The renovation of the self by the other in Iris Murdoch’s carnivalesque The Italian Girl (1964)

Abstract

Bakhtin (1895-1975), who was a Russian literary critic and philosopher, has made significant contributions to the terminology of literary theory, such as dialogism, polyphony and carnavalism.He examined the works of Dostoevsky to unpack the difference between Dostoevsky’s oeuvre and the other homophonic, that is single voiced novels. In these novels, characters are set and fixed whereas Dostoevsky’s characters are unfinalizable and they are defined ‘by the word of the other, so that the plot is drawn within the interaction between the characters not by the authorial ideal. In his Rabelais and His World (1965), Bakhtin underlines two important terms, ‘carnival’ as a social institution and grotesque realism as a literary mode. Carnivalism is used to refer to the collectivity of the society, that is people forming a unity coming from different socioeconomic or racial backgrounds. Throughout a carnival, an individual is renewed by exchanging bodies through wearing masks and costumes. Here, the focus seems to be on the awareness of one’s sensual, material, bodily unity and community. By focusing on the body, Bakhtin combines the carnival with the grotesque which determines the carnival’s stress on the bodily changes through eating, evacuation and sexuality. Iris Murdoch (1919-1999), who has unpredictable plots with characters from different layers of society and undermines the ideal civilized upper-class communities, has presented her reader with the themes of morality, good and evil in her novels. The aim of this paper is to read The Italian Girl (1964) using Baktinian criticism to interpret the renewal of her characters after they have connected the characters stigmatised as ‘the Other’ in the society, like the Jewish siblings who come from Russia and the Italian Girl, the governess of the family.