Nights at the Circus

“—and for seven long years, sir, I [Fevvers] was nought but the painted, gilded sign of love, and you might say, that so it was I served my apprenticeship in being looked at—at being the object of the eye of the beholder.”

This quote indicates the main problem that Fevvers must resolve in her character arc: her objectification and entrapment in an eternal performance for an audience whose perceptions imprison her. It also reinforces the theme of the constraints of the observer; as a character, Fevvers is continually subjected to performance, and the persona she constructs comes from trying to control others’ perceptions of her.

“Her voice. It was as if Walser had become a prisoner of her voice, her cavernous, sombre voice, a voice made for shouting about the tempest, her voice of a celestial fishwife. Musical as it strangely was, yet not a voice for singing with; it comprised discords, her scale contained twelve tones. Her voice, with its warped, homely, Cockney vowels and random aspirates. Her dark, rusty, dipping, swooping voice, imperious as a siren’s.”

This quote shows that Walser is guilty of considering Fevvers as a symbol or idea rather than a person in the beginning of the novel. Additionally, it demonstrates the contradictions in Fevvers’s character through a physical description of her voice; this reinforces the motif of juxtapositions that govern the development of characters and themes in the novel.

“But what I [Fevvers] never could get used to was the sight of their eyes, for there was no terror in the house our customers did not bring with them.”

This quote reflects the theme of the complex nature of humanity and its beastliness. Although the disfigured and “freak-ish” women at Madame Schreck’s are considered the beasts or abnormal ones because of their bodies, the ones who truly inspire terror are the patrons who take advantage of the exploitation of Fevvers’s and the other women’s bodies. This quote demonstrates the paradoxical and ironic nature of humanity. The terror doesn’t reside in the terror of the women’s abnormalities, but in the perversion of their patrons’ gazes.

“She [Fevvers] yawned, not like a whale, not like a lioness, but like a girl who has stayed up too long.”

This is the first instance in which Fevvers is not described in metaphor or symbolized as a concept or a performance. Here, the narrator explicitly depicts Fevvers as a normal girl. “Not like a whale, not like a lioness” means that the narrator/Walser does not view her in this moment as symbol or metaphor, merely as what she is: “a girl who has stayed up too long.” This indicates the direction that the arcs of both Fevvers and Walser will take, moving toward a place of de-abstraction, granting humanity to Fevvers outside of her performance.

“When Walser first put on his make-up, he looked in the mirror and did not recognise himself. As he contemplated the stranger peering interrogatively back at him out of the glass, he felt the beginnings of a vertiginous sense of freedom that, during all the time he spent with the Colonel, never quite evaporated; until that last moment when they parted company and Walser’s very self, as he had known it, departed from him, he experienced the freedom that lies behind the mask, within dissimulation, the freedom to juggle with being, and, indeed, with the language which is vital to our being, that lies at the heart of burlesque.”

This quote is significant because it foreshadows Walser losing his sense of self in Part 3. It also introduces the theme of construction/loss of self in performance; it points to the significance of the burlesque in crafting a persona that straddles truth and illusion, reinforcing the thematic paradox between the two, as well as the juxtaposition between chaos and order that governs Part 2.

“Walser never forgot this first, intimate exchange with one of these beings whose life ran parallel to his, this inhabitant of the magic circle of difference, unreachable…but not unknowable; this exchange with the speaking eyes of the dumb. It was like the clearing of a haze.”

This moment occurs during Walser’s up-close encounter with the Professor, and it is the first time Walser confronts the complex nature of humanity. This experience forces him to re-examine his conceptions and views of what is human and what is not. By relating himself to the Professor (“being whose life ran parallel to his”), Walser implicitly grants humanity to what others like the Colonel perceive as a “dumb beast.” This denotes Walser as an observer who is transforming—he is slowly moving out of the trap of keeping performers or “non-humans” transfixed with his perceptions of the denial of humanity. This prefigures Walser’s character arc in relation to Fevvers and reinforces the theme of the complex nature of humanity, and the power of the observer to ascribe or deny humanity.

