Narrative Cultural Stereotypes

5.2 Freedom/Independence

Fevvers wings are not the only way to make money, what of course allows her to be independent of others and find her self-realization as an aerialist, but they also allow her to be free in a broader sense. With the help of this “abode of limitless freedom“(Carter 45) Fevvers manage to escape from the burning brothel, Madame Schreck museum, and Mr. Rosencrutz, because wings can transfer her and she can consequently survive. There is a very interesting distortion of time and space in the scene where Fevers escapes the Grand Duke. She dropped the toy train on the Isfahan runner – mercifully, it landed on its wheels – as, with a grunt and whistle of expelled breath, the Grand Duke ejaculated. In those few seconds of his

It does not matter whether the toy train had become real or she somehow transport herself to the real train and the railway station, Fevvers is again free only because she wanted to be free. Makinen writes that in Angela Carter’s “Nights at the circus” "the focus is on mocking and exploding ...constructive cultural stereotypes" (qtd. in Peach 131) and by creating ambiguous Fevvers who is “resolutely unbounded by external definitions of self: she is at once (in a paradoxical and disorienting way) female and not-female, human and bird, virgin, and whore, angel and Cockney commoner” ( Hentiuk 423), she succeeds in presenting different feminist issues from a new perspective. Moreover, the novel also has the metafictional aspect; Carter is rewriting not the history, but the cultural narratives. For example, the final scene of Fevvers and Walser love making suggest women as a dominating person because “nature had equipped her only for the ‘woman on top position’. It also alludes to the story of the rape of Zeus and Leda in the form of swan, but in this scene, Carter inverts the classical stereotype of a male figure whose wings overwhelm a woman (Day