Summary
Part 3 of the novel, entitled "Siberia," begins on the Trans-Siberian Express. Notably, the narrative is, for the first time in the novel, conveyed via a first-person perspective—that of Fevvers—as she stares out over the vast, barren Siberian landscape and wonders how anyone can live in such a harsh, unpopulated land. Fevvers describes the somnolent goings-on aboard the train—the sound of the samovar, the Princess playing songs on her organ to keep the tigers calm—as she grows increasingly restless from boredom. Tensions are still high between Fevvers and Lizzie after Fevvers' close brush with death at the hands of the Grand Duke. Lizzie feels strongly that Fevvers' obsession with wealth and materialism is not only unbecoming, but dangerous. Lizzie also doesn't trust Fevvers' romantic inclination toward Jack Walser.
The narrative point of view begins to intermittently switch between third-person limited and first-person, centered on Fevvers. She describes the burgeoning relationship between Mignon and the Princess of Abyssinia. Samson the Strong Man's feelings for Mignon have only grown more acute since he abandoned her during the tiger attack, but now that she's with the Princess, Samson has become devoted to both of them. He stands guard outside of their carriage and humbly, though glumly, accepts that his role in regards to Mignon is not romantic in nature. His new place in his relationship to Mignon and Abyssinia changes the way he perceives and presents himself. For example, he starts wearing clothing, and focuses less on maximizing his physique.
Fevvers also reports on the sad state of Colonel Kearney's animal fleet. The Colonel prided himself on the prospect of transporting elephants across Siberia, succeeding where the great General Hannibal could not—but as the train chugs deeper into the icy expanse of Siberia, Kearney's elephants struggle to fight off pneumonia. The bulls are also ill, and the tigers are restless. The only animal on the train who seems to be doing well is Sybil, and she receives all kinds of special treatment. For example, Fevvers slips Sybil portions of her dinner in the club car. Fevvers is dissatisfied with the food aboard the train, but Sybil has no complaints.
It is, in fact, during one of these train-car dinners that the circus's expedition comes to a violent, unexpected halt. Some obstruction on the track causes the train to derail and crash. Abyssinia is concussed, and Fevvers breaks a wing, but it seems that most passengers miraculously survive. The tigers run free, supposedly into the Siberian darkness. The faithful elephants use their trunks to spray the melted snow on the flames. The clowns stumble out of their economy car, bruised, cut, and covered in soot, but mostly whole. The only passenger for whom Fevvers is unable to account is Jack Walser, but before she can dig around for him, she and Lizzie are kidnapped and dragged away from the chaos, along with the Colonel and a handful of other performers.
The following chapter, in third-person omniscient, transports the reader to a women's prison in Siberia. Carter recounts the founding of the prison by a Dutchess who, herself, murdered her husband over the course of several years with low doses of arsenic. Though the Countess was never caught, she is ironically inspired to start a prison for women who murdered their husbands, to see if these women are capable of remorse and reformation. With the help of researchers, she handpicks prisoners from all over Russia, brings them out to Siberia, and makes them build the prison themselves. The prison is designed as a panopticon, with the cells arranged circularly around a central point of surveillance, where the Countess resides. The cells are covered in felt, and the ceilings are padded to render the space completely silent and shut down even the most rudimentary forms of communication between prisoners.
The prison chapters follow the path of one prisoner in particular, Olga Alexandrovna, the longest resident prisoner of the Countess's experiment, and the romance that blossoms between herself and a guard, Vera Andreyevna, after they start passing notes to one another via food trays. Their love foments a joint insurrection of prisoners and guards against the Countess, who by her own admission considers her all-female guard, bound by contract, just as imprisoned by her as her prisoners. With some coordination, one day, as the cages open for the prisoners' hour of daily recreation, the guards and prisoners band together to lock the Countess in her central surveillance tower and throw the key into the blank Siberian landscape, to be buried irretrievably under ice and snow. From there, the prisoners and guards set out into the wilderness together, variously grouping and pairing off toward separate destinies.
Shortly after beginning their voyage, the escapees encounter the scene of a devastating train crash. They see that bandits are kidnapping several of the crash victims and leaving the rest to languish in the freezing cold and await a rescue party. The escapees resolve to help the crash victims, but not to intervene in the kidnapping, for they are certain that the bandits would overtake them. Olga and Vera find Jack Walser under some rubble, and when they wake him, they find that in his amnesia, he's regressed to an infantile state. He calls Olga "Mama" and communicates with limited sounds and gestures, like rubbing his stomach to indicate hunger. Olga wants to keep him, but Vera finally convinces her to leave him behind for the rescue party to attend to. As the rescuers approach in their ancient train car, the escapees steal away into the woods again.
