For Better or For Worse offers a distinctive perspective on domesticity and mothering that was quite remarkable at the time—rather than elevating and essentializing mothers, as has often been the case in popular culture, or demonizing them, as was the trend of some femi-nists of the time, Johnston gently and sympathetically depicted the often invisible pressures and disappointments of motherhood, cre-ating a compassionate, insightful lens that executed an experience
seldom discussed in actuality rather than simulacrum. This truth is particularly powerful when understood within what Kenneth Burke suggests is the “comic frame,” a narrative that reaches out to the audience to persuade through gentle humor.
In Attitudes Toward History, Kenneth Burke discusses “frames of reference,” narratives individuals invoke in order to contextualize experience. Burke contends that “out of such frames we derive our vocabularies for the charting of human motives. And implicit in our theory of motives is a program of action, since we form ourselves and judge others (collaborating with them or against them) in accor-dance with our attitudes” (92). In “Ghandi and the Comic Frame,” A.
Cheree Carlson claims, “Frames are the symbolic structures by which human beings impose order upon their personal and social experi-ences. Frames serve as perspectives from which all interpretations of experience are made” (447). Thus, narratives can productively be understood as either frames of acceptance or rejection, a stance of approval or denial in consuming and interpreting human experience.
According to Burke, in the comic frame “the element of acceptance is uppermost” (Attitudes 43); the comic frame exhibits a stance marked by belief. While the reader may not agree with the supposition of the comic narrative, he or she recognizes the argument and responds from a place of willingness to receive the idea. The comic frame, as outlined in Attitudes Toward History, “requires the maximum of foren-sic complexity. . . . Comedy deals with man in society, tragedy with the cosmic man (42), and the frame is “essentially humane, leading in periods of comparative stability to the comedy of manners, the dra-matization of quirks and foibles” (42). This humanizing, humane con-struction is “charitable, but at the same time it is not gullible” (107).
Unlike the tragic frame, no villains are required for a comic plot to function (41), only ordinary people making foolish, and relatable, choices. Burke explains:
The progress of humane enlightenment can go no further than in picturing people not as vicious, but as mistaken. When you add that people are necessarily mistaken, that all people are exposed to situ-ations in which they must act as fools, that every insight contains its own special kind of blindness, you complete the comic circle, returning again to the lesson of humility that underlies great trag-edy. (Attitudes 41)
The comic frame thus educates the audience about humility, just as a tragedy might, but does so within a more common, ordinary setting, one familiar to the audience. A. Cheree Carlson notes that the comic frame agitates for change, for improvement, but does so without ever losing sight of a shared humanity:
A movement arising from a comic frame would not accept naively the flaws in the present system; it would change or even overthrow the system if necessary. But it would also have a regard for social order as a human creation and respect the fact that some order must exist for humans to function. The social order can be changed, but never at the cost of the humanity of those on the other side. (448) Therefore, the comic frame operates in gentle affirmation, guid-ing readers to relate to the characters, sharguid-ing their frustrations and encouraging identification, another important means of rhetorical strategy outlined by Burke.
In A Rhetoric of Motives, Burke clarifies the importance of the lis-tener or viewer identifying with the rhetor in such cases: “In being identified with B, A is ‘substantially one’ with a person other than himself. Yet at the same time he remains unique, an individual locus of motives. Thus he is both joined and separate, at once a distinct substance and consubstantial with another . . . in acting-together, men have common sensations, concepts, images, ideas, attitudes that make them consubstantial” (Burke 21). Brooke and Hogg argue that
identification between persons is the fundamental act in rheto-ric, at both foundational and persuasive levels. Foundationally, we make the effort to listen or read, Burke says, only when we already believe the speaker or writer is engaged with us in a common ect of some sort (no matter how far apart their approach to that proj-ect may be). We are persuaded when we come to believe that the speaker or writer speaks for us in some way. (118)
Thus, through the positive act of opening oneself up to identify-ing with the experiences of another, we can accept that, however removed we might be, we can act together toward a common goal.
While Kenneth Burke’s rhetorical treatises might seem removed from the comics pages of the daily newspaper, the audience reading For
Better or For Worse enters into a gentle, humane, yet educational dieg-esis, identifying with the characters and being guided toward a more nuanced understanding of the pains and pleasures of motherhood.