"Big Blonde" by Dorothy Parker portrays a fast paced world with time only for work and pleasure. Drinking heavily is a normal part of the Jazz Age; people are desperate to forget their troubles. Hazel Morse, a big, busty, blonde searches for a way through life. She tries to play the role society expects her to fill, the dumb, happy, dizzy blonde, woman. She finds herself living two lives, one a facade for the public the other her true self. Hazel Morse's painful decline reveals Parker's critique of the Jazz Age.
Hazel's story reveals the decline of a "good sport." (Parker I 1) She becomes accustomed to trading sex for security, a characteristic exchange it appears to her, within her society. "Men liked her, and she took it for granted that the liking of many men was a desirable thing. Popularity seemed to her to be worth all the work that had to be put into its achievement." (I 1) Discarded by a series of increasingly inferior men as age cuts into her beauty, she resorts to alcohol, and eventually attempts a suicide, which rather cruelly doesn't come off. In spite of the dullness and vulgarity of Hazel's situation, Dorothy Parker breathes enough life to separate her from the blur of women in the story who are "stout, broad of shoulder and abundantly breasted, with faces thickly clothed in soft, high-colored flesh." (II 2) Hazel's final solution for peace is suicide.
Suicide is the only solution for Hazel's miserable existence. "It would be nice, nice and restful, to be dead. There was no settled, shocked moment when she first thought of killing herself; it seemed to her as if the idea has always been with her."(II 3) Hazel's life in the Jazz Age is a string of tragic failures and disappointments. Every solution she has found to her problems has only compounded them further. There can be no mistake in death. Death assures peace, rest, and freedom from the drudgery and misery of her life.
In the story "Big Blonde" by Dorothy Parker, conformity and melancholy are the driving forces that influence Hazel's behavior and ultimately lead to the collapse of her character. ... Hazel's overwhelming feeling of melancholy begins with Herbie when she realizes that he only wants the bubbly blonde that she portrays not the woman that she is underneath. ... She is not allowed to be anything but the bubbly blonde. ...
