Angela carters nights at the circus 118

JEANNETTE BAXTER

105

domains normally reserved for male leaders. Moreover, Fevvers’ immersion in
and exploitation of commercial culture of Victorian Britain shows her to be an
economic miracle of the sort that Thatcher would have admired: ‘Everywhere you
saw her picture; the shops were crammed with “Fevvers” garters, stockings, fans,
cigar, shaving soap . . . She even lent it to a brand of baking powder’ (Pt. I, Ch. 1,
p. 8). As the name ‘Fevvers’ (the plural form ‘feathers’ means commodity) verifies,
the aerialiste is a circulating product within a postmodern capitalist spectacle of
merchandising, branding and celebrity endorsement.32
Although intriguing parallels can be drawn between Thatcher’s and Fevvers’
narratives of female influence, a paradox nevertheless exists between Fevvers’
exploitation of a capitalist spectacle that calcifies the imagination and her role as
an artist whose survival depends, in part, on the liberation of the imagination.
Ironically, this textual ambiguity, which Ernst’s painting replicates visually,
touches on the paradoxical position to be occupied by Carter who, following the
success of this novel, was at the height of her career success in the 1980s since, as
Sarah Gamble notes, it was during this period that her novels were remarketed
and ‘repackaged for more general consumption’.33 As Malcolm Bradbury
observes: ‘Novelists were themselves an economic miracle, anti-Thatcherite icons
in an age of “lifestyles”, “role-models” and a culture of consumption, emulation,
stylistic competition, presentation, glossy and mannered “success”.’34 That Carter
incorporates this cultural double bind into the contradictory figure of Fevvers
suggests her anticipation of and critical resistance to this co-opting of literary
authors as figures to be consumed like any other in the postmodern marketplace.
After all, Fevvers is sought out initially by advertisers precisely for her uniqueness
and character, but the ubiquity of her name and picture in advertising soon erodes
the very virtues upon which it first seized. What is worse, Fevvers’ very existence
is threatened when her journey leads her to lose ‘some vital something of herself

[. . .] some of that sense of her own magnificence which had previously sustained
her trajectory’ (Pt. III, Ch. 8, p. 273).
As this sense of loss of self suggests, then, there is more to Fevvers than a purely
performative postmodern identity. Although the postmodern idea of the self as ‘a
social and ideological construct which is endlessly in process’ fits certain aspects
of the artiste (the way the audience constructs her, her endless layers of make-up,
her self-conscious form of narration), it does not tell the whole story.35 Another
dimension exists, therefore, to Fevvers’ instruction to the audience at the Alhambra
– ‘Look at me!’ (Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 15). The implication is that beneath Fevvers’
excessive surface, an inner depth also resides. Fevvers is a site of tension, in other
words, between the metaphoric and the material, between the performing body
and the physical body. Lizzie gestures to this duality when she reminds Fevvers
that her ‘singularity’ is not entirely dependent on her construction by others;
‘You’re fading away, as if it was only always nothing but the discipline of the
audience that kept you in trim’ (Pt. III, Envoi, p. 282). Fevvers’ material disintegration towards the end of the novel (her dark roots are showing, her feathers are

32
33
34
35

Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979, F:119, p. 974.
Gamble, The Fiction of Angela Carter, p. 137.
Bradbury, The Modern British Novel, p. 451.
Ian Gregson, Postmodern Literature, London: Arnold, 2004, p. 40.