[In the following essay, Michael examines Carter's utopian feminist vision in Nights at the Circus.]

With extravagant playfulness, Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus (1984) weaves together elements of the carnivalesque and fantastic with those of harsh material realism as vehicles for feminist aims. Carter's novel is the literary heir of Virginia Woolf's Orlando and Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, both of which engage the fantastic and the carnivalesque, and indeed is more literary or fully artificial than the novels of Lessing, Piercy, and Atwood. Set in 1899, Nights at the Circus purports to usher in the twentieth-century. Carter's depiction of the past is strikingly familiar, however, which suggests that the present is effectively her target and that 1899 and the 1980s are not worlds apart. The novel is set not only in the past but also in places that are out of the ordinary—a whorehouse, a museum for women monsters, a circus, St. Petersburg, and Siberia—which enables Carter to engage in flights of imagination that do not directly contradict the immediate context of the contemporary reader.

The feminism of Nights at the Circus is complex in that it brings together more than one strand of feminism, an engaged Marxist feminism and a subversive utopian feminism.¹ Lizzie and her adopted daughter Fevvers serve, respectively, as mouthpieces for each of these two feminisms, although there is an overlap as the two characters influence each other. The novel's omniscient narrative voice strives to conjoin these two strands of feminism, in order to posit a feminism that would be liberating while retaining a sociohistorical grounding: a feminism that would free human beings from the hierarchical relations in which Western culture, with its binary logic, has entrapped them, without becoming disengaged from the material situation. In order to analyze the status both of women and of existing relationships between women and men within Western culture and, more radically, to propose possible avenues for change, Carter pits a Marxist feminist realism against postmodern forms of tall tales or autobiographies, inverted norms, carnivalization, and fantasy. Disruptive strategies usually associated with postmodernism pervade Nights at the Circus to a greater extent than any of the other novels I have discussed so far; but, like the others, it uses postmodern aesthetic strategies specifically to strengthen and further its feminist aims.² Even as she appropriates extraordinary and fantastic elements, Carter retains certain conventions of realism and a firm connection to the historical material situation as means of securing her novel's feminist political edge and ensuring that her novel remains accessible to most readers.³

To accomplish its aims, the novel engages and attempts to resolve the tensions that have characterized the uneasy relationship between Marxist feminism and postmodernism. Marxist feminism has generally rejected postmodernism on the grounds that its tendencies toward abstractions give way to a disconnection from the material world and from history, that it rejects metanarratives (such as Marxism and gender theory), and that it dissolves the subject. In contrast, Marxist feminists emphasize the material world in which women are daily oppressed as women and situate their analyses of women's oppression within specific political, cultural, historical, economic, ideological contexts. As Toril Moi explains, “patriarchy itself persists in oppressing women as women,” so that “as feminists we need to situate our deconstructive gestures in specific political contexts.”⁴ Materialist feminism takes as its point of departure “the oppression of women” and asserts “the social origins” of that oppression, employing both micro- and macro-analyses. Furthermore, as “a social movement,” a “revolutionary movement” actively seeking to change the world, Marxist feminism requires active agents/subjects.⁵ However, as I argue in Chapter 1, postmodernism is a slippery area of contention that cannot be reduced to any oversimplified characterization. Indeed, the work of critics such as Fredric Jameson, Andreas Huyssen, Linda Hutcheon, Nancy Fraser, and Linda Nicholson demonstrates that postmodernism is not inherently antithetical to feminism and Marxism, that it is very much tied to the material world, that it actively engages history, that it does not necessarily invalidate all metanarratives, and that it seeks to reconstruct and reconceptualize, rather than negate, the subject. Similarly, Carter's novel aesthetically engages and conjoins Marxist feminism and certain postmodern aesthetic strategies in an effort to construct an engaged feminism with liberatory potential.

Carter's novel highlights its own textuality with its three labeled parts and its presentation of a metafictional narrative in which the sheer number of embedded narratives undermines notions of authorship and single-leveled reality. As with the other three novels I discuss in this study, one of the central preoccupations of Nights at the Circus is its challenge to the traditional Western opposition between reality and fiction. However, Carter's novel uses different strategies than the other novels to disrupt that dichotomy: the construction of carnival spheres, the relativizing of time, and the creation of fantastic images. The novel's rejection of any neat demarcation between reality and fiction functions as the pivotal strategy for undermining the Western conception of the subject and of traditional gender categories and for offering forms of liberating power. This liberating power carries with it possibilities for change in the realms of subjecthood and the relations between the sexes and also anticipates potential new forms for feminist fiction.

Nights at the Circus is divided into three parts labeled in terms of geographical location: “London,” “Petersburg,” and “Siberia.” The movement toward increasingly foreign and remote places parallels a movement away from any stable grounds of reality and toward the ever more fantastic. The narrative is fragmented by various embedded stories, told by and about women, that further destabilize conventional notions of reality, truth, and authorship. Although the omniscient narrator purports to concentrate on the central male character's point of view, the narrative's perspective continuously shifts as it is appropriated by women characters telling their stories-histories in long monologues that often include vivid dialogue exchanges.

The novel's focus and central character is Fevvers, a huge female “aerialiste” with wings, whose fame rests on her indeterminate identity and origins: her slogan reads, “Is she fact or is she fiction?”⁶ Lizzie, a staunch Marxist feminist, is Fevvers' adopted mother and companion, who took her in as a foundling. The “London” segment of the novel consists of an interview of Fevvers, in Lizzie's presence, by a young American journalist, Jack Walser. Walser's initial purpose is to expose Fevvers as “a hoax,” as one of the “Great Humbugs of the World” (11). Although Walser is the interviewer, Fevvers and Lizzie control the session by telling Fevvers' life story and challenging his disbelief and skepticism. Walser's curiosity is only awakened by the women's “performance” (90) during the interview, and he decides to join the circus in order to follow up on this story. The second part, “Petersburg,” focuses on Walser's transformation into a clown as he becomes subsumed within the magical circus world and recognizes that he has fallen in love with Fevvers. This segment relies more heavily on authorial narration, although it also includes segments of dialogue as well as embedded stories of the abused female circus performers befriended by Fevvers. By the novel's last section, “Siberia,” the fantastic has taken over. The train carrying the circus crashes and the various characters wander around Siberia in various groups, meeting extraordinary people and situations. Walser and Fevvers are separated, and the novel ends when they are reunited. In this segment, the narrative shifts among Fevvers's and Walser's stream of consciousness, dialogue, embedded stories, and authorial narration.

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Feminist and postmodern elements are so enmeshed in Nights at the Circus that any discussion of either necessarily overlaps with the other. It is, nevertheless, useful to begin with the more overt feminist currents. From its first page, Carter's novel begins to undermine conventional notions of gender construction and sexual hierarchy.⁷ Fevvers asserts authority over her own story-history and evades attempts by Walser to fix an identity upon her. As in The Handmaid's Tale, a male writer is intent upon naming and thus objectifying a female character; but, in Nights at the Circus, his quest begins rather than ends the novel, which announces from the start the subversion of his attempts to appropriate Fevvers. Carter in this way begins to call into question accepted notions of identity and the binary logic on which they depend, as she attempts to create a new female subject that seeks to satisfy feminist aims.

Fevvers defies Walser's attempt to prove her a fake not by refusing to answer his questions but by taking command of her own self-definition as she tells him her story and thereby assumes a position of authority. As Teresa de Lauretis asserts, “strategies of writing and reading are forms of cultural resistance,” and this argument surely can be extended to oral storytelling.⁸ By having Fevvers read her own life and write, or rather tell, her own story-history as she chooses, the novel challenges the traditional appropriation of women's lives and histories endemic of Western male-centered culture. Furthermore, Fevvers deliberately flirts with the boundary between truth and non-truth. Her story is both an autobiography and a tall tale and, as such, destabilizes both male definitions of women and notions of identity, truth, and reality.

The novel opens with Fevvers' assertion that she “never docked via what you might call the normal channels, sir, oh, dear me, no; but, just like Helen of Troy, was hatched”; and the narrative specifies that she accompanies her statement with direct eye contact “as if to dare him: ‘Believe it or not!’” The reference to the mythical Helen, engendered by Zeus in the form of a swan and Leda, ironically links Fevvers' self-definition to the history of Western culture by raising her to mythic or at least fantastic proportions. The narrative normalizes the comparison, however, by playfully debasing it to the level of ordinary family resemblances: “Evidently this Helen took after her putative father, the swan, around the shoulder parts” (7). Moreover, according to Ricarda Schmidt, Fevvers' claim that she was hatched suggests that she “fantasizes a beginning for herself outside the Oedipal triangle” associated with the nuclear family and subject formation.⁹ To more thoroughly mystify her biological origins, Fevvers further asserts that she was a foundling. As a half-woman, half-swan orphan, Fevvers challenges prevailing notions of identity that are grounded in verifiable origins and binary logic.

By allowing her origins to remain a mystery and encouraging speculation about them, Fevvers maintains her status as “Heroine of the hour” (8). Her fame depends precisely on her being suspect, whether or not her wings are real. Although Walser is skeptical of Fevvers' claim that she is a “genuine bird-woman,” he “contemplate[s] the unimaginable” while watching her perform on the trapeze and recognizes the “paradox” that, “in a secular age, an authentic miracle” would have to “purport to be a hoax, in order to gain credit in the world” (17). Walser's reflection highlights the precarious nature of the opposition between reality and fiction by suggesting that the concepts are intertwined. Fevvers' indeterminate identity and her insistence on preserving its mystery threaten the dichotomy between reality and fiction.

