The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [152]
Carnival revelers indulged in gender-role reversals. We tend to see cross-dressing onstage or at Halloween as very different from doing it in your bedroom or at a bar, but it is arguably not.12 Carnival was an opportunity to do what you wanted so it was a good time to discover what you wanted. In a Spanish play of 1611, young Serafina tells her maid Doña Juana:
At the Feasts of Carnival
Every woman ends up in disguise.
I desire to amuse myself;
It should not surprise you
That the clothing of a man attracts me
Since it is that which I cannot be.13
Carnival was rebellious; but it was also a sanctioned mock rebellion that served as a safety valve.14 Two of the most famous theorists of carnival, Bakhtin, and the American historian Natalie Zemon Davis, saw it as much more an agent of change than a safety valve.15 As Bakhtin put it: be they monk, priest, scholar, governor, or physician, at carnival, people willingly cast off their status in order to join the common melee “and perceive the world in its laughing aspect.”16 Zemon Davis demonstrated that the “women-on-top” trope of the carnivals, at the very least, reminded people that this “perversion” was an option. Charivari was a carnival-type event where costumed bands would go visit people who had made fools of themselves, particularly May-December newlyweds on their wedding night. They’d bang pots and pans under their windows—or some other infuriation—and refuse to leave until they were paid off. (There was often a standard price.) Charivaris mocked adulterers, excessive wife beaters, and husband beaters. The latter were called skimmingtons and were represented by men dressed as women, carrying the metal skimming ladles that symbolized a wife’s weaponry.17 Charivaris shamed the rebellious, but also celebrated them in a way, and advertised them.18 Events of a carnival type, including feasts of fools, carnivals, and charivari, were a significant part of regular life. It is estimated that at the events’ height of popularity, large cities devoted around three months a year to them.19 Carnival mocked the whole order of things, mocked even the wrongness of sin and the rightness of virtue, mocked the pope with his permission and encouragement, mocked God in heaven and the devil in hell. One of the indispensable props of carnival was a wooden stage set of hell. Bakhtin wrote of carnival’s hell theater: “The people play with terror and laugh at it; the awesome becomes a ‘comic monster.’”20 Like women-on-top, mocking hell is a complex behavior. It rivets attention on the threats of hell, but also elicits laughs.
Ancient festivals and medieval carnival have striking similarities. Both have two main sets: the world and the underworld. Both have girls impregnated by the uncle or the Father. In both there is the drama of the beloved son, his gruesome death, and his marvelous revival. Christmas is a time to meditate on his difficult but successful birth and the sudden rise in status of the new mother: kings now come to her and await her sign to see the heir to the world. Easter called minds to bloody death and magical revival. Carnival was a chance to try these on.
The age of witch hunts, Inquisitions, and religious wars did not last forever. After the transition from medieval to modern, the fear of change waned; the gross repression ended, and so did the festival frenzy. As always, while people are fighting about whether things should change or not, things change. Novelties become more familiar. When that happens, even the conservatives’ lives bear no resemblance to