Occupational Cross-Dressing in the Autobiographies of Hannah Snell and Charlotte Charke

Abstract

This paper addresses the craft of disguise and spatial mobility through the reading of two eighteenth-century autobiographies. The Life and Adventures of Hannah Snell (1750) deals with the life story of a woman who dons male garb and joins the Royal Marine. A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke (1755) features an actress and author notorious for cross-dressing both on and off the stage. Broadside ballads that deal with narratives of cross-dressing began to be printed at the end of the sixteenth and became greatly popular in the next century. While the autobiographies of Charlotte Charke and Hannah Snell partly follow the customary patterns of printed ballads, their narratives diverge from them in that Charke and Snell’s clear self-identification as laboring woman allows their crossover into economic agents. The ruses they employ to traverse out of traditional boundaries and to participate in exclusively male domains are examined in this paper with respect to the transforming definition of industriousness and women’s labor at the mid-century. While the second half of the eighteenth century witnessed the rise of domestic subjectivity based on the secluded private space, the two autobiographies signal that an antithetical type of identity also arose by using spatial mobility to breach the rigid division. The tradition of broadside ballads and popular literature must be investigated alongside the domestic novel in order to fully envisage the contemporary bounds of women’s work.