The Hybrid Other in Angela Carter's novel The Nights at the Circus
Abstract
Angela Carter’s political novel Nights at the Circus, written in 1984, presents the hybrid Sophie Fevvers as the personification of “Wisdom in the Flesh.” Her body conveys a huge body of knowledge related to indigenous history and myths. As a bird-woman, a shaman and a trickster figure she will change (the consumerist “Little Man“) Native Californian reporter Walser’s outlook related to “difference” and “the Other.” Angela Carter by locating her characters in the open land, creates a Third Space for thinking deconstructing the orphic discourses of the West. By using the devices of magical realism, she writes a counter story about the indigenous people of both Russia and America, showing the plight of these people whose lands are occupied by schizophrenic capitalist and globalist forces, which destroy the whole world with their progress and growth stories. With his new eco-self, he now will understand Fevvers, the “bird-woman” and enable the communication between the colonizer and the colonized. The aim of this paper; is to explore the realities and truths related to the (hybrid) ”different other“ through “animal symbolism” and Deleuze and Guattari concepts of “minor literature and art,” becoming woman, becoming animal, nomadism, assemblage and flight employing “nomadic thinking, “ to open up a Third Space in the mind as a site for the construction of new discourses deconstructing the dominant Western discourses created by binary oppositions and descentering man and God and questioning of the “grand narratives of growth and democracy“ in the quest for true knowledge in a Western oriented “global” world through counter local knowledges.
Keywords
References
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Details
Primary Language
English
Subjects
Creative Arts and Writing
Journal Section
Research Article
Authors
Dilek Caliskan
*
Türkiye
Publication Date
April 25, 2020
Submission Date
July 31, 2019
Acceptance Date
March 23, 2020
Published in Issue
Year 2020 Volume: 19 Number: 2