Dorothy Parker and an Analysis of Her Short Stories - Research Paper Example

12 November Assignment Dorothy Parker was an American poet best known for her wit, wisecracks as well as satire in the many short stories and poems that she wrote. She had a very unhappy childhood which moulded her into the writer and poet that she came to be and soon became a literary marvel for the world to read about. Parker often made use of wit and humour from her life and supplied it into her stories by way of making other readers understand what she was going through and at the same time, appealing to the similar situations that they were caught up within in life. That is why people were and are still able to relate to her work quite a bit. She went through three marriages, including two with the same man. Most people say that her sharp wit was also a result of these marriages and suicidal attempts, which indulged her to take on alcohol as a soothing device. Nonetheless, this paper helps to provide an insight into three of her short stories, while comprehending how Parker has made use of wit and humour from her life, into those stories, in order to tell the world about the miseries of her marriages. She was also one of the founders of the Algonquin Round Table and wrote for Vanity Fair however, her wit proved to be too sarcastic for some of the producers. Initially however, her wit as a critic was extremely popular among the people because she told the truth in its rawest form making a number of producers and directors feel extremely uncomfortable for their less than average results in the box office. No wonder Parker was able to laugh at herself quite well too. Her stories are permanent proof of how she was witty about everything including her own personal life. For example, she had extreme ambivalent feelings about her Jewish background and she joked that in order to escape her name, she got married to a Wall Street stock broker by the name of Edwin Pond Parker II because of the anti-Semitic feelings that were prevalent in America, as well as around the world, at the time. All her stories have some or the other snippet taken from her life and this paper presents her married life in comic through her writing. (Meade, Marion) Through her worst years, Dorothy Parker always tried to maintain a very tough exterior for the world to see. This was probably because of a few reasons ranging from the already doomed image of women in the much talked about patriarchal society at the time, as well as maintaining her position as someone who had the best wit in the country at the time. She drank publicly in order to portray a sense of masculinity and to show that women could be tough as well. Parker often said, “Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.” (Parker, Dorothy) Despite her failed marriages, she scoffed at her own misery in public in order to show people that there were worse problems in life. “In subsequent successful volumes of poetry—Sunset Gun (1928), Death and Taxes (1931), and Not So Deep as a Well (1936)—Parker poked fun at her own heartbreak, masochism, and hopefulness. Her most effective verse captures the breadth of her dreams and disappointments with bitter irony and perfect turns of phrase, but only hints at their depths.” (Itzkovitz, Daniel) One of Parker’s very famous short poems is about how she was reckless enough to drink and be with any man that she wanted to. For example, “I like to have a martini, Two at the very most. After three I’m under the table, after four I’m under my host.” However, her stories still portray women in a much closed form where they are not able to speak up other than to their own thoughts. In all her stories discussed within this paper, Parker’s characters are only able to speak to the voices in their heads. (Walker, Nancy) ‘The Waltz’ written by Parker is one of her all time best satirical pieces in which a young woman’s thoughts get meddled up as she says yes to waltzing with a man. Her cynical side gets the best of her positivism and she grimly acknowledges both the voices in her head. This proves to be very humorous because as she begins to dance with the man, her thoughts tell her that she actually doesn’t want to do what she is doing, however she does not know how to refuse. (“The Poetry & Short Stories of Dorothy Parker.”) At the time, society was extremely averse to young women speaking up their minds, and that is what Parker feels created half the issues in society. If a man asked a woman to dance, it was impolite to refuse and thus Parker plays the role of a young bruised woman locked into society’s rules. She thus laughed at how she wanted to break free from the treacherous norms she was forced to live under, but because of her own inabilities to speak up, she was stuck dancing with the man. (Treichler, Paula) Parker takes a hit at the norms that women were supposed to adhere to in the patriarchal society that they lived within at the time. Parker mumbles to herself, not because she finds solace in doing so, but because she has no other choice as no one else will listen to what she exactly wants. She has tried to turn the story into a prior happening before her marriages took place. Through the wit present in the story, she has tried to take a jab at society and talks about the horrendous way in which women were trapped into believing that they could only succumb to what the men had to say. In this manner, Parker blames her failed attempts at keeping together her marriages because she never had a say in what she wanted and always had to give. (Lane, Patricia) Her witty and sarcastic thoughts during the waltz reveal the distaste that she holds for society and how she wished that her voice was heard. As a female humorist, other writers write that Parker has learnt to accept the fate that she brought upon herself by commonly making use of humour. In the Waltz, she contrasts between her wants and her forced nature to the experience of dancing with a man that she does not want to, that she is undergoing. Her personality at the point thus helps to provide the readers with a comic sense of incongruity and gives a clear picture of how the waltz that the two are dancing is actually Parker submitting to the needs of male domination, despite her long monologues of how she would not have been in the position that she was stuck in, had she the chance to speak up. ‘The Lovely Leave’ is yet another story by Parker against the backdrop of marriage where she writes about the stress of coping with a husband who was part of the army during the Second World War. She talks about how despite the love that her husband and she reciprocated for one another, it was tough to be married to somebody who only had limited time