Marietta Holley: The Humorist as Propagandist

MARIETTA HOLLEY: THE HUMORIST AS PROPAGANDIST by Shelley Armitage* Walter Blair was quite right in calling Marietta Holley a propagandist .1 Born on the family farm in Jefferson County, New York in 1836 where she lived until her death in 1926, she confronted the nineteenth century's most urgent issues in the twenty novels which span a 41-year career. Racial and religious questions, women's rights, temperance, fashion, manners, travel—all were scrutinized by her crackerbox philosopher, Samantha Allen, whose wisecracks and button-hole logic entertain and edify the reader.2 All also derive from Holley's central concern: if women could just get the vote, they could gain control of their lives and positively affect political decisions. Of course women did get the vote, and despite an immense popularity that earned her one reviewer's sobriquet as "the female Mark Twain," Holley's topicality and her formula novels made her a literary antique only ten years after her death.3 For the reader who has the benefit of retrospect, Holley is unique among women writers of her day. Not only did she address crucial issues with a comic approach, but she used the language of humor to popularize the feminist stand generally unpopular with the mass audience because of its shrill or intellectual rhetoric. Samantha Allen, from rural Jonesville, spoke in a dialect her audience could identify with. Her rustic homilies were grounded both in a religious respectability and in everyday experience which made credible and simple the arguments for women's rights. More important, Holley discovered in humorous language not merely a proselyting agent for causes, but a means for exposing and challenging the overriding sentimental views which kept women from seeing themselves realistically. When Holley published her first novel, My Opiyiioyis ayid Betsey Bobbett's (1873), she was immediately successful because she wrote in a tradition already popular with the mass audience. Sold •Shelley Armitage is an assistant professor of English at Tarrant County Junior College in Fort Worth. Texas. She began her study of women humorists as a NEH fellow studying "American Humor and Mark Twain" at the University of New Mexico. She publishes poetry andin scholarly journals and is a free-lance writer and photographer. 1.Horse-Sense in America» Humor (Chicago. 1942). p. 238. 2.For a complete list of Holley's novels and a brief discussion of her many subjects, see Katherin Blyley's dissertation, "Marietta Holley," University of Pittsburgh . 1936. 3.See The Critic. 1904, p. 6 for short comment and photograph. ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW193 Shelley Armitage by subscription by American Publishing Company salesmen, the novel was in the style of the Literary Comedians who used language extraordinarily (figurative language, malapropisms, exaggerations , understatement) and the Down Easters whose common sense characters spoke dialect. Holley drew Samantha Allen in direct line from Ben Franklin's Silence Dogood, Benjamin Shillaber's Mrs. Partington, and Frances Whitcher's Widow Bedott. But there was an important difference. Samantha is indeed a wise fool like Mrs. Partington, remarking to Horace Greeley that the only Darwin she knows is Darwin Gowdey, a "natural fool"; but she also is the "hero" of the Samantha books. I say hero because she is strong, wise, active, self-reliant, a leader, organizer, adviser—all the characteristics usually exhibited by the male protagonist. Moreover, she has none of the so-called feminine shortcomings. She's not helpless, sickly, jealous, or sentimental. Yet she is a good wife and mother and is active in domestic and community affairs. What Holley had up her sleeve in combining these "male" and "female" characteristics is partially clarified in a remark she made in the article, "How I Wrote my First Books": . . .at that time decidedly unfashionable, my first sketches were full of women's suffrage. . . I thought that it would soften somewhat the edge of unwelcome argument to have the writer meekly claim to be the wife of Josiah Allen, and so stand in the shadow of a man's personality.4 Thus, all of the Samantha books are authored by "Josiah Allen's Wife," whose "unfashionable" judgments were accepted as sound for two other reasons. Holley made Samantha respectable according to the values of the...