Satirizing Gender Expectations: Fanny Fern as the Impossible Subject

This chapter examines at length the core topic for Parton as satirist: gendered expectations for behavior, which entails exploring masculinity as well as femininity, with patriarchy as primary butt. Though this topic includes the more explicitly public side of Fanny Fern—her comic takes on the mores of the day, on women as literary domestics, on women’s rights, and on women’s strategies to gain those rights—in Parton’s satiric world the private is also the public in the sense that she was committed to the common good.