Summary
The weeping figure who threw herself at Walser's feet at the end of Chapter 4 turns out to be Mignon, previously known only to the reader as "the Ape-Man's woman," who was abandoned by the Strong Man during the tiger attack and subsequently beaten by Lamarck (the Ape-Man). Walser, not knowing what to do with her, thinks to bring her to Fevvers’ hotel for a hot meal and a bath. So, Walser and Mignon walk through the slums surrounding Clown Alley and eventually breach the luxury commercial section of the city. “What thundering noise!” Carter writes. “What brilliant lights! Crowds of people, of horses, of carriages!” (126). Mignon is in awe of the commercial district. They walk up to the hotel where Fevvers and Lizzie are staying, but the doorman refuses to let them into the lobby. Walser tries talking his way in with no success, but luckily, Fevvers returns from running errands and brings Walser and Mignon up to her room with her. Fevvers is irritated that Walser has showed up with a young woman from the circus; she is under the impression that Walser and Mignon are romantically involved. Walser senses some jealousy emanating from her, and he’s pleased by this, because he also has feelings for Fevvers.
Fevvers has Lizzie draw a bath for Mignon. She tries speaking several languages to Mignon, but nothing registers until she reaches German. She produces a box of chocolates and offers them to Mignon, and Mignon hugs the chocolates with appreciation and glee. Lizzie and Fevvers are both shocked by how skinny Mignon is, and how discolored her skin is from bruises from Lamarck’s daily beatings. While Mignon waits for her bath to fill, she marvels at the ornate suite. In the midst of this scene, Carter introduces Mignon’s origin story, starting with the conspicuous statement that “[Mignon] used to pose for the dead” (128).
Carter intercuts Mignon’s biography with the scene in the hotel room. She begins by describing a major event in Mignon’s childhood, wherein her father butchers her mother with a bread knife after learning that she’s sleeping with officers stationed nearby, dumps her body and the knife in a nearby lake, and then returns home to prepare dinner for his daughters. The problem is, he needs the knife to cut the bread, so he goes back to the lake, but in searching for the knife, drowns in less than five feet of water. When they dragged the lake, they found both her parents and the bread knife.
Mignon and her sister are taken to an orphanage, and they live there through the winter. When spring comes, Mignon steals away in a cabbage cart. She buys passage to the city with sex, and for a while, she lives on the street and struggles to survive by selling arrangements of scavenged flowers. She turns to pickpocketing and finds a community of street kids. They stay together and party around bonfires, and life is fun like this until one night, the fire grows out of control and burns their makeshift shelter. A few of Mignon’s friends die in the flames.
Mignon returns to pickpocketing and fending for herself, until one day she encounters a man called Herr M. Herr M. is a so-called medium and spiritualist who occasionally officiates ceremonies, but his main occupation is running a scam on the families of recently deceased young women. He’s a skilled photographer, and with the help of a teenage assistant, he tricks families into believing that he can call back their deceased daughter for a brief Q&A and photo opportunity. When he encounters Mignon, he has coincidentally just lost his previous “assistant” (she ran off with her lover and took “a few bits and pieces of portable property” [133] from Herr M.). Herr M. is struck but how ghostly Mignon looks, and he thinks she’ll be a perfect replacement.
Mignon assists Herr M. with his scam for a while. They live together, and Herr M. provides her with clothes, food, and lodging. He denies her a salary—she’s so effective at perpetuating his scam that he once considers paying her, but abandons the idea because he’s afraid she’ll leave if she saves enough. He has sex with her every night. Mignon doesn’t like sleeping with him, but she regards the scam as a game, and she’s happy to have a place to stay and food to eat. Eventually, the police bust the scam, and Herr M. is sentenced to six years in jail, which is reduced to two years for good behavior. He treats jail like a networking event, and when he’s released, continues scamming elsewhere. Mignon isn’t charged with any crimes for her part in the scam, and she eventually sets herself up nicely with a job at a pub and a furnished room in an apartment building. Carter writes, “Those were her best days, although there was always something feckless about her, something slack and almost fearful in her too frequent smile, so that when you saw Mignon being happy, you always thought: ‘It can’t last’ (139).
