Bakhtin’s Carnivalesque as Voiced Through Gilman’s Carnivalized Herland-Ourland Saga

This article explores the use of different techniques in carnival and carnivalized texts in the creation of new meanings and alternatives, as Mikhail Bakhtin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman did, the former regarding the social hierarchy and the latter more on feminist issues. Its main objective is to provide an overview on some diverse devices that are used in relation to the fight against authority as a whole and the injustice particularly against women. This article aims to show how these concepts of carnival (esque) and carnivalized text were created and how they define female speculative fiction from different practice-based positions. It argues that these techniques and devices work to preserve a sense of female agency in two ways: they can serve both as a concrete carnivalesqe claim that strengthens political action as Bakhtin and Gilman had in their minds as their aim and as a conceptualization of the broad and independent feminist positions that make up feminist praxis, though Bakhtin ignored it but Gilman tried a lot for it.