Laughing With the Boys and Learning With the Girls: Humor in Nineteenth-Century American Juvenile Fiction

Nineteenth-century American juvenile fiction mirrors the segregated worlds boys and girls will enter as adults: the separate spheres of the domestic and the commercial.¹ The subject matter for "boys' books" is often adventure, school days, and practical jokes, while girls' books are concerned with the home, family, and romance. Perhaps the most popular nineteenth-century American book for boys read today (also enjoyed by girls) is Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer, published in 1876; its contemporary for girls is Little Women, written by Louisa May Alcott in 1868-9. In my analysis of the use of humor in nineteenth-century American juvenile fiction, I will also consider two novels lesser known today, but which were extremely successful in late nineteenth-century America and beyond: What Katy Did (1872), by Sarah Chauncey Woolsey, and Gypsy Breynton (1866), by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.

Besides the difference in subject matter, there are also, in these texts, differences in the function of humor which seem related to gender.² Alfred Habegger, in his essay "Nineteenth-Century American Humor: Easygoing Males, Anxious Ladies, and Penelope Lapham," identifies the gender-relational quality of much of American humor, and uses as examples the boys' books of the 1870s and 1880s, where "the distinguishing mark of the boy is the tireless enterprise he devotes to practical jokes" (884). Girls, on the other hand, have little to do with humor, save "manly" Jo, who, "is the exception that proves the rule—that humor was a masculine trait" (885).

Virtually everything seems funny in the boyish world of Tom Sawyer, from the narrator's wry tone, and stock characters (the "model boy," the "old maid"), to Tom's superstitions and various capers. As James Cox writes in Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor, this humor lies "precisely in the discovery of a character who could create the world as play" (151). Tom's tricks open the book: "My! Look behind you, aunt!" (12) when he wants to escape punishment; and his innocent fantasies close it: in his gleefully solemn discussion of "turning robber," Tom defines "initiation" for Huck—"It's to swear to stand by one another, and never tell the gang's secrets, even if you're chopped all to flinders, and kill anybody and all his family that hurts one of the gang." "That's gay—mighty gay" Huck responds (218). And in between is the famous whitewashing incident—which has become part of the American idiom for ingenuity and cleverness—turning the Protestant work ethic on its head. We laugh at the jealous boys' naivete and Tom's ability to discover their weakness—it is one we all share: the desire for what another is enjoying. We also laugh to see that the trickster has again succeeded in getting what he wants: the boys' treasures, an idle day and the opportunity to shock Aunt Polly with his industry. There is an even exchange—each boy barters what he has for something of greater value—but only Tom really comes out ahead because he knows, as does the reader, that in a youthful fantasy, work is worthless. The episodic series of summer days all serve to create a boy's world full of warmth and good fun, even when coupled with the danger and evil of Injun Joe. Evil, however, is ultimately conquered, justice served, and to fulfill the idyll completely, a treasure is found making Tom and Huck rich.

Within the innocent world of Tom Sawyer, evil is overcome by Old Testament justice and morality: the good are saved (Tom and Becky are "allowed" to find a way out of the cave) and the bad are damned to an ironic suffering: Injun Joe is trapped behind an iron door Judge Thatcher has had constructed in order to save lives, and starves to death. Evil is therefore something external to Tom which can be eradicated. In the lives of the little women of Alcott's novel, Katy Carr of What Katy Did and Gypsy Breynton, however, evil, badness, corruption, are housed within.³ This fundamental...