REVELRY, ABSURDITY, AND THE GROTESQUE: STAGING THE CARNIVALESQUE IN THE BALD SOPRANO AND WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?

Türkçe

This study examines Eugène Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano (1950) and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) in the light of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque, with particular concentration on how absurdist dramaturgy is employed to destabilise established social norms. Ionesco deliberately disturbs the linguistic coherence of the narrative to parody bourgeois discourse; Albee, though, exposes the ideological and emotional ruptures that underlie domestic life through fashioning a more realistic structure. Despite their divergent aesthetic strategies, a party scene at the heart of both plays offers a carnivalesque space where a temporary subversion of hierarchical norms leads to the exposure of the inherent instability of language, identity, and authority. By amplifying the absurd through grotesque humour, performative excess, and fragmented discourse, both plays address the performative scripts of social life and challenge the illusion of stability in the fabric of everyday interactions. This study, therefore, highlights the orchestration of the temporary dissolution of hierarchical and discursive norms, an eruption of absurdity, in which the party space becomes a site of transgressive liberation. Yet, the ironic climax in both The Bald Soprano and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? occurs once the characters inevitably return to their defined, familiar roles and once the collapsed truths succumb to restored facades. The audience here experiences the cyclical nature of their existential condition and faces the paradox that even within the liberating theatrics of the absurd, the grip of social convention remains unbroken. Each play presents a carnivalesque victim whose symbolic function reinforces this cyclicality, serving both as an agent of transgressive inversion and a vehicle for social critique. Mrs Smith, the wife in the domestically rigid Smith household, falls into the trap of verbal absurdity and performative incoherence, suggesting that the ritual of bourgeois order is being disassembled, aligned with Bakhtinian notions of subversion and renewal. Likewise, Martha, George’s emotionally destructive wife, is presented as the focal carnivalesque victim, unmasked and emotionally exposed, to introduce the revolving cycle of humiliation. Taken together, this study argues that these victims collectively reveal the inescapable, ritualized cycles of humiliation governing social performance, exposing the fragile foundations of authority and the self-perpetuating mechanisms of power that sustain bourgeois ideology.