“Are You Watching Closely?”

The Representation of the Spectacular in Neo-Victorian Literature.

 

Declaration of originality

I, Anne-Marie Dentzer, hereby declare that this travail de candidature is all my own

work and that all the references contained within it have been correctly cited and the

original authors acknowledged.

Dentzer Anne-Marie Dudelange, 28th April 2013

 

Dentzer Anne-Marie

Candidat au Lycée de Garçons Esch/Alzette

“Are You Watching Closely?”1

The Representation of the Spectacular in Neo-Victorian Literature.

Esch/Alzette, 2013

                                                                                                               1 Opening line from The Prestige (2006) (Nolan and Nolan 2006: 3).

 

Abstract

1 Research aims

In my thesis I discuss the representation of the spectacle (circus and the music hall)

and magic in neo-Victorian literature, juxtaposing reality to fiction, and traditional

Victorian literature to neo-Victorian fiction. The themes of magic, spiritualism and

entertainment have been quite popular in recent publications and my thesis mainly

deals with the following neo-Victorian novels: Angela Carter’s, Nights at the Circus,

Christopher Priest’s, The Prestige, Erin Morgenstern’s, The Night Circus, Barbara

Ewing’s, The Circus of Ghosts and The Mesmerist, Peter Ackroyd’s, Dan Leno and

the Limehouse Golem, Rosie Garland’s The Palace of Curiosities, and Steven

Millhauser’s short story, ‘Eisenheim the Illusionist’. I also draw onto other neo-

Victorian novels, which have similar themes, but are not set in a circus or music hall,

namely Patricia Duncker, James Miranda Barry, Sarah Waters’ Affinity and George

Moore’s Albert Nobbs. As a number of the above mentioned novels have been made

into films, I also briefly mention the film adaptations.

In my thesis I discuss three major aspects which all centre around the

spectacle, thus the circus and music halls. In the first part I analyse the novels in the

light of postmodern criticism, such as the ontological other and historical metafiction.

The second part deals with the role of the circus, as well as the music halls,

thus more specifically with the aesthetic and ideological aspect in these novels. The

different institutions have specific functions and enable the different characters to

assume roles, which would have been impossible in Victorian times. The specific

novels offer different kinds of performances, ranging from traditional to grotesque to

spiritual ones. The circus and music hall offer some sort of escape to the protagonists,

helping them to flee the real world and live their true identities. By deceiving the

audience as well as the reader, they manage to create an illusion by using magic or

costumes, which enables them to achieve their goals. In my thesis I analyse the

concept of gender and how it can be subverted for different purposes, mainly through

entertainment and deception. Talking of cross-dressing and performance, another vital

concept of the thesis, is Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque.

In the third part I discuss the ethical and ideological aspect of these novels and

discuss how contemporary writers give outcasts and freaks a voice. This argument is

 

rounded off by analyzing whether or not these novels have an ethical purpose or if

they are merely opportunistic. The genre clearly moves away from the Victorian

tradition, as it addresses themes or taboos, if you will, such as homosexuality or cross-

dressing, which were nearly non-existent in Victorian literature.

2 Methodology

Throughout the research and writing process, I kept in touch with my

supervisor, mostly via e-mail. I used all available resources. Moreover, I used the

libraries I had access to, such as the national library of Luxembourg, the University of

Glasgow library, the University of Toronto library, the Victoria and Albert Reading

Room in London, to have ready access to secondary sources.

3 Outcome

By working closely with my supervisor and researching the subject matter

thoroughly, I was able to deepen my knowledge on the topic I had chosen. Thus, I

was be able to analyse the different literary works in the light of literary theory in

order to juxtapose the Victorian tradition to the artificiality of neo-Victorian fiction,

and how the latter gives traditional Victorian outcasts a voice in the modern world.

 

 

Table of Contents

Introduction 9

1. Postmodern Fiction and Victorianism 15

1. Historiographic metafiction 15

2. Fact and fiction 29

3. Becoming the Other 36

4. Technology and magic 55

5. Mesmerism, magic or science? 69

2. The Aesthetic and Ideological Role of the Circus and Music Hall 75

1. The role of the spectacle and entertainment in society 75

2. The circus as microcosm of your society 77

3. The circus and its representation in arts and literature 82

4. The circus and the carnival 87

5. The different natures of magic 96

6. Different kinds of performances on and off stage 98

7. The circus and other means of escape 120

8. The different kinds of prisons 128

3. The Ethical and Ideological Aspect of Neo-Victorian Literature 141

1. The fascination for the Victorian era 141

2. Sensationalism in the nineteenth century and today 144

3. The ethical function of neo-Victorian literature 161

4. The unrepresentable and unspeakable in neo-Victorian literature 164

Conclusion 191

Bibliography 193

Acknowledgements 209

 

9

Introduction

The fascination for the spectacle has always been present in our society. Whereas in

the past it once served as one of the only means of entertainment, in the guise of the

circus, the theatre, or later the cinema, it is now omnipresent in our everyday lives, as

most people in western society have easy access to a wide range of multifarious forms

of entertainment. The hunger for entertainment and diversion is an essential feature in

many cultures and societies, especially in times of crises, social tensions and hardship.

One could go back all the way of human social history and discover how various and

quite often similar concepts were applied to keep people entertained. The Roman

phrase for these socially acceptable and favoured forms of entertainment or downright

political policies could apply through the ages. Juvenal’s panem et circenses, though

taken from the author’s Satires, is a concept which has made its way into mainstream

literature up to this vey day.2 The nature of the spectacle is foremost to offer the

audience a means of escape and maybe allow them to forget the real world if only for

a short period of time.

Despite the fact that modern technology and high-tech home entertainment have

taken much of the mystique pertaining to the more elaborate and sophisticated forms

of entertainment, people are still drawn to some of the more traditional forms of

entertainment, such as the circus or magic shows. It is certainly true that the circus no

longer shares the popularity with the other traditional extravaganzas that it did

decades ago, but one still finds travelling circuses or those which have built a

residency show, choreographed along modern and sometimes refreshingly familiar

concepts, one may only think of the popular Canadian Cirque du Soleil.

The same circus lends itself as an interesting and complex topic for a number of TV

programs and films, such as HBO’s acclaimed Carnivàle (2003-2005) and Tim

Burton’s Big Fish (2003), or a number of novels, such as Nights at the Circus or the

recent bestseller The Night Circus. Victor Hugo’s more obscure novel L’Homme Qui

Rit (2012) has recently been adapted for the cinema, offering viewers a Tim Burton-

like tale set in the seventeenth century. The theme of the circus has also been used in

advertisements or in music videos, such as In this Shirt by the Irrepressibles, which

                                                                                                               2 One may think of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games (2008).

10

shows an extract from an art project entitled The Forgotten Circus (2008) by Shelly

Love.

The nature of the circus still mesmerizes its audience today, as it bears so many

different facets and it incorporates a multitude of acts and different performers.

People can still be surprised by human feats and witness man’s dominion over the

animal world, however small or large, harmless or ferocious. Aspects of the circus

still fascinate the masses today, as they create awe and demonstrate not only the

beauty but also the strength and control of the human body.

When it comes to illusions and magical tricks, it goes without speaking that people

are aware that they are being deceived, but the popularity of magicians such as

Siegfried and Roy or David Blaine, still account for the cravings for magic and

illusions.

From a modern-day perspective, late nineteenth-century western industrialized

countries, for our purpose Britain and the United States, may be considered today to

be ideal nurturing ground for a public thirsting for spectacles, for magicians and their

magic tricks, a time when spiritualism and science were both fighting for authority

and credibility. These were two key topics at the time, and the same society, and its

literature, are still concerned and fascinated by he same dichotomy between science

and mystique, have remained interesting and still providing inspirations for neo-

Victorian authors who have taken up the setting of the circus, music hall, or other

public performances in a number of bestselling novels.

In my thesis I will discuss the representation of the circus and the music hall, as

well as the spectacle and magic in neo-Victorian literature, juxtaposing reality with

fiction, and traditional Victorian literature with neo-Victorian fiction. The themes of

magic, spiritualism and entertainment have been quite popular in recent publications

and my thesis will mainly deal with the following neo-Victorian novels: Angela

Carter’s Nights at the Circus, Christopher Priest’s The Prestige, Erin Morgenstern’s

The Night Circus, Barbara Ewing’s The Circus of Ghosts and The Mesmerist, Peter

Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, Rosie Garland’s The Palace of

Curiosities, and Steven Millhauser’s short story ‘Eisenheim the Illusionist’. I will also

draw onto, or point at other neo-Victorian novels which have similar themes, but are

not set in a circus or music hall, namely Patricia Duncker’s James Miranda Barry,

Sarah Waters’ Affinity and George Moore’s Albert Nobbs. As a number of the above

11

mentioned novels have been made into films, I will also briefly mention the film

adaptations.

The thesis will follow a traditional outline with a main body containing three

main chapters, which will in turn be subdivided.

The first chapter will be rather theoretical and will deal with a number of

postmodern concepts, such as hyperreality and historical metafiction.

In a first part of this chapter, I will argue to what extent the novels that I have

chosen are historical metafictions, and by which means the authors try to render their

novels true to life. Postmodern thinkers that are paramount in this discussion are

Hutcheon and Lukács. I will analyse to what extent history cannot be separated from

fiction, and how the two concepts enable us to make sense of the past.

In the second part, I will draw on the concept of the ontological other, as these

novels clearly play with the notions of fiction and reality, history and History

(“her”story), male and female, gender and genre. In this part I will analyse these

polarities in the light of the different novels, but I will also draw attention to novels

that deal with similar issues without using the setting of the stage, music hall or circus

(James Miranda Barry, Albert Nobbs).

The authors deliberately confuse the readers by mixing fact with fiction to the

extent that we no longer know what is real and what is not. It is at this stage that the

concepts of magic, costume and illusion become more prominent, as they emphasize

the blurring of reality and fiction. The fictional characters as well as the authors play

with these concepts throughout the novels at varying levels, by using fictional

autobiography for example. The question that arises here is who we are listening to,

as the characters deliberately exploit uncertainty and create deception through

manipulation.

I will then move on to discuss the issue of gender in more detail, as the

protagonists intentionally blur the boundaries by cross-dressing for either sexual or

economic reasons. Thus the protagonists become the opposite of what they appear to

be, emphasizing the tension between appearance and reality. This tension is created

through cross-dressing but also by other means, such as medicine and state of the art

technology. On the one hand, the familiar world is haunted by the uncanny, such as

ghosts and the double. But on the other, it becomes clearer that the past and known

world is invaded by modern technology and medicine, through various discoveries,

such as ether, the daguerrotype, and the use of light for special effect.

12

Like the author, the protagonists try to create an illusion or deception.

Baudrillard’s concept of “hyperreality” will be discussed in further detail here, as it

plays with the notion that we no longer face the simulacra real objects but their

referents. In addition, this part will briefly draw on the genre of steampunk, as it

combines elements of science fiction and alternative history.

The second chapter will mainly deal with the concept of the spectacle and

performativity, as well as discuss the aesthetic and ideological role of the circus and

music halls in the novels mentioned earlier. In the first part I will discuss the nature

and role of the circus more generally, focussing on its importance and fascination in

the late nineteenth century. I will also discuss why the spectacle is so prominent in

today’s literature.

Then I will develop my argument further by analyzing the role of the circus

and music hall in the different novels. The circus, stage and music hall offer the

protagonist a different world, a more playful one, where boundaries can be crossed

and social rules broken. They represent microcosms of our society and here Guy

Debord’s La Société du Spectacle is the reference work.

But at the same time, these institutions represent an alternative reality, where

everything is possible, and social hierarchy is not respected. Here an analysis of

Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque will be essential. Thus, the circus and music

hall tie in with the movement of neo-Victorian literature, as they are all playful human

creations. There are no limits and no boundaries to human imagination.

In the following part, I will also analyse the different ideas of magic and illusion.

Thus magic can be understood in its traditional terms, but other notions, such as

medicine and crime, are also regarded as some sort of magic (trick) and performance.

Thus, the spectacle pervades not only the circus but numerous alternative areas.

In the final part of this chapter, I will discuss the role of the circus and music hall

as a means of escape for the audience, the performers, as well as the reader. The

notion of the world being a stage (London as well as the operating theatre), and all

agents being actors is paramount in all these novels. Therefore the concept of

performativity will be discussed in further detail, for example, by drawing onto

gender. Having analysed the escapist function of the spectacle, I will also discuss the

idea that the circus or stage can act as prisons. Foucault’s analysis of the prison is

essential here, as the structure of the Bentham prison is similar to that of a theatre and

enables people to watch the spectacle from different angles. This then will tie in with

13

the concept of voyeurism and constant observation (the gaze), which leads in to the

third and final chapter.

The third and final chapter deals with the ethical aspect of these novels, and the

role played by neo-Victorian literature. All the novels give marginal characters and

outcasts a voice, and thus the authors create alternative stories, something which was

unimaginable in the Victorian era.

In the first part of this chapter I will analyse these outsiders and discuss why they

were not given a voice in the nineteenth century. In addition, I will discuss why there

is a need for these people to be given a voice today and if this is an effective way of

representing them.

In the second part, I will discuss the sensationalist nature of these bestsellers and

why they meet today’s readership’s hunger for fiction. In addition, I will juxtapose

present day with Victorian sensationalist fiction in order to find common

characteristics. By having a closer look at the different themes of the novels, I will

analyse whether or not they are merely opportunistic or if they have a clear and more

profound ethical function.

Thus, I will be able to analyse the different literary works in the light of literary

theory in order to juxtapose the Victorian tradition with the artificiality of neo-

Victorian fiction, and show how the latter gives traditional Victorian outcasts a voice

in the modern world.

     

    15

1 Postmodern Fiction and Victorianism

1.1 Historiographic metafiction

We only have access to the past today through its traces – its documents, the

testimony of witnesses, and other archival materials. In other words, we only

have representations of the past from which to construct our narratives as

explanations. In a very real sense, postmodernism reveals a desire to understand

present culture as the product of previous representations. The representation of

history becomes the history of representation. (Hutcheon 2002: 55)

According to Linda Hutcheon, our present reality is as much a representation of the

present as is the past. Since first hand witnesses are no longer available, scholars have

to reconstruct the past using documents and materials. The latter offer mere

representations of the past, which leave a lot of aspects of the past unexplored and

unexplained. Postmodernism seeks to explain the present by basing itself on historical

texts and therefore, the knowledge of this particular past is crucial. Thus, "postmodern

fiction suggest that to re-write or to re-present the past in fiction and in history is, in

both cases, to open it up to the present, to prevent it from being conclusive and

teleological” (Hutcheon 1988: 110). Hence, history cannot be separated from fiction,

and the two concepts enable us to make sense of the past.

In a first part of this chapter I will explain to what extent the novels that I have

picked are historical metafictions, and by which means the authors try to endow their

novels with a referential dimension that favours effects of verisimilitude. First of all,

it is important to explain what metafiction is before moving on to historical

metafiction. According to Patricia Waugh metafiction can be defined as follows:

Metafictional novels tend to be constructed on the principle of a fundamental

and sustained opposition: the construction of a fictional illusion (as in

traditional realism) and the laying bare of that illusion … to create a fiction and

to make a statement about the creation of that fiction. The two processes are

held together in a formal tension which breaks down the distinctions between

    16

‘creation’ and ‘criticism’ and merges them into the concepts of ‘interpretation’

and ‘deconstruction’. (Waugh 1984: 6)

Postmodern fiction is characterized by polarities, an illusion showing how that

world is re-created. Historical metafiction works in a similar way, as it unites fiction

with historical facts. However, historical metafiction has not always been an

acclaimed and popular genre if one considers the work of Frederic Jameson, who

bases himself on the concept of the simulacrum, the copy of the real object:

Guy Debord’s powerful slogan is now even more apt for the “prehistory” of a

society bereft of all historicity, one whose own putative past is little more than a

set of dusty spectacles. In faithful conformity to poststructuralist linguistic

theory, the past as “referent” finds itself gradually bracketed, and then effaced

altogether, leaving us with nothing but texts. (Jameson 1991: 18)

Jameson’s view when it comes to postmodern literature is rather degrading, as he sees

no historical value in it, and it “merely reproduces nostalgia” (Jameson quoted in

Woods 1999: 55). He considers it to be a mere spectacle rather than profound

research, a representation if you will, offering superficial texts rather than knowledge.

However, considering the popularity of historical metafictions in the recent decades

proves that it is exactly this kind of fiction that a male and mostly female readership

are asking for, as they offer readily accessible fictional historical accounts. The reader

does not need to have a comprehensive understanding of the historical context or

correlations to understand the plot and can become immersed in the intricacies to a

more leisurely degree.

In her novel Affinity, Sarah Waters notes that “any piece of history might be

made into a tale: it was only a question of deciding where the tale began, and where it

ended” (Waters 2000: 7). History is thus given a more superficial rendering, as it is

the one who includes historical details, who decides what to give prominence and

what to leave out. This certainly reflects the concept that history is always written

from varying perspectives, so that “it turned out that there were not only individuals

but whole peoples who we have simply written out of our history” (E.L. Doctorow

quoted in Woods 1999: 54). Therefore, historiographic metafiction has also become

    17

an exercise of filling in gaps or omissions in the received history of the time and

giving the others, the minorities a voice.

According to Linda Hutcheon “historiographic metafiction [is] fictionalized

history with a parodic twist” (Hutcheon 2002: 50). History and facts cannot be

separated from fiction, as once facts are introduced into a fictional account they

become part of the story and turn into a means to an end to render the plot more

authentic. It is Linda Hutcheon who furthers this argument stating that

in fact, the teller – of story or history – also constructs those very facts by

giving a particular meaning to events[; as] facts do not speak for themselves in

either form of narrative; the tellers speak for them, making these fragments of

the past into a discursive whole. (Hutcheon 2002: 56)

By mixing fact and fiction, putting facts into the mouths of the protagonists,

postmodern authors create a dialogue between the present and the past. This

“discursive whole” is paramount in postmodern fiction, as it demonstrates that the

present can only exist through the past and vice versa.

Postmodernism favours a creative process and “re-creating the past, in our own

or others’ images, does not signify the dissolution of a real, fact-based history as

much as it forces its reassertion” (Green-Lewis 2000: 42). By creating a dialogue with

the past, histographic metafiction “zielt zumeist auf eine Vermittlung kultureller

Erinnerung, historische Sinnstiftung und kollektive Identitätskonstruktion”

(Altemöller 2004: 18)3. However, it is worth pointing out that the depiction of history

in historiographic metafiction can never be objective since “history as narrative

account, then, is unavoidably figurative, allegorical, fictive; it is already textualized,

always already interpreted” (Hutcheon 1988: 143). Novelists pick past events to fit

their purpose, and re-write them moulding them to create a narrative dealing with

present concerns. The idiom “history repeating itself” holds true, considering that past

events can be recycled, as similar problems keep recurring in our society.

By using history to back up their work, authors want to render their works more

authentic and address a wider readership. The concept of authenticity dates back to

the Restoration period, when authors such as Aphra Behn and Daniel Defoe’s main                                                                                                                3 “mostly aims at a cultural mediation, historical sensemaking and collective construction of identity” (Altemöller 2004: 18, own translation).

    18

concern was to give an authentic account of a person’s life, as this was the trend of

the time and the readership demanded it. Since one of postmodern literature’s main

characteristics is to mix and to imitate traditional genres, it is not surprising that

contemporary authors attempt to render their novels more authentic and validate them

by using facts and material from the past, thus keeping their novels in the tradition of

historical metafiction, whose rules claim “that which is modelled on historiography to

the extent that is motivated and made operative by a notion of history as a shaping

force (in the narrative and in human history)” (Hutcheon 1988: 113), or even more

elaborately:

Zur Darstellung der Vergangenheit binden zahlreiche historische Erzählungen

historische Dokumente ein. Postmoderne historische Romane übernehmen diese

Methode der Intertextualität, verwenden dabei aber sowohl authentische als

auch pseudo-authentische oder erfundene Dokumente und betonen so die

Subjektivität der Darstellung und die Unmöglichkeit einer validen Darstellung

auf der Basis von dokumentarisch belegten Quellen. (Altemöller 2004: 17)

The question that arises here is certainly whether or not contemporary novelists

are able to recreate the past by merely adding historical facts and details. Historical

fiction is a social construct linking two opposites, as Diana Wallace furthers the

concept stating that: “The very term ‘historical fiction’ is a kind of oxymoron, joining

‘history’ (what is ‘true’/’fact’) with ‘fiction’ (what is untrue’/’invented’, but may aim

at a different kind of truth)” (Wallace 2005: x). Mariaconcetta Costantini argues along

the same lines when stating that

this juxtaposition of fact and fiction, past and present, is problematic, since it

raises the question of defining 'reality' both epistemologically and historically

(i.e. of distinguishing the boundaries between evidence and imagination,

documents and literature, the Victorian world and our world). […] It is only by

merging them together that we get a better sense of the 'reality' of past ages and,

in so doing, detect affinities with the present, which help us rethink our role and

identity. (Costantini 2006: 19)

    19

It is this interplay between fact and fiction which renders postmodernism so

interesting and turns it into a playful genre, and Jennifer Green-Lewis sums this

argument up quite well when, basing herself on Frederick Jameson, she states that:

The magnetic field or “cultural dominant” that is postmodernism should in fact

be understood as forcing discussion of the limits and uses of historical

knowledge, through its continual and obsessive play between the authentic and

the inauthentic (Jameson, 56). (Green-Lewis 2000: 43)

Writers of historical fiction do not aim at re-creating the past per se, but to

create fictions which are set in the past using topics which are very much relevant

today, as “the narrator of metahistorical novels explicitly focuses on issues relating to

historiography and the philosophy of history” (Bormann 2002: 59). The playful nature

of histographic fiction does by no means make it less relevant but enables it to distort

facts for its own purposes, and thus “historiographic metanarratives […] aim to

engage us in a game with their artefactuality” (Heilmann 2009/2010: 39). Hence,

contemporary authors like Peter Ackroyd will simply change Dan Leno’s birth date in

order to make it fit the purpose and render the plot more intriguing.4 By doing so, the

author does not cause any relevant harm to the actual historical person and the reader

himself might not even be aware of this amendment unless he has prior historical

knowledge of the precise sequence of events.5

Ernest Baker’s take on historical fiction distances the genre even more from

mere historical factual accounts, which he regards as more informative:

Historical fiction is not history, but it is often better than history … may easily

teach more and carry a deeper impression than whole chapters of description

and analysis … will probably succeed in making a period live in the

imagination when textbooks merely give us dry bones. (Baker 1968: viii)

                                                                                                               4 For a more in-depth analysis of the manipulation of facts, see Susana Onega, Metafiction and Myth in the Novels of Peter Ackroyd (Onega 1999: 143-144) 5 Peter Ackroyd’s rendition of Dan Leno is more or less true to life, as he does not distort the biography of Dan Leno. However, postmodern artists are prone to parodying history by completely changing historical facts.

    20

The writer and the reader are well aware that historical metafiction is an

artificial construct, which re-creates the past mixing fact with fiction. Thus historical

metafiction is conceived to be sold on the mainstream market, thus be made available

to a wider readership. The latter consists of readers seeking to read a captivating plot

set in a given historical context, and they thus indulge in the story as well as the

historical knowledge they gain. However, historical fiction has made its way into

academic research and is by no means to be ignored and denoted as an opportunistic

genre. The authors of historical fiction, such as Sarah Waters, are oftentimes

academics who research the period or subject matter thoroughly. Ernest Baker, who is

very much in favour of the genre, has a similar take on this, arguing that:

The historical novel is as sincere and valid reconstruction as the best efforts of

the serious historian, and much the same methods are employed. Neither can

possibly be more than an approximation to the reality; neither can help us do

anything but a partial realization of the past which is no more. (Baker 1968:

viii)

The readership, like the audience of a magical séance, is aware that they are

being duped and they willingly accept this. In a sense historical metafiction and magic

or illusions share similarities, to quote Michael Mangan:

Magicians, as we have seen, have traditionally blurred the line between truth

and reality. A world characterized by the hyper-real, by the ‘precession of

simulacra’, and by a distrust of the rational, a world in which traditional

epistemological distinctions, hierarchies and categories have been replaced by

relativism, and where ‘the real and the imaginary continually collapse into each

other’ seems like fertile ground for the magician. (John Storey quoted in

Mangan 2007: 173)

Alfred Borden points this out at the beginning of The Prestige:

The performer is of course not a sorcerer at all, but an actor who plays the part

of a sorcerer and who wishes the audience to believe, if only temporarily, that

he is in contact with darker powers. The audience, meantime, knows that what

    21

they are seeing is not true sorcery, but they suppress the knowledge and

acquiesce to the selfsame wish as the performer’s. The greater the performer’s

skill at maintaining the illusion, the better at this deceptive sorcery he is judged

to be. (Priest 2004: 33)

This passage clearly reflects Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin’s statement that “a

conjuror … is an actor playing the part of a magician” (Robert Houdin quoted in

Mangan 2007: 97). In this interplay between fact and fiction, the reader is conscious

that he is reading fiction, and unless he or she are knowledgeable about the past do

not even make a difference between what is real and what is made up.

Thus the magician’s trade is based on illusion, and audience and readership are

prepared to accept the terms of the ‘contract’ they entered into with the author or the

performer:

Well, tricks and illusions are based on deception, but on ingenuous deception.

The rules of the “game” are such that the performer must deceive the viewers

and the viewers ardently wish to be deceived and to remain in a state of blissful

ignorance as to what happened to the card that has just been in the hands of the

enchanter, in what way a rabbit has appeared in the empty box or how a wave of

the magic wand has caused a cherry orchard to blossom out of the circus arena.

(Anon. 1988, np)

The spectators are fully aware that they are being deceived and that there needs to be

an explanation for the trick that they are witnessing. This concept of deception is dealt

quite cleverly in The Night Circus, by having Alexander or the man in the grey suit

conclude that people “want to believe that magic is nothing but clever deception,

because to think it real would keep them up at night, afraid of their own existence”

(Morgenstern 2011: 380).

Slavoj Žižek furthers this idea by arguing that “they [the spectators] know very

well how things really are, but still they are doing it as if they did not know [;] the

illusion is therefore double: it consists in overlooking the illusion which is structuring

our real, effective relationship to reality” (Žižek 1989: 32-33). In her novel The Night

Circus, Erin Morgenstern plays with this concept and subverts the idea by exposing

    22

magicians and their tricks but at the same time claiming that theirs is real magic. Thus

Hector Bowen argues:

“Not a single person in that audience believes for a second that what I do up

there is real,” he says, gesturing in the general direction of the stage. “That’s the

beauty of it. Have you seen the contraptions these magicians build to

accomplish the most mundane feats? They are a bunch of fish covered in

feathers trying to convince the public they can fly, and I am simply a bird in

their midst. The audience cannot tell the difference beyond knowing that I am

better at it.” (Morgenstern 2011: 13)

A similar idea can be found in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus, as “in a secular

age, an authentic miracle must purport to be a hoax, in order to gain credit in the

world” (Carter 2006: 16). Fevvers, the main protagonist, does reveal her secret to

Walser stating that

I commenced to dye my feathers at the start of my public career on the trapeze,

in order to simulate more perfectly the tropic bird. In my white girlhood and

earliest years, I kept my natural colour. […] Now, that’s my dreadful secret, Mr

Walser, to tell the whole truth and nothing but, the only deception which I

practise on the public! (Carter 2006: 25)

The authors of the two novels play with the notion of performance and subvert the

traditional order of things. Since people are used to being deluded, to be exposed to

the unreal, they cannot take reality in and have to be confronted with a fake version.

This certainly ties in with Slavoj Žižek’s argument that in society, individuals

“are acting as if nobody exists behind the relation between things” (30) [and] “it is not

the reality” but “the illusion which is structuring their reality, their social activity”

(32), so “they know very well how things really are, but they are doing it as if they

did not know” (32) (Žižek quoted in Lindner 2003: 76-77).

Part of the illusionist’s show is indeed to act in order to render the show even

more spectacular. A magician, like an actor, can adopt different roles, as Bouisaac

puts it:

    23

By using illusionary techniques, a magician can also appear to be a master of

bonds (escapism), a master of life and death (knifing, beheading, or

dismemberment of a person whose bodily integrity is eventually restored), and a

master of the mind (guessing hidden facts and hypnotizing persons and

animals). These aspects of magic acts relate differently to other constituents of

the cultural context as well as to other circus acts, such as death-defying

acrobatics and apparent control of wild animals […]. (Bouissac 1976: 80)

Priest furthers this idea of the real and the unreal by transposing it onto the

illusionist’s trade and also onto the narrator of The Prestige, Alfred Borden. Hence,

Borden is deliberately confusing the reader by not revealing his real motives:

Already, without once writing a falsehood, I have started the deception that is

my life. The lie is contained in these words, even in the very first of them. It is

the fabric of everything that follows, yet nowhere will it be apparent.

I have misdirected you with the talk of truth, objective records and motives. Just

as it is when I show my hands to be empty I have omitted the significant

information, and now you are looking in the wrong place.

As every stage magician well knows there will be some who are baffled by this,

some who will profess to a dislike of being duped, some who will claim to

know the secret, and some, the happy minority, who will simply take the

illusion for granted and enjoy the magic for the sake of entertainment. (Priest

2004: 34)

Priest himself is talking through Borden, as both men are creating a false reality. It is

quite striking to note that this idea of creating oneself is part of the history of

magicians. Michael Mangan notes that “in the history of stage magic it is virtually a

cliché to say that one of Houdini’s greatest tricks was the creation of Houdini; like so

many clichés, however, this points to an important truth” (Mangan 2007: 181). Like

the magician, Priest has created an illusion, a mysterious character, who is able to

manipulate the reader and grasp his or her attention. Despite gaining some historical

insight, one must not forget that it is a fictive story one is reading, to quote De Groot:

    24

Historical novels are keenly interested in the interaction between what is

‘known’ and what is made up, querying, for instance the deployment of

varieties of quoted ‘evidence’, which is often literary, therefore highlighting the

innate textuality of history, to frame a persuasive narrative, and the use of the

realist mode to present a story which is clearly fiction. (De Groot 2009: 113)

De Groot’s quotation underlines the historical novel’s playful nature and its

ability not only to mix fact and fiction, but also different genres. Linda Hutcheon

underlines this argument by stating that “unlike the documentary novel as defined by

Barbara Foley, what I have been calling postmodern fiction does not “aspire to tell the

truth” (Foley 1986a: 26) as much as to question whose truth gets told” (Foley quoted

in Hutcheon 1988: 117). Historiographic metafiction consciously fools the reader but

it “always asserts that its world is both resolutely fictive and yet undeniably

historical” (Hutcheon, 1988: 142), and is aware of this role.

Hence, it clearly contrasts with the historical novel of the nineteenth or

eighteenth centuries, such as Scott’s Ivanhoe, which adamantly defended their

authenticity and veracity. It is clear that herein lies the difference between historical

novels and historiographic metafiction, to quote Linda Hutcheon:

The interaction of the historiographic and the metafictional foregrounds the

rejection of the claims of both ‘authentic’ representation and ‘inauthentic’ copy

alike, and the very meaning of artistic originality is as forcefully challenged as

the transparency of historical referentiality. (Hutcheon 1988: 110)

Changing facts is on the one hand one of the strengths of the genre but on the other, it

is also its weakness to quote De Groot: “Much criticism of the historical novel

concerns its ability to change fact, and indeed those who attack the form are often

concerned with its innate ability to encourage an audience into being knowingly

misinformed, misled and duped” (De Groot 2009: 6). A means to mix fact with fiction

is to introduce real past figures, as can be seen in The Mesmerist, The Prestige, and

most notably Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem. In her novel The Mesmerist,

Barbara Ewing, tries to render the plot more authentic by introducing prominent

people from the time, such as Professor Elliotson, Charles Dickens, or William

Wordsworth. Having researched the subject matter, these references are certainly

    25

appropriate and historical. In The Mesmerist, a newspaper article by William

Wordsworth is quoted in which he compares mesmerism to the railway: “…

Mesmerism is one of the many expressions of a prevailing fever of the novel, the

technological, that threatens to destroy the fragile peace, the slow pace and the

pastoral world in which life should be lived” (Ewing 2007: 132).

Cordelia does not take his words seriously and undermines his words, by simply

claiming that he is an idiot. The given quotation was not expressed by Wordsworth

himself but by Alison Winter in her publication on mesmerism (Winter 1998: 152).

There is clear evidence though that Wordsworth was not in favour of mesmerism, as

revealed in Memoirs of Will: In Two Volumes:

He discussed mesmerism very agreeably, stating strongly his detestation of

clairvoyance; not only on the presumption of its being altogether false, but

supposing it, for argument sake, to be true, then he thinks it would be an engine

of enormous evil, putting it in the power of many malicious person to blast the

character of another, and shaking to the very foundations the belief in individual

responsibility. He is not disposed to reject without examination the assertions

with regard to the curative powers of mesmerism. (Wordsworth 1851: 455)

Wordsworth’s point of view reflects the thinking of the time, and mesmerism was

indeed a controversial issue, as it was regarded as fraud, which served knowledgeable

men as a financial opportunity to cheat a gullible followership.

The same accounts for Sarah Waters, as the characters’ names hint at

Victorian transvestite performers, such as Hetty King, by naming her protagonist Nan

King.6 Linda Hutcheon explains that “the real figures of the past are deployed to

validate or authenticate the fictional world by their presence, as if to hide the joins

between fiction and history in a formal and ontological sleight of hand” (Hutcheon

1988: 114).

In her study on history and cultural memory, Kate Mitchell suggests that “the

historical novel has always been invested in historical recollection and aware of the

                                                                                                               6 For a thorough study of the (re)presentation of the male impersonator on the Victorian music hall stage see Allison Neal, ‘(Neo-)Victorian Impersonations: Vesta Tilley and Tipping the Velvet’ (Neal 2011: 55-76)

    26

partial, provisional nature of such representations” (Mitchell 2010: 4). This

emphasizes the notion of postmodernism being aware of the way it functions, and that

it consciously uses intertextuality. Mitchell furthers her argument by stating that the

Victorian age is no longer chained to academic studies, and that today mainstream

historical accounts create a dialogue with a wider readership (Mitchell 2010: 4).

Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem is rendered authentic by mixing fiction

with documents, and Susan Onega notes that it is a type of historical fiction that has

been coined “romance of the archive” (Onega 2011: 269). Suzanne Keen defines this

type of historical fiction “in which scholarly and amateur characters seek information

in collections of documents […in order to] unabashedly interpret the past through its

material traces” (Keen 2001: 3). In this type of fiction “characters are transformed,

wrongs righted, disasters averted, villains exposed, crimes solved” (Keen 2001: 4).

Postmodernism enables writers to create new stories using factual evidence and there

are no limits to the imagination. However, Keen’s argument is striking in the sense

postmodern writers are not the only ones using historical facts. This same technique

was used by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, “who had long filled [their] own

works with sensational elements, and [were] fascinated by murder [so that their]

source material included press reports of contemporary murder cases” (Diamond

2003: 3). The Victorian writers’ opportunistic drive led them to take advantage of the

readership’s hunger for the sensational and use topics and real criminal cases as

inspirations for their own work. Sensational elements were crucial to the novel’s

popularity to the extent that Margaret Oliphant noted: “A book without a murder, a

divorce, a seduction, or bigamy, is not apparently considered worth either writing or

reading; and a mystery and a secret are the chief qualifications of the modern novel”

(Oliphant cited in Radford 2008: 2).

Peter Ackroyd and Barbara Ewing have clearly taken up this method and re-

worked it into their own works, turning them into pastiches by mimicking

sensationalist fiction.

Peter Ackroyd uses this idea of doing research in his own novel Dan Leno and

the Limehouse Golem, as it features “the plot action of ‘doing research’ in

documents” (Keen 2001: 3). Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem keeps to the

tradition of the romance of the archive as it incorporates different means, such as

newspaper articles and extracts from the trial of Elizabeth Cree, to render the novel

more authentic. In addition, the novel offers the reader different perspectives and a

    27

more personal and intimate insight through the use of a diary. The concept of

research is furthered in Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem by introducing

prominent contemporaries, such as George Gissing and Karl Marx.

By using their own imagination and mixing it with historical facts, their novels

partake of the concept of fictional history, as Gertrude Himmelfarb puts it:

[The] postmodernist imagination is uninhibited and unapologetic. It is then,

liberated from the delusion of “fact fetishism” and persuaded of the “fictive”

nature of all history, that creative interpretation may take the form of fictional

history […] Postmodernism entices us with the siren call of liberation and

creativity, but it may be an invitation to intellectual and moral suicide.

(Himmelfarb 1997: 164-5, 173)

It is precisely this call for liberation and creativity that can be found in Angela

Carter’s Nights at the Circus. Like Ackroyd, Carter drops names of Victorian public

figures in order to set her tale in a well-defined historical context, but at the same time

her story is full of fantastical and grotesque elements. Thus, the author is taking the

plot beyond historical metafiction because it “does not belong to ‘authentic history’ [;

as] it offers, instead, a kind of fantasy history, weaving its stories in and across the

gaps, silences and pregnant shadows of recorded fact” (Waters’ introduction to Carter

2006: viii). Like the body of the text, Fevvers’ body reconciles the different

characteristics of postmodern literature and the polarity of historiographic

metafiction:

Lady of the hub of the celestial wheel, creature half of earth and half of air,

virgin and whore, reconciler of fundament and firmament, reconciler of

opposing states through the meditation of your ambivalent body, reconciler of

the grand opposites of death and life, you who come to me neither naked nor

clothed, wait with me for the hour when it is neither dark nor light, that of dawn

before daybreak, when you shall give yourself to me but I shall not possess you.

(Carter 2006: 93)

Intertextuality and self-reflexiveness are crucial to Carter’s novel and in the

fashion of Baron Munchausen, Fevvers keeps inventing herself indulging in her very

    28

own [his]tory; to quote Aidan Day: “It is a rewriting of the historical events from a

feminine perspective and in that sense Nights at the Circus is a ‘herstorical’ rather

than a ‘historical novel’” (Day 1998: 185). It is Lizzie who needs to remind Fevvers

of who she really is and who watches that Fevvers does not get entangled in her own

fantastic tale: “This time it was Lizzie who kicked furiously at Fevvers’ ankle and the

girl never missed a beat of her narrative but went smoothly on a different tack”

(Carter 2006: 62).

Research into and writing on history has on the main been done by men, and

they concentrate predominantly on male historical figures. In addition, women were

largely ignored in classical historical writing, which was a male dominated genre. By

making Fevvers the protagonist of her novel, Carter invades a patriarchal genre. Thus,

the historical novel written by Carter takes on yet another dimension, as it is also a

commentary “in a coded way on the issues of the day” (Wallace 2005: 4). Diana

Wallace defines the genre of the historical novel in a four-point synopsis:

In its use of a particular period for its fictional setting; in its engagement with

the historical moment (social, cultural, political and national) of its writing; in

its relation to the personal life history of the writer herself; and in its relation to

literary history, most obvious in the intertextual use of earlier texts. (Wallace

2005: 4)

Erin Morgenstern’s novel The Night Circus differs from the earlier mentioned

historical metafictions, as it does not contain any historical facts or historical figures

as such. Quite on the contrary, it becomes a self-contained unit, as all the characters

are made up but are made to seem like authentic historical characters. This is shown

through the imitation of traditional elements, for example the use of epigraphs, a

device that was often used in Victorian novels. According to Christian Gutleben “the

epigraph is a sort of playbill: and advertisement, a summary and a miniature

reproduction of the novel. Considering these fundamental purposes, the epigraph is

necessarily chosen for its aura and prestige, […]” (Gutleben 2001: 18). However,

Gutleben bases his argument on authors using extracts from other novels as their

epigraphs. Morgenstern does not use other writers’ voices, but creates her own

epigraphs by quoting the fictional characters from her novel. Thus, she is imitating the

Victorian novel and its format, thereby keeping to the tradition of the pastiche, and it

    29

is in the latter that “contemporary fiction striv[ing] after the Victorian model can best

be seen” (Gutleben 2001: 84).

The novel refuses to mention historical figures and bases itself on fictive

characters, such as characters from Shakespearean plays, the most prominent being

The Tempest, namely Prospero and his daughter Miranda.

To conclude, historiographic metafiction creates a dialogue between past and

fiction, and it can fill gaps. Creativity and freedom of writing enable authors to re-

recreate the past in their own words, and mix it with contemporary concerns. They

use historical facts as well as postmodern elements to back up their stories. However,

the question whether or not we can re-create the past in fiction remains. But it is

worth adding that it is not the writers’ intention to accurately re-create the past but to

write their version, and therefore, historiographic metafiction is always subjective. By

mixing creative elements and concerns of today, the authors deliberately create a

distance between the past and the present, and they also make their stories available to

a wider readership. Today’s readers are well aware that they are not reading proper

historical accounts, and like the audience of a magical séance or an illusion, they

know that they are being tricked and that they are reading mere fiction. Hence, the

authors take on the role of the magicians, who use their creativity and the playful

nature of postmodern fiction to enchant their readers. Gutleben’s argument becomes

even more appropriate in the context of this thesis, as he compares the author John

Fowles to a magician: “Fowles wants to perform fictional magic and to reveal the

secrets of the magic, he wants to provide the reader with a new vision of history and

to disclose how he proceeds to impart this new vision” (Gutleben 2001: 116).

1.2 Fact and Fiction

Like historiographic metafiction, the spectacle plays with the concept of the

ontological other and offers a world of fact and fiction, the real and unreal. This is

certainly a characteristic of the circus, which plays with the notions of truth and

deception. In his work on the circus, Paul Bouissac states that “a commonplace which

frequently recurs in the critical discourse about the circus is that its spectacles are true

and genuine [and adds that] another commonplace of the discourse is that it is a world

    30

of lies and deceptions” (Bouissac 2012: 199). These lies and deceptions can take on

different guises ranging from illusions to men dressing as women to women

pretending to be birds. However, Bouissac argues that for example “the acrobat who

walks on a high wire cannot cheat [and that] he or she actually does this in front of the

spectators’ eyes” (Bouissac 2012: 199). The Night Circus plays with these notions of

fact and fiction by taking on a mixture of different forms, such as the diary and

quotations by real writers and characters from the novel.

In addition this game between the real and fake is furthered in The Night Circus

with the idea that among the magicians we can distinguish between real men of the

trade and mere charlatans: “I cannot say I approve of such exhibitions,” the man in

the grey suit says […]. “Passing off manipulations as tricks and illusion. Charging

admission” (Morgenstern 2011: 13).

The two men take on a superior attitude, as they are real magicians looking

down on would be ones. According to them, one cannot pay a price for magic, as it is

beyond mere spectacle. Hector Bowen furthers the idea by stating that he “can’t be

too good if [he wants] them to believe [he’s] as fake as the rest of them”

(Morgenstern 2011: 14).

Morgenstern’s novel exposes magic as being real on the one hand and fakery on

the other. The first is to be considered a serious even dangerous art, whereas the

second is just a means of pure entertainment. This idea is furthered by Mr Barris, the

engineer, architect and proprietor of the circus, when talking to Marco Alistair: “I

believe stage magicians employ engineers to make their tricks appear to be something

that they are not. In this case, I provide the opposite service, helping actual magic to

appear clever construction” (Morgenstern 2011: 146).