Her happiness ends when Lamarck comes into the pub one evening with the Professor, the leader of his chimps. Lamarck charms Mignon with the help of the Professor, who presents her with a flower. Mignon runs away with the circus without even returning to her apartment to pack a bag. It doesn’t take long for her to realize that Lamarck is violent and full of rage. Carter writes, “On the third day on the road, he beat her because she burned the cutlets. She was a lousy cook. On the fourth day, he beat her because she forgot to empty the chamber-pot and when he pissed in it, it overflowed. On the fifth day, he beat her because he had formed the habit of beating her” (140). Mignon exists in this hostile new world without a friend to turn to, until she meets a stable boy who speaks German. He hears her singing one day and introduces himself, and they become friends. He’s gay, and one of the only men Mignon meets in the circus that doesn’t try to sleep with her or sexually assault her when she refuses them. The boy teaches her some English songs. They maintain a friendship until Lamarck beats the boy to death and leaves him on the side of the road.
All the while as Carter intercuts Mignon’s grim path to the circus, the scene in the hotel room paces forward. Walser, Lizzie, and Fevvers sit around the suite and they hear Mignon singing an English song in the bath. The song is actually a poem by Lord Byron titled, “So We’ll Go No More a Roving.” Mignon’s beautiful voice combined with the knowledge that she doesn’t understand the words moves Fevvers and Walser to tears. When Mignon finishes her bath, Fevvers announces that she’s reserved them the bridal suite (thinking Walser and Mignon are together). They go up to the suite, and Mignon is, again, amazed by the opulence of the room. For a moment, Walser considers forcing himself on her, but he decides against it. He asks Mignon, “What am I to do with you?” Carter writes, “To be addressed directly in the English language struck some chord in that particular and selective organ, [Mignon’s] memory. … She smiled. This smile contained her entire history and was scarcely to be borne. ‘God save the Queen,’ she said” (144), and something about this peculiar, contextless pronouncement sends Walser rushing out of the room, near tears.
Chapter Six offers a brief (half-page) summary of two particulars of Walser's circumstances that are throwing off his equilibrium (145). The first is that his injured arm, from the tiger attack, makes it impossible for him to write. Without his writing, he’s no longer a journalist undercover as a clown—he’s purely a clown. This sudden shift in his identity, imperceptible to those around him but paramount to his own perception of himself, deeply troubles him. The second is that he’s in love with Fevvers, and she makes him feel a way he’s never felt before with any woman. At the same time, he still believes that she is a con, and he, in love, feels conned. In this topsy-turvy state, he goes on a freezing walk through Petersburg.
In Chapter Seven, the narrative gaze turns toward a member of the circus called the Princess of Abyssinia, a pianist and tiger trainer. Her act consists of a predictable combination of those two skills, in which she plays the piano for the tigers, and the tigers interact with the music according to some rehearsed choreography. The Princess was raised by a performer duo; her mother played piano and her father kept tigers. Despite her regular exposure to the tigers (and, perhaps, because of it), the Princess maintains a healthy fear of their raw power and predatory instincts. Even though she's been performing nearly her whole life, fear creeps up her spine every time she sits at the piano. She does not smile at the tigers, nor does she ever speak to them; she's noticed a while ago that when the tigers hear human language, they growl. So, the Princess never speaks, even when she's not around the tigers. She thinks, as she sits by the tiger enclosure, about how she wishes she had a partner in her act. Someone she could really trust, as opposed to the stable boys who assist in preparing the stage.
Enter Fevvers and Lizzie, with their new charge, Mignon. The circus stirs when they enter; Samson the Strong Man, addressing the rumors that he abandoned Mignon during the tiger attack, tells the stable boys that he's going to beat Walser the next time he sees him for "stealing his woman" (150). But when Walser does actually appear, he's surrounded by his fellow clowns. Samson, seeing Buffo tower over the clowns, thinks better of attacking Walser while he's so well-guarded. Also spotted among the clowns is Little Ivan, who despite his inital terror, has become a clown himself. With his arm in a sling, Walser has had the alter-ego of the Human Chicken bestowed upon him, because his slung arm looks like a chicken wing.
