Smile of Discontent: Humor, Gender, and Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (review)

Smile of Discontent: Humor, Gender, and Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, by Eileen Gillooly; pp. xxv + 289. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999, $55.00, $20.00 paper, £38.50, £14.00 paper.

In her Foreword to Smile of Discontent, Catharine R. Stimpson confesses that she began reading the manuscript with some suspicion: Would it illustrate "some important general idea about humor?" Could it justify producing yet more "close readings of canonical or near-canonical women writers?" (xi). Indeed, Smile of Discontent erects an elaborate scaffolding to read very closely, as Stimpson says, a few canonical novels by women writers. Gillooly's scaffolding is architecturally elegant; the readings generate some strikingly original insights; the illustrations are beautiful. But the book disappoints the reader seeking broader attention to questions of gender, culture, and writing.

Gillooly argues that feminine humor hides behind the gender stereotypes it reproduces even as it weakens their "cultural and psychic authority" (17). Eschewing the masculine tropes of hyperbole and metaphor, feminine humor deploys self-effacing tropes that conceal its existence: litotes, apophasis, meiosis, polysemy, metonymy, metalepsis, and association occur locally, so as not to challenge the authority of the culturally dominant oedipal narrative that culminates in the heroine's transformation from daughter to wife. Yet feminine humor also works to revise the family romance and thus to undermine its oedipal narrative. The narrator's empathic bond with the victimized heroine protects her from suffering--until she is eroticized, abides by paternal law, and is thus "displaced [. . .] from the circuit of humor altogether" (30).

Gillooly deploys psychoanalysis to theorize not only this oedipalized paradigm but feminine humor, as well. Tendentious, aggressive, or obscene, the joke functions in an oedipalized structure in which two men express hostility toward a female other or object. Defensive rather than aggressive, humor is dyadic; the super-ego--here uncharacteristically kind to the ego--fends off the possibility of suffering, imagines an invulnerable (if childlike) ego, and maintains the pleasure principle, all by identifying with the father or parental figure. In Gillooly's narratological model, the narrator is necessarily female and femininely empathic and is bonded to the heroine; yet, in order to make this model work, Gillooly alters Freud's "father" or "parent": because it is benevolent, this super-ego must be maternal. Feminine humor, unlike the masculinized joke, thus participates in a pre-oedipal merging, thematically seeks lost motherly nurture, and affectively constitutes a sympathy assumed to be feminine.

This psychoanalytic, narratalogical, and rhetorical model is so complex that few literary examples can demonstrate it. Even the chapter on "Feminine Difference: Three Paradigms" feminizes Anthony Trollope as author, masculinizes his narrator's humor, and acknowledges that the narrator refuses to bond empathically with the heroine. It also feminizes Henry James's late narratorial tropes, identifies his narrator's sympathy as a "masculine homoerotic poetics" (69), and admits his sadistic address of his poor, young heroines. Indeed, Edith Wharton's humor is "neither normatively masculine nor feminine but queer" (74). Although these three paradigms fail to model the book's framing concepts, Gillooly's readings of Jane Austen quite successfully demonstrate her model. In Mansfield Park (1814) and Persuasion (1818), she argues, the maternal narrator's humor empathically bonds her with the heroine, protecting the girl by "attacking (stealthily but fiercely) the construction of femininity that constrains her"; the narrator turns aggressive, however, when her heroine displays "the feminine tendency to overidealize romantic love" (81). Thus Mary Crawford's humor, despite her delight in (masculine) hyperbole, provides the narrator with a linguistic outlet for her frustration with cultural definitions of femininity, as does the narrator's humor at the masochistically constant Anne Elliot.

In Gillooly's reading of Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford (1851-53), Amazons subject the young narrator, Mary Smith, to daughterly household tasks, and Mary's rage against these inadequate maternal figures enables their displacement by Captain Brown as a good- enough mother. Humor serves as...