Tracing the eighteenth-century literary origins of the “feminist killjoy” archetype

In this provocative literary history, Rebecca Anne Barr reveals how the high-minded heroine of Samuel Richardson’s tragic Clarissa provided a lasting template for female humorlessness in service of morality. Killjoy Comedy traces Clarissa’s influence in a series of intelligent, moral and thoroughly obstinate female protagonists whose unhappiness fueled both cultural critique and comic misfires in 1750s fiction. Even as women writers recognized difficulty as a source of empowerment, they refused to wholly abandon their sense of humor, creating experimental fictions that mixed wit and morality, seriousness and mirth.

Killjoy Comedy exposes how the cultural potency, negative energy, and performative politics of the female scold were established in the mid-eighteenth century novel and influenced the dissident heroines of Mary Wollstonecraft, Austen’s Mansfield Park, and Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and left a legacy that can still be felt today. Barr not only challenges our perception of gender, genre, and humor in 1750s fiction, she also provides an arresting comparison with the cultural politics of the present.