Amanda Burns & Ashley Billman
Howe 335
March 19, 2006
Annotated Bibliography
Saccamano, Neil. "Wit's Break." Body & Text in the Eighteenth Century. Ed. by Veronica Kelly and Dorothea Von Mücke. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. 45-67.
Neil Saccamano explores the relationship between the body, language, and violence in the eighteenth century and how the relationship is inextricable from epistemological studies as a function of cultural and political production. By examining the development and use of wit in the eighteenth century, Saccamano demonstrates the power of language as a vehicle for transmitting value and creating a sense of value in a culture. As a result, wit, if used incorrectly or misunderstood, has the ability to harm or even incite violence: “In the eighteenth century, the question of wit or figural language often seems to lead to violence” (46). This article is useful because it delineates the idea of “true” and “false” wit in terms of proper usage of wit as an art form. Such a distinction illustrates why wit was so powerful in eighteenth century literature as well as why wit was the concern of many conduct manuals in its proper usage.
Saville, George, Lord Halifax. The Lady's New-year's Gift: or, Advice to a Daughter. London: D. Midwinter, at the Three Crowns in St. Paul's Church-yard, 1724. 68-82, 89-94.
Through various chapters of his conduct manual on religion, husband, house, family and children, censure, behavior and conversation and more, George Saville, Lord Halifax, presents the numerous rules to which a young lady, in particular his daughter, should adhere if she wishes to be a success in society. He analogizes the education and emergence of a young lady into the world to the care of a flower; if a young lady tends to these rules with care and is watchful in her social environment she will flourish as a good standing member of society just as a flower does under proper and mindful care. The chapters entitled "Behavior and Coversation" and "Censure" are particularly helpful because Saville directly addresses laughter and its proper usage for a young lady in the presence of company. Just as we see in Evelina, to laugh in public is a faux pas, and "is an unnatural Sound, and looketh too much like another Sex" and "throweth a Woman into a lower Form" (76-77). Additionally this conduct manual is helpful because it is a primary source and lends itself as an example of a rule book of social conduct that young ladies utilized through their emergence into society.
Gay, Peter. “The Bite of Wit.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 135(3); 327 – 331.
Gay argues that aggression is inherent in humor, specifically in the works of 18th and 19th century humorists and writers. He presents laughter, “a froth with a salt base” (327), as both a tool for self defense and vehicle for biting social commentary. Gay suggests that the humor of “a man slipping on a banana” is not simply physical. Instead, we laugh because we are not falling. According to Gay, this sort of vulgar humor worked because audiences “enjoyed to see others suffering mishaps because it indicated, tremendously, that one might be exempt from such involuntary pratfalls” (328). The bite of humor is also inherent in its function as a social regenerator. Writers of the age often imaged themselves as physician-humorists, relying on satire and caricature to “exploit and exacerbate the guilty conscience of the middle class” by way of “subversive humor” (330). The “bite of wit” is one way of approaching the idea of laugher and the function of ‘banana peel moments’ within the epistolary novel Evelina. The article also makes a strong case for the sadistic undercurrent pervading the bulk of humor during the period.
Poole, Kristen. The Fittest Closet for All Goodness: Authorial Strategies of Jacobean Mother’s Manuals. Studies in English Literature 35(1); 69-88.
Poole details the origins and implications of the first advice books written by women made popular during the 17th and 18th centuries. Her genealogy of the conduct manual begins in 1601, with a mother’s manual written by a man in the guise of a woman. The maternal voice invoked by Thomas Rowe was a “strategy for entering the discourse of advice,” (70) a literary niche which women writers themselves began to secure for themselves. Women writers found a space for authorship by entering into the “debate over the parameters of a woman’s social space” (71). Paradoxically, the revolutionary female writer produced conduct manuals in support of traditional beliefs regarding feminine virtue, restraint, and silence. The advice genre itself was built on a paradox. At once public and private, such books were often written directly to the author’s children and yet proliferated through out the public sphere. Poole likens this duality to a woman standing in a doorway, “publicly speaking out yet only to her children” (74). Early women authors used biblical mandate, social responsibility, and their own biological maternity as justifications for their advice manuals. It was their job as the mother figure to provide “spiritual food” (76) for their offspring. They were merely “fulfilling the dictates of their own heavenly advisors” (77). Poole’s examination of the origins of the advice genre works to contextualize and inform later conduct manuals and epistolary novels such as Pamela and Evelina.