Javascript must be enabled to continue!

VICTORIAN CARNIVALESQUE

The Carnival is just over, and we have entered upon the gloom and abstinence of Lent. The first day of Lent we had coffee without milk for breakfast; vinegar and vegetables, with a very little salt fish, for dinner; and bread for supper. The Carnival was nothing but masking and mummery. M. Héger took me and one of the pupils into the town to see the masks. It was animating to see the immense crowds, and the general gaiety, but the masks were nothing.—Charlotte Brontë, letter, March 6, 1843. . . Humble as I [Pecksniff] am, I am an honest man, seeking to do my duty in this carnal universe, and setting my face against all the vice and treachery.—Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44)Women were playing [at cards and roulette]; they were masked, some of them; this licence was allowed in these wild times of carnival.—Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847–48)OVER FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, Allon White acknowledged “the small army of literary critics now regularly describing modern cultural phenomena as ‘carnivalesque’” (109). Surprisingly, though, only advance scouting parties of carnivalesque critics have infiltrated the various war games, love feasts, slanging matches, “blood” sports, food fights, drinking bouts, carnal appetites, funferalls, body cultures, ludic acts of toasting, roasting, masking, mumming, and other folk and fair festivities — besides the recurring clowns, fools, rogues, tricksters, killjoys, and spoilsports — that significantly enliven and inform Victorian literature. When such critical forays have occurred, the role of the carnivalesque has often been contested, reflecting perhaps what White’s liminal reading of cultural history calls the nineteenth-century’s initial “‘disowning’ of carnival, and the gradual reconstruction of the concept of carnival as the culture of the Other” (102). And yet Robert Browning’s Fra Lippo Lippi still speaks eloquently for various Renaissance and Victorian writers when he proclaims that he is but “one” of many who “makes up bands/To roam the town and sing out carnival” (ll.45–46). Indeed, his double-voiced, pantagruelian aesthetic is to “go a double step,/Make his flesh liker and his soul more like,/Both in their order” (ll.206–08), for

Cambridge University Press (CUP)

Mark M. Hennelly

Victorian Literature and Culture

2002

Title: VICTORIAN CARNIVALESQUE

Description:

The Carnival is just over, and we have entered upon the gloom and abstinence of Lent.

The first day of Lent we had coffee without milk for breakfast; vinegar and vegetables, with a very little salt fish, for dinner; and bread for supper.

The Carnival was nothing but masking and mummery.

Héger took me and one of the pupils into the town to see the masks.

It was animating to see the immense crowds, and the general gaiety, but the masks were nothing.

—Charlotte Brontë, letter, March 6, 1843.

Humble as I [Pecksniff] am, I am an honest man, seeking to do my duty in this carnal universe, and setting my face against all the vice and treachery.

—Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44)Women were playing [at cards and roulette]; they were masked, some of them; this licence was allowed in these wild times of carnival.

—Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847–48)OVER FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, Allon White acknowledged “the small army of literary critics now regularly describing modern cultural phenomena as ‘carnivalesque’” (109).

Surprisingly, though, only advance scouting parties of carnivalesque critics have infiltrated the various war games, love feasts, slanging matches, “blood” sports, food fights, drinking bouts, carnal appetites, funferalls, body cultures, ludic acts of toasting, roasting, masking, mumming, and other folk and fair festivities — besides the recurring clowns, fools, rogues, tricksters, killjoys, and spoilsports — that significantly enliven and inform Victorian literature.

When such critical forays have occurred, the role of the carnivalesque has often been contested, reflecting perhaps what White’s liminal reading of cultural history calls the nineteenth-century’s initial “‘disowning’ of carnival, and the gradual reconstruction of the concept of carnival as the culture of the Other” (102).

And yet Robert Browning’s Fra Lippo Lippi still speaks eloquently for various Renaissance and Victorian writers when he proclaims that he is but “one” of many who “makes up bands/To roam the town and sing out carnival” (ll.

45–46).

Indeed, his double-voiced, pantagruelian aesthetic is to “go a double step,/Make his flesh liker and his soul more like,/Both in their order” (ll.

206–08), for.

Back

Related Results

Victorian Literature and Translation

Translating done in the Victorian era, as well as the later translation of Victorian literature out of English, has remarkable cultural, historical and theoretical significance. Un...

Devotional Verse

Perhaps what best defines the Victorian period are the various fluctuations and developments within religious culture that punctuate its timeline. A dominant and crucial strand wit...

Neo-Victorian

Despite neo-Victorianism's theoretical awareness of how colonial structures continue to infuse imaginations of the long nineteenth century, and how neo-Victorian culture might chal...

Whiteness in Victorian Literature

Victorian ideas of whiteness are inseparable from the expansion of British settler colonialism and the concomitant rise of racial science in the nineteenth century. In the century ...

Ireland

Irish Victorian literature is full of possibilities for research, and interest in it is growing continually. Long neglected, its time has apparently come at last. In the past it su...

Carnivalesque Reversal and Liminal Escape in Deudākhel

The purpose of this article is to investigate the interconnection between performer, performance and audience during the performance procession of deudākel. The paper, however, ill...

American Victorian poetry

“American Victorian Poetry” sounds like a contradiction in terms. Actually, the phrase “Victorian Poetry” was coined by an American in New York, when E. C. Stedman publishedVictori...

Ecology in Victorian Literature

Ecology, as a topic in studies of Victorian literature, is both longstanding and new. As recently as 2015, scholars were lamenting the field’s seemingly belated turn to ecocritical...

Email:
Password:

Email: