Feminine Freakishness: Carnivalesque Bodies in Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus (Critical Essay‪)‬

[1] Angela Carter described herself as being in the "demythologising business" ("Notes", 38) and in her 1984 novel Nights at the Circus Carter's interrogative scope is both broad and complex. The winged aerialiste Fevvers and the rag-bag of circus freaks with whom she journeys evoke the Rabelaisian carnivalesque that Bakhtin cites as a powerful challenge to the spatial, temporal, and linguistic fixities of the medieval world. The transformative and regenerative potential of Rabelais' grotesque is evident in Nights' temporal setting, which foregrounds the possibilities of birth through death. Set at the "fag end" of the nineteenth century (19), the characters are witness to history on the cusp as "[t]he old dying world gives birth to the new one" (Bakhtin, 435). Here Carter has shifted the point of historical regeneration from Rabelais' subversion of the Neo-Platonic medieval cosmology to, rather hopefully, symbolize the demise or at least the derailment of the Age of Reason, industrial progress, Imperialism, and their respective ideologies of misogyny. For Fevvers and Walser the excess of the carnivalesque prompts a crisis of subjectivity that signals both the redundancy of restrictive ideologies of demarcation and hierarchy, but also the playful possibilities of corporeal fluidity and referential relativism. [2] In emphasising Fevvers' and Walser's "crises" of subjectivity this paper takes Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque rebirth as a means of reading Fevvers' corporeal excess and the ambivalence of her performativity as a destabilisation of the assumed causality between corporeality and ontology. The hegemonic discourses that are so reliant on ontological stability are unsettled one by one in the novel as Fevvers, the New Woman in (and with) the wings, "hatches" a plan, a new future, and indeed a New Man. Walser's symbolic "rebirth" sees him abandon his "grounded", objective and misogynistic narrative voice to become Fevvers' masochistic lover and the New Man for the New Century. This essay argues that the theoretical conflux of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque and Butler's performativity foregrounds the eroto-political possibilities of the flesh as well as the counter-hegemonic ambiguities that might be rendered in corporeal performativity. Reading Nights through this lens opens a textual space for the destabilisation of cultural norms regarding the binary anatomical imperative and its associated discourses of rationalism, objectification and sexualised commodification.