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Freak Show Femininities:Intersectional Spectacles InAngela Carter's Nights at theCircusErin Douglas aa Miami UniversityPublished online: 09 Jan 2014.

To cite this article: Erin Douglas (2014) Freak Show Femininities: IntersectionalSpectacles In Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus , Women's Studies: An inter-disciplinary journal, 43:1, 1-24, DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2014.852418

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Women’s Studies, 43:1–24, 2014Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 0049-7878 print / 1547-7045 onlineDOI: 10.1080/00497878.2014.852418

FREAK SHOW FEMININITIES: INTERSECTIONALSPECTACLES IN ANGELA CARTER’S NIGHTS AT THE CIRCUS

ERIN DOUGLAS

Miami University

Theorizing Spectacles of Femininity

Del LeGrace Volcano’s photograph, Kath Moonan, London 2006 ,situates femininity and feminine people within volumes ofqueer, lesbian, intersex, and transgender theories and histories(Figure 1). Bird la Bird,1 pictured in Kath Moonan, London 2006 ,rests her arms on copies of Joan Nestle’s The Persistent Desire andA Restricted Country, Judith Halberstam’s Female Masculinity, JudithButler’s Bodies that Matter , Anne Fausto-Sterling’s Sexing the Body,Leslie Feinberg’s Transliberation and Stone Butch Blues, Sally Munt’sButch/Femme: Inside Lesbian Gender , and so on—representativetexts that have and continue to shape how we think about non-normative genders and sexualities. Volcano’s photograph andBird la Bird’s performance make her and her queer femininitypart of the volumes of non-normative genders and sexualities thatsurround her. This photographic performance is reminiscent ofAngela Carter’s novel Nights at the Circus (Nights), a connectionwhich Bird la Bird herself notes in her narrative accompanimentto her photograph and in her renaming of herself as Bird la Bird(Dahl and Volcano 68, 70). Half-bird and half-woman, Fevvers(Nights’s main character) challenges human and bodily normsthat govern how people’s genders, sexualities, and nationalitiesare read, lived, and recognized. Fevvers says that “‘You mustn’tbelieve what you read in the papers!’” drawing attention to howshe rewrites and performs the narrative of the “New Woman” for

Address correspondence to Erin Douglas, Miami University, English, 229 RentschlerHall, Hamilton, OH 45011. E-mail: douglaej@miamioh.edu

1Kath Moonan refers to herself as Bird la Bird.

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FIGURE 1 Kath Moonan, London 2006 , from Femmes of Power: Exploding QueerFemininities, photographed by Del LeGrace Volcano (Dahl and Volcano 69)(Copyright granted by Del LeGrace Volcano, 2013) (color figure availableonline).

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Freak Show Femininities 3

the “New Century” (Carter, Nights 294). Creating new papers andnarratives, Fevvers inserts herself into the stacks upon stacks oftheories and histories of non-normative genders, sexualities, andnationalities.

Both Bird la Bird and Fevvers connect women with birds tochallenge how sometimes women are not read and/or treated ashuman and to queer femininity. Bird la Bird explains how shereclaims and queers the British term bird as a:

. . . . homage to one of my heroines, Angela Carter and to Fevvers in Nightsat the Circus. “Is she a woman or is she a monster?” “Is she fact or is shefiction?” . . . . I like using a non-human term, inspired by Donna Haraway,it’s about affinities between feathered and non-feathered birds and creat-ing loose alliances between those who wear lipstick and feathers and thosewho don’t. (quoted in Dahl and Volcano 68, 70)

Bird la Bird’s opting for a non-human term such as bird demon-strates how feminine people have become something other thanhuman. The reclaiming of the term bird offers us a space to com-plicate how we define and read bodies via conventional ideas offemininity and create bodies that are more than simply but alsoempowering representations of femininities. In British culture,historically the term bird implies that women are pretty ornamentsand/or animals that sing heteronormative ballads of romanceand naivety. Fevvers and Bird la Bird re-script and reclaim theterm bird, resisting heteronormative and imperial narratives offemininity. Fevvers challenges heteronormative romantic ideologyby pointing out the violence and misrepresentation in such nar-ratives. Bird la Bird specifically utilizes the term bird to critiqueideas of normalcy, arguing, “We are incubated in beauty salons andhatched in hairdressers!” (quoted in Dahl and Volcano 68, 70).2

Beauty, femininity, and normalcy are not natural; they are made bybeauty salons, hairdressers, and even by fictional, historical, andtheoretical narratives. Narratives of normal femininity have real

2Similarly, Rosmarie Garland-Thomson theorizes connections of beauty and normalcyas, “This flight from the nonconforming body translates into individual efforts to look nor-mal, neutral, unmarked, to not look disabled, queer, ugly, fat, ethnic, or raced. Beauty,then, dictates corporeal standards that create not distinction but utter conformity to abland look that is at the same time unachievable, so as to leash us to consumer practicesthat promise to deliver such sameness” (“Integrating Disability” 11–12).

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4 Erin Douglas

effects upon all people because they are crafted out of the per-petual violence of sexism, imperialism, racism, able body-ism, andheteronormativity.

Nights critiques how normative spectatorship objectifiesfreaks and simultaneously offers the freak show as a subversivespace. Fevvers’s freak shows re-imagine human definitions andbodies. Emphasizing how bodies deemed abnormal and freaky areread visually, conceptually, and textually as inhuman,3 freak showsrepresent how normativity works by excluding minority subjectsfrom human recognition. As Judith Butler argues, people who areculturally intelligible and defined as human have easier access toa “livable life” than those who are not (17).4

My reading of Carter’s Nights is informed by AnneMcClintock’s theory that historically categories of gender,race, nationality, sexuality, and class are made intersectionally.McClintock argues that it “is not simply about relations betweenblack and white people, men and women, but about how the cat-egories of whiteness and blackness, masculinity and femininity,labor and class came historically into being in the first place”(16). Fevvers, the Princess, and Mignon perform in The ImperialTour, a circus very similar to the exhibition of the freak show atcarnivals. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson details the history of thefreak show as a space where “[b]odies whose forms appeared to

3Robyn Wiegman asks, “What does it mean, for instance, that the visual apparatuses ofphotography, film, television, and video (as well as many offshoots of computer technolo-gies) serve as our primary public domain, our main shared context for the contestationsof contemporary cultural politics? And perhaps more important, what does it mean thatwithin these technologies, the body is figured as the primary locus of representation,mediation, and/or interpretation?” (Wiegman, American 3).

