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1.5 Necessity of a Humour of One’s Own

One of the most controversial issues among critics is whether women’s humour is different from male humour. In her A Room of One’s Own, Woolf differentiates between conventional humour and women’s humour as related to women’s experience. Woolf foregrounds women’s humour concentrating on their distinct experiences. Thus, as Judy Little argues, comedy “written by women may be different from comedy written by men” (Comedy ix) since, according to Woolf, men’s and women’s “values” are to some extent different although the prevailing values are masculine. She maintains that “the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex.” Woolf considers this difference very “natural” and unquestionable: “this is so” (Room 76). However, she sidelines the constraints imposed by the existing male standards prevailing over the context in which women writers produce literature. She adds:

Speaking crudely, football and sport are ‘important’; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes 'trivial'. And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room. A scene in a battlefield is more important than a scene in a shop - everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value persists. (Room 77)

Woolf, nevertheless, recommends women to draw on their particular experiences, caused by their particular condition, as an advantage in order to write their own peculiar humour through which they can see and laugh at men’s absurdities and hypocrisies: “learn to laugh, without bitterness, at the vanities – say rather at the peculiarities, for it is a less offensive word – of the other sex” (Room 94). Thus, Woolf prepares the basis for women’s humour and encourages them to express themselves humorously.

Exploring and questioning the conventional theories related with humour, theory of women’s humour has recently appeared as an outstanding strategy of reading women’s fiction. By considering the rise and development of the theories of humour and their application, a comprehensive theoretical study of women’s humour necessarily puts into question the traditional claim that since women do not have a sense of humour, or at best a particular or distinct one, humour is primarily considered to be a male dominion. Some of the twentieth century thinkers, such as Schopenhauer, Bergson, and Freud declared that “women had no sense of humor” (Sochen 9). Thus, it is no surprise that women’s humour has been ignored and misread since the patriarchal ideology did not recognise women’s sense of humour as a separate and specific type of humour in its own right. As June Sochen observes, “the conservative point of view dominated, and the rebellious one, albeit a powerful one, was looked at suspiciously by all lovers of the status quo, it took a long time to overthrow the long-held notions about women’s alleged lack of capacity to laugh and to create laughter” (10). Consequently, it was a challenging task for the dominating male system to grant recognition to this type of humour for women’s use and to provide the required conditions to broaden and theorise about it.

According to the theorists who essentially consider humour as a male art, any theorising about women’s humour is invalid. Referring to this situation, Kate Sanborn, as the first woman who published an influential book on women’s humour, proposes that “While the wit of men, as a subject for admiration and discussion, is now threadbare, the wit of women has been almost utterly ignored and unrecognized” (1). Theorists of women’s humour thus tend to highlight it as a separate ignored and unrecognized category of humour, particular to women. The theory that women do indeed possess a humour of their own initiated further investigation of their particular style of humour and its difference from the conventional male humour. For instance, in the introduction to her anthology, Sanborn admits that her decision to collect women’s humour is largely due to the myth that women do not have a sense of humour. Her purpose in collecting the humorous writings of women is an attempt to prove the falsity of the general belief, as put by Richard Grant White, that comedy is the ‘‘rarest of qualities in woman” (qtd. in Sanborn 13). Sanborn, moreover, describes her desire to publish such a book by stating that “it roused such a host of brilliant recollections that it was a temptation to try to materialize the ghosts that were haunting me; to lay forever the suspicion that they did not exist” (13). Although Sanborn does not theorise about women’s humour in her book, she collects English women’s humorous writings and claims that “there were many literary Englishwomen who had undoubted humour” (15). Accordingly, women’s humour is generally believed to have appeared in women’s texts as a remarkable rhetorical device.