Fevvers narrates their voyage with their captors. She reports that they're treated fairly well, considering the violence of their kidnapping. In addition to her and Lizzie, they've taken Samson, Mignon, the Princess, the Colonel, Sybil, and several of the clowns. The leader of the outlaws brings Fevvers into his hut for a conference, and there, he tells her they are in Transbaikalia, and that together, he and his compatriots compose the brotherhood of free men. He tells Fevvers that they mean the circus no harm, but they've kidnapped her because they are all fugitives, and they've read in the papers that Fevvers is betrothed to the Queen of England's son, and therefore they hope to ransom her freedom for their own pardons. Hearing this, Fevvers curses the Colonel for spreading his tabloid lies, which have landed them all in this predicament. For Fevvers and Lizzie, the worst casualty of the train wreck was Ma Nelson's stopped clock, which, it is suggested, has important magical properties. Fevvers informs the leader of the brotherhood that she is not, in fact, of any relation to the Queen, and the leader flies into a rage of self-loathing, kicking and pitching around the contents of his tent until Samson can come and subdue him.
The clowns seem to get along well enough with the brotherhood. The Princess of Abyssinia is beside herself with grief over the loss of her piano, and possibly of the use of her hands. Lizzie, Fevvers, and Samson find themselves in the position of leadership with regards to the circus, with Colonel Kearney sinking into a possibly-guilt-fueled drunken stupor after Fevvers tells him that it was his rumors that led to their abduction. Lizzie and Fevvers have a falling out over the predicament, and Fevvers retires to the hut she's staying in. Late that first night, a knocking comes at her door, and when she answers it, she meets an escaped convict.
Meanwhile, in the expanse of ice and snow, Walser the Human Chicken stumbles into a shaman on a spiritual journey. Walser is still arrested in an infantile state after the accident. The shaman initially takes him for a hallucination, but quickly realizes that Walser is very much real. Walser rubs his stomach, expectantly, hoping to be fed, and the shaman urinates into a thermos and offers it to Walser to drink. His urine contains remnants of fly agaric mushrooms, and Walser spirals into hallucinations after drinking it. The shaman, now thinking Walser is a shaman of a different group of people, lifts him up and carries him back to his village.
Back at the brotherhood's camp, the young outlaw who knocks at Fevvers' door has also crossed paths with the all-female band of prison escapees. He's just left from donating his sperm to them, so they can keep their feminist utopia afloat for at least another generation. He also relates to Fevvers that the escapees found a blonde foreigner in a clown suit, and she's overcome with relief to know that Walser is alive and somewhere not too far away. The young convict and Lizzie get to talking about politics and the state and future of humanity. Lizzie is far more skeptical than the young man, and even more skeptical of his bright-eyed optimism. They debate through the night, while the clowns and the brotherhood inch ever closer to the brink of blackout drunkenness. The young convict suggests that they convince the brotherhood to let them go, so that they can catch up with the band of escapees, or with the rescue party at the tracks.
Lizzie convinces the clowns to put on a show for the brotherhood in order to soften their hearts enough to release them. To inspire them, she invokes the memory of Buffo, which sends a wave of emotion through the clown brigade. They put on a chaotic dance for the brotherhood, which sends their captors into fits of unbridled mirth. In the midst of the performance, both the clowns and the brotherhood are swept clean away by a sudden squall. Those remaining—Fevvers, Lizzie, Samson, Mignon, Abyssinia, the Colonel, and Sybil, and their new acquaintance—take advantage of the opportunity and continue on their trek.
In their course of travel, they encounter a cabin. They enter and search the rooms; it appears abandoned, until they encounter an old man sitting on a piano bench before an out-of-tune grand piano. The Princess of Abyssinia, at the sight of the piano, seems to come back from her catatonic state induced by the train wreck. When she approaches the piano, the old man screams and throws himself across the keys, in a gesture to protect his instrument. To calm him, Mignon starts to sing. Her beautiful song lulls him into a more amenable state, and after she finishes, he allows the Princess to tune the piano. He also takes them out to the frozen river to show them how to fish. While they're out at the river, Mignon and Abyssinia, who stayed behind, can be heard dueting across the expanse of ice. Their song puts everyone in a near-trance. It draws the tigers out of the woods, and they dance. It also draws out a group of native people, and among them is Jack Walser, bearded and donning bearskins. So overcome with excitement at the sight of him, Fevvers spreads her wings, with burst through her bearskin suit, rupturing its seams and exposing her naked torso, and attempts to fly to him, forgetting about her broken wing. She only makes it a few meters before her wing fails, and, thus interrupting the song, sends the tigers fleeing and the native people retreating back into the woods.
