A Gendered Collision: Sentimentalism and Modernism in Dorothy Parker's Poetry and Fiction (review)

The central argument of A Gendered Collision is that Dorothy Parker is not primarily a humorist. Instead, Pettit demonstrates that the distinctive elements of Parker’s work result from a collision of modernist and sentimental aesthetics. As an act of feminist recovery, Pettit rescues the sentimental tradition repressed and ridiculed during Parker’s day and positively assesses its influence on Parker’s poetry and short stories. Without underplaying the discontinuity and quirkiness of Parker’s oeuvre, Pettit makes a solid case for using it as a lens through which to read the general dynamics of women’s literature.

Pettit’s primary method is close reading of representative works. Although passing comparisons to Parker’s contemporaries and influences appear, the reader’s attention remains squarely on Parker’s writing. Pettit’s readings of the light verse are particularly useful; they reveal its patterns, habits, and references without losing sight of its ironic twists and turns. The pages on Parker’s friendly parodying of Adelaide Ann Procter’s mourning poems offer particularly fresh insights into women writers’ appeals to tradition. A similarly attentive analysis of more of Parker’s prose would also have been welcome.

The major contributions of the study are its treatment of the central, positive role granted to writing that appeared initially (and sometimes exclusively) in mass-market magazines and the focus on sentimentalism as a twentieth-century phenomenon. Pettit’s project raises interesting questions about how mass-market writing might best be studied: Is New Critical formalism sufficient or should one turn to cultural history? Pettit leans toward the former. If sentimentalism, however, is to be recovered as a positive and continuing strain in American women’s literature well into the twentieth century, it might be necessary to explain the social and cultural reasons for the persistence of this aesthetic, as well as documenting the forms it takes.

Pettit’s valuable project also opens the door to further discussion of Parker’s Hollywood and protest writings. Although these are frequently mentioned here, one wonders how a thorough examination also of Parker’s scripts and speeches might enhance the concept of sentimentalism. Is the Hollywood sentimentalism of Parker’s era continuous with or opposed to Victorian gentility or the sentimental novel of the early nineteenth century? Also, if Parker’s own writing, as is usefully demonstrated in A Gendered Collision, relies on racial stereotyping for progressive ends, it might be interesting to apply a similarly subtle analysis to her contemporaries—among whom, of course, were quite a few radicals of color and of the female gender.

Raising valuable questions for further research and offering detailed readings of writings all too often treated as ephemeral and merely amusing, Rhonda Pettit’s study will certainly contribute to our thinking on women and modernism. It usefully applies the insights of Suzanne Clark’s Sentimental Modernism to Dorothy Parker’s works and sensibly and successfuly supports the feminist project of reading women’s writing rather than their lives.