O‘zmu xabarlari вестник нууз acta nuuz

O‘ZBEKISTON MILLIY 
UNIVERSITETI
XABARLARI, 2023, [1/5]
ISSN 2181-7324 
 
FILOLOGIYA 
https://science.nuu.uz/ 
Social sciences 

---

O‘zMU xabarlari Вестник НУУз ACTA NUUz
 
FILOLOGIYA 
1/5 2023 
- 286 -
Reusencreutz, a Member of Parliament who pays a great and 
systematic political effort to prevent women from their right to 
vote[1]. Fevvers says, “I saw it in the paper only yesterday 
how he gives the most impressive speech in the House on the 
subject of Votes for Women. Which he is against. On account 
of how women are of different soul-substance from men, cut 
from different bolt of spirit and cloth, and altogether too pure 
and rarefied to be bothering their pretty little heads with things 
of this world, such as the Irish question and the Boer War”. 
Here in this satirical tone, Fevvers highly possibly alludes to 
the above mentioned W. E. Gladstone. In this quote, the reader 
can notice how preposterous and antique Carter makes it 
sound for phrases such as women’s “pretty little heads” or 
being “cut from different bolt of spirit and cloth” expressions 
that were ridiculous even in Fevvers’ time[1,38]. These days 
no public figure could afford to use them without being 
condemned and despised. Even in Carter’s time they would be 
unacceptable. Nights at the Circus gently infiltrates in the 
historical period of the dawn of the 19th century also by 
alluding to several real historical public figures from the 
branch of art, politics or science. In the very first scene where 
Fevvers enthusiastically tells Walser about her European tour, 
she drops a couple of famous names from art, starting with a 
British one, Dan Leno, the Victorian music hall comedian: “I 
love London. London - as dear old Dan Leno calls it, ‘a little 
village on the Thames of which the principal industries are the 
music hall and the confidence trick”. The reader can notice 
how Carter handily links her fictional circus performer 
Fevvers to the really formerly existing famous trickster Leno 
to dissolve the divide between the historical and fictional. 
After mentioning several French names associated with 
experimental art work, such as the dramatist Alfred Jarry who 
“proposed marriage”, the renowned painter of prostitutes 
Henri 
Toulouse-Lautrec 
(“not just Lautrec but all 
impressionists vied to paint her”) or the novelist Sidonie-
Gabrielle Colette and her husband Henry Gauthier-Villars 
known as Willy (“Willy gave her supper and she gave Colette 
some good advice”) she brings up an indirect reference to 
Sigmund Freud and his psychoanalysis, alluding to his 
notorious work with instincts and dreams: “in Vienna, she 
deformed the dreams of that entire generation who would 
immediately 
commit 
themselves 
wholeheartedly 
to 
psychoanalysis”. In London, Fevvers also gains the interest of 
the Prince of Wales. Another important element integrating 
the real political situation of the end of the 19th century into 
the novel is Lizzie. Although a former prostitute, she is a 
radical suffragist, a zealous and deliberate fighter for women’s 
rights, and an “epitome of the English radical tradition”. 
Compared to Fevvers who openly affects the wide 
audience Lizzie works secretly, as if from the entrenchment. 
Her style of work for women’s liberation might be move 
covert, nonetheless, the more efficient it is. She manipulates 
Walser to attach some of her letters to the journalistic mail 
packages he is sending to Britain. Later on, the reader figures 
out that they are politically oriented news about Russian 
internal affairs and that she is sending them to Russian 
dissidents in exile - the very group of politically active people 
who would eventually commence the Russian Revolution of 
1917. Day suggests that the roots of Lizzie’s political views 
can be traced down to the English radical movement of the 
1790s which are connected, among others, with the names of 
Mary Woolstencraft, a British writer, philosopher and 
advocate of women’s rights, and her partner, William Godwin, 
a philosopher, novelist and political journalist. The reader can 
notice that Lizzie is inspired by these existent personages of 
women’s suffrage in the scene where Lizzie ponders the group 
of female guards and convicts who escaped from the Countess 
P’s sanatorium and who are eager to start a female utopian 
society in the Siberian taiga. Lizzie cynically wonders whether 
the boy babies will be fed to female polar bears. Obviously 
bad-tempered, she is upset with their idea which she probably 
finds foolish and exaggerated and “clearly thinks herself back 
in Whitechapel at a meeting of the Godwin and Woolstencraft 
Debating Society”. As discussed in other chapters, Lizzie is a 
voice of the common sense and the most foresighted female 
character. To sum up, however spectacularly fantastic or 
magical Night at the Circus might seem, it carefully fits in the