Buch lesen: «The Rhetoric of Women’s Humour in Barbara Pym’s Fiction», Seite 2
Despite recognition of the comic as “the shaping spirit” (Long 3) of Pym’s work, Cooley’s comprehensive study of her comedy and her comic vision, for instance, is limited to the textual analysis of ironical humour. Cooley does not establish a particular theoretical basis. As Wyatt-Brown proposes, it is time to “examine the unexpected subsoil from which Pym’s comedy emerged” (xiii).
Pym’s humour reflects the socio-cultural and historical circumstances of 1950s England. In her exploration of this relationship, Orna Raz holds that Pym “limits her criticism to what she knows and often likes best” (6). Raz’s claim arises out of Pym’s own statement: “I suppose I criticize and mock at the clergy and the C. of E. [the Church of England] because I am fond of them” (qtd. in Raz 7). Therefore, the relatively subdued quality of Pym’s criticism is partially due to “the affection she has for her characters and her milieu” (7).
According to Anne M. Wyatt-Brown, there is a close connection between Pym’s life and her fictional works. Conducting a biographical study, she argues that Pym’s novels represent events of her own life: Pym “shared the perspective of marginal women, women of her generation, who, despite education and cultivation, felt they had no recognizable role left in the modern world,” because “social changes had undermined [women’s] inherited status” (2). Pym accompanies this estrangement with “comic good humour.”
Cotsell argues that Pym’s female point of view records and unveils seemingly insignificant matters in the lives of the characters. In agreement with other critics, Cotsell also contends that Pym considers humour to be an essential tactic in order to defy “disappointments” by means of maintaining “a humorous and hopeful engagement with life” (5).
Pym’s novels are measured against the novel of manners. As Annette Weld states, the novel of manners is interwoven with comedy and its roots “lie deeply buried in the comic mode” (8). Pym’s novels appear to be “creating a female, post-war perspective on a world where manners and social behavior are more often bypassed by popular writers in favor of the graphically violent or sexually explicit” (15). It should be noted that Pym’s notion of manners deviates from the traditional nineteenth-century notion. While presenting so-called proper manners, respectability, suitability, and conventionality are criticised and ridiculed as merely the traditional set of rules and norms.
Pym’s female characters mostly seek romance and love. Pym presents either the absence of love or failure in love in all its forms, transforming failure into comedy. In some way, she is able to relieve failure. Diana Benet attests to Pym’s “development from the comic to the tragic and from a feminine to a universal vision” (3). Exploring the function of gender in Pym’s novels, Janice Rossen argues that Pym “was a feminist writer in the 1950s before feminism became fashionable” (2). Laura L. Doan elaborates the role and function of the spinster in society and in Pym’s fiction. She argues that by applying a “dual-voiced narrative” (152), Pym presents two opposing viewpoints in relation to the spinster: “the voice of the patriarchy and the voice challenging that authority” (152). Relying on her own experience as a spinster and by expressing the experiences of being treated in the margins of society, Pym is able to break down the stereotype usually , surrounding the spinster.
According to Ellen M. Tsagaris, Pym through the discourse of trivia effectively undermines the “discourse of the romance novel” (9), stressing the “trivial,” as well as focusing on “the woman’s point of view” (29). As an established expert on Woolf, Pym, and Brook-Rose, Judy Little argues that the voices existent in women’s discourse are “appositional” and related to each other rather than being “oppositional” or subversive (2). In a similar vein, this book tries to show how Pym creates an appositional discourse and produces a significant discourse out of a seemingly insignificant one through what Little refers to as positioning “the discourse of the trivial” within “the ordinary and the everyday” (76).
Chapter 1, The History and Characteristics of Women’s Humour, explores the reasons behind the myth of women’s humourlessness and shows how the presuppositions and prejudgments of the dominant culture have affected women’s manifestation of humour. The humour specific to women is discussed in its deviation from conventional humour. The chapter in the process explores different theories of women’s humour.
