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

ibidem-Press, Stuttgart

For my daughters, Nihal and Nilay, who made me laugh and thus helped me to survive. May the free-spirited women who struggle to survive find similar humour.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Preface by Orna Raz

1 Characteristics of Women’s Humour

1.1 Myth of Women’s Lack of a Sense of Humour

1.2 Undermining Women’s Wit

1.3 Women’s Language and écriture féminine

1.4. Difference between Irony and Humour

1.5 Necessity of a Humour of One’s Own

1.6 Humour: A Female Device?

1.7 Misreading Women’s Humour and Images of Women

1.8 Lack of Ending in the Works of Women Writers

1.9 Differences between Conventional Humour and Women’s Humour

1.10 Women’s Humour and Socio-Cultural Restraints

1.11 Ideology of Domesticity and Domestic Comedy

1.12 Characteristics of Women’s Humour

1.13 Major Areas and Tactics of Female Humour

1.14 Self-Irony

1.15 Women Writers’ Humour in the Nineteenth Century

1.16 Humour as a Device of Sympathy

1.17 Female Humour and Narrative Structure

1.18 Rhetoric of Humour in Pym’s Novels

2 Some Tame Gazelle: Construction of Women’s Veiled Humour

2.1. Role of Rhetorical Strategies in the Construction of Women’s Humour in STG

2.1.1 Subversion of the Romantic Plot and the Discourse of Trivia

2.1.2 Belinda’s Double Text Discourse

2.1.3 Function of Gossip in the Construction of Humorous Narrative

2.1.4 Understatement and Self-Deprecation

2.1.5 Sympathetic Bond between Narrator and Heroine and among Characters

2.2. Function of Themes and Motifs in the Construction of Humorous Plot

2.2.1 Subversion of Female Stereotypes

2.2.2 Subversion of Male Images

2.3 Women’s Humour as Social Critique: Undermining the Institution of Church and Clergymen

3 Excellent Women: Humour of Mildred Regarded as an Excellent Woman

3.1 Rhetorical Strategies in the Construction of Women’s Humour

3.1.1 Understatement and Self-Deprecation

3.1.2 Mildred’s Double-Voiced Discourse

3.2 Themes and Motifs in the Construction of Humorous Plot

3.2.1 Subversion of the Stereotype of Excellent Woman

3.2.2 Subversion of Male Images

4 Jane and Prudence: Unconventional Wife and Satisfied Spinster

4.1 Jane’s Subversion of the Image of Conventional Clergyman’s Wife

4.1.1 Jane’s Creation of a Fantastic World

4.1.2 Jane’s Reversal of the Role of Serving Female

4.1.3 Jane’s and Prudence’s Use of Double-Voiced Discourse

4.2 Subversion of the Image of the Spinster and Prudence’s Creation of a Romantic World

4.3 Subversion of the Male Image by Exposure of Men’s Indolence and Self-Indulgence

Conclusion

Works Cited

Preface by Orna Raz

Ever since the 1950s, when her books first emerged on the literary scene, Barbara Pym has been roundly praised for her brilliant sense of humor. Her original audience appreciated her satirically incisive depictions of everyday life and her many slyly topical references, and contemporary readers continue to enjoy her sparkling wit and gently ironic social critique. Pym’s humor has also been the subject of much praise by other writers: Alexander McCall Smith has maintained that “Excellent Women is one of the 20th century’s most endearing and amusing novels,” while Jilly Cooper discloses that “even an umpteenth reading [of Jane and Prudence] this weekend was punctuated by gasps of joy, laughter and wonder that this lovely book should remain so fresh, funny and true to life.”

While Pym’s wit is generally acknowledged, very little specific research has been conducted about her employment of comic elements as a device. We might surmise that Pym’s humor has often been considered a merely decorative aspect of her novels, rather than an integral aspect of her craft, one that shaped her characterizations and plots, and formed an integral part of her protagonists’ engagements with – and the coping devices for navigating – the world depicted in her novels.

