A Republic of Laughter: Marietta Holley and the Production of Women’s Public Humour in the Late-Nineteenth-Century United States
1In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Marietta Holley enjoyed massive success as one of the most popular American humourists. Known as “the female Mark Twain” (Curry xiii). Holley blended dialect and regional humour into a new, democratic and transformative genre that challenged conventional representations of women’s emotional life and their relation to public and political spaces. Although Holley is often criticized for profiting from damaging gender stereotypes – or alternatively praised for combating these stereotypes through reversal – her engagement with such forms of representation in fact marks her participation in a democratic, popular discourse that articulated affective practice to performative participation in a nation perceived as a massive public fractured by gender. Stereotypes were, in this often misunderstood genre, instruments for imagining gender in relation to contested, emerging forms of identity that situated democratic subjectivities in relation to the nation. Holley’s lucrative and popular writing sought to fashion a place for women in the forms of emotional and political life that were key to the forms of national and political life that were becoming crucial to the nation in the nineteenth century.
2 In this paper, I will define the new genre of humour writing Holley helped to fashion, and situate it in relation to political and social notions of the public that were of key interest to humour writers in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century U.S. humour industry. Holley’s most popular books were written in the voice of Samantha, who often identified herself ironically as “Josiah Allen’s Wife.” The humor of such identification was two-fold: Holley was saying that such humility on the part of women writing in the public sphere was hopelessly old-fashioned, and was also pointing to the ridiculous nature of abstract hierarchical gender distinctions (since Josiah was much smaller, weaker, and ignorant than Samantha). Such ironic humility also contrasted with Samantha’s very modern mobility: many of her books were written about her travels to fairs and events of national significance held across the country. Novels such as Samantha at the World’s Fair, Samantha Rastles the Woman Questions, and Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition sutured popular events and popular stereotypes to expression and mobility, marking new possibilities for women, emotionally and politically, in a historical moment characterized by radical transformations in democratic government and democratic subjectivity. This moment, however, was also characterized by radical contradictions that always mark transformation, in modernity, as a process of conflict rather than consensus. For instance, though Holley’s fictional character traveled extensively, Holley herself rarely left her home, and almost never visited the fairs and expositions she described. Moreover, her status as “the female Mark Twain” indexes the overdetermined position of women writers at the turn of the century; always the subordinate, “female” equivalent of another writer, women humorists received praise and success, but were still positioned unequally in a public space fractured by gender.
Marietta Holley and Women’s Public Humour
3Women’s humour writing in the late-nineteenth-century United States was political in multiple ways, each characterized by struggles articulated to women’s prescribed place in hierarchies linked to gender and capital. Implicitly, women’s writing itself was a threat to these hierarchies that worked to establish a position of dominance for men in relation to forms of economic, social, intellectual, and political power. Specifically, women’s humour writing worked to situate women as contributors to forms of power that were newly forming with the emergence of mass culture.
4What is often forgotten in accounts of women’s humour writing at the time is the implicit struggle for power (inherent in such publishing) within the expansion of the humour industry, which, like other cultural industries, was expanding as mass culture took shape. Humour writing for profit in the United States was always an activity with a double significance; it functioned as an effort to secure capital and as an effort to direct one dimension of a public discourse working through the contradictions of nineteenth-century democratic government.[1]One might add a third dimension to humour’s significance at the time, since it can also function as what Alenka Zupancic calls “an internal condition of all ideology” (4). Women humour writers challenged boundaries established by patriarchal interests, and inevitably brought to light deep contradictions between patriarchy and democracy. Consequently, women’s humour writing, which was always in its own specific way liminal, almost always took up political issues explicitly, such as suffrage and labour, operating as it did in a very different context from men’s humour writing, which was not under the same burden to justify itself and to explain its own contradictions.
5Holley’s humour writing needs to be understood, then, in a specific historical context that transformed even the most light-hearted writing into a charged confrontation with powerful social and political forces. The genre that she invented itself can only be understood in such terms. What appears strange to us about the genre, when we read it today, marks how women’s place in the humour industry, and in political culture, has changed; and what appears familiar marks what has remained durable.