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

Women have been considered as being humourless over centuries, and their comedic and humorous writings have been ignored or misunderstood as serious works since they differed from the established conventions of comic literature. However, a more recent view of women’s writing proposes that, in Showalter’s words: “Women writing are not […] inside and outside of the male tradition; they are inside two traditions simultaneously” (202; emphasis original). Women’s writing is a “double-voiced discourse” (204) containing the inscriptions of both the dominant male culture and the oppressed, muted female one. The two discourses are not segregated but interwoven and simultaneous. In addition to its relation to general culture and literature, women’s literature treats matters relating to women’s lives and experiences. In this respect, women’s humour differs from mainstream humour.

The operation of the two-fold discourse is detectable in the novels treated here. While at the surface level it is the orthodox discourse which controls the narration, at the undercurrent level a resistant or an already oppressed but disrupting discourse lies at the centre of the textual orientation. This disruption is achieved mainly by humour in the selected narratives, in which the humorous voice largely operates as a strategy to resist and survive within the general culture. Therefore, it is arguable that Pym’s narratives contribute to the construction of women’s culture through a (re)description of conventionalised issues from the female perspective.

Pym’s humorous style seems to spring from her character. Her sense of humour would attract everybody during her lifetime. One person who in particular recognised Pym’s sense of humour was Robert Liddell. He appreciates Pym’s “original and quaint sense of humour – which she freely employed against herself. [...] Like myself” (qtd. in Long 5). Pym’s self-irony and her self-effacing humour primarily originated from her experiences in life and her temper. Her artistic vision involves creating a humorous situation out of tragic circumstances and distressing conditions. As Ackley rightly points out, “Pym implies that seeing the comic in things helps keep a balanced perspective on the sad and indefinite” (12). Pym was able to deal with “her characters and their experiences with humour and detachment” irrespective of “how serious her subject matter [was] – with illness, aging, decay, and death” (Ackley 3). In Pym’s comedy, Long finds “a special and distinctive charm.” At the same time, he thinks that Pym’s comedy includes a certain kind of sorrow. For example, most of her characters seek satisfaction in relationships that, “elusively, are only just out of reach of realization” (24).

Pym’s effective use of humour has been compared to Jane Austen’s, although Pym was embarrassed by such a tribute given to her. Ackley holds that “Pym’s style reminds one of Austen’s command of the humorous scene and her detached observations” (12). Pym’s central characters also portray her own “witty and wry sense of humour” (Ackley 21). Pym’s genuine talent and her skill lie in detecting humour in relation to “just about every character and event” (Ackley 16). Her concern for the affairs of the “domestic life such as food and clothing” is coherent with her belief “in the importance of small details” (16). For instance, the descriptions of preparing food, eating, and drinking are represented as having a significant role in the construction of Pym’s narratives. They also have a huge impact on the lives of the involved characters. Likewise, details of the characters’ clothing are employed for a humorous narrative. “Pym,” according to Cooley, “learned to combine humour with a delight in ordinary experience in order to rise up from the black depths to the saving surface of existence. She thus personified the very spirit of comedy by laughing away her sorrows” (Comic 6). Ackley finds Pym’s manner of handling misfortunate and pitiful conditions are “gentle, subtle and understated, seldom acrylic” (20).

Spinsters are considered to be Pym’s most mirthful and comic characters. However, avoiding stereotypes, she does not use her humour to humiliate. There are many reasons why Pym selected spinsters as her main characters. Having an undefined role in society, unmarried women are able to turn their hardships into humour since they are capable of creating satisfaction “despite unrequited love, solitude, and tedious work” (Cooley 4). Rather than denigrating her spinster characters, Pym uses her humour to sympathetically take a stand for victimised women in an oppressing patriarchal culture. The target of his kind of humour is the prevailing authoritarian system, not its victims. Pym’s ridicule extends beyond the individual level; by deriding male characters, she also criticises the dominant culture which creates hypocritical, absurd individuals.

Despite recognition of the comic as “the shaping spirit” (Long 3) of Pym’s work, Cooley’s comprehensive study of her comedy and her comic vision, for instance, is limited to the textual analysis of ironical humour. Cooley does not establish a particular theoretical basis. As Wyatt-Brown proposes, it is time to “examine the unexpected subsoil from which Pym’s comedy emerged” (xiii).

Pym’s humour reflects the socio-cultural and historical circumstances of 1950s England. In her exploration of this relationship, Orna Raz holds that Pym “limits her criticism to what she knows and often likes best” (6). Raz’s claim arises out of Pym’s own statement: “I suppose I criticize and mock at the clergy and the C. of E. [the Church of England] because I am fond of them” (qtd. in Raz 7). Therefore, the relatively subdued quality of Pym’s criticism is partially due to “the affection she has for her characters and her milieu” (7).

According to Anne M. Wyatt-Brown, there is a close connection between Pym’s life and her fictional works. Conducting a biographical study, she argues that Pym’s novels represent events of her own life: Pym “shared the perspective of marginal women, women of her generation, who, despite education and cultivation, felt they had no recognizable role left in the modern world,” because “social changes had undermined [women’s] inherited status” (2). Pym accompanies this estrangement with “comic good humour.”

Cotsell argues that Pym’s female point of view records and unveils seemingly insignificant matters in the lives of the characters. In agreement with other critics, Cotsell also contends that Pym considers humour to be an essential tactic in order to defy “disappointments” by means of maintaining “a humorous and hopeful engagement with life” (5).

Pym’s novels are measured against the novel of manners. As Annette Weld states, the novel of manners is interwoven with comedy and its roots “lie deeply buried in the comic mode” (8). Pym’s novels appear to be “creating a female, post-war perspective on a world where manners and social behavior are more often bypassed by popular writers in favor of the graphically violent or sexually explicit” (15). It should be noted that Pym’s notion of manners deviates from the traditional nineteenth-century notion. While presenting so-called proper manners, respectability, suitability, and conventionality are criticised and ridiculed as merely the traditional set of rules and norms.

