The Rhetoric of Women’s Humour in Barbara Pym’s Fiction

While discussing differences, theorists of women’s writing generally take into account four factors – biology, language, psychoanalysis, and culture. Although feminist criticism resists the patriarchal attribution of lower biological status to women, it takes into account the metaphorical significance of female biological difference in women’s own writings and the writings about them. In The Madwoman in the Attic, for instance, Gilbert and Gubar construct their explanation of women’s writing around metaphors of literary paternity. As Gilbert and Gubar understand, a woman writer undergoes anxiety of authorship caused by “socio-economic oppression and intellectual inferiorization as they have been considered to necessarily lack the instrument of generative power” (Madwoman 293). Hence, women writers’ anxiety is greatly felt “through the words they have produced and their anxiety of authorship is not only due to their status as mere ‘writers,’ but also due to their status as ‘women writers.’ The term refers to the ‘conscious fears of [writing] authority’ of a woman writer who conceives of the act of writing as ‘inappropriate to her sex’” (293). Gilbert and Gubar also cite socio-historical and cultural reasons for women’s absence from canonical literature. According to them, internalised cultural beliefs keep women away from reading and writing by restricting their self-awareness. Gilbert and Gubar propose that

women’s intellectual capabilities were overlooked, and they were given little chance to express themselves through literature. Only men could refer to themselves as the creators of artistic works in the colonial puritan society. Women almost always felt that they committed sin when they happened to put something in ink. Indeed, reading and writing were considered rather dangerous for women. (293)

In Showalter’s discussion of the rhetorical history of women’s writing in Anglo-American and French Feminism, Showalter highlights the defining importance of language from their perspectives. According to Nelly Furman, for instance, “It is through the medium of language that we define and categorize areas of difference and similarity, which in turn allow us to comprehend the world around us” (qtd. in Showalter 20). Male-centred categorisations predominate American English and “subtly shape our understanding and perception of reality; this is why attention is increasingly directed to the inherently oppressive aspects for women of a male-constructed language system.” Annie Leclerc proposes that women writers, in the first place, should “invent a language that is not oppressive, a language that does not leave speechless but that loosens the tongue” (qtd. in Showalter 21). In this way, through the gradual disruption of established patriarchal language, women writers can enter the appropriate language of their own into the existing discourse.

Showalter argues that women writers have long been accused of disrupting male discourse even before the rise of such discussions, mostly in the French tradition of feminist criticism. She emphasises that “the concept of a women’s language is not original with feminist criticism; it is very ancient and appears frequently in folklore and myth. In such myths, the essence of women’s language is its secrecy; what is really being described is the male fantasy of the enigmatic nature of the feminine” (21). Such a traditional view of women’s language is a misidentified recognition based on male illusion. Comparing the invention of a new language particular to women to the selection of a language in a decolonised society, Showalter argues that some women, by using the existing male language, endeavour to deliver their own experience through it. They gradually disrupt the established language in order to make their own voices heard and inscribe their style in the general writing tradition. In contrast, other critics believe that women writers should establish a fundamentally new language. As Showalter puts it, “The language issue in feminist criticism has emerged, in a sense, after our revolution, and it reveals the tensions in the women’s movement between those who would stay outside the academic establishments and the institutions of criticism and those who would enter and even conquer them” (22). Showalter acknowledges that “the concept of the women’s language is riddled with difficulties” because “there is no mother tongue, no genderlect spoken by the female population in a society, which differs significantly from the dominant language” (22). Moreover, the possibility of women’s language, its feasibility, as Showalter states, is not certain from the linguistic perspective either:

English and American linguists agree that “there is absolutely no evidence that would suggest the sexes are pre-programmed to develop structurally different linguistic systems.” Furthermore, the many specific differences in male and female speech, intonation, and language use that have been identified cannot be explained in terms of “two separate sex-specific languages” [McConnell-Ginet] but need to be considered instead in terms of styles, strategies, and contexts of linguistic performance. (22-23)

Showalter does not advocate a specific language for women as distinct from the male tradition. Instead, she holds that a new women’s language should be extracted from the dominant language. Her suggestion to feminist criticism

is to concentrate on women’s access to language, on the available lexical range from which words can be selected, on the ideological and cultural determinants of expression. The problem is not that language is insufficient to express women’s consciousness but that women have been denied the full resources of language and have been forced into silence, euphemism, or circumlocution. (23)

Therefore, women writers should primarily employ all the capacities of the existing language to be heard in that discourse because “women’s literature is still haunted by the ghosts of repressed language, and until we have exorcised those ghosts, it ought not to be in language that we base our theory of difference” (23).