4Butler asserts that “What makes for a livable world is no idle question. It is not merelya question for philosophers. It is posed in various idioms all the time by people in variouswalks of life. If that makes them all philosophers, then that is a conclusion I am happyto embrace. It becomes a question for ethics, I think, not only when we ask the personalquestion, what makes my own life bearable, but when we ask from a position of power,and from the point of view of distributing justice, what makes, or ought to make, the livesof others bearable? Somewhere in the answer we find ourselves not only committed to acertain view of what life is, and what it should be, but also of what constitutes the human,the distinctively human life, and what does not. There is always a risk of anthropocentrismhere if one assumes that the distinctively human life is valuable—or most valuable—or isthe only way to think the problem of value. But perhaps to counter that tendency it isnecessary to ask both the question of life and the question of human, and not let themfully collapse into one another” (Butler, Undoing Gender 17).

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Freak Show Femininities 5

transgress rigid social categories such as race, gender, and person-hood were particularly good grist for the freak mill” (Freakery 12).Nights queers normative ideas of the freak show because the per-formers (in the Imperial Tour) draw attention to how audiencesdo not recognize them as human but rather as imperial prod-ucts and commodities.5 Freak show femininities in Nights forceus to analyze, challenge, and change ideas of normalcy and theimplications thereof.

Fevvers as half-woman and half-bird makes her living asspectacles6—as the Winged Victory, in the museum of womenmonsters, and in the Imperial Circus. Much has been writtenabout the novel and a gendered gaze since Fevvers stresses,“I served my apprenticeship in being looked at—at being theobject of the eye of the beholder” (Carter’s emphasis, Nights23). Fevvers emphasizes that she creates her own display andher, to utilize Laura Mulvey’s phrase, “to-be-looked-at-ness” (Mulvey’semphasis 39–40).7 Yet Fevvers experiences dangers of being the

5The characters in Nights display themselves as empowering freaky spectacles. Eli Clarereferences, the strength and resistance of performers in freak shows because Clare wantsto “ . . . . breathe their fierceness into me” (Clare 259).

6For more theories on the spectacle look to: Debord, Guy. “The Society of theSpectacle.” The Visual Culture Reader . Ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff. 2nd ed. London and New York:Routledge, 2006: 142–144.

7Laura Mulvey a theorist of the gaze suggests that “In a world ordered by sexualimbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female.The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styledaccordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked atand displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so thatthey can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Woman displayed as sexual object is theleitmotif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to strip-tease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley,she holds the look, and plays to and signifies male desire” (Mulvey’s emphasis 39–40).One must wonder if what Mulvey refers to is that femininity is defined as “passive,” ratherthan the “female” per se. The “role” that women are said to play in Mulvey’s theory isconnected to their gender performance and as Butler says bodies are gendered as well.Femininity is passive because of the “to-be-looked-at-ness”—to be the one doing the lookingis “active” and to be looked at is “passive” according to Mulvey. Mulvey’s “to-be-looked-at-ness”says that women are always looked at whereas men do the looking; therefore, women arepowerless and men have the power. According to Mulvey, men have the power to struc-ture the gaze—what is looked at, who is looked at, and how subjects are looked at. Fevversresignifies this “to-be-looked-at-ness” as “active” and disrupt the active/passive binary. UnlikeFreud and Mulvey, Mary Ann Doane’s “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the FemaleSpectator” does not link femininity with passivity—in fact Doane discusses how femininityis positioned in power relations: “Femininity is produced very precisely as a position withina network of power relations. And the growing insistence upon the elaboration of a theoryof female spectatorship is indicative of the crucial necessity of understanding the position

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object of the gaze, Christain Rosencreutz attempts to sacrificeher and the Grand Duke wants to imprison her. Some criticsargue that Fevvers constructs her own pleasurable performanceand thus resists Mulvey’s theories of the male gaze (Michael;8

Cella; O’Brien).9 For example, Laurie J. C. Cella connectsFevvers’s creation of herself as an object of the gaze with heragency of narration suggesting that Fevvers controls how her“image is understood and publicized” (Cella 56).10 I argueFevvers cannot control how her “image is understood and pub-licized” since the Colonel and other characters advertise herin newspapers (Cella 56). Fevvers critiques rather than controlshow others publicize her and in turn creates non-normativenarratives of genders, sexualities, nationalities, citizenship, andhumans.

in order to dislocate it” (434). Throughout her article, Doane “dislocate[s]” prior theo-ries of femininity questioning past theories of the male gaze, “what is there to preventher from reversing the relation and appropriating the gaze for her own pleasure?” (422).Doane’s analysis “dislocates” and disrupts theories of femininity and “passivity” as well asre-signifies femininity as a position and performance that can wield power. In Doane’s the-ory, femininity as a masquerade does differ from traditional femininity precisely because,“The entire elaboration of femininity as a closeness, a nearness, as present-to-itself isnot the definition of an essence but the delineation of a place culturally assigned towoman. . . . The effectivity of masquerade lies precisely in its potential to manufacture adistance from the image, to generate a problematic within which the image is manipuable,producible, and readable by the woman” (433). The masquerade of femininity is demon-strated as being different from traditional femininity because of the “distance from theimage”—“the image” is the representation of traditional femininity. The performanceof the masquerade of femininity must be “readable” as an alternative performance offemininity.

8For example, Magali Cornier Michael argues that Fevvers turns herself into an objectto be gazed upon. Michael suggests, “Fevvers exhibits herself as object, object of theaudience’s gaze” (Michael 500).

9While other critics contend that even through this resistance, Fevvers reinforces herown objectification. Christina Britzolakis proposes that Fevvers does not resist objectifica-tion rather, “. . . the celebration of femininity remains, in both cases, linked to what Lizziein Nights at the Circus calls ‘the discipline of the narrative’ (280). It seems to me far fromclear whether these characters, in exploiting the creative possibilities of illusion, do indeedescape objectification or whether they end up colluding in their own objectification” (461).M.-L. Kohlke represents Fevvers as, “pursu[ing] careers objectifying [her] femininity asfetishized spectacle for visual consumption” (161).

10“Fevvers constructs herself as an object to be admired, but her posture and attitudereinforce the notion that she is the mistress of her own image, aware of herself as spectacleand controlling the way this image is understood and publicized.” Fevvers “controls” her“image” as spectacle and advertisement (Cella 56).

