Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus

A Routledge Study Guide

Helen Stoddart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415350112
• eBook ISBN: 9781134269464
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A highly original and influential work of modern British literature, Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus 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 complex novel, presents:

• 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 Heather Johnson, Jeannette Baxter, 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 a way through the wealth of contextual and critical material that surrounds Carter's text.

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.). 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 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:

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 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 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.).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.), 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.) 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 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 o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Notes and References
• Introduction
• 1 Text and Contexts
• 2 Critical History
• 3 Critical Readings
• 4 Further Reading and Web Resources