The Modern Feminine in the Medusa Satire of Fanny Fern 3031412761, 9783031412769

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The Modern Feminine in the Medusa Satire of Fanny Fern

James E. Caron

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture

Series Editor Joseph Bristow, Department of English, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture is a monograph series that aims to represent innovative and interdisciplinary research on literary and cultural works that were produced from the time of the Napoleonic Wars to the fin de siècle. Attentive to the historical continuities between ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’, the series features studies that assist in reassessing the meaning of these terms during a century marked by diverse cultural, literary, and political movements. The aim of the series is to look at the increasing influence of different types of historicism on our understanding of literary forms and genres. It reflects a broad shift from critical theory to cultural history that has affected not only the 1800-1900 period but also every field within the discipline of English literature. All titles in the series seek to offer fresh critical perspectives and challenging readings of both canonical and non-canonical writings of this era.

James E. Caron

The Modern Feminine in the Medusa Satire of Fanny Fern

James E. Caron Department of English University of Hawai’i Honolulu, HI, USA

ISSN 2634-6494 ISSN 2634-6508 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture ISBN 978-3-031-41275-2 ISBN 978-3-031-41276-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41276-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: “The Modern Medusa” by Will Caron This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Please say to her [Sara] that my heart is just as warm to her as when she was a bright laughing witch of a half saint half sinner in our school here in Hartford. Harriet Beecher Stowe If she is severe, it is only to rebuke some wrong, and if the dart of satire is thrown, it is merited. There is no malice, but rather justice in her writings. Boston Bee It [ Fern Leaves] has never been excelled as a delightful medley of humorous, plaintive, serious, philosophical, moral, witty, instructive, affectionate household rules and domestic homilies. Philadelphia Saturday Courier

Acknowledgments

This project has been a long time in the works, so I want to thank Judith Lee and Tracy Wuster, who were there at the beginning with their encouragement. More encouragement came from Linda Morris over the years as we shared our mutual enthusiasm for Sara Parton’s achievement as Fanny Fern. I owe a thanks also to Todd Thompson, who helped me retrieve digital copies of the Boston Olive Branch when we were both using the archive of nineteenth-century periodicals at the American Antiquarian Society. Librarians at AAS and the Boston Public Library proved invaluable for hunting down particular items. None of my writing on comic cultural artifacts happens without savvy questions and helpful comments from my wife Michelle, always with her usual good humor. Portions of the book have appeared earlier in different forms: “Gendered Comic Traditions: How Fanny Fern’s Satire Performs Nineteenth-Century Colonial Continuity and Enables Twenty-First Century Neocolonial Hybridity.” Studies in American Humor ser. 4, 7, no. 2 (2021): 277–303; “Comic Belles Lettres and a Literary History of the American Comic Tradition.” Studies in American Humor ser. 3, no. 29 (2014): 13–34.

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Contents

Introduction: Fanny Fern and the Mob of Scribbling Women Scholarship in the Rear-View Mirror The Medusa Satirist and Comic Belles Letters The Agenda

1 3 13 18

Sara Payson Willis Parton’s (Comic) Preacher, Fanny Fern Fanny Fern’s Comic Voices Challenging the Cult Newspaper Sermons and Cheerful Christianity Dark Providence The Scene of Parenting

23 27 30 31 33 39

The Satirist and Her Public Sara’s Comic Instincts Hiding Out in Public Fanny Fern Flirts and Banters with the Public; The Public Flirts and Banters in Return Fanny Fern’s Portrait for the Public

47 51 54

Satirizing Gender Expectations: Fanny Fern as the Impossible Subject Fanny’s Conversation with Social Convention The Impossible Subject Fanny Fern as Voleuse

64 72 79 81 88 99

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CONTENTS

Creating Comic Community: Scathing Epithets, Caricature, and Comic Violence Comic Curses Comic Violence Comic Insults Fanny’s Madcap and Merry Gender-Bending: Women and Femininity Fanny’s Madcap and Merry Gender-Bending: Men and Masculinity Fanny Does Caricature

105 109 110 113 115 118 121

Constructing Fanny Fern as Satirist Fanny Fern’s Self-Portrait (New Woman?) The Critics Sara Parton as Public Woman The Body Medusa Feminine and Proper Masculinity

129 134 138 153 156 161

Fanny Fern’s Significance in the American Comic Tradition Carnivals and Comic Laughter A Fanny Fern Genealogy

165 171 177

Works Cited Primary Contemporary Periodical Items Secondary

185 185 189 195

Index

207

Abbreviations

The following cited periodicals are referenced in the text by the designated initials. Albion BA BE BP BS BW CB CC CG CH CR CRER DD DFP DR ES FDP FL1 FL2 GG

The Albion, A Journal of News, Politics and Literature Boston Daily Atlas Brooklyn Eagle Ballou’s Pictorial Baltimore Sun Bangor Whig Boston Carpet Bag Cayuga (New York) Chief Country Gentleman Cleveland Herald Christian Review Church Review and Ecclesiastical Register Daily Dispatch Detroit Free Press Democratic Review Washington D.C. Daily Evening Star Frederick Douglass’ Paper Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio, first series Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio, second series Geneva (New York) Daily Gazette xi

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ABBREVIATIONS

GJ GLB GM HJ Ind Israel Jeff Knick LJ LLA MF MWT NOP NYEP NYFC NYH NYHM NYLW NYST NYT NYTr OB PeM Pioneer PM SG SLQ TF USR VC

Gallipolis (Ohio) Journal Godey’s Lady’s Book Graham’s Magazine New York Home Journal The Independent The Israelite The (Stroudsburg, PA) Jeffersonian New York Knickerbocker Louisville Journal Littell’s Living Age Michigan Farmer New York Musical World and Times New Orleans Picayune New York Evening Post New York Family Courier New York Herald New York Home Magazine New York Literary World New York Spirit of the Times New York Times New York Tribune Boston Olive Branch Peterson’s Magazine The Pioneer; or, California Monthly Magazine Putnam’s Monthly Scioto (Chillicothe OH) Gazette Southern Literary Quarterly Boston True Flag United States Review Vermont Chronicle

About the Author

James E. Caron is Professor Emeritus, University of Hawai’i at M¯anoa. In addition to publishing many articles on comic writers and comic artifacts, he has authored Satire as the Comic Public Sphere: Postmodern “Truthiness” and Civic Engagement (2021), and Mark Twain, Unsanctified Newspaper Reporter (2008), as well as co-edited essays on Charlie Chaplin in Refocusing Chaplin: A Screen Icon in Critical Contexts (2013).

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Introduction: Fanny Fern and the Mob of Scribbling Women

To read the scholarship on the persona and pen name of Sara Payson Willis Parton, Fanny Fern, is to plunge into the social, political, and economic turmoil of the United States from the 1790s to the 1850s and so confront the contradictions the era produced. Commentary on Parton1 and her persona entails investigation into the economic underpinnings and literary merits of the sentimental novel, which in turn leads straight to what antebellum Americans sometimes called “the woman question.” The phrase might refer to the women’s rights conventions that began at Seneca Falls in 1848, but the cultural context for it was broader than voting and property rights (Banks 1981; Hewitt 2010). This larger context centered on a clash between the gendered behavioral demands in what has been called the “cult of true womanhood” (Welter 1966) or the “woman-belle ideal” (Berg 1978), and the basic demand that the Enlightenment ideal “all men are created equal,” proclaimed in the US Declaration of Independence, should extend to women as well. Underneath this second level lies the most basic question: the nature of woman. Susan Okin (1982) shows that these topics occupied thinkers as early as the seventeenth century when Thomas Hobbes and John Locke argued for the inherent equality of any individual. In contrast, “the idealizing of

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 J. E. Caron, The Modern Feminine in the Medusa Satire of Fanny Fern, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41276-9_1

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the sentimental domestic family … provided a new rationale for the subordination of women. This rationale was clearly entrenched among political theorists by the latter part of the eighteenth century” (Okin, 65). Challenges to this dominant view at the end of the eighteenth century by Mary Wollstonecraft (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792), among others in Britain (Mellor 2013, 26), and in America in the first half of the nineteenth century, notably by Margaret Fuller (“The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men, Woman versus Women,” 1843—revised and expanded under the title Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 1844)— guaranteed ongoing debate. Moreover, controversies about the so-called woman question continued through the entire nineteenth century and beyond (see Banks 1981; Berg 1978; Hewitt 2010; McAlexander 1975; Rosenberg 1975; B. Smith 2010, 724–26; Tumber 2002). In addition, the scholarly debates about popular novels in antebellum America produced by and for women, generally tagged with the rubric sentimental fiction, also enjoyed protracted controversy, with a stark denigration of its cultural value competing with positive views, either wholly celebratory or advancing a more nuanced position admitting deficiencies while insisting on true worth. Crucially, these questions about the nature of women, their capacity for independence, and their political/legal rights found expression in antebellum America through cultural norms about the roles of wife and mother, norms increasingly scrutinized because of the social changes taking place due, in part, to a rising middle class and increasing education for women. For example, agitation for women’s rights during the 1850s changed the way conduct books promulgated the idea of true womanhood: “whereas earlier conduct book writers prescribed woman’s place, … later writers find that their task is to affirm and defend it” (Newton 1994, 79). Among those changes was a developing reading public, one trending female and tied to the efficient production of periodicals and novels. As commerce expanded and capital investment in steam printing presses and railroads increased in the 1840s (Hood 2017, 88), publishing as an industry matured such that a distinctly new literary marketplace came into existence to meet consumer demands that printing and distribution on a mass scale answered (Caron 2008, 208–13; Gilmore 1985; Kelley 1984, 1996; Knight 2021; Laffrado 2009, 61, 62; Loughran 2007; Machor 1992; Zboray 1993; Zboray and Zboray 1996; see S. Smith 2017 and Rubin 2003 for overviews, respectively, of early American print culture and print culture scholarship in general).

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That literary marketplace effectively offered equal opportunity to both women and men to succeed in a writing career, and as the 1830s became the 1840s and 1850s, writers such as Lydia Sigourney, Sarah Josepha Hale, Lydia Maria Child, Susan Warner, and E. D. E. N. Southworth took advantage (Coultrap-McQuinn 1990). These authors and others were so popular that Nathaniel Hawthorne railed against the “damn mob of scribbling women” who dominated the literary marketplace, ensuring that “much of [the] fiction of the middle decades of the century was written and read by women and pertained especially to female experience” (Hawthorne 1987, 304; Voloshin 1984, 283). These conditions replicated what had happened in England late in the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century (Mellor 2013, 15–22). The Modern Feminine in the Medusa Satire of Fanny Fern argues that Sara Parton occupies a star-power position within the scribbling mob through the creation of her literary alter ego, Fanny Fern, who should be understood as an example avant la lettre of Hélène Cixous’s (1976) laughing Medusa figure. Parton fashions Fanny Fern to dramatize a woman writing as an anticipatory exploration of écriture féminine, a woman writing satire as the impossible subject within patriarchy, a woman equal to but not identical with a man. Parton’s brand of satire could be called Medusan, and Parton as satirist could be figured as a laughing Gorgon, monstrously disturbing to the patriarchal status quo, both in domestic and in literary terms. Notably, Hawthorne intuited the truth of glossing Fanny Fern’s style with Cixous’s figure when he singled out Parton from the mob by declaring that she “writes as if the devil was in her; and that is the only condition under which a woman ever writes anything worth reading” (Hawthorne 1987, 308).

Scholarship in the Rear-View Mirror A review of scholarship on sentimental fiction (and therefore Parton and Fanny Fern) reveals how exemplary she and her persona are in dramatizing the cultural concerns over the woman question. G. M. Goshgarian (1992) schematizes the controversies within criticism debating the value of sentimental fiction into three camps: “hidebound antifeminists”; “foremothers of the women’s movement”; “neither, or else both” (9–10). Within these camps, criticism in general as well as specifically on the writings signed “Fanny Fern” persistently present a layering of splits, doublings, and contradictions. Goshgarian’s third category launches this

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process, displaying a split within itself that earns the label the “dialectical school of scribbler criticism” (11–12). Other divisions occur on several levels. The authors, dubbed “literary domestics” by Mary Kelley, were emotional “hybrids” (1984, 111), ambivalent about their commercial success; Parton uses multiple voices in constructing Fanny Fern, some mocking gendered expectations, others extolling normative values. The cultural background exhibits the same division, support for and struggle against the dominant view of gendered behavior, the cult of true womanhood, a clash Gregg Camfield (1997) characterizes as “a false belief in influence” versus a “subversion of masculinist politics” (15). Similarly, Stephen Hartnett (2002) argues that Ruth Hall dramatizes “the foundational contradiction of the cheerful brutality of capitalism, which is liberating and oppressive, creative and destructive, progressive and conservative” (11). Finally, commentary on Parton also stages a debate between literary modernism’s high-art point of view—shown in Goshgarian’s following Hawthorne’s (in)famous adjective for women writers of sentimental fiction by tagging them “scribblers”—and a take on popular fiction inflected by feminist and cultural studies. The hidebound antifeminists spoke early but not often in the twentieth century, led by Fred Lewis Pattee’s The Feminine Fifties (1940), seconded by Susan Conrad’s Perish the Thought: Intellectual Women in Romantic America, 1830–1860 (1976) and Ann Douglas’s The Feminization of American Culture (1977, 1998), who all argued for the literary inferiority of sentimental fiction. Notably, the positive side of the debate (literary domestics as proto-feminists) was also initiated early, with Helen Waite Papashvily’s All the Happy Endings: A Study of the Domestic Novel in America, the Women who Wrote It, the Women who Read it in the Nineteenth Century (1956), but it took another thirty years before Jane Tompkins mounted an unabashedly vigorous defense of the literary domestics in Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (1985). Though Tompkins does not discuss Fanny Fern, her challenge to the canon of American literature proved to be a watershed for examining sentimental novels as “agents of cultural formation” (1985, xvii) that offer dramatized ways for readers to respond to social and political issues of the day, addressing a felt need in the reading public. The novels tap that feeling for a mass market consisting mainly of a rising middle class of white women. Moreover, “the popular domestic novel of the nineteenth century represents a monumental effort to reorganize culture

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from a woman’s point of view [and] … is remarkable for its intellectual complexity, ambition, and resourcefulness” (Tompkins 1985, 124). Joyce Warren also makes the same case, and specifically for the cultural value of Fanny Fern, in her introduction to an anthology, “Ruth Hall” and Other Writings (1986), reprinting not just the popular novel but a number of newspaper columns as well. Goshgarian’s third category—the neither/both or what he calls the “dialectical” view of sentimental fiction written by the literary domestics—is underwritten by cultural cross-currents in print culture. For example, Lucy Morrison (2002) has argued “how by offering designs of suitable education and behavior for women, conduct books simultaneously demonstrate methods by which women writers could successfully evade masculine discourse’s limitations from within its boundaries” (203; see also Ashworth 2000; Donawerth 2002; Newton 1994). Alexandria Peary (2012) explains how a popular cookbook functioned as a vehicle for encouraging women to be writers, simultaneously validating a basic private sphere task and a public sphere profession. Contradiction fueling the need for a dialectical approach can be found at other levels. Rosalind Rosenberg (1975) shows that in the scientific community Darwinism could be invoked to support both liberal and conservative views about the nature of women. Barbara Berg (1978) makes a similar point (76ff) while also noting that despite their supposed frailty, American women were lauded as the bulwark against the social chaos engendered by rising industrialization (78ff). Susan Okin (1982) lays out the longstanding supremacy within conservative discourse of the ideology of the sentimental family—by the 1790s that ideology dominated American culture—despite significant pushback functioning as a minority report (McAlexander 1975; Valcourt 1855, 145–46). Cross-currents and contradictions also manifest as ambivalence. The exhaustive investigation by Welter (1966) of the print culture archive from 1820–60—women’s magazines, gift books, religious tracts, sermons, diaries and memoirs, and novels by women—documents the long-lasting strength of the sentimental family trope that promulgated the cult of true womanhood with its standards for gendered behavior (see also Berg 1978). That strength can be measured by the authors’ personal ambivalence about their success. While Nathaniel Hawthorne vents about having to compete in the bourgeoning marketplace with women writers, the women themselves were far from triumphant in their reactions, personal doubts casting deep shadows even in the high noon of

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record sales. Mary Kelley (1984) coined the term “literary domestics” to name the women authors who felt this apparently inherent conflict within the gender standards of antebellum American society. The most intellectual, best educated women of the times were socialized to make a sharp distinction between a woman’s sphere, which was always inside the home with family, and the man’s sphere, which was primarily outside the home in the worlds of business and politics (Newton 1994, 75). Even when a woman became a force in that outside world—for example, Sara Parton, who not only supported herself and two daughters but made a lot of money for publishers, printers, and booksellers—stepping metaphorically outside of the home with her literary activities guaranteed that society would insist she was doing a man’s job. This everywhere implicit assertion of doing a man’s job caused women writers such as Sara Parton to feel very uneasy about their public role in society as writers. To have a public persona was to be mannish within gender socialization of the day, and according to Kelley even a strong woman like Parton felt conflicted about being in the public eye. Despite their earning power, “the literary domestics did not in their own minds become legitimate economic providers or businesspeople. Instead, they remained fundamentally private domestic women” (Kelley 1984, 177). Because a happy woman was “supposed to be the woman who married, had children, managed a household, and was materially supported by her husband” (Kelley 1984, 139), successful women authors remained ambivalent about their economic success. As Ann Wood (1971) says, they wanted to “stay ‘feminine’ and write successful best sellers” at the same time (6). In Mary Kelley’s memorable phrasing, these authors wanted to remain private women even as they occupied prominent space on the public stage of literary success. For the critics examining authors like Sara Parton with a dialectical approach, cultural cross-currents and authors’ ambivalence provided a productive avenue for following Tompkins in her insistence on understanding sentimental fiction’s embeddedness within its historical moment. After Tompkins, the debate about sentimental fiction changed from arguing whether or not such novels as The Wide, Wide World had any literary merit or were merely grab bags of stereotyped characters and clichéd plots to deciding what kind of cultural work they might accomplish. Within that new interpretive framework, authors’ ambivalence plays out in some of the most popular sentimental novels as a contradictory

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plot line, a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too attitude about being an independent woman. Beverly Voloshin examines five best-selling novels—A New England Tale (1822) by Catherine Sedgwick, The Wide, Wide World (1850) by Susan Warner, The Lamplighter (1854) by Maria Susanna Cummins, and Beulah (1859) plus St. Elmo (1867) by Augusta Jane Evans—to make this point, arguing that, “Though the domestic ideal of the period is praised in these novels, the novels also value the opposing ideal of female independence and equality” (1984, 284). Because these novels were both deeply conservative and antithetical to or even subversive of conservative values, they stage a “conflict about woman’s role, … [which] reflects the larger ideological situation of the period” (Voloshin 1984, 283). Suzanne Ashworth says this conflict stages a “quiet radicalism” (2000, 143). In Voloshin’s estimation, this contradictory attitude about the constricting effects of the sentimental family can be called a “moderate and pragmatic feminism” (1984, 301, n. 2) dramatized by heroines’ heterodox behaviors, a conclusion she also attributes to Nina Baym (1978). Baym understands the ambivalent perspective on the ideal family and the ideal woman by the literary domestics as a sensible strategy to elide obliquely the prevailing norms on gendered behavior, a conclusion supported by Susan Harris (1988). Economics motivated many woman writers, and, within conventional gender roles, that impulse was deemed better than deliberately wishing to be successful authors in competition with men. Ambivalence, then, becomes repression. Women repressed that “facet of their literary activity motive … in their readers and in themselves,” as the example of editor and author Sarah Hale suggests, “an astute business woman” (Wood 1971, 9, 10) who nevertheless encouraged women to be domestic, not perform as literary domestics. As Hale says, “It is only on emergencies, in cases where duty demands the sacrifice of female sensitiveness, that a lady of sense and delicacy will come before the public, in a manner to make herself conspicuous” (qtd. in Wood 1971, 10). In practical terms, that view often dictated writing with a pseudonym. Whether using a pseudonym or writing under one’s name, the successful author suffered the joys of publicity, and conventional society judged women having public literary personae as mannish. In response, popular women authors hid in the shadows when possible, away from the reading public’s curious eyes. As Richard Brodhead says, referring to the story of the veiled lady in Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, the use of pseudonyms by many of the literary domestics is “the literary

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equivalent of that highly public erasure of oneself in public” (qtd. in Laffrado 1997, 90). “Such authors, like the Veiled Lady, can then ‘perform’ publicly, while their pseudonyms cover them, allowing them to appear as a public self and yet remain a concealed private self” (Laffrado 1997, 90). Being successful women authors by definition violated the doctrine of separate spheres based on a rigid gender binary, so literary domestics in their ambivalence enacted their own dialectical process of being both private women and public persons. The long-remarked emotional split in the literary domestics, then, mirrors larger cultural concerns, and Parton too exhibits that split, first noted by Ann [Douglas] Wood (1971), who claims that Parton “waged a curious and confused battle in which she often utilized the techniques of this subculture [the sentimental] to fight against it” (17). As Jaime Harker (2001) puts it, “her writings both embody and challenge common understandings of sentimental culture” (52). Harker’s characterization of this dynamic as a difficult challenge for scholars constructing interpretations, however, becomes for Wood the “half-confused, half-deliberate union of the sentimental and the mischievously Satanic [operating as] Fanny Fern’s trademark, … and her earliest work reads like an exercise in artistic schizophrenia” (1971, 18). Lara Cohen echoes Wood’s judgment of a literary split personality, referring to Parton’s “schizophrenic writing style” (2009, 76). While Beverly Voloshin signals a shift to understanding the contradiction between support for and struggle against the ideal family and ideal woman found in sentimental fiction as a dialectical relation, Mary Kelley and Jane Tompkins raise the stakes, insisting on that relation being understood as conscious on the part of the literary domestics. The contradictory presentation of so-called true womanhood within the novels had been noted by Ann Wood (1971) in her first examination of sentimental fiction. Before she panned such fiction in her 1977 book writing as Ann Douglas, she noted what she tagged a schizoid attitude toward gendered norms while declaring that “Authoresses like Sarah Hale and Fanny Forrester presumably unconsciously believed that they could succeed better, be more assertive economically, by hiding behind a conventional ‘feminine’ façade” (Wood 1971, 12, my emphasis). Though Wood believes that Parton’s work, perhaps especially Ruth Hall, should be lauded for its “questioning the validity and value of a genteel tradition,” that is, the tradition of the cult of true womanhood or woman-belle ideal, the rebellion was “only subconsciously planned” (1971, 4, 18). Contra Wood, the position taken

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up by Kelley and Tompkins has proved decisive so that later critics like Laura Laffrado (1997, 2009) echo the assertion of a planned dialectical presentation. Agreeing with Laffrado, Melissa Homestead (2001) replaces a diagnosis of Parton’s literary schizophrenia with a positive claim for a multiplicity of narrative voices. Susan Harris in two essays perhaps best represents the ways criticism on sentimental fiction and Parton have dramatically changed on basic issues since the 1980s; the turn toward faith in the literary domestics’ intentions also turned the negative argument by Pattee and Wood/Douglas on its head: “themes and structures [of sentimental novels] tend to work at cross purposes. Once dismissed as confused, such texts are now described as dialogic” (1991, 46). Harris even puts a positive spin on Wood’s disparaging metaphor of façade and turns it inside out in favor of a pragmatic approach to the literary marketplace: “the excessively ‘feminine’ language used in women’s novels was a façade that helped the authors to write, to produce, without facing the social and psychological consequences of doing so” (1988, 612). Harris agrees with Wood that Fanny Fern questions the validity of the genteel tradition, but she does so “actively” (1988, 613). For Lauren Berlant (1991), the schizoid split in sentimental antebellum fiction critics have been tracing since the 1970s becomes a dialectic between “pure and critical sentimentality” (434) within what she calls the “female culture industry” (432ff). The process displays the “progressively more explicit critiques of the patriarchal public sphere in America” (435) that can take place within sentimental texts by women. In that context, Lara Cohen (2009) reads Parton’s work as an example of critical sentimentality, a call to reconsider the “beliefs that women writers characteristically sought to hold themselves above the fray of print circulation” (80). Berlant’s category of critical sentimentality diminishes emphasis on ambivalence while underscoring agency. Thus one thread of scholarship on Sara Parton in the wake of Berlant’s spotlight on print capitalism details how Parton implicitly places herself as a shrewd entrepreneur into the public realm of publishing, especially in her first novel, Ruth Hall (Dowling 2008, 2009; Easton 1999; J. Harris 2006; Homestead 2001; Temple 2003). Stephen Hartnett (2002) elaborately pursues this line of inquiry, not only placing Parton squarely within the literary marketplace, but also insisting on a dialectical uptake of textual contradictions found in Ruth Hall and so, implicitly, in sentimental fiction as a whole: “Thus while offering one of the

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period’s most devastating critiques of a wide array of injustices, [Parton as Fanny] Fern and [the character Ruth] Hall celebrate the themes of late-Jacksonian America: social mobility, financial ascendency, and the conflation of capitalism and democracy. Ruth Hall is, therefore, an exposé and a celebration of the cheerful brutality of capitalism—‘A bundle of contradictions’ indeed” (1). Given the judgments of scholars such as Baym and Voloshin about the conflict over gender norms that runs through much sentimental fiction, the split between the sentimental and the satiric (“the mischievously Satanic”) found in Parton’s work does not mark her as a cultural outlier or indicate a confused literary effort, but rather, like so many of the literary domestics, suggests an oscillation between supporting and questioning the cult of true womanhood. What Cohen calls a schizophrenic writing style—sentiment on the one hand and satire on the other—taken together reflects the general tension in antebellum American culture about an ideology centering on the sentimental family and women’s role in it. However, if that tension results in a pragmatic feminism, how does that judgment about the literary domestics square with the intense contemporary reaction for and against Parton writing as Fanny Fern, especially in her early newspaper writings? Situating Fanny Fern within the cultural tension generated by challenges to the cult of true womanhood is a central theme of The Modern Feminine in the Medusa Satire of Fanny Fern. Because the voice of Fanny Fern in the newspaper writings sounds so brash, so much more direct than novelistic narrators presenting female protagonists, her brand of pragmatic feminism elicited more extreme reactions. Thus, another theme assesses Parton’s critique of patriarchal norms, that is, how useful is it to claim Parton writes a prototypical écriture féminine? Writing in the midst of second-wave feminism, Wood makes her claim of a split literary personality as a somewhat awkward challenge to what was then the standard twentieth-century critical dismissal of women writers like Parton, initiated by Fred Pattee (1940) and, curiously, later reinforced by Wood herself, writing under the name Ann Douglas when she published The Feminization of American Culture (1977). Wood initially wants the “mischievously Satanic” side of Parton—her satire—to rescue her obvious sentimentality, yet Wood/Douglas apparently remained unsure about the value of the sentimental pieces signed “Fanny Fern,” and so in her book, she shifts to a negative judgment

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about sentimental fiction more in line with earlier critics like Pattee. More contradiction. While Jane Tompkins asserts the value of the cultural work accomplished by sentimental fiction, Mary Kelley’s concept of “literary domesticity” has spawned other formulations when discussing Fanny Fern to capture not just the ambivalence women writers felt about their role as authors, but also the long-recognized divide between sentiment and satire in Parton’s work. Thus Jennifer Larson (2009) claims that women writers like Parton used their work “not to escape domesticity, but to construct what I call a ‘renovated domesticity’ where a re-constituted home really is … a safe refuge” (539). Carole Moses (2008) finds a “domestic transcendentalism” in the Fanny Fern persona, which not only “accounts for her popularity” but also shows how Parton “uses traditional beliefs (the sacredness of motherhood, for example) to uphold a controversial stance (feminism)” (93). Similar to these formulations is Jaime Harker’s (2001) notion of Parton’s “radicalized sentiment,” namely, that “Fanny Fern’s humor, her feminism, and her progressive politics came not in spite of or against her Christianity, but through it” (53) so that Parton’s religious beliefs anchor her rendition of the domestic sphere. These formulations might all fit under Berlant’s binary, “pure and critical sentimentality,” and they all provide valuable insights. I want to extend these efforts to account for the marked tonal divide in Parton’s writings, but from a very different point of view, one arguing that Parton is best approached first as a particular kind of comic writer, that her persona Fanny Fern advocates another kind of domesticity binding together the sentimental with the satiric, a comic domesticity found in the contradiction of a bourgeois carnival. Parton as Fanny Fern projects this bourgeois carnival, dramatizing a strong-minded woman who would not only willingly invoke the limited value of the domestic sphere, but who would also turn around and critique its pious hypocrisies and gender inequalities in a comic mode traditionally understood as masculine—satire—performing as a laughing Medusa figure. This project, then, has as its primary goal an examination of Sara Parton as a comic writer, in particular as a woman writing satire. Only a few scholars have focused on comic elements in the Fanny Fern writings. Elizabethada Wright (2001) shows how Parton can be ambiguous in her comic utterances, which allows for a measure of subversion against norms as well as the foundational demand that language be explicitly meaningful. The approach by Brenda Ellington (2014) implicitly treats Parton as a

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satirist, sorting two newspaper pieces as either Juvenalian or Horatian in their tones: one is a “serious, caustic verbal affront” while the other has wordplay and humor (314). Gregg Camfield (1997) seizes on one end of this dichotomy between playful humor and caustic satire in his examination of Parton as a “sentimental humorist.” “Humor is, to Fanny Fern, a saving attack on seriousness, a defense against outrage and sensitivity” (54). Like Ellington, Camfield links humor with play, but he stresses that it is also relief from stress arising in difficult situations (56). Moreover, humor entails pleasure derived from “potentially disturbing situations” (58), which fits Sigmund Freud’s notion of der humour (1927) perfectly, a strategy of ego defense. Camfield’s project traces Enlightenment ideas about sympathy and amiable laughter to highlight the humorous in Parton’s writings, though he admits that such humor “is not found in the bulk of Fanny Fern’s output; far more common is the satiric note” (56). Julie Wilhelm (2012), while invoking Freud for his concept of witz rather than his concept of humor, also works to establish links between the aesthetics of comic expression and sentimental expression. Wilhelm adds her voice to those who claim a subversiveness in Parton’s writings by glossing Freud’s model of joking economy with George Bataille’s “The Notion of Expenditure,” which “offers an economic model focused on a society’s nonproductive expenditures or losses, rather than its production and useful consumption. This helps to theorize a subversive role for the comic as non-productive expenditure that in this case challenges the order and accepted values of productive society” (203). In short, Fanny Fern playfully mocks patriarchy’s dual sphere ideology. While these discussions of Parton focus on comic technique and style as well as how a particular view of humor operates in her work, The Modern Feminine in the Medusa Satire of Fanny Fern pursues comic expression within Parton’s early newspaper writings as a sustained satiric challenge to patriarchal order and its accepted values. Moreover, even those writings on the sentimental side of the literary ledger can elicit a questioning of normative values. Parton’s critiques, however, swing both ways, that is, her efforts as a woman writing satire function both progressively, as laughter-prompting disturbances implying a need for reform, and conservatively, as sermons exhorting citizens to uphold values already in place. Fanny Fern as satirist, then, represents the ambivalence and contradiction of her cultural moment, dramatizing a dialectic of comic energies to make the reading public laugh at who they are and muse about who they should

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become. This core ambivalence and contradictory stance toward dominant cultural values suggests a trickster quality to Fanny Fern’s personality (Hynes 1993, 34); mythic tricksters “cause laughter [and] profane nearly every central belief, but at the same time they focus attention precisely on the nature of such beliefs” (Hynes and Doty 1993, 2). Perhaps the deepest comic roots for the Fanny Fern persona comes from the way Parton constructs her literary alter ego to resemble aspects of the trickster figure and to invoke the reversible world of carnival.

The Medusa Satirist and Comic Belles Letters Foregrounding the woman question within the emergence of a mature publishing industry provides important context for understanding the popularity and comic artistry of Sara Payson Willis Parton, but another background feature in antebellum American culture is equally crucial: Anglo-American theorizing about comic cultural artifacts and comic laughter. This Anglo-American theorizing operates within what Michel Foucault calls a “discursive formation”—that is, a discursive space in which some pronouncements equate to knowledge and truth for historical actors while other statements are rejected—in this case, what constitutes aesthetically legitimate satire. Comic belles lettres names that aesthetic (Caron 2014, 2021a). This conceptual unity can be made legible and its limits understood by describing the various ways in which constituent elements (énoncés ) relate to one another to establish an “enunciative field,” a set of relationships that “constitutes a system of conceptual formation” (Foucault 1972, 60). Comic belles lettres, then, should be understood as an aesthetic with its own discursive boundaries. Inevitably, efforts during the antebellum period to define the aesthetic created something akin to Foucault’s “regime of truth,” that is, linguistic data and material practices that give rise to rules of exclusion (Foucault 1991; see also Hook 2001, 523, 526ff). These rules involve how to make aesthetic judgments rather than adjust to governmental edicts, though the interplay of power and knowledge shapes both processes. The rules include not only who can speak with authority, but also which claims from within comic belles lettres are understood as true or false, which statements can legitimately be re-cited and re-circulated, which commentary on particular examples and foundational texts carries weight, which authors ought to serve as focal points of coherence, and in what ways

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the author function establishes unity and stability of meaning. How do critics deploy recurring and fundamental concepts such as “humor” or “satire”? Such parameters for a comic belles lettres aesthetic enabled and constrained the appearance of a comic belles lettres gentleman, a generic figure with elaborate laughter-prompting abilities: he could operate as the friendly humorist who indulges (humors) the foibles of others; he could perform as an amiable satirist; he could make an effort to claim benevolence as motive for his comic critique, especially when amiability gave way to harsh ridicule. The key point for Anglo-American theorizing about comic cultural artifacts and comic laughter that resulted in the comic belles lettres aesthetic resides in its promulgation of amiable laughter. Theorizing in England about an amiable laughter begins with Lord Shaftesbury in 1709, supplemented by Francis Hutcheson (1725) and Adam Smith (1759) later in the eighteenth century. The crucial pivot to the idea of an amiable laughter, however, came with pronouncements by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, mostly in The Spectator (1711–1712, 1714) and The Tatler (1709–1711), which proved foundational for establishing comic belles lettres. Addison and Steele insist that the best satire uses a pleasant raillery that originates in a friendly desire to urge people to behave and institutions to perform better than they usually do. The development of the idea of an amiable laughter has a long and complicated history within theory about comic cultural artifacts (Caron 2021b), but when the figure of the particular kind of English gentleman, the comic belles lettres gentleman performing as an amiable satirist, was adapted on the other side of the pond, it inaugurated a genealogy of what Judith Lee (2020) has called a “colonial continuity” for American comic writing, one authorizing US versions of the literary figure, as manifested, for example, by Lewis Gaylord Clark and advocated by George William Curtis (Caron 2021a). One of the more interesting features of this imperial regime of aesthetic truth promoting amiable laughter (and therefore the possibility of an amiable satire) centers on how its parameters feminize the traditional temperament of the satirist understood as aggressive, perhaps caustic, and even possibly misanthropic, but implicitly masculine. The “gentle” in “comic belles lettres gentleman” implies a domestic scene and a genteel posture that insinuates a feminine quality at odds with the stereotypical satirist. This gender dynamic does not replicate the usual scholarly division of satire into Horatian and Juvenalian modes (e.g. Ellington 2014),

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in effect modernizing the production of satire by moving away from its roots in ancient societies unable to imagine women writing satire. I do not mean that Addison and Steele were consciously encouraging women to write satire, nor do I claim that Clark or Curtis did so; rather, the point is that the aesthetic of an amiable satire provided literary conditions that should have encouraged women to write satire. In England, Jane Austen best fits the aesthetic. In the United States, Sara Parton does too. The relevant cache of statements from Addison and Steele that establish the comic belles lettres aesthetic begins with Addison’s idea that comic art forms should be used “to laugh Men out of Vice and Folly” (Spectator #249, 2: 237–240; 238). This corrective function occurs through a process of an audience viewing behavior that should create shame in them if they acted similarly. For Steele, the proper objects of ridicule can be found in people and characters who affect what they lack, “who set up for eminent sufficiency in that way wherein [they are] defective” (Tatler #63, 2: 98–105; 101). Addison insists that even the ridicule of specified individuals, that is, the ridicule dispensed in lampoons, be “tempered with Virtue and Humanity” (Spectator #23, 1: 69–72; 71). Steele insists that a good satirist must have a good-nature to “rail agreeably” and to create “representations [that] bear a pleasantry in them” (Tatler #242, 4: 234–38; 236, 237). Finally, Addison argues that some comic laughter is good-natured and that “we naturally regard Laughter, as what is both in itself amiable and beautiful” (Spectator #249, 2: 237–40; 239). The comic belles lettres aesthetic rests upon an implicit claim in these excerpts from Addison and Steele’s periodical writings: the best satirist ought to deploy satire amiably, as a gentleman (or as a genteel lady). Two first-order pronouncements embed themselves in that foundational claim: the existence of an amiable laughter; the possibility of an amiable satire. Both pronouncements run counter to centuries of theorizing about the nature of laughter and the nature of satire, in which laughter signals diminishing self-control and other negative behaviors while satire is not agreeable or pleasant or sweet in its sarcasm but instead registers as a symbolic caustic and verbal lash applied to the body politic and social. This long-held view about the caustic nature of laughter and satire can be found in scholarship by Lydia Amir (2014), Michael Billig (2005), Stephen Halliwell (2008), Jan Hokenson (2006), and John Morreall (2010). The shift in emphasis from caustic to amiable satire was first outlined by Stuart Tave (1960) for British writers and then followed

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by Gregg Camfield (1997) and Daniel Wickberg (1998) for American writers. That shift is rooted in Enlightenment ideas, especially in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), about human nature and its exceptional capacity for sympathy, enabling the comic belles lettres aesthetic. The representative figure for this aesthetic is the comic belles lettres gentleman. His elaborate comic abilities include a default behavior marking him as a genial humorist, yet he also has a capacity to perform as a satirist with variable degrees of amiable ridicule. In addition, his generally amiable posture does not exclude switching, at exceptional moments, to traditionally aggressive satire when the target warrants the change. The difference in the comic belles lettres aesthetic stems from the fact that its insistence on satirists being pleasant or amiable in their ridicule encourages tonal nuance, as though a given instance of satire could invoke both Horace and Juvenal. In most of his interactions with others, however, the amiable gentleman in a comic mode strives to tolerate—to humor— the eccentricities and foibles of other people and/or characters; that is, he treats them as fellow humorists, in part because he often displays a self-deprecating humor. The paradigmatic literary example of that dynamic can be found with Joseph Addison’s Mr. Spectator and Sir Roger de Coverley, a pairing replicated by Washington Irving’s Geoffrey Crayon and Squire Bracebridge. Like Sterne’s Uncle Toby, the Squire rides a hobbyhorse—the “deplorable decay” of old-time games and festivity—with his “singular” attitude of whim and dignity, an obsession Mr. Crayon does not mock (Sketch Book, 192). Irving’s The Sketch Book (1820) and its follow-up, Bracebridge Hall, or a Medley of Humorists (1822), function as the comic bridge from England to America, establishing the colonial tradition. By the 1850s, a genealogy of comic gentlemen able to behave as both tolerating humorists and (mostly) amiable satirists could be assembled to demonstrate the reach of that tradition. Besides more well-known characters such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Augustine St. Clare in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and, as I have argued elsewhere (Caron 2013), Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Miles Coverdale in The Blithedale Romance (1852), characters from writers famous during the 1850s but now forgotten would also be relevant. Even when the tone of the amiable satirist as character or narrator becomes noticeably harsher, so that foibles are reckoned as venal behaviors or even vices and so satirically chastised rather than humored, the parameters of the comic belles lettres aesthetic insist that the satirist

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adhere to Steele’s dictum: he or she must rail “agreeably” or produce satire with a “sweet sarcasm,” as a review of a contemporary comic series, The Sparrowgrass Papers , puts it (PM, July 1856). The satirist within this aesthetic must, at a minimum, demonstrate an effort to maintain a gentlemanly or ladylike decorum—an effort to remain amiable while nevertheless ridiculing a comic butt. Joyce Warren (1995) finishes a list of qualities that made Parton a rebel against conventions by saying that she created a “discourse that defied the rules of established criticism, did not fit into the established discipline, and was written by someone who was outside the ‘fellowships of discourse’ that establish exclusivity and limitation” (51). The Modern Feminine in the Medusa Satire of Fanny Fern shows that Sara Parton operated doubly outside such fellowships and their regimes of truth: not just outside the old-school tradition about satire that held sway since antiquity but also outside, in some measure, of the relatively new-school tradition of comic belles lettres, which had been developing its own rules of exclusion and legitimacy for over a hundred years when Parton published her first newspaper sketch. Because amiable and domesticated satire seemed like a genre that could be open to genteel women writers, it theoretically encouraged women to take it up. Parton’s experience, however, suggests a mixed reception at best in the literary marketplace. Her Fanny Fern persona did not comfortably fit the modern regime of aesthetic truth about amiable satire, but neither did it simply revert to the old-school version of caustic aggression inevitably marked as masculine. Instead, she created a third version of a satiric persona, one featuring the laugh of the Medusa. The Fanny Fern persona thus anticipates Hélène Cixous’s concept of a voleuse, a female figure based on the two meanings of the French verb voler: to fly and to steal. The voleuse negates (flies past) yet uses patriarchy (steals from its discourse) to revise what it means to be a woman writing satire. Laughter triggers a dislocation of masculine discourse from within via the double meaning of the verb: women can supersede that discourse but also take something from it to make something new, a sublation necessary even if “there’s a risk of identification” (Cixous 1976, 887). From the perspective of the voleuse, Fanny Fern represents a productive clash with patriarchal discourse. She embodies the impossible subject because she flies through and past patriarchal discourse, stealing from satire’s traditional association with masculine aggressiveness. That process

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is made possible, in part, by the comic belles lettres aesthetic due to its privileging of amiable laughter and thus the possibility of an amiable, domesticated satire. Parton as Fanny Fern, therefore, stages both the female equivalent of the comic belles lettres gentleman, the lady in the aesthetic, and something more, the woman satirist able to write as aggressively as any man, an equal but not identical, the Medusa satirist, beautiful and laughing—perhaps the ultimate expression of the contradictions rampant in sentimental fiction. The cultural significance of Parton’s Fanny Fern persona as voleuse and Medusa satirist includes links to the mythic figure of Trickster as a boundary-crosser and comic disruptor of social norms about what constitutes the feminine and the masculine. The persona tells its story within a historical moment fraught with opposition—first-wave feminism challenging patriarchal dicta. Parton’s alter ego mediates that opposition, represents a portal to show that the clash of a feminine pureness claimed by the cult of true womanhood and its woman-belle ideal against the masculine pureness inscribed in patriarchal law and customs obscures a third way. Fanny Fern represents the symbolic play between these opposed attitudes. The third-way structure also manifests in Fanny Fern’s being (at times) neither old-school satirist nor new-school comic belles lettres satirist but instead the Medusa satirist. The voleuse figure achieves the same eliding of binary boundaries by sublating patriarchal discourse: neither destroying that discourse nor creating something absolutely new, but instead establishing a third way that revises gendered expectations.

The Agenda The next chapter—“Sara Payson Willis Parton’s (Comic) Preacher, Fanny Fern”—shows Parton the comic writer playing the role William Thackeray called “the humorist writer [as] the week-day preacher” (1851, 4). As comic preacher, Fanny Fern consistently challenges the cult of true womanhood, with its four cardinal virtues: “piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity” (Welter 1966, 152). Sara Parton challenged that woman-belle ideal in each of these aspects, instead advancing her own ironic, even carnivalesque, version of being domestic and submissive. While her purity might be doubted because she was frank about bodies and sexual desire, she could nevertheless lay claim to being pious—but in her own idiom, supposedly creating “artistic schizophrenia.” This chapter suggests how that metaphor of a split personality might be emended

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by conceptualizing Fanny Fern as a comic preacher operating within a bourgeois carnival, a comic preacher displaying affinities with mythic tricksters. The third chapter, “The Satirist and Her Public,” traces the discursive development within periodical print culture of Fanny Fern as persona and alter ego in the midst of a burgeoning celebrity. Especially at the beginning of her fame, Sara Parton interacted with her readers in what at times goes beyond a dialogue and becomes a flirtation in print, with many paragraphs devoted to creating a literary profile with a comic temperament for the public. This interaction also features a hide-and-seek quality to questions about the person behind the persona in which Parton offers multiple profiles for Fanny Fern. Chapter four, “Satirizing Gender Expectations: Fanny Fern as the Impossible Subject,” examines at length what I take to be the core topic for Parton as satirist: gendered expectations for behavior, which means exploring masculinity as well as femininity, with patriarchy as primary satiric butt. Though this topic includes the more explicitly public side of Fanny Fern, in Parton’s satiric world the private is also the public in the sense that she was “committed to the common good” (Wolosky 2002, 665). Facets of her core topic have public sphere implications despite their inherent private domesticity. Often the satiric treatment of themes and social roles consists of pushback against stereotypes and conventional thinking about gendered behaviors. Chapter five, “Creating Comic Community: Scathing Epithets, Caricature and Comic Violence,” provides a closer look at Parton’s comic style, examining her caustic portraits of types and the way that her penchant for epithets evokes the ritual roots of satire, which includes curses. When Fanny Fern exposes the contradiction of the satirist guised as amiable, she creates laughter against normative views of gender that might be, ironically, called hysterical. That exposure effectively crosses a boundary from amiable to acerbic satirist. Parton thus necessarily re-writes the comic belles lettres lady of the Addisonian stripe into a laughing Medusa, that image summarizing so much of the contemporary criticism of her work. Rather than pretending otherwise, Sara Parton embraces that uptake as Medusa with a satiric style containing the most caustic of comic phrasing, as aggressive as any male author writing satire. For Parton, her satire written with the voice of a comic Gorgon expresses the contradiction of a private woman on a public stage, the liminality of being a lady yet not

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speaking like one. This chapter reinforces the portrait of Fanny Fern as a chronic transgressor of boundaries. Next, “Constructing Fanny Fern as Satirist” explores the utility of Addison and Steele’s definitions and boundaries of an amiable laughter voiced by the generic comic belles lettres gentleman figure for understanding Parton’s construction of her literary persona. Moreover, how useful are the definitions for understanding the way contemporaries constructed Fanny Fern? Because one of the key theoretical moves by Addison prescribes what the satirist’s temperament ought to be in the delivery of the satire, the comic writer in 1850s America operating within the enunciative field of comic belles lettres pays particular attention to the dramatized temperament of his or her satiric persona—as do contemporary critics, as the chapter’s tour through commentary shows. Revealing fervent praise for and strident horror about Fanny Fern’s comic confrontations with patriarchal values, the tour exposes once again the cultural contradictions that surrounded the production and consumption of sentimental fiction. Finally, “Fanny Fern’s Significance in the American Comic Tradition” argues that Parton offers a unique model for antebellum comic writers. Her Fanny Fern persona dramatizes a woman writing satire without using the vernacular, a model that anchors a potential genealogy of women comic writers largely ignored by scholars of American humor. The concept of a bourgeois carnival casts Fanny Fern in the role of the unruly woman who disrupts social norms with excessive laughter, suggesting how Parton can serve as a symbolic origin point for a comic feminism that could include standup comic Kate Clinton’s fumerism concept. Fumerism emphasizes affect and the body, a way to harness satire’s comic anger for a feminist project. Fumerism in turn suggests Peter Sloterdijk’s idea of “satirical resistance [as] uncivil enlightenment” (1987, 102). The two projects are linked by a privileging of body thinking rather than head thinking. Embodiment constitutes the heart of Sloterdijk’s kynicism as well as Cixous’s écriture féminine and both can be linked to fumerism. His figure is Diogenes and hers is Medusa, both meant to profoundly disturb the status quo philosophically (comic idealism as laughing Enlightenment) and socially (bourgeois patriarchy), with the mythic trickster peeking out from behind both. Unlike much of the scholarship on Parton and her persona Fanny Fern that centers on Ruth Hall, this study focuses exclusively on all her initial periodical writings, most of which were collected in two volumes that

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established her fame and fortune even before publishing her first novel. Nor do I examine Parton’s columns for Robert Bonner’s The Ledger (see McMullen 2018). Although I do not engage with criticisms then and now on Parton’s controversial first novel, I do use some contemporary commentary on Ruth Hall as part of reconstructing the print culture portrait of Parton and her alter ego. I also spotlight a number of specific items during her first years as Fanny Fern that were not collected into either of her Fern Leaves series. These uncollected columns often provide examples of Parton’s more daring challenges to the sentimental family ideology and its ideal of true womanhood. The focus on the early newspaper writings highlights the print culture archive of antebellum America. The periodical world of the 1850s stages a most elaborate conversation about writing of all sorts, which is why I have whenever possible quoted contemporary sources. The focus on the early newspaper writing also enforces confronting the apparent schizophrenia in the Fanny Fern persona, her sentimental and satiric selves. That confrontation tests my idea that Parton, through Fanny Fern performing as a comic preacher, advocates a comic domesticity binding together these apparently contradictory elements, a comic domesticity that can be figured with the oxymoron bourgeois carnival. A consideration of all of Parton’s newspaper writings up to the publication of the second volume of Fern Leaves in 1854 as a unit also has the merit of tracing the interaction of Parton with her reading public, which was extraordinary and speaks to the emotional power of the literary domestics writing sentimental fiction, a power that redefined the antebellum literary marketplace. As Joyce Warren (1995) puts it, Fanny Fern spoke to “the consciousness of the common reader [and] the powerless … particularly the women” (54; see also Susan Harris 1988, 1991). While the framework for this study rests on the primary assertion that Parton is a comic writer with a special talent for satire, a chief tactic for elaborating the specifics of that special talent is my showing how Parton, almost instinctively, took advantage of antebellum print culture to insinuate Fanny Fern into the emotional consciousness of her readers, including, for good and for ill, the literary critics who reviewed and commented on her work. More than authors of dramatic or tragic stories, comic writers writing jokes and puns, parodies and mocking burlesques as well as satiric critiques of social norms and personal habits must rely on a sympathetic implied audience to be successful in prompting and

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provoking laughter. Sara Payson Willis Parton memorably forged that connection with her audience from the very beginning of her career as Fanny Fern.

Note 1. Though Sara Willis did not marry James Parton until 1856, I use that last name from her third and longest marriage for convenience to emphasize that “Fanny Fern” is a pen name and persona.

Sara Payson Willis Parton’s (Comic) Preacher, Fanny Fern

Art might be defined as an imaginative reordering of experience. For Sara Payson Willis Parton, life before the invention of her print alter ego, Fanny Fern, furnished enough experience to fuel her early periodical writings, selected and collected in 1853 into Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio and in 1854 into Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio, Second Series. Unhappily, much of that experience was traumatic, starting in 1844, when Sara’s youngest sister, Ellen, dies in February, and her mother dies in March. A year later, her oldest daughter, Mary, dies. Finally, in October 1846, her first husband Charles Eldredge dies of typhoid fever. They had been married nine years and had three children together: Mary, Grace, and Ellen. Four deaths within three years (Walker 1993; Warren 1992). The trauma, however, was not finished. At the urging of her father, Sara in January 1849 marries Samuel Farrington. The marriage is a disaster. A jealous man, Farrington abused Sara mentally. Possibly, there was physical abuse; possibly, any physical love was, at a certain point, coerced, suppositions Joyce Warren makes using Parton’s novel Rose Clark as evidence (1992, 84–85). In January 1851, Sara took the radical step of leaving Farrington; their divorce was final in 1853. Farrington had two daughters of his own, so Sara for two years experienced the role of stepmother. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 J. E. Caron, The Modern Feminine in the Medusa Satire of Fanny Fern, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41276-9_2

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Parton published her first article on June 18, 1851, which meant that for the six months between leaving Farrington and writing professionally with initial success, Sara experienced the widow’s plight of working hard to support herself and her two daughters, yet facing serious privation when her family shunned her and refused to aid her efforts because she had renounced her marriage to Farrington. When Parton as Fanny Fern writes about experiencing the death of loved ones, being a stepmother, having an incompatible or unloving husband, and trying as a forlorn widow to feed herself and her children, she imaginatively reorders, even compulsively re-writes, her experiences. The range of experiences Parton uses for much of her early writing may have been narrow, but it was deeply felt, and Parton’s ability to express in swift and deft strokes the depth of that feeling clearly provides the source of the considerable power in her writing that can still be discerned today. The first medium for Parton’s imaginative rewriting of her own personal traumas was the newspaper column, in which she recast events to meet a specific purpose for her persona Fanny Fern: to play the role of comic preacher. The seismic cultural shift in the antebellum period included a steady drift away from the strict Calvinism of the Puritans, who envisioned a judgmental god, with humanity as sinners in his righteously angry hands, and toward a more sympathetic divinity. Mary Kelley says that Parton’s life “demonstrated that the change [in religious feeling] was more and more in evidence” (1984, 290) as the nineteenth century unfolded. Jaime Harker stresses that Parton “rejected the fearbased theology of her Calvinist upbringing to construct a God of love” (2001, 58), while Gregg Camfield says, “she endorses almost all of the commonplaces of sentimental domesticity and sentimental religion as alternatives to Calvinistic patriarchy” (1997, 50). In Kelley’s analysis, the entire enterprise of writing sentimental novels in effect transmuted them into sermons. “With intent or not, the literary domestics characterized themselves as preachers of the fictional page” (1984, 294). Parton understood her writing in the same way, but with this difference: her talent for satire often gave her sermonizing a laughter-provoking tone. With Fanny Fern playing a preacher’s role, the newspaper column became the pulpit for Parton’s sermonizing. The persona often dispenses advice in an essay format, but more likely she sermonizes by using character portraits and dramatic sketches that at times function as comic parables, laughable counter-examples of how to behave. The emotional coloring for her sermons often derived from those genres accessible in the

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popular culture of the 1850s: fairy-tale fantasy, melodrama, Gothicism, and Romantic sentimentalism (see Reynolds 1988). The emotional shock of deaths in the family as well as deep and easily tapped feelings provided themes developed in Parton’s periodical writings. A favored fantasy of fairy-tale triumph over adversity reimagined her lived reality, while the melodramatic struggle of the world’s good and evil, shaped by parable, opened into her most profound theme, an exploration of Providence. Within the mentalitié of the literary domestics Mary Kelley documents, Parton’s explorations in early periodical writings of multiple topics, but especially religious topics, invite reading them as sermons, but the columns also invite reading Fanny Fern as an example of what William Makepeace Thackeray calls “the week-day preacher.” Parton’s giving voice to a comic, sometimes humorous, sometimes satiric preacher creates the persona of Fanny Fern, for in her newspaper columns she does exactly what Thackeray claims for the humorous writer who operates within the aesthetic of comic belles lettres: her or his tolerant humor can sometimes give way to amiable satire or even caustic satire as long as the motive of benevolence remains: The humourous writer professes to awaken and direct your love, your pity, your kindness—your scorn for untruth, pretension, imposture—your tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the unhappy. To the best of his means and ability he comments on all the ordinary actions and passions of life almost. He takes upon himself to be the week-day preacher, so to speak. (1851, 4)

The sermon format dispenses one part advice and one part admonition, and so it involves judging people’s behaviors using a standard. That same process happens with the satire implied in Thackeray’s definition. Satire can function as sermon with a comic edge of laughing ridicule ground onto it. As Thackeray’s humorous week-day preacher, Parton uses Fanny Fern to awaken and direct the reader’s tenderness and pity as well as scorn, the moral and reforming intent behind the ridicule of satire resembling the admonition of a sermon. The comic preacher’s truth-telling satirizes in order to identify corrupt social practices to make readers aware or to remind them of their existence. The comic preacher advises and admonishes the reader about how to navigate that corrupting environment, which creates what Gale Temple calls a “fraught individualism” (2003, 150).

