PATRIARCHAL SUBVERSION THROUGH THE CARNIVALESQUE IN HUBERT SELBY’S REQUIEM FOR A DREAM

Abstract

American authors, like Hubert Selby, deconstruct the American Dream and display its evils in narratives such as Requiem for a Dream, where characters spiral into a realm of chaos. Thereby, subverting their American Dream into realities of drugs, prostitution, and hysteria. The aim of the research is to explore how the carnivalesque realm is an apparatus of subversion that provides emancipation for women. The research ultimately asserts that the carnival laughter is the highest form of wisdom that enables women to practise their agency through unconventional ways such as hysteria and prostitution, subverting conventional feminine standards. The research is a delimited character study of the females in the novel. The primary tool for research is a novel, Requiem for a Dream by Hubert Selby. The secondary source of research is Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the Carnivalesque in Rabelais and His World. It is qualitative research. The research concludes that dominant structures are subverted by placing the female characters in a carnivalesque space. It gives birth to an inverted world structure. that allows the Lowly Genres to have a taste of freedom. This presents an ambivalent image of the conventional woman, who attains freedom by subversion, marketplace language, defecation, urination, and sexual intercourse. The research study opens horizons for a novel which had hitherto been viewed as a contemporary tragedy only. Future researchers can navigate structures of masculinity in the novel.