ANGELA CARTER (1940-1992)

• born in Sussex in 1940, died in February 1992

• married; one son
• 9 novels, 5 volumes of short stories, 2 poetry collections, 5 children’s books, 2 film adaptations
• considered the most important English fantasist of her generation
• ranked tenth in The Times’ list of “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945”
• "We travel along the thread of narrative like high-wire artists" (Carter)
• the chronotope (Bakhtin 250)
→ “A term taken over by Mikhail Bakhtin from 1920s science to describe the manner in which
literature represents time and space. In different kinds of writing there are differing chronotopes,
by which changing historical conceptions of time and space are realised.”
http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?UID=187&rec=true

→ “We will give the name chronotope (literally, ‘time space’) to the intrinsic connectedness
of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature. This term is employed
in mathematics, and was introduced as part of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. The special meaning it
has in relativity theory is not important for our purposes; we are borrowing it for literary criticism
almost as a metaphor (almost, but not entirely)”. (Bakhtin 84)
• multiple narratives
• Carter’s interest in the question of what is real in fiction?
• can we trust the narrator? Is the narrator reliable?
• Nights at the Circus
→ the James Tait Black Memorial Prize
→ established Carter’s reputation as an extravagant stylist of the Magical Realist School
• autobiography & fairy-tale
• the journey & the circus → knowledge of the world & of the self ↔ framing the identity
discourse (what does the journey stand for?)
• overall atmosphere of the marvelous & uncanny
• 3 sections:
1. (1-5) London in 1899 (the turn of the century); the interview; Walser’s decision to follow Fevvers
2. (1-11) St. Petersburg → exploring human experience through the figure of the world as a circus.
3. (1-10) Siberia ↔ vast, uninhabited spaces ↔ a symbolic representation of freedom (no control or
social restraints); the freedpm of being oneself
+ Envoi (btw messenger & concluding part)
• setting: three geographical locations ↔ geographical movement from London to Siberia
paralleled by an increase in magic/fantastic elements; far-from-ordinary places: the brothel,
the museum of female monsters, the circus, the prison etc.
• hybridity (urban/rural, Western/Eastern; different social languages; the weird/the ordinary) &
baroque atmosphere ↔ baroque abundance of disorienting details (vivid descriptions of
places/objects; portrayal of supernatural characters)
• two simultaneous readings (a realistic & a fantastic one) ↔ two levels of reality (the natural & the
supernatural)
• (post-)feminist approach ↔ the women of the novel = the New Woman, the suffragists; stand for
the entire women's suffrage movement of the 19th and 20th centuries; going beyond restrictive
gender roles and against the male-dominated society ↔ individualism
• narrative temporality → the duality/opposition between story time & narrative time (Fevvers &
Lizzie maintain the illusion that time is suspended)
 • two areas of the grotesque – Fevvers’ body and her narrative.
• main narrators: Fevvers (a winged woman; unusual narrator combining Cockney English
with classical erudition) & Walser (an American reporter) ↔ magic & real / illusion vs
reality; the anonymous third person narrator in Part Two; shifts from 1st to 3rd person
narration (subjective vs objective POV)
• the beginning → presents the magical descriptions as real; Walser’s interview with Fevvers
(Walser tries to define what Fevvers is, to frame her identity)
"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. "Hatched out of a bloody great egg while Bow Bells rang, as ever is!"

• Characters (selection): Fevvers/Sophie, Jack Walser, Lizzie (the adoptive mother), Ma

Nelson, Madame Schreck, Toussaint, The Professor (leader chimp), Sybil – Colonel
Kearney's pet pig (oracle & business adviser), Princess of Abyssinia (the tiger tamer &
piano player), Buffo the Great, Fanny Four-Eyes, The Shaman, The Maestro

• Fevvers
→ claims to have been hatched from an egg laid by unknown parents = … (unsure of her origins ↔
cannot frame her own identity ↔ the audience provides the missing answers; they tell her of who she is)
→ btw angelic being & biological freak
→ represents the chaotic part of life
→ the audience’s/others’ reaction = a mixture of fear & disbelief;
→ Fevvers’ performances become marvelous reality (accepted & integrated into their rationality
/materiality)
→ her fuel = the audience’s astonishment “the eyes fixed upon her with astonishment, with awe, the
eyes that told her who she was. […]Hubris, imagination, desire! The blood sang in her veins. Their eyes
restored her soul.” (NC 173) ↔ the gaze
= “an oxymoron” (Finney)
= a hoax?
• her existence seems to depend on her status as object of desire; desire for immortality for
Rozencreutz, for pleasure for the Corporal, for power for the Duke, and for truth for
Walser, while to the reader she represents desire for meaning.
“The young American it was who kept the whole story of the old Fevvers in his notebooks; she
longed for him to tell her it was true.”(NC 273)

• the bird-woman recalls the animality of the humans

• she basks in her eccentricity and the mystery of her in-between body:
“My be-ing, my me-ness, is unique and indivisible. To sell the use of myself for the enjoyment
of another is one thing; I might even offer freely, out of gratitude or in the expectation of pleasure
– and pleasure alone is my expectation from the young American. But the essence of myself may
not be given or taken, or what would be left of me?” (NC 281)
 • a teasing game (seducing the audience)
• F. questions the validity of the Western tendency to privilege the visual as source of truth.
• JACK WALSER
= a well-travelled American journalist (= a sort of a narrator writing for his readers)
= patriarchal mentality (tendency to classify & to control things)
= the voice of reason
→ Fevvers approach to the world opens his eyes to the marvelous reality around him
→ represents order
→ represents the skeptic audience questioning Fevvers’ story & ability to fly
→ his desire to rationalise Fevvers
- struggles to maintain an objective pose
- learns new ways of thinking & seeing
- a world of distortions, excess and ambivalence upsetting his world of ordered
knowledge
- to bridge the gap between seeing and believing Walser has to learn how “to hesitate or
long enough to believe what he sees, even if what he sees is impossibility” (NC 97)
- joins the circus as a clown (the freedom of wearing a mask → TRUTH to the others & to
onself)
“the freedom that lies behind the mask, within dissimulation, the freedom to juggle with being”
(NC 103)
• Part I, London, centres around Fevvers’ narration, with Lizzie’s interference
• her birth from an egg (a bird? a human?)
• “Who laid me is as much a mystery to me, sir, as the nature of my conception, my father
and my mother both utterly unknown to me, and, some would say, unknown to nature”(NC
17)
• the versions of her life-story are designed for public consumption. Fevvers’ self-
representations invite us to respond with disbelief
• with Walser, she takes control of the narrative & witnesses his transformation from “a
sardonic contemplator” to someone who can love.
• F. performs her femininity, just as she performs her various roles as ‘Winged Victory’ (NC
37), ‘Cupid’ (NC 38), ‘Azrael, the Angel of Death’ (NC 79), ‘Dark angel of many names’
(NC 75), ‘Queen of ambiguities, goddess of in-between states, being on the borderline of
species’ (NC 81), ‘Scheherazade’ (NC 40) and ‘the great confidence artiste’ (NC 90).
• wings & ability to fly; challenging reason; (freedom & being different/unique; F=
representation of women who feel the desire to ‘fly’, to escape the patriarchal society of the
19th c and who were seen as ‘freaks’ for doing so)
“help her to escape from the nets of a patriarchal nineteenth century culture into a twentieth
century feminist haven of freedom.” (Brian Finney)
• flight & identity as performance (acting; masks? truth?)
• the egg = symbol of rebirth, fertility, new life; Fabergé
• the circus = a world where rules are broken, shaped by clowns, performers, animals
“A circus is always a microcosm"(Haffenden 89).
• the panopticon for female
[“a building, as a prison or library, so arranged that all parts of the interior are visible from a
single point.”]
• the tundra = a place where time loses traditional coordinates (Walser’s loss of memory)
 • loss of memory = a rebirth/reconstructed identity → turning into a New Man (who now sees
Fevvers as a human being and not as an object)
• Walser fears the loss of his sense of self (overpowered by Fevvers' presence & voice): “If he
got out of her room for just one moment . . . then he might recover his sense of proportion”
(NC 52)
• time
1. malleable
2. outside the individual’s control; seems to stop several times throughout
the novel (Big Ben striking midnight 3 times, Walser’s arrested memory, Ma Nelson’s
clock showing “the dead centre of the day or night, the shadowless hour, the hour of vision
and revelation, the still hour in the centre of the storm of time”, etc.)
→ the clock = a key item of the novel
= object suspended between the real (physical object) & supernatural (able to
manipulate the flow of time)
→ Big Ben = the time-keeper for the civilized world; regulating the external world of normality
th
• the liminal → transition / being on threshold between two states (story set btw 19 c and
th
20 c etc)
• the extraordinary = the starting point/cause of the pursuit of the ordinary/truth
• change →reforming personalities, rewriting social and gender dynamics
• the conventional hierarchical order in which man rules over animals is broken (animals
outsmart men = the circus)
• Walser & Fevvers’ reunion = the integration of New Man & New Woman [“And then she
saw he was not the man he had been or would ever be again; some other hen had hatched
him out. For a moment, she was anxious as to whom this reconstructed Walser might turn
out to be.” (NC 173)]
• constructing/deconstructing identity:
1. Fevvers ← the audience; Walser; abandoned & with a gloomy past, needs to re-invent her identity
2. Walser ← love & fear (Fevvers/Sophie)

