Authors
Fanny Fern (1811–1872) and Elizabeth Drew Stoddard (1823–1902)
Bibliography: Fanny Fern
Bibliography: Elizabeth Drew Stoddard
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Questions for Discussion and Writing
Fanny Fern was an agile and polished satirist whose work reveals a political edge and flashes of anger; her prose radiates elegance and verve that can remind you of Jane Austen. In comparison, Stoddard can seem idiosyncratic or quirky. Her women, old and young, say what they think flat-out, in ways that would make even Elizabeth Bennett blush. Rich Aunt Eliza dishes it out to Margaret, and Margaret, a young woman of modest means sent to be a compliant caretaker, dishes it right back; both of them seem to delight in the frankness, even the outright rudeness. Moreover, Stoddard’s narratives seem to jump and twist on the page, and reading her is a constant encounter with the unexpected. Stoddard was only about a dozen years younger than Fanny Fern, but when we read them in tandem, we can see American comic writing by women achieve what Margaret Huell calls a “striking” – a sudden move toward the fast cadences and surprises of modern comedy.
1. Compare the two aunts as comic characters – Fanny Fern’s Aunt Hetty, and Stoddard’s Aunt Eliza. Read aloud a few lines of Aunt Hetty’s monologue, and then compare some lines from Stoddard involving Aunt Eliza versus Margaret as they go back and forth. What differences do you sense in how these people talk? There are many other comic aunts – “maiden aunts” or widows – in nineteenth century imaginative literature: Betsy Trotwood in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield is probably the most famous. In stories about growing up and making your own way in life, why are aunts especially useful – more so, perhaps, than mothers or other family members – as sources of comedy?
2. American culture now brims with comedy, and practically anyone can access fresh material in a matter of seconds. Even in the midst of a war we seem to have no end of jokes, sit-coms, cartoons, and laugh tracks. Imagine the historical moment for the Fanny Fern sketches and also for “Lemorne versus Huell.” Humor was more scarce: only a few thousand new books per year were being published in the United States around 1850, and large-circulation magazines were just beginning to reach the national market. Also, many American religious groups frowned on indulgence in levity. We can also remember that Stoddard’s comedy, about love and lawsuits among the comfortable classes in Newport, was published in 1863 – the very middle of the Civil War, when news of bloody battles commanded the front pages of the national journals. In those contexts, what cultural roles could light pieces by Fern and Stoddard play at the time but not today?