Week Four: The New Weird

For this week we were asked to read the new weird genre. The story I selected to read for this week is Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter.

The novel focuses on the life and exploits of Sophie Fevvers, a woman who was, so she would have people believe, a hatched from an egg laid by unknown parents and ready to develop fully fledged wings. At the time of the story, she has become a celebrated aerialist, and she captivates the young journalist Jack Walser, who runs away with the circus and falls into a world that his journalistic exploits had not prepared him to encounter. This novel is separated into three different towns, London, Petersburg and Siberian.

In the London section of the novel it starts off with the American journalist Jack Walser interviewing Sophie Fevvers following a performance for the circus, which employs her. Fevvers claims to have been left as a baby in a basket on the doorstep of a brothel. Before she reached puberty she was a normal ordinary girl with a lump on each shoulder. When she hit puberty she sprouted complete wings. This stage of Fevvers' life comes to an abrupt end when Ma Nelson, the madam of the brothel, slips in the street and falls into the path of a carriage. The house and its contents is inherited by her brother who plans to convert it to a house for fallen women, but Ma Nelson's employees burn the place down and go their separate ways. Fevvers continues her story, she and Lizzie move in with Lizzie's sister and help run the family ice cream parlour. When the family falls on hard times Fevvers accepts an invitation from Madame Schreck. Madame Schreck puts Fevvers on display in her exclusive combination of freak show and brothel, along with several other women with unique appearances.

After some time Madame Schreck sells Fevvers to a customer, Christian Rosencreutz, who wishes to sacrifice a winged in order to procure his own immortality. Fevvers narrowly escapes and returns to Lizzie's sister's home. Soon after their reunion, she joins Colonel Kearney's circus as an aerialist and achieves enormous fame. The London section concludes with Walser telling his chief at the London office that he is going to follow Fevvers, joining the circus on its grand imperial tour.

            The Petersburg section begins as Walser, living in Clown Alley, types up his first impressions of the city. We learn that Walser approached Colonel Kearney who, taking advice from his fortune telling pig Sybil, offered him a position as a clown in the circus. Walser is introduced to the other members of the circus and Walser saves Mignon from being eaten by a tigress. The chief clown Buffo and his troupe invoke chaos at their dinner table. Walser ducks out of the meleé only to find Mignon waiting outside for him, as she has nowhere else to go after her husband and lover have both abandoned her. Not sure what to do with the abandoned woman, he takes her to Fevvers's hotel room. Fevvers assumes that Walser is sleeping with Mignon but, though jealous, takes care of the girl. On recognising the beauty of Mignon's singing voice Fevvers introduces her to the Princess of Abyssinia. The Princess, a silent tiger tamer, incorporates Mignon into her act with the dancing cats and Walser is recruited as partner to the redundant tigress. During rehearsals, the acrobatic Charivari family tries to kill Fevvers and the Colonel reluctantly kicks them out of the circus. Buffo the Great loses his mind during that night's performance and tries to kill Walser. The Princess has to shoot one of her tigresses when she becomes jealous of Mignon for dancing with her tiger mate during the tiger waltz. After her performance, Fevvers goes to a date at a mansion belonging to the Grand Duke. Here, she almost falls victim to his amorous advances but narrowly escapes into a Fabergé egg, reaching the circus train as it is about to pull out of the station.

The Siberian section opens with the entire circus crossing the continent to Asia. The train is attacked by a band of runaway outlaws who think that Fevvers can help them make contact with the Tsar, who will then allow them to return home to their villages. As the train is now destroyed, the entire circus, other than Walser, is marched to the convicts' encampment; Walser is rescued by a group of escaped murderesses and their former guards, who have become their lovers and helped them to escape. As Walser has amnesia, the band of women leaves him for an approaching rescue party but he flees into the woods before they reach him and is taken under the wing of a village shaman. Fevvers and the rest of the party are being held captive by the convicts. Fevvers tells the convict leader that she cannot help them as everything that they have heard about her is a lie. Depressed, the convicts sink into drunken mourning. Lizzie convinces the clowns to put on a show for the convicts, during which a blizzard comes, blowing the clowns and the convicts away with it into the night. The remnants of the circus begin to walk in the direction in which they hope civilization lies. They come across a run-down music school and take shelter with its owner, the Maestro. A brief encounter with Walser, now thoroughly part of the shaman's village, convinces Fevvers and Lizzie to leave the safety of the Maestro's school to search for Walser. Colonel Kearney leaves the group to continue his quest for civilization so as to build another, and more successful, circus. Mignon, the Princess and Samson remain with the Maestro at his music school. Fevvers finds Walser and the story ends with them together at the moment that the new century dawns.

Overall I found this reading to be really interesting and unique. I can see why this novel is in the category of the new weird. I feel that this mall is a mixture of a couple different genres like fantasy, sci-fi, and mystical. One reason why I find this novel to be weird, which is how different interesting it is two other books and novels that I’ve read. Also there is some a sort of random feeling to it and also with the use of the circus world gives this weird mystical reality to the novel.

Some themes that I think the novel touches on is Time, Postmodernism, Post-feminism, Feminism, Magical Realism, Order v. Chaos, Individualism, Appearance v. Reality and Class and wealth. One example the concept of time is hazy throughout this novel, beginning when Walser finds himself transfixed by Fevvers' narrative and hears the clock striking midnight three times within one night. This blurred sense of time represents the difference between narrative time and story time. Fevvers' hold on Walser reveals the true power of narrative and its influence on an audience. Initially, it is through her narrative that Fevvers wields power over Walser. Fevvers and Lizzie reveal in the Envoi, they had previously tricked Walser and purposefully played with his perception of time using Ma Nelson's clock. During their narratives, they support an illusion of time coming to a standstill but only retain control in this magical or illusory sense.