[In the following essay, Gass explores the image of the panopticon and its relation to the containment of women in Nights at the Circus.]

In her “Polemical Preface” to The Sadeian Woman Angela Carter writes,

All the mythic versions of women, from the myth of the redeeming purity of the virgin to that of the healing, reconciling mother, are consolatory nonsenses; and consolatory nonsense seems to me a fair definition of myth, anyway. Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives women emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.¹

Carter's point is that myths belong to a system of discourses, the purpose of which is to console women by convincing them that their place in society belongs to a “natural order.” Acceptance of that “natural order” results in being controlled by it. Carter rejects out of hand any appeal to metaphysical constructs, calling them “consolatory nonsense.” Instead, she insists that metaphysical constructs, indeed all discourses, are material elements, like language, that have no basis other than the fact of their materiality, their cultural acceptance, and their will to power.

Carter's Nights at the Circus is a novel about the ways in which these dominant, frequently male-centered discourses of power marginalize those whom society defines as freaks (madmen, clowns, the physically and mentally deformed, and, in particular, women) so that they may be contained and controlled because they are all possible sources of the chaotic disruption of established power. The whorehouse, the freak show, the circus, and the prison provide the defining arenas within which society may safely contain, define, and exploit these chaotic elements.

Although it appears only briefly, the novel's dominant image is the panopticon. It appears as the women's prison created by the Countess P. Carter imaginatively and creatively employs the image of the prison that Jeremy Bentham invented as a “progressive” correctional facility and that Michel Foucault demonstrates is an effective means of implementing and dispersing control over its inmates. The prison is structured with all of the diabolical precision that Bentham's plan prescribed: “It was a panopticon she forced them to build, a hollow circle of cells shaped like a doughnut, the inward-facing wall of which was composed of grids of steel and, in the middle of the roofed, central courtyard, there was a round room surrounded by windows.”² Each inmate is always visible to the monitor in the middle, or the hole, of the doughnut, and invisible to all of the other inmates and the guards. In fact, each inmate is not only deprived of the sight of others but also of the touch of others—her isolation is complete. She is always subjected to the warden's scrutinizing gaze. The Countess P.'s avowed purpose is to create a “charitable” institution whereby women who have murdered their husbands might repent their sins, accept responsibility for their crimes, and be returned to society. Her prison is

a machine designed to promote penitence.

For the Countess P. had conceived of the idea of a therapy of meditation. The women in the bare cells, in which was neither privacy nor distraction, cells formulated on the principle of those in a nunnery where all was visible to the eye of God, would live alone with the memory of their crime until they acknowledged, not their guilt—most of them had done that, already—but their responsibility. And she was sure that with responsibility would come remorse.

(212)

She creates the prison as a place of isolation and contemplation where women may confront their responsibility and be forgiven. Because the Countess P. is herself the very model of the subject of a discourse of power, she enacts its every law without questioning it, and in her enactment she perpetuates the law's reforming power. (Madame Schreck is another of those ultimate victims, and Carter reserves the most horrible retributions for them.) Unfortunately for the Countess P., her victims are nothing like her, and in all the years of the prison's existence not one woman has come forward to receive the Countess's benediction. Not one of the inmates feels responsibility, much less remorse; each of them views her act as one in which she has freed herself from the intolerable tyranny of a husband whose every cruel act is justified and legitimized by the state. Nevertheless, each inmate is the victim of an observing and defining authority both inside and outside the prison, and it is this model of observation that controls the novel as a whole.

The novel begins with observation. Jack Walser, a young “unfinished” reporter, interviews Sophie Fevvers, an aerialiste who insists that at adolescence she sprouted wings with which she flies from trapeze to trapeze in her circus act. Jack, a “connoisseur of the tall tale,” plans a series of interviews entitled “Great Humbugs of the World” (11): “Walser is here, ostensibly, to ‘puff’ her; and, if it is humanly possible, to explode her, either as well as, or instead of. Though do not think the revelation she is a hoax will finish her on the halls; far from it. If she isn't suspect, where's the controversy? What's the news?” (11). Jack is in London not to find out who Fevvers is but what she is. He is there to observe, to objectify, to subject Fevvers to his scrutiny, to define her. Jack is part of a system that defines others by labeling, naming, and describing what they are—a “hoax” or a humbug, perhaps, but never an individual human being. Knowing someone in this system means classifying her.