"What is your name? Have you a soul? Can you love?" he demanded of her in a great, rhapsodic
rush as she rose up out of her curtsey. When she heard that, her heart lifted and sang. She batted
her lashes at him, beaming, exuberant, newly armed. Now she looked big enough to crack the roof
of the god-hut, all wild hair and feathers and triumphant breasts and blue eyes the size of dinner
plates.”
• Fevvers takes over the narration at the end of the novel "That's the way to start the
interview!" she cried. "Get out your pencil and we'll begin!" (NC 173)
→ rewriting identity
“He was as much himself again as he ever would be, and yet 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.” (NC 174)
→ identity markers: love & fear

He contemplated, as in a mirror, the self he was so busily reconstructing.

“I am Jack Walser, an American citizen. I joined the circus of Colonel Kearney in order to delight my
reading public with accounts of a few nights at the circus and, as a clown, performed before the Tsar of
All the Russians, to great applause. (What a story!) I was derailed by brigands in Transbaikalia and
lived as a wizard among the natives for a while. (God, what a story!) Let me introduce my wife, Mrs
Sophie Walser, who formerly had a successful career on the music-hall stage under the name of –” (NC
175)
• Fevvers’ spreading laughter → heralds the coming century
• “To think I really fooled you!”
→ readings:
1. two triumphs - sexual and psychological
2. the hypnotic power of narrative
3. the author/writer’s triumph at having deceived the reader (into following the narrative to this
end point); the comic narrator enjoying her narrative triumph
• ↔ metanarrative: concern with the potentialities and limits of the act of narrating
• the end of this novel ↔ refuses closure in typical postmodern fashion

“we remake ourselves by retelling our stories about ourselves better” (Finney)

"It just goes to show there's nothing like confidence" = the entire fictional narrative is a gigantic
confidence trick (the skeptical Walser & the skeptical reader)
"Fevvers, only the one question. . . why did you go to such lengths, once upon a time, to convince me
you were the 'only fully-feathered intacta in the history of the world'?" She began to laugh.
"I fooled you, then!" she said. "Gawd, I fooled you!" She laughed so much the bed shook.
"You mustn't believe what you write in the papers!" she assured him, stuttering and hiccupping with
mirth. "To think I fooled you!" (NC 175)

• Zainab Abdullah Al-Jibory, “Magic Realism in Angela Carter's novel Nights at the Circus”
http://www.iasj.net/iasj?func=fulltext&aId=73237
• http://web.csulb.edu/~bhfinney/carter.html
• Filimon, Eliza Claudia, Worlds in Collision - Angela Carter's Heterotopia, GRIN
Publishing, 2013