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Content HUMOR AS A RHETORICAL AND COGNITIVE STRATEGY IN THE WORK OF THREE TWENTIETH-CENTURY WOMEN POETS: GERTRUDE STEIN, DOROTHY PARKER, AND ANNE SEXTON by Linda Pederson Carr A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (English) May 1995 Copyright 1995 Linda Pederson Carr UMI Number: DP23199 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, th ese will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI DP23199 Published by ProQ uest LLC (2014). Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United S tates Code ProQuest LLC. 789 E ast Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106 - 1346 UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA f*L f) THE GRADUATE SCHOOL f PI , . UNIVERSITY PARK LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90007 h. y t )S C3/I This dissertation, written by LINDA P. CARR under the direction of h e x Dissertation Committee, and approved by all its members, has been presented to and accepted by The Graduate School, in partial fulfillment of re quirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY d .. ^ Dean of Graduate Studies Date APril 28, 1994, DISSERTATION COMMITTEE Chairperson i i For my Mother Acknowledgments Humor research might be an oxymoron if I had not received encouragement and support from a number of people. First I wish to thank my committee who served with generosity. Jay Martin wore several hats during my years of agonizing over humor— as my advisor, he offered close attention to ideas and a careful reading of my work; as a psychologist he was able to clarify the conclusions I was drawing from research in a discipline not my own; as a friend, he maintained a genial welcome. Ron Gottesman's relaxed wit and tough questions gave a balance that always sent me ahead to the next stage. For her feminist perspectives, her strength as a Stein scholar, and her enthusiasm, Gloria Orenstein has contributed more than she knows. To others at USC I owe my gratitude for continuing interest and support. Betty Bamberg, especially, as my friend and director of the Writing Program, has helped me to balance teaching and research— and has served as a model of professional achievement in academia. I appreciate the particular gifts of others, most notably Vince Cheng's innovation and Virginia.Tufte's blend of grace and efficiency. At Stanford, Diane Middlebrook offered early and strong validation for my perspective on Sexton, and this made all of the work so much easier. Dear Jack Blum has provided ten years of jokes and drollery. My friends who laughed and fretted through this project are the best, the best: Pauline Havens, who talked through the tough knots; Joanne Yockey, who always quietly pointed out the comic in academic pomposity; George Hall, who contributed "thoughts for the day"; Mary Beth, who has laughed with me through two decades of sundial shining hours; Bob Brophy, who sustained a beach reading of Stein while catching a wave; Randall Huff, who contributed a motorcycle quals celebration and years of cheers; Laura Skandera, who sets the pace for "gumption"; Shirley Stuelpnagel, who offered hospitality and strategies on two critical occasions; Joy Cooper, who listened lovingly; and Charles Pomeroy, who brought up the idea of a Ph.D in the first place. Most of my original material for stand-up comedy at public gatherings was drawn from situations that my children would rather forget, so I thank them now for this contribution: Tommy, Steve, Paul, Andrew, and Alice. They have been the reality-check. My parents would have been thrilled to see the completion of this work. My first model for comedy was my father with his Sunday dinner audience: my brother and me, lost in side-aching, soup-spitting laughter. Later, my mother and I always cheered each other long distance with the sporty British exhortation "Keep your pecker up!" Humor V kept our lives buoyant, although at the time I didn't know why. Now I dedicate my work to the memory of my mother. She is, for me, the continuous present. Table of Contents Introduction.............................................. 1 I. The Wit-Work of Women..................................9 II. "Telling It Slant": Reading and Misreading Women's Humor....................................... 54 III. Sitting With Her Back to the View: Gertrude Stein's Skeptical Joke.................................... 102 IV. "Laughter and Hope and a Sock in the Eye": Dorothy Parker from Sentiment to Satire.....................203 V. "That Untamable Eternal Gut-Driven Ha-Ha": The Two Triumphs of Anne Sexton............................. 311 List of Figures Figure l. "Lifting Belly" from Bee Time Vine. Unpaginated holograph. Beineke Library, New Haven ............151 Figure 2. "Men just can't stand tired women!" Advertisement in The New Yorker 9 Sept. 1933, page 40 ...................................................... .250 Figure 3. "Eve Was Framed." Cover of Life magazine 13 August 1970 ....................................... 342 To produce the whole of its effect, then, the comic demands something like a momentary anesthesia of the heart. Its appeal is to the intelligence, pure and simple. Henri Bergson, Laughter Humor to me, Heaven help me, takes in many things. There must be courage; there must be no awe. There must be criticism, for humor, to my mind, is encapsulated in criticism. There must be a disciplined eye and a wild mind. Dorothy Parker, Introduction to The Most of S.J.Perelman Furthermore, not everyone is capable of the humorous attitude. It is a rare and precious gift . . . Sigmund Freud, "Humour" Introduction 1 Humor and women's issues have much in common. This has not always been recognized? in 1987 a cross-referenced entry of the topics Women and Humor into major university on-line library catalogs would produce not a single citation. Humor research from Freud to contemporary studies routinely has involved male subjects, and has presumed male speakers and topics. Nevertheless, as social frameworks humor and women's issues share certain commonalities: both invite disruptions of a spurious social harmony; both directly reflect contemporary social context, requiring study of materials from popular culture as well as theoretical texts; and because popular culture shapes debate and social change, both humorous anecdotes and feminist theory draw from and allude to those current events themselves. Consequently, as tuning fork of timeliness and topicality, both humorous commentary and feminist awareness influence popular culture, and both become vulnerable to charges of outdated views. After all, jokes, like the enlightening insights of theorists, surprise only once. Thus, humor in familiar texts encountered by readers unfamiliar with contextual social references risks the charge of no-longer-funny, just as an astute observer of women's issues must likewise acknowledge the developmental quality of this complex project of interpreting women's experience. 0 2 In other words, as public awareness of the paradoxical nature of women's issues has increased, earlier insights are sloughed away, consighed to the realm of naivete, anthologized as background for current debates, or presented as apologetic prefaces to single-authored collections of essays identified as more evolved.1 Over the past three decades, feminist projects first began with theories of sexual politics which informed consciousness raising, which in turn decried patriarchal oppression, which led to debate over women-as-victim, which stirred female will-to-power (and with it the spiritual movement and the metaphor of the goddess within), which triggered the reactionary backlash, which fueled the current call for multicultural feminisms and autonomous choice. Finally— concurrently with national debate over legislation to curb harassment and pornography— women urge women to abandon passive "niceness" in order to access material parity and in the process to acknowledge the bold and active "bad girl" within.2 I am writing in a "continuous moment" (Gertrude Stein's term) of restraining public behavior and encouraging public commentary— the optimum social climate for humor. Bold expression under artful disguise is at the core of the strategy of humor. All of these progressive feminist turns I have mentioned have endeavored to complicate, expand, and empower women; but humor also complicates, demands recognition, opens the potential for communication and bonding, and gains 3 control. I propose to explore the ways in which strategies . of humor serve feminist goals of personal autonomy and social change. Chapter 1, "The Wit-Work of Women," establishes the findings that my study has produced through a comparative project of examining theoretical humor research, feminist criticism, psychoanalytic theory, and textual analysis. Responses to developing views in feminist issues through all levels of social arrangements reveal deep class, race, and ideological divisions between women which preclude the sisterhood that might yield common assumptions underlying a "women's humor." Therefore I focus on the evolution and expression of humor as personal insight; I begin by drawing parallels between the doubled project of self inscribed in Lacan's mirror stage as a foundation for the social-I and the individual female perspective of humor, a perspective analogous to the matrix of incongruity which forms the basis for all discussions of humor. Humor generated by women, I find, demonstrates three characteristics: gender-presence, emotional detachment, and a sense of control. As textual expression, the language is unapologetically gender-inflected, the approach is marked by distance and canny intelligence, and the stance is one of control because the speaking subject (the joker) acts as agent, not victim. Although male humor may also retain ' 4 something of these characteristics as well, I contend that because conventional female sex role patterns inveigh against such traits, expression of them (both as parody and balance) marks women's humor as subversive— and often confounds reception. Chapter 1 also reviews Freud's theory of wit as the contribution of the unconscious (by providing a disguise to allow for the momentary lifting of inhibition to articulate repressed anger or to expose something of repressed sexuality) and Freud's theory of humor as the contribution of the superego (by advising the adoption of a power- attitude to convert adversity into compelling texts!). In the 1927 essay "Humour1 1 the superego foregoes its characteristic paternal identity and assumes a parental function of nurturing and instructing the ego in lesssons of detachment and narrative; therefore, I propose that in this role of humor-mentor, the superego is clearly maternal. Moreover, I argue that this humorous attitude— in a variation of Lacan's mirror stage— becomes the psychic outcome of a woman's entry into symbolic irony, and situates the woman (as I see it) in "the Law of the Mother." "Telling It Slant: Reading and Misreading Women's Humor" (Chapter 2) examines potential social change through the use Of humor and also surveys the critical commentary about and anthology attention to women's humor in the twentieth century. After scant attention to women as s producers of or speakers for American humor, recent studies by women begin to identify the terms and potential in the work that needs to be done. Resistance to outspoken humor of women has extended even to Virginia Woolf's classic discussion of women's writing, A Room of One's Own. In Chapter 3, "Sitting With Her Back to the View," I explore the strategies of humor in the word play of Gertrude Stein, in which she calls into question the forms and substance of what she calls "patriarchal poetry." In hermetic non-sense Stein writes plays that violate conventional forms and finally release for the reader (in Freud's terms) "pleasure in freedom of thinking, of which he is being more and more deprived by academic instruction and . . . the compulsion of criticism" (JRU 126-7). Creating her radical language portraits as "series productions" of a "continuous present," Stein parodies and transforms the luminaries of the art world into epistomological enigmas. Arrogance perceived in any form— from personal behavior to rigid grammar forms— comes in for Stein's serio-comic observation. Paragraphs are emotional, for example, sounding like her dog drinking water; poetry spills into bright private bits, those Tender Buttons. As a woman and as a writer, Stein has bewildered the reader and annoyed the critic. Even her exegetical prose poems (the Lectures in America for example), I would argue, take on the 6 characteristics of Freud's "skeptical joke," in which the point of attack is "the certainty of our knowledge itself." Satire informs Dorothy Parker's particular strategy of humor in Chapter 4, as she speaks with a double-voiced authorial presence. "A girl's best friend is her mutter," she claims, a subtext that she voices in her life and in her art. While her fiction describes the hapless surfaces of women's lives, her poetry counters both injustice and weakness— gaining control through end-stopped vigilante verse. Often a punch-line "mutter" exposes the romantic ploys and tropes which diminish women and mask their actual economic dependence; Parker's persona adopts a "momentary anesthesia of the heart" to write her way from sentiment to satire. She offers no solutions, realizing that "good and bad / Are woven in a crazy plaid." Chapter 5 "The Untamable Eternal Gut-Driven Ha-Ha," traces Anne Sexton's triumphant use of humor to move from psychosis to brilliant confrontation with male dominance. In texts of increasing intensity, she addresses father, mentor, analyst, husband, priest, and finally a God "as large as a sunlamp." I see her work in Transformations as genuinely transformative, by moving from the confessional mode to the mock-didactic persona of "Dame Sexton" the witch and by deploying the contemporary discourse of black humor. Just as in fairy tales the witch is the purveyor of transgressive behaviors, in Transformations she instructs 7 through subversive caricature, as an emissary from the "wild zone" (Elaine Showalter's term for female consciousness outside of the dominant structure and expression). With these poems, Sexton moves her cognitive and discursive styles into the black humor that allows her to inscribe reality into the sort of metaphor that Lacan has called "the letter in the unconscious." Through this strategy of humor, she can be true to her deepest experience; "The crystal truth is in my poetry," she claims (NES 115). At the close of her life and her work, her final poem celebrates the "two triumphs" of unpredictable love and irrepressible humor: "that untamable, eternal, gut-driven ha-ha / and lucky love." Notes 1 Representative of this ingenuous quality of women's writing is Nina Auerbach's preface to Romantic Imprisonmentf a collection of essays which boldly traces her evolving feminism, including early writings now refuted: "I suspect that the changing rhetoric in these essays, their move from apology to authority, would tell the inquisitive historian of criticism a good deal about the changing ideological climate of those years. For this reason, I have decided to leave the earlier essays unedited, hoping that errors, diffidences, and ditherings will emerge as signs of the times" (xiii; emphasis mine). 2 Regina Barreca compares the 1960s' good-girl(passive)/ bad-girl (active) split in I Used to be Snow White but I Drifted (Viking, 1991); the good girls never laughed, only looked cute when they were mad, but "the bad girls' ability to joke was seen as evidence of both their sexual awareness and their lack of femininity, although how these two can be paired without canceling each other out raises some complex issues" (6). In 1992 Camile Paglia outrageously promoted Madonna as "the future of feminism" in that "[s]he shows girls how to be attractive, sensual, energetic, ambitious, aggressive, and funny— all at the same time" (Sexual Personae 4). More recently Naomi Wolf calls for a "bad- girl" approach (as "the force of creativity, rebellion against injustice, and primal self-respect") in her widely- read feminist update, Fire With Fire. 1993 (319). Works Cited Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. Trans. James Strachey. New York & London: Norton, 1963. Sexton, Anne. No Evil Star: Selected Essays. Interviews, and Prose. Ed. Steven E. Coburn. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1985. 9 Chapter One The Wit-work of Women In spite of differences of time and condition, women's humor always bears their proprietary brand. The sexes have their own directions for toleration. Naturally men's derision has centered about biological and occupational peculiarities. And among women, the flowers of their humor are as varied as their lives. Martha Bensley Buere and Mary Ritter Beard, Laughing Their Way: Women's humor in America. 1934 No topic generates more humor than commentary and reports from the front-lines of that tedious engagement, "the battle of the sexes." Yet every joker is male in Freud's classic theoretical study of wit in 1905, and indeed even in 1981 only 12% of comedians were female (Janus 40). But when a woman uses humor, the dynamic changes— something happens: she speaks as a woman, with transposed gender- presence. Because social researchers find that "the power associated with the successful use of humor is socially identified as a male trait, associated with other traditionally masculine characteristics, such as aggressiveness, dominance, and assertiveness," rhetorical and cognitive strategies of humor are critiqued with skepticism (McGhee, "Role" 184). "For a female to develop into a clown or joker," Paul McGhee adds, "she must violate the behavioral pattern normally reserved for women." In this study, then, I propose that women's humor expresses 10 three characteristics: gender-inflection, emotional detachment, and a sense of control. Considering the rhetorical and cognitive approaches of three quite distinctive twentieth century poets, I ask: toward what purpose do serious women writers use humor as a strategy? Can we identify something called "women's humor"— and would it be different from "feminist humor"? Nearly one hundred years after Marietta Holley amused pre-suffrage America with her popular comic novels in which "Samantha rastles the woman question," that "woman question" is still being "rastled" in the legislatures, media, novels, academic journals— and comedy clubs.1 But the question has changed over time: after the "second wave" of the twentieth century women's movement and its conservative backlash, after the defeat of the E.R.A but the proliferation of women's writing and significant political presence, the question has generated feminist theoretical approaches to and understanding of the nature of "woman." Is it somehow an eternal "essence" or, rather, a social and linguistic construction? In other words, what stands as a commonality among women? A discussion of humor produced by women must necessarily resonate with this question— Henri Bergson had determined, after all, that "our laughter is always the laughter of a group" (64). Humor, in its flash of awareness and delight, connects through recognition— and how is it 11 that women understand their inter—connections? What can we determine as the nature of the 1 1 in-group," the terms of belonging, and its language codes? What does it mean to be a woman? In the dialogue of feminist theory, two major opposing positions speak to and influence each other. On one hand, voices of the French feminists call for a recognition of gender difference essentially bound to the sexed body? linguistic codes then flow from the understanding of effluence, multiple physical responses. A semiotic female language expresses body joy (jouissance), calls up body juices— "that good mother's milk. She writes in white ink," as Helene Cixous puts it (881). But the female experience mandates only two commonalities: daughterhood and menstruation. Even biology's prime-time feature— motherhood— (a condition episodically available for humorous treatment) is only an option, variously experienced and interpreted. On the other hand, views put forth largely by American feminist theorists question whether sensuality and its expressions can authentically reflect or define the diverse experience of female lives; instead, they suggest, such a libidinous voice works to affirm and encourage the hegemony of a patriarchal structure that ultimately operates through heterosexuality, capitalism, and bourgeois values. "Feminist theories and feminist inquiry based on the notion of difference, or 12 focused on demonstrating difference, are doing feminism a disservice," concludes Nancy Chodorow, because they ultimately rely on the defensively constructed masculine models of gender that are presented to us as our cultural heritage, rather than creating feminist understandings of gender and difference that grow from our own politics, theorizing, and experience. (113) A gendered self, according to this view, is constructed by a process that has blurred the categories, myths, and rituals imposed upon women as "natural"— and so we recognize women's literary expression as authored out of a network of complex social directives. The polemical quality of this discussion has lead to the widespread recognition that while the development of sexual identity draws from our anatomical reality, we take on gendered attitudes and role behavior as consequences of particular social context. Thus women in America, Adrienne Rich finds, are socially compelled to identify themselves as heterosexual and to regard lesbian women with suspicion (665-660); theorist Bell Hooks identifies the deep rift between the experience of the black womap and the white, and between the wealthy woman and the poor2; race and class, as well as sexual orientation can confound gender solidarity. Finally, professional identity requires preclusive allegiances— Jane Gallop in 1989 traces "an ongoing history of divided loyalties" in "our collective subject the academic feminist critic" (623); therefore, this "double 13 viewpoint [is] linked to her contradictory identity as both a feminist and a literary academic" (624). Can we hope then that such an unwieldy and inter-conflicting set of self- identities could be wedged into the glass slipper of sisterhood? The term "woman" becomes a negotiated signifier, a cross-hatch primal surname operating as a birthright and a cultural narrative: professional woman; black woman; Victorian woman; economically disadvantaged woman; Native American woman— Native American woman poet. ("Native American lesbian poet," laughs Paula Gunn Allen, "is too complicated to readily attract a publisher."3) Comedian Kate Clinton draws the line with "family woman"— "redundant," she notes (128). Feminisms (plural) is the title of a major 1991 anthology of literary theory and criticism;4 in 1993 social historian Naomi Wolf speaks of an ideal sisterhood as "a mesh of fluid, distinctive, interlocking circles . . . a network of female power" (302). So instead of a hypothetical monolithic sisterhood, we have the actual diversity of what Gallop calls "feminine plenitude." This framework of plenitude and difference is central to my discussion of women's humor because of the questions it raises. What sort of humor is generated by the spectrum of women's experiences? In 1934 (see this chapter's epigraph above), female anthologists found that men's humor springs from "derision [which] has centered 14 about biological and occupational peculiarities," but "among women, the flowers of their humor are as varied as their lives." For them, men's humor consistently centered on derision, but women's humor was imaged euphemistically as varietal flowers; to answer our question— how can humor reflect or appeal to a common femalO bond?— the very impossibility suggests instead a decentered and inclusive polivocality, something like what Annette Kolodny meant by her term for the spectrum of feminist methods and critical tools which would avoid oversimplification: "playful pluralism" (161). Thus I propose to reject the schematized and essentialist position that the subject of feminist humor originally seemed to invite; I find that women neither generate nor respond to humor simply out of their gender orientation alone, but instead gender serves as a "cross- hatch" for other terms of social, psychological, or cultural identity. However, given that gender is the primary lense of perception, we can say (with Stein's intensity of her "rose" statement) that a woman is a woman is a woman — although that gendered vision is refracted through her own ethnicity, age, and privilege, all within a patriarchal structure as it, too, changes its economics and politics over time. Such contradistinctions situate feminists, as critic bell hooks puts it, "imprisoned in the very structures they hoped to change. Consequently, the 15 sisterhood we talked about has not become a reality" (190). However, the abandonment of an unattainable monolithic ideal can restore an appreciation of particularity, which is also a concommitant aim of feminism and coincidentally a function of humor. Let's see how this works. Humor is a perspective— a detached, doubled, delighted way of perceiving— and then the articulation of that perception. I would maintain that the birth of that doubled and humorous perspective coincides with that event which Jacques Lacan describes as the mirror stage: the infant's discovery that her ego identification is split between the experiential (limited and fragmented) self and the unified (ideal) self in the mirror. Lacan describes the event as a crucial moment in which the infant (experiencing insufficiency in her own bodily movements) recognizes the self in the mirror as a perfect unity— the Jtifeal-T— which she greets with incipient anticipation. The mirror stage, for Lacan, is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insuffienciency to anticipation— and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies . . .to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject's entire mental development. (4) The tiny self sets out to match herself up with (m)other images and so to participate as what Lacan calls a "social J"— with just a bit of help from a set of fantasies and a 16 suit of alienating identity-armor in the form of sturdy Verneinung (denials). Shortly I will discuss the nature and agents of these contributions to the development of this budding humorist or the female specular I turned ironic social I. The point here is that in this pre-Oedipal moment of imago-discovery is born the wordless joy (!) of a lifetime of frustration, to be spent pursuing an illusory ideal self. Although Lacan projects as pronominally male this mirror-fantasy form that will hereafter "situate the agency of the ego," let us transpose the gender; when the figure in the mirror is a female Ideal-I providing homeomorphic identification for female development, we hesitate when Lacan proceeds by "asking the larger question of the meaning of beauty as both formative and erogenic" (3). The infant's narcissistic ecstasy in her discovery of the mirror imago is chilled by the "alienating identity" constituting that more perfect fantasy figure; she then anticipates her life-quest to assume that alien identity. When Lacan casts this "knot of imaginary servitude" into language, he hits upon the metaphor-of-choice for our humor connection: quadrature. Leaping "from insufficiency to anticipation," the subject embarks upon "the inexhaustible quadrature of the ego's verifications," and so emulates the mathematical problem of quadrature— squaring the area of one space with another— but here meaning squaring the real with the ideal. (The classic 17 problem of the "quadrature of the circle" means figuring the area of a square which precisely equals the area of a given circle; mathematically this is impossible.) Such a pursuit, Lacan admits ruefully, calls up ego defences, paranoia, and denials leading to inertia and then neurosis. For remedy he proposes psychoanalysis as the guide to "that point where the real journey begins" to redress "this knot of imaginary servitude that love must always undo again or sever." Although Lacan's mirror stage initiates the subject into existential despair and sexual frustration, conversely I believe that this event marks the birth of humor. Love medicine or psychoanalysis aside, the tiny female self's ecstatic meconnaissances or mis-recognition of mirror illusion ("Thou art that"), when simultaneously "is revealed to him [sic] the cipher of his [sic] mortal destiny," points surely to disaster. Beyond the Lacanian story of the birth of frustration, however, is the more complex awareness that if love or psychic mentoring is unavailable, humor can offer the perspective; humor can skid (or skate) across the inflexibility of expectations of an unrealistic ideal. Whether that ideal is a communal solidarity or an individual socialized perfection, quadrature connotes humor. The equation may be impossible; the effort may be absurd; but the story of it (written later) can be hilarious, revealing, and liberating. 18 Therefore I conclude that a woman's humor— as she writes from a perspective already complicated and "doubled" through her multiple identities distinct from her primal surname "woman"— expresses three characteristics which, because they conflict with conventional sex role patterns, mark her discourse as subversive: gender-presence, emotional detachment (autonomy), and (through intelligence) a sense of control. * * * Before taking up these three characteristics marking the humor of the woman writer, I want to clarify the paradox that the very complexity of women's identity provides the divided perspective that the production of humor requires. At this point I want to look further at the split or bi level perception which is at the core of all discussions of humor. Incongruity theory provides the ground for perception and production of humor from nonsense rhymes to practical jokes to malicious satire. According to Freud, "jokes present a double face to their hearer, force him to adopt two different views of them" (JRU 214), and contemporary researcher Paul McGhee claims that the perception of an incongrous relationship (absurd, unexpected, inappropriate, and otherwise out-of-context events are included in this term) forms the basic foundation for all humor experiences. (Humor 42) 19 In Arthur Koestler's theory of "bifurcation" (bisociation), too, the generative matrix of humor corresponds to the perception of two incongruous planes of experience. According to Koestler, this doubled awareness potentially could present three alternative responses: "that is to say, the same pair of matrices can produce comic, tragic, or intellectually challenging effects" (45). Incongruity might seem signal a tragic confrontation or despair; the perception of incongruity could as well present to another individual a puzzling problem, which could evoke an original and inspired connection of previously unconnected experience— creativity. A third (and more complex) response— humor— accounts for these conflicting images in their simultaneity. Here energy deflected from two opposing planes of experience is transformed through the intelligence into a perception able to account for both. The double concept of outward social forms opposing inward authenticity is a staple of humor, and especially humor by women. For example, Dorothy Parker's persona demonstrates the humorous articulation of such a pattern of bifurcation by articulating a double-discourse of public social euphemisms and platitudes which are then undercut by a private "mutter" of truth. Parker is sharply aware of both public and private sensibilities, and in the clever expression of simultaneous and conflicting planes of experience, she 20 creates humor. Koestler emphasizes that humor compares to creativity in that The creative act, by connecting previously unrelated dimensions of experience, enables him [sic] to attain to a higher level of mental evolution. It is an act of liberation— the defeat of habit by originality” (96). The comic element in two incongruous and conflicting modes of behavior suggests to Henri Bergson "the mechanical encrusted upon the living." For Bergson, comedy results when the habitual (mechanical) quality of an individual's daily rituals or thought persist even though to continue in such behavior is no longer useful or even logical. When we notice that the individual has not adapted to change but obliviously continues as a human automaton, "rigidity is the comic, and laughter is its corrective" (74). Any ritual or ceremony, too, is mechanical enough to be rendered vulnerable to laughter, which provides the substance of Gertrude Stein's language play; and Bergson's eruption of the living presence occurs, too, when we think about the body at a time when we are intending to focus on the spiritual— and we laugh. Thus Sexton's ribald suggestion that "God loafs around heaven, / without a shape / but He would like to smoke His cigar / or bite His fingernails"5 deflates and yet accesses the imagistic construction of anthropomorphic idiosyncracy. 21 For Bergson, not only ritualistic or pompous social behavior is characterized as "the mechanical encrusted upon the living," but vice, too, is confronted and can be meliorated through a dose of laughtef. Bergen understands vice as a rigid habitual behavior that has taken on an aspect of the "curvature of the soul," appearing to the beholder as deformity." Anne Sexton's fairy tale caricatures in Transformations are grotesque portraits of malevolence frozen into deformity. Just so, Dorothy Parker's treatment of pompous social prescriptions reveal society's boorish curvature or cruelty. The power of her work comes, in part, from the reader's recognition of the conflation of social mores and their twisted consequences, never so acute as when the reader reads the implications of the reader's own laughter. The "superiority theory" of humor, too, works from this sort of a comparative surprise, but with a greater cynicism — which requires more than just a momentary anesthesia of the heart: "Whatsoever it be that moveth laughter, must be new and unexpected," Thomas Hobbes claimed, "a sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly. "6 Aside from the problematical moral validity of this superiority theory of humor, we can see a relevant application here when a woman can distance herself in this way from the foibles of an earlier inexperienced 22 self. Such "sudden glory" may signal an invidious arrogance that smacks of the "vainest part of mankind," Joseph Addison admonished Hobbes,7 and yet the woman who values her developing experience is able to laugh at herself (or maybe smile with chagrin) in a retrospective glance whether at pubertal breast anxiety or a youthful eager desire for what turned out to be a defeating relationship. Anne Sexton writes with "sudden glory" when she jokes about her former romantic obsessions, long-ago woolly-legged male professors, and quirky male gods. Adaptations of this bisociative perspective which is central to humor account in part for the three characteristics of women's humor that I have found. The first characteristic is gender-salience; humor delivered under a woman's signature or in a woman's voice is always understood as gender-inflected— "marked" in the Barthesian sense of being identified as outside the norm, which regards humor as male. "Laughter," Henri Bergson claims "always implies a kind of secret freemasonry or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary" (64); they share common ideas and references. When Freud refers to the joke as a "double meaning with an allusion" (JRU 41)— that allusion (the missing, unarticulate piece of the joke) is the major premise. The unstated allusion carries the wit, and this major premise requires the reader/hearer's 23 interpretation. Ethos determines interpretation: an apocryphal joking event automatically will invite a male interpretation of that allusion, but when a woman jokes, the allusion shifts gender-alignment. Her other identities, traits, and allegiances may guide and de-center the interpretation, of course, but no factor is so central to humor comprehension as the sex of the speaker. The reason for this is found in the crucial and instant response required for the full response of the listener. To do so, that person "must be in sufficient psychical accord with the first person to possess the same internal inhibitions, which the joke-work has overcome in the latter," Freud notes (JRU 151), suggesting the difficulty of male listeners imaging the inhibitions overcome by a female humorist. But the joke-frame allows no time for such discursive analysis because, as Freud warns, the allusions made in a joke must be obvious and the omissions easy to fill; an awakening of conscious intellectual interest usually makes the effect of the joke impossible." (JRU 150) Can a man assume the role of a woman's perspective to capture the humorous allusions, without this "conscious intellectual interest" which will wither the joke? In other words when a woman jokes or uses humor, she speaks as a woman, clearly distinct from a man, and (her life situated in Lacanian mirror-irony) her gendered allusions evoke the spectrum of relational questions— from her point of view. 24 Her gender-inflected observations expose— not protect— both women and men to the paradoxes implicit in the patriarchal system. Female assumptions and allusions which lie at the back of women's humor are disguised in what Freud calls the joking facade, but in fact they retain their edge in addressing the same repressions that Freud identified: hostility and sexuality. For women to express anger directly or to openly expose their own sexual knowledge through innuendo is (just as it is for men) to invite criticism. For the "jester" using banter or verbal nonsense," however, it may be permissible to say the thing and gain "the satisfaction of having made possible what was forbidden by criticism" (JRU 129). More complex is the intellectual strategy of transforming the unconscious dream- energy which is the source of repressed anger and unexpressible sexuality— a process and strategy critical to women's discourse. Freud's study of jokes, in fact, grew out of his earlier work in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). Here in his primary contribution to twentieth century understanding of human behavior, when he explored the concept of dreams as the reflection of the dreamer's unconscious, Freud noticed that "dreamers are insufferably witty." Connections between what Freud calls "dream-work" and "wit-work" identify the similarities. The conscious 25 mind represses tendencies and urges that seem undesirable or unmanageable, usually of a sexual or hostile nature. In sleep the repressions of the waking sensibility— the conscious mind— are temporarily unmonitored. Socially unacceptable sexual aggression and repressed hostility then are able to be released in dream sequences, transformed into images that seem incongruous to the dreaming individual, who may later claim to be unaware of their significance. This process by which dreams transform the repressed hostile impulses or sexual urges Freud calls dream-work. In a similar heuristic, when the conscious mind relaxes its monitor system for a moment and uses language to transform the repressed urges into a witticism, the private dream is disguised in metaphor to reappear as a public anecdote.8 Later this joke-event involves three persons: the first person, whose preconscious thought had been revised in her subconscious; the second person, who is seen in a hostile or suggestive way (and this "butt" of the joke can figure as not only a person but an event, a behavior, a ritual, or a convention); and a third person, who listens, laughs at the word play which disguises hostility or obscenity, when she simultaneously fully understands (or "catches" onto) that repressed tendency. The listener can laugh at the surprise of the joke-narrative without openly acknowledging its disguised subtext. At this point the teller too can join in the hilarity. The joke manipulates our response, Freud 26 tells us, because it "will evade restrictions and open sources of pleasure that have become inaccessible. It will further bribe the hearer with its yield of pleasure into taking sides with us without any very close investigation" (JRU 103). Wit which has required the mental apparatus to construct ironically depends in the telling upon the suspension of the mental apparatus to fully succeed. This is because the "tendency" or the hostile edge must remain disguised. But what if women's jokes do not express a hostile edge, one might ask? I refer to this conclusive and revealing remark from Freud: Jokes, even if the thought contained in them is non-tendentious and thus only serves theoretical intellectual interests, are in fact never non-tendentious" (JRU 132). Humor always carries a sharp edge; rhetorical disguise is the strategy of the woman writer who uses humor. A clever use of language (with allusion or metaphor) to seduce a listener into collusive sympathies is not a ploy only of humor; the strategy of persuasion serves as a dimension (pathos) of all rhetorical utterance. In the instance of the joking process, however, the strategy, following the line presented here, springs from deeply held but unexpressed urges. Avoiding the critical censor from outside OR inside (inhibitions) drives the inflecting slant to the narrative. Through punch-line laughter, women can enjoy a subtext of sexuality that social conventions even in 27 the last years of the century have deemed too coarse for women's open discourse— an unstated taboo. Or they can acknowledge and express hostility that cannot be expressed effectively: Harriet Goldhor Lerner, in her 1985 study The Dance of Anaer remarks that women's standard practices of "avoiding anger or blowing up both serve to protect others, to blur our clarity of self, and to ensure that changes do not take place" (5). In a 1993 study reported in the New York Times f "only 9 percent of the women said they would directly confront the person who touched off their anger" (Brody B9). After the laughter which confirms reality, sexuality, or hostility, Freud's joking event can instruct others, when the listener turns joker: A joke must be told to someone else . . . something remains over which seeks, by communicating the idea, to bring the unknown process of constructing a joke to a conclusion." (JRU 143) In this chain of revelation, the joker will "complete my own pleasure by a reaction of the other person upon myself" (156); just as the writer needs a reader, this woman joker- writer-teacher needs a student— to share the vision. "Laughter is among the most infectious expressions of psychical states," Freud finds (156). To discuss the gender-salience of women's sexual humor in terms of Freudian structures, I must acknowledge the misogynist implications of the three-person triadic 28 narrative that situates (for him) the character of the obscene joke. When Freud relates comic examples in Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. in every case he identifies the first person (speaker/joker) and third person (listener) as male; the repressed instinct is a predatory sexuality— and the second person (or situation about which the humor is centered) in Freud's obscene jokes is female, whether personal or theoretical. The speaker's sexual interest has been frustrated— unrequited, blocked by another male, and thus the fulfillment of actual sexual pleasure is not possible. Repressing his frustration, lust, disappointment, and hostility, the speaker gains another sort of pleasure in a verbal triumph; he makes a clever (sly or witty) remark that veils his hostility toward the unrequiting female and he gains a sympathetic appreciative listener in the bargain. When his listener laughs at this exposure of gendered foibles and flaws, the speaker relaxes and laughs as well. This might not be as satisfying as mutual sexual passion, Freud admits, although "tendentious jokes provide a means of undoing the renunciation and retrieving what was lost" (101), and in the bargain there is a climax and bonding between the laughing male partners.9 In a wider context, however, we can see that this Freudian motivation for obscene joking draws not only on male rivalry but on a broad range of male frustrations and restraints, most typically: performance anxiety, invidious 29 comparison with other males, the transference of the Oedipal taboo, and also the fear of potential transformation of the female love-object into a controlling tyrant or castrating Fury.10 Freud's narrative anecdotes blend the strategies of both obscene and hostile jokes, by casting the obscene joke into a verbal exchange that inscribes women into the role of victim/butt. This conflation is particularly salient in Freud's thematic genre of hostile joking in which the crafty male marriage broker speaks as joker, with the undesirable bride as the butt of the joke. This deceptive con-artist acts as a stand-in for a despairing patriarch, and although he exploits the system and cheats the bumbling consumer (simple groom), the figure of broker/joker serves Freudian invention here. Paternal incestuous desire has been effectively thwarted by what Freud's punchlines reveal to be the daughter's deformity; no rival but nature has robbed him of implicit tabooed pleasure. Relief comes with the joke/bargain to commodify the frustrating rejection (daughter's inviolability) and pawn it/her off on the listener/groom as a viable sexual prospect. Discouraging as these models might be for the efficacy of using Freudian humor theory in a feminist context, I propose to retain the exegetic analysis while dismantling Freud's anecdotal narrative models. Marriage brokering may still echo suggestively in our own late twentieth-century dating-game culture, but for Freud it was inscribed in 30 socioeconomic practice; for my purpose here it serves only as a decisive example of our legacy of cultural misogyny. Freud narrates from assumptions that only men make jokes and only men have an interest in sexuality or have a social consensus to permit its referential expression; as we will see, however, the riotous language of libido in Stein's celebration of female erotica (in Bee Time Vine or "Patriarchal Poetry," for example) and Sexton's comic analysis of seduction and romantic fantasy (Transformations1 refute this claim for male hegemony on ribaldry. Twentieth century women have indeed set aside Freud's male joker-voice and adopt the strategy of the sexual joke with a female speaker— contemporary women can use the frame for their own picture by simply removing the portrait of the patriarch. A second characteristic of humor generated by women, I conclude, is autonomy— a quality linked here with emotional detachment. Here is another subversive element which conflicts with conventional notions of female development. The joker defies anticipated social patterns identified as feminine, most notably the priority given to relationships (with emphasis upon affection, romance, and sentiment). Object-relations theory, too, points out the socialized maturation processes of children which effect certain gender differences: Nancy Chodorow's 1978 work points out that maturing boys strive for individuation, while girls seek to 31 maintain relational connections. According to studies by Carol Gilligan, stronger moral considerations develop in maturing females, accounting for a distinctly gentler tone of expression, "a different voice.'1 Yet the role of the humorist operates in direct conflict with the woman's expected role involving care and engagement. For a woman writing humor (whether as joker, satirist, or wit), along with verbal skill, emotional separation is required. "Indifference is its natural environment," notes Bergson, "for laughter has no greater foe than emotion" (63). In a century before all the talk about ego boundaries, Bergson cautioned against indiscriminate empathy: Try, for a moment, to become interested in everything that is being said and done; act, in imagination, with those who act, and feel with those who feel; in a word, give your sympathy its widest expansion: as though at the touch of a fairy wand you will see the flimsiest of objects assume importance, and a gloomy hue spread over everything. (63) Overextended, the sentimentalist gets the blues; the humorist on the other hand, will look upon life as a disinterested spectator; many a drama will turn into a comedy. It is enough for us to stop our ears to the sound of music in a room, where dancing is going on, for the dancers at once to appear ridiculous. (63) Once the music of sentiment is removed, the swirl of romance turns burlesque, clumsy, or obvious. The humorist is disengaged from sentimentality, and most especially 32 unencumbered by crippling romantic enthrallment. "To produce the whole of its effect, then, the comic demands something like a momentary anesthesia Of the heart. Its appeal is to the intelligence, pure and simple" (64). Such emotional detachment or "momentary anesthesia of the heart" promotes a distance which allows the woman to dismiss seductive fantasy and instead focus on the particulars. According to Bergson, humor can sharply point out a gap between illusion and reality because it partakes of the scientific . . . the deeper we go down into an evil that actually is, in order to set down its details in the most cold-blooded indifference. . . A humorist is a moralist disguised as a scientist, something like an anatomist who practises dissection with the sole object of filling us with disgust ..." (143) Such delight in concrete terms and actual facts effectively dispels sentiment and fantasy, when, as in Dorothy Parker's work, for example, we, as women, laugh at her verse- antidotes to the reality of women's lives— lives which now stand distinct from our own by virtue of our sharpened awareness, marked by our laughter. Far from a romantic or a sentimentalist, Parker as humorist/moralist often seems "disguised as a scientist . . . with the sole object of filling us with disgust." Sexton, too, documenting the real world of dementia and doubt, dispels fastidious discretion with pounding scatological glee. 33 The third and most critical characteristic of humor in women's writing, I believe, is a sense of control. No other personal style is so discouraged for female social behavior: the "controlling woman" has become an expression of invective in business, entertainment, and domestic situations. Not only behavior but an attitude of being in control is often regarded as "unfeminine"— the contrary but commonly held expectation (subliminally borrowing from Freudian ideology) suggests that hysteria, PMS, or emotional disturbance lurks at an essential female core. Whether perceived as dominatrix or hysteric, the woman becomes object not subject; others create her by imbuing her with external interpretation. On the other hand, when the woman writer uses humor successfully, she expresses her self with control, forcing others to recognize and acknowledge an unrevealed premise (or "tendency"). As Paul McGhee points out, "the use of humor serves as a means of gaining or maintaining dominance or control over the social situation" (183). And by creating pleasure for the listener, she circumvents the reactionary criticism and draws a favorable response for herself. Humor provides, as we have seen, a pleasurable verbal disguise for pungent views. But beyond the strategy of humor in a social milieu, the writer faces a far more challenging task. With language alone, she must communicate double meanings and situate the linguistic gaps to imply the syllogistic premise— all the 34 while building a context to assure that the reader will catch the allusions, and understand the cognitive connection in a simultaneous insight. With such a formidable linguistic construction at issue, why not proceed instead in a logical analysis? Forceful serious discourse, after all, can effectively confront and persuade. She chooses humor because of the sheer pleasure in the intellectual difficulty. To welcome the work of such a complex cognitive process— and to exercise the skill to manage the verbal machinations— requires that feature of attention that Freud comes later (1927) to call "the humorous attitude." The woman who exercises control through humor is a woman with attitude. This "humorous attitude" comes close to resembling what is commonly thought of as a "sense of humor," in that the focus is on perception and interpretation, but here is a significant difference: rather than a "sense" of some situation presented as "humorous," the "humorous attitude" is for Freud a clear function of the human mind as it sorts through and arranges, and interprets all external phenomena. The function is cognitive, and the psychological process involves the displacement of psychic energy that is so vital to humor. The effect of the humorous attitude is that the individual is diverted from her unguarded painful responses to external assaults (and the dailyness of life provides anyone with that field of experience in a wide range of 35 severity!) toward a response that transforms frustration into pleasure. How can this be done, short of hypnosis or religious fervor? What internal cognitive agility can effect this transformative cerebral process of bringing pleasure through control? No longer can the unconscious take credit. The unconscious may provide, in Freud's terms, the repressed tendencies which are converted by joke-work to surface in artful language because a preconscious thought is given over for a moment to unconscious revision ... a joke is thus the contribution made to the comic by the unconscious. (21.165) But the humorous attitude makes a preliminary contribution to this witty conversion of primary inhibitions into cleverly covert and yet public expression. The essence of humor, Freud claims, is in the displacement of the attention to the unpleasant "affects to which the situation would naturally give rise" in favor of a jest; the inclination to turn attention in this way— to permit the joking event gained in the process of the work of the unconscious— demonstrates powerful control. The euphoria of possessing such control through humor is liberating, writes Freud: "the triumph of narcissism, the victorious assertion of the ego's invulnerability." In refusing to suffer, the ego shows that "the traumas of the 36 world are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure" (21.162). From trauma to comedy, here is a plot-line, a punch-line: "A story! A story! / (Let it go. Let it come.)" are the opening lines of Sexton's final book. By rejecting the reality of conflicts and frustrations, the ego can turn to the pleasure principle, re-ordering, and imaginatively re-arranging the multiple, conflicted influences upon her life. "Humor is not resigned; it is rebellious," Freud concludes. She laughs and makes a narrative. Emily Dickinson flexes her super-ego comfort when, after "a thing / so terrible — had been endured — I told my soul to sing" and even when instead more pain comes, My Brain — begun to laugh — I mumbled — like a fool — And tho' 'tis Years ago — that Day — My Brain keeps giggling — still. (#410) But what force within the psychical dynamic can direct such a change of attention? Although the joke itself originates at a dream-level where "a preconscious thought is given over for a moment to unconscious revision," humor itself is wide awake: "the contribution made to the comic through the agency of the super-ego" (21.165). Such ultimate control figures metaphorically here in the signifier of a parent. Identifying comic behaviors in others comes as a function of a detached and superior perception (primarily in Hobbes' view), which for Freud's humorist means "by assuming the role of the grown-up and identifying himself to some 37 extent with his father, and reducing the other people to being children" (21.163). Freud assigns the parental function to the super-ego, expressed for him as the voice of the father, a voice which, on other occasions, has delivered cautionary Oedipal lectures urging inhibition and repression. Here, however, the super-ego takes a consolatory position, "speaking kindly words of comfort to the intimidated ego," which enables the ego to re-assess and then boldly to articulate a transformed interpretation. The accent here is on intention: The main thing is the intention which humor carries out, whether it is acting in relation to the self or other people. It means: "Look! the world which seems so dangerous! It is nothing but a game for children— just worth making a jest about!" Through its winking intention, humor yields pleasure and becomes control— a strategy. At this point the gender inflection of the parental role that Freud has ascribed to the super-ego puzzles even Freud: This will teach us that we have much to learn about the nature of the super-ego. . . If the super-ego tries, by means of humor, to console the ego and protect it from suffering, this does not contradict its origin in the parental agency. (21.166) Functioning as a parent, then, but not as a patriarch, here the super-ego surprisingly more nearly resembles the mother. Freud apologizes for the unexpected maternal behavior of a male super-ego who "speaks such kindly words of comfort to 38 the intimidated [male] ego," but this may not be as contradictory as it seems. Martin Grotjahn, speaking as a mid-century psychologist who shared the Zeitgeist with Philip Wylie (purveyor of the frightening threat of "momism"), also recognizes the powerful fiction of mother- control. Grotjahn reinforces my suspicion that the voice of super-ego/humor may be Mom's; in fact, he does this by conflating the psychological matrix of the Oedipal myth into humor theory. He starts with Freud; "At the beginning of cultural development stands the incest taboo and the repression of man's love for his mother." Then the mastery of this instinctual desire, Grotjahn hypothesizes, is emblematic of the mastery of bodily movements that signals, finally, the emotional maturity necessary for an understanding of jokes and witticisms. Grotjahn adapts the gendered super-ego by identifying key characteristics of humorist's psyche not as paternal but rather as maternal: The humorist finally recreates in hijmself [sic] the good, kind, tolerant mother who has to smile at the misery of her unruly and guilty child whom she more or less willingly forgives. (259-260) [emphasis mine] Freud's parental super-ego which guides the ego toward her humorous attitude shares benevolent personal traits with Martin Grotjahn's mid-century Mom. The implication here is that the (male) humorist, by mastering Oedipal instincts, can distance himself psychically from his conflicts far 39 enough to take for himself the most powerful control he knows— that of his own mother. But what happens when we figure the super-ego not as a father but as a mother, who then instructs the ego-as-female in the humor lessons of control? Does the process differ? Freud's paternal super-ego consistently contributes instruction in repression (as strategy for achievement in an Oedipal world of male dominance based on anatomical sexual arrangement), and only relinquishes this stern role in his tutorial for humor as strategy. On the other hand, when the super-ego becomes Grotjahn's super-mom, she contributes instruction in empowerment ("Quit shaking and take controlI You can do it! See this as a mom1 It'll make a great story!"); here is strategy for achievement in an Oedipal world that fears women and especially vilifies the mom who can spread cautionary fictions about infractions requiring first-degree castration. The quaking female ego receives her super-ego's instruction which "emphasizes the invincibility of [her] ego by the real world, [and] victoriously maintains the pleasure principle" (21.163). This transformtive mechanism is an inter-psychical phenomenon, emphasizing the potential control possible when the gir1-woman accents the super-ego and "alters the reactions of the ego." She refuses to suffer and instead sets about to create for herself "a yield of pleasure." Her 40 internal mother-mentor is a powerful segment of the girl- woman's own mind-map. But what of her actual mother? Thus far the internal humor training has come from the psychic self-as-mother, but how influential is the guidance of the actual mother, and what does such maternal direction consist of? By maternal influence I mean the didactic effect upon the daughter of the mother's example and instruction in gender socialization. This is quite separate from the effect upon the daughter of the experience of being mothered— of being in the symbiotic dyad generating what Adrienne Rich calls "the mother-daughter passion and rapture" (237). Maternal instruction in gender socialization may be pragmatic— even ironic or sardonic— and maternal example within the parental marriage may be submissive and self-defeating; such instruction and example contributes to gender development and, by conscious arrangement of perception, contributes to the development of a daughter with (humorous) attitude. I want to consider this development not only in terms of object relations and socialization, but in the light of Lacan's theory of a mirror stage. I believe we find maternal training proceeding pragmatically when we return for a moment to Lacan's mirror. When the small female self (during that brief time of her life when she is "outdone by the chimpanzee in instrumental intelligence") first sees the imago of her totalized Ideal- 41 I, she moves "from insufficiency to anticipation." Operating with sub-chimp wit, she is naturally "caught up in the lure" of this‘together-image in the mirror, and as impressed as she is jubilant, she opts for "the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject's entire mental development." No longer just her ordinary out-of-control diapered self, she now gains an [alien] identity— whose homeomorphic femaleness (Lacan notes) resembles Mom, who is (now according to Oedipal narrative) "the imago of the counterpart [in] the drama of primordial jealousy." Thus moving from "the specular I into the social J," she will enter a world is one of "socially elaborated situations," Lacan suggests, of desire, instinct, danger, and finally co operation. The full irony is that her early impression of image- coherence results in her further vulnerability. Now (through the looking glass) this toddler social-T will be "henceforth dependent . . . on a cultural mediation"— instruction delivered primarily by that same "imago of the counterpart [in] the drama of primordial jealousy" (in the traditional Oedipal scheme)— the mother. Lacan admits elsewhere that the structural effect with the identification with the rival is not self- evident, except as the level of fable, and can only be conceived of if the way is prepared for it by a primary identification 42 that structures the subject as a rival with himself. ("Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis," Ecrits 22) A humorous attitude might note the anomaly present when the specular I is a female who contemplates the "difference in the structural effect with the identification with the rival": here may be also the birth of her lifetime concern over cup size. For the toddling girl to see and identify this female figure as a "rival with [herself]" needs strong socialization beyond the "level of fable" in order to compute the quadrature ensuring that "instinct will conform to the physiological sex of the individual" (22). Even a chimp might see the difference. So if "identification with the rival is not self- evident," exactly how is the way "prepared for it by a primary identification that structures the subject as a rival with himself"? Object-relations theorists do not find "genital apperception or genital difference to be causal and central in gender identity and gender personality"; according to Nancy Chodorow, instead they "focus on the experience of self with other and how that comes to be organized and appropriated" (1989, 187). Just so, Adrienne Rich writes that Thousands of daughters see their mothers as having taught a compromise and self-hatred they are struggling to win free of, the one through which the restrictions and degradations of a female existence were perforce transmitted. (235) 43 The mirror stage transmits compromise and conflict when "paranoic alienation . . . dates from deflection of the specular I into the social I." Behaviors instruct (the example of mother behaving within patriarchal socialized prescription), along with articulated instruction of sex- role patterns imposed upon the girl's own sense of developing identity. Experiential lessons in female compliance with the patriarchal system, male dominance, and sexism will confirm the requirement of adopting that "alienating armour"? even the demonstration of her mother's behavior prioritizing self-in-relation to others provides the daughter with direct observation of lack of autonomy and dissolution of self. On the other hand, a maternal model of conscious but ironic complicity carries the potential for sarcasm. For example, Anne Sexton's black humor demonstrates the result of the daughter's instruction by a pragmatic mother who operates within the system and yet rebels against gendered submission by using a powerful detumescing sarcasm: If I make love you give me the funniest lines. Mrs. Sarcasm, why are there any children left? ("Praying on a 707," CP 378-379) Such prophylactic laughter serves as birth control, along with a playful lightness attending the mordant shutout; this mother/instructor shares her postcoital respite together 44 with her true partner (God/Instructor) as their combined power bobs effortlessly on a salt sea: Mother, you and God float with the same belly up. ("Praying on a 707," CP 380) Sexton's black humor also transforms her elderly great- aunt's workaday instruction (which confuses plumbing with romance) into comic obscenity: Every time I get happy the Nana-hex comes through. Birds turn into plumber's tools, a sonnet turns into a dirty joke. ("The Hex," CP 313) Humor becomes part of the "alienating armour" necessary for the Ideal-I to begin functioning in the mirror as the social J, and we sense, too, what Lacan calls "the notion of aggressivity as a correlative tension of the narcissistic structure in the coming-into-being (le devenir) of the subject" (22). The babe in the mirror stage is on her way to becoming a humorist: Mrs. Sarcasm. The only sociological study specifically focusing on the development of humor initiation in girls finds that those girls who joke and clown also consistently reveal dominating and aggressive behavior toward peers, with high instance of unprovoked verbal and physical aggression (McGhee, "Growing Up," 190). In the early elementary years, apparently, the girl uses humor to express hostility. McGhee uses four categories to measure humor: behavioral 45 humor, verbal humor, amount of laughter, and hostility of humor. The 1979 study links what McGhee calls "homes judged to be poorly adjusted" with the development of humor, finding that "all four humor measures were consistently negatively related to the general level of adjustment in the home in the first three years ("Growing Up," 189). We can hear the suggestion of Lacan's nursling checking the Ideal-I in that mirror, relating this to the reality experience, and developing her coming-into-being (le devenir) as the little humorist. What seems to me to be a more significant feature also marks the background of girls who use aggressive humor: the absence, or the problematic presence, of the mother— a factor that McGhee categorizes as absence of "maternal babying" in the 3-6 age period ("Growing Up," 191). Thus, McGhee interprets, "girls whose mothers tended to leave them alone to solve problems and deal with conflicts were more initiating of humor and laughed more in middle childhood." His research shows that the toddler who experiences the early sense of maternal abandonment, later in the grammar school years will show adaptation through assertiveness and wit. Verbal expressions of humor, one might conclude, show a consequent tough-minded independence— in women one possible outcome of their experience of mother-lack, and the transference of psychic accent to the [maternal] super-ego. 46 Corroboratively, Ellen Moers, writing on the motivation which drives women writers, cites this absence of mothering as a factor consistently present in their early development (90). Moers points out that a sense of abandonment generates anger, defiance, and finally the vigor to break out of compliant agreement and express the truth of experience— the break with expectation. Here is the truth— the (unconscious) Other that cannot show on the surface of her life, transformed through the creativity of dream-work and wit-work, and then (through the encouragement from the maternal humorist super-ego) released in language. The girl has lived with frustration, contradiction, and irony, and finally sees absurdity, comedy, and the invincibility of her ego by the real world. Just as Camus declares that the existential mode invites the writing of a happiness manual (90) (the existentialist knows that this frame of mind is not intuitive but needs instruction!) the unmothered woman shares her perceptions in the comic— the joke, the double entendre, the hidden illusion. No maternal babying here, the woman who uses humor is guided by "intelligence pure and simple." In my study of three poets, such mother-lack (figured biographically or psychologically) impacts the childhood of each woman. Gertrude Stein regards her mother as an ineffectual figure: Amelia Stein, as a character in The Making of Americans f "was never important to her children 47 excepting to begin them” (254). Young Gertrude had felt a sharp sense of childhood alienation from parental regard, claiming that both she and her brother Leo were "extra," only "replacements" born to fill the spot vacated by the death of two older siblings (Everybody's Autobiography 134). Amelia Stein died when her daughter was fourteen, but Gertrude's later ascerbic comment dismisses any maternal presence: "when she died she had been ill a long time and had not been able to move around and so when she died we had all already had the habit of doing without her" (138). Indeed, as an adult in France, Stein muses that it interests me very much when the father dies or the mother and it is a large family and the children are all old enough to like it better. Whatever happens they do like it better. (EA 138) Regarding her own family members left motherless, each to chart an individual course, Stein speaks with a bit of Bergson's momentary heart anesthesia when she concludes that "Whatever happens they do like it better." Dorothy Parker, too, was motherless to find her own way. She was five years old when her mother— as she later reported with flippant directness— "promptly went and died on me" (Cooper 57); five years later her inimical stepmother also died. Anne Sexton's mother was an absent or negative figure for her, finally rejected in part through Sexton's teenage elopement. All three of these poets, then, had matured as girls who felt alone, self-reliant by default— an experience that 48 studies determine to be an early perceptual matrix of creativity both for the woman who writes and for the woman who is able to initiate humor. A maternal super-ego whispers, "Look! here is the world . . . just worth making a jest about!" 49 Notes 1 From 1873 to 1914 Marietta Holley wrote more than twenty volumes featuring the character Samantha, or "Josiah Allen's wife," a jolly 204-pound commonsensical feminist who speaks out against injustice and empty sentimentality. Holley's books were as popular as Twain's at the turn of the century. "Samantha Rastles the Woman Question" is the title of Jane Curry's early study of Holley's work ( ' Journal of Popular Culture 8 [1975]; 805-824). 2 The thesis of Ain't I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South End Press, 1981. 3 Personal conversation with Paula Gunn Allen at University of Southern California, 6 February 1991. 4 Eds. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl. New Brunswick, NJ; Rutgers UP, 1991. 5 "The Earth," Complete Poems 431. 6 From Leviathan. Qtd. Koestler 53. 