While the clowns march out of Clown Alley and Samson talks himself up to the stable boys, Fevvers and Lizzie introduce Mignon to the Princess of Abyssinia. In halting French, Fevvers explains Mignon's situation to the Princess, and the Princess consents to Mignon joining her in the enclosure. Mignon is terrified, but the Princess gestures toward the gun on her piano, and Mignon takes some comfort in it. The Princess then proceeds to play a tune, and Mignon accompanies her on vocals. The beauty of their performance captivates everyone within earshot, including the elephants, who momentarily stopped worrying their chains. When their song concluded, the Princess feels that she finally had a partner who could quell her fear of the tigers, and she kisses Mignon. Fevvers and Lizzie congratulate themselves on their arrangement; Fevvers says, "The cruel sex threw her away like a soiled glove..." and Lizzie finishes, "but us girls 'ave gone and sent her to the cleaner's" (155). After their triumph, Fevvers tracks down Walser and tells him that she knows he and Mignon weren't sleeping together; her affection for him is thus restored. She also recognizes that with his arm slung, he's likely not able to write home to his editor, so she provides him with a stack of papers to send instead.
Jealous of Fevvers' singular celebrity and suspicious of her wings, the aerialist clan, the Charivaris, try to sabotage her by damaging one of her ropes. During a performance, the rope snaps, but Fevvers deftly recovers, and the Charivaris' contracts are terminated by the Colonel. Afterward, Mignon and the Princess of Abyssinia debut their duet; their performance also serves as an audition for the skeptical Colonel. The Colonel sees the beauty and natural talent of Mignon, but he thinks that her singing is too "high-class" for the Ludic Game. The crowd and Sybil seem to agree, and her operatic performance earns a halting applause. However, the second part of their act, in which Mignon waltzes with a tiger, is met with raucous enthusiasm by both crowd and Colonel. After the performances, Samson the Strong Man beats Jack Walser for allegedly sleeping with Mignon; afterward, Samson's weeping is received by Fevvers' "impersonal motherliness" (166). Walser is frustrated because he feels like the victim in this situation, and yet Samson, his attacker, gets all the sympathy.
Chapter Eight concludes with the ape Professor stealing Lamarck's contract, shredding it, and approaching the Colonel about getting a contract of his own. The Professor communicates with the Colonel by writing on a notepad. He explains that Lamarck is a useless drunk, and he could lead the apes without him. The Professor names his price and advocates for the rest of the apes in the process. After consulting Sybil, Colonel Kearney reluctantly accepts the Professor's terms.
An eventful performance follows an eventful rehearsal. Before the show, Buffo goes on a massive bender, getting more drunk than the other clowns had ever before seen him; this is saying something for Buffo, for whom drinking an entire bottle of vodka in one day isn't uncommon. But this time, Buffo has truly outdone himself, and his clown apostles are concerned. They perform the last supper for a sold-out house, and Buffo, at the center of the act, is fully hallucinating. Walser, the Human Chicken, is the main course of the supper performance; but when he bursts out from under the entree cover, Buffo earnestly tries stabbing him with the carving knives. Walser runs for his life as the other clowns try to restrain Buffo. Finally, the Princess of Abyssinia hoses Buffo down with the hose she uses to thwart tiger attacks. Samson the Strong Man carries Buffo out, where he's observed by doctors and ultimately committed to a mental hospital. All the while, the crowd is in stitches.
The next fiasco occurs when, during the Princess of Abyssinia and Mignon's act, a tigress attacks Mignon. The Princess has to shoot the tigress mid-act, which causes a stir in the crowd. At this point, Colonel Kearney is in a panic. He's lost his head clown, and he's lost a tiger. While he's explaining the dire situation to Fevvers, the Professor storms into the room with his twelve ape compatriots in tow, all holding suitcases. The Professor angrily gesticulates to a clause in his contract, which the Colonel refuses to honor. Now, he's lost his Educated Apes. In the wake of the commotion, a handful of stable boys take their earnings and buy train tickets to various destinations, abandoning the circus for new adventures.
