“Waiting in the Wings”: The Economics and Ethereality of Theatrical Space in Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus

In this chapter Newberry interrogates a range of theatrical spaces navigated by Angela Carter in Nights at the Circus (1984), a theatre novel which explores the intersections between sexual, transactional, and gendered performativity. Engaging with Foucault’s work on heterotopic space, Baudrillard’s engagement with the simulacra, and more recent critical scholarly analysis examining the politics of gender and space as performance, Newberry examines themes of bought pleasure and the commodification of performance; the relationship between authenticity, power and public and private space; and where we might seek and find elements of the real in a novel that blurs historical and biographical ‘truth’. How might the audience, the reader, and the scholar, search for, discover, and dismantle the illusions that Fevvers, and Carter, set up for us?