The Rhetoric of Women’s Humour in Barbara Pym’s Fiction. Naghmeh Varghaiyan

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