Narrative "Confidence Games": Framing the Blonde Spectacle in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925) and Nights at the Circus (1984)

So tomorrow we will be in England bright and early. And I really feel quite thrilled because Mr. Eisman sent me a cable this morning, as he does every morning, and he says to take advantage of everybody we meet as traveling is the highest form of education.

Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes¹

What makes Lorelei Lee from Anita Loos's novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925) so appealing is her ability to manipulate her own image and effectively become mistress of her own grand confidence game. Throughout the novel, it is clear that Lorelei is aware of herself as an image, and she constantly adjusts this image to best "take advantage" of the situation around her. In effect, she is smarter than she looks, and she uses this to her rhetorical (and financial) advantage. Recently, Christina Britzolakis has questioned the viability of reading the "feminine spectacle" as a particularly feminist undertaking.² Although Britzolakis is right to point to the patriarchal underpinnings that inform the male gaze, I argue that the rhetorical construction of the wise-cracking, self-reflexive blonde often enacts a critique on the system of commodification and objectification that she appears to uphold, thus meriting more critical and scholarly attention.³ More specifically, I investigate the parallel rhetorical strategies in Anita Loos's novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus to reveal the self-reflexive and ultimately subversive nature of a deliberately constructed blonde spectacle.⁴ In contrast, the main character in Dorothy Parker's short story "Big Blonde," Hazel Motes, is not in control of her own narrative and thus her "performance" as a blonde has disastrous results; a brief analysis of Parker's use of the blonde spectacle will provide a useful contrast to Loos's Lorelei Lee and Carter's main character, Sophie Fevvers. Loos and Carter draw our attention to the image of blonde beauty as a valuable commodity, yet both shy away from condemning their heroines as "gold-digging blondes." By handing narrative control to their heroines, these authors allow Lorelei and Fevvers to frame their own performances rhetorically and thus to alter our perception of their subsequent parodic performances.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925): An Educational Shell Game

Throughout Loos's novel, Lorelei is aware of her role as mistress of her own confidence game. Lorelei's first journal entry signals her awareness of her own rhetorical savvy and her private joy at having deceived her suitor Gus Eisman into thinking she was just another dumb blonde:

A gentleman friend and I were dining at the Ritz last evening and he said that if I took a pencil and a paper and put down all my thoughts it would make a book. This almost made me smile as what it would really make would be a whole row of encyclopediacs.

(Loos, 3)

It is clear that Lorelei's thoughts of Eisman are comic in nature—he makes her laugh at his pomposity. What is also clear is that Lorelei does not take on this new writing task simply because she has been told to do so; instead, she reveals a certain confidence in her own narrative ability, for she believes that her written words will be as rich and full as a row of "encyclopediacs." Based on Lorelei's expressed confidence in her abilities, I believe that her grammatical error is a purposeful misnomer that elicits more than just another dumb blonde joke.

In her article "Taking Blondes Seriously," Susan Hegeman refers to Lorelei's grammatical mistakes as a device to "foreground the materiality of language" and further highlight Lorelei's unintentional comedy.⁵ However, a closer examination of these grammatical errors suggests that Loos may have had another aim: to put her readers in a position of false superiority comparable to Lorelei's hapless suitors. In her first entry, Lorelei smiles to herself over her inept gentleman friend's assessment of her wit, and this small joke on Eisman is made more subversive when Loos enacts a similar...