“Bending the tune to her will”: Laughing (at) Freaks in Carter’s Nights at the Circus and Garland’s The Palace of Curiosities”

In different albeit complementary ways, Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984) and Rosie Garland’s The Palace of Curiosities (2013) use the reference to Victorian freaks (and processes of ‘enfreakment’) in order to treat issues that are still cogent nowadays, such as gender roles and female agency. These two novels focus on the lives of the winged ‘Cockney Venus’, Sophie Fevvers, and of Eve, the Lion-Faced Woman, through a typical neo-Victorian filter aiming at exploding the ideological and cultural frame of mind of the nineteenth century, as it were, from within. Through the presence of literary strategies such as parody and historiographic metafictional rewriting (since Eve’s story is partially modelled on Julia Pastrana, the ‘Ape Woman’), Carter and Garland turn Fevvers and Eve from emblems of non-normative bodies into active agents of their own destiny. In this respect, humour and carnivalesque laughter become the instruments through which these female freaks question patriarchal norms.