[In the following essay, Melzer offers a feminist perspective on Parker's work.]

It is astonishing that Dorothy Parker's universe remains essentially unexplored as serious literature about women. A gifted satirist, reputed as the wittiest woman in America, Parker lived with flamboyant flair in the 1920's and become legendary as a writer of verse and short fiction that depicted uniquely female experiences.

By all accounts, she was the leading light of the small literary set centered in New York during the Jazz Age. When she published her first collection of poems, Enough Rope, in 1926, the book was an instant best-seller—one of the few best-selling poetry books in American history. But people bought it because the author was a media celebrity, and they seemed to appreciate it more for the voguish humor, rather than for the subtle details of the subtext, which touched upon the little, painful, and poignant struggles of women's life.

Despite Parker's popularity and reputation, or perhaps because of it, her short stories have generally been regarded as playful fictional satires, depicting stereotypical female behavior and providing little more than comic pieces of amusement for either public or academic audiences.

Although a new understanding of woman's roles in literature has begun to take hold, virtually no critics have sought to furnish serious consideration of the view of women in the works of Dorothy Parker or to explore her treatment of women from a feminist perspective.

The purpose of this work [The Rhetoric of Rage] is to provide fresh perspective on the portraits of women that Dorothy Parker created and to present contemporary analyses that offer insight into female experience. This book grows out of a need to examine the fiction of Dorothy Parker as serious social commentary, to reinterpret the humor in her stories as a masking device for muted anger toward a traditional society, and to adjust the critical perspective on Parker's position as a feminist writer.

This book, furthermore, locates links between the author's life and the fiction, and aims to set the stories within a biographical context where such connections seem fruitful. Biographers agree that as a writer, Dorothy Parker drew heavily on her personal experiences as a woman. Because a woman writer has direct access to female experience, her work is imbued with a particular “consciousness” which “informs” her literature and reflects her experience and the way she perceives it. As Elaine Showalter suggests, this “consciousness” and self-awareness translates itself into literary form with specific and uniquely female patterns.

Though ‘biographical speculations” can carry inherent risks, Parker's personal history, a disturbing struggle for stability and happiness, interwoven with her fictional treatment of women, furnishes a rich dimension to a feminist evaluation. Her biography was the quintessence of the Jazz Age with all its contradictions. Dazzling, flippant, reckless, and rebellious on the outside, inside, her life was marked by abject sadness, incurable pessimism, failed relationships with men, mordant moodiness, self-doubt, and self-punishment. As her life fed her fiction, her fiction elucidated elements of life.

Although, Parker's work has recently been recognized as “women's literature,” and is beginning to be included in academic texts dedicated to representing women writers, nevertheless there is a notable absence of substantive scholarship on Parker in American literary criticism. Her work, critically ignored and undervalued, commands renewed attention and fresh interpretations from feminist thinkers who are seeking truthful portraits of women's lives to replace the old counterfeit models that have been handed down.

As Adrienne Rich has suggested, “redefining” women in established literature is essential as a feminist project. Feminist critics, she argues, must “re-read, re-see, re-vise,” seeking valid modifications of existing images and ideals, placing them in a new context, free of old conventions. It is true that women writers may to some extent dominate their own experiences by writing about them, as Elaine Showalter and Ellen Moers argue, but still women are part of a larger cultural system which dictates not only to them, but to the way in which their work is perceived.

Hence, the arbiters of taste who praised Parker for her brisk, wry humor at her prime and then condemned her to critical disregard years later, failed in two ways to authentically assess Parker's value to contemporary feminist thinkers. The milieu from which Parker drew her subject matter may have been narrow, but her work was not trivial.

Dorothy Parker's stories seen from the perspective of modern feminist theory, shed new light on the way in which a woman's image, status, social roles, sexual behavior and relationships are to be read in literature. While drawing playful attention to the stereotypical behavior of women, Parker's ironic humor disguised implicit criticism and outrage toward a repressive and patriarchal society.

Comic stories depicting pathetic alcoholics, wisecracking “broads,” submissive housewives, or love-sick girlfriends, can now be viewed from a feminist framework as socially significant statements, symptomatic of the hidden discontent and buried conflicts in women's lives.

