The Modern Feminine in the Medusa Satire of Fanny Fern

James E. Caron’s single-author study on Fanny Fern (the pen name of Sara Payson Willis Parton) draws on both feminist theory and humor studies to reposition her as a central feminist satirist in American literature—or, as Caron puts it in one of my favorite phrases from the book, “the grandmother of all so-called nasty women” (183). The book richly contextualizes Fern’s entry into the nineteenth-century American literary marketplace and the reception of her work in it, rightfully treating her as essential reading.The introduction first offers a thorough overview of Fern scholarship and a historically situated theoretical definition of her satire. Caron relishes the “plunge into the social, political, and economic turmoil of the United States from the 1790s to the 1850s” required to review the scholars who have addressed Fern (1). Sara Parton’s writings have been analyzed as sentimental fiction, comic fiction, feminist manifestos, writings that both question and codify the cult of true womanhood, and so on. Caron ably guides readers to an understanding of how such disparate readings are made possible by Fern’s “trickster quality” (13), a persona used by Parton to negotiate the fraught expectations faced by women authors. Caron asserts that Fern nestled into an emergent aesthetic (comic belle lettres) that valued amiable humor and feminized satire and hence enabled a clever woman like Parton to enter an otherwise male-dominated literary space, though not without difficulty. “Her Fanny Fern persona,” Caron explains, “did not comfortably fit the modern regime of aesthetic truth about amiable satire, but neither did it simply revert to the old-school version of caustic aggression inevitably marked as masculine” (17). When Fern is most aggressive and overtly feminist, Caron labels her a “Medusa satirist—beautiful and laughing,” riffing on Hélène Cixous’s theory of écriture féminine. The Medusa satirist gains power neither in “destroying [patriarchal] discourse nor creating something absolutely new” but instead by “establishing a third way that revises gendered expectations” (18).In subsequent chapters, Caron substantiates this theoretical conceptualization of the Medusa satirist by examining Parton’s entry into the literary marketplace as a comic preacher, her purposefully nebulous relationship with her readership, her evasions of gender expectations, and the somewhat surprising patience evinced by her readership for her most bellicose comic outbursts. In the first chapter, “Sara Payson Willis Parton’s (Comic) Preacher, Fanny Fern,” Caron connects Parton’s desire to offer amiable corrective humor to her personal, traumatic experiences. Scholars of Fern are familiar with the loss and patriarchal oppression that compelled her to pick up a pen and publish. Caron manages to refresh that familiar biography by layering his narrative with theoretical insights steeped in an awareness of nineteenth-century humor and satire. Comparing her adoption of a persona to Samuel Clemens’s adoption of Mark Twain, Caron suggests that Parton uses Fanny Fern as a mask that allows her to appear before a judgmental public as a comic preacher who “does not satirize sentimentality so much as she ridicules false feelings and promotes true ones” (43).While in his next chapter, “The Satirist and Her Public,” Caron clearly intends to position the persona of Fanny Fern as a “split personality” through which Parton evokes “sentiment and pathos and idealism” at the same time that she deploys “fierce satire” (49), the chapter is ultimately a fascinating example of cultural historicism that delineates both how readers responded to Fern’s performance and how Parton used her to tease, evade, and cajole her readership through a brilliant overview of reviews, responses, and fan mail correspondences. The section “Fanny Fern Flirts and Banters with the Public: The Public Flirts and Banters in Return” is one that anyone interested in gendered receptions of humor should read. By the end of the chapter, I found myself wondering if Samuel Clemens ever had to simultaneously fend off marriage proposals to Mark Twain while asserting his heterosexual attractiveness in order to sustain popularity. Sara Parton did, and Caron’s rendering of the history is a richly researched, theoretically nuanced boon to the field of humor studies.Chapters 3, 4, and 5, respectively titled “Satirizing Gender Expectations: Fanny Fern as the Impossible Subject,” “Creating Comic Community: Scathing Epithets, Caricature, and Comic Violence,” and “Constructing Fanny Fern as Satirist,” are Caron’s forums for example after example after example of Fern performing the laughing Medusa. He cleverly compares her “chain-lightning” to the tall tales of figures like Davy Crockett and Mike Fink (100, 129) and her characteristics to those of mythic trickster figures (106–7), describing her as “an American woman interacting with an American man as an equal, an implicitly political gesture signaled by the camaraderie of a human behavior called amiable laughter” (138). Caron supplies ample evidence that the pen name Fanny Fern gives Parton tremendous flexibility in how she deploys her satire. His thesis, though perhaps too often repeated in these chapters, grows more nuanced and compelling through his many examples.In light of the 2024 national election that yet again provided evidence that many Americans would rather vote a divisive strongman than a truly strong woman into power, the conclusion of The Modern Feminine in the Medusa Satire of Fanny Fern is an inspiring manifesto. Caron calls on his readers to “amplify the roster of women comic writers in the nineteenth century,” noting Anna Cora Mowatt and Elizabeth Stoddard as two figures who deserve more attention (179). He celebrates feminist theorists like Cynthia and Julie Willett, Kate Clinton, Jessyka Finley, and Katelyn Wood who bring new angles to the field of humor studies and reminds any twenty-first-century reader who might find herself feeling dejected that Sara Parton faced many “roadblocks to a writer career,” which were “put up by her family and society at large,” but she “nevertheless . . . persisted” (183). Overall, while Caron’s book may deal with a single author and focus mostly on the genre of satire, it is an important contribution—and model for—the fields of humor studies and gender studies.