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Fevvers utilizes disidentification to resist the very norms, dis-courses, and narratives that define her as inhuman and freaky.11

In his book Disidentifications, José Esteban Muñoz theorizes that“disidentification is a strategy that works on and against dominantideology . . . this ‘working on and against’ is a strategy that triesto transform a cultural logic from within, always laboring to enactpermanent structural change while at the same time valuing theimportance of local or everyday struggles of resistance” (11–12).12

Fevvers utilizes disidentification to change heteronormative andimperial narratives of femininity from within. Ideas of “normal”femininity imply heterosexuality, British womanhood, and white-ness while Nights resists normalcy with freak show femininities.13

Fevvers disidentifies with classic icons that representfemininity as beauty, unintelligence, object, victimization, and aneed to be rescued. Beryl Schlossman argues that early twentiethcentury “[m]odernism oscillates between two types of feminineobjects, virginal and womanly (sensual, loving, and maternal)”(22). According to Schlossman, different male modernists (i.e.,Yeats and Joyce) as well as psychoanalysts (i.e., Freud) definefemininity as virginal,14 womanly, or both thus historically situ-ating femininity with the maternal and Christianity (188).15 In

11Wendy O’Brien utilizes queer studies to complicate theories of the gaze suggestingthat “Dislocating the conventional connection between the masculinist gaze and objectifi-cation or possession, Fevvers subverts notions of female object passivity by demanding to belooked at. For Fevvers, the audience perception and reaction to her appearance are neces-sary to maintain the performance of her identity as winged aerialiste” (O’Brien’s emphasispar 5).

12Bird la Bird’s excessive performance of femininity with her red high heels, red lip-stick, corset, and thigh high pantyhose references ideal standards of femininity and beautyand then queers them with her brazen femme photographic performance. For theoriesof brazen femininity look to Chloë Brushwood Rose and Anna Camilleri’s Brazen Femme:Queering Femininity.

13McClintock discusses how femininity and domesticity contribute to and encourageimperialism suggesting that “As such, white women were not the hapless onlookers ofempire but were ambiguously complicit both as colonizers and colonized, privileged andrestricted, acted upon and acting . . . imperialism cannot be fully understood without a the-ory of gender power. Gender power was not the superficial patina of empire, an ephemeralgloss over the more decisive mechanics of class and race. Rather, gender dynamics were,from the outset, fundamental to the securing and maintenance of the imperial enterprise”(6–7). White women also perpetuated imperialism in the colonies and within England.

14Schlossman argues, “Western culture is mediated by a discourse of feminine desire,transgression, and original sin” (187).

15Schlossman asserts, “Mary the Virgin mother is a uniquely idealized feminine objectof Christendom and the highest lady addressed by the poetic discourses of courtly love

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the twentieth century, definitions of femininity intertwine withdiscourses of sexualities (heterosexuality and non-normative sex-ualities, desires, and pleasures). Nights resists Sigmund Freud’sideas that “normal femininity” can only experience pleasure inone correct way (147).16 Fevvers’s narratives of pleasure create

and fin’amor . . . . Her role is passive, maternal, and ancillary; her femininity is defined byChristian doctrine in precisely these terms” (188).

16Similar to many normative discourses of femininity, psychoanalysis connectsfemininity with passivity while simultaneously suggesting it doesn’t. Freud warns us that“[e]ven in the sphere of human sexual life you soon see how inadequate it is to makemasculine behaviour coincide with activity and feminine with passivity” (143). However,Freud does the very same thing that he warns us against, connecting “feminine with pas-sivity” writing “[w]e are entitled to keep to our view that in the phallic phase of girls theclitoris is the leading erotogenic zone. But it is not, of course, going to remain so. Withthe change to femininity the clitoris should wholly or in part hand over its sensitivity, andat the same time its importance, to the vagina” (147). For the development into “normalfemininity,” women must move their multiple erogenous zones into their vaginal canals.Thus, pleasure and the movement of pleasure from the clitoris to the vagina for repro-duction defined femininity; therefore, vaginal orgasms come to define femininity. Freudand sexology fear that the clitoris can work like a little penis and thus threatens heteronor-mative sex, gender, and sexuality. The clitoris threatens heteronormativity because it canpenetrate if enlarged enough and can be a key site of pleasure for women outside ofheterosexual reproduction and intercourse. If women actively want to have sex, penetra-tive or otherwise, it troubles the object/subject binary that Freud, Weininger, and otherssetup. Thus, the clitoris represents women’s self pleasure, pleasure without the fear of preg-nancy, and sexual relations between women. This creation of a “normal femininity” directlyresponds to “threats” of lesbianism and a fear that the “lesbian contagion” will spread andlesbians will take over England, making women indifferent to men and their reproductive“duties.” Freudian theory suggests that women who fail to develop into “normal femininity”are “female homosexuals” because they do not do some or all of the following: give all oftheir clitoral pleasure over to their vaginas; actively want to pleasure their clitorises; want togive pleasure to other women’s clitorises and vaginas; want to receive pleasure from otherwomen via their clitorises and/or vaginas; want to penetrate women with their enlarged cli-torises; and/or find pleasure in other parts of their bodies. Freud terms these women who“cling to” “activity” and “avoid” “passivity” as, “defiantly rebellious, even exaggerates herprevious masculinity, clings to her clitoral activity . . . the wave of passivity is avoided whichopens the way to the turn towards femininity. The extreme achievement of such a mas-culinity complex would appear to be the influencing of the choice of an object in the senseof manifest homosexuality” (161). Thus for Freud, heterosexuality and heteronormativitydefine “normal femininity” and masculinity, clitoral pleasures, a “masculinity complex,”and activity signify “female homosexuality.” Here Freud does not use female masculinityand female homosexuality mutually exclusively; in fact, Freud thinks of homosexuality inwomen as a developmental stage and not a female body visibility marked by masculinityas many sexologists did. “The masculinity complex” is defined by sexual “activity,” enjoy-ing clitoral stimulation, and not fully replacing the desire for clitoral pleasure with thedesire for heterosexual intercourse. For Freud, “avoiding” “the wave of passivity” definesfemale masculinity, “abnormal femininity,” and “female homosexuality.” Importantly for

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Freak Show Femininities 9

femininity and feminine people as strong, intelligent, rescuingthemselves, and experiencing many pleasures.

Classic narratives/scripts of femininity create icons thatnormalize the damaging and violent effects of heteronorma-tivity and imperialism. Nights repeatedly rewrites the mythical“Leda and the Swan” tradition in literature and art history thatreinforces violence against women as part of normal scripts offemininity. Fevvers says that she was conceived from “Leda and theSwan” and then she displays herself to challenge the damagingand victimizing icons of femininity within this literary tradition.Employing disidentification as resistance, Fevvers’s spectacles offemininity highlight what victimized scripts of femininity do.Fevvers repeated citation of “Leda and the Swan” rewrites scriptsof femininity, turning the traumatic and victimized narrative ofLeda’s rape into a story of the necessity of resistance, strength, andpleasure of femininity and feminine people.17 Nights’s freak showfemininities create scripts that show that pleasure not violence is anecessary part of life for feminine people.

Is Femininity Human?: Fevvers’s Performanceof “Is she fiction or fact?”

