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Circus and Nature in Late Georgian England
This chapter concentrates upon the founding example of Astley’s in order to
analyze the attitudes to the environment that the circus inherited, and with which
it played. The circus is, after all, basically about nature, testing its limits by
dwelling on spectacular and exceptional things. Most of these performances are
obviously gained through training and cultivation, but some are presented as
natural anomalies. My method is borrowed from structural anthropologists,
notably Claude Lévi-Strauss and Edmund Leach, who have studied the way that
humans tend to order the world into fundamental categories, regardless of place
or time. 9 These categories fall into a sequence as one moves from the familiar
realm of the self and the home, through the ambiguous zone of “vermin” and
“game,” to the threatening domain of “the other,” the exotic, and the wild. Corresponding
sequences apply to all phenomena: thus humans may be (and frequently
are) subjected to the same criteria of domesticity, wildness or ambiguity as other
animals. Indeed the chief lesson of this approach is that statements about the
differences between species actually reflect our perceptions of difference within
our own, and our evaluations of them.
It may seem inappropriate to use such an avowedly anti-historical doctrine as
structuralism as a tool of historical analysis. But I see no reason why the foundations
of human thought cannot be shown in their relationship to the more
superstructural, ideological elements of belief and practice that changed over time.
Indeed a more chronologically inflected application of structuralist thinking can
be seen in the work of the famous Soviet critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who saw
revolutionary potential in the grotesque symbolism employed by the French
sixteenth-century writer Rabelais, especially in his story of the gluttonous and
incontinent giants Gargantua and Pantagruel. 10 These literary idioms stemmed,
Bakhtin argued, from an ancient and pervasive culture of the carnival that,
ironically, reached its peak in the repressive and religiose world of the late Middle
Ages and early Reformation. Humans tend to punctuate periods of normalization
and restraint (in this case Lent) with outbursts of misrule, when the social lid is
lifted off and the world seems temporarily to be turned upside down. Night
becomes festive day, women dominate men, boys are dressed up as bishops and
swing censers filled with human excrement, animals dress up as humans and vice
versa. Authority is lampooned; hierarchies and taboos are suspended in a phase of
Dionysiac excess. The lofty realm of the mind is temporarily subverted by the base
physical interests of the genitals and the guts – the “lower bodily stratum,” as
Bakhtin called it.
Much of this symbolism is of course traceable in the modern circus, most
particularly in the nonsensical trickster-figure of the clown, but in a comparatively
etiolated form. There is no spilling over into the mass participation that characterizes
the carnival proper. This is partly because the circus is a reformed form,
shaped by the moral and political campaigns of late Georgian and Victorian
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