Gender and Sexuality

Gender and Sexuality in ‘Hard Times’ and ‘Nights at the Circus’

Carter celebrates Fevvers vivacity, sexuality and ambiguous gender role whereas many of Dickens’ characters are not only sexually repressed, such as Louisa who falls at her father’s feet from slightest stirrings of desire, but also in very fixed gender categories or even extreme, such as the hyper-femininity of Sissy and Stephen’s wife and the hyper-masculinity of Gradgrind and Bounderby. In this essay I will examine sexuality, the excess of it or lack of it in characters and gender identity.
In Victorian society women thought ‘to be at the mercy of their biology’ and their ‘strengths were emotional ratherthan bioogical, sympathetic and domestic rather than rational and worldly’ (Gilmour. 1993: 191) and for all these reason and much more women were seen as unfit to exercise their vote. However Fevvers is not ‘at the mercy of [her] biology’ because she ‘was not docked via what you might call the normal channels. […] but just like Helen of Troy was hatched’ (Carter. 1994: 7). Thus right from the start she is portrayed as androgynous and indeed very ‘worldly’. Her gestures are ‘grand and vulgar’ and she dreamt of very ‘worldly’ things such as ‘bank accounts […] and the jingling of cash registers’ (Carter. pg 7). Even physically she is androgynous: the swan had masculine and feminine connotations and so ‘becomes the ambiguous, androgynous creature associated with both man and woman’ (Milne). She represents both Cupid and Venus. Her ‘discovery of wings is treated as if it were something like the onset of menstruation […] or the hump […] a second breast that has to be concealed’ but at the same time something masculine, ‘the hump maybe be phallic, mbiguously bisexual’ (Armstrong, 1994: 273). According to Gamble she ‘blatantly displays the freakish excesses of her body, all twits, wings and the tantalising illusion of nakedness’ (Gamble. 1997: 161). In conclusion, Fevvers is both oxymoronic and androgynous in many aspects.

Like Fevvers, Louisa Gradgrind is not at ‘the mercy of [her] biology’. This is because of Gradgrind’s philosophy that ‘the one thing needful’ is ‘facts’ (Dickens. 1994: 1). Being a ‘man of realities’ (Dickens. Pg 2) and ‘perfectly devoid of sentiment’ (Dickens. pg12) he has brought up his children on these principles. Therefore Louisa is likewise ‘devoid of all sentiment’ and de-sexualised. Her complete lack of emotion on hearing Bounderby’s proposal from her father, which ironically Gradgrind is ‘moved by’, (Dickens. Pg 90) appals the reader. Her marriage is not a question of mutual love and desire but rather on questions of facts, Gradgrind informs his daughter
‘the question of fact you state to yourself is: Does Mr. Bounderby ask me to marry him? Yes, he does. The sole remaining question then is: shall I marry him?’(Dickens. Pg 88)

It is therefore not surprising after being brought up on these principles, that Louisa is tempted by James Harthouse, a man who even impresses the witch of the novel, Mrs Sparsit: on seeing Harthouse her immediate thoughts are:
‘Five-and-thirty, good-looking, good figure, good teeth, good voice, good breeding, well-dresses, dark hair, bold eyes.’(Dickens. Pg 107)
A man that even Mrs Sparsit finds ‘good-looking’ will inevitably stir some affection in Louisa, this even Mrs Sparsit herself predicts. Like the prisoners who can never escape the ‘tyranny of [Countess P’s] eyes’ (Carter. Pg 214), so Louisa cannot escape Mrs Sparsit’s gaze and her descent down the ‘staircase’ provides much amusement to Mrs Sparsit. She follows Louisa, hoping to catch her with Harthouse but instead she becomes a grotesque figure: as it starts raining her white stockings become various colours and caterpillars are attached to various parts of her dress. And it is this scene, according to Lodge that proves her to be the witch of the novel:
‘Traditionally witches are antipathetic to water. It is appropriate, therefore, that the frustration of Mrs Sparsit’s spite, when she loses track of Louisa, is associated with her ludicrous, rain-soaked appearance’(Lodge. 1969: 103)
Louisa does ‘fall’, but not at the bottom of the staircase, but at her father’s feet. Not only is she de-sexualised but she also does not comply with expectations of her gender. For example, domestic duties. When Mrs. Sparsit comes to live with her and Bounderby, she overlooks the domestic side of the household even though this is traditionally the wife’s role and compared to Mrs Sparsit, Louisa appears incompetent.