Showalter’s understanding of women’s writing is in line with Gilbert and Gubar’s argument that “the female subject is not necessarily alienated from the words she writes and speaks” (“Sexual” 516). They argue that by using the existing discourse a woman writer can enter “not just female jouissance but female puissance” or her own identity into the dominant culture. In this way and “in spite of the feminist doubt and masculinist dread,” Gilbert and Gubar confirm that “woman has not been sentenced to transcribe male penmanship; rather, she commands sentences which inscribe her own powerful character” (“Sexual” 516; emphasis original). Gilbert and Gubar, therefore, do not advocate a totally new female writing tradition; instead, according to them, “there has always been an ‘écriture féminine;’ it has just been overlooked” (Berg 10). They hold that in order to express their particular experiences, women have “come to terms with the urgent need for female literary authority through fantasies about the possession of a mother tongue” (qtd. in Berg 10). The so-called “mother tongue,” according to Berg, is considered to be “primordial, passionate, powerful, [and] private.” It also includes “new words, a new language to express what has never been expressed before, [and] the woman’s experience.” This new type of language is “a subversive language powerful enough to subvert patriarchal power” (Berg 11).

As with women’s writing, feminist critics also disagree about the existence of a distinct women’s culture. The relationship between women’s culture and general culture based on the patriarchal values is by no means straightforward. To define women’s culture, some basic models have been proposed by critics, historians and anthropologists. Some critics point out the existence of a totally separate sphere as a necessity for the possibility of a separate female culture. In contrast, Edwin Ardener proposes a diagram on the relationship between the dominant and the muted group, maintaining that a great deal of the two spheres overlap, while there is still a “wild zone” which belongs to the muted group, and stands outside the male domain (qtd. in Showalter 200):

If we think of the wild zone metaphysically, or in terms of consciousness, it has no corresponding male space since all of male consciousness is within the circle of the dominant structure and thus accessible to or structured by language. In this sense, the 'wild' is always imaginary; from the male point of view, it may simply be the projection of the unconscious. In terms of cultural anthropology, women know what the male crescent is like, even if they have never seen it, because it becomes the subject of legend (like the wilderness). But men do not know what is in the wild. (Showalter 200)

Criticising those who think that it is possible for female writers to write only in the wild zone extracted from the dominant sphere, Showalter asserts that, “we must also understand that there can be no writing or criticism totally outside of the dominant structure” since the publication industry totally depends on the “economic and political pressures of the male-dominated society.” Therefore, “the concept of a woman’s text in the wild zone is a playful abstraction.” Showalter believes that “women’s writing is a ‘double-voiced discourse’ that always embodies the social, literary, and cultural heritages of both the muted and the dominant.” Thus, women’s writing cannot be considered as “inside and outside of the male tradition;” rather, it is “inside two traditions simultaneously” and reflects the characteristics of both traditions (201-02; emphasis original). Moreover, some critics have tried to explain the production and interpretation of the women- authored texts by the theory of double-text5.

Showalter, then, believes in a two-fold relationship between the general, dominant culture and women’s muted culture: “One of the great advantages of the women’s-culture model is that it shows how the female tradition can be a positive source of strength and solidarity as well as a negative source of powerlessness; it can generate its own experiences and symbols which are not simply the obverse of the male tradition” (204). Showalter highlights the importance of such cultural models in the reading of women’s fiction, proposing that:

Women’s fiction can be read as a double-voiced discourse, containing a “dominant” and a “muted” story […] I have described it elsewhere as an object/field problem in which we must keep two alternative oscillating texts simultaneously in view: “In the purest feminist literary criticism we are […] presented with a radical alteration of our vision, a demand that we see meaning in what has previously been empty space. The orthodox plot recedes, and another plot, hitherto submerged in the anonymity of the background, stands out in bold relief like a thumbprint. (204)

Pym’s texts can also be considered as a double-voiced discourse in Showalter’s sense. The first part of this is the dominant patriarchal discourse. The second part is the humorous discourse of the woman writer which, standing outside the power relations, ridicules the dominant discourse as well as the values and the ideology related to it.

Acting within the limitations of the existent dominant culture, the exploration of women’s culture can be regarded as the most important part of the search for a theory of women’s writing. The appearance of such culture can help to redefine conventionally established female roles, functions, activities, tastes and behaviours from a woman’s perspective based on her real life experiences. By the same token, Pym’s novels represent women’s lives as a distinct way of life differing from the dominant one.

STG, for instance, depicts the lives of two middle-class, middle-aged, unmarried sisters. The narrative mostly focuses on their disjointed viewpoints which subtly disrupt dominant cultural values. Similarly, EW displays Mildred’s unique values, beliefs and behaviours which oppose the dominant post-WW II culture of 1950s England. Likewise, the lives of Jane and Prudence in JP show their disconnected cultures and perspectives and their centrifugal drive away from the prevalent stream of patriarchal culture. Pym in these narratives attempts to redefine fundamental concepts from the women’s perspective.

Although feminist critics and theorists disagree over the existence of a separate kind of writing called women’s writing, nonetheless, they commonly accept that female experiences in women’s writings may vary from male experiences due to differences in their biology, history, language, and culture. Thus, women are seen capable of finding a way of expression to disrupt the deep structure of the patriarchal tradition. Thus, by working within the existing male tradition, women writers include in their writing some subtleties which are related to their own being and existence in order to imprint their voice or biological, historical, linguistic, and cultural concerns in the literary canon. In order to understand such texts, readers should also take into account the historical concerns of the woman author who mostly imagine their implied readers be aware of the woman writer’s conditions as a whole.

Female humour is generally considered to be one of the techniques female authors use in order to have their own voices heard and also to criticise the existing patriarchal tradition. Besides, women’s humour is addressed to a particular group of readers since only some well-informed readers can interpret and decode the strategies women use in their writings in order to neutralise the masculine obstacles. Related to this, Gillooly argues that since “the production and content of the humour are gender-marked,” thus, the readers for such humour are also probably “gender-marked” (Smile xx). Moreover, the relation between the writer of the humour and her/his addressee is a significant issue. The traditional and conventional forms of humour call for an extremely rigid “emotional distance” between the writer and his addressee whom Gillooly calls his “victim” (Smile 12). In contrast, women writers’ humour comforts the “suffering self ... soliciting readerly empathy for her in the process” (Smile 12). Referring to the problem-novels, such as Jane Austen’s, Gillooly states that “Curiously, the narrator’s relation to the heroine in the problem novels is at once less distant and less stable than in the others” (Smile 80). The relation between the heroine and the narrator is, however, of a compromising nature and, thus at some point, the narrator makes some alterations in the relationship. As Gillooly proposes, what has usually been labelled as Jane Austen’s “irony,” severely settles “the quality of all her narrator-heroine relationships” (Smile 80). The narrator sometimes distances herself from her heroine, while at other times intimately connects and wordplays with her.

Pym’s works, as are the case with Austen’s novels, raise a significant question of the prevalent mode – are they mostly ironic or humours? This study considers Pym’s writings as humorous, rather than ironic. Similarly, Jane Austen’s texts are of consideration in terms of the recurrent mistaking women’s humour as irony, and have symptomatic value in this context. As Gillooly points out, theorists of women’s humour suggest that Austen should not be considered as an “ironist” but rather a humourist, because of the “affective closeness she sustains between her narrator and heroine, even when the latter is the object of narrative amusement” (Smile 80). Gillooly, furthermore, asserts that a certain emotional distance that exists between “the ironist and the ironized,” however, can either be “experienced by the reader abstractly (in the disjunction between the ideal and real) or immediately (in the disproportionate knowledge of reader and character).” In contrast, there exists a “necessary emotional distance” in feminine humour. This emotive intimacy inscribed in the “narrator-heroine bond” (Smile 80) ends in Austen’s texts as being instances of female humour rather than irony, as has been considered until now. Accordingly, the woman writer’s bond to the source based on which she constructs her own sense of humour is not authoritative and mastering; rather, it is sympathetic and respectful owing to the particular socio-cultural experiences encountered by women. Gillooly further argues that female humour in this way can work “as a tactic of cultural as well as textual resistance” (Smile xx). This statement shows that female humour is not only a textual device, but also a cultural and ethnical resistance and can benefit from women’s individual lives. In a similar manner to Austen’s, Pym’s works have mostly been considered by scholars and critics as ironical works. However, the present study considers Pym’s writings as humorous, rather than ironic.

1.4. Difference between Irony and Humour

Women writers have not only used humour in their writings, they have reflected on it as well. According to Gillooly, George Eliot, for example, studied the different kinds of humour and the nature of the ludicrous. Eliot differentiates three main groups of humour. The first type, related to the illiterate and uncultivated, is “barbaric” humour. This kind of humour is associated with ludicrous events or situations, and the pleasure is evoked through “its ‘flavor’ in ‘triumphant egoism or intolerance,’ and its origins in ‘the cruel mockery of a savage at the writhings of a suffering enemy.’” This type is totally aggressive in dealing with its victims since its pleasure comes from the farcical deriding of an individual and laughing at its pain in the hands of its victimisers. The second type of humour, “wit” in Eliot’s classification, is based on the mental faculty and its significant features are “ingenuity, condensation, and instantaneousness.” This “wit” is not different from “reasoning raised to a higher power.”

Eliot suggests that “both barbaric humor and ‘wit’ are troped as masculine strategies.” The latter is close to what other theorists refer to as irony. Although it is not as rough and aggressive as the first type, it lacks the shaping element of women’s humour. It solely deals with reason, intellect and wordplay. This type also displays “hostility toward the Other.”

The third type of humour, according to Eliot, is “sympathetic humor,” which is closer to women’s humour. She describes this type as “a refined, ‘higher form’ of humor, which ‘in proportion as it associates itself with the sympathetic emotions,’ with the ‘sympathetic presentation of incongruous elements in human nature and life,’ [and] frequently attains the status of ‘poetry.’” It has much in common with women’s humour in many respects. First of all, it creates a sense of sympathy that accompanies the exchange of discourse caught up in a continuum of further suggestions. Patriarchal wit, by contrast, comes out as a weapon directed against a certain addressee while sympathetic humour, according to Gillooly, “is not simply feminine but preoedipally maternal.” Moreover, Eliot proposes that “in being ‘poetic’ and imaginative, it [sympathetic humor] is ‘of earlier growth than Wit,’ and thus prior to reason and the Law.” As Eliot adds, “‘maternal’ feelings belong solely to women” and woman novelists “have a precious specialty, lying quite apart from masculine aptitudes and experience.” Eliot states that “‘chastened delicate humor’,” in addition to being metaphorically maternal, is “the chief aim and measure of female writing as well” (qtd. in Giloolly, Smile 165-66).

Modern critics have frequently defined and evaluated irony and humour based on a pattern of dual oppositions. For instance, by contrasting their relationship with law, Deleuze argues that “The first way of overturning the law is ironic, where irony appears as an art of principles, of ascent towards the principles and of overturning principles. The second is humour, which is an art of consequences and descents, of suspensions and falls” (qtd. in Colebrook 129). While irony “ascends” the existing context, the “descending” humour functions inside the existing context focusing on the “bodies, particularities, noises and disruptions that are in excess of the system and law of speech” (Colebrook 129).

According to Candace D. Lang’s distinction of irony from humour, which highlights the ideological potential inherent in each, the two linguistically different phenomena have mistakenly been marked as “irony” despite their diametrically different meanings. The function of an ironic text is to present “a preexistent idea or concept like any sincere statement in language” (Lang 5). The purpose of irony is limitation and suppression of meaning addressed to a specific addressee. Humour, by contrast, avoids addressing meaning to a particular addressee by employing linguistic ambiguities and connotative resonances. The ironist is often in distress because of the inadequacy of language for self-expression, while for the humourist language plays a constitutive role for both thought ego. The ironist needs to twist the function of language and his/her aim is the expression of meaning, whereas the humourist needs to exert language elements and his/her purpose is the production of meaning. The ironist has a certain intention or message in advance while the humourist has little idea what will emerge in the process. The humorous text does not express meaning in the “traditional, etymological sense of exteriorizing what was interior to the authorial psyche;” but it brings together linguistic elements and arranges them “into systems offering a variety of potential meanings to be actualized by the reader” (Lang 7). In an ironic text, the intended meaning of the author/intender prevails over the reader/addressee’s. In other words, with an implication that s/he has a complete identity or message, the author tries to control the meaning of the text. But “the author” in the humorous text is of secondary importance. The humourist, unlike the ironist, creates potential meaning(s) to be actualized by “the reader.” For the humourist, the discourse/text is central and the potential meaning(s) are liberated. The liberated humourist text, therefore, contributes to the consolidation of the very presence of the utterer. As Lang argues, “The humourist critic focuses on the functioning of the text at the level of the signifier, rather than seeking to somehow ‘see through’ the language to its referent or authorial source” (7). Consequently, the reader of humorous texts is relatively free to read and interpret such texts. Thus, irony can be interpreted or translated while humour can be commented or rewritten. If a statement can be negated in an ironic statement, then we can achieve a signifier-signified match. In other words, “when the signifier coincides with the signified,” we can assume that “irony becomes serious” (Lang 41-42).

Considering Lang’s discussion, Gillooly argues that Hegelian or romantic irony is “based upon a logic of binary oppositions (like ideal/real, meaning/expression, subject/object, male/female, master/slave)” (“Women” 446-77). Moreover, romantic irony refers to the “notion that the word itself is but an envelope for the idea.” This type of irony functions based on negation and the assertion that there is “a primary and originary intention” behind written words (Lang 2-3), even though these words fail to express it adequately. Thus, it is the inequality “between the idea and the word that constitutes the ‘irony’” (Gillooly, “Women” 477). On the other hand, Socratic irony, or what Lang labels as humour, keeps away from the “simple splitting or duplication” (115) of meaning. This is the most important feature of Hegelian irony which “limit[s] one’s reading to the extraction of a coherent message” (Lang 193). In opposition to irony, which seeks “truth,” humour is understood “only as a divergence from truth, with no subsequent moment of convergence” (Lang 42). Humour disseminates signification through challenging “the traditional concept of meaning as a transcendental signified” (Lang 194). As Colebrook, based on Deleuze’s understanding of the concept, argues:

Humour falls or collapses: ‘down’ from meaning and intentions to the singularities of life that have no order, no high and low, no before and after. Humour can reverse or pervert logic, disrupt moral categories or dissolve the body into parts without any governing intention. Humour is not the reversal of cause and effect but the abandonment of the ‘before and after’ relations – the very line of time – that allow us to think in terms of causes and intentions, of grounds and consequents. (134; emphasis original)

Gillooly similarly argues that humour not only rejects the “‘truth’ of a master discourse or interpretation” (“Women” 477) but also endangers its basis.6 Therefore, in contrast to irony, which is an outcome of binary logic, humour produces “multiple, often conflicting, interpretive possibilities” in language and, consequently, subverts the potency of the prescribed language. Thus seen, while irony functions as “a principle of antithesis, humour operates as a principle of subversion.” Considering the fact that “the rire of irony corresponds to the derire of humor” (Lang 186; emphasis original), it can be argued that the ridiculing and mocking of the official and the law, as well as its “dialectic discourse” (Gillooly, “Women” 477), may function as a technique for domination. The user of irony tends to master the other(s), and since irony operates as a “momentary or sustained recognition of existential dissonance,” it also includes, among others, “sarcasm and satire as well as a host of otherwise unspecified and not necessarily funny incongruities in life and representation” (Smile xxi). Moreover, the most elemental constituent of irony is “The disparity between the idea and the word (or between normative and individual action)” (Smile xxii). Being a masculine trope, “in its comic incarnation, irony presumes not only an alazon but an eiron or figure of disguised authority.” This figure is “an awkward posture for the feminine to maintain in almost any existent culture” (Smile xxii).