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

~ (Author) "Christ was saying something to the people one day, which interested Him very much, and interested them very much; and Mary and his brothers came..." (more)
Key Phrases: feminine humor, humorous victim, narrative humor, Sir Thomas, Mansfield Park, Mary Smith (more...)

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Product Description

Like sex, Eileen Gillooly argues, humor has long been viewed as a repressed feature of nineteenth-century femininity. However, in the works of writers such as Jane Austen, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, and Henry James, Gillooly finds an understated, wryly amusing perspective that differs subtly but significantly in rhetoric, affect, and politics from traditional forms of comic expression.

Gillooly shows how such humor became, for mostly female writers at the time, an unobtrusive and prudent means of expressing discontent with a culture that was ideologically committed to restricting female agency and identity. If the aggression and emotional distance of irony and satire mark them as "masculine," then for Gillooly, the passivity, indirection, and sympathy of the humor she discusses render it "feminine." She goes on to disclose how the humorous tactics employed by writers from Burney to Wharton persist in the work of Barbara Pym, Anita Brookner, and Penelope Fitzgerald.

The book won the Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Award given by the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature.

About the Author

Eileen Gillooly teaches English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Product Details

• Paperback: 316 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition (June 15, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226294021
• ISBN-13: 978-0226294025
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #705,590 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Sumversive Smiles, December 24, 2009

By	Becky Czlapinski (Bangor, Me) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.