Like the typical fairy tale "Charivari" is a nightmare with a happy ending. However, the happy ending of fairy tale denies nightmare, preserves childhood innocence; the happy ending of "Charivari" is ironic, undercutting the false security of dream, affirming the reality of nightmare. (p. 83)
Charivari denotes "a serenade of 'rough music,' with kettles, pans, tea-trays, and the like, used … in mockery and derision of incongrous or unpopular marriages" (OED). "Charivari" is a satiric epithalamion to the marriage of Henry and Emily Van, two forty-year old children. Provided with money and a country estate by their parents, Henry and Emily have played house for fourteen years, though both subconsciously desire to break out of their fairy-tale world of parties and games. Henry has a nightmare in which he views Emily with a child. The next day during one of their parties, Emily announces her pregnancy. The news is terrifying because the birth of a child will force the couple to acknowledge their age, to accept time and the inevitability of death. Henry flees, a runaway child, but is found and brought back by his father. In a parallel action Emily is taken by her mother to a doctor, who finds that the pregnancy is hysterical. Returned home, Emily again appears youthful, and the children resume their games. This marriage is Hawkes' microcosm for twentieth-century Western society, affluent, hedonistic, committed to the preservation of youth and to the establishment of paradise on earth. Henry's nightmare and Emily's hallucination correspond to nightmare realities in Western civilization—to world war, which is the result of, and a threat to, utopian social and political dreams. Henry and Emily's parents, representatives of the Victorian age, are immediately responsible for their children's marriage, for the world in which Henry and Emily live. Hawkes implies that these parents were victimized by their own parents, and so on back through history. Ultimately, both dream and nightmare are grounded in man's existential condition. Life evokes in man the desire for eternal life, but man is also condemned by nature to death. Attempting to deny or escape his human condition, man has created systems of order, which in denying death, deny life as well. (pp. 83-4)
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