Abstract
Most criticism on Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) highlights her literary persona only to the detriment of the study of a profuse work comprising six decades of narrative, poetry and drama. Probably her best-known contribution to literature was her condition of the voice of the Jazz Age generation, shifting from acquiescence to irony. A corpus of Parker’s short stories written in the 1920s and early 1930s will be analyzed from feminist perspectives, such as those by Pettit, Melzer or Showalter, in terms of ‘appearance’, ‘social life’ and ‘bonds with men’ to determine whether her heroines respond to the stereotype of the flapper in the Roaring Twenties. Results show a satirized viewpoint conveying dissatisfaction regarding body, idleness and romance predicting many of the conflicts of women in the second half of the XXth century.Keywords: Dorothy Parker, short stories, flappers, Jazz Age, feminist criticism, body, satire.
Highlights
Most criticism on Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) highlights her literary persona only to the detriment of the study of a profuse work comprising six decades of narrative, poetry and drama
Most criticism on Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) has traditionally focused on her role as the main attraction of the Vicious Circle of the Algonquin Round Table, a dynamic group including some of the major personalities of the Broadway scene in the late 1920s, most of them humorists, such as Alexander Woollcott, George Kaufman or Harpo Marx
This selfpromotion, which made them earn the nickname of ‘log rollers’, was the identity sign of the Algonquinites together with their particular kind of humor, regarded as too cultivated to be considered popular culture, and too light-hearted to enter the classical canon, and which would be later labeled as quintessentially ‘middlebrow’. Their production, for which they were called “the first literary generation of America” (Gaines 24), seemingly fits this category of ‘smart’ entertainment, and insistently deals with the war of sexes and their ludicrous self-consideration as elite, based on the uniqueness of their own place and times, that is, to a playful lifestyle, including endless parties and trips, provided by New York in the Roaring Twenties, especially from their privileged jobs in the media and the show business. This publicity is considered a key factor of the rising of Dorothy Parker (Miller 120), since her anecdotes and epigrams were often quoted among the funniest out of a posse characterized by loudness and wit, and the awareness of having an audience made her embark on a literary career out from her position as a theatre critic –the same Willa Cather had twenty years before
Summary
Most criticism on Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) has traditionally focused on her role as the main attraction of the Vicious Circle of the Algonquin Round Table, a dynamic group including some of the major personalities of the Broadway scene in the late 1920s, most of them humorists, such as Alexander Woollcott, George Kaufman or Harpo Marx. Conversations in Parker’s short stories picture the new obsession with losing weight diets, and the subsequent anxiety about food, the own perceived physical image and its consequences on an inner level by recurrently stressing the superficiality, irrationality and uselessness of the effort together with the ill-intentioned comments about other women (“Mrs Carrington and Mrs Crane”) In such an environment where couples start to be formed mostly in terms of attraction, physical appearance acquires a vital relevance and ugliness turns into a sad, cruelly-penalized condition.
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