Summary
Sophie Fevvers is a famous aerialist, and at the start of the novel, her fame has grown to such an extent that she's considered a global phenomenon, a household name with her image featured on products ranging from "garters, stockings, fans, cigars, [and] shaving soap..." The narration goes on to clarify that "she even lent [her image] to a brand of baking powder; if you added a spoonful of the stuff, up in the air went your sponge cake, just as she did" (8). But an important anatomical distinction separates Fevvers from other aerialists: she has enormous wings protruding from her back. At the start of the novel, she has just completed a world tour, and on her return to her native London she is met with fanfare.
But in a sea of fans, there still remain plenty of skeptics, and one of them joins her in her dressing room. He is a young journalist from San Francisco named Jack Walser. The entirety of Part 1 takes place in Fevvers' dressing room after one of her shows. The story of her life unfolds as she and her lady-in-waiting, Lizzie (but mostly Fevvers), take turns telling Walser the long and epic story of Fevvers' life, starting with her childhood, navigating through her arduous adolescence, and finally leading up to her achievement of celebrity. Through long narrative monologues in which Fevvers spares few details, the reader is transported to various locations from Fevvers' childhood, despite the characters never actually leaving the dressing room.
But before Fevvers and Lizzie fully drop into the autobiographical narrative, Carter richly renders Fevvers' chaotic dressing room and establishes the fraught conversational dynamic between Fevvers and Walser. Carter describes the fishy, perfumed air of the dressing room as air one breathed "in lumps" (8), due to the thick, musky mixture of aromas. There are undergarments, ointments, powders, and various personal effects cluttered about the floor and draped over furnishings. Walser is a bit flustered by the "mistresspiece of exquisitely feminine squalor" (9) that is Fevvers dressing room, but he takes pains to appear confident and unshaken, even occasionally teasing Fevvers and poking fun at her and Lizzie (which they don't take kindly).
Carter intersperses a sense of Walser's deep and overwhelming skepticism regarding Fevvers' wings, communicating to the reader that Carter is entering this interview fully thinking that Fevvers is nothing but a charlatan. Lizzie and Fevvers crack open a bottle of champagne and send a page to fetch them eel pies and a bounty of other various street foods. Once they're settled in and the champagne is flowing, the storytelling begins. Fevvers insists she was hatched from an egg and left as an infant on the perimeter of a brothel run by a woman named Ma "Admiral" Nelson. Lizzie discovered her while leading a client off of the premises and took her in.
Fevvers grew up in the brothel and was cared for by Lizzie and Ma, and as she grew, her wings budded from her back, little feathery mounds. Around the age of seven, her wings spread, and Ma Nelson got the idea to hide Fevvers in plain sight by using her as a sort of living decoration for the brothel. Fevvers played Cupid in the foyer of the brothel until well into her adolescence. Even after she hit puberty, Ma Nelson never allowed her clients to sleep with Fevvers, and thus her virginity and perceived status as an angel on earth spread through their London neighborhood. Fevvers tells Walser that around the age of fourteen, her wings fully spread, and she attempted flight for the first time from her usual perch on the mantel. Knowing nothing about flight at that point, or of the mechanics of her wings, Fevvers tumbled down to the floor.
But she explains that she was not deterred by her initial failure. Instead, she takes inspiration from a pigeon fledgling she witnesses being pushed out of its nest by a mother pigeon. Young Fevvers is convinced that she simply must take a higher leap of faith in order to force herself into flight, as if her wings needed a jump-start. So, after conferring with Ma and Lizzie, one night the three of them go to the roof of the brothel, five stories up, and Fevvers strips down so as to not have any of her clothing obstruct her flight, and she leaps. Much to her surprise and relief, the ground doesn't race toward her. Instead, she finds herself hovering miraculously, high above the ground. After her first successful flight, Ma Nelson graduates Fevvers from playing Cupid to standing in for the statue of Winged Victory. Nelson realizes that, unlike Winged Victory, Fevvers has arms in addition to wings. In order to give Fevvers something to occupy her arms, Nelson gifts her her admiral's sword, which she holds with pride in the vestibule of the brothel.
Fevvers continues to pose as Winged Victory until the age of seventeen, when Ma Nelson dies suddenly after slipping on Whitechapel High Street and being trampled by horses. Since she never established a will, the brothel falls into the possession of Nelson's miserly, puritanical brother, who immediately evicts all of the residents, whom Ma Nelson considered family. He intends to convert the building into a halfway house for "fallen girls" (44), and invites any of the women to "repent and stay on" because "he thought a repentant harlot or two would come in handy about the place" (44). None of the women there accept his insulting offer, and they all set out on seperate paths.