In Carter’s Nights, the question “Is [Fevvers] fact or is she fiction?”continually surfaces emphasizing how she moves between andintertwines fact and fiction as well as other binaries (Carter,Nights 147)—real/fantasy, woman/animal, human/monster,citizen/immigrant, and so on. Fevvers’s movements among thesebinaries trouble constructions of gender, sexuality, humanity,and nationality. Wendy O’Brien suggests that in Nights, “Fevvers

Freudian theories, “achievement of a masculinity complex” defines “female homosexual-ity”; therefore, female homosexuality is not marked on the body rather is a failure in sexualdevelopment. All women are suspect (not just visibly marked female inverts). Freudiantheories and certain strands of sexology combine to make lesbianism both visible and invis-ible, enforcing multiple forms of discipline—everyone was suspect simultaneously watchingand being watched. The enforcement of “normal femininity” proscribes “correct” pleasuresand passivity. The women who didn’t “develop” or choose “normal femininity” but instead“abnormal femininity” or “female masculinity” faced accusations of “female homosexuality”and in turn sexism and homophobia.

17Similarly to Nights, Carter reimagines the “Leda and the Swan” myth in her novel TheMagic Toyshop.

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frustrates more than conventional binaries of masculine/feminineas her metaphorical presence challenges the discretion of the cor-poreal form as human” (O’Brien par. 7, 8).18 O’Brien argues thatFevvers utilizes femininity to challenge how bodies themselvesare defined as human or inhuman. I theorize that it is at theintersection of Fevvers’s performance of femininity and globalother that Fevvers complicates how we read and understandcertain bodies as inhuman, freaky, and abnormal.19 Adding toO’Brien’s theories, I argue how in Nights gender intersects withrace and imperialism because Fevvers represents the “lumbarroom of femininity” and “the lumbar room of [imperialism]”simultaneously (Carter, Nights 69). This lumbar room illustratesthat femininity and nationality are made, can be unmade, andthus remade.20

Significantly set in 1899 at the turn of the century when cri-tiques of the discrimination of imperialism, gender, and sexualitygain cultural prominence in Britain, Nights displays and exhibits atableau vivant of intersectional discriminations (Carter, Nights 23).Imperialism changes into globalization at the turn of the twenti-eth century—with the emphasis on global commodities and trade(Carter, Nights 265).21 Globalization spreads commodities around

18According to O’Brien, “Fevvers’s continual frustration of attempts to constrain heridentity in terms of the mythologies of femininity, celestial beings or birds is counter-pointed by the suffering of the other female characters at the hands of similar historicaland discursive traditions” (par. 7, 8)

19Butler suggests that “To be legitimated by the state is to enter into the terms of legit-imation offered there, and to find that one’s public and recognizable sense of personhoodis fundamentally dependent on the lexicon of that legitimation” (Butler, Undoing 105). Butwhat happens when even the norm or the ‘legitimate’ are not necessarily defined as humanor human status is always relative?

20Further, the very same spectatorship that objectifies femininity also objectifies colo-nized people under British rule. Nights shows that it isn’t just gender relations that structurelooking relations rather as Ann Kaplan aptly notes, “Like everything in culture, look-ing relations are determined by history, tradition, power hierarchies, politics, economics.Mythic or imaginary ideas about nation, national identity and race all structure how onelooks. . . . The possibilities for looking are carefully controlled. . . . Looking is power, asMichel Foucault has amply shown” (4). Yes, “looking is power” but within Foucauldiantheory, everyone has the ability to wield power although people’s access to power is dispro-portionate. Interestingly, Carter at times employs filmic looking relations. Film’s structurehelps us, as Kaplan suggests, “. . . to examine how looking is conceived, what looking ispossible and what boundaries there are to looking relations” (6). But unlike Kaplan, Cartershows “what looking is possible” merely to disrupt the “boundaries” of “looking relations.”

21For example, “those last bewildering days before history, that is, history as we knowit, that is, white history, that is, European history, that is, Yanqui history—in that final little

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the world—not just products but people as well with Fevvers’sperformance in the Imperial Circus/Tour. The Imperial Tour vis-ibly emphasizes the physical trade of people within imperialismand the visual exhibition of colonized people as spectacles for thecolonizers to view, exchange, and display.22

Discourses of British nationality in the nineteenth centurydefine nations, not exclusively by geographically bounded areas,but rather, as an Empire that circles the globe. As Britain turnsto the twentieth century, concepts of nation, nationality, and cit-izenship shift with immigration. For example, McClintock arguesthat within the imperial cities normative discourses search out dif-ferences and define them as deviant and, in turn, people visiblymarked as non-white and non-British are classified as deviant andabnormal (43).23 In addition to Fevvers’s character, Nights con-tinually references intersectional politics illustrative when Fevverssays about Lizzie:

[a]nd it was, of course, never religion that made her such an inconvenientharlot, but her habit of lecturing the clients on the white slave trade, therights and wrongs of women, universal suffrage, as well as the Irish ques-tion, the Indian question, republicanism, anti-clericism, syndicalism andthe abolition of the House of Lords. (292)

Lizzie, the inconvenient harlot and Fevvers’s foster mother,verbalizes connections of gender, imperialism, and heteronorma-tivity with the call for universal suffrage and also she critiquesthe institution of marriage urging Fevvers not to marry. Further,

breathing space before history as such extended its tentacles to grasp the entire globe, thetribespeople were already addicted to tea and handy imported firearms and axes whichthey could not make themselves” (Carter, Nights 265).

22With World War I quickly approaching, the need for war necessitates importedfirearms. Firearms, one of the most important global commodities during the World Wars,contribute to the writing of white global history. Framed by white European progress nar-ratives of the necessity of violence and technology, this white history furthers imperialviolence and dehumanization. These tentacles tangle themselves into the globe makingthe “tribes people” reliant on commodities from the very people who dehumanize them.

23McClintock describes, “In the metropolis, the idea of racial deviance was evoked topolice the ‘degenerate’ classes—the militant working-class, the Irish, the Jews, feminists,gays and lesbians, prostitutes, criminals, alcoholics and the insane—who were collectivelyfigured as racial deviants, atavistic throwbacks to a primitive moment in human prehistory,surviving ominously in the heart of the modern, imperial metropolis” theorizing how thesediscourses of race, gender, imperialism, and sexuality historically work intersectionally(43).

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Lizzie challenges conventional ideas about prostitutes because shediscusses the politics and injustices of sexism and imperialismwith her clients. Lizzie demonstrates the connection of pleasures,bodies, politics, and intelligence.

