Nights at the Circus

Contents

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Angela Carter was born in 1940. She read English at Bristol University, and from 1976–8 was a fellow in Creative Writing at Sheffield University. She lived in Japan, the United States and Australia. Her first novel,
Shadow Dance
, was published in 1965, followed by
The Magic Toyshop
(1967, John Llewellyn Rhys Prize),
Several Perceptions
(1968, Somerset Maugham Award),
Heroes and Villains
(1969),
Love
(1971),
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
(1972),
The Passion of New Eve
(1977),
Nights at the Circus
(1984, James Tait Black Memorial Prize) and
Wise Children
(1991). Four collections of her short stories have been published:
Fireworks
(1974),
The Bloody Chamber
(1979, Cheltenham Festival of Literature Award),
Black Venus
(1985) and
American Ghosts and Old World Wonders
(1993). She was the author of
The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History
(1979), and two collections of journalism,
Nothing Sacred
(1982) and
Expletives Deleted
(1992). She died in February 1992.

Short Stories

The Virago Book of Fairy Tales
(editor)

The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales
(editor)

Wayward Girls and Wicked Women
(editor)

Novels

Non-fiction

Drama

Introduction

My first encounter with the lush, extravagant universe of Angela Carter’s fiction came in 1984, when I was just eighteen. This was the year that Carter collaborated with Neil Jordan to produce the film
The Company of Wolves.
Quite by chance, I caught a radio programme promoting the film, and discussing Carter’s collection of rewritten fairy tales,
The Bloody Chamber
, on which it was based. I’d had a taste for the Gothic since childhood. The idea of a book which seemed to mix Perrault and Grimm with Hammer Horror impressed me enormously. Carter’s name stuck in my mind and, on a trip to Cardiff soon after, I went into a bookshop and sought
The Bloody Chamber
out.

I was a bookish teenager and relatively well-read, but Carter’s writing was unlike anything I’d ever come across before: vivid, theatrical, full of dazzlingly rococo narrative swoops and a startling sexual bluntness. A few years later, studying
The Bloody Chamber
for a literature MA, I would appreciate more than ever the sophistications of Carter’s project, her engagement with the founding myths of Western culture, and with Freud and Lacan. But in the meantime, I simply read every bit of her writing I could lay my hands on.
The Passion of New Eve
and
Heroes and Villains
I discovered to be baroque apocalyptic fables, stories of sex-change, sorcery, the epic struggle between civilisation and chaos.
The Magic Toyshop
I read as a Gothic story of adolescent awakening, of pleasure and fear.
The Sadeian Woman
, a piece of cultural criticism, daringly recast the Marquis de Sade as a clear-sighted analyst of sexual relations, the feminist’s ‘unconscious ally’.

Nights at the Circus
was published in the autumn of 1984, as I was starting life as an English student, too poor to afford a hardback. I bought the novel when it came out in paperback the following year and begged the university bookshop to give me the poster that had been sent out as part of the publicity campaign; and I stuck it to my college bedroom wall, as I might have pinned up other iconic ’80s images – the film poster for
Betty Blue
, or stickers saying ‘
Coal Not Dole.
’

I had to wait until 1991 for Carter’s next novel, the rambunctious
Wise Children
; this time, a girlfriend bought me the hardback as a birthday present. I had no idea that this would be Carter’s last work. I did not know that she was already becoming ill. This was years before I ever thought of writing myself, and the literary world was a closed and very distant one. I was familiar with a much-reproduced image of her, which showed an appealing-looking, handsome woman with strikingly high cheekbones and white hair, but I had never seen her speak or read from her work. Then, on a Sunday evening in the February of 1992, a friend rang me up to say that he had just heard on the radio that Angela Carter had died of lung cancer. We were both floored by the news – both, absurdly, as upset as if we’d known Carter personally; and both, with the sorrow of passionate readers, devastated at the loss of such a glorious literary talent.

Our reaction was, I suspect, far from unique. Carter’s literary reputation had been relatively slow to build; there had been a surge of popular interest in her work, at exactly the time I’d first heard of her, as a result of the release of Jordan’s film; but her audience, after that, remained a fiercely devoted one. And her writing had a particular resonance, I think, for women readers. Her theatrical, fabular style has much in common with that of the other great magic realists, Salman Rushdie and Gabriel Garcia Marquez; but she wrote, always, with a distinctly feminist agenda, determined to debunk cultural fantasies around sexuality, gender and class. She helped stimulate an excitement about feminist writing and feminist publishing (she was hugely supportive, for example, of the founding of the women’s publishing house Virago Press, in 1979), and many of her literary preoccupations – the challenging of the canon, the rewriting of fairy tale and myth, the imagining of female utopias and dystopias – lie at the heart of much feminist writing and thought from the 1970s and ’80s. But few other writers, female or male, had her imagination, her literary audacity, her confidence with language and idea. Few had her power to unsettle as well as to inspire and console.

