“Circuses and Silences”: Angela Carter’s Circus Worlds and the Urban Family

Angela Carter’s invocation of the circus locus in her penultimate 1984 novel Nights at the Circus has been well-documented in critical works that focus on topics such as her freakish subversive feminism, but a previously unpublished short story “Caligari’s Circus” invites a fresh analysis of ways in which Carter’s engagement with and manipulation of various circus worlds in her fictions illuminates our seemingly dislocated and disparate experiences of “urban family.” Working through depictions of circus in “Caligari’s Circus,” The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, and Nights at the Circus, an analysis of the development of the circus worlds concludes that Carter is using the dissolution of boundaries in the chaotic collapse of circus worlds to illustrate the foundering boundaries between writer and reader, part of her ceaseless quest to “ask questions that can’t be asked in any other way.” Ever timely, Carter’s conjurings of circus worlds speak to our dislocated contemporary experiences through her depictions of these constantly evolving relationships, inviting us to laugh at the ridiculousness of our own performances.