1.6 Humour: A Female Device?

The kind and function of humour in women’s writing have always been under debate. For example, by referring to the problematic history of the theory of women’s humour, Gillooly states that Lang’s discussion contributed a lot to the study of women’s humour her personal lack of interest in women’s use of humour. As Gillooly says, Lang “suggests why ‘humor’ as opposed to irony, comedy, or another formulation is the most appropriate general term by which to refer to what is amusing in women’s writing” (“Women” 477). She further proposes that the peculiar characteristics inherent in women’s humour including, for instance, “the characteristic subtlety, the intercategorical nature, of female humor ... conforms more fully to a reading attuned to polyvalence than to the strict either/or dualism associated with Hegelian irony” (“Women” 477). Moreover, dissimilar to irony that attempts “to dominate signification” in order to remove other ‘trivial’ and insignificant meanings, women’s humour is in fact “adversarial and oppositional to the dominant discourse” without threatening or endangering the foundations of the dominant order. Therefore, humour, as Gillooly asserts, “like female utterance, is unauthorized discourse,” “It is not a sharply contrasted principle enforcing the law by negation, instead, it is beyond the law and thus “dangerously subversive of its hegemony” (“Women” 477-78).

In her attempt to theorise about female irony, Gillooly argues that, in comparison to the “reinforcement of ego characteristic of irony,” female ego is fabricated as “dispersed, relational, passive, and renunciative.” Thus, as Gillooly states, the female writer benefits more from humour because it provides her more “sympathetic relation to self” (Smile xxii). Walker also points out “women’s quite different relationship to authority” (Very 12) while at the same time demonstrating women’s alienation from the dominant order. Agreeing with Walker, Gillooly asserts that if irony is a “masculine” device, which is a “direct negative response to the Law,” then “feminine irony,” obstructed by the women’s peculiar position in society, is only expressed as “silence” (Smile xxii). Moreover, Walker proposes that language, as being the most essential constituent of women’s writing, is applied in two different styles. The first group of women writers resist and challenge “the male-dominated language, either by appropriating male discourse for women’s purposes or by altering or subverting it.” This is the strategy that women comic writers employ in their writings. They resist and challenge the “dominant discourse” by the application of comic strategies such as “irony.” The second group of women writers stress “women’s exclusion from language – their silence.” These writers, according to Walker, mostly tend towards modes such as fantasy as another accompanying narrative strategy (Feminist 44). Those women writers, who chose to challenge the male-centred language by various strategies, must realise that “the initial step in negating the hegemony of oppressive language is to question its authority by making fun of it.” (Walker, Feminist 44) Pym applies this tactic effectively in her fiction. For example, although she accepts religion as her ideology, yet, she challenges it in a peculiar humorous tone. Thus, in Walker’s words, by employing humour that contradicts “the power of hegemonic discourse,” by her refusal “to take that power seriously,” and by “pointing to the absurdity of the official language of a culture,” the woman comic writer can build up resistance against the dominance of the male-centred language (Feminist 44).

Pym’s ridiculing tone regarding patriarchal discourse is observable in her dealing with the very topics and themes which are regarded as insignificant by male critics and writers. Barreca also points out the disregard of the literary and cultural critics for women’s humour, “When it can be seen, comedy written by women is perceived as trivial, silly and unworthy of serious attention.” (Untamed 20). Thus, since women writers mostly write outside the domain of “power and authority,” many critics consider women’s writing activities less significant than those of men: “by writing comedy, in which the unofficial nature of the world is explored (to paraphrase Bakhtin), women are damned to insignificant twice over” since “traditional arguments posit that women’s comedy, as in women’s gossip, the unimportant discuss the unofficial” (Barreca, Untamed 20). Thus, it is possible to regard women writers’ humour as generally unimportant through evaluating the subjects they write about as insignificant.

