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Nineteenth-Century American Humor: Easygoing Males, Anxious Ladies, and Penelope Lapham

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Alfred Habegger
Alfred Habegger*
Affiliation:
University of Kansas, Lawrence
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Abstract

The basis of much nineteenth-century American humor was a certain male mask—the easygoing, countrified sloven. Women played a complementary role in society and fiction—the anxious manager of house and culture. Thus, Howells' and Mark Twain's couples often consist of a relaxed, humorous man and a tense woman. There was a tradition of female humor, however, best represented by Kate Sanborn's The Wit of Women (1886). The humor in this anthology has a genteel aplomb quite different from the male mask's incompetence. A few women writers, notably Marietta Holley, invented vernacular female humorists, but Howells created the finest of all in The Rise of Silas Lapham. Penelope, the first humorous female lead in an American novel, is a male impersonator, and her droll, unfashionable sensibility proves more attractive than the “gilded” femininity of beautiful, vapid Irene. Yet Howells rejects Penelope in the end.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 91 , Issue 5 , October 1976 , pp. 884 - 899
Copyright
Copyright © 1976 by The Modern Language Association of America

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References

Notes

1 Jones W. A., “The Ladies' Library,” Graham's Magazine, 21 (1842), 333.

2 Sanborn Kate, The Wit of Women (New York: Funk, 1886), pp. 205–06. Hereafter cited as Wit.

3 Boynton H. W., “American Humor,” Atlantic Monthly, 90 (1902), 418.

4 For the major surveys, see Rourke Constance, American Humor (Garden City: Doubleday, 1955); Walter Blair, Native American Humor (San Francisco: Chandler, 1960); Jessie Bier, The Rise and Fall of American Humor (New York : Holt, 1968); Louis D. Rubin, Jr., ed., The Comic Imagination in American Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press. 1973).

5 Blair See Walter, Horse Sense in American Humor (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1942), p. 231.

6 Cox Samuel S., Why We Laugh (New York: Harper, 1876). Like many later writers, Cox took it for granted that American humor was masculine. In arguing that' a shallow mind cannot be humorous, he wrote: “Genuine humor is founded on a deep, thoughtful, and manly character” (p. 17).

7 Peck George W., Peck's Bad Boy and His Pa (Chicago: Belford, 1883), p. 14. Cox, pp. 60-61, saw the practical joker as a version of the cunning Yankee trader.

8 Innocents Abroad (New York: Harper, 1907), i, 251.

9 The Shadow of a Dream and An Imperative Duty, ed. Martha Banta (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 3, 18.

10 Years of My Youth (New York: Harper. 1916). p. 181. See also Pattee Fred Lewis, The Feminine Fifties (New York: Appleton-Century, 1940).

11 [Charles Henry Smith], Bill Arp: So Called (New York : Metropolitan Record Office, 1866), p. 6.

12 [Charles Farrar Browne], Artemus Ward: His Book (New York: Carleton, 1862), p. 175. Ward is seen as the average American man by Stanley T. Williams, “Artemus the Delicious,” Virginia Quarterly Review, 28 (1952), 214-27, and by James C. Austin, Artemus Ward (New York: Twayne, 1964).

13 “Recollections of Nasby,” Indianapolis News, 13 March 1888, as cited by John M. Harrison, The Man Who Made Nasby, David Ross Locke (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1969), p. 98.

14 [David Ross Locke], The Struggles (Social, Financial and Political)of Petroleum V. Nasby (Boston: Richardson, 1872), p. 34.

15 “Editor's Easy Chair,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 42 (1871), 614, 615. On Rip Van Winkle, see Fiedler Leslie, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Criterion, 1960), pp. 332–36. Jefferson's Rip Van Winkle opened in 1865, when the literary comedians were at their crest.

16 See Kenneth Lynn's important book, Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor (Boston: Little, 1959), based on the contrast between the Self-Controlled Gentleman and the Clown: “The conflict between two radically different styles is the enduring drama of American humor, representing ... a conflict between two utterly different concepts of what American life should be” (p. 168). For other versions of this general view, see James M. Cox, “Humor of the Old Southwest,” and Louis D. Rubin, Jr., “‘The Barber Kept on Shaving’: The Two Perspectives of American Humor,” in Comic Imagination. Cox: “First of all, there is Longstreet's own path, following the border between refinement and vernacular” (p. 107). Rubin: “Every one of Mark Twain's major books is based squarely on the clash of cultural modes” (p. 390).

17 Cited from Falk Robert, The Victorian Mode in American Fiction: 1865-1885 (East Lansing: Michigan State Univ. Press, 1965), p. 24.

18 Bostonians (London: Macmillan, 1886), p. 18.

19 The Portrait of a Lady (Boston: Houghton, 1882), p. 79.

20 “Types of American Women,” in Literary and Social Silhouettes (New York: Harper, 1894), p. 14.

21 Thornwell Emily, The Lady's Guide to Perfect Gentility (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1973),n.pag. Both the 1856 and 1884 editions carried this warning.

22 From Ethel Parton's unpublished biography as cited by Ann D. Wood, “The ‘Scribbling Women’ and Fanny Fern: Why Women Wrote,” American Quarterly, 23 (1971), 4-5.

23 The Complete Poetical Works of James Whitcomb Riley (New York: Grosset, 1937), p. 371.

24 The Kentons, ed. George C. Carrington, Jr. and Ronald Gottesman (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1971), p. 222.

25 Sketches New and Old (New York: Harper, 1907), p. 109. In a review, Howells called the sketch “a bit of genre romance which must read like an abuse of confidence to every husband and father” (My Mark Twain: Reminiscences and Criticisms, ed. Marilyn Austin Baldwin, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1967, p. 103).

26 Mark Twain wrote two other McWilliams sketches, “Mrs. McWilliams and the Lightning” and “The McWilliamses and the Burglar Alarm.” They were to some degree autobiographical, just as Basil and Isabel March were based on Howells' own wedded life, See Mark Twain–Howells Letters, ed. Henry Nash Smith and William M. Gibson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. 1960), i, 277, 305–06. After reading Their Silver Wedding Journey, Mark Twain decided that Isabel March was a portrait of his own wife. Both men often felt oppressed by the strictness and irrationality of their wives and struck back with irony: see Letters, i, 63-64, 220-21, 360, 449, 452; ii, 658-59.

27 The Widow Bedott Papers (New York: Derby, 1856), pp. xiii-xiv.

28 See Harrison, pp. 240–43.

29 Odell George C. D., Annals of the New York Stage (New York : Columbia Univ. Press, 1940), xii, 41. Charles B. Bishop also played Bedott.

30 Annals, xi, 42. For a photograph of Burgess as Widow Bedott, see Annals, xi, 40. See also Clapp John Bouvé and Edgett Edwin Francis, Players of the Present (New York: Dunlap Society, 1899), pp. 46–47. In the Dictionary of American Biography (New York: Scribners, 1929), iii, 276, Edgett wrote that Burgess “burlesqued rather than interpreted the eccentric personalities of elderly women.”

31 See Mark Twain—Howells Letters, i, 398-99. Howells may or may not have had a hand in placing his own work in the Library of Humor (see Letters, ii, 549). As for the arrangement, “when I had done my work according to tradition, with authors, times, and topics carefully studied in due sequence, [Mark Twain] tore it all apart” (My Mark Twain: Reminiscences and Criticisms, p. 17). Possibly, Howells had placed the sketch by Neal and the excerpt from Their Wedding Journey side by side under the “topic” of petticoat tyranny, and Mark Twain then interposed the episode from Tom Sawyer. Howells expressed a low view of Neal in “Editor's Easy Chair,” Harper's Monthly Magazine, 123 (1911), 310.

32 Mark Twain's Library of Humor (New York: Webster, 1888), pp. 124–26.

33 These episodes appear in the Library of Humor under the titles “At Niagara” and “Their First Quarrel.”

34 Interview by Johnson Clifton. Cited from American Literary Realism, 6 (1973), 327. For a useful survey of Howells' irrational women, see John Roland Dove, “Howells' Irrational Heroines,” University of Texas Studies in English, 35 (1956), 64-80.

35 Troupers of the Gold Coast, or the Rise of Lotta Crahtree (New York: Harcourt, 1928), p. 158.

36 Julia Newberry's Diary, ed. Margaret Ayer Barnes and Janet Ayer Fairbank (New York: Norton, 1933), p. xi.

37 “German and American Women,” in Literary and Social Silhouettes, pp. 32–33.

38 At her death in 1917, Sanborn was spoken of in several press notices “as the leading woman humorist of America” (Edwin W. Sanborn, Kate Sanborn/July 11, 1839/July 9, 1917, Boston: McGrath-Sherrill, 1918, p. 63). She succeeded Mark Twain in the “Club Room” department at the Galaxy. Her favorite “funny man” was Charles H. Webb. She was a friend of Frances E. Willard, though without taking the pledge. The Wit of Women is weaker than, and not nearly so amusing as, her later books. Thirty years after compiling it, she wrote: “If a masculine book reviewer ever alluded to the book, it was with a sneer” (Memories ami Anecdotes, New York: Putnam, 1915, p. 164).

