<b>Womanliness as Masquerade: Tracing Luce Irigaray’s Theory in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus</b>
Keywords:
womanliness, masquerade, performativity, New Woman, Irigaray, FevversAbstract
Womanliness as Masquerade: Tracing Luce Irigaray’s Theory in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus
Abstract
Published in 1977 with a great deal of controversy within European feminist circles, Luce Irigaray’s This Sex Which Is Not One presents the author’s commentary on the modern phallocentric culture, commodification of women and their counteraction disguised within the very patriarchal structures. Irigaray, for instance, views womanliness and female submissiveness as a strategy that women have always made use of in order to develop a much more unfettered self behind such masks. Women masquerade as objects to be consumed to achieve a freer voice from the patriarchal discourse and to establish themselves as the ultimate subjects of a never-ending cultural exchange.
Irigaray’s views on female strategies such as masquerade and performativity are applicable to a feminist reading of Angela Carter’s famous postmodern novel, Nights at the Circus (1984), which critiques the patriarchal ideology with its suggestion of a New Woman. Fevvers, the protagonist of the novel, imprisons the male voice in the novel behind the invisible cage of her own world of performances and uses her womanliness to suppress the male willpower to the degree of self-submission. In this respect, this study argues that Carter’s generation of Fevvers as the New Woman is reminiscent of what Irigaray theorizes in her above article with respect to questions like womanliness, masquerade and performativity.
References
Butler, Judith (1999). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York
and London: Routledge.
Carter, Angela (2006). Nights at the Circus. London: Vintage Books.
Castle, Terry (1986). Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-
Century English Culture and Fiction. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press.
Doane, Mary Ann (1982). “Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator”.
Screen. 23. September-October. pp. 74-88.
Heath, Stephen (1986). “John Riviere and the Masquerade”. Formations of Fantasy. Eds.
Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Caplan. London and New York: Routledge. pp. 45-61.
Irigaray, Luce (1985). This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. New York:
Cornell University Press.
Kılıç, Mine Özyurt (2009). Gender-Bending Fantasies in Women’s Writing. Saarbrücken and
Berlin: VDM.
Riviere, Joan (1986). “Womanliness as a Masquerade”. Formations of Fantasy. Ed. Victor
Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan. London: Methuen.
Root, Janine (1999). Performing (and) Identity In Angela Carter's Nights a t the Circus and
Wise Children. Diss. Ontario: Lakehead University Press.
Sceats, Sarah (2007). “Performance, Identity and the Body”. Angela Carter’s Nights at the
Circus. Ed. Helen Stoddart. New York: Routledge.
Stoddart, Helen (2007). Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus. New York: Routledge.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
All papers licensed under Creative Commons 4.0 CC-BY.- Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
- Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.
Under the following terms:
Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
- No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.