Review | New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century
Reviewed by Allison Nick, Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies
In New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century, Sabrina Fuchs Abrams offers an enlightening glimpse into the writing and self-fashioning of the “foremothers of women’s humor” from the interwar era: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, Tess Slesinger, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Dawn Powell, and Mary McCarthy (1). These women writers share a commitment to humor as a form of truth-telling that gives voice to the marginalized and articulates their own complicated relationships to gender. Fuchs Abrams delves into the motivations for, and purpose and efficacy of, humor in mid-century U.S. women’s writing to understand why scholars have tended to overlook women humorists in general and the satire of these interwar writers in particular. New York Women of Wit questions the extent to which humor can effect political and cultural change and whether irony and satire are by nature subversive modes of writing.
As a feminist recovery project, New York Women of Wit combines summaries and close readings of lesser-known texts—like Millay’s mock advice columns in Vanity Fair—with analysis of the broader interwar contexts in which these women were writing. These include the fraught categories of the New Woman and New Negro Woman in intellectual sites like Greenwich Village, Harlem, and literary institutions like the Partisan Review. Situating her monograph in the field of humor studies, Fuchs Abrams argues that “the female satirist is in a unique position as . . . an outsider operating within mainstream society” and that these women can thus offer a “dual perspective” that leads to the “ironic, double-voiced, or dialogical” quality of women’s satirical writing (2). According to Fuchs Abrams, this “double-voiced irony,” combined with their own “feminist fashioning,” allowed a “masking of their subversive message” necessary at a time when stereotypical gender roles precluded women from being humorous, witty, or critical (2). Though many of these “women of wit” relied on gender stereotypes in their writing, Fuchs Abrams shows that the writers use a “double-voiced humor…in order to subvert them”—and thus Fuchs Abrams emphasizes the importance of attending to subtext and double-meaning when reading these satirists (18).
Together the six chapters in New York Women of Wit situate these writers amidst the predominantly male intellectual circles with which they were associated and the competing versions of womanhood prevalent in these circles. In the first chapter, Fuchs focuses on Millay’s series of satiric sketches, written under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd, in which the poet poked fun at gender roles in the “antimaterialism and antiestablishment” of her bohemian Greenwich Village surroundings (46). The second chapter turns to Parker, a Jewish woman doubly marginalized in the “vicious circle” of the Algonquin Round Table. Fuchs Abrams analyzes Parker’s monologue skits to show the use of a “double voice of social propriety and inner desire” to parody the contentious figure of the New Woman and the hypocrisy of the New York elite (51, 58). Fuchs Abrams’s third chapter explores Slesinger’s “socialist feminist novel,” The Unpossessed: A Novel of the Thirties, in which Slesinger satirizes the contradictory expectations of the supposedly liberating free-love lifestyle of the New Woman, especially amidst the predominantly male, leftist intellectuals of the Menorah Journal group (87). The fourth chapter, one of Fuchs Abrams’s strongest, does the most work of feminist recovery by reclaiming Fauset’s largely overlooked “sentimental fiction,” centering on Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral as a carefully constructed work of satire that “subvert[s] the sentimental romance genre” to critique the racial, gender, and class expectations that informed discourses of “racial uplift, purity, and respectability,” and inhered in representations of the New Negro Woman (113, 120). Fuchs Abrams’s reading of Powell’s “democratic satire,” in chapter five, shows how Powell satirizes the “herd instinct and profit motive” of the publishing industry in New York City, an urban environment both cosmopolitan yet increasingly commercial (142, 154, 157). In her final chapter, Fuchs Abrams analyzes McCarthy’s dark satire of the “false ideals of progress among the leftist intellectuals,” namely those of the anti-Stalinist Partisan Review set, and her use of comedy as a coping mechanism for “the more serious issue of gender subordination and sexual violation” (173, 181).
New York Women of Wit excels as a cultural-historical foray into gender in interwar New York City. Fuchs Abrams approaches the feminine self-fashioning of each writer with nuance, celebrating the deftness with which these women managed contradictory understandings of gender roles and performed multiple forms of womanhood. That is to say, as Fuchs Abrams points out, their humorous writings are neither wholly conservative nor entirely subversive. Fuchs Abrams unpacks the relationship between the respective public personae of these women and their depictions of femininity to reposition the often too-fixed figures of the New Woman and the New Negro Woman. On this topic, the chapter on Slesinger shines brightest; Fuchs Abrams considers how Slesinger’s satire taps into discussions of women’s roles in broader political movements. As Fuchs Abrams argues, Slesinger’s parody of the “ineffectual male intellectual” also indicts the sexual politics of leftist circles at the time. In these circles, which saw sexual liberation as the primary road to liberation for the New Woman, sexual freedom furthered essentialist views of gender, reducing “women to their biological, reproductive function,” and led to unwanted abortions, which Slesinger portrays as acts “of submission to a patriarchal authority that considers parenthood to be an expression of bourgeois, domestic life to be avoided” (96). I also enjoyed Fuchs Abrams’ carefully threaded through-line about the social effects that laughter can offer, for example, in the contrast between the joyful laughter of the Black community and the ironic laughter of white bohemians in Fauset’s Plum Bun, where laughter serves to accentuate Paulette’s attempts to navigate both her “alienation among white, bourgeois society” and the “stereotype of racial uplift and bourgeois respectability of the New Negro” (131-2).
In each chapter, Fuchs Abrams brings alive New York City’s vibrant interwar intellectual contexts. She sustains the thread of “double-voiced irony” and the political effects of satire throughout the book, but the mechanical differences between humor, irony, and satire often felt muddled because these terms were applied indiscriminately to each writer, despite their distinct humor styles. I found myself wondering whether some contrast between the writers’ use of this double voice might illuminate the advantages of these different modes. Do the white satirists discuss race or critique white intellectuals in the same way Fauset does? Several of the writers discuss taboo topics like abortion, but are they writing about it in the same way? Fuchs Abrams does, as already noted, tease out the contradictions in these authors’ engagement with femininity and gender stereotypes, and this analytical subtlety could be more carefully applied to the more problematic aspects of their humor: Millay’s use of Chinese stereotypes, for example, Parker’s jokes at the expense of women, or McCarthy’s humor about sexual violation. Fuchs Abrams mentions and identifies these themes, but she does not analyze them fully in terms of the limitation of these writers’ privileged, white perspectives.
Overall, Fuchs Abrams recovers an array of women’s writing in under-appreciated literary modes, such as the shorter skits and sketches of Parker and Millay, and brings them to our collective scholarly attention. Fuchs Abrams’s thoughtful attention to interwar historical and cultural contexts makes New York Women of Wit an excellent contribution to discussions of the subversive nature of satire and irony, the re-fashioning of cultural memory of interwar womanhood, and feminist scholarship on literary institutions. New York Women of Wit is an excellent resource for those interested in gender in the interwar period, especially the role of the New Woman and New Negro Woman in radical intellectual circles, and the intersection of humor and social politics.