Creating Comic Community: Scathing Epithets, Caricature, and Comic Violence

This chapter provides a closer look at Parton’s comic style, examining her caustic portraits of types and the way that her penchant for epithets evokes the ritual roots of satire, which includes curses. When Fanny Fern exposes the contradiction of the satirist guised as amiable, she creates laughter against normative views of gender that might be, ironically, called hysterical. That exposure effectively crosses a boundary from amiable to acerbic satirist. Parton thus necessarily rewrites the comic belles lettres lady of the Addisonian stripe into a laughing Medusa, that image summarizing so much of the contemporary criticism of her work. Rather than pretending otherwise, Sara Parton embraces that uptake as Medusa with a satiric style containing the most caustic of comic phrasing, as aggressive as any male author writing satire.