Playing Smart: New York Women Writers and Modern Magazine Culture

2. “This Unfortunate Exterior”: Dorothy Parker, the Female Body, and Strategic Doubling

2 / “This Unfortunate Exterior”: Dorothy Parker, the Female Body, and Strategic Doubling In magazines of the 1920s, Art Deco representations of the modern woman rivaled New York City’s rising skyscrapers in height and symbolic glory.1 One ad for stockings featured a drawing of a giant woman tiptoeing through the New York grid at Park Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street.2 The October 1926 issue of Vanity Fair featured a portrait of “The New York Girl,” her garters and petticoats exposed by her billowing skirt as she stood atop skyscrapers in high heels. The caption writer rhapsodized that “toward her serenely frivolous body yearns fiercely and perpetually an entire, amorous, upward city—incarnation and epitome of the vivid and ferocious age in which we live.”3 The frivolous New York Girl was the symbol not simply of the city but indeed of modernity and its promise. Dorothy Parker, the poet of broken promises, the ferocious narrator of modern foibles, knocked this symbol from her pedestal. As she explained in a New Yorker book review: “I know those girls. I’ve seen them. That’s why I’m not so well.”4 A cultural icon associated with Manhattan even today, Parker might seem a candidate for representative New York Girlhood; she lamented that she “was cheated out of the distinction of being a native New Yorker, because I had to go and get born while the family was spending the Summer in New Jersey.”5 In spite of, and indeed because of, her potential resemblance to the New York Girl, Parker burlesques the prevailing stereotypes of modern women with her skeptical tone, ironic juxtapositions, and emphasis on their excessive embodiment. After all, a female body the size of a skyscraper could seem a threatening King Kong instead of 52 / “this unfortunate exterior” a lovely Fay Wray, if one looked through the right lens. In her humor Parker provided that lens. For example, in a 1923 poem that appeared in Life, then a humor magazine and, not coincidentally, John Held Jr.’s first venue for his famous flapper caricatures, Parker treated the flapper’s body as a modern threat: Her girlish ways may make a stir, Her manners cause a scene, But there is no more harm in her Than in a submarine. (lines 5–8)6 In Parker’s reimagining, the flapper’s body becomes enormous and mechanical as she plows through the modern scene. Parker’s irritation with the flapper’s girlish ways reflects her reservations about feminine roles that substitute a cult of the body for intellectual development and narcissism for ambition. In a 1927 New Yorker book review, Parker bemoaned the chic feminine persona in popular fiction: “She is always cool and wise and epigrammatic. In short, the sort of woman about whom my happiest day-dreams centre. I love to lie and think of dropping a girder on her head.”7 The magazine’s tendency to flatten both body and mind into superficial feminine stereotypes vexes Parker, so she proposes flattening that imaginary woman herself. While many may have thought of Parker herself as cool and wise and epigrammatic, Parker deliberately stresses her authorial persona’s failure to fit popular feminine roles in order to ensure that she would not be conflated with brainless flappers or superficial sophisticates. In magazine fantasies, the flapper is flighty and sexy, slangy and imprecise in a verbal looseness that corresponds with implied sexual looseness. She is, in short, significantly more body than mind, and Parker refuses that ratio. In a book review, Parker quotes a popular romance novel that deems its heroine as “‘fresh and bright and sparkling as the fresh bright sparkling March morning itself.’” Parker rejects such surface sparkle and responds: “Now fun’s fun, and all that, but how is one who is only flesh and blood, after all, to keep that up?”8 Stereotypes that cast modern girls as upbeat, beautiful, energized creatures ignore the inevitable limitations imposed by money, resources, time, and physical condition. Parker reminds her readers of those reality principles. In so doing, she emphasizes her own labor as a professional journalist and establishes her distance from the sexualized female bodies represented in the illustrations and advertisements of the magazine. The expansion of the New York magazine industry in the 1910s and “this unfortunate exterior” / 53 1920s shaped Parker’s career just as middlebrow humor conventions shaped her aesthetic. Lauren Berlant...