American humor Critical Essay | Nancy Walker

Nancy Walker

SOURCE: "Wit, Sentimentality and the Image of Women in the Nineteenth Century," in American Studies, Vol. 22, No. 2, Fall, 1981, pp. 5-22.

In the following essay, Walker posits female humor writing as a challenge to the popular nineteenth-century notion of women as the frail and humorless keepers and producers of the "sentimental."

W. A. Jones Asserts That Women Cannot Be Humor Writers:

There is a body and substance in true wit, with a reflectiveness rarely found apart from a masculine intellect. . . . We know of no one writer of the other sex, that has a high character for humor—no Rabelais, no Sterne, no Swift, no Goldsmith, no Dickens, no Irving. The female character does not admit of it.

W. A. Jones, Graham's Illustrated Magazine, December, 1842.

In two articles in The Critic in 1884, Alice Wellington Rollins attempted to counter the conventional notion that a sense of humor was "that rarest of qualities in woman," as...
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