Carmen Bujdei

Feminine Monstrosity Reconsidered: Sirens, Mermaids and Giant Women in Contemporary English Novels

 “All human societies have a conception of the monstrous-feminine, of what it is about woman that she is shocking, terrifying, horrific, abject.”

Barbara Creed (1986) “The Monstrous-Feminine” Screen 27:I

From the Medusa of ancient mythology to Freud’s uncanny, arising out of the encounter with the horrific sight of the mother’s genitalia[1], from Aristotle’s[2] association between the female and the monstrous to Victor Frankenstein’s horrific dismemberment of the monsterette: what all these figures of feminine monstrosity allude to is the female body as a site of abject liminality[3] – an emblem of lust, of irrepressible sexuality or of uncontrollable fecundity. If it is true that each cultural epoch needs to define those characteristics which it regards as essential to its humanity, and that only by identifying pollution phenomena, perceived as impure or dangerous, monstrous or abject, can a culture clarify and delineate more firmly the taxonomies that anomaly violates[4], it will be interesting to find out how the theme of female monstrosity resonates in the works of two contemporary English novelists, to what extent cultural clichés linking femininity to monstrosity are perpetuated or discarded.

Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1985) relates the picaresque adventures of a 19^th-century celebrated trapeze artist who is about to embark on a Grand Imperial Tour scouring the vastness of two continents. Sophie Fevvers, who is so called because of her literal endowment with wings, is referred to as “the pure child of the century that just now is waiting in the wings, the New Age in which no women will be bound to the ground”. Despite the attempts of the American journalist, Jack Walser, to denounce the birdwoman as a hoax, Fevvers – whom I perceive to have definite associations with the mythical siren figure – has complete control over the production of her own identity, including the construction of her own originary myth.

Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry (1989) revisits notions of culturally-constructed, stable gender identities, and resorts to a grafting of perspectives which renders the traditional opposition masculine-feminine, heroic-monstrous, solar-chtonian ineffectual. The 17^th-century giantess and her 20^th-century counterpart, are, literally, the colossal heroines whose very monstrosity provides the impetus for destabilising social and political hierarchies. Both the Dog Woman, a royalist who helps bring down the Puritans’ rule of terror, and her alter ego, an actively engaged environmentalist, are figures that conclusively unsettle the traditional woman-monster dyad.

Sirens at the thresholds

A woman in the shape of a monster

a monster in the shape of a woman

the skies are full of them

Adrienne Rich, Planetarium

As he proceeds to interview the winged aerialiste of Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus, Walser reluctantly gets enthralled by her narrative and appearance, becoming slowly reeled in and rendered captive by the very yarn that he attempts to unravel. Constantly on the lookout for visual and physical clues as to Fevvers’s fraudulence and bogus monstrosity, he becomes increasingly unsettled by the “marvellous giantess’s” sheer bulkiness, evincing no other flaw “in the classic cast of her features, unless their very size was a fault in itself, the flaw that made her vulgar”.

Becoming immersed into the atmosphere of specular/spectacular distortion that pervades Fevvers’s London dressing room, Walser’s discomfiture is augmented by her “appropriation of space” (Michael 1998: 211): she appears not only to enhance her narrative to mythic or even fantastic proportions but also to literally consume the enclosed space of her boudoir: “Fevvers yawned with prodigious energy, opening up a crimson maw the size of that of a basking shark, taking in enough air to lift a Montgolfier, and then she stretched herself suddenly and hugely, extending every muscle as a cat does, until it seemed she intended to fill up all the mirror, all the room with her bulk”. Intent on living up to her slogan (“Is she fact or is she fiction?”), she allows her self-devised icon to be explored by Walser primarily as it is reflected in the mirror and in another artefact, as if the inseparability of fact and fictional representation were being alluded to[5].

Fevvers’s constant wavering on the threshold of verifiable reality and illusory contrivance is illustrated by the wall-size poster in her dressing-room which arrests “l’Ange Anglaise” in a simultaneously hovering and upward-shooting flight (“a disconcerting pact with gravity”). The “steatopygous perspective” from which her ascent is illustrated (“bums aloft, you might say”) and the “tremendous red and purple pinions, pinions large enough, powerful enough to bear up such a big girl as she” are the graphic details of this “preposterous depiction” that at the same time question and confirm the massive creature’s ability to take wing. Fevvers’s “self-advertisement”, as well as her flight in the real arena, where the arrestment of her “Rubenesque body” “in slow motion” is designed to both allow the spectators “enjoy the spectacle” and to invite an “absolute suspension of disbelief” by highlighting the very “limitations of the act”, are exercises of pure simulation, whereby the impact of her self-concocted image overrides the meaning behind it, and renders the flesh, corporeality as subordinated to its mediation through representation. Fevvers “makes a spectacle of herself” (Lee 1997: 94), her very existence is dependent upon her being the “object of the male gaze” (Boehm 1998: 195), as long as she can manipulate and remain in control of her self-constructed image.

The “scopic regime” (Tucker 1998: 17) governing Walser’s (mis)guided perception of Fevvers’s morphology[6] is kaleidoscopically amplified in the ‘Fevvermania’ phenomenon (“mass hysteria and the delusion of crowds”), which accounts for the ubiquitous display of the winged woman’s picture, in consumerist fashion, on “garters, stockings, fans, cigars, shaving soap… She even lent it to a brand of baking powder; if you added a spoonful of the stuff, up in the air went your sponge cake, just as she did. Heroine of the hour, object of learned discussion and profane surmise, this Helen launched a thousand quips, mostly on the lewd side“. Far from refusing to exhibit herself as alluring surface, as the “object” of the “the eye of the beholder”, Fevvers’s “self-fashioning” demands that her misshapen body be displayed in plain view: “Look at me! With a grand, proud, ironic grace, she exhibited herself before the eyes of the audience as if she were a marvellous present too good to be played with. Look, not touch. She was twice as large as life and as succinctly finite as any object that is intended to be seen, not handled. Look! Hands off! Look at me!” This must read more than a sheer “insistence on the nature of femininity as impersonation” (Tucker idem: 18). Provided that the constant focus of the gaze[7] is on Fevvers’s nonhuman appendages, the authenticity of which might dictate her inclusion into or exclusion from the ranks of genuine freaks (“in a secular age, an authentic miracle must purport to be a hoax, in order to gain credit in the world”), and that monsters are closely related to performance and spectatorship (one etymon[8] is the Latin monstro, to show forth visible evidence), it will be interesting to detect the extent to which Fevvers’s sirenlike accessories invite a reductive or indeterminate construal of meaning. The reference to Fevvers’s eyes being “Chinese bodies” opening “into a world into a world into a world, an infinite plurality of worlds”, is an intimation of the irreducible potential of meaning inscribed across her composite body.

While critics have noticed the multiplicity of interpretations[9] to which Fevvers’s body generously lends itself, the possibility of reading the “Virgin Whore” as a 19^th-century replica (informed by a 20^th-century perspective) of mythical sirens has not yet been investigated. Classical sirens, as human-beast composites, displayed avian characteristics[10], predating mermaids in ancient myths and bestiaries. Denizens of earth and water, their hybrid morphology, transgressive of the boundary between animal and human, was also reflected in the liminal space they straddled – rocky outposts in cut-off islands – whence by singing or playing enticingly beautiful music, they lured sailors off their course to death. Their watery habitat – see Ovid’s reference to them as “monstra maris” – led to the conflation of winged sirens in medieval representations with fish-tailed mermaids; the deceptively virginal beauty of their upper body was belied by the concealed hideousness (fish-like, scaly, abhorrent) of their nether parts.[11] The seductive weaponry deployed by sirens, variously depicted as devouring monsters, anthropophagi who preyed on living mortals, resided either in their mellifluous voices[12], or in the promised knowledge of “all that happens on the much suffering earth”: Odysseus, of course, vanquished the sea temptresses by outwitting them.

Fevvers is repeatedly referred to as singing out in a “raucous and metallic” voice, sounding at times rather like the “clanging of contralto or even baritone dustbins”. Walser becomes “a prisoner of her voice, her cavernous, sombre voice, a voice made for shouting about the tempest, her voice of a celestial fishwife. Musical as it strangely was, yet not a voice for singing with; it comprised discords, her scale contained twelve tones. Her voice, with its warped, homely, Cockney vowels and random aspirates. Her dark, rusty, dipping, swooping voice, imperious as a siren’s.” However, in building up the atmosphere of growing enchantment and mesmerizing stupor that enthrals Walser to the point of his losing touch with reality, Carter seems to have emphasised the latter aspect of the sirens’ arsenal, that is the exclusive knowledge promised to the inquiring reporter, the “whole truth and nothing but”, which she has never revealed to any living man before: “Now, sir, I shall let you into a great secret, for your ears alone and not for publication, because I’ve taken a liking to your face, sir.” The lesson that Fevvers offers the self-assured, sceptical American journalist, who is here to expose her as one of the “Great Humbugs of the World,” is that her identity, her meaning is sheer fluidity, that it cannot be ossified into a mere tag.

