Summary
After Fevvers is kidnapped from Madame Schreck's, she spends two silent hours in a carriage with her captors, with no idea where she's being taken. Finally, the horses halt outside of a Gothic-style mansion covered in ivy and tucked away in the woods. She's brought into the house and finds a man named Mr. Rosencreutz awaiting her. Rosencreutz was a regular of Schreck's and an obsessive admirer of Fevvers, so she's not surprised to discover that he's the one who made the offer. When she walks into the chamber, Rosencreutz is reading a massive Latin volume. He comments on the soot on her nose, and she asks where the bathroom is so she can take a shower. At first, Fevvers isn't afraid of Rosencreutz and doesn't view him as a threat. She covers the keyhole in the bathroom so as to block his view in case he tries to snoop.
But when she finishes bathing, Rosencreutz denies Fevvers clean clothes unless she solves his riddle. He repeatedly refers to her as Azrael, the name of an angel of death, and regards her as an angel. His riddle is that she "must come out of the water neither naked nor clothed" (76). She considers the riddle for some time and ultimately decides to use her long, flowing hair to cover up, she says, "in the same way that Lady Godiva insubstantially yet modestly clothed herself on her celebrated ride through Coventry" (76). Rosencreutz seems both impressed and disappointed that she found a solution. Once clothed, Fevvers takes her dinner—it is fowl, which she would normally never eat because it feels to her like cannibalism; but she figures that in her current situation, she shouldn't make a fuss.
Over dinner, Rosencreutz lectures Fevvers on the philosophical stances of his esoteric sect, and she realizes he's likely a Rosicrucian. She also suddenly understands the symbolism behind the gold medallion he wears around his neck, a small sculpture of a winged erect penis with the stem of a rose wrapped around it. She realizes that Rosencreutz (not his real name) espouses radically misogynist ideas that cause him to believe that women are wicked and weigh down the natural ascendant trajectory of males. She also realizes, over the course of the night, that he plans on sacrificing her. He believes that by sacrificing an angel, he will become immortal. In a brief aside, Fevvers informs Walser of Rosencreutz's true identity—he is a well-known parliamentarian who advocates against suffrage for women.
Rosencreutz demands that Fevvers lie on her back on the dining table. When he takes out a knife, she takes out Ma Nelson's sword and backs him off. Then, she escapes the estate by flying away. She flies into the trees, hides out for the night, and the next day, slowly and stealthily returns to Battersea. She finds the Wiltshire Wonder asleep next to Lizzie in Isotta and Gianni's house. Lizzie explains how after she was kidnapped, Toussaint facilitated the escape of all of Schreck's prisoners, including himself. At this point in their retelling of the story, Walser is basically delirious. When the clock chimes again, Lizzie notes the time—6 a.m. They'd been in the dressing room all night. In the light of morning, Fevvers appears more human than she had all night: smaller, older, and less invulnerable. Walser walks them partway home, to the bridge. They refuse a cab; Fevvers tells him that they always walk home. The next day, Walser convinces his editor to let him go on tour with Fevvers and Lizzie, thus concluding Part 1: London.
Part 2 begins in St. Petersburg, with Jack Walser furiously tapping away at his typewriter, in the living room of a "baboushka" and, presumably, her grandchild, Little Ivan. Walser is dressed and made-up like a clown, and Little Ivan regards him with caution verging on fear. In his writing, Walser waxes poetic about the city of St. Petersburg. When he rereads his copy, he amuses himself thinking about how his editor will react to the uncharacteristically adjective-heavy descriptions. But he seems not to be able to help himself; the city inspires him.
After Walser finishes his copy, Carter transitions to a flashback depicting Walser's initial interview with the owner and founder of the circus, Colonel Kearney. The interview takes place at the Ritz Hotel in London. Kearney is accompanied by his prize pig, Sybil, whom he takes everywhere with him to help him make big decisions. Kearney explains to Walser how he ended up starting a traveling circus, or, as he calls it, "the Ludic Game" (100). He was a young man growing up on a farm in Kentucky, and he trained one of his pigs to stand on her hind legs and wave a flag. He cut three months of school to teach her to do that, and although he didn't intend for the pig to be an enterprise, when people started paying him nickels to see the pig wave an American flag, he felt like it was destiny. He took their show on the road, and over many decades, he built his traveling circus into a globetrotting phenomenon.
He asks Walser about his experience clowning, but clearly sees Walser's circus experience amounts to nothing. Kearney is both attracted to and wary of Walser's lack of experience and his rolling-stone spirit. He consults Sybil, whose oink of approval ultimately lands Walser a spot in the circus. But Walser's experience as a performer in the Imperial Circus is vastly different from Fevvers'. They both stay in St. Petersburg, but Walser lodges with the elderly woman and her grandson. As a clown, he has to traverse the city through its network of alleys and back channels in order to avoid being harassed and ridiculed, as well as to keep his identity concealed. He writes his accounts of the circus in the shadows of Petersburg, while Fevvers enjoys the luxurious trappings of celebrity in five-star hotels.