Chapter 2 examines the function of humour in STG. The narrative voice in this novel mocks and criticises the hypocrisies and absurdities of respectable community. Belinda Bede’s critique of her community, in a covert and oblique manner, subverts the power of religious authoritarian institutions such as the church and the clergy. The humorous tone and the trivial discourse in the narrative undermine the dominant male discourse. The narrative subverts both the conventional romantic plot and the so-called happy ending by eliminating the possible marriage of the two protagonists at the end of the novel.
Chapter 3 examines EW. The main focus is on the central character Mildred Lathbury’s ironic and comic account of her community and society during post-war England. Being on the verge of spinsterhood, Mildred narrates humorously the conventions, conducts and manners of the people surrounding her. Her paradoxical status, as both an unrelated single woman and an active member of the community, allows her to identify the deficiencies and hypocrisies in the individuals connected to the power structure, such as men in critical positions and clergymen. In a similar way to STG, EW presents spinsters not as sacrificial and selfless women, but independent individuals capable of loving and being loved and who, in fact, detest being regarded as men’s helpmates.
Chapter 4, which examines JP, focuses on the two protagonists’, Jane’s and Prudence’s, lives in their search for false myths and stereotypes. The main sources of humour here are how Jane as the inefficient wife of a clergyman subverts the presuppositions about women as helpmates of the clergy and the mocking of Prudence’s incessant seeking of romance.
This study contends that, unlike conventional humour, Pym’s humour neither humiliates nor ridicules the female characters at its centre; on the contrary, it creates a sympathetic bond between the heroine and the reader, as well as between the female characters themselves through demonstrating their victimisation by patriarchal culture. Pym’s humour hits hard on images and stereotypes such as the spinster and the Byronic hero by undermining the values and presuppositions associated with them. The female characters’ understatement and self-deprecation are not meant to humiliate them; rather, the characters are empowered by positioning themselves in the place of the oppressors, thus preventing further oppression. Pym artfully employs the double-voiced discourse such that it neither threatens nor endangers the dominant order but helps initiate reforms within that order. Pym also reverses the romantic love plot through the discourse of trivia, and by creating the significant out of the insignificant, and making gossip function as a shaping force of the narrative.
1 <https://www.facebook.com/groups/5250054113/?epa=SEARCH_BOX>
2 Theorists of humour have defined three types of humour on the basis of superiority theories, repression/release theories, and incongruity theories. Superiority theory suggests that laughter is rooted in the glorification of the self, mostly at the expense of others. Thomas Hobbes argued that we laugh at others’ limitations because it makes us feel superior. “Sigmund Freud believed that aggressive and sexual drives, necessary for survival, are repressed in their socially unacceptable form by the ego. “Humor thus provides a socially acceptable and pleasurable form of release of this repressed psychic energy” (Naranjo-Huebl 12). Incongruity theories focus on similarity and dissimilarity and how, in the presence of certain other factors such as surprise or suddenness and a perception of harmlessness, they elicit laughter. “Humor occurs, according to most incongruity theorists, when two distinct logic patterns or models of thought unexpectedly collide” (12).
3 Lord David Cecil praises Pym’s novels as “the finest examples of high comedy to have appeared in England during the past seventy-five years” (qtd. in Long 221).
4 Pym began studying English literature at Oxford in 1931 and graduated in 1934. During World War II, she worked as a censor in the Postal and Telegraph Censorship in Bristol. In 1943 she joined the Wrens (Women’s Royal Naval Service). Later, she worked as an editorial assistant at the International Institute of African Languages and Culture in London where she continued to work until 1974.
5 Pym enjoyed relative popularity afterwards. According to Long, she “reacted to this sudden fame unpretentiously, and her habits of living did not change” (23). Within some years, her health began to deteriorate and she became gravely ill by January 1980. Chemotherapy was unsuccessful and she died on January 11, 1980, and was buried in Finstock.
1 Characteristics of Women’s Humour
Comedy is dangerous. Humor is a weapon. Laughter is refusal and triumph. (Barreca, Untamed 30)
This study examines women’s humour as a subcategory of women’s writing. This humour, therefore, requires a different quality of reading and a different type of knowledge than male humour. The view of women’s humour1 as an aberration from the male norm will be engaged.
