Big Blonde and her Broken Mind

'She felt a cozy solidarity with the big company of the voluntary dead' - Dorothy Parker

All the beauty we are used  to associate with the feminine need not always be authentic. We fail to realize the fallibility in a woman's character. The hollowness behind that deep rouge lips, is sometimes all that she is. Nothing more. Its strange to comprehend it in such a way. 

After reading three brilliant stories by Dorothy Parker, something I understood about the women around me including myself. We all are just tired. Its just that simple. No matter how much we caress ourselves in beauty saloons like pedigreed bitches, sweat profusely to perfect our hips or just read heaps of books to sharpen our intellect (which will get ignored anyway), its just the same. 

The absence of any emotional reaction from a woman is always suspicious and if she manages to express it (rather haughtily) then she is creating a scene. What an overly dramatic bitch! 

I find this hypocrisy annoying as well as confusing. One way or another, we just end up tired, stripped away of our brilliance and beauty. Some hollow souls searching for our place in this dearth of a society. Maybe we can only be happy in our own Wonderlands, respectively.

With endearing wit in her writings, Dorothy Parker familiarizes us with twisted women characters and how sometimes over expectations leads us to miseries. So, the first one is 'The Custard Heart' in which the lady, Mrs. Lanier is always sad and hopeless. Even with all of her wealth (actually her husband's) she could never be truly happy. How her quest for happiness involves affairs  with young men. The hopeless trickster lures young men by posing as a damsel. How men are always in search of damsel!

The second one is 'Big Blonde' and perhaps one of the best by Parker. The story revolves around a voluptuous blonde woman named Hazel Morse and how she is always the sport! The expectations of her always a being a chirpy and goofy mess is overbearing. The story also highlights the shallowness of marriages, how a woman gradually begins to lose her desirability after becoming a wife. 

Final one is 'You were perfectly fine' - a short and funny story, much of an anecdote really. A young man wakes up with a hangover beside a girl which he had spent the last night with. After making lifelong promises to her in a drunken state, he realizes his mistake the next day. The naive girl took him by his word and now hopes for a future with him. The pitiable creature, not the woman, but the man!

So these classics by Dorothy Parker which are themed on the Jazz Age in America, keeps the reader on the edge while discussing the oddities of a woman's mind. Also, somehow they managed to add on to my existentialism as a woman as well.