terms ‘parody’ and ‘pastiche’. Fredric Jameson, in his famous essay on postmodernism, claims that pastiche is a form of ‘neutral’ imitation which is without any sense that there is an original and ‘normal’ figure which is being mocked in the imitation. It is, therefore, without ‘ulterior motive’ or ‘satirical impulse’ and is, thus, ‘without laughter’.98 Butler, on the other hand, argues that: The loss of the sense of ‘the normal’ . . . can be its own occasion for laughter, especially when ‘the normal,’ ‘the original’ is revealed to be a copy, and inevitably a failed one, an ideal that no one can embody. In this sense laughter emerges in the realization that all along the original was derived.99 In other words, pastiche may still provoke laughter, but it is laughter derived from relief at the inevitable emptiness or failure of the very idea of the ‘original’ rather than the mockery of it. Thus, it must be distinguished from Bakhtin’s concept of parody as it is described above (see Text and contexts, pp. 28–9) which derives its laughter from two elements (the original and its ‘mock copy’ or laughing aspect’) in a dynamic with each other. Of course, this definition of pastiche, as opposed to parody, brings to mind the novel’s final paragraphs wherein Fevvers’ laughter is indeed the product of her delight in the fact that she has fooled Walser into believing she was an original – ‘the “only fully feathered intacta in the history of the world” ’ (Pt. III, Envoi, p. 294). The very fact that the novel refuses to clarify which of these categories has been faked – the wings or the virginity – further muddies the clarity, and indeed possibility, of the original.

98 Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, in Hal Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983, p. 114. 99 Butler, Gender Trouble, pp. 138–9.

2 Critical history

Reviews In a rather peevish review of a number of books on Angela Carter published between 1997–8, Carol McGuirk despairs at the ‘cluelessness’ she finds in the body of criticism on Carter with which she has been confronted, none of which has furnished her with satisfactory answers to her questions: Is she best approached through her ideas or her images – i.e., her by turns gothic and festive representations of the body? Is she a philosopher or a gadfly? Is she tragic or comic, postmodern or surreal or realistic? Are we being invited to a lustily transgressive carnival or a grim and decadent masquerade? Did Carter write fantasy, historical fiction, science fiction, feminist polemic, or anti-feminist polemic? The answer is Yes.1 With the exception of the question about science fiction, all of these questions would be relevant to ask of Nights at the Circus and most are represented in various ways within the summary and assessment of critical approaches to the novel covered in the following pages. Yet McGuirk’s review also throws up an important contradiction. On the one hand she expresses a natural frustration about a critical ‘cluelessness’ that produces such an array of apparently contradictory questions but fails to spell out how they might work to provide a coherent overall understanding of the novel. On the other, she is horrified by a criticism of Carter’s work that simply boiled down her complex weave of ideas and allusions into ‘an orthodox litany of themes suitable for the classroom’.2 Elaine Jordan makes sense of this more explicitly when she warns against ‘flattening out’ Carter’s work with the ‘annotating hand of a schoolmistress’ into a set of ordered meanings and interpretations because, she claims: The meaning is not fixed, and that unfixedness, open to interpretation, is

1 2

Carol McGuirk, ‘Angela’s Ashes’, Science Fiction Studies, 26(3), 1999, online (Accessed 30 November 2005). McGuirk, ‘Angela’s Ashes’.

44

C R I T I C A L H I S TO RY as political as having a point to enforce. The process of reading is meant to act on and in the reader, whoever they are, however situated, without enforcement: ‘How do you like these possibilities? What do you want? What will you do?3

To a large extent, this caution could be related to the work of any writer. But Jordan’s point is that Nights at the Circus self-consciously employs playful and ambiguous ‘ironic, parodic, satiric mode[s]’. The pleasure and politics of a such novel, therefore, are specifically derived from the fact that it appeals to (and depends on) a range of active and questioning readers whose varied readings and rewritings of the novel will be based on their ‘noticing differently’. The function of the following pages, therefore, is to find a balance between providing readers of the novel with an ‘overview’ of this critical work but without ‘flattening out’ the sense of openness, ambiguity and critical possibility which are so central to both the pleasure and politics of the novel itself. When compared to Carter’s previous work, Nights at the Circus was relatively well and widely reviewed. As Joseph Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton point out, this was related to Carter’s switch in publishers (following her editor, Carmen Callil) from Virago to Chatto & Windus, who were able to distribute and publicize her novel very successfully. Reviews at the time, however, were divided between those that applauded the novel’s richness and engaged with its narrative challenges and others that felt it suffered from an over-extended ambition in both these respects.4 John Mellors felt his attention had been ‘hijacked’ and his ‘disbelief was only spasmodically suspended’, whereas Gillian Greenwood proclaims the novel ‘a glorious enchantment’ within which it is ‘impossible not to suspend disbelief’ because of the ‘earthy, rich and powerful language’ that somehow allows you to ‘hear’ and ‘smell’ the characters.5 Harriett Gilbert compares reading the novel to the champagne-drinking of Chapter 1, which sees Walser’s brain ‘turning to bubbles’; she acknowledges that the ‘effect is strange, exciting, alarming, not unequivocally pleasant’, though at the same time ‘addictive’ since it drives the reader to start ‘all over again’.6 Both Carolyn See and Adam Mars-Jones were engaged by the first section of the novel. However, as Mars-Jones puts it, through the ‘balance between the earthbound and the merely windy’ in the first section is a delicate one: ‘[s]ome sentences are swollen with brilliant effects, but they never actually burst: the riches are never quite embarrassing’, indeed ‘the balance tips at the beginning of the second section, and never quite manages to return to equilibrium’.7 See finds the novel cumulatively wearing and claims that by the third section ‘the reader begins to feel like a child who’s spent all his allowance on 10 pounds of chocolate chip

3 4 5 6 7

Jordan, ‘Down the Road’, pp. 176–8. Joseph Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton (eds), The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter: Fiction, Femininity, Feminism, London: Longman, 1997. See also Gamble, The Fiction of Angela Carter, pp. 135–6. John Mellors, ‘On the Game’, Listener, 11 October 1984, p. 30, and Gillian Greenwood, ‘Flying Circus’, Literary Review, October 1984, p. 43. Harriett Gilbert, ‘Morning after the Night Before’, New Statesman, 28 September 1984, p. 30. Adam Mars-Jones, ‘From Wonders to Prodigies’, Times Literary Supplement, 28 September 1984, p. 1083.

C R I T I C A L H I S TO RY

45

cookies’ with the result that ‘after a while, it’s hard not to get a little queasy’.8 Mars-Jones claims the use of a shifting point of view makes the novel ‘curiously fragmented’ and, together with the ‘compulsively elaborated histories’ it relates, ‘are likely to baffle the reader’.9 What is interesting here is that See and MarsJones, both novelists themselves, display forceful negative reactions to the techniques and effects of Carter’s prose style but engage very little with the cultural and political issues of the novel which have so occupied academic criticism and which are so overtly signalled in the novel. In a much later academic article, Beth A. Boehm furiously takes on both Mars-Jones and See for what she sees as their wilful misapprehension of the novel’s ambitions. Yet review pieces must also be understood in the context of the limited time and space within which they are written and the relatively wide audiences to which they must be intelligible.10 Valentine Cunningham’s Observer review is an exception in this sense for the way it considers Carter’s use of her performers as the ‘focus for some hard questions’ before going on to discuss the novel’s treatment of allegory, feminism and history in a review which is never less than completely enthusiastic in its appraisal.11 John Bayley – a more conservative and academic literary critic – used his obituary of Carter to lament the way that ‘good writing has politicized itself today, constituting itself as the literary wing of militant orthodoxy’, and held Carter as the main culprit in this, as he saw it, unwanted postmodern turn.12 Reflecting on these reviews of the novel, Bristow and Broughton explain that: ‘Carter’s writings exasperated those who felt that modesty, grace and dignity were the prerequisites of “proper” literature.’ Such critics were therefore unable to grasp her achievement as a ‘writer whose radical political interests were both feminist and socialist’ and whose work ‘refuses hierarchies between differing forms and genres’ and between ‘popular’ and ‘high’ literature.13 Among academic critics, especially those such as Elaine Jordan and Lorna Sage who had already been engaged by Carter’s work, Nights at the Circus quickly became an exciting challenge, precisely because of its radical politics and the way it appeared to flaunt existing literary categories. Debates about the merits of Nights at the Circus have, broadly speaking, revolved around several key areas: feminism and gender, the carnivalesque, history and politics, postmodernism and genre. In order to clarify the terms and questions at the heart of this very large body of ‘tendentious’ critical essays and book chapters, I have divided and arranged this material under these headings – rather than chronologically – but with the proviso that clashes, crossovers and new terms will be flagged up along the way.

8 Carolyn See, ‘Come On and See the Winged Lady’, New York Times, 24 February 1985, online at (Accessed 30 November 2005). 9 Mars-Jones, ‘From Wonders to Prodigies’, p. 1083. 10 Beth A. Boehm, ‘Feminist Metafiction and Androcentric Reading Strategies: Angela Carter’s Reconstructed Reader in Nights at the Circus’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 37(1), 1995, pp. 40–2. 11 Valentine Cunningham, ‘High-Wire Fantasy’, Observer Review, 30 September 1984, p. 20. 12 John Bayley, ‘Fighting for the Crown’, New York Review of Books, 23 April 1992, pp. 9–11, at p. 11. 13 Bristow and Broughton, The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter, pp. 6–7.

46

C R I T I C A L H I S TO RY

Gender, feminism and the carnivalesque As indicated above, Nights at the Circus was recognized by newspaper and literary critics alike as evidence of a huge shift in style and emphasis within Carter’s writing. However, while journalistic comment, as we saw, frequently accented the novel’s stylistic density and excess, conversely, academic criticism drew attention to its relative lightness compared to Carter’s previous work. Sarah Gamble puts this most felicitously in her reflection on the novel’s length: In terms of length, it’s the longest novel she wrote, but its sense of expansiveness doesn’t have so much to do with the number of pages as with the sense of space, for the narrative itself mimics Fevvers’ leisurely pace through the air, ‘potter[ing] along the invisible gangway between her trapezes’ [Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 17]. That is not to say that it isn’t a novel packed with incident and adventure, but it certainly lacks the lurking sense of claustrophobia that was a characteristic of Carter’s prose at the beginning.14 Paulina Palmer is one of several readers who identified this shift as a move away from the ‘analytic and “demythologising” impulse’ in her early works – The Magic Toyshop (1967), Heroes and Villains (1969), The Passion of New Eve (1977) – to a more ‘celebratory and utopian’ atmosphere from The Bloody Chamber (1979) onwards.15 As this implies, Palmer is critical of what she sees as the representation of the way in which patriarchy is presented in these early fictions as a set of closed but ever renewable institutions. Elaine Jordan, however, has written an important defence of the earlier fiction which Palmer had regarded as being somehow too exclusively focused on patriarchy: so caught up in offering accounts and critiques of patriarchal tyrannies and sexual violence that it forgets to offer alternatives or escapes and risks simply reinforcing the male power it elaborates. While Jordan concedes that some of Carter’s early fiction does indeed contain a ‘strong streak of misogyny which is very much of the period’, she also believes that ‘her work exposes a history, a process of change which involves a series of honourable attempts to be an agent of change – part of the solution, rather than contemplating a problem of which she is a part’.16 Jordan, however, is unusual in her insistence on the existence of this continuity between Nights at the Circus and the earlier fiction. Others, such as Lorna Sage and Sarah Gamble, observe that this novel marks the beginning of a change in Carter’s use of magical realism, involving a lighter tone which makes her writing both more accessible and more ‘carnivalesque’, but also somehow lends her feminism a more positive note. Paulina Palmer also feels there are political consequences at stake behind this change of emphasis. Carter’s earlier work, she claims, had been overly concerned

14 Gamble, Angela Carter, p. 157. 15 Paulina Palmer, ‘From “Coded Mannequin” to Bird Woman’, in Sue Roe (ed.), Women Reading Women’s Writing, Brighton: Harvester, 1987, p. 180. 16 Elaine Jordan, ‘The Dangers of Angela Carter’, in Isobel Armstrong (ed.), New Feminist Discourse: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts, London: Routledge, 1992, p. 120.

C R I T I C A L H I S TO RY

47

with the depiction of male authority, together with the ideologies and myths which give it weight and thereby sustain patriarchy, and had therefore tended to depict women and femininity in states of alienation or masochism. She finds the later work, however, to be more in tune with more recent feminist criticism and theory in that it not only permits the inclusion of more anti-patriarchal action and is more focused around women’s lives and desires, but also critiques the very categories of male and female, masculinity and femininity. One radical feature of Carter’s ‘deconstruction’ in this respect is that ‘[a]ttention is drawn to the opening up of areas of identity that were closed and to the formation of alternative structures, psychic and social’.17 New possibilities for understanding gender identity are presented in later works such as Nights at the Circus, Palmer believes, because Carter produces an invigorating new formula for her use of magical realism (see Text and contexts, pp. 34–7), one that energizes her work with a greater sense of delight and the marvellous. Palmer’s critique of the novel depends on her positive but slightly confusing use of Bakhtin’s ideas on the carnivalesque in literature (see Text and contexts, pp. 27–30) to highlight the importance and complexity of the themes of liberation and transformation in the novel. She argues that the most potent figure in this respect is: Fevvers herself and her magnificent wings. The image of the winged bird-woman which she represents is, however, more complex in significance than it appears. It is ‘transparent’ in the sense that a number of contradictory meanings are constructed on it. Though it is predominantly an image of liberation, the male protagonists impose upon it stereotypical interpretations of femininity, invented by a patriarchal culture. ‘Angel of death’, ‘queen of ambiguities’, ‘spectacle’ and ‘freak’ are some of the conventional female roles which they attribute to Fevvers in the novel. The egg from which she claims to have been hatched is an image which is similarly ambiguous. On the one hand, it represents psychic rebirth. On the other, it provides a vehicle for Lizzie to theorize about the oppressive nature of reproduction and child-care under patriarchy. Suspecting Fevvers of becoming interested in marriage and domesticity, she rebukes with her words ‘I’ve raised you to fly up to the heavens, not to brood over a clutch of eggs’ [Pt. III, Ch. 10, p. 282].18 The stress on ambiguity and contradiction throughout Palmer’s analysis, and with it the possibility of dual or multiple meaning, highlights her identification of a certain mobility and possibility in the writing. Since this mobility is predominantly focused on female figures, it is regarded as a feminist usage of a carnivalesque literary impulse. Palmer also argues that Carter is exceptional as a writer in that she frames her use of the carnivalesque within a feminist critique of it. One problem with Palmer’s argument, however, is that she does not find Carter critical of the category of the carnivalesque per se, but only of ‘carnivalistic images and

17 Palmer, ‘From “Coded Mannequin” to Bird Woman’, p. 182. 18 Palmer, ‘From “Coded Mannequin” to Bird Woman’, p. 199.

48

C R I T I C A L H I S TO RY

values’ such as the ‘playful exuberance’ of the circus clowns, which she claims are used to ‘represent the violence which is rife in male dominated society’.19 Partly, this is because Palmer slides Bakhtin’s term ‘carnivalesque’ towards a discussion of the circus, which she finds is dominated by male performers and driven by both a drive for profits and a callousness towards women and animals. What is presented as Carter’s critique of the carnivalesque, therefore, is really a critique of the circus, since none of the acts that Palmer cites are in any way carnivalesque – just examples of circus brutality and misery. Following Palmer, Linden Peach also believes that both the circus and the theatre are important contexts for Carter’s later work because both are potentially ‘sites of illegitimate power’ and, as such, are tied into her use of the carnivalesque as well as being responsible for the brighter, more expansive and less claustrophobic feel of her later work.20 Peach parallels Carter’s political interest in the carnivalesque to the German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s (1898–1956). He claims that the appeal of the carnivalesque for both lay in its potential to give centre stage and political/moral integrity to characters who might previously have been dismissed as merely marginal or troublesome outsiders, a point also picked up by Jeannette Baxter in this volume (see Critical readings, pp. 102–3). He cites Marina Warner to confirm his view that Carter’s engagement with the carnivalesque in her later work not only changes her tone but also lends the texts a more proletarian and demotic address. The earlier works, he believes, are more influenced by Carter’s fascination with folk tales from German Romanticism and are therefore less open in character. Peach also confirms Palmer’s view that the circus in Nights at the Circus is in the spirit of the carnivalesque in that it works as an ambivalent figure. Peach goes beyond Palmer, however, to claim that the circus ‘is also the focus for an alternative, carnivalesque world view, which, like the popular fairs to which Brecht and Bakhtin allude, demystifies and debunks social hierarchy’.21 Unlike Palmer, he cites Carter’s own reservations about Bakhtin’s carnival thesis (see Critical readings, pp. 27–30), though he goes on to re-state Palmer’s point that the novel challenges the carnivalesque by filtering it through a point of view defined as female which sees the circus as a haven for male violence against women. He claims more extensively, however, that the novel’s power lies in the way that, throughout, the serious or ‘solemn’ are held side by side next to the carnivalesque. In his view, this parallels the closely bound relationship between the illegitimate and the legitimate, where legitimacy is taken to refer not just to culture but more specifically to theatre and, of course, to birth.22 The simultaneous holding together of these contrary impulses in the text is itself carnivalesque, Peach argues, because he finds that in much of the novel there is no single, unified utterance. In its interweaving of different voices – Fevvers, Walser, Lizzie, the capitalist entrepreneur Colonel Kearney and so on – with allusions to Shakespeare, Milton, Poe, Ibsen,

19 20 21 22

Palmer, ‘From “Coded Mannequin” to Bird Woman’, p. 198. Linden Peach, Angela Carter, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998, p. 167. Peach, Angela Carter, p. 141. Peach, Angela Carter, p. 149.

C R I T I C A L H I S TO RY

49

Joyce, Foucault . . . all express different attitudes and ideologies so that, typical of the carnivalesque, the novel appears to proclaim the relativity of everything.23 Yet despite this ‘relativity of everything’, Peach still locates a critical voice against patriarchy in the novel which resides in the access it gives readers to aspects of ‘European socioeconomic history of the nineteenth century’ that belong to the ‘underground’ or illegitimate aspects of Victorian Britain in particular: Through, for example, Fevvers’ description of her experiences in a London brothel, Nights at the Circus explores how the development of a sophisticated life of the emotions which is our cultural heritage has relegated certain aspects of sexuality to the social underground. In this respect, the location of the narrative at the end of the nineteenth century is especially significant for it is during this period, as Steven Marcus . . . points out, ‘that pornography and especially pornographic writing became an industry’ . . . However, it was also a time when fantasy – perceived as the illegitimate in cultural terms – came up against science, perceived as part of legitimate culture . . . Prostitution itself is seen in the novel as challenging traditional demarcations of reality and illusion. Afterall [sic], the women assume a role and the men pay not for sex but for the simulacra of sex. Hence, Nights at the Circus takes us through many positions of debasement, evidenced in worlds assembled and contained for the pleasure of men.24 Thus, for Peach, the novel’s carnivalesque impulse partly resides in its promotion of the debased and the marginalized – the victory of the illegitimate. Yet if the presence of a social critique in the novel can be detected, as is implied here, then it must surely be hard to maintain the claim to the carnivalesque whose ambivalence and sense of relativity have also been highlighted. The outcome of a critique based on some aspect of cultural history is likely to be the elevation, validation or retrieval of one set of experiences or events over another. Carter may reclaim the Victorian brothel as a place of sexual and therefore social power in Nights at the Circus, but neither Palmer nor Peach would argue that the novel is ambivalent about whose pleasures were served by the sex on offer there. Both Palmer and Peach, therefore, are attracted to Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque because it appears to offer a way of addressing the allure that socially disreputable spaces such as the circus and the brothel hold for this novel, as well as its structural and intellectual reticence about resolutions and definitive statements. Yet both critics also struggle to marry what they see as the novel’s feminist depiction of gender power relations and history with the primary openness at the heart of Bakhtin’s carnivalesque.

23 Peach, Angela Carter, p. 149. 24 Peach, Angela Carter, p. 151. His reference is to Steven Marcus, Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth Century England, London: Corgi, 1969.

50

C R I T I C A L H I S TO RY

Performance and masquerade In a later reworking of the work discussed above, Paulina Palmer extends her claims about the empowering function of Nights at the Circus for women by focusing less on the novel’s carnivalesque elements and more on its depiction of femininity as a masquerade (see Text and contexts, pp. 37–9). She quotes from the Belgian feminist pyschoanalyst, Luce Irigaray, who claims that: ‘[To] play with mimesis is, for a woman, to try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced by it.’25 In other words, it is possible to escape being defined and confined by patriarchal representations of women by creating new, playful figures that both reveal how women have been defined through representation while also indicating that there are identities beyond these familiar versions. In Nights at the Circus, Palmer claims, Carter ‘engages in an exuberant version’ of this mimesis: She playfully mobilizes and parodies the images of womanhood available in nineteenth-century culture, assuming at different periods of her life the roles of music-hall artiste, femme fatale and proto-feminist. In order to highlight the oppressive nature of the misogynistic stereotypes that Fevvers has to negotiate, Carter concentrates on the attempts made by her male admirers and acquaintances to confine her within conventional definitions. ‘Angel of death’, ‘queen of ambiguities’, ‘spectacle’ and ‘freak’ are some of the titles imposed on her by men. However the typecasting of her in these roles does not prevent Fevvers from achieving a strong degree of agency and self-determination. In her performances, off stage as well as on, she strives – often precariously – to elude male control, and remains, in general, triumphantly in charge of her own production’.26 Although Palmer concedes that Carter stops short of fully investigating the limits of this ‘playful’ engagement with masquerade or pointing readers towards its ‘problematic aspects’, her claims about ‘self-determination’ and ‘agency’ clearly underscore her belief in the positive value for feminism of this strategy. Anne Fernihough makes a rather similar argument, though she does so through more explicit reference to Judith Butler’s concept of performativity (see Text and contexts, pp. 37–9) and, specifically, to the idea that gender parody can constitute an ‘imitation without an origin’.27 The key claim made by Fernihough is that: ‘Nights at the Circus seems to be engaged in exactly this replacement of a truthbased model of gender and identity with a time-based or repetition based model.’28 In other words, gender identities can only be established through time

25 Paulina Palmer, ‘Gender as Performance in the Fiction of Angela Carter’, in Joe Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton (eds), The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter, pp. 24–42 (p. 31). 26 Palmer, ‘Gender as Performance in the Fiction of Carter and Atwood’, pp. 31–2. 27 Judith Butler quoted in Anne Fernihough, ‘ “Is She Fact or Is She Fiction?”: Angela Carter and the Enigma of Woman’, Textual Practice, 11(1), 1997, pp. 89–107. 28 Fernihough, ‘ “Is She Fact or is She Fiction?” ’, p. 95.

C R I T I C A L H I S TO RY

51

because they are ‘reliant on citation or iterability’, and are thus renewed and reformed through each citation and performance that ‘codify’ gender afresh.29 They are, therefore, without any real grounding or essence. Nights at the Circus, she argues, tempts us into a false search for the truth of Fevvers’ origins and identity through the decoy question of whether her wings are genuine but finally brings us up short by pointing out that this is the wrong trail. Nonetheless, Fernihough’s implication seems to be that gendered identities and iterability are connected in that the repetition through time of new forms of femininity may lead to more accurate or at least more desirable ones. Christina Britzolakis confirms what is clear so far from this survey, which is that a great deal of critical writing on Angela Carter is concerned with the issue of theatricality. This is hardly surprising given the variety, luminosity and detail of the different forms of performance that parade themselves through her novels.30 Like Russo (see Critical history, pp. 52–4), she questions whether the enactment of femininity as a spectacle is always necessarily consistent with feminism and liberation. She is also doubtful about whether characters such as Fevvers, ‘in exploiting the creative possibilities of illusion, do indeed escape objectification or whether they end up colluding in their own objectification’.31 Britzolakis investigates the extent to which gender in Nights at the Circus is conceived as a set of performances or ‘masquerades’ which reveal femininity to be a fiction rather than an essence. She is also sceptical about the way in which other feminist critics – most notably Palmer – have accepted this revelation as a key to female empowerment. Furthermore, she is concerned to recognize that Carter ‘is at least equally engaged by the male scenario of fetishism which lies behind, and is required by, the female scenario of the masquerade’.32 However, Britzolakis also suggests that Carter herself may similarly be engaged in a form of self-objectification by means of the characteristically dense ‘virtuoso’ prose of her novels which ‘foregrounds its own spectacular stylistic effects’ and wide-ranging allusiveness and ‘is saturated with sensuous detail, with coruscating surfaces and ornate façades’.33 She links this to Carter’s own background as a beneficiary of the post-war educational and welfare reforms described above (see Text and contexts, p. 10) and the social and intellectual advancement these conferred on many of Carter’s generation. ‘Theatricalism,’ she claims, ‘is the language of the female “parvenue” whose critique of the establishment must always be conducted in the mode of the greedy and more or less fetishistic taking possession of its cultural properties, and which remains partly mortgaged to the heritage it travesties.’34 Issues of class as well as gender, it is implied, are at stake in the many ways in which Carter employs theatricality in her writing. Intellectualism and elaborate

29 Fernihough, ‘ “Is She Fact or Is She Fiction?” ’, pp. 89 and 95. 30 Christina Britzolakis, ‘Angela Carter’s Fetishism’, Textual Practice, 9(3), 1995, p. 459, reprinted in Alison Easton (ed.), Angela Carter: Contemporary Critical Essays, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000, pp. 173–91. 31 Britzolakis, ‘Angela Carter’s Fetishism’, pp. 460–1. 32 Britzolakis, ‘Angela Carter’s Fetishism’, p. 470. 33 Britzolakis, ‘Angela Carter’s Fetishism’, pp. 461 and 462. 34 Britzolakis, ‘Angela Carter’s Fetishism’, p. 470.

52

C R I T I C A L H I S TO RY

stylization are as much on show, and indeed cannot be separated from, the elaborate female masquerades described within it. However, in common with sexual fetishism of the female body which is driven by an impulse to exaggerate and travesty the very objects it desires, so Carter’s prose, Britzolakis claims, rarely fails to pastiche its multiple references to literature and philosophy, even while it indulges them. Britzolakis sees the carnivalesque in Nights at the Circus as the key to understanding the way in which Carter is involved in breaking the commodified connection between the spectator and the female object. Carter does this, she believes, not only by turning Fevvers into a series of male fantasies but also by pairing these fantasy versions of femininity with a body which is also at times grotesque: ‘a farting, lumbering down-to-earth creature’.35 By implication, the carnivalesque also invades Carter’s writing itself in the form of ambivalence towards literary and intellectual culture expressed within writing that, for example, invokes the words of W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot only to attribute them to clowns. In this sense, Britzolakis echoes Anne Fernihough’s characterization of Nights at the Circus as a carnivalesque body in itself: one that appears to have swallowed an indigestibly large amount of European culture only to spew it all out again ‘in all manner of reconfiguration, inversion and parody’.36

Freakery and the grotesque Paulina Palmer alludes to Bakhtin’s concept of the grotesque when she claims briefly that, through Fevvers, Carter elaborates on Bakhtin’s concept of the grotesque body as a body in the ‘act of becoming’.37 It is Mary Russo, however, who in her book-length study of the female grotesque and its relationship to spectacle, picks up this issue at length to ask what exactly can become of the female grotesque body. She argues that Carter’s novel actually ‘grotesquely de-forms the female body as a cultural construction’, but does so in order to show how it can be differently and surprisingly articulated, but not necessarily in original or forward-looking ways.38 For her, this suggests new political possibilities for feminism which may involve difficult or even contradictory physical associations, but the point is that they would never hold the body in the same place. Like Carter’s novel as a whole, which is far too narratively and conceptually complex to point in a single, conclusive direction at the end, Fevvers resists being held in place; she never quite answers the questions asked of her identity because she is always in the process of producing alternative versions of herself – or going back to old ones. In this respect, Russo’s critique maintains an understanding of the ambivalences at the heart of the text and in the figure of Fevvers in particular, without, as Peach and Palmer do, mapping the implications of this ambivalence onto Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque with all the limitations that follow from this. 35 36 37 38

Britzolakis, ‘Angela Carter’s Fetishism’, p. 472. Fernihough, ‘ “Is She Fact or is She Fiction?” ’, p. 97. Palmer, ‘From “Coded Mannequin” to Bird Woman’, p. 198. Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity, London: Routledge, 1995, p. 179.

C R I T I C A L H I S TO RY

53

In doing so, Russo suggests that Carter does indeed investigate some of the provocative repercussions of her ambiguous and mischievous depiction of female spectacle. Russo describes Fevvers as a figure who ‘straddles high and low culture’ and, as such, is ‘an exhilarating example of the ambivalent, awkward, and sometimes painfully conflictual configuration of the female grotesque’.39 Fevvers’ anomalous body, with its absent belly button and present wings is ‘not lacking’, Russo believes, ‘but her trajectory . . . in relation to her act, is out of sync with the conventions of what is called human development. She starts and stops in the intervals between points, hovering on the brink of possibility, instead of going forward.’40 In this sense, Fevvers is an embodiment of possibility, of becoming without ever coming into being, which for Russo places a limitation on, or suspension of, her status as a utopian figure who defies or escapes patriarchy because she cannot move towards progress at the end, only suggest it. What Russo finds ‘unique’ about the novel is its depiction of relationships between women as spectacle, and women as producers of spectacle. To the extent that female countercultures are depicted in the novel, they are placed within larger social and economic histories and fictions. The point I want to make here is simply that to the extent that value is contested in the production of women in this novel, it is contested socially. One body as a production or performance leads to another, draws upon another, establishes hierarchies, complicities, and dependencies between representations and between women. Conflict is everywhere.41 In other words, there is a lively economy of production, exchange, resistance, reduplication and replacement in the novel in which women as well as men take part as, variously, profiteers, distributors and objects, in relation to the representations of women that circulate: In a series of counterproductions of the affirmative woman ‘who will have wings and who will renew the world’, Fevvers is born and born again, as an act (in the theatrical sense) of serial transgression. I have described Fevvers as the figure of ultimate spectacularity, a compendium of accumulated cultural clichés, worn and soiled from circulation. Yet, poised as she is on the threshold of a new century, her marvelous anatomy seems to offer endless possibilities for change.42 Given that women are shown to have such varied relationships to the used myths and fictions about them that circulate, depending on their changeable interrelationships and position within wider social hierarchies, it is impossible to pin Fevvers down, either in positive or negative terms – only as a figure for change itself. Though Palmer suggests that there may be something liberating in the idea

39 40 41 42

Russo, The Female Grotesque, p. 159. Russo, The Female Grotesque, p. 164. Russo, The Female Grotesque, pp. 165–6. Russo, The Female Grotesque, pp. 165–6.

54

C R I T I C A L H I S TO RY

of the grotesque body as one which is in the process of becoming, Russo’s argument appears to act as a reminder that it may only be in the process of becoming something it once was, ‘worn and soiled from circulation’.43 Russo claims that what is important about Fevvers is that she is both the object of sometimes well-worn male fantasies, even while she harbours the power to subvert those fantasies. She is, therefore, both a site of labour and of transcendence: Fevvers reveals what angels and circus stars normally conceal: labor and its bodily effects in the midst of simulated play and illusion. Her body dawdles lazily (the hardest work of all in the air) and yet, unlike her angelic sisters, she never stops to occupy discrete spots on the trajectory: she does not rest. She vamps in the musical sense, filling the intervals with somersaults. The one time she is static in the air, perched on the swing, the rope breaks and she is stranded. What is revealed in her routine is at one level economic: the Victorian working girl is not the angel . . . , and the novel is in many ways about working girls.44 Russo sees Fevvers as an indication of the fact that spectacle always conceals the work of production that has gone into it, whereas ‘revamping spectacle’ works to highlight this ‘cultural production’.45 In Nights at the Circus, even the category of ‘newness’ itself is shown up as a cultural production which can only be possible as a result of the work of renovation, revision or head-on conflict with something already familiar. Of course, this also means that once the spectacle of newness has been produced once then it can also be answered in further defiantly contrary productions.46 Finally, both Shirley Peterson and Patricia Waugh both write explicitly on Carter’s characterization of Fevvers’ body in terms of its grotesque and freakish qualities. Peterson constructs her argument through a comparative framework involving Nights at the Circus and Fay Weldon’s contemporaneous The Life and Loves of a She Devil (1983) within which she explores the way that both writers ‘enlist freakishness for a feminist agenda’.47 Peterson’s argument values Mary Russo’s concept of the ‘grotto-esque’ as the ‘hidden, earthly dark, material, immanent . . . visceral’ qualities associated with the female grotesque.48 She also cites the French feminist Hélène Cixous’s ‘female-sexed texts’, or ‘sexts’, that work to transform patriarchal fears about femininity into a force for liberation and also work to uncover the concept of women as ‘other’ to men as illusory.49 As Britzolakis indicates in her discussion of masquerade and objectification, however, there is a dangerously thin line to be drawn between the positive conversion

43 44 45 46 47

Russo, The Female Grotesque, p. 166. Russo, The Female Grotesque, p. 177. Russo, The Female Grotesque, p. 177. Russo, The Female Grotesque, p. 179. Shirley Peterson, ‘Freaking Feminism: The Lifes and Loves of a She-Devil and Nights at the Circus as Narrative Freak Shows’, in Rosemarie Garland Thomson (ed.), Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, New York: New York University Press, 1996, pp. 291–301 (p. 291). 48 Russo, The Female Grotesque, p. 1. 49 Russo, The Female Grotesque, p. 1.

C R I T I C A L H I S TO RY

55

of such fears and the confirmation of them. Indeed, Peterson claims that Weldon and Carter display a feminism of such audacity that it ‘ “freaks out” feminism’ of the 1960s and 1970s, which tended to brush under the carpet differences between women such as race, class and sexuality, and thereby assumed and promoted a form of ‘normative femininity’.50 Nights at the Circus not only confirms patriarchy’s fear of ‘freaking feminism’ (as in the US parlance, ‘ “Those freaking feminists!” ’), but also brings ‘out the freak’. Fevvers, and her counterpart in The Life and Loves of a She Devil, Ruth Patchett, constitute such strikingly deviant physical manifestations of femininity that they upturn all previously secure definitions and standards upon which distinctions of both male and female, masculine and feminine conventionally rest. In the end, therefore, the term ‘freak’ comes to function in Peterson’s argument in a very similar way to the term ‘queer’ in recent critical theory. It does not so much respond to actual physical embodiments (for queer theory, of straight or homosexual) but rather refers to acts which involve contradiction, dissonance or tension and which use these energies to draw attention to the fault lines that lie within existing concepts of identity, sexual or otherwise. Above all, this means that the term ‘freak’ must always be read against particular historical contexts because, Peterson argues, women are by no means always on the side of the powerless within patriarchy, as both Fevvers and Margaret Thatcher demonstrate. If early twentieth-century feminists, she imagines, ‘could have conjured a future feminine freak, she might well have resembled the Iron Lady of the 1990s’ who took up her position at the centre of power only to work at destabilizing feminism and acting out a new set of separations between normal and freak.51 Like Paulina Palmer, Peterson values Fevvers’ character for the way she rumbles orthodoxies and keeps certainties in the balance rather than for her positive endorsement of new identities or gender politics, but this is precisely Patricia Waugh’s problem with the novel. Again within a comparative framework, though this time with reference to Jeannette Winterson’s slightly later Sexing the Cherry (1989), she finds Carter’s novel too removed from material reference points and too wrapped up in self-perpetuating versions of the masquerade to be politically meaningful for feminism. She describes Fevvers as ‘grotesque and beyond the bounds of possibility’, a character who is ‘forever staring at reflections in mirrors or reflecting back the gaze of others in the bottomless abyss of eyes that open up universes’.52 More significantly in terms of Waugh’s critique of Carter’s gender politics, however, she wearies of what others have celebrated as Carter’s knowingness and playfulness with concepts of identity such as those derived from the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. According to Waugh, Carter exemplefies Lacan’s belief that: Self is always an endless pursuit of reflection in the eyes of others, love a desire for the desire of the other, gender an unstable category bounded by struggles for power where what is within can never entirely free itself from dependency for definition on what is without. Women are 50 Peterson, ‘Freaking Feminism’, p. 293. 51 Peterson, ‘Freaking Feminism’, p. 299. 52 Waugh, Harvest of the Sixties, pp. 194–5.

56

C R I T I C A L H I S TO RY dependent on men for identification as bodies, and although they may yield those bodies as weapons, like men, too, they can never step out of image and into nature. Nature has never existed and nurture is all.53

Whereas, for Waugh, Winterson’s novel leaves space for ‘some autonomy’ for women within its equally fantastic and impossible narrative, Nights at the Circus puts everything in the balance in its ‘ever-picaresque place of disguise, dodge, and complicity with no escape: a circus’.54 In this sense, Waugh’s argument, made briefly but nonetheless sharply, captures one side of the dilemma that Nights at the Circus has posed for feminist critics. All those represented here have grappled in some respect with what often appear to be the constantly shifting politics of gender identity: like the kaleidoscope that represents Walser’s consciousness at the start of the book, they seem like a set of colourful, moving fragments that only ever offer an illusory coherence. While critics such as Palmer and Fernihough find positive value in the novel’s shifting, vivid fragments, carnivalesque suspensions and its challenging of stability in relation to women’s social, physical and sexual identities, for others this transience and defiance is too limited. Waugh and Britzolakis find the promotion of instability, masquerade and possibility are not in themselves enough when they stand undefined or undirected, as they see it, by specific critical positions located quite outside the economy that styles and commodifies images of women.

History and politics Several other critics have argued that the novel cannot be judged only on the basis of its carnivalesque effects when, as Russo’s argument has already suggested, the novel goes to some lengths to demonstrate the labour that takes place behind the masquerade as well as the historic and material conditions that frame and limit each act. Sarah Gamble articulates this eloquently when she points out that: Nights at the Circus . . . is a fantasy which ends up by negotiating its way out of fantasy. There comes a point, it implies, when the performance has to end, and the notion of being nothing more than the sum of your performance, a view by which Carter’s fiction was once seduced, is now regarded as a threat. There is real experience, authentic emotion, to be had in the world outside the circus, and the novel concludes having firmly staked its claim there.55 Having said this, Gamble also immediately points out that Fevvers’ laughter at the novel’s close means she still ‘manages to have it both ways’.56 Aidan Day, however, is more direct in his attempt to counter those critics whose concentration on the novel’s formal carnivalesque qualities has led them, as he sees it, to see

53 54 55 56

Waugh, Harvest of the Sixties, p. 195. Waugh, Harvest of the Sixties, p. 195. Gamble, Angela Carter, p. 166. Gamble, Angela Carter, p. 166.

C R I T I C A L H I S TO RY

57

only its carnivalesque themes. Day believes this approach runs the risk of ‘endorsing an unregulated subversion of established codes and conventions’ and thereby ending up with ‘a chaos of relative perspectives’ rather than any firm understanding of the issues raised.57 Where Waugh only sees this ‘chaos’ of relative and transient meaning and, indeed, Fernihough celebrates the novel’s ‘groundlessness’, Day argues that the carnival is consistently grounded, not in realism, but in a ‘rational, materialist, feminist base’ which is ‘at a deeper level, formally and generically quite traditional’.58 Day goes on to provide a very detailed account of the way he believes the novel is ‘firmly historicised’ because, although its fantastic, comic and absurd elements are undeniable. Nights at the Circus may embroider history, but it never lies about it; its sense of period and character may be richly drawn, but it is never factually misleading in its historical reference points. In fact, Day goes on, Carter has taken great care in her choice of historical setting because the late nineteenth century is associated with the issue of emergent women’s rights, and was a critical phase in the dawning of consciousness about and agitation for women’s rights. The late nineteenth century laid the ground for what would be, in part at least, consolidated and crystallized and turned into British parliamentary legislation in the twentieth century. The issue then at centre-stage was, of course, women’s suffrage. In 1865 John Stuart Mill was elected Member of Parliament for Westminster, having put the matter of women’s suffrage in his election address. Mill’s campaigning for women’s rights was profoundly influenced by the woman he had married in 1851, Harriet Taylor. From the point of Mill’s election as MP the issue of women’s suffrage came to occupy an important place in parliamentary business in each successive parliament. Numerous bills or amendments to bills were proposed with the intention of conferring the franchise upon women; all were defeated by one parliamentary ruse or another.59 Although Carter does not spell out all these details of the period or labour the issue of the emergence of women’s suffrage within it, Day believes that it enters the novel in codified form through its multiple references to verifiable historical characters. These include Dan Leno the music-hall performer and Edward, Prince of Wales, but also the malevolent Mr Rosencreutz whose ‘real name Fevvers secretly reveals to Walser before citing “Rosencreutz” as the type of those parliamentary men who consistently succeeded in the later years of the nineteenth century opposing the extension of the franchise to women’.60 Thus, though Day sees ‘flamboyant craziness’ in the novel’s exuberant fantasy, he maintains that this has significance only when it is mapped on to the historical background that Carter carefully maps out. Even her most fanciful symbols

57 58 59 60

Day, Angela Carter, pp. 168–9. Day, Angela Carter, p. 169. Day, Angela Carter, p. 173. Day, Angela Carter, pp. 173–4.

58

C R I T I C A L H I S TO RY can be recovered in rational historical terms. Take Fevvers. A woman with wings is a literal non-sense. This woman has a symbolic dimension that is self-consciously acknowledged in the narrative itself. As, for example, when Ma Nelson identifies Fevvers, after she has first spread her wings, as the herald of a ‘New Age in which no women will be bound down to the ground . . .’.61

In this respect, Day sees Fevvers’ relationship to symbols as a two-way process. She not only makes something concrete out of symbols – freedom and selfdetermination – that had not yet become material reality for women of the nineteenth century but also deconstructs the mythical symbols of winged women (such as the ‘Winged Victory’) which serve under patriarchy to remove women’s individuality. Universalizing symbols such as these are given a materially and dramatically functional body as well as a highly individual character. As Day puts it: With the reappropriation comes a rehistoricisation and re-humanisation of what men simply dehistoricised, transcendentalised and dehumanised. Abstractions of things like Victory and Liberty as constructed from a masculine perspective don’t tend to spill gravy and belch. The music of the spheres in masculine idealization isn’t characteristically associated with the making of cash.62 From his perspective, therefore, the novel not only lies within the bounds of existing literary genres – as opposed to being a postmodern subversion of them – but it also sets up a distinctly feminist critique of masculinist idealizations of women. The nature of this critique is not determined by the historical period to which it refers; in fact, what makes the novel radical is its contemporary voice and critical insight. Equally, it would be wrong, Day believes, to write off its period setting as just so much local colour or postmodern citation.

Postmodernism and history Although Aidan Day’s reading of the novel sees its relationship with postmodernism as wholly compromised by the nature and complexity of its engagement with material history, his position is not representative of all the critical treatments of postmodernism in Nights at the Circus. Indeed the publication date of the novel alone, 1984, is significant in that it emerged when ideas and debates about postmodernism and postmodernity were sweeping through academic institutions in Europe and North America. Very few innovative or experimental novels were not assessed in terms of their relevance to the ‘postmodern debate’. The fact that the novel is set well outside the postmodern period, just outside the twentieth century even, is not in itself a bar to its postmodern classification. As Susan Watkins points out, it is the novel’s own conception and framing of the complexity of 61 Day, Angela Carter, p. 177. 62 Day, Angela Carter, p. 178.

C R I T I C A L H I S TO RY

59

historical setting and period that is significant: ‘both its fin de siècle setting and its conceptual and stylistic apparatus’ point ‘backward to the grand nineteenthcentury narratives of modernity and forward to the local late twentieth-century narratives of postmodernity.’63 It is not surprising then that other critics have attempted to characterize the novel in postmodern terms. For example, Magali Cornier Michael, unlike Aidan Day, does not reject critical associations of the novel with postmodernism, though, in the end, her argument stops short of labelling the novel ‘postmodern’. She insists instead that it uses ‘disruptive strategies’ which have frequently been linked with postmodernism.64 Yet Michael’s use of the term ‘postmodernism’ eventually has the effect of muddying the waters rather than clearing them because she then goes to some lengths to argue that there is no necessary incompatibility between what she regards as the novel’s ‘Marxist feminist realism’ and postmodernism. She points out that: Marxist feminism has generally rejected postmodernism on the grounds that its tendency towards abstractions gives way to a disconnection from the material world and from history, that it rejects metanarratives (such as Marxism and gender theory), and that it dissolves the subject. In contrast, Marxist feminists emphasize the material world in which women are daily oppressed as women and situate their analyses of women’s oppression within specific political, cultural, historical, economical, and ideological contexts.65 Michael goes on to cite a group of postmodern theorists including Fredric Jameson, Linda Hutcheon and Andreas Huyssen who all support this definition of postmodernism as a set of practices that redefine our understanding of history and subjectivity rather than dismiss their relevance entirely. In the novel, she finds this process of redefinition translated into the negotiation between realism and materialism on the one hand and postmodernism, fantasy and the carnival on the other. Thus, the Grand Duke’s imprisonment of Fevvers and threat of fatal sexual violence against her becomes an example of the maintenance of: the conventions of realism, even if it does push toward the postmodern, since it ultimately grounds seemingly extraordinary incidents – such as her narrow escapes from the wealthy gentleman and the grand duke – in the daily victimization of women and thus challenges accepted notions of women as naturally and inevitably passive objects.66 Fevvers, therefore, is always ‘fantastic but recognizable’.67 Not only that, but this

63 Susan Watkins, Twentieth Century Woman Novelists: Feminist Theory into Practice, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001, p. 145. 64 Magali Cornier Michael, ‘Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus: An Engaged Feminism via Subversive Postmodern Strategies’, Contemporary Literature, 15(3), 1994, p. 493. 65 Michael, ‘Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus’, p. 493. 66 Michael, ‘Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus’, p. 502. 67 Michael, ‘Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus’, p. 502.

60

C R I T I C A L H I S TO RY

realism is informed by a feminist impulse to critique the ‘daily victimisation’ of women, something which the complex sense of historical period in the novel suggests did not end at the end of the nineteenth century.68 So far, however, Michael’s definition of literary postmodernism only sounds like the familiar magic-realist blend of fantasy and recognizability (see Text and contexts, pp. 34–7). Michael’s subsequent introduction of the link between postmodernism and the carnivalesque aims to suggest that the latter lets the former in the back door. Nights at the Circus, Michael argues, ‘utilizes a postmodern version of carnivalization as a vehicle for its postmodern aims’, which are to ‘destabilize existing norms as well as the binary logic which undergirds Western culture’.69 More specifically from this perspective, Fevvers herself becomes ‘an ambivalent figure of carnival stature, disrupting established conventions of female characters’ and, as such, Michael believes, her subjectivity pushes toward the postmodern in the sense that her multifaceted and fluid identity destabilizes the rigid boundary between subject and object. Her indeterminate nature challenges these dichotomies and heralds the advent of new female subjectivities that are not grounded in binary logic and are thus released from the hierarchal relations implicit in binarism.70 Here Michael comes close to arguing that Carter’s depiction of Fevvers is postmodern for the way in which she breaks down definitions of the individual self and appears to fictionalize her own past, yet the argument then incorporates these into a much less postmodern-sounding project for future progress towards ‘a new female subject’.71 It is interesting, therefore, that as Michael’s argument progresses, her claim about the novel’s postmodernism recedes somewhat, giving way to an increasing emphasis on the political and feminist potential of the carnivalesque, rather than carnivalesque postmodernism. This in itself, however, leads to a further glitch in the argument in that carnival acts, suspensions and ambivalences are defined by Bakhtin in terms of their temporary nature because they disclose subversions only to restore order. In order words, Michael’s argument struggles to match the essentially circular and renewable dynamic of the carnivalesque with the progressivism of a Marxist feminist ‘hope for the future’, on which note she ends her argument.72 Rachel Carroll also deals with the issue of history, narration and postmodernism in Nights at the Circus but from a completely opposite point of view in that she regards the novel as ‘an exemplary postmodern text’ in which the ‘textuality of history is self-consciously evoked by the historical and literary pastiche in which it revels’.73 Carroll, however, does not pursue the novel’s treatment of historical detail as Day does but focuses instead on its treatment of time. The

68 69 70 71 72 73

Michael, ‘Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus’, p. 502. Michael, ‘Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus’, pp. 506–7. Michael, ‘Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus’, pp. 508–9. Michael, ‘Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus’, p. 509. Michael, ‘Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus’, p. 519. Rachel Carroll, ‘Return of the Century: Time, Modernity, and the End of History in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus’, Yearbook of English Studies, 30, 2000, p. 188.

C R I T I C A L H I S TO RY

61

novel’s uneasy negotiation between past, present and future, its perpetual returns to the past in the telling of stories and in the characters’ travels means, for Carroll, that its postmodernity comes into focus ‘not in its representation of history but in its rendering of time’.74 Her reference point in postmodern thought is the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo (1936–) who ‘argues that the project of modernity is a process of return and overcoming, whereas postmodern thought is characterized by a critique of Western thought and of the very notion of a foundation’.75 Carter’s novel is, she believes, rather a ‘critique without overcoming, a taking leave of the logic of modernity’.76 Nights at the Circus rewrites modernity in ‘materialist and symbolic’ form;77 that is, rather than deal with the facts and figures of historical events, it draws out manifestations of the unconscious in history and traces elements of history within the unconscious. Confusingly, Carroll argues that in this respect the novel resembles (and refers to) two central discourses of modernity (rather than postmodernity) – Marxism and psychoanalysis – which both theorize the present in terms of its being a product of unsettled past conflicts and, ‘therefore’, of ‘making a return without overcoming’.78 Thus, as Carroll sees it, the novel is postmodern in that it abandons the idea that history could ever successfully be conceived of as a linear sequence, punctured only by occasional but ‘radical breaks or ruptures’.79 It imagines instead a constant relay of returns and journeys forward in which both past and future are always still full of possibility and therefore never fully ‘overcome’ or defined. The novel’s picaresque narrative structure, Carroll argues, contributes to its peculiar sense of time in that it presents ‘scenes of the past’ in terms of a set of tableaux ‘unmoored from their lodgings and set adrift in time’.80 Thus the ‘logic of modernity’ – progress and ‘overcoming’ – is replaced by ‘magical intervention’ that brings about ‘discontinuities and anachronisms’ which ‘disrupt the logic of time and history’.81 Although Carroll sees the novel as holding ‘a wake for the past’, it does not leave it behind, only the logic that anchors it in linearity. Instead, the narrative unleashes a new ‘threshold of the “somewhere, elsewhere” ’ by investing meaning in ‘moments of historical transition’.82 The key symbol of this specific form of transition in the novel is the railway line that dominates the third section of the novel but is also implied in the first two. The railway not only represents progress and modernity as it speeds through Europe, it also returns its passengers to ‘primitive’ civilization when the journey forces them into an uneasy confrontation with the Shaman and his tribe. More importantly, it does this through an explosive crash: Indeed the railway does inflict a ‘jolt’ of profound proportions: it initiates the human body into the modern era by its revolutionary

74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

Carroll, ‘Return of the Century’, p. 188. Carroll, ‘Return of the Century’, p. 187. Carroll, ‘Return of the Century’, p. 188. Carroll, ‘Return of the Century’, p. 188. Carroll, ‘Return of the Century’, p. 188. Carroll, ‘Return of the Century’, p. 188. Carroll, ‘Return of the Century’, p. 188. Carroll, ‘Return of the Century’, p. 188. Carroll, ‘Return of the Century’, pp. 188–9.

62

C R I T I C A L H I S TO RY technological achievement, ‘the annihilation of time and space’ . . . the hurtling pace with which the engine thrusts its cargo into other times and places attest to the violence immanent in the explosive changes of modernity. The force latent in this annihilation reveals its power in the train crash in Nights at the Circus, which shatters identity as well as time and space.83

The novel’s returns to the past before this, through the retold life stories of characters such as Fevvers, Mignon and Ivan, Carroll continues, never have any prospect of being converted through nostalgia, since the childhoods of all of them have been bleak, violent and often sexually exploitative. It is a world, she claims, of ‘dispossession’, which means that the purpose of looking backward to it can only ever be motivated by the desire to escape it and find a happier home in the future.84 For Andrzej Gasiorek, this does not stop Carter being ‘sentimental about marginal groups’ in her broader portraits of circus and vaudeville (the ‘illegitimate’ cultures identified by Peach) but in a way that still sets very distinct boundaries around the possibility of their liberation.85 But Carroll argues that in Nights at the Circus, home is always familiar and indeed unforgettable yet simultaneously unknown – always the ‘somewhere’ and the ‘elsewhere’ – because the ramifications of its traumas will continue to constitute the future in ways which are not yet known. Thus, ‘the interiors of Fevvers’ youth’ are ‘past but not dead’ in that they are still possessed of such a powerful resonance within her mind that even visiting them mentally constitutes a painful experience.86 Finally, however, Carroll concludes that the novel’s mobilization of past traumas works towards a complex and postmodern forward movement in which ‘the past is conjured . . . not to borrow its costumes but rather to dispense with them’ and therefore ‘return is made in the name of departure’.87 Like the train that both speeds forwards and crashes backwards, the narrative not only returns to ‘exorcise’ the ‘horrors’ of the past, but also ‘appropriate[s] its utopian anticipation of the future’.88 Carroll too, therefore, cites Walter Benjamin’s ‘angel of history’ (see Text and contexts, p. 32) as the appropriate symbol for the novel’s constructions of time thresholds in which the wind blowing in from the past, like Fevvers’ laughter, both disturbs and propels forwards. What is so interesting about Carroll’s argument is that it regards the novel’s magical-realist sense of time and its picaresque narrative structure as being part of the texture of its postmodernism rather than a bar to it, as Day has argued. It also begins to throw up an interesting distinction between those critics so far who have tended to produce more negative or ambivalent readings of the novel’s politics (Britzolakis, Fernihough and Waugh) and the more hopeful ones (Day, Carroll, Russo and Palmer). It would seem as though the terms of engagement for those critics who have focused on the

83 Carroll, ‘Return of the Century’, p. 191. Carroll quotes from Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Anselm Hollo, Oxford: Blackwell, 1977, p. 44. 84 Carroll, ‘Return of the Century’, p. 193. 85 Gasiorek, Post-War British Fiction, p. 134. 86 Carroll, ‘Return of the Century’, p. 198. 87 Carroll, ‘Return of the Century’, p. 199. 88 Carroll, ‘Return of the Century’, pp. 199–200.

C R I T I C A L H I S TO RY

63

issues of masquerade, fetishism and the performative in the novel (for example Waugh and Britzolakis) result in a flattening out of time within their view of the novel. Because Butler’s concept of the performative and Rivière’s concept of masquerade conceive of identity as an ever renewable or replaceable set of masks and performances, there is no sense of a historical tail that implicates one performance in the next or sees it anticipated in the previous one. As a result, Carter’s characters, and principally Fevvers, of course, appear to exist in a perpetually extending present in which the term ‘possibility’ ceases to have meaning because the ‘self’ is never conceived of in terms of a time trajectory, and because the ‘social’ consists of the relationship between a performance and its audience. Russo is perhaps the exception in this respect in that her analysis admits a political dynamic between gender construction and regressive or past-looking counter-construction.

Genre: picaresque, magical realism and Gothic Aidan Day qualifies his claim about the novel’s formal traditionalism by arguing that Nights at the Circus ‘reimagines’ rather than simply reproduces the traditional novelistic genre of the picaresque for a contemporary audience.89 In fact, both Aidan Day and Lorna Sage suggest that modern critics have been too quick to label the novel postmodern when it has much deeper and long-standing fictional roots. Sage believes that Carter ‘levitates out of the clutches of classification’ in Nights at the Circus and thus ‘escapes the gravitational pull of realism’s settings’ because it is ‘a book with hardly any houses at all’.90 But of course postmodernism is not the literary antidote to realism and, like Day, Sage and Linden Peach identify the eighteenth-century picaresque novel as the generic home that Carter has colourfully renovated and modernized.91 The picaresque is a novelistic genre which has its origins in European fiction of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and which takes its name from the Spanish words picaresco, or pícaro, meaning ‘rogue’. Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605–15) is a classic of the genre and, in common with this novel, picaresque narratives are typically episodic in structure, humorous or satiric in tone, and their content features a slightly hapless or roguish hero, often of low or questionable origin, engaged in a sequence of detailed and disreputable adventures in a society marked by corruption and greed. Sage sees Nights at the Circus as ‘radically picaresque’ for the way it unsettles labels and ideas ‘even the label “freedom” ’.92 Day quotes Carter’s own comments on the novel to John Haffenden when she talks about her intention to pick up on the picaresque tradition because it is a genre in which ‘people have adventures in order to find themselves in places where they can discuss philosophical concepts without distractions’. It, therefore, offers her the opportunity to both ‘entertain and instruct’ within it.93 Although it is a trait of postmodern fiction to pastiche existing literary 89 Day, Angela Carter, p. 169. 90 Lorna Sage, Women in the House of Fiction: Post-War Women Novelists, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992, p. 176. 91 Peach, Angela Carter, p. 138. 92 Sage, Women in the House of Fiction, p. 176. 93 Angela Carter quoted in Day, Angela Carter, p. 169.

64

C R I T I C A L H I S TO RY

genres, Day believes that Carter’s use of the picaresque, though reimagined, is ‘straight’ because there is a strong sense of belief in the way she pursues and presents the issues involved, which are, therefore, neither ‘ironised nor relativised’.94 He also believes the novel falls within the tradition of the historical novel, but again updates this, arguing that the term ‘herstorical’ is more appropriate because of the female-centred perspectives Carter adopts and the critique of male accounts of history. Thus, both Day and Sage reject the appropriateness of the label ‘postmodernism’, preferring to emphasize the novel’s continuity with existing traditions – though traditions reworked by new ideas – with Day specifically rejecting the idea that postmodernism’s generic ‘hybridity’ and narrative ‘fragmentariness’ match the novel’s true character. As the summaries above indicate, there has been a strong critical inclination to assume one of two positions in relation to the novel’s genre: either to see it as a ‘carnivalized’ work that therefore defies generic categorization or to note its affiliations with picaresque traditions. Few, however, have pursued the novel’s relevance for any other literary genres beyond this, preferring instead to concentrate on its mixture of metafictional, postmodern or carnivalesque tendencies. Although Gamble and Palmer identify Nights at the Circus as one of Carter’s least ‘claustrophobic’ novels, Lucie Armitt and Rebecca Munford both highlight what they regard as the greater importance of the novel’s darker edge and their readings therefore emphasize generic allegiances both with the Gothic and with magical realism. Armitt places the novel in the context of magical realism but on the ‘dark or under-side of the magic real’, which she implies overlaps directly with the Gothic.95 Moving from the whorehouse in London to Rosencreutz’s ‘gothic mansion’, clown alley in St Petersburg, the Grand Duke’s Palace and then Siberia, ‘the most agoraphobic landscape of all’, Armitt argues that the novel becomes ever more unsettling, even as the characters appear to break out into ever more expansive territories geographically.96 Its peculiar and unsettling form of magical realism, Armitt contends, comes from the way that it shows how increasingly fantastic phenomena and characters are commonly to be found in commonplace and domestic settings (the trick played on Big Ben’s chime, for example, Pt. I, Ch. 3, p. 53). She believes this tendency is coupled in the novel with more obviously Gothic strands such as the darker aspects of the circus which are epitomized by Buffo’s terrifying and grotesque display of lunacy (Pt. II, Ch. 4, p. 123). Munford is much more specific than Armitt in her definition and elaboration of Gothic conventions in so far as they are discernible in Nights at the Circus. Her point is that although Fevvers is possessed of wings throughout the novel, nonetheless she remains caught within what she sees as a architecture of entrapment which is completely resonant of the Gothic genre. Thus, she sees Nights at the Circus not as an ‘exploration of the carnivalesque but a deconstruction of the Gothic heroine’.97 Perhaps most surprisingly, Munford believes that the

94 95 96 97

Day, Angela Carter, p. 169. Lucie Armitt, Contemporary Women’s Fiction and Fantasy, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000, p. 181. Armitt, Contemporary Women’s Fiction and Fantasy, p. 181. Rebecca Munford, ‘Re-Vamping the Gothic: Representations of the Gothic Heroine in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus’, Paradoxa, 17, 2002, p. 235.