“After that, he [the Professor] stared directly into Walser’s eyes, producing afresh in Walser that dizzy uncertainty about what was human and what was not. How grave, how beseeching the Professor looked as he started to open and close his own mouth like a goldfish reciting a poem.”

This is another significant moment for Walser, further developing his first encounter with understanding humanity’s complexity. Here, Walser grasps the paradox of humanity: there is civilization and order in beasts, and chaos and beastliness in humans. This quote continues to develop Walser’s understanding, as well as the overall theme of humanity’s complexity and its juxtaposition to exploited beasts and people deemed less than human, like the women at Madame Schreck’s or the exploited performers at the circus.

“And yet, too, you might say, might you not, that the clown is the very image of Christ.’ With a nod towards the mildly shining icon in the corner of the stinking kitchen, where night crawled in the form of cockroaches in the corners. ‘The despised and rejected, the scapegoat upon whose stooped shoulders is heaped the fury of the mob, the object and yet—yet! also he is the subject of laughter. For what we are, we have chosen to be.”

This quote is significant in developing the theme of the constraints of the observer. Buffo demonstrates the irony in the clowns’ existence: they perform for others in a farce of slapstick comedy, yet they are deeply depressed by the burdens they bear. The clowns are entrapped by the audience; their martyrdom comes from the total sacrifice of their sense of self/individual identity.

“‘And yet,’ resumed Buffo, after a pull at a bottle, ‘we possess one privilege, one rare privilege, that makes of our outcast and disregarded state something wonderful, something precious. We can invent our own faces! We make ourselves. [...] it is, all the same, a fingerprint of authentic dissimilarity, a genuine expression of my own autonomy. And so my face eclipses me. I have become this face which is not mine, and yet I chose it freely.’”

This quote demonstrations paradox of truth in illusion. Like Fevvers, the clowns create a persona for performance that is in some ways constrained by the observer/audience, yet it is still something they created themselves and which they (or at least Buffo) feel still represents the truth of themselves. Although Buffo pegs the clown as an involuntary martyr, there’s also an element of choice to it. This quote also reinforces the theme of illusion in truth—although the clowns themselves take up an illusion, they also somewhat delude themselves regarding their relationship to the audience—they pretend it’s involuntary, but it’s still an identity they take up, reflecting the truth of themselves.

“The clowns. See them as a band of terrorists. No; that’s not right. Not terrorists, but irregulars. A band of irregulars, permitted the most ferocious piracies as long as, just so long as, they maintain the bizarrerie of their appearance, so that their violent exposition of manners stays on the safe side of terror, even if we need to learn to laugh at them, and part, at least, of this laughter comes from the successful suppression of fear.”

This quote reinforces the power of the observer to define and constrain the identity of object/performers; it also demonstrates the juxtaposition between order and chaos that governs Part 2. The clowns are sanctioned in their actions only by the definitions of the audience. Without the presence of the observer, the clowns’ violence would not be slapstick but regular violence. The clowns themselves represent this fine divide between chaos and order, and the audience defines their actions.

“‘To sing is not to speak,’ said Fevvers, her syntax subtler than her pronunciation. ‘If they hate speech because it divides us from them, to sing is to rob speech of its function and render it divine.’”

This quote presents art as connecting the human and the beast and reinforces the theme of humanity/relative beastliness. Fevvers’s framing of singing as “robbing speech of its function to render it divine” also mirrors the acts the performers do at the circus; certain things which seem unnatural (like Fevvers flying, or the tigers dancing, for instance) are re-framed as a transformation into the divine. Thusly, they are re-ascribed humanity instead of freakishness through the lens of art. This reinforces the theme of the complexity of humanity and puts the beasts in parallel to the exploited humans.

“She [Fevvers] would no longer be an extraordinary woman, no more the Greatest Aerialiste in the world but—a freak. Marvellous, indeed, but a marvellous monster, an exemplary being denied the human privilege of flesh and blood, always the object of the observer, never the subject of sympathy, an alien creature forever estranged. 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…As an anomaly, she would become again, as she once had been, an exhibit in a museum of curiosities. But what would she become, if she continued to be a woman? Then he [Walser] saw she [Fevvers] was pale under her rouge, as if recovering from real fear, and bundling herself in her feathery cape as if it would warm her. She gave him a thin smile.”

