Feminism, Marriage, and Women’s Liberation
An obvious concern of Carter’s in Nights at the Circus is female empowerment and women’s liberation. Though the novel has been critically labeled “postfeminist” due to its resistance to representing gender binaries, Carter’s characters are in constant conversation about how patriarchal structures and institutions, like marriage, parliament, and the Catholic Church, work to keep women in “gilded cages.” The recurring image of the gilded cage symbolizes that which appears luxurious, beautiful, and perhaps even “comfortable,” but remains, after all, a cage. The gilded cage is particularly mappable onto the institution of heterosexual marriage from a woman’s perspective, even more so at the time about which Carter is writing, at the turn of the 20th century. It is no coincidence that the protagonist and sometimes-narrator of the novel is half-bird, half-woman: birds being, in the human imagination, particularly susceptible to being kept in cages as pets, rather than as “prisoners,” necessarily.
At the start of Chapter Two, just as Walser’s interview is getting underway, he remarks that he’s “known some pretty decent whores, some damn’ fine women, indeed, whom any man might have been proud to marry,” and Lizzie responds, “Marriage? Pah! … Out of the frying pan into the fire! What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? No different! D’you think a decent whore’d be proud to marry you, young man? Eh?” (21). Lizzie remains the primary lobbyist against marriage throughout the novel, while Ma Nelson, in what little we hear of her reported dialogue, explicates Lizzie’s wings as a symbol of women’s liberation. When her wings spread in the brothel for the first time, Nelson weeps, and 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).
Toward the very end of the novel, as Lizzie and Fevvers make their way toward the village where Walser is staying, Lizzie tries to convince Fevvers that she’s reaching a crossroads with her love for this young man. Lizzie believes that Fevvers approaches mutually exclusive choices: to be married to Walser, or to retain her independence. “And when you do find the young American, what the ‘ell will you do, then? Don’t you know the customary endings of the old comedies of separated lovers, misfortune overcome, adventures among outlaws and savage tribes? True lovers’ reunions always end in marriage” (280). The word “marriage” stops Fevvers in her tracks.
At the mention of marriage, Fevvers leads with denial. Fevvers expresses that surely she can’t be expected to give up the essence of her being, her “me-ness,” as she calls it. She then suggests that there would be no churches or courts out in Siberia to marry them, and Lizzie assures her, “the harder the bargain men must strike with nature to survive, the more rules they’re likely to have amongst themselves to keep them all in order. They’ll have churches, here; and vicars, too, even if the vicars have weird cassocks and perform outrageous ceremonies” (281).
Fevvers goes on, against Lizzie’s skepticism, to say that she’ll make Walser into the New Man to suit her New Woman as they march forth into the New Century, but Lizzie remains unmoved, and the novel ends in a place of ambiguity as to whether marriage and women’s liberation can ever truly be squared.
Deception and Confidence Games
The theme of deception and confidence games lies at the very heart of Nights at the Circus, given that the burning question remains the same quite literally from start to finish: “Is she fact or is she fiction?”—she, being Fevvers. The whole of Part 1 consists of Walser conducting an interview with Fevvers, his intention being to sleuth out whether or not she, meaning her wings, is a hoax. Fevvers and Lizzie then seize the narrative, spinning a long-winded, circuitous network of stories that retell Fevvers’ upbringing; this gesture of overwhelming Walser, and by extension, Carter’s readers, can be seen as a sort of narrative sleight-of-hand. While Fevvers is telling all of these outrageous stories, corroborating here and there with a scrap of allegedly “oracular” evidence, like a scar for which she could just as easily have invented the context, or a handwritten letter she claims was written by Toussaint, for example—one easily loses sight of the original object of their skepticism: her wings.
Fevvers convincingly inverts this narrative of skepticism, though, presenting herself as a resilient and nonplussed victim of the world’s scrutiny. “Look, love,” she tells the outlaw in Siberia, “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” (244). She openly discusses how people think she’s a scam, and this openness belies any sense of deceitfulness.
Then, during the novel’s Envoi, at the very end, Fevvers admits to “playing tricks” on Walser, for example manipulating Big Ben during their interview to make it seem like they were stuck at a perpetually recurring midnight, but then says, “…as to questions of whether I am fact or fiction, you must answer that for yourself!” (292). When Walser asks why she tried to convince him she was a virgin, Fevvers utters the novel’s final line, “To think I really fooled you! … It just goes to show there’s nothing like confidence” (295).
