Ivory towers and Ivory Soap: Composition, housewife humor and domestic gothic, 1940--1970 (Erma Bombeck, Jean Kerr, Shirley Jackson)

In this dissertation I focus on post-World War II American socio-cultural scenes that set the conditions for a wave of women's domestic humor writing that had not been seen since the nineteenth century. I argue that the "housewife humor" of Shirley Jackson, Jean Kerr and Erma Bombeck serves as an original and important tool for interrogating feminisms, genre, culture, and writing practices. I investigate the post-War impulse of university English departments toward specialization and professionalization as they experienced an unprecedented wave of non-traditional students. Along these lines, I argue that New Criticism's intellectual anxiety with differentiating literature from student productions contributes to the official "untheorizing" of domestic humor writing and similarly marginalized genres and un/authorized writing.; This dissertation also explores critical conversations circulating around the domestic comedy of Jackson, Kerr and Bombeck, outlooks that variously claim this work as promoting values that honor women's work and women's communities and as damaging these interests. I engage with these conversations, their counter-arguments and the primary texts to claim that, as can other critically disenfranchised writing practices, housewife humor demonstrates a resistant agency, especially through its rhetoric of self-disparagement that has long troubled critical, especially feminist, evaluations of the genre.; "Peanut Butter and Gothic Jelly: Domestic Humor as the Female Gothic" (chapter three) presents an original paradigm, the "domestic gothic," which I use to assert that the pathos of the female gothic is also one of the conceits of domestic comedy. Understanding that contemporary feminist evaluations seek to reconcile the critically acclaimed "other" work of writers such as Jackson, who also wrote gothic short stories and novels, and Kerr, a Broadway playwright, I generate an understanding that "serious" writers of other genres can also be serious writers of personal domestic struggle. I argue housewife comedy as a genre haunted by mother figures and rooted in a female body coded as an abject body (a shared subjectivity with the student body). This dissertation asserts that housewife humor can be theorized through looking at the genre's haunted/haunting spaces that provide its powerful and sustaining aspects as well as protest the entropic, liminal nature of work required of women.