This quote is significant because it sums up Fevvers’s character. She is an object given value only through perception, losing it when she does something to make the audience question the persona/performance. Like the clowns, Fevvers is sanctioned only through the perceptions/beliefs of the audience; this reinforces the theme of humanity ascribed and denied in observing objects of performance. This quote also indicates Walser’s perception of Fevvers at this point in the novel. He is still guilty of abstracting her. He says it’s her “human duty” to be a symbol, yet in saying so, he’s taking away her humanity. Walser still sees Fevvers in the abstract; he is still in the role of the “other,” not quite the witness yet, because he is still trapping her within the confines of the audience’s perspective. However, after seeing her and realizing her genuine fear, Walser re-evaluates his perception; it shows how Walser is coming to reconsider his own beliefs and parallels the moment in Part 1 when he sees her like a girl, like a normal person and not a symbol when she yawns after her story.

“Mignon whirled by, flashed the clown a brilliant smile and Walser, supported by the unforged steel of the tigress’s forepaws, thought: There goes Beauty and the Beast. Then, looking into the tigress’s depthless, jeweled eyes, he saw reflected there the entire alien essence of a world of fur, sinew and grace in which he was the clumsy interloper and, as the tigress steered his bedazzlement once more round the Princess’s white piano, he allowed himself to think as the tigers would have done: Here comes the Beast, and Beauty!”

This moment develops the shift in Walser’s perspective regarding humanity and beasts. Here, Walser considers things from the beast’s perspective. Walser’s realization of their higher intelligence and humanity develops the theme of humanity ascribed and denied and provides development that allow shim to ascribe humanity to Fevvers later.

“For he [Buffo] presented a deplorable sight. His natural skin showed through his matte white in ghastly streaks and runnels and, in the course of his peripatetic carousing, he had mislaid his bald piece so that a mean fringe of coarse, greying hair, spiked with sweat, surmounted a piebald face that seemed, rather than its customary mask-like inhumanity, now hideously partly human.”

This quote foreshadows the breakdown caused by a lack of self or a self entirely constrained by performance. It reinforces the importance of self-determination, as well as the importance of being granted humanity. Buffo has spent so long in his “inhuman mask,” denying himself humanity, that ultimately it compounds his absent sense of self and leads to a total loss of reason.

“But Lizzie would whistle through her moustache at Fevvers’ naivety and reply: the baker can’t make a loaf out of your privates, duckie, and that’s all you’d have to offer him in exchange for a crust if nature hadn’t made you the kind of spectacle people pay good money to see. All you can do to earn your living is to make a show of yourself. You’re doomed to that. You must give pleasure of the eye, or else you’re good for nothing.”

Lizzie’s remark reinforces how Fevvers is trapped in the eye of the observer and continually made an object. This quote’s position right before Fevvers’s big breaking moment at the Duke indicates the importance of deconstructing this assumption to complete Fevvers’s character arc; it represents the main conflict Fevvers will have to overcome in order to reconcile her sense of self.

“‘That’s another question, innit,’ she [Lizzie] replies, unperturbed as ever. ‘You never existed before. There’s nobody to say what you should do or how to do it. You are Year One. You haven’t any history and there are no expectations of you except the ones you yourself create.’”

In this quote, Lizzie offers Fevvers a solution to the identity imposed by performance—that of self-determination. This foreshadows the arc Fevvers will take in Part 3; it is up to her to embrace or transform the persona she has created and decide who she is. This moment reinforces the theme of self-created identity.

“During the hours of darkness, the cells were lit up like so many small theatres in which each actor sat by herself in the trap of her visibility in those cells shaped like servings of baba au rhum.”

The prisoners of the Corrections House are called actors, symbolizing the fact that they are trapped in a performance, just like Fevvers and the clowns and other members of the circus. This reinforces the constraints of the observer and dehumanizing people to maintain power. The Countess traps the murderesses in an eternally imposed performance in which she condemns them and dehumanizes them and defines them only according to her own conveniences, all for the sake of absolving herself. It recalls the martyrdom of the clown, whose takes on the burden of the audience’s sorrows and endures humiliation for the sake of their pleasure.

