“The Spectacle of her Gluttony”: The Performance of Female Appetite and the Bakhtinian Grotesque in Angela Carter'sNights at the Circus

Abstract

Nights at the Circus (1984), set at the turn ofthe twentieth century, is dominated by winged aerialiste Fewers, a woman with the stature of a goddess and an appetite to match. This article explores how Fevvers, as Carters version ofthe New Woman, negoti ates mens and her own appetites in order to claim a share of power. Fevvers refuses the metaphorical and material self-starvation attendant upon conventional paradigms of femininity, instead overtly performing both her appetites (and the pleasure she takes from their satisfaction), and her body?an exemplar ofthe Bakhtinian grotesque, which fla grantly defies patriarchal injunctions of passivity and self-attenuation. Carter?herself a long-term anorexic?utilizes the trope of feminine eating, a locus of gendered power relations, in conjunction with images and metaphors of performance, to comment on how interactions with the social, cultural and physical forces of appetite can reflect and inform contemporary sexual relations in general.