“Big Blonde” as a Feminist Critique of American Society of the 1920s

Semesteroppgave ENG4435 – The Lost Generation and the 1920s, vår 2012.   

Dorothy Parker’s short story “Big Blonde,” first published in 1929 and an O. Henry Prizewinner for best American short story of that year (Kinney 137), is a mercilessly damning portrait of the role of women in contemporary American society, with specific focus on urban middle class – or, perhaps more specifically, the “roaring” part of it – gender roles and gender dynamics. In this essay I will present some salient themes of Parker’s story, and try to identify her position on these themes. I will focus my interpretation on how women are portrayed and on the interaction between women and men, and use that analysis as a point of departure for a discussion of how “Big Blonde” can be analyzed as a feminist critique of contemporary American society in the twenties.

Hazel Morse is the story’s focalizing protagonist. The development of her character, and the interplay between her gradually deteriorating self and the series of men she surrounds herself with and depends upon, becomes the main vehicle by which Parker’s commentary on society is both presented and represented. Hazel, and the series of states she is in, is the object of a continual mirroring in her own immediate context: The series of men, the neighbor Mrs. Martin, the newspaper clippings, the series of encounters with horses, and so on, all become reflections of the development of her character. Thus, the following interpretation of “Big Blonde” will center on this focal character.

According to Arthur Kinney’s succinct summary, “Big Blonde” is about the “birth and growth of alcoholism and suicidal despair and … an unrelenting study of the possible brutality of life” (136). I agree that these are major themes, and I would argue that the phrase “birth and growth” is a most fitting description of Hazel’s descent into alcoholism: At the story’s inception, Hazel seems deprived of a personal history: Her past is all in a haze, her old days “a blurred and flickering sequence, an imperfect film, dealing with the actions of strangers” (Parker 213) – and not, for example, with family, friends, or even Hazel herself. Furthermore, she is not “given to recollections” (213), her mother was “hazy” and her death “deferred” (213) – which, one must assume, is Hazel’s own dispassionate comment on an overlate maternal fatality – all creating the impression that her past is of no relevance or significance to how she leads her life when the reader is first introduced to her.

Thus, the make-up of Hazel’s character – both the internal dynamics of her psyche and her ways of interacting with her surroundings – can be determined then and there, on a blank (or perhaps sufficiently hazy) slate – and it is: She is liked by men, and being liked by men becomes her main motivating factor for everything she does: “Men liked her, and she took it for granted that the liking of many men was a desirable thing” (214). And the way to behave in order to be liked – or at least the way according to Hazel, for “she never pondered if she might not be better occupied doing something else” – is to be fun, to be a good sport: “So, and successfully, she was fun” (214). 

Albeit seemingly without any relevant prior history, Hazel is not without inherent characteristics beside the ones being shaped throughout the story – inherent characteristics having an important bearing on her present: She is large and fair (213), a “substantially built blonde” (214), of the type that “incites some men … to click their tongue and wag their heads roguishly” (213). These physical traits are Hazel’s main, or only, saleable assets, and the reason why she, when in her twenties, is employed as a model (213). And as she is getting older, the transient nature of these assets becomes her main impetus to marry (215). The marriage to Herbie is at first a respite and sanctuary from the stress of being fun and easygoing – “it was a delight, a new game, a holiday, to give up being a good sport” (216) – but it also marks the commencement of what is to become a downward spiral of male relationships.

And here I will side-step to introduce another perspective, on behalf of Parker herself, to the relationship between Herbie and Hazel – maybe offering part of an explanation for why it goes wrong. In another of Parker’s short stories, “A Telephone Call,” the female protagonist awaits a call from her boyfriend, and when it never comes, she asks herself, “Why [do] they hate you, as soon as they are sure of you?” (48). In “Big Blonde,” Herbie reaches a similar realization suddenly and dramatically, having been married just a short while. Married life “palled with a ferocious suddenness” (217), and “the next night he was through with the whole thing” (218). In the words of Hazel, “first they were lovers; and then, it seemed without transition, they were enemies” (218).

