HIPOTESIS DE LA INVESTIGACION

Circus enactments can be traced back to the eighteenth century when they formed part of the culture of spectacle that surrounded fairgrounds and market places. Brenda Assael argues that the circus originates in equestrienne performances and burlettas of the amphitheatre and distinguishes four periods in the gradual development of the circus into a specific performance art (3).³⁰ The circus resulted in a hybrid ramification of the culture of spectacle bringing together equestrian shows and skilled variety artist within the same performative space. Yoram S Carmeli notes that it was during the Victorian period it crystallised into a separate performance genre and had its heyday during the second part of the nineteenth century (213). As the nineteenth century evolved, the circus grew into a distinct genre characterised by its specific circular arena, spatial mobility and a proper set of circus numbers – including aerialist performances,

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30 For a full record of the chronological development of the circus see chapter one in Brenda Assael’s The Circus and Victorian Society (2005). The critic divides the history of the Victorian circus into four key periods; between 1768-1820 it commenced as a theatrical genre in the amphitheatre. Here, equestrian shows like burlettas and gloires militaires were staged in a circular arena. Then, 1820-60 other variety artists were incorporated into the act as a compliment to the equestrian number. Later, between 1860-80, variety acts grew more popular then the equestrian show and at the same period important fairs closed. As a consequence several street performers turned to the circus. Finally, from towards the turn of the century (1880-1900) wild animal acts were introduced into the circus. Yoram S. Carmeli claims that it was during the second half of the Victorian era that the circus crystallised into a separate ramification within the world of spectacle (213). The affluence of street artists like clowns, jugglers and tricksters to the circus and the growing popularity of variety acts evidence this. The circus kept its circular arena of the amphitheatre and has turned into a hallmark for the circus.

acrobatic acts and wild animal numbers, just to mention a few – that presented a daring and dangerous spectacle that required skilled, trained and muscular bodies.

The historiography of circus has for long been limited to biographical accounts of circus people who have mostly been presented from a bourgeois point of view. In addition, Carmeli claims, this particular branch of Victorian popular entertainment has been discarded by most critics of theatre studies, popular culture scholars as well as academics concerned with peripatetic people (214-15). The nomadic life of travelling circus companies and the alternative lifestyle it represents have often resulted in a romanticised view of the circus. In Helen Stoddart’s words, “the circus self-image is at heart a paradoxical one since it promotes an idea of itself in the popular imagination as embodying a lifestyle unfettered by conventionality or social and legal restraints; a freedom which was echoed in performances which foregrounded the illusion of ease”

(Stoddart, Rings 175). Its peripheral position to the rest of society in conjunction with the subversive potential of the spectacle in the ring seem to invite for comparisons with Michael Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque. In his reading of Rabelais the critic contends, “carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions” (Bakhtin 10). The topsy-turvy spectacle in the ring symbolically turned the world upside down; the clowns’ subversion of the social order through laughter, the seemingly impossible bodily performances of acrobats and aerialist who defied the physical limits of the human body or wild animal tamers capable of controlling the natural instinct of beast. The circus placed emphasis on the excessive and material representation of the body and human nature, which Assael links to Bakhtin’s “grotesque realism” (8-9). For these reasons, several scholars have adopted a carnivalesque focal point in their interpretations of literary representations of the

circus, as will be seen in the ensuing analysis of Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984) in chapter 5.1.

Indeed, the Victorian circus defied limits through a carnivalesque mode, nonetheless, the world of the circus also depended on a complex inner hierarchy and spatial organisation. Assael claims that “however the contradictions showcased in the ring pointed to larger contradictions regarding the place of the carnivalesque in this society. In many cases, an act’s wondrous quality and its transgressiveness blurred the boundary between respectability and unrespectability, making the circus, in turn, a highly contested institution” (Assael 15). As a performative space the circus is arguably a social space and I will take a closer look at how the circus experience is lived by performers and audience alike by narrowing down my analysis to the female circus artist as she epitomises the transgressive potential of spectacle. Her physical and visual presence in the public sphere and spatial movement during her performance subvert gendered norms and ideological restrictions on women in the Victorian period.

