The Rhetoric of Women’s Humour in Barbara Pym’s Fiction. Naghmeh Varghaiyan

women nor women’s humour were considered important by official culture. Nobody knew Barbara Pym or was concerned with women’s writing and humour. I began reading Pym’s Some Tame Gazelle for the funny reason that I liked her name. What stuck in my memory was Pym’s unique and specific humour. I decided to write my PhD dissertation on women’s humour in her novels. The path was thorny and long since there was no study on women’s humour at that time. However, I was lucky enough to have the support of my dear parents and friends, including my thesis advisor Assoc. Prof. Dr. Mustafa Zeki Çıraklı. I appreciate his help. I am also deeply thankful to Barbara Pym scholar Dr. Orna Raz for her invaluable encouragement, help and friendship.

      Years later, with the encouragement of my husband, I decided to rework my dissertation into a book. Orna Raz kindly accepted to write the preface. I am also grateful to Rose Little and Deirdre Bryan-Brown for providing me with Barbara Pym’s books from England. I thank Susan Mednick Bramson for sharing her views on Barbara Pym. The greatest thanks of all go to Assoc. Prof. Dr. Kerem Nayebpour, my husband, for his valuable comments, constant support, and kindness. He helped me to pursue my dream of a PhD and did all he could to provide a peaceful environment, so that I could study and write my dissertation. He also contributed much to the revision of the manuscript. This book could not be published without his contribution and support. I also appreciate and thank our dear friend, a painter himself, Buyuk Budagi, for his excellent suggestion for the front cover of this book.

      May the world one day acknowledge the importance of women’s literature and humour.

Abbreviations

      EW Excellent Women

      JP Jane and Prudence

      STG Some Tame Gazelle

Preface by Orna Raz

      Ever since the 1950s, when her books first emerged on the literary scene, Barbara Pym has been roundly praised for her brilliant sense of humor. Her original audience appreciated her satirically incisive depictions of everyday life and her many slyly topical references, and contemporary readers continue to enjoy her sparkling wit and gently ironic social critique. Pym’s humor has also been the subject of much praise by other writers: Alexander McCall Smith has maintained that “Excellent Women is one of the 20th century’s most endearing and amusing novels,” while Jilly Cooper discloses that “even an umpteenth reading [of Jane and Prudence] this weekend was punctuated by gasps of joy, laughter and wonder that this lovely book should remain so fresh, funny and true to life.”

      While Pym’s wit is generally acknowledged, very little specific research has been conducted about her employment of comic elements as a device. We might surmise that Pym’s humor has often been considered a merely decorative aspect of her novels, rather than an integral aspect of her craft, one that shaped her characterizations and plots, and formed an integral part of her protagonists’ engagements with – and the coping devices for navigating – the world depicted in her novels.

      It is thus a particular pleasure to introduce a new book which constitutes a significant contribution to Pym scholarship, one that centers on the subject of humor in her novels. Naghmeh Varghaiyan’s The Rhetoric of Women’s Humour in Barbara Pym’s Fiction is an important and insightful study of three early novels of Barbara Pym: Some Tame Gazelle (1950), Excellent Women (1952) and Jane and Prudence (1953). As Varghaiyan shows, Sevda Caliskan’s claim that traditionally “women and humor [have been regarded as] quite incompatible categories” (49) remains unfortunately relevant to this day. By focusing her investigation on Pym, Varghaiyan makes a convincing case for a specifically female sense of humor, countering the centuries-long tradition of mistakenly regarding such “writings related to comedy and humor […] as serious works since they differed from the established conventions of comic writings.”

      Following a comprehensive opening survey of attitudes towards the humorous works produced by female writers, Varghaiyan devotes the rest of her book to Pym’s early novels, of which at least two – Excellent Women and Jane and Prudence – are set in the post war era (the dating of the events in Some Tame Gazelle, which Pym began writing in the 1930s and revised after the second World War, is unclear). While Pym’s female characters are not overtly rebellious, they grow discontent with the patriarchal reality of their day, and their wry and often comic observations come to represent a mode of coping with the world. As Varghaiyan astutely notes, a good sense of humor can be both a matter of personal survival as well as a weapon. But although Pym's female characters turn to humor to cope with various distressing realities of their day – indignities ranging from the mundane (a shared bathroom in Excellent Women) to the existential (the loneliness of a young unmarried woman in Jane and Prudence) – they are never cruel, and their humor is not used to humiliate or belittle fellow human beings. In that regard, Varghaiyan argues, female humor in Pym’s work is different from conventional humor: it allows her heroines to undermine the authoritative power of the dominant male culture around them.

Writing this preface in the summer of 2020 amid the global COVID-19 pandemic affords a fresh and unexpected perspective from which to view Pym’s novels of the 1950s. Rereading Excellent Women, I feel like I better understand the crucial importance of comic moments in ameliorating the various hardships the characters encounter as they navigate their new postwar reality. On social media, members of the “Barbara Pym Fan Club” on Facebook report that her novels are a constant source of consolation. Just the other day, one member shared how rereading Some Tame Gazelle helped her get over her grumpiness about having to postpone her vacation this year, and another reader wrote that he kept returning to her books because they were “wickedly funny.”1

      During a recent spate of correspondence with Varghaiyan, in which we checked in on each other during the pandemic, we found ourselves chatting, as usual, about Pym, the reason why we first became friends several years ago. The humorist and academic Regina Barreca claims that humor (or comedy) is the least universal textual territory. But perhaps the case of my friendship with Varghaiyan proves that Pym’s humor transcends “age, race, ethnic background, and class.” After all, Varghaiyan and I are probably as distant a readership as Pym could have ever imagined: two women living in the Middle East: a Muslim and a Jew bound in friendship through our mutual admiration for her novels, with their humorous depictions of wry spinsters and bumbling curates; jumble sales and the ritual and hierarchy of tea pouring. If a stronger argument exists for the importance of appreciating female humor, I am eager to hear it.

      Introduction

      This book explores the basic characteristics and functions of women’s humour in British novelist Barbara Pym’s Some Tame Gazelle (STG), Excellent Women (EW) and Jane and Prudence (JP). The heroines featured in these novels manage to survive in a patriarchal culture through their personalities and humour. Guided by Pym’s structural and thematic strategies, their subversive humour undermines the authoritative power of the dominating culture. Although this study focuses on subjects, themes, and topics that are relevant to women, Pym did not have an openly feminist agenda. But since, as Michael Cotsell points out, “any study of Pym must keep in mind that its subject is a woman author, exploring one phase of women’s experience” (7), feminist concerns have to be considered in an analysis of her work.

      Although theories of humour have undergone fundamental changes, they have mostly remained under the influence of the standards set by the dominant patriarchal perspectives. Accordingly, the classical theory of humour has failed to provide an adequate set of terminology, or effective technical tools with which to analyse the specific sense of humour of female writers.

      This study is based on terminologies offered by forerunners of the theory of women’s writing such as Eileen Gillooly, Regina Barreca, and Nancy Walker. Dismissing conventional theories of humour in female writing, this study aims to offer an alternative approach to such humour as instantiated by Pym’s novels.

      Barreca highlights the inadequacy of conventional theories of humour in relation to female comical writing. According to her study, comedy has been traditionally defined in these ways: as a “celebration of fertility and regeneration,” as