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A review by lucialarsen
Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter
3.0
“She owes it to herself to remain a woman, he thought. It is her human duty. As a symbolic woman, she has a meaning, as an anomaly, none.”
Fevver’s is part woman, part bird, her career contingent not on the fact of her (her me-ness, as she calls it) but on the very question: is she fact or is she fiction? This is a question even Fevver’s begins to ask of herself at the end of the book, after she is ripped from her audience. Angela Carter uses magical realism in a turn of the century traveling circus to interrogate the idea of mythos and performance, and how they can both cage us and free us.
Fevver’s is part woman, part bird, her career contingent not on the fact of her (her me-ness, as she calls it) but on the very question: is she fact or is she fiction? This is a question even Fevver’s begins to ask of herself at the end of the book, after she is ripped from her audience. Angela Carter uses magical realism in a turn of the century traveling circus to interrogate the idea of mythos and performance, and how they can both cage us and free us.