Between Self and Other: A Psychoanalytic Study of Identity and Subjectivity in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984)

Abstract

This study undertakes a literary and psychoanalytic examination of Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984). It centers on the concept that the novel reflects unstable identities, psychological uncertainty and the collapse of stable rational and irrational, fact and fiction boundaries through the theoretical frameworks of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Julia Kristeva.

Unlike earlier researches and scholarships which have mainly approached Nights at the Circus from feminist, carnivalesque, magical realist, and Gothic revival standpoints, this work adopts psychoanalytic study as its central critical approach. In doing so, it showcases a reading that interconnects the novel’s concerns with identity and embodiment to wider psychoanalytic debates regarding subject formation, repression, and abjection.

Central to the analysis of this research is the main character Sophie Fevvers, whose winged body represents Freud’s notion of the uncanny. Fevvers takes a position of radical ambiguity that resists stable classification. This dynamic is further explored through Freud’s notion of intellectual uncertainty which unfolds when familiar system of understanding can no longer illustrate stable meaning. As the inquiry continues, Walser’s confidence in reason deteriorates gradually, leading to a deep crisis of subjectivity.

The study further argues that the grotesque bodies present in the novel function as representation of Freud’s return of the repressed. Fevvers’ hybrid body represents desires and anxieties that cultural systems attempt to suppress but return in other forms. Walser’s transformation can be interpreted as a return of repressed of the self that had previously been concealed under the mask of rational masculinity.

Lacanian theory of mirror stage provides an additional framework in which the novel’s unstable identities can be understood. Fevvers operates as an Imaginary image exposing the constructed nature of identity. Her strategy of dissimulation within simulation challenges the possibility of an authentic self-concealed beneath appearances. Simultaneously, Walser’s degradation from a fact-seeking journalist to a circus clown, Human Chicken, and amnesia wanderer reveals the collapse of the coherent self-image linked with Lacan’s Ideal-I.  Finally, Kristeva’s concept of abjection is analyzed through grotesque bodies, bodily excess, waste, fluidity, and liminality in the novel.

This research demonstrates that Nights at the Circus uses grotesque and uncanny representations to challenge fixed ideas of identity, gender, through psychoanalytic perspectives.