7 The Spectatorf No. 249 [1711]. Restoration and Eidhteenth-Century Comedy. Ed. Scott MCMillin. NY; Norton, 1973. 378. 8 In mphe Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious," Lacan links the dream image with the trope of metaphor— a crucial understanding in the process of converting dreams into jokes through "wit-work": from picture to word. (A fuller reference to this appears below in my Chapter Two). 9 Freud's libidinous joking triangle is the following: "When the first person finds his libidinal impulse inhibited by the woman, he develops a hostile trend against that second person and calls on the originally interfering third person as his ally. Through the first person's smutty speech the woman is exposed before the third, who, as listener, has now been bribed by the effortless satisfaction of his own libido" (JRU 100). In a cogent analogy, Jerry Flieger wittily aligns the joke-structure with the writer- reader seduction strategy; she counters the predatory infrastructure of the narrative by suggesting that cultural variables may allow the woman to overcome her Freudian role as mute hysteric— and thus to feel free to risk joking as well. ("The Purloined Punchline: Joke as Textual Paradigm." Ed. Robert Con Davis, Contemporary Literary Criticism [Longman, 1986]. 277-294) 50 10 Such transformation of shock into nervous laughter marked the sensational trial of Lorena Bobbitt in January, 1994. The country laughed and then claimed to be outraged by their own laughter. Certainly castration jokes about "bobbing" the conjugal penis of a brutal or philandering husband have held a place in the lexicon of black humor cliche— but as euphemistic metaphor. However, when Lorena Bobbitt acted out the "joke," nervous T-shirt humor converted Lorena and John Wayne Bobbitt into cartoons; female street-wit deployed thinly veiled ribald jokes. Bobbitt reference became only a cryptic gesture: fingers held up in a V, then brought together in a snipping motion. Barbara Ehrenreich (Time 21 Jan 1994: 34) points out that decades of endless debate over victimhood by "feminist intellectualdom" had not effectively addressed the issue of widespread sexual abuse; now, through the publicity attendant upon the Bobbitt trial, the world learned that long-term abuse can trigger irrational violence. Jokes by male comedians invited bonding through castration fears: Jay Leno pointed out a midwest newspaper's unfortunate proximity of two feature stories, one covering the day's events at the Bobbitt trial and the other on the death of House Speaker Tip O'Neall, captioned "Tip Mourned in Boston" (1/31/94); later a Leno guest exhibited his collection of antigue bowling pins with a muttered aside: "Looks like that Bobbitt woman's trophy room, huh?" (11 March 1994). 51 Works Cited Barreca, Regina. Preface. Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy. Women's Studies 15 (1988): 3-22. Bergson, Henri. "Laughter." 1899. Comedy. Ed. Wylie Sypher. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1956. 59-190. Brody, Jane E. "For Women, Anger Can Be Counterproductive." The New York Times 1 Dec 1993: B9. Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Trans. Justin O'Brien. New York: Vintage, 1955. Chodorow, Nancy. Reproduction of Mothering; Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: U of California P, 1978. . Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory. New Haven: Yale UP, 1989. Clinton, Kate. "On the Comedy Circuit with Kate Clinton." Ms. Oct. 1984: 128. Closson, Jane Louise. Humor Appreciation in Women's Liberation Members. M.A. Thesis. California State University Long Beach, 1973. Cooper, Wyatt. "Whatever You Think Dorothy Parker Was Like, She Wasn't." Esquire July 1968: 57+. Curry, Jane. "Samantha 'Rastles' the Woman Question." Journal of Popular Culture 8 (1975): 805-824. Dresner, Zita Zaklin. Twentieth Century Women Humorists. Diss. U of Maryland, 1982. Freud, Sigmund. "Humour." Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of sicrmund Freud. Trans. James Strachey. 24 vols. London: Hogarth, 1961. 21.160-166 • Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. [1905] Trans. James Strachey. NY: Norton, 1963. Gallop, Jane. "Heroic Images: Feminist Criticism, 1972." American Literary History 1.3 (1989): 613-636. Grotjahn, Martin. Beyond Laughter. New York: McGraw Hill, 1957. 52 Heilbrun, Carolyn. Writing a Woman's Life. New York: Norton, 1988. hooks, bell [Gloria Watkins]. Ain't I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Boston, MA: South End P, 1981. Janus, Samuel S. "Humor, Sex, and Power in American Society." American Journal of Psychoanalysis (1981). Rpt. in Making Connections Across the Curriculum: Reading for Analysis. Ed. Chittenden et al. New York: St. Martin's, 1986. 37-46. Jones, Rosalind. "Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of l'Ecriture feminine." The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women. Literature. and Theory. Ed. Elaine Showalter. New York: Pantheon, 1985. 361-377. Kaufman, Gloria, and Mary Kay Blakely, eds. Pulling Our Own Strings: Feminist Humor and Satire. B1oomington: Indiana UP, 1980. Koestler, Arthur. The Art of Creation. New York: Macmillan, 1964. Kolodny, Annette. "Dancing Through the Minefield." The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women. Literature, and Theory. Ed. Elaine Showalter. New York: Pantheon, 1985. Lacan, Jacques. "The Mirror Stage." Ecrits. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977. 1-7. Kostelanetz, Richard. Introduction. The Yale Gertrude Stein. Yale UP, 1980. viii-xxi. Loving, Jerome. "Whitman and Dickinson." American Literary Scholarship. Annual 1984. Duke UP. 88. McGhee, Paul E. "The Role of Laughter and Humor in Growing Up Female." Becoming Female: Perspectives on Development. Ed. Claire B. Kopp. New York: Plenum Press, 1979. 183-206. • Humor: Its Origin and Development. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1979. Moers, Ellen. "The Angry Young Women." Harper's Dec 1968: 88-96. Rich, Adrienne. "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence." Signs 5 (1980): 631-660. 53 Simon, Linda, ed. Gertrude Stein: A Composite Portrait. New York: Avon Books, 1974. Stimpson, Catharine R. "Nancy Reagan Wears a Hat: Feminism and Its Cultural Consensus." Critical Inquiry 14 (1988): 223-243. Tanner, Marcia. Bad Girls West. Catalogue for "Bad Girls West," exhibit in UCLA Wight Gallery Jan-Mar 1994. Thornwell, Emily. The Ladv's Guide to Perfect Gentility. (1856) Rpt. (in part) San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 1984. Unpaginated. Toth, Emily. "Female Wits." Massachusetts Review 22.4 (1981): 783-793. Weisstein, Naomi. "Why We Aren't Laughing . . . Any More." Ms. November 1973: 43-51. Wilder, Thorton. Introduction. The Geographical History of America. by Gertrude Stein. 1934. New York: Random House, 197 3. Wilt, Judith. "The Laughter of Maidens, the Cackle of Matriarchs: Notes on the Collision Between Comedy and Feminism." Women and Literature. Ed. Janet Todd. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980. Wolf, Naomi. Fire With Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change the 21st Century. New York: Random House, 1993. 54 Chapter Two Telling It Slant: Reading and Misreading Women's Humor And then I went very warily, on the very tips of my toes (so cowardly am I, so afraid of the lash that was once almost laid on my own shoulders), to murmur that she [the young woman writer] should also learn to laugh, without bitterness, at the vanities— say rather at the peculiarities, for it is a less offensive word— of the other sex. Virginia Woolf A Room of One's Own, 1929 Tell all the Truth but tell it slant — Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth's superb surprise Emily Dickinson (#1129) The humorous attitude— a "sense” of humor— is what Freud calls "a rare and precious gift," a protective epistemological strategy that can illumine life itself. Here is true liberation, the elevating perspective that "brings a yield of pleasure to the person who adopts it, and a similar yield of pleasure falls to the share of the non participating onlooker" (21.161). Humor is powerful not only for the individual, but in human relationships, and finally in re-ordering the frame of the culture (Bunkers 91). Umberto Eco, making a distinction between the comic (as "perception of the opposite") and humor (as the "sentiment of the opposite"), points out that this "sentiment" or attitude questions the order of things: 55 In comedy we laugh at the character and the frame the character cannot comply with. But we are no long sure that it is the character who is at fault. Maybe the frame is wrong. (8; emphasis added) Humor works for social change. Although the personal vision of the humorist (psychological perspective) and the technique of verbal wit (linguistics and aesthetics) influence response to humorous expression, ultimately, as sociologist Gary Alan Fine puts it, "without a social referent, humor would make no sense" (176). Satiric social commentary or jokes alluding to specific events serve as tools of interpersonal conflict or control, strategies to initiate or restrain social change. Comedy, given this potential, is for George Meredith "the ultimate civilizer," but not so happily, "the laugh of the satirist is often a sneer; and there is an undercurrent of satire in most comedy" (Sypher 242). Monolithic myths of social systems might be borne along by those whom they serve, but the myths can be parodied in comedy, challenged through ridicule, and subverted through humor. And so humor is political. The object of attack in what Freud calls the cynical joke may equally well be institutions, people in their capacity as vehicles of institutions, dogmas of morality or religion, views of life which enjoy so much respect that objections to them can only be made under the mask of a joke and indeed of a joke concealed by its facade. (JRU 109) 56 Humor shares this political focus with feminist issues; Feminisms editors Warhol and Herndl conclude a summary of shared feminist beliefs by asserting that even when they focus on such comparatively abstract matters as discourse, aesthetics, or the constitution of subjectivity, feminists are always engaged in an explicitly political enterprise, always working to change existing power structures both inside and outside academia. Its overtly political nature is perhaps the single most distinguishing feature of feminist scholarly work. (x; emphasis added) Both through the language of jokes and through a humorous outlook, women speak with gendered presence and also emotional detachment to gain control. Through strategies of humor, women find potential power. Historically, neither power nor humor has characterized women's lives. Indeed, the twentieth century has proved a sobering recognition of the distinct ways in which women have functioned in a socially validated climate of silence and oppression. "Feminist critics generally agree that the oppression of women is a fact of life," declare the editors of Feminisms in 1993 (x); and matter-of-fact assessments of women's social limitations such as these 1987 remarks by one Jungian feminist are disturbingly familiar: Patriarchy, understood as male dominance of public life and thought-systems, exists in Western culture and is reflected in all its institutions, including religion, psychology, and language. This does not mean that women have no power at all in patriarchy. Some women do, but it exists 57 primarily in a distorted form and, more often than not, in the private sphere. (Wehr 9) Such a qualified view of women's tentative power as distorted and typically enclosed in domestic authority functions as a denial of its very assertions» Earnest dedication (laced with frustration and anger), rather than either power or humor, have generally marked discussions of women's issues during the past decades of activism. The critical and life-changing character of the work of feminists to improve women's lives throughout the twentieth century has commanded a sober respect.1 Humor researchers in the 1970s concluded that "increased commitment to women's liberation is associated with decreased enjoyment of jokes"2 as traditional jokes engaging women as victim ("butt") predictably fell out of fashion among women. Other researchers, not surprisingly, found that respondents identified as high on a "Women's Liberation Ideology" scale found humor disparaging women "negatively amusing."3 Similarly, individual poets have episodically abandoned humor in the press of social consciousness. Humor in Gwendolyn Brooks' poems, for example, changed from warm realism tempered by irony to a militant tone after 1967 when she focused the power of her outrage on the oppression of African Americans.4 Catharine Stimpson, too, reminded readers in 1984 that feminism is politics after all, suggesting a limit to wittiness in the discussion of women's 58 issues so that we can forcefully attend to improving the lives of women in a harshly reactionary time: Our tone might become less ironic, less allusive, less playful. It might become blunter, angrier. . . in the arduous toil for survival of women and children. (243)5 When Elaine Showalter wryly notes that Lucy Irigaray "locates the subversive force of feminist discourse in a playful mimesis, a mimicry both of phallocentric discourse which exceeds its logic, and of the feminine position within that system," Showalter rejects that witty project: "Yet playing with mimesis cannot offer us authority except in individual star turns, especially if the dominant culture wants to play with your mesis too" (1991, 185). Or as one academician recently confided, "I'm tired of joking about getting jerked around; I really would prefer to sue."6 Yet one function of humor has been exactly to deflect the force of the grim pressures that enforce the status quo and resist change. Work by Regina Barreca and Judith Wilt have linked comedy to anger in the work of women novelists.7 Major theories of humor recognize its power to transform patterns of human behavior— as well as its contrary faculty to reinforce existing dominant structures; humor can cut both ways, to act as either challenge or control. By using the psychic unconscious dream-energy focused on what Freud calls "the major interests of life," jokes [wit] "seek to gain a small yield of pleasure from the mere 59 activity . . . of our mental apparatus" (JRU 179). Pleasure comes as a by-product of humor "during the activity of that [mental] apparatus and thus arrive secondarily at not unimportant functions directed to the external world" (JRU 180). Arthur Koestler established this humorous double vision (bisociation) as inscribing a discrete mode of creativity in an existential world; Koestler's cognitive tension reflects Henri Bergson's claims for humor that "its appeal is to intelligence, pure and simple" (64). Hobbes had called that intelligence a "sudden glory"; and Freud, too, describes the "humorous attitude" as a personal psychic triumph. Yet women writers who use humor aggressively as a strategy often are misperceived as simply comic figures, non-speakers in the crucial larger debates of political or literary issues. Reception theory of reading and of humor help to explain such misreadings: the disguise in the text permits the reader to laugh without guilt— until later. To seduce the reader, humor, warns Freud, will "bribe the hearer with its yield of pleasure. . , . without very close investigation" (JRU 100). Upon further analysis, however, logic and emotion often persuade the laughter-turned-critic against acknowledging the hidden insight responsible for immediate laughter, and then the critic may turn curmudgeon rather than second-generation joker, and will deny that this text was in fact humorous; more accurately, the critic no 60 longer finds the text humorous. Critics have dimmed their consideration of wit in the work of Parker and Sexton through a post-hoc dismissal of a verbal disguise that had proved effective earlier. The second complication presents an opposite risk: if the reader misreads the verbal disguise and so misses the syllogistic and problematic premise, the reader does not find the humor— and misses the point. Within the powerful insights of significant poetry, the reader may misread the clues of jesting that serves as tip-off to the subtle strategy and effects of humorous turns. For example, if a fastidious or devoutly religious reader resists the sardonic physical references in Sexton's "The Jesus Papers," she may reject the impact of humor. The bond between reader and writer can be enriched by the writer's quick ironic aside or her parodic sketch of a character, but only so far as the reader catches the turn. Finding the humor or understanding the irony situates the reader momentarily in the comic pleasure of the text; but beyond appreciating the comic, the reader's primary connection is with the mind of the writer, "of finding and communing with kindred spirits," as Wayne Booth writes of the rewards of ironic pleasures (14). In personal terms, Edith Wharton proposed that "a marriage of two minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humour or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so that their joint glances at any subject cross like interarching search- 61 lights" (qtd. Booth 13). If such humorous pleasure defines the success of certain passages then the contribution of the text is determined through affect upon the reader, a subjectivity dismissed in earlier literary criticism as the affective fallacy* Both the dubious validity of the affective criterion and the textual difficulty perceived by a reader alone with the text in responding to the intention of the writer is a further complication in the critical discussions of these individual writers. The three major figures in this study have confronted critical misunderstanding of the mixed linguistic modes of humor. Elaine Showalter asks, "And in mimicking the language of the dominant, how can we guarantee that mimicry is understood as ironic— as civil disobedience, camp, or feminist difference rather than as merely derivative?" (1991, 186). Indeed, although Gertrude Stein's work is recognized as a serious major contribution to twentieth century literature, when critics have overlooked strategies of humor in her 1934 Lectures in America (delivered as performance "explanations" of her work) they confound a critical consideration of even Tender Buttons; but when formatted as poetry and understood as humor, these baffling "lectures" can further enhance our appreciation of Stein's ironic aesthetic throughout all her work. On the other hand, Dorothy Parker's reputation as a writer of humorous verse obviated a measure of crucial political impact carried 62 in her eye-witness reports from the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, even as her stark observations of daily social cruelties in wartorn Spain present hard-hitting narrative journalism. Anne Sexton's sardonic humor in Transformations undercuts the poignant quality of her previous best-selling volume Love Poems: yet the steely voice of the witch balances and releases the limiting yet pervasive female fantasy of the fairy godmother. To understand the social impact of humor we must look at the ritual of joking as expressing contradictory social messages in the same way that joking expresses suppressed personal conflicts. The interpretation of funniness, whether of a joke or of observed behavior depends upon the social context. Sociologist Mary Douglas points out that "the joke form rarely lies in the utterance alone, but that it can be identified in the total social situation" (363). Central to our understanding of the social dynamic of humor as both a reflection and a subversion of conventional social behavior is Douglas's 1968 study of the structure of jokes as expressions of the social structure itself: A joke is a play upon form. It brings into relation disparate elements in such a way that one accepted pattern is challenged by the appearance of another which in some way was hidden in the first . . . [thus] . . . a successful subversion of one form by another completes or ends the joke, for it changes the balance of power ..." (365) 63 In just such a way Freud explains the joking process itself as an expression of one pattern challenged by the sudden appearance of another hidden pattern. In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), he presents his theory of joking and the comic in terms of the work done within the human psyche between the conscious level and the unconscious. Upon hearing a joke, the listener's dominant (conscious) system of control is interrupted momentarily by a surprise challenge to that control (by the unconscious) and for a moment it is overthrown. The joke is "in the total social situation"; joking at the expense of women— stereotyped as the nagging wife, dumb blonde, domineering mother, or conniving sexual predator— has been the unguestioned substance of male comedy (see Legman 1968). In American popular culture, women's place in humor has been as object, not agent. In the media, women's agency as humorist predictably has taken the form of comedic roles scripted by a patriarchal social order. Such accommodative humor in the first decades of television reinforced rather than challenged the limitations on women's use of humor. Comedy that made light-hearted wackiness out of the restraints on women's creativity outside the home became the material for the influential "I Love Lucy" series. Patricia Mellencamp points out that in the 50's "the U.S. foreign policy of containment extended to the domestic scene as well" (82). 64 The result was a weekly comic performance in which the actress (Lucille Ball) becomes a star while representing her character (Lucy Ricardo) who reverts to childlike repentance under husband Ricky's scolding. Ironically, then, the plot provided a performance vehicle for the featured actress while reinforcing the contradictory story of female domestic confinement. American women could laugh each week, but nothing had changed when "the heart, this time as a literal curtain," closes in a graphic metaphor for what Mellencamp calls "a massive yet benevolent containment" (90). Lucille Ball's comedy of the housewife's bid for public admiration succeeded in part because the joke reflected the social condition of the time. Mary Douglas finds the joke sequence to be congruent with the social structure because a joke is seen and allowed when it offers a symbolic pattern of a social pattern occurring at the same time. As I see it, all jokes are expressive of the social situations in which they occur. . . .[in that] a dominant pattern of relations is challenged by another. If there is no joke in the social structure, no other joking can appear. (366) To appreciate the joke as a symbolic pattern standing in for a social pattern, the individuals hearing or reading the joke must at least recognize that social pattern— if not affirm its validity— in order to understand the joke. The values within their identity group will determine their response. "Whatever the joke," Mary Douglas asserts, "the telling of it is potentially subversive": 65 Since its form consists of a victorious tilting of uncontrol against control, it is an image of the leveling of hierarchy, the triumph of intimacy over formality, of unofficial values over official ones. (366? emphasis added) Each of these three poets' strategies of humor in their work function exactly as this "tilting of uncontrol against control," the "leveling of hierarchy," and the exposure of official posturing. Not only Freud's classic study of jokes assumes the tendentious joker to be a male speaking at the expense of women, but contemporary sociological and theoretical discussions of humor also dismiss the possibility of a female speaker. Typically, Joseph Boskin's 1979 collected lectures titled Humor and Social Change in Twentieth Century America address the subversive social challenge of humor; in close analysis he deconstructs implications of race and class while retaining the traditional figure of woman as cross-cultural scapegoat. In alternating chapters, Boskin addresses first the techniques and themes of humor expressed as attack by a power group directed against a marginalized group (in-group vs out-group), and then a responding chapter demonstrates how that victimized group is able to deploy their own defensive weapons of humor. Boskin's analysis itself, however, imposes the configuration of a misogynous in-group joke; informative and entertaining, the analysis implicitly and relentlessly establishes a devastating use of 66 humor against women. The reader becomes the third person listener in this discursive joke-act. In Boskin's wide- ranging examples of aggressive humor against an ethnic, class, or regional group, the most acceptable scapegoat for demeaning remarks is a woman who belongs to that group. His section "Humor and Ethnicity" takes up women as a category separate from— although discussed simultaneously with— African Americans, Jews, and various ethnic identities. Jokes targeting women, along with a summary of the "logic" of such mysogynist jokes, figure as one-third of the chapter "The Humor of Oppression," the remainder being an extended demonstration of racist and anti-Semitic jokes as conflict humor. Boskin's rebuttal chapter, "The Humor of the Oppressed," excludes women except for one notable anecdote. In a lengthy analysis of humor by blacks and Jews, along with a brief mention of Native American humor, Boskin includes two illustrations of "retaliatory humor that comes from the elderly." Here we find the only joke in the chapter in which a woman is the narrator. In the one female joking identity that rates social acceptance, she speaks as an "older woman": An eighty-year-old man having an affair with a twenty -year-old woman finally decided to tell his eighty-year-old wife about it. She listened impassively and then exclaimed, "I'm glad you told me about the affair, dear, because now I have to tell you about mine. I'm seeing a young man of twenty." "What?" blurted the husband. 67 •'Yes,” continued the wife, "and you know what? Twenty goes into eighty better than eighty goes into twenty." (49) Boskin notes that this "example illustrates [that] the response to stereotyping involves an intuitive sensitivity to the power and nature of aggressive humor." The female aggressor here reveals an "intuitive sensitivity" that challenges not only the myth of the sexually disaffected older woman but the comparative gender-related availability of sexual pleasure for active elders. Interpretation of the controlling incongruity, as in any joking pattern, rests with the reader. Not only in sociological discussions of humor are women erased as agent, but in literary studies, too, women as writers of humor are included in such brief asides that our American literary humor histories often present a female tokenism equivalent to a one-liner. Name-dropping replaces substantive discussion. Major post-WWII studies of American humor include works by Norris Yates, Jesse Bier, and Walter Blair with Hamlin Hill. Each of these critics works within the notion that we are able to interpret the national character through a study of what American people find funny, a methodology which comes directly from the example of Constance Rourke in her 1931 study American Humor: A Study of the National Character. Her sociological approach influenced later theorists to follow her example in extrapolating a 68 definition of the American character in the expressions and personalities of its (male) humorists. Rourke's distinct types— the shrewd Yankee, the backwoodsman (the Gamecock of the Wilderness), and the minstrel— "make a comic trio, appearing in the same era . . . of Jacksonian democracy" (86), and she concludes that a composite figure of the American (male) humorist might fairly blend characteristics of each of the comic trio. This speculation of a ready mix is supported by the reality that although black minstrel stage performances are assumed to represent humor of African Americans, in fact, white men such as Thomas Dartmouth ("Jim Crow") Rice and Dan Emmett created the dance and lyrics of minstrelry. These white composers, Rourke assures her 1931 readers, "had studied the Negro character" (72), and the white males who performed the routines "knew the Negro at first hand." Accuracy accounted, too, for the low comedy of the minstrel mode: "Burlesque appeared, but burlesque was natural to the Negro" (84). Analogous to Rourke's acceptance of this white interpretation of the African American voice is her conventional male co-option of female literary achievement: while nineteenth-century writers such as Frances Whitcher and Marietta Holley were well-known in their time, Rourke's American Humor omits women entirely.8 Only a few years later Martha Bruere and Mary Beard compiled their 1934 anthology Laughing Their Way: Women's Humor in America. and they, too, took the measure of "the 69 temper of a people— its humors," through expressions of its humorists (v). National assumptions, they agreed, center on the democratic America of those Yankee, farmer, and wilderness types that Rourke had outlined, paying "scant account" to women. Moreover, within the national mythology "the 'spirit of woman' is distinctly matriarchal . . . classical and mystical" (vi). Although flesh-and-blood women may write poetry out of their own various and "diverse 'humors' within the nation," the abstract concept of Woman figured into national symbolism with a grim mission: her allegorical significance as a moral guide conscripted by America as an emblem of war. Bruere and Beard prefaced their book of women's humor with a doleful observation on the exploitation of a mythology of women: "The male type may be an amusing wag; the female must be somber and suggest the superhuman." How improved would be the relations between nations, they envision, if they could no longer fall back on the obscure divine mother for militant justification— if armored ladies symbolizing war, preparedness, and patriotism, or unarmed angels and Amazons leading on embattled hosts were removed from their minds! (vi) Bruere and Beard's anthology in part attempted to accomplish this demystification by presenting a range of topics and techniques which would belie the monolithic emblem of military mother. Their goal of demonstrating the virtuosity 70 in women's humorous writings is one which I share in this study. Just as Woman in the abstract traditionally had been deployed as the muse of inspired righteousness, so too could she serve as antithetical foil for male humor that points up wholesome male virtue as a national trait. During the years of growing social consciousness in America, Norris Yates constructed another revisionary view of the humorist as analyst of the American character in The American Humorist: Conscience of the Twentieth Century (1964). Unknowingly riding the wave of that moral domesticity that his contemporary Betty Friedan exposes as the feminine mystique (1963), Yates speaks of humor as reflecting morality, d national conscience. Representing such rectitude, the cracker barrel philosopher becomes the good citizen, a plain fellow of good sense and down-home speech, eschewing "high brow" cultural interests, a man whose moderation and temperament is tested only by his idle, free-spending wife and children. With the exception of a brief chapter on Dorothy Parker (who Yates sees as an amusing purveyor of many of the same stock characters as her contemporaries), Yates ignores women as creators of humor. He concedes that there may be much to say about women as a topic: "A separate book could be written on women in twentieth-century American humor, especially the New Woman of the Progressive ideology" (212). For example, of the females in the Archy poems of 71 Don Marquis, he finds Hermione pretentious and Mehitabel disreputable. "From his citadel of masculine common sense, Marquis satirized both types of erring female," Yates concludes with patriarchal equanimity (212). By the mid-sixties, the social and political tone of the country had changed, and with it the humor. In 1968 Jesse Bier's study The Rise and Fall of American Humor concludes nostalgically that the tone and topics of American humor of that era demonstrate a decline in personal values. A sick humor reflects a sick nation, Bier finds; unlike the earlier humor of hearty frontier optimism and exaggeration or Yankee shrewdness, the contemporary underground humor of the 60's encourages and reveals a disturbing neurosis of self-degradation. Bier steps up Rourke's thesis by proposing humor as a bellwether for the national soul. Women's humor had helped to change that wholesome down- home optimism of earlier American "Phunny Phellows" into this darker assessment of national life, according to Walter Blair and Hamlin Hill nearly a decade later. America's Humor, their 1978 update on a lifetime (for Blair) of humor research, presents a review of the three major types of "wholesome" American humor: the meandering tale, the tale in which the small powerless man tricks or triumphs over a daunting opponent, and the "tall tale"— the exaggeration that Max Eastman still regarded as the distinguishing characteristic of American Humor. Then Blair and Hill trace 72 another, darker strain of comic expression: from a growing urban sophistication, the New Yorker school of tongue-in- cheek focus on the nerve-wracking difficulties of living with the "system"— a neurotic encounter with the modern world. Comic troubles here are either technological (mechanical breakdowns frustrate and confuse the "little men" who face them) or social: the power hierarchy of politics and business confuse men who later in the day wend their way home to face "the battle of the sexes"— in the person of a Thurberesque nagging wife. (Tellingly, Blair and Hill's good-natured compendium of their years of humor research is dedicated "To our wives, without whose nagging this book never would have been completed.") Quite apart from the comfortable conjugal stereotypes of nagging wives who oftimes leer and menace from Thurber cartoons but in reality prod research into publication, were the outspoken women who influenced the later "underground humor"— satire on stereotyped behaviors of minorities and women. Forerunners for twentieth-century women were Edna St.Vincent Millay and Dorothy Parker, "who sloughed off rusticity, cultivated wit, and wryly bemoaned not only women's but their own personal frailties" (496). In 1978 Blair and Hill shook their heads over Parker ("broadly humorous and gamy"), who had led to the uninhibited writing of Erica Jong ("horny, funny, and popular" [496]). In such changed times, lamented America's Humor, a feminist such as 73 nineteenth century feminist Marietta Holley, "a Christian, a loving wife and a model housekeeper, . . . could never have become as popular today as she did during her lifetime*' (496). On the contrary, thanks to the influence of the frank humor of Parker and Millay, "outrageous comedy about . . . women that had been in the worst possible taste floated up from the underground" (497). Women's humor of this sort, sighed Blair and Hill, had contributed to the country's moral slide. The last straw for America's Humor was the advent of black humor popularized by Lenny Bruce (with his "lack of a satiric target and complete indifference to reform"). Black humor ran through the fiction of the sixties in Catch 22 and Vonnegut's Mother Night, among others; "'The truth is what is, not what it should be,' Bruce said; 'what should be is a dirty lie'" (500). Later working in this vein, Anne Sexton in 1970 does not propose reform for social anomalies arising from women's fractious sexuality, but instead she wraps them up in surrealist fantasies, blending the "dirty lie" of expectation with black humor's truth-telling. She matches Dorothy Parker's satire, lacing bitter parody into the old fairy tales to expose them as a outrageous take on girlhood dreams. Recent scholarly treatments of American humor, too, have neglected women. In the 1978 Twayne collection Critical Essays on American Humor, the index includes 361 74 names of men and 64 names of women— although 54 of those women are mentioned in one single essay on women's humor itself. Only six women writers are mentioned by all other contributors combined. Emily Toth's study of humor by women writers emphasizes a "humane" women's humor, one that does not attack individuals but only voices objections to the restraining roles and institutions that mark the lives of both men and women. In 1978, Toth's essay was a pioneer contribution; fifteen years later it reads as a self consciously segregated voice in a volume discussing American humor marked as male. Critical Essays on American Humor suggests that women might more easily understand humor than create it— the editors' dedication congratulates a responsive audience: "To Charlene and Annette, who know when to laugh." The study of women'p humor, according to Zita Dresner in 1988, is "a task that has only begun in the last ten years" (12). The spirit of the decade of the 80s— that overworked, power-hungry, "lifestyle"-loving period— also spawned a popular rage for comedy clubs and cable TV late- night specials. Producing humor has become a serious American focus, and comedy as the stuff of scheduled leisure has accustomed Americans to a diet of ringing political satire and bold sexual commentary. Woman, too, have defied the implicit taboo to stand up as comedians in a field dominated by men— even in 1981 only 12% of stand-up 75 comedians were women (Janus 40)— although in 1994 women are often billed together and targeted for a female audience or notably balanced with male performers. Nevertheless, out of this Zeitgeist women are employing strategies of humor, challenging public opinions. In 1986 Nancy Walker published the first full-length scholarly study on the topic: A Very Serious Thing: Women's Humor in America. Walker's field is popular culture, and her subjects are women who are generally acknowledged as humorists. She looks closely at the texts of women writers from mid-nineteenth century, beginning with Frances Whitcher (who said "It's a very serious thing to be a funny woman"), to post World War II writers. This thoughtful analysis of women's writing in popular literature has drawn some important conclusions about the topics of women's humor. One significant difference in literature by women, Walker proposes, lies with gender orientation to social prescriptions for "acceptable" behavior. In traditional (male) humor, Walker finds, "the central persona or narrator flaunts the standards of society— whether with ironic effect, like Huck Finn, or in fantasy, like the husband in Thurber's 'The Unicorn in the Garden.'" By comparison, American women's humor commonly deals with the central (female) figure's attempt to meet or adhere to such standards. Whereas the male humorous figure, from Rip Van Winkle onward, seeks escape from the moral domination of women, the female figure in women's humor struggles vainly to live up to 76 expectations for her behavior emanating from a culture dominated by men. (122) Walker and Dresner's 1988 collection of women's humorous writings restores their work to a male tradition, thereby— as the book's title announces— Redressing the Balance: American Women's Literary Humor from Colonial Times to the 1980s. Not surprisingly, such humor generating from a woman's struggles "to live up to expectations for her behavior emanating from a culture dominated by men" are fueled by anger and long concealed by domestic lightheartedness, Regina Barreca finds in her 1987 work on comedy and aggression in women's novels. In the work of Muriel Spark, Elizabeth Bowen, and Faye Weldon, Barreca traces what she sees as the defining features of comedy in women's writings: without the necessary happy ending or the closure of marriage, women's comedies . . . destroy a social order, perhaps but not necessarily to establish a new and different order. . . . They use comedy not as a safety valve, but as an inflammatory device, seeking, ultimately, not to purge desire and frustration but to transform it into action; the reader is not left Content with happy resolution but engaged with the text in a way to convert awareness of the disfunctional or unfair social order into an agenda of change." (8) Similar steps through a transformation of oppression into freedom of expression is what Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi has called "stage four" consciousness: "creative non- victimhood": 77 This final stage culminates earlier stages thfough which the colonized— women, minorities, actual members of ex-colonies— must pass: (1) denial; (2) realization of oppression but submission to the status quo; (3) anger. Only in the fourth stage can people freely realize and express themselves. (Gelpi, qtd. Van Spanckeren 103) From denial, to recognition, then to anger, "the colonized" move finally into the fourth stage— freedom of expression. One step away from anger, energy is converted (through wit- work) to language. Writing, critical theory, and performance art by contemparary women respond to and create this growing awareness: writers both in literature and in academia have abandoned their earlier recognitions of women as victims. Yet Biddy Martin identifies . . . a danger in too virulent a critique of the notion of oppression. If it is conceptualized out of existence, rendered immaterial, this is to have serious repercussions upon material intervention. (16) On the other hand, to understand women's humor strategically only as an expression of outrage or cunning against patriarchal influence in all the range of nuance that individuality permits is to invite a new monolith. Biddy Martin cautions against a radical feminist construction of woman-essence for the convenience of a categorical theory: We must question the extent to which our projects and our meanings subsume difference and possibility under the conceptual and ^ strategic grasp of a unitary identity of woman, the extent to which we close our struggle around certain privileged meanings, 78 naturalizing the construct woman once again. (Martin 14) Humor interrupts the single trajectory of this unitary identity of oppression. Contemporary women write influential texts in which humor grows out of an individualistic orientation. Every witty (or unhappy) woman is witty (or unhappy) in her own way, not likely to fall into what Biddy Martin alludes to as the "strategic grasp" of the unitary identity of subversive confrontation. Darkly true, after all, is Martha Bruere and Mary Beard's 1934 euphemism, "The flowers of [women's] humor are as varied as their lives." Thus in two important— crucial— ways humor adjusts the lens on the question of women's oppression. Through expressions of wit, women effectively counter the assumptions that work against their achievement and voice, and through the humorous perspective that grants psychic distance to the intrusive disturbances in their lives, a confidence and perspective enhances real possibilities. The liberation theory of humor describes this distance, this space: When we operate out of our sense of humor, we train a widened perspective on our selves. We see ourselves and our lives from a certain distance, and that distance makes all the difference. (Mindess 701) Away from the cultural narrative of women as oppressed, we can understand the control and detachment that rests in the humorous perspective. 79 Deep genuine humor . . . extends beyond jokes, beyond wit, beyond laughter itself to a peculiar frame of mind. It is an inner condition, a stance, a point of view, or in the largest sense an attitude to life. (Mindess 701) How is it that one can achieve the freedom of this "attitude to life"? What counsel can contemporary literary women find in the strategy of humorous expression? As women "think back through their mothers" they come across an unexpected mentor. Virginia Woolf, that witty foremother of women's writing, recognized this freedom of the mind as the vital perspective of the visionary writer. Metaphorically she describes the dynamic toward achieving what she calls this "wide, eager, and free" sensibility in A Room of One's Own: it comes through humor. Through a playful re-orientation toward the dominant system, the apprentice writer (a.k.a. woman of authentic self-expression) can be free of defensiveness and conciliation. Woolf presents a strategy of humor, although with what some critics have found to be an edge of ambivalence: she exhorts its advantages and yet at the same time cautions its use. She understands the critical teeth that nip at the heels of women who dare to laugh. Woolf wryly conducts a tutorial evaluation of the work of her hypothetical young woman novelist, whom she calls Mary Carmichael. She encourages Mary to first "look beneath 80 into the depths," to "illumine her own soul," and to observe the vivid and unrecorded lives of obscure women. Then she recommends that the young writer must "learn to laugh" at male vanities (26). Woolf, however, promotes such boldness timidly, sotto voce: And then I went very warily, on the very tips of my toes (so cowardly am I, so afraid of the lash that was once almost laid on my own shoulders), to murmur that she should also learn to laugh, without bitterness, at the vanities— say rather at the peculiarities, for it is a less offensive word— of the other sex. These peculiarities of the other sex are for Woolf signified by a spot on the back of the head, available for close scrutiny by the woman writer who will cast it into text: For there is a spot the size of a shilling at the back of the head which one can never see for oneself. It is one of the good offices that sex can discharge for sex— to describe that spot the size of a shilling at the back of the head. She anticipates the charge of unfairness: that a man so described has no rebuttal to a discourse that he cannot match— a description of what he cannot observe or know. Woolf answers that women conventionally have been the object or butt of satiric commentary; with heavy irony she implies that the accuracy and honesty with which women have been treated at the hands of Strindberg will be reflected now in the work of modern women writers. Think how much women have profited by the comments of Juvenal; by the criticism of Strindberg. Think with what humanity and 81 brilliancy men from the earliest ages, have pointed out to women that dark place at the back of the head! And if Mary were very brave and very honest, she would go behind the other sex and tell us what she found there. (94) To look and then to "tell us" is to invite comedy. One Bergsonian formula for laughter, after all, is the reminder of the physical as it interrupts an intellectual or spiritual stance. And lest the reader doubt the aggression in this earnest proposal to interpret humorously for men their unsuspected reality, Woolf recalls some texts resulting from such a study: Jane Austen's pretentious Woodhouse and George Eliot's man of low wick, Casaubon: A true picture of man as a whole can never be painted until a woman has described that spot the size of a shilling. Mr. Woodhouse and Mr. Casaubon are spots of that size and nature. (94) But Woolf moves now to a quick caveat, and we remember her earlier remarks about inhibited women writers influenced by anticipated criticism. She had recommended us to read old forgotten novels and listen to the tone of voice in which they were written to divine that the writer was meeting criticism; she was saying this by way of aggression, or that by way of conciliation. . . . She had altered her values in deference to the opinion of others. (77) Now perhaps Virginia Woolf herself feels again that "lash to the shoulder" from patriarchal society, because she modifies her call for Juvenalian satire: Not of course that any one in their senses would counsel her to hold up to scorn and ridicule of set purpose— literature shows 82 the futility of what is written in that spirit. Be truthful, one would say, and the result is bound to be amazingly interesting. Comedy is bound to be enriched. (94-95) Mary Carmichael has taken notes on the shilling-spot on the back of patriarchy's head, and through the language of truth she produces humor. Woolf has instructed Mary in a strategy for women writers that invites that freedom of mind essential to vision. For Virginia Woolf the humorous attitude (like that outlined by Freud) here facilitates a bold and honest perspective. In her writing, Mary Carmichael now has "natural advantages" when men are "no longer the opposing faction": Fear and hatred were almost gone, or traces of them showed only in a slight exaggeration of the joy of freedom, a tendency to the caustic and satirical, rather than to the romantic, in her treatment of the other sex. Then there could be no doubt that as a novelist she enjoyed some natural advantages of a high order. She had a sensibility that was very wide, eager, and free. (96) Residual rage may linger in "a tendency to the caustic and satirical, rather than to the romantic, in the treatment of the other sex," but Woolf urges her woman writer to press on in earnest. She compares Mary's determination to write the woman-vision ("thinking of things in themselves") to a horse race beset with hurdles. Woolf, herself seeing clearly the antagonism of the patriarchal world, curiously wishes for her Mary Carmichael, writing in the midst of these voices, a magnificent single-minded oblivion: 83 I saw, but hoped that she did not see, the bishops and the deans, the doctors and the professors, the patriarchs and the pedagogues all at her shouting warning and advice. You can't do this and you shan't do that! . . . like the crowd at a fence on the race-course, and it was her trial to take her fence without looking to right or left. If you stop to curse you are lost, I said to her; equally, if you stop to laugh. Hesitate or fumble and you are done for. Think only of the jump, I implored her, as if I had put the whole of my money on her back, and she went over it like a bird. (97; emphasis added) A soaring flight of female imagination is launched with the lightness of humor, a sensibility that for Woolf is "wide, eager, and free." Conversely, nevertheless, Woolf predicts that Mary's comic expression, satire, or jokes may bring her defeat. Above all, Woolf wants Mary to write her story, her Life's Adventure, and laughter may divert her, satire may draw lethal criticism. So Virginia Woolf— mother of Anglofeminism— says "Learn to laugh," but "don't stop to laugh." Humorous perception is essential, but (as our nineteenth century Frances Whicher pointed out) wit can be dangerous. Contemporary feminist critics are not so sensitive to the warning labels for humor. Mary Carmichael's humorous text was the spot (bald?) on the back of the male head; her task was to "tell us what she found there," so that "comedy would be enriched." When Helene Cixous confronts the male back, however, the narrative is cast in terras both life- threatening and life-generating. Cixous's essay "The Laugh 84 of the Medusa” takes as a frame-myth Perseus's rash boast to kill Medusa. In the myth he beheads her, but here Medusa is "beautiful and she's laughing." Whereas Mary Carmichael might feel intimidated by the "doctors and professors" et al, for Medusa the male threat is against her very life. Mary has cunning and verbal skill as weapons; Medusa has her essential mythology as her power. To look straight at her brings death because Medusa stares down the male myths. It turns out, Cixous claims, that male fear of women is energizing for their imagination as well as erotically arousing: Men say that there are two unrepresentable things: death and the feminine sex. That's because they need femininity to be associated with death; it's the jitters that gives them a hard-on! for themselves! They need to be afraid of us. (885) In Cixous's narrative, male fear is legion. Medusa sees Perseus (his form in multiples) approaching, marching backwards. This phalanx of Perseuses is taking no chances— they will not face her lest they receive the look that kills, and they carry ritual potions to ward off evil. Like Woolf's Mary Carmichael, Cixous's Medusa sees the back of the male figure: "Look at the trembling Perseuses moving backward toward us, clad in apotropes." Even though Medusa does not have Mary's literary task of converting the lofty male cerebral faculty into a cameo portrait of stark physicality which will render him humorous, Medusa does have 85 a brief and comically sensual response: "What lovely backs!" Then she remembers herself: "Not another minute to lose. Let's get out of here." Cixous's Medusa is not on feminist assignment to deconstruct Perseus or his mission— she separates. She lives and goes on to voler (double translation: to fly/to steal). "Flying is woman's gesture— flying in language and making it fly . . . to break up the truth with laughter" (886). Such effusive joy, filling one's mouth with language in a "honey-mad" excess and exhilaration metaphorically frame the strategies described by Patricia Yaeger in her discussion of the escape from patriarchal restrictions and the celebration of woman-play. Yaeger's work Honey-Mad Women: Emancipatory Strategies in Women's Writing develops a feminist theory of play, "an examination of the ways in which play can help psyches work, either collectively or individually, to transform the conditions of their socialization" (226). Play, in Yaeger's study, is always in the spirit of opposing "the weight of patriarchy— its force and inevitability" (227), the point being to understand "the cracks, flaws, and inequities, the "madness" of ideology that form the basis and create the need for play (238). Playfulness does offer to the writer a way of "unburdening oneself of the dominant tradition, of lightening the weight of custom and making it open to change" (231). Yaeger's study generates a critical dialogue that models feminist 86 concerns in the considering humor in women's writing. Carla Kaplan questions the value of the critical agenda of identifying play in women's writing; such work, in her view, can instead vitiate texts that serve as an "indictment of patriarchal values and male domination . . . It is dangerous to overprivilege play . . . To insist that all successful strategies succeed in all situations," Kaplan argues is to invite misinterpretation (359). The tension here centers on texts Yaeger chooses as problematical. They are disruptive ("mischievous") perhaps, but not altogether humorous. Kaplan is annoyed by Yaeger's invitation to "play" with texts that, for her, do not clearly signal humor; after the reading, then, a certain irritation is likely to remain with the tea leaves. Certainly misinterpretation is the foul-ball in the game of humor: claiming to find playfulness in a text or to understand a narrative as a joke or to read irony in a solemn statement is always a choice to suspend belief. The reader must decide: is this text playful or is it earnest? Is this a joke or a creed? Interpretation of play or of irony as strategy rests with a complicity between reader and writet; Wayne Booth describes this as a bargain struck entirely through the reader's assessment of the author's intentions (9). At any juncture, of course, the reader can stumble; Booth points out, too, that 87 some modern critics . . . have suggested that every literary context is ironic because it provides a weighting or qualification on every word . . . requiring the reader to infer meanings which are in a sense not in it. (7) The writer/reader bargain is critical for humor to succeed. "Even today most of [Gertrude Stein's] works are commonly misunderstood," notes Richard Kostelanetz in 1980 (xiii); because of her heretical experimentation. Her word play becomes potentially a step to revolutionary change, but only if the reader elects to "play" as well. Through play, as the operative strategy, new forms can be constructed, and those established "people who generally smell of the museums" are surpassed. Stein takes control, with the detachment that she shows when she claims, "I like a view, but I like to sit with my back turned to it" (SW 3). My argument interconnects the reader's play with the writer's strategy of humor. Drawing the reader into the collusion of delight that mirrors the dynamic of the joke structure, the writer combines what Jerry Flieger points to in Freud's work as those "twin esthetic mysteries dear to his heart; the writer's magic (which he calls 'the poet's secret') and the joker's art" (277). With her magic as a writer, the woman poet voices the humor in the gaps between her inter-identities, between her experience ; the joke of suppressed libido and the wit of repressed hostility serve as defense and attack. Control monitors both from within and from outside relax. The "joker's art" shapes the 88 poetics. The poet's own mother/super-ego counsels her to establish the distance that allows her to experience Bergson's momentary "anesthesia of the heart." Her special gift of humor brings a "peculiarly liberating and elevating effect" and in this "politics of play," we understand, too, the heartening strength available in the study of it. No trivial pursuit, humor provides an intellectually complicated, socially influential, life-affirming engagement. * * * My project, then, is to use these theoretical frameworks of psychological and sociological approaches to humor to look at the techniques and at the consequences of humor strategies which inform the work of women poets. A methodology of inclusiveness guided my choice of writers and texts: because my early hypothesis centered on the impossibility of commonality for women's experience and writing— along with a concommitant problematical sisterhood — I elected to focus on three quite different writers, as representative of many others. To emphasize the complex plural identity of individual women as well as the diverse matrices of humor stimuli, I have selected poets who inscribe differences of class, geography, profession, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Within the limits of a dissertation, this can only suggest the variety that I argue. 89 Gertrude Stein, for example, is American, but spent most of her working life in France writing about being American; she identifies herself as a Jew and casts the metaphors of ethnicity into humor. Her lesbian domesticity emphasizes her female presence and yet she co-opts male behavior and persona often to comic effect. Dorothy Parker represents the urban professional woman in America during decades of economic upheaval as well as dramatically changing popular views of women; with satire she engages brutal situations of sentimental women caught in ruthless romance rituals or in abject exploitation. Although Parker was half Jewish (nee Rothschild), she experienced her Jewishness, as I see it, not as culture but as interior intra-ethnic conflict and social vulnerability in a time of unrestrained anti-Semitism. Anne Sexton represents the crucial centrality of women in the class and gender structure of the entrepreneurial American Dream; she typifies the mid-century "feminine mystique" of the princess turned suburban mother, idled by affluence and dependent upon psychoanalysis. Her black humor confronts a conservative American Zeitgeist entangled in patriarchal religious motifs and obsessed with the family romance. All three poets recognize inter-conflicting gendered identities through strategies of humor. The concept of "strategy" is central, locating the discussion in a dialogue of tension, positing a design to 90 engage an ally or confront a challenging force. In this dissertation I use the term "strategy" to mean the conscious maneuvers and purposeful devices that shape the discourse of connection between writer and reader both to produce pleasure and to gain a partisan allegiance through the co- optive delight inherent in humor. To speak of maneuvers and purpose implies assessing the poet's intention, a task complicated by the intentional disguise inherent in the structure of the joke-event and by the reader's necessary agreement with the assumptions of the text, based on her own experience and views. To dismiss the punch of an abrupt turnabout ending in Dorothy Parker's poems, for example, and instead read bitterness and vulnerability is to miss the point; yet ambiguous conflation of authorial and poetic personae permit such various interpretation. Conversely, to interpret (through silent reading) a sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay as a poignant refrain may create a text quite different from that same lyric as crooned by contemporary performance artist Andrea Marcovicci; setting a breathy caesura ahead of the closing line and then belting it out, she gives the poem a wry twist and a punch line— to waves of audience laughter.9 As feminist critics have pointed out, "strategies of writing and of reading are forms of cultural resistance,"10 but readerly cognition can largely determine the affective success of the humorous text. Humor relies on readerly reconstruction of implicit textual ellipses through 91 accurate comprehension of referential allusions— as well as an understanding of ironic tone. Because humor negotiates a veiled discourse which alludes to a sub-text of secondary meaning, success rests with the art of the disguise. The artist controls language to effect the joke, structure the irony, or to veil the aggression; her intentional linguistic turns facilitate a collaborative exchange between the writer and the reader. I have never intended my work here to be a rollicking romp through collections of light verse, or a survey of women's wit.11 The subjects of my three extended chapers are women of significant literary reputation in the twentieth century, all of whom invite critical attention to the problematics of their use of humor. Much more than antic narrative is happening in the literary production of these writers; each is engaged in the dynamic enterprise of interpreting meaning in the twentieth century, writing into the conflicting messages of the debates their own polyvocal text. They are not necessarily known as humorists, although one of my criteria for selection was that the critical response had identified humor in their work. Gertrude Stein is generally recognized as being droll; a witty excerpt from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is included as the closing selection in the important 1934 anthology of American women's humor Laughing Their Way. Yet in 1936 Thorton Wilder astutely pointed out that the 92 confusion caused by Stein's opaque writing was further complicated by her ’ ’spirit of play.” The reason, according to Wilder, which "renders this style difficult for many readers proceeds from the author's humor" (48). Neil Schmitz's 1974 study of Stein's confrontation of patriarchy humorously inscribed in Tender Buttons and The Autobiography suggests the work yet to be done in the analysis of humor as a controlling method in Stein's prose poems.12 In my own study, Gertrude Stein's view of the world as a humorist— this BEING humorous— becomes the subject of her writing. She tirelessly writes the awareness of being. For Stein, writing meant the flex of the human mind, a "self-portrait" of consciousness. As her particular imprint, it was the recording of the ironic, whimsical, and deliciously arrogant humor in her lively "continuous present"— an ongoing humorous attitude, which Freud identifies as "a rare and precious gift, and many people are even without the capacity to enjoy humorous pleasure that is presented to them" (21.166). I now believe that the fullest importance of Stein's gift comes through the power of her humor. Dorothy Parker is acknowledged to be the definitive woman writer of humor in the twentieth century, her name almost a cliche to signify female wit— or sarcasm. Her name appears on summary lists of humorists in any discussion of major American humorists— often as the only woman included. New feminist studies of women's humor discuss Dorothy Parker 93 as a major figure of popular culture13 and anthologies include a standard selection. Ironically, her reputation for biting wit has worked to subvert the critical reception of her work. Critical response to Dorothy Parker has faded to pat assessment; two biographies in the same year (1988) treat her life with disdain and her work as autobiographical.14 On the contrary, I would argue, Parker's fiction demonstrates a virtuosity of incisive commentary on the vivid inequities of human behavior that themselves pass for sophistication, maturity, moral rectitude, and domestic serenity. Her dark, often harsh, prose insights are cynical, often far from humorous. In her short stories the humor flashes in sardonic asides or pointed description; in the poetry it dazzles. I want to highlight them as epigrammatic commentary to be read within a discursive range of passionate social awareness. To do this, I draw on the theory of the strategic psychological and social interchanges involved in what Freud calls wit- work. Utilizing the dynamic and structure of the Freudian joke^-act, I read Parker's individual poems as complex responses that speak to and illuminate the individual prose narratives, lending to entire work a full coherence. Humor facilitates the genre-dialogue between the bleak fiction and the feisty poetry; hearing the lyric laughter of Parker's poetry, a reader can address the narrative despair, and we can more fully understand the strength of the continuum. 94 Parker herself directed an editorial arrangement of alternating sections of prose and poetry in the 1944 Portable Dorothy Parker, and this invites the sort of interstitial reading that I propose. Anne Sexton's humor contributes to the insights she had when she claims that "the crystal truth is in my poems." A progressively black humor revises her earlier searing confessional mode into existential autonomy. Defying conventional restraints on women's writing, her poetry ripples with ribald and scatological frankness, heretical caricature, and a tone that at times seems to reflect more a skeletal rictus than a smile. Sexton demonstrates the accuracy of Freud's claims for humor which has "something liberating about it, . . . something of grandeur and elevation," through which the traumas of the world "are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure." (21.162) Sexton achieves this "humorous attitude . . . by means of which a person refuses to suffer, emphasizes the invincibility of [her] ego by the real world, victoriously maintains the pleasure principle." She calls this "the excitable gift." Sexton's black humor is apparent in the early work, but the full impact of her deployment of humor as a strategy comes with the publication of Transformations. In this frame series of poems she moves away from the confessional poetry she had written as a way of working through a painful emotional breakdown. With an irreverent 95 parodic look at childhood's fairy tales through the eyes of the poet/witch/shaman, she becomes an ironic interpreter of her culture's messages. Out of the tensions of mid century's Atomic Age, that Zeitgeist of moral prescriptions that froze individuals into an emotional cold war within the "nuclear" family, Sexton (in Emily Dickinson's words) "dances like a bomb." Through what she calls her "dark, dark laughter," she transforms not only the myths of girlhood but her own struggle as a woman to come to terms with her understanding of her self and her figures of God. "Humor," for Freud, "takes the place in the great series of methods devised by the mind of man for evading the compulsion to suffer"; and as Anne Sexton distances her personal self into a wry persona of witch/joker, she gains a new and powerful voice. Finally, we can read the echo of the contagious laughter of women not only in their own contemporaries, but in the work of those who followed. Stein's language experiments shine out in the work of Lynn Hejenian? her laughing lesbian experience rings in Judy Grahn's merriment. Dorothy Parker's caustic punchlines color the poetry of Erica Jong, Diane Wakoski, and a host of others; her witty deflation of female romantic enthrallment inspired the young Gloria Steinem. Anne Sexton's dark laughter loops through the synechoches of Cynthia Macdonald's fW)holes (1984), and the vivid irony of Sharon Olds' narratives of family entropy 96 (The Dead and the Living. 1984). Sexton's earthy experience of the female body (from the tug by a "Woman With Girdle" to "In Celebration of my Uterus") resonates in the easy rolling of Lucille Clifton's hips ("homage to my hips" in Two-Headed Woman f 1982). Never again will the princess motif hold quite the same charm for a reader of Sexton's Transformations: not soon will Parker's reader consider the intensity of unrequited love to be a permanent dysfunction. In the echo of laughter, the fullness of Cixous's joy, and the bonding of human beings, over the twentieth century we can feel the presence of the woman of humor. As <Jo Davidson said of Stein, "We both laughed, and her laughter was something to hear. There was an eternal quality about her— she somehow symbolized wisdom" (Simon 96). 97 Notes 1 Ruth Bader Ginsburg, during her supreme court confirmation hearings, emphasized that she found little humor in the serious work she did. Indeed, her daughter has written a memoir citing these infrequent instances, ironically titled "Mother Laughed" (Tanner 61). 2 Jane Closson's 1973 M.A. study (CSULB) presented seventeen jokes to "women's liberation members and to non-members." The jokes included "some hostile to men, some hostile to women, and some with no apparent hostility to either." 2 In this project male and female respondents judged the funniness of explicitly sexual cartooning in British "seaside postcards." 4 Later, in 1989 Brooks read her poetry to the MLA Chicago convention, chuckling intermittently in a witty confrontation of racial affectations. 5 In 1994, however, Stimpson promotes laughter as a response to hate speech (Chronicle of Higher Education 16 Mar 1994: B1+). 6 Exasperated colleague in private conversation. 7 See Judith Wilt, "The Laughter of Maidens, the Cackle of Matriarchs: Notes on the Collision Between Comedy and Feminism." Women and Literature. Ed. Janet Todd. NY: Holmes & Meier, 1980; and Regina Barreca's dissertation "Hate and Humor in Women's Writing: a discussion of twentieth-century authors." City University of New York, 1987. 8 Revisionist humor historians have credited Rourke with attempting to include ethnicity as a source of humor. Early clumsy notice of this concludes that minstrel forms inspired jazz and blues, generally boosting creativity in "the Negroid soul" (Blyder* Jackson, "The Minstrel Mode" in The Comic Imagination in American Literature. Ed. Louis D. Rubin, Jr. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1973. 149-156. 8 Westwood Playhouse, Los Angeles, 14 September 1990. Marcovicci's interpretation of several Millay poems drew the audience into rounds of laughter; her cabaret persona was that of sophisticated chanteuse in black velvet who wittily scoffed at love-struck melancholia. 10 Teresa de Laurentis, qtd. Kaplan 339. 98 11 Recommended reading for this approach: Nancy Walker and Zita Dresner's anthology Redressing the Balance collects representative humor by American women since colonial times; Regina Barreca compiles a survey of wicked wit (including a round of prize anecdotes and fast come-backs!) to promote women's strategic use of humor in professional and business situations (They Used to Call Me Snow White . . . but I Drifted. 1991). 12 Of Huck and Alice: Humorous Writing in American Literature. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. 13 For an overview of major anthologies, pioneer studies, and modern analyses which have established a canon and theoretical framework for a male tradition in American humor, see the extensive bibliography in Zita Dresner's chapter "Women's Humor" in Humor in America: A Research Guide to Genres and Topics. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988. 14 Meade's mean-spirited biography (Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell is This?"^ relies on sneering gossip and second hand reports taken out of context; Leslie Frewin (The Late Mrs. Dorothy Parker. 1986) focuses attention on himself as a character in his own drama of reminiscence and reportage, becoming a self-promoting Parker-groupie hopeful. 