Running Away with the Circus: Chappell Roan Through the Lens of Angela Carter
Words: Georgina Bruce
When I was a teenaged girl, I wanted to run away with the circus. Not the actual circus, where I had been as a kid, and peed my pants in the big top. Not the circus where skinny young men with bare chests pushed girls around in the waltzer cups. I wanted to run away with the other circus, the place of magical delights and dreamy sexuality I had read about in Angela Carter’s stories, and of course, in her novel, Nights at the Circus.
I’m talking about the circus where an aerialiste grows real wings. Where freak shows and runaways travel alongside the company of lion tamers and acrobats. The kind of glitzy, gothic place where a lonely teenage girl - whose only friends are in books - can find something so completely magical that it feels real. To clarify: I didn’t want to learn to tightrope walk, or to learn any kind of skill, really. And I certainly wasn’t interested in getting up early and shovelling elephant shit all day.
I wanted to be an artiste. The life of the artiste was not measured by applause, by bows taken in front of an adoring audience, or even by money. It was an unmeasurable quality residing in greasepaint, rope, sawdust-strewn places between canvas and tarpaulin. The sound of hungry lions, roaring at dawn. The expression on the face of the bearded lady, tanning herself in the morning sunshine while her boyfriends packed up her caravan for another journey.
I guess the circus aesthetic – if not its bleak realities – appeals to the adolescent desire for self-exploration. Running away with the circus – or dreaming about it – is a way of finding out who you are. (In my case: lazy, unmotivated, and not cut out for the circus life at all.) The circus represented a subculture in all the best senses of the word: Subliminal, sublime, subterranean, subversive. To me, it was a place where the conventions and rules of suburbia didn’t apply, where no one expected you to get an office job and a mortgage and a husband. A place for precisely those individuals who thought that particular set of conventions could go and get shot out of a cannon.
That circus is a place where pop artist Chappell Roan could easily fit in. With her glittery eyes, wild red hair, and diamante-encrusted hot pants, Roan stomps and stalks the stage like she’s just fallen out of the pages of an Angela Carter story. It’s not just her visual aesthetic that makes it so - her loud, dizzy, pop music is the ideal soundtrack to a freak show. Bizarre, heady, full of sex and jokes and sexy jokes – the best of which she excitedly half-shouts in her song Red Wine Supernova: “I hear you like magic / I’ve got a wand and a rabbit!”
But most of all, there’s the unsettling sense that at any moment, the whole performance could go completely off the rails. It’s this unpredictability, this going just a little bit too far, that places Roan firmly in the realm of the outsiders. Despite being signed to a major label, and supporting pop ingenue Olivia Rodrigo on her tour, she is weirdly far from the mainstream. Her zany, theatrical, moustache-twirling declaration of sexuality is just too much for the average man - but then again, it’s not created for him.
Roan seems to sidestep convention and there are moments of incredible vulnerability in her music, such as in the song Casual where she laments a situationship. In the chorus she plaintively asks that while she is, “knee deep in the passenger seat and you’re eating me out/is it casual now?” It’s a wild image for the totally relatable experience of being gaslighted by a lover, yet it’s an image which also highlights and foregrounds Roan’s sexuality. There’s sadness, a desperation that leaks out between the jokes and the playful sexuality. “Here come the excuses that fuel the illusions,” Roan sings, making clear that she too is subject to the romantic tricks staged by those who see her primarily through the lens of her youth and beauty.
“Girls who want to explore their talents and powers often have to treat their looks as an obstacle. Angela Carter knew this.”
Girls who want to explore their talents and powers often have to treat their looks as an obstacle. Angela Carter knew this. The inner worlds of girls and women are always under siege in Carter’s stories, always beset by terrors all around, inevitably involving the amorous advances of wicked men. But in their core, those inner worlds are inviolable. Yet Carter was writing in the before times - in the days when life was a private affair, and spectacle was, well, spectacular.
We live now in a world where girls are no longer allowed an inner life that can’t be captured by the lens of a phone camera. Their hair, their skin, their bodies, their clothes – all value is visual, or so they’re told. It’s demanded of girls that they put on a performance of beauty and femininity and that they never allow anything ugly – like pain, or ambition, or facial hair – to ever betray them. There’s no excuses allowed in a time where perfect beauty can be achieved with the swipe of a credit card or, failing that, a couple of TikTok filters.
Carter’s visions of circus spectacle are always tempered by their liminality, by the sense that they secretly mean more. The beautiful woman flying through the air is the image, but below the image is a universe of meaning. We are intrigued by the mask that reveals. In this context, I think Chappell Roan might be getting ripped off. The spectacle of youth and sexuality has a thinness to it that makes Roan’s music seem more trivial than it is. Being desirable (“call me hot not pretty”) is her mission statement. Being seen – “On the stage in my heels/it’s where I belong” – is the source of her identity.
We see a woman trapped “every night / both lips on the mirror.” A showgirl through and through. While her version of the circus is alluring in its own way, it does not have the magic and mystery that makes us want to run away with it. Instead of taking us down the rabbit hole into another, inner, world, she keeps leading us back to the mirror at the centre of our modern problems with femininity. What we see there is only an image: fragile, breakable, and shallow.
