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MATERIAL GIRL: THE SUBJECTIVE ROLE OF OBJECTS IN
DOROTHY PARKER’S POEMS AND SHORT STORIES
Briana M. Spencer
A Thesis Submitted to the University of North Carolina Wilmington in Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Department of English University of North Carolina Wilmington 2005 Approved by Advisory Committee Barbara Frey Waxman Katherine Montwieler
Janet Mason Ellerby Chair Accepted by Robert Roer Dean, Graduate School
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT................................................................................................................................... iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...............................................................................................................v
- INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................... DEDICATION............................................................................................................................... vi
- POEMS ..........................................................................................................................................
- Idealized Objects................................................................................................................
- “Day-Dreams”........................................................................................................
- “Afternoon”............................................................................................................
- “Ninon de L’Enclos, On Her Last Birthday”.........................................................
- Objects of Disillusionment ................................................................................................
- “The Red Dress” ....................................................................................................
- “The Satin Dress” ..................................................................................................
- “Salomé’s Dancing-Lesson”..................................................................................
- Female Body as Objects.....................................................................................................
- “Iseult of Brittany”.................................................................................................
- “News Item”...........................................................................................................
- “Interior”................................................................................................................
- SHORT STORIES .........................................................................................................................
- “Here We Are”...................................................................................................................
- “A Telephone Call” ...........................................................................................................
- “The Lovely Leave”...........................................................................................................
- “The Garter” ......................................................................................................................
- CONCLUSION..............................................................................................................................
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ABSTRACT
This thesis is a study of the importance of objects within Dorothy Parker’s poems and short stories and how her use of material items as metaphors for the restricted roles available to women of her day simultaneously intensifies and challenges these gender-related limitations. The essay draws upon the tenets of feminist theory that call for a pluralistic reading of female texts and an appropriation of “feminine” items within a literary language, as well Karl Marx’s theories of commodity in which material objects serve the primary purpose of capitalistic exchange and Laura Mulvey’s study of pleasure- viewing in which women play specific roles designed for them by men. This study of how Parker illustrates her heroines through the material objects surrounding them serves to highlight her writing as an innovative subversion of the commonly accepted parameters for the women of her era.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to Dr. Janet Ellerby, a wonderful thesis chair whose enthusiasm was matched only by her sage advice. Thanks also to Dr. Katherine Montwieler and Dr. Barbara Waxman for their intuitive suggestions and kind words of support. Special thanks as well to Pat Conlon for her comradely encouragement. I would like to thank the UNCW English Department for welcoming me into the M.A. program and offering so many interesting courses, and Dr. Lewis Walker in particular who has served admirably as our Graduate Coordinator. Thanks to my family for lending me either an ear or an arm for support whenever needed. Thanks also to the friends I met here in Wilmington for joining me in our own various Round Tables. I wish you all the very best in whatever lies ahead.
Dorothy Parker began writing as a young child. While on summer holiday with her older sister, Helen, she and her father exchanged daily letters that were often filled with light verse, their subjects ranging from accidental sunburn to Rags, the beloved family dog. As Parker reached adulthood, her poems and short stories continued to focus on similarly inconsequential subject matter, yet simultaneously addressed social concerns that alternately amused, puzzled, or infuriated their author. Throughout the body of her work, Parker’s primary concern appears to be the objectification of women within certain social roles. At a time when women were cautiously beginning to step away from the domestic sphere and embark on professional careers, Parker’s poems and short stories reflect an impatience for those women who clung to previously prescribed traditions of feminine behavior. Parker illustrates this vexation through her heroines’ preoccupation with the mundane material objects that could typically be found within a woman’s traditional surroundings. As a young woman embarking