Fevvers interweaves gazing upon and the exchange ofwomen’s, colonized, and immigrant bodies. Feevers’s imperialmetropolis, her “Beloved London,” “degenerately” racializes heras “Cockney bred and born” (Carter, Nights 87, 118). Being“Cockney bred and born” makes Fevvers not quite Englishwithin normative ideas of nationality and citizenship. Importantly,Fevvers utilizes her trans-nationality to critique discriminatoryideas of who is and who is not considered a real British citizen.24

Fevvers makes herself into spectacles, which emphasize being“Cockney bred and born;” therefore, critiquing the British Empireand challenging spectators to do the same. Fevvers’s spectacleemphasizes the not quite human status of immigrants in norma-tive ideas of British citizenship.

In Fevvers’s first public display as England’s “Winged Victory,”she is whitened with powder and clown’s “wet white” illustratingthat she is not quite “white” enough and thus must be madewhite (Carter, Nights 37).25 Audiences pay money to see thisnot quite white, not quite woman, not quite British citizen, notquite human, and not quite bird painted white and exhibitedon her platform. The necessity of Fevvers being whitened alsoreferences normative constructions of femininity and imperial-ism that enforce an image of femininity as white British womenimposing British ideas of domesticity in England and the colonies.Fevvers ironically performs these intersections for audiences toview as, “She twisted round, and, with her free hand, waved, or,as they say at the circus, ‘styled’ at the Imperial Box in an ironic

24On the other hand, the character, George Buffins “. . . was Cockney bred and born;his real name was George Buffins, but he had long ago forgotten it, although he was a greatpatriot, British to the bone, even if as widely traveled as the British Empire in the service offun” (Carter, Nights 118). George Buffins attempts to erase being “Cockney bred and born”becoming a “great patriot” perpetuating imperialism and even having fun doing it.

25At the brothel where Fevvers grows up, she performs the Winged Victory for peopleto view but not touch. Carter writes, “‘How was I costumed for my part [Winged Victory]?My hair was powdered white with chalk and tied up with a ribbon and my wings werepowdered white, too, so I let out a puff if touched. My face and the top half of my bodywas spread with the wet white that clowns use in the circus and I had white drapes from mynavel to my knee but my shins and feet were dipped in wet white, too’” (37).

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gesture” (159). Fevvers resists normative spectatorship with herstyled and ironic wave, which creates a parody of the Queens ofEngland with their royal waves as gestures of dignity and grace.Thus, this imitation of Queen Elizabeth, points to the hypocrisyof the idea of her white virtuous, innocent, femininity that wasactually cloaked in the blood of imperialism.

Within Carter’s the Imperial Tour, variations of women’s bod-ies demonstrate how femininity, race, nationality, sexuality, andimperialism signify inhuman in certain cultural and historical con-texts. Fevvers narrates her performances along with the Princess’sand Mignon’s to Walser, a newspaper journalist and her love inter-est, for him to write “The New Woman for the New Century”to create a history, literature, and pages that define women andfemininity as human (Carter, Nights 281). Since Walser first meetsFevvers because he wants to write a newspaper article abouther, as a half-bird and half-woman extraordinary creation, Nightsdraws attention to and implicates the media in creating and per-petuating ideas of normalcy. Fevvers says that she will “hatch”Walser so that she can make him into the “New Man” to matchher as the “New Woman.”26 Fevvers, the Princess, and Mignon’sbodies are visibly marked by their non-normativity. Also, withtheir performances in The Imperial Circus, these characters chal-lenge which bodies have claims to nationality and citizenship andwhich do not. As performers in Imperial Tour/Circus, the char-acters display themselves to emphasize how audiences read themas imperial bodies/commodities without nationality that exist asinterchangeable parts from and for the British Empire.

Nights creates new narratives of human history according toHelen Sword’s argument that “. . . Yeats . . . describes Leda’s rapeas one in a series of annunciatory events shaping human history”as well as human definitions (311). Fevvers remakes W.B. Yeats’sversion of “Leda and the Swan” to narrate an alternative and resis-tant human history. Carter takes Yeats’s critiques of nationality,that “[n]ationality was like religion, few could be saved, and med-itation had but one theme—the perfect nation and its perfectservice” (Yeats, Autobiographies Vol. III 272), and expands uponthem connecting exclusionary definitions and consequences of

26Fevvers says, “I’ll make him into the New Man, in fact, fitting mate for the NewWoman, and onward we’ll march hand in hand into the New Century” (Carter, Nights 281)

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nationality with those of gender, sexuality, and normalcy. Yeatslinks nationality with religion, drawing on a history and his politi-cal present where people were killed in masses because of religiousand/or national persecution.

In “Leda and the Swan,” the narrator asks, “Did she put onhis knowledge with his power/Before the indifferent beak couldlet her drop?” (Poems 14–15). As a mode of resistance, Leda takeson power and knowledge, but the poem emphasizes that she takeson his power (Sword 305). Sword stresses Yeats’s construction of“Leda’s receptivity,” contrarily Nights critiques and subverts Yeats’svision of Leda’s receptivity with Fevvers’s transformative spectacles(305).27 Fevvers sees her “conception” while looking at a pictureof “Leda and the Swan” (Carter, Nights 28), and representativelyher reflection merges and is mirrored “through [the] glass” thatseparates her from the painting (Carter, Nights 28). Half-womanand half-bird, Fevvers repeatedly recreates Yeats’s vision of “Ledaand the Swan” much differently and defiantly.

Fevvers becomes a slave when she displays herself in theMuseum of Women Monsters where she experiences the dan-gers and violence that accompany her spectacle status. Fevversand the other women in the museum of women monsters are“prisoners” and “slaves” to Madame Schreck (Carter, Nights 63).Fevvers rewrites Leda’s ending when Madame Schreck sells herto Mr. Rosencreutz and she must escape—a direct connection tothe slave trade, misogyny, racism, and religion, which perpetu-ate ideas of humanity being defined by purity. Rosencreutz wantsto sacrifice Fevvers because he sees her as the angel of deathand as an in-between, “‘Beautiful lady who is neither one thingnor the other, nor flesh nor fowl, though fair is fowl and fowl isfair—tee hee! tee hee hee! . . . By pure thoughts,’ . . . ‘Queen of

27As Sword describes, Yeats’s version “focuses less on Zeus’s erotic or political motiva-tions for the attack than on Leda’s capacity to translate such divine immanence into humanunderstanding: ‘Did she put on his knowledge with his power / Before the indifferent beakcould let her drop?’ (Poems 212). Although the poem, which thematizes divine revelation,presumably was not born of it-in fact, the early drafts demonstrate that ‘painstaking effortrather than a single flash of inspiration’ (Ellmann 176), a tentative hovering rather thana ‘sudden blow,’ characterized the poem’s genesis—Yeats himself describes its origins aslargely visionary. . . . If, in contrast to Leda, who remains silent throughout the poem, Yeatshimself succeeded in channeling pos-session into self-possession, inspiration into articula-tion, and spiritual annunciation into poetic enunciation, his visionary conception of thepoem nonetheless implies a certain identification with Leda’s receptivity” (305).

