International Conference, Sponsored by The Elizabeth von Arnim Society and supported by The Open University (UK), King’s College (US), and Misericordia University (US). Online, 17-18 September 2022.
- About the conference
- Conference programme
- Keynote speaker Margaret Stetz
- Paper Abstracts
- Conference participant biographies
Paper Abstracts
Brad Bigelow, “Virginia Faulkner and the Limits of Wisecracking”
‘All I have been doing is high-class wisecracking in the literary world.’ Virginia Faulkner wrote this in 1934 before her first novel Friends and Romans had even been published. ‘If I’m ever really going to be any good,’ she continued, ‘I’ll have to give up this smart, know-it-all line for something a little kinder and truer.’ Yet, for twenty years, Faulkner went on wisecracking for a living, publishing short stories, writing for Hollywood and Broadway, and firing off quips that earned her a reputation as ‘the next Dorothy Parker’. Then, in the mid-1950s, after a period during which she immersed herself in a study of Willa Cather, she returned to her hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska, became an editor with the University of Nebraska Press, and left her writing career behind. Did Faulkner discover the limits of wisecracking as literary art?
Leslie De Bont, “‘Perhaps he thinks he’s Jupiter’: May Sinclair’s parody of the patriarchal self in Mr. Waddington of Wyck (1921)“
May Sinclair’s forgotten 1921 novel, Mr. Waddington of Wyck, draws “a minutely painted portrait of a monumental fool” (Townsend 1921) and Waddington’s conceited relations to his wife, son and secretaries perform a complex role in the novel’s feminist and comic aesthetics. In this paper, I will show that Sinclair’s comedy of power differs from better-known modernist satires as it unfolds several embedded, yet contradictory narratives that interrogate the frontiers of fiction and fantasies. Additionally, the dark mockery of Waddington’s pomposity gives way to a seemingly light-hearted parody that leads secondary characters to reflect on the place, role and influence of the “stuffed paterfamilias” (Boynton 1921) as well as on their own affective responses.
Richard Cappuccio, “‘The whole tone of the thing’: The Satiric Voice in Katherine Mansfield and Rose Macaulay”
Leonard Woolf remembers Katherine Mansfield as someone who ‘was gay, cynical, amoral, ribald, [and] witty’. Mansfield never wrote for publication about the craft of comedy; however, she was an astute (and sometimes harsh) book reviewer. In The Athenaeum she reviewed two books by Rose Macaulay and praised one as ‘brilliant’ and the other for its ‘cleverness and wit’. Mansfield and Macaulay crossed paths at Harold Munro’s Poetry Bookshop, meeting through Naomi Royde-Smith, the editor of the Westminster Gazette to which both writers contributed; they also shared the same editor at Constable, Michael Sadleir. What really links the two writers, though, is both Macaulay and Mansfield were masters in employing comic elements to elevate serious thematic material. A shared concern with the effects of tone comes to light in their private writing. This paper looks at two of Macaulay’s satires, The Making of a Bigot (1914) and What Not (1919), that correspond with Mansfield’s approach to humour in her late story ‘Marriage À La Mode’ (1920).
Astyartha Das, “The disabled woman behind mischief-maker William: Examining Richmal Crompton’s comedy in Just William’s Luck (1948)”
Often confused as a man, Richmal Crompton Lamburn (1890-1969), the author of the Just William book series, was one of the few disabled female authors of the early 20th century whose writing incorporated elements of comedy. Remaining true to the tagline “He’s mad, he’s bad…he’s just William”, Crompton constructs the character of the never-ageing eleven years old William Brown in a way that his actions make the reader roll in laughter, more often than not. William and his friends (Ginger, Henry, Douglas) form the quintessential squad of troublemakers aka ‘The Outlaws’. Crompton’s comedy has two main sources– sometimes, the comic element arises out of a smart parody of the adult world, and sometimes it stems out of the simple, funny acts of William. This paper aims to explore the comedy of Richmal Crompton in the Just William series, with a special focus on Just William’s Luck (1948), the only novel of the series. The novel accidentally becomes a comic mystery of sorts, when the Outlaws end up catching a gang of coat smugglers. This paper shall also highlight the significance of the literary prowess of Richmal Crompton, as a disabled person suffering from polio, in the literary canon of 20th century children’s literature.
Edit Gálla, “Indecent exposure: Poking fun at impostors in Stevie Smith’s poems“
Stevie Smith’s poems teeter on the edge of the horrific and the revolting; however, some of her poems, which manage to turn their main theme into an extended metaphor, and thus oscillate between two different realms of association, have a grimly humorous effect. The incongruity theory of humour seems an appropriate conceptual framework for the analysis of such poems as “Not Waving but Drowning,” “Thoughts about the Person from Porlock,” “Death Bereaves our Common Mother / Nature Grieves for my Dead Brother” and “Tenuous and Precarious,” in which two realms are sharply contrasted: the jovial and the tragic, the lofty and the banale, the noble and the despicable, the compassionate and the cruel. This paper contends that these poems expose the disingenuousness of social, moral or literary constructs by the blending of incongruous elements, using such rhetorical devices as repetition, tautology, exaggeration and absurdity.