99 Works Cited Barreca, Regina R. "Hate and Humor in Women's Writing: A Discussion of Twentieth-century Authors." Diss. City University of New York, 1987. Bergson, Henri. "Laughter." 1899. Comedy. Ed. Wylie Sypher. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1956. Bier, Jesse. The Rise and Fall of American Humor. New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1968. Blair, Walter and Hamlin Hill. American Humor: From Poor Richard to Doonsbury. New York: Oxford UP, 1978. Booth, Wayne C. A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1974. Boskin, Joseph. Humor and Social Change in Twentieth Century America. Boston: Public Library of the City of Boston, 1979. Bruere, Martha Bensley and Mary Ritter Beard. Laughing Their Way. New York: Macmillan, 1934. Bunkers, Suzanne L. "Why Are These Women Laughing? The Power and Politics of Women's Humor." Studies in American Humor 4.1-2 (1985): 82-93. Chapman, Antony J., and Nicholas J. Gadfield. "Is Sexist Humor Sexist?" Journal of Communication 26 (1976): 141-153. Cixous, Helene. "The Laugh of the Medusa." Trans. Keith and Paula Cohen. Signs 1.4 (1976): 875-93. Closson, Jane Louise. Humor Appreciation in Women's Liberation Members. M.A. Thesis. California State University Long Beach, 1973. Douglas, Mary. "The Social Control of Cognition: Some Factors in Joke Perception." Man 3 (1968): 361-376. Dresner, Zita Zacklin. "Women's Humor." Humor in America: A Research Guide to Genres and Topics. New York: Greenwood, 1988. Eco, Umberto. "The Frames of 'Comic Freedom.'" Carnival. Ed. Thomas A Sebeok. New York: Mouton, 1984. 1-9. 100 Fine, Gary Alan. "Sociological Approaches to the Study of Humor." McGhee and Goldstein, Vol 1. 159-182. Flieger, Jerry Aline. "The Purloined Punchline: Joke as Textual Paradigm." Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Robert Con Davis. Longman, 1986. 277-294. Freud, Sigmund. "Humour." Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. James Strachey et al. 24 vols. London: Hogarth, 1964. 21.160-166. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1963. Kaplan, Carla. "Women's Writing and Feminist Strategy." American Literary History 2.2 (1990): 339-359. Legman, Dershon. Rationale of the Dirty Joke. New York: Grove, 1968. Martin, Biddy. "Feminism, Criticism, and Foucault." New German Critique (1987): 3-30. (Quoted in Leslie Stern "Introduction to Plaza." m/f 4 (1980): 28. Mellencamp, Patricia. "Situation Comedy, Feminism, and Freud: Discourses of Gracie and Lucy." Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture. Ed. Tania Modleski. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. 80-95. Meredith, George. "An Essay on Comedy." Comedy. Ed. Wylie Sypher. Johns Hopkins UP, 1956. Mindess, Harvey. Laughter and Liberation. Los Angeles: Nash, 1971. Rourke, Constance. American Humor: A Study of the National Character. 1931. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1973. Schmitz, Neil. Of Huck and Alice: Humorous Writing in American Literature. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. Simon, Linda, ed. Gertrude Stein: A Composite Portrait. New York: Avon, 1974. Stimpson, Catharine R. "A Conversation, not a Monologue." The,Chronicle of Higher Education 16 Mar 1994: B1+. 101 . "Nancy Reagan Wears a Hat: Feminism and Its Cultural Consensus." Critical Inquiry 14 (1988): 223-243. Toth, Emily. "A Laughter of Their Own: Women's Humor in the United States." Critical Essays on American Humor. Ed. William Bedford Clark and W. Craig Turner. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1984. 199-216. Van Spanckeren, Kathryn. "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Apocalypse: Laurie Anderson and Humor in Women's Performance Art." Studies in American Humor 4.1-2 (1985): 94-104. Walker, Nancy. A Very Serious Thing: Women's Humor and American Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988. — - and Zita Dresner, eds. Redressing the Balance: American Women's Literary Humor from Colonial Times to the 1980's. Jackson and London: UP of Mississippi, 1988. Warhol, Robyn R. and Diane Price Herndl. "About Feminisms." Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. New Bruswick: Rutgers UP, 1993. Wehr, Demaris S. Jung & Feminism: Liberating Archetypes. Boston: Beacon, 1987. Wilt, Judith. "The Laughter of Maidens, the Cackle of Matriarchs: Notes on the Collision Between Comedy and Feminism." Women and Literature. Ed. Janet Todd. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. 1929. San Diego: Harvest, HBJ, 1957. Yaeger, Patricia. Honey-Mad Women: Emancipatory Strategies in Women's Writing. New York: Columbia UP, 1988. Yates, Norman. The American Humorist: Conscience of the Twentieth Century. Ames: Iowa State UP, 1964. 102 Chapter Three Sitting with Her Back to the View: Gertrude Stein's Skeptical Joke It is a difficult thing to like anybody's else ideas of being funny. Everybody's Autobiography (136) Dance a clean dream and an Extravagant turn up, secure the steady rights and translate more than translate the authority, show the choice and make no more mistakes than yesterday. Tender Buttons (SW 508; format mine) It takes very much courage to do anything connected with your being that is not a serious thing. . . In some, expressing their being needs courage, in foolish ways, ways that are foolish ones to every one else, in them. It is a very difficult thing to have courage to buy clocks and handkerchiefs you are lofing, . . . with which you have very seriously pleasure with enjoying and everybody is thinking then that you are joking. Making of Americans (SW 3 07; format mine) In the midst of writing. In the midst of writing there is merriment. "Lifting Belly" (Bee Time Vine 115) I. Gertrude Stein wrote courageously. For her, writing was "expressing her being" often in "ways that are foolish ones to every one else." She took "very seriously pleasure with enjoying" while readers and critics were wondering 103 whether or not she was joking. She was seriously dedicated to her work, yet her vision was imbued with humor. When, in 1914, critics parodied Tender Buttons and other poems in Life magazine, she instructed the editors ’ 'that the real Gertrude Stein was . . . funnier in every way than the imitations, not to say much more interesting, and why did they not print the original" (Selected Writings 161J.1 Art and humor were the twin geniuses of her life. When we recognize humor as the enabling understanding for an otherwise hermetic body of experimental texts, Gertrude Stein's poetry can become for contemporary feminist critics an inspiration entirely new. As late as 1980 Richard Kostelanetz reflected that on one hand "no other twentieth-century American author had as much influence as Stein; and none influenced his or her successors in as many ways." On the other hand, he mused: "One curious fact that I will let others explain is the absence of visible influence upon subsequent women writers" (YGS xxxi). Indeed, in this study I am demonstrating (in company with other feminist critics since that 1980 Kostelanetz commentary) that Stein's influence on women writers is certainly greater than has been recognized, both in her use and critical analysis of language and her actual presence as larger-than-life woman artist. Recovering and reading Stein had been a project of her friends who posthumously published the erotic poetry (and 104 other work), a new generation of artists, academics in research, and the women's movement along with the gay liberation movement (Stimpson UCLA). Gertrude Stein's place in American literature is recognized as central; it continues to be assessed either in terms of formalist experimental techniques or else as an "intuitive" recognition of a personality constructed by the responses of readers and critics according to their own lights. Catharine Stimpson in 1990 says that readers are still inventing their own personal Gertrude Stein ("Flourishing" 7). Feminists have contributed significantly by bringing studies of presymbolic language patterns into an intertextual dialogue; they have discovered the extensive legacy of coded lesbian poetry. Humor is generally mentioned briefly as an accepted, but unexamined, presence; I want to read her prose-poems, her "plays," and her magisterial non-sense pieces (which claim to clarify) within her radical strategy which advances the cognitive power of language.2 II. Can you be more confusing by laughing? Do say yes. — "Have They Attacked Mary. He giggled." There is another thing that one has to think about, that is about thinking clearly and about confusion. . . . A great many think that they know confusion when they know or see it or hear it, but do they. A Thing that 105 seems very clear, seems very clear but is it. ("Portraits,” Lectures 173) Gertrude Stein's readers have indeed been confused, but her critics have not always known when to laugh. Her wit has helped to de-center the assumptions of literary production, and her personal idiosyncrasies have always captured the imagination of the world of art and literature, but the act of reading Stein continues to puzzle readers. Early critics, confused but not laughing, simply excoriated her work as childish, tedious, and immature. Her brother called her work stupid. Other critics charge her with not making sense— that is to say, not making sense to them. One particularly notorious reader declared defensively in 1958 that "her failure to communicate is the crime for which we will finally have to hang her" (Reid 191). But slowly the burden of interpretation has shifted onto the reader; now perhaps the fault might lie in the reception. Critical format began to take shape as instruction guides for the very act of reading Stein. Robert Haas titled his 1960 Stein anthology A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein. A catalog of the "how-to-read" advice literature sounds something like Stein's own "insistence" writing; Catharine Stimpson's "On Reading Gertrude Stein, Marjorie Perloff's "Six Stein Styles in Search of a Reader," Ellen Berry's "On Reading Gertrude Stein," and Bruce Kellner's 1989 introduction to A Gertrude Stein Companion 106 titled "How to Read Gertrude Stein." To impose structure on acoherence, many of the assistance efforts inventory numbered concrete plans. In a slightly different tack, however, Judy Grahn's feminist approach (in Really Reading Gertrude Stein1 stresses play. In a step toward undoing the systematic strategies of the Steinian advice literature, Judy Grahn recently observes that "one day it occurred to me to say it the other way: "She is easy. I am difficult'" (Grahn 5). She proposes to slay defensive antagonism to Stein's work by adopting a cheerful optimism that might reveal the text as a friendlier confidant. This inspires an open, indeterminate method of reading, mimetic of the text's own circularity and suggestiveness; as an adaptation of deconstruction, playfulness asks for creative originality. Indeed, Freud's study of play situates it at the outset of the joking mode, to set the tone and relax the listener in order that she might abandon the singleminded directness which interferes with the double mental response required for joking. To alert the reader for Stein's multiple mental processes and layers of suggestion, we can read playfully. Curiously, such a strategy of play inspires Grahn also to count the ways and her list of five includes: play with her. Skip around. Sing, read aloud with a friend. However, the double edge of play involves reader-risk as well. How does she know when such play might interfere with communication? 107 How does she understand the playfulness in the text? Can she be certain that the writer is playing? Is there a joke in this text? Catharine Stimpson sums up Grahn's call for play: "Forget the imperious quest for critical mastery. Replace 'understanding,' the mining of hidden meanings, with 'interstanding,' a lively mixing of writer and reader whom the writer respects" ("Flourishing" 1). Here is a new fear for the Stein reader who had been longing to know how to read: Am I that reader whom the writer respects? When Stimpson speaks of the "reader whom the writer respects," she alludes to a reader who can seljf-identify as that reader whom the writer respects. Stein often asserted ironically, "I am I because my little dog knows me." In other words, through recognition from others— even from one's dog— one gains a sense of self. The identity thus acquired is, of course, only the perception of a response, and here the perception is unnerving: "I am [the respected] I because my little dog [writer] knows me" (sic). Leaning on the earlier humorous assertion that the dog-owner gains identity through the epistemological recognition by his small dog, the "joke" now transfers to confer an identity upon the reader that is as meta-referential as that of the canine pal. How does the reader know that she is the respected reader? Because she understands Stein? Takes the pulse Of the writer? Gets the jokes? Judy Grahn admits 108 that "every single person I know finds her difficult." Now a gnawing suspicion for most honest readers is that their own confusion may seriously interfere with their being that "reader whom the writer respects." Readers have suspected that although they cannot quite see the point, Stein's work is humorous. Indeed, Carl Van Vechten blames her humor in part for an estrangement with her audience: the "actualities" and . . . her perpetual good humor, and her sense of fun, which leads her occasionally into obscuratism, all assist in keeping part of her prospective audience at a little distance behind her. (xxiv) Even her own explanation of her work turns out to be more a composition than explanation: from Tender Buttons we read A WHITE HUNTER A white hunter is nearly crazy. Over thirty years later Gertrude Stein re-reads and "explains" this "prose-poem," this pithy line: "A white hunter is nearly crazy." This is an abstract, I mean an abstraction of color. If a hunter is white he looks white, and that gives you a natural feeling that he is crazy, a complete portrait by suggestion, that is what I had in mind to write. (Haas 24) Stein speaks to the reader in the style of jokiness— cryptic, allusive, and poker-faced. She may be telling "what [she] had in mind to write," but this "complete 109 portrait by suggestion" is as minimalist as the original text. In 1980 Richard Kostelanet2 speculates tentatively, I think I know what she was doing . . . because I am familiar with the history of experimental literature since Stein (and see her as the precursor of contemporary concerns); but I am not at all sure what she ultimately thought she was doing. (xxx) The reader may be familiar with the Freudian triangle of roles in the joking dynamic— the collusion of witty speaker, informed listener, and the deflated, diminished, or unaware "butt"— and these roles now are unclear to the reader already confused. Part of the difficulty of reading Stein, then, has become the jittery suspicion that this joke may be on the reader, if the reader doesn't "catch on" soon. Struggling more sincerely for the pattern, hoping to embrace a structure, to grasp a Steinian point of view, the reader wanders in disconnected insights and non sequiturs until no assumptions about the authorial direction can be decried. Reader is frustrated, then angry; the reader, after all, had wanted to be that "reader whom the writer respects." Instead, reading Stein feels much like being taken advantage of toyed with, joked about. The butt. A contemporary reviewer in 1914, too, felt much like the victim of a bad joke: It is a nightmare journey in unknown and uncharted seas. . . . Scoffers call her writings a mad jumble of words, and some of them suspect that she is having a sardonic joke at the expense of those who profess to believe in her. (qtd. Hoffman 175). 110 * * * Freud calls this type of tendentious joke a "skeptical joke." This is how it goes: Two Jews met in a railway carriage at a station in Galicia. "Where are you going?" asked one. "To Cracow," was the answer. "What a liar you are!" broke out the other. "If you say you're going to Cracow, you want me to believe you're going to Lemberg. But I know that in fact you're going to Cracow. So why are you lying to me?" (Jokes 115) Reading Stein's poetry feels to many readers like being told that your companion is headed toward Crakow, but you are sure that something else is going on and you just don't understand it; your friend's destination seems to you to be a fiction, for whatever purpose, and even though it is in fact his destination, for you it is not the truth. [The] powerful technical method of absurdity is here linked with another technique, representation by the opposite, for according to the uncontradicted assertion of the first Jew, the second is lying when he tells the truth and is telling the truth by means of a lie. But the more serious substance of the joke is the problem of what determines the truth. . . . Is it the truth if we describe things as they are without troubling to consider how our hearer will understand what we say? . . . does not genuine truth consist in taking the hearer into account and giving him a faithful picture of our own knowledge? (Jokes 115) The problem of knowing, and more specifically the problem of what one person can teach another person to know was the painful theme of Stein's early story "Melanctha." In this poignant Garden of Eden, the apple of what one needs Ill to know brings rejection, suspicion, and isolation. The immediacy of knowing (sensuality) is tempered by memory (morality), and intimate communication is shaped by the desired response. Pleasing the loved one leads to dishonesty. Unmediated by humor, the story folds into eddies of distrust, and the only laughter is in the faintly patronizing echo of Jeff's ingenuous ethnicity ("laughter that gives the warm broad glow to Negro sunshine" (111]) and Melanctha's "hard forced" laugh of bitterness. Here language fails to bring "interstandings." Later Melanctha's trust in Jem makes her "foolish." Freud's skeptical joke modifies the pain of mistrust into a short narrative. We listen to the foolish fellow thunder his accusation. And because the announced destination is his companion's actual destination, there is no ready answer to the outrage: "Why are you lying to me?" In fact, that cannot even be the question. It is obvious that the first traveler is not lying. He is going to Crakow. The repressed urge revealed in the joke is neither hostility nor lust. Instead, it has to do with a demand to know the "truth"— not in the abstract, but in what Lacan calls "the locus of signifying convention." When Lacan wishes to explain the complexity of this convention, he curiously (and rightfully) calls up Freud's joke about the traveler en route to Crakow. The dimension of truth emerges with the appearance of language, and the truth as that 112 language produced by or with the Other who is the guarantor of Good Faith, the 'nucleus of our being'" (173). What we are hearing from Lacan is what we already know about humor, and what we read in Gertrude Stein. Integrity in language means writing your own moment, not checking for the little dog who recognizes you or checking the temper of an audience and writing for their pleasure. The language of suppressed desires, shaped to one's own pleasure, can be comically outrageous— Emily Dickinson's "letter [in the unconscious] to the world." Freud's Der Witz. Let us retrace for a moment the lines of the Freudian tendentious joke: an instinct suppressed in the unconscious is briefly allowed to bubble up into the consciousness and is expressed in a clever word play that passes as anecdote, playfulness, or nonsense. The teller relates this to a listener who hears first the language play and then hears the hidden tendency. Triumphant that he is able to acknowledge the tendency (after all, he re-cognizes— knows again— the tendency as his very own) and at the same time he does not have to admit this openly even to himself. The relief he feels causes him to laugh; hearing this laughter that signifies instinctive understanding, the teller can join in open laughter; and the bond is secure. Having been caught by the surprise of hooking into his repressions, however, the listener now resolves to "catch" another, to 113 become a joker himself. The speaker/joker, after all, is the one who ’ "knows." The power of words here reflects the urge to control. The repressed tendency in this joke is not a desire for sexual gratification (to control by seduction— but to settle for smut) or a desire for angry revenge (to control by murder— but to settle for mockery), but rather the desire to "know" (to control by gaining or exceeding the information presented— but to settle for controlling one's own cognitive perspective.) Freud's second Jew is out of control: he feels certain that the information is accurate and yet he reads the intention of his informant to convey something other than the signs that he is getting. He is not getting the "truth” of the informant's news. He believes he is fooled. He believes that he is a fool. This fool-elect is the "second person" in the Freudian joke paradigm. Desire to know, to be in control, is his fixation, and in the fixation of his desire he betrays his access to knowing, through his skepticism. The only truth for him now is that he cannot believe. Desiring not to become a fool has made him a fool. Meanwhile, the train carries its passenger to Crakow, and we are left laughing ruefully at the foolish fellow who scratches to know, to be in control. Perhaps we can remember the joke to tell again; probably we will forget. Only the tendency remains: we want to control, to know, to 114 understand. For a moment the language of joking has made us touch that raw place of uncertainty about knowing anything. If a traveler's announced city of distination can wobble, then the signifying convention is disturbingly decentered. II. Throughout Gertrude Stein's work the double topoi of humor and art weave and intersect, twin strands of development. A double-voiced articulation, both the poetry and the laughter rise from the same depth of creativity that she was able to touch throughout her life. Stein understood the creative impulse as an intuitive center separate from the daily life of public affairs and logic. Similarly, these two modes of experience frame the perspective of the humorist; to explain the automatic quality of habit versus the vitality of contrary instinctual urges, Henri Bergson uses the terms "the mechanical and the living." Arthur Koestler invents the term "bisociation" to develop his theory of humor as energy deflected from two opposing surfaces. Freud speaks of the attentive consciousness versus the "witty" unconscious that holds and represses the most vital elements of human life. An upsurge of this vitality produces humor; likewise, an upsurge of this vitality produces art. Art and humor were the twin geniuses of Gertrude Stein's life. Stein began her tenacious study of her own creative experience in the laboratory at Johns Hopkins as a medical 115 student. During the same years that Freud was studying the link between dream-work and wit-work, Stein was publishing her own student research on the automatic writing of language produced by a submerged consciousness.3 Both Stein and Freud were studing the voiced impulses of the unmonitored aspect of personality. They both called their territory the "unconscious." Freud's notion of wit (der Witz) as an energy-saving short-cut that turns arduous psychic energy into relief laughter echoes Stein's discovery of language that can be produced and written from hidden impulses— a "second personality." Only in later writing did her voiced impulses flash in wit; her academic findings were sober and direct. When she left medical school she dead- panned, "you don't know what it is to be bored" (SW 77). Nevertheless, the writing experiments irresistably led to the aesthetic mandate of her art: "using everything," writing out of "the continuous present" instead of memory, and eliminating nostalgia and emotion from experience to find the clean lines of the moment itself. "Dance the clean dream," she writes (SW 508). The poems of Tender Buttonsf like Freud's dreamers, are "insufferably witty." Verbal strategies of humor run through the entire Stein oeuvre. Puns and nonsense combine lyrically in Tender Buttons and later in the posthumous volumes Bee Time Vine and Stanzas in Meditation. The comic form of the American "shaggy dog story" appears in The Autobiography of Alice B. 116 Toklas when Stein's Alice-voice begins to tell the story of the paintings by Derain and Braque that showed the artists to be "Picassoites"— whenever she returns to announce the beginning of this story once again, she wanders instead into tangential narratives (SW 14, 17, 60, 85, 87). In caricature as a modernist art form she writes disjunctive language impressions of friends and acquaintances. These are ironically called "portraits," although the identity of the sitter may be only revealed in the title and a single mention of a name in the hermetic text. Humor as a strategy to empower language in its ironic doubleness or polyvocal meanings is a function of personal defense and attack, according to major humor studies. In Freud's 1927 essay on the psychological disposition to humor, he describes the humorous attitude, "by means of which a person refuses to suffer, emphasizes the invicibility of his ego by the real world, victoriously maintains the pleasure principle— and all this, in contrast to other methods having the same purposes, without overstepping the bounds of mental health" (21.163). Indeed, when Stein and Picasso sat "knee to knee" explaining their art to each other, the autobiographical Alice reports, Picasso often spbke about unhappiness: Because Picasso is a Spaniard [sic] and life is tragic and bitter and unhappy. Gertrude Stein often comes down to me and says, Pablo has been persuading me that I am as unhappy 117 as he is. He insists that I am and with as much cause. (SW 73) Gertrude poses the question for Alice, but also for the reader. "Do you believe that I am unhappy?" But are you, I ask* Well I don't think I look it, do I, and she laughs. He says, she says, that I don't look it because I have more courage, but I don't think I am, she says, no I don't think I am. (SW 73) Stein may toy with the possibility of her own unhappiness, but her courage, in this exchange, is never at issue. Characteristic of humor, writes Freud, is that the ego "refuses to be distressed by the traumas of the external world," but it seizes upon these errors and difficulties as "no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure" (21.162). Through a long process of resisting suffering, Gertrude Stein came to empower her language and her vision through humor. The pain of her early years produced a rhetoric of defense. She, like her character Melanctha, "had not loved herself in childhood" (Three Lives 90). Feeling dismissed by her parents, Stein had understood her very birth as only a replacement (along with her brother Leo) for two siblings who had died. The word "extra" appears often in the Stein lexicon: "We are extra," she asserts as a non sequltur in "Have They Attacked Mary."4 The peripatetic family moved often, finally to Vienna and back to California in search of business opportunities for her father and a measure of contentment for her mother. 118 A significant lack of maternal nurturing exacerbated young Gertrude's alienation and courage. Always a discontented and ineffectual figure in Stein's early life, her mother died when Gertrude was only fourteen. "When she died we had all had already the habit of doing without her," she observed coldly Everybody's Autobiography 138). The tough independence that her mother's absent behavior and early death occasioned in Gertrude Stein is a trait found to be shared by women who are able to use wit and humor as well as by women who develop into writers. Recent humor research exploring the dvelopment of personal skill and inclination toward the use of humor has found that a lack of early and close mothering, combined with high verbal skills, and aggressive behavior contribute to the invention of comic responses, clowning, and satiric humor (McGhee, "Growing Up" 191). Similarly, Ellen Moers's study of the backgrounds of ninteenth century women writers found that a lack of strong mothering encouraged defiant anger along with independence, both of which circumstances propelled the woman into her writing direction (93). Gertrude Stein became both writer and humorist. Not only family trauma but personal unattractiveness disturbed Stein's teen years. According to her niebe, when Stein was sixteen she weighed one hundred and thirty-five pounds, and later at Radcliffe, she "hired a boy to box with her every day to get some of that weight off" (Haas 134). 119 Training to attack in this sporting, non-combative way, however, may have allowed the tension that became essential to her for creativity; moreover, she later suggested, abandoning such defensive tension might be fatal to artistic production. She once answered Matisse's charge that she had lost interest in him by saying "there is nothing within you that fights itself and hitherto you have had the instinct to produce antagonism in others which stimulated you to attack. But now they follow" (SW 61). Without an attack, either from within or without, there is no tension to provoke creativity. Neither is there a tension to create humor. In a droll preface to the Vanity Fair publication of "A Portrait of Jo Davidson," Stein defended her cubist language techniques in Tender Buttons against critics who, she said, "brought down upon her an enormous amount of ridicule and indignation." Wryly "attacking back," the opening lines of the portrait-poem seem to position the speaker as an out-of- sorts monarch addressing an impertinent military mutiny: To be back, to attack back. Attack back. What do you mean by attack back. To be back to be back to attack back. What do you mean by, what do you mean by to be clean to be a queen to be mean, what do you mean to mean to be a queen to be clean. What do you mean. What do you mean; what do you mean by readdressing a queen. The address the readdress they readdress in between. (Vanity Fair 2 3 February 1930) Humor, writes Freud, "signifies not only the triumph of the ego but also of the pleasure principle, . . . against 120 the unkindness of the real circumstances" (21.163); and Gertrude Stein's real circumstances were formidable. In 1909 when she published Three Lives. Stein set as an epigraph a line attributed to Jules Laforgue; "Done je suis un malheureux et n'est ni ma faute ni celle de la vie" (Therefore I am unhappy, and it is not my fault nor that of life.) Although Stein cites Laforgue as the source of this quotation, this cannot be verified.5 The elusive authenticity of the statement subtly subverts its function as preface to the discourse. Gertrude Stein almost never dropped French words or phrases into her writing, and wrote only one brief film sketch in French; she kept to her claim for English as her language (SW 66, 72). A French preface then is an anomaly in this collection of narratives centering on simple American women whose lives were spent in the service of others. It seems to me, therefore, that this statement of despair is poly-voiced; it belongs to Stein herself far more than to the three narrative subjects or to an incidental comment by Laforgue. Here is unhappiness too heartfelt to present straightforwardly in her native language, and so she veils the text. Although we are able to read it in translation, Stein has both distanced the desperation from the American characters and she has qualified it for the reader. At the time of writing this in Paris, Stein herself was indeed "an unhappy one." She had given up her studies, broken off with her lover, left her 121 country, and settled with her difficult brother; she was writing a novel of a thousand pages that she was unable to publish for twenty years. Her brother Leo imperiously bullied her as they collected art togather, and he ridiculed her writing. As he grew voluble in his self-serving deafness, she fell silent. When the Autobiography became a best seller in 1933, Leo, looking back later, wrote, "If I hadn't known that Gertrude couldn't write . . . I might be inclined to take her more seriously. . . . I doubt whether there is a single comment of general observation in the book that is not stupid" (142). Nevertheless, "the grandeur of [humor] clearly lies in the triumph of narcissism, the victorious assertion of the ego's invulnerability" (Freud 21.163). Triumphantly, then, against what might seem overwhelming odds, Gertrude Stein concluded that she was one of "three first class geniuses." Alice records that "She realizes that in english [sic] literature in her time she is the only one. She has always known it and now she says it" (SW 72). The humor in this role is the controlling principle in her public life. As her own clown, she silences the rebukes. In ironic hyperbole she writes under a Vanity Fair byline of her own name in 1917 to introduce herself as "immensely famous in France" (55). The subtitle of her article is "an Utterance from the High Priestess of Cubist Literature." Because she presents this outrageous yet earnest persona, the critics 122 must first address this invention; she invites and daunts, in the style of her college sparring partner. In 19 30 she quotes Sherwood Anderson's tongue-in-cheek profile of her as "an artist . . . who has even foregone the privilege of writing the great American novel, uplifting our English speaking stage and wearing the bays of the great poets to go live among the little housekeeping words . . ." ("Jo Davidson" 25). Not all contemporaries could tolerate her clownish ego-bluster and respond with irony as keen as Anderson's when he speaks of her restraint in not following her call to write the great American novel. Katherine Anne Porter describes Stein as one of a "company of Amazons [who] played out their self-assumed, self-created roles in such masterly freedom as only a few early medieval queens had equaled" (522). But Gertrude Stein turns her slant lens of comic irony on this sort of scorn. The "genius" label is deconstructed in Alice's Autobiography when Alice sits with "geniuses, pear geniuses and might be geniuses" (81). The category, we learn, may admit some apprentices. To regard oneself as comic is quite different from the appreciation of and laughter at others as comic. In other people, "the comic expresses, above all else, a special lack of adaptability to society," declares Henri Bergson (146). "Any individual is comic who automatically goes his own way without troubling himself about getting into touch with his fellow beings . . . Every member must be ever attentive to 123 his social surroundings; he must model himself on his environment" (147), Through a rigidity that does not conform, an individual can be regarded as comic. Through a lapse of common sense he is not paying attention, and so we laugh at him. "Laughter is, above all, a corrective," Bergson contends. Reversing all of this, we can see that Stein takes herself as comic, and in this role— just where one becomes the art of one's public life— Stein refuses to "be ever attentive to her social surroundings [and to] model herself on her environment"; she becomes, as in Alfred Maurer's 1911 oil painting, The Clowness. an eiron. Stein costumes for the part. She writes often on the artifice of clothing, fashion, and body style. One aspect comedy lies in the notion of "disguising" the body and "going as" someone else. "It might almost be said that every fashion is laughable in some respect," Bergson claims, in his discussion of comic disguise (85). Art and life mime each other in Alice's report of her own earnest conversation on her first evening in the Stein salon under the paintings; she and Miss Mars discuss "how to make up your face." They analyze women's (comic?) "types": "femme decorative, femme d'interieur and femme intrigante" (SW 13). The comic French affectations highlight the absurdity of the topic. Portraits, photographs, and sculptures of Gertrude Stein now have installed her image as a twentieth century icon.6 In many of these, we can find the comic principle of 124 a person observed as a thing (one of Bergson's marks of the comic)— but consistently in a spirit of Stein's approval or amusement. We are not always sure how to read these strange renderings, however, just as it is true that Stein's writing can never be assumed to be either straightforward or ironic. Nevertheless, the richness of the image contributes to our own pleasure in Gertrude Stein, the artist as art: she allows herself to become a Buddha for Jo Davidson's sculpture, a monk for Cecil Beaton's photograph in Belignin, a Clown in a bowler hat in a well-known photograph taken with Toklas, and a sacerdotal figure in a photograph from the Autobiography's first edition— a figure that suggests, for one critic, "dead crusaders" (Alkon 876). She was always aware of the effect of her image. Her monkish "costume was ideal for Spain," the authorial Alice quips; "they all thought of her as belonging to some religious order and we were always treated with the most absolute respect" (SW 109). Yet rhetorical highjinx aside, the Man Ray photographs of Stein at her Renaissance writing table surrounded by her paintings are magnificent. The comic Stein both humanizes her voluble egotism, and invites our shared laughter; her ironic presence calls up laughter both from those who have slipped the bonds of self-conscious cosmetic addiction and from those who recognize an artful and elegant posturing. And no more do we agonize with the college girl turned sparring partner to "get some of that 125 weight off.” "Size is nice," we hear in "Lifting Belly," where laughing asides turn physicality into landmarks: "Mount Fatty." Most widely known of Stein's portraits is the work by Picasso (one of the trio of Stein geniuses), in which she gazes with one eye open large and the other squinting skeptically. Stein's friendship with Picasso^— potentially patriarchal in style— was, it seems to me, a good match, and marked by a sharp humor. Contemporary feminists acquainted with Cixous's lively engagement with the paradigm of patriarchal decapitation as the comeuppance for subversive laughter will read uneasily the story of Stein's portrait sittings. Picasso repeatedly painted out her head— a sort of comic echo of her aesthetic of "beginning and beginning again." But years after the portrait was complete Stein noted that she was one of only two women of her acquaintance who had retained the "ancient fashion" of long hair, and so J — belatedly following a fashion trend— she sheared off her piled hair. Thinking of his portrait, Picasso was "for a moment angry," then philosophical (SW 233). "It is all there," he assured her. Of course "it" wasn't there. Picasso had complained when he had abandoned the painting earlier, "I can't see you any longer when I look" (SW 49); now no observer could. The portrait had become entirely memory. Stein herself was the moment. * * * 126 Not only in her life, but in her work, too, Gertrude Stein presents herself as the genius— the genius in harlequin. Even during what she later calls "all those tormented years," she was able to coach her public in a preferred light-hearted acceptance of her. She ventriloquizes this lesson in clown-appreciation by assigning to Henry McBride the role of speaker: "Laugh if you like, he used to say to her detractors, but laugh with and not at her, in that way you will enjoy it all much better" (SW 114). Against critique and for herself, Gertrude Stein adopts "the humorous attitude" that Freud describes, "by means of which a person refuses to suffer." It is a pleasure "of very high value . . . especially liberating and elevating." Freud casts his own instruction in courage in the words of the individual's super-ego (now "in an amiable mood," quips Freud's editor Strachey). Humor (cast as the super-ego) says to the self or to other people: "Look! here is the world, which seems so dangerous! It is nothing but a game for children— just worth making a jest about!" (21.166). And so Stein chuckles and reads aloud to Alice from the mocking columnists who review Tender Buttons in what is becoming the "long campaign of ridicule" (£W 148) To read the humor of these pieces we need to look briefly at the process. The text of Tender Buttons is, it seems to me, the process of looking itself. The text is personal, humorous, and technically a function of the 127 unconscious, in the manner both of Stein's automatic writing experiements and of the Freudian notion of the release of joking. First, the looking— the language of it— is the letter as Stein's own "agent in the unconscious," in Lacan's terms. It is her own personal connection that informs and becomes the text. On the contrary, Stein herself would have us believe that her process in Tender Buttons is the application of words non-referentially to objects, absenting the creator to pare nails as in the Joycean model: [W]ords that make what I looked at be itself were always to me very exactly related themselves to that thing the thing at which I was looking but as often as not had as I say nothing whatever to do with what any words would do that described that thing. (Lectures 192) The words, Stein claims, are related to the thing at which [she] was looking. But I contend that it is the connection— the stream of thought— that holds the relatedness of language as the agent in the unconscious. I agree with Alicia Ostriker's conclusion that modernist women writers write personally, whereas the reigning doctrine of modernism had become impersonality: Yeats's 'all that is merely personal soon rots,' or the 'extinction of personality' called for by Eliot (46-47). stein's subject throughout all of her poetic work is Stein: her gaze, her thought, her persona, and her life. She has announced that "Her metier is writing, and her language is english [sic]" 128 ( (SW 72). We might add that Gertrude Stein is her subject and humor is her stance. Written with intellect (wit) out of the hidden spring of creativity (the unconscious), these texts inscribe a personal direct process. Stein's great mentor, William James, described the primary reaction to objects as the "ultimate self"; all experience is objective— either self or not-self— and the stream of thought between the two is the subjective condition of the response. But James says, "The knowing is not immediately known. It is only known in subsequent reflection. . . along with whatever else it is thinking. . . a steam of consciousness." The process itself, stripped to its immediate perspective, might be better called a stream of SCIOUSness pure and simple, thinking objects of some of which it makes what it calls a "Me" and only aware of its "pure" Self in an abstract, hypothetic or conceptual way. Each "section" of the stream would then be a bit of sciousness . . . including and contemplating its "me" and its "not me" as objects which work out their drama together. (141-142) In the poetic moment of experiencing an object, then, flashes the drama of the "me" and the "not-me," and the movement of Stein's pencil "voices the articulation of that creative unconscious, just as the joke is the voiced urgency of the suppressed life force. Humor holds the pencil. Before Tender Buttons. Stein had "been concerned with seriousness and the inside of things, in these studies she 129 began to describe the inside as seen from the outside" (SW 147). (Turnabout implied, then, in this text she is no longer focused on seriousness.) Here, too, we must consider the influence of her medical school research in automatic writing. For research subjects, these scientists had used themselves: "We both as far as we know stand as representatives of the perfectly normal— or perfectly ordinary— being, so far as hysteria is concerned," Gertrude records solemnly (494). Of her own writing from the unconscious, she notes, "The stuff written was grammatical, and the words and phrases fitted together all right, but there was not much connected thought" (506).7 During the experiment, Stein listens to a voice reading, writes "automatically," and then manages to read along behind her automatic text production, "following three or four words behind her pencil." We can only imagine the super-ego watching the struggle and advising, "Look! here is the world . . . just something to make a jest about!" That same moment— the moment when the joke can spring from the unconscious and which is also the moment of the act of writing— marks for Lacan the emergence of metaphor. Composing Tender Buttons. Stein writes, in a stream of consciousness, the process of (to paraphrase Lacan) the "think-spark" that connects the desire with the act, the going-to-write.8 Stein's magical snaps of language are 130 written as playful fore-pleasure; in a Steinian use of ludic language we might call such bits "meta-fore." Writing down such meta-for-pleasure language is metonymy turned metaphor. In metonomy objects are chained by signifiers to other signifiers. Objects, signified as names, as nouns, are identified referentially when the reader swings along the metonymic chain of signifiers: the word-to-word identification of description. In that case, the traveler shows his ticket to Crakow. It is not poetry, nor is it a joke. It is only a ticket, with words. But words turned to metaphor empower the language, whether or not we believe the intention or the ticket. Alfred Kazin in the 1967 Paris Review Interviews sums it up: Power, technical and intellectual power, the power to shape words that open up new realities in the mind, is what writers live for. (ix) When Lacan says that the creative spark flashes between two signifiers, and the signifying convention emerges as one word for another, . . . that is the formula for the metaphor and if you are a poet you will produce for your own delight a continuous stream a dazzling tissue of metaphors. (157) Instead of a metonymic system of signifiers, the metaphoric letter in the unconscious produces for the poet "the credit . . . which [s]he has drawn over [her] intentions" (175). The metaphor voices the creative spark. 131 The metaphors of Tender Buttons. it seems to me, are of three types, and all of them are comic: purely nonsensical, aphoristic, and sexually tendentious. Playing with the "riddling poetry" in this way we are following John Ashbery's early reading of Stein as "an all-purpose model which each reader can adapt to fit his own set of particulars. . . . a hymn to possibility" (251).9 To develop the comic possibility in this extremely difficult text is to open further the range of ways to read, and to sharpen our play of connection, instead of checking up for our pre-inscribed views. My first type of comic metaphor is nonsense-play with words. Although this is never a style to impress Stein's critics, she yet continues in spite of scathing criticism to produce here (with Melanctha's "break neck courage") her joking jumps of attention. Because of her persistent defiance, we could call these pieces tendentious, in the Freudian meaning of containing an edge of repressed hostility. Their form radically mocks convention. We will see that even Stein's later "explanations," which they pretend to help, become hermetic poetry themselves. Frequently they serve only to convince the reader that the text is lying; the text seems to want to pretend its destination in Lemberg. "Wit," (writes Freud in the early translation of "Der Witz") "insists on maintaining play with words or with 132 nonsense unaltered. . . . Thanks to the ambiguity of words and the multiplicity of conceptual relations, . . . nothing distinguishes wit more clearly from all other psychical structures than this double-sidedness and this duplicity in speech" (Jokes 172). But h^re is the rub: "wit appears most brilliantly, however, at the moment when we slyly satisfy ourselves that we have made sense of nonsense" (Jokes 12). Therefore, even when the sense is not forthcoming from the language itself, the reader must somehow continue to believe, at some level, that the text is not lying. Boasting of the sources of pleasure at its command, [wit] would appear before criticism as sheer nonsense and not be afraid to provoke contradiction from it; for the joke could reckon on the hearer straightening out the disfigurement in the form of its expression by unconscious revision, and so giving it back its meaning. (Jokes 204; emphasis added) Stein revels here in metaphoric pleasure nonsense. Through Freud's recommended "unconscious revision," we can say of Tender Buttons. I believe, just what Freud wittily claimed for certain odes: "they are a kind of picnic in which the author supplies the words and the readers the meaning" (Jokes 86). With some of Freud's "unconscious revision," I propose to catch some Jamesian "bits of SCTOUSness": A NEW CUP AND SAUCER Enthusiastically hurting a clouded yellow bud and saucer so is the bite in the ribbon. 133 (Here are impressions of ribbons, gift paper, enthusiasm, lifting the calico yellow print china cup and saucer out of the wrappings, but somehow happiness is clouded by hurt and bite,) A DRAWING The meaning of this is entirely and best to say the mark, best to say it best to shown sudden places, best to make bitter, best to make the length tall and nothing broader, anything between the half. (The artist tenses to capture the scene in pencil, measuring against the paper, trying to do best best best, catching the sudden places, but finally feeling bitter with attempting to satisfy the arbitrary standards of the "mark.") My second category of Buttons metaphor is the aphorism, in this instance a joke in the form of a horoscope or the crinkled strip from a fortune cookie. Such a reading is not as whimsical as it might appear. After all, Stein is noted for her invention of aphorisms, most memorably "Remarks are not literature," and "You are all a lost generation." Horoscope readings fascinated Stein; the autobiographical Alice tells of her delight upon meeting Max Jacob the cubist innovator, not because she learns anything about his aesthetic views, but simply because he reads her horoscope and writes it down. Usually, she tells us, he will "just say them off hand" (25). Just so, Stein's children's book, To Do: Alphabets and Birthdays appears to "just say them off hand," but in this volume of exhaustive innovation, each day records either a sequence of names or an annotation on the date, in the manner of conventional birthday books, but the 134 acoherent language sequences of Alphabets and Birthdays situate themselves "on the border of fact and fancy," admits editor Donald Gallup (xi). Cast as horoscope entries, then, sections of Tender Buttons can forecast a mandarin joy or a caution. Again, my "translations" are in parenthesis: Search a neglect. A sale, any greatness is a stall and there is no memory, there is no clear connection. (SW 480) (This is a good day to rummage at lawn sales. Watch out for the cunning neighborhood sharpster.) Suspect a single buttered flower, suspect it certainly suspect it and then glide, does that not alter a counting. (SW 484) (Do your gardening today, but take time out to caress the slippery leaves, the dewy flower. But don't try to pick bouquets— leave all of them blooming.) Equally promising is the jolly prospect of unfolding a ribbon of tissue from the crisp folds of the fortune cookie and reading the Stein stream of thought. "Yes!" the diner laughs, and passes it over to her companions to read. "But whatever can this mean?" they ask. After all, this ribbon of words was printed with no thought of its reader; it is a joke in search of the joker. A miniature widom, it nestles into one's life wherever it fits. Such oblique commentaries are later taped to the refrigerator. Now try Tender Buttons as fortune cookies: 135 Anything that is decent, anything that is present, a calm and a cook and more singularly still a shelter, all these show the need of clamor. What is the custom, the custom is in the centre. (SW 483) (Pretty boring there in the center of things ["you don't know what it is to be bored"]. You need to get away from the kitchen and the house and all of your church responsibilities and kick up your heels. Let's clamor!) A bent way that is a way to declare that the best is all together, a bent Way show no result, it shows a slight restraint, it shows a necessity for retraction. (SW 484) (Don't apologize so profusely, you are not that guilty. Go slow in talking out your problem. Suggest a vacation instead of counseling. Respect the other person's privacy. Good luck!) Pride, when is there perfect pretence, there is no more than yesterday and ordinary. (SW 481) (A pompous friend is not worth your irritation or attention. Try to regard him simply as the furniture of your daily life.) My third reading of Buttons as metaphor uses Stein's personal references ("demanding and inscrutable" says Bruce Kellner) as a blank joking envelope or "caption" for our own anecdote or event. As another sort of "hymn to possibility," the piece necessarily will change from an impenetrable discourse or Otherness to a text that we can claim as the headnotes for our own narrative fiction or illustration.10 For example, here in excerpts lifted from 136 "Food" in Buttons (SW 480), Stein script-writes and gives stage directions; I extend the action: Suppose there is a pigeon, suppose there is. (A parent teases with an older child on the back porch: "How can we know? A pet? A name? Gabriel? Find work for him? Overnight express? On the grass? Just suppose . . - ") . . . Sincerely gracious one morning, sincerely graciously trembling, sincere in gracious eloping, all this makes a furnace and a blanket. All this shows quality. (Two lovers awaken. The quilts are tumbled. In the next room their glasses are still by the fireplace. It was good for me, was it good for you? It was really good for me, but was it really good for you? It was really really good for me, but . . . ) This brings us to the most contemporary readings of Tender Buttons as lesbian domesticity, encoded in language of friendship, kitchen work, dressmaking and fittings, and explicity genital erotica. Cast in terms of humor, many of the Buttons texts can slide into a licentious joke. Written on holiday in Spain, the "Objects" and "Food" sequences suggest the lush orality of Stein's later "Lifting Belly" frolic. (When we look at the explicitly referential lines of both "Sonatina" and "Lifting Belly," the suggestions in Buttons are more startling.) If our reading style, therefore, is too fastidious to shift to a double entendre mode, we will miss what was very likely its original context: lesbian love. We can take this ribald ticket to 137 Crakow and try to use it on the train to the Lemberg cathedral, but it won't work. What is written here seems all too obvious: Something that is an erection is that which stands and feeds and silences a tin which is swelling. This makes no diversion that is to say what can please exaltation, that which is cooking. (SW 499) Or this: NOTHING ELEGANT A charm a single charm is doubtful. If the red is rose and there is a gate surrounding it, if inside is let in and there places change then certainly something is upright. It is earnest. (SW 464) Michael Hoffman in 1965 reads the work seriously as art, but evades the issue of sexuality: After a time the still lifes begin to . . . [depend] more on the suggestiveness or juxtapositions of words, as in "A PETTICOAT: A light white, a disgrace, an ink spot, a rosy charm." All four items in this short catalogue could possibly be associated in some way with a petticoat, but the associations must be made by the reader. (186) Even in 1976 the critics slide through: "Petticoats are lightweight and often white; a petticoat that shows is a disgrace which might provoke a modest blush. (Stein has been greatly overread, but it seems safe to identify the obvious and public association)" (Dubnick 93). A 1990 feminist reader, Bettina Knapp, however, sets aside the "blind glass" (SW 461) to read "Petticoat" as an expression 138 of Stein's ire against the patriarchal Judeo-Christian society with its hierarchy of unsavory and deficient values. . . . Virginal "light" and "white" opposed to the usually black "ink spot," is the unconventional writer, a "disgrace." The spot from menstruation, "viewed as unclean, symbolizes a rejection of women" (122). More specifically she labels as "pornographic" the mini-poem "PEELED PENCIL, CHOKE." The full text is as follows: Rub her coke. (SW 476) Knapp explicates these six words (title and text) in two pages of exhaustive etymological deconstructions of sexual linguistics. Only fifteen years have passed since Michael Hoffman, in his role of explicator, wrote that the "associations must be made by the reader." Reading a sexual joke can be much like detecting irony, in Wayne Booth's sense of the process of first doubting the straightforward surface of the text, next looking for other meanings, then considering what in this text or other texts by this writer might favor one of these meanings over the another, and finally by reading a new (and superior) meaning into the writing (25). Freud tells us that the source of sexually explicit language— what he calls "smut"— is the speaker's libidinal impulse inhibited by a woman's resistance to seduction. The motivation for the resulting joke, then, is to degrade her ("the woman is exposed") in 139 the company of the other man/men who had earlier blocked his sexual pleasure. The obstacle to frank talk about sexual adventure, Freud explains (seeming to find no contradiction here) "is nothing other than women's incapacity to tolerate undisguised sexuality, an incapacity correspondingly increased with a rise in the educational and social level" (Jokes 101). At this point [male] sexual interchanges need the disguise of the joke. Civilization and higher education have repressed our ability to enjoy undisguised obscenity, Freud laments. Only in the joke is that pleasure regained. There are (at least) two comic cruxes here. First, of course, there is the obvious comedy in Freud's sober analysis that moves women in two directions at once; he establishes woman as object and victim of the sexual joke, and then protests when this woman refuses to tolerate the degradation, proposing that her reason must come not from outrage but from either repression (of her secret urge to be ravished and then ridiculed?) or from her over- intellectualized views (She is too over-educated to participate in the "primary possibilities of enjoyment"? Given the statistics on the lack of accessability and encouragement for women's education until very recently, this sort of general threat from women seems unlikely). Freud's feminization of the sexual joke-logic is comic in its contradictions; one source of the comic is, of course, the "simultaneous application of two different ideational 140 methods, between which the comparison is then made and the comic difference emerges" (JRU 2 34). However, the real "joke" (or perhaps "non-joke") in Freud's analysis is that the dynamic of the "smut" joke lies quite somberly in the structure of the patriarchal social condition itself. Discussion of sexual matters in public settings is always edged with implication, and the "exposure" of women still imposes its tactical restraint in mixed groups. Mary Douglas has pointed out this parallel between the joking dynamic and the social matrix that produces it (see Chapter One for Douglas's account of the social rituals of joking). Apart from mixed social company, women's unrestrained and aggressive sexual joking has gained audiences in the impersonal theatricality of late night TV, and most aggressively in women's comedy presentations where Virginia Woolf herself, as she did in A Room of One's Own, might check whether "behind that red curtain over there the figure of Sir Chartres Biron is not concealed? We are all women, you assure me?" (85). But to reverse the pronominal references in Freud's discussion of sexual joking— and also, by extension, his discussion of most tendentious jokes— moves the text outside of contemporary gendered social experience. Sharing the portmanteau of those individuals whose business it is to restrain those "primary possibilities of enjoyment" are the intellectuals, according to Freud, both 141 men and women. In reading Stein critics, I am struck by the frequency of straightforward discussions of form and aesthetics that systematically ignore the "wild and laughable rhubarb" of the textual/sexual jokes. These may be examples of the most comic automatism of all, the Bergsonian mechanical sensibility driving straight to the business of theory long after others have pointed out the turns in the road. Listening to other Stein readers, we must ask ourselves if we ourselves as readers and critics are seduced by the language of theory and the argot of academia to believe that we can look only at word-by-word "bewilderment and discovery" (Dubnick 95) and not pay attention to the chaos of sensual language whirling just below the writing and joking moment. In the analytical frenzy of deconstruction, are we persuaded that we can read a poem in which, as Stein wrote in Ada, "trembling is all living," and believe that we are only to see words on a page, standing as paint chips in a cubist painting? Feminist scholars who have decoded the misplacement in diction and syntax— hearing the sibilant whispers of sensuality— have returned Gertrude Stein to a world of flesh and blood. So Stein subverts the patriarchal "poetry" not only by abolishing syntax, punctuation, and narration, but here she turns riddling poetry into lively (gay) detective fiction (her favorite genre) in which the "little death" of female 142 sexuality is the metaphor, but the victim of the joke can be the reader who insists on boarding the train to Lemberg while holding a ticket to Crakow. * * * Stein's lesbian lyrics were private, unpublished until after her death. Such secrecy resulted in euphemistic critical commentary even as late as 1973. Florence Howe introduces her feminist anthology No More Masks 1 (’ ’especially not [for women] the oldest of these, the mask of maleness”) with an ironic tribute to Stein's gender-mask: [N]either [Stein nor Marianne Moore] is known for poems written about their lives as women. . . . Their poetry might be described as sexually and otherwise 'objective.' . . . Or to put it another way, those women artists esteemed by men are not ones to declaim themselves as women. (7) Released posthumously by her own wish and with funds from her own estate, the erotic poems make a statement— something of the sort that the later twentieth century would call "coming out of the closet." To appreciate the risk in public lesbian poetic merriment even ten years after Stein's death, we can read Martin Grotjahn, physican and humor analyst, who still refers to homosexuality as a perversion in his 1957 work. He comments on the necessity for a disguise for gay joking: It would be most dangerous, for instance, to call the latent-homosexual kidder by his 143 right name and to challenge him. He would not need to kid if he could embrace manifest homosexuality as a perversion. He will rear up like a wounded lion and repeat: "I was only kidding." (Grotjahn 40) At her death then, Stein had requested Carl Van Vechten to publish everything. Accordingly, editors were selected for the Yale Series of eight volumes of Stein's previously unpublished work. Virgil Thomson, Stein's close friend and librettist for several of her operas, served as editor for the third volume, titled Bee Time Vine. This collection contained many of the shorter lesbian poems, plus "A Sonatina Followed by Another," and "Lifting Belly," a work that Bruce Kellner in 1990 calls "sometimes scabrous" (22). With somber naivete, Thomson introduces "Lifting Belly," that wildly erotic hymn to lesbian intimacy, as "not hermetic, however obscure some references in it may seem. It is a picture of Venice and its environs and of Miss Stein living there" (3). His general introduction advises that poems such as "Sonatina" and "Lifting Belly" "reveal their \ content to persons acquainted with the regions they describe or with their author's domestic life" (v). Because recent scholarship no longer resists the discussion of explicit lesbian content, the text of Bee Time Vine. read as a blend of the two voices of poet and critic, takes on a comic resonance. Taken together, Stein's erotic associative poetry thick with private allusions and innuendo and 144 Thomson's tentative and courteous speculations make a comic dialogue in and of itself. Stein's lesbian lyrics spin an aesthetic thread between the upsurge of libidinous joking in the veiled discourse of Tender Buttons to the disembodied surrealist voices of the "plays.” Even in her earlier Three Lives the characters appeared primarily as verbal consciousnesses, speaking and responding in waves of thought not much different from the continuous present that formed the participial repreating in the bulky Making of Americans. Stein's talking voices in "A Sonatina Followed by Another" make the moment lively with emotion pouring out in language-words asking, answering, giving. This is a scene of playfulness much like the one Lucy Irigaray describes: I would like both of us to be present. So the one doesn't disappear in the other, or the other in the one. So that we can taste each other, feel each other, listen to each other, see each other— together. . . . I would like us to play together at being the same and different. You/I exchanging selves endlessly and each staying herself. ("And the One Doesn't Stir," qtd. Chessman 61? emphasis added) "Playing together" in the merriment of "A Sonatina," the poem is stamped with a rebellious humor. The meandering lines echo Stein's untutored improvisation at the piano. Virgil Thomson tells of long evenings when Stein, who did not read music, would play a "sonatina," using only the 145 white keys. She would announce, "I'm going to play a march in my sonatina," but then to calm his surprise, she reassured him, "Ohi Not a Turkish march" (Bee Time Vine 3). Humor is inscribed in the poem in a similar displacement of the train of thought— she reassures Thomson that the "march" that she will play will not be a Turkish march, when the real question was his doubt about identifiable structure at all. Here, too, what proposes to be a poetic sonatina turns into a sensual romp. We have the transference of one set of conditions for another, with the same characters participating, and with a humorous flip of male and female roles and imagery. One scene is the locus of intimacy in which "Little Alice B. is the wife for me." This switches, however, to a Judaic Sampson fantasy: "Little Alice B. so tenderly is born so long so she can be born along by a husband strong who has not his hair shorn. And what size is wise. The right size is nice" (12). Another reverse takes us first to conventional images of tenderness and female identification (handkerchiefs, kisses, eating, love, and melon). Then the poem turns to phallic Roman scenes, suggesting architecture and bathing: "To be a roman and Julius Caesar and a bridge and a column and a pillar and pure how singularly refreshing" (13). My discussion of humor in the lesbian love songs must address two issues: both concern the authority informing 146 patriarchal dominance and Stein's inversion of the language codes that structure the work. First, the ribald humor of the moment is contained by regulations, rules that are congruent with and subversive of conventional conduct. Second, while humor in lovemaking does not allow for mockery— discouraged even in a subdued teasing form— such understated mockery becomes the tone for the public (albeit hermetic) portraits that Stein sketches of such figures as Mabel Dodge Luhan, her brother Leo, or, later, Hemingway. (In the following section I will discuss these portraits, and Stein's inventions in creating them.) Rules limit teasing in "Sonatina.” Ridicule would destroy the love-spell— especially that most potent spell- breaker, laughter at the expense of the lover: We know of a great many things we are not to do. We are not to laugh or be sarcastic or harsh or loud or sudden or neglectful or preoccupied or attacked or rebukeful. (13) Such behavior is forbidden— lovers must not hurt one another by mocking, lashing out, rebuking, or pouting. The comic spirit of this conjugal frolic is much like George Meredith's description of the effect of a gentle "comic spirit": [upon a hurtful slight from a companion] [ijf you [will] laugh all round him, tumble him, roll him about, deal him a smack, and drop a tear on him, own his likeness to you, . . . it is a spirit of Humor that is moving you. (42) 147 In this spirit, Stein's erotic texts are laughing lovers' dialogues, fumbling and mumbling in a jumble of lush suggestions. In "Lifting Belly," the two partners coyly assure each other that they are quite serious about their joking ("I don't mean to laugh. / Lifting belly is such a reason" or "Lifting belly is no joke" (77). "Making fun" is a different thing, and, as in this coded reference to her lover as George Sand in "A Sonatina," it is off limits: "Georgie Sand is in my hand and what are omelettes made of, of oranges and lemonade and how did you see the new moon" (Bee Time Vine 15). And "George Sand" retorts resentfully: "Don't make fun of me" (15). In just these words, Alice momentarily balks when in the Autobiography Stein brings her the portrait "Ada" in the kitchen: "I thought she was making fun of me" (SW 107). Although the commandments of lovers are to be respected ("We are not to laugh or be sarcastic or harsh . . ."), on the contrary, the "things we are not to do" perversely ignore restrictions imposed by the commandments of Judaism. These patriarchal codes hold no such sacred power here: I took a piece of pork and I stuck it on a fork and I gave it to a curly headed jew jew jew. I want my little jew to be round like a pork, a young round pork with a cork for his tail. A young round pork. I want my little jew to be round like a young round pork. I do. fBee Time Vine 13-14) 148 Such a disquieting turnabout is remarkable in its subversive potential for two Jewish women: Stein clearly identifies herself in 1917 as "a Jewess," and Toklas comes from a German-Jewish background (Kellner 272). An apppropriation of the ritual taboos of the Jewish fathers in order to "laugh or be sarcastic or harsh," emphasizes the force of their playful but gentle commitment to each other, and replaces the patriarchal structure with the joy of the female goddess sensibility.11 Stein celebrates and affirms the female body, female voices, and female genius. The humor in Gertrude Stein's erotica reflects the inclusiveness of "using everything" (as she herself so often explained about her work" and this irreverent and jolly play presents a full embodiment of Helene Cixous's laughing Medusa— the woman who uses language freely, repeating again and again, and can just so amply give away her spirit of sharing what Stein calls the "human mind": Actually. Question and butter. I find the butter very good. Lifting belly is so kind. Lifting belly fattily. Doesn't that astonish you. You did want me. Say it again. Strawberry. Lifting beside belly. Lifting kindly belly. (Bee Time Vine 81) Such abundance fills her literary landscape with a sense of herself as genius, talking and listening; disregarding the 149 rules of the "game" in favor of play, Stein's authorial autonomy comes in part, it can be argued, from the expressive freedom of the humorous attitude. Rhythms of sexual lullaby rock through the text. In their private life, Gertrude and Alice use the cooing tones of affectionate baby talk— in letters to Carl Van Vechten the three of them become a crooning "family" of "Mama and Papa Woojurns" (Alice and Van Vechten) with Gertrude as "Baby Woojums." In "Lifting Belly" she conflates this infacy/intimacy laughter with the language of the continuous sensual moment, totally female, woman talking to woman. In the terms of Lucy Irigaray# this is the primal speech act; two lips speaking, as the "sex that is not one." The two voices, rhythmically responding, ascend to breathless dialogue in "Lifting Belly." Neil Schmitz, reflecting Freud's somber assessment of the civilized woman's educated repression, calls this a "happy scandal" (12). Certainly it is happy, a document of "merriment in the midst of writing": My baby is a dumpling. I want to tell her something. Wax candles. We have bought a great many wax candles. Some are decorated. They have not been lighted. I do not mention roses. Exactly. Not only pre-symbolic infant language shapes this whimsical poetry, but a disguise of coded language. "Aunt 150 Pauline," meaning Gertrude Stein's truck, can also mean (in code) Stein herself. The name "Godiva" can refer to a car subsequently owned by Stein (a runabout), but the antecedent Godiva, of course, is a naked woman riding, an image which is central in this poem: Lifting belly enormously and with song. Can you sing about a cow. Yes. And about signs. Yes. And also about Aunt Pauline. Yes. Can you sing at your work. Yes. (BTV 115) Stored now in catalogued boxes in the Rare Book Room in Yale's Beineke Library, this sensuous poem is written in three student notebooks of lined paper. The manuscript reflects the wild tactile quality of erotica. Scrawled in pencil, the script stands in a sprinkling of words on each page, the letters looping upward toward four ruled lines in height. The text, in Steinian fashion, begins again and again. At times the erratic pressure of the pencil signals an abandonment of form, splashes the language recklessly through the pages. Such writing must have required the writer's left hand to be turning pages over in a rhythm all the while the right wrist was inscribing large oval movements turned from the shoulder— and then abruptly the regularity of handwriting resumes for a few pages. I propose that we think of this text— these giant pencil- strokes— as a sort of visual "performance art" (Figure 1). 