Abstract
The mock-battles and slap-stick scenes that arise at pivotal moments in Shirley encourage us to re-examine 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 satirizes 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 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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Notes
- 1.
Charlotte Brontë to William Smith Williams, 10 January 1850, in Margaret Smith, Letters, vol. 2, 328.
- 2.
George Henry Lewes, “Shirley: a Tale,” 158. Subsequent citations are referenced by page number in the text.
- 3.
Brontë to Lewes, 19 January 1850, in Smith, Letters, vol. 2, 332–3. For an overview of the impact of Lewes’s review of Shirley on Villette, see Smith, Letters, n.1–5 and Juliet Barker, Brontës, 612–14.
- 4.
See Cynthia Miecznikowski, “‘Do You Never Laugh, Miss Eyre,’” 373 for a psychoanalytic reading of humour and wit in Brontë’s work.
- 5.
On Yeast, see Brontë to Mrs. Gaskell, 6 August 1851, in Margaret Smith, Letters, vol. 2, n. 9, 676–9. On Mary Barton see Brontë to Williams, 1 February 1849, in Smith, Letters, vol. 2, 174.
- 6.
See, for example, Smith, Introduction to Shirley, xxvi.
- 7.
Herbert Rosengarten, “Charlotte Brontë and her Critics,” 45.
- 8.
Tim Dolin, “Fictional Territory,” 205.
- 9.
Heather Glen, Imagination, 196.
- 10.
See Jennifer Judge, “Bitter Herbs” and Elizabeth Langland, “Mosaic, Dialogue, Discourse.”
- 11.
Karen Gindele, “Victorian Embodiments of Laughter,” 147.
- 12.
Brontë, Shirley, 12. Subsequent citations are referenced by page number in the text.
- 13.
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Madwoman, 373–4.
- 14.
Judge, “Bitter Herbs,” paragraphs 2 and 7.
- 15.
Brontë to Ellen Nussey [?28 January 1850], in Smith, Letters, vol. 2, 337.
- 16.
Brontë to Nussey [?28 January 1850], in Smith, Letters, vol. 2, 337.
- 17.
Brontë to Williams [?1 March 1849], in Smith, Letters, vol. 2, 185.
- 18.
See Robert Bernard Martin, Triumph of Wit, 28–9 on the transition from predominantly sentimental modes of humour in the first decades of the 1800s (exemplified by Carlyle’s essays on Schiller and Jean Paul Richer) to an emphasis on the intellectual qualities of wit in the last quarter of the century.
- 19.
See Dolin “Introduction,” xiii and Rosengarten, “Charlotte Brontë and her Critics,” 45–6 for discussion of Villette as a corrective to Shirley’s unsuccessful third-person narration. See Lewes, “Shirley: a Tale,” 159 on disunity stemming from the failed “panoramic” view of the “spectator.”
- 20.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais, 19. Subsequent citations are referenced by page number in the text.
- 21.
Robert M. Polhemus, Comic Faith, 30.
- 22.
Polhemus, Comic Faith, 33.
- 23.
Marilyn Butler, “Maria Edgeworth,” 145.
- 24.
Eileen Gillooly, Smile of Discontent, 18.
- 25.
Gillooly, Smile of Discontent, xxv. See also Jillian Heydt-Stevenson, Unbecoming Conjunctions, 1–28 on the allusions, puns, and riddles that allow Austen to engage in sexual humour without putting the body itself on display. See also, Gabriela Castelanos, Laughter, War and Feminism, 4 on Austen’s revision of carnivalesque laughter to adhere to the conventions of the sentimental novel.
- 26.
Lewes, “Recent Novels,” 687, 691.
- 27.
Lewes, “Recent Novels,” 687, 692.
- 28.
Lewes, “Recent Novels,” 687.
- 29.
Brontë to Lewes, 12 January 1848, in Smith, Letters, vol. 2, 10.
- 30.
Brontë to Lewes, 12 January 1848, in Smith, Letters, vol. 2, 10.
- 31.
Brontë, “Preface to Jane Eyre,” 4–5. See also Smith, Letters, vol. 2, xxxvii.
- 32.