While the protagonist of Nights at the Circus is indeed a “fabulous bird-woman”, at various points during her interview with Walser she is clearly foregrounded as a sea enchantress. Walser notices the “marine aroma”, the core ingredient of the “essence of Fevvers”, which amalgamates into an almost “solid composite of perfume, sweat, greasepaint and raw, leaking gas”. The ice on which their champagne is cooled comes from a fishmonger’s, “for a shiny scale or two stayed trapped within the chunks.” Walser’s determination that there is “something fishy about the Cockney Venus” is gradually substantiated by his sighting in Fevvers’s boudoir “a writhing snakes’ nest of silk stockings, green, yellow, pink, scarlet, black” and even a corset that looks like “the pink husk of a giant prawn emerging from its den”. He becomes so enmeshed in Fevvers’s narrative, that his “brain is turning to bubbles” to the point of hallucinating about seeing a “fish, a little one, a herring, a sprat, a minnow, but wriggling, alive-oh, go into the bath when she tipped the jug.” Another clue to Fevvers’s representation as a siren-mermaid composite is the account of her maiden flight: not only are the wing movements “not dissimilar to those of a human swimmer,” but flying itself is defined as cutting “a corridor through the invisible liquidity of the air.” Fevvers’s maiden flight poses her at the brink of the borderline of species: its successfulness would imply a commitment to her “irreparable difference”, which is not necessarily morphological, but essential, profound: “I feared a wound not of the body but the soul, sir, an irreconcilable division between myself and the rest of humankind. I feared the proof of my own singularity.”

Nonetheless, the most overt signifiers of Fevvers’s transgressive nature are her much publicised “feathery appendages”. Her assumed anatomical doubleness is evinced by her allegiance to both the human and the avian species (see her refusal to “strike […] or harm another mortal even in self-defence” or to “touch a morsel of chicken, or duck, or guineafowl and so on, not wanting to play cannibal”). Her ostensibly displayed swan’s wings, emerge into the discourse as an occlusive sign (a conundrum Walser feels empowered to demystify), which then circulates excessively in an escalating spiral of signification. Based on her purported circumvention of the normal channels of creation (like Helen of Troy, this “Helen of the High Wire” was “hatched out of a bloody great egg”), Fevvers claims mythical ancestry by soldering the “mystery” of her parentage (“my father and my mother both utterly unknown to me, and, some would say, unknown to nature”) onto the image of Leda’s ravishment by the swan god: “I always saw, as through a glass, darkly, what might have been my own primal scene, my own conception, the heavenly bird in a white majesty of feathers descending with imperious desire upon the half-stunned and yet herself impassioned girl”.

Through the caked surface of this painting, prior to the narcissistic contemplation of her mirrored surface, Fevvers claims to have experienced an intuitive realisation of her selfhood as hyphenated alterity; in Lacanian terms, the subject, initially experiencing itself as a fragmented body, a body in pieces, perceives a specular, exterior image to be what it inside already is: a composite self that contains its own dynamic contradiction. The London aerialiste’s body is an occluding referent around which an entire “Fevvermania” is spun, which refuses commodification into a specific, quantifiable meaning, and which, in a catachrestic volley of self-staged representations, ultimately reveals Fevvers’s radical indeterminacy.

Her somatic hybridity can no longer be translated merely as the perilous female sexuality that ancient or medieval sirens embodied, for she destabilises “all sorts of fundamental boundaries” (Booker 1991: 223): in addition to her challenging the human-animal distinction, she not only straddles the boundaries separating the animate from the inanimate (in Ma Nelson’s brothel, her initial assignment is to pose as a sculpture of Cupid), but she also conflates the boundaries of gender, deflating stereotypical views of woman as a delicate, ethereal creature: “Her face, in its Brob­dingnagian symmetry, might have been hacked from wood and brightly painted up by those artists who build carnival ladies for fairgrounds or figureheads for sailing ships. It flickered through his mind: Is she really a man?” Moreover, her fluid, anamorphic identity conflates the monster-angel opposition that writers like Gilbert and Gubar (1984) have identified to govern patriarchal representations of womanhood. When in Ma Nelson’s home she assumes the pose of the Winged Victory, her accessories include a sword, which undercuts her angelic, protective role (“At close quarters, it must be said that she looked more like a dray mare than an angel”). “L’Ange Anglaise” is in effect temporarily incarcerated in the traditional image of the castrating woman (“as if a virgin with a weapon was the fittest guardian angel for a houseful of whores”), yet despite the magnificence and grandeur of her attire, her inadvertent revenge at this reification is not long awaited, bringing about the collapse of the business: “it may be that a large woman with a sword is not the best advertisement for a brothel.”

Fevvers’s materialism and greed (“she dreamed, at nights, of bank accounts […] to her, the music of the spheres was the jingling of cash registers”) approximate at times the harpies’ voracity and insatiability. Given the illusion of corporeal beauty as well as the dangerous femininity of monstrous sirens, medieval Christian representations of sin often resorted to them as symbols of lechery and concupiscence, conjoining their morphology with that of the harpies: a shift from beautiful maid above the navel, bird below the waist to hideous clawed monsters (“her white teeth are big and carnivorous as those of Red Riding Hood’s grandmother”)[13]. Fevvers’s boudoir routine involves considerable scatology. Her gluttony and enormous, unappeasable appetite acquire gargantuan dimensions: she can devour “a Fujiyama of mashed potatoes; a swamp of dried peas cooked up again and served swimming in greenish liquor”. Her table manners are repugnant: she “gorged, she stuffed herself, she spilled gravy on herself, she sucked up peas from the knife; she had a gullet to match her size and table manners of the Elizabethan variety. /…/ She wiped her lips on her sleeve and belched. She gave him another queer look, as if she half hoped the spectacle of her gluttony would drive him away, but, since he remained, notebook on knee, pencil in hand, sitting on her sofa, she sighed, belched again.” Fevvers’s flaunting of any rules for decorous female behaviour has been seen to reflect a Bakhtinian inscription of the potential for subversiveness in the fluid, unfinished and open female body[14]. Carter’s “highly carnivalesque treatment” of the female body as excessive physicality, abject matter – Fevvers is a “mistresspiece of exquisite feminine squalor”  – appears to parodically challenge both the patriarchal and the feminist appropriations of the woman-matter complex. In this sense, Fevvers’s liminality translates an opposition to any essentialized idea of the feminine and a deconstruction of representation stereotypes.[15]

The paradoxical Fevvers refuses any attempt to have her meaning ossified into a quantifiable equation, for here is a purported freak who, instead of having her body examined by the Royal College of Surgeons, does not even so much as unbutton her bodice, entertaining their curiosity with a three-hour lecture on navigation in birds “with such infernal assurance and so great a wealth of scientific terminology that not one single professor had dared be rude enough to question her on the extent of her personal experience”. Like the figure in the carpet, Fevvers’ monstrosity – understood as a transgression of all categorical boundaries – is complex and circuitous, refusing even containment in a fetishistic iconography as elaborate and pompous as that of Mr. Rosencreutz: “Queen of ambiguities, goddess of in‑between states, being on the borderline of species…. Lady of the hub of the celestial wheel, creature half of earth and half of air, virgin and whore, reconciler of fundament and firmament, reconciler of opposing states through the mediation of your ambivalent body, reconciler of the grand opposites of death and life.”

The museum of female freaks

I want you for my museum of woman monsters. (NC 55)

Given the dangerous slippage of spectatorial desire into fetishism or voyeurism (Tucker ibid: 18), as well as the mixture of desire and fear elicited by the female body as a potential “site of dangerous excess”[16], the possibility of the woman who self-manages the production of her own representation losing control of her spectacular/specular image is always pending. Reification of the female body into the object of the gaze of the beholder is what afflicts not merely Fevvers, in her chilling encounters with prototypal male Gothic antagonists such as Rosencreutz or the Grand Duke, but an entire array of other women characters, whose deformity of the soul or of the body is fully exploited in various horrific stagings of or variations on the motif of the freak show.

In her survey of gothic monstrosity across the 19^th and the 20^th centuries, Halberstam argues that gothic strikes a markedly “modern preoccupation with boundaries and their collapse” (1995: 23), in that it constitutes a versatile narrative technology of producing “the monster as a remarkably mobile, permeable, and infinitely interpretable body” (idem: 21); the monsters of modernity become “meaning machines” (ibid), characterized by their increasing proximity to humans and configuring otherness no longer as a single negative identity, but as a complex of race, nationality, gender, sexuality and class: “any kind of alterity can be inscribed across (constructed through) the monstrous body” (cf Cohen 1996: 7). The accretion of women’s bodies that verge on monstrous aberration in Madame Schreck’s museum signals how a doubly marginal creature[17] (the female monster), onto whom masculine anxieties concerning women’s alleged proclivity towards sexual duplicity have been ingrained, has served to legitimate the establishment of male prerogatives of power.

