| Chapter : | Introduction |
|
|
freedom, its utopian character oriented toward the future, was gradually transformed into a mere holiday mood” (33). Victorian writers called upon a powerful force when they invoked the grotesque but, in Bakhtin's eyes, often failed to recognize its significance. For Bakhtin, the years leading up to the Victorian period dealt a blow to the carnival spirit. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romanticism lost track of the communal and corporeal aspects of the grotesque, and instead created “an individual carnival, marked by a vivid sense of isolation. The carnival spirit was transposed into a subjective, idealistic philosophy. It ceased to be the concrete (one might say bodily) experience of the one, inexhaustible being” (Bakhtin 37). Mid- and late-Victorian literature did even greater damage to the cultural role of grotesque images:
The increasing taboo of the “vulgar” grotesque, along with the appropriation of grotesque imagery to individual rather than collective social commentary, dissipated the significance of the grotesque as a tool for the free-spirited destruction and regeneration of mainstream culture. Bakhtin particularly mourns a lack of playfulness in the Victorian era. He shows concern that a changing relationship with humor changes ideological debate: “The bourgeois nineteenth century respected only satirical laughter, which was not actually laughter but rhetoric” (Bakhtin 51). For Bakhtin, grotesque imagery as “a peculiar form of satire” is robbed of the collective quality of carnival laughter: it presents a binary between the critic and the criticized rather than an opportunity for meaningful exchange. Victorian satirical grotesque has lost the element of carnival with its collective reinvention of the dominant ideology because it is too often subordinated to the rhetorical purposes of an individual author. Bakhtin finds this targeted