This passage reflects the difference between real and fake illusions, and claims that

real magic exists but that it needs to be concealed and disguised as mere trickery. Mr

Barris and Marco are both engineers if you will, but Mr Barris being an actual

architect works with his hands in order to create machinery that is visible and

tangible. Marco, an illusionist like Celia Bowen, is the engineer and collaborative

partner behind the construction, keeping it alive in his mind and in a little room. The

resemblance with Ariadne from Christopher Nolan’s film Inception (2010) is quite

striking, as both construct the fantasy and dream-like worlds. Nolan’s film and The

Night Circus are very much alike as they both deal with the unconscious and dreams,

    31

and how magicians or specifically trained people are able to control or manipulate

other people’s or the audience’s minds.7

The circus in The Night Circus is far from being perfect and exempt from

possible threats, which is also reminiscent of the vulnerable and created worlds in

Inception but also in Matrix (1999). Like the audience, most of the performers in

Morgenstern’s novel are part of the circus but they are not aware to what extent their

lives are linked to it by an invisible thread. Once they start doubting the circus, the

way Tara Burgees does (“I think many things about the circus strange” (Morgenstern

2011: 151)), the circus starts crumbling.8 It is she who states that she is “finding it

difficult to discern between asleep and awake” (Morgenstern 2011: 152), which

echoes Nolan’s Inception once more. Caught up in her own dilemma and not being

able to keep the real from the dream world, she comes close to lunacy. Her doubt is

also her death sentence, as the ones keeping the circus alive cannot allow it to falter

and need to maintain its integrity from within. This idea is certainly not a new one,

and has often been depicted in novels and films alike. Once a sheep turns errant, it

either needs to be taken back to the flock or be eliminated. The performers are not

only observed by the audience who enjoys the spectacle but also by the circus’

creators, who want to keep it alive and cannot allow flaws. This idea of observation

comes close to a dystopian state where people are not allowed to swim against the

stream, as Tsukiko points out at Tara’s funeral:

“We are fish in a bowl, dear,” Tsukiko tells her, cigarette holder dangling

precariously from her lips. “Very carefully monitored fish. Watched from all

angles. If one of us floats to the top, it was not accidental. And if it was an

                                                                                                               7 It goes without saying that the juxtaposition of the real and the unreal, as well as dream-like states are dear and common themes when it comes to Christopher Nolan’s films, such as Memento, The Prestige and Inception. Baudrillard’s influence on Nolan’s films is not to be ignored, as the concept of hyperreality is demonstrated in the dreamlike states of the protagonists, who no longer know whether or not they are in the real world or dreaming. This blurring of dreams and reality is also dominant in The Night Circus, the difference being that the audience is not aware that their minds are being manipulated as they think that there is some magic trick behind the performance they are observing. It is in The Prestige that the audience and the reader are being challenged to watch closely in order to understand the mystery behind the performance. There are numerous similarities between The Night Circus and Christopher Nolan’s work, another one being Tsukiko. Like Leonard Shelby in Memento (2000), Tsukiko uses tattoos to document her story: “I tired of writing things in books, so I began inscribing them on my body instead” (Morgenstern 2011: 344). 8 A similar idea can be found in Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009), where audience members can explore their own imaginations.

    32

accident, I worry that the watchers are not as careful as they should be”.

(Morgenstern 2011: 188)

Being mere fish makes the performers vulnerable and at the same time demonstrates

that they are kept within a confined space unable to escape. Kept in a bowl, a circular

container similar to a circus, or even a prison if one considers Bentham’s

construction, allows the observer to permanently keep an eye on the performers. Once

someone does not keep to the rules or starts to doubt the circus, they are eliminated,

often making it look like an accident. This is once more reminiscent of The Matrix,

where Agent Smith, a computer program, was generated to keep stability.

The entertainment business seeks to find new means to make its audience even more

fascinated, but this has certainly become a hard task. Spectators today are used to

seeing gory and unusual spectacles every day in a variety of visual media. Ackroyd

plays with this new social media phenomenon in Dan Leno and the Limehouse

Golem. In a grotesque plot even death becomes yet another variety act and is not

taken seriously anymore, as this passage demonstrates: “Yes but, as you say, the

atmosphere surrounding [the deaths], the newspaper paragraphs, the crowds of

spectators – it’s like being in some kind of penny gaff or theatre of variety” (Ackroyd

1995: 205). The irony of this passage lies in the fact that here we have Dan Leno, an

actor, speaking, someone whose trade it is to deceive and/or entertain people. Now, he

has reached the point where the grotesque murders lead him to doubt the authenticity

of the crimes. The murders are turned into a spectacle, like a show trial, which

everyone can follow and be his or her own judge. This was certainly the case in the

Victorian age, where trials were sensations and people followed their outcomes

attentively. In his work on sensationalist fiction, Michael Diamond makes an

interesting point when referring to the trial of Madeleine Smith: “As defendants

accused of murder were not allowed to give evidence Madeleine was a spectator at

her own trial – but also, because all eyes were on her, part of the spectacle” (Diamond

2003: 6). Our society has certainly not changed in this respect, which would explain

the present craze for a number of show trial programs, such as Judge Judy, or murder

case programs, such as Cold Case or the CSI series.

Ackroyd constantly plays with the notions of fact and fiction, leaving the

audience and also the readers flabbergasted. The two concepts become even more

    33

prominent towards the end of the novel, before and during the performance of The

Crees of Misery Junction, a play that is supposedly based of the lives of John and

Elizabeth Cree. The melodrama is John Cree’s problem child, as he does not find the

inspiration to finish it, and therefore, his wife decides to do it for him. Once Elizabeth

is sentenced to death, the play is amended, by adding “some topical references”

(Ackroyd 1995: 276). Like the author, the performers strive to render their

performance as real to life as possible: “An additional touch of authenticity was

afforded by the players themselves: the part of Elizabeth Cree was taken by Eveline

Mortimer, who was headlined on the bills as ‘The Woman Who Was There’”

(Ackroyd 1995: 277).

At the end of the novel during the performance of The Crees of Misery

Junction, the audience and the reader are left to judge whether the hanging was real or

not: “The critics from the Post and Morning Advertiser were also transfixed but, even

as they marvelled at the scene, they knew that they would eventually dismiss it as

‘pantomimic’ and ‘unreal’” (Ackroyd 1995: 280). It is quite striking that the theme of

hanging as a form of capital punishment is recurrent in neo-Victorian literature, as it

is also used in The Prestige for example. Like in Ackroyd’s novel, the act of hanging

becomes a performance, a make-belief. Whereas, the two women in Dan Leno and

the Limehouse Golem die in the process, hanging is very much an act in The Prestige.

A similar idea can be found in The Night Circus, the night when Herr Friedrick

Thiessen is killed. The audience is used to being entertained in the circus and thus

makes no difference between an act and real death: “The handful of patrons who

witness the event are ushered quickly away. Later they assume it was a clever stunt. A

touch of theatricality for the already festive evening” (Morgenstern 2011: 281).

Ackroyd is very much aware of the interplay of fact and fiction and in his

novel Gissing concludes that “it is not that human beings cannot bear too much

reality, it is that human beings cannot bear too much artifice” (Ackroyd 1995: 280).

This phrase clearly echoes and deconstructs T.S. Eliot’s lines “that human kind

cannot bear very much reality” (Eliot 1943: 4). Human beings are surrounded by

misery and they are able to cope every day, despite looking for means of escape and

distraction. Gissing’s statement in the novel is rather modern in the sense that in

today’s society we are overwhelmed by means of distraction and a never ceasing

development of new ways of entertainment. Reality is what we are familiar with, as

we have always had to deal with it, whereas modern technology is invading our world

    34

and it is getting more and more difficult to adapt and assimilate what we are presented

with every day. Hence, dealing with what Gissing terms “artifice” is becoming more

and more problematic as we no longer know how to handle the masses of new

information and technology to the extent that distinguishing the real from fiction is

getting more difficult as well.

The method of mixing fact and fiction enables neo-Victorian writers to create

new plots using the same means Victorian writers used. However, neo-Victorian

fiction is not without its controversies, as Mariaconcetta Constantini argues:

This juxtaposition of fact and fiction, past and present, is problematic, since it

raises the question of defining 'reality' both epistemologically and historically

(i.e. of distinguishing the boundaries between evidence and imagination,

documents and literature, the Victorian world and our world). (Constantini

2006: 19)

Using the stage or the circus as settings for their novels or their stories, the authors

discussed here not only transform their narratives into microcosms of our society, but

they also emphasize the concept that history and the spectacle are entangled. Thus, the

reading process can be compared to becoming immersed in history, as we, as readers

or spectators, are involved directly and indirectly, as Hutcheon even claims that “we

are both spectators of and actors in the historical process” (Hutcheon 1988: 123). The

reader reads the novel but at the same time shapes it, as he or she interprets it in a

given way. In addition, the blurring nature of the circus is interesting in postmodern

studies as it offers numerous facets and can be interpreted at different levels, as it is

not linear and reflects the notions of plurality and polarities, to quote Linda Hutcheon:

The multi-ringed circus becomes a pluralized and paradoxical metaphor for a

decentered world where there is only ex-centricity. Angela Carter’s Nights at

the Circus combines this freak-circus framework with contestings of narrative

centering: it straddles the border between the imaginary/fantastic (with the

winged woman protagonist) and the realistic/historical, between a unified

biographically structured plot, and a decentered narration, with its wandering

point of view and extensive digressions. (Hutcheon 1988: 61)

    35

Hence, the circus clearly plays with the notions of fiction and reality, history and

History (or “her”story), masculinity and femininity, gender and genre. The so-called

“Other” has been accepted in the circus world, as social norms are turned upside

down and therefore, all sorts of outcasts are accepted. As the circus crosses

boundaries in terms of accepting the other, it does not keep to other norms either.

Thus, ‘the circus disturbed the seemingly safe staged distance between self and Other

because it was interactive: the entertainer-as-Other was a central part of the circus;

consequently audiences were always vulnerable as they unwittingly became part of

the “show”’ (Davis 2002: 27-28).

It is at this stage that the concepts of magic, costume and illusion become

more prominent, as they emphasize this blurring of reality and fiction. The fictional

characters as well as the authors play with these concepts throughout the novels at

different levels, by using autobiography for example. The question that arises here is

who are we listening to, as the narrators deliberately exploit uncertainty and create

deception through manipulation.

Historiographical metafiction deliberately mixes fact and fiction, and the novels

discussed here work similarly, as they juxtapose the spectacle, illusions and magical

séances with the real world. In addition, they even mix illusions and real magic.

Therefore, the authors and the characters, like the magicians, deliberately deceive the

readers and the audience. Literature and magic share a similar nature as they offer

make-belief performances, and enable their consumers to escape a reality, which has

become too much to bear. The readers and the audience are turned into actors as well

as spectators in the microcosm that is the circus and the spectacle. Like society, the

circus offers numerous facets and in this topsy-turvy world enables us to cross

boundaries and therefore, outcasts are welcome.

    36

1.3 Becoming the Other

Post-modernist studies have revaluated the notion of the self by defining it as a

socially shaped construct9. The idea of construction is universally applicable, and also

accounts for the Victorian period, an era deeply fascinated by the notion of the self.

Jonathan Skinner argues that “whether in Victorian or contemporary times, this

occurs in much the same way that different nations obtain a construction of ‘self’,

defining ‘us’ by constructing ‘you’, frequently deforming the ‘other’ in the process:

here civilization, there barbarity” (Skinner 1998: 259). Judith Butler is right in

“stating that individuals are shaped by dominating conventions” (Butler 2006: 10-11)

but at the same time one is led by the illusion that one can act according to one’s will

and play along in society by performing in a certain way. The idea of constructing the

self is taken up in another neo-Victorian novel, Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus,

in the grotesque metaphor of the clown Buffo who exclaims: “We make ourselves”

(Carter 2006: 141). I will now move on to discuss the issue of gender in more detail, as the

protagonists deliberately blur the boundaries by cross-dressing for either sexual or

economic reasons. Today drag is perceived as entertaining, women and men can

enjoy drag shows. However, cross-dressing or transsexuality for sexual reasons make

people still feel uncomfortable. Despite recent films, such as Laurence Anyways

(2012), which deal with the subject of drag, cross-dressing and transsexuality, these

notions are still taboos in our society. Marjorie Garber argues that

cross-dressing can be “fun” or “functional” so long as it occupies a liminal

space and a temporary time period; after this carnivalization, however, whether

it is called “Halloween” (in “Princetown” or “green world” (in Shakespeare),

the cross-dresser is expected to resume life as he or she was, having,

presumably, recognized the touch of “femininity” or “masculinity” in her or his

otherwise “male” or “female” self. (Garber 1992: 70)

                                                                                                               9 Cf. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: on the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (Butler 1993: xi) and Gender Trouble (Butler 1993: 10-11).

    37

Society accepts cross-dressing if it serves a specific purpose but cannot

understand as to why a man or a woman would want to wear the attire of the other sex

in their everyday life. Facing a cross-dresser makes people generally feel ill at ease,

and as Garber’s title indicates it triggers a feeling of anxiety before the unknown, the

uncanny even. However, cross-dressing has been present for centuries, not only in the

spectacle.

In a detailed discussion of historical fiction, it is worth pointing out that this

genre shares similarities with gender and cross-dressing:

In their different ways historical fiction and cross-dressing negotiate the

limitations and concepts of the “real thing‟ and the “counterfeit‟, of authenticity

and artificiality. One can draw similarities, for example, between neo-Victorian

fiction’s methodology of (re)creating the past and the dissolution of temporal

lines and the transvestite’s transgressive act of (re)creating and blurring of

gender boundaries. (Neal 2011: 58)

It goes without saying that gender is a social construct, an ideas that has been

nurtured by feminists over the last decades, most notably by Simone de Beauvoir,

who states that “one is not born, one rather becomes, a woman” (de Beauvoir 1997:

295). Catharine A. MacKinnon expresses similar ideas when stating that “women and

men are divided by gender, made into the sexes as we know them, by the social

requirements of heterosexuality, which institutionalizes male sexual dominance and

female sexual submission” (MacKinnon 1982: 19). Teresa de Lauretis argues along

the same line by explaining that “gender is (a) representation [… and] the

representation of gender is its construction” (de Lauretis 1987: 3).

However, despite being socially constructed, gender cannot simply be

determined and it remains a blurry area, to quote Judith Butler:

When the constructedness of gender is theorized as radically independent of

sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that

man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and

woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one. (Butler 2006: 9)

    38

There were quite a number of women throughout the centuries who assumed

male roles in order to be able to live the life they wanted, and it was “in the first half

of the nineteenth century [that] assuming a male identity enabled individual women to

enter professions from which they were otherwise barred” (Heilmann 2000: 84). The

concept of women taking on male roles does not limit itself to putting on male

clothes; adopting a pseudonym is clearly another means to get more freedoms and

enter male-dominated spheres and gain recognition. This is certainly the case for a

number of female writers who took on male pen names, such as George Eliot,

Michael Field, and George Sand.

An economic reason was one of many, as Emma Donoghue points out that

“their motives for disguising their sex were many: escape from home, patriotism, the

need for a job, crime following men to sea or war, leaving men behind, avoiding rape,

preserving virginity, and love and desire for women” (Donoghue 1995: 59). In her

extensive work on cross-dressing, Marjorie Garber gives similar reasons why women

put on male clothes: “s/he did this in order to a) get a job, b) find a place in a man’s

world, and c) realize or fulfil some deep but acceptable need in terms of personal

destiny” (Garber 1992: 69).

This historical fact can be found in a number of novels, such as James

Miranda Barry and Albert Nobbs. In these two works, the women in question assume

male roles in order to either do the job they want or for purely economic reasons.10

Even as late as the 1940s women did not benefit from the same advantages as men,

especially when it came to financial independence and a say in politics. It is Simone

de Beauvoir in The Second Sex who coined the concept of woman being the “Other”,

stating that “He [man] is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other” (de

Beauvoir 1997: 16). She discusses that women are not given a choice other than to

conform, as “to decline to be the Other, to refuse to be a party to the deal – this would

be for women to renounce all the advantages conferred upon them by their alliance

with the superior caste” (de Beauvoir 1997: 21). Thus women were forced to accept

their condition of the inferior sex unless they resorted to other measures, such as

adopting the guise of the superior sex11.

                                                                                                               10 These women had to disguise themselves and therefore, their accounts are what Estelle C. Jelinek named “disguise biographies”: “Our focus here, however, is on women who wore men’s clothes and masqueraded as men in secret and wrote autobiographies” (Jelinek 1987: 54). 11 See Bram Dijkstra, chapter 1 in Idols of Perversity for a discussion of the nun-like and pure representation of women in art (Dijkstra 1986:11-24).

    39

Albert Nobbs, herself a woman, has taken on the role of a man in order to be

able to earn a living and have her own life not depending on anyone else. Dressing up

as a man has become normal and there is nothing sexual attached to it. Albert, it

seems, is a non-sexual being who has never thought of her actions being any wrong.

She has become Albert, who seems to be neither male nor female, and of herself she

thinks that “she had been about so long a man that she only remembered occasionally

that she was a woman” (Moore 2011: 13)12. This certainly contrasts with the female

cross-dresser in Tipping the Velvet, as the protagonist Nancy discovers her sexuality

once she puts on masculine clothes: “There was something rather thrilling about

embracing her [Kitty], in such a costume, with Walter so near and unknowing”

(Waters 2002: 114). In her essay Cheryl A. Wilson interestingly points out that “Nan

manipulates clothing and costumes - both onstage and off - to disassociate herself

from the role of the traditional Victorian woman” (Wilson 2006: 297).

Women in the nineteenth century “had no property rights and were deprived

of their identity, as wives, while at the same time they were incarcerated in a domestic

world” (Ackroyd 2012: 92). Moreover, the female sex was regarded as frail and

vulnerable, unable to do certain jobs. This frailty and inability to act in a male

dominated world, is dealt with quite well in Albert Nobbs. As an illegitimate child,

Albert had a difficult childhood and her adolescence was not easy either. All too soon

she had to realize that her love for Mr Congreve would never be mutual, and that she

would remain a mere servant girl. It is only then and due to her physique that she

takes on the role of a man to escape her miserable life as a woman. Thus, cross-

dressing enabled women to escape their destiny, as Valerie Arkell-Smith explains:

“Trousers make a wonderful difference, dressed as a man I did not, as I do now

wearing skirts again, feel hopeless and helpless … I want to up and do those things

that men do to earn a living rather than to spend my days as a friendless woman”

(Arkell-Smith cited in Wheelwright 1989: 50). This quotation is most powerfully

reflected in Ann Heilmann’s statement that “it was costume, not the body, which

inscribed gender and assigned social power to the wearer” (Heilmann 2000: 83).

“Clothes make the man” or to quote Oscar Wilde’s quotation: “the influence of the

costume penetrates to the very soul of the wearer” (Wilde cited in Gilbert 1932: xvii).                                                                                                                12 This is reminiscent of Colonel Barker’s story, a male impersonator, who claimed: “[S]o long have I lived in as a man, that I have come to think as one, behave as one, and be accepted as one. For the life of me, I would not know how to put on women’s clothes now!” (extract taken from the last installment of the autobiography in the Empire News quoted in Halberstam 1998: 91).

    40

Albert Nobbs has taken this path, which certainly was not an easy one, considering

that she denies her own sexuality. Albert thinks of herself as “an old perhapser […]

neither man nor woman!” (Moore 2011: 31). Albert does not see herself as a sexual

being, and therefore does not fully understand Hubert’s relationship with another

woman, who can be named a “female husband”13.

In addition, by denying her own sex, she personifies the opposite of the New

Woman ideology, but it is worth pointing out that “the appearance of sexlessness was,

in fact, a prerequisite for many real-life female cross-dressers to protect their social

standing” (Heilmann 2000: 93). In addition, it was Walter Benjamin who concludes

quite poetically that “es geht nicht um Sexualität, die beiden Mädchen sind nicht

Transvestiten, sind Proletarierinnen, die ein Zufall des Broterwebs in diese Kleider

gesteckt hat, die ihnen auf den Leib gewachsen sind” (Benjamin 1928: np).14

The Victorians were not unfamiliar with the notion of cross-dressing, as it had

become quite popular, especially in the entertainment world. Numerous women

assumed male roles or androgynous parts in plays or the pantomime. People did not

question this and certainly did not think of it as a sexual fetish. In addition, so-called

“disguise autobiographies” enjoyed immense popularity at the time[,] as personal

accounts were turned into literature consumed by a mass audience, individual readers

were inspired to follow the example of their heroines, and in turn came to provide

textual material for further stories” (Heilmann 2000: 84)15. These stories had become

quite popular, but they also contained underlying messages, as they were part of the

New Woman movement at the end of the nineteenth century. Ann Heilmann notes

that “cross-dressing narratives therefore frequently carry a warning, implying that

society should be more attentive to women’s healthy desire to lead full and purposeful

lives and less tolerant of men’s wrong doings” (Heilmann 2000: 85-86).

Cross-dressing opened up a number of possibilities for women but was

certainly not without its risks, and numerous women were tried for fraud. Another                                                                                                                13 See Judith Halberstam for an elaborate historical analysis of the concept of the female husband, most notable by discussing the life of Anne Lister (Halberstam 1998: 65-73). 14 [“It is not about sexuality, the two girls are not transvestites, they are proletarians, which a coincidence of making a living has put into these clothes, which have become one with them” (Benjamin 1928; 102, own translation). 15 “Disguise autobiographies”, a term coined by Estelle Jelinek (Jelinek 1987: 53-62), were personal accounts of women who passed themselves off as men in order to start careers that were limited exclusively to men during the nineteenth century. A famous account is the one of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, who in order to pursue a medical career, turned herself into Dr James Barry. For further discussion on female cross-dressing, see Julie Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids (London: Pandora, 1989).

    41

reason as to why people cross-dressed, was linked to sexual or even macabre fetishes.

The very intriguing opening chapter of Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem leaves

the reader perplexed, as it describes a grown-up man putting on a woman’s gown; but

it is worth pointing out that it is not just any woman’s gown: “That night, in his small

house on Hornsey Rise, he took it carefully from the bag; he lifted it above his head,

and put it on. He was wearing nothing else, and with a sigh, he lay down upon the

carpet in the gown of the hanged woman” (Ackroyd 1995: 3).

Unlike most novels discussed in this thesis, Ackroyd’s work clearly bears the

most disturbing examples of cross-dressing, but also the most complex and clever

ones. Opening with an intriguing chapter that carries disturbing and macabre elements

of cross-dressing, the novel becomes even more mysterious. However, as it unfolds,

the author provides hints, which will become clear at the final dénouement. In the

novel, Solomon Weil, who is also murdered by the mysterious Limehouse Golem,

mentions his large library to Karl Marx. The irony that lies herein is the simple fact

that it once belonged to the “Chevalier d’Eon, the famous French transsexual, who

had lodged in London in the latter half of the eighteenth century” (Ackroyd 1995: 64).

Little does he know that the fate that he will meet is linked to the chevalier’s, as his

murderer will be a woman in guise as well.

In order to live her perverted and dark side, Elizabeth Cree disguises herself as a

man. Ackroyd’s characters are far more complex than their simple pure disguise, and

in order to create the perfect crime, Elizabeth will also falsify documents, mainly by

writing her husband’s diary. Thus, she really “invented a whole history which made

[her] much more interesting to [her]self, and [she] had really no difficulty in

sustaining it” (Ackroyd 1995: 107). Therefore, she can most rightly claim in her

diary: “What fools these people are” (Ackroyd 1995: 87), as she deceives them at

multiple levels, as she later reveals to the priest:

There is a bit of a game en travesti. Do you understand me? That is when the

female serio puts on her male clothes and fools them all. Then some of the flash

girls, have a shocking bit of bad luck. They want to know what is in my little

black bag, and I show them. I had no trouble with that part, father. When my

mother made me, she made me strong. I’m a natural for the blood tubs, I always

have been. (Ackroyd 1995: 272)

    42

Thus the protagonists become the opposite of what they appear to be,

emphasizing the tension between appearance and reality. The way we perceive

performers is turned topsy-turvy, and the authors play with our perceptions. The idea

of a woman deceiving her surroundings is discussed by Christian Gutleben in his

discussion of Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Gutleben’s analysis of

Fowles’ novel can also be applied to Elizabeth in Dan Leno and the Limehouse

Golem:

In case of the narrator, the recognition of deception […] destroys the reliability

of his account and consequently unsettles the bases of traditional reading. By

laying bare his lies and tricks, the narrator displays a certain honesty in his

dishonesty and moreover, clearly states his aesthetic priorities which are

focused on the principle of unveiling – or undressing. (Gutleben 2001: 116)

Elizabeth has not only cheated her surroundings, but also the reader, as her true

identity is only revealed at the end of the novel. Like Fowles, Ackroyd gradually

drops hints, before unveiling the secret. Gutleben’s use of the word “undressing” is

quite appropriate when it comes to discussing Ackroyd’s novel, as Elizabeth not only

acts the part, she also disguises herself as a man. The same idea of putting on men’s

clothes is present in Sarah Water’s Tipping the Velvet and Moore’s Albert Nobbs, but

the reader is aware of the protagonists’ true identities right from the start, as the

stories are told by an omniscient reader, and not by the protagonist herself.

Actresses and homosexuals, mainly lesbians, were outcasts in traditional

Victorian fiction. In neo-Victorian novels women assume male roles to achieve their

goals, as if they were trying to gain social recognition through a new genre, which

plays with Victorian literature, and which enables them to become the main

protagonists. And despite the fact that these novels are more liberal, they still have to

cross-dress.

Attributing male character traits to women protagonists in Victorian fiction

was not unusual, and it is for example in Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White that

you find “two complex types, the strong-minded and ‘masculine’ woman as opposed

to the ineffectual and ‘feminine’ man” (Ackroyd 2012: 91).

Whereas Albert disguises herself in order to be able to survive in a male-

dominated world, Elizabeth Cree on the one hand puts on male garments in order to

    43

entertain people, and on the other assumes the role of a man to live her dark side,

namely being a murderess.

Ackroyd’s novel uses cross-dressing as an additional element of entertainment,

but it also enables people to conceal their true identity in order to attend to criminal

business. Hence, Elizabeth Cree uses different personae in her performance, which

also includes switching gender:

Everyone knew that I was also ‘Little Victor’s Daughter’, but that was the joy

of it. I could be a girl and a boy, man and woman, without any shame. I felt

somehow that I was above them all and could change myself at will. That was

why I perfected the art of running off the stage, before the end, and coming

back as Little Victor’s Daughter while they stared at me in surprise. Uncle was

acting as my dresser now, and had my feminine rags in his hand as I came off;

he would always pat me on the you-know-what while I changed, but I pretended

to ignore him. I recognised all his tricks by now, and I knew that I was equal to

them. (Ackroyd 1995: 153)

The stage enables Elizabeth to cross gender boundaries without any problems and she

is in control of her own actions as well. In the theatre, emancipation is important

because her popularity turns her into a stronger woman, who rises above men. Thus,

gender roles are reversed, as she becomes the object of desire on the stage whereas

her uncle is left in the less glamorous space backstage. She knows that she has

reached equal status with men and therefore has the claim to the stronger character.

Her newly acquired self-esteem leads her to come up with tricky ventures, as she

decides to take her male disguise out into the streets of London, but merely for the

thrill of it:

It must have been two or three months after the Older Brother was born that I

had a sudden fancy of my own: it might be a piece of fun to take him out into

the streets of London and see the other world. I had a room to myself in our

diggings now, just next door to Doris, and after the show was over I would go

back in my own clothes as if I were about to toast a slice of bread and retire. But

then I would quietly dress myself as the Older Brother, wait until the lights were

dimmed and the house was quiet, and then creep out of the back window to the

    44

staircase. Of course he never wore his stage clothes, which were a trifle too

short and too shabby, and he had bought for himself a whole new set of duds.

He was a scamp, as I said, and I likes nothing better than to stroll through the

night like a regular masher; he would cross the river down Southwark way and

the wander by Whitechapel, Shadwell and Limehouse. (Ackroyd 1995: 153)

Elizabeth’s idea is merely a sudden fancy and does not bear any sexual desire, which

is the case in Tipping the Velvet, which will be discussed hereafter. Being an

emancipated woman in the world of the theatre, Elizabeth has “a room of her own”16

where she can do as she pleases. However, this only accounts for the theatre because

she still needs to hide or pretend to be sleeping when she leaves the theatre dressed as

a man. She cannot venture into the world holding her head up high but has to sneak

out, unseen by both the audience and her fellow actors. The passage underlines

Elizabeth’s schizophrenic character traits, as she suddenly switches from the first to

the third person singular when talking about her other self, her brother. This shows

that she is no longer able to keep the two personae apart. However, using the third

person to talk about “her new character is also something that real transvestites often

do” (Onega 1999: 142). Enacting the role of the Older Brother enables her to walk the

streets of London, in particular the dodgier parts of town, freely and without having to

fear any sexual harassment. She does not need to worry that an older man like Uncle

might grab her behind and taking it for granted. But she is not only tricking the people

that she is walking past but also the reader who is as yet unaware of her true nature.

The passage discussed here already anticipates her later actions when she endorses

male clothes in order to proceed to her murders. Thus, she is using the streets of

London as her very own stage to rehearse her role as a man. There are numerous

occasions during which Elizabeth, also known as Lambeth Marsh Lizzie, hints at her

true intentions. In a conversation with her future husband, Mr Cree, she reveals that

Dan Leno is planning a new act which will be “a shocker [and she is] to become a

very masculine murderer’ followed by the statement that ‘stage folk are capable of

anything” (Ackroyd 1995: 179). She cunningly reveals her criminal intentions to her

future husband whom she will get involved in the crime later on. In addition, she

                                                                                                               16 This reference alludes to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, where Woolf claims that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she wants to write fiction” (Woolf 2002: 6).

    45

states that actors are ruthless, as they do not refrain from anything, not even

murdering innocent people.

However, she might be free physically, but at the same time she is still tense

and fearful, especially when she walks past a Hebrew:

That is not precisely true. One man did see her. The Older Brother was walking

through Old Jerusalem, just by the Limehouse church, when a Hebrew passed

him by gaslight – they almost collided, since the Jew was walking with his eyes

fixed upon the pavement. When he looked up, he saw Lizzie beneath the male

and recoiled. He muttered something like ‘Cab man’ or ‘Cadmon’ and, in that

instant, she struck out and knocked him on the ground. Then she went on her

way as a swell of the night with her frock-coat and fancy waistcoat; she even

made a point of tipping her hat to the ladies. (Ackroyd 1995: 154)

Whether or not the Hebrew recognised Elizabeth’s true identity or had a different

understanding of human nature is debatable, as he was not looking straight at her but

merely had to look up once he had run into her. Her disguise might be good but she

cannot let go of her inner fears and tension. Other outcasts and prostitutes do not

threaten to reveal her disguise, as she is like them and they do not care for such

appearances. But once she collides with a Hebrew, another outcast but most of all an-

Other, she starts to doubt her costume. He is not like her and therefore she cannot

trust him. The reader finds out at a later stage that she cannot forget this incident and

later on perfects her disguise by visiting the Jew and eventually killing him for having

seen her real self. It is worth pointing out that being dressed as a man she has no

problems punching an innocent man, whereas as a woman she remains indifferent

when other men touch her but does not hit them for indecently molesting her. Here

her double persona enables her to strike an innocent man who has just passed her. It

is, however, very interesting that once she doubts her own disguise, that she switches

personal pronouns again and it is not her older brother, but her very own self who

knocks the Hebrew down. Once she feels less self-confident and is overcome by fear,

she cannot truly assume her role as a man and becomes merely a woman in man’s

clothes. But she remains professional enough to walk on and salute ladies. But once

again, her greeting other women is a much easier convention to follow in a tense

situation because, unlike the Jew, they do not pose a threat.

    46

In Tipping the Velvet, Kitty and Nancy use cross-dressing for entertainment

purposes but at the same time it also has a more personal significance, as it is because

of her male attire that Nancy discovers her true sexual orientation.

Like Albert, Nancy does not have any major difficulties coming across as a boy

due to her androgynous looks:

She looked, I suppose, like a very pretty boy, for her face was a perfect oval,

and her eyes were large and dark at the lashes, and her lips were rosy and full.

Her figure, too, was boy-like and slender – yet rounded, vaguely but

unmistakably, at the bosom, the stomach, and the hips, in a way no real boy’s

ever was; and her shoes, I noticed after a moment, had two-inch heels to them.

But she strode like a boy, and stood like one, with her feet apart and her hands

thrust carelessly into her trouser pockets, and her head at an arrogant angle, at

the very front of the stage; and when she sang, her voice was a boy’s voice –

sweet and terribly true. (Waters 2002: 13)17

Being a copy of a boy, she becomes too real to be true and too authentic in

comparison to the original. Despite putting on a perfect act, contemporary

conventions were not in favour of having a woman coming across as a man, as “the

theatre, like the circus and the carnival, licenses the temporary breaching of gender

boundaries within its walls as long as it ultimately sustains the concept of sexual

difference” (King 2005: 147).

Kitty differs from Albert in many a way, most strikingly by the fact that Kitty

puts on an act and indulges in the audience’s gaze. In addition, Kitty is described in a

sexual fashion, and unlike Albert, she does not deny her own sexual desires. Kitty in

Tipping the Velvet certainly does not stray from the norm when it comes to her looks,

as she is rather an attractive woman. However, she plays with her tomboy looks to the

                                                                                                               17 In her essay entitled ‘Gender play and role reversal in the music hall’, J. S. Bratton discusses the emergence and reception of cross-dressers at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Young woman clad as boys were considered charming and a delight to watch as they did not pose a threat to a male audience (Bratton 1996: 93-95). One should also consider the homage that Waters is paying to music hall performers by naming one of the characters Nan King after Hetty King. See Neal 2011: 57 and Bratton, 1996: 93-96. The quoted passage also echoes ‘the contemporary critic W.R. Titterton to state in 1912, “but for a subtle hint of a womanly waist and curving hips you might fancy it indeed a round-faced boy. Even so, you are doubtful” (Titterton 1912: 147 cited in Neal 2011: 59).

    47

extent that other people draw her attention to it by comparing her to an oyster: “For

the oyster, you see, is what you might call a real queer fish – now a he, now a she, as

quite takes its fancy. A regular morphodite, in fact! […] You’re a bit of an oyster,

then, yourself, Kitty” (Waters 2002: 49).  

Throughout the novel, Waters uses the adjective “queer” to maintain or even

highlight the ambiguity. The oyster is a fitting example from the animal world to use

since it is a hermaphrodite, being male and female, and therefore able to reproduce

itself. But why then use morphodite, the colloquial (some definitions even call it the

comic pronunciation of the word) rather than the more common, regular name. Kitty

can be compared to an oyster because of her androgynous looks but also because of

her cross-dressing. Her looks enable her to deceive the people around her who cannot

tell whether she is male or female. In addition, she is also “queer” because of her

sexual orientation. But like the oyster, Kitty is bi-sexual, as she may engage in an

affair with Nancy, but later ends up marrying Walter. Other commonly held beliefs

are that oysters are considered to be an aphrodisiac, which reflects on the sexual

relationship between Kitty and Nancy. Moreover, they are said to resemble female

sex organs, which emphasizes the lesbian relationship between the two women, which

the title already hints at.

Like Cordelia and Rillie, Nancy and Kitty act their parts and like them they

need to observe men in order to be able to imitate them. Therefore, they “spen[d]

hours as [Walter] had advised in shops and market squares and stations studying the

men” (Waters 2002: 86). Male attire enables the two women to act their parts, thus

convincingly keeping in line with Ann Heilmann’s statement that clothes enable you

to become who you want to be, and the clothes themselves turn into performers, as

“the costumes themselves perform, and are reviewed, and their wearers are often

praised for their knowledge of how to wear them, to show them off—as were

beautifully gowned women with other acts” (Bratton 1996: 100). The same idea can

be found in Sarah Waters’ novel: “Four nights before had I stood in the same spot,

marvelling to see myself dressed as a grown-up woman. Now, there had been one

quiet visit to a tailor’s shop and here I was, a boy – a boy with buttons and a belt”

(Waters 2002: 118). Nancy is turned into a boy with her own consent, not because of

her need to survive but for entertainment purposes. Despite her acting her part, the

audience needs to be able to tell that she remains a boy, hence the deception cannot be

completed, as the following passage demonstrates: “Too real. She looks like a boy.

    48

Which I know she is supposed to – but, if you follow me, she looks like a real boy.

Her face and her figure and her bearing on her feet. And that ain’t quite the idea now,

is it?” (Waters 2002: 118). It is worth pointing out here that “much male

impersonation on the nineteenth-century stage involved a “boy” role in which a

boyish woman represented an immature masculine subject; indeed, the plausible

representation of mannishness by women was not encouraged” (Halbertsam 1998:

233). W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan even proclaimed that “on artistic principles,

no man should play a woman’s part and no woman a man’s” (Gilbert and Sullivan

quoted in Stedman 1973: 20). In his study on drag, Peter Ackroyd’s take on the role

of women in pantomime is rather simple as he merely states that “the male

impersonator is never anything more than what she pretends to be: a feminine, noble

mind in a boy’s body. It is a peculiarly sentimental and therefore harmless reversal”

(Ackroyd 1979: 102). He continues stating that the female impersonator “has a more

dramatic presence” (Ackroyd 1979: 102), thus, deeming actresses to be less talented,

if you will. However, reality has it that women were allowed to play innocent boys in

a pantomime, for example, but they were not allowed to become men, as it was

perceived as threatening and “mature masculinity once again remains an authentic

property of adult male bodies while all other gender roles are available for

interpretation” (Halberstam 1998: 233) because “[the nineteenth-century stage]

discouraged serious impersonation” (Bullough and Bullough 1993: 231). Women

could not possibly have endorsed male roles in an age when science had just

generated the concept of the “inverted” and society tried to create specific gender

roles.

It was on the stage that women and men were equal and that women’s

popularity rose. During the Edwardian period

the rhetoric of the girl worked further wonders, generating a welcome

androgyny that converted the girl into the playmate or one of the boys,

transforming the stilted exchanges of conventional social address between the

sexes into the chummy discourse of men relaxing with other men. (Bailey 1996:

54)

In her work on female masculinity, Judith Halberstam traces the genre of male

impersonation back almost two hundred years noting that “male impersonation as a

    49

theatrical tradition extends back to the restoration stage, but more often than not, the

trousers role was used to emphasize femininity rather than to mimic maleness”

(Halberstam 1998: 233).

It was only towards the beginning of the twentieth century that some women ventured

into the public space wearing male costume. A prominent example here would be

Radclyffe Hall.

Like Albert, Nancy quickly recognizes the advantages of being a boy since

“whatever successes [she] might achieve as a girl, they would be nothing compared to

the triumphs [she] should enjoy clad, however girlishly, as a boy” (Waters 2002:

123). Unlike Albert, she is perfectly aware of the impact she has on people and how

to use her own sexuality. Her playing an innocent boy in pantomimes, which were

holiday basically entertainment for families, contrasts with her hidden sexual life,

which has started to flourish.

This idea is furthered later in the novel when Nancy starts to walk the streets

and becomes a “male” prostitute. Hence, she takes her performance out of the

microcosm of the music hall and moves onto the streets of London, or as Stefania

Ciocia states quite convincingly

the novel's action gradually moves from the theatre as such, where performers

and audience are neatly differentiated, occupying well-marked and separate

places, to the boundless stage of the square and the city streets, where the gap

between actors and spectators is erased by a universal and subversive

participation to the show. (Ciocia 2005: np)

In her study, Judith Halberstam notes “that some male impersonators carried

over their cross-dressing practices into their everyday lives suggests that their relation

to masculinity extended far beyond theatricality” (Halberstam 1998: 233). Despite

putting on drag in the public sphere, Nancy still has to hide, and by becoming a male

prostitute, she remains in the lower social strata and an outcast, if you will. As she has

already done, Nancy adopts the ways of the streets and acts her role once more:

For a week or two I continued to wander, and to watch, and to learn the ways

and gestures of the world into which I had stumbled. Walking and watching,

indeed, are that world’s keynotes: you walk, and let yourself be looked at; you

    50

watch, until you find a face or a figure that you fancy; there is a nod, a wink, a

shake of the head, a purposeful stepping to an alley or a rooming-house....

(Waters 2002: 201)

Her disguise enables her to invade a male-dominated space, the streets of London,

where young women were certainly not expected to wander alone at night, as she

claims herself: “Oh, the uniform is my disguise for the streets, not a party. I find that a

girl in skirts, on her own in the city, gets looked at, rather, in a way not always nice”

(Waters 2002: 235). Turning herself into a young boy provides her with a protective

shield and she is safe from the glances of lecherous men, and even attracts young

women ignorant of her true identity:

But the glances did not settle on me: they only slithered past me, to the girls

behind. There was no cry, and I began to walk a little straighter. At St Luke’s

church, on the corner, a man brushed by me with a barrow, calling, ‘All right,

squire!’ Then a woman with a frizzed fringe put her hand upon my arm, and

tilted her head and said: ‘Well now, pretty boy, you look like a lively one.

Fancy payin’ a visit, to a nice little place I know...?’ (Waters 2002: 194)

Her disguise is next to perfect, her performance a success because she manages to

deceive everyone: “With my hair trimmed, I thought, and a pair of proper boy’s shoes

upon my feet, anyone – even Kitty herself! – might meet me in the streets of London,

and never know me for a girl, at all” (Waters 2002: 192). The streets of London have

become her stage and she is fully aware of this, as the following passage reveals:

My one regret was that, though I was daily giving such marvelous

performances, they had no audience. I would gaze about me at the dim and

dreary place in which my gentleman and I leaned panting, and wish the cobbles

were a stage, the bricks a curtain, the scuttling rats a set of blazing footlights. I

would long for just one eye – just one! – to be fixed upon our couplings: a bold

and knowing eye that saw how well I played my part, how gulled and humbled

was my foolish, trustful partner. (Waters 2002: 206)

    51

Like Fevvers in Nights at the Circus, Nancy indulges in the gaze of others to the

extent that her desire bears sexual connotations, even voyeuristic tendencies. Another

resemblance with Fevvers is the fact that both women become angel or bird-like

creatures: “it was not like she was cutting hair, it was as if I had a pair of wings

beneath my shoulder-blades, that the flesh had grown over, and she was slicing free”

(Waters 2002: 405). Turning the two women into birds enables them to free

themselves from social norms and be deviant. Nan’s cutting her hair does not make

her any less attractive, on the contrary, her androgynous looks are emphasized, which

makes her even more appealing for her female audience, which she encounters in the

streets of London when turning into a female renter.

Despite prostituting herself in order to earn money, she secretly indulges in

acting her part and wants other people to share her secret. She even craves the risks

and the dangers of being found out. As the novel develops, Nan encounters her new

lover Diana who turns her into her very own toy and dresses her up. Having been

independent in the streets of London, she now becomes a commodity that Diana can

display in front of her lady friends:

I had posed for Maria and Dickie and Evelyn in my trousers with the scorch-

mark and my underthings of silk. When they came a second time, with another

lady, Diana had me pose for them again in a different suit. After that, it became

a kind of sport with her, to put me in a new costume and have me walk before

her guests, or among them, filling glasses, lighting cigarettes. (Waters 2002:

280)

Like Fevvers, Nan is turned into a tableau vivant or “a living picture” (Waters 2002:

270), which attracts the lustful gaze of other women: “It seemed my fate to be dressed

and fashioned and admired by others. I didn’t mind it” (Waters 2002: 270). Nan not

only indulges in the gaze of others, which nourishes her narcissistic nature, she also

does not seem to care that she is being manipulated by her mistress. She also adopts

the roles of mythological creatures in order to satisfy the demands of her mistress:

I might be Perseus, with a curved sword and a head of the medusa, and sandals

with straps that were buckled at the knee. I might be Cupid, with wings and a

    52

bow. I was once St Sebastian tied to a stump – I remember what a job it was to

fasten the arrows so they would not droop. (Waters 2002: 281)

However, she is no longer master of her own actions and becomes a puppet

whose strings somebody else holds.18 Thus, she is turned into a vulnerable girl again

who is imprisoned captive in a big mansion. In addition, her golden cage keeps her

safe from the male gaze, as she is purely among women now: “But all performers

dress to suit their stages, I recalled. And what a stage was this – and what an

audience!” (Waters 2002: 272). She is one of them and no longer poses a threat to

men now, which is clearly positive but also sad, as she can only live her own

sexuality in a cut-off and secluded mansion, to quote Stefania Ciocia:

There is always an element of theatricality in what Nancy does, even if this time

she is acting for a select, knowing audience: if with Kitty Nancy was part of an

act (but could not really be herself off stage), with Diana she is little more than

a commodity, a peacock strutting in a golden cage for her mistress's pleasure,

performing in a variety of amazing costumes for a restricted, privileged, semi-

clandestine circle of aristocratic lesbians. (Ciocia 2005: np)

Therefore, her true identity remains a secret that is only shared by a selected

few at Diana’s mansion and at the Cavendish Club.19 Nan only performs for a very

small audience, which is reminiscent of closet dramas, plays which were not created

for the big stage but in small groups. This is clearly ironic, as Nan herself hidden

away in a secluded space, is put back into the closet, away from the dangerous

London life and streets.

