Carter, Angela - Brian H. Finney (essay date spring 1998)
Brian H. Finney (essay date spring 1998)
SOURCE: Finney, Brian H. “Tall Tales and Brief Lives: Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus.” Journal of Narrative Technique 28, no. 2 (spring 1998): 161-85.
[In the following essay, Finney discusses Carter's assertion that Nights at the Circus is about the nature of narrative.]
Nights at the Circus (1984), Angela Carter's penultimate novel, epitomizes her wildly inventive, highly idiosyncratic mode of fiction, centered as it is on Fevvers, a Cockney artiste who claims to have grown wings. Most critics and reviewers have seen the main thrust of the novel to reside in the portrayal of Fevvers as a prototype of the New Woman whose wings help her to escape from the nets of a patriarchal nineteenth-century culture into a twentieth-century feminist haven of freedom.1 The novel ends with Fevvers astride her American lover, Walser (she now playing the missionary role),...
[The entire page is 10196 words long]
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