Carter's Artifice and Feminist Agenda

         Carter forces the reader to question the validity of Fevvers’ story from the very beginning, and it is precisely because of Walser’s investigation that we come to know Fevvers’ story.  He says: “Though do not think the revelation she is a hoax will finish her on the halls; far from it.  If she isn’t suspect, where’s the controversy?  What’s the news?” (11) Because we are primed with the seed of doubt by the narrator, subsequent moments of supernatural happenings – like the moment in which Fevvers sprouts her wings – become increasingly questionable.

         For example:

“She let out a great shriek,” said Lizzie, “that brought me up out of a dream – for I shared the attic with her, sir – and there she stood, stark as a stone, her ripped chemise around her ankles, and I would have thought I was still dreaming or else have died and gone to heaven, among the blessed angels; or, that she was the Annunciation of my menopause.” (24)

         The first things about this passage that caught my attention was its reliability – not even Lizzie knows if what she saw was really happening, or if the sprouting of wings was just a dream.  This ambiguity feeds back directly into Walser’s initial skepticism, and reinforces the potentially artificial nature of the story. 

         This particular moment in the story is very much concerned with feminist themes.  In many ways, Fevvers wings symbolize the beginning of her transformation from ordinary child to “…the pure child of century...[in a] New Age in which no women will be bound down to the ground.” (25) But what if this transformation never took place?  Does this debunk the story’s potentially feminist agenda?  Carter clearly intended for the reader to also question the verisimilitude of Fevver’s and Lizzie’s stories, but why?  Carter’s ambiguity suggests that the story could take place even if Fevver’s story isn’t true.  Perhaps Carter is suggesting that a winged woman does not do anything to directly change a woman’s role in society.  It certainly has changed Fevver’s circumstances by providing her with wealth and fame, but winged or not, she still endured certain female experiences – both bodily and at the hands of men – in which her wings played only a minor role.  For example, she grew up in a brothel and witnessed the way women were treated.  She learned from these experiences.  And this was well before she sprouted her wings.