151 Figure 1. "Lifting Belly" from Bee Time Vine. Unpaginated holograph. Beineke Library, New Haven. 152 Understood as the semiotics of a graphic art form, the notebook becomes a theatre piece; the poem is wild dialogue, code-loving and laughing. The voices blend, respond, touch, but they do not invite the reader in to a personal naming system. In this garden of names, the two Eve-figures assign the logos of their life, punning and funning, as they please themselves. This is a "logodrama," centered on speaking and listening— behaviors that marked Stein's definition of being a genius. Here, the genius of the household is the speaker, scrawling her "play" with no stage directions that write to the reader. This is becoming the genre of her work: a play of voices, released from identity into a wry consciousness, at the juncture of dream-work and wit-work. IV. "Representation by the opposite"— Freud's definition ^f irony can be the stuff of humor, if both joker and audience comply in their understanding of the sense of the standard and its opposite. Stein's invention of her particular genre of language-portrait is an oblique irony: even when her theme is announced as a "portrait" of someone else, Gertrude Stein herself is subject and object of her work. Her own awareness— her stream of thought (carrying whatever flotsam of the collective moment)— while she is meditating on the subject (the process of that looking) is the "portrait"; it is the voice of the gaze. "The exchange which is fanciful and righteous and mingled is in the author mostly in the 153 piece," Stein writes in her portrait of Marsden Hartley (Stavitsky 20). Throughout Stein's portrait production, those who were featured (or mentioned) as the celebrated subjects, however, continued to believe they were the focus of the text. They variously claimed to feel honored (Picasso), thrilled (Mabel Dodge Luhan), annoyed (Leo Stein), frustrated (Eugene Berman) bewildered (Marsden Hartley), and bemused (Jo Davidson). The earliest pieces, such as "Two: Gertrude Stein and her Brother," "Ada," and the Picasso and Matisse portraits allude to narrative or descriptive possibilities, but later significant identification with the subject must be constructed by the reader. Stein's language portraits are expressions of herself, just as each portrait or photograph of her becomes that artist's own expression, and its title might well be "How I See Gertrude Stein: My Own Look." In this way Stein's aesthetic medium of words approaches most nearly the medium of pain, in that what is produced is in fact the representation of the process. A close look at an oil portrait reveals the drag of the brush; here, in language, the erratic periods, commas, the surging word brings the hand of the writer directly before the eyes of the reader. And in the voice of this idiosyncratic portraitist, the word slides to the line of caricature, the quick sly joke, and the comic touch in a misplaced courtesy overstates and undercuts the ritual. 154 Stein's portraits are in fact what she titles a long poem, stanzas in meditation. Like the seventeenth century meditations, her composing process in fundamentally the same. She concentrates on the subject (the "sitter" in painterly terms), who, in line with the metaphysical divine subject, is an absent presence, unlike the subject of the portrait artist. The sitter is not physically necessary to the creation of the portrait, simply because the text intends neither to reveal the "essence" nor even the identity of the sitter, but instead to reveal the language of the artist's imagination as it gazes in meditation upon the idea of that subject. Of Matisse, Stein wrote: This one was one, some were quite certain, one greatly expressing something being struggling. This one was one, some were quite certain, one not greatly expressing something being struggling. (Portraits and Prayers 16). In the year of that writing, 1909, Stein herself was struggling to be greatly expressing. She, too, with many other people, was not certain about what she was expressing. It seems clear to me, however, that these portrait texts are not examples of "automatic writing," any more than the seventeenth century poets John Donne or Richard Crashaw composed their meditations while in a trance state. Crashaw's own artful meditations on Saint Theresa of Avila came from his perception of the impact of Theresa upon his own consciousness. Stein, too, voices the poet's psychic 155 response to, rather than a description or a story of the subject. I suggest that the confusion by Stein's critics regarding the issue of automatic writing is caused by her choice of terms in her earliest essay on her laboratory research undertaken at Johns Hopkins. Critics have understood the writing produced without conscious will as "automatic." However, after carefully reading Stein's early university report, I find that the activity that is to be regarded as automatic is not the writing activity; instead, the act of attention is directed in an "automatic" fashion toward the manifest activity at hand. The activity becomes automatic— the writing is spontaneous, authentic, witty. In the experiment, this activity is simply the attention paid to a story being read or an ongoing conversation. This activity is focused, but can be called "automatic" only because it must be maintained unceasingly; if the focus of attention is broken (that is, distracted), the contact with the lively subconscious is lost. That contact with the creative impulse— the locus of dream- work/wit-work-— is only available to the pen of the poet when the poet is not watching or considering its production. However, according to the findings of Stein's 1896 experiments, not only would a conscious look at the production of the creative text break the flow of that text, but a distraction in the surface level of the "automatic" activity would halt the creative act of writing. Thus the 156 "automatic" surface-focused activity is the requisite condition for the voice of the sub-conscious to be heard. The monitor of the conscious must be entirely directed away from the performance of the unconscious in order for the creativity to take place. In this double performance lies the important distinction between automatic activity and writing that is produced because of an upsurge of creativity (for Stein, "essence" or "entitity") that breaks through the mechanical surface patterns. Such a conceptual recognition of the process of Stein's inventive meditation into poetry corresponds significantly with Bergson's definition of humor. When Gertrude stein meditates upon the sitter-subject, this focus becomes that surface activity, and the writing produced is the stream of her thought; the writing also is wit-work— it is the veiled humorous discourse situated between associative jottings and caricature. Stein's most celebrated early portrait was of Mabel Dodge, written when Gertrude and Alice were her houseguests in 1912. Filled with platitudes and allusions to charm and hospitality, the portrait thrilled Mabel Dodge and prompted her to write an article praising Stein and to print three hundred bound copies of "Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia" for private distribution. Most unwittingly humorous, however, was her enthusiasm as she encouraged Stein in a career of itinerant and sycophantic portraiture: 157 "Gertrude Stein," Mabel suggested, according to the autobiographical Alice, "should be invited from one country house to another and do portraits and then end up doing portraits of american [sic] millionaires which would be a very exciting and lucrative career. Gertrude Stein laughed" (SW 124). Part of Stein's amusement, it seems to me, must have been generated by the ironic pleasure Mabel Dodge took in regarding the portrait as "so faithful a portrait as, I think, to produce about the same effects as myself were the truth always said!" (Gallup, Flowers 66). The truth might be produced by Stein's "effects," but it is a shadowed and winking truth. Mabel's husband was away, and as Stein sat writing methodically through the night in Edwin Dodge's study at Curonia, Mabel was receiving the amorous petition of her son's twenty-two year old tutor. He knocked at the door of her bedroom (adjacent to Gertrude's room) and, in Mabel's words, they "clasped each other" until "we were lying, arms about each other— white moonlight-— white linen— and the blond white boy I found sweet like fresh hay and honey and milk" (Mellow 169). Nevertheless, according to Mabel Dodge, she resisted this passion, and at the door the boy whispered: "I love you so— and the wonderful thing about you is that you're GOOD!" Biographer James Mellow refers delicately to the subtext of this transcript: "Because of the 'adulteration' and 'breathing' figuring ambiguously in Gertrude's text," he 158 speculates, "it seems possible that, subliminally at least, Gertrude must have been aware of the footsteps passing down the red-tiled corridor to Mabel Dodge/s bedroom" (169). More overtly, I would propose that the portrait is composed at two levels: one level employs the cliches of courtesy, flattery, and hospitality; the other level banters the language of sibilant seduction. Interweaving the two produces truth; it also generates a comic irony, especially as its protagonist later applauds what she interprets as the author's rich insights. Stein sets the scene as a greeting card tag-line: "The days are wonderful and the nights are wonderful and the life is pleasant" (SW 527). To counter the seduction of this comfortable banality, we might read James Fiebelman's thoughts on this stylized use of cliche: Stein uses platitudes in a way which is capable of restoring their original powerful meaning; but pointing up the meaninglessness of an orthodox nature, she repeats, and it is funny. . . . meaning aggravatingly looks out and we are almost tempted to avail ourselves of a serious reading. (239) So while these "nights are wonderful," recondite meetings are afoot; as she writes, Stein shares the darkness with these erotic negotiations: "bargaining is something and there is not that success . . . That was not an adulteration." Prohibitions are in force: "So much breathing has the same place and there must not be so much suggestion." In the lovers' "argument," there is energy 159 spent "nicely": "As the expedition is without the participation of the question there will be nicely all that energy" (SW 527). Language follows which considers the practical aspects of evidence of the rendezvous, and suggests a reassurance of male respect later for the woman who submits: If the spread that is not a piece removed from the bed is likely to be whiter then certainly the sprinkling is not drying. There can be the message where the print is pasted and this does not mean that there is that esteem. . . . this will not deepen the collected dim version. (SW 528) All this while, Stein writes steadily, there in the absent husband's darkened study, toward morning. Next door, passion continues apace: It is a gnarled division that which is not any obstruction and the forgotten swelling is certainly attracting, it is attracting the whiter division, it is no sinking to be growing, it is not darkening to be disappearing, it is not aged to be annoying. There can not be sighing. This is this bliss. (SW 528) As the portrait closes, the lover slips away "when there is done what is done and the union is won and the division is the explicit visit. There is not all of any visit" (530). No, Stein is not giving us all of this visit, at least not in a direct account. She may have smiled as she wrote, anticipating Mabel's enthusiasm for poetry about herself. When we as later readers know the circumstances of the composition of the portrait, and we are able to trace the 160 element of caricature in the language, we must wonder how Mabel could have wished three hundred copies distributed. She may have believed her own statement that Stein's language truthfully reflected her charm: "There is that where there is not that which is where there is what there is which is beguiling" (SW 529). On the other hand, Stein's joke seems at Mabel's expense, saved only by the obtuse diction and unhinged syntactical arrangement of language; Stein may even have created the covertly sexual melodrama as a sly rejoinder to Mabel's own flirtatious glance for Gertrude earlier in the visit. Finally, Mabel's promotion of the portrait may have been prompted by her enjoyment of the openly boasting joke of her erotic adventure which she was able to deploy among a select circle of readers under the safe cover of Stein's hermetic style. Regardless of the reader's response to the portrait at Curonia, it seems clear that an understanding of the strategic wit in the writing is essential. Thus we can see the truth in Bergson's claim that ritual invites humor by virtue of its mechanical aspect of programmed expectation and consequent fulfillment. stein consistently uses the tropes of courtesy as occasion for teasing and an opportunity for humor. Edged with mockery, courtesy can adopt the cliches of ritual while covering the reality of resentment in a subterranean text* Such a 161 construction is clear in the development of Gertrude's two portraits of Leo Stein. The first portrait, "Two: Gertrude Stein and her Brother" is a text written in her most pounding style of "insistence." As a document of daily frustration, repressed anger, and manipulation, the repetitive participials and the walking verbal constructions of gerunds establish the relentless pressure of Leo's inescapable domineering presence: In being one he was not loving and sound coming out of him sound was sounding and sound sounding coming out of him he was expressing that he was not being loving. . . In being one he was being beginning and in being beginning he was filling and in filling he was explaining and in explaining he was perfecting and in perfecting he was not continuing and in not continuing he was describing and in describing he was expecting and in expecting he was feeling and in feeling he was arranging and in arranging he was deciding. (Portraits 47) This is the record of pain and separation; very little humor is inscribed here. Ironically, however, just below the surface is our readerly construction of Bergson's mechanical man, that butt of humor. Comedy, for Bergson, results from all these being processes that consist in looking at life as a repeating mechanism, with reversible actions and interchangeable parts. . . . Actual life is comedy just so far as it forgets itself, for were it always on the alert, it would be ever-changing continuity, irreversible progress, undivided unity. (126) 162 Leo's repeating mechanism of arranging and describing, while sound is coming out of him, teases at the borders of caricature: If he arranged everything that he arranged and in answering what he answered he was expressing that he had arranged all that he arranged, if he arranged everything that he arranged he would have begun everything that he had begun. ("Two," Portraits 67-68) The mechanical tyrant is ultimately banished, however, and a loving partner takes his place. "There was the return and there was that which when the front was left did not destroy the courage" (Portraits 141). Humor later demonstrates this front whose courage had not been destroyed. Stein inscribes a "courteous revenge" later in the second portrait, "She Bowed to her Brother." After years of Leo Stein's posturing pedantry and his scornful aesthetic judgments of her work, Gertrude Stein achieves a poetic reposte through a brief comic interlude. She mimes his rigid and formal pomposity in a comic ceremony. Bergson explains the effect of such a gesture: The ceremonial side of social life must, therefore, always include a latent comic element, which is only waiting for an opportunity to burst into full view. It might be said that ceremonies are to the social body what clothing is to the individual body: they owe their seriousness to the fact that they are identified, in our minds, with the serious object with which custom associates them, and when we isolate them in imagination, they forthwith lose their seriousness. For any ceremony, then, to become comic, it is enough that our attention be fixed on the ceremonial element 163 in it, and that we neglect the matter. . . . Any form or formula is a ready-made frame into which the comic element may be fitted. (89) Nearly twenty years after Leo's wrenching departure from 27 rue de Fleurus, Gertrude writes the second portrait. It is a non-narrative of the incident of accidentally bumping into her repugnant but long-absent brother. The actual incident took place briefly, in heavy traffic on a street corner in Paris. In the portrait, the speaker stutters a fragmented discourse: She could think. Of how she was. Not better. Than when. They could say. Not. How do you do. To-day. Because. It is an accident. In suddenness. When there is. No stress. On their. Address. They do not address you. By saying. Rather. That they went by. And came again. Not. As. Or. Why. (Portraits 239) Logical discourse proceeding by linking subject and verb is subsumed in the frantic abortive leaps of emotional surges. Words turn into orphans, alone and ineffective. Without a controlling consciousness, there is no direction in this language. The conventional intention of inquiring after the health of the other is chopped into stress points. Communication and response contracts to "mention": Not. After. In intention. The same. As mention. She did not mention. Nor was there. Intention. That she. Bowed to her brother. She bowed to her brother. (Portraits 240) The poem ends with this punch-line. With the distance of courtesy comes the distance of humor; courtesy rescues the flustered speaker. She makes a clown-bow to the 164 brother. With this exaggerated gesture, moreover, comes the return of coherent language. She forms a complete sentence. i Stein's revisionary portraits of Picasso show a similar meditative insistence in the earlier work, modified by the staccato shattering of language chains that indicate a formal ritual run to comic fragments. Her 1909 "Picasso1 ' coils in participials of "This one was one who was almost always working. This one was not one completely working" (Portraits 19), interwoven textually with language of "following," and "charming"; we as readers are "almost always" sure that he is working, we are certain that he is charming, and we are following Picasso. Insistance persuades. A different syntax marks the portrait written fourteen years later, subtitled "A Completed Portrait of Picasso." In response to Picasso's dalliance with his completion of his own oil portrait of Stein, especially his repeated obliteration of the head, Stein suggests the flattery required for the ego of the portrait painter when the painting is completed. Her own portrait becomes a caricature of that sort of compliment pressured into language; the language of courtesy masks the skepticism inscribed in the duty. A tongue-in-cheek humor sets the tone in this portrait that gives no help to the reader who only wishes to see it as a word study: If I told him would he like it. Would he like it if I told him. 165 Would he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it. . . Picasso is only likely to accept her views, she believes, "Exactly as as kings [sic]." But she will venture her judgment anyway: "Shutters open and so do queens. . . . Now actively repeat at all, now actively repeat at all. I judge judge." The portrait ends in counting and rhymes, repeating "three" alternately with nonsense hop-scotch sounds of "A note," "A float," and "They dote." She concludes her "completed portrait" with "Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches." Such a portrait gives her Napoleon-Picasso exchange a fair sense of her quid pro quo— a dutiful posture, sketched in wit. Using the ritual semiotics of courtesy, Stein is able to avoid the direct, personal confrontations that she disdained. In many portraits, plays, and lectures the reader feels that the "please" and "thank you" signals convey the veiled intensity or impudence of a joke. Such a reading is validated by the openly admitted convention of using ritual courtesy as a weapon: Stein's portrait of Eugene Berman encodes this strategy of courtesy turned mockery: I have been very busy with it for myself. If I said I have been very busy with myself I would employ what I meant by kindly. (P&P 185) Self-serving activity, this suggests, requires a polite mask of courtesy. The portrait would imply that this duty 166 belonged to Berman. Soon, "How many ways are there of being polite in it," the portrait muses. The subject is the words and exchanges to mark favors: A cake is a cake if there is a ring without it, so he says. Kindness through a device. What is truly rural. Their attaching their order to their man. A man is men. Useful is the same as fairly necessary. Hour is not an hour. By which they mean. It is easy to be wakeful when they are asleep they are asleep quickly. Thank you for our planting. Why should I laugh when I or he leave. (Portraits 188) Alluding to Berman's stay in Bilignin, Stein refers to a woman: "She is a season of seems"— and various rabbit hunts, all of which hints of caricature. The most troublesome bit of double-edged reference, however, is the concluding line: "A very good digestion makes a little old man sing. Not a song." No sensible houseguest could mistakenly regard this Rabelaisian suggestion as flattery. After Berman responded that he did not understand this opaque word portrait that Stein had written for him, she brusquely told him that his room at Bilignin was needed for other guests, and their friendship ended. Answering Stein's rudeness in the convention of ironic courtesy, Berman wrote her a hyperbolic "letter of thank-you," the bread-and butter note that he referred to as "courteous revenge" (Mellow 340); in it he professed his "deepest gratitude" for "all the attentions with which you surrounded me" and especially 167 for "the great impression made upon me by your words on the mixture of true and false . . . formulated as simply and precisely as you did" (Portraits 238). The rhetoric of this comedy of manners takes many textual formats. In tone and format, then, Stein's suggestive portraits can be interpreted as fitting into this rhetorical tradition. V. In the portraits as well as in the erotic poetry, Gertrude Stein interweaves voices to produce what I have called the "logodrama" of her own mind capturing in words the moment of its own awareness. The logodrama in her work ultimately assumes a theatricality that she refers to as "plays." Considering her consistent use of humor as the double-edged tone of her work, I interpret her "plays" as just that: play, in the most transgressive authorial mode. Caricature, as I have discussed here, provides the subtle strain of humor in her portraits, and it is a particular caricature that provides for us a transition to the whimsical format of her plays, with their laughing one- line "acts," and absence of events. Stein's portrait of her friend, the art critic Henry McBride, is pointedly subtitled "A Political Caricature." A editorial note added in later publication advises the astute reader that "the 'political' quality of Miss Stein's caricature will not be misapprehended by students of her work" (£W 532). Her rhetorical strategy in the humor here involves the oblique 168 commentary that becomes possible on the sensitive topic of social tyranny by the art critic. As a reflexive poem, then, the subject of Stein's "play" is Stein/s own response to the critics, rather than the art critic as subject of either caricature or portrait. So for the June 1917 issue of Vanity Fair, she composes— tongue-in-cheek— the one-page piece (edited to fit snugly on page 55) that includes her own introduction in which she characterizes these voice fragments as a "poem": "Have They Attacked Mary. He Giggled." This poem is formatted as a series of cryptic memos cited as "pages" in Roman numerals through XXXIII. Even at a glance, the poem itself invites one— or both— of two readerly responses: an attack or a giggle. In a further ludic gesture, the work carries the subtitle "An Utterance from the High Priestess of Cubist Literature." Lest the reader wince at this hyperbole, Stein's introduction to the "utterance" sets out a biographical vignette of the "priestess." Reminding later readers of the pseudonymous authority of Alice Toklas fifteen years later in the Autobiography f this introduction documents Stein's "genius." She writes, under her own by line, an "objective," generous, and admiring critique of "Gertrude Stein." She begins with Stein's selfless service to France, even as a writer of masterpieces: 169 Miss Gertruds Stein, the Cubist writer and author of that greatly misunderstood masterpiece, "Portrait of Mabel Dodge," has given up her literary labors of late, in order to drive an ambulance in France, of which country she has long been an enthusiastic and loyal resident. Without pause, the critic then presents the reader with an opportunity to take his own cultural pulse; here is a sort of instruction sheet for the poem as Rorschach: Somehow, it seems as if the surest test for the detection of a modern philistine is the poetic work of Gertrude Stein. The reader who takes a delirious joy in the poem which we publish here, who constantly stops his reading to say "Isn't it great?" "Isn't it wonderful?," etc., is NOT a philistine. On the contrary, the individual, male or female, who begins foaming at the mouth at Miss Stein's second page, who shrieks "This is insanity" at the third or fourth, and ends by writing a letter of protest to the Editor of Vanity Fair. IS one. Decidedly this second individual is one. Is one decidedly. (55) In Stein's critical system, the cultural value called into guestion is not that of the poem, but of the reader's insight. Whereas Emily Dickinson measured the worth of poetry in the force of its impact upon her own sensibility ("If it makes me so cold no fire can warm me . . . then I know this is poetry"), Stein flips the equation and measures the worth of the reader. The poem "They Attacked Mary. He Giggled" becomes the bellwether of readerly joie de vivre, measured by cries of pleasure, or the revelation that one is a philistine. "Is one decidedly," she concludes. So, 170 resolving not to reveal a lurking philistinism, the reader begins: Page I Can you be more confusing by laughing. Do say yes. We are extra. We have the reasonableness of a woman and we say we do not like a room. We wish we were married. Why do you believe in me. Including all that is sold, you mean three pictures, including all that is sold why cannot you give me that. I do give it to you. Thank you I was only joking. But I do mean it. Thank you very much. We are plunged into the world of the art critic— a milieu of * barter, investment based on taste, judgment, and trust. The art critic becomes, in Stein's hands, a nervous composite of con-man, courtesy, common sense, pomposity, and affectation. The fragmented dialogue runs as a collage of voices. To release the arrogant access of the critic to the poem/picture, the laugh track comes first: "Can you be more confusing by laughing." Instruction for the reader indicates: "Do say yes." The next voice is of a commonsensical woman; such a basic response is dismissed, however: "We are extra. We have the reasonableness of a woman and we say we do not like a room." Striking a bargain in the art world seems to make strange bedfellows; talk of marriage becomes a subtext in the delicate negotiations ("We wish we were married"). A 171 pledge of trust figures into the price tags on art as well as in nuptial vows, but the vow contradicts itself as the statement of potential chicanery ("Why do you believe in me"). A brief haggling ensues ("Including all that is sold, you mean three pictures, including all that is sold why can't you give me that. / I do give it to you.") And the outcome of this elliptical bravura is cast in the humor of erasure ("Thank you I was only joking.") The voice of "I do give it to you" continues with bewildered sincerity, "But I do mean it." Finally the con-man/critic (who poses as joker) bows out: "Thank you very much." Any philistines yet? The answer, we may remember, depends upon the reader's cry of "delirious joy": "Isn't this great? Isn't this wonderful?" But maybe it's a bit early to check for philistinism. We continue to read: Page II. Can you swim in a lake? We can. Then do so. What should we make of this? It is interrogation by an authority, then reassurance and permission. Another bargain follows— this time a pretty one, perhaps a plunge into a dappled Impressionist landscape. The literary philistine, we must remember, will begin foaming at the mouth about now; we have reached the end of the second "page." 172 "Pages" III, IV, and V eavesdrop on a used car purchase, an event that suggests a similar transaction by the trustworthy art dealer. The statement "Have you an automobile" composes the entire text of Page III. Then Page IV dialogues into: The queen has We asked for one. They cannot send it now. Cannot they. We will see. And here Stein's alleged philistine will shriek, "This is insanityI" As a tendentious joke, the poem dauntingly composes a landscape of personal references, flashes of opinion, and key words that Stein uses in the erotic portry. She dares the reader to frolic in her landscape, reveling in language, "excreating" (the Buttons neologism) a cinematic series to correspond with the suggested "acts." In Mallorca in 1915, she had decided that "a landscape is such a natural arrangement for a battlefield or a play that one must write plays" (SW 554). A readerly "battlefield" is never far away, however, as the frustrating non secjuiturs and private allusions break into the erratic schemata of these plays; her work is indeed full of these sly references to matters unknown to their readers and only someone completely familiar with the routine, and roundabout, ways of Miss Stein's daily life would be able to explain every line of her prose. (Van Vechten, SW xx i v) 173 The context of the plays— the canvas against which they are inscribed— is the private world of Stein and Toklas, but the tendentious effect creates a sort of "battlefield." At times the voices mix in a bewildering barter scene: "They made the mistake of choosing that silver. Little silver little silver." . . . "Can you think in meaning to sell well." Often the debate centers on trust in these matters: "Not necessarily a deception." . . . "Can they accept us. We marry. They ask." . . . "Believe me in everything.". . . "Can you please me with kisses." . . . "Can you excuse anyone." And playfulness ("Can a Jew be wild.") is balanced by pride and duty: "A great many settlers have mercy." . . . "Of course women porters. Why should we be proud. Because it is foolish (playful), yet proud (dignified) to be commonplace, only a porter— and a woman porter. "Can you confuse by laughing," the poem originally had asked. One anticipated answer could be that immediate letter of protest to be fired off to the editors of Vanity Fair, as Stein herself had suggested at the outset as the boorish alternative. But as I have pointed out earlier, another response is possible. The droll potential of courtesy offers humor to answer outrage. Stein concludes her poem "Have They Attacked Mary. He Giggled." with a model of ironic behavior: "The French are polite." 174 With a stroke of directness that tweeters on the absurd, Gertrude Stein claims in 1934 that "when you write a play you ought to announce that it is a play and that is what I did. What Happened. A play." (Lectures 118). In Stein's plays, however, nothing at all happens— the "what" that might happen is lost in the foregrounding of the voices playing. She systematically erases from her syntax the structuralist narrative components: first, the noun as the character/actor/object, and now the verb as the event/action. In writing Tender Buttons. Stein had proposed to remove nouns in favor of the movement of connecting language; here Stein removes events, the idea being that "without telling what happened, to make a play the essence of what happened," or "to tell what could be told if one did not tell anything" (Lectures 119). In the play of voices of "What Happened" we learn something about the possibility of meaning through articulation: "Length what is length when silence is so windowful." And the stage is set for mood here, as well: "What is the commonest exchange between more laughing and most." Through a windowful of silence, then, we will look with more— and finally, most— laughing. Stein wanted her plays to be produced, not simply read, and the production of her plays has received critical acclaim. In 1934 Virgil Thomson's score for Four Saints in Three Acts drew recognition for Stein's work while she was 175 in the United States lecturing, after publication of Alice's Autobiography. The production included magnificent black singers, and a whimsical but dazzling mass of crinkled blue cellophane as the backdrop of the set. Against the sky, a flattened magpie represented the Holy Ghost. Stein was convinced that this posture was authentic ("they do something that I have never seen any other bird do they hold themselves up and down and look flat against the sky” [Lectures 129]) in spite of the fact that "A very famous French inventor of things that have to do with stabilization in aviation told me that what I told him magpies did could not be done by any bird but anyway whether the magpies at Avila do do it or do not at least they look as if they do do it” (Lectures 129). Thirty years later, the staging of "What Happened. A Play” won an Obie in 1964 for Best Production at New York's Judson Poets Theatre. In both cases the element of wit blended the serious production effort with the radical outrageous. Performance of Stein's plays in the Soho loft- playhouses in Manhattan and the experimental storefront theaters in Los Angeles continues to amuse and delight audiences in the last decades of the twentieth century. One example of a puckish performance that featured humor to highlight Stein's reflexive commentary on drama was a 1988 off-Broadway staging of Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters, at the Arts Two Theatre in Manhattan.12 Title roles (the 176 three sisters) were played by one male and two female actors; musical accompaniment was orchestrated by "instruments" such as kazoos, doggy sgueak toys, and a whoopie cushion. Rounding out the bizarre quality of the evening in the cavernous second-story loft, when an emergency prevented the appearance of the player in the role of Helen, the theatre management conducted a voice-vote among the tiny audience to proceed with the production with Helen played by an actress who had volunteered on the spot. The ad hoc stand-in read her lines from a script, in the midst of high camp and highjinx. "Helen" was especially droll during her own death scene in which she lay on the floor reading her final remarks— pointing out the obvious: a Stein "play" is finally a construct of language. Such whimsical productions indicate an understanding of humor as a dominant tone in the plays, even if Stein's humor remains problematic in the rest of the work. When the critics have analyzed the strategy of humor in the plays, often they have arrived at a wrong-headed conclusion. James Fiebelman, for example, discusses Gertrude Stein as the comic advocate of a stylistic, even patriarchal, tradition. When Feibelman speaks of Gertrude Stein as a comedian, he characterizes her so by default only; she did not intend, he asserts, to be comical. He allows that "the Stein which is represented by [Tender 177 Buttons and the plays] is essentially the comedian. That Gertrude Stein would probably not agree with this estimation is nothing to the point" (236). More than the artist, the critic may perceptively detect humor in the work, being "more eguipped to assign them their proper place than the artist himself. Thus we are justified in calling Miss Stein a comedian provided only that we can show wherein the comedy lies" (237). Feibelman wants to convince us that Stein's humor is the result of irrational writing— an unwitting comedy. We are to interpret the effect of this to be an intentional absurdity, produced in the service of traditional poetry written by others: She is a defender Of reason who has chosen as her method the exposition of the absurdities or extreme irrationalism . . . It is the kind of irrationalism Miss Stein makes fun of by herself taking it seriously and asking us to do the same, in order to demonstrate that such serious consideration is quite impossible. (237) Here is Freud's skeptical joke in full force. Stein makes fun of irrationalism, Fiebelman is claiming, by taking it seriously AND asking us to take it seriously, BUT she REALLY wants us to believe that we CANNOT take it seriously. Again, following Feibelman: she is making fun of her own discontinuous poetic practices and wants us to join her; to do this, she PRETENDS to take her poetry seriously and PRETENDS that she wants us to take it seriously. Stein is going to Crakow and wants us to know that she is going to 178 \ Crakow. So she tells us that she is going to Lemberg and pretends that we believe that she is going to Lemberg— but somewhere she winks, according to Feibelman, and somehow we must catch on that we are only playing a game with all of this going to Lemberg ("flock movement" in Lacan's terms). We are only doing it to make fun of the people who are ticketed for Lemberg, because we are really going to hop on the train to Crakow. Now if you don't catch the wink, you are likely to chug off to Lemberg; but Fiebelman is sure that there is a wink somewhere. We can't really be taking all this talk about Lemberg seriously. As Freud's "representation by the opposite," this is a comedy; he assures us. It is because he says so. It's no wonder that critics are confounded while reading Stein. Her humor does it. Interpretation hangs on a wink. If you "see" it, you will believe that she is "putting you on"— demonstrating absurdity with this endless breaking the sequence. She disruptively includes material extraneous to the text but somehow swallowed into it. She destroys genre format by writing plays that radicalize dramatic conventions; for example, Civilization: A Play in Three Acts indicates sixty-five stage directions to signal "Act III," some of these "acts" running one line long (Operas 149-160). She composes "lectures" that run to endless repetitive sentences. But now what if the reader doesn't "see" the wink that Fiebelman invents as the clue to 179 what he believes is Stein's nonsense-satire that makes a case for conventional prose systems? That reader (and I join her) who does not read Fiebelman's wink is going to be the reader who takes Stein's humor seriously, the reader for whom Stein writes seriously. I argue here that this reader finds freedom in the “humorous attitude," joy in the comedy of ironic and topsy-turvy forms to express the ideosyncracy of human awareness; here is humor that empowers its own voice. IV. "I like a view," Stein's Alice says of drama, spectacle, portraits, and the philosohy inscribed therein, "but I like to sit with my back turned to it" (SW 7). No more graphic demonstration of irony is possible: to apprehend a landscape so inclusively that one can see it more completely by facing away. Together, stein and Toklas share what they know, and need no tedious, earnest, or obvious proofs. So they speak with humor— and irony— to that reader who shares the view. In lectures, prefaces, and asides in her novels, Gertrude Stein creates repetitious "explanations" of her poetry. Like the poems themselves, these, too, are laced with irony, hyperbole, and eccentric homor. Stein's strategy behind the humor of her essays is not, as Fiebelman argues, to scramble the conventions of discourse in order to make an argument for the necessity of order. Rather, I 180 would assert, Stein's focus is always the integrity of the human mind. Transcendent over individual identity of a specific human nature, the human mind is capable of a control and autonomy not available to a human nature anxious for personal identity which is conferred by outside recognition: "I am I because my little dog knows me." The human mind, on the other hand, needs no mirror of acclaim from others nor the memory of earlier events or ages; ongoing knowledge becomes the vast landscape itself rather than the view of a single, particular individual scanning the distance. Sharing what Stein calls the "communism" of the human mind (Geographical History 56) resembles the awareness of the Emersonian oversoul, an awareness that permits the secure and also ironic position of sitting "with one's back to the view." Because the human mind knows what it knows and knowing what it knows it has nothing to do with seeing what it remembers, remember how the country looked as we passed over it, it made designs big designs like human nature draws them because it knows them without ever having seen them from above. (63) Identity becomes the memory and the design, a metonymy that requires insistent reinforcement, recitation of dates and detail. It is awfully difficult, action is direct and effective but after all action is necessary and anything that is necessary has 181 to do with human nature and not with the human mind. (Masterpieces 86) The human mind, on the contrary, creates the Laconian "dazzling tissues of metaphors." These "masterpieces" are authored not by identity (not for audience approval— "an audience never does prove to you that you are you" [Haas 122]) but by entity (the voice of the mind working, moving, living: the "logodrama" in my own term). Stein's "entity" speaks from the comic view. She becomes the super-ego of her own controlling perspective. Irony is her vista, and she is seated with her back to the view of human nature. Stein's control is most clearly inscribed in the deliberate irony of her "lectures." She rejects and subverts basic conventions of instruction itself, as well as language, in the service of the freedom of her expression. She appropriates the patriarchal forms and turns them on their head. Her composition belongs to her alone. Paradoxically, she delivers her lectures to an audience, and she writes for an anticipated readership. The punch line here, however, is that she does not bend her thoughts to assure their reception. As Freud asks in his discussion of the skeptical joke, is it the truth when you do not consider your audience? and "... does not genuine truth consist in taking the hearer into account and giving him a faithful picture of our own knowledge" (Jokes 115). 182 When Gertrude Stein explains "how to write," what can we make of the "truth" that she offers as "A Grammarian"?: I am a grammarian. We will or we will not cry together. These. Have not a cousin. These have not a cousin she is a nun. Their cousin these have several one of them is a nun. I love my love with a b because she is precious. I love her with a c because she is all mine. This is very simple grammar. Who takes it there. This is not simple because it is not trained. fHow to Write 105) This runaway unstructured un-"grammar" is not trained to grammatical convention, and the writer weeps frustrated tears of resistance. She will need loving support ("precious" and "all mine") which is not likely to come from a reading or listening audience. (The lectures, we should note, are shot through with petition: "I hope you like what I say" echoes the request from Making of Americans. "Please love my work.") Nevertheless, Stein's freewheeling expression of the mind at work untrammeled and untethered has a more reliable ally, however: wit-work. The complex humor in Stein's "explanations" of her work lies primarily in the contradiction between the expectation on the part of the reader or audience of clarification, and instead finding the unfiltered process of a mind in the creative act, unhampered by the traditions of "correct" language processes. Again from How to Write: If you think of grammar as a part. Can one reduce grammar to one. 183 One two three all out but she. Now I am playing. And yielding to not attempting. fHow to Write 110) The resulting confusion generates (as I have pointed out in earlier discussion) "an attack or a giggle": anger or laughter. After the laughter, however, comes the reader's reflective appreciation of the playful blend of her defiant autonomy with the originality of an unusual work of art. Here the logic of developing and presenting a plan for the writing process is co-opted by presenting instead a palimpsest, the recording of the human mind. What is announced as logic turns out to be, in psychological terms, paleologic. The license here is in the name of both humor and creativity. In the creative process of a joke, writes psychologist Silvano Arieti, cognitive mechanisms that are usually discarded because of their faults, become available to the creative person [who] is able to select those which give the fleeting impression of being valid . . . The amused response on the part of the listener occurs when he realizes the invalidity of the thought processes— that is, when he recognizes the logic-paleologic discordance. (112) The creative process of wit, then, first compares these two processes and reveals the discordance, which provokes laughter. But when Arieti further clarifies the process of wit-perception, we can reach the turn at which Stein's critics find the stretch in their credulity too demanding, consequently responding in an echo of Freud's skeptical 184 joke. The two systems of logic/paleo-logic appear in discordance, impossible to process into wit (or art)— a necessary step because the discovery by a creative person of an apparent concordance in a logic-paleologic discordance constitutes the . . . creative process of the joke. Of course, additional factors may enter into and increase the value of the joke, which may no longer be just a joke but also an unusual work of art. (112) The "concordance" or unity is the punch line, in which the explanation and the process are conflated into a truth that is "playing. / And yielding / To not attempting." In the skeptical joke, Freud's traveler shouts, "What a liar you are!" when he senses his companion's failure of concern for his comprehension. For critics who do not catch on to the irony of the form and the wit in the expression, Stein's explanations of her work are indeed puzzling, as for Richard Kostelanetz: Her essays and speeches on her own work tended to be suggestive and formally interesting but, by critical standards, evasive and incomplete; and I am scarcely alone in regarding How to Write (1931) as misleadingly labeled." (xxx) Earlier, midway into The Geographical History of America. Stein had announced that "[t)his whole book now is going to be a detective story of how to write." Even then, she believed that there is no formula for the expression of the human mind, and she felt no compulsion to develop one. 185 Kostelanetz further ventures that "the general failure of American criticism to acknowledge its native experimental tradition . . . partly accounts for why Stein never felt obliged to make more precise statements about her purposes" (xxx). According to this view, Stein would have been more lucid and straightforward if she had believed she could have convinced the critics that an American experimental tradition was viable and she was a leading representative; finding this a slim prospect, however, she simply resorted to a metaphorical mishmash. Kostelanetz cannot read her "explanations" as wry ironic commentary— poetry in their own right. As Stein's latterday defender (even in 1988) against charges of a "hoax," James Laughlin characterizes her 1934 lectures as a "succes de surpris, . . . the discourse, so baffling, yet presented with such conviction it could hardly be a hoax" (532). Laughlin suggests that simply the sincerity of delivery must reflect her straightforward intention. Somewhere between hoax ("What a liar you are!") and failure to communicate (B.L. Reid's accusation) is the bold truth of Stein's authenticity and her humor. Thorton Wilder poses a general question regarding Stein's bewildering language in the lectures: "Why does she nbt state her [metaphysical] ideas in the manner that metaphysicians generally employ?" (Geographical History 47), He then supplies three answers: because she invents her own 186 Original terms, because she works as an artist using a "succession of 'metaphysical metaphors,'" and because she writes with humor. Pointedly, Wilder in his introduction to Four in America recommends that the reader take Stein's playful allusions seriously: She even listened intently to dog nature. The often-ridiculed statement is literally true that it was from listening to her French poodle Basket lapping water that she discovered the distinction between prose and poetry. (Simon 191) This process-rhythm of the lapping dog had inspired Tender Buttons as a study of the flow of words caught in order to express the gaze of the artist; so, too, the lectures are poetic word-systems, caught syntactically in the arrangement of the human mind at work. As a declaration of thinking, these "elucidations" or lectures are simultaneously declarations of looking, and the observation itself. They are performative. They are the poetry of walking— "wandering" in Stein's term. As she wanders the landscape of thought, she plays with form, and modulates the patriarchal conventions. The essays and speeches move seductively into a matrix of humor and poetry, where language playfully dances between ideas, performance, musicality, and response-laughter. Like the playful "plays," the speeches and essays become suggestive frames of energy rather than documentaries of sequential analysis. Wilder introduces Geographical History of America with a 187 statement of the strategy of humor as the response to restricting analytic forms: Miss Stein has always placed much emphasis on the spirit of play in an artist's work. The reward of difficult thinking is an inner exhilaration. Here is delight in words and in the virtuosity of using them exactly; here is wit; here is mockery at the predecessors who approached these matters with so cumbrous a solemnity. (47-48) Stein's joke is on patriarchy and its grammar. Her instructions in How to Write include: "Forget about grammar and think about potatoes" (109); yet in her lecture on "Poetry and Grammar" she claims that "When you are at school and learn grammar grammar is very exciting. I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagraming sentences [sic]" (Lectures 210). Such contradictory statements signal a paleo-logical drollery. Nevertheless, "every joke calls for a public of its own," wrote Freud, and Stein herself could never be sure of the understanding by her audience, even as late as the lecture tour. "You do see what I mean by what I say. But I know you do," she speaks reassuringly to her audience in "Portraits and Repetition." She continues, then, to suggest that although they may share the understanding, they probably will not be able to decode or accept her text as an expression of this common understanding: "Will you see it as clearly when I read you some of the portraits that I have written. Maybe you will but I doubt it. But if you do well 188 then if you do you will see what I have done and do do" (Lectures 184). Playing with form, wandering and thinking, Stein speaks as the human mind as it "excreates,1 1 weaving into the thinking of her audience but resisting the objections of obscurity. The lectures become performance art— real life, really living. Here is the mind working authentically, humorously, apart from traditional patriarchal "lecture podium" identity. This wandering, repetitive, open-ended, and humorous style of the lectures is in fact a form of "mockery at the predecessors who approached these matters with so cumbrous a solemnity." The joke is clearly tendentious. As early as in The Making of Americans (1908), Stein points out that the repeating discourse is a blend of aggression along with humor: Loving repeating being is more of that kind of being that has resisting as its natural way of fighting than of that kind of being that has attacking as its natural way of winning. . . . As I was saying all little children have in them mostly very much loving repeating being. As they grow into bigger children some have it in them more some have it less in them. Some have it in them more and more as a conscious feeling. . . . Many have it in them all their living as a conscious feeling as a humorous way of being in them. (SW 271) Her humor is combative; "loving repeating being" resists both the static events taught by school and the frozen art of the museums. Following Stein's thought, schools and 189 museums represent fossils of the earlier work of the human mind, transformed by their recognition by human nature. In the "Portraits and Repetition" lecture, she draws strict distinctions between a didactic, deadly documentation and her own lively "exciting" repetition: When I made portraits of every one I know. I said that I knew as they said and heard what they heard and said until I had completely emptied myself of all they were that is all that they were in being one hearing and saying what they heard and said in every way that they heard and said anything. (Lectures 178) The reader is tempted to identify this as repetition. All of the "hearing and saying" presents a burden— together with a vague annoyance in having to pick out the clauses without benefit of punctuation. However, Stein follows this closely with a disclaimer: And this is the reason why that what I wrote was exciting although those that did not really see what it was thought it was repetition. If it had been repetition it would not have been exciting but it was exciting and it was not repetition. It never is. I never repeat that is while I am writing. (179) In the sway of this contradictory hyperbole, the reader can only laugh. This passage both denies itself as repetition and valorizes repetition— but only repetition that becomes "exciting." Earlier Stein had disdained other forms of pat repetition: "The only time that repeating is really repeating, that is when it is dead, is when something is 190 being taught" (Geographical History 49). In school, then, the repeating experience can be negative, and the pedantic structure of the lecture itself reinforces the artificial identity— the repetition-imitation of the work of others— that precludes creative work: I am I because my little dog knows me but, creatively speaking the little dog knowing that you are you and your recognizing that he knows, that is what destroys creation. That is what makes school. Picasso once remarked I do not care who it is that has or does influence me as long as it is not myself. (Masterpieces 84-85) Little children who are loving repeating their own authentic being are participating, then, in the spirit of genius; a genius is eternally young. But what good does it do, Stein asks again and again, to be a young boy if you are to grow up to be a man— to be a genius if you are going to become an observer? Hemingway, she says, smells of the museum— that is, frozen into his static mimetic reportage of daily life. "Nobody can define events or history or human nature or government or propaganda and make them interesting" (Geographical History 175), and Hemingway is a journalist, Stein notes with derision. "The newspapers are full of what anybody does and anybody knows what anybody / does but the thing that is important is the intensity of anybody's existence," she intones (Lectures 182). But then, in a stroke of comic dissonance, she illustrates this noble primal human intensity by recommending our attention to her 191 favorite notorious criminal: "Once more X remind you of Dillinger. It was not what he did that was exciting but the excitement of what he was as being exciting that was exciting." We can see the point, but it is in spite of the jarring incongruity of the unexpected intrusion of John Dillinger. Humor emphasizes the universality of "essence." But between the immediate "essence" and memory, "There is a world of difference and in it there is essentially no remembering" (Lectures 182). The memory of human nature and its limiting necessities cancels the immediacy in the human mind playing at its genius. What good does it do to be a little boy [genius] if you are going to grow up to be a man [journalist or museum curator!], we might ask, when schools and museums congeal the spontaneous human mind. Conventional instruction and public acclaim deaden creativity, Stein cautions. Spontaneous and thoughtful performance art voices the creative spark; such dramatic innovations took fifty years to appear in American theatre. Susan Sontag echoes Stein half a century later as she describes the theatrical radicalism of "happenings": "Simple acts like coughing and crying will be prolonged, repetitively to a point of demonaical frenzy" (268). Stein's notion that the simple acts happening in the daily life of a dog provide metaphors for the writing process functions in this comically radical way. "The 'Happenings' of the 60's register a protest against the museum concept of 192 art— the idea that the job of the artist is to make things to be preserved and cherished," continues Sontag. Extending this mode of creative protest, Stein proposes a comic metaphor of the wandering painting. The concept of the painting as a completed thing in itself, apart from the process, apart from the resemblance, is "confusing" for Gertrude Stein; and we remember that confusing is caused by laughing— by humor. "Confusion is essential in the idea of an oil painting," she muses in her lecture "Pictures" (Lectures 87). Stein wonders about the completion, the frame, of the masterpiece; This whole question of a picture being in its frame returning to its frame or not returning to its frame is the question that has latterly bothered me the most. Modern pictures have made the very definite effort to leave their frame. But do they stay out, do they go back and if they do is that where they belong and has anybody been deceived, i think about that a great deal these days. (Lectures 87) The comedy of the modern picture wandering from its frame, indecisive, pondering its identity and where it really belongs, generates confusion for the viewer and provides material for the metaphysical humorist. Like the dog gulping, this concept serves Stein as a metaphor for the pulsating creative process, a protest (like Sontag's descriptions of the later "happenings") against "the museum concept of art— the idea that the job of the artist is to make things to be preserved and cherished." 193 To complete a work of art is to announce its identity as just such a thing to be preserved; finishing, for Gertrude Stein, was an aesthetic practice that she dismissed in favor of simply stopping. Like her notion of the modern painting that wanders from its frame in a resistance to maintaining an identity as artifact, her textual continuous present runs on beyond the text. There is a comic element in the honest, and yet absurd conclusions to her work, and especially to the lectures that include an exchange with a live audience. Discussing the finish of her peripatetic novel The Making of Americans. Stein tells her audience, "And I went on and on and then one day after I had written a thousand pages, this was in 1908 I just did not go on any more" (SW 250). To frame a lecture such as "Portraits and Repetition" she humorously calls attention to the arbitrary and forced ending to this immediate thinking, and suggests the epistemological wandering that will continue beyond the frame. Writing, after all, is what happened: I have finished that and now I am trying in these lectures to tell what is by telling about how it happened that I told about what it is. I hope you quite all see what I mean. Anyway I suppose inevitably I will go on doing it. (Lectures 206) As human mind (Emerson's "man thinking"), stein will go on— her wry humor and convoluted unpunctuated sentences wandering each one as it may. Through the freedom of what Freud calls the "humorous attitude," she eschews the 194 recognition of public validation. I am I, she seems to say, even though my reader may not know me. 195 Notes 1 Hereafter The Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein will be referenced in the text as SW. 2 Both Neil Schmitz in Of Huck and Alice: Humorous Writing in American Literature (1983) and Jo Anna Isaak in The Ruin and Representation in Modernist Art and Literature (1988) discuss Stein's humor at length. Schmitz presents a case for her rhetorical escape from patriarchal codes and controls through subversive humor; Isaak focuses on Stein's graphic language of fractured representation through the use of humor. Schmitz emphasizes the distinction here between being "wrong" and being "humorous." 3 Solomons, Leon and Gertrude Stein. "Normal Motor Automatism." The Psychological Review 3 (1896): 492-512. 4 This seems a shaky assumption. When Gertrude was born, her mother already had four children under nine years old, including a retarded boy of six— Simon was "enormously fat" and "had to be treated differently" (Haas 129). A maternal compulsion to deliberately "replace" yet another child appears unlikely. The anecdote instead seems only to reflect Stein's sense of rejection. 5 Bruce Kellner claims that his comprehensive search of the writings of Jules Laforgue has failed to turn up this quotation. Marianne DeKoven mentions the epigraph as mysterious, without clear citation (Kellner 81-82). I propose that it is apocryphal— perhaps an expression of Stein's "human mind," without source in a specific identity. 6 The portraits and photographs discussed appear in the following publications: Alfred Maurer's The Clowness in Stavitsky, 40; Jo Davidson's sculpture in Vanity Fair 23 Feb 1930; Cecil Beaton's photograph of Stein and Toklas in Benstock, 141, and in Gilbert and Gubar, 359; and the photograph "Stein in front of the atelier door" in Alkon, 854. 7 With a comparative look at these automatic writing experiments and Tender Buttons. B.F Skinner in 1936 is able to dismiss Stein's difficult texts on the grounds that they spring from an unconsciousness that detracts from the work of "a fine mind." He has it both ways, however; if the writing is automatic, it is chaotic and for Stein's sake must be dismissed as well. ("Has Gertrude Stein a Secret?" Hoffman, 64-70) 196 8 In his discussion of the abundance of text (like Stein's "chaotic plenitude" in Buttons), Lacan reveals the surprise hidden in his example at hand to be— what else?— the sacred context of [the old man's] accession to paternity . . . The signification of paternity" (158). Patriarchal uncertainty is resolved once again. 9 The term "riddling poetry" is Marjorie Perloff's in "Six Stein Styles," in Kellner 108. 10 My use of this trope of "caption-as-meaning" developed out of the suggestion of playful alternative titles for stein poems that Marjorie Perloff assigns to "Preciocilla" and others (Poetics 104). With such a title comes a structure that draws the diffused language into focus. 11 Gloria Orenstein extends this recognition of Stein's transcendent sensuality to argue convincingly that Stein's subversive references to the Judaic taboos reflects the tension between her lifelong need to assimilate to her Jewish identity and yet to replace the patriarchal structure with her own matristic spiritual vision. 12 353 W. Broadway, NYC. 197 Works Cited Alkon, Paul K. "Visual Rhetoric in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas." Critical Inquiry 1 (1975): 849-879. Arieti, Silvano. Creativity; The Magic Synthesis. New York: Basic Books, 1976. Ashbery, John. "The Impossible." Poetry 90 (1957): 250-254 Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940. Austin: U of Texas P, 1986. Berry, Ellen E. "On Reading Gertrude Stein." Genders 5 (1989): 1-20. Booth, Wayne. A Rhetoric of Irony. U of Chicago P, 1974. Bridgman, Richard. Gertrude Stein in Pieces. New York: Oxford UP, 1970. Chessman, Harriet Scott. The Public is Invited to Dance: Representation, the Body, and Dialogue in Gertrude Stein. Stanford UP, 1989. Cowley, Malcolm. Exile's Return. 1934. New York: Viking, 1956. DeKoven, Marianne. A Different Voice: Gertrude Stein's Experimental Writing. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1983. . "Gertrude Stein." The Gender of Modernism. Ed. Bonnie Kime Scott. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. Dubnick, Randa K. "Two Types of Obscurity in the Writings of Gertrude Stein." American Women Poets. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Dydo, Ulla E. "Stanzas in Meditation: The Other Autobiography." Chicago Review 35.2 (1985): 4-20. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "The Comic." Theories of Comedy. Ed. Paul Lauter. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964. Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. 1905. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1963. "Humour." The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. 24 Vols. London: Hogarth, 1964. 21.159-166. 198 • Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious. 1905. The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud. Ed. and trans. A.A. Brill. New York: Modern Library, 1938. Gallup, Donald. Introduction. Alphabets and Birthdays. By Gertrude Stein. Vol. 7 of The Yale Edition of the unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein. New Haven: Yale UP, 1957. , ed. The Flowers of Friendship: Letters Written to Gertrude Stein. New York: Knopf, 1953. Gass, William H. Introduction. The Geographical History of America. By Gertrude Stein. New York: Random House (Vintage), 1973. Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. "'She Meant What I Said': Lesbian Double Talk." Sexchanges. New Haven: Yale UP, 1989. Vol. 2 of No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. 3 Vols. Grahn, Judy. Really Reading Gertrude Stein: A Selected Anthology with Essays by Judy Grahn. Freedom, CA: Crossing P, 1989. Haas, Robert Bartlett, ed. A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow P, 1971. Hadas, Ramela. "Spreading the Difference: One Way to Read Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons." Twentieth Century Literature 24 (1978): 57-75. Hemingway, Ernest. 88 Poems. Ed. Nicholas Gerogiannis. New York: HBJ, 1979. Hoffman, Michael J., ed. Critical Essays on Gertrude Stein. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1986. Isaak, Jo Anna. "Gertrude Stein: The Revolutionary Power of a Woman's Laughter." The Ruin of Representation in Modernist Art and Texts. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research P, 1986. Kazin, Alfred. introduction. Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews. Third Series. New York: Viking, 1967. Kellner, Bruce, ed. A Gertrude Stein Companion: Content with the Example. New York: Greenwood, 1988. 199 Knapp, Bettina L. Gertrude Stein. New York: Continuum, 1990. Kostelanetz, Richard, ed. Irttroduction. The Yale Gertrude Stein. New Haven: Yale UP, 1980. Lacan, Jacques. "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious." Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977. 146-175. Laughlin, James. "About Gertrude Stein." Yale Review 77 (1988): 528-536. Liston, Maureen R. Gertrude Stein: An Annotated Critical Bibliography. Kent State UP, 1979. Martin, Jay. Introduction. Studies in American Humor 3 (1984): 101-106. Meredith, George. "An Essay on Comedy." Comedy. Ed. Wylie Sypher. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1956. McGhee, Paul E. "Humor Development: Toward a Life Span Approach." Handbook of Humor Research. Ed. Paul E. McGhee and Jeffrey Goldstein. 2 vols. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1983. . "The Role of Laughter and Humor in Growing Up Female." Becoming Female: Perspectives on Development. Ed. Clairie B. Kopp. New York: Plenum, 1979. Moers, Ellen. "The Angry Young Women." Harper's Dec 1968: 88-96. Orenstein, Gloria. "Gertrude Stein." Reflowering the Goddess. New York: Pergamon, 1990. Ostriker, Alicia. Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America. Boston: Beacon, 1986. Perloff, Marjorie. "Poetry as Word-System: The Art of Gertrude Stein." The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Reimbaud to Cage. Princeton UP, 1981. 67-108. . "'Ninety Percent Rotarian': Gertrude Stein's Hemingway." American Literature 62.4 (1990): 668-683. . "Six Stein Styles in Search of a Reader." A Gertrude Stein Companion: Content with the Example. Kellner 96-108. 200 Porter, Katherine Anne. "Gertrude Stein: A Self-Portrait." Harper/s Dec. 1947: 519-127. Reid, B. L. Art by Subtraction. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1958. Ruddick, Lisa. "A Rosy Charm: Gertrude Stein and the Repressed Feminine." Critical Essays on Gertrude Stein Ed. Michael J. Hoffman. Boston: Hall, 1986. Scott, Bonnie Kime. The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. Schmitz, Neil. "The Gaiety of Gertrude Stein." Of Huck and Alice: Humorous Writing in American Literature. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. Simon, Linda, ed. Gertrude Stein: A Composite Portrait. New York: Avon, 1974. Skinner, B.F. "Has Gertrude Stein a Secret?" Critical Essays on Gertrude Stein. Ed. Michael J. Hoffman. Boston: Hall, 1986. Solomons, Leon and Gertrude Stein. "Normal Motor Automatism." The Psychological Review 3 (1896): 492-512. Sontag, Susan. "Notes on 'Camp.'" 1964. Against Interpretation. New York: Farrar, 1966. Stavitsky, Gail. Gertrude Stein: The American Connection. New York: Sid Deutsch Gallery, 1990. Stein, Gertrude. Bee Time Vine and Other Pieces (1913" 19271. Vol. 3 of the Yale Edition of the Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein. New Haven: Yale UP, 1953. . Everybody's Autobiography. 1937. New York: Random House, 1973. • The Geographical History of America. 1936. New York: Random House (Vintage), 1973. . "Have They Attacked Mary. He Giggled." Vanity Fair June 1917: 55. . Lectures in America. Modern Library, 1935. Boston: Beacon, 1985. . Three Lives. 1909. New York: Random House (Vintage), 1973. 201 . "A Portrait of Jo Davidson.” Vanity Fair 23 Feb 1930: 25, 90. . Operas and Plays. Plain Edition, 1932. Rpt. with foreword by James R. Mellow. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1987. . Painted Lace. Vol. 5 of the Yale Edition of the Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein. New Haven: Yale, 1955. . Portraits and Prayers. New York: Random House, 1934. . Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Ed. and Preface, Carl Van Vechten. 