As if responding to the feminist statement[18] that womanhood is a body hybrid that amalgamates and integrates difference and heterogeneity (“women”) without completely reducing and absorbing its components into a monolithic corpus (“woman”), Carter adduces evidence to the manner in which an ostensibly “misogynistic” period such as the 19^th century attempted to reify femininity in an inventory of clichéd portrayals. Fevvers’ landing in Madame Schreck’s subterranean museum of female freaks coincides with her exploration of one of the most horrendous Gothic sites: here, encased in underground niches, can simultaneously be admired and abhorred[19] a startling array of female marvels and quasi-hominid freaks, some sort of “anatomical performers” (Russo 1998: 228) who cater for the voyeuristic needs of equally grotesque males[20]. The sense of claustrophobia that translates the arrestment of women within the masculine dictates of bodily representation points to the containment of woman’s desire for “self-representation” (see Robinson idem: 11).

What is variously referred to as the “lumber room of femininity”, or the “rag-and-bone shop of the heart” is a disaffected wine cellar lodged in the bowels of a gloomy abode in Kensington, which exhibits all the ominous ingredients of the stock gothic mansion: a “melancholy garden” with “worn grass” and “leafless trees”, a soot-blackened façade “as if the very stucco were in mourning”, tightly barred shutters and even the door knocker swathed in crepe. The male guardian and caretaker of the place is no less a monstrous creature than the women he has in custody. Toussaint eats through a tube up his nose “liquids only but sufficient to sustain life”, and Fevvers again provides “scientific verification” for this case: a mouth-insertion surgery was allegedly performed on him at St Bartholomew’s Hospital[21], even the news is to be found in a paper (“You’ll find a full account of the operation in The Lancet for June, 1898, sir.”). The vault or crypt where the “girls” are displayed in “profane altars” (“stone niches cut out of the slimy walls”) is dubbed the “Down Below” or “The Abyss”. The show routine involves “some gent” selecting the masked outfit of his choice (the most dreaded one being “the executioner’s hood”) and being ushered in by Madame Schreck, with all the background effects characteristic of gothic horror: requiem tunes, “clanking of chains”, candles throwing “all manner of shadows” on the bleak and “sweating walls”; however, the Dantesque innuendoes are there all right: Madame Schreck “comes like Virgil in Hell, with her little Dante trotting after” arousal of expectation and desire (“deliciously scarified anticipation”), skilfully slipped questions: “Shall I open the curtain? Who knows what spectacle of the freakish and unnatural lies behind it!”

To the extent that Nights at the Circus queries the relationship between “women as spectacle, and women as producers of spectacle” (Russo idem: 234) – examples of such female countercultures ranging from Ma Nelson’s brothel to Countess P’s self-gratifying panopticon – Madame Schreck’s manipulation of women into dematerialised images betrays the highest degree of complicity with the patriarchal establishment: she is indeed “the body as performance in extremis” (idem), “some kind of wicked puppet that pulled its own strings”. The “female prodigies of nature” (Fanny Four-Eyes, the Sleeping Beauty, the under three-foot high Wiltshire Wonder, the bipartite Albert/Albertina, who was “half and half and neither of either” and Cobwebs), whose identities become all surface – “arrested images of various ‘perversions’ of femininity assembled for penetration by the male gaze”[22] in a gallery of “tableaux vivantes” – differ from the prostitutes under the care of Ma Nelson, for if the latter “accommodated those who were perturbed in their bodies”, Madame Schreck “catered for those who were troubled in their … souls”. While Ma Nelson functioned as a sort of catalyst of desire, who “wished to verify that, however equivocal, however much they cost, the pleasures of the flesh were, at bottom, splendid”, Madame Schreck is a “connoisseur of degradation” and a “scarecrow of desire”, whose business is not in the female body trade, since what she has for hire is the “idea” of woman.

In this world crammed with bodies transfigured and deformed, the denizens of “Down Below” are integrated into an amalgamative female body whose perpetually transgressed borders place the limits of identity under ceaseless interrogation.  For instance, Fanny’s corporal deformity is reminiscent one of the Plinian races[23], the Blemmyae[24], who were once thought to inhabit the marvellous margins of imagined geographies. While Fanny’s “mamillary eyes” should account for an augmented power of vision – as they enable her to see the same as with her top ones, only “lower down” – they nevertheless segregate her from the rest of womanhood, barring her from experiencing maternity, for “How can you nourish a baby on salt tears?” Another female exhibit, the Wonder, is a diminutive dancer whose high kicks resemble the “opening up a pair of embroidery scissors”. Not only is she at the antipodes of Fevvers’ size, but her attitude to displaying her body is contrasted with the gigantic woman’s exhibitionism: the reason for degrading herself in the “house of shame” is concealment, for she would rather expose herself to private viewings than perform for “an entire theatre-full of the horrid, nasty, hairy things”. To the Wonder, confinement in the Abyss means the protection and camouflage provided by the proximity of same-self creatures: “Amongst the monsters, I am well hidden; who looks for a leaf in a forest?” This desire for similarity in difference, while recalling the desperate plea of Frankenstein’s monster for a companion in the likes of himself[25], corresponds, as Becker remarks (1999: 54), to the emergent construction of a sense of self as other, implying the subject’s self-recognition as monstrous, as well as an awareness of the mainstream repudiation of otherness and difference.

The only female exhibit lying prostrate in The Abyss is the Sleeping Beauty, a “living corpse” and clearly a rewriting of the fairytale pattern of damsels in distress being awakened to full life by the kiss of a prince. Hers is a “tragic case”: her soporific state is triggered by her very sexual maturation (“the very day her menses started, she never wakened”). As her “dreaming body” is taken to the crypt, her female flow subsides, her hair starts growing in a portentous unleashing of dormant sexuality. That the slumbering beauty is not a “dreamless sleeper” (a disturbing revelation evinced by the continuous convulsions and twitching of her limbs “as a dog’s paws do when it dreams of rabbits”, by her restless eyeballs continually rolling under the closed eyelids that are dark like “the underskins of mushrooms”, or by her moaning and crying out, punctuated by a soft laughter) and that her recumbent effigy should be guarded by the resplendent Fevvers masquerading as “the tombstone angel”, “the Angel of Death”, “Death the Protectress” with her wings fully spread, attest to an insistent portrayal of female sexuality as resilient, always on the verge of erupting in the most stifling of environments, such as Madame Schreck’s “chamber of imaginary horrors”.

From holy harlots to warring suffragettes

The French poet, sir; a poor fellow who loved whores not for the pleasure of it but, as he perceived it, the horror of it, as if we was, not working women doing it for money but damned souls who did it solely to lure men to their dooms, as if we’d got nothing better to do… Yet we were all suffragists in that house; oh, Nelson was a one for “Votes for Women”, I can tell you! (NC 38)

In The Sadeian Woman, Carter expresses her endorsement of the moral pornographer, an artist whose “true obscenity”[26] critiques “current relations between the sexes” and involves, through a “total demystification of the flesh”, the projection of a world model where “absolute sexual license for all the genders” would dislocate “our culture[‘s]” distorting contempt for women (1979: 19-20). Tucker (ibid: 12) remarks that Carter’s cultural study of pornography came out at a time when a heated debate around the issue of pornography emerged in feminist circles, some of its detractors conflating it with the aggressive societal relegation of women in positions of inferiority[27]. Longino, for instance, makes a strong case against pornography on feminist grounds, decrying its injurious, libellous character – the fostering of sexist, male-centred attitudes and its reinforcement of the suppression and exploitation of women, by subjecting them to an objectifying and dehumanising portrayal: “pornography is verbal or pictorial material which describes sexual behaviour that is degrading or abusive to one or more of the participants in such a way as to endorse the degradation” (1980: 221).  In Nights at the Circus, the commodification of women in Ma Nelson’s brothel, where they can share in the management of the masquerade of “libidinal gratification” as well as derive financial satisfaction from it, allows them to experience a “degree of explicitly sexualized freedom” (Tucker ibid: 17). Fevvers becomes Carter’s acclaimed “virginal” prostitute of The Sadeian Woman: “At least the girl who sells herself with her eyes open is not a hypocrite and, in a world with a cash‑sale ideology, that is a pos­itive, even a heroic virtue” (55).

