A Telephone Call Dorothy Parker

Wu Yue

10300120199

Text Analysis

About Dorothy Parker

Background and Reflection

Wit to Appreciate

Dorothy Parker   (August 22, 1893 – June 7, 1967)

• Poet

• Short story writer

• Critic

• Satirist

Best known for:

• wit

• wisecracks

• eye for 20th century urban foibles

Early literary output:

• New Yorker

• Vanity Fair

Algonquin Round Table:

•Dorothy as one of the

founding member

•an informal luncheon group at the Algonquin Hotel in the nineteen-twenties

•re-printing of her lunchtime remarks and short verses

•offend powerful producers too often

Hollywood:

screenwriting

two Academy Award nominations

Hollywood blacklist (left-wing politics)

Sharp wit endured

Dorothy Parker: “Big Blonde” (Bookman Magazine, February 1929)

•The O. Henry Award, an annual American award given to short stories of exceptional merit

Marriage:1st: Parker2nd, 3rd: Campbell

The New York Times wrote:

Miss Parker, for all her mercury-quick mind, was a careful, even painful, craftsman. She had her own definition of humor, and it demanded lonely, perfectionist writing to make the truly funny seem casual and uncontrived.

Text Analysis

About Dorothy Parker

Background and Reflection

Wit to Appreciate

Monologue

• a sentimental woman tortured by the uncertainty of love

Emotional cycle

• counting, guessing, waiting, begging, cursing

A call from the man (man busy, office; woman doing nothing)

Ending unwritten

Repetition

Stream of Consciousness

Satire

11

22

33

Repetition

• Numbers: 50, 55, 35

• Words three times in a row: “please, please, please”“dead, dead, dead”

• Dispersed repetition:“let him telephone me now”

Repetition

Stream of Consciousness

Satire

11

22

33

Stream of Consciousness•Cycles of emotional bursts

•Curse

•the telephone

• “I'll pull your filthy roots out of the wall, I'll smash your smug black face in little bits. Damn you to hell.”

•herself

• “send me to hell”

•the man

• “hurt him like hell”

• “I wish he were dead, dead, dead”

Metaphor: tele- remote

men &women

Repetition

Stream of Consciousness

Satire

11

22

33

SatireWomen: should not sit and wait for love

master of their own fate

Male-oriented society

Celebrity culture Women writers

Text Analysis

About Dorothy Parker

Background and Reflection

Wit to Appreciate

Enough Rope, one of the first best-selling volumes of poetry in America

Short stories, distinction between what the speaker says and what she thinks

•“A Telephone Call” (The Bookman, January 1928),

•“The Garter” (The New Yorker, September 8, 1928),

•“But the One on the Right” (The New Yorker, October 19, 1929),

•“Sentiment” (Harper’s Bazaar, May 1933), and

•“The Waltz” (The New Yorker, September 2, 1933)

Each female monologist outwardly presented a sacrificial politeness that belied the bitingly satirical mentality within.

the only monologues, indeed the only works, in which Parker explicitly named herself as the

protagonist

•leaving the endings of these stories essentially unwritten

•not delivering what the form of the autobiographical monologue promises, namely some insight into the self

the alienation the speaker experienced as a woman

--- the distinction between what she thinks and what she can properly say

Seeing reviews of her work

Hearing accounts of her behavior

Having her one-liners quoted back to her

the division between external and internal expression in these monologues

Awareness that she could no longer completely control her public image

Her satirical mockery of what publicity did to women writers

unprecedented public fascination with celebrity culture in America

Monologues

•Her own personal experience of becoming a public figure

•The beginnings of a larger cultural phenomenon of literary celebrity that has come to influence the current market of fiction as well as contemporary literary studies

•Avoided evaluative comparisons to male writers

•Wanted to compete with her male contemporaries

early twentieth century mass culture in America governed by rigid gender roles

Male authors

play heroic roles

refined, cultured, and sophisticated

Female authors

most often compared to their male contemporaries in pursuit of defining their worth among the cultural elite if “successful”, not successful in dispelling a cultural paradigm that associated masculinity with superior talent and femininity with inferior forms of writing

a more masculine persona

the rhetorical strategy of satire

masculinity

literary longevity

To exploit the literary market

To critique the limiting effects of celebrity culture on women writers

Resisting interpretations of the relationship between her work and her “self” to the end of her life, she inspired her last interviewer, Wyatt Cooper, to write “If you didn’t know Dorothy Parker, whatever you think she was like, she wasn’t. Even if you did know her, whatever you thought she was like, she probably wasn’t”.

Her image continues to be created, refashioned, and complicated in a way that makes her an especially intriguing figure in light of contemporary observations about the fluid nature of gender.

Text Analysis

About Dorothy Parker

Background and Reflection

Wit to Appreciate

Algonquin Round Table

One of her most famous comments was made when the group was informed that former president Calvin Coolidge had died.

Parker remarked, "How could they tell?"

Advertisements:

One of her earliest ads for Vogue parodies a famous line from Shakespeare’s Polonius: “Brevity is the soul of wit” to describe a line of women’s undergarments: “From these foundations of the autumn wardrobe, one may learn that brevity is the soul of lingerie.”

Continuing this line of humor, Parker again wrote an amusing ad for an expensive but revealing nightgown: “There was a little girl, who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good, she was very very good, and when she was bad, she wore this divine nightdress of rose-colored mousseline de soie, trimmed with frothy Valenciennes lace.

(mousseline de soie—silk, Valenciennes –a French Town)

Thank you all!