Brontë to Lewes, 12 January 1848, in Smith, Letters, vol. 2, 10.
- 33.
Brontë to Lewes, 18 January 1848, in Smith, Letters, vol. 2, 14.
- 34.
Elizabeth Gaskell, Life of Charlotte Brontë, 397.
- 35.
Barker, Brontës, 614.
- 36.
Lewes, “Recent Novels,” 687.
- 37.
Dublin University Magazine, “A Bunch of New Novels,” 685–6.
- 38.
Brontë to Williams, 28 January 1848, in Smith, Letters, vol. 2, 23.
- 39.
Brontë to Lewes, 18 January 1848, in Smith, Letters, vol. 2, 14.
- 40.
See Sara L. Pearson, “God save it!” on debates about the High Church Movement in Shirley.
- 41.
See Peter Burke, Popular Culture, 182.
- 42.
Peter Burke, Popular Culture, 193, 235, 240. See also Allon White, “Hysteria” on further prohibition of fairs in England during the mid-1800s.
- 43.
Brontë to Ellen Nussey, 6 March [1843], in Smith, Letters vol.1, 311.
- 44.
Burke, Popular Culture, 182.
- 45.
Burke, Popular Culture, 186.
- 46.
Burke, Popular Culture, 183.
- 47.
See Joseph Leo Koerner, Bosch & Bruegel, 86. Bruegel’s painting now hangs in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. www.khm.at/de/object/320722549d/. Although Bosch’s painting of the same name has been lost, seventeenth-century works in the same style are held across Europe. See, for example, The Battle Between Carnival and Lent, manner of Jheronimus Bosch, 1600–20, collection of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/SK-A-1673/catalogue-entry.
- 48.
See Burke, Popular Culture, 185–8 and Ethan Matt Kavaler, 113–15.
- 49.
See Helen MacEwan, The Brontës in Brussels, 77–80 on Brontë’s life in Brussels and the history of the Isabelle Quarter.
- 50.
White, “Hysteria,” 169.
- 51.
Bakhtin, Rabelais, 10–11.
- 52.
See Burke, Popular Culture, 203–5 and Will Kaufman, “Triumph of Wit,” 35.
- 53.
See Mary Russo, “Female Grotesques,” 219 and Bakhtin, Rabelais, 29.
- 54.
Brontë to Lewes, 18 January 1848, in Smith, Letters, vol. 2, 14.
- 55.
See Bakhtin, Rabelais, 34–6 and Stephen P.J. Knapper, “Carnival, Comedy, and the Commedia” on the origins of commedia dell’arte.
- 56.
See Burke, Popular Culture, 178 on connection between Christmas and Carnival.
- 57.
Jim Davis, Victorian Pantomime, 1.
- 58.
See Jeffrey Richards, “E.L. Blanchard and the ‘Golden Age of Pantomime,’” 21–40.
- 59.
A.E. Wilson, Christmas Pantomime, 92–4.
- 60.
On the connection between melodrama and Victorian pantomime see Davis, 2.
- 61.
See Christine Alexander, Early Writings, 20 for details of the Brontës’ early reading.
- 62.
“Appropriate Illustration,” 7.
- 63.
Dickens, “Pantomime of Life,” 291. Subsequent citations are referenced by page number in the text.
- 64.
See Elliott Vanskike’s essay “Consistent Inconsistencies” on Shirley’s similarity to the famous “principle boy” Madame Vestris.
- 65.
Brontë to Williams, 4 October 1847, in Smith, Letters, vol. 1, 546.
- 66.
Brontë to Williams, [?c. 10 February 1849], in Smith, Letters, vol. 2, 181.
- 67.
Brontë to Williams [?1 March 1849], in Smith, Letters, vol. 2, 185.
- 68.
Terry Eagleton, Myths of Power, 3.
- 69.
Virginia Woolf, Essays, 168.
- 70.
Lucasta Miller, The Brontë Myth, 2.
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Pizzo, J. (2020). Gendering the Comic Body: Physical Humour in Shirley. In: Pizzo, J., Houghton, E. (eds) Charlotte Brontë, Embodiment and the Material World. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34855-7_3
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