“At six feet two in her stockings” (12), Fevvers disrupts the conventions of female characters. She asserts her authority by simply taking up space: “Fevvers yawned with prodigious energy, opening up a crimson maw the size of that of a basking shark, taking in enough air to lift a Montgolfier, and then she stretched herself suddenly and hugely, extending every muscle as a cat does, until it seemed she intended to fill up all the mirror, all the room with her bulk.” Walser is threatened by her appropriation of space and attempts to escape the room so that “he might recover his sense of proportion” (52), which is clearly male-defined. The novel's simultaneous insistence on Fevvers' bodily presence and on her self-construction frustrates the traditional Western dichotomy between soul-self and body, in which the body—and in turn the material world—is relegated to irrelevance and inferiority.¹⁰ Fevvers significantly fills the mirror before she fills the room, highlighting the postmodern notion that nothing exists outside of representation or a specific context; yet she nevertheless fills the room as well, fulfilling the feminist insistence that representation retain a firm link to the material situation.¹¹

Fevvers's “raucous” voice and her “grand, vulgar” (12-13) gestures indicate that she is comfortable with herself and has chosen her own codes of behavior. She takes up a traditionally masculine role by asserting herself as the author of her own actions and words. Having internalized conventional categories, Walser describes Fevvers as having a “strong, firm, masculine grip” (89) when she shakes his hand. The narrative also stresses her femininity, however, by describing her dressing room as “a mistresspiece of exquisitely feminine squalor” (9), using deliberately feminized language. Moreover, the depiction of one of her feminine flirtatious gestures, when “she batted her eyelashes at Walser in the mirror” (40), again presents Fevvers via the mediation of a mirror. Fevvers is altogether an ambivalent figure who threatens traditional binary categories: she possesses masculine strength and authority as well as feminine charms and wiles.¹² The interview reduces Walser, rather than Fevvers, to a passive state: “It was as if Walser had become a prisoner of her voice” (43). Carter's novel challenges the traditional association of female with femininity and male with masculinity through the depiction of characters who confound accepted gender norms and polarity. As Sally Robinson suggests, “For Carter, gender is a relation of power, whereby the weak become ‘feminine’ and the strong become ‘masculine.’ And, because relations of power change, this construction is always open to deconstruction.”¹³ Indeed, the novel does deconstruct the hierarchical opposition between masculine and feminine by presenting Fevvers as co-opting both masculine and feminine characteristics to establish her power over Walser.

Fevvers and Lizzie assume control of the narrative in the novel's “London” section, unfolding Fevvers's life story-history through long dynamic monologues, interrupted by dialogues between the two women. The customary association of authorship and activeness with the male is here reversed: Fevvers and Lizzie are the active speakers-writers and Walser is the passive spectator-reader. Fevvers is able to “challenge and attack” (54) Walser's attempt to fix her identity, and thus objectify her, by constructing her own self and story-history. Fevvers exhibits herself as object for an audience's gaze; yet, as the author of herself as object, she is also a subject who has control over how much she will allow herself to be consumed by her viewers: “Look at me! With a grand, proud ironic grace, she exhibited herself before the eyes of the audience as if she were a marvellous present too good to be played with. Look, not touch” (15).¹⁴ Fevvers begins her working career by posing as a “tableau vivant,” actively constructing herself as an object to be seen but not touched: as a child she is “Cupid” (23), and as she matures she becomes “Winged Victory” (25) and then “Angel of Death” (70). Although Fevvers objectifies herself, she remains a subject by constructing her own objectified image. By destabilizing and yet retaining the conventional opposition between subject and object, the novel moves toward non-hierarchical and non-binary notions of subjectivity while simultaneously engaging and highlighting issues of power relations. Although feminists such as Nancy Hartsock have criticized postmodernism for “getting rid of subjectivity or notions of the subject,” Nights at the Circus illustrates ways in which postmodern notions of subjectivity can be tapped for feminist purposes without disintegrating subjectivity to the point where it no longer exists. Carter's novel never loses touch with the material oppression of women even while it attempts to offer new forms of subjectivity that are not based in the binary thought system that has helped to oppress women in Western culture. The novel does precisely what Hartsock claims is necessary for feminism to move forward: “we need to engage in the historical, political, and theoretical process of constituting ourselves as subjects as well as objects of history,” and “we need not only to critique the dominant culture but also to create alternatives.”¹⁵

Carter's novel differentiates among those who are performing the objectification of women and for what purposes. Fevvers's existence as both subject and object challenges the type of objectification by which “male-subjectivity creates its Other precisely to designate itself as its superior, its creator-spectator-owner-judge.”¹⁶ Fevvers vehemently rejects her own objectification by men: “I did not await the kiss of a magic prince, sir! With my two eyes, I nightly saw how such a kiss would seal me up in my appearance for ever!” (39). The threat of being forced into the position of static object to be viewed and dominated is all too tangible for Fevvers, who is again and again faced with attempts to fix the ambivalent figure she presents to the world.

The novel contains two separate instances in which men literally attempt to objectify Fevvers. In each case, the men seek to dominate her by depriving her of control over her own life. Their attempts to transform her into a corpse in one instance and into a toy in the other support the notion that “you can only objectify the living by taking away its life; by killing it either in fact or fantasy.”¹⁷ In the first episode, a wealthy gentleman purchases Fevvers from the museum of women monsters and attempts to kill her with a blade. Viewing her as a “reconciler of opposing states” and as his “rejuvenatrix” (81-82), he tries to sacrifice her on Mayday to ensure his own life and power. But Fevvers rejects the role of passive victim and male-constructed object and pulls out her own sword to save her life. She asserts her authority and subjecthood by matching his phallic power—located in his weapon rather that in his penis—sword for sword. The novel in this way emphasizes the violence that is part of male domination and that is tied to the realm of sexuality. As Michele Barrett argues, “sexual relationships are political because they are socially constructed and therefore could be different” and because of “the unequal power of those involved in sexual relationships.”¹⁸ Indeed, Christine Delphy explains that sexuality is “one of the fields of confrontation” or “struggle” between “social men and social women,” so that oppression within the realm of sexuality is just “as material as economic oppression.”¹⁹ Later in the novel, a Russian grand duke attempts to cage her among his collection of exotic toys, but again Fevvers fights against objectification. After the Grand Duke breaks her sword, depriving her of phallic power, she resorts to feminine wiles to distract him: “a deep instinct of self-preservation made her let his rooster out of the hen-coop for him and ruffle up its feathers.” She masturbates him and makes her escape at the moment “the Grand Duke ejaculated” (191-92). However, the novel does not jettison the conventions of realism, since it ultimately grounds seemingly extraordinary incidents—such as her narrow escapes from the wealthy gentleman and the Russian Grand Duke—in the daily victimization of women and thus challenges accepted notions of women as naturally and inevitably passive objects.²⁰

Although Fevvers is presented as a fantastic being whose experiences encompass the extraordinary, the novel never severs the connection between her exploits and the material situation: Fevvers is fantastic but recognizable.²¹ Her relationship with Lizzie is in this respect crucial, since Lizzie functions as the novel's didactic feminist voice. As a staunch Marxist feminist and former prostitute, Lizzie keeps the novel's focus from diverging too far from the economic aspects of material existence. In Hartsock's terms, Lizzie provides the novel with a “feminist standpoint [which] can allow us to descend further into materiality to an epistemological level at which we can better understand both why patriarchal institutions and ideologies take such perverse and deadly forms and how both theory and practice can be redirected in more liberatory directions.”²² Fevvers's story also indicates that Lizzie's politics have influenced her adopted daughter, particularly in the depiction of the whorehouse in which Fevvers was raised as “the common daughter of half-a-dozen mothers” (21) and which disrupts the nuclear family developed under capitalism. Since “the family” is at present “itself the site of economic exploitation: that of women”²³ and since “it is within the family that masculine and feminine people are constructed … [and] that the categories of gender are reproduced,” the production of new forms of subjectivity require new family structures and ideologies.²⁴

Indeed, one of the means by which the novel begins to call into question the status quo and construct new notions of the subject is through its inversion of accepted norms in its treatment of prostitution and marriage. When Fevvers challenges Walser to print in his newspaper that she was raised by “women of the worst class and defiled,” Walser's reply reveals his firm entrenchment in Western binary thought: “I myself have known some pretty decent whores, some damn' fine women, indeed, whom any man might have been proud to marry.” Walser retains and even reemphasizes the dichotomy between good women and bad women, wives and whores, by asserting that some whores are good enough to become wives. The novel rejects these oppositions through Lizzie's voice, whose assertion that wives and whores have more in common than not undermines the Western ideology of marriage: “What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many” (21).

Lizzie's words echo not only Frederick Engels' discussion of bourgeois marriage in The Origin of the Family but also Carter's own discussion in her book-length essay, The Sadeian Woman (1978). The Sadeian Woman proposes that “sexual relations” are “necessarily an expression of social relations” and that, like prostitutes, “all wives of necessity fuck by contract.” Carter undermines the conventional hierarchical opposition between wives and whores by stressing that “Prostitutes are at least decently paid on the nail and boast fewer illusions about a hireling status that has no veneer of social acceptability.”²⁵Nights at the Circus fictionalizes this criticism of the bourgeois notion of marriage and of the traditional dichotomy between wife and whore by using prostitutes as its positive female characters, reducing marriage to nothing more than an unquestioned custom grounded in a false ideology of happiness: “The name of this custom is a ‘happy ending’.” Lizzie cynically defines marriage as forcing a woman to give to a man both herself and her “bank account” (280-81), thus highlighting the economic exploitation of women within the institution of marriage that is covered over by fictions of romance.

The novel's Marxist feminism and its stress on the economic as well as ideological oppression of women surfaces in the descriptions of prostitutes as “working women doing it for money,” as “poor girls earning a living” (38-39). Fevvers challenges the myths of whores as degenerates or nymphomaniacs by asserting that economics rather than pleasure informs the prostitute's work: “though some of the customers would swear that whores do it for pleasure, that is only to ease their own consciences, so that they will feel less foolish when they fork out hard cash for pleasure that has no real existence unless given freely—oh, indeed! we knew we only sold the simulacra. No woman would turn her belly to the trade unless pricked by economic necessity, sir” (39). In addition, the assumption that sexual favors can be both “real” and a “simulacra” of themselves calls into question the opposition between reality and fiction. Fevvers's words undermine the conventional association of sex with pleasure or desire by highlighting the contractual nature of all sexual relations. The novel designates sex as a business transaction rather than a moral category. Carter suggests that both the prostitute and the wife engage in sex as an economic exchange; the only difference lies in the prostitute's explicit acknowledgement of the contract. The prostitute comes out ahead in the novel, precisely because she is more aware of her position within an economic system in which all women necessarily participate.