1.7 Misreading Women’s Humour and Images of Women

Misreading and misunderstanding women’s humorous writing is the most problematic subject in women’s writing. Women comic writers have often been victims of the misreading and misunderstandings of the critics. In this regard, Barreca states that “Women’s humor has not so much been ignored as it has been unrecognized, passed over, or misread as tragic” (Untamed 17). Furthermore, as Gillooly refers to it, women’s comic writings are often valued according to the universal standards: “Because readers have historically been taught to identify and appreciate the presence of humour according to ‘universal’ standards and to privilege certain of these over others, they frequently ignore or misread humour produced by women whenever it refuses to conform to the established standards” (Women 475). Barreca also underlines the role of universal standards by proposing that the important problem in reading and recognizing women’s humour has been measuring their humour against the so-called universals (Untamed 45).

According to critics such as Woolf, the fact that many woman writers choose to write about the so-called small details of life (e.g. birth, death, marriage, and sex) implies that women cannot master the universal subjects (e.g. sports, finance, and academics) (Room 77). Woolf highlights the inefficiency of the literary critical tradition to “recognize and read women’s humour” rather than the “inability of women to produce comedy that accounts for the absence of critical material on the subject” (Room 20). By the same token, while some critics and scholars misread Pym’s humour as serious and sober, they misrecognise her subtle and covert style of humour.

As it is true about the existing images and stereotypes for women, classification of women into types and groups, rather than considering them as individuals, has been one of the significant factors in misreading their humour through the years. As long as the conventionalised stereotypes for women ignore their individualities, working against their particular private and social states, and as long as a woman is viewed merely as “helpmate, sex object, and domestic servant, she cannot at the same time be allowed the capacity for humour, with its implication of superiority and its fundamental critique of social reality” (Walker, Very 98). Therefore, in order to read women’s humour without the prejudices and presuppositions, and to understand it, first of all the negative stereotypes related with women must be wiped out. Understanding women’s historical, cultural and social states is obligatory for reading and understanding their particular type of humour. Further, what in fact differentiates women’s humorous writing from those of men, originates from differences in the way women relate to culture, as well as from the lack of a balance between the authorised and the unauthorised, and the workings of the power between them. The authorised and the dominant are not always powerful and the unauthorised and marginal are not always powerless.

The balance between the power of the authorised and the unauthorised may sometimes turn counter-wise. Walker proposes that the “delicate balance between power and powerlessness” shapes the “themes and forms of women’s humorous writing.” She also adds that women’s literature “has described myriad aspects of women’s lives, employing familiar stereotypes about women for the purpose of mocking those stereotypes and showing their absurdity and even their danger” (Very 10). Pym employs these stereotypes in her writing in order to display the absurd and subordinating view of the patriarchal culture in relation to these stereotypes. Likewise, Walker states that, “It is for this reason that women’s humor so often seems to turn on and perpetuate traditional stereotypes of women: the gossipy spinster, the nagging wife, the inept housekeeper, the lovelorn woman, the dumb blonde. These are some of the roles in which women have been cast by men and male institutions, and as such they have, until quite recently, seemed fixed” (Very 11). Similarly, Pym’s novels are full of spinsters, unloved women, and tactless housewives. She depicts these women not primarily to exhibit their ineffectiveness, but to display the shortcomings of the male-centred culture in dealing with them. Walker also observes that: “What female humorists have done with these stereotypes, however, is to subvert them. The housewives who cannot reach perfection ... are in this situation because the standards for their performance are impossibly high; the lovelorn women ... are victims of male indifference and the double standard” (Very 11). Pym likewise resists and undermines the dominant order by ridiculing the standards set for women by the prevailing culture. In addition to subverting the standards prescribed for women, women’s humour also criticises the institutions and individuals who are in some manner associated with the power structures.