Angela Carter’s contention in Nights at the Circus is that in the midst of marginalized subcultures there germinate the seeds of social transformation and reform. Not only are the prostitutes sheltered by Ma Nelson’s establishment contained within the contours of “a wholly female world”, to the exclusion of even the male representatives of the canine or feline species, but the brothel, officially inscribed in historiographic discourse as the site for lewd gratification of the flesh is subversively revealed to be an unorthodox academy, with a well-stacked library where even abstruse or hermetic material can be perused by its unconventional students. Fevvers’s estimation of the male patrons’ loss of interest in brothels as triggered by the fin-de-siècle feeling of malaise which she assigns to the influence of the French poète maudit, Baudelaire[28], refutes the end of the 19^th-century biased conception of “fallen” women as demonic sirens, whose sole intent is to dispatch a tragic fate to men, and reveals instead the political commitment of the suffragette harlots. Ma Nelson’s brothel (she is a “one-eyed, metaphysical madame, in Whitechapel”) is not simply a site for the exploitation of female bodies, or merely a “repository of so many bittersweet memories and humiliation and camaraderie, of whoring and sisterhood”, but a veritable “academy” whose members are constantly exposed to learning (“We all engaged in our intellectual, artistic or political […] pursuits and, as for myself, those long hours of leisure I devoted to the study of aerodynamics and the physiology of flight”) and political awareness (“we were all suffragists in that house; oh, Nelson was a one for ‘Votes for Women’”).

The fin-de-siècle association between prostitutes and their mythical counterparts, the sirens, was also prominent in medieval discourse, where their common denominator resided in their lasciviousness and their deadly threat. It is useful, therefore, for a comparative outlook, to consider Carter’s reassessment of the prostitute identity in the context of the 19^th-century commodification of female sexuality alongside with medieval representational practices of siren prostitutes. Hassig (1999: 79-81) considers the sirens depicted in medieval bestiaries to be the most frequent icons of moral depravity, serving as caveats against lewdness of behaviour and against the perils of female sexuality. Moreover, she highlights the identification of siren representations in bestiary texts with the ubiquitous social class of harlotry (sirens as aquatic harlots, or meretrices[29]). Whereas it is difficult to claim that female prostitution could be regarded as having represented a subjective, intrinsic identity in the Middle Ages, it is the awakening of a group identity at the turn of the 20^th century – Ma Nelson’s employees emerging as a self-conscious and self-assertive occupational category – that Carter’s novel appears to emphasise. Prostitution, as an externally demarcated, socially constructed and sexually determined identity, is not necessarily confined to the 19^th-century scientia sexualis[30]. Karras (1999: 159) takes issue with Foucauldian supporters of sexual identities being mainly constructs of 19^th-century bourgeois society, and, adopting Sedgwick’s concept of “minoritizing discourses”[31] around sexuality, examines the shaping of the medieval prostitutes’ identitarian category. In Carter’s novel, this group identity has already emerged, as Fevvers presumptuously confesses to her upbringing in the brothel (“in a brothel bred, sir, and proud of it”), where she served as a statuary emblem of the establishment.

Given the impossibility for past marginalized groups such as prostitutes to encode or textualise their experience, one must necessarily look – for a more or less ”reliable” and “accurate” reading of historical fact – at the manner in which societal systems of classification and dominant discourses framed an externally imposed identity onto these individuals[32]. What Carter’s novel does is exactly to allow such a marginalized minority as that of prostitutes to voice their own perception of subjectivity, valorising it in the process. For instance, while Hassig contends that the containment of the medieval prostitutes’ pollution behaviour[33] could be enforced through prescriptive codes, including sumptuary legislation and clothing regulations which compelled them to display such visual signals as the garish striped headgear, for the presumed 19^th-century star aerialiste, with all her declared exhibitionism, the wearing of similar stigmatising yet glamorous accessories is a prerequisite endorsing the success of her show: “[o]n her back she bore an airy burden of furled plumage as gaudy as that of a Brazilian cockatoo”.

However, even this negative, outwardly constructed identity appears to be slightly undercut by what Karras outlines as, on the one hand, the medieval prostitutes’ incipient sense of solidarity and pride in their collective identity[34], and, on the other hand, the compelling imagery of holy harlots, sinners converted into saints, who became potent symbols of repentance and charted the most profound identitarian reorientation and transformation that the Middle Ages could envisage. In Carter’s novel, apart from picturing the brothel as a site of emancipation and its employees as the mouthpieces for various strands of feminism, ranging from a most “subversive utopian variety” to “an engaged Marxist one” (see Michael 1998: 206), the persistent image is that of women witnessing the demise of old structures of power (along with “the fag-end, the smouldering cigar-butt, of a nineteenth century” being “ground out in the ashtray of history”) and empowering themselves in the process. Thus, even the abused and “monstrified”[35] members of Madame Schreck’s extreme version of a brothel recuperate their essential humanity: the Lilliputian Wonder is persuaded to return to her adoptive Brobdingnagian family, casting aside the divergence of size that has so far been seen to segregate otherwise similar humans; Fanny sets up an orphanage, “so now she has twenty lovely babies to call her ‘mama’”; Cobwebs establishes a “fine reputation as a painter in chiaroscuro” and the Sleeping Beauty’s “marvellous fate” is to bestow her “lifelike” dream onto “the coming century”, anticipating the total divestment of female sexuality from its abject undertones. Above all reigns supreme “the common daughter of half-a-dozen mothers”, Fevvers, who “has all the éclat of a new era about to take off.”

Hybrid identities

My mother, when she saw me patiently trying to make a yield between a Polstead Black and a Morello, cried two things: ‘Thou mayest as well try to make a union between thyself and me by sewing us at the hip,’ and then, ‘Of what sex is that monster you are making? (SC 78-79)

The title of Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry (1989) refers to determining the gender of a cherry tree that has been subjected to grafting. Whereas for the 17^th-century natural scientists who perform it – the royal gardener Tradescant and his apprentice – grafting is a legitimate means of begetting disease-resistant, climate-inured plants by fusing tender and vigorous subspecies, for the Church, it is clearly associated with unnatural, monstrous births, “without seed or parent”, which circumvent the normal, God-given channels of procreation. The possibility of applying this process to humans is hinted at by both the gargantuan motherly figure of the Dog-Woman, who likens the grafting of two cherry scions to an incestuous suture of cross-human limbs, and by the foundling son himself, Jordan, who “wondered whether it was an art I might apply to myself”. Jordan’s quest for a hardier, more accomplished “heroic” self implies, more than scouring the world’s oceans in search of exotic fruits (he is “identified” as the first sea-faring explorer who fetched the scaly pineapple from outlandish Barbados to England, just in time to be relished by the newly crowned monarch, Charles II), a sequence of metaphorical fusions with the spirits of self-poised women he encounters. In outlining the male protagonist’s journey as informed by a heroic quest but as effected through an exploration of feminine experiences, Winterson disrupts the rigid, culturally-inscribed boundaries that demarcate and objectify identities into unequivocally sexed bodies, opting instead for charting a fluid bodily geography that allows for mergings, crisscrossings and reinscriptions of one’s gendered identity.

On one fantasmatic return to the city of Jordan’s mind, he accompanies a female cleaner whose menial service consists not in scrubbing the cobbled streets, but in erasing, from a balloon, a thickening canopy of hovering words that amass in violent, life-threatening throngs and acquire a repulsively visual, as well as olfactory, materiality. Far from being ethereal, disembodied carriers of logos and reason, the indelible words that get “trapped under the sun” and “form a thick cloud over the city” are not merely polluting emissions that need cleansing, but also aggressive, ferocious entities inflicting malicious laceration (“biting”, “mauling”) on the street cleaners’ flesh. The concrete visualization of language as a noxious effluvium released by “people in the streets who, not content with the weight of their lives, continually turned the heaviest of things into the lightest of properties” unbalances the traditional dichotomy spirit-matter, whereby the former term has tended to assume precedence over the latter; in true deconstructive fashion, the rigid demarcation between these polar opposites is seen to slacken and collapse, bringing about an interrogation of other hierarchically structured pairs of opposite such as high-low, masculine-feminine, normal-abnormal or heroic-monstrous.

In the very same city of words, Jordan can enhance his collection of odd life experiences, which contribute to constantly remoulding his heroic pursuit[36]. He reminisces exploring a floorless house where diners, either lying in gilded chairs suspended from the ceiling or walking about on tightropes, feast above a bottomless crocodile-infested abyss, ignoring their “ever-downward necessity and [continuing] ever upward, celebrating ceilings but denying floors”. That the residents of this, by now, deserted house should have turned oblivious to the fact that the chasm underneath is in actuality a garden of scented strawberries, “some clutched in spiders’ webs like forgotten rubies”, attests to the perils ensuing from rigidly divorcing matter and spirit. It is at this point of utter disregard for matter that Jordan’s pursuit of Fortunata, the elusive “woman whose face was a sea voyage I had not the courage to attempt”, begins, leading him through downward-spiralling “circles of infamy” (read “cafes, casinos and bawdy-houses”) to experience, in travesty[37], the gothic version of a harem, a brothel where the female detainees take nightly flights from the “Locked Citadel” via underground streams to the nearby Convent of the Holy Mother. The proximity of the lewd and the holy, of the heavy and the light is all too apparent, in so far as the proceeds of one are revealed to have financed the other all along, and as the treasure vault of prostitutes is one day found to have been deserted by the recently converted novitiates at the convent.