C R I T I C A L H I S TO RY

65

fact Fevvers’ body sprouts wings just at the age where menstruation would normally occur sets up a powerful and suggestive connection between Fevvers and the conventional Gothic figure of the vampire. In turn, she argues, the novel reimagines the sexuality associated with the so-called ‘New Woman’ of the turn of the century in a way that suggests a direct link between her and her more decadent opposite in fin-de-siècle typology, the sexually voracious vamp. In one stroke, therefore, Carter reverses the traditional association made between bird imagery and female incarceration, emphasizes Fevvers’ predatory power (specifically over Walser), and connects flight to female power and liberation. It is hard to reconcile these two versions of Fevvers as both an addictive, vampiric, predatory force and, at the same time, an image of female empowerment. Nonetheless, the more significant part of Munford’s analysis involves an extensive and detailed examination of the novel’s accounts of what she sees as a succession of Gothic spaces, including Ma Nelson’s brothel, Madame Schreck’s ‘Museum of Woman Monsters’, Rosencreutz’s castle and the female penitentiary, all of which subject Fevvers to conventional forms of Gothic imprisonment and control. The nadir of her descent in this respect is the moment when the Grand Duke shows her the ‘golden egg’ which contains the framed ‘miniature of the aerialiste herself’ (Pt. III, Ch. 11, p. 189), because for Munford this is a precursor to Fevvers’ ‘final imprisonment within her own iconography’ at the end of the novel.98 Fevvers’ dressing room is an exception in this respect, and, thus, it demonstrates the possibility of winning back Gothic spaces as locations in which female-centred narratives can be told. For Munford, therefore, Fevvers remains a relatively conventional Gothic heroine, ‘imprisoned within the Gothic architecture of her own autofiction’ and caught in her narcissistic absorption in her own public images (‘the blonde of blondes’, Pt. III, Ch. 11, p. 290). Carter, she suggests, has failed to provide her central character with a suitably ‘alternative narrative space’ in which the full potential of her winged body might be realized. However, Lizzie, Munford argues, is quite literally a different story.99 Her emergence from the Shaman’s hut, she believes, sees Lizzie ‘reach an apotheosis as a prophetic maternal figure’, and it is she, therefore, who represents Carter’s more successful ‘re-vamping of the Gothic heroine’ because it is her story, not Fevvers’, which is the more truly radical.100 What is striking about Munford’s argument, however, is that it can find no positive place for an active female sexuality in the novel, seeing sexuality only as the perpetual weight around Fevvers’ neck from which even her wings cannot offer escape. Her (hetero)sexual union with Walser and the rollicking laughter which ensues is viewed grimly as a final bolt on the prison door. Lizzie is the alternative heroine because she is maternal and menopausal without ever having been sexually active. Armitt and Munford, therefore, both produce a convincing set of textual examples of scenes, characters and events that point towards the Gothic genre. Still, as Munford’s reading in particular demonstrates, the Gothic resonances of Nights at the Circus need to be stripped out of it with some 98 Munford, ‘Re-vamping the Gothic’, p. 244. 99 Munford, ‘Re-vamping the Gothic’, pp. 252–3. 100 Munford, ‘Re-vamping the Gothic’, pp. 253–4.

66

C R I T I C A L H I S TO RY

determination, and this process also involves bypassing the confident, wisecracking, good-humoured texture of the novel’s prose. Finally, it is clear from most of the critical material covered in this section that a great deal can be discovered from the way in which individual critics read the novel’s ‘Envoi’. In these final moments of the novel, Fevvers is united sexually with Jack but still refuses to answer his question about why she lied to him about her wings and virginity, answering him (and the reader) only with her literally earth-shattering laugh. Palmer and Peach, for example, who both embrace Bakhtinian readings of the novel, regard the laugh as a sign of the novel’s goodnatured defiance of social convention and its perpetual suspension of the regulation that would end carnivalistic mirth to reinstate social hierarchy and order. Munford, on the other hand, specifically takes issue with Palmer’s positive welcoming of the laugh ‘socially and psychically liberating’ because it is a sign of ‘carnivalistic mirth’, seeing it rather as a laughter which is necessarily ‘restricted by her participation in a Gothic narrative that insists upon its dénouement within traditional notions of marriage and the domestic’.101 Gasiorek confirms the representativeness of the final laugh as a fitting note because it stands as a symbol for Fevvers’ only real weapons which are ‘mockery and laughter rather than silence and cunning’. At the same time, he also believes that this note cannot be interpreted completely optimistically since the novel has worked so hard, especially through its portraits of the clowns, to demonstrate the political limitations of these very weapons.102 Both Gasiorek and Munford identify Fevvers’ reference to a ‘long history of exile and cunning’ (Pt. III, Ch. 10, p. 285), which she uses to describe Lizzie’s much longer and more complex life history, as an allusion to James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). They read this as the novel’s acknowledgement that, as Munford puts it: ‘Lizzie’s story provides a subversive and disruptive subtext to the narrative of the Gothic daughter’s journey of self-discovery.’103 Yet, as Munford points out, where Joyce’s artist’s (Stephen Dedalus) story is one of ‘silence, exile and cunning’, the point of Nights at the Circus is precisely to give a lively, ringing voice to a ‘female-centred storytelling’ imbued with ‘feminist politics’.104

101 102 103 104

Munford, ‘Re-vamping the Gothic’, p. 252. Gasiorek, Post-War British Fiction, p. 134. Munford, ‘Re-vamping the Gothic’, p. 252. Munford, ‘Re-vamping the Gothic’, p. 254.

3 Critical readings

Heather Johnson, ‘Metafiction, Magical Realism and Myth’ Heather Johnson works in the areas of Gothic studies and contemporary women’s writing and is based at the University of Rhode Island. Her publications on Carter focus on gender and subjectivity. See ‘Textualizing the DoubleGendered Body: Forms of the Grotesque in The Passion of New Eve’ in Angela Easton (ed.), Angela Carter, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000; and ‘Unexpected Geometries: Transgressive Symbolism and the Subject’ in Joseph Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton (eds), The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter. Johnson’s essay places Nights at the Circus in the canon of postmodernist British fiction as a classic example of metafiction (see Text and contexts, pp. 31–4). While Carter herself is commonly referred to as a magical realist (see Text and contexts, pp. 34–7), critics have not before considered her novel in relation to this term specifically. Further, a politics of embodiment, Johnson’s essay argues, underpins Carter’s conception of myth in the novel. The chapter then covers three key terms often used to characterize overlapping aspects of Nights at the Circus: metafiction, magical realism and myth. The following analysis shows that they share a common attitude to the conventions of fiction, the real and the historical: an impulse to undermine the certainties underlying all three. As we saw in Text and contexts (p. 34), literature that uses metafictional techniques does so with the implicit understanding that the reader shares a sense of self-consciousness about the operations of fiction. Thus, metafiction relies on a stable notion of fiction’s conventions in order to play knowingly with these conventions. Magical realism, on the other hand, declares its stance towards the real in its own terms: reality is not absent in the literature of magical realism, but rather the fantastic invades a still-recognizable world. The mythical and fantastical are commonly associated, taking their measure against a verifiable history, a world of facts rather than embellishment or fancy. All three terms, the chapter points out, can be grouped together under the heading ‘postmodern fantastic’. Finally, Johnson argues that Carter, in her use of these fictional modes, clearly shows how each rubs against some value of the real;

70

CRITICAL READINGS

yet, her fiction also aims, at the same time, to offer a feminist challenge to our assumptions about those established conventions: namely, history, reality and fictional worlds.

From Heather Johnson, ‘Metafiction, Magical Realism and Myth’ The fantastic in Nights at the Circus reveals not only a love of fictional play but also a political urge, born in part out of the feminism that emerged from the mid-1960s onwards to challenge representations of women, question restrictive views of the real and, thereby, open up new political possibilities. Like many of her generation in Britain and North America, Carter also used the fantastic to experiment with fictional form. The fantastic has been regarded as ‘a mode in which dreams, or metaphors, are employed to say something about social and historical or psychological realities.’1 Fantastic writing unmasks the metaphorical dimension of cultural discourses, since it addresses the metaphors belonging to these same realities of history, culture and psychology. In its attention to metaphoric language, feminist writing is sensitive to the act of representation itself. Looking askance at reality leads the ‘alternative tradition’ of the fantastic in women’s writing to question strictly realist forms. As Nancy A. Walker points out, the fantastic is employed in feminist writing, whereby dreams and fantasies ‘represent the possibility of change rather than stasis and entrapment’, not as a means of escape, but rather as a thoughtful engagement with an entire cultural tradition and its often static representations of the female figure.2 Insisting on the relativity and mutability of truth and reality, contemporary feminist writers question established conventions to help us begin to see the strangeness of the assumptions of the ‘real’ world. Carter’s novels and short stories certainly bear out this account of fiction written by women of her generation. Yet the sophistication of Carter’s engagement with modes such as magical realism and myth has long marked her as a distinctive voice in British fiction from the 1960s to the 1980s. Amongst her contemporaries, Carter is in fact unique; not content with revisions of male-authored texts or fiction that champions women’s experience, Carter’s range of interests includes philosophy, science and art as well as gender relations, popular culture and poststructuralist theory. Her evident intellectualism and razor-sharp scepticism about inherited concepts, particularly as they relate to women, are frequently packaged in her fiction in forms associated with fanciful storytelling. An example of this, she imports magical realism into British writing as a means of presenting a feminist perspective on cultural, political and representational traditions. Through this mode in particular, she is able to expose the idealistic as ‘unrealistic’ by investigating the reality that lurks behind idealized forms. Her characteristic blend of high culture and popular culture, along with the three modes considered

1 2

Alexander, Contemporary Women Novelists, p. 61. Nancy A. Walker, Feminist Alternatives: Irony and Fantasy in the Contemporary Novel by Women, Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 1990, p. 117.

H E AT H E R J O H N S O N

71

below, provide the formal fireworks through which Carter expresses her feminist and poststructuralist ideas.

Metafiction This section explores the ways in which Nights at the Circus can be read as a metafictional novel, taking as its starting point Patricia Waugh’s account of the genre in which she describes the way that ‘characters suddenly realize that they do not exist, cannot die, have never been born . . . [o]r they start to perform impossible acts’.3 In several respects, Fevvers is a typical metafictional character. Her miraculous origins are repeatedly mentioned in the narrative. In the tradition of biography, the novel opens with her response to the question of her birth: ‘Hatched out of a bloody great egg while Bow Bells rang’ (Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 7). Because Fevvers did not issue from ‘normal channels’ (Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 7) and, moreover, is Carter’s revision of the offspring produced through the mythological coupling of Leda and the swan, in a sense she has never actually been ‘born’. The central character of Nights at the Circus is, literally then, made up, ‘hatched’ from the writer’s imagination. Her association with the dawn of the twentieth century adds to this impression of an original; after all, Lizzie reminds her foster-daughter, ‘You are Year One. You haven’t any history’ (Pt. III, Ch. 1, p. 198). From the opening pages, it is clear that the central character can perform an impossible act: she can fly. This premise is obviously central to the novel, since the question of Fevvers’ credibility drives the narration of Jack Walser, whose initial intention is to expose the aerialiste as a fake. The creation of characters who are ‘fabulous’, while maintaining a narrative framework not entirely divorced from realism, points to a feature of characterization in general: it is not possible to make up real people. All characters are literary constructions made through language. As readers, we are constantly being challenged by Carter’s narrative to answer the questions, does Fevvers really have wings and can she fly? The fact that the novel includes many other unbelievable characters who perform impossible acts means that these questions rapidly cease to have any urgency. Fevvers’ status seems less remarkable when we consider that the Colonel’s pig, Sybil, acts as an oracle and is able to spell out names in Russian (Pt. II, Ch. 1, p. 98) as well as English. One of the many scenes that may remind the reader that they have suspended disbelief from the outset occurs with the disappearance of the clowns and outlaws, who essentially ‘will’ themselves out of the world (Pt. III, Ch. 7, p. 243). The novel further draws attention to its status as a piece of writing through the device of the journalist as narrator. Walser has come to interview the renowned aerialiste and to document her personal history. We see him taking notes – which then ostensibly comprise the novel itself – and writing asides to himself. For example, ‘the girl was rumoured to have started her career in freak shows. (Check, noted Walser)’ (Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 14). This suggests authenticity on the part

3

Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction, London: Methuen, 1984, p. 91.

72

CRITICAL READINGS

of his narrative because, as a journalist, Walser is concerned with ‘truth’, with facts and with ‘uncovering’ the story. That is, Carter chooses a journalist for her narrator specifically because his job traditionally requires the separation of fact from fiction. Any detail of Fevvers’ story which might be objectively verifiable attracts Walser’s particular attention. Fevvers offers him her bare foot to reveal the injury received while escaping Rosencreutz, and Lizzie confirms its effect as evidence of Fevvers’ story: ‘Oracular proof . . . Seeing is believing’ (Pt. I, Ch. 5, p. 83). Walser’s journalistic ‘scepticism’ (Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 16), however, remains intact at the close of the first section, and he regards the interview as a fabulous fiction: ‘He flicked through his notes. What a performance! Such style!’ (Pt. I, Ch. 5, p. 90). Through repeated references to documentation and journalism, the novel underlines both this question of whether fiction is believable and also its own status as fiction. In an effort to persuade the journalist of Fevvers’ life story, Lizzie first refers to ‘this scarcely credible narrative’ (that is, the story comprising the novel itself) and then produces a document as proof: ‘three impeccable sheets of manuscript, written on invoices for an ice-cream parlour’ (Pt. I, Ch. 5, p. 84). It is Toussaint’s account of their escape from Madame Schreck’s which is read by Walser, who ‘noted the scholarly handwriting, the firm signature’ (Pt. I, Ch. 5, p. 85) and who is at that moment persuaded. For the journalist, a document written by a witness has the status of fact, and these examples function as embedded narratives in fiction to prove its ‘reality’. Allusions to writing and documents may at first seem to support the notion of verifiability, and, indeed, the inclusion of references to actual publications arguably suggests that the events of Carter’s novel are to some degree true or realistic. For example, the character Toussaint’s actual existence seems confirmed when Fevvers refers Walser to the June 1898 edition of the medical journal The Lancet (Pt. III, Ch. 4, p. 60). Fevvers’ own response to the sight of a newspaper reassures her of some stable ‘reality’ when she arrives at the mansion belonging to the threatening figure of Rosencreutz: ‘Only the current copy of the London Times laying on an oak chest was proof I had not been somehow magically transported into an earlier age’ (Pt. I, Ch. 5, p. 74). But metafiction sets out to destabilize preconceptions about the status of fact and the status of fiction. Walser’s ‘factual’ narrative loses both its prominence and journalistic impartiality as the novel progresses, and the novel itself comments on the reader’s expectations that fiction can be distinguished from a factual, verifiable history. Where it had been clear that the journalist was trying to produce an objective account, Walser soon concedes that his account (and the novel itself) have taken a different turn: ‘the violence of that authentic history to which this narrative – as must by now be obvious! – does not belong’ (Pt. II, Ch. 1, p. 97). In this way, the novel announces its own fictionality. Further references to writing contribute to and complicate the novel’s metafictional self-consciousness. The apes write on a blackboard (Pt. II, Ch. 2, p. 108), and the women incarcerated in the House of Correction write notes to each other in blood (Pt. III, Ch. 3, p. 216). Walser uses writing to ‘reconstruct’ himself in the end, giving an account of all his adventures and parenthetically remarking ‘What a story!’ (Pt. III, Envoi, p. 293). Fevvers then reminds him, ‘You mustn’t believe what you write in the papers’ (Pt. III, Envoi, p. 294). So, to this extent, the fiction

H E AT H E R J O H N S O N

73

is finally unravelled. Walser reflects on his own creative writing, openly declaring the fictionality of these compositions: ‘the elaboration of artifice; I am inventing an imaginary city as I go along’ (Pt. II, Ch. 1, p. 97). Such self-consciousness continues in the narrative’s direct address to the reader on a number of occasions: ‘Let me tell you something about Fevvers, if you haven’t noticed it for yourself already; she is a girl of philosophical bent’ (Pt. II, Ch. 11, p. 185), and ‘Do not run away with the idea, from all this, that the Shaman was a humbug’ (Pt. III, Ch. 8, p. 263). The narrator declares an awareness of the reader that implicates the reader’s interpretative role in ‘constructing’ Carter’s novel. Carter constantly foregrounds the fact that the novel is a written account. The novel refers to its own plot structure and to the conventions of fiction, to the extent that possible endings are discussed by the characters before the reader reaches the final chapter. In a sense, the end returns the novel to the beginning in a circular fashion, as Fevvers and Walser meet on more equal terms: ‘ “That’s the way to start the interview!” she cried. “Get out your pencil and we’ll begin!” ’ (Pt. III, Ch. 10, p. 291). Pointing out to Fevvers that stories share conventional endings, Lizzie summarizes the novel’s own past events as a fictional plot: ‘Don’t you know the customary endings of the old comedies of separated lovers, misfortune overcome, adventures among outlaws and savage tribes?’ (Pt. III, Ch. 10, p. 280). Playing with the reader’s expectations of the romance plot, here between Fevvers and Walser, Lizzie instructs Fevvers that marriage is generally the result: ‘The name of this custom is a “happy ending” ’ (Pt. III, Ch. 10, p. 281). Scepticism towards this narrative and cultural convention appears elsewhere in Carter’s fiction (The Passion of New Eve and ‘The Bloody Chamber’, see Further reading, p. 125) as Carter requires her readers to reassess the heterosexual relationship, particularly its power dynamic and expectations of masculine and feminine roles. Carter’s play with the language of various discourses belongs to metafiction’s insistence on its own construction. As Patricia Waugh has indicated: The more a text insists on its linguistic condition, the further it is removed from the everyday context of ‘common sense’ invoked by realistic fiction. Metafictional texts show that literary fiction can never imitate or ‘represent’ the world but always imitates or ‘represents’ the discourses which in turn construct the world.4 The use of different kinds of writing or language serves to accentuate the linguistic status of the text. Nights at the Circus follows Carter’s previous work in its combination of contrasting styles of language. Perhaps one of her signature techniques, Carter includes vulgar or colloquial language in conjunction with a language of refinement, luxury or decadence. The down-to-earth colloquialisms of ‘morning mug and doorstep’ (Pt. II, Ch. 7, p. 149) (that is, tea and toast), ‘Suckers’ (Pt. II, Ch. 10, p. 180), and one of Fevvers’ trademark Cockney exclamations, ‘Oooo-er’ (Pt. II, Ch. 11, p. 190) appear in a novel which also contains a litany of exquisite objects: a ‘Bokhara’ rug (Pt. I, Ch. 2, p. 29), a ‘Bechstein grand’

4

Waugh, Metafiction, p. 100.

74

CRITICAL READINGS

(Pt. II, Ch. 7, p. 148), the ‘Kohinoor’ diamond (Pt. II, Ch. 10, p. 179), and an ‘Isfahan runner’ (Pt. II, Ch. 11, p. 192). Decadent imagery such as this is often associated in Carter’s work with patriarchal characters (to whom Carter refers as varieties of the ‘mad scientist’ figure), but it is also typical that this discourse of wealth and power is disrupted by coarse language from a female character. In a similar juxtaposition, when one kind of language becomes too pretentious or inflated, the text often punctures this with a simpler or earthier interjection. The ethereal epithets of Rosencreutz’s speech – ‘Azrael, Azrail, Ashriel, Azaril, Gabriel’ (Pt. I, Ch. 5, p. 75), already ridiculous in their redundancy – sound particularly artificial when Fevvers tells him, ‘Show us the bathroom and let’s have a wash then’ (Pt. I, Ch. 5, p. 75). In his early observations of Fevvers, Walser sees her inhale ‘enough air to lift a Montgolfier’, where she is associated with the daring elevation of the first hot-air balloon, before he is ‘confronted by stubbled, thickly powdered armpits’ (Pt. I, Ch. 3, p. 52). This technique of deflation relates to Carter’s feminism; to be entranced by idealized forms, she implies, is to be unenlightened, even naïve. Romance, in its many guises, is confronted at all times by Carter’s acerbic rationalism. Another kind of language in the novel, contemporary historical references, such as branded products, create a texture of cultural and historical verisimilitude through references to ‘Pears transparent soap’ (Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 14), ‘Germoline’ (Pt. I, Ch. 2, p. 31) and ‘Argyrol’ (Pt. II, Ch. 7, p. 149). In contrast to this grounding effect, foreign languages typically create a sense of exaggeration in Carter’s work. Inquiring as to Walser’s toleration of bedbugs, the Colonel informs him through overstatement that he will encounter many should he become a clown: ‘a circus is just one big Pullman diner to cimex lectularius’ (Pt. II, Ch. 1, p. 102). French words serve a similar purpose: in keeping with her enormous scale, Walser notes Fevvers’ ‘torrent of concealed billets doux’, ‘bonnnefemmerie’ (sic) and ‘éclat’ (Pt. I, Ch. 1, pp. 9 and 11). A change in narrator can also mean a change in language, and at Chapter 6 (Part II), the novel introduces a short chapter written in the third person, which has a noticeably even or ‘factual’ tone (Pt. II, Ch. 6, p. 145). Lines from poetry and song contribute yet another tone to the novel, such as Kipling’s line ‘the female of the species is deadlier than the male’ (Pt. II, Ch. 3, p. 114) and lines from ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ spill into the narrative (Pt. III, Ch. 8, p. 262). Carter’s comic use of cliché meanwhile exposes the unconscious habits of language: ‘out of the frying pan and into the fire’ (Pt. II, Ch. 5, p. 143); ‘fair is fowl and fowl is fair’ (Pt. I, Ch. 5, p. 76); ‘the rest is history’ (Pt. I, Ch. 5, p. 87). This mosaic of styles illustrates what Carter means when she describes her own writing technique as a form of bricolage, pulling together, as it does, a whole series of different references and registers from a variety of sources that extend well beyond the strictly literary.5 Elaborate adjectives and exaggerated imagery also create a stylized effect and prevent the reader from being able to respond to the novel’s world as though it were real. Sentences that draw attention to themselves because of their language remind us that they belong to a written text.6 Mundane activities are elaborately

5 6

Haffenden, Novelists in Interview, p. 92. Waugh, Metafiction, p. 95.

H E AT H E R J O H N S O N

75

expressed in some metafictional writing. Fevvers eats a sandwich with ‘vigorous mastication of large teeth’ (Pt. I, Ch. 3, p. 53); while eating Rosencreutz’s Stilton, she is ‘pondering as I savour it the baroque eclecticism of his mythology’ (Pt. I, Ch. 5, p. 77). Herr M. of the Spirit Church is described in terms of ‘oleaginous sentimentality’ (Pt. II, Ch. 5, p. 135). Frequently, exaggerated style mirrors the exaggerated content. The ‘tumultuous impulses of her half hundredweight of hair’ (Pt. II, Ch. 5, p. 78) builds up Fevvers’ larger-than-life presence. Walser’s writing style changes along similar lines, as St Petersburg ‘precipitated him towards hyperbole’ (Pt. III, Ch. 1, p. 98). Ironically, the sign that Walser is regaining his connection with reality comes from his mimicry of Fevvers’ way of speaking – ‘Eel pie and mash, me old cock’ (Pt. III, Ch. 8, p. 256) – so that in a reversal of the novel’s opening, she now symbolizes a feet-on-the-ground sense of reality while he has been temporarily subsumed into the Shaman’s world of the fantastic. Yet, in repeating Fevvers’ phrases – ‘ “A whore’s drawers, said Walser to himself, reflectively” ’ (Pt. III, Ch. 8, p. 263) – it strikes him as fantastic: ‘the more unlikely it seemed’ (Pt. III, Ch. 8, p. 263). This exchange between the real and the fantastic and between writing and speech is essentially an exchange of gender. The male journalist, associated through his act of writing with the real and the factual, gradually learns an alternative way of being, one more imaginative and expressed through ‘primitive’ speech, a form of expression initially aligned with the female character. It is typical of Carter’s writing more generally that where a text centres on a male and female couple, she often establishes certain traits associated with each – such as writing with Walser and speech with Fevvers – before inverting these associations in the course of the narrative to highlight the constructed nature of gendered identity. Within the conventions of metafiction, the narrative may also incorporate references to its own linguistic material such as ‘sign, or signifier’ (Pt. I, Ch. 2, p. 29). During a debate with the Escapee, Lizzie uses an argument laced with grammatical terms: ‘future perfect by the present imperfect’ (Pt. II, Ch. 5, p. 239). Earlier, Buffo breaks down the etymology of the word ‘clown’ (Pt. II, Ch. 4, p. 120). So, in metafiction we find less an acknowledgement of reality and more of the linguistic context of the literary text. Two additional features common to metafiction are also worth noting: the use of names and the insertion of historical references. Metafictional novels, as Waugh points out, can include a particular treatment of names: they aim ‘to focus attention precisely on the problem of reference. Here, proper names are often . . . placed in an overtly metaphorical or adjectival relationship with the thing they name’.7 In Carter’s penchant for exaggerated names, we can identify the tendency that Waugh outlines. In accordance with sideshow tradition, many of the women on display in Madame Schreck’s are known by metaphorical names such as the ‘Wiltshire Wonder’ (Pt. I, Ch. 4, p. 59). In addition to the comic mispronunciation of ‘feathers’ in her common name (Fevvers), a plethora of metaphorical names occur in Nights at the Circus to refer to the protagonist herself: ‘Cockney Venus’ (Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 7; Pt. II, Ch. 10, p. 273; Pt. III, Ch. 9, p. 273), ‘Victory with Wings’ (Pt. I, Ch. 2, p. 38), ‘Angel of Death’

7

Waugh, Metafiction, p. 93.

76

CRITICAL READINGS

(Pt. I, Ch. 4, p. 70), ‘Azrael’ and ‘Gabriel’ (Pt. I, Ch. 5, p. 75), ‘Madonna of the Arena’ (Pt. II, Ch. 5, p. 126), ‘Misericordia’ (Pt. I, Ch. 5, p. 127), ‘Winged Wonder, Brittanic Angel’ (Pt. III, Ch. 5, p. 231). In many of these cases, men are making her into what they want her to be, assigning her a metaphorical function or projecting a symbolic identity onto her. Here, metafiction’s obsession with names coincides with Carter’s feminist parody of Fevvers’ mythological function. Some metafictional novels insert real/historical events into an overtly fictional context to expose the illusion, or indeed deceptiveness, of documentary/factual writing.8 Once we have noticed that the novel questions the status of history as ‘truth’, we become alert to ways in which the novel points to its own fictionality. Accordingly, it concludes in the world of the Shaman with the ‘implausibility of authentic history’ (Pt. III, Ch. 8, p. 253). In general terms, the novel is set at the fin-de-siècle, a historical moment already charged with an extra-ordinary sense of time, pitched at a moment of uncertainty. The incidents of Fevvers’ life are further mapped against real events: ‘the Irish question and the Boer war’ (Pt. I, Ch. 5, p. 79). The personal narrative invokes historical figures both as proof and to add to the sense of the grandiose historical stage on which she acts out her life. She claims that ‘not just Lautrec but all the post-impressionists vied to paint her’ (Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 11). This strategy only makes Fevvers’ biography seem all the more believable and lends it a larger backdrop of history. Nights at the Circus presents history as personal narrative or reconstruction, illustrating the novel’s impressive engagement with contemporary developments (from the 1960s onwards), such as historiography, which questions the ‘truth’ of historical narratives.

Magical realism We have seen how postmodernist novels such as Carter’s highlight an uncertainty about their ‘reality’ status via a self-conscious condition of textuality; they also achieve this, with reference again to Waugh, through an ‘ostentatious construction of “alternative worlds” ’.9 In the circus, ‘the magical circle of difference’ (Pt. II, Ch. 2, p. 108), we find a ready-made ‘other’ world, and its combination of the imaginary with the realistic brings us to a related genre commonly associated with Carter’s writing: magical realism (see Text and contexts, pp. 34–7). Just as the novel itself overtly refers to its metafictional concerns – is it fact or fiction? – so we find similar references to the novel’s choice of genre. Thus, an observation about the conditions of the Shaman’s world is applicable to the text as a whole: ‘there existed no difference between fact and fiction; instead, a sort of magical realism. Strange fate for a journalist, to find himself in a place where no facts, as such, existed!’ (Pt. III, Ch. 8, p. 260). However fantastic the events in Carter’s novel appear, it remains the case that the story is grounded in a realistic manner. One way that Carter achieves this is through the references to the actual geography of London – Queenstown Road, Belgravia, Piccadilly, Trafalgar Square, Chelsea Bridge and St Paul’s – and by

8 9

Waugh, Metafiction, pp. 104–5. Waugh, Metafiction, p. 103.

H E AT H E R J O H N S O N

77

peppering the novel with the kind of brand-name objects noted earlier, such as ‘Golden Syrup tins’ (Pt. III, Ch. 9, p. 276). So however remote the imaginary worlds may seem – the Countess P.’s penal panopticon or the Grand Duke’s palace – the novel never entirely leaves a recognizable frame of reference. In another example, a self-reflexive joke about her feathered identity accompanies Fevvers’ anecdote about her ‘lace tea-gown’ and how she ‘bought it from Swan and Edgar’s for the joke’ (Pt. III, Ch. 5, p. 229) (a reference to an actual department store which was located at Piccadilly Circus at the turn of the century). Names which are highly familiar or contemporary – such as ‘Special Branch’ (Pt. I, Ch. 3, p. 55) – interrupt the sense of illusion afforded by outrageous stories, in this case of Madame Schreck’s whorehouse. Geographical and historical coordinates fix an otherwise fantastically located narrative. While ‘magical realism’ is open to a wide range of interpretation, it is possible to identify several consistent features. Two of these, marginality and the transgression of boundaries, account in part for Carter’s focus on the circus. First, it is widely accepted that many writers of magical realism are in some way speaking from the margins, whether politically or geographically. As Theo D’haen puts it, ‘the notion of the ex-centric . . . [is] an essential feature of that strain of postmodernism we call magical realism’.10 One of the genre’s principal traits is the disruption of dominant discourses from within. Carter’s use of magical realism in Nights at the Circus is unquestionably tied to the novel’s feminism, as an ‘ex-centric’ perspective on reality reveals that reality to be centred on patriarchal values and fixed models of gender identity. Its marginal status is commonly reflected in magical realism’s preference for liminal settings, attracted to marginal worlds as places of potential metamorphosis. Certainly, the location of the circus provides such an arena, and the magic of the circus, where the audience routinely suspends disbelief, creates a parallel effect to that of magical-realist fiction. It is not so much that a sense of reality is lost, but we understand that its rules are being defied. According to Faris, the circus is just one of the ‘sacred enclosures’ typically found in magical-realist texts.11 Such enclosures, often distinct from one another, as in Carter’s novel, are worlds apart from any known reality. Consequently, the narrative can become disorientating and vague in its descriptions: for example, ‘We were translated into another world, thrust into the hearts of limbo to which we had no map’ (Pt. III, Ch. 5, p. 225). Coordinates of time and space recede temporarily, and these places acquire a dream-like quality, like the Shaman’s tribal village which ‘would remain unaware of that moment . . . when the nineteenth century would transform itself into the twentieth’ (Pt. III, Ch. 8, p. 265). While a number of transgressions stand out in the novel, such as the boundary between fact and fiction and Fevvers’ identity as both bird and woman, the manipulation of time and space lend the novel the recognizable quality of magical

10 Theo D’haen, ‘Magical Realism and Postmodernism Decentring Privileged Centers’, in Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (eds), Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995, p. 194. 11 Wendy B. Faris, ‘Scheherazade’s Children: Magic Realism and Postmodern Fiction’, in Zamora and Faris, Magical Realism, p. 174.

78

CRITICAL READINGS

realism. Impossible feats of time and space occur, making the allusion to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) – ‘curiouser and curiouser’ – a particularly apt one. For example, during the interview with Walser, Fevvers seems to shrink, while it seems as if the room had ‘been plucked out of its everyday, temporal continuum, had been held for a while above the spinning world and was now – dropped back into place’ (Pt. I, Ch. 5, p. 87). At several points in the novel, characters remark on the strange pace of time: ‘Something’s going on . . . time has passed – or else is passing – marvellous swiftly’, says Lizzie (Pt. III, Ch. 9, p. 272). The figure of Father Time ends up as a throwaway object among the train wreckage (Pt. III, Ch. 4, p. 221). The narrative includes moments when time moves as if in slow motion (the train explosion and its aftermath) and when a kind of ellipsis occurs. Within the space of three sentences, Fevvers drops a toy train in the Grand Duke’s gallery, runs along a platform to board this train (now suddenly life-size) and finds Lizzie already inside, despite the fact that it has been among the Grand Duke’s collection of miniature eggs (Pt. II, Ch. 11, p. 192). In altering ‘our habits of time and space’, a peculiarly postmodern enterprise, magical realism challenges too a certain conception of history.12 The notion of ‘history’ is often included, but it is no longer treated as a primary or privileged entity. One of the most arresting features of Carter’s text in terms of magical realism, finally, relates to its treatment of fantastic elements. Compelling images such as the marvellous invention that would fulfil the ‘human desire to live in the past, the present, and the future all at once’ (Pt. II, Ch. 5, p. 136) give expression to such evident impossibility. Indeed, many of these beautiful images are difficult to imagine literally. As if the result of the train crash has been to imprint the actual tigers on glass, Olga finds among the wreckage ‘a shard of mirror strangely painted with umber stripes on orange. When she touched it, it burned her fingers’ (Pt. III, Ch. 4, p. 221). Later, when the circus group approach the abandoned conservatory, an extraordinary scene confronts them: ‘We saw the house was roofed with tigers. Authentic, fearfully symmetrical tigers burning as brightly as those who had been lost . . . [with] tails that dropped down over the eaves like icicles of fur’ (Pt. III, Ch. 7, p. 249). It is the striking choice of almost visionary language here – for example ‘roofed’ and ‘icicles of fur’ – that vividly conjures up such an impossible scene. Indeed, descriptions of animals’ behaviour alone might testify to the novel’s magical realism because a common phenomenon in this genre is the appearance of thinking animals. The Professor is able to write a note to the Colonel expressing the apes’ views (Pt. II, Ch. 8, p. 169), and the cats ‘pondered the mystery of their obedience and were astonished by it’ (Pt. II, Ch. 7, p. 148). Some share the mysterious origins of the protagonist: ‘The Shaman believed the bear, as a baby, had been let down from the sky in a silver cradle’ (Pt. III, Ch. 7, p. 257). Moments of ‘enchantment’ centre on the magical capacities of the circus animals: ‘All the tigers were on their hind legs, now, waltzing as in a magic ballroom in the country where the lemon trees grow’ (Pt. II, Ch. 8, p. 164). The lyricism of such ‘enchanted’ descriptions points to an affinity with Latin American magical realism, yet in

12 Faris, ‘Scheherazade’s Children’, p. 174.

H E AT H E R J O H N S O N

79

Carter’s novel the miraculous facilitates a scepticism towards inherited concepts – nothing can be taken for granted when anything seems possible – and an exploration of the politics of gender, an exploration evident in Carter’s focus on the gendered aspects of myth.

Myth Magical realist texts’ ‘primary narrative investment are often in myths’ or collective practices.13 Carter’s understanding of the term ‘myth’ reaches beyond the traditional notion of myth found elsewhere in magical realism: ‘I use other people’s books, European literature, as though it were that kind of folklore’ – the folklore of the peasantry used in other traditions of magical realism – whereas in her case, it is ‘a folklore of the intelligentsia’.14 Many of the myths that feature in her work, then, are of a specifically textual nature. In this regard, readers are most familiar with Carter’s use of fairy tales, which themselves would be considered by Carter as myths, since they belong to a Western cultural tradition, or as she puts it, ‘the lumber room of the Western European imagination’.15 Her writing discloses the relation of ‘everyday experience’ and a ‘system of imagery derived from subterranean areas behind [that] everyday experience’.16 Such interpretative or critical intentions are, for Janet Wolff, a quintessentially postmodernist trait, in its ‘commitment . . . to engage critically with contemporary culture’.17 The exhortation to examine cultural structures obviously carries particular resonance for women, for whom ‘investigating the social fictions that regulate our lives’ becomes an important political activity.18 It is important to realize that Carter’s feminism is not confined to the interests of women; she rejects the idea that ‘fiction that demythologizes . . . is only of interest to women’, arguing that men live by myths as much as women do.19 We can see this in part by the fate of many of her male characters, including Walser, who undergoes a kind of feminist conversion that enables him to achieve a nonpatriarchal relationship at the novel’s close. Central to Nights at the Circus, however, is the Greek myth of Leda and the swan, immortalized in Homer’s The Iliad, and also referring here to the myth’s many subsequent literary manifestations (for example, W. B. Yeats’s poem, ‘Leda and the Swan’). Objects remind Fevvers of this mythic conception: for example, ‘a lovely little swan’, provided by the Grand Duke, is ‘a tribute, perhaps, to her putative paternity’ (Pt. II, Ch. 11, p. 192). Carter’s treatment of this myth is typical of her work in that she literalizes the symbols that represent that myth: ‘Carter offers us a rewrite of Homer that

13 Zamora and Faris, Magical Realism, p. 3. 14 Haffenden, Novelists in Interview, p. 82. 15 Angela Carter, ‘Notes from the Frontline’, in Michelene Wandor (ed.), On Gender and Writing, London: Pandora, 1983, p. 72. 16 Angela Carter, Fireworks (1974), New York: Harper & Row, 1981, p. 133. 17 Janet Wolff, Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990, p. 96. 18 Carter, quoted in Wandor, On Gender and Writing, p. 70. 19 Haffenden, Novelists in Interview, p. 91.

80

CRITICAL READINGS

redefines the future of humanity from a feminist ideology . . . such a rewrite only proves possible with the help of magic realist means: the female protagonist, “Fevvers,” is a “bird,” not just metaphorically but also literally.’20 D’haen’s brief discussion of Carter’s novel points not only to the writer’s use of myth but also to her trademark process of exposing the literal underbelly of metaphor. Her approach to myth works by a process of defamiliarization, a strategy of ‘looking at the world as though it were strange’.21 Her demythologizing can be directly related to her magical realism. As she herself said, ‘Another way of magicking or making everything strange is to take metaphor literally’.22 This strategy exposes the tension between the idealized representation or ‘preposterous depiction’ (Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 7) and the often physical reality behind mythic images. In order to explore the composition of metaphor and materialism that she locates in the operation of myth, Carter’s fiction engages in a process of exaggeration, parody and deflation. Several examples of inflated names (‘Madonna of the Arena’, Pt. II, Ch. 5, p. 126) and gigantic descriptions of the mythicized female character (her ‘half hundredweight of hair’, Pt. I, Ch. 5, p. 78) have been discussed above. This exaggerated style also relates to magical realism, since, as Zamora and Faris point out, ‘excess is a hallmark of the mode’.23 In Fevvers’ case, she is depicted as a mythic symbol and a real person, for Carter believes that ‘there is a materiality to symbols’.24 Aware of their dual identity, she is caught between the literal and the metaphorical: Fevvers ‘felt herself turning, willy-nilly, from a woman into an idea’ (Pt. III, Ch. 10, p. 289). Carter explores images of femininity through a revisionist practice, in which iconic figures from history, myth and literature are ‘embodied’ and, thereby, demythicized. At the same time, Carter’s impulse to exaggerate and embody means that her writing often works to question the ahistorical status of myth. She challenges the claims made by myths to a ‘truth’ that is beyond the specifics of history and culture. Mythologizing efforts are mocked through parody. Tempted by the Shaman’s regard for her, Lizzie wonders whether she should take ‘a little holiday from rationality and play at being a minor deity’ (Pt. III, Envoi, p. 293). Parody such as this is accompanied by the device of deflation, where Carter accentuates the material, the bodily, the vernacular and the grotesque (just as the text contrasts elevated language with vulgarisms, as discussed in relation to metafiction). A gradual revelation of Fevvers’ material reality takes place over the course of the novel. She is seen by others, not as magnificent and powerful, but as a flawed vision: ‘Incompetence of the apparition!’ thinks the Shaman when he realizes that her wings are not functional (Pt. III, Ch. 8, p. 269). She herself admits the decline of her status: ‘Now she was a crippled wonder . . . The Cockney Venus! she thought bitterly’ (Pt. III, Ch. 9, p. 273). In a sense, the physicality of her wings becomes more apparent once she requires splints (Pt. III, Ch. 5, p. 228). The essence of her mythical status, her wings, which are generally not described with any precision or realistic detail (‘my you-know-whats’), soon ‘fluttered

20 21 22 23 24

D’haen, ‘Magical Realism and Postmodernism’, p. 199. D’haen, ‘Magical Realism and Postmodernism’, p. 199. Haffenden, Novelists in Interview, p. 92. Zamora and Faris, Magical Realism, p. 1. Haffenden, Novelists in Interview, p. 85.

H E AT H E R J O H N S O N

81

lopsidedly’ (Pt. III, Ch. 7, p. 251) in a gesture of imperfection out of keeping with an idealized flying woman. Hints that her mythic status might be explained or reduced in this manner come early in the novel. When Walser considers the effect of her voice, ‘Walser had become a prisoner of her voice, her cavernous, sombre voice’, he reflects that ‘such a voice could almost have had its source, not within her throat but in some ingenious mechanism or other behind the canvas screen’ (Pt. I, Ch. 2, p. 43). Just as the Wizard of Oz ceases to be a monumental figure when the curtain reveals a man pulling levers, so Walser, ever the sceptic, suspects that myth is constructed and is an effect more than a human-scaled reality. As Fevvers’ material reality becomes foregrounded, the mythic names are discarded: ‘No Venus, or Helen, or Angel of the Apocalypse, not Izrael or Isfahel . . . only a poor freak down on her luck, and an object of the most dubious kind of reality’ (Pt. III, Ch. 10, p. 290). Fevvers is not the only character associated with myth in the novel. Buffo starts to unravel both himself and the myth of the clown. In one of the references to W. B. Yeats’s poetry (all of which act as a reminder of the poet’s version of Leda and the swan), Buffo’s identity also seems constructed: ‘He is himself the centre that does not hold’ (Pt. II, Ch. 4, p. 117). The history of the great clown highlights the source of myth’s power: ‘This story is not precisely true but has the poetic truth of myth’ (Pt. II, Ch. 4, p. 121). Metafictional concerns about the distinction between fact and fiction continue to be an issue in the closing chapters: ‘The young American it was who kept the whole story of the old Fevvers in his notebooks; she longed for him to tell her she was true’ (Pt. III, Ch. 9, p. 273). Her mythic status is dependent on his textual snapshot of her and on her continued identification with that version. Ironically, Fevvers herself seems to regret the loss of her status, a clear indication that Carter does not take a simplistic view of mythic identity but instead acknowledges that the attention which Fevvers elicits must ultimately be on her own terms and of her own making. As materialism replaces myth – ‘not the music of the spheres, but of blood, of flesh, of sinew, of the heart’ (Pt. III, Ch. 9, p. 275) – Fevvers’ wings cease to be marvellous objects: no longer hidden, they ‘no longer seemed remarkable’ (Pt. III, Ch. 9, p. 277). Myth proves to be a sanitized, hermetic phenomenon in its hidden realities; its power relies on what is secret and mysterious. Once Fevvers cannot maintain her appearance, her authentic self seems to emerge: ‘She was so shabby that she looked like a fraud’ (Pt. III, Ch. 9, p. 277). The friction between myth and reality, which Carter so deftly handles, drives her novel Nights at the Circus, and the unmasking of the fantastical in turn creates a world that is magically real. Through its matrix of metafiction, magical realism and myth, Carter’s text undermines the reader’s sense of assurance and challenges cultural preconceptions. The novel ends on a self-reflexive note, when Fevvers tells Walser: ‘ “To think I really fooled you!” she marvelled. “It just goes to show there’s nothing like confidence” ’ (Pt. III, Envoi, p. 295). This final comment points to the distinctive tone in which the story is told (challenging the reader to disbelieve) and suggests too that the novel, like the discourses of fiction, history, reality and myth can operate as a kind of confidence trick, fooling the inattentive reader. Carter’s writing reminds us of the need to remain wary, to be sceptical like Walser, and so alert to the possible deception inherent to familiar cultural discourses which often determine our understanding of the world.

Sarah Sceats, ‘Performance, Identity and the Body’ Sarah Sceats is Principal Lecturer in English Literature at Kingston University, London and specializes in twentieth-century fiction, especially women’s writing. She has published on Angela Carter, Doris Lessing, Rose Tremain, Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Bowen and Betty Miller among others. She is particularly interested in food and eating in literature, and contributed a chapter on appetites in Carter’s work for Joseph Bristow’s and Trev Lynn Broughton’s The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter (see Further reading, p. 129). Her book Food, Consumption and the Body in Contemporary Women’s Fiction, in which Angela Carter’s writing features substantially, was published in 2000 by Cambridge University Press (paperback 2004). More recently, she has published on Carter in A Companion to Magical Realism edited by Stephen M. Hart and Wen-chin Ouyang (Boydell and Brewer, 2005). Sarah Sceats’s essay on performance begins by relating Nights at the Circus to Judith Butler’s thesis on ‘performativity’ (see Text and contexts, pp. 37–9). She outlines the limitations of this argument, pointing out, through reference to Martha Nussbaum1, that it provides no analysis of what the basis of these subversive or parodic acts might be and therefore leaves readers to ‘fill the void with their own good ideas of equality or dignity’. She also notes that Angela Carter does not provide a purely performative model of gender identity. Indeed, she argues, the novel emphasizes the different physical ‘inhabitation’ of bodies and stresses Fevvers’ intermittent assertion of the singular control she claims to maintain behind her masquerade. Behind this claim to control her own image or masquerade and, therefore, absolutely central to this chapter, is the concept of ‘agency’, a term that describes active and independent participation in any negotiation of meaning, practice, policy or convention. As such, the establishment of where agency lies

1

Martha Nussbaum, ‘The Professor of Parody’, The New Republic Online, available at (accessed 1 August 2006).

S A R A H S C E AT S

83

in any action, event or performance (fictional or otherwise) lies at the heart of the politics or political effects of such actions. This is because all social change, subversion or indeed maintenance of power is driven by the active participation of (usually various) ‘agents’ who seek to exert control over the way the meaning of such actions, events and identities take shape and are understood. For example, important matters of sexual politics are involved in Fevvers’ spectacular acting out of various male and stereotypical fantasies of the female body (‘Helen of the High Wire’, Leda and the swan, and so on). Through these episodes, the novel challenges the reader to decide whether Fevvers acts independently of those fantasies as a controlling agent who has chosen to use them strategically to further her own interests or whether she is merely collaborating with a controlling and conventional male view of femininity within which she is merely an object. Fevvers’ act, therefore, works to question whether intention is crucial to the establishment of agency: does Fevvers deliberately and knowingly act out male fantasies of women with an excess that renders them comically harmless? Does this ‘knowingness’ of intention make her the agent of her own identity? Or is she in fact trapped by these fantasies and simply deludes herself that she maintains the upper hand? The question of agency, then, becomes especially complicated in forms of performance such as parody, mimicry or irony where intention is obscured by false positions which are deliberately taken up in order to mock or undermine existing assumptions. Clearly, as Sceats points out, in Nights at the Circus, a novel which is packed with performances of this kind – together with crucial insights into the lives that lie behind them – the establishment of agency and intention is almost perpetually at issue. Also relevant here is Butler’s thesis that cultural ‘norms’, in terms of gender identities, can be subverted through forms of parody that involve questioning the idea of an ‘original’ through a kind of ‘dissonant’ imitation.2 Her example in this thesis is drag performance, through which ‘the anatomy of the performer is already distinct from the gender of the performer’ so that the ‘the performance suggests a dissonance not only between sex and performance, but sex and gender, and gender and performance’.3 The intriguing complication about Nights at the Circus, however, is that this element of dissonance is provided by Fevvers’ anatomical distinction – her wings – which, whether the reader believes in them or not, remain in question and therefore render Fevvers’ identity, together with the many versions of female she performs, subversively unstable. What is more, unlike a drag act, Fevvers’ audience must wonder beyond gender to question what sort of manifestation of the human she is and, indeed, whether she is ‘fact or fiction’. As Sceats suggests, therefore, Fevvers’ bodily ‘inhabitation’ is not only important but also involves issues of identity that go beyond questioning the opposition between male and female.

2 3

Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 137. Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 137.

84

CRITICAL READINGS

From Sarah Sceats, ‘Performance, Identity and the Body’ Nights at the Circus is self-evidently a novel about performance. The central figure, Fevvers, is literally – professionally – a performer, and much of the situation and content of the novel is concerned with performing. Even the text itself has a performative quality: ‘Look at me!’ it seems to declare, with as much exuberant self-consciousness as Fevvers displays in her intoxicating, calculated opening narrative. Carter’s writing is nothing if not extravagant. Yet it is not so just for the sake of pleasure, important as pleasure may be, for, as Carter herself says, however vibrant the prose and lifelike the characters, she is inclined to be didactic, and she writes to be understood on as many levels as possible.4 In this respect she is a deeply political writer. Part of that politics has to do with the intersection between individuals and society, and one of the chief mechanisms of interaction, manifest in much of Carter’s writing, is performance. As Lorna Sage has emphasized, Carter’s writing incorporates and engages to a remarkable degree with contemporary theory (as well as plundering and engaging with eclectic aspects of European – and other – cultures).5 There is no doubt that in some ways she was a prescient thinker and writer. In terms of performance, it is fairly commonplace to read her fiction as in some degree anticipating the writings of Judith Butler, in its coupling of the notion of performance with the way women, in particular, engage with the world. Nights at the Circus was published some six years before Butler’s Gender Trouble and nine before her Bodies that Matter (see Text and contexts, pp. 37–9).6 Both writers embrace the notion of the constructedness of femininity, a concept that in part grows out of psychoanalytic theory. An especially significant reference point for Butler is an essay by Joan Rivière, first published in 1929, called ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’ (see Text and contexts, pp. 37–8). In this, Rivière argues that women put on a mask of femininity ‘both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it’.7 To put it another way, ‘feminine’ behaviour may be seen as defensive and instrumental, performed (however unconsciously) for a purpose in a world in which power and femininity are considered to be mutually exclusive. It is not simply the expression of an inherent femininity, for women have the capacity to be ‘masculine’ as well as feminine. Butler goes further, proposing that gender is not part of an essential identity but is discursively constructed or displayed in performative acts. In other words, gender (masculinity/femininity) is not necessarily connected to sex (being male or female), for these polarized genders, so argues Butler, are artificial and to some extent arbitrary. She claims that gendered behaviour does not merely reflect or report on something that already exists in the world but actively creates and reinforces it. If we carried out these ‘performances’ differently, parodically, therefore, we might be able to disturb the restrictive categories a little and achieve some

4 5 6 7

Haffenden, Novelists in Interview, p. 79 and in the Omnibus programme, Angela Carter’s Curious Room, dir: Kim Evans, BBC Television, 15 September 1992. See Angela Carter’s Curious Room, as well as Lorna Sage, ‘Introduction’, in Sage (ed.), Flesh and the Mirror, pp. 13–20. Butler, Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, New York and London: Routledge, 1993. Rivière, ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’, p. 38.

S A R A H S C E AT S

85

agency for ourselves. The applicability of these ideas to Carter’s writing generally is evident in the edgy sexual politics of her early novels, in the gender and identity bending of The Infernal Desires of Dr Hoffman. The Passion of New Eve and many of her short stories, most particularly in the frankly performative emphases of her last two novels, Nights at the Circus and Wise Children. Not everyone is convinced by Butler’s arguments, however. In a significant review essay, Martha Nussbaum criticizes Butler for her inference that we are entirely constructed by our experience at the same time as making the contradictory claim that we can offer resistance and even effect change.8 She takes her to task, too, for the claim that the body, especially in its sexual differentiation, is a social construction; since the body is clearly a material entity, it seems preferable to speak instead of our conception of the body as being socially constructed. ‘It is surely too simple to write it all off as culture’, Nussbaum writes, with limpid logic, for different bodies have different needs at different times, and the interplay between the physical and the cultural is more complex and nuanced than Butler’s ‘abstract pronouncements’ allow.9 As for the question of parodic performance as a means of subverting inequalities, this is all very well, Nussbaum says, but it only works if you agree about what needs to be subverted. What happens when someone engages in parodic and subversive acts that are, for example, anti-feminist or anti-gay: ‘These things happen. They are parodic and subversive. Why, then, aren’t they daring and good?’.10 She also points out that the mechanism Butler identifies as producing the harmful perpetuation of gender inequalities also functions where ‘social virtues’ (such as justice) are concerned. As any good teacher or student knows, we learn through repeated performance (Nussbaum alludes to Aristotle’s concept of learning by doing) and this is how we become socialized in the best sense. The parodic subversion of justice is not good, either in politics or in personal life. The core of Nussbaum’s criticism, then, is that there is a lack of core in Butler: readers must fill the void with their own good ideas of equality or dignity. Before I consider the extent to which Butler and Nussbaum are applicable to Carter’s writing, it is worth noting that there is some debate about the extent to which Carter embraces a truly ‘Butlerian’ view of the mutability of gender, given what some see as her recidivist tendency to represent women as having an ‘essential’ feminine identity. Some critics consider that, despite her avowed emphasis on the social construction of gender and identity, her writing indicates a view of femininity and masculinity as being to some extent innate and, therefore, presumably, unalterable. Since this ground has been well trodden, I do not propose to rehearse all the arguments here, though some of the material will effectively be covered, if from a slightly different perspective.11 Instead of limiting the focus of this essay to considering the performative nature of gender, my intention is rather to explore how Nights at the Circus plays with various political and existential possibilities relating to the self and performance, the body and the construction (deconstruction/reconstruction) of identity.

8 9 10 11

Nussbaum, ‘The Professor of Parody’. Nussbaum, ‘The Professor of Parody’. Nussbaum, ‘The Professor of Parody’. For examples, see Bristow and Broughton, The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter.

86

CRITICAL READINGS

Gender is key, for much if not all of Carter’s work is concerned with gender and identity, arising out of her early preoccupation with how, as she puts it in ‘Notes from the Front Line’, ‘that social fiction of my femininity was created, by means outside my control, and palmed off on me as the real thing.’12 The construction of such a ‘social fiction’ of femininity – and to some extent masculinity – is precisely what Carter explores, exaggerates and parodies in her writing. Indeed, she does not limit her focus to gender but maintains that we are thoroughly moulded by circumstance and history; she writes of sexuality, for example, that ‘flesh comes to us out of history; so does the repression and taboo that governs our experience of flesh’.13 Her approach to identity, gender politics and interpersonal relations is thoroughly material. Thus, her stance is at once more general and more specifically historicized than Butler’s and, indeed, encompasses class and race as well as gender. If, as Nussbaum suggests, Butler’s theory offers subversion without values, Carter’s famed subversiveness is underpinned by a socialist feminism that embraces not just analysis but action too.14 While Fevvers in Nights at the Circus is self-regardingly and provocatively subversive, Lizzie represents her active political counterpart, engaging in covert anarchist and suffragette activities in London and despatching revolutionary materials from Siberia. The women in the panopticon also take action in their break-out from imprisonment as performers under the Countess’s gaze, and the performing apes likewise achieve freedom through education. As for Carter’s conception of the body compared to Butler’s, it is more thoroughly material inasmuch as she lays a powerful emphasis on physicality, on physical differences, needs, desires and appetites, as well as acknowledging the social and political forces that act upon the person. If Butler’s theory is borne out in Carter’s writing, then, this only happens in a limited way. In Nights at the Circus, Carter’s approach to gender is inextricable from her exploration of identity and how these are (or might be) constructed: textually, historically, performatively. Fevvers’ opening narration illustrates all three. Obviously, it is a textual construction inasmuch as we are reading a book by Angela Carter who has created the text out of nothing, as the occasional metafictional aside reminds us. But the auto/biography that comprises Part I, related by Fevvers and Lizzie to Walser the journalist, is both their constructed history (‘[t]hirsty work, this autobiography’, Pt. I, Ch. 4, p. 57) and a narrative about the construction of Fevvers herself. This is important, not only because through Fevvers Carter identifies some of the forces at work in the construction of female identities but also because it is through telling her own story – truthfully or otherwise – that Fevvers is the agent of her own construction or reconstruction herself. The telling is finely calculated and carefully crafted. The performance involved may be viewed as a sort of double act, with Lizzie acting as the prompt and foil. Part of the fun of the opening narrative is Carter’s many indications of performance, some of which read almost as stage directions: ‘Pause of a single heartbeat’, for

12 Angela Carter, ‘Notes from the Front Line’ (1983), in Uglow (ed.), Shaking a Leg, p. 38. 13 Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman, London: Virago, 1979, p. 11. 14 For evidence of this political dimension in Carter’s journalism, see ‘Masochism for the Masses’ (1983) and ‘Anger in a Black Landscape’ (1983) in Uglow (ed.), Shaking a Leg, pp. 189–94 and 43–52 respectively.