From the first chapter the reader is aware of Gradgrind’s hyper-rationality (his demands for ‘Fact!’) which consequently makes him hyper-masculine. But it is not his hyper-masculinity that I find humorous, because he does redeem himself at the end by acknowledging and accepting the failure of his system, rather it his de-sexuality that amuses me. For example, in chapter one of the first book, Dickens portrays Gradgrind as the epitome of ‘squareness’: ‘square forefinger[…]square wall of a forehead […]square coat, square legs, square shoulders’ (Dickens. Pg 1). His de-sexuality is so extreme that Dickens de-personifies him too, but what is humorous here is that whilst he is de-personified his clothes take on personality: ‘his very neckcloth, trained to take him by the throat with an unaccommodating grasp’!

The fundamental difference between Nights at the Circus and Hard Times is that Carter appears to celebrate human sexuality and ambiguous gender roles whereas Dickens portrays sexually repressed Victorians and punishes ambiguous gender roles. For Dickens those who do not comply with Victorian gender construction are not given a happy ending. For example, Sissy Jupe is portrayed as a Victorian female stereotype: the ‘Angel in the House’ and thus she meets what is expected of her gender, for this Dickens rewards her with a husband and children and a home- the reader hopes a happy home with a loving husband. This was perceived as utopia for a Victorian woman. In contrast, the ‘Bully of humility’ (Dickens. 1994: 12), the hyper-masculine Bounderby is disgraced and removed of his false pride-rather appropriately-in front the very audience to whom he had previously boasted of his fairy-tale origins.

In Carter’s novel ‘the radical possibilities of fluid gender roles are given a happy ending’ (Suleiman, 1994: 115). By Carter’s own admission Walser becomes an ‘object’ (VanderMeer. 2001) when traditionally it is women treated and regarded as objects and VanderMeer sees Walser as ‘weak specimen’ but Carter refuses to marginalize him as a character simply because men have marginalized women. She may point out the stupidities, cruelties, and ignorance of men, but she will not deny the individual his “right to vision.” Nor will she deny the positive realities of romantic heterosexual relationships even as she skewers the negatives and promotes lesbian liaisons’ (VanderMeer. 2001)

At the end, Carter celebrates human sexuality: Walser and Fevvers are making love and it is Fevvers who is on top. This scene ‘inverts the classical stereotype of a male figure with wings overwhelming a woman’ (Day. 1998: 192). Day is referring to the classical myth of the rape of Leda by Zeus disguised as a swan (in the myth it is the man with wings on top) . But more importantly, as Day points out, this is more than just an inversion of a stereotype. One of the characteristics of masculinity is dominance, especially over women but throughout Circus Carter portrays women as the more rational and dominant species. But in this scene Carter is not trying to show Fevvers dominating Walser, rather she is showing that the relationship between Walser and Fevvers is not
based on the principles of dominator and dominated but on the idea of love between equals (my emphasis). The cancelling of the traditional patriarchal icon of male dominance is necessary to emblematise this new relationship. (Day. 1998: 192)

As Fevvers is the ‘New Woman’ and as she will ‘hatch’ Walser ‘into the New Man…fitting mate for the New Woman’ (Carter. 1994: 281) the reader can assume that this relationship is an example of the ‘New Relationship’ in the new century. To Carter, the notion of ‘hatching’ becomes a metaphor for the idea that gender identity is something that is not given but made (Day. 1998: 181).

Bibliography

Armstrong, Isobel (1994) ‘Woolf by the Lake, Woolf at the Circus: Carter and Tradition’. In Sage, L. (ed) Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter. London: Virago Press Limited. Pg 257-278.

Carter, Angela (1994) Nights at the Circus. London: Vintage.

Day, Aidan. (1998) Angela Carter: The Rational Glass. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Dickens, Charles (1994) Hard Times. London: Penguin Group.

Gamble, Sarah (1997) Angela Carter: Writing From the Front Line. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Gilmour, Robin (1993) The Victorian Period: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature 1830-1890. New York: Longman.

Lodge, David (1969) ‘The Rhetoric of Hard Times’. In Gray, E. Paul (ed) Twentieth Century Interpretations of Hard Times. New Jersey: Prentice Hall. Pg 86-105.

Milne, Andrew. (n.d) Spider’s and Threads: Arachnological, Intertextual Weavings in Angela Carter’s Writing [online] Available from: http://perso.wanadoo.fr/andrew.milne/page%201.htm Consulted on 9.12.2005

Suleiman, Susan R. (1994) ‘The Fate of the Surrealist Imagination in the Society of the Spectacle’. In Sage, L. (ed) Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter. London: Virago Press Limited. Pg 98-116.

VanderMeer, Jeff. (2001). Angela Carter. [online] Available from: http://www.themodernword.com/scriptorium/carter.html Consulted on 9.12.2005.