Female monster

A free woman in an unfree society will be a monster. (Carter, 1978, The Sadeian Woman)
Slide 2
Depiction of Fevvers in terms of the monstrous
Bakhtin says that the grotesque body is contrary to the classic images of the finished, completed
man; cleansed of, or liberated from, the social construction and evaluation of the body, it exists
only in its materiality. If the body beautiful is the completed, formed social body, then the body
grotesque is the incomplete, the unformed (Fiske 88).
The vast feminine body is thus far from the centre and boundless.
She-monsters are thought to be grotesquely large, their size makes them both fascinating and
terrifying.
Fevvers called a big girl (2006: 7), twice as large as life (13), a six foot two (8) as being
divinely tall (12) and as a Nordic giant (28). In addition, she is described as [w]ell-grown
(29), large woman (38), the enormous girl (181) and giantess (42, 51, 143). Fevvers
wings: tremendous red and purple pinions (4)
Fevvers is large because of her enormous feet (18), her white teeth are big (18), her arms are
long, her eyes are great and her breastbone stuck[s] out like the prow of a ship (15).
Angela Carter writes about the she-monster: Now she looked big enough to crack the roof of the
god-hut, all wild hair and feathers and triumphant breasts and blue eyes the size of dinnerplates
(2006: 291).
Fevvers explicitly enjoys every fart that escapes her as well as every greasy morsel she stuffs in
the ever-hungry hole in her face with gargantuan enthusiasm (22). Carter is quite successful in
creating a female monster in the sense of the word implying physical aberration or largesse, and
equally importantly, in the sense of a person that is highly successful in what she or he does
(Monster, def. 5).
Through her vastness, Fevvers triumphs over Walser. She is beautiful to him because of her size.
Hugeness is something to be admired, something gorgeous.
Slide 3
In The Female Grotesque, Marry Russo writes: The classical [beautiful] body is... closed, static,
self-contained, symmetrical and sleek... the grotesque body is... multiple and changing... it is
identified with... social transformation (Russo 8). Thus, the body deformed is unclosed, not
static and is not self-contained and it is asymmetrical. As it is multiple and changing it appears
to cross boundaries of the norm and as such it appears to cross boundaries of gender as well
because huge female body is somewhat closer to a man than a woman.
Slide 4 Gender masquerade - Sophie Fevvers as monstrous male:
Barbara Creed argues in her book The Monstrous Feminine that the female monster is defined
in terms of her sexuality. The phrase monstrous-feminine emphasizes the importance of gender
in the construction of her monstrosity (Creed 3).

With sexuality seen as something unstable that is constructed and not inborn, the monster woman
may change her sexuality to something that is perceived to be outside the social norm. She
evades and disturbs this norm, thus, she is deviant.
As Barbara Creed writes: [T]he notion of the monstrous-feminine challenges the view that
femininity, by definition, constitutes passivity (Creed 151). Fevvers is by no means passive.
She has a strong firm masculine grip (2006: 103). She opposes openly the owner of the
museum of the female monsters and with a considerable strength of character she is able to evade
some dangerous situations in which she is found throughout the story. She has muscular hands
(200) and has a disturbingly masculine fashion (166) when shaking off something from her
shoulders, she has a voice that changed like dust-bin lids. (3). It is disturbing as Fevvers is
wholly feminine in her sexual attraction of Walser and other characters, nevertheless she
possesses these masculine traits as she is active all the time and has considerable strength.
The grotesque image of her body ideally represents this ambivalence because it is continually in
the act of becoming. There is nothing remotely evil, or nasty even, about Fevvers except for the
highly personal aroma composed of perfume, stale feet, greasepaint and sweat, with a pinch of
raw gas and the stench of old fish from her dressing-room (89). Rather, Fevvers gradually
reveals herself to be a shrewd and saucy yet emotional and idealistic young woman who uses her
unique looks to advance herself economically and socially by creating a public sensation and
market herself under a brand in her own name.
Slide 5 - Female sexuality
Look again at the way her female monstrousness is particularly gendered. The crucial analysis
comes from Lizzie, who argues that Fevvers might want to "think twice about turning from a
freak into a woman" (2006: 283), because of the costs that "nature" imposes for doing so, by
which we understand that she actually means the costs of the social construction built around
female biology.
womens sexuality renders them desirable and also threatening Stephen Neale
Fevvers has a considerable propensity to tempt men, especially Walser, the fact which might be
seen as monstrous. It is especially her wings which might be seen as erotic and tempting. But
Fevverss whole being, including her voice is described in the novel as highly tempting. Walser
thinks about the heroines voice: It was as if Walser had become a prisoner of her voice, her
cavernous, somber voice, a voice made for shouting about the tempest, her voice of a celestial
fishwife (43). At the same time, he acknowledges that her voice might be not only tempting but
dangerous as well. He thinks: Her voice, with its warped, homely, Cockney vowels and random
aspirates. Her dark, rusty, dipping, swooping voice, imperious as a sirens(43).
She is a loud, rude, sweating and farting glutton who is yet capable of seducing and arousing any
man. Parading her female sexuality, Fevvers is almost intimidating in her overt use of various
instruments of artificial femininity, such as her long bottle blonde hair (19), six inch false
eyelashes (7), slabs of rouge and powder (18), and frilly intimates and corsetry (9). Nevertheless,
she strikes a likeable figure and is consequently not grotesque at all in the Romantic sense of the
term.