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Written in the piecemeal format of periodical publication, the individual newspaper items in both series of Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio—Parton’s comments on “the ordinary actions and passions of life”—nevertheless trace two large patterns within what Lauren Berlant calls “the experience of intimate collective identity, a feminine counterpublic sphere whose values remained fundamentally private” (1991, 436). Berlant’s claim for a private sphere that is also a counterpublic sphere points to a structural irony in Parton’s early work, a claim I would modify by arguing that the intimate collective identity consists of a dialectic between a quasi-private sphere and a more deeply private sphere. The quasi-private sphere (the counterpublic) stems from views on marriage and centers on gender roles, particularly Parton’s presentation of woman as author, but also includes some recognition of the struggle for women’s rights, which was an important civic issue in the early 1850s. These are topics that will be explored in some depth later. The wholly private sphere centers on religious piety, a focus for this chapter. On the topics of marriage and gender roles, Fanny Fern consistently challenges the cult of true womanhood and its woman-belle ideal. In Barbara Welter’s classic work documenting the cult, she identifies four cardinal virtues: “piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity” (1966, 152). With her persona Fanny Fern, Sara Parton challenged the popular image of woman in each of these aspects. However, she did so not in a revolutionary manner meant to render these virtues obsolete, but rather by revising them into her own distinctively comic, counterpublic vision. Parton thus advanced her own ironic, even carnivalesque, version of being domestic and submissive. Her purity might be doubted because she was frank about bodies and sexual desire, yet she could lay claim to being pious—but, again, in her own idiom. The result manifests a Fanny Fern persona voicing sentimental themes meant for a privately emotional circulation as well as for launching satiric attacks, “incursions into the patriarchal public sphere” (Berlant 1991, 432). These traversings between public and private spheres create the signature tension in the Fanny Fern writings that in the past was tagged a “schizophrenic writing style” (Cohen 2009, 76) or “artistic schizophrenia” (Wood 1971, 18). Fanny Fern conceptualized as a comic preacher, however, offers a way to emend the metaphor of a split personality. Jaime Harker’s concept of “radicalized sentiment” has a similar intent: “Fanny Fern’s humor, her feminism, and her progressive politics came not in spite of or against her Christianity, but through it” (2001, 53).

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Fanny Fern’s deeply private aspect centers on piety and spirituality, particularly in the context of the family. Like any preacher in midnineteenth-century America, Parton must show her congregation how to be good Christians. Because Parton’s audience was mostly women, the Fanny Fern columns often show concern with how to be a good Christian mother and wife, but the duties of parenting can become the focus when children come into the picture. Broader issues include the importance of charity and the necessity of faith in a hard world. Implicitly, Parton asks the tough question about belief in God’s design—what is the meaning of suffering?—and her answer sounds an ambivalent note and touches on what she calls a “dark Providence,”1 not unlike some of Emily Dickinson’s poems on the subject of God’s will. In what follows, I will first briefly suggest how Parton defies as she revises three of the key qualities of “true womanhood”—submissiveness, purity, and the domestic scene as it implies husbands and wives—before offering a more elaborate examination of piety and the domestic scene as it implies families, especially mothers and children. The deeply private aspect of Fanny Fern emphasizes the extent to which an apparent endorsement of norms about Christian principles becomes an exploration of them that has the potential to turn into critique, a characteristic move for Parton: operating within sentimental ideology yet critiquing it (Berlant 1991; J. Harris 2006; S. Harris 1988; Temple 2003). The examples all come from Parton’s early newspaper work that culminated in her first two collections and solidified her fame and fortune in the antebellum literary marketplace. Above all, Fanny Fern as comic preacher speaks in either admonitory or querulous tones, creating an attitude that confronts and questions. The selections from Parton’s writings sometimes show how the humorist as preacher shades into the wholly earnest preacher or transforms in another direction into the satirist. Fanny Fern demonstrates the way in which critique, comic or not, cuts both ways when it scrutinizes social norms, able to uphold or subvert them.2

Fanny Fern’s Comic Voices Fanny Fern can be read as comically rebellious against the idealism of socalled true womanhood. However, the persona first establishes her comic profile by performing her gendered version of “the comic belles lettres gentleman” (Caron 2014, 2021a), who could operate as the friendly humorist indulging the foibles of others, perform as an amiable satirist, or

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employ harsh ridicule while nevertheless making an effort to claim benevolence as motive for his comic critique. Fanny Fern’s comic preacher performs in these multiple comic registers, encompassing amiable, even sentimental, versions of advice and admonition as well as caustic and satiric versions. Parton’s mix of dramatic sketches and essays evokes Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s efforts in The Spectator to advocate for the existence of amiable laughter, which in turn allowed for the possibility of an amiable satire. The essays written by all three possess a conversational quality, as though a friend or acquaintance were holding forth on a particular topic. Their sketches contain imaginative scenes to dramatize what has been made explicit in their essays. The best known of the dramatic sketches in The Spectator feature Sir Roger de Coverley, mostly by Addison. Parton does not employ the same tactic of following a particular character in a series of sketches. Rather, she explores certain character types and imagines iterations of basic scenarios, such as a death in the family or the triumph of the protagonist after trials and tribulations, or the rigidity of the righteously respectable versus the tolerance of the humane. Like Addison and Steele, Parton sought to address the foibles of everyday manners and correct what she saw as mistaken behaviors, doing so through comic presentations that mark her as Thackeray’s preaching humorist or Addison and Steele’s amiable satirist. Both figures embody Richard Steele’s dicta to “rail agreeably” and to create “representations [that] bear a pleasantry in them” (Tatler no. 242; 236, 237). Certainly, one has a sense of amiability in the preface to Parton’s first collection: “If the reader will imagine me peeping over his shoulder, quite happy should he pay me the impromptu compliment of a smile or a tear, it is possible we may come to a good understanding by the time the book shall have been perused” (FL1, vi). The image of reader and author poised together over the page captures the way in which the comic belles lettres gentleman or lady always stands ready to find a comic comrade. However, if Thackeray’s definition of a humorist—which encompasses “pity [and] tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the unhappy”—opens the door for Parton’s melodramatic and sentimental writings, his insistence that the humorist teaches the reader to “scorn... untruth, pretension, [and] imposture” raises the question of how a comic writer might rail and ridicule while being agreeable if not quite sentimental. In addition, because Parton in the preface to her third collection, Fresh Leaves (1857),

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addresses her reading public as her “parish” (vi), the question of how a comic writer can also be a preacher comes into view. The Fanny Fern persona combines Parton’s biography and the rhetorical voice of an essayist in ways that resemble the Mark Twain persona of Sam Clemens. However, whereas Clemens turned Mark Twain into a semi-fictional character in a playful mixture of reporting and yarning (Caron 2008), Parton voiced her experiences in the format of a newspaper column. That voice quickly becomes oracular, especially for her women readers. Persona operates as more than a mouthpiece; rather, it creates the theatrical mask presented to the public as “Fanny Fern,” with this general feature: Fanny Fern in trickster style personifies overturning and ridiculing norms and stereotypes about gendered behavior, in particular, though other topics are prominent. Trickster’s power comes from “opposing the central social structures that uphold the cultural rules” (Hynes 1993, 24), and yet “in spite of all their disruptive behavior, tricksters are regularly honored as the creators of culture” (Hyde 1998, 8). If Fanny Fern as Trickster does not quite function as culture-bringer, she does operate, more precisely, as culture-reviser, rewriting the rules for how women should behave within the scenario of the sentimental family. Fanny Fern in the role of comic preacher expresses differing levels of scorn, depending on the subject. Working through the Fanny Fern periodical writings, one becomes aware of the spectrum of stylistic tactics Parton employs to mount her critiques, ranging from very little overt comic phrasing to very many overt ridiculing epithets. Parton’s willingness to employ the scorn of ridicule to confront and question norms of behavior and standard ways of thinking threatens the amiability implied in a lady’s or gentleman’s style of satire, but it does not obviate the benevolence that Addison and Steele insist must motivate that scorn, a benevolence that Thackeray endorses in his week-day preacher analogy. In this respect, Fanny Fern might agree with the sentiment of Donald Grant Mitchell’s satiric narrator John Timon in The Lorgnette, a notorious pamphlet series published in 1850: “the matter [in her columns] was not made up out of spitefulness or malice toward any man or woman; on the contrary, [her] feelings are tender toward the men in general,—and women specially” (vol. 1, xii).

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Challenging the Cult Once one acknowledges the range of comic voices that Fanny Fern deploys, the range of critiques against the four pillars of the cult of true womanhood comes into focus. The satire directed at the virtue of submissiveness within the domestic scene involves a strategy of carnival inversion—a woman accepting the stereotype of being the weaker vessel while knowing herself to be in fact the opposite (“The Weaker Vessel,” FL1, 337–38). This strategy leads to advice for how women should assert their will in a marriage: “Ask their [men’s] advice, and they’ll be sure to follow yours. Look one way, and pull another!” (“A Little Bunker Hill,” FL1, 347). Welter tells us that “Submission was perhaps the most feminine virtue expected of women” (1966, 158). Maybe this invocation of a faux submissiveness, therefore, creates Fanny Fern’s biggest comic faux pas against patriarchal expectations for what domesticity should be, a first glimpse of Fanny Fern’s trickster tactics: disguise and masquerade, presenting a fluid self; in effect, she “encrypt[s]” her identity (Hyde 1998, 51). Nevertheless, more comic challenge appears, and on a topic more fraught: the body and desire. Fanny Fern agrees with a headnote that encourages women not to kiss men who use tobacco, except that “the deuce of it is, all the handsome men use it in some shape! and ‘kissing’ is a luxury not to be dispensed with! As to a female kiss, faugh! there’s no effervescence in it!... it’s a miserable substitute!” (OB, July 24, 1852, original emphases). Parton highlights the physical body while forcefully implying a heterosexual woman’s desire. Such sentiments spur an anonymous writer to call Fanny Fern “a dirty blackguard... bawdy scribbler... [and] female nuisance” (BE, September 26, 1855). Lewis Gaylord Clark must have had such columns in mind when he expressed his satisfaction that the first collection of Fern Leaves had omitted the “occasional coarseness” found in the columns as they first appeared to the public (Knick, July 1853). For a Brooklyn Eagle editor, Fanny Fern represents “spasmodic trash” (August 22, 1856). No wonder items such as “Kissing and Tobacco” were not reprinted by Parton. In this, she replicates the ambivalence of the literary domestics, first performing as a laughing Medusa yet bowing to convention by not reprinting this more radical comic critique. Nevertheless, these items suggest the measure of Parton’s willingness to mock normative ideals

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about a wife’s submissive posture within the domestic sphere as well as ideals about a woman’s purity.

Newspaper Sermons and Cheerful Christianity Sara Parton surely used her Fanny Fern persona to scorn what she judged to be pretension and imposture, effectively mocking the tenets of socalled true womanhood. Nevertheless, she also paid some homage to “the core of woman’s virtue, the source of her strength,” religion or piety (Welter 1966, 152). That attitude becomes especially evident in the deeply private side of Fanny Fern’s comic preaching, with its concerns about spirituality and family. A crucial aspect to these private topics appears in Fanny Fern’s argument that cheerfulness should be the mark of a good Christian, developed in “The Stray Sheep” (FL2). The narrative links the idea of a cheerful Christianity to bad parenting as well as religious hypocrisy. Harry rebels against an overly strict religious upbringing. Growing up, he had witnessed Christian hypocrisy personally. The results are disastrous, and Fanny Fern draws this moral from her parable: “Oh Christian parent! be consistent, be judicious, be cheerful. If, as historians inform us, ‘no smile ever played’ on the lips of Jesus of Nazareth, surely no frown marred the beauty of that holy brow. Dear reader, true religion is not gloomy” (FL2, 228, original emphases). In a second column, Fanny Fern argues that the best day should be Sunday, but only if parents do not make it a crushingly solemn one. “Mistaken parent! Relax the over-strained bow—prevent the fearful rebound, and make the Sabbath what God designed it, not a weariness, but the ‘best ’ and happiest day of all the seven” (“Best Things,” FL2, 163, original emphases). Similarly, Fanny Fern counsels humoring an exuberant child (OB, December 20, 1851). In these sketches, Fanny Fern’s sermonizing loses its satiric edge, even any comic tone. Satire functioning as sermon presents clever mixes of earnestness and jesting, so that only a small effort keeps the earnest and loses the jest, as these sketches suggest. “Willie Grey” again relates an instance of the parable of a well-meaning but mistaken parent, but this time with comic scorn. As part of a scathing portrait of Willie Grey’s father, a true son of stereotypical Puritans who was never seen to smile, Fanny Fern elaborates the pinch-faced religiosity against which she campaigns: “Farmer Grey considered it acceptable to the God who painted the rainbow, and expanded the lily, and tinted the rose, to walk the bright earth with his head bowed like a bulrush,

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and his soul clad in sackcloth. No mercy fell from the lips of his imaginary Savior; no compassion breathed in His voice; no love beamed in His eye; His sword of justice was never sheathed” (FL2, 65, original emphasis). Fanny Fern judges Farmer Grey’s creed harshly, finishing with an image worthy of Jonathan Edwards: it was “a creed which would forever close the gate of heaven on every dissenter, or inculcate doctrines, which, if believed, would fill our lunatic asylums with the frantic wailings of despair” (FL2, 67). Here the sermon’s tone veers toward the caustic satire often found in William Thackeray’s work. The scene of such bad parenting can become two snapshots of home with two different fathers—one all business, one with time for the children (“Look on this Picture and then That,” FL1, 16–17)—or essays with more explicit sermonizing, a warning not to make Sabbath so solemnly awful for children that they rebel against its observance when they grow up, for extremes are bad either way (“Observing the Sabbath,” FL1, 210– 13); or a word of advice for parents to allow childhood to be sunny by not cramping an exuberant child, for life is not a “charnel-house.” Moreover, God “the Great Pilot” will watch over the child (“Child Life,” FL1, 240, 242). Nestled in Parton’s championing a cheerful Christianity lies the notion that laughter and being merry contribute to mental health. Parton apparently showed such a disposition at an early age, according to her granddaughter’s memoir and a reminiscence of Harriet Beecher Stowe when Sara attended school at Catherine Beecher’s Hartford Seminary (Kelley 1984, 75, 291), a sunny disposition she carried into her adult life. Two other Fanny Fern parables imply the folklore bromide laugh and grow fat. “Our Nelly” presents the mismatched marriage of a woman with a merry temperament and a man with a severely solemn one, but imagines the grimmest outcome, with sweet and beautiful country girl Nelly married to choleric city boy, Walter May. His “negative abuse” silences her “merry-ringing laugh” (FL2, 216). Though not physical, the abuse nevertheless becomes emotionally deadly. Nelly dies heartbroken, carried away from the country to the city, out of her element, a grim warning for all women and an acerbic indictment of some men. “Sober Husbands” dispenses Fanny Fern’s advice to women in such marriages, a proclamation of the good in good-natured “teasing... that would give his [the husband’s] melancholy blood a good, healthful start” and cause him “to grow amiable” (FL2, 192). The solution to what might be emotionally deadly features the impish Fanny Fern, playful but not humorously

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tolerant of the sober husband type. Rather, Fanny Fern anticipates Henri Bergson’s (1899) credo about the socially corrective music of comic laughter, yet in an amiable key. A cheerful and amiable temperament in a Christian can be logged as Fanny Fern’s primary goal when her role as comic preacher focuses on private family issues, but a related issue featured as a recurring problem in Fanny Fern’s columns are those Christians whose Farmer Grey orthodoxy guarantees nothing about the sincerity of their Christian practice. Several stories in both collections feature ostensibly “good people” who nevertheless refuse to help those in need.3 Fanny Fern warns that, once one is successful, those people will act as though they have always been friends. The life lessons gained: people mostly do not practice charity; the world is a hard place. The catch-phrase trust in Providence too often becomes a dodge to avoid providing help, leading Fanny Fern to ask, “I wonder who but the ‘father of lies’ originated this proverb, ‘Help yourself and then everybody else will help you’” (“A False Proverb,” FL2, 114). Because the stakes here are much higher than a stodgy and grumpy husband, Parton harshly lashes her comic target rather than teases good-naturedly.

Dark Providence Charity is important, but faith is necessary. Parton writes from within an Anglo-American culture saturated with religious piety, signaled by Parton’s apparent allegiance to a faith in a Christian God. Though Fanny Fern projects that allegiance, a close look at a group of items in Parton’s collections reveals a complex attitude about faith in God’s Providence, especially in the age-old question about the moral value of human suffering. Two clearly autobiographical items suggest her ambivalence, one accepting and one implicitly critiquing Providence. “A Page from a Woman’s Heart; or, Female Heroism” tells the tale of a miserly father refusing to help his daughter, Agnes, who has made a bad marriage. The narrative leaves out the reasons for that marriage: the rich father’s avarice becomes the focal point. Agnes acts nobly in her striving to survive. She becomes a literary woman, and Parton in this instance relives her past while proleptically writing drafts of her later, sharply satiric novel Ruth Hall. Agnes has faith in God, despite the current state of affairs, what she calls “God’s dark Providence” (FL1, 306) in a speech declaring her will to overcome her trouble, even refusing the help of her friend, Earnest. Earnest’s rich uncle, however, takes in Agnes and her family and

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declares, to the father’s face, that from now on she will be his daughter: “And may God forgive your avarice” (FL1, 310). Here the resources of another aid the triumph of the struggling literary woman, with the effect of highlighting the father’s avarice, which causes his unnatural behavior and renders him an American Harpagon. The struggles of another widow to support her family do not end as happily. “Thorns for the Rose” features an uncle who has money but who will not help Rose and her family. Instead, he plans to have the daughter raised by her husband’s distant and childless and rich relatives, the Claires. This story also has roots in Parton’s actual experience. Her first husband’s well-to-do mother and father offered to raise Parton’s oldest daughter, Ellen, but only if Sara relinquished her rights as mother. Parton gives us a psychological portrait of a widow’s mourning for a loved husband. Her dilemma: What is best for the daughter? Keep her in poverty or give her up? She gives her up. Mrs. Claire, however, clearly embodies that particular kind of ogre, an evil stepmother. She hides the mother’s letters from the daughter (FL1, 55). The daughter, Kathleen, is miserable. She dies heartbroken because apparently no one loves her, because she believes her mother does not want to see her. As Rose prepares to visit, she hears the news of the daughter’s death, and the shock sends her to an insane asylum. “Thorns for the Rose” exemplifies the way Parton’s early forays into fiction can emphasize Agnes’s dark Providence, with other tales equally bleak. “Dark Days” (FL1) shows the struggles of a widow and her child with a Dickensian pathos. The boy dies and she cannot find steady work. The ending suggests no hope. “Edith May, or the Mistake of a Lifetime” stuffs a life’s tale into a few paragraphs, with a gothic plot featuring emotional wrenching, twisted fortunes, death by heartbreak, madness, and the cruelty of a jealous husband. Shock operates as its major motif. “Thanksgiving Story” portrays a family without a father and no money, the children going to bed hungry. Relatives shun them now that they are poor (FL1). “Summer’s Days or the Young Wife’s Afflictions” dramatizes how quickly a happy life can turn dark and gloomy. The narrative starts selfconsciously as a short story, with blank names standing in for supposedly actual places. The opening scene features a pastoral retreat—a communitas among women and children that registers almost as joyous carnival in its reverse image of business affairs—husbands in the “dusty, heated” city (FL1, 42) toil all day but can come back to the retreat at day’s end

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for rejuvenation. A sense of health and contentment pervades the scene, with “merry” shouts (FL1, 42) and the example of Mrs. –––––, (Mary) “the embodiment of mischief, and fun, and kindness” (FL1, 43). Her husband mirrors her perfection with “a form like Apollo’s” (FL1, 43), yet his sudden death registers as “an everyday history” (FL1, 46). “A Night Watch with a Dead Infant” dwells on death, consisting of two paragraphs of farewell and then a list of others also in the cemetery, with a gothic image of them in the final sentence, who “await with folded hands, closed eyes, and silent lips . . . the resurrection morn” (FL1, 99). The grim reality of infant mortality in the antebellum United States clearly prompts the tale, including Parton’s loss of her first daughter, and the death of a child might be read as the quintessence of a dark Providence. However, the slight mention of resurrection at least provides the rationale for submitting to God’s will, which does not happen with the father’s death in “Summer’s Days.” Perhaps the darkest version of the dark Providence theme happens in “The Widow’s Prayer” (FL1), with its implication of a vengeful, Old Testament God. The scene opens on the deathbed of the widow’s only child. Her prayer for recovery is answered, but neither she nor the boy are grateful. Her son becomes a criminal and is executed. The mother’s post-prayer behavior was impious and punishment ensues. God’s design in these several stories seems only made of pain and suffering. Read separately as a group, these stories imply a critique, or at least a serious questioning, of the benevolence of Providence. Not comic, these stories trace the farthest arc of Parton’s earnest sermonizing. Though Agnes in “A Page from a Woman’s Heart; or, Female Heroism” begins her speech of independence saying, “what I am now, by God’s dark Providence, you see,” by its end she says that “I will wait and trust. If I forsake not myself, God will not forsake me” (FL1, 306, 307). Her combination of belief in a capable self and a just God finds its root in American Puritanism, and has implications for antebellum women’s subjectivity and sense of self (see Berlant 1991; Sanchez 2000; Temple 2003). However, its implication that the darkness will give way, due in part to an individual’s effort, symbolizes the drift away from a strict Calvinism that marked Protestant sects in the United States throughout much of the nineteenth century. Hers may not be Walt Whitman’s sunny optimism, but Agnes does share a sense of possibility, born of individual effort, that was the sign of shedding Calvinism’s emphasis on original sin,

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which Sara Willis showed as a young girl (Wood 1971, 13; Kelley 1984, 290). In a number of items, particularly in the first collection, Parton features a faith that the mystery and suffering inherent in dark Providence can be overcome. In “Thoughts Born of a Caress” (FL1) the speaker, a mother, worries about the fate of her daughter in the cold world should she die. A father’s affections, she says, cannot be the same because business affairs distract him. Notably, Parton in this narrative switches speakers to a third person, presumably Fanny Fern, who imagines a life for a motherless daughter, predicting a bad marriage because no mother is there to prevent it. However, God answers a prayer to shield the motherless. Another story, “The Stray Lamb” (FL1), dramatizes what “Thoughts” only claims: God watches over children. As winter approaches, Fanny Fern sees a party of emigrants (one character’s accent suggests they are all Irish) on the streets with baggage. The shoeless child receives special attention. Suddenly, she meets her well-dressed mother, who clearly behaves thankful to God for finding her lost child. Fanny Fern weeps for joy that the lamb has been found. Faith in God receives its reward. Sermons admonishing the reader to have faith occur in other examples. “Nil Desperandum” explains dark Providence and exhorts against despair, addressing readers directly. Every cloud has “a silver lining” and the Lord knows when to show it (FL1, 67). Other items dramatize this faith. “Childhood’s Trust” shows a young boy asking God to watch over him, though lost in the woods; he has enough trust in the prayer to sleep. That scene constitutes the headnote. Fanny Fern follows with an apostrophe in which she wishes to have such childlike trust in God and remember that the things of the earth shall pass away. The title “All’s Well” in another example plays on the watchman’s cry by listing many terrible ways that the world is not well, and then enjoining the reader to look to God, to give in to his will, to have faith. “Night” as well as “The Cross and the Crown” provide reminders to the dear reader that life is hard but is only a dream. The true life is eternity. Even the most careless eye looks involuntarily toward heaven with an appeal (FL1, 183), making it the reward for suffering. The dream of life encompasses its cross and sorrows, while the waking to eternal life provides the crown. Cheerful Aunt Milly in “Sorrow’s Teachings” (FL1) instructs Ellen to accept God’s will, even when He “takes” her husband and child. Fanny Fern dramatizes the proof of such faith in “Merry Christmas! Happy Christmas!” Kate is a sorrowing widow amid Christmas festivities. Her

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sailor husband—said to be lost—instead shows up at her door, providing the ultimate Christmas gift. Finally, “An Infidel Mother” preaches a sermon to a mother without faith in God. He is all around. He is the Great Pilot (FL1, 196), a perfect epithet for believing in God’s will and the design of Providence despite its apparent darkness. The advice from this second grouping of examples involving Providence counsels having faith in God’s will, even when times are rough. Be a cheerful Christian, perhaps especially in the emotional darkness of sorrow and loss. The theme of a dark Providence ties into another of Fanny Fern’s key pieces of advice: the need for an individual to help herself or himself, a clear deviation from the ideal of feminine submissiveness. Fanny Fern braids the tricky nature of Providence into the theme of the need to be independent in two similar stories, with similar titles, one appearing in each of the two collections. “Summer Friends” (FL2) and “Summer Friends or ‘Will is Might’” (FL1) invoke Thomas Paine’s famous phrase from The American Crisis , “the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot,” underscoring the theme of friendship that fades in the face of trouble. Though her own experience leads Parton to privilege writing as the means of success, “Summer Friends or ‘Will is Might’” demonstrates what underpins any version of a tale of success: hard work and determination. When Emma Grant’s summer friends refuse to help because her father goes to prison for forgery, her own troubles begin. Without any family other than her father, Emma experiences profound isolation when everyone abandons her, and so she learns her first life lesson: “the selfishness and hollow-heartedness of human nature” (FL1, 62). Pious and “benevolently inclined,” Mr. Bliss exemplifies the prime example of the lesson, someone whose “pharisaical” (FL1, 62, 64) denial of help suggests the hypocrisy of so-called Christians. Emma meets her situation with a fierce desire to overcome all obstacles. She works hard and succeeds in her ambition to be a teacher, owning her own school patronized by the best families. The story reveals Mr. Bliss as even worse than pharisaical, for at the end he fraudulently claims that he helped her (FL1, 65). The brief tale closes with Emma about to marry a Senator. Those so-called friends who ignored her earlier now pretend to be friends of Senator Mrs. Emma Hall, suggesting the way status more than Christian charity shapes social interactions. Emma suffers yet perseveres, and a marriage implied to be happily-ever-after appears as the stereotypical ultimate reward within a sentimental fiction.

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The second story, “Summer Friends,” reads as a comic rant against a sentiment given in a headnote, Fanny Fern saying the man who wrote it was either “a knave” or a “fool”: “If every pain and care we feel/ Could burn upon our brow,/ How many hearts would move to heal,/ That strive to crush us now” (FL2, 91).4 In Fanny Fern’s school of hard knocks, people are more apt to flee if they know one has troubles. Most will not help. Notably, faith in God becomes a joke when spoken by insincere people: summer friends “wind up telling you to ‘trust in Providence’; to all of which you feel very much like replying as the old lady did when she found herself spinning down hill in a wagon, ‘I trusted in Providence until the tackling broke!’” (FL2, 91). The old lady’s comic wisdom invokes Emily Dickinson’s lines, “Faith is a fine invention/ For Gentlemen who see!/But Microscopes are prudent/ In an Emergency.” The rant dramatizes a sermon with a comic yet bitter flavor: work hard, ask no favors, and forget none that are given; God helps them who help themselves. In “How to Cure the Blues,” the cure is to work hard and “make yourself independent!” (FL2, 183, original emphasis), the formula for success that will be conspicuous in Ruth Hall. Fanny Fern offers Biblical authority for her brand of a Horatio Alger creed and God’s bounty to provide it: “To him that hath shall be given” (Matthew 25:29). Once independent, one can do what one likes, ignoring those summer friends. Fanny Fern satirically implies the fickleness of society’s morality. Success enables social carte blanche: “At the most, it [doing what one likes] will only be an ‘eccentricity!’” (FL2, 183), a flippant observation that mocks the sanctity of social conventions. However, one must bless and reward the true friend who helped when the day was dark. Possibly, in this caution to reward a true friend, she has in mind the editor and publisher of the New York Musical World and Times , Oliver Dyer, to whom Parton dedicates the second series of Fern Leaves. Parton’s sketches of women’s success, often in a rags-to-riches plot, predated by more than a dozen years the appearance in serial form of Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick in 1867, which would ultimately lead to Alger’s name being used as synonymous for such tales.

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The Scene of Parenting Women constituted Parton’s main reading audience. When she turns her attention to dramatizing and discussing motherhood and children, one can more clearly grasp the way that the moral and reforming intent behind the ridicule of satire resembles the admonition of a sermon. Though the sermon format usually precludes comic elements, in “Children’s Rights” Fanny Fern brings critique to bear in ways that create the possibility for the comic critique of satire.5 The piece imagines several scenes from a child’s point of view implying that adults are tyrants or unthinking in their demands, but Fanny Fern will “throw down the gauntlet for children’s rights!,” for which they “should pay me with [a] merry laugh” (FL1, 188, 190). The challenge of her amiable comic sermon enjoins parents and adults to be patient and attentive to the world of children. Children— “fresh, guileless, and loving”—embody an amiable comic critique of the “din, and strife, and envy, and uncharitableness” of the “museum [adult world] full of... dry, dusty, withered hearts” (FL1, 191). Fanny Fern predicates her use of a child’s behavior to critique the museum world made by adults on their purity of soul, which means that having children potentially transforms an adult morally. The single businessman, for example, thinks babies are a nuisance, until he is married and a father. Then everything changes because love replaces business. Fanny Fern heaps scorn on men who are “perfectly astonished they feel that they should have been so infatuated as not to perceive that a man is a perfect cipher till he is at the head of a family!” (“A Talk about Babies,” FL1, 89). Fanny Fern may employ scorn to make her point, but only with the most benevolent of intentions, to encourage the best of behaviors from her readers. In William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” (1815), the poet insists that “trailing clouds of glory do we come/ From God, who is our home:/ Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” Often in Fanny Fern newspaper columns, the children trail clouds of glory returning to heaven, and in doing so, extend the critique of the museum world of adult hearts that are “dry, dusted, withered.” “The Transplanted Lily” (FL1) begins with a scene in an orphanage without any human love or touch; a supervisor, Miss Betsy, thinks her stiff, proper, soulless ways help children morally. A childless woman wants to find a child to raise, but talks of having a certain kind, like a breed of dog. Her thoughtful friend warns her how hard it will be

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to raise the child well. The woman chooses Lily, and her innocence and faith transform the new mother to faith in God before she dies. “Little May” (FL1) follows the same plot trajectory. May wants to know who made God, and she goes to the woods with Fanny. Little May is so taken with God’s natural handiwork that she must give him thanks. Now dead and in heaven, May provides the lesson to transform the adult reader. “The Passionate Father” features a tyrant father who is physically abusive. The mother’s love enables the boy to forgive. He does so with his last breath, dying from blows struck by the father, who then repents. Parton also shows the purity of a child’s love in “My Little Sunbeam” (FL1). The title is a metaphor for a little girl who gives Fanny Fern violets every day for no apparent reason. The flowers remind Fanny Fern of true—that is, unconditional—love. This piece was the first signed “Fanny Fern” by Parton, suggesting an important aspect of the emotional space she occupied at the outset of her writing career. Notably, she collected almost all of these purely sentimental pieces in the first series of Fern Leaves. Having experienced both the heartbreak of burying a child as well as giving up one of her children to live with an unkind and rigid grandmother while she built a viable writing career, Parton obviously had complex emotions about the ultimate separation due to a child’s death. In her fictional world, children figure as angels who remind everyone of the reward of heaven and function as spiritual vehicles. “Two in Heaven” features a mother who remembers her two children in heaven along with the two still on earth. She is the mother of angels who draw her spirit to heaven. The conceit of children as angels for a mother takes a somewhat gothic turn in “Incident at Mount Auburn.” The death of a child begins the story, and the book has an illustration of a mother going daily to the gravestone. In Parton’s dramatic sketches, the first-person “I” could be read as a fictional character in a completely fictional narrative. Parton’s habit of direct address, however, argues for Fanny Fern as the speaker, the mother’s friend. She accompanies her to the graveyard once, after it closes, when a child appears and calls “Mother!” (FL1, 262). Both women see the child, who turns out not to be a ghost but another of her children looking for her. The mother faints, and the story ends, but the message resonates: children are angels. Critics accused Parton of being mawkish in her use of sentiment, and Fred Pattee (in)famously labeled her the “grandmother of all sob sisters” (qtd. in Camfield 1997, 48). The theme of children’s deaths functioning

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as triggers for moral repentance may seem as contrived as Little Eva’s in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published the year before Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio, but the deaths all clearly serve the emotional power of sentimental fiction to encourage a loving family. Several items in the collection, however, belie this one-sided portrait of Parton and highlight instead the dark Providence to which Agnes in “Female Heroism” refers and which dominates “Thorns for the Rose.” Like her scribbling sisters the literary domestics, Parton as Fanny Fern presents a complicated, even nuanced exploration of the sentimental family in her early fictional efforts. Parton’s use of the innocence of children as implicit critique of parenting norms takes a particular turn when she attacks the selfish neglect of fashionable parents. The title of “Still Small Voice” plays on a phrase for conscience and on the voice of the little boy Frankie, who asks his mother, with “the world of fashion at her feet” (FL1, 13), if he must die. When she repeats the question to her husband, he scoffs and says that religion is for “children and old people” (FL1, 14). When Frankie dies, however, joy as well as sorrow appears, for “From that little grave, so tear-bedewed, the flower of repentance springs” (FL1, 15). God’s will be done to achieve salvation, even if it means His taking the child. “Little Charlie, the Child Angel” features another fashionable and neglectful mother—a “thoughtless mother, well content to pass her time devouring all sorts of trashy literature” (FL1, 199). Worn out with business, the father wants to escape the day’s work but not by being with his son. When little Charlie dies, he passes without the “childish mother” present; she had been “drawn from his side by the attraction of a great military ball” (FL1, 200). The implied moral about values rings out clearly, though unstated. “The Ball Room and the Nursery” (FL1, 141– 45) changes the details of the fable but with the same moral: a frivolous life pales compared to the solemn yet joyous duty of taking care of children. A proud father ignores the child, Walter, for his own anticipated pleasure attending a ball. The mother does not want to go but he persuades her. She has a premonition and wants to leave the ball early, but he will not let her. The child dies before they return, and the mother almost dies too—of grief. Parton again implies her ambivalence about Providence in the dark ending of this tale, one published in the first months of her career. These stories about children and parents, especially about mothers, were often designed to draw forth tears rather than any sort of laughter,

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the frequent deaths of a child a reminder of the actual fragility of children’s health in the United States of the 1850s. Nevertheless, Fanny Fern uses a metaphor embedded in literary and popular culture—the child as an angel, trailing clouds of innocent glory—as part of a critique of another social norm, the culture of strict parenting in the name of spiritual discipline, noted above. This critique often takes the form of opposing stiff and dour behavior with a humorous tolerance, adults having a sympathetic attentiveness to children. Parton vacillated when attempting imaginative presentations of Providence, and in so doing walked a boundary, the far side of which presents an open critique of Christian belief. A would-be weekday preacher, Parton as Fanny Fern gives a glimpse of her satiric proclivity when holding forth on explicitly spiritual matters. However, Parton presents that satiric attitude in what I am calling the deeply private side of Fanny Fern more as simple observations of actual behavior rather than incidents distorted by fictional plots and comic techniques, as something Parton calls “live satire” (TF, May 21, 1853). Despite Parton’s chronically melodramatic shaping of incident into parable, the novelist, essayist, and editor George Curtis might say that much of the critique presented in the tales centering on Providence and the family fits his claim that the satirist merely shows the reader what exists, mirroring aspects of a social reality that need reformation (Potiphar Papers, 1853, 12–13). Parton’s term, “live satire,” makes the same claim, which grounds itself in the implicit values of the critique, values that inform the moral judgment appropriately expressed in parable form. Discussing satire, commentators routinely insist that the satirist and the reader must share a value or values that underpin the comic presentation. Perhaps all satire consists only of parables presented with comic techniques. Certainly, Parton’s Fanny Fern newspapers columns gain much of their satiric force by foregrounding the parable as the format for enabling social critique. Dramatizing God’s will on earth gave Parton her metaphysical theme, but how to be a good Christian mother gave her a core emotional theme. The scene of bad parenting in particular concerned her, in an era where children were often said to be “pert, impertinent, disrespectful, arrogant brats” (Rapson 1965, 521) spoiled at home, especially by the woman-belle version of mothers who treated their children the same way husbands treated their fashionable wives: ornaments for status display (Calhoun 1960, 66, 226, 236, 237). This dysfunctional situation was

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widespread, even in the earlier decades of the antebellum period, despite efforts by mothers to be moral guides and domestic teachers, as the ideology of separate spheres dictated (Kuhn 1947). Catherine Beecher expressed the positive view of those motherly efforts: “Parents have learned, by experience, that children can be constrained, by authority and penalties, to exercise self-denial, for their own good, till a habit is formed, which makes the duty comparatively easy” (1845, 224–25). The idealism surrounding children and mothers, then, should be read as the melodramatic counterweight to the sordid realism of satiric observation, mirroring dark Providence and dark human nature, though both emotional sides of her critique exhort Fanny Fern’s congregation to behave itself better than it usually does. One reviewer of the second series of Fern Leaves summarizes Parton’s spiritual aspect this way: “Here are practical demonstrations of Christian faith—a faith that is at once ‘the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen.’ Here are sweet and domestic pictures, full of feeling and genuine sensibility. A healthy tone pervades all of Fanny’s writings, and every sketch has its accompanying high moral” (FDP, June 2, 1854, original emphasis). For Ann [Douglas] Wood, Parton was “half-confused, half deliberate” in her explorations of the sentimental family through newspaper essays and fictional sketches, working both sides of the street and so “could get her audience both going and coming; work on their sentimentality, then satirize it” (1971, 18). This line of reasoning misses the point of the dialectic between pure and critical sentimentality. Parton does not satirize sentimentality so much as she ridicules false feelings and promotes true ones. Her sermons are neither partially confused nor partially deliberate. Rather, she feels deeply on both sides of the emotional ledger, promoting proper sentiment and ridiculing behaviors satirists traditionally ridicule: hypocrisy, greed, and vanity. Thus she can in one story lament and scorn wrong feelings while joyously celebrating the right feelings in another. Rosalind Rosenberg argues that “Because business increasingly claimed the attention of men [in the antebellum period], women were able to take over the direction of religious activity without challenging men. In the process, the idea of womanhood came to encompass spiritual leadership as well as domestic nurturance” (1975, 141). Parton as comic preacher, then, does not shatter conventions about parents and children so much as specify wholesome directions for properly enacting them. In her early newspaper work, Parton often constructed a negative image of so-called true womanhood and the sentimental family, even when her writing

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promoted what patriarchal norms steered women writers toward, “deathoriented and nonsectarian religious fervor” (Wood 1971, 7). Parton as (comic) preacher embraced that genre but did so with a critical eye. Parton’s experience functioned as an enormous asset for projecting authenticity into her sermonizing about good and bad husbands, about agony over losing loved ones, especially children, and about becoming a literary success. Fanny Fern comports with her reading public as very middle class and religious, but not in a conventionally pious and church bureaucracy, doctrinaire way. She satirically targets religious hypocrisy, for she has experienced such behavior with her in-laws and her father. Raised in a religious setting but stung by callous treatment from family members, Sara Parton projects a critical Christian with her comic persona, an attitude that meshes with her domestic, pragmatic feminism.

Notes 1. “A Page from a Woman’s Heart; or, Female Heroism” (FL1, 303– 10; 306). Pages references are either to Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio (Auburn: Derby and Miller; Buffalo: Derby, Orton, and Mulligan; Cincinnati: Henry W. Derby, 1853), FL1 hereafter, or Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio, Second Series (Auburn and Buffalo: Miller, Orton, and Mulligan, 1854), FL2 hereafter. 2. One good indication of how Parton writes her Fanny Fern columns as though she were a comic preacher is the number of instances in which she criticizes the behavior of a congregation and worries about actual preachers or simply imagines a church scene: “Not a ‘Model Minister’” (FL1, 293–94); “The Model Minister” (FL1, 335–36); “Soliloquy of the Rev. Mr. Parish” (FL1, 348–49); “A Chapter on Clergymen” (FL1, 364–66); “The Aged Minister Voted a Dismission” (FL2, 150–51); “The Fashionable Preacher” (FL2, 230–32); “Henry Ward Beecher” (FL2, 285–88); “Father Taylor, the Sailor’s Preacher” (FL2, 292–95). 3. “The Widow’s Trials” (FL1, 17–24); “Thorns for the Rose” (FL1, 49–58); “Thanksgiving Story” (FL1, 59–60); “Summer Friends or ‘Will is Might’” (FL1, 61–66); “Mistaken Philanthropy” (FL1, 333–34 and FL2, 135–36); “Shadows and Sunbeams” (FL2, 13–35); “Summer Friends” (FL2, 91); “A False Proverb” (FL2, 114–15); “Dollars and Dimes” (FL2, 212–13); “Apollo

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Hyacinth” (FL2, 381–83). These items are clearly motivated by Parton’s experience with her family. 4. I have been unable to identify the author of this verse, likely one of the innumerable efforts from would-be poets published in antebellum magazines and newspapers. 5. As Thackeray claimed, a humorist should be considered an everyday preacher, but in several of Parton’s early newspaper items devoted to being a mother and taking care of children, the sermons exhorting particular behavior come without a comic presentation. Thus Fanny Fern asks a mother who favors one child over another, who neglects the less gifted “but often warmer-hearted” child, to love—not neglect (“The Partial Mother,” FL1, 139), and in another reminds mothers that the hardest part of parenting is to nurture the child’s soul (“A Word to Mothers,” FL1, 234–235). Two other items defend stepmothers from the stereotype of being cruel by showing how “The Model Step Mother” (FL1, 301–302) acts like a saint in the face of all criticisms and trials, while a second example—“The Step Mother” (FL1, 230–233)—chronicles how the stepmother changes a spoiled girl with patience and prayer.

The Satirist and Her Public

Sara Parton built her meteoric career as “Fanny Fern” on an almost instinctive ability to express herself, on the one hand, in sentimental terms, and on the other, in satiric terms. Both aspects of her literary enterprise propelled her popularity, but in radically different ways. The sentimental aspect fit into the style that dominated commercial literary production in the 1840s and 1850s, the style that Nathaniel Hawthorne had in mind when he attacked the “damn mob of scribbling women.” The reading public was largely female, so from a market standpoint, the sentimental style made sense. Moreover, the sentimental style had deep roots in the Anglo-American literary tradition, reaching back to the eighteenth-century “Man of Feeling” trope as well as the Enlightenment’s privileging of sympathy and benevolence, which provided the philosophical and ethical underpinnings for such cultural production (A. Smith 1759; see Camfield 1994). Parton’s domestic sketches, full of pathos, blend into that background. In this regard, she was part of that mob of female scribblers, the sort her famous brother Nathaniel Willis had helped launch in the persons of Sara Jane Lippincott (“Grace Greenwood”) and Emily Chubbuck (“Fanny Forrester”). However, while Parton’s sentimental side surely gained her readers, the satiric aspect created at break-neck speed a profile that made her persona an immediate comic sensation. Scanning the issues of the Boston © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 J. E. Caron, The Modern Feminine in the Medusa Satire of Fanny Fern, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41276-9_3

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Olive Branch in 1851 and 1852, the periodical in which Parton begins her writing career and enjoys her first notable successes, one cannot help but be struck by how easily the sentimental pieces fit the prevailing style and how much her comic pieces do not. The Olive Branch’s associate editor, Mrs. Mary A. Denison, routinely covered much of page two with the usual material from the scribbling mob, and Fanny Fern fits right in when Parton wanted. As she grew more confident about the power and relevance of her persona’s comic potential, however, Parton more readily displays the persona’s laughter-provoking aspect, and in the process the comic critique embedded in satire also became more prominent. Even at the beginning, however, her sharply satiric items stand out; they are surely the source of Hawthorne singling her out for praise amid the mob—“The woman writes as if the devil were in her”—obviously referring to the ridiculing tones Parton employed with facility. That devilishness marked Parton as the satirist at her most caustic, as the Medusa satirist. In the midst of the incipient women’s rights movement, Parton in her Fanny Fern persona added a noticeably forceful voice to the cultural discussion already underway not only about political rights, but also domestic relations, women’s duties, and feminine behavior in general—including whether wearing Bloomers was just a sartorial mistake, constituted a moral impropriety, or signified a technological challenge to gender expectations (Banks 1981; Berg 1978; Mas 2017; see also Nelson 2004). Though one can easily conceptualize the sentimental and the satiric as antithetical, as though Fanny Fern dramatized a split personality, the aesthetics of comic belles lettres harnesses together the two halves in the figure of the comic belles lettres gentleman/lady and its characteristic agreeable raillery, that is, sympathy and benevolence provide the motive for satire’s ridicule, however strident. Thus the problem for writing satire within the comic belles lettres regime does not just center on the ethical one worried over in Shaftesbury’s famous essay defending raillery and ridicule, but also the aesthetic one of what tone an author takes constructing satires. Any variety of tones within a set of satires would be a result of how much sympathy the writer adds to the ridicule, as though the satiric style of a particular author as comic belles lettres lady or gentleman depends upon a recipe of two-thirds sympathy and benevolence mixed with one-third ridicule—or vice versa. In other words, if Parton writes as though the devil were in her, can her satiric output be placed into the regime of truth I have been calling comic

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belles lettres, with its insistence on amiability? If scholars of American literature should acknowledge Parton as an important satiric voice in midcentury American culture, can she be called the comic belles lettres lady of the antebellum period to complement all the possible comic belles lettres gentlemen? Moreover, if her brand of satire at times mixes two-thirds ridicule with one-third sympathy, maybe lady satirist as a label must give way to Medusa satirist, a laughing Gorgon, monstrously disturbing to the patriarchal status quo. While the Fanny Fern persona allows Parton to project sentiment and pathos and idealism, yet then pivot to employ fierce satire that includes comic insults and curses, the world she creates remains profoundly gendered regardless of the emotion presented or the kind of comic laughter generated. Next to her exploration of dark Providence, her most important theme centers on the question: How should men and women interact? This first-level question entails exploring masculinity as well as femininity, exploring what constitutes the behavior of ladies and gentlemen, and exploring how—in particular—husbands and wives should behave toward one another. Along with marriage, families remain a focus, especially the relationship of mothers and their children, as the previous chapter has shown. Moreover, because husbands and wives are such a big focus, so too are bachelors and single women—maids young and old. Often the satiric treatment of these themes and social roles consists of push-back against stereotypes and conventional thinking about gendered behaviors. As she developed her alter ego Fanny Fern, Sara Parton built her own fictional projection of a new woman, with her own temperament as the foundation: independent, fun-loving, quick-tempered but affectionate, smart, capable, attractive, charming. She likes men in general, but often quarrels with their conventional behaviors and attitudes. She has no objection to marriage in principle, but does not understand that state as the logical and necessary goal of any and all women. Once in the marriage, Parton’s new woman expects a partnership, ideally, but she does not mind engaging in some subterfuge to secure her position as a free individual and citizen to counter the tyrannizing tendency of patriarchal values. Moreover, for all of Parton’s rebellion against stereotypes for gendered behavior, she subscribes, especially in her sentimental writings, to the theory of the angel in the house, an ideology positing that the true social power of a woman should be moral. From that perspective, women become angels without wings, able to transform the waywardness of men,

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if needed. Only the innocence of children, trailing clouds of glory from heaven, can trump such power. Finally, Parton’s new woman is deeply religious, her faith in her God as a true bulwark against the vicissitudes of a world that can be cruel when not simply indifferent. All these elements went into Fanny Fern, creating a formidable literary alter ego for Sara Parton. A pseudonym can function as a mask to hide the author. However, a persona does not just mask an author; it can also establish character, that is, project a personality or a temperament. A literary alter ego replicates temperament and might even incorporate physical attributes of the author so that persona and author seem to merge. Critics claimed such merging for William Thackeray both as lecturer and author, as well as for Lewis Gaylord Clark as editor (Caron 2021a). Sara Parton uses Fanny Fern at all of these levels. Early in her career, because of personal circumstances, she wants to be hidden from the public, and so she shape-shifts, pretending that Fanny Fern is by turns an old maid, a widow, or a widow with children, even though only the last status was true. She can be against marriage or flirt about marrying. While Donald Mitchell in The Lorgnette (1850) always hides behind the pseudonym of John Timon, or occasionally uses the character Tophanes as a more caustic alter ego, Parton combines these functions to interact with the public in what at times goes beyond a dialogue and becomes a flirtation in print. She can be in a mirth-provoking conversation with the public in general or with specific correspondents; at other times, she demands her privacy. Even her letters to the editor of the Olive Branch, Thomas Norris, contribute to a dialogue. Similarly, Parton’s frequent use of quotes from other periodicals as pretexts for columns—a practice she expands as her early career develops—mimics conversation. Sara has the gift of gab, and she does not mind exercising a metaphorical jaw in print. The reading public understood the conversational protocol and reciprocated. Not only did people write letters to periodicals about their locality, they sent stories and poems to their favorite periodicals to be published gratis, often signed with only initials or possibly a pseudonym. Case in point, the editor of the Olive Branch, Thomas Norris, says that he has over 30,000 pages of manuscript on hand, and asks his readers to stop sending material for a while so that they can catch up a bit by printing some (August 28, 1852). As with the Knickerbocker and Clark’s feature “Gossip with Readers and Correspondents” (see Caron 2021a), they were participating in the republic of letters in every case; they performed as the

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Genteel Author, a lady or gentleman of some education; they enacted the literate public sphere on display in print culture. Thus the ground for the comic public sphere of satire Fanny Fern dramatizes already has a place in the periodical world. Parton deploys Fanny Fern as her comic truth-teller, but her readers equally construct the persona, a dynamic featured throughout her career (Gunn 2010). Their reactions to Fanny Fern validate Parton’s satiric ability in various ways, but always in ways that imply contested notions of woman, lady, wife, mother, and the general tenor of domesticity. Parton acknowledges this dynamic when she includes thirteen fan letters in Ruth Hall (Sanchez 2000, 49). In this chapter, I will trace the development of Fanny Fern as persona and alter ego in the midst of a burgeoning celebrity. Sara Parton both cherished her anonymity behind a pseudonym and teased the public with shape-shifting comic descriptions of her alter ego persona and its temperament. An intense curiosity about who Fanny Fern was in real life accompanies the nearly immediate popularity of Parton’s writings in the Boston Olive Branch and Boston True Flag starting in 1851. Sara Parton in effect constructed her alter ego in dialogue with that curiosity, in part by fictionalizing her own experience. Perhaps one should say instead that Fanny Fern scribbled a self-conscious portrait. Either formulation suggests how Sara Parton as an author and Sara Parton as a woman meshed to create one of the most important comic writers of the antebellum period. In doing so, Parton’s alter ego Fanny Fern became a literary vehicle for creating the mirthful conversation that signals the existence of a community of humorists and amiable satirists.

