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This paper analyzes The Life and Death of Mary Frith in terms of the spatial mobility of London women against the backdrop of early modern fictions, city comedies, and prose diatribes. Anti-metropolitan works of the period were tightly linked to the misogynic representation of women as epitomizing urban corruption. The increasing attack simultaneously signals that the presence of women in the city had become undeniably mushroomed. While female pedestrians were being criminalized and harassed in the double senses of illegal vagrancy and improper behavior, they developed a walker’s tactic to traverse spatial boundaries and to defy gender regulations. Cross-dressing can be understood in the respect of both social delinquency and subversive tactics, a result of which is led to the generation of more mobile and distinctly urban self-identity. The (pseudo-)autobiography of Mary Frith exemplifies the life of the hermaphrodite not only as a tomrig who attempts to appropriate male status but also as a transvestite performer whose notoriety inversely matched the chances of spatial, social, and gender mobility. Frith renders the practice of brokerage as a way of social exchanges across different ranks and genders, and her fame as a cross-dressing pickpocket had become the pivot of intercourses as such. The Life and Death of Mary Frith showcases the ruse of a lower class woman, who tried to stray out of disciplinary gender regulations and succeeded to carve out her own niche for survival.