Carter transforms the whorehouse into a “wholly female world,” a “sisterhood” of active ambitious women, whose lives are “governed by a sweet and loving reason.” The prostitutes are “all suffragists” (38-39)—not suffragettes—and professional women.²⁶ They engage in “intellectual, artistic or political” (40) pursuits before the whorehouse opens each evening and are thus active subjects as well as sexual objects. By making the prostitute its version of the feminist, the novel disrupts accepted norms and dualisms—including conventionalized notions of feminists. The term whore becomes ambivalent when it is dislocated from its position as polar opposite of wife, good woman, and even feminist. Furthermore, although her use of the term “honour” to denote selfhood is conventional, Fevvers's explicit questioning of the common reduction of women to their bodily orifices challenges traditional stereotypes: “Wherein does a woman's honour reside, old chap? In her vagina or in her spirit?” (230). Fevvers's words also emphasize the ways in which the biological body has been co-opted in the service of those in power.²⁷

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Although some of the ideas Carter espouses in The Sadeian Woman find a voice within Nights at the Circus, the latter shapes Carter's ideas into a web of creative and overtly fictionalized narratives. In Nights at the Circus, Carter strengthens her feminist position through the use of various destabilizing aesthetic strategies. The novel's subversion of the notion of prostitution, for example, goes far beyond its overt analysis through the voices of Fevvers and Lizzie; it is reinforced by a thorough carnivalization of the whorehouse itself. Indeed, Carter's use of carnivalization and her creation of carnival spheres strengthen the novel's feminist impulses. Mikhail Bakhtin describes the process of “carnivalization” as the “transposition of carnival into the language of literature” that brings to literary works the “carnival sense of the world [which] possesses a mighty life-creating and transforming power, an indestructible vivacity.” The carnival attitude challenges the status quo by sanctioning unofficial behavior and by celebrating the “joyful relativity” of everything, so that the “behavior, gesture and discourse of a person are freed from the authority” of “the all-powerful socio-hierarchical relationships of non-carnival life.” Bakhtin argues that this carnival attitude has been transmitted through the ages via various carnivalized genres, and in particular through Menippean satire.²⁸

Literary critics engaging the postmodern have been quick to point out a connection between the carnivalization implicit in Menippean satire and postmodern literature. Brian McHale, for example, argues that “Postmodernist fiction is the heir of Menippean satire” and demonstrates ways in which postmodern literature appropriates processes of carnivalization. McHale maintains that postmodern fiction compensates for the loss of “the carnival context by incorporating carnival, or some surrogate of carnival, at the level of its projected world,” so that “In the absence of a real carnival context, it constructs fictional carnivals.”²⁹ An examination of the basic characteristics of Menippean satire as delineated by Bakhtin further suggests that carnivalization has overt political implications and might, therefore, be adapted as a feminist strategy. I am here arguing that Nights at the Circus utilizes a postmodern version of carnivalization as a vehicle for its more subversive feminist aims.

The political potential of Menippean and postmodern forms of carnivalization lies in what Bakhtin describes as its “experimental fantasticality,” its “creation of extraordinary situations for the provoking and testing of a philosophical idea.” Carnivalized scenes of “scandal,” “eccentric behavior,” and other “violations” of “established norms” are used to create “a breach in the stable, normal (‘seemly’) course of human affairs and events,” so as to “free human behavior from the norms and motivations that predetermine it.” Bakhtin's further characterization of Menippean satire as having a “concern with current and topical issues” and as being “full of overt and hidden polemics” also points to the inherently political nature of this form of carnivalization.³⁰ Carter's Nights at the Circus is a prime example of a carnivalized novel, whose ultimate aim is to expose current feminist concerns and offer possibilities for change.³¹ The novel's use of extraordinary and fantastic characters and situations and its creation of actual and surrogate carnivals begins to destabilize existing norms as well as the binary logic which undergirds Western culture.

By constructing the whorehouse, the museum for women monsters, the circus, and Siberia as versions of carnival, the novel disrupts and challenges traditional Western notions of reality and provides an aesthetic vocabulary for delineating possibilities of change. Since the carnival is a space within which the dominant hierarchical system and its laws and prohibitions are suspended, the carnival allows for ambivalence and relativity as well as for new forms of interrelationships—a primary feminist aim. The whorehouse in the “London” section of Nights at the Circus, for example, functions as a surrogate carnival and, as such, reinforces the novel's disruption of the accepted notion of prostitution and of the binary logic on which it depends. The novel's presentation of prostitutes in a positive light and of prostitution in non-moral terms, as well as its use of an extraordinary heroine with wings, are all carnivalesque disruptions of established norms. The physical description of the whorehouse itself further establishes its carnival status. The house's “staircase that went up with a flourish like, pardon me, a whore's bum” and its “drawing room [that] was snug as a groin” are comic touches that transform conventional imagery by inserting a whorehouse world view within a traditional descriptive style. Fevvers's outrageous depiction of the house as having an “air of rectitude and propriety” and as being “a place of privilege,” in which “rational desires might be rationally gratified” (26-27), further challenges the status quo by deploying adjectives generally reserved for officially sanctioned institutions. The novel brings together high and low culture, destabilizing the distinction between them. The whorehouse of the novel's “London” section is a carnival sphere, in the sense that it defies established conventions and codes; it becomes other than what it is generally thought to be and thereby challenges the rulling order.

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Fevvers is herself an ambivalent figure of carnival stature, disrupting established conventions of female characters. Not only are her identity and origins nebulous, but her reputation as “Virgin Whore” (55) defies the highly charged opposition between virgin and whore used by Western culture to name, objectify, categorize, and marginalize women. By claiming that she is the “only fully-feathered intacta in the history of the world” (294), Fevvers participates in her own social definition. Her admission at the end of the novel that she is after all not an “intacta” demonstrates that, in the absence of an essential self or soul, the possibility of self-construction exists alongside construction by others; Fevvers is able to create the being that others see her to be. Indeed, the outrageous nature of Fevvers as a character heightens the novel's challenge to Western culture's version of women as passive objects.³²

The novel uses Lizzie's voice to reinforce didactically and theoretically the claim that selves are constructed rather than essential. Lizzie rejects the notion of “soul” as “a thing that don't exist” and asserts that it is history “that has forged the institutions which create the human nature of the present in the first place.” In line with her staunch Marxism, Lizzie argues that the possibility of change rests on a thorough dismantling and restructuring of society: “It's not the human ‘soul’ that must be forged on the anvil of history but the anvil itself must be changed in order to change humanity” (239-40). Lizzie's declaration lends a Marxist tinge to the novel's feminism, with its implication that women's oppression will not end until social structures are radically altered. Carter uses the novel's two central female characters, Lizzie and Fevvers, to conjoin a material analysis of existing means of subject-construction and a carnivalized version of female self-construction as a way of exploring the possibility of new female subjectivities.

As a fantastic and indeterminate being, Fevvers can never be pinned down as a subject; her status is always in process of becoming other than itself.³³ Her identity is unstable, since she is a site of apparent contradictions: woman and bird, virgin and whore, fact and fiction, subject and object. Fevvers begins to lose her power and her subjecthood, however, when she questions her own status, “Am I what I know I am? Or am I what he thinks I am?”, and regains it only when she reasserts her indeterminate identity by spreading her wings and recognizing herself through “the eyes that told her who she was” (290). Once again, she creates herself as the object of her spectators' desires and functions as both subject and object of desire.³⁴ Fevvers's subjectivity pushes toward the postmodern in the sense that her multifaceted and fluid identity destabilizes the rigid boundary between subject and object. Her indeterminate nature challenges these dichotomies and heralds the advent of new female subjectivities that are not grounded in binary logic and are released from the hierarchical relations implicit in binarism.

Desire is linked to a new version of subjecthood, as delineated by Fevvers, and to feminist liberating powers. By the end of the novel, Fevvers defines herself as a “New Woman” (273) in relation to—not in opposition to—both Walser, as the object of her desires, and desire itself. Her linking of Walser's “beloved face” to “the vague, imaginary face of desire” (204), suggests that the novel posits desire as an elusive but life affirming notion. The novel rejoins desire and love, which it depicts as divorced from sex in most instances—since it depicts sex as most often nothing more than pornography—and presents love and desire as containing emancipatory potentials. Carter ends The Sadeian Woman with the claim that “It is in this holy terror of love that we find, in both men and women themselves, the source of all opposition to the emancipation of women” (150). In Nights at the Circus, she takes a step further and creates a world in which human beings are freed through love and desire, by learning not to fear love and not to equate desire and sex with pornography. The novel's presentation of desire smacks of essentialism—desire as opposed to the culturally constructed pornographic mise-en-scène of desire—and yet, since desire functions on a utopian level and as carrying liberatory potential, it may be a utopian rather than essentialist reformulation of desire.

The novel distinguishes between pornography and desire. The pornographic nature of the “museum of woman monsters” (55), in which Fevvers is forced to work for a time, lies in its mise-en-scène of sexuality. As the Angel of Death, Fevvers claims that she does not engage in sexual intercourse itself; she merely poses as one of the “tableaux vivants” staged on “stone niches” in a “sort of vault or crypt” (60-61). The museum's male visitors indulge in a pornographic voyeurism; they don costumes and look at the female “prodigies of nature” (59) arranged as spectacle. The gentleman who favors Fevvers, for example, never touches her but, rather, looks at her while “playing with himself under his petticoat” (71). The male engages in sexual actions without the female in this pornographic situation and, as a result, remains in control; she serves merely as a visual stimulus. The novel's depiction of pornography as a staged representation of sexuality rather than as sexuality itself supports Marie-Françoise Hans and Gilles Lapouge's view of pornography as a “sexual spectacle, its reproduction or its representation, the discourse on sexuality and not sexuality.”³⁵

The museum of women monsters in Carter's novel reinforces the notion that pornography is a representation of male domination.³⁶ The museum is an artificial arena, in which men occupy the position of dominance with no hindrances, since women are literally cast as museum objects to be viewed and consumed: Fevvers claims that the men visitors “hired the use of the idea of us [the women]” (70). Carter's depiction of the pornographic museum functions as a critique of male domination and the oppression of women; it supports her claims in The Sadeian Woman that pornography has a liberating potential, if it is used “as a critique of current relations between the sexes,” and that “sexual relations between men and women always render explicit the nature of social relations in the society in which they take place and, if described explicitly, will form a critique of those relations, even if that is not and never has been the intention of the pornographer.”³⁷ In other words, if pornography is a representation of male domination, then it is implicit that pornography can be used to criticize that very domination. As Susan Gubar points out, the divergent feminist arguments about pornography suggest that “an explicitly misogynist representation cannot automatically be equated with a sexist ideology.”³⁸ Indeed, Nights at the Circus depicts the misogyny inherent in pornography as a means of criticizing male domination and its sexist ideology in general.

