Ladies Laughing

Wit as Control in Contemporary American Women Writers

Barbara Levy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134385935
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Arts de la scène

This engaging and accessible book examines the world of seven contemporary, popular American women writers and their individual use of wit as a subtle and effective strategy to engage, or "control", the reader. A chapter is devoted to each of the seven writers - Lisa Alther, Rita Mae Brown, Nora Ephron, Shirley Jackson, Alison Lurier, Grace Paley, and Anne Tyler - and discusses their writings and their use of wit in the context of their lives. An opening chapter frames wit and control in psychological realities, and a concluding chapter summarizes the power of wit. A bibliography of the writers' works is also included, making this an ideal introduction and companion to these writers and their works.

1

Introduction

WHAT WIT CONTROLS:

Women are not accustomed to calling the shots. Nor have they ever been encouraged to be funny. On the contrary, women have consistently been told they have no sense of humor whatsoever.¹ And yet more and more women are learning to enjoy the power of wit, learning to disregard the connections of wit to witch and bitch and write on. This book will focus on the wit of recent women writers, explore the relationship between wit and control, and consider how lives as well as texts have benefited from the alliance.

Wit may seem to offer a false control, a sort of last-ditch effort to salvage something from a situation slipping beyond one’s grasp. When all else fails, make a joke. While this may be true of wit at its most desperate, with writers we are always dealing with wit at its least desperate, with wit at its most strategic and manipulative. Shirley Jackson once claimed that “The only way to turn something that really happened into something that happens on paper is to attack it in the beginning the way a puppy attacks an old shoe. Shake it, snarl at it, sneak up on it from various angles.” Nora Ephron admits to an incredible number of draft copies, although her final versions always create the illusion of effortlessness. She estimates that one six-page double-spaced typewritten essay, written in pre-word processor days, could use up to 300 or 400 pieces of typing paper. Lisa Alther allows that it takes her six drafts and about five years to complete a novel. Rita Mae Brown, who may sound like the sassiest and most spontaneous in this collection of voices, claims that she never thought of being anything but a writer, and that her Dad gave her a typewriter when she was only eight. Alison Lurie remembers that she received parental encouragement to see herself as a writer when she was only six or seven. Grace Paley recalls that her attentive older brother and sister encouraged her to play with words even before she was old enough write. She made up songs or poems and they wrote them down. The young Shirley Jackson, on the other hand, received little or no encouragement, but that didn’t stop her from shutting herself in her room every day after school to write.² Clearly, none of these writers ever considered wit to be a last-ditch effort to salvage a desperate situation. Quite the contrary, their wit has always been a carefully executed writing strategy used to shape and control their fiction.

All of these writers recognized the controlling possibilities of fiction, some at a remarkably early age. Several have used writing to enhance what they perceived as an uneventful childhood. As a young girl, Anne Tyler felt that what happened in books was more “reasonable and interesting and real, in some ways, than what happened in life.” When she ran out of books she made up her own. And when she couldn’t sleep, “she made up stories in the dark.”³ As an adolescent, Alison Lurie discovered she could even control non-fiction in her letters home from boarding school. Whatever version of her teacher she chose to present would be the truth—“if I said so, the whole truth.”⁴ As an adult, Lisa Alther used fiction to revise certain adolescent disappointments. She made the heroine of Kinflicks a flag-swinger for her high school, something Alther had failed to become despite years of practicing in the back yard. “At last,” Alther notes wryly, “I get to be a flag-swinger.”⁵ As adults, both Jackson and Ephron acknowledge using fiction to improve their lives. It is easier, Jackson claims, to write a story about raising children than to cope with their daily problems: “It helps a good deal—particularly with children around—if you can see them through a flattering veil of fiction.”⁶ Ephron, in an essay called “Revision and Life,” argues that fiction gives you the “chance to rework the events of your life so that you can give the illusion of being the intelligence at the center of it, simultaneously managing to slip in all the lines that occurred to you later.”⁷ In each of these observations, the writer suggests that she uses her wit to control her own version of her life by reshaping it into a more interesting and promising one.

The more people she can convince of the validity of her version, the more in control she becomes. A witty writer gains some degree of control over the events in her life, then, by retelling her story her own way, by putting herself, as Ephron said, as the intelligence at the center of it. Shirley Jackson’s son Barry made this telling observation about his mother’s writing:

She realized that the only tools the magician needs are in the head. You make the world, you decide what your name is, your role, decide what people are going to think of you by your own force of will. And that’s real magic in the real world.⁸

A witty writer learns to control her material with one main goal—to convince her reading audience that her viewpoint is a valid one. Of course, all effective writers cast a spell over their readers, who willingly push aside their own consciousness to fall sway to the author’s. One great attraction of reading, in fact, is that it does give our own overworked consciousness a break by allowing us to escape into someone else’s. But there is an added aggressive quality to the control of witty writers. This is partly due to the stance of feigned vulnerability they adopt. Nora Ephron likes to recreate herself in adolescence as gawky, flat-chested, and unpopular, Shirley Jackson projects herself on paper as an incompetent and overwhelmed mother, while Faith, the narrator of so many of Grace Paley’s short stories, seems haplessly manipulated by the men in her life. For a while, we seem to manage everything better than these fictional heroines: our love lives, our finances, our moral positions. But ultimately they are going to emerge in the position of superiority. In point of fact, they have been there all along.