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ambiguities, goddess of in-between, being on the borderline ofspecies, manifestation of Arioriph, Venus, Achamatoth, Sophia’”(Carter, Nights 76, 81). Rosencreutz juxtaposes Fevvers as an in-between with impurity suggesting that she is not human and thusis acceptable to sacrifice for the sake of purification. However,as Nights points out with the repeated citation of “Leda and theSwan,” even purity does not save women. Leda’s purity does notprotect her from rape. But in Nights Fevvers’s impurity saves her,her body that is both woman and bird provides her with the abilityto fly from this violent scene and rewrite her potential narra-tive end. Fevvers’s freaky body gives her the ability to change thefictions of rape, sacrifice, and normalcy.

Purity merely exists as a narrative that nations tell themselvesin order to create nationality, which defines citizenship throughexclusion. Before Fevvers escapes she realizes that Rosencreutzintends to rape and murder her with his blade thus readingher as expendable. At this moment in the text, Fevvers makesconnections between rape and England when:

[Rosencreutz] approaches with a purposeful stride. I’d have clenched myteeth and thought of England had I not glimpsed, peering over my shoul-der, a shining something laying along his hairy old, gnarled old thigh ashis robe swung loose. This something was a sight more aggressive thanhis other weapon, poor thing, that bobbed about uncharged, unprimed,unsharpened. . . . I saw this something was—a blade. (Carter’s emphasis,Nights 83)

England and masculinity connect in this scene as Fevvers fearsrape.28 Rosencreutz wants to rape and kill Fevvers with a blade,significantly not his penis. His flaccid penis lacks phallic power,“uncharged, unprimed, and unsharpened.” Rosencreutz’s bladeworks similarly to Zeus’s beak in Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan.” Theimage of Rosencreutz’s blade reminds Fevvers of her own blade,which she wields to fight him and then escapes via flight (Carter,Nights 83). Up to this point in Nights, Fevvers cannot use her wingsto fly. Then, out of necessity, Fevvers learns to fly. Yeats writes Ledaas, “So mastered by the brute blood of the air,” whereas Fevversmasters the air to avoid blood, rape, and death to find freedom,

28At times, Fevvers describes England as idealic, for example, “‘and now my own.Beloved London’” (Carter, Nights 87).

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life, and safety (Poems 13). Yeats’s poem lyrically constructs thisiconic victimization of femininity, while Fevvers re-writes herplace in this emblematic narrative that imagines femininity as,“How those terrified vague fingers push/The feathered gloryfrom her loosening thighs” (Yeats, Poems 5–6). Sword highlightshow previous versions of the Leda myth and “. . . Yeats’s poemfocuses on Leda’s role as a visionary victim” (309). Fevvers utilizesher fictional mother’s “visionary victim” narrative as she becomesthe narrator herself and creates a new fiction of resistance andstrength. If Fevvers is conceived from Leda’s rape scene, shethen uses Zeus’s disguise (the swan) and her mother’s knowledgeto change the script. Fevvers’s escape changes the iconic scriptof sexual trauma and violence against femininity and women.Fevvers textual performance offers stories of the “New Woman forthe New Century” and new resistant fictions of femininity (Carter,Nights 281). “Is she fact or is she fiction?”—she is both (Carter,Nights 147).

Rosencreutz connects imperialism and gender not only in hisdiscussion of in-betweens, but also when the newspaper advertisesthat he gives speeches against women’s enfranchisement, “Onaccount of how women are of a different soul-substance frommen, cut from a different bolt of spirit cloth, and altogethertoo pure and rarefied to be bothering their pretty heads withthings of this world, such as the Irish question and the Boer War”(Carter, Nights 78–79). Representative of anti-suffrage politics,Rosencreutz, argues that women should not have the right to voteso that they don’t have to worry their “pretty heads” about impe-rialism and that they are too pure to make such decisions. Thisgovernmental legislation of femininity suggests that women existas pretty creatures, not humans, because they lack the intelligenceand the wherewithal to understand questions of nation, war, andimperialism required for enfranchisement and full citizenship.

Before Fevvers escapes from Rosencreutz, she fears that shewill have to clench her teeth and think of England while he rapesher (Carter, Nights 83). In this scene, imperialist discourses of gen-der, race, and sexuality suggest that rape is something womenmust endure for England. Nights’s critiques of England’s imperi-alism and exhibition of people continues with “Captain Kearney’sGrand Imperial Tour,” which shifts names between Imperial Tourand Imperial Circus connecting both exhibitionist spaces (Carter,

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Nights 90). The Colonel advertises Fevvers as literally made out ofimperialism:

That morning, the newspapers carry an anonymous letter which claimsFevvers is not a woman at all but cunningly constructed automaton madeup of walebone, India-rubber and springs. The Colonel beams with plea-sure at the consternation this ploy will provoke, at the way the box-officetills will clang in the delicious rising tide of rumour: “Is she fiction orfact.” (147)

The Grand Imperial Circus advertises Fevvers as made out of impe-rial products and simultaneously suggests she “is not a womanat all” rather an imperial automaton imitating a human. Thus,the advertisement of Fevvers represents imperialist discourses,which construct British immigrants without nationality becausethey exist not as British citizens or humans but rather as inter-changeable automatons who merely imitate humans (87, 118).The Imperial Tour uses Fevvers and the other performers to adver-tise imperialism, proposing that what England has found in thecolonies are objects and freaks to make profits from and lookupon with wonder and exoticism. As Garland-Thomson arguesabout the freak show, “The exaggerated, sensationalized discoursethat is the freak show’s essence ranged over the seemingly singu-lar bodies that we would now call either ‘physically disabled’ or‘exotic ethnics,’ framing them and heightening their differencesfrom viewers, who were rendered comfortably common and safelystandard by the exchange” (Freakery 5). The Imperial Tour thus:(1) justifies imperialism, suggesting colonized people are reallyautomatons and not humans at all and (2) perpetuates the neces-sity of future imperialism to obtain new automaton spectacles forthe entertainment and financial gain of the Imperial World.

