Towards the end of my previous article about the glowing, gaudy and decidedly bloody brilliance of Nights at the Circus, I made a passing reference to “serious and strong” issues. My contention was that the book whacks you in the face with ideas you can’t ignore. Then I did my best to ignore them – for that week at least.
This was partly for artistic reasons. Nights at the Circus is first and foremost a very fine novel. It’s also a very enjoyable one. To talk about it solely in terms of feminism is to miss many of its other qualities. It strikes me as a general plea for life, for fun, for compassion and integrity.
Last week, I mentioned Carter’s description of the book as “psychedelic Dickens”, suggesting that her comment might refer to the novel’s realism. On reflection, I also wonder if she was thinking about Dickens’s morality. In some ways hers doesn’t feel so different from the great Victorian’s. Sophie Fevvers, with her larger-than-life decency and moral heroism, could be seen as an heir to Betsey Trotwood or Newman Noggs – even if she has rather more of an “acid edge”.
But none of that is to deny or diminish feminist readings of the book. Indeed, all of the above is intimately linked in with such readings – if you accept that feminism is a fundamental part of human decency. It’s even tempting to argue that the very existence of Nights at the Circus is a challenge to patriarchy. It’s a book that demands to be admired. Can you read this novel and not be a feminist? At least in so far as feminism includes the belief that women are just as able as men to do astounding and wonderful things? (Or, as Carter shows, better able.)
The forthright, eloquent and bloody-minded Fevvers is a two-fingered salute to a world where our leaders still feel it’s acceptable to make demands about the way women dress; where women are consistently paid less than men; and where rape and violence against women remain horrifyingly prevalent. And just as she is aware that her identity is a kind of performance – “acting like” herself – and often seems to exist above and outside her own story, so you could argue that Carter the novelist always has that extra awareness of her craft and the high-wire act she performs. She’s deliberately showing off. And that still feels important today.
But it feels especially political because Carter makes it so. I didn’t feel compelled to make similar statements about Beryl Bainbridge, Penelope Fitzgerald or many of the other superb female novelists who have featured in the reading group. Early on in Nights at the Circus we are told that Fevvers, when she first spreads her wings, will herald a “New Age in which no women will be bound down to the ground”. Early on, too, we see the gloriously over-the-top heroine feeling vulnerable – which prompted contributor MythicalMagpie to comment:
I obviously can’t speak for all female readers but as soon as the over-the-top personality that is Fevvers showed that hint of nervousness and distrust around Walser I got the sense of a woman hiding behind an assumed image for survival. That’s something most women know, if not personally then secondhand. Instant empathy.
The scene is set. From then on, there’s no avoiding the wider resonances of repeated images of cages and captivity, of escape and flight, of women who are beaten and abused, and who find their own kind of peace and love. And who have quite a few radical ideas:
It’s not the human ‘soul’ that must be forged on the anvil of history but the anvil that must be changed in order to change humanity. Then we might see, if not ‘perfection’, then something a little better or, not to raise too many false hopes, a little less bad.
There are hundreds of ideas about gender and identity, control, society and love. They are strewn about the book – as contributor Natasha Fatale put it – like Fevvers’ “makeup and underwear”.
NatashaFatale also said: “This book is way too good to be poked and tormented by analysis.” I understand the point of view. I also shy away from trying to dig too deep into those political ideas because everything in the book is so deliberately messy and multifaceted. It’s one thing to point out that this book has a lot to say; another to try to nail it down.
Some of these ideas were cleverly expressed by contributor RO42:
The debate about this novel’s feminist credentials seemed at first – to me – to be a sort of Judean People’s Front / People’s Front of Judea affair. Carter is undeniably a feminist and her novels are undeniably making a feminist point, I thought.
Then I thought about it from a different angle. This is a novel written by someone who very strongly holds political and social views, and a novel that reflects those views in its themes and story, but is it really a Political Novel in the didactic sense?
The idea I want to get across is that there’s a body of political genre fiction that very plainly states what’s wrong and what should be avoided and resisted. Nights at the Circus isn’t that, and isn’t interested in being that. It’s depicting a strange world and the women and men within it. It puts across without lecturing what the author believes about feminism.”
I didn’t feel like I was being lectured either. But by the time Fevvers was roaring through Siberia, harrumphing about characters trying to welcome her to the “brotherhood” of free men, and declaring with triumphant laughter that there’s “nothing like confidence”, it was hard to deny that there was a powerful message.
