Out of the two novels we have read so far, Angela Carter's book was a more fulfilling read and said more than "Geek Love"could ever dream of. Carter wove her storylines perfectly winding them to tell so many different stories within the story of Fevvers and Walser. Feminism, consumption, American domination, oppression, and marriage are just a few of the subjects the book dives into.
I have been thinking about why "Nights at the Circus"was such a more enjoyable read. I think it is because it kept you guessing all the time. After reading "Geek Love"I was not expecting the happy and boisterous ending we are given in "Nights at the Circus". Every switch in voice and scene was important because it introduced a new theory and though of Carter's. She used the story to give her own opinions and in some places in the book it is almost as if she forgets this.
Another thing that was surprising and held the reader even tighter was simply the way in which Fevvers spoke and the language she uses. At the beginning of the book when she is explaining how she was born and raised in a whore house so of the language is so eloquent even it leads you to question even further "is she fact or fiction". For example when Lizzie, who raised Fevvers and apparently worked in a whore house for most of her life says,
"Oh, that Toussaint!" said Lizzie. "How he can move a crowd! Such eloquence, the man has! Oh, if all those with such things to say had mouths! And yet it is the lot of those who toil and suffer to be dumb. But, consider the dialectic of it, sir, ' she continued with freshly crackling vigour, 'how it was, as it were, the white hand of the oppressor who carved open the aperture of speech in the very throat you could say that it had, in the first place rendered dumb, and-''
Nights and the Circus pg 67.
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