Later in Nights, Fevvers wants to wear and consume imperialproducts, “She wanted to eat diamonds” (Carter’s emphasis, Nights182). In Nights, jewels function as icons to display femininity, impe-rialism, race, and nation. Within twentieth-century British cultureaccording to Enda Duffy and Maurizia Boscagli, “jewels andtheir enforced absence are used to resist normative discourses ofimperialism and gender” (190). Rather than the absence of jewels,Nights uses the presence of jewels to challenge normative ideas ofgender, sexuality, and imperialism. Significantly, Fevvers connectswomen’s liberation with Irish liberation. Rather than coming

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to represent Ireland, Fevvers is advertised as an imperial prod-uct from India demonstrating how, within an imperialistic logic,colonies are interchangeable just as women can be exchangedwithin heteronormativity (i.e., marriage). Diamond engagementrings represent heteronormativity to visually show that a woman isoff the market.29 Within Nights, diamonds come to signify the con-straints and dangers of heteronormativity and imperialism. TheGrand Duke gives Fevvers diamonds to woe her. Of course, Fevversparticipating and wearing imperialism cannot end well for her.The Grand Duke wants to collect her saying, “‘You must knowI am a great collector of all kinds of objects d’art and marvels. Of allthings, I love best toys—marvelous and unnatural artifacts’” indi-cating that he along with normative ideas of citizenship do notdefine her as human rather as an “unnatural artifact” from thecolonies (Carter’s emphasis 187).30 The Grand Duke’s referenceto the unnatural highlights that he reads Fevvers as unnatural andnot human; therefore, she can be collected in his “objects d’art.”Colonized people and immigrants become objects and toys for theBritish Empire to play with, display, and keep in cages.

Walking through the Grand Duke’s display of “marvelousand unnatural artifacts,” Fevvers sees herself as one of his toys,“It was white gold and topped with a lovely little swan, a trib-ute, perhaps, too her putative paternity. And, as she suspected,it contained a cage made out of gold wires with, inside, a littleperch of rubies and of sapphires and of diamonds, the good oldred, white and blue. The cage was empty. No bird stood on theperch yet” (Carter, Nights 192).31 Gold wires are still wires, andFevvers realizes that she does not want to live within this “golden”“gilded cage” for diamonds, gold, rubies, and sapphires (Carter,

29See: Gayle Rubin’s “Traffic in Women: Notes on ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.”30Britzolakis suggests that “It enables us to argue that Carter deploys masquerade-like

tactics in order to expose the fictional and inessential character of femininity. But it alsoenables us to argue that she is at least equally engaged by the male scenario of fetishismwhich lies behind, and is required by, the female scenario of the masquerade” (470).

31This is not the first time we’ve seen a preoccupation with diamonds in Nights sinceMadame Schreck orientalizes and worships her gold and jewels as, “Aladdin’s cave, inside!the contents shone with their own light pile upon pile of golden sovereigns, a queen’sransom of diamond necklaces and pearls and rubies and emeralds piled huggermuggeramong bankers’ draughts, bills of exchange, foreclosed mortgages etc. etc. etc. With adisplay of the greatest reluctance, [Madame Schreck] selects five soveirgns counts ‘em outagain and, with as much painful hesitation as if they were drops of her dear heart’s blood,she hands ‘em over” (59).

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Nights 190). The cage connects to England since the perch is madeout of red, white, and blue, which pictorially represents the col-ors of the British national flag. Imperialism constructs the Britainof the twentieth century with the display of jewels obtained fromBritain’s colonies. The Grand Duke wants to display Fevvers, whois rumored to be made out of Indian rubber—Fevvers representsIndia the jewel of the British Empire, on a British flag made out ofimperial jewels. Significantly, Fevvers mentions, “with a lovely lit-tle swan, a tribute, perhaps, too her putative paternity” again citingYeats’s “Leda and the Swan” (Carter, Nights 192). Carter re-writesYeats’s poem as she does numerous times throughout Nights, eachtime with a difference. Fevvers escapes the Grand Duke’s grasp ashe masturbates and then ejaculates. The Grand Duke is so caughtup in his own pleasure that it offers Fevvers the perfect momentto flee and rip off her diamonds, the shackles that almost boundher to life as the Grand Duke’s feminine and imperial toy.

Fevvers challenges twentieth-century constructions offemininity beautifully attired in jewels, gold, and imperialism.Normative discourses of femininity entail a particular type ofwoman—so what happens when the woman is half bird, notclearly raced, sexualized, and colonized to begin with? Neverdefined as a “real” woman, British citizen, or human, Fevversexists as a fiction and an in-between freaky body who lays claimto humanity. Race, nationality, and gender nuance femininity, itslooking relations, its claim to human definitions, and its resistantpleasures within Fevvers’s freaky performances of femininities.32

Pleasurable Intersections: Spectacles of Queer Desires

Mignon and the Princess perform in the Imperial Tour inCarter’s Nights, and their spectacles represent pleasure, transfor-mation, and happiness of queer desires and relationships. ThePrincess’s and Mignon’s queerness offer them a pleasurable life inNights. Fevvers, the Princess, and Mignon perform their resistantfemininities to question heteronormativity and damaging icons offemininity (“Leda and the Swan” and fairytales). The novel setsup Mignon and the Princess’s spectacle for other characters in the

32Fevvers’s performances challenge the supposed “great ones,” historically inscribedas English, white, and royal, because after all “‘Don’t the great ones themselves weave thegiant web of injustice that circumscribes the globe?’” (232).

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novel to watch (a performance within and for the Imperial Tour,within Fevvers’s narration to Walser, and within the novel itself).Mignon and the Princess’s spectacles offer audiences somethingdifferent to imagine than the fairytale heteronormative romanticnarrative.

The violent effects of heteronormativity and imperialismare written on Mignon’s and the Princess’s bodies.33 WhenFevvers and Walser rescue Mignon, her “skin was mauvish, green-ish, yellowish from beatings” from her husband, showing howheteronormativity can violently visibly mark bodies (129). ThePrincess’s body is covered by scars from the tigers she tames, “Onrare, random occasions when she took some other human backto her bed in the straw beside the sleeping tigers, she always madelove in the dark because her body was, every inch, scarred withclawmarks, as if tattooed. That was the price they made her payfor taming them” (149). Both the bruises and clawmarks connectto sex as Walser and Fevvers look at Mignon’s bruised, nakedbody, and then Fevvers comments on the Princess’s entire bodytattooed with clawmarks and the fact that she must make lovein the dark so that no one can see her—she does not want hermarked skin visible (149).

