“You make everything into a joke”: the forward-looking feminism of Elaine Dundy and Barbara Pym

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article considers two popular novels of the 1950s, Barbara Pym's Excellent Women (1952) and Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado (1958), whose sophisticated comic and satiric techniques exemplify overlooked forms of feminist creative and intellectual labor within the post-war years, while also anticipating contemporary modes of feminist comedy. Though the novels seem at first to reflect common stereotypes around single women, their narrators’ strategic use of self-deprecation and satire undercuts those initial impressions and challenges assumptions regarding not only single women but romance and sexuality more broadly. In addition, Pym and Dundy counter a typical understanding of self-deprecation as uniformly reinforcing a patriarchal view of women, instead offering a new conception of the mode's feminist potential. Finally, by situating these texts within a satiric tradition, my reading expands an understanding of satire to one that better incorporates the historically more subtle and sympathy-driven work of female novelists.