I was reading Rachel Rich’s blog post for the women’s roles in Carnival
Plays. “I feel like the flexibility in gender roles in these set of plays could
be due forward thinking of equality or all for the sake of comedy.” Although I
do not agree that it’s due to forward thinking of equality of genders, I agree
in that it’s for the sake of exciting laughter. The women’s roles were to strip
the men characters of their masculinity, which is supposed to be funny because
the men in Hans Sachs’s time were seen as the head of the households (being the
strong, dominant, smarter one).
In the 1500s, males were expected to play the dominant
role instead of being the submissive one, which is a role usually given to
women. In The Stolen Bacon, the farmer Hermann
said, “Oh, God, help me get my bacon back, huh? Oh my life is going to be
manure. My wife is gonna beat me and then rip me apart. She’s gonna peck me raw
like a fat hen.” It’s silly because he’s the farmer, yet his wife makes the
decisions over what happens with his meat. Not only that, she rules over his
life with a “reigning fist”, which shows she’s the dominant one in the
relationship. In The Pregnant Farmer, the sick farmer Kunz said, “Wife,
you are to blame for this ‘cuz you always want on top.” Apparently, the
dominant role is being the person on top while having sexual intercourse, and
his wife has taken that role when males are expected to be the dominant one.
Remember this is all in the 1500s (time of Hans Sachs).
In the 1500s, it’s highly likely that females were
thought to be mentally inferior since they weren’t offered better career
options than males. In The Wife in the Well, the wife outsmarts her
husband in that the she was able to sneak her way back into the house and lock
him out, make him look guilty in the end, and also connivingly had an affair
with her lover for 6 months behind her husband’s back. In The Farmer with
the Blur, Gretta tricks Heinz into believing that instead of seeing his
wife having an affair with the priest, his eyes were actually blurred and
fooled by the fog and mists. Both plays humiliate the males’ intelligence by
females.
Yes, I argued that the women’s roles were to excite
laughter for the audience because they acted against the status quo of Hans
Sachs’s time. However, I also had another topic I wanted to explore: Hans Sachs
portrayed most of these females in a negative light: abusive, deceitful, harsh,
cruel, crazy, cheaters, dominant. Why? Perhaps, Sachs main message overall was
actually in the play The Evil Woman: Stay single and try to not get into
a relationship with unhappiness/women. That's just a thought.
I found an interesting little bulletin when researching gender roles in 16th century Europe. It hinted at a change in the perception of women around that time -- that "writers began to challenge the Christian and Aristotelian views, which identified women with sin and imperfection."
ReplyDeleteSo maybe Sachs was clinging to an old idea in the midst of a changing worldview?
Great find, Whitney! This certainly can help inform our understanding of the plays. Thanks for sharing!
DeleteAlice, I agree with your analysis. I think much of the comedy is 'lost in translation' as well as 'taken out of context'. There is hardly a way for us to know what people thought was funny in the 16th century, so we have to guess. I also wondered in another post if Sachs was writing about his wife. I'm surprised that so many of our ideas coincide with one another, because we are all quite different. I think these writings were much more absurd than we in the 21st century can even imagine.
ReplyDelete