In the beginning of the present century the time was ripe for disciplinary studies of circus history that would regard its artists and performances from new critical perspectives. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, several scholars have made attempts to fill this gap and publications such as Helen Stoddart’s Rings of Desire: Circus History and Representation (2000), Janet M Davis’s The Circus Age:

Culture and Society Under the American Big Top (2002), Brenda Assael’s The Circus and Victorian Society (2005) and Paul Bouissac’s Semiotics at the Circus (2010) testify to this.³¹ All the works mentioned here coincide in their treatment of the Victorian circus as a social space which offered possibilities for people who looked for a different lifestyle that did not fit the ideological norm. As Bouissac argues, the circus is inflected

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31 Other volumes that are dedicated to the Victorian circus are Peta Tait’s Wild and Dangerous Performances: Animals, Emotions, Circus (2011) and Jacky Bratton and Ann Featherstone’s The Victorian Clown (2006).

with deeper ideological meanings because “[the] circus always takes place within a particular culture and display through its own prism [of] ethical values and social norms, historical and political references, ethic standards [and] the memory of circus tradition itself” (181). Another point discussed by Stoddart, Janet Davis, Assael and Boissac alike, is the social construction of the circus spectacle as they concur in the importance of the audience’s role in the conception of the performance.

Considering the semiotics of this branch of Victorian world of spectacle, Bouissac speaks about the circus ring as a socially produced space and highlights how the specific topology of the circus ring is based on an inner structure that “generates a set of topological oppositions that produces spatial meanings” (14). He is particularly interested in how the spatial algorithm of the circus is marked by a symbolic enclosure that is imbued with transgressive movements. Here, the critic stresses how circus artists deal with the continuum of the physical space as actual distances and gravitational forces, and by manipulating discrete semiotic categories such as inside/outside the ring, centre/periphery, diametric/circular movements, horizontal/vertical acts the circus enactment blends the binary oppositions that are conceived as impossible. As Bouissac remarks,

the spatial categories that are meaningfully manipulated in circus acts are the same as the ones that are cognitively alive in everyday life. But the prism of the circus makes them more salient because it concentrates them in a strongly bounded space whose whole matrix can be perceived in a single vista. (20) In addition, the spectacular meaning that is produced within the performative space of the circus ring is conceived mainly through sight as the performer plays with the audience visual expectations. Therefore, I am particularly interested in agency, space

and the workings of the gaze to find out how gender is perceived, conceived and lived within the circus ring.

Lately, scholars address circus historiography from perspectives that break with the traditional approaches to circus studies. David Carlyon and Peta Tait draw attention to how up to recently, circus historiography has been notoriously selective and many topics have been overshadowed, in particular issues concerning female performers and sexuality. The combination of femininity, sexuality and public display is one of the main reasons why the enactments of female circus performers in the Victorian era have not been fully examined. On the one hand, scholars have for long held a stereotyped image of the Victorians as prudish and sexually naïve, and on the other hand, the middle-class viewpoint has been regarded as representative for Victorian society at large, and as a consequence, criticism has turned a blind eye to taboo topics.

Carlyon looks into the erasure of sex from nineteenth-century circus performances and insists on how the contemporary apprehension of the Victorian spectator as dull bystander has been distorted,

whatever issues of taste, morality, gender, or economic empowerment came into play, sexual allusion glimmers through apparent innocence. It also serves as a salutary reminder that nineteenth-century audiences were not naïve rubes . . . clueless bystanders missing references . . . To the contrary, they were as smart, sophisticated, and sexual as ourselves. (47)

Similarly, in his study of corporeality in the circus, Tait argues that, “[c]ulture’s memory of muscular bodies appears to be a domain imbued with ideological bias” (28).

Both scholars challenge the taboo regarding the sexed feminine body, and as Tait remarks, “culture’s capacity to remember seems to be attuned to beliefs about gender and body identity since muscular female bodies have been more easily overlooked with

the passing of time” (26). As argued above, the circus provided a public space where alternative lifestyles to normative ideology were openly exposed. Therefore, it is of great concern for contemporary studies of the female circus performer to pay heed to how this public professional was perceived by the audience, visually conceived in the circus ring and finally how this was experienced by the performer herself during the enactment.

Like other performance categories within the Victorian world of spectacle, the circus was a visual form of entertainment as the numbers on display in the sawdust arena appealed to sight above other senses. Assael stresses how, “the circus spoke to the eye and triggered a system of meaning that had relevance far beyond the ring itself” (8).

Similarly, Ann Feathertone claims the spectacle in the ring was surrounded by voyeurism and defines the circus audience specific mode of watching in terms of the gaze arguing, “[the] gaze is speculative . . . it observes and itemises, attracted by the prospect of performance, and is informed by what he already knows about the scenario”

(“Peep-Show” 51). Female performers were often represented in an eroticised fashion in the ring, and along these lines Featherstone suggests that circus women were turned into fetishized objects of pleasure (“Peep-Show” 48). These ideas need further consideration as the gaze often is regarded in terms of one-way direction, and more specifically, in the context of the spectacle of the female body, the women performer is often reduced into a sexualized object subjugated to the control of the male gaze. Concurring with Assael, the visual encounter in the circus performance rests upon a set of meanings. Since the public display of the body was rather suggestive than revealed, it could be read in terms of being a strategy to exhibit eroticised bodies to the maximum that was allowed by society’s standards (Carlyon 35). In this sense the female circus performer stood on the threshold between respectability and immorality, an idea I will develop in this section.

Assael adapts a new approach to the circus by giving insight into the social history of this performance culture and how its members lived and built its trade. Her study is a significant contribution to circus historiography as she pays attention to the representations and receptions of the acts, as well as, how the spectacle was constructed through the gaze. Framed by the circus ring, the gaze and spectacle are two concepts that are interconnected, and as Assael contends, this is densely charged with social criterion:

The spectator’s “gaze” involved more than just looking: complex feelings of fear, sympathy, lust, awe, bewilderment, and shock arose in the process. This presents methodological questions how the displays were understood and how the audiences and the gazes of individuals in them are “read”. I would argue that audiences are more “readable” through the eyes of individual spectators, whose pluralized selves appear in a variety of ways and attitudes, confusing and complicating class identity. Focusing on subjectivity in this way permits an interrogation of those social values that have been used to define the age, such as respectability, progress and improvement, to name a few, and those categories that have been used to delineate social groups within, such as class.

(10-11)

As pointed out earlier, the theme of sexuality, particularly the sexualised female body, has been omitted from circus historiography, only to become a key concern for contemporary circus historians. Regarded as improper and treated as a taboo topic, the staging of the female body in an erotised manner was the norm in the Victorian circus.

This can be perceived both as a means to attract the male observer appealing to the sexual titillation of the performance, and as a strategy to stifle the potential threat

patriarchal supremacy that female agency in the ring represented. Therefore, I will regard the female circus performer through the lens of the gaze.

The circus as a performative institution encompasses several kinds of spectacle.

Although some numbers like lion taming, clowns and fire eating were predominantly male, the circus offered a manifold of professional opportunities for women. Female acrobats, aerialists, equestriennes are three of the most common roles for female performers and they attracted large audiences that felt spurred by the desire to watch women do hazardous acts. In fact, by late nineteenth-century women circus acrobats had gained immense popularity and probably outnumbered male aerial artists (Stoddart, Rings 114-15).³² Assael symbolically calls these circus figures “women on top” (108), and her expression is suitable for these public women taking into consideration their spatial movements and position in the circus ring, as well as their superior corporeality, both as trained athletics and skilled performers. The circus numbers required great physical ability and skill, as well as strength and courage. In the Victorian period these were considered male characteristics, yet female performers had these qualities as well.

