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
Keynote Speaker Margaret Stetz
Margaret D. Stetz is the Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women’s Studies and Professor of Humanities at the University of Delaware. She has published more than 120 scholarly essays on literature, art, material culture, film, humor, and feminism. Her books include a study of late–19th and 20th-century British women’s comic fiction, an edited volume of essays on WWII military sexual slavery, and a catalogue of late-Victorian portraits. She has also curated over a dozen exhibitions of art and print culture at museums and libraries in the US and UK. Currently, with Mark Samuels Lasner, she is co-curator of Aubrey Beardsley, 150 Years Young at the Grolier Club in New York City.
Keynote: “Ptomaine Street: Carolyn Wells and Long-Form Parody”: 17 September 2022, 5:00-6:00 pm BST
In 1921, when the American poet and novelist, Carolyn Wells (1862–1942)—already well known as a satirist and as an anthologist who had collected the humorous verse of others—took aim at one of the most highly regarded works of the day, Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (1920), no one could have predicted what would result. The history of parody in general, and of women’s parodies in particular, had included numerous instances of writers using short prose forms to mock full-length novels; indeed, brevity itself was often a strategy to encourage laughter, as condensing a narrative proved an effective way to make it seem ridiculous. So, too, there had been many cases of novels that had set their sights on a particular genre of fiction and poked fun simultaneously at several texts embodying similar characteristics—as Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey most famously had done with Gothic literature. Much rarer, though, were examples of full-length novels by women devoted to skewering a single target and to drawing comically upon identifiable characters, themes, and plots from only one such work throughout in a one-to-one correspondence.
This did not stop Carolyn Wells from creating a 125-page-long, freestanding volume titled Ptomaine Street: The Tale of Warble Petticoat in 1921, a year after Lewis’s fictional tale of a protagonist named Carol Kennicott appeared. That Wells would plunge in and take the commercial risk involved in producing a full-length parody (and that a major mainstream publisher—J. B. Lippincott—would be her partner in this venture) was perhaps not surprising, for she was a bestselling author of mysteries for adults and of stories for girls, and thus a writer with a cushion of popularity. She had proven herself, moreover, a fearless wit and a relentless practitioner of take-no-prisoners comedy, who did not hesitate to snicker at the most respected of literary figures, living and dead. Among her favorite targets, from the 1890s onwards, had been Swinburnean Aestheticism and then, in later years, experiments in Modernism by writers such as Gertrude Stein—indeed, anything that struck her as elitist and pretentious.
In Ptomaine Street, she found a brilliant way to attack in two directions at once, by turning the premise of Sinclair Lewis’s novel on its head. Lewis had depicted sympathetically the frustrations of a young woman facing the philistinism and anti-intellectualism of bourgeois America and had satirized the small-town complacency of “Gopher Prairie.” Carolyn Wells flipped that script. In her smug small town, “Butterfly Center,” all the inhabitants were High Art connoisseurs and collectors of artistic rarities, obsessed with Beauty. The outsider, Warble (Mildew) Petticoat, newly married to Dr. Bill Petticoat, tried determinedly, but without success, to introduce plainness, practicality, efficiency, and the pleasures of vulgarity, especially in the form of popular culture such as Mack Sennett’s slapstick films. This reversal allowed Wells not only to laugh at what she saw as the lack of nuance in the opposition that Lewis had set up between sophisticates and the uncultured, but to lampoon the world of snobbish and self-satisfied highbrows that she knew well as a New York City-based author.
Margaret Stetz’s keynote will examine this unusual and now-forgotten example of long-form parody of a single, widely lauded novel by a contemporary male novelist and will make a case for its inclusion in the canon of twentieth-century American women’s humor.
