Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus Attempts to Create Feminist Utopia

Using and subverting the fairy tale form, In “Nights at the Circus”” Angela Carter has attempted to create a feminist utopia out of the fragments of myths, legends, and stories from everything between antiquity and the Brothers Grimm. By employing elements of fairy tales with overt irony and parody, she has points out the politics of female representation in such tales and subsequently, has turned the whole genre of the fairy tale upside-down. Far from being a simple example of magical realism, “Nights at the Circus” is more of a treatise on the depiction of women throughout literature, and arguably, in this case, even before actual written literature in the form of legends in oral traditions. Carter’s treatment of these literary traditions in “Nights at the Circus” is driven by a feminist concern for changing these representations of women, thus in a sense, she is rewriting these fairy tales for the postmodern generations. The main concern in “Nights at the Circus” is how literary and mythological representations of women shape male desire and their perception of females. By gender-bending traditional fairy tales, legends, and myths, such as Cinderella, and Leda and the Swan, Angela Carter causes readers to question the impact of folk tales on gender construction. This is certainly not to say that “Nights at the Circus” doesn’t promote a postmodern feminist agenda in other ways, but this is one of the clearest methods she uses to instigate at least some thought on the literary connections to femininity and masculinity.