“For what is ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’, sir? The mould in which the human form is cast is exceedingly fragile. Give it the slightest tap with your fingers and it breaks” (Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus).
Susan Bardo reflects on the changing presence of ‘the body’ in contemporary discourse, observing that ‘Formerly, the body was dominantly conceptualized as a fixed, unitary, primarily biological reality. Today, more and more scholars have come to regard the body as a historical, plural, culturally mediated form’. ‘The body’ in literature as a mutable expression of culture goes under interrogation in Angela Carter’s novel Nights at the Circus (1984) and Ian McEwan’s short-story collection In Between the Sheets (1978). These texts engage in fantastic, grotesque, and surreal representations of the female body to examine gender performance and relations. Engaging with the body in this way evaluates the reality of female bodies and womanhood, as Carter and McEwan debate the ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ of the female form. Depictions of fantastical and grotesque bodies are largely presented in partnership with a male gaze or anxiety as perceptions of women are taken to a surreal extreme. McEwan particularly displays male anxieties of the female form in its sexual agency in his short stories ‘Dead as They Come’, ‘Pornography’, and ‘In Between the Sheets’.
In this essay I will be referring to Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the grotesque, which focusses on the ‘lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and the reproductive organs; it therefore relates to acts of defecation and copulation, conception, pregnancy and birth’. This operates in contrast to the classical body, which is fixed and with closed orifices. Abigail Dennis makes the connection between the Bakhtinian grotesque and gendered bodies, saying it ‘is particularly associated with the earthed, physical feminine’, due to its foregrounding of apertures and reproductivity. Carter and McEwan engage with and reflect the proliferation of second-wave feminism of the 70s and 80s through these mediations of female corporeality.
In this essay I will be referring to Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the grotesque, which focusses on the ‘lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and the reproductive organs; it therefore relates to acts of defecation and copulation, conception, pregnancy and birth’. This operates in contrast to the classical body, which is fixed and with closed orifices. Abigail Dennis makes the connection between the Bakhtinian grotesque and gendered bodies, saying it ‘is particularly associated with the earthed, physical feminine’, due to its foregrounding of apertures and reproductivity. Carter and McEwan engage with and reflect the proliferation of second-wave feminism of the 70s and 80s through these mediations of female corporeality.
The gendered body in Carter and McEwan’s fictions is subjected to scrutiny surrounding its ‘natural’ or produced form. Judith Butler asks: ‘Does being female constitute “natural fact” or a cultural performance, or is “naturalness” constituted through discursively constrained performative acts that produce the body through and within categories of sex?’. Nights at the Circus evaluates the female body through the debate of fact or fiction surrounding Fevvers. The site of her body is cause for speculation over how to engage with femininity and gender performance. Butler’s comments are useful in reading and interpreting Carter’s dilemma of corporeal womanhood, as she questions an essential femininity and argues gender to be culturally manufactured through ‘performative acts that produce the body’. The text explores the notion that ideal feminine beauty cannot be a real physical form, as women’s fantastical bodies operate within the text to debate their status as a symbol of femininity. This is demonstrated through the women at Madame Schreck’s museum brothel, as Karen Ya-Chu Yang suggests they symbolise primary aspects of feminine coding: ‘Sleeping Beauty represents the extreme of female passivity; Fanny, with tears for milk, fails to nurture; and Cobwebs’s covered face always reflects patience’. Their fantastical bodies operate as a corporeal manifestation of femininity as the text distorts expectations of gender through the ‘freakshow’. Carter thereby uses ‘freak’ bodies to reveal the arbitrary nature of gender essentialism.
Femininity and gender are represented as performative constructs, highlighted by the text’s setting of a circus performance space. Paulina Palmer concurs that Carter ‘employ[s] circus and fairground motifs to represent and explore the performative aspects of gender’. The production of femininity in the performance space is seen in the novel’s denouement as Fevvers’ suffers an identity crisis and feels herself transforming ‘from a woman into an idea.’ (343). Under Walser’s gaze, Fevvers’ singularity is threatened, and her body becomes indiscrete and multiple – recalling the Bakhtinian unfinished grotesque body. Fevvers’ selfhood destabilises, and she questions her own reality and truth:
She felt her outlines waver; [...]. For one moment, just one moment, Fevvers suffered the worst crisis of her life: ‘Am I fact? Or am I fiction? Am I what I know I am? Or am I what he thinks I am? (Carter, 344)
Fevvers acknowledges her divided identity between her own self-perception and the spectator’s view, namely Walser. By Fevvers’ lack of confidence in her wings, she is lessened from the symbolic status of ‘Venus’, ‘Helen’, and ‘Angel of the Apocalypse’, to a ‘poor freak down on her luck’ (344). This demonstrates that through the absence of her performativity and desire to be watched, the symbolism attached to her bodily form is disparaged and her corporeal style is depreciated. However, a performance space is cultivated as a crowd forms to observe and lights shine on her. As Fevvers becomes the object of spectacle once more, her identity is recovered: ‘the eyes fixed upon her with astonishment, [...] the eyes that told her who she was’ (345). As ‘the eyes’ inform Fevvers’ identity, the text suggests selfhood to be relational to an audience presence and not spontaneous.
