Is she fact or fiction? : Blurring boundaries in Angela Carter’s ‘Nights at the Circus’
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published 07/10/2008
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SummaryIn Nights at the Circus, Angela Carter succeeds in creating a heroine so untraditional, so much larger than life in both physique and personality, that the topic of who Fevvers is and what she represents is discussed even more by critics than it is by the book’s other characters. The winged woman has been labeled a freak, a monster, a symbol of the New Woman of the 20th century, a gothic heroine, a victim and an anomaly by critics and characters alike. Considering that it is “the eyes” of her audience that tell Fevvers who she is, it is difficult to ascertain her true identity, and this is exactly Carter’s point (Carter 290). By creating a heroine who is a hybrid—a bird-woman, a masculine woman, a monster and a beauty all at once—Carter encourages readers, once they have given up on solving Fevvers’s puzzling identity, to simply accept her whoever she may be.
Table of Contents
- Introduction.
- Fevvers's wings, her large size and lack of refinement.
- Carter uses Fevvers and other characters on the margins of society to draw readers into their identities.
- Explosive actions orchestrated by Fevvers.
- An illusion of wings and a larger-than-life persona.
- Freaks must have some lofty purpose for existing for Walser as well as Foucault.
- Recognizing disability according to what Rosemarie Garland Thomson says.
- Examining how hegemonic ideology is subverted by Carter via Fevvers.
- The boundaries that have been crossed.
- The reconstructed Walser.
- Transformation of Walser and the reader.
- Conclusion.
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