“TO WHAT EXTENT DOES ANITA LOOS PRESENT LORELEI AS A ‘NEW WOMEN’ WITH ATTITUDES WHICH CHALLENGE PATRIARCHY?” Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was published in 1925, a time when society was just discovering the meaning behind the terminology of the ‘new women’- ‘flapper’, ‘suffragette’, and ‘bob haircuts’. These were transitional times. The flapper’s shocked society with their short clothes and bare arms and legs. Due to the ratification of the 19th amendment in the American constitution, American women received the right to vote. The people were convinced that this new found independence these ‘new women’ enjoyed are leading to loss of tradition. They were jeopardizing the long-held mantle that women bore as wives and mothers. Their bold nature was a symbol of the liberal period of the roaring twenties and Lorelei Lee was the epitome of all this. Lorelei was how some people put it, ‘a flappers flapper’. She knew exactly how to tackle the male chauvinism the society wreaked of. She diffuses the presented patriarchy with her charm, beauty, and all the “brains” she can muster. Anita Loos uses dialect and intentional illiteracies to fill the reader with a sense of false superiority much like Lorelei hides her intellect to lure in her ill-fated suitors. Instead of being confined and exploited by men due to her gender, she uses the stereotypical image of the blonde to her own advantage, fooling the men to take advantage of her pretense vulnerability all the while laughing at their stupidity. Lorelei makes these men feel responsible to help her out by making their relationship personal through the help of nicknames like “cocco” and “piggy”. The way Lorelei tricks these “gentlemen” into showering her with gifts as if it was their decision in the first place is truly an art. Anita loos portrays Lorelei as a ‘blonde’s heroine’. Lorelei not only does away with all the exploitation but manages reap all the benefits of the marginalized viewpoint society has of women. She outwits the “gentlemen” and the women of the upper class society. She swindles ‘Lady Francis Beekman’ as much as she swindles ‘Sir Francis Beekman’, no discrimination between sexes.
Lorelei Lee, in all her glory and ‘sunshine’, has quite an ambiguous past in the beginning of the book. Further into the book we get a first person narrative from Lorelei herself of how she both killed and was acquitted of the charge for killing a man. She once again uses her ‘brains’ and turns the then present patriarchal system in her favour. Lorelei took advantage of the popularized view that women do things in a fit and are not themselves when it happens. Hence, any man who had a ‘mother or sister’ should understand that they could not hold Lorelei accountable for the murder. Lorelei is a woman who ousts the man from his superior position position without him even coming to know. After she enchants these men, she then turns them into her now ‘proverbial dogs’ who buy her gifts from ‘diamond tiaras’ to trips to England and France to get her ‘educated’. Lorelei lee is the perfect example of women in the 1920s that strategically challenges the patriarchal systems and always gets her way.