Whereas the above mentioned characters virtually turn themselves into men,

Fevvers from Nights at the Circus appears masculine from the start with her                                                                                                                18 The motif of puppetry in a patriarchal society is quintessential in Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop. For an in-depth analysis of the novel in the light of neo-Victorian fiction and Victorian family values see Sarah Gamble, ‘Monarchs and Patriarchs: Angela Carter’s Recreation of the Victorian Family in The Magic Toyshop’ (Gamble 2011: 245-263). 19 It is only later in the novel that Nan finds her very own lesbian community and when she no longer needs to perform a role for anybody. She becomes her very own woman and is able to have a relationship with Florence, another servant. It results that Nan and Florence can live their love among the working-class people, for the simple reason that poor people do not care and clothes have different values and purposes attached to them. For an interesting discussion on how lesbians lived their own sexuality in the different social classes, see Emilia Heimonen’s thesis ‘Sweethearts and Wives’: The Representation of Lesbianism in Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet’ (Heimonen 2009: 65-67).

    53

“extraordinarily raucous and metallic voice; clanging of contralto and baritone

dustbins” (Carter 2006: 11). Fevvers is not described as elegant and feminine but as a

larger than life character bearing masculine traits:

in steatopygous perspective, shaking out about her those tremendous red and

purple pinions, pinions large enough, powerful enough to bear up such a big girl

as she. And she was a big girl. Evidently this Helen took after her putative

father, the swan, around the shoulder parts. (Carter 2006: 4)

Her costumes and make-up, such as fake eyelashes remind the readers of drag

queens rather than a delicate woman. Even the American journalist Walser questions

her sex at one point in the novel:

Her face, in its Brobdingnagian symmetry, might have been hacked from wood

and brightly painted up by those artists who build carnival ladies for fairgrounds

or figureheads for sailing ships. It flickered through his mind: Is she really a

man? (Carter 2006: 37)

Carter defines Fevvers as Brobdingnagian, which means gigantic, and she adds that

her features are symmetrical, which implies that she is perfectly shaped despite her

enormous size. The author places Fevvers alongside Brobdingnag, a fictional land in

Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, which implies that Fevvers’ character hints at a

satire, since she is a larger than life woman herself. However, the Brobdingnagians

are also morally good beings despite their physical ugliness.

In addition, Fevvers seems to be carved from wood, a man-made figurehead to

embellish fairgrounds and ships. This also suggests that she is considered a piece of

decoration, an add-on rather than a real human being.

Walser’s doubts clearly reflect Judith Butler’s argument that

the moment in which one cannot with surety read the body one sees, is precisely

the moment when one is no longer sure whether the body encountered is that of

a man or a woman. The vacillation between the categories itself constitutes the

experience of the body in question. (Butler 2006: xxiv)

    54

Unlike Albert, for example, who is considered a man, Fevvers takes her

persona even further my blurring the boundaries between the real and the fictional,

leaving her environment and the reader in constant guessing as to what she actually is:

“Is she fact or is she fiction?” (Carter 2006: 3). But it is worth adding that Angela

Carter presents a panoply of different representations of women, such as Lizzie, who

is “a tiny, wizened, gnome-like apparition” (Carter 2006: 10); and therefore the cross-

dresser is also present in Nights at the Circus, in the character of Ma Nelson. The

latter is openly described as a cross-dresser, as she “always dressed in the full dress

uniform of an Admiral of the Fleet” (Carter 2006: 34) but this fact is also revealed in

a Dickensian manner through her drawing-room:

At first sight, you’d have thought this drawing-room was the smoking room of a

gentleman’s club of the utmost exclusivity, for Ma Nelson encouraged an

almost lugubrious degree of masculine good behaviour amongst her clients. She

went in for leather armchairs and tables with The Times on them that Lizzie

ironed every morning […]. (Carter 2006: 28)

In a sense, Ma Nelson is a patriarchal figure and the man of the house, as she is the

owner of the brothel. Unlike Ma Nelson, Fevvers becomes “masculine” in terms of

her behaviour whereas Ma Nelson and Albert Nobbs, for example, assume the role of

a man by putting on male clothes. All in all, Fevvers is more masculine as she clearly

imposes herself upon her surroundings, whereas Albert, being a servant, remains in

the background and does as she is told. Hence, once could argue that despite turning

herself into a man physically, she still keeps to her submissive role, serving men and

women.20

Acting and disguise enable people to turn the entire world into a stage and

delude their surroundings. Gender is a crucial aspect when it comes to the ontological

other and it shares a number of similarities when it comes to history and magic, as it

helps to deceive people by putting on a show.

To conclude, in order to become the other and be accepted by society, women

have deliberately assumed male roles and put on male clothes. This demonstrates that                                                                                                                20 The two women thus personify Angela Carter’s vision that ‘gender is a relation if power, whereby the weak become “feminine” and the strong become “masculine” (Robinson 1991: 77).

    55

gender is a mere and also blurry construct, which can be changed at will. Cross-

dressing has different underlying aims, as women either do it for entertainment

purposes, sheer survival, or even murder if one considers Dan Leno and the

Limehouse Golem. By playing with their surroundings’ perceptions, and appearing the

opposite if what they are, women can escape their fates. It is also worth adding that

cross-dressing is not limited to the stage, but that the women from the novels

discussed here take their disguise and performance into the world.

Another aspect of the spectacle, which enables performers to deceive their

audience is technology. In the next chapter I will discuss yet two other polarities

namely technology and magic.

1.4 Technology and magic

The novels discussed here do not conceal the technology behind the illusions and

therefore, historiograhic metafiction and magic might share some similarities, to

quote Ann Heilmann:

Metanarrative neo-Victorianism employs the same performative techniques as

Victorian stage magic. In allowing us insight into how the illusion is produced,

if only we “watch closely” enough, neo-Victorianism departs from stage magic,

challenging us from the outset to embrace a double vision, which satisfies our

desire for what Baudrillard calls “a visible past, a visible continuum, a visible

myth of origin” (Baudrillard 2004: 10), even as it is engaged in deconstructing

it. (Heilmann 2009/2010: 39)

An example of a magician revealing his tricks and even explaining them in great

detail, can be found in Millhauser’s ‘Eisenheim the Illusionist’:

The illusion depended on two separate deceptions: the mechanical tree itself,

which produced real flowers, real fruit, and mechanical butterflies by means of

concealed mechanisms; and the removal of the handkerchief from the trick box

as it was handed to the spectator. (Millhauser 1997: 218)

    56

This idea of laying bare the tricks clearly reflects the concept of mixing fact

with fiction. The author gives a rational explanation of what the protagonist is doing

and how he is deceiving the audience, but at the same time he or she knows that in

order to grab the reader’s attention he needs to take it a step further by entering the

realm of the uncanny: “[…] there was a touch of the uncanny about his illusions; and

some said even then that Eisenheim was not a showman at all, but a wizard who had

sold his soul to the devil in return for unholy powers” (Millhauser 1997: 220). The

same technique of revealing tricks is used by neo-Victorian novelists. Christian

Gutleben develops this idea when discussing Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s

Woman, but it can easily be applied to the novels discussed here:

Fowles wants to perform fictional magic and to reveal the secrets of the magic,

he wants to provide the reader with a new vision of history and to disclose how

he proceeds to impart this new vision, he wants to “summon up a sense of

reality while forcing us to attend to the nature and falsehood of art”.21 (Gutleben

2001: 116)

The same technique is used in The Night Circus, where “real” magic, as in the

dark arts, which do not necessitate any technology and tricks, and mainstream magic

are set side by side, thus belittling the latter:

The man on the stage, a slick-haired, bearded fellow whose white gloves move

like birds against he black of his suit, performs simple tricks and sleight-of-hand

misdirections. Birds disappear from cages with false bottoms, handkerchiefs

from pockets to be concealed again in cuffs. […] The spectators seem

impressed by the deceptions, often applauding them politely. […] And this

magician does not hide handkerchiefs within his lace shirt cuffs. The birds that

appear from all manner of locations have no cages at all. These are feats that the

boy has seen only in his lessons. Manipulations and illusions he has been

expressly informed again and again must be kept secret. (Morgenstern 2011: 27)

                                                                                                               21 Gutleben quotes Malcolm Bradbury here (Bradbury 1989: 282).

    57

Morgenstern plays with the notion of the seemingly real at different levels. During the

first performance it is the magician who seems to make birds appear from all

directions and it is the audience’s decision whether or not to believe what they see.

The description of the second magician echoes the performance of the first one, as the

same sentence structures are used. The use of repetition reflects the routine and

repetitiveness of a magical performance. In this passage, Morgenstern distinguishes

real from fake magic by stating that the latter may be exposed whereas the real one

must be hidden and kept secret. Audience and performer create a dialogue and after

the performance, it is the audience’s turn to join in the performance by applauding:

“A show without an audience is nothing, after all. In the response of the audience, that

is where the power of performance lives” (Morgenstern 2011: 45). Here the performer

can judge whether or not the applause is merely a polite automatism or if it is sincere

and authentic.

The idea of keeping magic tricks secret is played on in The Prestige. Right

from the beginning Alfred Borden is obsessed with secrecy noting that

the magician naturally wishes to preserve his secrets, so that he may go earning

his living from them, and this is widely recognised. He becomes, though, a

victim of his own secrecy. The longer a trick is part of his repertoire, and the

more often it is successfully performed, and by definition the larger the number

of people he had deceived with it, then the more it seems to him essential to

preserve its secret. (Priest 2004: 49)

Borden insists that he is keeping to an ethical and professional code preventing him

from revealing the secrets of the trade (Priest 2004: 57) but at the same time he cannot

refrain himself from finding out his opponent Angier’s new trick.

Despite embracing modern day technology, which enables the authors to

render their work more authentic, the protagonists reject to rely fully on these new

technologies, which renders the plot uncanny. This is clearly reflected in ‘Eisenheim

the Illusionist’ where “the radical simplification was not only aesthetic: it meant the

refusal of certain kinds of mechanical aid, the elimination of certain effects”

(Millhauser 1997: 227). The story elevates the past by rejecting modern technology:

    58

[…] it appeared that he was summoning objects into existence by the sheer

effort of his mind. In this the master illusionist was rejecting the modern

conjurer’s increasing reliance on machinery and returning the spectator to the

troubled heart of magic, which yearned beyond the constricting world of

ingenuity and artifice toward the dark realm of transgression. (Millhauser 1997:

229)

By rejecting modernity and technology, the protagonists embrace the past and

its innocence or ignorance, if you will. Thus, the authors aim at a certain sense of

nostalgia by returning to a simpler past in which numerous things could not be

explained. This idea of returning to the past reflects the nature of neo-Victorian

literature, as we move back to an era, which has shaped our modern society and we

think about it in nostalgic terms, to quote Christian Gutleben: “retro-Victorian fiction

displays signs of nostalgia in its very principle, namely the revival of a bygone

tradition, in the conservatism of a certain Victorian aesthetic precepts and the

imitation of a language of the past” (Gutleben 2001: 193).

The past provides the readers as well as the protagonists with something

tangible, something familiar, whereas the new era, the future is unknown and

therefore, uncanny. This fear towards the new century and the new technology can be

found in Millhauser’s story, as Eisenheim “had created an illusory Eisenheim from

the first day of the new century” (Millhauser 1997: 237). At the same time, one can

argue that Eisenheim and his uncanny magic tricks had to make way for the new

century and the new technology. In an age where science started to unravel illusions

and tricks, there was no room for deceptions anymore. The ending of ‘Eisenheim the

Illusionist’ is therefore quite striking, as it calls for change but the same time evokes

mystery,

all agreed that it was a sign of the times; and as precise memories faded, and the

everyday world of coffee cups, doctors’ visits, and war rumors returned, a secret

relief penetrated the souls of the faithful, who knew that the Master had passed

safely out of the crumbling order of history into the indestructible realm of

mystery and dream. (Millhauser 1997: 237)

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In an age that keeps developing and being threatened by war and the enemy,

there is no room for illusion and the uncanny. People long for the ordinary and their

daily routine and therefore magic and illusions can merely be part of our dreams and

our fantasies.

The contrast between past and present, magic and new technology is even

more striking in the film adaptation. In the latter, illusions and film-making are

juxtaposed, both being magical trades. Matthew Solomon quite interestingly notes

that

the illusions in The Illusionist, which deceptively blur the distinction between

digital manipulation and prestidigitation, are simultaneously reflective,

mirroring the techniques of theatrical illusion, and reflexive, foregrounding the

cinematic medium’s own capacity for creating visual illusions. (Solomon 2009:

81)

The rise of new technology enabled showmen to render their shows even more

breathtaking. In order to attract more spectators, they had to come up with new ideas

in order to capture their audience’s attention and admiration. Mr P Silas Swift in The

Circus of Ghosts does not hide his intentions and the secrets of his trade by saying

that “calling her THE ACROBATIC GHOST and getting her up on the trapezes and

using the lights to make her look ghostly is how we are gonna do it and we’re gonna

pretend that magic does exist, because I make magic, that’s my job!” (Ewing 2011:

32). The American showman’s language differs from Mister Roland’s, a native

Frenchman, in terms of his lack of punctuation, emphasis on certain words, and

informal use. His tone is more straightforward and aggressive, but so is his intention

of selling a product. Monsieur Roland, on the other hand wants to keep traditional

mesmerism alive, and not have its reputation spoilt by some American showman. This

is clearly an example of the new world threatening the more slow placed Europe,

which still sticks to its traditions. This juxtaposition of old and new is certainly a

characteristic of neo-Victorian fiction, as there is a “duality inherent in the neo-

Victorian genre, the tension between old and new, past and present, even as emphasis

is repeatedly placed upon the ‘new’ elements of the process” (Yates 2009/2010: 188).

Monsieur Roland and Silas P Swift clearly have divergent views when it comes

to entertaining an audience, as the Frenchman takes his trade very seriously. It is in a

    60

conversation with Cordelia Preston that Monsieur Roland expresses his fears

concerning the future of mesmerism:

And you know, Cordelia, here, in this new country, people are not bound to the

past, to old ways of thinking. I think it is no coincidence that these modern

inventions – the invention of the telegraph say, and indeed Mr Morton’s work

with sulphuric ether to close the brain down – were discovered here, and not in

the old world. Tradition does not stifle, here. (Ewing 2011: 191)

Throughout the novel Monsieur Roland remains the calm observer, who

notices the changes that take place around him. He is perceptive and is the first to

voice Mrs Spoons’ dementia. He is the voice of reason in their little family, which can

also be seen in his use of language, as he uses correct grammar and punctuation.

Moreover, his words are well chosen and reflect a certain calmness.

The Victorians witnessed a tremendously fast increase in visual technologies,

which went hand in hand with their craving for the spectacle, and the epoch was

defined by “living through looking” (Marsch 1999: 276). On the one hand, their

familiar world is haunted by the uncanny, such as ghosts and the double. But on the

other, it becomes clearer that the past and known world is invaded by modern

technology and medicine, through various discoveries, such as ether, the

daguerrotype, and the use of light for special effects. Like the authors, the

protagonists try to create an illusion / deception, as Cordelia notes in The Circus of

Ghosts: “He’s like Silas Swift, she thought. Using light for effect” (Ewing 2011: 285).

The same idea of using lights to this effect can be found in the Night Circus:

There is so much that glows in the circus, from flames to lanterns to stars. I

have dear the expression “trick of the light” applied to sights within Le Cirque

des Rêves so frequently that I sometimes suspect the entirety of the circus is

itself a complex illusion of illumination. – Friedrick Thiessen, 1894.

(Morgenstern 2011: 91)

The protagonists embrace the new technology, as new devices introduce new

means of making money, such as the daguerrotype, a momentous technological

advance over the camera obscura, in which the artist intervenes at a later and much

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different stage. Introducing this device reflects the concept of “hyperreality” once

more, as a photograph is a mere copy of reality, a representation, which may capture a

moment but cannot give a perfect representation. Jennifer Green-Lewis notes quite

accurately that “before it is anything, every photograph is a picture; a construction,

made, not begotten” (Green-Lewis 2000: 36-37). Like a photograph, a neo-Victorian

novel is a reconstruction of traditional Victorian novels, which is similar to “this

daguerreotype, [which] as a sign of a real world, is profoundly unlike the reality it

represents” (Green-Lewis 2000: 37). Linda Hutcheon argues along the same lines

when it comes to comparing photography and fiction, stating that “both forms have

traditionally been assumed to be transparent media which paradoxically could

master/capture/fix the real” (Hutcheon 2002: 39). However, photographs and

historical novels are witnesses of the times they are conceived in. They may not

represent reality as such but a novel as well as a photograph can be called

““mirror[s]” of the world” (Jay 1994: 126).22 In addition, early perceptions of

photographs as magic tie in with the overall topic of this thesis, and it is Roland

Barthes who argues that ‘the realists do not take the photograph for a “copy’ of

reality, but for an emanation of past reality: a magic, not an art” (Barthes 1981: 86).

This certainly reflects the Victorian age, an epoch of the sensationalist and new

technology, as

this was an age of increasingly spectacular ‘special effects’, involving dioramas,

panoramas, elaborate lighting systems and machinery of all kinds. Theatrical

illusion and the Victorian machine culture combined in a new technology of

representation. In short, this decade was a moment of consolidation in the ‘era

of the spectacle’ – inaugurated by the French Revolution [1789-99], and

consolidated by the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the International Exhibition of

1862. (Pykett 1994: 2)

In addition, the introduction of photography can be linked to the Victorian

consumerist and commodity culture, to quote Jonathan Crary: “To understand the

“photography effect” in the nineteenth century, one must see it as a crucial component

of a new cultural economy of value and exchange, not as part of a continuous history                                                                                                                22 For a very interesting and detailed account of the invention of photography, see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes (Jay 1994: 83-148).

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of visual representation (Crary 1992: 13). It is Cordelia in The Circus of Ghosts, who

recognizes the potential lucrative use of the daguerrotype, which reflects Crary’s

notion that “photography and money become homologous forms of social power in

the nineteenth century” (Crary 1992: 13). The possible uses of photography are also

dealt with in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus, as the fraudulent Herr M. takes

pictures of Mignon posing as dead girl. This certainly bears necromantic and ghostly

connotations as “Mignon’s daily work henceforward consisted of personating the

dead, and posing for their photographs” (Carter 2006: 156). Herr M. creates spectral

visions to fool people grieving the loss of their beloved ones. In a sense he is similar

to every circus manager/showman trying to take advantage of people’s naivety, and

like any magician, he is merely creating an illusion: “He believed the best illusions

were the simplest. However, as a hobby, experimented with various optical toys and

magic lanterns of the most sophisticated kind” (Carter 2006: 157).

Magic and illusion go hand in hand with science and technology. This concept

of the co-existence of the two poles can be seen best in The Prestige in which Nicola

Tesla plays an important part. Millhauser’s short story also contains technological

elements and Eisenheim clearly experiments with it: “In the basement of the factory

was a large room in which he conducted chemical and electrical experiments, and a

curtained darkroom; Eisenheim was a close student of photography and the new art of

cinematography” (Millhauser 1997: 226). Science and magic may be at opposite poles

to each other to a certain extent, but magicians themselves are well aware that

the art of conjuring developed alongside the growth of scientific knowledge in

the field of optics, chemistry, mechanics, and electricity. The set of appliances,

the so-called props – with which the modern illusionist works rather resembles a

scientific laboratory with complex mechanisms and apparatuses. This made it

possible to continuously develop the methods of the actor’s mastery, to perfect

his style and manner of performing the trick, affording, on the other hand, a

possibility to complicate the subject matter of the conjuring acts, turning them

into a single performance with ever more surprising tricks following in rapid

succession. (Anon. 1988: np)

The world of the circus and the stage are prime examples for the fact that we,

the audience, are constantly exposed to illusion. We may even draw on Plato’s

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Allegory of the Cave, which suggests that we do not face reality but mere shadows.

Postmodern theoreticians, such as Jean Baudrillard have come up with similar

concepts. Baudrillard’s concept of “hyperreality” plays with the notion that we no

longer face real objects but the representations of the representations, thus “signs will

exchange among themselves exclusively, without interacting with the real (and this

becomes the condition for their smooth operation) (125)” (Baudrillard quoted in

Lindner 2003: 144). He further explains the concept by saying that “what was

projected psychologically and mentally, what used to be lived out on earth as

metaphor, as mental or metaphorical scene, is henceforth projected into reality,

without any metaphor at all, into an absolute space which is also that of simulation”

(Baudrillard 1983: 128). Therefore, according to Baudrillard, we no longer face the

real as it no longer exists. This is quite striking in today’s society, which is becoming

more and more visual and also technological. Humanity no longer needs to step out

into the world but merely needs to switch on television to learn about the world. The

same accounts for the stage and the circus, the two media invite people into their

realms in order to offer them their reality, a similar technique that the cinema and

television use today. They offer you alternative realities, histories, and stories, and we

take them for granted. But we should not easily be deceived by ‘this diabolical

seduction of images’ [as] “it is the reference principle of images which must be

doubted, this strategy by means of which they always appear to refer to a real world,

to real objects, and to reproduce something which is logically and chronologically

anterior to themselves” (Baudrillard 2011: 478), “as simulacra, images precede the

real to the extent that they invert the causal and logical order of the real and its

reproduction” (Baudrillard 2011: 478). Images have thus become so powerful and

dominant in our society that we no longer make a difference between what is real and

what is not. Baudrillard’s essay mainly focuses on the obnoxious impact of images

from television and the cinema. However, images and illusions have a similar impact,

as they are able to manipulate human beings to the extent they may believe almost

anything. Therefore, Baudrillard’s statement that

the image has taken over and imposed its own immanent, ephemeral logic; an

immoral logic without depth, beyond good and evil, beyond truth and falsity; a

logic of the extermination of its own referent, a logic of the implosion of

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meaning in which the message disappears on the horizon of the medium

(Baudrillard 2011: 482),

should not be forgotten. It is Angela Carter who takes up the concept of

simulacra in Nights at the Circus, thus showing the self-reflexiveness of her own

writing. In her description of the prostitutes that she used live with, she notes that

“[they] knew [they] only sold the simulacra”’ (Carter 2006: 42) and their own

pleasure was merely a deception and part of their trade.

The introduction of technology is a crucial aspect of the nineteenth century and

therefore is a recurrent aspect in neo-Victorian fiction. Technology has become

influential to the extent that a new subgenre dealing specifically with this aspect has

been created, namely steampunk.

An important element of the sub-genre of steampunk is the clock and it is used

extensively in The Night Circus: “The only movement within the circus is the clock

that ticks by the passing minutes, if such a wonder of sculpture can even be called a

clock” (Carter 2006: 4). The idea of a clock holding together an entire microcosm is

also expressed in the opening sentence of Ann and Jeff Vandermeer’s Steampunk:

“It’s a Clockwork Universe, Victoria” (Ann Vandermeer and Jeff Vandermeer 2008:

ix). The idea of the clock can be found in Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet where

backstage is compared to a huge clock:

I had the sensation then – and I felt it again in the years that followed, every

time I made a similar trip backstage – that I had stepped into the workings of a

giant clock, stepped through the elegant casing to the dusty, greasy, restless

machinery that lay, all hidden from the common eye, behind it. (Waters 2002:

29)

This passage shows that performances work like clockwork and that everything needs

to be timed and practised in order to work. There is no room for spontaneity, as

everything moves according to a set script. Moreover, it takes the magic of the

performance away, as it demonstrates that everything needs to be planned beforehand.

Victorians were fascinated by clocks, as they enabled them to time and

regulate/control the new technology and machinery, but at the same time clocks more

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and more came to regulate people’s lives. Clocks are mechanical devices allowing us

to quantify the passing of time and creating a make-believe that we are somehow in

control of time, as Caroline Cason Barratt suggests: “we can see how these machines

work and can manipulate them, an attractive option that reasserts our ability to control

our own destiny, even in the face of the inevitable passage of time” (Barratt 2010:

170).

The notion of control and a ticking clock is predominant in The Night Circus, where

the clock is an important character in the mechanism of the plot:

The finished clock is resplendent. At first glance it is simply a clock, a rather

large black clock with a white face and a silver pendulum. Well crafted,

obviously, with intricately carved woodwork edges and a perfectly painted face,

but ultimately a time-keeper.

But that is before it is wound, before it begins to tick, the pendulum swinging

steadily and evenly. Then it becomes something else.

The changes are slow. First, the colour changes in the face, shifts from white

to grey, and then there are clouds that float across it, disappearing when they

reach the opposite side.

Meanwhile, bits of the body of the clock expand and contract, like pieces of a

puzzle. As though the clock is falling apart, slowly and gracefully.

(Morgenstern 2011: 69)

This passage reflects once more the idea of the seemingly real, as the clock hides a

second nature. Once it is set in motion, the clock comes to life and “the body of the

clock expands and contracts” just like a heart does. This passage echoes a previous

line, which states that “if we do things properly, it will undoubtedly take on a life of

its own” (Morgenstern 2011: 61). This shows that the circus in itself is a living

organism and that it can only function as long as all the organs or pieces function in

perfect concord, which is also reflected in the following passage: “The

monochromatic colour scheme, the endless circles of the pathways like clockworks.

Herr Thiessen is amazed at how well his clock fits the circus, and how well the circus

fits his clock” (Morgenstern 2011: 123). Little does Herr Thiessen know about the

real role of the clock and how it controls the entire circus and the performers alike.

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The concept of time keeping and the clock are crucial in the novel, so is the idiom of

time being up or running out. This is for example the case in the scene preceding Tara

Burgees’ death. Her not being able to find a “clock to check the time” (Morgenstern

2011: 178) anticipates her imminent death as she is no longer part of the circus.

Technology is contrasted with magic, or old magic to be more precise.

Towards the end of novel, Marco tells Bailey to “think of the circus as a machine [and

the] bonfire is one of the things that powers it” (Morgenstern 2011: 361). The use of

the bonfire shares connotations with old magic and witchcraft, as witches needed a

fire to heat up the cauldron in order to create their spells. In addition, it also reminds

the reader of technology, as steam locomotives were powered by coal.

The use of clocks in neo-Victorian fiction ties in with the concepts of the

subgenre of steampunk.23 The idea of a mechanism holding the plot together is quite

striking and reflects the importance of technology in Victorian and neo-Victorian

Literature. The latter and steampunk go hand in hand, as they both give alternative

versions of the past, as “the steampunk world is sepia-toned and somehow timeless,

filtering a new view of the future through anachronistic elements of the past” (Barrett

2010: 175). Steffen Hantke defines steampunk as “a science fiction subgenre that

postulates a fictional event of vast consequences in the past and extrapolates from this

event a fictional though historically contingent present or future” (Hantke 1999: 246).

In addition, this passage reflects the Victorian fascination for technology and

mechanisms:

                                                                                                               23 The following quotation sums up steampunk quite nicely: “First and foremost, steampunk is about things – especially technological things – and our relationships to them. As a sub-genre of science fiction, it explores the difference an object can make; it imagines alternative Victorian pasts in which technological advances (such as those imagined by H.G. Wells and Jules Verne) radically alter the course of history and open up possible future techno-cultural worlds. As a craft and lifestyle movement, it produces material things that might make a difference today; steampunk artists produce fanciful Victorian-like gadgets (inspired by both actual and fictional Victorian mechanical inventions) or refurbish contemporary technological objects to make them look and feel ‘Victorian’ in order to challenge contemporary technological design and help us reconsider the value of things. In both its literary and material manifestations, steampunk is about learning to read all that is folded into any particular created thing – that is, learning to connect the source materials to particular cultural, technical, and environmental practices, skills, histories, and economies of meaning and value” (Forlini 2010: 73). In the film Hugo Cabret (2011), Martin Scorsese’s homage to the silent movie and to the film pioneer Georges Méliès, the director draws extensively on postmodern concepts and steampunk in particular.

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The mid to late 19th Century was an age of extraordinary experimentation, when

science, industry and technology were driving massive changes in Western

society. […] This was an era when it seemed that anything might be possible,

that mankind’s only limit was the human imagination; in addition, the

appearance of numerous Science Fiction publications during this period was

testament to the way that limit was being pushed. (Strongman 2011: 19)

The empiricist nature of the nineteenth century still has a role in today’s literature and

can be found in steampunk literature and films. In an interview Paul di Filippo

justifies his attraction to the Victorian age as follows:

It’s the beginning of our modern era, so its relevance remains keen. But it’s also

the start of a highly documented culture, thanks to photography, sound

recording, early movies, and institutional/governmental record-keeping en

masse. The sheer volume of researchable material encourages us to voyage

there! (Yaszek 2010: 191)

Moreover, events, such as steampunk conventions, relive the fascination for

technology and science that the Victorians experienced over a century ago. Such

events enable fans to dress up and live their fantasy world.24

Unlike most neo-Victorian literature, steampunk fiction describes fantasy

worlds in the tradition of the likes of Jules Verne or H. G. Wells. Its plots are

characterised by fantastical plots, such as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

(2003) or Steamboy (2004). Therefore, it is not surprising that “steampunk

technologies require some facet of ‘magic’ in order to be rendered plausible [and] its

technology is far closer to magic than hard science” (Perschon 2010: 140). This

magical element ties in with the fantastical nature of The Night Circus, in which a

clock is the omnipresent and magical device that holds the circus and the plot

together. The purpose of steampunk literature is to create a magical and fantastical

world, thus creating an implausible alternative history. Steampunk does not adhere to

the traditional historical novel but subverts it, as “the shaping force behind steampunk                                                                                                                24 Bestseller novels like The Night Circus inspire entire fan communities to re-create the fictional world through art (see https://pinterest.com/haley_keim/the-night-circus/) and even dress up like the characters in the novel. This fact is even more striking considering that the novel itself deals with a so-called fan community, the rêveurs, who follow the circus everywhere.

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is not history but the will of its author to establish and then violate and modify a set of

ontological ground rules” (Hantke 1999: 248).

Despite relying heavily on imaginary worlds and extraordinary devices, this

sub-genre bears postmodern characteristics according to Rebecca Onion:

To some extent, steampunk is postmodern: it picks and chooses from previously

existing styles of physical technology and ideological modes of technological

engagement. In their love for the breadth and the perceived innocence of

technological and scientific knowledge, exemplified by the figure of the

gentlemen-scientist and/or tinkerer, steampunks look back to the Victorian era.

(Onion 2008: 142)

Hence, The Night Circus, despite being set in the Victorian age, does not give an

authentic account of the period in a fashion that other historical fictions do, to quote

Perschon: “Steampunk is less concerned with recreating the past than an idea of the

past, a nostalgic romanticism of what the Victorian era represents, rather than how it

actually was” (Perschon 2010: 142). By distancing itself from historical fictions in the

sense that it does not give an account of actual historical events, The Night Circus is

even more at liberty to use science fiction and fantasy elements.

Technology and modernity certainly contrast with the past and magic in

historiographic metafictions, and so do science and magic. It is therefore not

surprising that the more controversial practices like mesmerism would also find their

way into the genre.

In neo-Victorian fiction, authors display their technique of mixing historical

and fictional elements. Magicians work along the same lines, and like novelists, they

also create a dialogue with the audience and the readers. Both also reject modern

technology and create a sense of longing and nostalgia. The past they describe was

much simpler and the audience and readers still share a familiarity with it, to which

they wish to return to. Technology might help the artists to render their acts more

spectacular, but the gap between the new and old world remains. Since magicians rely

on technology, one can conclude that magic and illusions must rely on science and

technology. This enables the artists and the magicians to create a different world, and

it is technology that holds it all together. This fascination with technology has also led

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to the creation of yet another subgenre, steampunk, which is similar in nature to

postmodernism, due to its equally playful nature. It mixes previously existing

technology with futuristic elements, and does not offer an accurate historical account.

1.5 Mesmerism, magic or science?

Throughout The Mesmerist, the different characters try to justify the

importance of mesmerism, linking it to science rather than to magic:

However, mesmerism is not magic and it is not a matter of ghostly powers:

mesmerism is a matter of transference of energy from a practitioner to another

person for the power of good. That is all. Magic does not exist, Mr Swift. And

there is nothing ghostly about mesmerism: no-one is pretending to look into the

future or look into the past or be from the underworld, and the name you

propose to use is totally misleading. (Ewing 2011: 31)

Monsieur Roland strictly refuses to link mesmerism to magic, and also

categorically rejects magic.

The introduction of psychology in the wake of scientific progress reflects the

mentality of the Victorian era to explore unknown territory of the human body, and in

the case of this particular science the workings of the mind. Scientists thirsted to get

an insight into the depths of the human consciousness and find an explanation for

certain phenomena, such as mesmerism. When it was introduced by Franz Anton

Mesmer, animal magnetism, also known as hypnotism or mesmerism, was regarded

as a science (as was phrenology), and its longevity was mainly due to its wide-ranging

popularity, since “in Victorian Britain almost any member of society – from factory

worker to aristocrat to priest – might succumb to the powerful attractions of the

mesmeric séance” (Winter 1998: 1).

However, during the nineteenth century the common view had it that

hypnotism may be made a remedial agent of the highest value, and of great use in

surgical operations where heart and lung affections render the employment of

chloroform or ether dangerous, and that the only obstacle in the way of its

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adoption lies in the undoubted moral dangers attending its use. (Bramwell and

Best 1890: 543)

The ability to influence and even manipulate other beings fascinated the Victorian

mind and led it to come up with all sorts of possible fears dominated by the idea of

not being able to master one’s personality anymore. Mesmerism encountered much

justified criticism related, in particular, to fraud and impostors who discovered the

financially lucrative nature of the pseudo-science and its manipulative power to

deceive ignorant and naïve audiences. Moreover, it was accompanied by other

dangers and fears, which were linked to the unconscious state, sexual abuse being the

most prominent:

By far the most interesting of the cases which have yet occurred in the practice of

animal magnetisers, are those in which the patients have been females, and

pregnancy one of the results. This curious effect, at the one time, made

magnetising a highly popular operation. (Anon. 1829: 384)

Mesmerism has always been quite a prominent theme in literature, most notably in

the works of Romantic writers, such as Coleridge or Shelley. Traces of mesmerism or

animal magnetism can be found in European literature (Stanbury 2012: 11-12), as it

always provided material for supernatural tales, the uncanny. However, in the

nineteenth century mesmerism was associated with evil rather than healing powers,

for example in the fictions of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and George du Maurier’s Trilby

to name but two. It is therefore not surprising that Barbara Ewing chose a native

Frenchman as the serious and wise mesmerist in her novels The Mesmerist and The

Circus of Ghosts. A similar idea can be found in George du Maurier’s Trilby, a novel

set in France. One could argue that Monsieur Roland is therefore but “un écho, un

simulacre, quoi! pas autre chose! …” (du Maurier 1998: 299) of a Victorian

mesmerist. Mesmerism has become one of the most common features of neo-

Victorian literature, as this pseudo-science “lend[s], especially in contrast to today’s

beliefs, dramatic and often humorous possibilities to neo-Victorian fiction, spicing up

and serving as a counterpoint to the stodginess often associated with Victorians”

(Glendening 2013: 102). Mesmerism, like neo-Victorian fiction, is controversial, as

they both have people speaking in favour of them, and detractors. Mesmerism was

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thought to be fraudulent and was merely practised to cheat people and make money.

The same accounts for neo-Victorian fiction, as it also a hybrid genre, often mixing

spicy topics, such as mesmerism and homosexuality, in order to gain a wider

readership. It is “a loose, baggy genre” (Yates 2009/2010: 186) with “an obstinate

resistance to generic characterisation” (Yates 2009/2010: 186). Criticism against neo-

Victorian fiction holds that it is not historical fiction, as it does not accurately

reproduce the past. Therefore, like mesmerism it moves away from a historical

method and science. However, Louise Hadley argues that

[neo-Victorian fiction’s] concern with historical narratives is connected to both

the Victorian context that it evokes and the contemporary context in which it

was written, [thus holding] out the possibility of establishing an emphatic

connection to the past without resulting in presentism. (Hadley 2010: 26)

The theme of fraud is introduced in Christopher Priest’s The Prestige, where

Angier turns to mesmerism in order to make a living, being fully aware of his

fraudulent undertaking: “For indeed I am sort of a charlatan they seek to discredit. I

am not what I say I am, but my deceptions are harmless and, I do believe, helpful at a

time of personal loss” (Priest 2004: 178).

Mesmer eventually started training other practitioners (Stanbury 2012: 10),

and Ewing’s novels portray mesmerism as an effective means to relieve people’s pain,

but also take into account that mesmerism was also practiced by frauds who only

deceived people by putting on a performance. Ewing does not deal with the fact that

male mesmerists were often accused of sexual harassment, something that

contemporaries certainly criticized or even satirized (Stanbury 2012: 11). In her essay

on mesmerism, Sarah Gracombe’s emphasises the exact same idea by stating that

“mesmerism prompted concern about the possibility of such influence – generally

wielded by a man, often upon a younger woman – being used for nefarious purposes,

whether criminal or sexual” (Gracombe 2003: 100).

Throughout the novel, Monsieur Roland wants people to take his trade

seriously and recognize its importance in the scientific domain. However, few people

share his view, like Mr Silas P Swift, for example, who only sees the opportunity

behind it. Monsieur Roland is well aware that his fight is difficult and he also knows

that mesmerism is losing its potential as a medical practice, as it is not generally

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accepted as a science: “Mesmerism had always had to travel with controversy and

disapproval, because people believed that mesmerism was scientifically unexplainable

– they saw it, but they did not believe it: it had to be a trick” (Ewing 2011: 25).

Mesmerism and magic are treated in a similar way, as the audience always thinks that

they are witnessing a trick and that there is a rational explanation.

Throughout the novel, the author constantly tries to add value to this practice:

“And yet, yet: in truth there was an uneasiness about the whole thing: they had seen,

but mesmerism was neither scientific nor explainable. Some of them conceded at

least, however, that it was better than slugs of brandy, and the screaming” (Ewing

2011: 15). Like in the short story ‘Eisenheim, the Illusionist’, mesmerism has turned

into a remnant of the past as modern day science is flourishing, and new discoveries

are being made. The protagonists in the novel have recognized that the turn of the

century is opening up new horizons, leaving the past behind. It is Monsieur Roland

who notices that “from now on mesmerism and hypnotism will become […] pure

entertainment” (Ewing 2011: 21) rather than a procedure used in the operating theatre.

Mesmerism loses its medical values and becomes mere entertainment, which is not

taken seriously any longer: “And all the time the circus proprietors and music hall

managers are looking for even further ways to enhance mesmerism – to vulgarise it

even further to please their ever-hungry, thrill-seeking audiences: more lights, more

shadows, more trapezes, more lions, more brass bands!” (Ewing 2011: 22).

Barbara Ewing obviously did some research into the history of mesmerism in

England and Monsieur Roland was probably created whilst doing this research, as

Stanbury notes that it was “travelling showmen [who] kept the subject alive”

(Stanbury 2012: 13). He continues, stating that “a showman from France of Germany

had slightly more cachet than a native-born and such was the case when Baron

Dupotet, who could hardly speak English, came to London in 1837 as a strong

believer in mesmerism who wished to make money” (Stanbury 2012: 13). The

concept of the foreigner has always been dear to novelists, especially when it comes

to sensationalist fiction. A foreigner like Monsieur Roland or even Tesla in The

Prestige, render the plot more interesting. At the same time using foreigners with ring

to their names, indicates that science, or new methods have invaded Britain.

In her novel Ewing subverts the traditional depiction of the male mesmeriser by

introducing lady mesmerists to render her work more uncanny. Victorian novelists,

for example, Du Maurier, kept their work in a particular Victorian ideology: “For

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instance, the mesmerizer was usually male and the patient female, thereby setting up a

paradigm of mesmerism in keeping with Victorian gender ideals where the conscious

man seemed to control the unaware, unconscious and passive woman” (Weliver 2000:

72).

Despite the negative criticism, mesmerism also had its prominent followers in the

eighteenth and nineteenth century, authors who favoured this practice, for example

Charles Dickens and Robert Browning, and who used mesmerism in their works

(Stanbury 2012: 13; 15). Mesmerism provided them with elements of the supernatural

and sensational, something that the contemporary audience was asking for. It is

known that Charles Dickens went to mesmerism séances and it is he who introduced

Wilkie Collins to the practice when the latter was of ill health (Ackroyd 2012: 107). It

goes without saying, that Wilkie Collins then re-worked his experience and included

John Elliotson in The Moonstone (Ackroyd 2012: 107).

Despite some initial doubts when it comes to mesmerism, it is taken more and

more seriously as the plot The Mesmerist develops. There are a number of occasions

when the different agents in the novel point out that it is not fraud and can be linked

to science: “phrenology seemed to be based on knowledge; and [that] mesmerism was

not about ghosts and spirits. Neither activity had anything to do at all with magic”

(Ewing 2007: 122). In spite of constantly pondering on the efficiency of their trade,

the author, Barbara Ewing, is not imposing a set opinion on her reader, as she keeps

using the verb ‘to seem’ instead of using the much more convincing and stronger verb

‘to be’. She leaves it up to the reader whether to believe that it is real science or not.

To conclude, mesmerism has become a common element of neo-Victorian

fiction, as both of them a considered controversial. They both long for a return to the

past. In addition, mesmerism like spiritualism enables authors to add more dramatic

and spectacular effects to their narratives, due to their uncanny and unfamiliar nature.

Mesmerism and magic are thought to be tricks, and readers today are well aware that

are, but still are fascinated by them. In addition, mesmerism and neo-Victorian fiction

share elements in common, as they had to fight for their recognition. But in the end it

is worth remembering that they also share elements of pure entertainment, and

mesmeric séances like fiction are meant to tickle and captivate the readers and

audience.

   

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2 The Aesthetic and Ideological Role of the Circus and Music Hall

2.1 The role of the spectacle and entertainment in society

Having previously dealt with the concepts of historical metafictions, the second

chapter will mainly deal with the concepts of spectacle and performativity, as well as

discuss the aesthetic and ideological role of the circus and music hall. The circus,

stage and music hall offer the protagonist a different world, a more playful one, where

boundaries can be crossed and social rules broken. They represent microcosms of our

society and here Guy Debord’s La Société du Spectacle is of particular interest.

Today’s society is invaded by spectacle, and the media are present in our life.

Therefore, it is not surprising that the spectacle represents our society, to quote Guy

Debord:

Le spectacle se présente à la fois comme la société même, comme une partie

de la société, et comme instrument d’unification. En tant que partie de la

société, il est expressément le secteur qui concentre tout regard et toute

conscience. Du fait même que ce secteur est séparé, il est le lieu du regard

abusé et de la fausse conscience; et l’unification qu’il accomplit n’est rien

d’autre qu’un langage officiel de la séparation généralisée. (Debord 1992:

16)25

According to Debord the spectacle is omnipresent in our society and

represents an integral part of it. It is a means to control our society, as it focuses on

people’s gaze and conscience. Despite the spectacle’s function to entertain the

audience, one should not forget, to quote Debord:

Le spectacle est l’idéologie par excellence, parce qu’il expose et manifeste dans

sa plénitude l’essence de tout système idéologique: l’appauvrissement,

                                                                                                               25 The spectacle appears at once as society itself, as a part of society and as a means of unification. As a part of society, it is that sector where all attention, all consciousness, converges. Being isolated – and precisely for that reason – this sector is the locus of illusion and false consciousness; the unity it imposes is merely the official language of generalized separation (Debord 1995: 12, trans. Donald Nicholson Smith).

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l’asservissement et la négation de la vie réelle. Le spectacle est matériellement

« l’expression de la séparation et de l’éloignement entre l’homme et l’homme ».

La « nouvelle puissance de la tromperie » qui s’y est concentrée a sa base dans

cette production, par laquelle « avec la masse des objets croît … le nouveau

domaine des êtres étrangers à qui l’homme est asservi » [Debord refers to Karl

Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844)]. (Debord 1992:

205)26

The spectacle is ideological and utopian in nature, as poverty and enslavement are

non-existent within its narrow boundaries. Debord’s depiction of the spectacle is quite

negative, as it assumes that it deludes its audience, and instead of bringing people

closer together, separates them even more. The audience is asking to be entertained;

and taking Debord’s work into consideration, the spectators become part of the

entertainment, an idea which can be found in Barbara Ewing’s The Circus Ghosts:

And all the time the circus troupe kept up, as usual, a running commentary

among themselves about the audience, in among the cries of HOUP-LA! And

HURRAH! and the roaring of the lion; the audience came to be entertained by

the circus, did not perhaps know that they were themselves entertaining also.