Pym’s female characters mostly seek romance and love. Pym presents either the absence of love or failure in love in all its forms, transforming failure into comedy. In some way, she is able to relieve failure. Diana Benet attests to Pym’s “development from the comic to the tragic and from a feminine to a universal vision” (3). Exploring the function of gender in Pym’s novels, Janice Rossen argues that Pym “was a feminist writer in the 1950s before feminism became fashionable” (2). Laura L. Doan elaborates the role and function of the spinster in society and in Pym’s fiction. She argues that by applying a “dual-voiced narrative” (152), Pym presents two opposing viewpoints in relation to the spinster: “the voice of the patriarchy and the voice challenging that authority” (152). Relying on her own experience as a spinster and by expressing the experiences of being treated in the margins of society, Pym is able to break down the stereotype usually , surrounding the spinster.

According to Ellen M. Tsagaris, Pym through the discourse of trivia effectively undermines the “discourse of the romance novel” (9), stressing the “trivial,” as well as focusing on “the woman’s point of view” (29). As an established expert on Woolf, Pym, and Brook-Rose, Judy Little argues that the voices existent in women’s discourse are “appositional” and related to each other rather than being “oppositional” or subversive (2). In a similar vein, this book tries to show how Pym creates an appositional discourse and produces a significant discourse out of a seemingly insignificant one through what Little refers to as positioning “the discourse of the trivial” within “the ordinary and the everyday” (76).

Chapter 1, The History and Characteristics of Women’s Humour, explores the reasons behind the myth of women’s humourlessness and shows how the presuppositions and prejudgments of the dominant culture have affected women’s manifestation of humour. The humour specific to women is discussed in its deviation from conventional humour. The chapter in the process explores different theories of women’s humour.

Chapter 2 examines the function of humour in STG. The narrative voice in this novel mocks and criticises the hypocrisies and absurdities of respectable community. Belinda Bede’s critique of her community, in a covert and oblique manner, subverts the power of religious authoritarian institutions such as the church and the clergy. The humorous tone and the trivial discourse in the narrative undermine the dominant male discourse. The narrative subverts both the conventional romantic plot and the so-called happy ending by eliminating the possible marriage of the two protagonists at the end of the novel.

Chapter 3 examines EW. The main focus is on the central character Mildred Lathbury’s ironic and comic account of her community and society during post-war England. Being on the verge of spinsterhood, Mildred narrates humorously the conventions, conducts and manners of the people surrounding her. Her paradoxical status, as both an unrelated single woman and an active member of the community, allows her to identify the deficiencies and hypocrisies in the individuals connected to the power structure, such as men in critical positions and clergymen. In a similar way to STG, EW presents spinsters not as sacrificial and selfless women, but independent individuals capable of loving and being loved and who, in fact, detest being regarded as men’s helpmates.

Chapter 4, which examines JP, focuses on the two protagonists’, Jane’s and Prudence’s, lives in their search for false myths and stereotypes. The main sources of humour here are how Jane as the inefficient wife of a clergyman subverts the presuppositions about women as helpmates of the clergy and the mocking of Prudence’s incessant seeking of romance.

This study contends that, unlike conventional humour, Pym’s humour neither humiliates nor ridicules the female characters at its centre; on the contrary, it creates a sympathetic bond between the heroine and the reader, as well as between the female characters themselves through demonstrating their victimisation by patriarchal culture. Pym’s humour hits hard on images and stereotypes such as the spinster and the Byronic hero by undermining the values and presuppositions associated with them. The female characters’ understatement and self-deprecation are not meant to humiliate them; rather, the characters are empowered by positioning themselves in the place of the oppressors, thus preventing further oppression. Pym artfully employs the double-voiced discourse such that it neither threatens nor endangers the dominant order but helps initiate reforms within that order. Pym also reverses the romantic love plot through the discourse of trivia, and by creating the significant out of the insignificant, and making gossip function as a shaping force of the narrative.

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2 Theorists of humour have defined three types of humour on the basis of superiority theories, repression/release theories, and incongruity theories. Superiority theory suggests that laughter is rooted in the glorification of the self, mostly at the expense of others. Thomas Hobbes argued that we laugh at others’ limitations because it makes us feel superior. “Sigmund Freud believed that aggressive and sexual drives, necessary for survival, are repressed in their socially unacceptable form by the ego. “Humor thus provides a socially acceptable and pleasurable form of release of this repressed psychic energy” (Naranjo-Huebl 12). Incongruity theories focus on similarity and dissimilarity and how, in the presence of certain other factors such as surprise or suddenness and a perception of harmlessness, they elicit laughter. “Humor occurs, according to most incongruity theorists, when two distinct logic patterns or models of thought unexpectedly collide” (12).

3 Lord David Cecil praises Pym’s novels as “the finest examples of high comedy to have appeared in England during the past seventy-five years” (qtd. in Long 221).

4 Pym began studying English literature at Oxford in 1931 and graduated in 1934. During World War II, she worked as a censor in the Postal and Telegraph Censorship in Bristol. In 1943 she joined the Wrens (Women’s Royal Naval Service). Later, she worked as an editorial assistant at the International Institute of African Languages and Culture in London where she continued to work until 1974.

5 Pym enjoyed relative popularity afterwards. According to Long, she “reacted to this sudden fame unpretentiously, and her habits of living did not change” (23). Within some years, her health began to deteriorate and she became gravely ill by January 1980. Chemotherapy was unsuccessful and she died on January 11, 1980, and was buried in Finstock.

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