Nights at the Circus

Portrayal of females, fairy tale, high-low factors, fantasy/reality, unconventional sentences that confuse the reader, complicated vocabulary

After Crash and Money I was surprised at the tame attitude of Angela Carter's Night at the Circus; I was expecting something much ruder. After contemplation the transgressive tendencies of the novel become apparent but they aren't like those of Amis and Ballard. Carter's blending of genres and fictional realities and use of unconventional sentence structures (with an academic vocabulary) push her into this new authorial category in a surprisingly subtle way. There are folk story qualities to her writing with the blatant foreshadowing (the mysteriously intellectual chimps, Fevver's eyes, and the midnight clock) and grimy glamour but her use of almost incorrect syntax is delicately arresting.

To tackle the syntax: Nights could easily be read for its entertainment factor without any thought to literary hierarchy but Carter's purposefully choppy or repetitive sentences prod reconsideration of author intention. There are a lot of commas in this book. "Her geniality evaporated; she squinted at him beneath her thick pale lashes with almost hostility, seemed ill-at-ease, reached out to toy with her bunch of violets in a bored fashion" (page 43). There is something slightly off-putting about this sentence; why are there no "ands"? Also, for someone who grew up in a Cockney brothel, why is Fevver's vocabulary so advanced? How does she know what a "Manichean version of neo-Platonic Rosicrucianism" is?

The narrator's vocabulary is interesting for its obscure items: "steatopygous" is on the first page. How can a clock have a "prolegomena" (page 89)? Not unlike Money in this way, Carter makes sure her reader is aware that her characters are abnormal in ways beyond their physical characteristics. The repetitive use of the word "surely" coupled with Walser's doubts about Fevver's narrative enforce the reader's unease with the story's validity.

There is a feminist undercurrent masked by folk story traditions in the form of Madame Schreck's performers, Fevver's intense femininity, the sacrificial incident with Rosencreutz, and this quote said by Nelson: "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" (Page 25).