Sara’s Comic Instincts The Boston Olive Branch printed Parton’s first article on June 28, 1851. For the remaining six months of the year, Parton’s work appeared twentythree more times, all under multiple pseudonyms. At the outset, Sara indulges her gift for comic writing, a gift displayed early in her life in the only composition she wrote while at school that has survived, “Suggestions on Arithmetic” (Warren 1992, 40–41). The very first professional effort, titled “A Model Husband” and signed “Clara,” imagines the perfect husband with notable comic touches (e.g., his wife kicks him under the table so he won’t take more strawberries when there are not enough for guests, and he doesn’t complain; he says women should wear

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Bloomers if they wish because, after all, it would be impossible to stop them). Parton signs the next five pieces “Tabitha,” and they each mix humor and satire while Tabitha delivers unorthodox opinions on fashion and women’s rights or pretends to be an old maid or recounts for her audience that she was “an untameable [sic] romp” as a deacon’s daughter. After that string of comic pieces, at the end of August 1851, Parton writes “Little May,” a sentimental article, unsigned, later rewritten for Fanny Fern’s first children’s book. When Parton in September finally uses the Fanny Fern signature, Joyce Warren notes that for “the first few weeks … she seems to have used it only for her nonsatirical pieces” (1992, 98), which is true for the first three items. The first piece signed “Fanny Fern,” “The Little Sunbeam” (OB, September 6) features a child who gives Fanny Fern flowers. Another (OB, September 13) in parable form clearly comes from Parton’s recent experience trying to support her family after leaving her marriage to Farrington: little Effie worries that her mother Mrs. Fay is working too hard at sewing; relatives won’t help but a friend does; God is good and so one must wait and trust. A third piece with the signature “Fanny Fern” (OB, September 20) again features children and flowers but functions as a set-up to encourage parents to create a cheerful home. Yet another Fanny Fern piece meant to appeal to the heart, “The Ball Room and the Nursery” (OB, October 4), features a proud father who ignores his child, Walter. This story appears on the same page after two similar tales by the assistant editor Mary Denison, suggesting how Fanny Fern could easily voice a sentimental narrative featured in such family papers as the Olive Branch. Joyce Warren also attributes to Parton a piece signed “Aunt Emma” (1992, 98), which mixes serious and comic tones, Emma first instructing children how to behave before ending with an anecdote from her childhood that depicts a slapstick scene of squirrels running loose in her bedroom, released by her madcap brother. Though Warren cannot be certain about attributing the article to Parton, the mix of tones does suggest one of her writing strategies during the remainder of the year, publishing two articles at once, one serious and one comic (OB, October 4, November 1, November 8). Warren also notes a pair of articles in October, serious and comic, signed “Olivia Branch” that are also Parton’s (1992, 98). Finally, Parton finishes the year with the same tactic: pairing a serious item with a comic one (OB, December 27). Notably, Parton also signed “Fanny Fern” to comic pieces soon after first using the pseudonym. “The Young Cook” (OB, September 27),

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which Warren calls nonsatirical, is certainly comic and can be read as a gentle satire on fashionable women. Newly married Elsie ruins the dinner, reading a novel as she works. The piece also features Negro dialect from Dinah the actual cook, a comic tactic Parton never indulged again. In a sign that Parton in the first few months of writing for the Olive Branch felt unsure about how to channel her comic talent, she imitated the famous comic character Mrs. Partington, invented by Benjamin Shillaber. In an untitled piece signed “Fanny Fern” (OB, October 4), Fanny speaks as though she were Mrs. Partington commenting to her nephew Ike about a procession of Scotsmen, joking about their kilts, saying that they apparently gave away their pants to the Bloomer crowd. Parton again signs “Fanny Fern” to a brief paragraph of puns supposedly spoken by Mrs. Partington (OB, November 1), and a week later employs Mrs. Partington to joke about women’s rights (OB, November 8), even though Shillaber a few weeks before had complained that Fanny Fern was mis-characterizing Mrs. Partington in her imitations (CB, October 18, 1851). Parton also tried out other comic voices. Though Aunt Charity (OB, November 22) retains a bit of Mrs. Partington’s signature habit of speaking malaprops, along with some vernacular dialect, another voice sounds original, speaking in straight-forward plain English. In “Aunt Hetty’s Ideas of Matrimony” (OB, December 6), Aunty Hetty provides a comic yet rather harrowing view of marriage meant to discourage the young women in her sewing circle. Parton liked the piece so much that she reprinted it in the first series of Fern Leaves. In two other early instances, Fanny Fern speaks with comic purpose in her own voice, in a letter format to Mr. Norris, the editor. In the first, Fanny Fern claims she is an old maid and recounts all the good deeds that she had done recently that only caused her trouble (OB, December 13). In the second, she complains in a mock worried tone that she cannot be a lady as defined in a recent newspaper article because she goes out for a walk on a rainy day. Moreover, if one must be outside, the article says, one should lift one’s dress “artistically” if required. Fanny Fern ridicules such advice and calls herself a gypsy because she must “exercise in the open air” regardless of weather, even if people not only say she is not a lady but is crazy too (OB, December 27). Parton in effect declares herself outside the pale of supposedly proper women’s behavior when she calls herself a gypsy.

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However, the more forceful declaration of a beyond-the-pale behavior comes in another letter to the editor about “her husband Solomon Stillwater” (OB, November 22). The exuberant Fanny (“energetic, warmhearted”) complains about her dull husband and claims she once used firecrackers to stir him up, but to no avail. Aunty Hetty may complain about the marriage state, but Fanny stands ready to offer a slapstick solution that features a carnival inversion of wifely submissiveness complete with comic violence. Parton also liked this one enough to reprint it in the first series of Fern Leaves. Fifteen of the first twenty-four newspaper items attributed to Parton or signed Fanny Fern in 1851 are comic. Parton begins her writing career with a string of comic pieces, and she quickly signed “Fanny Fern” to several more in her first months with the Olive Branch. The multiple pseudonyms, the imitation of Shillaber’s famous comic character Mrs. Partington, the invention of other voices to accompany Fanny Fern, and pairing the dual tracks of sentimental and comic pieces all suggest how much in her initial efforts Parton experimented with comic styles and tones as she also sought suitable topics.

Hiding Out in Public In the first few weeks after Sara Parton saw her initial writing effort published in the Olive Branch on June 28, 1851, she wrote the first of many efforts to present a profile and a temperament for the public. Still unsure about what pseudonym to adopt, Parton provided two signatures for an untitled item that appeared in the format of a letter to the editor. In the letter, she says that she is not pretty and so the men do not notice her. She is also unlucky: “a regular female Jonah.” She recounts comic anecdotes to prove that fate, in particular her failure to marry. Her suitor meets her in the evening, and she makes sure he courts her at night because she is not pretty. She plans the ceremony for the evening, but it is postponed when the license goes missing. “The next morning the impatient bridegroom called to tell he had procured another license; of course, I could not refuse to see him—he saw me by daylight! and you will not think it a circular singumstance (as Mrs. Partington might say,) that this day I sign myself ‘An Old Maid, and very unfortunate at that,’” though “Tabitha” is visible off to the side of the column (OB, August 2, 1851, original emphases).

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In several subsequent pieces, some now signed “Fanny Fern,” Parton continues to present her pseudonyms under the fiction of being an old maid (OB, December 13, 1851; OB, February 14, 1852; OB, July 31, 1852). One piece varies the ruse by claiming she is 62 (she is 41) and has a niece rather than children (OB, January 3, 1852). In yet another piece published in 1853, well into Parton’s fame and notoriety, Fanny Fern not only claims she was never married but remains happy in her unmarried “spinster” state; she declares if that state changes, “I should be all teeth and claws” (TF, February 26, 1853). The willingness to mock marriage and present a comic fierceness displays only one of several laughter-prompting treatments of her marriageable status. “To ‘Bachelor M. O, Acton Centre’” (OB, February 28, 1852) responds to a fan who has proposed marriage. Evidently, M. O. has believed earlier claims that Fanny Fern is an old maid. Fanny now admits that the old maid image was a “miserable, delusive, unsubstantial, un-huggable humbug; all whip-syllabub. Soap-suds and moonshine!” Instead, she claims a widow’s status complete with many children, including a baby. After joking that she has caught a bachelor for which she has no use, she changes her mind and asks several questions about him and his temperament, as though sizing him up. She also offers a portrait of herself. She says that if they do get married—which she mocks as being “noosed”—he should know that “I like fun and frolic better than eating and drinking, so it will be cheap providing for me, if you’re only of the same mind.” However, she also jokes about her temper being comparable to Socrates’s wife, famously a scold, and then declares an important caveat before marrying: “I won’t say ‘obey’ for any priest in the land; no! not if you held a pistol to my head!” (original emphases). Parton thus crowns her jokes by again opting for a comic fierceness in what amounts to multiple claims for independence, all the while inventing details about her persona. Inventing details about her persona apparently constituted Parton’s playful way to respond to her growing celebrity as Fanny Fern. However, as Fanny Fern gained popularity during 1852—indicated by the New York Musical World and Times beginning to publish Parton in the fall while the Boston Carpet Bag says that Fanny Fern “has so long gleamed, meteorlike, across newspaperdom” (October 9, 1852)— comic flirting became a serious game of hide-and-seek that entailed more misdirection about her persona. In effect, the multiple profiles for Fanny Fern amounted to shape-shifter lying in trickster fashion. Sara Parton had very personal reasons for maintaining anonymity by deploying a variety of

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screens to obscure her actual identity with contradictory descriptions of her pseudonym. Due to the treatment she had from family after her first husband Charles Eldredge died—her parents’ and in-laws’ refusals to help support Sara and her two young daughters; her brother Nathaniel Willis’s refusal to help with her fledgling literary career (even though as editor of the well-regarded New York Home Journal he had helped other young woman writers)—the multiple comic images and comic bantering with correspondents provided one way to maintain an opaque firewall in print from prying eyes. Moreover, that catalog of adversity does not include the entire family abandoning her after her disastrous second marriage to Samuel Farrington and subsequent separation and divorce. Periodicals continue to call Parton “Fanny Fern” throughout the rest of the year. Godey’s Lady’s Book belatedly acknowledges that a “writer of great terseness and acuteness of observation has lately made her appearance in the ‘Olive Branch’ under the nom de plume of ‘Fanny Fern.’ Fanny has already secured thousands of admirers, and will probably be honored with as many more, if she … does not become too much of a coquette” (November 1, 1852). In the same month, the Olive Branch refers to “our racy correspondent, Fanny Fern” (November 20, 1852). While touting a new volume of the Olive Branch, the editor Norris says that “We have also secured weekly contributions from the pen of that eccentric, but very gifted anonymous lady, Fanny Fern” (December 4, 1852) or “weekly contributions from the pen of that most gifted and graphic writer, Fanny Fern” (OB, December 11, 1852). That commitment, however, was not exclusive, no doubt the reason for Norris making the announcement. The Boston True Flag calls Fanny Fern “Our Fanny Fern” in honor of her writing for that publication, while bragging that she is “the most original, piquant, and witty female writer of the day … [possessing a style] rich with epigram, satire and pleasantry” (rpt. OB, December 11, 1852), that is, displaying a style within the parameters of the comic belles lettres aesthetic. Joyce Warren says that an editor reveals Parton as Fanny Fern on December 30, 1854, just as Ruth Hall is selling briskly. In the first of a series of spiteful articles [which become Life and Beauties of Fanny Fern], the editor of the True Flag, William U. Moulton, angered by his loss of Fanny Fern’s columns and incensed at her unflattering portrait of him in Ruth Hall as Mr. Tibbets of The Pilgrim, revealed the carefully guarded secret of her identity. Having written the book in the belief that

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her incognita was safe, Fern had based the story of Ruth Hall on her own life, using real models for many characters, who, though fictionalized, were easily recognizable once her identity was known.

Warren calls Moulton’s action “catastrophic for Fern personally,” though it “dramatically increased the sale of the book” (1992, 123). The problem with this sensational scenario is that Parton’s identity had been published in the Brooklyn Eagle as far back as October 1, 1852, apparently because she is now contributing to a New York City periodical, Musical World and Times : “Fanny, we believe, is sister of the editor of the Musical Times, and of N. P. Willis, one of the editors of the Home Journal. She has been noted of late as a correspondent of the Olive Branch, and a woman of mark—quaint, smart and clever” (2). This notice by a Brooklyn paper of Sara’s relationship to her two Manhattan literary brothers suggests how popular—and so newsworthy—Fanny Fern had become not much more than a year after she first appeared in print. Despite the truth about Fanny Fern’s identity being in the public domain, in January 1853, the Musical World and Times ran an editorial, “Who is Fanny Fern?,” in response to all the inquiries about the author’s true identity, saying all of the suppositions are “false. Fanny Fern is not discovered yet.” When Thomas Norris, editor of the Boston Olive Branch, reprints the editorial, he also answers all the prying folks: “none of their business. If a gifted writer wishes not to be drawn before the public by her true name, and that person a lady, we consider it a violation of the proprieties of life to endeavor to drag such a lady from her privacy, before the public.” The author of the Musical World and Times editorial, most likely Parton’s brother Richard, notes that some claimed Mrs. Marion H. Stevens as Fanny Fern, but Stevens denies it in a letter to the Boston Times while saying that Fanny Fern should be considered one of the best writers in the English language. Norris’s editorial gives background about Parton’s start in the Olive Branch and notes that she now writes for the True Flag and the Musical Times with regularity, while also for the Home Journal and the New York Dutchman. Norris continues as though Parton remains anonymous: “She is a worthy lady, moving in the best circles of society, and speaks to the public through the columns of the best papers in the country. If she chooses not to come before the public over her true name, her modest desire should be granted, and a curious public should be satisfied. The better classes will be” (rpt. OB, January 29, 1853). Presumably,

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Sara’s brother Richard knows she is Fanny Fern, certainly Norris does. Undoubtedly, they both have been asked by Parton to continue the hide-and-seek tactics she has been practicing. However, the efforts to maintain the mystery of “who is Fanny Fern?” dissipate completely as part of the publicity for the first series of Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio, which appears on June 1, 1853. Many now routinely understand Parton to be Fanny Fern, a number of periodicals in 1853 identifying her as sister to the Willis brothers (CG, June 2; BE, July 6; USR, August; Lowell, July 11; BE, September 29; CR, October 1). These examples no doubt represent a small slice of such notices around the country, given the exchange system. The renewed attention on Fanny Fern’s true identity occasioned by the publication of Parton’s first book nevertheless brought sustained silence from her brother Nathaniel. Regardless, more articles circulating in the newspaper exchange system during 1853 would build pressure on Willis to admit the truth as the reading public continued its obsession with determining the author behind the enormously popular Fanny Fern. The first clue from the print archive for definitively dissipating any remaining mystery about Who is Fanny Fern? comes from the New York Evening Mirror, which quotes an article in the Boston Transcript , which in turn is reprinted both in the Brooklyn Eagle and the Louisville Journal (and no doubt in other newspapers around the country). The piece claims sales of 10,000 copies of Fern Leaves the first week of its publication but also notes that, “A Boston correspondent is responsible for the statement that this lady has been twice married,” naming Eldredge and Farrington and saying that the latter has moved to the west, “where he at present resides, and where he has just obtained a divorce” (rpt. BE, June 22, 1853; LJ, June 25, 1853). The wording of the Mirror article suggests that Parton’s brother Nathaniel still sought distance from Sara as Fanny Fern. The Eagle two weeks later reports that “the Boston Transcript now acknowledges that ‘Fanny Fern’ is Mrs. Farrington of that city. She was formerly Mrs. Eldbridge [sic], and is a sister of N. P. Willis” (BE, July 6, 1853). Curiously, Parton had already deliberately dared her reading public to discover her identity with semi-veiled references to her famous older brother. About a month before her first book appears, the Olive Branch publishes an item headed “Impudent Questions,” the relevant question being, “To ask an editor the names of any of his correspondents” (OB, April 30, 1853). Fanny Fern replies in her ironic and sarcastic way that

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of course it is perfectly fine to investigate the true identity of a writer, if one suspects it is a woman, and that is it perfectly fine to be sneaky about it so that some literary hack can write up a sketch about the literary lady and how she looks physically, “finely proportioned” or not. Parton clearly has herself in mind, for she imagines the now exposed literary lady to be the sister of “Napthali Zerubbabel Dimple, Esq.,” a name which manages to hint at her brother’s first name while implying Nathaniel’s bad writing (babel) and vanity (dimple). Nathaniel becomes Napthali again in a second reference to her brother in “Newspaper-dom” (OB, August 13, 1853; rpt. from MWT). Joking about how folks long ago could not have possibly survived without newspapers, Fanny Fern ridicules all the trivia that they print. Without newspapers, for example, “How could they find out whether Fanny Fiddlesticks was Napthali Wilkens’ sister?” This example probably appeared originally in the Musical World and Times at the end of July, which means that these two joking references bookend the infamous lampoon of N. P. Willis that also appears in the Musical World and Times, “Apollo Hyacinth” (June 18, 1853). Presumably, when the release of the first collection of Fern Leaves drew extensive attention to Sara’s true identity, she decided to obliquely stir up more attention in the midst of the general knowledge of her relationship to the well-known Nathaniel Parker Willis. Everyone had recognized Willis in the Apollo Hyacinth lampoon, and linking characters with the same initials as the principals (F.F. and N.W.) in “Newspaper-dom” renders them purloined letters for all to read. One wonders what Sara’s other brother, Richard, as an editor of the Musical Word and Times, thought of the fun Sara was having mocking their older brother. While one might wonder about what Richard thought of Sara’s jokes at the expense of Nathaniel Willis fils, who keeps his distance in the midst of the summer publicity about Parton’s book and family, in September Nathaniel Willis pere weighs in, apparently orally, to Mr. Norris of the Olive Branch, after Norris publishes this brief note: “The publishers of Fanny Fern’s book have already sold forty thousand copies, and the demand is apparently unabated. We have some pride in bringing out that lady in opposition to her father and nearly all the family, and shall at another day give some chapters on the subject which may startle the community. The matter is at present in abeyance” (OB, August 27, 1853). Probably, Sara had confided in Norris about the family’s coldhearted treatment of her and her two young daughters—thus the source

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of the startling chapters—which apparently never materialized. Norris must have thought it best not to mix in with the family turmoil. However, he did comment on Nathaniel Willis senior’s reaction to Sara’s immense success: This lady’s father assures us that our little note concerning Fanny and her family, as far as he is a party, is liable to be misunderstood. He says he never was opposed to Fanny’s doing anything she judged proper to better and improve her circumstances. His opposition was solely confined to her style of writing, which is one he does not approve. The venerable and most respectable gentleman is fully entitled to the benefit of this explanation. We have ample evidence that he has spared no reasonable pains or expense to promote his daughter’s comfort and happiness. But we must say to our respected friend that it was that very peculiarity of style, used by unsurpassed intellectual power, which gave her all her success—that success which has placed her as a writer, as vastly ahead of her brothers, gifted writers as they are. But for the present we waive the whole subject, some part of which may come before the public, should we publish those chapters to which we last week referred. (OB, September 3, 1853, original emphasis)

Because the fact of Sara being a Willis has been known since October 1852, and has, in the wake of her book being published in June 1853, again become an topic for the newspapers, Norris’s two items are tantamount to saying that not only has he spoken to N. P. Willis the senior as Sara’s father, but he also has knowledge of how the family threw up obstacles to Sara’s success as Fanny Fern, despite his claim that the father tried “to promote his daughter’s comfort and happiness.” Parton may have teased the reading public with allusions to N. P. and all but admitted she was his sister with the Apollo Hyacinth lampoon, but she also continued her hide-and-seek ploys about Fanny Fern’s true identity, perhaps in particular after her divorce from Samuel Farrington, which Warren says was possibly final September 7, 1853 (1992, 334, n. 33), though the Boston Transcript had reported in June that Farrington had obtained a divorce (rpt. BE, June 22, 1853). The Brooklyn Eagle later in the year repeats that Fanny Fern “the popular writer” has divorced from “her husband, a Mr. Farrington,” but follows that fact with a reprint of a letter from the Boston(?) Sunday Visitor signed “Fanny Fern” in which the author claims to be married. The language sounds genuine Fanny Fern, which would mean Parton continues conducting some sort of theater either to disassociate herself

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from Farrington or to spike rumors of a new marriage, still trying to obscure her identity. After noting that folks have been saying that she is either N. P. Willis or one of the Beechers, Fanny Fern gives a detailed description of herself and situation, complete with a husband and one daughter (Parton had two). She is “four foot five,” “good looking of course,” of a domestic turn, always home mending clothes, etc., “generally as lively as a cricket,” friend to all except “tyrannizing men,” and “independent in everything.” She continues: “I’m no ‘bloomer,’ as some say, for I hate to see women so immoral. It looks as if they tried to do something and couldn’t. I go for women’s ‘legitimate rights,’ but let the lords of creation stay where they are, and mind you ‘neither the advice nor consent of the council,’” i.e., she will keep an independent stance above all (BE, September 29, 1853). Conversation with her intrusive reading public meant mixing some truth with the shape-shifting disguises, for many of these details about temperament describe Sara. Though N. P. junior remains silent about his sister throughout the 1853 publicity buzz about Fanny Fern’s book and the true identity of the author, the reading public and the newspaper exchange guaranteed that he could not maintain his silence. The beginning of the end occurs with “Who Fanny Fern is Not,” appearing in the New York Evening Mirror in early March 1854. Some irony can be found in the fact that the inadvertent campaign for the truth about Sara and Nathaniel seems to have gained a renewed emphasis with an item in which the author provides an eleven-point refutation of the idea that N.P. Willis could be the brother of Fanny Fern, an “impossible” idea. Without question, “Who Fanny Fern is Not” reads like a public relations hatchet job on Willis as man and author, with this list: (1) Fanny Fern has a heart; N. P. has none; (2) Fanny Fern is free from affectation and “humbug”; N. P. is “an actor in print”; (3) Fanny Fern writes “for the people”; N. P. is “effeminate and frivolous”; (4) Fanny Fern read to farmers creates tears and laughter; N. P. is “dainty”; (5) Fanny Fern projects a “humane spirit of the times”; N. P. has “no trace of sympathy”; (6) Fanny Fern has a “noble rage”; N. P. can’t be imagined to have the same; (7) Fanny Fern is “church-going”; N. P. “anything but … devout”; (8) Fanny Fern thinks debt is a horror; everyone knows about N. P.’s bills; (9) Fanny Fern sells far more books; (10) Fanny Fern is fresh, writes without “premeditation”; N. P. is “artificial”; (11) Fanny Fern is patriotic; N. P., not so much (rpt. in CH, March 15, 1854). The piece deploys such a thoroughgoing disparagement of Willis that a reader days

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later feels compelled to defend him against the “mean attack” by insisting on Willis’s merits, mostly as a writer rather than as a person (CH, March 17, 1854). The editor and publisher of the Mirror was Hiram Fuller, who founded the newspaper with George Morris and Nathaniel Willis, and who took over the paper in 1845 when Morris and Willis leave to start the Home Journal. Fuller clearly held enough animus against Willis to join in that significant segment of the reading public who disliked him. Not long after the Mirror article, the New York Tribune publishes “A Card from Fanny Fern” (March 27, 1854), which responds to a paragraph printed earlier in the Tribune that again notes Sara’s identity, “what is widely known in the world of letters.” The claim that “Mrs. Farrington (Fanny Fern)” is the daughter of the “Veteran Printer” Mr. Willis and has two brothers elicits this sentence from Fanny: “I beg to state that, several years since, by a sudden reversal of fortune, I was deprived of all my relatives.” At this point in her career, Parton has been identified for a year and a half, yet she still attempts obfuscation with a clever turn of phrase. Thus when the Detroit Free Press references the Tribune card, the editor says that it contradicts what everybody thought they knew: she is N. P. Willis’s sister (April 1, 1854). The New Orleans Picayune understands Parton’s meaning, however, explaining that the statement signifies estrangement and not literal loss (April 7, 1854). Seeing her true identity in print (again) likely determined her to joke bitterly about the break with her older brother and father. Sara has undoubtedly started writing Ruth Hall in March, after signing a contract on February 16, 1854, that forbids her from doing any other writing so as to publish the novel as soon as possible and take advantage of Parton’s spectacular popularity (Warren 1992, 120). Parton must have relived the emotions surrounding her family’s treatment as she wrote, and so the long-standing animus against her father and brother Nathaniel finally required a public declaration. Because the latest outbreak over her identity had happened in a New York City newspaper, because both her brothers edited New York City periodicals, and because she was contemplating moving to the city (which she does in June), Sara decided to have her own say in a prominent New York City newspaper. That say no doubt circulated widely (e.g., LJ, March 31; DFP, April 1; NOP, April 7) and so forced N. P. Willis’s hand. The Home Journal ’s feature “Lesser Gossip” reprints an item from the Boston Transcript about the Willis family, in which it is noted that “three children are certainly widely known in the world of letters, viz.: N. P. Willis, Mrs. Farrington

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(Fanny Fern), and Richard S. Willis (editor of the Musical World and Times ).” The article also reprints a speech made by their father, which does not mention his children. Following the speech, N. P. Willis adds, “the pioneer of religious journalism has three literary children—ourself, Richard Storrs Willis and ‘Fanny Fern’” (HJ, April 1, 1854, original emphasis). When the Scioto Gazette refers to the uproar over the Tribune card (SG, April 25, 1854), it reveals that Parton’s denial of her family had drawn the mockery of the Boston Literary Museum, which calls the card “sarcasm.” The Literary Museum was published by George Putnam, so possibly he wrote the attack, which, in any case, calls the father “venerable” and a “worthy printer.” Moreover, the author claims that Fanny Fern owes her popularity to the “influence and friendship” of her two brothers and their publications, the Home Journal and Musical World and Times, which is manifestly not true. Then comes the real backlash: “many of her articles have been of so unchaste and lascivious character” that they would have ruined “any paper not well established.” That a Boston editor would make this claim suggests willful ignorance of the Boston Olive Branch, a religiously oriented family paper edited by the Reverend Thomas Norris, but it also demonstrates that Fanny Fern’s true identity had been common knowledge for some time, at least among the literati. The climax to this apparent mystery tale of true identity could be said to have appeared under the title “Fanny Fern,” (SG, April 29, 1854), in which Parton refers to “a kindness intended by an article in our paper some week since” that continued to link her to the Willis family and called her Mrs. Farrington: “You are entirely mistaken with regards to my affairs; I am not a Mrs. nor ever intend to be; and that your article purports that which I am wholly unacquainted with. My name is ‘Fanny Fern’ and nothing else.” After some ridicule of Fanny Fern’s icy temperament in denying her relatives, the editor continues: “She eschews all knowledge of Mrs. Farrington, all family connections whatever and glories alone in the soubriquet ‘Fanny Fern’” (original emphases). By the time Moulton publishes his supposed news about the woman behind the soubriquet in December 1854, Sara Willis Eldredge Farrington had, months before, publicly declared herself to be Fanny Fern; in a sense, she had already become Fanny Fern.

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Fanny Fern Flirts and Banters with the Public; The Public Flirts and Banters in Return Though Sara Parton had reasons both comic and serious to obfuscate her true identity, the comic efforts were continuous and did much to endear her to the reading public. One of the most notable aspects of reading the Fanny Fern writings in the order in which they appeared week after week is the conversation in print that springs up with correspondents. People do not just want to know who Fanny Fern really is; they also want to share their affection and admiration, banter in response to her comic spirit, attack her, and/or defend her. Perhaps it is not too much to say that the reading public became her comic family, perhaps even functionally a substitute for a brother and a father who refused to help her when she was faced with supporting herself and her two daughters and who denied their relationship to her for more than a year. In any case, Fanny Fern undoubtedly stimulated conversation in print and so created an imagined community of folks ready to humor her eccentricities. Much of the interaction between Fanny Fern and her public wanting to know who she really is involves the question of her marriage status. A letter from “Frank” calls her a “charming writer” and so concludes she must be a “charming lady,” a thought that apparently animates all of the expressions of affection. Frank wants her to furnish a daguerreotype and wants to know if she is married and older than twenty-five (OB, May 8, 1852). Norris steps in to respond in a way that treats Fanny Fern as Parton’s alter ego, saying Fanny has no intention to marry, and she has admirers in her circle if she did. However, he cannot forbear a bit of teasing when he claims that the revealing photo would surprise those who know her because they do not suspect the truth. “Jack Plane” from Groton writes multiple letters asking who Fanny is. He loves that she makes him “laugh and grow fat” (OB, March 6, 1852). When he writes again about Fanny and still wants to know her real name, but realizes the editor Norris will not tell, Jack concludes, “I did not know but that she was some faded and wrinkled old maid; but I am now convinced she is a sweet Fern” (OB, March 27, 1852). Mr. Norris feels obliged to enter the conversation again and respond to Jack Plane, again in a way that implies Parton’s persona functions as alter ego, saying Fanny Fern wants no notoriety, but belongs to a “respectable” family and has many friends who esteem her.

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Referring to Jack Plane, “Patience Pepper” advises Fanny Fern not to get married and offers her experience for evidence: her husband changed totally after the marriage and then ran off (OB, May 1, 1852). When “J. F.” from Portland, Maine, declares his love for Fanny Fern, he claims to be better than Jack Plane. Moreover, he will “strike” the German professor Fanny had attacked in an earlier column for his article in Blackwood’s Magazine saying woman’s character is unreliable, if she wishes—or hold her in an embrace, her choice, but he prefers the idea of using his arms for the latter task (OB, April 3, 1852). In this sequence of letters, an eligible Fanny Fern whimsically engaging the male portion of the reading public becomes clear. Fanny Fern of course must respond, writing to Norris about Jack Plane and J. F. in Portland and their offers of marriage. She wishes she could have them both, but she especially likes the fight of Jack, declaring that she hates a coward. Moreover, there are two “humans [she would] flog within an inch of their lives ” if she was physically strong enough. Whoever will whip those two—one suspects Farrington and N. P. Willis—“he’s the man for me!” She jokes that Norris should study up on the marriage vow, but repeats her caveat about the wording: when he comes to the word “OBEY,” she will “back straight out ” (OB, April 10, 1852, original emphases). Two letters from “Harry Honeysuckle” intensify the bantering with the male reading public. The first makes another request of the Olive Branch editor asking about the true identity of Fanny Fern. Harry wants Norris to divulge the secret or let him hide in the editorial office when she visits. She must be a young and sweet fern because she writes so amiably, but Harry also jokes that she must be an ugly witch because she has bewitched her readers. If she has a husband, he might be challenged to a duel, and that prospect suits Harry because either he gets rid of the husband or dies for love of her. Surely, she must be young because she is “full of fun and roguery,” which he likes because such “lively creatures are provoking” and one cannot help but love them (OB, May 29, 1852). In another letter to Norris, Harry claims that he saw Fanny Fern when someone pointed her out, and there were blushes all around. The key point—everyone out in the countryside remains curious about who she is: “I live a little out of the way, it is true, but wherever I go, and in all the communications of my correspondents, the inquiry is as constant and urgent as ever, ‘Who is Fanny Fern!’” (OB, July 10, 1852). “Jenny Jessamine” decides to turn the curiosity into cash. She does not know if

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Fanny Fern is young and single and beautiful, a matron, or an old maid, but she claims to know someone who knows the identity, and she plans to sell the information and then she will be rich (OB, May 15, 1852). One might suspect that “Harry” represents someone’s idea of a mock desperate lovesick swain. When Harry writes again, it would appear that he remains unsure if he saw Fanny Fern. Parton’s donning an old maid’s guise has changed his mind. He asks Fanny Fern to stop giving advice about the woes of marriage to the young girls because they might not marry as a consequence. That repeated advice has now convinced him that she is an old maid: “I know now you are a soulless old maid, or you are no woman at all. I know you can’t be a man. Nor you can’t be a ‘mother.’ Nor you can’t be any ‘of the girls.’ No, you are certainly an old maid. And because you couldn’t marry, you are just talking as you are, to keep the girls from marrying” (OB, July 24, 1852, original emphases). The variety of possible Fanny Ferns Harry imagines suggests Parton’s success with her shape-shifting strategy of multiple disguises. “Harry Honeysuckle” speaks intensely, but “Albert” goes him one better as a lovesick swain. Also asking in a letter to Mr. Norris to reveal Fanny Fern’s true identity, he says he will kill himself if refused. In his demand to know if Fanny Fern is very pretty and unmarried, he reveals a comic intent in his proposed vehicle to see her, as though he could travel by telegraph instead of railroad: “I know she is the brightest, the best; and if I were satisfied that she be young, pretty, with no lordly tyrant to rule over her, then would I take the Telegraph for Boston to-night; couldn’t wait the slow motion of a steam car.” Albert’s heated rhetoric suggests parody: “I can think of nothing but Fanny Fern by day, and at night a sweet creature, all smiles, with pouting lips, rosy cheeks and saucy eyes mingles with my dreams, and on waking, the word Fanny trembles on my lips.” He ends by threatening to come to the Olive Branch office and remain until he knows the truth to the mystery (OB, June 19, 1852). A variation on matrimonial desire for Fanny Fern comes in a letter signed “A. Bousett,” who purports to be married and a father. He has none of the “prying curiosity” but understands it in others. If he were single, he would want to know who she was “to see what kind of match she would make,” but he admires her in a different way, “and should above all things like to be introduced to the source from whence such sweet, witty, rich, and racy sayings emanate” (OB, May 29, 1852). While Mr. Bousett sounds sensible in his request to meet a writer he admires, all

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these letters, including the parodic love letters, express in comic or quasiserious ways the hold Fanny Fern has on the reading public’s imagination as well as the bantering manner both Parton and her public use to stage a desire to know her intimately. Notably, that hold was not confined to the male population. Eva from Lowell seems to have declared affection for Fanny Fern, who protests that she cannot love a woman. However, she will help Eva to catch her own husband instead. Parton then adds another image to her multifaced persona, Fanny Fern joking about visiting Eva “like a witch on a broomstick” (OB, January 31, 1852). A letter from E. A. B. in Vermont says, “The great question of the times, and of females in particular, is ‘Who is Fanny Fern?’” The writer goes on to allude to Jack Plane and Norris’s refusal to divulge the answer; he might be satisfied, but female readers are not, including her, and she asks Fanny Fern to reveal herself, as though a request from a woman should penetrate the veil of secrecy: “and if she thinks me too inquisitive, she can exercise some of her tender regard, and ‘thrash’ me” (OB, April 10, 1852). Who says women readers cannot appreciate irony and the comic violence Parton makes one of Fanny Fern’s signature features? Just below this letter in the same column is a poem from “Eliza” (i.e., E. A. B.), “To Fanny Fern,” which in effect asks if the pseudonym masks a man or a woman while clearly assuming the latter. Eliza asks what Fanny Fern looks like, says Fanny Fern to her is “a being kind and true” who displays “all that’s good in womankind.” Eliza finishes the poem with, “Oh mirth-provoking Fanny,/ If the genius of your pen/ Can stir the heart of woman thus/ How is it with the men?” The ambiguity of that question invites Sara—as with Eva from Lowell—to answer Eliza comically about her heterosexuality and about being a woman. “I’m a female woman! and I wish the day had been blotted out of the calendar, that wrote me down one. Such a ‘Jack’ as I might have been! It makes me mad to think of it. No help for it now. I shall know better next time.” Then, contradicting other declarations about marriage, Fanny Fern says, “It’s my present intention to get married as soon as I can get a chance.” She next lists her attractive qualities to wed in tall-talk fashion: “I am as sensitive as the ‘Mimosa,’ spirited as an eagle, and untameable [sic] as chain lightning. Can make a pudding or write a newspaper squib, cut out a child’s frock or cut a caper, and crowd more happiness or misery into ten minutes than any Fanny that ever was christened.” She tells Eliza these things in confidence because

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women are so good at keeping secrets, and praises Mr. Norris for keeping her real name a secret. “He deserves a medal from the Woman’s Rights Convention” (OB, April 17, 1852, original emphases). Parton indirectly alludes to her aggressive style by wishing she had been born a man, even as she mocks women as gossips. Using a tall-talk boast to list her attractive features as a bride undercuts the wish for marriage by once again comically asserting her independent and fun-loving temperament (“spirited as an eagle, and untameable [sic] as chain lightning”), but she also insists that her fantastic abilities include both her writing and homemaking skills. That projection of a forceful, even masculine personality, combined with traditional duties for a woman, hints at the bourgeois carnival of domesticity that Parton will comically champion throughout her early newspaper columns via her style of satire. Her use of tall talk mimicking a Backwoods Roarer’s boast is unique in the initial phase of her career for employing a well-known comic tactic of vernacular frontier humor. (More on this topic later.) “To Fanny Fern,” a poem by Winnie Woodfern, provides another declaration of love and an idealized portrait of Fanny Fern that would be a good description of the comic profile Parton is creating for her alter ego: “saucy and beautiful [with a] piquant mind … free, dark, fearless eye [and a] lip half curling up in scorn” (CB, July 24, 1852), that is, a beautiful and laughing Medusa, neither the traditional masculine satirist nor even the elastic, gendered possibility implied in the comic belles lettres aesthetic. Two weeks later another poem, “Saucy Questions” by “Optic,” who evidently has in mind the poem to Fanny Fern from Winnie Woodfern, returns to imagining Fanny Fern as an attractive candidate for marriage. The poem invokes mock pastoral (again) and then imagines both writers as young and pretty and kissable women: “What e’er they are, one thing is plain— /ye swains, with rapture burn— /these rural fairies of the quill/Must surely be Sweet Fern!” (TF, August 7, 1852). Though the poem’s language can be read as parodic, like other so-called love letters, it nevertheless registers in its way the intense interest in the woman behind Fanny Fern. Not all the letters from readers were so positive, though they nearly always retained a comic banter, even when attacking Fanny Fern. One letter writer pretends to be the fictional character Jemmy Jessamy Fanny Fern had mocked in an earlier column and complains that her “virago tongue” has made him “a public mark.” He jokes that he has heard of a newspaper position tailor-made for her because she can “write out

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thunder and lightning at a stroke” (TF, May 1, 1852). Another letter (signed simply “s”) comes from a woman who also objects to an earlier column because now her husband wants her to always be merry, like Kitty in a Fanny Fern sketch, as she does domestic work. She objects about the effects Fanny Fern’s articles have on the various kinds of people she “hits”: “you have no sort of mercy on either sex.” The writer then launches her main attack, saying no one would marry Fanny Fern since she will not obey, directly alluding to one of the four pillars of the cult of true womanhood, submissiveness. A husband would flee her in twentyfour hours. She calls Fanny a “rattler,” a “will-o’-wisp, helter-skelter, jack-o’-lantern creature!,” and then imagines her married and “used up” by domestic chores and altered from her present feisty state (OB, April 17, 1852), implying that domestic duties inevitably tame unruly women to a decidedly unmerry state. The very next week, “Nick Notion” writes to defend Fanny Fern from all the charges leveled by “s” (OB, April 24, 1852). The cross-currents of emotion swirling around Fanny Fern in the spring and summer of 1852 created a print culture version of media buzz. That attention boosted sales of the Olive Branch and True Flag, and induced Oliver Dyer, editor and publisher of the New York Musical World and Times , to offer Fanny Fern a rate double what she was being paid by the Boston papers to write exclusively for his periodical. Within a year of the Fanny Fern persona first appearing in print, Sara Parton’s career is accelerating into financial territory previously unimaginable. Part of the media buzz happened because Fanny Fern was stirring up the comic public sphere, the definition of a good satirist. One of the controversies Parton created began when Fanny Fern said in an early article that women too often indulge in scandal and gossip (OB, August 16, 1851). Months later, in January 1852, Fanny Fern asks the Olive Branch editor Norris to stop publishing complaints about that piece, saying that she feels more afraid of angry women than angry men, and joking she might have to marry because she is an unprotected single woman. Parton has in mind a particular letter from Eva, to whom she has Fanny Fern repeat the charge: “There’s no use in mincing matters, my dear; (I never could tell a lie, and I’ve tried more than a hundred times) women never make decent friends to their own sex; they are always telling each other’s secrets, and pulling each other’s caps and characters to pieces, and throwing dust in each other’s eyes, or scratching ‘em out. I

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wouldn’t trust a woman with my middle name if I didn’t want the Sandwich Islanders to hear it before sunset” (OB, January 31, 1852, original emphasis). Parton in her response to Eva demonstrates how light-hearted comic banter can become satiric critique. Eva worries that Fanny Fern’s mocking the image of a gallant lover undermines marriage, and the rather condescending promise of help in finding Eva a gallant lover implies a mocking attitude toward the assumption by Eva that a woman must be married, expressed with more than a bit of ironic sarcasm: “But my darling, I’ll tell you what I will do. I’ll give you a pattern of the prettiest dresses I have, twist you up a dainty little breakfast cap before you can pronounce ‘Kossuth’; dress your hair to a charm; lend you my prettiest pair of gaiter boots; (I couldn’t go beyond that!) and introduce you to a gentleman who will endeavor to convince you of the sinfulness of spending your precious time in loving a female woman” (OB, January 31, 1852, original emphases). Just above Fanny Fern’s response in the same column is “To ‘Eva’ from Lowell,” a letter from a man who signs himself “Frank Real” (OB, January 31, 1852). He apologizes for Fanny’s jokes about the faults of both men and women but then jokes about offering himself to Eva as a sterling candidate for marriage. Norris’s positioning of these letters suggests how much he appreciated the way Parton could engage readers across multiple issues of his paper and how much he aided the effort in order to sell more copies of the Olive Branch. Fanny Fern controversy was good for business. Some letters demonstrate that readers understood Parton’s basic comic intent. One letter writer from Maine says folks down their way do not need to know who Fanny Fern is in real life because her writings show her temperament, and then praises her, in effect, for being a truth-telling satirist (OB, May 8, 1852). “Strong-Minded Woman,” published in the Detroit Free Press , again demonstrates how Fanny Fern generates conversation for a comic public sphere, and not just in Boston, for it responds to a letter from a female reader who had attacked Fanny Fern about her “teachings concerning matrimony.” Fanny Fern wants to reform abuses, the writer retorts, which is needed (DFP, December 24, 1852). A letter from “Frank Barleycorn” admires her satiric style: “Now, Fanny, I like your out and out way of handling some subjects …. A word in your ear, Miss Fanny; you give it to the masculines about right; I wish I could say what I know, but I darsn’t because I’m a man myself. Just

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you keep on the spurs, and make a few more double knots in your whip, and lash ‘em like blazes, into good behavior. All the women will uphold you here—they’re for Fanny Fern, to a man” (OB, July 10, 1852, original emphasis). The writer here expresses a key element for the comic belles lettres aesthetic: reform motivated by benevolence even if Fanny Fern delivers the satire with metaphorical spurs and whips. The dates of these letters show that by spring of 1852, Fanny Fern had become a cultural sensation. In August, the Olive Branch capped off the reading public’s reaction to Parton’s persona by publishing a set of letters that displays a range of comments. “J. A. Johnson” commends “Mr. Norris, Mrs. Denison, and Fanny Fern” for providing such “a good family paper.” “J. R. Harrall” says, “Retain Fanny Fern as a contributor, and above all have the services of that admirable lady, Mrs. Denison, as an assistant”; “Anonymous” seems to rate Fanny Fern above the other wits appearing in the paper. After saying that it is difficult to separate “the spurious from the genuine,” that many doubt that other featured comic writers are amusing, and that those others are “trash,” Anonymous says, “Of ‘Fanny Fern,’ we have nothing to say, although there may be danger of spoiling her.” “Francesca Lowell” says, referring to Fanny Fern’s talltalk description of herself, “Now you say your eyes are black. I have more than once suspected that you sported one black eye at least. And you are sensitive as the ‘Mimosa.’ Mrs. Partington thinks it would be better if you was sensible, too. My husband thinks you have been disappointed in love, and that is what makes you so flighty.” “Fannie Dade” writes what amounts to a reader’s full-blown review and assessment, admiring both sides of Parton’s writings, the serious and the comic: My Dear Fanny: As you have gained a corner in the sunny side of my heart, permit me to come with a few words of greeting. And how shall it be? in your merry, laugh-waking, mad-cap style, or in the sweet, low strain wherewith you are wont to breathe the heart-stirring of the mother’s sorrow, or the woman’s path in life? … About your identity, as to the who, or the where, has troubled me very little. I know what you are to me in the weekly visits of the Olive Branch—a kind, loving sister, with a flashing smile that breaks through the drolleries, making me long to shake hands with you. This merry, sarcastic style always had a witching power over my mirth bump, as Mr. Fowler1 would say, for many a time a laugh would escape when I was expected to sit with real, reverential dignity, not that independence was my motive in it, that quality is out of my line, to my regret be it said, but a sense of something so ludicrous in the passing scene

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would give to the winds my efforts for control. (OB, August 28, 1852, original emphases)

Parton effectively sums up her response to all the inquiries when she answers the question is she “M.A.D.” that is, is Fanny Fern the pseudonym for the assistant editor of the Olive Branch, Mary A. Denison, who writes about half the material in the paper and signs with her initials. Fanny Fern responds that she is never mad. “She is young or old, ugly or pretty, just as you choose to fancy her, and she lives for the most part—at home. She’s amply rewarded for all her labor by the knowledge of the fact that curiosity is not confined to females! and if she has driven away the blue devils, or aided your digestion, by helping you to a hearty laugh, it is to be hoped you enjoyed it quite as well as if you had known she was — — —— as well as Fanny Fern” (OB, July 24, 1852, original emphasis). In this response, Parton justifies the trickster lying she has employed to present a shape-shifting persona: the public can make of Fanny Fern what it will. If the resulting comic laughter provoked by her alter ego has a useful, entertaining, and healthy effect, she rests content. Parton happily knows that her audience includes men, even though she takes a woman’s point of view and criticizes men for their unthinking behavior, suggesting the self-consciousness of her satire.

Fanny Fern’s Portrait for the Public The public may make of Fanny Fern what it will, but I have already shown that in a number of her newspaper columns, Sara Parton reveals details about her own temperament as she creates the variegated profile for her literary alter ego. This section will assemble more details to present the full comic self-portrait in print known as “Fanny Fern,” starting with her physical appearance. She says she is “four foot five,” “good looking of course,” of a domestic turn, always home mending clothes, etc., “generally as lively as a cricket” (BE, September 29, 1853). George Bungay says that “She has large light eyes, a healthy honest, not handsome face, beautiful bust; in a word, a form of perfect mould [sic]” (CG, June 2, 1853; rpt. from CC).2 Keeping Bungay’s phrase “not a handsome face” in mind and turning to a Fanny Fern column that takes issue with an article entitled “Author’s Phrases,” one finds a link. “Author’s Phrases” signifies routinely deployed conventional phrasing for conventional beauty. Fanny Fern makes fun of such mindless worship

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of a certain physical look. “Had the latter [Madame Kossuth] been ‘a beauty,’ the men would have all unharnessed her carriage, and made donk—!! —HORSES! of themselves!” Fanny Fern instead posits the fascinating woman who is “irresistibly magnetic” even though her physical features are not “classically beautiful” (OB, September 4, 1852, original emphasis). Bungay’s phrase should recall Parton’s early joke made over her first pseudonym, “Tabitha,” who was so ugly that her would-be husband ran away the first time he saw her in daylight. However, Fanny Fern has also claimed she is “good looking of course,” and in a column for Christmas, addresses “Sir Santa Claus” on the subject of inappropriate gifts: “Remember that dancing pumps are too suggestive for a deacon; a thimble out of place in a blue-stocking; a ‘Declaration of Independence’ a solemn mockery to a married man; a ‘guard chain’ useless for a widow, a ‘porte monnaie’ for an editor, an ear-trumpet for a pair of lovers, or a grin-stone for me,” a gift apparently similar to the knife folklore says is traditionally given to the ugliest man and so implying that she is beautiful (OB, December 25, 1852, original emphases). Parton’s trickster shape-shifting in this context has a decidedly personal coloring as she maneuvers to both claim and deny she is not conventionally beautiful while challenging the privilege of physical beauty for judging a woman. Turning from physical characteristics to Parton’s temperament displayed in Fanny Fern, one quickly encounters a crucial feature already noted, her untamable independence. Twice she has insisted that if she were to be married, the one part of the wedding vow she would not pronounce is “to obey your husband.” In her tall-talk self-description, she is “spirited as an eagle, and untameable [sic] as chain lightning.” In “Deacons’ Daughters and Ministers’ Sons,” one of Parton’s earliest pieces, signed “Tabitha,” her alter ego runs through a series of mischievous actions when younger worthy of Tom Sawyer, including “‘Stole pies at boarding-school,’ hey? and then threw the plate out the window to escape detection and cut a great gash in our minister’s son’s nose” (OB, August 9, 1851). One of Parton’s biographers, Joyce Warren, mentions her piestealing at boarding school but not the damaged nose of a minister’s son, and reveals that one of Sara’s nicknames while attending Catherine Beecher’s Hartford Female Seminary was “Sal Volatile” (Warren 1992, 31). Even though this piece is signed “Tabitha,” Parton uses details from her own experience to lay claim to the headstrong nature that Fanny Fern projects. The chain-lightning metaphor Parton uses in her tall-talk

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self-portrait suggests Fanny Fern behaves as a force of nature, not to be diverted from her chosen path and dangerous to those who might block that path, an apt description for when Fanny Fern displays the fearful power of a Medusa satirist. However, the chain-lightning metaphor also implies an immense capacity for vivacious living. Thus Fanny Fern says, “I like fun and frolic better than eating and drinking” (OB, February 28, 1852) and claims she can “crowd more happiness or misery into ten minutes than any Fanny that ever was christened” (OB, April 17, 1852, original emphasis). In this fun-loving mode, Fanny Fern again employs a tall-talk style with familiar characteristics: “I am naturally a happy, bright, energetic, warm-hearted, chain-lightning, impulsive woman—born after stages were exploded, and in the days of railroads and steam-engines. I’ve the most capacious heart that ever thumped against a silken bodice; can hate like Lucifer, and love in proportion, and be eternally grateful to any one who is kind to me” (OB, November 22, 1851; “An Interesting Husband” in FL1, 369, with changes). The phrase “hate like Lucifer” hints at Parton’s Medusa capacity for stinging epithets and caustic satire (to be explored later), perhaps most notably seen in her portrayal of her brother Nathaniel as Apollo Hyacinth; it also signals her awareness of being called an evil trouble-maker by the guardians of the sentimental family. The capacity to love or hate fiercely Fanny Fern has demonstrated before, saying she finds joy in her supposedly unmarried “spinster” state and noting if that changes, “I should be all teeth and claws” (TF, February 26, 1853), but Parton also has her alter ego claim in “Musings” that her fierce nature has a more daring pedigree than a deacon’s daughter. Fanny Fern has noticed the several hell-raising women in the Bible—such as Eve, Jael, Delilah, and Salome—and wonders if her ancestor is there in the list. If she were Mrs. Noah, she would have “stood my chance for a ducking, than to have been shut up with such a ‘promiskus’ men-agerie. Noah was a worthy old gentleman. No mention of him getting tipsy but once, I believe” (TF, February 26, 1853, original emphasis). No doubt such cheeky use of Biblical figures outraged self-styled arbiters of proper gendered behavior and fueled backlash in print. At times, Fanny Fern’s untamable nature comes across as mere eccentricity, as when she declares that she hates uniformity and loves clouds, wind, and sea because they are so changeable (“A Fern Soliloquy,” FL1, 375–376). By embracing images used to disparage women and making

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them a source of power, Parton here approaches writing what Hélène Cixous calls écriture féminine. (More on this topic later.) Such genteel eccentricity, however, easily achieves a chain-lightning impulsiveness in her response to a quote used as headnote to a piece entitled “Sober Husbands”—“If your husband looks grave, let him alone; don’t disturb or annoy him.” Fanny Fern replies, “Oh pshaw! When I’m married, the soberer my husband looked, the more fun I’d rattle about his ears.” She would do crazy things to break his mood, like put pepper in his tea, and I wouldn’t stop for the Great Mogul, till I had shortened his long face to my liking. Certainly he’d “get vexed”; there wouldn’t be any fun in teasing him if he didn’t, and that would give his melancholy blood a good healthful start, and his eyes would snap and sparkle, and he’d say, “Fanny, WILL you be quiet or not?” and I should laugh, and pull his whiskers, and say, “decidedly, Not!” And then I should tell him that he hadn’t the slightest idea how handsome he looked when he was vexed … and then he’d begin to grow amiable. (FL2, 192–93, original emphasis)

Fanny Fern in this instance simultaneously projects a domestic scene turned upside down yet a loving relationship capable of tranquil amiability; she somehow manages to transgress marital norms while simultaneously upholding them, once again displaying comic ambiguity about boundaries, invoking the trickster who “subverts and revalidates the ultimate bases” of social life (Vecsey 1993, 108). Fanny Fern’s antics in an imaginary marriage when her husband behaves much too soberly also neatly dramatizes how Parton can write as a lady satirist within the comic belles lettres’ aesthetic. Parton’s comic tactics fit her to that role because her laughter-provoking chastisements explicitly have a benevolent goal: to transform her husband’s melancholy to amiability. All the “fun” Fanny has vexing her spouse provokes in order to drive away the blues with laughter. She treats him as the satirist treats the body politic, vexing to give it “a good healthful start.” However, the degree of vexing that occurs moves Fanny Fern away from being the lady satirist and toward the Medusa satirist. In addition to putting pepper in a cup of tea, Fanny would “salt his coffee,” “sugar his beefsteak,” “hide his newspaper,” “sew up his pockets,” and “dip his cigars in water.” Fanny supplements this sabotage of the domestic sphere with physical pain, planning to “tread on his toes” and “put pins

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in his slippers,” and of course “pull his whiskers.” The hilarious exuberance of Fanny Fern’s list of vexations, enacting a tall-tale attitude toward the problem of a husband whose behavior needs adjusting, takes her beyond the manners of the satirist as a lady targeting social ills with comic ridicule. If the domestic sabotage represents the ridicule inherent in teasing, madcap but amiable, the images of physical pain suggest caustic satire applied to the body politic, the possibility of the Medusa satirist. With an impulsive, chain-lightning temperament, Fanny Fern “can hate like Lucifer, and love in proportion.” Benevolence as motive for ridicule, a comic tough love, justifies the belles lettres satirist, but Parton clearly projects Fanny Fern’s variable style of satire as potentially dangerous to masculine prerogative and cultural norms about marriage. Fanny Fern’s strategy to banish a grave mood, therefore, registers as complicated in comic terms. The scenario features teasing, an amiable interaction among good friends and loving couples, but the underlying dynamic spotlights a wife determined to alter her husband’s behavior “to my liking.” She claims a benevolent motive—to “give his melancholy blood a good healthful start”—yet the tactics have an outrageous quality that signals her determination to set the domestic tone. Her laugh in the midst of the emotional chaos would presumably be chameleon-like, first laughing at the husband and his vexation and then laughing with him when he grows amiable. Fanny Fern advises every woman to make understanding human nature a crucial “branch of her education” (FS1, 385) before getting married, which can certainly be seen in this example when she says how handsome he looks when vexed. The comic campaign to reinvent the husband presents Fanny Fern as impishly mischievous, laughably blowing up any pretense to be a wife submissive to her husband’s every mood before she manages to restore an amiable harmony to the household. She creates a domestic economy that demands merriment, even sometimes of a low-watt devilish sort. “Sober Husbands” no doubt arrested the attention of the reading public, yet one suspects that it represents the Fanny Fern demeanor that most angered certain segments of that public while it made other segments laugh. Put into practice, Fanny Fern’s independent streak often defies stereotypes such as the submissive wife. When she says that women need to be fair to each other and stop passing around scandal, she declares herself to like the boys more than girls (OB, August 16, 1851) and denigrates women as gossips. In a letter to Mr. Norris, Fanny Fern challenges standard parameters for ladylike behavior, lamenting that she is unable to be a

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lady as defined in a recent newspaper because she goes out on a rainy day (OB, December 27, 1851). In a piece that might be an actual incident thinly fictionalized, Mehitable Prim, a stereotyped prude, cuts Fanny’s acquaintance when she speaks to a man in the street she does not know to ask him to lift her niece over a big mud puddle, again defying the conventions that constrict respectable women (OB, March 27, 1852). Fanny Fern’s impulsive and vivacious nature can lead her to joking about sexual attraction, undermining one of the pillars of so-called true womanhood, purity. She writes to Norris saying she has changed her mind about the Hungarian patriot, Kossuth; she thinks Mrs. Kossuth is “non compos ” because she did not respond to his public gesture to her when she arrived in Boston. Moreover, Fanny Fern declares she is bewitched, joking about throwing herself at him, not flowers, and wonders if Mrs. Kossuth is in good health, and does he need an amanuensis to help him against his detractors; her only ammunition for defense would be a gridiron and a darning needle. She says she heard him speak at Faneuil Hall and can’t understand why everyone isn’t on his side and some call him a humbug. She is “magnitized” by him, and will need laudanum to calm her and a straight-jacket to restrain her (OB, May 8, 1852, original emphases).3 Fanny Fern joking about her attraction to Kossuth epitomizes Parton’s most daring opposition to the cult of true womanhood. It is one thing to claim the virtues of a carnival treatment of a grave husband’s mood, as she does in “Sober Husbands”; it is quite another to admit to having an attraction to a man, for a key aspect of supposed true womanhood centers on the claim that women were naturally “passionless” and so had little or no sexual desire (Goshgorian 1992, 49, 224, n. 44). Fanny Fern decidedly compounds her defiance of polite rules because the man is a public figure. “A Model Husband” provides another instance of Parton inverting the pure and passionless wife by projecting yet another comic disguise for Fanny Fern, who now imagines being ready to remarry, despite a widow’s devotion, “quicker than a flash of chain-lightning,” if a first husband provided money and his blessing. Moreover, she imagines her contentment with a sensuous image, saying, “I’d have been as happy as a humming-bird in a lily cup, drowsy with honey dew—see if I wouldn’t!” (TF, February 12, 1853, original emphasis).4 No doubt the editor of the Boston Literary Museum had such items in mind when he accused Fanny Fern of writing “unchaste and lascivious” articles, though, as will be shown later, there are more obvious candidates for such categories.

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Perhaps he would have paired Fanny Fern with the notorious Lola Montes for such frankness (OB, April 3, 1852). With Parton, the literary alter ego Fanny Fern effectively fuses with the author—Sara is Fanny and Fanny Sara for the reading public—which illustrates why Parton engages in the elaborate hide-and-seek with her readers about the person behind the pseudonym. As a member of the famous Willis family, Sara hid in plain sight. As a widow and then a divorcee, Sara hid in plain sight to protect her daughters; it did not help that the divorce was emotionally and legally messy and already too public as her writing career began to rocket toward celebrity. As a satirist writing from a strong woman’s point of view, she again hid in plain sight, pouring her temperament and her experience into her sentimental stories and trenchant satires.

Notes 1. Orson and Lorenzo Fowler and their sister Charlotte were leading advocates of phrenology. 2. It is likely the Cayuga Chief reprinted this sketch from a Boston periodical. George Washington Bungay (July 22, 1818–July 10, 1892) was a poet, journalist, biographer, and an anti-slavery and temperance reformer. In 1856, Bungay joined the editorial staff of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. There he worked with such famed writers as George Ripley, Charles A. Dana, Fanny Fern, Bayard Taylor, and Whitelaw Reid. His Crayon Sketches and Off-Hand Takings of Distinguished American Statesmen, Orators, Divines, Essayists, Editors, Poets, and Philanthropists (1852) was originally printed serially in the Boston New Englander starting in 1850. No doubt during his association with that periodical he first met Parton. 3. Kossuth spoke twice at Faneuil Hall: April 29 and May 14. He faced opposition from abolitionists because he was neutral on slavery. Frederick Douglass denounced him, and the President of Harvard, Jared Sparks, called him a humbug. 4. Parton wrote two sketches with this title. The other appears in the second Fern Leaves, 116–17.

Satirizing Gender Expectations: Fanny Fern as the Impossible Subject

Sara Parton’s ascent to the rank of popular comic writer was astonishingly swift, and she captures the emotional roller coaster entailed a mere six months after first being published when she addressed a reader: “you labor under the hallucination that I felt merry when I wrote all that nonsense! Not a bit of it; it’s a way I have, when I can’t find a razor handy to cut my throat!” (OB, January 31, 1852, original emphases). Parton implies the emotional pain that underpins the comic outrage that often fuels satire. One must feel deeply about certain topics to write satire of an acerbic or caustic sort. Her comment insists on an emotional relief had from writing satire, a point that brings up the temperament of the satirist within the aesthetic of comic belles lettres. The tenor and tone of satire within that aesthetic mirrors the temperament of the satirist. The varied tones in the range of critiques Parton mounts about domestic topics, including religious piety and faith, therefore, create for the reading public a complicated persona whose calling as comic preacher demands the truth-telling of satire both amiable and caustic. This chapter examines what I take to be the core topic for Parton as satirist: gendered expectations for behavior. Though this topic includes the more explicitly public side of Fanny Fern—her comic takes on the mores of the day, on literary ladies, women’s rights, and women’s strategies to gain those rights—in Parton’s satiric world the private is also the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 J. E. Caron, The Modern Feminine in the Medusa Satire of Fanny Fern, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41276-9_4

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public. Not only how society expects men and women to be gentlemen and ladies, but also how men and women expect the opposite sex to treat them, in particular within the institution of marriage, become facets of her core topic that have public sphere implications despite their inherent private domesticity. Though Parton critiques parenting norms and worries about her faith in a benevolent Providence, when husbands and wives become the topic, she presents a contradictory attitude, one that accepts marriage as an institution—but with caveats. Fanny Fern both supports the traditional angel in the house motif yet undercuts with sarcasm and slapstick the motif’s implication of inevitable marital bliss. This contradiction can be seen in a formal binary that structures Parton’s writings on marriage: pieces that moralize without being comic and thus endorse social norms, some of which have been discussed when the topic entangles religion and spirituality; comic pieces that moralize in satiric fashion and thus ridicule social norms, hints of which have also been discussed previously. This contradiction replicates what scholars have found in the novels of the literary domestics: both support for and questioning of the ideology of the sentimental family and its woman-belle ideal. This ambivalence about cultural norms for gender behavior becomes entwined with the ambivalence Mary Kelley documents for the literary domestics about being successful writers: fame never was part of a woman’s supposed destiny, and so they felt “uncomfortable” in the public eye of the literary market, at best “ambivalent, at worst that they simply did not belong there” (1984, 29). Though Parton as Fanny Fern replicates the contradiction of both supporting and mocking the pillars of the cult of true womanhood, she does not project an ambivalence about being a successful writer. The contradiction over the value of marriage and the core topic of gendered behaviors becomes more obvious when comparing the first series of Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio to the second. The differences in the second collection of Fanny Fern newspaper columns intrigue because they suggest an arc to Parton’s early career as a satirist. Most importantly, Parton places more emphasis on gendered behaviors and marriage while de-emphasizing spiritual matters, plus providing fewer pathetic tales. As Parton elaborates and explores her Fanny Fern persona in columns reprinted in the second collection, her manifest success with the first collection apparently encouraged her to take a more overtly satiric stance.

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In addition, as a result of Parton moving to New York City in June 1853, Fanny Fern also becomes something of a flaneuse, reporting on strolls about the city and particular events, such as the opening of the Crystal Palace, an activity that in itself represents Parton’s own convention-defying behavior about the public mobility of women (Warren 1992, 109–16; Walker 1993, 17). These perambulations offer a chance to comment more directly on civic affairs, but they also provide an opportunity to discuss the mundane, for example, shops and shopping. The fashionable world remains a comic butt, while the family and proper parenting also retain a prominent place. Inevitably, Fanny Fern overturns and ridicules norms, stereotypes, and conventional thinking as she writes up her experiences and imagines dramatic scenarios. Already noted are parenting topics: alternative ways to keep the Sabbath without harming children and advice on how to treat overly exuberant children, but she also advises on other domestic topics. She questions typical images for stepmothers, old maids, and women as the weaker vessel, reversing those images with tales of women capable of achieving success and independence. Both collections feature in particular Fanny Fern’s disregard and even disrespect for standard gendered behavior, as well as her embodiment of what might be called her version of the new woman circa 1853. These aspects of Fanny Fern remain as the most important for considering Sara Parton as a satirist within the discursive formation of amiable laughter.

Fanny’s Conversation with Social Convention One important strategy for Parton in her comic critiques of gendered expectations and behaviors involves a chronic habit of simple pushback against circulating stereotypes. Her basic strategy relies on Fanny Fern’s direct confrontation of stereotypes about the behaviors of women in which she often inverts a normative attitude or conventional situation. Thus “Curious Things” attacks the idea that only women behave jealously (Fl2, 48). “Mr. Punch Mistaken” responds to the periodical Punch claiming that men will admit they are wrong, but women will not (FL2, 257), while “The Time to Choose” (FL2, 261) responds with the same point to another periodical advising young men to propose marriage in the morning after ten because before that time women are sulky or slatternly: men behave the same way. Even when these confrontations have

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a minimum of comic techniques, they function as truth-telling against social norms. More than once Fanny Fern’s critique invites laughter at the stereotype that women are naturally extravagant. “Mr. Pipkin’s Ideas of Family Retrenchment” (FL2) makes it clear that he behaves as the extravagant one in the family, refusing to cut back on his expenditures for clothes, wines, and cigars. Parton also changes the focus on family finance by discussing how the stereotype about women’s extravagance leads to a bad habit of husbands: forcing wives to ask for money. Strictly speaking, argues Fanny Fern, not enough money exists to pay a wife for all she does: e.g., nursing a husband behaving like a “big baby” when he is sick. A husband would have to be a beast (“a polar bear”) or a savage (“a Hottentot”) to wait for a wife to ask for money (“A Lady on Money Matters,” FL1, 383). Moreover, wives can be trusted with a large denomination, though Fanny Fern does make a distinction that provides a good example of how Parton’s caustic phrasing powers her satiric observations: I’m not speaking of those doll-baby libels upon womanhood, whose chief ambition is to be walking advertisements for the dressmaker; but a rational, refined, sensible woman, who knows how to look like a lady upon small means; who would love and respect a man less for requiring an account of every copper; but who, at the same time, would willingly wear a hat or garment that is “out of date,” rather than involve a noble, generoushearted husband in unnecessary expenditures. (“Women and Money,” FL2, 247)

The pieces on family finances demonstrate how Parton’s satire does not necessarily ridicule marriage but rather targets particular kinds of wives (“doll-baby libels on womanhood”) and husbands behaving badly (“Hottentot” or “polar bear”) in favor of responsible wives and respectful husbands. Mocking certain behaviors, Fanny Fern ratifies proper values. When marriage per se becomes a topic for dramatization, Parton presents an ambivalence that might remind readers of the way she explores the concept of Providence in her more earnest writings. At times, Parton idealizes marriage by idealizing woman, as in the parable of “Elsie’s First Trial.” In fairy-tale fashion, Fanny Fern unfolds a tale of rollercoaster emotions centering on a test. Elsie lives happily married until her somewhat erratic husband Harry says that he will visit his old flame, Marion. Fanny Fern contrasts the perfection of domestic happiness in the

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beginning of the sketch with Elsie’s wretched state of mind while she waits for Harry to return. His distraction continues; he seems infatuated with Marion. Nevertheless, Elsie stays faithful, patient, and steadfast— yet proactive. She visits Marion and convinces her to leave town. The moral: Elsie’s (and Marion’s) goodness saves Harry from himself. “Kitty’s Resolve” implies a similar moral: a faith in the stereotype of a woman’s true power to love and redeem a wayward man. Kitty dazzles everyone at a ball, presented by Fanny Fern as a kind of fairy-tale scene of romantic idealism, but Kitty has realized the “butterfly existence” of fashionable friends (FL1, 129). Only Harvey among her acquaintances stands out as a true gentleman, but he has one fault. She will save him, a noble purpose beyond just thinking of her pleasures in a fashionable life. His fault? He drinks. However, woman has “an angel’s power” (FL1, 132) to save, and Kitty’s love rescues Harvey and establishes the foundation for their happy marriage. While stories such as “Elsie’s First Trial” and “Kitty’s Resolve” show Parton capable of expressing without irony social norms about a woman enacting the cult of true womanhood, she can also muster ridicule toward a standard view of the relationship of husbands and wives, as examples examined in the previous chapter have shown. Indeed, more often Fanny Fern’s basic attitude entails ridicule of such norms as the ideal of the angel in the house embodied in Coventry Patmore’s 1854 poem. For example, “The Flirt, or the Unfaithful Lover” completely negates confidence in a woman’s angelic moral power. Kate behaves as an “arrant coquette” (FL1, 271), bored and desiring a “new sensation.” Her friend Nelly is not as beautiful, but rather “fascinating and intellectual” (FL1, 272). Nelly uses Kate as a test for the love of her fiancé, Fitz. He is not a “fop” but a splendid man, with “cultivated manners” (FL1, 274), yet he fails the test, implicitly condemning men who value physical beauty more than intellectual capabilities. Such satiric takes on gendered behavior, before and during marriage, include a comic challenge in “Aunt Hetty on Matrimony” (FL1), not to the institution of marriage but to stereotypical women’s attitudes about being married. Fanny Fern also ridicules women who complain after being married, while warning in particular of the risk and consequences of marrying a dullard. Parton organizes the piece with a comic set of complaints about the worst in husbands, but ends ridiculing the foolishness of entertaining thoughtlessly the supposedly inherent happiness of being married. Aunt Hetty advises the girls who are her interlocutors not

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to marry at all, but bets that they will anyway: the world is half fools, half idiots, she declares. Aunt Hetty clearly voices a world-weary if not cynical take on marriage, probably why Parton voices another character instead of her Fanny Fern persona. In “The Tears of a Wife,” Parton again targets the misplaced values concerning marriage that lurk behind bad behaviors: Your mind never being supposed to be occupied with any other subject than himself, of course a tear is a tacit reproach. Besides, you miserable little whimperer! What have you to cry for? A-i-n-t y-o-u m-a-r-r-i-e-d? Isn’t that the summum bonum, —the height of feminine ambition? You can’t get beyond that! It is the jumping off place! You’ve arriv! [sic]—got to the end of your journey! Stage puts up there! You have nothing to do but retire on your laurels, and spend the rest of your life endeavoring to be thankful that you are Mrs. John Smith! “Smile!” you simpleton! (FL1, 324–25, original emphasis)

Expressed in forcefully sarcastic terms (and this time in Fanny Fern’s voice), the piece sharply ridicules not only the supposed importance of a woman having a husband to whom she must always be devoted, twentyfour seven, but also the notion that a wish to be married comprises the essence of woman. “Owls Kill Hummingbirds” continues the comic critique against a woman mindlessly accepting marriage as her life’s goal by warning against believing that opposites attract. A headnote commenting that a man can be manly even if playful at times leads Fanny Fern to another favorite topic: a woman as lively as a hummingbird who marries a thickwit as solemn as an owl. Her advice in this essay: a woman having a “bump of mirthfulness” should never marry a “tombstone, [someone] as genial as the north side of a meeting house” (FL1, 397, 398), for a kind of spiritual death will ensue. Again, Fanny Fern’s comic imperative to be merry in domestic precincts shows. However, when Fanny Fern operates at full throttle within a ridiculing mode, satirizing standard social attitudes about women and stereotypes about gendered behavior, her portrayal of a literary woman, a so-called bluestocking, stages the most forceful challenge to those attitudes. “Bluestocking” refers to an English literary society founded by Elizabeth Montagu in the 1750s. Until the late eighteenth century, the term had referred to learned people of both sexes, but subsequently was applied

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primarily to intellectual women, with negative implications. Anne Mellor (2013) quotes several such assessments, ending with a vituperative simile by an unidentified writer in The British Critic: “The bluestocking is the most odious character in society;... she sinks wherever she is placed, like the yolk of an egg, to the bottom, and carries the filth and the lees with her” (24). Such patriarchal venom indicates the high stakes when challenging the stereotype, while suggesting why the literary domestics expressed concern about being women authors. Presenting woman as author also rates as the most personal challenge for Parton; part of the emotional power in her periodical writing stems from her habit of re-living her own traumas in her fictional characters (not being merry but can’t find a handy razor). Sara Parton lived the bluestocking role. Being a self-supporting woman and mother, competing in the literary marketplace with her persona Fanny Fern and winning, Parton forcefully undermined patriarchal claims about what women should be and what they could be, what they could accomplish. Being a comic belles lettres lady satirist of the usually milder Addisonian sort nevertheless grates on some folks with conventional views about gender because the variable satire—amiable or caustic—entailed in the figure supposedly cancels being a lady. To be a female not just with an independent point of view, but also one with a potentially sharp satiric tongue to express it and the periodical platform for thousands to hear it, marks a woman as masculine or, at best, not feminine in the classical sense of possessing the divine composure projected by the angel in the house who embodies the cult of true womanhood. Perhaps the biggest stereotype about a female author entails the claim that any woman who takes up writing professionally must necessarily be a complete failure as a housewife. In “A Practical Bluestocking,” Parton derides the myth that a literary wife must be “untidy, slatternly, [with] inky fingers, frowzled hair, rumpled dress, and slip-shod heels” (FL1, 101, 100), a slander that Parton herself endured (SG, January 5, 1855). Emma Lee the bluestocking wife explodes the stereotype: goodlooking, cheerful, and practical as well as competent in domestic affairs. Her husband James rests perfectly content with his situation. True love forms the base of the marriage. Moreover, the income from Emma’s writing saved the family when James’s business fell on hard times. They enjoy a partnership on economic as well as emotional grounds. “A Practical Bluestocking” does not just defend women authors; it imagines one in domestic bliss. Emma Lee embodies the ideal literary

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bluestocking. Perfect wife, mother, and homemaker as well as successful author, she represents the woman who has it all, an alternative ideal to the angel in the house for women in general. Parton welds together a conservative satire in the service of status quo, invoking a domestic femininity classical in its orderly serenity, with a subversive satire in the service of a radically new viewpoint, representing the modern feminine of the new woman, a third way to imagine marriage. The bluestocking as perfect wife simultaneously upholds conventional domesticity and challenges the patriarchal assumptions at its economic and emotional foundations. In this little drama, Parton highlights the attitudes of the men toward female authors that contribute to the consistent allegory about gender roles she creates in her periodical writing. The contentment of the husband James symbolizes a utopia of marital bliss, while Harry, the husband’s best friend, holds the stereotypical single male’s view. Harry symbolizes conventional thinking. The magic of the plot happens with Harry’s transformation from that view to a de facto agreement with the contentment of James Lee. Harry’s uncle, Mr. Seldon, provides a glimpse of the enlightened man on the subject of bluestockings, an attitude signaled by his “peculiar smile” (FL1, 100) when he asks Harry to call on his old friend as a favor. Seldon has seen the Lee household, presumably, and moreover has seen, prophetically, what will happen when Harry makes his social call. A smile signaling Mr. Seldon’s progressive attitude perfectly captures how the comic belles lettres gentleman embodies Enlightenment principles in laughter-prompting fashion.1 The parable of a single man’s transformed view about literary women proved compelling enough for Parton to repeat it in the first collection with “A Chapter on Literary Women.” Parton presents her sketch this time in a dramatic dialogue in which the Colonel retails stereotypical ideas about women writers, especially “satirical” ones: they cannot be “feminine” (FL1, 175). The Colonel does not want a smart woman, but only one that thinks of him instead of an audience. Minnie plays his interlocutor in the drama, an exponent of the literary woman’s point of view. The Colonel marries a woman who turns out to be an author, but they too are happy, and he concludes that he does not mind her being a writer. He completely converts, another example of conventional thinking turned inside out. Parton again represents the possibility of domestic happiness with a bluestocking wife, replicating the Lee household: “a woman may be literary, and yet feminine and lovable” (FL1, 179). In what clearly represents a comic turn of irony against the blind rigidity of men like

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the Colonel, Parton has Minnie introduce the Colonel to his future wife, obviously knowing that she is a writer but also obviously knowing that it will not matter. “A Chapter on Literary Women” stands out not only because Minnie has a speech that expresses the female author’s temperament, but also because the Colonel reveals the psychology of a masculine ego threatened by an intelligent and articulate woman who feels deeply and stands ready to stake her claim as an artist: Fancy me walking meekly by her side, known only as Mr. Somebody, that the talented Miss——— condescended to marry. Horrible! Minnie, I tell you, literary women are a sort of nondescript monsters; nothing feminine about them. They are ambitious as Lucifer; else, why do they write? “Because they can’t help it,” said Minnie, with a flashing eye. “Why does a bird carol? There is that in such a soul that will not be pent up, —that must find voice and expression; a heaven-kindled spark, that is unquenchable; an earnest, soaring spirit, whose wings cannot be earthclipped. These very qualities fit it to appreciate, with a zest none else may know, the strong, deep love of a kindred human heart. Reverence, respect, indeed such a soul claims and exacts; but think you it will be satisfied with that? No! It craves the very treasure you would wrest from it, Love! That there are vain and ambitious female writers, is true; but pass no sweeping condemnation; there are literary women who have none the less deserved the holy names of wife and mother, because God has granted to them the power of expressing the same tide of emotions that sweep, perchance, over the soul of another, whose lips have never been touched ‘with a coal from the altar.’”2 (FL1, 176–77)

One suspects that Minnie herself is a writer, with this passionate and poetic defense. The stereotypical view insisting that a literary woman must be unfeminine implicitly denies her the possibility of romance and love, to which Fanny Fern objects. Here arises again an apparent contradiction within Parton’s attacks on standard gender roles, for her satire ridicules neither romance nor marriage. Her claims for literary women do not advocate shunning men and the married state, but instead despise rigid patriarchal assumptions concerning male superiority and the limits to a woman’s capability, especially if those assumptions limit a woman to being little more than a husband’s arm ornament wearing the latest fashionable dress. Vanity, selfishness, and an empty-headed desire for marriage at any cost comprise Parton’s true comic butts.

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Moreover, Minnie’s language underscores the deep-seated quality of Parton’s belief in the possibility of a good marriage: the names of wife and mother are “holy.” Just as deep-seated, however, is the need for a woman writer to write, an impulse as natural as a bird singing. That impulse signals a gift given by God, and elsewhere, Parton makes clear what duty a writer has as a result, regardless of gender: to understand the vocation as “a blank page to be filled by your hand with holy truth” (FL1, 47). The core of Parton’s Fanny Fern persona as belles lettres lady satirist symbolizes her mission as comic preacher: God shaped Parton’s life to be a writer who will be a comic truth-teller, using amiable satire if possible, and caustic satire if necessary—both the lady satirist and the laughing Medusa.

The Impossible Subject Because Parton is living the life of a successful woman author when Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio is published in 1853 and the second series appears in 1854, knocking down the prevailing negative bluestocking stereotype matters personally. Moreover, because Parton had to accomplish her success as a widow whose family refused to help her, emotional trauma accompanied that success. Several examples from the first collection demonstrate how Parton has been working through that trauma by fictionalizing triumph over it. Thus, she often portrays the female writer as a widow (“The Widow’s Trials” and “Comfort for the Widow”), or someone who has been abused emotionally by her family (“Our Hatty”) or abandoned by her family after she has made a bad marriage (“A Page from a Woman’s Heart; or, Female Heroism”). In various ways, the female protagonist overcomes obstacles in these narratives to achieve a notable measure of success, sometimes independently and sometimes with the help of others. In her representation of woman as author, in living the role of a comic belles lettres lady who functions as Thackeray’s comic preacher, Parton also inscribes an image of woman within what Hélène Cixous (1976) calls écriture féminine: writing that represents “the woman who would hold out against oppression and constitute herself as a superb, equal, hence ‘impossible’ subject, untenable in a real social framework” (879). Imagining Fanny Fern as a comic belles lettres writer, as a woman author unafraid of her satiric aspect, Parton gestures toward the impossible subject, that is, writing woman as an equal to any man who writes, even

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(or perhaps especially) as a writer writing satire, a traditionally masculine comic mode. Parton in one instance can lightheartedly present the mundane difficulties of being the impossible subject—an author yet a wife and a mother. “Mrs. Adolphus Smith Sporting the Blue Stocking” creates a comic scene in which all sorts of domestic distractions thwart Mrs. Smith from writing and lead to her laughing summary of the day: “it’s no use for a married woman to cultivate her intellect” (FL2, 102). However, Parton more often dramatizes what Cixous might mean by the impossibility of the equal female subject. Pompous Mr. Broadbrim, for example, epitomizes the thoughts of male editors and critics who act appalled at the success of an authoress, Miss Fiddlesticks. He believes he will “annihilate her with one stroke of [his] pen.” Not only is Miss Fiddlesticks’s style and talent inferior according to Mr. Broadbrim, “she is an incorrigible sinner” (FL2, 63, 64). This piece undoubtedly spotlights the contemporary negative criticism against Parton and her Fanny Fern persona (More on this topic later). A companion piece for this theme would be “Critics,” the headnote for which defines critics as “Bilious wretches, who abuse you because you write better than they” (FL2, 87). Fanny Fern’s completely ironic agreement follows, which she creates with counter-examples, such as, “I never heard of an unsuccessful masculine author, whose books were drugs in the literary market, speak with a sneer of successful literary feminity [sic], and insinuate that it was by accident, not genius, that they hit the popular favor!” (FL2, 87). Such attacks make clear that Fanny Fern does not embody the passivity supposedly endemic to female nature. Fanny Fern’s examples imply an ideal critic who behaves as a true man. Parton elaborates this distinction between genuine and phony men in “Have We any Men Among Us?” After seeing a placard on the street, “MEN WANTED,” Fanny Fern offers this scathing observation: “Well; they have been ‘wanted’ for some time; but the article is not in the market, although there are plenty of spurious imitations” (FL2, 181). Fanny Fern lists petty and vicious acts by editors that must have happened to Parton to imply that no worthy men exist in the year 1853 and ends by reprinting a newspaper item about a woman shooting a man for his calumnies of her. That gloss from an actual violent event suggests a level of desperation for the impossible subject far beyond a comic treatment, however satirically caustic, and grimly implies what Cixous says about the untenable nature of the equal subject in a real social framework. One

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might also recall the violent image that began this section, when Fanny Fern says that her satire is necessary when “I can’t find a razor handy to cut my throat,” a glimpse of a woman’s fear, anger, and outrage that can fuel the most bitter of satires. Parton repurposes acknowledged attributes of the literary bluestocking to generalize the superb and equal and thus impossible subject when Fanny Fern attacks the prevailing view in antebellum America that men were naturally superior to women, intellectually. Using her often-repeated tactic of ironically reversing standard thinking on a topic, Fanny Fern in “The Weaker Vessel,” the title of which obviously refers to women, argues that weaker should be understood as superior. The item’s headnote, a quote from a French writer, claims that women are invariably ahead of men: “‘When a man has toiled step by step, up a flight of stairs, he will be sure to find a woman at the top’” (FL1, 337). Fanny Fern elaborates the image, saying that “when an American woman gets to the top of that mental staircase, she is obliged to appear entirely unconscious of it.... So we sit on ‘that top stair’ and laugh in our sleeve at them—all the time demurely deferring to their opinion” (FL1, 337). This strategy of carnival inversion—a woman accepting the stereotype of being called the weaker vessel while knowing herself to be in fact the opposite—leads to advice employing a similar strategy for how women should assert their will: “Ask their [men’s] advice, and they’ll be sure to follow yours. Look one way, and pull another!” (FL1, 347). In making this counter-intuitive suggestion, Fanny Fern separates the domestic from the political: “In the first place, my dear woman, ‘female rights’ is debatable ground; what you might call a ‘vexed question.’ In the next place,... granted we had ‘rights,’ the more we ‘demand,’ the more we shan’t get them. I’ve been converted to that faith this some time. No sort of use to waste lungs and leather trotting to Sigh-racuse about it” (FL1, 346; original emphasis; partially quoted in BE, March 12, 1853). For Parton, the mistake would be a frontal assault of the Bunker Hill variety on patriarchal norms—advice which, with a pun, Fanny Fern explicitly links to the third National Women’s Rights convention held in Syracuse during September, 1852. Control can be had, but only with “reins of silk” (FL1, 347). In two other pieces, “What Mrs. Smith Said” (FL1) and “Mrs. Croaker” (FL1) Parton dramatizes her anti-Bunker Hill stratagem: the wives trick their husbands by asking them to do the opposite of what Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Croaker want. This jujitsu technique creates a worldturned-upside-down view of the standard power relationship of the sexes,

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and Parton again generalizes its meaning, Fanny Fern making a comic comment on people when Mrs. Croaker sums up the efficacy of her reverse psychology: “‘You see there’s nothing like understanding human nature! No woman should be married til she is thoroughly posted up in this branch of her education’” (FL1, 385). “Wasn’t You Caught Napping?” also delivers Fanny Fern’s advice about the difference between asserting one’s will domestically and acquiring one’s rights politically, again using a quote as a pretext, one taken from a British newspaper repeating what Martin Farquhar Tupper said in one of the many editions of Proverbial Philosophy, first published 1837, about the choice of a wife: “‘Hath she wisdom? It is well, but beware that thou exceed!’” (FL1, 380). Tupper’s maxim assumes as axiomatic that men fear a smart woman, motive for the popularity of the weaker vessel theory. Fanny Fern jokes that, in America, wives who exceed their husbands in wisdom are already ubiquitous. Her advice for women, again, involves subterfuge when employing that superior intellect, and she includes another explicit jab at the political suffragettes: All femality3 is wide awake, over here Mr. Tupper. They crowd, they jostle, and push, just as if they wore hats. I don’t uphold them in that, because, as I tell them, ‘tis better policy to play possum, and wear the mark of submission. No use in rousing any unnecessary antagonism. But they don’t all know as much as I do. I shall reach the goal just as quick, in my velvet shoes, as if I tramped on rough-shod, as they do, with their Women’s Rights Convention brogans! (FL1, 380–81)

The claim to be wearing “the mark of submission” implies the conventional image of a woman in a marriage. In this piece, the married state entails the default scene for Parton, in which domestic control rather than political suffrage names her goal. Parton dramatizes that goal of asserting homebound rights by imagining Fanny Fern as a wife obtaining them from a husband, which entails a possum subterfuge. Parton implies that the stereotyped masculine ego cannot be changed but can be worked around. Moreover, for all of Fanny Fern’s repeatedly challenging gender stereotypes with her image of the bluestocking as perfect wife, “playing possum” works as a vernacular endorsement of the stereotype of the devious woman—but for a worthy goal. Fanny Fern’s pretense of being submissive changes the normative cultural discourse of wives obeying husbands, like the trickster Hermes

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who lies to Apollo about stealing his cattle. As Lewis Hyde puts it, “Spoken at the boundary of what is and is not the case,... his lies unsettled and moved that boundary” (1998, 74). Patriarchy would read Fanny Fern’s proposed subterfuge as an echo of Eve handing the apple to Adam, as proof of an innate duplicity. Read as a different mythic gesture, Fanny Fern’s suggested behavior operates outside the patriarchy’s narrative, an instance of Trickster’s function as culture-bearer. The betwixt and between of liminality generates new ideas and metaphors, speculating with comic mental energy. “The ingredients of such moments—surprise, quick thinking, sudden gain—suffuse them with humor” (Hyde 1998, 130; see also Turner 1969). Parton thus contradicts herself, inhabits a liminal space, by wishing for a comically inverted domestic world that, despite its apparent subversion, nevertheless somehow maintains its conventional parameters. The most interesting aspect of Parton’s tangling with the then current movement for women’s political rights stems from an oxymoronic twist she imagines as alternative—a bourgeois carnival—when dramatizing how a woman best achieves her rightful place in the domestic sphere. This bourgeois carnival can be read as something like the double move Hélène Cixous advocates in her call for écriture féminine, which involves rewriting and thus re-purposing gender stereotypes. Écriture féminine inscribes the feminine, but not the traditionally classical kind in which woman is figured as possessing a “divine composure” (1976, 876). Instead, Cixous advocates a modern femininity that projects subversive power, but she does so by employing images traditionally associated with women: “floods,” “outbursts,” and “waves” (1976, 876, 889)—overflows. In this rewriting of the feminine, woman projects an “ephemeral wildness,” “labyrinths,” a subject with an “imaginary [that] is inexhaustible” (1976, 879, 878, 876), a force destructive yet of intense “fragility” (1976, 886). Fanny Fern personifies the doubled move of écriture féminine in her claim that power accrues through wearing “the mark of submission,” that is, her comic stratagem of appearing to be unconscious of sitting on the top step of a symbolic intellectual staircase. Parton thus advocates, with some irony, embracing the stereotype of the submissive wife as the gambit for an assertion of self within the traditional inequality of the conventional marriage. Consider this wisdom from Miss Tabitha in “Our Hatty”: “It is every woman’s duty to be lovely and attractive” (FL1, 36). What could be more conventional? Clearly, the duty is to be what men want women

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to be as potential brides and ornamental wives. Nevertheless, Parton puts this maxim into the mouth of someone opposite to this image: an unmarried and older woman, the figure of the spinster, a variation of the crone, already creating a contradiction. Moreover, Fanny Fern yokes Hatty’s maxim to this description of her as a mature woman: “Her face, —not beautiful, certainly, if tried by the rules of art, —and yet, who that watched its ever-varying expression, would stop to criticize? No one cared to analyze the charm. She produced the effect of beauty; she was magnetic; she was fascinating” (FL1, 38). Notable here is what publisher and editor Robert Bonner said of Sara Parton: “she possesses, in a word, that assemblage of graces which invests a person with the composite and indefinable charm designated by the word style; —if we were to say this, and much more than this, should we have described Fanny Fern? By no means.... There is about her a magnetic something which defies description” (qtd. in Warren 1992, 147, original emphasis). Parton as Fanny Fern moves her audience to imagine an aesthetic for women beyond the conventional; one that does not so much deny the privileging of physical beauty, but rather rewrites beauty as an effect of a magnetic and fascinating personality. This rewriting of normative attitudes about physical characteristics complements the rewriting of normative attitudes about gendered behavior within marital dynamics. The undermining of conventional gendered looks as well as behavior takes place in multiple domestic scenarios. Thus Fanny Fern will agree with the headnote in “Hungry Husbands” that a husband will love a woman who can cook before she puts a comic spin on that dynamic. “Well, it is a humiliating reflection, that the straightest road to a man’s heart is through his palate” (FL2, 273). Delivering a joke on more than one level at the expense of male appetite, Fanny Fern ends with this punning comic advice for subterfuge through food, advice that again spotlights Parton’s willingness and ability to employ within a domestic scene a comic violence registering ironically as masculine: Well, learn a lesson from it—keep him well fed and languid—live yourself on a low diet, and cultivate your thinking powers; and you’ll be as spry as a cricket, and hop over all the objections and remonstrances that his dead-and-alive energies can muster. Yes, feed him well, and he will stay contentedly in his cage, like a gorged anaconda. If he were my husband, wouldn’t I make him heaps of pison things! Bless me! I’ve made a mistake

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in the spelling; it should have been pies and things ! (FL2, 274, original emphases)

A more earnest expression of the same advice happens in “What Love will Accomplish,” which also ridicules fashionable women. A newly married Kitty cannot keep house or cook but is determined to learn and asks help from her neighbor, after she puts away “my guitar and my French and Italian books, and that irresistible ‘Festus’” (FL2, 280).4 She is completely successful. Final words of teasing advice from Fanny: “And now, dear reader, if you doubt whether Mrs. Kitty was rewarded for all her trouble, you’d better take a peep into that parlor, and while you are looking in, let me whisper a secret in your ear confidentially. You may be as beautiful as Venus, and as talented as Madame de Stael, but you’ll never reign supreme in your liege lord’s affections, till you can roast a turkey” (FL2, 282). Although this wisdom for domestic harmony reflects a conventional image, in Fanny Fern’s world, it folds into rather than contradicts the portrait of the successful bluestocking who can do it all, if one recalls Fanny Fern’s tall-talk self-image: “Can make a pudding or write a newspaper squib, cut out a child’s frock or cut a caper, and crowd more happiness or misery into ten minutes than any Fanny that ever was christened.” Parton’s joking about cooking and domestic harmony contradicts what she dramatizes in other sketches. The moral in “Our Hatty” states that mutual love is better than anything: “what is Fame to a woman?” (FL1, 39), which fits perfectly with the portrait of the literary domestics that Mary Kelley sketches. A similar moral obtains in “How Husbands May Rule.” In this dramatic sketch, Harry wishes Mary would not visit her friend Mrs. May, whom Mary describes as “refined, intellectual, fascinating” (FL1, 116), that is, in terms very similar to Hatty. Nevertheless, Mary gives her up: “Perhaps, after all, Harry was right about Mrs. May; and if he wasn’t, one hair of his head was worth more to her than all the women in the world” (FL1, 118). Submissive here does not register as stratagem. Fanny Fern drives the point home: “Dear reader, —won’t you tell?—there are some husbands worth all the sacrifices a loving heart can make!” (FL1, 119). In this instance, no irony and satiric laughter should be inferred. Parton inscribes classical femininity. In that concept, a woman’s basic power resides not in the subversion projected by the bluestocking as perfect wife, but rather in the potential wife in every woman who has

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grasped how easily vain foolishness can accompany physical beauty, as for example in “Kitty’s Resolve”: “Has a pretty woman [like Kitty] nothing to do but smile and look captivating, and admire herself?” Kitty dramatizes instead a woman’s true mission á la the cult of true womanhood: to understand her classical feminine power for moral good and to act accordingly, as the angel in the house. “Alas! that woman, gifted with an angel’s powers, sent on an angel’s mission, should so often be content with the butterfly life of a pleasure-seeking fashionist!” (FL1, 129, 132). The rhetoric of religion returns to mark the sacred quality of wives and mothers because Fanny Fern had a very specific satiric target in mind, ridiculing the ephemeral pleasures of fashionable ladies. Within the comic pretzel logic Parton creates in her variegated advice about marriage and how husbands and wives should comport themselves, Fanny Fern may seem confused, but in fact she voices a particular vision of marriage and the wife/husband dynamic: a partnership. For example, “Mrs. Weasel’s Husband” implies the wrong kind of woman’s rights, for the marriage depicted is not a partnership. Mr. Weasel fears his “chainlightning” wife (FL2, 188); he is living proof that the proverb in the headnote—“‘A woman, a dog, a walnut tree/ The more they are beaten the better they be’”—is not true.5 Notably, Mrs. Weasel is a suffragette: Parton shows her coming home from the “‘Woman’s Rights Convention,’” where she made a speech (FL2, 188). Nevertheless, this sketch clearly does not celebrate Mrs. Weasel’s demonstrating the inanity of the proverb, for Mr. Weasel is obviously a derisively laughable fool. Instead, the sketch, though mocking Mr. Weasel as the weaker vessel, has as its more profound target the mismatch of temperaments and absence of sympathy. Mrs. Weasel parodies the suffragettes in their public demand for equality, but Parton does not disagree with their goal, only their methods, which focus on the public sphere. Fanny Fern champions the right for a woman to behave as an equal to any man, to be independent of marriage if she chooses and has the means. However, her realm of activity encompasses not the convention hall but the kitchen and the parlor. The feminism she stages should be logged as a different sort of pragmatic from what scholars (e.g., Voloshin) have identified in sentimental fiction, which is why she acknowledges the potential need for a subterfuge stratagem within domestic precincts. The misogynistic proverb in “Mrs. Weasel’s Husband” hints at the terrible reality requiring that stratagem: physical abuse. In addition, “Household Tyrants” displays Fanny Fern’s

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grateful acknowledgment to William M. Thackeray for saying out loud that other kinds of abuse exist: “‘A husband may kill a wife gradually, and be no more questioned than the grand seignor who drowns a slave at midnight’—Thackeray, on Household Tyrants .” This scenario reveals why women must be “cunning” and “keep our arms a-kimbo” (FL2, 245, 246), why subterfuge might be necessary. Similar in its satiric target, “Mary Lee” dramatizes the husband’s “seignior” power in the United States of the 1850s. The very pretty protagonist has married a jealous husband. She tries not to upset him, drops acquaintances, and is no coquette (FL1, 84). She practices patience. This scenario imitates Parton’s life: her second husband, Samuel Farrington, had a similar temperament. Joyce Warren (1992, 83– 84) quotes from Parton’s daughter to show that Mary Lee’s submissive behavior echoes Sara’s when married to Farrington. Mary Lee, however, does not escape as Sara does. Mary loves her husband and stays faithful, yet he betrays and tricks her, taking her to a lunatic asylum as a punishment for her perceived faults. She dies heart broken. In such instances, Parton presents husbands as far worse than fools. Some foolishness, then, deserves laughter, like Mr. and Mrs. Weasel, while some behaviors, like Mr. and Mrs. Lee’s emotional dynamic, register as beyond laughter. Other behaviors fall somewhere between silly and fatal. For example, the husband in “Mr. Clapp’s Soliloquy” (FL1) indignantly blames the wife for birthing only girls and complains about soon reasserting his role as master of the house, as though the sex of a baby were the same as choosing a wallpaper pattern: next time he will insist on his wife’s getting it right. “The Invalid Wife” (FL1) presents a moment soon after the birth of a new baby (number eight), as the mother lies in bed wondering how the household is managing. The nurse only makes things worse, while her husband acts like an idiot who does not notice the chaos. Though the ridiculous husbands in these scathing sketches move closer to Mr. Weasel than Mr. Lee, the chilling facts behind their scenarios remain: a wife treated as an infant-machine, the husband stupidly unaware or cruelly indifferent to her physical and mental health. For Parton’s pragmatic feminism, the domestic sphere takes precedence over the political and public sphere as the default for staging the comic ridiculing entailed in her bourgeois carnival. “Hour Glass Thoughts” has Fanny Fern imagining a series of scenes, each one with two parts that oppose one another. Many of them center on the injustices of the social world, how appearances trump truth, for example. Then,

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almost at the end, Fanny Fern makes this observation: “Wives rant of their ‘Woman’s Rights,’ in public; Husbands eat bad dinners and tend crying babies, at home” (FL2, 124). If the suffragettes hated Sara Parton for this sentiment, they could also count on her for strenuously attacking some of the worst consequences of patriarchy. Crucially, women in Fanny Fern’s paradigmatic bourgeois carnival “laugh in our sleeve” while presenting a demeanor of “demureness.” The concept of écriture féminine insists on a return to the body, the breath of speech, in order to recover “the rhythm that laughs you” (Cixous 1976, 882). Woman in this concept speaks from without, below, beyond the social norms, “from the heath where witches are kept alive” (Cixous 1976, 877). The witch embodies a fear that grips those upholding patriarchal norms about the proper behavior of women, a fear of the challenge posed by the intellectual woman, for example, a fear that woman represented as the weaker vessel conjures mere wishful thinking by men. Robert Elliott (1960) shows that the unruliness of comic laughter has generated traditional images of the satirist as monsters or agents of black magic. From this angle, Sara Parton writing écriture féminine satire and so being worthy of the laughing Medusa figure returns full circle back to satire’s roots. The comic belles lettres aesthetic wants to have its satiric cake and eat it too by revising that traditional view of the satirist into the gentlemanly amiable satirist who could be Thackeray’s everyday humorous preacher, critiquing with sweet sarcasm. This take creates a modern view of satire, that is, one commercially viable for a much more diverse audience than Juvenal, for example, could imagine. Indeed, the comic belles lettres aesthetic in the United States implied an audience even broader than Addison and Steele might have imagined, not only one dominated by women but also one (mostly) beyond the class distinction implied by the “gentleman” in the tag “gentleman humorist.” However, Parton as Fanny Fern circling back to satirists as monsters or witches capable of black magic mesmerized Parton’s reading public in ways that both asserted a woman’s independence and embraced the conventions of marriage. Perhaps the ultimate male fear centers not on the intellectual woman as a version of a witch, but on a physically attractive intellectual woman. Fanny Fern imagines such an individual in “The Sick Bachelor” (FL2). Like Emma Lee the ideal bluestocking, the sexy and competent doctor is Cixous’s Medusa: the supposed Gorgon who is “beautiful” and who is

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“laughing” (Cixous 1976, 885). Fanny Fern not only speaks these challenges, she does so with laughter, unafraid of representing a woman’s body. Cixous uses the figure of the Medusa and rewrites its meaning to embody the power of écriture féminine, to cast its monstrous shadow over the norm, “a monstrosity that goes by the name of ‘sext,’” as Anca Parvulescu puts it (2010, 111). The Medusa represents woman as marked by a body and a sexuality that appears as radical challenge; the Gorgon’s face that signifies “monstrous and unknown forms to a horrified society” ruled by patriarchy (Parvulescu 2010, 106). Asserting her power as literary bluestocking, Fanny Fern appears as such a form, yet all the while asserting too that she might (easily?) wear a mask of conventionality. Parton’s double move of embracing yet eliding gender stereotyping may not be Cixous’s écriture féminine in its full import, but it can be read as an opening, a significant crack in the patriarchal edifice through which satiric laughter sounds. Thus Fanny Fern imagines scenes from carnival marriages, such as the sarcastically ironic portrait of “The Quiet Mr. Smith” (FL1), a man who allows his wife to support him, or a one paragraph soliloquy of a husband ruled by his wife, “A Grumble from the (H)altar” (FL2). “Important for Married Men” (FL1) likewise imagines conventional marriages turned inside out. The piece counters a claim in the headnote, which jokes about the price of tomatoes rising because a woman supposedly could not talk for a week from eating too many. The sketch, however, shows that when women talk together, with wit and vivacity, their husbands enjoy it. As Robert de Valcourt says in his conduct book, “There is no man who would not walk ten miles for the chance to talk with such a woman [who has] a fair development of intellect” (1855, 156). In this last example, Parton mocks a fundamental stereotype: women talk too much. Cixous says one must always “keep in mind the distinction between speaking and talking. It is said, in philosophical texts, that women’s weapon is the word because they talk, talk endlessly, chatter, overflow with sound, mouth-sound: but they don’t actually speak, they have nothing to say. They always inhabit the place of silence” (1981, 49, original emphasis). The headnote Fanny Fern comically inverts implies that women should be silent because, after all, they have nothing worthwhile to say: they merely chatter. Against this viewpoint, Fanny Fern asserts the possibility of marriages in which wives not only speak intelligently but in ways that entertain and intrigue their husbands. Rather than

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imagine oppressive division within a marriage, the woman passive and silent as the man holds forth, Fanny Fern offers an image of pleasurable camaraderie.

Fanny Fern as Voleuse In her Fanny Fern columns, Sara Parton’s persona enacts the role Cixous implies for woman as impossible subject, a voleuse, the woman who flies past patriarchy yet takes something from it, as a thief, for the French verb, voler, means both to fly and to steal. Parton’s trickster-style ambivalence about challenging marriage and conventional gender roles manifests most clearly in the contradiction of the bluestocking as perfect wife. Flying becomes the new woman’s gesture, even as she steals from the discourse of patriarchy. “If woman has always functioned ‘within’ the discourse of man... it is time for her to dislocate this ‘within,’ to explode it, turn it around, and seize it; to make it hers, containing it, taking it in her own mouth, biting that tongue with her very own teeth to invent for herself a language to get inside of” (Cixous 1976, 887). To celebrate conventional marriage yet undermine it demonstrates the double move of rewriting gender stereotypes. Parental and conjugal (i.e., phallocentric) representations inscribe Woman with a classical femininity. As laughing Medusa and flying voleuse, Fanny Fern sublates classical femininity with a new representation, negating (flying past) yet using patriarchy (stealing from its stereotypes) in her rewriting of Woman. This rewriting emphasizes sexual difference instead of sexual opposition even as it risks being identified with that from which it steals. This move approximates the idea of reversing a dominant discourse. Michel Foucault provides a good example: “Homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or ‘naturality’ be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified” (1978, 101; see also Walker 1988, 9–13). As Cixous employs the figure of the Medusa, the Gorgon introduces laughter in a form monstrous for patriarchy— the disturbance of a laughter perceived as hysterical—sounded with open mouth(s) that deny the smooth beauty of the classically feminine, all apertures closed. The image of the comic belles lettres gentleman, with its constraint to “rail agreeably,” can be read as an effort not just to argue for the existence of an amiable laughter, but to tame the monstrous form of the

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satirist with his caustic tongue-lashings. One might say that the comic belles lettres gentleman of Addison and Steele sublates the figure of the satirist, negating yet preserving the power of his fearful words. Amiable laughter then apparently marginalizes satire or nominally replaces satire with humor. The sweet sarcasm of the comic belles lettres gentleman feminizes the satirist, creating a discursive space that should therefore also enable female humorists and lady satirists. Oliver Wendell Holmes appears in that space, with his beloved autocrat of the breakfast table, while Mortimer Thomson writes his parodies of Longfellow and Butler. Caroline Kirkland can, theoretically, step easily into the space of amiable laughter and write as a comic belles lettres lady, all examples of colonial continuity in Judith Lee’s (2020) humor and matters of empire scheme. Frances Whitcher, with the Widow Bedott’s vernacular dialect voice, however, resides outside the comic belles lettres aesthetic. Whitcher slots into Lee’s post-colonial discontinuity category, while James Russell Lowell’s political satire of the Mexican War stands unique, a mélange of high-culture diction and vernacular dialect. Comfortably within the aesthetic of comic belles lettres and amiable satire, Fanny Fern represents colonial continuity in American comic writing; she almost never uses the vernacular humor or dialect that characterizes the familiar roster of frontier humorists or the crackerbarrel humorists like Widow Bedott. Examples from that roster certainly fit Lee’s post-colonial category. The obvious exception to this apparently rigid conceptual border happens with Parton’s use of the tall-talk boast, exemplified by her repeated use of the epithet “chain-lightning.” Mimicking the boast, Parton ties the comically unruly woman figured by the laughing Medusa to the quintessentially comic unruly man figured by the Backwoods Roarer. The boast of the Roarer had been extant in antebellum popular culture for more than twenty years when Parton employs it to suggest the beyond-the-pale comic temperament of Fanny Fern (Caron 2001) in a bid to claim some of its boundary-denying freedom. Mark Twain’s use of the boast in the raft passage from Huckleberry Finn demonstrates its shelf-life lasts until the 1880s. Repeatedly mimicking comic tall-talk demonstrates one of the ways that Sara Parton apparently recognized instinctively how a comic belles lettres lady always contained, in both senses of the word, the production of masculine satire: delimiting the harsher tones of satire yet harboring the possibility of woman enacting the role of the contentious satirist. Moreover, she was willing at times to conjure the satirist beyond the

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comic belles lettres lady, even in monstrous forms—as virago, as witch, as Medusa. Cixous uses the image of the Medusa as counter-force to the Freudian notion of woman as a lack, as a castrated man. Écriture féminine instead writes the truth that women are not castrated men while still embracing the concept that they are Other. Admitting this truth is the equivalent of looking at the Medusa straight on and seeing that “She’s beautiful and she’s laughing” (Cixous 1976, 885). As Anca Parvulescu puts it, “Écriture féminine... offers the promise of a laughing text,” but of course from the woman’s point of view (2010, 111). The Colonel in “A Chapter on Literary Women” provides the traditional male reaction to that laughing text as it manifests the Gorgon: “Horrible! Minnie, I tell you, literary women are a sort of nondescript monsters; nothing feminine about them” (FL1, 177). What kind of laughter occurs when a female satirist asks the reader to look into her Gorgon face? The answer has to be laughter at its most unruly, unruly to the point of monstrousness. However, that kind of laughter, maybe, simply offers another way to fly past and also steal from the traditional view that marks Woman as body, for no laughter happens without a body. If comic laughter has the potential to feature an essential unruliness beyond the full grasp of the rational, that potential should be marked as Medusa feminine. Maybe this Medusa quality reiterates what Georges Bataille (1986) names with his philosophy of unknowing, a way to capture what he calls the operation of The Comic. The fear of a laughter presented in the image of a laughing and beautiful Medusa appears in the story told in Sun-tzu’s The Art of War that Hélène Cixous discusses in her essay, “Le Sexe ou la Tête?” (“Castration or Decapitation?” 1981) and that Anca Parvalescu (2010) rehearses in her chapter “Feminism, or ‘She’s Beautiful and She’s Laughing.’” In that story, Sun-tzu feels compelled to punish the wives of the emperor when they will not stop laughing as he drills them to be warriors. A similar dynamic happens in another story of patriarchy. Given the way that Parton employs the Bible, the way that she believes yet questions God and His Providence, the ultimate male figure in Western cultures, perhaps Sarah, Abraham’s wife, rather than women warriors, should be the figure embodying the laughing Medusa quality of écriture féminine. When Sarah hears that she will bear a child, her doubt and surprise are expressed with a laugh. Laughing at the Lord will not do, of course, for it implies a limit to His power.6

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When the Lord God confronts her about laughing, Sarah fearfully denies it, but she is not punished, only admonished. In Sun-tzu’s story, the two leaders of the unruly laughing women are decapitated. In both stories, it would seem, male power registers as mean, for it means no more laughter. The remaining women in Sun-tzu’s story not only remain silent; they never make a mistake in their warrior’s drills. Sarah submits to her lords, both Abraham and God. As with Fanny Fern, Sarah does not embody an exotic wish to escape the domestic; she becomes a mother after being a faithful wife for many years. However, Abraham and Sarah name their son Isaac, Hebrew for “he will laugh.” In Fanny Fern’s storyworld, Sarah would have picked out the name, not Abraham, and in so doing Sara and Sarah would elide in some measure the deadly force of patriarchy. Sara Parton did not choose to call her persona Isaac, as Donald Grant Mitchell did with his famous comic character Ike Marvel, though doing so would have been apt to indicate a writer of comic material, and of course also would have had the advantage of hiding her gender, the way that Louisa May Alcott chose to write her blood and thunder short stories under an ostensibly masculine name, A. M. Barnard. Instead, Parton chose to be Fanny Fern, which at first can be read as an embracing of a traditional femininity; she ostensibly had in mind the sweet fern when she chose the name and sweet evokes a traditional femininity, which is why within the comic belles lettres aesthetic of amiable humor and its amiable laughter sweet sarcasm is allowed. However, as Joyce Warren explains, the sweet fern is not a true fern with delicate and feathery fronds; it is a low shrub that grows all over New England, a sturdy bush, tenacious, one that “will grow in sandy soil and windswept locations where more delicate plants cannot survive” (1992, 103). Fanny Fern signifies the sweet and not-so-sweet comic belles lettres lady satirist, the champion of a bourgeois carnival who celebrates and castigates, all at once, the normative domestic scene, the lady satirist with the potential to be the laughing Gorgon embodying the Medusa feminine.