Meanwhile, Walser is distracted by his desire for Fevvers. It's clear that some aristocrat is after her hand in marriage, and she has plans to meet him after the show. He's already sent her a diamond bracelet, and he's promised more diamonds when she meets him, but only if she comes alone. Lizzie is highly skeptical of the meeting and urges Fevvers to pass on it, but Fevvers simply cannot resist the prospect of increasing her wealth. Walser can't stand to think of her alone with some fancy aristocrat, and this jealously consumes him so much that he fails to read the letters Lizzie gives him to pass along to his editor in London.
Against Lizzie's advice, Fevvers goes to the Grand Duke's house alone, where she finds a lavish dinner laid out for her in his study. The Duke presents Fevvers with an ice sculpture of her likeness, wings fully spread, towering over the dinner table. He then arranges thirty-seven vodka glasses to spell out her name, Sophia, on the table, fills them, and drinks all thirty-seven glasses. At this point, she begins to fear the Duke. She wishes she'd listened to Lizzie and had not come alone. The Duke demands to see Fevvers' wings in exchange for one of his Fabergé eggs. Fevvers, sensing danger, allows him to touch her breasts and her wings while she strokes his penis. As the Duke caresses her, he finds Ma Nelson's dagger. He laughs at the dagger, breaks it across his knee, and tosses it into the now-pitch-dark room.
They move through the study in this threatening dance, as Fevvers inspects each of the Fabergé eggs. She finds one with a miniature version of the Trans-Siberian Express and tells the Duke she chooses that one, but he refuses her and tells her that he had one specially made for her. In this egg, a miniature bird cage made of gold resides in the center. There is no bird in it—or rather, Carter emphasizes, there is no bird in it yet (192). Fevvers feels a dreadful sense of shrinking, and she realizes that the miniature dioramas in the eggs represent separate realities. She's overwhelmed with the feeling that if she doesn't act fast, she will be trapped in the Duke's custom egg forever. So, just as the Duke ejaculates, she breaks free of his grasp and dives inside the egg with the miniaturized train. She runs into Lizzie's embrace and joins Walser and the rest of the circus on their trek to Siberia, thus concluding the St. Petersburg section of the novel.
Analysis
The latter half of the St. Petersburg section of the novel severely destabilizes both of Carter's main characters, Fevvers and Walser. Fevvers' destabilization is perhaps more shocking because up until now, she has maintained such consistent control over the unfolding narrative, whereas the potency of Walser's destabilization stems from the complete and utter strip-down of his established identity that gradually occurs after he joins the circus. Walser's transformation is succinctly spelled out in Chapter Six of St. Petersburg, a half-page chapter through which Carter explicates Walser's lovesickness and degeneration. She writes:
Two things, so far, have conspired together to throw Walser off his equilibrium. One: his right arm is injured and, although healing well, he cannot write or type until it is better, so he is deprived of his profession. Therefore, for the moment, his disguise disguises—nothing. He is no longer a journalist masquerading as a clown; willy-nilly, force of circumstance has turned him into a real clown... p. 145
Here, Carter demonstrates the razor-thin semantic boundary between Walser's understanding of himself as a "fake clown"/"real journalist" and the practical fact of Walser's circumstances, i.e., after breaking his arm, he cannot fulfill the one and only basic task that makes him a journalist, and which separates him from being an actual clown: writing copy and sending it back to his editor. Carter ingeniously ties this deficiency to a freak accident that is a direct result of Walser playing the masculine savior to a "damsel in distress." The limitation comes out of nowhere, and it isn't some grand, intellectual lapse of inspiration, but rather something totally mechanical—Walser simply cannot type nor write with his dominant arm in a sling. Not only can he no longer exploit the circus for his journalistic ambitions—he now relies on the circus as a source of nurture and community as he heals. Via an act of "masculine" intervention, i.e. saving Mignon from the charging tigress, Walser is emasculated, put at the mercy of Fevvers and Lizzie, and disengaged from some of his masculine albeit toxic inclinations.