on a literary career, Parker seemed singularly preoccupied with the material objects that dominated women’s lives and curtailed the options available to them. Her early submissions to various magazines were poems that “epitomized trivia: wrong telephone numbers, bloopers made at the bridge table, the pros and cons of nutmeg in rice pudding” (Meade 31). These were initially met with rejection. When she finally received a letter of acceptance for one of her poems in 1914 from the new Condé Nast publication Vanity Fair, she used the opportunity to ask its editor, Frank Crowningshield, for a job. Hired to work for the copy department of Vogue, she was required to properly represent the magazine by appearing at work in the female employee dress code of “hats, white gloves, and black silk stockings” (36). She spent her days writing captions for fashion illustrations of the latest nightgowns, corsets, etc. Quickly wearied by the tedium of performing this task for a magazine at which it was deemed “easier for a camel to navigate a needle’s eye than for an ambitious
woman to achieve literary grandeur” (35), she began to lash out against her situation by criticizing “the office paintings, its marble tables and raw silk curtains, [and] the uniformed maid who tiptoed around dusting desks and arranging fresh flowers” (36). Her disdain extended to her female coworkers who pandered to the pompous trivialities their workplace mandated for them, and she often amused Frank Crowningshield by privately ridiculing the materialistically- consumed conversations she had overheard throughout the day. The poem that had first won her Crowningshield’s appreciation, “Any Porch,” was a similarly humorous invective against the women who had surrounded Parker during those childhood vacations with Helen. Though it is not one of her most well-known pieces and was neglected when she assembled The Portable Dorothy Parker, the poem does embody her contemptuous disregard for a perceived feminine tendency to ignore worldly issues in favor of focusing on the mundane objects that inhabit the daily lives of women. As her biographer Marion Meade points out, “Again and again in her writing Dorothy would return to these women, and for good reason. She feared becoming one of them” (32). Parker’s poems, made easily accessible to women readers through publication in such magazines as McCall’s, The Ladies’ Home Journal, Ainslee’s, and Life served as revealing mirrors into which these women could see not only themselves but their attention towards those pretty objects around them that served to anchor them within a world of feminine absurdities. As the focus of “Any Porch” drifts from one porch to another and snippets of nine various conversations are recorded, this apparently random community of female voices trivializes itself in the way that topics such as philosophy, women’s suffrage, and World War I are immediately interrupted by discussions of nightgowns, bobbed hair, and playing cards: “I’m reading that new thing of Locke’s – So whimsical, isn’t he? Yes–”
patriarchal definitions that intervene” (17). Women writers of Parker’s era were expected to adhere to their traditional roles by composing stories appropriate to their gender, and the mention of items associated with this feminine realm of the household, such as a dress or a piece of artwork, served to confine women within the male-ordinated parameters of a woman’s capabilities while simultaneously dissuading them from attempting to achieve social significance through their work. A true element of genius in Dorothy Parker’s work, however, is her ability to cloak emancipatory sentiments with ironic subtlety, simultaneously gaining prestige as a female writer while mocking the gender-appropriate subject matter that ostensibly characterizes her work. By placing the majority of her heroines within traditional settings, she was able to lure readers into a false sense of security before revealing a trailblazing feminist tendency to ridicule the very notion of these traditions. Various critics have speculated on the impulses lying behind Parker’s subversive literary style. While biographer Arthur Kinney aptly observes that Parker “used clever, even sardonic quips to poke through the shallowness and commercialism of what she saw” (Kinney 33), it is Marion Meade who seems to touch more accurately upon Parker’s true ambition: to succeed within a literary world that she viewed as inherently male. Meade argues that Parker rejected “the prevailing standards for female writing and thinking. She had chosen to present herself not so much as a bad girl but as a bad boy, a firecracker who was aggressively proud of being tough, quirky, feisty, [and] a variation of the basic Becky Sharp model” (Meade 45). This “bad boy” attitude seems to have bolstered Parker’s attempts to evade the two things she most dreaded: “being considered a ‘woman writer’ and turning into a ‘society lady’” (Day 42), yet it also creates an interesting study in contrasts: although she may have cultivated a masculine tongue, the persona that Dorothy Parker presented to the world was unequivocally female.
As a member of the famed Algonquin Round Table, perched demurely among the “the literary male-wolves” (Fagan 231) that she had befriended, Dorothy Parker seemed anomalous. Though she initially sat in silence, “shyly blinking at everyone from under the brim of her Merry Widow hat, virginal, self-conscious, and extremely well turned out in one of her good suits so that she looked like a Park Avenue princess slumming” (Meade 61), she eventually proved herself the reigning queen of witty repartee, her ten-second word puns becoming legendary for their succinct ingenuity. She was so much the “bad boy” (45) that many of her jokes “were lost because their obscenity made them unprintable” (85). The same contrast proved true while she served as drama critic for Vanity Fair , chosen by Crowningshield to replace comedic favorite P.G. Wodehouse in 1918. Though she introduced herself to readers of her column “as ‘a tired business woman’ who was ‘seeking innocent diversion” (45), Parker quickly became known for her acerbic and relentless criticism of her contemporaries. The power she was able to wield with her pen was not