Fevvers's assertion that the women freaks in the museum had “hearts that beat like yours, and souls that suffer” (69) is an indictment of a society that objectifies women and treats them as less than human. The association of pornography and the dominant male-centered ideology surfaces through Fevvers' statement that “there was no terror in the house our [male] customers did not bring with them” (62). The novel depreciates male dominance with its depiction of men who are so fearful of losing their positions of mastery in the hierarchy of conventional heterosexual relationships that they are reduced to jerking themselves off while looking at women freaks in a damp basement. Nights at the Circus’ strategy of turning pornography on its head manifests both feminist and postmodern impulses: feminist in the sense that it uses a conventionally misogynist discourse—pornography—to criticize the male-centered ideology that produces it; postmodern in its subversion of the supposed dichotomy established between pornography and daily life. Fevvers's assertion, for instance, that it was “those fine gentlemen who paid down their sovereigns to poke and pry at us who were the unnatural ones, not we. For what is ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’, sir?” (61) both criticizes and calls into question the conventional dichotomy between that which is natural and that which is unnatural, exposing the opposition as an ideological construction. Within the world of the museum, sexual gratification occurs through staged means and is devoid of interpersonal connections or, in some cases, contacts. In the “Black Theatre,” for example, the woman freak's task is to place “a noose around his [the client's] neck and give it a bit of a pull but not enough to hurt, whereupon he'd ejaculate” (61). The portrayal of the museum and its offerings demonstrates pornography's dehumanization of sex and sexuality.

The novel's depiction of pornography exceeds the bounds of the museum scenes, however, which heightens its criticism of male domination in its suggestion that sexual relations are for the most part pornographic in a culture that objectifies women. The attempted rape-murder by sword of Fevvers by a gentleman is a good case in point; it is a pornographic mise-en-scène of a sexual act. He makes her “Lie down on the altar” naked and approaches her with something that “was a sight more aggressive than his other weapon, poor thing, that bobbed about uncharged, unprimed,” and that “something was—a blade” (83). This scene demonstrates the utter divorce between sexuality and interpersonal love and/or desire and the explicit link between sexuality and violence that exist in a male dominated world. Fevvers's description of the gentleman's useless and passive penis both ridicules the notion that man's dominating position is grounded in his natural aggressivity and exposes the means by which men dominate in actuality: through violence. The novel playfully reinforces the Lacanian notion that the privilege attributed to the male and the penis is grounded in “a confusion of the virile member with a phallic signifying function.”³⁹ The gentleman dominates the situation only through his possession of a lethal sword, a phallic power that Fevvers appropriates—she has her own sword—to extricate herself from his power. Fevvers also uses her wings to escape the gentleman's grasp by simply flying out of his window and, therefore, uses a power that is not phallic in nature. The fantastic enables Carter to bypass and undermine phallic power and to posit other forms of power. Although flying away from an aggressor is not a practical solution for most women, Carter's use of the image indicates the liberating quality of strategies of empowerment that are not phallic and violent. Fevvers's use of her wings is a form of power similar to her use of storytelling, which she rids of its phallic associations—pen as penis—as well as of its reliance on strict distinctions between fiction and non-fiction; in both cases, self-empowerment is achieved through means that are nonviolent and that subvert Western binary logic.

The life stories of various abused women, which are retold by Fevvers within her own narrative, also contain depictions of events that are both part of everyday life and pornographic. Carter in this way makes explicit the link between pornography and the system that produces it. The story of the diminutive Wonder, one of the museum's women monsters, is punctuated by a description of how a company of comic dwarves mistreated her: “I travelled with them seven long months, passed from one to another, for they were brothers and believed in share and share alike. I fear they did not treat me kindly, for, although they were little, they were men.” The dwarves' passing around of Wonder highlights the objectification of women inherent in Western culture. For the male dwarves, Wonder is a commodity to be used by all and then discarded, “abandoned” (68). Mignon's story is more explicit in its depiction of the violence inflicted on women by men to assert their authority. She is a battered circus wife, who is literally treated as an object: “the Ape-Man beat his woman as though she were a carpet” (115). She is also “abandoned to the mercies of a hungry tiger by her lover” (127), the Strong Man, when an escaped tigress intrudes upon their sexual encounter. Mignon's body itself, with its skin that was “mauvish, greenish, yellowish from beatings” and showed “marks of fresh bruises on fading bruises on faded bruises” (129), testifies to the horrifying violence that daily ensures male dominance.

The novel does not merely point out the oppression of women by a male-dominated system, however; it offers potential solutions. Mignon, for example, acquires self-confidence and steps beyond her role as eternal victim. Fevvers and Lizzie help clean her up and find her a new position free of “The cruel sex [that] threw her away like a soiled glove” (155). Mignon is teamed up with the Princess in the dancing tigers act: the Princess plays the piano and Mignon sings. The two women quickly become friends and lovers, cherishing “in loving privacy the music that was their language, in which they'd found the way to one another” (168). Mignon is strengthened through the music that she believes they have “been brought together, here, as women and as lovers, solely to make” (275). The novel offers lesbian relationships as a possibility for women to find love and purpose in a world in which violence dominates heterosexual relations and women are kept from assuming control of their lives and talents. Fevvers reacts to this flowering of Mignon by asserting that “Love, true love has utterly transformed her” (276), in the sense that love has enabled Mignon to reject the role of victim and create herself as an active subject.

The transformative powers of love and the potential of lesbianism take on a larger and more fantastic force in the novel's depiction of a Siberian asylum for women who murdered their husbands and the revolt of these prisoners sparked by the vitality of desire. Designed and run by a Countess who “successfully poisoned her husband” and sought to assuage her conscience by serving as “a kind of conduit for the means of the repentance of the other murderesses,” the prison is a “panopticon”: “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. In that room she'd sit all day and stare and stare and stare at her murderesses and they, in turn, sat all day and stared at her” (210). As Michel Foucault has pointed out in Discipline and Punish, the panopticon prison design makes it “possible to hold the prisoner under permanent observation” by setting up “a central point from which a permanent gaze may control prisoners and staff.” However, the cost of this system of surveillance by observation is that it also manages “to entrap the whole of penal justice and to imprison the judges themselves.”⁴⁰ Carter playfully presents this paradox in the depiction of the Countess who is “trapped as securely in her watchtower by the exercise of her power as its objects were in their cells,” since she must always keep watch over her prisoners: “the price she paid for her hypothetical proxy repentance was her own incarceration” (214). The wardresses are also imprisoned and watched, so that every one within the system of the asylum is, in effect, a prisoner regardless of her official position. Carter's depiction of the prison configuration implicitly serves as a parallel to the existing social structure, in which all human beings are effectively imprisoned.

In the prison chapter, the novel's omniscient narrative voice is totally separated from the voices of Fevvers and Walser, who are not present. Although the narrative does not condone murder, it analyzes the murderesses' acts as responses to the historically specific condition of women: “There are many reasons, most of them good ones, why a woman should want to murder her husband; homicide might be the only way for her to preserve a shred of dignity at a time, in a place, where women were deemed chattels, or, in the famous analogy of Tolstoy, like wine bottles that might conveniently be smashed when their contents were consumed” (210-11). The narrative voice's feminism surfaces in this discussion of the murderesses as victims of an inequitable system. The mock-rational tone emphasizes the absurdity of a world in which violence is the only recourse for women, since they are dominated and oppressed by men through violence. The narrative zooms in on one of the inmates, Olga, “who took a hatchet to the drunken carpenter who hit her around once too often” (211). Having “rehearsed in her mind the circumstances of her husband's death” and attributed them to things outside of her control, Olga “exonerated herself” (214-15) and set out to communicate with the wardress who brought her food daily. The relationship between Olga and her guard, Vera, quickly moves from a touch of the fingers, to “a free if surreptitious exchange of looks,” to an exchange of notes. Having no pen or pencil, Olga “dipped her finger” in “her womb's blood” to write an answer to Vera's “love-words” (216).

Olga's use of her menstrual blood to assert herself as an active subject challenges the traditional association of menstrual blood with dirtiness and inferiority to men. Later in the novel, Carter provides evidence of this conventional devaluation of anything to do with women's reproductive selves in the depiction of a tribal woman banished to a “primitive hut” outside the village to give birth to her child. Lizzie aptly describes the scene, with the submissive “prone woman” and her baby alone in the freezing hut, as a “tableau of a woman in bondage to her reproductive system” (280-81).⁴¹ Olga uses one of the most overt emblems of femaleness, traditionally used to set women apart as inferior to men, as a means of empowerment; she literally writes herself into subjecthood with her menstrual blood. This specific instance of a woman's assertion of power through an innovative writing process is linked to the novel's general presentation of creative story-telling as a strategy for empowerment and self-construction that challenges the established order.

Moreover, desire has generative powers within the world of the prison. It engenders love, which in turn feeds desire. The desire and love that develop between Olga and Vera spread to the other inmates of the asylum: “Desire, that electricity transmitted by the charged touch of Olga Alexandrovna and Vera Andreyevna, leapt across the great divide between the guards and the guarded. Or, it was as if a wild seed took root in the cold soil of the prison and, when it bloomed, it scattered seeds around in its turn. The state air of the House of Correction lifted and stirred, was moved by currents of anticipation, of expectation, that blew the ripened seeds of love from cell to cell” (217). The novel depicts desire as a force strong enough to destroy the artificial divisions that culture establishes between human beings to uphold a given hierarchical social order. Desire and love become agents of hope that have potential liberating powers. Within the world of the prison, that potential is actualized when the women prisoners and guards rise up against the countess and escape the asylum.

The image of “an army of lovers” striking out on foot across the Siberian tundra to “found a primitive Utopia” is both fantastic and freeing. Carter's novel uses this extraordinary situation to assert the possibility of change: “The white world around them looked newly made, a blank sheet of fresh paper on which they could inscribe whatever future they wished” (217-18). The new sisterhood of women sets out to forge a new social order that excludes men and rejects the notion of “fathers” and “the use of the patronymic” (221). This new “republic of free women” is not totally independent of men, however, since they are forced to ask a passing male traveler for “a pint or two of sperm” to ensure their community's survival. When Lizzie hears the traveler recount his meeting with the women, she sarcastically asks what they will do if they give birth to baby boys: “Feed 'em to the polar bears? To the female polar bears?” (240-41). Lizzie's question highlights the impossibility of severing ties between the sexes if humanity is to continue, since both sexes are necessary for reproduction. While the narrative voice cannot be equated with Lizzie's specific words, Lizzie's challenging of the female utopia indicates that the novel does not view a separatist lesbian community as a final answer to the problems faced by women within a male-centered culture. The novel clearly seeks to go beyond separatism to a restructuring of the whole system in such a way that men would no longer dominate and oppress women.

