dorothyparker19 - Tumblr blog

[dorothyparker19]

Two years later, Sunset Gun, was published. The Red Dress written within the volume came with many similarities to The Satin Dress. This time, the dress rather than the material comes with a persona. The poem begins with a childhood fantasy - rather than a feminine fantasy in The Satin Dress - of owning “a gown of the reddest red” in order to of achieved adulthood. Only used within the poem once, red is an obvious colour symbol of love, the red dress a metaphor for her dreams. The dream of her love life and reality not living up to the dream. The poems disappointment is not that the childhood fantasy has not come true, but that the dress she always dreamed of was itself incapable of extraordinary transformation. The Red Dress is in some ways an important piece of wisdom, the things we want don’t always turn out to be the same as we thought we wanted.

Parker’s ability to give both the dresses a personality is exceptional. These poems rather than represent the ideas society have forced women to act or be, show the ideas women give themselves.

[dorothyparker19]

Ms. Parker once said, for every five words she wrote, she would change seven. Her work continually focused on subject matter that perhaps deemed unimportant, yet would skillfully underline and address social concerns that infuriated her. Her key concern appeared to be the objectification of women within specific roles designed for them by men. They existed to appeal to the sensory scrutiny of the men around them, becoming animated mannequins. Her stories were personal, but shaped the larger issues of the day, consistently illustrating that she was not bound by the limitations of her gender. By reading her work women of the generation could recognise that they could reinvent the definitions rather than living secondarily to others, women at the time started to step away from the domestic sphere and Parker was an example and inspiration of that, taking on a professional career that before only men would embark on. “She wrote about abortion when you couldn’t write the word”, Regina Barreca once said, Parker was the first to insult men for their ignorance and drag society for its narrow-minded views on racism and sexism but in a luring way.