Telling Unique Feminist Conciousness

Angela Carter (1940-1992) is an important contemporary English novelist. Her work draws heavily on symbolism and traditional fairy and folk myths, and is often filled with a keen sense of the unpleasant and the strange. Nights at the Circus (1984), Carter’s most important work, won Tait Black Memorial Prize in1985. The novel is about a female Victorian circus performer called Fevvers and establishes its reputation as a canon of English literature for its feminist theme and unique writing style.Based on Western narrative theory, this thesis attempts to have a textual analysis of the novel, focusing on the interplay between novel’s narrative technique and its feminist thematic concern.The thesis holds that Carter, by employing such narrative techniques as the extradiegetic-heterodiegetic narrator, the protagonist narrator, minor characters as narrators, fixed internal focalization, protagonist’s first-person experiencing internal focalization, variable internal focalization, zero focalization and the shift between the overlap and separation of these narrative voice and narrative focalization, succeeds in presenting us the image of the new, angle-like woman Fevvers, new man Walser, untraditional mother Lizzie, lesbian, utopian lesbian community, and marginalized clown’s world. The thesis also points out that women’s suffering is almost always caused by the oppression of patriarchal society they live in, that women’s feminist consciousness needs to be woken up as soon as possible, and that women need to form sisterhood with other women so as to subvert patriarchy if they are to live with men as equals.