It is important to remember that Parker operated in a male-identified group. As resident female wit and “Empress of the Algonquin Round Table,” Parker matched quips and word-play with George Kaufman, Alexander Woollcott, Franklin P. Adams and Robert Benchley. She attended Long Island parties at the Fitzgeralds and later in Hollywood and abroad befriended fellow writers S. J. Perelman, Nathanial West, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, whom she alternately revered and reviled.

In this atmosphere of predominantly male literati, Parker nurtured her talent for acid humor and quick repartee which she transmuted into fiction. Her short stories were marked early on by lacerating dialogue. Drawing characters from a narrow band of Eastern, American, urban, intellectual and middle to upper class society, Parker's fiction was popularized in The New Yorker magazine and soon identified as a type of genre, The New Yorker short story, characterized as smart, stylish, and amusing.

But, beneath the slick black humor, the subject matter of her work was distinctly feminist, with its preoccupation with women's problems, women's roles and women's relationships. Parker's mind bristled with female images of fashionable affectations, vacuous conversations, superficial relationships, failed romances, pointless infidelities, which she translated into sophisticated satires that had at its roots a cunning indictment of a society that permitted limited options for women and viewed them from a traditional male point of view.

It should be noted that the application of feminist theory to the works of Dorothy Parker does not assume that Parker had a specific feminist polemic or a consciously feminist intention. Indeed, what we now regard as “women's social criticism” is largely the result of Parker's unique exploration of female behavior, which inspires the contemporary critic to examine the forces in our society which drive that behavior.

An author may not set out purposely to expose aspects of sexism, or the domination of one sex by another. Although Parker does not actually present what have been called “women's issues” directly as the central focus in all of her works, nevertheless, in her portrayal of women characters, we ascertain underlying issues, situations, and attitudes of feminine concerns. In this way Parker indirectly exposes the restrictions placed upon women in a sexist society. Either consciously or without intention, Parker describes the debilitating effects of cultural oppression.

The stories in the book span Dorothy Parker's career as a short story writer, beginning in 1922 with her first published story, “Such a Pretty Little Picture,” and ending with her last, “The Banquet of Crow,” in 1957.

The chronological arrangement of the works enables us to observe that there is a progression and evolution in Parker's own view of women. As her life changed, her perspective changed. It would seem that as her own existence became more intolerable, Parker exhibits greater empathy with women. For example, the women of her later stories, such as Mimi McVicker (“The Lovely Leave”) and Maida Allen (“The Banquet of Crow”) are more mature and autonomous women than those in her earlier works. The portraits are more touching, and there are flashes in their behavior of female awareness and independence.

The stories selected are not propaganda for any particular bias towards women. Parker presents few feminine ideals; nor does she attempt to moralize about the female condition. The stories, we must remind ourselves, are written as literature, not pedagogy. Therefore, the structural analysis of women characters, i.e., who they are, how they are presented and how they are described, reflects primarily the way the author thinks and writes about women, not necessarily the ways we would like to see women portrayed in literature. Indeed, Parker frequently reflected ambivalent, sometimes negative attitudes toward her women characters.

The informing principle behind the selection of the short stories was limited to those stories in which women were principal figures and/or women's roles were central issues in the works. While most stories selected claim women as protagonists or primary narrators, some of them were chosen because a particular artistic treatment of women was considered valuable, whether it was a positive or negative portrayal.

Many of the central conflicts in the stories revolve around the inability of women to define their relationships with men: a wife's role with a weak husband (“Such a Pretty Little Picture”), the effects of army life on a young marriage (“The Lovely Leave”), the struggle of a middle-aged woman to adapt to her husband's desertion (“The Banquet of Crow”), the results of male abuse and abandonment (“Big Blonde”), the image of a lover's indifference and double standards of conduct to a young woman (“A Telephone Call”), a father's selective treatment of two daughters based on traditional patriarchal values (“The Wonderful Old Gentleman”), the tumultuous inner conflicts of a woman forced into a deceptive social situation with an unsuitable male partner (“The Waltz”), and the reactions of an unattractive woman to the hypocrisy and cruelty of traditional, and frequently also male-defined, standards of beauty (“Horsie”).