S A R A H S C E AT S

87

example (Pt. I, Ch. 2, p. 33). And this narrative, this ‘autobiography’, this performance is put on entirely for the benefit of Walser, the sceptical journalist who wishes to discover her secret. ‘ “Oh, Lizzie,” she cries, “the gentleman must know the truth!” ’ gazing at him sharply ‘as if to ascertain just how far she could go’ (Pt. I, Ch. 2, p. 35). So how is Fevvers constructed? To begin with, she – with Lizzie’s complicity – tells a tall tale. The literal impossibility of her existence is of no matter; if we are to read the novel, or Walser to engage with her story, it is simply necessary to accept the premise of a six-foot-tall bird-woman. Indeed, by the end of the novel it hardly matters whether her wings are real or not, and her ultimate jubilant claim, ‘I fooled you’ (Pt. III, Envoi, p. 295) seems to apply not so much to her wings as to her supposed virginity – and to Carter’s own ability to entrance her readers. The creation of Fevvers lies rather in the detail, of both the story and its telling. If we think back to Carter’s comment about the ‘social fiction’ of her femininity being foisted onto her, Fevvers’ tale is at once an exaggerated delineation of the factors that go to make up that social fiction (together with the constraints it creates) and a demonstration of resistance – of the battle to achieve some sort of agency for women in particular in the face of those constraints. The constructions, pressures and restrictions are evident at every turn. Fevvers may spend her early life in a wholly benign, rational and female world, but it is the world of the brothel nevertheless, in which the women are, by Lizzie’s admission, ‘caged’ (Pt. I, Ch. 2, p. 38). It seems that Carter tries to have it both ways here, for life in the brothel is depicted in positively utopian terms, and prostitution is described by Lizzie as less exploitative than marriage. Yet Fevvers admits that ‘No woman would turn her belly to the trade unless pricked by economic necessity’ (Pt. I, Ch. 2, p. 39), and all the women are preparing themselves for preferable occupations. In this first incarnation, Fevvers is imprisoned by the male gaze, encased as she is by the wet white that hardens on her face and clothing. The burning down of Ma Nelson’s brothel, therefore, while ostensibly an act of revenge against her sanctimonious brother, enacts a liberation of sorts from catering to the specular desires of men. Fevvers’ next step, however, is retrogressive, and she falls into a much less benign environment in the more literal imprisonment of Madame Schreck’s Gothic establishment. Here, with the other female ‘freaks’, she is again displayed, this time in a macabre travesty of religious devotion, catering to the most secret and perverted of male appetites. These are the dark, fearful appetites of those who are rich and seem powerful in the world and yet are tormented with secret fears: ‘there was no terror in the house our customers did not bring with them’ (Pt. I, Ch. 4, p. 62), observes Fevvers. ‘Freakish’ women thus serve to tease the dread of otherwise confident men. It is important to note that the women themselves, like those in Ma Nelson’s establishment, are only freakish in the eyes of the ‘normal’, constrained world of gender stereotyping, and they easily establish bonds of mutual support and complicity among themselves. The embedded narratives of the women here, each of whom has a symbolic deformity or peculiarity, emphasize and enact a variety of constructions and abuses foisted on young women. Most of the peculiarities have to do with objectification, infantalization (miniaturization) and the inculcation of passivity. Sleeping Beauty, for example, the logical conclusion of passivity, embodies the

88

CRITICAL READINGS

reluctance of a blooming young woman to take any part in such restricted adult womanhood (I use the performance metaphor deliberately). The only exception, in terms of gender, is Toussaint, the black servant, who, with heavy symbolic resonance, lacks a mouth. Significantly, he is named after one of the leaders of the Haitian slave uprising of 1791, and Lizzie’s reference to his fictional afterlife suggests he lives up to his name in becoming a political orator. Toussaint’s plight parallels the women’s in terms of oppression (the construction of an enslaved masculinity makes no provision for a voice), but he refuses to take part in the tableaux vivants, removing himself, by his own agency, from being an object of the (masculine) gaze. Carter thus extends her range of concern with restrictive constructions beyond gender to include race but does not conflate the two. Notwithstanding the implied coercion, the motif of imprisonment within a constructed gender throughout Fevvers’ opening ‘autobiography’ is loaded with references and images suggesting a challenge to or subversion of the ‘social fiction’ of gendered or, to a lesser extent, racial or class identity. The studying whores, recurrent instances of female solidarity, Lizzie’s – and Toussaint’s – politics and especially the sword with which Ma Nelson equips Fevvers, all provide examples of resistance to the given order. But it is towards the end of Part I of the novel that the emphasis shifts more emphatically towards agency as Fevvers ceases to be a puppet of the various madames and begins to take action for herself. When Fevvers is kidnapped and taken to Mr Rosencreutz’s Gothic mansion, she does active battle with his attempts to ensnare, elevate and sacrifice her on the altar of his impotence and superstition. First, she identifies and pigeonholes his peculiar brand of misogyny, thereby empowering herself though knowledge and analysis: ‘This is some kind of heretical possibly Manichean version of neoPlatonic Rosicrucianism, thinks I to myself’ (Pt. I, Ch. 5, p. 77). Then – after she belatedly realizes that he intends a ritual sacrifice – she fends him off with her sword and takes flight out of the window. Carter does not make it easy; Fevvers’ escape is described as a scramble, and her ungainly flight from tree to tree is hardly a soaring victory. But, despite her inexperience and limited capabilities, she acts: she makes use of a sword (that peculiarly phallic symbol of power), quick thinking and her body’s attributes and abilities. There is an issue of biological essentialism in the representation of Fevvers’ escape; of whether it is her wings or own sense of personal agency that cause it to happen. Without wings – that is without what makes Fevvers physically distinctive – she would not be able to make her escape: she would fall to the ground and die. Since earlier, when describing how she learned to fly, she proclaims: ‘I only knew my body was the abode of limitless freedom’ (Pt. I, Ch. 2, p. 41), we must assume that her physical attributes give her confidence and ambition, that it really is the case that in her body lies her freedom. This body is no social artefact; it is not moulded by conventional mores and is very materially present. Indeed, Fevvers’ body may be said to be constructed in defiance of social norms (as it is, of course, quite deliberately, by Carter) in its resistance to models of delicate, responsive femininity and its overt expressions of need, satisfactions and desire. Fevvers might even be said to confound Rivière inasmuch as she performs but adopts no defensive mask; she is defiantly masculine and erotically feminine. I will return to the body later. First, however, there is more to say about

S A R A H S C E AT S

89

achieving agency, especially in the face of social pressures towards passive acceptance of a conventionally constructed identity. If, as I have suggested, Nights of the Circus provides evidence of resistance through refusal, there is also what may be considered a more proactive and positive response through performance. To some extent, Fevvers’ performance within her opening narrative – mirrored by those of her fellow female ‘freaks’ – demonstrates recognition of and even collusion with the requirement to perform in certain ways for the delectation of society, here largely in the form of male voyeurs and female profiteers. Even so, there is rebelliousness and subversion. The infant Fevvers-as-Cupid, for example – armed, proto-phallically with a toy bow and arrows – does not merely sit quietly and decoratively in an alcove but from time to time fires her toy arrows among the brothel’s visitors. She claims this is play, but it clearly bears some symbolic charge. At Madame Schreck’s, she briefly acts as ‘avenging angel’ (Pt. I, Ch. 4, p. 72), though her performance is curtailed when she is captured by Rosencreutz’s men. Later, of course, she begins to create her own performances, casting off the various ‘parts’ she has hitherto been ascribed, as Cupid, Winged Victory, Death the Protectoress, Azrael and Queen of Ambiguities (and the other various labels Rosencreutz attempts to give her) and taking flight as Fevvers, the winged aerialiste. By the time the novel moves into its second part in St Petersburg, she is the winged aerialiste, and the essence of her role, her performance, has altered. Her identity through the central portion of the novel remains relatively fixed; we perceive her largely from Walser’s point of view, as magnificent, unassailable, out of reach. Even Lizzie, it seems, finds her a handful at this time. With Fevvers thus established, for the time being at least, the novel’s second and third parts open out to explore performance more widely and to focus on the construction of Walser’s identity. The connection between performance and identity is most clearly articulated in terms of the clowns, but it is by no means straightforward. When Walser dons clown make-up at the beginning of Part II, he becomes for the first time an object of fear for children (in the person of little Ivan); it is as though his own untarnished and childlike innocence becomes overlaid by the pre-existing face (and thus culturally constructed identity) of the clown. Subject to the clown’s exaggerated identity, he experiences a hyperbolic tendency: ‘Walser-the-clown, it seemed, could juggle with the dictionary with a zest that would have abashed Walser-the-foreign-correspondent’ (Pt. II, Ch. 1, p. 98). Still more unsettling is the ‘vertiginous sense of freedom’ (Pt. II, Ch. 1, p. 103) that he experiences on first putting on the clown make-up. Here surely is the essence of performance. It is the ‘pretend’ that so frightened the Puritans and that Judith Butler is so keen to harness in relation to gender: ‘the freedom that lies behind the mask, within dissimulation, the freedom to juggle with being, and, indeed, with the language which is vital to our being, that lies at the heart of burlesque’ (Pt. II, Ch. 1, p. 103). Holding forth to the new recruit, Buffo extemporizes along similar lines. Clowns possess the rare privilege of being able to construct for themselves the face they present to the world; as he puts it, ‘we make ourselves’ (Pt. II, Ch. 4, p. 121). This is, he says, a ‘perfect’ freedom (Pt. II, Ch. 4, p. 122). Once chosen, however, the face is permanent; the circus code allows no change, the wild freedom of existential choice disappears, and the clown is condemned to be, or to perform, his constructed self in perpetuity. Clowns, the source of mirth,

90

CRITICAL READINGS

are themselves attended by despair; they have not even chosen to become clowns, Buffo declaims, but resorted to clowning through failure in other spheres. What is left, he asks rhetorically, but to force, and thus own, the laughter of which they would anyway be the object? The freedom to juggle with being is an illusion, itself a mere performance. There is, however, a kind of agency here, and in Carter’s overall scale of values, clowns are empowered; as the ‘whores of mirth’ (Pt. II, Ch. 4, p. 119) they receive due payment for their performance, even if they thereby gain no pleasure themselves. It is nevertheless a bitterly prescriptive empowerment. The clowns are creatures of appearance; they present comic faces to the world which are, Carter says, like death masks, as though they themselves are in some ‘essential sense’ absent (Pt. II, Ch. 4, p. 116). Clowns’ behaviour, then, is not so much an expression of self, of identity, of gender even, as precisely the kind of parodic performance that Butler embraces. But what are they achieving through these performances? The clowns may, according to Carter, commit ‘the most ferocious piracies’, but only so long as they maintain their strange appearance, so as to remain ‘on the safe side of terror’ (Pt. II, Ch. 7, p. 151). They are operating, in effect, more as a safety valve than as agents of change; far from disturbing and displacing the rigidity of pre-existing categories, the clowns’ performances merely confirm the status quo. They provide evidence that everything will be all right: ‘that nothing came of catastrophe; that chaos invoked stasis’ (Pt. II, Ch. 7, pp. 151–2). Their performance, in other words, is carnivalesque, something about which Carter is unequivocal: ‘The essence of the carnival, the festival, the Feast of Fools, is transience. It is here today and gone tomorrow, a release of tension not a reconstitution of order, a refreshment . . . after which everything can go on again exactly as if nothing had happened’ (Carter’s ellipsis, my italics).15 For the public, therefore, the clowns represent liberating but contained anarchy, but the clowns themselves are confirmed by their pretended negativity; their performance of chaos conceals only the chaos beneath. When the drink-sodden Buffo finally loses his mind in the third section of the novel, he appears to be ‘performing’ madness, though his despair gives the act an apocalyptic quality. All his fellows can do is to join in, in a frantic attempt to sustain the illusion. Reality and performance coincide here to terrible effect; the cliché of the suffering Pierrot is borne out in the clowns’ desperate cover-up of Buffo’s disintegration. Similarly, with the clowns’ own departure: prevailed upon to perform one last time with a view to charming the troupe’s captors, they dance ‘the whirling apart of everything’ (Pt. III, Ch. 7, p. 243), calling up an entropic wind which bears no relation to their performed identities but which enacts the negating and deathly spirit of Buffo’s peroration in Clown Alley. If the clowns – as the antithesis of the celebratory eroticism of Fevvers – engage in performance which is at such odds with identity that it cannot ultimately be sustained, then what of the other members of the circus? Because of her traumatic history, Mignon might be said to be entirely performance; she can sustain only a present-tense existence, the shortness of her memory saving her from despair, for

15 Angela Carter, ‘In Pantoland’ (1991), in Uglow (ed.), Shaking a Leg, p. 399.

S A R A H S C E AT S

91

her core is in suspension. What delivers her from sleepwalking is itself a performance of sorts but one of a different order: singing. Inarticulate and numbed with abuse as she is, she expresses her self in song, an artless performance that reaches out to the voiceless ‘Princess of Abyssinia’. The coupling of these two – first as a circus act with the tigers, later as lovers and music-makers – paradoxically becomes less and less a performed connection and more and more a lived and expressed one. The Strong Man, too, moves away from performance, through recognition that his overdeveloped body conceals an underdeveloped spirit, and dedication to loving service of the two women. As for the performing apes, once the drunken stupor of their trainer and defection of Mignon leave them to their own devices, they simply use their public performance as a cover for selfbetterment, in the manner of the ‘girls’ at Ma Nelson’s. The apes might be said to conceal, Rivière style, their ‘human’ selves with an ‘animal’ masquerade. Walser, however, unlike the other circus performers, is a neophyte, a greenhorn, a ‘first-of-May’ (Pt. II, Ch. 1, p. 102). New not only in terms of circus, he is in some way inwardly untouched by experience. His detachment lends him a useful scepticism, but it also renders his identity incomplete. As Lizzie and Fevvers observe, he is immature and ‘unhatched’ (Pt. III, Ch. 10, p. 281). The freedom he experiences on donning clown’s make-up is thus doubly vertiginous, for it allows him to try out an alternative identity to the one he has tried but not fully inhabited thus far. Such evolution of character does not, however, take him far enough for Carter, who proceeds to further deconstruct his identity by temporarily removing his entire sense of self. While she gives him experiences – most notably humiliations and erotic awakening – that begin to mark him through the course of the narrative, nothing less will suffice than reduction to a clean sheet. The point of this reduction is that it provides a dehistoricized empty canvas on which to (re)construct a desired or desirable identity. In the final section of the novel, Carter takes the above-all rational and sceptical Walser and robs him of his wits, leaving him after the train explosion ‘[l]ike the landscape . . . a perfect blank’ (Pt. III, Ch. 4, p. 222). Driven by hunger, he rubs his belly; when the escapees from the panopticon abandon him, he cries freely, though he is quickly diverted by the enchanting sight of starlit snow. It is this diminished capacity, along with a sensuous response to sound, warmth and the smell of simmering herbs, that delivers him into the hands of the Shaman, who further twists his wits and thus engineers the expansion of his perceptions to accommodate more comprehensively an irrational world, one that properly includes the ‘reality’ of Fevvers. In a cultural polarization in which intellect is often figured as masculine and the body as feminine, Carter’s masquerade here gives Walser his femininity. While he is struggling to get some bearings in his delirium, memories of his previous experiences are of almost no use to Walser, given how little they impinged on his sense of self. It is as though he consisted of performance, without being the performer. He cannot re-establish his ‘existential credibility’ (Pt. III, Ch. 8, p. 252), except as hallucinating madman; his memories seem even to him to be mere raving, a ragbag of shreds and tatters which are meaningless without an interpretive narrative. The Shaman, of course, is on hand to interpret, but since his world view is a ‘closed system’ it cannot take into account any explanation but its own and thus makes no connection with Walser’s lived experience or his perception and memories of it. So, with no personal bearings and the only

92

CRITICAL READINGS

available identity being that of the madman, Walser’s self remains suspended. Carter makes an interesting distinction here between self and identity. The latter, it seems, is socially conferred (putatively here by the tribe) or constructed through performance. The self, by contrast, seems to be what Carter means by ‘inwardness’, that which in Walser was untouched by his experiences on the road to Damascus or among the assegai in Africa referred to at the beginning of the novel (Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 10). Walser’s self only really begins to develop in the final section when he retreats into ‘troubled introspection’ (Pt. III, Ch. 8, p. 260), as his memories slowly, piecemeal and almost incomprehensibly, return. The house of his being, in Carter’s metaphor, begins to receive its tenant. For Walser, then, performance might thus be said to be a necessary but insufficient constituent of identity. In the end, it is the presence of Fevvers that tips Walser back into possession of his mind. Her own aversion to being idealized (manifested in fits of the shivers whenever she senses someone about to ‘reduce’ her to an idea) prompts her to perform her public identity – bedraggled and truncated though it may appear in the Shaman’s hut – in a self-fulfilling promise of ‘hubris, imagination, desire’ (more performance), which in turn provokes a ‘rhapsodic rush’ of existential questions from the newly (re)constructed Walser (Pt. III, Ch. 10, p. 290). As the final chapter goes on to stress, however, the ‘new’ Walser will never be the same as the old, for his self has finally been touched, indeed shaken and changed. In an extraordinarily serious and moving passage Carter writes: That ‘self’ would never be the same again for now he knew the meaning of fear as it defines itself in its most violent form, that is, fear of the death of the beloved, of the loss of the beloved, of the loss of love. It was the beginning of an anxiety that would never end, except with the deaths of either or both; and anxiety is the beginning of conscience, which is the parent of the soul but is not compatible with innocence. (Pt. III, Ch. 10, pp. 292–3) Walser’s self has become experienced in the best sense; he has been forged into a serious person. He can begin to rehearse his own story as he contemplates his reconstruction, foreseeing a future in the experiencing first person rather than the detached third. No performance is involved here, it seems. Let us return, finally, to the body, for there is a very material concern here that is manifest in many forms in the novel, from the scatological humour of the clowns to the panopticon escapees’ use of body fluids and substances to effect their communication and thus their escape. If flesh comes to us out of history, it is nevertheless the medium through which we experience the world and from which our identity is inseparable, however ‘constructed’ it may be. The imprisonment of the body is an absolute, as both the panopticon episode and the various attempted and successful incarcerations of Fevvers illustrate. There is a faint parallel too, perhaps, with the clowns trapped in their roles. The women in the panopticon (the guards and Countess almost as much as the prisoners) are wholly incarcerated. Furthermore, they are imprisoned in their roles: prisoners, guards, observer. The prisoners have no choice but to perform as prisoners, which defines them every way except inwardly, in their selves. No matter how often Olga

S A R A H S C E AT S

93

Alexandrovna rehearses her guilt, she cannot find it in herself to feel penitent at having chosen herself over her violent and abusive husband. Even though she is kept under total surveillance for three years, her self remains intact; the gaze of the Countess – unlike those of the circus audience – does not confer identity. It is, rather, mutual touch and intense speaking that liberates and confirms. For her part, Fevvers is most threatened by the twin physical and psychical dangers of incarceration and abandonment. When she takes up the Grand Duke’s invitation, she risks being reduced (literally) to nothing but a semblance of the performing bird-woman. The intended miniaturization is an apt metaphor of the wholesale removal of agency, and the discounting of all her (large-scale) female (but not feminine) attributes. Her body thus deprived of expression, like a puppet, and her symbiotic relationship with the audience removed, she would be as effectively isolated and tortured as Olga Alexandrovna and company. We have already seen how imprisonment and escape function as a dynamic in her account of her early life and in the construction of her identity. Though she escapes the Grand Duke – by means, once again, of her wits and her body, together with the experience that guides her to manipulate (literally) his lust – there is both a physical and an emotional cost. Like Walser, she is rendered vulnerable, and her identity is called into question. In the aftermath of her nick-of-time escape, Fevvers mopes in the train, unkempt and grizzling, bemoaning the wilderness space and trimming her toenails disconsolately. To make matters worse, when the train is blown up, Fevvers finds herself in an agoraphobic nightmare: Siberia, the seemingly limitless antithesis of her beloved London. Carter complicates matters further by giving Fevvers a broken wing and disposing of Lizzie’s handbag wherein lie the means to revive Fevvers body and spirits by touching up the roots of her blonde hair and re-dyeing her feathers. This is an intermittent handbag, it seems, for though it is ‘lost’ in the train wreck (Pt. III, Ch. 5, p. 226), Lizzie manages to find a pack of cards in it for the restive clowns in the captors’ shed (Pt. III, Ch. 5, p. 228) and a candle to light the birth hut in the wilderness (Pt. III, Ch. 10, p. 283). Fevvers’ body, that ‘abode of limitless freedom’ (Pt. I, Ch. 2, p. 41) deteriorates to such an extent that Colonel Kearney mentally redubs her ‘The Feathered Frump’ (Pt. III, Ch. 9, p. 276). What Carter does to Fevvers here is the counterpart to what she inflicts on Walser (though not quite so savage, perhaps); where he is physically attacked and deprived of his self, she is physically degraded and deprived of her audience and her income. Lizzie’s observations provide a guide to the significance of these depredations when she reminds Fevvers that she can only make a living by making a show of herself. For Fevvers is a being who embodies a ‘silent demand to be looked at’ (Pt. III, Ch. 9, p. 277); that is her power and her singularity. It is as though performance itself, the relationship with an audience, imbues her with her special identity. When she has her moment of existential vertigo on first re-encountering the disorientated Walser and seeing herself reflected as a hallucination in his eyes, all she can do to revive herself is to spread and flutter her wings, as best she can in the circumstances. It is the ‘Ooooooh’ of collective admiration that instantly renews her and makes her feel more blonde, positive and desirable. In the ‘eyes of awe’ of her primitive audience, she rediscovers who she is: ‘transformed back into her old self again, without an application of peroxide, even’ (Pt. III, Envoi, p. 293). Though, unlike Walser, she is not remade by her experience, she is restored and,

94

CRITICAL READINGS

as she had imagined, the admiration in Walser’s gaze is what makes her feel whole. More than that, it causes her to expand physically, so that she seems about to burst the roof of the hut. All the elements of her identity are here: performance, singularity, the relation to a beloved and triumphant material presence (inhabitation of her body). Small wonder she laughs so infectiously.

Jeannette Baxter, ‘Postmodernism’ Jeannette Baxter is an associate tutor at the University of East Anglia, specializing in contemporary British fiction but with a particular interest in the cultural and intellectual legacies of surrealism in post-war British fiction. Her interest in the counter-historical dimensions of Angela Carter’s literary postmodernism is part of a wider research project into experimental historiographic practices in the work of Angela Carter, as well as a range of post-war British authors such as J. G. Ballard, Kasuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, John Fowles and Doris Lessing. Her focus on the intertextual nature of Carter’s writing stems from a research project (headed by Lorna Sage) in which she collated Angela Carter’s private library. In this essay, Baxter takes issue with Aidan Day’s reading of Nights at the Circus (see Texts and contexts, pp. 56–9) wherein he argues that the novel’s engagement with the history and politics of late-nineteenth-century Britain prevents it from being properly postmodern. She argues instead that Carter excavates and engages with certain specific aspects of postmodern literature and culture in order to fashion and advance her wider and ongoing feminist project. By tracing a range of techniques, such as pastiche, parody and, in particular, intertextuality (see Text and contexts, pp. 31–4), she explores the ways in which Carter draws upon postmodern strategies in order to create new critical perspectives that place official, male-authored versions of history and culture on trial. Baxter, however, also notes that Carter does not embrace postmodernism wholeheartedly or uncritically. Postmodern views of identity as a purely performative or fragmenting construct (see Text and contexts, pp. 31–4), she believes, do not quite fit Carter’s feminist agenda, nor do postmodern poetics that would engage in ‘a kind of terminal reflexiveness, a notion of fiction as a vacated funhouse’ correspond with Carter’s idea of fiction’s role as a form of historical and cultural critique.1 The chapter begins, therefore, by asserting that

1

Lorna Sage, Angela Carter: Writers and Their Work, Plymouth: Northcote House, 1994, p. 58.

96

CRITICAL READINGS

Carter approaches literary postmodernism with the discerning and transformative gaze of the bricoleur (see Text and contexts, pp. 32–4), seizing on postmodernism’s disruptive textual practices and modifying them according to her own experimental vision. Nights at the Circus is subsequently found to exhibit a highly idiosyncratic form of postmodern narrative, which is at once subversive in impulse but which also remains historically and politically engaged.

From Jeannette Baxter, ‘Postmodernism’ I have always used a very wide number of references because of tending to regard all of Western Europe as a great scrap-yard from which you can assemble all sorts of new vehicles . . . bricolage.2 Night at the Circus is a flamboyant and provocative exercise in bricolage. Flaunting an eclectic knowledge of European literature, literary and cultural theory, politics, philosophy, Greek mythology, music and the visual arts, Angela Carter mines the vestiges of Western culture and history with intellectual rigour and imaginative agility. The question that this chapter addresses is whether her wideranging and thrilling engagement with such diverse cultural and historical materials can reasonably be characterized as postmodern. A fertile point of entry into the postmodern debate is Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (see Text and contexts, p. 31). According to Lyotard, the defining characteristic of the postmodern condition is ‘an incredulity towards metanarratives’.3 He argues that in the second half of the twentieth century there emerges a profound disbelief in grand explanatory theories that make absolute claims to knowledge and truth (he cites the belief in human progress towards perfection characteristic of Enlightenment philosophy, as well as Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis as examples). However, metanarratives or ‘grand narratives’, Lyotard argues, function to regulate and restrain individual subjects by validating certain political or philosophical positions and forms of historical knowledge over others. Metanarratives are also privileged over ‘micronarratives’ because these homogenizing and ‘unifying’ stories offer exclusive accounts of ‘legitimate’ knowledge and truth which negate or exclude the possibility of potential counter or ‘illegitimate’ narratives. Lyotard exposes this exclusion of contradictory ‘little narratives’ while he himself champions them because in a ‘postmodern condition’ marked by indeterminacy and fragmentation he regards the ‘little narrative’ as the quintessential form of imaginative invention and resistance – experimenting with, challenging and dismantling traditions and myths of legitimation.

2 3

Haffenden, Novelists in Interview, p. 92. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi, Minneapolis, Minn.: Minnesota University Press, 1984, p. xxiv.

JEANNETTE BAXTER

97

There are many stories to be told in Nights at the Circus, and the first section rips opens on a note of raucous difference and illegitimacy: ‘Lor’ love you, sir!’ Fevvers sang out in a voice that clanged like dustbin lids. ‘As to my place of birth, why, I first saw light of day right here in smoky old London, didn’t I! Not billed the “Cockney Venus”, for nothing, sir, though they could just as well ’ave called me “Helen of the High Wire”, due to the unusual circumstances in which I come ashore – for I never docked via what you might call the normal channels, sir, oh, dear me, no; but just like Helen of Troy, was hatched. (Pt. I, Ch. 1, p.7) Fevvers’ rasping voice sets the tone for a narrative of authorial dexterity in which knowledge is unstable and identity is indeterminate. From her very first utterance, the aerialiste’s autobiographical reminiscences show themselves to be as excessive and puzzling as her manoeuvres on the circus trapeze. Cutting laterally across discursive registers, Fevvers cloaks her biographical details in an idiosyncratic blend of cockney vernacular (‘Lor’ love you, sir!’), urban and classical mythology (‘ “Helen of the High Wire” ’), and metaphor (‘the normal channels’). Her mobile narrative style, in turn, elides fragments of high (classical literature) and low (circus) culture, while her eclectic idiom mixes aspects of poetic and popular language. On one occasion, for instance, Walser is ‘amazed enough to drop his professional imperturbability’ (Pt. I, Ch. 2, p. 38) when, describing her upbringing in Ma Nelson’s whorehouse, Fevvers makes an intellectual connection between the declining sex trade and the work of ‘the French Poet’ (Pt. I, Ch. 2, p. 38), Charles Baudelaire. For the reader and Walser, this clash of conventionally incommensurate references and registers is at once comical and confusing. There is something inherently funny about a gargantuan bird-woman who is conversant with Latin (Pt. I, Ch. 2, p. 40), literature, philosophy and metaphysics (Pt. I, Ch. 5, p. 77), who also burps and farts and revels in ‘a thousand quips, mostly on the lewd side’ (Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 8). Yet Fevvers’ fragmentary and paradoxical discourse also forms a radical postmodern pastiche that disturbs readerly expectations and undermines notions of textual authority and authenticity. The disruption of conventional knowledge, however, is not the sole motive within Fevvers’ rhetorical performances. Her jostling of different vocabularies and incongruous discourses also functions to create a narrative of displacement. Fevvers’ use of extended metaphoric language (‘to come ashore’, ‘to dock’, ‘normal channels’) allows her to stretch out the story of her birth in a manner that obscures factual origins and fosters fictional ones; each figurative utterance prevents the reader (and Walser) from anchoring the story of her life. Similarly, Fevvers’ flair for exploiting the ambiguities inherent in language equips her with a dynamic and elusive voice. Her echoing of Helen of Troy’s ‘hatching’ clearly provides the circus entertainer with a birth narrative of mythic proportions. Yet the metaphor of hatching also supplies the knowing narrator with a license to invent; to ‘hatch’ also means to devise or to invent a plot. Unlike Helen, her silent classical counterpart, this verbose storyteller fashions herself as an active and vocal agent in her own historical, cultural and textual production. Refusing to be written into someone else’s story, therefore, Fevvers boasts of how, on a Grand

98

CRITICAL READINGS

Tour of Europe, she performed in Vienna and ‘deformed the dreams of that entire generation who would immediately commit themselves whole-heartedly to psychoanalysis’ (Pt. I, Ch. 1. p. 11). Displaying a postmodern incredulity, in Lyotard’s terms, to the grand narrative of psychoanalysis, Fevvers resists incorporation into the Freudian grand narrative that would seek to label and transform her from mesmerizing spectacle into mute symptom. No single, overarching story about Fevvers exists. Rather, her verbal autobiography consists of an accumulation of ‘little narratives’. Though billed variously as the ‘Cockney Venus’, ‘Helen of the High Wire’ and ‘l’Ange Anglaise’, Fevvers is the name ‘on the lips of all’, while her image proliferates across newspapers, billboards and posters, circulating vertiginously in the media circus that the Illustrated London News has dubbed ‘Fevvermania’ (Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 8). The promiscuity of quotation marks within Fevvers’ narrative, which is itself framed by quotation marks, distinguishes the novel as one in which a very postmodern sense of authorship and meaning operates. It is one in which it is very difficult to draw clear distinctions between the voices of the author, narrator and character and in which the narrative is frequently highly self-reflexive, drawing attention to its own literariness and its fictional status. An important critical reference point in this respect is Roland Barthes’s essay, ‘The Death of the Author’, which is a cornerstone of poststructuralist thought and a precursor for postmodern theories of author-text-reader relations. Barthes’s thesis dismantles traditional views of the author as the authoritative ‘explanation’ of the work. He argues that no unified authorial consciousness or stable locus of meaning exists behind (or above) the text. Instead, he posits a theory of intertextuality (see Text and contexts, pp. 31–4) in which the text is authored by a plurality of voices, textual references and narrative echoes in which it is ‘language that speaks, not the author’.4 Barthes’s theories of authorship are explored on a fictional level by Carter in a contest of narrative voices that pitches Walser’s scepticism against Fevvers’ and Lizzie’s experimental narration. Accustomed to trading in facts rather than fictions, Walser scrutinizes each claim that passes through his narrators’ lips: ‘(How does she do that?’ pondered the reporter.)’, ‘(check if she trained as a dancer.)’ (Pt. I, Ch. 1, pp. 8 and 16). Walser’s controlling narrative strategies cannot, however, curb the proliferation of meaning which Fevvers’ and Lizzie’s postmodern story exhibits. Indeed, Fevvers’ and Lizzie’s playful and shifting narrative makes a dramatic feature out of what Barthes claims is true of all texts, which is that they are a ‘tissue of quotations drawn from the inumberable centres of culture’.5 Crucially, Barthes’s reconfiguration of textual paradigms goes on to place a different emphasis on how meaning is produced from this newly understood sense of literary texts as things which are not in the first place completely original and therefore more provisional. Because the text has not been articulated and fixed by a godlike author figure, it is open to fresh interpretation by each new reader or, as Barthes puts it, ‘the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author’.6 As this suggests, Barthes’s theory of textuality as a place of intertextuality ushers in a reader who is no longer a passive consumer but an active producer of a text. 4 5 6

Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath, London: Fontana, 1977, p. 143. Barthes, Image, Music, Text, p. 146. Barthes, Image, Music, Text, p. 148.

