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The Modern Feminine in the Medusa Satire of Fanny Fern

  • Book
  • © 2024

Overview

Authors:
  1. James E. Caron

    1. Department of English, University of Hawai’i, Honolulu, USA

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  • Understands Sara Parton as a symbolic origin for a genealogy of feminist satirists
  • Draws on theories about comic artifacts and American empire in a transnational context
  • Examines Sara Parton’s early newspaper writings as well as many uncollected items

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Table of contents (8 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xiii
    Download chapter PDF

  2. Introduction: Fanny Fern and the Mob of Scribbling Women

    • James E. Caron
    Pages 1-22

  3. Sara Payson Willis Parton’s (Comic) Preacher, Fanny Fern

    • James E. Caron
    Pages 23-45

  4. The Satirist and Her Public

    • James E. Caron
    Pages 47-78

  5. Satirizing Gender Expectations: Fanny Fern as the Impossible Subject

    • James E. Caron
    Pages 79-104

  6. Creating Comic Community: Scathing Epithets, Caricature, and Comic Violence

    • James E. Caron
    Pages 105-127

  7. Constructing Fanny Fern as Satirist

    • James E. Caron
    Pages 129-164

  8. Fanny Fern’s Significance in the American Comic Tradition

    • James E. Caron
    Pages 165-184

  9. Works Cited

    • James E. Caron
    Pages 185-205

  10. Back Matter

    Pages 207-217
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Keywords

About this book

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.

Authors and Affiliations

  • Department of English, University of Hawai’i, Honolulu, USA

    James E. Caron

About the author

James E. Caron is Professor Emeritus, University of Hawaiʽi at Mānoa. In addition to publishing many articles on comic writers and comic artifacts, he has authored Satire as the Comic Public Sphere: Postmodern “Truthiness” and Civic Engagement (2021), and Mark Twain, Unsanctified Newspaper Reporter (2008), as well as co-edited essays on Charlie Chaplin in Refocusing Chaplin: A Screen Icon in Critical Contexts (2013).

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