Angela Carter: Nights at the Circus (1984)

Abstract

Angela Carter’s most ambitious novel, Nights at the Circus (1984), took her almost ten years to write (Carter “Sweet” 44). It has received a lot of critical attention, the majority of it feminist. This is hardly surprising considering that the novel features as its principal protagonist a woman with wings ushering in the twentieth century. “Fevvers,” we are told in the opening chapter, “has all the éclat of a new era about to take off” (11). Fevvers’s ability to fly prefigures the new liberated woman of the twentieth century “that just now is waiting in the wings, the New Age in which no woman will be bound to the ground” (25). Carter has set the novel in 1899, the year that the British Parliament was debating a motion on Votes for Women, a fact alluded to in the novel. While many of the feminist interpreters of the book have focused on the ways in which the newly gendered subject has been formed in the course of the narrative, most have allowed their allegiance to the women’s movement to simplify Carter’s complex and ambivalent handling of emancipated female subjectivity. Paulina Palmer set the trend with an important essay in 1987 which argued that in Nights at the Circus “[a]cts of resistance against patriarchy are represented … A reevaluation of female experience takes place and the emergence of a female counter-culture is celebrated” (180).