Subjectivity, Subversion, and the Rewriting of Literary History in Women’S Satire of the Twentieth Century

BLADES, SONYA ELISA, Ph.D. A Satire of Their Own: Subjectivity, Subversion, and the Rewriting of Literary History in Women’s Satire of the Twentieth Century. (2016) Directed by Dr. Robert Langenfeld. 247 pp. In recent years, there has been renewed interest in the study of literary satire, particularly twentieth century works that are more aligned with the complexity and ambiguity found in Menippean satire. Despite the abundance of scholarship about satire produced within the past decade, twentieth century women’s satire is an area that has been largely ignored. One reason why there are so few studies about women’s satire is that women theorists and critics distance themselves from the genre, making the argument that satire and women’s writing are in contention with one another. Because satire is an important tool used by the oppressed to mock their oppressors, this dissertation aims to uncover how women writers of the twentieth century use specific techniques of satire to deride the literary establishment that attempts to categorize and rank genres as ‘literary’ while marginalizing women’s ways of writing. I make the argument that parody and irony, both often used for the purpose of satirizing, are the two most common tools women writers use to critique the literary tradition. Furthermore, women’s satire uses humor and an emphasis on the subjective experiences of women to deflate the masculine focus on empiricism, objectivity, and literary exclusivity. Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories related to Menippean satire, parody, dialogism, carnival and the novel are used in this study to offer a framework of how women writers situate their criticisms of patriarchal hegemonies and hierarchies, including those within the male dominated literary tradition. Women satirists favor the Menippean form because of its ambiguity, playfulness, malleability and resistance to easy categorization, as well as the genre’s roots in the communal and egalitarian features of carnival. In addition, poststructural feminists such as Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler add insight as to why women’s writing, including satire, is often misread by men when considering its refusal to fit neatly into the literary tradition and within distinct genre boundaries. This project intends to recover satire as an ‘available means’ for the woman writer. The chapters in this study offer examples of women writers within various literary movements of the twentieth century – Virginia Woolf, Stella Gibbons, Angela Carter, and Margaret Atwood – who satirically parody established genres including biography, history, rural fiction, the fairy tale and dystopian literature. A SATIRE OF THEIR OWN: SUBJECTIVITY, SUBVERSION, AND THE REWRITING OF LITERARY HISTORY IN WOMEN’S SATIRE OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY by Sonya Elisa Blades A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 2016 Approved by ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !!!!"#$$%&&''!"()%*! ! © 2016 Sonya Elisa Blades ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! #$!%&!'(%")&*! +$%!(,-!.(-/!'$0!&$10!,232042,-",5!6177$08!(,-!9$,'"-2,92!",!%2*! :&0")/!&$1!;(32!<22,!%&!0$9=/!(,-!>!9$1)-!,$8!;(32!'","6;2-!8;"6!70$?298!@"8;$18!&$10! )$32/!7(8"2,92!(,-!1,-2068(,-",5*! A,-!8$!8;2!,2@268!(--"8"$,!8$!$10!'(%")&/!8;2!6%")2&!A1-"2B!&$1!%(-2!8;"6!70$9266! ",820268",5/!)"88)2!$,2C!>!@$1)-!,$8!;(32!;(-!"8!(,&!$8;20!@(&*!!#;"6!"6!'$0!&$1/!72(,18*! ! ""! APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation written by SONYA ELISA BLADES has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Committee Chair ___________________________________ Robert Langenfeld Committee Members ___________________________________ Hephzibah Roskelly ___________________________________ Ben Clarke ____________________________ Date of Acceptance by Committee __________________________ Date of Final Oral Examination ! """! ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my committee – Dr. Hephzibah Roskelly, Dr. Ben Clarke, and Dr. Robert Langenfeld – for their support and guidance. Their advice and feedback were essential to the completion of this project, and I am grateful for having had the opportunity to work with such wonderful, insightful people. I am especially grateful to Dr. Roskelly for being my advisor and mentor for ten years (!) of graduate study. I’ve thanked Hepsie more times than I can count, but I can never say “thank you” enough. Her encouragement and confidence in my project kept me going during the most difficult times. I also want to thank the staff members who work so hard managing everyone in the English Department, a job that seems more appropriately described as “herding cats” at times, I’m sure. I sincerely thank Alyson Everhart, administrative assistant extraordinaire, for tirelessly answering my many questions, making sure everything was in order, and, more importantly, for being a friend. Last, but certainly not least, I would like to thank all of my friends and colleagues at UNCG for the stimulating discussions, helpful suggestions, and the kind of camaraderie that keeps a person sane during the dissertation process. There are too many to name everyone here, but I want to give a special shout-out to Laurie Lyda and Leah Milne, two strong, inspiring women who certainly understand the value of humor and community within academia. Thanks for repeatedly telling me, “You can do this!” and for the thought-provoking conversations and laughter over good food. ! "#! TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................1 II. TOWARD A THEORY OF WOMEN’S SATIRE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY .............................................................................11 III. POLYPHONIC PARODIES: PLAYING WITH GENDER AND GENRE IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S ORLANDO ............................................48 IV. ‘DISPERSED ARE WE’: THE SERIO-COMIC PERFORMANCE OF MENIPPEAN CARNIVAL IN BETWEEN THE ACTS ...........................86 V. CONFRONTING ‘SHEER FLAPDOODLE’: THE EQUALIZING FORCE OF MIDDLEBROW COMEDIC SATIRE AND STELLA GIBBONS’ COLD COMFORT FARM ........................................126 VI. ‘NEW WINE IN OLD BOTTLES’: FEMINIST (RE)VISIONS AND THE FIGHT FOR FEMALE SUBJECTIVITY IN ANGELA CARTER’S THE BLOODY CHAMBER AND MARGARET ATWOOD’S THE HANDMAID’S TALE .....................................................170 VII. CONCLUSION ..................................................................................................232 WORKS CITED ..............................................................................................................235 ! v! CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Satire has a long history of transgressing social boundaries, with writers relishing in the ability to collectively entertain and infuriate readers as social and political institutions are brought down through wit, humor, and oftentimes outright aggression. Traditionally speaking, it functions as a way to ridicule human vices and follies or specific persons or establishments, either as a way to cope with injustices or absurdities in life, or, more importantly, as a means to enact actual social change. Using techniques such as irony, double entendre, caricature, and humor, satire is given the creative license to denigrate what would otherwise be too risky and dangerous to attack. Twentieth century writers have taken advantage of the diverse, often playful qualities of the genre, blending various subgenres and exaggerating for comic effect, whether that comedy be light and teasing or terrifyingly dark and distressing. In the past decade or so, there has been a resurgence in the study of satire as both a cultural phenomenon and an art form. One collection, the expansive Blackwell companion to satire, includes contemporary essays that primarily reestablish traditional understandings of satirical terminology, techniques, and characteristics associated with particular periods. Another recent text, Jonathan Greenberg’s Modernism, Satire, and the Novel, is more specialized in that it reviews and redefines many of these traditional ! "! understandings of satire in light of new studies of modernist fiction, emphasizing the compatibility, even necessity, of satire during a time of rapid social change, mass production, and shifts in value systems. While Greenberg’s work is valuable in its new approach toward satire as an inherent element of modernist culture, and as comprehensive as the Blackwell essays appear to be in their variety and expansiveness, one alarming absence continues to haunt studies of satire: the complete absence of any discussion concerning women satirists as a whole, especially women satirists of the twentieth century and how theories about women’s writing directly relate to changes in satirical study. When mentioned at all, critics of satire have relegated women satirists to the margins of history, as though only extraordinary or exceptional women writers made use of satirical strategy to condemn human foibles and societal ills. In most critical texts about satire, the reader may find the usual suspects mentioned, typically Jane Austen and Aphra Behn, and any accounts of gender in satire are generally about depictions of women and not depictions by women. The only essay to mention gender in Blackwell’s collection of twenty-nine essays, Claudia Karioff’s “Gendering Satire: Behn to Burney,” concludes

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