"Oh, my little one, I think you must be the pure child of the century that just now is waiting in the wings, the New Age in which no women will be bound down to the ground."
In Fevvers' recounting of her childhood, she describes to Walser the moment her wings spread. At this point in the retelling, Fevvers quotes Ma Nelson, who casts metaphorical significance on Fevvers' wings. Nelson's words loudly underscore Fevvers' role as a symbol of women's liberation. Throughout Part 1, Fevvers exerts her power over the narrative to ascribe symbolic and allegorical significance to her biography, often making subtle allusions and refracting her life story through characters from literature, poetry, and theology.
"Oh, that Toussaint! ... How he can move a crowd! Such eloquence, that 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..."
At this point in Fevvers and Lizzie's joint retelling of Fevvers' origin story, they're speaking of Fevvers' time as an indentured servant to Madame Schreck, who kept Fevvers and her colleagues in a dungeon and denied them their pay. Madame Schreck ran a brothel, but one quite unlike Ma Nelson's, for Schreck's place was exclusively staffed with women who, like Fevvers, were considered "oddities." Toussaint was Schreck's manservant, a Black man who was born with no mouth. Fevvers explains that through her connections with the medical community, years after leaving Schreck behind, she managed to arrange a surgery that gave Toussaint a mouth.
Throughout Part 1, both Fevvers and Lizzie have moments in which their speech, diction, and subject matter change register, and they show themselves as intellectuals. In each of these moments, the other reminds the speaker that they are in mixed company (with Walser) and they quickly revert back to their established manner of speaking. Here, Lizzie begins to explicate the irony of Toussaint's condition and "rehabilitation" at colonial hands. She refers to his literal and figurative voicelessness, at which point Fevvers cuts her off, obviously not wanting her to reveal the extent of her radical politics in front of Walser.
"I fear they did not treat me kindly, for, although they were little, they were men."
During her retelling of her time at Madame Scheck's, Fevvers tells the tale of the Wiltshire Wonder by taking on the perspective of the Wonder. The wonder tells the tale of her conception; her mother told her she was fathered by a fairy king while she spent the night in a crypt, thus explaining her extremely small stature. Her mother sold her, and she was passed around multiple times until eventually she was adopted by a loving family. However, one night, at a performance of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, the Wonder decides to run off with the cast, thinking that among the players, who were themselves dwarves, she could finally feel at home. However, this line quoted from her tale confirms that her hopes were dashed, and the dwarves didn't make her feel at home, but rather used and abused her.
Walser noticed how the Professor glanced at these frolics with an air of grave melancholy while the chimps themselves seemed to take no pleasure from the sport, going through the motions with a desultory, mechanical air, longing, perhaps, to be back at their studies, whatever they were, for nothing is more boring than being forced to play.
Carter describes Walser's first encounter with Lamarck's educated apes. The Professor, leader of the apes, catches Walser watching them while they think no one can see. The apes are engaged in real learning and discussion, but when they realize that they have human eyes on them, their organized lesson quickly devolves into a more comfortable, expected performance for human eyes. They start throwing things at each other and riding around on unicycles.
The line, "for nothing is more boring than being forced to play," comments on the expectations projected onto the chimps. They're more intelligent than they allow anyone to think, and in order to play into those low expectations, likely for their own safety, they are forced to debase themselves. This behavior is comparable to how Lizzie and Fevvers make sure to check themselves when their discourse becomes too 'academic' or 'intellectual' in front of Walser—or any man in a relative position of power, for that matter. The chimps check themselves in order to avoid threatening the powers-that-be and allow themselves to safely continue their learning under the radar.
The mirth the clown creates grows in proportion to the humiliation he is forced to endure. ... And yet, too, you might say, might you not, that the clown is the very image of Christ.
Buffo the Great, leader of the clowns, holds court in Clown Alley in St. Petersburg. Carter frequently compares Buffo to Christ; his main acts include a Christmas dinner that is arranged like the Last Supper—and when he dines in Clown Alley, he sits "not at the head but at the magisterial middle of the table, in the place where Leonardo seats the Christ" (116)—and a resurrection, in which his clown disciples try to stuff him in a coffin, but he refuses to stand still. Here, Buffo dons a more intellectual tone to counter his slapstick renditions of Christ, now making an earnest pass at the comparison.
Sometimes the lengths to which I'll go for money appall me.
In the first few pages of undisguised first-person narration from Sophie Fevvers, she reflects on the disastrous dinner date she just concluded with the Grand Duke in St. Petersburg. With this bit of narration, we see self-criticism and self-awareness about some of her qualities that, prior to this moment, have gone uninterrogated by her. Here, Carter demonstrates that Fevvers takes into account Lizzie's anti-materialist perspective and understands the dangers and drawbacks of her own materialism, even if she would never admit it.
But, wherever we go, we'll need no more fathers.
After Vera, Olga, and the rest of the women who escaped from the countess's experimental prison discover the train wreck, Vera finds Ma Nelson's clock among the refuse. She identifies the figure on the clock as Father Time, and thus throws the clock away, believing that the symbol of Father Time is an archetype upholding patriarchal structures.
First place, what is this soul of which you speak? Show me its location in the human anatomy and then I might believe in it. But, I tell you straight, dissect away how much you like, you won't find it. And you can't make perfect a thing that don't exist. So, scrub the "soul" from out of your discourse.
Lizzie speaks with a young intellectual outlaw whose demeanor is shaped by his overwhelming optimism and faith in the inherent good of mankind. Lizzie doesn't believe in inherent goodness or in the concept of souls. The irony of her words here is that she too claims to be a skeptic, while being a practitioner of prestidigitation. She espouses the philosophy that seeing is believing, when her whole way of life depends on illusions.
Look, love, ... if I hadn't bust a wing in the train-wreck, I could fly us all to Vladivostok in two shakes, so I'm not the right one to ask questions of when it comes to what is real and what is not, because, like the duck-billed platypus, half the people who clap eyes on me don't believe what they see and the other half thinks they're seeing things.
This quote offers another perspective on the running theme of "seeing is believing." Fevvers discounts her own authority as to what is "real" and "fake" while speaking to the outlaw after leaving the outpost of the brotherhood of free men, claiming that she, as a subject of scrutiny with regard to her authenticity, isn't the right person to field his question.
Think of him as the amanuensis of all those whose tales we've yet to tell him, the histories of those woman [sic] who would otherwise go down nameless and forgotten, erased from history as if they had never been, so that he, too, will put his poor shoulder to the wheel and help to give the world a little turn into the new era that begins tomorrow.
In her spirited defense of Jack Walser, Fevvers tries to make a case for Lizzie as to how Walser can be of practical use to them and their cause, beyond being the object of Fevvers' affections. She tries to convince Lizzie that Walser can use his platform to help beckon forth the New Age and be a champion for the New Woman, but Lizzie remains skeptical, believing that ultimately, Walser will serve himself over their cause.