1946. New York: Random House (Vintage), 1972. • Stanzas in Meditation. Vol. 6 of the Yale Edition of the Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein. New Haven: Yale, 1951. . Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters: An Opera. Arts Two Theatre, 353 W. Broadway, New York. 28 October 1988. . Two and Other Early Portraits. Vol. 1 of the Yale Edition of the Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein. New Haven: Yale, 1956. . What Are Masterpieces. Ed. Robert Haas. Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie Press, 1940. i Stein, Leo. Journey Into the Self. New York: Crown, 1950. Steiner, Wendy. Introduction. Lectures in America. 1935. Boston: Beacon, 1985. Stimpson, Catharine R. "Going to Be Flourishing." Women/s Review of Books 7.8 (1990): 1+7. . Lecture. Gertrude Stein symposium. 10 November 1984. UCLA. . "Gertrude Stein and the Transposition of Gender." The Poetics of Gender. Ed. Nancy K. Miller. Gender and Culture Series. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. 1-18. Thompson, Virgil, ed. Preface and Notes. Bee Time Vine and Other Unpublished Pieces r1913-19271. Vol. 3 of the Yale Edition of the Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein. New Haven: Yale UP, 1953. 202 Van Vechten, Carl. "A Stein Song." The Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. New York: Random House, 1972. Wagner, Linda. "Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein." The Columbia Literary History of the United States. Columbia UP, 1988. 873-886. Wilder, Thornton. Introduction. Geographical History of America. By Gertrude Stein. 1936. Random House (Vintage), 1973. 203 Chapter Four "Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye": Dorothy Parker from Sentiment to Satire The satirist is a moral agent, often a social scavenger, working on a storage of bile. George Meredith, "An Essay on Comedy" Three be the things I shall have till I die: Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye. Dorothy Parker, "Inventory" Dorothy Parker seemed to be "one of the boys" when she lunched and laughed with her Round Table cronies at the Algonquin Hotel in the twenties. The infamous group originally had grown out of Parker's mid-day highjinks with fellow writers Robert Sherwood and Robert Benchley, and it came to include the purveyors of the droll trend-setting style most fully articulated in The New Yorker magazine. In those early days Parker wrote witty verse, columns, reviews, and fiction for magazines and newspapers, and rented a room in a large house downtown— ^"Jesus we had fun!" she recalled. She credited F.P. Adams with her first recognition ("He raised me from a couplet"), and in 1925 she became a founding editor of The New Yorker. The magazine's editorial statement of intention suggests Parker's own style: "to reflect metropolitan life, to keep up with the events and 204 affairs of the day, to be gay, humorous, satirical, but to be more than a jester1 1 (21 Feb 1925). And Parker became far more than a jester. In the twenties she both participated in and critiqued the life of New York theater and Long Island Weekends, deflating pretensions and offending even as she fascinated. Major portions of her poetry and short stories were collected in 1944 for the portable volume intended for servicemen abroad in World War II, one of the first in the Viking Portable writers series. During the thirties in Hollywood Parker wrote or collaborated on nineteen screenplays and devoted energy to anti-war and labor activities. Reporting from war-torn Spain, she first claimed that "ridicule . . . is not a weapon," and then clarified the confrontation for "puzzled" Americans by observing that "even I could figure out that there is something not quite right when Moors are employed to defend Christianity" ("Incredible" 15). With others she founded the Hollywood Anti-Nazi league and organized the Screen Writers Guild to address exploitation of aspiring writers on ad hoc assignments (defending screenwriters, Parker caustically declared, "I can look my God and my producer--whom I do not, as do many, confuse with each other— in the face, and say that I have earned every cent of it"1). Her activism ultimately brought censure from friends and a subpoena to appear before the House Un- American Activities Committee. She was married to writer 205 , Alan Campbell for thirty-one years (allowing for a stormy three-year divorce-sabbatical). Together they wrote screenplays, entertained theater and literary luminaries on both coasts, drank to hallucination, argued viciously, and maintained a lifelong dialogue of wit. Parker continued to work episodically on stories, plays, and contributions to magazines until the last years of her life. In 1958 when she received the Marjorie Peabody Waite Award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, Malcolm Cowley remembers that "there had never yet been [a standing ovation] at an Institute Ceremonial. But when Dorothy Parker received her award, the whole audience rose spontaneously . . . [He] saw men and women in the audience wiping away tears" (Meade 72). More than a jester, she continued to evoke responsive tears as well as laughter. Dorothy Parker is recognized as the foremost woman humorist in the twentieth century. Even those who have never read her stories or her poetry recognize her by reputation— generally as the acerbic commentator on the gender wars which followed the Great War. Both as a personality and as an artist, Parker continues to be an inspirational influence for contemporary feminists: Nora Ephron recalls that as a young writer, "All I wanted in the world was to come to New York and be Dorothy Parker" (139). When Gloria Steinem interviewed Parker in the sixties as a reporter for a woman's magazine she knew Dorothy Parker's 206 verses by heart; she had heard her mother quote them (13). In 1936 Margaret Lawrence surmised that "She is probably the most quoted woman in the world" (173), and even two generations later in 1992, Los Anaeles Times columnist Liz Smith cites a Parker remark with an aside to her readers: "Never thought I'd find a quote by D.P. that was new to me" (2). Clearly, a modern oral tradition of women's wit and style continues to echo the influence of Dorothy Parker. Parker considered herself a feminist, and in her poetry, fiction, and drama, her major subject became women's values, their behavior, and their emotionally proscribed place in an capitalist patriarchal system. Her narrative voice assumed a range of personae; her humor became a complex strategy to address controversial issues of social injustice, systems of economic exploitation of women, and duplicitous personal behavior. But she also presents exploitation by women and duplicitous personal behavior by women— as well as revealing the unsettling symbiotic quality of women's complicity in their own (often repressive) situations. Depending upon how critics will read and interpret the code-switches between irony and empathy, Parker's work seems to level indefensible scorn against women. If read without irony, her work often resists feminist values entirely. Her perspective on women's experience is often harsh, and feminist scholars confess to finding her fiction to be 207 (understandably) "disturbing"2; "none of Parker's characters are women whom we can enjoy without anxiety," concludes Zita Dresner (diss 107). Reading the short stories, Emily Toth concludes that Parker's work, in fact, is "traditional, because the women are unable to get out of their oppressive pattern" (1978, 82). The fiction IS disturbing, but my thesis is that this darkly ironic fiction is answered antiphonally in the satire of her verse. So readers wonder whether Parker, speaking as a woman, is laughing with women or at women. Indeed, according to Henri Bergson, "Our laughter is always the laughter of a group" and "however spontaneous it seems, . . . always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers real or imaginary" (64); Freud, too, concluded that "every joke calls for a public of its own" (Jokes 151). Parker's laughers, real or imaginary, must share a "secret freemasonry," and I propose that this consists of their common inhibitions. In Dorothy Parker's work, the surface may be smugness, convention, or even repartee, and the social system in place may execute daily cruelty, but the system is protected through the inhibitions which prevent revealing the depth of ignorance or mean- spirited motivations. Such announcement of ongoing exploitation, injustice, social duplicity may provoke the \ critical rebuke that it is rude to notice. 208 Thoughts disguised in the pleasurable language of jokes, however, are protected from criticism, Freud finds, and thus the function of jokes "consists from the first in lifting internal inhibitions and making sources of pleasure [the disturbing thoughts] fertile which have been rendered inaccessible by those inhibitions" (.Jokes 130). Parker's work divides readers into what Stanley Fish has called "interpretive communities,"3 and this poses special problems: interpretive communities differ, in part, because humor cannot be perceived outside of a mutual agreement on previous assumptions regarding the function of existing systems and the inhibitions that protect them. Humor researcher Joseph Boskin points out the use of humor by socially coherent "in-groups" as well as "out-groups" (25- 60).4 Humor can reinforce mutually affirmed values of an in-group against discontent and rebellion within its membership by ridiculing or attacking those who do not belong. Humor can also serve as a strategy by those who are excluded, in order to denigrate that restrictive social group and thereby validate the outsiders. As a powerful weapon in social skirmishes, satire proves effective in ethnic commentary by Jewish and black humorists; although Boskin does not discuss humor by women, I would argue that it is far more difficult to interpret the humor of women when it appears to be used against the speaker herself, or against women as a social group. Because women participate 209 in social systems with varying involvement, all women are not going to interpret the same situations as frustrating or oppressive; common inhibitions are lacking. Some women speak openly on a topic that others find offensive or coercive. To create a joke about a subject, the woman joker must be able to first erect in the listener the same inhibition that she herself (as joker) has overcome: The hearer must be able as a matter of habit to erect in himself the same inhibition which the first person's joke has overcome, so that, as soon as he hears the joke, the readiness for this inhibition will compulsively or automatically awaken" (Jokes 151). No inhibition, no joke. So not only can the irony in Parker's fiction be misunderstood, but the poetry, too, which is celebrated especially for its humor, can be jarring— depending upon readerly inhibitions. On one hand, Parker's humorous poetry often takes the tone of bitterness, mockery, vindictiveness, and opportunism which can offend; on the other hand, Parker's female persona who deploys a sentimental pose and the maudlin voice of unrequited love can send a frisson. Ironically, both positions (tough or sentimental), when read straightforwardly, defy the conventions of feminist humor as it is identified by some contemporary theorists and writers: "an uplift, not a put-down," Gloria Kaufman sanguinely explains in 1980— "We do not laugh at people, we bond with them" (16). Continuing on this optimistic note, comedian 210 Kate Clinton believes that feminists have "an in-group bonding power based on the sharing of [their] common joy" (42); and Emily Toth perceives that women "follow the humane humor rule: they [only] mock people for their choices" ("Laughter" 205)5 Not surprisingly then, in a 1978 analysis of women's humor, Toth finds Dorothy Parker's work not identified as feminist but rather as "the best example of what I would call the more traditional female humor" (1978, 70). This interpretation of Parker as only a problematical feminist (and often seen as male-identified in a man's world) may result from the inherent conflict between the pragmatic goal of the satirist and this optimistic goal for feminist humor. The satirist only aims to name the game, to coldly expose cruel reality: "Satire is a gadfly to society, provoking a reevaluation of its attitudes, though not necessarily prompting any action to change those attitudes" [emphasis mine] (Feinberg 273). As a satirist, then, Dorothy Parker does not conform to the feminist project expressed by Leigh Marlowe in 1985: "The content of feminist humor aims at changing women's behavior, and aims at changing women's relations with men" (273). In a first reading of the fiction, the feminist critic might well be dismayed at the frustrated, even doomed, lives of Parker's women, and a reading of Parker's poetry, too, inspires no improvement in relations between the sexes. Her verse— with 211 its sardonic and cunning reversals, vigilante humor, and tactical emotional revenge gained by the heartbroken woman— yields pleasure, but the humor is far from that "uplift" which Kaufmann claimed for feminist humor. Parker's work both exposes and returns the bruise. Curiously, these contemporary views of feminist humor seem perversely to echo the assumptions of 50's humor researcher Martin Grotjahn, who takes no pleasure in a woman frightening "the contemporary male, who is easily frightened in his masculinity": The woman of today [1957] is supposed to be warm, understanding, charming, attractive, passive, and accepting. She may show a sense of humor in her later years as a sign of maternal maturity; but she had better not show her wit too obviously if she is young and intelligent, for she will scare the contemporary male, who is easily frightened in his masculinity. . . . Wit is decidedly a sign not of gentle love, but of disguised hostility."6 Because of a gendered temperament, then, women are not suited to disguised hostility. Later Grotjahn clarifies the distinction: "wit is his; humor is hers" (59). But Dorothy Parker's work defies such categories of gender characterization. She figures dynamically in the development of women's humor in the twentieth century— clearly speaking as a woman, but in the role of satirist. Expectations for a woman's expression and behavior inherently conflict with the role of satirist. Because the efficacy of satire depends upon an overt sincerity if not 212 innocence, the feminine persona can provide a wryly convincing disguise. But another convention of satire— the attack upon the satirist— gains a double target. Dorothy Parker, as a woman satirist, came in for gender-inflected critique. From the first years of the Round Table and The New Yorker f Dorothy Parker was the only woman identified at the center of that influential group, although others drifted in and out. As she gained a name for quick wit and biting satire, the reports of her conversational sallies became as well-known as her one-liners in print. Her appearance— small and doe-eyed— belied her sharp tongue, and the traditional fear of a satirist colored the responses of her expanding circle. Criticism of her centered on her inclination to comment on duplicity operating below surface social behaviors, a discourse that commentators attributed to feminine behavior. In reports which might be read at this remove as petty gossip, her critics both male and female often defensively resorted to sexual innuendo and demeaning personal invective; she responded both as a satirist and as a woman. When she offers the conventional apologia required as a satirist to protest satiric intention, her self-effacing statement in later life reflects a coy denial of sexuality as well. Speaking as a satirist and as a woman, she first disavows the title of satirist: "Ah . . . They're the big boys," she sighed to an interviewer. "If I'd been called a satirist there'd be no 213 living with me" (Capron 77). Instead she proposes that she had never meant to violate a conventional girlish light heartedness, establishing her comments as well-meaning if lacking in substance: "I was only a little Jewish girl trying to be cute." This bit of autobiographical fiction re-states and re enacts her ironic disguise of being "only" naive, artless, and in a tradition of oppression. Speaking as "little" voice allowed her to be especially slashing; speaking as a "girl," she could comment upon and even innocently promote sexual manipulation as pure common sense. She was "cute" only when she mocked pretension or spoke as a persona designed to demonstrate the ignorance of women's complicity which caught them in a trap of their own device. Her Jewish claim tapped into a tradition of oppression, actually experienced by Parker not as culture as much as vulnerability and personal conflict. Her father was Jacob Henry Rothschild, her mother a Scot— Eliza Marston; her writing carries nothing of Jewish life, but this divided background contributed to her personal recognition of injustice and bigotry as well as her unrelenting satire on vacuous liberal rhetoric. And finally, she was never simply "trying" to be clever: she turned out wildly popular collections of verse (the first into eleven printings), volumes of short stories, weekly reviews, contributions to a variety of magazines, nearly two dozen screen plays, and 214 decades of significant work in The New Yorker. Parker's satire, however, depends in large part on the ambiguous interplay between the public announcement of a disguise and the later muted revelation through what she calls "her mutter." She functions as a satirist by announcing her personae as variations of "only a little Jewish girl trying to be cute." Such disguises and splits in her life and work have led scholars, critics, biographers, and journalists first to identify the typical woman in Parker's stories as neurotic— "an unintegrated personality" (Dresner 114)— and then to identify that woman as Parker herself: "The best gloss on Parker's own life is to be found in her stories" (Douglas 174). Even sophisticated critics consistently read Parker's work as autobiographical, confusing her fictional characters and her poetic personae with her personal life. Zita Dresner reflects that "Dorothy Parker's fascination with the ways in which her female characters indulge in hypocrisy may derive from the fact that she was given to pretense herself" (105). (Earlier, Donald Ogden Stewart had speculated that "she could recognize pretense because that was part of her make-up. She would get glimpses of herself doing things that would make her hate herself for that sort of pretense" (Keats 62). When Emily Toth finds that "Dorothy Parker is a prisoner of her image" (77), she refers to the limited serious reception of ideas by a "humorist," but I would 215 point out that the humor itself is vitiated when we read it as literal autobiography. Reading Dorothy Parker's prose and poetry as interpretive clues to her life instead of satiric commentary on human behavior makes a grim project. It creates cranky critics. For these reasons, then, the widely differing critical interpretations of her work by both men and women often twist into a virulent personal attack on Parker herself. Again, this is a convention of satire— the public suspicion of the satirist. Robert Elliott points out the cause: "No matter how conservative the rationale of the satirist may be, it is inevitable that the pressure of his [sic] art will in some ways run athwart society's efforts to maintain its equilibrium" (153). And because society's equilibrium largely rests on a consensus view of woman's role in personal politics, the sharp-tongued woman satirist suffers increased vulnerability— and personal attack. "On the most obvious level [society] points with outrage to the inevitable discrepancy between the ideal image [of the satirist as responsible commentator], projected by rhetorical convention, and what it takes to be actual fact," notes Elliott. "Swift, or Pope— so goes the reasoning, was a wicked man; therefore we may dismiss his satire" (153). And likewise, if she is wicked we may dismiss her satire. Thus Brendan Gill, writing the Introduction to the 1973 reissue of The Vikina Portable Dorothy Parker, editorializes 216 disparagingly that while reading her poetry "one cannot help thinking with sympathy of the miserable days and nights through which she drove a succession of distracted lovers" (xxvii). (In his bestseller, Here at The New Yorker Gill conspicuously had omitted any discussion of Dorothy Parker's substantial and influential contributions to the formation of the magazine, only mentioning her name first in the list of founding editors and then in a list of hard drinkers.) Parker's long life— during which she often wrote humorously about suicide— strikes Gill as "a reluctance to keep old promises made in poems" (xxvi). He wraps up her career: "She enjoyed an early vogue, which passed . . .(xiii) The verses most appealing to the original readers, he claims, "are the ones likeliest now to set our teeth on edge, as being tainted with a glib gallantry" (xvii). Gill likens her to "a tattered old teller of tales," and he defensively suggests that even his reluctant praise would be rebuffed, so perversely did Parker court abuse: There were few circumstances under which, with an effort, she could refrain from making wisecracks; though it is risky to assume that an occasion for paying homage to her would be among them, we do well to take that chance. . . how much readier she was to accept abuse than praise. Greatly daring, we salute her. (xxviii) In similar patronizing curmudgeonly assertions, Marion Meade, her 1988 biographer, finds in Parker's life a tawdry melodrama instead of humor, self-denigration instead of 217 social critique, recklessness instead of boldness.7 She trivializes Parker's achievement ("play reviewing offered unlimited opportunities for bellyaching, one of her favorite pastimes" [48]), and implies that her later financial misfortunes may stand as fair retribution for her alcoholic or foolish behavior (Meade claims she was told that Parker "had a habit of giving all her money to the ladies-room attendant" [192]). A caustically unsympathetic biographer, Meade reads Parker's fiction as transcripts of autobiography, and her sardonic poetry as simple expressions of personal despair. Her unrelenting references to what she reads as Parker's promiscuity finally slides into anti- Semitism when she speculates that young Dorothy thought her future in-laws "were treating her like a New York Jew on the make" (41). This language is Meade's; it echoes the anti-Semitism as well as the sexual innuendo that Parker experienced. In 1936, at the apogee of tolerance for anti-Semitism, Margaret Lawrence simplistically critiqued Parker's work in terms of ethnic traits; She is half Jewish and half Scottish. Which means she has the cast-iron effrontery of the Jew when put up against the world, and the cast-iron sense of superiority which is the temperamental inheritance of the Scot. It also means that she has the knife-blade bitterness of the Jewish tongue put together with the emotional economy of the Scot. This leads her to set her remarks within the smallest containing phrase and to aim them at the bull's eye. (173) 218 Beyond an analysis of rhetorical skill based on stereotypes, forty years later Arthur Kinney, similarly, attributes Parker's personal inclinations to general ethnic contributions. He claims that "her Jewishness gave her the felt roots of her being: a sense of being dispossessed . . , a long intellectual heritage . . . , and the desire for financial success" (1978, 18). I would argue that Parker's divided background only complicated her responses and rather than align her with her Jewishness instead distanced her from the richness of the Jewish heritage as well as from what Freud calls "the manifold and hopeless miseries of the Jews." She is gifted, however, with the skill to acutely observe a miserable state until it assumes a dimension of absurdity, and becomes what Freud calls the "cynical joke"— a critical or blasphemous wit so bitter and accurate that cues in "dialect or skill in narrative are necessary for raising a laugh" (Jokes 114). Parker's cynicism often surfaces in the same manner as Freud describes the genesis of Jewish jokes, in which intended rebellious criticism is directed against the subject himself, or, to puf. it more cautiously, against someone in whom the subject has a share— a collective person (the subject's own nation, for instance).. (Jokes 111) Her wit, however, is not directed at herself as Jewish, but as conflicted. She joked about titling an autobiography "Mongrel," and in a 1928 New Yorker article she (as both Jew 219 and Gentile) observes a double edge in the observation itself: "For the Gentile, there is always something just a little bit comic about a Jew. That is the tragedy of Israel."8 Her poetry faces both ways as well. Over the years Parker wrote three Christian poems imagining the Virgin Mary as "a gentle thing" at the Nativity and as an anxious mother, released from the burden of sanctity. All are heavily ironic; "The Maid-Servant at the Inn," for instance, recounts that although the birth night "Was more than thirty years ago; / I've prayed that all is well with them" (The Portable Dorothy Parker 225).9 More bitterly ironic is her only poem alluding to Jewishness, "The Dark Girl's Rhyme," in which she writes of mixed ethnic backgrounds as the impediment of a romance: "Angry ran between us / Blood of him and me." Neither heritage comes off well here— his is "Toadying, in sing-song, / To a crabbed god"; hers are "folk of mud and flame," actually "devil-gotten sinners," who are "Fiddling for their dinners, / Kissing for their beds" (PDP 78-79). Along with her double ethnic consciousness, Parker was aware that her family had often muted their heritage; later in a merciless fictional satire she denounced such denials. Her Christian stepmother had enrolled Dorothy in a Catholic grammar school, and later when Dorothy attended Miss Dana's boarding school in New Jersey, "her records indicate that 220 her parents attended the Episcopal church” (Meade 27). Another precedent for her ethnic ambivalence may be reflected, too, in her father's name change from Jacob to J. Henry Rothschild, although name changes by public figures certainly was not uncommon: a ready example is Elmer L. Rice, Dorothy's collaborator in their early stage musical, who had changed his name from Elmer L. Rizenstein (Kinney 1978, 41). When Dorothy Rothschild married Eddie Parker she took his name for life (”Mrs. Parker to you,” she once tongue-in-cheek told the readership of her theater reviews), which many critics have regarded as evidence of ethnic denial— a specious assumption, I believe, after her developing reputation as a writer had carried the byline of Parker, and contemporary social custom had assumed that marriage mandated a patriarchal surname. Her lingering uneasiness over her misleading surname looms as subtext in her revealing story of the obsequious Horace in "Mrs. Hofstadter on Josephine Street" (PDP 155-164). Horace is black, but the significance of his behavior addresses the general issue of individual racial identity. Hired as a domestic servant or factotum by the narrator and her husband the Colonel, Horace comes with highest apocryphal recommendation from his last employer "out in her lovely home on Josephine Street.” Horace's endless enthusiastic self-promotion features name-dropping compliments from "Mrs. Hofstadter” until finally the couple 221 finds that "there was only space; space filled with Horace. . . . All his conversation was for us." Horace's pride in domestic trivia is only exceeded by his successful disavowal of his ethnicity? of his daughter, he reports proudly; that girl of mine, she's taken for white evey day in the week. Yes, sir. I bet you there's a hundred people, right in this town, never dreams that girl of mine's a colored girl. And my sister's just about the finest hairdresser you ever set your eyes on. And never touches a colored head, either. . . .1 try never to say an unkind thing, I don't hold nothing against the colored race, but Horace just doesn't mix up with them, that's all. (159) What consequence might be in store for the daughter who can pass and a person who "don't hold nothing against" his own race, but "just doesn't mix up with them, that's all"? The narrator follows Horace's declaration directly with an example of Freud's cynical joke; I thought of a man I had known once named Aaron Eisenberg, who changed his name to Erik Colton. Nothing ever became of him. This pride-and-fall sequence and the flat tone of it fit Freud's concept of the cynical joke: "Technically this joke is nothing other than an object-lesson; dialect or skill in narrative are necessary for raising a laugh, but in the background lies the sad question . . . (Jokes 114) The question rings through the center of Parker's humor; Freud concludes that "It is on account of the allusion made by these pessimistic stories to the manifold and hopeless miseries of the Jews that I must class them with tendentious 222 jokes" (114). No fully tragic involvement is available for the individual who can only claim a half-hopeless misery; for her, there will be the embarrassing sense of observing one half observing the other. To call attention to this awkwardness is to tap the unspoken inhibition. Parker may have reacted to the erasure of her nominal Jewishness on her wedding day to Edwin Pond Parker II when, in a harbinger of the name-changer's fate ("Nothing ever became of him"), she entered as her occupation on the church registry as "None." Not only divided in her ethnic identity, Parker also maintained an ideological distance from the major women writers of her time. As a satirist, she required such removal in order to address issues with humor that is characterized as scientific in its particularity. Henri Bergson maintains that the "very essence" of humor is to go down into an evil that actually is, in order to set down its details in the most cold-blooded indifference. . . . Humor delights in concrete terms, technical details, definite facts. A humorist is a moralist disguised as a scientist, something like an anatomist who practises dissection with the sole object of filling us with disgust. (143) The painful allusion in the cynical joke gains in impact with a full report of the language as well as the personal manipulation involved in bigotry, elitism, superficiality/ and exploitation. A satirist begins with the assumption that the system is wrong. On the contrary, 223 when a writer affirms the validity of social practices and participates fully, that writer will neither scorn the conventional rituals nor will she joke about them. According to Freud, she would not be able to erect the necessary inhibition in order to overcome it with laughter. For Dorothy Parker, this meant that to maintain integrity as a writer she would need to separate herself from professional identification with many of the other women writers of her time. She makes careful distinctions between her own expression and the work of prolific writers such as Faith Baldwin, Edna Ferber, and Kathleen Norris ("those who write fantasies" [Capron 76]): . . . they gush. Norris said she never wrote a story unless it was fun to do. I understand Ferber whistles at her typewriter. And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on the floor for three days looking for the right word. (Capron 77) That Flaubertian struggle for precision haunted Dorothy Parker, too: to capture the word that carries innuendo, the rhyme that snaps into wit. This struggle divided her from the women novelists of domestic harmony: I'm a feminist, and God knows I'm loyal to my sex, and you must remember that from my very early days, when this city was scarcely safe from buffaloes, I was in the struggle for equal rights for women. But when we paraded through the catcalls of men and when we chained ourselves to lamp posts to try to get our equality— dear child, we didn't foresee those female writers. (Capron 77) 224 For Dorothy Parker, writing "like a woman" implies a denial of her professional integrity. In 1929 she writes a chatty letter to Alexander Woollcott from the Riviera, where she is "working like a fool" on "an awful pile of work," but she bemoans that "it's nothing, compared to what I tear up." She offers a jaunty prayer to Jesus against the internal foe who is to blame for this: "Dear God, please make me stop writing like a woman. For Jesus Christ's sake, amen." (Kinney, "Letters" 489). In this phatic petition, Dorothy Parker the woman satirist disavows the "writing-like-a- woman" voice that could block the authentic production by her professional Flaubertian craftsman-self— "that poor sucker.1 1 When Dorothy Parker's fictive voice scorns the invidious conduct of women or the poetic voice taunts and derides the sentimental woman, we must recognize the fictive invention of separate female personae in the service of satire of quite specific behaviors. In a full-length discussion of the social construction of gender identity, Judith Butler argues that the social condition of being female can be approached as linguistic construction.10 If we can believe that social behavior of a certain description can be called "female," then (by extension) females who act following these expectations can be identified as belonging to an "in-group" defined by gender specificity. Satiric commentary directed against those individuals living 225 according to these assigned "female" behavior modes could be interpreted as "against women," but more accurately this satire addresses the values and roles affirmed by this particular social group of women.11 One of her first published verses is a satirical litany of superficial and trivial pastimes of women titled "Women: A Hate Song"; Parker at twenty-three levels wry exasperation at the idle and petty: "Oh, I hate that kind of woman." She signed the piece "Henriette Rousseau." Henriette may scorn "that kind" but she certainly does not count herself among them. As a satirist she draws types and characters who are suggestive "representations of the opposite" as Freud claims for wit. She is in control, documenting the pettiness which may have passed for grace and charm, but which here inspires disgust instead of social acclaim. Parker's fictional women differ from each other, and when women confront women in Parker's stories, they represent conflicting attitudes and compulsions, but consistent in her fictional women is their lack of personal control. Such control— which is central to women's humor— here belongs only to the writer, that is to Parker as the satirist. Editorial control of the structure, sequence, and timing of the humorous narrative will control the readerly affect. According to Freud, when one person [the writer] establishes a situation which leads another [the reader] to expect that the first person will produce the signs of an 226 effect— to weep, scream, or show despair— [the reader] will expect to follow that lead. Then when the writer instead makes a jest, "the expenditure on feeling that is economized turns into humorous pleasure in the [reader]" (21.162). Parker's structural arrangement of her work— as she meant for it to be read in the key text of 1944, The Portable Dorothy Parker— follows Freud's paradigm. When we read the poems as satiric voices responding to the ironic contexts of her fiction— a genre interplay of dialogic voices— we can fully appreciate the coherence and subtlety of Dorothy Parker's work. Reading her poetry alternating with her short fiction, we can hear the texture of contradiction as a rhetorical and cognitive strategy of humor. In order to appreciate the complexity of her skill, her importance for women writers, and her place in American humor, we must read Parker's work as an intra-dialogue. In 1944 Parker herself ordered the seguence of the selections in Viking's The Portable Dorothy Parker: here groups of stories alternate with the complete volumes of poetry, in an interlocking format. Although the sequence is roughly chronological, certain pieces are placed so that an intertextual colloquy develops. The resulting intra dialogue results in star-turns of satire as fiction and poetry respond to each other. Read separately, her fiction may be haunting and the poetry often dazzling, but when we understand the fiction in terms of a constricting social 227 context and the poetry as a bold epigrammatic response, we can recognize the full complexity and subtlety of her work. Whereas irony becomes tragic in Parker's fiction, her satire in the poetry is expressed in comic turns and jokes. The chief distinction between irony and satire, according to Northrop Frye, is that "satire is militant irony: its moral norms are relatively clear, and it assumes standards against which the grotesque and absurd are measured. [On the other hand] . . . whenever a reader is not sure what the author's attitude is or what his own is supposed to be, we have irony with relatively little satire (223).12 Dorothy Parker's short stories are ironic studies in ambiguity. Is "Horsie," for example, a humorous or a pathetic story? Is "Arrangement in Black and White" a heavy-handed portrait of bigotry or is it hilarious— "a scream," as Harold Ross found it? (Meade 305). And George Douglas registers his own tellingly ambivalent response to "Lady with a Lamp": "One can't help laughing at Mona's 'friend,' but the story is actually brutal ..." (169). In Parker's fiction, the narrator or speaker is a wry and ironic observer, inclusively documenting detail of near-Hogarthian backgrounds,13 noting significant gestures, and reporting conversation. What to make of it all is up to the ironic insights of the reader. Her fictional characters are sharply real: they speak self-revealingly and they are described in spare and uncompromising strokes. Through 228 their own ingenuous misunderstanding or impulsive temperament, however, such egregious suffering befalls the victims that we are compelled to forgive their foibles in our amazement at the ironic and punishing consequences. * * * The dark ironic quality of Dorothy Parker's fiction rests in the lack of resolution. Her women relentlessly repeat compulsive behavior reflecting a desire for romance, vulnerability to flattery, or their need for economic security as well as a public validation of their good intentions. While dreams of love, personal recognition, security and integrity are intrinsically human longings (and scarcely gender-specifid) Parker often paints a precarious world of female fantasy and emotional addiction, in which hope for a future requires steady denials and pragmatic daily lies. These lies and self-deceptions in the fiction connect to and inform the satiric dialogue in the poems between public hypocrisy and inner truth-telling; this convention of satire strikes a poignant correspondence with culturally sanctioned behavior by women. Parker ruthlessly demonstrates how self-deception, denial, frustration, and continued blind aspiration can transform basic longing into obsession. Consistently, in Parker's prose, her fictional women lose out in the struggle to control their lives; they may be addicted to alcohol, or to episodic abuse from a man, or to 229 a defensive wish to control their children. Or they may seem to the reader simply to be stuck in mindless immersion in trivia. Only in the aftertaste of the story can the reader feel the alienation (and futile hostility) that directs a woman's life-energy toward the minutiae that earlier had held promise of graceful living. In "From the Diary of a New York Lady," a woman writes out cryptic notes (in images of violence) documenting her vacuous life: Started to read the papers, but nothing in them except that Mona Wheatley is in Reno charging intolerable cruelty. Called up Jim Wheatley to see if he had anything to do tonight, but he was tied up. Finally got Ollie Martin. Can't decide whether to wear the white satin or the black chiffon or the yellow pebble crepe. Simply wrecked to the core about my finger nail. Can't bear it. (PDP 3 30) Some quality of isolation defines the life of Parker women whether rich and poor. Domestic workers drift in and out of Parker's stories, attentive (they are always treated sympathetically in the narrative), but detached and disaffected. In "The Bolt behind the Blue" (PDP 394-415), two women on either side of class lines each feel isolated, diminished: Miss Mary Nicholl was poor and plain, which afflictions compelled her, when she was in the presence of a more blessed lady, to vacillate between squirming humility and spitting envy. The more blessed lady, her friend Mrs. Hazelton, enjoyed Miss Nicholl's visits occasionally; humility is a seemly tribute to a favorite of fate, and to be the cause of envy is cozy to the ego. (PDP 394) 230 But such simplistic satiric comment on class attitudes later turns to a dark irony. Finally, who envies whom? the reader is left to wonder. During Mary Nicholl's obsequious visit to Mrs. Hazelton, she is offered what she considers a small cocktail (she asks for refills of the melted ice) and an invidious tour into Mrs. Hazelton's "great deep closets”— a scene reminiscent of Gatsby's hectic whirl through his shirts for Daisy's appreciation. The reader, who has been drawn to sympathize with Mary, now hears Parker's narrator report her petty calculation: Miss Nicholl went to work, and put her shoulders into it. She piled up praises until she seemed to be building them into dizzy towers. Mrs. Hazelton did not speak, but there was encouragement in the way she looked distractedly about, as if searching her stores for something to give. (411) In a misplaced and patronizing gesture, Mrs. Hazelton rewards Mary's abject behavior with "a sequinned purse, perfect to be carried with a ball gown,” and the narrator seems to shrug in resignation, along with Mary: "Still, a present is a present, and Miss Nicholl positively writhed with gratitude." Later Mary modestly boasts of her dinners with Idabel (another of the "woiking goils," she quips) in a tea room where the tiny table flowers are dyed blue and the prune spin is cheap; sometimes they see a movie afterward. She ingenuously adds that the tea room generally is crowded. Mrs. Hazelton responds with her own tales of "Parties, parties, parties," until her daughter interrupts, "Oh, you 231 haven't been out at night for ages." As Mary walks to the bus stop, she rails under her breath against the "blessed lady": "No, sir, she can have her pearls and her hangers and her money and her twice-a-week florist, and welcome to them." When her claim contradicts her earlier "spitting envy" ("I swear, I wouldn't change places with Alicia Hazelton for anything on earthi"), a "bolt from the blue" should deliver cosmic justice upon such a liar, but no such bolt, we are told, swoops down upon Mary. Mrs. Hazelton makes a parallel denial to herself later in her room "sweet with shimmering blossoms. She touched the pearls about her throat . . . and glanced down at the delicate slippers that were made for her in Rome." Then addressing her indifferent daughter, Mrs. Hazelton reverses her earlier interpretation of Mary Nicholl's life to rationalize: . . . she hasn't any responsibilities and she has a job that gives her something to do every day, and a nice room, and a lot of books to read, and she and her friend do all sorts of things in the evenings. Oh, let me tell you, I'd be more than glad to change places with Mary NichollI" And that bolt which would mark truth stays "back of the blue." Neither denial can be entirely counted a lie; and the narrow lives of these women continue, defined in part by cultural and economic limitations, but also isolated by their own fictions and denials. 232 In Parker's stories the ambiguity of narrative attitude toward women marks out irony that is tragic; in the poetry, however, the persona of satirist takes over, and this controlling stance vindicates the hapless fictional characters. The women in Parker's stories, for example, regardless of their discomfort or frustration, have no relief— they must continue as they are. As the dancer in "The Waltz" struggles to follow an oafish partner, she mutters that he worked up his little step himself, he with his degenerate cunning. And it was just a tiny bit trickly at first, but now I think I've got it. Two stumbles, slip, and a twenty-yard dash: yes, I've got it. (PDP 50) Nevertheless, she pretends to respond eagerly to his encore invitation: "Oh, goody. Oh, that's lovely. Tired? I should say I'm not tired. I'd like to go on like this forever." She feels "trapped like a trap in a trap."14 The young woman may consider herself a "trap" (under the terms of the courtship rituals) for a man's interest in marriage; instead she is trapped into demonstrating a show of energy and fun. The waltz, then, is a trap for her which she needs to appear to enjoy. The verse satirist, on the other hand, turns such a victim into a skilled professional, and turns the dance into strategy. In "Salome's Dancing-Lesson," while the speaker 233 darices for her life, she also mutters to herself— but now as an opportunist: She that begs a little boon (Heel and toe! Heel and toe!) Little gets— and nothing, soon. (No, no, no! No, no, no!) She that calls for costly things Priceless finds her offerings— What's impossible to kings? (Heel and toe! Heel and toe!) Salome instructs initiates: ’ ’Scratch a king and find a fool!" (PDP 298) The ironic fiction and the satiric verse riff together on themes that intertwine romantic dreams and economic reality. In a Parker story women often reduce hope to minimal expectations as when Miss Wilraarth ("Horsie," PDP 260-275) finds a dry husk of pleasure in knowing that even though she will have no other possibility of romantic experience than receiving gardenias from her contemptuous employer (and "They might not fade maybe for days"), still "she could keep the box." For Miss Wilmarth only the forms and structures— the envelope— of romance is available. The reason is clear. With intrusive brutality, the narrator interprets Miss Wilmarth's off-putting appearance: "Her neck glowed crimson, and her face, even with its powder, looked more than ever as if it should have been resting over the top rail of a paddock fence," and Gerald Cruger cruelly refers to "Seabiscuit." But the reader, watching her open her flower box in the final scene, is told that "Miss 234 Wilmarth's strange resemblance was not apparent, as she looked at her flowers." Thus the reader must decide whether to feel embarrassed, revolted, annoyed, or sympathetic when this woman cherishes a pasteboard box. Parker's poetic satirist-persona, on the other hand, would have no patience for this minimalist gift. Far from cherishing it, she would go for bigger game: Why is it no one ever sent me yet One perfect limousine, do you suppose? Ah no, it's always just my luck to get One perfect rose. ("One Perfect Rose," ER 73) No such hard-boiled pragmatism is available in Parker's stories; there any developing awareness belongs only to the reader. The character themselves continue in their self- defeating behavior. Women talk out their unhappiness in circular musings ("Diary of a New York Lady," "The Little Hours"), or conversational fantasy ("Standard of Living"), or tearful, amnesiac drunken conversation ("Three O'clock in the Morning," "Just a Little One," "You Were Perfectly Fine"), but because their drifting language reflects their drifting lives, the reader knows that their desperation will continue. Fictive closure comes only in the break of the narrative: the phone line is disconnected ("New York to Detroit") or the frame of time for talk is cropped by the schedule of the upcoming salaried work day (or time for "The Lovely Leave" ends). The tearful "Dialogue at Three in the Morning" ends with repetitive talk "across the Scotch-soaked 235 tablecloth" when, surrealistically, "From the unknown, a waiter appeared. He chirped and fluttered about them. Presently, you felt, he would cover them with leaves . . "15 Equally spent, the drunken skit-story "A Terrible Day Tomorrow" ends with "And so on."16 Parker points out that her fictional women are ironically complicit in their relentless, repressive and punishing fates. Their reasons for complicity are various, but most crucially they endure hopeless conditions because of the bondage which I call "emotional thralldom."17 Some are held in an emotional bondage to their desire to be loved by a man, but they also are driven by what they perceive as a duty— for example, to an indifferent or cruel family member (as in "The Wonderful Old Gentleman") or to their country at war (in "Song of the Shirt 1941"). Parker's fictional women seem to have little control over their own independence, their personal economic success, or their reproductive lives. In "The Custard Heart," Mrs. Lanier's young maid finds herself pregnant and abandoned while ?elf-concerned Mrs. Lanier enjoys a manicure and entertains young men, prattling all the while about her fantasy of having a baby to complete her life. The lackluster corporation man in "Mr. Durant" arranges for an abortion for his secretary Rose— the dark consequence of their after-hours meetings. His company, "the rubber works," is sketched for us in phallic metaphor as 236 the solid red pile, . . . six neat stories rising impressively into the darkness. You would go far, he thought, before you would find a more up-and-coming outfit, and there welled in him a pleasing, proprietary sense of being a part of it." (PDP 35) On his way home, the philistine Mr. Durant thinks "of his dinner— it was fish-chowder night— of his children, of his wife, in the order named." On the contrary, Rose has no emotional support; even her friend Ruby, who had arranged the abortion, gives Mr. Durant "a little upward glance, mischievous. There was a sense of intimacy, of a shared secret binding then cozily together." Mr. Durant disposes of Rose as neatly as he does of his children's new pet, a female dog. Professing revulsion toward the puppy, he lectures his wife: "All the males in the neighborhood will be running after her. First thing you know, she'd be having puppies— and the way they look after they've had them, and allI That would be nice for the children to see, wouldn't it?" He directs his wife to set the puppy loose at night, but the reader never knows what happens to Rose. At the close of a Parker story or sketch, women's lives continue, frustrated and fumbling. "Irony with little satire," Frye says of such a dramatic stasis, "is the non heroic residue of tragedy, centering on a theme of puzzled defeat" (224). The stories, understated, subtle, language- rich, are complex and ironically inconclusive. 237 Dorothy Parker's poetry, on the other hand, resonates with retaliatory resolutions of many of these themes. Here the woman-voice regains power, in the controlled structures of humor. Somerset Maugham finds that "it is in her poems that she displays the quintessence of her talent" (603). Women's voices, rhyming their lines as poetic personae, maintain a close control of language.18 They speak in a range of separate verse-voices, often alternating first in the persona of a victim of erotic or economic bondage, followed by a contradictory voice in a poem inscribing a / triumph— through satiric wit. The satirist works in an ironic twist or in an unexpected punchline— and through the Hobbesian sense of "sudden glory" in the triumph of humor, the poems escape the earlier debilitating emotion.1® Parker frames her verse satire in the following four ways: first, in the epigram, a style that has come to be known as her signature ("the most accomplished classical epigrammist of our time," maintains Arthur Kinney in his Twayne monograph 116). Many a Dorothy Parker couplet- commentary has passed to American cliche: Men seldom make passes At girls who wear glasses. ("News Item," ER 85) The assumption here can be variously interpreted: lust is curtailed by either the emblem of spinsterly bookishness or male suspicion of female intelligence. A Parker epigram can combine a play on words and a mix of lexical suggestion to 239 Needs little enough to clutter it and bind it, Who meet a slanted gaze, and ever must Go build themselves a soul to dwell behind it." But in the sestet the speaker first finds delight in four lines of autonomy: For now I am my own again, my friend! This scar but points the whiteness of my breast; This frenzy, like its better, spins an end, And now X am my own. And that is best. Then the closing epigrammatic couplet moves to a more direct accountability for separation: it belongs to him. Speaking as a sunny satirist, Therefore, I am immeasurably grateful To you, for proving shallow, false, and hateful. A third form of Parker's verse satire is what I call the "joke-poem." The punchline snaps in a twist that follows Freud's joking paradigm. The joker-speaker sets up one condition, then implies a contrary truth that defines the situation quite differently (and darkly), by relying on an unspoken but implied assumption; the reader laughs in recognition of a suppressed sexual taboo or hostility. Consummation of romantic desire, for example, conventionally assumed to convey the intensity of the lovers' passion, becomes instead the site of a Parker joke. Such is an "Unfortunate Coincidence": By the time you swear you're his, Shivering and sighing, And he vows his passion is Infinite, undying— Lady, make a note of this: One of you is lying. (ER 51) 240 Mutual exchange of love, confesses the satirist, is impossible--in the real world, lovers perversely desire the unavailable. (And a readerly chuckle of recognition might signal the reader's own episodic contrary behavior.) A more innocent joke-poem holds a canonical place in the oral tradition of women's humor; Dorothy Parker's classic "Comment," has been committed to memory by American schoolgirls throughout the twentieth century: Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song, A medley of extemporanea; And love is a thing that can never go wrong; And I am Marie of Roumania. (ER 55) A fourth structure of Parker's verse satire is the arrangement itself of poems that can be read as antiphonal humor. Poetic personae riff together, as we read the collections of poems in sequences that become narratives; moreover, a pair of poems arranged in these related sequences can be read as a discursive joke-paradigm. A poem might serve, for example, as the joker's punchline to answer a prior "sti a prior "straight man" poetic lament which h reader into a level of sentimentality, nostalgia, or romantic sadness. Parker sets up two such poems as a joke- paradigm at the clos£ of the Death and Taxes poetry section of The Portable Dorothy Parker.20 These two poems were not included in the original publication of Death and Taxes so we do well to note that Parker herself has added and positioned them here to close this section. First, "Temps 241 Perdu" (PDP 317-318) speaks of the emotional distress that continues to haunt the speaker even long after the actual wounding event is forgotten. The poem concludes: The look of a laurel tree birthed for May Or a sycamore bared for a new November Is as old and as sad as my furtherest day— What is it, what is it, I almost remember? And the following poem (the final piece in this poetry section of the anthology) resolves this problem as a joke. The speaker's heart (now an older and wiser "Autumn Valentine") speaks in synecdoche and demonstrates a pragmatic option: just forget it. The speaker may choose to nurture her anguish, but the broken heart itself has disowned the whole affair: In May my heart was breaking— Oh, wide the wound, and deep! And bitter it beat at waking. And sore it split in sleep. And when it came November, I sought my heart, and sighed, "Poor thing, do you remember?" "What heart was that?" it cried. (PDP 318) Another variation of Parker's sequencing poems into a joke-paradigm sets up a condition of injustice in one poem, whereas the next one takes a comic tone of vigilante vengeance. In a "General Review of the Sex Situation," (ER 99), the speaker sighs that woman's steadfast devotion is generally unreturned: Woman wants monogamy; Man delights in novelty. Love is woman's moon and sun; Man has other forms of fun. 242 Woman lives but in her lord; Count to ten, and man is bored. With this the gist and sum of it, What earthly good can come of it? Editors of contemporary anthologies seemingly concur in the validity of such wistful female yearning, for this poem continues to appear in literature texts and volumes of light verse. What they do not include is the poem that directly follows it in The Portable Dorothy Parker. In a gender reversal, the speaker now takes a review of her own "delight in novelty." She finds herself organizationally-impaired: too many lovers, too little memory. She relishes her nostalgia; she just cannot remember her individual lovers. Hazy memories now, they have become "Pictures in the Smoke": Oh, gallant was the first love, and glittering and fine; The second love was water, in a clear white cup; The third love was his, and the fourth was mine; And after that, I always get them all mixed up. (ER 101) My argument that Dorothy Parker's intentional arrangement of these poems together to create a joke-sequence is supported by her editing changes for The Portable Dorothy Parker. In the original text of Enough Rope. this sexual riff is interrupted. The two poems (printed singly on pages 99 and 101) are separated by "Inscription for the Ceiling of a Bedroom" (100)21. When Parker herself re-arranged poems from Enough Rope for The Portable, she cleaned up and clarified this joke-sequence. * * * 243 Beyond the rhetorical skill needed to initiate humor, another vital requirement for the humorist— here the satirist— is emotional detachment. "There must be no awe," wrote Parker about humor. Henri Bergson believed that "the comic demands something like a momentary anesthesia of the heart. Its appeal is to the intelligence, pure and simple." The social uneasiness generating the outdated view that wit is not for woman (Freud [1905, later Grotjahn [1957]) has been supported by the general assumption that attack is not part of female socialization.22 Because satire is in fact an attack balanced by wit, a "woman satirist" becomes a contradiction in terms.23 A nineteenth century advice manual, The Lady's Guide to Perfect Gentility, warns Against sarcastic remarks.— Be careful also how you indulge in sarcasm. If you are constitutionally inclined to this, you will find that there is no point in your character which needs to be more faithfully guarded.2 4 This regrettable temperamental predetermination requires close control, The Lady's Guide continues, precisely because these "sarcastic remarks'* are so effective: There are some few cases in which severe irony may be employed to advantage; cases in which vice and error will shrink before it, when they will unhesitatingly confront every other species of opposition. A century later, women may have achieved success in subduing their talent for satire, because in 1940 David Worchester feels compelled to offer an explanation for an absence of 244 women satirists. He proposes that the emotional detachment essential to the satirist may not be possible for women: People [only] threatened with suffering or forced to watch others suffer are more apt to "take pen in hand" than the man who has spent ten years in a mercury mine or who has been run down by a drunken driver. Feminine readers may find in this observation a possible explanation for the fact that no woman has ever made a mark in satire.25 [emphasis mine] Writing satire, for Worcester, depends on two conditions: a detachment from feeling and a lack of involvement in actual suffering. His assumption is not that women are sheltered from experience, but on the contrary, rather too deeply immersed in personal suffering to qualify as a calculating and detached satirist. Answering just such a reservation (and with a wicked nod to the spirit of The Lady7s Guided. Parker's mentor- persona satirically recommends a disciplined mask "For a Lady Who Must Write Verse" (SG 72). Even into advanced age, such a "lady" must conceal any trace of her natural mischievousness and deny any hint of immorality: Unto seventy years and seven, Hide your double birthright well— You, that are the brat of Heaven And the pampered heir to Hell. The counselor advises setting a curb, too, on ambition and pride, while writing only frivolous verse: Let your rhymes be tinsel treasures, Strung and seen and thrown aside. Drill your apt and docile measures Sternly as you drill your pride. 245 Such repression can only result in a sharp aggressive wit: Show your quick, alarming skill in Tidy mockeries of art; but the satirist can never reveal her own distress: Never, never dip your quill in Ink that rushes from your heart. If the verse-writing "lady” should express such pain on paper, the satirist declares that she must burn it; the consequence of a woman writing out of emotions is to risk judgment by a patronizing ("benignant"— not benign, but through mimetic suggestion we can read "malignant") critic: Never print, poor child, a lay on Love and tears and anguishing, Lest a cooled, benignant Phaon Murmur, "Silly little thing!" The critic wastes no more effort than a murmur to infantilize the poet, to reduce her to a "little thing." So Parker's satirist must show her "quick alarming skill" in "tidy mockeries." She must also hide her "double birthright well— / You, that are the brat of Heaven / And the pampered heir to Hell." But the woman writer faces a double bind; she must hide this wild side, yet to free herself to write she must drop the internal inhibitions that Virginia Woolf calls the "Angel in the House." "Above all— I need not say it— ," Woolf whispers of the Angel, "she was pure" (Moth 237). Later, Woolf recommends satire as a corrective: "Think how much women have profited by the comments of Juvenal" (Room 94). 246 Without the emotional detachment and rhetorical skill of tlie satirist, the woman who recognizes her "double birthright"— the double bind— may remember the admonition (or curse) that Fitzgerald's Daisy Buchanan directs to her newborn daughter: "And I hope she'll be a fool— that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool" (17). This may be heavily ironic, but it is not humorous. Daisy laughs "with thrilling scorn," but the reader agrees with Nick Carraway: . . . I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. It made me uneasy, . . . and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face, as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged. (18) To act as a beautiful little fool— to pretend not to understand and not to care— is a way to cope in a world of savage amusement in which men hold the money and woman are valued for their beauty and their fun, then cast aside. Significantly, Dorothy Parker implies that the woman who does not understand the potential for the mask of a beautiful fool will actually become that fool. To naively comply with the conventional game of female affability is foolish, even disastrous. Parker takes such affability (a woman's mask of genial humor) as her satiric text. Speaking as a woman and with emotional detachment, the woman who uses humor is in control— but I do not mean simply 247 this pleasing genial response, feigned or not. Parker writes that "there must be criticism, for humor . . . is encapsulated in criticism. There must be a disciplined eye and a wild mind" (Perelman xii). To judge critically, with that disciplined eye, the woman must curtail adaptive affability. Genial humor positions a woman in a powerless reactive position. Dancing to the tune is one such textual theme that becomes the target of Parker's most bitter satire: the enforced geniality of Parker's dancer in "The waltz," for example, or the instruction from Salome's dance school in pleasuring the monarch/partner. Researchers of the impulse and techniques of humor from Freud to contemporary feminists have found that the conventional view of women's contribution to humor centers on the affability of a genial woman, intent on the wit of her male companion or spouse. The stereotype of the happy woman— 'the pontented adaptable "good sport"— is a staple of American life. In her fiction, Parker consistently presents women's public affability as an adaptive pose— and often as a strategy for eliciting male attention.26 "Social situations frequently call for duplicity and not authenticity," proposes humor researcher Mariane LaFrance in 1979, "Feigned laughter is functional; fabricated smiling is serviceable" (12). So Parker's fictional women feign jocularity. Mimi, the neglected young wife in "The Lovely Leave" (PDP 3-18) smiles at the anecdotes her husband tells of his high times with 248 "the boys" in their aviator antics— until she explodes and they quarrel; later she reports to a friend that her hour with her reluctant husband was a lovely leave. The young woman in "Dusk before Fireworks" (PDP 135-150) attempts to ingratiate herself and conceal her hurt by laughing to her lover over the prospect of other women decorating his apartment; the bride in "Here We Are" (PDP 125-134), too, covers her irritability with diversionary joking. But maintaining such a facade drains psychic energy. Keeping one's good humor in the face of potential rejection carries the self-destructive duplicity that is "The Second Oldest Story": Smile I must at every twinge, Kiss, to time its throbbing; He that tears a heart to fringes Hates the sound of sobbing. (SG 29) And Dorothy Parker's most notable woman of good humor ("a good sport") is driven to suicide by her spurious affability. Hazel Morse, in "Big Blonde" (PDP 187-210), had worked as a model when "it was still the day of the big woman," but her style of beauty fades with fashion change and age. After "a couple of thousand evenings of being a good sport among her male acquaintances" (and "more conscientious than spontaneous about it"), she marries Herbie. "Wedded and relaxed, she poured her tears freely. To her who had laughed so much, crying was delicious." But "Herbie was not amused." They both are alcoholics by the 249 time he walks out- Hazel entertains a series of lovers, each time trying to be "convincingly gay with him, though the effort shook her." When her suicide effort fails, There passed before her a slow, slow pageant of days spent lying in her flat, o£ evenings at Jimmy's being a good sport, making herself laugh and coo at Art and other Arts; she saw a long parade of weary horses and shivering beggars and all beaten, driven, stumbling things. (209) Hazel Morse, finding herself alive, drinks wearily to the ironic prospect of facing the days of enforced geniality. She prays that God would "please keep her always drunk." In the final moment of the story, her maid unwittingly giggles, "You cheer up, now." And the final compliance; "'Yeah,' said Mrs. Morse. 'Sure.'" This is Frye's "irony with little satire, . . . the non heroic residue of tragedy, centering on a theme of puzzled defeat" (224). But Hazel Morse reflect? a pose mandated by popular culture of the period. During the same month of Parker's New Yorker publication of "The Waltz" (in which the young woman must feign sprightly enthusiasm to "dance forever" with her bozo partner), The New Yorker also carried an advertisement for the product that would guarantee to women the energy for that project; coffee "dated" to insure freshness of the caffeine boost (Figure 2). And the dynamic quality of the "It" girl dazzled movie audiences; the film adaptation of Elinor Glyn's the best 250 W H A T S “THE M A T T E R WITH 0 E .T T V ? SH E'S S e t t i n g T o B E A N AW FUL F L A T T iR E ALL RIGHT SETT>< BUT IT SE E M S TOO BAD “IRE MUSIC'S d o v o u MIND IF WE SIT OUT T H IS DANCE7 / Do v b u HAVE DATED COFFEE WHAT l% T ? S U R E .M IS S ! IT S G o t t h e d a t e v O F D E L IV E R S ON IT SO Vfau KNOW ' i t s f r e s h * S t a l e C O FFfeE c a n s l o w y fa u u r — t h i s G i v e s y& u P E P ! TWO WEEKS LATER* WILL V b u Y OVER. AAV SO T O THE J DEAD BODy! G o r d o n s ’ S . x f e e l l i k e d a n c e , b e t t / . a d a n c i n g AND DANCE? ) F O R E V E R . o r s h a l l r w a n k s t o . X A S K v r DATED COFFEE! Jo a n ? ALWAYS TIRED ? CAec4 i , c n < A &i ^ L e s A ? I F y o u 'r e fe e lin g l e t dow n , cheek y o u r cof fee. Irrrth coffee pule new life into you*— for w o rk or pley. B ut sc ie n e c ta y s s/a/s coffee develops a ran c id o il. often causes headache*, . depression, “ n e rv e s ." *Th«f’s w hy C hase A San* ho rn giveyuu JJatrJi loffec. A t yo u r g ro c e r's you w ill find the actu al dale o f de* liv ery on every pound. N o can allow ed to stay on his shelf m ore than 10 days. Y uu is s ir it's fresh. Figure 2. "Men just can't stand tired women!" Advertisement in The New Yorker 9 Sept. 1933, page 40 251 selling novel The It Girl starred Clara Bow, who took that silver screen identity as her own. But the phenomenon of "It" was not simply female sexiness. It was a vitality— for which Hazel Morse is by nature unsuited: The possessor of "It" was above all a person confidently assured of his or her own personality, without exactly being aware of it. "It" was the tension between cool self- sufficiency and hot energy, a tension that lit up the screen and infused the whole decade of the twenties. (Douglas 29) Yet even actress Clara Bow revealed her own disingenuous mask of good humor in a 1927 interview: I know that everyone looking at me on the screen says: I'll bet she's never unhappy. The truth is that I haven't been happy for many, many months. The person you see on the screen is not my true self at all, it's my screen self. . . (Douglas 28) This good humor mask becomes the source of despair for Hazel Morse-^-but an occasion for Parker's satire. On the surface, who can fault an energetic optimism? To shift a benign (but problematic) concept of affability into a liability causes critics to recognize the difficulty of satirizing conventional behavior (Frye 226); on the other hand, this critique of unquestioned female adaptability has provided the staple of the women's movement ideology. When feminist critic Florence Howe titles her 1970 collection of women's poetry No More Masks 1 she refers to that same sort of mask: conventional behavior that reduces women's experience to generic responses while at the same time reducing the risk 252 of self-revelation. Howe called for necessary anger, open critique, and the voice of female experience (3-8). Parker, too, exposes and rejects the traditional mask of feigned jolliness, but she adopts instead this mask of the lyric persona speaking with "innocence" and wit— as a satirist. Satire "demands at least a token fantasy, a content which the reader recognizes as grotesque, and at least an implicit moral standard, the latter being essential in a militant attitude to experience" (Frye 224). Dorothy Parker adopts t.his militant attitude toward the conventions and cliches of romance; her satirist has learned the rules. She is a "Post-Graduate"; Hope it was that tutored me, And Love that taught me more; And now I learn at Sorrow's knee The self-same lore. (SG 56) Her persona often takes the stance of the ingenue, innocently affirming the romantic conventions in this perverse game of elusiveness, and brutal rejection. Parker's ingenue compares roughly to the figure of the ingenuous male eiron, a recognizable staple of American literature. He is, for example, the anti-hero or Thurber's "little man": The figure of the low-norm eiron is irony's substitute for the hero, . . . the disappearance of the heroic. This is the main reason for the predominance in fictional satire of what may be called the Omphale archetype, the man bullied or dominated by women, which has been prominent in satire all through its history, and 253 embraces a vast area of contemporary humor, both popular and sophisticated. (Frye 228^ 229) Dorothy Parker reverses this conventional male figure of an Omphallically-whipped satirist. Her own "little woman" of verse satire often poses as a pathetic and bewildered victim, recording self-blame for a pale ineffective love life. The reader sees below the surface to the facile duplicity and exploitation by her lovers.27 Hers is "A Fairly Sad Tale" (PDP 235). Parodying Kilmer's ode to a tree28 ("I think that I shall never know / Why I am thus, and I am so"), she woefully implies that her nature (like the tree) is mysterious and pre-determined. Her solitary loveless fate, then, must be due to her own inadequacy: she is incapable of enhancing male vitality ("Around me, other girls inspire / In men the rush and roar of fire") and strength ("The durability of granite; / But me— I don't know how to plan it."). She guesses that male development has only been curtailed through a failure in female strategy. The reader, however, is invited to believe that the speaker fully understands that her lad had little "rush and roar of fire" or "durability of granite" to begin with— and he left when she revealed her generous interest in boosting his masculinity. The satiric eiromess of this "fairly (but not entirely?) sad tale" tenaciously holds onto ladylike euphemism. In an earlier New Yorker sketch of Hemingway, 254 Dorothy Parker had awarded him a dubious "prize for his travail. He has lived to see any writer who employs the word 'bastard' hailed as 'another Hemingway'" (PDP 588). Parker's demure satirist, on the other hand, rhymes her mandatory euphemism into sporting humor: The lads I've met in Cupid's deadlock, Were— shall we say?