At this point, Hazel has become beset by a “terrific domesticity” (219), clinging to the life that rescued her from the life that brought her here. So, in order to save her marriage, Hazel tries her best to resume her act as a good sport and avoid “crabbing” (218), using alcohol as her main numbing and energy-redirecting agency. But when their marriage finally ends, she has reached a stage where she is sufficiently numbed, and sufficiently unworried, and already with a prospective new benefactor, to manage to care deeply. She moves on to Ed, who is already married and thus suitable for a less binding relationship – and when he moves out of town, she moves on to other men, always using the same strategy for keeping them, namely being a good sport. The men in turn gradually become less attractive, less viable, and less bound to her. In the end, the series of men becomes so endless, the monotony of it all so numbing, that she loses track of the order of which they enter and exit her life.

At the bottom of the spiral there is Art, a diminutive both in name and stature (and an anagram for rat?), “short and fat and exacting and hard on her patience when he was drunk” (237). Art is a long fall from Herbie, an unpleasant mirroring of the depths she has sunk to, being the only male she is able to attract at this stage of her gradual deterioration. He has no redeeming features, and, importantly, no interest in any other side of Hazel than her ability to be a good sport. This is when Hazel decides that death is a more inviting prospect than a continuation of this kind of life.

What Parker wishes to say about Hazel, she also wants to make more general. Hazel is, according to the narrative voice, of a certain breed of women, joined both by their physical similarities and a collective (un)consciousness, their ideas, or rather, their “acceptances” (214). Thus, she is not an isolated incident, but rather a representative of a type. Even Mrs. Martin, her next-door neighbor, is “a great blonde of over forty”, and a “promise in looks of what Mrs. Morse was to be” (223). The gritty restaurant Jimmy’s functions as a meting point for Hazel and the other women constituting her type. Even though the female personnel “changed constantly,” “always the newcomers resembled those whom they replaced” (231), becoming, at this stage in the narrative, a large “they” with shared characteristics: They are all of the same build (231); they are matronly and often have one child, their initial husbands dimly remembered except by the flaunting of their surnames (231); and they are fatalistic to the point of utter lack of worries, as they have learned to trust that a new benefactor will appear whenever the current one disappears (232). They all seek permanence and security in the form of one man paying all their bills, but this end “grew increasingly difficult yearly” (232). Thus, they all seem to be trapped in the same downward spiral.

Assuredly a contrast in physiognomy and intellect, did Parker intend Hazel as a contrast to herself? Many have argued the opposite point, that there is much of Parker in Hazel. According to Marion Meade (195), “Big Blonde” “readily suggests Dorothy and presents a fictionalized account of some bad things that had happened to her,” being “perhaps the most intensely autobiographical of all her fiction.” Parker was an accomplished socialite, lionizing the social scene of twenties’ New York (Meade xvi–xviii), and, consequently, was well-acquainted with the detrimental effects of too much alcohol, developing a drinking problem during that period (177). Moreover, according to Ellen Lansky, a main theme for Parker – and thus, for her female characters – was 

alcoholism and the "female troubles" that they encounter as they try to negotiate a life for themselves in a culture that asks them, as heterosexual women, to subordinate their bodies, desires, and aspirations to their male partners. (213)

So, rather than a contrast, one might speculate whether some of Hazel’s core characteristics are derived from some of Parker’s: Parker was a celebrated wit, and might have felt the pressure to “perform” in social gatherings – like Hazel’s experience of feeling the need to be a good sport. And Hazel’s “bigness” could be taken to symbolize an engorged femininity, perhaps Parker’s commentary on how her male company made demands on herself, and other women in her vicinity, to behave in a certain feminized way. As Lansky (213) suggests, Parker “preferred the company of men, even though this company often left [her] in a solitary and precarious social position.”

Thus, I would argue that in “Big Blonde,” Parker suggests that the huge cost for women of being, or making themselves into, that which will attract a suitable man is what makes them, once marriage (or sufficient financial support in the form of a benefactor) is secured, regress into a distasteful disposition, and thus become repulsive to a husband or benefactor, as the initial price for becoming that which attracted the male in the first place has to be paid eventually: A pre-marital good sport makes a post-nuptial crab. This could perhaps be seen as Parker’s analysis of the underlying causes, or logic, causing men to start resenting women the moment they are sure of them. There might of course be more reasons for this, but it seems reasonable that the transformation from a sport to a crab elicits a similar transformation in the male counterpart from love to resentment, or even hatred. In the words of Kinney (136), “Herbie finally leaves her … despising him in her.” Parker seems to want to stress this specific point in “Big Blonde,” by devoting a substantial part (some fourteen of the approximately 35 pages of the short story) to the dysfunctional marriage between Hazel and Herbie, and to present and then delve in some detail into their trials and tribulations.

