A Carnival Jangle is a short story written by Alice Dunbar, an African-American female writer and political activist. It was published in the Boston monthly review, a socialist magazine whose ideology and readership was very close to that of the independent Marxist weekly newspaper The National Guardian (Phelps, 1999).

A Carnival Jangle is a story of social contestation, even if it remains a limited one. In fact the story takes place during a New Orleans carnival: by choosing such a setting the author thus states her desire to erase common social boundaries since carnivals were used as a tool for social catharsis.

A Carnival Jangle revolves around Flo, a female character that ‘hovers between childhood and maturity’ and gets dragged out of an unmasked group by a Prince of Darkness who offers to ‘show [her] what life is’. What is interesting here is the clear reference to the coming of ageprocess: indeed by subjecting to a specific ritual, as shown by the use of the word ‘initiated.

19th century America, of female drag, american society’s relationship to gendered and sexual norms, short story, english