The possibility of a distinct women’s writing has always been a controversial subject among feminist critics. Elaine Showalter considers women’s writing as an achievable end within the dominant trend. Similarly, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar believe that women writers can inscribe their own character in the dominant language they write and speak. Eileen Gillooly, Nancy Walker, and Regina Barreca also argue that women’s humour must be considered as a distinct type. Thus, major feminist critics acknowledge the existence of a distinct women’s humour through which a woman writer can imprint her unique character, voice, and culture in the canon.
1.1 Myth of Women’s Lack of a Sense of Humour
Literary theorists and critics have rarely associated women with humour. Their sense of humour has mostly been discredited, even negated. As one reason for this Walker suggests that comedy, considered to be “boisterous and aggressive,” was “temperamentally unsuited to women”: Women should remain “lady-like and angel-like” because aggression was “improper” to them (94). According to Gillooly, women writers, particularly those who wrote comedies, crossed the established gender borders and, therefore, regarded as “not only ‘scandalous’ scribblers but, given the double entendre of female publication (public woman = prostitute), suspiciously whorish as well” (Smile 4; emphasis original).
In order to highlight the limitation of women’s humour, critics generally refer to women’s roles in comedies. According to Walker, comedies do not represent women truly because they “are restricted to some stereotypes, being unlike women’s real selves.” She argues that “Female roles in comedy are limited and limiting, and are often misinterpreted as evidence of the limitations of female humour” (Disobedient 94).
Another formidable challenge that kept women from participating in comedic writings and performances was that sexual themes were considered necessary for comedy and comedic performances, but considered inappropriate for women. A woman who is an object in the sexual marketplace cannot participate in the joke-telling tradition or write in a comic mode; otherwise, as Barreca rightly points out, she might be regarded as “sexually promiscuous.” This is because of the assumption “that it takes a certain ‘fallen’ knowledge to make a joke”; thus, “only old women – or women who are somehow outside the sexual marketplace – are permitted to make lewd remarks” (qtd. in Stott 94). They are thus entitled to participate in the joke-telling and comic-writing tradition. As a spinster, to whom these criteria apply, Pym used her entitlement, but in a patriarchal society it was neither easy nor a pleasant task for her. Consequently, her humour is subtle and indirect.
1.2 Undermining Women’s Wit
Women’s exclusion from writing, according to Walker, has had a considerable influence on their creation of a literature and humour of their own: “The exclusion of women from language and the authority it confers has become a common trope in women’s writing itself” (Disobedient 2). Historically, women have often been forbidden from telling jokes. In explanation, the sociologist Paul McGhee states that “women are neither expected, nor trained, to joke in this culture. […] it seems reasonable to propose that attempting a witty remark is often an intrusive, disturbing and aggressive act, and within this culture, probably unacceptable for a female” (qtd. in Barreca, introduction 5). McGhee finds a close connection between the controlling socio-cultural power and the successful use of humour: According to him, the initiation of humour has culturally become associated with males rather than with females because males hold the power (Bunkers 162).