MALE FEAR OF WITTY WOMEN:

The potential power of a witty woman has not been not lost on men. Male writers as far back as Chaucer have portrayed women with quick wits as dangerous ones to wed. While The Canterbury Tales offers many examples of such shrews, The Wife of Bath coming immediately to mind, Chaucer’s clearest portrayal of the dangers to men of witty women can be found in “The Merchant’s Tale.” The Merchant’s diatribe can be read simply as a bitterly humorous warning to other old men about what to expect if they foolishly lust after young brides. The characters’ names alone—January and May—anticipate the problem. We are set up to expect that fresh young May will betray withered old January and we are not disappointed. But it is not the fact of May’s betrayal so much as her astonishingly clever excuse when January catches her in the very act of sex that concerns us here. Nor is it merely the cleverness of her words, nor the fact that they were granted her magically by the fairy queen, but rather that this queen has promised to grant all women equally clever answers to extricate themselves from equally com promising situations that becomes distinctly worrisome. For she vows to grant a witty tongue not only to May, but to “alle women after:”

For lak of answere none of hem shal dyen.

Al hadde men seyn a thyng with bothe his yen, (2271–2)

[None of them shall die for lack of an answer,

Even if the men have seen the thing with his two eyes]⁹

The misogynistic assumption that all women after May will need such magical aid is troublesome enough, but it is in the assurance that all women will get it—that we will all have clever and effective answers for gross misconduct—that we best see the projection of male fear of women’s wit.

January, who has inexplicably grown blind, is trying to enjoy his young wife in the private garden he created for them alone. But he has become so jealous that, once blinded, he always keeps a hand on her. Nevertheless, May has managed to get her young lover, Damyan, inside the garden and to signal for him to climb a pear tree. All that remains is for her to free herself from January’s hand. So she feigns so sharp a longing for a pear (thereby flattering the old man by suggesting he has impregnated her) that he allows her to climb the tree, using his own back as a step up. No sooner is she in the tree than Damyan is in her:

And sodeynly anon this Damyan

Gan pullen up the smok, and in he throng (2352–3)

At precisely this moment, of course, January’s sight returns. He roars his protest. ‘What ails you?’ May soothes, not missing a beat, ‘I was taught there was no better thing to make you see than to struggle with a man in a tree.’ At first January doesn’t believe her: “‘Struggle!’ quod he, ‘ye algate (nevertheless) in it wente!’” (2376). ‘Then,’ retorts May, ‘the medicine was false’: “Ye had som glymsing, and no parfit sighte” (2383). When January protests that his sight is perfect, May grows indignant: “This thank have I for I have made you see” (2388). Here January gives up. Either he believes her or he pretends to believe her, choosing to be blind to the truth rather than lose his young wife. However one chooses to interpret January’s acquiescence, what is clear is that the woman’s cunning gave her the last word and that word, quite obviously, was false.

WOMEN, WIT, AND WITCHCRAFT: THE BURDEN OF STEREOTYPES

Before any witty woman could write, then, she had to learn to ignore such negative associations in literature and legend, reaffirmed more recently on television, in newspapers, and the movies, between a woman and her wit. Until very recently, the picture of the clever woman has nearly always been the picture of the witch, the shrew, or the bitch. Margaret Atwood deplored the literary and legendary models for women in a clever essay she called “The Curse of Eve—Or, What I Learned in School.” Her list explodes with

… Old Crones, Delphic Oracles, the Three Fates, Evil Witches, White Witches, White Goddesses, Bitch Goddesses, Medusas with snaky heads who turn men to stone, Mermaids with no souls, … evil stepmothers, comic mothers-in-law, … Medea who slew her own children, Lady Macbeth and her spot, Eve the mother of us all, …¹⁰

Atwood is clearly enjoying herself but she is not exaggerating. In the past, when women showed signs of cleverness they were often suspected of being witches. And if enough “proof” could be gathered they were killed. In both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, according to Gilbert and Gubar, “even the most talented literary women were constrained by cultural strictures which implied that any intellectual ambition might mean they were evil.”¹¹ Virginia Woolf expressed the connection from the opposite direction:

When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on the moor or moped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to.¹²

The relationship of the witch to the community, simultaneously powerful but feared and ostracized, must have appeared to many a woman writer as a relationship ominously analogous to her own, or to her fears of her own, situation. For women have always occupied a marginal position in society. Judy Little’s opening chapter of Comedy and the Women Writer is a thoughtful and thorough presentation of how the norms and values of society have pushed women into this marginal position:

… the monomythic norm—the varied quest myth described by Northrop Frye and Joseph Campbell—has allotted to women a peripheral role…. The women is catalyst, landscape,… but not herself the adventurer.¹³

Little’s book explores the comedy of Virginia Woolf and Muriel Spark in depth, and adds a final chapter which includes Jean Rhys, Margaret Drabble, Penelope Mortimer, and Beryl Brainbridge. All these British novelists, Little notes, “perceive themselves to some extent as outsiders” (6). The peripheral position of women in society is one more reason the imag...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Introduction to the Series
• Acknowledgments
• 1 INTRODUCTION
• 2 FORERUNNERS Dorothy Parker, Dawn Powell, Betty MacDonald
• 3 NORA EPHRON All You Ever Wanted to Know About Control (But feared you’d appear too manipulative if you asked)
• 4 SHIRLEY JACKSON “In the Country of the Story, the Writer Is King”
• 5 ALISON LURIE “Writing Was a Kind of Witch’s Spell”
• 6 GRACE PALEY “The Ear Is Smarter than the Eye”
• 7 ANNE TYLER Seeing Through a “Mist of Irony”
• 8 LISA ALTHER Playing for the Laugh: Comic Control in Kinflicks
• 9 RITA MAE BROWN “An Equal Opportunity Offender”
• 10 CONCLUSION What Wit Controlled
• BIBLIOGRAPHY Women and Wit
• Index