Humor and Irony in Nineteenth-Century German Women's Writing: Studies in Prose Fiction, 1840-1900 (review)

In this study on humor and irony in selected women's writing, Helen Chambers explores the lives and works of nine authors from Germany and Austria, focusing "on narrative fiction as the dominant generic cluster in the realist period" (2). Although all of the authors were well-known at the time they wrote, most of them are no longer part of the canon. In scope, their works range from social and gender issues caused by the patriarchal nature of their societies to the conditions of the poor in urban settings. The five chapters are mostly chronologically arranged, and the title of each indicates the main point of examination. Necessarily, Chambers had to make selections (of both authors and texts) and is able to offer only a "limited, indicative sample" (3). Each chapter includes brief introductions to the writers' lives and works, as well as pertinent influences that affected their writing and biographies. Importantly for her thesis, Chambers also includes any comments or observations about humor that the authors themselves made.

Chambers begins her investigation with a brief historical overview of women writers (starting in the tenth century) who produced comedy. She explains that her "approach is in line with Elaine Showalter's notion of the female tradition as something that exists but—still—needs to be made clearly visible" (2). In the following chapters, she then exposes how humor, irony, and satire are used by female authors and juxtaposes these literary traits and techniques against social norms and male writing. The notion that men were viewed as rational and women as emotional still dominated the critical reception of women authors throughout much of the nineteenth century, a view that clearly imposed limiting (patriarchal) expectations on women and their works and, in turn, resulted in such aspects of their writing as humor and irony often being overlooked. Although Chambers notes that "[b]oth humor and irony are elusive terms" (4), she defines them loosely, drawing on "three theoretical strands that concern notions of incongruity, superiority, and relief or release" (4).

Chapter one looks at two aristocratic writers, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (1797–1848) and Ida Hahn-Hahn (1805–1880). The Droste-Hülshoff quote at the beginning underscores Chambers's premise in the entire investigation: "Es fehlt mir allerdings nicht an einer humoristischen Ader" (13). Here, Chambers refutes the prevailing impression of Droste-Hülshoff (one of few nineteenth-century female authors included in the canon) as serious and melancholy by looking at various works and identifying the humoristic tendencies. According to Chambers, both she and Hahn Hahn used humor and irony to raise gender awareness (Hahn-Hahn more so), and both use "humor to challenge gender norms and assumptions" (46). The second chapter addresses the middle-class authors Ottilie Wildermuth (1817–1877) and Helene Böhlau (1859–1940), who set their stories in small towns of the early nineteenth century. Chambers states that they consciously wrote "against the grain of existing classical texts, turning their backs on the wider world to tell stories [. . .] [that call] back to life a forgotten world whose values reflect on the present" (68). In her textual analysis of their works, she shows how both intentionally use humor; Wildermuth's humor is more "heuristic and therapeutic," and Böhlau uses it to test the "limits of freedom" (86).

The middle chapter is devoted entirely to Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830– 1916): "Satire, Physical Comedy, Irony, and Deeper Meaning." Also an aristocratic writer and a staple of the canon, Ebner-Eschenbach's texts expose society's double standards; her works are concerned with the breadth of human experience and potential, "ranging from physical victimhood and abjection to sublime sovereignty" (118), and Chambers maintains that humor "together with irony is part of the route to that sovereignty" (118).

Chapter four discusses the works of the Austrian author Ada Christen (1839– 1901) and the German Clara Viebig...