An Expenditure Saved Is an Expenditure Earned: Fanny Fern's Humoring of the Capitalist Ethos

Among the many ridiculous characters in Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time, the heroine's mother-in-law, Mrs. Hall, stands out as the most comical with her supply of unhelpful clichés and suggestions. One of her sayings in particular, "Waste not, want not," taken from Benjamin Franklin, sums up her role as one of the many spokespeople for economy in Ruth Hall (31). In this role, she complains that her new daughter-in-law's frilly underwear and silk stockings reveal a profound disregard for economy, and even suggests that Ruth apply something to straighten her curls because one "should avoid everything that looks frivolous" (30-31). Her husband, Dr. Hall, counts the pieces of firewood the servant uses each night and spends his dinner hour "[narrating] the market prices he paid for each article of food upon the table" (36, 38). Dr. and Mrs. Hall betray a trait common in the novel's abundant stereotypical characters: Although they stand in the privileged position to spend, they compulsively save at the cost of everyone around them. During the brief phase in the novel when the heroine, Ruth, is married and financially supported, these characters serve as comical nuisances that cause familial tension; however, when Ruth's husband dies and leaves her penniless, these characters threaten to deprive the widow and her children of their basic necessities. The satirized stereotypes of Ruth Hall are powerful figures who blame Ruth's financial hardships and their refusal to help her on her lack of economy. Old Mrs. Hall's "Waste not, want not" becomes a motto through which the empowered attribute poverty to sufferers' "thriftlessness" and thereby absolve themselves of responsibility (87). In contradistinction to these clichéd characters with their secure cultural positions, Ruth Hall must make her own way through nineteenth-century industrial capitalism. The novel's title pays tribute to her singularity amid the generic masses.

As ambassadors of acquisition and conservation, old Mrs. Hall and her fellow economizers are finally laughed off once Ruth learns how to negotiate the financial world herself. Ruth Hall's heroine-turned-capitalist negotiates a comfortable position for herself and her daughters. Even as the novel resolves economic injustices thematically, its techniques of humor express the cultural pressures that these now-marginalized characters represent—namely, the pressure to save time and energy.¹ Drawing on Sigmund Freud's The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, I trace how Ruth Hall's comical stereotypes and wordplay enable readers to save the exertion required to understand new characters or ideas, to pursue a chain of reasoning, or to feel a certain way. However, rather than helping the reader accrue and conserve capital—the motivation for saving that the elder Halls and the novel's plot resolution ultimately endorse—the savings of the comical are expended in laughter. Through this process, Fern renders the comic a space of resistance by way of its overt, nonproductive consumption of energy. This technique aligns the novel's comical episodes with its sentimental passages: Both modes of writing solicit audience expenditures, one in the form of laughter and the other in the form of affect.

Paving the way for the techniques of the comic, Ruth Hall's preface justifies formal choices through a socioeconomic concern for efficiency. Fern writes: "I have compressed into one volume what I might have expanded into two or three. I have avoided long introductions and descriptions, and have entered unceremoniously and unannounced, into people's houses, without stopping to ring the bell" (iii). Thus, even before introducing characters who enforce thriftiness, Fern reveals that saving time and space motivates the narrative. With chapters that are often the length of newspaper sketches—the form through which the heroine will build her own capital—the narrative frequently lets the information exchanged in conversation drive the plot forward without reiteration or explanation. These conversations often occur between unfamiliar, marginal characters—characters to whom we are, as promised, not introduced. (At times these characters are stereotypes of their professions and ethnicities...