What are the motifs in Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter?

Although feminism is one of the most persistent motifs in this novel, Carter’s brand of feminism is sometimes branded “post-feminism,” as she sometimes uses crude terms to refer to women, and women and men are not placed in strict victim-oppressor roles.

The major (and many of the minor) women characters in this novel are all (almost magically) extraordinary. The turn of the century was a dynamic time for women, to be sure, but the majority, by far, were still held to strict Victorian gender roles. The word “feminism” appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary for the first time in 1895.