Gendered Comic Traditions: How Fanny Fern's Satire Subverts Nineteenth-Century Colonial Continuity and Enables Twenty-First Century Neocolonial Hybridity

Abstract

Abstract This article offers examples from the antebellum period that bear out Judith Lee's matters of empire framework; it exposes the ways in which American humor both continues and breaks away from its English antecedents, showing in particular how Sara Willis Parton as Fanny Fern does and does not fit into aesthetic and philosophical parameters about satire and satirists that can be traced back to English periodicals. After outlining a colonial continuity through a discussion of Parton and two contemporaries, Lewis Gaylord Clark and William Makepeace Thackeray, I go on to suggest that Parton's Fanny Fern persona also functions as a symbolic origin for a genealogy of women satirists who evoke Hélène Cixous's image of a laughing Medusa, a genealogy I describe as a neocolonial hybrid because it details American women writing satire to mock and resist the domestic imperium of US patriarchy.