Pretty girls and pompous Aldermen and mean-mouthed gangsters alike: they

may not have observed they were observed but indeed they were; the

performers were calling in their own circus language to each other: a mixture of

new American slang – high-falutin’, humbug – plus theatrical gestures that may

have seemed part of the act and Spanish whoops from the charros, the wild and

clever Mexican cowboys. (Ewing 2011: 7)

This passage gives an insight into the world of the spectacle and the circus by

explaining that the observers become the observed and vice versa. The length of the

sentences reflects the language of business entertainment, and like the circus troupe,

                                                                                                               26 The spectacle is the acme of ideology, for in its full flower it exposes and manifests the essence of all ideological systems: the impoverishment, enslavement and negation of real life. Materially, the spectacle is “the expression of estrangement, of alienation between man and man.” The “new potentiality of fraud” concentrated within it has its basis in that form of production whereby “with the mass ob objects grows the mass of alien powers to which man is subjected” (Debord 1995: 151, trans. Donald Nicholson Smith).

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they keep going on. In addition, the use of exclamations and words written in bold for

emphasis echo an exhilarating language. By mixing fonts and long sentences, the

reader is not given a respite, and kept on tenterhooks. The text captivates the reader’s

attention, and is rendered more challenging by the use of different fonts. Hence,

Susan Stewart’s argument that “the spectacle assumes that the object is blinded; only

the audience can see” (Stewart 1993: 108), is not valid as the performers are mostly in

control of the situation, being able to grasp the audience’s attention, and so is the

writer.

But at the same time the two parties are being ignorant, as a third player,

namely the reader is the ultimate observer who reads and therefore, sees what is going

on, and then can provide his or her own interpretation. This scenario resembles a

painting, showing all the different actors within a circus who are subjected to

perpetual motion and noise. The actors as well as the audience judge each other and

then assume the role that is asked of them. Animals and human beings are juxtaposed,

and due to the chaotic atmosphere and cacophony, it is hard to tell human

exclamations from the lion’s roaring. Little do they know that they are all actors in the

microcosm of the circus, which represents our society, to quote Julia Kristeva: “la

peinture est considérée comme une représentation du réel, devant lequel elle serait

mise en position de miroir” (Kristeva 1981: 308)27.

2.2 The circus as microcosm of society

As the circus brings different aspects of society together, it can be regarded as a

microcosm of our society, or to quote Bouissac:

A circus performance tends to represent the totality of our popular system of the

world, i.e., it actualizes in one way or another all the fundamental categories

through which we perceive our universe as a meaningful system. According to

this cosmological view of the circus, the constituents of the acts are the symbols

or tokens of their class, and their identification by the audience constitutes an

important part of the decoding process. A circus performance is easily

understood because, in a way, it is redundant with respect to our culture; and it                                                                                                                27 “Painting is considered a representation of the real, in front of which it would be in the position of the mirror” (Kristeva 1981: 308, own translation).

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is gratifying because it enables us to grasp its totality in a limited time and

space. (Bouissac 1976: 7)

Within its very specific and precise confines, the circus reflects aspects of our

society and it is entertaining at the same time, or to quote Bouissac “it is a kind of

mirror in which the culture is reflected, condensed and at the same time transcended;

perhaps the circus seems to stand outside the culture only because it is at its very

centre” (Bouissac 1976: 9). It may stand outside, as does the fool in Shakespearean

plays, enabling him thus to observe and criticize our society.

Donna Gustafson’s essay on the representation of the circus in art, drew my

attention to Georges Seurat’s Le Cirque, and her reflection on this nineteenth-century

painting echoes the concept of the microcosm:

Seurat’s painting represents the circus as a microcosm of modern society and

includes the full spectrum of social classes, identified by costume and by

placement in the seats. The well-dressed men who congregate around the

entrance to the ring, like the well-dressed men depicted in Degas’ images of the

ballet, frequented such places to form liaison with the women performers.

(Gustafson 2001: 15)

The same accounts for the music hall, to quote Cheryl A. Wilson:

As a site of female performance, the Victorian music hall bore a vexed

relationship to ideas and ideals of women’s music, transforming a domestic

accomplishment – ostensibly designed to attract a husband and fill leisure time

– into a titillating spectacle and means of employment. (Wilson 2006: 285)

In her novel The Circus of Ghosts, Barbara Ewing takes this forming of liaisons

into account, and invites the reader to join her observations: “And it was only if you

happened to be looking very, very carefully indeed that you might have seen the wild-

haired woman and one of the city Aldermen (a most unlikely combination) exchange

an almost imperceptible nod” (Ewing 2011: 7-8). The idea is again taken up by the

same author in The Mesmerist, the prequel of The Circus of Ghosts. In this novel

Cordelia, the heroine, falls for Lord Ellis, a nobleman. Like in Seurat’s painting, the

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circus in The Ghost Circus enables people from different social classes to come

together and mingle, which clearly reflects Guy Debord’s concept of the spectacle,

according to which “[it] is not a collection of images, but a social relation among

people, mediated by images” (Debord 1995: 12). Their union is impossible according

to contemporary standards, as a man of high rank could clearly not marry an actress

or mesmerist. The plot is sensationalist in nature and the newspapers crave for similar

stories. It is here that noble men can meet female artists and actresses, a union, which

would have been despised in another more conventional setting considering the rather

low reputation of the trade.

The circus blurs boundaries and there are different rules in this microcosm, but

despite the more liberal nature of the venue, the spectators still stick to certain

conventions, as can be seen in Seurat’s painting:

Two spaces are juxtaposed: the space for the stage and the artistes, all curves,

stylised arabesques and spirals, filled with dynamic tension, or imbalance even;

and the space for the seating and the public, rigid, orthogonal, motionless,

strictly geometrical. (Lewandowski 2006, para. 2)

But at the same time, the circus and the music hall, represent an alternative reality,

where everything is possible, and social hierarchy is not respected. Stallybrass and

White clearly state that “the carnival, the circus, the gypsy, the lumpenproletariat,

play a symbolic role in bourgeois culture out of all proportion to their actual social

importance” (Stallybrass and White 1986: 20). Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque

is quintessential in this discussion, as we are constantly surrounded by the spectacle

and carnival, to quote Bakhtin: “Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they

live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people”

(Bakhtin 1984: 7). The notion of the carnivalesque is crucial and cannot be separated

from the circus or music hall. The latter offer different worlds, where social laws are

suspended, or in Bakhtin’s words: “What is suspended first of all is hierarchical

structure and all forms of terror, reverence, piety, and etiquette connected with it; that

is, everything resulting from socio-hierarchical inequality” (Bakhtin 1984: 123).

Bakhtin also adds that

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carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the

established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges,

norms, and prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of

becoming, change, and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and

completed. (Bakhtin 1984: 10)

As has been pointed out before, the carnival offers an idealised world, where no

order exists and men have become equal. In addition, it has a cathartic function, as it

enables man to forget but at the same to be cleansed. One of the means to obtain that

goal is certainly the circus, which “by appealing to the senses […] has attracted a

wide variety of spectators of both sexes and different classes, regions, and ages”

(Assael 2005: 1), and even continues to do so today. The circus fascinates people of

all ages and classes, and is a dear subject to artists and writers alike. The circus has

always attracted different sorts of people with different backgrounds and expectations,

and “thus, the circus is imagined as a zone of difference whose very existence, by

contrast, affirms the stability of the established society” (Handy quoted in Gustafson

2001: 92).

The circus may be a world of chaos and disorder, but it is precisely this feature that

makes it so interesting. At the same time,

it is significant that the performances take place in the “vacuum” of a circular

arena, a proxemically [from proxemics: the branch of study concerned with the

amount of space that people set between themselves and others] neutral space,

and usually not during working hours. We should keep in mind that although

the circus is daily work for the artists, it represents an exceptional event for the

audience. One or twice a year it punctuates, like a ritual, the otherwise

homogeneous “text” of “reality” itself. (Bouissac 1976: 81)

A night at the circus allows the audience to forget about the real world and explore

more exotic and exciting things, and this fact makes it all the more appealing for

artists as well. The concept of offering another world links the circus to Bakhtin’s

carnival:

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While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it. During carnival time life is

subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom. It has a universal

spirit; it is a special condition of the entire world, of the world’s revival and

renewal, in which all take part. Such is the essence of carnival, vividly felt by

all its participants. (Bakhtin 1984: 7)

Similarly to the carnival period, the circus creates a microcosm, which is cut off from

society. The circus and carnival do not take any differences into account, and they

welcome people of all classes, race and gender. Both of them disobey any laws, but

have created their own ones, separating themselves from society.

Like the carnival period, the circus performance is an event that keeps touring and

also returning to the same places. The concept of returning can be linked to the idea of

a cyclical movement, as it keeps coming back to its beginning, often with only minor

changes to its original concept or programme. The circular shape of the circus can

also be associated with the concept of a ritual, and the audience keeps being attracted

by the circus to quote Paul Bouissac:

All circus acts indeed create the context for a challenge and stage the required

moves in the real time and space of the ring. The outcome of these acts impacts

our brains in a significant, transformative manner, which in many ways must be

addictive since we return again and again to participate in circus rituals.

(Bouissac 2012: 47)

The nature of the circus is addictive and mesmerizing if you will, and it is also quite

complex. On the one hand it offers the audience a topsy-turvy world and on the other

one, it follows an exact routine. All the participants play their well-defined parts, the

same way we enact different roles in society.

To conclude, the circus offers a microcosm of society and at the same time

blurs boundaries; a technique neo-Victorian fiction has also adopted, as it mixes

different literary categories, such as detective and sensationalist fiction. They both

create chaotic worlds and an alternative reality.

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2.3 The circus and its representation in arts and literature

The circus and the visual arts share a lot of elements in common, as their role is to

entertain their audience and viewers. It provides artists with a lot of inspiration and

ideas due to its versatile even contradictory nature, to quote Handy:

The circus is a theatre of contradictions, a place where a melange of performers’

precisely calibrated routines dazzles viewers and creates an overall impression

of exciting chaos, a place where both fear and pleasure are juxtaposed, a

popular entertainment that has inspired numerous avant-garde artists, a site for

visceral response to visual spectacle. (Handy quoted in Gustafson 2001: 92)

The contradictory nature of the circus makes it all the more attractive, despite the

chaos it generates. Whereas the visual arts, such as paintings and sculptures, are static,

the circus is in perpetual motion and travels to places where it can mesmerize even

more people. It goes without saying that the circus and its mystical world have lent

numerous artists inspiration and material. The very same idea has been put forward by

Jean Starobinski, who claims that “on ne diminue en rien le mérite des peintres du

cirque, si l’on reconnaît ce qu’ils doivent aux poètes qui les ont préparés à être émus

par les écuyères et par les clowns” (Starobinski 1970: 11).28

There have been numerous exhibitions on the circus, such as Images from the

World Between’, organized by the American Federation of Arts, and an exhibition

entitled Circus Showmen: Innovators who Shaped the Circus, the University of

Sheffield held earlier in 2012. Lee Siegel’s comment on the relation between art and

the circus sums it all up perfectly:

For art reconciles us to extinction. The circus travels the world in perpetual

motion. We stay in one place when we read a poem or gaze at a painting or

listen to music, and yet these experiences transport us through time and space.

The circus sends men and women flying through the air. A work of art, through

metaphor, through breathtaking imagery, through new harmonies and weirdly

                                                                                                               28 “We by no means belittle the merit of the painters of the circus if one recognises what they owe the poets who prepared them to be moved by the female circus riders and the clowns.” (Starobinski 1970: 11, own translation)

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recognizable dissonances, sends reality flying through the air by anchoring our

attention to our imagination. (Siegel quoted in Gustafson 2001: 163)

The world of the circus lends itself to this exercise, as it enables artists to depict

the world within a confined space, which is rich in its versatility. The world of the

circus has attracted many an artist to use it as a theme or even the protagonist of his or

her work. This also holds for prominent Victorian writers, such as Charles Dickens,

whom

the circus furnishes […] not only with a series of exceptional bodily

performances and dramatic character-types similar to those he has often turned

out himself, but he also recognised that, as a form of live, predominantly mute,

body-centred entertainment, it issues a radical challenge to literary

representation itself. (Stoddart 2000: 115)

Dickens was fascinated by the circus, as it provided him with enough material,

since all the elements and performers “were physical embodiments of that

quintessentially Dickensian love for “fancy”, an inalienable human desire generated

by spontaneity, freedom, release, enjoyment, curiosity, and the wonder of life”

(Assael 2005: 1). Therefore, it is understandable that people still crave plots that are

set in the circus as it provides a panoply of different themes and juxtapositions:

In general, the circus reveals a strange double life lived by the Victorians. The

human body featured in the ring, which went faster, higher, and deeper,

encouraged greedy eyes that searched for more – more authenticity, more

curiosity, more skilfulness, more daring. The circus thus revealed a shifting and

unstable boundary between foreigner-hating and nationalism (the equestrian

spectacle); objectification and interest (the “exotic” human or animal);

subversion and innocent fun (the clown); lewdness and skilfulness (the female

acrobat); and barbarity and fascination with the prodigy (the child performer).

(Assael 2005: 155)

Thus, the circus was an attractive setting for Victorian novelists, as it showed

a topsy-turvy world with a multitude of characters. Since neo-Victorian novelists try

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to imitate traditional Victorian novels and traditions, the recent publications of novels

using a similar setting is quite understandable. The same accounts for stories taking

place in music halls and pantomime theatres. However, it is worth pointing out that

the subversive nature of the circus reflects “the presentation of the retro-Victorian

novel, [which] on the other hand, is a fundamental scepticism towards any form of

stability” (Gutleben 2001: 139). Neo-Victorian fiction and the circus are similar, as

they both do not offer any stability but an escape from a rigid routine and ordered

society. Unlike the Victorian novel, neo-Victorian novels, such as Dan Leno and the

Limehouse Golem, and The Night Circus, offer different perspectives and not “a

single narrative guide” (Gutleben 2001: 139).

The colourful and chaotic world of the circus is an accurate aesthetic choice,

as it reflects the nature of postmodernism and neo-Victorian fiction, to quote

Gutleben:

The unity and organicity of Victorian narrative structures are rejected and

replaced by a mosaic of snapshots, impressions, anecdotes, experiences and

testimonies. Beyond the strictly narrative considerations, the principle of

fragmentation underlines the failure of order and harmony and the

foregrounding of disarray, chaos and entropy. It is manifestly also a rejection of

unitary and dogmatic interpretations and an advocacy of plural visions, various

truths and relativity. (Gutleben 2001: 140)

Like neo-Victorian literature, the circus offers a mosaic of different colours, and gives

an insight into exotic and unknown worlds. Both offer unfamiliar concepts, and their

impressions and dynamism are fast-paced to the extent that they confuse the readers

and inspire awe. Like the circus, neo-Victorian fiction does not impose any views and

one single voice, thus, granting readers more freedom of interpretation.

The circus has a universal nature due to its lack of rules and norms, as “it seems to

be at the same time both “within” and “outside” culture” (Bouissac 1976: 7). In

Circus and Culture, Bouissac calls the circus a language, arguing that “when a circus

director puts a show together or when an artist creates and then performs an act, the

audience is exposed to a sequence of audio-visual events that are in effect messages”

(Bouissac 1976: 5). In the circus, or any kind of show, the audience and the

performers enact their parts following a set of codes. During the performance the

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different agents create a dialogue, and they both know what is expected of them. This

dialogue takes place between all the agents in a circus, even the freaks. The latter

“required interpretation from their audience, challenging it to decipher their grotesque

human forms as part of the social body” (Winkiel 1997: 9).

In the light of our consumerist society, Bouissac is right to point out that “the

audience “consumes” these messages – that is, it understands what is performed in the

ring – and gives signs of enjoyment and approval” (Bouissac 1976: 5). These signs of

enjoyment and approval have traditionally been clapping and maybe short

exclamations. In the Prestige Alfred Borden mentions a similar dialogue, which he

coins “the Pact of Acquiescent Sorcery” (Priest 2004: 33).

In modern day society this dialogue – the understanding between performer and

audience – has been interrupted and no longer works in the same traditional way. This

can be illustrated by the fact that today the audience will be coached before a show,

and applause light and telecaster tell people when to clap and when to jump up or

shout certain things. Therefore, the audience no longer understands what is happening

before them and they merely consume without filtering the input they are given,

without questioning the content anymore. Hence, the ringmaster turns into the

puppeteer, holding the strings not merely of the performers but also the audience,

thereby directing the performance at will, and controlling the performance from

beginning to end.

Despite Bouissac not considering this element, his concept of codes shared among

the audience and the performers cannot be refuted, as it is indeed true that the circus

brings different cultures together due to its universal nature, as “a circus artist can

usually perform successfully in any country, without knowing the language or the

specific culture” (Bouissac 1976: 5).

Like society today, Victorian people had developed a hunger for the visual as

has been pointed out earlier in the context of the advances in technology. People

asked for entertainment, which was provided by the means of the theatre, pantomime,

the music hall, and the circus, for example. One could argue that the Victorian age

laid the foundations for the entertainment society that we live in today. As opposed to

the different means of entertainment in the nineteenth century, the circus differed as it

“was unusual among Victorian spectacles in really delivering wonder[,] others

presented a simulacrum” (Marsh 1999: 279). In addition, Paul Bouissac notes that

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during the nineteenth century, a time of intensive industrial, political, and

cultural expansion which exalted individual heroism and the conquest of exotic

frontiers, the circus provided a rich “crucible” in which both the anxiety of

change and otherness, and the exhilaration of novelty and liberty combined to

form a magnet for artistic imagination. The dynamic which was created then

still operates today, and has reached international dimensions after having

merged with other similar traditions during the contemporary process of cultural

globalization. (Bouissac 2012: 159)

The spectacle enables people to create a different persona, someone they want to be

but cannot be due to social restrictions. The Victorians were yearning for spectacular

events and performances, and were drawn to the circus. This exciting world offered

things they had never seen before, and they could not get enough of these

performances. This idea of the Victorian double life and the contradictory nature of

the setting provided Angela Carter with an ideal framework for her novel Nights at

the Circus. When referring to this novel, Linden Peach argues that on the one hand,

the circus in the novel is a symbol of the hierarchical and patriarchal society

which carnival mocks and mimics with its hierarchy of male performers, pursuit

of profit and oppression of subordinates. […] However, the circus is also the

focus for an alternative carnivalesque, which, […] demystifies and debunks the

established social hierarchy, including its own. (Peach 2009: 124)

But one has to ask the question to what extent the circus imposes its view on the

audience by pitching its tent in a town. Another question that arises here is whether or

not the audience willingly accepts to be scrutinized and examined in order to be

exposed, or ridiculed.

Neo-Victorian literature subverts this idea, as it clearly plays with the concept of

the grotesque, even the vulgar. It moves away from nineteenth-century Realism

creating fictional worlds where boundaries are crossed and the real can no longer be

distinguished from the unreal. The circus offers an ideal surrounding when it comes to

subverting norms, as it “encompassed an array of remarkably transgressive bodies:

women grew long beards, armless ladies sewed with their feet, hairy people worked

as “missing links”, and midgets and giants played cowboys, royalty and military

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figures” (Davis 2002: 27). Thus, the circus comes close to a playground as it gives

authors a multitude of ideas that can be developed. There are no limits in the circus,

which enables authors to come up with fantastic plots set in topsy-turvy worlds.

2.4 The circus and the carnival

Choosing the circus as the setting for her novel provides Angela Carter with a

transgressive space, and in addition, “the circus’s emphasis on the materiality of the

body meant that it traded in excess” (Assael 2005: 8). Angela Carter’s novel is a

milestone when it comes to representing the female grotesque body in modern

literature. Fevvers, the protagonist of Carter’s novel, fits into the circus, as “the body

(belonging to the clown, equestrian, or acrobat, for instance) became grandiose,

exaggerated, immeasurable, and heroic” (Assael 2005: 8).

It is apparent that Fevvers’ appearance is unusual or freakish if you will, but it is

exactly her appearance, which is in sync with the concept of the grotesque body and

its implications, since Mary Russo explains that

the grotesque body was exuberantly and democratically open and inclusive of

all possibilities. Boundaries between individuals and society, between genders,

between species, and between classes were blurred or brought into crisis in the

inversions and hyperbole of carnivalesque representation. (Russo 1995: 78)

Fevvers clearly exemplifies the grotesque body due to her unusual appearance.

Her size makes her larger than life so to speak, and true to her gargantuan dimensions,

the “Rabelaisian lady, [she] embodies carnival spirit” (Assael 2005: 10). Like him,

she has insatiable cravings and can devour next to anything, even lustful men.29

Stewart furthers this argument stating, “we cannot have a mammoth petite and

graceful ballerina unless we want a parody” (Stewart 1993: 94). The question that

arises here is whether or not the description of Fevvers can be regarded as a parody of

an aerialist, as she embodies an angel, but is obviously not fitting the part.30

                                                                                                               29 For a detailed analysis of the gigantic, see Susan Stewart’s On Longing (Stewart 1984: 70-103). 30 Like Fevvers, aerialists are often depicted as androgynous or in-between beings. Jean Starobinski notes that Théophile Gautier’s Auriol is “un Hercule mignon avec de petits pieds de femme …” [a cute Hercules with small women’s feet] and adds that “tout se passe comme si la légèreté féminisait l’acrobate” [everything happens as if the lightness feminized the acrobat] (Starobinski 1970: 43, own

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Fevvers wants to be her own woman, and in order to achieve this she needs to

be larger to be successful in a male-dominated world. In addition, by turning Fevvers

into a giant figure, Carter keeps her character in the tradition of the tall-tale, which

“incorporates the themes of the gigantic […]: the grotesque, the body, feasting,

leisure, the exterior and the public over the domestic; the vernacular and secular over

the official and sacred” (Stewart 1993: 97). Hence, Carter places Fevvers in line with

a genre that mainly focuses on male heroes or narrators. One only has to think of

Gargantua or Pantagruel, who are epitomes of the grotesque body (Stewart 1993: 98).

Like Rabelais, Carter uses exaggeration and also relies on the semantic field of food

when it comes to describing Fevvers: “Her face, broad and oval as a meat dish, had

been thrown on a common wheel out of coarse clay; nothing subtle about her appeal

[…]” (Carter 2006: 9). Thus, she echoes Rabelais’ work, in which “the material

bodily principle, that is, images of the human body with its food, drink, defecation,

and sexual life, plays a predominant role” (Bakhtin 1984: 18). Fevvers’ appearance is

certainly not feminine but coarse like a man’s, a rough mould and one of a kind,

deliberately formed and shaped by her creator. Despite being portrayed as a rather

masculine being, Fevvers’ association with clay and earth bears feminine

connotations, as “earth and the reproductive body are associated with the feminine”

(Vice 1997: 156) and reminds us of the earliest representations of femininity and

fertility. This ambiguous creature, Fevvers fits quite well into the circus, which is in

itself a space of binary oppositions, which was “fraught with contradictions – order

versus disorder, transgression versus respectability, foreign versus familiar” (Assael

2005: 13).

In the course of the novel, Carter intentionally keeps referring to Rabelais in her

work when depicting Fevvers:

[…] but her mouth was too full for a ripost as she tucked into this earthiest,

coarsest cabbies’ fare with gargantuan enthusiasm. She gorged, she stuffed

herself, she spilled gravy on herself, she sucked up peas from the knife; she has

a gullet to match her size and table manners of the Elizabethan variety. (Carter

2006: 21)

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             translation). Whereas Fevvers is depicted like a man, the male acrobat is portrayed like a feminine being. This is certainly reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Ariel from the Tempest, who is also a fairy-like being.

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This passage echoes Stewart’s definition of the tall-tale, as feasting is the major

theme. Fevvers is the female counterpart of Rabelais’ Gargantua, because like him

she is an exaggerated being. Like Rabelais, Carter uses hyperbolic language, which

“arises out of folk tradition, and thus the feast of the body in Rabelais has its corollary

in the feast of words and images offered during market celebrations” (Stewart 1993:

96). In addition, Carter links the body to food, which is also turned into a grotesque

element and typical for Rabelais, as “the exaggeration of the mouth is the

fundamental traditional method of rendering external comic features, as pictured by

comic masks, various “gay monsters […], devils in diableries, and Lucifer himself”

(Bakhtin 1984: 325).

Depicting Fevvers as a gigantic and determined woman, who dominates men

and knows perfectly well what she wants, clearly turns her into a representative of the

New Woman movement, as “the New Woman was represented as simultaneously

non-female, unfeminine and ultra-feminine” (Pykett 1992: 140). Like Fevvers, the

New Woman was depicted as a contradictory being, as it was both “mannish [and]

aping masculinity [as well as showing traits of] hyperfemininity” (Pykett 1992: 141).

Unlike Albert Nobbs, she is clearly more determined and not willing to give up

her own sexuality. Quite on the contrary, Fevvers is a lecherous figure, who knows

how to use her own assets. It is in the world of the circus that the New Women gained

recognition, as they were regarded as a novelty: “And Fevvers has all the éclat of a

new era to take off” (Carter 2006: 9).31 The circus enabled women to be independent

and recognized, or to quote Janet M. Davis: “in an era when a majority of women’s

roles were still circumscribed by Victorian ideals of domesticity and feminine

propriety, circus women’s performances celebrated female power, thereby

representing a startling alternative to contemporary social norms” (Davis 2002: 83).

Turning Fevvers into a controversial being goes hand in hand with the perception of

female acrobats in the nineteenth century who “were controversial not only because

of the danger involved but also because of their perceived lewdness” (Assael 2005:

115), which was further emphasised by the aerialists’ costumes (Assael 2005: 118-

119).

                                                                                                               31 For a more in-depth discussion see Janet M. Davis, The Circus Age (Davis 2002: 82).

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The discussion on the difficulty of distinguishing the real from the unreal in the

first chapter can be followed up by an analysis of the element of the grotesque in

Barbara Ewing’s The Circus of Ghosts. The title already introduces the concept of

ghosts in the form of flying women or aerialists in a circus environment. The

profession of the female aerialist and her performing in a circus share some common

concepts, the most prominent one being their transgressive nature. They both subvert

traditional and social norms, as well as defy the constraints normally imposed on the

body:

In the acrobatic, equestrian and aerialist acts which demonstrate human

transcendence in the natural world (over animals) and the natural elements

(defying gravity and fire), over machinery (wires, bicycles, cannons) and over

the possibility of death itself, this power is partially signified in surrounding

discourses by what might at first seem an incongruous set of attributes

describing the powerful bodies involved as light, often weightless, flying or

even transcendent of the physical body. (Stoddart 2000: 166)

In her study, The Female Grotesque, Mary Russo discusses the profession of the

aerialist by drawing on the work of Michael Balint, who states:

The dynamic reason for this ambivalent respect is that acrobats and actors are

allowed and dare to perform publicly philobatic acts symbolising primal scenes.

The community, however, is allowed to participate in the form of passive

spectators only, thrilled by identification.

The question of what happened, mainly during the nineteenth century, that

turned the spectators into actors is an interesting problem […] It is possible that

this change is only one symptom of a general tendency of that epoch, perhaps

best expressed by Nietzsche, ‘to live dangerously’. (Balint 1959: 31)

Balint focuses on the dangers of the aerial performances and his study also mainly

deals with men rather than women. Russo furthers Balint’s study, noting that women

merely become partners rather than the main performers (Russo 1995: 39). Balint’s

study very closely reflects Angela Carter’s heroine, as “one type of showpiece is

either beautiful, attractive women, or frightening, odd, and strange females; the other

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type is powerful, boasting, and challenging men” (Balint 1959: 30). Whereas Russo

discusses that one “assumes the presence of freaks and other grotesque curiosities”

(Russo 1995: 40), I want to argue that Balint presents two types of women that can be

found in contemporary literature. Fevvers clearly embodies the “frightening odd, and

strange female”, whereas Ewing’s characters are the “beautiful, attractive women”.

This is certainly most striking in Angela Carter’s Night at the Circus where Fevvers is

depicted as follows:

The artist had chosen to depict her ascent from behind, bums aloft, you might

say; up she goes, in a steatopygous perspective, shaking out about her those

tremendous red and purple pinions, pinions large enough, powerful enough to

bear such a big girl as she. And she was a big girl. Evidently this Helen took

after her putative father, the swan, around the shoulder parts. (Carter 2006: 4)

This extract does not depict Fevvers in flattering terms, as it points out

physical features, which are deviant from the common perception of beauty today,

and contrast with the traditional image of the slim and petite aerialist. She is quite the

opposite of the aerialists in Ewing’s novels or even Wim Wenders’ aerialist in Wings

of Desire, who are known for their mystical and beautiful appearance. Despite being

compared to an angel, or impersonating Cupid at an earlier stage of her career, she

certainly does not bear any similarities with such a creature and the descriptions leave

the reader with the mental picture of a male figure with a hunchback32 or a “hump-

backed horse” (Carter 2006: 18).33 However, it is worth pointing out that despite the

mainstream ideal of the delicate and petite acrobat, the fact of the matter is that not all

                                                                                                               32 See Mary Russo for an elaborate discussion on the masculine traits of aerialists, Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque, chapter 6, (Russo 1995: 170-177). 33 Fevvers’ appearance does not match the images of traditional angel-like beings, and she is rather masculine as well. It is interesting to note that in his study on the dark arts, Michael Mangan gives a similar portrayal of the magician Houdini, who was not as masculine as we would expect him to be: “To read Houdini as a kind of exemplar of the heroic masculine is not wrong, but it is only part of the picture. Houdini is a fascinating figure for those who are trying to make sense of twentieth-century masculinities, but not because he embodies the hero who triumphs against the most impossible odds. Houdini exemplifies something far more kaleidoscopic: he is a figure who changes with the change of light; not a heroic unity so much as a fragmentation of meanings, an appropriate elusiveness which defies a single reading. Thus the generic expectations associated with the magician mean that the heroic masculinity you are being presented with its already encoded as an illusion, a cheat. What you see is not what you get. The masculine power he embodied was not so much invincibility as contradiction – which, in another sense makes him a very appropriate icon of that slippery, ill-defined thing called ‘masculinity’” (Mangan 2007: 160).

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female aerialists were slender but actually quite the opposite, some were curvy and

strong. In her work on the circus, Brenda Assael provides the example of Zaeo, whose

twelve-stone, two-pound figure and healthy eating program were not in keeping

with Victorian constructions of the “delicate” feminine body and the idealized,

dainty appetite in etiquette books, works of fiction, and tea-room and restaurant

menus. On the other hand, the acrobat’s “strong muscular condition” spoke to

the ways in which other contemporary discourses concerning physical

development translated into a system of discipline, order, and neatness,

particularly among boys and girls. (Assael 2005: 125)

It is worth adding that Fevvers’ depiction does not completely stray from the

depictions of female aerialists of the nineteenth century. These were athletic and

strong women, who dared to perform dangerous acts. The readers of Carter’s novel

might find her description strange but this also accounts for the spectators of the

Victorian age, as “taken together, beauty, flirtation, the thrill, and the strong female

body produced complex responses on the part of the viewer, manifested in the gasp,

the gape and the widening of the eyes” (Assael 2005: 109).

Fevvers is compared to a swan, a concept that was familiar in the domain of the

circus, as “trapeze artists and acrobats became birds and butterflies [this challenging]

the distinction between human and animal” (Davis 2002: 27). Fevvers’ comparison to

a swan certainly alludes to the mythological Leda, a figure who fascinated nineteenth-

century male viewers (Dijkstra 1986: 314).34 Dijsktra argues that the Leda paintings

mostly depict her as a breathtakingly beautiful woman and they attracted the male

gaze at the end of the nineteenth century (Dijkstra 1986: 314). Carter plays with this

fascination by using the well-known myth, and instead of portraying a beautiful

woman giving in to her bestial lover, Carter’s Fevvers incorporates the seemingly

beautiful woman and the beast with “her white teeth [that] are big and carnivorous as

those of Red Riding Hood’s grandmother” (Carter 2006: 17). Fevvers’ mythlike

nature ties in with the circus, as it also plays with the concepts of mystification and

mysticism to quote Paul Bouissac:

                                                                                                               34 For further discussion on the representation of Leda and the Swan see Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity (Dijkstra 1981: 314-319).

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A powerful discourse has emerged in European culture, establishing the circus

as a unique source of values at the interface of the technique – perceived as an

ascetic exercise leading to a profane sainthood – and a sort of metaphysics in

which mystification, mastery, and mysticism become one and the same thing.

(Bouissac 2012: 162)

In Idols of Perversity, Dijkstra argues that women which did not fit into the

common framework of what was perceived an ideal Victorian woman, were regarded

as evil creatures or even “monstrous goddesses of degeneration” (Dijkstra 1986: 325)

which were surrounded by animals. In keeping with Dijsktra’s ideas, strong and

independent women had to be freakish creatures, as they were perceived to be

dangerous to society, most notably by men. Fevvers is such a dominant creature, a

swan-like woman perfectly in line with the dangerous and seductive turn-of-the

century female that is so widely discussed in Dijkstra’s work. An angel in a

monstrous guise, she reflects Linden Peach’s conclusion that “women in the novel are

seen in terms of binarisms – either as goddesses and angels or as subhuman” (Peach

2009: 148). This idea of women being “subhuman” is again emphasized by the use of

the female aerialist, as

despite the acrobat’s partial sublimation of her strength to her gender identity,

her most striking quality (and that of other athletic performers, such as

equestriennes) was her superhuman dexterity. Her attempts to defy gravity

placed her in the role of a cultural figure rebelling against static forces,

effectively divorcing herself from the outside world. (Assael 2005: 126)

Fevvers clearly incorporates the idea that nothing is what it seems, and by

taking a closer look, the reader and audience notice that she is not the beautiful

creature that she claims to be:

At close quarters, it must be said that she looked more like a dray mare than an

angel. At six feet two in her stockings, she would have to give Walser a couple

of inches in order to match him and, though they said she was ‘divinely tall’,

there was, off-stage, not much of the divine about unless there were gin palaces

in heaven and where she might preside behind the bar. (Carter 2006: 9)

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Whereas the audience was generally fascinated by the aerialists’ performances,

the narrator of this passage depicts reality, and does not portray Fevvers as a beautiful

and divine creature. The tone is ironic and mocks Fevvers, claiming that only drunk

people think her beautiful. Carter turns her into a parody of the stage aerialist and her

performance is comical, as her body does not meet the audience’s expectations of an

athletic acrobat:

When the hack aerialist, the everyday wingless variety, performs the triple

somersault, he or she travels through the air at a cool sixty miles an hour;

Fevvers, however, contrived a contemplative and leisurely twenty-five, so that

the packed theatre could enjoy the spectacle, as in slow motion, of every tense

muscle straining in her Rubenesque form. The music went much faster than she

did; she dawdled. Indeed, she did defy the laws of projectiles, because a

projectile cannot mooch along its trajectory; if it slackens its speed in mid-air,

down it falls. But Fevvers, apparently, pottered along the invisible gangway

between her trapezes with the portly dignity of a Trafalgar Square pigeon

flapping from one proffered handful of corn to another, and then she turned

head over heels three times, lazily enough to show off the crack in her bum.

(Carter 2006: 15)

Fevvers’ act has more of a clown’s performance than the elegant flight of a

muscular aerialist. She is not in tune with the music and does not seem to follow any

choreography. Her flight, which by the nature of her performance should be either

elegant or truly vigorous, is a clumsy affair. She has adopted the ways of the street

and cannot act like an elegant young woman. In addition, her performance moves

from the grotesque to become outright vulgar, as she finishes by revealing her bottom

to the audience, which is clearly a faux pas, but she does not even seem to register it.

In addition, her full-figure or Rubenesque form helps create the impression that she is

progressing as if in slow motion, which renders her performance even more comical.

Fevvers’ representation of an angel is funny in a sense that she is not only a fraud but

does not share any similarities with the traditional image of this fictional creature.

Angels were regarded as pure and sexless beings, characteristics that Fevvers claims

to have and that she plays with. Victorian women were supposed to have these angel-

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like features, one must only think of Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House35,

where the woman’s haven was the home and her duty was to remain a model of

Victorian virtue and look after the children. Female aerialists did not inhabit that

space, but were constantly on the move, thus escaping the traditional female fate.

They were regarded as dangers, as they first invaded a male profession and they were

literally speaking out of reach for ordinary men, a notion which Jean Starobinski

discusses:

Par sa virtuosité même, la prouesse acrobatique se sépare de la vie de ceux d’en

bas: le poète, s’il en fait à lui-même l’application allégorique, se donne pour

vocation d’affirmer sa liberté en un jeu supérieur et gratuit, tout en faisant la

grimace aux bourgeois, aux “assis”. (Starobinski 1970: 38)36

Starobinski’s argument is very interesting as it represents Fevvers and

Cordelia’s roles in the novels, Nights at the Circus and The Circus Ghosts. These two

women are well aware of their influence on men and how they can manipulate them.

Fevvers, in particular, not only plays with the American journalist Walser but also

with the reader. In the given contexts, the two women clearly play a game and use

their superiority in order to achieve their goals. They also use the distance that is

created between them and the spectator, as it “helped to perpetuate the “magical”

qualities surrounding the acrobat and also created an important separation between

her [the acrobat] and her audience, the expression and consummation of whose desire

was necessarily contained by her elusiveness” (Assael 2005: 120).

Their territory might be way up in the sky of the tent, but their position

enables them to watch what is going on in the circus, and hence they are able to judge

the events, being the observers indulging in the gaze of the spectators. The latter

“involved more than just looking: complex feeling of fear, sympathy, lust, awe,

bewilderment, and shock arose in the process” (Assael 2005: 10).

Therefore, it is worth arguing that the women in the novels are strong women

who indeed are able to control the dominant sex either through their beauty or their                                                                                                                35 See Bram Dijsktra for further discussions on the pure representation of women in the household, chapter 1, (Dijsktra 1986: 18-19). 36 By its very virtuosity, the acrobatic prowess separates itself from the lives of the ones below: the poet, if he makes to himself the allegorical application, he grants himself the vocation to affirm his liberty in a superior and gratuitous game, while simultaneously making a face at the bourgeois, at the “seated” (Starobinski 1970: 38, own translation).

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freakishness. Either way, beautiful woman or freak, being an aerialist demanded

physical strength and discipline, which procured the acrobats awe and admiration,

from male and female audiences alike. Starobinski furthers this idea by comparing

female acrobats to princesses and adding that they are “des étrangères énigmatiques,

avec la souplesse, avec la vigueur qui font d’elles des persécutrices idéales” [female

enigmatic strangers, with the suppleness and the vigour which make them ideal

persecutors] (Starobinski 1970: 45). Female acrobats gained more esteem for the

simple fact that they were women and “the figure of the performer signified ironic

detachment both from the heaviness of the flesh and from the class of paying

spectators; the female performer as muse was lifted off the classical pedestal to fly or

at least dangle in the heavens” (Russo 1995: 43-44). In her study, The Victorian

Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction, Jeannette King on the one hand

represents Fevvers as a docile figure but on the other she furthers Russo’s argument

by stating that Fevvers “achieves release from Victorian gender constraints and resists

objectification when she is admired for what she does, rather than what she is, when

her flight, rather than her wings, is the focus of attention” (King 2005: 137).

The circus and music hall tune in with the trends of neo-Victorian literature, as

they are all playful human creations. There are no limits and no boundaries to the

human imagination.

2.5 The different natures of magic

Having discussed the different functions of the circus, as well as the concept

of the grotesque and carnivalesque, and the perception of female aerialists, I will now

move to the different natures of magic. The magical trade can be understood in its

traditional terms; but other categories, such as medicine and murder, are also regarded

as some sort of magic (trick) and performance. Magicians and surgeons, for example,

both use their hands to perform their tricks.37 The hands become very important, as

Bouissac puts it:

                                                                                                               37 In ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Walter Benjamin also compares the magician to the surgeon: “To answer this we take recourse to an analogy with a surgical operation. The surgeon represents the polar opposite of the magician. The magician heals a sick person by the laying on of hands; the surgeon cuts into the patient’s body. The magician maintains the natural distance between the patient and himself; though he reduces it very slightly by the laying on of hands, he greatly increases it by virtue of his authority. The surgeon does exactly the reverse; he greatly diminishes the

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It could be claimed that the audience’s attention is focused on the objects –

moving, appearing, or disappearing – rather than on the hands that are

responsible for these effects. Such a view extracts particular moments from an

act and overlooks the fact that these acts display a narrative structure through

which an artist acquires a hero status that is directly related to his hand

movements. But a performer’s special ability with his hands does not in itself

constitute sufficient reason for an impact on the audience, for the same excellent

reflexes and precision, displayed outside the context of the circus (e.g. in

handicrafts or surgery), do not have the same impact. The difference therefore is

in the particular relationship that exists between the hands and the objects in

juggling and conjuring. (Bouissac 1976: 76-77)

The importance of hands is particularly important in Christopher Priest’s The

Prestige:

[…] The illusionist will say, or if his act is silent he will seem to say, ‘Look at

my hands. There is nothing concealed within them.’ He will then hold up his

hands for the audience to see, raising his palms to expose them, splaying his

fingers so as to prove nothing is gripped secretly between them. […] He then

performs his trick, and during it, moments after this incontrovertible evidence of

empty-handedness he produces something from his hands: a fan, a live dove or

a rabbit, a bunch of paper flowers, sometimes even a burning wick. It is a

paradox, an impossibility! (Priest 2004: 32)

Hands are the illusionist’s most important tools, as he needs to be in control of them

and know how to use them quickly and effectively. Using your bare hands to

accomplish a trick has always been considered a feat. The magician Alfred Borden is

certainly obsessed with his own hands, as he keeps referring to them throughout his

diary, praising their “strength and dexterity” (Priest 2004: 42) and describing them as

follows: “Eight long and slender fingers, two sturdy thumbs, nails trimmed to an exact                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              distance between himself and the patient by penetrating into the patient’s body, and increases it but little by the caution with which his hand moves among the organs. In short, in contrast to the magician - who is still hidden in the medical practitioner – the surgeon at the decisive moment abstains from facing the patient man to man; rather, it is through the operation that he penetrates into him” (Benjamin 2011: 439).

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length; not an artist’s, nor a labourer’s, nor those of a surgeon, but the hands of a

carpenter turned prestidigitator” (Priest 2004: 42). Borden depicts his hands as elegant

and flawless in their precision. They are his tools and his trademark. In addition, his

transformation from carpenter to magician certainly bears religious connotations, as

Jesus was a carpenter by trade. The latter also used his hands to perform miracles, for

example turning water into wine or multiplying objects, and thus Borden elevates

himself to divine status to manipulate his audience and of course the reader by using

his hands only.

2.6 Different kinds of performances on and off stage

The spectacle pervades not only the circus but also numerous other areas. One

of these performances is medicine, as the operating theatre can be considered a stage.

