Comparing Paths to Liberation and Selfhood in Angela Carter's Nights

Not a Sweet Little Bird in Sight: Comparing Paths to Liberation and Selfhood in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus and Toni Morrison’s Beloved Tess Weitzner A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts in the Department of English and American Literatures, Middlebury College May, 2018 I have neither given nor received unauthorized aid on this work Weitzner 2 Acknowledgements I would like to thank Professor Brett Millier for keeping me grounded in my focus and for pushing me out of the nest when she knew I was ready. I would also like to thank my family for supporting me from the moment my topic hatched. Weitzner 3 Table of Contents Preface…………………………………………………………………………..…………………4 Thesis Introduction……………………………………………………………………………..…5 Section i: Giving a Voice to the Smothered: Engagements with Postmodern Literary Techniques………………………………………………………………………………...7 Section ii: Between Feminisms………………………………………………………..…18 Section iii: Magical Realism……………………………………………………………..22 Section iv: Flight and Inversion: The Motif of Birds……………………………………26 Works Cited & Works Consulted……………………………………………………………..…40 Weitzner 4 Preface In the tradition of literary criticism, comparisons are everywhere you look. As readers, we are always permitted to ask, “So what?” I am interested in comparing two specific works of Angela Carter and Toni Morrison to learn more about these texts and their creators. These authors seem to constantly oscillate between falling into and out of the same literary and contextual categories that literary critics have designed. They wrote around the same time, they wrote about heroic, complicated women, and they wrote about these women in ways that, at times, strongly align with some pertinent feminist ideologies, and, at other times, challenge them. But there is so much more than that, namely, the nuances of the “new” women they created. They pull in tradition and myth just to break them, and in doing so, re-shape the way we think about women and especially women’s liberation. Their texts are feminist, but there are many ways to write a feminist narrative. So what does it matter that they are a little different but also a little similar? Morrison’s handling of race and ethnicity is considerably more comprehensive and frequent than Carter’s, and the oppressive experiences endured by Morrison’s characters tend to be far more emotionally and physically traumatic. In this scenario, we can ask how these oppressions are formed, what they have in common, and how identity lends itself to oppression and freedom. To analyze one author as the “white, British one” and the other as “the African- American one” is not to position them against each other, or to pretend that Carter speaks for the entire white British experience, while Morrison speaks for the entire African American experience. There are, of course, so many more voices, and many of them work together even if they represent different identity categories. My hope is that this comparison is a snapshot of two distinct feminist voices whose heroines might have more in common than meets the eye. Weitzner 5 Introduction What could an African American slave and a white, British circus performer possibly have in common? A comprehensive comparison between the fictional experiences of Sophie Fevvers, of Angela Carter’s 1984 novel Nights at the Circus, and of Sethe Suggs, of Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved indicates that more is shared than meets the eye. These texts gave to the world two supremely distinct heroines who sharply deviated from the literary trajectories of 1980s feminism. What does it mean to be a fictional character who is a product of a feminist agenda? How similar are their characterizations and their experiences of oppression and liberation? Critical precedent demonstrates how Morrison and Carter used these novels to break dominant cultural myth and recover negated histories. Can we learn more about these myth- breaking female protagonists by comparing them? Possessing different identities on the premises of race, class, and community, these heroines led overtly disparate lives. Furthermore, their experiences of oppression can’t be weighed as equally traumatic. However, both engage in complex struggles of self-reconciliation and self-defined liberation that are developed by surprisingly similar themes and styles. Thematically, both Fevvers and Sethe fight to achieve personal identities greater than those of objects or animals, as such demeaning reductions are often imposed by external forces. In achieving these self-defined identities, they both grapple with notions of selfhood, self-acceptance, and self-ownership that are rooted in the relationship between the physical body and the spirit. Stylistically, Carter and Morrison drive these plots with the heavy use of magical realism, metafiction, and the recurring motifs of birds and flight. Contextually, both authors constructed heroines to drive texts that deconstruct and decode cultural myths. Weitzner 6 These engagements with deconstruction, magical realism, and metafiction signify the authors’ use of postmodern literary techniques. Carter and Morrison both explicitly defined themselves as feminists, and their stories can each be viewed as an intersection of literary postmodernism and feminism. However, the ideological melodies of second-wave feminism, African-American feminism, and white British feminism were not perfectly harmonious when these two novels were published. Yet, surprising similarities in the literary approaches to these novels make themselves known through the analysis of texts, contexts, and authorial statements. Employing feminist theory and critical race theory, this examination of these shared literary approaches may offer a more comprehensive understanding of the constructions of Sophie and Sethe as they are simultaneously reflected in, and products of these socio-historical circumstances. While these two authors do use a number of surprisingly similar approaches to develop the paths to liberation of Fevvers and Sethe, this comparison will not be productive if we weigh their experiences of oppression as identical. That equality is simply false. In “An Open Letter to Mary Daly,” Audre Lorde writes, The oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries… but that does not mean it is identical within those differences [...] To deal with one without even alluding to the other is to distort our commonality as well as our difference [...] For then beyond sisterhood is still racism. The lived experiences of misogyny and objectification in Sophie Fevvers’ life are certainly not to be trivialized, but their traumas are not akin to the notoriously penetrative pain and suffering of slavery and racism as endured by Sethe. Rather, this comparison aims to examine two paths to liberation taken by two distinct female protagonists, and to understand what it means that their creators shared such similar literary themes and styles in the context of the mid-1980s. What does it mean that the same literary approaches are used to paint two different pictures of two seemingly different women? Weitzner 7 I. Giving a Voice to the Smothered: Engagements with Postmodern Literary Techniques Two groundbreaking novelists, Morrison and Carter are often regarded as writers who redefined the traditional boundaries of the genre. Beloved and Nights at the Circus appeared as triumphant works that each author wrote relatively late in her career. Morrison was 56 when her novel was published, and Carter was 44, just eight years shy of her death in 1992. Carter tells the story of Sophie Fevvers, a bird-woman circus aerialiste who grows wings from her back. Jack Walser, an American journalist, wants to know the truth behind the “Cockney Venus.” Is she fact or is she fiction? Morrison tells the story of Sethe Suggs, an escaped slave who kills one of her children when her master comes to reclaim her children as his property. In that moment, Sethe decided she would rather pass her children onto heaven than let them live a life of bondage, but she is haunted by the ghost of her dead baby and suffers the psychological scars of slavery. In giving literary life to suppressed representations of women, both summoned highly original characters by blending what they believed to be their heroines’ quieted histories with more commonly known myth. Sally Keenan, in her writing, From Myth to Memory: The Revisionary Writing of Angela Carter, Maxine Hong Kingston and Toni Morrison, argues that their writing shares, “an appropriation of prior myths and fictions” which the authors use to “disrupt and challenge forms of discursive inheritance which have effaced or distorted the histories of women in western culture.” Morrison specifically challenges the histories of her respective ethnic communities in the United States (2). Consequently, their writing recontextualizes our knowledge of history and reality and, “...contribute[s] to the challenge posed to post- Enlightenment western hegemonic discourses by those who it left out, its gendered and racial others” (3-4). Indeed, new representations of women, and especially women of color, had been at the time largely shut out of the global canon. Weitzner 8 These myth-breaking stories are inevitable products of their socio-historical contexts, just as they are critiques of these environments. While Nights at the Circus and Beloved were both written in the mid-1980s, neither is set in the author’s present day. Fevvers takes flight in 1899, “before the last

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