universally admired, and the prevailing attitude of Parker’s male contemporaries appears to have been that which she most feared: that she was merely a woman writer stepping too far out of prescribed social boundaries. In 1920, after her column insulted Billie Burke, the wife of influential Broadway producer Florenz Ziegfeld, Parker was fired from Vanity Fair and replaced by Edmund Wilson, who would later become a great admirer of Parker’s work. Recalling their first meeting at the magazine’s offices, however, Wilson describes her in his memoir as “overperfumed, and the hand with which I had shaken hers kept the scent of her perfume all day. Although she was fairly pretty and although I needed a girl, what I considered the vulgarity of her too much perfume prevented me from paying her court” (Wilson 33). Other male heavyweights within her field offered similar observations centering around her femininity. Though she had firmly expressed to Frank Crowningshield when he first hired her at Vogue that “fashion would never
with women, were denigrated both socially and economically by their very connection to femininity. In “Any Porch,” Parker alludes to this devaluing of a woman’s potential within the workforce: “I don’t want the vote for myself, But women with property, dear – ” “I think the poor girl’s on the shelf, She’s talking about her ‘career.’” (13-6) The stanza listens in on two conversations revolving around the social power derived through economic independence. In the first conversation, the issue of women’s suffrage is dismissed as relevant only for those women who own property; the speaker of these lines is content to relinquish her right to vote in deference to her husband who, as a result, owns not only the property but this women as well. The second conversation of the stanza concerns a woman who has attempted to step outside of the boundaries instituted by the patriarchate and venture into the workforce. Her cold dismissal by the speaker as being “on the shelf” denotes the fact that her marketability as a woman (i.e. the measure of her appeal to the male provider) is dwindling, forcing her to into a difficult situation: in order to provide security for herself, she chooses to pursue a male-dominated career path, and, in so doing, further alienates herself from her socially-acceptable identity as a woman. The material objects comprising a woman’s sphere then began to divide into two branches: those intended for domestic use and those used to accentuate personal appearance. In terms of Marxist theory, the social relations of a woman began to reflect the success rate of her material relations; her value as an individual evolved into a measure of the attractiveness of her apparel and the comfort of her home.
Insofar as a material object is concerned, its value as commodity is realized in the act of social exchange, and the rate of this exchange determines the social standing of the object’s owner; as Marx argues in Capital, Volume 1, “the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things” (777). As the division of labor historically became more focused on male-specific productivity outside of the home, the economic survival of a woman depended on her ability to attract and marry a man who could successfully provide for her. In “Any Porch,” Parker addresses this issue of women approaching marriage primarily as an economic transaction : “I’ve heard I was psychic, before, To think that you saw it – how funny –” “Why, he must be sixty, or more, I told you she’d marry for money!” (21-4) The first conversation of this stanza humorously addresses a perceived elevation of the power of a woman’s mind. The woman who is described as “psychic” seems herself unaware of her extraordinary potential; she cannot determine this quality for herself, but rather must be told of its existence. Regardless, she refuses to capitalize on the idea. In characterizing the notion of being recognized for this capability as “funny,” the speaker is dismissing any significant role that her acute mind could potentially play in her identity as an individual. This element of surprise in her tone is replaced by the more certain tone of the second speaker in the stanza, whose conversation deals with the more realistic expectations of a woman’s pursuits. The woman who has basically sold herself to a much-older man in order to gain financial security is not exactly chastised by the speaker for doing so, but is rather being acknowledged for having satisfied the
signify castration, and activate voyeuristic or fetishistic mechanisms to circumvent this threat” (25). This stems from the Freudian division of pleasure-viewing into the categories of scopophilia , in which pleasure is derived from viewing a fantasized spectacle from a distance, and ego libido , in which the spectator identifies himself with the object on display. As Freud considered these two categories to be inextricably linked, Mulvey observes that: Ultimately, the meaning of a woman is sexual difference, the visually ascertainable absence of the penis, the material evidence on which is based the castration complex essential for the father. Thus the woman as icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active controllers of the look, always threatens to evoke the anxiety it originally signified. (21) The “fetishistic mechanism” employed to assuage this anxiety signifies a return to the anxiety’s original source, given that Freud also divides fetish into two categories: that pertaining to an inappropriate body part or else to “some inanimate object which bears an assignable relation to the person whom it replaces and preferably to that person’s sexuality (e.g. a piece of clothing or underlinen)” (Freud 100). Those same material items that had originally prompted a woman’s commodification as spectatorial object then become disproportionately larger in focus than the woman who is associated with them. That is to say that a woman’s identity becomes increasingly overshadowed by the fetishized object’s representation of the idealized masculine version of femininity. As Mulvey maintains, “Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like. Hence the split between spectacle and narrative supports the man’s role as the active one of advancing the story, making things happen” (20). Despite the fact that these objects are traditionally exclusive to the female sphere, their value as commodity depends on the masculine interpretation of their intended use. In Parker’s poems and short stories, the heroines’ preoccupation with various material
