LEC052012. Aparna Reghunathan. "Draft 2 : Analysis of 'Tickets, Please!' by D.H Lawrence"

 

Locating carnivals and subversion in D.H Lawrence’s ‘Tickets, Please!’

 ‘Tickets, Please!’ is a short story set in 1919 industrial England still reeling from the impact of World War I. Written by D.H Lawrence, the story narrates how Annie, a tram conductor is jilted in love by tram inspector and sexual predator John Joseph Raynor. Her vengeance, which marks the climax of the story, is phenomenally transgressive and spectacular. The work is speckled with instances of heightened sensory experience, a recursive marker in Lawrence’s works. Drawing on the concepts of ‘carnival’ and ‘carnivalesque’ developed by Mikhail Bakhtin, it is possible to locate instances of deviance made possible through carnivalesque inversions of existing social orders.

Bakhtin, alluding to the carnivals of the middle ages that transgressed the notions of propriety preached by the church, positions carnivals as a “temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order.” With Renaissance gaining foothold in Europe, carnivals were curbed as authorities sensed its subversive potential. When it was forced to depart from the public domain, it was absorbed by literary forms like parody and satire. Carnivalesque elements came to be identified in literary works, performing its function of questioning and overturning the established order, traditions and rules.

Interestingly, the existing order of public life in ‘Tickets, Please!’ had already been toppled by the World War even before the story begins. With a large majority of the male population at war, there was an unprecedented rise in the female workforce. Positions like those occupied by Annie were traditionally occupied by men. John Joseph Raynor, in a position of authority over the female conductors, continuously abuses his power. He manipulates women conductors into entering into a relationship with him which ends tragically for all women. They fall prey to his nocturnal adventures only to be unceremoniously spurned by him. Annie, bold and levelheaded, sees through his perversive machinations early on. She rejects all his advancements until the night he approaches her at the Statutes fair.

Lawrence gives a very sensory description of the fair which easily qualifies as a quintessential carnival. He writes:

The roundabouts were veering round and grinding out their music, the side-shows were making as much commotion as possible. In the coconut shies there were no coconuts, but artificial substitutes, which the lads declared were fastened into the irons. There was a sad decline in brilliance and luxury. None the less, the ground was muddy as ever, there was the same crush, the press of faces lighted up by the flares and the electric lights, the same smell of naphtha and fried potatoes and electricity.                                                  (Lawrence)

Amidst all the merriment they partake in, John manages to establish a precarious proximity with Annie. The carnivalesque quality of the setting does away with Annie’s rational inhibitions as she wilfully reciprocates John’s interest in her.

The subversive quality of the carnival prods Annie to let down her guard. Bakhtin in his book Rabelais and his world writes:

The carnivalesque crowd in the marketplace or in the streets is not merely a crowd. It is the people as a whole, but organized in their own way, the way of the people. It is outside of and contrary to all existing forms of the coercive socioeconomic and political organization, which is suspended for the time of the festivity. This festive organization of the crowd must be first of all concrete and sensual. Even the pressing throng, the physical contact of bodies, acquires a certain meaning. The individual feels that he is an indissoluble part of the collectivity, a member of the people's mass body.           (Bakhtin 255)

The sensual appeal of the fair, along with the close physical proximity it warranted between the two, permits Annie to give in to her desire for companionship. It permits her to envision a holistic relationship with a man she had earlier identified as a pervert. This instance subverts the professional relationship and impersonal attitude that Annie had strove to maintain between John and her. The carnival had, in effect, provided ground to take liberties and let down normative behaviour.

            Later, the inevitable happens. John walks out on an indignant Annie. Though she subconsciously knew she had it coming, she refuses to condone his predatory nature. She amasses the support of all her fellow workmates who were similarly wronged by John. They huddle together in the waiting room of the station where John would eventually arrive. John soon finds himself surrounded by the ladies who unleash beastly, visceral violence upon him. They enigmatically appropriate the predator’s nature as they take him down mercilessly. The lack of agency that earlier informed the female conductors disappear into thin air as they reverse the roles. They position themselves in a stature much more privileged than the inspector. The anarchic retaliation concludes with the women collectively rejecting a battered John Joseph.

            The numerous women before Annie had suffered the dishonour silently as they found themselves at a disadvantage in the existing power structure in their workforce. As the inspector, John wielded authority that he misused. However, when the women come together in the waiting room of the station and form a circle around John, they set up the ground for a carnival. As they vilely coerce him to choose one of them to go home with, they effectively turn the tables on him. The little games they propose to play with him add to the tension of the room which by then had transgressed the quality of an innocent waiting room. The women evidently find themselves in their element and relish their vengeance. The subversive quality of the carnivalesque setting takes away the last remnants of fear from them. Bhaktin points precisely to this quality when he writes in Rabelais and his world:

In the whole of the world and of the people there is no room for fear. For fear can only enter a part that has been separated from the whole, the dying link torn from the link that is born. The whole of the people and of the world is triumphantly gay and fearless. This whole speaks in all carnival images; it reigns in the very atmosphere of this feast, making everyone participate in this awareness.                                                                                  (Bakhtin 256)

            Both these events of heightened tension which occur at the fair and the waiting room are distinguishable for its carnivalesque elements. This quality permits the inversion of norms that would otherwise have never been transgressed. As Bhaktin rightly observed, the carnivals allowed room to challenge and distort hierarchical regulations and power structure as portrayed by Lawrence in ‘Tickets, Please!’.

 

Works Consulted

Bakhtin Michail Michajlovič and Iswolsky Hélène, Rabelais and His World, Indiana University Press, 1984, pp. 196–277.

  Lawrence, D.H. “'Tickets, Please!'.” 'Tickets, Please!' - D. H. Lawrence, www.pseudopodium.org/repress/shorts/D_H_Lawrence-Tickets_Please.html.

  Mambrol, Nasrullah. “Key Theories of Mikhail Bakhtin.” Literary Theory and Criticism, 21 Nov. 2019, literariness.org/2018/01/24/key-theories-of-mikhail-bakhtin/.

  Ravenscroft, Neil & Gilchrist, Paul. Spaces of transgression:governance, discipline and reworking the carnivalesque, Leisure Studies, 28:1, 35-49