For example, after Walser brings Mignon to Fevvers and Lizzie, and Fevvers—mistakenly thinking Walser and Mignon are romantically involved—reserves them the bridal suite, Carter writes, "Walser's first, deplorable impulse was to throw himself on the poor child and force her, to teach somebody or other—he was not quite sure whom—a lesson. But he was a fair man and the fierce pain in his wounded arm when he seized Mignon by the shoulder reminded him it would be unjust, so he let her be" (144). Of course, this last sentence exemplifies Carter's penchant for verbal irony and dark humor, because Walser being "a fair man" has little to do with what actually stops him from raping Mignon, which is the pain in his shoulder; furthermore, his instinct to do so demonstrates a total lack of regard for what is fair and just. But this pain, nonetheless, cuts him off from that "deplorable impulse" (144).
This leads to the second "thing" that has "conspired ... to throw Walser off his equilibrium": Carter writes:
He has fallen in love, a condition that causes him anxiety because he has not experienced it before. Hitherto, conquests came easily and were disregarded. But no woman ever tried to humiliate him before, to his knowledge, and Fevvers has both tried and succeeded. This has set up a conflict between his own hitherto impregnable sense of self-esteem and the lack of esteem with which the woman treats him. p. 145
Carter describes Walser's devotion to Fevvers in terms of humiliation and how this relationship diminishes his sense of self-esteem; we can track, from the beginning of the novel, the radical inversion that occurs in Walser's sense of confidence, worldliness, masculinity, and control. When he arrives at Fevvers' dressing room, ready to debunk her whole claim to fame, he enters with his chest puffed out, unflappable, certain that he's seen it all. By Petersburg, Walser has been reduced to a literal clown, and among clowns, is known as the Human Chicken. Carter once described her work to her students at Brown as "cut[ting] like a steel blade at the base of a man's penis" (Moody), and this definitive gesture of castration and emasculation in order to topple patriarchal structures and subvert the male gaze speaks to the thematic heart of Nights at the Circus.
Formally, Carter accomplishes this subversion by keeping the narrative perspective consistently ambiguous, and providing the reader with an in-text, diagetic game of narrative tug-of-war via Jack Walser's undercover journalism project. Because Walser's job is to report the events of the circus, the reader may suspect that his perspective is favored by the omniscient narrator. As mentioned in previous sections, Carter explicitly demonstrates how Fevvers often usurps Walser as reporter and controller of the narrative by "seiz[ing] the narrative between her teeth" (32), but in St. Petersburg, after Walser breaks his arm and can no longer write, Lizzie takes over the writing and has Walser send her pages to his editor. Walser is so lovesick and generally distraught by the conditions in Clown Alley that he sends Lizzie's writing without even giving it a cursory read. This shift represents a concrete transfer of both literal and perceived narrative authority from Walser to Lizzie and Fevvers. The shift is further underscored by the switch to Fevvers' first-person perspective in Part 3, Siberia.
Fevvers, on the other hand, is undone by another construct in Carter's crosshairs: capitalism. Carter frequently refers to Fevvers' prioritization of money and material goods, sometimes to the detriment of her safety and wellbeing. While Fevvers' concern for her financial security and her personal management of her self-made fortune are, in many respects, exemplary of the feminist ideals that she symbolizes, Carter also demonstrates the pitfalls of material obsession, and Fevvers' concern for her financial security, at a certain level of obscene wealth, is reframed less as concern and more as simply greed. When the Duke sends Fevvers a diamond bracelet, Lizzie urges her to leave it be. Keep the bracelet, but refuse to see him alone. Fevvers disregards Lizzie's advice, and Carter punctuates the chapter with the sentence, "Her pupils narrowed down to the shape of £ signs" (172). Even while Fevvers is in the violent clutches of the Duke, she's mesmerized by his collection of Fabergé eggs. Ironically, she's forced to travel through one of the bejeweled eggs in order to escape the Duke; but one of the eggs contained a miniaturized cage in which she could have been trapped for eternity, and that egg symbolizes the dangers of material obsession through the concept of being possessed by possessions, which Carter suggests is something to which Fevvers is susceptible.
