Boxed-In: Women and Mid-Nineteenth Century Farce

Abstract

In this essay, I argue that stage farce was a vital means of imaginatively engaging both the liberating potential and threatening instability of urban modernity during the mid-nineteenth century, a period of massive transition. Shifting the focus away from the upper classes of earlier plays, the majority of one-act farces from these decades took as their subject the experiences of the urban middle and working classes. Set in the very milieu that now composed a significant portion of the audiences at London theatres, I suggest that these farces were an ideal vehicle for exploring domesticity, sexuality and gender roles, and that women, in particular, played an important part in these narratives of urban life. Represented as both the source of disruption and the metonymic means of containing the multiple threats that shifting living and working conditions engendered, women in farce are physically and discursively boxed in, a process literalized on the stage by the use of the box set. A number of these plays also, however, exposed the mechanisms of control that were becoming increasingly invisible during this period, and offered comically pragmatic methods to out-maneuver rigid systems of containment and categorization, at least for a time.