kvarterakademisk - Akademisk kvarter - Aalborg Universitet

akademiskacademic quarterkvarterThe Transgressive Literacy of the Comic Maidservant inTobias Smollett’s Humphry ClinkerKathleen AlvesThe maidservant’s unwitting punning operates as the mechanismthat conveys the obscene joke at her expense framed withinher poor literacy. “Good puns” contain the play of sound andsense, keeping themselves within the text, yielding meanings thatare additional but relevant to the word (Bates, 1999). Smollett’splay with sounds strongly suggests associations that exist regardlessof the sense of words, but the servant’s written language challengesthe neatness of such playful polysemy. Writing to fellowmaidservant Mary Jones, Win confuses the proper orthographicarrangements of words for comical substitutes. “County of Killoway”becomes “cunty of Killoway” (51). The jest of the poor literacyof the servant conveys itself clearly here and poses no problemsof recognition. A third meaning emerges as well and onlymakes sense within the social context of the “servant problem” inthe eighteenth century: disobedient, intractable, and promiscuousservants who were more loyal to their purse than to their employers.Social commentators wrote frequently on the problem of servantpromiscuity, seeing the proliferation of illegitimate children andvenereal disease tied specifically to the ungovernable sexuality ofservant women. Therefore, the signification of “county,” locatedin a sexually charged place of the female body, the pudendum,gestures to the communal characteristic of female servant sex. Thesuggestion can be discerned only in the distorted orthography ofthe servant’s limited skills in literacy. The bad spelling disturbsthe neatness of the “good pun.”Ferdinand de Saussure objects to the use of punning in communicationsince the practice ambiguates meaning and disturbs theneat system of communication by which meaning is conveyedfrom speaker to listener. In his view, human society depends onthis system to make us intelligible and understood (1983). The puncreates confusion and impedes understanding, an “anarchist” inchallenging the stability of linguistic order. Win’s written languageinadvertently pokes fun at her own presumption of beingliterate, but in a rough sense, it also stands as a metaphor for thethreat of an alternate literacy emerging from other social groups.Win speaks no gibberish here; the reader can clearly understandboth her and Smollett’s meaning in the punning. Even in shockinglybad writing, Win urgently promotes servant literacy to herfellow servants:Volume03 282