Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:26:52Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2010-06-25Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T19:14:15Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 yatsu_rk_me_assis.pdf: 641166 bytes, checksum: 5d7b2ce790cd209f94655f0110c76b1b (MD5) / O presente trabalho apresenta uma análise do romance Noites no circo (1984), da autora inglesa Angela Carter, abordando principalmente a personagem central, Fevvers. No primeiro capítulo tratamos brevemente da vida e obra da autora, e também da fortuna crítica produzida sobre o romance. Ainda neste primeiro capítulo, procuramos analisar algumas das nomenclaturas ligadas à produção carteriana, como realismo mágico, pósmodernismo e feminismo, tendo como referência alguns estudos já realizados. No segundo capítulo, utilizamos teorias acerca da simbologia. O interesse é analisar alguns dos símbolos que aparecem no romance e são relevantes na leitura, pois deixam subentendidos alguns dos sentidos que a autora deseja transmitir. No terceiro capítulo, o interesse é demonstrar que nesta extensa narrativa de Angela Carter, as representações estão presentes e produzem o clima de espetáculo, fazendo do romance um verdadeiro circo / The present work presents an analysis of the novel Nights at the circus (1984), by the English writer Angela Carter, above all approaching the main character, Fevvers. In the first chapter we briefly deal with the writer´s life and work, and also with the critical works produced about the novel. Still in this chapter, we try to analyze some of the terminology related to Carter´s production, such as magic realism, post-modernism and feminism, taking as reference studies already done. In the second chapter, we use theories about symbology. The interest is to analyze some of the symbols which appear in the novel and are important during the reading because they let implicit some of the meanings that the author wants to transmit. In the third chapter the interest is to demonstrate that in this long Carterian narrative the representations are present and produce the spectacle mood, turning the novel into a real circus

A repeated theme in the fiction of Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson is the use of domestic space as a tool for defining socially acceptable versions of female sexuality. Four novels that crystallize this theme are the focus of this dissertation: Winterson??s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) and Art and Lies (1994) and Carter??s The Magic Toyshop (1967) and Nights at the Circus (1984). Each chapter examines both authors?? treatments of a specific room in the house. Chapter II, "Parlor Games: Spatial Literacy in Formal Rooms," discusses how rooms used for formal occasions project a desirable public image of a family. More insidiously, however, the rooms protect the sexual order of the household, which often privileges male sexuality. Using the term spatial literacy to describe how characters interpret rooms, the chapter argues that characters with a high spatial literacy can detect not only the overt messages of these formal rooms, but also what underlies those messages. Chapter III, "Making Meals, Breaking Deals: Mothers, Daughters, and Kitchens," discusses the kitchen as the site of the production of domestic comfort. An analysis of who has primary responsibility for the production of comfort and whose comfort is privileged often reveals the power hierarchy of a given household. The chapter also examines the kitchen as a volatile space that can erupt with violence and the expression of repressed emotions and repressed sexuality. Finally, the kitchen is analyzed as a space of intimacy between mothers and daughters. Chapter IV, "Bedtime Stories: Assaulting Sexuality in the Bedroom," argues that the privacy of the adolescent bedroom is often disrupted by the surveillance of family members trying to control the sexual identity of the room??s occupant. The chapter also examines how social prescriptions encourage women to tolerate the interruption of their privacy. Each of the protagonists from these four novels has opportunities to learn about subverting the discursive constructions of domestic space, and several characters enact that subversion. This ability for subversion suggests the possibility for agency, a possibility that postmodernist thought often rejects, but one that Carter and Winterson allow.

