“Whores of Mirth”: Examining Sex Work in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus Emily Price College

It takes a writer like Angela Carter to make connections between circus clowns and prostitutes. Her novel, Nights at the Circus, depicts both, and they are shown to be more similar than one might first imagine. In Nights at the Circus, Carter uses circuses and freak shows as symbols for the artifice necessary in sex work done out of desperation - a performance that is inherently degrading to the one who works for the pleasure of another. She writes of several characters - from a half-swan aerialist to a man with no mouth to a circus clown - who, with no better options, become living spectacles; through fantastic people like these she is able to depict grim truths about real-life sex work.

The book’s first section gives the backstory of Sophie Fevvers, a supposedly half-swan trapeze artist who grew up in a brothel. From the very beginning Carter makes connections between the circus and the whorehouse, and the most obvious of these connections is the aspect of performance, or artifice. According to Fevvers’ story, she was abandoned as a child and raised by the prostitutes who found her. From the age of seven her job was to be a spectacle. With roses in her hair and a toy bow and arrow, she was made to sit in the drawing room of...