Notes 1. Though other items dramatize domestic bliss, they do not have the radical import of “A Practical Bluestocking” or “A Chapter on Literary Women.” Those other stories, all in the first collection, include “Self-conquest,” in which a wife escapes her dragon of a

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mother-in-law when her husband rents a house and furnishes it to surprise her: her patience is rewarded; “Lilla, the Orphan,” in which the virtuous Lilla, Cinderella-like in her beauty and grace amid a slovenly farm family who abuse her emotionally, marries happily to an “eccentric old bachelor” (208); “Sweet Briar Farm,” in which Kitty’s good nature transforms “peevish” (285) Aunt Betsy, and an admirer, Mr. Frank, woos her successfully, with another happilyever-after ending implied; and “Lena May, or Darkness and Light,” in which Lena, the beautiful and loving sister of Charley, who is blind and dying when the narrative opens, saves him by becoming an artist’s model. Lena and the artist, Ernest Clay, fall in love. He can support the whole family. Patience, good-nature, and God’s benevolent providence redeem everyone: satire for the status quo. Isaiah 6: 6–7: “Then flew one of the seraphim unto me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar. And he laid it upon my mouth, and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away and thy sin purged.’” The implication?—the God-gifted woman writer has not sinned and thus does not need the purification of the burning coal. Parton here borrows a neologism found in Margaret Fuller’s essay on women’s rights, “The Great Lawsuit.” The term comes from two 1843 articles in the short-lived periodical New York Pathfinder, probably by Parke Godwin, who edited it. Fuller uses it to suggest the essence of the feminine. Perhaps her comment comes closer to Parton’s use, which emphasizes women behaving with a masculine activity: “Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But, in fact, they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.” Originally published in The Dial, July 1843. https://archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/ transcendentalism/authors/fuller/debate.html. James Philip Bailey is known almost exclusively by his one voluminous and very popular poem, Festus, first published anonymously in 1839. The proverb is probably based on Aesop’s fable of “The Walnut Tree,” reprised, among other places, in T. C. Haliburton’s The Clockmaker, or the Sayings and Doings of Sam Slick, 1836. The relevant passage is Genesis 18:10–15: “And he said, I will certainly return unto thee according to the time of life; and, lo, Sarah

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thy wife shall have a son. And Sarah heard it in the tent door, which was behind him. Now Abraham and Sarah were old and well stricken in age; and it ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women. Therefore Sarah laughed within herself, saying, After I am waxed old shall I have pleasure, my lord being old also? And the LORD said unto Abraham, Wherefore did Sarah laugh, saying, Shall I of a surety bear a child, which am old? Is any thing too hard for the LORD? At the time appointed I will return unto thee, according to the time of life, and Sarah shall have a son. Then Sarah denied, saying, I laughed not; for she was afraid. And he said, Nay; but thou didst laugh.”

Creating Comic Community: Scathing Epithets, Caricature, and Comic Violence

The comic belles lettres gentleman figure carries a contradiction in its comic DNA, explicitly committed to an amiable laughter yet possessing, like a sheathed weapon, the potential for creating the derisive laughter of an unamiable, acerbic, and caustic satire. Writing satire as a comic belles lettres lady, Sara Parton with her alter ego Fanny Fern must embrace that contradiction. The feminization of satire found in the concept of the comic belles lettres gentleman apparently allows, even encourages, women to write satire more easily than ever before. The discourse touting an amiable laughter would seem to be perfect for nurturing female satirists. However, as soon as a woman writes satire even of the amiable sort, normative values assert that she loses her claim to be feminine simply because her potential to unsheathe the weapon of acerbic or caustic satire supposedly unsexes her. American society in the 1850s marks the built-in aggressiveness of satire, even in the toned-down, Addisonian mode of pleasant raillery, as masculine. The gentleness of the comic belles lettres gentleman might include “manly, yet soft and loving tones [so that] he chastise[s] in no illnatured or malicious vein, but in love,” as George Curtis said of William Thackeray (1855, 286), but the same mix of gendered behavior is apparently not permissible in a woman. She may have soft and loving tones and chastise with love—but how can she be manly, or more pointedly, how © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 J. E. Caron, The Modern Feminine in the Medusa Satire of Fanny Fern, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41276-9_5

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can she be allowed to write satire as a man would write satire? The female satirist thus becomes the impossible subject, potentially the monstrous Gorgon Medusa, an image representing an overturning of the supposed natural order, a woman who apparently wants to be a man. Rather than pretending otherwise, Sara Parton embraces this enforced role as Medusa with a satiric style that often contains the most caustic of comic phrasing, as aggressive as any male author. The laughter in this monstrous form doubly disturbs, subverting not just as satire often subverts social norms, but subverting even the figures of the comic belles lettres gentleman and lady embodying a discursive field that theoretically enables Fanny Fern. Sara Parton as comic Medusa unsheathes the stringent satiric aspect of the comic belles lettres gentleman as forcefully as any satirist of the day, as, for example, Donald Mitchell did in his pamphlet series, The Lorgnette (1850), or Thackeray did in his many novels, most famously in Vanity Fair (1847), for these authors often rail caustically as much as pleasantly. However, because Parton must write first as woman, the contradiction of the comic belles lettres gentleman or lady figure, explicitly committed to an amiable laughter yet carrying the potential for derisive laughter, doubles back on itself. Fanny Fern as satirist begins already marked by the contradiction from the other side of the gender divide with her prototypical écriture féminine, which risks identification with negative stereotypes about strong-minded women by rewriting them. The image of a bluestocking suggests écriture féminine as it invokes the original salon of Lady Montagu’s cultural intellectuals (Mellor 2013), the private—and more egalitarian because both men and women were participants—equivalent of the gentlemen’s coffee house club found in Addison and Steele’s Spectator essays and sketches. Amiable laughter indicates the sense of community nurtured in salons and coffee houses, thus functioning as a crucial énoncé for understanding the aesthetic of comic belles lettres. The comic belles lettres gentleman or lady, when employing an amiable satire, implies community manifesting an endemic camaraderie; in a sense, the comic belles lettres gentleman or lady cannot perform as such until he or she has met and humored a fellow eccentric. As demonstrated in a previous chapter with Fanny Fern and her reading public, the bluestocking as comic writer interpellates her audience as a mirthful salon in print. I have been hinting that one of the ways to measure the comic power of Fanny Fern is to understand her as a trickster. William Hynes

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(1993) claims six characteristics typify the mythic trickster figure. “At the heart of this cluster of manifest trickster traits is (1) the fundamentally ambiguous and anomalous personality of the trickster. Flowing from this are such other features as (2) deceiver/trick player, (3) shape-shifter, (4) situation-invertor, (5) messenger/imitator of the gods, and (6) sacred/ lewd bricoleur” (34). While Fanny Fern clearly does not manifest #2 and #5, the persona just as clearly fits into #3 and #4. Fanny Fern does not embody a version of the fabled confidence man so prevalent in various examples of antebellum humor; she does not concoct deceptions that angle for profit or individual amusement. Fanny Fern instead has as an often-targeted satiric butt the kind of deception usually called hypocrisy. Nor does she project the special mythic quality of tricksters that authorizes them as conduits to the gods; she performs as a comic preacher of Christian values, not as a sacred prophet who relays God’s voice. She does, however, shape-shift early in her career with the deployment of multiple guises calculated to keep the reading public guessing about the actual person behind the literary persona, although this element disappears when Parton’s identity becomes public. However, Fanny Fern’s role as a “situation-invertor” remains throughout her career, both on the micro level of individual columns, frequently using a quote from elsewhere as a pretext that she promptly dismantles, and on the macro level as she persistently challenges the precepts of patriarchal discourse. In the latter aspect of this role, Parton as Fanny Fern most clearly displays the behavior for which tricksters are renowned, boundary-transgression. Ambiguous and anomalous within the sentimental culture of antebellum America, paradoxically for and against conventional marriage, Fanny Fern enacts the trickster’s basic function as an enemy of boundaries. That basic function appears most obviously in the contradiction Parton projects with her Fanny Fern columns, both sentimental and satiric. In Hynes’s list of the trickster’s basic characteristics, this duality, noted by decades of commentary on Sara Parton’s writing, maps closest with #6: “sacred/lewd bricoleur.” Parton earns the title bricoleur because of her ingenuity involved in comically lobbying for metanoia, for transforming attitudes about gender roles, by using “anything at hand” because cultural definitions of women in the age of Women’s Rights conventions are unstable (see Hynes 1993, 42). Parton’s exploration of faith in God’s Providence clearly involves sacred topics, and later I will discuss the examples of newspaper columns about bodies and sexual desire that normative values would label lewd. For the moment, I want to revise the binary of

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#6 to reflect again the ambiguous and anomalous quality of Fanny Fern, namely, her genuine respect/comic disrespect for some normative values. Fanny Fern validates norms while simultaneously mocking them and even cursing their agents. This chapter will provide a closer look at Sara Parton’s comic style, highlighting its Medusan aspect by examining her caricatures and caustic portraits for the way that her penchant for epithets evokes the ritual roots of satire, which include curses. Given Fanny Fern’s central contradiction of endorsing yet denigrating dominant cultural values, her satiric scorn can register as either conservative or subversive. In either case, her satire invokes an implied community, but from the angle of trenchant, acerbic, and caustic satire, not one of amiability found in the flirting and bantering with her reading public seen earlier. This implied community cloaks itself in darker colors, certainly beyond merely endorsing an attitude of sweet sarcasm. To accede to the truth of caustic portraiture and to enjoy the acerbic sting of comic epithets is to accede to their harsher point of view; to laugh at comic epithets is to acknowledge a shared set of values, particularly the need to express comic outrage. When her persona Fanny Fern exposes the contradiction of the satirist guised as amiable yet ready to lash the body politic and social, Parton proposes a laughter against normative views of gender that might be embraced by both men and women, a hilarious laughter that could be ironically designated hysterical . That exposure effectively ignores the boundary between amiable and acerbic satirist. In those moments, Parton rewrites the comic belles lettres lady satirist of the Addisonian stripe into the laughing Medusa satirist by presenting a women’s unsparing view of a social world populated with knaves and fools. Fanny Fern as Thackeray’s comic preacher can “awaken and direct... love... pity, kindness... [and] tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the unhappy.” Parton’s sentimental stories emphasize that effect. Fanny Fern can also awaken and direct “scorn for untruth, pretension, imposture,” especially when it comes to gender roles. Focused on her core satiric topic—gendered expectations for behavior—Parton showcases a talent for giving the voice of Fanny Fern the hard edge of stringent sarcasm enabled by wide-spread irony, thus producing a habitually caustic tone. Those qualities best fit Fanny Fern to the supposedly baleful profile of the laughing Medusa, in effect a woman satirist resembling the more traditional masculine version, even one that might be tagged as Juvenalian.

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Comic Curses In the mouth of a woman, comic curses conjure the image of a witch, converting Juvenalian attack to a mock witchcraft that produces a Fanny Fern at her most hysterically funny. One column, not reprinted in either collection, reads almost entirely like a curse, with a barrage of everyday minor catastrophes and string of whimsical puns. Fanny Fern is responding to a joke by the famous German humorist Jean Paul about a woman being unfit as an army officer because her commands for the men to halt would supposedly be crippled by wordiness and lack of force: Now, Monsieur Jean, it was an unlucky day you wrote that sentence—. May you never hear anything but that little concise word NO! from every rosy lip you meet between this and your tombstone! May you “halt” wifeless through life; may your buttons be snappish, your strings knotty, and your stockings holy. May your boot-jack be missing, your feet be corned, your shaving water be cold, your razor dull, your dickies lay down; may your beard be porcupiny, your whiskers be thinly settled, and your moustache curl the wrong way; may your coffee be muddy, your toast smoky, and your tea be water-bewitched; may you dream of Paradise, and wake in some other place! and with a never-dying desire for affection, may you crawl through creation a meek, miserable, nasty, forlorn, fidgetty, fussy, ridiculous, ruined, rejected, ragged, old bachelor! Amen! “A Lady Officer” (GG, February 4, 1853)

“Jean Paul” was the pseudonym of Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, best known for his comic novels and stories. Some irony exists in Fanny Fern wishing him deprived of the paradise of matrimonial bliss beyond the fact that he died in 1825. His “peculiar combinations of sentiment, irony, and humour expressed in a highly subjective... style” anticipate in some ways Parton’s periodical writings (see “Jean Paul,” Britannica Online Encyclopedia). Fanny Fern’s response features a particularly hilarious ending, her comic rant full of curses finishing with Amen!, as if leading a prayer. The comic preacher becomes a comic Fury, with the implied intention of subverting the hoary stereotype not only of the weaker sex but also the image of a constantly chattering woman. In another instance, also not reprinted in either collection, Fanny Fern makes fun of a man with a prosaic mind; basically, she curses him with the prospect of marrying a woman just like him: “May gridirons and rainbows, roast beef and roses, pancakes and poetry, moonlight and music

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and mutton, excite in her mind equal enthusiasm. And may her heart and pulse be incapable of one accelerated beat, by any magic or necromancy!” (OB, September 11, 1852, original emphases). This curse binds together two people temperamentally suited, which can read as a positive outcome, but it also reaffirms Fanny Fern’s more important value of a merry domestic scene with partners emotionally matched. Just to show that Parton promotes an equal opportunity dispensing of comic curses, another instance entitled “A Fern Soliloquy” mocks women: “I wish they’d [six Missis Pecksniffs sisters] catch the cholera or a husband—either will answer my purposes, as far as they are concerned;...—wish there’d come a shower and spoil their six pink bonnets” (FL1, 375–376). Wishing for suddenly ruined hats laughs at fashionable vanity, but equating catching a husband with catching a deadly disease may be Parton’s most trenchant joke against marriage as a cultural norm. The rigid repetition of the sisters’ bonnets suggests the mindless conventionality of women wanting to marry no matter what, so completely the opposite of the free-flowing characteristics of the feminine in éricture féminine. As Fanny Fern says, in the same soliloquy: I “love clouds because they change as I gaze; the sea, because it ebbs and flows; the wind, because it is untamable and fetterless” (FL1, 375).

Comic Violence Comic curses invoke the ritual roots of satire in rhymed invective and apopotraic chants (Elliott 1960). Parton dishes out other versions of symbolic violence in a variety of settings. Sometimes, straight description can function as a satiric judgment, as in this bit from a stroll in Manhattan: “Cholera and pestilence, what a sight!... the middle of the street a quagmire of jelly-mud, four inches deep, on which are strewn, ad-infinitum, decayed potatoes and cabbage stumps, old bones and bonnets, mouldy [sic] bread, salt fish, and dead kittens.” Fanny Fern immediately places blame for the revolting condition of the city streets using violent images full of comic derision: “That pussy-cat New York corporation [i.e. city council] should be put on a diet of peppered thunder and gunpowder tea, and harnessed to a comet for six months. I doubt if even then the old poppies would wake up” (FL2, 318, 319). Politicians being tied to a comet (just for six months, mind you) adds a fantastic whimsy to this harsh and detailed assessment of their incompetence and indifference.

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Parton in “An Interesting Husband” suggests a similar fate for a dull husband, Solomon Stillwater, advising his wife to stir him up with firecrackers (FL1). In “Fanny Fern on Smoking,” Fanny Fern comically laments the fact that American men (“Brother Jonathan”) chew and spit everywhere so that “Every omnibus, and car, and stage-coach, and steamboat, and public stair-way, and side-walk, are one mammoth spittoon!” Cigars are no better, but she again presents a violent fantasy as a comic solution, saying she has “some twinges of conscience at having occasionally introduced gunpowder into the ends ” (TF, September 11, 1852, original emphases). The comic solution here registers as fantastic in that the diction choice “occasionally” hints that Fanny Fern has at times actually blown up cigar-smoking men, yet she only has a modicum of regret. Like the comic violence proposed for the New York City council, she makes the radical solution of gunpowdered cigars to wake men up to their disgustingly cavalier treatment of public spaces. More comic violence can be found in two other examples, both implying deadly intents. One features a contemptuous rant declaiming that any man should feel lucky to have a woman’s love and listing all the things that wives do for husbands. Parton inverts an opinion in a headnote in which the musings of the lover when away from the beloved do not dwell on the woman’s “insignificant love.” The piece ends with this wish—one even beyond the curse leveled at the Misses Pecksniffs: “‘Insignificant love!’ I wish I knew the man who wrote that article! I’d appoint his funeral to-morrow,—and it ‘should come off, too’!!” (FL2, 138). The phrasing anticipates the choleric side of Mark Twain, as does a character’s comment in “The Sick Bachelor”: “‘Doctor is coming!’ Well, let him come. I’m as savage as if I’d just dined off a cold missionary. I’ll pretend to be asleep, and let old Pill-box experiment” (FL2, 250). Given the popularity of Fanny Fern at a time when Sam Clemens was actually in New York City (see Ryan, 2008), one can easily imagine him reading Parton’s columns and latching onto such phrasing for later use. Parton joking about how to deal with literary imitators again reveals her considerable capacity for ire, this time on a most personal subject. By July of 1852, Fanny Fern had several doppelgängers, some of whom were published with her in the Olive Branch. When Parton complains in a letter to the editor Thomas Norris and asks him to tell her the true names of those imitating her (e.g., “Sweet Pea”), he refers to her letter as a “rather caustic” reply to his refusal. Fanny Fern notes that she has stopped imitating Mrs. Partington because touchy Mr. Carpet Bag

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has complained and Norris has asked her to desist, so she wants him to “strangle in the birth any embryo imitation” of her as fair compensation (OB, July 3, 1852). Parton returns to the topic later in the year, attacking “Harry Honeysuckle” for “shooting round a corner at my ‘Model’ factory” and declaring that “Every body sees the theft” (see Homestead 2001). Fanny Fern warns that “plants sometime choke each other. You’ll die of the Fern-strangle one of these days.” She may sarcastically appreciate the “unintentional compliment” of being copied, but “You’d better let me alone, ‘Harry,’ if you don’t want to be a ‘FIXED’!”—verbally choked to death, with a literary funeral to follow (OB, October 16, 1852, original emphases). When Parton responds to an item in the Boston Carpet Bag extolling the “jolly bachelor,” Fanny Fern sounds more whimsical but not kinder in her attack. The image of being at once jolly and a bachelor registers as ridiculous, she says, imagining the bachelor sick and alone in a state of chaos without anyone to be nice to him and nurse him as a wife would. The author of such nonsense should be “kicked to death by grasshoppers for telling such a pack of lies” (CB, April 24, 1852), a wonderfully fantastic image (how many grasshoppers would that take?). Whimsicality disappears, however, when Parton in “A Wick-ed Paragraph” responds to a headnote from a newspaper item about a Mr. Wicks, whose wife has left him. He says he wants her back and loves her, but also that he can prove with three witnesses that she has been a bad wife. Fanny Fern begins her subversive response saying, “Now take a little advice, my dear innocent, and don’t allow yourself to be badgered or frightened into anything. None but a coward ever threatens a woman. Put that in your memorandum book. It’s all bluster and braggadocio. Thread your darning-needle, and tell him you are ready for him—” (FL2, 133). The implied potential for actual violence here (“your ‘wick’ entirely snuffed out”) offers the grimmest of satires against a patriarchy in which courts routinely treated wives as chattel, with the image of a darning needle as literally a last defense, projecting another kind of fantastic scenario. However, the true core of Fanny Fern’s dire advice resides in an encouragement to not be a stereotypically passive female while mocking the cowardly husband as “all bluster and braggadocio.”

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Comic Insults For Richard Steele, a good satirist must have a good-nature to “rail agreeably” and to create “representations [that] bear a pleasantry in them” (Tatler #242, 4:234–38; 236, 237), but in addition he must have a cause that is society’s concern and not merely his own. The dictum warns against the ease with which a proper satire, especially one complete with caustic phrasing and comic curses, can slide over into mere lampoon. In a column entitled “Fanny Fern to John Bull,” Fanny Fern ridicules the London Athenaeum for trashing Parton’s writing as slang. Fanny Fern serves up plenty of insult in return, American style: mocks the English with a reminder of Bunker Hill, calls John Bull a “blustering coward,” and refers to the war in the Crimea with Russia as a “pussy-cat war policy” (NYTr, June 29 and 30, 1854). In this instance, Parton tips over into lampooning rather than satirizing, breaking Richard Steele’s rule, as she displaces literary style with nationalism. Parton’s comically sarcastic style sometimes appears almost as a throwaway insult, a slippery slope toward lampoon. Mrs. Carrott is not just a shrew, but a “virago” with a mop (FL2, 372). In another example, Fanny Fern ridicules those who would imitate a popular literary figure such as her, especially sporting an alliterative signature, with this sarcastic advice: “make someone else light the torch, and do you flutter round its rays; only be careful not to venture so near the blaze as to singe those flimsy wings of yours” (FL1, 332). Yet another example simply reads as a gratuitous swipe at the French: “You are a gentleman, and a scholar, if you do live on fricasseed kittens and frog-soup” (FL1, 337). Similarly, Fanny Fern in the middle of a stroll about Manhattan goes after a target closer to home: “‘sinners here in New York need waking up’ [says the tract man]—which sentiment I endorse, and advise him to call at the N.Y. Tribune office” (FL2, 314), a comment that again implies a lampoon as retort to a cause personal rather than social. Other examples also rely on insult and epithet for their comic punch, yet nevertheless can claim a public sphere issue as their justification. Few pieces of discourse can so easily earn Parton’s wrath as stereotypes about women. When a German professor named Stahr publishes an article in Blackwood’s about Louis Napoleon, he sums up the French leader by saying, “‘But no reliance can be put upon him. In a word, his character is that of a woman’” (OB, March 6, 1852, original emphasis). Fanny Fern in response produces a long list of women’s behaviors that prove their

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reliability, and then she sums up the professor: a “curmudgeon” and a “stupid old fool” as well as a “beer-drinking, phlegmatic, tobacco-dried old German.” This one reads dangerously close to name-calling just for the sheer exuberance of transgressing polite social discourse, but the piledriving effect does have, ostensibly, a stereotypical slander against women as its true target. Perhaps the German professor rates as collateral damage in the subversive assaults against stereotyped women, one caricature smashing another. Parton perhaps would rate herself as merciless truth-teller, a title particularly apt for an effort in another column in which Fanny Fern inverts the sentiment in a phrase from Tupper’s Proverbial Philosophy about a baby being “‘a well-spring of pleasure’” in a house. She sarcastically destroys that poetic notion, calling a baby a “‘well-spring’ of botheration,” a “little wretch,” and a “shapeless, flimsy, flabby little nuisance.” Mr. Tupper shouldn’t mention babies again “unless you’ll sketch from life as I do!” (TF, May 1, 1852, original emphases). The comic target here clearly appears as the foolishly romantic male point of view about one of the most difficult tasks in a household, caring for an infant. Fanny Fern insists on a dose of realism (“sketch from life”), that is, husbands stereotypically leave all the care to the wives, so why would anyone with sense and a pair of observing eyes believe Tupper’s gushing remark? Referring to a baby as “shapeless, flimsy, flabby” jokingly describes all newborns, but calling it a “wretch” and a “nuisance” mocks a sitting-room aesthetic, as though shocking readers used to Fanny Fern’s sentimental pieces forms part of the comic goal. If sugary sentiments about babies will not be spared, then similarly flavored notions about courtship have no chance. “On a Valentine” ridicules the symbolism of exchanging hearts because a woman has “a great bouncing heart, to which yours [the man] bears the same comparison as a bullet to a cannon ball.” And there’s more: a man’s heart is a “little, perforated, withered, fragmentary, dead-and-alive concern, incapable, under any system of coaxing, of one, good, strong, healthy pulsation. I’m no lawyer, but it strikes me you might be indicted for ‘trying to obtain goods under false pretences [sic]’” (TF, February 26, 1853). Again, this piece reads as Parton indulging her talent for namecalling, even though done to brandish a satiric point: women are far more loving than men. “Love Making” continues the theme, ridiculing a woman as a “double-distilled little simpleton” because she signals an interest in a man right away, foregoing the pleasure of pursuit (BE, May

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3, 1853; rpt. from TF). In this instance, Fanny Fern returns to an important strategy for challenging patriarchal notions about women, defending them and implicitly promoting their cleverness, this time emotionally instead of intellectually, but she also implies the common sense, normative value of proceeding slowly in a courtship.

Fanny’s Madcap and Merry Gender-Bending: Women and Femininity The symbolic violence of comic insults and comic curses forms the sharpest end of Sara Parton’s satiric pen in both volumes of Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio. She reserves some epithets for particularly deserving cases, but for all such examples the liberal use of them projects an aggressive Fanny Fern capable, when necessary, of flying past the sweet sarcasm of a comic belles lettres lady’s style to employ tactics calculated to invoke a laughing Medusa. Parton is clearly willing at times to turn a Gorgon’s gaze toward certain comic butts, to display Fanny Fern with serpents instead of hair for the most terrific of sarcastic judgments, which, at times, could be read as an indulgence in comic rants and personalized lampoons. Such indulgence risks losing one or both intertwined elements for maintaining the posture of a proper satirist: a motive of benevolence for the harsh comic tactics; a public sphere issue as the stake. When Parton as Fanny Fern focuses her satiric attention on women’s behavior, she again projects her signature ambiguous, even contradictory evaluation. One instance brings out comic hyperbole. In “Miss Fanny Fiddlestick’s Soliloquy, On Reading a Complimentary Notice of Herself, Written by a Lady,” Fanny Fern pretends to be unnerved by reading praise of her in the notice. Though the title claims the soliloquy as Fanny Fiddlestick’s, the speaker refers to herself as “Fanny” and a “Fern”: “Praise from a woman! Oh, this Fanny isn’t verdant, even if she is a Fern! There’s something behind it! When a woman pats you with one hand you may be morally certain she’s going to scratch you with the other. Here—hands off! clear the track of all petticoats! I’m going to the pistol gallery to take lessons in shooting. That complimentary notice is the fore end of a runner of something” (OB, January 22, 1853, original emphasis). In this example, complete with a hint of potential gunplay, Fanny Fern reinforces a stereotype that women not only chronically fail to be friends but also are too readily capable of deceit and malice, a charge related to Parton’s claim early in her career that women routinely slander each other with gossip.

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Fanny Fern repeats her lack of illusions about woman behaving as sympathetic sisters when she pushes back against this headnote in another piece: “‘Let cynics prattle as they may, our [men’s] existence here, without the presence of the other sex, would be only a dark and cheerless void’” (FL2, 61). The two paragraph retort reads like an old-fashioned spleenventing, one that begins by ridiculing the headnote’s praise for women, representing female friendship only as an impossibility. The piece also manages to trash a number of fashionable habits of dandies when Fanny Fern imagines herself as the only woman in the world (which would supposedly guarantee peace), allowing her to tell all the men how to dress and behave. As noticed in other examples, Parton’s comic attacks can both reinforce and mock stereotypes. When the editor of the Olive Branch jokes that women never have lockjaw because they talk so much, Fanny Fern takes him to task because the week before he had praised a letter from a female reader for its brevity. She jokes that because of his censure, she wants to become the most laconic of women, so she will learn sign language: “didn’t I, on the strength of that hint, go straight to the Deaf and Dumb Institution to learn to make signs (I understood making eyes before!).... Moreover, “there ain’t a mother’s son of you [men] that don’t DOAT on hearing [women] talk” (OB, March 27, 1852, original emphasis). Learning sign-language functions as a reductio-ad-absurdum that mocks the value of brevity in both males and females, but at the same time implicitly endorses the stereotype of prattling women by staging the necessity of women needing special training in order to be brief. Fanny Fern then ridicules the entire issue with the reference to “making eyes,” another kind of sign language that surely both sexes can understand, before turning up-side-down the complaint about women talking too much by declaring that men in fact do not complain about women talking because they “like to hear women talk.” Parton in a few lines comically suggests that the stereotype of women talking endlessly may not be entirely untrue, but, in any case, the problem is trivial, even nonexistent, because men enjoy women talking. While some examples suggest equivocation in Sara Parton’s general campaign against normative gendered expectations, she does not pass over conventional ideas about women and femininity without acidly acerbic phrasing splashed their way, given her penchant for comic epithet. For example, a new wife’s mother-in-law is “a regular old hyena” (FL1, 26), or an “old Jezebel,” a “vixen,” and a “skinflint” (FL1, 268, 269). A

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gaggle of meddling women becomes “a self-appointed committee of Paul Prys in petticoats” (FL1, 301).1 Aunt Betsey Moore embodies a type, the professional female complainer, sure she is regularly victimized. “She was an inefficient, dawdling, nervous, fidgety woman, taking no interest either in house or farm; always fancying herself ‘just gone’ with some incurable complaint; exacting, peevish and fretful; making everybody as uncomfortable as herself” (FL1, 285). Parton saves particularly strong scorn for those who discover marriage is not a utopia: “you miserable little whimperer! What have you to cry for? A-i-n-t y-o-u m-a-r-r-i-e-d?... ‘Smile!’ you simpleton!” (FL1, 324, 325). These tongue-lashings are meant to chastise bad habits stereotypically assigned to women. In another instance, Fanny Fern sounds epigrammatic about marriage before joking about shopping. “Matrimony and the toothache may be survived, but of all the evils feminity [sic] is heir to, defend me from a shopping excursion” (FL2, 339, original emphasis). Shopping for ball dresses in particular draws forth this pungent comment about the ultimate motive for such purchases: “Then if you patronize those ever-to-beabominated and always-to-be-shunned nuisances called parties, where fools of both sexes gather to criticize their host and hostess, and cut up characters and confectionary, you can step into that little room from which day-light is excluded, and select an evening dress, by gaslight, upon the effect of which you can, of course, depend, and to which artistic arrangement many a New York belle has probably owed that much prized possession—her ‘last conquest.’” A final barb again stings aging coquettes on shopping excursions: “you will see dinner dresses that remind you of a shivered rainbow, for passé married ladies who long since ceased to celebrate their birth-days, and who keep their budding daughters carefully immured in the nursery” (FL2, 341; original emphasis). While Parton lines up the stupidity and pettiness of fancy balls in her satiric cross-hairs, the broader targets in this piece are women who define their existence with fabric and fashion. These satiric darts are as sharp as any that Donald Mitchell hurls in his notorious satire on New York City’s upper tendom, The Lorgnette (1850). Parton thus reserves a true tongue-lashing for the dandyism of rich and fashionable women who spend lavishly on clothes—or $40 for a pocket handkerchief, an overdressed figure easily seen in Broadway on a sunny afternoon (Calhoun 1960, 232). Fanny Fern deflates such women by imagining a scene in which a group of men notice “a figure” of a woman whose “limbs” are so graceful that she looks good in anything

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and has an “artistic eye” to pull it off (FL2, 168), an emphasis on body suggesting that Parton was not afraid to hint at physical beauty and sexuality. (More on this topic later.) In line with other comments about how women treat other women with malice, Fanny Fern imagines fashionable women reacting with actual violence and self-serving lies after reading her comments: “Pout if you like, and toss your head, and say that you ‘don’t dress to please the gentlemen.’ I don’t hesitate to tell you (at this distance from your finger nails) that is a downright—mistake! and that the enormous sums most women expend for article, the cost of which few, save shop-keepers and butterfly feminines [sic], know, is both astounding and ridiculous” (FL2, 167). Because status motivates spending so much money, Fanny Fern sarcastically suggests that such women put price tags on each item of their clothing.

Fanny’s Madcap and Merry Gender-Bending: Men and Masculinity Given Parton’s focus on satirizing patriarchal expectations for gendered behaviors, men as a class are ridiculed often, especially as a strenuous pushback intending to subvert the Bible-inspired stereotype of men as “lords of creation,” always rational and competent.2 The stereotype implies woman as the weaker sex, but Fanny Fern ridicules both aspects of this gender divide with repeated mockings of the inanimate quality of a variety of men who are clearly below par, whether they are single or married, which Parton demonstrates with several trenchant portraits. “Bachelor Housekeeping” makes clear the chronic stupidity of bachelors; they are creatures too ignorant to know that toast is made from bread and too incompetent to keep their clothes in a decent state. Others “may make themselves merry at their expense [but] their case calls for the deepest commiseration” (FL1, 329), says Fanny Fern, her portrait mixing (mock?) pity with its ridicule. In “Tim Treadwell,” Parton exemplifies the worst version of a confirmed bachelor. Mr. Treadwell acts miserly with his money while behaving “contented to play lacquey [sic]... to any pompous aristocrat” that he meets on the street. He “bears a striking resemblance to a pair of rusty tongs in locomotion [and his] bow was a cross between a St. Vitus shake and a galvanic spasm.” In addition, “not withstanding that Tim owned a looking-glass, he labored under the hallucination that every woman he met was plotting against his single-blessedness” (FL1, 350), a

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remarkable display of male vanity, despite a conspicuous lack of looks and talent. “The Quiet Mr. Smith” presents a sarcastic and ironic portrait of a dull man who allows his wife to support him. For Parton, a marriage should be a partnership, not a situation in which one side does nothing. Among other scathing epithets for how dull he is: “If he’d been born of a poppy he couldn’t be more soporific”; “he is the expressed essence of chloroform!” (FL1, 341, 342). Another Mr. Smith in “An Interesting Husband” is so boring that “you couldn’t freeze him colder than he is” (FL1, 370). Such laughter-prompting scorn no doubt delighted readers who appreciated Fanny Fern as truth-teller just as other readers recoiled at such harsh comic critiques. Parton contrasts such cloddishness with those who have merry and flexible temperaments, a recurring theme that leads to this advice for women: “if you have the bump of mirthfulness developed, don’t marry a tombstone. You come skipping into the parlor, with your heart as light as a feather, and your brain full of merry fancies. There he sits! stupid—solemn—and forbidding... he’s about as genial as the north side of a meeting house.... Marry a man who is not too ascetic to enjoy a good, merry laugh” (FL1, 397, 398). “Edith May, or the Mistake of a Lifetime” dramatizes someone who did not hear or heed such advice. Edith May marries Mr. Jefferson Jones, who elicits a barrage of comic epithets: “an ossified old bachelor... angular, prim, cold and precise; mean, grovelling, contemptible and cunning”; “a soulless block”; “the stupidest possible encumbrance, in the shape of a husband”; an “idiot”; “the very prince of donkeys” (FL1, 108, 109, 110, 111). That Parton reprises this theme of mismatched temperaments not only reflects her experience with Samuel Farrington, but also insists on the importance of mirth for living in a happy marriage. The harshness of the epithets invokes the Medusa satirist, but the underlying value of cheerfulness stresses that the Medusa is laughing. In addition, Edith’s domestic scene implicitly faults women (especially younger women) marrying men (probably older men) just to be married regardless of the inferior quality of the prospective husband. Parton sketches these portraits as part of her project of overturning gender stereotypes with satiric ridicule, a reversal generalized in this biting observation: “out of ten couples you meet, nine of the wives are as far above their husbands, in point of mind, as the stars are above the earth” (FL2, 137). The foibles of the men in the portraits so far are perhaps trumped by the behavior of the man portrayed in “I Can’t,” a

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caustic rendering of someone who gives up, who does not show persistence against the hard world, “the very picture of cowardly irresolution” (FL1, 362). Fanny Fern says this type of man is “a disgrace to corduroys,” and she is ready to “throw my glove in your face, if I am a woman!” (FL1, 363, original emphasis). She must feel that if she, a so-called mere woman, can persist, so can any man. This instance of her satire assumes the stereotype of the weaker vessel in order to deny it with the image of a challenge to a duel. Presumably, Parton intends this sarcastic castigation to encourage a certain class of males who need to be manly. The challenge of a glove in the face also happens when Fanny Fern quarrels with this comment made in the British periodical Punch: “‘What is the height of a woman’s ambition? Diamonds’” (FL2, 291). Fanny Fern claims that women have such ambitions because too many men value money above all else in a prospective wife. At best, men and women are equally venal and materialistic. However, she finishes with a blistering description of materialistic men as faux males: “The race of men is about extinct. Now and then you will meet with a specimen; but I’m sorry to inform you that the most of them are nothing but coat tails, walking behind a moustache, destitute of sufficient energy to earn their own cigars and ‘Macassar’ [hair oil], preferring to dangle at the heels of a diamond wife, and meekly receive their allowance, as her mamma’s prudence and her own inclinations may suggest” (FL2, 291, original emphases). Clearly not anti-men, Parton instead promotes what she implies are true men by mocking specific and, in her view, all-too common behaviors. Reducing men to walking mustaches—such trenchant remarks imply the question, Who is really the weaker vessel? In “Jenny Lind Goldschmidt,” Parton shreds an editor’s manliness for printing rumors about a woman. She not only mockingly offers physical harm for his craven behavior; she also essentially doubts his manhood, again implying the question about which gender is naturally weak: I should like to see a pistol pointed at you, for the satisfaction of seeing you drop on your cowardly knees and whine for mercy, as men (?) who slander women, always do. You never heard of the days of chivalry, did you? Well sir, men in those days would have crushed you like a viper for speaking a woman’s name so lightly. Men in those days never conveyed the swift lie by the accursed non-committal sneer, or shrug, or lifting of the eyebrows. Men in those days put one hand on their swords and the other on their hearts, when woman’s name was mentioned. You a man! Heaven

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save the mark! I am glad I was born a woman! (TF, April 9, 1853, original emphases)

Men who casually slander women or trail their diamond wives while walking behind a mustache are not men at all. When Fanny Fern imagines being the only woman in the world, and how she would make changes in the behavior of all men, she enlarges her attack on faux masculinity by condemning anyone who is an “abomination or off-shoot of dandyism whatsoever” (FL2, 62). As she says elsewhere, “defend me from Bettys in corduroys!” (OB, July 31, 1852).

Fanny Does Caricature Parton’s periodical writings, both sketches and essays, move easily into comic territory because she persistently uses caricature to present the people who populate her columns. She imagines characters as types and many of her examples serve up variations. Insofar as those variations feature knaves and fools, Parton’s storyworld presents a satirist’s point of view. Caricature, like burlesque and parody, operates as false imitation, that is, its imitation does not produce a copy but a distorted iteration when simply describing proves inadequate to the satiric task. Observation clearly forms the basis for any good satirist, yet simple description rarely becomes the method of choice for conveying the ridicule that accompanies comic counter-examples. The satiric mirror distorts, irony as well as caricature being favored techniques. The tour around Fanny Fern’s house of caricature can begin with two items, the port-cochère entrance to the main building. The first one ridicules bad manners, “The Bore of the Sanctum” (FL1), which features one long epithet about a disagreeable type of person: self-centered, vain, chaos creating. The piece creates a tour de force of unbelievably wretched manners. In the second, “Letter to the Empress Eugenia,” Fanny Fern first jokes about the Empress coming to America and then turns the column into a satiric portrait of vulgar American behavior when individuals meet her at a hotel (FL2, 335–36). Once inside the house, one encounters a room divided in two, the halves mirroring each other. Here, Parton mocks life both in the country and the city, targeting people for living according to false values: a love of gossip, scandal, and status display. “A Tempest in a Thimble” sprinkles peppery words onto narrow-minded village life, where everyone knows

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everyone else’s business, and the smallest occurrence becomes an excuse for gossip. “The tailor, the farmer, the dressmaker and the milliner, love scandal better than patronage, or coppers, or crops” (FL1 339). Meddlers feature as satiric butts in other items (e.g., “Nancy Pry’s Soliloquy,” FL2) and one such person ends up horsewhipped for his meddling (“Meditations of Paul Pry, jun.,” FL2). The last example lets escape the outrage that fuels satire and overwhelms artful comic presentation, a boundary between rants and satire as a comic mode seen before. The counterpart for country bad behavior in the city presents a group of people that Parton routinely ridiculed—the fashionable “‘upperten’dom” (FL2, 169) of New York City—in a manner that recalls contemporary sardonic looks by Donald Grant Mitchell (The Lorgnette, 1850), Charles Astor Bristed (The Upper Ten Thousand, 1852), and George William Curtis (The Potiphar Papers, 1853). During a stroll around town, Fanny Fern visits the city prison known as “The Tombs” because “I am weary of this hollow show and glitter—weary of fashion’s stereotyped lay-figures—weary of smirking fops and brainless belles, exchanging their small coin of flattery and their endless genuflexions: let us go out of Broadway—somewhere, anywhere” (FL2, 358). Gritty reality engages Parton more than the hollowness of glittering society, mirroring the harsh view of an ostensible pastoral’s underside. Parton’s comic (and not-so-comic) warnings about marriages between mismatched temperaments has been noted before, and a large gallery exists for a related satiric target: stuffy and stiff folks, the temperamental relatives of the Misses Pecksniff, those who create “this great museum of [a world with their] dry, dusty, withered hearts” (FL1, 191). One example of such people can be recognized because “her kerchief [is] starched as still as her manners” (FL1, 250). The stuffy stiff folks can be big men with small souls, “some pompous theologian” (FL1, 189), or an “inanimate preacher, who would drawl out the hymns very much as an ignorant nursery-maid might repeat melodies to a sleepy child” (FL1, 263). The prim and proper schoolmistress provides another example where human feeling apparently cannot be found, calling forth harshly comic phrasing: Here comes the teacher, brisk, angular, and sharp-voiced. Heaven pity the children! She’s a human icicle—pasteboard-y and proper! I already experience a mental shiver. Now she comes up and says (apologetically to my new satin cloak), “You see, madam, these are only poor children.” The

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toadying creature! Lucky for her that I’m not “a committee.” Can’t her dull eyes recognize God’s image in linsey-woolsey? Can she see no genius written on yonder broad forehead? No poetry slumbering in yonder sweet eyes? Did Franklin, Clay, and Wester study their alphabet in silk and velvet? She ought to be promoted to the dignity of toe-nail polisher to Queen Victoria. (FL2, 313, original emphases)

The comic curse at the end offers a strange image for the schoolteacher’s “toadying” behavior, ironically claiming dignity accompanies such a station in life, while implying she presently occupies a significantly lower status from which she could be promoted. Apparently, the “toadying” schoolteacher would welcome such a promotion. A type related to the inhumane schoolmistress can be found in the refined gentleman who forgets his family: “the hum of busy life has struck upon his ear, drowning the voice of love. He has become a MAN! refined, fastidious!—and to his forgetful, unfilial heart (God forgive him), the mother who bore him is only—‘the old woman!’” (FL2, 171, original emphasis). Parton’s (in)famous lampoon of her brother, N. P. Willis, levels the same charge. “Apollo Hyacinth” begins with a headnote: “‘There is no better test of moral excellence, than the keenness of one’s sense, and the depth of one’s love, of all that is beautiful.’” Her rebuttal: “I don’t endorse that sentiment. I am acquainted with Apollo Hyacinth. I have read his prose, and I have read his poetry; and I have cried over both” (FL2, 381). Troubles are boring, so Mr. Hyacinth ignores them as well as relatives in trouble. Social position remains paramount, vulgarity to be despised always in order to be respectable. Love of the beautiful clearly crowds out love of the moral. In another gallery in the house of caricature, Fanny Fern displays examples of a favored target of the satirist: avarice. Thus Prudence Prim has “an iron creed and an India-rubber conscience” in which money trumps principles. She personifies “two-faced, oily-tongued people, who twist, and turn, and double, like rabbits in a wood, why, it needs a gun that will shoot round a corner to hit them” (FL1, 343). Piety masking avarice provides a particular version of hypocrisy that Parton returns to several times in her first collection. Nicodemus Ney epitomizes the type: “As if a man who belongs to the church, wears such a long face, fortified with such a white and stiff cravat, makes such long prayers, and has such a narrow creed, could be anything but the quintessence of honesty!” (FL1, 315). Like Prudence, Nicodemus obsesses over money.

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Parton generalizes such men in “The Best of Men have Their Failings” (FL1), an ironic portrait of apparently good men, but other examples particularize. Pious and “very benevolently inclined,” “correct and proper” Mr. Bliss behaves in fact as a “pharisaical” phony (FL1, 62, 64). “Sanctimonious, avaricious Uncle John” with his “pharisaical skirt” and lack of charity provides a twin: “where your heart should have been, there was a decided vacuum” (FL1, 23, 18, 24). Perhaps the ultimate example in this set can be found in the “cruel, avaricious father” who refuses to help his own desperate daughter, a man “‘worse than an infidel!’” (FL1, 310). The piece obviously serves as a satiric swipe at her own father, who, despite being known as “Deacon Willis” and publishing a self-avowed religious newspaper, apparently did not know this Bible verse: “But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel” (1 Timothy 5:8). Hypocrisy remains a perennial target for Parton as Fanny Fern. “Uncle Jabe” give us a special type of hypocrite, one who speaks freely about a literary lady, pretending to know her and thus trying to enhance his status and to advertise himself “by hitching on to her literary apron-string.” As one might imagine, Parton has particularly strong language for this sort of man. She says that he would face a duel if he said such things about a gentleman as he has about a literary lady, then insinuates that he behaves like a coward by comparing him to a highwayman brave enough only to rob a woman because she is “alone and defenseless” (FL1, 367, 368). These examples function as ante-room for the grand salon, where Parton exhibits satiric portraits laced with epithets to mock specific faulty behaviors related to attending church. Given Parton’s Christian values and her multiple efforts to explore spirituality, the special status for this topic should not surprise. “The Vestry Meeting” literally features a church full of character types: the good folks are seamstresses and servant girls “glad of a reprieve”; the innocents comprise mothers with crying babies and children who do not understand the proceedings, while “sincere, good-hearted Christians —respectable citizens” are in evidence (FL2, 164, 166). However, while Parton arranges the good folks in groups, she individualizes the bad folks, a sure sign of the satirist’s world full of knaves: “the sharp-nosed old sexton”; Madams Spy and Prim; the four precious Miss Nippers; Mrs. John Edmonds, the snooty and showy aristocrat; Mr. Nobbs, who thinks he knows religious doctrine but talks foolishly; fat Zebedee Falstaff, who

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speaks of charity but practices none, a variation of the pious hypocrite; pompous Dr. Pillbox; young Smith, “who chased an idea around until he lost it.” For a finish, Fanny Fern gives us a bad poet, “Mr. Addison Theophilus Shakespeare Milton, full of poetical and religious inspiration, who soared so high in the realms of fancy, that his hearers lost him” (FL2, 164, 166)—obviously another lampoon of Parton’s brother, N. P. Willis, to accompany “Apollo Hyacinth” (FL2, 381–83), who becomes Hyacinth Ellet in Ruth Hall. Jabs at other ostensible Christians include “Soliloquy of Mr. Parish,” which reveals how petty-minded Deacon Smith torments the reverend. Three pieces total in the first collection (“A Chapter on Clergymen” and “The Model Minister” as well as “Soliloquy of Mr. Parish”) invite derision at congregations for their mean, stingy, and sanctimonious behavior, Parton even implying that some church-going folks will be damned to hell for it (FL1, 366). Parton multiple times paints the portrait of the hypocrite who pretends to be pious, showing how vanity for the things of the world trumps spirituality. Perhaps the worst of this sort in Fanny Fern’s satirical world of knaves and fools is a mother teaching her daughter to cover vanity with piety: “There; now [after dressing and primping] you look most as pretty as your mother did, when she was your age. Don’t toss your head so, Jane; people will call you vain; and you know I have always told you that it makes very little difference how a little girl looks, if she is only a little Christian” (FL2, 173, original emphases). The double meaning of “a little Christian” provides a deliciously ironic gloss on the mother’s behavior. Finally, “Whom Does It Concern” presents a full-blown satiric parable of greed and Christian hypocrisy in which girls become prostitutes because they cannot earn enough money to feed themselves. Mary starts as a seamstress, envying the well-clad women in the great house across the street. When Mr. Skinflint of Simon Skinflint and Co. refuses to pay a higher wage, Mary ends up in the great house, which turns out to be full of prostitutes. Later, she works on the streets and then dies in a pauper’s grave. In denying Mary’s request for a higher wage, Mr. Skinflint says that it does not concern him if she refuses what he offers: others will take it. The story ends with a wish and a patented Fanny Fern comic curse: “God speed the day when the Juggernaut wheels of Avarice shall no longer roll over woman’s dearest hopes; when thousands of doors, now closed, shall be opened for starving Virtue to earn her honest bread; when he who would coin her tears and groans to rear his palaces, shall

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become a hissing and a by-word, wherever the sacred name of Mother shall be honored” (FL2, 305). Parton’s usual focus on a woman’s independence in the domestic sphere explicitly broadens to the public sphere in this dramatization of how marketplace practices can ruin people’s lives (Calhoun 1960, 188). One important sign of Parton’s comic style, how it tilts not just toward satire but aggressive forms of satire, can be noted in the relatively rare use of more lighthearted comic techniques. “A Moving Tale” (FL2), a story about moving day in New York City, which custom says happens on May 1, provides a good example. The circumstances of the Smith family moving engender the comic tone, not their behavior or temperament. The slapstick account, complete with Mr. Smith sleeping on the floor the night before and ending with his head in the fireplace, and one of the children eating some of the paint as painters finish painting the new rooms, concerns mishaps rather than traits of character. Similarly, “Barnum’s Museum” offers a lighthearted look at the great tourist attraction. When Fanny Fern sees the famous Bearded Lady, lots of essentially silly jokes ensue: “I have not come to New York to stifle my inquisitiveness. How did you raise that beard? Who shaves first in the morning? You or your husband? Do you use a Woman’s Rights razor? Which of you does the strap-ping? How does your baby know you from its father? What do you think of us, smooth-faced sisters? Do you (between you and me) prefer to patronize dress-makers or tailors”? (FL2, 374). Notably, humor in its tolerant sense does not operate in these two examples. The Smiths remain as comic butts for readers’ laughter, and Fanny Fern’s jokes maintain the freak status of the bearded lady. These examples all serve to underscore Parton’s most generalized comic target: traits of character discerned through behavior. The storyworld of Fanny Fern teems with foolish and rascally individuals. Parables and sermons direct ridicule at such people, possibly to reform them, but certainly to comically remind readers of how not to behave. Given Parton’s comic style in her efforts to be the week-day preacher and make people laugh at bad behaviors and ethically dubious values, Fanny Fern fits into Thackeray’s formula that “the humourous writer” awakens and directs scorn. And yet, satirical writer clearly fits Fanny Fern better than the tag humorous writer, despite the claim from Addison and Steele for the existence of an amiable laughter that should enable the comic belles lettres lady satirist. Though Fanny Fern can be the lady

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satirist for many contemporary critics, as the next chapter shows, their apprehension of the laughing Medusa often overrides that amiable role.

Notes 1. Paul Pry (1825), a farce in three acts, was the most notable play written by nineteenth-century English playwright John Poole. The storyline centers on an idle, meddlesome, and mischievous fellow consumed with curiosity. Unable to mind his own business, he’s an interfering busybody. 2. The idea of man’s dominion in the Bible: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth”(Genesis 1:26); “You made them rulers over the works of your hands; you put everything under their feet” (Psalm 8:6); “Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name” (Genesis 2:19); “Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee” (Genesis 3:16). However, the lyrics to a folksong sound more like Fanny Fern: “You lords of creation men you are called,/ You think that you’ll rule the whole,/ But you are much mistaken after all,/ For its under a one’s control./ For ever since this world began,/ Its always been the way,/ For did not Adam that very first man,/ The very first woman obey, obey, obey.”

Constructing Fanny Fern as Satirist

Sara Parton’s pen name of “Fanny Fern” was so popular by the spring of 1852 that race horses were named after her, with steamboats to follow.1 As shown in Chapter 2, the speculation about the real person behind the Fanny Fern persona was intense. Joyce Warren (1992, 101–2, 104) and Laura Laffrado (2009, 54, 70–72, 77–78) discuss that speculation about Fanny Fern’s true identity. Although Parton at times resented the public probing into her life, even providing misinformation when it suited her, she also, as noted before, had the good humor to provide a mocking biography of herself as a female Backwoods Roarer. Fanny Fern says she is “a female woman! … [with a] present intention to get married as soon as I can get a chance. I have black eyes and hair, and am very petite. I am as sensitive as the ‘Mimosa,’ spirited as an eagle, and untameable [sic] as chain-lightning. Can make a pudding or write a newspaper squib, cut out a child’s frock or cut a caper, or crowd more happiness or misery into ten minutes, than any Fanny that was ever christened” (OB, April 17, 1852, original emphases). There may be no better single example of Fanny Fern’s ambiguous temperament, her gender-bending capability within contemporary popular culture, than her mix of feminine domesticity and an out-of-doors wildness associated with men.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 J. E. Caron, The Modern Feminine in the Medusa Satire of Fanny Fern, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41276-9_6

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Fanny Fern’s multi-leveled comic ambiguity no doubt startled the reading public and so stoked interest in the author. Certainly, her claim about wanting to marry circulated widely. The Brooklyn Eagle (July 31, 1852) notes a bachelor’s big chance with the “sprightly” newspaper writer. The Washington D.C. Daily Evening Star revives the joke sometime later (February 10, 1854), and the Baltimore Sun follows suit in a piece titled “Chance of Getting Married” (February 16, 1854), inviting “any enterprising bachelor” to take notice. The trickster-joke about wanting to marry, however, rests in plain sight, purloined letter fashion. Mimosa pudica is the Latin name for a flower called “touchme-not” in the vernacular; it suggests someone “shy, bashful, shrinking.” The flower’s leaves fold inward and droop when shaken or touched. Fanny Fern of course is anything but shy and bashful, nor does she have black hair. The aggressiveness of her boast denies her Mimosa status. Parton’s comic portrait thus provides misdirection about her identity in a laughter-prompting fashion. Another sly effort at comic misdirection shows up in “A Card from Fanny Fern” (NYTr, March 27, 1854): “by a sudden reversal of fortune, I was deprived of all my relatives.” As noted before, newspapers widely commented on this disavowal, given that for more than a year everyone knew she was N. P. Willis’s sister. Parton also claimed to be married the month Farrington divorces her (BE, September 29, 1853). At times, then, Parton might joke about the intensity of the reading public’s wish to know the true identity of Fanny Fern, but other times the personal stakes demand spinning yarns. In addition, Parton did not shy away from pushing back on intrusive journalism, once writing to an editor, “what business is it of yours, in particular,” when his paper reports a quarrel between the famous singer Jenny Lind and her husband (TF, April 9, 1853). A public celebrity in her Fanny Fern guise, Parton nevertheless valued a right to privacy. An adoring or prying reading public (perhaps adoring and prying at the same time) looks familiar to someone living in the celebrity saturated environment of the twenty-first century. Whether the fans of today eagerly consume the tweets and posts on social media of their favorite pop culture stars or the fans of the 1850s eagerly read the weekly newspaper installments of Fanny Fern, they all keenly wish to know every possible detail, every personal trait, to feel simpatico with the temperament of their special celebrity friend, a goal that Parton mocks with her parodic tall-talk biography. Parton’s shape-shifting misdirections about Fanny Fern both

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indulge her reading public and thwart it, while her comic style simultaneously projects recognizable if complex temperament, both a comic belles lettres lady and a Medusa satirist. Traits of character establishing temperament define a central concern for an understanding of satire embedded in the aesthetic comic belles lettres with its signature amiable laughter. A key context for examining Fanny Fern as the Medusa satirist has been the originary function of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in making visible a new conception of satire and the satirist. The proverbial moral fury of the satirist has possibly always been troubling to some commentators, especially in the personalized satire of a lampoon. Addison agrees with Plato that lampooning ridicule from an ill-natured individual should trouble, but he does not as a solution ban the genre. Instead, ridicule should be tempered with “Virtue and Humanity” (Spectator #23, 1:69–72; 71). The best satirist is therefore an amiable satirist. Addison’s amiable satirist maintains comic artifacts’ potential ethical function of exposing bad behavior to ridicule but reconfigures the satirist’s motivation by touting benevolence, which proscribes harsh and personal ridicule while engendering a cheerful and good-natured manner. Cheerful benevolence theoretically renders ridicule agreeable and even pleasant so that the satirist can “rail agreeably” (Tatler #242, 4: 234–38; 236). Initiated by the periodical writings of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, the aesthetic of an amiable satire had been in evidence for well over one hundred years in Anglo-American letters, with Washington Irving in The Sketch Book (1819) and Bracebridge Hall (1822) functioning as the literary bridge from England to America, when Parton started her career. Moreover, evidence exists that the aesthetic obviously shaped comic writings contemporaneous with Parton’s newspaper columns. The aesthetic could boast not just a well-established tradition, however; it also could theoretically accommodate a woman writing amiable satire that did not employ the device of vernacular speech. Given the previous chapter demonstrating that Sara Parton’s comic style as Fanny Fern often resides well beyond the boundaries set by comic belles lettres, how are Addison and Steele’s definitions and boundaries useful for understand Parton’s construction of her literary persona? The answer: the comic belles lettres aesthetic puts into clear perspective just how unique Parton was as an antebellum American comic writer. Parton’s aggressive comic style suggests that while she can be placed into the aesthetic as a lady satirist, she often deliberately chose to fly

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past the aesthetic as a voleuse projecting a Medusa satirist. Parton as a woman writing satire therefore operated not only beyond the pale as far as the ideology of the sentimental family and cult of true womanhood was concerned, but as the Medusa satirist, she also claimed territory outside the friendly and genteel confines of comic belles lettres. As a Medusa satirist writing something akin to écriture féminine, Sara Parton performing as Fanny Fern lived a literary life as an outsider twice removed. Because the key move by Addison consists of his prescribing what the satirist’s temperament ought to be in the delivery of the satire, the comic writer in 1850s America operating within the enunciative field of comic belles lettres pays particular attention to the temperament of her or his satiric persona. Thus the temperament of Parton as understood through her alter ego Fanny Fern, the object so fervently pursued by the adoring and prying public, becomes a legitimate topic of discussion even before gender becomes an issue, a process also followed by literary critics evaluating William Thackeray’s temperament, when critics discussed even his physical presence (Caron 2021a). Despite Parton’s singular style, viewing persona and author temperament as one in the same is a parameter of comic belles lettres that she could not escape. How she presented herself when she presented Fanny Fern, therefore, inevitably tangled with how the reading public and the critics reacted to the writing, as well as reacting to Parton’s efforts to obfuscate her identity. The model of gentlemen joking or railing agreeably with other gentlemen, most memorably invoked by Shaftesbury and as old as Aristotle, had already become something else in The Spectator. While the papers that focus on Roger de Coverley present the gentlemen’s club in a fashion Shaftesbury and even Aristotle would probably recognize, that emphasis on class, effectively replicated when Mr. Spectator visits Sir Roger at his ancestral home, has shifted to include a mercantile and middle-class readership envisioned by Addison and Steele for The Spectator. That shift from aristocracy to middle class had obviously accelerated in the United States by mid-nineteenth century, despite Irving’s replication of Mr. Spectator and Sir Roger with Geoffrey Crayon and Squire Bracebridge. Not only had the setting for comic writing moved out of Irving’s England, but also the American periodical world of the 1850s boasted a far wider readership than anything Addison and Steele could have imagined. The gentlemen’s club has become the editor’s

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table epitomized by Lewis Gaylord Clark (Caron 2021a), and the agreeable raillery among aristocratic gentlemen has become humorous gossip among correspondents. Those changes mean that gentleman cannot signify in the same way, or, more accurately given the variety of comic treatments given to the figure of the gentleman in other satiric efforts in the 1850s, gentleman is a much more fluid and laughably contested term. No less contested is the meaning of lady. One might substitute lady for gentleman in the Addison and Steele formulation, so that “honest Gentlemen … who are Men of Wit and Sense” becomes “honest Ladies … who are Women of Wit and Sense.” These are individuals who of course might “rail agreeably” and with “a benevolence to all,” but when one evaluates the Fanny Fern persona, the fundamental meanings of woman as well as lady become part of the stakes in its satire. Not only does the idea of a comic belles lettres gentleman or lady potentially constrain the way Parton as an American comic writer can project a satiric persona, but even Parton being a woman apparently constrains the persona of an amiable satirist. Ironically, the feminization of the satirist that has accompanied the rise of the comic belles lettres gentleman does not obviously help Parton fashion Fanny Fern, certainly not in the judgment of many contemporary critics. Just being a literary lady, a bluestocking, already puts in doubt Parton’s claim to being a true woman in the ideology of the sentimental family. However, the deeper source of conflict lies elsewhere. The benevolent motivation required to create an amiable satirist encourages discriminating any comic laughter aimed at a butt into two levels: one that ridicules vice and folly; one that tolerates and humors foibles or eccentricities. Comic laughter, then, can be effectively divided into ridiculous and ludicrous modes, the former used to correct major faults, the latter deployed as a sign of tolerance for lesser faults. In Fanny Fern’s satiric world, most of her comic characters display faults that need reforming, not toleration; they are, often, objects of an acerbic rather than amiable satire, further undermining a claim that the persona behaves, talks like, a lady. Parton does deploy both kinds of laughter, as all the amiable satirists do, but the ridiculous mode of acerbic or caustic satire predominates. Moreover, because her central topic for satiric treatment entails gender expectations for both men and women, Fanny Fern becomes a lightning rod not only for the aesthetic choices implied in the figures of an amiable satirist or a comic belles lettres lady satirist, but also for a set

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of social and political ideas at issue in the public sphere. Indeed, that fusing of aesthetics with social and political concerns makes Fanny Fern such a compelling comic persona, then and now. Along with the literary domestics writing sentimental fiction, Fanny Fern represents an aesthetic engagement with gender expectations that defined the private sphere and were also spilling into the public sphere in parallel with the efforts of the suffragettes. However, because the engagement proceeded via the comic critique of satire, Fanny Fern also represented a particularly disturbing cultural presence. Thus the contemporary scrutiny of the Fanny Fern persona focuses on Parton as a woman who writes satire. For the periodical world of the early 1850s, Sara Parton as Fanny Fern stood out as fair game for all manner of comment. The discourse from fans and critics alike thus grapples with the multi-faceted, even paradoxical, way that Parton stages Fanny Fern’s temperament. Because Parton so obviously poured her own temperament into her persona, what also intrigues is the way that critics construct Fanny Fern as persona and Parton as author in reviews, as well as the way that some imagine Parton as a woman and author using what they glean from her persona’s voice. Finally, portraits from individuals who knew Parton personally add another layer to the complex print-culture portrait of Fanny Fern.

Fanny Fern’s Self-Portrait (New Woman?) In “A Fern Soliloquy,” Parton imagines a scene in a church that reveals details of Fanny Fern as an amiable satirist who can also claim to be a lady: she acts eccentrically, hating uniformity and loving clouds, wind, and sea because they are so changeable. In providing a comic portrait of her alter ego, Parton in this sketch implies écriture féminine, embracing images stereotypically female and making them a source of power. As Hélène Cixous says, “we are ourselves sea” (1976, 889). The motion implied by clouds, wind, and sea becomes Fanny Fern’s humor. She dramatizes her humor of detesting uniformity when she sits in a pew behind six “exact” Misses Pecksniffs, who represent in cookie-cutter fashion the classical version of femininity. Their number signifies the cultural standardization of their behavior—“so straight, so proper, and so pasteboard-y” (FL1, 376), as if mass-printed from a steel engraving—obviously the opposite of a temperament like Fanny Fern’s. Fanny feels so at odds with

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the Pecksniff sisters that she imagines them catching either cholera or husbands; it is all the same to her. Fanny Fern matches her harsh, musing wish by another she spins against the scary sexton at her boarding school, “a distorted carving of ‘Time with a scythe’ on a tombstone [with] a cold slimy look. … Didn’t I hope he might catch the small-pox, or be quietly removed in some way?” (OB, August 9, 1851). Such phrasing, anticipating Mark Twain in his most irascible mood, epitomizes the acerbic wit of a satirist only sometimes restrained, suggesting how an amiable satirist reveling in the charm of changeable clouds can pivot to a sarcastic tone; it also symbolizes the worst fears of those imprisoned by stereotypical thinking about men and women, especially about a woman author. Fanny Fern’s language figures husbands as equivalent to a deadly disease, and her wish for the six Misses Pecksniffs registers as a curse. Robert Elliott’s (1960) study of satire’s roots shows that curses are a kind of proto-satire in its most acerbic forms. I have already argued that Parton’s presentation of a literary woman contains her most potent symbolic threat to a standardized view of gendered behavior. In her caustic caricatures of character types and liberal use of epithets, Parton demonstrates how allowing the appearance of the acerbic satirist tends to overwrite the amiable satirist. In Addison’s conception of the comic belles lettres gentleman, the traditional masculine aggressiveness of satire has been rendered gentle and feminized, signifying civilized, even genteel, behavior. The writer who wishes to practice satire as a comic belles lettres gentleman feels compelled to justify caustic and acerbic phrasing, effectively downplaying its harshness by insisting on the motive of benevolence. In her conception of Fanny Fern, Parton necessarily stumbles over the same mix of feminine and masculine qualities, but from the opposite direction. Fanny Fern shows that being a woman writer who wishes to promulgate satire does not guarantee nor necessitate the more feminized—that is, amiable—satire of the comic belles lettres gentleman. That Parton routinely transgresses the boundary between amiable and acerbic satire easily as often as any male counterpart is not lost on the literary community found in periodicals. Fanny Fern claims a temperament “as sensitive as the ‘Mimosa,’” but in several other places irony clearly undercuts the claim. Thus she behaves as “untameable [sic] as chain-lightning,” refusing to be passive while “waiting till that man [her dour husband] got ready to speak to me! You can see at once it would be—be—. Well, the amount of it is, I

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shouldn’t do it!” (FL2, 193, original emphasis). Parton apparently wrote this piece, “Sober Husbands,” especially for the second series of Fern Leaves. Well-known by the time the second series appears in 1854, she clearly expects her audience to grasp how impossible it would be to imagine Fanny Fern in this submissive posture. Parton’s willingness to project this image of an untamable temperament can be seen early in one of her first publications, when Fanny Fern reveals she is a deacon’s daughter, proverbially wild. “And now let me tell you, between you and I confidentially, it wasn’t that dear father’s fault that I wasn’t a good girl [for] I was born an untameable [sic] romp” (OB, August 9, 1851, original emphasis). The very next week, Parton, writing as “Tabitha,” declares herself to like the boys more than the girls, again placing her literary alter ego against the grain of respectable gendered behavior (OB, August 16, 1851). Though the feature of being untamable both as girl and woman fashions a self-portrait, as Warren’s biography confirms (1992, 14, 31), Parton indulges in a comic metaphor—“chain-lightning”—that insists on repeated displays of an awesome natural power, as though she warns in a single image that her satiric agenda will often be both dangerous and illuminating. The phrasing Parton uses in many of her columns suggests the deepseated quality of her feelings about the subjects she takes up in her newspaper writing. “When You are Angry” spotlights the chain-lightning anger and outrage that often fueled such satiric phrasing. Even though Mrs. Penlimmon speaks, I would argue that Fanny Fern embodies the same attitude, which cannot be ruled by the sentiment in the item’s headnote when it says to take three breaths when angry. I’m telegraphic [i.e. fast as a message sent by telegraph],—if I had to stop to reflect, I should never be saucy. I can’t hold anger any more than an April sky can retain showers; the first thing I know, the sun is shining. You may laugh, but that’s better than one of your foggy dispositions, drizzling drops of discomfort a month on a stretch; no computing whether you’ll have anything but gray clouds overhead the rest of your life. No: a good heavy clap of thunder for me—a lightning flash; then a bright blue sky and a clear atmosphere, and I am ready for the first flower that springs up in my path. (FL2, 199)

Here Parton projects the temperament of the comic belles lettres lady— fundamentally amiable (“bright blue sky and a clear atmosphere”)—yet

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the imagined disposition also possesses a thunder-and-lightning aspect when it is necessary to be “saucy,” that is, Medusa satiric. Fanny Fern treats the comic belles lettres aesthetic as a voleuse, taking something from it but also flying past it. “Feminine Waiters at Hotels” adds another facet, suggesting the selfconscious nature of Parton’s comic writing. The headnote in this example focuses on hotels possibly employing female waiters. Fanny Fern encourages women to apply, even though they are bound to encounter idiotic customers. Parton ultimately welcomes such encounters for the sake of her comic business as a satirist, however. “This would be a horridly stupid world, if every body were sensible. I thank my stars every day, for the share of fools a kind Providence sends in my way” (FL2, 333). Notably, Parton simply ignores the imperative that a woman who claims the status of a lady should not place herself in the gaze of a public eye as she touts the satirist’s need for fools as grist to the comic mill. This piece displays one of the few times that class difference shows in the Fanny Fern writings. Parton’s popularity spanned class divisions, but this endorsement of waitressing clearly targets working-class women, though one wonders what choice she would have made if the option had been available in the lean six months after leaving Farrington and before starting her writing career. The self-consciousness of being a satiric bluestocking can be found in other examples. In “City Scenes and City Life No. 1,” Fanny Fern imagines herself such a good speaker that she would top “Miss Lucy Stone” (FL2, 315), the famous orator and suffragette. In “Newspaper-dom,” Fanny Fern gives her idea of happiness—sarcastically. She likes helping out an editor by being a practical bluestocking in the offices of a newspaper as a volunteer assistant. This part rings true. The sarcastic irony comes when reading that editor’s editorial opinion some days later, “‘deploring the intellectual inferiority of women’” (FL2, 180). Parton claims a joy in the work of writing in “Who Loves a Rainy Day.” Fanny Fern first imagines a set of individuals for whom the rainy day creates a kind of reprieve from something unpleasant or routine, or a chance for someone to catch up on writing tasks, e.g., an editor or clergyman. She declares herself one who loves such days too: no visitors to worry about and writing can be done. The piece works through a series of imagined letters while sketching each correspondent. Fanny Fern ends with the pathos of rediscovering a pressed flower apparently meant to represent a keepsake of Parton’s first husband (FL2, 309). Here, the satirist at work finishes

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with a pivot to sentiment congenial for the amiable comic belles lettres lady safely ensconced within the cult of true womanhood. Finally, Parton imagines Fanny Fern on a steamboat as the sun rises, remarking the beauty of the river. She notices a man with his spinster sister. When the sister asks a question about the safety of her umbrella in the hands of the porter, “My stranger eyes meet his, and we both laugh involuntarily—(pardon us, oh ye prim ones)—without an introduction!” Fanny Fern champions laughter and merriment, not only the opposite of being prim but also associated with breaking protocols about women in public: she behaves daringly. At the pier, all the other passengers emerge as a spectrum of types. A final comment, however, gives us Fanny Fern’s basic humanity to balance her spleen and so behave as a comic belles lettres lady should: “On they go. Oh, how much of joy—how much of sorrow, in each heart’s unwritten history” (FL2, 265, original emphasis, 267). When Fanny Fern meets the stranger’s eyes and then they “both laugh involuntarily,” Parton demonstrates that, despite the habit of her persona making acerbic comments, she also replicates the doubling dynamic so crucial to comic belles lettres, finding another eccentric individual, in this case, someone also not afraid to transgress social protocol in a public space. Moreover, what registers as socially daring in Fanny Fern, that as a woman she should boldly meet the eyes of a strange man without an introduction, can also be read as an American woman interacting with an American man as an equal, an implicitly political gesture signaled by the camaraderie of a human behavior called amiable laughter. Looking at the Medusa straight on shows her laughing and beautiful, not so dangerous after all.

The Critics When one turns to the way that others construct Fanny Fern as comic persona and Sara Parton as comic writer, opinions appear decidedly mixed on a number of issues. “She [is] a woman of mark—quaint, smart, and clever,” says the Brooklyn Eagle (October 1, 1852). At such moments, commentators understand Parton as both an acerbic satirist as well as amiable satirist in the Addisonian mold. That commentators read Parton, “the witty and brilliant Fanny Fern,” as a satirist certainly cannot be in doubt: “a vein of satire runs through all she writes” (DFP, December 16, 1853), for it is “Fanny’s object to reform abuses” (DFP, December

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24, 1852). “Her tendencies are progressive” (NYTr, May 26, 1854). Lampoons cause trouble for Parton, her “personal satire,” an especial problem for a clever writer, presumably because she exhibits so much talent for that form of comic writing (NYEP, December 12, 1854). Fanny Fern can display the temperament and the sensibility fitting for an amiable satirist of the comic belles lettres lady sort when Eliza calls her “mirth provoking” (OB, April 10, 1852), and when George Bungay says she is “doing good by rebuking … and laughing to scorn” that which needs the rebuking of scornful laughter (1853, 352). Provoking both mirthful laughter and scornful laughter suggests the paradox of the comic belles lettres lady satirist’s mandate to rail agreeably. However, only when Fanny Fern also shows the required benevolent heart as motive for her comic gibes does the amiable satirist come fully into view. Thus Parton as Fanny Fern “usually breathes a spirit of genial humanity, no less than of exuberant gayety” (Ripley, December 16, 1854). Childhood friends of Parton’s picture the woman in the same light as her persona: she is “truehearted and noble-hearted” (LJ, January 6, 1855), and though “Her success and her plain speaking have doubtless made enemies who will try to injure her, … I can assure you that you can rely implicitly upon her honesty and goodness, whatever you may hear or read to the contrary” (BS, February 16, 1855). Possessing the “Virtue and Humanity” Addison insists on for the comic belles lettres gentleman, Parton embodies its female counterpart. As one reviewer puts it, Fanny Fern operates as a “great magnetizer of humanity” (USR, August 1853). Reviews of the first series of Fern Leaves reiterate the features in Parton’s Fanny Fern persona that mark the comic belles lettres lady: satire’s reforming intent leavened with genial humanity and even gaiety. Though the Cleveland Herald says that “Her style is not always such as we would desire it to be, … it is ever piquant and her motive always good. Her wit and satire are aimed always at abuses and rarely miss their mark” (May 30, 1854). Two other reviews of Fern Leaves, first series, emphasize Parton’s characteristic mix of mirth and scornful yet benevolent laughter. She is “saucy and dashing [yet] has a tender sympathy with human suffering” (NYHM, July 1853). Fanny Fern has a “warm heart, a clear head, and a certain energetic way of saying what she thinks, without pausing to consult much the so-called ‘proprieties’ of letter writing”; she has “good sense and talent [as well as] a keen eye for shams”—“the genius of mirth and laughter” (Ind, July 7, 1853).

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An Englishman transposes the comic belles lettres lady persona into culinary terms, saying he likes Fanny Fern’s books because they have a “roast beef of good sense and healthy feeling, with the mustard of wit, the gravy of good humor, the horseradish of sarcasm” (NYTr, July 12, 1854). For the New York Home Magazine, Fanny Fern appears as the “arch, daring, vivacious, paragraphist … amusing readers by her bold and rough, yet broadly humorous ‘hits’ of life and characters, … winning their affections as a tender, thoughtful, and pathetic moralist” (July 1853). The formula “bold and rough, yet broadly humorous ‘hits’ of life and characters” nicely captures the balancing act of the amiable satirist operating within the comic belles lettres aesthetic. Some reviewers emphasize the basic reforming impulse of satire, the “bold and rough” aspect: “There are others who have drawn characters as faithfully, and touched them with traces as life-like as Fanny Fern, but we know of no writer who has made such a severe onslaught upon popular errors. She never hesitates to say what seems right in her eyes, let the bolts fall and the lightnings scathe where they will” (CG, June 30, 1853). However, reviewers do not forget the agreeable part of the raillery. The key for Fanny Fern fitting the figure of the comic belles lettres lady satirist resides in how she delivers the satire, with a “laughing contempt for cant and conventionalism” and an attitude implying “a mine of fun, tenderness, and truth” (LLA, November 19, 1853; rpt. from Eliza Cook’s Journal ).2 Lewis Gaylord Clark in the Knickerbocker calls the sketches in Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio “brief, sententious, ‘telling’… always embodying a wholesome moral or pungent satire, and not infrequently some touch of tender pathos,” with a “simple and direct” style (July 1853). Clark’s discrimination of two kinds of writing, “wholesome moral and pungent satire,” suggests how the amiable satirist who might lean toward the more caustic end of a spectrum—“pungent”—also always wants to be perceived as benevolent—“wholesome.” An unsigned review in the New York Tribune of Fern Leaves, second series, undoubtedly by George Ripley, who wrote literary reviews for the paper from 1849 to 1880 (Tuchinsky 2009, 112–13), also notes in Fanny Fern a temperament fitted to the amiable satire implied in the figure of the comic belles lettres lady. “Her taste for satire is indeed tempered by warm womanly sympathies—otherwise it might be mischievous … though she cuts and thrusts with nimble alacrity, she leaves no venom in the wound, which she has made less in malice than sport. With her perennial mirth, she blends a genuine sense of the pathetic, and often relieves her brilliant

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flashes of humor, with a sudden burst of sympathy” (Ripley, May 26, 1854). I will come back to the issue of how “womanly sympathies” might temper satire, but Lewis Gaylord Clark’s comment that Parton’s style in the first series of Fern Leaves is “simple and direct”—which he reiterates in his notice of the second series when he says that Fanny Fern is “our plain-spoken friend” (Knick, July 1854)—brings up an important feature of Parton as a satirist: the commitment to observation that necessarily underlies the direct style of a satirist. Parton as Fanny Fern becomes a “writer of great terseness and acuteness of observation” (GLB, November, 1852), and the “secret of the popularity of Fern Leaves is its simplicity and truthfulness” (CG, June 30, 1853). This aspect comes in for praise later in Parton’s career with Ruth Hall , which is “a live book … a tale of real life; the heroine is a flesh and blood woman, of like nature with ourselves, and not a silly, transcendental exaggeration as heroes and heroines usually are.” The story is “told with a power and pathos, and a fidelity to nature, which excites alternate grief, and joy, and rage, and smiles, and tears” (CH, December 11, 1854). Ripley also asserts Parton’s “fidelity to nature” in the novel (May 26, 1854). As Joyce Warren makes clear in her biography of Parton, much of what Fanny Fern portrays in her writings comes straight out of her own dramatic and often painful experiences as daughter, wife, and mother. From this angle, Parton’s comic writing fits the traditional mirror metaphor for satire, ostensibly merely showing what exists yet should be ridiculed and changed. Reviewers commenting on Parton’s style emphasize an energetic quality that underpins her plain-spokenness. Fanny Fern is a “name in American light literature” with a “raciness of style” (PeM, February 1854), or she has a “dashing and trenchant ” style (GM, May 1855, original emphasis). Charles Lowell pronounces her writings “vigorous” (July 11, 1853) while another reviewer says “vivacious” (FDP, June 2, 1854). The ways in which commentators describe this energetic quality in Parton’s style reveals the gendered expectations about a woman writing comic material. On the one hand, critics softened that energy by calling it “sprightly” or “sprightliness,” which turns Fanny Fern into a mirthful pixie. Critics employ those terms for both Parton’s novel, which has “sprightliness … a “dashy style of writing” (NYEP, December 12, 1854) or a “sprightly, dashing style” (SG, December 15, 1854) as well as for her newspaper work. Fern Leaves first series shows a “sprightliness and

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grace of style,” “exquisite pathos,” and “good lessons” (CR, October 1, 1853). The metaphor of a woodland sprite gives Parton’s comic aspect a light-heartedness that fits with imparting lessons and employing pathos: comic laughter from this angle obviously registers as mirth; “sprightly and suggestive” can thus impart “deep and sweet pathos … while in her wildest flights of fancy, she never loses sight of common sense” (TF, rpt. OB, December 11, 1852). Thackeray himself could not have expressed better the image of the comic belles lettres lady’s humor as week-day preacher. However, the uptake of Parton’s comic style as sprightly energy can shade toward stronger stuff when critics say that Fern Leaves is not only “sprightly and spirited, sensible, sparkling,” but also “saucy, satirical, stinging, and, occasionally … slangy” (NYLW, August 6, 1853). Possessed of a style “rich with epigram, satire and pleasantry,” Fanny Fern becomes “the most original, piquant, and witty female writer of the day” (OB, December 11, 1852). When Parton publishes Ruth Hall, “piquant female writer” becomes “a spicy little woman” (DD, January 4, 1855). Though “piquant” and “spicy” belong to the domestic vocabulary of the kitchen, critics generally deployed them with positive connotations (along with “racy”) for male comic writers too. However, “saucy” suggests a gendered impudence; that culinary term easily transmutes to “hoyden.” When commentators criticize Parton’s energetic style as a “dashy style of writing,” the aesthetic judgment may not entail gender, but instead be a marker of a belles lettres taste that often looked down its Hugh Blair nose at the vernacular. However, the underlying issue of gender was often explicit, for example, when Ballou’s Pictorial says that Parton’s writing has a “slap-dash, Lady Gay Spanker style”3 (January 13, 1855), and the New York Times says Fanny Fern is a “clever” woman, but maybe pretentious too, with a “slap-dash vulgarity” (June 22, 1854, original emphasis). Being “slangy” proclaimed a no-less-loaded aesthetic judgment, but again the comments come with a gender-slanted censure. Thus Fanny Fern’s novel takes its place among “common-place productions,” while the author has less “poetry” in her soul than “school marms” and “females playing lady’s maid.” She “exhibits an admixture of reckless, audacious, slang-whanging, [and] vindictive, devil-may-carish, impudent abandon”—too piquant and too saucy presumably (BE, May 19, 1855). The Michigan Farmer makes the point explicitly: “vulgarity is not sprightliness—slang is not wit—and both are unbecoming, either from the lips or pen of a lady” (August 1, 1854). Perhaps this point of view explains what

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the Home Journal means by saying Fanny Fern has a “peculiar talent” (rpt. CH, July 15, 1853). This broad aesthetic viewpoint did have a positive side. When Parton publishes the second series of Fern Leaves, the Pioneer claims that her persona is “known throughout the length and breadth of the land, and wherever there is a man of taste, there will she be heartily welcomed” (September, 1854), while the New York Herald says that her “great talents” should be applied to something in “the higher walks of literature” (NYH, May 28, 1854). George Ripley in his unsigned review in the New York Tribune of Fern Leaves, second series, more clearly understands Parton’s slap-dash quality when he notes that the pressures of deadlines mark the evident “hasty composition,” yet nevertheless says that Parton is a good writer due to “her fidelity to nature, and her sympathy with the most universal tastes” (May 26, 1854). Ripley’s insight about writing for periodicals, however, does not save Parton from the mixed judgment of the Democratic Review (August 1853) about the first series of Fern Leaves, whose reviewer says that she cannot rival Dickens or Hawthorne—she has no art—though she does write much better than N. P. Willis, a “fifteenth-rate Washington Irving, varnished over with vulgarity and dandyism.” No doubt because the reviewer remains very aware that the readers of the Democratic Review represent “the thinking and the educated,” he ultimately renders decidedly left-handed praise, saying “Reader, she is—and we intend this as a compliment—she is a charming little humbug. She ought to have married Barnum.” Why? Because Sara Parton has committed the great sin of writing for newspapers and money. Newspaper writing means “writing quantity in place of quality [and] selling your soul to the devil—the printer’s—for a mess of potage [to create a] Crystal Palace of mediocrity.” There can be no art or no genius in such work, which is what “the thinking and the educated” reader wants. The Democratic Review continues: “On the whole, Fanny is amusing and readable, [but] when she would be easy and reckless, she is too often outrageously vulgar; and where a bold defiance of conventional absurdity is intended, a jarring coarseness is too often the apparent result” (189). The reviewer recognizes the satiric impulse in the newspaper writing with the phrase “bold defiance of conventional absurdity,” but judges the boldness of her critique (“defiance”) as reckless, coarse, and “outrageously vulgar.” He implies the need for satiric critique by admitting convention can be absurd, but the manner of the critique has clearly disturbed

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an aesthetic taste. Worse, maybe, comes from the judgment about being humorous: “Nine-tenths of her humor is sheer nonsense” (188). The reviewer uses Fern Leaves to castigate popular taste, so that Fanny Fern merely amuses at best, but gender stands apart from the criticism of her satiric effort. The Southern Literary Quarterly (April 1855) also takes up the issue of popularity and an implied readership. After praising some particular women writers, including Harriet Beecher Stowe for Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and saying that women have something to say, the reviewer claims that Ruth Hall is “another matter,” and cannot understand its popularity—in terms of artistry. Rather, the reviewer explains it in terms of the market and “an immense middle class of ordinary readers of average intelligence. This great middle class is composed of four-fifths women.” Ruth Hall “hit the nail precisely on the head” for the “massed enthusiasts of inspired mediocrity.” Hawthorne, for example, remains beyond them. Ruth Hall represents “the miracle of inspired mediocrity” for “the small intelligences … pious, pathetic, funny, dramatic” (original emphasis). Parton never flies too high or too low. The reviewer does admit to one fine passage that he quotes. The reviewer condemns the market for fiction in general as a “putrid sea of imbecility” that cannot appreciate good authors such as Hawthorne, Thackeray, Dickens, and the Brontes. This review should be understood as the root of the criticism that will blossom in the twentieth century with Fred Lewis Pattee and Ann Douglas. Lewis Gaylord Clark is “glad to see that the occasional coarseness … in the newspapers is omitted from the contents of the collected volume” of the first series of Fern Leaves (Knick, July 1853), while the Democratic Review states explicitly the kind of language omitted that several other commentaries have only suggested, namely, that Fanny Fern defies an aesthetic boundary when mounting her satiric critiques, even sometimes becoming “outrageously vulgar” (August 1853, 189). For a Brooklyn Eagle editor, Fanny Fern represents “spasmodic trash” (August 22, 1856). For a Dayton Daily editor, Fern Leaves is far worse than the inspired mediocrity claimed by the Southern Literary Quarterly; the book “‘will take hold of virtue’s nose, and lead modesty to the dogs! [and] is something that “the sewer will reject” (qtd. in Dyer 1853). Though the condemnation by the Dayton Daily in the name of virtue represents an outlier’s view in the commentary presented here, Parton and her literary alter ego Fanny Fern did suffer routine attacks from another

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quarter, namely, because she was a woman. At times, the commentator only implies this line of attack. Thus when the Detroit Free Press condemns Fanny Fern’s use of “many unrefined expressions” and her lack of “true delicacy,” the phrase really means the ostensibly natural delicacy of the woman-belle ideal implied by the ideology of true womanhood (December 16, 1853). When gender expectations are explicitly at stake, the easy manner in which commentators conflate persona and author perhaps surprises. In a review of Little Ferns (1853) that is actually mostly about her earlier work, the two series of Fern Leaves, the Chicago Daily Tribune says that “Many of her newspaper articles are of a character that no pure minded woman can read without a blush, nor any pure minded woman write under any circumstance.” Fanny Fern has an “ill-natured bitterness that fuels her sarcasm.” Her writings are full of “wickedness [that] produce[s] … a hardening and debasing” influence. Her sufferings have “soured and perverted her natural kindness and goodness of soul. Complaints of the present condition of women; ill-bred and low insinuations against the motives of those who differ from her; vulgar and broad allusions to things and subjects, which she, as a woman, should ignore; covert and malignant sneers at a religion of which she professes to be a devotee, stand upon every page of her writings.” She should have received “the chastening rod [of her tribulations] in meekness and submission” (December 7, 1853, original emphasis). The review of Life and Beauties (1855) in the Detroit Free Press takes the spurious biography in the book as true history that explains the venom in Ruth Hall, so that any blame for the Willis family’s dysfunction falls on Sara, who was “utterly unmanageable,” a “wilful hoyden” (February 14, 1855). The charge of vulgarity hits a reputation as one thing, the epithet “hoyden” another, for it once again opens the commentary and literary criticism into the realm of gender politics. In its more negative connotations, “hoyden” means a rude, impudent, uncultured, rowdy girl, or unruly woman, though in less pejorative terms it means high-spirited and boisterous or saucy and tomboyish, a point of view previously noted in many comments upon Parton’s style and all but admitted by Sara early in her writing career. Those disposed to dislike Parton and her literary alter ego did not pull punches when attacking from this angle, though Ruth Hall in particular evoked such sentiments. Putnam’s review of the novel says that “it is, in substance, a furious bombardment of her own family … very seldom

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has so angry a book been published. It is full and overflowing with an unfemininely bitter wrath and spite.” In contrast, her newspaper columns were “sketchy, scrappy, and unsubstantial to the very last degree of flimsiness, although certainly they contained many terse and striking sentences” (February 1855, my emphasis). The Vermont Chronicle quotes Putnam’s review approvingly and adds that the book displays “the ebullition of a wicked woman’s wrath and spite” (January 30, 1855). Though Putnam’s has good things to say about the first series of Fern Leaves —the pieces in the collection are “acute, crisp, sprightly, knowing, and, though sometimes rude, evince much genuine and original talent, a keen power of observation, lively fancy, and humorous as well as pathetic sensibilities”—the reviewer also wishes that “certain bold, masculine expressions [were] chastened” (July 1853, my emphasis), producing a double bind. The reviewer implies that one can accept a woman writing satire, as long as she shuns the masculine in her expressions, a parameter that the comic belles lettres aesthetic with its concept of an amiable satire and its figure of a gentle man writing satire deploys. The demand to be amiable in writing satire—to write with sweet sarcasm—falls doubly on a woman, then, conjuring another version of Cixous’s impossible subject. To not allow a woman or man to be caustic when the comic butt deserves such treatment is to deny that such satire is necessary at times. Sara Parton ignores such criticism, ignores the parameters of both traditional satire— always a man’s province—as well as soars past the boundaries of comic belles lettres to write as the Medusa satirist. The double bind can also be found when the Albion reprints a notice of Ruth Hall from an unnamed London paper that condemns the novel. Fanny Fern’s “attempts at humor … are absolutely revolting in their coarseness and vulgarity” because they are the “productions of a woman” (March 10, 1855). The New York Times ’ review of the novel mixes praise and complaint. “There is a wholesome bitterness in her satire.” However, though a man could write such revenge, a “delicate, suffering woman” should not because a “womanly gentleness” should prevent “remorselessly” attacking her persecutors (December 20, 1854). Clearly, a sizable portion of comments line up with the view that no literary violations in print against family can be justified, not even for “unnatural neglect, or wicked scorn.” Sara Parton’s “pen is as lawless as it is pointed … [with] scorching severity [and] intense bitterness” (CRER, January 1855). The novel’s “unpardonable blemish” is its “revengeful purpose” (NYFC, December 30, 1854) in the hands of a woman.

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In the context of Cixous’s “The Laugh of the Medusa,” the epithets hurled at Fanny Fern because she is a woman and a lady, yet also a forceful satirist, are instructive. Ruth Hall has a “sickly whine” or “sicklier smile on … every page” (NYFC, December 30, 1854). The novel’s “biting sarcasm” and “concentrated essence of nursed wrath!” earn Parton the titles of a “snapping turtle” or a “laughing hyena” (CRER, January 1855, my emphasis). The most intense attack, featuring an image of vicious hysteria as well as name-calling in a luridly patriarchal rant, comes from the Charleston [OH] Courier, reprinted approvingly by the Scioto Gazette. Fanny, whose incognita is removed partially in this volume, stands revealed as decidedly and confessedly the Penthiselea of the literary amazons —the queen and fugle woman [i.e. a model for a woman]—in corduroy pantalets, however—of the Tom boy school of scribbling. While using all the privileges of womanhood and vociferously protesting against all the abatements in the courtesies due to the sex, she is no woman. She is an Ishmaelite, born with the right to petticoats, and she runs amuck through society, and against family, friends, and relatives, with angry face and dishevelled hair, bearing in one hand an unusually long bodkin and in the other a steel pen, both sharpened to a finest point, and the latter dipped in acid of the most malignant sort. Instead of a vinaigrette, she carries in a cigar case, which answers for a reticule, a small vial of oil of vitriol, which she takes occasionally to spurt out on ladies’ dresses and gentlemen’s faces. (March 5, 1855, my emphases)

The Albion rests content with “she has demeaned herself” (December 30, 1854) in a review of Ruth Hall that condemns it as well as both volumes of Fern Leaves, but the image of hysteria in the Charleston Courier becomes madness in another comment. Parton as Fanny Fern condemning her father in the novel can only be explained by “there must be a screw loose,” for no provocation could justify her reckless behavior (DD, January 4, 1855). Images of hysteria and madness, animal behavior, or even unnatural, monstrous behavior—these are the attacks generated against Fanny Fern because of her most outrageous comments, for example, when she curses in comic fashion the six Misses Pecksniffs, hoping they will catch the cholera or husbands (FL1, 375). Such caustic wit makes Fanny Fern a by-word for the kinds of behavior Cixous represents with the image of a laughing Medusa. Thus a Brooklyn Eagle editor, describing Louis Napoleon Bonaparte’s new wife, Eugénie, says that she “seems to be a

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beauty, a wit, a witch, a sorceress, a dare devil, a double fortified Fanny Fern, who can turn men’s heads into spinning tops with a glance of one eye, and their hearts into furnaces with a wink of the other. She rides like a Navajo, dances like a sylph, [and] fights bulls like the best toreadors of Madrid” (February 14, 1853, my emphasis; see also NYST, June 5, 1852). Moreover, commentators were prepared to curse Fanny Fern in return. While “witch” and “sorceress” denigrate, they also imply great power, so that the most terrible curses to imagine are those that strike Parton by saying she fails as a woman. A letter signed “s” says that no one will marry Fanny Fern because she is a “will-o’-wisp, helter-skelter, jack-o’-lantern creature” (OB, April 17, 1852). A “lady well known to the public” quotes someone who supposedly knew Parton’s first husband, who said Sara was a “poor housekeeper” (SG, January 5, 1855), a clear condemnation from within the precincts of true womanhood ideology. In the face of such attacks, hoyden or “unlady-like” (Israel, January 19, 1855) might register as mild, but they all signify a deep fear of a conjured Lady Macbeth figure, willing and eager and able to unsex herself for wicked purposes. The image of the Empress Eugénie fighting bulls “like the best toreadors of Madrid,” indirectly attributed to Fanny Fern, illustrates how deeply disturbing to normative gender behavior Sara Parton and her literary alter ego could be. Trawling through such commentary in the print archive, one quickly understands what surely motivated, in part, Parton’s habit of blistering epithets and scathing caricatures; she clearly knew what the rough-and-tumble of the literary marketplace could produce from its critics. Sal Volatile necessarily becomes a Medusa Satirist. However, not everyone was so afraid. An editor for the Country Gentleman says that those who do not like Fanny Fern writings have “minds who give their tastes very little latitude and their hearts very little exercise” (June 30, 1853). The Musical World and Times makes a basic point about Parton’s gender-defying style. “It was argued, by many, that the writer of such searching, forcible, and, withal, common-sense articles as sometimes came from the unknown pen, must be a man—the public being unwilling to give femininity credit for the power and courage necessary for their production” (May 28, 1853; rpt. OB, June 4, 1853; qtd. in Warren 1992, 101). This comment, simultaneously praising Parton and condemning normative expectations about gender behavior, was probably written by one of the editors, Richard Willis, Sara’s other literary brother. The Literary World in its positive review of Fern Leaves jokes that

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a more appropriate pen name than “Fanny Fern” would be, for example, “Amazonia Thistle” and says the metaphoric fern leaves in the collection function as explosions, thus highlighting the satire while claiming a positive connotation for Fanny Fern as a fierce Amazon and a proverbially prickly plant (August 6, 1853). George Ripley in the New York Tribune (December 16, 1854) wrote one of the first reviews of Ruth Hall, using over three columns to comment and preview the book. He notes the originality of Fanny Fern’s style first: “the abruptness, audacity, and defiance of conventional rules, which mark the genius of the author as well as her pen.” The novel’s tones vary, from “gayest humor” to “animosity” and “racy bitterness.” Its “satirical sketches” are “dipped not so much in gall, as in fire and brimstone,” which contrasts with the Fanny Fern persona in Fern Leaves, whose “prevailing temper [is] genial humanity [and] exuberant gayety [sic].” Ripley elaborates this contrast to suggest that Fanny Fern narrating the novel has gone astray from what made her collections of columns so good, “her warm sympathies with all human conditions, … her heart-felt scorn of pretension, baseness, and unreality”—the very combination of motives Thackeray claims for the satire of a humorous writer, embodied in the figure of the comic belles lettres gentleman or lady. The novel instead resembles an “outpouring of ‘vials of wrath.’” The mistake in the novel, then, comes not from a satiric impulse per se, but from its descent into mere outrage, especially because of “allusions to private history,” that is, because of its lampoons. At one point Ripley injects gender into the commentary, tying sympathy to a traditional view of femininity when he imagines better work in the future from Fanny Fern “characterized by the womanly charities which it is one of the noblest functions of feminine genius to illustrate.” Notably, Ripley’s review both acknowledges the legitimate power of satire written by a woman, yet also insists on the desirability of normative attitudes about the nature of women, highlighting the basic cultural and literary tension Fanny Fern reflects. Other critics find no fatal contradiction between a proper women’s behavior and a woman expressing herself as a less-than-amiable satirist. “Nor would I intimate that there is anything incompatible with true womanhood in its highest, most admirable manifestations, and a literary life. I believe ‘Fanny Fern’ to be a good woman” (NYT, June 22, 1854). The reviewer for the Country Gentleman reiterates this progressive view: “As a general rule sarcasm and contempt do not come with good grace

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from a woman’s pen or lip; still, Fern Leaves shows some examples which for keenness and bitterness have few equals. The day is passed when a woman is to be recognized as a creature all sweetness, gentleness, and amiable acquiescence in ‘the powers that be.’ She must be allowed to exercise her own power, and we hope that none will ever display it for other ends than have influenced Fanny Fern” (June 30, 1853). The New York Home Magazine review of Fern Leaves, first series, deliberately invokes the image of the new woman: “The great success of Fanny, as a writer, springs from her vigorous naturalness. She gives vent to her thoughts upon paper as an independent woman might be supposed to speak; freely, a little pertly at times, and occasionally with a dash of recklessness.” Like the Knickerbocker’s Clark, the reviewer praises a particular feature of Fern Leaves: the newspaper items causing some doubt that she behaves “‘right womanly’” have been eliminated in the book (July 1853). For Eliza Cook, the well-known English proponent of political freedom for women, Fanny Fern appears “totally without that affectation of extreme propriety which is popularly attributed to the ladies of the New World. She goes straight up to her subject with the courage of a man, and avoids, without hiding, its dangers with a woman’s tact. She accomplishes that difficult task—the task of talking of things which are tabooed by society without shocking the most sensitive, and of using rough, plain words in a spirit which will cause the most refined to tolerate them” (qtd. in LLA, November 19, 1853, my emphasis). Cook’s comments do not deny the comic defiance of normative propriety. However, that transgression has merit in its presentation of a woman performing the traditional function of the satirist, whose sometimes acerbic and caustic mode (“rough, plain words”) nevertheless has the proper benevolent motivation, the “spirit which will cause the most refined to tolerate” those words. Harper’s has a review of the second collection of Fern Leaves, “which in many respects is superior to the former quaint and merry productions.” The reviewer, probably George William Curtis, praises Fanny Fern for daring to be original and for her “sheer force of audacity.” However, Curtis notes the issue of being too bold or audacious. “Often verging on the bounds of wholesome conventionalities, she still shows a true and kindly nature—she has always the sympathy with suffering which marks the genuine woman—and her most petulant and frolicsome moods are softened by a perennial vein of tender humaneness.” She can “excite alternate smiles and tears,” but what matters is that “She dips her pen in her

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heart [and] builds on universal human sympathies” (July 1854). Humaneness and sympathy sanction the audaciousness that verges on trespassing “wholesome conventionalities.” Curtis had used in his reviews of Thackeray’s work the same terms for analyzing Parton. In both cases, Curtis provides a formula essentially the Addisonian dictum for the temperament of the amiable satirist: the sympathy of benevolence authorizes caustic expressions that might offend conventional sensibilities. That formula has the potential to soften satire’s traditional sting. That softening can be understood as feminizing satire, suggested when Curtis explicitly makes sympathy a mark of “the genuine woman.” Here lies the nub of the gender issue about satire entailed in the amiable laughter aesthetic of comic belles lettres. To mitigate if not elide the caustic nature of satire delivered by a man, the satirist becomes a comic belles lettres gentle-man, his aggressive satire softened, which amounts to the masculine nature of his persona being feminized in some measure. Notably, that process exactly names a main goal of conversation between the sexes held in the English bluestocking salons, to polish away the rough edges of the men. Within the aesthetic of amiable laughter, that polishing becomes a tendency to suppress caustic styles of satire. Fanny Fern’s gender should fit her perfectly into that taste regime, which Curtis clearly understands. However, if bold and masculine (read caustic) or merely “petulant and frolicsome” comic expressions threaten to undermine the aesthetic enabling the comic belles lettres gentleman, the threat becomes double for Fanny Fern or any female satirist because, while the male satirist becomes more masculine in his bold expressions, the female satirist risks, like Lady Macbeth, unsexing herself. Mostly, reviewers do not attack Parton merely for being a satirist, but for trespassing on the boundary of good taste and being vulgar or coarse in presenting her satire, a potential problem for any comic writer (see Caron 2008, 265–80). However, the way in which reviewers easily imagine that boundary in terms of traditional ideas about women and feminine behavior complicates the judgment. Because arguments about what constitutes good (proper) satire tangle with arguments about what constitutes proper (good) behavior for women, at times commentary can detach itself from the former and become fixated on the latter. Then the issue becomes women either not acting like women or acting like men, a topic easily mentioned because of the recent efforts in the public sphere by suffragettes advocating for equal rights.

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This mélange of issues can be found in a comment made in the Democratic Review about Life and Beauties of Fanny Fern, which contains a spurious biography of Parton, with a version of the strife within the Willis family unflattering to Sara: the reviewer presents Fanny Fern as a “most undutiful daughter to a most indulgent father” and a “reckless critic” of her brother. The reviewer goes on to say he cannot “properly appreciate” such a “female character” because he does not belong to “the school of Lucy Stone” (March 1855), alluding to the well-known lecturer and suffragette who in 1847 became the first woman from Massachusetts to earn a college degree. This allusion intrigues because, despite Parton’s skepticism about the Women’s Rights movement, Fanny Fern imagines herself such a good speaker that she would top “Miss Lucy Stone” (FL2, 315). Women prominent in the campaign for equal rights, like Lucy Stone or Fanny Wright, were attacked in part because their behavior so clearly trampled on traditional notions of feminine nature encoded in the ideology of the sentimental family and the cult of true womanhood. A friend of Lewis Gaylord Clark, Frederick Shelton, referred to Fanny Wright as a “notorious virago of the Wollstonecraft school … an accursed fiend in the shape of woman, to whose attributes she is a stranger … [and thus a] disgrace to her sex” (Shelton 1837, 31, 32), a judgment worthy of a believer in the doctrine claiming men as the lords of creation. Parton as Fanny Fern has such venom directed at her in a brief notice in the Brooklyn Eagle, which begins, “Fanny Fern has few good points— very few. She is a fluent writer, but has a temper as sour as ver-juice,” made by pressing unripe grapes: verjuice is highly acidic. The Brooklyn Eagle comment is in part a reaction to this line from “City Scenes and City Life, No. 1,” in the second series of Fern Leaves: “she ought to be promoted to the dignity of toe nail polisher to Queen Victoria,” which the writer reprints in the notice. The editor goes on to call her “a dirty blackguard … a bawdy scribbler … a female nuisance,” concluding that “Such vulgar minded hoydens as Fanny Fern are a disgrace to the sex” (September 26, 1855). The only thing missing is an allusion to Medusa. A final example of the more considered and thoughtful side of contemporary appraisals can be found in comments made by John S. Hart in his revised edition of The Female Prose Writers of America: “even in the earliest of [Fanny Fern’s writings], one is struck with the evidence they exhibit that the writer understands her own powers perfectly; or rather, that she knows positively that she can do certain things better

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than they have ever been done before.” The writings were “models of style and composition. … No words were wasted … [and topics were] clearly worked up in every attractive and telling phrase possible.” Though Hart hides what Parton writes about with the phrase “certain things” and also evades all questions of how the Fanny Fern persona entangles gender and satire, he underscores one of her strengths as a periodical writer: concise phrasing. Even in her longer forays into fictional scenarios, Parton consistently sketches scenes and characters with a few bold strokes. The only negative comment comes in a back-handed compliment, probably made because her career so far has been as a newspaper writer: “she doubtless often achieves more brilliant triumphs than she anticipated; in other words, she is probably often surprised at the excellence of her own articles” (qtd. in NYTr, October 3, 1854).

