She Stoops to Conquer: A Revel in Carnivalesque

Abstract

Mikhail M. Bakhtin is best known for his visionary conception of ‘Carnivalesque', as a model for the regeneration of time and world as well as the emancipation of human spirit. ‘Carnivalesque' generally refers to a literary mode that subverts and liberates the assumptions of the dominant style or atmosphere through humour and chaos. It also offers a chance to have a new outlook on the world, to appreciate the relative nature of all that exists and to enter a completely new order of things. Bakhtin himself declares in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, that the carnival is the place for working out ‘a new mode of interrelationship between individuals, counterposed to the all powerful socio-hierarchical relationship of non-carnival life'. In carnival, everything is rendered ever-changing, playful and undefined. Hierarchies are overturned owing to inversions, debasements and profanations; performed by normally silenced voices and energies. My venture in this article is to re-read Oliver Goldsmith's renowned anti-sentimental comedy She Stoops to Conquer (1773) with the carnivalesque stances. This play is often termed as a ‘comedy of manner', but how far the hypothesis goes with the theoretical framework of Bakhtin's proposed notions about Carnivalesque, will be my exploratory endeavour here.