The Female “Carnivalesque” and Resisting Patriarchal Authority in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus

The aim of this research is to explore the concept of female resistance to patriarchal oppression in one of Angela Carter’s novels: Night at the Circus. The novel throws light on the lives of oppressed and marginalized women who occupy inferior positions in patriarchal culture. The concept of female resistance in Nights at the Circus is discussed in the light of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the “carnivalesque”, which he introduced in his study on French popular culture in Rabelais and his world. Bakhtin uses the concept of the “carnivalesque” to describe the literary motifs that characterize Francois Rabelais’ writing and which can be traced to popular cultural expressions that surrounded him in the sixteenth century. Bakhtin regards the “carnivalesque” as a liberating anti-authoritarian force that challenges dominant world views and subverts the discourses of “high” culture.
The present research demonstrates the role of the female “carnivalesque” in challenging dominant patriarchal culture through the application of three main concepts in Bakhtin’s theory to Carter’s feminist novel: the concept of “heteroglossia” in a language, the image of Rabelaisian clowns, and the notion of physical excess and grotesque body. The research also makes use of Bakhtin/ Volosinov’s theory on the relationship between language and ideology, and provides a historical analysis of the different forms of English spoken language used in the novel. In the final analysis, this research argues for the value of Bakhtin’s theory of the “carnivalesque” in analyzing forms of female subversion of patriarchal authority in works written by women writers.