Customer Reviews

Smile of Discontent: Humor, Gender, and Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Women in Culture and Society Series)

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Eileen Gillooly's Smile of Discontent: Humor, Gender and Nineteenth-Century British Fiction begins with an examination of masculine and feminine humor leading to the assertion that masculine humor, based in oedipal urges, is binary, ironic and satiric; feminine humor, originating in an infantile sense of anxiety at separation from mother, is defensive, masochistic and subversive. While male humor is aggressive, female humor is sympathetic. A little too Freudian with a tendency toward essentializing gender difference for me.

A dominant motif in the book is the subversive nature of female humor as seen in the opening line of Austen's Pride and Prejudice: "It is a truth universal acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife" in which Austen is subverting an axiom. Female humor is also protective as we see in Frances Burney's Evelina when Mrs. Selwyn diverts unwanted male attention away from the heroine through witty comments. Evelina learns this strategy from Mrs. Selwyn and is able to fend for herself at the end of the book.

Working her way through standards written by women authors, Gillooly begins by discussing the humor in Austen's Mansfield Park asserting that Austen ridicules societal standards by creating a strong discrepancy between a modest and meek heroine and appealing socially aberrant females such as Mary Crawford and Mrs. Croft. Fanny Price, an Austenesque Cinderella, is ironically held up by all males in the book as the ideal woman - meek, mild, self-sacrificing and - useful. The humor of the work, Gillooly suggests is that Fanny takes pride in her usefulness in doing little more than fetching letters and behaving submissively.

I have never read Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell, one of the next books Gillooly analyzes, but, after having read this section of Smile of Discontent, I have added Gaskell to my reading list. The women of Cranford are described by the narrator as amazons because Cranford is a town run by women landowners who are property owners because they are widows or spinsters or daughters. The idiosyncratic, independent mostly middle-aged women of Cranford operate in the domestic realm believing their have power and authority as their daughters, like Fanny Price, make themselves useful. The humor arises in the discrepancy between the events as described by the narrative voice and the reactions of other characters.

Smile of Discontent raises some salient points but seems to try to force too many lenses including Freudian, queer theory, and feminism without being a very interesting read.