In Defense of Credulous Women: Magic and Optical Spectatorship in Cranford.

The figure of the superstitious old woman is common in mid-nineteenth-century literary and graphic representations of magic and optical spectatorship. Through her literal belief in images, the superstitious woman acts as a comic foil against which modern, disenchanted practices of spectatorship can be asserted. This essay examines the representation of female magic spectatorship in Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford by placing it in the context of Victorian magic practice and discourse. The novel centers on a magic show performed by an itinerant conjurer for a group of women spectators who fear they are witnessing a demonstration of the occult. Cranford portrays magic panic not as a symptom of undisciplined female minds, however, but rather as a manifestation of literary and cultural anxieties about the unstable status of the real. Through a combination of literary close reading and media archaeology, this essay argues for a female-coded counter-discourse to magic's pedagogy of disenchantment. At the same time, it demonstrates that Cranford 's depiction of stage magic is reflexive and allows the novel to conceptualize how representations construct reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]