Nights at the Circus: A Space Experience of Modernity

Angela Carter set the story deliberately in a closed space in Nights at the Circus to offer a reflection of the cramped space of modern people. Through the unique images, incidents and their spatial relationship, Carter put human's mercilessness and earnestness together, mixed fantasies, absurdities and realities into one, and thus invented a world of being real and unreal, ridiculous and pathetic as well. Such a world was full of irony and mockery. Accordingly, she exposed the ugliness, the ruthlessness, the helplessness, and the disorientation of human nature, and made a poignant criticism of both spiritualism and materialism of the western world in the course of modernization. This essay aims to explain what Nights at Circus can enlighten us from the following three aspects: the representation of spatial experience, the deconstruction of power space and the juxtaposition of space narrative.