But beyond Fevvers' character, this theme of con artists and confidence games absolutely pervades the novel and feeds into questions of exploitation, particularly when it comes to taking advantage of people’s religious beliefs for financial gain, or using religion to justify bad behavior. There’s Herr M., who uses Mignon and his status as a religious leader in the community to scam bereaved families. The phrenologist, a practitioner of a pseudoscience used to justify racism and white supremacy, helps the countess select ideal candidates for her prison. And the shaman who takes Walser under his wing teaches Walser that the three key practices of a shaman are prestidigitation or sleight-of-hand, ventriloquism, and perfecting a look of preternatural solemnity. Carter writes that the shaman isn’t even engaging in deception, necessarily, because he is the most ardent believer in himself. Carter writes, “[the shaman’s] was the supreme form of the confidence trick—others had confidence in him because of his own utter confidence in his own integrity” (263).
At every turn, readers of Nights at the Circus encounter deception, even in cases where the deceiver and deceived are one in the same person. Ultimately, the reader is left to figure out when they are the one deceived, and what might be the function and nature of that deception perpetrated by Carter’s crafty imagination.
Materialism
As Fevvers reflects on her close brush with eternal imprisonment by the Grand Duke, she thinks to herself, “Sometimes the lengths to which I’ll go for money appall me” (198). This moment, deep (almost a full two-thirds) into the novel, is the first time Fevvers consciously acknowledges her own wealth obsession, but her materialism is a persistent source of tension between her and Lizzie throughout the novel, and is at odds with certain political and philosophical alignments suggested of Lizzie. While Lizzie’s politics are never explicitly identified with any particular revolutionary movement, her secret communications from Russia with attachés in England, in light of her rhetoric throughout, suggests that she advocates for workers’ and peasants' rights. Given the year the novel takes place, Lizzie may be involved in organizing the First Russian Revolution in 1905. Lizzie doesn’t care for glitz and glamour; she accompanies her foster-daughter through the intoxicating world of celebrityhood and five-star hotels, but the luxury doesn’t change who she is.
Her foster-daughter, on the other hand, is obsessed with diamonds, gold, and other displays of wealth. Money is a form of empowerment, and Fevvers, coming from a background of poverty, where for most of her life her decisions were informed by extreme need, feels empowered by her newfound wealth and fame. However, her dependence on material wealth proves, overall, to be dangerous and detrimental to her empowerment. For instance, the Grand Duke is able to lure her into a dangerous situation with the promise of a diamond bracelet, and even in the clutches of danger and violence, the Fabergé eggs still manage to entrance Fevvers. The image of the “gilded cage” also applies to the figurative prison of materialism, where one is hemmed in by dependence on luxury, and is thus susceptible to the whims and pitfalls of wealth and poverty.
Storytelling and Perspective
Arguably the most prominent formal quality of Nights at the Circus is its ambiguous narrative perspective. Carter’s ingenious arrangement of the characters, and the characters’ relations to one another, in Part 1, sets the stage for their persistent vying for narrative control in the eyes of her reader. Which is to say, the reader can never be certain who is the primary storyteller of Nights at the Circus until we reach Siberia. Carter accomplishes this through a combination of narrative circumstances—i.e., Walser happens to be a journalist, and not only that, but he happens to be writing a profile on Sophie Fevvers. Part 1 consists almost entirely of an interview of Fevvers and Lizzie, the overwhelming majority of which is direct dialogue from Fevvers. The staging suggests that her account is actually being written in Walser’s notebook, which poses Walser as somewhat of a scribe, or, as Fevvers later suggests, potentially “the amanuensis of all those 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” (285).
With Walser thus posed as a reporter of the story, it may seem like he is an obvious candidate to be the closest mind to the sometimes-omniscient, sometimes-close-third narrator. However, at different points in the novel, through more narrative sleights-of-hand, Carter shows how even Walser's journalistic duties are usurped by Lizzie and Fevvers. When Walser loses the ability to type after the tigress attack, Lizzie asks if she can send pages to his editor. Walser consents without even reading them; that is the extreme extent to which he divests himself of narrative control in St. Petersburg. By the time the Circus reaches Siberia, Fevvers' first-person interludes make it clear that she and Lizzie have been in control the entire time, and this sense of control presents a significant conflict of interest: when the primary question of the novel is, “Is she fact or is she fiction,” and the person in question is also the person presenting every bit of information the reader encounters, there is a case to be made that the reader is being manipulated, almost hypnotized, into taking for granted that Fevvers is an actual winged woman. The presence of pseudoscience and scams leave the genre open to interpretation as well—is this magical realism, or is this simply realism being manipulated by a narrator who is a skilled con artist? The reader is asked to make that determination, along with Walser, in the Envoi.