It is thus a particular pleasure to introduce a new book which constitutes a significant contribution to Pym scholarship, one that centers on the subject of humor in her novels. Naghmeh Varghaiyan’s The Rhetoric of Women’s Humour in Barbara Pym’s Fiction is an important and insightful study of three early novels of Barbara Pym: Some Tame Gazelle (1950), Excellent Women (1952) and Jane and Prudence (1953). As Varghaiyan shows, Sevda Caliskan’s claim that traditionally “women and humor [have been regarded as] quite incompatible categories” (49) remains unfortunately relevant to this day. By focusing her investigation on Pym, Varghaiyan makes a convincing case for a specifically female sense of humor, countering the centuries-long tradition of mistakenly regarding such “writings related to comedy and humor […] as serious works since they differed from the established conventions of comic writings.”

Following a comprehensive opening survey of attitudes towards the humorous works produced by female writers, Varghaiyan devotes the rest of her book to Pym’s early novels, of which at least two – Excellent Women and Jane and Prudence – are set in the post war era (the dating of the events in Some Tame Gazelle, which Pym began writing in the 1930s and revised after the second World War, is unclear). While Pym’s female characters are not overtly rebellious, they grow discontent with the patriarchal reality of their day, and their wry and often comic observations come to represent a mode of coping with the world. As Varghaiyan astutely notes, a good sense of humor can be both a matter of personal survival as well as a weapon. But although Pym's female characters turn to humor to cope with various distressing realities of their day – indignities ranging from the mundane (a shared bathroom in Excellent Women) to the existential (the loneliness of a young unmarried woman in Jane and Prudence) – they are never cruel, and their humor is not used to humiliate or belittle fellow human beings. In that regard, Varghaiyan argues, female humor in Pym’s work is different from conventional humor: it allows her heroines to undermine the authoritative power of the dominant male culture around them.

Writing this preface in the summer of 2020 amid the global COVID-19 pandemic affords a fresh and unexpected perspective from which to view Pym’s novels of the 1950s. Rereading Excellent Women, I feel like I better understand the crucial importance of comic moments in ameliorating the various hardships the characters encounter as they navigate their new postwar reality. On social media, members of the “Barbara Pym Fan Club” on Facebook report that her novels are a constant source of consolation. Just the other day, one member shared how rereading Some Tame Gazelle helped her get over her grumpiness about having to postpone her vacation this year, and another reader wrote that he kept returning to her books because they were “wickedly funny.”1

During a recent spate of correspondence with Varghaiyan, in which we checked in on each other during the pandemic, we found ourselves chatting, as usual, about Pym, the reason why we first became friends several years ago. The humorist and academic Regina Barreca claims that humor (or comedy) is the least universal textual territory. But perhaps the case of my friendship with Varghaiyan proves that Pym’s humor transcends “age, race, ethnic background, and class.” After all, Varghaiyan and I are probably as distant a readership as Pym could have ever imagined: two women living in the Middle East: a Muslim and a Jew bound in friendship through our mutual admiration for her novels, with their humorous depictions of wry spinsters and bumbling curates; jumble sales and the ritual and hierarchy of tea pouring. If a stronger argument exists for the importance of appreciating female humor, I am eager to hear it.

Introduction

This book explores the basic characteristics and functions of women’s humour in British novelist Barbara Pym’s Some Tame Gazelle (STG), Excellent Women (EW) and Jane and Prudence (JP). The heroines featured in these novels manage to survive in a patriarchal culture through their personalities and humour. Guided by Pym’s structural and thematic strategies, their subversive humour undermines the authoritative power of the dominating culture. Although this study focuses on subjects, themes, and topics that are relevant to women, Pym did not have an openly feminist agenda. But since, as Michael Cotsell points out, “any study of Pym must keep in mind that its subject is a woman author, exploring one phase of women’s experience” (7), feminist concerns have to be considered in an analysis of her work.

Although theories of humour have undergone fundamental changes, they have mostly remained under the influence of the standards set by the dominant patriarchal perspectives. Accordingly, the classical theory of humour has failed to provide an adequate set of terminology, or effective technical tools with which to analyse the specific sense of humour of female writers.

This study is based on terminologies offered by forerunners of the theory of women’s writing such as Eileen Gillooly, Regina Barreca, and Nancy Walker. Dismissing conventional theories of humour in female writing, this study aims to offer an alternative approach to such humour as instantiated by Pym’s novels.

Barreca highlights the inadequacy of conventional theories of humour in relation to female comical writing. According to her study, comedy has been traditionally defined in these ways: as a “celebration of fertility and regeneration,” as “the vulgar and exaggerated presentation of the familiar,” as “catharsis of desire and frustration,” as a “social safety valve,” as a “carnival,” as an “unconscious, psychological reaction to personal and social instabilities,” and as a “happy ending, joyous celebration, and reestablishment of order” (introduction 8). Such definitions, as Barreca understands, do not exemplify women’s comic writing, which primarily “has to do with power and its systematic misappropriation.” In spite of its undermining power, traditional humour substantiates the dominant cultural values, mostly patriarchal. Judith Curlee also emphasises this point, stating that traditional and conventional comic discourse supports the patriarchal order since it “generally maintains the status quo in society by failing to problematize the kinds of inequity that it often reveals” (35). Thus, the traditional comic discourse has covertly and invariably been in the service of the dominating patriarchal culture.

According to Barreca, numerous events and details in life determine, and have an impact on, “the way we create and respond to” (Untamed 12) the humorous and humour. Thus, the theoretical discussions on humour and comedy, as one of the artistic mediums of humour, had long existed before the commencement of any structural analysis in literary studies. In the canonised sense of the term, humour can be described as something which causes one to smile and/or to laugh. This concept has been a relatively recent phenomenon, although the concept of comedy has always existed in literary texts.2 “Comedy,” according to Alleen and Don Nilsen, “is a term that literary scholars ‘owned’ long before the popular culture gave it today’s more generalized meaning of something that brings smiles and laughter” (246). The definition of the term ‘comedy,’ however, has undergone enormous changes throughout time. For instance, as Alleen and Don Nilsen point out, in medieval times it “was applied to literary works that were not necessarily created for the purpose of arousing laughter, however, it had happier endings and less exalted styles than tragedies.” In the Middle Ages it was categorised into different parts such as “High Comedy (what we now refer to as smart comedy or literary comedy) relied for its humour on wit and sophistication, while low comedy relied on burlesque, crude jokes, and buffoonery” (246). As Barreca highlights, the lack of a universal definition for comedy is due to the fact that “out of all the textual territories explored,” it is “the least universal” (12). The reason is that comedy appears to be fundamentally subjective in nature so that its production as well as its reception is contextually gender-based since “age, race, ethnic background, and class are all significant factors in the production and reception of humor” (Barreca 12).

Theorists and humourists throughout history, however, have only paid attention to men’s humour. This intellectual subordination of women was mostly due to the fact that, as Virginia Woolf states in A Room of One’s Own “nothing could be expected of women intellectually” (55) since numerous intellectuals believed in “the mental, moral and physical inferiority of women” (31). Likewise, as Regina Gagnier suggests, despite the fact that some recent works address the effects of gender on humour, “historically theorists of humour have been men, and they have seldom considered the role of gender in humor” (136). Barreca also asserts that male theorists such as Freud and others before him misinterpreted the specificity of women’s humor as humourlessness: “What early theorists like Freud failed to understand is that women do not lack a sense of humour; they just find different things funny” (qtd. in Bennett 37).

There has been a long-standing claim against feminists’ lack of a sense of humour. As Barreca argues, the belief that women lack a sense of humour is specific to men only, since “women typically have hidden this trait from men in order to appear traditionally ‘feminine.’” Accordingly, she emphasises that “it is no secret to women that women have a sense of humor” (Snow White 103). Thus, a theory of women’s humour is indeed necessary to analyse the true nature of the humour in the works of female writers and to prevent misinterpretations of such texts. As Gail Finney sums up, in addition to Judy Little’s work, the works of Walker, Barreca, Gillooly, Sochen, and Zita Dresner have “effectively exploded the myth that women have no sense of humour” (1).