“Then she [the Countess] would let them [the imprisoned murderesses] go for, by their salvation, strenuously achieved through meditation on the crime they had committed, they would have procured hers… You could think of this wheel-shaped House of Correction as a kind of prayer-wheel, intended to rescue the Countess who was its hub from perdition, although the only thing in it which rotated like a wheel was herself, on her revolving chair.”

The Countess imprisons the other murderesses in their “performance” for her own benefit, demonstrating that the oppressive nature of the observer lies in the fact that it is self-serving. The religious allusions here recall the allegory of clown as Christ, reinforcing this concept; in the clowns’ case, the observer’s observations were likewise constraining because they were self-serving, which is what made the clown into a martyr. The religious allusion here, likewise, subverts religious symbols into a negative thing that abstracts rather than offers validation of identity.

“So it was an army of lovers who finally rose up against the Countess when the cages opened for the final exercise hour.”

The moment when the prisoners of the Corrections House rebel reinforces the importance of witness in liberation. The “army of lovers” represents their ability to witness each other—love, the ultimate act of witness, returns to them a sense of humanity and frees them from performance and catalyzes their self-determination. This also foreshadows the resolution for Fevvers and Walser in their character arcs in Part 3—through love, they return a sense of self to each other.

“And even when his [the Shaman’s] eyes were open, you might have said the Shaman ‘lived in a dream.’ But so did they all. They shared a common dream, which was their world, and it should rather be called an ‘idea’ than a ‘dream,’ since it constituted their entire sense of lived reality, which impinged on real reality only inadvertently.”

The description of the tribespeople’s beliefs reinforces the theme of the truth in illusion. Although it’s not real, it’s their reality because they’ve decided it is. For them, their illusion is a truth because they validate it through their absolute belief in it as their own truth.

“Do not run away with the idea, from all this, that the Shaman was a humbug who would have been a prize addition to that series of Walser’s ‘Great Humbugs of the World,’ if he’d still been looking for candidates. The Shaman most certainly was not a humbug. His was the supreme form of the confidence trick—others had confidence in him because of his own utter confidence in his own integrity.”

This quote further reinforces the theme of self-determined reality and demonstrates the paradox therein. Although the Shaman is actively lying to the tribespeople, it’s still a truth because he’s interpreting the reality that they all share. Thus, in the illusion lies the truth because he believes it to be so, and so do the other participants in the illusion.

“She [Fevvers] felt her outlines waver; she felt herself trapped forever in the reflection in Walser’s eyes. For one moment, just one moment, Fevvers suffered the worst crisis of her life: ‘Am I fact? Or am I fiction? Am I what I know I am? Or am I what he thinks I am?’”

This moment occurs as part of the climax of the entire narrative. It is the culmination of Fevvers’s character arc, her primary character conflict, and the thematic arc of self-determination and paradox of need for the other within self-determination and the juxtaposition between witness and observer.

“Fevvers, with a strange sense of desperation, a miserable awareness of her broken wing and her discoloured plumage, could think of nothing else to do but to obey. She shrugged off her furs and, though she could not spread two wings, she spread one—lopsided angel, partial and shabby splendour! No Venus, or Helen, or Angel of the Apocalypse, not Izrael or Isfahel…only a poor freak down on her luck, and an object of the most dubious kind of reality to her beholders, since both the men in the god-hut were accustomed to hallucinations and she who looks like a hallucination but is not had no place in their view of things.”

This moment is a large part of the climactic moment, in which Fevvers experiences a true unveiling of herself to others as well as to herself. The use of allusion in this passage de-mystifies Fevvers; alluding to all the mythological characters she’s been abstracted as, both by herself and others, recalls these abstractions to the reader’s minds. Here, Fevvers is denying these symbols. Not only does this quote represent the culmination of Fevvers’s character arc and theme of humanity and self-determination within the novel, but it also reinforces the motif of paradoxes and irony; although Fevvers finally reveals the truth of herself, she still appears as an illusion to the tribespeople, which is ironic because they already believe in so many other illusions.