Fanny Fern’s Significance in the American Comic Tradition

Abstract

This chapter argues that Parton offers a unique model for antebellum comic writers. Her Fanny Fern persona dramatizes a woman writing satire without using the vernacular, a model that anchors a potential genealogy of women comic writers largely ignored by scholars of American humor. The concept of a bourgeois carnival casts Fanny Fern into the role of the unruly woman who disrupts social norms with excessive laughter. This role suggests how Parton can also serve as a symbolic origin point for a comic feminism that includes Kate Clinton’s fumerism and Peter Sloterdijk’s idea of “satirical resistance [as] uncivil enlightenment” that resurrects kynical philosophizing as an antidote to modern cynicism. His figure is Diogenes and Cixous’s is Medusa, both with an emphasis on the body meant to profoundly disturb the status quo philosophically (idealism as Enlightenment) and socially (bourgeois patriarchy).