SOURCE: Gass, Joanne M. “Panopticism in Nights at the Circus.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 14, no. 3 (fall 1994): 71-6.

In the following essay, Gass explores the image of the panopticon and its relation to the containment of women in Nights at the Circus.

In her “Polemical Preface” to The Sadeian Woman Angela Carter writes,

All the mythic versions of women, from the myth of the redeeming purity of the virgin to that of the healing, reconciling mother, are consolatory nonsenses; and consolatory nonsense seems to me a fair definition of myth, anyway. Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives women emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.¹

Carter's point is that myths belong to a system of discourses...