A caravana dos prodígios: maravilhas, figuras grotescas e freaks na obra “Noites no Circo” de Angela Carter

Abstract

This dissertation aims to make a genealogy of the process of conversion of prodigious and wonderful figures of the past in monstrous and aberrative figures in the West. In order to do so, we accomplished three stages of our itinerary: the paradigm of the Greco-Roman and medieval world of wonders, the birth of the grotesque aesthetic in the light of the modern civilizational process and the disciplinary era of the bodies, moment of therapy and hospitalization of the so-called monsters. In a second moment of our research, we aimed to comprehend the look that women literature concedes to these prodigies in an attempt to synthesize their uses in a critical relation to the patriarchy. The process of disenchantment of the stranger as a facet of this genealogy intersects with aspects of the advent of modern patriarchy, especially in what it refers to the ways of treating its alteritary figures. Recently, such intersection made monsters, freaks, prodigies and marvels described in the women's literature occupy more potent and positive places, often metaphorical, to expose and re-signify various aspects of the female condition. We focused on Angela Carter and, more specifically, her oeuvre from 1984, Nights on the Circus, because her characters demonstrate dynamics of an inverse process to the abjection of the stranger: instead of being disenchanted, they were figures that re-enchanted the world by means of a reappropriation of its prodigiousness