— born out of wedlock." She whimpers that she is a voiceless victim of a series of cruel lovers (whom the reader sees as only cowardly or self- serving) : They broke my heart, they stilled my song, And said they had to run along, Explaining, so to sop my tears. First came their parents or careers. But she gains no insight: But ever does experience Deny me wisdom, calm, and sense. Turning on pun, the speaker is without either "calm and sense" or common sense, and so her nature dictates a repetition compulsion. After all, next time might be different . . . : I must go on, till ends my rope, Who from my birth was cursed with hope. A heart in half is chaste, archaic; But mine resembles a mosaic— The thing's become ridiculous 1 Why am I so? Why am I thus? (SG 65) Dorothy Parker's role as a satirist is a series of mirrors. Through satire the perspective shifts, and from such a "blasted world of repulsiveness and idiocy, a world without pity and without hope, satire begins again" (Frye 255 239). To borrow from Frye's metaphor of satire's point of view, Dante saw Satan standing upright in hell at the earth's center, but when he climbed out on the other side he saw Satan bottom side up. Parker's fictional women are in silent bondage to their own devils (real and addictive), but in the poetry the satirist speaks, exposing the vagaries and the exploitation— as turned bottom side up. In such a crafty reversal as "The Fairly Sad Tale," the (fairly) innocent speaker reveals her own vagaries, and the speaker/poet/Parker-herself can pass dead center and play with the player. As a satirist, then, Parker criticizes more than what Emily Toth calls "the traditional social norms themselves^— and the foolish choices made by those do not think or criticize their own society" ("Laughter" 207). The satirist here speaks as a type, a woman who foolishly continues to blame herself (her essential nature) when a man declares that his failure is her fault because she failed to encourage him. However, Parker's variation on this type might complain that an indifferent lover "stilled my song," but yet through her compliance with the game of ladylike language she creates her clever epigram— more innovative than sycophantic lyrics. The tale is only "fairly sad," because the poet-speaker manages to up-end the devil of accepting blame and rejection by turning out precise epigrams; unlike Hazel Morse and the other frail women in 256 the stories, the poet-speaker is in control. The rhymes are masculine and the lines are end-stopped. * * * Control comes for the humorist in the interior voice of the super-ego re-ordering the impact of external events, but Parker's poetry includes voices and portraits Of female mentors. By contrast, the women in Parker's fiction (whether drawn as real women or types) have no female support system. Stories like "Glory in the Daytime" (PDP 276-290) may depict women visiting and drinking together, but their invidious admiration for each other centers on clothing, home situation, or stage image; Parker generally reveals their specious personal values to be riddled with bigotry, affectation, naivete, vanity, greed, arrogance, impotence, or defensive bullying. Other examples of women's shabby treatment of women include the hypocritical sister in "The Wonderful Old Gentleman" (PDP 52-64) who superintends her father's will so that her siblings receive only the castoff furniture and "his set of Thackeray"; Mrs. Ewing, Big Lannie's patronizing employer in "Clothe the Naked" (PDP 360-369), whose ludicrous gift of castoff evejning clothes to Lannie's blind grandson inspires violent ridicule for the boy when he unwittingly wears the grotesque outfits to play in the street; and most boorish is the snide hospital visitor in "Lady with a Lamp" who comforts her friend who 257 has just had an abortion with a reminder of her disappointment and abandonment: I don't see how you could possibly have done anything else, I know you've always talked about how you'd give anything to have a baby, but it would have been so terribly unfair to bring it into the world without being married. You'd have to go live abroad and never see anybody and— . . . .Mona, for heaven's sake! Don't scream like that. I'm not deaf you know. All right, dear, all right, all right, all right. . . . (PDP 250) Another story of an elitist matron who finds self definition through indifference to others is "Song of the Shirt, 1941" (PDP 65-73). Mrs. Martindale, an affluent matron whose volunteer war work assumes dimensions of compulsive exaggeration, labors in her blue-grey satin sitting-room over endless piecework assigned by the volunteer Headquarters ("each garment must have two sleeves"). She responds obsessively to the challenge of the work ("Wounded people can be made terribly uncomfortable by crooked seams"), along with its blue-grey uniform and gratitude. When Mrs. Martindale is asked to find employment for a woman who needs money to care for her crippled child, she can think of nothing that can be assigned to Mrs. Christie. Parker's irony is dazzling in the incisive narrative twist— the story closes: "And as she stitched, faithful to her promise and to her heart, she racked her brains." She is on the rack, we might say, tortured by her own misguided earnestness, yet insensitive to the to the 258 plight of a woman in real need. If Mrs. Martindale were Simply self-indulgent and vacuous, she could be freely satirized, but Parker gives her a desperate earnestness that locks her into an enforced labor, pitiful in its shortsighted frenzy. (Auden observed that satire deals with the rogue,29 but here this woman wanting patriotic gratitude for her unpaid labor seems only ludicrous, albeit at the expense of others. She is more complex than a satiric type.) Thomas Hood's 1844 poem of the same title exposed the exploitation of women workers in the sweatshops of the nineteenth century, but the internalized sweatshop where Mrs. Martindale "racks her brains," is a grim place where her own insecurity drives her to frantic, ennervating, mindless activity. Blind to the needs of another woman, even as she believes she aids the needy, she becomes both a victimizer and a victim. Demonstrating in the short fiction, then, that women are without interconnection and support, Dorothy Parker's poetry develops a strong responding perspective. Here is the control that women's humor brings. In an early Ladies' Home Journal piece, "The Education of Gloria," Parker had described the maternal contribution provided for "sweet, dear" Gloria who was then congenitally equipped with a restfully uninquiring mind, an amiable submissiveness of spirit, a readily formative point of view. It was as if some generous fairy, acting under explicit instructions of 259 Gloria's mother, had endowed the infant with those three priceless gifts at her christening. (Oct. 1920: 37+124) The opening poem of Sunset Gun answers the young woman's need for stong and practical support of women: a godmother pledges help to Parker's satirist-persona at her christening "a hundred years, and more!1 ' This hag-mentor— hardly a jolly Disney character— warns her about the hostile world. No platitudes or rituals can whitewash the sinister truth that the "Godmother" teaches: The hag stood, buckled In a dim gray cloak; Stood there and chuckled, Spat, and spoke: "There's few enough in life'll Be needing my help, But I've got a trifle For your fine young whelp. I give her sadness, And the gift of pain, The new-moon madness, And the love of rain." And little good to lave me In their holy silver bowl After what she gave me— Rest her soul! ("Godmother," SG 13) Out of the intensity of female identification (melancholy and menstruation— the new-moon madness), this gift of counsel is the hag's help for the "fine young whelp." The counsel of prudence is a convention of satire. Frye points out that in a world full of injustice, folly, and crime, anyone who wishes to keep his balance in such a world must keep his eyes open and his mouth shut. Counsels of prudence [urge] the reader in effect to adopt an eiron role . . .[recommending] conventional life at its best: a clairvoyant knowledge of human 260 nature in oneself and others, an avoidance of all illusion and compulsive behavior. . . an attitude of flexible pragmatism [emphasis mine]. (226) In the tradition of the counsel of prudence, the "godmother-savant"— or the standup comic!— provides the voice of the woman satirist. To those Parker Women of the short stories who welcome the disingenuous invitations of men, she might offer this advice-lyric, as a "Social Note": Lady, lady, should you meet One whose ways are all discreet, One who murmurs that his wife Is the lodestar of his life, One who keeps assuring you That he never was untrue, Never loved another one . . . Lady, lady, better run! (ER 72) (Mr. Durant's Rosa might have wished for such a godmother.) Parker's satiric voice is always a set of nested boxes of parody: even the inverted logic of the satirist, tested through experience hgainst theory, can be flipped into a satire of itself. The cynical hag-mentor who spits and chuckles can predict the pain because she has lived it-*— because she had rejected the counsel of her own prudent godmother. Nevertheless, she offers her wisdom "For an Unknown Lady": If he whistles low and clear When the insistent moon is near And the secret stars are known— Will your heart be still your own Just because some words were true? . . . Lady, I was told them, too! (ER 80) Parker's mentor La Rochefoucauld had said it earlier: "It is easier to be wise for others than for oneself."30 261 More than subverting, now, her own prudent counsel by confiding her earlier foolhardiness, the godmother offers self-reflective satire in her advice "For a Favorite Granddaughter." Among her warnings: Never love a simple lad, Guard against a wise, Shun a timid youth and sad, Hide from haunted eyes. . . Never give away a tear, Never toss a pine; Should you heed my words, my dear, You're no blood of mine! (SG 62) In this joke-poem, her tough advice carries an ironic reversal, the punchline: beneath the armor of her buckled "dim grey cloak" the grandmother's actual legacy is her vulnerability. Satire, of course, never offers obvious prescriptions; the grandmentor has freed the girl to choose to move either way. And at once, satire re-doubles to imply that these very cautions are rhetorical, undone by a threat to disown the girl if she fails to live lustily, boldly. In terse, precise lines of rhyme and epigram (she "spat, and spoke") the poet's mentor-voice answers those women of Parker's stories— these little women of feckless passion and paralytic pathos. In stories such as "The Last Tea" and "Dusk before Fireworks," women make futile efforts to please a lover; in "The Lovely Leave" and "Here We Are" the women use nervous dialogue as hopeful foreplay. But working to satisfy a lover, counsels the satirist-mentor, means concealing one's 262 own complexity and intensity. The project— requiring exhausting toil— yields dubious results, as in "The Lady's Reward": Lady, lady, never start Conversation with your heart Keep your pretty words serene; Never murmur what you mean. Show yourself, by word and look Swift and shallow as a brook. Be as quick and cool to go As a drop of April snow; Be as delicate and gay As a cherry flower in May. Lady, lady, never speak Of the tears that burn your cheek— She will never win him, whose Words had shown she feared to lose. Be you wise and never sad, You will get your lovely lad. Never serious be, nor true, And your wish will come to you— And if that makes you happy, kid, You'll be the first it ever did. (PDP 317) Mixing metaphors of courtly love with flippant slang, the hag-mentor warns (with a hoot) that courtship manipulation and pose will gain for her no happiness with a "lovely lad." Instead, Parker's verse-satirist recommends to a woman the integrity of acting on one's own impulses, and dressing as one pleases. Boldly, ever! impudently, the satiress adapts the stories of courtesans and and courtly lovers as narratives for modern readers; none of the ’ 'Beloved Ladies" (the title of the quartet of poems published together in the 14 December 1929 issue of The New Yorker) are love-objects, but women of complex design.31 Lesbia, whose love is the inspiration and subject of the poetry of Catullus, frankly 263 confesses that she is glad to have him out of the house for a while; he has been preoccupied with turning her life into his art: It's just the same— a quarrel or a kiss Is but a tune to play upon his pipe. He's always hymning that or wailing this; Myself, I much prefer the business type. ("From a Letter from Lesl?ia," DT 48) "Guinevere at Her Fireside," too, is frank about her experience. She prays beside her bed (only "a thing to kneel beside!" now), professing love for Arthur in language of the nun who weds in heaven: A nobler king had never breath— I say it now, and said it then. Who weds with such is wed till death And wedded stays in Heaven. Amen. Guinevere the nun is matter-of-fact when she recalls her adultery with Lancelot ("Ah, me"); and the intensity of her transgressive desire is meliorated when she casually mentions that she might have chosen Tristan if he had been available. Meanwhile, Lancelot's hair-appeal seems as compelling as anything of his character: I found him not unfair to see— I like a man with peppered hair! And thus it came about. Ah, me, Tristram was busied otherwhere . . . (DT 42-43) Lancelot and Tristram are interchangeable in the satirist's revisionary construction of the legend (a license available to Malory and Tennyson as well). At a surface level, the poem seems to indict Guinevere's inconstancy, but the 264 satirist pulls the structure of the poem into a symmetry that matches Guinevere's marriage: she was married before her adulterous drama and she is married at the close of her life (and her poem: "Amen*") The structure holds— and it is the structure (not Guinevere) that sustains the satire on the double standard here. At the same time, the marriage (whether maintained by the bed or the nunlike vow) provides absolution and continuity. For whatever reason Guinevere broke the rules and vows, it matters little now; she might say, as the poet-satirist does elsewere: "But I am old; and good and bad / Are woven in a crazy plaid,"32 "and regret is no part of my plan."33 The most controversial of these "Beloved Ladies" who act on their own terms is Salome, who in the King James Version of Mark (6.17-28), dances at a lavish dinner given by her stepfather, King Herod. Tension is high: King Herod has married his brother's wife (Salome's mother), and John the Baptist is in prison for the criticism he had leveled against both of them. Mark's account does not indicate that Salome's dance is in any way lewd, only that it "pleased Herod and those who sat with him" (6.22), that is, "his lords, high captains, and chief estates of Galilee." But only drunkenness could account for his bizarre offer (and twice he swears) that "whatsoever thou shalt ask of me, I will give it thee, unto the half of my kingdom" (6.23). Salome consults with her mother, and they forgo the division 265 of the kingdom; they ask instead for the head of John the Baptist. The king, sobering up and "exceeding sorry," must comply "for their sakes which sat with him" (6.26); he murders John the Baptist to save face. "Scratch a king and find a fool!" runs Parker's coda. In Dorothy Parker's version, Salome's maternal dpncing teacher instructs what seems a doltish pupil, delivering versified instruction in theory of retaliation while directing (in parenthetical italicized commands) her resistant pupil's steps around the practice floor; Kings are shaped as other men. (Step and turn! Step and turn!) Ask what none may ask again. (Will you learn? Will you learn?) ("Salome's Dancing Lesson," DT 20-21) Further instruction in control (and humor) comes from another "beloved lady" here and a figure of controversy, Ninon de Lenclos. As the doyen of the literary salon of seventeenth century France, she was an independent woman whose early uninhibited behavior caused her mother to confine her to a convent; later she wrote "The Coquette Avenged." Ninon maintained her charisma into late life— inspiring Parker to exhort women in midlife to take inspiration from her and not from Ninon want-to-be's; Look at Ninon de Lenclos. No; don't go off thinking about all the other poor souls who sought to cheer themselves by looking at Ninon de Lenclos. Just keep your eye on Ninon de Lenclos and you can't go wrong; what woman has done, woman can do." (PDP 597) . 266 Her appeal for imaginative women inspired Dorothy Parker to write lines for the character of gentle Mary Lamb in her 1949 play The Coast of Illyria. When Parker's Charles and Mary Lamb entertain their circle of poet-wits they invent the game "What Persons Would you Like Most to Have Seen." To the amazement of her brother Charles, Parker's Mary declares "I should like vastly to have seen Ninon de L'Enclos. . . . Because I have not seen anyone like her" (182). Parker had created her own Ninon in her poem "Ninon de Lenclos, on Her Last Birthday," entertaining a cluster of men: So let me have the rouge again, And comb my hair the curly way. The poor young men, the dear young men They'll all be here by noon today. (DT 51) This old woman may appear (in a literal-minded reading of this poem) to be a parodic counterpart to the shallow Camilla with her men in "Horsie" and Mrs. Lanier hopefully dressing for men in "The Custard Heart." But if costuming and cosmetics can provide comic disguise, age becomes illusion: So bring my scarlet slippers, then, And fetch the powder-puff to me. The dear young men, the poor young men— They think I'm only seventy! (DT 52) In a mini-farce, this self-artist at ninety believes she passes for seventy. The old woman enjoys a lively fantasy (we notice that no men are actually present here), and she celebrates her beauty for her own joy. Taking a page from 267 the lives of these legendary women, another jolly poet- speaker identified as "The Little Old Lady in Lavender Silk" is whimsically arrogant ("I was seventy-seven come August,/I shall shortly be losing my bloom") and surprises the reader with a lusty memory of herself as a lover: Though the shabby unbalanced the splendid, And the bitter outmeasured the sweet, I should certainly do as I then did, Were I given the chance to repeat. For contrition is hollow and wraithful, And regret is no part of my plan, And I think (if my memory's faithful) There was nothing more fun than a man* (DT 32) The lady in lavender silk basks in lively memory, and her retrospective (if her memory's faithful— a seed of doubt here?) includes a (faithful?) jolly or entertaining man. She accepts her splendid— and shabby— life; she joins the "Beloved Ladies," asserting that "regret is no part of my plan." On the other hand, the woman of sustained virtue receives words of cold comfort from the satirist. In place of insouciance, risk-taking, and bold aspiration, the virtuous woman finds in her mirfor only repression. To silence her objections and to keep herself in line (lacking advice from a hag-mentor), she may need to keep her own satiric counsel of prudence by inscribing into that image her own praise for a reflected virtue. In "Words of Comfort 268 to Be Scratched on a Mirror," reassurance is as genuine as a nursery rhyme: Helen of Troy had a wandering glance: Sappho's restriction was only the sky; Ninon was ever the chatter of France: But oh, what a good girl am II" (ER 108) And the satiress cannot help gleefully mentioning— hardly "words of comfort"— the liberty available to these "bad girls": with a wandering glance, the sky's the limit. As "the chatter of France," Ninon de Lenclos would, of course, have her detractors. Iri a later poem, "The Whistling Girl" considers such gossips to be silly geese, and defends her joy in erotic variety, even though it comes with tears: Back of my back, they talk of me, Gabble and honk and hiss; Let them batten, and let them be— Me, I can sing them this: "Better to shiver beneath the stars, Head on a faithless breast. Than peer at the night through rusted bars, And share an irksome rest. "Better to see the dawn come up, Along a trifling one, Than set a steady man's cloth and cup And pray the day be done. . . . (SG 51) The conventional outcome— marriage to a stolid "steady man" (perhaps a "man that solicits insurance" as in "Bohemia" [SG 35]) — is a dismal reward for virtue. Better to be a "Whistling Girl." Still, even the bad girls needed liaisons to hurtle them into their reputation. Lack of such apprenticeship- experience, therefore, might prevent a modern woman from 269 identifying with these courtesan-heroes. It may be possible to feel kinship with "the glamorous ladies," but acting out one's sexual impulsiveness may be available (regrettably) only by invitation from a person of limited insight. "Song of One of the Girls" concludes: I'm of the glamorous ladies At whose beckoning history shook. But you are a man, and see only my pan, So I stay at home with a book. (ER 109) If the measure of the success of the wild whistling girl is her popularity with men, the satirist implies that the standard is skewed. Conversely, to unsettle a readership who believes in abstemious female piety as the standard for excellence in an applicant for the job of lover, the satirist gives this "Interview": The ladies men admire, I've heard, Would shudder at a wicked word. Their candle gives a single light; They'd rather stay at home at night. They do not keep awake till three, Nor read erotic poetry. They never sanction the impure, Nor recognize an overture. They shrink from powders and from paints. So far, I have had no complaints. (ER 106) Either way (at home with a book or powdered and painted), the flippant speaker thumbs her nose at expectations. Under guidance of the hag-mentor who baptizes her into the reality of woman-pain, and with the model of women "at whose beckoning history shook," Dorothy Parker's poetic persona can speak as an autonomous narrative voice. Her standard of personal integrity, then, is not a project 270 to be left to male affirmation or to sexual appeal; nor is it dependent upon formulas of virtue. Philosophies of life abstract from life, and an abstraction implies the leaving out of inconvenient data. The satirist brings up these inconvenient data, sometimes in the form of alternative and equally plausible theories. . . " (Frye 229) The grand-mentor voice at once scorns the formulas of virtue and convention, and, in so doing, calls attention to the subtext of the satirist's "inconvenient data" of women's experience. * * * When the satirist brings up the experiential data beneath the smooth surface of formulaic social conventions, she also creates an alternative discourse— in Parker's work the subvocal aside that she referred to when she said that "a girl's best friend is her mutter." It marks a subterranean truth— one which is generally unpleasant, embarrassing, or painful, but which comes as a jolt of glee for the reader because of the relief in hearing the disclosure of the "inconvenient data" as well as exposing the false expectations. Freud, of course, found that "anyone who has allowed the truth to slip out in an unguarded moment is glad to be free of the pretence" (Jokes 106). The muttered truth may be cynical and messy, but strikes a punchline that relieves the anxiety of keeping up a facade. "It's not the tragedies, its the messes that kill 271 us," Parker said finally (Capron 77). The satirist's honest cynicism breaks the more ideal but false structure-— the "frame," as Umberto Eco calls the hard edges of social context— in a muted contradiction exposing the actual (messy) practice of living.34 Such a gritty shock of reality breaking through when it is not expected is a convention of satire that Parker's poet-persona relishes. While the helpless women in Parker's stories tell lies to please others, her poet-persona reveals those lies; Parker as writer tells about lies. Here Lies is the title of her 1939 collected stories: the neat epitaph "Here lies ..." suggests the death of honest exchange, while an implied subtitle— "Here [are some] Lies"— introduces the unregulated messiness of life. For example, in an erotic relationship the codes of passion cue anticipated responses— shivers and vows are required, and the demand generates lies. Parker's romance- mentor delivers a cold splash of reality in the final couplet: By the time you swear you're his, Shivering and sighing, And he vows his passion is Infinite, undying— Lady, make a note of this: One of you is lying. ("Unfortunate Coincidence," ER 51) Only a lie can create the illusion of mutuality in this love-connection. The perversity of erotic desire dictates that sexual energy belongs to pursuit. Here the influence 272 of John Donne is worth noting; satisfaction can only bring the post-coital depression that Donne describes. After such pleasures, vows of eternal constancy turn to lies, and Donne's lovers bid "Farewell to love." Donne laments that erotic pleasure Being had, enjoying it decayes: And thence, What before pleas'd them all, takes but one sense, And that so lamely, as it leaves behinde A kinde of sorrowing dulnesse to the minde. Ah cannot wee, As well as Cocks and Lyons jocund be, After such pleasures, unlesse wise Nature decreed . . 35 Dorothy Parker takes Donne's theme that "after such pleasures" (the title of Parker's 1933 collection of stories) a "kind of sorrowing dulnesse to the minde" sets in. In a later poem, "The Thin Edge," Parker's satirist (married, we might suppose) watches the years wash away her emotional investment; within a serene domestic boredom, sheltered even from the cool rain of her thoughts. She wards off that "sorrowing dulnesse to the minde" only through imagination. Still physically present (she touches hands), her mind romps in a sunnier space; With you, my heart is quiet here, And all my thoughts are cool as rain. I sit and let the shifting year Go by before the windowpane, And reach my hand to yours, my dear . I wonder what it's like in Spain. ("The Thin Edge," ER 75) 273 Given this inevitable erotic entropy, the satirist elsewhere is able to candidly reveal her momentary anesthesia of the heart as she reflects on the ephemeral quality of her attraction to a lover. From the satirist's observation deck she reviews the parade of defunct loves: Pictures pass me in long review— Marching columns of dead events. I was tender and, often, true: Ever a prey to coincidence. Always knew I the consequence; Always saw what the end would be. We're as Nature has made us— hence I loved them until they loved me. ("Ballade at Thirty-Five," ER 74) Slipping through the censor of the reader's disapproval, she (like Donne) blames the decree of "wise nature" ("We're as Nature has made us" [ER 74]), that is, emotionally turned off as soon as the energy of the chase is gone. She deflects blame for inconstancy: she was tender and true— but her candid qualifier ("often") leaves the reader unconvinced. Never a predator, she claims, she was a prey— but to coincidence. If satire exists in opposition to epic not tragedy, then the farthest point from the tragic character flaw that ordains destiny would be the short attention span that bumps into chance opportunity. As a satirist, she points both to the hopeful but untenable theory of constancy (lies) and to the actual practice of compliant hypocrisy (truth). As a satirist, she speaks honestly about the practice of 274 dishonest and inconstant behavior; here lies become necessary in order to comply with the demand for honesty. Paradoxically, the satirist tells us, truth-telling when it means confessing love or pain seldom makes good strategy under the courtship code. Parker's opening poem of Enough Rope celebrates the romantic appeal of melancholy to attract a new lover ("Lips that taste of tears, they say, are the best for kissing"). Thus, the opportunity for enticing new encounters is enhanced with the intensity that a broken heart might lend. News of recovery might signal that accessibility which would repel the desire of the chase. Therefore, she concludes: If there's one gone whistling by Would I let it grieve me? Let him wonder if I lie; Let him half believe me. (ER 11) The strategy of selective revelation— truth-telling when it suits— becomes "Superfluous Advice": Should they whisper false of you, Never trouble to deny; Should the words they say be true, Weep and storm and swear they lie. (SG 67) The consequence of this double discourse for the poet- satirist is a counter-voice of interior integrity— her mutter. This alternative discourse is the subvocal aside that Parker referred to when she said that "a girl's best friend is her mutter" (Keats 20). The mutter (a German pun suggests a real mutter/mother) vocalizes not the pre literate mother-talk but the frustrated and repressed pre- 275 articulate objection to one's own public utterance* Dorothy Parker expresses this interior alternative discourse (often a hidden text) in three forms of private expression: (1) her actual stage asides of whispered "smartcracker wit" at the Algonquin (apocryphal reports multiplied until she could say that "for a long time anything that was called a crack was attributed to me"), (2) as the italicized text in her sketches36 (the woman in "The Waltz," for example, compliments her heavy-footed partner and then mutters silently "Get off my instep, you hulking peasant!" (3) as the concluding lines of a poem in which a public lament is followed by an expression of cunning retaliation or a private revisionary cynicism, or (4) a merrily spiteful poem that appears intrusively in a sequence of lyrics of sentimental distress or emotional despair. In each case, the alternative discourse presents a congruent interpretation, albeit one that the speaker previously has chosen not to foreground. This is generally the voice of unbidden honesty— an interior integrity— which breaks through the codes of agreeable deception. Her "mutter" keeps her honest, in its direct contradiction of her compliant public behavior. For example, when the speaker listens patiently to the smug bravado of her friend, she understandably could feel struck by her own doubtful ability to cope so boldly. She also could choose to confront her arrogant friend's "Story" and 276 call her a liar; instead, she registers her reality-check in a concluding mutter: "And if he's gone away," said she, "Good riddance, if you're asking me. I'm not a one to lie awake And weep for anybody's sake. There's better lads than him about! I'll wear my buckled slippers out A-dancing till the break of day. I'm better off with him away! And if he never come," said she, "Now what on earth is that to me? I wouldn't have him back!" I hope Her mother washed her mouth with soap. (SG 52) Conversely, the honesty of enjoying a feeling of freedom after the painful conclusion of her love affair conflicts with the speaker's sense of conventionally expected behavior. She feels an obligation to suffer. Therefore, although she is "Now at Liberty," she exercises the language of misery. There is honesty, however, in her mutter: Little white love, your way you've taken; Now I am left alone, alone. Little white love, my heart's forsaken. (Whom shall I get by telephone?) Well do I know there's no returning; Once you go out, it's done, it's done. All of my days are gray with yearning. (Nevertheless, a girl needs fun.) (ER 54) Not only does the satirist feel the mandate of rhetorical conventions during the adversities of love, but in the throes of infatuation she is tempted to indulge in the sentimental rhetoric of romance. Fortunately, however, Ill within the isolation of intimate relationship, the speaker can save herself from becoming hostage to her own language construction of her romance— with her mutter. Her "Love Song" for her lover is a blend of cliche ("his eyes are lit with laughter") and imagination ("He is jubilant as a flag unfurled"). In this arpeggio of romantic rhetoric she might convince herself and her audience that "he is all my heart," but she finishes each stanza in an honest mutter: As sharply sweet to my heart he seems As the fragrance of acacia. My own dear love, he is all my dreams— And I wish he were in Asia. . . (ER 77) Curiously, however, the satirist does not condemn the erotic games even while she exposes them as cruel, duplicitous, and messy. The sexual battle, with its strategies and ritual lies, hostages, ceremonies, ballads and messiness is, after all, life. The satirist— rather than eschewing potential sadness and oppression— perversely joins in the energy of the fray: Readers sometimes assume that the satirist is offering a positive solution, in the form of behavior which is exactly opposite to that displayed in his satire, but this rarely proves to be true when one gets to know the satirist. (Feinberg 3) It is this high tolerance for paradox that fuels the energy of the satirist. "I must go on, till ends my rope," the poet sighs, "who from my birth was cursed with hope" (SG 6 5 ) . 278 This same distrust of the conventions of words infuses Dorothy Parker's complex attitude toward the projection of image. Clothing can be deceptive or revealing; Henri Bergson understood that clothing is disguise— and a comic one at that (85). Again, honesty comes only with the frank demonstration of the "inconvenient data" that the satirist throws up to her reader. Dorothy Parker understood the persona and disguise of costume; often, in fact, the characters in a Parker story might have no names until perhaps a casual mention near the end* They are introduced and defined only in terms of their clothing: the girl in the petunia-colorbd hat, the young man in the chocolate-brown suit, or the girl with the artificial camellia.37 Not only Parker's narrator, but her fictional characters themselves create an image with costume; they study costume as definition of persona. Mimi buys a new dress for "The Lovely Leave": ". . .black— he liked black dresses— simple— he liked plain dresses— and so expensive that she would not think of its price." Later, she stood looking at herself in the mirror with deep interest, as if she watched a chic unknown, the details of whose costume she sought to memorize." (PDP 8)38 "Little Mrs. Murdock" in the story "Glory in the Daytime," also is sharply defined in terms of clothing ("blue serge and little white ruffles— that was she" [PDP 279]); later when she is ashamed of her naive regard for the crude and 279 bloated actress, she restores her own integrity through attention to her costume: "She felt a tenderness for her frock; she wanted to protect it. Blue serge and little ruffles— they were her own" (288). Even the most tedious characters study their clothing presence carefully; the affluent matron of "The Wonderful Old Gentleman" may cheat her sister out of an inheritance, but Mrs. Whittaker's dress was always studiously suited to its occasion; thus, her bearing always had that calm that only the correctly attired may enjoy. (PDP 55) Ironically, even her long-suffering sister pauses to consider changing her own costume in order to demonstrate her attitude toward her father's death She had thought that Mrs. Whittaker might expect her to display a little distraught untidiness at a time like this; might even go in for it in a mild way herself. (56) Projecting an image or disguising oneself in costume is to construct the self— -and even (or especially!) with all the rhetorical skills of cliche and convention to assist, this is a serious business. But the "romantic fixation which revolves around the beauty of perfect form, in art or elsewhere, is also a logical target for satire," Frye notes (233). The language of this "perfect form" is the rhetoric of fashion, and this was Dorothy Parker's apprenticeship to satire. Her first job as a writer for Vogue magazine was to compose promotional one-liners for women's fashions ("'This 280 little pink dress will win you a beau,' that sort of thing” [Capron 73]). Here Parker recognized the absurd and yet complex manipulation involved in the packaging and merchandising of female appeal. She also saw a network of women innocently yet insidiously converting real women into a fashion image for other women to emulate: Funny, they were plain women working at Vogue, not chic. They were decent, nice women— the nicest women I ever met— but they had no business on such a magazine. They wore funny little bonnets and in the pages of their magazine they virginized the models from tough babes into exguisite little loves. (Capron 73) Funny, yes; Parker as a satirist reverses this fashion conversion. Her satire goes directly for the "virginization” process. The dress itself may signify the individual, but Bergson sees comedy in that dressing-up itself. Parker, on the other hand, recognizes the distancing rhetoric and technique of fashion. Fashion •'attempts to substitute its artifice, i.e., its culture, for the false nature of things," Roland Barthes tells us; "it does not suppress meaning; it points to it with its finger" (303). The false nature of the posture of a woman turned into a thing (even an "exquisite little love") is inherently absurd. Even beyond this caricature is the absurdity of the artifice (the rhetoric of fashion) that creates the artifice (the garment) for the artifice (the woman, posed, draped, and described). In this concentric convention, the meaning 281 is the consensus of deception. When the satirist points to it with her finger, the admiration for oppressive fashion is exposed as complicity. We are no longer fooled. L'envoi: we might look for a positive solution— a model of behavior in opposition to this shallow system of appeal and opportunism (here Frye nods knowingly), "But this rarely proves to be true when one gets to know the satirist." So in spite of all, Dorothy Parker's verse-satirist never abandons her love of fabric, dresses, powder and paint: "The Satin Dress" begins as a paeon for lovely clothing: Needle, needle, dip and dart, Thrusting up and down, Where's the man could ease a heart Like a satin gown? . . . (ER 23) "Satin's for the free," for the bold, for the wise. And finally, even after death, "They will say who watch at night, 'What a fine shroud!'" Perversely, the satirist appreciates the garment— what Bergson called the mechanical that evoked laughter when the living element popped up. But for Parker's women, the garment was consoling; it was she. It gave her the controlling definition of her life. * * * Rhetorical control produces the transformation of humor. Parker moved from word games, puns, captions, one- liners, and epigrams to verse. With her "disciplined eye and (her] wild mind," she converts the most flagrant sentimentality into satire. Throughout her career, Dorothy 282 Parker strove to write with economy and precision. She moved within the Conde Nast corporation from caption writer to assignments as journalist and reviewer, a journalist writing under deadlines and for an immediate audience; she met (however painfully) press deadlines. But while her poetry was terse, spare, and dense with double-entendre, her reviews of books and plays took on a quality of the shaggy dog story. She wrote them in the classic persona of the satirist in a comic monologue, subverting her critique of an earnest but second-rate production into an absurd focus on an irrelevant detail. As a satirist, she might concentrate on her own comfort during the performance— or a costume as a measure of the performance; . . . she had the temerity to wear as truly horrible a gown as ever I have seen on the American stage. There was a flowing skirt of pale chiffon— you men don't have to listen— and a bodice of rose-colored taffeta, the sleeves of which ended shortly below her shoulders. Then there was an expanse of naked arms, and then, around the wrist, taffeta frills such as are fastened about the unfortunate necks of beaten white poodle-dogs in animal acts. Had she not luckly been strangled by a member of the cast while disporting this garment, I should have fought my way to the stage and done her in, myself.39 For years, however, The New Yorker tempered the weekly hilarity of Constant Reader's long-suffering trials with best-sellers by following CR's reviews with a brief straightforward review by a less familiar critic; if readers 283 wanted conventional judgments, the editors seemed to say, they should have them. As a corrective, she reports, Franklin P. Adams once gave me a book of French verse forms and told me to copy their design, that by copying them I would get precision in prose. The men you imitate in verse influence your prose, and what I got out of it was precision . . . (Capron 75) When F.P.A. introduced Dorothy Parker the journalist-poet to the satiric epigrams of Baron La Rouchefoucauld, she found the style to shape her work. The French verse epigrammist ("that lovable old cynic" [PDP 255]) captured Parker's imagination; her 193 3 prose monologue "The Little Hours" in The New Yorker centers on her obsession with La Rochefoucauld. In a model of satiric consciousness, the speaker muddles through her store of his seventeenth century epigrams— succinct observations of universal human behavior in twists of ironic truth. Sighing philosophically, La Rochefoucauld observes in Maxim #19, "We all have strength enough to endure the trouble of others."40 And of love, the cynic observes (Maxim #136), "Some people would never have fallen in love if they had never heard of love." The narrator awakens in the little (wee) hours, after an ill-considered early bedtime, and she blames her sleeplessness on reading. ("God, the bitter misery that reading works in this world!"): All the best minds have been off reading for years. Look at the swing La Rouchfoucauld took at it. He said that if nobody had ever learned to read, very few people would be in 284 love. There was a man for you, and that's what HE thought of it. Good for you, La Rouchefoucauld; nice going, boy. I wish I'd never learned to read. (PDP 254) In a deliberate misreading of Maxim #136, the Parker-persona meditates on this cerebral construction of love: language ("if they had . . . heard of love") has produced the condition called love!— and love has caused her wakefulness. But then she develops her own epigrammatic satire. Actually, she muses, love might spring not from intellectual suggestion, but from a more direct event: I wish I'd never learned to take off my clothes. Then I wouldn't have been caught in this jam at half-past four in the morning. If nobody had ever learned to undress, very few people would be in love. No, his is better. Oh, well, it's a man's world. (PDP 254) These radical topsy-turvy didactics credit a man with the intellectually suggestive but sensually limp definition of love as a disembodied reader-response. On the other hand, experience might show that not reading but undressing might cause love— this interpretation comes from a woman. After weighing these alternatives, she finishes with a cliched aphorism: "It's a man's world." Hardly a lapidary epigram bearing succinct truth, her one-liner is a satiric commentary on both succinct truth and the epigrammatic style. Parker's poet-satirist controls the language, the rhyme, and the timing of the punchline. She gains control of the very vulnerability that maintained the emotional 285 suffering in Parker's ironic stories. This transformation from irony to satire forms a sub-text of the story "Sentiment." In the course of the sketch we see the development of the woman as satirist. The progress from sentimentalist to satirist becomes logical, even organic— inevitable. At the beginning, the speaker in this monologue-sketch functions out of obsession; she rides on the melting of her own nostalgia, to paraphrase Frost, and heightens her anguish. Rosalie catches a taxi ("Oh, anywhere, driver, anywhere— it doesn't matter. Just keep driving.") She rides in broad daylight, but with her eyes shut.41 In that way she has no sense of regality, only the voices and scenes in her mind as she replays memories of a relationship that ended. Tearfully remembering her lover's conversation, she catches herself in the fantasy of it: Oh. Oh, I forgot. He didn't say so. He wasn't here; he isn't here. It was I, imagining what he would say. And I thought I heard him. He's always with me, he and all his beauty and his cruelty. But he mustn't be any more. I mustn't think of him. That's it, don't think of him. Yes. Don't breathe, either. Don't hear. Don't see. Stop the blood in your veins. (PDP 356) At this point, only romantic death seems a logical resolution. What else can be done with uncontrollable obsession? ("I cannot stand this frantic misery. . . it is always the same and there is no end.") But then, as Parker 286 had titled an earlier poem, "Cassandra breaks into verse." She recites to herself a maudlin parody of Parker's own sentimental poems: 42 "Sorrow like a ceaseless rain Beats upon my heart. People twist and scream in pain— Dawn will find them still again: This has neither wax nor wane, Neither stop nor start." (PDP 356) This oral tradition of romantic fantasy gives her a rhetoric of misery. We see her hunting the rhyming words, which, in the best conventions of the satirist, "prevents even the process of writing itself from becoming an over-simplified convention or ideal" (Frye 234). Conflating banal style with Shakespearean impulse, she considers, "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. How am I to drag through them like this?" Her friends advise her to have a good time, but she relishes her melancholy: "Don't sit alone and dramatize yourself." Dramatize yourself! If it be drama to feel a steady— no, a ceaseless rain beating upon my heart, then I do dramatize myself." Shoring up the hash of her sentiment,43 the poet begins to choose and edit: "steady" converts to a dramatic "ceaseless." She becomes a dramatist, the choreographer of her sentiment. Rosalie begins to remind us of Parker's couple in the "The Dramatists," whose cliched memory ("A string of shiny days we had, / A spotless sky, a yellow sun") can, with a pretty tear, become tragedy: And each of us will sigh, and start 287 A-talking of a faded year, And lay a hand above a heart, And dry a pretty tear. (ER 37) Working out of a mawkish sentimental tradition, Rosalie turns disappointment into drama— and with another step back, to comedy. Better than dying, she now begins "a-talking of a faded year." She "dries a pretty tear," and then inverts the Wordsworthian philosophy of poetry: Sorrow is tranquillity remembered in emotion. It— oh, I think that's quite good. "Remembered in emotion"— that's a really nice reversal. I wish I could say it to him. (PDP 357) The voice of the sentimentalist makes a "really nice reversal," and the voice of the satirist is born. At last she conjectures that the taxi's route must be carrying her through their old neighborhood ("oh, God, we must be at our house now!"), but when she opens her eyes, she finds that she is not where she had imagined. Her agony has resulted not from the experience, but from the fantasy life she has created. We laugh at the irony. But Rosalie's nostalgia will not be stanched by an eyeful of reality; we understand that she will continue to brood, moaning, "it is always the same and there is no end." The story ends in comic irony, but her self-pity is shadowed with the tone of the developing satirist; in the shaping of verse, she is finding the drama (and the melodrama— the meta-drama) and then, standing apart from her experience, she will find the joke, as in "Anecdote": 288 So silent I when Love was by He yawned and turned away: But sorrow clings to my apron strings, I have so much to say. (ER 25) Only one gift from “Godmother'’ had been the love of rain; because of this affinity for melancholy, the woman-voice has "so much to say." The satirist-hag at the church door, by coaching her to convert it all into (Rosalie's words now) "a really nice reversal," has become the mentor for women who write humor. * * * Only the perspective has changed. Emotional distance creates the ground for satire, as the writer diverts her energy to finding the words, turning the pun, rearranging, conceptualizing, writing and shaping what turns into "anecdote." Dorothy Parker as a satirist is resigned to the certainty of betrayal, pain, and loss: war is inevitable, money buys power, and death interrupts all human effort. But while these may be inevitable (as Death and Taxes— the title of her third volume of poetry), Dorothy Parker reads these exigencies of life as constructions of language. The satirist is concerned with verbal wit, dazzling incongruity, shocking caricature— in short, grabbing the attention of the reader through her cleverness. And as she writes, the satirist confronts basic human fears and futility— and turns them toward her control, reduces them to absurdity, reductio ad absurdum. The "little lady" satirist distills the male agenda of war into her "little verse," a "Song of Perfect 289 Propriety," but it does not reduce the impact; rather, it exaggerates it into perspective: I'd like to straddle gory decks, And dig in laden sands, And know the feel of throbbing necks Between my knotted hands. Oh, I should like to strut and curse Among my blackguard crew .... But I am writing little verse, As little ladies do. (ER 70) The satirist has channeled the murderous energy of wringing "throbbing necks between my knotted hands" into poetry— and then claims that the resulting text is only a "little verse." At a second level of perspective, however, she claims that she would prefer to be acting out this mayhem in a colossus-straddle of warships awash in gore. Control over that desire is what infuses the verse with tethered violence. Such work then becomes a "Song of Perfect Propriety"-— the poet pretends to behave in the conventions of the little ladies writing little verse. The satirist's blithely violent language demonstrates what her "perfect propriety" covers up, and what the satiric text reveals about the power of the writing process to expose and yet deny. Writing such "little verse" is work. Through the power in writing, not only can the anguish of personal relationship convert into the "pretty tears" of satire (more easily dried than heartfelt involunary tears!), but the very work of writing substitutes for the drama of 290 erotic extremes, and promotes the whistling expression of humor: I'll dig at my lettuce, and sweep my floor— Forever, forever I'm done with woe- And happen I'll whistle about my chore, "Scratch a lover and find a foe." (from "Ballade of a Great Weariness," ER 60) While she is working (writing), "the whistling girl" transforms her lover-foe from an obsession into an aphorism. And she certainly does not expect professional acclaim from him. The poet has no illusions: her lover-foe represents a precarious balance. He may dish up personal criticism, and even abuse, but she expects no better from him. However, while she can ignore his personal criticism (the speaker can overlook her lover's accusations of promiscuity, pride, despondency, masochism, or maliciousness), yet that unlucky lover's crude critique of her work becomes "Fighting Words" — and cause for her to dismiss him: Say my love is easy had, Say I'm bitten raw with pride. Say I am too often sad— Still behold me at your side. Say I'm neither brave nor young, Say I woo and coddle care, Say the devil touched my tongue— Still you have my heart to wear. But say my verses do not scan and I get me another man! (ER 93) The work of writing is the satirist's focus. True, she opposes affectation and stupidity, cruelty and duplicity; but she does not aim to philosophize them away. Rather, she 291 engages them further in her wit and attack: jousting, piercing . . . and sometimes only teasing. She is a writer. All of the incongruities of living are her game. Paradoxically, however, the satirist needs her personal suffering, injustices, and animosity— otherwise there can be no writing satire. Moods of joy may pass and feelings of love may go "a-rocketing," but a more serious attitude adjustment will bring real loss: "All my pretty hates are dead, / And what have I left?" ("Wail," ER 22). Her godmother (the hag at the white church door [ER 13]) had chosen to "give her sadness, / And the gift of pain, / The new-moon madness, / And the love of rain," so she is fitted to the livelihood of the satirist, even though she may carp in French that she is done with lyric lament ("Pour Prendre Conge" [SG 71]): I'm sick of embarking in dories Upon an emotional sea. I'm wearied of playing Dolores (A role never written for me). I'll never again like a cub lick My wounds while I squeal at the hurt. No more I'll go walking in public, My heart hanging out of my shirt. We know that no earnestly heartbroken lover is going to hunt down rhymes as outrageous as "cub lick" paired with "public," nor will she speak of her grief as "my heart hanging out of my shirt." This recovering love-addict has transferred her energy from woe to wit. Like Rosalie taxiing through her urban memory lanes with her eyes shut, 292 the poet-satirist here has made "a really nice reversal." It has become her work. She may think that I'm through with performing the ballet Of Love unrequited and told. and so in a Latinate farewell to the muse— "Euterpe, I tender you vale"— she waves a maternal health bid: "Good- by, and take care of that cold." But, thinking it over later (head in hand?) she realizes that tossing on an emotional sea provides her with the resume material (not all of it virtuous, didactic, or necessarily moral) needed to spin out satiric verse. Her farewell to the sniffling muse (and her resolve to live a more subdued life) ends with her sense of professional obligation . . .: I'm done with this burning and giving And reeling the rhymes of my woes. And how I'll be making my living, The Lord in his mystery knows. (SG 71) But even the joy of yoking triumph and pun does not create a philosophy for the satirist; in fact, the writer of satire watching the writer of satire writing satire must keep a parodic eye out for smugness. The process of writing, instead of becoming (like love) a romanticized ideal, may inscribe a joke in the process: the "Danger in Writing Defiant Verse," for instance, is that the defiance may not survive through the writing. At first the speaker gloats, And now I have another lad! No longer need you tell How all my nights are slow and sad For loving you too well. 293 She has withdrawn her ex-love's license for kiss-and- tell confessions calculated to stir pity in his potential paramours. She has another advantage, too: by finding a steady fellow as a replacement, she has returned to a scheduled, predictable life: He never weaves a glinting lie,, Or brags the hearts he'll keep. I have forgotten how to sigh— Remembered how to sleep. Most commendable of his recommendations is his plodding erotic style; he is not apt to transport her into irrational rapture. . . Only then does honesty break in: He's none to kiss away my mind— A slower way is his. Oh, Lord! On reading this, I find A silly lot he is. (DT 14-15) In the spirit of satire here, no satisfying guide to living is offered. Often, too, there is no counsel of prudence— only life, in all its quirkiness and variety. For the woman who searches for a quest to match the universal— a.k.a. male— quest, the voice of the satirist always comes round to the pragmatic. Any philosophy is only the irritation of static muddling, according to "The Veteran": When I was young and bold and strong, Oh, right was right, and wrong was wrong! My plume on high, my flag unfurled, I rode away to right the world. "Come out you dogs, and fight!" said I And wept there was but once to die. But I am old; and good and bad Are woven in a crazy plaid. I sit and say, "The world is so: And he is wise who lets it go. 294 A battle lost, a battle won— The difference is small, my son." Inertia rides and riddles me; The which is called Philosophy. (ER 65) "When good and bad are woven in a crazy plaid," the rigid mechanics of social control and "perfect propriety" are called into question. Most satirists suspect, according to Feinberg, "that people choose a philosophy and an ethic not to redirect their lives to nobler ends, but to justify the kind of life they are already leading" (5). Whenever a theory threatens to appear, the satirist contradicts it; our Parker satiress, for example, points out that the recognition for tenacious effort may be overlooked or overrated. Instead of complaining that the world is not fair, however, she makes Rosalie's "really nice reversal." She focuses on her own reaction, measuring its fairness: If I should labor through daylight and dark, Consecrate, valorous, serious, true. Then on the world I may blazon my mark; And what if I don't, and what if I do? (ER 79) She reminds us of La Rochefoucauld: "Self-interest speaks all manner of tongues and plays all manner of parts, even that of disinterestedness."44 No further advice is given. The self-interest of disinterestedness would be enough to snap the prison of those "little women" of the Parker short stories. The writing subject/"little woman" who writes the Parker "little verse" is able to take for a topic "the feel of throbbing necks / Between my knotted hands." 295 Dorothy Parker proposed no viable correctives for the inequalities of gender, nor those of class or race. Later, in the fifties, women would live with compromise in the suburbs; in the sixties, they would convert rage to rhetoric and in the seventies explore separatist alternatives and communal living styles; they would move with the high energy of career women in the eighties. But Parker suggested no system, no theory, no plan. She was spotlighting foibles and frustrations— working in the role of social satirist.45 "It's not the tragedies that kill us;" she once observed, "it's the messes. I can't stand messes" (Capron 82). For Dorothy Parker, art shapes the messiness of life. Poetry— the satiric verse— wraps up the ironies. And humor provides the courage, the perspective for life, and finally the substance of writing. The extreme alternative to the messiness of living (all the "inconvenient data" of satire) would be the perfection of death: closure, freedom from mutability, a predictable text. Death removes risk, and the vulnerability to attack, to criticism, as Sylvia Plath later writes in "Edge": The woman is perfected. Her dead Body wears the smile of accomplishment, The illusion of a Greek necessity . . ,46 Free of decisions and culpability, "the pompous dead"47 are dead right, inflexible. Parker's verse satirist considers suicide, but with no such "smile of accomplishment"; 296 instead, with resignation, she opts against the simple inconvenience of it: Razors pain you; Rivers are damp; Acids stain you; and drugs cause cramp. Guns aren't lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live. (ER 61) The satirist chooses life by default; you might as well live. She chooses direct engagement with life's "messes," and the complexity of experience— then controls it with wit. Death, on the other hand, is simple; one standard applies to all. And the simple, sentimental "mooning world" can invent the dead, endowing them with attitudes and language, to construct the romantic narrative that glorifies desire: Therefore the mooning world is gratified, Quoting how prettily we sigh and swear; And you and I, correctly side by side, Shall live as lovers when our bones are bare And though we lie forever enemies, Shall rank with Abelard and Heloise. (ER 44) After death, the lovers are eulogized as devoted (sighing prettily) and pure (swearing fidelity); so begins another apocryphal narrative of legendary lovers. The truth is that in death, as in life, they lie enemies. Such a marriage in a Parker story is not tragic but only, as she titled one example, "Too Bad." In her ironic fiction Dorothy Parker offers no solutions; in the poetry, the joke of death turns the messes 297 of life into satire— an epitaph, a jaunty verse. The Parker satirist finds in an "Inventory" of life-strategies: Three be the things I shall have till I die: Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye. (ER 96) and the work— the poetry— amounts to a "sock in the eye." Sealed into insouciant rhyme, the words live beyond the artist; the prospect of writing enduring lines is invigorating. Given the power of the artist's vision, the epigram/epigraph/epitaph is memorable— and so becomes what Dorothy Parker once winkingly described an honor she had received: a "shining tombstone. . . It gives me, as you might say, something to live for" ("Thurber's Men" viii). So the women of Parker's fiction fumble and ache in their vulnerability— and at the close of a story they all (rich and poor) must continue to live— and cope. But the poet answers in the strong voice of satire. She detaches from suffering, leaves her heart "out wailing in the rain" or "bowls it down the street," and instead applies "thumb to nose." Dorothy Parker's creates the polished rhyme and balanced syntax of comeuppance epigrams; she works in an oral tradition of women's humor through generations— when Gloria Steinem can recite Parker's verse from the memory of listening to her mother. Dorothy Parker lived with laughter, could look uncompromisingly at the blocked lives of women and yet find, through wit and laughter, the vitality to hope again; and she crafted her poetry as the 298 "sock in the eye." Humor became the strategy for her life and for her art. "Successful satire has got to be pretty good the day after tomorrow," observed Parker* "The people we call satirists now are those who make cracks at topical topics and consider themselves satirists . . . Their stuff is not satire; it's as dull as yesterday's newspaper" (Capron 77). Critics agree that successful satire demands an audience that agrees on their attitude toward the person or idea under attack. Political systems, ethnic attitudes, fashions, and media-promotes national values may shift and permute, but because the complexities of sexual relationships remain a given, Dorothy Parker's wide influence on popular culture continues through the twentieth century. In 1993, feminist cartoonist Nicole Hollander has written thirteen years of daily syndicated humor, "sending [her character] Sylvia out to talk about personal politics. She never runs out of things to say."48 The Portable Dorothy Parker is stocked in campus and trade book stores across America; because the subtexts of wit and attack in personal politics remain constant, Parker's satire is still viable— and memorable. Emily Dickinson said of the "certain slant of light" that signaled despair: "when it goes 'tis like the Distance / on the look of death." From just such a distance Dorothy Parker studied "the look of death" and decided with a rueful 299 laugh that she "might as well live." The default of life gave her the perspective of Satire, and finally, hope. George Meredith reflected that to love Comedy you must know the real world, and know men and women well enough not to expect too much of them, though you may still hope for good. (24) As a satirist, Parker documented the daily lies, the duplicity and selfishness, inertia and stupidity; she relentlessly pointed to the repetition of victimization and the fantasies that allowed it. Yet near the close of her long life, Dorothy Parker still described herself as "the greatest little hoper in the world."49 300 Notes 1 Dorothy Parker, "To Richard— with Love," in The Screen Guilds' Magazine May 1936: 8. Uncollected. 2 Martha Bone in her 1984 dissertation, identifies Parker's target as "the hypocrisies and stupidities in the women she knew"(55). Bone's literal reading of Parker concludes simply that she "could not accept traditional values, and she twisted the self-satisfaction of those who could, much as she twisted the endings of her poems" (56). 3 "Interpreting the Variorum" (1980). Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Robert Con Davis. New York: Longman, 1986. 393-408. 4 Boskin builds from Gordon Allport's classic discussion of the formation of in-groups as a foundation for xenophobia and bigotry (The Nature of Prejudice. Addison-Wesley P, 1955); Allport notes that sex constitutes an in-group, accounting for an antifeminism that seems to him to be "unreal" (33). 5 Emily Toth, "A Laughter of their Own: Women's Humor in the United States," in Critical Essays on American Humor. 201. Reginia Gagnier, too, writing of women's humor and class issues, concludes that in working women's autobiographies "the sole source of humor is real or imaginary gransgressions relating to social class. The form these humorous transgressions take is . . . a process of imaginative engagement" (140); on the other hand, Regina Barreca, beginning with her 1987 doctoral dissertation Hate and Humor in Women's Writing: A Discussion of Twentieth- Century Authors and continuing through her 1991 publication I Used to be Called Snow White. But I Drifted. . ." consistently emphasizes the harsh and cunning quality of women's subversive humor. 6 Grotjahn's analysis of what he perceives as women's response to and creation of humor derives from Freudian assumptions of women's motivation and essential character (see his discussion in Beyond Laughter 51-63. 7 Dorothy Parker: "What Fresh Hell Is This"? John Updike astutely reviews Meade's biography: "the writing is shoddy, the mood sour, and the subject rather resolutely unsympathetic" ("Witty Dotty" 109). 8 "Excuse It, Please— Americans at Play; This Sentimental Grand Vizier," The New Yorker. 18 Feb 1928: 79. (Uncollected). 301 9 Hereafter reference to The Portable Dorothy Parker will appear in the text as PDP. Parker's volumes of poetry will be cited as follows: Enough Rope: ER; Sunset Gun: SG; Death and Taxes: DT. 10 Gender Troublef Chapter 1. 11 When critic Emily Toth finds Parker's targets to be the social roles that men and women are locked into, she "paved the way for a new openness in humor— for housewives, for feminists, and for women who are both" (207). Such a binary distinction (feminist/housewife) points up the uneasy and conflicting roles dividing individual integrity. 12 Northrop Frye offers the standard analysis of satire in his chapter "The Mythos of Winter" in Anatomy of Criticism. 223-239. Other sources for my discussion of satire and its practitioners include Leonard Feinberg's Introduction to Satire and Modern Satire by Alvin B. Kernan. 13 In Parker's 1949 play The Coast of Illyriar the stage set of the home of Charles and Mary Lamb is dominated by a Parkeresque motif: a complete set of the eight Hogarth paintings of "The Rake's Progress," concluding with the Hogarth "Bedlam"— a work (and a place) that Mary Lamb feared with a phobic intensity. 14 Paula Treichler argues persuasively that the dancer is trapped by her own construction of herself as a trap for a man (55-61). 15 The New Yorker, 13 Feb. 1926: 13. Uncollected. 16 The New Yorker. 11 Feb. 1928: 14-16. Uncollected. 17 Shulamith Firestone identifies the economic dependence of women as a consequence of erotic dependence in her early feminist landmark The Dialectic of Sex (1970). Selection from Firestone rpt. in Sharon Bishop and Marjorie Weinzweig, eds. Philosophy and Women 154-159. 18 Later I discuss Parker's debt to the epigrammatic style of LaRouchefoucauld, La Fontaine, and others. 19 See Chapter 1 for my reading of Hobbes's superiority theory of laughter as apparatus for women's humor. 20 These poems have been added here to the text of Death and Taxes. although they do not appear in that volume of poetry. Death and Taxes closes with "Summary," a satire on 302 emotional thralldom, in which the poet speaks ironically: "Would I knew a little more, / Or very much less!" 21 Parker's revisionary intention was to clean up the joke- sequence. "Inscription" is a wry statement of the consistent outcome of each day (or achievement or loss): . . . Though I go in pride and strength, I'll come back to bed at length, Though I walk in blinded woe, Back to bed I'm bound to go. . . Here is the inevitable repetition that marks so many Parker stories, and by extension measures the sturdy but ultimately daunted effort of human endurance against the predictability of death. 22 Carol Gilligan's work on the individuation process for males and females concludes that the "different voice" results from the accommodation and relating of a young woman within the family structure, especially with her mother. 23 Leonard Feinberg's caveat pertains here: "Satire is such a protean species of art that no two scholars use the same devinition or the same outline of ingredients." Satire is "a heterogeneous mixture of incongrous elements which simply cannot be satisfactorily classified, except for the purpose of focusing discussion" (vii). 24 Emily Thornwell, The Lady's Guide to Perfect Gentility (1856). Unpaginated. 25 David Worcester, The Art of Satire. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1940. Qtd. in Kernan, p. 180. 26 Social researchers in 1968 found that "women use self- deprecating humor 64% of the time compared to 11% for men" ("The Feminine Routine" Levine 174). Levine concludes that "it can be surmised that comediennes are echoing the values of their social milieu in order to attract and keep a mass audience" (175). Playing to an audience, they claim, requires shaping their jokes to familiar social expectations, insuring that the audience will catch on and appreciate their wit. 27 In the stories, however, the ingenuous narrator ironically discloses the disaffecting consequences of the woman's pose— or compulsion— of tenacious geniality and affection. Hazel Morse had felt (wrong-headedly) that marriage had given her permission to drop the pose. 28 I think that I shall never see 303 A poem lovely as a tree. A tree whose hungry mouth is prest Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;... The Pocket Book of Verse. 366. Joyce Kilmer's saccharine poem was memorized by schoolchildren long after his war poetry was forgotten. 29 MThe rogue transgresses the moral law at the expense of others, but he is only able to do this because of the vices of his victims; they share in his guilt." "Notes on the Comic" in The Dyer 's Hand 384. 30 Maxim #132. La Rochefoucauld 51. 31 Margaret Lawrence, in 1936, discusses Parker as the "queen of the little girl pals"— those writers of the twenties who, in pants and bobbed hair, smoke, joke, and sport as equals with men. They reconstruct the courtesan image for women in the twentieth century: "Painted by women the courtesan is a calculating hussy" (170). . .The little girl pals dealing with courtesans are . . . [like] the good women of all countries and all classes suffering from puritanism. The courtesan gets the impact of the ancient female resentment, fear and jealousy. . . The little girl pals painted them in success" (172). 32 "The Veteran." ER 65. 33 "The Little Old Lady in Lavender Silk." DT 32. 34 Eco's discussion questions comic carnivalization as only a momentary transgression that seems to disturb the frame, when in fact strengthens it (9). 35 #79 "Farewell to Love." The Complete Poetry of John Donne. Ed. John T. Shawcross. Garden City, NY: Doubleday [Anchor], 1967. 150. 36 The sketch as a form is identified as a genre in Mary Beard's 1933 anthology of women's humor and in popular magazines of the 20's to which Parker contributed. 37 Hat: "Dialogue at Three in the Morning"; suit and camellia: "The Last Tea." 38 The scene is reminiscent of Lacan's mirror stage in which the infant finds [her] image in the mirror to be an Ideal-I, far superior to [her] own fragmented experiential self, and caught in the lure of anticipation of enacting that self, the subject begins the quest to become, and 304 adopts an alienating armor which will mark further development. I have called this moment the birth of humor (see Chapter 1). 39 nA Few Minutes of Your Time," The New Yorker 4 April 1931. The Portable Dorothy Parker 445-446. 40 The insomniac Parker-persona considers how she will appear to her friends after a sleepless night: "I'll'be a seamy sight for all those rested, clear-eyed, fresh-faced dearest friends of mine— the rats! My dear, whatever have you been doing; I thought you were so good lately. Oh, I was helling around with La Rochefoucauld till all hours; we couldn't stop laughing about your misfortunes." (PDP 257) 41 As Rosalie hurtles along over dark streets— her eyes are closed, remember— we might think of another young woman of literature, Isabel Archer: "Do you know where you are drifting?" Henrietta pursued. "No, I haven't the least idea, and I find it very pleasant not to know. A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can't see— that's my idea of happiness." (Portrait of a Lady, [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956, 144) Isabel, too, reveled in her detachment from reality (and emotional self-indulgence), leaving responsibility for her own life decisions to another; she accommodated the ethical consequences for the rest of her life. 42 Norris Yates recognizes the contradictory personae voiced throughout Parker's work, but reads the connection here as though it were accidental instead of strategic: the "language of [Rosalie's] reverie is a parody of Elinor Glyn and other sentimental novelists, and perhaps also a mocking of the sentimentality which Miss Parker could often have found in her own work without looking too far" (268). 43 "The word satire is said to come from satura or hash, and a kind of parody of form seems to run all through its tradition. . ." (Frye 227). 44 Maxim #39: 40. 45 "On the assumption that only constructive criticism is valuable, no one but a fireman would inform people that a house was burning . . . A satirist should no more be expected to provide the world with a satisfying way of life than a detective or an exterminator" (Feinberg 15). 46 Ariel (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1966): 84. 305 47 »The White Lady" PDP 90-91 (and in Enough Rope 39). When Parker edited her poetry in Enough Rope for The Portable Dorothy Parker. she changed "the drowsy dead" to the pompous dead," honing an edge on the tone of the piece. In the final line in The Portable. the speaker joins those recently deceased "[w]ho hate the pompous dead." 48 Laura Mansnerus, "A Valentine's Greeting from Sylvia: Find a Lover from Another Planet.” New York Times 14 Feb. 1993: E7. 49 Capron 82. 306 Works Cited Acker, Ally. "Dorothy Parker." Reel Women: Pioneers of the Cinema. New York: Continuum Press, 1991. 186-189. Barreca, Regina, They Used to Call Me Snow White . . . But I Drifted: Women's Strategic Use of Humor. New York: Viking, 1991. Barthes, Roland. The Fashion System. Trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard. London: Jonathan Cape, 1985. Bergson, Henri. "Laughter" [1899]. Comedy. Ed. Wylie Sypher. New York: Doubleday, 1956. Bone, Martha Denham. "Dorothy Parker and New Yorker Satire." Diss. Middle Tennessee State University, 1985. Boskin, Joseph. Humor and Social Change. Boston: Trustees of the Public Library of the City of Boston, 1979. Bunkers, Suzanne L. H/I Am Outraged Womanhood': Dorothy Parker as Feminist and Social Critic." Regionalism and the Female Imagination 4 (1978): 25-34. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Capron, Marion. "Dorothy Parker." Writers at Work. Ed. Malcolm Cowley. New York: Viking, 1958. Clinton, Kate. "Making Light: Another Dimension." Trivia (1982): 37-42. Cooper, Wyatt. "Whatever You Think Dorothy Parker Was Like, She Wasn't." Esquire July 1968: 57+. Douglas, George H. Women of the Twenties. New York: Norton, 1986. Dresner, Zita. "Women's Humor." Humor in America: A Research Guide to Genres and Topics. Ed. Lawrence Mintz. New York: Greenwood, 1988. Eco, Umberto. "The Frames of 'Comic Freedom.'" Carnival. Ed. Thomas A. Sebeok. New York: Mouton, 1984. 1-9. Elliott, Robert. "The Satirist and Society," English Literary History 21.3 (1954): 237-48. Rpt. Kernan 153. 307 Ephron, Nora. Crazy Salad: Some Things about Women. New York: Knopf, 1975. Feinberg, Leonard. Introduction to Satire. Ames, IA: Iowa State UP, 1967. Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex. 1970. Rpt. in Philosophy and Women. Ed. Sharon Bishop and Majorie Weinzwieg. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1979. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. 1925. New York: Macmillan, 1980. Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious 1905. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Penguin, 1976. • "Humor." 1927. Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Siamund Freud. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1961. 24 Vols. 21.159-166 Frewin, Leslie. The Late Mrs. Dorothy Parker. New York: Macmillan, 1986. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton UP, 1957. Gagnier, Regenia. "Between Women: a Cross-class Analysis of Status and Anarchic Humor." Women's Studies 15 (1988), 135-148. Gill, Brendan. Introduction. The Portable Dorothy Parker. New York: Viking, 1973. Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. Boston: Harvard UP, 1982. Grotjahn, Martin. Beyond Laughter. New York: McGraw Hill, 1957. Heilman, Lillian. An Unfinished Woman. Bantam Books, 1970. Kaufman, Gloria and Mary Kay Blakeley, eds. Introductions. Pulling Our Own Strings: Feminist Humor & Satire. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980. Keats, John. You Might As Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970. Kernan, Alvin B., ed. Modern Satire. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1962. Kinney, Arthur F. Introduction. The Coast of Illyria. By Dorothy Parker. U of Iowa P, 1990. 308 . "Dorothy Parker's Letters to Alexander Woollcott." Massachusetts Review 30 (1989): 487-515. . Dorothy Parker. Twain Series. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1978. La France, Marianne. "Felt Versus Feigned Funniness: Issues in Coding Smiling and Laughing." In McGhee and Goldstein, Vol.l. 1-12. La Rochefoucauld, Francois. Maxims♦ Trans. L.W. Tancock. Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1959. LaFrance, Marianne. "Felt Versus Feigned Funniness: Issues in Coding Smiling and Laughing." McGhee and Goldstein 1-12. Lakoff, Robin Tolmach. Talking Power: The Politics of Language. New York: HarperCollins (Basic Books), 1990. Lawrence, Margaret. The School of Femininity. (1936). Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1966. Levine, Joan B. "The Feminine Routine." Journal of Communications 26 (1976): 173-175. Marlowe, Leigh. "A Sense of Humor." Imagination. Cognition, and Personality 4.3 (1984-85): 273+. McGhee, Paul E. and Jeffrey H. Goldstein, eds. Handbook of Humor Research. 2 vols. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1983 . Meade, Marion. Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell is This? New York: Vi Hard, 1988. Meredith, George. "An Essay on Comedy." Comedy. Ed. Wylie Sypher. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1956. 3-57. Miller, Nina. "Making Love Modern: Dorothy Parker and Her Public." American Literature 64.4 (1992): 763-784. Moers, Ellen. "The Angry Young Women." Harper's Dec 1968: 88-96. Parker, Dorothy, and Elmer Rice. Close Harmony or The Lady Next Door. New York: Samuel French, 1924. . Introduction. The Fireside Book of Humorous Poetry. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959. 309 . Introduction. The Most of S.J.Perelman. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1958. . Preface- Thurber/s Men. Women, and Doas: A Book of Drawings. 1943. Bantam, 1946. , and Ross Evans. The Coast of Illyria: A Play in Three Acts. Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa P, 1990. . Death and Taxes. New York: Viking, 1931. . Enough Rope: Poems. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1926. "Incredible, Fantastic . . . and True." New Masses 23 Nov. 1937: 15-16. . Sunset Gun: Poems. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1928. . Not So Deep as a Well: Collected Verse. New York: Viking, 1928. . The Collected Poetry of Dorothy Parker. New York: Modern Library, 1931. . The Constant Reader. New York: Viking, 1970. Smith, Liz. "Dietrich Dearest." L.A. Times Calendar 1 June 1992: 2. Sochen, June, ed. Women's Comic Visions. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1991. Steinem, Gloria. Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions. New York: New American Library, 1983. Suls, Jerry M. "Cognitive Processes in Humor Appreciation." McGhee and Goldstein, Vol. 1. 39-58. Thornwell, Emily. The Lady's Guide to Perfect Gentility. 1856. Rpt. (in part) San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 1984. Unpaginated. Toth, Emily. "Dorothy Parker, Erica Jong, and the New Feminist Humor." Regionalism and the Feminist Imagination 3.2-3 (1977-78): 70-85. . "A Laughter of their Own: Women's Humor in the United States." Critical Essays on American Humor. Ed. William Bedford Clark and W. Craig Turner. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1984. 199-216. 310 Treichler, Paula A. "Verbal Subversions in Dorothy Parker: 'Trapped Like a Trap in a Trap.'" Language and Style: An International Journal 13.4: 46-61. Updike, John. "Witty Dotty." Rev. of Dorothy Parker by Marion Meade. The New Yorker 25 April 1988: 109-112. Walker, Nancy. "Fragile and Dumb: The 'Little Woman' in Women's Humor, 1900-1940." Thalia: Studies in Literary Humor 5.2 (1982-83): 24-29. Wilson, Edmund. "A Toast and a Tear for Dorothy Parker." The New Yorker 20 May 1944: 75-76. Woolf, Virginia. "Professions for Women." The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. 1942. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970. 235-242. Yates, Norris. The American Humorist: Conscience of the Twentieth Century. Ames, IA: Iowa State UP, 1964. Zillmann, Dolf. "Disparagement Humor." McGhee and Goldstein, Vol 1. 85-108. 311 Chapter Five "The untamable eternal gut-driven ha-ha": The Two Triumphs of Anne Sexton If I make love you give me the funniest lines. Mrs. Sarcasm, why are there any children left? "Praying on a 707" He starts to laugh, the laughter rolling like a hoop out of His mouth and into mine, and such laughter that He doubles right over me laughing a Rejoice-Chorus at our two triumphs. . . Dearest dealer, I with my royal straight flush, love you so for your wild card, that untamable, eternal, gut-driven ha-ha and lucky love. "The Rowing Endeth" Anne Sexton's life vectors between fairy tale, nightmare, and business strategy— dreams, disturbance, and determination. Out of this multiple perspective, her poetry of dazzling images achieves an ironic double triumph of confrontation and control. Her suicide confounds an understanding of these two triumphs for observers who choose to focus on the closing moments of her life, but Sexton herself had accounted for this split between her life and her work: ". . . there is a lot of unconscious truth in a poem. In some ways, as you see me now, I am a lie. The crystal truth is in my poetry" fNo Evil Star 115).1 Most 312 significantly through her use of humor— in poems of caricature, burlesque, parody, and heresy— Sexton both masks and affirms life "with all its cracked stars shining / like a complicated lie." The crystal truth in poetry and the unconscious truth in humor both wear a complex disguise. Feminist critical assessment of her work centers on the equation created by her genius, her madness, and her role as a woman of her time. Suzanne Juhasz speaks of the double-bind situation between conflicting role demands . . . of being 'woman' or 'poet.' Anne Sexton's poetry is a testament to her courage and ability to be both for as long as she could." (117) This double perspective as woman and poet inscribed in Sexton's work a unique amalgam of tragic struggle, poetic insight, and dark absurdity. Her biographer, Diane Middlebrook, explains Anne Sexton's life as a psychological fairy tale: the princess falls under the influence of a threatening father, a hurtful or absent mother, a seductive great-aunt, and the pressures to conform to the expectations of social role models.2 Her transformation under the magic of the psychiatrist brings about her rebirth— as a poet. When psychotherapy centers her life and generates her art, confession becomes both the process and the text. Because, as I will demonstrate, confession and wit share a psychological matrix, Sexton accesses the strategies of humor in order to confront tyrannical male preeminence in her life and control it in her work. 313 Her work and her life both reflect the major dilemma for women in the twentieth century: the conflicting polarities of female autonomy on one hand and the pressure of social expectations on the other— a tension that has produced influential sociological studies. In the American sixties that dialectical confrontation translated into the rhetoric of "women's liberation" from male dominance. The prosperous and patriarchal Eisenhower years had proposed the white middle-class values of suburban family life as the material reward for hard work and decency; the fairy tale of prince and princess informed that domestic fantasy. Anne Sexton came from such a dream background; she was the youngest of three daughters in an affluent Boston family, her father a wool merchant, her mother involved in social events and philanthropies. She was lively, active, later popular and glamorous; never an academic, she drove a black convertible, smoked, and enjoyed the drama of early romance. At nineteen Anne left home to elope with Alfred Muller Sexton IV (Kayo), whose family's summer home neighbored their own on Squirrel Island in Maine. The couple settled near their parents in the Boston suburbs. In retrospect, to Anne her romance and marriage seemed less an independent choice than an embrace of the desires of others, and she told a later interviewer that she saw herself as a victim of the American Dream, the bourgeois, middle-class dream. All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, 314 to have children. I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. (NES 84) Male preeminence was generational. Her father made a place for Kayo with the sales force for his wool company, while Anne became a housewife and mother. Thus far the story might seem a fairy tale; it is what she later wryly would call "that story." Mainline patriarchal religion buttressed these traditional families in the fifties: "The family that prays together stays together," roadside billboards promised. Father-as-God prevailed, and a TV sitcom assured that "Father Knows Best." Later, the system setting the norm in post-war American life was identified as male dominance: Its point of view is the standard for point- of-viewlessness, its particularity the meaning of universality. Its force is exercised as consent, its authority as participation, its supremacy as the paradigm of order, its control as the definition of legitimacy. (Mackinnon 638-39) At the heart of Anne Sexton's poetry is her confrontation with this patriarchal authority: father, husband, mentor, and psychoanalyst are each endowed with the power and authority of a male deity that marks her final conflict. As she creates her autonomy (as a woman and yet in spite of being a woman), the struggle between her attraction and resistance to male control is relentless, and its strategies shape her poetry. 315 Critical reception of her work founders, however, in conflicted personal responses to her frank revelations of female sensuality and her ribald scatological language and images. From the beginning Sexton's work defies conventions, especially standards of "taste" implicit upon women writers. Her stunning poetry draws on women's explicit sensual and emotional experience intersecting with restricting social mandates— volatile circumstances that have persistently evoked in women an anxious vulnerability and defensive compensation. Sexton rejects a defensive literary posture (whether identified as subtle or simply faint-hearted), feeling that poetry "should be a shock to the senses. It should almost hurt" (NES 72). (Emily Dickinson, too, had recognized poetry when it caused her to feel "as if the top of my head were taken off.") Sexton takes for an epigraph Kafka's statement that "a book should serve as the axe for the frozen sea within us"3 because she sees poetry very literally as an axe, cutting right through . . .— and we need something to shock us, to make us become more aware. It doesn't need to happen in such a shocking way, perhaps, as in my poetry. (Marx, in Colburn 72) Her after-thought apology here is a small sop to the psychologically jolting similes and sexual images that mark off a literary territory that is taboo— "vulgar," Sexton's early critic Vernon Young claims (McClatchy 149)— and Helen 316 Vendler curiously describes Maxine Kumin's praise for Sexton's poetry using (for Vendler) a double pejorative: "vulgarly feminist.1,4 When a woman transforms suppressed desires into language (whether as confession or as wit), she risks disapproval based on a gendered standard for appropriate expression. Although Dorothy Parker had written a satiric "Song of Perfect Propriety" in 1928, implied considerations / of propriety still shadow critiques of women's poetry sixty years later— including judgments by other women. For example, Vendler (in 1988) responds to Transformations as work "written by a person who is not 'nice'" (305). A "slashing glee" rather than sympathy for human distress marks Sexton's transformed fairy tales, Vendler complains. At odds here might be a lack of shared perspective requisite for humor, but more than this is a wider gap in shared sympathies between critic and poet— and beyond that, between women. "What is occurring in such writing," Vendler continues, "is not so much the shattering of taboos as the expression of an extremity of nonparticipatory vision." And with what sort of vision might we wish to participate? Emily Dickinson, Vendler points out, did have the great gift of observation— not of the freaks of the world, making common cause with them, like Sexton (the witches, the old, the sick, the winos, the crippled), but rather of the cosmos, a universe strict, impersonal, beautiful, dangerous, and indifferent. (308) 317 But Anne Sexton's poetry is about daring (not "niceness"); about the universe as inclusive (not "strict"), close and raw (not "impersonal"), and grotesque (not "beautiful"); but— agreeing with Dickinson— conclusively dangerous and indifferent. Her outcast themes do involve "the freaks of the world, making common cause with them": the suffering, the angry, and the marginalized.5 Indeed, her vision requires the eye of the Black Humorist, as Bruce Jay Friedman advises: And it may be that if you are doing anything as high-minded as examining society, the very best way to go about it is by examining first its throwaways, the ones who can't or won't keep in step (in step with what?). (xi) With aesthetic brilliance in its very unevenness, Sexton's poetry examines those women "who can't or won't keep in step." She probes into the contradictions and absurdities, to the far reaches of female experience. Hers is humor according to Henri Bergson's classic description, which . . . partakes of the Scientific . . . the deeper we go down into an evil that actually is, in order to set down its details in the most cold-blooded indifference. . . A humorist is a moralist disguised as a scientist, something like an anatomist who practises dissection with the sole object of filling us with disgust ..." (143). As a moralist disguised as a scientist, Sexton might seem to some to undertake a "dissection with the sole object of filling [her critics] with disgust." Robert Lowell once calls her work "embarrassing"; James Dickey blusters that 318 "It would be hard to find a writer who dwells more insistently on the pathetic and disgusting aspects of bodily experience."6 She goes beyond candid expressions of a widespread contemporary "sexual revolution." Even more disturbing critical voices are raised to protest this self-dramatizing poetry of lust and adultery. "Dozens of poems," Diana Hume George observes, "may be failures in the feminist sense" ("How We Danced" 196). Shattering taboos against female braggadocio, at the same time such indulgent and even abject sexual narratives seem to deny the feminist potential for autonomous strength.7 Jane McCabe concludes, "Although many feminist poets have tried to claim her they have had to turn a deaf ear to some of her best poetry to do so" (McClatchy 217). Alicia Ostriker asks a key question: "How is the feminist reader, or any reader who is committed to changing his or her own life and the life of society, to respond to an art seemingly so complicit with female victimization?" (Colburn 17). To bring critical perspective and a balanced feminist reading to my answer to this question, I propose to read Anne Sexton's work in the light of another and more complex life-strategy that intersects and transforms her primary confessional mode: humor— and here Sexton's own variant, her Black Humor. By humor I mean a complex interior attitude, a perspective which is first revealed through expressions of wit. These two— confession and wit— claim common origin, in 319 Freudian theory. The compulsion to confess is an overwhelming need to reveal the hidden impulses of one's repressed desires— and to construct the story in a way to gain audience from a listener.8 Confession requires that reader, that priest. But wit, in more circuitous and clever way, can also serve the need to reveal the hidden impulses of one's repressed desires, according to Freud, by providing the disguise of language* The individual who is blocked, frustrated, rejected, or disappointed transforms her response through a process of unconscious wit-work. She gains the language to construct a joke, turn a pun, or narrate a comic sequence.9 She constructs her story in a way to gain audience from a listener. Wit requires that listener, that ear, that mind which comprehends— someone who "gets it." Although confession may gain expiation— a triumph for the confessor— confession may not create a shared bond; when wit generates laughter, however, two minds have shared— if only for a moment— a common response— and the speaker/joker gains the pleasure of being able to laugh along with the listener because he has allows himself this momentary break from repression. More significantly, this moment as textual wit provides the reader with an interfacing trope which both results from and also rewards the spirit of paradox. 320 But how can humor work to counter the dark forces of oppression, frustration, and despair that thematize this poet's earlier confessional poetry— her "serious" literary work? How can the joke or a comic revision of narrative gain anything more than an interlude against inevitable constraint or, regressively, risk critical misunderstanding that can draw charges of triviality? A major strategic payoff for a skillfully crafted, sequentially narrated joke or turn of narrative wit is that it provides a momentary transgression, opens the space for change. The important change comes in an attitudinal perspective that humor generates not only for the listener, but ultimately in self-affirmation for the narrator herself. Ultimately, the witty narrator finds that her joking interludes enable her to move away from the affective or emotionally entangling consequence of a problem; she can gain further distance and another perspective— an attitude. To clarify, "[cjonfessional poetry is a poetry of suffering," claims M.L. Rosenthal; and "the suffering is generally 'unbearable' because the poetry so often projects breakdown and paranoia" (Colburn 65). But Sexton, unlike other contemporary confessional poets, summons that life- enhancing strategy of humor, which Freud determines is one of "the great series of methods which the human mind has constructed in order to evade the compulsion to suffer" (21.166). From Sexton's early poetry in the service of 321 psychotherapy to her last poems of spiritual intensity, her work gains in courage; humor becomes her most enabling strategy. Anne Sexton has come to be regarded as the quintessential confessional poet of the time. She had begun her writing as a stay against madness, to create a text of her self in order to stabilize herself. Her subject became her own raw momentary experience and her metaphorical memory as she "invaded her own privacy" (NES 84); her craft transformed and shaped that realm of privacy into art. When Sexton checked into Westwood Lodge as a psychiatric patient shortly after the birth of her second child in 1956, she was suffering from two illnesses: the first was her clinical illness that troubled her all her life; the other was the illness of the time, identified by Betty Friedan as the "problem that has no name." The Feminine Mystique documented the frustration of the American housewife of mid- century, but Friedan's illuminating research would not reach publication until 1963; by that time, Anne Sexton was writing the poems that would compose the text of her Pulitzer winner, Live or Die. Her development as a confessional poet was male- mentored. When her psychiatrist recommended writing poetry as therapeutic expression, she found W.D. Snodgrass's poem "Heart's Needle" a stirring model of personal revelation;10 she studied first in an adult school forum with John Holmes 322 and then joined a class at Boston University with Robert Lowell. In an era of national self-examination (during the tensions of the Cold War) and personal psychic exploration (under the spell of the Freudian family romance), the male "confessional poets" were transforming their emotional landscape into poetry,11 although critics now suspect that her influence on Lowell's work may have been greater than anyone had guessed; she had submitted to him the drafts of To Bedlam and Part Way Back while he was writing Life Studies.12 Aside from its female persona, her work demonstrated consistent differences from Lowell's themes and techniques. True, Lowell, like Sexton, was emotionally gripped ("My mind's not right") by the legacy of cultural leadership ("Health to the new people, / health to their flag, to their old / restored house on the hill!") and the family romance ("Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother's bed.")13 Moreover, Lowell's work, like Sexton's, is shaped by a persona who spins narcissism into metaphor, but his view is somber. In a largely disaffected tone, he casts the weight of national angst onto private New England experience. Changing awareness within the text comes in ironic melancholy more than through the darting illumination of humor, so that when, in Life Studies. Lowell situates his depression within both his own personal and the national experience, from the mental hospital he asks, "What use is my sense of humor?" ("Waking in the Blue" 81). 323 What use? Sexton's humor even in the first poem offers a saving perspective, the courage to resist suffering. According to Freud, humor is the first line of defense against the inevitable trauma of the human condition: [Humor's] fending off the possibility of suffering places it among the great series of methods which the human mind has constructed in order to evade the compulsion to suffer— a series which begins with neurosis and culminates in madness and which includes intoxication, self-absorption and ecstasy. (21.163) Both Sexton and Lowell look through the distorted lens of madness as they each consider the responsibilities of family privilege and a response to patriarchal influence, but in Sexton's work it is often only a small step from irrepressible revelation to irrepressible laughter. For Sexton, both humor and confession characterize tone and substance of even the early work: like bees caught in the wrong hive we are the circle of the crazy ladies who sit in the lounge of the mental house and smile at the smiling woman who passes us each a bell. ("Ringing the Bells," Complete Poems 28)14 Sexton had been marginalized— placed out of any larger social policy-making— first because of her aborted education and early marriage, and then due to the breakdown which further set her into a dysfunctional alienation ending in the institutionalized world of "Bedlam." There she measures her own inner chaos against predictable routine— and she addresses her psychiatrist Martin Orne, who plies a course 324 between his world and hers: "You, Doctor Martin, walk from breakfast to madness" (CP 3). He is an adaptation of parent/superego, her guide when "Still, I search in these woods and find nothing worse / than myself, caught between the grapes and the thorns"; the title of her second poem supplicates "Kind Sir: These Woods" (CP 4). However, another stronger and internalized voice of the super-ego works in the psychic woods of Anne Sexton's mind: the enabling control of humor. Even her very early work demonstrates the "humorous attitude" which Freud identifies as a parental function of the superego. Humor in this context facilitates transcendence beyond grim reality ("myself, caught between the grapes and the thorns" ["These Woods," CP 5); humor refuses to stay with the control of wisdom and understanding. "Humor is not resigned; it is rebellious," Freud writes (21.163). It rejects the grim claims of reality which includes, for the poet, imprisonment: "We stand in broken / lines and wait while they unlock / the door and count us at the frozen gates / of dinner" ["You, Doctor Martin," CP 3]). Humor refuses the single perspective, going beyond this to a counter appraisal— one that will yield pleasure: It signifies not only the triumph of the ego but also of the pleasure principle, which is able here to assert itself against the unkindness of the real circumstances" (21.163). 325 Thus even in this first volume the sexton-persona is able to achieve something of a "triumph of the ego" when she can metaphorically step out of the broken lines that wait at "the frozen gates of dinner" and become instead "the queen of this summer hotel / or the laughing bee on a stalk / of death." Transformed in her joking imagination, she becomes a regal presence at a luxury resort— reinstating her possibilities for choice— or the queen bee who can laugh at death even as she pauses to gather honey. Here is only a beginning— the joke. The goal is more complex: an attitudinal achievement, actualized, in part, through articulating the unconscious project of wit-work: The jest made by humor is not the essential thing. It has only the value of a preliminary. The main thing is the intention which humor carries out, whether it is acting in relation to the self or other people. (Freud 21.166; emphasis added) The intention which humor carries out, Freud tells us, is the parental agency of the super-ego, whose voice speaks to the frightened ego both consolingly and creatively, proposing an alternative response to hostility and despair— as "the queen of this summer hotel." The humorous attitude understands the world as an opportunity to transform danger into narrative, displacing and re-wording the terror into the pleasure of a joke that reveals both reality and surprise. The intention behind this language gains the edge: "It means: 'LookI here is the world, which seems so 326 dangerous! It is nothing but a game for children— just worth making a jest about!'" (21.166). In the frail world of madness, the childlike quality of the patients is clear ("What large children we are / here"), but their "smock of smiles" represents the disguise of compliance that they wear, not the complex intellectual integration of paradox. Comically imaging herself as both the laughing bee and a large child, the poet is able to assert herself "against the unkindness of the real circumstances." Sexton, writing herself as a resort queen or a chuckling bee, resists the compulsion to suffer. During 1957 she composed sixty poems which she presented to Dr. Martin Orne— the major part of her first book, when she was "part way back" from Bedlam. * * * Humor aggressively tinges even her early ingenuous poetry of sexuality. In the fleshy images of "Woman With Girdle," a standard of beauty created by encasing the female shape in a rubber girdle-hold is both mocked and celebrated: Your midriff sags toward your knees; your breasts lie down in air, their nipples as uninvolved as warm starfish. (CP 71) The mirror reports with assertive truth in place of air- brushed illusion? here is the female upper body in a state of comic relaxation. While the title is a parodic suggestion of a rosy Degas bather, the starfish nipples bring to mind a water nymph. Indeed, the poem is addressed 327 to the speaker's mirror image, defamiliarized as a comic Birth of Venus: "You stand in your elastic case, / still not giving up the new-born / and the old-born style." Sexton's Venus resists traditional pastel Botticelli innocence and ethereal loveliness, however, by breaking into a bawdy strip: Moving, you roll down the garment, down that pink snapper and hoarder, as your belly, soft as pudding, slops into the empty space; Here the fleshly body of a real woman arrives not over the waves On a pink shell, but in the wake of the juggernaut- girdle that retreats in slow motion like a rolling pin, over crisp hairs, that amazing field that hides your genius from your patron; over thighs, thick as young pigs, . . . These mixed images of a kitchen implement, pubic hair, Medici patrons, and piglets probably spring from a round of drinking and laughing with colleagues from John Holmes's workshop, a time when Sexton recalls that I'll never forget how we laughed. He [Ted Weiss] just got us all into women's girdles. I mean, in its own way it is a bit vulgar, and yet to me it isn't really vulgar at all. It's beauty, it's the girdle that's corrupting her. It was funny. But . . . John found me evil. (NES 164) "Evil" was the perceived accusation for poetry that seemed to John Holmes to be "too personal" (NES 164). Yet, later when "Woman with Girdle" was set to music to accompany readings, it was given what Diane Middlebrook calls "a slow, 328 sensuous treatment, . . . revealing the immanence of a goddess archetype in the imagery" (305) in lines such as: Now you rise, a city from the sea, born long before Alexandria was, straightway from God you have come into your redeeming skin. Such expression was encouraged at the time not only by "confessional poets" and by therapists, but by feminist theorists who found vitality in the pulse of women's writing out of their physical experience. In fact, the early direction of feminist literary theory posits that the "authority of experience" makes a claim for truth that decenters the "universal" truth which male canonical texts have presented. Margaret Homans notes in 1980, "The prevailing feminist opinion is that poetry by women must report on the poet's experience as a woman, and that it must be true. . . [assuming that] telling the truth without any sort of mask is both possible and desirable" (216). Confession becomes art through the transformation of language because, as Homans herself recognizes, "language is inherently fictive and creates masks [which is] the power that poetry genuinely offers." (216) Masked with language, however, women's truth can never be unmediated self- expression; moreover, to announce a confession from behind the veil of madness is to create a persona twice protected. The poet commandeers the reader's desire to know— to share 329 the grisly along with the sublime— and the poem seduces the reader's empathy through the poet's urgency. From the beginning, however, her work defies limits and runs to excess. As the instruction to express becomes the compulsion to confess, Sexton reveals and unsparingly enhances the events of her childhood, marriage, and motherhood.15 Her writing reminds us of Helene Cixous' description of the "feminine text" as an outpouring , , . which can appear in primitive or elementary texts as a fantasy of blood, of menstrual flow, etc., but which I prefer to see as vomiting, as "throwing up," "disgorging." (54) Bold images taunt the censors. Although the poet here is protected by the very madness that had provoked Dr. Martin Orne to encourage her to write, even in her first collection (To Bedlam and Part Way Back1 ) she defies the interdiction of her teacher John Holmes when he calls for limits and taste. She writes "For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further" (CP 34-35). Here she claims to have begun writing by making only a modest personal confession: I tapped my own head; it was glass, an inverted bowl. It is a small thing to rage in your own bowl. The poetic locus of the "bowl" connects the mental whirl of anger with a private imagery of toilet and kitchen. Such human needs suggest common experience, so her own perception expands to include other spaces: 330 At first it was private. Then it was more than myself; it was you, or your house or your kitchen. In the end, the "small thing" of confession edges into a threat to the equilibrium of the doctor (and implicitly of the reader, too), even though "there ought to be something special / for someone / in this kind of hope". . . although your fear is anyone's fear, like an invisible veil between us all . . . and sometimes in private, my kitchen, your kitchen, ray face, your face. One's own experience is separated from that of others only by an invisible veil; private space is illusory. Her inquiry steps up close, and ends in "my face, your face." The power of art threatens to tear the fragile veil that privatizes experience and the rebellious poem positions the problem of confrontation and control. But while a certifiably mad poet could be granted leave to rave in such images, but a poet speaking with keen defiance, who would pull together the fragments and bind them into her own shocking truths, might be dangerous. She could turn into what Helen Vendler calls "not a nice person." In the slim distance which separates the disgorging confessor-persona from the shrewd self-selecting autobiographer, her early psychotherapy created that space in which she is free to image her hostility (with its scatological expression and context) and sexuality (with its specificity and aggression); the texts might be regarded as 331 therapy as much as literature. In an expression edged with disgust, for example, she can speak to her father ("I cried on your fat shoulder") as "my drunkard, my navigator, / my first lost keeper" ("All My Pretty Ones," CP 51). The distance created by humor will also accord that space to image her hostility. From behind the veil of confession shadowed by madness, Sexton had dared to continue "to enquire further" beyond conventions of woman' allowed limits. "Sometimes I felt like a reporter researching himself," she said about these early poems (NES 87). Indeed, in her manifesto of confessional poetry ("With Mercy For the Greedy") she conflates two images: the reporter-researcher and the comic sinner-cleric who busily catalogues materials for later confessions/poems. Here the poet responds to a friend's gift of a crucifix, and rejects her counsel to learn to know Christ: My friend, my friend, I was born doing reference work in sin, and born confessing it. This is what poems are: with mercy for the greedy they are the tongue's wrangle, the world's pottage, the rat's star. (CP 62-63) With a touch of wry humor, she images herself as a furtive scholar with indexes of blame, seeking absolution not in the church's confessional, but in confessional poetry. Poetry grants mercy to those who greedily want all the world's 332 language— its figures, words, associations. Following the biblical narrative of Jacob who sold his birthright for a mess of pottage to satisfy his greedy hunger, the poet may have given away her rightful religious absolution, but she has gained the beautiful secular scramble of words. A palindrome such as "rat's star" substantially "wrangles" the tongue as an example of how "the world's pottage" of language satisfies hunger. Such a word-eating poet suggests Sexton's later image of the witch who craves the wrong food in Transformations's Hansel and Gretel story, a figure who holds an ambiguous power "like something religious." And what is this sin that wrangles with poetry, mandates a confession, and converts into comic expression? Simply being a woman. Sin so intrinsic that one is "born confessing it," for Sexton, is the experience of female sexual development— the potential catalyst for provoking inevitable male lust. Her obsession with the threat implied in female sexual development is the theme of the unpublished play which she put through three extensive revisions over eight years. Finally produced as Mercy Street in 1969, the play centers on Daisy, a young woman who suffers unreasoning guilt over her developing sexuality, and therefore blames herself for her father's incestuous overtures. She first petitions her psychiatrist, and then her priest, wishing to confess and receive expiation for her "crime"; finally, however, the dramatic tone is meliorated by Black Humor, as 333 Daisy seeks Christ in a sideshow. Scripting the carnival as a metaphor for transgressive experience foreshadows Sexton/s rhetorical strategy of bawdy humor in Transformations. Sexton had intended to use Black Humor to define and yet deflect the impact of the forbidden psychodrama of incest: in an earlier draft of the play, titled Tell Me Your Answer True. she had written a set of comic off-stage voices to be barked through a loudspeaker, bringing a sardonic dimension to the personal intensity of the young girl's story. This earlier plot, according to Sexton, was only slightly different from Mercy Street: A girl who has committed suicide finds herself in death as a character in a circus sideshow looking for Christ. She is hounded by morality figures with names like Backbiter, Barker, Flesh, and Charity, (gtd. in Middlebrook 218) When the play reached production in 1969, these figures were intended to become the "Witnesses," an offstage carnival circus that accompanies Daisy's flashbacks of incest (the "remembrance scene"). Representing her own irrepressible interior voices, the Witnesses chant in witty/ raunchy doggerel. Whenever Daisy recalls her father's incestuous overtures, an offstage circus of three Barkers and four Witnesses call out in hawking rhymes: Barker Two: Hark ye! Gather round, pull up your chair, to see the universe in its underwear. Hark ye! Give me your sentiments please. Don't push for places like rats on cheese. 334 [. . .] Pregnant nuns and crooked financiers, the hairy, the horny, the gouty in this arena, arrive for your eyes without subpoena. Forget about shawls and chains and chow, we have our victim ready now. Backbiter: My name is Backbiter. I ride on a horse. This is my hobby— a lobby of sorts. Being the devil, I take none by force. With death on his tongue And a dart in his heart Everyman here is a fool and a fart. Charity: My name is Charity and I live with my daughter. Her name is mercy but she's gone insane. We live without beef, we live without water. Life is our portion, but most of it's pain. (qtd. in Middlebrook 219-220) This rhyming, brassy, arm-wrenching black humor offers the power of subversive laughter; Sexton calls this laughter "doubling off" (Middlebrook 220)— which I read as a sort of looping, a response that forces a brutal awareness of the extremes of reactions. It probably was this baffling incongruity which prompted the director of Mercy Street to decide (against Sexton's wishes) to cut the Witnesses from his production because, he claimed, they were "difficult to integrate into the play due to the new concept of the Mass" (Middlebrook 327). In other words, they complicated the confessional tragedy. But without the sardonic rowdiness of the Witnesses, the resulting straightforward presentation seemed embarrassingly revealing to the critics, who reviewed it under titles such as "Oh, I was Very Sick," and "A Woman 335 Upon the Altar." But when, with disturbing awareness, Walter Kerr carps that the play seems "impotent to complete itself,"16 we can understand that this is overtly accurate: the play cannot resolve the tragic consequences of incest. Kerr's language of impotence, however, points to the mortal wound resulting from the director's Procrustean editing of the crucial backstage comic voices of the Witnesses. Looping, "doubling off" in laughter, on the other hand, can lead to resolution, through breaking the patriarchal power to victimize— although Sexton will not fully realize this potential, I believe, until her final published poem. In Mercy Street. the complicated dark theme of sexual guilt can not result in the acquittal that it attempted for Sexton's character or for the playwright herself. Later, when Sexton concludes Transformations with the same patriarchal sexual menace in "Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty)," she recognizes that [this] difficult poem for me . . . seems now to deal with one of the themes of Mercy Street. As many times as I saw that play, I never worked it out. I guess therapy is the place for it, not the stage. (Letters 321) Both the comic intention and the actual production of Mercy Street influence much of her later work. The anguish of pubertal sexuality which she perceives as stirring paternal lust and which therefore requires forgiveness had been the driving theme of three re-writes of this play over eight years. The quest for expiation of such guilt informs the 336 lifework of Anne Sexton, manifesting itself in an emotional and discursive voyage toward her personal God, a voyage whose anguish is mediated through poetry— and the Black Humor that implements sardonic confrontation and control. * * * Stripping the mask from the truth of socialization that oppresses women as surely as the girdle's mold requires a darker view. Anne Sexton is the first American woman to write as a Black Humorist. She tiptoed into this unchallenged position by turning the reality of women's social and sexual behavior into joke-similes; she continued on "to sail into darker waters somewhere out beyond satire," Bruce Jay Friedman's metaphor for Black Humor which aptly characterizes Sexton's final work The Awful Rowing Toward God (x). "Black Humor has probably always been around," Friedman maintains, "always will be around, under some name or other, as long as there are disguises to be peeled back, as long as there are thoughts no one else cares to think" (xi). She peels the social disguises like the metaphorical "glue-skin" in her last poem, and also the verbal disguises, to finally reveal the center of creativity and humor which Arthur Koestler calls "a double-minded, transitory state of unstable equilibrium where the balance of both emotion and thought is disturbed."17 More effective than confession, Black Humor enables Sexton to move toward a bold comic existential perspective in her last poems. 337 Right here I want to clarify Sexton's strategy of Black Humor by first contextualizing it as a response to the specific contemporary Zeitgeist. During the summer of 1969 and into 1970 (just as Sexton began to transform Grimms' tales), the style of expression that reflected the mood of % the country had become Black Humor— according to Max Schulz, "a predominantly American phenomenon of the sixties, whose anxieties proceeding from pluralism, conformity, and an irresolute value system give it both its method and its subject” (15). Irony had blurred to absurdity in the Zeitgeist of disturbing times as structure in every form (and especially national authority) was called into question. For example, while Americans felt a sense of limitless national potential after their country's astronaut walked on the moon, only days earlier they had seen the private limitations of their Massachusetts senator at Chappaquidick. It was the season of Woodstock and the counter-culture. In November the largest anti-war rally in U.S. history was held in Washington, D.C., while Viet Nam war generated violence at home and abroad: in December, the governmeht announced that Lieutenant Calley had massacred Vietnamese civilians, and the following May four Kent State University student protesters were killed by National Guardsmen. Domestic life, too, was unmasked as women across the country organized local CR (Consciousness Raising) Groups. There, shared experiences exposed and documented 338 for the first time the widespread reality of frustrated lives and domestic violence.1® Such unsettling social conflict revealed the hypocrisy of participation by both women and men in behaviors that were theoretically deplored; conformity and protest co existed in fractious vexation. Max Schulz describes Black Humor writers (male, by default) who "share a viewpoint and an aesthetics for pacing off the boundaries of a nuclear- technological world intrinsically without confinement" (5). In so doing, however, "Black Humor condemns man to a dying world, . . . never envisions the possibilities of human escape from an aberrant environment to the forest milieu" (Schulz 8). And although reaching neither individual release nor social reconciliation, "Black Humor seeks rather a comic perspective on both tragic fact and moralistic certitude" (Schulz 13). Simply put, Black Humor is attitude, not action. As a woman, Sexton adapts Black Humor to "pace off the boundaries" of a world purported to stand intrinsically without confinement, but the limitless universe perceived by male writers is one sharply restricted for women; to return to Schulz's points, throughout Transformations and significantly in its closing poem— "Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty)"— Black Humor "never envisions the possibilities of human escape from an aberrant environment to the forest milieu"; Sleeping Beauty is caught. Although the reader 339 might have hoped for her individual release (and a catharsis for the reader) or a social reconciliation of sinister misunderstandings, Black Humor may only reach for but does not allow either individual release or social reconciliation.19 So Sexton, as a woman, writes Black Humor that "seeks rather a comic perspective on both tragic fact and moralistic certitude," and she generates comedy that mocks and decenters its own moralistic bent, comedy which confronts patriarchal order, but at the same time concedes the threatened viability of feminist achievement. Women's multiple, necessarily adaptive, yet cross^-limiting life choices imply bewildering dilemmas, and yet she presents no consensus prescriptions that smack of "moralistic certitude."20 substituting one set of values for another like a shell game is not the transformation Sexton effects in her fairy tales. Sexton engages Black Humor, nevertheless, to serve what Rachel Blau DuPlessis calls a "female aesthetic," which turns out to be a specialized name for any practices . . . which wish to criticize, to differentiate from, to overturn the dominant forms of knowing and understanding with which they are saturated. (285) And any feminist project of critiguing the "dominant forms of understanding" in 1969-70 is complicated by ambiguous attitudes toward women in the popular press. One barometer of conflicting attitudes is the advertising and essays appearing in Mademoiselle magazine, a purveyor of taste for 340 young college-bound women.21 While in 1970 the magazine, on one hand, is aware of the serious reconsideration of women's values, still it does not discard coy romantic appeal. An essay by established critic Elizabeth Hardwick shares pages with an advertisement for "100% human hair stretch wigs”; an advertisement for Hearts and Flowers douche declares that "What the new sexual freedom needs is a little old-fashioned romance" (November 1970: 97). Graphic photographs of the beehive hairdo compete with instructions in the painstaking artifice to achieve the "natural look." Toward feminist projects, the magazine's tone alternates between promoting and patronizing: although the feminist study Sisterhood is Powerful is on Mademoiselle's Gift Book List, here the editor is playfully mocked as "Libmother Robin Morgan." In an advertisement in the same issue a posturing woman identified as a "suffragette" is trivialized through exaggeration as she sips tea with her little finger raised, while the product advocate interprets this gesture: "Its apartness is saying, 'Notice me for my independence, my wit, my sexuality'" (November 1970: 210). On the contrary, contributor Hortense Calisher notices that contemporary women writers were avoiding the subject of their own "basic female experience, from puberty on through childbed." She concludes that . . . in an era when the male writer is exploring and exhausting his basic dowry, the role of his sexuality, it is curious how 341 comparatively little American women writers let theirs intrude. (Feb 1970: 271) Such ambivalence marks a vacillation in attitudes as women struggled with the strongest prison: what Nina Auerbach refers to as "when we believe we are what people tell us we are" (ix). By contrast, humor enables such other-defined prisoners to free up perspective. From fairy tales to Genesis, no buttress to traditional gender arrangements— however sacred-— escaped subversive revision in 1971; the 13 August cover of Life magazine features a photo collage of Eve in a fig-leaf with a young woman in jeans holding a protest sign: "Eve was framed" (Figure 3). Such contemporary iconoclasm marks Sexton's revision of fairy tales for adults, prompting Stanley Kunitz to lament: "The brothers Grimm are so much a part of me that I really didn't want to see their tales recapitulated, modernized, diluted" I Letters 3 35).1,22 Why would a woman take on these myths? According to DuPlessis, . . . when the exploration of self-in-world turns up a world that devalues the female self . . . she cannot just 'let it be,' but must transform values, rewrite culture, subvert structures. (285) Sexton writes transformational parodies to gain distance from the legends of contented female victimization, thereby exerting control over her story. Although critics note that humor is a feature of the original tales, they overlook the context: the hero/con-man tricks or bumbles his way into achievement as often as he earns it, but the rewards for 342 Figure 3. ”Eve was framed.” Cover of Life magazine 13 August 1971. 343 these action-adventures belong to males as well. In Grimms' tales female protagonists, on the contrary, are seldom either humorous or active, but instead vulnerable or passive: Goldilocks runs away, and Red Riding Hood is rescued by an avuncular hunter; Rapunzel waits, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty snooze. Bruno Bettleheim, who interprets fairy tales as representing "in imaginative form what the process of healthy human development consists of" and making "such development attractive for the child to engage in" (12), finds that the tales of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty "encourage the child not to be afraid of the dangers of passivity" (226); only Grimms' girl-children, however, figure in that lesson. Sexton's humor, in its darkest tone, points out the sinister outcome of a woman's passivity— and the joy of female aggression, cunning, and risk. This perception and transformation of Grimms' double- standard messages demonstrate Arthur Koestler's theory comic perception as a foundation of creativity. He explains humor (and the overflow of laughter) as the shock resulting from recognition of a double matrix of perception: "through language, two apparently incompatible ideas are linked, and a new sharp light provides sudden illumination." He refers to this concept of recognizing humor as "bisociation.1,23 But such a double-layered perspective, Koestler points out, can as easily yield three distinctly alternative 344 perspectives: a tragic view of life, a cognitive breakthrough toward understanding, or a humorous attitude. Sexton implements such a "new sharp light" of double perspective to re-align tragic consequence, to re-create meaning, and (in Koestler's eclectic mode of creativity) to sardonically redirect female complicity with the mechanical models of myth and fairy tales, toward recognition of impending loss and compromise. Through subversive caricature, women's expression may change women's experience— when there are no more, in Dorothy Parker's words, "Songs of Perfect Propriety." Sexton, petitioning Kurt Vonnegut to write the introduction to Transformations. gingerly acknowledges the humor in it: Without quite meaning to I have joined the black humorists. I don't know if you know my other work, but humor was never a very prominent feature . . .terror, deformity, madness and torture were my bag. But this little universe of Grimm is not that far away. (Letters 3 31) While Sexton only demurely suggests that she might be an accidental Black Humorist, Bruce Jay Friedman points out that a new "chord of absurdity has been struck in the land, that there is a new mutative style of behavior afoot, one that can only be dealt with by a new, one-foot-in the-asylum style of fiction" (ix). In Sexton's "little universe of Grimm" she sets her Bedlamesque reflections into a poetry of Black Humor: "I think they end up being as wholly personal 345 as my most intimate poems, in a different language, a different rhythm, but coming strangely, for all their story sound, from as deep a place” rLetters 331] emphasis added). In this "different rhythm,” she switches from the interior angst of autobiographical psychodrama to the seventeen tales, each prefaced in a parody of the original etymological introduction by Jacob Grimm. In what Sexton calls her "different language," the tales themselves become a wild collage of fantastic metaphors, contemporary slang, scatological boldness, improbable similes, paradoxes, and oxymorons. That "deep place" which generates this dark sort of humor Freud identifies as the unconscious. There, the process of wit-work, like dream-work, involves the repression of aggressive or obscene tendencies; the wish to attack or the wish to openly express sexuality is temporarily repressed, pushed down into the unconscious where it is disguised by the wit-work. Using word-play in what Freud calls "fore-pleasure," and jesting to set a comic mood, the unconscious transforms the forbidden "tendency." Such a tendency— whether hostility, or sexual taboo— in its transformation becomes a joke. In this way the disguised expression produces relief through, as Freud puts it, "the economy of psychic expenditure." No longer must the joker need to use psychic energy to suppress the impulse, and this energy is released in the pleasure of expression. The person to whom the joke is told responds by releasing the 346 energy required to suppress that aroused tendency: she laughs, and without guilt. Teller and listener, then, are bonded in a covert understanding of shared pleasure, and the teller, moreover, has avoided criticism which may be been levied against a straightforward expression of an explosive issue. The teller was, after all, "just kidding." Because the laughter would not have been as forthcoming in the face of open hostility or obscenity, the success of the joke, therefore, Freud claims, depends on the success of the disguise, and not on the social acceptability of the concealed "tendency" or repression (Jokes 103-106). We know that earlier Sexton had disguised the expression of suppressed tendencies with the veil of madness; now when she moves away from the personal heat of Bedlam toward translating folktale instruction into ribald Black Humor, she converts painful personal experience (from "as deep a place") into comic narratives. Here topics of sexual indulgence, personal treachery, voyeurism, matricide, child abuse, incest and molestation all serve to address the central themes developed throughout all of her work: open expression of women's sexual experience apart from victimization; mother-daughter identity/conflict; woman's struggle for autonomy; and finally the confrontation with patriarchy.24 By using Black Humor as her vehicle to transform the social programing and female vulnerability inherent in the happily-ever-after fairy tales into a 347 derisive guide to a predatory world, her re-vision turns out to be what Stanley Kunitz calls "a wild, astonishing, blood curdling book" (Letters 335) . * * * Crucial to humor's affect is the persona of the humorist. Sexton's narrative voice in Transformations expresses what I consider to be the three qualities of women's humor: emotional detachment, control through intelligence, and a gendered voice. Confrontation (here using humor) can facilitate women's independence from debilitating emotional enthrallment; intelligent inquiry can yield realistic (yes, grim) understanding of women's experience within cultural expectations; but the gendered voice of humor complicates issues of women's autonomy. Sexual expression stands as a critical factor in creating a woman's autonomy and yet (as Transformations will show) ironically endangers that autonomy. Sexton's narrative voice in Transformations is crucial. Taking the structure of Grimms' tales of initiatory experience, she adopts the persona of "a middle-aged witch” to mentor her revised quest-narratives. Bettelheim, too, promotes confidential dialogue as the ideal parental locus: The telling of the [fairy] story to a child, to be most effective, has to be an interpersonal event, shaped by those who participate in it." (151) 348 In the prologue poem "The Gold Key," Sexton sets up the classic Freudian joke-paradigm: the reader becomes the (third party) listener to the joke-text (here the transformed fairy-tale) while the on-stage joker-narrator identifies herself as a double appositive: The speaker in this case is a middle-aged witch, me— tangled on my two great arms, my face in a book and my mouth wide, ready to tell you a story or two. (CP 223) The two voices ("a middle-aged witch, me") strike a duet: the "middle-aged witch" introduces each tale with the caustic didacticism of a theatrical aside, then narrates the tale as "Dame Sexton," in a cackling parody of Grimm; "me," the appositive narrator, retains the subtextual voice of Sexton herself, here re-casting her own confessional experience. This provides the double matrix essential to the distanced perspective of humor. The middle-aged witch of Transformations has the control available to a joker; her narrative voice embodies what I believe to be the qualities of women's humor: detachment, intelligence, and sexual presence. We need to look more closely at each of these characteristics. First, for humor to be successful the writer must assume a cool detachment, because as Henri Bergson puts it, "laughter has no greater foe than emotion" (63). The comic perspective must abandon nostalgia, romance, even earnest 349 affection and pity. Bergson instructs his reader that to understand the depression caused by a clutter of emotions, give your sympathy in its widest expansion: as though at the touch of a fairy wand you will see the flimsiest of objects assume importance, and a gloomy hue spread over everything. To dispel the gloom and adopt a comic view, one must suspend emotional involvement through a rational act of will; therefore, Bergson concludes, "the comic demands something like a momentary anesthesia of the heart. Its appeal is to intelligence pure and simple" (63). This requisite intelligence is the second quality of the humor that women create. Writing as a Black Humorist, according to Bruce Jay Friedman, means that after "throwing you some laughs to get you to lower your guard," the writer decides to follow every labyrinthian [sic] corridor to its source to ask the final questions, turn over the last rock, to take a preposterous world by the throat and say okay, be preposterous, but also make damned sure you explain yourself. (xi [emphasis added]) Friedman's no-nonsense quest for explanations serves as corollary to Sexton's "Gold Key"; when Dame Sexton transforms the fairy tale ("Do you remember when you / were read to as a child?") into a darkly comic meditation on the female development, this journey, too, calls for revised cognitive strategy. Sexton dedicates her transformations of fairy tales to her daughter "Linda, who reads Hesse and 350 drinks clam chowder," but then in the prefatory poem "The Gold Key" she recognizes that "It is not enough to read Hesse / and drink clam chowder / we must have the answers." In this plural pronominal quest, then, "we" are compelled to leave the myths of girlhood (reading Hesse/Grimm) and achieve an understanding (the answers) regarding what it means to become a woman. The third component of women's humor— sexual presence— is bound up with the other two, and the witch's humor must not be presumed absent of sexuality. Alicia Ostriker, for example, notes that the witch-narrator "emits an air of exhilarating mental and emotional liberty, precisely because she is distanced from the material she so penetratingly understands" (Stealing 234), but attributes that liberating distance to a sexual neutrality. She can be objective because "Hers is an asexual role vis-a-vis her gendered characters."25 While I agree that these characters are bound by fixed and damaging social patterns whereas "Dame Sexton" the witch enjoys mobility and freedom, I propose that this freedom results not from an asexual persona but from the distancing perspective of humor. Moreover, it is because of her humorous attitude and joking wit that she can afford to be mobile, unbound, and also a woman. Sexton demonstrates that humor liberates a woman from vulnerability and yet allows her to express herself in a sexed voice. 