Of Pastors and Petticoats: Humor and Authority in Puritan New England

Of Pastors and Petticoats: Humor and Authority in Puritan New England shaun horton And here we think it very strange & ridiculous, to see Satyrists play the Divine, and deny that it falls under the Cognaizance of our MINISTERS. —Cotton Mather, A Vindication of the Ministers of Boston, 1722 N 1722, Solomon Stoddard (1643–1729), pastor at North- I ampton, Massachusetts, issued An Answer to Some Cases of Conscience Respecting the Country, a sixteen-page pamphlet that decisively addressed a series of issues challenging the integrity and continuity of Puritan New England. Once a tiny frontier town, Northampton had mushroomed from two dozen families to over two hundred and was now a promi- nent community. Sabbath observance had become lax, mer- chants routinely cheated their clientele, and civil lawsuits were 1 legion. “Hooped petticoats”—undergarments and skirts that had been stiffened and expanded with whale bone or with in- 2 tersewn wooden hoops —were, notwithstanding their affront to the natural function of clothing, all the rage among young women. Along with mixed dancing and private drinking par- ties, hoop petticoats were, Stoddard insisted, “Practices that are plainly Contrary to the Light of Nature.” Despite their pretense of adequately covering women’s bodies, in fact “HOOPED 1 Solomon Stoddard, An Answer to Some Cases of Conscience Respecting the Coun- try (Boston: B. Green, 1722), pp. 1, 7–10, 14. 2 See Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “hoop-petticoat.” The New England Quarterly, vol. LXXXII, no. 4 (December 2009). C 2009 by The New England Quarterly. All rights reserved. 608 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.608 by guest on 30 September 2021 OF PASTORS AND PETTICOATS 609 petticoats have something of Nakedness” in their design, he 3 concluded. Stoddard’s brief but striking commentary on ladies’ undergarments abruptly closed an otherwise grave and methodi- cal discussion. Some of his readers may have laughed at this brusque shift, an inadvertent juxtaposition of serious contemporary problems with innocuous underskirts. Hoop-Petticoats Arraigned and Condemned by the Light of Nature and Law of God (1722), a parody of Stoddard’s sermons in general and his pamphlet in particular, quickly followed on its heels, suggest- ing that at least one eighteenth-century reader thought this was 4 funny. The episode, minor as it was, contributed to an emerg- ing trend in popular entertainment. Not only were citizens engaging in activities that fit poorly with church leaders’ moral vision, but they were also openly defying religion’s prescriptive social mores.´ New England Calvinists’ struggle to maintain in- fluence throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been extensively discussed, but the social function of humor in the contestation of authority has received little treatment. During the eighteenth century, the function of humor in New England slid from an affirmation of the Puritan community’s solidarity into an increasing willingness to mock the spokesper- sons for social order. Through multivalent social symbols like the hoop petticoat, critics used humor to address perceptions of gender roles, national identity, and sexual norms and to subvert and symbolically reverse the balance of social power. Humor’s Engagement with Authority Two of humor’s primary theoreticians are Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud. For Bergson, who presents the human mind as 3 Stoddard, Cases of Conscience, p. 15. The material quoted above encompasses the entirety of the pamphlet’s comments on hoop petticoats. 4 The authorship of Hoop-Petticoats Arraigned and Condemned by the Light of Na- ture and Law of God (Boston: James Franklin, 1722) has been attributed to its printer. Franklin also produced The New-England Courant (1721–26), a satirical newspaper that lampooned well-known clergymen and social elites, especially Cotton Mather. See Bruce C. Daniels, Puritans at Play: Leisure and Recreation in Colonial New En- gland (New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1995), pp. 42–43, and Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), pp. 334–42. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.608 by guest on 30 September 2021 610 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY essentially spontaneous and autonomous (as opposed to mechanistic or automatic), laughter is a response to “automatism in contrast with free activity.” Individuals become comical when their rigid, mechanical, or stereotypical actions betray their lack of self-control or originality. Bergson sees humor as a social cor- rective to insincerity, arrogance, absent-mindedness, and other shortcomings that lead human beings to act like automatons. Laughter chastises automatism by reasserting the superiority of human spontaneity over mechanistic habits and rituals. Freud, who also connects humor to spontaneity, attributes the