One morning, as Walser mosies around the circus ring, he encounters Lamarck's Educated Apes rehearsing their routine. Their enclosure is configured to resemble a classroom, and sitting attentively in desks are twelve apes—six males and six females—dressed smartly in school uniforms. At the front of the class, before a chalkboard, is the professor ape, who appears to be giving a lecture in sign language. Their trainer, Lamarck, is passed out drunk nearby. Lamarck's girlfriend, the keeper of the apes, is filing her nails and not paying attention to them. Walser walks up and notices that the apes appear to actually be discussing some concept or another. They're raising their hands to ask questions, and the professor is writing things on the board in symbols. Walser can only imagine what the symbols mean. He tries quietly to inch closer to the lesson to get a better look at what the professor is writing, but his massive clown shoes cause him to bump into something and make a racket.
When the apes hear him and realize they're being watched, the lesson devolves into chaos. One of the students throws an inkwell at the professor, and then the apes disband and ride around on unicycles and get up to other circus hijinks as they might be expected to. The professor then puts on a show of regaining order. He fits the students with dunce caps and sits them back down. He approaches Walser and fits him with a dunce cap, too. Then, with a long, transfixing bought of eye contact, he recruits Walser to assist him in a human anatomy lesson (but not before gesturing, with a finger over his mouth, to keep silent about the apes' actual, organized intelligence). At the prompting of the professor, Walser strips to nothing but his dunce cap and stands before the class of apes. The professor pokes, prods, and writes on the board. Meanwhile, the Strong Man walks over to Lamarck's girlfriend after a bracing session of weight lifting. He and the ape keeper start having sex right next to Lamarck's sleeping form. Walser is rather uncomfortable standing there naked in a dunce cap in a silence only broken by the rhythmic grunts of the Strong Man and the keeper.
Then, in a moment of seemingly choreographed chaos, the Strong Man has an orgasm, the Colonel's pig, Sybil, screams onto the scene squealing away, and someone yells, "TIGER OUT! TIGER OUT!" (111). The strong man abandons Lamarck's girlfriend and runs out of the ring. The apes climb up to the orchestra. Sybil burrows down into the earth. Walser tears off his dunce cap, wishing not to die wearing an article that denotes fools, and tries to find an exit. He realizes that the ape keeper, whom the Strong Man callously abandoned, is struggling to run away, and is tripping over her own clothes that are wrapped variously around her ankles and knees. Walser chooses heroism and charges the tiger.
When he awakens, he's being attended by Lizzie and Fevvers, who makes no effort to conceal her displeasure. His employment by the circus is news to her, and she doesn't like the fact that he's sneaking around and writing accounts of it. She and Lizzie act stern but nonetheless care for him and dress his wounds. Fevvers pays the doctor who treats Walser. She even reapplies his clown makeup to help him stay concealed. It occurs to her that this secret knowledge gives her leverage over him, but she's not yet sure how she'll use it.
After Walser is bandaged and mending, he's sent back to Clown Alley, where the raucous band of clowns resides. Carter describes the lodgings in great detail as a dingy den of sadness and depravity. The baboushka who first appears at the beginning of Part 2 works as a cook for the clowns, and her grandson, Little Ivan, attends them too, despite the fact that he's terrified of clowns. Ivan is in the care of his grandmother because his mother lives in a prison camp in Siberia for killing his father and chopping his body apart with an axe.
The leader of the clowns is named Buffo the Great, and he presides over them from the middle of a long dining table; several times, his position at the table is compared to Christ's seat at the last supper. Carter describes Buffo's act and style of clowning. He's seven feet tall and performs a lot of minute physical humor to demonstrate how the world is constantly falling apart at his fingertips. Carter calls him a "victim of material objects" and says that "things are against him" (116). She uses the example of a doorknob coming off in his giant hand. Buffo, like Lizzie and Fevvers, is Cockney; he also shares with Lizzie and Fevvers an unexpected erudition that demonstrates a complete understanding of his sociocultural condition. Buffo explains the sad irony of clowning and the relationship of the clown to his audience. Then, two other veteran clowns, Grik and Grok, begin tapping a melody on the dining table, and the troupe breaks into a Bergomask dance of chaos. Slapstick and destruction reign through the kitchen as the baboushka sleeps and Little Ivan watches in terror. Walser knows that the display is partially in his honor, as an initiation rite as the newest clown, but he's more overwhelmed and disturbed than anything else. He slips out the back door for some fresh air.
