Female Awakening in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus

Abstract

This research, based on Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus, is an analysis of female awakening at the backdrop of socio-historical marginalization of working females. This work brings together the critical insights of Marxist feminism and subversive attempts of the major characters in the novel. Lizzie and her adopted daughter Fevvers serve as mouthpieces for these feminist attempts. The novel's omniscient narrative voice also attempts to run alongside these two voices in order to posit a feminism that would be liberating while retaining a socio-historical grounding- -a feminism that would free human beings from the hierarchical relations. In order to analyze the status of women and of existing relationships between women and men within Western culture, this research ventures through Marxist feminist instances in Carter’s novel. Even as Carter appropriates extraordinary and fantastic elements, Carter retains certain conventions of realism and a firm connection to the historical material situation as means of securing her novel's feminist political edge.