50 pages • 1 hour read
Angela CarterNights at the Circus
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1984A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapters 1-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “St. Petersburg”
Part 2, Chapter 1 Summary
Walser is in St. Petersburg, Russia, touring with Colonel Kearney’s circus as a clown while sending reports back to the news chief in London. Walser recalls his first meeting with Colonel Kearney, a self-proclaimed red-blooded American who hails from Kentucky and dresses in red and white striped pants with a blue starred waistcoat, and Colonel’s incredible pig Sybil, who communicates in English via pointing at letters on alphabet cards to spell out words. Kearney is obsessed with what he calls the “Ludic Game”—that is, the game of making his circus dominant in the entertainment industry—and plans to “conquer” the globe by taking his traveling circus across Siberia to Japan, a feat which has not been accomplished before. Kearney is initially hesitant to hire Walser, but Sybil indicates with her alphabet cards that Walser could serve them as a “clown.” Kearney hires Walser despite his misgivings about Walser’s lack of clowning experience, as Kearney believes that all men make fools of themselves eventually, and so will Walser. Now, Walser lives on “Clown Alley” with the other clowns, in the home of an old Russian woman and her grandson Ivan, whom the old woman cares for alone because Ivan’s mother is a murderess. Walser can never take off his clown makeup or costume, but paradoxically he feels a kind of freedom in this.
Part 2, Chapter 2 Summary
Walser arrives at the circus ring, where he finds the Educated Apes, trained apes kept by Monsieur Lamarck and used in his circus act, hard at work in front of a blackboard. Lamarck is absent today, and although his wife is there with the apes, she pays no attention to them. The Professor, the lead ape, writes something on the blackboard and appears to actually be teaching the other apes; Walser is dumbfounded by this sight, but when the apes are alerted to his presence they immediately stop. The Professor gathers up a bunch of dunce caps and puts one on every ape’s head, and they set to their “forced play,” turning tricks on unicycles and such things that are part of their circus act.
The Professor places a dunce cap on Walser’s head and Walser, inches from the Professor’s face, feels a strange sense of connection and understanding. The Professor takes Walser down to the chalkboard and forces him to undress; meanwhile, the Strong Man enters the ring, and he and Lamarck’s wife have sex. While the two copulate, Walser stands naked in front of the blackboard and the Professor gives his class an anatomy lesson; the Professor prompts Walser to speak aloud while he observes the machinations of Walser’s speech. Sybil interrupts the lesson, running through the ring “as though it were sticking-time” (111); the Colonel follows shortly after, shouting that there is a tiger loose. The apes climb to safety in the rafters, leaving Walser stranded with the other humans. The Strong Man uses his impressive strength to climb out and escape, abandoning Lamarck’s wife, and locks the door behind him. The tiger tears into the ring and advances on Lamarck’s wife; Walser realizes that he must play the hero and rescue her.
Part 2, Chapter 3 Summary
Walser wakes to find Lizzie and Fevvers tending to the scratches he sustained to his arm during his heroics. They are very displeased to find that he has joined the circus, and even more so because they think he was having relations with the Lamarck’s wife. Walser explains that he is undercover at the circus to write a story, and although they are still a little suspicious of him, Lizzie and Fevvers begrudgingly agree to keep his secrets. Walser returns to Clown Alley feeling somewhat “diminished” in their eyes, and he feels that he has confirmed himself as a fool, just as the Colonel said Walser eventually would.
Part 2, Chapter 4 Summary
Over dinner back at Clown Alley, Walser and the clowns listen to the philosophical musings of Buffo the Great, the unofficial leader of their group. Buffo muses on the nature of the clown’s profession, and how they are at once defined by and trapped by their personas. As clowns, they are the objects for people to laugh at, constantly trapped in a farce of life; they get to create their characters as individual clowns, but they become trapped within those identities thereafter. Buffo feels that theirs is an existence of misery and suffering, taking on a Christ-like role and subjecting themselves to endless humiliation for the pleasure of the audience. The clowns finally erupt into a food fight that exemplifies the absurdity of their lives, in conjunction with the humiliation they must become subject and object to. Walser slips outside, where someone suddenly springs from the shadows and falls at his feet sobbing.
Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary
The unknown figure from the previous chapter is Lamarck’s wife, Mignon. Walser takes Mignon to Fevvers’s hotel suite, and Fevvers is extremely annoyed; she thinks that Walser was having an affair with Mignon. Nonetheless, Fevvers provides Mignon with a bath and gives her a hearty meal, all the while communicating with her in German. Mignon’s backstory is revealed: Her father murdered her mother when Mignon was six for sleeping with army men. Afterward, Mignon lived an orphan’s life on the streets until being discovered by a con man who pretended to be a medium who communicates with the dead. This man, Herr M, used Mignon as an actor in his schemes; although he never mistreated her, he didn’t pay her a salary, and she never left his apartment. After Herr M is inevitably arrested for his scam, Mignon makes a living as a barmaid, where she meets Lamarck and the Professor, and she runs away with the circus. Lamarck beats her daily. While Mignon is in the bath at Fevvers’s suite, she begins to sing, “We’ll Go No More A-Rovin.” Fevvers, Lizzie, and Walser are quite certain that Mignon doesn’t know the words, but Fevvers and Walser are moved anyway.
Part 2, Chapter 6 Summary
Walser’s arm is broken after the incident with the tiger, and he feels that he’s become a full-time clown now, since he cannot continue typing his reports due to his injury. Walser realizes that he’s fallen in love with Fevvers, but he feels that she has somehow humiliated him, and that Fevvers and Lizzie are duping him. Distraught and confused, Walser wanders on the banks of the Neva, where he sees the horseman statue of St. Petersburg and ponders it with an odd terror.
Part 2, Chapters 1-6 Analysis
Walser receives the most character development in this chapter grouping, and the direction his character arc will take in the rest of the narrative is established. In taking up the identity of the clown, Walser discovers a kind of freedom in “dissimulation” (103), this builds upon the previous theme on the construction of the self. Just as Fevvers was abstracted from the common definition of humanity in order to be granted humanity, Walser finds himself gaining an identity as he erases himself into the “hollow” identity of the clowns (121). Previously, Walser was a blank character; the irony of him discovering a sense of self-hood in his clown’s act, which constitutes an erasure of his personal identity/humanity, establishes the paradox of the observer in constructing and constraining personal identity. Chaos and order is the governing juxtaposition of Part 2, and the order Walser feels in embracing the chaos of his hollow clown’s identity is paradoxical and reinforces this juxtaposition.
This juxtaposition is evident in Walser’s encounters with the Professor and the Educated Apes, which develops the theme of humanity’s complexity. Walser discovers the relative nature of beastliness in his encounter with the Professor: Walser feels that he’s seen something alien when he comes face-to-face with the Professor (literally), but it’s something that bestows upon Walser a revelation, “the clearing of a haze” (108). In this scene, the chaos of the animals is subverted, and chaos is instead ascribed to humans. While the apes learn an anatomy lesson from the Professor, Mignon and Samson copulate like animals in the background. Although the apes are treated like dumb beasts, the irony in this scene is that they are the ones who are acting uncivilized. The contrast between the refinement and control of the apes and the chaos of the humans’ behavior supports the development of the theme of humanity’s complex nature. Walser’s exclamation of “Oh, what a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How great in faculty!” (111) when the Professor instructs him to speak reinforces this—if this is what it means to be human, than the apes are human too, having demonstrated great intelligence and faculty.
The clowns themselves are particularly emblematic of the chaos and control juxtaposition, which is served by the religious allegory Buffo ascribes to their profession. When Buffo compares the clown to a Christ-like figure, he emphasizes how the clowns have sacrificed an individual sense of self for the sake of the audience’s pleasure; the clowns are barely controlled forces of chaos, their slapstick humor verging on violence saved only by the audience perceiving it as humorous. The chaos also comes from their lost sense of self; although Buffo says that the clown alone is given the freedom to decide their own face and thus their own identity, he also says that “once the choice is made, I am condemned, therefore, to be ‘Buffo’ in perpetuity” (122). Although it gives them a self-created persona, it also takes away their individual sense of self outside of their performance, and, ultimately, without their clown identity, they are merely “An absence. A vacancy” (122), according to Buffo. The paradoxical nature of the clown’s identity exemplifies a chaotic control: the chaos of leaning into the burlesque humor to craft an identity out of nothing, which offers some definition and control; however, the chaos of being without a stable personal identity presents itself as a loss of reason, which foreshadows Buffo’s breakdown at the end of Part 2.
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