Sara Parton as Public Woman The very core of the comic belles lettres gentleman is his temperament as someone capable of “pleasant raillery.” That temperament as an ingrained attitude tames the unruly satirist enough to make the benevolence of his satire clear. However, no clear boundary exists between literary persona as satirist and the man himself, and hence, the argument for the kind of satire he writes being understood as contingent in part upon his own temperament. Given this view of an amiable satirist, the question of a woman’s nature, traditionally understood, inevitably arises when the satirist—amiable or not—is female. Moreover, once the temperament of Fanny Fern becomes an issue, judgments about Sara Parton as an author become judgments about her as a woman too. When the marriage to James Parton becomes public, the following description of Sara blends woman with author: Mrs. Parton (Fanny Fern) brings as her dowry two daughters, and $25,000, coined from her fertile brain. She is full forty-three, erect, nimble, robust, with a keen, flashing eye, thin grippy lip, pointed nose, and a form that an artist might (and that many have) admired. Rapid in movement, genteel in carriage, accomplished, gay, ambitious, proud as Lucifer, aristocratic with a ring, selfish, cold, jealous, passionate—there she is a marvel to others, and we doubt not to herself. (ES, January 23, 1856)

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When commentary turns explicitly to Parton as woman, many adjectives describing her appearance and demeanor indicate a commanding and attractive physical presence: “her mien commanding and indomitable, yet winning” (BA, May 18, 1854). The comments from people who knew her, even folks who knew her growing up and as a young wife and mother, as well as those from Parton herself, round out the portrait of her painted by myriad brushes in the periodical archive. Her “countenance betokens a woman of spirit” (SG, January 22, 1855); she is “high-spirited” (LJ, June 6, 1853); she has a “sanguine … temperament” (CG, June 2, 1853). Her high spirits can indicate a fondness for “fun” (SG, January 22, 1855), or for “rambling in the woods” (BS, February 16, 1855). She has “a keen, dauntless, loving blue eye” (BA, May 18, 1854). Such comments compliment what Fanny Fern says herself: she is “generally as lively as a cricket” (BE, September 29, 1853). More than once it is said that she had a stunning figure, though not a conventionally beautiful face. “She has large light eyes, a healthy honest, not handsome face, beautiful bust; in a word, a form of perfect mould [sic]” (CG, June 2, 1853). Someone who was apparently a schoolmate says, “Her face, though not decidedly beautiful, was exceedingly interesting; her chestnut curls fell luxuriantly over her brow and shoulders; her form was as perfect as a sculptor’s dream” (LJ, January 6, 1855). “[H]er figure is perfectly symmetrical, and her bust and shoulders … would excite the envy of Venus herself. She has … an honest, handsome face” (BA, May 18, 1854). “Fine form. Chest a model” (SG, January 22, 1855). “[S]he has one of the finest forms I ever saw. Her face is not handsome, but she is so good-hearted, so frank and simple in her manners, so intelligent and witty, that in conversing with her you would never think of calling her homely” (BS, February 16, 1855). Fanny simply says that she is “good looking of course.” Apparently, Sara Parton had a knack for dressing well to go with a faultless taste in clothes, even as a young girl. “Fanny dressed the most tastefully of us all. She could tie a ribbon, put the bows and flowers and feathers on a bonnet, cut and make an apron, alter or fit a dress, arrange a collar, or darn a stocking better, and make a few ornaments, and a slim wardrobe go further than anybody else I ever saw. … although she seldom attended parties herself, she used to take much pleasure in ‘fixing up’ her friends for such momentous occasions” (BS, February 16, 1855). “She dresses in perfect taste, generally in black” (BA, May 18, 1854). “Dresses

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in the cut-and-dash school. Fond of ribbons, laces, millinery, etc., generally” (SG, January 22, 1855). More than once, commentators note her “graceful” carriage (BS, February 16, 1855; SG, January 22, 1855; and BA, May 18, 1854), but also that “her step [is] as proud as that of a young queen over a conquered realm” (LJ, January 6, 1855), or that it is “an elastic step, which indicates unyielding energy of purpose” (CG, June 2, 1853). For one observer, this energy of movement marks her “Proud as Lucifer,” which means that “When passing the street, [she] takes eight eyes out of ten” (SG, January 22, 1855), or she “sweeps along Broadway with a grace, abandon, and self-forgetfulness characteristic of the accomplished lady of society and nature’s gentlewoman—two characters seldom united in the same person” (BA, May 18, 1854, original emphasis). The question of how experience informs her writing comes through strongly in the reminiscence of a person who grew up with her. The acquaintance tells how much Parton got along with children, so evident in individual pieces as well as in the three books she wrote for children: “She was very fond of children.” “She would quit the gayest circle at almost any time to dress a doll or cover a ball for a child, or to have a good play with the little folks generally.” Her family life and suffering and faith are topics, most obvious in her role as comic preacher. Fanny proved an excellent housekeeper, contrary to the predications of some of her acquaintances. Her husband [Charles Eldredge] was a splendid man, and I used to think I never saw so fine a couple as they when they came into church on Sunday. They had three children, the oldest of whom died when about six years old. Poor Fanny! The death of her little darling almost broke her heart. She was a most affectionate and devoted mother, and it took her a long time to recover from the shock. Our Jessie died not long after, and was buried near dear Fanny’s little one; and we used often to visit their graves and weep there together. During these hallowed communings, I learned to respect and love Fanny more than ever. I have never been acquainted with another such a religious nature as hers. She is orthodox through and through; and nothing can shake her faith. Religion is not a matter of belief with her; she knows it. Had it not been for this strong religious nature, I think she never could have borne up under her trials; for trials she has had, many and severe. The death of her husband was a terrible blow to Fanny. They loved each other devotedly. For some months I was afraid she’d go crazy, but her trust in Providence sustained her. Then came years of poverty, and sufferings worse than poverty: but of this enough has been said by others.

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Even in those dark days, Fanny’s taste and judgment, her dexterity with the needle, and her faculty for making a little go a great way, enabled her always to make a good appearance at home and abroad. (BS, February 16, 1855)

One sees without difficulty this portrait of Sara Parton within the persona projected by Fanny Fern in the periodical writings, capturing as it does some of the spectrum of moods in the columns. That spectrum established a selling point for the two collections, with ads that touted their ability to generate both laughter and tears while providing “wit, pathos, humor, common sense, intelligence, amusement, and instruction” (Jeff, December 28, 1854). No doubt such ads were printed in dozens, if not hundreds, of newspapers, and no doubt they were effective. Joyce Warren (1992, 108–9) points out that part of the reason Parton agreed to publish her newspaper writings with Derby and Miller was their vigorous promotional tactics. Nancy Walker (1993, 19) notes the same efforts were made later for Ruth Hall and by Robert Bonner when he hired Parton to write exclusively for the New York Ledger (see also Kelley 1984, 5–6). These ads probably express most simply and directly the secret of Fanny Fern’s popularity.

The Body Remarkably, the portrait of Sara Willis Eldredge Farrington about to become Mrs. James Parton noted above focuses attention on Sara’s face and figure: e.g., “keen, flashing eye, thin grippy lip, pointed nose, and a form that an artist might … have admired.” This emphasis on body has a place in Parton’s periodical writings. No doubt part of the reason for charges of vulgarity and coarseness stem from her willingness to have Fanny Fern refer to both men’s and women’s bodies, occasionally in ways that imply sexuality. Parton may cultivate controversy with the violence of her comic fantasies and her sharp tongue-lashings directed at both men and women, but she courts notoriety with her writing that can be tagged risqué. In these examples, Sara Parton (again) performs both conservatively and subversively. One example reads as just silly. Parton complained about imitators, but early in her career she imitated Benjamin Shillaber’s character, Mrs. Partington, famous for spoonerisms (“all the curioysters come to Boston” while some folks behave “abdominal and prediculous”). Fanny

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as Mrs. Partington focuses on a procession she witnessed, saying that the Scotsmen in the parade must have given away their pants to the Bloomer crowd (OB, October 4, 1851), a quip that ignores the serious debate underway about the convenience as well as the health and moral aspects of wearing bloomers (HJ, May 3, 1851; HJ, June 5, 1851; NYTr, July 1, 1851; HJ, July 5, 1851; HJ, August 2, 1851; HJ, August 16, 1851). As one conduct book puts it, no reason exists why women should not wear men’s clothes, if “neat,” “convenient,” and “pleasant to others,” but the “failure of the Bloomer dress seems to have arisen from the mixed character it assumed, and the unpleasant confusion of ideas it occasioned” (Valcourt 1855, 33). In another example, one in which Fanny Fern clearly speaks for Sara Parton, Fanny says she heard Kossuth speak at Faneuil Hall, and she is “magnitized” by him, will need laudanum to calm her and a straightjacket to restrain her (OB, May 8, 1852, original emphasis). The fact that Parton uses her persona to express her extravagant excitement about an actual man in the public eye perhaps registers as particularly brazen for a certain demographic even though she merely implies sexual attraction. In “The Sick Bachelor,” Fanny Fern presents the topic of physical attraction between men and women from the man’s point of view. Part of the joke in this sketch rests on the stereotypical whining of the caricatured bachelor, always domestically incompetent, only more so, now that he is sick. When the doctor turns out to be a woman, Tom Haliday explicitly notices her fine figure: “‘If it isn’t a Female Physician! dainty as a Peri— and my beard three days old! What a bust! (Wonder how my hair looks?) What a foot and ankle! What shoulders; what a little round waist. Fever? I’ve got twenty fevers, and the heart-complaint besides. What the mischief sent that little witch here? She will either kill or cure me, pretty quick.’” Tom returns to the witch image when finishing his thoughts: “‘Oh Cupid! of all your devices, this feminine doctoring for a bachelor, is the ne plus ultra of witchcraft’” (FL2, 250–51, original emphases). Notably, Parton uses the trope of witch and witchcraft to indicate how the power of a woman can be both intellectual and physical. Perhaps Parton had Elizabeth Blackwell in mind. She was the first woman to enroll in a US medical school, Geneva (NY) Medical College, and she graduated in 1850. In an item not reprinted in either Fern Leaves collection, Fanny Fern discourages women from kissing men who use tobacco, except that “the deuce of it is, all the handsome men use it in some shape! and ‘kissing is a luxury not to be dispensed with!’ As to a female kiss, faugh! there’s

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no effervescence in it! … it’s a miserable substitute; a sham article! done half the time to tantalize some of the male audience!” Fanny advises that “kissing is a natural gift, not to be acquired by any bungler; when you meet a gifted brother, ‘make a note on’t,’ as Captain Cuttle says.” She finishes by imagining non-gifted brothers—transcendental kissers— and comparing their airy and abstract kisses to the so-called sublimity of “‘unwritten kisses,’” as though they were unwritten music and poetry (BE, August 27, 1852, original emphases). The abstraction implied in a transcendental kisser, whose kisses effectively do not even exist, stands no chance against the pleasure of the real thing from real lips, despite tobacco. “Tyranny of the Petticoats” hints at much more than kissing. The column starts with an entire paragraph from an unnamed source. Parton again acknowledges heterosexual desire when Fanny Fern reacts against the quote that, among other statements, claims that “‘Unbeaten woman is a tyrant’” who uses hysterics to cow her husband. Fanny Fern calls herself an old maid, but wonders if men will always use force to subdue women and so make “a bungling piece of work of matrimony.” Fanny says if she were Tom Fern she could manage any wife, and sketches how to do it, imagining herself as a loving husband whose strategy for control is to “keep the bit and reins out of sight!” and to be sure to “take a microscopic view” of the wife’s face when returning home from the office, and then “just put my arms around her blessed little neck [if] she looked dull.” This encouragement to pay attention to blue moods and console in part with physical contact has a sequel: “Then I’d kiss her, and tell her to keep up her spirits till I came home at night, and we’d have an early tea, and hear Tommy say his prayers, and go to— (well! I DARSEN’T say it); but I’d TAKE her there!!” (OB, July 31, 1852, original emphases). This column probably had its own notoriety. When reprinted later on the front page of the Northern Democrat of Pulaski, New York on January 27, 1853 under the title “Connubial,” the editor cut off the rest of the article immediately after the allusion to retiring to the bedroom. In a culture that claimed women had no sexual passion, to call the scenario Fanny Fern sketches remarkable would be an egregious understatement. Nevertheless, in “The Model Sea Captain,” Parton perhaps pens the most scandalous of her sketches. “After a four years’ absence, though quite unable to select his own children from the neighbors’ [children], very properly takes his wife’s word for it, and considers it rather a pretty curiosity, than otherwise, that his youngest child’s eyes should be blue,

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while its father’s and mother’s were black! When he says ‘adieu,’ leaves his wife plenty of ‘pin money,’ and advises her (very unnecessarily) to make herself as happy as possible during his absence!” (OB, July 24, 1852, original emphases). Read within Parton’s bourgeois carnival of domesticity, the sketch seems to countenance adultery as it mocks a most foolish cuckold. The husband not only believes his wife about who has fathered her children, but gives her money and says (“very unnecessarily”) be happy in his absence, advice she clearly has already followed. His way of taking his wife’s word for the legitimacy of the children (“very properly”) signals his dull complacency about the situation. However, more likely is an ironic reading. Melissa Homestead (2001, 217) and Laura Laffrado (2009, 69) note that Parton wrote a series of columns under the running title of “Model,” and many were meant as warnings of what not to do. If “The Model Sea Captain” rates as such a comic counter-example, meant ironically, Parton takes a big risk that folks will misunderstand her comic intent. Yet even with an ironic reading, Parton flaunts conventional piety about true womanhood, for the scenario in either case dramatizes the possibility that a wife will cheat on an absent husband. Behind all the joking in these examples lies a norm-defying frankness about physical attraction, sexual desire, and sexuality probably unique in Victorian America to that point in 1852. Such items no doubt were what commentators had in mind when they charged Parton with vulgarity and coarseness. Lewis Gaylord Clark must have had such columns in mind when he expressed his satisfaction that the first collection of Fern Leaves had omitted the “occasional coarseness” found in the columns as they first appeared to the public. Another aspect of Parton’s willingness to represent bodies and sexuality shows in Fanny Fern’s ridicule of any gentleman whose overly-refined manners put his masculinity in doubt. For example, when comparing a new doctor to an old-fashioned one, Fanny Fern says, “the doctor, whom I saw yesterday at Aunt Jerusha’s sick-room, [is] a little thing with bits of feet, and mincing voice, and lily-white hands, and perfumed moustache.” She drives home the point about a feminizing delicacy with a suggestion about how to handle him: “He should be laid gently on a lily leaf, and consigned to the first stray zephyr” (FL2, 345). This sketch mocks dandyism, another subject circulating in mid-century public sphere discourse. Parton’s view cannot be misunderstood.

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Dandyism as a comic butt animated other Fanny Fern efforts. In an uncollected column entitled “A Bearded Woman,” apparently a reference to a Barnum’s American Museum attraction, Fanny Fern again jokes about men whose manners are too dainty for her taste and again suggests how to handle them: As if [a bearded woman] was a curiosity! I can see legions of them any day, … lisping and mincing aimless through creation, on their patent leather toes, behind a dicky and moustache. —Poor silly creatures! they excite my commiseration, and I sometimes feel as though I should like to take them up with a pair of sugar tongs, spread them out on a rose leaf and feed them with a pap spoon. A pretty bit of life satire that bearded woman is, to be sure!— Wonder they [the dandies] don’t challenge [the bearded woman] for invading their feminine territory. … [They are] be-whiskered, be-scented, be-cravated, be-jewelled, be-everlasting-despised Lilliputian dandies. (my emphasis)

Parton turns the details of dress and grooming against the dandies, implying their diminishment in physical stature as well as their highly feminized manners. In addition, Parton also proves fearless by having Fanny Fern admire a man’s physique as a contrast to the effete dandy: “I meet so many of these bearded women, that it is a perfect relief to me to see a huge, broad shouldered, full chested Anskim of a Vermonter, with a fist like a sledge-hammer, a voice like Mars, and a stride like Hercules. I can get up something akin to respect for such an embodiment of masculinity” (rpt. from OB in GJ, June 16, 1853).4 Calling such dandies an example of “life satire” makes it clear that Parton has in mind examples she has seen in the street or met in fashionable parlors. The body provides a site of inscription for social rules: e.g., women do not have sexual desire, claims the cult of true womanhood. Fanny Fern targets that boundary for antebellum female behavior (hide that desire, silence its articulation). Addressing this topic, Parton performs the most radical part of her bourgeois carnival in ways that invoke the obscenity of Trickster. Her brand of carnival obscenity enacts what Lewis Hyde calls “ritual dirt-work” (1998, 188), a disorder that seeks to reorder patriarchal prescription with dirt-speech. Reordering social rules puts them out of their customary places, renders them, in Mary Douglas’s formula, as “dirt … matter out of place” (1966, 35). When critics script the bourgeois carnival performance of Fanny Fern as merely vulgar, as befits a scandalous hoyden and female nuisance, they misunderstand her role as

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unruly woman. The Medusa satirist does not enact ritual dirt-work for the sake of being offensive; rather, the unruliness of her dirt-speech necessarily offends deeply because the targeted rules are so deeply embedded in the cult.

Medusa Feminine and Proper Masculinity The trickster-like structure of both replicating while subverting gender norms creates the problem that even Sara Parton must contend with at some moments in her Fanny Fern columns. Perhaps the best example is the attractive female doctor whose mere presence upsets her male patient’s composure. The doctor both subverts gender stereotypes (she is a doctor, a traditionally male occupation) and reinforces them (she is physically attractive). She illustrates perfectly what Cixous argues for in her revision of the male gaze and male language into an écriture féminine. Because the doctor makes house calls, her body is visible in a relatively intimate setting, and the comic turn comes from the male patient’s assumption of her availability. Fanny Fern’s satiric storyworld assumes heterosexuality. Parton targets men who seem feminine—dandies—and women who somehow are too masculine—wearing bloomers in her view rates as more than a sartorial mistake, an instance of Parton endorsing a norm about gendered behavior. Discussing twentieth-century female stand-up comics, Linda Mizejewski (2014) notes how a suggestion by a bawdy female comic that she is sexually available may create the sense that “What you see is what you get—are you sure you can handle it?” (19). Thus the status of the female body itself—its visibility, availability, and presumed heterosexuality—becomes intrinsic to women’s comedy even at its most transgressive, which echoes Cixous’s emphasis on the symbolic power of the female body. The items about a proper masculinity return to the question of how the Addisonian insistence on a toned-down satire and the embodiment of that insistence, the comic belles lettres gentleman, implies a feminizing of the masculine aggressiveness of a traditional satirist. When does the admired gentleman become the despised dandy? When does manly behavior trump (gentle)manly behavior? My presentation of the comic belles lettres gentleman has preserved the satirist in a guise of amiability; his satire, when necessary, retains the key motive of benevolence and some measure of its associated emotion, sympathy.

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Beginning as far back as Eleanor of Aquitaine’s promulgation of courtoisie, the very idea of a gentle man has entailed a deliberate and desired diminishment of men’s stereotyped aggressiveness, a polishing of rough manners by conversational contact with intelligent and articulate women, everyone discussing and practicing les beaux arts. The public space of the royal court for such activity became in England the salons of the bluestockings and the coffee houses of London in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, became even in some measure the gentleman’s club of the nineteenth century. Lewis Gaylord Clark’s “Editor’s Table” and “Gossip with Readers and Correspondents” in the Knickerbocker magazine stage a similar process of education and refinement in their mimicking of conversational exchange (Caron 2021a). The Fanny Fern newspaper items retain some of these features, certainly the idea of a public space that mimics conversational exchange in a bid to educate. However, Parton addresses her “Dear Reader” mainly to other women, though, like the writings of Clark and even Addison, the reader could be either gender. Moreover, the reader is middle class. Unlike the court or the salon, the imaginary comic public space of the Fanny Fern newspaper writings is solidly bourgeois, not aimed at an “upper-tendom” readership, though cognizant of the manners of fashionable ladies and dandified gentleman. However, despite similarities to the other contemporaneous comic writers in regard to creating an imaginary comic public space to speak as an amiable satirist, Fanny Fern as the representation of a woman satirist complicates the deployment of an aesthetic of amiable laughter, itself already complicated insofar as it tries to accommodate a satiric mode of comic writing. Adam Smith’s philosophical ideas about benevolence, when tied to the emotion of sympathy and an attitude of tolerance, became the conceptual backdrop for a claim that such a thing as amiable laughter exists. Moreover, insisting on benevolence as the motive for satire allowed Addison and Steele to argue for a style of satire that offered a tone of kindness and liberality, a “pleasant raillery.” At some point, the philosophy of benevolence behind amiable satire assumes a gendered inflection: sweet sarcasm and tender humanity becomes the order of the day for mounting comic social critique. Aesthetically, the female equivalent of the comic belles lettres gentleman makes perfect sense. However, aesthetics cannot easily trump social habits encoding the traditional roles of men and women. Though the example of the English bluestockings arguably had their American counterparts

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(e.g., the Peabody sisters), the bluestocking as satirist challenged social roles as well as aesthetic techniques. An amiable female satirist defied the traditional idea of a woman’s nature because even in the kinder versions of comic phrasing, a woman ran the risk of supposedly acting like a man. Sara Parton as Fanny Fern never worried much about the supposed necessity of remaining in the realm of kinder comic phrasing, with the result that the persona flouted stereotypical notions about gender. The temperament of Fanny Fern, so deliberately mirroring the temperament of Sara Parton, enabled satire from a woman’s point of view, écriture féminine for the 1850s, resembling “keen Damascus blades” … “bright, strong, sharp” (SG, January 4, 1855). Fanny Fern appears in the antebellum periodical marketplace in the midst of intense attention on the issue of women’s rights so that femininity and the nature of women are being contested in the public sphere, attention that includes Bloomers as the visible sign of the new fluid gender context (HJ, May 31, 1851; HJ, June 5, 1851; NYTr, July 1, 1851; HJ, July 5, 1851; OB, July 19, 1851; HJ, September 20, 1851). The early newspaper pieces by Parton, even before she signed items “Fanny Fern,” pointedly explore female voices, including the old maid, the rebellious daughter, the crazy woman who walks around the countryside (or a city on a rainy day) like a man, and the pious woman who discovers in the Bible models for her own forceful nature. Fanny Fern as Sara Parton’s alter ego persona expresses an outspoken tomboy temperament for an articulate and smart woman who thinks out of the box about the stereotypical roles for men and women, about marriage and courtship, about what constitutes a lady and a gentleman. Within the regime of aesthetic truth created by comic belles lettres, Parton’s satiric style synchs with her complex temperament. That satiric style registers as neither simply genteel nor feminine, though it could be both. Instead, her style often registers as aggressive and masculine in its use of epithets and other forms of comic violence. Fanny Fern can be not just saucy with her wit but risqué. She might reinforce norms about men and women while clearly endorsing heterosexuality, yet she assaults patriarchal behaviors. She believes in marriage, but only if it is a partnership, while genuine submissiveness (the injunction to “obey” in the marriage vow) stays off the table. She champions a woman’s rights in the domestic sphere, not women’s rights in the political sphere. However, because satire supplements the public sphere (Caron 2021c), her satire carries her beyond the confines of the kitchen and the parlor.

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Notes 1. For horses named Fanny Fern, see “Petersburg (VA) Spring Races,” New York Spirit of the Times, May 20, 1852, and “Great Race in Virginia,” New York Times, May 15, 1854; for steamboats, “Red River,” New Orleans Picayune, January 6, 1855. Mary Kelley documents the long-lasting effect of Parton’s popularity, noting the existence in 1873 of a fancy railroad parlor car named the “Fanny Fern” (1984, 3). See also Laffrado (2009, 73). 2. Eliza Cook was a proponent of political and sexual freedom for women, and believed in the ideology of self-improvement through education. From 1849 to 1854, she wrote, edited, and published Eliza Cook’s Journal, a weekly periodical published in London. 3. Lady Gay Spanker is the “horse riding virago” character in Dion Boucicault’s 1841 play London Assurance. 4. “Anskim” is a typographical error for “Anakim,” sons of the legendary Anak and a race of giants (Numbers 13: 31–34). Their name may come from a Hebrew root meaning “strength.”

Fanny Fern’s Significance in the American Comic Tradition

The Fanny Fern persona represents a nineteenth-century woman voicing the modern feminine, a forerunner of écriture féminine. Although many critics contemporary with Parton understood her Fanny Fern persona as conforming to the comic belles lettres lady satirist who rails pleasantly with sweet sarcasm and displays a benevolent motive even for her most caustic satire, other critics constructed Fanny Fern as virago and witch, a scandal to normative expectations about women’s behavior. That second group of critics did not exactly misfire in their attempts to name Parton’s considerable comic power, but they judged as prisoners of their patriarchal ideology and its doctrine of the sentimental family. My construction of Fanny Fern as Medusa satirist also acknowledges the force of that power, but from a twenty-first-century position of admiration, not fear. Parton voices women’s point of view within and against the patriarchal values embedded in the image of the woman-belle ideal. Sara Parton as Fanny Fern speaks against those values that she encounters everywhere in the periodical world of antebellum America, scribbling and then printing her objections. The often-repeated structure of inversion in her newspaper columns—a quote used as a headnote that she then mocks, ridicules, and otherwise undermines—demonstrates that dynamic. Stereotypes about women, their behaviors, their supposed nature, and their

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 J. E. Caron, The Modern Feminine in the Medusa Satire of Fanny Fern, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41276-9_7

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place in society are legion, and Fanny Fern’s mission as comic preacher and Medusa satirist turns them inside out and so subverts them. This dynamic constitutes a conversation or dialogue in which the voice of a strong-minded woman assumes an authority equal to men in order to engage with and possibly contest conventional norms. Often, that voice sounds out as one of instruction for, even admonition of, women on how to maneuver within those norms. At times, Fanny Fern also instructs and admonishes men. In her own way, Sara Parton embodied the contradiction discerned by academic critics examining the women writing sentimental fiction, the literary domestics: a dialectic of both supporting and challenging the ideology of the sentimental family, something akin to Trickster’s transgression of values from both sides of a boundary. For some twentieth- and twenty-first-century critics, Parton, therefore, advocates a pragmatic feminism. The Modern Feminine in the Medusa Satire of Fanny Fern insists that Parton’s brand of pragmatic feminism happens in comic fashion, as a bourgeois carnival. Parton can be placed within the camp of the literary domestics in that they all to some extent question the ideology of the sentimental family, but Parton’s method relies most often on a direct challenge, using satire and the power of its ridiculing laughter. Fanny Fern as both comic belles lettres lady satirist and Medusa satirist, therefore, demonstrates a different kind of emotional split than the literary domestics’ characteristic ambivalence, one that invites laughter. In Lauren Berlant’s terms (1991), both aspects of Parton as satirist model critical sentimentality rather than pure sentimentality. Parton was capable of writing pure sentimentality too, and in that respect she fits easily into the emotional ambivalence of the literary domestics about being a public figure as an author that Mary Kelley documents. Parton early in her writing career went to considerable lengths to hide her true identity, offering fanciful and misleading details to protect her private self. However, Parton’s emotional center did not straddle the pure versus critical sentimental divide. Instead, she toggled back and forth between the amiable satire of comic belles lettres and the harsher tones of satire that mark the Medusa satirist, equal to but not identical with any man writing comic critiques. Perhaps her comic efforts even exist within a “direct ratio between the degree of seriousness attending a given belief and the degree of laughter and play necessary to hold the first in check” (Hynes and Doty 1993, 6). In other words, for Fanny Fern, the more seriously patriarchy claims the truth of its ideology’s tenents, the greater the necessity

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for a barrage of satiric laughter, a ratio functioning as the premise for the Medusa level of satire found in Fanny Ferns’s curses and epithets. Parton’s oscillating center of satiric gravity shows in the way that even some of her ostensibly sentimental pieces about piety and spirituality are best understood as sermons with comic flashes. Parton certainly sermonized in ways that are thoroughly earnest and sentimental. However, very often and early in her career she expressed a laughter-prompting attitude in acerbic tones that evokes Hélène Cixous’s beautiful and laughing Medusa. The Modern Feminine in the Medusa Satire of Fanny Fern reorients scholarship on Sara Parton by insisting she be understood first as a comic writer, and, moreover, by insisting that Fanny Fern functioned as her vehicle for satiric critique of the cultural milieu she knew best. This milieu claimed the naturalness of the split between the private sphere of domesticity marked feminine and the public sphere of commerce and politics marked masculine. Focusing on Parton’s initial newspaper columns shows how the mix of sentimental and satiric work she offered her readers shifted more toward the satiric as her Fanny Fern career unfolded. That shift culminates in Ruth Hall (1855), as Parton’s confidence in her satiric voice reached an initial plateau. In addition, Parton signals that shift by also segregating a significant portion of her purely sentimental writing for inclusion in her first book for children, Little Ferns for Fanny’s Little Friends (1853), a process she enshrined by continuing to publish books exclusively for children after becoming a columnist for Robert Bonner’s The Ledger. The Modern Feminine in the Medusa Satire of Fanny Fern emphasizes the boldness with which Parton constructed Fanny Fern by spotlighting controversial items, including a number of sketches not included in either of the Fern Leaves series. Those uncollected items represent the outer limits of Parton’s willingness to write her own version of écriture féminine and comically perform Cixous’s impossible subject. In addition, this study does not just mine the print culture archive for Parton’s own words in early newspaper columns to demonstrate that comic performance. Contemporary critics’ commentary and fan letters alike trace a complicated interplay of popular author and mass reading public that in total yields a full contemporary portrait of Fanny Fern. This print culture portrait makes clear Parton’s unique status within American comic writers of the nineteenth century: part lady satirist of the comic belles lettres sort, but also, and most memorably, part woman satirist of the Medusa sort. I have extensively quoted all these archival layers,

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giving contemporary voices the privileged place in building context. The dynamic in the archive among Fanny Fern columns, the reading public, and the periodical critics invokes Sarah Fielding’s idea about a “mirthful chorus” of conversation centered on gendered expectations for men and women within the ideology of the sentimental family (qtd. in Tave, 144). Parton’s interaction with her public creates Fielding’s notion of a mirthful conversation that in some respects resembles the comic community of humorists conjured by Lewis Gaylord Clark’s “Gossip with Readers and Correspondents” feature in the New York Knickerbocker (Caron 2021a). Readers not only appreciated Parton’s Fanny Fern voice and comic talents: they were inspired by her values to write poems about her and engage in mock courtship. In other respects, the community of humorists generated by the Fanny Fern persona differs from Clark’s imagined community, as well as from earlier iterations in the comic belles lettres aesthetic, such as Addison and Steele’s Spectator crowd or the more generalized group imagined by Sarah Fielding’s phrase. The obvious difference centers on gender. Addison and Steele’s coffeehouse club featured in The Spectator admits men only, even though The Spectator and the Tatler self-consciously address women as well as men. The humoring of eccentricities found in Mr. Spectator and Sir Roger de Coverley in effect echoes the bantering of Shaftesbury’s gathering of men imagined in his “Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humor” (1709). Gentlemen could ridicule in bantering forms because they were equals in rank and education, a scenario also implied in Aristotle’s (1984) notion of the ready-witted gentleman who knows how to properly deploy his wit. A class issue thus appears alongside gender. Aristotle’s and Shaftesbury’s mirthful conversation assumes an aristocracy; Addison and Steele’s assumes a mercantile and professional class. As American authors, Clark and Parton assume an even broader class of readers, in effect the entire American reading public, which entails widespread literacy and literary education—as in all these cases. Parton’s great achievement rests upon forcefully including women readers as part of the mirthful conversation, even though mirth often morphed into sardonic kinds of laughter. Parton’s version of this conversation takes its place alongside the dramatic chorus of serious conversation generated by the literary domestics writing the sentimental fiction that altered the antebellum literary marketplace and revised the cultural zeitgeist. Fanny Fern works within yet challenges the comic belles lettres aesthetic by writing satire as a woman, often moving beyond the

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boundary of amiable satire in her Medusa guise and so not consistently speaking as a comic belles lettres lady. She mirrors her male comic belles lettres contemporaries—e.g., Charles Astor Bristed, Donald Grant Mitchell, and George William Curtis1 —who also shift from the amiable to the caustic in their satire yet claim the motive of benevolence in order to retain a gentle man’s status. Thus Parton writes satire as their equal within comic belles lettres, and like them she also conforms to the aesthetic by writing comic material that is not steeped in the vernacular, in contrast to the accomplishments of two notable women authors writing comic material earlier, Ann Stephens in High Life in New York (1843) and Frances Whitcher in The Widow Bedott Papers (1840s, book form 1855). Though Stephens and Whitcher comically target the same broad topics as male satirists of the day—fashion and social status—they do so with vernacular speaking characters, Stephens with Jonathan Slick and Whitcher with multiple women personae. Parton as Fanny Fern thus stands doubly removed from writers like Stephens and Whitcher. First, Parton as woman satirist wrote within the aesthetic boundaries of comic belles lettres, in contrast to the comic vernacular tradition long favored by critics of American humor studies who celebrated frontier humorists such as Johnson J. Hooper (see Blair and Hill 1978). Second, though comic belles lettres theoretically authorizes a feminizing of the masculine aggressiveness of the satirist, she moves beyond that accommodating aesthetic by constructing an unmatched feminine aggressiveness that earns Fanny Fern the epithet Medusa satirist. In order to emphasize the profound impact of Parton’s Fanny Fern persona, I have suggested that it can be usefully linked to the mythic figure of Trickster: Fanny Fern functions as culture-bearer and culture disruptor, embodying and enacting certain aspects of first-wave feminism. The single biggest cultural fact of the contemporary context for the Fanny Fern persona is status quo patriarchy, which presents as eternal truth, sanctioned by God and Nature. In the late 1840s and early 1850s, firstwave feminism appears as a newly-formed and obvious challenge, e.g., women wearing bloomers. Fanny Fern invokes Trickster by amplifying the challenge. She muddies the line between the masculine and the feminine by talking as though she embraces both; she, therefore, moves the boundaries between the masculine and the feminine, rewriting rules for men’s and women’s behaviors. The vernacular tradition of American humor features con men and folk tricksters—from Simon Suggs to Brer Rabbit, along with Mark Twain’s

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Duke and King—but Fanny Fern as Trickster does something different. Moreover, she deploys that difference without vernacular speech, though she does employ tall talk in a significant way. In doing so, Fanny Fern as voleuse imports tall talk to appropriate masculine confidence for a protofeminist agenda. Her double-voice, her brand of signifying appears as voleuse acting within domestic carnival: look one way, pull another, a contradiction sometimes manifested as the laughing Medusa. Appropriating a tall-talk attitude and occasionally speaking in a Mrs. Partington style of vernacular speech reveals Parton coming close to employing tactics associated with the frontier humor touted by scholars as the backbone of antebellum American humor. Instead, Parton resides in the comic belles lettres aesthetic, eschewing vernacular as a comic device. Parton’s more profound attitude manifests within her bourgeois carnival attitude: inverting stereotypes about gender, yet ironically wearing the mark of submission. This habitus of bourgeois carnival links her to Trickster, her penchant for contradiction in which she operates as both/neither feminine nor masculine in the usual ways, both/neither conservative or radical in her satire, both/neither comic belles lettres lady satirist and Medusa satirist. The bluestocking wife embodies the structure of contradiction best: she both upholds and subverts conventional domesticity, revising the way to conduct a marriage, and so suggesting new behaviors for a new culture. Her trickster aspects do not make Fanny Fern an example of a favored figure of the frontier humor tradition, the confidence man. Fanny Fern as Trickster does not perform as con man or tall-tale raconteur; she does not act for material gain or personal glory; she is not a practical jokester like Ned Brace. No important overlap exists between Trickster and the confidence man, despite the latter’s endemic trickery; the con man exploits trust for amusement or monetary gain, but Trickster has no such motivation. Trickster’s antics, on the contrary, often help people. Trickster is a culture-bearer, not a cynical betrayer of trust or a practical jokester. Trickster performs as a shape-shifter, an enemy of boundaries, for purposes beyond aggrandizement, not because it is good to be shifty in a new country.2

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Carnivals and Comic Laughter Joyce Warren emphasizes Fanny Fern’s Medusa quality: “Reading through the periodicals of the time, it is easy to see why Fanny Fern quickly became so famous. Her articles stand out; they sparkle among the dust of convention and artificiality. Her brusque tone and candid air give the impression that she is saying exactly what she thinks—regardless” (1992, 99). While this assessment rings true, it ignores the way that Parton could be conventional too, and it should be noted that, unlike twentieth and twenty-first-century critics, readers contemporary to Parton were not confused or concerned by Fanny Fern writing both sentimental and satiric pieces. This raises the question: what did Fanny Fern’s outspoken comic demeanor signify for the 1850s reading public versus modern critics? The quick answer is that, despite some fierce opposition, a significant part of the reading public of the 1850s remained open-minded enough to appreciate Parton’s satire even if they too, like Parton herself, held onto some normative values about gender expectations and religion. Modern critics wanting to redeem the literary domestics from critical condemnation for their sentimentality tend to overlook Parton’s sentimental pieces, even in some cases denigrating them with the metaphor of schizophrenia to explain the difference in tone and attitude. However, critics then and now should be able to agree on one thing underlying Parton as satirist: comic laughter can signal an opposition, sometimes consciously, to normative behaviors or civic power. This opposition has a potential to disrupt status quo values, though modern critics go further, claiming resistance and even subversion of those values as they theorize in social or political terms about comic artifacts and the laughter they engender (Finley 2019; Kramer 2020; Krefting 2014, 2019; North 2021; Rossing 2013). At its most profound, the opposition of the comic stands against the serious, workaday world. Comic laughter can signify the silly, the whimsical, and the playful—a holiday state of mind; comic laughter can signify communal fun and joyous relaxation. In medieval Europe, carnival expressed this opposition in ritual terms that licensed temporary excess and unruliness. The paradoxical dynamic of oppose and endorse embodied in the Fanny Fern persona also applies to the mythic trickster figure who “subverts and validates” … “probes and proves” the rules, structures, and boundaries of a culture (Vecsey 1993, 108, 119). In addition, the same

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ritual process (probe, reflect on cultural values, then ultimately validate them) occurs with ceremonial ritual clowns (Christen 1998; Hereniko 1995; Hieb 1972; Mitchell 1992) and can be found in one of the closest examples of the trickster/ritual clown figure in the antebellum American vernacular humor canon, Sut Lovingood (Caron 1996). Sut Lovingood and even satiric personae such as Mark Twain and Fanny Fern in some measure aim their comic disruption at the corruption of cultural values, especially when they target religious hypocrisy. In that circumstance, their satire also has a conservative purpose: to bring people back to a proper spirituality, which mimics what tricksters and ritual clowns accomplish in traditional societies (see Caron 2008). However, one must be careful about analogizing trickster figures and ritual clowns in traditional societies with literary satiric tricksters in modern American culture because the transgressions of the traditional tricksters and clowns function only to validate and prove the rules of a society, not revise them. They project socially sanctioned comic figures. In modern Western societies, personae like Mark Twain and Fanny Fern might perform comic disruption that can potentially cause cultural reflection, but they are not socially sanctioned in the sense that they act as part of a ritual process, as clowns or tricksters do in traditional societies, a process also enacted in the carnivals of medieval Europe. Trickster figures in modern Western societies might therefore transgress rules to validate them, but they can also operate freely to intend subversion of social rules and norms because no ritual time frame exists, as with carnival, that blocks such intention. Fanny Fern stands out for being conservative about religious sentiment while also being radically subversive of patriarchal dicta about gendered behaviors. The Western trickster figure might therefore critique norms and beliefs—satirize them—while the traditional comic figure does not. Nevertheless, the general comic frame for reflexive thinking on the social rules remains theoretically possible, even if unlikely. The link among ritual clowns, mythic tricksters, and the literary personae of Fanny Fern, Mark Twain, and Sut Lovingood comes to this: they all focus attention on beliefs by transgressing the symbolic boundaries established by those beliefs. Fanny Fern challenges patriarchy subversively, critiquing social order with a view to change, not as a way to evoke a cosmos, as ritual clowns or mythic tricksters do. Neither does Fanny Fern act as a confidence woman whose trickery evokes fraud and deception in the service of material gain.

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She does, however, behave as a shape-shifter in a bid to evade patriarchal categories for women, especially within their supposed summum bonum status—marriage—when she pretends to be married or not or shuffles real details about age and children from one newspaper column to the next. Perhaps one can understand Parton’s forays into public in men’s clothing as performative complements to such symbolic shape-shifting in print (see Warren 1992, 183–86). Cross-dressing performs the liminal, in-between the rigid gender differences that the cult of true womanhood demands. At bottom, such clowning in-betweenness suggests the trickster’s profound social function, analogous to Mary Douglas’s definition of a joke: affording an “opportunity for realising that an accepted pattern has no necessity” (1968, 365). Trickster, then, embodies an ultimate unruliness that challenges the supposedly objective status of a social order, in this case patriarchy. In Kathleen Rowe’s study of the unruly woman figure, Mikhail Bakhtin’s theorizing about carnival occupies a central theoretical place. However, Rowe criticizes Bakhtin’s account of carnival for its insufficient attention to the “social relations of gender” (1995, 34) that could explain the disruptive power of the unruly woman. In the patriarchal societies of medieval Europe, women were mostly excluded from the comic, or rather their ideal forms were excluded, leaving behind only their negative, dark forms—hags laughing uproariously, for example. Such grotesques were to be laughed at, even feared. Their excess hinted at the danger inherent in carnival’s exuberant display of communal fun, namely, that people would not willingly return to the serious, workaday world when the ritual moment of carnival freedom ended. Patriarchy coded Woman as Other, and so a woman laughing without restraint during carnival felt doubly dangerous, twice ignoring important symbolic boundaries (Niebylski 2004; Parvulescu 2010). Outside the ritual time of carnival and in modern societies, women using laughter in ways deemed unruly, perhaps particularly in explicitly political contexts, loudly and emphatically transgress norms for gender behavior (Graefer et al. 2010). Carnival for Bakhtin dramatizes the material principle of life, bound up in the aesthetic of the grotesque, which features incompleteness, dismemberment, terror, and death, yet carnival’s festive setting also emphasizes plenitude—excessive eating and drinking, as well as sexual license. The grotesque aesthetic thus ranges itself against everyday norms from two vectors. The comically grotesque might apply to Parton when Fanny Fern performs excessively by invoking tall talk or speaking her chain-lightning

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disposition, and certainly she ranges her Fanny Fern alter ego against important everyday norms. In particular, her willingness to represent sexuality and female sexual desire will inevitably be marked as excessive by the everyday norms of patriarchal ideology. Woman acts most transgressively “when she lays claim to her own desire” (Rowe 1995, 31). Thus woman as unruly subject resists confining herself to her (supposedly) proper place, which is to say, an abject place, without desire; she does not stay within the domestic sphere of the traditional feminine, but instead reaches for a place as modern feminine in the public sphere. The literary domestics of the antebellum period project an ambivalent transgressiveness in this carnival context, for as authors they commanded a place in the public sphere of the commercial marketplace for books, but they resisted that status too by insisting that they essentially reside in the domestic sphere as private women. My concept of bourgeois carnival captures the comic quality of Parton’s ambivalent transgressiveness that she shares with the literary domestics, who, to some extent, challenge normative gender expectations with their questing heroines, yet ultimately submit them to the imperative to marry. Parton’s authorial stance remains ambiguous in that she stays focused on private domestic matters, but Fanny Fern’s published presence in periodicals dispensing advice and admonition for both men and women creates a notorious public persona. Parton guised as Fanny Fern claims her own desire, which is, essentially, to be an independent individual, especially within a marriage. She does not dismiss marriage, so she stops well short of advocating the value of free love promulgated by the Oneida community, but marriage must unfold in partnership, not submission, in equality, and not subordination. In addition, she stands apart from the suffragettes’ quest for political rights; from that side of the equation, she retreats from the public sphere. Nevertheless, Fanny Fern projects the unruly woman and that figure’s inherent transgressiveness; she acts both as the relatively restrained lady satirist of comic belles lettres and as the chain-lightning Medusa satirist, a doubled comic role that offers a doubly defiant profile to patriarchal ideology. Parton’s carnival turn, however, differs from a Bakhtinian description, for her brand of comic writing retains its domestic setting; a bourgeois carnival contains the unruly woman in both senses of the word. Moreover, Fanny Fern’s unruliness requires no ritual moment outside the everyday. Her excess exists within mundane domestic precincts, a fundamental and peculiar contradiction. Fanny Fern’s comic quality registers as liminal on multiple levels, but not in ways that evoke Bakhtin’s connecting

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carnival to the grotesque. Fanny Fern does not routinely perform as the angel in the house but neither does she habitually cavort as a gargoyle. In addition, Parton’s carnival also differs from Bakhtin’s in that she dispenses with the language of the marketplace; the comic belles lettres aesthetic contains a significant portion of her satiric style, eschewing the vernacular Bakhtin famously touts and that was so popular in so much antebellum comic writing in the United States. Insofar as terror marks the aesthetic of the grotesque, the Medusa figure presents as grotesque, and certainly from a patriarchal point of view, Fanny Fern’s satire can register as monstrous. However, Fanny Fern performs Hélène Cixous’s Medusa, who is not only laughing but beautiful, so the grotesque becomes something else, perhaps something more like a comic sublime—terror and beauty fused together in a most ambivalent aesthetic, especially when supplemented by laughter, that quintessentially ambivalent social gesture, laughing at or laughing with somebody or something. Trickster disrupts a culture to stir things up, to inject vitality into social rules gone stale. Fanny Fern exemplifies the symbolic drama of this comic process when she teases and harasses a husband in order to break him out of his blue mood (“Sober Husbands” and “Solomon Stillwater”). Within the Western industrial society of antebellum America, one might say that Fanny Fern as a trickster figure moves the culture along, enabling a sense of development. Sara Parton cannot be called a women’s rights advocate, though she writes as a feminist, illustrating Barbara Berg’s distinction: women’s rights implies a demand for specific privileges, especially voting rights and educational opportunities. The feminist project of women’s emancipation demands freedom to decide their own destinies, postulating that “woman’s essential worth stems from her common humanity and does not depend upon the other relationships in her life” (Berg 1978, 5). A recent analysis of Ruth Hall (Mahmoud et al. 2022) treats the novel as a feminist text. More specifically, her dramatization of a bourgeois carnival prefigures écriture féminine. Nevertheless, when I invoke Cixous’s laughing Medusa, I am not saying that Parton consciously executes her version of écriture féminine; and yet, she clearly defies the patriarchal ideology of the sentimental family and its fetish, the cult of true womanhood, sometimes with scathing satire. Moreover, such transgression does not brandish the worst from a male-centered point of view. The trope of a laughing Medusa ultimately suggests not transgression nor disruption, subversion, resistance, or even destruction, but instead a will to embrace being Other

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yet simultaneously to deny any subordination in that status, the core goal of Cixous’s concept of écriture féminine, as well as all forms of feminism. Cixous deployed écriture féminine as a counter-force to Lacanian psychoanalysis, to name a desire to speak the feminine, to posit a subjectivity that stands at least partially outside the standard versions of psychoanalysis. As Ann Jones puts it, French feminists “oppose women’s bodily experience … to the phallic/symbolic patterns embedded in Western thought” (1981, 252). Female sexuality has been repressed, so it must be released to oppose phallogocentrism, and that process begins with the body. Parton wants to affirm a women’s sexuality but not as a gambit to overturn a discourse, namely, the standard versions of psychoanalysis, a discourse that does not yet exist in the 1850s. However, simply asserting that women have a sexual desire runs counter to a deeply-embedded aspect of the cult of true womanhood: women are naturally pure, passionless. Nevertheless, Fanny Fern in trickster fashion does not perform an unambiguous version of écriture féminine. She does not project a revolutionary figure that somehow erases masculine writing, but rather presents as something in-between, liminal and ambivalent. What I am calling Parton’s conversation with masculine values—a sustained pushback against stereotypes of women—radical feminist theory would probably label a half-gesture of rebellion, wishing instead for an overthrow of those values, or at least their suspension or jamming: jam cultural masculine meanings to render them inoperable or suspend them to make visible a thoroughgoing alternative. Instead, Fanny Fern offers “the corridor of humor” (Hyde 1998, 274) that suggests Trickster’s third way as mediator of oppositions. Carnival understood in a domestic and bourgeois setting, then, highlights how Parton challenges patriarchy as Cixous’s voleuse. Fanny Fern does not so much invert patriarchy in a carnivalesque world-turnedupside-down fashion but rather sublates it, reinventing it from the inside, as it were. In this way, bourgeois carnival can be logged as compatible with écriture féminine and its feminist revision of Lacanian psychoanalysis to fashion an identity for women different from any patriarchal representation, independent of masculine discourse, yet not wholly separate. The rewrite of the Medusa myth that Cixous offers can thus be read as profoundly liminal, a byword for terror within patriarchal discourse, yet the alternative view she offers—looking directly at the Medusa instead of

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taking a sideways glance at a reflection—sees her beauty and also hears her laughter. She possesses a demonic beauty accompanied by what must surely be a raucous, unruly and therefore excessive laughter, yet her power destroys only in a revisionary way. Asserting herself as a subject who claims her own desire, her own self, Cixous’s Medusa as a new element in a socially symbolic system necessarily alters patriarchy. The trope of the unruly woman on top, unruly because she presents herself as being on top, expresses in comic terms the primary goal of equality. Parton’s image of an American woman already sitting at the top of the stairs before a man reaches the landing dramatizes women waiting for men to acknowledge, intellectually, the independence and equality of women (FS1, 337). The tension/torsion/liminality in the image of the laughing and beautiful Medusa repeats in the idea of Parton’s bourgeois carnival. Parton may be ready at all times to subvert the bad mental habits of men and invert the patriarchal claims to be naturally superior and so entitled to its dominance, yet that challenge remains nominally in a domestic space with a middle-class constraint that has its own version of carnivalesque excess. Hence, the most relevant aesthetic for understanding Fanny Fern is not the grotesque but comic belles lettres. Fanny Fern does not partake of the demotic vernacular and the language of the marketplace, for all her brisk phrasing and supposed lack of artistry according to many critics. The voleuse embodies these torsions and tensions in her act of sublation. Hélène Cixous’s concept of the voleuse, the female figure that negates (flies past) yet revises (steals from) masculine discourse may be the most consequential concept for écriture féminine as a project. The act of sublation by the voleuse—destroying yet also creatively remaking—stakes out a position for women’s subjectivity that effectively exists alongside masculine discourse: not just a room of their own but a tongue (langue) of their own. This partial outsideness indicates a tolerance for difference as it signifies an independence. The laughing Medusa embodies this sublation, the destructive power of its gaze a prelude to a revision, the something new created, under the sign of comic laughter.

