Fevvers' Dressing Room
Carter describes Fevvers' dressing room as "a mistresspiece of exquisitely feminine squalor, sufficient, in its homely way, to intimidate a young man who had led a less sheltered life than this one" (9), and notes that between the street food and the perfumes, oils, and creams, one felt that one "breathed the air in Fevvers' dressing-room in lumps" (8). The dense imagery of clutter contributes to the overwhelming claustrophobic feeling that the reader comes to share with Jack Walser over the course of Part 1.
Clown Alley Kitchen in Petersburg
Part 2 opens with imagery that firmly establishes the new location. Carter describes a new character, Little Ivan, "perched, round-eyed, on a three-legged stool beside [his grandmother] in the kitchen as she blew on the charcoal underneath the samovar with a big pair of wooden bellows brightly painted with folk-art motifs of scrolls and flowers" (95). The samovar, a traditionally Russian appliance, as well as the evocation of folk art and artisan carpentry transports the reader to the humble kitchen of Clown Alley in Petersburg, a clear visual departure from Fevvers' dressing room in London.
The Decadent Profanity of the Circus
The first image Carter offers her readers of the circus at rest reads, "At this dead hour of the afternoon, under a sad sky tinted the lavender of half-mourning, the courtyard was empty but for a small bird with long legs who pecked with a gourmet air the fibres out of a mound of yellow elephant dung on the cobbles. A smashed bottle, a rusting can; a pump dripped water which froze as it hit the ground" (106). The image is both beautiful and repulsive; melancholic, introspective, and profane. The image of a bird stooping "with a gourmet air" over a pile of dung encapsulates the decadence of the circus, and of self-indulgent figures like Fevvers, who relies on the low, ludic art of the circus to fund her luxurious lifestyle.
Train Wreck in Shattered Mirrors
When their train derails in Siberia, Fevvers describes the wreckage in a beautifully descriptive paragraph:
Amongst the ruins of the 'wagon salon,' I beheld a great wonder. For the tigers were all gone into the mirrors. How to describe it. The 'wagon salon' lay on its side, ripped open like the wrappings of a Christmas toy by an impatient child, and, of those lovely creatures, not a trace of blood or sinew, nothing. Only pile upon pile of broken shards of mirror, that segmented the blazing night around us in a thousand jagged dissociations so you might think, if you had time or patience to fit them back together, then, suddenly, all would be as it had been before, the forest, the plain, the twin tracks of the railway lines bearing forwards towards the infinity of the horizon the pretty little carriages and the puffing train which now seemed to me to have been a kind of gauntlet flung down in the face of Nature—a grand gesture of defiance which Nature had picked up, then tossed disdainfully back upon the heaving earth, shattering it into fragments. (205–206)
The imagery here not only projects the physical space of the Siberian landscape aflame—a strange, orange deviation from its usual expanse of white snow and ice—but also reinforces an important theme of the novel, which is the manipulation of time and space. Fevvers describes this hypothetical ability to rearrange reality, shard by fragmented shard, and this instinct parallels the project of narrative manipulation that takes place in the text.