Analysis
By the time Fevvers' story reaches the imposing halls of Rosencreutz, she has proven herself to be quite the keen culture critic. After an afternoon of listening to her purchaser talk through his belief system, she realizes that he practices Rosicrucianism (hence the pseudonym she gives him), an esoteric order originating in the 17th century that claims knowledge of a secret science that would beckon forth a new enlightenment. It is at this point that Fevvers begins to feel real fear. Where before, she thought he was merely a creep that wanted to sleep with her, as she realizes that he's a true believer in a massive conspiracy theory, she also realizes that he will torture and sacrifice her if he thinks it will serve his cause. As an affiliation for Rosencreutz, Rosicrucianism is an apt choice on Carter's part, because the order was famously split when Johann Valentin Andreae, who claimed to have written one of the order's foundational texts, later claimed that he wrote the manifesto as a joke. Christian Rosenkreuz is also the name of a prominent messiah figure of modern Rosicrucianism, and his name closely resembles Carter's character. The reason Fevvers gives for using a pseudonym for the man is because he's a prominent politician in parliament. Upon whispering his true name to Walser (unseen by readers), Fevvers says, "I saw in the paper only yesterday how he gives the most impressive speech in the House on the subject of Votes for Women. Which he is against" (78).
By constructing the character this way, Carter draws a clear distinction between esoteric occultism and the totally undogmatic magic of Fevvers' wings. She folds anti-feminist sentiments into the inane dough of a massive conspiracy theory that was disavowed by one of its alleged founders, and she renders a truly terrifying portrait of the violent dangers of entitled misogyny. Where Rosencreutz's gold medallion of an erect, winged penis wrapped in rose stalks once inspired envy in Ma Nelson and company, once Fevvers deciphers its true meaning—the notion that females and femininity are the crippling siren song of mankind—she fears what he'll do to her.
Part 2 finally shuttles the reader away from the claustrophobic confines of Fevvers' dressing room and brings the narrative to St. Petersburg. The setting shift is assisted by the shift in point-of-view. Just as in Part 1, the perspective is ambiguous at first, and the text begins in the midst of a dialogue that is immediately interrupted and resumed after ample description. The first words of Part 2 are, "'There was a pig,' said the baboushka to Little Ivan" (95). Then, Carter describes the woman, her grandson, and the whole sordid kitchen for a page and a half, before the baboushka struggles to repeat herself and begin the story again, as if the first time was a false start: "'There was...' puff!... 'a pig...' puff!... 'went to Petersburg...'" (96). Ultimately, the Baboushka abandons the narrative altogether, but Carter deftly uses the repeated attempts to tell a porcine tale as a transition to Walser's first meeting with the Colonel and his pig, Sybil.
The introductory narrative of Part 2 also intercuts italicized, grandiose descriptions of St. Petersburg—these excerpts are understood to be Jack Walser's copy which he's secretly sending back to his editor at the newspaper. Walser has infiltrated the circus as an undercover reporter, and his copy about St. Petersburg is a self-conscious pastiche of sensational journalism: "Walser reread his copy," writes Carter. "The city precipitated him toward hyperbole; never before had he bandied about so many adjectives" (98). Walser blatantly engages in orientalism, writing things like, "Russia is a sphinx. You grand immobility, antique, hieratic, one haunch squatting on Asia, the other on Europe, what exemplary destiny are you knitting out of the blood and sinew of history in your sleeping womb?" (96). He repeats this phrase, "Russia is a sphinx," to emphasize the notion that Russia has secrets concealed by riddles and trickery for the colonial mind to tease out.
While Carter has operated in the realm of the carnivalesque since the beginning of the novel, she homes in on the profanation of sacred symbolism in her depiction of Clown Alley and her introduction of Buffo the Great. At several points in Chapter 4 of St. Petersburg, Carter compares Buffo to Christ, first in terms of where he sits at the communal table—"not at the head but at the magisterial middle of the table, in the place where Leonardo seats the Christ" (116)—then in terms of his act, which involves a resurrection witnessed by an apostle-like troupe of clowns (117-118), and finally, in Buffo's own words—"And yet, too, you might say, might you not, that the clown is the very image of Christ ... the despised and rejected, the scapegoat upon whose stooped shoulders is heaped the fury of the mob..." (119). Buffo, like Lizzie and Fevvers, is an intellectual under the cover of an outcast. The clowns are literally wearing disguises—a layer of "wet white" and makeup that allows them to outwardly project any emotion or image they chose, within the confines of clowndom. Characters like Buffo and Fevvers serve as a perfect counterpoint for pseudointellectuals like Rosencreuntz, who hide their eccentric, dangerous, and irrational beliefs in plain sight (in Rosuncreuntz's case, he's actually a legislator). Meanwhile, Buffo and Fevvers conceal their poignant cultural critiques behind a facade of dangerous eccentricity.
