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

appetites of the silvery, moonlit clown. Gender was as ghostly and as
paradoxical as the clown’s own nature.
Pierrot’s origins in the Commedia dell’arte and his original role as a buffoon
had altered by the late-nineteenth century. He had come to represent a silent
malevolence and shadowy evil which was subtly contained within the
lineaments of his lunar-coloured garments. The pantomime role had involved
the challenging and transgressing of boundaries and the world of the demonic
was invariably present, though it never triumphed; rather, laughter and love
prevailed with repeated beatings and roistering. With the Decadent movement
of the fin de siècle the demonic became the prevailing tone, filled with a
sardonic bitterness and searing, although hidden pain. Pierrot’s silence and
pallor were seen as the ultimate attributes with which to convey the trangressive
and mordant nature of the liminal artistic life. The clown’s achromatic colour
and his muteness were aspects that resembled the unsullied emptiness of page
and canvas, and his mutable, quicksilver nature was as indeterminate and fluid
as any interpretation or subjective artistic representation. The artist could thus
mould the figure to represent what was wished and in so doing reveal how
slippery and subjective any representation is.
In the chapters on Giraud, Ensor, Dowson and Beardsley this thesis explores
the carnivalesque and transgressive attributes of the wan clown as a central
concern in the work of these artists. Kristevan and Bakhtinian theory on the
carnivalesque and the relation of language to transgression will structure and
guide the tenets and arguments of the thesis. The mutability and fluid
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