Queer illegible communities in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus

Abstract

Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus uses the hybrid subjectivity of Fevvers to lay groundwork of Fevvers’ ability to be illegible, meaning to be un categorizable, as Jack Halberstam describes. Fevvers illegible individual subjectivity allows her to illegibly exist in community, have relationships with people by means of their stories and emotional labor instead of through hegemonic categorizations. When American journalist, Jack Walser, attempts to interview her, she disorients him with the help of her friend and mother figure Lizzie and teaches him to unlearn hegemonic modes of understanding one another categorizations by letting him get to know her through her life stories. Lizzie also helps Fevvers by balancing out Fevvers greed with Lizzie’s own Marxist ideology. Through these differing ideologies, an interrelational gearshift feminism emerges, allowing people flexibility to change their mode of moving situationally. This mode of feminism is also used in the second plot in this novel about the panoptic prisoners. Interrelational gearshift feminism is enacted by Fevvers in her accepting of a transformed Walser, providing a hopeful message about the importance of small change to create big, global change. Carter also uses an interrelational gearshift feminism model in outlining what characters she is uninterested in transforming through excessive caricatures. Keywords: English Literature, illegibility, categories, Jack Halberstam, Angela Carter, gearshift feminism, transformation.