Moreover, women’s talent in writing has been ascribed to the potential power of the genre itself rather than to female authors (Walker, Very 94). Walker also holds that men’s insufficient or distorted understanding of a woman’s thoughts and desires stands in the way of their appreciation of female humour (Very 94). In order to be able to identify with women’s humour, men must step down from the state of being originators of the law and standards and sympathise with marginalised female writers. A common example of misunderstanding is the misreading of
women’s protest against a male-dominated culture that is embedded in women’s humor. To find such humor amusing requires that the reader assents to the political proposition it contains, and just as women find uncomfortable the negative images of themselves found in male literature, so men find it difficult to appreciate accusations that they occupy the role of oppressor. (Walker, Very 72)
Writings on ethics, conduct, and social etiquettes have exerted a profound effect on women’s humorous styles, often silencing women’s voices. Even though wit is typically considered a virtue, John Gregory, for example, warns women against exercising their wit:
Wit is the most dangerous talent you can possess. It must be guarded with great discretion and good nature, otherwise it will create you many enemies. […] Wit is perfectly consistent with softness and delicacy; yet they are seldom found united. Wit is so flattering to vanity, that they who possess it become intoxicated, and lose all self-command. (Qtd. in Walker, Disobedient 93)
Some conduct books advised women how best to serve selflessly in the roles ascribed to them. A series of conduct books by Sarah Stikney Ellis, for instance, and similar publications, “gave specific, detailed directions on how to most selflessly serve in the domestic roles available to women” Gillooly, Smile 248). Ellis’s advice is grounded “on her belief that female self interest lies in selflessness.” If women carry out the labours related with their roles as “wife, mother, unmarried daughter most fully and selflessly the women will best be appreciated and therefore be financially provided for” (qtd. in Smile 248).
Wit is considered the most significant factor in comic writing. Walker differentiates wit from sentimentality:
If sentimentality in literature is a result of powerlessness, wit may be seen as its opposite: an expression of confidence and power. The word remains closely associated with its Old English origin in wita, “one who knows.” Long before it acquired the connotation of amusement, wit was connected with knowledge, understanding, perception. Sentimentality exerts a passive, often subversive power; wit, on the other hand, is a direct and open expression of perceptions, taking for granted a position of strength and insight. (“Wit” 6)
Wit is a mental state as well as a strategy for writers to prevent their fall into the pit of sentimentality. While wit has mostly been considered an integral part of men’s writings, it is seen as a dangerous weapon in women’s hands. However, Pym’s rational use of it makes the total body of her work unsentimental as well as witty. According to the conventional ideology of domesticity and the proper female, women are exclusively a source of comfort to their husbands. A witty woman, as conduct writer James Fordyce has it, is “a permanent nuisance for the comfort and ease of the husband since she always criticizes him” (qtd. in Bilger 22-23). Therefore, Fordyce does not approve of women exercising wit as it goes along with criticism.
Audrey Bilger asserts that since “middle-class women had few outside forums in which to register their discontent with their place within the domestic sphere” (23), conduct books and their advice to refrain from criticising men can interpreted as upholding the whole patriarchal system rather than just the domestic domain. Similarly, Walker proposes that:
by the mid-nineteenth century […] the ‘cult of domesticity’ was so firmly entrenched that womanly wit had difficulty maneuvering around the image of ideal womanhood – an image that denigrated woman’s intellect in favor of her emotional and intuitive nature. (Very 27)
1.3 Women’s Language and écriture féminine
Critical theories have often emphasised the different functions of language in men’s and women’s speech acts. In the patriarchal tradition, women have often been secluded and marginalised from the unifying power of linguistic conventions. The foundation of women’s language,” according to Robin Lakoff, is her marginality from the “serious concerns of life” (48), which are the domain of men.
The expression of a woman’s thoughts is restrained: “In appropriate women’s speech, strong expression of feeling is avoided, expression of uncertainty is favored, and means of expression in regard to subject-matter deemed ‘trivial’ to the ‘real’ world are elaborated” (Lakoff 48). Women are considered objects whose “sexual nature” and “social roles” require them to use euphemism and be “derivative and dependent in relation to men” (45). Women have usually been regarded as dependent beings or powerless sexual objects. Therefore, women’s language is “restricted in use to women and […] descriptive of women alone” (Lakoff 45). It systematically withholds power from women.
Women writers, however, have made efforts to overcome the linguistic barriers by following certain stylistic strategies in their works. Therefore, men’s and women’s relations to power differ considerably because of their differences in using language. Pym’s self-censorship, self-effacement, and use of indirect, subtle language are considered to be the most significant linguistic features of her works. In addition to being an unmarried woman-writer and living on the periphery of her society, Pym had no direct access to the power structures. Thus, her conservative and indirect use of language in her writings is due to her peculiar socio-cultural position as a woman-writer, living in the margins of society.
The concept of women’s writing has long been a controversial issue among feminist theorists. Anglo-American and French feminist critics such as Virginia Woolf, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Showalter, and Gilbert and Gubar have theorised about the boundaries, possibilities, content, and structure of such writing. There is a controversy among scholars concerning the labelling of different types of women’s humour. The comedian Kate Clinton, according to Linda Pershing, makes a distinction between “feminist humor” and “mainstream male and female humor” (qtd. in Pershing, 223-24). In her description, rather than being “covert,” feminist humour is “overt.” Instead of being passive, it is “active,” and in contrast to conventional female humour’s anti-revolutionary strategies, feminist humour is grounded “on the possibility of change.” Rather than escapist, feminist humour is transformational: it “transforms painful expression.” Thus, it surpasses the duality which considers that “serious is more real. Serious is truth. Humorous is less than real, trivial, trifling.” Moreover, feminist humour “does not ridicule or humiliate, instead, it is thoughtful.”
Nancy A. Walker also differentiates feminist humour from women’s humour. According to her, “the collective consciousness of women as an identifiable group with common problems and interests leads ultimately to a feminist humor” (Very 13). Based on this tradition, feminist humour has two forms. The most frequent type of feminist humour “makes use of a double text to pose a subtle challenge to the stereotype or the circumstance that the writer appears superficially merely to describe.” The other sort of feminist humour “stresses discrimination, and has tended to emerge during the periods of organized agitation for women’s rights. This type of feminist humor may parody anti-suffrage arguments, or may, by the use of fantasy, posit a society in which women are powerful” (Very 13). Walker argues that although women’s humour differs from feminist humour, “it has a feminist consciousness or stance than has been acknowledged” (Very 142). By recalling Naomi Weisstein’s view on feminist humour, Walker argues that in women’s condition there exists “an absurdity that they should use for their own purposes” (Very 143). According to Weisstein, it is a success “to turn what is defined as a ridiculous state of being into your own definition of the ridiculous, to take control of the quality of the absurdity, [and] to turn it away from yourself.” A humorous writer, according to Weisstein, must demonstrate that “nobody is either WOMAN or ‘lady,’ and that all this is very funny indeed” (qtd. in Walker, Very 143).
Feminist humour, therefore, has the capability to redefine conventional views about women, thus proving that it is the male-centred culture that is ridiculous – not women. Walker draws on Gloria Kaufman in order to show their shared emphasis on the role of social system in feminist humour. According to Kaufman, social revolution is the desired purpose inherent in feminist humour. Women’s aim in ridiculing the system is to transform it. Female humour, as Kaufman says, “may ridicule a person or a system from an accepting point of view (‘that’s life’), while the nonacceptance of oppression characterizes feminist humor and satire” (qtd. in Walker, Very 143; emphasis original). Kaufman concludes that while on the one hand female humour is normally less biting than feminist humour, on the other hand, it is “humor of hope” since it rejects oppression and refuses to submit to the existent conditions. In other words, feminist humour does not ridicule the action itself, since deriding the absurd action is to make it appear unimportant. Rather, as Walker says, it derides the ideology of gender inequality in order to depict this inequality as “absurd and powerless.” Similarly, the author of the female humour “is not merely ‘accepting’ the status quo, but is in fact calling attention to gender inequality, in ways designed to lead to its ultimate rejection” (Very 145).
Theorists of feminist humour have unanimously proposed that an effective way of resisting the dominant patriarchal order for women writers is through using a particular type of humour. It can enable them to enter their muted voice into the dominant general culture based on male standards. Central to their discussion is the point that since texts written by women are encoded by their particular biology, psyche, language use, culture, and unique experience, the decoding of such texts requires quite a different kind of approach which should take into account the fundamental characteristics of women’s writing as a whole. In other words, any study on women’s humour, including the present one, presupposes the existence of women’s writing as a distinct type of writing that needs to be investigated based on a different approach. The main reason for such a presupposition is the fact that women writers explore female experiences in non-conventional, non-canonised ways.