to spend before he was gone again on duty. She writes, “"If you looked for things to make you feel hurt and wretched and unnecessary, you were certain to find them, more easily each time, so easily, soon, that you did not even realize you had gone out searching.” ("The Lovely Leave") However, what is funny is that Parker is jealous of the kind of life that her husband was living when on duty. He was meeting new people and getting a taste of the war while she was sitting at home and eagerly waiting for the telephone to ring so that she could get his favourite meals ready and dress up for the time that he did come back home. Apart from that, she felt herself growing affection for other people around her and wanted to do something about her only natural feelings. Neither does she want to live the same old life that she will be living once her husband leaves and nor does she want to be the one who is left behind. What she does not understand is how difficult it must be for her husband to have to leave her and perform his duties for the country. She compares herself with the position that she is in and feels that he comes back to love her a few times. It was very tough for her to hold up her marriage during the war years and that was what led it to crumble so easily. (Toth, Emily) Moving on to Dorothy Parker’s ‘A Telephone Call’, the voice of obsession can be observed in this particular story. She has made use of short interjections and excellent verbatim in order to display the obsessive infatuation that a woman has. For example, the opening of the story, “PLEASE, God, let him telephone me now. Dear God, let him call me now. I won't ask anything else of You, truly I won't. It isn't very much to ask. It would be so little to You, God, such a little, little thing. Only let him telephone now. Please, God. Please, please, please.” (Parker, Dorothy) The woman has a voice filled with plea and aggressiveness in order to create a very frantic pace which excites the readers about what is to come next. In the story, the woman is seen begging God for help because she can see herself losing control because of the situation that she has put herself into. She has immense feelings of aggravation and attachment to the object of her infatuation to the point that the reader can feel herself understand and empathize with the pain of the deranged woman. The woman in the story has been waiting for a telephone call and making random statements and begging God for help, making the entire circumstance seem almost urgent. Parker has thus tried to provide the emotion of obsession with a voice and the short monologues speak for themselves as if obsession itself were speaking to the readers. In this way, Parker has provided humour as well because it is almost funny to watch this woman go mad over the wait that she is not being able to endure. The choice of words and mannerisms used to describe the woman are very stereotypical of impatient women all around the world. (Pettit, Rhonda) Parker has tried to portray how women sometimes have very irrational and unbalanced thoughts which are seldom coherent in nature. Through this, she has tried to rationalise how a single moment can seem like eternity for some women. Yet, she does not give way to what the phone call might be about because she has only focused on the way obsession with a single moment is enough to drive a woman crazy. In conclusion, through the three stories mentioned within the purview of this paper, ‘The Waltz’, ‘The Lovely Leave’, and ‘The Telephone Call’, Dorothy Parker has used humour in order to intimate her readers about her married life. All these three stories have been written from a very personal point of view as she takes examples of her own behaviour and links it up with what most women at the time, or even today, might have been going through. It is thus very easy for women to relate to her stories and they find it quite appealing because her tone speaks of comprehension as only another woman going through the same feeling is able to understand a woman’s concern. Parker has made use of examples from her married life and she has been strong by laughing at the failures that she has endured so very strongly. Writer Daniel Itzkovitz writes that “before her lonely death in New York on June 7, 1967, Parker disparaged the life that she and other Round Tablers had lived. She also judged her own writing harshly as derivative and not living up to her promise. "I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Edna St. Vincent Millay," she once claimed, "unhappily in my own horrible sneakers." Elsewhere she said that she had been "just a little Jewish girl trying to be cute." However, her work uniquely catalogued society's random pretensions and her own tough, intimate longings. She remains one of the most shrewdly sensitive and elegant satirists of the twentieth century.” (Meade, Marion) Therefore, Dorothy Parker did indeed make use of a vast amount of humour as can be seen in order to depict the miseries that she was going through during her married life and was sure that most women at the time would be able to compete with her with regard to her feelings and emotions. Despite her wit being extremely caustic and sour for most people, women were able to relate to her work so well because of the voice that she was providing them with through her stories and satire. Works Cited Herrmann, Dorothy (1982). With Malice Toward All: The Quips, Lives and Loves of Some Celebrated 20th-Century American Wits. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. p. 78. Itzkovitz, Daniel. "Dorothy Rothschild Parker." Jewish Virtual Library - Homepage. Web. 12 Nov. 2011. . Lane, Patricia. "A Review of “A Telephone Call”." Turtola's CyberEnglish Blog. Web. 12 Nov. 2011. . Meade, Marion (1987). Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?. New York, NY: Penguin Books. p. 5. Parker, Dorothy. Dorothy Parker,. New York: Viking, 1944. Print. Pettit, Rhonda. (1999) "Lo(w)cations for 'High' Modernism: Dorothy Parker and Early Twentieth-Century Literature." Presented at the 41st Annual Convention of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Treichler, Paula. (1980) "Verbal Subversions in Dorothy Parker: 'Trapped Like a Trap in a Trap.'" Language and Style 13:4 (1980): 46-61. Toth, Emily. "Dorothy Parker, Erica Jong, and New Feminist Humor." Regionalism and the Female Imagination 2:2 (1977): 70-85. Walker, Nancy. (1988) A Very Serious Thing: Women's Humor and American Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 30-35. "The Poetry & Short Stories of Dorothy Parker." The Short Story Reading Challenge. Web. 12 Nov. 2011. . "The Lovely Leave" A Work in Progress. 7 Dec. 2008. Web. 12 Nov. 2011. . Read More