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Although the novel depicts love and desire as they manifest themselves between women on the margins of accepted institutions or norms of behavior, such as prostitutes, freaks, battered women, and murderesses, Nights at the Circus also delineates the transformations necessary to achieve love and desire within heterosexual relationships. Carter's novel asserts that changes in the status of women and the relations between the sexes require the formation of “New Men” alongside “New Women.” As in the novels of Lessing, Piercy, and Atwood, Nights at the Circus implicitly calls for a restructured society in which the quality of life would improve for both women and men. Fevvers proposes to “mould” and “transform” Walser “into the New Man, in fact, fitting mate for the New Woman, and onward we'll march hand in hand into the New Century” (281). She has a utopian vision of the future as a “new dawn”: “all the women will have wings” to escape their “mind forg'd manacles” and to “rise up and fly away.” At the same time, the novel grounds this utopian dream and fantastic images in the material situation, through Lizzie's retort that “It's going to be more complicated than that” with plenty of “storms ahead” (285). Lizzie's words do not negate the novel's utopian impulses so much as refuse to disconnect them from material practice. The novel offers possibilities for the future while highlighting the extensive struggles that will be necessary to achieve the kind of feminist utopia Fevvers imagines.

Despite Lizzie's skepticism about the future, Nights at the Circus does contain two male characters who undergo significant changes that move them closer towards Fevvers's notion of the “New Man” by the novel's end. The Strong Man begins as an abusive male who uses his physical strength to dominate and oppress women such as Mignon. His lust for her is slowly transformed, however, into a love for Mignon and the Princess as a pair. He grows “stronger in spirit,” and his new hope is to become worthy of the two women's love of him as “a brother”: “I abused women and spoke ill of them, thinking myself superior to the entire sex on account of my muscle, although in reality I was too weak to bear the burden of any woman's love” (276). Through its depiction of the Strong Man's metamorphosis from a caricature of a misogynist he-man to a complex caring “New Man,” the novel exposes self-indulgent lust as a form of desire that is nothing more than power-play, while highlighting the transformative potential of desire that grows into selfless love.

Walser also undergoes great changes, which the novel delineates in much greater detail than in the case of the Strong Man—a relatively minor character. The novel traces Walser's transformation from a skeptical man of action who tries to establish and co-opt Fevvers' identity to a man who accepts indeterminacy and seeks to explore the complexities of humanity itself. His questions shift from a disengaged “Is she fact or is she fiction?” (7) to an intense “Have you a soul? Can you love?” (291). While fashioning Walser into a suitable companion for the “New Woman” demonstrates feminist impulses, the novel uses the carnivalesque and fantastic, strategies often associated with postmodern fiction, to disrupt traditional linear time and notions of an essential core self as well as the rigid distinctions between reality and fiction, civilization and nature, self and other. Although the novel initially presents Walser as a polished and skeptical man of the world, the narrative also specifies that he is “unfinished” and that “his inwardness had been left untouched” (10) by his experiences. This “unfinished” quality implies that Walser is neither fixed nor static, that he is malleable, that he is a subject in process. Walser's decision to join the circus to follow up his story of Fevvers functions as a step into the realm of the fantastic. The novel's central section focuses on the world of the circus, a more overt form of the carnival than the whorehouse of the preceding section. The depiction of the circus performers both in and out of the ring challenges the conventional opposition between reality and fiction. Although illusion is sought within the ring, the novel indicates that illusion exists outside of it as well. The carnivalesque repudiation of the established hierarchical order filters out from the circus ring into the personal lives of the performers. The novel extends the boundaries of carnival well beyond the physical circus ring, thus extending the carnival's transformative powers to life itself.⁴²

Fantasy and the material situation meet head on in the world of the circus. The set divisions and hierarchies between humans and animals and between men and women in the Western world at large break down in Carter's circus. The ringmaster is a caricature of the American capitalist and patriot with his belt “buckle, in the shape of a dollar sign” and his “tightly tailored trousers striped in red and white and a blue waistcoast [sic] ornamented with stars” (99). He uses his pet pig, Sybil, to make his decisions for him, so that, when Walser asks for a job with the circus, the ringmaster invites “his pig to tell him whether to hire the young man or no” (98) and to tell him how Walser should be used. Sybil proceeds to nod her approval and to spell the word “C-L-O-W-N” (102) out of a pile of alphabet cards. The ringmaster as an incarnation of Uncle Sam both in and out of the limelight disrupts the distinction between illusion and reality: he is a fantastic absurd figure and yet occupies a tangible position of power, since he actively manages a circus and controls the fates of his employees. Moreover, Sybil's decision-making skills and responsibilities not only reinforce the ringmaster's extraordinary nature but also undermine the conventional division between humans and animals, based on the posited opposition between civilization and nature.

The circus not only actively brings together the civilized and natural worlds, by placing under the same roof “lovely ladies” with their “French perfume” and hairy beasts with their “essence of steppe and jungle” (105), but also explodes the hierarchical opposition between civilized humans and primitive animals. The chimpanzee act parodies a classroom scene, with a Professor chimp writing on the blackboard and the student chimps busy over their slates. Walser “knew he had stumbled on a secret when the lesson immediately stopped” after he attempted to get a closer look at the Professor's “mysterious scholarship.” After Walser's and the Professor's eyes meet in a nonverbal but “intimate exchange,” a “meeting across the gulf of strangeness,” Walser recognizes that the chimp is “unreachable … but not unknowable.” This unusual contact allows Walser to ascertain that the chimps take no pleasure in the forced play of their comic monocycle routine, “going through the motions with a desultory, mechanical air, longing perhaps, to be back at their studies.” When the Professor uses Walser as a model for an anatomy lesson, Walser is left with “a dizzy uncertainty about what was human and what was not” (108-10). The irony of the episode lies in the contrast between the studious chimps and the trainer's woman, Mignon, who is copulating with the Strong Man on the side of the ring during the anatomy lesson. This overt reversal, in which the chimps are engaged in civilized behavior while the humans have descended into brute animalism, challenges the established order. The Professor even negotiates his own contract with the ringmaster, on the grounds that “Nature did not give me vocal cords but left the brain out of Monsieur Lamarck,” the Ape Man (169). The novel's comic and fantastic treatment of the chimps exposes the indeterminacy inherent in concepts such as humanity and civilization as well as in the dichotomies used to anchor them. Moreover, the Professor's rejection of the Ape Man's humanity and authority reinforces the novel's feminist stance by challenging man's place at the top of the hierarchy of existence. Like the chimps, the women circus performers rebel against the men that dominate them: Fevvers foils the ringmaster's advances, Mignon rejects both the Ape Man and the Strong Man in favor of the Princess, and the Princess keeps aloof of human beings altogether.⁴³

The circus scenes not only break down the conventional hierarchical order in which man rules over women and animals but also challenge the notion of Being itself. The figure of the clown functions as a locus of indeterminacy that threatens Western metaphysics. While the clown's makeup and costume are a mask, this mask takes on a life of its own and as such has a liberating potential: it undermines notions of the self as predetermined, fixed, unitary, and centered. When Walser is transformed into a clown for the first time, he feels “the beginnings of a vertiginous sense of freedom,” “the freedom that lies behind the mask, within dissimulation, the freedom to juggle with being” (103). The clown's mask unsettles Being by calling into question notions of origin and selfhood. The mask disrupts the Western concept of the essential self by reducing identity to an explicitly artificial mask. As the clowns sit together eating a meal, their white faces “possessed the formal lifelessness of death masks, as if, in some essential sense, they themselves were absent from the repast and left untenanted replicas behind” (116). If there is merely “An absence. A vacancy” (122) beneath the mask, then the mask is merely an empty signifier, an illusion of a stable identity. However, while the clown scenes present the self as nothing more than a constructed shell, this self is neither powerless nor static. Clowns have the privilege of self-construction: “We can invent our own faces! We make ourselves” (121). Their freedom to choose the self they wish to become undermines the Western concept of an essential self or soul that exists prior to socialization. The political potential of a conception of the self as constructed rather than essential is great, since it allows for the creation of new versions of the self. Once Walser dons the clown mask, for example, he becomes other than he has been. The novel's attempt to conceive a “New Woman” and a “New Man” depends on this possibility of creating the self as other than it has been constructed by and through a male-centered culture.

The clown also challenges the traditional Western opposition between subject and object by being both the subject and the object of laughter. In this respect, the novel's version of the clown is similar to its version of the prostitute. Clowns are “whores of mirth” whose chosen means of economic survival entail giving pleasure to others; they are subjects who consciously make themselves into objects. Like the prostitutes, the clowns defy the conventional opposition between work and play: “Our work is their pleasure and so they think our work must be our pleasure” (119). It is the clown's job to foster illusions by suspending the distinction between reality and fiction. The novel goes one step further, however, in its depiction of the clowns' final performance, during which the head clown, Buffo, goes raving mad and attempts “real manslaughter” on Walser. This scene totally breaks down the hierarchical opposition between reality and fiction, as the clowns pretend that Buffo is only pretending to try to kill Walser. The clowns attempt “to give the illusion of intentional Bedlam” (177) to a scene that is Bedlam. What is real or true and what is fiction or illusion are so completely intertwined that they can no longer be distinguished. The narrative's claim that “the circus could absorb madness and slaughter” (180) emphasizes the subversive potential of carnival, with its power to challenge and break down the binary logic that undergirds Western culture. In Carter's novel, the carnivalesque infects everything, so that its subversive impulses are not contained within any artificial boundaries such as the circus ring.

The collapse of the rigid opposition between reality and fiction in the depiction of the clowns renders the laughter they engender ambivalent. This ambivalence is a function of the uncertain object of the laughter: is it the clowns' antics or the established order they are parodying? The ambivalent laughter they have induced has a liberating potential, since it creates a space for overtly criticizing the dominant system through ridicule. Although this space has the potential of being harnessed for specific political purposes, the narrative is seduced at times into a nihilistic descent into chaos. When they perform outside the circus ring in their Russian lodging and, later, out on the tundra, the clowns' dance becomes a “savage jig” that mimes “beastly, obscene violence.” Rather than an affirmation of life or a parody of established order, it becomes a “Dance of disintegration; and of regression; celebration of the primal slime” (124-25). The clowns' “dance of death” literally ends in death when a snow blizzard hits the site of their performance in the Siberia section, blowing all the clowns “off the face of the earth” (242-43). The novel's emphasis on chaos and disintegration in some of the clown scenes veers away from either a criticism of the dominant system or an offering of new possibilities. At those points where a movement toward unrestrained deconstruction and chaos surfaces, the narrative severs its connection to the novel's feminist reconstructive aims.

