Nights at the Circus Literary Elements

Literary Fiction, Postmodern Fiction

London, St. Petersburg, and Siberia from 1899 to the turn of the 20th century.

Carter cycles between an omniscient narrator; close-third narrations focalized through Fevvers and Walser, respectively, with elements of free-indirect discourse; and, in the final section, first-person narration from the perspective of Sophie Fevvers. The point-of-view of the novel is manipulated by Carter to make the reader think certain characters are in control of the narrative, when, in the end, it seems that Fevvers and Lizzie have managed to maintain consistent control throughout.

The novel has a bold, bawdy tone that is at once capable of cutting satire and irony, while also demonstrating earnest sentiment and compassion. The novel is deeply political in nature, and engages the reader's political sensibilities, particularly as they may relate to feminism and capitalism.

Sophie Fevvers is the protagonist. She encounters several antagonistic figures, including Madame Schreck, Christian Rosencreutz, and the Grand Duke in St. Petersburg.

Major conflicts include the question of whether Fevvers is "fact or fiction," whether Walser and Fevvers' unspoken love for one another will ever come to fruition, and whether, after being hunted in London, Petersburg, and Siberia, Fevvers will ever truly shake the yoke of oppression in a male-dominated society.

The climax of the novel occurs in Siberia, when Lizzie and Fevvers arrive at the village where Walser has been learning to be a shaman. They're carrying a villager and her newborn baby, who had been left by the shaman in the freezing cold as a part of a ritual. Lizzie and Fevvers usurping tradition by bringing the woman and child to safety results in a climactic confrontation between themselves and the village, led by the shaman and Walser.

Lizzie suggests that encountering the dying woman with her child, which she calls a "tableau of a woman in bondage to her reproductive system," (283) portends Fevvers' future if she chooses to marry Walser; the unreliability, verging on unbelievability, of the final scene of domestic harmony between Fevvers and Walser calls back to Lizzie's suggestion.

Carter makes frequent biblical allusions, for example to the story of Lot (111), and especially regarding Buffo the Great's (106-107) resemblance to Christ. She also makes allusions throughout to artists: post-impressionists like Alfred Jarry and Henri Toulouse Lautrec (11), Gauguin (106), allusions to Helen of Troy (10) and deities of antiquity, and some subtle and not-so-subtle allusions to Yeats. The line, "foul rag and bone shop of the heart" (69), to describe Schreck's museum of women monsters is lifted from Yeats's poem, "The Circus Animals' Desertion," and when Carter describes Buffo as "the center that does not hold," (117) she's referencing a line from Yeats's poem, "The Second Coming."

Carter densely packs the narrative with rich, minute details that contribute to her precisely appointed world. Especially in Part 1, when the inhabited space is limited to a cramped dressing room, Carter's maximalism helps make the reader feel truly present in the space. Her maximalism stalls when the narrative enters the sweeping, vacant Siberian landscape, at which point Fevvers begins her first-person narration by lamenting the dearth of life and detail in Siberia, a testament to the importance of detail and imagery to Carter's style.

Walser considers a major paradox of the novel early on in the interview that takes place over the course of Part 1: "In order to earn a living, might not a genuine bird-woman—in the implausible event that such a thing existed—have to pretend she was an artificial one? He smiled to himself at the paradox: in a secular age, an authentic miracle must purport to be a hoax, in order to gain credit in the world" (17).

The double-life of Lamarck's "Educated Apes" parallels the double-lives of Lizzie and Fevvers. The chimps pretend to be less intelligent than they really are in order to evade scrutiny and further oppression by the systems of power that hem them in. Fevvers and Lizzie, in a similar fashion, cut themselves off during their initial interview with Walser if their speech ever veers toward the scholarly or intellectual, or if they begin to offer real criticism of the culture. They both believe that in order to remain successful in the public eye, as women, they cannot risk being threateningly intelligent.

Many examples of personification are present throughout the novel in Carter's lively, fantastical prose. Examples include the roses "blushing" on page 80, when a glass of wine is poured in their pot, and in Carter's introduction to Buffo, when she describes the common objects of life—doorknobs, stairs, handles—being "against" Buffo (117), as if they were capable of conspiring.