Sara Payson Willis Parton’s (Comic) Preacher, Fanny Fern

This chapter shows Parton the comic writer functioning in the role of what William Thackeray called “the humorist writer [as] the week-day preacher.” As comic preacher, Fanny Fern consistently challenges the cult of true womanhood, with its four cardinal virtues: “piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity.” Parton instead advanced her own ironic, even carnivalesque, version of being domestic and submissive. While her purity might be doubted because she was frank about bodies and sexual desire, she could nevertheless certainly lay claim to being pious—but again in her own idiom, supposedly creating “artistic schizophrenia.” This chapter suggests how that metaphor of a split personality might be emended by conceptualizing Fanny Fern as a comic preacher operating within a bourgeois carnival, a comic preacher displaying affinities with mythic tricksters.