Originally posted by: Ekahriz
Chapter 6
Theatrics And Dance With The Self;
The Curtain Finally Fell Or Has it?
"All the world's a stage, and all men and women merely players" - Shakespeare.
Ervin Goffman expands this idea into a dramaturgical approach to studying the minutiae of everyday face to face interactions of people. He used the imagery of the theatre to portray the importance of human and social action. All actions, Goffman urged are social performances that aims to give and maintain certain desired impressions of oneself to others. In social interactions, humans are actors on a stage giving a performance for an audience.
Isn't this what Abhimanyu and majorly Akshara has been doing? Both of them are performing an act that they are happy with their circumstances on a daily basis. They are doing this in order to elicit certain impressions from the people around them. For Akshara, she wants Aarohi to see her sisterly love, and for Abhimanyu, he wants his mother to see him as happy and moving forward. Thus, they are constantly putting up a theatrical performance on the Goenka and Birla stages respectively.
However, applying Freudian psychology here, we can see that Abhimanyu's id is stronger than his ego or super-ego when it comes to Akshara. So the taking over of id makes him act out of character causing cracks in his act and his self visible. Whereas in, Akshara is a tough nut to crack and hence is a master in impression management.
Goffman discusses that the only time individuals can be themselves and get rid of their role or identity in society is the backstage, i.e. where no audience is present. This is what happens during the curtain dance. For all the exhaustion from their performance, when they see the curtains, they visualize the ends of their act and their real self tends to come out. So, they engage in a dance off between their real self and their social self. Abhimanyu is successful in binding the curtain and creating visibility for his self in the end, but Akshara is still shown as trying to find a way out of the curtains because she is the queen of drama as Abhimanyu would say. It's not that easy to break her act since her theatrics have been going for a while.
PS: Hope this is sufficient enough. Coz I am getting bored of this show.
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