Medical progress was viewed as magical, as common people were ignorant as to how

the new techniques worked. Hence, surgeons were often compared to magicians

capable of healing people. In order to render their magic tricks more sensational,

magicians did not hesitate to link themselves to scientists, and

very frequently the conjuror flirts with the ‘magic’ of science – and especially

the magic of ‘bad science’ or pseudo-science – which is why, in the eighteenth

and nineteenth centuries, so many magicians called themselves ‘Professor’ in

their stage name, conferring upon themselves a quasi-scientific authority which

that title bestowed. (Mangan 2007: 107)

Contemporary magicians saw the lucrative side of this business and did not hesitate to

use scientific methods in their shows. Robert-Houdin, a master of stage illusion,

stated:

Surgery had supplied me with the first idea of it. It will be remembered that in

1847 the insensibility produced by inhaling ether began to be applied in surgical

operations; all the world talked about the marvellous effect of this anaesthetic,

and its extraordinary results. In the eyes of many people it seemed much akin to

magic. Seeing that the surgeons invaded my domain, I asked myself if this did

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not allow me to make reprisals. I did so by inventing my ethereal suspension,

which, I believe, was far more surprising than any result obtained by my

surgical brethren. (Eugène Robert-Houdin quoted in Mangan 2007: 107)

This idea of surgery becoming a performance is also present in The Mesmerist

by Barbara Ewing. In the nineteenth century, people were allowed to watch surgeons

operate, as Rillie points out: “Well, there’s a show going on at the new University

Hospital, look at this, I tore it out of the newspaper when the library man wasn’t

looking” (Ewing 2007: 11). These operations had the same appeal as magic shows,

and were therefore advertised in newspapers. The advertisements were similar to

other ones in terms of their spectacular nature:

MESMEROMANIA DIVIDES THE METROPOLIS! EXPERIMENTS IN

MESMERISM AT UNIVERSITY COLLEGE HOSPITAL! PROFESSOR

ELLIOTSON IS USING TWO CHARITY PATIENTS AT THE HOSPITAL,

THE OKEY SISTERS FROM IRELAND […] TO SHOW THE EFFECTS,

AND POSSIBLE MERITORIOUS USEFULNESS, OF MESMERISM IN

HOSPITAL PATIENTS. (Ewing 2007: 11)

This idea is developed further in the novel, once the audience has assembled

in the theatre:

The audience (for they seemed like an audience) in the small crowded theatre

(for it seemed as if they were at the theatre) was hushed and excited and

disturbed all at one: great wafts of perspiration and old perfume seems to fill the

space as the girl in the nightdress went on singing and dancing. Cordelia

watched with absolute concentration: she had seen mesmerism enough when

she was young to understand what was happening, yet she could not be sure if

she was witnessing a trance or a performance. (Ewing 2007: 33)

The author plays with the concepts of reality and the seemingly real by

playfully insisting on the identical terminology, emphasizing how the spectators

would take their very similar positions in an operating theatre as they would in a

variety theatre. It was not unusual for members of the public to watch operations in

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hospitals, and as the above extract shows, the place was usually crowded and the

room was filled with anticipation of what was to be performed. The venue for these

public operations were the amphitheatres of teaching hospitals, and once again

expectations were high, especially when the case to be presented had a high

entertainment value in so far as the patient would himself put up a good show. Public

executions had a similar allure, especially if the condemned was expected not to go

quietly. In the operating theatre some patients even acquired celebrity status, as was

the case for some mental patients, for example Blanche Wittmann, who became

known as the “Queen of Hysterics” (Showalter 1987: 148). Axel Munthe gave an

account of Charcot’s lectures, which became the talk of the town and very fashionable

venues: “The huge amphitheatre was filled to the last place with multicoloured

audience drawn from tout Paris, authors, journalists, leading actors and actresses,

fashionable demimondaines” (Axel Munthe quoted in Showalter 1987: 148). The

same holds for Elliotson, whose mesmeric séances attracted “Dickens, Cruikshank

[…], various members of the aristocracy, as well as several Members of Parliament,

Fellows of the Royal Society, physicians, and literary men” (Forrest 1999: 143).

In The Night Circus:

The whole of Le Cirque des Rêves is formed by series of circles. Perhaps it is a

tribute to the origin of the word “circus”, deriving from Greek kirkos meaning

circle, or ring. There are many such nods to the phenomenon of the circus in a

historical sense, though it is hardly a traditional circus. (Morgenstern 2011: 7)

The amphitheatre becomes a place where trades are taught and where future

practitioners can learn the techniques and tricks. Hands are used to perform medical

wonders or to create illusions thereof, but the same hands can also be trained to

perform other, more gruesome skills. In Peter Ackroyd’s novel Dan Leno and the

Limehouse Golem hands are not used to save lives but to kill, and murder is treated

like yet another performance you want to practise for:

It was the hour to show my hand but, as yet, I was a mere tyro, a beginner, an

understudy who could not appear on the great stage without rehearsal. I had first

to perfect my work in a secret hour, stolen from the tumult of the city: if only I

could find some secluded grove and, like some pastoral being, shed London

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blood within a green shade. But that was not to be. I was still in my own

particular private theatre, this garish spot beneath the gas lamps, and here I must

perform. But, at first, let it be behind the curtain … . (Ackroyd 1995: 27)

Elizabeth Cree, who is the author of the journal, describes herself as yet a dilettante of

the trade of murder, which most certainly echoes De Quincey’s opening sentences of

‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’: “A good many years ago, the reader

may remember that I came forward in the character of a dilettante in murder” (De

Quincey 1849: 1).

She compares murder with acting, and explains that she still has a lot to learn,

and thus cannot venture into the outside world in order to kill. Murder, surgery, and

acting are all interlinked as they require rehearsals, experience and skills. One cannot

simply enter the stage without knowing what to do; every step needs to be rehearsed.

This is certainly true for acting but is even more crucial when it comes to saving lives

or murdering people, as one does not want to fail or be found out. In order to justify

her deeds, she quotes De Quincey in her diary:

I hugged myself in delight when I read how [John Williams] had dressed for

each murder as if he were going upon the stage: ‘when he went out for a grand

compound massacre he always assumed black silk stockings and pumps; not

would he on any account have degraded his position as an artist by wearing a

morning gown. In his second great performance, it was particularly noticed and

recorded by the one sole trembling man, who under killing agonies of fear was

compelled (as the reader will find) from a secret stand to become the solitary

spectator of atrocities, that Mr Williams wore a long blue frock, of the very

finest cloth, and richly lined with silk.’ (Ackroyd 1995: 30)

Like John Williams, Elizabeth Cree dresses up before venturing outside to kill

innocent people. Ackroyd keeps his novel in the tradition of De Quincey’s essay by

using similar language as well as the same murder technique. It is quite striking that

De Quincey also uses the semantic field of acting, and turns the murders into

performances or artistic masterpieces:

For in came the London morning papers, by which it appeared that, but three

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days before, a murder the most superb of the century by many degrees had

occurred in the heart of London. I need hardly say that this was the great

exterminating chef-d’oeuvre of Williams at Mr. Marr’s, No. 29 Ratcliffe

Highway. (De Quincey 1849: 3)

De Quincey uses exaggeration when it comes to describing the murders: they are not

awful but superb. John Williams is praised rather than denounced for his awful deeds,

instead of being a villain he is turned into an artist. In addition, De Quincey’s essay

focuses on details, such as the choice of clothes. Williams chose fine clothes and

tissues, such as silk stockings, which turned the murders into grand spectacles.

Ackroyd mimics the language of the past and reinforces his technique by including

the voice of George Gissing, who like Ackroyd writes about De Quincey. Christian

Gutleben has coined this imitation of language as “aesthetic nostalgia [and adds that]

the language [of] the contemporary novel tries to capture is not the language of

postmodern anxiety but that of Victorian literature, the heyday of achievement in the

British written arts” (Gutleben 2001: 45). Whereas Ackroyd imitates De Quincey’s

writing style, Elizabeth mimics John Williams. Her murders are mere copies of

Williams’, since he butchered the Marr family of Radcliffe Highway, whereas

Elizabeth is responsible for the Radcliffe Highway killings of the Gerard family.

Hence, both De Quincey’s essay and Ackroyd’s novel have a similar function, as they

immortalize a real as well as a fictional family, to quote George Gissing: “the Marr

murders of 1812 reached their apotheosis in the prose of Thomas De Quincey, who

with purple imagery and soaring cadence has succeeded in immortalising them”

(Ackroyd 1995: 36). Ackroyd consciously builds De Quincey into his novel by also

having the different characters either read or analyse his essays, emphasizing the

novel’s self-conscious use of intertextuality. Elizabeth Cree, therefore, also consults

De Quincey’s essay, as well as medical books, in order to get the necessary

information: “Elizabeth Cree had finished De Quincey’s essay on the Radcliffe

Highway killings before ordering other books which would have some effect upon the

lives of the characters in this history; she asked for certain volumes on contemporary

surgical techniques” (Ackroyd 1995: 270). Elizabeth carefully plans her murders by

getting information from the library, which can be linked to her rehearsing her lines

from a textbook. In addition, Ackroyd’s use of the word history instead of story is

quite striking, as it assumes that the text is historical and not fictional. Hence, it is

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once more linked to the idea of immortalizing a text as well as different characters,

who in his case are fictional. By using London as a setting and finding influence in

the murderers John Williams and Jack the Ripper, Ackroyd “reproduces a clearly

identifiable spatio-temporal setting in contemporary fiction” (Gutleben 2001: 60), and

thus, keeps it in the tradition of Victorian realism. To quote Christian Gutleben:

From an aesthetic point of view, the documentary dimension conveyed by the

bulk of social information links the neo-Victorian novels to the realism of their

predecessors. Whereas postmodernism problematizes and questions fiction’s

relationship to historical knowledge, these novels tend to reproduce the use of

history “as a model of the realistic pole of representation”. [Gutleben quoting

Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction

(London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 15] (Gutleben 2001: 66)

Comparing herself to an artist, Elizabeth, cannot wait to enter the stage and

eventually kill a person, which is her deepest and most disturbing desire: “So this was

to be my green room or, rather, my red room. This was to mark my entrance upon the

stage of the world” (Ackroyd 1995: 28). Her conclusion is ironic in the sense that

Elizabeth pretending to be her husband, is constantly acting. She has already turned

the streets of London into her very own stage, wandering through them dressed as her

Older Brother in order to test her authenticity. She is clearly playing with, even

mocking, the reader, as she is truly in control of her so well plotted murders, as the

following passage illustrates:

‘Laugh, Scream and Speech’ and I discovered that I had even marked a passage

in the margin, where pantomime is described as ‘the short for fun, whim, trick

and atrocity – that is, clown atrocity or crimes that delight us’. What a

wonderful phrase that was – crimes that delight us – and of course it quite

explained all the popular interest in my own little dramas in the streets of

London. I could even see myself appearing before the next whore with a mallet

in my hand, exclaiming ‘Here we are again!’ in the right tone of screaming

excitement. I might even put on costume before I slit them. Oh what a life it is!

And of course the audience loves every minute of it – was it not Edmund Burke,

in his very suggestive essay on the Sublime and Beautiful who explained how

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the greatest aesthetic sensations come from the experience of terror and danger?

Horror is the true sublime. (Ackroyd 1995: 191)

This passage holds all the irony and shows Elizabeth’s superiority in controlling

events. She is omnipresent in the novel, as she knows exactly what is going on. Her

desire to kill is reminiscent of grindhouse films by the likes of Quentin Tarantino. Her

imagining her next murder is grotesque. Killing people has become a routine and a

very exciting activity. It is all part of her act and deception, which is underlined by the

fact that she might disguise herself before killing her victims. She still indulges in her

new hidden life and considers the world her stage where she can do as she pleases. By

citing the philosopher Edmund Burke she wants to justify her own actions, linking

murder to aestheticism. This reminds the reader of the end of the century atmosphere

and the decadent writers, who perceived women as some sort of femmes fatales

capable of any atrocious crime. It also reflects the notion of everything repulsive and

abnormal being beautiful, a concept which was so forcibly introduced in Baudelaire’s

Les Fleurs du Mal (1857). Like in this collection of poems, Elizabeth juxtaposes

decadence, crime, horror to beauty and eroticism.

Having Elizabeth murder a young prostitute is rather intriguing, mostly because

the intoxicated young female is easily deceived by Elizabeth’s disguise. The irony of

this scene lies in the fact that one social outcast, a murderer, kills another one, a

prostitute, and that the murderess is an actress, whose trade was often linked to

prostitutes, as their business was full of vice, and they wore make-up and raunchy

clothing, where their skin was laid bare. Actresses and prostitutes differed enormously

from the pure and innocent depiction of an ideal wife, and would stem from and

belong to the lower social classes. Keeping these common elements in mind, one can

argue that the murder of the young prostitute is the first act of a play and it is rendered

even more absurd because the two women’s trades are quite similar in nature, they

both sell their bodies or perform an act in order to entertain their audience.

The notion of acting and putting on a show is dealt with quite extensively in

Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem and also in Barbara Ewing’s novels. In the

Mesmerist, the two young ladies, Cordelia and Rillie, having witnessed a mesmerist

séance, doubt its authenticity, stating that the young Irish girl was “a very good

actress” (Ewing 2007: 34). Rillie even points out that: “I know an actress when I see

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one! She was giving a performance” (Ewing 2007: 34) and adds that “it sort of seems

to [her] like what [they] do […] a performance!” (Ewing 2007: 35). This idea of

mesmerism being a performance is expressed repeatedly in the novel: “Again it was

rather like attending, they thought, a theatrical performance” (Ewing 2007: 126) or ‘as

if they were in a theatrical production’ (Ewing 2007: 132). In addition, the idea that

an actress turns mesmerist clearly raises doubts: “But a mesmerist and an actress all

rolled into one! She probably acts the mesmerism!” (Ewing 2007: 235). Realizing that

a mesmeric séance includes a lot of acting, Rillie and Cordelia decide to change

trades:

We’ll watch their faces and listen to their voices and we will guess. It will just

be another performance – we’re actresses – we are used to using our faces and

our voices for certain effects. Are we not then qualified to look carefully at

people who do not have our skills and make a pretty good guess at what they’re

feeling? And then we’ll learn up all this stuff about parts of the head (even if we

don’t really quite believe it) to make our pronouncements sound

knowledgeable! I’ll learn it all up, just like a part, and I’ll dress up and we’ll

polish the stars! (Ewing 2007: 83)

Rillie’s discourse about mesmerism is quite naïve and her language is rather simple. It

differs from Monsieur Roland’s language as she stresses certain words in order to

emphasize their profession. The two women decide to deceive other people by putting

on a show and simply pretend to be familiar with mesmerism. This idea of mimicry is

particularly striking in the context of neo-Victorian fiction, as this genre also tries to

imitate Victorian fiction, whose authors copy the style of Victorian writers by reading

their works, and then imitating the narrative structures, plots, characters, for example.

In addition, modern day novelists also have to provide fictional information, as our

knowledge about the Victorians is far from complete. Authors have the necessary

skills to mimic writing styles, and like the two women, they can use different

narrative structures to achieve the effect they aim for.

At this stage in the novel, mesmerism is not taken seriously but just another

means to make money. Of course, this perception of mesmerism echoes what people

thought and are still thinking today on the given subject, that it is a farce rather than

real science. It is only when Rillie and Cordelia get to know Monsieur Roland, the

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foreigner, that they start to take mesmerism more seriously. According to Monsieur

Roland “mesmerism is completely explainable [,] it is not magic […] it is a matter of

power – that is why it can be dangerous if not treated with honesty and respect”

(Ewing 2007: 114). A similar idea of forgery can be found in The Prestige. Robert

Angier commissioned the scientist Tesla to create a teleporting machine, which he can

include in his act. Every time the magician uses the device, he is cloned and the

original self dies. Knowing that the machine can clone human beings, he wants to

multiply his fortune by taking money with him. In this context, the foreign scientist

Tesla acts as a moral conscience, as he refuses to sanction this use of his device:

Tesla, I should in all conscience report, warned me against such an act. He is a

highly moral man, and he lectured me long on the subject of forgery. He said he

also had scientific reasons, that the apparatus was calibrated for my own body-

weight (with certain margins of safety), and that the presence about my person

of small but massy objects, such a gold coins, could make the projection

inaccurate over longer distances. (Priest 2004: 307)

Despite some initial doubts when it comes to mesmerism, it is taken more and

more seriously as the plot develops. There are a number of occasions when the

different agents in the novel point out that it is not fraud and can be linked to science:

“phrenology seemed to be based on knowledge; and that mesmerism was not about

ghosts and spirits. Neither activity had anything to do at all with magic” (Ewing 2007:

122). In spite of constantly pondering on the efficiency of their trade, the author,

Barbara Ewing, is not imposing a set opinion on her reader, as she keeps using the

verb ‘to seem’ instead of being more assertive. She leaves it up to the reader to

believe whether it is real science or not.

In his novel The Prestige, Christopher Priest has accumulated facts and real-

life characters in a fictional account of the two rival magicians Alfred Borden and

Rupert Angier. The interest of the novel lies in the fact that it gives an in-depth

analysis of what makes the truly great magicians, by revealing far more than expected

and leaving the reader on tenterhooks.

The magician himself, as a performer, acts according to certain conventions or

codes. Rupert Angier is aware of his role as a stage performer, and his task to keep up

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with the expectations: “I am a performer, a professional. I must give an appearance to

what I do, give it a sheen and a glamour” (Priest 2004: 281). An illusion requires

acting skills, and according to the given extract, has to keep up the appearances clad

in “a sheen and a glamour.” This demands constant rehearsals and perfect stage co-

ordination, as Alfred Borden puts it:

[…] I stood before a full-length mirror and practised palming and fording,

shuffling cards and spreading them, passing and fanning them, discovering

different ways of cutting and feinting. I learnt the art of misdirection, in which

the magician trades on the audience’s everyday experience to confound their

senses – […]. (Priest 2004: 42)

However, more so than in other stage performances, the act not only relies on the

actors’ presence on the stage, but also on an interaction between him and the

audience. Alfred Borden has recognized this cooperation:

The magician and the audience have entered into what I term the Pact of

Acquiescent Sorcery. They do not articulate it as such, and indeed the audience

is barely aware that such a Pact might exist, but that is what it is.

The performer is of course not a sorcerer at all, but an actor who plays the

part of a sorcerer and who wishes the audience to believe, if only temporarily,

that he is in contact with darker powers. The audience, meantime, knows that

what they are seeing is not true sorcery, but they suppress the knowledge and

acquiesce to the selfsame wish as the performer’s. The greater the performer’s

skill at maintaining the illusion, the better at this deceptive sorcery he is judged

to be. (Priest 2004: 33)

The given extract is interesting since it attributes the roles to the different elements

that constitute a spectacle:

But in the sense that I do my performance in public, for spectators who are

interpreting and/or performing with me, there are real effects, meanings solicited

or imposed that produce relations in the real. […] A performance, whether it

inspires love or loathing, often consolidates cultural or subcultural affiliations, and

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these affiliations might be as regressive as they are progressive. The point is, as

soon as performativity comes to rest on a performance, questions of embodiment,

of social relations, of ideological interpellations, of emotional and political effects,

all become discussable. (Diamond 1996: 5)

In the main, the magician creates an illusion, which the spectators are willing to

believe as such without scrutinizing it. In doing so, the audience is attributed a

superior role, since they “suppress the knowledge” because they want to “be fooled”

(Nolan and Nolan 2006: 7). The performance in itself can only work as long as the

two parties adhere to the pact they enter into tacitly. Thus, an illusion is constituted of

a number of well orchestrated elements, it is all about technical skill and performance,

and will ultimately wear off because the more the reader gets involved, the less

spectacular the trick appears: “Magic has no mystery to magicians. We work

variations of standard methods. What will seem new or baffling to an audience is

simply a technical challenge for other professions” (Priest 2004: 66). In addition,

magical tricks become more efficient the more they are rehearsed, which creates a

certain routine, which is crucial to performativity, to quote Judith Butler:

“Performativity is not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual, which achieves its

effect through its naturalization in the context of a body, understood, in part, as a

culturally sustained temporal duration” (Butler 2006: xv). Thus, magical tricks are the

result of routine and practice, but they are also more than that, as they become part of

the body, and our very selves. This implies that we act and perform every single day,

and that our behaviour is part of an act, which is deeply ingrained within ourselves,

and thus becomes part of the society and culture we live in.

In the narrative this idea is intensified since the magician relies on science, the

rational element in order to perform:38

IN A FLASH, by scientific method, in fact achieves the hitherto impossible. What

the audience sees is actually what has happened! But I cannot allow this ever to be

known, for science has in this case replaced magic. I must, by careful art, make

my miracle less miraculous. (Priest 2004: 282)                                                                                                                38 A similar idea of the wizard/magician being a mere scientist without any supernatural powers can be found in the film The Wizard of OZ (1939).

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The text takes on the Victorian fascination for science and progress and the ephemeral

belief that they would help “achieve the impossible.” Angier is one of those

innovative Victorian characters prepared to see whether that science can hold its

promises, and whether it will allow him to create “miracles.”

The scientist who might deliver the ultimate “apparatus” becomes a performer

himself:

[Tesla’s] show (for it was nothing less than this) bore an odd resemblance to any

good illusionist’s. The audience did not need to understand the means to enjoy the

effects. (Priest 2004: 192)39

In the Victorian age and even up to the early years of the twentieth century,

technology and electricity, in particular, fascinated people all over the industrialized

world, and they would gather in flocks at scientific shows, where the scientists would

obviously perform their most spectacular experiments in order to propagate their

inventions. In Moon Palace by Paul Auster, we find a number of references to these

shows, where scientists would compete in Prestige-like fashion to convince their

audiences of the superiority of their concepts. In the rivalry between Edison, the

Wizard of Menlo Park, and Tesla, the latter’s performance is described as follows:

“He performed magic tricks with electricity, spinning little metal eggs around the

table, shooting sparks out of his fingertips, and everyone kept gasping at what he did,

myself included, we’d never seen anything like it” (Auster 1989: 139).

The magician’s profession demands absolute sacrifice, and in order to become

professionals they have to live their art. The ensuing performance concept is

documented in the episode of the Chinese magician:

Performances mark identities, bend time, reshape and adorn the body, and tell

stories. Performances – of art, rituals, or ordinary life – are made of “twice-

behaved behaviors,” “restored behaviors,” performed actions that people train to

do, that they practice and rehearse. That training and conscious effort go into art is                                                                                                                39 “Although he was best known to the public for his dramatic demonstrations in the 1890s of high-frequency electrical effects – including flaming sparks, new forms of lightning, and wireless control of his “telautomatons” – his invention of an alternating current motor in 1887-88 had already influenced the course of American electrification” (Dalrymple Henderson 1998: 43).

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clear. But everyday life also involves years of training, of learning appropriate bits

of behavior, of finding out how to adjust and perform one’s life in relation to

social and personal circumstances. (Schechner 2002: 22-23)

Ching Ling Foo is not what or who he seems, on and off stage, and Schechner’s

definition also holds in the following:

But logic was magically in conflict with itself! The only possible place where the

heavy bowl could be concealed was beneath his gown, yet that was logically

impossible. It was obvious to everyone that Ching Ling Foo was physically frail,

shuffling painfully through his routine. When he took his bow at the end, he

leaned for support on his assistant, and was led hobbling from the stage.

The reality was completely different. Ching was a fit man of great physical

strength, and carrying the bowl in this way was well within his power. Be that as

it may, the size and shape of the bowl caused him to shuffle like a mandarin as he

walked. This threatened the secret, because it drew attention to the way he moved,

so to protect the secret he shuffled for the whole of his life. Never, at any time, at

home or in the street, day or night, did he walk with a normal gait lest to be

exposed.

Such is the nature of a man who acts the role of a sorcerer. Audiences know well

that a magician will practise his illusions for years, and will rehearse each

performance carefully, but few people realize the extent of the prestidigitator’s

wish to deceive, the way in which the apparent defiance of normal laws becomes

an obsession which governs every moment of his life. (Priest 2004: 36)

Ching Ling Foo is the perfect example of the artist paying dearly for his art,

sacrificing a healthy body to the “prestige” of one key act. Keeping Schechner’s

definition in mind, the Chinese sorcerer’s performance has “marked his identity” and

literally “reshaped the body”. His entire life has become a stage act, which he cannot

change without losing his reputation as the “sorcerer;” this is not the “cour des

Miracles” where crippledom could be reversed at nightfall.40 Borden is fully aware of

these particular consequences when he realizes that: “My deception rules my life,

                                                                                                               40 See Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (Hugo 1834: 70-72).

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informs every decision I make, regulates my every movement” (Priest 2004: 36).

Goffman conceives performances in a similar way:

At one extreme, one finds that the performer can be fully taken in by his own act;

he can be sincerely convinced that the impression of reality which he stages is the

real reality. When his audience is also convinced in this way about the show he

puts on – and this seems to be the typical case – then for the moment at least, only

the sociologist or the socially disgruntled will have any doubts about the

“realness” of what is presented. (Goffman 1959: 17)

This goes far beyond impersonating a character on stage, the two lives can no

longer be dissociated. Impersonating might mean adopting a disguise or a different

identity, both easily reversible. Angier uses similar stage devices in order to render his

act more interesting when he takes on the role of the “French professor” (Priest 2004:

37),41 but the use of pseudonyms is a common device among artists, and far less

demanding. Like makeup and other stage paraphernalia, names are a means of hiding

something: “It is important to note that when an individual offers a performance he

typically conceals something more than inappropriate pleasures and economies”

(Goffman 1959: 43). In Angier’s case it is to hide his family background: “I have

become, and shall remain, plain Mister Rupert Angier. I have turned my back on my

past. No one in this new life of mine will ever find out the truth of my birthright”

(Priest 2004: 162). It is worth pointing out that the film version does not explicitly

deal with the class issue, the audience is simply left in the dark because the

connection between Lord Caldlow and Angier is not directly made. His family

background is only once mentioned when he says that he has to pretend to be

somebody else “because of the family” (Nolan and Nolan 2006: 28). The origin of his

financial independence and fortune are not revealed until very late, and the audience

is left in the belief that he is the more commercially astute performer. He is the

socialite, the man who can use language and manipulate his speech and physical

performance to render his performance more authentic and manipulative: “He moved

stiffly, and several times favoured his left arm as if it were weaker than the other; […]

his face was tormented, his whole body moved as if racked with pain. He shambled                                                                                                                41 For further discussion on the idea of the fascination for foreign magicians in the nineteenth-century, see Geoffrey Lamb, Victorian Magic (Lamb 1976: 37-39).

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like a drunk or an invalid, or a man finally exhausted with life” (Priest 2004: 93; 98-

99).

The idea of performing disability is highly effective and subject to numerous studies,

thus “the performance of disability relies on the understanding that disability is

transparent, uni-vocal, easy to see, and wholly reproducible in theatre. Disability

functions as a master sign in our culture by dominating other discourses of identity”

(Kuppers 2003: 54). It is worth pointing out that later in the novel, the weakened

Angier changes his act because he can’t perform the way he would like to anymore.

The idea of stigmatisation is referred to earlier in the novel: “My left hand bears a

small scar, a reminder of the time in my youth when I learnt the true value of my

hands” (Priest 2004: 43). Moreover, it is interesting to note that in the film version

Angier is made to drag his left leg after his act was sabotaged. He is crippled by his

fall, which ironically turns into a boon for his act, since it intensifies the stage

presence. The “disability functions as a concept of otherness – it is a name for widely

different impairments, and widely different embodied experiences” (Kuppers 2003:

58).

He has turned slave to a profession, which henceforth dominates not merely his

professional career but also his life off the stage. Borden is aware of the complete

hold that his profession has on the individual:

Most people enjoy the sense of mystery created by the performance, and do not

want to ruin it, no matter how curious they feel about what they seem to have

witnessed.

The magician naturally wishes to preserve his secrets, so that he may go on

earning his living from them, and this is widely recognised. He becomes, though,

a victim of his own secrecy. The longer a trick is part of his repertoire, and the

more often it is successfully performed, and by definition the larger the number of

people he has deceived with it, then the more it seems to him essential to preserve

its secret. […] Secrecy becomes obsessive. […] I have spent my lifetime guarding

my secret by appearing to hobble. (I am alluding to Ching Ling Foo, not, of

course, writing literally). (Priest 2004: 49)

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Borden has inextricably assumed his act, stating that as long as you please the

audience you have to keep up the pretence. Angier sacrifices to the same demand by

feigning his death in order to be able to leave his wife: “For many years I acted the

rôle of the dead man while Julia was the widow” (Priest 2004: 295). Officially

declared dead, Angier can take on another identity without creating a public scandal.

The pretence takes a macabre twist in the light of future events when Angier literally

dies numerous times over.42

The novelist has ways of tickling the imagination and arousing interest and

curiosity that the film director can choose to respect or to ignore. Scriptwriters are

more likely to favour the visual impact with storyboards already on their minds,

especially in spectacular productions. In The Prestige, the contention is with the stage

performance and the text as revealed by the narrative, but also by the diary entries.

The magicians can literally deceive their audience both ways. On stage they will only

give away as much as will keep their audience entranced, in their diaries they will

hide or reveal, mislead and manipulate at will. Striff states that “in performance art,

the performers themselves become the text to be read” (Striff 2003: 9), and Borden to

illustrate his point:

It is time to pause, even so early, for this account is not intended to be about my

life in the usual habit of autobiographers, but is, as I have said, about my life’s

secrets. Secrecy is intrinsic to my work. […] The very act of describing my

secrets might indeed be construed as a betrayal of myself, except of course that as

I am an illusionist I can make sure you only see what I wish you to see. (Priest

2004: 32)

Borden’s part in the novel is more interesting, since it is more complex and less linear

than Angier’s, and wants to be a book on magic rather than a personal diary.

Thus, Borden emphasizes the idea of accuracy in his writings:

Every word in this notebook that describes my life and work is true, and honestly

meant and accurate in detail. […] Much of what is here may be checked against                                                                                                                42 “The faking of my own death had a deceptive side to it that I suspect could be construed as illegal, even though I can’t imagine what harm might befall anyone else as a consequence” (Priest 2004: 311).

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objective records. My career is noted in newspaper files, my name appears in

books of biographical reference. (Priest 2004: 33)

His diary becomes an instance of legerdemain, now you see it, now you don’t,

everything is apparently laid open but nothing is revealed. It is interesting that he

stresses the fact that his life, his profession and his writings are all part of a greater

deception, but at the same time he rejects the idea of lying: “Already, without once

writing a falsehood, I have started the deception that is my life. The lie is contained in

these words, even in the very first of them. It is the fabric of everything that follows,

yet nowhere will it be apparent” (Priest 2004: 34).

The act of writing is influenced by the same constraints that his profession

imposes onto him:

Even now, as I embark on the writing of this memoir, it controls what I may write

and what I may not. I have compared my method with the display of seemingly

bared hands, but in reality everything in this account represents the shuffling walk

of a fit man. (Priest 2004: 36)

The reader is clearly being deceived by this fragmented and rather confusing version

of the events. His narrative ties in with Wayne C. Booth’s concept of the “unreliable

narrator” (Booth 1961: 211-234) who intentionally creates a bias in order to justify

himself.

Borden’s disrupted narrative hints at a split personality: “My life is full of

secrets and contradictions I can never explain. Whom did Sarah marry? Was it me, or

was it me? I have two children, whom I adore. But are they mine to adore, really mine

alone … or are they actually mine?” (Priest 2004: 115). At this point in the novel the

reader is not familiar with the existence of twins, and thus, the internal monologue

reveals a troubled mind with paranoia and schizophrenia looming. The illusion of

being able to control your creation in any situation is shaken:

Until that moment it had seemed to me that I had reached the kind of stability I

had been seeking all my working life. I had my family, I had my mistress. I lived

in my house with my wife, and stayed in my flat with my lover. I worshipped my

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children, adored my wife, loved my mistress. My life was in two distinct halves,

kept emphatically apart, neither side suspecting the other even existed. (Priest

2004: 85)

The convoluted deception, which from sheer necessity had to include his private and

extra-marital lives, becomes his nightmare. A similar narrative of schizophrenia is

developed in Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem with Elizabeth Cree creating her

double persona:

It was as if I had some other personality which walked out from my body every

time I stood in the glare of the gas, and sometimes she even surprised me with

her slangster rhymes and cockney stuff. She had her own clothes by now – a

battered bonnet, long skirt and big boots suited her best … and, as I slowly put

them on, she began to appear, Sometimes she was uncontrollable, though, and

one night at the Palace in Smithfield she began to perform a burlesque medley

of the Bible with the most wicked patter about David and Goliath. (Ackroyd

1995: 106-107)

Elizabeth’s creating a double persona provides means of justifying her acts at

different levels. In this passage she claims that she is not in control of the other

personality emerging from her body. She even adds that she is surprised at what her

second self says on stage in order to keep the blame from herself. By adopting these

schizophrenic characteristics she is not to be kept responsible for her own actions, as

it is not she who is committing these indecent acts but a sort of demon that is

lingering inside of herself waiting to be let out on stage in order to use profanities.

Her behaviour certainly echoes Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, one of the most

famous novels recounting the tale of a man with a double persona. The concepts of

the double and the uncanny are certainly elements that keep recurring in neo-

Victorian novels, which give them “an uncanny nature” (Arias and Pulham 2010: xv).

Rosario Arias and Patricia Pulham develop this idea by stating that:

[The neo-Victorian novel] often represents a ‘double’ of the Victorian text

mimicking its language, style and plot; it plays with the conscious repetition of

tropes, characters, and historical events; it reanimates Victorian genres, for

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example, the realist text, sensation fiction, the Victorian ghost story and, in

doing so, seemingly calls the contemporary novel’s ‘life’ into question; it

defamiliarizes our preconceptions of Victorian society; and it functions as a

form of revenant, a ghostly visitor from the past that infiltrates our present.

(Arias and Pulham 2010: xv)

However, it is worth keeping in mind that Elizabeth does not turn into another

dangerous woman but into a man. It is as if she were protecting the female sex, as

women were not thought to be able to commit such atrocious acts of slaughter. Thus

she turns into the contrasting figure of Dan Leno, a female impersonator, as his

performances mock women and are merely of entertainment value. Susana Onega

furthers this idea arguing that

Dan Leno, the (historical) male transvestite impersonator of Sister Anne, and

Elizabeth Cree, the (fictional) female transvestite impersonator of Bluebeard,

may be said to stand in a doppelganger relationship, with Dan leno embodying

the comic or “white” emanation, and Elizabeth Cree the tragic or “black”

emanation of “perpetual, infinite London”. (Onega 1999: 144)

Neo-Victorian literature itself is also a double, a hybrid of traditional

Victorian literature. In his essay on steampunk, Hantke argues that this “steampunk

plots stage the disruptive return of Victorian culture’s dark double, its seamy

underside or secret truth” (Hantke 1999: 251). The very same idea can be found in

Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem as well as The Prestige, as the two novels play

with the notions of the evil double and the uncanny. It is, however, Christopher

Priest’s novel that is kept in the tradition of steampunk, as its protagonists use

technology to deceive their audience and create their double. It is precisely The

Prestige that ties in with Hantke’s characteristics of steampunk as “scientific

knowledge appears as inadequate, conceited, or mystifying set of dogmas that have

little to do with the newly revealed reality [and] respectable public figures are

exposed as morally, in some cases even biologically, ambiguous creatures” (Hantke

1999: 251).

Borden makes such a sacrifice himself by leading a double life, or put more

appropriately, sharing a life with his twin brother: “The Borden brothers have built

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their lives around sustaining this illusion. Nothing about them can be trusted” (Priest

2004: 291). The Evening Star interviewer Arthur Koenig’s revelation is ironic since,

as the argument reveals, all magicians create an illusion of some sort, which

intrinsically implies that one cannot trust any magician. This is, however impossible,

since the magician will always perform this balancing act with his audience’s trust in

order to create an illusion.

Another interesting element in the deception is the twin brothers’ names:

“Albert and Frederick Borden, identical brothers, who perform together as one”

(Priest 2004: 290). Alfred becomes the acronym of yet another verbal construction, as

the name is made up of the two brothers’ names Alfred and Frederick. Priest allows

this particular revelation to be followed by Koenig’s stating that: “I have since learnt

to check facts, to double-check them, then to check them once more” (Priest 2004:

290). His obsession with accumulating facts will incite him to investigate the

existence of the actual double.

The concept of identical twins has been the subject of various literary

interpretations, and “der Bezug des Doppelgängermotivs zum Phantasma eines

‘anderen Seins’ ist besonders deutlich bei einigen Mythen, die das verwandte

Zwillingsphänomen betreffen” (Forderer 1999: 10)43. They act as one person by

having one of them excluded from society all the time, and allowing the twin a brief

moment in the limelight, only to have his existence denied by the demands for

secrecy.44

The notion of the twin is played upon throughout the novel and thus Angier

even perfects the “Zwillingsphänomen” in the creation of his prestige: ‘He and I were

perfect complements to each other. Everything I lacked was in him; everything I had

he had lost. Of course we were the same, closer to each other than identical twins’

(Priest 2004: 341).45 However, the comparison is flawed in the sense that Angier’s

“twin” is not identical and merely a part of him, or as he describes it: “It was a thin,

unsubstantial copy of myself, a partial prestige” (Priest 2004: 302).

                                                                                                               43 “the relation of the Doppelgänger to the phantasm of an alter ego is particularly obvious in some myths concerning the related twins phenomenon” (Forderer 1999: 10, own translation). 44 For further discussion on the concept of doubles and twins in Victorian literature see Susan K. Gillman; and Robert L. Patten, ‘Dickens: Doubles: Twain: Twins’ (Gillman and Patten 1985: 441-458). 45 This same idea of complements can be found in the concept of the alter ego in the Victorian novel by Stevenson Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886).

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The concept of twinhood is further worked upon in the novel by having

Andrew Westley look for his twin, and Borden himself fathering twins. The film

version offers an interesting alternative to the deception in the novel. Here the

audience is confronted with the actual twins, in the guise of Borden and his

“Ingénieur” Fallon, throughout the film. Moreover, the film has the twins

permanently switching roles: “We were both Fallon. And we were both Borden”

(Nolan and Nolan 2006: 143). The concept of “two men sharing one life” makes the

reality that sacrifice “is the price of a good trick” (Nolan and Nolan 2006: 145), even

more poignant. Throughout the film, the possibility of there being a brother is

permanently being envisaged, for example by having Sarah’s nephew inquire after the

canary’s brother in a conventional stage trick. It must be said that the film script opts

for a more direct, confrontational line in its method of unravelling the mystery. Both

the scenes where Cutter asks Borden about the knot he tied in the fatal incident, and

where he states that he “just do[es] not know” (Nolan and Nolan 2006: 37) which also

implies that he was not there,46 and the confrontations of Borden and Sarah or Olivia,

are completely absent in the original novel.

The film adopts a similar approach in the way it highlights the sacrifices to the

point of self-mutilation. After one of the Borden twins has two of the fingers on his

left hand cut off to copy the amputation his brother had to have after a previous

incident with Angier, the mutilation becomes a sort of stigma, to use Goffman’s

expression, in his performance. It is used to “refer to bodily signs designed to expose

something unusual and bad about the moral status of the signifier” (Goffman 1968:

11). In the film version Olivia points out that this “makes [him] unique [and that he]

must display it proudly [since] it takes great skill to perform illusions with one good

hand” (Nolan and Nolan 2006: 102).

Where the film again differs from the original is in the confrontation of the

twins themselves. The scenes where the two brothers are present together are more

numerous, and the concept of the alter ego is far less abstract. The notion of good and

bad is more directly represented, with a more moralizing outcome, since it is the twin

who wanted to find out about Angier’s secret who has to die in the end.

                                                                                                               46 Please note that this example refers to a crucial scene in which Angier’s wife dies during a trick, which does not appear in the novel where she survives throughout the narration.

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In Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem a similar uncanny atmosphere starts to

build up, as Elizabeth’s husband, John Cree, slowly starts feeling uneasy in the

presence of his wife as if he feels that she is up to mischief:

He had first known her as a performer on the halls, but since their marriage, she

had become a more unfamiliar and disquieting figure. He recognised very well

what troubled him – she played the part of a wife perfectly, and yet in the very

definition and completeness of her role there was an air of strangeness. There

were times when Elizabeth Cree did not seem to be there at all, as someone else

took over the part, but there were also occasions when she became ‘wifely’ with

a fierceness and determination that were almost professional. (Ackroyd 1995:

227)

John is not a fool and he is aware that his wife is merely enacting a part, but he is

unaware of the actual dimension of her acting. This emphasizes the fact that Elizabeth

is well aware of how to fool the readers and the audience. On the one hand, this

passage shows that she claims to be honest and innocent, stating that she has a double

persona, which is quite innocent in so far as she uses it to make blasphemous

comments. On the other side, she keeps her actual double and more macabre criminal

character hidden from the gaze of the audience. In order to live her perverted and dark

side, she even disguises as a man.

Like a magician, she lures the innocent girls by deceiving and then murdering

them. She has no scruple when it comes to killing people because she claims that she

is strong enough to go through with it. Social determinism and her background have

made her strong, because she has never known an easy life. By inflicting corporal

punishment, her mother has turned her into a strong and ruthless person.

Ackroyd’s characters are far more complex than their only disguise would

indicate, and in order to create the perfect crime, Elizabeth forges documents, mainly

by writing her husband’s diary. Thus, she really “invented a whole history which

made [her] much more interesting to [her]self, and [she] had really no difficulty in

sustaining it” (Ackroyd 1995: 107). Therefore, she can most rightly claim in her

diary: “What fools these people are” (Ackroyd 1995: 87), again asserting her control

over events and people around her.

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The film version of the Prestige deals quite remarkably with the diaries by

using multiple flashbacks, but it is the novel which sets the higher challenge. In his

mind’s eye, the reader may visualize the show effects the film so spectacularly relies

on, but his main challenge will be not to be led up the alleys chosen by the diarists.47

The diaries or notebooks serve as facts and become another trick in the search for the

ultimate illusion.

Both, the book and the film deal quite differently with the notion of

performance and magic, however, it is up to the audience and the readership whether

they really want to know or if they prefer to be lulled by the deception.

To conclude, all the characters discussed put on different performances in

order to achieve their goal or to survive in society. They become real artists of the

trade, to the extent that they cannot lay off their profession, and it becomes part of

their everyday life. They keep on putting on a show and creating an illusion, so that

their performances turn into a cleverly rehearsed routine. They live their trade, which

even makes some of them create a double-persona in order to be able to lead a normal

life or live their darkest secrets. They truly sacrifice their lives for the spectacle.

2.7 The circus and other means of escape

The audience wants to flee the routine and tediousness of their every day life and

the circus helps people escape into another world, an imaginary or fantasy one. The

circus is by no means a regulated and beautiful space, but it is exactly therein that lies

its actual beauty.  

The circus has always been perceived as a magical, exotic, and dreamlike sphere.

In The Circus of Ghosts Barbara Ewing constantly contrasts “the magic of the circus”

(Ewing 2011: 93) to harsh reality. It is an unreal world where impossible things are

made possible and the audience can forget about their all too ordinary lives. The same

ideas was picked up by Ernest Hemingway, who described the circus as follows:

The circus is the only ageless delight that you buy for money. Everything else is

supposed to be bad for you. But the Circus is good for you. It is the only                                                                                                                47 See Christopher Nolan and Jonathan Nolan ‘Introduction’ to The Prestige (Nolan and Nolan 2006: vii-ix).

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spectacle I know that, while you watch it, gives the quality of a truly happy

dream. The big cats do things no cat would ever do. You can see them jumping

effortlessly over Mr. Konyct’s head instead of making that unbelievable low

rush they close with in the dusk when the female lion shows her cubs the way to

kill. […] But in the Circus it is like a dream. The animals are dream animals.

The riders are dream riders. The flyers really fly and catch each other the way

you are caught in good dreams. (Hemingway 2006: 130)

The idea of the circus being a place for dreams is quite prominent in The Circus of

Ghosts: “The circus: dream-time for one night only in a small, small town called

Hamford, many miles west of New York […] across the farmer’s fields towards the

magic, enchanting place: the circus” (Ewing 2011: 91). Ewing describes it as a

magical place where the spectators can forget their normal lives by witnessing

breathtaking acts before undermining it by juxtaposing real facts, such as the

following: “[The lion-tamer] had actually lost his arm, not when attacked by a lion but

when a heavy cart ran him over, but this was never told” (Ewing 2011: 97). Ewing

plays with the notion of the seemingly real and what the audience wants to believe is

real. The spectators go to the circus because they want to be spellbound and

entertained, and therefore they accept that not all of the performance is real:

And somehow the Clairvoyant Ghost seemed to fly upwards, right up into the

murky shadows, and it seemed like magic: they were seeing real magic: the

Clairvoyant Ghost flew upwards, up, like a ghost-bird: it was against the laws of

nature and the law of gravity but there she was: up, up: then she caught a dark

trapeze with one hand. She swung herself – and she stood there, swinging slightly,

and the audience could not take their eyes from her and then very slowly, balanced,

she stood with her arms outstretched, as if she held the audience to her in some

magical way. (Ewing 2011: 514)

Barbara Ewing does not give the reader the possibility to be taken in by this

mystical scene due to her use of language. Cordelia Preston is only pretending to be

flying and is deceiving her audience. However, the audience captured by her aura or

her persona want and allow her to fool them, and therefore they do not question the

authenticity of her performance. They are so fascinated by her presence that they

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ignore the dark trapeze, and therefore the magic in this extract stems from Cordelia’s

ability to capture an entire audience’s attention. Barbara Ewing plays with the notion

of the seemingly real in her novels, as the following passage reveals:

This short, fat man in front of him now, lying there with poulticed legs and

bandaged knees, drinking whisky and swearing, seemed like something from the

stage rather than from real life, but the Inspector had, over the years, seen clearly

that the nobility lived so differently that they could not conceive that rules that

applied to the general populace also applied to them. (Ewing 2007: 214)

Whereas the previous passage played with the notion of deception and discussed how

Cordelia manipulates the audience, this passage mixes real life with the stage. The

Duke is depicted as a clown, a figure from the stage rather than a nobleman.

