COMEDY

THE BODY 95believe ‘Such order from confusion sprung/Such gaudy tulips raisedfrom dung’ (Swift, 1967: ll. 141–142).The comic abjection of the female body and its foundation in culturalgender bias can be seen in Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside.This city comedy features a scene in which three puritan ‘gossips’attend a christening, get drunk, and wet themselves. Gail Kern Paster hasshown how this scene, and the play’s overall attention to urinary tropes,draws together a number of patriarchal assumptions about female vocal,sexual, and physical ‘incontinence’ that locate cultural views offemininity in medical discourse. Early modern theories of sexualdifference believed that men were essentially ‘hotter’ than women,accounting for their supposedly active dispositions and external genitals.By contrast, women’s relative coolness and supposedly idle lives madethem considerably more ‘watery’. This medical fact produced a seriesof associations connecting women with water, especially the sense of awoman as a vessel whose impermeability or otherwise was an allegoryfor her chastity and moral value. The puritan gossips are therefore‘leaky’ women: their unrestrained talking shows their lack of discipline,reinforced by their weak bladders. ‘The female characters of A ChasteMaid in Cheapside’, writes Paster, ‘reproduce a virtual symptomatologyof woman which insists on the female body’s moisture, secretions, andproductions as shameful tokens of uncontrol’ (Paster, 1993:52). Thatmuch of the play’s action takes place during Lent draws out theiniquities of character by emphasizing their total lack of abstinence andphysical denial.There are, of course, generations of female comedians who, whileoften uncelebrated, have been extremely able physical comedians, asMorwenna Banks and Amanda Swift’s history of women in music hallshows (Banks and Swift, 1987). Of the better-known examples ofphysical comedy written and performed by women, Jennifer Saunders’sAbsolutely Fabulous (1992–96) has been the most prominent of recentyears. In the double act of Patsy and Edina, Saunders personifies thepretensions of the publicity and fashion industries and the hedonism andegomania that accompany them. The grotesque physicality of this pair,who are so penetrated by the contradictory and dictatorial demands offashion that they have become utterly misshapen, ridicules the beautyworship to which they are slavishly subject, which in its purest formdemands that women subjugate their bodies entirely to become demureand non-corporeal. The satire of the industry and its vacuous beliefs isliterally performed on the bodies of the women, in the garish and poorlyjudged clothes they wear, in Patsy’s promiscuity, Edina’s immaturity,