Indeed, all of the stories deal with issues that at their core are concerned ultimately with the way in which men and women struggle, and in most cases fail in their relationships. However, since almost all of the stories (as almost all of Parker's stories in general) focus on a woman's response to these relationships, Parker's cynical treatment of marriage, family, and sex roles suggests that the current state of sexual arrangements lacks satisfying resolution primarily for women. For example, despite accommodations, as in “The Waltz,” submissiveness as in “Mr. Durant,” or adaptation as in “Big Blonde,” women, for the most part, conceal their anger, outwardly play the role men expect of them, and accept whatever terms have been traditionally imposed on them.

However, we see in some cases that the actions of women such as Hazel (“Big Blonde”), Mimi McVicker (“The Lovely Leave”), and Maida Allen (“The Banquet of Crow”) indicate that these women characters gradually recognize the constraints on their lives and the roles they have assumed in their relationships, and are struggling in their own way to come to terms with this awareness. They strive to achieve a consciousness of their own, one which evolves out of their experiences as women.

In addition to the pervasive question of male-female relationships, the themes of these works suggest the author's interest in a wide range of female social concerns covering a spectrum of issues from abortion (“Mr. Durant”) to lesbianism (“Glory in the Daytime”), wife abuse (“Big Blonde”), and divorce (“The Banquet of Crow”). As a result of the breadth of this concern, the stories shed light on the twentieth-century image of women, as an integral part of society not only in their relationship to men, but to other women, their social place, and their cultural environment as well.

The feminist perspective, applied in this way to Parker's work, helps reveal aspects of the text which might otherwise be overlooked. Read in the light of new social awareness, Parker's treatment of women suggests more complexity and more hidden anger, particularly against men, than was previously noted by critics interested primarily in the satiric humor and urbane style of her work.

Also illuminated throughout the stories is the socialization process, which shapes not only the sex roles that individuals assume are a fixed and natural part of our society, but the forces both direct and indirect that structure the male and female temperaments in accordance with these roles. As Kate Millet suggests, the status accorded to men and women derives from the various values assigned to maintaining civilization.¹

The female characters portrayed in many of the stories, though responsible for their own actions, are generally depicted within a social framework rooted in specifically socially defined roles, the result of what Karen Horney calls, the “culture complex.”² Parker's characterizations of women may appear cynical, amusing, harsh, or stereotypical, but beneath the humor, the author affords the reader the opportunity to explore the origins of these roles, and the condition of women's lives which have often led to their behavior, whether aggressive, self-centered, pathetic, or submissive.

The stories bear out the view held by feminist writers suggested earlier, that this stereotypic behavior, seemingly in women's nature, is often a woman character's strategy for coping with a set of circumstances or an environment that presents limited alternatives associated with her condition.

Dominance (Mrs. Wheelock), submissiveness (Mrs. Durant), hysteria (narrator in “A Telephone Call”), bitchiness (Hattie), self-centeredness (Camilla), as portrayed in these stories, are traceable in part to the repressive and limiting environment of their lives as women, which cause them to act in ways that are traditionally, but perhaps mistakenly, regarded as endemic to their female nature.

Furthermore, while the two narrators in “The Waltz” and “A Telephone Call” are clearly outraged and abused as a result of their disappointment and humiliating experiences with men, we must bear in mind that these women exhibit another form of social conditioning that Horney calls “the soil for the growth of masochistic phenomena,” a certain “preparedness in women for a masochistic conception of their role.”³ Both these women appear to have a history of unhappy affairs with men and yet cling to arrangements which provoke their degradation and mistreatment.

Beneath the worldly bravado as a public celebrity, Parker herself dealt with the pain of being a woman. Broken love affairs that led to a string of suicide attempts, failed marriages, traumatic abortions, depression and drinking testified to the terrible despair of her private hell, a female place of insecurity, loneliness and fragility.

Feminist critics argue that cultural factors are so powerful an influence, that it is hard to imagine that any woman can avoid some degree of masochistic behavior in her relationship with men. Parker's characterizations of these emotionally dependent women are among her most unforgettable portraits, no longer regarded as comic “clinging vines,” but viewed as an effect of male ideologies that promote submissive traits more frequently desired by men.

Certainly it must be acknowledged that there are other causes that contribute to the restrictive behavior of women. Without minimizing the influences that social and cultural factors exert on women, or the effects of internalized patriarchal ideals, there are inherent “anatomical-physiological-psychological” characteristics innate to women and feminine development that govern their lives as well. Phyllis Rose, for example, acknowledges the “shadowy internal prohibitions and emotional phantoms”⁴ that haunted Virginia Woolf. The precise weight of these two groups of factors cannot be assessed, nor was it the intention of this study to do so. It is clear, however, that there is a confluence of forces at work in the lives of women that must be addressed by contemporary thinkers. Parker provides material to build a case for a feminist examination of those synergetic forces that forge a woman's history.

As previously pointed out, Parker's characters are not necessarily sympathetic. Indeed, like the domineering Mrs. Wheelock (“Such a Pretty Little Picture”), the vacuous Camilla (“Horsie”), and the bitchy Hattie (“The Wonderful Old Gentlemen”), they are often negative and unappealing. Nevertheless, Parker's perceptions of women help raise contemporary consciousness as to the causes of why women are this way. Thus, negative images and stereotypical images alike can be subject to analysis derived from new techniques of feminist criticism recently formulated and relatively uncharted during the author's lifetime. Since Parker's basic genre was satire, we must realize she presents a particular and unusual form of feminist awareness, not necessarily in her exhortations, but in her perceptions.

Obviously, prior critics have acknowledged the presence and portrayal of women characters in Parker's work. Still, as this study illustrates, the application of feminist theory calls for new approaches towards the way that women characters define themselves and their lives in fiction, and fresh understanding of the literary strategies of women writers who have generated a female tradition and style of their own.

Parker's fiction in particular provides a paradigm for the study of “women's language.” Each of the works in this study deals not only with women, but also contains the language traits, lexicon, speech patterns, vocabulary, idioms, and forms that have been associated with women's language. The topic of language and the sexes has drawn a wave of critical attention recently, both in published works and in ongoing research.

Robin Lakoff's book, Language and Woman's Place, suggests that the overall effect of “women's language”—meaning “both language restricted in use to women and language descriptive of women alone”—is that it submerges a woman's identity by “denying her the means of expressing herself strongly and encouraging her in expressions of ‘triviality.’” This linguistic phenomenon has the ultimate effect of systematically denying women access to power and encouraging them to feelings of inadequacy.

Parker's parodic and satiric language, the lexical traits of her female characters, viewed from the rigors of a feminist tradition, reflect these patterns of women's speech, now understood as the result of cultural conditioning, but nevertheless provocative of contemptuous stereotyping about women and their womanish ways.

Parker's career as a writer had a brilliant beginning, but sadly, an early demise. Despite the fact that Parker lived a protracted life, her powers as a writer diminished and her bitterness increased. By 1967 the majority of her friends were gone or alienated, and her popularity had become part of a vogue that had vanished. Unable to write, aging, ostensibly impoverished, assuaged by alcohol, and comforted by the only companion whom she had not estranged, her poodle, Troy, Parker died alone and in obscurity in a hotel room in New York, having long outlived her fame. In an irony that would have pleased her, most people who read of her passing thought that she had been dead for some time.

The literary audience of her own time recognized and celebrated her lively and vivacious wit. Her portraits of women were viewed as paradigms of satiric genius. It remains, however, for contemporary feminist thinkers to probe beneath the brilliant humor to discover the subtle rage and elusive wisdom, that consciously or inadvertently etched with canny skill the discontent of women's lives and the prescriptive environment in which they lived. The reader is invited to join in this discovery.

Parker's work suggests at its deepest level, that it is a very serious thing to be a funny woman.

Notes

1. Millet argues that, “however muted its present appearance may be, sexual dominion obtains nevertheless as perhaps the most pervasive ideology of our culture and provides its most fundamental concept of power.” Sexual Politics (New York: Ballantine Books, 1969), p. 33.

2. Karen Horney, Feminine Psychology (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1967), p. 230.

3. Horney, p. 231.

4. Phyllis Rose, Women of Letters, A Life of Virginia Woolf (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978) p. xiv.