The Most Dangerous Presumption: Women Authors and the Problems of Writing Satire

Abstract

The essay discusses the question why it is that women writers are almost absent from the canon of satirical writing. While female writers have managed during the 20th Century to establish themselves in all genres of literature, satire, with very few exceptions, has remained a territory for male writers. One of the main arguments for this absence is the fact that satire is one of the most aggressive forms of humour. While the tabooisation of aggression, which to a certain extent undermines satire, also applies to male authors, the position of the female writer, already rendered precarious by its deviation from the norm, is exacerbated by her position as a satirist and as a woman. German writer Gisela Elsner (1937-1992), lately being referred to as an “older sister” to Elfriede Jelinek, has accurately described this position as a “literary ghetto.” The example of the reception of Elsner’s work demonstrates how a blocking-out of a certain female tradition of satire reveals not only the limits, but also the blind spots of feminist-leaning women’s literature studies.