Gendering the comic body: Physical humour in Shirley
Gendering the comic body: Physical humour in Shirley
The mock-battles and slap-stick scenes that arise at pivotal moments in Shirley encourage us to reexamine Brontë’s sense of humour, which is neither as grim, nor as naively crude as critics from George Henry Lewes to Virginia Woolf have deemed it. Drawing on Brontë’s engagement with the theatrical traditions of European Carnival and British pantomime, this chapter demonstrates how physical humour in Shirley satirises the gendered dictates of literary realism that Lewes had laid out for the author in public reviews and private correspondence. By rejecting the witty drawing-room comedy often associated with her predecessor Jane Austen, and adopting the brash language of the body common to both popular performance and the work of her male peers Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray, Brontë participates in important mid-nineteenth-century debates about gendered authorship and the literary marketplace.
female embodiment, comedy, pantomime, theatre, gender, realism, George Henry Lewes, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray
49-74
Pizzo, Justine
361ed39e-7af3-446d-b290-78e5aa9acdcf
June 2020
Pizzo, Justine
361ed39e-7af3-446d-b290-78e5aa9acdcf
Pizzo, Justine
(2020)
Gendering the comic body: Physical humour in Shirley.
In,
Pizzo, J. and Houghton, E.
(eds.)
Charlotte Brontë, Embodiment and the Material World.
(Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)
Cham.
Palgrave Macmillan, .
(doi:10.1007/978-3-030-34855-7_3).
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Abstract
The mock-battles and slap-stick scenes that arise at pivotal moments in Shirley encourage us to reexamine Brontë’s sense of humour, which is neither as grim, nor as naively crude as critics from George Henry Lewes to Virginia Woolf have deemed it. Drawing on Brontë’s engagement with the theatrical traditions of European Carnival and British pantomime, this chapter demonstrates how physical humour in Shirley satirises the gendered dictates of literary realism that Lewes had laid out for the author in public reviews and private correspondence. By rejecting the witty drawing-room comedy often associated with her predecessor Jane Austen, and adopting the brash language of the body common to both popular performance and the work of her male peers Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray, Brontë participates in important mid-nineteenth-century debates about gendered authorship and the literary marketplace.
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Accepted/In Press date: 7 December 2018
Published date: June 2020
Keywords:
female embodiment, comedy, pantomime, theatre, gender, realism, George Henry Lewes, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray
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Local EPrints ID: 442483
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/442483
PURE UUID: 949800cd-62d4-433d-ad86-642df2d6fb1d
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Date deposited: 16 Jul 2020 16:30
Last modified: 17 Oct 2024 01:46
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Editor:
J. Pizzo
Editor:
E. Houghton
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