Accustomed to the female attire, Jordan decides “to continue as a woman for a while”, taking a job on a fish stall and deeming himself in female disguise as “a traveller in a foreign country”, where he is abhorred as well as fascinated to learn about a conspiracy concocted by women in order to compensate for their absence of power, which at the societal level, seems an exclusively male prerogative. Much aggrieved by the women’s manual of hatred against men that he is conspiratively let into, yet even more discomforted by what he perceives to be its underlying accuracy, Jordan is snatched away from the bevy of unfortunate females by ravenous birds of prey, which, “somehow imagining [him] as a great fish”, carry him across the seas, teeming with Tropics-bound ships, to other imaginary sites. These include a city whose inhabitants outwit the creditors by regularly tearing down and rebuilding their houses in ever-changing locations so that buildings vanish and reemerge in a disconcertingly anamorphic array (with houses being successively displaced by museums or by windmills); this subterfuge and “most fulfilling pastime” accounts for the extraordinary longevity of the denizens of this city who have reconciled two discordant desires, fixedness and perpetual motion. An interregnum simile is again employed concerning mankind at large – “since settling down and rooting like trees, but without the ability to make use of the wind to scatter our seed, we have found only infection and discontent” – as a means of suggesting the lassitude and pathogenic vexation of a once nomadic species.

It is in this shifting urban geography, architecturally mirroring its dwellers’ grafted identity (at once static and dynamic), that Jordan is told the stories of the twelve dancing princesses, who, at night time, used to escape the paternal cage and embark on dancing sprees in the silver city; the novel, which has up to this point grafted the perspectives and alternative narratives of Jordan and his mother, now embeds yet another scion, the multi-headed fabulous tale (in a feminist revisionary grid) of abused, maltreated or deceived women who have carried out the letter of the manual of hatred against men and set up an all-female community.

Jordan is greeted at the entrance of a circular chamber by the princesses and their attending maid, actually a mermaid (now spouse to one of the princesses), described as “very beautiful but without fine graces”, and whose irresistible gluttony compels her to gobble at Jordan’s piscine offertory, “dropping [the fish] back into her throat the way you or I would an oyster”. While Jordan has so far pursued a fantastic picaresque voyage searching for a union with the idealised figure of Fortunata (the twelfth dancing princess, absent from the premises), his quest is rendered futile by the dismaying catalogue of abortive heterosexual unions, suggesting somehow the impossibility of the traditional idea of happy marriage. For instance, one princess who is a collector of religious items, including “the still-born foetus of the infamous Pope Joan”, retaliates at her husband’s interference with her hobby and immolation of the wrapped-up body of a saint’s relics, mummifying him in return. Another princess rewrites the Rapunzel tale by rendering the cohabitation of the maiden and the hag in the windowless tower a self-willed lesbian union, eventually intruded upon by a reckless, senseless male. Yet another resents her husband’s excessive greed and gargantuan appetite, feeding him on a poisonous potion that after causing his belly to swell out of proportion, triggers its explosion and release of “a herd of cattle and a fleet of pigs”.

The tragic end to which many of the husbands come in these tales – slaying, dismemberment, evisceration – is synthetically resumed in mythical frame in the story recounted by Fortunata herself, when she is encountered at her dancing academy on the magical island: Artemis, who vengefully kills Orion with a scorpion after her ravishment, becomes an emblematic figure of strong, self-dependent women who reject male companionship and domination. The out-of-timeness of this sacrificial act makes its endless recurrence possible, with history being rewritten ceaselessly into both the 18^th-century Dog-Woman’s massacring of the Roundheads and, even further, into the 20^th-century carnage inflicted by her environmentalist militant version.

The nonlinear journey (“always back and forth, denying the calendar; the wrinkles and lines of the body”) undertaken by Jordan renders the customary definitions of androgyny and transsexuality problematic. While it is true that in Winterson’s exploration of the relationship between the body as sexed and the body as gendered Jordan’s emergent identity is hybrid (“I thought I might become someone else in time, grafted on to something better and stronger. And then I saw that the running away was a running towards. An effort to catch up with my fleet-footed self, living another life in a different way”), corporeality is no longer a datum, a mute, inert facticity[38], but a topos under constant construction and resignification.

Gargatom refigured: giantesses and shrivelled crones

“…are they, in reality mother and daughter?

Yet, if this were so, what Nordic giant feathered the one upon the swarthy, tiny other?” (NC 28)

Gigantism and its reverse phenomenon, dwarfism, consistently occur as signifiers of monstrosity in teratological taxonomies. As Williams (1996: 111-113) notes, somatic deviances such as violations of the norm of size, through either hypertrophy or atrophy, engender figures of “exorbitance” (giants) or figures of “deprivation” (pygmies, dwarves), which function as both “physical and conceptual opposites” policing the extreme edges of the spectrum of body height. While the morphology of grotesquely huge or tiny bodies could be drawn by reference to the normal human body, viewed in its integrity, it is nevertheless true that this standard is by no means absolute, bigness and smallness existing in varying degrees within a range of relative normality. Extreme diminution or massive exaggeration of bodily size, as phenomena transgressive of prescriptive limitations, also assist in the definition of these normative boundaries: “It is not in measuring some suspected deviant against an established, absolute norm that the abnormal is derived from the normal; prior to that measurement there must have occurred a comparison of beings of a range of sizes against extremes of large and small, the maximum and the minimum, for the norm to have come into existence. In this way, the abnormal always precedes the normal, making possible the definition of the normal” (Williams idem: 113).

In both Sexing the Cherry and Nights at the Circus the female subjects are allowed to voice their own interrogation of what constitutes monstrosity – and in particular their gigantism – to the effect that they challenge their relegation to peripheral cultural and societal positions and manage to secure stations of purported centrality. Both women posit themselves as tangentially or crucially involved in decisive historical events and as interacting with historically verifiable characters, which serves to challenge the authenticity and reliability of official historical records from which the agency of such portentous female figures may have been effaced[39]. In Winterson’s novel, the 17^th-century Dog Woman is a giantess who modestly avows a focal role in both avenging the death of King Charles, by wreaking mass murder amongst the “snivelling Puritans”, and starting the Great Fire that devastated London (“a foul place, full of pestilence and rot”) in 1666.

Despite her exorbitant size (her skirt is so wide that “would serve as a sail for some war-torn ships” and her shawl is made of “a dozen blankets sewn together”), she dismisses her formidable girth as fitting the paradigm of the monstrous since “despite my handicaps I cut something of a fine figure, I thought”; the very feature that confers the Dog Woman the ex-centric position of a female woodwose becomes, for the self-querying subject, divested of its pejorative associations and even interpreted as a mark of pride: “[Jordan] was proud of me because no other child had a mother who could hold a dozen oranges in her mouth at once”. While the human community marginalizes her, she foregrounds her nonnatural hugeness as an advantage, explicitly linking it with superhuman aspects such as sheer strength and the terror she inspires: it keeps her enemies at bay and even makes her immune to the all-consuming Plague (“I have no fear of the Plague. My body is too big for sour-sickness to defeat it, and if it is a judgement on us all then surely I am the last to be judged?”. The Dog-Woman’s refusal to assume her position as “other” in a society bent on damming up “the abject or demoniacal potential of the feminine” (Kristeva 1982: 65) is clearly evinced by her radical reassessment of the female body as a hallowed site, stripped of any connotations of sinful carnality. Since “gargoyles” are typically placed outside the confines of holy enclosures such as churches, and the parson’s injunction prohibits the Dog Woman’s access to the choir stalls, she resigns herself to pursuing her calling (“singing is my pleasure”) “inside the mountain of my flesh”. The image of the spotted toads from Tradescant’s garden who “engage in madrigals and set up an anthem more fair than any choir in church”, and the Orphic valences of the Dog Woman’s “slender” voice (“[w]hen I sing the dogs sit quiet and people who pass in the night stop their jabbering and discontent and think of other times, when they were happy” contribute to querying the legitimacy of conflating physical and moral grotesqueness in what clearly emerges as a cultural inscription of morphologically “aberrant” bodies.