Nights at the Circus
is her masterpiece; it’s also the most engaging and accessible of her fictions. Her earliest novels tend towards the stylised;
Nights
, by contrast, is a sprawling, garrulous book, a picaresque story of Rabelaisian proportions, with a suitably larger-than-life heroine: Fevvers, the winged Victorian ‘Cockney Venus’, six feet two in her stockings, with a voice like clanging dustbin lids and a face as ‘broad and oval as a meat dish’. Fevvers’s extraordinary life-story – given in the form of an interview to a sceptical American journalist, Jack Walser, backstage at the Alhambra Music Hall – makes up the novel’s substantial Part One. After that, still in pursuit of his story, Walser signs up alongside Fevvers as a clown, and Parts Two and Three transport us, unexpectedly, to Imperial Russia; first to the barely controlled mayhem of the St Petersburg Circus and then to the dizzying white wastes of Siberia. As the landscape grows more extreme, so Carter pushes at the limits of the novel form itself. The cosy realist start expands, via fantasy and allegory, to open up a space for radical change. By the end of the book, personalities will have been reformed, social and gender dynamics rewritten, by – a wonderful phrase, which beautifully sums up Carter’s style and literary ethos – ‘the radiant shadow of the implausible’.

For Carter was, among many things, a fabulous storyteller, a professional liar, always revelling in narrative and its rude, primal pull.
Nights at the Circus
is full of stories, its basic structure regularly opening out to offer us the potted biographies of minor characters. There are Ma Nelson’s prostitutes, for example, who first discover Fevvers, newly hatched and abandoned, in a basket on the doorstep of their Whitechapel brothel. There are the inhabitants of the Museum of Women Monsters – Fanny Four-Eyes, the Wiltshire Wonder, and others – with whom Fevvers briefly throws in her fortunes once the brothel is disbanded. There are the artistes of the Imperial Circus: Mignon, the Ape-Man’s abused missus; the tiger-taming Abyssinian Princess; and Buffo the Clown, who loses his wits mid-performance and is carted off to an asylum – much to the delight of the unsuspecting crowd, for whom it’s all part of the craziness of the ring. These characters’ stories erupt like fantastic blossoms out of the already gaudy foliage of Carter’s narrative, pushing it in wild, surprising directions but never throwing it off balance or weighing it down.

The novel treads a similarly agile path between realism and fantasy. Its historical setting, for example, is a very specific and meaningful one – the action takes place at the ‘fag-end’ of the 1890s, and Fevvers is utterly a woman of her time, a woman who’s been painted by Lautrec, had supper with Willy and Colette, troubled the psychoanalysts of Vienna, and been courted by the Prince of Wales. The outrageous name-dropping becomes more sly and more exuberant as the novel proceeds. Carter’s pen trips with wonderful breeziness through the Western literary canon, offering us echoes of Goethe, Shakespeare, Poe, Swift, Baudelaire, Mozart and Blake; but giving nods, too, to Yeats, Laurel and Hardy, Foucault, and – ‘They’re a girl’s best friend,’ twinkles Fevvers at one point, displaying her diamond earrings – Anita Loos. As these flagrant anachronisms hint – and as Carter makes explicit once we reach the ‘Sleeping Beauty of a city’ that is
fin de siècle
St Petersburg, soon to be awakened by the ‘bloody kiss’ of revolution –
Nights at the Circus
does not belong to ‘authentic history’. It offers, instead, a kind of fantasy history, weaving its stories in and across the gaps, silences and pregnant shadows of recorded fact.

It’s a tribute to Carter’s skill as a novelist that her characters can inhabit this gloriously artificial universe and yet remain so emotionally compelling and physically convincing. Even Fevvers’s feathers convince us. Carter clearly gave them an awful lot of thought – ‘Really,’ she once said, in interview, ‘how very, very inconvenient it would be for a person to have real wings, just how really difficult’ – and I’ve always been tickled by the attention she gives to Fevvers’s aerodynamics, the detail into which Fevvers goes when explaining to Walser her awesome but inconvenient physique:

My legs don’t tally with the upper part of my body from the point of view of pure aesthetics, d’you see. Were I to be the true copy of Venus, one built on
my
scale ought to have legs like tree-trunks, sir; these flimsy little underpinnings of mine have more than once buckled up under the top-heavy distribution of weight upon my torso, have let me down with a bump and left me sprawling. I’m not tip-top where walking is concerned, sir, more
tip-up.

Fevvers is a wonderfully fleshly creation, a creature of sweats and appetites, of belches and farts. Her predicament – like that of many charismatic women (like Wedekind’s Lulu, for example, about whom Carter would write a stage play in 1987) – is that she is continually preyed upon by people seeking to turn her into a commodity or a symbol. She narrowly escapes being ritually sacrificed by the sinister Mr Rosencreutz, who sees her as ‘Flora; Azrael; Venus Pandemos!’. She is almost turned into a literal ‘bird in a gilded cage’ by a Russian Grand Duke. Just as Walser, ‘unfinished’ at the novel’s start, must be remade, reformed, via amnesia and cultural displacement, so Fevvers has to learn how to tell her own story, on her own terms: to become ‘No Venus, or Helen, or Angel of the Apocalypse, not Izrael or Isfahel’, but the agent of her own imagination and her own desire. For only then will she become a symbol really worth celebrating – a symbol of the new century which, significantly, is just breaking at the novel’s close, a century in which (with a bit of luck) ‘all the women will have wings’.