SOURCE: Simpson, Amelia. “Black on Blonde: The Africanist Presence in Dorothy Parker's ‘Big Blonde’.” College Literature 23, no. 3 (October 1996): 105-16.

In the following essay, Simpson examines racial themes in “Big Blonde,” contending that the story provides “a penetrating view of the divides of American identity, and of one white author's attempt to write that identity.”

The story “Big Blonde” (1929) articulates some of the ambivalence with which Dorothy Parker's work approaches feminist inquiry.¹ There is a vicious style to Parker's compassionate portrait of a woman hopelessly trapped in social codes of femininity. Just as intriguing, however, is the way race is inscribed in a text so overtly marked as a reflection on gender.² Foregrounding the Africanist presence in the text discloses the real source of the story's power to disturb. Blackness surfaces in Parker's story in a way that provides an unusually clear example of the use of racial difference...