The cost Hazel pays for being a “good sport” becomes evident when she, for a while, is allowed to rest from that act. In the first period of marriage, she cries incessantly, and over seemingly insignificant things. Why does she really cry? Following Lansky’s suggestion that contemporary culture asked women to subordinate their desires and aspirations to their male partners, it would seem that Hazel’s crying indicates that there is within her character something indefinable and intangible but still existent, something perhaps deeper or more real or essential, something inherently herself, that is repressed and therefore not allowed to make itself manifest in her adult life. The onslaught of “domesticity” experienced by Hazel as she settles into married life with Herbie, fueling her desperate attempts to save their marriage, and mirrored by the analogous matronly disposition of the female clientele at Jimmy’s, might be Parker’s suggestion of a specific content to this essential female self: The need to attract a male, to settle down with him, and to raise a family. Thus, there is a certain desperate circumstantial imprisonment here, the logic of it being something like this: A woman has an inherent need to become a wife and mother, within the framework of a safe and stable home. In order to achieve this, she must secure a stable breadwinner. However, the breadwinners of the era have grown accustomed to a certain type of frivolous woman, one of which one has to become to attract a male. Playing this role is unsustainable in the long run, and the act dissipates as soon as domestic life settles in – becoming the very source of ruin for that which it achieved.

If feminism in its simplest form is defined as “seen from the perspective of women, and sympathizing with their afforded chances and outcomes,” “Big Blonde” must surely be seen as a feminist comment on contemporary American society. The fate of Hazel is central to the story, and her fate is generalized to comment on that of women in general. We know that Parker became increasingly radicalized toward the end of the twenties, was deeply engaged in the general uproar against the highly probable miscarriage of justice in the Sacco and Vanzetti case, wrote anarchist poetry, and always took the side of the weak against society’s high and mighty (Meade 179). Even though the men in “Big Blonde,” perhaps with the exception of Herbie, are rather peripheral, they are still constituting the circumstances that shape Hazel’s tragedy, and must be seen as being in general both more powerful and more free than the women, especially financially. Herbie is instrumental in leading Hazel to drinking, which in turn initiates her gradual downfall. And the men set the standards at Jimmy’s, they are the proprietors of the coveted economic freedom, and they are the ones the women put on their show for.

By using Hazel as her main focalizer, and then making her fate more universal by aligning it with the female clientele at Jimmy’s, Parker must be seen to try to make her characterization of contemporary women more generalized. Their tragic misfortune becomes convincing, and takes on greater universal relevance, partly by the work done by the reader: I would argue that Parker here exploits a reader’s inclination to imbue a character with certain essentialist features, a notion perhaps of an inherent self or a potential self, a self that may or may not be able to come to its fullest fruition, and when thwarted, seeks other ways to perversely express itself. Thus, when Hazel and her fellow women obviously do not live according to their non-explicit selves, this comes out in perverted forms, for example through Hazel’s crying, crabbing, drinking, and generally feeling blue, and in the end driving her to want to end her life. In this analysis, the tragedy of Hazel would be one that contemporary women (and perhaps men) could be able to relate to.

One could probably argue that these women by no means would be regarded as representative by the average contemporary reader, especially one outside of New York, who might (rightly) have dismissed this as a story about easygoing flappers, and not about women in general. But notwithstanding the admittedly limited demographic scope of the story, the general impression at the time seems to have been that a new role for women was developing, one that received a great deal of attention, and creating a lot of controversy. To most readers of the twenties, “Big Blonde” appeared to be a scathing critique of contemporary sexual liberation: The sexually liberated women are as close to prostitutes as one could be without actually becoming one – or more to the point, they blur the dividing line between the “fallen” women and everyone else.

