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[ 104 ] SHERWOOD BONNER AND THE POSTBELLUM LEGACY OF SOUTHWESTERN HUMOR KatHryn McKEE THis Essay BEtrays traditional ExPEctations for soutHwestern humor in two signal ways: It focuses on four stories written, not in the antebellum period, but in the postbellum one—all authored by a woman. My purpose is not to argue with the useful and largely accurate characterizations of the genre that have held sway, or with the trajectory of the form’s prevalence.1 Rather, my goal is to suggest that the eclectic writer Sherwood Bonner (Katherine Sherwood Bonner McDowell [1849– 83]) is one of the earliest postbellum writers directly indebted to the genre, not in a diluted, “feminized” form, but in a manner that clearly recalls the spirit of antebellum humor and what Inge and Piacentino have calculated as its potentially “transgressive” nature (Southern Frontier Humor 6). Four of the stories collected in Bonner’s Dialect Tales (1883)—“Hieronymus Pop and the Baby,” “Dr Jex’s Predicament,” “Aunt Anniky’s Teeth,” and “The Gentlemen of Sarsar”—share a reliance on the strategies and sensibilities of southwestern humor. Demonstrating that Bonner was actively imitating the form is secondary to recognizing an overarching commonality uniting her with her antebellum precursors; Bonner’s humor exposes the fault lines of southern culture—in her case as they destabilized expectations for both race and gender in an uncertain postbellum world. In this group of stories, Bonner explores not only changing roles for black and white men and women, but also humor as a means of resisting the simultaneous instantiation of restrictively contoured white womanhood at the center of nascent “lost cause” ideology. The notion that there is a dearth of women writers among the practitioners of southwest humor seems to rest on generally received understandings of the humor itself—how it was created and how it was received. In addition to being generally thought “unfunny,” women have seemed BonnEr and tHE PostBElluM lEgacy of soutHWEstErn HuMor [ 105 ] unlikely to create sport at the expense of someone else, an unkindness ill-suited to the expectations of either the antebellum cult of domesticity or the Victorian associations of womanhood with rigorous self-control.2 In contrast, southwestern humor, with its penchant for violence and obsession with the physical body, frequently embeds moments of callous, unsympathetic laughter and regularly depicts the comeuppance of characters who roundly deserve (or do not deserve) to be mocked by means that are anything but genteel. In his introduction to The Humor of the Old South, James Justus maintains that the southwest humorists belong to “a vital, if narrow, room in the house of fiction,” for “[w]ithin a generation, purged of their more barbarous inelegancies, the linguistic scofflaws of A. B. Longstreet, Johnson Jones Hooper, and George Washington Harris modulate into the better-behaved colloquialists of Sherwood Bonner, Mary Noailles Murfree, and Joel Chandler Harris, who endearingly violate the rules with dignity and homespun fluency” (3). This essay adopts a different position, suggesting that it is precisely because Sherwood Bonner extends the conventions of southwestern humor into a new frontier—the world of the post–Civil War South—that she is an awkward fit with prevailing expectations for both women’s writing and regional writing of the time. Hers is an unladylike landscape shot through with violence, ranging from the seemingly harmless stuffing of Uncle Brimmer’s misshapen body through the opening to the loft (“Dr. Jex’s Predicament”) to the bloody extraction of Aunt Anniky’s teeth, to the celebrated hanging that leaves Hieronymus Pop to babysit his infant brother, right through to the “nigger hunt” that pulls the gentlemen of Sarsar out of bed on a frosty morning. This is a world littered with bodies that constantly demand our attention —with their color variation, with their physical comedy, with their pain—and our sympathies drift, when they are activated at all, uncertain where the author is aligning them. Only when we stop to look closely at who laughs in Bonner’s tales, and who is being laughed at, do we unlock the transgressive power of her latter-day southwest humor and the new frontier it simultaneously reflects and disrupt. Born in 1849 in Holly Springs, Mississippi, Katherine Sherwood Bonner led an unconventional life before and after the Civil War. Her father was a medical doctor, and she was born into a world of some privilege that included the African American slave on whom her later series of “Granmammy” sketches was based. Educated first at the Holly Springs [3...

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