Looking
Forward, Looking Back:
American Women’s Humor in the Twenty-First Century
Q: How many
feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: That’s not funny. Nancy Walker would no doubt have offered
several additional answers to this old feminist saw, in spite of her early
(and, in my experience) accurate observation that women tend to be storytellers
rather than joke tellers. Although I
have known a number of women comfortable with the one-liner, many more enjoy
the development of humor over time and space, often accompanied by (as Linda
Morris’s essay below on Mary Lasswell suggests) food and drink.
One recent occasion comes to
mind. I regularly give presentations
for the North Carolina Humanities Council, and recently I was asked to give a
talk on American women’s humor to a group of retired schoolteachers. Ranging in age from their late sixties to
early eighties, these K-12 teachers—all but three of whom were women—invited me
to their monthly lunch, with the talk to follow. As we discussed humor ranging from early nineteenth-century
poetry to a contemporary email circulating among my university’s Women’s
Studies colleagues on “How to Prepare for Your First Mammogram,” I listened as
they teased each other, laughed, and told their own stories. I related a narrative shared by a North
Carolina Girl Scout leader on a similar occasion: A man visits his doctor, who says, “I have some really bad news
for you: you are very sick and need a brain transplant.” The man replies, “That’s
terrible, doctor; what will I do?” The
doctor says, “Well, the good news is
that new technology makes it possible for me to offer you a brain
transplant. You can have a man’s brain,
which will cost $15,000, or a woman’s brain, which will cost $10,000.” The man
says, “That’s great—but why does the woman’s brain cost so much less?” The doctor replies, “Well, of course, it’s used.”
After joking speculation
about the doctor’s gender and amused jibes to the three men present, the group
pressed one of their oldest members, whom several attendees of the audience
asserted was their funniest member, to tell a story. She responded with two narratives, the first of which goes as
follows: Mary, an elderly woman, was
driving her friend, Sarah, downtown for some shopping. As they went along, Mary went through a red
light. Her friend, thinking Mary had
merely failed to respond in time, said nothing. A few minutes later, Mary went through another red light; this
time, Sarah decided that she would not embarrass Mary. Then came another red light, which Mary
drove through without hesitating. At
this point, Sarah turned to her friend and said, “Mary, did you notice that you
just went through three red lights?”
Mary glanced at Sarah and replied, “Oh, am I driving?”
Although some in the group
had obviously heard this story before, there was widespread laughter—indeed,
perhaps the laughter occurred because the narrative had a shared
history. This form of shared history, I
hoped to tell them, had deep roots, from Anne Bradstreet’s witty complaints in
“The Prologue” about prejudice toward women writers, to the work of Frances
Whitcher, Caroline Kirkland, Fanny Fern, Kate Sanborn, Marietta Holley, and
Zora Neale Hurston. Nodding at the familiarity of Fern’s observation that “the straightest road to a man’s heart is through
his palate,” the group roared with delight at “Hungry Husbands” while
noting its subtextual frustration and anger.
Nancy Walker was perhaps the first contemporary critic to enable us to
make this connection and hence, to appreciate the multi-layered texture of much
women’s humor.
The essays in this special
issue in honor of Nancy continue the work that she so energetically, wittily,
and imaginatively has begun. One
important feature of Nancy’s scholarship was to honor our foremothers, a task
that Regina Barreca addresses in her own celebration of Nancy’s work and
life. As Barreca points out, “Women, as
well as men, have had a rich history of being able to deal with the world
through humor, and because of Nancy’s important and influential articles, as
well as her books—especially . . . A Very Serious Thing and Redressing
the Balance—we have been given access to this history and a vocabulary with
which to deal with it” (3). The fact
that current scholars have been able even to know of these earlier women
humorists’ existence is in large part due, as Barreca underscores, to Nancy’s
vigorous recovery work in the field.
Barreca also offers a glimpse into Nancy’s profound generosity, a
generosity that many of us working in the field experienced at first hand.
Paula Bennett’s essay,
“Laughing All the Way to the Bank: Female Sentimentalists in the Marketplace,
1825-1850,” offers readers an entirely new way to understand women poets who
have until recently been disregarded due to their putative unidimensionality
and damp simplicity. Bennett explores “how three of the most popular poets of the antebellum
period—Lydia Sigourney, Frances Osgood and Phoebe Cary—used various forms of
irony, including [. . .] the self-reflexive, to distance themselves from their
art and, equally important, from the genteel social and domestic values it
promoted” (10). They created this
subtle self-distancing in the first instance, she argues, to enable their books
to continue to sell. But in doing so,
as Bennett concludes of Phoebe Cary, they also challenged “the literary and
gender assumptions of [their] time and place, giving [them] control over
[their] own [lives] and the direction [their] work took,” enabling them at the
same time to go “laughing all the way to the bank” (20).
In “Mary E. Wilkins
Freeman’s ‘A New England Nun’ and the Dilemma of the Woman Artist,” Susan K.
Harris provides a view of a later woman writer working in an entirely different
genre. Nevertheless, like Bennett,
Harris clarifies for us the complicated aesthetic (as well as social and
historical) context in which the writer’s work appeared and how that context
shaped the work in fundamental ways. Reading Freeman’s story against such texts
as E.D.E.N. Southworth’s novel, The Deserted Wife, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
story, “The Birthmark,” and William Wordsworth’s sonnet, “Nuns Fret Not,”
Harris contends that “in exposing the
contradictions inherent in a woman’s choice to devote herself to art—and
herself—rather than to marry, Freeman was not only critiquing the choices her
contemporaries offered for women’s lives [. . .] but also challenging the very
ideal of domesticity” (26). Harris’s conclusion
parallels Bennett’s: “Freeman parodies
the domestic ideal, first, to highlight
the paucity of women’s choices and second, to show what kinds of strategies are
necessary for a woman to truly control her own life” (34).
Like Harris, Gregg Camfield offers us a different view of a relatively familiar writer whose work is not usually considered humorous; indeed, he observes, “I imagine scoffers at the outset” (37). Camfield begins by examining first the social-historical framework offered by Jewett’s contemporaries’ passionate interest in “the language of flowers,” a language that, as he shows us, Jewett deploys with delicate wit; he continues by highlighting the Biblical context from which Jewett’s subtly humorous representations of widows emerged—and the transformations of that context in work by such precursors as Frances Whitcher and Marietta Holley. Finally, exploring the relationship between Jewett’s narrator and the inhabitants of Dunnet Landing, Camfield argues for a less contentious view of humor, an approach that builds community rather than reinforces differences: “The narrator has larger frames of reference, and her cosmopolitanism and education allow her to see the comic limitations of these other characters. In accepting their humors, however, she laughs to herself, not in their faces” (49). Read together with Bennett’s and Harris’s essay, Camfield’s suggests the necessity of a delicate apprehension of humor.
Less delicate is the humor
of Mary Lasswell, the subject of Linda Morris’s essay. Rowdy, hungry, and hard-drinking, the
elderly women in Lasswell’s work appear at first glance to have little in
common with the genteel women who wrote sentimental poetry, with Freeman’s
delicate Louisa, or even with Jewett’s sibyllic Mrs. Todd. Yet Mrs. Feeley, Mrs. Rasmussen, and Miss
Tinkham possess a common desire for independence, for control over their own
lives. Lasswell’s plain-spoken (and
sometimes even slapstick) depiction of these women, particularly the earthy
Mrs. Feeley, sparks delight in the reader—Morris underscores the enormous
popularity of Lasswell’s work, even among American servicemen in World War
II—and undercuts stereotypes of widows and single women as surely as Lasswell’s
precursors do. In addition, Morris
points out, “Lasswell’s humor requires
that we expand our sense of the possibilities for domestic humor. ‘Home’ has to be redefined to extend beyond
the scope of the nuclear family, beyond a stratified, gender-based domesticity,
and the focus has to embrace more than implied middle-class values and assumptions”
(57). In some sense, we might think of
all of the writers under consideration in this special issue as participating
in this redefinition.
Cheryl Torsney’s essay on
Constance Fenimore Woolson’s humor emphasizes the writer’s balancing act:
“Throughout her career, Woolson offers examples of funny females: some are young, some are old; some are rich,
some are poor. All, however,
demonstrate a strong sense of self that conflicts with the status quo in one
way or another, creating gentle irony that often teeters on the edge of the
tragic” (69). Torsney’s essay reveals
that, like many of the American women writers explored in the preceding essays,
class difference and class awareness form the foundation for much of their
humor. To others’ ironic, amused, or
rollicking view of Americans “at home” in various ways, Woolson adds
representations of Americans abroad.
Like the sentimentalists whom Bennett discusses, Woolson frequently
offers ironic humor as an undercurrent or counterpoint to a less optimistic
vision of American culture. Torsney concludes
with a caution that could well apply to the larger field of American women’s
humor: “Perhaps we have been blind to Woolson’s humor because in a patriarchal
world where the more valued half of the binary is still associated with the
masculine—head over heart, strong over weak, serious over humorous—we have
rushed to recover Woolson’s tragic side in an effort to bring her critical
attention” (77).
As Kathleen Reich’s
introduction to Woolson’s delightful Asheville drawings suggests, scholars have
also rushed to recover the “high” art done by American women humorists,
neglecting more mundane and, we might say, “domestic” forms. In these sketches done by “Aunt Connie” for
her niece, Clare Benedict, we see another side of the elite writer of “Miss
Grief” and friend of Henry James—someone who amply understood and punctured the
“classy” veneer of middle-class women’s practices of dressing up and making
visits. Printed here for the first
time, the drawings remind us of the continuity between domestic and public for
many women artists.
Along with the Woolson sketches, each of the essays in this collection contributes to the work that Nancy has begun for us; in particular, each continues the recovery process, either by inviting us to take a fresh perspective on familiar writers or by introducing us to “new” voices and visions. Finally, Judith Lee’s annual essay, “The Year’s Work in American Humor Studies, 2001,” reminds us of some of the ongoing work in American women’s humor and indicates work remaining to be done. The popularity of American women’s humor not only inside the academy but outside it, in the lived and shared experiences of American women, suggests that the field that Nancy Walker so generously inaugurated has not only a distinguished past but a vibrant future.
Works Cited
Fern, Fanny. “Hungry Husbands.” Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: An Anthology. Ed. Karen L. Kilcup. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1997. 120-21.
Walker, Nancy A. A Very Serious Thing: Women’s Humor and American Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.
Walker, Nancy A., and Zita Dresner. Redressing the Balance: American Women’s Literary Humor from Colonial Times to the 1980s. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1988.