Carnivalesque Features in Joe Orton's What the Butler Saw

摘要

Joe Orton’s play What the Butler Saw is featured with a strong sense of carnival.Comparison can be made between the carnivalesque in this play and Rabelaisian carnivalesque life which Bakhtin delineates in Rabelais and His World.Characters in Orton’s play have ambiguous sexual identities and dubious psychological states,and are unconscious of the desperate life they live.Their pseudo carnivalesque life,in a state of anarchic insanity,suggests Orton’s revolt against the rigid social institutions and his call for genuine mass democracy in the welfare society,nevertheless he is not optimistic about that if considering the religious path he indicates at the end of the play.