1.8 Lack of Ending in the Works of Women Writers

One significant difference that theorists of women’s humour point out is that between the endings of novels written by female and male humorous writers. Barreca considers women’s humour a specific type of humour stating that comedies by female writers have no “happy endings” (introduction 8). Instead, “The endings of comic works by women writers,” as Barreca states, “do not, ultimately, reproduce the expected hierarchies, or if they do there is often an attendant sense of dislocation even with the happiest ending” (Untamed 23).7 Following that, Little considers “lack of closure” or “lack of resolution” as the fundamental characteristic of the feminist comedy (qtd. in Untamed 29). However, despite their non-comedic endings, women’s humorous writings “can indeed be classified as comedies” (Barreca, introduction 8). Similarly, the narrative endings in Pym’s selected novels do not conform to the established norms of comedy; for instance, the endings of Pym’s novels differ from the endings of the traditional plots. Although marriage and union are obtained at the end of some of her novels, they cannot be considered a great change in the fate of the characters. In fact, marriages and unions are reversed as unfortunate destinies of the characters. In many of Pym’s novels, nothing in particular happens at the end, and everything goes on as before.

Thus, the endings of women’s comedy differ sharply, and considerably, from the male’s traditional perspective of the term comedy. This particular type of comedy does, as Barreca emphasises, destroy social order without establishing a new and different one. Moreover, it revolts against the norms and the values of the patriarchal system which have already penetrated into the socio-cultural deep structure. Barreca, moreover, proposes that women’s comedic writings “may contain very little joyous celebration” and in contrast to the comedies produced as “a safety valve,” they are produced as “an inflammatory device.” The result of this type of humour “is not to purge desire and frustration” but “to transform it into action” (Untamed 18). Similarly, Walker argues that women’s writings lack a definite ending. It implies that the text does not allow for a closure. As she observes: “A feminine textual body is recognized by the fact that it is always endless, without ending: there’s no closure, it doesn’t stop.” She suggests that there exists in women’s texts the tone of being interminable, “A feminine text starts on all sides, all at once, starts twenty times, thirty times, over (Feminist 11). Accordingly, as Stott argues, even though women wrote comedies, which they in fact did, they were criticised for being restricted in themes compared to men’s comedies which deal with important aspects of life: “Female comedians only discuss ‘women’s’ themes – relationships, shopping, and menstruation, for example – whereas male topics are thought to be unbounded and therefore to have universal appeal” (94).

Pym’s novels are mostly inconclusive. In other words, no satisfactory conclusion may be drawn after reading them. The three selected novels in this stury are open-ended and the reader can imagine dozens of possible endings for them. It is for the purpose of comedy that Pym deliberately keeps her novels open-ended. For instance, the ending of EW gives only some hints that Everard might ask Mildred to marry him. Through the narrator’s report of her inner thoughts, Mildred is reported as imagining herself at Everard’s “sink peeling potatoes and washing up;” doing Everard’s indexing and proofreading for a “nice change” (EW 255). Moreover, the endings of STG and JP suggest implicitly that they are in fact non-endings. For example, it is possible to imagine that Belinda and Harriet Bede, despite having suitors, will stay unmarried; Belinda will remain in love with Henry; Harriet will go on flirting with the young curates; and/or Jane will seek worthy suitors for Prudence Bates, while Prudence will fall in and out of love with imaginary lovers! This sharp contrast between the endings of the women’s and men’s writings makes possible the other differences between the more conventional humour and women’s specific humour.

1.9 Differences between Conventional Humour and Women’s Humour

Feminist critics and theorists of humour claim that women have a humour peculiar to themselves that differs widely from men’s conventional humour. According to Gail Finne, women’s humour is different from men’s and is particular to themselves: “The gender of the creator of comedy makes a difference in the kind of comedy produced” (1). Reading and encoding this humour calls for a particular type of historical, social, and political knowledge about women’s condition since according to Walker, “women’s relation to language, literature, education and cultural traditions has been made problematic and complex by centuries of unequal access to power and agency within these systems” (Disobedient 2). Gillooly also “demarcates” women’s humour from men’s and proposes to investigate the peculiar techniques: “Those narrative, rhetorical, and affective tactics that – because of their passivity, indirection, and self-effacement – have been gendered feminine in nineteenth-century British culture” (Smile xix). Hence, on account of women’s unequal relation to language and power, women are obliged to apply different tactics and strategies so that they might overcome the dominating patriarchal language. Consequently, this results in their producing a different kind of humour.

