Nights at the Circus

Nights at the Circus: summary

Check out the summary below of Nights at the Circus:

Set in 1899, the novel opens with the aerialiste Sophia Fevvers giving an interview to an American reporter called Jack Walser. After contracting yellow fever whilst travelling around the world reporting on war and disaster, he is taking a break from heavy topics to look at human interest angles.

Jack is invited into the aerialiste’s dressing room, where she tells him her life story. Sophia’s foster mother, Lizzie, interjects at points to add to the narrative. Sophia Fevvers makes the bold claim that she was hatched from an egg and has real, functioning wings.

She talks Jack through her early childhood in Ma Nelson’s brothel, after being left as a foundling in a box on the doorstep, nestled amongst straw and the smashed pieces of her shell. She also details her adolescence, which was marked by the unfurling of her wings and her perilous first flight.

Fevvers explains how, after Ma Nelson’s death, the brothel was inherited by her estranged brother and that the inhabitants burned it to the ground before leaving. Sophia and Lizzie go to stay with Lizzie’s family, where they experience a brief idyll helping in the family’s ice cream parlour.

Sadly, this happiness does not last as the family are plunged into poverty and illness. Desperate to help, Fevvers joins Madame Schreck’s Museum of Women Monsters. This is a type of brothel and place of voyeurism. The Madame is cruel and exploitative. Sophia works there alongside Fanny, who has an extra set of eyes for nipples, the Wonder, a woman with dwarfism who claims to have been fathered by a fairy, and several others. The Madame sells Fevvers to Mr Rosencreutz, who believes that she holds the power to youth and longevity. She manages to escape by jumping out of a window and flying to freedom.

Fig. 1 - The main character of Nights at the Circus is Fevvers, a woman who claims to have been born with wings.

Fevvers concludes her tale by explaining how she met the circus owner, Colonel Kearney, and became a professional aerialiste. Against his better judgement, Jack finds himself toying with the possibility that Fevvers may be telling the truth and that the safest place for a winged woman would be in the circus, where she could pretend to be a fake pretending to be real. Enthralled by Fevvers, the reporter persuades his boss to let him join the circus to report on it incognito. The circus’ next tour route is through Russia, where they will perform for the Tsar before finishing in Japan.

Jack Walser’s path crosses Fevver’s again after he rescues Mignon from a tiger attack. Just before the troop set off for Siberia, Sophia narrowly escapes from the clutches of a sinister Grand Duke, whom she decided to visit alone against Lizzie’s advice. Whilst travelling by train through rural Siberia, a group of bandits deliberately derail the train. All of the circus performers are led away by the bandits, except for Jack. Believing tabloid gossip that Fevvers was engaged to the Prince of Wales, they had hoped that she would be their emissary to the Queen of England.

The escaped inmates and equally oppressed former gaolers of a cruel institution for female murderers come across the train wreck. One briefly feeds Jack, who is in a state of confusion and amnesia following a head injury, but they leave him. Finding himself alone, Jack leaves the train wreck and wanders through the frozen Siberian forest until he comes across a Shaman. Believing the babbling stranger to be another Shaman’s lost apprentice, he takes him under his wing and teaches him his traditions.

Jack assimilates well to life as the Shaman’s apprentice, learning fragments of his language and having drug-induced visions. His memory slowly returns in fragments. Fevvers and Jack are reunited, and she helps him to remember who he is.

They marry, against Lizzie’s advice, and whilst in bed together, Jack asks her why she tried to convince him that she was the world’s only fully feathered intacta. This leaves the readership questioning whether or not Sophia Fevvers truly was a winged woman at all. What was her deception? Her wings, her virginity, or both?

Nights at the Circus: characters

The main characters in Night at the Circus include Sophia Fevvers, Jack Walser, Lizzie, Mignon, and the Shaman.

Sophia Fevvers

Sophia is one of the key characters of this novel. Her surname, Fevvers, is a reference to the smattering of soft, downy feathers she claims were present on her back as an infant. Throughout the novel, she claims to be the world’s only fully-feathered virgin. However, the truth of this is called into question at the very end. Her physical appearance is a key focus of the novel: she is tall, voluptuous, and glamorous with peroxide blonde hair and bold grease paint for her performances as an aerialiste. She dyes her wings a flamingo pink and has a hunchbacked appearance when they are concealed. She is interchangeably vulgar and eloquently spoken.

