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Gender and Humor in German Literature of the Fin De Siècle

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Gender and Humor in German Literature of the Fin De Siècle GENDER AND HUMOR IN GERMAN LITERATURE OF THE FIN DE SIÈCLE Melanie April Ungar A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Carolina- Duke Graduate Program in German Studies. Chapel Hill 2016 Approved by: Eric Downing Clayton Koelb Ann Marie Rasmussen Stefani Engelstein Kata Gellen © 2016 Melanie April Ungar ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Melanie April Ungar: Gender and Humor in German Literature of the fin de siècle (Under the direction of Eric Downing) This dissertation explores the intersection of gender and humor in German-language literature of the fin de siècle. At the turn of the century, the German-speaking countries of central Europe experienced a surge of interest in humor theory as well as unprecedented feminist activity, making the relationship between humor and gender a fruitful area of study. However, most literary criticism on gender and humor published in the last forty years has focused on the gender of a humorous literary text’s author rather than how humor affects representations of gender within the text. This dissertation therefore examines literary works by decidedly non- feminist authors like Theodor Fontane, Thomas Mann, and Frank Wedekind as well as the feminist activist Hedwig Dohm and analyzes how humor works to influence gender representation in novels, short stories, dramas, and polemic essays. Ultimately this dissertation argues two main points: First, humor in literature of the fin de siècle often acts as a social leveler and creates a space in which men and women can prove themselves intellectual and moral equals. Second, humor in this literature often goes beyond depicting men and women simply as equals and challenges traditional and essentialist gender roles by exposing them as social constructs devoid of any “natural” foundation. In order to make these arguments, this dissertation engages with humor theory, classical to contemporary, as well as Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity. iii To my parents. Thank you for your love and your laughter. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to express my gratitude to my advisor, Eric Downing, for his exceptional intellectual insight, unflagging patience, and wonderful sense of humor. I cannot thank him enough for supporting me in my graduate studies these past seven years and helping shape my academic interests. I would also like to thank the members of my dissertation committee: Clayton Koelb, Ann Marie Rasmussen, Stefani Engelstein, and Kata Gellen, all of whom read my materials and provided me with invaluable feedback. I am so grateful for their ideas and encouragement. I also owe a debt of gratitude to my fellow graduate students for their academic and emotional support. I am especially grateful to Lindsey Brandt, Rory Bradley, Tres Lambert, Sara Budarz, Steffen Kaupp, Tayler Kent, Christine Kenison, and Natasha Chernysheva for going on numerous "disserdates" with me throughout the years and being fantastic colleagues. Finally, I would like to thank my partner of over five years, Kevin Banda, for supporting me in everything I do. v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1..................................................................................................................................29 "Always Quick and Clever": Humor and Fontane's Frauen CHAPTER 2..................................................................................................................................74 "War sie nicht eine Frau und er ein Mann?": Gender and Humor in Thomas Mann's Early Fiction CHAPTER 3................................................................................................................................137 Roleplay: Sex and Humor in Frank Wedekind’s Frühlings Erwachen CHAPTER 4................................................................................................................................191 "Spotte des Spottes": The Uses of Humor in the Feminist Writings of Hedwig Dohm EPILOGUE..................................................................................................................................237 vi INTRODUCTION As recently as 2007, Vanity Fair—a pop culture magazine with a monthly circulation of over 1.2 million—felt it totally reasonable to publish an article titled "Why Women Aren't Funny" by the American journalist Christopher Hitchens. I bring up this odious piece of writing not to argue, as Hitchens does, that there exists some sort of "humor gap" between men and women, but rather to illustrate that such an assumption was recently so widely accepted that a so- called "public intellectual" could base a 2,700-word think piece around it without stopping to consider the veracity of his assertion that "men [are], taken on average and as a whole, funnier than women."1 In his essay, Hitchens asks: "Why are women, who have the whole male world at their mercy, not funny?" Which leads me to ask: Why are men, who control every government and corporation in the world, so desperate to insist that women are not funny? The answer, of course, boils down to power and who is supposed to exercise it. Funny women prove that women are not the "incompetent" speakers the patriarchy makes them out to be2 and are instead fully capable of "ignoring the script that tells [women] when to speak (almost never) and when to laugh (when someone else tells [them] to)."3 Funny women grab discursive power for themselves. 1 Christopher Hitchens, "Why Women Aren’t Funny," Vanity Fair, January 2007, http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2007/01/hitchens200701. 2 Susan Purdie, Comedy : The Mastery of Discourse (Buffalo, NY: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 133. 3 Regina Barreca, They Used to Call Me Snow White ... but I Drifted: Women’s Strategic Use of Humor (New York: Viking, 1991), 182. 1 Since I began researching humor and gender in 2011, I have witnessed a shift in consensus in Western society about who and what can be considered funny. In 2011, the most recognizable (or arguably the only recognizable) feminist comedian in America was Tina Fey, whose award-winning television series 30 Rock had been tackling topics like menstruation, women in the workplace, and feminist hypocrisy since the beginning of its run in 2006. In the last five years, comedians like Mindy Kaling (The Mindy Project), Amy Schumer (Inside Amy Schumer), and Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson (Broad City) have joined the ranks of female showrunners like Fey who self-identify as feminists and whose feminist brand of humor has brought them critical and commercial success. Schumer, most notably, achieved international fame when she wrote and starred in the successful 2015 film Trainwreck, which grossed over $140 million worldwide. Trainwreck is a funny and entertaining film, but thematically and structurally, there is very little about it that could be described as innovative, as it follows the plot of nearly every romantic comedy: woman improves herself and earns the affections of a deserving man. Nevertheless, Trainwreck received a great deal of media attention when it was released for the unabashed sexual humor of its titular character. Several days into its release, the film began to receive attention for a very different reason: a lone gunman in Lafayette, Louisiana had entered a movie theater playing Trainwreck and opened fire on the film's audience, murdering two young women and injuring nine other people before committing suicide. The shooter, a 59-year-old white man, had a history of calling into a local talk show and expressing his anger about "the growing power of women." A former host of the talk show summarized the shooter's views by saying: "He was anti-abortion. The best I can recall, Rusty had an issue with 2 feminine rights. He was opposed to women having a say in anything."4 Unsurprisingly, the shooter's choice of film turned out to be premeditated—police searched his motel room and found a journal in which the shooter had scrawled Trainwreck's title and showtimes among a series of rambling misogynistic remarks.5 The Lafayette shooting raises the same question I posed at the beginning of this introduction: why do misogynistic men find the mere existence of funny, feminist women so threatening? So threatening that one particularly unhinged man felt the need to take lethal action against a theater of strangers watching a comedy film? Regina Barreca, a scholar of humor theory and gender studies, provides something of an answer when she argues that "[m]aking your own jokes is equivalent to taking control over your life—and usually that means taking control away from someone else."6 At the same time, Sean Zwagerman, who studies many of the same topics as Barreca, is also correct when he writes that this type of statement "overstates humor's subversive action."7 As much as I enjoy them, even I doubt Broad City's fart jokes are going to help pass the Equal Rights Amendment. However, I do believe humor can do cultural work that seriousness cannot. As this introduction will demonstrate, humor is a force that can be at once 4 David Weigel, "TV Hosts Remember Alleged Lafayette Gunman as Anti-Tax, Anti-Feminist ‘gadfly,’" The Washington Post, July 24, 2015, sec. Post Nation, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/07/24/tv-hosts-remember-alleged- lafayette-gunman-as-anti-tax-anti-feminist-gadfly/?utm_term=.0317ce1105d0.
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