Critical Thinking Connection - Carnival Plays

Red Guards — high school and university students — wave copies of Chairman Mao Zedong's Little Red Book during a parade in June 1966 in Beijing's streets at the beginning of China's Cultural Revolution. More than 1 million people are believed to have died during the decade-long upheaval. (Jean Vincent/AFP/Getty Images)

While listening to the radio yesterday, I heard a report on China coming to terms with a bloody period in its history called the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), which was initiated by Chairman Mao Zedong and enforced by his Red Guards.

One image from the report struck me as particularly cogent to our discussion of the inverted hierarchies in Sachs' Carnival plays: students attacking teachers. What sets this image of inversion apart from the content of the Carnival plays? Why does this action come across as particularly violent and revolutionary when much of the action in Sachs' texts seems so light-hearted and humorous? How does a comedy have to present an inverted hierarchy for it to "work" within the text?

Lysistrata- Political satire at its finest….

I think this play is interesting from a female perspective, because my initial reaction was that the play sounds sympathetic to women and feminism. In truth, if taken in the history and context at the time Lysistrata was written, it is the opposite of a feminist work. The idea that a woman would conspire to go against her husband or any man was absurd. In today’s terms, this play would be a comedy of epic proportions, because the events in the play are so ridiculous to Athens men, that they thought it was hilarious in 411 B.C. This reminds me of the movie Cats and Dogs, where the humans are portrayed as the sub-intelligent species, compared to the highly intelligent canines and felines. I also think it is important to remember that this play would have been performed by all males, so you can imagine men, pretending to be women, telling other men pretending to be women, how great their butt looks . . . very comical when you think about it.

The leading lady, Lysistrata, states at the very beginning that there are no more men left in Athens, because if there was a true man, the war would be ended. The underlying idea that a woman could end the war, because there were no real men, was a political jab to the ruling men of Athens by Aristophanes, the author of the comedy, who wrote this play during the Peloponnesian War being fought between Athens and Sparta. The idea presented in the play that if the money was cut off from the men, this might end the war, and that women could budget better than the Athens men--showed clear underlying frustrations that the money was being mishandled by the men at war, and even women could do better.

I believe this play is more political, rather than gender related. Aristophanes portrays most of the women as weak, inferior, senseless and preoccupied—these things would all be in keeping with a stereotypical female in 411 B.C. from a male’s point of view. Aristophanes was saying that even a female could do better than what our government is doing. Ironically, many times they can. Even though this writing was meant to be funny and absurd, I bet there were still women who were impacted by some of the ideas presented in this play. 

Something else I thought was very funny—Lampito , the Spartan girl, was portrayed as the ‘hillbilly’ of all the women. It was amusing to me that I had no trouble at all reading her dialect in the story.