Fevvers's quest is to undergo the transforming process by which she becomes “the female paradigm, no longer an imagined fiction but a plain fact” (286). Like all women, Fevvers is the “imagined fiction” of the patriarchal culture to which she belongs. Because of her wings, she becomes the object of men's desires, especially and almost exclusively their sexual desires; virtually all of the men who see or hear about her imagine themselves to be the one who takes her virginity.

She is defined by her body, by her outward appearance, just as the freaks and clowns are. As a freak, she has economic value; as a commodity, she is bought and sold by those who collect unique and exotic objects; she has no intrinsic value as a human being. As Lizzie, her companion and fellow anarchist, tells her:

the baker can't make a loaf out of your privates, duckie, and that's all you'd have to offer him in exchange for a crust if nature hadn't made you the kind of spectacle people pay good money to see. All you can do to earn your living is to make a show of yourself. You're doomed to that. You must give pleasure to the eye, or else you're good for nothing. For you, it's always a symbolic exchange in the marketplace; you couldn't say you were engaged in productive labour, now, could you, girl?

(185)

Fevvers, however, takes advantage of her commodity value in order to further her special destiny to be “the pure child of century … the New Age in which no women will be bound to the ground” (25). She trades upon her position as a “rara avis” knowing full well that the money squandered on her by men who think of her as a “bright, pretty, useless thing” has “nothing to do with [her] value as such” (185). She exploits her exploiters by profiting from her appearance in order to further her revolutionary political aims, yet she never gives up her uniqueness (and that uniqueness is not her virginity) because she understands clearly that once she has succumbed to “the kiss of a magic prince … such a kiss would seal [her] up in [her] appearance for ever” (39).

Fevvers inhabits those marginal institutions of society—the whorehouse, the freak show, and the circus—that safely contain those elements that threaten to disrupt the orderly and legitimate exercise of power. In each of these institutions the inhabitants are on display, objects to be bought or seen for the pleasure of the viewing and consuming public, safely ensconced behind walls or bars or within the carefully prescribed circle of the circus ring. She and her fellow inmates are, as Foucault describes the inmates of the panopticon, like actors on the stage, enclosed in “small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible” and which have the effect of inducing “in the inmate a state of consciousness and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.”³ In Nelson's Academy (the whorehouse) and Madame Schreck's museum of women monsters Fevvers and the other women are objectified because of their sex; in the circus she and the other performers are there because of their ability to use their excessive physical features to perform. Their physical appearance does not, however, generalize them, nor does it reduce them to an undifferentiated group. The panopticon individualizes its inmates in an impersonal and diabolical way: “one finds in the programme of the Panopticon a … concern with individualizing observation, with characterization and classification, with the analytical arrangement of space” (Foucault 203). Each of the inmates of the whorehouse, the freak show, and the circus is easily identifiable by her specific deformity or talent or face (we must remember that no clown has the face of another; his makeup is his signature). In the arena each can be safely observed or used, but she only threatens established power when she exceeds the bounds of the arena.

The clowns represent contained chaos. They exemplify “carnival” in a thoroughly Bakhtinian sense:

The festivities associated with carnival are collective and popular; hierarchies are turned on their heads (fools become wise, kings become beggars); opposites are mingled (fact and fantasy, heaven and hell); the sacred is profaned. The “jolly relativity” of all things is proclaimed. Everything authoritative, rigid or serious is subverted, loosened and mocked.⁴

The circus provides a forum whereby society may indulge itself without, in fact, exposing itself to the dangers that the clowns represent. We must not forget that carnival is a legitimized event “allowed” by the power structure.

The clowns. See them as a band of terrorists. No; that's not right. Not terrorists, but irregulars. A band of irregulars, permitted the most ferocious piracies as long as, just so long as, they maintain the bizarrerie of their appearance, so that their violent exposition of manners stays on the safe side of terror, even if we need to learn to laugh at them, and part, at least, of this laughter comes from the successful suppression of fear.

(Carter 151)

The clowns are “licensed to commit licence and yet forbidden to act.” Therefore, they are safe; they cannot really overthrow the comfortable existence of those in power. They are safely contained within the little “O” of the ring, objects of the laughter which suppresses fear. For so long as these elements can be contained within that little “O,” “nothing [will] really change” (151).

As Foucault points out in The History of Sexuality, when society finds it needs to make room for illegitimate sexuality and madness, it constructs a “proper” arena for such things.