“Remember the rock from whence ye are hewn and the pit from whence ye are digged”: these are the words carved on the medallion that the “only woman in English fiction confident enough to use filth as a fashion accessory”, “a huge and monstrous creature with a powerful right hook and a wide vocabulary “[40] bestows onto her adopted son on the day she excavates him from the slime of the river. The Dog-Woman is a blatantly overcoded feminine figure, coalescing attributes of a chtonian mother goddess[41], a Cynocephalic giantess and a vengeful Amazonian warrior.

In a self-portrayal, which questions the degree to which her unsightliness might amount and her failure to conform to societal standards of attractiveness (“How hideous am I?”), the Dog-Woman adopts an extrinsic gaze at herself in an attempt to understand why the surface of her body should be read as abject otherness. However, size, no doubt the most obvious indicator of her departure from the norm, is not conclusively inserted in the inventory of her repugnant features – the flatness of her nose, the scarcity of teeth in her mouth, or the cave-like holes in her face that are big enough to shelter fleas: “In the dark and in the water I weigh nothing at all”. Questioning the relevancy of size as a defining characteristic of monstrosity, the Dog-Woman suggests that fallacious perspective can erroneously distort the correlation between physical appearance and essence, external somaticity and identity.

For instance, the crowd who attend a weight contest between the Dog Woman and an elephant, a beast of fabulous magnitude carried around by an itinerant circus, respond differently to their display: pleasure at the sight of “the huge beast with a wandering nose”, massive swooning at glancing the “mountain range” to which the Dog-Woman’s prominently displayed genitalia are hyperbolically likened. What becomes a clearly gendered confrontation between beastly masculinity  – Samson, the elephant’s trick is to “sit itself in a seat like any well-bred gentleman, and wear an eyeglass” – and excessive femininity, renders the giantess victorious as she purportedly enacts a feminine version of a cosmogonic feat: “Far above us, far far away like a black star in a white sky, was Samson”. The correlation size-weight is left unsettled, and the whole exploit becomes laden with gender-sensitive connotations: “It is a responsibility for a woman to have forced an elephant into the sky. What it says of my size I can­not tell, for an elephant looks big, but how am I to know what it weighs? A balloon looks big and weighs nothing”.

Like Carter’s aerialist giantess, who relishes in perpetuating her self-constructed image of outlandish grotesqueness, the Dog-Woman resists her incarceration in a specular frame, reification, exclusive containment within a “cultural gaze”[42]. Giants by their nature violate the concept of containment (Williams ibid: 113), perpetually struggling against limitations of form. The Dog Woman recounts how after her Thumbelina-like infancy, when she “was tiny enough to sleep in [her] father’s shoe”, she experienced such excessive growth that the idea of exhibiting her in a freak show dawned on her father. Her rejection of the imposition of a freakish tag onto her expansive physicality is poignantly evinced by the image of her overgrown body violently bursting out of the confines of the barrel in which she had been immured, inadvertently slaying her own father with the slivers flying thereof. Cohen (idem) insists on the giants’ morphic and semiotic slipperiness and on the manner in which they refuse teratological as well as textual control and restraint by their progenitors – one need only think of Frankenstein’s progeny and the havoc he wreaks on his creator, or Frankenstein the book itself as a monster, given the surfeit of meanings that the novel cannot stably accommodate[43].

Through her gigantic size, her cohabitation with canine beasts and her devoted allegiance to royalty, secular and divine, the Dog-Woman bears clear similitudes with the 3^rd-century converted Christian and martyr, St. Christopher, whose life is widely documented in western hagiographical literature, such as the 13^th-century Golden Legend compiled by Jacobus de Voragine. A member of the lineage of heathen Canaanites, Saint Christopher (whose originary name is Reprobus) is of colossal stature (he measures twelve cubits in length), cynocephalic appearance, fierce countenance and cannibalistic appetites. The ambition that he harbours is to serve the mightiest of all masters: Reprobus successively vows obedience to an earthly king, to Satan and ultimately to Christ. Entering the service of the most powerful master implies his acceptance of the task of safely ferrying on his shoulders all those requesting passage across a river in whose turbulent waters they might otherwise perish. Traditional iconography however focuses on the representation of Christopher (i.e. the Christbearer, a name etymologically derived from Gr. christos, Christ and pherein, to bear) wading, staff in hand, through the river with a minuscule child placed onto his shoulder. Paradoxically, as he progresses through the waters, the child is growing increasingly heavier, as if the whole world were pressing on his shoulders, almost crushing and drowning the giant under his weight. The image of the giant carrying an infant on his shoulders is grotesquely echoed in the text “When Jordan was new I sat him on the palm of my hand the way I would a puppy, and I held him to my face and let him pick the fleas out of my scars”. The huge woman is also associated with riverine banks, and she even names her foster son whom she rescues from drowning after the great river of Palestine encountered by the Israelites in their passage to the Promised land: “I call him Jordan and it will do. He has no other name before or after. What was there to call him, fished as he was from the stinking Thames?”

While prior to his conversion, Saint Christopher represents a monstrosity that is both corporeal (dog-man hybrid) and linguistic (barking), the Dog Woman’s communal residing with the dogs implies a rejection of human companionship to the point of utter estrangement from humanity’s biological norms[44]. However, she is allowed to provide her own narrative, running in parallel with that of the male hero, the explorer prototype. Saint Christopher’s ranking as a Cynocephalus, based on the episode of his cannibalism outlined by The Contendings of the Apostles, appears to be related not merely to his grotesque canine appearance and inarticulate barking but also to his pre-conversion habit of anthropophagy. The Dog Woman is also fascinated with mouths and what mouths can do. In Tradescant’s exotic garden where ponds teem with “fabulous fishes of the kind imagined but never seen”, the Dog Woman’s favourite spot is a cherry-lined grotto basin at the bottom of which fresh-water shrimp are “feeding on creatures even smaller than themselves” only to fill the beak of a kingfisher that afterwards “ascends like a saint, vertical and glorious”. The Dog Woman’s enthralment with ingurgitation, with mouths and beaks that feed on and are fed on by others, may denote a desire to explore the precarious limits that discriminate selfhood from otherness: if the boundaries demarcating physical entities collapse in an endless cycle of erasure and redefinement (the food chain), to what extent is otherness literally absorbed and assimilated into selfhood?[45]

According to Cohen, anthropophagy, cannibalism constitute an exploration of selfhood’s limits: “the material incorporation of one body into the flesh of another, cannibalism condenses a fear of losing the boundary that circumscribes identity and produces discrete subjects” (1999: 2). When the Dog-Woman attends the public display of a banana brought over from the Bermuda island, allegedly located in the proximity of paradise, she interprets its shape in anthropomorphic terms, abhorring the idea of its edibility: given its livid yellowness and length, the banana is likened to the private parts of an Oriental, “either painted or infected”. As soon as instructions are offered as to the consumption of this wondrous exotic fruit, the crowds exhibit the same indignation against what they perceive to be a cannibalistic practice: “At this there was unanimous retching. There was no good woman could put that to her mouth, and for a man it was the practice of cannibals. We had not gone to church all these years and been washed in the blood of Jesus only to eat ourselves up the way the Heathen do”. The Dog-Woman appears to express at this stage the typical revulsion medieval travellers experienced when confronted with alien cultures and dietary habits; moreover, the act of consuming a banana is firstly interpreted in a sexually segregated grid, implying sexual perversion if done by a woman and anthropophagy if done by a man, and then resumed in a generalised statement encompassing all Christians for whom ablution in the blood of the sacrificed Jesus makes the reiteration of sparagmos inconceivable.

If the giant’s body is an affront to natural proportion, it may well encode “an excess[46] that places him outside the realm of the human, outside the possibility of desire” (Cohen 1999: xiii). The Dog Woman fits the prototype of the castrating woman, whose willingness to experiment (“I like to broaden my mind when I can”) drives her to accepting the overtures of a man. The intended fellatio entails, however, his emasculation: her mouth becomes a devouring organ, and the sexuality of the scene is supplanted by connotations of feeding.[47] This mere act of dismemberment[48] is hyperbolically inflated in the Dog Woman’s enactment of the Old Testament enjoinment, “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth”: taking upon herself the loyalist assignment of avenging the death of the King, she wreaks carnage amongst the Puritans, collecting a sack of trophies that amount to “119 eyeballs, one missing on account of a man who had lost one already, and over 2,000 teeth”. That she should use the dental waste as a “drainage for my watercress bed” attests to another similarity with the cynocephalus saint, who is protector of orchards and vegetation: having ferried Christ safely across the river, he plants his staff in the river banks where it blooms and bears fruit.

