Modernist Women Writers and Whimsy: Marianne Moore and Dorothy Parker

Will May

doi:10.3390/h9010024

Abstract

This article assesses the work of Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) and Marianne Moore (1887–1972) in relation to the aesthetic category of whimsy. It considers how whimsy has been used as a term of dismissal for American women poets, outlines ways both writers’ receptions have been informed by this context, and explores questions of cost, worth, and value raised by their work. It situates whimsy in relation to Sianne Ngai’s account of diminutive modes in Our Aesthetic Categories (2015) and suggests why American women’s modernist poetry can be a useful context for exploring the aesthetic and cultural associations of whimsy.

Highlights

This article assesses the work of Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) and Marianne Moore (1887–1972) in relation to the aesthetic category of whimsy
While the poem is a gentle satire on gossip, it blurs the lines between mimicry and echo: Parker’s biographer glosses her early poems as ‘trivia’ (Meade 1988, p. 31), as if the poem were as insubstantial as the smocks
Both might be taken for a kind of whimsy, and were partially dismissed by the writers themselves. Both poems help us understand the surprisingly rich qualities of whimsy, drawing attention to its power, puzzle and pathos. They show its breadth: we are led from the whimsy of the insubstantial in Parker to the whimsy of the inscrutable in Moore

Summary

Whimsy in Context

If whimsy has a literary history beyond being an expedient dismissal, it begins with John Dennis’. Rich’s collocation of the whimsical with the generic suggests the persistent link between questions of trust, genre, and form: to be whimsical is a way of not being taken seriously and a way not to be trusted Given this literary and historical context, we may not be surprised to find the term’s pejorative associations haunt the reception of a number of female American poets, as in the baffled account in Atlantic Monthly of Emily Dickinson’s poetry as ‘whimsical memoranda’ which ‘have a certain something, which, for want of a more precise name, we term quality’

Bridging the Gap

Gifts of Whimsy

The Whimsical Poet

Conclusions