Ann Heilmann, “The comedy of misdirection: Militant femininity, laughter, and reader seduction in Edwardian suffrage narratives”
The strategic deployment of dissimulation and comic misdirection in building and staging dramatic spectacle that the suffragettes put to such effective use in their political practice was also an important literary device, especially when harnessed to the subversive politics of militant femininity. While anti-suffragists focused on the damage inflicted by militancy on individual lives, human relationships and the wider body politic, Suffragette writers emphasized the personal agency, excitement and empowerment enabled by militant action, buoying up narratives of political martyrdom with interludes of comic relief. In doing so, they presented two revisionary readings of femininity: within the discursive framework of patriarchy, ‘femininity’ was but the mere performance, not essence, of women and therefore lent itself to radical subversion; ‘authentic’ womanhood, on the other hand, expressed itself in the capacity for infinite courage, unflagging determination and heroic self-sacrifice which were so amply evidenced in suffrage activism. Consequently, the range of femininities to which readers might feel attracted was extended to incorporate unconventional and experimental behaviours. To engage in outrageous acts, especially in the context of militancy, could be fun; it did not rob a woman of her femininity; on the contrary, it enhanced it. Drawing on a range of fictional and life writings (selected from a wider corpus of writing by Gertrude Colmore, Agnes Grove, Constance Lytton, Constance Elizabeth Maud, Katherine Roberts, Elizabeth Robins, Evelyn Sharp, and Edith Ayrton Zangwill), this paper examines what Margaret Stetz has called ‘comedy’s function as a survival tactic’ and a political tool by exploring the textual strategy of laughter with which feminist activist writers of the early twentieth century sought to direct and ‘seduce’ their readers’ sympathies towards an endorsement of the suffrage campaign.
Judith Hendra, “The Maids’ Comedy: A Forgotten Masterpiece?”
In 1910, an anonymous author with an inside knowledge of South Africa published the first installment of The Maids’ Comedy in the British general interest journal The New Age. In 1911 it appeared in book form. With a year it had promptly disappeared. The novel’s creator the hybrid British-South-African writer Beatrice Hastings waited until the 1930s to acknowledge authorship. Our paper makes a necessarily brief case for Hastings’ contribution to the comedy opus. The plot is a pastiche of Cervantes Don Quixote where the questing couple become a pair of young women. Hastings was an accomplished satirist and parodist. She maintains a light touch as she debunks Olive Schreiner’s pessimistic The Story of an African Farm and the “despair-and-death-fixation” of “New Woman” novels. Her young women end the story unharmed and joyfully unmarried. Male characters are enlightened or outmaneuvered; Boers and Anglos reconcile. Fear not says Hastings: the wise know “how many maggots there are in the peaches if you look after you have eaten.”
Diana Hirst, “Hunt the thimble! Treasure hunts! Jigsaw puzzles! Elizabeth Bowen’s party games”
The novelist Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) has a playful side, and within her narratives she conceals games, games which she would have played as a child. ‘Hunt the Thimble’ occurs when she inserts a reference to a character or episode from another author’s work. She will often provide clues: sometimes one clue leads to another, as in a Treasure Hunt. The prize at the end for the reader who follows the clues is an enhanced understanding of the novel. She provides her characters with pieces of puzzles to make into a pattern to help them sort out their lives. Alas, frequently the pieces do not fit together and her character fails to resolve their problem. I invite my listeners to join me on the hunt for examples of these games in three of Bowen’s novels from the 1930s: To the North, The House in Paris and The Death of the Heart.
Sue Kennedy, “Anita Loos’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925): ‘The Great American Novel’ or ‘a frivolous exercise written for a female audience’?”
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes might be seen as an accidental creation by the prodigious Anita Loos, hitherto known for screenplay, intertitles and other offshoots of the silent movie industry. Loos herself admitted: “I had no thought of it ever being printed; my only thought was to make Henry (Mencken) laugh at himself, which it did.” I would argue that it deserves more than a passing reference in the history of modern literature.This presentation will consider the status of ‘Blondes’ in the context of 1920s America and its broader literary reception. It will reflect on Loos’ uniquely accomplished combination of frivolity and seriousness, her use of American vernacular, of satire, of her exploitation of gender stereotypes, laid above a humourous foundation of sex and American high society.
Zhen Liu, “‘When a man speaks according to his thoughts in America—that is called a joke. That is a joke, is it not?’: Humour in Edith Eaton’s writing”
In this article, I will argue that Edith Eaton deployed humor in her writing not only as other turn-of-the-century women writers did to manifest their modernity and independence but also as a pioneer writer of ethnic minority to disguise her attack on racism and injustice in society. Eaton used humor sparsely and moderately as she intended her humour as a device to sugar coat her anti-racist messages at a time when racism was rampant in North America against the Chinese immigrants. Examples will be drawn from both stories collected in her only published book Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Stories (1912) and her travel writing “Wing Sing of Los Angeles on his travels” (1904) which was recently recuperated by Mary Chapman in her Becoming Sui Sin Far (2016).
Ann Herndon Marshall, “The Age Wars: Intergenerational Comedy by Vita Sackville-West and Elizabeth von Arnim”
Vita Sackville-West and Elizabeth von Arnim both depict the striking differences between women raised in Edwardian England and those who came of age after the First World War. Sackville-West depicts the conflict between a post-war woman and her mother in a time-travel story, ‘The Unborn Visitant’. An Edwardian lady is astonished by the attitudes of her daughter. Their meeting highlights four points of conflict: sex outside marriage; feminine attire and performance; nerves and a penchant for self-analysis; the altered tempo of life. The representative upper middle-class Edwardian woman is ‘nothing if not correct in her behavior’ whilst her daughter is casual and flippant. Von Arnim treats the same flashpoints in a more serious vein in the tragi-comic The Jasmine Farm. The New Woman daughter does not parade her differences before her upright mother, but the family is vulnerable in a social milieu that still enshrines purity. Her mother Lady Midhurst is known for her role as rescuer to those about to fall, not those already fallen. As this mother faces catastrophe, the mesmerizing ‘Mumsie’ of the subplot seizes an opportunity to promote herself and her own daughter’s fortunes. The inclusion of class conflict and the growing threat of German belligerence complicates intergenerational issues in disturbing and amusing ways.
Jane McVeigh, “Richmal Crompton’s Frankenstein and Her Monster, William Brown”
Richmal Crompton’s writing brought her both success and disappointments. By the 1950s, Crompton was calling William Brown her Frankenstein monster. She wondered whether she should have written her novels under a pseudonym because William always seemed to take centre stage. Crompton failed to achieve literary recognition for her novels. In this paper, I will consider reasons why the range of her comedy in the William stories and her novels have been underestimated. She was perceived as an author of light comic fiction, rather than an author of more complex allegory. Many of her readers, even today, believe she must be a man. Readers compare her William stories to novels by P.G. Wodehouse and in doing so they are unlikely to accept the feminist gaze nor appreciate the portrayal of comic outsiders in her novels.
Katherine Murray, “Not Like Other Girls”: Confronting the Crisis of Masculinity“
Anita Loos and Dorothy Parker demonstrated that female writers of middlebrow texts were held to even higher standards than peers who were comfortably situated as purely popular or staunchly intellectual. Not only did they master code-switching between media, they also achieved that ultimate standard to which women in the spotlight are held: likeability. In order to demonstrate that they were not only fluent in but also tastemakers of the zeitgeist, Loos and Parker were forced to juggle some uncomfortable truths in public-facing projects that caused tension in their private writing. IThe double standards of gendered comedy encountered by Loos and Parker were enabled by fragile white masculinity. Just as the performative internalized misogyny became a prerequisite of female humorists’ right to take up space on the page, so too did performative anti-Semitism become necessary to assure white American men that they were the ones who deserved the last laugh.
Noreen O’Connor, “‘Pa, I have runned off with the boarder’: Early film and the feminist comedy of women who run away“
Elizabeth von Arnim writes that running away “is considered an awful thing to do even if you are only a housemaid or somebody’s wife. If it were not considered awful, placed by the world high up on its list of Utter Unforgivableness, there is, I suppose, not a woman who would not at some time or other have run. She might come back, but she certainly would have gone.” In this paper, I will discuss the comic elements embedded within the transgressive image of the runaway woman, as she appears in early Paramount Pictures comic films starring Leatrice Joy, such as “His Neglected Wife” (1917) and “Her Fractured Voice” (1917), in 1920s silent films such as “The Runaway Princess,” an adaptation of Elizabeth von Arnim’s 1920 novel Princess Priscilla’s Fortnight, and early 1950s films like “Roman Holiday.”
