Sophie Fetocacis Analysis and Interpretation of Dorothy Parkers One Perfect Rose

One Perfect Rose

A single flow'r he sent me, since we met. All tenderly his messenger he chose; Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet One perfect rose. I knew the language of the floweret; 'My fragile leaves,' it said, 'his heart enclose.' Love long has taken for his amulet One perfect rose. Why is it no one ever sent me yet One perfect limousine, do you suppose? Ah no, it's always just my luck to get One perfect rose.

Dorothy Parkers poem One Perfect Rose, published in 1926, is one of many pieces in her output that consist of wry, terse commentary on gender roles and romantic customs. This particular poem uses the image of the rose to expose the potentially empty formalities of courtship, and contrasts the rose with more material gifts, symbols of status, which the speaker claims never to receive. Furthermore, the tone of irony revealed unequivocally in the last stanza helps to suggest another layer of content, that of an idealist and essentialist representation of the female, and its deconstruction within the poem. The poem essentially describes the receipt of a single, pristine rose from a man. The speaker claims to understand the amorous message the man is trying to convey with this flower, and at the end of the poem she laments that her admirers never send a perfect limousine instead of a rose. In light of this ironic complaint in the last stanza, it is clear that the speaker considers the giving of roses to women as an empty and formulaic gesture. Parker articulates this through the poems form and structure; she employs an unadventurous form and a somewhat vapid tone, as well as a very neat and just so structure. The poem is composed in three structurally identical four-line stanzas, with the first three lines of each stanza in iambic pentameter and the last line in iambic dimeter. The simplicity and terseness of the form serve the double purpose of setting up the naive, wistful character of the first two stanzas while also contributing to the effectiveness of the witty, rhetorical pondering on the lack of limousine gifts in the last stanza.

What Dorothy Parker is doing with the sarcastic limousine wish is renegotiating the terms of romantic engagement. The meaning of gifts and the interpretation of social customs depend entirely on cultural values. The speaker states her informed interpretation of the gift in the poem: I knew the language of the floweret/My fragile leaves, it said, his heart enclose. She goes a step further in the next lines, stating, Love long has taken for his amulet/One perfect rose. So the rose is intended to endear the man to the object of his affection by making his heart, through association with the rose, seem fragile and sensitive. The rose is also used as an amulet, warding off fear of bad or improper intentions with its pure and simple beauty. The speaker, however, does not want these assurances of affection. She wants a limousine instead; she dismisses the trite social notion of what makes a woman feels secure, and asks instead for material gain. She sets up a dichotomy between the fair but materially valueless rose, and the obviously valuable limousine (valuable both materially and socially, as a status symbol). This is the crux of the matter of renegotiating terms of gender engagement womens sexual emancipation in the first two decades of the twentieth century brought significant risks with its advantages. It was no longer unequivocally the case that a mans affection for his beloved ensured her a secure future, something Parker herself knew too well from her series of failed relationships. The rose, this outmoded symbol of affection, tender and deephearted, is therefore no longer of use to the speaker. It is currency not backed up by gold. For this reason she claims to prefer a limousine an object of tangible, exchangeable wealth. Not a lovely, fragile leaf, but a solid, practical object that the speaker can use to get around, and in style. An interesting, though characteristically facetious, reflection of Parkers sense of the significance of material wealth as well as her own poor character judgment in relationships, can be seen in this advertisement she wrote for Stetson hats in the early 1920s: I dont say that I am one of those big business women that make anywhere between ten and twelve dollars a month, in their spare time, by reading character from the shape of the hair-cut or the relative positions of the mouth and the ear. In fact, if I were to sit down and tell you how often I have been fooled on some of the most popular facial characteristics, wed be here all afternoon. All I say is, give me a good, honest look at a mans hat and the way he wears it, and Ill tell you what he is within five pounds, or five you your money back. 1 This preoccupation with materialism and its relationship to gender-status renegotiation can be clearly observed in One Perfect Rose. It can be further elucidated by a look at the lyrics of the song Diamonds are a Girls Best Friend, featured most famously in the 1953 film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, recorded (mostly) by Marilyn Monroe. The lyrics Square-cut or pear-shaped, these rocks dont lose their shape makes use of the same notion of rejecting symbols of affection that are not
1