The writer’ gender, therefore, has a determining effect on the kind of humour present in his/her writings. For example, Finney observes that “the gender of the creator of comedy can make a difference in the kind of comedy produced” (1). Theorists also argue that the socio-cultural conditions have operated against women’s manifestation of humour. Based on Walker’s opinion, the main cause of women’s limitation in expressing their humour is that they “have lacked opportunities for free expression of their humour due to the cultural expectations regarding their status and behaviour.” However, women have always struggled to reject this opposition. Hence, to resist this lack, as Walker puts it, “women have typically masked their humorous utterance with a pose of anxious adherence to cultural norms” (Very 86). Consequently, women’s humour lacks the direct and aggressive nature of men’s humour. Since women live in a patriarchal society, they have to adapt their humour to the realities of the society wherein they live. As a result, women’s resistance to the patriarchal order occurs in a particular context where they have to survive and their humour takes the form of indirect resistance to power. Moreover, according to Walker, the paradoxical beliefs about women and their position and status in society, such as the general culture’s belief in their sinfulness and at the same time the simultaneous admiration “for their purity,” are some of the reasons for women’s use of subversive forms of humour. Women have always resisted against such patriarchal beliefs “by means of a subversive laughter” (Very 86).

Some critics argue that women’s humour mostly supports the oppressed and the powerless, rather than supporting the oppressors and the powerful. For instance, Barbara Bennett suggests that a significant difference between male and female humour is what Emily Toth in her article “Female Wits” has termed as the “humane humor rule.” Toth argues that women, in contrast to men, “target the powerful rather than the powerless and rarely ridicule an aspect of a person or society that cannot be changed.” She then gives the example of the “physically handicapped, choosing instead to attack those who hold narrow-minded attitudes and adhere to cultural stereotypes” (qtd. in Bennett 13). Likewise, Barreca observes that “Women are more likely to make fun of those in high and seemingly invulnerable positions than their male counterparts.” To put the same thought differently, women’s humour, according to Barreca, “is power-sensitive” or it is “often anarchic and apocalyptic; the unsolicited laughter of women spells trouble to those in power” (Untamed 21-22). However, women’s humour is opposed to the creation and employment of any stereotype. For instance, the stereotype of the father-in-law does not exist in women’s humour, in contrast to the stereotype of the mother-in-law, or a bachelor is not ridiculed as a spinster is parodied in men’s humour. According to Gillooly, “feminine” humour can be distinguished from the other forms of traditional or “masculine” humour in different aspects of “production and consumption, in form, content, occasion, and psychological function” (Smile xx). For instance, in spite of conceiving humour as the disconnection between the norm and its violation, as the theories of humour as incongruity have argued, female humour reverses the standards by ridiculing the traditional patriarchal norms.

Based on Gillooly’s study, another significant deviation of women’s humour from the traditional, conventional, or masculine humour is that, by exercising various tactics and strategies in the text, feminine humour not only furtively attacks the dominating “ideological construction of ‘woman,’” but also denounces “certain narrative and rhetorical tactics” such as used by the nineteenth-century writer Ribaldry (Smile 17). Furthermore, women do not employ satire in their writings: “Nor does satire – at least in concentrated form or in prodigious quantities – occur with any regularity” (Smile 18). The humour of Vanity Fair is an example of masculine humour which does not apply the “veiled tactics common to feminine humour to replicate.” Masculine humour is, therefore, “too pronounced and transparent” compared to the covert tactics of feminine humour. Rather, feminine humour, works invisibly, to “unsay its sober expression, locally undermining the overt ideology of the text” (Smile 18). That is feminine humour does not express itself in a straightforward manner; instead, it topically subverts the open and visible notions of the text.