Whereas in teratological taxonomies giants and pygmies bracket the normal at one or the other extremity of the size spectrum, separated as they are by a gapping continuum of normal size constituents, the possibility of juxtaposing the immense and the nugatory in a conjoined figure raises problematic aspects of perspectivism and the positioning of the nondeviant relative to this coupling. Citing Friedman, Prescott (1993: 75) remarks not only the definitional marginality of monsters, but also their spatial or situational eccentricity, nature affording greater playfulness and sporting at the edges of the world. While size-entrenched monstrosity is rendered ambiguous by spatial relativity[49] (a human of default size may become a giant in Lilliput and a dwarf in Brobdingnag), the textual and figural conflation of the gigantic and the minuscule in a position of spatial and ontological centrality may serve either to synthetically express “mingled or contradictory feelings” about such “double-bodied grotesques” (Prescott idem: 88) or to legitimate ”abnormality” as the distorted projection of an extrinsic gaze and not as an intrinsic deformity.

Both Sexing the Cherry and Nights at the Circus feature female couples of blatant disparity in size. In Winterson’s novel, the Dog Woman and her neighbouring crone are grotesquely inversed mirror reflections: contrasted with the former’s expansive body, the latter’s carcass seems in a continuous process of emaciation and diminution. While the Dog Woman is so huge that when she puts on a plumed hat, it sits on her head “as a bird nests in a tree”, the next-door hag is withered, “blackened and hairless” almost to the point of becoming reified into “a side of salt beef wrapped in muslin”; her head resembles “a piece of leather like a football”, her body disseminates into “a fantastical mass of rags” and her hands are “always beckoning and twisting, look like the shrivelled monkeys the organ-grinders carry”. Compared with the giant wench’s earthen propensity, her ageless neighbour, who “airs herself abroad as a witch”, has invisible feet (“there’s no knowing what it is she walks on”), which generates the illusion of her lack of movement. In contrast with the Dog Woman’s self-professed civility and decent manners (“I’m not one for a knife and spoon myself, but I do know how to eat in company”), the virago’s hands are constantly engaged in a scatological exploration of her own body, which makes her feeding manners approximate those of troglodyte cave-dwellers: “her hands are never still, scratching her head and her groin and darting out to snatch food and ram it square into her mouth”.

Through their physical juxtaposition (“I am designed on the grand scale and, even at fourteen, you could have made two Lizzies out of me”) and rhetorical coupling (the two women take turns recounting the Fevvers myth to the American journalist), the pairing of gargantuan Fevvers and Thumbelina-Lizzie approximates what Prescott has coined as “Gargatom”, “a single anamorphic and unimaginable figure” that frequently featured in 17^th-century chapbooks[50]. Such juxtapositions operated on confrontational grounds, opposing astuteness to aggressive force, with midgets (Tom Thumb) at times outwitting and therefore vanquishing giants (Gargantuas).

Antagonism in the female couples under discussion, however, is only superficially and transitorily explored, as both Carter and Winterson convey their characters’ soldered identities, refashioned in the foster mother-daughter dyad in the first case, and gradually shaped into a continuum of foster motherhood in the second case. The 20^th-century alter ego of the Dog Woman is a version of Gargatom turned outside in: she is an environmentalist chemist whose gigantomachia is targeted at earth-polluting companies and who contains her own discordia concors, reconciling normal surface and giant core, a living shell encasing her colossal predecessor who resists contraction, compression and threatens to burst open the boundaries of her host’s body, like a dwarfish outfit stifling its gigantic wearer.

“The giant is represented through movement, through being in time… In contrast to the still and perfect nature of the miniature, the gigantic represents the order and disorder of historical forces… And while our daydream may be to animate the miniature, we admire the fall or the death, the stopping of the giant.”[51] That Winterson’s giantesses should deny containment, both spatial and temporal, evinces, nevertheless, a crucial reconsideration of the monstrous female paradigm.

Both Nights at the Circus and Sexing the Cherry revisit traditional notions of female monstrosity and, while dismantling assumptions of women’s necessary relegation to societal and political margins, provide an effective critique of what White calls the “technique of ostensive self-definition by negation” (1978: 151-2) deployed by mainstream civilisation (in this case, the patriarchal establishment). Carter’s investment of the siren-prostitute figure with the potential for destabilising 19^th-century stultifying notions of excessive female sexuality and Winterson’s outlining of the giantess as the foundational heroic figure whose underground quest allegedly brought about a restoration of the legitimate monarchical rule in the 17^th century, highlight a radical shift in the paradigm of the monstrous female: as Halberstam argues, “within postmodern Gothic we no longer attempt to identify the monster and fix the terms of his/her deformity, rather postmodern Gothic warns us to be suspicious of monster hunters, monster makers, and above all, discourses invested in purity and innocence” (1998: 21).

[1] See Creed, for whom “the concept of the monstrous-feminine, as constructed within/by patriarchal and phallocentric ideology, is intimately related to the problem of sexual difference and castration” (idem: 44 qtd in Becker 1999: 56), or Luce Irigaray’s This Sex Which Is Not One (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985) in which she outlines the inscription of the female as “lack.”

[1] Both monsters and women represent figures of dissimilarity and deviations from the norm: “The female is as it were a deformed male” (Aristotle, Generation of Animals, qtd in Huet 1993: 3). On the Greeks’ concern with self-definition attained by “exploring the boundaries between ‘self’ and ‘other’, ‘self being the Greek male subject”, i.e. “not-barbarian, not-woman and not-beast”, see King (1995: 138-141).

[1] Cf. Kristeva  (1982: 1-11).

[1] Douglas (1966: 147-9)

[1] Cf. Michael (1998: 210)

[1] Tucker (1998: 17) remarks the “power of the image … to govern the subject’s trajectory of desire”.

[1] Fevvers both complies with and challenges the “traditional exhibitionist role” of women who are “simultaneously looked at and displayed” by the “determining male gaze”; her “to-be-looked-at-ness” is not passive acquiescence to but active involvement in the outlining of her body as sexual fetish. See Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” included in Rivkin & Ryan (1998: 389).

[1] Derived from Saint Augustine’s connection in De civitate dei of the Latin monstrum with the verb monstrare, meaning ‘to show, to reveal’ (cf. Cohen 1999: 187).

[1] Lee (ibid: 94) and Booker (1991: 210) point to the infinite plurality in any act of seeing or reading across Fevvers’s body a “compendium” of images of transgression.

[1] See South (1987: 148-153) & King (1995:143-148).

[1] Durand highlights the fatal connotations of sirens as feminised avatars of the beastly monsters lurking in polluting, stagnant waters (1977: 128).

[1] Sirens are briefly referred to in Pausanias’ Description of Greece as having lost the singing contest with the muses. On the other hand, it is their melodious alluring voice that prevails in Plato’s association of the sirens with the harmonious music of the spheres, as evinced in the myth of Er, which closes his Republic. The sirens’ music rather than their words posed a fatal threat to the Argonauts as they passed by the delightful island of Anthemoessa, yet their song was drowned out by Orpheus’ lyre, setting yet another example of the manner in which the male hero can break their lethal spell of carnal seduction, countering the perils of sexuality which most half-woman, half-animal monsters such as the Echidna or the mermaids seem to embody. See King (idem).

[1] The deceitfully alluring surface of the siren’s body conceals foul inner substance, the contrast between the world of sensory perception and the underlying reality deepens, as happens for instance in Dante’s 9^th Canto of the Purgatory, where, under the gaze of Virgil, a misshapen, faltering siren becomes beautiful and articulate, yet when her clothes are tore open her flesh emits a terrible stench. See King (idem).

[1] Cf. Russo (1998: 238-244); Booker (1991: 226-7).

[1] See also Booker (idem: 230-1).

[1] Mary Russo (1994) The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity New York: Routledge p. 67 qtd. in Tucker (idem: 18).

[1] See Robinson (1991).

[1] See, for instance, Rich A “Notes Towards a Politics of Location” in Rivkin & Ryan (eds) (1998: 633-649).

[1] On the mixture of “revulsion” and “enchantment”, “horror and desire” characterising male constructions of female bodies, see Robinson (idem: 129-130).

[1] Not only the brothel women collected by Madame Schreck but also their clients, whose ugliness makes Fevvers remark that “he who cast the human form in the first place did not have his mind on the job”, hover on a fragile boundary demarcating naturalness from unnaturalness. This incites the winged woman’s rumination on the brittleness of the standard anthropomorphic mould: “Give it the slightest tap with your fingers and it breaks”.

[1] What Fevvers alludes to is the reversibility of monstrosity and the possibility for deformed others to join the ranks of the same. Toussaint’s mouthlessness and his food ingestion through a single orifice that also serves for breathing approximates the figure of Straw-drinkers or Astomi, a Plinian race synthetically catalogued by Friedman as follows: “noseless and mouthless, they breathe through a single ori­fice and eat and drink through a straw” (2000: 12).

[1] Cf. Robinson (ibid: 130)

[1] Friedman (idem) dubs “Plinian” those monstrous races of the Latin Middle Ages which were initially cataloged by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History.

