Superior Mirth: National Humor and the Victorian Ego
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SUPERIOR MIRTH: NATIONAL HUMOR AND THE VICTORIAN EGO Katharyn L. Stober, B.A., M.A. Dissertation Prepared for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS May 2012 APPROVED: John Peters, Major Professor David Holdeman, Committee Member and Chair of the Department of English Alexander Pettit, Committee Member James D. Meernik, Acting Dean of the Toulouse Graduate School Stober, Katharyn L. Superior Mirth: National Humor and the Victorian Ego. Doctor of Philosophy (English), May 2012, 179 pp., references, 119 titles. This project traces the wide and varied uses of patriotic (and, at times, jingoistic and xenophobic) humor within the Victorian novel. A culture’s humor, perhaps more than any other cultural markers (food, dress, etc.), provides invaluable insight into that nation’s values and perceptions—not only how they view others, but also how they view themselves. In fact, humor provides such a unique cultural thumbprint as to make most jokes notoriously untranslatable. Victorian humor is certainly not a new topic of critical discussion; neither is English ethno- cultural identity during this era lacking scholarly attention. However, the intersection of these concerns has been seemingly ignored; thus, my research investigates the enmeshed relationship between these two areas of study. Not only do patriotic sentiment and humor frequently overlap, they often form a causational relationship wherein a writer’s rhetorical invocation of shared cultural experiences creates humorous self-awareness while “inside” jokes which reference unique Anglo-specific behaviors or collective memories promote a positive identity with the culture in question. Drawing on and extending the work of James Kincaid’s Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter, Harold Nicolson’s “The English Sense of Humor,” and Bergson’s and Freud’s theories of humor as a social construct, I question how this reciprocated relationship of English ethnic identity and humor functions within Victorian novels by examining the various ways in which nineteenth-century authors used humor to encourage affirmative patriotic sentiment within their readers. Copyright 2012 By Katharyn L. Stober ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page 1. INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………….1 My Contribution: Minding the Gap The Big Three: The Basics of Humor Theory and Criticism The Final Step: Connecting Ethnic Identity to Humor 2. FRAMING HUMOR: DICKENS AND COMIC SERIALIZATION……………………15 The Pickwick Papers: Creating Englishness Nicholas Nickleby: Correcting Englishness Martin Chuzzlewit: Celebrating Englishness 3. THACKERAY, THEATRICALITY, AND SATIRIZING SENTIMENT……………….52 Mocking Realism: History, Nostalgia and the “Real” Narrator Mocking Literature: Selective Omniscience and Narrative Fate Mocking Readers: Narrative Omissions and “Filling-in-the-Blanks” 4. LAUGHING THE ANGEL OUT OF THE HOUSE: DISRUPTIVE HYSTERIA AND THE ENGLISH PATRIOTESS……………..91 Rejecting Conformity: The Widow Barnaby as Anti-Heroine Rejecting Idleness: Miss Marjoribanks takes charge Rejecting Isolation: Cranford, Collective Memory, and Solidarity Rejecting Silence: Amy Levy’s Laughing (New) Women 5. THE THOUGHTFUL PATRIOTISM OF TRAVEL HUMOR: LOCATING SELF AND QUESTIONING THE EGOTISM OF “HOME”…...134 Maps, Landscapes, and Geographic Nostalgia Landmarks, Genus Loci, and Socio-historical Nostalgia Finding Self in the “Typical” Other BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………172 iii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Benedict Anderson defines “the nation” as “an imagined political community…. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow- members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (6, emphasis in original). Some may propose that the true sense of any society then is only perceptible and apparent to disinterested, objective historians, removed from said culture by several thousand miles and several hundred years, however I would argue that every newspaper story, every personal diary, every scrap of statistical evidence through which historians would attempt to establish a national or ethno-cultural “communion” are skewed and tainted by the perceptions and egos of citizens of that nation. If nations, as cultural entities, are ideologically imagined, they are also artificially created.1 Perhaps one of the reasons it is so difficult to “get at” a true idea of English-ness in particular is because there appears to be “a manifestation in the academic world of the fond old idea that God is an Englishman” (Newman xix). It is this idea of a “cultural motherland” (Newman xxiii) which clouds an outsider’s objective view of a particular society’s cultural productions. For