Yet, as Fevvers reaffirms her identity, she puts on a ‘brilliant, artificial smile’, suggesting her ‘true’ self has a degree of performativity and falsity. This reveals identity to always be partially relational to spectators’ and cultural perceptions of gender and the body. Christina Brtizolakis also speaks to the problematised aspects of this passage, arguing that ‘the celebration of femininity remains,’ tied to ‘the discipline of an audience’. Yet, Carter is suggesting through this that femininity and gender identity is produced out of performance rather than an essential quality.
Grotesque and classical bodies clash to reveal the crisis in truth and representation of the female form. Indiscrete bodies in McEwan’s work are displayed through his engagement with bodily waste, as Jeanette Baxter observes that ‘McEwan’s early writings are littered with waste of every kind,’ naming ‘traces of urine, vomit, semen, snot, spit, pus and blood wet and stain’ cluttering his early fictions. This is evidenced in ‘Dead as They Come’ as, in his misery at Helen’s suspected affair, the narrator’s ‘mouth filled with cankers and [his] breath had about it the stench of a decaying carcass’, and he gets ‘a vicious boil in [his] anus’. The focus on orifices such as the mouth and anus indicate the employment of the grotesque in opposition to the unattainable classical body. The classical, finished body is symbolically rendered by the mannequin Helen in the story, as McEwan uses the irony of the narrator’s delusion to comment on the idealisms of the female body. By investing qualities of the classical body in Helen, McEwan suggests the unreality of this form as it can only exist in an uncanny mannequin impression of womanhood.
Yet, her classical body becomes open and unfixed as the narrator penetrates her during sex. Sex thus begins her departure from the classical as the narrator describes the ‘fetid warmth of her virgin lust’ (67), the excretion of bodily fluids aligning with the grotesque. The symbolic value of the female form is demonstrated through Helen’s equivalency to art. As the narrator kills her, he also rampantly destroys his art collection, linking the ‘related desires’ (76) of destruction through penetration and violence. Her murder suggests that by holding women to a classical body idealism, they are subject to violence through their perception as passive objects anticipating male destruction. Thereby McEwan remarks on the unreal expectations of the female form and their propagation of gendered violence by entrapping women within this framework.
The unreal body of the mannequin Helen is starkly contrasted with Carter’s exploration of the animated female body through Fevvers. This is illustrated through her characterisation as a winged woman, her fantastical nature is set out from her birth as she, ‘just like Helen of Troy, was hatched’ (3). The comparison to ‘Helen of Troy’ reveals that from birth Fevvers’ body has always been attached to feminine symbolic meaning. Her character appears ontologically insecure in her conflation of the mythological and realist female body and brings to crisis realms of fact and fiction. Fevvers’ introduction evidences this tension between the corporeal ‘Cockney’ and the symbolically feminine ‘Venus’. Artificiality and performance are primarily suggested as she ‘ripped off six inches of false lash from her left eyelid’. The attention brought to her cosmetics draws the link between feminine coding and the art of performance, suggesting the artificiality of gender essentialism.
Carter uses alterations of language to set up Fevvers’ introduction as an emblem of the feminine. This is demonstrated as the room is described as a ‘mistresspiece of exquisitely feminine squalor’ (6), semantically reversing language’s androcentrism. This recurs as the text converts ‘bonhomerie’ to ‘bonfemmerie’ (8), changing masculine coded words to feminine counterparts. This illustrates Fevvers’ dressing room as a space of absolute femininity in which gender power dynamics are reversed on Walser. Carter asks how received femininity operates within the confines of the classical body, which is contradicted by the emphasis on Fevvers’ bodily functions. Expectations of femininity in their affiliation with the classical, static body are countered and dismantled through Fevvers’ grotesque depiction as she ‘let[s] a ripping fart ring around the room’ (8). She occupies a liminal space between the factual and fictional body: her fantastical wings work in contrast to her bodily functions and excretions. The corporeal emphasis raises questions of how symbols operate when tied to the materiality of the body, alluding to the disillusion of grand symbols in postmodernism through this contradiction. Carter suggests through the text’s mediation on gender that the ontological being of women and their bodies is a culturally mediated invention.