Fevvers recounts the women's various trajectories for Walser. Two of the women, Louisa and Emily, had grown close over the years and had been saving their money for just this type of catastrophic circumstance. The day after their eviction notice, they set out for the South Coast to look for a little house for themselves. Another pair, Annie and Grace, plan to start their own typing and professional school for women entering the workforce. Jenny, described by Fevvers as "the prettiest and best-hearted harlot as ever trod Piccadilly" (45), has absolutely no savings or fall-back plan at the time of Nelson's untimely death. She's inconsolable and at a loss for what to do, until suddenly a letter arrives for her from a nobleman who frequented Nelson's establishment. He asks her to marry him, and shortly after they wed, he chokes to death on a piece of food. In mourning, Jenny takes off to Monte Carlo to gamble some of her sorrows away when she meets an American sewing-machine tycoon at the roulette tables, and they hit it off and promptly wed.
After explaining the trajectories of the others, Fevvers tells Walser that over the years, she and Lizzie had been sending their money to Lizzie's sister's business, an ice-cream shop in London; so when the time came, they had a place to stay that they'd earned and helped to build and maintain. Before all the women of Ma Nelson's establishment set off for their respective journeys, they burn the brothel to the ground, leaving Nelson's miserly brother nothing but a mound of smoldering ash for his inheritance.
Fevvers and Lizzie live what they describe as an idyllic, wholesome life in Battersea, selling ice cream and enjoying the company of Lizzie's sister and brother-in-law and their sweet children. Before they go on with the story, Lizzie offers to make a run for bacon sandwiches, leaving Walser and Fevvers alone again. Walser feels notably uncomfortable being left alone with Fevvers in her dressing room. He feels consumed by the space, claustrophobic and surrounded by undergarments. When Fevvers stretches, he notes her prodigious size. He thinks she could definitely crush him, despite his own fairly large frame. He tells Fevvers he has to use the bathroom as an excuse to leave the room and get some fresh air, but she insists that he use the pot behind her dressing screen. He's not sure whether his feeling of disorientation can be blamed on the champagne, or the uncanny way in which time seems not to pass in the confines of the dressing room; nonetheless, he's flooded with relief when Lizzie returns.
Settled in once again with more street food and champagne, Lizzie and Fevvers promptly resume their tale. Life in Battersea is stress-free until winter rolls in, and Lizzie's brother-in-law, Gianni, falls ill. Gianni and Isotta's newborn falls ill at the same time, and the cold weather heavily impacts ice cream sales. With two sick family members, neither of whom are responding to treatment, Lizzie's family is at risk of losing everything. Around the same time, the evil Madame Schreck approaches Fevvers to recruit her for her "museum of woman monsters" (55). Lizzie's family begs Fevvers not to accept the offer on their behalf, because they anticipate the abuse and terrible conditions to which Madame Schreck subjects her "employees," but Fevvers doesn't heed their warnings. She decides the sacrifice is worth it if it means she can provide for the people who helped her in her time of need.
Madame Schreck's "museum" turns out to be a brothel, but her establishment is nothing like Ma Nelson's. Schreck keeps her women locked away in a dungeon and denies them their pay. They are unable to escape and are kept essentially as slaves. Some of the women are unable even to attempt an escape—like the girl they call "Sleeping Beauty," who sleeps all day and night. She wakes at sunset to eat, fills a bed pan, and falls right back into her dreams. She was afflicted with chronic exhaustion at a young age and Schreck took her from her parents promising she'd receive medical care.
Fevvers befriends the other so-called "women monsters," like the Wiltshire Wonder, a dwarf who, according to her mother, is the daughter of a fairy king, half-human/half-fairy. The Wonder's mother sold her to a baker, who used her as entertainment for children's birthday parties. He would place her in cakes and she would pop out and surprise the children. The Wonder hated the job; besides the generally demeaning conceit of it, she's claustrophobic, and she constantly feared being sliced by the clumsy children whom the baker would allow to cut into the cake. One day, the Wonder broke out of the cake and ran across the table, into the arms of one of the partygoers. The girl took pity on the Wonder and shamed the baker for abusing her. Then, the girl's family adopted the Wonder and raised her as their own.
The Wonder lived in this way, in a loving and nurturing home, for a while, but she always felt out of place due to her extremely small stature. One night, the family attended a performance of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and the Wonder was enchanted by the dwarves in the play. She tells Fevvers that she couldn't believe that there were other people like her in the world, and the temptation of a community of fellow little people overcame her. She ran away with the theatre troupe, but she immediately realized her mistake. She spent seven long, cruelty-filled months with them, and tells Fevvers, "I shall spare you the sorry details of my fall, Fevvers. ... I fear they did not treat me kindly, for, although they were little, they were men" (68). At the end of this seven months, says the Wonder, Madame Schreck swept her up into her menagerie of "monsters."
After Fevvers has been at Madame Schreck's for several months, a man by the name of Christian Rosencreutz makes an offer to buy Fevvers from Schreck. Fevvers immediately asks how much money she'll earn from her sale, and Schreck concedes a measly fifty guineas. In a rage, Fevvers seizes the Madame and demands all the money she's owed. She forces Schreck to open the safe, and then she grabs her, flies to the ceiling of the dungeon, and hangs her by her collar from a curtain rail. With the safe open and Schreck strung up and powerless, Fevvers has the perfect opportunity to redistribute the wealth among the prisoners and escape. But before she can do any of this, a couple of hulking, unidentified men break into the room, drag Fevvers out, and stuff her in a car en route to an unspecified location.
Analysis
It's clear in the first four chapters why Angela Carter described Nights at the Circus as her psychedelic version of Charles Dickens. Carter draws on Dickens's tendency toward rich, realist scenes dense with minute details, but her disorienting narrative experimentation lends to a "non-ordinary" reading experience. Though Part 1 of Nights at the Circus is technically told by an omniscient third-person narrator, Carter's spatial and temporal staging of Fevvers' interview with Walser, combined with Fevvers' tendency to "seize the narrative between her teeth" (32), blurs the lines between narration and reported dialogue. In other words, the proportion of Fevvers' narration to Walser, presented in the text as reported dialogue, far overshadows the lean, progressively more scarce instances of actual third-person narration. This strategy of Carter's subtly positions Fevvers as the master and commander of the narrative without the reader even noticing in the moment, or being able to identify when exactly the shift occurs.
This question of perspective and reliability of narration lies at the thematic heart of Part 1. Walser is, after all, an investigative journalist. He's there, in Fevvers' dressing room, with the purpose of writing a juicy exposé about how she does not actually have wings, but is a fraud who has conned the world. What little we know about Walser we learn in the first few pages. Carter devotes lopsided narrative attention to Walser in the beginning of the novel, informing readers of his bold travels, his adventurous sensibilities, and the hardships and horrors he's incurred on the road. Because of the narrator's initial focus on Walser, and the establishment of the interview as the primary mode of storytelling, the reader could easily assume that Walser is the character here most closely aligned with the omniscient third-person perspective.
However, Carter quickly demonstrates the total lack of control Walser has over "his" interview. He doesn't actually ask a single question—he doesn't have to after Fevvers and Lizzie resolve to tell Fevvers' entire life story from birth to present-day. Perhaps he asked one question, but it occurs right outside of the first margin of the novel. The novel begins with Fevvers answering a question, presumably how she was born, to which she answers that she was hatched. As Fevvers goes on, Carter's rendering of the dressing room becomes less and less frequent. The "present" of the dressing room becomes a frame for the "real" narrative project of Part 1, which is to communicate Fevvers' rags-to-riches legend. A looming question of Part 1 is whether this legend resembles reality, or if Fevvers and Lizzie are spinning a yarn.
But this question becomes more complicated than whether or not Fevvers is lying about her wings. Early on, Walser internally questions his own skepticism, thinking, "in order to earn a living, might not a genuine bird woman in the implausible event such a thing existed have to pretend she was an artificial one?" (17). Walser's private inquiry turns out to be quite pertinent, for as the story of her life unfolds, Fevvers and Lizzie catch each other slipping and revealing too much, but not in a way Walser expected or even seems to notice. Neither ever give any indication that they're lying about Fevvers' wings; the wings become entirely secondary to the true nature of their secret, which is their deeply intellectual sociopolitical analysis of Fevvers' fame and success and their own respective positions in society. At several points in their recounting, Lizzie and Fevvers cut each other off, so as to prevent the speaker from revealing too much to an outsider. For example, when Lizzie describes the social and philosophical irony of the surgical correction of Toussaint's condition (he lacked a mouth), she slips into a vernacular totally foreign and elevated from the one with which she's been speaking. "Consider the dialectic of it sir," she says, "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 that it had, in the first place, rendered dumb..." (60) but her speech is cut short.
Carter writes that "Fevvers shot Lizzie a look of such glazing fury that the witch hushed, suddenly as she'd started. Walser raised his mental eyebrows. More to the chaperone than met the eye! But Fevvers lassooed him with her narrative and dragged him along with her before he'd had a chance to ask Lizzie if—" (60). We can only guess what he was going to ask Lizzie, because Fevvers' narrative picks up and steamrolls forward. Here we find another instance of Carter describing Fevvers' almost physical wrestling and domination of the narrative, as if the narrative were a tangible thing to be shaped, dented, bitten, or lassooed. Carter affords major agency to Fevvers by presenting her narrative as something malleable. In the tornado of surreality and absurdity, and among all the unbelievable aspects of her life, she feels that it is her political consciousness and intellectuality that she must, as a woman, hide. That the process of her wings growing and spreading map neatly onto her experience of puberty and adolescence in a female-run brothel only underscore the strong feminist themes of the novel. She, with her wings and flight, is consciously regarded by the characters in the novel as an inaugural symbol of a new wave of feminist liberation, particularly by Ma Nelson, who says, "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" (25).