Carter's novel as a whole avoids this tendency towards excessive chaos, however, through its periodic re-anchoring of chaos and the fantastic in the historical and material situation, and thus implicitly exposes the limits of the postmodern tendency toward chaos. The world of the circus, for instance, is firmly grounded in its physical locale, in the daily lives of its performers, and in the hierarchies of Western culture at large. The luxury of the “Imperial Circus,” with its “red plush boxes trimmed with gilding,” cannot escape “the aroma of horse dung and lion piss that permeated the building” (105), so that the circus' illusion of grandeur and magic is always in the process of being challenged. Outside the ring, the performers must take part in the daily tasks that ensure survival, as evidenced by the “row of freshly washed white muslin frocks pegged out on a clothesline,” Lizzie “carrying a tray covered with a white cloth” (106) for Fevvers' lunch, and the Princess filling “her arms with bleeding meat” to feed the lions (148).

The link between power and material conditions that prevails in Western culture finds its parallel in the world of the circus. The ringmaster and the star, Fevvers, stay in a luxurious hotel, filled with “the dazzle of electricity, the furry carpets, the fine ladies” (126-27), while Walser and the “clowns were lodged among the poorest” (98) people in St. Petersburg's “rotten wooden tenement” (116). The narrative further highlights the inequities inherent in hierarchical positions through its depiction of the different cities that Walser and Fevvers experience: Walser has “seen only the beastly backside” of St. Petersburg, while “Fevvers, nestling under a Venetian chandelier in the Hotel de l'Europe has seen nothing of the city in which Walser lodges” (104). All of these physical details strengthen the novel's socio-historical grounding and prevent its disruptive postmodern tendencies from falling into an overly aestheticist or theoretical realm divorced from the material situation. Although the novel uses the circus to expose the artificiality of the traditional dichotomy between reality and fiction, the novel does not collapse the two terms. Instead, the fantastic stands side by side with the details of daily human existence, so as to emphasize their necessary interrelatedness; ultimately, everything—including the fantastic—exists within the context of the material situation and the relations of power that structure it. The novel not only makes use of the carnivalesque and fantastic to disrupt Western metaphysics as a means of creating a space for reconstruction but also highlights the carnivalesque and fantastic as aesthetic modes constructed within and intricately tied to material contexts.

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As the narrative progresses into the Siberia section, temporal and spatial logic break down more radically, and the fantastic becomes more prominent. The circus segment ends with Fevvers's escape from the Grand Duke's attempt to objectify her literally, as a bird in a gilded cage to stand among his collection of toys. Her method of escape, however, transgresses all established notions of time and space. Fevvers jumps onto the Grand Duke's toy train, which immediately becomes the Siberian Express on which the circus company is traveling:

She dropped the toy train on the Isfahan runner—mercifully, it landed on its wheels—as, with a grunt and whistle of expelled breath, the Grand Duke ejaculated.

In those few seconds of his lapse of consciousness, Fevvers ran helter-skelter down the platform, opened the door of the first-class compartment and clambered aboard.

“Look what a mess he's made of your dress, the pig,” said Lizzie.

(192)

Not only does Fevvers shrink to the size of the toy train, but the toy train is then transformed into the life-size train carrying the circus across Siberia. Consequently, she travels from the Duke's home to the Siberian Express instantaneously. This episode totally disrupts Western temporal and spatial laws, which view time as linear movement and duration and space as a fixed three-dimensional entity, and thus steps decisively into the realm of the fantastic. The narrative does not differentiate between the reality status of the toy train and the Siberian Express, so that distinct levels of narrative merge and the opposition between reality and fiction becomes meaningless.

Postmodern fiction often engages the fantastic as a means of making visible “the unsaid and the unseen of culture.” Rosemary Jackson's argument, in Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, that fantasy “reveals reason and reality to be arbitrary, shifting constructs, and thereby scrutinizes the category of the ‘real’” suggests that fantasy and postmodern fiction have some common grounds.⁴⁴ Indeed, McHale claims that postmodern fiction has “co-opted” the fantastic as one of several strategies that “pluralizes the ‘real’ and thus problematizes representation.”⁴⁵ Fantasy's subversive potential is postmodern in the sense that fantasy continuously questions the reality status of what is being presented, thereby creating a climate of perpetual indeterminacy that threatens the established order. Moreover, Jackson's assertion that fantasy does not “construct alternative realities” but rather focuses on “absence, lack, the non-seen” and “moves into, or opens up, a space without/outside cultural order” points to a possible use of fantasy as a strategy to fulfill feminist aims.⁴⁶ Since most of the absences and silences in Western culture stem from that which threatens the male dominant order, a genre that highlights these spaces has feminist potentials.⁴⁷

The novel's last section is significantly positioned in what is essentially a non-location. As a vast, seemingly boundless, empty expanse, Siberia is an ideal context for fantastic occurrences. The tundra is literally a “white world,” a “blank sheet of fresh paper” (218), a “limbo to which we had no map” (225), an “empty horizon” (236). Unlike the whorehouse, the museum for women monsters, and the dressing room in the first section and the circus in the second section, Siberia is neither an enclosure nor a cultural artifact. It is an open space that dissolves the very notion of limits and boundaries that structure Western thought. Like the whorehouse and the circus, however, Siberia becomes a carnivalized realm. After the Siberian Express crashes, the characters are set wandering about the tundra and encountering extraordinary situations and persons.⁴⁸

The novel does not lose sight of material conditions, however; the fantastic quality of the events that follow the train's derailment stands side by side with the mundane details of daily life. The immediate consequences of the crash include both the extraordinary fate of the circus' tigers and the basic physical harm suffered by various characters: the “tigers were all gone into the mirrors,” having “frozen into their own reflections,” while Fevvers has broken her “right wing” and Walser has been knocked unconscious. The performers are kidnapped by “a band of rough-looking coves in sheepskins, armed to their teeth” (205-07), with the exception of Walser, who remains hidden under a pile of debris in a comatose state. Walser is later unearthed but left behind by the escaped murderesses. Beset by amnesia, Walser subsequently wanders around in the tundra until he is taken up and apprenticed by a tribal Shaman. When Walser and Fevvers meet again, the time span that has elapsed is not the same for each of them. Although this string of events is fantastic and absurd in the sense that it flaunts the conventions of realism, the implausibility or strangeness of the various incidents do not sever them from their sociohistorical grounding. For instance, the bandits who derail the train and kidnap its passengers are outlaws as a result of the vengeance they sought against the “minor officials, army officers, landlords and such like petty tyrants, who forcibly dishonoured the[ir] sisters, wives and sweethearts.” Having read a newspaper headline claiming that Fevvers is “the intimate of the English royal family,” the bandits blow up the railroad track in an attempt to get Fevvers to intercede in their favor with “Queen Victoria.” The extraordinary nature of the bandits' actions and motives are linked to unjust class relations and to their idealistic vision of the ruling class. Fevvers shatters the bandit chief's illusions by informing him that it is “idle folly” to “fancy these great ones care a single jot about the injustice you suffer,” since they “themselves weave the giant web of injustice that circumscribes the globe” (230-32). Although the narrative's tone is ironic and the bandits appear overly naive, these absurd fantastic events have a firm basis in the material situation. The fantastic plot here functions as a means of exposing sociohistorical inequities.

Walser's amnesia, his aimless wanderings through the snow without freezing to death, and his adoption by a Shaman are similarly ludicrous and fantastic in nature. In the world of the Shaman and his tribe, reality and dream-vision are not distinct. Indeed, the Shaman valorizes dreams as that which “dissolved the slender margin the Shaman apprehended between real and unreal.” For the tribesmen, “there existed no difference between fact and fiction; instead, a sort of magic realism” (260). This notion of “magic realism” is appropriate to the novel as a whole, since the novel is intent on bringing together realism and fantasy. Unlike the tribesmen, however, Carter's novel does not collapse fact and fiction but rather disrupts the Western hierarchical opposition between the two to reveal the constructed and artificial nature of Western binary logic. Since the tribesmen value dreams and hallucinations as communication with the world of spirits, they respect Walser's amnesiac ravings. As he slowly recovers from his amnesia, Walser views his memories as dreams or products of his trances or hallucinations. Although others eventually substantiate some of his memories, the distinction in his mind between fact and fiction remains fluid after his sojourn within the tribe.

Walser's developing self is as a result no longer firmly grounded in binary logic. The first thing Fevvers notices about Walser when they are finally reunited is that his eyes contained “no trace of scepticism at all” (289), a striking reversal from the novel's initial description of Walser as having “eyes the cool grey of scepticism” (10). Fevvers instantly recognizes that “he was not the man he had been,” that he was a “reconstructed Walser.” When he asks Fevvers about her soul and her ability to love, she is “exuberant” and assures him that “That's the way to start the interview” (291). No longer bound by and trapped within binary logic, which the novel early on exposes as male-centered, Walser moves toward Fevvers's ideal of the “New Man.” While Walser's development into this “New Man” fulfills the conventions of romance narratives, in that he becomes a “fitting mate for the New Woman” (281), the novel simultaneously disrupts the very conventions of romance fiction, which are based on a binary logic that posits men as dominant over women. Free of his initial skepticism, Walser is no longer interested in whether Fevvers is fact or fiction, a question that has little meaning or relevance after he experiences and acknowledges the arbitrary and artificial nature of such an opposition. Although Walser's new concern with Fevvers's identity and soul would seem to revert back to an essentialist viewpoint, these notions lose their essentialism, since they are no longer grounded in binary logic or in any belief in origins. Walser has learned to accept Fevvers as an indeterminate being; he is no longer interested in drawing “any definite conclusions” from the fact that “she indeed appeared to possess no navel” (292). Moreover, the subversive carnivalesque nature of Fevvers, her life-story, and the laughter with which the novel ends inherently disrupt essentialist positions.

Before Walser and Fevvers are reunited at the end of the novel, the fantastic forcefully rears its head when Fevvers gets a momentary glimpse of Walser with the tribesmen. She is startled by his long beard and wild appearance: “But it's not a week since we all parted company! You can't go native in a week.” Lizzie reminds Fevvers that they have lost their clock and therefore have no control over time: “Remember we have lost our clock; remember Father Time has many children and I think it was his bastard offspring inherited this region for, by the length of Mr Walser's beard and the skill with which he rode his reindeer, time has passed—or else is passing—marvellous swiftly for these woodland folk” (272). Moreover, the narrative asserts that “Time meant nothing” to the tribesmen and that, if a “global plebiscite” had been taken, “the entire system of dividing up years by one hundred would have been abandoned” (265). The novel uses the fantastic to disrupt the Western notion of time as a linear and absolute dimension. The power with which the lost clock is imbued serves as a means of highlighting the notion that clocks, a product of Western rationalism, construct and control time. However, Lizzie's comment is also ironic, since the old clock, taken as souvenir from the whorehouse, is permanently stopped at midnight or noon; the dysfunctional clock suggests the precariousness of a concept (time) that depends on a mechanical, physical, and thus breakable object. That Lizzie and Fevvers choose to carry around a stopped clock indicates their rejection of Western conceptual modes. Indeed, from the beginning of the novel, Fevvers and Lizzie are involved in disruptions of linear time. During the initial interview scene, for instance, Walser becomes “seriously discomposed” (42) after he hears Big Ben strike midnight three separate times while Fevvers tells her story. The literal suspension of time, which renders Fevvers' dressing room into a place “plucked out of its everyday, temporal continuum” (87), defies the linear movement attributed to it by Western culture and poses a threat to Walser, whose very being is defined by that culture.

The difference in the time periods lived by Walser and Fevvers under divergent systems of thought and beliefs exposes time as a relative concept rather than a series of fixed quantitative increments. The novel goes beyond the modernist incorporation of Einsteinian relativity, which focuses on the position of the observer, by flaunting its transgression of established temporal boundaries. The length of Walser's beard indicates a time span that is incommensurable with the week that Fevvers claims has passed, regardless of perspective. Traditional Western logic cannot reconcile this lack of agreement and symmetry. The gap between the two divergent temporal experiences, which remains open and unresolved, disrupts one of the West's central points of reference. Crucial to my argument is that the novel's emphasis on temporal indeterminacies through fantasy serves a practical function linked to its feminist impulses. It allows Walser a significant time span to recover from his amnesia and reshape himself under the influence of a culture that is not grounded in binary logic and values the world of the irrational, such as dreams and hallucinations. Unlike Fevvers, who is already moving toward being a representative of the “New Woman” from the novel's start, Walser needs time to develop a self that moves toward Fevvers's utopian image of the “New Man.” Fevvers's wanderings through Siberia need not include the same number of experiences as Walser's for them to meet on a more equal footing when they are reunited. The novel's transgression of temporal boundaries functions as a means of both disrupting confining Western conceptual modes and fulfilling asymmetrical narrative needs.

Although Walser undergoes a more extensive transformation, Fevvers's experiences in Siberia also shape her. Having lost both her sword and her clock, Fevvers no longer possesses the tools she has usurped from the dominant order to wield her own power and control. She feels “herself diminishing” (273) and must seek new ways of empowerment that are neither male-centered nor male-defined. Lizzie explains to Fevvers that, since she exists as a recent untried phenomenon, she must shape the form this “New Woman” will take: “You never existed before. There's nobody to say what you should do or how to do it. You are Year One. You haven't any history and there are no expectations of you except the ones you yourself create” (198). Fevvers has created herself as an indeterminate being, hovering between fact and fiction, with the help of her extraordinary wings. With one wing broken and the dye in her hair and on her wings fading, however, her explosive singularity diminishes; she feels reduced from a “tropic bird” to a “London sparrow” (271). Furthermore, the tundra affords her no audience to view her as a marvel and value her as a new being. Fevvers feels renewed only when she spreads her wings in front of Walser and the tribesmen and feels “the wind of wonder” from “their expelled breaths.” Her power and strength as a “New Woman” requires others whose “eyes fixed upon her with astonishment, with awe, the eyes that told her who she was” (290). The novel's notion of the “New Woman” thus retains the concepts of subject and object and of self and other at the same time as it challenges the hierarchical oppositions within which these concepts have traditionally been positioned by Western culture. Fevvers's existence as a subject is dependent on both her own self-construction and the acknowledgment of that construction as read in the eyes of others, which indicates that subjecthood is a continuous process rather than a static position (see discussion earlier in the chapter).

Nights at the Circus also posits another dimension to the formation of new women and men subjects: romantic love. Contemporary fiction has tended to focus on the absence or death of love rather than on its presence. Carter revives the notion of love by redefining it and asserting its liberating potential. Love replaces the sword, or violence in general, as a means of self-empowerment. All of the novel's characters who undergo transformations toward the ideal of the “New Woman” or the “New Man” are also in love: Fevvers, Mignon, the Princess, the murderesses, Walser, and the Strong Man. Although the novel depicts love between women, its focus is on exploring the possibility of a strong heterosexual love. Fevvers and Walser fall in love fairly early in the novel, but only when they are separated in Siberia and undergoing transformations does their love surface and grow. On one level, the novel is a romance, although it is a literary rather than a realistic romance. Carter's novel asserts that the recognition of “fear of the death of the beloved, of the loss of the beloved, of the loss of love” (292-93) helps to shape a self that is engaged and open to change. The love proclaimed by the novel as liberating is a form of love that has been released from culturally imposed prescriptions and from oppressive relations of power. The novel seeks to get beyond the “popular ideology of romantic love,” which, as Barrett argues, coexists with “the brutal facts of rape, domestic violence, pornography, prostitution, a denial of female sexual autonomy.”⁴⁹ Walser's initial hopes for the future with Fevvers are marked by his dream of making her his “wife, Mrs Sophie Walser,” and thus occur within the context of male domination and ownership of women. By the end of the novel, however, Walser recognizes that he must rewrite his hopes for the future, which now focus on “busily reconstructing” a “self”: “Walser took himself apart and put himself together again”; he has “to start all over again” (293-94). Content to be Fevvers's lover, Walser no longer seeks ownership of her; and she, in fact, remains in control of their relationship to the novel's last line.

Although the novel ends with the bringing together of the “New Woman” and the “New Man,” the utopian quality of the ensuing bedroom scene between the two reunited lovers is firmly grounded in details of material existence. For example, Fevvers insists on “washing herself piece by piece in a pot of water” before consummating their relationship. Romance is brought down to the realm of practical considerations that is a vital part of human daily life. As he watches Fevvers wash with her feathers released, Walser also focuses on practical physical details by reflecting on “how nature had equipped her for the ‘woman on top’ position.” Moreover, the utopian union of Fevvers and Walser exists side by side with Lizzie's active feminist practice, as she sets up an “improvised maternity ward” for the Shaman's tribe and embarks “on the elaboration of an extensive ritual of mother-and-baby care” (292-93).⁵⁰ Carter's novel retains its political impetus by offering both possibilities for change and practical examples of how change can be brought about.

.....

The novel ends on the rejuvenating and liberating note of Fevvers's carnivalesque laughter, brought on by Walser's question as to why she went “to such lengths” to convince him that she was the “only fully-feathered intacta in the history of the world?” She is delighted by this question, to which she gleefully retorts, “Gawd, I fooled you.” Fevvers's subjecthood is assured through Walser's question, since it proves that she has the power to construct her own version of herself. She attributes her ability to fool even a skeptic, such as Walser was at the start of the novel, to her spirited determination to define herself: “‘To think I really fooled you!’ she marvelled. ‘It just goes to show there's nothing like confidence’” (294-95). Along with love, then, laughter functions as a liberating strategy that is useful in the process of developing new versions of the subject.

Fevvers's loud uncontrollable laughter problematizes the meaning of the novel's ending at the same time as it releases a liberating energy. It is an ambivalent form of laughter, in that it exceeds its context and in that its meaning is plural and dynamic. Ambivalent laughter is a vital element of the carnival, described by Bakhtin as embracing both “death and rebirth” and as “directed toward something higher—toward a shift of authorities and truths, a shift of world orders.”⁵¹ Fevvers's laughter salutes the end of Walser's skepticism and disengagement, as well as her feelings of diminishment, and welcomes the fresh winds of change. The laughter that physically ends Carter's novel creates a sense of beginning. Uncontained, it “spilled out of the window” and infected everyone and everything: “The spiralling tornado of Fevvers' laughter began to twist and shudder across the entire globe, as if a spontaneous response to the giant comedy that endlessly unfolded beneath it, until everything that lived and breathed, everywhere, was laughing” (294-95). This ending, which is also a beginning, offers ambivalent laughter as a means of approaching twentieth-century life, since Fevvers's laughter rings out as midnight passes and ushers in a new century.

Carter's exploration of carnivalistic laughter also indicates that it can help propel feminist aims. Fevvers's laughter over her ability to fool Walser into believing that she is a virgin bird-woman challenges male domination as well as Western binary logic. Fevvers resists male-centered definitions of her by assuming control of her own self-construction and undermining the conventional opposition between reality and fiction. Her laughter disrupts the male-centered established order; it is a manifestation of release from the status quo that is directed toward an as yet undelineated feminist version of a new and better world. Ending the novel on a note of carnivalistic laughter does not diffuse the subversive nature of Nights at the Circus; rather, it provides a vital image, one that is divorced from Western rationality and logic, to carry the potential for change that the novel urges. Bakhtin's claim that carnivalistic laughter can “grasp and comprehend a phenomenon in the process of change and transition” helps to explain why it is a useful vehicle for feminist fiction seeking not only to expose the ills of the established order but also to posit ways in which that order is being undermined and changed. The novel's ending with laughter also anticipates potential new forms for feminist fiction. Bakhtin's argument that carnivalistic laughter possesses “Enormous creative, and therefore genre-shaping, power” supports my argument that a feminist appropriation of carnival laughter opens up the way for the formation of new types of feminist fiction that would be subversive and liberating both at the level of narrative and of politics.⁵² Since ambivalent laughter and the carnivalesque in general bring together the ordinary sensory physical world and the visionary, and thus allow a space for change and for the future without divorcing themselves from the material situation, they make ideal strategies for the furthering of subversive feminist aims.

