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Abstract
This paper examines the two rebellious female characters, Ellida and Bolette, in Henrik Ibsen’s play The Lady from the Sea (1888), which challenges patriarchal authority and thus disrupts the script of the phallocentric world through their subversive acts. This paper applies a dual theoretical lens of Hélène Cixous’s theory of écriture féminine and Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of carnival, later called carnivalesque, to demonstrate how both women fight for their freedom of choice, symbolically destroying the traditional ‘book’ of marriage in a patriarchal society. The article illustrates how Ellida and Bolette create chaos to resist the written and unwritten authority of books, including social contracts, laws mainly reflected in masculine voices that are submerged in their hegemonic philosophy. In contrast to the dominant masculine voice, their chaotic actions are expressed through a fluid, multiple, and embodied language in a carnival space in which women can articulate their desires, emotions, and thoughts. Through their subversive performances, Ibsen’s women seek feminine language, disrupting the existing dominant masculine language, and thus imagining an alternative society for themselves. The objective is to illustrate how Ibsen’s women inscribe and project themselves into new forms of a transformative future, where dominant male narratives will no longer hold.