So, if we assume that one of Parker’s main motivations behind “Big Blonde” was to create a certain compassion for the women she created, she did not make it simple for herself, or her reader. The characterizations of women in “Big Blonde” are obviously not flattering. They are weak, uneducated, fatalistic, highly dependent on men, slaves to their circumstances, and without any meaningful designs of their own. And if feminism is about women’s liberation, or should present strong and self-reliant women, create idealized pictures of them and of how they should behave, including the strategies they should use to hold their own in a male-dominated society, this story would definitely fall outside that category. On the contrary, this short story does not offer any such prospects – there is only one way out of this misery, and that is by ending it completely. Only read as a satire will this become a feminist critique – and not simply a damning portrait of contemporary women – when readers ask themselves: Do we really want women like this in our society? Might there be something within the society we have created that we would want to change?

So, it is tempting to see Hazel as a representation not only of Parker herself, but also of a female role that Parker wants to make obsolescent – and the proliferation of different variants of the same female type in the story underscoring this intention. Hazel’s bloatedness is probably one of the most telling symbols in this regard, a sort of dinosauric symbol, functioning both as a more local comment on the type of women we are presented with, but also on the life they lead: A body blown out of proportions, with deteriorating brain functions, nearing extinction. Hazel’s reactivity, her lack of reflective thoughts, her dependence upon her surroundings, specifically the support of men, and her need to sedate and near-prostitute herself to make a living, is perhaps an exaggerated characterization of women of the era. Still, as I suggested above, this is a depiction that many would be able to relate to, and that Parker wants to both satirize and create some compassion for.

To this reader, “Big Blonde” becomes a gloomy, pessimistic and fatalistic commentary on this specific type of life lived by contemporary women. Hazel is most certainly a “Lost” character, in all senses of the word: She has no past and thus no grounding, she is not strong-willed enough to have any designs or desires of her own, and she is adrift and thus a victim to her circumstances. Her tragedy seems inevitable. As she is deprived both of history and of the ability to reflect meaningfully on her own situation, she is not able to envision any viable alternatives to the life she leads. And as her life depends on her looks and ability for alcohol-induced “sportiness,” it is inherently transient. And, as the way she lives is inconsistent with a deeper, more essential, or more genuine longing, the things she must do prey on the things she wants to do, until she becomes so tired (“she was so tired much of the time. Tired and blue” (235)) that life becomes unbearable and death her most natural respite. Thus, the picture drawn by Parker about contemporary gender relations becomes a bleak and pessimistic one.

However, might we still construe Hazel as a heroine of sorts, albeit a tragic one? Kinney (137) suggests that Hazel’s prototype is Emma Bovary – both tragic heroines, both lead to suicide by failed ambitions – but then Hazel must be a deprived replica of that type. Where Bovary has conscious ambitions, Hazel has only base drives. And Hazel even fails to kill herself. But while Hazel is similar to the other women in “Big Blonde,” she is also different. Like Hazel, the other women are all absolutely unhappy and dissatisfied. They do not want this kind of life, they cry, they suffer from insomnia, and they wish for something else, even though they seem unable to express exactly what that might be. They have to sedate themselves, subdue their selves, to be able to live their lives. But Hazel suffers more than the others at Jimmy’s. And she is treated differently, never being allowed to be anything else but fun, not granted the “privilege of occasional admitted sadness” (233) she sees is afforded the other women. Also, she tries to commit suicide, setting her distinctly aside from the others, who seem to be accepting their lot without questions, and without any sign of resistance. Thus, Hazel does not accept what the others accept, and rejects this desolate life and tries, as none of the others try, to break away from it. And even though it is by an utterly destructive mean, it is the only mean she has at her disposal, and she uses it to the best of her limited abilities. 

Bibliography

Kinney, Arthur F. Dorothy Parker. Ed. Kenneth Eble. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978. Print.

Lansky, Ellen. "Female Trouble: Dorothy Parker, Katherine Anne Porter, and Alcoholism." Literature and Medicine 17.2 (1998): 212–30. ProQuest Health & Medical Complete; ProQuest Medical Library. Web. 12 May 2012.

Meade, Marion. Dorothy Parker. A Biography. What Fresh Hell Is This? New York: Villard Books, 1988. Print.

Parker, Dorothy. “Big Blonde.” Here Lies. Collected Stories. New York: The Literary Guild of America, 1939. 213–50. Print.

Parker, Dorothy. “A Telephone Call.” Here Lies. Collected Stories. New York: The Literary Guild of America, 1939. 41–50. Print.