Analysis
Carter greets her readers with a major formal shift at the start of the novel's "Siberia" section: Sophie Fevvers' first-person narration. Though the novel flirts with the first-person perspective through tactics like long, uninterrupted quoted monologues by Fevvers in London and the use of free-indirect discourse in St. Petersburg, never does Carter completely cross the line into full first-person until the circus reaches Siberia. But the cross into first-person is fleeting and non-committal, as if Fevvers is skittish about sharing her direct consciousness, and several times the narrative switches back to the third-person limited, while at other times further expanding to an omniscient perspective. Fevvers revealing herself to be the figure closest to the source of the text has temporal implications for the novel; despite the fact that once we reach St. Petersburg, events unfold in the present tense, for Fevvers to be able to report with a sense of omniscience the journeys of other characters on completely separate paths from her own suggests that all of the events of the novel may have already come to pass.
On the other hand, we have already seen, at this point, that Nights at the Circus is a novel unabashedly steeped in magic and fantastical elements, especially with regard to the passage of time, which may discourage attempts to logically square Fevvers' omniscient-adjacent first-person perspective with the novel's present tense. A more fruitful analysis may be to track when, exactly, the narration switches perspectives and what subject or action may be the trigger of such a switch. The first time the narration switches from first-person back to third-person is when Lizzie acerbically confronts Fevvers about their unfortunate circumstances. Following Lizzie's dialogue, the narration continues, "Fevvers, thus pushed, could think of no reply." Fevvers picks up the narration in the middle of the page, after the third-person narration reports her crying. "How can I tell why I began to blubber away like that?" she says. "Who hasn't cried since Ma Nelson died" (200). The next time this switch happens is immediately prior to the train's disastrous derailing, as Fevvers trains her desirous eyes onto Walser as he enters the dining car; she resumes the narration a page later to report on her broken wing (204-205).
For the remainder of these chapters, when Fevvers is in or around a scene, the narration stays in the first person; when she is distant from a scene, or when Carter introduces a seperate, converging timeline, like the women's prison, the third-person omniscient resumes. This seemingly ambiguous shifting prompts the reader to ask, why is this happening here, specifically, at these points? Evidence suggests that Fevvers requires an audience for whom to perform; she is, after all, a performer. And she remarks, at the beginning of the "Siberia" section, on the unbearable barrenness of the region, and furthermore how this barrenness is particularly unbearable for her sensibilities. She says, "How do they live, here? How do they cope with it? Or aren't I the right one to pop the question, I'm basically out of sympathy with landscape, I get the shivers on Hampstead bloody Heath. As soon as I'm out of sight of the abodes of humanity, my heart gives way beneath me like rotten floorboards, my courage fails" (197).
Perhaps, then, we can interpret the gradual shift into the first-person as an abandonment of performance by Fevvers, as her audience for whom to perform dwindles with each passing catastrophe. On that same page, Fevvers comments on a remark Lizzie makes to her regarding her behavior around Walser: "Since he made himself known to us in Petersburg," says Lizzie to Fevvers, "you've been acting more and more like yourself" (197). And what is the formal embodiment of being like oneself, if not adopting the first-person perspective? Not to suggest that the first person isn't subject to artifice and performativity, but in the context of switching from third- to first-, the first-person perspective is undeniably more personal and authentic. Siberia's barrenness, providing virtually no atmosphere to play off of, coaxes this inclination to talk to herself, about herself, and from herself, out of Fevvers, and the instances at which Fevvers retreats back to the refuge of the third-person perspective mark moments where she is made to feel especially vulnerable either by reproach or romantic desire that she's unsure is reciprocated. These are moments when, as she says, her "courage fails."
Throughout Nights at the Circus, Carter suggests that to claim a narrative, to "seize it between one's teeth" (32), is, in fact, a radical act of courage, especially on the part of someone who for her entire life has had the legitimacy of her body, her conception, and her very existence called into constant question. Walking back to the tracks beside the escaped convict, Fevvers says, "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" (244). Fevvers' reality is of course heightened and made fantastical by virtue of her wings, but her challenges in the face of society's delegitimizing gaze map onto the challenges of women, wings or no, in a male-favoring, patriarchal society.