[1] North African people whose faces supposedly lay on their chests, and whose fabulous appearance has been historically confirmed and offered a plausible explanation:  seen from a distance, the ornamented armoury worn by the Blemmyae may have terrified travellers into believing that what they saw were neckless warriors (cf Friedman ibid: 25).

[1] “I am alone and miserable; man will not associate with me; but one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species and have the same defects.” Shelley M (1993) Frankenstein, or: A Modern Prometheus London: Pickering.

[1] Scenes of violent obscenity, such as the clowns’ massive orgy in the “Petersburg” section, which are reminiscent of Sade’s staging of “rites of monstrous cruelty” in spaces secluded from a “pusillanimous” world, allow for transgressing any borders of decorum and implicitly relaxing the tight strings that restrain sexual licentiousness. What Carter seems to be taking for granted is “the political nature of sex”, simply assuming “that the body politic is also the individual body and proceeds to play outrageous games with their identity” (cf. Kendrick 1993: 68).

[1] Tucker (ibid: 12-14) subscribes to the idea that the issue of pornography is more likely to receive nonbiased treatment in the context of filmic representation and spectatorship. Far from sanctioning a reinscription of patriarchy, pornographic fiction and photography, or the “pure forms of sexual fiction, of the fiction of sex” (SW 17), counter the mythic inscription of femininity in such falsely empowering and abstracting figures as that of the goddess, whereby the “actuality of the flesh” is belied and the “enslavement of women” is perpetuated. Fevvers’s construction of her own originary myth, based on the blurred Titian portrayal of Leda’s rape by the swan god, would testify to an undermining of western representations of subdued feminine sexuality.

[1] See Carter’s story “Black Venus”, where Baudelaire’s satanically inspirational yet silenced muse avenges her reduction to the figure of the biblical temptress, a “vase of darkness” always on the brink of infesting the world with her “black light”.

[1] The term used for prostitutes in canon law, meaning “women who earn”, cf. Hassig (1999: 79). Karras (1999: 162) contests the ascription of the label of prostitute on the grounds of a woman’s commodification of her sexual favours; the defining feature of meretrices, which was closer in meaning to today’s ‘whore’ than to ‘prostitute’, was not necessarily their commercial behaviour (accepting money for sex), but their essential sinfulness – a “state of the soul”, “what we today call an identity” (ibid) and indiscriminate sexual availability.

[1] Foucault M (1990) The History of Sexuality, Robert Hurley (transl)  New York: Vintage.

[1] In Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 45-47, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick reframes the debate around sexual identity in terms of coextant and conflicting, “minoritizing” versus “universalising” discourses, amending the previous scholarly distinction between acts and identities (discussed in Freccero 1999: 186).  In contrast with the latter type of discourse, which renders all people liable to appropriating a certain sexual identity should they engage in certain nonpermissible acts, the minoritizing discourse provides identitarian cohesion (minority identity).

[1] Minoritizing historiography envisaged prostitutes as members of an outcast, stigmatised group functioning as a safety valve at the margins of the medieval city, “preventing the seduction or rape of respectable women, or redirecting men away from sodomy” (Karras idem: 163), while universalising discourses insisted on applying this label to any sexually transgressive woman, given all women’s inherently sinful nature. “The (minoritized) prostitute thus was a paradigm for the (universalized) lustful woman” (ibid: 170).

[1] Douglas (1966) considers that only by identifying so-called abominable, deviant, or impure phenomena can a culture firmly delineate and clarify the epistemological boundaries that such anomalies tend to transgress and confound.

[1] In the French fabliaux, for instance, there is cooperation amongst prostitutes, designed to outsmart their lovers. In Nights at the Circus, Fevvers’s “legendary inaccessibility” is a gross distortion of fact, a lie jointly uttered by both Lizzie and her gigantic offspring.

[1] See Russo’s concept of “monstrification” (1994) or its application by Braunberger (2000).

[1] Jordan voices his androgynous identity by professing that what he “would like is to have some of Tradescant grafted on to me so that I could be a hero like him. He will flourish in any climate, pack his ships with precious things and be welcome with full honours when the King is restored” (SC 79).

[1] Perhaps the climactic instance in which Jordan’ body itself can be read as sexually ambiguous is the episode of his literal crossdressing, a subterfuge apparently necessitated by external circumstances – only by masquerading in female attire could he attend the trial and executions of Charles I: “Everyone anxious to attend the trial was subjected to a rigorous search and investigation, though the Puritans, concerned to uphold their public image, had promised an open trial free to all, except supporters of the King. Tradescant and Jordan dressed themselves as drabs, with painted faces and scarlet lips and dresses that looked as though they’d been pawed over by every infantryman in the capital”. That only Jordan should have attracted “a good few offers of a bed for the night” raises questions regarding his effeminacy or possible androgyny. Williams (1996: 168) claims that in medieval discourse “the monster par excellence is the being deformed by the possession of both sexes”, yet, citing Eliade, he amends the phenomenon as not merely sexual in nature but ontological: “androgyny signifies, not the existence of two sexes in one being, but rather the transcendence of the oppositions and metaphysical limitations that maleness and femaleness signify” (170).

[1] see Butler (1993).

[1] On Nights at the Circus as a “historiographic metafiction”, with Fevvers “being the object of the peculiar erotic fantasies of the rich and famous”, see Lee (1997: 103). Fevvers “advertises” herself as a ubiquitous presence at the nexus of the forces shaping history on the brink of the new century: mass suicides are committed in Paris for her sake, the post-impressionists vie to paint her and in Vienna, she deforms “the dreams of that entire generation who would immediately commit themselves whole­heartedly to psychoanalysis”.

[1] Cf. Winterson, <http:// www.winterson.net> (The official Jeanette Winterson site).

[1] The Dog Woman’s earthliness and her protectiveness of vegetation clearly associates her figure with that of primitive mother goddess (see Baring & Cashford, 1991, for the evolution of the myth of the earth goddess).

[1] See Cohen (1999: xiv)

[1] See Halberstam (1995: 28-52) & Baldick (1987: 1-9).

[1] Human  reproduction, fertilisation necessitate external eplanation: “In copulation, an act where the woman has a more pleas­urable part, the member comes away in the great tunnel and creeps into the womb where it splits open after a time like a runner bean and deposits a little mannikin to grow in the rich soil. At least, so I am told by women who have become pregnant and must know their husbands’ members as well as I do my own dogs.”

[1] “The mouth constitutes one of the principal thresholds of the body and thus of the self, a border between the inside and the outside, a portal giving access to the recesses of the living organism or, in the other direction, to the phenomenal, physical world. Through the mouth the self deals with the other” (Williams idem: 141).

[1] Consider the Dog Woman’s programmatic rejection of self-effacement: ““I would rather live with sins of excess than sins of denial.”

[1] As the Dog-Woman touches the “pea-pod”, it grows into a cucumber, she is urged to put it into her mouth as she would a “delicious thing to eat” but then swallows it up entirely and bites it off with a snap, eventually feeding one of her dogs on it. This cannibalistic gesture is then explained as having been triggered by the conviction that males have their sexual organs grow again, like lizards’ tails, as well as dictated by ignorance and a desire for “humble” submission to the males’ “reckless” will. The male body, sexuality itself is a forbidden experience for the Dog-Woman and are explored only tentatively:

[1] While here she merely feeds her dogs on the eyeballs, in another episode of sadistic revenge against the “unrepentant vermin” 87, a brothel becomes the stage for their execution in a grotesque unleashing of orgiastic necrophilia – the “sisters” at the Spitalfields brothel made a fortune by announcing that there were “freshly dismembered bodies to be had” (105).

[1] As was the case of the 13^th-century Jacques de Vitry (quoted in Friedman 2000: 163-164), who in Historia Orientalis introduced an incipient “cultural relativism” into the medieval consciousness: “just as we consider Pygmies to be dwarves, so they consider us giants… and in the land of the Giants, who are larger than we are, we would be considered dwarfs by them”.

[1] Prescott’s analysis includes early Stuart chapbooks, such as Richard Johnson’s History of Tom Thumb (1621) and samples of nonsense writing, such as Martin Parker’s Legend of Sir Leonard Lack-wit (1633), charting the political overtones of these popular 17^th-century English narratives.  In the former pamphlet, an anonymous, English-born minuscule Tom ensures his victory over the mighty, excessively overgrown Gargantua, whose tumescent bravado makes it even more challenging and entertaining a task for the witty, ironic midget who deflates, shrinks and eventually defeats his gigantic opponent. It is ultimately through rhetorical diminution and subversion, operating on a logic of lack and negation, that this feat is accomplished. In the latter burlesque, carnivalesque figments of the likes of Gargantua and Tom Thumbe are interpreted by Prescott as supporting a persistent, underground royalist, unpuritanical feeling.

[1] Susan Stewart (  1984) On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, qtd in Cohen (1999: xi).

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