On the Wire with Death and Desire: The Telephone and Lovers' Discourse in the Short Stories of Dorothy Parker

From the telephone's earliest history in America, white middle- and upper-class users have considered the instrument tailored to the projects of desire.¹ Providing a sheltered space that isolates lovers from the scrutiny and supervision of the outside world, the telephone "cuts a dyad out of the speech community and wires it into an exclusive, private, two-person community" (Hopper 30). The proximity of mouth to ear—orifice to orifice—encourages a sense of conspiratorial intimacy. Marshall McLuhan has gone so far as to argue that "it is quite natural to kiss via phone" because the instrument, like the "language of love," "unites voice and ear in an especially close way" (266). Yet even as the telephone can bring the beloved near, it can also keep the beloved (or the unwanted admirer) far away. As a material thing, the telephone is an ambiguous monument, signifying both presence and absence, proximity and distance: "the telephone line holds together what it separates" (Ronell 4). Comfort and curse, the instrument offers the possibility of possessing an absent Other while simultaneously imposing distance and loss.

Dorothy Parker's fiction of the twenties and thirties taps this paradoxical line, amplifying the uneasy intersection of telephonic ardor, gender, and social prescription. Four of Parker's stories—"A Telephone Call," "New York to Detroit," "Dusk Before Fireworks," and "Advice to the Little Peyton Girl"—portray the telephone as a site of female anxiety and urgent desire, the locus of a power struggle between heterosexual lovers. Through its capacity to command and disconnect, advance and withdraw, the telephone promises to level or circumvent the power imbalance between lovers while at the same time reinforcing it. In their order of publication, the stories chart women's increasingly desperate attempts to short-circuit the telephone tactics men use to retain the upper hand and to disentangle themselves from the traditional discourse of love that holds them captive. Ultimately, the stories argue, any attempt to subvert the masculine hegemony in telephone discourse—or in the love affair—is futile.

Because the telephone's disembodied "electric speech" hides the identity of the person calling, it typically sets up an imbalance of power between caller and answerer. Avital Ronell explains that in the act of answering the telephone, "You're saying yes, almost automatically, suddenly, sometimes irreversibly. Your picking it up means . . . you're its beneficiary, rising to meet its demand, to pay a debt. You don't know who's calling or what you are going to be called upon to do, and still, you are lending your ear, giving something up, receiving an order" (2). Answering the telephone is by definition a "suspension of ‘No!'" (5). It puts the answerer at the mercy of the caller, who can set the agenda and whose identity can be mystified.² Linguist Robert Hopper calls this imbalance "caller hegemony," explaining that "the two parties in a telephone conversation relate asymmetrically. . . . The caller acts, the answerer must react" (9). Hopper outlines some of the privileges of the caller role and the corresponding drawbacks of the answerer role:

The answerer's role includes the obligation to speak first, which entails vulnerability to be recognized by a still-unrecognized caller and to assent to whatever the caller asks. . . . The caller's role includes first chance to show recognition of the other and first chance to launch preliminary inquiries such as "what are you doin [sic]"—inquiries that may intrude into the answerer's privacy. Caller also gets first chance to introduce the call's first topic.

(34)³

In social practice, the asymmetrical balance of authority between caller and answerer roles has been intensely gendered. The employment of women as switchboard operators institutionalized the woman's role as answerer; though boys were installed as operators on the first commercial switchboard in 1878, they were quickly and systematically replaced by women, who were—it was presumed—less inclined to talk back to customers or play practical jokes, as well as more dexterous, patient, and reserved (Maddox 266). The...