Lynn E. Cohen begins the article by comparing Bakhtin’s carnival to young children’s pretend play. Children fall into the same norm that peasants found themselves under in a hierarchal ruling system. These bonds were escaped in carnival. The peasants, like the children now, lived a life under their everyday demands, but with carnival the peasants and children assume a new guise. They can assume the identity of anyone with impunity. It’s a parallel concept between the two. In the days of carnival, the higher authority figures scoffed at the mockery just like how parents will laugh off a child’s playful imagining.
Lynn E. Cohen decided to test how this would develop by putting children in a position to use their imagination. Her findings confirmed the similarity. Example 2 shows three girls. One acts as a horse, another throws money, and the third is throwing food. The children are no longer children by looking at their roles. They have become the part they are playing. Just like an actor becomes the character in a production, so too do the children.
She continues her observation and expands it to “grotesquerie.” Three more children are observed, and, like the girls from example 2, escape from the prescribed roles. This becomes more evident in Example 5 as the children take the roles of animals. The roles do not fit a normal social status, and fit even more into Bakhtin’s ideas of carnival.
Her purpose of this experiment analyze the children’s play habits within the context of Bakhtin’s carnival.