Cordelia and Fevvers in Nights at the Circus share the idea of pretending to be able

to fly:

Like Lucifer, I fell. Down, down, down I tumbled, bang with a bump on the

Persian rug below me, flat on my face amongst those blooms and beasts that

never graced no natural forest, those creatures of dreams and abstraction not

unlike myself, Mr Walser. Then I knew I was not ready to bear on my back the

great burden of my unnaturalness. (Carter 2006: 30)

The author does not deceive her readers but faces them with the facts. A similar

idea has been mentioned earlier in relation to the showman, Mr Silas P Swift, who

does not hide his opportunistic intentions when it comes to deceiving the audience by

using lighting effects to make his shows more spectacular. The author gives insights

into the artists’ trades by revealing their tricks, but at the same time, claims that

mesmerism is not magic, but something genuine.

The stage or the music hall also provide a means of escape for Elizabeth Cree in

Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem.48 Having experienced a particularly hard

                                                                                                               48 In Abigail Dennis’ interview with Sarah Waters, the latter mentions Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem and the similarities between Nancy and Lizzie: “It’s interesting, I think that when you read Nancy and [Ackroyd’s] Lizzie alongside each other, there are some similarities in the

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childhood, her mother’s death is a relief for the young woman. It is once she sees Dan

Leno perform that she experiences catharsis, which enables her to let go of her past

and guilt: “She was conscious only of the strange comedy with which Leno had

assuaged the misery of her life” (Ackroyd 1995: 20). The theatre has left her

mesmerized and she turns indifferent to the horrors of the outside world: “There were

three small boys dragging something out of the water, but even this spectacle could

not satisfy her after the enchantment of the Craven Street theatre” (Ackroyd 1995:

20). It is left unsaid what the boys are dragging out the water but it might be a corpse

or carcass considering the murderous nature of the novel. In the light of the

performance that Elizabeth has just witnessed even a murder becomes banal and

unspectacular. At the same time, however, this incident is turned into a spectacle

itself, which once more underlines the idea of all the world being a stage and we are

all performers in the play that is called life. Her mother’s death does not affect her as

she is relieved of the burden that she was. From now on her life is turned into an act

and she becomes a centre stage actress herself: “I was Dan Leno mocking his naughty

daughter; then I took my mother’s stained pillow, cradled it, kissed it, and flung it to

the floor” (Ackroyd 1995: 51). Elizabeth is indifferent to the loss, and develops a

morbid attraction to the smell of death, which adds to the decadent atmosphere in the

novel. Her thoughts change once she enters the theatre, this purifying space: “All

thoughts of Lambeth Marsh and of my mother disappeared as I took my ticket and

went up into the gods. This was where I belonged, with the golden angels all around

me” (Ackroyd 1995: 52). Elizabeth and Nancy from Tipping the Velvet are quite

similar, as the two women find comfort in the theatre, where they may forget their

harsh and dull lives. Elizabeth’s relation to the theatre is stronger as she feels attracted

to the entire institution, whereas Nancy’s cravings for it, are in relation to a person,

her lover Kitty. In keeping with the concept of catharsis, the theatre enables Elizabeth

to relegate her past at will. Here she can pay to be granted access to the gods in the

theatre, something she will be denied in the afterlife after her life as a criminal and a

murderess she will now embark on. Strictly speaking, she does not belong to the

golden angels and having barely laid off her old life, Elizabeth reflects on it as if it

were a thing long past: “In my old life I had seen things darkly, but now they were

most clear and brilliant. Even the dust on the stage seemed to shine, and the painted                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              narrative tone – there’s a kind of delight and a teasing, in keeping back the thrills and plot twists and all that kind of thing” (Waters quoted in Dennis 2008: 46).

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green door at the corner of Villier Street seemed so inviting that I wanted to knock

and walk in” (Ackroyd 1995: 52). Like the audience in the theatre, she is mesmerized

and even deceived by the limelight of the theatre. Like her mother previously being

inebriated by alcohol, she is now intoxicated by the glamour of the theatre. Her life is

turned into a Cinderella story, and like in the fairy tale, her newly found happiness is

only short-lived and disappears once the spell wears off:

It was like being expelled from some wonderful garden or palace, and now all I

could see were the dirty bricks of the house fronts, the muck of the narrow

street, and the shadows cast by the gas lamps in the Strand. There was straw

scattered on the cobbles of Craven Street, and some pages from a magazine

lying in a puddle of filth. A woman or a child was crying in an upper room, but

when I looked up I could barely see the silhouettes of the chimney stacks

against the night air. Everything was dark, and the sky and the rooftops merged

together. Now, with all my strength, I longed to be in the theatre once more.

(Ackroyd 1995: 53)

This passage bears religious connotations as Elizabeth compares her being pushed out

of the theatre to Adam and Eve’s expulsion from paradise. In addition, one can

compare Elizabeth to Lucifer. Like him, she has fallen from the gods and quite

literally she is a fallen woman or angel, as she becomes a criminal and an actress.

From heaven, the place of radiance and bliss, she falls into darkness and obscure

reality. Once she is out in the streets of London again, she faces the squalor and the

harsh world of poverty. The minutely described depiction of the outside world is kept

in the tradition of Realism and Naturalism, and the works of the likes of Zola.

Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem incorporates different media, such as

newspaper articles and extracts from the trial of Elizabeth Cree, to render the novel

more authentic. In addition, the novel offers the reader different perspectives and a

more personal and intimate insight through the use of a diary. The concept of research

is furthered in Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem by introducing prominent

contemporaries, such as George Gissing and Karl Marx.

Like in the majority of the novels discussed in this thesis, women are the stronger

sex and they have a dominant influence on men. Moreover, it is mostly women who

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are responsible for the events and outcomes. The same accounts for Ackroyd’s novel,

as Elizabeth Cree manages not only to fool her husband and the court, but also the

reader. The idea of women being the stronger sex is also emphasized in the novel in

the person of George Gissing:

This was not because he was in any sense a misogynist – far from it—but he

was still young enough to maintain the illusion that the pursuit of knowledge

must be a cloistered and self-denying activity, in which the mind itself must

suffuse or overpower the body. In any case he came to the Reading Room partly

to escape what he termed, in homage to Nietzsche whom he had just been

reading, ‘the presence of the Female Will’. (Ackroyd 1995: 110)

This passage is interesting, as George Gissing keeps up an appearance by creating the

“illusion” that he must not give in to sensuality but that knowledge and rationality are

more important. Hence, he is fooling himself in order to keep away from the female

sex, more precisely from the alcoholic Nell. He is constantly drawn to her for the false

reasons, as “the romantically inclined literary young man became obsessed with her

because of her drunken prostitution” (Ackroyd 1995: 111). He is in love with his own

literary self and wants to become a character of an Emile Zola novel. Therefore, he

cannot blame her because “his misfortunes [were] in part the result of his own

delusions” (Ackroyd 1995: 111). He, thus, escapes to the Reading Room to be among

other intellectuals and to do some research. The Reading Room of the British

Museum is surrounded by mystery, which attracts a certain kind of people, and

Ackroyd explains this by writing that

the connection between occult bookshops and the British Museum might simply

be explained on the grounds that libraries are commonly the home of lonely or

thwarted people who are also likely to be attracted to magical lore as a

substitute for real influence or power. (Ackroyd 1995: 139)

Gissing is not the only character in the novel seeking comfort in the library, John Cree

becomes a fellow reader trying to escape reality. As has been pointed out earlier, Cree

does not feel comfortable in the presence of his wife and has a writer’s block when it

comes to his melodrama. Instead of tackling the problem and talking it through with

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his wife, “he read[s] books concerned with the sufferings of the London poor, and

passe[s] his time beneath the great dome of the library” (Ackroyd 1995: 227). The

library turns into a sanctuary or a monastery devoid of women and misery. Here men

can devote themselves to other intellectuals; it is the place where great minds like

Karl Marx and George Gissing meet to deepen their research. The reading room gains

romantic, or even homoerotic connotations.

Instead of dealing with his own miserable life, he looks up the misery of

others in order to feel better about his own condition, and to assert his intellectual and

financial superiority. At the same time, Ackroyd having himself published books on

London and its history, is talking to us through his creation, John Cree.

Like the circus, libraries have a singular attraction for lonely people who are

looking for something new but also to escape and hide from the outside and real

world. The two places offer a different version of the real world, as people can either

find comfort in the spectacle or in books. Like the library, the circus “offered a

“second life” to the people, but rather than inverting power relationships for a day or a

week, it had a more permanent role to play in this society” (Assael 2005: 8).

The novels provide the readers with different means of escape, in Dan Leno

and the Limehouse Golem it is the music hall but also the library. In the music hall it

is particularly pantomime that offers the spectators a means of escape: “The popular

reading of pantomime defines it as a fantastical escape in which harmlessly fun, stock

characters act out traditional fairy stories in a good-humoured display of slapstick,

popular song, romance and spectacle” (Radcliffe 2010: 118).

The fascination for the circus itself has been considered a form of escapism in

both literature and in films. As mentioned earlier, Victorian novelists were also keen

on the circus, and Charles Dickens’ Hard Times depicts the circus “as an alternative

to the labours of industrial society, rather than as a symptom or product of it”

(Stoddart 2000: 122).

The romantic concept of the circus as an escape from reality can be found in

Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus. Bailey, a little boy from Massachusetts, wants

to escape his dull life and not go to Harvard. He is entranced by the circus, and when

Poppet, one of the Murray twins, asks him, he decides to run away from home:

I don’t care if you [his sister Caroline] don’t understand that. Staying here won’t

make me happy. It will make you happy because you are insipid and boring, and

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an insipid, boring life is enough for you. It’s not enough for me. It will never be

enough for me. So I’m leaving. (Morgenstern 2011: 285)

Failing to join the circus in time, Bailey decides to follow it, and during his journey

he becomes a rêveur. He becomes a member of the fan community of the circus, who

keep following the circus wherever it goes.

Naming the young boy Bailey is certainly no coincidence, as one of the most

famous ringmasters in the history of American Circus was James Anthony Bailey,

who established Barnum and Bailey's Circus with P. T. Barnum. It is towards the end

of the novel that this link between the fictional boy and James Anthony Bailey

becomes clearer. In order to keep the circus alive, Marco and Celia ask Bailey to

become its caretaker. By accepting this responsibility, Bailey will become an integral

part of it: “All the time. You’d be tied very tightly to the circus itself. You could

leave, but not for extended periods of time” (Morgenstern 2011: 361).

In The Night Circus and The Circus of Ghosts and The Mesmerist, the circus

becomes a means of escape for the audience but also for the protagonists themselves,

as Dan Leno phrases it quite appropriately: “[Pantomime] is believed only while it is

performed. In real life things are a bit harder, you know. And I suppose that’s what

we try to do in pantomime. Soften the hardness just a little” (Ackroyd 1995: 206).

In the novella Albert Nobbs, the escape is not material but rather mental, namely

a dream or the hope for a better future. Throughout the novella, Albert is driven by

her very own obsession of opening up her own shop. She is completely overcome by

her own dream that she does not consider Helen’s aspirations, whom she wants to

include in her venture:

Yet it had possessed her completely; and the parlour behind the shop that she

had furnished and refurnished, hanging a round mirror above the mantelpiece,

papering the walls with a pretty colourful paper that she had seen in Wicklow

Street and has asked the man to put aside for her. (Moore 2011: 84).

The protagonists find comfort in the spectacle, as it enables them to escape their dull

and sometimes harsh lives. The music hall and the circus as well as other public

spaces, such as the library help people find refuge and forget about the outside world.

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However, it is worth adding that it does not have to be an actual space that people can

escape to, it can also be a dream or invented world. Literature shares this function, as

reading is yet another means of seeking comfort and softening reality.

2.8 The different kinds of prisons

In the previous part, the spectacle and the circus have been discussed in terms of their

escapist function. The latter certainly bears romantic connotations, as people go to the

circus to forget about their worries. However, there is also a more disturbing side to

the spectacle and the circus, namely its carceral side.

In The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern introduces the concept of the circus as

a prison towards the end of the novel, when the two protagonists Celia and Marco try

to save the circus. In order to do so, they “were pulled apart and put together again in

a less concentrated state” (Morgenstern 2011: 355). They have become one with the

circus and are mere spectral beings. Widget later explains that: “They are in the

circus. They are the circus” (Morgenstern 2011: 379). They are imprisoned within the

confines of the circus, and can no longer escape. Despite their imprisonment the

young couple are together and therefore it is a happy ending. However, not every sort

of imprisonment bears similar connotations. Celia and Marco being spectral beings

within the circus echoes Julian Wolfrey’s discussion on spectrality and the written

text:

Textuality brings back to us a supplement that has no origin, in the form of

haunting figures – textual figures – which we misrecognize as images of ‘real’

people, their actions, and the contexts in which the events and lives to which we

are witness take place. We ‘believe’ in the characters, assume their reality,

without taking into account the extent to which those figures or characters are,

themselves, textual projections, apparitions if you will, images or phantasms

belonging to the phantasmic dimension of fabulation. (Wolfreys 2002: xiii)

The reader can only guess whether or not Marco and Celia are happy and if they will

eventually find peace. Like Ewing in The Mesmerist, Morgenstern leaves the ending

open and therefore the two novels reverse Victorian traditions, the way John Fowles

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also does in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, “which resists closure, lingers on in the

reader’s interpretative mind and rather than offering the consolation of a rounded

form teases the reader with its plurality of openings” (Gutleben 2001: 118).

Foucault’s analysis of the prison is of great value here, as the structure of the

Bentham prison is similar to that of a theatre and enables people to watch the

spectacle from different angles. Foucault states that “[cells] are like so many cages, so

many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and

constantly visible” (Foucault 1995: 200). The concepts of the theatre and the prison

are dear to Sarah Waters.49 Whereas the protagonist in Tipping the Velvet finds her

place on the stage, the action of Affinity takes place in a prison. Waters’ description of

the prison echoes Foucault’s analysis of the Bentham prison: “for the tower is set at

the centre of the pentagon yards, so that the view from it is of the walls and barred

windows that make up the interior face of the women’s building” (Waters 2000: 10).

Millbank prison is depicted as a place of fear, where one cannot escape from the gaze:

“it is in lifting my eyes from my sweeping hem that I first see the pentagons of

Millbank – and the nearness of them, and the suddenness of that gaze, makes them

seem terrible. I look at them, and feel my heart beat hard, and I am afraid” (Waters

2000: 8). Margaret is afraid when first entering the grounds of Millbank prison, and

feels as if she cannot escape the gaze. However, her perception of the prison changes,

and becomes more sentimental:

The prison, drawn in outline, has a curious kind of charm to it, the pentagons

appearing as petals on a geometric flower -- or, as I have sometimes thought,

they are like the coloured zones on the chequer-boards we used to paint when

we were children. Seen close, of course, Millbank is not charming. Its scale is

vast, and its lines and angles, when realised in walls and towers of yellow brick

and shuttered windows, seem only wrong or perverse. It is as if the prison had

been designed by a man in the grip of a nightmare or a madness -- or had heen

made expressly to drive its inmates mad. I think it would certainly drive me                                                                                                                49 In an interview with Abigail Dennis, Sarah Waters confirms Angela Carter’s influence on her own work: “It’s funny, because I recently wrote an introduction for Nights at the Circus [1984], and of course I had to reread it … I loved it all over again, but also, I could see all the kind of stuff that had seeped through into my own writing: the interest in performance, in a sort of musical burlesque; there’s even a women’s prison in there – in my second book [Affinity] there’s a women’s prison” (Waters quoted in Dennis 2008: 42).

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mad, if I had to work as a warder there. (Waters 2000: 8)

In this passage Margaret no longer sees the prison as a cold and horrible place, but she

calls it charming and even compares it to a flower. In addition, she points out the

geometry of the flower, which reflects the neatness and order of the prison. Margaret

also turns sentimental, as the prison reminds her of her own childhood. Margaret

awakens from her dream-like state, and faces reality by realizing that Millbank is not

an ideal place, but that it is perverse. She claims that the prison must have been

created by a madman, and that she could not work in it, as its claustrophobic design

would drive her mad. It is worth pointing out that Waters’ depiction of Millbank not

only echoes Bentham’s panopticon, but it also turns out to be a microcosm of our

society, just like the circus: “you see, we are quite a little city here! Quite self-

sustaining. We should do very well, I always think, under a siege” (Waters 2000: 9).

Mr Shillitoe is quite proud when talking to Margaret about the prison, a fortress and

symbol of essentially male dominance, in a patriarchal society where women are

judged, and sentences executed by men. The further Margaret enters the prison, the

more uneasy she feels, as she cannot escape the feeling of oppression she experiences

the moment the first gate of this forbidding and well-structured building closes behind

you:

We passed only along a succession of neat, whitewashed corridors, and were

greeted at the junction of these by warders, in dark prison coats. But, the very

neatness and the sameness of the corridors and the men made them troubling: I

might have been taken on the same plain route ten times over, I should never

have known it. Unnerving, too, is the dreadful clamour of the place. Where the

warders stand there are gates, that must be unfastened, and swung on grinding

hinges, and slammed and bolted; and the empty passages, of course, echo with

the sounds of other gates, and other locks and bolds, distant and near. The

prison seems caught, in consequence, at the heart of some perpetual private

storm, that left my ears ringing. (Waters 2000: 9-10)

Margaret, clearly emphasizing the neatness of the prison, and the fact that everything

looks the same, is struck by the prevailing order and regularity of the place. It seems

as if they were moving in circles, and by its symmetry the prison shares structural

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features with a labyrinth. The entire building bears nothing personal, even the warders

are anonymous beings wearing the same dark coats, which stand in contrast with the

whitewashed corridors. Another horrible aspect of the prison is the terrible noise, as

all the sounds echo. Margaret’s depiction of the prison, reminds the reader of a lunatic

asylum, a place of madness she cannot escape from. The monotony of the building, its

shape and the terrifying noises, all add up to an oppressive vision and contribute to

the effect prisons have on inmates and visitors alike.

The concept of the panopticon is also crucial in Angela Carter’s Nights at the

Circus, where the author depicts it as follows:

It was a panopticon she forced them to build, a hollow circle of cells shaped like

a doughnut, the inward-facing wall of which was composed of grids of steel

and, in the middle of the roofed, central courtyard, there was a round room

surrounded by windows. In that room she’d sit all day and stare and stare and

stare at her murderesses and they, in turn, sat all day and stared at her. (Carter

2006: 142)

Countess P. who has conceived this institution as a place for retribution and

atonement rather than rehabilitation tries to adopt the role of the good conscience in

the running of the prison, but she still plays a game with her inmates and adopts a

male role indulging in her own power. In addition, staring at the convicts is similar to

watching a performance and this passage reflects the concept of the pact between

audience and performer once more. They are both part of the performance, and are

aware that they are watching and being observed. This idea of performance is quite

striking in the next passage: “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” (Carter 2006: 248).

In her study on Nights at the Circus, Helen Stoddart makes an interesting

observation when it comes to Foucault’s detailed description of the architecture of the

panopticon, pointing out “his consistent emphasis of its theatrical effects” (Stoddart

2007: 25). She backs it up with the following quotation taken from Foucault’s

Discipline and Punish:

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By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out

precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the

periphery. They are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each

actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible. The panoptic

mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to

recognize immediately. In short it reverses the principle of the dungeons; or

rather three of its functions – to enclose, to deprive of light and to hide – it

preserves only the first and eliminates the other two. Full lighting and the eye of

the supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected.

Visibility is a trap. (Foucault 1995: 200)

The circus and the panopticon share more than just their circular shape, to quote

Alison Lee:

As the circus is a microcosm, so is the panopticon, and the similarity between

the two is a reminder of the mechanisms of power that seek to control people

who are considered abnormal. Like the women who have murdered their

husbands, the circus performers are on the fringes of society. Both are

controlled by being rendered perfectly visible and therefore are assumed to pose

no threat. People who watch the circus are consumers of the performances; the

actors in the panopticon are consumed by the eyes of Countess P. As if to make

the point more clearly, Carter uses food imagery to describe the prison: its shape

is like a doughnut, its cells are like babas au rhum, and its structure is like a

honeycomb. (Lee 1997: 101)

Ruth Robbins’ analysis of Nights at the Circus furthers this idea by noting that

the circus as well as the panopticon needs an audience:

What we have seen so far of circus life tends to suggest that the performers are

imprisoned in their own world of illusion, dependent for their existence on an

applauding audience. There is no performance if there is no one to see it.

Similarly, as far as the Countess P. is concerned, there is no discipline or

repentance unless she sees it. (Robbins 2000: 60-61)

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Despite the similarities between the circus and the panopticon, it is Foucault

who himself notes that “our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance […]

We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine,

invested by its effect of power, which we bring to ourselves since we are part of its

mechanism” (Foucault 1995: 217).

In addition, the countess invades a male space and takes on a male role,

namely the warden and also the male gaze. Women are subject to the perpetual male

gaze, which they cannot escape:

In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split

between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its

phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional

exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their

appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to

connote to-be-looked-at-ness. (Mulvey 1975: 11)

It also echoes Foucault who states that the “major effect of the panopticon is

to induce in the inmate a state of consciousness and permanent visibility that assures

the automatic functioning of power” (Foucault 1995: 201). The countess is in charge

of the surveillance and this certainly hints at perversion, especially when taking into

account the following extract:

The Countess, in the observatory, sat in a swivelling chair whose speed she

could regulate at will. Round and round she went, sometimes at a great rate,

sometimes slowly, raking with her ice-blue eyes – she was of Prussian

extraction – the tier of unfortunate women surrounding her. She varied her

speeds so that the inmates were never able to guess beforehand at just what

moment they would come under her surveillance. (Carter 2006: 248)

The countess turns into the ringmaster and only she controls the surveillance. She

knows when and whom she wants to watch and it all turns into a game with strong

sexual connotations. Countess P. turns into some sort of sadistic Peeping Tom, who

takes pleasure in observing the vulnerable inmates. Laura Mulvey argues along the

same lines stating that “at the extreme, it can become fixated into a perversion,

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producing obsessive voyeurs and Peeping Toms, whose only sexual satisfaction can

come from watching, in an active controlling sense, an objectified other” (Mulvey

1975: 9). Despite being the observer, “the countess and the warders are also

imprisoned and watched, […] as the panopticon serves as an image of the way in

which in society at large all are imprisoned” (Peach 2009: 158).

Her Prussian descent, her title and her looks place her at a higher rank than the

prisoners. Her superiority is furthered in the next passage:

The women in the bare cells, in which was neither privacy nor distraction, cells

formulated on the principle of those in a nunnery where all was visible to the

eye of God, would live alone with the memory of their crime until they

acknowledged, not their guilt – most of them had done that, already – but their

responsibility. (Carter 2006: 248)

By drawing the obvious parallel between the panopticon and a nunnery, Carter

provides the Countess with the powers of the abbess, the ruler over women’s lives in

a cloistered environment, the almighty observer, the one who carries out the sanctions

imposed by the order and the male religious hierarchy outside the convent. She is the

one who can hear confessions to a degree, make people repent and who may absolve

them from their sins.

The Countess has these privileges and need not forfeit some of those granted

the nobility since, just like the Grand Duke, she is allowed to collect commodities.

They take pleasure in watching their personal collections of other human beings, thus

creating a power relation:

To produce a subject/object dynamic between the viewer and the artifact was to

reproduce a particular power arrangement between active and passive, between

a subject with will and the possibility of movement and an object frozen in

space. This subtended exhibits’ panopticon quality with a dynamic of

voyeurism which, in its mechanism of “reversal of affect”, produced not only

some of the spectator’s pleasure in viewing, but also the wish to be viewed – to

be the object of the imperial gaze. (Roof 2000: 105-106)

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The main difference being that Fevvers in Nights at the Circus is not

imprisoned in the panopticon, but that the Duke wants to capture her.

Female authors such as Sarah Waters and Angela Carter discuss the

concept of the New Woman in their novels, women who try to escape their

imprisonment and thus their female role. Whereas, Waters’ portrayal of the New

Woman is depicted in a rather conventional way, Carter’s novel turns it into a fairy

tale like story. It is towards the end of Nights at the Circus that Fevvers hints at the

turn of the century and optimistically exclaims:

And once the old world has turned on its axle so that the new dawn can dawn,

then, ah, then! all the women will have wings, the same as I. This young woman

in my arms, whom we found tied hand and foot with the grisly bonds of ritual,

will suffer no more of it; she will tear off her mind forg’d manacles, will rise up

and fly away. The dolls’ house doors will open, the brothels will spill forth their

prisoners, the cages, gilded or otherwise, all over the world, in every land, will

let forth their inmates singing together the dawn chorus of the new, the

transformed –. (Carter 2006: 338-339)

Whereas Carter’s passage is quite optimistic in terms of women escaping their

fate or imprisonment, George Moore’s Albert Nobbs cannot so easily break from her

environment. She has created her own imprisonment, which is her disguise, and “her

costume […] is not only her disguise but becomes her prison, then takes over the

body” (Benmussa cited in Diamond 1990: 100)

The circular structure of the panopticon and the concept of performance link

the prison to the circus, which can in turn be considered a prison. It is worth pointing

out Ruth Robbins’ analysis of the concepts of the prison and the circus in Nights at

the Circus here:

The circus and the prison share both a context (they are in the same novel) and a

geometry (they are in the same circular shape). We are invited to read them as

connected structures, and our expectations about their meanings (prisons bad,

circuses good) are subverted, though not evenly so – our expectations are not

simply overturned because, in the end, both prisons and circuses are shown as

bad, in different ways, for different reasons. (Robbins 2000: 115)

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The description of the circus bears negative connotations, as it is a highly

disturbing, topsy-turvy world. The prison, on the other hand, provides a certain

rigidity and precise structure. It is an institution conceived to punish and discipline

criminals.

Whereas Carter’s depiction of the circus bears negative and grotesque

connotations, other writers point out its escapist and liberal nature. The circus

provided women a space where they were able to be independent and make their own

living. This is particularly well demonstrated in Barbara Ewing’s novels The

Mesmerist and The Circus Ghost, as the female protagonists earn their own money

through acting, mesmerism, and acrobatic acts, all without having to rely on men.

Whereas the women who have chosen the circus are free to move around and do as

they wish, the other more ordinary women know a different fate. This is the case for

Cordelia’s daughter, Manon, who marries the Duke of Trent. Despite her new

prosperous life, she cannot accept her husband and her duties as a wife, which will

eventually lead her to take her own life. Her so-called imprisonment is nicely

described as “intense rhythmical moving around and round a room: something caged,

something incoherent” (Ewing 2007: 244). Manon is described as a caged animal,

which is frantically trying to escape its imprisonment. She is no longer referred to as a

young woman, but as “something”, thus reducing her to an object rather than a human

being. In addition, her circular movements remind the reader of the behavioural

patterns of animals in the circus arena or an enclosure in a zoo, which are rounded or

in the shape of an amphitheatre as well. She is turned into a hysterical and savage

object, no longer in control of itself and moving around incoherently. Like many

another woman, she is turned into a commodity whose duty it is to please her

husband, and marrying into nobility has rendered her savage and mad, as she is no

longer in control of her own fate. Being unfamiliar with her duties, she becomes

hysterical and eventually commits suicide. Manon’s fate is ironic as her marriage,

initially envisaged to give her financial security and a controlled and regulated life,

ends in chaos and lunacy. Her mother, on the other side, has known chaos and

sadness, but has found harmony and comfort in a chaotic and exotic world, namely

the circus. The latter has accepted her being an actress, as it does not care about class,

and has given her a new family. This becomes even clearer at the end of the novel

during the trial of Lord Ellis’ murder. Having discussed the sensationalist nature of

the novel earlier on, this particular moment in the novel depicts Cordelia as a modern

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and idealistic woman, well ahead of her time. But her language and actions would

certainly have been unacceptable in Victorian Britain and this is hinted at in the

novel:

She was now so far from the ideal womanhood that every man in the room held

clearly to his heart that, although they indeed saw her magnificence, she could

not retrieve the situation. They thought to themselves, she is an actress, after

all, and of how they would not like their wives and daughters to hear her words.

(Ewing 2007: 288)

Despite her telling the truth, Cordelia is shunned and has lost her dignity. Her fall is

irrevocable, as she is now the talk of the town, something she certainly had aspired to

in the past but under different circumstances. Now she is part of the “the most

disgusting exhibition to have been witnessed in a generation” (Ewing 2007: 295) and

the court room becomes her new stage, where she needs to fight in order to be

credible. Her performance is emphasized by the presence of another actor, Mr

Tryfonr, who later in the novel asks her: “How did you like my evidence in your

show?” (Ewing 2007: 370).

Once more she is reduced to womanhood and she cannot escape her fate after

having committed such an indecent crime, which has been turned into “THE TRIAL

OF THE CENTURY” (Ewing 2007: 295). Not only has the courtroom become her

stage, the entire town has been turned into one. Whereas Rillie and Cordelia had

turned the streets into their stage earlier on in the novel, they are now the public space

where “all the evidence at the inquest [is] sung about” (Ewing 2007: 295), thus,

paying homage to Shakespeare once more. Moreover, the streets of London were

regarded as a stage at the beginning of the nineteenth century, as Deborah Epstein

Nord points out:

We see in the 1820s a society that regarded the metropolis as a stage on which

to perform and witness its own civility, grandeur, and ebullience. The image of

theatre is crucial to urban representation in the early nineteenth century, for it

suggests not only entertainment and performance but also a relationship of

distance and tentativeness between spectator and the action on the stage. The

urban spectator of this period, whether writer or imagined subject, experienced

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the sights and people of the streets as passing shows or as monuments to be

glimpsed briefly or from afar. This distance helped to obscure and control all

that was seen, however arresting or unsettling, and it helped, too, to ensure that

whatever did unsettle the spectator would not be understood as a symptom of

some larger social disturbance. (Epstein Nord 1995: 20)

Cordelia’s lodgings are turned into a stage in front of which people gather to

witness the spectacle: “Outside the house in Bedford Place, Bloomsbury, crowds

gaped and swirled and hoped for glimpses; ginger beer and pies were sold, even more

heavy rain did not keep people away and mud and slush flew upwards” (Ewing 2007:

296). Cordelia’s life is turned into a spectacle and comes close to what we perceive as

reality television today. She is no longer safe from the public gaze, which she

previously indulged in being as an actress. In order to flee from her fate and forget her

past, she escapes to the circus, a world which does not care about her past and where

judgement is not passed. On the contrary, it welcomes her ruined reputation as people

will flock to the circus to see the fallen and controversial woman, as Silas P. Swift

puts it in the novel: “I understand that as well as being a Mesmerist or Phreno-

Mesmerist, you were once an Actress. What a wonderful combination for my

Entertainment Theatre!” (Ewing 2007: 368). The businessman is not interested in her

personal fate but in her reputation and how to incorporate her into his own spectacle.

Thus Cordelia moves from a public and uncontrolled stage to a more protected and

closed environment.

Barbara Ewing plays with the concept of spectacle in her novels and she does

not hide the showman’s intentions when it comes to satisfying the spectators’ hunger

for entertainment. In The Mesmerist the circus manager has grasped the popular

demand for the spectacular and tells Cordelia: “Audiences don’t want Actors any

more, […] these days audiences want Spectacle! And what they mean by Spectacle

ain’t second-rate actors and that mangy old horse” (Ewing 2007: 4). The Victorian

society was developing rapidly and so was their taste for spectacular entertainment,

thus “the audience wanted action, more smoke rising, more horses, drums, moving

scenery” (Ewing 2007: 6).

The circus and its various manifestations have has always played a crucial role

in our society, which is largely due to the fact that they act as yet another mirror of

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societal developments and realities. They have numerous functions, ranging from

pure entertainment, escapist aspirations, to being a prison from which the different

agents cannot escape. The circus is quite a complex institution, as it is both regulated

and chaotic at the same time, both following and originating trends in the world of the

spectacle, and as such a precursor to modern-day developments in the entertainment

world.

         

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3 The Ethical and Ideological Aspect of Neo-Victorian Literature

3.1 The fascination for the Victorian era

The third and final chapter deals with the ethical aspect of these novels and the role

of neo-Victorian literature, since “the neo-Victorian novel can be used as a vehicle for

the exploration of alternative versions of history, bringing to the fore what exists in

the original nineteenth century only as subtexts or veiled allusions” (Armitt and

Gamble 2006: 142).

The past few decades have witnessed an increase in the fascination for this period

in English history, for the simple reason that it is the century that had a tremendous

formative influence on the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. To quote

Christine L. Krueger: “No matter how vociferously we protest our postmodern

condition, we are in many respects post-Victorians, with a complex relationship to the

ethics, politics, psychology, and art of our eminent—and obscure—Victorian

precursors” (Krueger 2002: xi). In Victorian Afterlife, John Kucich and Dianne F.

Sadoff argue that

rewritings of Victorian culture have flourished, we believe, because the

postmodern fetishizes notions of cultural emergence, and because the nineteenth

century provides multiple eligible sites for theorizing such emergence. For the

postmodern engagement with the nineteenth century appears to link the

discourses of economics, sexuality, politics, and technology with the material

objects and cultures available for transportation across historical and

geographical boundaries, and thus capable of hybridization and appropriation.

(Sadoff and Kucich 2000: xv)

Modern day society and its tastes are quite similar to the nineteenth century, as it

was

[the Victorians] who first invented the theme park, the shopping mall, the

movies, the amusement park, the roller-coaster, the crime novel and the

sensational newspaper story [and they watched death-defying tightrope acts,

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played mechanical arcade games and were dazzled by the spectacles offered by

panoramas, dioramas, neoramas, nausoramas, physioramas and kinematographs.

(Sweet 2001: x-xi)

And it is important to quote Mitchell here in order to stress how this spatial and

historical proximity make us shun the direct and obvious links with this recent

common past, despite or mainly because of the fascination they exert on us today:

The past exists in the present in the shape of buildings and urban spaces and in

residual customs, beliefs, institutions and practices. Since the spatial distance

between the past and the present is negligible, this can sometimes make the past

seem close, as though very little separates it from the present at all. In spite of

this, or perhaps because of it, for much of the twentieth century, and at times,

today, the Victorians and their culture have been characterized in terms of their

absolute otherness. Rather than the shock of recognition we experience the

terror (and sometimes pleasure) of alterity, the fright (and satisfaction) of

estrangement. We feel keenly, and assert strongly, our indomitable distance

from the Victorians. (Mitchell 2010: 39)

Due to the rapid changes and development in the nineteenth century, the Victorian

age is still quite appealing to contemporary writers and also to the readership. This

particular epoch does not differ substantially from today mainly because it laid the

foundations for modern day society. The fact that all the novels discussed have been

widely acclaimed demonstrates that we are still drawn and fascinated by the age.

Hence, I cannot but agree with Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben, who state

that “there is something strangely appealing about the nineteenth-century traumatised

subject, inhabiting the ghostly liminal space between historical and living memory”

(Kohlke and Gutleben 2010: 7). Kate Mitchell argues along the same line stating that

a steady interest in things Victorian gained momentum in the second half of the

[twentieth] century until, in the final decades, a fascination with the period

invaded film, television, trends in interior decoration, fashion, genealogy,

advertising, museums, historical re-enactments, politics and scholarship about

the Victorian period. (Mitchell 2010: 1)

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Despite our desire of being different from the Victorians, we cannot escape the

past, as it clearly haunts the present in numerous ways. It is not surprising that this era

is very much present in our media and literature today, as we still identify with the

Victorians. Therefore, it is understandable why neo-Victorian fiction is so popular

today. The latter encompasses numerous topics and settings in order to meet the

readership’s demands. Magic and spirituality have been en vogue topics, and in the

context of this thesis, it has been demonstrated that neo-Victorian literature and magic

share a number of elements, the first being that they are both human creations,

fabrications of the mind. This idea clearly reflects Ann Heilmann’s statement that

“Neo-Victorianism is sustained by illusion: the fabrication of a ‘plausible’ version of

the Victorian past” (Heilmann 2009/2010: 18). Allison Neal develops this idea stating

that “just as the act of male impersonation or drag can be defined as a copy of a copy

with no original core of gender, so too can neo-Victorian literature itself [can] be

classified as a rewriting, a palimpsestic copy of Victorian mores or even a literary

„drag act‟, if you will” (Neal 2011: 57). Therefore, Sarah Gamble is right to point out

that “the nineteenth century lives on in the twentieth only as an artefact or relic, which

can be viewed curiously, critically or nostalgically, but never “known” in an authentic

sense” (Gamble 2009: 126).

Kate Mitchell deems neo-Victorian novels “as acts of memory which […] address

the needs or speak to the desires of particular groups now” (Mitchell 2010: 4). By

being mere acts of memory, copies, or illusions, neo-Victorian novels cannot be

granted the definition of accurate historical texts. They contain historical facts but

they are also acts of nostalgia, and by definition contain a sense of longing. I cannot

but agree with Kate Mitchell who states that “these fictions are less concerned with

making sense of the Victorian past, than with offering it as a cultural memory, to be

remembered, and imaginatively re-created, not revised and understood” (Mitchell

2010: 7). They provide alternative versions of the past, telling us what could have

been, instead of tedious historical facts. On the contrary, neo-Victorian fiction is an

act of memory as well as of nostalgia, both of which “might be productive, giving

voice to the desire for cultural memory to which these novels bear witness” (Mitchell

2010: 5). Despite not giving accurate historical accounts, neo-Victorian fiction, like

all historical metafictions, enables us not to forget the past, as the latter “only exists in

our re-creations of it [and] its meaning is produced in and by our very accounts of it,

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[thus] historical inquiry is recast as desire in these novels, and remembrance is

naturalised as a necessary human action” (Mitchell 2010: 37). In conclusion, neo-

Victorian literature has a historical function since it gives an account of the past, even

if it is not completely accurate. The pleasure of reading is therefore foregrounded, and

so is the aesthetic function of neo-Victorian literature. The readers want to read

stories set in the nineteenth century, and

[i]t may be argued that we cannot understand the present if we do not

understand the past that preceded and produced it … But there are other, less

solid reasons, amongst them the aesthetic need to write coloured and

metaphorical language, to keep past literatures alive and singing, connecting the

pleasure of writing to the pleasure of reading. (Byatt 2000: 11)

3.2 Sensationalism in the nineteenth century and today

The book market has certainly undergone numerous changes. Whereas books are

widely available today in either printed or virtual form, the readership in the Victorian

age was far smaller, as not everyone had the financial means to acquire books, the

necessary education to read books, or even the leisure time to read them. However, it

remains true that it was the Victorian age that witnessed a notable increase in the

publishing industry.

The expansion of the number of publishing houses enabled more writers to get

their novels edited. The wide availability and the readership’s hunger for novels led to

the introduction of new genres and subgenres, one of the most notable ones being

sensationalist fiction. The latter’s

‘[…] design […] was ‘to electrify the nerves’. The experience of perpetual

suspense may be deleterious to the nervous system: many of the characters in

the novel [Women in White] seem themselves to be in a hysterical state and may

communicate the fever to the reader’ […] He was concerned with doubles and

double identity, with monomania and delusion. (Ackroyd 2012: 93)

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The very notion of sensationalist fiction can be found in Barbara Ewing’s

novels, The Mesmerist and The Circus of Ghosts. In these two works, Rillie always

reads the news to her already demented mother. Songs and news headings can be

found throughout the book and emphasize the Victorians’ hunger for scandals: “This

was not just a funeral. This was – and the words, seething with possibilities, passed

from mouth to mouth –a thrilling event: murder, suicide and mayhem” (Ewing 2007:

259).

Hence, the plots of the two novels tie in with the traditional sensationalist

novels. Cordelia Preston, becomes the heroine of these novels, and she is both

participant and victim. The journalists are turned into vultures who want to know

every detail about the woman mesmerist, and it suits them just fine that she is a

woman, making the story even more sensational: “A woman in the story was what

they had been hoping for: that would be news” (Ewing 2007: 267). In addition,

Cordelia being an actress and also a mesmerist gives them even more material which

they can turn into a sensational piece of news and which is then presented in these

terms:

WITH EVIL EYE SHE DREW HIM IN,

INTO HER TERRIBLE HOUSE OF SIN.

HER ACTRESS SKILLS SHE BROUGHT TO PLAY,

AS EVEN IN DEATH’S ARMS HE LAY;

SOME USE AN AXE; THEY SAY A KNIFE;

OR DID MESMERISM TAKE HIS LIFE?! (Ewing 2007: 273)

This particular piece of news in the broadsides and broadsheets is quite stereotypical

as it portrays Cordelia as a murderess, an actress, a mesmerist, and also a seductress

or prostitute. Thus she is outright degraded to the lowest social class despite her being

innocent. The Victorians had a craving for sensationalist plots, and due to the

development of ever more performing printing presses and cheaper nationwide

transport, such pieces of news were available to a large audience at a reasonable price.

Furthermore, the denouement of the plot is in line with traditional Victorian

sensationalist novels, as it was not Cordelia who committed the murder, but Lord

Ellis’ lawful and noble wife. The only crime Cordelia committed was giving

“matrimonial advice” (Ewing 2007: 284), which consisted in enlightening young

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women about their sexual duties of becoming a wife, and thus ruining them. This was

all the more tragic as she failed to give her own daughter advice on the given subject,

as it indirectly led to her committing suicide. However, Cordelia’s life is ruined by the

mere fact that she told women the truth and not for being a murderess. This is clearly

ironic, as the murder of Lord Ellis becomes the lesser issue in the court hearing.

Ewing is clearly parodying the prudish nature of Victorian women who did not dare

talk about the state of matrimony to anyone and certainly not in public. This,

however, turns the plot of the novel into a farce, as such an incident was unimaginable

in a Victorian court. By including this sex scandal in her novel, Ewing bases herself

on Victorian fiction, to quote William Cohen:

While it ought to be obvious, it has not been remarked that scandal, often sex

scandal, structures the usual plot of the realist novel in the Victorian period. The

typical story of the novel involves the loss and eventual recovery of a fortune,

benefactor, parent, child, sibling, or spouse. The course of recovery necessitates

disclosure of a secret, which has been hidden because it is in some way immoral

or illegal; most often, it involves adultery or illegitimacy. The plot of the novel

unfolds by threatening and finally effecting the exposure of the secret to the

community, and once this revelation has occurred, the goods (property, family)

are redistributed, now more justly, among those who survive. The novelistic

plot, distilled in this way, is analogous to the form of the scandal. (Cohen 1996:

16-17)

Ewing’s novel The Mesmerist is structured very much the same way as a Victorian

novel, as Cordelia’s past is eventually revealed, and the reader gets to know that she

has three illegitimate children and that she is an actress. Cordelia is, therefore,

reunited with her children but she has not found a happy ending, as two of her

children die and she has become a fallen woman. In addition, The Mesmerist does not

have closure, as the ending is open-ended and leaves room for a sequel.

The same idea of the public thirsting for sensational news can be found in Dan

Leno and the Limehouse Golem:

The brutal murder of the Jewish scholar, only six days after that of the prostitute

in the same area, provoked a frenzied interest among ordinary Londoners. It was

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almost as if they had been waiting impatiently for these murders to happen – as

if the new conditions of the metropolis required some vivid identification, some

flagrant confirmation of its status as the largest and darkest city of the world.

(Ackroyd 1995: 88)

The murders create a state of panic among the citizens to the extent that “it was as if

some primeval force had erupted in Limehouse, and there was an irrational but

general fear that it would not stop there but would spread over the city and perhaps

even the entire country” (Ackroyd 1995: 162).

Sensationalism grew more and more popular, something not only novelists,

but also ringmasters were aware of. Therefore, they had to render their shows as

sensational as possible, and a means of doing so was certainly through advertisement.