Meade, 1989: 111

durable and will not retain their shape; that is will not retain their value. The awkward metrical and musical stress of the word their reinforces the same dichotomy, seen in One Perfect Rose, between what will and what will not endure. The material gifts referred to in both the poem and the song are collateral; both speakers want a symbol of affection that has worth independent of changeable social values. The complicated legacy of the sexual emancipation of women plays a large role in these matters. The movement was described by Nancy Cott, in reference to the 1910s, as a personal form of direct action as risky, as thrilling, as full of a paradoxical sense of play and deadly responsibility as throwing a bomb.2 The struggle between womens sexual freedom and the problem of their status as a gender is clear in the notion that the erotic and reproductive connotations of women their very bodies figured largely in mens exclusion of them from male scenes of power and privilege.3 Both Diamonds and One Perfect Rose acknowledge this conundrum by pointing to the fact that women are sexually free and available, which amounts, in many ways, to more equality, co-dependency and cooperation between the sexes, and yet they are still denied access to the world of status and power (represented by diamonds and the limousine respectively) on which men keep a tenacious hold. In short, a trite kiss on the hand, or a perfect rose, isnt fooling anyone. The rose also functions, in a manner as old as literature, as a representation of the female. The rose is sending two implicit messages, distinct but not entirely separable; first is the aforementioned representation of the mans sensitivity through association with the rose; second is essentially the message you are as lovely as the rose. This second meaning is reinforced by the thoroughly well established topos of the flower-like nature of women and the wealth of poetic conceits that make use of it, but more specifically by the line My fragile leaves ... his heart enclose. In this context the rose and its attributes are a trope; in fact, it is the object of the mans affection that is figuratively in possession of his heart; it is she that is deep-hearted, pure and perhaps even scented. It is she, fragile and fair, that encloses his heart. In Parkers poetry this is only half the story; her poems chew and spit out these notions. In One Perfect Rose she initially presents the romantic gesture in all seriousness and sincerity, only to utterly undermine it at the end. This is fairly obvious, but her rejection of the woman = rose equation happens on the level of form as well as content. The tenacious commonplace of the flower as feminine works to contain the feminine within the confines of something beautiful, fragile and becoming to shape the woman as a flower is to

2 3

Cott, 1987: 42 Cott, 1987: 151

control her boundaries and submit her to the regulation and articulation of the male perspective4. Parker responds, as in various other poems such as A Certain Lady, Epitaph for a Darling Lady and to a certain extent Penelope, by writing an extremely regulated, articulated and polite verse, calculated to both show up and negate the notion of the delicate, flower-like female. Her verse is contained, certainly, but contained by a sarcastic terseness that reveals the fallacy of the construction she is rejecting. This style is fairly reactionary and provides interesting support for Elaine Showalters notion of feminist and female literature; the former takes a radical, separatist position with respect to gender roles, while the latter draws more directly from genuine female experience5. Parkers poetry often lies on the border of these two phases, a border Showalter locates historically in the 1920s. Many contemporaneous poets played with the convention of the rose-image in their work, often with a view to redefining or negating its symbolic significance. William Carlos Williams 1923 poem The rose is obsolete... is an obvious example. This poem subjects the rose-image to various interesting examinations, but it resembles Parkers poem in its negation of the rose as an emblem or amulet of love, as in the following couplets:

The rose carried weight of love but love is at an end--of roses It is at the edge of the petal that love waits The poem also plays with the articulated, regulated image of the rose by paying special attention to its form and boundaries, as in the opening stanza: The rose is obsolete but each petal ends in an edge, the double facet cementing the grooved columns of air--The edge cuts without cutting meets--nothing--renews itself in metal or porcelain Further attempts at similar deconstructions can be seen in H.D.s Sea Rose, published in her 1916 book titled Sea Garden. H.D.s rose is a sort of mollusc-rose, washed up on the shore, flung on the sand. Her imagery is of an anti-rose, or an imploded rose. Her rose is her poem, and in it she
4

Carson, 2010: With regard to a notion of the female dating from Ancient Greek literature and myth: In order to achieve form or consistency, the female must submit itself to the regulation and articulation of the male. 5 Barry, 2002: 122 123, Elaine Showalters critical distinction between feminist and female literature, quoted from A Literature of Their Own, Showalter, 1999.

appropriates the rose topos and turns the convention inside-out by taking apart and re-defining the roses array: Rose, harsh rose, marred and with stint of petals, meagre flower, thin, sparse of leaf, more precious than a wet rose single on a stem you are caught in the drift. Unlike these two poems, One Perfect Rose stays in the sphere of witty, ironic commentary and does not engage in a dialogue with its material; does not seek to rework or transform it. Its meaning is almost entirely contingent on the limiting social customs it points to. As such it is apt to seem dated, but nonetheless remains a valuable piece of social commentary.

Bibliography
Books Cott, Nancy F. The Grounding of Modern Feminism. Vail-Ballou Press. New York, 1987. Eagleton, Mary, Ed. Feminist Literary Criticism. Addison Wesley Longman Inc. New York, 1991. Meade, Marion. Dorothy Parker: A Biography: What Fresh Hell is This? Cox & Wyman. London, 1989. Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own. Princeton University Press. Princeton, 1999. Lectures Carson, Anne. The Blaney Lecture at The Philoctetes Centre for the Multidisciplinary Study of the Imagination. October 29, 2010. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jb6JW89EF5U.