Although Carter uses a variety of strategies to strengthen and propel the novel's feminist aims, her use of postmodern adaptations of fantasy and carnivalization, with its ambivalent form of laughter, dominates. Like madness in Lessing's The Golden Notebook and Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, fantasy and carnivalization perform disruptive functions within Carter's Nights at the Circus. By subverting expectations, these strategies both expose and challenge the established male-centered order and offer possibilities for change. But Carter is careful to keep her narrative grounded in the material situation by maintaining a balance between depictions of daily life and fantastic occurrences, even if they are intermingled.

As in the case of the other novels discussed, Nights at the Circus delineates a new female subject that exists as a process or a becoming other than itself rather than as a fixed and centered entity. Unlike the other novelists, however, Carter emphasizes the liberating potential of love and desire.⁵³ She revolutionizes the conventional notion of love by separating it from social contracts and reuniting it with desire, and she offers love and desire as alternate means of empowerment and subject formation. The novel also makes more explicit the claim that men as well as women must be transformed if a new world free of oppression is to be created. Carter's novel demonstrates how fantasy and carnivalization can be mobilized as aesthetic means of depicting the possibility of such transformations, since these strategies sever the characters from the Western laws of binary logic and rationality.

While fantasy and carnivalization propel forward the novel's more utopian feminism, other strategies, such as embedded stories-autobiographies and inverted norms, also serve subversive functions, notably as vehicles for the novel's Marxist feminism. A variety of strategies usually associated with postmodern fiction enable Carter to bring the two strands of subversive feminism together and to posit a feminism that blends their best qualities and avoids their pitfalls: Nights at the Circus adopts Marxist feminism's emphasis on the material situation, which utopian feminism tends to ignore; and it adopts utopian feminism's creative and hopeful dynamism, which Marxist feminism often lacks. By establishing a materialist socio-historical grounding for its utopian vision, of new women and men creating a world that would be better in feminist terms, the narrative explains why the present world is still far from being a feminist utopia and yet still offers some hope for the future.

Notes

1. In a related vein, Palmer locates “a key area of tension in Carter's writing” between “utopian elements” and a “strong emphasis on the analytic and the ‘demythologising’ [sic]” (“From ‘Coded Mannequin’ to Bird Woman,” p. 179). I argue that the bringing together of these two impulses in Nights at the Circus creates not tension but rather a space where possibilities for change can be explored.

2. See “Chapter 1” for an in-depth discussion of feminism and postmodernism.

3. In one sense, then, Carter's novel is an example of what Lee describes as the tendency within British postmodern fiction to “challenge Realist conventions from within the very conventions they wish to subvert” (Realism and Power, p. xii). Lee does not discuss Nights at the Circus or how feminism and/or feminist fiction fits into her thesis.

4. Moi, “Postmodernist Theory: Feminist Postmodernism in the USA,” pp. 36, 43.

5. Delphy, Close to Home, pp. 215, 211.

6. Carter, Nights at the Circus, p. 7. All subsequent references from this novel will be placed in the text itself.

7. Similarly, Robinson argues that Carter “disrupts an essentialist equation between biological sex and social gender” but, at the same time, “foregrounds gender as constitutive of subjectivity by tracing the processes by which ‘official’ women—that is, individuals sexed female—are socially and discursively constructed as Woman according to the needs of the dominant, ‘official’ sex, men” (Engendering the Subject, p. 77).

8. De Lauretics, Alice Doesn't, p. 7. Along the same line, Moi argues that “To name is to exercise power” and that although “Definitions may well be constraining: they are also enabling” (“Postmodern Theory,” p. 37). Robinson notes that Fevvers “places Herself as the subject of her story” (Engendering the Subject, p. 23).

9. Schmidt, “The Journey of the Subject,” p. 67. Siegel also notes that Fevvers is “hatched—in defiance of biological genre” (“Postmodern Women Novelists,” p. 12).

10. For example, Hartsock argues in Money, Sex and Power that, within “masculinist ideology,” “The body is both irrelevant and in opposition to the (real) self, an impediment to be overcome by the mind” (242), and that it is not surprising that the body and “material reality” are devalued by Western societies, since these are the realms with which women are in closer contact (235-36).

11. Although this interest in mirrors recalls mannerism, postmodern fiction more thoroughly problematizes the dichotomy between appearance and reality by demonstrating that reality is always already represented and thus cannot be disassociated from appearance. Fevvers's identity is one that she has created for herself and cannot be separated from what she appears to be.

12. Fevvers in this sense has more in common with Amazon warrior women than with traditional Western conceptions of women.

13. Robinson, Engendering the Subject, p. 77.

14. My argument thus differs from that of Robinson in Engendering the Subject, who argues that, “While Fevvers is placed as the object of various male gazes in the text, she simultaneously places herself as the subject of her story” (23). I am suggesting that Fevvers actively creates herself as subject and object, that she is not passively “placed as the object of various male gazes.” Later in her discussion, however, Robinson seemingly contradicts her earlier analysis, when she suggests that “Fevvers takes full responsibility for engineering herself as spectacle and, thus, resists victimization” (125)—a formulation with which I thoroughly agree. In much the same way, Schmidt argues that “the miraculous Fevvers is the inventor of her own singularity for which she seeks acclaim” (“The Journey of the Subject,” p. 72). As Siegel suggests, “Carter gives us woman as someone other than Other, someone who is not defined by and absorbed into the patriarchal power structure” (“Postmodern Women Novelists,” p. 12).

15. Hartsock, “Foucault on Power: A Theory of Women?,” pp. 170-72.

16. Finn, “Patriarchy and Pleasure,” p. 91.

17. Ibid., p. 89.

18. Barrett, Women's Oppression Today, pp. 42-43.

19. Delphy, Close to Home, pp. 217, 166.

20. FBI statistics on rape support the claim that women are victimized daily. For example, 1987 FBI statistics cited in Crime in the United States indicate that, in the United States alone, there is “one Forcible rape every six minutes” (6). The FBI reports define “forcible rape” as “the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will,” which includes “Assaults or attempts to commit rape by force or threat of force” (13). These figures are necessarily conservative, since many rapes and attempted rapes go unreported.

21. In a similar vein, Hutcheon notes that Carter's novel “straddles the border between the imaginary/fantastic (with her winged woman protagonist) and the realistic/historical” (A Poetics of Postmodernism, p. 61), but she does not pursue this line of analysis.

22. Hartsock, Money, Sex and Power, p. 231.

23. Delphy, Close to Home, p. 59.

24. Barrett, Women's Oppression Today, p. 77. I am here using the term ideology in the sense defined by Barrett, as “a generic term for the processes by which meaning is produced, challenged, reproduced, transformed” (97).

25. Carter, The Sadeian Woman, pp. 3, 9.

26. Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale similarly depicts the prostitutes working at the illegal hotel-turned-whorehouse as incorrigibles, many of whom had been professional women before the Gileadean regime took over.

27. This is particularly evident in attitudes and laws concerning women's reproductive capacities.

28. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, pp. 122, 107, 123, 157-58.

29. McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, pp. 172-74. However, I prefer to discuss postmodern impulses within fiction rather than postmodern fiction (see Chapter 1).

30. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, pp. 114-18.

31. Carter's clear theoretical awareness suggests that she knows Bakhtin's work and is using it for her own purposes. Palmer has, like myself, made the connection between Carter's Nights at the Circus and Bakhtin's concept of carnivalization. In a discussion aimed more specifically toward the novel's focus on “woman-identification and female collectivity,” Palmer argues that Carter adapts carnivalistic perspectives to perform “an analysis of patriarchal culture and the representation of female community” (“From ‘Coded Mannequin’ to Bird Woman,” pp. 200, 197).

32. In much the same way, the Amazon warrior woman has often been created as a figure that threatens the status quo.

33. Hutcheon also suggests in more general terms that in the fiction of writers such as Carter “subjectivity is represented as something in process, never as fixed and never as autonomous, outside history. It is always a gendered subjectivity, rooted also in class, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation” (The Politics of Postmodernism, p. 39).

34. Although she does not explicitly assert that Fevvers creates herself as both subject and object simultaneously, Schmidt does note that “Fevvers does not simply become man's passive object, for her wings ensure that she herself constitutes a formidable subject which others must react to. But as the eye metaphor indicates, she does nevertheless need the reaction of others to have her own conception of herself confirmed” (“The Journey of the Subject,” p. 68).

35. Hans and Lapouge, Les femmes, p. 24 (my translation).

36. Gubar argues that most feminists agree that “pornography represents male domination,” even writers as dissimilar as “Millett and Carter” (“Representing Pornography,” p. 730).

37. Carter, The Sadeian Woman, pp. 19-20.

38. Gubar, “Representing Pornography,” p. 730.

39. Ragland-Sullivan, Jacques Lacan, p. 290.

40. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 248-50.

41. Much Marxist feminist analysis highlights the connection between women's reproductive capacities and women's oppression.

42. This contradicts charges that subversiveness is contained within the carnival and is thus not politically effective.

43. Palmer similarly argues that “Carter constructs a witty parallel between the subordinate position of the troupe of performing apes in the circus and the position of the women performers. Both are forced to endure frequent indignities and brutalities” and “both rebel” (“From ‘Coded Mannequin’ to Bird Woman,” p. 199).

44. Jackson, Fantasy, pp. 4, 21. Jackson does not use the term postmodernism in her work; she uses the term modern to cover both modern and postmodern literary works.

45. McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, p. 75.

46. Jackson, Fantasy, pp. 42-43.

47. Woolf's Orlando is a good example of a novel that uses elements of the fantastic as a strategy to fulfill feminist aims and is thus a precursor of Carter's novel.

48. There is a strong parallel between Siberia in Carter's novel and the Zone in Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.

49. Barrett, Women's Oppression Today, p. 42.

50. In a related vein, Robinson argues that, near the end of the novel, “Lizzie, always the materialist, draws Fevvers back from this becoming Woman by pointing to the woman with a baby” (Engendering the Subject, p. 131). However, I find it problematic to hold on to the concept of “Woman,” even if it is qualified by “becoming,” and prefer to talk in terms of new female subjectivities that are always in process.

51. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, p. 127. Turner also links Fevvers' laughter at the end of the novel with Bakhtin's notion of ambivalent laughter, asserting that it “expresses a relationship to existence of all inclusive regeneration that is both mocking and triumphant” (“Subjects and Symbols,” p. 57).

52. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, p. 164.

53. Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale also posits a connection between desire and subjecthood, but it does not investigate the link between desire and love.