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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, СКАЧАТЬ