By complicating Fevvers’ characterisation through allusions to the Bakhtinian grotesque, Carter debates the tension between the material body and the symbolic feminine. Anne Fernihough touches on this as she says at one level Fevvers ‘is the opposite of the classical body (unusually tall, ungainly, gluttonous, uncontained); at another level, by being all these things and a trapeze artist and winged woman, she outrageously conflates the classical and the grotesque.’ The claim that she ‘conflates the classical and the grotesque’ contributes to Carter’s discussion of how gender is performed through actions and cannot be reduced to corporeal styles. Through this, Carter suggests that the symbolic rendition of women is problematised by ensnaring them in an imaginary infrastructure.
The texts figure the male gaze and anxieties in relation to the female body which manifests in the surreal and the fantastic. McEwan thematises this throughout the text, reflecting the gender relations of the 70s as second-wave feminism was granting women more sexual autonomy and independence from men. The threat to the male subconscious surfaces as an anxiety over female sexuality, as McEwan employs elements of the surreal and the psychosexual to literalise the threat to the male psyche. ‘Dead as They Come’ speaks to the threat of female agency as the narrator says that Helen ‘demanded the orgasm I could not give her’ (67), as sexuality becomes weaponised against men. This is further echoed in the titling of ‘Pornography’, as pornographic content seeks to decentre female sexual agency by framing it in a male libidinal economy. By using this for the stories’ title, McEwan shows the reclamation of this agency by literalising Freudian fears of male castration. In the story, female sexual agency is particularly antagonistic and violent to men as Lucy masturbates to O’Byrne’s helpless captivity and imagining his penectomy (24).
Moreover, ‘In Between the Sheets’ illustrates the male gaze and anxiety over the female body as the narrator Stephen fears adult female sexuality in his wife and pubescent daughter Miranda. The story displays Stephen unable to handle adult female agency, causing him to psychosexually attempt to recover his masculine authority in his benign relations with his daughter and her friend Charmian. This anxiety is first displayed as Stephen almost confesses to Charmian: ‘I never satisfied my wife in marriage you see. Her orgasms terrify me’ (86). Furthermore, Stephen reads that ‘Dreams culminating in emission may reveal the object of the dreamer’s desire as well as his inner conflicts. An orgasm cannot lie’ (85). Thus, his paedophilic wet dream reveals his desire for masculine power which he has failed to obtain from adult women. His ‘inner conflicts’ revolve around regaining lost male sexual authority from his fear of the sexually agentic female body. Stephen compares Miranda to a waitress, and by recalling his dream expands his paedophilic desires to incest. Her body’s pubescent state of transition allows her to ‘[move] easily between woman and child’ (89), thus his desire for children becomes mixed with his fear of adult women’s sexuality. This is demonstrated as his daughter’s orgasm, which he overhears and mistakes for his wife’s, is considered the ‘frame of all anxieties’ (92). Ultimately, he rescinds his masculine authority as he puts Miranda back to bed, recovering his role from paedophile to loving father as her body becomes a symbol of childish purity instead of pubescent sexuality. Through this, McEwan uses In Between the Sheets to comment upon the female body in its sexually agentic state through the male perspective, to satirise male anxieties over this new autonomy which accompanied the feminist movements of the decade.
Carter turns the horrified male gaze against itself through her presentation of the grotesque female body in its sexuality and autonomy, primarily through Fevvers’ character. The conflation of food and female appetite in the text suggests this, as Dennis observes ‘Fevvers's freakish sexuality is intricately interwoven with her supposedly abnormal appetite, making her simultaneously mesmerizing and terrifying to her audiences, particularly the men who wish to consume her or be consumed by her’. She further notes the insistent reference to her mouth, ‘functioning as a locus of subconscious masculine fears of the devouring other.’ Significantly, Dennis remarks the ‘simultaneously mesmerizing and terrifying’ effect of her appetite on ‘subconscious masculine fears’, indicating how the sexually-autonomous female body terrorises the male subconscious. Fevvers is further physicalised through food: ‘Her face, broad and oval as a meat dish’ (9), suggesting the relationship between her comestible qualities within the male gaze and her sexual appetite. Thus, Carter creates an intersection between Fevvers’ sexuality and her appetite for food to demonstrate the anxieties of the male gaze, as Fevvers incarnation of the New Woman reclaims sexual agency through the body.
Ultimately, Carter’s Nights at the Circus and McEwan’s In Between the Sheets use the female body to comment upon the upheavals of gender relations by second-wave feminism. In Carter’s novel, gender coding is revealed as performative, illustrated through the presentation of fantastical bodies in a performance space. McEwan echoes this in his engagement with the surreal and fantastical body in contingency to gender politics. This is developed as there is a tension within the texts between depictions of classical and grotesque bodies, as they physicalise the conflict between symbolic and material modes of femininity. McEwan and Carter further employ a rendition of the male gaze and anxieties over female agency, specifically regarding sexuality as their fear projects into fantastic and grotesque depictions of the body. The gendered ‘mould in which the human form is cast’ is thereby revealed as ‘unnatural’ and culturally mediated.
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