Stoddart contends that “so not only were these performances sexually transgressive in terms of the nineteenth-century public stage on which, far from any concessions being made to women’s lesser strength, they performed the same moves in the same way as men” (Rings 175). In other words, the world of the circus erased gender differences regarding ability, skill and corporeality. While some people welcomed this, others felt it as a potential threat to the social order.

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32 There is no fixed number of female artists registered, but historians understand that by late-Victorian era, female acrobats represented fierce competition to men in the profession, as women became the main draw. Senelick goes one step further arguing that the circus was misogynist environment and that female impersonators were preferred to female artists for being more reliable for their physical strength (84).

In the circus ring women had a rare opportunity to experience public agency and physical freedom and to feel liberated from social restrictions. Davis suggests that “[i]n an era when a majority of women’s roles were still circumscribed by Victorian ideals of domesticity and feminine propriety, circus women’s performances celebrated female powers, thereby presenting a startling alternative to contemporary social norms” (J M Davis 82). Indeed, female circus performers represented a lifestyle that did not correspond to the Victorian ideal of womanhood: pure, chaste, submissive and still.

Conversely, the ring represented a “transient and liberating life” in contrast to domesticity (J M Davis 96). In addition, female circus performers could gain financial independence through their earnings and pursue a career of aesthetic fulfilment. Assael compares life at the circus with the music hall arguing, “[l]ike the music hall and other performance trades, the circus depended on artists who observed industrial time-work discipline. As skilled workers, these performers required constant training and practice to perfect and maintain their unique talents” (6). This pinpoints the Victorian world of spectacle as a public space available to female experience, agency and empowerment as a career within the entertainment business required full dedication, hard training and active participation in order to succeed.

As a result, the female circus performer had a strong and muscular body that, taken the aesthetic values at the times, posed a transgressive potential of gender and corporeality. The strong and athletic body of acrobats and aerialists alike was a necessity for their enactments and result from hard continuous training, and is, moreover, closer to the contemporary ideal of the healthy and abled body. In the nineteenth century the muscular feminine body trespassed, as Tait points out, Victorian beliefs of physical features regarding gender and physicality, which proves how

“muscular bodies appears to be a domain imbued with ideological bias” (27-28). Since

the muscular female entertainer displayed her skilled body in the ring the audience had the opportunity to linger over her body. Her female body and performance that enhanced her female identity contradicted her muscular corporeality, and as Stoddart argues, “the acrobat’s success depended on the performer negotiating various aesthetic codes that sometimes were in conflict” (Rings 126). To reinforce that she was a woman, the performer engaged with social codes of femininity striking ladylike poses and body language. The spectator’s perception of women’s corporeality was disturbed when it did not coincide with the norm, consequently, the arena served as a space of speculation of the female body and gender roles.

Unavoidably, by situating the female body in semi-nude attire in the spotlight the circus performer became the object of the gaze. In many ways, the muscular female body was sexually attenuated and embodied a titillating spectacle for the audience and this was a conscious mode of representation by circus managers. Featherstone claims that strong bodies were represented as an erotic spectacle staged for the male gaze in ways that favoured eroticism above physical skills (“Peep-Show” 48). Yet, Featherstone fails to notice that because the muscular body was in motion instead of a static image, the performance represented voyeuristic pleasure for the observer. Female aerial performers and acrobats were capable of swinging into risky actions and execute perilous manoeuvres. Contrary to Featherstone, Assael recognises the titillation of the active body and argues, “taken together, beauty, flirtation, the thrill, and the strong female body produced complex responses on the part of the viewer, manifested in the gasp, gape, and the widening eyes. In essence this kind of spectatorship became an engrossing and embodied experience” (Assael 109). The way the female muscular body was perceived by the observer, conceived during the act and experienced all together by