‘Not Billed the “Cockney Venus” for nothing!’: Thatcherite ‘Victorian Values’ and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984)

This paper concentrates on neo-Victorianism in Angela Carter’s 1984 novel Nights at the Circus. I argue that Carter deploys neo-Victorianism to subvert the idealization of the national past which represented so crucial and violent a foundation to Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal politics throughout the 1980s. Thatcher’s rhetoric of “Victorian values” was a key part of her ideological strategy, aimed at fanning patriotic flames, reinventing Britain’s past according to models such as, in particular, the importance of a strong family structure combined with a focus on individual responsibility and self-discipline [1]. Carter’s novel, I argue, rewrites and reconceptualises this narrative of the Victorian, painting her wild, absurd and overflowing late-Victorian backdrop as a direct critique. Carter’s late-Victorian world is one of backstreet encounters, theatre dressing rooms, brothels, broken-down trains: her Victorian characters are impossible hybrids, outcasts, the dispossessed, the marginalized. Her families are supportive communities of “freaks” or sex workers; history is written by clowns; self-discipline signals (specifically) men ludicrously deluded as to their own authority. Carter’s protagonist, Fevvers, is a trapeze artist who happens to have wings. She is at once both animal and human, a subversive hybrid, described as “Rubenesque” and with a face like a “meat dish”; she is dirty, loud, excessive. Billed as the “Cockney Venus”, Fevvers’ narrative represents an alternative British history, which walks the line, in the tradition of the grotesque, between exoticization and subversion of the categories she refuses to fit. Through Fevvers, Carter’s neo-Victorian novel challenges the image of Britain and British history upon which Thatcherite policy and ideology rested. Revisiting this text in the contemporary context of discourses about British “independence” from Europe, imperial nostalgia and the rise in racially-motivated violence, as I propose to do, therefore seems especially timely and vital.

[1] Thatcher, Margaret. “TV Interview for London Weekend Television Weekend World (“Victorian Values”)”. Interview by Brian Walden. 1983.

Anna Rivers is a PhD student at the University of Warwick, researching the poetry of Emily Brontë, Christina Rossetti and Mathilde Blind. Her thesis concentrates on how poststructuralist ideas of spectrality and haunting intersect with sound studies, looking at resonance, rhythm and echo as ways of renegotiating the limitations and possibilities of ethics, memory, mourning and subjectivity. More broadly her research interests cover poetry and poetics, feminist theory, spectrality, the supernatural, disability studies, monster theory, affect theory, posthumanism, phenomenology, Romantic and Victorian studies and the long nineteenth century.