Publicising the Private: Dressing Room Performances in Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus

Abstract

As liminal spaces between the public and private, women’s dressing rooms are often represented in literary texts as sites within which gender constructs are contested. By engaging with notions of theatre, performativity, carnival and the grotesque, this article examines the ways in which the social fictions of women’s duality are dispelled in Fevvers’ dressing room in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus.