Smile of Discontent : Humor, Gender, and Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

by Gillooly, Eileen

• ISBN13: 9780226294025
• ISBN10: 0226294021
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-05-01
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

Like sex, Eileen Gillooly argues, humor has long been viewed as a repressed feature of nineteenth-century femininity. However, in the works of writers such as Jane Austen, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, and Henry James, Gillooly finds an understated, wryly amusing perspective that differs subtly but significantly in rhetoric, affect, and politics from traditional forms of comic expression. Gillooly shows how such humor became, for mostly female writers at the time, an unobtrusive and prudent means of expressing discontent with a culture that was ideologically committed to restricting female agency and identity. If the aggression and emotional distance of irony and satire mark them as "masculine," then for Gillooly, the passivity, indirection, and sympathy of the humor she discusses render it "feminine." She goes on to disclose how the humorous tactics employed by writers from Burney to Wharton persist in the work of Barbara Pym, Anita Brookner, and Penelope Fitzgerald. The book won the Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Award given by the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature.

Author Biography

Elizabeth A. Kaye specializes in communications as part of her coaching and consulting practice. She has edited Requirements for Certification since the 2000-01 edition.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Preface

Introduction: Positioning the Feminine, 1778-1913

Theory and Praxis

The Poetics of Feminine Humor Humor and Rhetoric Humor and Affect Surviving the Feminine: Humor and Pathology

The Feminine Difference: Three Paradigms Captain Mirvan and Mrs. Selwyn

The Case of Anthony Trollope Sadomasochism and the Humor Relationship

Readings

Humor as Maternal Aggression:Mansfield Parkand Persuasion

The Example of Fanny Price Undermining Patriarch

The Relief of "Throwing Ridicule": Mary Crawford and the Narrator

Laughable Lovers: Fanny as Romantic Heroine

Laughable Lovers Again: Anne Elliot's "Eternal Constancy"

Humor as Daughterly Defense: Cranford Locating the Narrator Amazons and Patriarchs

The Dutiful Daughter in Drag: Mary Smith and Peter Jenkyns Narrative Structure, Humorous Tropes, and Cultural Text

Humor as Maternal Protection

The Mill on the Floss Parental Failures Preoedipal Longing and the Objects of Displaced

Desire Narrative Mothering Recapitulating the Maternal Bond Bonds of Suffering and the Ties that Bind Coda

Feminine Humor in the Twentieth Century

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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