The Critical Waltz: Essays on the Work of Dorothy Parker

Many people in the reading public and even those who are not readers can quote Dorothy Parker. (Possibly the most famous of her many witticisms is, "Men don't make passes at girls who wear glasses.") While Parker has often been dismissed as a clever but troubled self-promoter, she is the author of a significant body of work that includes poetry, drama, and essays. Rhonda S. Pettit's edited collection, The Critical Waltz: Essays on the Work of Dorothy Parker, provides readers with tools for greater understanding and appreciation of Parker's important contribution to literature. The book, which includes thirteen reprinted essays, five new essays, and two student essays, will be of interest to scholars, students, and the discriminating general reader. Pettit has provided a fine introduction to the collection, which is divided into four sections: Modernist Contexts, Feminist Issues, Classroom Encounters, and Conversations.

As one of the wits of the famous Algonquin Round Table, Parker was a celebrity during the age of the flapper, and her works were best-sellers. Since that time her reputation has had a checkered history. Pettit places Parker firmly in the modernist camp but points out that her accessibility made her suspect in the eyes of critics (a situation similar to that faced by her contemporary, Edna St. Vincent Millay). Parker was one of the female casualties of New Criticism. Pettit reports, for example, that Mark Van Doren dismissed Parker's work as sentimental. Van Doren's reasoning will be familiar to those who have followed the critical reception of women writers: women writers tend to be sentimental, and hence they are popular but inevitably shallow.

In the decades that followed, Parker's fame rested more on her association with the age of the flapper and on the notoriety of her lifestyle than on her artistic achievements. As a humorist, Parker was further slighted. Andrea Ivanov-Craig writes in her essay, "Being and Dying as a Woman in the Short Fiction of Dorothy Parker," that even to some humor scholars, Parker's work is seen as doubly trivial: "'trivial' because it is humor, and 'trivial' because it concerns the lives and perspectives of women" (p. 232).

Within the various sections of the volume a dialogue emerges about whether or not Parker was a feminist. Parker's reputation was given a boost by second-wave feminists (essays by Emily Toth and Suzanne L. Bunkers are included), but even they did not agree on the matter. An important essay by Paula A. Treichler on Parker's use of female language ("Verbal Subversions in Dorothy Parker: 'Trapped Like a Trap in a Trap'") also presents Parker as complicit with patriarchal culture. Parker calls herself a feminist in the interview published in Paris Review in 1956 included in the volume. In her life she may have negotiated between obeying feminist impulses and adapting to patriarchal constraints, but most critics see her as engaging in a sophisticated critique of narrow gender roles and social pathology.

With such riches at hand, it is hard to single out individual selections for special mention. In "Black on Blonde: The Africanist Presence in Dorothy Parker's 'Big Blonde,'" Amelia Simpson analyzes the three black figures in the story "to [expose] the way gender and race are mutually constitutive" (p. 187). Asserting that Parker was influenced by the satirist Jonathan Swift, Ellen Pollak gives a compelling analysis of Parker's book reviews to make her case ("Premium Swift: Dorothy Parker's Iron Mask of Femininity"). Pollak makes a striking claim given that Parker left school at fourteen, and there is no hard evidence she ever read Swift. The essay includes many hilarious quotations from Parker, who is merciless in demolishing a book on happiness by a Yale professor of English, who happens to have been a frequent lecturer for women's clubs and a respected public voice at the time. In the section on teaching Parker, I especially recommend Sophia Mihic's "Mrs. Parker and the History of Political Thought." To counter the problem that students are prone to navigate and manipulate philosophical texts without ever really becoming engaged, Mihic uses Parker's story "Big Blonde" to "read Rousseau with Parker's aid" (p. 297). With the aim of reinvigorating the study of Rousseau while at the same time gaining greater insight into Parker's story, she explores the concept of feminist artifice in both writers' work.

We are fortunate that Pettit has chosen to include some of Parker's letters and the Paris Review interview because they treat us to Parker's own witty prose. However, these selections are just the frosting on a very substantial cake. Pettit's collection will be useful for many years to come.