Jack Walser

Jack Walser is a well-travelled American reporter. He is a brave man who does the right thing when the situation calls for it, such as rescuing Mignon from a raging tiger and sending the stowaway child Ivan back to his grandmother. For most of his life, Jack experiences an emotional detachment from that very life. His experiences with the Shaman and his reunion with Sophia help him to start to live in the present. He finds love and happiness in his marriage to Sophia.

Lizzie

Lizzie is a former sex worker and an ardent feminist. She was not a successful sex worker due to her habit of talking about politics with her clients, so she became the brothel’s housekeeper. Lizzie is of Italian descent and speaks with a distinctive blended Italian-London accent. She has a close relationship with her family. Her own baby died shortly before Sophia was found on the brothel’s doorstep, so she was able to breastfeed her. The other women take on motherly roles towards Sophia, but Lizzie is her main caretaker. When Sophia becomes an aerialiste for a circus, she travels with her, assisting and advising her.

Mignon

Mignon survives a childhood and adolescence marked by abuse and tragedy. Her father murdered her mother after discovering evidence of her infidelity. He then drowned in a shallow pond whilst searching for the bread knife with which he had stabbed her. Mignon runs away from the orphanage to which she is sent, leaving her sister behind. She lives on the street, begging and stealing with a band of other homeless children, before being discovered by a con artist, Herr M, who exploits her sexually and financially.

Her next relationship, the marriage to the circus’s Ape-man, is physically abusive. The Ape-man murders her only friend. She is rescued by Jack after a tiger charged her and rejected by her husband, who believes her to have been having an affair with him.

Free from her abusive marriage, she grows in confidence, becoming a talented singer and dancer who performs alongside the Princess. The Princess is a piano-playing tiger-keeper with whom she falls in love.

The Shaman

The Shaman takes Jack Walser on as an apprentice. He is a kind man and begins to develop a father-son bond with him. Although he employs certain illusions to keep the local community assured of his powers, such as sleight of hand and voice throwing, he is no con artist. He believes these illusions are necessary to convince the community he serves of the truth of his diagnosis, such as malevolent spirits causing diarrhoea because they cannot see the spirit world. The Shaman is concerned that the traditions of his community, and his place in it, may be eroded by the increasing influences of outside societies.

Nights at the Circus: themes

The important themes in Nights at the Circus include love and relationships, and truth and deception.

Love and relationships

This novel focuses on the absence or presence of love in different types of relationships. The reader is presented with many nurturing relationships. Some of these blends the bonds between mentor and mentee and parent and child. Another key focus is the absence of love and the presence of abuse in many relationships. Finally, there are also romantic relationships that bring love and fulfilment.

Truth and deception

This theme runs throughout the novel, from bold claims to tricks and sleights of hand.

Nights at the Circus: genre

Like many of Angela Carter’s other stories, Nights at the Circus (1984) belongs to the genre of magic realism. It is set within the realistic and familiar settings of London and Russia. Within this believable setting are characters with magical features and abilities. These include not just human characters, such as the employees at the Museum of Woman Monsters, but a chimp (The Professor) and a pig (Sybil). These animals possess the intelligence of humans. The Professor negotiates pay through writing, and Sybil makes key business decisions for the Circus.

Feminist critique runs throughout the narrative, covering topics such as the male gaze, abuse and exploitation, truth and deception, and justice.

Key characteristics of magic realism in Nights at the Circus

• Realistic setting: it is vital that the setting is believable. The realistic nature of the setting has the function of helping the reader to suspend their disbelief and embrace the magical and fantastical elements of the story.
• Use of magic: this can take many forms, such as characters with magical abilities or magical creatures.
• Social commentary or critique: a hallmark of this genre is the critique of society. This could be aimed at a particular social class, a political movement, or a source of oppression.

Quotes from Nights at the Circus

Consider how Sophia subverts the Madonna-Whore complex in the quote below. Rather than being defined as one or the other, she is viewed paradoxically as both.

Sophia learns about the male gaze during her childhood in the brothel, where she dresses up as Cupid and serves as a mascot.

The novel is set in 1899, and Sophia is optimistic that the new century holds the promise of equality in romantic relationships between the sexes.

At its heart, Nights at the Circus is a story about the power of performance to shape our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. Fevvers, with her wings and her larger-than-life personality, is the perfect embodiment of this idea. She uses her performance to challenge traditional ideas about femininity and masculinity and to carve out a space for herself in a world that is often hostile to those who do not conform to societal norms.