Similarly, Walker claims that unlike women’s humour, which “is almost never purely comic or absurd” (Very xii), men’s humour is carefree and playful. According to Walker, the melancholic mood and serious tone of women’s humour can be regarded as the significant characteristics of their humorous expression since in referring to the infinite “absurdities that woman have been forced to endure in this culture, it carries with it not the light-hearted feeling that is the privilege of the powerful, but instead a subtext of anguish and frustration” (Very xii). Thus, the state of being carefree and playful is not consistent with women’s humour wherein a troubled and melancholic ego exists underneath. The woman humour writer has her own way of healing for her troubled ego, or as Walker proposes, being “at odds with the publicly espoused values of the culture,” the woman writer subverts the traditional and conventional grounds ridiculing the absurdities of “the politician, the pious, and the pompous.” The woman humourist, then, “must break out of the passive, subordinate position mandated for them by centuries of patriarchal tradition and take on the power accruing to those who reveal the shams, hypocrisies, and incongruities of the dominant culture.” A woman humourist’s task, therefore, as Walker identifies, is an arduous one since it must face and overthrow the authority that keeps her unauthorised as well as “to risk alienating those upon whom women are dependent for economic survival” (Very 9). This is one of the reasons why women’s humour has conventionally been subverted and ignored through the ages.

A major difference between masculine and feminine humour refers to the modifications feminine humour makes to the narrative conventions. While, as Gillooly points out, women’s humour is subtle and “at least apparently unthreatening” (Smile I18), the narrative conventions of masculine humour are generally direct and threatening. One instance of such alterations is in decentring the marriage convention “as the authorizing textual principle.” However, women’s humour does not openly challenge the “authority of culturally dominant oedipal narrative” that mostly results in “the heroine’s erotic and economic transformation from daughter to wife” (Smile 18). Thus, feminine humour does not make drastic changes to the narrative; instead, it undermines the authority of the dominant patriarchal ideology through gradual disruption of its power. For instance, Pym similarly undermines the mastering ideology by counteracting the power of marriage at the end of her novels. Her novels for the most part do not end in marriage and if, by chance they do, marriage is demonstrated as the reversal of the type of marriage depicted in the conventional comic novels. The marriage Pym presents is ineffective, and does not result in the coupling of the lovers.

Even though men and women reserve narrative motifs and themes for comic outcomes, feminine humourists, as Gillooly contends, employ “literary forms generally shunned by their fellows” (Smile 18). The reason for women writers’ acting in this way might differ from writer to writer, but the most important cause is the limitation and restriction of their writings in terms of motifs and structure. Throughout history, women writers have been able to express their humour in a specific language and mode, different from men’s. For instance, they picked out the genre of fairy tales and made radical changes to it. As Gillooly claims, “Fairy tales – which inform the content and closure of most narratives of the period – are openly exploited by writers like Gaskell, Bronte, and Austen for humorous purposes” (Smile 18). Much later, the form of the fairy tale is also used in the novels of Pym for the same humorous purpose.

Pym’s novels reverse the narrative structure and the plot of the conventional fairy tale in all aspects. To make a relationship with Gillooly’s statement, they typically revise the “family romance that pervades nineteenth-century British narrative.” Pym’s novels generally reverse the structure of the fairy tales in which, as Gillooly says, “paternal figures (fathers primarily) are customarily royal, powerful, and loving, stepmothers cruel and sometimes murderous” (Smile 19). Unlike fairy tales, Pym’s novels are emptied of the royal, efficient, and powerful male figures and fathers. There barely exist any father-figures in her novels. If they do, they are all inefficient fathers and husbands. They are exceedingly common men without a single drop of royal blood. They are mostly clergymen or university professors who do not have the authority as the father-figure at home. They are mostly abandoned by their wives and their children and are left with nobody really to care for them. In contrast, the spinsters in Pym’s novels are the ones with the authority. They are all efficient individuals, capable of not only solving their own problems, but also counteracting those of other characters. The world in which Pym’s characters live is not even a nuclear family. Most men and women live lonely lives, without having any children. By drawing such a sketch and for comic reasons, Pym reverses the conventional structure of the nuclear family and family romance.