“Beyond the money, he would take nothing” A Literary Analysis of Stephen Leacock’s Stereotyped characters

Davi Gonçalves,Luciana Rassier

doi:10.35572/rlr.v9i2.1601

Abstract

Cognisant that humorous narratives rely in many occasions on some stereotypes that have already become second nature for those who are reading them, the purpose of this analysis is to make out if and, if so, how the narrator of Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (LEACOCK, 1912) makes use of these stereotypes as to put them into question. For that to be achieved, we shall highlight and scrutinise the ironic tone of his/her descriptions in two specific moments of the narrative: 1) The hiring of a metropolitan speaker for addressing the candidacy discourses prior to the elections; and 2) The investigation carried out in Mariposa to solve the bank mystery. As to identify how the narrator develops this critique upon the stereotyping of both the novel’s saviour and the villain (i.e. the speaker and the vagrant who robs the town’s bank), we recur mainly to the elaborations on irony as a humorous artefact set forth by Constance Rourke in the book American Humour (1959) as well as to Peter Flynn’s ideas on stereotypical images available in Interconnecting Translation Studies and Imagology (2015).

Highlights

Leacock’s Colourful Individuals[1]Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), considered by many one of the most enduring classics of Canadian humorous literature, comprises comic scenes taking place in a fictional village called Mariposa
According to Gerald Lynch, the fictional Mariposa represents a typical Early XX Century Canadian town divided between the urban and the rural; populated with what he calls colourful individuals, “it is the place from which many affluent city-dwellers migrated, the community which they have partly forgotten, and the ‘home’ towards which they nostalgically yearn
Cognisant that humorous narratives rely in many occasions on some stereotypes that have already become second nature for those who are reading them, the purpose of our analysis is to make out if and, if so, how the narrator of Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (LEACOCK, 1912) makes use of these stereotypes as to put them into question

Summary

Introduction

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), considered by many one of the most enduring classics of Canadian humorous literature, comprises comic scenes taking place in a fictional village called Mariposa. That the novel intermingles the past, present and future through the advent of memory and imagination – asking us to accept the unacceptable and to follow the illogical structuring of “facts” For this brief analysis we shall focus on two comic scenes developed by Leacock’s (1912) narrator in the chapter where s/he tells us about the day before the elections as well as in a previous chapter, in which the event concerns a supposed attempt to rob the bank of Mariposa. Thereby, as the following topics are gradually developed, we shall 1) present more thoroughly our object of research, 2) provide a more general discussion regarding the relevance of stereotypes for meaning making and identity articulations, 3) analyse if and, if so, how Leacock’s (1912) narrator makes use of stereotyping as a humorous artifice, and 4) reflect upon the manner how any of this proves to be relevant when the process of translating this novel into Brazilian Portuguese is brought onto the arena

An unnamed speaker

Looking for a Suspect