Feminine freakishness: Carnivalesque bodies in Angela Carter’s nights at the circus

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.