Recovering New Humor: Negotiations of Class

Karen L. Kilcup

Class difference and class relations have been rich sources of American humor. Whether we consider the wry advice of Franklin, the dialect humor of Frances Whitcher’s Widow Bedott Papers and Twain’s Huck Finn, or the offbeat parody of the weird rich lawyers on Fox TV’s Ally McBeal, writers have found the subject of class in a putatively classless society irresistible. Each of the writers whose neglected works are investigated in this special issue conjugate class, though in very different ways, as a fundamental part of American experience.

Although Peter Kratzke’s discussion of Ambrose Bierce does not address class relations directly, it becomes evident as we read both Kratzke and Bierce himself how important the subject was to the latter. In repeatedly emphasizing the “vulgarity” of certain locutions, for example, Bierce carefully measures off a distance between the educated, well-spoken individual, and his or her ignorant counterpart. For example, Bierce exposes the difference between the pseudo-genteel and the authentically genteel in his entry on the word “gentleman,” which insists that “it is not possible to teach the correct use of this overworked word. . . . To use the word gentleman correctly, be one.” In a similar vein, he sniffs that the word “spell” is “not very well-born.” Bierce emerges from a long line of advice writers in the United States whose goals, like Eliza Leslie’s in “Incorrect Words” (1835), included both making class more fluid and congealing the boundaries between classes (see Kasson, Karcher, Halttunen, Matthews, Schlesinger; Sedgwick, Harland, Sherwood).

As Joyce Warren’s essay on Fanny Fern indicates, “correct” language also included, for women, language that was not too plain, “coarse,” or direct. Although Bierce’s agenda in Write it Right may be more ambiguous—it is difficult to know whether he aims to reinforce class hierarchies or to enable them to be scaled—Fern’s advice, as Warren indicates, empowered the disenfranchised in American society, giving voice in particular to the working-class woman. As Alison Easton’s recent essay on Fern explains, “Fern . . . knew from personal experience the fragility of . . . middle-class life and understood it as a construction” (223). Fern regarded most advice writing as “moral molasses,” yet her own writing performs the kind of selfhood she advocates for American women: an independent, plainspoken, and socially aware individual. Constructing an analogy between Fern’s writing and contemporary rap singers, Warren reminds us that Fern creates her identity via a sharp, satirical voice that is not afraid to take on the powers-that-be in the public sphere, a voice that resonates in today’s diverse United States culture.

Jacky O’Connor investigates the work of Tennessee Williams, which she affirms is too infrequently studied for its humor. While Warren places Fern within a tradition of American women’s humor, O’Connor situates Williams in the frameworks of both Southern and urban intellectual humor. Just as language serves as a class marker for Bierce and Fern, so too it does for Williams, whose characters in “The Lady of Larkspur Lotion” ironically perform not so much a clash between the “haves” and the “have-nots” but a tension between those who have little and those who have less. As O’Connor observes, “attempting to mask her repulsion with her good manners, Mrs. Hardwicke-Moore appears hesitant to criticize Mrs. Wire’s rooming house openly. Perhaps she would have the landlady believe that she is too well-bred to talk about insects.” Behind the humor of this tension between landlady and tenant resides the poignant irony of an American dream translated into the ownership of a fake Brazilian rubber plantation.

In focusing on a story taken from a working-class periodical of the early twentieth century, Ellen Gruber Garvey explores how Susan Brown Robbins attempts to negotiate across the class divide that we see articulated, though very differently, in Bierce, Fern, and Williams. Like each of the contributors, Garvey seeks to situate her writer within the social and cultural context of her time; she also offers a glimpse of a virtually forgotten periodical, Ladies’ World, that in seeking a middle-class readership as well as an audience of farm women incorporated many of the tensions in turn-of-the-century American culture. Robbins’s story, Garvey argues, offered a kind of double-voiced discourse, enabling rural woman to laugh at the folly of their frivolous and fragile city sisters—whom Fern had also mocked much earlier—while the latter could smile at the naïve rusticity of rural people. Like Warren and O’Connor, Garvey suggests the investment (in both senses) of class relations in the body: Robbins intimates that rural woman benefit financially from neurasthenic city women seeking “rest cures,” while those urban counterparts acquire health of mind as well as body. However distanced the two groups may be from each other, they come together in a shared sisterhood of laughter, as the potential distancing of the urban outsider’s perspective so common in many regionalist writers’ work of this period is abolished in favor of a relationship of sympathy that we see in the work of a writer such as Sarah Orne Jewett (Brodhead, Fetterley and Pryse).

Recovering the work of regionalist George Savary Wasson, Cameron Nickels also reminds us that this relationship between rural and urban people was a necessary, if not symbiotic, one. Although Wasson was himself an outsider to his adopted state of Maine, he effectively transforms himself into one of the storytellers in Cap’n Simeon’s store, as they recount the city-foolishness of the “summer folks,” most hilariously for me in the discussion of what kind of coffee the Cap’n sells. Emphasizing Wasson’s painterly skill with description and character, Nickels conveys both the humor and the seriousness of the writer’s message about differences of class and location. As in the work of all the writers included here, Wasson’s stories reveal an acute awareness of language difference as a marker of class difference—and not, by any means, to the disadvantage of the rural characters. Just as it does for Fern and Robbins, storytelling becomes a crucial bridge to understanding—as well as a powerful incentive for laughter within a diverse American culture.

Works Cited

Brodhead, Richard. Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.

Fetterley, Judith, and Marjorie Pryse. Introduction to American Women Regionalists, 1850-1910. New York, Norton, 1992. xi-xx.

Easton, Alison M. J. “My Banker and I Can Afford to Laugh! Class and Gender in Fanny Fern and Nathaniel Hawthorne.” In Soft Canons: American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition. Ed. Karen L. Kilcup. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1999. 219-36.

Halttunen, Karen. Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870. New Haven: Yale UP, 1982.

Harland, Marion. Eve’s Daughters, or Common Sense for Maid, Wife, and Mother. New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1881.

Jewett, Sarah Orne. The Country of the Pointed Firs. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1896.

Karcher, Carolyn. The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child. Durham: Duke UP, 1994.

Kasson, John. Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America. New York: Hill and Wang, 1990.

Kilcup, Karen L. “’Essays of Invention’: Transformations of Advice in Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing.” In Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: A Critical Reader. Malden, Mass. and Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. 184-205.

Leslie, Eliza. “Incorrect Words” (1835). Rpt. in Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: An Anthology. Ed. Karen L. Kilcup. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1997. 21-24.

Matthews, Glenna. “Just a Housewife”: The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

Schlesinger, Arthur M. Learning How to Behave: A Historical Study of American Etiquette Books. New York: Macmillan, 1946.

Sedgwick, Catharine Maria. Morals of Manners, or, Hints for our young people. New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1846.

Sherwood, Mrs. John. Manners and Social Usages. 1884; rpt. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1887.