The Radical Politics of Laughter: Militant Femininity, Comic Misdirection, and Reader Seduction in Edwardian Suffrage Narratives

The ploy of dissimulation that the suffragette movement harnessed in political practice also played an important role in suffrage literature and stage drama. Here, the trope of comic misdirection (such as the misrecognition of suffrage identities) served to expose the foolishness of anti-feminists, encouraging readers and spectators to dismiss the upholders of the law while applauding suffrage activists. In the process, femininity was reconceptualised in two ways: the essentialist model so misrepresentative of women's life-experience was debunked through comic caricature and contrasted with the "authentic" femininity that manifested in the bravery and daring of militancy. To engage in subversive political acts did not strip a woman of her femininity; it amplified it. Drawing on a range of fiction and stage drama, this essay explores the textual strategy of laughter with which feminist activist writers of the early twentieth century sought to galvanise audience and reader sympathies. Informed by Freudian laughter theory, the article argues that in the triangulation of narrative actors, the agent of comic subversion (the suffragette) was intended to dispose the reader/observer to share her joke at the expense of the representatives of the old order.