She’s Beautiful And She’s Laughing”: Laughter As Subversive Discourse In Lady Audley’s Secret And Daniel Deronda

My thesis applies the lens of feminist theory, particularly Hélène Cixous’ “The Laugh of the Medusa,” to the subject of female laughter in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda. I build off nineteenth-century theories by Darwin and Spencer about female sexuality and the purpose of laughter and more contemporary scholarship by Gilbert and Gubar and Showalter on protofeminism in Victorian literature to ask, What are Braddon and Eliot doing with their female characters’ laughter? Ultimately, I conclude that Braddon and Eliot consciously endow their female characters with laughter that functions as a type of l’écriture feminine, or female writing, which functions outside of phallogocentrism and resists and subverts Victorian patriarchal oppression. By more closely examining what the authors do with laughter, I hope to open up a new vein of criticism that may enable critics to locate the coded acts of resistance Victorian women were engaging in, leading scholars to a better understanding not only of the texts themselves but the women behind the writing as well.