Francesca Pierini, “The Garden and the Playground: The Italian Landscape as Catalyst of Change and Restorative Force in Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April“
The presentation explores a particular construct of the British cultural and literary imagination: the perspective on – and perception of – Italy as a country relatively free of class constraints and stark social divisions, which is in consequence often described as a space appropriate for returning to unaffected behaviour, sensual openness, untested options, and existential re-invention. This notion, part of a composite constellation of counter-values (to British standards and ideals) has been most diversely imagined and articulated by a variety of authors writing in English. Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April (1922) re-formulates, in a distinctively brilliant and light-hearted key, the construction of Italy as a counter-realm through the creation of an Italian garden as a parallel dimension of existential possibilities and psychological healing, as well as a time-capsule in partial discontinuity with the modern world.
Juliane Roemhild, “‘The Truth about Themselves’: The Diaries of Elizabeth and the Provincial Lady“
Elizabeth von Arnim’s diary novel Elizabeth and her German Garden (1898) and E.M. Delafield’s The Diary of a Provincial Lady (1930), both huge successes in their day, are seemingly quite different works. On closer inspection, however, both show a number of similarities as documents of comic, covert rebellion and non-compliance. In my presentation I would like to explore their sense of humour as examples of a double-edged satire, caricaturing both the patriarchal structures in which they are written as well as the writers’ attempts at female emancipation.
Anna Szirák, “The Comic Modes of Girlhood in Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle“
The paper is a study of girlhood as a mode of comedy in Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle (1948). With the understanding that protagonist Cassandra Mortmain’s adolescent diary narration reveals the fears that she as a young woman faces, this paper investigates girlhood as a thematic and linguistic framework in which anxieties are expressed through the often-vaudevillian sequences of the plot, mixing humor with tragic undertones. Placed in the apparatus of cultural studies, gender studies and girlhood studies, and via the close reading of the bath and bear episodes as exaggerated scenes, the paper ultimately argues that the novel’s stylized diary narration relieves tension and calls attention to the ever-changing paths that girls take during their identity formation.
Zsofia Anna Toth, “Mae West and ‘Charged Humor'”
This paper aims to argue that even if Mae West is usually remembered ‘only’ as a sex goddess, her comedic agenda was much more profound than that as she pursued a social justice project. Although, she is remembered primarily as a performer, she was always the writer of what she performed likewise while also having creative control over her productions, so she was the auteur of these works. Relying on Rebecca Krefting’s concept of “charged humor” (2014), I intend to argue that West embodied the democratic spirit of the US while she tried to speak up for everybody. So, Krefting’s current concept of “charged humor” applies to West since she wanted to secure cultural citizenship, promote social justice as well as initiate social change and contribute primarily to the amelioration of women’s lives and situation, yet also to those of other minorities and disadvantaged groups.
Nick Turner, “‘The Naked Seagull’: control versus absurdity in Barbara Pym’s early work”
Increasingly recognised as one of the great comic writers of the mid-twentieth century, Barbara Pym has a wide, even cult, readership for her novels today. Comedies of manners, domestic comedy and academic satire are modes she employs, as well as showing the influence of Austen, Trollope and Gaskell in her comedy of the recognisable and familiar. Nonetheless, it is important to recognise her love of the absurd, and her moments of wildness and subversion which set her apart from her predecessors. Looking at extracts from her early work – drafts unpublished in her lifetime as well as Crampton Hodnet and Some Tame Gazelle – I will discuss Pym’s love of eccentricity, and how her moments of absurdity show a writer straining at the canons of literary comedy – even if she never deserts them.
Mario Valori, “Chimney’s a Fine and Private Play”
With the only partial exception of The Mousetrap, Agatha Christie’s plays have never enjoyed the same success as her novels. However, academics should pay more attention to this material, especially when it comes to adaptations of previous stories. A comparative analysis, in these cases, could be highly fruitful for both the literary scholar and the cultural historian: the former can profitably explore creative processes (the very nature of detective fiction, focused on the challenge to the reader, demands radical interventions, far more significant than those required by any other literary genre), while the latter can identify and categorize the tastes and expectations of different target audiences in those years. Chimneys, a 1931 play based on the novel The Secret of Chimneys (1926), offers all this and much more. The Chimneys cycle represents Christie’s most sincere and lively drift towards Wodehouse’s ironic and light style, humorous parodies of the crime fiction genre rather than detective stories. This comedy had been lost for over seventy years; a critical analysis of this peculiar text seems to me the best tribute to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of its rediscovery.
Tom Zille, “Austenian Irony in Women’s Fiction of the Interwar Years“
Interwar Britain saw an unprecedented level of interest in the life and works of Jane Austen as well as her canonization as a major English literary classic. Her influence on the literature of the period, however, remains underexplored. This paper examines the legacy of that key feature of Austen’s writing, her irony, in the works of anglophone novelists influenced by Austen’s style including Georgette Heyer (1902-1974), Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969), and Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882-1961). These and other writers in the period adapted the model of Austenian irony in transformative ways, sharing in a tradition of Austenian comedy that cuts across critical distinctions such as middlebrow/highbrow or modernist/realist.
