The Modern Feminine in the Medusa Satire of Fanny Fern

James E. Caron

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9783031412752
• eBook ISBN: 9783031412769
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Modern Feminine in the Medusa Satire of Fanny Fern argues that Sara Parton and her literary alter ego, Fanny Fern, occupy a star-power position within the antebellum literary marketplace dominated by women authors of sentimental fiction, writers Nathaniel Hawthorne (in)famously called "the damn mob of scribbling women." The Fanny Fern persona represents a nineteenth-century woman voicing the modern feminine within a laughter-provoking bourgeois carnival, a forerunner of Hélène Cixous's laughing Medusa figure and her theory about écriture féminine. By advancing an innovative theory about an Anglo-American aesthetic, comic belles lettres, Caron explains the comic nuances of Parton's persona, capable of both an amiable and a caustic satire. The book traces Parton's burgeoning celebrity, analyzes her satires on cultural expectations of gendered behavior, and provides a close look at her variegated comic style. The book then makes two first-order conclusions: Parton not only offers a unique profile for antebellum women comic writers, but her Fanny Fern persona also anchors a potential genealogy of women comic writers and activists, down to the present day, who could fit Kate Clinton's concept of fumerism, a feminist style of humor that fumes, that embraces the comic power of a Medusa satire.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction: Fanny Fern and the Mob of Scribbling Women
• Sara Payson Willis Parton’s (Comic) Preacher, Fanny Fern
• The Satirist and Her Public
• Satirizing Gender Expectations: Fanny Fern as the Impossible Subject
• Creating Comic Community: Scathing Epithets, Caricature, and Comic Violence
• Constructing Fanny Fern as Satirist
• Fanny Fern’s Significance in the American Comic Tradition
• Works Cited
• Back Matter