If it was truly necessary to make room for illegitimate sexualities, it was reasoned, let them take their infernal mischief elsewhere: to a place where they could be reintegrated, if not in the circuits of production, at least in those of profit. The brothel and the mental hospital [and in this case, the freak show and the circus] would be those places of tolerance: the prostitute, the client, and the pimp, together with the psychiatrist and the hysteric … seem to have surreptitiously transferred the pleasures that are unspoken into the order of things that are counted. Words and gestures, quietly authorized, could be exchanged there at the going rate. Only in those places would untrammeled sex have a right to (safely insularized) forms of reality, and only to clandestine, circumscribed, and coded types of discourse.⁵

These institutions that control illegitimate forms of expression, Foucault says, effectively repress and silence the discourse of the “abnormal” and “improper” by relegating them to “proper” arenas where they may entertain, and even shock. And, in this novel at least, the most abnormal and improper humans are women.

They are abnormal and improper because their discourse, the discourse that threatens the very foundations of the powers that suppress them, is the discourse of love. The murderesses escape from the Countess P.'s panopticon because they have defeated her through the power of human touch and human love. They set out to forge for themselves a new society based upon love.

Just as the murderesses break the panopticon of their prison, so does Fevvers provide the means by which the panopticons of the whorehouse, the freak show, and the circus are ruptured. Her presence in an institution seems to invite its disastrous demise. Because she plays “Winged Victory” at the whorehouse, business declines. When Nelson's brother arrives to take possession of the whorehouse after Nelson's death, the prostitutes, in an act reminiscent of Bakhtin's carnival, burn the house down and, having prepared themselves for successful “legitimate” careers, set out to begin again. When Madame Schreck tries to cheat Fevvers, she causes the old hag's death and frees the inmates of the museum of women monsters, and she and Lizzie restore each inmate to a happy situation. Finally, after Fevvers joins the circus, it literally disintegrates—the clowns disappear into the Siberian snows; the apes get a better contract and join another circus; the aerialists are fired; the circus train is sabotaged in Siberia and the remaining members of the circus scattered over the tundra. Fevvers's heroic role, it seems, is to be the instrument of destruction of panopticons.

However, she is not just a destroyer; she is a mender, a builder, a unifier. What she destroys are the cages that confine the socially oppressed; her goal is to “see the end of cages” (38). What she builds are human relationships. She and Walser rescue Mignon from her life of repeated sexual and physical abuse and introduce her to the Princess; in the process Mignon is transformed from the child-woman victim of male violence to a woman loved unconditionally by another woman. Fevvers and Lizzie rescue and aid other victims as well. The strong man, who had mindlessly abused Mignon, learns to love her without any expectation that she will ever be more than a friend; he learns to love a human being who deserves to be loved because she is human.

Finally, Fevvers has to break out of her own cage; she has to learn to love and be loved by a man. After a long quest in which she and Jack Walser both learn the value of love and Jack learns to see the human being beneath the wings, they find one another. Love brings them together, and together they will tell the “histories of those women who would otherwise go down nameless and forgotten, erased from history as if they had never been” (285). He will be her amanuensis; she will be his muse.

Fevvers has a vision of a new world and a new woman to be born with the twentieth century, and, although Lizzie tempers Fevvers's idealism by warning her that she “sees through a glass darkly,” Fevvers's vision of the new woman nevertheless holds promise for us at the end of the twentieth century that at long last another discourse, the individual female voice, will be heard. She says:

And once the old world has turned on its axle so that the new dawn can dawn, then, ah, then! all the women will have wings, the same as I. This young woman in my arms, whom we found tied hand and foot with the grisly bonds of ritual, will suffer no more of it; she will tear off her mind forg'd manacles, will rise up and fly away. The dolls' house doors will open, the brothels will spill forth their prisoners, the cages, gilded or otherwise, all over the world, in every land, will let forth their inmates singing together the dawn chorus of the new, the transformed—

(285)

The panopticon, as we have seen, is not inescapable. Although the human body, and especially the female body, is, as Foucault asserts, “the ‘site’ at which all forms of repression are ultimately registered,” it is also, in Nights at the Circus, the locus for another kind of discourse. As David Harvey writes in The Condition of Postmodernity, “The only way to ‘eliminate the fascism in our heads’ is to explore and build upon the open qualities of human discourse, and thereby intervene in the way knowledge is produced and constituted at the particular sites where … power-discourse prevails.”⁶ In Carter's novel the site is the female body, but that body has wings, and she can fly.

Notes

1. Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (New York: Pantheon, 1979), 5.

2. Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus (New York: Penguin, 1986), 210; hereafter cited parenthetically.

3. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), 201; hereafter cited parenthetically.

4. Raman Selden, A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1988), 17-18.

5. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980), 4.

6. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 45-46.