The Comedy and Legacy of Music-Hall Women 1880–1920 by Sam Beale
Author:Sam Beale
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030479411
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
The Ironic Ceiling
Women’s relationships with their audiences were complex and dynamic: they necessarily acknowledged morally and socially acceptable feminine attitudes and behaviour, but were also engaged in a comic dialogue with audiences through which those prescribed roles and norms were brought into question. They offered a multiplicity of possible attitudes and responses to romantic love, sex, marriage, motherhood and family life and did so variously through the portrayal of exaggerated comic caricatures; the presentation of positive and negative female role models; the frequent disruption of familiar types and stereotypes; and the telling and retelling of heightened but nonetheless recognisable versions of stories which undoubtedly resonated with the life experiences of the women and men laughing in the auditoria. As the examples used in this chapter show, these performances sometimes tested preconceptions about acceptable thoughts and behaviour for women by exploring new ways of ‘acting female’ (Glenn 2002, p. 6) and ironically unbalancing and revising familiar representations of women. My point is that such comic attacks on the status quo are not simply observations or criticisms; inherent in a joke is always an alternative way of seeing. As Douglas indicates: if a joke ‘devalues the social structure, perhaps it celebrates something else instead’ (1975/1978, p. 104). The examples examined here each assert a temporary comic release from the existing ways social relationships or gendered expectations are thought about and, in witnessing a woman exercise such imaginative freedom, her audience sees that such alternatives are possible.
This is not to say that these tactics are without their shortcomings; irony has its limits. The polysemy inherent in jokes and comic interactions continues to create interference in the reception and perception of performed irony and, though I have argued the case here for performed irony as a positive and progressive cultural intervention, what Hutcheon describes as the ‘transideological nature’ of irony (1994, p. 29) continues to affect unpredictable valencies and effects in female representations. The following chapter assesses the volatility of performed meanings making use of the complexity of one area of comic practice that provokes ongoing critical debate concerning its efficacy and impact as feminist critique: self-deprecation.
Micro-history 3: Maidie Scott (1881/2–1966)—‘Just a Comedienne’
Maidie Scott was born Mary Elizabeth Pim in Ireland. The limited biographical information about her in music-hall histories suggests she was born in 1887. However, birth and marriage records indicate the date was several years earlier, in 1881 or 1882 (Fig. 4.1).
Fig. 4.1Signed publicity photograph of Maidie Scott. (Author’s collection)
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