Victorian England, the particular mode of cultural production I examine is the novel. Now, of course, I could examine the intersection of humor and cultural identity in political cartoons (Punch is certainly not lacking in ethno-centric political humor), or journalism, or poetry, or a number of other modes, but these are other studies entirely—necessary studies, 1 I am using the term nation here to indicate a culture defined by both geographical and chronological boundaries. For example, although occupying the same geographic space, Victorian Britain was a completely different Nation from 20th or 21st century Britain. And, yes, the boundary lines of my definition here might seem arbitrary to many (“But where does one Nation end and another begin? So Britain the day before Victoria died was a separate Nation to the same Britain 24 hours later?”), these distinctions are just as real (or arbitrary) as setting a geographic boundary on a certain parallel of longitude and determining that those on this side of the line are Nation X, and those on that side are Nation Y. 1 which should be made, but I am limiting my focus to the Victorian novel here for several reasons. First, although the so-called “rise of the novel” has been nearly universally attributed to the eighteenth century, I would like to investigate the ways in which nineteenth-century novelists sustained and prolonged this rise. Also, there is the suggestion that “print-capitalism gave a new fixity to language, which in the long run helped to build that image of antiquity so central to the subjective idea of the nation” (Anderson 44). Thus all printed novels offering this “new fixity to language,” offered not only a view of England to their nineteenth-century English readers, but also a time-capsule-like view of this English ego to us, the 21st century global reader. Nineteenth-century novelists were heavily responsible for creating Victorian England’s image of itself, its ego. Gerald Newman suggests that “the national image is an idealized projection of traits selected by writers in their interconnected effort to reject the alien culture and thus ‘find’ both their own culture and themselves, to identify the basic qualities of the national soul…and realize these in their own works of art” (125, emphasis in original), and that “qualities chosen by frustrated intellectuals are projected as national traits…very largely a mirror image of those intellectuals as they saw themselves and wished themselves to be” (124, emphasis in original). Victorian novelists, then, had an incredible power: to essentially create an ethno-cultural identity. So, considering the great power their pens possessed, what specific narrative tools might these authors use to achieve the “nation-ness” (Anderson 4) of a communally powerful English ego? I’m suggesting here that they, whether consciously or unconsciously, used humor to achieve this effect. My Contribution: Minding the Gap There currently exist a plethora of sources dealing with humor in the eighteenth century, and several concerning the fin-de-siècle playwrights (Wilde, Shaw, etc.), but alarmingly few 2 sources addressing mid-nineteenth-century humor or humor and its specific connection to “Englishness.” The extant sources which do address this topic do so in an introspective manner—many looking only within the novels themselves, and not at larger socio-historical issues. The works which do question and explore the world outside the novels, such as James Kincaid’s Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter, while identifying humor as a rhetorical tool and showing how it can be used to promote a broad socio-political agenda (sanitation reform, education, etc.), do not connect this rhetoric with the patriotic sense of Englishness. Simply put, extant scholarship does not examine how Victorian authors used humor to promote patriotism and positive ethnic sentiment itself. Kincaid does a superb job addressing how Dickens used humor to make England a cleaner, more compassionate country, but he sidesteps the larger issue of how humor was used to make English readers proud to be English. Additionally, the works which attempt to pinpoint what makes English humor identifiably English, such as Harold Nicolson’s essay “The English Sense of Humor,” examine humor closely in terms of satire vs. irony vs. parody vs. burlesque, etc. but ignore the larger rhetorical mode Victorian humor occupied. Nicolson poses the infinitely puzzling question: “Are the English more sensitive than are other nations to certain aspects of the inconsequent or the incongruous? Or is the English sense of humour little more than the temperamental reflection” of certain “national characteristics”? (3). I would like to fill in the gaps here by examining not only in what ways the novels I address present their humor as quintessentially