Marginalization, Dispossession, and Abandonment
As Michiko Kakutani wrote for The New York Times at the time of publication of Nights at the Circus, one of the morals of the novel is “how women are used and abused by men, and how their imaginative and intuitive gifts are debased by the rationalist, male world.” She continues, “the women in ‘Nights at the Circus’ are all victims—as an unusually gifted female, Fevvers, especially, is treated as a freak—whereas the men emerge as either sex fiends or unfeeling dopes.” While this is true from a certain perspective, Carter also demonstrates how men’s propensity for “sex fiendishness” and “unfeeling dopiness” infects society on a grand scale and obstructs equity. For example, Christian Rosencreutz, the Rosicrucian occultist who tries to sacrifice Fevvers in order to attain immortality, is also a legislator in the British Parliament. Fevvers says of him, “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).
And just as they’re denied a voice in government, Carter shows how women are denied property at the hands of men who believe they know what is best for them. When Ma Nelson dies suddenly, because she never established a will, her brothel goes to her puritanical brother instead of to the women who lived there. The brother then immediately evicts them so he can turn the place into a halfway house for “fallen girls” (44).
Nights at the Circus is full of orphaned women with ambiguous origins. Fevvers, for one, was left on the stoop of the brothel for Lizzie to find and nurse. Then there’s Mignon, orphaned after her father killed her mother and then died while disposing of the evidence of his crime. The Wiltshire Wonder’s mother sold her to a baker for fifty guineas. And the list goes on. Carter shows women being treated like chattel: to be bought, sold, and thrown away, marginalized by the patriarchal structures that shape the society in which they live.
Performance
Of course, in a novel about the circus, we expect performance to figure as a prominent theme. Performance is connected to the themes of deception and perspective. Performance is one way that people present themselves to the world, and when that presentation misaligns with some deeper truth or intention, their performance may be regarded as a form of deception. And the ways in which the private perspective of the performer—to which the reader is sometimes granted privileged access—contradict their public performance also informs the way the reader interprets the performer's behavior. An example of this tension occurs during Buffo’s breakdown, when he hallucinates during the final performance in Petersburg and tries to kill Walser with a carving knife.
Carter describes the dissonance between the crowd’s perception of Buffo’s breakdown (which they think is part of the performance) and the performers' perspective of the breakdown. There’s also the second-order dissonance between the performers’ performance of joy and glee and their private sorrow at watching their friend and leader go insane before their eyes. Carter writes, “as the crowd held its aching sides and mopped its eyes, Samson the Strong Man hauled prone, soaked, semi-conscious, fearfully hallucinating Buffo off up the gangway that led to the foyer as little children gave him one last tittering poke for luck before he vanished as from the face of the earth, while the clowns ran round and round the tiers of seats, kissing babies, distributing bonbons and laughing, laughing, laughing to hide their broken hearts” (178).
Before Buffo’s downfall, he offers frequent tutorials during communal meals of his personal philosophy of clowning, and, by extension, performance in the circus. “Under these impenetrable disguises of wet white, you might find, were you to look, the features of those who were once proud to be visible.” He continues to say that the clown's disguise “invites the laughter that would otherwise come unbidden” (119). Buffo proposes a theory that performance is a type of protection, an armor against the hostilities of the world. Though she’s not a clown, this analysis applies to Fevvers, too, whose persona as a winged woman and larger-than-life aerialist has lifted her and her loved ones out of constant poverty; this persona also allows her to “fly away” from the conflict and oppression with which she’s faced.
Time, Aging, and Mortality
Ma Nelson’s clock, which purportedly has magical qualities that allow Lizzie and Fevvers to manipulate time, is destroyed in the train wreck in Siberia. Also lost in the wreckage is Lizzie's handbag, which contains unnamed substances that allow her to help Fevvers maintain her youthful appearance. Of course, these substances could be as simple as bleach, dye, and skincare supplements, but the ambiguous way in which Carter very pointedly regards these substances as having magical properties emphasizes the toxic, socially reinforced manner in which a woman’s appearance and age affects her ability to participate in society and maintain her independence.
The destruction of Ma Nelson’s clock seems to speed up the previously halted or significantly slowed process of aging for Fevvers, and she ruminates on this in Siberia. “The Cockney Venus! she thought bitterly. Now she looks more like one of the ruins that Cromwell knocked about a bit. Helen, formerly of the High-wire, now permanently grounded” (273). As Colonel Kearney makes his rounds in a last-ditch effort to keep any of his performers before he leaves Siberia with his new Business Manager, he regards newly-aged Fevvers as “a cheap fraud.” Carter writes, “freed from the confines of her corset, her once-startling shape sagged, as if the sand were seeping out of the hour-glass and that was why time, in these parts, could not control itself” (276-277). Kearney’s almost unconscious disdain for the natural process of aging as it occurs to his female star demonstrates the disproportionate importance of youth and beauty when it comes to female performers' marketability.
