50 pages • 1 hour read
Angela CarterNights at the Circus
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1984A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 3, Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “Siberia”
Part 3, Chapter 1 Summary
On the Trans-Siberian Railway with the other circus members, Fevvers feels trapped and restless, stuck in a rail car in the middle of the snowy wasteland. Fevvers asks Lizzie if there’s anything she can do to speed the train up a little—Fevvers reveals that Lizzie is in possession of magic, implying that the earlier trick they played on Walser with the clock was accomplished by supernatural means. However, Fevvers, now the first-person narrator, clarifies that there’s a logic to Lizzie’s magic, a logic “of scale and dimension that won’t be meddled with, which she [Lizzie] alone keeps the key of” (199). It is referred to as Lizzie’s “household magic,” and implied that it’s less “magic” and more just advanced scientific thought.
Meanwhile, the clowns can do nothing but play cards all day, adrift without their leader Buffo and too depressed by his loss to plan new acts; they are waiting “for their Christ to rise again” (200). The Colonel is elated to at last be on the road to Siberia, the next leg of his planned circus conquest; however, in reality the circus is all in shambles. The Colonel has lost Buffo, he’s lost the tiger act, he’s lost the apes; and the circus’s elephants, the symbol of the Colonel’s domination at the Ludic Game, are weakening and dying due to the cold.
The tigers, meanwhile, are kept in the wagon salon with the Princess and Mignon, where the tigers happily rip up the upholstery and are fascinated by their reflections in the mirrors that surround the entire car. The Princess is depressed, agonized by how she had to kill one of her tigers to save Mignon; the bond of trust between the Princess and her tigers is irreparably damaged.
Lizzie and Fevvers have dinner with the Colonel in the dining car, and much to Fevvers’s pleasure, are joined by Walser. During dinner, the railcar suddenly crashes and goes rolling off the tracks. Fevvers’s right wing is broken; she finds Mignon relatively unharmed, and the Princess unconscious but otherwise unhurt. Fevvers is desperate to find Walser but cannot. The tigers have vanished without a trace, and Fevvers thinks that they have “gone into the mirrors” (206). Outside, the nearby forest is on fire from the explosion of the train. The elephants have freed themselves from their chains and are using their trunks to help move debris and put out the fire. Out of the woods comes a group of people armed with guns and dragging sleighs behind them. They force the surviving members of the circus onto the sleighs at gunpoint.
Part 3, Chapter 2 Summary
Walser is alive, unconscious beneath the debris of the dining car. An unnamed woman, apparently a murderess, unearths him.
Part 3, Chapter 3 Summary
Olga Alexandrovna is a prisoner at a corrections house for female murderers, run by a woman called the Countess who feels guilty because she poisoned her husband but got away with it. The Countess keeps the murderesses imprisoned in cells arranged in a circular structure in total isolation, where the Countess sits in a chair and rotates around and stares at them all day. Olga killed her husband, but she feels that she is innocent because her action was justified since he was abusive. She further exonerates herself by reasoning that she is a loving mother. The reader can infer from this information that Olga is Ivan’s absent mother alluded to by the grandmother in Part 2. Olga’s self-exonerations give her a resiliency against the Countess’s punitive, inescapable gaze. The guards at the Corrections House are also women, and they wear hoods so that all that can be seen of them is their eyes. They are forbidden to talk to the prisoners, and total silence reigns in the Corrections House.
One day, Olga makes the bold move to touch the hand of her guard, Vera Andreyevna, and that ignites a connection between them. Olga and Vera begin communicating in any way they can and form an intimate relationship, which leads to other guards and prisoners finding common ground with each other as a group. The prison is transformed by the power of love and rises up against the Countess, who is powerless to stop them. The women arm themselves with weapons and food and march out from the Corrections House.
Part 3, Chapter 4 Summary
The escapees from the prison come upon the train wreckage and watch the procession of the circus survivors go past, led by their kidnappers; the procession includes Lizzie, the Colonel, Samson, Mignon and the Princess, the clowns, and Fevvers, moaning on her sleigh. Olga, Vera, and the other women examine the train wreck for anything they might find useful. Olga debates where she wants to go from there, longing to return to her mother and son in St. Petersburg. Olga finds Walser beneath the wreckage, however, he seems to have reverted to infancy, as he can only coo and communicate in gestures like rubbing his stomach, and he calls Olga and Vera “Mama.” When the women feed Walser some eggs, this appears to spark a memory in him, and he cries out “Cock-a-doodle-do.” Despite Olga’s reluctance, Olga and Vera are forced to leave Walser when a rescue train comes up the way, to avoid being sent back to the corrections house. Walser weeps like a child when he realizes Olga and Vera have abandoned him. He runs into the woods after them, but he is dazzled by the snow and forgets about them.
