In 1892, professor and literary critic John Bell Henneman addressed the Virginia Literary Society of the State Female Normal School of Farmville, Virginia. Henneman would go on to some academic prominence, helping to edit in the early years of the twentieth-century, for example, the multivolume series, South in the Building of the Nation (1909-1913) and overseeing for time the publication of the Sewanee Review. But in 1892 he was professor at neighboring Hampden-Sydney College, who took for his lecture's title The Nineteenth Century Woman in Literature His subject matter was natural choice given his audience, he explains, and given the fact that are actually at the root of many of history's turning points: man's loss of innocence in the Garden of Eden, the outbreak of the Greek and Trojan War, the dissolution of Antony's empire. Now, in this period of the emancipation of women (3), Henneman professes, are still busy, engaged in coquetting with, and in wooing, and in many instances in successfully capturing every employment, every occupation, every field of literature, art, and even science (3). Though Hennemann's chivalric flourishes throughout his speech surely suggest man who wanted to woo his own audience, the subtext of his early remarks seems clear: woman could be dangerous, her ambitions were many, and subterfuge was her surest ally. My interest in women's writing is prompted by an interest in that subterfuge, by an interest in how authors say what they mean by not appearing to mean what they say. Long denied access to as tool for delivering message, while seemingly unaware of or uncommitted to its content, have historically been thought unfunny. Daniel Wickberg, in his recent study of the concept of having a sense of argues that humor, as we understand that word today, really emerges in the mid to late nineteenth century, when humor begins to refer to a mode of representation rather than to the laughable qualities possessed by individuals, as it had been earlier understood. A then, comes to mean self-conscious creator of (29). Yet just as the role of the humorist is being defined in the nineteenth century, are being excluded from exercising its power: show sense of remarked writer for the Nation in 1866 (qtd in Wickberg 82). In the last fifteen years, however, scholars and readers have at last confirmed what Kate Sanborn, editor of Wit of Women, observed in 1885: have consistently written and society has persistently failed to recognize it as such. Recent critical essays and anthologies have begun to rectify what Nancy Walker once termed the very invisibility of American women's by suggesting that have long history of appropriating the role of the humorist, that they have created specific literary forms to bear the weight of their comedic efforts, and that they have turned to to serve purposes distinctive from those of their male counterparts (10). Southern seldom appear in such studies, however. Not until Barbara Bennett's recent examination of southern women's humor, Comic Visions, Female Voices: Contemporary Women Novelists and Southern Humor (1998), do we encounter sustained effort to examine the South's intersection with gender and the production of humor. In her wide reading of southern women's novels published since 1970, Bennett argues persuasively that have used satire to debunk specifically southern icons (the southern lady) and codes of behavior (southern honor). Women have used humor, Bennett asserts, to create themselves, to unite themselves, and to transgress culturally prescribed boundaries. Yet as Bennett's opening chapter intimates, southern women's is not phenomenon of the twentieth century's last thirty years. In fact it stretches far beyond even the mid-century authors whom critics generally regard as humorous--Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor, for instance--although even their uses of remain largely unexamined. …