A Republic of Laughter: Marietta Holley and the Production of Women’s Public Humour in the Late-Nineteenth-Century United States

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Marietta Holley enjoyed massive success as one of the most popular American humourists. Known as “the female Mark Twain” (Curry xiii). Holley blended dialect and regional humour into a new, democratic and transformative genre that challenged conventional representations of women’s emotional life and their relation to public and political spaces. In this paper, I define the genre of humour writing Holley helped to fashion, “women’s public humour,” and situate it in relation to political and social notions of the public, especially those fractured along gender lines, that were of key interest to the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century U.S. humour industry.