Virginia Woolf advises women writers to create their own tradition of writing. Although women might learn “a few tricks” from male writers, they cannot generally benefit from the dominant male tradition. When a woman writer began writing in the past, “Perhaps the first thing she would find [...] was that there was no common sentence ready for her use” (Room 79). And such a “lack of tradition, such a scarcity and inadequacy of tools” spared the woman author “freedom and fullness of expression” (80). To create such a tradition, not only the female, but also the male writer’s mind should function androgynously: “woman-manly and man-womanly,” because it is “when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties” (102). A woman writer can find her own tradition if the female part of her brain functions cooperatively with the male part, or if she can use all faculties of her brain simultaneously. Thus, Woolf’s emphasis lies mainly on the role of the author’s psyche in the creation of a different kind of tradition. Besides that, Woolf condemns the social conditions for restricting women’s creativity since the psyches of women writers are basically the by-products of social conditions.2
Furthermore, by referring to the “angel in the house” as an ideal of womanhood, Woolf highlights the socio-historical connotation of the concept as an “influential Victorian ideal of deferential, sportive and domestic womanhood” (Parsons 85). This ideal woman was thought to be “intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. […] She was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. […] Her purity was supposed to be her chief beauty – her blushes, her great grace” (Woolf, Death). As Woolf suggests, women themselves have unconsciously strengthened such a cultural myth by internalising it over the years. Thus, Woolf considers “Killing the Angel in the House” a significant task of the woman writer. In her own writings, Woolf struggled to dispose of the established image since, as she argues, “had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing” (Death).
Pym’s fiction includes such angels – Belinda Bede, Mildred Lathbury, and Jane Cleveland are among them. At least, society expects them to be angels. Although they may appear to be helpmates, their thoughts show how they dislike being considered as such. The socio-cultural expectations towards women prevent them from expressing their true selves and from revealing their experiences in their writing. In the case of her characters’ traits and their life accounts, Pym ironically criticises the existing socio-cultural conditions which act as invisible obstacles preventing their private and social contributions. Pym’s criticism was about the cultural realities of her time. As Gillooly states, “in the globalizing middle-class culture of the late twentieth-century,” a culture which was financially and mentally based on the satisfaction of “self-interest.” it was not an easy task for female virtues such as “self-sacrifice and eager sympathy” to seem “ludicrous” (Smile 208).
According to American feminist and literary critic Elaine Showalter’s argument in her A Literature of Her Own,3 women’s specific condition in the patriarchal society should be taken as the most important factor in encouraging them to create a different kind of literature – their own literature. She coined the term “gynocriticism” in order to pose the significant issue of “difference.” Her main purpose was to “constitute women as a distinct literary group” and to recognise and analyse the “difference of women’s writing” (15), which is why women’s writing should be rediscovered and extended. In developing her theory on the direct relationship between women’s writing and women’s culture, Showalter critically reviews existing theories about the relationship between a woman’s text and her body, psyche, and language. According to this discussion, the shift from “an androcentric to a gynocentric” criticism is owed to Patricia Meyer Spacks’s studies. Showalter emphasises the importance of Spacks’s analysis of “how women’s writing had been different, and how womanhood itself shaped women’s creative expression” (15).
Showalter regards the concept of écriture féminine, which was proposed by Hélène Cixous,4 as possibly the most significant contribution to the issue of women’s writing. Showalter considers it “the inscription of the female body and female difference in language and text.” Écriture feminine signifies a “Utopian possibility rather than a literary practice” (15) since showing the defining differences in women’s writing is a challenging task. Showalter also argues that there is no agreement among critics whether women’s writing is be considered a stylistic or a generic matter, or a subject related to experience, or “produced by the reading process, as some textual critics would maintain” (16). Critics in general believe that the difference in women’s writing is affected by all these factors. That is, women writers’ style, the experience they convey, and the themes and subjects they write about differ to a great extent from what is common in mainstream literature. According to critics such as Judith Fetterley and Jonathan Culler, women’s reading process differs from that of men.