Ringmasters did not hesitate to aggrandize their acts, especially when it came to

human curiosities:

Showmen fabricated freaks’ backgrounds, the nature of their condition, the

circumstances of their current lives, and other personal characteristics. The

accurate story of the life and conditions of those exhibited was replaced by a

purposeful distortion designed to market the exhibit, to produce a more

appealing freak. (Bogdan 1996: 25)

This idea of aggrandizing freaks can be found in Rosie Garland’s The Palace of

Curiosities, where Eve is coined “The Non-Pareil of the Female Sex” (Garland 2013:

101). She is advertised as follows: “The Wonders of the Age! Come and see the only

true and genuine Lion-Faced Women, Star Attraction at Professor Arroner’s

Marvels!” (Garland 2013: 101). The businessmen had to come up with all sorts of

strategies to promote their exhibits in order to make money. Using spectacular

language was important, and the more fanciful the background of the freak, the more

spectators it attracted. Mr Arroner also fabricates Eve’s background emphasizing that

she is not an automaton:

Ah, yes! This unusual creature you see before you was brought into London at

great expense from the broad savannahs of Africa! From the establishment of a

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certain lady of such high position and royal connections that discretion does not

permit me to elaborate further. (Garland 2013: 120)

Unlike Fevvers in Nights at the Circus, Eve had a mother and she was of woman

born. Mr Arroner makes up lies in order to render Eve more interesting and hence

more lucrative. He buys Eve a lot of dresses to make her look like a lady, which was

also an element which made freaks somehow appear larger than life:

The aggrandized-status mode meant dressing the part as well. For some exhibits

this involved expensive jewelry and stylish clothes – top hats and tails, evening

gowns, furs and other accoutrements of fine taste lavishly displayed. For others

it merely entailed being very, clean, neat, and respectably dressed. (Bogdan

1988: 108)

Eve and the reader become partners in the game of exposing Mr Arroner’s lies:

I ducked behind my fan at hearing such an exaggerated account of my

beginnings. I felt no shame about my humble origins, and I wondered if he did,

for it was such a mesh of lies he was spinning. I had no desire to be thought

showy. (Garland 2013: 121)

Eve does not want to hide her background but does not interrupt her husband’s show

either. This passage shows that Eve and Carter’s Fevvers are quite different. They are

different in what they are supposed to represent, but Eve is much more modest. In

addition, she takes her difference for granted and does not try to convince the reader

and the audience that she is different. Fevvers keeps repeating that she is different and

emphasizing the way she looks. However, like Fevvers, Eve is very much in control

of her performance, and she also becomes an observer:

See how they struggle with pity, horror and amusement, [Donkey-Skin] said.

How terrified they would be if they looked into the mirror and saw you instead

of their own milky faces.

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You are what they fear they might truly be. When they have snuffed the bedside

candle, you are there. You are the darkness that swims over them. (Garland

2013: 123)

The passage analyses the spectators’ feelings and reactions. They are scared as well as

fascinated when coming face to face with a human oddity. Eve’s voice of reason

Donkey-Skin speaks the truth when saying that people are afraid of her, and more

specifically, they are afraid of her being different. Garland develops this idea by later

turning the spectators into monsters:

The streets I walked down were entirely populated with monsters: hell of

ravening fangs, biting, tearing, devouring; scrambling over the backs of the

weak, stamping those below into a mash of humanity, with no light in their eyes

other than the beastly imperative: Destroy! (Garland 2013: 284)

Eve is not the monster of the novel, she tries to be different but in the end she accepts

who she is. The real monsters are the spectators who keep asking for more grotesque

and absurd spectacles. To re-use Bogdan’s argument, it is the spectators and society

who create monsters, as “enfreakment emerges from the cultural rituals that stylize,

silence, differentiate, and distance the persons whose bodies the freak-hunters or

showmen, colonize and commercialize” (Garland-Thomson 1996: 10). Society and

showmen do not care about the human being, they are only interested in the profit and

the show they put on. Differences only become interesting because of their lucrative

value but they are not accepted and esteemed.

In modern-day post-Victorian novels these outcasts have become the

protagonists of bestsellers. The question that arises here is of course why today’s

readership feels itself drawn to reading about the dramatic lives of freaks or lesbians,

for example. I want to argue that the nature of today’s readership is not that different

in its essence, as we, the readers, still hunger for the non-normative. We may have

moved away from Foucault’s Puritan Victorians, but at the same time there is still an

urge to know about the intimate lives of others. In addition, today’s media provide the

readers or the viewers with a sheer endless supply of more or less sensational

information. If Victorians could merely hint at what was happening behind closed

doors, today’s paparazzi provide us with evidence. The audience and readership have

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developed a craving for scandals and the deviant, and the media have clearly realized

this. The Victorian readership craved for sensationalist fiction, the more scandalous

the better, as Ackroyd puts it:

A review in the Quarterly Review described the sensation novel of the 1860s as

‘the morbid phenomenon of literature – indications of a wide-spread corruption

… called into existence to supply the cravings of a diseased appetite’. That

appetite was provoked by the morbid and the brutal. The novels took their plots

from the police courts and the new divorce courts; they were concerned with

family secrets, with seductions and bigamies and murders. (Ackroyd 2012: 93-

94)

Crime fiction was and is certainly still in vogue, and Dan Leno and the Limehouse

Golem is yet another example. In addition, Ackroyd takes up the concept of “the city

as spectacle” in his novel. The hanging of Elizabeth Cree becomes a spectacular event

to the extent that it is turned into a play at the end of the novel. The actual hanging is

referred to as “ceremony” and the prisoners’ “ritual howling” (Ackroyd 1995: 1),

which clearly bear religious connotations. This is emphasized by Elizabeth’s last

words “Here we are again” (Ackroyd 1995: 2), which hints at the execution of Christ

and his resurrection. The idea of being born again is made stronger due to the fact that

the novel begins and ends with Elizabeth’s execution, thus coming full circle and

bearing the obvious historical reference to the famous last words of Queen Mary’s. At

the same time, Elizabeth’s words remind the reader of her acting career. Having given

up her job in the music hall when she got married, she eventually ends up on a stage

again, due to the fact that public executions were quite popular in the nineteenth

century, as “hanging was essentially a form of street theatre” (Ackroyd 2001: 298).

Ackroyd built this fact into his novel when writing:

The public executioner was waiting for them in a wooden shed across the yard

where a gallows had been erected – only a few years before the woman could

have been hanged beside the walls of Newgate Prison, to the delight of the vast

crowd assembled there throughout the night, but the chance of such a great

performance had been denied her by the progressive legislation of 1898.

(Ackroyd 1995: 1)

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Despite being put up on stage, she cannot perform in front of a crowd, but has to die

in privacy, which is certainly not what she would have liked. The tone of the narrator

is clearly ironic here and Elizabeth is punished twice because she is being executed

and she is also denied an appreciative and knowledgeable audience.

In his novel, Ackroyd also introduces the element of gender ambiguity, which

renders the plot even more sensational, and “critics have noted a connection between

gender ambiguity and late-Victorian detective stories” (Craton 2009: 142). Barbara

Ewing also plays with this gender ambiguity in her novels when it comes to detective

inspector Rivers, which echoes Craton claiming that “sensation novels also tend to

feature effeminate male detectives, who, as culmination to their efforts, gain more

secure footholds in middle class masculinity” (Craton 2009: 142-143). In The

Mesmerist and The Circus of Ghosts, Cordelia Preston remains the strong woman at

the side of Inspector Rivers, who cannot stop admiring her: “During the few weeks of

that terrible trial he had been made aware of her courage and her strength and her

wild, unwise passion and her unimaginable pain” (Ewing 2011: 64). In the sequel The

Circus of Ghosts, Cordelia becomes the strong woman, who wants to rescue her

husband, and she does not hesitate to tell the police off in very threatening terms for

not helping her: “How dare you say “wait” you little cowards! Don’t you dare wait,

it’s my husband, Inspector Rivers, who is missing and if you don’t find him I will,

and I’ll shame the whole New York Police Force and its brave men!” (Ewing 2011:

458). In order to save her husband, Cordelia eventually decides to act, and in a

spectacular rescue mission saves her husband. By having a woman grabbing the

initiative, Barbara Ewing reverses gender roles and also renders the plot more

sensational. Thus, modern fiction uses elements of Victorian sensationalism but also

introduces new topics and new characters to render the stories more appealing for a

modern readership. The only difference today is that we have moved on and have

become used to far more sensationalist diversity, and therefore our fantasies and ideas

have become even more deviant and absurd, with new variants being added all the

time.

However, the publishing industry itself has not changed, as it still functions along

the same lines, because it ‘creates demand by creating a need that resembles an

“appetite”, but the inappropriateness of the model of eating to describe cultural

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consumption means that satisfying that appetite is a form of addiction and perversion’

(Cvetkovich 1992: 20).

Modern bestsellers are quite similar in nature to Victorian sensationalist literature,

in the sense that they talk about the “other” and subjects that differ from the norm, as

“the sensational novel itself was concerned in all sorts of ways with the unfixing and

transgression of boundaries” (Pykett 1992: 53). Ann Cvetkovich argues that

sensationalism […] the embodiment, in both the literal and figurative senses of

social structures. It not only renders them concrete, by embodying them in a

single and powerful representation, but the responses it produces are bodily and

physical experiences that seem immediate and natural. (Cvetkovich 1992: 24).

In addition, “mass-cultural texts are not simply a conduit for emotions; they

actively construct affective experience” (Cvetkovich 1992: 30). The nature of

sensationalist fiction endeavours to provoke the readership by intentionally addressing

the readers and their emotions. By using characteristics of this particular genre,

contemporary writers aim to reproduce similar reactions and responses. This is

certainly the case for Sarah Waters, as her novel Tipping the Velvet opens a peephole

for readers and gives quite an explicit account of lesbian sexuality.50 Like most

sensationalist writers, Waters seeks to arouse the readers physically and at the same

time attempts to heighten their interest by presenting them with a generally little

discussed concern, namely homosexuality. Victorian sexuality and especially

homosexuality keep recurring in neo-Victorian novels, and “to explore the forbidden

land of Victorian sexuality is one of the postmodern narratives’ favourite games

destined to provide a new, iconoclastic versions of an allegedly rigid tradition”

(Gutleben 2001: 104).

Waters most notably “subversively recasts storylines and scenarios from the

genres of melodrama and the sensation novel associated with Charles Dickens and

Wilkie Collins, by employing them as vehicles for exploring same-sex female

                                                                                                               50 Waters certainly gives quite explicit accounts of lesbian sexuality, which is also noticeable in her crude use of vocabulary, as Eckart Voigts-Virchow points it out: “Waters’s narrators perform feats of unabashed Victorian ventriloquism – and slang dictionaries are useful for decoding the faux Victorian cant. “Fuck” and “cunt” are the very antithesis to widespread notions of Victorian prudishness. […] In particular the faux London lowlife slang of Waters’s character narrators, therefore, appears as a curious mixture of historically contingent and contemporary, muddling notions of an indigenous and alien Victorian cant” (Voigts-Virchow 2009: 119).

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relationships and queer encounters” (Palmer 2008: 70). Thus, Waters’ work can be

“read as an emblem of neo-Victorian novelists’ obsession with “exhibiting” the

underside of nineteenth century propriety and morality, a sensationalised world of

desire and novelty, where any sexual fantasy might be gratified” (Kohlke 2008: 53).

In historical fiction, women writers in particular, have found a genre to express

and deal with their concerns and specifically address female readers, to quote Diana

Wallace: “the historical novel’ has offered women readers the imaginative space to

create different more inclusive versions of ‘history’, which are more accessible or

appealing to them in various ways” (Wallace 2005: 3).

The novel discussed in this thesis that most deals with homosexuality, is

clearly Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet. The author has engaged in a topic that was

taboo in the Victorian age, as “women engaging in same-sex relationships in the

Victorian era were on the whole invisible and we have little knowledge of their

literary interests” (Palmer 2008: 69-86). Same-sex relationships existed in the

Victorian age, but one simply did not discuss such a matter, and homosexuality was

scorned. There were a number of prominent lesbian couples, such as Michael Field,

but once their true identities were revealed their fame as authors faded.

Nineteenth-century medicine coined the term lesbians and from the end of the

century onwards, lesbian women were no longer welcome in literary circles. They

were perceived as minor threats to the social order that had just been established.

Unlike male homosexuals, lesbians generally did not have to fear imprisonment or

severe punishment by the law because ‘lesbian women were exempted from

prosecution both because they were not deemed as socially dangerous as male

homosexuals and because of their relative invisibility” (Hughes 1999: 40). Female

homosexuality simply was not meant to exist in a society which had placed

womanhood in a position it could nor derogate from, to the extent that

in 1885 when the Criminal Law Amendment regarding homosexual behaviour

was passed in England, Queen Victoria (1819-1901) refused to sign it until all

references to women were removed. She did not believe female homosexuality

existed and did not wish to blemish women by referring to them in this law

about public or private homosexual acts. (Massiah 2000: 401)

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In her study The Apparitional Lesbian, Terry Castle deals with this

“invisibility”, stating that “the lesbian is never with us, it seems, but always

somewhere else: in the shadows, in the margins, hidden from history, out of sight, out

of mind, a wanderer in the dusk, a lost soul, a tragic mistake, a play denizen of the

night” (Castle 1993: 2). Hence, the lesbian has also been wilfully ignored and has

never been perceived as a threat. In recent years, lesbian fiction has become more

popular due to Sarah Waters’ books, such as Tipping the Velvet and Affinity. Kate

Mitchell argues that Waters “silently inserts her depiction of nineteenth-century

female homosexuality into our memory of cultural Victorian fiction” (Mitchell 2010:

118). Waters’ technique works quite well, as by

deploying the easily recognisable tropes of gothic and sensation fiction, and

extending their field of representation to include the representation of female

homosexuality, Waters’ use of Victorian narrative strategies and generic

conventions provides a structure within which her invented ‘history’ can be

written, remembered, and communicated as cultural memory. (Mitchell 2010:

118)

Whereas Kate Mitchell argues that Waters uses a clever technique to render

the readers aware of female homosexuality, Marie-Luise Kohlke uses a much more

straightforward language when claiming that “Waters breathes life into Terry Castle’s

notion of the “Apparitional Lesbian” giving her flesh, blood, sex, and cunt” (Kohlke

2008: 65). Sarah Waters’ novel Tipping the Velvet demonstrates quite well that

lesbian women were still not able to publicly claim their love and walk the streets of

London as a couple, and it is Cheryl A. Wilson who argues that “the working-class

music hall performers, like their domestic counterparts, could not pose a direct threat

to traditional masculine authority—the gender-crossing behaviours that were

applauded on the stage were forbidden on the street” (Wilson 2006: 294). It was

especially on the stage of the music hall that women were allowed to turn themselves

into men, to quote Allison Neal:

The nineteenth-century music hall, with its ability to delve into the realm of

fantasy and subversion, is a ripe environment for reinventing previously

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unheard stories, and for creating the outspoken voices of the marginalised or

oppressed, such as that of the transvestite (Neal 2011: 55).

Despite the fact that our society has become more open-minded in terms of sexual

orientation, lesbian writers still face more difficulties when it comes to publishing and

gaining recognition on the mainstream market. This is certainly due to the fact that

writers of lesbian literature have been “silenced by a homophobic and misogynist

society” and “forced to adopt coded and obscure language and internal censorship”

(Zimmerman 1997: 81). Zimmerman’s article dates from the 1980s and therefore does

not take recent literary developments into account. In addition, in her work The Safe

Sea of Women, she furthers this idea stating:

Lesbians have been reticent and uncomfortable about sexual writing in part

because we wish to reject the patriarchal stereotype of the lesbian as a voracious

sexual vampire who spends all her time in bed. It is safer to be a lesbian if sex is

kept in the closet or under the covers. We don’t wish to give the world another

stick with which to beat us. (Zimmerman 1992: 97)

However, the past two decades have seen quite a development in terms of queer

fiction, namely with prominent writers such as Alan Hollinghurst and Sarah Waters.

Not only have the two authors gained general acclaim and even received awards for

their works, but their novels have also been adapted for television by the BBC.

There has been an increase in TV adaptations, which Ann Heilmann and Mark

Llewellyn comment on as follows:

From a cynical point of view there is of course the unavoidable fact that there is

a neo-Victorian market sales corollary: just as the adaptation of a classic

Victorian novel for the TV ensures increased sales, especially of the TV-tie-in,

so sales for contemporary novels feed into the purchase of rights for the

adaptation which in turn, when broadcast, leads to increased sales for the

contemporary novel. Historical fiction sells, and Victorian historical fiction sells

better than most. (Heilmann and Llewellyn 2010: 27)

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So too does neo-Victorian literature; and in particular Walters’ Tipping the Velvet

and its adaptation achieve their „authentic‟ creative expression through the

artificiality of Victorian parody and pastiche. As Gamble further contends, “novels

that place the theme of gender performativity at the centre of the narrative expose the

neo-Victorian project in its entirety as a form of masquerade” (Gamble 2009: 128).

Sarah Waters takes up the topic of lesbian relationships in most of her novels and

depicts it in more or less realistic ways, in the sense that the women cannot openly

live their relationship, to quote Mariaconcetta Constantini:

By using her scholarly knowledge to increase the 'realism' of her settings.

Waters shows her intention to restore and give meaning to the world of her

ancestors. This intention is confirmed by her refusal to indulge in historicistic

games. Instead of inserting diachrony into synchrony, she offers a well-

documented portrait of Victorian life, which, though fictionalised, preserves its

distinctive marks. (Constantini 2006: 20)

In a sense Waters writes for the same reason Bonnie Zimmerman does, as she

“write[s] not as an outsider looking in, but as an insider looking around” (Zimmerman

1986: xvii).

As Mariaconcetta Constantini asserts, Waters attempts to “bring back to life the

secret yearnings and the anxieties that plagued the Victorians’ minds and, in different

ways, still haunt our existence in the new millennium” (Constantini 2006: 20). In

addition, she takes up a male dominated genre of the Victorian age, sensationalist

fiction, and mixes it up with same-sex relationships (Palmer 2008:70). These women

may put on male attire but they cannot openly show that they are in love with each

other, as the following passage demonstrates:

After all, the two things – the act, our love – were not so very different. They

had been born together – or, as I liked to think, the one had been born of the

other, and was merely its public shape. When Kitty and I had first become

sweethearts, I had made her a promise. ‘I will be careful,’ I had said – and I had

said very lightly, because I thought it would be easy. I had kept my promise: I

never kissed her, touched her, said a loving thing, when there was anyone to

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glimpse or overhear us. But it was not easy, nor did it become easier as the

months passed by; it became only a dreary kind of habit. (Waters 2002: 127)

Despite being in love, the two women have to hide their feelings, and it becomes like

a game to keep the truth hidden but at the same to fool the audience. The theatre or

stage enables them to be masculine, as they are performers and the audience assumes

that they are putting on a role ignoring the explicit nature of their sexual intimacy.

The microcosm in the music hall or theatre enables Nancy to live who she really is,

but sadly she can only do so on the music hall stage where “the illicit, the

transgressive, and the unthinkable can all be explored and experienced, through acting

and dress” (Neal 2011: 60). By depicting the lives of music hall performers, “the

novel reconstructs a variety of women’s experiences while calling attention to their

shared participation in per- forming femininity” (Wilson 2006: 295).

Tipping the Velvet and Sarah Waters’ other novels clearly offer today’s

readership something new as they provide historical facts, sensational plots and a

touch of eroticism.51 It is this touch of eroticism which makes these novels more

popular, as little is known about the sexual lives of lesbians in the Victorian age.

Therefore, it is worth taking Marie-Luise Kohlke’s argument into account: “Yet

nineteenth century sexuality too is “only to be imagined” [Kohlke referring to Fowles’

Possession) but never known as anything other than a simulacrum of our own desires”

(Kohlke 2008: 64). Sarah Waters has clearly found a niche on the literary market, and

this also reflected in the guise of one of her characters:

How long have we been looking for something that will lift the act above the

ordinary, and make it really memorable? This is it! A double act! A soldier –

and his comrade! A swell – together with his chum! Above all: two lovely girls

in trousers instead of one! When did you ever see the like of it before? It will be

a sensation! (Waters 2002: 112, italics in the original)

                                                                                                               51 In The Palace of Curiosities, Rosie Garland also adds homoerotic elements, but she does not develop them. At the beginning of the novel, the protagonist Abel is sexually attracted to his friend, Arthur. In one scene, Arthur kisses Abel when he is drunk, but then Arthur turns away disgusted. Their friendship suffers, as Arthur cannot accept that Abel might be homosexual. He even calls him “nancy-boy” (Garland 2013: 113). Once Abel leaves Arthur, homosexuality is no longer mentioned or hinted at in the novel, as Abel ends up falling in love with Eve. The fairy tale-like ending is only disturbed by the fact that Abel needs to mutilate himself in order to get an erection. Therefore, it seems as if Garland keeps adding different sexual practices in order to render the novel more interesting, but she does not do so in a very convincing manner.

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In this passage, Walter’s exclamation hints at his opportunistic nature and how his

new act will be his claim to fame and how the girls will rise to stardom. The very

same idea can be found in Barbara Ewing’s The Mesmerist in a letter from Silas P.

Swift, who is clearly a fictional representation of P.T. Barnum. After being accused of

murder and being a fallen woman, Cordelia Preston has turned into an outcast and is

now unwanted in England. The American show- and businessman sees the lucrative

potential behind this fallen woman and in his letter writes: “I understand that as well

as being a Mesmerist or Phreno-Mesmerist, you were once an Actress. What a

wonderful combination for my Entertainment Theatre!” (Ewing 2007: 368).

But at the same time, Waters speaks through Walter, because she also opens a

new niche with her tale about Victorian lesbians. In her novel she creates a past that

was as such unknown to the world. In addition, the lesbian encounters are kept secret

and hidden in the domestic sphere, thus turning the reader into a voyeur peeping into

the intimacy of young women. However, it is worth pondering on the opportunistic

drive, because Waters’ novels all include lesbians, and she is certainly exploiting a

new niche here. This is even the more emphasized by the fact that her novels have

been adapted by the BBC, which can be regarded as “a marketing tool which plays to

the sexual immaturities of our age, the neo-Victorian body can, in more sophisticated

textual reconstructions, serve to address contemporary identity politics by

‘mainstreaming’ gay coming-out-stories” (Heilmann and Llewllyn 2010: 107).

Therefore, Christian Gutleben is certainly right when he claims that

repeated from one novel to another, these politically correct perspectives, far

from being subversive or innovative, become predictable, not to say redundant.

Admittedly then, retro-Victorian novels which set out to rectify Victorian

(imputed) injustices are assured of winning universal approval, but, from an

ideological point of view, the enterprise of rectification, rather than giving rise

to an analysis of the flawed situation, can be likened to a compulsive demeanour

or “a conditioned reflex” [phrase taken from Annie Le Brun], and from an

aesthetic point of view, it can hardly pretend to any originality. (Gutleben 2001:

169)

Waters argues that she wrote Tipping the Velvet because of her own interest in

the subject and also because she wants to write lesbian fiction. This goes hand in hand

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with Zimmerman’s view that “fiction is a particularly useful medium through which

to shape a new lesbian consciousness, for fiction, of all literary forms, makes the most

complex and detailed use of historical events and social discourses” (Zimmerman

1982: 2). However, it is worth pointing out that “the aim of [Waters’ novels] is not to

accurately depict the past in deference to history’s authoritative discourse, but rather

to invent a past that links it to the present [and thus] the lesbian novel is an act of

memory in the present” (Mitchell 2010: 120). Hence, Waters herself becomes a

magician or illusionist, as “proceeding through invention, she pursues the illusion of

authenticity” (Mitchell 2010: 120).

However, the director Geoffrey Sax and the screenwriter Andrew Davies’ desire

to turn the novel into a TV series follows different imperatives, as they clearly wanted

to show the audience something different, even shocking. This becomes clear in

Allison Neal’s essay on the subject matter, who concludes that:

It seems that in contemporary society the neo-Victorian cross-dressed lesbian is

still just as shocking to the mass viewing public and must be appropriated into

the heterosexual matrix in order to remain acceptable and controlled, even

though both straight and gay audience members may also find the scenes

sexually titillating too and it was also an opportunity for lesbian viewers to self-

identify with the characters. (Neal 2011: 67)

Arguing along Neal’s lines, lesbian fiction may be accepted more widely but it still

needs to be contained within a male-dominated and patriarchal society. Hence,

adapting the novel for TV, clearly hints at an opportunistic trend, and it becomes the

product of a male director (Geoffrey Sax) and screenwriter (Alan Davies) trying to

satisfy the expectations of their audience. This is certainly a point that Pauline

MacPherson takes up in her essay:

I would argue that this is important in recognising the way that this production

found itself easily incorporated into male heterosexual fantasy. When Waters

describes the love-making in the novel, the love scenes are very erotic and

descriptive. This is repeated in the graphic love scenes in the television

production but the turning of these into a farcical performance for the camera

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has had a detrimental effect on the way in which this production has been

received by the media. (MacPherson 2008: 271)

MacPherson heavily criticizes the adaptation of Tipping the Velvet by concluding that

it has been “transformed into a male voyeuristic lesbian fantasy” (MacPherson 2008:

272).

The explicit content of Tipping the Velvet demonstrates that “adaptations have

become more courageous and imaginative, and viewers are more willing to accept

changes to plot and dialogue […]” (Cardwell 2007: 193), enabling directors to make

films about same-sex relationships and have them broadcast on mainstream TV

channels.

Whereas reading the novel allows every reader to let their imagination flow,

the TV series imposes a male interpretation of the novel onto its viewers, thus

controlling the women once more, just like Walter did.52 Sadly, the main purpose of

the TV adaptation is to attract a wide audience and entertain the viewers, rather than

giving outcasts a voice and tell their sad fates. Thus, I more than agree with Ellen

Bayuk Rosenman who states that such adaptations only “serve a particular function:

to stand as an oasis of art within the wasteland of popular culture, understood as

mass-produced entertainment designed first and foremost with market considerations

in mind” (Rosenman 2002: 54). Sarah Waters’ succeeds in giving lesbians a voice by

re-creating their past, and her stories are read widely. In addition, the TV adaptations

are successes as well, as they are broadcast during prime time, and are made available

to a wider audience. This is certainly a huge step when it comes to homosexual fiction

and films, and Waters has certainly found a niche. Eckart Voigts-Virchow praises

Waters’ entrance in the twenty-first century mainstream noting that the author

succeeds “in rendering subcultures culturally acceptable and commercially

acceptable” (Voigts-Virchow 2009: 114). But at the same time the negative

connotations remain, as not only Waters but also the media have taken advantage of

the success of her books. Thus, one can conclude that despite trying to escape

patriarchal society and the spectacle, Waters like Fevvers and Cordelia, will always                                                                                                                52 In her essay, Neal discusses the TV adaptation in further detail, also taking the erotic aspect into account: “The adaptation of Tipping The Velvet incorporates Mulvey‟s “leitmotif” of woman displayed as erotic spectacle. The sexual scenes between Nan and Kitty, Nan and Diana Lethaby, Nan and Blake, and also Nan and Florence, all privilege the televisual audience, yet do so through the diluted and explicit male gaze of the screenwriter and the director. The lesbian sexual erotic fantasy is appropriated and made blatant by the act of adaptation” (Neal 2011: 69).

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be entrapped in their clasps and fulfil opportunistic needs and the demands of the

audience.

3.3 The ethical function of neo-Victorian literature

Having discussed the aesthetic and nostalgic function of neo-Victorian literature

and why we are still drawn to the Victorian era today, I will now move to the ethical

function. The Victorian era has certainly shaped our society, and from a chronological

point of view, it is the era we are closest to, and refer to quite readily. Therefore,

using contemporary concerns in neo-Victorian literature and mixing them with a

Victorian setting seems justified, or as Julie Sanders put it:

The Victorian era proves in the end ripe for appropriation because it throws into

sharp relief many of the overriding concerns of the postmodern era: questions of

identity; of environmental and genetic conditioning; repressed and oppressed

modes of sexuality; criminality and violence; the urban phenomenon; the

operations of law and authority; science and religion; the postcolonial legacies

of the empire. In the rewriting of the omniscient narrator of nineteenth-century

fiction, often substituting for him/her the unreliable narrator we have recognized

as common to appropriative fiction, postmodern authors find a useful

metafictional method for reflecting on their own creative authorial impulses.

(Sanders 2006: 129)

The novels discussed in this thesis give marginal characters or outcasts a voice,

something which was unimaginable in the Victorian era, and thus these novels “voice

others’ trauma” (Kohlke and Gutleben 2010: 14) and “to generate the tradition they

fictively continue, the retro-Victorian novels invert its priorities: the excluded

becomes included, the unheard becomes voiced, the hidden becomes foregrounded,

the marginal becomes central” (Gutleben 2001: 124). Neo-Victorian literature takes

on quite a responsible role, as it gives a voice to outcasts, and thus they become equal:

More often than not, the characters brought to life in neo-Victorian novels are

those whom fiction or historiography has forgotten, those who have never had a

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proper voice, story, or discursive existence in literature. […] By speaking of

these speechless characters, recording their unrecorded thoughts, telling their

untold stories, asserting their human rights to be recognised, to be given back a

face, to have their suffering affirmed, contemporary fiction does not repeat the

already said, but rather gives birth to what has never been able to be born. It

gives historical non-subjects a future by restoring their traumatic pasts to

cultural memory. (Kohlke and Gutleben 2010: 31)

However, it is worth adding that this is not the only role of neo-Victorian fiction,

as “the contemporary novel tries to retrieve the whole fictional principle of the

Victorian era” (Gutleben 2001: 84). Neo-Victorian literature is aware of its fictional

and imaginative nature, and it “primarily seeks to fill vacant spaces of enunciation

rather than usurp prior subjects’ voices” (Kohlke and Gutleben 2010: 18). The

question that arises here is of course that of the ethical and ideological aspect of neo-

Victorian literature, and the question: “what seems undecidable is whether the

spreading of the politically correct made the birth of the retro-Victorian novel

possible or whether the retro-Victorian novel developed out of a resolution to exploit

an ideological trend which had reached a consensus” (Gutleben 2001: 168).

However, the question that needs to be dealt with here is to what extent modern

writers and readers alike are allowed to give Victorians a voice today, considering

ethical issues; and to what extent it is only done for lucrative purposes. In this context,

Christian Gutleben argues that “today, at the time of the politically correct, these

voices [of the outcasts] correspond precisely to readerly expectations” (Gutleben

2001: 37). Contemporary writers use histographic metafictions to right the wrongs if

you will, as Peter Mandler puts it:

The imaginative capability of history is closely connected to its ethical

capability. One of the purposes of historical time travel is to transport our

modern selves into alien situations which allow us to highlight by contrast our

own values and assumptions. Sometimes it is easier to examine complex ethical

questions honestly and openly in a historical rather than in a contemporary

setting, the distancing involved in taking out some of the heat of the moment

without disengaging entirely contemporary values and attitudes. In this aspect

history asks us not to lose ourselves in the past but to view the past from our

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own standpoint; in fact, one of its functions is to help us define our standpoint

more clearly. (Mandler 2002: 147)

Giving outcasts a voice is not without its dangers, as the readers might forget the

ethical function of the novels, and mainly focus on the oftentimes scandalous and

sensational content. Hence, giving homosexuals or freaks, for example in HBO’s

Carnivale, a voice fits the demands of the readers and spectators. By giving freaks so

much media attention, shows their importance in society, to quote Mary Russo:

The freak embodies the most capacious aspects of media culture, taking in and

consolidating otherwise lost or fragile identities. The freak can be read as a

trope not only of the “secret self,” but of the most externalized, “out there,”

hypervisible, and exposed aspects of contemporary culture and of the

phantasmatic experience of that culture by social subjects. (Russo 1995: 85)

Therefore, I cannot but agree with Gutleben who states that

the fictionalization of Victorian outcasts may have a critical function, it is

certainly also a response to a fashion. In the end, the representation of Victorian

voices, those that were celebrated as well as those that were muffled by their

epoch, involves, in the first case because of a lasting prestige, in the second

because of the current trend, an opportunistic aetiology. (Gutleben 2001: 37)

Thus, the writers may have “a greater creative freedom in recreating this particular

past” (Kohlke and Gutleben 2010: 8), but

it also carries a risk of turning historical trauma into spectacle at a reassuring

temporal remove, which conveniently renders impossible any actual

intervention – beyond the purely symbolic and mnemonic compensatory

functions of narrative – thereby absolving complacent readers of any ethical

obligations to take action, disconnecting the act of witnessing from subsequent

political engagement. (Kohlke and Gutleben 2010: 8)

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There certainly has been a greater demand for neo-Victorian fiction, as well as film

adaptations, to the extent that “certain neo-Victorian perspectives – the nineteenth-

century fallen woman, medium, or homosexual, for instance – have become rather

over-used, tired, and hackneyed, to the point where it becomes difficult to view them

any longer as embodiments of an ethics of alterity” (Kohlke and Gutleben 2010: 23).

The sticking point here is the ethical debate whether voicing the unheard is allowed or

if it is done purely for opportunistic reasons.

However, it is worth keeping in mind that authors today have a greater

creative freedom: “Questioning the legitimacy of voicing the other’s trauma in art

naturally leads to questioning the freedom of art and, of course, denying that freedom

can hardly be called an ethical duty” (Kohlke and Gutleben 2010: 17). It is this

freedom of art that enables “neo-Victorian literature [to lend] a voice to the voiceless,

speak[s] for the speechless, where historians can only speculate as to what such

persons might have said or sounded like, emphasising the purely theoretical nature of

their representations” (Kohlke and Gutleben 2010: 19). Giving outsiders a role and

recreating their fictional past, is one of the “functions of art [as it can] present what

the narrow and desperately practical perspectives of real life exclude” (Lewis 2002:

10). In addition, this creativity and ability to give others a voice also demonstrate that

“retro-Victorian fiction constitutes a response to the evolution of the publishing

context and displays a remarkable capacity of adaptation to its cultural environment”

(Gutleben 2001: 205).

The power and influence of art should not be underestimated, and literature is

an effective means when it comes to giving outcasts a voice, even if the plots are not

completely historically accurate.

3.4 The unrepresentable and unspeakable in neo-Victorian literature

Since the unrepresentable and unspeakable are two concepts that are dear to neo-

Victorian literature, they can be found in numerous works, such as Dan Leno and the

Limehouse Golem and Nights at the Circus. These works deal with horrific acts and

depict strange creatures, which reflects the idea that “the monstrous represents not

only an epistemological and ontological challenge to the humanity of the human but

also an ethical reminder of the potential otherness of the human” (Gutleben and

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Wolfreys 2010: 67). The concept of the freak still exists in today’s society, but has

moved away from the initial notion of the biological freak of nature. The actual noun

still bears negative connotations, as it denotes a person or something that is different

from the norm. However, the phenomenon of the Victorian freak has clearly changed

as today’s society still witnesses biological deformities and abnormalities but there is

no longer a “cultural anxiety about the ramifications of bodily spectacle by

confirming a fear that middle-class normalcy face[s] contamination from freaks”

(Craton 2009: 2). By giving outcasts a voice, neo-Victorian fiction clearly moves

away from the Dickensian types, and subverts the Victorian “novel’s implications for

an increasingly proscriptive culture of physical normativity” (Craton 2009: 25).

Despite its hunger for normativity and control, Victorian society witnessed a

craze for sensationalism and the other. It is worth pointing out that Queen Victoria’s

coronation festivities included “menageries, waxworks, marionettes, conjurors,

acrobats, jugglers and other circus acts, not to mention peep-shows, roundabouts and

a display of giants, dwarfs, the woman with two heads, the living skeletons and the

pig-faced lady” (Diamond 2003: 9). Thus, it is not surprising that the circus knew its

heyday in the nineteenth century, and “in contrast to the mass culture spectacle, which

presented an unchallenging, pleasant, uniform show, the circus broadened the social

horizon to include the most outrageous specimens of humanity” (Winkiel 1997: 9).

Freaks were widely discussed due to their otherness, which fascinated people, to the

extent that Victorian novelists also used them in their writings to render them more

spectacular:

Images of performing freaks were part of Victorian cultural discourse and made

their way from the stage to the page. Physical difference is intriguing, and

Victorian popular authors made use of that appeal as they reached out to

middle-class audiences. Since fiction was an important part of how the

Victorian middle class understood the world, these authors also stood as

moderators of normative culture. (Craton 2009: 37)

Despite the Victorians’ urge for the deviant, they also tried to find medical

explanations which tied in with their need to control their surroundings, to quote

Craton: “Both the horror and the wonder tied to physical difference abate as the

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interest felt for such bodies transforms into a medicalized effort to control and

understand their physicality” (Craton 2009: 26).

Freaks have been subjected to the gaze of the spectators for centuries, and even

today society is still fascinated by otherness. Freak shows were very popular in the

Victorian age, but vanished in the twentieth century mainly due to the fact that people

started to perceive them as morally and ethically wrong. However, freaks have not

ceased to exist and the word is still very much in use with all its connotations. This

certainly demonstrates that freaks are products of our society or “social constructs”

(Bogdan 1996: 24). Bogdan argues that “it is a way of thinking about and presenting

people – a frame of mind and a set of practices” (Bogdan 1996: 24) and “the

enactment of a tradition, the performance of a stylized presentation” (Bogdan 1996:

35). This also reflects Susan Stewart’s notion that he/she “is a freak of culture”

(Stewart 1993: 109). In the light of today’s media, it is the audience and the producers

who turn people into freaks. It is quite striking that this argument bears similarities

with gender, as both the latter and freaks are made into what they are by society.

Tod Browning’s film Freaks (1932) is a milestone in the depiction of freaks, as

he also shows real freaks, and has clearly inspired modern day productions, such as

HBO’s Carnivàle. Numerous TV programmes, which are often of controversial

nature, document the lives of people with spectacular disabilities. There certainly is a

demand for “freaks” today if one considers that the British TV channels are

broadcasting shows such as The Undateables or I’m Spazticus. The people shown on

these programmes have chosen to participate in these documentaries of their own free

will and thus expose themselves.

Whereas freaks can be found on TV today, freak shows no longer exist the way

they did in the nineteenth century. The exhibition of human oddities attracted a lot of

spectators in the Victorian era, most notably in the circus. The nature of the circus

welcomes people that are different, as it provides people with physical abnormalities

with a “home”, of more or less comfort, and enables the circus to offer additional

attractions and attract more spectators. Thus is creates a microcosm of minorities

which are exposed to the gaze of society or as Sally Robinson notes that “Fevvers,

and other “freaks” in the “magic circle of difference” known as the circus, are denied

agency by those in power who construct them as objects of a controlling gaze, and

other forms of penetration” (Robinson 1991: 23).

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This idea can be found in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus, as Fevvers

relishes the idea of being different, and takes advantage of this, to quote Sally

Robinson once more:

The spectacles in Nights at the Circus – the cast of “freaks”, women, clowns,

etc. – are produced as powerless within the terms of a dominant culture that

engender the object of the gaze as feminine; but they also produce themselves

as social subjects, agents who turn the gaze on themselves and on their position

in relation to that dominant culture. (Robinson 1991: 118)

Freaks consciously manipulate the audience in order to gain their favours and thus,

the society turns them into mere commodities in the “dominant culture”. Women are

oftentimes the subject of the observer, but it is worth pointing out that they are well

aware of the situation they find themselves in, as John Berger states:

A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually

accompanied by her own image of herself. […] She comes to consider the

surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct

elements of her identity as a woman. […] Men look at women. Women watch

themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between

men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of

woman in herself is male: the surveyed, female. Thus she turns herself into an

object -- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight. (Berger 1990: 46-47)

According to Berger, women turn themselves into objects, commodities if you will.

This again ties in with the Victorian commodity culture, as women are mere objects

that men can watch. However, “the circus was a comfortable space for women who

felt alienated by social norms” (Davis 2002: 83). In Nights at the Circus, Fevvers is

well aware of the situation she is in, but she is clever enough, and thus indulges in the

life she has:

Look at me! With a grand, proud, ironic grace, she exhibited herself before the

eyes of the audience as if she were a marvellous present too good to be played

with. Look, not touch. She was twice as large as life and as sufficiently finite as

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any object that is intended to be seen, not handled. Look! Hands off! LOOK AT

ME! (Carter 2006: 13).

She has invented herself and has become a larger than life object. It is worth pointing

out that Fevvers invites the readers to look at her, which echoes Barbara Brook’s

argument that “the term ‘performance’ captures within its meanings the idea of

offering up the body/the self to public consumption, and of being assessed on the

adequacy of the performance” (Brook 1999: 113).

Thus, one cannot but stare at this grotesque figure and it is the gaze that gives

her satisfaction. Grotesque bodies have always been subject to the gaze, and “in the

Victorian era, two kinds of bodies definable as grotesque were the diseased body and

the body of the prostitute – often one and the same, [and] both were defined chiefly

by their permeability, and both became the objects of the gaze” (Gilbert 2005: 17).

Rosie Garland also uses the gaze as an important concept in The Palace of

Curiosities, and it unites the two protagonists, Eve and Abel. Both of them are freaks

and therefore outcasts. They both belong to the category of “True Freak”, just like

Fevvers:

The true Freak, however, stirs both supernatural terror and natural sympathy,

since, unlike the fabulous monsters, he is one of us, the human child of human

parents, however, altered by forces we do not quite understand into something

mythic and mysterious, as no mere cripple ever is. Passing either on the street,

we may be simultaneously tempted to avert our eyes and to stare; but in the

latter case we feel no threat to those desperately maintained boundaries on

which any definition of sanity ultimately depends. Only the true Freak

challenges the conventional boundaries between male and female, sexed and

sexless, animal and human, large and small, self and other, and consequently

between reality and illusion, experience and fantasy, fact and myth. (Fiedler

1978: 24)

Once Abel and Eve meet, they are drawn to each other because of their

differences:

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I recognise her with an eye that is not one of common sight. It is an odd sense of

communion: we are both different. Hers is the first thing people remark upon:

she is never free of her distinguishing strangeness. Mine is less easy to find out,

so that I can pass as a man amongst men. Yet both of us are shackled. I wonder

if we have met before. I forget these things. (Garland 2013: 144)

Eve cannot hide her difference unless she shaves all her hair. Abel’s difference

is not visible on the outside, he is immortal and his body heals up quickly:

I hide a great secret, one that marks me as grotesque. Am I man or animal? I can

no longer call myself either: I do not have the comfort of calling myself a beast,

for a beast can be butchered for the use of mankind, and I cannot serve any such

purpose. Nor can I say that I am a man, for no man can do what I have done: cut

myself and heal, against nature. (Garland 2013: 49)

In this passage Abel speaks for himself as well as for Eve, as one cannot see his

difference, but Eve is clearly the beast. However, his secret is much darker and more

disturbing than Eve’s. Eve looks like an animal, and therefore her difference is

visible. Like Abel, she has another hidden gift, as she can read people by touching

their hands. Unlike Abel, she has no macabre thoughts and she is essentially good-

natured. It is only towards the end of the novel that she becomes angry and wants to

take revenge. She then decides to put Mr Arroner’s house on fire, an incident in which

her husband is killed because he refuses to leave the house without taking his

belongings. This incident clearly reminds the reader of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre,

as it is the Edward Rochester’s savage and mad wife, Berta Mason, who sets the

house on fire. It is worth pointing out that Eve does not take the decision alone, but

Donkey-Skin returns and tells her to get “a box of lucifers” (Garland 2013: 298). Eve

might not be an evil creature, but she shows some characteristics of schizophrenia

when it comes to her alter-ego Donkey-Skin. By putting the blame on Donkey-Skin,

she remains the pure and lovely wife, whereas Donkey-Skin is an evil influence who

leads her to sin. Therefore, one can argue that Eve as well as Able may be innocent

and good-hearted people on the outside, but they both cultivate disturbing and

macabre thoughts on the inside.

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However, Rochester does not perish in the fire, but Berta does. Jane Eyre and

The Palace of Curiosities are similar, as they both tell the story of a man marrying a

savage woman whom they need to keep in their houses, and who must not escape.

The difference is that Berta Mason is mad and Rochester is no longer in control of

her. Mr Arroner, on the other side, is the perfect colonizer who dominates Eve, and

she needs him in order to survive.

It is worth adding that the two of them do not wish to be different, but

ordinary people. This wish is certainly stronger in Abel, whose body heals up very

quickly, and who cannot die: “My most sincere wish is to be man and not miracle”

(Garland 2013: 47). He considers his genetic anomaly a curse, which he cannot

escape. His attempts at putting an end to his ordeal by committing suicide all fail.