One character describes her as follows: the female part, or absence, or atrocious hole, or
dreadful chasm, the Abyss, Down Below, the vortex that sucks everything dreadfully down,
down, down where Terror rules (77).
By describing her as absence and atrocious hole, the character might be referring to the essence
of femininity which Fevvers represents to the men. Women, according to psychoanalysis,
represent the absence, the lack, as opposed to men. Here, in Nights at the Circus, the man seems
to fear female sexuality because he links her to Terror, but he needs it as well, as it is this
character who contacts Fevvers and invites her to his house.
Susan Lurie men fear women because the latter are not castrated, not mutilated; men fear
women can castrate them psychically and physically.
Linda Williams Affinity btw monster and Woman biological freaks whose bodies represent
fearful and threatening form of sexuality. threats to male power womens power-indifference
Slide 6 - Becoming-woman
"Lor' love you, sir!" Fevvers sang out in a voice that clanged like dustbin lids. "As to my
place of birth, why, I first saw the light of day right here in smoky old London, didn't I!
Not billed the 'Cockney Venus' for nothing, sir, though they could just as well 'ave called
me 'Helen of the High Wire,' due to the unusual circumstances in which I came ashore
for I never docked via what you might call the normal channels, sir, oh dear me, no; but,
just like Helen of Troy, was hatched.
"Hatched out of a bloody great egg while Bow Bells rang, as ever is!" (p. 7)
She was born like a bird. She is half woman-half swan - a monster hybrid
her "dark, rusty, dipping, swooping voice, imperious as a siren's" (p. 43)
Which is the reality? What is her reality? post-modern technique of doubting the reality uncanny and carnivalesque elements. Jack Walser contemplates for example, whether Fevvers
has a navel, whether she is a man or a woman or whether she is a fact or whether she is a fiction.
Fevvers, the monstrous aerialiste with wings, incorporates all conventional tropes of mythical
femininity, fusing freak and angel into one.
Slide 7
What is she? She is not entirely human either. Fevvers explains her view of 'human nature':
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. (p. 61)
First, shes not talking about the human form itself, but the mold in which it is cast: external
forces act to produce the human nature we see, bound up by gender roles and all the rest.
Second, she doesn't talk in terms of the mould being flexible, or varied, but in terms of it
being fragile. It can break, and at that point there is no "true" definition of humanity that
can apply to her.
What is she? Fevvers appears to escape social control, she is disruptive and disorderly as she is
fully independent and cares nothing for her surroundings which would call her a construed
machine. She stands for a potential threat to the patriarchal society as she is fully independent

of men and she threatens order which she disrupts and destroys. The society looks as if it does
not know how to cope with Fevvers, maybe that is why it is more convenient for it to call her the
machine instead of the human being.
Slide 8 New Woman
Breaking away from the traditional roles of manhood and womanhood, deviation, disruption of
boundaries, transgression and evasion from the norms, Fevvers hopes that in the future all
women would be the same, would be able to fly. She says: And once the old world has turned
on its axle so that the new dawn can dawn, then, ah, then! all the women will have wings, the
same as I (2006: 285). And she continues: The dolls house doors will open, the brothels will
spill forth their prisoners, the cages, gilded or otherwise, all over the world, in every land, will let
forth their inmates singing together the dawn chorus of the new transformed (285)
The dream of Fevvers appears to come true by this disintegration of the control of women and by
her final laughter which occurs exactly at the turn of the century which is expected to liberate
women.
Slide 9 deep insight of the new woman
Fevvers becomes the New Woman, who subverts the conventional, limiting concepts of
femininity by enacting them all, without reserve, to the extreme, and thus embodying the
carnivalesque grotesque. The latter is defined by Mihail Bakhtin as transgressive corporealitys
potential of subverting systems, violating boundaries, and resisting closure by its ambiguous,
open, changing, unfinished, irregular, heterogeneous, protruding, corporeal, and excessive
performance. Fevvers, an irregular, heterogeneous, changing grotesque being is the Queen of
ambiguities, goddess of in-between states (81). Fantastic and freak, Fevvers embodies the
Kristevian subject in process/on trial(9) balancing on a borderline in a grotesque body always
becoming another, performing a carnivalesque subversion of the hierarchical social order, of the
homogeneous subject, of transparent language and of conventional representations of femininity.
Fevvers is a self-parodic and self-made woman (de)constructing her patchwork wings by
recycling the divine Leda and the Swan just as much as a lowly London pigeon. She is never
what she seems to be, she performs simulacra, her repetition is a revision of icons of femininity
and an embodiment of her multiple selves, constituting a part of her confidence trick, a
subversive feminist tactic, revealing a liberating play of carnivalesque identities and narratives.
Fevvers, a subversive seductress, defies the male gaze by taking advantage of her feminine
being-looked-at-ness(21) to her slogan LOOK AT ME! she adds Look! (but) Hands off!
(15). The giantess aerialistes eyes gain an erotic investment and a feminist re-visionary
potential: She turned her immense eyes upon him, those eyes made for the stage . . . Walser felt
the strangest sensation as if these eyes of the aerialiste were a pair of sets of Chinese boxes, as if
each one opened into a world into a world into a world, an infinite plurality of worlds, and these
unguessable depths exercised the strongest possible attraction, so that he felt himself trembling
as if he, too, stood on an unknown threshold. (29, see 40, 48, 78, 87) As Mary Russo claims, the
grotesque body of the trapeze artist destabilizes gender by an ambiguous relation to the gaze: on
the one hand her being objected to the desire of the male spectator reinforces masculine power
position, but on the other hand the voyeur is obliged to look upward, and is hence diminished,
becoming dwarfed, clownish or infantilized22 due precisely to the gaze destined to master the
woman as spectacle. Fevvers subverts her spectacularity to her own ends, ambiguous, everchanging she can never be pinned down as a trophy of the male Collector.