pleasure derived from jokes to the momentary freeing of the subconscious in response to disruptive stimuli or ideas. Because the psyche is constantly engaged in monitoring the subconscious, an incident amusing enough to briefly confound it relieves some of the stress involved in the psychic expenditure, thereby re- leasing a temporary burst of enjoyment and freedom. In both theoreticians’ views, the joke thus functions to challenge accepted patterns and to subvert a dominant structure of ideas. For Freud, a man slipping on a banana peel is funny because his sudden, unexpected, frenetic motion reveals some hidden aspect of his person. For Bergson, the episode is funny because with his sudden, unexpected loss of control, the man has been instantaneously reduced to an automaton. At the psychoanalytic level, the power of the joke is its ability to destabilize systems 5 of control. Mary Douglas extrapolates this aspect of humor beyond the realm of the psychoanalytic to posit an essential “joke-pattern” that operates at the social level. By juxtaposing “a control against that which is controlled, this juxtaposition being such that the latter triumphs,” jokes undermine systems of com- 6 munal regulation. Because jokes are deeply embedded in the 5 Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (New York: Macmillan Company, 1914), p. 130; Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1960), pp. 42–44. 6 Mary Douglas, “Jokes,” in Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies, ed. Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 296. The essay, which occupies pp. 293–300, is reprinted Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.608 by guest on 30 September 2021 OF PASTORS AND PETTICOATS 611 social context in which they are delivered, the analyst must understand that social context if he or she is to appreciate the joke’s significance. For Freud, wit itself involves an econ- omy of articulated ideas. A well-crafted joke, which employs puns, double entendre, and allusions to shared (but unspo- ken) knowledge, carries its punch connotatively far more than literally. Douglas argues that a joke must also posit a social structure congruent with the audience’s own experience, which does not necessarily conform to the prescriptions of recognized authori- ties. “A joke confronts one accepted pattern with another” and thus provokes a creative reinterpretation of social relationships. As long as it occurs within the boundaries of particular conventions that distinguish jokes from other modes of communica- tion, the disruption does not threaten the basic integrity of the social system and so is distinct from “obscenity” or abomina- tion, which intrudes one set of meanings onto another without relying on accepted social conventions. Whereas the joke rep- resents only a “temporary suspension of the social structure”— a momentary “disturbance in which the particular structure of society becomes less relevant than another”—obscene or abom- inable episodes disrupt not only the social order and social convention but also the rational categories of perception that make 7 sense of order and convention. Jokes attenuate confrontation by operating within customary parameters that affirm the tran- sience of the subversion and, ultimately, the cohesion of the group. As such, jokes are not permanently intimidating, but they do offer an occasion for looking at the social order from a different perspective and, in some cases, of evaluating it. How- ever, those evaluations will gain acceptance only among those who are not offended or threatened by them. And so we return to Douglas’s hypothesis that the significance of a joke is contin- gent on its social context—and, by extension, on its historical context as well. from Douglas, Implicit Meanings (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 90–114. 7 Douglas, “Jokes,” pp. 304–6. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.608 by guest on 30 September 2021 612 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Why Petticoats? As difficult as humor may be to detect and to understand across cultural and historical divides, available evidence suggests that hoop petticoats were silly. The London papers had ridiculed the English hoop petticoat from its emergence in 1709. At the time, it was referred to as a new fashion, although skirts with hoops had gone in and out of vogue (and occasionally been banned) throughout Western Europe since the fourteenth century. Popular accounts (satirical and otherwise) attributed the invention of the hoop skirt to various noblewomen intent on hiding embarrassing pregnancies. The garment’s precursors, the French and Spanish farthingales, be- came popular in their respective countries during the sixteenth century. The Spanish farthingale made its way into British wardrobes when Mary Tudor adopted it as her customary court dress, a style that Queen Elizabeth maintained throughout her reign.

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