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With extravagant playfulness, Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus (1984) weaves together elements of the carnivalesque and fantastic with those of harsh material realism as vehicles for feminist aims. Set in 1899, Nights at the Circus purports to usher in the twentieth century. Carter's depiction of the past is strikingly familiar, however, which suggests that the present is effectively her target and that 1899 and the 1980s are not worlds apart. The novel is set not only in the past but also in places that are out of the ordinary--a whorehouse, a museum for women monsters, a circus, and Siberia--which enables Carter to engage in flights of imagination that do not directly contradict the immediate context of the contemporary reader.
The feminism of Nights at the Circus is complex in that it brings together more than one strand of feminism, an engaged Marxist feminism and a subversive utopian feminism.(1) Lizzie and her adopted daughter Fevvers serve, respectively, as mouthpieces for each of these two feminisms, although there is an overlap as the two characters influence each other. The novel's omniscient narrative voice strives to conjoin these two strands of feminism in order to posit a feminism that would be liberating while retaining a socio historical grounding--a feminism that would free human beings from the hierarchical relations in which Western culture, with its binary logic, has entrapped them, without becoming disengaged from the material situation. In order to both analyze the status of women and of existing relationships between women and men within Western culture and, more radically, propose possible avenues for change, Carter pits a Marxist feminist realism against postmodern forms of tall tales or autobiographies, inverted norms, carnivalization, and fantasy. While disruptive strategies usually associated with postmodernism pervade Nights at the Circus, it uses these strategies specifically to strengthen and further its feminist aims. Even as she appropriates extraordinary and fantastic elements, Carter retains certain conventions of realism and a firm connection to the historical material situation as means of securing her novel's feminist political edge and ensuring that her novel remains accessible to most readers.(2)
To accomplish its aims, the novel engages and attempts to resolve the tensions that have characterized the uneasy relationship between Marxist feminism and postmodernism. Marxist feminism has generally...