No longer having to make love in the dark, from the momentthe Princess and Mignon meet erotic sparks fly giving both theopportunity to imagine and enact Anne Cvetkovich’s term, queer“creative responses” to trauma (3). The Princess and Mignon liveamongst the Princess’s tigers in her cage. Pleasure and pain min-gle as the Princess’s and Mignon’s desires transform their cagedperformances. The cage and the Princess’s clawmarked skin vis-ibly show the connections of pleasure and pain. The Princess’sscars become like electric circuits of desire, pleasure, and painyearning to be touched by Mignon. A kiss signifies Mignon’sand the Princess’s queer desire when the Princess, “. . . kissed[Mignon] on the mouth and the two girls clung together fora little longer, only a moment longer, than propriety allowedalthough, such was the vigour and ovation, nobody noticed exceptthose to whom it came as no surprise. Then the Princess snapped

33McRuer suggests, “. . . that critical queerness and severe disability are about col-lectively transforming (in ways that cannot necessarily be predicted in advance)—aboutcripping—the substantive, material uses to which queer/disabled existence has been putby a system of compulsory able-bodiedness, about insisting that such a system is never asgood as it gets, and about imagining bodies and desires otherwise” (32).

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shut the piano lid, took up her rifle and gestured imperiously withit” (Carter, Nights 165). Audiences view a performance of queerpleasure as the women “kissed on the mouth” and the Princessgestures the end of their performance with her rifle. The Princesstakes the rifle—a Prince does not have the rifle to rescue her nordo British colonizers—the rifle is her’s as are her non-normativeperformances of genders and sexualities.

The other performers in the Imperial Circus daily view thePrincess’s and Mignon’s newfound happiness, and pleasure in aworld that attempted to tame them. Fevvers must question herown heteronormative assumptions when someone says, “‘Leavethe love-birds together.’ Love-birds, was it? Of course it was! Handin hand, the girls now went back into the cage, . . . So she wouldnot sign in the ring; well and good. So much the better, in fact!They would cherish in loving privacy the music that was theirlanguage, in which they’d found the way to one and another”(Carter, Nights 168). The queer interracial relationship betweenthe Princess and Mignon is the only extended display of pleasureand happiness in the novel. Other characters and relationshipsexperience momentary pleasures and traumas. Pleasure, pain,and happiness make the dark and their cage a subversive spacethat Mignon and the Princess create. Privately they experience thepleasure, language, and music between their bodies.

Nights queers Mignon’s and the Princess’s names, challenginghow normative scripts of gender and sexuality define femininity.Mignon is no longer anyone’s mignon nor is she an interchange-able and undistinguishable commodity. The Princess in Carter’stale queers notions of princesses since she tames tigers, carriesa rifle, and is “love-birds” with Mignon (Carter, Nights 168). Theuse of “the Princess” confronts a genre of fairytales of femininity.Carter’s Princess challenges the idea of fairytale femininity withher body covered by scars from taming tigers, the act of taming,and the rifle she carries. The Princess’s scars demonstrate howdiscourses of fairytale femininity actually attempt to tame womeninto submission at times visibly marking their bodies. Yet, no onetames Nights’s Princess; in fact, she tames.34 Always carrying a

34In Nights, The Princess rescues Mignon: “. . . carried the rifle with which she hadshot the tigress, a peerless bullet straight between the eyes, the moment after, just onemoment after the jealous tigress, deprived of her escort, could bear the sight of Mignondancing with her mate no longer” (179). The Princess must shoot the tigress when sheattacks Mignon although she does not want to shoot her.

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riffle, even in her “white” “good girl’s” dress, the Princess queersfemininity (Carter, Nights 148).35 Depicted as a strong, violentwoman, and never the traditional delicate and soft princess icon,Fevvers describes, “. . . the Princess’s dark face was that of Kaliand the perfume round her dense enough, rank and pervasiveenough, to act as an invisible barrier between herself and allthose who were not furred” (Carter, Nights 153). This version ofPrincess femininity challenges traditional narratives of princessesand whiteness in similar ways that Fevvers does with “Leda andthe Swan.” The Princess resists notions of fairytaled virtuous,heteronormative, and white femininity even creating an invisi-ble barrier to ward off princes trying to rescue her. These new“mignon” and “princess” versions of femininities “enchant” oth-ers with their pleasurable, queer, and strong gender performances(Carter, Nights 165).

Fevvers, Mignon, and the Princess resist heteronorma-tive ideas of femininity and normalcy thereby offering queerperformativity and creating narratives of non-normative gendersand sexualities. At the end of Nights, Fevvers’s spectacle shifts tothe importance of her sexual pleasure:

“Fevvers, only one question . . . why did you go to such lengths, onceupon a time, to convince me you were the only fully-feathered intacta inthe history of the world?” She began to laugh. “I fooled you, then!” shesaid. “Gawd, I fooled you!”. . . . “You mustn’t believe what you read in thepapers!”. . . The spiraling tornado of Fevvers’s laughter began to twist andshudder across the entire globe, as if a spontaneous response to the giantcomedy that endlessly unfolded beneath it, until everything that lived andbreathed, everywhere, was laughing. . . .” (294–295)

By this point in the novel, Fevvers and Walser are married. Walserassumes that Fevvers vigorously protected her chastity. Fevvers hasnarrated her life to Walser, but only specific parts. Walser has lis-tened to Fevvers’s narratives of her resisting rape, but not whenshe experiences sexual pleasure. Fevvers’s laughter itself moves

35It is said about the Princess that “So much for her history, which was only mysteriousin that she told it to nobody because she never spoke. In the ring, she looked like a mem-ber of the graduating class at a provincial conservatories, in a white frock with starchedflounces, white cotton stockings, flat, strapped shoes of the kind called Mary Janes, and abutterfly bow of white satin in the crisp hair that stuck out half way down her back. In thisgarb, she played the piano and the tigers danced. . . . She came after, in her good girl’sdress, and sat down at the Bechstein grand” (Carter, Nights 148).

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Freak Show Femininities 23

forth as waves of pleasure that spreads around the globe twistingand shuddering. Walser attempts to put Fevvers in an innocent“once upon a time” feminine romantic fairytale narrative to whichFevvers responds, “‘You mustn’t believe what you read in thepapers!’” (Carter, Nights 294). The papers are not just the newspa-per articles that Walser plans to write about Fevvers, but also thepapers upon papers that attempt to write, fictionalize, historicize,legalize, medicalize, classify, psychoanalyze, and even corpore-ally create femininity as innocent, needing rescued, unintelligent,victimized, normal, and not desiring or experiencing pleasure.Fevvers creates a spectacle of feminine laughter that displays andspreads pleasure in fooling Walser and such damaging normativediscourses of femininity. Fevvers, the Princess, and Mignon dis-play freak shows of femininities to queer femininity and challengeconceptions of normalcy, desire, gender, sexuality, imperialism,and human definitions. Desire, pleasure, and femininity twist andshudder shattering illusions of heteronormative conceptions ofgenders and sexualities. Freak show femininities within Carter’sNights question who has access to pleasure and human definitionsand demand them.

Acknowledgements

A special thanks to Madelyn Detloff, Katie Johnson, Susan Pelle, Lynn Hall, andthe reviewers for Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal for commenting onthis article in its many stages.

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