Once Abel meets Eve, he cannot but look at her, and the concept of the gaze

becomes more and more prominent: “My eyes are tugged sideways, and it seems each

time they alight upon her I meet her gaze” (Garland 2013: 161). They become

accomplices and their hidden gazes are turned into a play, as Eve starts to watch Abel

as well: “My gaze was drawn to the slick of damp fur fanning across his chest and

stomach, and I forced myself to turn away” (Garland 2013: 165). At the end of the

novel, Abel and Eve find love and true happiness in a Cinderella-like plot. Abel

recognizes Eve’s true beauty and loves her for who she is.

The gaze also takes on more disturbing connotations, as Abel is fascinated by

his own self-mutilation, and when he opens his body, he is entranced by what he sees:

“I do not want to fix my gaze anywhere but on this work, which terrifies me yet is

familiar, and comforting in its familiarity” (Garland 2013: 33). Watching his own

body and the gore does not terrify him, as it is a familiar sight from his anatomy

studies in one of his previous lives: “We gaze at her [corpse], not one of us showing

any discomfort at her nakedness” (Garland 2013: 192).

Erin Morgenstern also plays with the notion of the male gaze in The Night

Circus, but it differs from the concepts of surveillance and otherness, as it is Marco

watching his beloved Celia. Marco cannot but look at Celia, and keeps watching her

throughout the novel: “Celia laughs, but she knows that Mme. Padva is correct, as she

has felt Marco’s gaze burning into the back of her neck all evening, and she is finding

it increasingly difficult to ignore” (Morgenstern 2011: 205). The gaze becomes

stronger as their relation deepens and she can feel it all the more. It is as if he were

branding his desire onto her body: “The intensity of the gaze is even stronger than it

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had been when it was focused on the back of her neck, and while Celia can feel the

coercion of it, a technique her father was always fond of, there is something genuine

as well, something almost like a plea” (Morgenstern 2011: 206). Returning his gaze

becomes more tempting to the extent that she cannot resist it anymore, as “looking

away again becomes more difficult each time” (Morgenstern 2011: 216).

Marco’s gaze keeps following Celia, even when she performs: “The man’s gaze

does not waver. He does not so much as glance at the vanishing door” (Morgenstern

2011: 257). He watches Celia in June 1901, and August 1902, where the same

incident occurs, and the author uses the same words (Morgenstern 2011: 315). By

beginning this chapter in exactly the same manner as the previous one, the gaze

acquires uncanny connotations. Marco cannot let go of her, and keeps stalking her.

Once more Celia sits down opposite Marco but her behaviour changes. Whereas she

could not meet his gaze the first time, she now “only looks at him with tear-soaked

eyes, the first time she has held his gaze steadily” (Morgenstern 2011: 317). Their

relationship has changed, Celia has become stronger, and she knows that Marco loves

her. Celia is developing as the plot develops, and at the end, she becomes the one who

gazes at people: “In response, Celia only looks at him, staring directly into his eyes

without wavering. Widget returns her gaze silently for some time while Poppet

watches them curiously. Eventually, Widget blinks, the surprise evident on his face.

Then he looks down at his shoes” (Morgenstern 2011: 328). This passage shows that

Celia has become more dominant and knows how to use her gaze. Like Marco, she

can now gaze at people without wavering and can now look them straight into the

eyes. Poppet’s twin brother cannot hold her gaze, just like she could not hold Marco’s

at the beginning. He feels intimidated, and ends up looking at his shoes, which

demonstrates that gender roles have been inverted, and Celia is now the dominant

person in the conversation.

Freaks and grotesque bodies were not welcome in society, but at the same time

the bourgeoisie felt an urge to contemplate the “other” in order to find justification for

their own superiority or as a means of identification, to quote Lillian Craton:

Displays of physical difference serve to demarcate the culturally drawn

boundaries between categories of normal and abnormal and thus confirm the

self-satisfaction of those close to the norm. The odd-bodied person as other is

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vulnerable to reification: he or she may be objectified and appropriated for work

in support of dominant ideological discourses, […]. (Craton 2009: 35)

It is worth adding that “circus people often perceived themselves to be removed

from the rest of society because home, for most circus folk, was on the road” (Davis

2002: 72). They thought that their difference was also to be attributed to the fact that

they were not sedentary and had no wish to conform or adapt, to quote Janet M.

Davis:

Circus workers referred to noncircus folk as “outsiders,” “gillies,” or “rubes,”

and frequently mentioned in their autobiographies that they were only

comfortable with other show folk. They spoke a language peppered with jargon

unfamiliar to the “grillies” that widened the gulf between insiders and outsiders.

(Davis 2002: 72)

The concept of the freak also bears connotations of the wilderness, and by

taming these beasts, the colonizer’s superiority is even more emphasized, as “the

freak represents the naming of the frontier and the assurance that the wilderness, the

outside, is now territory” (Stewart 1993: 110). Therefore, freaks are turned into mere

commodities that can be displayed to satisfy the disturbing hunger of the bourgeoisie

for the deviant. This same idea is taken up by Stewart, who argues that: “Repeatedly

in the history of freaks it has been assumed that the freak is an object. The freak is

actually captured and made a present to the court or to the College of Surgeons, as the

case may be” (Stewart 1993: 110). In addition, it is often the female savage that needs

to be captured and tamed, as “neo-Victorian fantasies repeatedly take on curiously

antiquated overtones of imperialist adventures by would-be conquerors of exotic

female “others”” (Kohkle 2008: 6). This concept of conquering the female exotic

body can also be demonstrated with the example of Saartjie Baartman, the Hottentot

Venus. African people were considered sub-human and therefore she was treated like

an animal, as “the exhibition of animals correlated with that of exotic peoples as

emblems of imperial conquest and proved a particularly lucrative form of public

amusement” (Heilmann and Llewellyn 2010: 123). She incorporates one of the most

striking examples of the exploitation of freaks, and her display was deemed “both

immoral and illegal” (Lindfors 1996: 210). This was particularly striking in an “era

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that saw the abolition of one system of economic exploitation – the slave trade – and

the concurrent institutionalization of another – imperialism” (Lindfors 1996: 208).

However, Saartjie Baartman insisted that “she had the right to make a spectacle of

herself” (Lindfors 1996: 210); but little did she know that she was to have “a career in

science as well as popular culture, having been reified not only as a comic figure of

outlandish voluptuousness, but also as a durable set of physiological reference in

biometric discourse” (Lindfors 1996: 210). The Hottentot Venus has inspired writers,

who allude to her in their works, for example Angela Carter. Thus, Fevvers is “billed

as the “Cockney Venus,” a blend of the vulgar and divine, recalling common carnival

attractions such as The Bald Venus and The Bearded Venus, and perhaps alluding to

the notorious Hottentot Venus” (Peterson 1996: 294).53

This idea of the freak being a mere commodity can also be found in Rosie

Garland’s The Palace of Curiosities. Eve is born a freak because she is covered in

hair, which will later turn her into the Lion-Lady. Her mother repeatedly wants to turn

her into an ordinary girl by shaving her hair. She is afraid of the public gaze and

justifies her actions as follows: “You’re only safe out there on the streets because I

make you look like a real girl” (Garland 2013: 19). In order to feel normal, Eve

accepts to take Mr Arroner as her husband, who introduces himself as “Josiah

Arroner. Amateur Scientist. Gentleman of Letters. Entrepreneur” (Garland 2013: 59).

The idea of a manager marrying one of his performers is certainly not a new one, as

“Mr Lent also married the famous bearded lady, Julia Pastrana in 1858 as a means,

according to various sources, of ensuring that her profits would continue to come in”

(Stern 2008: 201).

Despite Eve noticing that “he gripped the brim of his hat and tipped it to me,

flapped the tails of his coat like a ringmaster” (Garland 2013: 65-66), she does not see

the man’s true nature. Being vulnerable and as an act of rebellion, Eve marries Mr

Arroner, not knowing his hidden ambitions. She is captured and turned into a

commodity, which Mr Arroner exhibits in order to make money along with “his crew

of freaks, to do with as he pleases” (Garland 2013: 287). The naïve and young girl

does not realize that she is about to be turned into a curiosity and still thinks that Mr

Arroner has married her because he loves her: “I feel a rippling run down my spine,

                                                                                                               53 For a fictional account of the Hottentot Venus, see Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Hottentot Venus (2004) and for an analysis of the novel, see Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn, ‘Race, science, and the gaze: Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Hottentot Venus (2003)’ (Heilmann and Llewellyn 2010: 120-131).

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and look down at my body, convinced I will discover some change, but I am the

same. The walls are lined with clocks of all sizes and types: beehive, carriage, crystal

regulator, Vienna regulator, drop trunk, lantern, long case, ogee, skeleton” (Garland

2013: 82-83). Marriage has not changed her, but she has been turned into an object

which is collected together with other curiosities and inventions. Once she moves in

with her husband, she quickly realizes that he is not interested in her as a person and

is not attracted to her: “I felt like a bird of paradise, stuffed and mounted on a twig, a

glass dome rammed down over my head” (Garland 2013: 119). Eve thinks that a man

can only love her when she is “a real girl” (Garland 2013: 129); and therefore she

shaves her hair, only to learn that her husband is shocked. Eve is trapped within a

fairy tale world, thinking that she has met her Prince Charming. By shaving, she

thinks that: “Cinderella cleaned of her grime and ready to meet her prince” (Garland

2013: 129). She considers her fur dirt and in order to be desired and accepted, she has

to get rid of it. However, she cannot separate herself from her true nature, and her fur

will always grow back. Left in her own despair, she has invented an invisible being

that accompanies her and gives her advice, namely Donkey-Skin. The latter is yet

another reference to a fairy tale by Charles Perrault, called Donkeyskin, a Cinderella-

like tale with a happy ending. It is a reminder that Eve needs to be careful, and that

she lives in her own little world: “You are my very own princess stuck in the tower”

(Garland 2013: 19).

The use of fairy tales enables Eve to create a protective shield, a world into

which she can escape:

[Donkey-Skin] told me new stories: of a prince clever enough to spot a princess

through her wrapper of dirt, who would kiss the beast to make it beautiful. A

fearless man who would fight through the bramble forest a hundred years’ thick,

past the wolf at the door and the witch at the gate. My fur was my protection.

Only the most true of heart would find their way through. (Garland 2013: 22)

The stories help Eve to forget reality and the harsh words that people shout at

her. She turns her own life into a fairy tale as well, as she thinks that a prince will

save her one day. Her fur becomes a protective layer, and she thinks that she will

eventually find a man who will love her for her true beauty. There are numerous other

textual references to other fairy tales, the most striking being the use of mirrors:

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“They were here to stare into my magic mirror; for always I gave the same answer:

You are the fairest” (Garland 2013: 222). The use of mirrors is important in the novel,

as looking into the mirror reminds Eve of her differences: “Mirror, mirror, in the

palm of my hand, I am the ugliest in the land” (Garland 2013: 295).54 In addition,

mirrors where important symbols in Victorian literature, and “a woman’s glance in

the mirror became representative of her perverse unwillingness to recognize that it

was her natural, predestined duty to yield her ego to man’s will” (Dijkstra 1986: 135).

Garland uses the mirror much in the same way, as it is Eve’s husband who first hands

her a mirror. Before their first encounter, Eve’s mother tried to protect her daughter

by keeping her away from mirrors: “Mama said I shouldn’t look in mirrors: it would

upset me. What she meant was, it upset her” (Garland 2013: 15). Eve is certainly right

when claiming that it will upset her mother, but at the same time she does not realize

that her mother wants to protect her from reality. Once Eve receives the pocket

mirror, she cannot “take [her] eyes off the mirror” (Garland 2013: 67), and is

enchanted. Only later does she realize that she “fell in love with the mirror he gave

[her]” (Garland 2013: 295), thus, she fell in love with her own reflection, with the

obvious connotations: “The mirror, then, came to be regarded as the central symbol of

feminine narcissism. The story of Narcissus and the nymph became especially

popular because it permitted a convenient conjunction of the themes of woman as

mirror and woman in the mirror” (Dijkstra 1986: 144).

Eve does not fit into Dijsktra’s definition of the independent woman, as “the

theme of the mirror [was] the symbol of feminine self-sufficiency” (Dijkstra 1986:

135). But she certainly becomes victim to “woman’s vanity [another] traditional

symbol linked to the mirror” (Dijkstra 1986: 135).

Angela Carter’s use of fairy tales in her novels is a common practice amongst

writers, as “they offer archetypal stories available for re-use and recycling by different

ages and cultures” (Sanders 2006: 82). Another reason why fairy tales are so

attractive is that “their stories and characters seem to transgress established social,

cultural, geographical, and temporal boundaries” (Sanders 2006: 82-83). In addition,

the concept of woman as freak is prominent in Garland’s novel but also in Angela

Carter’s Nights at the Circus, as both works mix women’s fates with fairy tale                                                                                                                54 Angela Carter also uses a lot of fairy-tale elements in her writings, and it is especially “in the longer fictions, The Magic Toyshop (1967), Nights at the Circus (1984) and Wise Children (1992), [that] she uses fairy-tale motifs: changelings and winged beings, mute heroines, beastly metamorphoses, arduous journeys and improbable encounters, magical rediscoveries and happy endings” (Warner 1994: 243).

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elements. Shirley Peterson notes that “one of the ways that femininity is modelled and

contained within patriarchy has been through myth and folklore, genres populated

with freaks, monsters, and human mutants that act as warnings against deviance”

(Peterson 1996: 294).

Despite being imprisoned within a male-dominated world, Fevvers and Eve

decide to escape their fates. It is towards the end of the novel that Eve decides that she

“shall be [her] own woman” (Garland 2013: 265) having realized that her husband

does not desire her sexually:

However much I tried to put off the dawning of truth, I knew there was only one

fortune for me: fool. I was a fool, for my husband would never take me in his

arms, whatever I had dreamed of. I was his Golden Goose, and as long as I was

careful to remain so, I would suffer neither the mistreatment nor the harsh

words he dealt out to my companions. He would continue to laugh and call me

his little kitten, for to him I was no more than an interesting pet who would

bring fortune his way with my freakish talents, a helpless creature who would

stray or be lost if it were not for his strong right hand. (Garland 2013: 238)

Unlike Eve, Fevvers’ larger than life mentality enables her to ignore her being

considered a freak or an outcast, she clearly indulges in her otherness, and she

‘prefers to remain a “freak”, that is, to play her part as spectacle in order to avoid

being reduced to an “idea of woman” (Robinson 1991: 125). Her being and self-

invention are all part of her act and with in her performance she is aware of the

advantages she may garner. In addition, “as the name ‘Fevvers’ (the plural form

‘feathers’ means commodity) verifies, the aerialiste is a circulating product within a

postmodern capitalist spectacle of merchandising, branding and celebrity

endorsement” (Baxter 2007: 105). Turning herself into a commodity reflects human

oddities of the Victorian era, as most of them turned themselves into spectacles in

order to make a living:

In many ways, the concept of “freak,” is an anomaly in current social scientific

thinking about demonstrable human variation. During its prime the freak show

was a place where human deviance was valuable, and in that sense valued.

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Modern scientists advocate a view of people with physical, mental, and

behavioral anomalies as stigmatized, rejected, and devalued. While this

viewpoint may reveal part of the story of the people who were exhibited, it

leaves out a great deal. Some were exploited, it is true, but in the culture of the

amusement world most human oddities were accepted as showmen. They were

congratulated for parlaying into an occupation what, in another context, might

have been a burden. (Bogdan 1998: 268)

Fevvers is considered a commodity and this condition is made more apparent in

the novel once the Grand Duke appears in her life, and he introduces himself as

follows: “You must know I am a great collector of all kinds of objets d’art and

marvels. Of all things, I love best toys – marvellous and unnatural artefacts” (Carter

2006: 220). The Grand Duke is quite similar to Herr M., since both men like to collect

toys, items that may have no specific purpose. Moreover, the two men no longer make

a distinction between objects and human beings, treating Fevvers and Mignon as mere

commodities meeting the collectors’ criteria, and exploiting them. It is at this stage

that Fevvers turns into a real tableau vivant, merely an item in a man’s collection.

Despite being turned into a commodity, Fevvers is not immune to the

temptation of consumerist society, which turns her into a “predator” (Carter 2006:

218) wanting to get hold of the Grand Duke’s property. Hence, Fevvers and the Grand

Duke incorporate two typical elements of consumerism. They both cannot get enough

to the extent that items can no longer be attributed any value, nor is any means brutal

enough to get their hands on desired items:

The Grand Duke surveyed his clockwork orchestra with a satisfied air. A bored

Emperor commissioned them long ago, in China. A mandarin murdered the

Emperor to obtain them. A bored ancestor of the Grand Duke’s murdered the

mandarin to get them for himself. They had the authentically priceless glamour

of objects intended only for pleasure, the impure allure of the absolutely

functionless. The Grand Duke pressed another button. (Carter 2006: 221)

In addition, “repeatedly in the history of freaks it has been assumed that the

freak is an object” (Stewart 1993: 110), a tradition that Fevvers certainly clings to.

Indulging in the gaze of others is just another aspect of her narcissistic nature and a

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clever turn in her career. The idea of being an object and subject to the gaze of others,

is particularly striking during the period during which Fevvers is Cupid:

I was a tableau vivant from the age of seven on. There I sat above the company

– as if she were the guardian cherub of the house – and for seven long years, sir,

I 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. (Carter 2006: 23)

Fevvers intentionally turns herself into a spectacle and is aware of the male as

well as the female gaze. This idea of the spectacle and the living picture is central to

Victorian sensation fiction, and can be found in the depiction of Aurora in Mary

Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd:

Aurora was lying on the sofa, wrapped in a loose white dressing-gown, her

masses of ebon hair uncoiled and falling about her shoulders in serpentine

tresses that looked like shining blue-black snakes released from poor Medusa’s

head to make their escape amid the folds of her garment. (Braddon 2008: 271)

Like Fevvers, Aurora is turned into a sexual object inviting both the male and the

female gaze. Whereas, Fevvers’ looks are controversial, Aurora is depicted as a

beautiful yet dangerous woman, a real temptress. This is emphasized by the

comparison with Medusa and the snakes in her hair: the viewer may well look at her

but touching her could be fatal.

Fevvers longs to be looked at, and wants others to take an interest in her person.

She is powerful and creates a mise en scène, which was quite common for freaks in

general, to quote Bogdan:

As freaks sat on the platform, most looked down on the audience with contempt

– not because they felt angry at being gawked at or at being called freaks, but

simply because the amusement world looked down on “rubes” in general. Their

contempt was that of insiders towards the uninitiated. For those in the

amusement world it was the sucker who was on the outside, not the exhibit.

(Bogdan 1998: 271)

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Bogdan claims that freaks felt superior and they were able to make a career by

exhibiting themselves. By inviting other people to gaze at her, Fevvers turns herself

into an object, an idea that has been discussed earlier in relation to the commodity

culture. Fevvers personifies the Victorians’ desire to show off their possessions in

public. Moreover, in his study on Victorian commodity culture, Andrew H. Miller

argues that “for women, observing their own objectification could shape the desire it

attempts to contain, inculcating self-regulation and making them fantasize now about

becoming the object of the gaze” (Miller 1995: 66). By turning herself into an object,

she shows that she is dominant and in control.

Fevvers demonstrates that she is very much an emancipated and self-made

woman. The concept of being a self-made woman reflects the idea that gender is a

construct and that each agent is very much able to determine her or his gender for

themselves, or to quote Teresa de Lauretis: “The construction of gender is the product

and the process of both representation and self-representation” (de Lauretis 1987: 9)

And thus, Fevvers personifies Teresa de Lauretis’ argument that

“objectification, or the act of control, defines woman's difference (woman as object/

other), and the eroticization of the act of control defines woman's difference as sexual

(erotic), thus, at one and the same time, defining "women as sexual and as women"”

(de Lauretis 1990: 115).

In addition, de Lauretis’ argument clearly shows Fevvers’ narcissistic nature,

as Fevvers is aware of her presence and effect that she has on people. Mary Russo has

perfectly grasped the nature of Carter’s novel by stating that “[it] is unique in its

depiction of relationships between women as spectacle, and women as producers of

spectacle” (Russo 1995: 165). By turning herself into this openly sexual being, she

enters dangerous grounds by exposing herself. It is worth adding Mary Russo’s

discussion of making a spectacle of oneself here:

There is a phrase that still resonates from childhood. Who says it? The mother’s

voice – not my own mother’s, perhaps, but the voice of an aunt, an older sister,

or the mother of a friend. It is a harsh, matronizing phrase, directed towards the

behaviour of other women:

“She” [the other woman] is making a spectacle out of herself.

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Making a spectacle out of oneself seemed a specifically feminine danger. The

danger was of exposure. (Russo 1995: 54)

Fevvers is not afraid of the danger, and neither is Cordelia Preston in The Mesmerist.

These two women are strong enough to expose themselves in public in order to make

a living. In addition, Fevvers does not have a mother telling her what to do, and

Cordelia only wants the best for her own daughter. This is certainly different for Eve

in The Palace of Curiosities, whose mother keeps reminding her of her being

different: “Look at you! […] You’re not even human!” (Garland 2013: 19).

Despite living in a brothel, a world where women are sold as mere

commodities, Fevvers, Madame Schreck, and Ma Nelson are dominant enough to

create their own spectacle and thus to control the world around them. All the women

in the house complement each other through their presence and performance, to quote

Russo: “One body as production or performance leads to another, draws upon

another, establishes hierarchies, complicities, and dependencies between

representations and between women” (Russo 1995: 166). Hence, Fevvers is similar in

nature to Albert Nobbs; as she becomes her own “self-made” woman, she becomes

the person she wants to be, and more importantly, the woman or creature that she

wants her environment to perceive her as. To further the idea of women as the objects

of financial transactions, Fevvers and her surroundings make people, men in

particular, pay to be allowed to stare at her. Hence, despite being a freak, she clearly

becomes an object of desire surrounded by mysticism. It is her abnormality which

makes her more interesting:

All Freaks are perceived to one degree or another as erotic. Indeed, abnormality

arouses some “normal” beholders a temptation to go beyond looking to knowing

in the full carnal sense the ultimate other. That desire is itself felt as freaky,

however, since it implies not only a longing for degradation but a dream of

breeching the last taboo against miscegenation. (Fiedler 1978: 137)

And it is exactly this idea that is put forward in Starobinski’s work, and it

also reflects the depiction of women at the end of the nineteenth century by authors

such as Flaubert and Huysmans:

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La femme, telle qu’on a le droit de la contempler en payant, n’est pas seulement

différente de toutes les autres femmes: elle est, de plus, secrètement différente

de son apparente féminité. Elle possède un immense pouvoir de métamorphose,

associé à son agilité – d’où son aptitude à revêtir, pour le spectateur, un rôle

sexuel changeant. Elle se prête au caprice imaginatif de l’amateur. A première

vue, elle n’est qu’un objet merveilleux, qui paraît attendre d’être cueilli comme

un fruit. Elle semble appartenir virtuellement au plus offrant. Elle est une chose,

presque une victime; on se la représente captive d’une tyrannie implacable: un

directeur cruel la séquestre et l’exploite. Princesse prisonnière, elle attend d’être

délivrée. Mais cette victime, cet objet vénal, a des muscles d’acier: par sa force,

par ses ressources surhumaines, par son animalité superbe, elle échappe à toute

sujétion. Selon la dialectique polaire de l’imagination, la victime idéale se

transforme rapidement en bourreau: dans la souplesse de ce corps féminin se

cache en fait une virilité agressive et dangereuse. (Starobinski 1970: 51-52)55

This extract clearly reflects Fevvers’ nature because she is well aware of being a

financial commodity and of being different. In addition, Starobinski mentions the

concept of metamorphosis, which is relevant to Fevvers and Cordelia. Both women

turn themselves into what the public demands them to be, which in return enables

them to manipulate their audience. They may appear victims at first sight but they

clearly bear notions of the femme fatale, a threatening concept, especially at the turn

of the nineteenth century. Despite their female assets, these two women represent the

strong and even dangerous woman that Starobinski describes in such detail in this

extract. It is this same idea that has been put forward by female writers, and one can

say that Starobinski’s description of female acrobats bears feminist connotations, as

he portrays them as strong and dominant, even dangerous women.                                                                                                                55 Woman, in so far as we are entitled to watch her against payment, is not only different from all other women; she is, in addition, secretly different from her apparent femininity. She possesses a tremendous power of metamorphosis, associated with her agility – from which stems her capacity to invest herself/to adopt for the spectator with a changing sexual role. She lends makes herself available to the imaginative caprice of the amateur. At first sight, she is but a marvellous object, seemingly waiting to be picked like a fruit. She seems to belong virtually to the highest bidder. She is a thing, almost a victim; she is presented as a captive of an implacable tyranny: a cruel director keeps her locked up and exploits her. An imprisoned princess, waiting to be delivered. But this victim, this venal object, has muscles made of steel: through/by her strength, her superhuman resources, her superb animality, she escapes any subjection. According to the polar dialectic of the imagination, the ideal victim quickly is transformed into a torturer: behind the litheness of this feminine body hides an aggressive and dangerous virility. (Starobinski 1970: 51-52, own translation)

182

The performance of female aerialists has always been considered

transgressive, as women are performing dangerous acts. Female acrobats take on male

roles, and thus, transgress gender roles, to quote Barbara Brook:

Because the feminine body was culturally identified with restraint and passivity,

it was the female aerialist who most fulfilled the audience’s desires: the extent

of her skills was emphasised by the extreme contrast between her use of

feminine gestures at the beginning and end of her act, the feminine costume,

and the sight of her body in apparent free fall, over which she had sole control.

The disciplined site of the circus, therefore, allowed a physical freedom in

action to the female body which was denied it outside the circus. (Brook 1999:

128)

Helen Stoddart argues along the same lines when it comes to female aerialist

and her work Rings of Desire should be given due consideration when it comes to

discussing this profession:

So not only were these performances sexually transgressive in terms of the

nineteenth-century public stage since they construct a spectacle out of the semi-

naked female body, but also because aerial acts provided a stage on which, far

from any concessions being made to women’s lesser strength, they performed

the same moves in the same way as men. Indeed, delicacy and smallness of

stature were seen as positive assets since, as we have already seen, at the core of

circus entertainment is a championing of the power of human will in

competitions between human bodies and objects or natural forces which would

conventionally be assumed to be impossibly physically superior, preferable to

the extent of being life-threatening. (Stoddart 2000: 175)

The two women thus personify Angela Carter’s vision that ‘gender is a

relation of power, whereby the weak become “feminine” and the strong become

“masculine” (Robinson 1991: 77). Unlike Albert Nobbs, who is considered a man,

Fevvers takes her persona even further blurring the boundaries between the real and

the fictional, leaving her environment and the reader in constant doubt as to what she

actually is. This concept of blurring boundaries is by no means new to Nights at the

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Circus if one considers Helen Stoddart’s Rings of Desire, in which she talks about the

nineteenth-century diarist Arthur J. Munby as follows:

In his diaries the female aerialists’ bodies are surrounded be the language of his

own sexualised curiosity. This was also a curiosity about gender ambiguity,

since within these accounts it is possible to see how both the gender and the

sexuality of the aerialist have frequently been conceived in ambiguous and at

times quite contradictory terms. […] The aerialist constructs and operates

within a fantasy space in which the body is at once made insubstantial and

unclassifiable and is thereby liberated from the limitations normally attached to

bodies physically marked out in terms of their gender or race. (Stoddart 2000:

171; 175)

But it is worth adding that Angela Carter presents a panoply of different

representations of women, and therefore the cross-dresser is also present in Nights at

the Circus, in the person of Ma Nelson. Fevvers becomes “masculine” in terms of her

behaviour, whereas Albert Nobbs assumes the role of a man by putting on male

clothes. All in all, Fevvers is more masculine as she clearly imposes herself upon her

surroundings, whereas Albert, being a servant, remains in the background and does as

she it told. Hence, once could argue that despite turning herself into a man physically,

she still keeps to her submissive role, serving both men and women.

However, it is worth pointing out that Fevvers’ turning herself into a spectacle

is not always regarded as an act of liberation and emancipation, as she is entrapped in

the world of the spectacle. It is Lizzie who takes Fevvers back to reality when

claiming that:

All you can do to earn a 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. For

you, it’s always a symbolic exchange in the marketplace; you couldn’t say you

were engaged in productive labour, now, could you, girl? (Carter 2006: 217)

In this passage Lizzie’s tone is authoritative, patronizing, even belittling as she

faces Fevvers with the truth and the fate of being a female aerialist. She has to

continue playing her part in order to make money. This certainly reflects the tragedy

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of many a human exhibit, as “their main concern was to make money” (Bogdan 1996:

35). Lizzie’s comment is quite superficial, as she tells Fevvers that she is only a

commodity that people want to see, and that there is not much else for her to do. By

insisting on the financial transactions at the heart of their business, she emphasizes

that Fevvers is a materialist girl, and that money is crucial to her. In addition, she

hints at the political philosopher Karl Marx, when talking about labour, thus

juxtaposing real work and labour to Fevvers’ superficial and materialistic desires. The

reality that performers had to work hard to make a living, to quote Tracy C. Davis:

While performers repeatedly demonstrated that class origins could be defined

by hard work, talent, or strategic marital alliances to secure some a place in the

most select company, others lived with and like the most impoverished classes.

Unlike other occupational groups, performers’ incomes spanned the highest

upper middle-class salary and the lowest working class wage, and were earned

in work places that ranged in status from patent theatres to penny saloons.

(Davis 1991: 3)

Despite being a man-like figure, aiming to be her own woman, and willingly

turning herself into an artefact, Fevvers still remains a woman imprisoned in a

patriarchal society.

Barbara Brook concludes that ‘women, then, could be said to be always

performing when in public: needing to “watch herself” (Brook 1999: 112). It is worth

arguing that women have always been judged inferior to the male sex because of their

otherness. This concept of the “Other” was widely discussed by Simone de Beauvoir,

and this otherness clearly turns women into outcasts (de Beauvoir 1997: 18-21). It is

only in the world of the circus, a space that subverts traditional norms, that women are

more powerful and dominant. Cordelia Preston and her daughter Gwenlliam have

gained their social status through their beauty but also because of their putting in extra

hard work.

Fevvers clearly embodies this “otherness” through her looks. Her freakish

appearance renders her appealing, but at the same time she can only survive in this

other mystical world that is the circus. By foregrounding the body and the female

protagonists’ looks, Carter and Ewing keep to the tradition of Victorian sensation

fiction, to quote Lyn Pykett:

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The speaking presence of the body in the text was a much-discussed aspect of

sensation fiction. Their tendency to dwell on the (female) body was generally

regarded as one of the improprieties of sensation novels; the intense physicality

of their representation of the heroine was the source of their perceived

transgression. (Pykett 1992: 99)

The women in sensation novels, such as Lady Audley’s Secret and Aurora

Floyd, are depicted as beautiful yet dangerous women.

Fevvers’ performance as Cupid stands in stark contrast with the fact that she

lives in a brothel, a place where women were mere commodities and exposed to the

constant gaze of men. Here women are turned into financial transactions and goods

that can be looked at. In The Female Grotesque Russo argues along the same line

stating that

Fevvers poses as the advertisement and model for similar commodities; not

exactly a prostitute herself, she nonetheless installs the myth of femininity as

virgin space in the displaced aura of the art work, while suggesting the comfort

of the already-used, “the sloppy seconds” of womanhood waiting, for a price, in

the upper chambers. (Russo 1995: 167)

Fevvers certainly uses the spectacle and her freakish looks in order to become a

celebrity and gain recognition.

Despite their good looks, Cordelia Preston and her daughter Gwenlliam are

outcasts due to their profession and their lives of crime. In the prequel to The Circus

Ghosts, The Mesmerist Cordelia is accused of having murdered her late husband.

Initial reports/court reports present her as a calm and beautiful woman, but once it is

revealed that she used to be an actress, the initial impression and the actual murder

become irrelevant. By revealing her past, she becomes a vulnerable prey for the

journalists: “There was a great flurry of activity and muttering now from where the

journalists were sitting: Did this – could their good luck be that this woman who

called herself a mesmerist used to be an actress” (Ewing 2007: 270). All the clichés

drop into place as the

186

actresses’ identity within this occupational cluster was further complicated by

social constructs of their sex. All Victorian women’s lives were interpreted by a

male-dominated culture that defined normative rules for female sexuality,

activity and intellect. Social respectability was merited as long as women met

the views prescribed for their age and class, but actresses – virtually by

definition – lived and worked beyond the boundaries of propriety. (Davis 1991:

3)

Cordelia Preston is well aware that being an actress was linked to low social class, as

she puts it herself when trying to convince her daughter to stay with Lord Ellis:

I could never, never give you what Ellis has given you. You must understand

what I did not understand when I was your age: the world is divided not just

between rich and poor but between those who are respectable and those who are

not – it is the greatest dividing line in the world and I did not understand and I

have done you great damage. […] I was an actress, I was the daughter of an

actress: it would never, ever be possible for you to have the same place in

society as you do now if you lived with me, shared my life. (Ewing 2007: 176)

Cordelia is fully aware of her position in society and knows that she cannot provide

her daughter with the life she thinks she deserves. Her tone is full of pathos and she is

trying to convince her daughter to continue living with Lord Ellis. The passage clearly

reflects the actress’s position in society, as they were scorned and could not move

freely in society without being dreaded and feared.

Actresses did not meet the Victorians’ perception of pure women, which was

also due to the way they dressed and their gaudy use of make-up. Simple and modest

appearances became fashionable, as Maggie Angeloglou points out: “[The actress] no

longer wore a mask. Her face was naked and exposed” (Angleloglou 1970: 96). A

“naked” or pale face was required to reflect feminine purity, whereas “Rouge was the

viper [and] this one word described all the abhorred paint” (Angeloglou 1970: 97).

Hence, the use of make-up was limited to certain lowly regarded professions, mainly

actresses and prostitutes, who were both frequenting similar locations at the time:

“Attached to the great theatres is the saloon, […], but virtuous females could not be

187

seen here; for here, at the half price, are to be found swarms of well-dressed, highly-

painted, but unhappy females, […]” (Nowrojee and Hirjeebhoy 2007: 106). The

author of this extract introduces the notion of “painted faces” for prostitutes and

categorizes them as “unhappy females” which would appear to be a patronizing and

unjustified comment since Judith R. Walkowitz states that “the entry into prostitution

seems to have been voluntary and gradual” (Walkowitz 1980: 13).

Both professions used artificial face paint for their trade, becoming the

“painted women”, and thus the association between the two was quickly made.56

Moreover, Baker points out in his essay that ‘in late Victorian police courts the term

‘actress’ was widely used as euphemism for ‘tart’’ (Baker 1978: 102), as “for a large

section of society, the similarities between the actress’s life and the prostitute’s or

demimondaine’s were unforgettable and overruled all other evidence about

respectability” (Davis 1991: 69).57 Tracy R. Davis furthers this idea by stating that:

The public nature of acting and the absolute necessity of putting oneself up for

general scrutiny led to an intellectual association between actress and prostitute

that no other educated public woman moving in society on a pretense of her

accomplishments, marriage, or breeding was saddled with. Whether or not an

individual actress played on the connection between the stage and the immoral

trade, acting was the only living other than prostitution in which a woman’s

own labour could be so financially rewarding, with added advantage of paying

regularly and predictably at such intervals. (Davis 1991: 19)

Actresses and prostitutes were regarded as threats to the social order, as they

were independent women, and did not meet traditional values, to quote Tracy Davis:

“As working mothers and wives (but not necessarily both) they threatened traditional

family structures, the balance of economic power, and gender-based restrictions of

association, movement, dress, education, and influence” (Davis 1988: 232).

                                                                                                               56 For further discussion see Michael Baker’s The Rise of the Victorian Actor (Baker 1978: 95-108). 57 In her essay on prostitutes and actresses, Tracy C. Davis points out that actresses were quite powerful women, as they made their own living and were independent: “Actresses enjoyed freedoms unknown to women of other socially approved occupations. They were symbols of women’s self-sufficiency and independence, but as such they were doubly threatening: like the middle classes generally, they advocated and embodied hard work, education, culture, and family ties, yet unlike prostitutes and feminists they were regarded as proper vessels of physical and sexual beauty and legitimately moved in society as attractive and desirable being” (Davis 1988: 222).

188

However, the actress only used make-up on stage whereas the prostitute took

her trade to the streets and wore her make-up outdoors, or as Felski puts it:

[The prostitute’s] extensive use of fashion and cosmetics underscores the

artificiality of conventional gender roles, exaggerating femininity to the level of

parody, and in her dual role as seller and commodity she is seen to expose and

subvert the hypocrisy of the bourgeois ideology of romantic love. (Felski 1991:

103)

According to Felski the prostitute’s use of make-up is not merely a means of

recognition but also of protest against the conventions of her time. Depicting both

actresses and prostitutes thus became a recurrent trademark of some European

painters, notably the French painters Edgar Degas and Toulouse Lautrec, where the

latter extended the generosity of his art to taking sides for the girls he was painting. In

The Palace of Curiosities, Garland, therefore, does not need to label women as

prostitutes, as their looks are telling enough: “Two gaudy females swagger across our

path: one has pale yellow curls and a length of lace tied around her eyes; her

companion has thumbed a line of rouge along her cheekbones, as scarlet as her hair”

(Garland 2013: 98-99).

Therefore the revelation of Cordelia being an actress renders the entire trial

even more spectacular, as such news filled the broadsides and the broadsheets of the

time, as Cordelia herself puts it: “A bit of scandal doesn’t hurt actresses” (Ewing

2007: 352). But at the same time, she knows that her being accused of having

murdered Lord Ellis, makes it impossible for her to marry Inspector Rivers: “Also

you – a detective – could not be married to an actress, and a notorious actress at that”

(Ewing 2007: 352). Therefore Cordelia fits into the “Victorian lore, ‘once a prostitute’

– the history of a ‘woman-with-a-past’ was never forgotten” (Davis 1988: 230).

The character of the detective is also exploited in a number of neo-Victorian

novels, as there is “a connection between the detective and the writer of historical

fictions” (Hadley 2010: 28). The detective as well as the writer want to find clues in

order to find answers, and therefore they dig up the past, to quote Hadley: “In neo-

Victorian detective fiction, this interest in the narratives of the past particularly

focuses in the issues of evidence, truth and judgement about the past” (Hadley 2010:

59). However, not every detail can be known, and it is the author’s task to fill the

189

blanks with his or her own imagination, which creates a dialogue between past and

present:

Most obviously, the idea of evidence connects to the role of historical fact in

historical fictions, but the retrospective nature detective fiction, which

reconstructs the past from a present perspective, also raises questions about the

relationship between the present and the past in historical fiction. (Hadley 2010:

28)

The concept of gathering clues is quite prominent in Peter Ackroyd’s novel, as it is

only at the end that the reader learns the truth about Elizabeth Cree. Hence, the reader

takes on the role of the detective as well as the historian in this novel set in Victorian

London: “The events and objects of the detective story only acquire meaning at the

end of the story, when the detective reconstructs the events of the narrative and

reveals them as ‘clues’. Detective fiction, then, engages in a process of historical

recovery” (Hadley 2010: 60).

Peter Ackroyd also uses prostitutes and actresses in his novel, but in Dan Leno

and the Limehouse Golem the actress ends up killing the prostitutes. Unlike Cordelia,

Elizabeth Cree moves up the social ladder by marrying John Cree. This is reminiscent

of a fairy tale, as her dreams become true, and her marriage will enable her to become

a respectable actress: “Ever since the death of Uncle I had dreamed of leaving the

halls and advancing upon the legitimate stage. With John Cree as my writer and

patron, was there any reason why I could not become another Mrs Siddons or Fanny

Kemble?” (Ackroyd 1995: 214). When marrying John Cree, Elizabeth claims: “It was

a lovely occasion, and all the more moving because I was seeing most of the acts for

the last time. It was the end of my second life” (Ackroyd 1995: 215). At this stage, the

readers think that her second life is the fact that she turns herself into the Older

Brother at will, and thus can roam the streets of London. However, as the plot

develops, the reader gets to know Elizabeth’s sick and disturbing nature, which leads

her to poison her own husband. Her marriage is not a happy one, as Elizabeth does

not want to have any sexual intercourse with her husband, due to what she went

through in her childhood. Therefore, John Cree starts having an affair with the maid

but his wife’s change in temper does not go unnoticed. Despite having married John

190

Cree, Elizabeth has not forgotten her acting skills and therefore she can act the role of

the wife perfectly. She is still living a double life, which her husband has not yet

grasped, but he is well aware that her behaviour is strange. This idea of the wife

leading a double life and eventually killing her husband can also be found in Barbara

Ewing’s The Mesmerist, and is a common topic in sensationalist fiction.

191

Conclusion

In conclusion, the circus and the stage offer neo-Victorian authors a transgressive

space and a world which does not adhere to strict rules. Thus, neo-Victorian fiction

and the world of the spectacle have a playful nature in common, which enables

performers and authors to cross boundaries. The topsy-turvy world of the circus and

neo-Victorian literature is characterised by the use of different narrative styles as well

as intertextual references. Neo-Victorian fiction mixes different elements of Victorian

fiction and therefore, becomes chaotic just like the world of the circus. Literature and

the circus provide us with microcosms of our society, they reflect different

interpretations of who we are and also mirror our fears, which are presented under

different guises.

Literature and the spectacle do not impose any views on the reader, and

intentionally leave room for interpretation. Like the Victorians, we are all still drawn

to the spectacle, and we wish to be flabbergasted. Therefore, the dialogue between the

reader and the author becomes even more important, as neo-Victorian authors

intentionally avoid closure, thus engaging the reader more in the interpretation

process. This dialogue between the reader and writer is similar to the relationship

between the performer or the magician and his or her audience. Like the audience, the

readers want to be duped, and they are well aware that what they are reading is

fiction. They want to escape the tediousness of everyday life, and literature as well as

the circus offers them an escape. Hence, readers and audience give in to the illusions

and fabrications and accept them willingly. Spectators and readers do not want to be

faced with reality but with an alternative world, and neo-Victorian fiction and the

spectacle create such a space. Therefore, it is worth keeping in mind that the fictions

discussed here are not accurate historical accounts, but narratives intentionally mixing

fact with fiction. This also demonstrates that neo-Victorian fiction can adapt to the

demands of its readers, with all the opportunistic connotations this entails. But it also

shows that the playful nature of neo-Victorian literature leaves enough room for

incorporating contemporary concerns. Therefore, neo-Victorian fiction is accessible

to a wider readership, which wishes to gather historical knowledge as well as be

entertained. Most of these novels have been subject to academic studies, which

certainly proves their importance in the literary canon.

192

The novels discussed in this thesis demonstrate that the past is linked to the

present. By re-constructing the past, we fill the blanks with our own imagination, and

hence we become part of it. This shows that the Victorian past is very much present

today, and that there is a certain sense of longing and nostalgia attached to that

particular era. The ethical question that arises here is certainly whether or not we are

entitled to reconstruct a past that we were not first hand witnesses of. At the same

time, this may be the only means to give a voice to the voiceless. In addition, we are

aware of the artificiality of these novels, which enables us to create a distance. The

question that remains is whether or not we want to watch closely to learn the truth and

the tricks, as this may lead to utter disappointment. Maybe we just want to be fooled

and enjoy the playfulness of these novels.

193

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screenplay by James Robinson, perf. Sean Connery, Peta Wilson, Stuart

Townsend. Film.

The Prestige. 2006. Dir. by Christopher Nolan, screenplay by Christopher Nolan and

Jonathan Nolan, perf. Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Michael Caine. Film.

The Wizard of Oz. 1939. Dir. by Victor Fleming, screenplay by Noel Langley and

Florence Ryerson, perf. Judy Garland, Frank Morgan, Ray Bolger. Film.

Tipping the Velvet. 2002. Dir. by Geoffrey Sax, screenplay by Andrew Davies, perf.

Rachael Stirling, Keeley Hawes, Anna Chancellor. Telefilm.

209

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor Christian Gutleben for his assistance, guidance

and valuable advice throughout the various stages of this travail de

candidature.

I would also like to thank my parents for their support without which this

would not have been possible.