Female Slapstick in Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford

Critics have tended to look through—rather than at—Elizabeth Gaskell's comedy in Cranford (1851–3), whilst those who have been attentive are divided as to whether it disguises or reveals deeper, or more radical, ideological processes. Few critics have directly addressed the physical humour of the novel, and relatedly, what kind of feminine comic body it produces. Drawing on two comic historiographies—the field-creating work of Maggie Hennefeld on female slapstick in early twentieth-century film, and Jonathan Buckmaster's extensive consideration of the nineteenth-century slapstick clown Joseph Grimaldi, and his influence on the comedies of Charles Dickens—this essay traces out the appearance of three ‘slapsticks’ in Cranford , which symbolise three progressive stages towards female autonomy and publicness. Whilst slapstick's effects are more oblique than direct, they nonetheless produce a version of the female in Cranford , which, like slapstick itself, begins in the melodramatic world, but transforms sadness—presented in Gaskell's novel as a corporeal aftershock of patriarchy—into a form of agency whilst materialising new and unanticipated iterations of the feminine.