39 Memories and Anecdotes, p. 164.

40 “Whenever in the pages of our brilliant contemporary Life [a humor magazine], it becomes necessary to ‘sit upon’ a dude, to ‘take down’ an Anglo-maniac, or to snub the British aristocracy, a young woman is usually chosen to demolish the victim with her wit” (Alice Wellington Rollins, “Woman's Sense of Humor,” The Critic and Good Literature, NS 1, 1884, 146; italics mine).

41 Doctor Zay (Boston: Houghton, 1882). According to Christine Stansell, “Elizabeth Stuart Phelps: A Study in Female Rebellion,” Massachusetts Review, 13 (1972), 239-56, the common pattern of Phelps's novels is that a superwoman figure tries to overthrow the male autocracy that deforms women's lives. See also Mary Angela Bennett, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1939).

42 Josiah Allen's Wife as a P.A. and P.I.: Samantha at the Centennial (Hartford: American Publishing, 1877), p. 71. P.A. and P.I. stand for Promiscuous Advisor and Private Investigator.

43 Annie Kilburn (New York: Harper, 1889), p. 49.

44 “Editor's Study,” Harper's Monthly, 79 (1889), 318.

45 “Editor's Study,” Harper's Monthly, 78 (1889), 492.

46 The Rise of Silas Lapham, ed. Walter J. Meserve and David J. Nordloh (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1971), p. 88. Subsequent references are to this edition.

47 See, e.g., Cunliffe Marcus, The Literature of the United States (Baltimore: Penguin, 1961), p. 198: Howells “contrive[s] a subplot that seems a little implausible.”

48 James's praise (“Everything in Silas Lapham is superior—nothing more so than the whole picture of casual, female youth and contemporaneous ‘engaging’ one's self”) points to Penelope more than to anyone else. Cited from “William Dean Howells,” Harper's Weekly, 30 (1886), 394. In Cottage-Hearth: A Magazine of Home Arts and Home Culture, 11 (1885), 326, the reviewer considered Penelope “natural to the least detail.” The only review that praised Penelope's humor was in the British Saturday Review, 60 (1885), 517.

49 Atlantic Monthly, 53 (1884), 399.

50 Critic, NS 1 (29 March 1884), 145. Rollins thought highly of Howells' realism; see her “Effie's Realistic Novel” in Benardete Jane, ed., American Realism (New York: Putnam, 1972).

51 “The Humor of Women,” Critic, NS 1 (28 June 1884), 302.

52 According to Walter J. Meserve in his introduction to Silas Lapham, p. xvi, Howells began in July.

53 The Nation's reviewer shared Mrs. Corey's distaste: “The most unpleasant and the most unnatural girl is Penelope Lapham . . . , ironically snubbing her relations, or urging her sister to inextinguishable laughter by mimicking their father” (41. 1885, 348). The Critic's reviewer found it “beyond belief” that Tom should love “the half-cultivated” Penelope (NS 4, 1885, 122).

54 Lapham “knew who the Coreys were . . . and . . . had long hated their name as a symbol of splendor which, unless he should live to see at least three generations of his descendants gilded with mineral paint, he could not hope to realize in his own” (p. 92; italics mine).

55 On women and self-sacrifice, see Cady Edwin H., The Road to Realism: The Early Years, 1837-1885, of William Dean Howells (Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1956), pp. 232–34. For general discussions of Howells' women, see Edward Wagenknecht, William Dean Howells: The Friendly Eye (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 156-70, and William Wasserstrom, Heiress of All the Ages (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1959).

56 William Dean Howells: An American Life (New York: Harcourt, 1971). Cady's earlier biography also gives strong emphasis to Howells' neuroticism, and Road to Realism, pp. 243–45, remains the most convincing explanation of what Howells may have meant when he said that “the bottom dropped out” as he worked on Silas Lapham. For other important studies of the divided self in Howells, see Kermit Vanderbilt, “The Rise of Silas Lapham (1884-1885): The Crisis of Wealth in the Gilded Age,” in The Achievement of William Dean Howells (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1968), and Lewis P. Simpson, “The Treason of William Dean Howells,” in The Man of Letters in New England and the South: Essays on the History of the Literary Vocation in America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1973).

57 “There was a moment, baleful or hopeful as the reader may decide, when ... it appeared as if we almost expected to be saved by humor” (Howells, “Editor's Easy Chair,” Harper's Magazine, 123, 1911, 311).