JEANNETTE BAXTER

99

In ‘Notes from the Front Line’, Carter wrote explicitly about the role of the reader in the creation of the text in a way that explicitly echoes Barthes: ‘Reading is just as creative an activity as writing and most intellectual development depends upon new readings of old texts. I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the old bottles explode.’7 Carter’s view of intertextuality as an explosive, disruptive textual strategy resonates clearly with what Barthes termed its ‘truly revolutionary’ potential in that ‘to refuse to fix meaning’ is to destabilize the dominant cultural ideologies of ‘reason, science, law’.8 What Carter’s approach to intertextuality particularly stresses, however, is the writer’s and reader’s position in relation to history. Barthes’s modern writer is ‘born simultaneously with the text’, and writing or ‘enunciation has no other content (contains no other proposition) than the act by which it is uttered’.9 Similarly, Barthes’s reader is stripped of any personal identity, ‘the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted’.10 In contrast, as we see below, Carter seeks to emphasize the reader’s historical specificity. Barthes’s removal of a sense of history from author–reader–text relations does not quite fit Carter’s historical and feminist agenda in Nights at the Circus. As Aidan Day points out, ‘for all its flamboyant craziness’, a very real sense of history permeates Carter’s novel, from its ‘firmly historicised’ setting to its ‘reference to specifically historical facts and personages’.11 Day’s stress on the materialist or Marxist feminist dimensions of Nights at the Circus points up, in turn, the potential limitations of postmodernism for Carter’s fictional project. According to Day, Carter ‘stands at odds’ with what he terms ‘extreme postmodernism’ because the ‘relativising impulse’ of postmodern philosophy, namely the notion that all historical systems (such as patriarchy), or political perspectives (such as sexism), are equally true and valid, threatens to undermine Carter’s ‘specifically feminist politics’.12 If postmodernism is, as Day asserts, apolitical and ahistorical in its outlook, then what potential remains for a grounded feminist critique? Although Day’s reading is valuable for highlighting potential theoretical tensions between postmodernism and feminism, his conclusion that they are mutually exclusive (he argues that for Carter to be a materialist feminist she must also be ‘fundamentally anti-postmodernism’) is potentially reductive on two counts.13 First, it refuses even to acknowledge the historical and political potential of postmodernist writing when others, such as Linda Hutcheon, argue that it is ‘resolutely historical and inescapably political’.14 Self-conscious narrative strategies function, she argues, reinstall ‘historical contexts as significant and even

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Carter, ‘Notes from the Front Line’, in Michelene Wandor (ed.), On Gender and Writing, p. 71. Barthes, Image, Music, Text, p. 147. Barthes, Image, Music, Text, p. 145–6. Barthes, Image, Music, Text, p. 148. Day, Angela Carter, pp. 169–70. Day, Angela Carter, p. 12. Day, Angela Carter, p. 12. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, London and New York, Routledge, 1988, p. 8.

100

CRITICAL READINGS

determining’ while they simultaneously call the ‘entire notion of historical knowledge’ into question.15 Second, Day’s reluctance to explore the identifiably postmodern textures of Carter’s work (although he does acknowledge pastiche, intertextuality and reflexiveness as features of her writing) also closes down potentially valuable discussion about the ways in which Carter’s bricolage approach to postmodernism actually liberates the material histories which postmodernist fiction ostensibly denies. Intertextuality does not function in Nights at the Circus, for instance, as a form of postmodern play that is estranged from historical reality. Although Carter recognizes the potentially futile nature of embedded narrative forms – ‘Books about books is fun but frivolous’ – she fashions a unique intertextual space that is at once imaginatively charged and historically engaged.16 For the intertextual and historical layers which Carter deposits in her narrative generate the rubbing together of multiple layers – historical and imaginative, fact and fiction, past and present – in order to produce a dynamic space that is not ahistorical, but counter-historical. Carter sets out to rewrite history by modifying traditional forms of historical representation, for, as Fevvers puts it: ‘It’s not the human “soul” that must be forged on the anvil of history but the anvil itself must be changed in order to change humanity’ (Pt. III, Ch. 7, p. 240). By emphasizing the intertextual nature of history, Carter works towards forging a radical, revisionist history which boasts a double impulse. First, it exposes the writing of history as a literary process and scrutinizes its forms of representation, which conspicuously omit, as Carter reminds us, ‘that statistically rather more than half the human race to which we belong’.17 Second, it disturbs the reader’s inherited assumptions, expectations and previously held views of history in order to engender a new historical perspective. One intertextual reference that opens up the historical and political contexts of Carter’s novel is John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748). Hailed as the ‘first pornographic novel written in English’, Cleland’s eighteenth-century vision of prostitution has courted controversy, censorship and prosecution.18 These are precisely the heretical qualities that make Cleland an important figure on Carter’s reading list alongside the Marquis de Sade and Georges Bataille (Carter published her own exercise in the cultural history of pornography, The Sadean Woman in 1979). Carter foregrounds issues surrounding literary censorship and moral propriety when Lizzie challenges Walser to publish exclusive excerpts from Fevvers’ apprenticeship in Ma Nelson’s brothel: ‘Come on, sir, will they let you print that in your newspapers? For these were women of the worst class and defiled’ (Pt. I, Ch. 2, p. 21). Representing society’s official voice of condemnation, Lizzie’s emphases function ironically to hold the moral hypocrisy of Victorian society up to ridicule. Declared the ‘great social evil’ by contemporary nineteenth-century commentators, prostitution was viewed as

15 Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, p. 89. 16 Haffenden, Novelists in Interview, p. 79. 17 Angela Carter, ‘The Language of Sisterhood’, in Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks (eds), The State of the Language, Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1980, p. 227. 18 P. Fowler and A. Jackson (eds), Launching Fanny Hill: Essays on the Novel and Its Influences, New York: AMS Press, 2003, p. xiii.

JEANNETTE BAXTER

101

both ‘symptom and effect of urban poverty and immorality’.19 Accusations of moral degeneracy, social decay and sexual contagion were directed at the figure of the prostitute. Yet conspicuously absent from this economic equation was the male (middle-class, married, respectable) customer. While prostitutes were vilified publicly, Victorian double standards ensured that male virtue and morality remained untainted and intact. Is Walser (and his reading public) ready for a subversive tale that will challenge a selective and hypocritical patriarchal narrative which denies its own illegitimate pleasures? In the first instance, Carter’s project of historical recovery appropriates Cleland’s representation of the whorehouse as a site of female agency and autonomy. Following brief employment within the fiercely competitive brothel run by Mrs Brown (an avatar of Madame Schreck), Fanny graduates to Mrs Cole’s ‘academy’ for fallen women. A space of ‘decency, modesty and order’, Mrs Cole’s business operates in the spirit of camaraderie, cooperation and ethical conduct as she offers ‘the best advice and instruction’ to her ‘small domestic flock’.20 Parallels between Mrs Cole’s economic utopia and Ma Nelson’s ‘academy’ as a discrete and discerning space in which Fevvers and her ‘sisters’ live and work are clear: ‘At first sight, you’d have thought this drawing room was the smoking room of a gentlemen’s club of the utmost exclusivity, for Nelson encouraged an almost lugubrious degree of masculine good behaviour’ (Pt. I, Ch. 2, pp. 27–8). Following Cleland, Carter writes the whorehouse into another, more visible space within cultural history. Mrs Brown’s and Ma Nelson’s academies for working girls are not, as official history would have it, sites of defilement and disease, but professional establishments of decency and decorum. The brothel emerges within this libertine vision as a monument to an alternative ‘Age of Reason’; not, as Day points out, ‘the Enlightenment reason of egocentricity, exclusion and oppression’, but ‘the reason of mutuality, communication and exchange’ – an Age of Reason that recognizes the need for sexual expression to be a healthy and vital component within the larger social mechanism.21 Notably, it is on this subject of sexual expression that Nights at the Circus departs radically from Fanny Hill as Carter tests the limits of Cleland’s text by forging a literary experiment which does not require an eighteenth-century ending: Fanny Hill closes with the marriage of Fanny and Charles. As feminist readers such as Nancy K. Miller have pointed out, the narrative’s formal and historical constraints ‘require the ultimate neutralization of disruptive female desire’.22 In a closing gesture of patriarchal ascendancy, the flame of female sexual expression with which Cleland’s novel opens is extinguished, once and for all, with the institution of marriage. Whereas Cleland’s narrative of female sexual autonomy buckles under historical pressure, however, Carter wrests female desire from such formal and ideological restraints. The eventual union between Fevvers and Walser, for instance, rewrites traditional representations of male–female power

19 Hilary Fraser and Daniel Brown, English Prose of the Nineteenth Century, London: Longman, 1996, p. 111. 20 John Cleland, Fanny Hill, or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748), London: Penguin, 1994, pp. 116–17. 21 Day, Angela Carter, pp. 182–3. 22 Nancy K. Miller, ‘ “I’s” in Drag: The Sex of Recollection’, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 22, 1981, pp. 47–57 (p. 53).

102

CRITICAL READINGS

relations with a heretical postmodern flourish. Equipped only for the ‘woman on top position’, Fevvers straddles Walser in a parody of heterosexual coupling when, practising at introducing his bride-to-be (‘Let me introduce my wife, Mrs Sophie Walser’), Walser is ‘feminized’ as Fevvers pins him ‘cheerfully to the bed’ (Pt. III, Envoi, pp. 293–4). As Linda Hutcheon notes, the force of postmodern parody lies in its dual potential to be both ‘deconstructively critical and constructively creative, paradoxically making us aware of both the limits and the powers of representation’.23 At the end of Nights at the Circus, therefore, Carter seizes upon the ambiguous force of parody in order to censure Cleland’s containment of female sexuality and, at the same time, to posit an alternative, albeit playful, model for thinking about sexual politics. In his discussion of postmodern fiction, the cultural critic Fredric Jameson argues that the recycling of history is symptomatic of contemporary art’s antihistorical gravitation towards reproducing works of ‘pseudo-historical depth, in which the history of aesthetic style displaces “real” history’.24 One problem with Jameson’s suggestion that postmodern literature privileges surface over depth and style over substance is that it depends upon a questionable distinction between ‘fake’ and ‘real’ histories. Indeed, notions of ‘real’ history are under erasure in Carter’s subversive narrative. Take the serio-comic figure of Ma Nelson as a case in point. Revered by Fevvers and Lizzie as ‘a proper lady’ who ‘always dressed in full dress uniform of an Admiral of the Fleet’ (Pt. I, Ch. 2, p. 32), Ma Nelson is also a gross parody of the historical figure Lord Horatio Nelson (1758–1805). The subject of countless books, paintings, films and documentaries, Nelson has been celebrated and immortalized within epic narratives of nationalism, heroism and sacrifice. What this fictional treatment of Lord Nelson highlights, however, is the way in which history is constructed and mediated as a literary process. By challenging official history’s claims to veracity, fixity and authenticity, postmodernist fiction works to cleave open the historical record. In the words of the radical historian, Hayden White, it scrutinizes the relationship between history and literature and ‘the essentially provisional and contingent nature of historical representations and of their susceptibility to infinite revision’.25 Drawing on the popular, comic and irreverent traditions of the music hall and pantomime that travestied official, po-faced representations of ‘great’ historical figures, Carter seizes the opportunity to exploit the conditional nature of historical representation by rewriting Nelson. Once the valorized epic hero and keeper of the nation, she transforms him into a one-eyed brothel-keeper whose story is a bawdy and vulgar mock epic. Appropriating postmodern parody once more as ‘a kind of contesting revision or rereading of the past that both confirms and subverts the power of the representations of history’, Carter engages in an exercise in iconoclasm.26 Yet her subversive narrative does more than merely write Ma Nelson back into a historical record that might have denied her existence. Rather, her

23 Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, London and New York: Routledge, 1989, p. 98. 24 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991, p. 20. 25 Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978, p. 82. 26 Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, p. 95.

JEANNETTE BAXTER

103

excessive parodic presence serves to contaminate and bastardize an official and homogenous patriarchal history that discriminated against her on the grounds of her sex. Carter extends her enquiry into the relationship between historical representation and female subjectivity in another passage in which notions of ‘real’ and ‘fake’ are playfully negotiated, namely the moment when Fevvers interprets Leda and the Swan by Titian, which hangs in Ma Nelson’s picture gallery. The story of Leda’s rape by Zeus has been re-envisaged throughout art and literary history by poets (W. B. Yeats, ‘Leda and the Swan’ [1924]; H.D. ‘Leda’ [1925]) painters (Leda and the Swan, Leonardo da Vinci [1506–8]) and authors (John Banville’s Mefisto [1986], and Carter’s The Magic Toyshop [1973]). In her illuminating reading of intertextuality in Nights at the Circus, Mary Russo raises the suspicion, however, that Ma Nelson’s painting might be a forgery: ‘Fevvers construes her own primal scene from a possibly fake and certainly filthy (“as though through a glass darkly”) painting of “Leda and the Swan” by Titian.’27 Russo’s reading highlights the unreliability of textual and visual documents whose claims to authenticity can be skilfully created by the convincing hand of the forger. But the difference here is that the skilful artist at work in this instance of falsification is not an anonymous painter, but Carter herself, because, as far as we know, Titian never painted a version of Leda and the swan. Carter’s incorporation of a fake intertextual reference into her novel underscores postmodern fiction’s ongoing interrogation of the grounds of textual authority and authenticity because, in the absence of any kind of stable author figure, the interpretative burden of a text lies ‘not in its origin but in its destination’.28 Fevvers’ reading of this ambiguous visual intertext announces the birth of the reader in more than one sense, then. Obscured by dirt and grease which have been deposited over time, the painting which hangs over Ma Nelson’s mantlepiece is as open to interpretation as a Rorschach ink print. Thus, as Barthes argues, the text becomes ‘a polysemic space where the paths of several possible meanings intersect’.29 As a reader/ spectator, Fevvers is once more the agent of her own textual production, and this imaginative reader-response, which transforms a fiction into a material reality, emerges as a vital strategy within her survival. Carter explores the relationship between reading, agency and survival still further in the scene at the Alhambra in which Fevvers flaunts her excessive, glorious biology before a stupefied audience: While the band play on, slowly, slowly, she got to her knees, then to her feet, still muffled up in her voluminous cape, that crested helmet of red and purple plumes on her head [. . .] On her back she bore an airy burden of furled plumage as gaudy as that of a Brazilian cockatoo. On her red mouth there was an artificial smile.

27 Russo, The Female Grotesque, p. 216. 28 Barthes, Image, Music, Text, p. 148. 29 Roland Barthes ‘Theory of the Text’, in Robert Young (ed.), Untying the Text: A Poststructuralist Reader, trans. Ian McLeod, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981, p. 37.

104

CRITICAL READINGS

Look at me! With a grand, proud, ironic grace, she exhibited herself before the eyes of the audience as if she were a marvellous present too good to be played with. Look, not touch. [. . .] Look at me! (Pt. I, Ch. 1, pp. 14–15) Self-display and empowerment are, as one critic notes, inextricably linked for Fevvers as she ‘makes a virtue out of her spectacular objectification and positively demands to be looked at.’30 Teasing the audience with her indeterminate ontology – ‘Is she fact or is she fiction?’ (Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 7) – Fevvers has the bewildered audience under her control. At the same time, however, the nature of spectacle that this ambiguous ‘freak’ cultivates is more than a mere reversal of the object– subject, performer–audience power dynamic. Indeed, in a moment of theatrical revelation in which she emerges from a voluminous cape and into the spotlight, Fevvers fashions her arrival on stage in the form of an overtly stylized birth narrative. Offering herself up as a postmodern text which the audience can read and produce, Fevvers’ imperative to ‘suspend disbelief’ calls for a mode of spectatorship that disrupts conventional ways of reading ontological categories (such as real/fake, fact/fiction, normal/abnormal), and that encourages a more questioning and imaginative response to these categories. Another way of seeing Fevvers’ spectacular body emerges, for instance, when her baroque performance is read intertextually with Max Ernst’s surrealist painting, The Robing of the Bride (1939). Ernst’s picture depicts a giant bird-woman swathed in a cloak of vibrant red plumage (which is also her body) who is being attended to by three figures of corporeal excess: a half-human, half-swan figure who clutches a broken arrow, a pregnant dwarf with four breasts and webbed feet and a nymph-like figure whose hair is a fan of velvet and red plumes. The bride and her attendants are standing in front of a mirror that, notably, does not reflect them from behind. Instead, it represents an altered version of the frontal image that the spectator is looking at. In the mirror image, the bridal party has been turned into red stone; all distinction, detail and excess have been calcified into a mass of crimson pumice. A visual tension exists, then, between the two images within the painting: an image of excess versus an image of calcification. One way of reading this visual intertext, which also opens up the political moment of production of Nights at the Circus, is as a critique of the calcification of the cultural imagination within Thatcherite politics during the 1980s in Britain. As literary and cultural commentators have observed, the aggressive venture-capitalist politics of the Thatcher era transformed the arts into businesses and creativity into stone; as the author Anthony Burgess put it: ‘We have had ten years of a lady [Thatcher] who chills the heart and stultifies the national imagination.’31 Statuesque and carefully ‘cantilevered’ by her ‘Iron Maiden’ corset (Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 15), Fevvers clearly evokes the ‘Iron Lady’ of British politics, Margaret Thatcher, whose power and influence reached into (and shook up) political 30 Britzolakis, ‘Angela Carter’s Fetishism’, p. 471. 31 Anthony Burgess, quoted in Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern British Novel: 1878–2001, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001, p. 447.

JEANNETTE BAXTER

105

domains normally reserved for male leaders. Moreover, Fevvers’ immersion in and exploitation of commercial culture of Victorian Britain shows her to be an economic miracle of the sort that Thatcher would have admired: ‘Everywhere you saw her picture; the shops were crammed with “Fevvers” garters, stockings, fans, cigar, shaving soap . . . She even lent it to a brand of baking powder’ (Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 8). As the name ‘Fevvers’ (the plural form ‘feathers’ means commodity) verifies, the aerialiste is a circulating product within a postmodern capitalist spectacle of merchandising, branding and celebrity endorsement.32 Although intriguing parallels can be drawn between Thatcher’s and Fevvers’ narratives of female influence, a paradox nevertheless exists between Fevvers’ exploitation of a capitalist spectacle that calcifies the imagination and her role as an artist whose survival depends, in part, on the liberation of the imagination. Ironically, this textual ambiguity, which Ernst’s painting replicates visually, touches on the paradoxical position to be occupied by Carter who, following the success of this novel, was at the height of her career success in the 1980s since, as Sarah Gamble notes, it was during this period that her novels were remarketed and ‘repackaged for more general consumption’.33 As Malcolm Bradbury observes: ‘Novelists were themselves an economic miracle, anti-Thatcherite icons in an age of “lifestyles”, “role-models” and a culture of consumption, emulation, stylistic competition, presentation, glossy and mannered “success”.’34 That Carter incorporates this cultural double bind into the contradictory figure of Fevvers suggests her anticipation of and critical resistance to this co-opting of literary authors as figures to be consumed like any other in the postmodern marketplace. After all, Fevvers is sought out initially by advertisers precisely for her uniqueness and character, but the ubiquity of her name and picture in advertising soon erodes the very virtues upon which it first seized. What is worse, Fevvers’ very existence is threatened when her journey leads her to lose ‘some vital something of herself [. . .] some of that sense of her own magnificence which had previously sustained her trajectory’ (Pt. III, Ch. 8, p. 273). As this sense of loss of self suggests, then, there is more to Fevvers than a purely performative postmodern identity. Although the postmodern idea of the self as ‘a social and ideological construct which is endlessly in process’ fits certain aspects of the artiste (the way the audience constructs her, her endless layers of make-up, her self-conscious form of narration), it does not tell the whole story.35 Another dimension exists, therefore, to Fevvers’ instruction to the audience at the Alhambra – ‘Look at me!’ (Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 15). The implication is that beneath Fevvers’ excessive surface, an inner depth also resides. Fevvers is a site of tension, in other words, between the metaphoric and the material, between the performing body and the physical body. Lizzie gestures to this duality when she reminds Fevvers that her ‘singularity’ is not entirely dependent on her construction by others; ‘You’re fading away, as if it was only always nothing but the discipline of the audience that kept you in trim’ (Pt. III, Envoi, p. 282). Fevvers’ material disintegration towards the end of the novel (her dark roots are showing, her feathers are

32 33 34 35

Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979, F:119, p. 974. Gamble, The Fiction of Angela Carter, p. 137. Bradbury, The Modern British Novel, p. 451. Ian Gregson, Postmodern Literature, London: Arnold, 2004, p. 40.

106

CRITICAL READINGS

moulting, and she is covered in ‘spots and rashes’ (Pt. III, Ch. 9, pp. 271 and 277) is a physical manifestation of a crisis of self-confidence, which is intimately linked to her love for Walser and, specifically, with the implications of their relationship for her feminist agenda. A shortcoming in Fevvers’ feminism, Carter intimates, is the belief that in order to love Walser, she must relinquish her autonomous self: ‘My being, my me-ness, is unique and indivisible [. . .] the essence of myself may not be given or taken, or what would there be left of me?’ (Pt. III, Envoi, pp. 280–1). That Fevvers’ perspective on marriage is a response to patriarchal paradigms that contain female agency and autonomy is clear. Yet, the suggestion remains that political, intellectual and emotional progress do not lie in a simple reversal of these oppressive conventions. Fevvers’ vision of herself as ‘the New Woman’ who will ‘mould’ Walser into ‘the New Man’, who, in turn, will record ‘the histories of those woman [sic] who would otherwise go down nameless and forgotten, erased from history as if they had never been’ (Pt. III, Envoi, p. 285) is, for instance, tellingly curtailed by Lizzie; ‘It’s going to be more complicated than that [. . .] You improve your analysis, girl, and then we’ll discuss it’ (Pt. III, Envoi, p. 286). Fevvers’ rhetoric of female emancipation (‘all the women will have wings’, Pt. III, Ch. 10, p. 285) may be utopian in spirit. But that, as far as Lizzie is concerned, is part of the problem. Meaning ‘no place’, utopia is an imaginary realm without time, space, history or politics. Progress can only emerge, therefore, out of ‘difficult’ or dystopian situations such as being in love. Indeed, the recovery and preservation of a sense of self, which is so important to Fevvers’ feminist project, is realized through a form of love which is fraught with vulnerability and anxiety, but ‘anxiety’, as Carter notes, ‘is the beginning of conscience, which is the parent of the soul but is not compatible with innocence’ (Pt. III, Envoi, p. 293). Carter advocates a form of love at the close of her novel which is neither controlling nor naïve, but one that admits tensions and ambiguities. This is evident in Walser’s reaction to Fevvers’ naked body when ‘he saw, without surprise, she indeed appeared to possess no navel but he was no longer in the mood to draw any definite conclusions from this fact’ (Pt. III, Envoi, p. 292). Walser’s ever-diminishing scepticism signals a future for himself and Fevvers which remains uncertain, but which hints, nevertheless, at mutual growth and expression. Even Lizzie recognizes the benefits of this when, looking into Walser’s eyes, she sees how Fevvers ‘was transformed back into her old self again, without an application of peroxide even’ (Pt. III, Envoi, p. 293). As for Fevvers, her power and self-confidence are restored when she embraces Walser’s love and thus stops questioning her own indeterminate identity – ‘Am I fact? Or am I fiction? (Pt. III, Ch. 19, p. 290) – and accepts that she is neither one nor the other, but both. Indeed, Fevvers’ closing line ‘To think I really fooled you! [. . .] It just goes to show there’s nothing like confidence’ (Pt. III, Envoi, p. 295) gestures to the power of self-confidence and the allure of the confidence trick. That Carter playfully reasserts Fevvers’ ambiguity at the end of the novel suggests that the aerialiste’s survival is dependent upon on a constant negotiation of self and spectacle, matter and metaphor, woman and freak. In a moment of teasing triumph, therefore, Walser and the reader are kept guessing as Fevver re-emerges, for the time at least, on top. In Nights at the Circus, Carter seizes upon the disruptive potential of

JEANNETTE BAXTER

107

postmodern aesthetics in order to fashion a subversive feminist critique. While pastiche functions to create sites of narrative resistance from which female subjects can speak back to male-authored discourses which threaten to deny them, the novel’s parodic textures posit a move away from history as a homogenous and flat narrative towards a form of historical representation which is multilayered and heterogeneous. Carter’s version of intertextuality, meanwhile, not only invites the reader to challenge normative textual boundaries and reader–text paradigms in order to participate in the making of a dense and alternative cultural history, but its mobilizing, counter-historical presence forges a series of dissenting discursive spaces. A significant achievement of Carter’s bricolage narrative, therefore, is that it calls for a review of materialist feminism and postmodernism as exclusive and antagonistic. Indeed, one conclusion that Carter urges the reader to make at the end of Nights at the Circus is that the potential for political and historical progress can be negotiated through the juxtaposition (as embodied by Fevvers) of postmodernist and feminist discourse. For it is out of this uncommon alliance that a revised historical viewpoint might just emerge which will finally allow the underdogs (the circus ‘freak’ and the ‘fallen woman’) to speak their place in the world of the text and to take their place in the text of the world.

Helen Stoddart, ‘Popular Culture, Carnival and Clowns’ Helen Stoddart is a lecturer in literature and film at the University of Keele. She is the author of Rings of Desire: Circus History and Representation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), an investigation of the cultural history of the circus in Britain and North America as well as an examination of the relationship between circus and forms of representational art, specifically film and literature. Her interest in Angela Carter, therefore, stems from Carter’s fascination with other forms of spectacular entertainment and culture, such as circus and film. She has also published ‘The Passion of New Eve and the Cinema: Hysteria, Spectacle, Masquerade’, in Fred Botting (ed.), The Gothic: Essays and Studies 2001, The English Association: Cambridge, 2001, pp. 111–32. Nights at the Circus provides an excellent example of the peculiar critical double bind in which Angela Carter found herself in her relationship to popular culture. On the one hand, as we saw (see Critical history, pp. 43–5), negative reviewers of the novel settled on terms such as ‘vulgar’ and ‘excessive’ to describe her writing. As Joseph Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton also point out, critics have too speedily identified an affinity between this perceived stylistic excess and Carter’s attraction to the ‘trashy glitziness’ of popular theatrical modes such as circus, music hall and pantomime, as though her attraction to ‘showiness’ in theme as well as style somehow makes her work incompatible with serious thought and social engagement.1 Yet an equally common criticism of the novel is that it makes too many demands on its readers with its ‘politicized’, complex and dizzying levels of allusion to the ‘high cultural’ domains of European literature and philosophy – with the implication that this would be inconsistent with the ‘appropriate’ use of familiar popular forms. The following analysis examines the specific uses of popular culture – particularly carnival and circus – in Nights at the Circus in order to assess Carter’s relationship to popular pleasures and challenges in the novel.

1

Bristow and Broughton, The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter, p. 8.

H E L E N S TO D DA RT

109

Beginning with the claim that the popular infiltrates the novel’s thematic concerns, prose texture and narrative structure, the chapter proceeds by examining the ongoing dialogue it sets up between the comic exhilaration of its popular influences and figures (most specifically the clowns) and the philosophical and critical discourses that function to qualify, distance or critique the limitations of what seem only to be easy or inconsequential pleasures. The pleasures and social and political implications of spectacle are crucial to this analysis. Where other critics have tended to ignore or underestimate the character of Walser, here both Fewers and Walser are examined in terms of their contrary but connected relationships to popular spectacle. Historically, Fevvers is more linked to nineteenth-century entertainments such as circus and music hall, whereas Walser’s fragmentary, kaleidoscopic and constantly shifting perception aligns him to the new visual pleasures of the twentieth century such as cinema and photography. For both, however, their relationship to spectacle becomes potentially fatal: for Fevvers because she has become excessively absorbed in the spectacle of herself she sells on stage and for Walser because he is in danger of substituting his experience of external spectacles, such as Fevvers, for his own sense of an accumulated experience of the world. The treatment of the clowns in Nights at the Circus also feature heavily here, both for the way in which they lie at the heart of Carter’s resistance in the novel to the political possibilities of the carnival and for the way they distinguish her mobilization of popular culture from that of the ‘high modernists’ such as T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) and W. B. Yeats (1865–1939). Whereas Carter confines her portrait of futility and self-destruction to the clowns, their references to the poetry of Yeats and Eliot pinpoint a misanthropy and sense of hopelessness and fatigue in their work that suggests mankind generally has no escape from the disintegration, meaninglessness and loss of tradition they see as inevitable in the modern world. Moreover, Carter’s good-humoured and permissive mingling of popular and high culture ends on a note of both pleasure and possibility, though it is without either a plan for the future or a coherent, rational explanation of what has passed. In both respects, then, Nights at the Circus is more postmodernist play than modernist lament. Finally, by outlining what Carter saw as the political limitations of the concept of carnival, this essay goes on to describe how the clowns’ miserable performance of madness forms part of Carter’s investigation of the political dangers of laughter at popular forms and figures. Laughter is not always freely or spontaneously given, nor is it always benign or generous, and since the novel begins and ends with Fevvers’ tumultuous guffaw, it becomes important to be able to identify both laughter’s destructive and its generative potential.

From Helen Stoddart, ‘Popular Culture, Carnival and Clowns’ Although Nights at the Circus may occasionally sound popular with its stage cockney, its exuberant style and tipsy excitement over colour, show and low bodily functions, the operation and effect of these elements of the prose are always directed by an intelligence that is critical and academic as well as pleasure-seeking.

110

CRITICAL READINGS

Even when Angela Carter constructs portraits of some of the archetypes of popular culture such as the clowns of ‘Clown Alley’, it is clear that they are the descendants of existing literary and film representations of clowns, harbouring allusions to artists such as the modernist poet T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), and Italian film director Federico Fellini (1920–93). It is also clear that Carter’s treatment of such figures is consistently imbued with extensive scholarly investigation as well as personal pleasure. The result is that all of these figures (clowns, convicts, a strongman, prostitutes and a trapeze artist) are caught up in a fictional tissue of allusion and cross-reference that holds together popular and high culture as well as the literary, the critical, the philosophical and the performative. Within this mix, therefore, the popular elements never appear entirely for their own sake as moments of pure pleasure or entertainment. Rather, they are co-opted in the service of an impulse to fill the popular with an accumulation of knowledge (both factual and reflective) and significance, an impulse that has been revolutionary and influential in the context of the development of British literary fiction at the end of the twentieth century. At the same time, the novel is also representative of a fictional and intellectual left-leaning culture that emerged in Britain from the late 1950s onwards (see Text and contexts, pp. 10–11). Within this, writers, artists and academics sought to revisit and re-evaluate popular culture in a way that gave intellectual credit and importance to many of the very features that had previously assured its dismissal: its vulgarity, use of colloquialism and dialect, comedy, accessibility, sensationalism, sentimentality, immediacy of address and a privileging of bodily movement and language over verbal wit and sophistication. Carter’s lifelong fascination with popular culture, especially its visual and spectacular forms, permeates nearly all of her fiction and non-fiction writing. Shaking a Leg, a volume of her collected journalism, contains short essays and reviews that deal with subjects ranging from the American pornographic film star, Linda Lovelace, the cult of the British cookery writer, Elizabeth David, to Irish and Arab folk tales and David O. Selznick’s film, Gone with the Wind (1939).2 Yet her fiction is probably most famous for its reworking of folk and fairy tales, Hollywood cinema (which she treats most perceptively and systematically in The Passion of New Eve (1977), music hall, popular theatre and song, with which, as Kate Webb puts it, she has a ‘field day’ in both Nights at the Circus and Wise Children3. Carter herself has explained that this impulse to unite what might be regarded by others as ‘high’ and ‘low’ (or popular) culture is not so much borne out of a desire to elevate the popular, but rather because she ‘started very early on to regard the whole of western European culture as a kind of folklore’. Therefore, despite being ‘a rather booksy person’, she saw ‘all aspects of culture as coming in on the same level’ that could not easily be separated into distinct domains.4 What is clear from this and other statements on the subject is that Carter regards folklore and ‘oral culture’ as being just as significant a foundation of Western culture as what she calls ‘ “straight” literature’. More specifically, she regarded Nights at

2 3 4

Uglow (ed.), Shaking a Leg, 1998. Kate Webb, ‘Seriously Funny: Wise Children’, in Sage (ed.), Flesh and the Mirrorr, p. 296. Haffenden, Novelists in Interview, p. 85.