Part 3, Chapter 5 Summary
Fevvers awakens on the back of the sleigh. Lizzie tells her that they lost Ma Nelson’s time piece in the wreck, and after Fevvers losing her sword in the incident with the Duke, the two women feel that this bodes very ill indeed. Their kidnappers are part of a band of brigands that live in the woods. They take the circus survivors to their camp, which is a ramshackle assortment of huts. Fevvers is disconcerted to notice that there are no women among the brigands. The circus folk are given lodgings in a hut of their own and treated courteously; however, the brigands leave a boy with them to watch them and tend the fire, and the boy snaps the neck of one of the clowns’ poodles without a second thought when it annoys him.
The leader of the brigands summons Fevvers, alone, to his hut. He explains that his group is on the run from the law because they killed a group of Russian officials who raped their wives and daughters. The leader reveals that the brigand group was the one who blew up the train, all for the purpose of capturing Fevvers. The brigand leader is under the impression that Fevvers holds sway with the British royal family because the Colonel previously advertised (without Fevvers’s knowledge or consent) that Fevvers is engaged to the Prince of Wales in order to drum up business for the circus. Now, the brigand leader wants Fevvers to intercede on their behalf and earn the brigands clemency for their crimes. He thinks Fevvers can do this because Queen Victoria’s daughter is married to the Tsar of Russia, and so “it’s a family matter, is what it is” (231). The brigands think that if the Tsar sees the truth of what his officials did, then he will be moved to administer justice, but Fevvers finds it laughable that they think justice will be served from on high. Enraged when Fevvers tells him the truth of the matter, both regarding her fictional engagement and the mercies of sovereigns, the brigand chief destroys his room, and Fevvers calls Samson to restrain him. Fevvers returns to the lodgings the circus survivors have been given, and she, Lizzie, and Samson discuss their situation. Sometime later, a man who sounds “educated” knocks on their door, and Fevvers says in narration that this is how they “made the acquaintance of the escaped convict” (238).
Part 3, Chapters 1-5 Analysis
The theme of witness in Part 3 is established with the story of the escaped murderesses. They overcame the demeaning and imprisoning observation of the Warden through witness of each other, by loving and acknowledging each other as human. The Warden represents the oppressive observer: In reality, she was only using the murderesses to witness herself by projecting her own guilt onto all these other women and punishing them instead of herself. This recalls the clowns as a Christ figure; in Part 2, Buffo says that the audience pins their sorrows on the clown while the clown enacts scenes of absurdity to absolve them of their own suffering, just as the Countess pins her guilt on the murderesses and punishes them to attain a sense of absolution for herself. This signifies why the constraints of the observer’s perceptions are harmful: They are ultimately self-serving. A witness, in contrast, is not constraining but validating—the murderesses and the guards exemplify this when they establish relationships with each other and are “subverted” (217) to each other’s humanity, witnessing one another’s individual identities and restoring the lost sense of individuality through love.
At the beginning of Part 3 Chapter 1, the narration shifts to first-person perspective from Fevvers’s point of view. The ambiguity of the third-person narrator up until this point emphasizes the construct of Fevvers as an object, as a performance to be observed. However, even within this first-person narration, there are still instances when it abruptly switches back to third person. This indicates Fevvers’s shifting perspective of herself. Taken out of the setting of her stage persona, Fevvers feels a lost sense of identity, and the shifts in narrative perspective reinforce this. The setting of the Siberian wasteland also reinforces this: It represents the blankness that Fevvers feels in her state of transforming self-perception, foreshadowing the direction her arc will take in the remaining chapters.
This is true for Walser as well: after the accident with the rail car, he has no memory or sense of self and has regressed to child-like behaviors. This recalls Buffo’s mental breakdown at the end of Part 2, foiling Walser against Buffo and establishing Walser as a new “Christ” figure. This is reinforced by Olga and Vera unearthing Walser from the debris of the wreckage in Chapter 4; it resembles Mary Magdalene unearthing a presumed-dead Christ in the Bible. The clowns “waiting for their Christ to rise again” foreshadows that Walser will ultimately regain his sense of identity (200).
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