351 Dame Sexton's gold key to knowledge, too, is as sexual as Eve's apple: Its secrets whimper like a dog in heat. It opens this book of odd tales which transforms the Brothers Grimm A central question surfacing here echoes the earlier theme from Mercy street: How can the developing young woman experience her autonomous female vitality without allowing herself to become a fairy tale sexual prize, vulnerable to emotional victimization, or finally a hostage to marriage? "I was alone / I waited like a target," Sexton had written in her poem celebrating Linda's womanhood, "Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman." She had proposed, in its concluding lines, one answer to the vulnerability of sexual development. Recognizing the girl's excitement in her own potential sexual energy, she counsels her to both enhance and arm this vitality with the distance of laughter: Darling, stand still at your door, sure of yourself, a white stone, a good stone— as exceptional as laughter you will strike fire, that new thing! (CP 148) Her maternal Polonius-persona directs her daughter to pause at the threshold of puberty and take stock of her independence, establishing her clear boundaries. As she leaves the cool mineral quality of virginity (a white stone, a good stone), she can temporary suspend emotion— and adopt 352 a Bergsonian "momentary anesthesia of the heart." And here is the critical line of advice: only by engaging the power of laughter can she become an exception to the lurking entrapment of emotional thralldom ("as exceptional as laughter"). Instead she will "strike fire" and create the bright "new thing" of her unique sexuality. When she laughs, she no longer will be a stone, but neither will she be enthralled, and so she can escape vulnerability and burn toward the climax of that final exclamation point. Daughter Linda may be the implied reader of Sexton's Transformations. but the implied readership that its narrator— the middle-aged witch— instructs and constructs is a wider audience, one that corresponds to those Mercy street theatregoers who missed hearing Black Humor confronting the predatory world. When Sexton begins her fairy tale revisions, she feels that splitting of the humorous attitude, that claims that "It's something quite strange and different, and I'm having an awfully good time" (Letters 319).26 In this mode of detachment, she moves out of the setting of Love Poems— out of straightforwardly confessional erotica and the discourse of emotional thralldom. Dame Sexton is confessor-turned-witch. Sexton's earliest figure of the witch had signified an idiosyncratic (even mad) power to supersede standard social prescriptions and conjure the "black arts" of sex and writing. Bound to an allegiance to family members while she 353 tested the limits, the witch is constructed as a confessional persona in the context of transgression. She had betrayed an traditional feminine image when "I have gone out, a possessed witch, / haunting the black air, braver at night," unseemly conduct, because "A woman like that is not a woman, quite. / I have been her kind" (CB 15); later, a more heinous transgression involves "the black art" of writing, thereby breaking the implicit silence protecting many aspects of women's experience when "A woman who writes feels too much, / those trances and portents I" The witch/writer is both outside and within female experience because "A writer is essentially a spy" (CB 88). When Sexton's evolving witch-persona accelerated her transgressive behavior by adopting the status of mother, even her unpredictable and adulterous behavior had been benevolently accepted by her loving family: Even with the witches' gymnastics they trust my incalculable city, my corruptible bed. Their muted response (ambivalent denial) transforms her into a more gentle image: 0 dearest three, 1 make a soft reply. The witch comes on and you paint her pink. ("Live," CB 169) The witch-narrator of Transformations marks a compromise between this happy prodigal-mom and the misanthropic figure of the later poem "The Witch's Life," a booming power who 354 . . . would open the window and yell: Get out of my life! She had hair like kelp and a voice like a boulder. I think of her sometimes now and wonder if I am becoming her. My shoes turn up like a jester's. Along with her power and isolation (Sexton emphasizes), this witch retains the burning energy of her sexuality into later life, after climbing the primordial climb, a dream within a dream, then sitting here holding a basket of fire. (CB 422-23) With her lap of fire. Transformations' Dame Sexton the witch-artist is situated in this narrative of female sexuality. Her voice is newly evolved from the earlier throaty surrenders and laments of the lover-princess of Love Poems: her message a transformation of that of the lovely barefoot princess who celebrated her physical self: Loving me with my shoes off means loving my long brown legs, sweet dears, as good as spoons. ("Barefoot," CB 199) Such loveliness then had been placed at the service of her lover's pleasure: And at first I rubbed your feet dry with a towel because I was your slave and then you called me princess. Princess! ("Us," CB 203) Serious erotic desire in "The Touch," "The Breast," or "Eighteen days without you" of Love Poems fades into sly 355 mirth when the energy slides to the joking asides delivered by "the middle-aged witch" of Transformations who follows Bergson's formula: Now step aside, look upon life as a disinterested spectator: many a drama will turn into a comedy. It is enough for us to stop our ears to the sound of music in a room, where dancing is going on, for the dancers at once to appear ridiculous. (63) The poet/witch stops the music of the emotions of Love Poems f and distances herself from the vulnerability of an erstwhile princess-persona. Even in the precedent of Love Poems, however, we can find this vital transition from the voice of an enthralled princess to that of a cool-headed writer who transforms erotic experience into the literary opportunity for humorous verbal fore-pleasure. Cues like "The trouble is / that I'd let my gestures freeze" ("The Touch," CB 173) signal her remove from sentimental context, so that the Bergsonian dancer/princess of "That Day" (CB 180), for example, is able to reassess on the morning after. The music of her emotion has stopped. Without the sound of music, "the dancers at once . . . appear ridiculous," and more so as she casts them first into the declarative monosyllables of nursery rhyme: This is the desk I sit at and this is the desk where I love you too much and this is the typewriter that sits before me where yesterday only your body sat before me with its shoulders gathered in like a Greek chorus, with its tongue like a king making up rules as he goes. 356 When the princess becomes a writer, she can review the events of "that day" in front of her typewriter, tapping out the nuances of day-old passion. When she remembers her lover's erotic response that "brings forth a tower," the poet's language develops a Swiftian urban fantasy, a Lilliputian adaptation of a tabloid spectacular: A multitude should gather for such an edifice. For such a miracle one stands in line and throws confetti. Surely The Press is here looking for headlines. Surely someone should carry a banner on the sidewalk. The urge to call in the press corps is answered by her work on her confessing typewriter; "Yesterday I did not want to be borrowed," the poet sighs, reconsidering, "but this is the typewriter that sits before me / and love is where yesterday is at." The sixties' slangy "where it's at" emphasizes her comic resignation to her publishing compulsion. Here is the typewriter, after all, so what's a princess to do? This rush of triumph reminds us of Hobbes: The passion of laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from a sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly. (45 [emphasis added]) While typing up the denouement of a princess-day (and later while transforming the fairy tales), the poet catches a sense of eminence in her narrator-self (now as artist) through Hobbesian comparison with her own "former infirmity" of playing the princess-slave game. She can laugh. Inevitably, the conflict resulting from dividing her 357 energies between the art of loving and the art of poetry may have finally produced in the poet a Freudian "aggressive tendency" to understand something of the ludicrous aspect of the princess-behavior. Tone in the final piece in Love Poems ("Eighteen Days Without You") moves radically toward the Black Humor of Transformations. In a cartoon image, the poet offers her own body as material for her lover/artist. The speaker is both traditional woman-as-conformist and the contractor at her own construction site, barking sexual orders. It seems that this poet's Pygmalion needs instructions: I am laid out like paper on your cabin kitchen shelf. So draw me a breast. I like to be underlined. Look, lout! Say yes! Draw me like a child. I shall need merely two round eyes and a small kiss. Overtly submissive as shelf paper, the lover-poet foreshadows the sexual blankness of Snow White. She is graphically created by the lover, but in the manner of the upcoming fairy tales, here, too, romance is subverted. The language of epithet ("lout!") replaces endearment, and command not invitation ("So draw me a breast") signals caress. Her lover is a cartoonist and the portrait is a caricature, grotesque, and suggestive. Love Poems closes with a nursery rhyme imperative in which an S&M love-kingdom has come (after eighteen days of absence): Lock in! Be alert, my acrobat and I will be soft wood and you the nail 358 and we will make fiery ovens for Jack Sprat and you will hurl yourself into my tiny jail and we will take a supper together and that will be that. (CP 220) This consummation, like the marriage orientations throughout Transformationsf comes in terms of violence, pain, fire, entrapment, self-destruction— and then deadly routine. For Cinderella, "That / will be that" will become "That story." Sexton voices the unconscious wit-work that transforms romantic imprisonment into a joke, and propriety and repression into narratives of horrific humor. Sexton's book of fairy tales fits into the continuum of her work through caricatures that offer sardonic answers to the anguish of many earlier poems. As a Black Humorist, she does (in Friedman's words) "take a preposterous world by the throat," musing "I think it's about time I showed a sense of humor," (Letters 328). * * * Black Humor drives a tough-minded feminism in Transformations. These Grimm/grim revisions are not celebrations of feminist achievement; rather, they deliver a hard look at loss of mothering, male aggression, limited choices, and entrapment. They are comic narratives of hostility, replacing confessions of victimization. Humor suspends sentimentality, and its appeal (as Bergson puts it) is to intelligence pure and simple. Breakaway tales of female daring such as "The Twelve Dancing Princesses" feature adventure that is nocturnal and clandestine, and 359 even though they are athletic and bold (their dancing slippers were "as worn as an old jockstrap") their fun is over when "the [male] sun came up / naked and angry"; and their romp finally ends in containment, with no more dazzling excess/ exhaustive laughter, or heavenly deviltry: Now the runaways would run no more and never again would their hair be tangled into diamonds, never again their shoes worn down to a laugh, never the bed falling down into purgatory to let them climb in after with their Lucifer kicking. (CP 281) Surveillance discloses their brazen frolic ("The princesses danced like taxi girls at Roseland") and the spy himself, at the invitation of the king, could choose a bride for his trouble. He could, in Dame Sexton's words, "take his pick of the litter." The princesses, now corralled into a bridal party, "averted their eyes / and sagged like old sweatshirts." A romantic liaison that turns a woman into a mewling puppy or an old sweatshirt hardly elicits female desire. Dame Sexton narrates Transformations with that emotional detachment so critical for humor. In Love Poems f themes of dramatic erotica centering on male appeal had figured keenly; Sexton's narrator-lover-persona had engaged with high seriousness in the discourse of desire. In religious terms she had written of the touch of the lover's hand ("this is the kingdom / and the kingdom come") and likewise 360 his kiss becomes "Zing! a resurrection!" (CP 173-174). The poet had praised her lover's erection ("that monument. / The blood runs under ground yet brings forth a tower"); in Transformations. by contrast, the description of male musculature suffers in the service of the witch-jester's report. When the virginal Rapunzel's athletic suitor, for example, bursts into her tower room without warning, Rapunzel glimpses his male form: What is this beast, she thought, with muscles on his arms like a bag of snakes? What is this moss on his legs? What prickly plant grows on his cheeks? What is this voice as deep as a dog? This fellow turns out to have a certain appeal for her, however, both rhetorical and erotic: Yet he dazzled her with his answers. Yet he dazzled her with his dancing stick. But the consummation of passion as they romp in Rapunzel's tresses suggests a downsized religious ecstasy: They lay together upon the yellowy threads, swimming through them like minnows through kelp and they sang out benedictions like the Pope. By converting the male "monument" into a "dancing stick," and the born-again rapture of kisses into a doctrinaire Papal duet, the witch-jester of the fairy tales disengages from the phallic enthrallment of her earlier love poems. These irreverent similes do not suggest the "Black Art" of "a woman who writes feels too much. / those trances and 361 portents!"; no love-trance here, its appeal is to intelligence, pure and simple. Dame Sexton suspends sentimentality and adopts the "anesthesia of the heart." A more permanent anesthesia in Sexton's transformed tales comes with marriage itself, that stock resolution of fairy tales.27 Conjugal confinement is limited (they "lived together on a sugar cube" in "The Maiden Without Hands") and complete ("he hired a nightwatchman" in "The Frog Prince"). In Sexton's earlier poetry she had invested her parents' marriage with horror ("I lived in a graveyard full of dolls" with "those people who stand at the open windows like objects / waiting to topple" (CP 118, 75), but such grotesque conversion of people into objects can also be a major source of comedy, according to Bergson ("We laugh every time a person gives us the impression of being a thing . . ."[97]). Dame Sexton converts the oft-told standard marriage story boxed into a narrative of paralysis; Cinderella and the prince lived, they say, happily ever after, like two dolls in a museum case never bothered by diapers or dust, never telling the same story twice, never getting a middle-aged spread, their darling smiles pasted on for eternity. Regular Bobbsey Twins. That story. In "The White Snake" another pair are sealed into a marriage that becomes a static art object. When a servant enters the contest for the local princess ("A common way for princesses to marry"), his preliminary trials do not satisfy ("The 362 princess, ever Eve, / said it wasn't enough / and sent him out to find the apple of life")* Sexton reverses Eve's blameworthy gender role as the scapegoat of fellx culpa; a feistier Eve dispatches Adam to fetch the apple of knowledge. Here she heeds Dame Sexton, who had instructed young women that, "It is not enough to read Hesse / and drink clam chowder, / we must have the answers." Upon his return the stories of Genesis and Grimm are conflated to flip the outcome: He returned to the princess saying, I am but a traveling man but here is what you hunger for. The apple was as smooth as oilskin and when she took a bite it was as sweet and crisp as the moon. But this is no lusty consummation— the couple enjoys a prissy wedding night that even the God of Genesis could have watched approvingly: Their bodies met over such a dish, His tongue lay in her mouth as delicately as the white snake. They played house, little charmers, exceptionally well. Snake charmer turned traveling salesman, he provides dessert for his unctuous lunch (an apple "smooth as oilskin") with a postprandial kiss. They have the apple-information now: they understand the routine of marriage. With such knowledge they will behave delicately. Playing house, they are a charming couple, deservedly rewarded for congenial 363 domestic behavior. Dame Sexton, the witch-joker, winks at the reader as she pronounces sentence: So of course, they were placed in a box and painted identically blue and thus passed their days living happily ever after— a kind of coffin, A kind of blue funk. Is it not? Asking the reader, too, to join in affirming this funereal funk, the narrator coyly invokes the rubric of happily-ever- after. One box fits all, she notes. Sexton's earlier claustrophobic psychodrama of childhood (’ ’ graveyard of dolls") has been contained in a marital playhouse and finally converted into a coffin of eternal blue. Here is a chilling view of that "bourgeois, middle-class dream . . . a little piece of life, to be married ..." young Anne herself had aspired to. Virginity and naivete are redefined as ignorance when Dame Sexton "takes a preposterous world by the throat"; beauties, princesses, and young women who are easily enchanted are treated with cool detachment (Bergson's "anesthesia of the heart"). The Love Poems princess-now- witch transforms what had been a scene of abject passion ("And at first I rubbed your / feet dry with a towel / because I was your slave") into wit, and the princesses in Transformations who persist in princess behavior are straightforwardly foolish. No intelligent young woman 364 sipping clam chowder would willingly identify with such a royal. In ’ 'Iron Hans," for example, the princess has minimal standards for love. A foolhardy boy stuffs his metal hair under a cap to conceal it while in the presence of the princess, when actually, there was little need: You look like a bird, she taunted him, and snatched off his cap. His hair fell down with a clang It fell down like a moon chain and delighted her. The princess fell in love. Falling in love with a fellow with clanging iron hair who resembles a bird seems to imply a fair lack of judgment. A similar blank insight belongs to Snow White. The witch introduces her with sardonic reference to the [male] market value of virginity, implying that to purchase an unspoiled maiden Compares to the tony indulgence in slim cigarettes and French wine. (Indeed, 1970 cigarette sales were stimulated by sexist appeal: Life magazine [male] readers were reassured that "You like your cigarettes like you like your women: Thin and rich.")28 No matter what life you lead the virgin is a lovely number: cheeks as fragile as cigarette paper, arms and legs made of Limoges, lips like Vin Du Rhone, rolling her china-blue eyes open and shut. Snow White the doll rolls her eyes helplessly to respond to double mandates. The witch points out her repressed Eduardian courtesy toward a maternal authority that 365 reinforces her marriage-market commodification and her ceramic potential for mute sexual compliance: Open to say, Good Day Mama, and shut for the thrust of the unicorn. As sleeping Beauty discovers, when she closes her eyes the protector of maidens (whether unicorn or paterfamilias) turns to a rapist; Snow White does not have the intelligence nor the fortitude for either survival or humor, being "no more important / than a dust mouse under the bed." She continues in meek helplessness with the dwarfs, in their house that is "as droll as a honeymoon cottage": The dwarfs, those little hot dogs, Walked three times around Snow White, the sleeping virgin. They were wise and wattled like small czars. In the euphemistic tradition of fairy tale mini-lust and faux conjugality, Snow White's comatose sexuality is only teased by phallic wind-up figures: the salacious "little hot dogs" wattle as they march in ritual, but the tiny despotic roosters cannot waken Snow White. Neither her sexuality nor her intelligence can be stirred. Notwithstanding the warning from these "wise dwarf-czars," when / the queen came, / Snow White, the dumb bunny, / opened the door . . .," and the reader groans. As a cautionary tale, the example of Sexton's Snow White gives the lie to the value of female innocence. Dame Sexton warns 366 that a woman must awaken to an awareness of the danger in remaining a girlish "dumb bunny." Ironically, the evolution generated by bunny-dumbness in Dame Sexton's Snow White will follow the same pattern of Sexton's earlier somber recognition: "A woman IS her mother. / That's the main thing" ("Housewife," CP 77). The (step)mother's (mirror)image may be unappealing, but in it the daughter will find (or misread) her own model. In the poem "Christmas Eve," Sexton had addressed her mother's portrait from the perspective of "your aging daughters, . . . each one avoiding your portrait, each one aping your life" (CP 139). Snow White's mercurial stepmother "had a mirror to which she referred— / something like the weather forecast— "and in a zing of irony, the mature Snow White apes her (step)mother as she now holds court, "rolling her china-blue doll eyes open and shut / and sometimes referring to her mirror / as women do." In the mirror image (Lacan's "mirror stage") she has read her first identity: invidious vanity. "We must have the answers" when Black Humor asks "the final questions," but only one option is to do "as women do": follow Snow White's compulsive misreading of the mirror stage, which leads to dangerous consequences. But with a momentary anesthesia of the heart, the woman reader can look at herself looking at Snow White looking, and appreciating 367 the china doll/dumb bunny/stepmother, and laugh-~perhaps bitterly, "as women do." Lacan's mirror stage of constructing the I through identification with the "counterpart," as I have said earlier, is the recognition of incongruity, and thereby the birth of humor. In the meconnaissance or misreading of her isomorphic model, the infant girl misreads her potential. According to Lacan, the reflection (imago) represents a social mediation of instincts identified with the mother; her own place in the Freudian romance as well as her response to her gendered social behaviors is inscribed in her perception. While wit, studies have shown, develops richly in girls who have experienced absent or hurtful mothers, the girl who observes her mother functioning compliantly in a world of male dominance can react as Snow White or may rebel into sarcasm. Maternal authority will teach and model submissive behaviors (Snow White's eyes were "open to say, / Good Day Mama, / and shut for the thrust of the unicorn") but at the same time subsume God's power: Mother, each time I talk to God you interfere. You of the bla-bla set carrying on about the state of letters. If I write a poem you give the treasurer's report. If I make love you give me the funniest lines. Mrs. Sarcasm, why are there any children left? (CP 380) 368 Mrs. Sarcasm could turn any serious seduction into detumescence. She figures prominently in the development of humor in her daughter, and significantly in Lacan's understanding of the development of aggressivity in that daughter, for it is in this erotic relation, in which the human ihdividual fixes upon [herself] and image that alienates [her] from [herself], that are to be found the energy and the form on which this aggression of the passions that [she] will call [her] ego is based” ("Aggressivity" 19). Mother might be a Freudian rival in one sense, but she is also the catalyst for the girl's entry into the recognition of incongruity, the invidious symbolic— "a state of letters.” In the daughter's developing sense of humor, the mother models subversion ("If I write a poem / you give the treasurer's report") so that frustrated desire is both modeled and rebuked ("If I make love / you give me the funniest lines"). If the formative mirror stage of meconnaissance provokes a rejection (Lacan's Verneinung, or what Dame Sexton might call the Big No), Lacan maintains that "its effects will, for the most part, remain latent, so long as they are not illuminated by some light reflected on to the level of fatality, which is where the id manifests itself" ("The Mirror Stage" 7). Black Humor provides the "light reflected on to the level of fatality" ("Why are there any children left?") but at the same time provides "the funniest lines." The mother in the mirror fixes the 369 "dialectic that will henceforth link the "I" to socially elaborated situations" ("Mirror Image" 5); the mother in the mind (the maternal superego) births the humorous attitude (Freud's term) that transforms frustration, jealousy, and hypocrisy into humor. (See Chapter One for full discussion of the maternal superego and humor.) But what of the influence of the nurturing mother— she who cares for her child? Dame Sexton's Mother Gothel in "Rapunzel" presents a congruent mirror image of mother and daughter ("We are two birds / washing in the same mirror") but maternal motivation (although ambiguous) is exploitive: "A woman / who loves a woman / is forever young." In a teasing love-game, "They play mother-me-do / all day," and Mother Gothel jealously guards against Rapunzel's potential heterosexuality ("we have kept out of the cesspool") by tethering her in the tower (the rope of her own hair "was as strong as a dog leash"). After Rapunzel's suitor "flung himself out of the tower, a side of beef," he wandered "as blind as Oedipus," reminding the reader that it is Rapunzel who had married her parent. In the end, what Adrienne Rich calls "compulsory heterosexuality" is achieved ("A rose ynust have a stem"), and social expectations are met ("They lived happily as you might expect"), — and here Black Humor takes over— proving that mother-me-do Can be outgrown, just as the fish on Friday, 370 just as a tricycle. (249) Sentimentality, even in the wake of heartbreak, is veiled in cliche and trivialization. "So it goes," Sexton borrows from Vonnegut, when a dancing princess foils a spy and "so he was beheaded / Poof! like a basketball" (CP 279). Dame Sexton's Black Humor inveighs against affectation and fraud, but especially subverts any perceived advantage in women's participation in the system of male dominance. Moving entirely outside of social conventions, in "The Little Peasant" the intrepid female autonomy only implied by default in fairy tales is perversely achieved in the figure of the undiscovered adulteress and the entrepreneurial peasant who converts his voyeurism into a cash narrative— a project of Sexton herself. Adultery is one issue which is muted in women's experience although addressed by male poets: key examples are James Dickey as a disaffected transgressive persona in "Adultery," and Seamus Heaney as witness of the public social consequences— the torture and death of a young woman in Celtic Ireland ("Punishment").29 Unique as a woman poet writing in the persona of adulterer, Sexton writes about adultery in two distinct ways: first seriously, as a varied misery for women, but in "The Little Peasant" as behavior less heinous than some commonly accepted daily cruelties— adultery becomes an opportunity for joking (a male tradition, here co-opted by Transformations' middle-aged witch). The contrast in tone 371 is startling. In Love Poems the poignant "For My Lover, Returning to His Wife," had focused on women's double heartache: the unknowing wife (carrying toddlers to bed) and the unrequited lover who images herself as "a watercolor. / I wash off" (CP 190). Now Sexton's middle-aged witch washes off both the romance and the heartache from adultery; motivations in "The Little Peasant" reverse the noble legend of a lonely Puritan adulteress and her minister-lover in the forest; here, in a calculated run for youth, The women cry, Come, my fox, heal me I am chalk white with middle age so wear me threadbare wear me down, wear me out. The male adulterer, not quite so sure he is a fox, here feels more like a badminton pawn— Bounce me off like a shuttlecock Dance me dingo-sweet for I am your lizard, your sly thing. (CP 238) He still hopes to impart an impression of lizardly craftiness. Can we say that this text is marked somehow as a woman's writing? If this is a woman's joke, then who is the listener/reader/audience? Initially it was the readers of Playboy magazine, a problematic audience which calls for a word here about the autonomy for women that humor 372 facilitates in not only the narrative but in publication itself. At stake is the ownership of female experience. Elaine Showalter conceptualizes male experience and female experience as overlapping circles with an excluded crescent composing a "wild zone" of purely female experience which is unknowable to males except through their imaginative projection. The male experience (including the female overlapping circle) is public— and dominant. Experience in the female "wild zone" is muted; she argues that "women's writing is a 'double-voiced discourse' that always embodies the social, literary, and cultural heritages of both the muted and the dominant" (263).30 Sexton/ however, often writes in the boundaries between such territories, speaking without inhibition of her life in her female "wild zone," but then she cheerfully pillages the "dominant" discourse to submit to Playboy "The Little Peasant," her first transformed fairy tale. In her version she pares down the picaresque rambles of Grimms' "Little Farmer" to a single event of opportunistic voyeurism: finding shelter from a storm with the miller's stingy wife (who offers him only "a hunk of stale bread"), the little peasant overhears her athletic adultery with the minister. Turning his information to profit when her husband returns the next day, he bargains with this arrogant foolish man to coerce the miller to ask his pet raven a series of playful questions. The ventriloquist's dummy-bird tells the miller 373 of wine under the pillow "as warm as a specimen," and meat under the stove ("It lay there like an old dog"), and then he informs on "the devil in the cupboard." The miller runs "the devil" out of his house, but the wife's pungent indiscretion is never revealed ("her secret was as safe / as a fly in an outhouse"); and the peasant-voyeur leaves with "gold pieces knocking like marbles / in deep pants pockets." Sexton as a woman poet/voyeur/entrepreneur had qualms about the suitability of the male venue Playboy as the purveyor of her narrative. Does their payment for her ribaldry assign to her those male qualities "like marbles / in deep pants pockets"? she wonders. Does joking about women's adultery represent a message from the "wild zone" or is it pandering to the "dominant"? Is she "in" or "out"?; It worries me a little to be published in Playboy. They exploit women, and now I've got a hand in it. As you say, I'm "in," but I was never conscious of being out. Still, what the hell. I'd feel a lot worse if they'd turned them down. <Letters 320) Like the little peasant, Sexton tells a story for profit, but the conflicted gender perspective in the story and in the telling suggests an in-or-out dichotomy. In a text produced by a woman and now read by a male (implicitly voyeuristic) audience, she has mocked the deceived husband and the exploitive (albeit timid) minister, but at the same time she has allowed the adulteress (even a selfish and stingy one) to frolic and yet go unstoned. Does the tale of 374 this sybaritic wife contribute to or escape from exploitation of women when the writer is a woman? Or, more likely ■ , in this text from a woman, does the droll story save us from the conventional sentiment and sense of duty required to maintain the woman in her marriage to a selfish oaf? Such a strategy of female humor may appeal equally to the male reader of Playboy, in the triumph of the peasant/poet*s entrepreneurial gaze. Dame Sexton had begun her heroic wit-quest by asserting that "It is not enough to read Hesse / and drink clam chowder, we must have the answers." The female hero transforms the traditional journey of initiation so that her achievement is not to slay a villain or to marry (although these events might occur), but the goal of the journey for the female hero must be a conquest through knowledge.31 But such stark knowledge of how the world treats women turns out to mean that Sexton's narratives are harsh, raw, and scatological— as Helen Vendler had concluded, "not the work of a nice person." Kurt Vonnegut counters that she "domesticates my terror, examines it and describes it, teaches it some tricks which will amuse me, then lets it gallop into my forest once more" (vii). Through an exorcism of wit— some amusing tricks— Sexton has "domesticated" the themes of her earlier work, and even when (in the poetry that follows Transformations^ we meet these themes galloping in our psychic forest once more, we are amused by the tricks 375 they have learned; the poet romps in a "wild zone," her erstwhile vulnerability to predators shored up with the near-metaphysical wit of incongruity. This emancipatory play marks a strong textual achievement, yet the transformations of initiatory instruction conclude with the ominous theme of paternal incest. Neither the structure (fable to satire) nor the content (heroic instruction) culminates in a satisfying closure. Black Humor differs from existentialism in its resolution, according to Max Schulz: while both "posit an absurd world devoid of intrinsic values, with a resultant tension between individual and universe," existentialism reaches a resolution in action and therein an affirmation of the dignity of the self (6). Sexton's Black Humor in Transformations has proposed no heroic resolutions for female development, but in mocking the codes of girlhood mythic education humor has set out a model of defiance, independence, and laughter. Black Humor establishes attitude, not action. "Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty)," the final poem in Transformations. brutally deconstructs the happily-ever- after marriage as resolution or after-life for the female hero. Sexton's Sleeping Beauty awakens to reality as her own inevitable old age with "the table set / and a faltering crone at my place" (she has set her place at the table of convention and will eat from that plate into her old age; 376 her humor and balance falters grotesquely). Far worse for the young princess than this distant daylight prospect, however, is the immediate terror of nights filled with a menacing male presence. This figure of predatory authority, a looming phallic threat, is resistant to satire and breaks the shield of humor.32 It's not the prince at all but my father drunkenly bent over my bed, circling the abyss like a shark, my father thick upon me like some sleeping jellyfish. (CP 294) Female sexuality— for all its sporting fun in "The Twelve Dancing Princesses" and "The Little Peasant" or its stupifying domesticity in "Cinderella" and "The White Snake"'— opens vulnerability, risks violence. Mercy Street had raised the pervasive concern for female vulnerability to sexual assault and the precautions that this reality inscribes into self-imposed daily restrictions of a reasonable woman. Such limitations cause adjustments in women's work schedules to avoid working alone in off-hours, evening arrival in unfamiliar cities, and relaxation in isolated areas; free access to work and adventure thus is restrained by rape fantasy and avoidance of behavior which could be identified as provocative or inviting. A consuming guilt over sexuality ("so great I was born confessing it") in Mercy Street focuses on Daisy's sense of her own normal sexual development that precedes incest. Sexton's unsolved 377 problem of the play addresses developing female desirability that social codes translate to validate male violence; Dame Sexton's description of Snow White as an assemblage of product promotions (wine and cigarettes) indicates to Ellen Cronan Rose that "the male culture that defines and prizes her is in fact a rape culture" (213). Sexton's mocking transformations expose the reification of women as token, victim, and package awarded as recognition for male achievement. Now this text breaks at the moment of an analogous revelation; even the putative power of a princess cannot guarantee control, and so her developing appeal continues to invite danger. At the primordial level we see that women's power only exists in illusory terms as the lack of power; Desirability to men is commonly supposed to be a woman's form of power. This echoes the view that consent is women's form of control over intercourse, different but equal to the custom of male initiative. . . .That sexual expression is even framed as a matter of woman's consent, without exposing these [flawed] presuppositions, is integral to gender inequality. Woman's so-called power presupposes her more fundamental powerlessness. (MacKinnon 655 [emph. mine]) Female desirability to males may be perceived as hypothetical "power" and consent tauted as female control— but the male backlash is forced sex. The major quest of Sexton's poetics had been "to enquire further" ("we must have the answers") toward this menacing patriarchal confrontation. Yet even to engage in aggressive language in 378 male discourse may be to risk provocation; Jung confirms the link between female intelligence and the pigue of the rapist: The "Father" (i.e. the sum of conventional opinions) always plays a great role in female argumentation. No matter how friendly and obliging a woman's Eros may be, no logic on earth can shake her when she is ridden by animus. Often the man has the feeling— and he is not altogether wrong— - that only seduction or a beating or rape would have the necessary powers of persuasion. (Jung 153). The poet, at this point, defies Vonnegut's claim that her wit can "domesticate this terror." The disturbing lack of closure calls into guestion the efficacy of humor as both shield and weapon. The transformed quest-narratives seem now to have not supplied the answers to the question of powerlessness against patriarchal exploitation. Again the double appositive subject assumes an interrogative voice as both narrators— "the middle-aged witch" as well as the authorial "me"— inquire within the text of "Sleeping Beauty" and beyond the text to the reader who drinks clam chowder: What voyage this, little girl? This coming out of prison? God help— this life after death? Although the witch-jester's jokes had derisively revealed the various emotional prisons that are available for women to choose— so that the old stories have been subverted and so transformed ("this coming out of prison")— still the poet 379 cries out for resources which she calls "God's help" to understand her continuing troubled voyage. To combat the predatory patriarch, she summons an ironic advocate in the Father God. And how better to control one's enemy than to invent him? "Typing out the God / [her] typewriter believes in" (CP 466), she creates him in the image of humor: "I call it, 'my funny God'" (NES 190). Recognition of the gender limitations which are implicit in a rhetorical construct of God as Father was not fully introduced into feminist dialogue until the year Anne Sexton died;33 consequently, her confrontation with God as a conceptually sexed body was metaphorically unique. In 1973 theologian Mary Daly proposed a gender-free revision of God as a lyric universal presence of a Verb who is Be-ing, who has not been revealed once for all time, who can be revealed at any moment in a constantly unfolding (not merely repeated) revelation. (183) In a contrasting tone, Daly, like Sexton, employed comic metaphors to undercut the impact of the established Christian church, whimsically alluding to a closed organization of insiders who now offer us [women] the 'future' of incorporation with Yahweh & Son. . . . the corporation of God the Fathet has formed a merger with the Earthly Town Fathers on the sly (soon to be subject to an antitrust suit). Together they have sent nocturnal emissions beyond the earth's atmosphere, bringing forth signs and wonders in the 380 heavens, converting nearby outer space into a celestial junk yard. (184) i Daly, too, finds a useful strategy in humor to convert divine power into a double-dealing corporate headquarters peddling junk bonds in a collusion as gender-specific as uncontrollable wet-dreams. Concurrently, although coincidentally, Sexton was rhetorically constructing her god, too, as a clown, a blatantly physical and sexual lout, a deceitful buffoon. To triumph over the figure of a predatory patriarch of Transformations. Sexton launches into a more searing comic treatment of the fathers throughout following works: The Book of Follyf The Death Notebook, and finally The Awful Rowing Toward God. This time she is Pygmalion, creating her nemesis from words: from the psychoanalyst in a mask, to the teacher as frog, to the doctor as father, to the priest in the confessional, and finally to the joker-God, the predatory patriarch undergoes sequential literary transference. At the outset of Sexton's poetic journey, the first patriarchal authority had been the analyst, and (not surprisingly) in Bedlam's opening poem the poet sees her analyst— "You, Doctor Martin"— as a deity much like the figure in her final poem; [...] Of course, I love you; you lean above the plastic sky, god of our block, prince of all the foxes. 381 "Of course," she claims to love him. Only the earlier line "There are no knives for cutting your throat" reveals the subliminal hostility. Against a surreal backdrop of plastic sky, the analyst is a parochial bully "god of our block"; as prince of foxes, he is a Faustian suggestion of her compromised position in the asylum, a figure with the power of God and the devil. In the second poem of this initial volume, she supplicates the doctor in terms of "Kind Sir; These Woods," in which she dreams "O Mademoiselle, / the rowboat rocked over." These two images— the fateful rowboat and God leaning above the plastic sky— overarch the entire Sexton oeuvre and will inform the final poem that Anne Sexton edits for the publisher: "The Rowing Endeth." To counter the officious authority— and diminish the patriarch (now conflated to "father-doctor")— in her second book she writes comic doggerel; "My father was a perfect man / clean and rich and fat." Obvious as the paternal caricature is, Sexton later in an interview ingenuously speculates, "I think 'Cripples and Other Stories' is a hate poem somehow" (NES 93).34 In spite of Sexton's meliorating language of "I think" and "somehow," the poet draws brutal family sketches that certify a "hate poem." She distances her resentful petition by concealing it in concentric structures, framing a hop-scotch jingle ("this silly rhyme") with her narrative intertext; in a relentless pulse of 4-3- 382 4-3 rhythm, then, "Cripples" foreshadows the Black Humor of Transformations: My doctor, the comedian I called you every time and made you laugh yourself when I wrote this silly rhyme . . . Each time I give lectures or gather in the grants you send me off to boarding school in training pants. God Damn it, father-doctor. I'm really thirty-six. (CP 160) The speaker begins by cajoling the doctor, seducing him into believing that it is actually he who is the jolly comedian when he laughs in response to her own coy rhymes, but her doggerel is a thinly disguised protest: what she really tells him is that while she is achieving professional recognition, he continues to infantilize her, metaphorically turning her into an incontinent toddler. What begins as a self-mocking humor turns into a cursing scold. Her Freudian "aggressive tendency" surfaces only a stanza away from "this silly rhyme"; she tears the disguise of humor to declaim her resentment. Predicting Transformations ' final poem "Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty)," this one, too, ends with a sinister punchline: Father, I'm thirty-six, yet I lie here in your crib, I'm getting born again, Adam, As you prod me with your rib. (CP 163) The analyst, who has blurred into "father-doctor" and then into Adam, effects her religious rebirth: his "rib" prods a 383 child-Eve toward an awareness expressed as climactic sexual awakening. The humor in her earlier lines cannot hold, in light of the speaker's infantile helplessless against violation, which has been seductively proposed as a maturation process. (Similarly, the witch's narrative humor cannot obtain when the handsome prince--Sleeping Beauty's conjugal sexual partner by virtue of his awakening kiss— is revealed to her as the same menacing patriarch: "my father / drunkenly bent over my bed, / circling the abyss like a shark.") In Sexton's early work and even through Transformations, intimations of humor cannot entirely combat oppressive, even sinister, patriarchal authority. Humor is more effective against male authority which only suggests the father-god. For example, in her early "Elegy in the Classroom," Sexton had used a dark comic image to transform the powerful male mentor ("your words were all things") into a fairy tale frog, now grotesque in his out- of-body presence: I find this boily creature in your place; find you disarranged, squatting on the window sill, irrefutably placed up there, like a hunk of some big frog watching us through the V of your woolen legs. (CP 32) Because the "woolen legs" recall the wool business of Sexton's father and her husband, the poem links patriarchal forms. Here the student/princess (not yet the witch) does not purposely convert her mentor into a frog, but only 384 ingenuously "finds" the creature squatting comically between his own woolen teacher-legs (logistically, both teacher and frog must be squatting on the sill). A frog between princely legs presents a daunting sexual challenge for the princess later in "The Frog Prince": "At the feel of frog / the tough-me-nots explode / like electric slugs" (CP 282), but here the mentor is no prince— only a consumer of princes. The poet of "Elegy in the Classroom" wishes to "ignore your fat blind eyes / or the prince you ate yesterday / who was wise wise wise." A cliche of the 70's made claim that "you are what you eat," but the poet offers little hope that the frog-teacher will become the prince of his yesterday's lunch. Just as she had re-voiced the Grimm fairy tales with street savvy, Sexton recasts the narratives of Christian tradition into farcical inventions, through an imaginative prioritizing of Christ as the Son of Man rather than divine manifestation. Such re-creation (in fact, recreation) turns comic, and she reports the exploits and idiosyncracies of Jesus with an emphasis on physical quotidian behavior. As Bergson puts it, "Any incident is comic that calls our attention to the physical in a person, when it is the moral side that is concerned" (93). In other words, when attention is drawn away from the vitality of intellectual and moral life, and instead fixed on the material side, the body becomes 385 a kind of irksome ballast which holds down to death a soul eager to rise aloft . . . inert matter dumped upon living energy. The impression of the comic will be produced as soon as we have a clear apprehension of this putting the one on the other. (Bergson 92- 93) Thus in language of associative simile that claims cousin to the breakaway subconscious wit-work, Sexton links scatology and eschatology to create "The Jesus Papers," a series of wry poems documenting a round of Christ's daily activities. They pose an outrageous spoof that merges Black Humor, Freudian sendup, and familiar Christian texts. When Jesus prays, "Oh Lord, / send down a short-order cook," God instructs him to "Work on the sly, / opening cans of sardines." In "Jesus Cooks" he becomes "The Pied Piper of yeast"; in "Jesus Asleep," Sexton's character sublimates his Oedipal desire into art: in his dream He desired Mary. His penis sang like a dog, but he turned sharply away from that play like a door slamming. Instead, he turns his talent to sculpting: "With His penis like a chisel / He carved the Pieta" (CP 339). Aesthetic/ phallic expression (so earnestly discussed in psychological approaches to literature) here is on the cutting edge— so to speak— gaining new achievement, as Sexton transforms the Christian myth. Through caricature and unmasking techniques, the exposure of the physical reality of the Son of Man achieves 386 a (problematical) comic pleasure (Freud would say) through the economy of psychic expenditure necessary for the repression of imaginative suggestions of necessary routine bodily processes. Such repression for the Christian seems appropriate, even "correct," so that a comic poet's free indulgence in imaging these unconscious and blasphemous thoughts is certainly "faulty" reasoning: Consciously giving free play to unconscious modes of thought (which have been rejected as faulty) is a means of producing comic pleasure; . . .When, on hearing a thought which has, as it were, been formed in the unconscious, we compare it with its correction, a difference in expenditure emerges for us from which comic pleasure arises." (Jokes 205, emphasis added) Considering this sort of "correction" of scatological insights in "The Jesus Papers," Sexton calls her poems "probably blasphemous, I would say." One which she was forced to omit was titled "Jesus Ailing," which starts out— this is unpublished, not in the book— "There was trouble that day. / Jesus was constipated." Well they said "now look, we just can can't have this," so I said "okay." (NES 154-55) Cheerful censorship saves Sexton from further charges of blasphemy, but ironically a remarkably similar scatological insight in Carl Jung's childhood resisted transformation into comic pleasure and instead was published instead as Jung's evidence of God's grace. As a boy of twelve, Jung had felt an "atrocious thought" coming to him (threatening him, he felt, with eternal damnation), but he prevented 387 himself from thinking it through until he had concluded that the thought must come (as all other things) from God. He must dare, therefore, to "go through with it, [and] then He will give me His grace and illumination," Jung decided, and let the pernicious thought come to him: I saw before me the cathedral, the blue sky. God sits on His golden throne, high above the world— and from under the throne an enormous turd falls upon the sparkling new roof, shatters it, and breaks the walls of the cathedral asunder. (39) Jung's boundless gratitude to God for grace which allowed him to reflect on a giant turd zeroing in on the cathedral as accurately as a stealth bomb might be perceived as comic; Jurig, however, was thrilled because "after that experience I knew what God's grace was" (40). Sexton's adult Jesus, too, as a quirky but benevolent miracle worker, generates gratitude and conversion from the woman who follows his traditional gospel advice to become as a little child, in the case of "Jesus Raises Up the Harlot": The harlot followed Jesus around like a puppy for now He had raised her up. Now she forsook her fornications and became his little pet. His raising her up made her feel like a little girl again when she had a father who brushed the dirt from her eye. Indeed, she took hold of herself, knowing she owed Jesus a life, as sure-fire as a trump card. (CP 340) The harlot's dogged gratitude for the journeyman miracles (emblematized as a trump card played by the god-figure) differs from the poet's complex response later to God's 388 trump card in her final poem "The Rowing Endeth." Here in "The Jesus Papers" she is using "this business of words" to create a divine presence comically demystified in his physical needs; in the later poem when the God of her recreation pulls his trump card, the poet will roar her own triumph; laughing, she will refuse to become "his little pet" or a little girl with dirt in her eye. Nevertheless, even at the close of "The Jesus Papers," in the authorial coda ("The Author of the Jesus Papers Speaks") the poet refuses to follow as a puppy, but instead will speak out, in spite of censorship by God's discretion- police: Then God spoke to me and said; People say only good things about Christmas If they want to say something bad, they whisper. The poet reaches into the depths for her own expression out of the "holy" water: "So I went to the well and drew a baby / out of the hollow water." Although the speaker refuses to surrender to religious challenge, or to Dorothy Parker's ironic notion of "perfect propriety," or to Helen Vendler's mandate to be a "nice person,, r the poet points to her potential defeat in the rites of consummation: Then God spoke to me and said: "Here. Take this gingerbread lady and put her in your oveh." When the cow gives blood and the Christ is born we must all eat sacrifices. We must all eat beautiful women. (CP 345) 389 Like Gretel, the speaker has little choice: "Here. Take this ..." in a macabre communion ("take and eat") both the woman-cookie and Hansel's witch become eucharist host- sacrifices. Whether the offering be Christ, the witch, the "gingerbread lady," the harlot, or merely a sensual woman, this God demands a sacrifice. Although Sexton tells an interviewer, "At the end of that book, there's a kind of belief thing going on," she concludes: "You know, it's a little war" (NES 155). In a progressive and cumulative dark comic sketch, Sexton's ultimate patriarchal confrontation has widened beyond a physical Christ to include a male God-figure. She had designed her God in various human— and consequently humorous— modes, in decades of "typing out the God / my typewriter believes in" ("Frenzy," CP 144). For her he is "my funny god"; she creates a divinity as a text in the same graphic process as the cartoonist of Love Poems had drawn onto shelf paper the figure of a woman to become his lover. Throughout Sexton's work, her typewriter's God is male and physical, finally becoming the transference of all her authoritative patriarchs— but as a comic figure his anthropomorphic power can be rescinded. At times he becomes a functionary who loafs on company time: "And as for God," she once said, "he now has an answering service that informs us, like the weather girl, that he is out".35 Or he is an officious boor as into the 390 lovers' nest "God comes in like a landlord / and flashes on his brassy lamp" ("You All Know the Story," CP 196.) In "The Fury of God's Goodbye" (from "The Furies" sequence of The Death Notebooks), the poet is abandoned by a petulant God who sulks when his work is not appreciated: One day He tipped His top hat and walked out of the room, ending the argument. He stomped off saying: I don't give guarantees. Here God is "that washerwoman / who walks out / when you're clean / but not ironed" (CP 374). "God's Backside" is a mooning metaphor to represent winter and war (CP 382-83). Sexton borrows tall tale language in The Awful Rowing Toward God to invent a deity whose attributes suggest Freud's male signifier and Eliot's authorial disaffection: God loafs around heaven, without a shape but He would like to smoke His cigar or bite His fingernails and so forth. ("The Earth," CP 431) This capitalized God envies humans their bodies: "He is all soul / but He would like to house it in a body / and come down / and give it a bath / now and then." An ebullient God appears in the final psalmic couplet at the close of The Book of Folly ("For God was as large as a sunlamp and laughed his heat at us / and therefore we did not cringe at the death-hole" (CP 413)), but even when 391 Sexton's God is filled with compassionate largesse, he is never far from caricature that alternates between the comic and the most grotesque Black Humor. Most startling is "The Ballet of the Buffoon," one of three prose pieces included in The Book of Folly but never reprinted (Linda Grey Sexton chose to omit them in her edition of The Complete Poems— one might speculate that she acted in the same mood as that of the director who exorcised The witnesses from Mercy Street1. Here God as "Mr. Ha-Ha" becomes the archdeceiver, and later both victim and avenger. The God/buffoon murders his wife and then whips her back to life in a whimsical resurrection; following this model, human "buffoons" are inspired to gain control of their own conjugal lives through similar action. After they, too, have killed their wives, "they laughed. A dark laughter." One of them, a merchant, re-marries— this time to Mr. Ha-ha (God himself), who has seductively disguised himself first in drag and then on the wedding night in the form of a nanny goat. Then the merchant attempts to imitate the performance staged earlier by God by burning his goat-wife in a ritual funeral pyre, but he fails to revive her; Mr. Ha-ha smugly explains the ways of God to man: "it was the darker order of things." Furthermore, he adds, the merchant has been "altogether managed by fate. . . . Every man kills his wife." Now taking on the role of avenger, Mr. Ha-ha is clearly in charge. He declares himself to be "the one who runs the clock, the trickiest and 392 the wisest man of all" (81). No catharsis here, nor reconciliation— in the Blackest of Humor. * * * After the defenseless patriarchal confrontation imaged as sexual assault in "Sleeping Beauty," Sexton has transformed patriarchal authority through caricature and Black Humor throughout two collections of poetry. She can confront and answer her construction of the buffoon-god, "the trickiest and the wisest man of all," in the final poetic image in the last poem that she arranged for publication, "The Rowing Endeth." In this poem which answers "Sleeping Beauty," Sexton voices a complex resolution that affirms both her vulnerability and her control— a double triumph of laughter that grants her both a radical revision of power and the autonomy to love. Searching to understand "what voyage this," the poet has undertaken The Awful Rowing Toward God. And when she arrives ("I'm mooring my rowboat / at the dock of the island called God," she can still reassure herself that her own efforts will prevail: "It's okay," I say to myself, with blisters that broke and healed and broke and healed— saving themselves over and over. Far from offering answers, however, God turns out to be a cheating and laughing poker player. At first, squatting on 393 the rocks at their game, both the poet-persona and God seem to hold a winning hand: I win because I hold a royal straight flush. He wins because He holds five aces. But she loses to the freewheeling deity because a wild card had been announced but I had not heard it being in such a state of awe when He took out the cards and dealt Rather than raging against her fate, however, or blaming her own inattention, the poet on her island with God "catches" the joke: As he plunks down his five aces and I sit grinning at my royal flush. He starts to laugh, the laughter rolling like a hoop Out of His mouth and into mine. and such laughter as He doubles right over me laughing a Rejoice-Chorus at our two triumphs. Layering the images of the poker game with the blend of voices in the Hallelujah chorus, the reader might well ask what sort of double triumph beldngs to a loser at the card game of life. The answer comes in her laughter-— the laughter that engages and animates all energy in the immediacy of her experience: Then I laugh, the fishy dock laughs the sea laughs. The Island laughs. The Absurd laughs. Her own response controls and activates her universe; she escapes becoming the plaything of an absurd and whimsical buffoon-god when she shares the laughter. God still holds 394 the cheating trump card, of course: no matter how royal, how attractive, how wealthy, how clever, or how dynamic one might be, the wild card has been announced without our realizing it— Death itself. Our only escape from the tragic recognition of this definitive temporality is our laughter. We laugh in the face of the absurdity of this end, and our laughter transforms the world. The wild card in a deck is conventionally figured as the joker, and the paradox of the joker in the face of death takes on special significance. Sociologists tell us that for certain African tribes the presence of the joker at a funeral suggests an emotional liberation: He lightens for everyone the oppressiveness of social reality, demonstrates its arbitrariness by making light of formality in general and expresses the creative possibilities of the situation (Douglas 372) . This funeral joking becomes ritual purification. By association, the joker as god promises a wealth of new, unforeseen kinds of interpretation. He exploits the symbol of creativity which is contained in a joke, for a joke implies that anything is possible. (Douglas 3 73). God's joke (his wild card) is death? the poet's joke (her wild card) is laughter. "Our two triumphs" cancel each other in a moment of transcendence. They hoop and interlock as two faces of the joke: death and laughter. All along the question has resonated: What voyage this? And the answer is 395 clear: the struggle calls for imagination to recast the inimical presence into the control of language and laughter. Out of imagination and subterranean wit-work has come the joking mode, and through this change in perspective she can "move off" from the pain and create the distance that marks a slim space for life change. The humorous attitude, on the other hand, is dialogic and interior: for Anne Sexton, inner psychic voices speak in rhymes, in nonsense, in scenarios of Christian frolic and mythic farce— all variations of Freud's super ego whispering "Look! a jest!" which enables the ego (that fragile "awkward bowl, / with all its cracked stars shining") to live, to write, and to laugh. * * * Anne Sexton ended her life on October 4, 1974. The Awful Rowing Toward God was not yet in publication. Readers and critics have asked the poet's own question: "What voyage this?" What strength lies in poetry if it cannot sustain life? Are we to interpret her final poem as surrender? Critics have difficulty finding either humor and courage in "The Rowing Endeth," a poem which is followed by suicide.36 To answer, I propose to read the suicide itself as a text. Placed against the text of her last poem, we can "read" them as phenomena distinct in form, genre, and meaning. Anne Sexton choreographed the event of her death as skillfully as she had arranged her characters on stage in the production of Mercy Street or her performance in her 396 poetry readings. It was a Friday afternoon in October; she had lunched with her dear friend Maxine Kumin and was anticipating a dinner date. But instead she slipped into her mother's mink coat and, without alerting any audience, she carried a glass of vodka down to the garage, settled into the dark car. She turned on the radio. Sexton always wrote with the radio's random music selections as background and carried her mother's radio to check into hospitals even though "the hospital is suspicious of these things because they do not understand that I bring my mother with me, her cigarettes, her radio. Thus I am not alone."37 Now she turned on the car radio. All the features of Sexton's working life were inscribed in this event; collaboration with her friend over her poems, a romantic promise for the evening, her body double-imaged inside the fur coat initialed "MGH" in satin, the alcohol that stirred both images and despair— and the radio. This experiential text closes with her death. Whereas in suicide Sexton surrendered her life, the poetry offers not surrender but her manifesto of fortitude; You need courage to overcome the little inherent deceits in yourself and stamina to bring the truth alive in a poem. That is what I mean by truth— there is a lot of unconscious truth in a poem. In some ways, as you see me now, I am a lie. The crystal truth is in my poetry. (NES 115) The crystal truth in poetry and the unconscious truth in humor both allow an affirmation of life "with all its 397 cracked stars shining / like a complicated lie." "Stamina to bring the truth alive in a poem" means striving for ("the awful rowing toward") rational understanding. Such rationality can only touch the possibilities, but humor transcends the blistering effort of the voyage and changes the horizon. The higher principle here is the liberating and elevating pleasure, the humorous pleasure of transforming disappointment, mutability, and knowledge of human failing. The humorous attitude is initiatory, but the change it brings will be ultimately evident and physical. The body itself feels the triumph as liberating, elevating. Phenomena of the landscape change, and the world is different.38 At that point of release, the joker's promise of infinite possibility, the game is no longer cast in terms of winning. The joker turns her world upside down, reverses the order, transforms the substance to pure laughter response. In that moment the poet can even embrace the cosmic "dealer".39 The poem closes with a paean to luck, laughter, and love: Dearest dealer, I with my royal straight flush, love you so for your wild card, that untamable, eternal> gut-driven ha-ha and lucky love. The poet delights in her unrestrained, illogical participation in life. She accepts the randomness of fortune, the tenuousness of love, and the sheer luck of it 398 all— and at the same time she invites us to rejoice in our own immersion in the laughter of the absurd. Freud comments on the mutuality of laughter: Laughter is among the highly infectious expressions of psychical states. When I make the other person laugh by telling him my joke, I am actually making use of him to arouse my own laughter; and one can in fact observe that a person who has begun by telling a joke with a serious face afterwards joins in the other person's laughter with a moderate laugh. (Jokes 156; emphasis added) So when the poet feels the "dearest dealer" laughing, that laughter is her own triumph.40 When the poet catches "the laughter rolling like a hoop out of His mouth / and into mine," she turns the hoop of the death-joke: his game of life is rigged to end all individual achievement. But even though the outcome of the game is inevitable, her joke is that she can become the joker, too, and no longer a victim. Turning trauma to pleasure, she can laugh at her God's mean little game, at herself being (as she had written earlier) "stamped out like a Plymouth fender" or growing "like a pig in an overcoat"— and at God as a washerwoman, or a goat on his wedding night. Here she abandons the blistered effort to order life logically and seriously: earlier she had prayed "Let me laugh for an entire hour / at your supreme being, your Cadillac stuff, / because I've come a long way / from Brussels sprouts" (CP 391). 399 Such a release follows the recognition of the absurdity abiding in her bondage to a tyrannical god which her typewriter had created. Camus comments on this epiphanic moment: "One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. . . . Happiness and the absurd are inseparable" (90). The consequent feeling that all is well, concludes Camus, "drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile sufferings. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men [sic]" (91). Creating a world with triumphant laughter, the poet can "fasten a new skin around it / as if I were dressing an orange / or a strange sun" (CP 35). In so doing she gets to make fun, make jokes, make witty language— all of which change the horizon; the world is "just worth making a jest about!" (Freud 21.166). Such pleasure is, Freud tells us, "a rare and precious gift." The poet has returned laughter of her own to the God-joker, but her own joke (triumph) catches him, too, as he doubles over her. But after the laughter, this sexual trope no longer will signal the danger that it did in Sleeping Beauty's nightmare; we can infer (following Koestler) that, on the contrary, laughter prevents the satisfaction of biological drives, it makes a man equally incapable of killing or copulating; it deflates anger, apprehension, and pride. The tension is not consummated .(emphasis mine) . . (51) 400 Her joker's autonomy causes momentary impotence of the laugher. When she hoops end rolls with her laughter, she changes everything.41 Self into self, she confronts her own actualization of God (*'my funny god") over a game of luck and skill, but mitigated by deceit.42 Her laughter reflects humor which has something liberating about it; but it also has something of grandeur and elevation . . . in the triumph of narcissism, the victorious assertion of the ego's invulnerability. (Freud 21.162) "Our double triumph" of the poet with her double-dealing God-player is the "triumph of narcissism, the victorious assertion of the ego's invulnerability." The persona may come to "love the dealer," but forgiving him is problematical. She may have changed her landscape, but not the dealer. The speaker never diminishes the power of her adversary, nor does she forgive him. She does not escape her nemesis through her laughter, but confronts and transforms his power. Her powerful and inclusive transformation sweeps over the horizon in hoops of laughter, and the "dearest dealer" becomes part of the chorus, but only through luck— through her own sustaining power to engage in lucky love. She grants herself, then, as a woman, that chance to transcend emotional dependence in favor of autonomy.43 After the laughter, she may freely choose to love— now outside of structure and servitude. The answers for a woman's life that she has been seeking are still 401 uncertain, open-ended, and individual, but in Sexton's terms, the gut-driven laughter is eternal and untamable. 402 Notes 1 Hereafter cited in the text as NES. 2 Anne Sexton. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1991. 3 All My Pretty Ones vi. 4 "I'm getting more vulgar in my old age," Sexton tells an interviewer in 1970 as she is writing Transformations. "Now what do I mean by "vulgar'? Not tasteless. Of the people. Common, is that it? Vernacular" ("Craft Interview" [1970] with William Packer in McClatchy 46.) 5 Alice Ostriker's Stealing the Language (1986) explains fully the now-familiar connection between women's repressed anger and their literary expression. 6 Lowell, "Anne Sexton" in McClatchy 71; Dickey, "Review of All My Pretty Ones" in Colburn 106. 7 Grace Schulman (herself a poet) militates against gratuitous judgments regarding writerly promiscuity by reassuring a 1991 Nation readership: "And let me emphasize, lest Sexton be cudgeled for this— as professional women are even now— that she was more candid than others but not necessarily more prone" (23 Sept. 1991: 342). The message is the mainstream. 8 Theodore Reik (The Compulsion to Confess [1959]) constructs his analysis of confession from Freudian theory. 9 In Chapter Two I have reviewed Lacan's important work describing this language event in his essay "The agency of the letter in the unconscious." 10 When her first book was half finished, she discovered Snodgrass's "Heart's. Needle," and his personal poetry "catalyzed in her a talent . . . for making poetry the vehicle of autobiography, of self-analysis." (Middlebrook 82) 11 M.L. Rosenthal only introduced the term "confessional poet" in 1967 in The New Poets: American and British Poetry Since World War II (New York: Oxford UP). 12 The original cover of To Bedlam and Part Wav Back carries Lowell's double-negative endorsement of Sexton's 403 poems: "I don't see how they can fail to make the great stir they deserve-" 13 From "Skunk Hour," Life Studies 90; "My Old Flame," For the Union Dead 6; and "Man and Wife," Life Studies 87. 14 Hereafter referenced in the text as CP. The Complete Poems will serve as source for all work cited. 15 Sexton blended obvious fictions into her these "autobiographical" poems: a hypothetical brother in "The Papa and Mama Dance," for example, and a son/brother ("Christopher," after Christopher Smart, the religious parodist) in the Book of Folly. These devices dismantle a literal reading of Sexton's poems. 16 Review of Mercy Street. New York Times 2 Nov. 1969. Colburn, Telling the Tale, 212. 17 Arthur Koestler's definition of bifurcated, creative thought— the source of humor (The Act of Creation 36). 18 See Echols' Darina to Be Bad for a comprehensive social history and analysis of the period marking this rise of the women's movement and its factions. 19 Regina Barreca in her unpublished dissertation "Hate and Humor in Women's Comedy" establishes a pattern of unresolved conclusions in women's comic fiction, patterns that are incongruent with the social reconciliation that conventionally characterizes [male] comedy. 20 "Feminist fundamentalism" is the term used by journalist Laura Flanders to describe what she interpreted as theoretical didacticism (political correctness) which may have silenced objections in a discussion of women's issues that typically has been marked by heated controversy. (Nation 11 Aug 1993: 177) 21 Mademoiselle's prestigious Guest Editor summer program earlier had attracted talented young women of diverse literary turns: Sylvia Plath in 1956 and Sandra M. Gilbert in 1960. 22 Sexton once told a class that "nursery rhymes were potentially powerful" and "to alter them would shock the reader ..." (Polly Williams, "Anne Sexton in the Classroom," McClatchy 99). 23 Koestler argues against the earlier theories of humor as compensations of psychic energy in terms of economy. He emphasizes that humor compares to creativity in that "The 404 creative act, by connecting previously unrelated dimensions of experience, enables [her] to attain to a higher level of mental evolution. It is an act of liberation— the defeat of habit by originality" (96). 24 Not only the fairy tales but Sexton's personal narratives are disguised and re-told in sardonic "transformations." She veils with humor her struggle to gain mastery over the influence of her father, her mother, Nana, her husband and lovers. 25 This sentence was added to the original essay which appeared in Signs (1981), to be later reprinted in The New Feminist Criticism, ed. Elaine Showalter, 314-338. 26 Although Sexton wrote on 17 July 1970, that she was "having an awfully good time" writing Transformations. she attempted suicide in mid-AUgust (Letters 321-322). 27 Robert Scholes proposes another utilitarian use for marriage beyond fairy tale closure: "Marriage is a sacrament of structuralism," he concludes (Structuralism in Literature. Yale UP, 1974). 28 July 1970: 75. 29 "Adultery" from Fallingr May Day Sermon, and Other Poems. rpt. in The Whole Motion: Collected Poems 1945-1992 (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1992), 262-3; "Punishment" from North (1975), rpt. in Poems 1965-1975 (New York: Farrar, 1980), 192-3. 30 Elaine Showalter's term in "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness" identifies an area of experience which she finds particular to women-— conceptually drawn as a crescent which results when the circle of the experience of a female "muted" group which cannot intersect in a commonality with the circle of male "dominant" experience. This area outside the dominant boundary becomes the "wild zone" of women's culture only; here the consciousness produces a woman's text as "a playful abstraction" (162). Women's "double-voiced discourse" informs not only gynocentric criticism, I believe, but the women's humor. 31 See Pearson and Pope's perceptive analysis of the differences between adaptations of the mythic quest for male and female in The Female Hero 3-15. 32 "It would be simplistic to suggest that the Oedipal theme overrides all other considerations in Sexton's work, but a good case might be made for viewing her poems in terms of their guest for a male authority figure to love and 405 trust, Maxine Kumin proposes with equal sincerity and naivete in her Introduction to The Complete Poems (xxix). 33 Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation served as catalyst for expanding women's possiblities for change beyond their roles in institutional religion. 34 In 1968, Sexton writes to a friend, "I hardly ever get angry with people. Anger is the missing ingredient in ray personality . . " (Letters 301) With an interviewer in August of 1968, however, she discusses Silvia Plath's hate poems as "the one thing I had never dared to write. I'd always been afraid, even in my life, to express anger (NES 93). 35 Middlebrook 228. 36 In her introduction to the biography Diane Middlebrook speculates that Sexton's life "might have ended silently and much earlier if she had not, almost miraculously, found something to do with it" (xxi). 37 "All God's Children Need Radios," Colburn, NES 26. 38 Laughter is "the spectacular end of a complex process . . . a culmination of feeling— the crest of a wave of felt vitality. . . . A sudden sense of superiority entails such a lift of vital feeling," Susan Langer observes (P. Lauter 512). 39 Sexton's "soul-making" failed to save her life, Estella Lauter concludes, in part because she follows (uneasily) the myth of the crucifixion and a corollary identification with the Father: "she embraces the confidence man she had describe^ as loafing around heaven desiring a body to house his soul (Awful Rowing 24), because he outwits her in their decisive poker game (Awful Rowing 85-86)" (44). Lauter finds that Sexton's quest to rid herself of the tyranny of God the Father was "defeated by the anonymity of her goddess images" (42). 40 James Kincaid makes a similar but more heartening point: ". . . laughter is a means of having it both ways; it reassures us of our social being (we are part of a chorus), but also . . . of our own Invincible and isolated ego. . .It moves toward a coalition, but it is a coalition of joyful people dedicated to freedom and play; order is at best, secondary." (The Laughter of Dickens 14-15) Sexton's persona may still cling to "having it both ways," but she has clearly moved through the "coalition" to a freedom from the imposed order of sexual dominance. 406 41 Jean Tepperman's poem "The Witch" (1969) from No More Masks 1 ends with a figure that evokes Sexton's persona from "Her Kind" as well as the attitudinal response of her poker- playing persona here: We are screaming, we are flying, laughing, and won't stop. (334) 42 Estella Lauter states that "her vision of Him as the winner in a crooked pOker game at the end of that book is a sporting admission of her defeat rather than a decisive renewal of the Christian myth" (qtd. by Kurain in Introduction to The Complete Poems xxxi). Maxine Kumin replies, "On one level, I agree. But on another, even more primitive level, God the poker-player was the one living and constant Daddy left to Sexton out of the 'Death of the Fathers.' 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