Abstract
Laughter is often viewed as a form of self-evident body
language, its significance being universal across time and culture.
This study examines, however, instances of merriment that carry
different meanings within different cultural moments. Exploring the
ways in which laughter in post-Jacksonian America was bound
intimately with cultural conceptions of happiness, morality, and
both mental and physical health, I argue that its depiction -
whether in the marketplace, in the discourse of reform, or, indeed,
in aesthetics - comprises a rich but largely unexamined shifting
political discourse about social identity and democratic rights.
Telling Laughter contends that humor of this era was the site of
complicated debate between striving for an expanded democracy and
maintaining the status quo. This investigation of the strained
logic of differentiation between the laughter of full citizens and
that of marginalized or non-citizens sheds light upon the ways the
laughing bodies were interpreted during a time in which the more
"constant" state of a body - its sex and race - determined its
civil rights. Depictions of hysterical women and "happy darkeys"
evince the willful misreading of sexed and raced bodies in the
throes of hilarity. Telling Laughter foregrounds context by
gathering and comparing visual and textual rhetorical maneuvers on
the topic of hilarity in order to show the confluence of commercial
markets, reform movements, and the desires of their publics. With
examinations of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Henry Clay Lewis's
"The Curious Widow," Paul Laurence Dunbar's The Sport of the Gods,
and more brief treatments of authors including Thoreau, Hawthorne,
and Stowe, I evince that culturally-historicized readings of
laughing bodies bring into relief the interactivity of these
authors and the popular press in engaging with the political issue
of the extension of democratic rights. Finally, Telling Laughter
highlights literary and popular instances in which marginalized
subjects utilize laughter to shatter stereotypes and be heard.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Introduction: Stories of
Laughter………………………………………………..……..1
Chapter 1: Selling Laughter on the Antebellum
Marketplace….….….21
Chapter 2: Resuscitating
Reformers………………………………………………...69
Chapter 3: Melville's Laughing
Evangel…………….………….…………………104
Chapter 4: The Impelling Laughter of Henry Clay Lewis's
Curious Widow
and Pierre Janet's Irène
…………..………………..………………..140
Conclusion……………………………………….............………………………………….174
Bibliography…………………………………………............……………………………..195
About this Dissertation
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