A Fanny Fern Genealogy Amiable laughter feminizes the unruly nature of comic laughter, especially in its promise of an amiable satire, and thus redirects the aggressiveness of the fractious satirist, rethinking her/him as the comic belles lettres

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lady/gentleman who often presents as a genial humorist. That shift in conceptualization partakes in some measure of the traditional sense of femininity, and as such should easily offer more opportunities for women in mid-nineteenth-century American culture to become comic writers. The Fanny Fern persona dramatizes the impossible subject writing as woman, in part, because even the comic belles lettres aesthetic, at least theoretically amenable to a woman writing satire, apparently could not provide a widespread cultural purchase beyond her own work for Parton’s powerful combination of satire and sentiment, one which shuns vernacular speech. Although the comic belles lettres gentleman, with his embrace of an amiable laughter, in effect offered a domesticated satire that feminized that mode of comic writing, conventional gender roles within the broader culture of antebellum America hampered Parton’s comic energy within the literary marketplace of the 1850s and its critical apparatus. Nevertheless, many contemporary critics appreciated her third way of writing satire, neither old-school satirist nor new-school amiable satirist played by the comic belles lettres gentleman, but instead one played by the Medusa satirist.3 Not that women writing comic material did not exist. Gregg Camfield (1997) and Nancy Walker (1988) investigate examples, and Linda Morris (1988, 1992) spotlights Francis Whitcher and her crackerbarrel characters, the Widow Bedott and Aunt Maguire. Whitcher enjoyed success and suffered notoriety with her versions of Yankee dialect speakers, yet only Parton made a big commercial mark as a woman writing satire within the comic belles lettres aesthetic before the Civil War, one that overshadowed a comic writer arguably her nearest competitor, Caroline Kirkland, with her A New Home—Who’ll Follow?, or Glimpses of Western Life (1839). Parton’s impact on American literature has been obscured by standard histories of the American comic tradition, despite her remarkable popularity and financial success, beginning in the 1850s, a success cemented by the fact that she became the highest paid newspaper columnist, featured for twenty years thereafter in Robert Bonner’s enormously successful periodical the New York Ledger. Those histories not only fail to appreciate the scope and unique nature of her success, but they fail to name any significant women writers of satire until Marietta Holley begins publishing her Samantha stories in 1872. Parton’s impact on the American comic tradition has been obscured because scholarship on nineteenth-century-comic writers like Holley has privileged vernacular speech as the comic tactic. The concept of an amiable

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laughter with satiric possibilities, however, suggests more popular antebellum women writing comic material exist than usually suspected because they write within the comic belles lettres aesthetic. How many other lady humorists might there be? Another question to accompany such an investigation: how much satire might be found in comic writers tagged as polite lady humorists? If one boundary of the amiable laughter aesthetic features satire that cannot be read as a pleasant raillery, then the other frontier of its spectrum becomes visible when the sentiment of benevolence takes over so completely that one crosses over into a pathos of tolerance that not only precludes satire but even precludes the possibility of laughter and thus moves out of the discourse of The Comic. Between those boundaries lies the territory of amiable lady satirists. For women authors, these speculations suggest a necessary remapping of the scholarly terrain of antebellum comic writers, but they also suggest that in general a comic belles lettres aesthetic has the potential to establish a method for revising how scholars sort and categorize nineteenth-century-comic artifacts. American humor studies scholars, then, need to amplify the roster of women comic writers in the nineteenth century before and after the Civil War. Some will surely be of the belles lettres variety, for example, Anna Cora Mowatt and her play Fashion (1845), or Carolyn Wells and her parodies in Idle Idyls (1900). Elizabeth Stoddard, with her witty and satiric columns for the San Francisco Alta California (1854–1858), seems like an obvious candidate. Nicole Livengood’s claim that Stoddard “used her position as the Alta’s ‘Lady Correspondent’ to lift the veil surrounding the white middle-class female body” (2010, 32) marks her as Parton’s sister in comic arms against the cult of true womanhood. Judith Lee’s provocative thesis (2020) about American humor and matters of empire provides a key part of any useful framework for the task of enlarging a roster of women comic writers, while I have argued elsewhere (2021a) that women in the twentieth century more likely write as Medusa satirists under Lee’s concept of neo-colonial hybridity, with Fanny Fern providing a functional origin point for a genealogy of Medusa satirists. Both of those efforts can be folded into Kirsten Leng’s project of recovering a history of humor in US feminism (2016). I want to extend the possibilities of elaborating a genealogy of women satirists writing in a Medusa mode by briefly exploring a conceptual matrix of Kate Clinton’s fumerism, Hélène Cixous’s écriture féminine, and Peter Sloterdijk’s kynicism, all of which center on affect and body rather than

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reasonable persuasion and thus enact in their peculiar ways the comic public sphere in a feminist mode. Clinton’s neologism fumerism names a feminist style of humor that fumes, that embraces anger and outrage (Willett and Willett 2019, 27). Cixous’s écriture féminine calls for a writing that “will return to the body” (1976, 880), so that the body itself functions as text, or “a monstrosity that goes by the name of ‘sext’” (Parvulescu 2010, 111). Allied to writing the body is Clinton’s emphasis on affect in the production of comic artifacts, while Sloterdijk’s kynicism (1987) offers a less-than-polite pushback against modern cynicism that emphasizes the body as a site of resistance, with Greek Cynic philosopher Diogenes as the model (Higgie 2014). The body as comic topos emphasizes the belly laugh and gut feeling, the festive, and the hilarious, with roars of laughter that destabilize. This trio of concepts expresses the raucous, the unruly, and the hysterically funny woman. In some ways, Jessyka Finley’s (2016) notion of “comic soapboxing” by black women satirists does too, which finds an echo in Katelyn Wood’s (2021) study of black women doing standup. While écriture féminine functioning as the locus for speaking the feminine emphasizes the body (Cixous 1976, 876, 885, 886), that same emphasis can be found in media savvy examples of fumerism. The Lesbian Avengers and Guerrilla Girls both began in New York City to protest sexism (see Leng 2020a, 2020b). The Ukranian-born Femen Movement began by protesting sex tourism (Chevrette and Hess, 2019), and the Canadian-born SlutWalk designed public events to call attention to and protest against a rape culture that blames victims because of their so-called provocative clothing (Willett and Willett 2019, 99–120). Those protests and happenings function as comic political speech acts, carnivalesque (post)modern rituals whose tactics overturn patriarchal injunctions about the proper display of women’s bodies and about what women should and should not wear. The Femen protests gained prominence for what became their signature gesture, protesting topless, so that their bodies become the material sign of their civic engagement. Notably, Femen protesters often wrote on their bodies as well as carried signs, literally producing body messages, a tactic sometimes seen with participants in SlutWalks too. One notable protest by the Femen Movement took place on April 8, 2013, when five topless Femen members suddenly confronted Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the Hanover trade fair. The scene recalls an incident Peter Sloterdijk recounts

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when in 1969 a group of student protesters at Frankfort University forestalled a lecture by Theodor Adorno. Some of the female students bared their breasts. For Sloterdijk, the students performed a critique with their bodies, a praxis of social change in a carnivalesque mode that recalls the antics of “the unruly Diogenes” (1987, 110). Their protest used “the living body as sensor of the world,” “naked flesh exercising ‘critique’” (1987, xxxiii, xxxvii) as an embodied form of comic Enlightenment. Such protests enact a “[c]heekiness from below” that manifests a “‘dirty’ materialism” (1987, 110, 105). Sloterdijk proposes a carnivalesque philosophy linked to the Greek cynic Diogenes, which “causes pious seriousness to collapse when the physiologically irresistible energy of laughter attacks it” (1987, 110). Slutwalk exemplifies rituals to dramatize a “carnival humor,” with “raucous laughs [that] perform a sense of renewal” (Willett and Willett 2019, 115, 120). The tactics of Femen or SlutWalk participants have been harshly criticized as self-serving at best and self-defeating at worst (Nguyen 2013), and Sloterdijk’s vision of laughter’s irresistible energy sounds a utopian note, but his concept of kynicism as a comic, body-sourced antidote to modern cynicism bears a structural resemblance to the reverse discourse tactics of the Femen Movement or the SlutWalks, in which participants reverse the normative meanings of signifiers about women’s bodies and dress from shame, inhibition, and abjection to elements in narratives celebrating pride and strength. Like Cixous’s voluese, women participating in Femen and SlutWalk protests sublate patriarchal discourse, flying past yet stealing from that discourse to initiate a writing of the body that speaks a new sort of feminine. Specifically for Parton, such laughter as Sloterdijk imagines punches back, tongue-lashes those who would shame and so tongue-tie women. Moreover, Parton as Fanny Fern hits back at those who would shame and tongue-lash her for walking away from her marriage to the abusive Samuel Farrington. Her own family expressed concerns about damage to her reputation, and William Moulton tried to shame Parton with stories about male visitors in the libelous and spurious biography he included in his collection of Fanny Fern columns, The Life and Beauties of Fanny Fern. Parton in many instances of her newspaper columns projects an angry humor, a fumerism about gendered norms. She excoriates the German writer John Paul with an extended litany of rude epithets (“A Lady Officer,” GG, February 4, 1853); imagines someone horsewhipped for his

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gossip and meddling (“Meditations of Paul Pry, jun.,” FL2); and wishes a hated male authority figure at her school would catch the smallpox or “be quietly removed in some way” (OB, August 9, 1851). Parton sums up the comic intensity of such examples when she tells a reader, “you labor under the hallucination that I felt merry when I wrote all that nonsense! Not a bit of it; it’s a way I have, when I can’t find a razor handy to cut my throat” (OB, January 31, 1852, original emphasis). In this context, Parton’s first novel, Ruth Hall, can be read as her ultimate satiric punch back at her detractors, her most extended effort at fumerism. Within fumerism, “belly laughs catalyze anger” in a catharsis of loud and raucous guffaws (Willett and Willett 2019, 102). Thus Fanny Fern, not just in her novel but in many of her comic columns, dramatizes Audre Lorde’s concept of “life force,” a kind of eros and joy that marks comic discourse from below (Willett and Willett 2019, 18, 104ff), enabling what Cixous calls “the living other, the rescued other” (1981, 50). Parton deploying Fanny Fern into the public sphere provides “joyous glimpses of another world” in her comic ridicule of patriarchal values (Willett and Willett 2019, 36), the world of a woman writing satire unafraid and confident of her power to speak her mind about gender expectations. As one contemporary critic puts it, “She writes … as if communing with a very near friend, to whom any thought might be freely outspoken, rather than to and for the public. And herein lies one of the secrets of her great favor with the public. What others feel and think and often wish to say, she utters fearlessly” (Arthur’s Home Gazette, qtd. in MWT, July 29, 1854). In other words, Fanny Fern carries out the duties of a satirist, dispensing comic tough love, comic ridicule for a worthy civic purpose, not simply to bully and denigrate a comic butt for the sake of crude bullying and verbal degradation. Fanny Fern performs as the literary domestics’ parrhesiastes. Parton prefigured the comic excess in her Fanny Fern style that signifies the Medusa satirist when she was a young woman at the Hartford Female Seminary, where she earned the nickname “Sal Volatile.” Her style can generate a hysterical laughter that functions as a reverse discourse, that is, hysteria in its very etymology pathologizes women’s behavior as excessive, but the laughter Fanny Fern prompts registers as hysterical in its comic opposition to patriarchy. An implied contagion lurks in such laughter, “a certain kind of laughter … that breaks out, overflows” (Cixous 1981,

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55), a laughter part anger and annoyance and part gleeful comic exuberance, a nineteenth-century version of fumerism. Kathleen Rowe touts the idea that the comic should be marked feminine (1995, 100) because within patriarchal discourse woman signifies disruption and unruliness and disorderly gestures such as laughter. Given the deeply-seated gender bias in the archive of commentary on comic cultural artifacts that reaches all the way back to Aristotle’s notion of the ready-witted gentleman, Parton’s success in writing satire strikes first as a lightning bolt, suddenly illuminating features of the cultural landscape obscured by patriarchal values, and then second like a battery of stage lights that continue to show what is possible for a woman satirist. Feminist humor must be political, say Cynthia and Julie Willett (2019, 128, 138, 152), and though Parton considered herself a-political in the context of first-wave feminism, yet her challenges to patriarchal values/ meanings sound political to twenty-first-century ears. To the ears of some nineteenth-century critics, Parton’s choppy style of dashes and short sentences registers as vulgar; perhaps that indictment alone authorizes reading her style as rudimentary écriture féminine. In any case, the shapeshifting variations of Fanny Fern as married or not married or widowed surely manifest Cixous’s idea about the feminine being an overflow, an inexhaustible unconscious. Like Walt Whitman’s “I,” Fanny Fern contains multitudes and embraces contradiction. Fred Pattee called Sara Parton the “‘grandmother of all sob sisters’” (qtd. in Camfield, 1997, 48). Instead, she can be read as the grandmother of all fumerists and their politics of eros and joy, or the grandmother of all so-called nasty women, or the American forerunner of Cixous’s écriture féminine. However she might be labeled, given all the roadblocks to a writing career put up by her family and society at large, nevertheless she persisted.

Notes 1. Bristed, The Upper Ten Thousand (1852); Mitchell, The Lorgnette (1850) and The Fudge Papers (1852 to 1854, book form 1855); Curtis, The Potiphar Papers (1853). 2. Susan Kuhlmann sees the con man motivated by “financial advantage” (1973, 5). Karen Halttunen (1982) offers a similar portrait, the con man intent on manipulating others either for money or status. Gary Lindberg claims the figure is a “covert culture

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hero,” not just about swindle but also “admiration, amusement, and connivance.” The con man does not disrupt social boundaries, like Trickster: “his message is the boundaries are already fluid, that there is ample space between his society’s official rules and its actual tolerances” (1982, 3, 4, 8–9). Warwick Wadlington’s use of Trickster approaches closest to how Fanny Fern operates, discussing writers who embrace Trickster’s dissolution of customary boundaries and re-creation of new boundaries, what he calls their “originative energy” (1975, 5). Lewis Hyde insists on the basic mythic quality of Trickster as the “embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox” (1998, 7). 3. For a decidedly positive presentation of Fanny Fern, one should scan the reviews of both series of Fern Leaves that the New York Musical World and Times in three instances compiled: May 6, 1854, 10; July 29, 1854, 156; August 12, 1854, 208. The editors Oliver Dyer and Richard Willis were probably Parton’s biggest boosters, and these reviews from many sources, a mini-archive inside the antebellum print archive, suggest various reasons for her popularity.

Works Cited

Primary Bristed, C[harles] Astor. 1850. The Upper Ten Thousand. New York: Stringer and Townsend, 1852. Curtis, George William. 1853. The Potiphar Papers. New York: Putnam, 1854. Irving, Washington. 1820. The Sketch Book. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. ———. 1822. Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists: A Medley. New York: John Lovell, 1889. Kirkland, Carolyn M. 1837. A New Home. Who’ll Follow?, or Glimpses of Western Life. Schenectady, NY: New College and University Press, 1965. Mitchell, Donald Grant. 1850. The Lorgnette: or, Studies of the Town. By an Opera Goer. Volume One. New York: Stringer and Townsend. Sixth Edition, 1852. ———. 1850. The Lorgnette: Or, Studies of the Town. By an Opera Goer. Volume Two. New York: Charles Scribner. Eleventh Edition, 1854. Moffett, Anna Cora. 1845. Fashion, or Life in New York. In Plays by American Women: The Early Years, ed. Judith E. Barlow. New York: Avon, 1981.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 J. E. Caron, The Modern Feminine in the Medusa Satire of Fanny Fern, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41276-9_8

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Moulton, William. Life and Beauties of Fanny Fern. New York: H. Long and Brother, 1855. Parton, Sara. “The Model Husband” [signed “Clara]. Boston Olive Branch. June 28, 1851, 1. ———. “Thoughts on Dress” [signed “Tabitha”]. Boston Olive Branch. July 19, 1851, 3. ———. Untitled [“Tabitha” as “An Old Maid”]. Boston Olive Branch. August 2, 1851, 3. ———. “The Model Wife” [signed “Tabitha”]. Boston Olive Branch. August 2, 1851, 4. ———. “Deacons’ Daughters and Ministers’ Sons” [signed “Tabitha”]. Boston Olive Branch. August 9, 1851, 3. ———. Untitled [Women’s Faults: signed “Tabitha”]. Boston Olive Branch. August 16, 1851, 4. ———. “Little May.” Boston Olive Branch. August 30, 1851, 4; rpt. in FL1, 311. ———. “The Little Sunbeam.” Boston Olive Branch. September 6, 1851, 4; rpt. in FL1, 25. ———. Untitled [Mrs. Fay works too hard]. Boston Olive Branch. September 13, 1851, 4. ———. Untitled [cheerful home]. Boston Olive Branch. September 20, 1851, 4. ———. “The Young Cook.” Boston Olive Branch. September 27, 1851, 4. ———. Untitled [as Mrs. Partington]. Boston Olive Branch. October 4, 1851, 2. ———. “The Ball Room and the Nursery.” Boston Olive Branch. October 4, 1851, 4; rpt. in FL1, 141. ———. Untitled [Partington style]. Boston Olive Branch. November 1, 1851, 2. ———. Untitled [dissipated son reformed]. Boston Olive Branch. November 1, 1851, 4. ———. Untitled [as Mrs. Partington]. Boston Olive Branch. November 8, 1851, 2. ———. “Charity.” Boston Olive Branch. November 8, 1851, 3. ———. Untitled [Solomon Stillweather]. Boston Olive Branch. November 22, 1851, 3; rpt. as “An Interesting Husband” in FL1, 369–71.

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———. “Aunt Charity’s Advice to Her Nephew on Leaving Smithville.” Boston Olive Branch. November 22, 1851, 4. ———. “Aunt Hetty’s Ideas of Matrimony.” Boston Olive Branch. December 6, 1851, 3; rpt. as “Aunt Hetty on Matrimony in FL1, 377–79. ———. Untitled [letter to Norris: no good deed unpunished]. Boston Olive Branch. December 13, 1851, p. 2. ———. Untitled [the exuberant child]. Boston Olive Branch. December 20, 1851, 4. ———. Untitled [letter to Norris: Fanny unladylike]. Boston Olive Branch. December 27, 1851, 3. ———. “Lights and Shadows.” Boston Olive Branch. December 27, 1851, 4. ———. Untitled [shopping for presents]. Boston Olive Branch. January 3, 1852, 3. ———. Untitled [response to Eva]. Boston Olive Branch. January 31, 1852, 3. ———. Untitled [women gossip, revisited]. Boston Olive Branch. January 31, 1852, 3. ———. “Little Charlie.” Boston Olive Branch. February 14, 1852, 4. ———. “To ‘Bachelor M. O, Acton Centre.’” Boston Olive Branch. February 28, 1852, 3. ———. Untitled [Professor Stahr]. Boston Olive Branch. March 6, 1852, 3; rpt. as “Hit Him Again” in New York Spirit of the Times, April 24, 1852, 112. ———. Untitled [women talking]. Boston Olive Branch. March 27, 1852, 2. ———. Untitled [Mehitable Prim]. Boston Olive Branch. March 27, 1852, 3. ———. Untitled [response to Jack and J. F.]. Boston Olive Branch. April 10, 1852, 3. ———. Untitled [response to Eliza]. Boston Olive Branch. April 17, 1852, 3. ———. Untitled [jolly bachelor]. Boston Carpet Bag. April 24, 1852, 4. ———. “A Sprig of Fern, for Mr. Tupper.” Boston True Flag. May 1, 1852, 2. ———. “Kossuth.” Boston Olive Branch. May 8, 1852, 3.

188

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———. “Fanny Fern and those who Attempt to Imitate her Style of Writing.” Boston Olive Branch. July 3, 1852, 2. ———. “To ——–.” Boston Olive Branch. July 24, 1852, 3. ———. “Kissing and Tobacco.” Boston Olive Branch. July 24, 1852, 3; rpt. in Brooklyn Eagle. August 27, 1852, 4. ———. “The Model Sea Captain.” Boston Olive Branch. July 24, 1852, 3. ———. “Tyranny of the Petticoats.” Boston Olive Branch. July 31, 1852, 3; rpt. Brooklyn Eagle. November 29, 1852, 4. ———. “Author’s Phrases.” Boston Olive Branch. September 4, 1852, 3. ———. Untitled [prosaic minds]. Boston Olive Branch. September 11, 1852, 3. ———. “Fanny Fern on Smoking.” Boston True Flag. September 11, 1852, 2. ———. Untitled [warning to Harry Honeysuckle]. Boston Olive Branch. October 16, 1852, 3. ———. Untitled [note to Santa]. Boston Olive Branch. December 25, 1852, 3. ———. “Miss Fanny Fiddlestick’s Soliloquy, On Reading a Complimentary Notice of Herself, Written by a Lady.” Boston Olive Branch. January 22, 1853, 3. ———. “A Lady Officer.” Geneva (NY) Daily Gazette. February 4, 1853, 4; rpt. from Boston Olive Branch or Boston True Flag. ———. “A Model Husband.” Boston True Flag. February 12, 1853, 2. ———. Untitled [unmarried]. Boston True Flag. February 26, 1853, 2. ———. “Musings.” Boston True Flag. February 26, 1853, 2. ———. “On a Valentine.” Boston True Flag. February 26, 1853, 2. ———. “Jenny Lind Goldschmidt.” Boston True Flag. April 9, 1853, 2. ———. “Impudent Questions.” Boston Olive Branch. April 30, 1853, 3. ———. “Love Making.” Brooklyn Eagle. May 3, 1853, 2; rpt. from an April issue of Boston True Flag. ———. “The Bearded Woman.” Boston True Flag. May 21, 1853, 2; rpt. from the New York Musical World and Times; rpt. as “The Bearded Woman” in Gallipolis (Ohio) Journal. June 16, 1853, 1.

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189

———. “Apollo Hyacinth.” New York Musical World and Times. June 18, 1853; rpt. in FL2, 381–83. ———. “Newspaper-dom.” Boston Olive Branch. August 13, 1853, 2; rpt. from New York Musical World and Times. ———. “Fanny Fern” [self-portrait]. Brooklyn Eagle. September 29, 1853, 1; rpt. from Boston [?] Sunday Visitor. ———. Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Port-folio. Buffalo: Miller, Orton, Mulligan, 1853. ———. Little Ferns for Fanny’s Little Friends. Buffalo: Miller, Orton, Mulligan, [1853] 1854. ———. Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Port-folio. Second Series. Buffalo: Miller, Orton, Mulligan, 1854. ———. “A Card from Fanny Fern.” New York Tribune. March 27, 1854, 5. ———. “Fanny Fern to John Bull.” New York Tribune. June 29 and 30, 1854, 3. ———. Fresh Leaves. New York: Mason Brothers, 1857. Shelton, Frederick. The Trollopiad, or, Travelling Gentleman in America, a Satire. New York: Shepard, 1837. Stephens, Ann S. High Life in New York. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson, 1843. Wells, Carolyn. Idle Idyls. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1900. Witcher, Frances Miriam. The Widow Bedott Papers. New York, Derby and Jackson, 1855.

Contemporary Periodical Items A. Bousett. Untitled [letter to Fanny Fern]. Boston Olive Branch. May 29, 1852, 2. Albert. Untitled [letter to Fanny Fern]. Boston Olive Branch. June 19, 1852, 3. Albion, A Journal of News, Politics and Literature. “A New Bookselling Dodge.” March 10, 1855, 117. Ballou’s Pictorial. “Notices of New Publications.” January 13, 1855, 26. Baltimore Sun. “Chance of Getting Married.” February 16, 1854, 2. ———. “A Lady’s Opinion of Fanny Fern.” February 16, 1855, 1. Boston Carpet Bag. Untitled. October 9, 1852, 8. Boston Daily Atlas. “An Authoress in Broadway.” May 18, 1854, 2.

190

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Boston Olive Branch. “Mrs. Bloomer.” July 19, 1851, 2. ———. “Lola Montes in Boston.” April 3, 1852, 2. ———. Untitled [reader’s letter about Fanny Fern]. May 8, 1852, 2. ———. Untitled [letters about Fanny Fern]. August 28, 1852, 2. ———. Untitled [original Fanny Fern]. December 11, 1852, 2; rpt. from Boston True Flag. ———. “Who Is Fanny Fern?” January 29, 1853, 2; rpt. from New York Musical World and Times. ———. “Fanny Fern’s New Book.” June 4, 1853, 3; rpt. from New York Musical World and Times. Brooklyn Eagle. Untitled [eligible Fanny Fern]. July 31, 1852, 4. ———. Untitled [Fanny Fern revealed]. October 1, 1852, 2. ———. “The Empress.” February 14, 1853, 2. ———. Untitled [women’s rights]. March 12, 1853, 2. ———. “Fanny Fern.” June 22, 1853, 2; rpt. from New York Mirror. ———. Untitled [Fanny Fern’s identity]. July 6, 1853, 2. ———. “Fanny Fern.” September 29, 1853, 2. ———. “Sudden Rise in the Literary Market.” May 19, 1855, 2. ———. Untitled [bitter Fanny Fern]. September 26, 1855, 2. ———. “Two Denials.” August 22, 1856, 2. Bungay, George. “Crayon Sketch of Fanny Fern.” Country Gentleman. June 2, 1853, 352; rpt. from the Cayuga (NY) Chief . Chicago Daily Tribune. “New Publications.” December 7, 1853, 2. Christian Review. “Notices of New Publications” [Fern Leaves, First Series]. October 1, 1853, 625. Church Review and Ecclesiastical Register. Untitled [review of Ruth Hall ]. January 1855, 626. Clark, Lewis Gaylord. “Review of Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio.” New York Knickerbocker, July 1853, 109. ———. “Fanny Fern’s ‘Fern Leaves’” [Second Series]. New York Knickerbocker, July 1854, 110. Cleveland Herald. Untitled [Fanny Fern in New York]. July 15, 1853, 2; rpt. from New York Home Journal. ———. “Who Fanny Fern Is Not.” March 15, 1854, 2; rpt. from New York Evening Mirror. ———. “N. P. Willis and Fanny Fern.” March 17, 1854, 2. ———. Untitled [Review of Fern Leaves, Second Series]. May 30, 1854, 3. ———. “Fanny Fern’s Novel.” December 11, 1854, 1.

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Country Gentleman (Albany, NY). “Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio.” June 30, 1853, 406. Curtis, George William. “Literary Notices [review of Fern Leaves, Second Series]. Harper’s. 9 (July 1854), 277. ———. “Thackeray’s Newcomes.” Putnam’s Monthly. 6 (September 1855), 283–90. Daily Dispatch. “Fanny Fern.” January 4, 1855, 2. Democratic Review. “Fanny Fern.” 8 (August, 1853), 187–90. ———. “The Life and Beauties of Fanny Fern.” 35 (March 1855), 235. Detroit Free Press. “Strong-Minded Woman.” December 24, 1852, 2. ———. “New Books.” December 16, 1853, 2. ———. “Who Is Fanny Fern?” April 1, 1854, 2. ———. “New Book” [review of Life and Beauties ]. February 14, 1855, 2. Dyer, Oliver. “Dyed-in-the-wool Meanness.” New York Musical World and Times. March 19, 1853, 178. E. A. B. Untitled [letter to Fanny Fern]. Boston Olive Branch. April 10, 1852, 3. Eliza. “To Fanny Fern.” Boston Olive Branch. April 10, 1852, 3. Evening Star (Washington D.C.). Untitled [eligible Fanny Fern]. February 10, 1854, 1. ———. Untitled [Fanny Fern marries]. January 23, 1856, 4. Frederick Douglass’ Paper. “Literary Notices” [Fern Leaves, Second Series]. June 2, 1854, 3. Frank. Untitled [letter to Fanny Fern]. Boston Olive Branch. May 8, 1852, 2. Frank Barleycorn. Untitled [letter to Fanny Fern]. Boston Olive Branch. July 10, 1852, 3. Frank Real. “To ‘Eva,’ in Lowell.” Boston Olive Branch. January 31, 1852, 3. Fuller, Margaret. “The Great Lawsuit.” The Dial. July, 1843. https:// archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/fuller/deb ate.html. Geneva (New York) Daily Gazette. “A Lady Officer.” February 4, 1853, 4. Godey’s Lady’s Book. “Godey’s Arm Chair.” November 1, 1852, 488. Graham’s Magazine. “Editor’s Table” [review of Ruth Hall ]. May 1855, 465.

192

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Harry Honeysuckle. Untitled [letter to Fanny Fern]. Boston Olive Branch. May 29, 1852, 2. ———. Untitled [letter to Fanny Fern]. Boston Olive Branch. July 10, 1852, 3. ———. Untitled [letter to Fanny Fern]. Boston Olive Branch. July 24, 1852, 3. Independent. Untitled [review of Fern Leaves, First Series]. July 7, 1853, 108. Israelite. “Fanny Fern.” January 19, 1855, 221. Jack Plane. Untitled [letter to Fanny Fern]. Boston Olive Branch. March 6, 1852, 3. ———. Untitled [letter to Fanny Fern]. Boston Olive Branch. March 27, 1852, 3. Jeffersonian [Stroudsburg, PA]. “A Sparkling, a Glowing, a Live Book.” December 28, 1854, 4. Jemmy Jessamy. “To Fanny Fern.” Boston True Flag. May 1, 1852, 2. Jenny Jessamine. Untitled [letter to Fanny Fern]. Boston Olive Branch. May 15, 1852, 2. J. F. Untitled [letter to Fanny Fern]. Boston Olive Branch. April 3, 1852, 3. Littell’s Living Age. “Fern Leaves.” November 19, 1853, 484–90; rpt. from Eliza Cook’s (London) Journal. Louisville Journal. “Fern Leaves.” June 6, 1853, 2. ———. “Fanny Fern.” June 25, 1853, 3; rpt. from New York Mirror. ———. “A Card from Fanny Fern.” March 31, 1854, 2. ———. Untitled [“Ruth Hall”]. January 6, 1855, 2. Lowell, Charles. “The Fate of Genius.” Bangor Whig. July 11, 1853, 2. Michigan Farmer. “Ladies Department: Editorial Remarks.” August 1, 1854, 246. New Orleans Picayune. “Personalities.” April 7, 1854, 7. ———. “Red River.” January 6, 1855, 7. New York Evening Post. Untitled [review of Ruth Hall ]. December 12, 1854, 2. New York Family Courier. Untitled [review of Ruth Hall ]. December 30, 1854, 1. New York Herald. “New Books.” May 28, 1854, 6. New York Home Journal. “Ladies in Trousers.” May 3, 1851, 1. ———. “Ladies in Trousers.” May 3, 1851, 2.

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———. “The Reform in Ladies’ Costume.” May 31, 1851, 2. ———. “The New Costume.” June 5, 1851, 2. ———. “Mrs. Partington on the New Dress for Ladies.” June 5, 1851, 3. ———. “The New Costume.” July 5, 1851, 2. ———. [no title: Bloomers]. July 5, 1851, 2. ———. “A Lady in Town.” August 2, 1851, 2. ———. [no title: Bloomers]. August 16, 1851, 1. ———. “The Bloomer Dress.” September 20, 1851, 2. New York Home Magazine. “New Publications.” July 1853, 80. New York Literary World. Untitled [review of Fern Leaves, First Series]. August 6, 1853, 21. New York Musical World and Times. Untitled [reviews of Fern Leaves ]. May 6, 1854, 10. ———. Untitled [reviews of Fern Leaves ]. July 29, 1854, 156. ———. Untitled [reviews of Fern Leaves ]. August 12, 1854, 208. New York Spirit of the Times. “Petersburg (VA.) Spring Races.” May 20, 1852, 163. ———. “Fanny Fern.” June 5, 1852, 182. New York Times. “Great Race in Virginia.” May 15, 1854, 8. ———. “‘Fanny Fern’s’ Letter—A Growl against Literary Ladies.” June 22, 1854, 2. ———. “Notices of New Books” [review of Ruth Hall ]. December 20, 1854, 2. New York Tribune. “Bloomerism.” July 1, 1851, 6. ———. “New Publications” [The Female Prose Writers of America]. October 3, 1854, 6. Nick Notion. Untitled [letter to Fanny Fern]. Boston Olive Branch. April 24, 1852, 3. Norris, Thomas. “Notice to Correspondents.” Boston Olive Branch. August 28, 1852, 2. ———. Untitled [racy Fanny Fern]. Boston Olive Branch. November 20, 1852, 3. ———. Untitled [Fanny Fern, regular contributor]. Boston Olive Branch. December 4, 1852, 2. ———. “Fanny Fern.” December 11, 1852, 2. ———. Untitled [N. P. Willis, senior]. Boston Olive Branch. August 27, 1853, 2. ———. “Fanny Fern.” Boston Olive Branch. September 3, 1853, 2.

194

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Northern Democrat [Pulaski, New York]. “Connubial.” January 27, 1853, 1. Optic. “Saucy Questions.” Boston True Flag, August 7, 1852, 2. Patience Pepper. “To Fanny Fern.” Boston Olive Branch. May 1, 1852, 3. Peterson’s (NY) Magazine. Untitled [Review of Little Ferns ]. February 1854, 157. Pioneer; or, California Monthly Magazine. “Literary Notices.” September, 1854, 163. Putnam’s Monthly. “Editorial Notes: American Literature” [review of Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio]. July 1853, 103. ———. “Literature” [review of Ruth Hall ]. February 1855, 212. ———. “The Sparrowgrass Papers by Frederic Cozzens.” 8 (July 1856): 99. Ripley, George, “New Publications” [Fern Leaves, Second Series]. New York Tribune. May 26, 1854, 7. ———. “Fanny Fern’s Novel.” New York Tribune. December 16, 1854, 3. “s”. Untitled [letter to Fanny Fern]. Boston Olive Branch. April 17, 1852, 3. Scioto (Chillicothe OH) Gazette. Untitled [Fanny Fern’s sarcasm]. April 25, 1854, 2; rpt. from Boston Literary Museum. ———. “Fanny Fern.” April 29, 1854, 2. ———. “Our Book Table.” December 15, 1854, 2. ———. “Fanny Fern’s Autobiography.” January 4, 1855, 2. ———. “Fanny Fern Badly Handled by One of Her Own Sex.” January 5, 1855, 2; rpt. from Boston Olive Branch. ———. “Fanny Fern Daguerreotyped.” January 22, 1855, 2. ———. Untitled [review of Ruth Hall ]. March 5, 1855, 2; rpt. from Charleston (OH) Courier. Shillaber, Benjamin. Untitled [Fanny Fern imitates Mrs. Partington]. Boston Carpet Bag. October, 18, 1851, 3. Southern Literary Quarterly. Untitled [review of Ruth Hall ]. April 1855, 438–50. United States Review. “Fanny Fern.” 2, August 1853, 187. Vermont (Bellows Falls) Chronicle. “New Publications” [review of Ruth Hall ]. January 30, 1855, 2. Willis, Nathaniel P. “Lesser Gossip.” New York Home Journal. April 1, 1854, 2.

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Winnie Woodfern. “To Fanny Fern.” Boston Carpet Bag, July 24, 1852, 2.

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Index

A abuse, 23, 32, 40, 88, 95 Addison, Joseph, 14, 131, 135, 139, 168 adultery, 159 The Albion, 146 Alcott, Louisa May, 102 Alger, Horatio, 38 “All’s Well”, 36 All the Happy Endings: A Study of the Domestic Novel in America, the Women who Wrote It, the Women who Read it in the Nineteenth Century (Papashvily), 4 alter egos, 50. See also pseudonyms ambivalence cultural norms, values, 13, 80 literary domestics and, 30, 166 about Providence, 33, 41 women writers and, 4, 11, 80 The American Crisis (Paine), 37 “An Infidel Mother”, 37

antifeminists, 3. See also feminism “Apollo Hyacinth” (N.P. Willis), 59, 74, 123 Aristotle, 132, 168, 183 The Art of War (Sun-tzu), 101 Ashworth, Suzanne, 7 “Aunt Hetty’s Ideas of Matrimony”, 53, 83 Austen, Jane, 15 avarice, 33, 123

B bachelors, 39, 97, 112, 118, 157. See also marriage Backwoods Roarer, 100, 129 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 173–175 “The Ball Room and the Nursery”, 41, 52 Ballou’s Pictorial, 142 Baltimore Sun, 130 “Barnum’s Museum”, 126 Bataille, Georges, 101

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 J. E. Caron, The Modern Feminine in the Medusa Satire of Fanny Fern, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41276-9

207

208

INDEX

Baym, Nina, 7 “A Bearded Woman”, 160 beauty, 54, 72, 93, 97 Beecher, Catherine, 32, 43, 73 benevolence, 47, 162 Berg, Barbara, 5, 175 Bergson, Henri, 33 Berlant, Lauren, 9, 26, 166 “The Best of Men have Their Failings”, 124 Beulah (Evans), 7 Blackwell, Elizabeth, 157 Blackwood’s Magazine, 65 The Blithedale Romance (Hawthorne), 7 bloomers, 48, 157, 163, 169 bluestockings, 84, 99 Bonaparte, Eugénie, 147 Bonner, Robert, 93, 156 “The Bore of the Sanctum”, 121 Boston Carpet Bag, 55, 112 Boston Literary Museum, 63 Boston Olive Branch, 48, 51, 56, 63 Boston Sunday Visitor, 60 Boston Transcript, 58, 62 Boston True Flag, 51, 56 bourgeois carnival, 11, 90, 92, 97, 159, 170, 174 Bracebridge Hall, or a Medley of Humorists (Irving), 16, 131 Bricoleur, 107 The British Critic, 85 Brodhead, Richard, 7 Brooklyn Eagle, 57, 130, 138, 144, 152 Bungay, George, 72, 139 Bunker Hill, 90

C Calvinism, 24, 35 Camfield, Gregg, 4, 12, 24

“A Card from Fanny Fern”, 62, 130 Caricatures, 126 “Castration or Decapitation?” (Cixous), 101 chain-lightning, 67, 73, 77, 100, 129, 135 “A Chapter on Literary Women”, 86, 101 Charleston [OH] Courier, 147 Chicago Daily Tribune, 145 “Childhood’s Trust”, 36 children child mortality, 35, 41 legitimacy of, 158 Little Ferns for Fanny’s Little Friends, 167 men and, 39, 114 as morality reminders, 39 stories of, 39, 52 Christianity, 31, 42, 107, 124 Chubbuck, Emily (a.k.a. Fanny Forrester), 47 “City Scenes and City Life No. 1”, 137, 152 Cixous, Hélène, 17, 98, 147, 175. See also écriture féminine Clark, Lewis Gaylord, 30, 133, 140, 144, 159, 162 Clemens, Sam (a.k.a. Mark Twain), 29, 100, 172 Cleveland Herald, 139 Clinton, Kate, 179 Cohen, Lara, 8 comedy. See also laughter American periodicals, 132 Bataille’s Comic, 101, 179 comic curses, violence, insults, 109 comic preachers, sermons, 24, 39, 43, 107 fumerism, 180 as opposition, 171, 176, 182 vernacular and, 131, 169, 178

INDEX

vulgar, coarse, 151 women and, 14, 141, 178 comic belles lettres aesthetic of, 13, 71 comic belles lettres gentleman, 16, 27, 99, 161 comic belles lettres lady, 49, 106, 131, 136, 139 objectives, 15, 25, 48 paradox of, 139 pre-Civil War, 178 sweet sarcasm, 17, 97, 102, 146 conduct books, 2, 5, 157 Conrad, Susan, 4 Cook, Eliza, 150 Country Gentleman, 148, 149 Coverley, Roger de, 28, 132, 168 “Critics”, 89 “The Cross and the Crown”, 36 cross-dressing, 157, 173 “cult of true womanhood”, 1, 26, 83, 95, 160. See also women cultural norms, values ambivalence for, 13, 80 class differences, 137 endorsing, overturning, 29, 38, 80, 81, 91, 160 of femininity, women, 2, 48, 76, 97, 113, 138 marriage, 49, 76, 80, 83, 93 Cummins, Maria Susanna, 7 “Curious Things”, 81 Curtis, George William, 42, 105, 150 cynicism, 180

D dandyism, 121, 143, 159 “Dark Days”, 34 dark Providence. See Providence Darwinism, 5 Dayton Daily, 144

209

“Deacons’ Daughters and Ministers’ Sons”, 73 Defamation, slander, 85, 89, 114, 120 Democratic Review, 143, 152 Denison, Mary A., 48, 52, 72 Detroit Free Press, 62, 70, 145 Dickinson, Emily, 38 Diogenes, 180 disruptors, 29, 169 Douglas, Ann. See Wood, Ann (Douglas) Douglas, Mary, 160, 173 Dyer, Oliver, 38, 69

E écriture féminine body as text, 180 feminism forerunner, 165 Medusa and, 98, 101, 132 power of, 134, 161 rewriting stereotypes, 92, 106 sexuality and, 101, 176 voleuse sublation, 177 women writers and, 3, 88 “Edith May, or the Mistake of a Lifetime”, 34, 119 “Editor’s Table”, 162 Eldredge, Charles, 23, 58, 155 Ellington, Brenda, 11 Elliott, Robert, 97, 135 “Elsie’s First Trial”, 82 Enlightenment ideals, 1, 12, 47 equality, 2 estrangement, 34, 64 Evans, Augusta Jane, 7

F faith, 36, 40. See also religion Fanny Fern. See also Parton, Sara Payson Willis

210

INDEX

“A Card from Fanny Fern”, 62, 130 character evolves, 49, 52, 102 criticized, praised, 30, 40, 55, 61, 77, 138, 142 describes self, 55, 61, 72, 129 faith, religion and, 26, 33, 74 “Fanny Fern on Smoking”, 111 “Fanny Fern to John Bull”, 113 Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio, 23, 58, 80, 115 “A Fern Soliloquy”, 110, 134 identity of, 56, 62, 64 independence, 73, 97 Mimosa, touch-me-not, 67, 129, 135 popularity, 51, 55, 64, 69, 129, 168 sentiment and satire, 11, 47 sexuality and, 67, 77, 98, 157 shape-shifter, 50, 55, 61, 72, 173 temperament, 132, 136, 163 as Trickster, 13, 29, 92, 107, 160, 169, 171 voice of, 4, 10, 27, 108 “Who Fanny Fern is Not”, 61 “Who is Fanny Fern?”, 57 writing style, 3, 8, 26, 48, 134, 141, 156 as voleuse, 17, 99, 132, 137, 170, 176 Fanny Forrester (Emily Chubbuck), 47 Farrington, Samuel, 23, 58, 96, 119, 130 The Female Prose Writers of America (Hart), 152 Femen Movement, 180 The Feminine Fifties (Pattee), 4 “Feminine Waiters at Hotels”, 137 femininity behavior expected, 48, 76

Fern lampoons, 115 power of, 92, 95 submission and, 26, 30, 91 women’s rights and, 152 women writers, 6, 8, 86, 88, 148 feminism antifeminists, 4 bloomers, 163, 169 “Feminism, or ‘She’s Beautiful and She’s Laughing’” (Parvalescu), 101 The Feminization of American Culture (Wood), 4, 10 fumerism, 180 movements, 180 sentimental fiction, 7 women’s rights and, 175 Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio, 23, 58, 80, 115 fiction, 2, 24. See also sentimental fiction, family Fielding, Sarah, 168 Finley, Jessyka, 180 flaneuse, 81 “The Flirt, or the Unfaithful Lover”, 83 Foucault, Michel, 13, 99 Freud, Sigmund, 12, 101 Fuller, Hiram, 62 Fuller, Margaret, 2 fumerism, 179 G gender. See also women comic belles lettres gentleman version, 27 line between, 169, 173 stereotypes, 29, 84, 92, 98, 105, 137, 161 Godey’s Lady’s Book, 56 Gorgons, 3, 49, 98, 99, 106. See also Medusa

INDEX

Goshgarian, G.M., 3–5 gossip, 68, 76, 122 “Gossip with Readers and Correspondents” (Clark), 50, 162 Grace Greenwood (Sara Jane Lippincott), 47 “The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men, Woman versus Women” (Fuller), 2 Greed, 33, 123 “A Grumble from the (H)altar”, 98 H Hale, Sarah Josepha, 7 Harker, Jaime, 8, 11, 24, 26 Harper’s, 150 Harris, Susan, 7, 9, 21 Hart, John S., 152 Hartnett, Stephen, 4, 9 “Have We any Men Among Us?”, 89 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 3, 5, 7 High Life in New York (Stephens), 169 Hobbes, Thomas, 1 Holley, Marietta, 178 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 100 Homestead, Melissa, 9, 159 Horatianism, 12, 14 “Hour Glass Thoughts”, 96 “Household Tyrants”, 95 “How Husbands May Rule”, 94 “How to Cure the Blues”, 38 hoydens, 142, 145, 152 humor, 12, 16, 100, 180. See also comedy “Hungry Husbands”, 93 Hutcheson, Francis, 14 Hyde, Lewis, 92 Hynes, William, 106 hypocrisy, 31, 37, 107, 123, 172 hysterical laughter, 99, 108, 147, 173, 182

211

I “I Can’t”, 119 “Important for Married Men”, 98 “Impudent Questions”, 58 “Incident at Mount Auburn”, 40 independence, 33, 70, 73, 174 industrialization, 5 “An Interesting Husband”, 111, 119 “The Invalid Wife”, 96 Irving, Washington, 16, 131

J jealousy, 81, 96 Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter), 109 “Jenny Lind Goldschmidt”, 120 Jones, Ann, 176 Juvenalianism, 12, 14, 109

K Kelley, Mary, 4, 6, 11, 24, 25, 80 Kirkland, Caroline, 178 “Kitty’s Resolve”, 83, 95 Knickerbocker, 140, 162 Kossuth, Lajos, 70, 77, 157 kynicism, 179

L “A Lady Officer”, 109 Laffrado, Laura, 9, 129, 159 The Lamplighter (Cummins), 7 Lampoons, 113, 131 Larson, Jennifer, 11 “The Laugh of the Medusa” (Cixous), 147 laughter. See also comedy comic laughter types, 133 “Feminism, or ‘She’s Beautiful and She’s Laughing’”, 101 hysterical, 99, 108, 147, 173, 182

212

INDEX

mental health and, 32 Lee, Judith, 14, 100, 179 Leng, Kirsten, 179 Lesbian Avengers and Guerrilla Girls, 180 “Letter to the Empress Eugenia”, 121 The Life and Beauties of Fanny Fern (Moulton), 56, 145, 152, 181 Lind, Jenny, 120, 130 Lippincott, Sara Jane (a.k.a. Grace Greenwood), 47 literary domestics, 3, 7, 24, 30, 166. See also women writers literary marketplace, society, 2, 47, 84 Literary World, 148 “Little Charlie, the Child Angel”, 41 Little Ferns for Fanny’s Little Friends (Fern), 167 “Little May”, 40 “The Little Sunbeam”, 52 Livengood, Nicole, 179 Locke, John, 1 London Athenaeum, 113 Lorde, Audre, 182 The Lorgnette (Mitchell), 29, 106 Louisville Journal, 58 love, 74, 83, 94, 114 “Love Making”, 114 Lovingood, Sut, 172 Lowell, Charles, 141 Lowell, James Russell, 100

M manners, 25, 28, 121 “Man of Feeling”, 47 Mark Twain (Sam Clemens), 29, 100, 172 marriage adultery, jealousy, 81, 96, 159 behavior within, 49, 76, 80, 83, 93 comic insults, violence, 111, 135

emotional abuse, 23, 32, 88, 96 Fern and, 32, 55, 68, 75 independence vs., 73, 174 partnership, 49, 119 submission and, 26, 30, 91 wives as chattel, ornaments, 93, 112 woes of, 37, 95, 109, 117, 122 “Mary Lee”, 96 Materialism, 120. See also money Meddlers, 121 Medusa écriture féminine and, 3, 101 female satirist, 13, 49, 106, 108, 132, 169, 175 “The Laugh of the Medusa” (Cixous), 147 patriarchy and, 99, 165, 176 sexuality, 98, 101 voleuse, 17, 132, 137, 170 Mellor, Anne, 85 men bachelors, 39, 97, 112, 157 dandyism and, 121, 143, 159 fear, threatened by smart women, 83, 91, 97 Fern mocks, promotes, 118 gentlemen’s clubs, 132 shallow, 54, 83, 92 women writers and, 7, 86 “Merry Christmas! Happy Christmas!”, 36 Michigan Farmer, 142 Mimosa, 67, 129, 135 “mirthful chorus”, 168 “Miss Fanny Fiddlestick’s Soliloquy, On Reading a Complimentary Notice of Herself, Written by a Lady”, 115 Mitchell, Donald Grant, 29, 50, 102, 106, 117, 122, 169 Mizejewski, Linda, 161 “A Model Husband”, 51, 77

INDEX

“The Model Sea Captain”, 158 money, 7, 33, 82, 120, 123 Montagu, Elizabeth, 84 Morrison, Lucy, 5 Moses, Carole, 11 Moulton, William U., 56, 63, 181 “A Moving Tale”, 126 “Mr. Clapp’s Soliloquy”, 96 “Mr. Punch Mistaken”, 81 “Mrs. Adolphus Smith Sporting the Blue Stocking”, 89 “Mrs. Croaker”, 90 “Mrs. Weasel’s Husband”, 95 “Musings”, 74 “My Little Sunbeam”, 40

N Napoleon, Louis, 113 “Napthali Zerubbabel Dimple, Esq.”, 59 National Women’s Rights convention, 90. See also Women’s Rights, movements A New England Tale (Sedgwick), 7 A New Home—Who’ll Follow?, or Glimpses of Western Life (Kirkland), 178 “Newspaper-dom”, 59, 137 New York Dutchman, 57 New York Evening Mirror, 61 New York Home Journal, 57, 62, 143 New York Home Magazine, 140, 150 New York Ledger, 156, 178 New York Musical World and Times, 38, 55, 57, 69, 148 New York Times, 142, 146 New York Tribune, 62, 140, 149 “Night”, 36 “A Night Watch with a Dead Infant”, 35 “Nil Desperandum”, 36

213

Norris, Thomas, 50, 53, 56–60, 63–69, 71, 76–77, 111–112 Northern Democrat, 158 “The Notion of Expenditure” (Bataille), 12 O “Observing the Sabbath”, 32 “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” (Wordsworth), 39 Okin, Susan, 1 “On a Valentine”, 114 “Our Hatty”, 92, 94 “Our Nelly”, 32 “Owls Kill Hummingbirds”, 84 P “A Page from a Woman’s Heart—or Female Heroism”, 33, 41 Paine, Thomas, 37 Papashvily, Helen Waite, 4 parenthood, 31, 39 Parton, Sara Payson Willis. See also Ruth Hall (Parton) biographical writings, 24, 34, 56, 88, 96, 141 bluestocking role, 85 brothers, father, 47, 56, 58, 60, 124 children, 155 criticized, 148, 183 described, 32, 72, 153 faith, religion and, 11, 24, 43, 155 family estrangement, trajedies, 23, 35, 56, 62, 64 Fanny Fern evolves, 6, 47 fumerism, 183 marriages, 23, 58, 96, 119, 130, 153, 155 private, public life, 6, 26, 42, 50

214

INDEX

pseudonyms, 50, 51, 54, 73 Rose Clark, 23 “Sal Volatile”, 73, 182 subversiveness of, 12, 17 “Suggestions on Arithmetic”, 51 voice, writing style, 8, 50, 93, 166, 171 Parvulescu, Anca, 98, 101 “The Passionate Father”, 40 patriarchy attacks on, 9, 12, 24, 90, 97, 115, 172 Fern as voleuse, 17, 99 Medusa and, 98, 176 women and, 3, 4, 150, 180 Pattee, Fred Lewis, 4, 10, 40 Peary, Alexandria, 5 Perish the Thought: Intellectual Women in Romantic America (Conrad), 4 phallogocentrism, 99, 176 Pioneer, 143 Plato, 131 “A Practical Bluestocking”, 85 proto-feminists, 4. See also feminism Proverbial Philosophy (Tupper), 91 Providence, 27, 33, 41 pseudonyms, 7, 50, 51 publishing. See literary marketplace, society Punch, 120 Puritanism, 24, 35 Putnam’s, 145 Putnam, George, 63 Q “The Quiet Mr. Smith”, 98, 119 R Ragged Dick (Alger), 38 raillery

comic belles lettres aesthetic, 14, 16, 48, 99, 105, 131 gentlemen’s club, 132 with pleasantries, 15, 28, 113 rape culture, 180 “regime of truth”, 13 religion. See also faith Calvinism, 24, 35 Christianity, 31, 42, 107, 124 comic preachers, sermons, 24, 39, 43, 107 Fern’s vehicle, 11 hypocrisy of, 31, 37, 124, 172 Puritanism, 24, 35 stories of, 124 week-day preacher, 25 women and, 50, 74 “renovated domesticity”, 11 Richter, Johann Paul Friedrich (a.k.a. Jean Paul), 109 Ripley, George, 140, 143, 149 Rose Clark (Parton), 23 Rosenberg, Rosalind, 5, 43 Rowe, Kathleen, 173 Ruth Hall and Other Writings (Warren), 5 Ruth Hall (Parton) autobiographical, 57, 141 feminism, 175, 182 promoting, 156 reactions to, 4, 9, 51, 56, 144

S sarcasm, 17, 97, 102, 146 satire. See also Medusa aggressive, 105 amiable, 14, 131, 135, 151 benevolent, sympathetic, 47, 162 comic belles lettres, 13, 16 feminization of, 100, 105, 146, 151 Jane Austen, 15

INDEX

Juvenalian, Horatian, 12, 14, 109 objectives of, 14, 25, 131 pain beneath, 79 proper satirists, 115, 132, 151 spectrum of, 43, 140 sweet sarcasm, 17, 102, 97, 146 vernacular and, 131, 169, 178 women and, 3, 100, 133 “Saucy Questions” (Optic), 68 Scioto Gazette, 63 scribbling women, 3. See also women writers Sedgwick, Catherine, 7 selfishness, 37, 41 Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction (Tompkins), 4 “Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humor” (Shaftsbury), 168 sentimental fiction, family, 11, 24, 41, 168 sex tourism, 180 sexuality attraction, desire, 77, 157, 174, 176 Medusa, 98, 101 phallogocentrism, 99, 176 Shaftesbury (Lord), 14, 48, 132, 168 shape-shifting, 50, 55, 61, 72, 173 Shelton, Frederick, 152 Shillaber, Benjamin, 53, 156 “The Sick Bachelor”, 97, 111, 157 The Sketch Book (Irving), 16, 131 sketches, 28, 31, 47 Slander, defamation, 85, 89, 114, 120 Sloterdijk, Peter, 20, 179–181 SlutWalk, 180 Smith, Adam, 14, 162 smoking, 30, 111, 157 “Sober Husbands”, 75, 136, 175 society. See cultural norms, values

215

“Soliloquy of Mr. Parish”, 125 “Sorrow’s Teachings”, 36 The Southern Literary Quarterly, 144 The Sparrowgrass Papers, 17 The Spectator, 14, 132, 168 “The Stray Lamb”, 31, 36 Steele, Richard, 14, 113, 131, 168 St. Elmo (Evans), 7 Stephens, Ann, 169 stereotypes. See women Stevens, Marion H., 57 “Still Small Voice”, 41 Stone, Lucy, 137, 152 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, v, 16, 32, 144 “Strong-Minded Woman”, 70 submission, 26, 30, 91, 170 “Suggestions on Arithmetic” (Parton), 51 “Summer Friends”, 37, 38 “Summer Friends or ‘Will is Might’”, 37 “Summer’s Days or the Young Wife’s Afflictions”, 34 sympathy, 47, 162

T “Tabitha”, 52, 54, 73, 136 “A Talk about Babies”, 39 The Tatler, 14, 168 “The Tears of a Wife”, 84 “A Tempest in a Thimble”, 121 Temple, Gale, 25 Thackeray, on Household Tyrants (Thackeray), 96 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 25, 28, 96, 105, 132 “Thanksgiving Story”, 34 Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith), 16 Thomson, Mortimer, 100

216

INDEX

“Thorns for the Rose”, 34 “The Time to Choose”, 81 “The Transplanted Lily”, 39 “Tim Treadwell”, 118 tobacco, 30, 111, 157 “To ‘Bachelor M. O, Acton Centre’”, 55 “To Fanny Fern” (Woodfern), 68 Tompkins, Jane, 4, 6 “touch-me-not”, 130 Trickster, 18, 29, 92, 107, 160, 169, 171 Tupper, Martin Farquhar, 91 Tupper’s Proverbial Philosophy, 114 “Two in Heaven”, 40 “Tyranny of the Petticoats”, 158

V Valcourt, Robert de, 98 values. See cultural norms, values Vanity Fair, 106 Vermont Chronicle, 146 “The Vestry Meeting”, 124 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Wollstonecraft), 2 violence, 40, 95, 110 virtues, 26, 30 voleuse, 17, 99, 132, 137, 170, 176 Voloshin, Beverly, 7, 8 vulgarity, 142, 152, 156

W Walker, Nancy, 156, 178 Warner, Susan, 7 Warren, Joyce Parton biography, 17, 23, 73, 96, 136, 141, 156, 171 Parton identity, pseudonyms, 52, 56, 129 ‘Ruth Hall’ and Other Writings, 5

Washington D.C. Daily Evening Star, 130 “Wasn’t You Caught Napping?”, 91 “The Weaker Vessel”, 90 “the week-day preacher”, 25 Welter, Barbara, 5, 26, 30 “What Love will Accomplish”, 94 “What Mrs. Smith Said”, 90 “When You are Angry”, 136 Whitcher, Frances, 100, 169, 178 “Who Fanny Fern is Not”, 61 “Who is Fanny Fern?”, 57 “Who Loves a Rainy Day”, 137 “Whom Does It Concern”, 125 “A Wick-ed Paragraph”, 112 The Wide, Wide World (Warner), 6 The Widow Bedott Papers (Whitcher), 169 “The Widow’s Prayer”, 35 Wilhelm, Julie, 12 “Willie Grey”, 31 Willis Eldredge Farrington, Sarah. See Parton, Sara Payson Willis Willis, Nathaniel Parker “Apollo Hyacinth”, 59, 74, 123 Parton and, 56, 58 writer, editor, 47, 143 Willis, Nathaniel Sr., 60, 124 Willis, Richard, 57, 148 witches, witchcraft, 97, 109, 157, 165 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 2 women abused, defamed, 96, 113, 120 bluestockings, 84, 99, 106 clothing, 48, 157, 163, 169, 173, 180 “cult of true womanhood”, 1, 26, 83, 95, 160 expected behaviors, 2, 97, 113, 138 Fern’s new woman, 49 Fern mocks, 94, 110, 115

INDEX

intelligence of, 83, 87, 91, 97, 137, 177 power of, 5, 49, 82, 95, 134, 151, 157 readers, writers, 2, 4 sexuality and, 77, 160 stereotyped, 5, 68, 76, 81, 92, 109, 113 superiority of, 114, 119, 177 woman-belle ideal, 1, 26, 42, 80 “the woman question”, 1 Women’s Rights, movements, 3, 90, 150, 163, 175 women writers ambivalence of, 4, 11, 80 comedy and, 14, 141, 178

217

defamed, slandered, 85, 89 femininity and, 3, 8, 88 literary domestics, 3, 7, 24, 30, 166 men’s attitudes toward, 10, 86 pseudonyms, 7 stereotyped, 6, 85, 106 stories about, 85 Wood, Ann (Douglas), 4, 6, 8, 10, 43 Woodfern, Winnie, 68 Wood, Katelyn, 180 Wordsworth, William, 39 Wright, Elizabethada, 11

Y “The Young Cook”, 52