In 1985, the year after Angela Carter published Nights at the Circus, her short story collection, Black Venus (called Saints and Strangers in the UK) was published. Though the collection was published after the novel, the title story of Black Venus first appeared in Next Additions in 1980, four years prior to the novel, and cleary provided inspiration for Nights at the Circus. In comparing Carter's rendition of Jeanne Duval—a Haitian-born actress best known for being the muse of French poet Charles Baudelaire—to Carter's fully fictional invention, the allegedly-winged aerialist Sophie Fevvers, we can not only trace Duval as a clear blueprint for Fevvers' character, but we can also better understand the constellation of metaphor and symbolism at play in Nights at the Circus.
The first connection one might draw between Nights at the Circus and the story "Black Venus" is that Sophie Fevvers is widely known as "the Cockney Venus" (7) and introduced as such as early as the first paragraph of the novel. Both titles, by virtue of being defined by their modifiers, i.e. "Black" and "Cockney," forefront an otherness about the respective characters to which they refer. The presence of these adjectives before the primary reference of the title, Venus, to refer to the Roman goddess of sex, love, beauty, and fertility, suggest that the original Venus could not have been either Black or Cockney. Carter also refers to Jeanne as "black Helen" (Burning Your Boats, 237), and in Nights at the Circus, compares Fevvers to Helen as well: "This Helen launched a thousand quips, mostly on the lewd side" (8).
While Carter's "Black Venus" concerns the erasure of Black voices and contributions of people of color, particularly women of color, in the wake of colonialism, discussions of race are conspicuously absent from Nights at the Circus, where Carter's primary focus seems to be a more general discussion of feminism and critique of capitalism, where marginalization is framed in a more mythical, rather than "realistic," way by focusing on the stories of women who were deemed "freaks" and "monsters," and thus ended up traveling with the circus. The racial and ethnic backgrounds of these women are not always clear, but they are certainly not a main subject of analysis; one might say that anything less than rigorous attention to the nuances of racial difference in a novel discussing patriarchal oppression and the dangers of capitalism is a massive omission that fails to address the intersectionality of gender, race, and class inequity, and privileges a brand of white feminism—especially when much of the source material for the white, English protagonist stems from a Black historical figure.
On the other hand, Carter's tapestry of characters in Nights at the Circus is, after all, quite a diverse one. Many of the women have entire chapters devoted their origin story, and race is not completely outside of the scope of the novel—for example, Madame Schreck's mute, mouthless manservant, (a slave, for he isn't paid), is named Toussaint. Toussaint ends up leading the escape effort of the captives of Madame Schreck's museum of women monsters. Thus we have a character named Toussaint, leading a slave revolt, naturally evoking Toussaint L'Ouverture, the Haitian general and revolutionary who led a slave rebellion in Haiti during the French Revolution. And yet, the extent to which this reference is analyzed with regard to race is a passing digression from Lizzie—"'Oh, that Toussaint!' said Lizzie. 'How he can move a crowd! Such eloquence, the man has! Oh, if all those with such things to say had mouths! And yet it is the lot of those who toil and suffer to be dumb. But, consider the dialectic of it, sir, ... how it was, as it were, the white hand of the oppressor who carved open the aperture of speech in the very throat you could say it had, in the first place, rendered dumb..." (60). Lizzie refers to when Fevvers paid surgeons from the Royal College to surgically grant Toussaint a mouth. In this way, the novel responds to contemporary critical and political conversations about colonialism and race. Lizzie's discussion of Toussaint's speech resonates with an essay that, published four years after Carter's book, would become perhaps the defining work about post-colonial politics: Gayartri Spivak's "Can the subaltern speak?"
There are other connections between Carter's Nights at the Circus and "Black Venus." "Black Venus," which reimagines the relationship between poet Charles Baudelaire and his mistress Jeanne Duval, is filled with imagery of birds. On a dreary fall day, when Carter's Baudelaire compares Jeanne to a cat, Carter writes, "on these days, nipped by frost and sulking, no pet nor pussy she; she looked more like an old crow with rusty feathers in a miserable huddle by the smoky fire which she pokes with spiteful sticks" (Burning Your Boats, 232), and later, from crow to albatross: "Venus lies on the bed, waiting for a wind to rise: the sooty albatross hankers for the storm" (239). Carter follows with an extended analysis of albatrosses, their mating habits, and how they are regarded (disrespected and underestimated) by sailors on the high seas. Jeanne is posed as a metaphorical albatross, and her appearance is, at several points in the story, likened to some or other kind of bird. Carter takes this idea one step further in Nights at the Circus and makes Fevvers an actual winged woman, allegedly the child of a swan, whom she describes as "an albatross fed on the same diet that makes flamingos pink" (15).
Like Fevvers' "gilded cage," Carter refers to Jeanne as an "inmate" in Baudelaire's house, his house made more like a prison from his choice to frost all the windows except for the very highest panes, to give the house the feeling of a hot air balloon, with panoramic views of the sky. Carter refers to Jeanne's time there as her "seasons in the clouds" (Burning Your Boats, 234), further emphasizing this theme of flight.
Fevvers and Duval also share similar statures. Carter heavily emphasizes both of their sizes, frequently referring to Fevvers as a giantess, an Amazonian, and remarking on her height and presence, and she does the same with Duval four years prior in "Black Venus," writing, "she was a woman of immense height, the type of those beautiful giantesses who, a hundred years later, would grace the stages of the Crazy Horse or the Casino de Paris in sequin cache-sexe and tinsel pasties, divinely tall, the colour and texture of suede" (Burning Your Boats, 233), and noting "her big feet and huge, strong hands" (235).
Of course, there is the inherent feminist question at the heart of both works, which balances cultural conceptions of "morality" with the desire to achieve agency and resist patriarchal structures. In "Black Venus," Jeanne wonders, "if she was going to have to dance naked to earn her keep, anyway, why shouldn't she dance naked for hard cash in hand and earn enough to keep herself? Eh? Eh?" (234), a question that pervades Nights at the Circus, especially in the context of Ma Nelson's brothel.
And, finally, there are clear parallels between Fevvers' and Jeanne's ambiguous, unknown and unknowable origins. Carter describes Jeanne in "Black Venus" as "deprived of history, ... a pure child of the colony," and reports, "her granny said to Jeanne: 'I was born in the ship where my mother died and was thrown into the sea. Sharks ate her. Another woman of some other nation who had just still-born suckled me. I don't know anything about my father nor where I was conceived nor on what coast nor in what circumstances" (Burning Your Boats, 238). This origin sounds eerily similar to how Fevvers describes her origin to Walser: "For you must know that Liz just lost a child when she found me and so she took me to her breast and suckled me" (292). Despite the important differences in tone, setting, and genre, the real story of Jeanne Duval clearly has something to say in every line of Nights at the Circus, and as for the works' respective protagonists, they are both women without concrete origins, dispossessed—bird-like, in Carter's imagination—and navigating the complex terms of their social captivity.
