Carnival Plays: Women's Roles

The Carnival plays had many common aspects to them that reoccurred during many of the plays that we were assigned to read.  All of the plays were realistic, but yet absurd.  Although these adjectives of description seem to contradict each other, it is true.  They can be described as realistic due to the lack of fantasy or events that have no possibility of existing, but also absurd due to the unlikelihood of the events actually happening.  In this way, I found that this set of plays aligns with “Lysistrata” that we read last week.  Another common aspect, in which I would like to focus on, which is found among, not all, but many of the plays is the role of women.  In the majority of the plays that was read, women played a strong, confident role and even mean or manipulative.  Like “Lysistrata”, I thought that these plays were written in a time where women played a passive or subservient role in day to day life.  In “The Wife in the Well” and “The Farmer with the Blur”, the women actually played the “trickster”.  As was mentioned in the introduction, “The trickster is one of Sachs's favorite dramatic characters.”  In both of these dramas the women used manipulation and scheming to achieve their desired outcome.  In “The Wife in the Well”, she is quick-witted and clever to come up with tricking her husband shortly after he surprised her by locking her out.   In “The Farmer with the Blur”, it was the cleverness of the neighbor woman who out-witted the husband-who was portrayed as gullible and weak.  In other plays as “The Stolen Bacon” and “The Evil Woman”, the woman is mean and controlling.  Obviously in “The Evil Woman”, due to her harsh words and reputation, but also a little more subtly in “The Stolen Bacon”.  He continues to express fear of what his wife would do if she found out any of the bratwursts were missing.  Again the male character is shown as gullible and weak, due to the chicanery of the priest.  It is to be noted that in some of the plays, it is a man who is the trickster or unkind one.  This was surprising to me due to the time period and is something that I focused on when reading the plays, due to my interest in the role of women in time.  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.  This idea is consistent with various interpretation of “Lysistrata”.