Orientador: Cleide Antonia Rapucci / Banca: Antonio Roberto Esteves / Banca: Carla Alexandra Ferreira / Resumo: O presente trabalho apresenta uma análise do romance Noites no circo (1984), da autora inglesa Angela Carter, abordando principalmente a personagem central, Fevvers. No primeiro capítulo tratamos brevemente da vida e obra da autora, e também da fortuna crítica produzida sobre o romance. Ainda neste primeiro capítulo, procuramos analisar algumas das nomenclaturas ligadas à produção carteriana, como realismo mágico, pósmodernismo e feminismo, tendo como referência alguns estudos já realizados. No segundo capítulo, utilizamos teorias acerca da simbologia. O interesse é analisar alguns dos símbolos que aparecem no romance e são relevantes na leitura, pois deixam subentendidos alguns dos sentidos que a autora deseja transmitir. No terceiro capítulo, o interesse é demonstrar que nesta extensa narrativa de Angela Carter, as representações estão presentes e produzem o clima de espetáculo, fazendo do romance um verdadeiro circo / Abstract: The present work presents an analysis of the novel Nights at the circus (1984), by the English writer Angela Carter, above all approaching the main character, Fevvers. In the first chapter we briefly deal with the writer's life and work, and also with the critical works produced about the novel. Still in this chapter, we try to analyze some of the terminology related to Carter's production, such as magic realism, post-modernism and feminism, taking as reference studies already done. In the second chapter, we use theories about symbology. The interest is to analyze some of the symbols which appear in the novel and are important during the reading because they let implicit some of the meanings that the author wants to transmit. In the third chapter the interest is to demonstrate that in this long Carterian narrative the representations are present and produce the spectacle mood, turning the novel into a real circus / Mestre

Angela Carter (1940-1992) positions herself as a writer in ‘the demythologising business’ (1983b:38). She defines myth in ‘a sort of conventional sense; also in the sense that Roland Barthes uses it in Mythologies’ (in Katsavos 1994:1). Barthes states that ‘the very principle of myth’ is that ‘it transforms history into nature’ (Barthes 1993:129). This process of naturalisation transforms culturally and historically determined fictions into received truths, which are accepted as natural, even sacred. This thesis explores Carter’s demythologising approach in her collection of fairy tales, The Bloody Chamber, and her novel, Nights at the Circus. The readings of these texts are informed by the ideas that Carter discusses in her feminist manifesto The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History, which she describes as ‘a late-twentieth-century interpretation of some of the problems [de Sade] raises about the culturally determined nature of women and of the relations between men and women that result from it’ (1979:1). In The Bloody Chamber and Nights at the Circus, Carter questions the culturally determined roles that patriarchal ideology has ‘palmed off’ on women as ‘the real thing’ (1983b:38), and she scrutinizes the relations between the sexes that have resulted from them. In The Sadeian Woman, the subject-object dichotomy of gendered identity is explored as a predatory hierarchy. The Bloody Chamber explores the same ideological ground, and ‘the distinctions drawn are not so much between males and females as between “tigers” and “lambs”, carnivores and herbivores, those who are preyed upon and those who do the preying’ (Atwood 1994:118). The most discomfiting point that Carter makes in The Bloody Chamber is that patriarchal ideology has traditionally viewed women as herbivores, or ‘meat’, that is, as passive objects of desire and inert objects of exchange. In Nights at the Circus, the subject-object dichotomy is presented in its spectator-spectacle guise. Fevvers, the female protagonist, is a winged aerialiste who articulates an autonomous identity for herself that exists outside of patriarchal prescription. She presents herself as feminine spectacle and, in so doing, becomes simultaneously a spectator, as she ‘turns her own gaze on herself, producing herself as its object’ (Robinson 1991:123). Mary Ann Doane refers to this strategy of self-representation as the masquerade. In ‘flaunting femininity’, Fevvers ‘holds it at a distance’, and in this way womanliness becomes ‘a mask which can be worn or removed’ (Doane 1991:25). Susanne Schmid points out that ‘every act of deconstruction entails a process of reconstructing something else’ (1996:155), and this suggests that Carter, in demythologising, also remythologises. Roland Barthes argues that ‘the best weapon against myth is perhaps to mythify it in its turn, and to produce an artificial myth’ (1993:135). In the characterisation of Fevvers, Carter creates an ‘artificial myth’ that does not present itself as either eternal or immutable. In masquerading as a feminine spectacle, Fevvers temporarily incarnates an archetypal femininity. But this is just a performance, for Fevvers is also an agent of self-representation, and so she is both a real woman and an artificial myth of femininity. / Dissertation (MA (English))--University of Pretoria, 2005. / English / unrestricted