objects could be argued to be a direct result of such fetish theories. In other words, as the male viewer contemplates the female figure, his sexual desire leads him to focus on that element of a woman’s body that is not only different from his but is physically lacking something that his body possesses. The male viewer’s desire to be close to this woman, however, leads to a feeling of anxiety over losing that part of himself, the “castration complex.” He refocuses his attention, therefore, on the objects used to accentuate a woman’s figure, and fetishizes them so that they are no longer adornments but substitutes for the woman herself. As the woman becomes secondary to the objects around her, the male viewer is able to approach her without the anxious dread of losing his identity. He further limits a woman’s power over her own identity by assigning value to those objects that had become exclusive to a woman’s sphere based on his sexual fantasy. The feminist response to such fetishization has been to question how much women should value those objects that directly correspond with masculine standards of value. In “Any Porch,” Parker addresses the frustration inherent to a woman feeling bound to attain those objects that will enhance her value as commodity within the male framework of desirability: “I don’t call Mrs. Brown bad , She’s un -moral, dear, not im moral – ” “Well, really, it makes me so mad To think what I paid for that coral!” (5-8) The two conversations, again, parallel each other in that the very essence of a woman’s character is being challenged. In the first conversation, Parker is being progressive with the idea that a woman may bend the rules of society without stepping completely out of her boundaries. In the second, the woman who has paid too much for some jewelry is not stepping out of her bounds – she has indeed bought the coral – but she is bending the rules by challenging the value of her
various objects in order to rewrite their own formulaic, predetermined life-stories. And just as the evil stepsisters fail in achieving their desired goal, so too do Parker’s heroines typically meet with unsatisfying or disillusioning conclusions. However, Parker’s heroines ultimately challenge the myth of their object’s effectiveness, and, in so doing, their stories illuminate Parker as one of the earliest and most compelling voices of twentieth-century feminism. POEMS Parker’s three major volumes of poetry, Enough Rope (1926), Sunset Gun (1928), and Death and Taxes (1931), reflect her desire to elevate herself beyond the life she was living in which she was limited by her gender yet faced with its unnerving inevitability. From a feminist framework, her poems’ preoccupation with death could be interpreted as having dual meaning: first, that there was no other option available to women who found themselves confined to such limiting and therefore miserable conditions; and second, that the use of material objects to define and confine women exclusively within the domestic sphere was a death unto itself. Parker’s characterization of women and their relationships to objects can be divided into three categories: those women who idealize objects, those who find themselves disillusioned by objects, and those whose physical identity itself is portrayed by way of object imagery. Idealized Objects The following three poems portray an inclination among their speakers to remain optimistic about their options in their portrayal of certain feminine objects. Though each poem does end with a hint of disillusionment, the steadfast, albeit naïve, optimism of the speakers emphasizes the struggle Parker would have had to face against the women of her day who remained firmly attached to traditional perceptions of their expected roles. “Day-Dreams” Included in Enough Rope, “Day-Dreams” is unusual in tone. While certain Parker poems
do begin with lofty or lighthearted sentiments, most of these poems’ speakers tend to surreptitiously burst their own happy bubbles by the final stanza. The speaker in “Day-Dreams,” however, maintains her optimism throughout in describing what she imagines to be a “model life” (26): while her husband goes to work, she will “gaily” (6, 19) and “valiantly” (13) perform the domestic duties expected of her. Though she does not expect to do them well, foreseeing that her culinary efforts will turn out “black and dry” (11), she remains secure in her role within the home, telling her husband that she is “assured you’d not complain” (14) and “if my finger I should burn, / you’d kiss away the pain” (15-6). The first three stanzas begin with the mention of such objects essential to this model life the speaker is planning: “a little bungalow” (1), “a little cook-book” (9) and “a little scrubbing brush” (17). The diminutive adjective before each item is simultaneously endearing and grating; it appears that this couple would indeed be attempting to live in the type of model home built as a young girl’s decorous plaything. Her description of the objects in her home as “little” may make their practical use appear less daunting, and her ideal of a perfect marriage may then seem more within her grasp. However, she seems to have rendered the objects too small and fragile to actually be handled. She admits that she is unable to cook, therefore her book can serve no practical purpose. The only “little” chore she seems capable of is scrubbing the floors with her “little” brush – a momentous undertaking for such an inadequate tool, and one that would likely keep her on her knees for hours on end. In effect, the woman is miniaturizing herself, presenting herself as a loveable doll within her doll house, albeit one who is conscious of the traditional role she is expected to play out. This doll-like persona seems to prompt the speaker to assume a mental vacuity as well. Though she does allude to the intellectual pursuits attracting many women of her day, she diminishes these as well:
