Behind the Mask: Carnival and Community in Eighteenth-Century Venice

"Behind the Mask" is a reconsideration of prevailing views of the use of masks in eighteenth-century Venice. For roughly a century, the popular view has identified the Venetian mask with carnival, a time outside time when convention was defied and pleasure held sway as costumers took on alternate selves. Mikhail Bakhtin's "Rabelais and His World" has reinforced the view with an overarching vision: that carnival was a utopian moment of reversal that exposed the artificiality of hierarchy and affirmed solidarity in the irreverence of laughter. Such views fashion the mask into a tool of liberation, effacing identity, suspending difference, affirming equality.
This interpretation fails to account for much of the actual masking in the city. Residents wore masks six months of the year. Masks were customary for formal state events such as open dinners hosted by the doge, marriage ceremonies of notables, and ambassadors' receptions.
Unmarried teen-aged girls wore masks when they appeared in public. Beggars begged in masks. Spectators attended the theater masked. Members of learned academies wore masks to meetings. Gamblers were required by law to wear masks when they gambled.
This paper recovers the origins and logic of masking in Venice. By offering the fiction of anonymity without denying identity, masks permitted communication among members of a highly stratified society. Masks preserved social hierarchy in Venice as the public sphere grew and mingling became inescapable. They offered a kind of plausible deniability, permitting elites and commoners to rub shoulders without the accustomed deference and ceremony, in theaters and cafés, at the gaming tables, and at common civic events. Consequences for traditional views of carnival will also be considered, with the applicability of Bakhtin questioned in matters of both detail and interpretation.