Seductive Nights: the circus as feminist challenge in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus

Abstract

Feminist scholars such as Jane Marcus and Theresa de Lauretis have argued that Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood presents a challenge to the feminist modernist canon in its resistance to meaning. This article argues that, to the contrary, Nightwood’s resistance to meaning is precisely what constitutes the novel as a feminist text. Foregrounding the obvious, yet critically unacknowledged, similarities between Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus, this article argues that the outsider society of the circus becomes a feminist tool of resistance to productive meaning. In many ways, Carter’s Nights at the Circus can be understood as a postmodern retelling of Nightwood, and thus key to our understanding of Barnes’s feminism.