“The Woman Does Not Exist“: Femininity in Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus

Abstract

This paper, a critical study on Angel Carter's Nights at the Circus, probes into the issue of femininity from a Lacanian perspective. Starting with a dialogue between Lacan and feminists like Irigaray and Butler on the issue of femininity as masquerade, the author would try to make explicit how Lacan's conception of femininity and the Woman would shed new light on the reading of this novel, the longest and perhaps the most complicated one of Carter's works. With recourse to Lacan's graph of sexuation and his interpretation of the Woman as a masculine fantasy underlying in patriarchal culture and ideologies, the first part of this paper would elaborate on how the grotesque bird-woman named Fevvers stand for the universal category of the Woman. In the second part, the focus is placed on the entwined connection between femininity as a fantastmatic construct and the feminine ”not-all” in order to map Fevvers's role as a fantasy object. The question whether Carter reveals a resolution to the impasse regarding femininity as masquerade is explored in the third part, where Fevvers's act of spreading her only wing is interpreted as a feminine act in the Lacanian sense, anact that disturbs the masculine fantasy of femininity as well as the patriarchal symbolic contours.