The comedy present in Pym’s work holds a special place in literature and can be classified as high comedy.3 Mason Cooley names “realism and comedy” amongst the most significant ingredients of her fiction (“Barbara” 384). Her specific type of comedy is mostly marked by indirectness and subtlety. While mainly rendering the lives and traditions of middle-class ordinary people, Pym depicts them and the human condition as “shot through with the antic spirit of comedy” (Cooley “Barbara” 384). By experience, Pym was entirely familiar with the conventions and traditions of the middle classes. Her awareness of the nature of middle-class culture and mentality significantly contributed to her detailed descriptions of middle-class life and people. Moreover, the Pyms were closely associated with the church and the vicarage, or “the vicar and curates” (Long 3).4

Pym’s novels STG, EW, and JP were published in 1950, 1952 and 1953, respectively, by Jonathan Cape. Following the publication of her sixth novel No Fond Return of Love, a prolonged period of negative critical responses to Pym’s novels began with the publication of her novel An Unsuitable Attachment. This period lasted for fourteen years. Despite suffering from depression and a lack of self-assurance, Pym continued writing several novels including an unpublished academic novel, and The Sweet Dove Died. Pym’s unpublished works were only published after Lord David Cecil and Phillip Larkin in the Times Literary Supplement in 1977 “named her one of the nation’s most underrated novelists” (Bentley et al. 286). Since then, various articles, books and dissertations have been written about her novels.5

Published in 1950, STG was Pym’s first novel. Her first experience as a novelist was generally favoured by critics and the critical reviews were mostly approving. Some critics connect this novel with the English sense of humour and traditional comedy. Being narrated from an omniscient point of view, the novel, in Long’s words, is “modestly voiced yet sharply focused” (14). STG is mostly considered as one of the most humorous novels of Pym. According to Long, it comprises Pym’s “characteristic ironies, ambivalences, and sense of the ridiculous,” displaying a humour coloured with “gentle malice” (Long 15). Her wit was considered to be subtle and indirect. Long argues that after STG, Pym began to “focus [on] her comic vision” (8). According to Cooley, the novel helped to establish Pym as a successful writer of comedy whose domain extends from “farce to the rarefied mental acrobatics of high comedy” (“Barbara” 367). Pym’s thoughtful employment of wit, as well as the attentive application of comic tactics and strategies contributes to the reversal and parodying of “literary convention” (“Barbara” 367). Critics generally agree that this novel subverts the romantic plot. Cooley, who studied Pym’s comic vision, suggests that this novel “both celebrates and mocks romantic comedy” (“Barbara” 367). Reversing conventional literary structure and subject matter, Pym’s subtle and gentle humour in STG undermines the long-held values of the prevailing patriarchal culture.

Critics also classify Pym’s second novel EW (1952) as a comic work. Here Pym satirises the figure of spinster and the Church of England (Long 15). According to Long, the critical reviews of this novel were exceedingly favourable as they stressed the novel’s brilliant comedy instead of its partial tone of “isolation and loneliness” (15). Cooley argues that Pym in this work effectively surmounts the hard task of accomplishing “comic effects” without breaking up the “realistic surface” (“Barbara” 367).

The first-person narration recounts the story of Mildred Lathbury, a country clergyman’s daughter, who is living alone in a shabby apartment in London. Mildred “establishes the character type of the ‘excellent woman,’ who is at the center of most of Pym’s fiction” (Cooley, “Barbara” 368). However, Marina Mackay suggests that although Pym appears to deride these excellent women, she is in fact “sympathetic” (161) towards them.

JP, Pym’s third novel chosen for this study, is narrated by an omniscient narrator and is mainly about two friends, Jane and Prudence. The mood and setting of this novel, in Long’s words, is “lighthearted yet extremely knowing, and the institution of marriage is examined from within and without.” The novel subverts the romantic plot and is in stark contrast to the “quest for romantic love” (16). According to Cooley, it is “one of Pym’s most purely funny novels. It handles the theme of appearance and reality, convention and fact, in a light and playful way” (“Barbara” 372). Moreover, it “is more obviously ‘literary’ in its inspiration and more explicitly comic” (370). It covers unexampled subjects such as inefficient wives and clergymen, unemotional mothers and egoist male characters.

Pym wrote a number of novels after JP; some of these were published during her lifetime, others posthumously. The experience of working as an editor in an anthropology institute helped her in shaping the subject matter and the characters of Less Than Angels, published in 1955, which primarily deals with the lives of anthropologists.

According to Cooley, most of Pym’s novels written during this era are “in an entirely modern world, postreligious and fragmented.” Human relations are “noncommittal and in flux” (“Barbara” 372). Although Less Than Angels appears to be much gloomier than Pym’s earlier novels, Long asserts that one reviewer’s note on it – a “humorous treatment of the anthropologists” – reminds us of Austen’s “extracting comedy from the dull or pompous’” (16).

Pym’s next novel, A Glass of Blessings (1958), is extensively praised for its singular and mighty comedy. Cooley considers this novel as “the most elegant and gossamer of Barbara Pym’s comedies” (“Barbara” 378). According to Long, Pym with her “faultlessly wry, deadpan humor that is typical of the understated quality of the work,” created one of the most appreciated comic novels. A Glass of Blessings is generally praised by reviewers, in particular for its “brilliant characterisation” and its “sparkling feminine malice” (Long 17).

Comic vision and techniques are noticeable in Pym’s subsequent novels as well. In her sixth novel, No Fond Return of Love (1961), Pym, applies “the most delicately comic scenes as well as broad comedy” (Long 17). The reviewers’ critique of the novel was also favourable and pointed to Pym’s sharp, tricky and devious wit (17). Pym’s next novel, An Unsuitable Attachment, which was rejected numerous times, was finally published posthumously in 1982. Ackley here finds “serious flaws in unity, focus, and credibility.” For instance, “there are too many characters given equal attention” (7). Pym’s next posthumous novel, The Sweet Dove Died, published in 1987, deals with the subject of homosexuality. In Long’s words, the novel became a “study in feminine wounding and isolation” (20). In An Academic Question, published in 1986, Pym practises a “different style” (Ackley 7). Although she failed, Pym tried to modernise her work. According to Ackley, the novel has “a few purely Pym characters and scenes” (8).

Quartet in Autumn (1977) is Pym’s only Booker Prize finalist novel. It differs considerably from her other works and can be described as a “study in urban isolation” (Long 21). It is much bleaker than her earlier novels and an extreme instance of “dark irony” (Cooley, “Barbara” 380). It is generally considered as a turning point, after which “Pym turned away from comedy to write tragedy or at least a very dark and sad realism” (380). However, as Pym stated in an interview in the BBC program Finding a Voice, it appears that her purpose in writing this novel was to present the novel not as tragic, but “as fundamentally comic” (Cooley, “Barbara” 380). Thus, traces of Pym’s wry style of humour are evident even in this seemingly bleak novel. Humour is a basic narrative element in Pym’s next two novels. A Few Green Leaves (1980) can be regarded as a typical Pym novel containing “small or ordinary lives, love of eccentricity, and attraction to vicars and spinsters” (Long 23). Crampton Hodnet (1985) can also be considered amongst Pym’s most humorous works. As Cooley states, by presenting “British respectability,” an indication of a secure and unchanging society, Pym both “burlesques and glorifies” the small group of common people who engage in daily activities of “love affairs and gossip” free from evils such as “war, disease, ageing, poverty, and more imperious passions” (“Barbara” 364). All in all, humour is a continuing aspect of Pym’s entire canon.