H E L E N S TO D DA RT

111

the Circus, in particular, as a novel which was involved in a sort of informal conversation involving ‘all manner of stimuli’ drawn from many different aspects of culture ‘in the same casual way that writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries made references to the classics’.5 It could not be argued, therefore, that Nights at the Circus is either a popular or a populist novel in that its central conceptions and purpose, as has already been established in this book, are quite explicitly intellectual and academic as well as entertaining. It is certainly the case, however, that both popular and high culture are given equal space and status as suitable material for the working out of the novel’s larger intellectual designs. The influence of popular forms can be detected in the form and structure as well as the content of Nights at the Circus. Carter has claimed that ‘the middle section is very elaborately plotted, like a huge circus’, although it is also true that the narrative structure of the novel as a whole has something of the circus about it.6 First, it concerns Fevvers who, like the history of the modern circus itself, begins life in London before taking off around the world, achieving her most notable early successes in Paris and St Petersburg.7 Second, the novel is ostensibly circular: it begins and ends with Fevvers’ laughter, though the theatrical, thigh-slapping and ‘uproarious’ (Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 7) guffaw of a con artist winking to herself in a mirror at the start is transformed by the end into a much more generous and infectious ‘response to the giant comedy’ that links life across ‘the entire globe’ (Pt. III, Envoi, pp. 294–5). In this sense, the novel’s conclusion is opened up, rather than closed off, by its circularity. Third, the novel’s narrative structure can be characterized as episodic and fragmented in that, although Fevvers, Lizzie and Walser are present at different points throughout the narrative, the story is also divided into three clear sections (‘London’, ‘Petersburg’ and ‘Siberia’) rather like three theatrical acts. Within this, the middle section in particular is made up of what comes close to being free-standing chapters in that, narratively, they connect or overlap very little with each other. The circus, and then its various ‘star turns’, are presented like the successive acts of a circus, with the additional performance of the virtuoso writing style of Carter in the role of the loquacious ring master balancing all the elements of the proceedings together. It is important to note, however, that although the presentation of successive self-contained ‘acts’ is entirely popular, conventional and unremarkable in the circus where audiences expect exactly this, when translated into novelistic form as a division of chapters into ‘acts’, the structure is defamiliarized, or made strange, and thereby becomes a sign of the novel’s radical difference. In other words, Nights at the Circus is a novel that uses a popular form in a radical new way but does so in the understanding that popular forms cannot simply be transported from one art or entertainment form to another without their effects being radically altered. Finally, the novel is striking in the manner in which the portrayal of the circus follows Carter’s own characterization of the funfair or fairground. In a short essay on funfairs, she claims, like the ‘music-hall [it] has a capacity for procuring instant nostalgia’, ‘is entirely sensational’, offers the ‘quaking attraction of gravity’ through ‘infernal machines for whirling, bouncing, whizzing, 5 6 7

Haffenden, Novelists in Interview, p. 92. Haffenden, Novelists in Interview, p. 89. For a brief history of the origins of the modern circus, see Stoddart, Rings of Desire, pp. 13–33.

112

CRITICAL READINGS

swooping down!’, yet is also a ‘hard-edged world, in which most of the decorative detail is two-dimensional, executed in that kind of trompe-l’oeil which deceives nobody and is intended to deceive nobody’.8 The fact that Fevvers moves so seamlessly between the music hall and the circus, that she appears to embody the London of the turn of the century ‘of which the principal industries are the music hall and the confidence trick’ (Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 8) and that she, like the circus, is a ‘permanent display[s] of the triumph of man’s will over gravity and over rationality’ (Pt. I, Ch. 2, p. 105), indicates that Fevvers herself is the novel’s symbolic embodiment of the pleasures and deceits of these popular entertainments. The novel, therefore, represents and investigates these popular pleasures but cannot and does not attempt to reproduce their predominantly physical and sensational effects. If it carries out any ‘whirling, bouncing, whizzing’ or ‘swooping down’, it is in relation to the ideas and dramas with which it invites its readers to engage, many of which are about the new kinds of visual technology that fed popular culture of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries in which new modes of spectatorship and visual engagement were involved. If Fevvers embodies some of the dominant characteristics of popular entertainments which have their roots in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain (music hall, theatre and pantomime), Jack Walser, as the novel’s central representative of the ‘new world’, captures a set of more turn-of-the-century popular sensibilities. Scott Bukatman has characterized a broad ‘sociocultural and phenomenological’ shift which he claims took place between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He regards this shift as the result of the ‘development and dissemination of advanced technologies’ of vision and transport that, most importantly, led to a destabilization of the gaze and a sense of dislocation between the body and the world it attempted to capture in its sights. More extensive and ‘panoramic views’ may have been newly available through these new technologies of vision (film, photography and special effects), but alongside these came what he terms a ‘kaleidoscopic perception, which was more frenetic and corporeal’ and in which ‘the spectator was no longer at a safe remove but was plunged into a jagged discontinuum of views’. He adds that ‘if the lateral glide characterized the panoramic, the kaleidoscope was the headlong rush, the rapid montage, and the bodily address’. Furthermore, he goes on to identify specifically popular forms of late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century entertainments such as ‘phantasmagoria, amusement park rides [. . .] and, perhaps most paradigmatically, the cinema’ as the primary sources for this new form of fast and excitable visual engagement with the world.9 Bukatman’s observations have an important bearing on Nights at the Circus, most specifically, of course, in relation to Walser, a character whose significance within the novel has often been marginalized in favour of the more obviously and powerfully spectacular Fevvers. Walser and Fevvers, however, can only be fully understood in relation to each other, for both represent distinct but corresponding positions in relation to popular visual culture at a key and transitional point in Western cultural history. In order to redress the critical balance, therefore, I shall begin with Walser. As

8 9

Angela Carter, ‘Fun Fairs’ (1977), in Uglow (ed.), Shaking a Leg, pp. 342–3. Scott Bukatman, Matters of Gravity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003, p. 3.

H E L E N S TO D DA RT

113

we saw earlier, Bukatman identifies the emergence in the modern age of a ‘kaleidescopic perception’, and in the novel Walser, described as a ‘kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness’ (Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 10), echoes this perfectly. Carter takes this phrase directly from an essay by the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), which is quoted in Walter Benjamin’s account of the modern city dweller (see Text and contexts, pp. 22–4). Benjamin describes this figure as one who exists in a state of nervous excitement as he experiences ‘shocks and collisions’ from the crowds around him: ‘Nervous impulses flow through him in rapid succession like the energy from a battery.’10 A sense of perpetual movement and fragmentation is also what typifies Walser at the beginning of the novel. His chaotic career, driven by an addiction to sensational shocks and colourful, even violent, spectacle leaves him ‘weary with all the spinning’ (Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 10). The description reminds us of the pun involved in the name Walser shares with both a dance of eighteenthcentury origin and a well-known fairground attraction: the ‘waltzer’ spins its occupants around in dizzying circular twists of movement, again echoing and confirming his resemblance to the kaleidoscope with its emphasis on colour, ceaseless movement, circularity and the blurring of form and vision. Yet Baudelaire, Benjamin and Bukatman’s ‘kaleidoscopic perception’ is without a built-in safe distance, whereas Walser’s cynicism initially appears to offer him some detachment. He scoffs, for instance, at a Calcutta crowd’s reaction to a magician’s rope trick by referring to it as ‘a little primitive technology and a big dose of the will to believe’ (Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 16) – a description which could just as easily be applied to early cinema. Though he is described as a ‘ “man of action” ’, and to this extent exemplifies Bukatman’s modern subject, is he also said to have ‘subjected his life to a series of cataclysmic shocks because he loved to hear his bones rattle’ (Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 10). The suggestion here is that Walser is both submerged in the experience of the shocks and slightly removed from it as he observes their effects on his bones with pleasure. Carter reinforces this sense of his critical remove when she refers to him in interview as a ‘permanent bystander’ and as someone who, at the beginning of the novel, demonstrates a facility for distance and ‘habitual disengagement’ (Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 10), though he is then shaken out of this safe distance as soon as he sets off with Fevvers.11 Thus, Walser appears to have accumulated shocks, sensations and cynicism at the expense of insight, experience and belief. The fact, however, that he has finally been ‘fooled’ at the end of the novel indicates that his mind has eventually been opened to the possibility of belief, and his performances as a clown with the Imperial Circus demonstrates his readiness at last to be the (humiliated) object of spectacle rather than merely its spectator. Indeed Herr M.’s obsessive misuse of the new technology of vision described by Bukatman – the ‘Praxinoscope’, ‘Phasmatrope’ and ‘Zoospraxiscope’ (Pt. I, Ch. 5, p. 136) – points to the dangers to women posed by thrill-seeking but detached male spectatorship. The progress of Walser’s character, therefore, demonstrates Carter’s acute awareness of the shifts of perception and understanding brought about by the new forms of visual technology and spectatorial engagement that dominated the late nineteenth century and the new 10 Walter Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations, London: Fontana, 1992, p. 171. 11 Haffenden, Novelists in Interview, p. 89.

114

CRITICAL READINGS

(twentieth) century that Walser and Fevvers are about to enter. She is particularly concerned to dramatize the relationship between the nervous, excitable and fragmentary perception identified by Baudelaire and Benjamin in the modern, urban subject and the visual objectification of women who are still more commonly the objects rather than the subjects of this perception. When regarded in this light, Walser is much more like Fevvers than he suspects on their first encounter. Both are characterized by an absorption in spectacle, though from opposite sides: he has been substituting his experience of external spectacles for ‘experience’ itself, while Fevvers appears to have been driven only by the task of constructing herself as a spectacle for others. By the end of the novel, both figures have been forced to look beyond, or rather behind, these respective façades in order to anchor and explain their existence. What is fascinating about the novel, however, is that even while its two central characters (representatives, respectively, of the appetite for and the purveyance of the spectacular) grapple increasingly desperately to make sense of themselves, the narrative voice of the novel never ceases to provide elaborate entertainment. Crucially, it also feeds this entertainment into its blatantly showy intellectual agenda where many of the ideas implicit in its own grand narrative designs are explored. As Isobel Armstrong observes, these aspects of the central characters are also reflected in Carter’s prose, which has a ‘stylised, objectifying, external manner, as if all experience, whether observed or suffered, is self-consciously conceived of as display’.12 Christina Britzolakis takes this assertion further when she relates this aspect of the novel’s style explicitly to Fevers’ popular music-hall act: Fevvers’ larger-than-life music-hall persona as the Cockney Venus also allegorizes the ‘vulgarity’ of Carter’s writing – not only the ‘overwriting’, or stylistic excess, the agitated baroque display of the surface of the texts, but their self-consciously allegorical quality, the use of narrative as a device for the patent exposition for the exploration of ideas.13 In other words, Carter’s writing as a whole in this novel resembles Fevvers’ character in so far as it possesses some of her energy, excess and vulgarity, and in this sense is aligned with the popular. Yet what is so distinctive about Carter’s writing is the way that these same popular attributes are also applied to the explication of intellectual and sometimes abstract concepts. The effect of this is not only to sprinkle glitter on high thoughts but also to insist that the energies and figures of popular culture are not inconsistent or incompatible with intellectual profundity or cultural importance. In addition to this, although it is Fevvers who most successfully allegorizes this fusion of excess and intellectualism in the writing of the text, Walser too has a supplementary and cautionary allegorical function. He embodies the excitement of a perception given over to change, daring and shock impressions but which is not tempered by engagement or ‘judgment’, because ‘judgment involves the positives and negatives of belief’ (Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 10), something of which he is not in possession at the beginning of the novel. Walser reflects

12 Armstrong, ‘Woolf by the Lake’, p. 269. 13 Britzolakis, ‘Angela Carter’s Fetishism’, p. 471.

H E L E N S TO D DA RT

115

on his life at the end of the novel that, before Fevvers, he ‘watched it but did not live it’ (Pt. III, Envoi, p. 294). The implication of this must also be that a narrative only concerned with staging ideas as a popular parade of show turns without connecting them to some overriding judgement, belief or action would be equally empty and badly fated. There is an underlying assumption throughout this novel, therefore, that the joys of popular culture – laughter, spectacle, thrill-seeking, subversion and sentiment – are some of the essential pleasures of existence but that an incautious indulgence of these alone can lead to a sense of emptiness, or even worse, to humiliation and defeat, as is the case with the clowns of ‘Clown Alley’. At the heart of this unease lies a critique of Mikhail Bakhtin’s writing on carnival and the carnivalesque (see Text and contexts, pp. 27–30). Fevvers’ trapeze act begins in the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris, a theatrical music hall, and is then signed up to travel with the ‘Imperial Circus’, the name of its proprietor, Colonel Kearney (pronounced ‘Carney’) being an explicit indication of Carter’s interest in the overlap between the circus and the carnival/carnivalesque. Indeed, Anne Fernihough argues that throughout Nights at the Circus Kearney’s circus ‘functions as a debased version of carnival, using all the carnivalesque tropes but showing how, in practice, they can often serve very different ends from the radical utopian ones emphasized by Bahktin’.14 The most extensive and explicit articulation of the dangers of an unrestrained carnival is provided in the novel’s portrait of the clowns in ‘Clown Alley’ (Pt. II, Ch. 4), which reveals Carter’s historical knowledge of European clowning during the period in which the novel is set. More broadly in evidence also are the distinctiveness of her use of references to popular or mass culture and her engagement with the critical concept of the carnivalesque as a way of evaluating the cultural significance and effects of such performances. Carter appears to have been inspired by a whole series of European clowns of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, several of whom (Domenico Biancolette, Joseph Grimaldi and Jean-Gaspard Deburau) are mentioned in this chapter by the chief clown, ‘Great Buffo’, in his account of his ‘desolating profession’ (Pt. II, Ch. 4, p. 120). But her extended description of the clown’s well-rehearsed routines is evidence both of her research in this field and of her awareness of the long-standing attraction of such figures for many other twentieth-century artists. For example, at the clowns’ Christmas dinner, the auguste clown is brought on with a ‘coxcomb on his head like a bird’ (Pt. II, Ch. 4, p. 117), and Pozzo or Bimbo run to get an axe to cut Buffo into the correct size for his coffin, though the axe turns out to be made of rubber (Pt. II, Ch. 4, p. 118). Their act is full of props which, like this one, either do not do what they are supposed to or completely fall apart, and in this respect they recall the Fratellini brothers, Paul (1877–1940), François (1879–1951), and Albert (1886–1961), who began their act at the start of the twentieth century (1904) and whose descendants still appear in European circuses.15 Their speciality was their use of props which would disintegrate or explode or which were used in incongruous, hazardous or absurd fashion, and they, above all other clowns, have been an inspiration to countless European artists, especially Parisian intellectuals of the 14 Fernihough, ‘Is She Fact or Is She Fiction?’, p. 104. 15 Joe Lee, Clowns for Beginners, London: Writers and Readers Publishing, 1995, pp. 160–2.

116

CRITICAL READINGS

1930s such as Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) and Pablo Picasso (1881–1973).16 A real clown called Grock (Karl Adrien Wettach, 1880–1959) also began working a little earlier than the Fratellinis (1884–1954), though he only took the name Grock from 1903. In his early career he was briefly in a double act as an auguste with another clown called Brick; just like Grik and Grok ‘the musical clowns’ (Pt. II, Ch. 4, p. 117) in the novel, they too specialized in acts based around musical instruments. As with the Fratellinis, much of Grock’s pantomime-based performance revolved around his futile struggle for mastery of inanimate objects which continually defied him by collapsing or exploding. His act is echoed in Carter’s account of Buffo when she describes the ‘climax of his turn, everything having collapsed about him as if a grenade exploded it, he starts to deconstruct himself’ (Pt. II, Ch. 4, p. 117). In the increasingly fast-moving world of the turn of the century – and subsequent decades – the clown came to represent a figure in a permanent state of sadness, loss and dislocation, unable to summon the material world under his control. Carter carefully mobilizes this set of long-standing clown types whose performances so eloquently enacted (without words) a profound sense of loss of control in the modern world so that she could highlight, by contrast, the ways in which women such as Fevvers might perform without experiencing this loss of dignity and identity. ‘Clown Alley’ also significantly reworks some of the most frequently quoted lines from Grock’s published memoirs. Famously, Grock claimed that ‘The genius of clowning is transforming the little, everyday annoyances, not only overcoming, but actually transforming them into something strange and terrific [. . .] it is the power to extract mirth for millions out of nothing and less than nothing’.17 His stress on the creatively transformative and indeed, therapeutic, power of clowning in being to ‘extract mirth’ from ‘nothing’ is emphatically overturned in Nights at the Circus. Grok’s philosophizing on the ‘dialectics of uselessness’, according to which ‘nothing plus nothing equals something’ is rudely contradicted by Buffo (‘Bollocks’, Pt. II, Ch. 5, p. 123). The phrase is itself a revision of the familiar Latin phrase ex nihilo nihil fit, meaning ‘Nothing comes from nothing’, but which also has the more positive implication that everything has to come from something. Yet earlier in the chapter, Buffo has proclaimed that the ‘beauty of clowning is, nothing ever changes’ (Pt. II, Ch. 5, p. 117). His assertion that precisely ‘Nothing will come of nothing. That’s the glory of it’ is then immediately taken up as a chorus for the ‘entire company’ who, ‘rustling like hollow men’ (Pt. II, Ch. 5, p. 121), ‘like dead leaves rustling’ repeat together, ‘That’s the glory of it! Nothing will come of nothing!’ (Pt. II, Ch. 5, p. 123). Implicit in this bleak drama, therefore, is the understanding that clowning’s only ‘glory’ is a ‘hollow’ one: that it changes nothing and hurts no one but the clowns themselves, whose very utterances already have a dry and ghostly quality about them. The clowns offer entertainment which is fast-moving, chaotic and hilariously entertaining to the safely distant spectators but which is fatally selfdestructive to the performers whose sense of self is further eroded with each new

16 See George Speaight, Book of Clowns, London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1980; and Maurice Willson Disher, Clowns and Pantomimes, London: Constable, 1925. 17 Grock, Grock, King of Clowns, trans. Basil Creighton (ed.), Ernst Konstantin, London: Methuen and Co., 1957; and Grock, Life’s a Lark, London: William Heineman, 1931.

H E L E N S TO D DA RT

117

turn. What the novel shows, therefore, is that though the immediate effects of popular culture may at first appear trivial or harmless, in the case of the clowns, this masks a corrosive power which potentially extends from the performers themselves to corrupt the audience whose laughter is cruelly neglectful of their suffering. It demands, for this reason, to be taken very seriously, especially by Fevvers, for whom the clowns’ tragic self-deception about the primacy of appearances constitutes a needful shot across the bows. What is also intriguing here is the way that Carter’s dramatization of the clown from popular entertainment is revised through clear reference to two ‘high modernist’ poems: T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925) and W. B. Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ (1919).18 In both instances, Carter mixes literary modernism freely with other literary and cultural borrowings from an impressive variety of high and low sources, but it is not granted a privileged status amongst these allusions. Instead, both of Carter’s central modernist allusions are framed as clownish, self-defeating reactions to a world of rapid change, mass culture and subsequent revolutions in value and tradition – conditions for which, by contrast, both Fevvers and Walser eventually manage to prepare themselves. ‘The Hollow Men’, for example, begins with voices declaring, ‘We are the hollow men / We are the stuffed men’, because they are stuffed, not with dead leaves, but with ‘straw’. Like the clowns of Clown Alley, however, they ‘whisper together / Are quiet and meaningless / As wind in dry grass’, and the poem ends in a voice parodying ‘The Lord’s Prayer’: ‘For Thine is the Kingdom / [. . .] This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but with a whimper.’ Eliot’s writing, like Nights at the Circus, is filled with cultural, historical and literary allusions which, perhaps more than any other modernist poet’s work, extend to popular as well as ‘high’ culture. His ‘hollow men’, therefore, refer to the popular effigies burned on Guy Fawkes Day, the conspirators in Julius Caesar and Joseph Conrad’s hero Kurtz in his novel Heart of Darkness (1901), all of whom famously ‘whimpered’ or crumbled at the last.19 Eliot’s modernist classic ends with the bitter pessimism of this accumulated and inescapable ‘whimper’ and has therefore been read as a lament for the loss of meaning and authenticity in the modern world of the early twentieth century. By contrast, Carter’s clowns appear to be caught in a futile and self-destructive existence that has become an unfortunate trap for them rather than an inevitable end for all mankind. After all, Walser, despite a close call, is able to escape this fate and to begin to fill his previously empty self with ‘experience’, and the novel itself ends with Fevvers’ exuberant laughter. Carter also snatches direct quotations from W. B. Yeats’s poem ‘The Second Coming’ (1919) to describe Buffo the clown: ‘Things fall apart . . . he is himself the centre that does not hold’ (Pt. II, Ch. 5, p. 117), ‘Things fall apart . . . the centre cannot hold’ (Yeats). Again, by emphasizing that Buffo ‘is himself’ the collapsing ‘centre’, Carter’s reworking of Yeats’s line clearly isolates Buffo’s

18 Richard J. Finneran (ed.), W. B. Yeats: The Poems, London: Macmillan, 1983, p. 187; T. S. Eliot: Collected Poems 1909–62, London: Faber & Faber, 1963, pp. 87–90. 19 On 5 November, Guy Fawkes’s attempt, together with a group of co-conspirators, to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605, is celebrated in Britain with bonfires, fireworks and by burning effigies of Guy. See Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, London: Arden Shakespeare, 1998; and Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1901), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004.

118

CRITICAL READINGS

disintegration from a broader one which might draw in all humanity, as Yeats had implied. In Carter’s text, Buffo stands as a warning about what happens when too much belief is invested in the power and potential of the carnival, whereas Yeats’s poem begins at a point where warnings are already too late. Thus, two giants of modernist poetry are sewn into her portrait of the clowns in order to point to an overlap between the clowns’ empty identities and spinning, collapsing world and the dystopian vision of modernity articulated by Yeats and Eliot. Raymond Williams has written about the way he believes these two poets were in ‘pessimistic recoil’ from modernity, yet Carter has Yeats’s words spoken (not quoted) by clowns who are eventually defeated by the very fragmentation, emptiness, speed and futility from which Yeats and Eliot sought to distance themselves in their poetic reflections.20 What is clear from this episode of the novel, therefore, is that, unlike these male literary modernists before her, Carter, in merging the voices of the clowns and the poets, undermines the modernist faith in the idea that the writer has a safe critical distance from the world about which they write. Walser’s progress too underlines the point further as he is forced to abandon cynical distance for unsafe and messy participation. In this sense, Carter’s use of popular culture is, in Linda Hutcheon’s terms, distinctly postmodernist in contrast to Eliot’s since it mobilizes a ‘discursive network of elite, official, mass popular cultures’ without attaching a discernible hierarchy of values that privileged ‘elite’ over ‘mass’ culture.21 At the same time, as has already been pointed out (see Text and contexts, pp. 31–4), Carter’s postmodernist ironic distance must always be qualified by the evidence throughout the novel of an engagement with politically material concerns and the belief in the possibility of social change. ‘Clown Alley’, with its emphasis on the isolated suffering and self-appointed powerlessness of the clowns, only emphasizes further the futility of action, no matter how energetic, that is not backed up by purpose, belief or sense of identity. Crucial to this revision of the meaning and function of clowns is Carter’s critique of Mikhail Bakhtin’s thesis on carnival and its literary manifestation, ‘carnivalization’ or the ‘carnivalesque’ (see Text and contexts, pp. 27–30). According to Bakhtin’s account of the carnival, it is a social, communal and highly ritualistic festival that provides a temporary liberation from social regulation and hierarchy through the physical acting out of violently subversive desires, the meaning of which are always profoundly ambivalent. The clowns’ public performances stick remarkably closely to this template of the carnival. In the act they perform in the kitchen, Carter describes the beastly, obscene violence they mimed! A joey thrust a bottle of vodka up the arsehole of an august; the august, in response, promptly dropped his pants to reveal a virile member of priapic size, bright purple in colour and spotted with yellow stars, dangling two cerise balloons from the fly. At that, a second august, with an evil leer, took a great pair of shears out of his back pocket and sliced the horrid thing off. (Pt. II, Ch. 4, p. 124) 20 Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, London: Verso, 1989, p. 43. 21 Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, p. 21.

H E L E N S TO D DA RT

119

The grotesque carnival body may not only be a debased body but a violently and absurdly sexualized one too. Again, it is typical of this new order that figures and objects form unexpected alliances and reversals – Buffo ‘wears his insides on his outside’ (Pt. II, Ch. 4, p. 116) – yet in Carter’s novel these are usually accompanied by humiliation or defeat. The clowns hold a chaotic ceremony to bury Buffo, but throughout it Buffo is always both dead and alive: ‘Buffo who was dead is now alive again’ (Pt. II, Ch. 4, p. 118). Buffo’s death and rebirth constitute a stark and mockingly parodic version of Christ’s crucifixion and second coming. Indeed, throughout the novel the clowns as a whole are continually referred to in terms of their relation to Christ’s suffering, yet they will experience no Christ-like second comings or rebirths because, as Buffo reminds them ‘we clowns are the sons of men’ (Pt. II, Ch. 4, p. 120), not of God. In the context of a discussion of Nights at the Circus, however, perhaps the most important aspect of this ambivalence lies in Bakhtin’s claim that: Carnival is, so to speak, functional, not substantive. It absolutizes nothing; it proclaims the jolly relativity of everything [. . .] All the symbolic aspects of this ceremonial of decrowning have a second and positive level of meaning – it is not naked, absolute negation and destruction (absolute negation, like absolute affirmation, is unknown to carnival). Moreover, precisely in this ritual of decrowning does there emerge with special clarity the carnival pathos of shifts and renewals. the image of constructive death.22 The echo of Grok’s utopian claims about the productivity of clowning is clear here in Bakhtin’s denial that carnival can result in ‘absolute negation’ – only ‘jolly relativity’. The validity of Bakhtin’s claim rests on the condition that carnival is only ever ‘functional’ and ambivalent, never resulting in material change of the world or definite conclusions, either positive or negative. It is precisely these temporary, ‘unsubstantive’ and terminally ambivalent characteristics of the carnival, however, of which Carter is critical. As she noted in interview with Lorna Sage, ‘The carnival has to stop. The whole point of the feast of fools is that things went on as they did before, after it stopped’, and this realization is integral to Carter’s understanding of the limited function and power of the clowns.23 The first sentence about Clown Alley points out that it is only ‘temporarily located’ and is in a ‘rotten wooden tenement’ that, like the clowns themselves, is more in danger of collapsing in on itself than endangering others. She describes them later, not as ‘terrorists, but as irregulars. A band of irregulars’, social misfits who are ‘permitted the most ferocious piracies as long as, just so long as, they maintain the bizarrerie of their appearance’ and are thereby kept ‘on the ‘safe side of terror’ (Pt. II, Ch. 4, p. 151). It is important, therefore, that they do not own, but rather are ‘permitted’ the right to behave in this way and in this sense are ‘licensed to commit licence’ (Pt. II, Ch. 7, p. 151), a fact that prevents them causing any actual insurrection. Thus the clowns can appear to have ‘detonated

22 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, p. 125. 23 Sage, ‘Angela Carter interviewed by Lorna Sage’, p. 188.

120

CRITICAL READINGS

the entire city’, though still ‘nothing would really change. Nothing’ (Pt. II, Ch. 4, p. 151). The narrator underlines the impotence of their violence, and indeed highlights its socially and politically stabilizing effects by pointing out that the clowns merely offer ‘proof, that things would always be as they had always been; that nothing came of catastrophe; that chaos invoked stasis’ (Pt. II, Ch. 4, pp. 151–2). Clowning, therefore, is shown to function ideologically as a sort of social safety valve, allowing for the ‘successful suppression of fear’ (Pt. II, Ch. 4, p. 151) that might otherwise erupt into more threatening or indeed more socially creative forms of activity. It is clear, then, that Carter is interested in exploring not just the political consequences of carnival in the chapter but also, more broadly, the politics of laughter. For a novel that begins and ends with laughter, it becomes important to distinguish between its destructive and its generative possibilities. Part of Carter’s strategy in encouraging a readerly questioning of the laughter generated by the clowns is to have them evoke precisely the kind of theatrical alienation (an ‘effort to make the incidents represented appear strange to the public’) described by Bertolt Brecht. He sees this ‘alienation effect’ as partly having its origins in a ‘primitive form in the theatrical and pictorial displays at the old popular fairs’ where ‘the way the clowns speak and the way the panoramas are painted both embody an act of alienation’.24 As Linden Peach points out, a similar effect is achieved through Carter’s accounts of the clowns’ actions and appearance in which all their features are exaggerated, crude and strange. In turn, this strangeness forces a re-evaluation of any residual familiarity and cultural sentimentality that may have become attached to the tradition of clowning.25 Carter’s vivid, even at times surreal, portrait of Buffo, for example, highlights his near gigantic height of ‘seven feet high’, ‘his four-cornered mouth, like a bow tie’ (Pt. II, Ch. 4, p. 116), and his ‘yellow, gravestone teeth’ (Pt. II, Ch. 4, p. 117). Buffo may be ‘hilarious’, but the next two adjectives – ‘appalling and devastating’ (Pt. II, Ch. 4, p. 116) qualify and define the grim, destructive hilarity he evokes. The ‘climax’ of his turn involves his attempt to ‘deconstruct himself’ in a shaking process of ‘convulsive self-dismemberment’ (Pt. II, Ch. 4, p. 117); and of course, this is exactly the purpose of Chapter 4 as a whole: to take apart the familiar theatrical face of the clown, to expose the emptiness behind the mask and to question its cultural and political consequences. The Italian film director Federico Fellini’s film I Clowns (The Clowns) (1970), which is a form of film essay to answer the question, ‘Who can still laugh at a clown?’, appears to have been an influence on the writing of this chapter of the novel. The film begins with a desultory, mirthless clown performance in a psychiatric institution (Clown Alley is described as having the ‘lugubrious atmosphere of a prison or a mad-house’, Pt. II, Ch. 4, p. 116), and climaxes with a frenetically chaotic and spectacular clown funeral that parallels Carter’s ‘dance of disintegration’ (Pt. II, Ch. 4, p. 125). Fellini’s published thoughts on the psychological and political meaning of the clown also lie at the heart of this chapter’s emphasis on the violent consequences of clowning – its residual and real stain – when he claims 24 Bertolt Brecht, ‘Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting’ (1936), in John Willett (ed. and trans.) Brecht on Theatre, London: Eyre Methuen, 1979, p. 91. 25 Peach, Angela Carter, pp. 140–1.

