Revealing Laughter: Laughter, Pleasure, and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel
Abstract
This study investigates the place of women’s laughter as an expression of pleasure in the nineteenth-century British novel and analyzes the intricate social dynamics that define and regulate female laughter in nineteenth-century British society by examining the works of three authors of the period: Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and Charles Dickens. Laughter has been historically interpreted and restricted as a social act that reveals one’s nature, virtue, and social standing, and, combined with the gender norms of the nineteenth century that deny women’s right to individual pleasure, the discourses on laughter contributed to limit women’s means to express, communicate, and thus, fully enjoy their pleasure. This study restores laughter’s role as an everyday expression and, especially, as a site of pleasure, which has been neglected in the previous studies of laughter focusing on its role in comedy and humor, and I argue that the way laughter is read, confined, and controlled in a patriarchal society crucially affects the individual woman’s seeking of happiness in the nineteenth-century novel. Austen, Brontë, and Dickens all show how the complexity and individuality of female laughter are being constantly disregarded and dismissed in a society that only finds few, fixed meanings from women’s laughter, and by doing so, these authors suggest the difficulty of having one’s own laugh for women.
Austen’s troublemaking laughing women, Brontë’s almost laughless and socially marginalized women, and Dickens’ laughing women who are not allowed to grow or survive reveal each author’s different perspective on the contemporary gender norms, and this study explores how far each author moves away from the dominant, restrictive views of laughter through their representations of alternative laughs of women.
Subject
LaughterPleasure
Gender
Theory of Emotion
Emotional Expressions
Nineteenth-Century British Novel
Feminist Criticism
Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë
Charles Dickens
Citation
Chung, Soha (2020). Revealing Laughter: Laughter, Pleasure, and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel. Doctoral dissertation, Texas A&M University. Available electronically from https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /191598.