Morphing Moonlight: Gender, masks and carnival mayhem- The ...

and unconventional behaviour closely relates the figure of the clown to the
carnivalesque tradition, where the Feast of Fools depicted ‘drunken orgies on
the altar table, indecent gestures, disrobing’ (Bakhtin 1984: 74-75). Medieval
fools were associated with laughter, both mocking and destructive of social
hierarchy, but at the same time regenerative. However, as Michael Bakhtin
notes, during the Romantic period this laughter lost its regenerative aspect and
became merely ‘cold humour, irony and sarcasm’ (Bakhtin 1984: 38). This
sardonic disposition accords well with the grimaces of the white mask of the
late nineteenth century, where a smile becomes the rictus of sarcastic pain
stretched over a white-floured carapace. Pierrot assumes the role of repository
for the desires and fears of the late nineteenth century.
Gender in the nineteenth century became one of the major social divisions
where an absolute split between the public and the private was instituted and
bodies were rigidly differentiated into male and female (Pollock 1996: 6-7).
This inscribed a discourse of power and social order which became a part of
the cultural representations of the time. These cultural representations
ensured the production and maintenance of the relations of power and
difference:
Events are presented from within a certain ‘vision’. A point of view
is chosen, a certain way of seeing things, a certain angle, whether
fictitious events or ‘real’, historical facts are involved. (Bal 2001: 42)
This study aims to analyse the poetic and visual narrative representation of
fin de siècle Pierrot as a figure of transgression, madness and ambiguous
gender in the works of Giraud, Ensor, Dowson and Beardsley. The reading
7