Gentlemen prefer blondes by anita loos5/30/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() This essay reads Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as a sentimental novel, one that exemplifies the aesthetic category of “modern sentimentalism.” As described below, modern sentimentalism reinvents the sentimental mode through experimental aesthetic practices, including, in Loos’s epistolary “diary of a professional lady,” stream-of-consciousness narration, dialectical writing, and an extensive use of irony. 1 What would it mean to treat Loos’s ironic sentimentalism sincerely, as a revision rather than a rejection of the literary mode? Pitted against Loos’s cynical persona, the “witless blonde” evokes Blondes’s protagonist, a woman whose allure derives from apparent sincerity, sympathy, and naiveté, combined with the hint that she may not be as innocent or inexperienced as her exterior suggests. Rather, in this quip as in her 1925 bestseller, Loos’s ironic rhetoric gestures toward and plays with sentiment’s various nineteenth-century connotations. Juxtaposing mere “liking” with the alternative embodied by the “witless blonde,” Loos does not exclusively redefine “sentiment” in terms of erotic desire. Menck liked me very much indeed but in the matter of sentiment, he preferred a witless blonde.Anita Loos, “The Biography of a Book”Īnita Loos’s euphemism for sex in her 1963 preface to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes invokes a long literary tradition of implicit physical intimacy. ![]()
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