Angela Carter's fiction: Nights at the Circus

When I consider my favorite fiction writers, some are on the list because of the consistent pleasure they afford. Others earn their place for one or two works towards which I feel a special affinity. [1]

For me Angela Carter is in the second category, for the collection of re-imagined fairy tales The Bloody Chamber (1979) and her dreamlike second novel The Magic Toyshop (1967). It had been many years since I last read them, but Edmund Gordon's recent biography The Invention of Angela Carter (2017) inspired me to read them again, along with two books I had found disappointing when they were first issued, Nights at the Circus (1984) and Wise Children (1991).

Of course there's a risk in revisiting the work of favorite writers. While there are novels that only grow richer with re-reading, for others we may discover that aspects of the work we once felt were powerfully engaging and original can seem less so after the passage of time. As our taste evolves, our discernment develops and we ourselves change, once-favorite works can appear diminished, at least in comparison to our fond memories and associations. So it was with a certain amount of trepidation that I approached this project.

As it turned out, I needn't have worried. What follows in this and the three subsequent posts are some of my thoughts about each of these four books, in the order in which I re-read them.

Nights at the Circus is the story of Fevvers, a circus aerialist at the turn of the twentieth century. In the first part of the book she tells her life story to Jack Walser, an American journalist. Against his better (or at least more rational) judgment Walser is charmed by Fevvers and winds up joining her circus in order to write about it from the inside. (The name "Jack Walser" seems to pay simultaneous homage to Jack London and to the Swiss writer Robert Walser, who among other parallels with the character also learned a highly ritualized profession—butlering—in order to write about it.)

It's not only Fevvers' name that's unusual. That name is an approximation of the Cockney pronunciation of "feathers," because (in her telling) as a foundling infant she bore a "little bit of down, of yellow fluff, on my back, on top of both my shoulder blades," which burst forth as full-fledged wings when she turned fourteen. [2]

The emergence of Fevvers' wings at puberty and her heart-pounding attempts to learn to fly are brilliant metaphors for the disturbing transformations and beckoning freedoms of adolescence. Fevvers tells Walser, "I suffered the greatest conceivable terror of the irreparable difference with which success in the attempt [to fly] would mark me. . .I feared the proof of my own singularity." Carter's conceit perfectly captures the teenaged anxiety of feeling utterly unique and at the same time yearning to belong. [3]

The metaphor's richness continues into Fevvers' adulthood: she tells Jack that to make a living as a performer (rather than as a sideshow attraction) she has to pretend to be a fake. She embodies the predicament of women who, in order to make their way in the world, find they must conceal their true powers and conform to confining (male) expectations. This is all made even more complicated by a hint in the final pages that Fevvers' wings may be fake after all. If so, she is pretending to pretend not to have powers that she really doesn't have.  (All performers are fakes, Carter suggests, and that's part of their appeal.)

Nights at the Circus may be a parable about the constricting roles forced on women, but the circus setting also provides Carter with plentiful opportunities to spin rollicking yarns. We witness the triumphs and disasters that occur both in performance and backstage and meet a menagerie of other performers, both animal and human. These include a cowardly strong man, a clown whose act careens into drunken murderous rage, dancing tigers tamed by the sound of music (but who occasionally break free and wreak havoc), a clan of rival aerialists who sabotage Fevvers' trapeze, and a fortune-telling pig.

But when in the final section of the novel the circus train derails in the snowfields of Siberia, the narrative also seems to go off track. Carter introduces new characters but fails to fully develop their stories, and at the same time she seems to lose interest in some of her extensive cast. Compared to the headlong momentum of the first two parts of the book, the last third feels static and ultimately anticlimactic.

There's also a strange shift in voice. For the first two parts of the novel the story is told in the third person, largely from Walser's point of view. In the last part some paragraphs abruptly shift into the first-person thoughts of Fevvers, but they are rendered in an utterly different voice than that of the Cockney raconteuse of the earlier part of the novel. If Carter is intending to remind us that performers are always on stage even in the presence of an audience of one, it's a point that by now surely has been made. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that this novel, Carter's longest, could have used some significant revision in the last section.

In the final pages of Nights at the Circus two of the stranded performers, the singer Mignon and her lover, the tiger-taming pianist Princess, meet a marooned music teacher, the Maestro. "'It's as though he found his long-lost daughter,' said Lizzie [Fevver's loyal dresser]. 'As at the end of one of Shakespeare's late comedies. Only he's found two daughters. A happy ending, squared.'" This passage, with its reference to doubles, reunions, and Shakespeare's comedies, seems as though it may have been the moment of gestation of Carter's next novel, Wise Children. [4]

Nights at the Circus has been adapted into a BBC Radio 4 drama, first performed in September 2018: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bkqcqh 

Next time: Wise Children

---

1. In the first category are writers such as Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis and Anthony Trollope; in the second, writers such as Felipe Alfau (for Locos), Daphne du Maurier (for Rebecca), George Eliot (for Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda) and Philippe Soupault (for Last Nights of Paris) 
2. Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus, Chatto & Windus, 1984, p. 12. 
3. Carter, Nights at the Circus, p. 34.
4. Carter, Nights at the Circus, p. 272.