Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 3. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 29)
Angelika Reichmann: Ledas and Swans in Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop and Nights at the Circus
LED AS AND SWANS 47 same way as "the clock in her reception room must show the dead centre of the day or night, ... the still hour in the centre of the storm of time" (NC 29). Madame Schreck's house is compared with a graveyard, with hell, with a Gothic castle, while she herself is nothing else but death impersonated as a skeleton. The Siberian prison may be a forerunner of 21 s t —or 20 t h? —century prisons: though Fewers' story takes place at the turn of the century, and ends on New Year's Eve in 1900, there are deliberate anachronisms and "numerous manipulations of time, place, scenery and character" (D'Haen 199) all through the novel. All of these houses are inhabited solely by women. The Utopian "sisterhood" (NC 39) in Ma Nelson's house is shattered only by her death, and it is to defend the house from male intrusion and order that the ex-whores burn it down, while the freak-women in the "museum" and the-prisoners and gaol-keepers in Siberia join their forces to get rid of Madame Schreck and the Countess, respectively, and establish a new existence of their own. The latter examples can be interpreted as worlds dominated by female characters, who, however, only reinforce the dominant patriarchal discourse. Practically the element of breaking out of such a world is the point where The Magic Toyshop ends —but Nights at the Circus does not stop here: all the life-stories go on and have a happy ending, like fairytales. In fact, Fewers and Liz use the possibility to tell the aerialiste's lifestory to tell several life stories, till Walser feels like "a sultan faced with not one but two Scheherezades, both intent on impacting a thousand stories into the single night" (NC 40). The stories are all rewritings of fairy-tales, of literary works of art, even of Carter's own rewritings of fairy tales, such as the story of the Sleeping Beauty, or the Beauty and the Beast. These women get a voice only through Fewers, who, in her turn, can speak only through Walser in the first part of the novel. As far as Fewers herself is concerned, her life-story seems to consist of nothing else, but repeated escapes from different houses. Though she "both hatejs] and fear[s] the open country" (NC 81), she is forced to fly —in both meanings of the word —either by a friend or by an enemy. The scene of her first flight from the roof of Ma Nelson's house is of crucial importance here. Since her first attempt from the top of the mantelpiece was unsuccessful, Liz feels that she "must shove [her] off the roof' (NC 33) and she does so. Fewers evaluates her help by saying that "it seemed that Lizzie ... was arranging [her] marriage to the wind itself' (NC 33), which connects the motifs of flying, leaving the house
