Whitcher, Frances (Miriam) Berry

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WHITCHER, Frances (Miriam) Berry

Born 1 November circa 1813, Whitesboro, New York; died 4 January 1852, Whitesboro, New York

Wrote under: Aunt Maguire, Frank, Widow Bedott, Widow Spriggins

Daughter of Lewis Berry and Elizabeth Wells; married Benjamin Whitcher, 1847; children: Alice Miriam

The eleventh of 15 children, Frances Berry Whitcher was the daughter of a prominent Whitesboro innkeeper. Deemed a precocious child, she was educated both at home and at a local academy. In spite of close family ties, she recalled having a lonely childhood because of her keen sense of the ridiculous; the neighbors sternly disapproved of her caricatures of them. As a young woman, however, she participated in many community activities.

In her mid-thirties, Whitcher married an Episcopal minister and moved with him to his new pastorate in Elmira, New York. Although her marriage was happy, her life in Elmira apparently was not. In 1848 her husband resigned his pastorate and they returned to Whitesboro, where she gave birth to her only child, Alice Miriam. Whitcher died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-nine.

Whitcher's first humorous sketches (published posthumously as The Widow Spriggins, 1867), written to entertain a literary society, are burlesques of a popular English sentimental novel, Children of the Abbey (1798), by Regina Maria Roche. The sketches ridicule both sentimental fiction and women who attempt to imitate literary heroines; Whitcher's persona, Permilly Ruggles Spriggins, is an uncouth sentimentalist who models her language and her every action on Roche's Amanda.

Whitcher's most famous series of sketches, written at the request of Joseph Neal of the Saturday Gazette (1846-47), are dramatic monologues presented entirely in the malapropian vernacular language of the Widow Bedott, who is a parody of a smalltown gossip. The sketches are laced with references to contemporary fads, such as phrenology lectures and literary society meetings.

Bedott devotes considerable energy to a search for a second husband. The first widower she shamelessly pursues seems about to propose, but instead asks for permission to court her daughter. Her second major effort succeeds when she encourages the rumor that she is a woman of means; she succeeds in marrying the Reverend Sniffles, who is as pompous as Bedott is conniving.

After Whitcher's move to Elmira, she began a third series of sketches for the widely popular Godey's Lady's Book (1847-49). Her new persona, Aunt Maguire, is more compassionate than her fictive sister Bedott and speaks a more colloquial language. Inspired by her own observations and experiences as a minister's wife, Whitcher satirizes the residents of small towns for their uncharitable conduct and genteel pretensions.

In one sketch, "The Donation Party," Whitcher satirizes the custom whereby parishioners augment their minister's meager salary by giving him "donations" of substantial commodities. In her story, the minister's guests bring only trifling gifts, break the wife's heirloom china, eat more food than they contribute, and exhibit crude and socially reprehensible behavior. At the end, the fictive minister resigns, declaring that one more donation party would ruin him financially.

Whitcher's most controversial Aunt Maguire sketches focus on a fictional sewing society ostensibly created for charitable purposes, but whose participants turn the meetings into malicious gossip sessions. The series ends when Aunt Maguire travels to a neighboring village where the inhabitants mistakenly believe it is their sewing society that served as the model for the story in Godey's and their minister's wife who is the offending author.

Although Whitcher's responsibility for the sketches had been a closely guarded secret, rumors persisted that the author lived in Elmira. So realistic and biting were the sketches that when Benjamin Whitcher confirmed his wife was indeed "Aunt Maguire," he was threatened with a lawsuit and ultimately forced to resign his Elmira pastorate. Not since Frances Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) had readers been so stung by a woman's social satire. Whitcher responded by abandoning humorous writing.

Following the tradition of writers such as Seba Smith (who created Jack Downing), Whitcher used first-person vernacular humor as a medium for social criticism. She was unique in humorously depicting smalltown life from a woman's perspective, and became one of America's first significant woman humorists. Her work was widely popular in the 19th-century, and modern readers will find much to admire and enjoy in her humor.

Bibliography:

Curry, J. A., "Woman as Subjects and Writers of Nineteenth-Century American Humor" (dissertation, 1975). Derby, J. C., Fifty Years Among Authors, Books, and Publishers (1884). Hart, J. D., The Popular Book: A History of America's Literary Taste (1961). Morris, Linda A. Finton, "Women Vernacular Humorists in Nineteenth-Century America: Ann Stephens, Frances Whitcher, and Marietta Holley" (dissertation, 1978). Neal, A., Introduction to The Widow Bedott Papers (1856). Whitcher, Mrs. M. L. Ward, Introduction to The Widow Spriggins, Mary Elmer, and Other Sketches (1867).