H E L E N S TO D DA RT

121

that, ‘There’s something of the madhouse in the circus. There’s madness in it, and terrifying experiences [. . .] There’s blood on the sawdust’.26 Like Fellini, Carter stresses the symbolic function of the clowns’ comedy, which is often far from innocent or harmless fun in its aggressive acting out of sadistic punishments, controls and humiliations of the wayward and ‘irregular’. Thus, Carter suggests, Clown Alley is not so much an echo of the prison and the madhouse, but an extension of them. Norman Manea, writing about the way that clown figures are a way of understanding European tyrants and dictator after the Second World War, also recognizes the potential for clowns to represent figures of madness which are at once created and controlled to promote the interests of politically totalitarian regimes: ‘It’s a razor’s edge situation in which Auguste the Fool no longer just mimes ambiguity but is possessed by it, and in which the boundary between hallucination and reality begins to dissolve. A minute dose of “simulation” . . . can ultimately lead to a genuine disturbance.’27 Again, this descent into madness depends on an over-investment in the idea of simulation to the extent that a sense of a real self has been lost. Like Carter’s clowns and the masks that eclipse their identities, the auguste here mimes ambiguity so effectively and continuously that he is tipped over the ‘razor’s edge’ into a state of madness, in which reality dissolves. In this way, Carter’s and Manea’s clowns can both be read as an allegory for the figure of the non-conformist who is forced into a pretense of conformity but who succeeds for so long that his identity is lost in his pretence and he goes mad. So clowning not only represents harmless performances of madness but is also capable of cultivating a much more dangerous and sustained insanity borne of fear and repression and, in this sense, is always potentially corrupt and corrupting. It is no surprise then that Fevvers recoils against the performances, declaring clowns ‘truly . . . a crime against humanity’ (Pt. II, Ch. 5, p. 137). It is this which gives meaning to Buffo’s poignant observation that, far from being innocent, childish entertainment, the ‘child’s laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown’ (Pt. II, Ch. 4, p. 119). It is also clear that not only does the ‘laughter of the clown grow[s] in proportion to the humiliation he is forced to endure’, but also that there is a connection between the clowns and the prostitutes described in earlier chapters: ‘We are the whores of mirth, for, like the whore, we know we are mere hirelings hard at work and yet those who hire us see us as beings perpetually at play’ (Pt. II, Ch. 4, p. 119). The clowns, too, deal in trading spectacular visibility, but ‘once proud to be visible’ (Pt. II, Ch. 4, p. 119), they, like the prostitutes, now offer up only disguised versions of themselves. Like sex, laughter involves both labour and subjugation as soon as it is sold or elicited under duress, which means that all forms of public and popular entertainment must be understood as a negotiation between amusement and exploitation. In Chapters 4 and 5, both Mignon and the clowns demonstrate the worst and most sadistic excesses of the latter involving the complete destruction of power and identity, while Fevvers’ final laugh and sexual union with Walser constitute examples of these pleasures more freely exchanged. 26 Federico Fellini, ‘Why Clowns?’, in Anna Kael and Christian Strich (eds), Fellini on Fellini, trans. Isabel Quigly, London: Methuen, 1976, p. 121. 27 Norman Manea, On Clowns: Dictator and Artist, London: Faber & Faber, 1994, pp. 51–2.

122

CRITICAL READINGS

Both the clowns of Colonel Kearney’s circus and Fevvers, therefore, embody many of the defining aspects of popular culture: its exuberant energy, its vulgarity and grotesqueness. The fact that they do so in ways that the novel – through the very different fates they meet – goes to some lengths to distinguish, speaks clearly of the way Nights at the Circus engages with popular culture more broadly in the novel. There is no doubt that the majority of the novel’s characters and settings, as well of many of its key references, belong to popular rather than high art and that, in this way, the novel validates popular forms as key resources for complex sets of historical, philosophical and cultural significance. Carter’s use of popular allusion, however, needs to be distinguished from its usage by the high modernists to whom she refers indirectly in the novel because she does not share their pessimistic view that fragmentation, misery and meaninglessness are the inevitable fate of humankind in the twentieth century. Nor does she completely embrace the postmodernist view that this fragmentation is merely playful. In its portrait of the clowns and circus, Nights at the Circus, therefore, never leaves behind either its awareness of relevant ‘high’ cultural contexts or its integration of the critical and philosophical theory that becomes the vehicle for the novel’s critical distance from the giddy pleasures of the popular as well as its political engagement with history, gender and representation. Finally, Nights at the Circus also shows that popular culture can be taken seriously without being hitched to a corresponding belief that philosophy and critical theory can be distributed in the same terms as popular culture, or vice versa.

4 Further reading and web resources

F U RT H E R R E A D I N G A N D W E B R E S O U R C E S

125

Further reading Throughout this book you will find footnote references to all the secondary works that inform and support the analysis offered in the book. What follows is a list, together with brief details, of key selected works that you will find it useful to consult in your further research. They are organized below under a series of headings that mirror those of the book as a whole and include works that deal with social context, relevant critical and theoretical issues, and specific textual readings.

Text and contexts Angela Carter: other relevant primary works Most books that survey Angela Carter’s books as a whole supply a full and detailed list of all her published work, fiction and non-fiction. Clearly all of these constitute potentially useful background reading for Nights at the Circus, though the following selected works both have particular resonances for the novel and represent some of the variety of genres in which she worked: Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber (1979), London: Vintage, 2006. It was with this slim but startling collection of short stories that Carter’s reputation really began to be widely established, and it is still both widely read and highly regarded today. Each tale is a reworking of a classic fairy story (‘Blue Beard’, ‘Puss-in-Boots’, ‘Sleeping Beauty’, for example) and the volume includes ‘The Company of Wolves’, a retelling of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ which was adapted as a film in 1984, scripted by Carter herself and directed by Neil Jordan. This edition is part of a new set of Carter’s work released by Vintage which, for the first time includes a specially commissioned introduction to each work; in this case the introduction is by the contemporary author, Helen Simpson. Angela Carter, Wise Children (1991), London: Vintage, 2006. Carter’s final novel picks up the cheeky humour and bawdy wit present in Nights at the Circus and extends their run in a novel which is both lighter in tone and more influenced by popular British genres and literary predecessors, most explicitly William Shakespeare, who is celebrated in the novel for his fun and impropriety rather than for his solemnity. In this respect, the twin sisters who propel the novel’s first-person narration, Dora and Nora Chance, are the twentieth-century successors to Lizzie and Fevvers. Their home is firmly located on London’s south side, the traditional home of all illegitimate entertainment; both, this time, are retired popular-theatre and music-hall performers, and both revel in the bawdy, carnivalesque aspects of the ‘Bard’s’ work. An excellent introduction by novelist Ali Smith is included in this edition. Angela Carter, Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales, London: Virago, 2005. A collection that brings together the tales previously edited by Carter in two separate volumes, The Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1990) and The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1992). A very useful introduction by Carter together with an afterword from Marina Warner are included, and these, together with

126

F U RT H E R R E A D I N G A N D W E B R E S O U R C E S

the fantastic variety of highly entertaining short tales from around the world, provide an important context for Carter’s use of fairy tale and magical realism in Nights at the Circus. Jenny Uglow (ed.), Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998. A collection of most of Carter’s most memorable short non-fiction, including contributions to books, and journalism (articles and reviews), from sources such as New Society, the New Statesman, New Review, the Guardian and the London Review of Books. Those which have most relevance for Nights at the Circus and are therefore cited in this book are: ‘Notes from the Front Line’ (pp. 36–42) in which she discusses her relationship to feminism and its impact on her writing, ‘Masochism for the Masses’ (pp. 189–95), which deals with the impact of Margaret Thatcher and ‘Thatcherite’ politics on British culture and society, ‘Fun Fairs’ (pp. 340–4) which is about the concept of ‘fun’ and the place of the fairground in the history of popular culture in Britain, and ‘In Pantoland’ (pp. 393–9), which is an enthusiastic celebration of British pantomime for all its glamour, vulgarity and gender confusion.

Adaptations Kneehigh Theatre’s musical production of Nights at the Circus, mentioned in the ‘Introduction’, has been published as a script: Tom Morris and Emma Rice, Nights at the Circus, London: Oberon Books, 2006. For reviews see: Michael Billington, ‘Nights at the Circus’, The Guardian, 27 January 2006. Susannah Clapp, ‘The Greatest Swinger in Town’, Observer, 29 January 2006. Ian Johns, ‘Nights at the Circus’, The Times, 30 January 2006. Paul Taylor, ‘Nights at the Circus, Lyric Hammersmith’, Independent, 27 January 2006. John Thaxter, ‘Nights at the Circus’, Stage, 1 February 2006.

Post-war Britain There are a great many accounts available of British culture and society during the period of Carter’s life and specifically of her writing of Nights at the Circus. Among these, Peter Clarke’s Hope and Glory: Britain 1900–2002 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004) provides a very detailed picture of the political, social and economic changes that have changed and shaped British society since the turn of the century. Alastair Davies and Alan Sinfield’s British Culture of the Post-War (London: Routledge, 2000) is particularly useful for the way in which it maps changes in British society onto specific developments within the arts (visual arts, literature and cinema). The chapters by Alastair Davies, Drew Milne and Alan Sinfield are particularly useful. Alan Sinfield’s Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) is similarly interesting, as Sinfield specifically traces connections between political change and literary innovation in the post-war period. For those not familiar with

F U RT H E R R E A D I N G A N D W E B R E S O U R C E S

127

the politics and events specifically of the Thatcher years in British politics, Anthony Seldon and Daniel Collings, Britain under Thatcher (London: Longman, 1999) offers a comprehensive and approachable introduction and some precise analysis of the short- and long-term effects of her policies and actions.

Literary contexts and beyond Various artists’ work is discussed in this section of the book, some of which you may wish to pursue in order to form a better picture of the connections between Carter’s writing and the work of feminist artists working in other fields during the 1980s. I have listed three of the most interesting below: Caryl Churchill, Plays, Vol. II: Objections to Sex and Violence, Softcops, Top Girls, Fenland Serious Money, London: Methuen, 1990. From this collection, Top Girls is perhaps Churchill’s most well-known play and, like Nights at the Circus, it sets up connections between the lives of historical and mythical women and women’s choices in 1980s Britain. T. G. Rosenthal, Paula Rego: The Compete Graphic Work, London: Thames and Hudson, 2003 and John McEwen, Paula Rego, London: Phaidon, 1997. In common with Carter, Rego produces fascinating versions of the human body in grotesque forms and situations – particularly females and children. There is also a strong narrative aspect to her work that frequently reimagines romance and children’s literature within a dark or perverse vision. Cindy Sherman, Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2003. Sherman’s photographs all feature herself in various elaborate poses that both replicate and complicate familiar photographs of film stars, mainly those from the 1940s and 1950s. Like Carter, Sherman explores the idea of female identities as forms of performance or masquerade.

Philosophy and critical theory It is important to read the relevant critical theory and philosophy cited in this section in its original form in order to grasp the tone and stress of the argument as it is articulated. Nonetheless, some of this material is challenging and at times confusing. The following list represents a set of introductory guides to the critical thinkers and concepts that inform this section:

Individual thinkers Caryl Emerson, The First Hundred Years of Bakhtin, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Graeme Gilloch, Walter Benjamin, London: Polity Press, 2001. Simon Malpas, Jean-François Lyotard, London: Routledge, 2002. Sara Mills, Michel Foucault, London: Routledge, 2002. Sarah Salih, Routledge Critical Thinkers: Judith Butler, London: Routledge, 2002.

128

F U RT H E R R E A D I N G A N D W E B R E S O U R C E S

Sue Vice, Introducing Bakhtin, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997.

Concepts Graham Allen, Intertextuality, London: Routledge, 2003. Maggie Ann Bowers, Magic(al) Realism, London: Routledge, 2004. Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary, London: Blackwell, 1996. Simon Malpas, Postmodernism, London: Routledge, 2004. Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction, London: Methuen, 1984.

Critical history Monographs Aidan Day, Angela Carter: The Rational Glass, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998. A substantial and important study of Carter’s writing which highlights her engagement with history and politics. As indicated in this section, Chapter 6 (pp. 167–94) on Nights at the Circus takes issue with previous attempts to categorize the book as postmodern. Sarah Gamble, Angela Carter: Writing from the Front Line, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997. Scholarly but accessible study of Carter’s fiction and non-fiction writing which is especially interested in its socially subversive potential. Chapter 6 (pp. 145–67) deals with Nights at the Circus, along with several other texts, and deals with the construction of female identities within patriarchy and the possibility of female freedom within this. Gamble’s The Fiction of Angela Carter: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001) contains an extremely useful and well-edited summary (pp. 135–62) of some of the most influential criticism of Nights at the Circus that reproduces key passages from the critics’ works. Linden Peach, Angela Carter, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998. In Chapter 5 (pp. 131–58), Peach provides a sustained examination of the presence of carnivalesque impulses, as well as criticism of the carnivalesque, in Nights at the Circus, which he examines in conjunction with Wise Children. Ruth Robbins, Nights at the Circus: York Notes Advanced, London: York Press, 2000. Like Wisker’s book, this guide is targeted at inexperienced readers, though it has the benefit of being focused only on Nights at the Circus and comprises an extremely useful chapter by chapter guide to the novel which includes lengthy and detailed glossaries of terms and explanations of intertextual, philosophical and historic references. Lorna Sage, Angela Carter: Writers and Their Work, Plymouth: Northcote House, 1994. In Chapter 3 (pp. 42–59) of Sage’s overview of Carter’s writing career, she provides a brief but invaluable, provocative and witty consideration of the book’s use of symbolism, time and narrative. Gina Wisker, Angela Carter: A Beginner’s Guide, London: Hodder & Stoughton,

F U RT H E R R E A D I N G A N D W E B R E S O U R C E S

129

2003. A very short introductory guide that provides an overview of Carter’s work and is designed to be a useful first stop for those readers previously unfamiliar with her work.

Edited collections Joseph Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton (eds), The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter: Fiction, Femininity Feminism, London: Longman, 1997. Again, although this is an excellent general collection with a particularly useful introduction, only two essays relate in any direct way to Nights at the Circus. Clare Hanson’s ‘ “The Red Dawn Breaking over Clapham”: Carter and the Limits of Artifice’ (pp. 59–72) compares Nights at the Circus with Wise Children in the context of an argument informed by the work of Michel Foucault (see Text and contexts, pp. 24–26) that questions the extent to which either novel challenges existing structures of social and symbolic power. Sarah Bannock’s ‘Autobiographical Souvenirs in Nights at the Circus’ (pp. 198–215) reads the novel as a form of depersonalized ‘auto/biography’, one that is more revealing about the literary influences, culture and history in which Carter operated than it is about the particular facts of her life. Lorna Sage (ed.), Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter, London: Virago, 1994. An influential collection on Carter’s work as a whole that sparked much later work. Though none of the essays deals exclusively with Nights at the Circus, Isobel Armstrong’s ‘Woolf by the Lake, Woolf at the Circus: Carter and Tradition’ (pp. 257–78) contains the most sustained discussion of the novel, which she places in the tradition of extravagant fantasy literature by women, of which she finds Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando (1928) exemplary. Marina Warner’s ‘Angela Carter: Bottle Blonde, Double Drag’ (pp. 243–56) identifies the novel as a turning point in Carter’s writing after which her view of fairy tales shifts in a way that affects her writing as a whole, bringing about a greater emphasis on ‘comic defiance’ (p. 247).

Book chapters Shirley Peterson, ‘Freaking Feminism: The Lifes and Loves of a She-Devil and Nights at the Circus as Narrative Freak Shows’, in Rosemarie Garland Thomson (ed.), Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, New York: New York University Press, 1996, pp. 291–301. Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity, London: Routledge, 1995. Chapter 3, ‘Revamping Spectacle: Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus’, is an important and lengthy consideration of the novel’s relationship to feminism. A shorter version has been reprinted in Alison Easton (ed.), Angela Carter: Contemporary Critical Essays, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000. Lorna Sage, Women in the House of Fiction: Post-War Women Novelists, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992. Contains a stylish and very instructive overview of Carter’s work, though it stops at Nights at the Circus.

130

F U RT H E R R E A D I N G A N D W E B R E S O U R C E S

Journal articles Each of these significant articles on Nights at the Circus is summarized and discussed in the ‘Critical History’ section of this book. Below I have listed the full references with page numbers: Beth A. Boehm, ‘Feminist Metafiction and Androcentric Reading Strategies: Angela Carter’s Reconstructed Reader in Nights at the Circus’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 37(1), 1995, pp. 35–49. Christina Britzolakis, ‘Angela Carter’s Fetishism’, Textual Practice, 9(3), 1995, pp. 459–75, reprinted in Alison Easton (ed.), Angela Carter: Contemporary Critical Essays, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000, pp. 173–91. Rachel Carroll, ‘Return of the Century: Time, Modernity, and the End of History in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus’, Yearbook of English Studies, 30, 2000, pp. 187–201. Anne Fernihough, ‘ “Is She Fact or is She Fiction?”: Angela Carter and the Enigma of Woman’, Textual Practice, 11(1), 1997, pp. 89–107. Magali Cornier Michael, ‘Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus: An Engaged Feminism via Subversive Postmodern Strategies’, Contemporary Literature, 15(3), 1994, pp. 492–521. Rebecca Munford, ‘Re-vamping the Gothic: Representations of the Gothic Heroine in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus’, Paradoxa, 17, 2002, pp. 235–56. Paulina Palmer, ‘From “Coded Mannequin” to Bird Woman’, in Sue Roe (ed.), Women Reading Women’s Writing, Brighton: Harvester, 1987, pp. 179–205.

Web sites The Wikipedia entry for Angela Carter offers several useful links and includes a very comprehensive bibliography and a list of further references, including many journalistic pieces about her.

An interview with Carter conducted by Anna Katsavos in 1988 in which Carter discusses a wide range of subjects, including the symbolism of Fevvers’ wings.

A Yahoo group devoted to discussing Carter’s work and other relevant subjects.

New York Times web site that provides a series of links to reviews of Carter’s work (an Salman Rushdie’s obituary) from its own archives.

An essay from 1998 by Brian Finney on Nights at the Circus, focusing on techniques of narration in the novel.

F U RT H E R R E A D I N G A N D W E B R E S O U R C E S

131

A lengthy essay by Jeff VanderMeer written in 2001. It provides an overview of all of Carter’s fiction, including Nights at the Circus, with particular emphasis on the fantastic in her work.

Unofficial web site with messageboard and chat room, limited bibliography and some links to other sites. Not regularly updated.

Much more up-to-date unofficial web site with news about all current events and publications related to Carter’s work as well as the usual message boards, bibliography and links to articles and information.

Index

agency 82–3 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll) 78 allegory 4–5, 13, 17, 114 Allende, Isabelle 7, 35 Almansi, Guido 13 Amis, Martin 14 Arendt, Hannah 19 Armitt, Lucie 64 Armstrong. Isobel 16, 114 Atwood, Margaret 19, 21 Bainbridge, Beryl 19 Bakhtin, Mikhail 7, 17, 48, 60: on ‘carnivalized’ literature 27; on grotesque body 29–30, 52; on grotesque realism 29–30; writing on carnival and carnivalesque 27–30, 115, 118–19; carnivalesque and feminism 47–9 Banville, John 103 Barker, Pat 4, 19 Barthes, Roland 98–9, 103 Bataille, Georges 100 Baudelaire, Charles 113–14 Bayley, John 45 Baxter, Jeannette 8, 48 Benjamin, Walter 7, 21–4: ‘angel of history’ thesis 22, 62; on historical materialism 21–3; on Baudelaire 113–14; ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ 21–2; on Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus 22 Bentham, Jeremy 24 Biancolette, Domenico 115 Black Venus 16 Blixen, Karen (see Dinesen Isak) The Bloody Chamber 6, 7, 15–16, 46, 125 Boehm, Beth A. 45, 130 Borges, Jorge Luis 35

Bowers, Maggie Ann 35 Bradbury, Malcolm 105 Brecht, Bertolt 48, 120 bricolage 32–4, 74, 96, 100, 107 Bristow, Joseph 44–5, 129 Britzolakis, Christina 51–2, 54–5, 62, 104, 114, 130 Brookner, Anita 19 Broughton, Trev Lynn 44–5, 129 Bukatman, Scott 112–13 Byatt, A.S. 19 Britain: British history 57–8; Education Act, 1944 10; 1980s 8– 10; 1960s 8, 10–11 Burgess, Anthony 104 Butler, Judith 37–9, 50, 82–6, 90 Callil, Carmen 44 carnivalesque 12, 17, 27–30, 118; see also Bakhtin, Mikhail and Nights at the Circus Carpentier, Alejo 35 Carroll, Lewis 78 Carroll, Rachel 60–2, 130 Carter, Angela: biographical summary 3–8; education and other writings 3–5, 70; ‘Fun Fairs’ 112; journalism 3–4, 126; ‘Masochism for the Masses’ 86, 126; ‘Pantoland’ 126; works see under titles of individual works Cervantes, Miguel de 63 Chatto & Windus 44 Churchill, Caryl 19, 127 cinema 112–13 Cirque D’Hiver 115 Cixous, Hélène 54 Cleland, John 100–2 I Clowns (The Clowns) (Fellini) 120 Cocteau, Jean 116

134

INDEX

Colette 12 Cunningham, Valentine 45 David, Elizabeth 110 Day, Aidan 56–9, 63, 95, 99–101, 128 Deburau, Jean–Gaspard 115 D’haen, Theo 77, 79–80 Dickens, Charles 13–15 Dinesen, Isak 15–16 Drabble, Margaret 19 Eliot, T. S. 8, 52, 109–10; ‘The Hollow Men’ 117–18 Elizabeth I, Queen 9 Ernst, Max 104–5 Fairy-tales 16–18: Sleeping Beauty 17–18, 20; Bluebeard 17; Beauty and the Beast 17; Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales 125 Fanny Hill, or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Cleland) fantastic, the 70, 75, 78 Faris, Wendy B. 77, 80 Fellini, Federico 110, 120–1 femininity: as masquerade 37–9, 50 feminism 99, 106–7 Fernihough, Anne 50–1, 57, 62, 115, 130 Foucault, Michel 7, 17, 19, 24–6; and the panopticon 24–5 Fratellini brothers (Paul, François, Albert) 115 Freud, Sigmund 7, 26 Fuentes, Carlos 7 fun fairs 111–12 Gamble, Sarah 7, 10, 46, 56, 64, 105, 128 Gas, William 33 Gasiorek, Andrezj 31–2, 62, 66 Gilbert, Harriett 44 grand narratives 31, 96 Greenwood, Gillian 44 Grimaldi, Joseph 115 Grock see Wettach, Karl Adrien grotesque realism see Bakhtin, Mikhail Haffenden, John 35, 63 Haiti (slave uprising of 1791) 88 H. D. 103 Heroes and Villains 46 Homer 79 Hutcheon, Linda 59, 99–102, 118 Huyssen, Andreas 59

Infernal Desires of Dr Hoffman, The 85 intertextuality 31–4, 98, 100–7 irony 18 Ishiguro, Kazuo 4 Jackson, Rosemary 36 Jameson, Fredric 59, 99 Janssen, ‘Parra’ x Jarry, Alfred 12 Johnson, Heather 69–81 Jordan, Elaine 18, 43–5, 46 Klee, Paul see Benjamin Walter Kristeva, Julia 17, 32 Lacan, Jacques 7, 17, 26, 55 Lawrence, D.H. 4 Lessing, Doris 19 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 33 Llosa, Mario Vargas 7, 35 Lovelace, Linda 110 Lurie, Alison 15–16 Lyotard, Jean–François 31, 96–8 McEwan, Ian 4 McGuirk, Carol 43 magic(al) realism 7, 13, 34, 17, 34–7, 69–70, 76–9 The Magic Toyshop 46, 103 Makinen, Merja 7 Manea, Norman 121 Márquez, Gabriel García 7, 35 Mars-Jones, Adam 44–5 Marx, Karl 21: Marxism 61, 96; historical materialism 21–3, 99 masquerade 37–8, 63, 82, 84, 91 Mefisto (Banville) Mellors, John 44 metafiction 31–4, 69, 71–6 metanarrative 96; see also postmodernism Michael, Magali Cornier 59–60, 130 micronarratives 96 modernism 16–17, 117–18 Moorcock, Michael x Mulvey, Laura 26–7 Munford, Rebecca 64–6, 130 Murdoch, Iris 19 music hall 14 mythology: female 18, 21; Leda and the swan 79, 81, 83, 103 Nights at the Circus: allegory 4–5, 11, 114, 121; authorship 98; autobiography 86–8,

INDEX

135

97; body 86, 88, 92–4; bricolage 74, 96, 100, 107; carnivalesque 29, 47–9, 52, 56–7, 59–60, 90, 119–20; circus in 76, 77, 97, 111, 113; clowns in 89–91, 110, 115–22; fact and fiction in 4, 16, 72, 76, 81, 104; fairy-tales 16, 18, 79; fantastic 78; female grotesque 30, 52–5; feminism in 99, 101–7 Fevvers’ symbolism 54–5, 57–8, 112; gender performance and identity 46–8, 50–2, 75, 84–94; genre 58; Gothic tendencies in 64–6; grotesque realism in 30; history, representation of 18, 22–4, 33, 57–8, 60–3, 64, 76, 78, 86, 99–107; internationalism 5–6; intertextuality 100–7; irony in 17; the look 25, 26–7; Mignon 4–5; magical realism 35, 36–7, 62; metafictional strategies in 71–6, 81; modernist allusions 117–18; myth and mythological references 21, 79–81, 97; narrative structure x, 111; narrative voice 8, 98; Kneehigh Theatre adaptation x, 126; panopticon 24–6, 86, 92; parody 80, 85, 90, 102; pastiche 39, 97; performance 84–94; popular culture 108–22; postmodernism and 58–63, 64, 96–107, 118; Russian Revolution, allusion to 23; theatricality x–xi, 13, 15, 16, 25; time, representation of xi, 16, 23, 36–7, 60–2, 77–8 Nussbaum, Martha 82, 85–6

postmodernism 31–4, 63, 96–107, 118; see also Nights at the Circus A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce) 66 prizes, literary 6–7

Okri, Ben 35 Orlando (Woolf) 16–17

Tennant, Emma 19, 21 Thatcher, Margaret 8–11, 19, 104–5; handbags 9; invasion of Falkland Islands 9–10; ‘Iron Lady’ 8, 55; Thatcherism 11 Titian 103

Palmer, Paulina 46–9, 50, 52, 53, 55, 63, 64, 66, 130 panopticon see Bentham, Jeremy and Nights at the Circus parody 18, 28, 31, 39, 80, 85, 102 Passion of New Eve, The 26, 46, 73, 85, 110 pastiche 18, 20, 32, 39, 52, 60, 63, 97, 100 Peach, Linden 48–9, 52, 62, 63, 66. 120, 128 performative; gender as 37, 62–3, 84–5: history as 18 Peterson, Shirley 54–5, 129 Picador Books 7 picaresque 12, 56, 61, 62, 63–4 Picasso, Pablo 116 popular culture 4, 70; William Shakespeare in 15

Rego, Paula 19–20, 127 Rivière, Joan 37–8, 84, 91 Robbins, Ruth 128 Roh, Franz 35 Rushdie, Salman 7, 35 Russo, Mary 51, 52–4, 56, 63, 103, 129 Sade, Marquis de 6, 100 Sadeian Woman, The 6, 100 Sage, Lorna 6, 15, 17, 45, 46, 63, 84, 95, 128, 129 Sceats, Sarah 82–94 Scholes, Robert 34 See, Carolyn 44–5 Selznick, David O. 110 Shakespeare, William 15 Shaking A Leg 110, 126 Sherman, Cindy 19–20, 127 Simpson, Helen x Smith, Ali x Spark, Muriel 19 spectacle: women as 4; and the panopticon 24–6 Stoddart, Helen 108–22

Vattimo, Gianni 61 Vintage Books x Virago Press 15, 17, 21, 44 Vinci, Leonardo da 103 Warner, Marina 19, 48 Waters, Sarah x–xi Watkins, Susan 58–9 Waugh, Patricia 11–12, 17, 34, 54–7, 62, 71, 73, 75, 76 Weldon, Fay 19, 54–5 Wettach, Karl Adrien 116 White, Hayden 102 Williams, Raymond 118

136

INDEX

Winterson, Jeannette 55–6 Wise Children x, 6, 7, 85, 110, 125 Wisker, Gina 128 Wolff, Janet 79 Wood, James 14 Woolf, Virginia 16–17

Yeats, W.B. 8, 52: ‘Leda and the Swan’ 79, 81, 103, 109; ‘The Second Coming’ 117–18 Zamora, Lois Parkinson 80 Zipes, Jack 18