American Women Humorists

Abstract

Novels are fine things. I adore curling up with a good novel, whether in anticipation of the special excitement that comes from reading a novel that I have never read before or the more complex pleasures of rereading a great novel that I have already read many times. In fact, I prepared for my trip to Oklahomal-a state that I have never visited before-by reading a novel I had never read before: Edna Ferber's Cimarron, published in 1930, but chronicling "the opening of Oklahoma" in 1889. Ferber explains that though she did significant research for the book, both in the Oklahoma State House Library and by talking with "a score of bright-eyed, white haired, intensely interesting women of 65 or thereabouts," her book is not an "attempt to set down a literal history of Oklahoma." "In many cases," she writes, "material entirely true was discarded as unfit for use because it was so melodramatic, so absurd as to be too strange for the realm of fic tion." In the non-novelistic world of "true history," on the other hand, Ferber declares, "Anything can have happened in Oklahoma. Practically everything has."2 Ferber's successful career as a novelist, as she appreciated, rested on other kinds of pioneer women, the earlier women novelists of the eigh teenth and nineteenth centuries. But it also rested on the accomplish ments of pioneer women writers of nonfiction who had challenged cultural assumptions about women's capacities to understand the larger world beyond the problems of adolescent courtship and domestic life. Given this invitation to reflect on the twenty-five years of scholarship on women's writing since the first appearance of Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature in 1982, I thought I would reflect upon one matter that struck me as I read through this scholarship in the course of working on my Literary History of Women's Writing in Britain, 1660-1789. This is the still-present temptation to make our history of women's writing a history of women writing novels and the temptation to use novels as the primary source of our imaginative contact with the lives and minds of eighteenth-century women. I say "our" here speaking as a literary scholar, my original role and one to which I am always happy to return despite occasional excursions into other disciplines. Feminist scholars in other disciplines usually do not succumb to this temptation. Indeed, one advantage of the interdisciplin ary character of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies is